I turned to Rosa. ‘The day you start feeling shamed about your past just let me know. I’ll let you have a few choice items from my own that should make you feel about as soiled as a Vestal Virgin by comparison. I’m going to leave you now. Burke’s waiting for me upstairs in the roof garden.’
‘No, Stacey, there are two of them. They will kill you.’
‘I don’t think so. On the other hand anything’s pos-sible in this life.’ I took out my wallet and handed it to her. ‘If it goes wrong, whatever you find in there should help you along the way more than a little. Now get dressed and wait for me downstairs in one of the cars.’
I started to turn and she caught me, held me to her yet did not kiss me. She said nothing, but her face was eloquent enough. When I pulled gently away she did not try to stop me.
EIGHTEEN
the door at the top of the stairs stood open, the garden was floodlit again, a place of wonder and delight, sweetly perfumed in the rain.
I paused to one side of the door and considered the situation for a while, then moved along the landing, tried another door and found myself in a study of sorts.
The room was in darkness, the inevitable glass doors that formed the other side standing open. Which way would he expect me to come, that was the thing. I stood there in the darkness, drained of all emotion, suddenly tired, caught by some strange fatalism that seemed to say it didn’t really matter-nothing mat-tered. We were on our predestined course, Burke and I. What would be, must be.
I went out through the glass doors in three quick strides and dropped into the green jungle of the garden.
His voice sounded clearly. ‘Over here, Stacey, I know you’re there.’
‘You and me, Sean?’ I called. ‘No one else?’
‘As ever was, Stacey boy.’ The more Irish he sounded the less I trusted him. ‘Piet isn’t here. He went up to the airstrip with our baggage. We’re getting out tonight.’
Which was a lie. Had to be because whatever else Hoffer had paid him, there was the bearer bond for fifty thousand dollars in that bank vault in Palermo and as today was Sunday he couldn’t possibly have col-lected it on his return. He wasn’t going to leave that.
But trapped by that strange fatalism, I decided to play his game and stepped out through the ferns into a narrow path between vines. He stood at the end on the terrace beyond a wrought iron table, his hands behind his back.
‘What are you holding there, Sean?’ I called.
‘Nothing, Stacey, don’t you believe me?’
‘After the mountain-after Cammarata?’
Both hands came into view empty. ‘I’m sorry about that, but I knew you’d never stand still for killing the girl.’ He shook his head and there was a kind of admiration in his voice. ‘But you, Stacey-you. Christ, you are indestructible. I thought you in pieces.’
‘You’re losing your touch, Sean-old age,’ I said. ‘If you’re interested, you didn’t do much of a job on the girl either. She’s doing fine. Hoffer’s the one who’s in trouble. Explaining himself to the devil about now, I should think.’
That got through to him and the slight smile left his face. ‘You’re a bloody swine, Sean,’ I said. ‘You always were only I never saw it before. Nothing on earth could excuse what you did up there on the moun-tain. You and Hoffer should get on fine when you next meet.’
‘You wouldn’t kill me in cold blood, Stacey, after all we’ve been through together.’
He spread his arms wide. ‘That’s just the way I in-tend to do it,’ I told him and Rosa screamed from the doorway behind me.
I swung, dropped on my face, pain tearing at my right shoulder as Piet Jaeger jumped from the vines no more than seven or eight feet away.
For some odd reason the weapon he clutched in both hands was a lupara which had presumably belonged to one of Hoffer’s men; just the thing for assassination at close-quarters.