“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.