Jack Higgins – In the Hour Before Midnight

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 ter-race 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 lan-guages so I tried Italian, remembering they’d been here during the war. That didn’t work and neither did Ger-man.

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 for-gotten 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 con-verted farmhouse and someone had spent a small for-tune 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 remem-bered.’

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

Seeing him standing there in the felt hat and bush shirt I was reminded again of that first meeting in Mozambique. He was just the same. Magnificently fit with the physique of a heavyweight wrestler and the energy of a man half his age and yet there were changes-slight, perhaps, but there to be seen.

For one thing, the eyes were pouching slightly and there was an edge of flesh to the bones that hadn’t been there before. If it had been anyone else I’d have said they’d been drinking, but liquor was something he’d never shown any interest in-or women, if it came to that. He’d always barely tolerated my own need for both.

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