Waking was a return to a heavy stillness. I was aware of flowers, the grass at eye-level like a jungle, the woman watching me from a few yards away. Was it an accidental encounter or had she been sent by Burke? I wasn’t angry, but strangely calculating considering the circumstances. I watched her through slitted eyes, apparently still asleep, making no move. She stayed perhaps two or three minutes, her face quite expressionless, then went away carefully.
When she had gone, I sat up, dressed and went down to the beach again feeling rather excited. In a way, the whole thing had become a kind of game with Burke making a new move as I countered the old one.
The cards were where I had left them together with my box of ammunition and when I moved to the firing line, I had never known such power, such certainty. I drew, fired and was reloading within the second, my old self again, the Stacey from before the Hole… and yet not the same.
This time I fired left-handed, drawing on the cross from my waistband and knew before I checked what I would find.
I slept during the afternoon waking just before night fell and yet I lay there without moving when Burke entered the room to check on me and softly departed.
When it was quite dark I got up, pulled on a pair of pants and ventured on to the terrace. I could hear voices near at hand, followed the sound and paused at the window of what was obviously his bedroom. He was sitting at a desk in one corner and Piet was standing beside him, his fair hair golden in the lamplight.
Burke glanced up at him and smiled – a new kind of smile, one I’d never seen before – patted his arm and said something. Piet went out like some faithful hound about his master’s business.
Burke opened a drawer, produced what looked suspiciously like a bottle of whisky, uncorked it and swallowed, which for a man who didn’t drink was quite a trick. He put the bottle back in the drawer when the door opened and the woman entered.
I got ready to leave, mainly because whatever else I am I’m no voyeur, but there was no need. He simply sat there looking very much the colonel and talked, presumably in Greek which I knew he spoke well after a couple of years in Cyprus during the Emergency.
I eased back into the shadows as she left and moved back to my room. The whole thing was certainly packed full of human interest and drama and I lit a cigarette, lay on the bed and thought about it all.
The story – that was the really weak link. The story about the Honourable Joanna and the rampant Serafino. Oh, it was possible, but strangely incomplete like a Bach fugue with page three missing.
Somewhere thunder rumbled menacingly. The gods were angry perhaps?
I didn’t hear her come in, but when lightning crackled out to sea, it picked her from the night standing just inside the French window. I made no sound. When it flared again, she had come closer, the dress on the floor behind her, the ripe body a thing of light and mystery, dark hair brushing the full breasts.
In the darkness following, her hands were on me, her mouth, her flesh against mine. In one single savage movement I had her by the hair, my hand tightening cruelly.
“What did he tell you to do?” I demanded. “Anything I wanted, anything to keep me happy?”
Her body arched in pain and yet she did not struggle and when the lightning flickered again, highlighting the heavy breasts, I saw that her eyes were turned towards me and there was no fear there.
My fingers slackened in her hair and she subsided. I gently patted her face, her lips turned into the palm of my hand. So, it had come to this? Stacey the satyr – fill one half of his bed for him and keep him happy. The rest was easy. Just like my English breakfast – Burke thought of everything. Only the piano was missing and he’d probably tried hard enough to get hold of one.
I went to the French window and stood looking out at the flickering sky. Suddenly, and for no accountable reason, the whole thing struck me as really being very funny – a monstrous game for children with motive laid bare to such a degree that it was ridiculous.
Burke wanted me – needed me. In exchange I got twenty-five thousand dollars and all my more carnal needs supplied. Now what well-bred satyr could complain at that?
I nodded slowly. Right. Let it be so. I would play his game through as I had done before, but this time perhaps a rule or two of my own might be in order.
Behind me was the softest of movements and I sensed her presence there in the darkness. I reached out and pulled her close. She was still naked and shivered slightly. I could smell the mimosa, heavy and clinging on the damp air. The whole electric world waited for a sign. It came and the heavens opened, rain falling straight from sky to earth.
The freshness filled my nostrils, drowning the womanly scent of her. I left her there, moved out on the terrace and stood, face turned up to the rain, mouth half-open, laughing as I hadn’t laughed in a long, long time, ready to take on the world again and beat it at its own dark game.
FIVE
IT WAS HOLY Week when we arrived in Palermo, something which I’d completely forgotten about. We drove in the thirty-five kilometres from the aerodrome at Punta Raisi and the black Mercedes saloon which had met us bogged down in the crowded streets. It finally came to a halt in deference to a religious procession which wound its way through the crowds, an ornate Madonna rising on a catafalque high above our heads.
During the whole of the run from Crete, Burke had been moody and irritable and now he lowered the window and looked out with ill-concealed impatience.
“What’s all this?”
“A procession of the mysteries,” I told him. “This kind of thing goes on during Holy Week all over Sicily. Everything else grinds to a halt. They’re a very religious people.”
“It doesn’t seem to have rubbed off much on you,” he commented sourly.
Piet Jaeger glanced at me anxiously. How much he knew of what had been said between Burke and myself, of the hardness of the bargaining, I wasn’t sure, but the change in our relationship had been plain enough during the past three days.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Didn’t you notice the Virgin had a knife through her heart? That’s Sicily for you – the cult of death everywhere. I’d have thought I fitted in rather nicely.”
He smiled reluctantly. “You could be right at that.”
I turned to Piet. “You’ll love it. It’s one hell of a place. On All Saints’ Day the children are given presents from the dead. The graves are probably the best kept in the world.”
Piet grinned, obviously relieved, but Legrande who was sitting beside the driver was hot and tired, his eyes tinged with yellow which didn’t look too good. Maybe one of the several fevers he’d picked up in that Viet prison camp after Dien Bien Phu was about to plague him.
“What is this, a conducted tour?” he demanded.
I ignored him and leaned out of the window as the Mercedes pushed its way through the crowd. The girls were a little more fashionably dressed than when I had last been here and so were the younger men, but I could smell incense and candle grease, hear voices chanting beyond the square. The crowd parted and the penitents appeared looking remarkably like the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in pointed hoods and long white robes.
No, nothing had changed – not down there beneath the surface where it counted.
About seven miles out of Palermo on the coast road to Messina you come to the beaches of Romagnolo, a favourite spot for city-dwellers at weekends. Hoffer’s villa was a couple of miles further on. It didn’t look more than a year or two old and had obviously been specially designed to fit into the hillside site, rising above us on three different levels with what looked like a Moorish garden crowning the highest roof.
