Cocaine Nights

by J. G. Ballard

  'The windows would have been closed. The entire house was air-conditioned.' Hennessy tried to steer me across the terrace, a curator at closing time ushering a last visitor to the exit. 'We're all concerned for Frank, and absolutely mystified by the whole tragic business. But try to use a little imagination.'

  'I'm probably using too much… I assume they were all identified?'

  'With some difficulty. Dental records, I suppose, though I don't think either of the Hollingers had any teeth. Perhaps there are clues in the jawbone.'

  'What were the Hollingers like? They were both in their seventies?'

  'He was seventy-five. She was quite a bit younger. Late sixties, I imagine.' Hennessy smiled to himself, as if fondly remembering a choice wine. 'Good-looking woman, in an actressy way, though a little too ladylike for me.'

  'And they came here twenty years ago? Estrella de Mar must have been very different then.'

  'There was nothing to see, just bare hillsides and a few old vines. A collection of fishermen's shacks and a small bar. Hollinger bought the house from a Spanish property developer he worked with. Believe me, it was a beautiful place.'

  'And I can imagine how the Hollingers felt as all this cement crawled up the hill towards them. Were they popular here? Hollinger was rich enough to put a spoke into a lot of wheels.'

  'They were fairly popular. We didn't see too much of them at the club, though Hollinger was a major investor. I suspect they assumed it was going to be for their exclusive use.'

  'But then the gold medallions started to arrive?'

  'I don't think they worried about gold medallions. Gold was one of Hollinger's favourite colours. Estrella de Mar had begun to change. He and Alice were more put off by the art galleries and the Tom Stoppard revivals. They kept to themselves. In fact, I believe he was trying to sell his interest in the club.'

  Hennessy reluctantly followed me along the terrace. A narrow balcony circled the house and led to a stone staircase that climbed the hillside fifty feet away. A grove of lemon trees had once filled the bedroom windows with their oily scent, but the fire-storm had driven through them, and now only the charred stumps rose from the ground like a forest of black umbrellas.

  'Good God, there's a fire escape…' I pointed to the cast-iron steps that descended from a doorway on the first floor. The massive structure had been warped by the heat, but still clung to the stone walls. 'Why didn't they use this? They would have been safe in seconds.'

  Hennessy removed his hat in a gesture of respect for the victims. He stood with his head bowed before speaking. 'Charles, they never left their bedrooms. The fire was too intense. The whole house was a furnace.'

  'I can see that. Your local fire brigade didn't even begin to get it under control. Who alerted them, by the way?'

  Hennessy seemed hardly to have heard me. He turned his back on the house, and gazed at the sea. I sensed that he was telling me only what he knew I would learn elsewhere.

  'As a matter of fact, the alarm was raised by a passing motorist. No one called the fire services from here.'

  'And the police?'

  'They didn't arrive until an hour later. You have to understand that the Spanish police leave us very much to ourselves. Few crimes are ever reported in Estrella de Mar. We have our own security patrols and they keep an eye on things.'

  'The police and fire services were called only later…' I repeated this to myself, visualizing the arsonist making his escape across the deserted terrace and then climbing the outer wall as the flames roared through the great roof. 'So, apart from the housekeeper and her husband there was no one here?'

  'Not exactly.' Hennessy replaced his hat, lowering the brim over his eyes. 'As it happens, everyone was here.'

  'Everyone? Do you mean the staff?'

  'No, I mean…' Hennessy gestured with his pale hands at the town below. 'Le tout Estrella de Mar. It was the Queen's birthday. The Hollingers always threw a party for the club members. It was their contribution to community Ufe-a touch of noblesse oblige about it, I have to admit, but they were rather nice shows. Champagne and excellent canapés…'

  I cupped my hands and stared at the Club Nautico, visualizing the entire membership decamping to the Hollinger mansion for the loyal toast. 'The fire took place on the night of the party… that was why the club had closed. How many people were actually here when it started?'

  'Everyone. I think all the guests had arrived. I suppose there were about… two hundred of us.'

  'Two hundred people?' I walked back to the south face of the house, where the balcony overlooked the swimming pool and terrace. I imagined the trestle tables decked in white cloths, the ice-buckets gleaming in the evening lights, and the guests chattering beside the unruffled water. 'There were all these people here, at least two hundred of them, and no one entered the house and tried to save the Hollingers?'

  'Dear boy, the doors were locked.'

  'At a party? I don't get it. You could have broken in.'

  'Security glass. The house was filled with paintings and objects d'art, not to mention Alice 's jewellery. In previous years there'd been pilfering and cigarette burns on the carpets.'

  'Even so. Besides, what were the Hollingers doing indoors? Why weren't they out here mingling with their guests?' *

  'The Hollingers weren't the mingling type.' Hennessy gestured patiently. 'They'd greet a few old friends, but I don't think they ever joined the other guests. It was all rather regal. They kept an eye on things from the first-floor veranda. Hollinger proposed the Queen's toast from there, and Alice would wave and acknowledge the cheers.'

  We had reached the swimming pool, where Miguel was raking the floating debris from the water at the shallow end. Piles of wet charcoal lay on the marble verge. The ice-bucket floated past us, an unravelled cigar inside it.

  'David, I can't understand all this. The whole thing seems…' I waited until Hennessy was forced to meet my eyes. 'Two hundred people are standing by a swimming pool when a fire starts. There are ice-buckets, punchbowls, bottles of champagne and mineral water, enough to dowse a volcano.

  But no one seems to have moved a finger. That's the eerie thing. No one called the police or fire brigade. What did you do – just stand here?'

  Hennessy had begun to tire of me, his gaze fixed on his car. 'What else was there to do? There was tremendous panic, people were falling into the pool and running off in all directions. No one had time to think of the police.'

  'And what about Frank? Was he here?'

  'Very much so. We stood together during the Queen's toast. After that he started circulating, as he always does. I can't be sure I saw him again.'

  'But in the minutes before the fire started? Tell me, did anyone see Frank light the fire?'

  'Of course not. It's unthinkable.' Hennessy turned to stare at me. 'For heaven's sake, old chap, Frank is your brother.'

  'But he was found with a bottle of ether in his hands. Didn't it strike you as a little odd?'

  'That was three or four hours later, when the police arrived at the club. It may have been planted in his apartment, who knows?' Hennessy patted my shoulders, as if reassuring a disappointed member of his Lloyd's syndicate. 'Look, Charles, give yourself time to take it all in. Talk to as many people as you want-they'll all tell you the same story, appalling as it is. No one thinks Frank was responsible, but at the same time it's not clear who else could have started the fire.'

  I waited for him as he walked around the pool and spoke to Miguel. A few banknotes changed hands, which the Spaniard slipped into his pocket with a grimace of distaste. Rarely taking his eyes from me, he followed us on foot as we drove past the ash-covered tennis court. I sensed that he wanted to speak to me, but he operated the gate controls without a word, a faint tic jumping across his scarred cheek.

  'Unnerving fellow,' I commented as we rolled away. 'Tell me, was Bobby Crawford at the party? The tennis professional?'

  For once Hennessy answered promptly. 'No, he wasn't. He stayed behind at the
club, playing tennis with that machine of his. I don't think he cared overmuch for the Hollingers. Nor they for him…'

  Hennessy returned us to the Club Nautico, and left me with the keys to Frank's apartment. When we parted at the door of his office he was clearly glad to be rid of me, and I guessed that I was already becoming a mild embarrassment to the club and its members. Yet he knew that Frank could not have started the fire or taken even the smallest role in the conspiracy to kill the Hollingers. The confession, however preposterous, had stopped the clock, and no one seemed able to think beyond his guilty plea to the far larger question mark that presided over the gutted mansion.

  I spent the afternoon tidying Frank's apartment. I replaced the books on the shelves, remade the bed and straightened the dented lampshades. The grooves in the sitting-room rugs indicated where the sofa, easy chairs and desk had stood before the police search. Pushing them back into place, I felt like a props man on a darkened stage, preparing the scene for the next day's performance.

  The castors settled into their familiar ruts, but little else in Frank's world fitted together. I hung his scattered shirts in the wardrobe, and carefully folded the antique lace shawl in which we had both been wrapped as babies. After our mother's death Frank had retrieved the shawl from the bundle of clothes that Father had consigned to a Riyadh charity. The ancient fabric, inherited from his grandmother, was as grey and delicate as a folded cobweb.

  I sat at Frank's desk, flicking through his cheque-book stubs and credit-card receipts, hoping for a pointer to his involvement with the Hollingers. The drawers were filled with a clutter of old wedding invitations, insurance renewal notices, holiday postcards from friends, French and English coins, and a health passport with its out-of-date tetanus and typhoid vaccinations, the trivia of everyday life that we shed like our skins.

  Surprisingly, Inspector Cabrera's men had missed a small sachet of cocaine tucked into an envelope filled with foreign stamps that Frank had torn from his overseas mail and was evidently collecting for a colleague's child. I fingered the plastic sachet, tempted to help myself to this forgotten cache, but I was too unsettled by the visit to the Hollinger house.

  In the centre drawer was an old photographic album that Mother had kept as a girl in Bognor Regis. Its chocolate-box covers and marbled pages with their art nouveau frames seemed as remote as the Charleston and the Hispano-Suiza. The black and white snaps showed an over-eager little girl trying hopelessly to build a pebble castle on a shingle beach, beaming shyly by her father's side and pinning the tail on a donkey at a birthday party. The flat sunless world was an ominous start for a child so clearly straining to be happy, and scant preparation for her marriage to an ambitious young historian and Arabist. Prophetically, the collection came to a sudden end a year after her arrival at Riyadh, as if the blank pages said everything about her growing depression.

  After a quiet dinner in the deserted restaurant I fell asleep on the sofa, the album across my chest, and woke after midnight as a boisterous party spilled from the disco on to the terrace of the swimming pool. Two men in white dinner jackets were splashing across the pool, wine glasses raised to toast their wives, who were stripping to their underwear beside the diving board. A drunken young woman in a gold sheath dress tottered along the verge, snatched off her stiletto shoes and hurled them into the water.

  Frank's absence had liberated his members, transforming the Club Nautico into an intriguing mix of casino and bordello. When I left the apartment to return to Los Monteros an amorous couple were testing the locked doors in the corridor. Almost all the staff had left for home, and the restaurant and bridge rooms were in darkness, but strobe lights from the disco veered across the entrance. Three young women stood on the steps, dressed like amateur whores in micro-skirts, fishnet tights and scarlet bustiers. I guessed that they were members of the club on the way to a costume party, and was tempted to offer them a lift, but they were busily checking a list of telephone numbers.

  The car park was unlit, and I blundered among the lines of vehicles, feeling for the door latch of the rented Renault. Sitting behind the wheel, I listened to the boom of the disco drumming at the night. In a Porsche parked nearby a large white dog was jumping across the seats, unsettled by the noise and eager to see its owner.

  I searched the shroud of the steering column for the ignition switch. When my eyes sharpened I realized that the dog was a man in a cream tuxedo, struggling with someone he had pinned against the passenger seat. In the brief pause between the disco numbers I heard a woman's shout, little more than an exhausted gasp. Her hands reached to the roof above the man's head and tore at the fabric.

  Twenty feet away from me a rape was taking place. I switched on the headlamps and sounded three long blasts on the horn. As I stepped on to the gravel the Porsche's door sprang open, striking the vehicle beside it. The would-be rapist leapt from the car, the tuxedo almost stripped from his back by the frantic victim. He swerved away through the darkness, leaping between the Renault's headlamps. I ran after him, but he raced across the knoll beside the gates, straightened the tuxedo with a careless shrug, and vanished into the night.

  The woman sat in the passenger seat of the Porsche, her bare feet protruding through the door, skirt around her waist. Her blonde hair gleamed with the attacker's saliva, and her blurred lipstick gave her a child's jamjar face. She pulled her torn underwear up her thighs and retched on to the gravel, then reached into the back seat and retrieved her shoes, brushing the torn roof liner from her face.

  A few steps away was the booth from which the parking attendant kept watch on his charges during the day and evening. I leaned across the counter and snapped down the master switch of the lighting system, flooding the car park with a harsh fluorescence.

  The woman frowned at the sudden glare, hid her eyes behind a silver purse and hobbled on a broken heel towards the entrance of the club, creased skirt over her ripped tights.

  'Wait!' I shouted to her. 'I'll call the police for you…'

  I was about to follow her when I noticed the row of parked cars that faced the Porsche across the access lane. Several of the front seats were occupied by the drivers and their passengers, all in evening dress, faces concealed by the lowered sun vizors. They had watched the rape attempt without intervening, like a gallery audience at an exclusive private view.

  'What are you people playing at?' I shouted. 'For God's sake…'

  I walked towards them, angry that they had failed to save the bruised woman, and drummed my bandaged fist on the windshields. But the drivers had started their engines. Following each other, they swerved past me towards the gates, the women shielding their eyes behind their hands.

  I returned to the club, trying to find the victim of the assault. The fancy-dress whores stood in the lobby, phone lists in hand, but turned towards me as I strode up the steps.

  'Where is she?' I called to them. 'She was damn nearly raped out there. Did you see her come in?'

  The three gazed wide-eyed at each other, and then began to giggle together, minds slewing across some crazed amphetamine space. One of them touched my cheek, as if calming a child.

  I searched the women's rest-room, kicking back the doors of the cubicles, and then blundered through the tables of the darkened restaurant, trying to catch the scent of heliotrope that the woman had left on the night air. At last I saw her beside the pool, dancing shoeless on the flooded grass, the backs of her hands smeared with lipstick, smiling at me in a knowing way when I walked towards her and tried to take her arm.

  5 A Gathering of the Clan

  Funerals celebrate another frontier crossing, in many ways the most formal and protracted of all. As the mourners waited in the Protestant cemetery, dressed in their darkest clothes, it struck me that they resembled a party of well-to-do emigrants, standing patiently at a hostile customs post and aware that however long they waited only one of them would be admitted that day.

  In front of me were Blanche and Marion Keswick, two jaunty Engli
shwomen who ran the Restaurant du Cap, an elegant brasserie by the harbour. Their black silk suits shone in the fierce sun, a sheen of melting tar, but both were cool and self-composed, as if still keeping a proprietary eye on their Spanish cashiers. Despite the large tip I had left the previous evening, they had scarcely smiled when I complimented them on their cuisine.

  Yet for some reason they now seemed more friendly. When I stepped past them, hoping to photograph the ceremony, Marion held my arm with a gloved hand.

  'Mr Prentice? You're not leaving so soon? Nothing has happened.'

  'I think everything has happened,' I rejoined. 'Don't worry, I'll stay to the end.'

  'You look so anxious.' Blanche straightened my tie. 'I know the grave yawns, but there's no room for you there, even though she's the merest slip of a thing. In fact, they could almost use a child's casket. I wish your brother were here, Mr Prentice. He was very fond of Bibi.'

  'I'm glad to hear it. Still, it's a fine send-off.' I gestured at the fifty or so mourners waiting by the open grave. 'So many people have turned up.'

  'Of course,' Blanche affirmed. 'Bibi Jansen was immensely popular, and not only with the younger set. In some ways it's a pity she ever went to live with the Hollingers. I know they meant well but…'

  'It was a terrible tragedy,' I told her. 'David Hennessy drove me to the house a few days ago.'

  'So I heard.' Marion glanced at my dusty shoes. 'David's setting himself up as some sort of tour guide, I fear. He can't resist putting a finger in every pie. I think he has a taste for the macabre.'

  'It was a tragedy.' Blanche's eyes were sealed within the dark wells of her sunglasses, a lightless world. 'But let's say the sort that brings people together. Estrella de Mar is far closer after all this.'

  Other mourners were arriving, a remarkable turn-out for a junior domestic. The bodies of Hollinger, his wife and their niece Anne, together with the secretary, Roger Sansom, had been flown to England, and I assumed that those attending the burial of the Swedish maid were paying their respects to all five victims of the fire.