There was a choice of three cars in the garage, but I took Marco’s red Alfa mainly because it had automatic gears and would be easier to manage with one hand. The fact that he’d left his keys on show also helped.
They must have heard me go the moment I rounded the house, but the gatekeeper was standing in the door of the lodge and recognised me as I arrived. The gates opened a split second later, too late for Marco who came down the drive on the run and still had ten yards to go as I took the Alfa into the night with a surge of power.
About three miles outside Palermo, I saw flames in the night and several cars blocking the road. I braked and pulled in behind a slow-moving line of vehicles that was being waved on by a policeman on the wrong side.
Petrol spilled across the road, buring fitfully and be-yond, where it had crashed head-on into the concrete retaining wall, a Mercedes saloon blazed fiercely.
I leaned out of the window as I approached the policeman. ‘What happened to the driver?’
‘What do you think?’
He waved me on and I moved into the night. So that was Mafia justice? Swift and certain and my grand-father had had his revenge. But the rest was mine-the rest was my vendetta. No one on earth was going to cheat me of that.
SEVENTEEN
it was still Holy Week in Palermo, something I had forgotten, and the streets were crowded, mainly with family groups. Everyone seemed to be enjoying them-selves and when it started to shower, no one took the slightest notice.
The municipal fireworks display got going just as I turned into the Via Vittorio Emanuele and drove to-wards the cathedral, gigantic coloured flowers blossom-ing in the night, and all around me I saw that strange mixture of carnival and piety so peculiar to Sicily.
There was little traffic for this was a night for walk-ing, but progress was slow, as in most cases the crowd simply flooded out from the pavements into the centre of the street.
I was sweating again and still conscious of the light-headedness I’d noticed earlier. Perhaps it was the drugs I’d had or maybe I was simply perilously close to being at the end of my resources. Whatever the reason, I felt like an outsider looking in, alienated from everything around me.
It was a nightmare scene that needed a Dante to do it justice. The noise of the fireworks, the multitude of exploding colours, the voice of the crowd and beyond, the penitents in sackcloth, bare-footed in the rain, three at the front of the procession staggering under the Cross, Our Lady floating in the darkness above the flaring torches.
The chanting swelled until it filled my head like the sea; whips, rising above the heads of the crowd, cracked symbolically as they descended. The stench of incense, of hot candle grease was nauseating, almost more than I could bear, and then the tail of the proces-sion passed, the crowd parted and I moved on.
I put the window down, breathed deeply on the fresh damp air and gave some thought to the situation which faced me at the villa.
First there would be the man on the gate with his automatic rifle and no other way in unless I could climb over that fifteen foot concrete wall which didn’t seem likely with one arm out of commission. In the villa itself, the two houseboys. I could discount them for a start, and the kitchen staff, which left Ciccio, Piet Jaeger and Burke. Against them, on my side, I had my left hand, the Smith and Wesson and five rounds in the chamber. Enough, considering the mood I was in.
Any professional gunman is faced with two kinds of killing. The first is in hot blood, an instant heat gener-ated by a particular situation, usually in defence of his own life or his employer’s.
The second is a different proposition altogether, a cool calculating business where the situation is care-fully assessed, the risks worked out in advance. But even that isn’t enough. The mental preparation is just as important, the winding-up of the whole personality like a clock spring so that when the moment comes there is an instant readiness to kill.