In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

FIVE

IT WAS HOLY Week when we arrived in Palermo, something which I’d completely forgotten about. We drove in the thirty-five kilometres from the aerodrome at Punta Raisi and the black Mercedes saloon which had met us bogged down in the crowded streets. It finally came to a halt in deference to a religious procession which wound its way through the crowds, an ornate Madonna rising on a catafalque high above our heads.

During the whole of the run from Crete, Burke had been moody and irritable and now he lowered the window and looked out with ill-concealed impatience.

“What’s all this?”

“A procession of the mysteries,” I told him. “This kind of thing goes on during Holy Week all over Sicily. Everything else grinds to a halt. They’re a very religious people.”

“It doesn’t seem to have rubbed off much on you,” he commented sourly.

Piet Jaeger glanced at me anxiously. How much he knew of what had been said between Burke and myself, of the hardness of the bargaining, I wasn’t sure, but the change in our relationship had been plain enough during the past three days.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Didn’t you notice the Virgin had a knife through her heart? That’s Sicily for you – the cult of death everywhere. I’d have thought I fitted in rather nicely.”

He smiled reluctantly. “You could be right at that.”

I turned to Piet. “You’ll love it. It’s one hell of a place. On All Saints’ Day the children are given presents from the dead. The graves are probably the best kept in the world.”

Piet grinned, obviously relieved, but Legrande who was sitting beside the driver was hot and tired, his eyes tinged with yellow which didn’t look too good. Maybe one of the several fevers he’d picked up in that Viet prison camp after Dien Bien Phu was about to plague him.

“What is this, a conducted tour?” he demanded.

I ignored him and leaned out of the window as the Mercedes pushed its way through the crowd. The girls were a little more fashionably dressed than when I had last been here and so were the younger men, but I could smell incense and candle grease, hear voices chanting beyond the square. The crowd parted and the penitents appeared looking remarkably like the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in pointed hoods and long white robes.

No, nothing had changed – not down there beneath the surface where it counted.

About seven miles out of Palermo on the coast road to Messina you come to the beaches of Romagnolo, a favourite spot for city-dwellers at weekends. Hoffer’s villa was a couple of miles further on. It didn’t look more than a year or two old and had obviously been specially designed to fit into the hillside site, rising above us on three different levels with what looked like a Moorish garden crowning the highest roof.

The whole was surrounded by a high wall and we had to wait to be identified at the gates by a guard who carried an automatic rifle slung from one shoulder.

“Why the private army?” I asked Burke.

“Hoffer’s a rich man. Since this business with the girl he’s been getting worried. Maybe they’ll have a go at him next.”

Which seemed reasonable enough. Kidnapping was, after all, one of Sicily ’s oldest industries and in any case, I’d been to parties at houses in Bel Air where the gatekeeper was armed. Sicily wasn’t the only society where the rich got neurotic about the prospect of someone trying to take it away from them.

On the other hand, Hoffer certainly seemed to cover all his bets. Even our driver, a burly Norman-Sicilian with ginger hair, was wearing a shoulder holster, a fact which his tight-fitting chauffeur’s uniform made rather too obvious.

There was a scent of wistaria in the air and I could see the purple blooms in profusion on the other side of the drive. It was all very lush, very Mediterranean with palm trees carefully placed to make every vista please and yet its very harmony was vaguely unsettling. Things were a little too perfect, a design on paper, product of some expert mind, planned to produce results in the shortest possible time. An instant garden.

The Mercedes braked in a gravelled circle in front of the entrance and a couple of houseboys came down in a hurry to get the bags. As they went back up the steps a woman appeared in the porch and looked down at us languidly.

She was small, dark haired and with the kind of body that can only be described as ripe. She was Sicilian to the backbone, twenty-two or three by my judgement, although she looked older as southern women often do. She was wearing black leather riding pants, a white silk knotted at her waist and a Cordoban hat.

“And who might that be?” Piet demanded.

“Hoffer’s girl friend. I’ll see what the situation is.”

Burke went up the steps and they held a brief, whispered conversation that died as I joined them.

“Hoffer isn’t here at the moment,” Burke told me. “Had to go to Gela on business last night, but he’s due back later on this afternoon. I’d like you to meet Signoria Rosa Solazzo. Rosa, my good friend Stacey Wyatt.”

Her English was excellent. She held my hand briefly, but didn’t remove her sunglasses. “A pleasure, Mr. Wyatt. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

Which might have been true or could have been merely conventional politeness. Hoffer didn’t sound like the sort who needed any confidante and from the look of her, it seemed more likely that he kept her around solely to help him through those long night watches.

She turned to Burke. “Rooms are arranged for you. The servants will take you up. I suppose you’d like to shower and change so I’ll order the meal for an hour from now.”

She left and we followed the houseboys through a large cool hall where everything seemed to swim in green and gold and up a short flight of stairs to the second tier of the building.

Piet and Legrande shared, but Burke and I were honoured with separate rooms. Mine was long and narrow, one wall consisting of sliding glass doors opening to a balcony overlooking the garden. The furniture was English and in excellent taste, the carpet so thick that it deadened all sound and when I tried the other door I found my own bathroom.

The houseboy put my bag on the bed and left and I went and turned on the shower. When I came back into the bedroom, Burke was standing by the window.

He managed a smile. “The rich full life, eh?”

“Something like that. I don’t know about you, but I’m going to have a shower.”

He was obviously eager to please and moved to the door at once. “A good idea. I’ll see you downstairs in an hour.”

But I had other plans. I gave myself about a minute and a half under an ice-cold needlespray and changed, pulling on a clean shirt and a lightweight suit in blue tropical worsted. A pair of gold-framed sunglasses completed the outfit.

I hesitated over the Smith and Wesson, but this was Sicily after all. I clipped the holster to my belt on the right-hand side, left the room quickly and went downstairs.

There seemed to be no one about and I paused on top of the steps outside the front door. The Mercedes was still there, the driver going over the windscreen with a wash leather.

Rosa Solazzo said from behind, “You are going somewhere, Mr. Wyatt?”

I turned and said cheerfully, “Yes, into Palermo if that’s all right with you.”

“But of course, I’ll tell Ciccio to take you wherever you want.”

It was nicely done and without the slightest hint of hesitation. The local dialect in Sicily is similar to the Italian spoken in the rest of Italy except for one or two different vowel sounds and an accent you could cut with a knife. She switched over to it as we went down the steps.

“The American wants to go into Palermo,” she told Ciccio. “Take him wherever he wishes and watch him closely.”

“You do that, Ciccio,” I said as he held open the door for me, “and I’ll slice your ears off.”

Or at least that was the gist of what I told him in the kind of Sicilian you hear on the Palermo waterfront and nowhere else.

His mouth sagged in surprise and the Solazzo woman’s head snapped round. I ignored her frown, got in the back of the Mercedes. Ciccio slammed the door and slid behind the wheel. He glanced at her enquiringly, she nodded and we moved away.

I made him drop me in the Piazza Pretoria because it seemed as good a place as any and I’d always been fond of that amazing baroque fountain and the beautifully vulgar figures of river nymphs, tritons and lesser gods. At the northern end of the bay, Monte Pellegrino towered in the late afternoon sun and I went on past the beautiful old church of Santa Caterina, turned into the Via Roma and walked towards the central station.

In a side street, I came across a small crowd waiting to go into a marionette theatre. They were mainly tourists – German from the sound of them. They were certainly in for a shock. Even in decline, the old puppet masters refuse to change their ways and the speeches are delivered in the kind of Sicilian dialect that even a mainland Italian can’t follow.

On the way in from the airport, I’d noticed one or two of the old hand-painted carts with brass scroll-work, drawn by feather-tufted horses, but on the whole, most of the farmers seemed to be running around on three-wheeler Vespas and Lambrettas. So much for tradition, but just before I reached the Via Lincoln, I saw a carriage for hire standing at the kerbside just ahead of me.

It was past its prime, the woodwork cracking, the leather harness splitting with age and yet it had been lovingly cared for, the brasswork glinting in the sunlight and I could smell the wax polish of the upholstery.

The driver looked about eighty years old with a face like a walnut and a long white moustache curling up around each cheek. From the moment I spoke he quite obviously took me for a Sicilian.

In Palermo it is necessary to make a bargain with a horse cab driver for any journey, however short, which can be rough on the tourist, but I had no trouble – no trouble at all. When I told him where I wanted to go, his eyebrows went up, a look of genuine respect settled on his face which was hardly surprising. After all, no one visits a cemetery for fun and to a Sicilian, death is a serious business. Ever-present and always interesting.

Our destination was an old Benedictine monastery about a mile out of town towards Monte Pellegrino and the cab took its time getting there which suited me perfectly because I wanted to think.

Did I really wish to go through with this? Was it necessary? To that, there could be no answer for when I considered the matter seriously, I discovered with some surprise that I could do so with a complete lack of any kind of passion, which certainly hadn’t been the case at one time. Once, my mind had been like an open wound, each thought a constant and painful probe, but now…

The sun had gone down and clouds moved in from the sea, pushed by a cold wind. When we reached the monastery I told him to wait for me and got down.

“Excuse me, signor,” he said. “You have someone laid to rest here? Someone close?”

“My mother.”

Strange, but it was only then, at that moment, that pain moved inside me, rising like floodwater threatening to overwhelm me so that I turned and stumbled away as he crossed himself.

A side entrance took me through a large cloister with arcades on each side. In a small courtyard, a delightful Arabic fountain sprang into the air like a spray of silver flowers and beyond, through an archway, was the cemetery.

On a fine day, the view over the valley to the sea was quite spectacular, but now the lines of cypress trees bowed to the wind and a few cold drops of rain splashed on the stonework. The cemetery was large and very well kept, used mainly by the cream of Palermo ’s bourgeois society.

I followed the path slowly, gravel crunching beneath my feet and for some reason, everything assumed a dream-like quality. Blank marble faces drifted by as I passed through a forest of ornate ornaments.

I had no difficulty in finding it and it was exactly as I had remembered. A white marble tomb with bronze doors, a life-size statue of Santa Rosalia of Pellegrino on top, the whole surrounded by six-foot iron railings painted black and gold.

I pressed my face against them and read the inscription. Rosalia Barbaccia Wyatt – mother and daughter – taken cruelly before her time. Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.

I remembered that other morning when I had stood here with everyone who mattered in Palermo society standing behind me as the priest spoke over the coffin, my grandfather at my side, as cold and as dangerously quiet as those marble statues.

At the right moment, I had turned and walked away through the crowd, broken into a run when he called, had kept on running till that famous meeting at the “Lights of Lisbon” in Mozambique.

There was a little more rain on the wind now, I could feel it on my face, I took a couple of breaths to steady myself, turned from the railings and found him standing watching me. Marco Gagini, my grandfather’s strong right arm, his bullet-proof waistcoat, his rock. I read somewhere once that Wyatt Earp survived Tombstone only because he had Doc Holliday to cover his back. My grandfather had Marco.

He had the face of a good middleweight fighter, which was what he had once been, the look of a confident gladiator who has survived the arena. The hair was a little more grizzled, there were a few more lines on the face, but otherwise he looked just the same. He had loved me, this man, taught me to box, to drive, to play poker and win – but he loved my grandfather more.

He stood there now, hands pushed into the pockets of his blue nylon raincoat, watching me, a slight frown on his face.

“How goes it, Marco?” I said easily.

“As always. The capo wants to see you.”

“How did he know I was back?”

“Someone in Customs or Immigration told him. Does it matter?” He shrugged. “Sooner or later the capo gets to know everything.”

“So it’s still the same, Marco?” I said. “He’s still capo. I thought Rome was supposed to be clamping down on Mafia these days?”

He smiled slightly. “Let’s go, Stacey, it’s going to rain.”

I shook my head. “Not now – later. I’ll come tonight when I’ve had time to think. You tell him that.”

It had been obvious to me from the beginning that he had been holding a gun in his right hand pocket. He started to take it out and found himself staring into the muzzle of the Smith and Wesson. He didn’t go white – he wasn’t the sort, but something happened to him. There was a kind of disbelief there, at my speed, I suppose, and at the fact that little Stacey had grown up some.

“Slowly, Marco, very slowly.”

He produced a Walther P38 and I told him to lay it down carefully and back off. I picked the Walther up and shook my head.

“An automatic isn’t much use from the pocket, Marco, I’d have thought you’d have known that. The slide nearly always catches on the lining with your first shot.”

He didn’t speak, just stood there staring at me as if I were a stranger and I slipped the Walther into my pocket. “Tonight, Marco, about nine. I’ll see him then. Now go.”

He hesitated and Sean Burke moved out from behind a marble tomb five or six yards behind him, a Browning in one hand.

“If I were you I’d do as he says,” he told Marco in his own peculiar brand of Italian.

Marco went without a word and Burke turned and looked at me gravely. “An old friend?”

“Something like that. Where did you spring from?”

“ Rosa got another car out quick and I followed the Mercedes into town – no trouble. It got interesting when we discovered you had someone else on your tail. Who was he?”

“A friend of my grandfather. He wants to see me.”

“He must have one hell of an information service to know you were here so quickly.”

“The best.”

He moved to the railings and read the inscription. “Your mother?” I nodded. “You never did tell me about it.”

And I found out that I wanted to, which was strange. It was as if we were on the old footing again or perhaps I was in that kind of mood where I would have told it to anyone.

“I said my mother was Sicilian, that my grandfather still lived here, but I don’t think I ever went into details.”

“Not that I recall. I believe you mentioned his name, but I’d forgotten it until I saw it again just now on the inscription there.”

I sat on the edge of a tomb and lit a cigarette. I wondered how much I could tell him, how much he could possibly understand. To the visitor, the tourist, Sicily was Taormina, Catania, Syracuse – golden beaches, laughing peasants. But there was another, darker place in the hinterland. A savage landscape, sterile, barren, where the struggle was not so much for a living, but for survival. A world where the key-word was omerta, which you could call manliness for want of a better translation. Manliness, honour, solve your own problem, never seek official help, all of which led to the concept of personal vendetta and was the breeding group for Mafia.

“What do you know about Mafia, Sean?”

“Didn’t it start as some kind of secret society in the old days?”

“That’s right. It came into being in a period of real oppression. In those days it was the only weapon the peasant had, his only means of any kind of justice. Like all similar movements, it grew steadily more corrupt. It ended up by having the peasant, the whole of Sicily by the throat.” I dropped my cigarette and rubbed it into the gravel. “And still does in spite of what the authorities in Rome have been able to do.”

“But what has this got to do with you?”

“My grandfather, Vito Barbaccia, is capo mafia in Palermo, in all Sicily. Number one man. Lord of Life and Death. There are something like three million Sicilians in the States now and Mafia moved over there as well and became one of the main branches of syndicated gangsterism. During the last ten years, quite a few Mafia bosses in the States have been deported. They’ve come back home with new ideas – prostitution, drugs and so on. An old-fashioned mafioso like my grandfather doesn’t mind killing people, but he just doesn’t go in for that kind of thing.”

“There was trouble?”

“You could put it that way. They placed a bomb in his car – a favourite way of getting rid of a rival in those circles. Unfortunately, it was my mother who decided to go for a drive.”

“My God.” There was shock and genuine pain on his face.

I carried on, “Believe it or not, but I didn’t know a damn thing about it, or maybe I didn’t want to know. I came home on vacation after my first year at Harvard and it happened on the second day. My grandfather told me the facts of life the same evening.”

“Did he ever manage to settle up with the man responsible?”

“Oh. I’m sure he did. I think we can take that as read.” I stood up. “I’m beginning to feel rather hungry. Shall we go back?”

“I’m sorry, Stacey,” he said. “Damned sorry.”

“Why should you be? Ancient history now.”

But I believed him for he seemed sincere enough. The wind moaned through the cypress trees, scattering rain across the path and I turned and walked back towards the monastery.