Jack Higgins - In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

He moved towards the steps leading down to the garden. Burke paused to light a cigarette and then everything happened at once.

Some instinct, product perhaps of the years of hard living, sent a wave of coldness through me and I froze, ready to jump like some jungle animal sensing an unseen presence.

Below the steps five yards on the other side of the gravel path, the leaves trembled and a gun barrel poked through. My grandfather was already on his way down. I sent him sprawling with a stiff left arm, drew and fired three times. A machine pistol jumped into the air, there was a kind of choking cough and a man fell out of the bushes and rolled on to his back.

I dropped to one knee beside my grandfather. “Are you all right?”

“There will be another,” he said calmly.

“Hear that, Sean?” I called.

“I’ll cover you,” came the reply in a voice like ice-water. “Roust him out.”

Marco came through the French windows in a hurry, the Walther in his hand and a shotgun blasted from the bushes over to my right, too far away to do any damage. You have to be close with those things. Marco dropped from view and I took a running jump into the greenery.

I landed badly, rolled over twice and came up about six feet away from number two. He was clutching a sawn-off shotgun in both hands, the lupara , traditional weapon used in a Mafia ritual killing.

I took one hell of a chance, simply because it seemed like a good idea to keep him in one piece to talk, and fired as I came up, catching him in the left arm. He screamed and dropped the lupara . Not that it did much good. As he straightened and backed away, Burke shot him between the eyes from the terrace.

He looked about seventeen, a boy trying to make a name for himself, to gain respect – the kind Mafia often used for this kind of work. The other was a different breed, a real pro from the look of him, with hard, bitter eyes fixed in death.

My grandfather pushed the jacket aside with his stick and said to Marco. “You told me he could use a gun. Look at that.”

I’d shot him three times in the heart, the holes covering no more than the width of two fingers between them. There was very little blood. I could hear the mastiffs barking and the guards arrived as I reloaded and slipped the Smith and Wesson back into its holster.

“How did they get in?”

The old man frowned and turned to Marco. “How about that? You told me this place was impregnable.”

Marco motioned to the guards without a word and they went off in a hurry, dogs and all. I stirred the man on the ground with my foot.

“So, they’re still trying?”

“Not for much longer,” he said grimly. “I can assure you. All bills will be paid. I owe it to your mother.”

I was shaken, but I turned to Burke. “That’s Mafia for you. Just one big happy family. Will there be any trouble over these two?”

My grandfather shook his head. “I’ll have the police come and take them away.”

“As simple as that?”

“But of course. It would, however, be wiser if you were to leave before they get here.”

He called to Marco, who was rooting around out there in the garden somewhere, to send the Mercedes round, then took me by the arm and walked a little way off.

“If you could play the piano like you can shoot, Stacey…”

“A shame, isn’t it?” I said. “But my mother was right about one thing. We all have a talent for something.”

He sighed. “Go with God, boy. Come and see me when you get back from the Cammarata, eh?”

“I’ll do that.”

“I’ll expect you.” He turned and held out his hand. “Colonel, my thanks.”

Later, after we had passed through the gates, Burke lit another cigarette and when the match flared I saw sweat on his face. I wondered if he had been afraid, but that didn’t seem possible.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

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?

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.