Jack Higgins – In the Hour Before Midnight

‘God knows,’ I said and thinking about it in retro-spect, I honestly couldn’t explain it even to myself. ‘Some kind of death wish, I suppose.’

The words were my own and yet at their saying, every instinct in me rebelled. ‘No, to hell with it. It was Burke-always Burke. Something between us that I can’t put into words, even for myself. Something I had to prove. I can’t say more than that.’

‘You hate this man, I think? This is the truth of it.’

I thought about that for a while and said slowly, ‘No, more than hate-much more. He took me with him into a dark world of his own creating, made me into what I am not, moulded me to his purpose. Up there on the mountain he told me he is a sick man, some kind of oblique explanation for his behaviour. I think he was trying to find in it an excuse for his own con-duct, but he lies even to himself. He was in decay long before his lungs started to rot. He needed no excuse.’

‘Ah, now I perceive a glimmer of light,’ he said. ‘You hate him for being something other than you pre-viously thought he was.’

He was right, of course, but only partially so. ‘You could have something there. In the early days when I first met him, he seemed the only really substantial thing in a world gone mad. I believed in him com-pletely.’

‘And later?’

‘Nothing.’ I shook my head. ‘I was the one who changed, he didn’t. He was always what he is now, that’s the terrible thing. The Sean Burke I thought I knew in Lourenco Marques and after never actually existed.’

The silence enveloped us and I lay there thinking about it all. Finally I looked up at him again. ‘You knew what they intended, didn’t you?’

‘In part only and guessed the rest. Hoffer was de-ported from the States some years ago after a prison sentence for tax evasion. He worked with Cosa Nostra, then came to us here in Sicily with several of his old American-Sicilian Mafia associates. They brought in new ideas as I told you. Drugs, prostitution, other kinds of vice. I didn’t want them, but they were all Mafia.’

‘Once in, never out?’

‘That’s right. The Council said they were entitled to be in.’

‘So you took them?’

He nodded. ‘Mostly they were good administrators, I’ll say that for them. Hoffer, for example, took over the running of our oil interests at Gela. On the face of it, he did a good job, but I never trusted him-or his associates.’

‘And these were the men who worked against you?’

‘Nothing is as simple as that. Sometimes together, often individually, they would give me trouble. They thought it would be easy, that they could fast-talk the stupid old Sicilian peasant into the ground. Take over.

When that failed, they tried other methods.’

‘Including the bomb that killed my mother? You knew they intended to kill you if possible and still you worked with them?’ I shook my head. ‘Sharks-tearing each other to pieces at the smell of blood.’

‘Still you don’t see.’ He sighed. The Council is Mafia, Stacey, not Vito Barbaccia alone. The rules said they were entitled to be in. The other business was per-sonal.’

‘And you killed them all according to the rules, is that what you’re trying to tell me?’

‘Any one of them could have been behind the bomb that killed your mother-or all of them.’

‘Then why is Hoffer still around?’

‘Drop by drop is better. I have my own way of doing things,’ he said grimly. ‘Hoffer is a very stupid man, like all men who think they are clever. He mar-ried this English widow, this aristocrat, for her money. Unfortunately she was smarter than he realised and soon sized him up for what he really was. She wouldn’t give him a penny.’

‘Why didn’t she leave him?’

‘Who knows with a woman? Love, perhaps? So he eased her out of this world into the next with a carefully contrived accident-he still doesn’t realise that I know about that, by the way-then discovered she had left him nothing.’

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