In the final analysis, that’s what separates the real professional from the rest of the field. A willingness to kill without the slightest hesitation, something most people can never hope to do.
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 con-gestion 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 be-yond 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 grand-father whom I loved deeply and who now stood re-vealed 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 Wyatt’s of Wyatt’s Land-ing 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 Lis-bon’, 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 in-credible 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.