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.