Cocaine Nights

by J. G. Ballard

  Untouched by snobbery, Crawford waved to the tourists, giving a cheerful thumbs-up to their choices. When the lights changed he pulled sharply to the right in front of the bus, barely missing the bull-bars of an oncoming truck, and set off down the Calle Molina for the old town.

  For the next hour I trailed him around Estrella de Mar, along an itinerary that seemed to trace a secret map of this impulsive man's mind. He drove almost without thinking, and I guessed that he took the same route every evening when he finished his duties as the Club Nautico's tennis coach and set off to visit the outposts of a very different kingdom.

  After a quick circuit of the Paseo Maritimo, he returned to the Plaza Iglesias and left the Porsche with its engine idling. He crossed the central gardens to the open-air café beside a newspaper kiosk, and joined the two brothers who spent their nights outside the doors of the Club Nautico disco. Edgy but affable, these former East End car-dealers sometimes offered me a generous discount on a new shipment of Moroccan hashish brought in by the powerful speedboat whose engines Gunnar Andersson tuned so expertly.

  Leaving their iced tea, they stood up to greet Crawford with the deference of experienced NCOs towards a trusted young officer. They spoke softly as Crawford scanned his diary, ticking off entries in what seemed to be his order book. When they returned to their tea, supplies assured, Crawford signalled to a beefy Maghrebian in a dark uniform who sat at the shoe-shine stand.

  This was Elizabeth Shand's chauffeur, Mahoud, who had watched me with his sour gaze while logging my licence number into his electronic notepad. After pressing a roll of pesetas into the shoe-shine boy's blackened hand, he joined Crawford in the Porsche. They circled the plaza, turned into a narrow side-street and stopped outside the Baalbeck Lebanese restaurant, a popular rendezvous and pick-up point for rich Arabs sailing down the coast from Marbella.

  While Crawford waited in the Porsche the chauffeur entered the restaurant, and emerged moments later with two fair-haired women in gaudy tops, leather micro-skirts and white stilettos. They pretended to blink at the open air, as if sunlight was a phenomenon they had never experienced at first-hand. With their patent handbags they were dressed in a high-style pastiche of Pigalle streetwalkers, their garish garb incongruously assembled from the racks of Estrella de Mar's most expensive boutiques.

  As the taller of the two hobbled along the narrow sidewalk I recognized under the platinum wig another of the mourners at Bibi Jansen's funeral, the English wife of a yacht-broker with offices at the marina. She was doing her best to play the whore, fleshing out her mouth and rolling her hips, and I wondered if this was all the whim of some avant-garde theatre director staging a street production of Mahagonny or Irma la Douce.

  The women joined Mahoud in the back of a taxi, which sped towards the luxury apartment houses of the high corniche. Satisfied to see them off to work, Crawford stepped from the Porsche and locked its doors. He strolled past the parked cars in the side-street, right hand hidden in the folds of his jacket, testing the door latches. When the passenger door of a silver Saab opened to him he slipped into the driver's seat and reached under the steering wheel shroud.

  I watched from the doorway of a tapas bar as he expertly jumped the car's ignition circuits. When the engine began to turn he pulled the Saab out of the parking lane and accelerated down the cobbled street, clipping the wing mirrors of the stationary cars.

  By the time I returned to the Citroen I had lost him. I drove around the plaza, and then searched the harbour and the old town, waiting for him to reappear. I was about to give up and set off for the Club Nautico when I saw a group of tourists outside the Lyceum theatre club in the Calle Domínguez trying to calm an impatient driver. Crawford's stolen Saab was boxed into the kerb by an unattended pick-up van loaded with Egyptian costumes for a forthcoming production of Aida.

  Before anyone could find the driver, Crawford shouted his thanks and drove forward, ramming the Saab into the space between the van and the car parked ahead of him. There was a rasp of torn metal as a wing buckled, and a headlamp shattered and fell between the wheels. The costumes danced on their hangers, a line of drunken pharaohs. Smiling to the startled tourists, Crawford reversed and then threw the Saab forward again, his arms raised as the van's crushed wing stripped the paint from his door.

  No longer bothering to conceal myself, I followed Crawford when he broke free and resumed his circuit of Estrella de Mar. Part inspection tour and part criminal jaunt, his route took him through a hidden Estrella de Mar, a shadow world of backstreet bars, hard-core video-stores and fringe pharmacies. Not once did money change hands, and I assumed that this whirlwind cruise was primarily inspirational, an extension of his cheerleader's role at the Club Nautico.

  Towards the end he parked again in the Plaza Iglesias, left the Saab and plunged into the crowds that overflowed the pavements outside the galleries and bookstores. Ever-smiling, his face as open as a friendly adolescent's, he seemed popular with everyone he met. Storekeepers offered him a pastis, shop assistants were happy to flirt with him, people rose from their café tables to banter and jest. As always I was struck by how generous he was, giving of himself as if drawing on a limitless source of warmth and goodwill.

  Yet just as freely he. stole and shoplifted. I watched him pocket an atomizer from a perfumery on the Calle Molina, then skip along the sidewalk, spraying scent at the feral cats.

  He supervised a streetwalker's make-up in the Gallería Don Carlos, examining her eyeliner with the seriousness of a beauty specialist, then slipped past her into the nearby bodega and helped himself to two bottles of Fundador that he placed between the feet of the winos dozing in a nearby alley. With the deftness of a conjuror he spirited a pair of crocodile shoes from a display stand under the nose of the store's manager, and minutes later emerged from a busy jewellery shop with a small diamond on his little finger.

  I assumed that he was unaware of my presence twenty yards behind him, but as we crossed the gardens of the Plaza Iglesias he waved to Sonny Gardner, who stood on the steps of the Anglican church, mobile phone to his plump lips. The sometime barman and sail-rigger nodded to me when I walked past him, and I realized that others had probably joined Crawford on his evening crime spree.

  Returning to the battered Saab, Crawford waited for me to take the wheel of the Citroen and start the overheated engine. Tired of the town and its tourist crowds, he left the plaza and drove past the last of the shops towards the residential streets on the wooded slopes below the Hollinger mansion. He led me in and out of the palm-lined roads, always keeping me in sight, and I wondered if he intended to break into one of the villas.

  Then, as we circled the same traffic island for the third time, he suddenly accelerated away from me, lapped the Citroen and sat on my tail before swerving off into the maze of avenues. His horn sounded a series of cheery toots that faded across the hillside, the friendliest of goodbyes.

  Twenty minutes later I found the Saab outside the drive of a large, half-timbered villa two hundred yards from the gates of the Hollinger estate. Beyond the high walls and security cameras an elderly woman watched me from an upstairs window. Crawford, I decided, had caught a lift from a passing driver, and the inspirational tour of Estrella de Mar had ended for the day.

  I walked over to the Saab and gazed at its battered bodywork and by-passed ignition system. Crawford's fingerprints would be all over the vehicle, but I was sure that the owner would not report the theft to the Guardia Civil. As for the volunteer police force, its main function seemed to be the preservation of the existing criminal order, rather than the tracking down of miscreants. Twice during Crawford's jaunt around Estrella de Mar the police patrol's Range Rovers had provided him with an escort and kept an eye on the stolen Saab while he shoplifted in the Plaza Iglesias.

  Exhausted by the effort of chasing Crawford, I sat down on the wooden bench beside a nearby bus stop and gazed at the battered car. A few feet from me a flight of stone steps climbed the hillside towards the rocky su
mmit above the Hollinger house. Whether or not by coincidence, Crawford had left the Saab at almost the exact spot where Frank's Jaguar had been found with its incriminating flask of ether and gasoline. It occurred to me that the arsonist had reached the lemon orchard by climbing the steps. On his return, seeing the Jaguar by the bus stop, he had seized the opportunity to implicate its owner by leaving the unused flask on its rear seat.

  Consigning the Citroen to the care of the elderly woman's security cameras, I began to mount the worn limestone steps. Centuries older than Estrella de Mar, according to a local guidebook I had read, they led to an observation post constructed during the Napoleonic wars. The perimeter walls of the adjacent villas reduced their width to little more than my shoulders. Beyond the encroaching shrubbery a hang-glider turned in the cloudless sky, the pilot's vizored helmet silhouetted against the rustling canopy.

  The last of the villas fell below me as I climbed the final steps to the observation platform. Sitting on the castellated wall, I caught my breath in the cool air. Stretched out beneath me were the peninsular heights of Estrella de Mar. Ten miles to the east the hotel towers of Fuengirola faced the sinking sun, their curtain walls like huge screens waiting for the evening's son et lumiére performance. From the stone platform the ground sloped down to the blackened grove of lemon trees and then to the rear gate and the garage apartment beside the fire-swept house.

  I left the platform and walked towards the orchard, searching the stony soil for any trace of the arsonist's footprints. Above my head sounded the leathery flutter of canvas. Curious to see who I was, the glider pilot hovered in the air above me, so close that his booted foot almost touched my head, his vizor masking his eyes. Too distracted to wave to him, I stepped through the charred stumps of the lemon trees, my shoes crushing the flakes of charcoal that covered the ground.

  Thirty yards away the Hollingers' chauffeur stood by the gate, his back to the old Bentley in the drive. He watched me in the same fixed and half-threatening way, hands clasped across his chest. He stepped forward as I approached, his boots a few inches from a shallow pit excavated in the soil.

  A tag of yellow police tape flew from a wooden stump, and I assumed that it marked the hollow where the arsonist had hidden his incendiary flagons on the night before the fire. As if out of respect, the hang-glider withdrew from the hill-crest, its canvas cracking in the air. Miguel stood at the pit's edge, the calcinated soil crumbling under his feet. Despite his aggressive stance, he was waiting for me to speak to him. Had he, conceivably, caught even the briefest glimpse of the arsonist…?

  'Miguel…' I walked up to him, a hand raised in greeting. 'I came to the house with Inspector Cabrera. I'm Frank Prentice's brother. I wanted to talk to you.'

  He lowered his eyes and stared at the pit, then turned on his heel and walked back to the gate. He closed it behind him and moved quickly down the steps, shoulders hunched as he disappeared into the garage.

  'Miguel…?'

  Irritated by the persistent hang-glider, I looked down at my feet. Two silver coins lay in the charcoal-covered soil, pieces of silver presumably intended to express the chauffeur's contempt for the family that had murdered his employers.

  I knelt down and prodded the coins with my fountain pen, then realized that I was touching a pair of car keys, linked together by a small metal chain and partly buried in the earth. Without thinking, I accepted that the keys were those of the Bentley, dropped by the chauffeur as he waited for me. I wiped them and brushed away the dirt, ready to return them to Miguel. But the Bentley's engine was turning, vapour rising from the exhaust, and the keys had no doubt been dropped by a member of the police forensic team. I held them in my hand, trying to identify the make of car, but the flat chrome was unmarked. Already I suspected that the keys might belong to the arsonist, lost or forgotten by him when he retrieved the buried flasks.

  The hang-glider hovered over my head, its steel guy-ropes singing in the air. The pilot's gloved hands clasped the control bar, as if reining in a winged horse. The craft banked steeply and dived across the orchard, its left wing nearly striking my face.

  I crouched among the burnt-out trees as the glider circled above me, ready to make another pass if I attempted to reach the gate to the Hollinger house. Head lowered, I ran across the ashy soil, deciding to make my way down the hillside that lay beyond the outer wall of the estate. Again the glider soared forwards, riding the thermals that swept up the open slopes. The pilot seemed unaware that I was scrambling and sliding beneath him, his eyes apparently fixed on the waves rolling towards the beaches of Estrella de Mar.

  Below me appeared a line of villas built among the eucalyptus trees that lay beyond the lower boundary of the Hollinger estate. The rear gardens and courtyards were protected by high walls, and from the alarmed expression of a maid watching me from a second-floor balcony I knew that none of the residents would come to my aid, let alone admit me to the shelter of their gardens.

  Covered with dust and ash, I stumbled towards the rear wall of the Protestant cemetery. The thoughtless pilot had returned to the summit, circling before he set off in a steep dive towards the landing beach below him.

  A stone refuse tip stood by the rear gate of the cemetery, filled with dead flowers and faded wreaths. I wiped my hands on a bouquet of cannas, trying to squeeze the last moisture on to my raw palms. Brushing the ash from my shirt, I pushed back the gate and set off through the graves.

  Apart from a single visitor, the burial ground was empty. A slim man in a grey suit stood with his back to me, clasping a spray of lilies and fern that he seemed reluctant to lay on the memorial stone. When I passed the burial plot he turned and almost flinched from me, as if I had caught him at a moment of guilty thought. I recognized the mourner shunned by almost everyone at the funeral of Bibi Jansen.

  'Dr Sanger…? Can I help you?'

  'No… thank you.' Sanger was feeling the face of the headstone, his gentle fingers touching the letters incised in the polished marble. The silver stone was the same colour as his hair and suit, and his eyes seemed even more melancholy than I remembered them. At last he laid the lilies against the stone and stood back, a hand on my elbow.

  'Well… how does that seem?'

  'It's a fine memorial,' I assured him. 'I'm glad everyone rallied round.'

  'I ordered it myself. It was the right thing to do.' He offered me his handkerchief. 'You've cut your hand-shall I look at it for you?'

  'It's nothing. I'm in a hurry. A hang-glider attacked me.'

  'A hang-glider…?'

  He searched the sky, and followed me when I set off for the entrance. I unlatched the gates and stepped into the street, steadying myself against the roof of a parked car. I tried to read the contours of the hillside. The Citroen was at least half a mile away, parked on the slopes to the east of the Hollinger estate.

  I waited for the next taxi to deliver mourners to the cemetery, then filled my lungs for the tiring walk. Fifty yards from me, outside the entrance to the Catholic cemetery, a motor-cyclist in black leathers and helmet sat astride his machine, a scarf over his face. His gauntleted hands gripped the handlebars, and I could hear the soft mutter of the machine's exhaust. The front wheel turned fractionally and seemed to point towards me.

  I hesitated before stepping from the kerb. The road ran past the secluded villas, and then dipped from sight as it descended towards Estrella de Mar. Hovering in the air like an observation craft was the hang-glider, its wings placed between me and the setting sun, so that the fabric glowed like the plumage of a burning bird.

  'Mr Prentice…?' Dr Sanger touched my arm. His face was composed now that he had left the cemetery. He pointed to a nearby car. 'May I give you a lift? It might be safer for you…'

  16 Criminals and Benefactors

  'You've been favoured,' I told Sanger as we rolled up the drive towards his villa. 'Apart from New York, that's the most impressive collection of graffiti I've ever seen.'

  'Let's be charitable and call
it street art. But I'm afraid it has other intentions.'

  Sanger stepped from his car and surveyed the garage doors. Graffiti covered every inch of the steel panels, an aerosolled display of fluorescent whorls and loops, swastikas and threatening slogans that continued across the window shutters and front door. Repeated cleanings had blurred the pigments, and the triptych of garage, windows and door resembled the self-accusing effort of a deranged Expressionist painter.

  Sanger stared wanly at the display, shaking his head like the distracted curator of a gallery forced by the pressures of fashion to exhibit works for which he had little sympathy.

  'I suggest you rest for a few minutes,' he told me as he unlocked the door. 'A taxi can take you back to your car. It must have been an ordeal for you…'

  'It's kind of you, Doctor. I'm not sure if I was in any danger. I seem to have a knack for tripping over my own feet.'

  'That hang-glider sounded threatening enough. And the motor-cyclist. Estrella de Mar is more dangerous than people think.'

  Sanger ushered me into the hall, watching the empty street before closing the door. With a faint sigh, a mix of relief and resignation, he stared at the bare walls, criss-crossed by the shadows of the steel grilles over the garden windows, each a dark portcullis. Our silhouettes moved across the bars, figures in a pageant of convict life.

  'It reminds me of Piranesi's Carceri – I never thought I'd live inside those strange etchings.' Sanger turned to examine me. 'Were you in danger? Very possibly. Crawford likes to keep the pot stirred, but sometimes he goes too far.'

  'I feel better than I thought. As it happens, that wasn't Crawford in the hang-glider. Or on the motor-cycle.'

  'His colleagues, I dare say. Crawford has a network of sympathizers who know what he wants. I assume they were teasing you. All the same, be careful not to expose yourself, even if you are Frank's brother.'