Not With a Whimper Page 8

  Good old sun. You don’t get too much of that in England. Very warm sun they have in Spain. But too much isn’t good for you. Makes you sick.

  I pushed myself up on my arms. They quivered, and I felt sick. Yes, too much sun.

  Behind me there was a deep soft snuffle, a muffled explosion of breath. I knew that sound.

  I also knew I hadn’t had too much sun. My arms weren’t trembling now. I couldn’t afford to have them like that, not if I’d recognised the sound correctly.

  I curled my toes inside my shoes so that the calf muscles contracted and relaxed, pressing the flat of each foot in turn so that the thigh muscles responded. I had two legs in not bad working order. My wrists were stiff. Their turn. I lifted each hand off the ground, carefully, looking at them, moving the fingers until they felt reasonably supple again. I rubbed the sand off my face, doing it gently. The skin felt tender and raw.

  I could still hear the sound behind me. I stood up and nobody ever moved as slowly or as carefully. But slow or not, I was ready to run.

  I turned round. It was no beach – I was in an enclosure with stone windowless walls on three sides and a wooden fence about six feet high with a gate in it on the fourth.

  The bull stood between me and it and he looked mean, soot black and half a ton of bone and muscle shaped for speed and built for death. He held his head high, slightly sideways, nostrils sniffing the air for danger, eyes white-edged and staring at me.

  I was careful not to make any sudden movement.

  How far to the wall? How high? Foot or fingerholds?

  I moved my head in fractions of an inch. Twenty feet or so in both directions. The same from the fence behind the bull. The bastards had dropped me in the middle. The walls were about ten feet high, whitewashed stone, rough but with no clear-cut holds. Tiled guttering that would break in your hand as you tried to pull yourself up.

  The adrenalin was working now. I wasn’t aware of the sweat running down my face. I watched the bull and I never took my eyes off his. I eased my jacket off one shoulder and then the other, pulling it down my back and making no other movement. Pity it was the Chester Barrie. I’d liked that suit. Only one I had.

  The bull was still facing at an angle to me, about 30 degrees to my right, head high, eyes rolling but never taking them off me, nostrils sucking the air for danger. There were flies at the corners of its eyes.

  We were each in our own safe little zone but I couldn’t stay there for ever. Querencia is the word for it, the part of the ring where the bull feels safe. I was going to have to cross it to get out.

  I began to walk towards him. I wanted to be as close to the gate as possible before he charged. I held the jacket to my side, just fluttering it slightly to give it movement but not enough to alarm him – yet.

  I made an inventory of my condition. I couldn’t feel any weakness. No real stiffness in ankles or knees, able to take the strain. No cramp in calf muscles. I licked the sweat running by the corner of my mouth but I didn’t feel the heat.

  The sand was fine silica, not deep but too much so to give good friction for sprinting.

  Bull motionless now. Head directly facing me. Low bellow. Warning – approaching the line of querencia.

  I stopped, checked my balance, feet slightly apart, left foot forward, knees flexed. My hands gripped and regripped the jacket collar automatically, then I lifted it sideways, waved it, tried to crack it with a snap of the wrist.

  He bellowed again, a thrusting insistent warning, drawing back his forefeet, rocking onto his hind legs.

  They’d given me nothing but the best. His horns were thin and needle sharp, could cut like a surgeon’s scalpel.

  It didn’t really matter what I shouted so I called out, “Hey, toro!” like any good matador.

  He moved like an Olympic sprinter, exploded into total acceleration, straight as a torpedo. I stopped, frozen but kept my arms flapping the jacket as far from my body as possible. And prayed.

  The bull’s track was straight at the jacket.

  I threw it forward onto his head and I ran straight past. I could feel the warmth of his body and smell the acrid smell of flesh and sweat.

  My feet were slipping in the sand. I stumbled onto one knee, left hand onto the ground but pushing forward towards the fence.

  Behind me hooves braked in the sand, pulling his half ton-weight to a stop. There was a thrashing, fluttering sound as he shook his head free from the jacket.

  I reached for the top of the fence, fingers hooking over the top bar, left foot between the spars, right leg over.

  He hit the fence and the vibration lifted me off, throwing me forward making me hit the ground heavily, side on. I lay there, my chest heaving, the sound of my heartbeat filling my ears. My left hand was raw and bleeding but I’d made it.

  He bellowed again, satisfied now that he had got rid of me.

  Ribs clamped my lungs and each breath tore my back muscles. I pushed myself back, one hand at a time until I was sitting on my heels.

  Then I stood up. My legs were shaking. I staggered to the wall on my left, instinctively, for the shade, hitting it with my shoulder, turning so my back was to the wall.

  I focused on my hand. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The flesh was scraped raw and the fingernails broken. With my right I wiped my forehead, slowly probing the scalp. It was gritty with sand. Sweaty too. I wiped them off on my trousers. The bull bellowed again, waking me up.

  They’d be coming back to pick up the body as soon as they heard that.

  I pushed myself off the wall and walked down the passageway, keeping to the shade. My shoulder hit the wall a couple of times, but I told myself I’d suffered worse damage on the rugby field and had still gone back for the second half. It didn’t sound convincing – I’d been younger then.

  The light at the end of the passageway bounced off my eyeballs. I stepped back into the shade and made a reconnaissance of the terrain.

  The land sloped down to the main road. The wall surrounding the house stretched unbroken on my left. The farm road with its line of poplars was on my left too while the field in front of me was planted with vines. The rows ran across the slope. I would have to climb over each row in turn. A wheat field was located several hundred yards to my right. Even in late March the wheat was high. Alright, that was the way out for me.

  Then I heard voices coming from behind the left-hand wall. That would be the courtyard. Spanish, male. Ilse. Carol Byrd. Carol thanking Don Carlos for letting her use the horse. Two thirty. All the guests would have gone by now. They wouldn’t have put me in with the bull if there’d been anyone left. Except Carol. Was she one of them? Not a kid of nineteen. She had been out riding. They couldn’t afford to wait for her to come back in case I came round and they wouldn’t want to hit me again in case they overdid it and killed me, not when an accident had been arranged. And a very good accident, too. No policeman would ask too many questions, not when you’ve got the sort of clout Don Carlos was sure to have.

  A car door slammed, just the one. Voices said goodbye. She was driving herself home.

  I walked quickly along the side wall, ready to run if I heard it start but they were still saying goodbye. If the worst came to the worst, it didn’t matter if they saw me or not. Carol meant safe conduct. I hoped.

  I walked down the road behind the poplars and waited.

  The car started and it came through the gateway fast, the dust already swirling round it.

  I stepped into the road in plenty of time for her to see me and held up my hand. She left it to the last minute before braking, swinging to a stop with wheels locked, a deliberate act of brinkmanship that did me no good at all. I was on the right side of the road and in the passenger seat while she was still fighting with the gear lever.

  “My God!” She looked at me. “You’re in a hell of a mess.”

  She had both hands on the steering wheel and she was looking at me from under her long hair. I leaned back and closed my eyes and held the bottom of
my rib cage with both hands and dug my fingers into my solar plexus. It helped to hold me together.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I had an argument with a bull.”

  “You don’t look as if you won. What happened?” she repeated.

  “Can you take me into town?”

  “We’d better get you seen to.” Her hand closed over the gear lever, starting to pull it back and down into reverse.

  I gripped her hand. “No,” I said. “Town.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I woke up shivering, cold as a frog’s leg. I was flat on my back and naked after the shower I’d had. I rolled over, and thankfully it didn’t hurt too much. I reached for my watch. Nearly six. It had been a hard, flat dreamless sleep but I was feeling much better. Until I remembered I was now twenty-four hours late in phoning McIntyre.

  I got dressed in a pale blue woollen shirt, navy flares and canvas yachting shoes, and was brushing my teeth when María called up and said she was making a tortilla if I was ready for it. I was. In fact, I was ready to eat my way through enough food for a Masons’ dinner.

  I took the meal in silence. María did her imitation of an anxious sparrow but she did it without talking. She fluttered round me and served me the tortilla which wasn’t one of her best efforts. Her mind was on other things and so was mine.

  I mopped up with some of the morning’s bread which had already gone slightly stale, remembered I didn’t have any brandy to go with the coffee and that I really should to get to grips with the commissariat when there was a knock at the door. María came back with the message that a small boy had come to see me. She wasn’t surprised. That surprised me. I wiped my mouth, took a swig of coffee and went to meet him.

  He had a round grubby face and round eyes and said, “The taxi driver said I was to give you this.”

  This was a sheet of scrappy paper. “The taxi driver?”

  “Sí. Félix Benítez. You are Señor Christian?”

  I said I was. I’d forgotten Felix drove a taxi. “Gracias.”

  “De nada.” He turned and skipped down the path and disappeared out of sight along the street.

  I unscrewed the paper. It was in English which made sense – the boy wouldn’t have been able to read it. “The pigs are watching. Play it cool. Same place as last night. Soon as you can make it. Make sure you ditch the tail.” Crawford would have written it and I didn’t like his command of the English language. I have a thing about the word “pig”. An ugly word for an ugly attitude.

  A tail. They thought the police. Maybe. Just as likely it was a second interested party.

  I screwed the paper back into its original state and jammed it in my pocket, telling María I was going out. I gave her some money for a couple of bottles of brandy and left her being very busy and quiet in the kitchen. I was pleased I’d remembered the brandy. Showed I still knew what was important.

  Not like having your passport and international driver’s licence when you hire a car. I was over the bridge on the way into town when I realised that. My Avis was still at Don Carlos’s.

  I stamped back into the house and got a sigh from María when I told her I’d forgotten something. She most probably thought I’d returned for a sub-machine gun and a couple of grenades.

  It was the same time as yesterday, the same soft glow to the sun. A woman watering geraniums on the balcony opposite. And none of it seemed like yesterday. Too much had happened. It had all happened a long time ago and I wouldn’t have been surprised if it hadn’t all happened to some other Alan Christian, not me.

  I walked briskly but I couldn’t tell if they were tailing me or not. They could have been in convoys behind me. At the moment it didn’t matter. It would after I got the car.

  I found a car hire office open up near the camp. It had been a longer walk than I’d thought but at least it had got the stiffness out of my system. Viajes Rota y Andalucía, SA. It took a clerk in a sky blue jacket and Clark Gable moustache ten minutes and a computer sheet in triplicate to get me the keys to a Simca 1100.

  Then I started to worry about being tailed. I drove round aimlessly for a bit before I picked him up. A SEAT 850. It appeared to be the only car taking an interest in my manoeuvres.

  You don’t really have to try hard to lose a car in traffic here so I found the conditions I wanted on the Calle Mayor. It’s a run-down street, a garage with a large forecourt right on the corner. That gave me a good view of the traffic coming down the dual carriageway. It was fairly heavy traffic but there was a two-car gap which would take a niftily driven 1100 after the cream Mercedes. I drifted to the corner, crunched the gears into first with a inept change (well, it was the first Simca I had driven) and bolted into the gap. The Austin Mini behind me leant on his horn but he hadn’t needed to change speed so he had nothing to grumble about really. After hitting second perfectly I felt a bit better. There was no room for the SEAT, but I played it safe and took the first opening on the right across the stream of traffic going the other way, resulting in some more furious horn work but there was definitely no tail now. I felt pretty pleased with myself. It was the first decent thing I’d done since coming to Rota.

  I didn’t even have any trouble phoning London. The trouble came when I got through to McIntyre.

  “What the hell happened to you yesterday? I stayed until after ten. Do you know what time it is now? I had a meeting with the minister I had to cancel. Do you know what I had to tell him?” There was a lot more like that and I let him get it off his chest and blew cigar smoke round the booth. Finally, “Keble, Gilbert Keble, managing director of Keble and Burnett. Keble Cream mean anything to you?”

  “Sherry?”

  “That’s it. Keble Cream, Keble Milk and so on. Business address Wapping, home address Wentworth. So far we can only check him out as far back as the late fifties when he came from Australia. He had money when he arrived because he bought into Burnett Son and Nephew, an old established company, a small classy firm. He changed directions, went for the mass market, and now Keble and Burnett have a capital value of over ten million. Really expanded. That was the easy one. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “O’Halloran bought Rosses Point Hotel in County Sligo in 1960 – it’s a sort of Irish equivalent of Gleneagles. He’s on the board of Galwaygold, a couple of woollen mills, a distillery, north-west Eire tourist board.”

  “But nothing before 1960?”

  “You know what it’s like trying to get anything out of Rhodesia today,” he huffed. “Christ, what more do you want? There’s about fifty man hours in acquiring that lot.” He wheezed some more and I waited. “Van Oudtschoorn. A bit odd this, Alan. South Africa house was quite helpful at first. Laycock was dealing with it. Which Van Oudtschoorn were we interested in? Right? Then suddenly they got very shirty, very stroppy indeed, wouldn’t say a blind dicky-bird. So Laycock got onto our embassy. Joseph is a member of a family who made their money in mining in the Transvaal. It’s a bit sketchy but it seems Joseph didn’t go into the mining business along with his brothers, not in Transvaal anyway. He spent some time in Bolivia in the forties before coming back home when he bought himself a farm in South West Africa and went into politics. At the moment he’s supposed to be in the States so what the hell he’s doing in Rota, God alone knows. If it is Joseph van Oudtschoorn,” he added.

  That was a thought. “Anything else?”

  “You mean Katz.”

  “I mean Katz.”

  “Do you think he could be in Rota?”

  “I do.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he moaned, “what the hell is going on? Just when we don’t have the proper staff. The number of times I’ve told –”

  “I’m running out of pesetas,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, right. Okay. Gunter Wolfgang Katz. Born Leipzig 1920 which makes him 58, 59 now, right?”

  “Right.”

  “One of the toughest and brightest of the SS. Wanted for the Cradowice massacre in Yugoslavia among other thin
gs. Disappeared along the Vatican route. Supposed to be in Haiti in the late fifties as adviser to Papa Doc but that wasn’t definite. You know how many rumours there are about those damned Nazis. He was also supposed to be in Peru about then. According to Mossad the last definite sighting was in Paraguay in 1954 – that’s going back a long way. An Israeli agent got the tip he was in East Berlin in the summer of ’54. He trailed him to Asunción. After that they don’t know because they never heard from their man again. Here’s one other thing. His girlfriend back in the good old days of ’44 was a tall blonde, hard as nails type named Ilse Pfaffman. She married a Spaniard.”

  I heard him suck in air and cough. I let him finish then said, “Don Carlos Medina y Ortega.”

  “Christ. How do you know?”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “How? When?”

  That was when time ran out on us.

  The last I heard of McIntyre was him yelling at me not to hang up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The same place as last night the note had said. I got it right at the third attempt. First had been a crone with thinning hair and two daughters giggling in the background. She looked as if she wanted to do a deal with me for one of her daughters. Or maybe both. The second produced a pregnant woman with three toddlers clinging to her skirt. She didn’t look any older than twenty but was ageing rapidly. The third try produced Domingo. He cackled when he saw me. “Heh, heh. We almost killed you.”

  I followed him in and he kicked the door shut. Benítez was sitting at the table. He was eating and he spoke with his mouth full, “That wasn’t your car.” He would know his car sounds.

  “I had to hire another.” I told him why. He went on eating. I sat on the bench where I had been last night. I lit a cigar. The old man stood by the fire. He cackled to himself and wiped his eyes.

  “Well?”

  “Un momentito.” Félix shovelled in a half kilo. “Let me finish this swill.”