He allowed the Browning to drop to his side, turned and took Piet by the arm. “Better let me have a look at that for you.”
They left without a word. Legrande hesitated and said slowly, “Look, Stacey, maybe we should have words.”
I’d never seen him look so troubled. “Go on, get out of it,” I said. “I’m sick to death of the lot of you.”
I gave him a shove into the corridor and slammed the door. I had a hard job keeping my laughter down. So now it was Stacey the wild man? Let them sort that out.
It was only later, alone in the silence, that I discovered that my hand really had begun to shake. I threw the Smith and Wesson on to the bed and dressed quickly.
I’d hung on to the keys of the Fiat and when I went down to the courtyard it was still there. As I climbed behind the wheel Legrande arrived and opened the other door.
“I’ve got to talk to you, Stacey. I don’t know which way I’m pointing.”
I shook my head. “You wouldn’t be welcome where I’m going.”
“As far as the village then. There’s a café there. We could have a drink.”
“Suit yourself, but I can’t give you long.”
He scrambled in and I drove away. He lit one of his eternal Gauloise and sat back, an expression of settled gloom on his hard, peasant face. He looked more like a Basque than anything else, which wasn’t surprising as he came from a village just over the border from Andorra.
He was a close man, one of the most efficient killers I have ever known, but not, I think, by instinct. He was not a cruel man by nature and I had seen him carry a child through twenty miles of the worst country in the Congo rather than leave it to die. He was a product of his time more than anything. A member of the Resistance during the war, he had killed his first man at the age of fourteen. Later had come the years of bloody conflict in the swamps of Indo-China, the humiliation of Dien Bien Phu followed by a Viet prison camp.
Men like him who had been through the fire swore that it would never happen again. They read Mao Tse-tung on guerrilla warfare and went to Algeria and fought the same kind of war against the same faceless enemy, fighting fire with fire, only to find, at the end, a greater humiliation than ever. Legrande had come down on the side of the O.A.S. and had fled to the Congo from yet another defeat.
I wondered sometimes what he lived for and sitting in the small café in the candlelight, he looked old and used up as if he had done everything there was to do.
He swallowed the brandy he had ordered and called for another. “What’s wrong between you and the colonel, Stacey?”
“You tell me.”
He shook his head. “He’s changed – just in this last six months he’s changed. God knows why, but something’s eating him, that’s for sure.”
“I can’t help you,” I said. “I’m as much in the dark as you are. Maybe Piet can tell you. They seem thick enough.”
He was surprised. “That’s been going on for years now, ever since the Kasai. I thought you knew.”
I smiled. “I only believed in story-book heroes until recently. How long has he been drinking?”
“It came with the general change and he goes at it privately, too. I don’t like that. Do you think he’s up to this thing?”
“We won’t know that till it happens.” I finished my brandy and got up. “Must go now, Jules. Can you get back all right?”
He nodded and looked up at me, a strange expression on his face. “Maybe he’s like me, Stacey, maybe he’s just survived too long. Sometimes I feel I’ve no right to be here at all, can you understand that? If you think that way for long enough, you lose all sense of reality.”
His words haunted me as I went out to the Fiat and drove away.
The Bechstein sounded as good as ever as I waited for my grandfather to appear. I tried a little Debussy and the first of the three short movements of Ravel’s Sonatina. After that I got ambitious, sorted out some music and worked my way through Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in E flat minor. Lovely, ice-cold stuff that still sounded marvelous, even if my technique had dulled a little over the years.
When I finished, there was still no sign of him. I went looking and was surprised to find him sitting on the terrace with a bottle and a couple of glasses in front of him.
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said. “I’ve been listening from here. It sounded fine.”
“At a distance.”
He smiled and filled a glass for me. It was Marsala and very good. Not one of my favourites, but I couldn’t have said so had my life depended on it because suddenly, and for no apparent reason, there was an intimacy between us. Something very real, something I didn’t want to lose.
“How did you get on in the mountains?” he asked me.
“Didn’t Marco give you a report? Hasn’t he returned yet?”
He managed an expression of vague bewilderment which didn’t impress me in the slightest. “Marco has been in Palermo all day as he is every Friday. It’s the biggest day of the week for us. Receipts to check, the bank to see. You know how it is in business?”
I smiled. “All right, we’ll play the game your way. I saw Cerda who told me where he thinks Serafino may be found. Catching him there is another matter with a shepherd whistling from every crag, but it could be done.”
“Is it permitted to ask how?”
I told him and he frowned slightly. “You’ve done this sort of thing before?”
“Oh, yes, I’m quite the commando.”
“But to jump into darkness in country like that sounds a more than usually dangerous practice.”
“Possibly, but it can be done.”
“Why, Stacey? Why do you want to do this thing? Why do you live this way?”
“There’s always the money.”
He shook his head. “We’ve been into that – not good enough. No, when I look at you I see myself forty years ago. Mafioso branded clean to the bone.”
“Which is another way of saying I like to play the game,” I said. “And a savage, bloody little game it is, but it’s all I’ve got. That and Burke.”
I stood up and moved to the edge of the terrace and he said softly, “You don’t like him?”
“It goes deeper than that. Everything I am, he made, people keep telling me that and I’m tired of hearing it.” I turned to face him. “He taught me that if you’re going to kill it may as well be from the back as the front, that there’s no difference. But he’s wrong.”
I desperately wanted him to understand, more than I had ever wanted anything. He sat there looking at me gravely. “Without the rules, it’s nothing – no sense to any of it. With them, there’s still something to hang on to.”
He nodded, a slight smile on his face. “ Something else you brought out of this Hole of yours, Stacey?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then it was worth it.” He took out a cigar. “Now go back to the piano like a good boy and play me your mother’s favorite piece again.”
The music was absolute perfection and brought her back to me like a living presence. All the sadness of life, all its beauty, caught in an exquisite moment that seemed to go on for ever. When I finished, there were tears on my face.
When I got back, Hoffer had returned and there was some sort of council of war going on in the lounge. Burke looked completely different. He’d shaved and wore a khaki shirt with epaulets which gave him a certain military air.
But the change went deeper. There was a briskness about him, an authority I had not seen since my return. When I went in, he glanced up from the map and said calmly, “Ah, there you are, Stacey. I’ve just been going over things with Mr. Hoffer.”
Piet stood in the background, a wad of sticking plaster moulding his left ear, Legrande beside him. The South African simply didn’t look at me as I went to the table.