Seagulls in My Soup

by Tristan Jones

  Other vaults were much simpler. They had rounded roofs, and were shaped something like beehives. They were generally discolored by dampness, which had caused green moss to grow on the stone roofs. These tombs looked like so many green-painted skulls, with their jaws buried in the ground, as if they were biting the earth.

  Soon we came to a small version of these beehive tombs. It was about fifteen feet in diameter at its widest, at ground level. It was almost overgrown with moss and a kind of ivy, some of which had grown over the low black iron door. The door was rounded at the top to form an arch, and reminded me of a skull’s eye socket.

  While la señora unloaded the perambulator of the ladylike child, the picnic hamper, and the now-grinning baby, all of whom and which she dumped unceremoniously on the grass, we men (including the pig-sticking eldest son), being men, took charge of the situation and cleared the fronds of overgrowth from the little iron door. The fronds were dry and crackled as we cleared them, like snapping sinews.

  On the door was a picture frame. Behind its glass, once José had cleaned it with a handkerchief (a clean one, courtesy of Sissie, which I had passed him) we saw a dozen photographic portraits, now yellow with age and exposure. They were all, it seemed to me, of the same small, dark man and the same small, dark woman. But José proudly pointed out who was who. We found that we were, in fact, looking at his mother and father, his father’s mother and father, his father’s father’s mother and father . . . and so on, back to about the time when Disraeli (illegally and without permission) bought the Suez Canal on behalf of the Widow of Windsor.

  Respectfully, José then stood back, delved in the pockets of his black trousers, and extracted an iron key so large that it looked as if it had been the key to the Bastille. Solemnly he inserted it into the keyhole in the tiny iron door, and forced the key around. The lock grated, then sprang with a clunk. I watched O’Boggarty’s face as José placed Sissie’s handkerchief over the shoulder of his black jacket and, screwing up his face, heaved.

  O’Boggarty stood there, his red hair looking as if it were about to stand on end, his blue-green eyes wide open, staring, gaping in silence. He looked like a small child at a magic show, expecting a white rabbit to come popping out of José’s sleeve.

  The iron door creaked and squealed and cursed on its hinges, with José heaving away at it in jerks, until it stood wide open. Following José, at his beckoning, we went inside, me at the fisherman’s heels, almost consumed with curiosity, feeling like Howard Carter must have felt when he reached the last door before Tutankhamen; and O’Boggarty, silent except for his heavy breathing, close behind me; then the eldest son behind him.

  By the light of the butane lamp which José held out in front of him, we stepped down about six feet, down stone steps which seemed to be carved out of the actual hillside. At the bottom of the steps was a room about twelve feet square, with a stone floor. The room was surrounded on each wall by faded, heavy red velvet curtains.

  As we looked on in silence José reached around one of the curtains and brought out a large card table, about four feet square. This he unfolded and set up in the center of the floor. Next he reached around and brought out five folding chairs, which he set up around the table. Then, rapidly, he told the little pig-sticker, his pride and joy, to bring down the men’s food. I realized that the females and the unproved son and the fat baby were to remain outside. This was a job for men only.

  Soon the tablecloth was laid—a lovely embroidered thing, all white and green and gold—and on it was laid a feast fit for a whole hierarchy, leave alone a king. The baby pig looked succulent (so did the eldest son’s face as he gazed proudly at his handiwork). The chicken was half sliced already by la señora, who kept up a running barrage of chatter at her husband through the tomb door from the sunlight above.

  O’Boggarty, who was a bit of a trencherman, looked now as if he had completely forgotten he was in a tomb, as his eyes wandered over the roast chicken and a dish of fresh green vegetables, and the bottles of wine—dark green, long-necked, slightly crusted, and obviously of a respectable vintage.

  José yelled up through the tomb door. Something came clattering down the steps. José bent and picked it up, whistling in his teeth all the while. It was a bottle opener. José opened all four bottles and slowly, carefully, poured the dark red liquid, which seemed to have a life of its own, into the twenty-two crystal glasses which the pig-sticker had gently laid out on the table in a row.

  That done, José stood back, his blue eyes gleaming in the light of the gas lamp. There was a dead silence, even from the sunlit land of the living outside the tomb door. O’Boggarty and I, fascinated, watched José as he stood, smiling at us. The pig-sticker stuck out his chest, proud to be a man among men. Suddenly, from somewhere came a wail. O’Boggarty’s face blanched. Then he realized that the fat baby had decided to cry. His tenseness eased momentarily, and he grinned wanly at José.

  José, savoring the holy moment, stood for a few seconds longer; then, just as suddenly as the fat baby had cried, he turned on his heel and pulled aside the curtain behind him. Even as we stared, all three of us—the pigsticker fascinated, me curious, and O’Boggarty in horror, José pulled aside the other curtains on the other three sides of the chamber. In a few seconds we were surrounded by glass coffins, and in each of them a desiccated body with a grinning skull and brown, leathery-looking remnants of skin and flesh hanging from the bones.

  José grabbed a glass of wine and toasted loudly, “A los muertos! To the dead!”

  I had, before I knew it, a glass in my hand, too. “To the living!” I saluted. José wouldn’t understand anyway.

  Just as the eldest son raised his glass there was a clatter. I stared around. O’Boggarty had fainted clean away, flat out on the floor. José flung a questioning look at me.

  “He had a bit too much to drink last night,” I explained.

  “Oh,” said José.

  By the time O’Boggarty came around, José, the eldest son, and I (and presumably the unfit and females outside) had consumed as fine a cold picnic lunch as you could expect to find south of the French frontier. We, the men, the privileged-with-the-dead, down below, had quaffed between us the whole four bottles of very good wine. It had a fine bouquet and a nutty flavor (which I thought suitable for the occasion).

  O’Boggarty stirred and groaned. I took him a glass of wine. He opened his eyes. He looked at me. He stared at the young pig-sticker. He gawped wildly at José. His head spun around to gaze again at the dear departed. His eyes widened, as if he were in absolute terror. Suddenly he was up. He shot off the ground. He wailed and slobbered. He tore himself away from my grasp and skittered up the steps and out into the sunlight as José, astounded, gazed after him. I wended my way, as steadily as I could, to the top of the vault steps, and squinted through the strong sunlight all around.

  There was la señora, weeping softly, on all fours, gathering together all the pieces of the meal, which O’Boggarty had scattered in his mad flight. There was the baby, howling its fat face out. There was the small, ladylike female child, as silent as ever. There was the still-a-child boy. And there, away down the hill, haring through the graveyard, was the Irish terrier, the terror of Bloomsbury, his yellow shirt swathing a yellow streak across the green grass of the ground of the goddess of the Phoenicians. And there was José, puzzled, at my side.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “He’s got a touch of tummy troubles. You know, all foreigners, all the tourists, get that . . .”

  “Ah, si, estómago malo,” murmured José. “What a pity.”

  It was after dusk when at last, escorted by José’s whole family, I staggered back to Cresswell, the waiting ministrations of Sissie, and the welcoming wags of Nelson’s tail.

  Run our David to Lluyncelyn,

  Fetch our Mati to the piggie,

  But our Mati told us quickly,

 
That the black pig it was dying.

  Chorus: Oh, our hearts are very sore,

  Oh, our hearts are very sore,

  Oh, our hearts are very heavy,

  As we bury the black pig.

  “Mochyn Du” (The Black Pig)

  “Mochyn Du” was a capstan and anchor-heaving chantey, very popular on Cape Homers with Welsh crews. “Burying the black pig” mostly alluded to settling a debt or getting rid of a hang-over. The translation is mine.

  3. Mochyn Du

  “Posh place,” I commented to Tony the Specs as we trotted up the wide front steps of the La Princesa Hotel in Málaga. An immaculate doorman, through some remarkable articulation of his right elbow, managed to both salute and hold out his hand at the same time. In fact he swiveled the arm so fast and violently that one of his white gloves fell out of his epaulette; so, while he, flustered, bent to pick up the glove, Tony and I sped past him without paying any extortion.

  It was still fairly warm in Málaga, and Tony was clad in a tropical suit, of which we were both proud. It was light gray, shot with black streaks of silk. He wore a pale pink shirt open at the neck, a Panama hat, tilted toward the back of his head to compensate for his stoop, and a pair of pimp’s pumps—at least that’s what they looked like to me. They were white calf, with a sort of straw-colored basket-weave over the instep, and were so new that they squeaked as he walked. I had my best rig on too—it’s only courtesy, after all, when you’re applying for a paid position. I wore my number-one corduroy pants, which had no more than three paint spots on them; my brick-colored cotton Breton fishing smock, a tee-shirt, and my best deck shoes.

  “Yes,” said Tony, peering around him in the hotel reception hall, all of marble and gold trim. “Yes, old chap, a bit like the Gritti Palace in Venice.”

  “Oh?”

  Shiner Wright was one of that remarkable breed—an Australian wheeler-dealer. I had met him some months before, when I had delivered a thirty-foot sloop for him from Genoa, where she had been built, to the island of Menorca, where Shiner was involved in a real estate deal. Since then he had arranged a couple of delivery jobs for me, and, although he was an aggressive materialist, I liked and respected him. He always treated me fair and square.

  Shiner had told me that before he came to the Mediterranean he had been engaged in apartment-letting in London for several years and had, by the age of thirty-six, already made his first million pounds. He was the kind of man that most people like instinctively. He was not exactly good-looking by cornflake-packet standards; he was too stocky for that, and his auburn hair and brown eyes somehow did not seem to belong together. But he had about him a self-assurance; he always looked as if he belonged wherever he was, and that seemed to put other people, especially young folk, immediately at their ease with him.

  I do not think he derived all his self-assurance from the money he had made. He had been born of a very poor family in the slums of Sydney. I think his assurance stemmed from the fact that he believed that everything was possible, given the guts and the will.

  We were very much birds of a feather, Shiner and I, even though it would revolt my Celtic soul, then, now, and always, to receive rent—and even more to pay it. Shiner was one of the most positive men I have ever met, and also one of the most integral. As young Americans would so delightfully put it, “he had his shit together.”

  It was small surprise to me, when Tony the Specs and I enquired at the reception desk, to find a message for us to go straight up to the “Royal Suite,” which was a penthouse apartment, completely self-contained, with its own kitchen and bar and staff, right up on top of the hotel roof.

  We were soon whisked up in the elevator by a small, dark porter, who was suitably awed at Tony the Specs (who must have looked more like a Professor of Economics than a delivery mate) and puzzled by my appearance—so much that he attempted a conspiratorial wink at me behind Tony’s back as he grasped the chrome handles of the double doors to the suite. Then the doors slid apart and I saw Shiner, as well-dressed and prosperous-looking as ever.

  Shiner was sitting, or rather reclining, in a deep leather sofa. He was wearing a light blue suit, and his beige tie displayed a pin with a pearl almost as big as a Yankee quarter and almost as bright as Shiner’s sudden smile as the doors silently slid shut behind us. He held up his hand and stared at the banknote he grasped in it. “Yeah, Tristan, me old mate—come in, cobber,” he said in his twangy Aussie drawl. “You and your oppo sit down. I won’t be a tick.”

  As I sat down I looked again at the banknote Shiner was holding. It was a 10,000-peseta note. At that time there were fifty pesetas to the dollar, so the piece of paper Shiner was studying was worth $200. Every few seconds, in the clock-ticking silence of the Royal Suite, Shiner looked up at the person who, with the back of his head showing toward me, was sunk low in a deep armchair facing him.

  “I’ve got five nines,” said Shiner in a low voice. He lifted one eyebrow and grinned at the armchair.

  “I do not believe you, Mr. Wright . . . Show me,” said the well-modulated, slightly French-accented voice which rose from the armchair.

  It dawned on me, after a second or two, that Shiner and his mysterious guest were playing “spoof,” a variation of “liar’s dice,” but played with the numbers on banknotes.

  Shiner’s grin widened even more as he leaned over and passed the 10,000-peseta note over to his partner. A hand languidly reached from the armchair. The French voice murmured, “Merde . . . Vous avez de la chance . . . pute alors!” The hand let the banknote flutter onto the richly carpeted floor, where it settled on top of a pile of other 10,000-peseta notes. I leaned over slightly to look at the pile of money. There must have been at least 150 notes, all of the 10,000-peseta denomination. I made a fast mental reckoning. There was at least $30,000 scattered over the floor between the sofa and the armchair!

  Shiner stood up and smoothed down his finely tailored jacket. He strode over to me and shook my hand firmly. “Nice to see you again, old son,” he said, even though he was five years my junior. He greeted Tony, reckoning him up as quick as a gnat’s wink. Then he took both our elbows firmly and gently guided us over to the deep leather armchair. There, still lounging deep in luxury, was one of the most classically handsome men I have ever seen.

  “Pierre Reynaud,” said Shiner, as the hand that had dropped a small fortune moments before languidly reached for mine.

  Reynaud was about thirty-five, or so I reckoned. His hair was curly dark blond, medium length, and it seemed to caress the temples of his finely shaped head. He was slightly sunburned—the smooth, rich sunburn which comes expensively from sitting under the Cinzano sunshades on the patios and verandahs of exclusive hotels. He wore a gold Rolex. His nose was perfectly straight and completely in proportion to the rest of him. His eyes—deep gray-green, were . . . beautiful. With their dark lashes they complemented, even spiced, everything else about him. He stood up in the graceful, sinuous manner of a man who has been everywhere, done everything, and knows everyone who matters.

  He was my height, about five feet, ten inches, but his litheness gave him the appearance of being slightly taller. He reminded me of a statue I had seen in some museum or other—Adonis. His mouth was sensual. His immaculate black suit, black shirt, black tie, and black shoes, and the way he padded over to Tony brought to mind a wily tomcat. My second impression was much nearer the truth. “Sprucer,” I said to myself, as I watched the way his body moved under the black suit. That body was not merely clothed—it was decorated.

  The only flaws in Reynaud’s outer perfection, which I noticed with a slight shock as he reached out to greet me, were the two fingers missing from his right hand, and the hard, dry feel of the hand. It was like grasping the claw of some exotic bird of paradise, and, after glancing at the shocks of beauty in the feathers, wondering about the brain; finding yourself somewhat discomforted—even threatened—by the perfect
ion before your eyes.

  Then you decide to keep things simple and coo at the bird—or you ought to. At any rate that’s what I, in a flash, decided to do that day in the Royal Suite of the La Princesa Hotel, surrounded by dark Spanish furniture, glancing quickly at the thousand glass pendants of the chandelier gleaming white, blue, and gold over my head, feeling the soft decadence of the Turkish carpet under my grubby deck shoes. ‘A right one we’ve got here,’ I thought.

  A flicker in Reynaud’s green-grey eyes told me, in a sliver of a fraction of a millisecond, that he knew I had been studying him.

  “Monsieur Reynaud has a boat . . .” said Shiner.

  “Oh, call me Pierre . . . We’re all friends here,” Reynaud chimed in.

  Shiner smiled. “Pierre has a boat which he wants delivered from Algiers to Marseilles.”

  This was a surprise, but not unexpected. Tony’s mouth opened slightly, but he said nothing.

  “A seventy-two-foot powerboat,” continued Shiner. He lit a Sobranie cigarette with a gold lighter in one continuous flow of movement, as we sailors stood silently and as Reynaud studied our faces. “Aries,” the Australian said.

  “That’s her name?” I asked, stupidly.

  “Right, cobber.”

  “Aries?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Oh.” An image of a ram flashed through my consciousness. “Algiers?”

  “Algiers,” Reynaud said, flatly.

  I turned to him. “No problems—I mean, permits and all that? There’s been quite a bit of fireworks over there lately . . .”

  Reynaud looked up in slight puzzlement.

  Tony piped up. “Tristan means political trouble.”

  Reynaud smiled and shook his head. “That’s all taken care of.” Then he looked at Tony. “Where are your boats now, Mr. Rankin?”