Road To The Coast

by John Harris

  As the loudspeaker stopped, the shouting died away once more and there was the sort of hush that comes before a tumult, so that the bang of shutter being slammed to above his head and the noisy flutter of pigeons’ wings as they started from the roof at the sound seemed to have an extra significance.

  He heard the tramp of disciplined feet and the sound of a soldier’s voice giving orders. Immediately, the uproar started again and there were more shouted threats from the crowd. He could see stones being thrown now and from somewhere above him he heard a window slam open and the sharp crack of a pistol.

  The sound came weak and thin in the din, but as the echoes died away the crowd panicked and for a moment they all seemed to be pushing different ways at once. Those at the back were trying to get forward and those at the front were trying to get back. Several people jammed themselves into the doorway with Ash and he tripped and fell over, and a girl fell on top of him. Then he heard the short chatter of a machine-gun and, as he scrambled to his feet, he saw people running past the doorway.

  Voices were raised in a chorus of wails that fell on his ears like the surge of waves, and the crowd seemed to part in front of the doorway like the sea breaking against a rampart of rocks, as men and women flung themselves down or pressed themselves against the walls. He saw a man stumble and fall, and the crowd, trying to get out of the alley, trampled over him, their shoes stamping on his hands and his legs while he struggled, shrieking, to rise to his feet again. As they scattered, he dragged himself upright and stumbled after them, limping badly, blood beginning to well out of a cut on his cheek where a steel-shod shoe had caught it.

  For a moment, there was silence again, then the wailing changed to a roar like the cry of an angry beast as the crowd withdrew to safety and began to shout their hatred of the military. In the distance Ash could hear the deep-throated cough of a mortar and a ragged burst of rifle fire, then there were more shots from above him and the shouting of the crowd stopped abruptly. A few more figures hurried crouching past the doorway, and there was another flurry of shooting from above his head, as though they’d managed to erect some sort of barricade on the roof, then again the clatter of the machine-gun. He saw plaster falling as the bullets chinked on the walls and whined away, and heard the crash of glass.

  ‘God damn it to hell,’ he shouted again in helpless fury.

  The men who had pushed him into the doorway were peering out into the street now, shouting abuse, and as the machine-gun started once more, he found himself thinking of Grace again, on board the ship listening to it all, hearing with dread the sounds from the town; and old Dainty, his head cocked on one side, his face fallen in, defeated and despairing.

  As the gun stopped, a stooping figure ran across the street, and he saw it was Dodgin. The steward cannoned against the man in the doorway, knocking him flying, and sprawled at Ash’s feet.

  ‘Saw you,’ he panted. ‘Thought I’d better get to you. This is a proper sod, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not half it isn’t. And we’ve got to get out of it a bit smartly, or we’ll get nowhere.’

  One of the men was beating on the door behind them with his pistol, shouting to be let inside. A frightened face appeared as the door was opened into a crack, then the man with the pistol put his weight against it and they all half-fell inside the house. An old man stood against the wall, a look of terror on his face.

  ‘It’s all right, grandfather,’ Ash said. ‘They’re shooting at us.’

  They followed the crowed as they ran through the house and found themselves in a narrow strip of garden behind, jammed with vines and cacti and lemon trees. Under the veranda of red-painted corrugated iron, a wireless on a wicker chair was blaring out a tango and it went flying, the sound coming to a dead stop, as they pushed past. There was a low wall at the other end of the garden, and, using the roof of a dilapidated chicken run, they reached the top of the wall and dropped down into a narrow muddy road beyond.

  For a moment, they all huddled together, panting wondering which way to move, then they saw an army car with four soldiers in it jolting towards them through the puddles, its wheels splashed with the mud it threw against the walls.

  ‘Stand still, for God’s sake,’ Ash shouted at Dodgin as he tensed himself to make a break for safety.

  The man with the pistol started to run, firing backwards, and the car stopped at once and a couple of soldiers tumbled out. There was a burst of firing and he sprawled in the roadway, his body sliding on the mud up against the wall, the pistol still in his hand, cocked up awkwardly against the stonework. The girl who had fallen over Ash in the doorway gave a whimper of misery, and flung herself across him sobbing, as he sat up, holding his knee grey-faced and moaning with pain.

  A third soldier, a sergeant, stood before the remainder of the group by the driver’s side of the car, gesturing with his rifle, and they instinctively raised their hands slowly into the air.

  The two soldiers were moving cautiously down the road now towards the fallen man and, as they reached him, the girl beside him scrambled to her feet and, turning on them, tried to attack them with her fists. As the sergeant laughed at their attempts to dodge her, the driver stuck his head through his window to look.

  In the momentary distraction of their attention, Ash brought his big fists down from above his head on top of the driver’s skull, driving his face against the edge of the door, and as though he had been motivated by the same nerve, Dodgin took a flying kick at the sergeant’s gun and sent it flying from his unwary hands. As the sergeant staggered away, dazed, Ash swung open the door of the car and plucked the moaning driver out and flung him in the roadway, still spitting out broken teeth between his hands.

  ‘Get in,’ he shouted to Dodgin. ‘Get in, and get out of the way!’

  As Dodgin dived headlong through the swinging door into the rear seat, Ash leapt for the wheel and revved the still running engine. For a second, the wheels spun wildly in the mud then the car plunged forward, the doors slamming one after another. The soldiers by the fallen man swung round, then pressed themselves flat against the wall as the car hurtled by, the mudguard catching the wall on the opposite side of the narrow road with a clang and a screech of torn metal.

  A hole appeared in the windscreen, then they were out of the muddy side road and on to the wet surface of a macadamed avenue.

  ‘Done it,’ Dodgin exulted, climbing over into the front seat. ‘We got away!’

  ‘Dodgin, old boy,’ Ash grinned. ‘I could have made a good soldier out of you.’

  Dodgin laughed excitedly. ‘Where do we go now?’ he demanded.

  ‘Christ knows! Anywhere away from here. If we stay here, the best we can hope for is clinkey with the rest of the poor sods and that won’t help us much.’

  Ash wrestled with the steering wheel as the big car roared round a corner with a screech of tyres. A soldier who stepped forward to challenge them leapt for his life and sent a shot speeding after them. Then an armoured car emerged from a gateway ahead of them and Ash swung the car down a side street, sending dogs and people diving for the safety of doorways.

  Emerging from the alleyway, he yelled suddenly in fury and disappointment as they found themselves on the edge of the Plaza san Martín and heading straight for a group of soldiers.

  ‘Down,’ he yelled. ‘Get your swede down!’

  The car was hurtling across the front of a machine-gun position which had been set up under the trees at the far side of the square facing the convent, and Ash caught a glimpse of an ominous activity behind the heavy weapon.

  ‘Down,’ he yelled again but the roar of the gun drowned his warning.

  One of the rear windows scattered fragments of glass about them and a front tyre wrapped itself noisily round the axle as it was split by a bullet, then Ash was fighting desperately with the steering as the car seemed to take control.

  The big vehicle slewed sideways, swaying from side to side alarmingly, bounced off a small tree into a newspaper kiosk, sending sp
linters of wood flying through the air, knocked over an iron seat, and finally plunged into a hedge where it came to a stop, its doors forced open and swinging on their hinges, a headlamp bouncing off and rolling ahead of them into a laurel bush.

  Ash scrambled out quickly, dragging Dodgin after him. He stood upright, still holding the steward’s collar, and waited for the soldiers running towards them from behind the machine-gun. He was surprised to realize the sun was almost at its zenith.

  ‘The bastards,’ Dodgin spat, looking like an infuriated alley cat, all skin and bone and pale angry eyes. ‘The bastards stopped us.’

  Ash shrugged philosophically, his face expressionless. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘They stopped us. Still’ – he shrugged – ‘it was a bloody good try.’

  Two

  The town seemed quieter as they were pushed across the square, jabbed in the small of the back at intervals by the butts of rifles.

  Dodgin walked wearily, almost stumbling, as though his legs were weak. His features seemed sharp and taut and he was blaming everyone in his usual misdirected fury for everything that had gone wrong.

  ‘You ought to have let me run for it,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I ought,’ Ash said. ‘You’d have got a dozen bullets in you then, and that would have stopped you complaining.’ He halted in his tracks near the fountain and turned round to the soldier who was following him.

  ‘If you jab me in the kidneys with that bloody gun again,’ he said calmly in English, ‘I’ll floor you.’

  The soldier looked startled and didn’t appear to understand but he noticeably kept his rifle to himself afterwards.

  They were pushed roughly through the gate of an old colonial house with a small courtyard built like a cloister, a mausoleum of majestic splendour and tarnished gilt which, with its decaying grandeur, its grilled windows and its garden filled with the moaning of doves, ought never to have existed in the dreary little town of Santa Rosa.

  There was a dispatch rider tinkering with his machine in the dramatic shadows of the palms and the magnolia and the lemon tree that grew near the central garden, and in the shade of a vast pot of geraniums a few soldiers were hunched, squatting on the ground, one or two of them, Ash noticed, wearing bandages. The scent of the flowers was drowned by the stink of petrol.

  A sergeant appeared on a stone balcony covered with a flowering vine where, under a torn awning out of the direct rays of the sun, a woman’s underclothes were drying. He signalled to the soldiers behind Ash and Dodgin and they were pushed across the courtyard into a shabby room redolent of rosemary and the mustiness of damp, which was furnished as an office, with papers and maps spread everywhere.

  As the door slammed behind them, Ash stood with his hands in his pockets, taking stock of his surroundings.

  ‘Chokey,’ he commented laconically. ‘Nice familiar feeling.’

  Dodgin sat down and started to brush the mud from his clothes, unspeaking and bitter. Ash shrugged and, crossing towards the solitary window, stared through the iron grill on to the square.

  At the far side of the plaza a mortar bomb had landed on the cantina in the corner, and chairs had been flung haphazardly about, reduced to driftwood. A few of the trees looked scorched and stripped of leaves and a group of prisoners were huddled by the wall, hollow-eyed, their hands clasped on top of their heads, indifferent to the stray dogs that pushed their way among them.

  There were one or two sprawled figures among the wreckage near a patch of uprooted paving stones, and a black-robed priest moved among them, the brightly coloured scarf he wore over his rusty soutane to protect him against the damp chill of the morning incongruous against his worn grey face. In the background, groups of soldiers crouched behind the trees, their eyes all the time on the convent, and then Ash noticed that the windows of one of the wings had been broken and the plaster around it was chipped and starred by the marks where bullets had struck.

  ‘Looks as though Carroll’s got his hands full for the moment,’ he observed.

  For some time, they waited in silence, listening to the grinding of motor vehicles and the occasional deep thump of a carbine firing. A machine-gun opened up again among the buildings near the church and they heard the creak of a mortar. The pigeons exploded into the sky and began wheeling round the twin spires, catching the sun as they circled the shining pinnacles. Then they heard the crunch of wheels over the broken glass on the wet asphalt outside that was starred with petals from the rain-thrashed hydrangeas, and the door burst open. Carroll stood framed in the entrance with the sergeant. He looked angry and anxious at the same time.

  ‘So you escaped, after all,’ he said.

  ‘Not quite,’ Ash said. ‘A bit more luck and you’d have had something to think about.’

  Carroll stared at him, his mouth working, his temper rising.

  ‘I have very little time for nonsense, Señor Ash,’ he snapped. ‘We’re busy.’

  ‘So I saw.’ Ash turned slowly from the window and faced him.

  Carroll gestured angrily towards the sunshine in the doorway. ‘There’s been a great deal of bloodshed in the town,’ he said. ‘We’ve had to use machine-guns. It seems we’re not quite rid of the dictator yet. We’ve been instructed to be severe.’

  He turned as Dodgin rose to his feet, eyeing him with loathing, and signalled to the sergeant behind him, who took Dodgin’s arm roughly and pushed him towards the door.

  ‘OK,’ Dodgin said, shaking off his hand. ‘I’m going. What’s on now? You going to shoot me or summat?’

  Carroll pushed the door to behind him with his foot and lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t know how you and your angry friend managed to reach the shore, Señor Ash,’ he said shortly, ‘but unhappily it didn’t do you much good.’

  ‘Unhappily.’

  ‘You arrived at a most inopportune moment. The insurgents have gone to ground in the convent. We drove them out of the cantina there but they’ve holed up again. I’m waiting now for something heavier.’

  ‘Atom bombs?’

  Carroll opened his mouth to retort then the motor cycle in the courtyard burst into life with a staccato roar. He frowned irritably and waited for it to stop.

  ‘It so happens,’ he went on as the noise died away in a series of spluttering coughs, ‘that you’ve saved me a journey out to that appalling ship. I was wanting to talk to you and only these disturbances stopped me going this morning. I’ve just had reinforcements from Códoba where the town is now secured, and they brought a story with them. A story about a briefcase containing money. A great deal of money, which should have gone towards financing our sacred cause against the tyranny of the mob.’

  ‘It wasn’t sacred enough for you to declare for it until it was successful,’ Ash commented brutally.

  Carroll ignored the remark. ‘That money’s still being sought,’ he said sharply. ‘Many people are bitter about it. The civilians are laughing.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. You’re a laughable lot.’

  Carroll frowned. ‘The people who gave it are saying the county’s troops can’t even protect their own wages,’ he went on.

  ‘It seems they’re right.’

  Carroll’s voice grew sharper. ‘My superiors would take great pleasure in rewarding the man who found it – if only for the fact that it would save them embarrassment. It’s been traced to this area.’

  ‘Oh, for the love of God,’ Ash said angrily, ‘why don’t your tell me that you think I’ve got it? You’ve got me here. You’ve won. You can shoot me, hang me, jump on me, give me a baby. For God’s sake, come to the point.’

  Carroll smoothed his moustache. ‘The woman has it, hasn’t she?’ he said more quietly. ‘On the ship. In the briefcase you were so keen to get on board when you were taken out by boat.’

  He crossed to the table and sat down, calm once more, as though he were suddenly sure of himself. The motor cycle in the courtyard started up again, filling the room with a nerve-splitting roar. Carroll lit a cigarette and puffed slow
ly at it until the noise died away, then he carefully knocked off the ash and looked up.

  ‘They caught the Norteamericano, Duffy,’ he said. ‘And the traitor, Salazar.’

  He stood up and moved towards the door, nibbling at his finger ends thoughtfully. ‘I expect the Americano will be angry,’ he went on. ‘His share wasn’t a very big one.’ Ash looked up quickly and Carroll waved his cigarette. ‘A few hundred dollars,’ he said. ‘No more. Not much for the trouble he took. Salazar was found to have seventeen thousand five hundred dollars in his briefcase. Seventeen thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money, Señor Ash.’

  ‘It’ll do.’

  Carroll nodded. ‘And somewhere,’ he continued, ‘somewhere not far away, according to my information, is another seventeen thousand dollars. There may be even more, so I hear.’

  Ash drew on his cigarette, saying nothing, and they heard the roar of engines outside in the square again and a spattering of rifle fire.

  ‘Unfortunately for the Americano,’ Carroll went on, ‘he picked up the wrong briefcase. The one he stole contained only leaflets and some money for the printer. Did you know Duffy, Señor Ash?’

  ‘You know damned well I knew Duffy.’

  Carroll took a pace forward. ‘I might as well be frank then, Señor Ash,’ he said sharply. ‘When the English ship was shelled by mistake, it was obvious there would be trouble.’

  ‘That was obvious to us too,’ Ash snapped. ‘From the fuss you made to avoid it.’

  Carroll sat down again abruptly. ‘There still might be,’ he said.

  ‘There still will be,’ Ash corrected him confidently. ‘You’ve been trying hard to persuade yourself for a long time that there’s a way out. That you might offer your boss something in exchange – a piece of paper, a child who might lead to Alvarado, and now, God help us, some money.’

  ‘There was a way out,’ Carroll snapped angrily, his voice rising again. ‘If everyone had kept their heads from the first, there’d have been no trouble. The ship would have been on its way and out of my area before anyone could have done anything, if that idiot who brought you ashore the day after it happened had only had the wits to push a paper at the crew before they knew what was going on, before they knew what it contained.’ He looked up at Ash. ‘Before you started interfering, Señor Ash.’