The morning air was blasted by the roar of motors. Three black cars sped toward him. Armed men appeared on every side of the square. Other armed men jumped out of the cars. One of the men shouted at him to surrender, to put up his hands.

Terranova took one last look at the cathedral, the statues of saints niched on its sides; he saw the blue and yellow balconies, the sun rising to light the azure sky. He knew that this was the last time he would see such wonders, that his seven years of luck were ended. There remained only one thing for him to do.

He took a great leap as if he would leap over death itself and hurl himself into a safe universe. As his body flew to one side and hit the ground, he drew his pistol and fired. One soldier reeled back and went down to one knee. Terranova tried to pull the trigger again, but by that time a hundred bullets converged on his body, blowing it to pieces, blowing the flesh off his bones. In one way he had been lucky – it had all happened so quickly that he did not have time to wonder if his mistress had betrayed him.

Terranova's death brought a sense of doom to Guiliano. He had known that the reign of the band was finished. That they could no longer counterattack successfully, that they could no longer hide in the mountains. But he had always thought that he and his chiefs would make an escape, that they would not go down to death. Now he knew there was very little time left. There was one thing he had always wanted to do, and so he summoned Corporal Canio Silvestro.

"Our time is over," he said to Silvestro. "You once told me you had friends in England who would protect you. Now is the time for you to go. You have my permission."

Corporal Silvestro shook his head. "I can always leave when you are safe in America. You need me still. You know I will never betray you."

"I know that," Guiliano said. "And you know the affection I have always had for you. But you were never truly a bandit. You were always a soldier and a policeman. Your heart was always a lawful one. And so you can make a life for yourself when all this is over. The rest of us will find it difficult. We will be bandits forever."

Silvestro said, "I never thought of you as a bandit."

"Nor did I," Guiliano said. "And yet what have I done these seven years? I thought I was fighting for justice. I tried to help the poor. I hoped to free Sicily. I wanted to be a good man. But it was the wrong time and the wrong way. For now we must do what we can to save our lives. And so you must go to England. It will make me happy to know that you are safe." Then he embraced Silvestro. "You have been my true friend," he said, "and those are my orders."

At dusk, Turi Guiliano left his cave and moved on to the Cappuccini monastery just outside Palermo where he would await word from Aspanu Pisciotta. One of the monks there was a secret member of his band, and he was in charge of the catacombs of the monastery. In these catacombs were hundreds of mummified bodies.

For hundreds of years before World War I it had been the custom of the rich and noble families to pin to the walls of the monastery the costumes in which they wished to be buried.

When they died, after their funerals, their bodies were delivered to the monastery. There the monks were masters of the art of preserving bodies. They exposed the corpses to slow heat for six months, then dried the soft parts of the bodies. In the drying process the skin shriveled, the features contorted into all the grimaces of death, some of horror, some of risibility, all terrible to the viewer. Then the bodies were dressed in the costumes that had been left for them and placed in glass coffins. These coffins were placed in niches in the wall or strung from the ceiling by glass wires. Some of the bodies were seated on chairs, some stood against the wall. Some were propped into glass boxes like costumed dolls.

Guiliano lay down on a dank stone of the catacombs and used a coffin as his pillow. He studied all these Sicilians dead for hundreds of years. There was a knight of the Royal Court in a blue silk ruffled uniform, a helmet on his head, a sword cane in his hand. A courtier, foppish in the French style, with white wig and high-heeled boots. There was a Cardinal in his red robes, an archbishop in his miter. There were court beauties whose golden gowns looked now like spider webs strangling the mummified shrunken bodies as if they were flies. There was a young maiden in white gloves and white frilly nightdress enclosed in a glass box.

Guiliano slept badly the two nights he spent there. As who would not? he thought. These were the great men and women of Sicily for the three or four last centuries, and they thought they could escape the worms in this fashion. The pride and vanity of the rich, the darlings of fate. Much better to die in the road like La Venera's husband.

But what really kept Guiliano awake was a nagging worry. How had Don Croce escaped the attack on his life earlier that week? Guiliano knew that the operation had been perfectly planned. He had brooded on how to do it ever since he had learned the truth about the massacre at the Portella della Ginestra. The Don was so well guarded that a chink had to be found in his defenses. Guiliano had decided his best chance was when the Don felt secure in the heavily guarded Hotel Umberto of Palermo. The band had a spy in the hotel, one of the waiters. He gave the Don's schedule, the deployment of the guards. With this intelligence Guiliano was sure his attack would succeed.

He had mustered thirty men to rendezvous with him in Palermo. He had known of Michael Corleone's visit and lunch with the Don, and so he waited until late afternoon when the report reached him that Michael had left. Then twenty of his men had mounted a frontal assault on the hotel to draw guards off from the garden. A few moments later he and his remaining ten men had planted an explosive charge against the garden wall and blown a hole in it. Guiliano led the charge through the hole. There were only five guards left in the garden; Guiliano shot one and the other four fled. Guiliano rushed into the Don's suite but it was empty. And it had struck him as strange that it was unguarded. Meanwhile the other detachment of his band had forced their way through the defense barrier and joined up with him. They had searched the rooms and corridors along the way and found nothing. The Don's huge bulk made it impossible for him to move quickly, so only one conclusion could be drawn. The Don had departed from the hotel shortly after Michael left. And now it occurred to Guiliano for the first time that Don Croce had been warned about the attack.

It was too bad, Guiliano thought. It would have been a glorious last stroke, besides removing his most dangerous enemy. What ballads would have been sung if he had found Don Croce in that sunlit garden. But there would be another day. He would not stay forever in America.

On the third morning, the Cappuccini monk, his body and face almost as shrunken as the mummies in his charge, brought a message from Pisciotta. It read, "In the house of Charlemagne." Guiliano understood it immediately. Zu Peppino, the master carter of Castelvetrano, who had helped Guiliano in the hijacking of Don Croce's trucks and had been a secret ally of his band ever since, had three carts and six donkeys. All three of his carts had been painted with the legends of the great Emperor, and as boys, Turi and Aspanu had called his home the house of Charlemagne. The time of the meeting had already been set.

That night, his final night in Sicily, Guiliano made his way to Castelvetrano. Outside of Palermo he picked up some shepherds who were secret members of his band and used them as an armed escort. They made their way to Castelvetrano with such ease that a suspicion flickered in Guiliano's mind. The town looked too open. He dismissed his bodyguards, who slipped away into the night. Then he made his way to a little stone house outside of Castelvetrano whose courtyard held three painted carts, now all bearing the legends from his own life. This was the house of Zu Peppino.