In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

by Jack Higgins

  In my case I had no option but to make for Bellona and I couldn’t see myself doing it in less than six or seven hours and there was always the possibility that my limbs might give out on me on the way, my body refusing to keep going.

  I shivered slightly as the sun touched me, conscious for the first time of how wet I was. I got Rosa’s flask out and drank a little more brandy. Joanna Truscott lay still and quiet, her arms neatly arranged on either side. She might have been sculpted from marble and resting on top of her own tomb for all the life she showed.

  If I left her and pushed myself hard, I might make it to Bellona in five or six hours, always supposing I didn’t collapse on the way. Even for a man as efficient as Cerda, it would take an hour or so to get together a rescue party and the return trip back up into the high country would take even longer.

  It came down to this then. If I left her, she would lie here alone for fifteen to sixteen hours at the very least and probably longer. By then she could be dead, which was something I had no intention of allowing to happen. She was going to live and I wanted to be there to see Hoffer’s face when he found out.

  The animals, which earlier had grazed so peacefully, had disappeared, obviously stampeded by the noise of the shooting. There were some bridles hanging by the door. I took one a little way into the woods and finally found a couple of goats and one of the donkeys nibbling a bush together. The donkey allowed me to get the bridle on him with no fuss and I led him back to the clearing and tethered him by the hut.

  The animal had obviously been kept to carry in supplies for Serafino and his men which meant there must be a pack saddle somewhere. I found two inside the hut, both of the same distinctive local pattern, made of wood and leather with a great V-shaped wooden trough in which sacks could be carried.

  The brandy had gone to my head, and for the moment the pain in my shoulder seemed to have receded a little. I dragged one of the saddles out and managed to heave it on to the donkey’s back at the third attempt. God knows what would have happened if the animal had had a temper or turned awkward at all, but it stood there placidly nibbling at the ground as I tightened the girth.

  Getting Joanna Truscott up was much more difficult, but after a struggle, I managed to get her on to her knees and knelt in front of her myself, allowing her to fall across my left shoulder. I deposited her on her back in the wooden trough, and none too gently, but she made no sound and lay there, face turned to heaven, her legs dangling on either side of the donkey’s rump. I got a blanket from the hut and covered her as well as I could and then tied her into position with a length of old rope.

  When I was finished, I was sweating. I sat down and felt for my cigarettes automatically. A wad of sodden paper stained with yellow was all that remained and I crossed to the bodies and found a packet in Ricco’s breast pocket, a popular local brand, cheap and nasty, but better than nothing. I smoked one through, had another swallow of Rosa’s brandy, then I wrapped the end of the donkey’s bridle firmly around my left hand and moved out.

  Buddhists believe that if the individual practises meditation long enough, he may eventually discover his true self and enter into that state of bliss that eventually leads to Nirvana. At the very least, a kind of withdrawal into the inner self is possible so that the external world fades and time, in its accepted sense, ceases to exist.

  The old Jew I had shared a cell with in Cairo had instructed me in the necessary techniques, had saved my life in effect, for I had only survived the Hole because of it. On many occasions I had withdrawn from the world, floated in warm darkness, had surfaced to find a day, two days – even three – had passed and I was still alive.

  Stumbling through the wilderness that was Monte Cammarata that morning, something very similar happened. Time ceased to exist, the stones, the sterile valleys and barren hillsides merged with the sky like a picture out of focus and I moved blindly on.

  I was conscious of nothing. One moment I was stumbling along in front of the donkey, the next a voice said quite plainly: “There are two kinds of people in the world. Pianos and piano players.”

  Burke had said that to me sitting at a zinc-topped bar in Mawanza. I was drinking warm beer because the electricity supply had been cut and the ice box behind the bar wasn’t working, and he was at his eternal coffee, the only thing he would drink in those days. We were half-way through that first contract in Katanga, had lost half our men and were going to lose most of the rest before it was over.

  Sitting there at the bar, a machine pistol at my elbow, my face staring back at me from a bullet-scarred mirror, the situation had all the ingredients to hand of every Hollywood adventure film ever made. I remember there was gunfire in the streets, the thud of mortar bombs, and now and again, the steady rattle of a heavy machine gun as they tried to clear snipers from the government offices across the square.

  By all the rules and because I was not quite twenty years of age, it should have been romantic and adventurous, just like an old Bogart movie. It wasn’t. I was sick of killing, sick of the brutality, the total inhumanity of it all.

  I was at the end of my tether, ready to go straight over the edge and Burke had sensed it instinctively.

  He’d started to talk, quietly and calmly. He was enormously persuasive in those days or perhaps it was just that I wanted to believe that he was. For me then, remember, there had to be no flaw in him.

  Before he was finished, he had me believing we were on a kind of holy crusade to save the black man from the consequences of his own folly.

  “Always remember, Stacey boy, there are two kinds of people in this world. The pianos and the piano players.”

  An unnecessarily complicated metaphor to suggest that there were those who let it happen and those who did something about it, but at the time I had believed him. In any case, the local police turned against us late that evening and I was too busy trying to save my skin during the week that followed to have time for anything else.

  Now, standing there on the mountainside, those words floated up from the past to haunt me, and remembering the incident so clearly I realised, with a kind of wonder, that he hadn’t given a damn about me personally; it had been himself he was thinking about as it had always been. He had to straighten me out to his way of thinking because he needed me. Because I had become as essential to him as a gun in his hand. A first-rate deadly weapon. That’s what I was – all I had ever been.

  I plodded on, the donkey trailing behind, my brain still filled with the past, which meant Burke. His relationship with Piet Jaeger had obviously been different in kind and he had certainly never put a foot wrong that way with me, presumably because his instincts had warned him off.

  As I have said, in the beginning he barely tolerated my need for women and my propensity for hard liquor. Now, looking back and remembering how his attitude had changed to a kind of good-humoured acceptance where those things were concerned, I wondered to what extent he had come to realise that their existence made it much easier for him to mould me to his purpose.

  Who was I, then, Stacey Wyatt or Sean Burke’s creature? No! To hell with that. I was myself alone, another kind of piano player, a man who played for himself and no one else.

  We had been on the move now for the best part of four hours and when I stopped to check on the girl’s condition she looked exactly the same, but she was still breathing, the only important thing.

  For myself, I had moved past pain, floated beyond it as I had done so many times in the Hole. My shoulder existed only as a dull ache, I had forgotten that I had a right arm at all and when the sun clouded over and heavy raindrops spattered the rocks about me, I stumbled on quite cheerfully, Stacey Wyatt, the great survivor.

  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.

  FOURTEEN

  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.”

  He frowned. “No, better to wait, Stacey. A rough ride in the car after the rain. The surface will have gone on most of the mountain roads.”

  “He’s right,” Cerda put in. “If the rain don’t stop soon there will be no roads left at all.”

  “In which case the ambulance will never get up,” I pointed out patiently.

  Cerda frowned and turned to Marco who shrugged helplessly. “Maybe he’s got a point.”

  After that, everything happened in a hurry. They wrapped Joanna in blankets and carried her out to the Alfa in the courtyard, stuffed the well between the rear and front seats with more blankets and laid her across them. I sat in the passenger seat and Cerda leaned in to fast
en my seat belt.

  “You give my respects to the capo, eh?” he said. “Tell him I handled everything just like he told me.”

  “Sure I will,” I said, leaned out of the window and called in English as we drove away. “Up the Mafia – right up!”

  But I think the significance of that eloquent and ironic English phrase was completely lost on him.

  I was right about the mountain roads and the heavy rain. To say that they dissolved behind our rear wheels may sound like something of an exaggeration, but it was not far from the truth.

  I don’t suppose we topped twenty miles an hour on the way down; if we’d gone any faster we’d have plunged straight over the edge in places and the Alfa wasn’t built to fly.

  Not that I was worried. There was a kind of inevitability to everything. The Sicilians are an ancient people and that side came uppermost in me now. Out of some strange foreknowledge, I knew the game was still in play, the climax yet to come. That was inevitable and could not be avoided. Neither by me nor Burke.

  It also helped, of course, to remember that Marco, driving a car sponsored by my grandfather and certain business associates, had once come third in the Mila Miglia.

  I closed my eyes and slept. When I opened them again, we were drawn up at the side of the main road beyond Vicari, as I discovered later, and I had lost two hours.

  They were already carrying Joanna Truscott into the rear of the ambulance on a stretcher. I tried to get up and found that my legs refused to move and then the door opened and I lurched sideways into the arms of a grey-bearded man in a white coat.

  I recall Marco vaguely somewhere in the background, but mainly my friend with the grey beard and the gold-rimmed spectacles. Surprising how respectable a doctor could look – even a Mafia doctor.

  Joanna was laid out on the other side. I recall that, and the man leaning over her and then Greybeard loomed large again, the interior light shining on his spectacles, the syringe in his hand.