Jack Higgins - In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

In late spring or early summer when the first real heat begins, violent thunderstorms are common in the Sicilian high country, and occasionally a drenching downpour settles firmly over the mountains for half a day or more.

I think, looking back on it, that it was the rain which saved us. Some people are rainwalkers by nature – it gives them a shot in the arm just to be abroad and feel it beating down on them. I’ve always been one of that happy band, so the rainstorm which broke over the Cammarata that morning gave me a psychological lift to start with. But there was more to it than that. Suddenly the earth came alive. I was no longer moving through a dead world, there was a freshness to everything.

Perhaps I had become a little delirious, because I found myself singing the famous old marching song of the Foreign Legion that Legrande had taught me a couple of centuries before when we were still brothers, before corruption had set in.

The rain was hammering down now and I went over a rise that blocked the end of a small valley, looked down through the grey curtain and saw Bellona beside the white smear that was the road.

I laughed out loud and shouted to the sky. “I’ll have you now, Burke. By God, I’ll have you now.”

I turned to reach for the donkey’s bridle and found that Joanna’s head had moved to one side, that her eyes were open. She stared blankly at me for a long moment and then, with infinite slowness, smiled.

I couldn’t speak, simply touched her gently on the cheek, took the bridle and stumbled down the hillside, tears of a kind mingling with the rain on my face.

THAT FINAL HOUR on the lower slopes was worst of all for the sparse turf, soaked by the incessant rain, proved difficult to negotiate. I slipped and lost my balance twice, and once the donkey slid to one side, tearing his bridle from my grasp, bringing the heart into my mouth. For a moment it had seemed he would roll over and the result would have been catastrophic.

Joanna Truscott’s eyes were closed again and I presumed she had sunk back into unconsciousness. I got a grasp on the donkey’s bridle close to the muzzle and started down the next bank, holding his head up with what strength I had left, and willpower.

Time again ceased to exist, but now, I suspect, because I had become more than a little light-headed. We floundered down through mud and rain together, and once I was aware of someone pleading with the donkey, in the most reasonable of tones, to stand up like a man and keep going. And then the same voice broke into song again, the same faint trumpet call that had echoed from the Hoggar Mountains of the Southern Sahara to the swamps of Indo-China.

I seemed to sink into a well of darkness where nothing existed, only a tiny, flickering point of light at the end of a long tunnel, came out into it, blinking, and found myself hanging on to the bridle for dear life with both hands.

At what point I had unstrapped my right arm I don’t know. Only that I had used it – presumably had needed to – and that blood soaked through the field dressing.

It was beautiful – the most beautiful colour I had ever seen, vivid against the muted greens and browns of my camouflaged jump suit. The world was a wonderful, exquisite place, the blood mingling with the green and the grey rain falling.

Sheep poured over a bank top like a flood of dirty water and milled around me and beyond, a ragged shepherd stared, turned and ran along the track towards the village.

I passed the place where I had sat with Rosa, lain with her in a hollow in the sun. Lovely, lovely Rosa who had wanted to warn me, but who was too afraid – afraid of Karl Hoffer.

There was blood below my feet now, which was strange. I shook my head and the stain turned into a red Alfa Romeo in the yard behind Cerda’s place two hundred feet below. There was confused shouting, men running along the track towards me.

Once, as a boy, I fell from a tree at the Barbaccia villa and had lain unconscious for an hour until Marco had found me. He looked just the same now, not a day older which was surprising. The same expression, a mixture of anger and dismay and love. Strange after all those years.

I lay in the mud and he held me up against his knee. “All right – all right now, Stacey.”

I clutched at the front of his expensive sheepskin coat. “Hoffer, Marco – Hoffer and Burke. They’re mine. You tell Vito that. You tell the capo . This is mine – mine alone. My vendetta ! My vendetta !”

I shouted the words out loud and the men of Bellona stood in a silent ring, faces like stone, the Furies in some Greek play awaiting the final bloody outcome with complete acceptance.

The cracks on the ceiling made an interesting pattern, rather like a map of Italy if you looked at it long enough, including the heel, but no Sicily.

Sicily . I closed my eyes, a hundred different things crowding into my mind. When I opened them again, Marco was standing by the bed, hands in the pockets of his magnificent sheepskin coat.

“That’s a beautiful coat,” I said.

He smiled, the kind of smile I’d known so often as a boy. “How do you feel?”

I was wrapped in a heavy grey blanket. When I opened it I found that I was still in my jump suit, that my shoulder had been rebandaged with what looked like strips of white linen torn from a sheet. I pushed hard and found myself on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor.

“Watch it,” Marco warned. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

“You’re wrong,” I replied. “Utterly and totally wrong. I’m indestructible. I’m going to live for ever.”

He wasn’t smiling now and when the door opened and Cerda came in quickly, I realised from the expression on his face that I must have shouted.

I saw that the Smith and Wesson was on a small bedside locker, reached for it and held it against my face. The metal was so cold it burned, or that was the sensation. I looked up into their troubled faces and smiled, or thought I did…

“Where is she?”

“In my bedroom,” Cerda replied.

I was on my feet and lurching through the door, pulling from Marco’s outstretched hand. Cerda was ahead of me by some strange alchemy, had the door open, and beyond, the dark, sad woman that was his wife turned from the bed in alarm.

The Honourable Joanna lay quite still, her face the colour of wax, another, cleaner bandage than mine around her head.

I turned to Marco. “What’s happening?”

“She’s not good, Stacey. I’ve spoken to the capo on the telephone. The nearest doctor is two hours away by road, but he’s been instructed to come.”

“She mustn’t die,” I said. “You do understand that?”

“Sure I do, Stacey.” He patted my arm. “There’s a private ambulance on the way from Palermo, two of the best doctors in Sicily on board. She’ll be all right, I’ve looked at her myself. It’s nasty, but it’s no death wound. You’ve nothing to worry about.”

“Except Hoffer,” I said. “He thinks she is dead. For him, it’s essential that she is.” I looked at him and nodded slowly. “But then you know about that, don’t you? All about it?”

He didn’t know what to say and tried to smile reassuringly. “Forget Hoffer, Stacey, the capo will deal with him. It’s all arranged.”

“How long for?” I demanded. “A week – a month? He used me, didn’t he, Marco? He used me like he uses you and everyone else?” I found that I was still holding the Smith and Wesson in my left hand and pushed it into the holster. “Not any longer. I settle with Hoffer personally.”

I turned and looked at the girl. If she was not dead she would be soon, or so I thought at the time. “We’ll go now,” I told Marco. “In the Alfa. Meet them on the way.”