In The Hour Before Midnight aka The Sicilian Heritage by Jack Higgins

Author:Jack Higgins [Higgins, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller

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.

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