Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  The man in the dirty trousers raised his arm and pointed. “The woman’s in that room with the grey curtains. Where that chink of light’s coming out—you see? There’s a cop on guard at the door. And there’s two more playing cards there in the front. The other one’s at the front door.”

  “Yes. I can see him. And the plain-clothes boys?’5

  “Most of the time they’re in with her. But they keep moving about.”

  “They would,” said the man with the moustache. “Okay. Hop it.”

  The other man turned and disappeared into the shadows. And the man with the moustache nodded to Mariano; who went forward over the dry grass. He moved fast, not bothering to crouch, but quietly and with caution. He reached the window at the back, the window next to the room with the grey curtains; laid the pistol on the sill. His hands worked stiffly with sticky tape, a glass-cutter: the window-catch came open, then the window itself. He braced himself for a moment, then vaulted up and into the dark gap.

  The two elder men were now moving forward, too; towards the room where the two guards sat playing siete-y-media. Looking back through the window, Mariano saw them as fleeting dark figures coming up to spreadeagle themselves by the greyish-white walls of the farmhouse: this was to be too easy, he thought, a piece of cake. The cops hadn’t any reason to expect this kind of attack. They’d be sitting at the table, close together, so that the grenades could go in at the same angle—one a shade shorter than the other, though, in case the table held too much of the blast. That, at least, was how he would have done it. . . .

  Ah, but tonight he had his own job to do. And it was time to get on with it. He turned and moved away from the window, eyes wide-open like a cat’s in the near-darkness, walking across the empty room towards the corridor. . . .

  VALERA was actually walking down the corridor when he heard the angry blast of the grenades, the sudden jitter of the Sten gun. The echoes were still ringing in his ears as he kicked the door open and stepped into the guard-room; the air was full of dust, of flakes of plaster, the acrid after-tinge of high explosive. He jumped to his right without glancing towards the two crumpled figures by the shattered table, moving with surprising speed for a man of his bulk; the man at the window with a grenade in his hand swayed to follow the movement, and Valera shot him through the neck. His fingers clawed for a second at the sill, then he disappeared; a long two seconds later, the grenade exploded; the solid wall seemed to heave and the remnants of glass in the window dissolved into a hail of splinters. Valera dived for the front door and out into the courtyard, almost tripping over the body of the guard; one of the two men by the window was crawling towards him with infinite effort, his smashed legs dragging uselessly behind him; he tried to raise the Sten to his shoulder, and Valera shot him through the head. The other had received the full impact of the grenade and lay like a heap of old clothes; Valera stared at him for a second, then stepped back into the house. He was angry, more than angry; he was filled with unreasoning Spanish fury. “Manolo!” he bawled at the top of his voice, striding towards the corridor. “What the hell are you waiting for? They got Carlos, God damn it, they got the other two as well, they’re starting a bloody war by the look of it. Get Fedora and the girl out of there—”

  He stopped, staring down the passage. Manolo the Civil Guard lay on the red brick tiles at the far end, clutching his belly; blood trickled wetly through his fingers. Valera swore, raced down the passage towards the door that lay behind Manolo’s shiny upturned boots; knowing, as he ran, that he was almost certainly too late. . . .

  . . . Because the door was open. . . .

  MARIANO—one death the more to his credit—stood balanced on the balls of his feet just inside the room; the woman with the notebook in her hand was screaming, so he shot her. It was a reflex action, hardly a conscious one. He watched as the heavy bullet spun her sideways out of the chair to land in a heap by the wall, and his upper lip wrinkled back over his teeth—another reflex action, a sort of a smile, perhaps. The other two people in the room sat very still and did not move. There was a man in a biscuit-coloured cotton suit, thin-faced, blue-eyed; there was a girl in a blue bathing-wrap; the girl was the one he had come to kill and therefore should be the first. He turned the pistol casually in her direction, pressed the trigger; as he did so the tall man jerked out his leg and kicked the chair from under her, sprawling her to the floor in a sudden chaos of swirling cloth and long suntanned thighs. The bullet kicked plaster from the wall directly behind her; Mariano grimaced and stepped to one side, levelling the pistol for a second shot; and Valera came through the door full tilt and crashed straight into him.

  The pistol scuttered over the floor as they went down together, Mariano underneath, and while he fell the knife was curving from his fingertips into his palm. His shoulders were tensing even as they struck the floor, driving the blade upwards; he felt the agonised outrush of Valera’s breath on his face, the jerk of contracting muscles around the steel; then he was rolling clear of the weight of the other’s body, the knife free again in his hand, was rolling clear and bouncing to his feet. The tall man was also on his feet now, watching him closely, his eyes pale blue, seemingly amused; Mariano’s hand swivelled back to flick the knife delicately into his throat; and then something smashed like a ton of ice into the small of his back, breaking his spine like a twig, bowling him to the floor. In the second before he died—a second of pretematurally sharp vision in which a whole lost world of movement and colour unfolded like a flower and vanished— he saw the girl kneeling in the corner with his pistol in her hand, saw the brown eyes wide open behind the barrel and then the cold pale blossom of flame opening out against the brightness of her hair. This time the bullet took him squarely between the eyes; he hardly even felt it.

  VERY nice,” said Johnny, “but not strictly necessary. The first would have been enough.”

  He transferred his attention for a moment to Valera’s recumbent body; his face became thoughtful, withdrawn. “So he got Valera, did he? Some people are going to be cross about that.”

  “He wanted some action, didn’t he?”

  “Well, action was what he got. And rather more than he’d bargained for, by the look of things.” Johnny moved absently forward, stopped as the pistol in Elsa’s hand swung round to come into line with his navel. “Well, what happens now?”

  “What happens now is that you keep still. I’m getting out of here.”

  “Going just where?”

  “Never mind. Take your gun out and drop it on the floor. Move slowly.”

  Johnny sighed. “I haven’t got a gun,” he said. He knelt down, began to prise the pistol loose from Valera’s clenched fingers. “Before we do anything else, we’d better make sure that the war’s over, don’t you think? Come on.”

  He went out and down the corridor. Elsa hesitated for a moment, then followed him. They paused inside the guardroom, staring at the desolation of smashed furniture, at the two twisted corpses; then Fedora moved quickly to the front door, peered cautiously out from behind the lintel. He came back dangling the pistol by the trigger-guard, his shoulders sagging slightly. “It looks as though it’s all over,” he said. “Just about a clean sweep. I must say I hadn’t expected anything quite so thorough.”

  “How many of them?”

  “There’s two out there. Both dead. That’s what you’d suppose—two to create the diversion, one to do the job. The classic method, in fact. Nearly came off. I wouldn’t have wanted it any closer.” He took her by the arm, led her through to the room where he and Valera once, a long time ago, had conversed. Even there, plaster had fallen from the ceiling and the smell of cordite hung in the air. “He was pretty fast with that knife of his. I really thought I’d had it. Lucky you pressed the button when you did.”

  She sat down in the armchair that still bore the imprint of Valera’s bulky body and began to tremble. Fedora took down the bottle of Sobcrano from the sideboard, began to fill two glasses; looking, as he did so, out of the
window. The hills and the rocks were there, grey in the starlight; the silence seemed so deep now as to have an actual weight, to be physically tangible. Invisible to the south was the sea, somewhere in the distance beyond the darkness; out there the Polarlys would be moving, and Moreno aboard her. “Here you are,” he said, handing her one of the glasses. “Nothing to worry about. Just reaction. I’ve got a touch of the jitters myself, if it comes to that. That’s why I’m talking too much.” She drank the cognac, put the glass down on the table. Fedora sat down opposite her, “Had you ever seen him before?”

  “Who?”

  “Chummy.”

  “No. No, never.”

  “It was you he was after.”

  “I know.”

  “. . . Scared?”

  She shrugged. “In a way. It gives one a . . . a goat-and-a-tiger sort of feeling.”

  “Not much of a tiger, really,” said Johnny. “At least, I expect they were the top of the tree in their own line, but it wasn’t much of a tree to start with. Tough boys from Africa, that’d be my guess.”

  “I still have to get back,” she said.

  “Get back where?”

  “To the yacht.”

  “The yacht’s already sailed. Early this evening.”

  He watched her digesting this new information in apparent calm; she didn’t seem to be particularly surprised. “I see. They have left me high and dry.”

  “Yes. Thrown to the wolves. It’s an old Russian custom.”

  “But I’m still alive.”

  “By a fluke.”

  “I want to stay that way,” she said with sudden passion. “I like being alive. I don’t want to die. Not now. Not ever.” Fedora finished his cognac; he, too, put down his glass on the table, let his hand rest there, tremorless, immobile. “When did it happen?” he asked. A muscle jumped high up in his cheek.

  “What?”

  “Well. . . . This. To us.”

  She lifted her head to stare at him; and whatever it was she had intended to say changed into a peculiar noise halfway between a growl and a sigh. Fedora felt the vibration of it pulsing against his mouth as it pressed into the softness of her throat; while under his tensed hand a pulse hammered quietly, a steady rhythmic beat under her warm skin, urgent on the ball of his thumb. His eyes were closed, yet he was aware of colour, of a dark and flowing redness enveloping him; he could feel it, a dull flesh-textured crimson, the warm colour of blood and of Elsa’s lips. I can touch it, he thought, out of the depths of his tiredness; touching things, that’s how we know they’re real. Sexual pleasure and physical pain, the vast lost kingdoms of the body; touching things, that’s how we know we’re alive. Elsa’s real; Elsa is alive. That other girl, the girl in the pool, that other warm infinity of slippery redness, that’s nothing but a nightmare. That’s Moreno’s kind of reality. This is mine.

  “. . . In the stars, I suppose,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Romeo and Juliet. You know. Starcrossed lovers.” Johnny withdrew a little, looked down at her surprisedly. She sat very still in the armchair; her eyes were still closed, the shadows of the lashes long on her cheeks. “What are you talking about?”

  “No se. Tienes razon. ?Que vamos a hacer?”

  “?Que quieres que hagamos?”

  “La cosa logica es hacer el amor ”

  “Caramba. ?Ahora?”

  “Si, ahora. Y despues descansaremos. ?Te parece?” He felt the touch of her hand at the nape of his neck. “Anda. Llevame en brazos.”

  “You’re crazy as a coot,” said Fedora.

  He slipped an arm under her thighs and lifted her from the chair. She was heavier than he had expected, but far from unmanageable. He carried her through to the side room, where his travelling-case stood in the comer at the foot of the camp bed; it was almost dark there, but the curtains had not as yet been drawn and starlight filtered palely through the window. He pushed the door to with his foot and held her close against him, his hands tangled in the vague black cloud of her hair; her tongue felt taut and hard inside his mouth, her nails dug fiercely into the skin beneath his shoulder-blades. This kiss was as real as the other had been, but far more immediate. His hands, moving down her body, touched her arms; his own shoulders seemed to jerk in protest. “Damn,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “We’d better do something about it, all the same.”

  He went back through the guardroom; walked over to the rack where the Civil Guards’ emergency packs were stored. He opened one and, after a few moments’ rummaging, unearthed a regulation First Aid box; then went back to the bedroom, switched on the light. Elsa lay now on the bed, face downwards, the bathrobe on the floor beside her and her hair spread out over the pillow. Fedora sat down, took a tube of petroleum jelly from the tin and began to doctor the red burn-rashes on her arms, her shoulders, her feet. He worked slowly and carefully, coaxing an unusual gentleness into his strong brown pianist’s fingers. “Your feet ought to be bandaged,” he said in the end. “I haven’t got one.”

  Elsa turned over, resting her weight on her left elbow. “I don’t want one. It isn’t necessary.”

  “I could tear up a shirt.”

  “All right.” Her hand reached up to his collar, jerked it open. ‘Tear up this one.”

  Fedora sighed. “You’ve got a one-track mind,” he said.

  He crossed the room once more to turn off the light. He undressed by the window, feeling the cool night air of the sierra on his arms and chest; it was a long time since the simple awareness of being alive had given him so complete and undiluted a pleasure. And Elsa, after all, was right; this was the only possible way to celebrate. He took Valera’s pistol from his pocket and laid it on the table beside the empty glasses, and he thought for a moment of Valera as he walked towards the bed. Pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure; like a medal with two sides and an indecipherable inscription. It didn’t make sense, none of it. Reason had no part to play at all. Valera was dead and they were alive, and the two facts were quite unconnected. And so there wasn’t a problem. No problem at all.

  Elsa lay stretched out on the turned-back sheets, relaxed, abandoned as though to the sea or to death itself; like a drowned body, Ophelia or Leander, lost in voluptuousness. He knelt down beside her, and under the hardness of his mouth her body became alive, hot, hungry, passionate; he heard the breath rasping in her throat, the same intense, half-animal sound he had heard before, and her hands reached up for him, drew him towards her. And the redness slowly turned to a throbbing blackness full of movement, a curtain that swayed with the surging of the dark tides deep within their bodies, irresistible yet impersonal as the force that brings alien planets into unwilling orbit. Outside, a night of stars. The insects that had been startled into silence were now back in force, and the courtyard was urgent with the soft broken chirping of the crickets. A night of small rustlings and of searchings. She sobbed, in an ecstasy of anguish, against his shoulder; and he held her close.

  IT took Fedora less than half-an-hour to go through Valera’s papers and the report that his secretary had left three-quarters typed; they were not especially revealing— Valera, after all, had not been a man to omit obvious precautions—but they gave Fedora adequate food for thought. He sat for another hour at the old deal table with the table-lamp angled over the thin cardboard folders, not reading but thinking, smoking Valera’s cigarettes; a little before midnight, he got up and went back to his room. Elsa was asleep; but she woke as he lay down beside her and turned over, feeling for his face with her right hand. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Looking at Valera’s papers.”

  “What’s the time?”

  “Just gone midnight.” He bit gently at the back of her thumb. “It’s a bad habit, you know.”

  “What is?”

  ‘To wake up asking questions.”

  “I expect you’re right. What did you want to see Valera’s papers for?”

  “To find out exactly
what he was doing.”

  “You mean you didn’t trust him?”

  “It never got as far as that. You don’t think he told me about it?”

  “Didn’t he?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what have you got to do with it, exactly?”

  “I told you.”

  “Yes, but officially? Are you Anglo-Spanish liaison, or what?”

  “Nothing of the kind. He arrested me, as well.”

  “What for?”

  “He didn’t believe it, either.”

  “Believe what?”

  “That I’m only in this thing by accident.”

  “And are you?”

  “That’s how it is.”

  Elsa groaned faintly. “These surrealistic conversations one gets into round about midnight. I suppose it all makes some kind of sense, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”

  “Yes,” said Johnny. “Sorry. Must be the effects of Valera’s prose style, which is kind of gnomic, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do. Others mightn’t. Did anything emerge?”

  “Oh yes. One thing’s quite clear. Moreno worked for the Russians in the last war as a double agent, handing on information he got from the Spaniards. And as his job in Spain was U-boat maintenance and supply, a lot of the information he got was very useful. Useful to us, though— the English—not to the Russians. So the Russians lent him to us for a spell. We were on the same side, then. Funny.”

  “The Russians and the English were. The Spaniards weren’t.”

  “They were neutral.”

  “Neutral, yes. They just supplied and serviced U-boats. That was all.”

  “And Moreno told us just where their assignation points were, so that an R.A.F. Sunderland could sort of happen by and drop a bomb on them. It worked out about even.”

  Elsa’s hand moved down to his shoulder, settled there as gently as a moth. He envied her delicacy of touch. “And you still don’t know what it was he wanted from the swimming-pool?”

  “I could make a good guess,” said Johnny. “The records of the sinkings. Their exact locations. The supply team’s logbooks, in fact. Logbooks are one of the few things that don’t spoil under water.”