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 background, 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.

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 anywhere 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?”

“A little – when I move.”

Behind him the door opened. I could sense his presence even before I became aware of the distinctive aroma of his Havana and then he moved into the light, his face dark and brooding, calm as always, Caesar Borgia sprung to life again, eternal and indestructible.

“Do you think you’ll ever die?”

As if following my thought processes perfectly, he smiled. “So, he’s going to live on us, this grandson of mine, eh, Tasca?”

“Oh, he will survive the bullet although much work will be needed on the shoulder if he is not to suffer some permanent stiffening.” Dr. Tasca looked down at me in a kind of mild reproof. “You should not have used the arm, young man. That was unfortunate.”

I didn’t bother to argue and he turned back to my grandfather. “No, it is his general condition that worries me. Physically speaking he is balanced on the edge of a precipice. A slight nudge and he goes straight down.”

“Hear that?” My grandfather just prevented himself from prodding me with his stick. “You want to die young, eh?”

“Can you make me a better offer?”

I tried to sound gay and flippant, but Tasca obviously didn’t approve at all. “I understand you have been in prison.”

I nodded. “Of a kind – Egyptian labour camp variety.”

“With the chain gang?” His face for the first time registered some kind of concern. “Now we know.” He turned again to my grandfather. “When he is on his feet he must come to me for a thorough examination, capo. He could well have tubercular lesions and there are definite signs of incomplete recovery from blackwater fever which could mean kidney damage. Not only will he need treatment, but careful nursing and rest – several months of complete inactivity.”

“Thank you, Doctor Kildare,” I said. “You’ve made my day.”

Tasca looked completely mystified by the remark, but in any event, my grandfather dismissed him. “Back to the girl now. I want to talk to my grandson alone.”

To my shame, it was only then that I consciously gave her a thought. “You’ve got Joanna Truscott here, too? How is she?”

He pulled a chair forward and sat down. “She’s doing all right, Stacey. Tasca’s a specialist in brain surgery – the best in Sicily. He brought a portable X-ray unit with him and gave her a thorough examination. She’s lucky – the skull isn’t fractured. She’ll have a bad scar, probably for life, but a good hairdresser can fix that.”

“Shouldn’t she have gone to hospital?”

He shook his head. “No need. She couldn’t have better treatment if she did and it’s safer here.”

I tried to sit up, my stomach hollow. “Hoffer knows then?”

He pushed me gently back against the pillow. “Only that his stepdaughter is dead. Not officially, of course, so that the world can be told, but he’s spoken to me already on the telephone.”

“And told you?”

He shook his head. “He asked for a General Council meeting tonight. He’s due here in half an hour.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What General Council?”

“Did you think I was Mafia all on my own, Stacey?” He laughed. “Sure, I’m capo – capo in all Sicily – but the big decisions are made by the Council. We have the rules and they have to be obeyed. Even I can’t break them.” He shrugged. “Without the rules we are nothing.”

The Honoured Society. I shook my head. “All right, maybe I’m not thinking too clearly, but I still don’t see what Hoffer is doing coming here.”

“First you tell me what happened in the mountains. We go on from there.”

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t know?”

“Some only. Now be a good boy and do as I say.”

So I told him, in detail, including my various suspicions about things from the beginning and he took it all without a sign, even my deliberately graphic description of the massacre.

When I was finished, he sat there in silence for a moment. “Why did you go, Stacey, that is what I can’t understand? You knew this man Burke was not being honest with you, you distrusted Hoffer, you knew that even I was not telling you the whole truth and yet you still went.”

“God knows,” I said, and thinking about it in retrospect, I honestly couldn’t explain it even to myself. “Some kind of death wish, I suppose.”

The words were my own and yet at their saying, every instinct in me rebelled. “No, to hell with it. It was Burke – always Burke. Something between us that I can’t put into words, even for myself. Something I had to prove. I can’t say more than that.”

“You hate this man, I think? This is the truth of it.”

I thought about that for a while and said slowly, “No, more than hate – much more. He took me with him into a dark world of his own creating, made me into what I am not, moulded me to his purpose. Up there on the mountain he told me he is a sick man, some kind of oblique explanation for his behaviour. I think he was trying to find in it an excuse for his own conduct, but he lies even to himself. He was in decay long before his lungs started to rot. He needed no excuse.”

“Ah, now I perceive a glimmer of light,” he said. “You hate him for being something other than you previously thought he was.”

He was right, of course, but only partially so. “You could have something there. In the early days when I first met him, he seemed the only really substantial thing in a world gone mad. I believed in him completely.”

“And later?”