Not With a Whimper Page 6

  I turned. He was in silhouette with the streetlight behind him, his shadow stretching up the bridge towards me. I shifted into top gear while over the bridge two men detached themselves from a car and started towards me. One of them limped. And he carried something in his left hand I didn’t like the look of. So did the man behind me.

  There were no lights in any of the houses, no other movement in the street. They came slowly and they didn’t make any noise.

  I looked over the bridge. About twenty feet. No water in the river worth talking about. Flat grey bed, no stones in it. I heaved my backside onto the parapet, swung my legs round and dropped.

  I hit the sand, staggered and began to run.

  I heard them come over the parapet, either side of the bridge, sliding and scuffling down the embankment, cursing. I recognised one of the voices but couldn’t place it.

  A tree trunk stood in my way, twisted, grey, brittle. I tried to vault it but the soft sand held my feet and I stumbled, falling onto one knee. I pushed myself on. Blood pounded in my ears, blocking out the sound of my pursuers. I wasn’t in a good condition for running.

  The riverbed opened out onto the beach and I was damned if I knew which way to run. Illogically, I wanted to run straight towards the sea. I heard the first footsteps behind me then. I whirled. Soft sand sucked at my feet and I was off balance. It made no difference. I couldn’t have avoided it anyway.

  There was something in his hand. It swung, hung in the air, descended. My head jerked sideways. My mouth opened. There was no pain, just a crimson somersaulting explosion and the realisation I knew him. Then nothing.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There was a candle in a wrought iron bracket. It flickered, floated, shifted in and out of focus. My head pulsed like someone trying to beat the dents out of my skull using a ball-peen hammer. He knew how to conserve energy, that guy. It was a nice steady rhythm. He could keep it up for ever. Nausea moved in cold waves through my body. Having my eyes open wasn’t doing me any good at all.

  I closed them. The candle went away. The hammering didn’t. The nausea didn’t. It was no dream.

  I didn’t have to open my eyes to smell the room. You could have bottled that atmosphere and sold it as “instant peasant”. Sour, acrid, the damp odour of animals mixed with the smell of cooking and earth floors, none of it fresh.

  A figure appeared over me, said nothing, went away. I turned my head to follow him. The merchant inside my skull increased his strike rate to let me know he didn’t approve of moving. To hell with him.

  The man stood by the fireplace. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could see the blue-grey steel of a revolver reflecting a sliver of light on a table.

  I raised myself on my elbows. That took a lot of effort and it took just as much not to groan. The merchant had changed his hammer for a vice and my stomach was somewhere up under my chin. I kept myself on my elbows to let him know who was boss. He wasn’t impressed. To hell with him.

  I cranked my legs round to sit upright. The room looped, curved, and finally settled down. I got my stomach back where it ought to be. The merchant in my skull went back to using a hammer but he was getting tired or bored maybe. He wasn’t putting so much effort into it.

  The man sat down at the table, his hands and wrists resting on it. They weren’t far from the revolver. “I advise you to talk,” he said.

  Talk? Yes, sure. I felt like talking. Nice day. Good for the crops. Rather cold for the time of year. How’s the family? Why, that was exactly what I had in mind. Nothing to beat a nice cosy chat round a warm cosy fire. No, he didn’t mean talking like that. What did he mean? Questions pierced the fuzziness of what I was using for a brain and went away unanswered.

  I stood up. The man said, “Sit down.” I had invested a lot of effort in standing up and I wasn’t going to waste it. He leaned forward slowly, taking his weight on his left forearm and picking up the revolver in his right. It looked only slightly smaller than a cannon. He told me again to sit down. Oh well, I could always stand up again at a later date. It didn’t have to be now. I sat down.

  “Bueno.” He put the gun down and sat back. He sat very straight. “Are you going to talk? I know you speak Spanish very well.”

  Did I? So I did. I spoke Spanish very well. I could order a drink in any bar in Spain. What the hell did he want to talk about? I asked him.

  He sucked his gums irritably. “The others will make you talk, heh! I’m not too old to help them.” The idea seemed to excite him. He waved the cannon back and forward. He cackled, “We Spanish can be very cruel. It is the nature of all men, but particularly the Spanish.”

  God, another philosopher. Another Miguel. Miguel. The name slashed the fog of my thinking. Aberaccín. Gallegos. Damn it, of course he would have reinforcements outside.

  I looked round and saw it properly for the first time: a low roofed room, whitewashed, with an earthen floor. There was an open fireplace with logs burning and an untidy brown dog sleeping beside it; candles on two walls. I was sitting on a built-in stone bench running the length of one wall. with another along the opposite wall. Four chairs stood round the table four or five feet away. So was the man.

  I must have looked brighter because he wagged the cannon at me and said, “A bang on the head did no man any harm.” That was a matter of opinion. He went on, “They said I was to shoot you if you tried to escape, heh! heh! I killed fourteen men in one day – in a few minutes. That was many years ago, in our troubles. I was famous.” He looked down at the cannon and then at me. “All I had was a rifle.” He kept on looking at me. “One more will make no difference.”

  I believed him. There was a nasty wistful edge to his voice.

  A car stopped outside. The dog lifted its head, watched the door. Car doors banged.

  “Now you will have to talk,” the man said.

  The dog uncoiled, shook itself and shuffled to the door, head down, sniffing lethargically at the crack at the bottom of the door. He jumped back as it opened. So did I.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I closed my eyes, shook my head. The merchant with the ball-peen hammer had quit for the day. My stomach was more or less in its appointed place. I opened my eyes. The old man was still there. The dog was still there. It was sniffing a trouser leg. The trouser leg belonged to MacDonald Crawford. Paco Sánchez and Félix Benítez were with him.

  “Eh, Domingo. Everything alright?”

  “Sí, Félix.” He stood up, putting the revolver in his pocket. The jacket sagged under its weight. “In Córdoba we would have made him talk. Let us see what the younger generation can do.” He spat on the floor and rubbed it in with his boot and wiped the corner of his mouth with dirty fingers.

  “Christ, Mac,” I said in English. “I never thought you were one of them.”

  He kicked the dog away and it looked reproachfully at him as he came round the table to me. His eyes were bloodshot, the whites flecked with yellow. His skin looked lumpy. He rubbed his fingers through his hair and stared down at me. “Tell them what they want to know or, so help me, I’ll tear you to pieces myself.” He was trembling and he turned away and repeated what he had said in Spanish to the others. His voice was hoarse.

  “We should have slit his throat on the beach,” Sánchez said. His black felt hat shadowed his face. He limped over and sat on the bench opposite me. He wore an old jacket and waistcoat and a collarless shirt of some thick material, while his trousers belonged to another suit. His boots were dirty with broken laces and needed stitching. He squeezed his knees with big hands, fetched a tin out of his pocket and got out a cigarette. There was a funny sound beside me and I realised it was Crawford’s breathing. His mouth was slightly open and it made a faint wet whistling sound between palate and tongue. It was the breathing of a man whose self-control was no thicker than the fuzz on a peach.

  Benítez sat himself at the table directly opposite me where Domingo had been sitting. He had a scorched face with eyes set deep in shelves of bone. They were
dark reedy eyes and they looked mad too. “Why did you kill him?” he said.

  That was an easy question to answer. I couldn’t figure out why he asked it though. “Why do you think?” I said cleverly.

  “Answer the question.” Benítez cracked the statement in the air like a whip.

  “He had a gun. He broke into my house. He was going to kill me. That’s not a bad reason,” I said, just as cleverly.

  Crawford didn’t think it was at all clever. He used the heel of his hand, slamming me on the shoulder with it, rocking me and turning me sideways. He still made the funny wet sound with his breathing.

  I felt a little confused and repeated, “He was going to kill me.” I didn’t try any more clever remarks, not with Crawford beside me in that mood. Even so he wasn’t impressed. “Madre de dios, Félix,” he forced out.

  “You should have let me slit his throat?” Sánchez said. Ash fell from his cigarette. “Then we would not have to listen to this nonsense about Miguel.”

  “I’m not talking about Miguel. You sent Gallegos to my house. Did you think I was going to say, ‘Okay, Juan, I’ll be right with you?” I looked at them.

  Benítez and Crawford looked at each other. Now they looked confused. Domingo spat on the floor again, frowned. Sánchez leaned forward so that he could rest an arm on the table and stared at me. His slow brown eyes were stained with anger. “Now he is talking about Juan,” he said. “What Juan?”

  Benítez nodded. “Yes, what Juan?”

  “In the name of heaven, Juan Gallego. I broke his neck. I killed him. Understand?” I was sitting upright and shouting.

  “No, I don’t,” Benítez said. The others had started to speak at the same time but the precise authority in his voice silenced them. “You killed a man called Juan Gallegos?”

  At last I was getting somewhere. It seemed to have taken a long time and I couldn’t understand why they were so stupid. “Yes, Juan Gallegos.”

  Sánchez didn’t believe me. “He’s lying.”

  Then I understood. I was the stupid one. “You think I killed Miguel?” I yelped.

  Sánchez pushed himself up with his arm on the table. He started towards me. His stiff leg scuffed the earth. The knife in his hand looked sharp and clean. “What stupid game is he playing with us, Félix? I shall end it.”

  Benítez cracked his authority again, said, “No, Paco.” Sánchez paused and Benítez repeated it and added, “Later. Let us hear what he has to say.”

  That seemed like a good idea. Sánchez didn’t think so but he did what he was told, backing to the bench, sitting down, dropping the knife so it stuck point down in the earth. His hands dangled between his knees and he looked at the knife, nodding and grunting occasionally as I told them about Gallegos. He wasn’t impressed by it. “What a story,” he said when I had finished. He picked the knife up and wiped it on his trouser leg.

  “We can easily find out if it is true, Félix,” Crawford said. His breathing sounded better now.

  I pulled out my house keys and threw them on the table. Benítez trapped them neatly. He got to his feet. “Bring him,” he said and went out.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Bénitez was already in his taxi, an old black and red SEAT 1500. He had the back door open. The courtesy light made a pale yellow oblong in the darkness.

  We walked to it through the cool night air. There was a well in the yard, around which weeds grew. Overhead, the stars were as far away as stars can get.

  I didn’t need to be told. I got in the back. Sánchez followed and adjusted himself so that he sat on his left hip, left leg bent and right leg fairly straight over the left. He held Domingo’s cannon loosely in his right hand. It was a make I didn’t recognise.

  Crawford sat beside Benítez. He bumped out onto the main road, Bénitez driving fast which was alright by me. I was anxious to get it over with. So I proved it was Gallegos I was talking about. So they helped me dispose of the body. It seemed like a fair arrangement to me.

  I got out a cigar but didn’t light it, sitting with it unlit in my mouth and rubbing my lighter between my fingers, thinking about nothing at all.

  There were no other cars on the road.

  Bénitez turned into the Calle Santa Isabel at a crawl, touching the brakes gently so we drifted to a stop outside my house. They sat in silence, watching the street. It was as empty as a sheep’s skull, just dust and dry leaves whispering in the air currents. I put the cigar and lighter away.

  We got out together, Bénitez and Crawford shutting the car doors with careful neat clicks making no more noise than a broken match. Sánchez stood close to me. He smelt of damp earth and goats. It wasn’t a bad smell. The bulge in his jacket pocket pointed in my direction.

  “The yellow key,” I said.

  Bénitez led the way, opened the door. Sánchez was no further away from me than my sleeve. In the hall I told them the light switch was on the left and Bénitez found it. I looked at my watch. At three in the morning we were the only people alive. Three a.m. always has that effect on me. We all blinked in the light while Crawford eased the door shut with both hands so it made no noise.

  I turned to Bénitez. He had both hands in his pockets, his thin face looking sharp as an axe head. “Upstairs, turn left, first door on the right.”

  Downstairs, we waited, me in an armchair, Crawford hunched on the window sill, Sánchez standing at the door holding the revolver openly. The light was bright: and my eyes and head ached, plus I was very, very tired. Sánchez bit a knuckle. Crawford twisted the curtain hem. The silence stretched between us. Bénitez’s footsteps went into the bedroom, back and forward, out and then later back in. He was taking a long time. Sánchez studied the knuckle where he had bitten it. Crawford let the curtain drop. They looked at each other. They seemed to be sharing the same thought and if it matched the thought I had, I couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t tired any more.

  Sánchez looked at me sadly. “I would not let him tell me a story like that.” He spat on the floor. “Truly, he killed Miguel.”

  “Maybe,” Crawford said.

  “He would lie on the grave of his mother.”

  “We shall see.”

  “We shall see alright. You will see I am right. I know he killed Miguel.” He looked mournfully at the revolver. “I shall do it myself.”

  Bénitez came in silently. He smiled a taut wolfish smile that showed his teeth but didn’t touch his eyes. He pointed his sharp chin at me.

  “Ah,” Sanchez sighed. The click as he cocked the gun was like a coffin lid shutting.

  “Félix?” Crawford said.

  Benítez patted his pocket. “I have the revolver. It will be useful.”

  “So?”

  “It is as he said, Mac.”

  Crawford sighed and moved away from me. “I am glad.”

  “Thanks.”

  “He has truly killed this Juan Gallegos?” Sánchez pushed his hat back, showing the white top of his forehead where the sun hadn’t got to it, then pulled the brim down.

  “I think Gallegos killed Miguel.” I squeezed my left fist in my right hand. I was shivering.

  Sánchez frowned. His black hat shadowed his face. He looked very tired.

  Crawford sat on the coffee table and took out a packet of cigars. He threw one to me and leant over to light it. Bénitez lit a cigarette for himself and Sánchez. The heavy smoke of Spanish cigarettes and cigars began to fill the room. It smelled good.

  “So what are you going to do now?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t want you doing to Paco Jurado what you were going to do to me.”

  “You’re not going to let him tell us what to do,” Sánchez exclaimed.

  Bénitez waved the back of his hand irritably at him.

  I said to Bénitez, “We must find out what it is, stop it.”

  “Félix?” Sánchez looked at Bénitez.

  “Work together?” Crawford sounded doubtful.

  “Oh no, never.
I do not work with English Fascist pigs.”

  “Paco!” Bénitez, sharply.

  “Never.” He dropped the cigarette, ground it on the floor with his heel.

  “We have until Monday – no. Saturday, according to Teresa.”

  “I think we should work together.” Bénitez turned to Sánchez. “Trust me, Paco. There is a terrible affair here.”

  Sánchez adjusted his hat carefully and squarely with both hands. He limped over to me, standing over me and staring down, lower lip out and creasing his chin. He reached out his hand for me to take. “I do not think well. My temper is not good. Without Félix I would get in much trouble.”

  I reached forward to take his hand. It was saddle hard and rough as a rock. The sudden insight surprised me. I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  “We shall work together as Félix says – but only Félix tells me what to do, eh, Félix?” He still held my hand and stared down at me to make sure I understood the bargain.

  Bénitez smiled. “Nobody tells you what to do, Paco,” he said gently.

  “No, I have too much hate. Sometimes it confuses me.” There seemed to be tears in his eyes. “There is so much to hate. I am going now. Good night, señor.”

  “Good night, Paco.” Then to Bénitez, “Can you … ?” I thumbed my head at the ceiling.

  He knew what I meant. “Mac?”

  Crawford knew too. “Your car, Félix?”

  “At this hour it will be safe”

  “Paco, you watch the street for me.”

  We heard Crawford’s footsteps on the stairs, then in the bedroom. We smoked in silence. He didn’t make any more noise coming down than going up.

  Bénitez stood. “You will hear from us, Alan. A dios.” He separated the word to give it its full meaning.

  I lifted my hand, palm towards him, acknowledging the significance.

  I didn’t see them out.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I hadn’t had that nightmare since being a kid but it still scared the hell out of me. I was tiny, less than an inch high, being chased by men the same height. They had red legs and pointed toes like regular pixies but they didn’t have faces. They chased me under the chairs, settee, up to the fireplace, back again, all the time getting closer but never quite catching up. The only sound was the crackle of the flames from a coal fire. Part of my mind knew it was a nightmare because it was saying, I hope you wake up before they catch you. And that was very important. If they did catch me before I woke up, something dreadful was going to happen.