Message From Malaga

by Helen Macinnes

  He explored quickly, thoroughly. There were two other doors from this room. One led to a bedroom with a window and an interior bathroom. The other took him into a small tiled kitchen, shelves filled with canned foods from meat to fruit, a rack of wine bottles, a miniature stove and sink, a refrigerator jammed into the old fireplace under a high mantelpiece.

  Tavita had followed him, watching his quick inventory. “Yes?” she asked, noting his frown.

  “Who cleans this place?”

  She looked at him impatiently. “Are these domestic details really necessary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Esteban has a cousin who comes in every week, just to make sure everything is safe and undisturbed.”

  “When does she come?”

  “On Fridays. Don’t worry, you’ll be gone before she comes again.”

  “She never asks questions about bed linen or towels or empty cans and bottles?”

  “Why should she? She is well paid. She needs the work. She is a cousin. Of course she asks no questions.”

  “How does she enter?”

  “By the front door.”

  “She has her own key?”

  Tavita said with studied boredom, “She has Esteban’s key.”

  “She might use it any time.”

  “She won’t. She does not intend to lose this job.”

  “She will wonder about your visitors here.”

  “She thinks they are Esteban’s friends,” Tavita said curtly. “I told you I’ve no connection with this place any more. I haven’t been seen near here for years. Now, come along—I want to show you the patio outside the front door.”

  “One second,” he said, and pointed to the kitchen window. “Where does that face?” He crossed over to it quickly.

  “Only on to a small interior courtyard—just like the bedroom’s window. A breathing space, actually. Not even the sun can look in on you.”

  He opened the shutters, looked out, saw a blank wall only a couple of arm lengths away. “What lies above us?”

  “A wing of the museum.”

  He stared at her.

  “Come here,” she told him, and led the way back into the main room. She switched off the lights. “This is the only place where you have to be careful when you turn on a lamp. Make sure, then, that the shutters are tightly closed.” She had moved over to a window, adjusted the louvres, let broad slats of bright moonlight come slanting over the tiled floor. “There’s the entrance to the museum,” she said, and pointed out at the patio. So he had to follow her, after all, and look. She drew aside, keeping well out of touch, he noted as he studied the layout of the courtyard.

  He could see it clearly through the iron screens that covered the window with a light and intricate pattern. (But strong enough, he thought, to bar intruders: this ground-floor apartment was well protected.) The patio was spacious and pleasant, its paved floor bathed in moonlight, with an edge of deep shadow along one side. There were slender pillars, forming a shallow colonnade, on either side of a large doorway that stood directly opposite him. It must lead into a street filled with traffic. He could hear a distant steady murmur, like some unseen sea breaking in constant muted rhythm, from the world outside. But here, in this courtyard, there was only silence and emptiness.

  He picked out the museum entrance to the right of the gateway, pillared and arched and heavy with stone curlicues. “Museum of what?”

  “Oh, things of old Spain—wood carved and painted, silver-work, iron screens, leather, lace, embroidery and furniture and—”

  “When does it open?” Arts and crafts, he thought. Always popular. People everywhere. Could be dangerous.

  She opened her eyes wide. “Oh, Madre de Dios,” she said impatiently. “How should I know? It was always closing for lunch when I was having breakfast.”

  “Does it open again in the afternoon?”

  “Three, perhaps four o’clock.”

  “And closes for the night?”

  “Around eight, I think.”

  “Is it a busy place?”

  “Busy, busy, busy—particularly on Sunday afternoon. Then the Spaniards come as well as the tourists. It will entertain you, help pass the time, but don’t open the louvres too wide. Tourists are always prowling around, always curious.”

  That was what he had feared. Constant movement out there in the patio. He would have to make sure everything was closed tight, suffocate in darkness, keep still, listen to the heavy footsteps trudging above his head on the old wooden floor of the museum. “So I’m locked away, am I?” Four or five days of this...

  She smiled. “Now you will know how women used to feel, watching the world through shutters and screens.” Her amusement vanished. She added coldly, “You aren’t a prisoner, and you know it. You can walk out through that gate any time you wish. And good luck to you.”

  He studied the entrance gate, kept his temper down. “It looks impregnable at this hour,” he said.

  “There is the key to this house.” She pointed to an elaborate piece of black metal, almost a hand span in length, that hung on the wall beside her front door. “And the caretaker will let you out of the courtyard—he is a veteran, who has his apartment right beside the gate.”

  He took command again. “What is that shop on the left? Opposite the museum entrance,” he added impatiently as she glanced out in the wrong direction.

  “A tinsmith’s. He spreads his wares in the morning outside those windows, takes them in again before nine in the evening. He is an excellent workman, employs only expert help.”

  “Popular with the tourists?”

  “He has many customers. So has the leather shop, next door to him.”

  “And the other doors around the patio?”

  “Once they were apartments like mine. But the museum now owns them, displays replicas of old Spanish rooms.” She moved back to the nearest lamp. “Close the shutters before I turn on the light,” she warned him.

  He gave one last look at the peace of the courtyard, then blotted it out of sight.

  She seemed to read his thoughts. As she switched on the table lamp, she said, “I should not risk taking a late stroll out there once the moonlight fades.”

  “Ah—the loyal veteran who guards the gate?”

  “And two other disabled veterans, custodians of the museum, who live in its basement. If they knew who you were, they would take you to pieces, even if one has a wooden leg and the other a hook for a hand. Your legacy to them, Tomás Fuentes. It keeps their memory alive. Or do you think we have all forgotten?”

  “Some have,” he reminded her, and scored a point. A good point, for she had nothing to say. He went on to improve it by adding, “You would be surprised by the number of recent contacts we have made—”

  “So?” she interrupted angrily. “Then why did you come to me and Esteban for help? What was wrong with all your good political allies?”

  He switched back to the courtyard. “All right, I don’t take any post-moonlight or predawn stroll. Not even when the veterans are sleeping off their brandy.”

  “If they were, there is always the tinsmith. He lives above his shop. They say he works for the police in his spare time.”

  Now that was an interesting piece of information, he thought. “Too bad,” he said. “A place like this, with so much coming and going, would make a perfect drop.”

  “A drop?” She had turned on another lamp, was looking around the room as if she were giving it one last check.

  “A place—” he began, but did not finish. She couldn’t care less, obviously, about a place where couriers could leave or pick up secret instructions. She was too engrossed with being the perfect, if unwilling, hostess. Women were really fantastic. He said, “When Ferrier gets here, how do you let me know?” She pointed to a telephone on a small writing desk in one corner of the room. “I shall call you before he comes down the long corridor.”

  “What?” he asked sardonically. “You use an ordinary telephone? No private line be
tween this house and the love nest perched on the cliff?”

  She faced him, eyes blazing with anger. Then she said, her voice low but intense, “It will be safe. When I call, the telephone will ring three times, and then break off. Within one minute exactly, it will ring again. This time, you can pick up the receiver. I shall do the talking. It will be brief.”

  “Don’t mention anything important!” he warned her quickly. “Nothing—”

  “Of course not!” she flashed back at him. “It is enough if you hear my voice. Then I shall interrupt myself, apologise for speaking to a wrong number. The call is over. Your voice is not heard. You are safe.”

  “And what if, in your excitement, you do call a wrong number?” he teased her.

  “Then the person to whom I was speaking would certainly tell me so. If it was a woman, she would be annoyed. If a man, he might try a little conversation. But you do neither. By your silence, I will know I have the right number.”

  He burst out laughing. “Amateurs are really—”

  “One last thing. I do not know what time of day you will leave here.”

  “Surely night is the obvious time—”

  “Too obvious, perhaps. Besides, it is also too quiet. Get rid of that suit”—she gestured to the chauffeur’s uniform—“and wear one of your own. Look like a tourist. You cannot carry your case, of course. You will leave it behind. I shall see it is destroyed.”

  “Listen,” he said angrily, “I will think up my own way of escape. Why not come back up to your house? Leave in darkness.”

  “You leave from here.”

  “More dangerous.”

  “Less dangerous. There may be friends visiting me. I may even be watched. You caused trouble at El Fenicio. There are people who have questions about that, and they will search for an answer.”

  She was thinking no doubt of that little State Security man—Rodriguez. But there were others who were interested, too, and able to move more quickly. Reid’s death—no accident—bore witness to their speed and efficiency. A good operation, even if it increased his fears for his own safety. He wondered if he should let drop the fact that Reid had been murdered, but then decided it wouldn’t be worth the extra shock he’d give her. With woman’s lack of logic, she would blame him for Reid’s death, making him its entire cause. And that could be really dangerous: she might even forget what trouble he could raise for her brother, turn him over to Esteban right away. Yes, that would be highly dangerous. And unjust. For it was a vain, emotional, irresponsible creature like Lee Laner who had really been the cause of Reid’s death: Laner had made Reid helpless, an easy target set up for the assassin. Yet come to think of it, even Laner was not to blame. It was the unknown informant, the one who had told Laner who Reid actually was. Without that little bit of help, the chain of Reid’s bad luck could never have been forged.

  “And so, you leave from here,” she repeated. She waited for a sharp contradiction, but he was strangely silent. She moved into the small room with its panelled walls.

  She isn’t even going to say goodbye, he thought. Well, if she doesn’t want the usual last word, I’ll give her it. “All very cosy, but you’ve forgotten one thing.” She turned to look at him. “Books,” he said sarcastically, waving his hand around the over-furnished room. “Pink shades on the lights, cushions, paper flowers, embroidered mats, all a man could desire. But what the devil do I read? Five days and—”

  “Ample time to think your great thoughts,” she said, and she was smiling. “Or, over by the telephone, you will find paper and ink. You might even write your memoirs.” She unlocked the door, stepped over the threshold, pulled the panel back into place behind her. By the time he reached it, she had already locked it once more. He listened, but he could not even hear the bolt sliding free on the second door. She would be entering the main corridor now, fastening that door securely. Then she would stride, lithe and sinuous, head high and triumphant, up the stairs and the sloping floors, until she reached her own security. And she would be laughing.

  He struck the panelled door with his fist. Twice. The pain brought him back to cold sense. He turned sharply on his heel, returned to the main room. He switched off the stupid little lights on their spindle-legged tables, felt his way to a window, opened shutters and glass pane, let the air stream in. It was bland, tepid. Not the cool breeze that had drifted over the high terrace, bringing the perfume of ripening apricots and night-flowering vines. He gripped the iron screen, shook it. I am trapped, he thought in a hot surge of anger; if she wants to betray me, she has me trapped.

  Would she betray me?

  No. Not until I am safely away from her and her people. Not until then. “We shall see about that,” he said softly to the silent courtyard. “We shall see.”

  13

  Ian Ferrier had swung the door open, but only far enough to let him bang it shut if the face of the cautious visitor turned out to be unknown. He might have a pistol in his hand or he might just happen to have a voice that sounded like Ben Waterman’s. Ferrier wasn’t in much of a trustful mood tonight.

  But it was Ben, all right. He stepped smartly into the hall, closing the door behind him on the dark, silent garden, saying quickly to Concepción in his execrable Spanish, “No, leave that hall light off. Please!” He moved past her into the big room, turned to face Ferrier, and stared. He shot a second glance, at Concepción, who followed them slowly, uncertainly, and his stare intensified. “What’s that for?” He pointed to the half-raised cooking pot. Then he looked at the chairs out of place, rugs wrinkled, one floor lamp fallen, and—through the wide doorway of the study—disorder complete. “I wondered why you were so damned slow to open that door,” he said, “but I must say—” He looked around him again, shook his head.

  “It’s all right, Concepción,” Ferrier said. She wasn’t even aware that she was gripping the pot as a weapon. “This is one of my friends. Would you get him a Scotch and soda? I’ll have another of Esteban’s specials.” That reassured her. It also got her out of the room. “What the hell are you doing in Málaga? Thought you were going to Toledo for the bullfight this weekend?”

  “That’s tomorrow. Might make it yet.” Waterman had a soft, gentle voice with traces of Atlanta clinging to it; a most deceptive voice. In Korea, where Ferrier had first met him after the ceasefire—both twenty-two and already realists—he had been one of the toughest reporters who wouldn’t take an evasion for an answer or an excuse as an explanation; in the Philippines, he had been one correspondent who had left the bars of Manila for Huk territory; in Vietnam, around 1958, he had penetrated to remote villages that had been converted to supporting the Vietcong and found—as an incentive to unanimity of opinion—the leaders of the anti-communist opposition impaled on high posts for all to see; in Washington, where he and Ferrier had come together again in the early sixties, he had frankly disliked his editor in chief, longed for overseas assignments, and eventually exchanged the newspaper world for government service. As a press attaché, he had been moved around enough to please, and perhaps exhaust, his curiosity about other places, other people. Or perhaps the times were out of joint. At present, he was stationed in Madrid, a pleasant appointment as well as a difficult one, which of course made it interesting. But when Ferrier had seen him last week for a long dinner and a catchup talk, Waterman was thinking of resigning before his next transfer, of getting back to reporting and the United States again. This time, he was going to explore his country. And he was also going to explore the new mushroom growth of little magazines and get-with-it newspapers that gave peculiar left twists to facts and events. That was the need, right now: an enquiring reporter (and the more the better), belonging to neither extreme left nor extreme right, who really went to work on the lower levels of his own fourth estate, exposing their sources to some bright daylight, getting into the dark corners of paranoiac rumour and calculated misrepresentation. Yes, that was where the biggest news story lay right now. In the USA... Dangerous? Well—there might be a l
ittle trouble, he had admitted gently. His soft blue eyes had looked as engaging as the rock face of Gibraltar.

  He had that same expression in his eyes now, as he crossed over quickly to the study to get a full view. He was a compact man, of commanding height, with a face as deceptive as his voice. It was round, soft, with a highly pink tan and a fuzz of curly fair hair far-receding from a clear, untroubled brow. “Anyone else here?” he asked. “Just you and the avenging Fury? Good.”

  And no questions about what happened, thought Ferrier. That means Ben has something else on his mind. “What are you doing here, anyway?” Ferrier insisted. “Or is this part of your job?”

  “Only temporary. I’m the innocent middleman. Co-opted and brought kicking and screaming away from the pleasures of Toledo. We got here around half past six, and I tried to telephone you. No answer. Later, we learned you were at the hospital. We also learned about Jeff Reid. So I’m no longer kicking or screaming, but the sooner we get this over with, the better.”

  “The middleman?”

  Waterman looked at him. “You’re slow on the uptake tonight.” He didn’t usually have to explain and double explain to Ian Ferrier.

  “Slightly thickheaded. Give it to me straight. Are you in Jeff’s line of work?”

  “No. I’m here for one reason, and that’s you. I know you. I can say definitely, ‘Yes, this is Ferrier, friend of Reid’s.’ And there are a couple of real superspooks outside in your garden right now, wanting to meet you. I also know them—mild acquaintances, but enough to assure you that they are the real thing. Not phonies. Not impostors. They and you can take each other at face value. And that, so help me, is why I am here.”