In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

the side were about as rare within my experience as the greater blue-tailed goose. Herr Hoffer sounded like a man of infinite possibilities.

“Where is he now?”

“ Palermo,” Burke said and there was a kind of eagerness in his voice as if, by asking, I’d made things easier for him.

Which explained Piet’s remark about the girls in Sicily.

“When you got me into the plane I asked you where we were going,” I said. “You told me Crete first-stop. Presumably Sicily is the second?”

“A hundred thousand dollars split four ways plus expenses, Stacey.” He sat down again and leaned across the table, fingers interlocking so tightly when he clasped his hands the knuckles showed white. “How does that sound to you.”

“For a contract?” I said. “A contract in Sicily?”

He nodded. “A week’s work at the most and easily earned with you along.”

The whole thing was beginning to fall neatly into place. “By me, you mean Stacey the Sicilian, I presume?”

“Sure, I do.” Whenever he got excited the Irish side of him floated to the top like cream on milk. “With your Sicilian background we can’t go wrong. Without you, I honestly think we wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said. “But tell me something, Sean. Where would I have been sitting right this minute if this Sicilian business hadn’t come up? If you hadn’t needed me?”

He stared at me, caught at one fixed point in time like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board, tried to speak and failed.

“You bastard,” I said. “You can stick your hundred thousand dollars where grandma had the pain.”

His hands came apart, fists clenched, the skin of his face turned milk-white with the speed of a chemical reaction and something stirred in the depths of those grey eyes.

“We’ve come a long way since the ‘Lights of Lisbon,’ haven’t we, colonel?” I got up without waiting for a reply and left him there.

In the cool shadows of my bedroom, anger possessed me like a living thing and my hands were shaking. There was sweat on my face and I opened the top drawer in the dressing table to search for a handkerchief. Instead I found something else. A pistol – the kind of side-arm I had always carried, a replica of the one the Egyptians had relieved me of on that dark night a thousand years ago – a Smith and Wesson.38 Special with a two inch barrel in an open-sided spring holster.

I fastened the holster to my belt slightly forward of the right hip, pulled on a cream-coloured linen jacket I found behind the door and slipped a box of cartridges into one of the pockets.

I found a pack of cards on a table in the living room as I knew I would where Legrande and Piet were around, and went out, taking a path down the hillside to the white beach below. One way of releasing tension is as good as another, and in any event it was obviously time to see if I’d forgotten anything.

FOUR

IN FACE-TO-FACE COMBAT, any soldier in his right mind would rather have a good rifle in his hands than a pistol any day of the week. In spite of what they say in the Westerns, a normal handgun isn’t much use beyond fifty yards and most people would miss a barn door at ten paces.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that with someone who knows what he’s about, there’s nothing to equal a good handgun for close quarters work.

I used to favour a Browning P35 automatic which is standard issue in the British Army these days, mainly because it gave me thirteen shots without having to reload, but automatics have certain snags to them. Lots of bits and pieces that can go wrong and no professional gunman I’ve ever met would use one from choice.

In an ambush at Kimpala, I had a Simba bearing down on me like an express train, a three-foot panga ready in his right hand. I shot him once then the pin fell on a dud round. It doesn’t happen all that often and in a revolver, the cylinder would have kept on turning, but this was an automatic. The Browning jammed tight and my friend, doped up to the eyeballs, kept right on coming.

We spent an interesting couple of minutes on the ground and the memory stayed with me for some time afterwards. From then on I was strictly a revolver man. Only five rounds if you leave one chamber empty for safety, but completely dependable.

When I got down to the beach, it was calm and still, the sea like a blue-green mirror, the sun so strong that the rocks were too hot to touch and light bounced back from the white sand, dazzling the eye and objects blurred, became indistinct.

I took off my jacket and loaded the Smith and Wesson carefully with five rounds then hefted it first in my left hand, then in my right. Already the old alchemy was beginning to work. Heat burned its way through the thin soles of my shoes, scoured my back, became a part of me as this gun was a part, the butt fitting easily to my hand. Nothing special about it, no custom-built grip or shaved trigger. A first-rate, factory-made deadly weapon, just like Stacey Wyatt.

I took out the pack of cards, lined five of them up in a thin crack on the edge of a lump of basalt and marked out fifteen paces. There had been a time when I could draw and hit a playing card five times at that distance inside half a second, but a lot had happened in between. I dropped into a crouch, drew and fired, arm extended, gun chest-high. The echoes died flatly away across the oily sea. I reloaded at once and went forward.

Two hits out of five. Even if the other three rounds hadn’t been too far off target it still wasn’t good enough. I returned to the firing line, adopted the conventional target stance, gun at eye level, and fired at each card in turn, taking my time.

I got all five as I had expected, put up fresh cards and tried again. I still stayed with the target stance, but this time emptied the gun fairly rapidly.

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.”