In the Hour Before Midnight (2 page)

It was a Cessna, I recognised that much as it taxied towards us, but there was no time to stand around. They hustled me forward as the cabin door swung open and pushed me inside. The others followed and as Legrande fastened the door the Cessna was already turning into the wind, her engine note deepening.

Burke held a flask to my mouth and I choked as brandy burned its way into my stomach. When the coughing had subsided, I smiled weakly. “Where to now, colonel?”

“First stop Crete,” he said. “We'll be there in an hour. Good thing, too. You could do with a bath.”

I took the flask from him and swallowed again and leaned back in my seat as a warm and wonderful glow spread throughout my body. Life began again, that was all I could think of. As the Cessna lifted into the air and turned out to sea, the sun died behind the horizon and night fell.

I
FIRST MET
Sean Burke in Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique in the early part of 1962 in a waterfront café called the “Lights of Lisbon.” I was playing piano at the time, one of the more useful byproducts of an expensive education, but wholly for money.

For reasons which aren't important at the moment, I was an aimless drifter at the grand old age of nineteen, working my way from Cairo to the Cape in easy stages. I was in Lourenço Marques because I'd only had enough money to take me that far on boarding the coastal steamer at Mombasa which didn't worry me particularly. I was young and fit, running so hard from the past that
my only concern was to discover what lay beyond each day's horizon.

In any case, I liked Lourenço Marques. It had a kind of baroque charm and, in those days at least, a complete absence of the kind of racial tensions I'd noticed elsewhere in Africa.

The man who ran the “Lights of Lisbon” was named Coimbra, a thin, cadaverous Portuguese with one interest in life—money. He had a hand in most things as far as I could judge and didn't have a scruple in the world. Whatever you wanted, Coimbra could get it for you at a price. We boasted the finest selection of girls on the coast.

I noticed Burke the moment he came in, although his enormous physique would have made him stand out anywhere. I think that was the thing which struck one most about him—the air of sheer physical competence and controlled power that made men move out of his way, even in a place like that.

He was dressed for the bush in felt hat, shooting jacket, khaki pants and sand boots. One of the girls made a pass at him, a quadroon with skin like honey and the kind of body that would have had a bishop on his knees. Burke looked through her, not over her, as if she simply didn't exist, and ordered a drink.

The girl was called Lola and as we'd been more than good friends I felt like telling him he was missing out on a damn good thing, but maybe that was just the whisky talking. In those days I wasn't too used to it and it was dangerously cheap. When I looked up, he was standing watching, a glass of beer in one hand.

“You want to lay off that stuff,” he said as I poured another. “It won't do you any good, not in this climate.”

“My funeral.”

I suppose that was the right kind of reply for the tough, footloose adventurer I fondly imagined myself to be at that time and I toasted him. He challenged me calmly, his face quite expressionless, and when I raised the glass to my lips it took a real physical effort. The whisky tasted foul. I gagged and put the glass down hurriedly, a hand to my mouth.

His expression didn't change. “The barman tells me you're English.”

Which was what I thought he was at the time, for his Irish upbringing was indicated more by tricks of speech and phrasing than accent.

I shook my head. “American.”

“You don't sound like it.”

“I spent what they term the formative years in Europe.”

He nodded. “I don't suppose you can play ‘The Lark in the Clear Air'?”

“As ever was,” I said, and moved into a reasonably straight rendering of the beautiful old Irish folk song.

It lacked John McCormack, but wasn't bad though I do say it myself. He nodded soberly when I finished. “You're good—too good for this place.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Is it all right if I smoke?”

“I'll tell the barman to send you a beer,” he replied gravely.

He returned to the bar and a moment later one of Coimbra's flunkeys tapped him on the shoulder. There was a short conversation and they went upstairs together.

Lola came across, yawning hugely. “You're losing your touch,” I told her.

“The Englishman?” She shrugged. “I've met his kind before. Half a man. Big in everything except what counts.”

She moved on and I sat there thinking about what she had said, working my way through a slow blues. At that time I was inclined to think she was talking into the wind, probably out of a kind of professional pique at being snubbed. A man didn't have to be the other thing just because he wasn't particularly attracted to women, although I've
never seen any virtue in not indulging at every opportunity in what is one of life's greatest pleasures as far as I'm concerned. The Sicilian half of me discovered women early.

I came to the end of the number I was playing and lit a cigarette. For some reason there was one of those sudden lulls that you sometimes get with a crowd anywhere. Everyone seemed to stop talking and the whole thing became curiously dreamlike. It was as if I was outside looking into the packed room and things moved in a kind of slow motion.

What was I doing here on the rim of the dark continent, Africa all around me? Faces everywhere, looming through the smoke, black, white, brown and subtle variations in between, riff-raff, not even a common humanity holding us together, all running from something.

Suddenly I'd had enough. In a way, I'd taken a look, not so much at myself as I was then, but at what I would soon become and I didn't like what I'd seen. I was hot and sticky, sweat trickling from my armpits, and I decided to change my shirt. I realise now, of course, that I was only looking for some excuse to go upstairs.

My room was on the third floor, Coimbra's apartment on the second, the girls being down
below. As a rule it was quiet up there because that was the way Coimbra liked it, but now, as I paused at the end of the passage, I was aware again of that same strange stillness I had experienced earlier.

The voices, when I heard them, seemed far away and I walked on, aware that someone was speaking angrily. The first door opened into a kind of anteroom. I went in cautiously and moved through darkness to where a thousand fingers of light pierced a lattice screen.

Coimbra was seated at his desk, one of his heavies, Gilberto, at his back holding a gun. Herrara, the man who had brought Burke up from the café, leaned against the door, arms folded.

Burke was standing a couple of yards away from the desk, legs slightly apart, hands in the pockets of his bush jacket. I could see him in profile and his face might have been carved from stone.

“You don't seem to understand,” Coimbra was saying. “No one was interested in your proposition, it's as simple as that.”

“And my five thousand dollars?”

Coimbra looked as if he was fast losing his patience. “I have been put to considerable expense in this matter—considerable expense.”

“I'm sure you have.”

“Now you are being sensible, major. In business
these things happen. One must be prepared to take risks for quick returns. And now you must excuse me. My men will escort you. This is a rough district. It would desolate me if anything were to happen to you.”

“I'm sure it would,” Burke said dryly.

Gilberto smiled for the first time and hefted the Luger in his hand and Burke took off his bush hat, wiping his face with the back of his right hand, looking suddenly beaten.

But I could see what they could not. Inside the crown of his hat an old short-barrelled Banker's special was held in place by a spring clip. He shot Gilberto from cover, so to speak, slamming him back against the wall, turned and covered Herrara who was starting to draw.

“I don't think so,” Burke said, and I was aware of the power in the man, the vital force.

He made Herrara face the wall and searched him quickly. And Coimbra, man of surprises to the end, opened a silver cigar box and produced a small automatic.

I had a friend once who took up golf and was a scratch man within three months. He had a natural flair for the game just as some people have language kinks and others can rival computers in mental calculation.

On one memorable Sunday afternoon during my first month at Harvard, another student took me to a local pistol club. I'd never fired a gun in my life, yet when he put a Colt Woodsman in my hand and told me what to do, I experienced a new feeling. The gun became a part of me and the things I did with it in one short hour had astonished everyone there.

So I was a natural shot with something of a genius for handguns, but I had never aimed at a human being. What happened next seemed so natural that, in retrospect, it was frightening. I flung open the door, dropped to one knee and grabbed for Gilberto's Luger where it lay on the floor. In the same moment, I shot Coimbra through the hand.

Burke swung, crouched for action, a tiger ready to spring, his own gun in one hand, Herrara's in the other. Although I didn't realise it then, it said a lot for his control that he didn't shoot me as a reflex action.

He gave me one brief glance and I thought he would smile. Instead, he opened the outside door, listened, then closed it again.

“The kind of place where people mind their own business,” I told him.

He walked slowly to the desk. Gilberto crouched
against the wall clutching his chest, blood at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, but he was obviously in deep shock. Coimbra had gone very pale and held his right hand under his left arm as if trying to stop the bleeding. Burke touched him between the eyes with the barrel of his revolver.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Even then Coimbra hesitated and I put in quickly, “There's a safe inside the walnut cabinet by the door.”

Burke thumbed back the hammer of his revolver with an audible click and Coimbra said hastily, “The key is in the cigar box under the tray.”

“Get it,” Burke told me. “Bring whatever you find.”

There was certainly considerably more than five thousand dollars in the cash box I brought to the desk although I never did find out exactly how much. Burke took the lot, the neat packets of banknotes vanishing into the capacious pockets of his bush jacket.

“One must be prepared to take risks for quick returns, isn't that what you said, Coimbra?”

But Coimbra was past caring and fainted across the desk. Herrara still leaned against the wall, hands flat. Burke turned and hit him almost casually, striking with clenched fist at the base of the
skull. Herrara went down with a groan.

The Banker's special was returned to its clip inside the crown of the bush hat and he replaced it on his head, adjusting the angle of the brim in the mirror. He turned to face me.

“First rule in the bush,” he said. “Walk, don't run. Remember that on the way out.”

We left by the side entrance which was usually kept open for those clients who wanted direct access to the girls and didn't welcome publicity. A Ford truck was parked just around the corner from the café, an African dozing behind the wheel. Burke told me to get in the back, spoke to the driver and joined me.

As the truck started to move, I said, “Where to now?”

“The old army airstrip at Caruba. Do you know it?”

“I've only been in town a couple of weeks. That job at the ‘Lights of Lisbon' wasn't intended to be my life's work. I was just trying to raise the price of a ticket to Cape Town.”

“Any special reason?”

“A man has to have an aim in life.”

He accepted it, looking quite serious and nodded. “That was good shooting back there. Where did you learn?”

When I explained he was obviously surprised. At that time I didn't realise how good I must have looked because it wasn't until later that I learned that I acted instinctively like a real professional who always aims for the shooting hand with his first bullet, knowing that a dying man can still get off a shot at him.

We moved out through the edge of town; there were no longer any street lamps and we were shrouded in darkness. After a while he asked if I had my passport.

I reached for my wallet instinctively and nodded. “About all I have got.”

And then, as if it had only just occurred to him, he said, “My name is Burke, by the way—Sean Burke.”

“Stacey Wyatt.” I hesitated. “Didn't I hear Coimbra call you major?”

“That's right. I was twenty years in the British Army—Paratroops. Left last year. I've just been granted a commission by the Katanga government.”

“The Congo?” I said.

“I'm forming a special unit to help keep order. Coimbra was supposed to find me a few men. The bastard didn't even try. Now I've got an old D.C.3 waiting at the airstrip and no one to fly out in her.”

“Except me.”

The words were out without thought and impossible to go back on, even if I'd wanted to. There was pride for one thing, but there was more to it than that. For some reason I found that I wanted his approval. I don't suppose a psychologist would have had much difficulty in analysing the situation. I'd lost my father too early in life for a growing boy, plus the whole of that side of my family. Now I was running hard, trying to erase the memory of the events of the last few terrible months that had taken my mother and had left me with only one individual on top of earth who really cared for me—my grandfather. The one person I was afraid to love.

Burke's voice cut in on my thoughts. “You mean it?” he said softly.