In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

hands.”

He spat in my grandfather’s face. Marco took a quick step forward, my grandfather’s hands flattened against his chest. “No, Marco, leave it. He is a dead man walking.” He wiped his face with a handkerchief and dropped it on the floor. “The man, Burke. He is at your villa?”

Hoffer, blaming Burke, I suspect, more than himself for his downfall, nodded.

“Good. Now get out! Outside the gate you are on your own.”

Hoffer turned and lurched towards the French windows. He was crossing the terrace when I caught up with him, but as I swung him around, Marco already had me by the arm, my grandfather just behind, moving with amazing speed for a man of his age.

“No, Stacey, not here. Here at the Council meeting he is inviolate. It is the law. Break it and you die too.”

“To hell with your bloody laws,” I said and he slapped me across the face.

I staggered back and Hoffer laughed shrilly. “That’s good – I like that. That’s what I gave Rosa Solazzo last night, Wyatt, only more. She wanted to warn you, you didn’t know that, did you? I don’t know what you did to her, but that stupid bitch must have liked it.”

I tried to get at him and Marco and two of the others held me back. “Want to know what I did with her?” He laughed again. “I gave her to Ciccio. He always panted for her. The original bull that one. He’ll have tried every variation known to man by now and a few of his own thrown in for fun.”

He wanted to hurt and he succeeded. I called him every dirty name I’d ever known and they held me there as he went through the garden to his Mercedes parked outside the gate. It was only when he started up and drove away that my grandfather ordered them to release me. I turned and pushed my way through the group and went back to my room.

I stood there in the darkness, my shoulder throbbing, sweat soaking the nylon shirt and thought of Rosa. Poor Rosa. So, she’d decided to stop being afraid after all and had left it too late. I remembered what Hoffer had said about Ciccio and at the thought of that animal sweating over her, I cracked completely. The only decent thing in this whole stinking business as far as I was concerned had been that girl’s futile gesture in trying to save me. I went out through the French windows on the run and moved through the gardens to the courtyard at the rear.

There was a choice of three cars in the garage, but I took Marco’s red Alfa mainly because it had automatic gears and would be easier to manage with one hand. The fact that he’d left his keys on show also helped.

They must have heard me go the moment I rounded the house, but the gatekeeper was standing in the door of the lodge and recognised me as I arrived. The gates opened a split second later, too late for Marco who came down the drive on the run and still had ten yards to go as I took the Alfa into the night with a surge of power.

About three miles outside Palermo, I saw flames in the night and several cars blocking the road. I braked and pulled in behind a slow-moving line of vehicles that was being waved on by a policeman on the wrong side.

Petrol spilled across the road, buring fitfully and beyond, where it had crashed head-on into the concrete retaining wall, a Mercedes saloon blazed fiercely.

I leaned out of the window as I approached the policeman. “What happened to the driver?”

“What do you think?”

He waved me on and I moved into the night. So that was Mafia justice? Swift and certain and my grandfather had had his revenge. But the rest was mine – the rest was my vendetta. No one on earth was going to cheat me of that.

SEVENTEEN

IT WAS STILL Holy Week in Palermo, something I had forgotten, and the streets were crowded, mainly with family groups. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves and when it started to shower, no one took the slightest notice.

The municipal fireworks display got going just as I turned into the Via Vittorio Emanuele and drove towards the cathedral, gigantic coloured flowers blossoming in the night, and all around me I saw that strange mixture of carnival and piety so peculiar to Sicily.

There was little traffic for this was a night for walking, but progress was slow, as in most cases the crowd simply flooded out from the pavements into the centre of the street.

I was sweating again and still conscious of the lightheadedness I’d noticed earlier. Perhaps it was the drugs I’d had or maybe I was simply perilously close to being at the end of my resources. Whatever the reason, I felt like an outsider looking in, alienated from everything around me.

It was a nightmare scene that needed a Dante to do it justice. The noise of the fireworks, the multitude of exploding colours, the voice of the crowd and beyond, the penitents in sackcloth, bare-footed in the rain, three at the front of the procession staggering under the Cross, Our Lady floating in the darkness above the flaring torches.

The chanting swelled until it filled my head like the sea; whips, rising above the heads of the crowd, cracked symbolically as they descended. The stench of incense, of hot candle grease was nauseating, almost more than I could bear, and then the tail of the procession passed, the crowd parted and I moved on.

I put the window down, breathed deeply on the fresh damp air and gave some thought to the situation which faced me at the villa.

First there would be the man on the gate with his automatic rifle and no other way in unless I could climb over that fifteen foot concrete wall which didn’t seem likely with one arm out of commission. In the villa itself, the two houseboys. I could discount them for a start, and the kitchen staff, which left Ciccio, Piet Jaeger and Burke. Against them, on my side, I had my left hand, the Smith and Wesson and five rounds in the chamber. Enough, considering the mood I was in.

Any professional gunman is faced with two kinds of killing. The first is in hot blood, an instant heat generated by a particular situation, usually in defence of his own life or his employer’s.

The second is a different proposition altogether, a cool calculating business where the situation is carefully assessed, the risks worked out in advance. But even that isn’t enough. The mental preparation is just as important, the winding-up of the whole personality like a clock spring so that when the moment comes there is an instant readiness to kill.

In the final analysis, that’s what separates the real professional from the rest of the field. A willingness to kill without the slightest hesitation, something most people can never hope to do.

But I could. Stacey Wyatt could. Had done it enough times before, would do it tonight and probably again. Strange how the thought, the possibility of my own death, never occurred to me, just as it never occurs to the professional criminal that he might get caught on his next job.

I slowed and paused briefly because of traffic congestion where the bridge crosses the Fiume Oreto on the Messina road. My face was hot, probably a fever starting, and I put my head out into the rain. It was cool and refreshing, and then a strange thing happened. For a brief moment, for an instant in time, the sounds of the traffic faded, all sounds in fact except for the rain swishing through the trees on the other side of the road and it was like nothing I’d ever known before and the scent of the wistaria in the garden of the house beyond filled the night, unbearable in its sweetness.

It was a fragile moment, broken by a peremptory horn behind and I drove on, pulled back into some kind of reality. But was that true? Who was I? What in the hell was all this about? What was I doing here?

When I ran from Sicily at my mother’s death, I ran from a lot of things. From pain, I suppose, and out of revulsion at the cruelty of life. And from my grandfather whom I loved deeply and who now stood revealed as a monster who battened on the misery of the poor and ordered death with the certainty of God.

But in running from Barbaccia’s grandson, I was also fleeing from the boy the Wyatts of Wyatt’s Landing had refused to accept. I was running from the Stacey Wyatt life and circumstances had made me.

And I had a chance to find myself – my own true self – me and no one else. For a time it had worked, had gone well. I had made it to Mozambique and Lourenco Marques, could have made it further and arrived at some kind of destination under my own steam, knowing myself as far as anyone can hope to or at least knowing what I could do