Free In the Hour Before Midnight by Jack Higgins

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.
    â€œExpecting trouble?”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI’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.

SEVEN

----
    M ONTI P ELIEGRINO , 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 diedin 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.
    â€œWhat in the hell was that supposed to be?” Burke demanded.
    â€œThey’re coming in for tomorrow’s market.”
    â€œAt this time of night?”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œI didn’t really take it all in,” he said. “This Mafia stuff. I thought it was all in the past.”
    â€œI can think of one place that’s had better than a hundred and fifty killings in four years—a town of