The old Jew I had shared a cell with in Cairo had instructed me in the necessary techniques, had saved my life in effect, for I had only survived the Hole because of it. On many occasions I had withdrawn from the world, floated in warm darkness, had surfaced to find a day, two days – even three – had passed and I was still alive.
Stumbling through the wilderness that was Monte Cammarata that morning, something very similar happened. Time ceased to exist, the stones, the sterile valleys and barren hillsides merged with the sky like a picture out of focus and I moved blindly on.
I was conscious of nothing. One moment I was stumbling along in front of the donkey, the next a voice said quite plainly: “There are two kinds of people in the world. Pianos and piano players.”
Burke had said that to me sitting at a zinc-topped bar in Mawanza. I was drinking warm beer because the electricity supply had been cut and the ice box behind the bar wasn’t working, and he was at his eternal coffee, the only thing he would drink in those days. We were half-way through that first contract in Katanga, had lost half our men and were going to lose most of the rest before it was over.
Sitting there at the bar, a machine pistol at my elbow, my face staring back at me from a bullet-scarred mirror, the situation had all the ingredients to hand of every Hollywood adventure film ever made. I remember there was gunfire in the streets, the thud of mortar bombs, and now and again, the steady rattle of a heavy machine gun as they tried to clear snipers from the government offices across the square.
By all the rules and because I was not quite twenty years of age, it should have been romantic and adventurous, just like an old Bogart movie. It wasn’t. I was sick of killing, sick of the brutality, the total inhumanity of it all.
I was at the end of my tether, ready to go straight over the edge and Burke had sensed it instinctively.
He’d started to talk, quietly and calmly. He was enormously persuasive in those days or perhaps it was just that I wanted to believe that he was. For me then, remember, there had to be no flaw in him.
Before he was finished, he had me believing we were on a kind of holy crusade to save the black man from the consequences of his own folly.
“Always remember, Stacey boy, there are two kinds of people in this world. The pianos and the piano players.”
An unnecessarily complicated metaphor to suggest that there were those who let it happen and those who did something about it, but at the time I had believed him. In any case, the local police turned against us late that evening and I was too busy trying to save my skin during the week that followed to have time for anything else.
Now, standing there on the mountainside, those words floated up from the past to haunt me, and remembering the incident so clearly I realised, with a kind of wonder, that he hadn’t given a damn about me personally; it had been himself he was thinking about as it had always been. He had to straighten me out to his way of thinking because he needed me. Because I had become as essential to him as a gun in his hand. A first-rate deadly weapon. That’s what I was – all I had ever been.
I plodded on, the donkey trailing behind, my brain still filled with the past, which meant Burke. His relationship with Piet Jaeger had obviously been different in kind and he had certainly never put a foot wrong that way with me, presumably because his instincts had warned him off.
As I have said, in the beginning he barely tolerated my need for women and my propensity for hard liquor. Now, looking back and remembering how his attitude had changed to a kind of good-humoured acceptance where those things were concerned, I wondered to what extent he had come to realise that their existence made it much easier for him to mould me to his purpose.
Who was I, then, Stacey Wyatt or Sean Burke’s creature? No! To hell with that. I was myself alone, another kind of piano player, a man who played for himself and no one else.
We had been on the move now for the best part of four hours and when I stopped to check on the girl’s condition she looked exactly the same, but she was still breathing, the only important thing.
For myself, I had moved past pain, floated beyond it as I had done so many times in the Hole. My shoulder existed only as a dull ache, I had forgotten that I had a right arm at all and when the sun clouded over and heavy raindrops spattered the rocks about me, I stumbled on quite cheerfully, Stacey Wyatt, the great survivor.
In late spring or early summer when the first real heat begins, violent thunderstorms are common in the Sicilian high country, and occasionally a drenching downpour settles firmly over the mountains for half a day or more.
I think, looking back on it, that it was the rain which saved us. Some people are rainwalkers by nature – it gives them a shot in the arm just to be abroad and feel it beating down on them. I’ve always been one of that happy band, so the rainstorm which broke over the Cammarata that morning gave me a psychological lift to start with. But there was more to it than that. Suddenly the earth came alive. I was no longer moving through a dead world, there was a freshness to everything.
Perhaps I had become a little delirious, because I found myself singing the famous old marching song of the Foreign Legion that Legrande had taught me a couple of centuries before when we were still brothers, before corruption had set in.
The rain was hammering down now and I went over a rise that blocked the end of a small valley, looked down through the grey curtain and saw Bellona beside the white smear that was the road.
I laughed out loud and shouted to the sky. “I’ll have you now, Burke. By God, I’ll have you now.”
I turned to reach for the donkey’s bridle and found that Joanna’s head had moved to one side, that her eyes were open. She stared blankly at me for a long moment and then, with infinite slowness, smiled.
I couldn’t speak, simply touched her gently on the cheek, took the bridle and stumbled down the hillside, tears of a kind mingling with the rain on my face.
FOURTEEN
THAT FINAL HOUR on the lower slopes was worst of all for the sparse turf, soaked by the incessant rain, proved difficult to negotiate. I slipped and lost my balance twice, and once the donkey slid to one side, tearing his bridle from my grasp, bringing the heart into my mouth. For a moment it had seemed he would roll over and the result would have been catastrophic.
Joanna Truscott’s eyes were closed again and I presumed she had sunk back into unconsciousness. I got a grasp on the donkey’s bridle close to the muzzle and started down the next bank, holding his head up with what strength I had left, and willpower.
Time again ceased to exist, but now, I suspect, because I had become more than a little light-headed. We floundered down through mud and rain together, and once I was aware of someone pleading with the donkey, in the most reasonable of tones, to stand up like a man and keep going. And then the same voice broke into song again, the same faint trumpet call that had echoed from the Hoggar Mountains of the Southern Sahara to the swamps of Indo-China.
I seemed to sink into a well of darkness where nothing existed, only a tiny, flickering point of light at the end of a long tunnel, came out into it, blinking, and found myself hanging on to the bridle for dear life with both hands.
At what point I had unstrapped my right arm I don’t know. Only that I had used it – presumably had needed to – and that blood soaked through the field dressing.
It was beautiful – the most beautiful colour I had ever seen, vivid against the muted greens and browns of my camouflaged jump suit. The world was a wonderful, exquisite place, the blood mingling with the green and the grey rain falling.