But I could. Stacey Wyatt could. Had done it enough times before, would do it tonight and probably again. Strange how the thought, the possibility of my own death, never occurred to me, just as it never occurs to the professional criminal that he might get caught on his next job.
I slowed and paused briefly because of traffic congestion where the bridge crosses the Fiume Oreto on the Messina road. My face was hot, probably a fever starting, and I put my head out into the rain. It was cool and refreshing, and then a strange thing happened. For a brief moment, for an instant in time, the sounds of the traffic faded, all sounds in fact except for the rain swishing through the trees on the other side of the road and it was like nothing I’d ever known before and the scent of the wistaria in the garden of the house beyond filled the night, unbearable in its sweetness.
It was a fragile moment, broken by a peremptory horn behind and I drove on, pulled back into some kind of reality. But was that true? Who was I? What in the hell was all this about? What was I doing here?
When I ran from Sicily at my mother’s death, I ran from a lot of things. From pain, I suppose, and out of revulsion at the cruelty of life. And from my grandfather whom I loved deeply and who now stood revealed as a monster who battened on the misery of the poor and ordered death with the certainty of God.
But in running from Barbaccia’s grandson, I was also fleeing from the boy the Wyatts of Wyatt’s Landing had refused to accept. I was running from the Stacey Wyatt life and circumstances had made me.
And I had a chance to find myself – my own true self – me and no one else. For a time it had worked, had gone well. I had made it to Mozambique and Lourenco Marques, could have made it further and arrived at some kind of destination under my own steam, knowing myself as far as anyone can hope to or at least knowing what I could do on my own.
But for me there had been the “Lights of Lisbon.” I had met Sean Burke, had become another kind of Stacey Wyatt and that was very much that until the Hole. I suppose most men have their “Lights of Lisbon,” but only a few know the Hole. Well, I had come to know it well, had been in filth and darkness, had survived, had found another Stacey Wyatt, someone I’d never known before who asked questions – asked questions about a lot of things.
My return to Sicily had been not only inevitable, but essential, I saw that now. I had to see again that incredible figure, so much a part of my youth, Vito Barbaccia, Lord of Life and Death, capo mafia in all Sicily, my grandfather, who kept telling me I was mafioso just like him only better and who, in my heart I knew, already saw me at the head of the Council table when he was gone.
But he was wrong. I wasn’t the man Burke had created, the hired killer posing as a soldier and I wasn’t my grandfather’s version either. To hell with both of them.
Who was I then? I had gone into the mountains, eyes open, knowing the situation was not what it seemed, with some vague notion of beating Burke at his own game, whatever that game was. I had lost, but so had he. Beat him now I had to, on his terms and on his own ground if ever I was to be free. However bloody that encounter might prove, however savage the prospect, it could not be evaded. I had stood in his shadow too long.
A fierce anger flooded through me then and as I swept round the next bend and found myself in the final stretch, Hoffer’s villa floodlit in the night three hundred yards up the road, a kind of madness took possession of me. I put my foot down hard and took the Alfa into the night with a burst of power, the engine howling like a wolf.
The guard saw me coming, but by the time he realised my intention, there was nothing to be done. He started to unsling his automatic rifle, thought better of it and jumped for his life as the Alfa ripped the bronze gates from their hinges and continued up the drive.
What happened next was very much the fortunes of war, the unexpected that decides who wins or loses. A Lambretta came round the bend of the drive, slowly, because the rider had obviously only just started. I braked instinctively, swung the wheel over with my one hand and slid broadside into the shrubbery in a wave of gravel.
The Lambretta too had skidded as the rider braked desperately, spinning in a circle so that the machine halted pointing the way it had come. It was one of the houseboys dressed in his best, obviously ready for an evening on the town. As I scrambled out of the Alfa, the Smith and Wesson ready in my left hand, I caught a glimpse of his white, terrified face and then he gunned the engine and roared out of sight, back towards the villa.
I could have had him with no trouble, but this wasn’t his affair and I let him go, even though it meant he would arouse the house, that Burke and Jaeger would know who it was. Perhaps the truth is that I wanted them to know. I didn’t get time to consider, because a couple of bullets pumped into the Alfa as the gate guard arrived and I ran for cover.
My right arm was hurting like hell, but the pain sharpened me, made me come alive again. It was raining harder now and I crouched in the bushes and waited as I had waited in other places, other jungles than this, for the slightest rustle, the breaking of a twig.
By some process of association the Lagona operation came back to me, when we had parachuted in and brought out the nuns from their beleagured mission. It had been a bad time, the beginning of the rains and thick bush all the way. And then I remembered, for some strange reason, that Burke had wanted to go in by armoured convoy. I’d been the one who suggested the drop and he’d objected because we would have no vehicles to come out in. But I had pointed out that we would have surprise on our side on our way back, fighting our way through them before they’d realised we’d even been in.
And in the end, he had agreed, as he always did, and at the first briefing it had somehow become his own idea. How many times had that happened? How many times right through to the Cammarata?
It had been staring me in the face for years and I had not seen it before, blinded by my belief in the man and I was aware of a strange release of tension, almost as if I had been set free from something, a kind of fierce joy surging through me.
I am Stacey Wyatt and no one else. That thought echoed in my head as a twig snapped. Several things happened. Somewhere in the night a voice called up on the roof and I picked up a stone and tossed it into the bushes. My friend of the gate was no bargain whatever Hoffer had paid him. He jumped out of the shrubbery and fired several times where my stone had landed.
I shot him through the upper part of his right arm, he cried out and spun round, dropping his rifle. We faced each other in the rain, the statue of some Greek goddess behind him watching blindly. There was no fear in his eyes. Perhaps Hoffer had made a better bargain than he knew.
“If you want to live, talk,” I told him. “What happened to Signorina Solazzo?”
“She’s been locked in her room all day.”
“And Ciccio? Is Ciccio with her?”
“He has been.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s nothing to do with me. She has the room with the gold door on the second floor.” He gripped his arm tightly to arrest the flow of blood. “Ciccio told me you and the Frenchman were dead.”
“He was wrong, wasn’t he? The others are here?”
“Somewhere about.”
I nodded. “Hoffer is dead. Barbaccia caught up with him at last. Go now – what happens has nothing to do with you.”
He faded into the bushes as a rifle cracked, the unmistakable thud of an A.K., and a bullet chipped a piece out of the Greek statue’s head. As I went to one knee, someone dropped back out of sight behind the retaining wall up there in the Moorish roof garden.