She left, closing the door quietly. It reopened almost at once and Greybeard came in.
“How do you feel?” he asked in Italian.
“Alive again. A remarkably pleasant sensation. Where am I?”
“The Barbaccia villa.”
He switched on the bedside lamp and took my pulse, composed and grave. The inevitable stethoscope was produced and probed around in the area of my chest for a while.
He nodded, to himself, of course, and stuffed it back into his pocket. “Your shoulder – it pains you?”
“A little – when I move.”
Behind him the door opened. I could sense his presence even before I became aware of the distinctive aroma of his Havana and then he moved into the light, his face dark and brooding, calm as always, Caesar Borgia sprung to life again, eternal and indestructible.
“Do you think you’ll ever die?”
As if following my thought processes perfectly, he smiled. “So, he’s going to live on us, this grandson of mine, eh, Tasca?”
“Oh, he will survive the bullet although much work will be needed on the shoulder if he is not to suffer some permanent stiffening.” Dr. Tasca looked down at me in a kind of mild reproof. “You should not have used the arm, young man. That was unfortunate.”
I didn’t bother to argue and he turned back to my grandfather. “No, it is his general condition that worries me. Physically speaking he is balanced on the edge of a precipice. A slight nudge and he goes straight down.”
“Hear that?” My grandfather just prevented himself from prodding me with his stick. “You want to die young, eh?”
“Can you make me a better offer?”
I tried to sound gay and flippant, but Tasca obviously didn’t approve at all. “I understand you have been in prison.”
I nodded. “Of a kind – Egyptian labour camp variety.”
“With the chain gang?” His face for the first time registered some kind of concern. “Now we know.” He turned again to my grandfather. “When he is on his feet he must come to me for a thorough examination, capo. He could well have tubercular lesions and there are definite signs of incomplete recovery from blackwater fever which could mean kidney damage. Not only will he need treatment, but careful nursing and rest – several months of complete inactivity.”
“Thank you, Doctor Kildare,” I said. “You’ve made my day.”
Tasca looked completely mystified by the remark, but in any event, my grandfather dismissed him. “Back to the girl now. I want to talk to my grandson alone.”
To my shame, it was only then that I consciously gave her a thought. “You’ve got Joanna Truscott here, too? How is she?”
He pulled a chair forward and sat down. “She’s doing all right, Stacey. Tasca’s a specialist in brain surgery – the best in Sicily. He brought a portable X-ray unit with him and gave her a thorough examination. She’s lucky – the skull isn’t fractured. She’ll have a bad scar, probably for life, but a good hairdresser can fix that.”
“Shouldn’t she have gone to hospital?”
He shook his head. “No need. She couldn’t have better treatment if she did and it’s safer here.”
I tried to sit up, my stomach hollow. “Hoffer knows then?”
He pushed me gently back against the pillow. “Only that his stepdaughter is dead. Not officially, of course, so that the world can be told, but he’s spoken to me already on the telephone.”
“And told you?”
He shook his head. “He asked for a General Council meeting tonight. He’s due here in half an hour.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What General Council?”
“Did you think I was Mafia all on my own, Stacey?” He laughed. “Sure, I’m capo – capo in all Sicily – but the big decisions are made by the Council. We have the rules and they have to be obeyed. Even I can’t break them.” He shrugged. “Without the rules we are nothing.”
The Honoured Society. I shook my head. “All right, maybe I’m not thinking too clearly, but I still don’t see what Hoffer is doing coming here.”
“First you tell me what happened in the mountains. We go on from there.”
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t know?”
“Some only. Now be a good boy and do as I say.”
So I told him, in detail, including my various suspicions about things from the beginning and he took it all without a sign, even my deliberately graphic description of the massacre.
When I was finished, he sat there in silence for a moment. “Why did you go, Stacey, that is what I can’t understand? You knew this man Burke was not being honest with you, you distrusted Hoffer, you knew that even I was not telling you the whole truth and yet you still went.”
“God knows,” I said, and thinking about it in retrospect, I honestly couldn’t explain it even to myself. “Some kind of death wish, I suppose.”
The words were my own and yet at their saying, every instinct in me rebelled. “No, to hell with it. It was Burke – always Burke. Something between us that I can’t put into words, even for myself. Something I had to prove. I can’t say more than that.”
“You hate this man, I think? This is the truth of it.”
I thought about that for a while and said slowly, “No, more than hate – much more. He took me with him into a dark world of his own creating, made me into what I am not, moulded me to his purpose. Up there on the mountain he told me he is a sick man, some kind of oblique explanation for his behaviour. I think he was trying to find in it an excuse for his own conduct, but he lies even to himself. He was in decay long before his lungs started to rot. He needed no excuse.”
“Ah, now I perceive a glimmer of light,” he said. “You hate him for being something other than you previously thought he was.”
He was right, of course, but only partially so. “You could have something there. In the early days when I first met him, he seemed the only really substantial thing in a world gone mad. I believed in him completely.”
“And later?”
“Nothing.” I shook my head. “I was the one who changed, he didn’t. He was always what he is now, that’s the terrible thing. The Sean Burke I thought I knew in Lourenco Marques and after never actually existed.”
The silence enveloped us and I lay there thinking about it all. Finally I looked up at him again. “You knew what they intended, didn’t you?”
“In part only and guessed the rest. Hoffer was deported from the States some years ago after a prison sentence for tax evasion. He worked with Cosa Nostra, then came to us here in Sicily with several of his old American-Sicilian Mafia associates. They brought in new ideas as I told you. Drugs, prostitution, other kinds of vice. I didn’t want them, but they were all Mafia.”
“Once in, never out?”
“That’s right. The Council said they were entitled to be in.”
“So you took them?”
He nodded. “Mostly they were good administrators, I’ll say that for them. Hoffer, for example, took over the running of our oil interests at Gela. On the face of it, he did a good job, but I never trusted him – or his associates.”
“And these were the men who worked against you?”
“Nothing is as simple as that. Sometimes together, often individually, they would give me trouble. They thought it would be easy, that they could fast-talk the stupid old Sicilian peasant into the ground. Take over. When that failed, they tried other methods.”
“Including the bomb that killed my mother? You knew they intended to kill you if possible and still you worked with them?” I shook my head. “Sharks – tearing each other to pieces at the smell of blood.”