Now why had Vito Barbaccia, capo mafia, arch schemer, gone out of his way to tell me that?
EIGHT
hoffer was as good as his word and provided a Fiat saloon for the reconnaissance trip. He also threw in Rosa Solazzo for good measure. His argument was that being a woman she would provide good cover and strengthen our story, but I suspected she was there to look after his interests as much as anything.
The final meeting on the following morning was a hurried one. He was flying to Catania on business in the Cessna and wanted to be away early so that he could be back that evening to hear what I thought about the situation on our return.
No mention was made of the shooting match at the villa, something else I found interesting. On the way back Burke had asked me to keep it to myself and seemed to think that it might upset a respectable busi-nessman like Hoffer to be associated with that kind of violence. But Ciccio had been there and must have heard the shooting at the very least, although he had been his usual phlegmatic self on the way back. I found it hard to believe that he hadn’t passed news of the dis-turbance on.
The route we followed was one normally taken by tourists driving across the island to Agrigento, certainly those in search of spectacular scenery. I did the driving as originally planned, Burke sat beside me and Rosa Solazzo had the rear seat to herself.
She looked very attractive in a navy-blue trouser suit cut on rather mannish lines, off-set by a more than feminine ruffled blouse in white nylon. A red silk scarf bound round her head peasant-fashion completed the outfit, plus, of course, the ever present sunglasses.
She didn’t attempt to make conversation, but read a magazine. When I stopped at the village of Misilmeri about ten miles out to buy cigarettes and asked if she wanted anything, her only reply was a shake of the head.
Obviously her presence limited conversation between Burke and myself, but in any case, he didn’t seem much in the mood and slouched back in his seat, sombre and. brooding as if carrying the weight of the world and there was that slight tremble in his hands again.
For the first time I found myself wondering whether he was up to what lay ahead. On the other hand, he’d shown no signs of having slowed down any during the affair at the villa. The shot which had killed the boy with the lupara had been a difficult one and yet he had been right on the button. Having said that, early warning signs of some kind of deterioration showed clearly and they didn’t look good. For the time being I pushed it out of my mind and concentrated on enjoying the trip.
It was almost the end of spring harvest, orange groves ripening in the warm air and flowers every-where. Red poppies, anemones and, in some places, blue iris spread like a carpet into the distance. Another week and the iron hand of summer would grasp the land by the throat and squeeze it dry, leaving in the high country a wilderness of thirst, a gaunt North African land of rock and sand and lava.
The further we moved away from Palermo into the heart of things, the more I realised how little it had
changed. Out here one didn’t see the three-wheeler Lambrettas and Vespas so common in the farming area immediately adjacent to Palermo. Here, one moved through a mediaeval landscape, through poverty of a kind to be found in few places in Europe.
We passed an old peasant riding a donkey, a little further on a line of gaunt women, baskets on their heads, dressed in fust black as if mourning their very existence, skirts trailing in the dust, who turned brown, seamed faces to watch us pass, old before their time.
And the villages seemed just the same, most of the houses windowless, the door the only source of light and air, opening into a dark cavern that housed, in many cases, pigs and goats as well as people.