Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  ‘Don’t look, but they’re in that little turret,’ added Harry, studiously following the music now. Jaime and Armando made faces at each other, and shut up. The piece finished, and it was time for the players’ glasses to be refilled, for everyone’s glasses to be refilled. Harry stood. ‘Follow me,’ he said. And the three of them loped off in file as if heading to attend to their toilette. Once through the big French windows, they ran at a clip, through the ballroom, out and downstairs to the long stone corridor that ran inside the hotel’s wall. Harry got to the narrow spiral staircase that obviously led back up to the turret, and slowly began climbing, step by step. The other two were right behind him, the young Italian trying not to giggle. Harry was getting ready to declaim, ‘Aha!’

  But when he turned the final curve, the person he saw stopped him dead. The figure was pressed against the furthest curve of the turret, sitting on its flagstone floor, eyes staring wide at Harry’s head in the stairwell. He was a gangly youth, and the first thing Harry was confronted with were feet, without socks, one in a tennis shoe and the other in a loose sandal, the ankle tightly bound in a bandage. Bare, tanned legs disappeared into a pair of sports shorts, and into those was tucked a khaki shirt with a Luftwaffe pilot’s wings on the breast, and the rank insignia of a Leutnant. The boy looked barely out of his teens, like most of them. He had blond hair, cropped at the sides and floppy on top, and a smooth tanned face that wore an expression that Harry in his surprise didn’t quite read.

  Armando’s head pushed up now behind him, and when he saw the German, he started to shout, ‘What’s he doing here?’, immediately angry. Then, directly into the German’s face, ‘What are you doing here? Are you spying on us?’, all in Italian, which the German obviously didn’t understand. ‘So you can go and tell on us? So you can get the Gestapo to tell the OVRA because we drink with Tommies?’ And he tried to struggle past Harry, to reach out and lay a hand on the boy.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Harry. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘Let’s drag him out,’ said the Italian pilot. ‘Let’s parade our prisoner! Fucking spy! Show that bastard Arse Clencher we know what he’s up to! He wants our families arrested!’

  Harry shot his gaze back at the German, and instantly he read the expression he’d missed a moment before: the boy was terrified, but not of the Italian. And he didn’t appear to be frightened of Harry either. Harry shoved the Italian back, telling him in his own language, ‘Stop. Wait a minute. Just take it easy here.’ But he kept his eyes on the German.

  ‘Sprechen . . . English?’ asked Harry, but the German shook his head. So Harry tried, ‘Français?’

  ‘Oui, un peu.’

  And so they spoke in French.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Harry.

  ‘I like the music,’ said the German, who risked a wry smile. And right away Harry knew without even having to ask, that if the Arse Clencher ever found out what he was doing, this boy would be in serious trouble. The Arse Clencher didn’t care what the Italians did, not really. But his own boy, sneaking off to listen to verboten music – that was tantamount to fraternising with the enemy. That’s why the young Jerry looked terrified. Yes, thought Harry, you’d be in very serious trouble indeed.

  ‘I’m Sub-Lieutenant Harry Gilmour, Royal Navy.’

  ‘Leutnant Jürgen Secker, Luftwaffe.’ He leaned forward and offered an outstretched hand. Harry shook it.

  ‘So you’re not here to spy on us, then, are you?’ asked Harry.

  ‘No. Just to listen to the music.’

  Harry believed him, and when he said so, his look convinced his two companions they’d better believe him too.

  So they came to an arrangement. Leutnant Secker could come and listen to the music any time he liked, and they would keep his secret. Harry would even leave a bottle of something in the turret, bread, stuffed pimentos, chorizo too; they’d even have someone watch the main entrance in case his Kameraden should chance to return early from whatever Kraft durch Freude activity the Arse Clencher might devise for his Truppen that day – activity Leutnant Secker could not for the time being join, because of his sprained ankle.

  Armando, the furious Italian pilot, was prevailed upon to calm down, while Harry explained things to him: the perils of dragging poor Jürgen here into the censorious light of day, of having accusations flying back and forth, and the unintended consequences that might arise, which might put an end to Eurico’s relatively benign regime.

  Even the nice but dim Armando could imagine how the Italian authorities might react to the way in which he and his comrades were fraternising with the British; he could even imagine how the British authorities would react, if it were ever, officially, drawn to their attention. And as for what measures might be taken to assuage an even more outraged German reaction . . . well.

  Jaime, the Spanish Army Engineer sagely confirmed this was true. ‘They might place you all under Army jurisdiction,’ he told the Italian. ‘You wouldn’t like that.’

  Harry and Armando agreed. Everybody knew what the Spanish Army thought of gangs of foreign airmen being allowed to swan around on sacred Spanish soil unchecked.

  So they all went back to listening to the music, but not before Jürgen had told Harry that he agreed with the general trend of the discussion taking place just before he’d been discovered. The terrace walls had echoed each word up to him with crystal clarity, and so yes, Britain really was a land without music, and indeed, how did they live with that? Cheeky bastard, thought Harry. I save his arse and that’s all the thanks I get.

  Afterwards Harry had asked Armando, ‘What’s the OVRA?’

  The Italian had looked suddenly subdued and almost ashamed. ‘Our Gestapo,’ he’d said, and refused to elaborate.

  Harry’s first Officers’ Mess ‘at home’, and Harry was resplendent in his white mess kit, tropical service, for the use of. The tables filled two-thirds of the huge ballroom, each one groaning with food, resplendent with silver and washed by the gently lapping light of a thousand candles, whose reflections danced in the glass of what seemed like as many bottles of wine. A string quartet played at the far end beyond an expanse of open floor, where the couples would soon gather to dance.

  When they’d all been summoned to the tables to dine, Harry, his head still turned by Sybilla’s flashing smiles, had jostled to get a place close to her, but it was Fabrizio’s arm she took to lead her to the table and he stood crestfallen while other guests flocked to grab the best places. Eurico had glided up and steered him away.

  ‘Let me introduce you to . . .’ said Eurico, but Harry didn’t quite catch the name of yet another temptress. The room was filling with them. Well-bred young women of rich families – they gave him the feeling that it might actually have been against the law for any of them to be plain or unattractive in any way. He was to escort the lady to her seat, but once there, it quickly became apparent he was going to have to share her with an EdA officer, and another Italian.

  The food and the dancing came and went in a blaze of light and noise and dazzle, and Harry was sitting at his table again. The girl, Estrella, had been charming, coquettish and everything a young woman should be at a ball like this – and deeply stupid too. Oh well. Not that he had a chance in the first place, or on genuine reflection, even wanted one. He had for a long time watched Fabrizio and Sybilla together: dining, dancing and then taking their stroll upon the terrace, with all the other strolling couples. And he was laughing at himself when Eurico came to join him.

  ‘Another triumph,’ said Eurico, beaming from ear to ear, congratulating himself on this, his latest Mess ‘at home’. ‘I’m going to become a master of ceremonies once this is over. Bugger psychology. Have you enjoyed yourself?’

  ‘A different world, Eurico,’ said Harry, returning his beaming smile. ‘You have transported me. I am seduced.’

  ‘Not by young Estrella, I hope,’ said Eurico with an arching of his brows. ‘I’d be obliged to cover up your murder, if her
father got to hear.’

  ‘No, not by Estrella,’ said Harry, pausing to gaze around the wreckage of the event. ‘This is a different world for me, Eurico.’

  ‘For us all, Harry. It’s called war. None of us would do any of this were the world still sane.’

  ‘I wonder sometimes who I’ll be – let alone where I’ll be when it all ends.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope you’ll still be alive to wonder,’ smiled Eurico, following Harry’s line of sight to where Fabrizio and Sybilla were coming in through one of the French windows. ‘You have an affection for her?’

  Harry looked at her, holding Fabrizio’s hand to her cheek and wondered how he could ever, even for a moment, have entertained the notion they might have been together. Sybilla in his parents’ kitchen in Dunoon, or even on a Clyde steamer, in the dull grey of a northern day. What part of his life even touched at any point the world she lived in?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Eurico, with that capricious look he had. ‘She’s a beautiful girl.’

  Harry turned to look him square in the face. ‘She wouldn’t get my jokes,’ he said, at length.

  And so the days passed.

  Eurico and Harry continued to debate the human condition, and Fabrizio forgot all about his embarrassing contretemps with a British battlecruiser, and wanted instead to talk about the wisdom of marriage. Harry even began to strike up a clandestine friendship with Leutnant Jürgen Secker, whose sprained ankle was taking some time to heal and whose presence in the little stone turret was becoming more and more frequent.

  ‘I miss jazz and Hollywood movies,’ he told Harry one day in his faltering French, after Harry had sarcastically asked him how he was enjoying the war. ‘We don’t get them in the Reich any more.’

  ‘Being the master race can’t be easy,’ Harry had replied, absently, trying to listen to the Bach cello concerto the boys were making a pretty good stab at below.

  ‘You think it witty to be mocking to someone who offers you friendship,’ said Jürgen in an even tone. ‘Is that the English way?’

  ‘I’m not English,’ said Harry.

  ‘Ja, ja, Schotten . . . and I’m not a fucking Prussian, I’m a Mecklenburger. So?’, and a deep sigh. ‘You know, I really want to visit your country one day and it saddens me . . . breaks my heart . . . that we’ll probably have to kill you first . . . because your stupid Prime Minister is too drunk to get in step with the march of history and join us.’

  ‘I’m not talking to you about this again, Jürgen, so just shut up,’ said Harry, reaching for the bottle of fundador and taking a stiff belt. But when he looked back at the lad, Jürgen’s eyes were tearing up and his face was filled with despair, and in the hole it opened between them, Harry saw how in another time they would have become friends, and he felt the same empty feeling gnawing at him too. ‘Any more of your nonsense and I’ll get them to play “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball” again,’ he said, with his lop-sided grin, ‘and you know how the Eyeties love that.’ Jürgen wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and then smiled the same tired smile.

  It was quite chilly in the mornings now, and Harry had a Spanish greatcoat on over his shirt and sweater when he took his coffee out to the terrace to enjoy the view of the port in peace and quiet. The sun was up, and the sky was the usual pure blue, and filled with birdsong that he wouldn’t be able to hear once his fellow inmates had risen. He was thinking about home, and about a girl called Shirley there, and how the young ladies of Palma really did come from a different world, when he saw Jürgen leaning out of the turret waving frantically at him. He looked around quickly to see if anyone else were there – this was an amazingly reckless thing for Jürgen to do: if anyone spotted him, if word ever got back to the Arse Clencher . . . Harry hurried over, and Jürgen reached down to pull him up and in through one of the narrow windows. They flopped down on to the flagstone floor and Harry could feel its chill seeping through the folds of the greatcoat.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked his friend in a hiss.

  Jürgen’s face looked grim. ‘Your friend, Fabrizio. He is a dead man.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are two men here,’ said Jürgen, holding Harry by the shoulder. ‘They say they are from our embassy in Madrid, but they’re not. They’re from Berlin. They’re here to take your friend away. Something his family is involved with. Back in Italy.’

  Harry knew it was true when he entered Eurico’s office ten minutes later, and found him sitting behind his desk, white-faced, staring into nothing.

  ‘I said they could have my office to talk to Fabrizio,’ said Eurico, ‘but no. They wanted to take him to the German consulate. More discreet, they said. Ha! More discreet to shut him in a box and put him on that Junkers 52 that’s sitting on the runway at Son Bonet. I told them there would be paperwork to complete. They are gone, for the time being.’

  Harry eventually found Fabrizio back in his quarters, adjusting his best walking-out uniform in front of a mirror. He was dressed as though he were about to head into town.

  ‘I am going to meet my accusers,’ he said. ‘I will not skulk from these people.’

  One look told Harry there would be no reasoning with him, so he ran downstairs and hunted through the reception area until he found the junior EdA officer of the day.

  ‘Sottotenente de Savelli is intending to break his parole,’ Harry told him. Any of the officers in the Hotel El Real could step out for the day, go into town, take the Ferrocarril to Sóller, so long as they had a written pass. There was no note of a written pass issued for Sottotenente de Savelli on the EdA officer’s day log. And breaking parole was a serious offence. The officer grabbed two airmen and sped off to detain Fabrizio. Harry went back to Eurico’s office, where he found him on the phone. He flopped into one of the huge wing chairs. Eurico finished his call.

  ‘His family. Father, uncles, God knows who else,’ said Eurico. ‘It appears they have been involved in some sort of plot against Il Duce.’

  Harry remembered what Fabrizio had said about Mussolini, the blacksmith’s son – and what his father thought. And his uncles.

  ‘They’re Black nobility, his family. Do you know that?’ said Eurico. ‘An ancient Roman baronial family. The “Black” came later though.’

  ‘I know,’ said Harry.

  Eurico arched his eyebrows.

  ‘You learn Italian as a language, you can’t help but pick up a bit of the history too,’ said Harry. ‘After the House of Savoy entered Rome and unified Italy in 1870, the Pope refused to recognise Victor Emmanuel as King and claimed he was a prisoner in the Vatican. The loyal families locked and draped their palaces in mourning in support, hence the “Black”.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Eurico. ‘Well done, mi erudito. The papacy never forgot that little gesture. So Fabrizio, he is from a very respected, very Catholic family. But I doubt even that will save him or his father or uncles from the wrath of Il Duce. Or of the Germans, if they’ve been plotting.’ And there Eurico paused, smiling to himself. ‘It would go down well with Señor Soriano, though. He wouldn’t demur for a moment at having his Sybilla take the name. But young Fabrizio needs to stay alive for that to happen.’

  Harry sat with his head in his hands, then he said, almost as if inspired, ‘Your bureaucracy. You can’t reason with paperwork. You said it yourself.’

  ‘Fascist bureaucracy,’ said Eurico. ‘It does what it’s told, like everyone else. Surely I don’t have to spell it out. El Caudillo is not exactly unsympathetic to Il Duce, or even Der Führer. The Els and the Ils and the Ders of this world do have a habit of sticking together, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘El Caudillo?’ asked Harry. ‘Is that . . .?’

  ‘Franco? Yes.’

  ‘We have to get Fabrizio off the island,’ said Harry, at length.

  Eurico stared long and hard at him, his mind working behind his glassy rabbit eyes. Eventually he said, ‘I will turn a blind eye. It is
the best I can do. Even by my just doing nothing, if you succeed, it will go badly for me. You know that?’

  Harry sat back, incredulous. ‘If I succeed . . .?’

  Eurico slammed the desk with the flat of his hand – a rare display of emotion for him. ‘Madre de Dios, Harry! What do you want from me? That I lay on a plane for him? Where would it fly to? To the British? Do you want me shot, too? And anyway, do you imagine Fabrizio would get aboard it?’

  Harry’s stare didn’t flinch from Eurico, nor could Eurico meet it. ‘Do you think you can morally blackmail me?’ said Eurico. ‘That I am some child? That you can squeeze some futile gesture from me with your sanctimonious silence?’

  ‘We all wonder, growing up, what kind of men we’re going to turn out to be,’ said Harry, with a theatrical quiet. ‘This is one of those moments where we get to find out.’

  It was Eurico’s turn to stare at Harry now. Seconds slipped away in the silence, until the noise of the others, emerging from their ignorant slumbers, began to waft into Eurico’s office. There was one particular bang: a door, someone falling over?

  Harry said, ‘Get me a boat. A yacht. There are plenty of them up in Puerto de Sóller. Water. We won’t need much food. And a chart . . . No, not a chart . . . A pilot book for the western Med. There must be something in a library somewhere, or on a chandlers’ bookshelf. How long can you hold them off?’

  ‘I’m astonished I’ve held them off at all,’ said Eurico, reaching for the telephone and dialling. ‘You know he won’t go with you voluntarily.’

  It only took until lunch for word to spread. Harry was out on the terrace with Russell’s Balearic Pilot, 1927, in English, which he found in the hotel’s own library; he was frantically scribbling while everyone else was inside queuing for aperitifs. A still-pimply RAF type, all pustules and ginger hair, already in his cricketing whites, appeared at Harry’s elbow. ‘Groupie wants a word in his quarters, quick-time,’ said the youth, shallow chest thrust out with the vicarious importance of his mission. ‘Follow me.’