In the Hour Before Midnight by Jack Higgins Page A

Immigration told him. Does it matter?” He shrugged. “Sooner or later the capo gets to know everything.”
    â€œSo it’s still the same, Marco?” I said. “He’s still capo . I thought Rome was supposed to be clamping down on Mafia these days?”
    He smiled slightly. “Let’s go, Stacey, it’s going to rain.”
    I shook my head. “Not now—later. I’ll come tonight when I’ve had time to think. You tell him that.”
    It had been obvious to me from the beginning that he had been holding a gun in his right hand pocket. He started to take it out and found himself staring into the muzzle of the Smith and Wesson. He didn’t go white—he wasn’t the sort, but something happened to him. There was a kind of disbelief there, at my speed, I suppose, and at the fact that little Stacey had grown up some.
    â€œSlowly, Marco, very slowly.”
    He produced a Walther P38 and I told him to lay it down carefully and back off. I picked the Walther up and shook my head.
    â€œAn automatic isn’t much use from the pocket, Marco, I’d have thought you’d have known that. The slide nearly always catches on the lining with your first shot.”
    He didn’t speak, just stood there staring at me as if I were a stranger and I slipped the Walther into my pocket. “Tonight, Marco, about nine. I’ll see him then. Now go.”
    He hesitated and Sean Burke moved out from behind a marble tomb five or six yards behind him, a Browning in one hand.
    â€œIf I were you I’d do as he says,” he told Marco in his own peculiar brand of Italian.
    Marco went without a word and Burke turned and looked at me gravely. “An old friend?”
    â€œSomething like that. Where did you spring from?”
    â€œRosa got another car out quick and I followed the Mercedes into town—no trouble. It got interesting when we discovered you had someone else on your tail. Who was he?”
    â€œA friend of my grandfather. He wants to see me.”
    â€œHe must have one hell of an information service to know you were here so quickly.”
    â€œThe best.”
    He moved to the railings and read the inscription. “Your mother?” I nodded. “You never did tell me about it.”
    And I found out that I wanted to, which was strange. It was as if we were on the old footing again or perhaps I was in that kind of mood where I would have told it to anyone.
    â€œI said my mother was Sicilian, that my grandfather still lived here, but I don’t think I ever went into details.”
    â€œNot that I recall. I believe you mentioned his name, but I’d forgotten it until I saw it again just now on the inscription there.”
    I sat on the edge of a tomb and lit a cigarette. I wondered how much I could tell him, how much he could possibly understand. To the visitor, the tourist, Sicily was Taormina, Catania, Syracuse—golden beaches, laughing peasants. But there was another, darker place in the hinterland. A savage landscape, sterile, barren, where the struggle was not so much for a living, but for survival. A world where the key-word was omerta , which you could call manliness for want of a better translation. Manliness, honour, solve your own problem, never seek official help, all of which led to the concept of personal vendetta and was the breeding group for Mafia.
    â€œWhat do you know about Mafia, Sean?”
    â€œDidn’t it start as some kind of secret society in the old days?”
    â€œThat’s right. It came into being in a period of real oppression. In those days it was the only weapon the peasant had, his only means of any kind of justice. Like all similar movements, it grew steadily more corrupt. It ended up by having the peasant, the whole of Sicily by the throat.” I dropped my cigarette and rubbed it into the gravel.“And still does in spite of what the authorities in Rome have been able to