Now he was calling me Mr. again. Strange how the Barbaccia affected people. And Rosa? Rosa had gone very pale and when I smiled at her, she dropped her gaze, fear in those dark eyes.

Barbaccia – mafioso. I suppose that to her, the two were interchangeable. When I tucked her arm in mine, she was trembling.

Hoffer obviously used a first-rate local chef. We had narbe di San Paolo which is a kind of ravioli filled with sugar and ricotta cheese and fried and cannolo, probably the most famous sweet in Sicily, consisting of a tube of flour and egg filled with cream. The others drank Marsala which is too sweet for me and I had a bottle of Zibibbo from the island of Pantellaria, a wine which is flavoured with anis. The sort of thing you either like at once or not at all.

We dined on the terrace, a rather conventional little group with Piet and Legrande very much on their best behaviour. Later – the wine having taken effect – things livened up a little. Piet gave all his attention to Rosa though strictly at a superficial level, and even Legrande unwound enough to smile once or twice.

The coffee was Yemeni mocha, probably the best in the world. I took mine to the edge of the terrace to drink. The laughter was louder now and no one appeared to notice as I faded away.

I went up to my room, got the Smith and Wesson in its spring holster from the drawer and snapped it to my belt. I pulled it clear a couple of times to make sure things were working all right and Burke came in. He closed the door and leaned against it.

“Expecting trouble?”

“I’m not sure.”

I replaced the Smith and Wesson, buttoned my jacket and slipped half a dozen spare rounds into my left-hand pocket and Marco’s Walther in the right.

“I’d like to come with you,” he said. “It might help.”

I looked him straight in the eye and he held my gaze, grave and serious. I nodded. “If you like.”

He smiled in a kind of relief – he was doing a lot of smiling these days – and slapped me on the shoulder. “The old firm, eh, Stacey boy?”

But it could never be that again, nothing was more certain. Why, as we went down the stairs, I wasn’t too happy about having him at the back of me.

MONTI PELIEGRINO, WHICH is about three miles to the north of Palermo, towers into the sky at the western end of the Conco d’Oro. It’s an interesting place, soaked in blood and history like the rest of Sicily. During the Punic Wars, Hamilcar Barca held it against the Romans for three years, but in more modern times it became famous mainly because of the cult of Santa Rosalia after whom my mother had been named. My grandfather’s villa was at the foot of the mountain just outside the village of Valdesi.

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 organisation he served had killed so many of its opponents over the years that in many towns murder was a commonplace.

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 needlessly.

“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 vendetta – 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 yourself 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.

There was no resemblance at all between the Barbaccia villa and Hoffer’s place. To start with the walls were at least two thousand years older, for like most country houses it had been built on the Roman site. They were about fifteen feet high and the villa itself was of Moorish origin and stood in the centre of a couple of acres of semi-tropical garden. Ciccio braked to a halt and sounded his horn.

The gatekeeper wasn’t armed, but then he didn’t need to be. A man appeared from the lodge behind him wrestling with two bull mastiffs of a breed common to the island since Norman times and another came out of the bushes holding a machine pistol.

The gatekeeper wore a neat khaki uniform and looked more like an insurance clerk with his moustache and steel-rimmed spectacles. There was a kind of impasse while he and his friends stared at us and the dogs didn’t bark, which was somehow even more sinister.

I opened the door, got out and approached. “I’m expected,” I said. “You must have been told.”