In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage

by Jack Higgins

Which was what I thought he was at the time, for his Irish upbringing was indicated more by tricks of speech and phrasing than accent.

  I shook my head. “American.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  “I spent what they term the formative years in Europe.”

  He nodded. “I don’t suppose you can play ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’?”

  “As ever was,” I said, and moved into a reasonably straight rendering of the beautiful old Irish folk song.

  It lacked John McCormack, but wasn’t bad though I do say it myself. He nodded soberly when I finished. “You’re good – too good for this place.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Is it all right if I smoke?”

  “I’ll tell the barman to send you a beer,” he replied gravely.

  He returned to the bar and a moment later one of Coimbra ’s flunkeys tapped him on the shoulder. There was a short conversation and they went upstairs together.

  Lola came across, yawning hugely. “You’re losing your touch,” I told her.

  “The Englishman?” She shrugged. “I’ve met his kind before. Half a man. Big in everything except what counts.”

  She moved on and I sat there thinking about what she had said, working my way through a slow blues. At that time I was inclined to think she was talking into the wind, probably out of a kind of professional pique at being snubbed. A man didn’t have to be the other thing just because he wasn’t particularly attracted to women, although I’ve never seen any virtue in not indulging at every opportunity in what is one of life’s greatest pleasures as far as I’m concerned. The Sicilian half of me discovered women early.

  I came to the end of the number I was playing and lit a cigarette. For some reason there was one of those sudden lulls that you sometimes get with a crowd anywhere. Everyone seemed to stop talking and the whole thing became curiously dreamlike. It was as if I was outside looking into the packed room and things moved in a kind of slow motion.

  What was I doing here on the rim of the dark continent, Africa all around me? Faces everywhere, looming through the smoke, black, white, brown and subtle variations in between, riff-raff, not even a common humanity holding us together, all running from something.

  Suddenly I’d had enough. In a way, I’d taken a look, not so much at myself as I was then, but at what I would soon become and I didn’t like what I’d seen. I was hot and sticky, sweat trickling from my armpits, and I decided to change my shirt. I realise now, of course, that I was only looking for some excuse to go upstairs.

  My room was on the third floor, Coimbra ’s apartment on the second, the girls being down below. As a rule it was quiet up there because that was the way Coimbra liked it, but now, as I paused at the end of the passage, I was aware again of that same strange stillness I had experienced earlier.

  The voices, when I heard them, seemed far away and I walked on, aware that someone was speaking angrily. The first door opened into a kind of anteroom. I went in cautiously and moved through darkness to where a thousand fingers of light pierced a lattice screen.

  Coimbra was seated at his desk, one of his heavies, Gilberto, at his back holding a gun. Herrara, the man who had brought Burke up from the café, leaned against the door, arms folded.

  Burke was standing a couple of yards away from the desk, legs slightly apart, hands in the pockets of his bush jacket. I could see him in profile and his face might have been carved from stone.

  “You don’t seem to understand,” Coimbra was saying. “No one was interested in your proposition, it’s as simple as that.”

  “And my five thousand dollars?”

  Coimbra looked as if he was fast losing his patience. “I have been put to considerable expense in this matter – considerable expense.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “Now you are being sensible, major. In business these things happen. One must be prepared to take risks for quick returns. And now you must excuse me. My men will escort you. This is a rough district. It would desolate me if anything were to happen to you.”

  “I’m sure it would,” Burke said dryly.

  Gilberto smiled for the first time and hefted the Luger in his hand and Burke took off his bush hat, wiping his face with the back of his right hand, looking suddenly beaten.

  But I could see what they could not. Inside the crown of his hat an old short-barrelled Banker’s special was held in place by a spring clip. He shot Gilberto from cover, so to speak, slamming him back against the wall, turned and covered Herrara who was starting to draw.

  “I don’t think so,” Burke said, and I was aware of the power in the man, the vital force.

  He made Herrara face the wall and searched him quickly. And Coimbra, man of surprises to the end, opened a silver cigar box and produced a small automatic.

  I had a friend once who took up golf and was a scratch man within three months. He had a natural flair for the game just as some people have language kinks and others can rival computers in mental calculation.

  On one memorable Sunday afternoon during my first month at Harvard, another student took me to a local pistol club. I’d never fired a gun in my life, yet when he put a Colt Woodsman in my hand and told me what to do, I experienced a new feeling. The gun became a part of me and the things I did with it in one short hour had astonished everyone there.

  So I was a natural shot with something of a genius for handguns, but I had never aimed at a human being. What happened next seemed so natural that, in retrospect, it was frightening. I flung open the door, dropped to one knee and grabbed for Gilberto’s Luger where it lay on the floor. In the same moment, I shot Coimbra through the hand.

  Burke swung, crouched for action, a tiger ready to spring, his own gun in one hand, Herrara’s in the other. Although I didn’t realise it then, it said a lot for his control that he didn’t shoot me as a reflex action.

  He gave me one brief glance and I thought he would smile. Instead, he opened the outside door, listened, then closed it again.

  “The kind of place where people mind their own business,” I told him.

  He walked slowly to the desk. Gilberto crouched against the wall clutching his chest, blood at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, but he was obviously in deep shock. Coimbra had gone very pale and held his right hand under his left arm as if trying to stop the bleeding. Burke touched him between the eyes with the barrel of his revolver.

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  Even then Coimbra hesitated and I put in quickly, “There’s a safe inside the walnut cabinet by the door.”

  Burke thumbed back the hammer of his revolver with an audible click and Coimbra said hastily, “The key is in the cigar box under the tray.”

  “Get it,” Burke told me. “Bring whatever you find.”

  There was certainly considerably more than five thousand dollars in the cash box I brought to the desk although I never did find out exactly how much. Burke took the lot, the neat packets of banknotes vanishing into the capacious pockets of his bush jacket.

  “One must be prepared to take risks for quick returns, isn’t that what you said, Coimbra?”

  But Coimbra was past caring and fainted across the desk. Herrara still leaned against the wall, hands flat. Burke turned and hit him almost casually, striking with clenched fist at the base of the skull. Herrara went down with a groan.

  The Banker’s special was returned to its clip inside the crown of the bush hat and he replaced it on his head, adjusting the angle of the brim in the mirror. He turned to face me.

  “First rule in the bush,” he said. “Walk, don’t run. Remember that on the way out.”

  We left by the side entrance which was usually kept open for those clients who wanted direct access to the girls and didn’t welcome publicity. A Ford truck was parked just around the corner from the café, an African dozing behind the wheel. Burke told me to get in the back, spoke to the driver and joined me.

  As the truck started to move, I said, “Where to now?
”

  “The old army airstrip at Caruba. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve only been in town a couple of weeks. That job at the ‘Lights of Lisbon’ wasn’t intended to be my life’s work. I was just trying to raise the price of a ticket to Cape Town.”

  “Any special reason?”

  “A man has to have an aim in life.”

  He accepted it, looking quite serious and nodded. “That was good shooting back there. Where did you learn?”

  When I explained he was obviously surprised. At that time I didn’t realise how good I must have looked because it wasn’t until later that I learned that I acted instinctively like a real professional who always aims for the shooting hand with his first bullet, knowing that a dying man can still get off a shot at him.

  We moved out through the edge of town; there were no longer any street lamps and we were shrouded in darkness. After a while he asked if I had my passport.

  I reached for my wallet instinctively and nodded. “About all I have got.”

  And then, as if it had only just occurred to him, he said, “My name is Burke, by the way – Sean Burke.”

  “Stacey Wyatt.” I hesitated. “Didn’t I hear Coimbra call you major?”

  “That’s right. I was twenty years in the British Army – Paratroops. Left last year. I’ve just been granted a commission by the Katanga government.”

  “The Congo?” I said.

  “I’m forming a special unit to help keep order. Coimbra was supposed to find me a few men. The bastard didn’t even try. Now I’ve got an old D.C.3 waiting at the airstrip and no one to fly out in her.”

  “Except me.”

  The words were out without thought and impossible to go back on, even if I’d wanted to. There was pride for one thing, but there was more to it than that. For some reason I found that I wanted his approval. I don’t suppose a psychologist would have had much difficulty in analysing the situation. I’d lost my father too early in life for a growing boy, plus the whole of that side of my family. Now I was running hard, trying to erase the memory of the events of the last few terrible months that had taken my mother and had left me with only one individual on top of earth who really cared for me – my grandfather. The one person I was afraid to love.

  Burke’s voice cut in on my thoughts. “You mean it?” he said softly.

  “ Coimbra was the first person I ever shot at in my life,” I told him. “I think I should make that clear in fairness to you.”

  “Four hundred thousand francs a month,” he said, “and all found.”

  “Including a shroud? I hear it’s rough up there.”

  He changed – altered completely, became almost a different person. He laughed out of the darkness, reached over and squeezed my arm. “I’ll teach you, Stacey – everything you need to know. We’ll cut a path from one end of the Congo to the other and come out laughing with our pockets full of gold.”

  Thunder rumbled beyond the horizon like distant drums and rain started to fall, heavy and warm, thumping against the canvas roof. The air was electric. I was seized with excitement. I suppose the simple fact was that I wanted to be like him. Tough, unafraid, not caring, able to look the world straight in the eye and stare it down.

  God, but I was happy then – happy for the first time in years as the truck lurched through the night, filling my nostrils with the dust of Africa.

  THREE

  BURKE’S BASTARDS, THAT was the name some newspaperman came up with after that first foray into Katanga. We lost a lot of men, but others lost more and the newspaper stories certainly helped recruiting. They built Burke up into something of a legend for a while and then forgot him, but then our reputation as an elite corps was secure. There was no more difficulty in finding men and Burke was able to pick and choose.

  And they were marvellous days – the best I had ever known. Hard living, hard training. I felt my strength then for the first time, tried my courage and found, as I suspect most men do, that I could keep going when afraid which, when you come down to it, is all that really matters.

  Burke was never satisfied. During one lull between engagements, he even forced us through paratroop training, dropping over Lumba Airport from an old de Havilland Rapide. A month later we used it for real and parachuted into a mission station in the Kasai just ahead of a force of Simbas. We pushed our way out through a couple of hundred miles of unfriendly bush bringing eight nuns with us.

  They made Burke a colonel for that little jaunt and I got a captain’s commission around the time I would have been in my third year at Harvard. Life was good then, full of action and passion as it should be and the money poured in as he had promised it would. Two years later, those of us who were left were lucky to get out in what we stood up in.

  Contrary to popular opinion, most mercenaries in the Congo were there for the same reason that young men used to join the Foreign Legion. It was what happened when you experienced the reality that was the trouble. I had seen what was left of settlers who had been quartered on the buzz saw of a lumber mill. I had also known mercenaries who had been in the habit of disposing of prisoners by locking them inside old ammunition boxes and dropping them into Lake Kivu, but only when they were too tired to use them for target practice.

  In between the two extremes, I had changed, but Piet Jaeger hadn’t altered in the slightest. He came from the sort of bush town in the Northern Transvaal where they still believed kaffirs didn’t have souls and was one of the few survivors of the original commando.

  Strangely enough when one considered his background, Piet was no racialist. He had joined us because the chance of a little action and some money in his pocket contrasted favourably with the family farm and the kind of father who carried a Bible in one hand and a sjambok in the other, which he was as likely to use on Piet as the kaffirs who were unfortunate enough to work for him. He had stayed because he worshipped Burke, had followed him gladly to hell and back and would again without a qualm.

  I watched him now in the mirror as he removed my beard with infinite care, a bronzed young god with close-cropped fair hair, a casting director’s dream for the part of the young S.S. officer torn by conscience who sacrifices himself for the girl in the final scene.

  Legrande leaned in the doorway, his amiable peasant face expressionless, a Gauloise drooping beneath the heavy moustache. As I said, most of those who went to the Congo were in search of adventure, but there were exceptions and Legrande was one of them, a killer who destroyed without mercy. An O.A.S. gunman, he’d come to the Congo for sanctuary and in spite of my youth had always shown me a kind of grudging respect. I suspect for my skill at arms, as much as anything else.

  Very carefully Piet removed the hot towel and stood back and a stranger stared out at me from the mirror, bones showing in the gaunt, sun-blackened face, dark eyes looking through and beyond, still and quiet, waiting for something to happen.

  “Flesh on your bones, that’s all you need,” Piet said. “Good food and lots of red wine.”

  “And a woman,” Legrande said with complete seriousness. “A good woman who knows what she’s about. Balance in all things.”

  “Plenty of those in Sicily so they tell me,” Piet said.

  I glanced up at him sharply, but before I could ask him what he meant, a woman appeared from the terrace and hesitated, uncertainty on her face as she looked at us. She was obviously Greek and perhaps thirty or thirty-five. It’s hard to tell with peasant women at that age. She had masses of night-black hair that flowed to her shoulders, an olive skin, the lines just beginning to show, and kind eyes.

  Legrande and Piet started to laugh and Piet gave the Frenchman a shove towards the door. “We’ll leave you to it, Stacey.”

  Their laughter still echoed faintly after the door had closed and the woman came forward, and put two clean towels and a white shirt on the bed. She smiled and said something in Greek. It isn’t one of my languages so I tried Italian, remembering they’d been here during the war. That didn’t work and n
either did German.

  I shrugged helplessly and she smiled again and for some reason ruffled my hair as if I were a schoolboy. I was still sitting in front of the dressing table where Piet had shaved me and she was standing very close, her breasts on a level with my face. She wore no perfume, but the dress she had on, a cheap cotton thing, had just been laundered and smelt fresh and clean and womanly, filling me with the kind of ache I had forgotten existed.

  I watched her cross the room and go out through the window and I took a few very deep breaths. It had been a long time, a hell of a long time and Legrande, as always, had put his finger right on the spot. I took off my robe and started to dress.

  The villa was sited on a hillside a couple of hundred feet above a white sand beach. It was obviously a converted farmhouse and someone had spent a small fortune making it just right.

  I sat at a table on the edge of the terrace in the hot sun and the woman appeared with grapefruit and scrambled eggs and bacon on a tray with a very English pot of tea. My favourite breakfast. Burke, of course – he thought of everything. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything quite like that meal sitting there on the edge of the terrace looking out over the Aegean to the Cyclades drifting north into the haze.

  There was a curious air of unreality to it all and things carried the knife-edge sharpness of the wrong kind of dream. Where was I? Here or in the Hole?

  I closed my eyes briefly, opened them again and found Burke watching me gravely.

  He wore a faded bush shirt and khaki slacks, an old felt hat leaving his face in shadow, and carried a.22 Martini carbine.

  “Keeping your hand in?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I’ve been shooting at anything that moves. It’s that kind of morning. How do you feel?”

  “Considerably improved. That doctor you provided pumped me full of one good thing after another. Thanks for the breakfast, by the way. You remembered.”

  “I’ve known you long enough, haven’t I?” He smiled, that rare smile of his that almost seemed to melt whatever it was that had frozen up inside, but never quite succeeded.