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 bolstered the Smith and Wesson and squatted be-side 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.’
It sounded like the sort of remark he’d spent a lot of careful work on beforehand, a characteristic of the Irish that didn’t just start with Oscar Wilde.
‘I get it,’ I said. ‘This is dust and ashes morning.’
He carried straight on as if I hadn’t said a word. ‘Life has a habit of catching up on all of us sooner or later, I suppose. You wake up one morning and suddenly for the first time ever, you want to know what it’s all about. When you’re on the margin of things like me, it’s probably too late anyway.’
‘It’s always too late to ask that kind of question,’ I said. ‘From the day you’re born.’
I was aware of a certain irritation. I didn’t want this sort of conversation and yet here I was in mid-stream in spite of the faint suspicion I’d had for a while now, where Burke was concerned, that somehow I was being conned, caught in a spider’s web of Irish humbug served up by a talent that wouldn’t have disgraced the Abbey Theatre.
He glanced at me and there was urgency in his voice when he said, ‘What about you, Stacey? What do you believe in? Really believe in with all your guts?’
I didn’t even have to think any more, not after the Hole. ‘I shared a cell in Cairo with an old man called Malik.’
‘What was he in for?’
‘Some kind of political thing. I never did find out. They took him away in the end. He was a Buddhist-a Zen Buddhist. Knew by heart every word Bodidharma ever said. It kept us going for three months.’
‘You mean he converted you?’ There was a frown on his face. I suppose he must have thought I was going to tell him I couldn’t indulge in violence any more.
I shook my head. ‘Let’s say he helped shape my philo-sophy. Me, I’m a doubter. I don’t believe in anything or anybody. Once you believe in something you im-mediately invite someone else to disagree. From then on you’re in trouble.’
I don’t think he’d heard a word I’d been saying or perhaps he just didn’t understand. ‘It’s a point of view.’
‘Which gets us precisely nowhere.’ I flicked what was left of my cigarette into the water. ‘Just how bad are things?’
‘About as rough as they could be.’
Not only the villa belonged to Herr Hoffer. It seemed the Cessna was also his and he’d provided the cash that had gone into the operation that had got me out of Fuad.
‘Do you own anything besides the clothes you stand up in?’ I asked.
‘That’s all we came out of the Congo with,’ he pointed out, ‘or do I need to remind you?’
‘There have been several bits of banditry in between as I recall.’
He sighed and said with obvious reluctance, ‘I might as well tell you. We were in for a percentage of that gold you were caught with at Rƒs el Kanƒyis.’
‘How big a percentage?’
‘Everything we had. We could have made five times its value overnight. It looked like a good proposition.’
‘Nice of you to tell me.’
I wasn’t angry. It didn’t seem to be all that impor-tant any more and I was interested in the next move.