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

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.”