I suppose, when you thought about it, he’d come a long way. He was born in Velba, a village in Western Sicily which was depressingly typical of the region, a dung heap where most children died in their first year and life was roughly equivalent to what it had been in England in mediaeval times.
His father was a share-cropper and the living that gave was of a kind that barely maintained life. Of his early years I knew little for certain, but by the time he was twenty-three he was a gabellotto, a mixture of tax collector and land agent whose function was to screw the share-croppers down and keep them that way.
Only a mafioso could have the job so he was on the way up at an early age. God knows what had happened in between-a killing or two-perhaps more, which was the usual method for any youngster to make his way in the Honoured Society.
He might even have spent some time as a sicario, a hired killer, but I doubted that. It didn’t fit into the code-his own very individual conception of what was honourable and what was not. The idea of making money out of prostitution, for example, filled him with horror because he believed in the sanctity of the family and gave to the Church. On the other hand, the organ-isation he served had killed so many of its opponents over the years that in many towns murder was a com-monplace.
The lights of the car picked out a couple of old women trudging towards us festooned with baskets.
‘What in the hell was that supposed to be?’ Burke demanded.
‘They’re coming in for tomorrow’s market.’
‘At this time of night?’
‘The only way they can secure a good pitch.’
He shook his head. ‘What a bloody country.’
I looked into the night at the lights of the city. ‘That’s one Sicily, but out there in the darkness is another. A charnel house for generations. The bread-basket of the Roman Empire based completely on slave labour. Ever since then the people have been exploited by someone or other.’
‘I didn’t really take it all in,’ he said. ‘This Mafia stuff. I thought it was all in the past.’
‘I can think of one place that’s had better than a hundred and fifty killings in four years-a town of less than twenty thousand inhabitants. You won’t find me a place in the world of comparable size that can match that.’
‘But why?’ he said. ‘I just don’t get it.’
‘People play games of one sort or another all the time, haven’t you ever noticed that?’
‘I don’t follow you.’
I could have told him that he’d been playing soldiers all his life-even in the Congo-but there would have been no point. He wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about and I’d have offended him need-lessly.
‘Let me put it this way. In the suburbs of Los Angeles or London, the struggle to keep abreast of the next man, the cut and thrust of business, or even an affair with someone else’s wife, adds that little touch of drama to life that everyone needs.’
‘And what does that prove?’
‘Nothing in particular. In Sicily, it’s an older game, that’s all, and rather more savage. The ritual of ven-detta-an eye for an eye, neither more nor less. And the rules may seem a little barbaric to outsiders. We kiss the wounds of our dead, touch our lips to the blood and say: In this way may I drink the blood of the one who killed you.’
Even thinking of it touched something inside me-a coldness like a snake uncoiling.
‘You said we,’ Burke observed. ‘You include your-self in?’
I stared out into the distance where an early cruise ship passed beyond the headland, a blaze of lights, a world of its own. I thought of school in London at St. Paul’s, of Wyatt’s Landing, of Harvard and laughed.
‘In any village in Sicily if I spoke my grandfather’s name and declared my relationship, there would be men who would kiss my hand. You’re in another world here, Sean. Try to get that into your head.’
But I don’t think he believed me-not then. It all seemed too improbable. Belief would come later.