Message From Malaga

by Helen Macinnes

  Torrens was saying heartily, “Goodbye.” In a lower voice, he added, “The cards tell you where you’ll each find a room for the night. Destroy them as soon as you are alone.”

  “But I thought—” began Laner.

  “You’ll have to wait one more day. Until your travel arrangements are complete.”

  “We were to leave in three hours—” Laner began again.

  “You can’t leave until your papers get here. There has been a delay. Don’t look at me. That is not my department. You’ll leave tomorrow. So I have been assured.”

  “Your American is slipping,” Pitt told him. “So I have been assured,” he repeated with high amusement.

  Laner asked worriedly, “Tomorrow when?” The sooner he was out of Málaga, the better. He had been counting on leaving tonight.

  “Around this time. A man will contact you at each of your hotels—he will use the recognition signals you exchanged with me. And stay in your rooms until he comes. Don’t go wandering in the streets. You could be picked up for questioning.”

  “Why?” No one saw me, no one paid any attention, Laner thought.

  “Anyone who was seen at El Fenicio tonight may be picked up for questioning. The Spanish police like to ask questions. We were all noticed back there. Don’t kid yourselves about that.” He stared hard at Laner, then glanced at Pitt. “Is my American doing better?”

  “What about our clothes, money—”

  “You’ll get them with your papers. Tomorrow. And you may be travelling separately. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “No. We weren’t told—”

  “Of course not,” Torrens said genially. “They never tell me anything either until the last minute.” He watched some men walking along the street toward them. He spoke quickly. “Both of you take this street down toward the water front. Pitt takes the first alley to his left; you, Laner, take the one on your right. You’ll find the addresses on your cards without any trouble. I’ll phone them to expect you.” He raised his voice to a normal level. The passing strangers could hear whatever they wanted to. “Well—nice meeting you. Drop in when you are next my way. Good night, good night!” He was off, heading for a telephone in the direction of the main street, its lights still bright at two in the morning, calling back over his shoulder in Spanish, “Have a good time in Madrid! Goodbye!”

  Pitt and Laner stared at each other, then at the narrow street they had been told to take. It was ill-lit, deserted, a place that worked hard through the day and shut up tight by night. “Dullsville,” Pitt said in disgust.

  Laner looked back at El Fenicio. It now seemed an oasis in a desert of new buildings. “There are other wineshops. There’s always plenty around a harbour.”

  “What bread have you got?”

  “Not much.”

  Pitt pulled out his wallet, showed it was almost empty, too. “So we do as the man says. We stay in our little rooms, don’t wander around town.” His voice was bitter. He resented Torrens’ quick goodbye that had left them both with their mouths open. “He’s a scared cat,” he said contemptuously as they started walking down the narrow street. Torrens was already out of sight.

  “And scared of what?” Laner was derisive. “A clown tripped over his two big feet and fell off a staircase. Who’s to prove otherwise?”

  “You sure of that?”

  “Sure I’m sure. No one saw me. No one paid any attention,” Laner protested. He was about to give some details, but the anger on Pitt’s face silenced him. “Hey, man, we’ve come right across Europe together—”

  “And been bossed every step of the way.”

  Not every step, thought Laner. And without help and instructions, money and safe rooms, where would they have been? But he wasn’t arguing with Pitt in this mood. Perhaps it was time they were travelling separately.

  They reached the alley that branched to their left. “So this is where I spend my last night in Europe,” Pitt said. He didn’t think much of it, but he started along it.

  “See you in New Orleans,” Laner called softly after him. There was no answer. Laner walked on toward the next streetlight. He looked at the card Torrens had pressed into his hand, slipped it into his pocket. He felt the spray-gun. He would have more ammunition for it—if you could call an ampoule ammunition—when Torrens sent his duffel bag tomorrow. What was Torrens scared of—that he had ripped it off, smuggled it across Europe, or that he’d keep on using it? Laner was smiling broadly. One test, that’s all I needed, just to get the real feel of the thing. One test, that’s all I wanted. And better here than back home. Safer is better, isn’t it? Besides, the risk was justified: no one saw me, no one noticed a thing. Everyone in that courtyard had had his eyes on the dancer.

  Some of the spring came back into Laner’s light walk. With confidence and caution, he appraised the small back street where he’d spend the next twenty-four hours. It was empty, so he could cross without delay, to the number he was looking for, slip quietly inside its door. He was expected. The fat, white-faced woman at the bar stopped talking with a half-drunken sailor to give Laner a searching look and then nodded when he sat down at the nearest table. She brought him a glass of wine, asked for no payment. “Room three” was all she said, looking at the stairs beside him, and she went back to the bar. Sleazy, dirty, filled with smoke and nitwitted talk in several languages. Not the Ritz, Laner decided, but safe. There wasn’t a boozehound in here who’d remember a thing tomorrow. He kept his eyes on the table, nursed his drink, waiting for the right moment to get upstairs unnoticed. An argument was starting. This was it. Torrens should see him now; he’d be less scared. Torrens... One thing you could say for that son of a bitch: he knew how to make quick arrangements.

  4

  For the first fifteen minutes or so after Reid had left him, Ian Ferrier paid no attention to the empty chair beside him, but concentrated on Pablo’s excellent footwork. And after that, there was Miguel’s singing. This was the part of flamenco he least enjoyed, but judging from the constant murmur of admiring olé’s from the courtyard around him, his taste was either poor or uninformed. Probably both, he thought with some amusement. The guitars were good by any standard. He listened to them, looked up at the stars, did some dreaming.

  Then Constanza began her dance, and his eyes were drawn back to the stage again. Halfway through, he had a small qualm about the empty chair beside him: there was a thin line of people now standing along the wall nearby. He glanced at them briefly without turning his head, wondering what the hell was keeping Jeff. And in that split second he glimpsed one of the Americans from the back corner table—the thin guy with the blond unwashed hair hanging over his brow—standing almost at the door. It may be difficult holding Jeff’s place, Ferrier thought worriedly. Esteban, who had been circulating quietly among his patrons, might have had the same idea. He came over to sit down for a few minutes with Ferrier and show that the half-occupied table had his approval, excusing himself with Spanish politeness and a touch of sardonic humour. “Do not worry,” he said in Ferrier’s ear. “Señor Reid will soon be back. He likes to talk with Magdalena, and she has always much to say.”

  Magdalena? Ferrier was no wiser, but he nodded. It seemed simpler for a foreigner not to start talking during a performance. Esteban, as manager of El Fenicio and old bullfighter friend, could do as he damned well pleased and get away with it.

  “You enjoy our flamenco,” Esteban stated, the deep furrows in his face pulling up into a real smile, and his melancholy dark eyes lightening with approval. For a minute or so, he watched the stage along with Ferrier. Then he sensed increasing pressure from the people standing at the side. “Excuse me,” he said, rose, bowed, and turned to gesture to them with his hands. They obeyed him, of course. They moved back against the wall. Perhaps Esteban fixed them with those dark eyes of his in the way he had dominated many a bull in the old days. But, thought Ferrier, I bet they don’t stay fixed; they’ll be back, once Esteban leaves. The thin American with the hunched shoul
ders was no longer standing near the door. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Now where did he go? Ferrier wondered; and then, looking at the stage again, forgot his question, didn’t even think an answer was important. Constanza was finishing her dance with a succession of fireworks from heels and castanets.

  There was a short lull, a sense of waiting, a sudden silence, and then gentle guitars. Tavita rose. She stretched her waist, raised her arms, advanced one thigh. Softly, at first, she began to dance the story of two different loves, a story that had been danced this way for more than four hundred years.

  Where’s Jeff? Ferrier wondered irritably. He was seeing the most wonderful dancing he had ever imagined, and it was being spoiled for him. (There’s something wrong, he kept thinking. Jeff had said he would be back in time to watch Tavita, and he had meant it.) As the dance progressed, from Miguel’s pleading into Pablo’s demands, Ferrier found he was looking at that door near him, almost as if he were trying to will Jeff to appear. But there was no sign of him. Give up, Ferrier told himself angrily: Jeff manages his own life; if he wants to miss Tavita, that’s his business. From then on, almost to the end of the dance, he watched the stage determinedly, ignoring the seepage of people along the wall beside him. They had returned, of course, Esteban now being seated at a table of bullfighters on the other side of the courtyard. One of them steadied himself against the back of the empty chair, as if he had been pressed forward unexpectedly. Ferrier glanced sideways, automatically. And beyond the stranger, who gave him a bow of apology, he saw a shaggy nondescript blond head. Ferrier’s eyes swerved back to the stage, but the last minutes of violent passion and remorse, now being danced so magnificently by Tavita, were completely ruined for him. The young American had come out of that damned doorway: what the hell was he doing, slinking out in that way? Come to think of it, he had been in there quite a while, hadn’t he? If he hadn’t come out so carefully, so unobtrusively, Ferrier would have paid less attention. He signed quietly to the stranger who stood by the empty chair that he and his friend could have the table. Then he rose, just as quietly, and made for the doorway.

  He entered a room that was dark and silent. A staircase ran steeply up the wall on his right, barely lighted by two naked bulbs on the landing that ran the full width of this hall. There were two entrances up there separated by a clock on the wall. There seemed to be a doorway, too, underneath the landing, down on this level. He had the uncomfortable feeling of being an intruder, and he hesitated, now mistrusting the instinct that had brought him here in such a hurry. The dusty blond American with the hunched shoulders and narrow chest might only have been searching for a men’s room, although there was one near the wineshop entrance, much closer to that back-corner table, much more obviously in use than this place; or he could have light fingers and a drug habit to support, but there was nothing down here that could be lifted without the help of two men.

  And where was Jeff? The silence worried Ferrier. No sound of voices, no laughter. He decided to try on this floor first, and quickly skirted the foot of the staircase to reach the door under the landing. He almost fell over Jeff Reid, lying sprawled, face down, one leg twisted under him.

  For a moment of complete shock, Ferrier looked down at his friend. He knelt, touched the body. It remained inert. “Good God, Jeff—” he burst out. The head turned a little, the eyes opened, the jaw unclenched, and Reid let out his first groan. His face looked ghastly under the feeble light that filtered down here from the landing; his tan had turned grey, his forehead was beaded with cold sweat, his white lips were bloodied where he had bitten them.

  He said softly, “I thought it was that—that—that little creep coming back to make sure.” He had a violent attack of shivering.

  I’ll hear about that later, Ferrier thought grimly. “I’ll get help,” he said, rising.

  Reid made an effort. “Don’t alarm the courtyard. Get Magdalena—upstairs. Blanket. Smelling salts.”

  “An ambulance is more like it,” Ferrier said, looking at Reid’s leg. Smelling salts?

  “But first—blanket. Smelling salts. Fresh air. Pull me near the draught. Pull me!” His voice was desperate.

  “You shouldn’t be moved,” Ferrier warned him, but he took Reid’s shoulders, helping him to turn on his back, and then pulled slowly for the six feet necessary to get him away from the lee of the staircase. It must have been the worst kind of torture, but Reid endured it without screaming. He groaned several times, once bit back a yell, and then lay in the cooler draught of pure air with his eyes closing. Ferrier stooped to loosen Reid’s collar and tie, and then was running two steps at a time upstairs. Afterwards, he’d wonder how he—twenty pounds lighter and two inches shorter—had managed to pull Reid’s dead weight so easily, or even how his feet had seemed to fly up these stairs, but now he thought of nothing except Magdalena.

  She heard the pounding of his feet on the wooden landing, came out to meet him as he yelled her name. He looked at her in amazement: she was old and slow-moving, not young, as he had imagined, and probably useless. He pointed down to the room below, grasped her arm to yank her over to the edge of the landing, from where she could see Reid. “Blanket—smelling salts.” God, what was the Spanish for smelling salts? “Ammonia.” In desperation, he dragged her into the nearest room, picked up a large shawl from a chaise longue, kept saying “sels, sels” (That was French, but what the hell.) He lifted a small bottlelike vase from a table, threw away its rose, and then sniffed at it in mime. She understood. She nodded vehemently, and pulled a small flask out from the pocket of her wide black skirt, where it had been all the time. He took it, tested it, nodded back, and turned to leave. He pointed to the telephone now, and some of his Spanish came back to him. “Call a doctor. Call the hospital. Señor Reid has broken his leg.”

  “Yes, yes.” She pulled the shawl away from him, shaking her head at man’s wastefulness, and replaced it with a less elegant (and warmer) blanket from a chest near the door. “Do not disturb the dance!” she warned him in a deep hoarse whisper. He waved a hand, ran on. Magdalena might be old, but she was neither stupid nor useless. Apart from her initial horror and fear, when she had recognised Reid lying on the floor below, she had reacted with a cool sense of the desperate need for haste.

  He ran down the staircase, noted that its only weakness was the railings: the treads were solid and firm, built to last like the rest of this place. There’s something more to this than a fall and a broken leg, he thought. Reid was semiconscious. He had vomited, and he was shivering. Half-opened eyes looked up at Ferrier, then at the bottle of smelling salts. He nodded gratefully. Something more, Ferrier thought again.

  From the courtyard outside came the abrupt silence of a dance that had ended, then the shouts of applause.

  * * *

  Tavita had noticed Reid’s empty chair when she had risen to dance, and then as the music caught hold of her she had forgotten about it. Now, standing at the centre of the stage with her arms held out for the applause that poured toward her, Miguel and Pablo spaced behind her, she saw that Ferrier had left, too: strangers sat at that table. Her glance swept on to the rest of the audience, a proud smile of delight on her lips, anger in her heart. I never danced so well, she thought, and they missed it, Jeff and his friend. She bowed her head, let her arms drop to her sides. Raised her head, bowed again. Now the anger was being replaced by worry. She remembered, just in time, to turn to Miguel and then to Pablo, drawing them into the ovation, before she walked back to her chair. She shook her head, as she heard the demands for an encore of the last part of the dance. “Later,” she called out, “later,” and fanned her face with her hand. She draped her shawl over her warm shoulders, tried to pin back her hair into a coil, wondered how long she would have to sit there. She pressed her fingers to her brow and cheeks, eased the neckline of her dress away from her skin, fingered her hair again, and prepared in general for an exit.

  “You look hot,” Constanza said, not without malice. You are gettin
g old, the large dark eyes were saying.

  “I am hot,” she admitted. This dress is too heavy. I must change.” She smoothed her hair again, found it hopelessly disobedient, shook her head over her little defeat, and rose with unconcern. “A fandango,” she told the guitarists as she left the stage. “Keep it going. Get them dancing in turn. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” That will hold them, she thought as she made her way, with smiles and bows for the various tables, toward the doorway. Behind her, she heard Constanza’s harsh clear voice calling “Anda, anda!” The little minx was taking charge. Let her, Tavita thought. I have more to worry about tonight than discipline.

  As she stepped over the threshold, she looked back in Esteban’s direction. Yes, he had noticed her summons. He would follow her. She started upstairs, got no farther than the first step when she became aware of the visiting American, Jeff’s friend, standing in the shadows of the room. “You did not like my dancing?” she began, and then came over slowly, unbelievingly, to where he waited. She stared down at Jeff Reid. She kept staring. “Dead?” She burst into a stream of Spanish, her hands at her face.

  “He is alive. He fell from the staircase, and broke his leg. We are waiting for the ambulance. It should be here—”

  “Fell? Impossible!” She swirled round to speak to Esteban, who had just entered, and again there was a flow of Spanish. Esteban made to close the door.

  “No,” Ferrier said quietly, “he needs the fresh air. Just keep your voices low.” But who would hear anything outside? Flamenco blotted out all other sounds. I never heard the crash of Jeff’s fall. And was it a fall? He couldn’t understand all of Tavita’s denunciation, although he got the idea that she was blaming Tomás: Tomás did this, Tomás tried to kill him. She looked, at this moment, as if she could kill Tomás herself. And so did Esteban. I’m glad I’m not this Tomás, whoever he is, thought Ferrier and glanced at his watch. Every three minutes, Jeff had told him; smelling salts every three minutes. So he knelt beside him, and applied the bottle again. Jeff was looking slightly better, his colour was still strange, but the nausea had stopped, and the violent shivers. There was silence in the room. Ferrier looked up to see Tavita watching him. Her anger had vanished. She knelt beside him, touched Jeff’s brow, smoothed back his hair. Then she rose, crossing herself quickly, and turned toward the staircase. There were heavy tears on her face.