Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

By G. A. Henty

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

For the Temple

Lost Classics Book Co.

Chapter One

A Stranger in the Village

Terrasini, Sicily
April 1995

The birthplace of my grandparents, of the bandit Francesco "the Monk" and theblur of generations before him, is a fishing village on the Gulf ofCastellammare, twenty-five miles west of Palermo. In the blinding Mediterraneannoon, four elderly men play cards under a makeshift canvas awning as I driveslowly through the port. Their eyes closely follow my car, but nobody speaks. Inthe rearview mirror, after I pass, they are still watching. The harborcaffes are deserted at this hour. A trawler rocks gently on a northernswell. The spring air is ripe with the odors of saltwater, lemon blossom, andwild fennel.

Two years have passed since my grandfather's death when I arrive in Terrasini,almost three since his enigmatic words in a Detroit kitchen. I have a story tosort out, a riddle to unlock. Beyond that, I can't really explain why I've comehere, to a village where I know no one and have no past of my own. There is onlythat riddle with my name on it, a dead man and his killer.

In the mirror, the card players have returned to their game. I park the car andwalk out along a concrete wharf, carrying a tourist brochure. From the sea,Terrasini is a cubist jumble of pastel houses set on a cliff above the harbor.

The wharf rests on blocks of amber limestone cut from Monte Palmeto, a bareridge two miles inland that rises nineteen hundred feet into a jagged mosaic ofpeak and canyon. Quarrymen, I read, have been sculpting the brow of Palmeto forthirty centuries, since a Bronze Age tribe built their chief city on theoutskirts of present-day Terrasini. The limestone blocks in the harbor may bethe vestiges of that city, or of the antique Roman settlement Terrasinus, the"land on the Gulf." The village fishermen, who moor their boats to the enormousold stones, insist that they are the ruins of Atlantis.

My grandfather passed his childhood on the Terrasini harborside. The Monk musthave watched the shadows flee Monte Palmeto under a noonday sun. I recognizethat a setting is unfolding, that the plot and characters of my story are hiddenin this landscape.

The rectangular grid of streets immediately above the harbor is the fishermen'squarter, a dozen blocks of net-draped cottages tightly packed onto a knollbehind the chapel of Maria Santissima della Provvidenza, protectoress ofseafarers. On a map posted in front of the chapel, the quarter is identified asContrada Marina, the maritime district, but its residents have always called it"Favarotta," as did my grandparents.

It is an allusion to the secret language that murmurs under the visible surfaceof Sicilian life, a vocabulary of coded words and symbols riven from a torturedhistory. The island of Sicily has been sacked by nearly every conqueror to passthrough the Mediterranean basin for three thousand years. Ten centuries ago,when the most recent invaders were North African, Arab galleys were moored tothe amber harbor stones. "Favarotta" is derived from fawar, Arabic for"fountain"; it refers to a spring of cool water that gushes up from slabs ofrose shale where Our Lady of Providence surveys the tuna fleet.

Favarotta occupies the narrow end of an elongated wedge that encloses thevillage. Its dimensions have barely changed since my grandfather's birth.Twenty-two streets climb the slope toward the base of Monte Palmeto, cut by tenthat parallel the gulf shore. The map's focal point, stretching along aneast-west axis for a full block between the fishermen's cottages and the rest ofthe village, is the broad Piazza Duomo, lined by shady ficus trees and thecrumbling palazzi of minor nobles. Maria Santissima delle Grazie, theprincipal church of Terrasini, anchors the piazza's upper end with two belltowers.

Officially, eleven thousand people reside in Terrasini and its outlyingcountryside in 1995. At noon on the day of my arrival, the face of the villageis a sun-washed mask: narrow cobbled streets interspersed with baroque churchesand squares, houses shuttered to the meridional heat, a border of seascape andcitrus grove. Its soul is the ancestral memory, a dark grotto of whispered namesand archaic understandings etched in nearly impenetrable code.

Sicily was familiar to me from periodic assignments dating back to the lateseventies, when I'd begun covering organized crime as a wire service reporter. Iknew the general history, a few of the local tales, and a lot of what wasdirectly connected to the murder trials and political scandals that brought meto the island on professional business. But I had never spent more than anafternoon in Terrasini.

The idea had materialized gradually in the year after my grandfather's death: Iwould take up residence in the birthplace of my namesake, a village where threeof my grandparents had also been born and the fourth was raised. I would learnwho killed the Monk, and why. I would find out what my grandfather's wordsmeant.

For two and a half years I put off this trip and prepared for it at the sametime. I had to make a living, I told myself; I couldn't drop everything to chasedown a riddle. But I knew, at heart, that it was just a matter of time.

I bought books on Sicily wherever I found them, straightforward tourist guidesand obscure academic studies in English, French, and Italian, until I'daccumulated a respectable library. I hoarded vacation days, letting them pile upuntil I could take off for a couple of months. Then I locked up my office at theSan Francisco Chronicle bureau in Paris and headed south across Franceand the Italian border to Genoa, where I boarded a car ferry for the 750-milevoyage to Palermo. Not precisely my grandfather's voyage in reverse, but asymbolic approximation.

Three hours after I arrived in Terrasini, I checked into a dusty guest housejust behind Maria Santissima delle Grazie. My room had a sagging, ornatelygilded matrimonial bed, a small wooden desk, and one chair, and a shower whosetemperature shifted unpredictably from scalding to ice cold. There was no phone.The windows opened onto a narrow balcony directly under the church towers; theirbells struck every fifteen minutes around the clock, in great baritone pealsthat rattled the window frames. Four strokes at 4:00 P.M. One at each quarterhour, two at the half hour, three at three quarters.

The bell towers overlooked the western turn of Terrasini's passeggiata,the evening promenade in the piazza. By unspoken consensus, teenagers ruled itfor two hours, starting at five. They strutted in unruly knots, clusters of boysshouting insults at each other and ogling clusters of girls. At the stroke ofseven, the teenagers promptly disappeared and were replaced by young familiesand older strollers, the men still with men and the women with women, glidingarm-in-arm past the church and the piazza's five caffes and three socialclubs.

The protocol was rigid. The first time I joined the passeggiata, sweptalong on a teenaged wave as the bells rang six, I noticed that the men sippingamaro outside of the Circolo Contadino and Di Maggio's Caffe remainedpinned to their chairs. An hour later, one of the Di Maggio clients rose fromhis seat, introduced himself in English, and walked me through several circuitsof the piazza, explaining the rules. He had spent seventeen years in Michiganand New York, learning the ways of life in the United States through trial anderror, and felt sorry for me. His name...