In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

by Jack Higgins

  Legrande looked glum. Having served with a colonial parachute regiment in Indo-China, and later, Algeria, he’d as much experience of that kind of thing as Burke and probably more.

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “A night drop into country like that is asking for it. All we need is for one of us to break a leg and we’re in real trouble.”

  “It’s the only way,” I said. “Otherwise we might as well pack our bags and go home.”

  “Stacey’s right,” Burke said briskly. “We’ve no choice. Now, let’s get down to the details.”

  I stood up. “You’ll have to manage without me. I’m going out.”

  He looked at me with a frown. “Don’t be absurd. We’ve got to get this thing organised.”

  “That’s your job. You’re supposed to be in charge. I spent a long, hot afternoon sorting the situation out for you while you lay flat on your back tanked up to the ears.”

  I found myself leaning on the table, caught in our first public confrontation. It was as if Piet and Legrande weren’t there – as if we were quite alone. There was a slight puzzled frown on his face, something close to pain in his eyes.

  He wanted to ask me why, I knew that. Instead, he said quietly, “All right, Stacey, if that’s the way you want it.”

  He went back to examining the map and I straightened. Legrande looked completely mystified, but Piet’s face was white and angry. I ignored them both and went out.

  I showered, then pulled on my old bathrobe and went back into the bedroom, towelling my hair. At that precise moment, the door opened and Piet Jaeger came in.

  He slammed it shut and glared at me. “What in the hell are you playing at? You shamed him in front of all of us, the man who’s done more for you than anyone else in the world.”

  “I’ll tell you what he did for me,” I said. “He taught me three things. To shoot my enemy from cover instead of face to face, to kill, not to wound, and that a bullet in the back is to be preferred to one from the front. Quite an education. Oh, there have been one or two other items in between, but those are the salient features.”

  “You owe him everything.” Piet was almost beside himself. “He saved you twice. We said no walking wounded at Lagona, but when the chips were down and you got it in the leg, what did he do?”

  “So he made them carry me out. I’d love to know why.”

  “You rotten bastard.” His South African accent had noticeably thickened. “He’s worth three of you any day of the week. You aren’t fit to walk in his shadow.”

  In a way I was sorry for him. I suppose a lot of his anger came down to plain jealousy. He loved Burke, I realized that now, and had probably always suffered me in silence. I had been with Burke from the beginning and he was right – by all the rules I should have been given a bullet in the head, the mercenary law to save me from falling into the hands of the Simbas alive. But Burke had ordered them to carry me out. For Piet that must have been about as easy to take as a lump of glass in the gut.

  “Go on, get out of it,” I said. “Go and smooth his wrinkled brow or whatever you do together in the night watches.”

  He swung hard, the kind of punch that would have knocked my head from my shoulders had it landed. I made sure it didn’t, allowing myself to roll backwards across the bed. I didn’t fancy my chances in any kind of fair fight. He hadn’t been in jail lately so he was fitter than I was and had a two stone advantage in weight.

  He scrambled across the bed, trying to get at me, got caught up in the sheets and fell on his face. I kicked him in the head which didn’t accomplish much as I was bare-footed, but it shook him for a moment and by the time he was on his feet I had the Smith and Wesson in my hand.

  “By God, I’ll have you now, Wyatt.”

  He plunged forward and I shot the lobe off his left ear. He screamed like a woman and his hand went to the side of his head as blood spurted. He stared at me in horror and then the door burst open and Legrande appeared. A second later, he was pulled out of the way and Burke entered, the Browning in his hand.

  He got between us fast, I’ll say that for him. “For God’s sake, what’s going on here?”

  “You’d better get your bloody lover boy out of it if you want to keep him in one piece,” I said. “This time I only nicked him. I’d be just as happy to make it two in the belly and he can take his own sweet time about dying.”

  A good ninety per cent of my anger was simulated and I even allowed my gun hand to shake a little. The total effect on Burke was remarkable. The skin tightened across the cheekbones, something stirred in his eyes and for a moment, hate looked out at me. I think it was then, at that precise moment, that I knew we were finally finished. That whatever had been between us was dust and ashes.

  He allowed the Browning to drop to his side, turned and took Piet by the arm. “Better let me have a look at that for you.”

  They left without a word. Legrande hesitated and said slowly, “Look, Stacey, maybe we should have words.”

  I’d never seen him look so troubled. “Go on, get out of it,” I said. “I’m sick to death of the lot of you.”

  I gave him a shove into the corridor and slammed the door. I had a hard job keeping my laughter down. So now it was Stacey the wild man? Let them sort that out.

  It was only later, alone in the silence, that I discovered that my hand really had begun to shake. I threw the Smith and Wesson on to the bed and dressed quickly.

  I’d hung on to the keys of the Fiat and when I went down to the courtyard it was still there. As I climbed behind the wheel Legrande arrived and opened the other door.

  “I’ve got to talk to you, Stacey. I don’t know which way I’m pointing.”

  I shook my head. “You wouldn’t be welcome where I’m going.”

  “As far as the village then. There’s a café there. We could have a drink.”

  “Suit yourself, but I can’t give you long.”

  He scrambled in and I drove away. He lit one of his eternal Gauloise and sat back, an expression of settled gloom on his hard, peasant face. He looked more like a Basque than anything else, which wasn’t surprising as he came from a village just over the border from Andorra.

  He was a close man, one of the most efficient killers I have ever known, but not, I think, by instinct. He was not a cruel man by nature and I had seen him carry a child through twenty miles of the worst country in the Congo rather than leave it to die. He was a product of his time more than anything. A member of the Resistance during the war, he had killed his first man at the age of fourteen. Later had come the years of bloody conflict in the swamps of Indo-China, the humiliation of Dien Bien Phu followed by a Viet prison camp.

  Men like him who had been through the fire swore that it would never happen again. They read Mao Tse-tung on guerrilla warfare and went to Algeria and fought the same kind of war against the same faceless enemy, fighting fire with fire, only to find, at the end, a greater humiliation than ever. Legrande had come down on the side of the O.A.S. and had fled to the Congo from yet another defeat.

  I wondered sometimes what he lived for and sitting in the small café in the candlelight, he looked old and used up as if he had done everything there was to do.

  He swallowed the brandy he had ordered and called for another. “What’s wrong between you and the colonel, Stacey?”

  “You tell me.”

  He shook his head. “He’s changed – just in this last six months he’s changed. God knows why, but something’s eating him, that’s for sure.”

  “I can’t help you,” I said. “I’m as much in the dark as you are. Maybe Piet can tell you. They seem thick enough.”

  He was surprised. “That’s been going on for years now, ever since the Kasai. I thought you knew.”

  I smiled. “I only believed in story-book heroes until recently. How long has he been drinking?”

  “It came with the general change and he goes at it privately, too. I don’t like that. Do you think he’s up to this thing?”

&n
bsp; “We won’t know that till it happens.” I finished my brandy and got up. “Must go now, Jules. Can you get back all right?”

  He nodded and looked up at me, a strange expression on his face. “Maybe he’s like me, Stacey, maybe he’s just survived too long. Sometimes I feel I’ve no right to be here at all, can you understand that? If you think that way for long enough, you lose all sense of reality.”

  His words haunted me as I went out to the Fiat and drove away.

  The Bechstein sounded as good as ever as I waited for my grandfather to appear. I tried a little Debussy and the first of the three short movements of Ravel’s Sonatina. After that I got ambitious, sorted out some music and worked my way through Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor. Lovely, ice-cold stuff that still sounded marvelous, even if my technique had dulled a little over the years.

  When I finished, there was still no sign of him. I went looking and was surprised to find him sitting on the terrace with a bottle and a couple of glasses in front of him.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said. “I’ve been listening from here. It sounded fine.”

  “At a distance.”

  He smiled and filled a glass for me. It was Marsala and very good. Not one of my favourites, but I couldn’t have said so had my life depended on it because suddenly, and for no apparent reason, there was an intimacy between us. Something very real, something I didn’t want to lose.

  “How did you get on in the mountains?” he asked me.

  “Didn’t Marco give you a report? Hasn’t he returned yet?”

  He managed an expression of vague bewilderment which didn’t impress me in the slightest. “Marco has been in Palermo all day as he is every Friday. It’s the biggest day of the week for us. Receipts to check, the bank to see. You know how it is in business?”

  I smiled. “All right, we’ll play the game your way. I saw Cerda who told me where he thinks Serafino may be found. Catching him there is another matter with a shepherd whistling from every crag, but it could be done.”

  “Is it permitted to ask how?”

  I told him and he frowned slightly. “You’ve done this sort of thing before?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m quite the commando.”

  “But to jump into darkness in country like that sounds a more than usually dangerous practice.”

  “Possibly, but it can be done.”

  “Why, Stacey? Why do you want to do this thing? Why do you live this way?”

  “There’s always the money.”

  He shook his head. “We’ve been into that – not good enough. No, when I look at you I see myself forty years ago. Mafioso branded clean to the bone.”

  “Which is another way of saying I like to play the game,” I said. “And a savage, bloody little game it is, but it’s all I’ve got. That and Burke.”

  I stood up and moved to the edge of the terrace and he said softly, “You don’t like him?”

  “It goes deeper than that. Everything I am, he made, people keep telling me that and I’m tired of hearing it.” I turned to face him. “He taught me that if you’re going to kill it may as well be from the back as the front, that there’s no difference. But he’s wrong.”

  I desperately wanted him to understand, more than I had ever wanted anything. He sat there looking at me gravely. “Without the rules, it’s nothing – no sense to any of it. With them, there’s still something to hang on to.”

  He nodded, a slight smile on his face. “ Something else you brought out of this Hole of yours, Stacey?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Then it was worth it.” He took out a cigar. “Now go back to the piano like a good boy and play me your mother’s favorite piece again.”

  The music was absolute perfection and brought her back to me like a living presence. All the sadness of life, all its beauty, caught in an exquisite moment that seemed to go on for ever. When I finished, there were tears on my face.

  When I got back, Hoffer had returned and there was some sort of council of war going on in the lounge. Burke looked completely different. He’d shaved and wore a khaki shirt with epaulets which gave him a certain military air.

  But the change went deeper. There was a briskness about him, an authority I had not seen since my return. When I went in, he glanced up from the map and said calmly, “Ah, there you are, Stacey. I’ve just been going over things with Mr. Hoffer.”

  Piet stood in the background, a wad of sticking plaster moulding his left ear, Legrande beside him. The South African simply didn’t look at me as I went to the table.

  “This is one hell of a good idea,” Hoffer said, rubbing his hands together. “Colonel Burke tells me it’s primarily your suggestion.”

  Burke’s voice was flat and colourless as he cut in. “The trouble is getting to Serafino before he realises we’re in the area. His camp, as we understand it, is about four thousand five hundred feet up on the eastern slopes of the mountain. The idea is that we make a night drop on to a plateau about a thousand feet below the summit on the western side.”

  “Then you cross over and catch him with his pants down?”

  Hoffer’s choice of phrase was unfortunate under the circumstances, but Burke nodded. “We should get over the summit at least by dawn. On the other side there’s a forest belt about a thousand feet down. Oak, birch, some pine, I understand. Once we reach that we’ll have plenty of cover on the final stretch.”

  Hoffer seemed genuinely excited as he examined the map. “You know something? For the first time I really believe there’s a chance. Let’s all have a drink on it.”

  “Another time if you don’t mind,” I said. “I could do with an early night. It’s been a long day.”

  He was pleasant enough about it and as no one pressed me to stay, I left them and went up to my room. Not that I could sleep when I did go to bed. I lay there with the French windows open because of the heat and after a while it started to shower. It was round about that time that Rosa arrived.

  She took off the silk kimono she was wearing. “Look, no trouser suit.”

  When she got in beside me, she was shivering, though from desire or cold was uncertain and whether she was there for herself or Hoffer didn’t really seem to matter. It was nice, lying there in the darkness holding her in the hollow of my arm, listening to the rain, even when she fell asleep on me!

  TEN

  AS I FOUND out later, Burke didn’t go to bed. Instead, he flew to Crete in the Cessna to pick up a few things we were going to need and was back just before eleven on Saturday morning.

  Sunday, being the conventional day of rest, seemed as reasonable a time to catch Serafino napping as we were likely to find, which meant going in that night. There was almost a full moon, which didn’t please Burke much, but he was impatient to be off now that the ball was rolling again and bustled around, full of energy, checking everything.

  We used a small private airstrip not far from the villa, a cow pasture really, with a hangar that was barely large enough to get the Cessna inside.

  The plane was the 401 model with eight seats and we had those out for a start. A particularly good point was the Airstair door amidships which would give us a clear exit, something we badly needed if all four of us were to get out in time to drop in a nice tight group.

  The pilot, a man called Nino Verda, was ex Italian air force, about thirty from the look of him and according to Hoffer the best money could buy. He needed to be. To fly that kind of country in the dark, graze a six-thousand-foot mountain and give us an eight-hundred-foot drop over that plateau was going to take genius.

  We were using the X type parachute, the kind British paratroopers used before they changed to the new N.A.T.O. one. Burke preferred the X type. It got you down faster and could be guided with greater accuracy. The reserve chutes were of the same type, and identical with those we had used in the Congo.

  Our weapons were unconventional by some standards, but proved in combat, the only realistic test. We were using the Chines
e A.K. assault rifle, probably the most reliable automatic combat rifle in the world at that time and the new Israeli sub machine gun, the Uzi, which was better than the Sterling in every way.

  Two grenades each, a commando knife – the list seemed endless. Burke even had a kit inspection with each man’s camouflaged jump suit laid out together with every item of equipment.

  And he went over the operation with the map and a stop-watch so many times that even Piet Jaeger looked sick by late evening. Towards me he seemed no different and I suppose any touch of formality in our relationship could have been put down to the exigencies of the situation.

  At dinner, Hoffer was joviality personified. Only the best was good enough although Burke put his foot down as regards alcohol. But the food was excellent. Surprisingly, I found an appetite for it and Rosa was there, wearing her best, looking absolutely magnificent.

  Afterwards, Burke took us through the plan again in detail, including the walk-out if everything went well, which he estimated would take eight or nine hours to the point on the Bellona road where we were to be met by Hoffer himself with the necessary transport.

  He shook hands with us all solemnly when Burke had finished and made a little speech about how much he appreciated what we were doing and how he hoped before long to have his stepdaughter with him again, God willing, which I thought was pushing it a bit far.

  Later, when I was changing in my room, Rosa appeared. She zipped up the front of my camouflaged suit and kissed me on the cheek. “From you or from Hoffer?” I said.

  “From me.” She touched my face briefly. “Come back safe.”

  She hesitated in the doorway, and looked at me, a strange expression on her face. She wanted to speak, wanted like hell to tell me something and was desperately afraid of the consequences.