In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

At first I thought I wasn’t going to get a reply and then it came, delivered with some bitterness. “Christ knows what they did to you in that place you were in, but it must have been bad.”

He was at last facing the fact that I had changed – really changed, which suited me perfectly. I sat there looking out to sea, thinking, not of what had just happened at the villa, but of Karl Hoffer and the Honourable Joanna and Serafino Lentini, the great lover who desired her so much that he insisted on keeping her just for himself. Serafino, who had lost his manhood, according to my grandfather, under police torture was incapable of the physical act of love.

Now why had Vito Barbaccia, capo mafia, arch schemer, gone out of his way to tell me that?

EIGHT

HOFFER WAS AS good as his word and provided a Fiat saloon for the reconnaissance trip. He also threw in Rosa Solazzo for good measure. His argument was that being a woman she would provide good cover and strengthen our story, but I suspected she was there to look after his interests as much as anything.

The final meeting on the following morning was a hurried one. He was flying to Catania on business in the Cessna and wanted to be away early so that he could be back that evening to hear what I thought about the situation on our return.

No mention was made of the shooting match at the villa, something else I found interesting. On the way back Burke had asked me to keep it to myself and seemed to think that it might upset a respectable businessman like Hoffer to be associated with that kind of violence. But Ciccio had been there and must have heard the shooting at the very least, although he had been his usual phlegmatic self on the way back. I found it hard to believe that he hadn’t passed news of the disturbance on.

The route we followed was one normally taken by tourists driving across the island to Agrigento, certainly those in search of spectacular scenery. I did the driving as originally planned, Burke sat beside me and Rosa Solazzo had the rear seat to herself.

She looked very attractive in a navy-blue trouser suit cut on rather mannish lines, off-set by a more than feminine ruffled blouse in white nylon. A red silk scarf bound round her head peasant-fashion completed the outfit, plus, of course, the ever present sunglasses.

She didn’t attempt to make conversation, but read a magazine. When I stopped at the village of Misilmeri about ten miles out to buy cigarettes and asked if she wanted anything, her only reply was a shake of the head.

Obviously her presence limited conversation between Burke and myself, but in any case, he didn’t seem much in the mood and slouched back in his seat, sombre and brooding as if carrying the weight of the world and there was that slight tremble in his hands again.

For the first time I found myself wondering whether he was up to what lay ahead. On the other hand, he’d shown no signs of having slowed down any during the affair at the villa. The shot which had killed the boy with the lupara had been a difficult one and yet he had been right on the button. Having said that, early warning signs of some kind of deterioration showed clearly and they didn’t look good. For the time being I pushed it out of my mind and concentrated on enjoying the trip.

It was almost the end of spring harvest, orange groves ripening in the warm air and flowers everywhere. Red poppies, anemones and, in some places, blue iris spread like a carpet into the distance. Another week and the iron hand of summer would grasp the land by the throat and squeeze it dry, leaving in the high country a wilderness of thirst, a gaunt North African land of rock and sand and lava.

The further we moved away from Palermo into the heart of things, the more I realised how little it had changed. Out here one didn’t see the three-wheeler Lambrettas and Vespas so common in the farming area immediately adjacent to Palermo. Here, one moved through a mediaeval landscape, through poverty of a kind to be found in few places in Europe.

We passed an old peasant riding a donkey, a little further on a line of gaunt women, baskets on their heads, dressed in fust black as if mourning their very existence, skirts trailing in the dust, who turned brown, seamed faces to watch us pass, old before their time.

And the villages seemed just the same, most of the houses windowless, the door the only source of light and air, opening into a dark cavern that housed, in many cases, pigs and goats as well as people.

And in the villages, mainly women, old men and thin, hungry looking children, living out their lives against a dying landscape.

In one such place, I stopped outside a small trattoria and we sat at a rough wooden table in the shade and the proprietor, an old, old man with white hair, brought a bottle of passito, ice-cold from the bottom of his well.

It was about eleven o’clock, but already very warm and when a ring of solemn-faced children surrounded us we could smell the sourness of their unwashed bodies.

“Don’t they have any men around here?” Burke demanded.

He looked tired and was sweating a lot, great damp patches soaking his shirt beneath each arm. “Most of them have emigrated,” I told him. “I’ve heard it said that in some provinces, eighty-five per cent of the population is made up of women and children.”

He looked disgusted and wiped sweat from his forehead. “What a bloody country.”

Rosa Solazzo had disappeared into the back to find whatever passed for a toilet in those parts and rejoined us in time to hear his comment. She obviously didn’t approve.

“This is one of the poorest areas in Europe, Colonel Burke. In summer it has the same climate as North Africa, the land is barely cultivated and what water there is, is controlled by the Mafia. These people are born without hope. What else can they do, but try and get out?”

Not that she had a hope in hell of making him understand. The people she was speaking of were her people – she was one of them, had probably started life in just such a place as this.

Burke laughed with a kind of contempt. “You seem to be doing all right, anyway.”

She pushed her way through the children and got into the Fiat. I emptied my glass and shook my head as Burke poured himself another. “I wouldn’t if I were you. Strong stuff, passito.”

That was enough, of course, to make him fill the glass to the brim. I left him there and got behind the wheel again. I found my cigarettes and offered one to Rosa.

“I’m sorry about that. He doesn’t understand.”

She was bitterly angry. “I don’t need your regrets. At least he only speaks from ignorance, but you and your kind – you and Mafia – are responsible for most of this.”

So, I was still mafioso? I turned away and she leaned across and touched me on the shoulder. “No, I am angry with him and I place it on you. You will forgive me?”

I couldn’t tell what was going on behind the dark glasses. Did she imagine she had gone too far and was trying to recover her ground or was she afraid at the very thought of offending Vito Barbaccia’s grandson? Or was it at all possible that she was just sorry?

My answer amply fitted every contingency. “That’s all right.”

Burke was on his third large glass. He finished it, stood up and sat down abruptly, looking surprised.

“You warned him about passito?” Rosa asked.

“He isn’t in the mood for advice.”

She started to laugh. Revenge, particularly where women are concerned, is always sweet.

We moved into the high country now, the great craggy solitudes around Monte Cammarata, the mountain itself towering almost six thousand feet into the sky.

Burke had lapsed into a kind of stupor and Rosa leaned her arms on the back of my seat and we talked softly, our voices dropping a degree or two as the crags closed in around us.

We turned off the main road, zig-zagging up into the hills, the valley deepening beneath us. A hell of a country, home of runaway slaves and bandits since Roman times.

During the war this had been the most strategic point in the Italian-German defence system when the Allies