from their chairs and stared in silence at the dead Spaniard.
"He could not be permitted to leave this room alive," said the padrone.
As if nothing had happened, the guests returned to their chairs, all eyes on this mightiest of men who could kill with such deliberateness, perhaps afraid for their own lives, it was difficult to tell. The padrone went on.
"All in this room are my inheritors," he said. "For you are the Council of the Matarese and you and yours will do what I can no longer do. I am too old and death is near -nearer than you believe. You will carry out what I tell you, you will divide the corruptors and the corrupted, you will spread chaos and through the strength of your achievements, you will inherit far more than I leave you. You will inherit the earth. You will have your own again." "What do you-can you-leave us?" asked a guest.
"A fortune in Genoa and a fortune in Rome. The accounts have been transferred in the manner described in a documen4 one copy of which has been placed in each of your rooms. There also will you find the conditions under which you will receive the monies. These accounts were never known to exist; they will provide millions for you to begin your work." The guests were stunned until one had a question.
"'Your' work? Is it not 'our' work?" "It will always be ours, but I shall not be here. For I leave you something more precious than all the gold in the Transvaal. The complete secrecy of your identities. I speak to each of you. Your presence here this day will never be revealed to anyone on earth. No name, no de- scription, no likeness of your face, no pattern of your speech can ever be traced to you. Neither will it ever be forced from the senile wanderings of an old man's mind." Several of the guests protested-mildly to be sure-but with reason. There were many people at Villa Matarese that day. The servants, the grooms, the musicians, the girls.
The padrone held up his hand. It was as steady as his eyes were glaring.
'7 will show you the way. You must never step back from violence. You must accept it as surely as the air you breathe, for it is necessary to life. Necessary to your lives, to the work you must do." He dropped his hand and the peaceful, elegant world of Villa Matarese erupted in gunfire and screams of death everywhere. It came first from the kitchen. Deafening blasts of shotguns, glass shattering, metal crashing, servants slain as they tried to escape through the doors into the great hall, their faces and chests covered with blood.
Then from the gardens; the music abruptly stopped, replaced by supplications to God, all answered by the thunder of the guns. And then-most horribly-the highpitched screams of terror from the upper house where the young ienorant girls from the hills were being slaughtered.
Children who only hours ago had been virgins, defiled by men they had never seen before on the orders of Guillaume de Matarese, now butchered by new commands.
I pressed myself back into the wall in the darkness of the balcony, not knowing what to do, trembling, frightened beyond any fear I could imagine. And then the gunfire stopped, the silence that followed more terrible than the screams for it was the evidence of death.
Suddenly I could hear running--three or four men, I could not tell-but I knew they were the killers. They were rushing down staircases and through doors, and I thought, Oh God in heaven, they are looking for me.
But they were not. They were racing to a place where all would gather together; it seemed to be the north veranda, I could not be sure, all was happening so fast. Below in the great hall, the four guests were in shock, frozen to their chairs, the padrone holding them in their places by the stren,ath of his qlaring eyes.
There came what I thought would be the final sounds of gunfire until my own death. Three shots-only threebetween terrible screams. And then I understood. The killers had themselves been killed by a lone man given those orders.
The silence came back. Death was everywhere-in the shadows and dancing on the walls in the flickering candlelight of the great hall. The padrone spoke to his guests.
"It is over," he said. "Or nearly over. All but you at this table are dead save one man you