Spike paid the fare and walked around to the other side of the cab. Once again, the driver did nothing but watch in silence as Spike heaved Massetti out, so he couldn’t resist a sarcastic ‘Thanks for all your help, compa’, as he slammed closed the door. Then the taxi hurtled off, wheels spinning on the hot tarmac, both man and machine relieved to escape what Spike was starting to think of as ‘the Massetti effect’.
Spike took Christopher’s elbow, and the old man leant heavily against him, hand gripping his wrist so tightly it made him wince. In the hallway, the flaking paint and anti-Spanish graffiti made him reappraise Flat 40B, Atlantic Heights. ‘Which floor are you on?’ he asked, noting with some apprehension the cramped, cage-fronted lift, its steel doors dented and warped.
‘Five,’ Massetti grunted, then limped past the lift to the stairwell.
They set off up the stairs, Spike keeping close by Massetti’s heels, carrying his hospital bag like a dutiful squire. Just as he was starting to think his presence unnecessary, Massetti leant a thick forearm on the landing wall, and Spike saw that his shoulder-length hair was slick with perspiration, his face grey. ‘Want to rest for a bit?’ he asked.
Massetti managed a shake of the head, blowing bursts of air through his bared teeth like a horse. The door to the flat opposite opened just a fraction, and Spike saw a curious eye peer out from the gloom, perhaps lamenting the fact that Massetti had returned. Spike stared back and the door quietly closed.
At last they reached the fifth floor, and Massetti groped above the lintel until he found a key. An important safety measure, Spike supposed, for someone liable to lose their wits and possessions of an evening. Massetti’s fingers shook as he tried to insert it into the lock.
‘Let me,’ Spike said irritably, then shoved open the door.
At first Spike wondered if they’d broken into someone else’s flat. The place was immaculate – the armchairs worn but clean, the cheap pine coffee-table polished to a high gloss, chess game still in play. Spike set down Massetti’s bag and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. The spine of each book had been carefully aligned by height: Dante’s Divina Commedia in the original Italian, My 60 Memorable Games by Bobby Fischer, Force H: The Royal Navy’s Gibraltar-based Fleet. Poetry, chess, militaria: it was like a more orderly version of Rufus’s study. A desk piled with papers faced an enormous picture window, and even Spike was struck by the panoramic view of the Bay of Gibraltar. Then he turned and saw Massetti slumped on the sofa, and noted the pallor of his face. ‘I’ll get you a glass of water.’
The first cupboard Spike opened in the kitchenette confirmed they were at least in the right flat, shelves crammed with half-drunk bottles of spirits. He closed it quietly, then tried another, where he found a collection of pint glasses, most of them liberated from Gibraltar’s hundred-odd pubs. As Spike filled one with tap water, his eye was caught by a portable stove on the work surface. The built-in cooker had been disconnected; perhaps Massetti couldn’t afford to fix it.
Hearing the unmistakable sound of retching, he turned and saw Massetti’s head lolling, a dark pool of sick glistening on the carpet below. ‘Christ,’ Spike muttered, as he reached for his phone.
But Massetti held out a hand. ‘It’s old blood,’ he gasped, ‘it happens sometimes.’ He forced himself to his feet, swaying a little as he tried to pull an arm out of his vomit-covered coat. Spike caught him before he fell, then helped him into the bathroom, fighting off a wave of nausea as he twisted on the shower.
The old man let himself be undressed like an obedient toddler. The skin of his body sagged at the buttocks and waist, and there were bruises on his hips and ribs, some black and new, others dating from an earlier fight or fall. Averting his eyes, Spike grabbed a bar of Imperial Leather from the sink and held it out. ‘Can you . . . ?’
Massetti nodded, and Spike drew the shower curtain and gratefully retreated.
Ten minutes later, Spike somehow managed to manoeuvre Massetti out of the shower and into bed. He fell asleep almost immediately, so Spike pulled to the bedroom door and set to work cleaning up the mess.
It wasn’t the first time Spike had cleared up after a drunk, and just as he remembered, it was the smell that bothered him most. He walked over to the picture window and shunted open the top panel, hearing a herring gull scream as it soared on the thermals of the Rock. The papers on Massetti’s desk began to rustle in the breeze, so he headed for the bookcase and placed one of the weightier tomes on top of a pile of photocopied newspaper articles.
Curiosity piqued, he looked closer. ‘Gibraltar Dockyard Bomb: Man Executed’, one headline read. Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1940. ‘Gibraltar Dockyard Explosion’, The Times. Every article was of a similar vintage, and all on the same theme: ‘Spanish Saboteur Hanged in Gib’ – the Daily Sketch, the Gibraltar Chronicle . . .
Hearing the sound of snoring from the bedroom, Spike picked up the top article, folded it into his suit pocket and left.
23
Re-emerging onto Rosia Road, Spike checked the time. The entire morning had now been lost, but at least there was an email from Peter, attaching a press release which announced that the Gibraltar regulator had finally agreed to grant a gambling licence to Bonanza Gaming. That should keep Peter humming for a while, Spike thought. No doubt he was humming his way to Jury’s Wine Bar already.
Spike walked on towards the striped awning of Marcela’s. As soon as he heard the bell, the headwaiter pointed up at the clock and shook his head.
‘It’s all right, Guillermo,’ came Marcela’s clipped voice, ‘I’ll see to Mr Sanguinetti.’
Registering the wintry expression on the old woman’s face, Spike found himself wondering how his day could get much worse. He tried what he hoped was a meek yet charming smile, but there was no mercy in Marcela’s haughty green eyes as she offered him a cool cheek to kiss. ‘Still persona non grata, Marcela?’ he asked.
‘I thought better of you, that’s all.’
Spike looked away, feeling, he imagined, a little like Charlie when placed on what Jessica had dubbed ‘the thinking chair’. ‘Have you seen Dr Capurro since the trial?’ he asked, for want of anything better to say.
‘She’s been brought very low,’ Marcela snapped back. ‘Very low. Her nephew says she’s barely left the house.’
‘It’s my job, Marcela. You know that.’
‘Then you should exercise better judgment when selecting your clients. Guillermo!’ The Spaniard jumped to attention as Marcela swept majestically back to the counter, teal caftan swishing.
Guillermo took Spike’s takeaway order with his usual precision and speed, then returned with an espresso and a shot glass of limoncello. ‘Cortesía de la casa.’
‘Mano de santo,’ Spike replied in his increasingly rusty Spanish, and Guillermo bowed his grey head.
The coffee tasted sweet and strong; Spike considered the limoncello for a moment, then decided against and pulled out the newspaper article he’d taken from Massetti’s flat.
31 October 1940 – The Colonial Office confirmed this morning that the execution of a Spanish national took place yesterday in Gibraltar. Esteban Alejandro Reyes, aged twenty-one, was found guilty of offences under the Gibraltar Defence Regulations after a three-day trial before the Chief Justice of Gibraltar.
A native of La Línea who lived and worked on the Rock, Reyes was recruited by a Spanish agent working for the German Secret Service and exhorted to commit sabotage in Gibraltar. On 9 April this year, he succeeded in smuggling a bomb over the border to Gibraltar and planting it in the Dry Docks of HM Dockyard. The explosion on 10 April caused the deaths of two Royal Naval Engineers, Engineer Commander Arthur Baines, aged fifty-four, and Engineer Lieutenant Harold Beck, aged twenty-two. Reyes himself was injured in the blast, but recovered in time to attend his trial. He is survived by a wife.
Set above the text was a black-and-white photograph of a handsome, dark-skinned youth being escorted towards an official-looking building by a
member of the Gibraltar Security Police. His hands were tightly cuffed behind his back, his head lowered.
‘Another case?’ Marcela was standing at Spike’s shoulder, the curve of her flamingo-painted lips suggesting she might have brought herself to forgive him. Spike passed her the newspaper article and she slipped on the horn-rimmed reading glasses that hung from a black ribbon around her neck. With her pixie-cut white hair, she suddenly looked like the very ancient curator of a London fashion college.
‘Do you remember this?’ Spike asked, realising as soon as he said it that the assumption that Marcela was old enough to do so might offend her. If it did, she didn’t say, just made a series of soft clicking sounds with her tongue as she squinted at the smudged print. When she’d finished reading, she pulled off her spectacles and started polishing them on the silk of her caftan. ‘It was a terrible thing,’ she said without looking up. ‘An act of treachery in a time of war.’
‘Did you know him?’
‘Who?’
‘The saboteur. Esteban Reyes.’
‘I knew of him. We all did.’
Guillermo appeared with Spike’s order. It had been a long time since breakfast, and just the aroma of garlic and rosemary was enough to make Spike’s mouth water. He gave Marcela her money and leant in for a kiss of thanks. ‘What you need to remember,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘is that everyone was so young.’
Spike waited for more, but Marcela just tucked the cash into a leather pouch and turned back to the counter. It wasn’t until he was nearing Massetti’s flat that he realised she hadn’t asked him where he’d found the article.
24
Spike was perspiring heavily by the time he reached the fifth floor, the plastic bags he’d loaded with milk and orange juice cutting into his palms. He found the key he had replaced on the lintel, then pushed open the door with a sense of familiarity that troubled him. This wasn’t a trip he wished to be making on a regular basis.
After restocking Massetti’s fridge, he stood back, hand on the open door, considering whether he could just leave the old man to it. He knew what Peter would say – that Spike had already exceeded any fiduciary or moral duties that bound him – but years of operating as unofficial carer for his father had taught him better, so he took out the box of rice and chicken stew and addressed himself to the portable stove. Knowing that what talents he possessed lay more in the cerebral than the practical, he eyed the device with suspicion. A pot of clear gel squatted in a metal drawer beneath the single hob; Spike lit the wick with a cigarette lighter from the kitchen shelf and it provided a surprisingly efficient circular flame. Once he’d tipped the food into an oblong steel pan, he surveyed his work with a sense of satisfaction, then prepared himself to tackle Massetti’s stash of booze. Job done, he checked on the patient.
Massetti was lying on his back, the only movement the laboured rise and fall of his chest. Spike edged towards his desk and had just slipped the article back on top of the pile when he heard a surly voice call out behind him, ‘Get away from there! Those papers are private.’
Spike turned and saw Massetti pushing himself up into a sitting position, face contorting with the effort. The bruises had formed a strangely beautiful rainbow around his eyes.
‘Hungry?’ Spike asked. ‘I am.’
To his surprise, Massetti nodded, so Spike returned with two plates and pulled up a chair by the bed. The stew was delicious, slow-cooked for hours, Spike suspected.
Massetti peered at the food. ‘You make this?’
‘Bought it from Marcela’s. Ever been in?’
‘Not my kind of place.’ Massetti raised the fork to his mouth. The tremors were back, Spike saw, his right hand shaking so violently that Spike wondered if it might be easier to feed him himself. ‘Who’s Esteban Reyes, Christopher?’
‘My father,’ Massetti replied.
Spike looked up sharply, but Massetti didn’t seem to notice. ‘My mother was pregnant when Esteban was arrested,’ Massetti went on. ‘After they executed him, she was evacuated to a refugee camp in Jamaica. She died of septicaemia a few months after I was born. Childbed fever, they used to call it.’ He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘There was another couple at the camp. Mark and Josephine Massetti. They’d lost a baby of their own on the journey. It wasn’t uncommon. Conditions on the evacuation boats were very primitive. After the war, they returned to Gib and raised me as their own.’
‘When did you find out Esteban was your father?’ Spike asked, as he chased the last few grains of rice around his plate.
‘I always knew I was adopted. But I didn’t know about Esteban till I was a teenager. That was when the taunts began. Traitor’s bastard. Son of a whore. That kind of thing.’ Massetti pushed his plate away and leant back against his pillow. ‘Then Franco closed the border with Spain, and people found other things to gossip about.’
Spike picked up their plates and set them on the desk. He remembered the tail end of that strange time – 1969–1985, sixteen years in which Gibraltar had been sealed off from the rest of the world. If the Second World War evacuation had hardened the Gibraltarians into a people, the border closure had forged them into a unit.
‘Josephine told me to leave well alone,’ Massetti continued. ‘There’s no point raking up the past, she used to say. Jo was a lovely woman. Too good for this world.’ Massetti gave a fond smile which softened his bruised face. ‘We lost her a long while back, then Mark died in the late nineties. That was when I started looking into the case against Esteban. At first there wasn’t much. But then some of the files were declassified. You know the National Archives at Kew?’
Spike nodded.
‘Anyone can order documents from there. And now, of course, there’s the internet.’
‘What was it that you hoped to find? That your father was innocent?’
Massetti tilted his large head.
‘I’d be the same,’ Spike said, and he felt Massetti’s grey eyes searching his face for a hint of scorn or judgment.
Finding none, Massetti continued. ‘I suppose I hoped Esteban might have been falsely accused. There was another man mentioned in the official reports. A poet. Raúl de Herrera?’
Spike shook his head: Spanish literature had never been his forte.
‘He was a big noise once. Even decorated by Franco.’
‘I didn’t think Franco liked anything that didn’t involve guns.’
Massetti’s eyes creased with amusement. ‘That’s why de Herrera’s work appealed. His poetry is full of violence. The imagery of blood sacrifice. People called him the Spanish Yeats.’
Spike realised he was getting out of his depth in a conversation with Christopher Massetti. He was starting to see what Rufus had found to admire in him.
‘At the trial,’ Massetti went on, ‘the Gibraltar Security Police claimed that Raúl de Herrera had been working with the Abwehr. The German Secret Service. That he gave my father the bomb.’
Seeing Massetti grimace as he lowered an arm beneath the bed, Spike crouched down and found a box file beneath the metal frame. He placed it on Massetti’s lap, and the old man started rifling through: ‘Here.’ He passed Spike a black-and-white photograph. At the bottom of the mount, Spike read in faded curling script, ‘La Línea, diciembre 1939’. The camera had captured three young men sitting around a table in a smoke-filled café. To the right, Spike recognised a handsome, dark face. ‘That’s your father?’
Massetti nodded.
‘And the poet?’ Spike asked, momentarily forgetting the name as he pointed at the man sitting in the middle.
‘Raúl de Herrera,’ Massetti supplied.
De Herrera looked to be the oldest of the group, his small, humourless eyes boring into Esteban’s face, black moustache waxed into pointed ends like a cut-price Dalí. ‘What happened to him?’ Spike asked.
‘After Esteban was convicted, de Herrera was arrested by the junta. But it was just to placate the British government. Twenty-four hours later, he was released
.’
‘Bet that went down well.’
‘He was killed six months later. A bar brawl, allegedly.’ Massetti tapped the side of his bent nose. ‘But the British got their man in the end, I think.’
Spike looked back at the photograph. A third figure sat in profile, the sunlight flooding through the café window obscuring his features. Dangling from the open neck of his shirt was a pendant. Its teardrop shape caught the light. ‘Who’s this?’
Massetti shrugged. ‘I think the picture was taken in secret. See how no one is looking at the camera?’
Spike did. ‘Where did you find it?’
‘At the Isthmus Museum in La Línea. They’ve got a section on local writers and artists.’ Massetti gave a low chuckle. ‘Not a very large section.’
The photograph didn’t look like a copy. ‘Is this the original?’ Spike asked.
‘It’s not like anyone’ll miss it. It’s hardly the Prado.’ There was a churlishness to Massetti’s tone now, and when Spike looked up, he saw him staring at the door. In the direction of his booze stash. It must have been forty-eight hours since he’d last had a drink, Spike realised. The withdrawal symptoms could be savage: he was surprised Dr Martinez hadn’t found a way to keep him in hospital a little longer. ‘So this photograph proves that your father was in contact with de Herrera just before the bomb went off,’ Spike said, more as a means to distract the man than anything else. ‘You must have been disappointed.’
A Thousand Cuts Page 7