In the Hour Before Midnight (4 page)

“That's very interesting,” I said. “But tell me something, Sean. Where would I have been sitting right this minute if this Sicilian business hadn't come up? If you hadn't needed me?”

He stared at me, caught at one fixed point in time like a butterfly pinned to a collector's board, tried to speak and failed.

“You bastard,” I said. “You can stick your hundred thousand dollars where grandma had the pain.”

His hands came apart, fists clenched, the skin of his face turned milk-white with the speed of a chemical reaction and something stirred in the depths of those grey eyes.

“We've come a long way since the ‘Lights of Lisbon,' haven't we, colonel?” I got up without waiting for a reply and left him there.

In the cool shadows of my bedroom, anger possessed me like a living thing and my hands were shaking. There was sweat on my face and I opened the top drawer in the dressing table to search for a handkerchief. Instead I found something else. A pistol—the kind of side-arm I had always carried, a replica of the one the Egyptians had relieved me of on that dark night a thousand years ago—a Smith and Wesson .38 Special with a two inch barrel in an open-sided spring holster.

I fastened the holster to my belt slightly forward of the right hip, pulled on a cream-coloured linen jacket I found behind the door and slipped a box of cartridges into one of the pockets.

I found a pack of cards on a table in the living room as I knew I would where Legrande and Piet were around, and went out, taking a path down the hillside to the white beach below. One way of releasing tension is as good as another, and in any event it was obviously time to see if I'd forgotten anything.

I
N FACE
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TO
-
FACE COMBAT
, any soldier in his right mind would rather have a good rifle in his hands than a pistol any day of the week. In spite of what they say in the Westerns, a normal handgun isn't much use beyond fifty yards and most people would miss a barn door at ten paces.

Having said that, there's no doubt that with someone who knows what he's about, there's nothing to equal a good handgun for close quarters work.

I used to favour a Browning P35 automatic which is standard issue in the British Army these days, mainly because it gave me thirteen shots without having to reload, but automatics have certain snags to them. Lots of bits and pieces that can
go wrong and no professional gunman I've ever met would use one from choice.

In an ambush at Kimpala, I had a
Simba
bearing down on me like an express train, a three-foot panga ready in his right hand. I shot him once then the pin fell on a dud round. It doesn't happen all that often and in a revolver, the cylinder would have kept on turning, but this was an automatic. The Browning jammed tight and my friend, doped up to the eyeballs, kept right on coming.

We spent an interesting couple of minutes on the ground and the memory stayed with me for some time afterwards. From then on I was strictly a revolver man. Only five rounds if you leave one chamber empty for safety, but completely dependable.

When I got down to the beach, it was calm and still, the sea like a blue-green mirror, the sun so strong that the rocks were too hot to touch and light bounced back from the white sand, dazzling the eye and objects blurred, became indistinct.

I took off my jacket and loaded the Smith and Wesson carefully with five rounds then hefted it first in my left hand, then in my right. Already the old alchemy was beginning to work. Heat burned its way through the thin soles of my shoes, scoured my back, became a part of me as this gun was a
part, the butt fitting easily to my hand. Nothing special about it, no custom-built grip or shaved trigger. A first-rate, factory-made deadly weapon, just like Stacey Wyatt.

I took out the pack of cards, lined five of them up in a thin crack on the edge of a lump of basalt and marked out fifteen paces. There had been a time when I could draw and hit a playing card five times at that distance inside half a second, but a lot had happened in between. I dropped into a crouch, drew and fired, arm extended, gun chest-high. The echoes died flatly away across the oily sea. I reloaded at once and went forward.

Two hits out of five
. Even if the other three rounds hadn't been too far off target it still wasn't good enough. I returned to the firing line, adopted the conventional target stance, gun at eye level, and fired at each card in turn, taking my time.

I got all five as I had expected, put up fresh cards and tried again. I still stayed with the target stance, but this time emptied the gun fairly rapidly.

Once more a hit on each card
. I was ready to go back to square one again. I put up more cards, turned and found Burke at the bottom of the path. He stood there watching, anonymous in his dark glasses, and I turned on the firing line, drew and fired, and five shots so close together that they
sounded like one continuous roll. As I reloaded, he went forward and got the card. Four hits—three close together, one at twelve o'clock. A whisker higher and it would have missed altogether.

“A little time, Stacey,” he said. “That's all you need.”

He held out his hand and I gave him the Smith and Wesson. He tried the balance for a moment, then pivoted and fired using his own rather peculiar stance, right foot so far forward that his left knee almost touched the ground, gun straight out in front of him.

He had five hits, three close together, the other two straying towards the right hand edge. I showed him the card without comment. He nodded gravely, no visible satisfaction on his face.

“Not bad. Not bad at all. A tendency to kick to the right a little. Maybe you could lighten the trigger.”

“All right, you've made your point.” I started to reload. “Why didn't you bring the heavy brigade with you?”

“Piet and Legrande?” He shook his head. “This is between you and me, Stacey—no one else.”

“A special relationship, is that what you're trying to say? Just like America and England.”

He didn't exactly boil over, but there was anger
there, pulsating just beneath the surface of things.

“All right, so I got out a little later than I'd intended. Have you any idea how much organizing it took? What it cost?”

He stood there, waiting, I think for some gesture from me and when it didn't come, turned abruptly and walked to the water's edge. He picked up a stone, pitched it away from him half-heartedly, then slumped down on a rock and sat there gazing into the distance looking strangely dejected. For the first time since I'd known him he seemed his age.

I holstered the Smith and Wesson and squatted beside him. I offered him a cigarette without a word and he refused with a small and peculiarly characteristic gesture of one hand as if brushing something away from him.

“What's happened, Sean?” I said. “You're different.”

He moved the sunglasses, ran a hand over his face and smiled faintly, looking out to sea. “When I was your age, Stacey, the future held a kind of infinite promise. Now I'm forty-eight and it's all somewhere behind me.”

It sounded like the sort of remark he'd spent a lot of careful work on beforehand, a characteristic of the Irish that didn't just start with Oscar Wilde.

“I get it,” I said. “This is dust and ashes morning.”

He carried straight on as if I hadn't said a word. “Life has a habit of catching up on all of us sooner or later, I suppose. You wake up one morning and suddenly for the first time ever, you want to know what it's all about. When you're on the margin of things like me, it's probably too late anyway.”

“It's always too late to ask that kind of question,” I said. “From the day you're born.”

I was aware of a certain irritation. I didn't want this sort of conversation and yet here I was in midstream in spite of the faint suspicion I'd had for a while now, where Burke was concerned, that somehow I was being conned, caught in a spider's web of Irish humbug served up by a talent that wouldn't have disgraced the Abbey Theatre.

He glanced at me and there was urgency in his voice when he said, “What about you, Stacey? What do you believe in? Really believe in with all your guts?”

I didn't even have to think any more, not after the Hole. “I shared a cell in Cairo with an old man called Malik.”

“What was he in for?”

“Some kind of political thing. I never did find out. They took him away in the end. He was a Buddhist—a Zen Buddhist. Knew by heart every word Bodidharma ever said. It kept us going for three months.”

“You mean he converted you?” There was a frown on his face. I suppose he must have thought I was going to tell him I couldn't indulge in violence any more.

I shook my head. “Let's say he helped shape my philosophy. Me, I'm a doubter. I don't believe in anything or anybody. Once you believe in something you immediately invite someone else to disagree. From then on you're in trouble.”

I don't think he'd heard a word I'd been saying or perhaps he just didn't understand. “It's a point of view.”

“Which gets us precisely nowhere.” I flicked what was left of my cigarette into the water. “Just how bad are things?”

“About as rough as they could be.”

Not only the villa belonged to Herr Hoffer. It seemed the Cessna was also his and he'd provided the cash that had gone into the operation that had got me out of Fuad.

“Do you own anything besides the clothes you stand up in?” I asked.

“That's all we came out of the Congo with,” he pointed out, “or do I need to remind you?”

“There have been several bits of banditry in between as I recall.”

He sighed and said with obvious reluctance, “I
might as well tell you. We were in for a percentage of that gold you were caught with at Râs el âyis.”

“Kan-How big a percentage?”

“Everything we had. We could have made five times its value overnight. It looked like a good proposition.”

“Nice of you to tell me.”

I wasn't angry. It didn't seem to be all that important any more and I was interested in the next move.

“No more wars, Sean?” I asked. “What about the Biafrans? Couldn't they use a good commando?”

“They couldn't pay in washers. In any case, I've had enough of that kind of game—we all have.”

“So Sicily is the only chance?”

It was obviously the moment he'd been waiting for—the first real opening I had given him.

“The last chance, Stacey—the last and only chance. One hundred thousand dollars plus expenses . . .”

I held up my hand. “No sales talk. Just tell me about it.”

God, but I'd come a long, long way in those six years since Mozambique. Little Stacey Wyatt telling Sean Burke what to do and he took it, that was the amazing thing.

“It's simple enough,” he said. “Hoffer's a widower with a stepdaughter called Joanna—Joanna Truscott.”

“American?”

“No, English and very upper-crust from what I hear. Her father was a baronet or something like that. She's an honourable anyway, not that it means much these days. Hoffer's had trouble with her for years. One scrape after another. Sleeping around—that kind of thing.”

“How old is she?”

“Twenty.”

The Honourable Joanna Truscott sounded promising
.

“She must be quite a girl.”

“I wouldn't know—we've never met. Hoffer has business interests in Sicily. Something to do with the oilfields at a place called Gela. You know it?”

“It was a Greek colony. Aeschylus died there. They say he was brained by a tortoise shell dropped by a passing eagle.” He gazed at me blankly and I grinned. “I had an expensive education, Sean, remember? But never mind. What about the Truscott girl?”

“She disappeared about a month ago. Hoffer didn't notify the police because he thought she was off on some binge or other. Then he got a ransom
note from a bandit called Serafino Lentini.”

“An old Sicilian custom. How much?”

“Oh, it was modest enough. Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Did he go to the police?”

Burke shook his head. “Apparently he's spent enough time in Sicily to know that doesn't do much good.”

“Wise man. So he paid up?”

“That's about the size of it. Unfortunately this Serafino took the money then told him he'd decided to hang on to her for a while. He also indicated that if there was any trouble—any sign of the law being brought in—he'd send her back in pieces.”

“A Sicilian to the backbone,” I said. “Does Hoffer have any idea where he's hanging out?”

“The general area of a mountain called Cammarata. Do you know it?”

I laughed. “The last place God made. A wilderness of sterile valleys and jagged peaks. There are caves up there that used to hide Roman slaves two thousand years ago. Believe me, if this Serafino of yours is a mountain man the police could chase him for a year up there without even seeing him and helicopters don't do too well in that kind of country. The heat of the day does funny things to
the air temperature. Too many down-draughts.”

“As bad as that?”

“Worse than you could ever imagine. The greatest bandit of them all, Giuliano, operated in the same kind of territory and they couldn't catch him, even when they brought in a couple of army divisions.”

He nodded slowly. “Could we do it, Stacey? You and me and the heavy brigade?”

I thought about it. About the Cammarata and the heat and the lava rock and about Serafino who might already have handed the girl on to the rest of his men. When I replied, it wasn't because the thought made me sick or angry or anything like that. From the sound of her, the Honourable Joanna might well be having the time of her life. I don't honestly think I was even thinking of my end of the money. It was more than that—something deeper—something personal between Burke and me which I couldn't have explained at that moment even to myself.

“Yes, I think it could be done. With me along it's just possible.”

“Then you'll come?”

He leaned forward eagerly, a hand on my shoulder, but I wasn't going to be caught that easily.

“I'll think about it.”

He didn't smile, showed no emotion of any kind and yet tension oozed out of him like dirty water and in a second he was transformed into the man I'd always known.

“Good lad. I'll see you later then. Back at the villa.”

I watched him climb the path and disappear. For the moment I'd had enough shooting. The sea looked inviting and I moved a little further along the beach, stripped and went in.