by Blake Banner
By noon they let us go and we took a taxi to the Occidental, on the Avenida de Andalucia. It was a big, classy modern hotel on a broad, sunny avenue. The pretty girl at the reception desk looked at us a little squeamishly when we went to check in, but we had already booked the room and paid for it over the phone, so there wasn’t a lot she could do about us except give us our keys and pray we would soon have a shower and a shave.
I asked her to have a bottle of the Macallan sent up to the room along with a bucket of ice. The buttons showed us up, opened the curtains, showed us the bathroom, accepted fifty bucks as a tip and scrammed.
When he closed the door I started to unbutton my shirt and kick off my shoes.
“I’m going to shower,” I said. “Then we’ll grab a couple of hours’ sleep. Shops open again here around six, so we’ll go buy some luggage. Then I’ll drop you back here and go visit Mendez.”
She had dropped on the bed and was lying staring at the ceiling. “I should shower first.” She spoke without looking at me. “I’m a woman.”
“Bull.” I started peeling off my pants. “You’ll take an hour to do what I’ll do in ten minutes. When I’m done you can spend all afternoon in there.”
I walked into the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the shower. From the bedroom I heard her voice calling, “You are such a sexist, misogynist prick!” She said it without much heat and somehow it made me smile. I climbed under the hot water and stood for a good thirty seconds just letting it pound my head and face and ease away the stress in my muscles. When I opened my eyes to reach for the shower gel she was standing at the cubicle door. She had no clothes on, but she was holding the gel and the shampoo in her hands. She also had a disposable razor.
She stepped up close to me, so the hot, steaming water started splashing her face too. She put everything but the gel on the shelf, then pushed her red hair back over her shoulders and poured some gel in the palm of her hand. She made it foam and rubbed it all over my stubble. Then, slowly, carefully, she started shaving me.
When she was done she poured more gel into her hands and started washing my chest. I figured the very least I could do was reciprocate.
At five thirty we showered again, dressed in our worn, used clothes and went shopping on the company credit card. We bought leather suitcases and expensive clothes to fit our profile. I also bought three burners: one for Diana and two for me. We got most of what we wanted from the Corte Inglés department store, changed in the bathrooms there and dumped our old clothes in the trash in the street. She helped me to choose pants and a jacket, and fussed just enough to make it nice. And I pretended not to notice that she cleaned up pretty good, until we stepped out into the early evening sun and I hailed a cab.
The copper sun was making long shadows out of the palm trees and there was a feeling in the air of a city gearing up for the night, a feeling of superb fish dishes and excellent, chilled wine, terraced restaurants and the sea lapping and sighing in the near distance. It was a good feeling and it was dangerously intoxicating.
I stood and looked at her as I held the taxi door open, and it was like I was seeing a different person for the first time. She was cute, and in the light, cream silk dress her legs were more than nice to look at.
I said, “You have legs.”
She climbed in gracefully and said, “Thanks for noticing.”
I got in beside her. “They’re hard to miss.”
“Are you flirting with me, Mr. Ethelbaum? That is not done among married couples.”
I told the cabbie the Occidental and smiled comfortably at the woman beside me. “I never was good at obeying rules. I’ll drop you at the hotel, make sure you’re safe and go and look for Mendez. I won’t be long. Once I’m done I’ll come back and get you and we’ll go out to dinner.”
She went quiet, looking out of the window at the passing city streets, the broad avenues lined with palms and the blue sky, still bright in the evening light.
“Are you going to…?”
“I don’t know. And it’s best you don’t know.”
“It’s all a bit crazy, isn’t it.” She still didn’t look at me.
“Maybe it seems that way, but it’s a story as old as humanity. Violence is the commodity that enables power.”
Now she turned to stare at me. “Violence is a commodity?”
I frowned. “Isn’t it the commodity you just bought? What did you think you were getting when you bought my services?”
She shook her head, frowning hard. “Protection!”
“Yeah?” I laughed. “And how am I supposed to protect you, by talking sense into them? By making them aware of their feminine side?”
She looked away, at the crowds, each muzzled with a blue and white mask, each breathing their own carbon dioxide, each hiding their expression from the world.
“I had never thought of it like that,” she said. “Violence as a commodity…”
“Well that’s what it is, Lois, and every power system on Earth, from the legal justice system and family hierarchy and discipline to international politics, depends on that one commodity. If you ain’t got control of the violence, you ain’t got shit.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“You know I am, Lois, darling. That’s why you stole the damned thing in the first place. There may be a few people vaguely interested in the medical applications of this technology, but the real interest, and the real money, comes from its military application. Whoever owns that device, controls the application of violence, and holds the world in his hands.”
“Or her hands…”
She met my gaze with level, cool eyes.
“Or her hands,” I agreed.
“I had never thought of it like that,” she said again. “Violence is the source of all power. Even if it is only the threat of violence…”
I gave my head a single shake. “The credible threat of violence. The threat alone is not enough. It has to be a credible threat. It was the idea underpinning the Cold War, and it’s the idea underpinning law and order to this day—‘do as we say, or else.’”
We stared at each other for a long moment. Then she asked, “How far can it take you?”
“All the way.”
I paid the cab and saw her up to the bedroom. I checked on the NPP and it was still in the wardrobe, in the box that had contained my new shoes, still packed in its magnets.
“Stay in the room. Don’t go out. Don’t open the door to anybody. I’ll leave the ‘do not disturb’ sign on the handle. Don’t answer the phone. If anything happens that you don’t like, or worries you, call me. I won’t be long.”
The NCS field office at Calle Virgen de la Palma was about two miles from the hotel, but I didn’t want to take a cab to that address. Field offices have a way of making contacts in taxicab offices because they are a rich source of information about people who come to and leave a city. Instead, I took a cab to the Mercado Central, a weird, oblong market square where you can buy fresh everything from noisy stalls that all smell of fresh fish. The market is what architects like to call neoclassical, which to my mind is an oxymoron and simply means an uninspired architect took a beautiful, classical design, sucked all the soul out of it and made it ugly.
The market is set in an old square with a huge, Doric gate and real classical columns forming a colonnade on four sides, under which there is a plethora of bars and restaurants, giving the place the kind of feel markets probably had in that very place, three thousand years ago, or more. For reasons of my own, I like to believe that the ancient isle of Ithaca, home to Odysseus, was not in Greece or Turkey, but in Cadiz, and as I took the pleasant evening stroll through the old town, through narrow cobbled streets lit by wrought-iron streetlamps, past ancient heavy doors onto tabernas, and cobbled squares under tall palms, I indulged my fantasy that I was treading the same ground that Odysseus trod in remote prehistory, at a time when tin, not oil was the big commodity, and Troy, the principal purveyor of that mineral, had grown
too big for their boots, so that Agamemnon, the Bush of his day, had decided to use that other, principal commodity, violence, to break the upstart kingdom of Priam.
It was less than ten minutes from the old market to Calle Virgen de la Palma. The streets were crowded and bathed in warm light from the bars, restaurants and cafés. I made my way down the Calle Pastora, among the tall, heavy buildings and found myself outside the Casa Fernando, a bar in a dilapidated 18th-century building with peeling ochre paint, wrought-iron balconies on the second floor with tall, narrow windows and Persian blinds painted green.
The bar was closed, behind a wooden door that would not have looked out of place in a medieval castle. Next to it, at number six, a second, similar door stood open onto a marble-floored entrance with blue and white tiles decorating the walls. Beyond the entrance was a patio, tiled in a similar style, with a fountain in the center and close to a million potted geraniums and carnations. It should have been elegant, and in a faded, dilapidated way it was. You got the feeling that back in the day, when Cadiz was growing rich selling sherry wine to the Brits, this house, right by the port, probably belonged to a prosperous merchant. But two hundred years later it had been divided up into shabby apartments.
I stepped into the patio and found, on my right, a flight of stairs that led to a galleried landing that encompassed three sides of the patio. I climbed the stairs and stopped outside a door I figured gave on to an apartment just above the bar downstairs. It was a pine door stained mahogany and had the digits 6A on it. I knocked. Nothing happened so I knocked again. I heard quiet movement inside and knocked a third time, louder and harder.
“I’m here to talk to Frank! Let me in!”
After a moment the door opened and a girl who was probably twenty, though half that age in her head, opened the door three inches and peered out. She managed to be pretty and uninteresting all at the same time, with dark hair, a perfectly oval face, pretty lips and black eyes that were windows onto a shopping mall. Her body was about right, but nothing more than that.
“What?”
I said, “Who the hell are you?”
“Maria…”
“Where is Frank?”
“Is out.”
“Let me in.”
She wasn’t about to make it hard. She stepped back, holding her fingertips over her breasts as I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I closed the door and saw a small, galley kitchen straight ahead, a dark bedroom on my right and a bright living room on my left with the door standing ajar. I stepped to it and looked in.
There were tall windows that were open onto a small balcony with a wrought-iron railing. There was a threadbare sofa and an armchair, a coffee table and a TV, and opposite the door a wooden table with four chairs.
I looked back. Maria was watching me.
“When will he be back?”
“Tonight. I don’t know what time he comes.”
I went to the bedroom. Her hands flicked toward me, then retreated as she gasped.
“No, he no like for people go in bedroom…”
I smiled at her. “I’m his friend. We work together. He’s like a brother to me. Understand?”
She nodded and there was a flicker of a smile in her eyes. I pushed into the bedroom. There was a large IKEA bed, unmade. By the window there was a desk with a computer, a notepad and a jar of pens. I thought about it, then turned back to Maria.
“You live here?”
“Yes, some time.”
I sat at the desk and wrote a note for Mendez:
Colonel Gilbert gave me a gift before he died, a cute talking doll. She didn’t talk a lot to start with, but then I found the right buttons to press and now she won’t stop. I’m not big on quantum physics, Frank. I’m more a relativity man. I prefer to be relatively rich to being relatively poor. I don’t want to make this complicated. Let’s meet and talk numbers, and you can have the doll, the little black box and all. Call me.
I wrote down the number of one of the burners and handed the note to Maria.
“Very, very important that Frank gets this. You know where he is?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Can you find him?” She frowned like the linguistics were getting complicated. I said, “Encontrar. Puedes encontrar Frank?”
“I can try.”
“Good. Wait in the living room.”
She went to the living room and I searched the bedroom. His Glock was not hard to find. It was in the drawer of his bedside table. It took me less than a minute to pop the firing pin and put the pistol back where he’d left it. I stepped out of the room and went to the living room where Maria was rolling herself a joint.
She smiled at me. “You want a smoke?”
I shook my head. “No. Go find Frank. Give him the note.” She stood, grabbed a small, Andean bag and came toward me. I didn’t move and she had to stop, looking up at me with a face that had never made it past seven years old.
“Listen to me, Maria. It is really important that you get this note to Frank. When you have given it to him, you call me, OK? You call me when you are alone. Cuando tu sola, llamar me, comprende? Then I give you one thousand dollars.”
I repeated it several times until I was sure she understood. Then I put my finger to my lips. “But no tell Frank, because he takes your money.”
By now she was smiling and nodding. “OK, I going finding him. I give him note. When I alone, I calling you, I have giving note to Frank.”
“Good girl, go quickly now.”
She left. I gave her a minute and then followed. When I got to the big, stone entrance I stood for a moment, leaning in the doorway, looking up and down. I didn’t see anybody who seemed interesting, so I made my way back toward the market square, where I got myself a taxi back to the hotel.
Thirteen
I was tempted to follow the brigadier’s advice and take Diana to the Tío de la Tiza restaurant, but I knew that when Frank called, I would have to either leave her unprotected, or bring her back to the hotel. So I opted for a tranquil night in at the hotel. I arranged a car rental at reception, called her on her burner and told her I’d meet her in the dining room.
The dining room was modern, shiny and gray, with marble floors and highly polished wooden tables with rush placemats and stiff linen napkins. I took a seat and ordered a dry martini, and for the heck of it told him I wanted it shaken, not stirred. The waiter, in a burgundy waistcoat, nodded gravely and went away to fetch.
As I was taking my first sip, Diana walked in. I had to pause and look carefully. The nondescript, expressionless woman from Irricana, east of Calgary, was nowhere to be seen. Lois Ethelbaum was a knockout. She looked like a million bucks all wrapped for Christmas, in dark green silk that hugged her like it never wanted to let go, and a slit up her right thigh that promised the impossible and made you believe it. Her red hair was pulled back with a black velvet bow, leaving a cute fringe, and her lipstick was an outrageous shade of red.
I stood as she approached.
“What did you do with Diana from Irricana?”
“I cannibalized her. It’s the kind of girl I am.”
“Good to know.”
Two waiters rushed to help her sit down and offer her a drink. She asked for a Bombay Sapphire and Schweppes with lime, not lemon, and a third waiter brought us a couple of menus that had been bound in old Bible covers.
As the brigadier, Alexander “Buddy” Byrd was paying, we started with two dozen oysters and a bottle of ice-cold Mumm Brut. She pleased me by ordering a sirloin steak rare with a simple salad. I said I’d have the same, and a bottle of Marques de Riscal Gran Reserva to accompany the meat.
The waiter went away and she sipped her G&T.
“Is it done?”
I gave my head a small shake. “I am waiting for a call. You want to know what I did with Diana from Irricana?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I was there, remember?”
“No. I disposed of her, along with Colonel Gilbert an
d his pals, in Lake Superior.”
She thought about it for a while. Eventually she gave a soft grunt.
“I’m not sure about that, Peter. I love the misinformation angle, but, unless I am mistaken, for that to work, you need to keep Frank alive.” She sipped her drink and set the glass down very carefully. Then she met and held my eye. “And I want him dead.”
I smiled. “Oh, we have change on multiple levels.”
“Not at all. This is me, always has been. I am a scientist, which means I am empirical from the tips of my toes all the way to the top of my head, and then through and through. I am not sentimental and I have no illusions about the law. If somebody is out to kill me, then I want that person dead. Problem over.” She gave one of her rare smiles and wagged a finger at me. “Don’t pretend you are not the same.”
I had to agree there was some truth in that, and my face told her so.
“Perhaps similar would be more accurate.”
She raised an eyebrow and chuckled, then rested her chin on her hand. “Yeah, you keep your sentimental side hidden, but I have spotted it from time to time.”
“You have? Next time you see it tell me, I’ve been searching for it.”
She gave a pretty laugh, then went quiet for a moment, staring at the tablecloth while the waiter brought the oysters and the wine waiter set a bucket of ice by our side and opened the bottle of champagne. He poured, bowed and went away. As far as she was concerned, he might not have been there. Maybe she was right. Maybe I had my sentimental side. Even if it means shooting them, I like to treat human beings like human beings.
She took an oyster and let it slip down her throat, licked her lips and sipped her champagne.
“You’re not CIA, you are definitely not FBI because you haven’t once called me ma’am. You talked about the British so you could be MI6, but I don’t think MI6 agents have behaved like this since Roger Moore.”
I set a shell on the plate and offered her a lopsided smile and did my best Sean Connery impersonation.