SPANISH ROCK

by Lex Lander

  Linda’s head lifted fractionally. ‘Warner …’ Whether she meant to plead or hurl defiant expletives I never learned, for she slumped once more, beyond even speech. It spurred me to flex my arms, in an eye-popping attempt to snap the tapes. There wasn’t a millimetre of slack.

  ‘Linda,’ I said, speaking round Petrov. ‘I’ve given them all I have. There’s nothing else, I swear …’

  I swear. The lie left a foul taste. I couldn’t live with it. So I fed Petrov more semi-factual pap. Now he had almost the whole box of tricks. All I held back was the true intentions of the British government, and my true profession. Like before, he let it permeate.

  ‘Look …’ I scoured my memory for harmless data that would sound more valuable than it was. ‘I’m not a professional. I’m an investor. It’s years since I worked in a regular job.’

  ‘We know all about you, and your Spanish bar, and your cover.’

  His nod to the woman, Ana, was the signal she was waiting for. She went to work with a will, loving her job. Linda squirmed suddenly and violently, lifting her knees to waist height.

  ‘No!’ Her voice was high and thin. ‘My baby …’

  ‘Well, Warner?’ Petrov was smiling. The click of the nail clipper was louder than ever. Sweat coursed down my temples and down the back of my neck.

  ‘There’s nothing else, I promise you …’

  I swear, I promise. What a regular, stand-up hero I was.

  Petrov stepped aside and I was now able to see what was happening. Linda was impaled on the broom handle, the lower part of her body swivelling in an effort to break free. But short of raising herself a good foot she and that handle were inseparable.

  ‘Don’t do it, Petrov,’ I pleaded. ‘She’s pregnant. You’ll harm the baby.’

  He was impassive, his eyes shrouded. ‘I will count to five, Warner. One …’

  Click-click went the clipper.

  ‘Two …’

  The Ana cow was actually wetting her lips, anticipating the thrill to come.

  ‘Three …’

  ‘You bastard!’ I yelled. ‘I’ve told it all, for fuck’s sake!’

  Linda gave a little cry, like a hurt child. ‘André … don’t let them … Oh God!… No!…’

  It flashed inconsequentially across my mind that she had never called me André before. I hopped my chair forward, as if to get closer to her was to somehow lessen her suffering.

  ‘Four.’

  I hurled myself, chair and all, towards Petrov. A hopeless, fruitless last throw. The chair overbalanced. I hit the ground, the worst of the impact softened by the thick layer of dirt, but winding me just the same.

  ‘Five!’ He pronounced it with relish. I twisted my head to look at him from down in the dirt. His gaze shifted from me to a point beyond Linda. His nod was so slight I might have imagined it.

  The shriek that followed hit the ceiling, travelled lengthways and sideways and when it could travel no further it resounded back towards the centre, in waves. When it abruptly ceased it left behind a vacuum in which all that could be heard was the resonance in my ears.

  ‘Ah, you scum,’ I groaned. ‘You stinking pigs.’

  Yet they stank no worse than me. For their masters they raped my girl with a broom handle. For Queen and Country I let them.

  I didn’t see or hear them leave. I simply sensed, after a while, that I was alone – alone with Linda, that is, be she dead or dying. Movement wasn’t possible in any direction. So I lay there, breathing dust and listening to a distant dripping tap. That and the hiss of the lamps were all I had to listen to.

  It sank in, infinitely slowly, that it wasn’t a dripping tap I could hear, nor was it distant. It was close, a regular tick … tick … tick. Investigation was impossible but I could slither round, through a full three hundred and sixty degrees if necessary, by using the foot that was in contact with the ground like a paddle. It took a while and in the process removed most of the skin from my ankle bone.

  The blank far wall entered my vista. Closer at hand were a pair of bare feet, toes turned in, somehow childlike. I watched the bright red dewdrop form and detach from the instep to splash into a spreading patch that glistened in the light of the gas lamps. My eyes traced it back to its source, via a red tendril to the top of her inner thigh, where the flow was stronger, thicker, branching out in places into tiny tributaries that wandered among the fine down on her legs.

  The discarded broom handle, red-smeared from the tip for a good quarter of its length, lay in the dirt. I felt physically sick. My stomach churned and gorge hit the roof of my mouth.

  ‘Linda?’ My voice was a squeak a mouse would have disowned. I dragged up phlegm to clear my vocal chords. ‘Linda … speak to me, for God’s sake, speak to me!’

  No response. Unconscious, maybe worse. I was in no position to help her. Duct tape is impossible to tear or stretch. My limbs were numb, even my body felt detached. Only the brain still functioned. And the voice.

  So shout, you fool. Shout.

  I shouted. I bawled at the top of my voice. The drip of Linda’s life blood slackened and dried up. Which might be good news or bad, no way of telling. The lamps thankfully continued to provide light.

  I shouted until my throat was raw and my lungs ached and a thirst such as I had never known came over me. I also, perversely, pissed myself.

  But eventually somebody did come.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Hospitals are not my favourite places to hang around. Whether it’s the smell, or the association with disease and pain, or simply all that white paint, I’ve never analysed. But once inside, even as a healthy visitor, I can’t wait to escape.

  The Naval Hospital in Gib was no different from its civilian counterparts except that the majority of its nursing staff was male. The surgeon was a few years my senior, slight of build, his naval rank concealed beneath a white topcoat which he wore unbuttoned. We discussed Linda in the cream-walled corridor by the reception desk with its hulking orderly.

  ‘She’ll live,’ the surgeon assured me. ‘Couldn’t save the baby though, I’m afraid.’ He treated me to a practised look of sympathy. For simplicity’s sake I had posed as the father. ‘It was a boy. The womb was ruptured, there was a loss of fluid, you see. In any case the foetus was only twenty-six weeks –’

  ‘Skip it,’ I said, more brusquely than was warranted. ‘How serious are her injuries?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Come on, doc, give it to me straight.’

  ‘Well, she’ll get over them all right, and probably quite quickly. The external damage is mostly confined to her thumbs … the ligaments have been quite badly deformed but they’ll heal in time. The facial bruising …’ (Linda had been beaten, though not too brutally) ‘…is just skin lesions, no permanent scarring.’

  ‘And the internal damage?’

  He folded his arms, studied his shiny toecaps. I noticed a bloodspot on the sleeve of his white topcoat. It made me think of Linda, of her blood spotting the dirt …

  ‘As I said, rupture of the womb … it’s unlikely she’ll be able to bear children.’ An expletive exploded through my teeth and he laid a consoling hand on me. ‘I’m really sorry. We’ve done all we can to repair the damage. She’s young, healthy, she’ll recover fast. A week, ten days at the most. She lost a lot of blood, but we’ve replaced that, of course.’

  ‘That’s fine, fine.’ My attention was elsewhere, wondering how precious to a woman was the ability to bear children. Very, I suspected. Yet another ruined life to be laid at my door.

  ‘You haven’t yet explained how she came by her injuries,’ he said, looking stern.

  ‘I’m not going to,’ I retorted.

  Nettled, he said, ‘The police will have to be notified anyway. Clearly some kind of assault took place.’

  ‘Superintendent Mascarenhas.’ The name provided by Toby. ‘Call him. He’ll vouch for me.’

  The doctor drew himself up and managed to add an inch to his modest stature.
‘That will be my decision, not yours. This is a military establishment, may I remind you. She should really have gone to St Bernard’s. If it hadn’t been an emergency, we would have had to turn her away.’

  ‘This has to do with national security,’ I said irritably, his officiousness beginning to rile me.

  Fortunately he took me at face value. He narrowed his eyes at me, and said, ‘Very well then. I’ll see what I can do.’

  I caught his sleeve as he made to depart. ‘While I’m here, may I see her?’

  Five minutes was all they allowed me, and no talking. Not that she was capable of holding a conversation: heavily sedated, not yet emerged from the anaesthetic. A saline drip was suspended by the bed, delving into her arm. Her face, always pale at best, was as white as the crisp night-gown they had dressed her in, relieved only by dark smudges under her closed eyes and the purple flare of her bruises. So deathly was her pallor that I half-doubted the evidence of the heartbeat monitor, despite the bleeps that came from it at one-second intervals, and felt constrained to check her pulse. It was there all right, pitter-patter, feeble but regular. I stooped to kiss her, a tenuous meeting of lips. Hers moved, formed the faintest of smiles.

  ‘Warner …?’ Her eyes stayed shut. ‘That you?’

  ‘Who else are you on kissing terms with?’ I said.

  * * * * *

  Major Ribble was waiting for me in the reception area in the company of a portly, rosy-cheeked man with coal black hair, who looked as if he had been sleeping in his clothes. Ribble introduced him as Superintendent Mascarenhas.

  ‘You move fast, Superintendent,’ I said as we performed the usual rituals.

  ‘London seems to regard you as a VIP,’ was his terse comeback, in accented English. ‘I was told to jump if you said jump.’

  ‘You look done in, Warner,’ Ribble commented without sympathy.

  I was also matted with grime from many hours spent on the cavern floor, not to mention ravenously hungry, having partaken of nothing more substantial than machine-dispensed tea and a machine-dispensed packet of tasteless biscuits, since the ambulance deposited me at the hospital around dawn.

  Ribble, Mascarenhas and I had been allocated a minuscule windowless office, fitted out with utilitarian steel furniture in warship grey.

  ‘Are you going to tell us about it?’ Mascarenhas asked, lowering his bulk onto a tubular chair not dissimilar from the one to which I had been taped for half the night.

  ‘Why not?’

  I told them all that had happened since my return from Spain, without mentioning the reasons for my absence over the border. When I began to describe what Petrov and his sadistic sidekick had done to Linda, Ribble blanched under his tan.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Not good, but she’ll pull through. Looks like she can forget about being a mother though, of this or any other kid.’

  ‘Christ, that’s tragic.’

  Mascarenhas was more conditioned to brutality.

  ‘We shall need to interview the young lady,’ he said, jotting in a small black notebook.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ I said firmly. ‘She stays out of this. Anything you want to know, you ask me.’

  He made no attempt to contest the point, coming as it did from a VIP.

  ‘How did you escape?’ Ribble said.

  ‘I shouted for help.’

  He gaped. Mascarenhas looked up from his notebook, disbelieving.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Sure I am. Luckily for us there was a guy, a hobo, crashed down for the night in another cave linked to ours. He freed me and helped me release Linda – the chain was hooked up to the ring bolt with a spring clip. He also helped me carry Linda to my car. I gave him some money, about fifty euros.’

  ‘Do you think he was an immigrant?’ Other of Mascarenhas’ instincts had been aroused. Now he would want to conduct two investigations simultaneously.

  ‘Later, Superintendent,’ Ribble said, sighing. ‘Let’s not get side-tracked. I’d like this Petrov character and his girlfriend picked up.’ He fixed me with a reproachful gaze. ‘I’m rather surprised you didn’t report this sooner, Warner. They’ve probably slipped across the border by now.’

  He was probably right. I was too whacked to care.

  ‘If you have all you need from me I’d like to go back to the hotel and get steam cleaned.’

  ‘This Petrov character …’ Mascarenhas’ police pencil was poised as if in anticipation. ‘Will you describe him, please? The woman also.’

  I obliged, down to the mole I had noticed on Petrov’s neck.

  ‘Somebody must know him,’ I added. ‘He was at the charity dinner at the Holiday Inn a couple of weeks ago. He would have needed a formal invitation to get in.’

  Mascarenhas jotted anew.

  My duty to the authorities done, I made good my exit. Ribble caught up with me in the parking lot.

  ‘You’d better have this,’ he said as I unlocked the car. He slipped me my fake Andre Warner passport without the accent over the “e”. ‘Be sure to return the Donaldson one. It’s needed elsewhere.’

  ‘Roger. If GIBESTÁ haven’t got cold feet about bombing their way to power I’ll be in the market for more plastic within the next day or so.’

  ‘Yours to command,’ he returned with a grin and waved me away.

  But I was not destined to luxuriate in a steaming bath yet awhile. As I pushed through the swing doors of the Caleta Hotel I bumped into Michael Vella.

  ‘André!’ His hand folded around mine, strong and firm and sincere. ‘What happened to you? Where have you been this past week?’ He took in my grubby demeanour, raised an inquisitorial eyebrow. ‘You look as if you’ve been in the wars.’

  ‘My apologies, Michael. I had to go and see an old friend in need. I only expected to be gone a couple of days, otherwise I’d have notified you.’

  ‘We must talk.’ He guided me through the reception lobby, into a corner of the Catalan Lounge Bar. ‘My colleagues want to step up the bombing. They have voted to place a bomb every other day from now on.’ He massaged the back of his neck. He looked as if he had passed a sleepless night or two. ‘I’m still against it at a moral level, yet … we must do something. Time is so short. Our followers are demanding action.’ His shoulders drooped. ‘I’m afraid if we don’t make a breakthrough very soon there will be real violence, possibly killing in the streets.’

  ‘You’ll end up under martial law.’

  ‘Quite.’ Glumly. ‘The last thing we want is curfews, bans on meetings in public places. Martial law would finish us.’

  We agreed to meet that evening at his apartment.

  Finally making it to my room, I decided on a bath instead of shower. Cossetted by the hot water, I fell asleep only to wake to the shrill of the telephone. I wrapped a towelling robe around my hot wet body and got to the phone before it gave up. Predictably, it was Toby. I should have let it ring.

  ‘I’m here in Gib,’ he announced, sounding short of breath as if he’d run all the way. ‘Flew in this morning. Richard Kirkland is with me.’

  ‘How cosy for you.’ I was still drowsy, the knell of doom too distant to detect.

  ‘Put your humour in cold storage,’ Toby said with gravel in his voice. ‘You’re to get over here immediately.’

  ‘Where’s here?’

  ‘The Convent.’

  The Governor’s HQ. I was going up in the world.

  ‘Don’t feel like it. I’ve had a hard night.’

  ‘You’ll be collected – two pm prompt.’

  The line went dead.

  Rebellion stirred within me like the rumbling of a dormant volcano. Stirred but didn’t erupt. When all was said and done, Toby and those above him were paying my wages and therefore entitled to order me about.

  So I confined my defiance to my garb: sneakers, jeans, and an open-neck checked shirt, crumpled from too many days in a suitcase. Rounded off the ensemble with my black leather biker’s jacket, always good
for thumbing your nose at the establishment. Finally I removed the chip from my camera and zipped it away in my breast pocket. If nothing else I would be able to barter forgiveness with it.

  My escort consisted of two hefty redcaps. They treated me more like a miscreant than the VIP Mascarenhas said I was, delivering me to the very door of the Governor’s office. Inside, the three of them lined up against me: Toby, my calm-water friend; Richard Kirkland, the Prime Minister’s private aide and hatchet-wielder. His own skin was all that would concern him. And, most exalted of all, there was the shiny new Governor: Sir Gilbert Dover, doll-like, politico-military, a career hybrid.

  I had never been inside the Governor’s sanctum before. It was tastefully done out in a mixture of English and Spanish, a lot of white woodwork on the walls. A blue and brown carpet, probably of Moroccan origin, well-worn so that the pattern had lost all definition. The floor was of wooden squares, laid diagonally, alternating light and dark in tone, and polished to military brilliance. Through the windows were treetops, the roof of the opposite wing of the building, and a piece of the Rock’s tablecloth cloud. It was warm and the window was open, letting in the rumble of traffic and a variety of birds in full chirp.

  When we were all seated around the egg-shaped conference table, including me, the inquest began. Kirkland fired the ranging shot.

  ‘Explain,’ he said, immaculate in pinstripes, every fine blond hair in place, ‘your protracted absence, your lack of progress, and your relationship with the son and daughter of General Irazola. In that order.’

  Toby was staring, you could say glaring, at me. No support to be expected from him.

  ‘Well?’ Kirkland rapped. ‘What are you waiting for? A sign from above?’

  ‘Balls to you, Kirkland. I was just trying to decide whether I should walk out and leave you all to catch the shit when it hits the fan.’

  Toby shifted in his seat. His complexion was bilious.

  ‘I suggest you confine your remarks to what’s relevant, Warner,’ Sir Gilbert said mildly.