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 cafe 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?”
“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.
“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
