‘See this tile, Patient chappy? Fits into a pocket thusly. Stuff them into all of the pockets and, hey sesame, a bulletproof jacket. The tile also makes a handy drinks coaster for when the dangerous stuff is finished.’
‘So far all we have is defensive. Are you considering the purchase of items that could be used in offensive tactics?’
‘Not really my style, to be frank. Never was much of a fighting sort.’
Ratty squeezed the new jacket over his leathers and stuffed its pockets with the shiny steel tiles. The combined weight caused him to stoop more than usual and made it difficult to move his arms.
‘Go on, hit me.’
The Patient shook his head.
‘It’s fine. Go on. I need to test my theory. Pretend you’re one of my former ruffian servants and hit me.’
‘I do not think you are protected, Ratty.’
‘Nonsense. Go ahead.’
‘Very well,’ sighed the Patient, throwing an effeminate punch at Ratty’s unprotected face.
‘Ah, very good,’ he said, rubbing his sore cheek. ‘Thinking dirty, just like they would do. I like your style.’
‘I fear our enemies may find amusement in your style.’
‘Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance, as some fellow in a sunny zoo once said.’
‘Well,’ said the Patient, ‘I don’t suppose a façade of military inferiority will test our skills at pretence very hard.’
***
‘Can I see your permits?’
The site manager looked up from his desk in the temporary office building. The portly visitor standing in his doorway was dressed in a black suit with a thin black tie and a white shirt, and was wearing dark sunglasses even though the afternoon was cloudy.
‘I said permits,’ repeated Charlie, now folding his arms and trying to look like Tommy Lee Jones. The site manager seemed nervous at this intrusion by what appeared to be an oversized extra from the film Men in Black. He scrabbled amongst the floor plans and piles of receipts on his desk.
‘I had everything cleared with the authorities before we started work,’ jabbered the site manager.
Charlie looked around him at the grubby contents of the office: a kettle and dirty coffee mugs, hard hats and raincoats, and health and safety notices plastered across the walls.
‘Well guess what, dude? I am the authorities. And I need to see your permits,’ said Charlie. ‘Now!’ he added, purely for effect.
‘It’s here somewhere. I wasn’t expecting to need it today. We don’t normally get inspected at weekends.’
‘Are you trying to hide something from me?’
‘No, of course not. Here. This is it.’ He thrust a folder in Charlie’s direction. ‘It’s all there. It’s all in order.’
Without opening the folder, Charlie turned away and walked to the door.
‘It had better be,’ he said. ‘It had better.’
‘Wait, you can’t take that with you. I’m supposed to keep it on site in this office until we’re done.’
Charlie began walking away briskly. It had all been too easy up to this point. Now he sensed the spell was starting to break.
‘If it’s all in order you’ll get it back tomorrow,’ called Charlie, breaking into a lolloping half-run from the site.’
‘Tomorrow’s Sunday,’ called the site manager. ‘We don’t work Sundays.’
‘Whatever,’ replied Charlie. This would work in his favour. It gave him an extra day to forge his own version of the permits and to source the tunnelling equipment he was going to need.
He looked over his shoulder. The manager was following him out of the construction site. Two muscle-clad workers joined him. Charlie had no prospect of escape. The options of fight or flight were both closed to him. He gulped hard, turned around, and marched boldly back towards them.
Something about his imposing disposition had an effect. The men stopped dead. Before he reached them, Charlie also stopped and held out his arm, pointing at their building site.
‘I strongly advise you guys to go back to work,’ he shouted. ‘Harassment of an official doing his duty is an offence. Even if your paperwork is in order, I will close you down for having a bad attitude. Do I make myself understood?’
The ensuing seconds crawled slowly by. Charlie’s underwear filled with the sweat running down from his back. His legs shook. Either he would win, or he would be found out and beaten to a pulp.
The three builders conversed quietly amongst themselves. Behind his dark glasses, Charlie closed his eyes, shutting out the terrifying reality.
Sunday 5th May 2013
The old man stared at the packet he had found. A hangover from the old days. An envelope of hope from the era when he had none. He opened the envelope and shook its contents onto the desk in the white walled office at the rear of his modernist home.
A single pill rolled onto the glass worktop. It clattered and span in a wide arc before settling at arm’s length. The pill was unmarked and came with no instructions, but the old man knew precisely what it was. He knew its ingredients. He knew its chemical make-up, the history of its development, the effects and the side-effects. In the Sixties, he had invested millions into the creation of this drug, sponsoring a laboratory and a team of doctors and chemists who dedicated themselves to perfecting a pill that would offer permanent relief from the pain that he felt within his heart.
The research had not been successful. Memories of those experiments returned to him. He wished he had not found this pill. He wished he had used it or disposed of it years ago. But he was now cruising fast towards the conclusion of his life. All the people he needed were in place. More people than necessary, in fact. His plans contained layers of redundancy. If his plan worked, this Sunday morning would be the last that he would experience. For that uncharacteristically sentimental reason, the old man had decided to use this final opportunity to go through his files and to reflect on his life. To prepare for his annihilation, he would embrace the memories of all that had happened to him, both good and bad.
There was very little good.
He opened another drawer and extracted a cardboard file. Inside was another envelope, much older than the one containing the pill. It was addressed to him in faded calligraphy, and carried an Argentine postmark.
This envelope had arrived on his eighteenth birthday, an occasion he remembered more vividly than most due to the realisation that it marked the granting of his inheritance. For inside the envelope was a piece of paper containing the name and address of a bank in Switzerland, and a series of numbers.
On that day, he had inherited wealth beyond his imaginings. The funds were secure in an unnamed account, untraceable, accessible with no questions asked. There was an almost limitless supply of cash available to him.
To possess it gave him no pleasure. Spending it was equally joyless. For the money was poisoned with the blood of millions.
***
Charlie had no idea what he was looking at. The eBay advert had shown some kind of machine on a pallet which was supposedly capable of digging a tunnel wide enough to accommodate the time capsule, and the vendor was desperate enough to be rid of it that he was happy to meet up on a Sunday. But the rusty wreck in front of Charlie in this New Jersey construction yard in the shadow of an oil refinery could have been anything. He couldn’t even see where the driver was supposed to sit.
He had been lucky the previous day –the builders had backed down – but would his luck continue today, or had he just bought some worthless junk?
‘Sit?’ replied the vendor when Charlie enquired on the subject. ‘This ain’t Journey to the Centre of the Earth, son.’ He laughed.
Charlie chuckled too, already regretting having won this auction.
‘How do I dig, then?’
‘Just crawl behind it. Shore it up as you go. Conveyor to take the spoil to the surface. This baby can make ten yards a day with the wind behind it.’ He laughed again.
Charlie sighed and h
anded over some of the cash he had been allocated for his mission. It was becoming steadily more complex. He wished he was back in Europe, driving Van Gogh to donut stores and generally wasting his life.
‘Can you deliver?’
‘Sure. What’s the address?’
Ah. That would be a problem, thought Charlie. He couldn’t give his hotel address. The machine had to be delivered directly to Flushing Meadows. He was going to have to forge his permits by the next morning.
‘I’ve been commissioned to survey some foundations on one of the old World’s Fair buildings,’ he explained. ‘As soon as I have the permits in place I’ll be able to accept delivery of this beast.’
‘No problem. Do you need anything else while you’re here? I have skips, portable office units, signage, fences, you name it. All for rent if you prefer.’
‘Why not? I’ll take the lot.’
‘How long for?’
‘Ten yards a day, huh? Well, just a week then.’
The man laughed again.
***
The remote mountain track across the Pyrenees into Spain was lined with scorched trees from a recent forest fire. It seemed an ominous welcome to Ratty, who had taken to wearing his home-made bulletproof vest for the final miles through southern France and into Spain, and it was starting to make his neck ache. The Patient had driven his shifts with basic competence, managing to avoid the motorway and its heavily monitored toll booths, arriving in Catalonia just as the sun began to rise above the Mediterranean
‘Where shall we begin our search?’ asked the Patient.
‘I think Mother wanted to visit Dalí. He was connected to whatever she found in the locked room. We should start at the house he lived in during the Seventies.’
Ratty programmed the satnav for Port Lligat, and the Patient took the next turning towards the coast. More evidence of the forest fire gave a bleak backdrop to the view. Eventually they reached the remote coastal village and followed the signs to Dalí’s former home, now open to the public by appointment.
The whitewashed house clung to the rocks of the serene bay, a jumble of original fisherman’s cottages and sympathetic extensions created by Dalí over the course of many decades. Its outbuildings were capped with giant eggs, similar in style to the roof of his museum in Figueres. After the Patient had managed to park the car with only minimal scraping against a neighbouring vehicle, Ratty stood on the beach and stared in silent reverence at the house.
He wondered if his mother had made it far enough to enjoy the same view. Had she stood on this same beach, thirty-eight years ago, with tears in her eyes at the thought that she could never see her son again? Ratty began to choke with emotion, but the Patient’s new fascination with the texture of the stones that littered the foreshore brought him back to his present reality and the awareness that he was sweating profusely beneath the leather coat and the jacket full of metal tiles.
‘The trail is cold,’ said the Patient eventually.
‘I don’t know what I expected to find here,’ said Ratty, deciding to remain inside his heavy jacket despite his fear of passing out in the heat.
‘We pass through life, we visit places, and very rarely do we leave a mark.’
‘Quite, Patient chappy, but Mother left a mark at Stiperstones. She left the message for me. Could she have created something at this end of the trail?’
‘Catalonia is not just this village,’ explained the Patient. ‘It is twelve thousand square miles. Seven million inhabitants. If she did not visit Dalí, how do we know where the trail ends?’
‘She must have come here. If the thing Granny locked away was connected to Dalí, Mother had to confront him about it.’
‘So we must venture inside the house.’
‘The website says “entry by appointment in advance only”. We can hardly book a visit in our own names if those pesky servants are still waiting to bump me off.’
‘Then our only course of action is to lie low until after dark and explore the house on our own.’
‘Golly. Sounds rather naughty. What about alarms and wotnot?’
‘Leave that to me.’
‘Ought we to scout around for the constable while we wait?’
‘I fear such a random search would be fruitless. We need to know more about the people against whom we appear inadvertently to be pitted. If we don’t find clues in the house tonight, the next step is to invite them to come to us.’
Ratty patted his metal tiles for comfort.
‘Paella?’ he asked, looking at the beach café behind them.
‘I can think of no finer breakfast under the circumstances.’
They sat on bench seats and studied the menu.
‘Dalí published two volumes of diaries, but he doesn’t mention your mother or your grandmother,’ said the Patient.
‘Nothing personal, I’m sure. Those diaries were partly fictitious. They build on the surrealist mythology, blending fact with wotnot and whatever.’
‘He may have kept private diaries which were never published, and which contain only facts,’ suggested the Patient.
‘If so, he left everything to the institute that he founded. Paella por favor.’
‘Dos,’ added the Patient, handing his menu back to the waiter.
‘But the institute kept it all on display in that house. This could be a jolly interesting night.’
The last visitors left Dalí’s house shortly after six in the evening just as two elderly women arrived, one carrying a bucket crammed with bottles of cleaning fluids, the other carrying a small vacuum cleaner. The old women entered the building unhurriedly and without vigour. Ticket office staff shook hands and closed the doors. Guides bade each other farewell and set off for home. A lone security guard took up a position in front of the building and started reading a magazine. Ratty led the Patient to a section of whitewashed garden wall, out of sight of the guard, where he considered entry might be more easily attained.
‘This has gone too smoothly,’ observed the Patient. ‘We have spent an entire day in this village, and no one has treated us oddly or displayed any suspicion towards us despite the fact that your armoured clothing makes you look as if gravity weighs twice as heavily upon you as it does for others.’
‘You really think they know we’re here?’
‘I consider it probable. Expect the unexpected whenever you least expect to need to expect it.’
‘A pithy motto indeed.’
When the cleaners finally departed, exiting the house with the same lack of urgency with which they had entered it, the Patient attempted to lift Ratty over the garden wall but the additional weight of his armour plating made the manoeuvre impossible. Ratty took off the jacket and dropped it over the wall where it landed with an attention-grabbing clatter upon a flagstone path. Ratty followed it and put his armour back on before helping to lift his friend high enough to join him.
The rear gardens of the property were screened with trees, and the men were able to move without fear of being seen. Dalí’s phallic-shaped swimming pool lay still, its pumps turned off, its pop art sculptures and decorations oddly sinister in the silence.
The Patient led the way to the rear of the house. He tried the first door they encountered: locked. Round the corner was another entrance. The handle on this one turned easily.
‘Probably the guard’s route from the house to the gardens when he does his rounds,’ suggested the Patient.
‘Which room shall we try first?’
‘Easy,’ said the Patient, who had spent much of the day reading online about the contents and features of the house, ‘his dressing room. Full of private photos of him with celebrities and friends.’
The dressing room seemed overloaded with vanity. Each wardrobe door – and there were many wardrobes – was plastered with photos from Dalí’s life. There he was, pictured with the stars of the Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. Ratty scanned the pictures carefully, looking for his mother or his grandmother. N
othing.
They tried to force open one of the locked cupboards, but after the door had creaked open it turned out to be empty. In other rooms, there was a smattering of books, but no personal papers. They returned to the dressing room. Ratty stood for a moment to imagine his mother’s presence in the building, to sense a connection with her, but the way the house had been sanitised and prepared for public viewings left it without its soul.
‘This obviously isn’t the place where his personal documents are kept,’ said the Patient.
‘So where are they?’
The Patient searched online and found the answer.
‘It would appear that there is such a thing as “The Centre for Dalínian Studies”,’ he announced. ‘It’s in Figueres, at the main Dalí museum.’
‘So we’re in the wrong place?’
‘This website says there are thousands of Dalí’s documents, photographs and books at the other place, but it’s been closed to researchers for the past year.’
‘Well let us make haste to Figueres,’ said Ratty, full of a new-found bravado. ‘If we can infiltrate one museum, we can infiltrate two.’
The clomp of footsteps elsewhere in the house silenced them. The Patient began to retrace his steps out of the room.
‘Keep still,’ whispered Ratty. ‘Perhaps he won’t come in here.’
‘It would be more prudent to split up. One man cannot apprehend two if we are not in the same room.’
Before Ratty could attempt to dissuade his friend from abandoning him at this sticky moment, the Patient had smoothly made his exit the way they had come in. Ratty looked around him at the wardrobes, wondering if he could squeeze inside the one they had opened, but remembered the noise made by its ancient hinges.
And now it was too late. The security guard entered the room and appeared to be surprised at Ratty’s presence.
‘Fair cop,’ said Ratty. ‘Go on, old chap, shoot me here.’ He tapped at his protected chest. ‘Or punch me, just here.’ He slapped his metal-encrusted stomach.
The guard sighed. He was in his fifties, and appeared to Ratty to have been doing this lonely job for long enough to lack the enthusiasm that the apprehension of an intruder should have sparked. He smoothly produced a pair of handcuffs, which he applied to the errant Lord without resistance before radioing news of his catch to his superiors.
The Dali Diaries (The Ballashiels Mysteries Book 2) Page 13