Legrande leaned in the doorway, his amiable peasant face expressionless, a Gauloise drooping beneath the heavy moustache. As I said, most of those who went to the Congo were in search of adventure, but there were exceptions and Legrande was one of them, a killer who destroyed without mercy. An O.A.S. gunman, he’d come to the Congo for sanctuary and in spite of my youth had always shown me a kind of grudging respect. I suspect for my skill at arms, as much as anything else.
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 terrace 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 languages so I tried Italian, remembering they’d been here during the war. That didn’t work and neither did German.
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 forgotten 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 converted farmhouse and someone had spent a small fortune 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 remembered.”
“I’ve known you long enough, haven’t I?” He smiled, that rare smile of his that almost seemed to melt whatever 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.
It was when he sat down and removed his sunglasses that I received my greatest shock. The eyes – those fine grey eyes – were empty, clouded with a kind of opaque skin of indifference. For a brief moment when anger had blazed out of them back at Fuad in the labour camp, I had seen the old Sean Burke. Now I seemed to be looking at a man who had become a stranger to himself.
He poured a cup of tea, produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, something I’d never seen him do before and the hand that held it trembled very, very slightly.
“I’ve taken up a vice or two since you last saw me, Stacey boy,” he said.
“So it would seem.”
“Was it bad back there?”
“Not at first. The prison in Cairo was no worse than you’d expect anywhere. It was the labour camp that wasn’t so good. I don’t think Husseini had been right in his head since Sinai. He thought there was a Jew under every bed.”
He looked puzzled and I explained. He nodded soberly when I finished. “I’ve seen men go that way before.”
There was silence for a while as if he couldn’t think of anything to say and I poured another cup of tea and helped myself to one of his cigarettes. The smoke bit into the back of my throat like acid and I choked.
He started to rise, immediately concerned. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I managed to catch my breath and held up the cigarette. “Something I had to manage without back there. It tastes like the first one I ever had. Don’t worry – I’ll persevere.”
“But why start again?”
I inhaled for the second time. It tasted rather better and I grinned. “I agree with Voltaire. There are some pleasures it’s well worth shortening life for.”
He frowned and tossed his own cigarette over the balustrade as if attempting to right some kind of balance for what I had said went completely against his own expressed beliefs. For him, a man – a real man – was completely self-sufficient, a disciplined creature controlling his environment, subject to no vices, no obsessive needs.
He sat there now, a slight frown still in place, staring moodily into space, and I watched him closely. Sean Burke, the finest, most complete man-at-arms I had ever known. The eternal soldier, an Achilles without a heel on the surface, and yet there were depths there. As I have said, he seldom smiled for some dark happening had touched him in the past, lived with him still. His spiritual home was still the army, the real army, I was certain of that. By all the rules he should have had a staggeringly successful career in it.
During his brief moment of fame in the Congo, the newspapers had unearthed his past in detail. Born in Eire son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant minister who had fought passionately for the Republic in his day. Burke had joined the Irish Guards at seventeen during the Second World War and had soon transferred to the Parachute Regiment. He’d earned a quick M.C. as a young lieutenant at Arnhem and as a captain in Malaya during the emergency, a D.S.O. and promotion to major. Why then had he resigned? There was no official explanation that made any kind of sense. Burke himself had said at the time that the army had simply got too tame. And yet there had been a story in one paper, cautiously told and full of innuendo, that hinted at another explanation. The possibility of a court-martial had he not resigned that would have sent him from the army utterly disgraced and I remembered again our first meeting at the “Lights of Lisbon.” What was it Lola had said of him? Half a man. Big in everything except what counts. It was possible. All things were possible in this worst of all possible worlds.