‘He’s right,’ Cerda put in. ‘If the rain don’t stop soon there will be no roads left at all.’
‘In which case the ambulance will never get up here,’ I pointed out patiently.
Cerda frowned and turned to Marco who shrugged helplessly. ‘Maybe he’s got a point.’
After that, everything happened in a hurry. They wrapped Joanna in blankets and carried her out to the Alfa in the courtyard, stuffed the well between the rear and front seats with more blankets and laid her across them. I sat in the passenger seat and Cerda leaned in to fasten my seat belt.
‘You give my respects to the capo, eh?’ he said. ‘Tell him I handled everything just like he told me.’
‘Sure I will,’ I said, leaned out of the window and called in English as we drove away. ‘Up the Mafia- right up!’
But I think the significance of that eloquent and ironic English phrase was completely lost on him.
I was right about the mountain roads and the heavy rain. To say that they dissolved behind our rear wheels may sound like something of an exaggeration, but it was not far from the truth.
I don’t suppose we topped twenty miles an hour on the way down; if we’d gone any faster we’d have plunged straight over the edge in places and the Alfa wasn’t built to fly.
Not that I was worried. There was a kind of inevit-ability to everything. The Sicilians are an ancient people and that side came uppermost in me now. Out of some strange foreknowledge, I knew the game was still in play, the climax yet to come. That was in-evitable and could not be avoided. Neither by me nor Burke.
It also helped, of course, to remember that Marco, driving a car sponsored by my grandfather and certain business associates, had once come third in the Mila Miglia.
I closed my eyes and slept. When I opened them again, we were drawn up at the side of the main road beyond Vicari, as I discovered later, and I had lost two hours.
They were already carrying Joanna Truscott into the rear of the ambulance on a stretcher. I tried to get up and found that my legs refused to move and then the door opened and I lurched sideways into the arms of a grey-bearded man in a white coat.
I recall Marco vaguely somewhere in the back-ground, but mainly my friend with the grey beard and the gold-rimmed spectacles. Surprising how respectable a doctor could look-even a Mafia doctor.
Joanna was laid out on the other side, I recall that, and the man leaning over her and then Greybeard loomed large again, the interior light shining on his spectacles, the syringe in his hand.
I tried to say no, tried to raise an arm, but nothing seemed to function any longer and then there was that darkness again-we were becoming old friends.
FIFTEEN
beyond, through the open french windows, a line of poplars stood like soldiers, waiting for a sign, black against flame, the burned-out fire of day. Long white curtains ballooned in a tiny breeze, ghostlike in the cool darkness of the room. Rebirth is always painful, but my return to life was eased by one of the most beautiful evenings I have ever known.
I was sane again, calm and relaxed, no pain any-where until I moved and touched off some spark in my right shoulder. There was a nurse at the end of the bed reading a book by the light of a small table lamp. She turned at my movement, the starched white cap like the halo around the face of a madonna. When she leaned over me, her hand on my forehead was cooler than anything I had ever known.
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?’