Sixteen
My battery life didn’t look good as I called Alex Guinart, and told him of the arrangements I had made for my boy and his dog. He promised that he would help them both pack: clothes and Game Boy for Tom, harness, lead and food for Charlie, and passports for them both.
I asked him to tell Tom that I would come to Monaco for him as soon as I could, although I had no idea of what that meant in real terms.
‘There is no sign of your aunt, I’m afraid,’ he said, as I was about to hang up. I hadn’t even thought to ask him: if there had been, that would have been the first thing he’d have told me. I could feel no optimism on that front. Adrienne would not have walked off on an errand without her bag or her phone, far less her great-nephew, and if she’d had an accident or a stroke anywhere about the house, Tom or Charlie would have found her.
I’d neglected to tell him before about Fanette’s mystery caller; I filled in that gap in his knowledge.
‘A woman, she said?’
‘Yes. German or Swiss accent. But if it was who I think it might have been, don’t go looking for her in your neighbourhood. I’m supposed to be meeting her here in a few hours.’
‘And you’re still going to?’
‘That’s my plan.’
‘Primavera . . .’
As he began to protest my phone gave an ominous ‘beep’. ‘Got to go,’ I said. ‘My battery’s dying.’ I ended the call.
I sat in my stone alcove, watching the ducks and thinking about where I was at. I looked around. The garden was still almost deserted; away in the distance I saw a man, tossing chunks of bread to the geese, but apart from him I was alone. It had just gone eleven thirty, three hours before I was due to meet Lidia Bromberg, and the sun was about to reach my refuge. Once it did, I wouldn’t be able to stay there for long.
Just as its first rays fell upon my feet, my mobile surprised me by ringing again. It was Mark Kravitz. ‘I’ve got some news for you,’ he began, ‘courtesy of a journalist contact of mine. The man that the police in Seville have now identified as Hermann Gresch died from a massive overdose of morphine, some time yesterday afternoon. They’ve got it down either as accidental death or suicide. Apparently there were empty capsules all over the place; on the face of it, Gresch was an addict with a big habit.’
‘And two different identities.’
‘The local police don’t know that yet, although they soon will. I’ve tipped a contact in the Guardia Civil to the fact; they should be getting in touch with Seville any minute now. If this is a scam, then it’s about to blow up, Prim. If it is, then for the sake of the investors we can only hope they haven’t moved the money yet.’
My phone beeped again. ‘Mark, my battery’s going dead.’
‘And so might you if you keep that date with Bromberg. You really mustn’t do it.’
I yielded to his judgement: by that time it was in line with my own. ‘Okay, I give in,’ I said. ‘Things have happened back in St Martí to help persuade me.’
‘What?’ he exclaimed.
‘It looks as if my aunt’s been snatched.’
‘And your son?’
‘Tom’s okay. He’s under guard and Conrad Kent’s on his way to get him and take him to Susie’s.’
‘That’s good; you’ve done something sensible at last. Now let me think. If Frank’s mother’s been kidnapped, that means . . .’
My phone beeped again and he was cut off in mid-sentence. I looked at it and saw that the battery indicator was solid red. ‘Bugger,’ I swore softly.
I checked my bag, to confirm that my passport was there, plus my cash and credit cards. Clickair had been the sort of operation that requires photo ID: although I’d booked only a one-way flight, it hadn’t been full and I was pretty confident that I’d be able to get on one that day, back to Barcelona. As I’d said to Mark, I had definitely given up on the idea of meeting Bromberg, or of looking any further for Frank in Sevilla. His mother had become my priority, although God alone knew what I was going to do about her.
With a degree of regret I left the gardens of the Real Alcázar. They had been truly peaceful, and I made myself a quiet promise that I would take Tom there one day, when he was old enough not to wonder where the play zone was. Heading out of the palace I shuffled down the side of the cathedral into Constitution Avenue, then across, into a maze of side-streets. It didn’t take me long to find what I was after: an Internet café. I took an empty terminal, logged on to the clickair website and bought myself a ticket on the six o’clock flight to Barcelona. Then, on a whim, I switched over to the electronic edition of Diario de Sevilla, and checked the latest entries.
There was a brief story on the discovery of a man’s body in a street near the ayuntamiento, following an anonymous tip, but that was all. I went to the newspaper site’s search facility and entered the name ‘Lidia Bromberg’: I drew a complete blank. I tried again with George Macela, but once more came up with nothing. Finally I entered ‘Roy Urquhart’ . . . and made a connection. The piece that appeared on screen was a year old, a feature about the Hotel Casino d’Amuseo project, built around an interview with my cousin. Yes. It was Frank, no doubt about it: his unmistakable image stared out at me from the centre of the article, those Asiatic eyes, that smile, managing to be modest yet dazzling at the same time.
I read it slowly. It was the same pitch that Bromberg had given me when I had called her two days before, only more so. Frank . . . or Roy . . . was selling it as the greatest thing to hit Sevilla for the last hundred years and more, and the journalist who had written the puff seemed to be buying it, and him, hook line and sinker. Lidia Bromberg hadn’t said anything about the golf course, but he had. This wasn’t going to be just another flat course for hackers and old men. Oh, no, they had the agreement of the European golf tour to staging an event within three years, and to taking the Ryder Cup there in 2018. I found myself wondering if anyone had told the European tour officials. Overall, though, the piece was wonderful publicity for the project. I couldn’t help but admire Frank’s natural ability as a salesman, and wonder at his ability to pitch so effectively a proposition that I feared more and more was a total fraud.
I was still smiling at his effrontery as I closed the window. There was one more thing that I wanted to do. I found the official website of the city council, entered ‘Caballero’ in its search facility, and clicked.
And there he was, Señor Don Emil Caballero i Benitez, the man I’d seen going into number forty-seven just before Hermann Gresch had taken his last and fatal fix: he wasn’t an official, he was a member of the bloody council, and a pretty senior one, by the look of it. He was thirty-eight years old, a ‘retail businessman’ by occupation, with a record of involvement in civic government that stretched back for nine years, and currently held responsibility for planning matters. ‘And as bent as a corkscrew, I’ll bet,’ I whispered, as I closed the window and shut down the terminal.
I paid the clerk, and checked my watch: it was half past twelve, and I was done in Sevilla. I needn’t have gone back to the hotel. I had left nothing there that was irreplaceable, and they had a print of my credit card to take care of my room charges. There was nothing stopping me hailing a taxi and heading straight for the airport, except, when I thought about it, that my phone charger was still on the dressing-table. It might be difficult to replace that at short notice, and I was beginning to feel out of touch already, after only an hour without my mobile. I decided I could afford to go back, give it a quick charge, then check out properly.
I took a circuitous route to the hotel, one that didn’t take me past the ayuntamiento, where I might just have bumped into friend Caballero, or past Calle Alvarez Quintero forty-seven, where that greasy bastard of a shopkeeper might have spotted me and shouted, ‘Policia!’, ‘Puta!’ or something equally inconvenient and embarrassing. Given my slow rate of progress, it was well after one when I got back, and by that time the streets were quiet, the shops having closed for lunch and the punters ha
ving gone home or off to a tapas bar. I looked around as Las Casas de los Mercaderes came into sight. The entrance to the narrow, pedestrianised street was all but blocked by a big black car, but at that hour it wasn’t causing any problems; even if it was still there when I called a taxi, there was plenty of room for it to get past.
Mind you, I thought, as I picked up my key, that’s if I go to the airport. The idea of fronting up Bromberg hadn’t gone away completely. But as I considered it afresh, I decided that there would be precious little point. Frank was gone, and possibly dead, as Macela/Gresch certainly was. As I saw it, the chances might even be that Councillor Caballero was tying off all the loose ends and that Lidia could be running for her own life.
Only . . . As I stepped out of the lift, Mark Kravitz’s final words came back to me, those he had been in the middle of forming when my mobile died on me. ‘If Frank’s mother’s been kidnapped, that means . . .’
I had just realised what it meant as I opened my door, and saw that decisions on my immediate future had been taken out of my hands.
Seventeen
For some reason, I’d been carrying a mental image of Lidia Bromberg as a Nordic type, a leggy blonde. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She was small, five-two tops without the heels, voluptuous but edging towards fleshy, and with a head of thick, jet-black hair, razor-cut, I guessed, as I stared at her. She wore white shorts that ended just above the knee, and her formidable bosom was crammed into a sleeveless pink top that was barely fit for purpose, to quote a former politician.
She wasn’t alone. Caballero was standing beside her, still in his lightweight cream suit, and in his hand he had a brutish-looking gun, made even uglier by a silencer. Okay, so they hadn’t come to sell me a share in the casino project.
If I’d been more alert, and if I hadn’t been hampered by a toe that I was not certain was cracked, maybe I’d have slammed the door shut and legged it, but staring down a gun barrel does have a certain hypnotic effect. So, instead, I stepped into my room.
That’s not to say I was completely stunned. ‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded. ‘There’s no wagon outside so you can’t be chambermaids, and you don’t fit my image of hotel-room thieves.’
‘I think you know who I am, Mrs Blackstone,’ Bromberg replied. ‘I believe we have spoken, yes? The way things stand, it looks as if you are going to be late for a meeting with me, yes?’
‘I’d decided to give that a miss. I had you checked out, you see, by a friend of mine, a security consultant, so I know that the whole project’s a con. I don’t really fancy pouring my money into a suitcase for you bastards to run off with.’
‘You’re totally off your head,’ said Caballero, angrily, in Spanish.
‘That’s been remarked upon before,’ I told him, in his own tongue, ‘but it’s never proved to be true. I’m clever enough to have made sure that my friend knows exactly where I am right now. I’d guess that in the last hour he’s tried to call me a couple of times on my mobile.’ I took it from my bag and held it up for him to see. ‘The battery’s dead; I only came back here for the charger, but he’s not to know that, is he? By now, he’s either called the police, or he’s about to.’
‘In that case, we’d better not delay,’ he said roughly. In that moment, I believed, truly, that he was going to shoot me. Instead, just as I felt my legs start to give under me, he picked up the charger from the dressing-table and tossed it to me. I caught it, one handed. ‘You’d better take this. We might want you to call your friend, to reassure him, and it’ll be most convincing if you do it on your mobile. Now this is what we’ll do,’ he continued. ‘We use the service list and we go out of the side door, to my car, which is parked outside.’
‘Maybe it’s been towed by now,’ I suggested helpfully.
He treated me to a small smile; he wasn’t a bad-looking bloke and I found myself reacting to it, clinging to it in the hope that he wasn’t all that bad in any respect. ‘My car doesn’t get towed in Sevilla,’ he advised me. ‘Now be good and come with us quietly. Killing you would be a last resort, but you have been a Goddamned nuisance, so I won’t feel too bad if I have to.’
So long, Mr Nice Guy! I looked at the gun, and considered it. Of course it could have been a replica, but it looked real enough, and when it comes down to it one doesn’t bet one’s life on such chances. There was also the silencer; it occurred to me that I’d seen fake firearms often enough in shops in L’Escala, and real ones in shops in the US, but I’d never seen a silencer, real or pretend, on display. The thing was like an exclamation point, emphasising my peril.
That was when I realised that I can’t do the Wonderwoman stuff any more. I have known a couple of moments . . . and I’m not including the plane crash . . . when my life could have come to a sudden, painful conclusion. On each occasion I took my chances, and came through. But things are different now. No reward could ever balance the risk of not seeing my son grow up, watching him turn from a boy into a man through his teenage years, feeling my chest swell with pride as he becomes a doctor or a scientist, or whatever. I realised in that room how much I’m looking forward to crying at his graduation, and at his wedding, and later on, to holding my grandchildren in my arthritic, stiffening fingers while I still can. No reward could ever make up for all that, and I hadn’t even gone south in search of one. I was doing a favour for an aunt I had barely known for much of my life and for a cousin who didn’t bloody deserve to have her as a mother. Bugger it! I was even paying my own air fare and hotel bill.
‘Okay,’ I said submissively, tucking the phone charger away in my bag. ‘You’re the dealer, whatever you say.’
‘Smart woman,’ Bromberg sneered. I really didn’t like her, I decided. She reminded me of someone I’d seen in a TV sci-fi drama a few years before, a character who’d worn an attractive human skin to conceal the voracious creature within. That wasn’t the moment to tell her, though. That wasn’t the moment to say anything more.
Instead I stood quite still as they came towards me, flanking me as she opened the door and took a quick look into the corridor. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, then took my elbow, pulling me roughly after her. I will tell you at this point that in the second half of my twenties, when I signed on as a nurse in an African war zone, I decided I should learn how to take care of myself, so I took up mixed martial arts. I was quite good, and trained with a couple of the UN soldiers in my base while I was away. They also taught me to shoot. Since then I’ve kept up my skills at classes, whenever I could. Maybe I was exaggerating with the Wonderwoman claim, but at another time, I might have broken a couple of Lidia’s fingers for the way she grabbed me.
At another time, when I didn’t have Caballero on the other side, and the gun, which I saw him tuck into his belt. I went with them meekly. They led me along the corridor, then to the right to a lift door that I hadn’t seen in my time there. Lidia pushed the call button. Nobody spoke as we waited; they had what they wanted and I knew there was no point in winding them up.
When the lift arrived, it was occupied by a chambermaid, with her trolley. She looked at us in surprise as she pushed it out. ‘This is the staff lift,’ she said, in a hard accent that told me she was from Ecuador, Guatemala or another of the Latin countries that provide Spain with much of its cheap labour.
‘City council,’ Caballero snapped, and she backed off, cowed. I guessed that she had read it as a threat, since not all of those migrant workers have legal status.
We rode the lift down to the ground floor. It opened into an area of the hotel that seemed to be closed to the public; the floor wasn’t carpeted and cleaning implements were propped against the wall in a corner. My captors must have studied the place on a plan in the city offices, I guessed, for they seemed to know exactly where they were, and where to go.
They walked me to a door and through it into another corridor, wider and with a fire exit at the other end. As we reached it Caballero raised his right foot and kicked the crash bar, releasing it and openi
ng the door outwards into the street. It was still deserted. Just my luck to be snatched at the hour when all of Sevilla was eating or asleep.
The big black car was almost directly opposite us: I was close enough to recognise the Chrysler badge on the back, and the model number, 300C. At least I was being kidnapped in style, I thought . . . until Caballero reached into his pocket, produced a key and pressed it. The boot popped open. ‘You get in there,’ he said. ‘Wait a minute!’ I protested involuntarily.
‘Don’t worry, you won’t suffocate. I don’t want you to see where we’re going, plus I’m not having you wave at every police car we pass on the way there.’ He dropped the key into his jacket’s right-hand pocket, took the gun from his belt, handed it to Bromberg, on my right, and grabbed my upper arms, as if he expected me to resist being put into that dark oven.
I probably would have too, even if things hadn’t started to happen very fast. Suddenly, I was aware of a new shape, moving just at the edge of my peripheral vision, and behind Lidia. I saw a hand clamp on the wrist that held the gun, and then a flash of metal. She screamed and dropped the weapon. As she did, Caballero loosened his grip on me, enough for me to wrench myself free and to dig my left elbow into the pit of his stomach. I heard him gasp as I spun round on my undamaged foot, dipping a little to allow me to bring my right forearm up, hard, between his legs, and to a very firm conclusion. The gasp turned into the sort of squeal of pain that I’m told no woman can make, or even understand. As he began to fold into himself, I snatched the pistol from the ground, dropped it into the bag that, by some miracle, was still slung over my left shoulder, and then grabbed him. Quickly, I retrieved the key from his pocket, along with a cell phone I found there, then pushed him, bundling him into the car’s capacious boot, the prison he had planned for me. ‘Sorry, mate,’ I hissed, as I slammed the lid shut, ‘but I’m told you won’t suffocate.’
Inhuman Remains Page 9