by Wilbur Smith
The spectators gasped and rose to their feet as one, and in the centre the American froze with the empty shotgun still mounted to his shoulder. He was allowed only two cartridges. If he reloaded now and killed the bird with a third shot, he would be instantly disqualified and would forfeit the prize money.
The pigeon reached the barricade and leapt weakly at it. It struck the wood with its chest only an inch from the top and fell back, leaving a splash of brilliant ruby blood on the white paint.
Half the spectators screamed, ‘Die!’ while those who had bet against the American screamed: ‘Go! Go for it, bird!’
The pigeon gathered itself groggily, and leapt once more at the barrier. This time, it reached the top and balanced there uncertainly, swaying back and forth.
Isabella was on her feet howling wildly with the others. ‘Jump!’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t – oh, please don’t die, pigeon! Get over, please!’
Suddenly the dying bird stiffened into a convulsive rigor, its neck arched backwards and it flopped from the wall and lay still and dead on the green lawn.
‘Thank you!’ Isabella breathed, and dropped back into the seat.
The pigeon had fallen forward and died outside the circle, and the loudspeakers above their heads boomed out the verdict in the Spanish phrases that Isabella had come to understand so well in the past two days.
‘One kill. One miss.’
‘My heart won’t stand the strain.’ Isabella clutched her bosom in a theatrical gesture, and Ramón smiled at her with those cool green eyes.
‘Look at you!’ she cried. ‘The original ice man. Don’t you even feel a thing?’
‘Not outside your bed,’ he murmured, and before she could find a suitable reply the loudspeakers interrupted her.
‘Next gun up! Number one hundred and ten!’
Ramón stood up, and while he adjusted the protectors over his ears his expression was still cold and remote. He had taught Isabella not to wish him luck, so she said nothing more as he moved to the long rack at the gate on which his was the only weapon still standing. He took it down, and broke it open and placed it over the crook of his arm and walked out into the bright Iberian sunshine.
To Isabella he looked so beautiful and romantic. The sunlight sparkled in his hair, and the sleeveless shooting-vest with suede leather shoulder-patches was tailored to his lean torso, fitting so smoothly that the butt of the shotgun could not catch on a fold or tuck of cloth as he swung it up to mount.
At the plate, he loaded the ‘under and over’ barrels of the Perazzi 12-gauge and snapped the breeches closed. Only then he glanced back over his shoulder at Isabella as he had done every time he had shot over the past two days. She had anticipated it, and now she held up both hands, clutching her own thumbs hard, and showed him her clenched fists.
Ramón turned back, and his whole body went still. Once again he reminded her of an African cat, that peculiar stillness of the wild leopard as it fixed on its prey. He did not crouch as the American had done, but stood tall and lean and graceful, and said softly, ‘Pull!’
Both birds bounded from the open baskets on wildly clattering wings, and Ramón mounted the gun with such elegant economy of movement that he seemed casual and unhurried.
When he had been in Mexico with his cousin Fidel Castro he had provided much of the funds of the embryo army of liberation’s war-chest with his shotgun in the live pigeon rings of Guadalajara. So he also was a professional with the marvellous eye and reflexes needed for the job.
The first bird was going obliquely out, speeding on shining green wings for the wall, and he had to drop that one first. He took it cleanly with a charge of number six shot from the fully choked bottom barrel, and it exploded in a puff of feathers like a burst pillow.
He turned for the other bird, pirouetting like a dancer. This pigeon was a veteran; it had been shot at a dozen times before, and it kept low at basket-level. The handler had plucked its tail unevenly, and although it was going at sixty miles an hour it slid to one side and wobbled in flight.
Instead of going for the wall, it came straight at Ramón’s head, reducing the range to less than ten feet and, in doing so, making the shot many times more difficult. As it flashed towards his eyes, he had only a hundredth part of a second to react, and the extreme shortness of range would not give the charge of shot an opportunity to spread. It was as though he were firing a single ball, and an error of a mere fraction of a minute of angle would mean a miss.
He hit the pigeon squarely in the head with the full charge at point-blank range, and the bird disintegrated. Its body was blown away in a flurry of bloodied feathers, and only the two separate wings remained intact. They spiralled down and fell at Ramón’s feet.
Isabella screamed wildly and came to her feet; then, with a single bound, she vaulted the barrier. Although the range-master called sternly to her in unintelligible Spanish, she flouted range discipline and ran out on long denim-clad legs to throw her arms around Ramón’s neck.
The crowd was already excited and volatile from the tensions of the contest. Now they laughed and applauded as Ramón and Isabella embraced in the centre of the stadium. They made a splendid couple, almost impossibly handsome, both tall and athletic, shining with health and youthful vigour, and that spontaneous display of affection touched a chord in those that watched them.
They drove into the city in the Mercedes that Isabella had hired at the airport. Ramón opened an account at the Banco de España in the main square and deposited the winner’s cheque into it.
In a strange fashion, they shared a common attitude to money. Isabella seemed never even to consider price or value. Ramón had noticed that if a frock or a trinket took her fancy she never even bothered to ask the price. She merely flipped one of her vast collection of plastic credit cards on to the counter, then signed the slip and crumpled her copy into her handbag without as much as glancing at it. When she emptied her handbag in the hotel room, she screwed the accumulated receipts into a ball and, still without reading them, tossed them disdainfully into the waste basket or dropped them into the nearest ashtray for the chambermaid to dispose of.
As a convenience, she also carried a fist-sized wad of banknotes, crammed into her large leather shoulder-bag. However, it was obvious that she had not concerned herself with the rate of exchange of sterling into Spanish pesetas. To pay for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, she selected a banknote whose size and colour she deemed appropriate to the occasion and dropped it on to the table, often leaving a waiter staring after her in speechless astonishment.
Ramón had a similar contempt for money. At one level he abhorred it as the symbol and the foundation of the capitalist system. He hated to be dictated to by the laws of economics and wealth which he had dedicated his entire life to tearing down. He felt besmirched and demeaned when he had to wheedle and haggle with Moscow for the cash with which to perform his duties. Yet very early on in his career he had become aware of the particular approbation that he earned from his superiors when he personally provided funds to finance his own operations.
In Mexico he had shot live pigeon. While he was at the University of Florida he had imported drugs from South America and sold them on campus. In France he had run weapons for the Algerians. In Italy he had smuggled currency and had arranged and executed four lucrative kidnappings. All the profits of these operations had meticulously been accounted for to Havana and Moscow. Their approval was reflected in the rapid promotion he had enjoyed, and the fact that a man of his age had been selected to replace General Cicero as head of a full section of the fourth directorate.
It had been quite obvious to Ramón from the outset that the paltry operating expenses that General Cicero had allocated for the Red Rose project were totally inadequate. He had been obliged to make up the shortfall as expeditiously as possible, and of course this little jaunt to Spain also provided an ideal opportunity to begin the second phase of the operation.
That evening, to celebrate Ramón’s win, the
y dined at a tiny seafood restaurant, jealously concealed from the tourist hordes in one of the back alleys where Isabella was the only foreigner amongst the dinner-guests. The meal was an exquisite paella cooked in the classical tradition and accompanied by a wine from one of the estates that had once belonged to Ramón’s family, and whose tiny production was never sold outside Spain. It was crisp and perfumed, and had a pale green luminosity in the candlelight.
‘What happened to your family estates?’ Isabella asked, after she had tasted and exclaimed over the wine.
‘My father lost them all after Franco came to power.’ Ramón lowered his voice as he said it. ‘He was an antifascist from the very beginning.’
And Isabella nodded with approval and understanding. Her own father had fought against the fascists, and she subscribed to the comfortable and fashionable belief of her generation in the essential goodness of all mankind and the fervent if rather hazy ideal of universal peace of which she was aware that fascism was the antithesis. She carried a ‘Ban the Bomb’ button in her handbag, although it would have been crassly non-U to wear it actually pinned on her clothing.
‘Tell me about your father and your family,’ she invited him. She realized that, although she had been with him almost a week, she actually knew very little about him, apart from what the Spanish chargé had told her over the dinner-table.
She listened with fascination as Ramón recounted a little of the family history. One of his ancestors had received the title after he had sailed with Columbus to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492, and Isabella was vastly impressed by the antiquity of his lineage.
‘We go back as far as Great-Grandfather Sean Courtney,’ she deprecated her own ancestry. ‘And he died sometime in the nineteen twenties.’ As she said it, she realized for the first time that if Ramón was the father, then her own son might one day be able to boast of such distinguished blood-lines. Until that moment, she had been content simply to be with Ramón, but now, as she leant close to him and watched his eyes in the candlelight, the horizons of her ambitions widened. She wanted him as she had never wanted anything in her life before.
‘And so you see, Bella, despite all of this, I am not a rich man.’
‘Oh, yes you are. I saw you pay over two hundred thousand dollars into your bank this afternoon,’ she told him gaily. ‘You can afford to buy me another bottle of wine, at the very least.’
‘If you didn’t have to fly back to London tomorrow morning, I would have used some of that money to take you up to Granada. I could have accompanied you to the bullfight, and shown you my family castle in the Sierra Nevada . . .’
‘But you have to go back to London as well,’ she protested, ‘don’t you?’
‘A few days – I could have managed a few days. Any sacrifice to be with you.’
‘You know, Ramón, I don’t even know what you do. How do you earn your crust?’
‘Merchant banking,’ he shrugged dismissively. ‘I work for a private bank and I am responsible for African affairs. We arrange loans for developing companies in central and southern Africa.’
By now Isabella’s mind was accelerating up to racing speed. Ramón’s lack of fortune was fully compensated for by his august origins, and he was a banker. There would certainly be a place for a merchant banker in the top ranks of Courtney Enterprises. It was all beginning to look marvellously exciting.
‘I would like more than anything in this world to see your castle, Ramón darling,’ she whispered huskily, and she thought: I wonder how much a castle would cost, and if I could talk Garry into it. Her brother Garry was the chairman and financial head of Courtney Enterprises. He was no more proof to Isabella’s charms and wiles than any of the other male members of the family. Like most of the family, he was also a terrible snob. A marquesa needed a castle – he might just fall for it.
‘What about your father?’ Ramón asked. ‘I thought that you promised you’d be back on Monday.’
‘You leave my father to me,’ she said firmly.
‘Bella, this is the most ridiculous hour to wake an old man,’ Shasa protested as he answered her telephone call. ‘What time is it, in the name of all that’s holy?’
‘It’s after six, and we have already been for a swim, and you are not old. You are young and beautiful, the most beautiful man I know,’ Isabella cooed over the international line.
‘This sounds ominous,’ Shasa murmured. ‘The more extravagant the compliment, the more outrageous the request. What do you want, young lady? What are you up to now?’
‘You really are an awful old cynic, Pater,’ said Isabella, and traced patterns in Ramón’s chest hair with her forefinger. He sprawled naked beside her on the double bed; his body was still sticky, damp and salty from their dip in the Mediterranean. ‘I just rang you to tell you how much I love you.’
Shasa chuckled. ‘What a dutiful little mouse. I certainly trained you well.’ He lay back on the pillows and slipped his free arm around the shoulders of the woman who lay beside him. She sighed sleepily and wriggled closer to him, nuzzling against his chest.
‘How is Harriet?’ Shasa asked. Harriet Beauchamp had agreed to provide cover for Isabella’s expedition to Spain.
‘She’s fine,’ Isabella assured him. ‘She’s right here now. We have been having a wonderful time.’
‘Give her my love,’ Shasa ordered.
‘Oh, I will,’ she agreed and, covering the mouthpiece, she leant over and kissed Ramón full on the lips. ‘She sends her love back to you, Papa, but she refuses to catch the London plane this morning.’
‘Ah!’ said Shasa. ‘Now we come to the true reason for all this filial consideration.’
‘It’s not me, Daddy, it’s Harriet. She wants to go up to Granada. There is a bullfight. She wants me to go with her.’ Isabella let her voice trail into silence.
‘You and I are flying to Paris on Wednesday. Had you forgotten that? I am addressing the Club Dimanche.’
‘Daddy, you speak so well; the French ladies adore you. I’m sure you don’t really need me.’
Shasa did not reply. He knew that silence was the one sure way in which he could disconcert his wayward daughter. He covered the mouthpiece and asked the woman cuddled against him: ‘Kitty, can you come to Paris on Wednesday?’
She opened her eyes. ‘You know I am leaving for the OAU conference in Ethiopia on Saturday.’
‘I’ll have you back by then.’
She raised herself on one elbow and looked down at him thoughtfully. ‘Get thou behind me, Satan.’
‘Daddy, are you still there?’ Isabella’s voice floated between them.
‘So my own flesh and blood are determined to desert me, are they?’ Shasa asked in his most injured tones. ‘All by myself in the least romantic city in the world?’
‘I can’t let Harriet down,’ Isabella explained. ‘I’ll make it up to you, I promise.’
‘You’d better, young lady,’ Shasa warned her. ‘I shall remind you of your indebtedness at a future date.’
‘Granada will probably be deadly dull – and I’ll miss you awfully, dear Papa,’ said Isabella contritely, and traced her forefinger down Ramón’s body, past his navel and into the thick bush of hair below it; she twirled a dark curl around her fingertip.
‘And I will be desolated without you, Bella,’ Shasa agreed, and dropped the handset of the telephone on to its cradle and pushed Kitty back gently on to the pillows.
‘I said get thou behind me, Satan,’ she protested huskily. ‘Not get thou on top of me.’
Isabella drove as fast and as well as any man he had known. Ramón lay back in the leather bucket seat of the hired Mercedes and studied her openly. She basked in his attention and every few minutes, when a straight section of road allowed it, she glanced sideways at him or reached across to touch his hand or his thigh.
Unlike many of the assignments that he had been given over the years, Ramón did not find it difficult to act out his part with this woman. He sensed a strength in
her, an untapped reservoir of courage and determination that intrigued him.
He recognized that she was as yet unfulfilled and restless, dissatisfied with and rebellious against her easy undemanding existence, ripe for excitement and challenge, searching for something, some cause to which to dedicate herself.
Physically she was immensely attractive, and he had no difficulty faking that tender concern towards her that was the hallmark of the accomplished lover. When he looked at her like this, it was a deliberate device. He knew the appeal of his gaze, that cold green contemplation like the stare of the serpent that mesmerizes a wild bird, and yet he enjoyed looking at her as at an exquisite work of art. Although he knew from her file that she had been with other men, he had learnt in these last few days that the core of her being was still untouched and there was a strange virginal quality about her that aroused him.
As with so many legendary male lovers, Ramón experienced that condition known as satyriasis. The name derived from those woodland godlings of Roman mythology which were half-man and half-goat and whose sexual appetite was insatiable. Although Ramón Machado was quite abnormally responsive to any woman, whether she was attractive to him or otherwise, yet it was unusual for him to be able to achieve orgasm. He was in most cases simply indefatigable, able to outlast a partner with even the most tardy libido and to drive a normal woman on and on until she at last screamed for mercy. Then he was able to continue at the very first indication that she wished to do so, and he was so sensitively attuned to feminine sexuality that he would usually recognize that indication before she did herself.
However, this woman was one of those rare creatures who was able to bring him on without too much difficulty. With her he had already achieved true orgasm a number of times and he knew he would again. It was, of course, essential to his plans that he did so.