Gibraltar Road

by Philip McCutchan

  Four men were coming along the road behind them.

  Of course, there was nothing suspicious in that fact, just by itself. But it was the whole aspect of those men. Their purposeful, alert faces had something to do with it, the eyes so steadily watching, the fact that they walked abreast and with a firm, unshakeable intent, the fact that each had his right hand in his coat-pocket and was quite plainly holding something there, something that bulged out the fabric. But the deciding factor was that a car was edging slowly along behind them, and that car was Don Jaime’s that he’d left on the Jerez road last night. Karina, he realized, must have been waiting in Andres’s bar for the ‘kill’. . . .

  Shaw’s grip tightened on Debonnair’s arm. She looked up questioningly into his eyes, her lips parting. Shaw muttered gruffly, “We’re being followed, darling, that’s all. But this time I think they mean to get us. Don’t look round. Just keep on at this speed and do what I say. I want to think for a bit.”

  She nodded.

  Shaw’s glance flickered from left to right ahead of them along the road, his mind assessing the possibilities. Could he jump a car and get to San Roque? Unfortunately, tonight being the night of the bullfight, the traffic was almost nose to tail and heading the wrong way—the whole of the Campo, the coastal strip, seemed to be converging on Algeciras this Sunday evening and making for the bull-ring, the family cars bulging with people. The fight did not take place every week, and the excitement whenever there was one became intense, had an English Cup Final knocked cold. In any case, Shaw still had to get that missing part back from Karina, so that was no good; and he had a nasty feeling, too, that the moment they tried anything like that they’d get a stream of lead in the back—all except Ackroyd, who’d be whisked into Don Jaime’s car for a quick tearaway.

  They were close to the bull-ring now, could hear the tinny strains of the local cavalry regiment’s band playing away inside the building.

  Once more Shaw took a quick glance to the rear. The four men had a section of the excited crowd in front of them now, were having some difficulty in forcing their way through. Shaw put on a spurt, drew ahead a little until the men behind were momentarily lost to sight round the circular side of the big, poster-splashed bull-ring. The stalls of the market outside helped to shield him; then, making up his mind and committing them all finally, he grabbed Debonnair’s arm again and hissed:

  “Come on—we’re going to the bullfight. Once we’re in we can lose ’em and slip out by another exit.”

  Quickly, dodging into the crowds, Shaw led the way to the nearest of the many entrances, up the stone steps to the box-office, paid for three seats in the sol or sunny side— which was all one could get without booking in advance, and though he’d have preferred to keep on the shady side, the sombra, where there was less chance of being picked out, it couldn’t be helped. Shaw knew he couldn’t risk going out again too soon, either; the men, if they suspected what he’d done, could watch at least some of the entrances, and he wouldn’t know which. He’d have to wait and see if they came in after him, then he could slip away behind their backs when the moment seemed right. Then, with those men safely in the bull-ring, he’d make for the Calle Jose Antonio and hope to catch up with Karina—alone.

  The place, shimmering in its day-long heat, was absolutely jam-packed with sweating, yelling, chattering humanity, rank on rank of people sitting on the banked stone seats with their backs pressed in between the knees of the men and women on the row behind them like sardines sizzling in their oil. Shaw had been to a bull-fight only once before, and that was some years earlier. He remembered the general layout of the place, but he’d forgotten the noise, the stupendous deafening noise of thousands of people opening their mouths simultaneously and continuously. Now he found that sustained din stupefying to the senses, a continual battering of sound on the eardrums which inhibited thought, and the heat was really terrible—the Zoo in a heatwave had nothing on this at all. Ackroyd, he saw, was opening and closing his mouth, but Shaw couldn’t hear a thing that came from it. Debonnair was being pushed this way and that by the seething crowds milling along the hot stone seats. She was hanging grimly on to Ackroyd, and Shaw grabbed her and fought his way along through the hordes of gaily dressed Spaniards, making for where there seemed to be room on the outside of a row near a gangway if two fat ladies could be persuaded to push along a little. Bottles of vino were already clinking against glasses, vendors of nuts and sugared almonds, cushions, straw hats, and aguardiente (a kind of aniseed liqueur) shouted their wares, their cries mingling with the excited shrieks of the audience as greetings were roared out to friends glimpsed in the ocean of bodies moving to the benches.

  Shaw made it at last, pushed the other two down on to the seat, which was not far from an exit so that they could make a quick dive out when the time came. The fat ladies were charming, but voluble; every one, they said animatedly, had a right to a seat at the bullfight and no one minded the discomfort, not in the least . . . the señor must not concern himself. . . .

  Shaw watched all the entrances as carefully as he could, though he was half blinded by the glare from the yellow sand and the many bright colours of the dresses, startling beneath the hot, fierce sun.

  The excitement was growing around them as the local fire-engine, whose hoses had been damping down the sand, moved away and the picadors came out into the glare. The band seemed to increase its tempo, and the sound thudded into the walls. The President of the fight was in his box now, surrounded by striking girls, some of them turned out in high combs and mantillas and dresses which swept the ground as they moved, chattering like every one else, to their seats. There was a constant click of fans, a fiap-flap of newspapers as the close, sweating bodies who were turning the place into an oven, an oven open to the sun, tried to start a little air moving. The stone seats themselves were hot to the touch after absorbing a full day’s sun. The picadors, fat and greasy men in tawdry finery on thin, scraggy, ramshackle, straw-sided mounts, strutted their weary horses about the ring, the long-pointed lances carried beneath their arms; the crowd roared. And just then Shaw felt the premonition of danger.

  He looked round.

  The four men were coming in, grim-faced and still with their right hands in their pockets clutching those guns, and this time Karina was with them.

  That altered things; Shaw would have to get Karina now, and get her for sure this time, before he could leave that bull-ring. Somehow he didn’t think they’d been spotted; it would be a difficult business to pick out anybody already seated among this vast, roaring, gesticulating crowd, and with any luck they wouldn’t be seen at all—until he was ready.

  The reluctant young bull was urged on to the arena’s sand as the cage-doors from the stall were lifted; and it stood uncertainly now before the President’s box, pawing a little at the ground and glaring with its little red eyes at the strange figures moving about before it, the matador making his preliminary passes with the cape to ‘play’ the animal and test its spirit. Somehow it seemed dazed—as well it might—to have been plunged into this noise and colour and light, excitement and blood-lust, from the quiet, cool pitch-darkness of the cell in which it had spent the last twenty-four hours. Soon, whatever the outcome of the fight, however bungling the matador, the bull would be a bloodied mess, would be a corpse dragged by ropes and mules over that sand, which would be red by then, red with its own hard-spilt blood, and out into the dead-meat room to be cut up for the poor.

  The bull didn’t know all this, of course, unless a long ancestry, a pedigree of champion bulls who had died in rings all over Spain and South America, could make it instinctively aware, through that blood which as yet flowed in its veins, of its unavoidable fate. But it got its first taste of searing pain a moment later when, the matador having danced away, a picador spurred his horse towards it and dug in the great lance. He dug it in unskilfully, and the bull roared, moved inward so that the picador retreated to the side of the arena. It lunged with its big, sharp ho
rns at the horse, got those horns into the straw padding and lifted a little, until the picador, moving upward in indignity, was wedged—white-faced now—between bull and ringside. The angry clamour of the crowd, who hadn’t liked this early lack of skill, changed suddenly to a happy gale of laughter at the picador’s expense when they saw his predicament.

  But, vicious now, the man got his lance in again, and the bull turned away in pain, a great spreading dark patch of red pouring down its flanks and dripping into the yellow of the sand.

  The four men left Karina’s side, and carefully, so as not to risk disturbing the patrons of the fight—whose terrible fury might wreck their plans—split up into four separate search-units. Shaw had seen them go, and he and Debonnair tried to watch each one as the people alongside roared and cheered and laughed and groaned and hissed and, now and then, bellowed, “Olé!”

  The bull by now had had two picadors at him, and he wasn’t in a very good state. But he was at last getting really angry, which had been the object of the exercise so far, and soon there would be some sport—he was, praise Heaven, showing a fighting spirit. He snorted, and rushed a picador, who dodged nimbly. And then the bandilleros came in jauntily, the brightly coloured bandilleros, and they were not very skilful either; they titupped lightly forward and stuck their heavy-shafted darts into the bull’s neck to lower his head for the matador, and one of them broke off a dart, clumsily, ripping a long tear in the bull’s hide, so that his blood spurted out along the broken stick-end, almost zipping into the sand, and the crowd didn’t like this either.

  Hissing, cat-calling, rising in their seats, they let the bandillero know, stormily, that he was not popular. They were red and steamy with anger, taut with contempt; and this whole-blooded concentration on the arena made them impatient when the slow, watchful progress of the four men threatened to interrupt their view as the searchers efficiently quartered the banked seats.

  But it wasn’t until that first fight of the series was nearing the Moment of Truth that two of the men, on closing paths after skirting the whole of the Sol, began to draw the net on Shaw. The excitement of the crowd was tremendous now. The bandilleros’ darts were sticking out from the bull’s neck like a ruff which trailed in bloody drips to the ground, a ruff of agony which pulled horribly at the torn flesh; and the animal’s head was down and ready. Just in the dead centre of the neck-muscles at the back, between the bone and the gristle and the sinew, the matador’s sword would slice soon and show its point through the bull’s chest. The matador, a young, saturnine man with his hair bunched blackly in the nape of his neck under the rakish tricorne hat, with his flamboyant jacket and the trousers tight to the knee, stood poised lightly on his toes, holding the red cape. He stood in the centre of the ring, waving the cape provocatively, making passes at the bull, standing neatly aside as the animal blundered at him in its pain, its blinding, bloodied agony. The band started up again now; the drama was intense—was in fact at its intensest, approaching the climax. The atmosphere was vital, almost supercharged, every one living this moment and every eye in the place—every eye save those very few who had something even more important to think about—was on that bloody scene, when Shaw decided it was time to go. He could slip away now, while the crowd’s attention came up to its peak, before a chase, a human fight, became of any interest to the watching thousands and made them interfere.

  But first there was Karina.

  Shaw touched Debonnair on the shoulder. “Right,” he said, almost having to shout into her ear. “This is it.”

  She nodded, got up. Her face was white beneath the sun. They each took one of Mr Ackroyd’s arms and moved up the gangway towards the exit half-way along the stepped slope. No one took any notice of them—no one except the two men, who’d spotted them and were coming for them now. These two men edged along beside the ring at the bottom of the banked rows, collecting curses and dirty looks as they stepped on toes and sprawled over picnic-baskets and bottles of vino. Making rudely for the gangway intersection, they were blocking the good view of the over-excited spectators at the worst possible moment—as Shaw had intended.

  Shaw went quickly past the exit, ran up on to the back row of seats where it was wider and he could pass behind the bodies, and, followed by Debonnair and Ackroyd, crouching low so as not to make too good a target—though the men were unlikely to open fire from the ringside, really —slipped down the next gangway but one. He went down towards Karina’s seat. She had watched him come, her face full of hate, but calm and icy cool as she waited for those men to get him. Shaw sat down beside her, pressed his revolver into her ribs through the cover of his pocket, hard.

  He said, “That piece of metal, Karina. You know what I mean. And no scenes or I’ll shoot.”

  Karina didn’t move. Shaw sweated blood in those next few moments, while the men below struggled past the furious patrons who were now openly doing all they could to hinder them, to give them such kicks as they deserved for behaving in this fashion. The men were hot, dishevelled, staggering about. . . . Karina sat still, disdainful, and suddenly, as the band started up again and a great gasp rose from the crowd, rose and spread, Shaw knew it was now or never—the Kill was imminent, the matador’s sword was ready behind the red cape. Soon, so very soon now, the first fight would be over, the carcase dragged away, the men raking over the blood and sand. The crowd’s attention would wander until the next fight started, the pursuing men would be allowed on their way. Shaw rammed his gun into Karina’s side harder, until he felt the gasp of her breath on his cheek, and he put his left arm round her as though helping her to her feet, and he dragged her bodily up from the seat. As he lifted her out into the gangway, holding her fast, Debonnair went round to her other side. Karina screamed, fought, was unseen, unheard in the din. No one in all that vast, intent mass paid the slightest heed, the band and the swelling Olés from the crowd drowning Karina’s cry.

  It was no distance to the exit. As Shaw and the little party plunged down into the cavern-like mouth and ran down the steps the crowd’s increased, stupendous roar, a deluge of sound, told them that the kill had been made. And then they were out into the open.

  As they dashed out the hysterical aficionados, now that the fight was over, let the two gunmen past. They went fast for the exit, they and now the other pair of the four, drawing their guns as they ran, silently, and then they too came out into the open.

  There was no hope now of getting aboard the Algeciras-Gibraltar ferry.

  Shaw had tried five cars before he found one that was unlocked, rushing in desperation from one to the other; and by this time all four of the men were running out. Shaw’s gun came up, and he fired at them as he twisted behind the steering-wheel of the unlocked car. He saw one double up, and then, even before the car doors had slammed, he was on the move, steering between the lines of parked cars and the market-stalls. As he went he heard and felt the thud of bullets hitting the side of the car, and then a low exclamation of pain from Karina. Then he had the car—it was an elderly Citroen, big and heavy and old-fashioned, but he could feel its power potential—through into the clear, and he was getting all he could out of her as he shot into the San Roque road.

  Behind him Debonnair said breathlessly, “It’s okay, darling, I’ve got it!”

  She sounded triumphant, and he didn’t need to ask what she meant. And he thanked God in his heart; in the panic he’d quite lost sight of the possibility that Karina might not have had that missing part actually on her still—though come to think of it she’d probably consider that the safest and most sensible thing to do—but how wrong she’d been!

  He asked, “She all right—she was hit, wasn’t she?”

  “Uh-huh . . . but she’ll live!”

  In a cloud of dust he saw the bonnet of a car behind, looming into his mirror. Then two flashes came from the dust-cloud and the handle of his driving door zipped away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Shaw felt that he was on the last lap now, and he meant t
o make it; his one real, gnawing anxiety was whether or not he’d make it in time, though it was only some twelve miles into Gibraltar by road. He knew well enough what the shipping in Algeciras Bay meant, and all the time he drove that dreadful rhythm was thumping away inside his head. And, as though in sympathy with his thoughts, little Ackroyd alongside him in the front seat began again:

  “Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . ."

  “Shut up!” Shaw’s long chin jutted.

  Ackroyd looked at him, hurt. “Eh, lad, ah was only—”

  Shaw said, between his teeth, “I don’t give a damn what you were only. Just shut up, like a good chap, will you?”

  There was something in Shaw’s tone that penetrated what still functioned of Ackroyd’s mind, and he subsided into indignant mutterings. Bloody hell, thought Shaw in anguish, is Gibraltar depending on this poor little bloke?

  His mouth set in a thin, tight line which brought his chin up, Shaw drove fast, his foot hard down for most of the way, trying to concentrate his whole mind on the job of sending that Citroen for the frontier; his eyes glared redly ahead through the insect-spattered windscreen. He was away from Algeciras in a flash, headed for the Palmones river. He screamed across the bridge, hurtling along the white ribbon of road that tore away beneath his wheels, shaking up his passengers as he took the bends fast, the vehicles in the opposite traffic lane coming up to him like so many scurrying beetles, then sweeping past him with a momentary whoosh of wind and dropping back into the distance behind.

  The countryside sped past, ever-changing—mountains, purple as the sun went down gloriously to set, glimpses of the darkening seas beyond the valleys, fields of corn and forests of cork-oak and the eucalyptus-trees between the Palmones and Guadacorte rivers . . . but, most of all, the great Rock of Gibraltar itself stood out, immense and strong and towering to the eastward for much of the way. In that brilliant sunset the whole Rock glowed a fiery red, the windows of its buildings reflecting back the light in huge pools of spreading flame, just as though the very rock was on fire—was it an omen, that burning redness which enveloped Gibraltar, an omen of the horror to come, a sign?