Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  “. . . Give me a cigarette,” said Elsa.

  Johnny took cigarettes from the packet he had left on the table, struck a match. He watched her as she leaned forward to take the flame, her face rigid in the sharp red light, her drawn-up thighs emerging round and smooth from the dark shadows. “It was the last one of all,” she said. “It was sunk a few days before the war ended, and Heilman was on it. We only found that out six months ago.”

  Johnny lit his own cigarette, shook out the match. “Who was Heilman?”

  “He was the head of Moreno’s organisation. Chief of Nazi liaison in Madrid. Do you know who is the head of the Spanish secret police?”

  “No,” said Johnny, and smiled.

  “Nor do we. But Heilman did.” The cigarette glowed abruptly against her mouth, held in her loosely-clenched fingers. “He helped to organise it. He laid down the plans, he brought in all the people who’re now the top men, the heads of departments. And when that boat was sunk, he was running off to Argentina to form a private Gestapo for Peron—on Spanish lines. He had all the details of the Spanish C.E. systems with him—in a waterproof safe. They’ll still be there.” The cigarette-end stabbed downwards. . A long way under.”

  “But good God,” said Fedora. “Is that all?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That was fifteen years ago, for God’s sake.”

  “Nothing’s changed. Franco’s still in, and things don’t change much in Spain anyway. Besides—when you have something good, you hang on to it.”

  “You think the Spanish secret police are good?”

  “Better than ours, maybe. Don’t you think so?”

  “It all depends,” said Johnny cautiously, “on what you happen to want a secret police force for.”

  “All I know is that Head Office thinks those papers are important. We still have high hopes for Spain, you know; all the factors that caused the Civil War are still floating around . . . in suspended animation, you might say. . . . When Franco goes, that’s when the balloon’ll be sent up. If we knew just how to paralyse his police system and if we could get in first with our putsch, then the balance of things would swing our way. I don’t have to tell you that. You know it’s true.”

  “It’s been known to happen that way before, of course,” Johnny admitted. He was staring sightlessly now at the dark ceiling, his head beside Elsa’s on the hard pillow. “It’d be a slap in the eye for the Americans if you did pull it off. Yes, I can see it’d be worth a gamble.”

  “It’s a highly centralised system—that much we do know. It all rotates round one man in just the same way as the Cabinet revolves round Franco. The top man is the man who counts. He’s the one that Fer. . . . that all our people are after.”

  They smoked in silence for a while. In the end, Johnny leaned sideways to stub out his cigarette on the floor and said,

  “Whoever it is must want those papers too.”

  “Obviously. They’re dangerous. But why do you say that?”

  “Because Valera must have been playing the old cat-and-mouse game. They let Moreno escape in the first place; and then, even when they must have guessed Moreno was on the yacht, they didn’t try to arrest him. They arrested you instead, hoping to force your people into moving too quickly. They want Moreno to lead them to the papers, don’t you see? —that’s what they’ve wanted all along. Valera must have thought I was playing exactly the same game on behalf of British Intelligence. It all fits together all right, in a lunatic sort of a way.”

  “But you said the Polarlys had sailed already?”

  “So it has. They couldn’t take a chance on you not talking —that’s how Valera was twisting their arms. But then he didn’t expect this kind of a counter.” Johnny waved his arm vaguely in the darkness towards the guardroom and the corridor. “It’s like you said—in the secret police, things tend to revolve round one man. Now Valera’s dead, it may be a little while before they can pull all the threads together again. That’s what they’re planning on—Moreno and your other pal whose name begins with F. They won’t be wasting any time. Listen,” he said, and turned his head sideways on the pillow. “Do you know where they’re going?”

  “I was there when they marked up the chart, yes. I’ve got a rough idea.”

  “How far is it?”

  “About four hours.”

  “Four hours? They’ll be there already, then.”

  “I don’t suppose they’ll have gone straight there. They couldn’t dive until it’s light enough to see. And they can’t rely on finding the wreck straight off. Even when you have an accurate fix, these things take some looking for.”

  “He’s a good navigator, is he?”

  “Very good. His name is Feramontov.”

  “Feramontov?” said Johnny; and there was a long silence. “. . . Yes,” he said in the end. “I’ve heard of him.”

  “Yes. And he’s heard of you.”

  In the next room, the telephone screamed shrilly. Johnny felt Elsa’s body stiffen into rigidity at his side; they lay still for a moment, listening to the long high-pitched peals of the buzzer coming through the darkness. Then Fedora sat up.

  “I’d better answer it . . . I suppose. . .

  DEEP under the Rock of Gibraltar, neon lights burn perpetually. They illuminate twenty-one miles of tunnels; wide roads down which lorries and ammunition trucks rumble with a noise like that of a distant explosion of dynamite, narrow concrete-lined passages down which men in military uniform move silently, on crepe-rubber heels, carrying sheaves of typewritten papers or leather despatch-cases with gold-embossed crests. There are doors that slide open at a touch and there are doors that are kept locked and have no keyhole; at each turning are gaily-painted signs that bear bewildering sequences of initials and numbers, GPRO 71 and DOCinC, HQMVODI and CE 7, all beneath the broad bands of colour that form the only signposts in the nearest thing to a rabbit-warren that human ingenuity can yet have devised. Trout sat on a very comfortable chair directly beneath the neon light in a hutch of a room filled with filing cabinets; a room known to the General Indexing System as NI 12 Double Red—the Archives Section of Naval Intelligence, Gibraltar—and more briefly, to the inhabitants of the neighbouring hutches, as the Pardonable Error Shop. The native genius of the place, Commander Macfarlane, R.N., sat behind a high barricade of filing trays and mumbled, ostensibly to Trout but really to himself. His unintelligibility was largely due to the meerschaum pipe clenched in his excellent teeth: Vice-Admiral Crane was known to hold that pipe-smokers were solid men, and Macfarlane had a reputation for brilliance to live down. Eventually, and as Trout had known he would do, he removed the object, glanced at it with some distaste, and said, “Well, it looks like Feramontov.”

  “Wonderful,” said Trout, who was feeling somewhat tired. “Amazing, Holmes.”

  Macfarlane placed the pipe down on the desk, where it instantly went out. “Ever heard of him?”

  “It rings a bell.”

  “So it ought to. He’s one of the few people that the Russkies always seem to have around whenever they have a project afoot that . . . well, whenever the sky’s the limit. Not a very good metaphor, in view of the Sputniks. But that’s a case in point. When the Russians go for something, they throw in everything but the kitchen sink.”

  “And send for Feramontov, the Bulbul Emir.”

  “That’s about it. I’ll give you the most recent items on the record, to show you what I mean. 1946 to 1951 . . . in the United States, working in the A-bomb spy-ring. 1952 . . . Persia and Afghanistan, pepping up the Mussadeq mob. ’53 to ’55, in East Berlin. In ’56 he was in Egypt and in ’57 he was in Hungary. Since then he’s been reported in Moscow, in Berlin again, in China and last year in North Africa— Red Hand stuff in Algeria, more precisely. What you might call a bit of a trouble-shooter.”

  “Well, and now he’s in Spain. Which seems to be the point. If it is him, just what does he want with Moreno?”

  “What does he want with the Polarlys? is
really more the question. Deep-sea diving, that isn’t his usual line. I must say your theory seems to make some sense, as far as it goes, but if it’s one of Moreno’s U-boats he’s after . . . one asks oneself, what for?”

  “Quite so. And docs one get an answer?”

  “No. One doesn’t. We can probably get the positions all right—Archie Lane’s running through the archives now— but once we’ve got them, I don’t quite see what we can do about it.”

  “You could patrol them, couldn’t you?” said Trout, and yawned profoundly. “Until the Polarlys shows up. Then you’ll know which is the right one. And can act accordingly.”

  Macfarlane picked up his pipe again and gnawed at the end of it for a while. “We could send a corvette, all right. Not that I suppose old Reynolds’d be all that keen on shooting her off at a moment’s notice without a rather better excuse than the one we’ve got. As for the act-accordingly part . . . that’s not so easy, either. We can’t very well go in for this diving racket ourselves, and if—as is quite likely—the wreck’s in Spanish territorial waters, we won’t be able even to approach it. And there’s nothing they can do about the Polarlys, either, assuming they have sense enough to keep moving. We can’t board her at speed and we can’t shoot her up, that’d be piracy on the high seas. I mean, there’s some things you can’t expect even the Navy to do.”

  “Well, and what about Johnny?”

  “Fedora? Well, we’ll take legal advice on that point,” said Macfarlane cheerfully. “No doubt we can make some kind of representation to the Spanish authorities, though you’ll realise it can’t very well be done through us. Between you and me, I very much doubt if there’s an awful lot that you can do.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Trout glumly. “In fact, he’s had his chips. The poor old sausage.”

  “. . . Valera?” said the telephone, in a raspy voice. Fedora moved the receiver a little farther away from his ear.

  “No. The Captain’s asleep. He asked not to be disturbed, except in case of emergency.”

  “Yes, well, who’s speaking? Cremades?”

  “Yes, this is Cremades.”

  “Right. Lopez here. Speaking from Malaga. I’ve got the report here, you want me to dictate it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Polarlys last picked up by radar at 2340 hours, still headed south-east. Position then some twenty-two kilometres south-south-west of Fuengirola. Helicopter pilot reports visibility excellent, but there may be some sea mist rising in the early morning, thinning out to heat haze. There’s a message from Madrid reminding the captain to file his report before noon tomorrow, you want me to give it to you word for word?”

  “No, that’s all right. I’ll remind him.”

  “Good. Report ends there. What are the instructions? Are we to go on checking the ship, or what?”

  “No,” said Fedora. “That’s no longer necessary.”

  A pause.

  “The pilots are to stand off, then?”

  “That’s for you to say. Valera says to call the hunt off, that’s all I know. He probably knows where they’re heading for, anyway.”

  “The girl’s talked, has she?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t suppose the Captain would be sleeping, if she hadn’t.”

  “Hombre, lestupendo! Enhorabuena. You’ll be calling us later, then.”

  “Yes. Later.”

  “Bueno, Cremades. Muy buenas noches.”

  “Lo mismo digo,” said Fedora, and hung up. The palms of his hands were sweating lightly. He went back to the bedroom; “Elsa,” he said. “Hey, Elsa. . . .”

  Elsa didn’t move. She was asleep.

  THE coffin scraped into its niche in the high white wall. The bearers stepped back, crossing themselves a little nervously, and the plasterer came forward; began to slap the wet cement into place, to build up the thin double tabique that would wall the coffin off from the world of the living. The mourners watched in silence. When the plasterer had finished his task to his own satisfaction, he took a hammer and drove a hook into the wall above the niche; reached up to hang upon it two small wreaths of Marbella roses. Another man, dressed in black, stepped forward and traced initials with his finger in the wet plaster; C.F.S. for Carmen Figueroas Sanchez. Slowly, the watchers began to turn away. The funeral was over.

  There was time to walk back to the village before the sun rose high enough to become oppressive. The cheap funerals were always early. Only the fashionable ones took place in the evening. Fedora, who had meant to pay for a first-class funeral and hadn’t had time to make the offer, felt a little guilty about this. He wasn’t even wearing a black suit. He hadn’t been at all surprised that people had looked at him and whispered. He thought it very natural. He might, after all, have been the one that had done it. He was a stranger; that made him an obvious suspect. People stepped aside from him as he walked down the path between the high white walls studded with memorial plaques, under the Moorish arch with its wrought-iron gate.

  From the road outside the cemetery, he could see the village spread out to his right; church tower, cypress spire, fronds of palm; and behind the village, the sea. And on the sea, a pale white ship leaving a hairline of foam. It wasn’t the Polarlys, of course; but it might have been. It served as a reminder.

  Fedora leaned his back against the cemetery wall and lit a cigarette. Half past nine; already it was hot; here on the high ground the sea breezes scarcely had strength left to be felt against the cheek. The villagers walked past him, coming out through the iron gates in twos and threes; some of them looked at him curiously again, but others didn’t look at him at all. Eventually, three young men went by; two of them were talking animatedly to each other, while the third had his eyes on the ground and said nothing at all. Fedora threw his cigarette away and fell into step beside them. “Garcia,” he said. “Could I speak to you for a moment?”

  “Si, senor. Desde luego ”

  “You know who I am, I suppose?”

  The young man nodded, still without having looked up.

  “I want you to do something for me. You and your brothers. I need some help, and pretty urgently.”

  The young man walked on; the other two men were now also silent, silent and slightly hostile. Fedora didn’t find their attitude at all encouraging; he wondered what to say next. “It wasn’t me that did it, you know,” he said. “Maybe some people say so. Some people will say anything. And if you think I should have prevented it happening, well, perhaps I should. But they’re not much use, are they?—all these should- haves and might-have-beens. All I want to do now is find the man who killed her. That’s all. And like I say, you can help me. That’s if you want to.”

  Black toecaps, scuffling in the dust. “. . . Some people think I did it,” said Garcia. “The Civiles—they thought so, at first. Had me up before the Senor Juez. I didn’t do it, though, of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t do a thing like that, Dios lo sabe.”

  An oddly deep voice with a thick malagueho accent, blurred consonants and sibilants strangled at birth. And a muscle that twitched at the side of his mouth as he spoke. And eyes, liquid and deep and brown, turning at last in Johnny’s direction. “Just what did you want me to do to help?” he said.

  AN hour later that morning, Fedora walked down past the brightly-painted bungalows with their scraps of withered garden to the steps that led down to the beach; and from the steps he walked past the wooden beach-huts and the noisy open-air bars and the sprawled-out groups of sunbathing Spaniards towards the lighthouse. He walked through a world of cheerful, extrovert holidaymakers, and as he walked he felt again that sense of isolation, of being as far removed from all hope of genuine communication as a visitor from another planet or a dog. On the beach were well over a thousand people, come to Marbella from all parts of Spain and now engaged in doing nothing and in thinking nothing, in spending their vacations as vacantly as they possibly could; Fedora picked his way amongst them, looking at them and at the sea as though both we
re obvious natural phenomena, most manifestly there but, in another way, not. The sunbathers and the mourners, the beach and the cemetery. . . . They formed a background, that was all, to such events as those of the previous night, events of which they knew nothing and in no way participated; Fedora and Valera, Elsa and Feramontov, with their plans and putsches, their schemes, attacks and assassinations, shared at least their difference from those other people, shared another kind of reality. There they all were— taking the sun, dipping their feet, drinking beer, thinking nothing, doing nothing, just living; Fedora watched them, and the awareness of his own loneliness moved all the time inside him like a kind of fear. He walked on, and eventually found Elsa stretched out on the sand in front of the lighthouse; she wore a tight yellow bathing suit with the shoulder straps unfastened, lay face down on a big towel with green and yellow stripes, and she seemed to be asleep. Then, as he sat down beside her, she lifted her head and opened her eyes. “You’re late,” she said.

  “A little.”

  “I was afraid you might not come.”

  “I was afraid you mightn’t be here.”

  “I was feeling lonely.”

  “I know,” said Johnny. “So was I.”

  He lay back on the edge of the towel, and the weight of the sun pressed redly against his eyelids. Lisa looked at him and, after a moment, reached out to rub her forefinger along the line of his collarbone inside his shirt, from neck to shoulder curve and back again. Her touch was like a sculptor’s, Fedora thought, working in clay; a caress to her was a means of self-expression. “You bought the stuff?” he asked.

  “Yes. All we need. I had to spend all the money you gave me, though.”

  “Never mind,” said Fedora lazily. “We won’t need money where we’re going.”

  “That does sound despondent.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”