Gibraltar Road

by Philip McCutchan

  He set down the food and went, locking the door behind him. After the man had gone Shaw felt in his pockets. All his papers had gone, and so, naturally, had his revolver. He didn’t know what construction they would place upon a British Service revolver being found in his possession, but since (as it appeared from the way the municipal had spoken) they seemed to be taking his worker’s pass into Gibraltar as genuine, and had no other apparent reason for not believing him to be a bona fide Spanish citizen, he could probably say that he’d pinched the weapon from somewhere in the dockyard and trust to their not being over-concerned about British property. He didn’t think he would be unduly pushed over that aspect; the big questions were, how long would they keep him locked up, and how could he skate from under the charge of actually firing the gun at the police— an act, incidentally, which he himself didn’t remember in the least? There was a chance—just a chance—that it mightn’t be all that serious; the policeman had seemed more kindly disposed toward him than he would have expected, considering that the charge was one of firing at the Policia. The inference, if anything at all was to be inferred from that, was that he had the excuse of being drunk. They understood that kind of thing in Spain. But—the Spanish legal formulae were timeless, might go on for days or even weeks.

  His mental processes made his head pains almost unbearable, and he lay back, sick in the guts, weakly cursing his lack of alertness the night before.

  Later, when Shaw had refused to touch the revolting breakfast, he was taken under escort to a dusty office where the sergeant in charge sat behind a deal table layered with forms. Charges were preferred, and Shaw felt too ill to attempt the sheer futility of disputing the indisputable. But he did gather that he was, as he had thought, being taken at his face value as Pedro Gomez, worker in Gibraltar Dockyard, which suited him well enough. He knew that it would be worse than useless to plead his British status to secure his release—for one thing, he had in any case entered Spain illegally, and as an agent he had only himself to blame for his predicament; and likewise—even apart from the all-important question of security—it would do him no good in the world to denounce Karina. She would clearly have left La Linea by this time, might be anywhere; and by the time the interminable delays, the procrastinations, the mañanas, over verification and all the diplomatic niceties had been gone through it would be far too late to find her; and anyhow the mere fact of her arrest would not of itself stop Gibraltar blowing to the skies.

  And now there were only five days to go. Shaw just had to get out of that casilla. So he played his one and only permissible card, the card which had been handed to him by Carberry and Latymer back in London.

  To the sergeant he said, “Señor, I ask you to get in touch with a friend of mine, a very good friend who lives in Torremolinos.”

  The sergeant grunted, picked at his teeth with a corner of Shaw’s worker’s pass. “It will do you no good, hombre.”

  “Nevertheless I ask you to do this.” Shaw’s fingers bunched into fists, his angular body tensed. “My friend is Señor Don Jaime de Castro, who has business interests in Jerez, and knows me well.”

  The tooth-picking operation stopped; the worker’s pass rasped downward over an unshaven chin. “Don Jaime!” The sergeant shot a stream of saliva on to the floor, scuffed it into the dust with his boot and laughed aloud. “Don Jaime would be flattered to think he had a friend such as you! Hombre, hombre, Don Jaime would not be interested, and you waste my time.”

  Shaw sweated, felt his teeth clench hard; he hung on to his remaining strength. He reeled a little, was forced to clutch at the table to steady himself. The pain was intense, grew worse as he thought of the overwhelming urgency. He said, “Señor, I am a sick man. I shall grow worse, much worse, in the calabozo. Don Jaime is my good friend. If you do not contact him at once, without delay—that is all I ask of you—it will go hard for you when he finds out that I asked for him and did not tell him.”

  Shaw hadn’t got the letter of introduction on him—it would have been stupid to bring in a letter addressed to Commander Shaw, a letter intended only as an excuse to the Gibraltar people for taking a little leave; he had to continue arguing and pleading, and his shirt became drenched with a cold sweat, his trousers clung clammily, he was shivering violently with a kind of ague. His threats became lurid.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Don Jaime de Castro was walking up from his private beach towards the emerald-green gramon, the creeping-grass lawns * which surrounded his Torremolinos villa. This grass appeared exceptionally green, miraculously unscorched by the burning heat of the fierce Andalusian sun, against the background of the surrounding country whose barren brown was slashed only by the villas and the white-dusty road into Malaga. Don Jaime’s villa was big, its white walls set off to perfection by the brilliant green surround. It was big and cool and white, altogether delightful, with a green veranda deep and comfortable and shady and furnished with cushioned basket-chairs and a table on which Don Jaime, as he approached from the sand with water dripping from the thick black hairs on his chest on to his full, round paunch, could see his butler setting out the paraphernalia of his mid-morning appetizer. It would be a fine, dry Amontillado. Don Jaime’s habits never varied, and the Amontillado was one of the oases to which he looked forward immensely. It would be a fine—the finest—sherry from Don Jaime’s own bodega in Jerez de la Frontera, where Don Jaime owned the most famous bodega of them all, as had before him his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, his great-great-grandfather. As the most substantial sherry-exporter of Spain, Don Jaime was a man of very great importance and quite considerable influence in an area stretching far beyond Jerez—an area stretching from Cadiz northeast to Granada, and from there down to Almeria.

  Don Jaime advanced slowly, almost sensually savouring the strength of the sun as it steamed the Mediterranean off his broad shoulders and left him feeling fresh and invigorated. Tufts of black hair proliferated from his armpits like young bushes, and these were matched by the luxuriant sprouting of his eyebrows and a profusion of hair from ears and nostrils. A hairy man—even his back carried a fluffy outcrop across the shoulders and tapering down the spine— except for the head. Apart from thickish tufts above the ears, and some sparse growth at the back, that head itself was as bald as a Seville tile and just as smooth, the brown scalp with its criss-cross of bluish veins tight and shiny over the immense barren plain of the flat head.

  A child—son of his eldest son, who would one day succeed to the great responsibilities of the bodega and its dependants —scampered up to Don Jaime across the grass, and the big man gathered the boy into his arms and lifted him high above his head, great muscles rippling in the boxer-like arms.

  He gave a booming laugh.

  “Well, little señorito. What brings you away from the school-room? Playing truant?”

  “The Miss has gone to her room. She has a headache,” said the little boy gravely.

  “Which you gave her, hijo.” The thick black brows came together in awful accusation.

  The boy’s skin darkened a little, but the eyes were mischievous. “Oh, no, Abuelo. I came to tell you that Señor Martin is troubled. The telephone rang once—twice. The matter is urgent, and he does not know what to do.”

  Don Jaime’s eyes twinkled through rolls of sun-dark flesh. He asked, equally grave, “How do you know that Señor Martin is troubled?”

  “Because he perspires, and looks anxious, and his belly wobbles.”

  The old man gave a great gust of laughter, and set the boy down gently at his feet. He lowered his thick eyebrows, and the laugh expired in a grunt. “Señor Martin knows better than to disturb me until I have dressed and drunk my sherry, little one. Until then we must let him agitate himself in peace.” He tweaked the child’s ear. “What else did the small ears pick up—the small ears which should not have been listening to what they were not meant to hear?”

  “Nothing more, Abuelo.”

  “Then off with you!” The
Spaniard gave a huge roar and crinkled his eyebrows terrifyingly. The little boy ran off, laughing but instinctively obedient. Don Jaime lumbered on towards the house, his body dried off now. In his shady, shuttered bedroom his valet had laid out a clean starched shark-skin suit, a dark red cummerbund, a white silk shirt. When Don Jaime had dressed with his usual care he strolled out to the veranda looking like a prosperous pirate from the Spanish Main, and smelling richly of the special pomade from Paris which he used upon the remnants of his hair. The butler, who was waiting for him, carefully poured the Amontillado into the cone-shaped glass and then left his master’s presence.

  Slowly, meditatively, Don Jaime sipped, the pale-amber liquid moistening his full red lips. He took his time; and when the glass was empty he lit a cigar and rang for the butler. When the man reappeared Don Jaime said, “Send Señor Martin to me.”

  “Si, señor.”

  The butler bowed, slid away silently. A minute later a dumpy, anxious little man scuttled urgently on to the veranda. Don Jaime grinned inwardly, rumbling away into his vast expanse of shirt-front. Martin, third of his four secretaries, was a fuss-pot. Gravely Don Jaime indicated a chair and Martin sat practically on the edge of it, his mouth pursed up as though trying to keep back the torrent of words of which it wished to be delivered. His stomach seemed to vibrate. The butler filled two glasses. Don Jaime knew with amusement that Martin wouldn’t dare to intrude with his business until the polite formalities were over. Meanwhile, let him sweat!

  “Salud, Don Jaime.”

  “Salud.”

  The two men drank. For some minutes Don Jaime held his third secretary in conversation on the merits of the Amontillado, seeking his opinion on the blend of the years. And then, when he saw that the moment was approaching, the little man sighed and gave a delicate cough, his plump body quivering, his posterior edging right to the limit of the chair’s seat. Don Jaime lifted an eyebrow. He said solemnly, “You may proceed.”

  “Señor!” Martin sat bolt upright, mopped at his face with a red silk handkerchief. “The matter is very urgent. There was a telephone call—two telephone calls.” He paused, then added importantly, “From the Policia Municipal at La Linea.”

  “The police—at La Linea?” Don Jaime’s brown eyes scanned the secretary’s face. “And what was their business, pray?”

  “Don Jaime, they have taken into custody in la casilla last night a man who was drunk.” The secretary swallowed, gabbled on. “If you will permit the use of the word, señor, the man was found not far from a—a brothel. The man asks for you, Don Jaime.” He looked away, drawing in his breath sharply.

  “For me?” Don Jaime’s eyebrows went up in surprise, but there was a new alertness in his manner. “What have I to do with a drunken man found outside a brothel?”

  Martin raised his hands almost in supplication. “Señor, I do not know! That is what I asked the sargento, but he was insistent. The man had threatened terrible things if they did not telephone to you at once.”

  “And the name of this man?” The eyes were slits now.

  “It was Pedro Gomez, a worker in the dockyard at Gibraltar—”

  “Pedro Gomez—Gibraltar!” Don Jaime’s body heaved; the table at his side fell, the sherry decanter and the glasses flew, smashed to splinters. Martin went pale, his mouth opening in alarm. Don Jaime didn’t notice; he stood up. “Get me the La Linea casilla at once . . . and then my car, the limousine. And do not speak of this to a soul, you understand? Thousand-fold fool!” he roared, his face a dark, suffused red. “Dolt—not to tell me at once of this!”

  He stormed off the veranda, the terrified secretary scuttling after him on rapid, twinkling feet, rolling his eyes despairingly to Heaven. Working for the rich Don Jaime could be so wearing, so upsetting. How was he to know? There were hundreds of men named Pedro Gomez in Andalusia, and probably very many of them were in prison. Yes, Don Jaime was very difficult; the only consolation was that his sudden and unreasonable rages never lasted for very long, and afterwards they were quickly forgotten.

  Two nights before, the Studebaker, its headlights dipping and rising again, had wound upward towards Ronda.

  It had made good progress until it had come to a better stretch of road below Vercín, where the way switched right for Ronda, and then over-confidence had taken charge. As soon as he felt the wheels take the good, hard surface the driver slammed his foot down hard, and the Studebaker, tyres whirring on the road, shot ahead at something like ninety miles an hour, the old walled town of Vercm high above them on its mountain crest like an ancient castle-fortress guarding a valley, tall stone tower reaching into the night sky and seeming almost to touch the low-slung lanterns of the stars.

  Then the blow-out came. The Studebaker had eased for a turn and she wasn’t travelling all that fast; but she seemed half to leave the road, the rear swaying and twisting upward like a bucking horse; then the whole car appeared to hurtle through the air like a flung stone. It lurched sickeningly to the verge, quite out of control, ploughed through earth and stone and sand when it touched, and then, fair and square, it hit the bole of a big cork-oak; its radiator burst into a cloud of steam and spurts of boiling water, and the bonnet crumpled until the shattered windscreen went dark and blank behind the mass of upturned metal. The steering-wheel drove full onto the driver’s chest, the column piercing him like a bayonet as the wheel itself splintered into a hundred fragments, the spokes disintegrating. A bloody foam appeared on the driver’s lips and he gave no sound beyond a sighing exhalation of breath. The big man in the rear seat went head first through the roof, face and hands smashed and lacerated, his neck broken, to be hurled like an unwanted kitten against the tree. Mr Ackroyd shot forward and his head was caught cruelly against the back of the front seat. Head down, his legs circled upward like a maddened pendulum, caught in the jagged, splintery hole in the roof. He hung there for a moment, and then his feet slipped free and slowly he slid downward on to his head and lay crumpled up in the space between front and back seats, a pathetic little scrap of scarcely living human wreckage, whimpering and muttering through a haze of unconsciousness.

  For a long time he lay there. And then, as he began to come back to life, something stirred in his crazy, unhinged mind, and he moved a little. He gave a yelp of pain as his left arm scraped against the front seat. He didn’t quite realize it then, but that arm was one big bruise, though it had not broken. After a while, still whimpering, Mr Ackroyd dragged his protesting body on to the back seat, which was canted up at a sharp angle.

  He lay back, panting, spent.

  After a long, long time he felt a little strength seeping back into his tortured body, and he began humming to himself, grotesquely: on a sombre note, constantly repeated, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .

  It was a gruesome, horrifying sound, that humming in the wreckage of the car; but—as yet—there was no one there to hear it. Mr Ackroyd realized, in a dim kind of way, that his refrain had some significance, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was, except that it was desperately important that he should get out of that car and get back to—back to where? Mr Ackroyd thought for a bit, got nowhere, and gave it up. He started humming again; later, when he grew tired of that, he remembered, in some curious way, that there was something he had to do, something he just had to do before he could go back to wherever-it-was he had to get back to. It was something that had been on his mind a lot just recently, and it was to do with that woman —the perfumed woman, and the awful beatings he’d had, the dreadful, wicked beatings that always came when he smelt that scent, the beatings that had left his whole body red and raw and bleeding and still most terribly painful however he sat or lay. There was something yet to do, something imprinted in the little man’s hazy memory because it was so wrapped in those beatings.

  Mr Ackroyd, praying to his Maker for more strength, began to do it.

  It had been the man who’d been driving who had had the thing, Mr Ackroyd thought shakily—he reme
mbered the woman giving it to him. Mr Ackroyd, with difficulty, dragged his body upright, leant over the driving-seat. When he saw that shattered, squeezed body that hung dead on the steering column Mr Ackroyd felt very sick and giddy for a bit, and then forced himself to go on. He reached down and went through the pockets, groped through the oozing blood which was starting to congeal now where the metal bar had entered the man’s body, felt then for the wallet in the breast-pocket which the steering-column had only just missed. He drew out the wallet, felt something hard in the folds of the soft, sleek leather.

  Utterly exhausted, Mr Ackroyd flopped back in the seat and closed his eyes, the pain from his arm sparking into his body. It was some minutes before he found the strength to open the wallet. When he did so he found tucked down the back pocket a thin, flat strip of metal with a hole in one end and a convex half-circle at the other. It was a delicate piece of work, almost wafer-thin, and the semicircular end had little teeth beautifully worked, very tiny and very even—sharp little teeth which were made to engage in another piece of metal. Mr Ackroyd felt those teeth, and gave an odd little, dry cackle. It was important, was that bit of metal, but Mr Ackroyd still couldn’t remember why, couldn’t for the life of him remember . . . and perhaps it didn’t matter very much now after all, for the woman hadn’t got it, which was the important thing; and as for Mr Ackroyd himself, he was assuredly going to die. No man could go on living in such pain.

  Mr Ackroyd gave a dry, choking sob as he thought about his death like that, and then he started humming again. Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da—it did cheer him up a little, that refrain, somehow brought him close to a necessary part of his life. His head seemed to float away from him, up into those lantern-like stars above the little town of Vercín, and he thought confusedly of Liverpool and Mrs Ackroyd and Annie and Ernie Spinner and such a lot of things like that. And as he sat and thought, and hummed at intervals, and clutched his little piece of metal with the sharp teeth—the little piece of metal that would have made things right in Gibraltar within five minutes—a group of shadowy forms led by a guardia straggled down the steep, rocky track from the walls of Vercín.