I nodded. ‘Who owns it?’
‘A man called Hoffer-Karl Hoffer.’
‘And who might he be when he’s at home?’
‘An Austrian financier.’
‘Can’t say I’ve heard of him.’
‘You wouldn’t. He isn’t too keen on newspaper pub-licity.’
‘Is he rich?’
‘A millionaire and that’s by my standards, not your Yankee one. As a matter of fact that was his gold you were running the night the Gypos jumped you.’
Which was an interesting piece of information. Mil-lionaire financiers who indulged in a little gold smug-gling on the side were about as rare within my experi-ence 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 eager-ness 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 ex-penses, 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 pre-sume?’
‘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 some-thing, 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 Lis-bon”, 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 handker-chief. 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 re-load, but automatics have certain snags to them. Lots of bits and pieces that can go wrong and no profes-sional gunman I’ve ever met would use one from choice.