But it didn’t stop her thinking about Luc for long. She’d believed him, as she was sick, vomiting, exploding with diarrhea, lying helpless on the floor, at her very worst, when he’d said, “I love you so much . . . Like this most of all.” She’d believed him. At that moment, she’d loved him too.
And then she remembered how he had knelt down beside Minka when she was vomiting next to the car outside the customs building, and wiped her face with a piece of cloth he’d torn from his shirt. So, the way he’d been with Aegina—the sweetness toward someone who was being sick—was nothing special. A dog, sniffing smells, would have behaved the same.
Thirteen
Once Lulu finished speaking with Luc on the phone, it had been impossible to get any more information from the Guardia Civil in Algeciras. Nobody knew anything, except, of course, that it was muy grave, very grave, señora, making it sound like murder.
She believed Luc when he said he and Aegina hadn’t been foolish enough to try to smuggle drugs, but they’d been stupid enough to get a lift in a car whose panels had been filled with hashish. It was not a good time to be stopped with drugs. The Spanish newspapers were filled with lurid stories featuring the highly visible efforts of the Guardia Civil or the agents of the aduana at apprehending hippies who apparently couldn’t go anywhere without kilos of marijuana. What smuggler wouldn’t want to cloak himself with a pair of hapless children to give the appearance of a holidaymaking family? The silly fools.
Lulu knew, by instinct and preference, that she would get nowhere trying to deal with the authorities in Algeciras or enlisting lawyers either there or in Mallorca. She needed to go to the top, to someone with immense clout who, with a few words, or the correct conduit of pesetas, in the right quarter, would bring the matter to a speedy conclusion.
She knew such a person. She dialed a telephone number.
“Hello, Barty. How are you?”
“I am well, Lulu,” replied the deep, cigar and single-malt voice that sounded inordinately pleased to hear from her. “How very charming it is to hear from you. How are you?” He spoke in fluent English, his madrileño accent barely apparent.
“I’m afraid I’m not ringing you about anything pleasant, Barty. I have a problem.”
“I am sorry to hear it, querida.” Bartolomé Llobet’s voice conveyed true sympathy. “What can I do?”
Lulu outlined the situation. Luc and a girl arrested getting off the ferry in Algeciras for being in a car packed with drugs—
“What drugs, querida?”
“You know, pot. Hashish, or kif, whatever it is that everyone gets caught with now.”
“Nothing else? Not heroin?”
“Good lord no, certainly not that I’ve heard of. It wasn’t theirs, they were simply being given a lift by the smugglers.”
“Of course. When did this happen, Lulu?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I only got a call from Luc just now.”
Llobet said: “Algeciras . . .” Bless him, Lulu could actually hear him writing down the details. “. . . and the ferry came from Tangier or Ceuta?”
“Tangier, Barty.”
“Bueno. I will do what I can, querida. It should not be too bad if there are no other drugs involved. It depends of course, on the circumstances, who these other people are, what have you.”
“Barty, you sound as if you know something about it.”
“Claro. I have children, no?”
“They haven’t been in trouble, not like this, have they? I’ve never heard anything.”
The quick breeze of air through a forest of nostril hair in the phone’s mouthpiece—an amused exhalation. “Exactly. Bueno, I will call you this afternoon.”
“You’re a lovely man, Barty.”
“Sí. Well, I was once, no?”
“Of course, you still are.”
He clicked off.
That should do it, thought Lulu.
• • •
Of course, you must absolutely go, Lulu,” said Milly. “Tom and I will manage everything.”
They were having breakfast on the terrace outside the sitting room. Milly was a large woman—six feet tall and built like a letter box—dressed in efficient English holiday mufti: Aertex shirt, cotton skirt, enormous plimsolls. Tom, sitting nearby with an old newspaper, looked like a scoutmaster. There was no question of their ability to manage the Rocks for a few days. India had been run for a hundred years by such people. Now they were doing perfectly well without an Empire. Bankrolled by Milly’s inheritance, Tom had recently built a machine that popped out thousands of plastic punnets to package and protect fruits and vegetables. His company was now selling machines and punnets that had revolutionized the transport and sale of supermarket produce all over England, and he was getting rich. However, they always found the time to come down to Mallorca. There was no one else Lulu would have left in charge of the place.
“We’ll keep the fires stoked, the animals fed,” said Tom.
“Bless you,” said Lulu. “I won’t go yet, though. No point being there until Barty’s done his job. Then I shall go and bring him home.”
Fourteen
We are conducting an investigation,” Teniente Coronel Ruiz told the Englishman, making it sound like a procedure at the highest level of Interpol. “I cannot tell you what will happen to your daughter, Señor”—he looked down again at the sheet in front of him . . . the names of these English—“Señor Ruteleje. She will remain in custody for now, until such a time that the investigation is concluded, when she will face a trial or she will be freed, or fined perhaps, depending on the charges.”
“I understand, Teniente Coronel,” said the Rutledge. “So she has not yet been charged with any offense?”
Astonishingly, the inglés had correctly determined Ruiz’s rank from the insignia of his epaulettes. “No. As I say, this is pending the outcome of the investigation. I can tell you, however,” said Ruiz, looking balefully across his desk at the Rutledge, “that she and her friend, the American Franklin, crossed from Algeciras to Tangier on the same ferry as the owner of the car, the German Zenf, one week ago. Did you know this?”
“No,” said the Rutledge, looking newly alarmed.
Ruiz shrugged. “It may be only a coincidence, but it could indicate a design, a plan.” That was all he needed to say—normally something he would have enjoyed imparting—but for some reason he felt himself unbending. “It does appear however, that there is no previous connection between your daughter and Franklin and this Zenf and his companion, the Montenegrin woman”—he looked down again, another impossible name—“Kovačević, who have been traveling together for some time. On the face of it, their story that they were simply given a ride when their car met with an accident—we are checking with the Moroccan police for verification of this accident—sounds not entirely unreasonable. It will depend if the association is considered circumstantial rather than complicit. Probably it will be more a question of some proof that will appear, or not, to implicate them, rather than that they will have to prove their uninvolvement.”
“I understand. Can I see my daughter?”
The Rutledge was even wearing a tie. A man of modest means, Ruiz realized, taking in the cloth and cut of his blazer, which appeared to be the sort of garment that sold for a few hundred pesetas at the Saturday market. “Of course. Cabo Primero.” Ruiz instructed his corporal to take the inglés to the cells to visit his daughter.
“Thank you,” said the Rutledge.
Very polite, respectful. Unlike the demanding and threatening Llobet, who had called again about the American Franklin, this time invoking the name and influence of a senador of the Junta de Andalucía if Ruiz could not provide details of any movement in the case. The Llobet did not seem aware of the Rutledge girl’s being involved, or even the Zenf and the other woman or any of the basic facts of the apprehension. He just wanted results for th
e Franklin. Ruiz, like any proper official at his level, was a master of dissembling obfuscation, and assured the Llobet that he was pursuing every avenue of the furtherance of the case of the American Franklin.
On the third afternoon, Rutledge came in, nodded at Ruiz and said, “Bona tarda,” slipping, absentmindedly it seemed, into Catalan, instead of his usual Buenas tardes.
“Bona tarda, Señor Ruteleje,” Ruiz responded. “We have heard from the Moroccan police. They have found a vehicle, a Renault, with French license plates, severely damaged, inoperable. This conforms to statements made by your daughter and the American Franklin, and indeed the German and the Montenegrin woman. This could be seen as a corroboration of the innocence of your daughter and her friend.”
“Wonderful,” said Rutledge. “May I see my daughter?”
“Of course. Cabo Primero.”
The corporal, normally at a desk in the adjoining room, did not respond. Ruiz craned his head to see through a door. He stood up. “I will take you up myself, Señor Ruteleje.”
They climbed stairs to the second floor and walked down a linoleum-floored corridor to the holding cells. Ruiz instructed the cabo at the duty desk to bring the female prisoner Ruteleje to the visitor’s room. He waited for a moment with the Englishman.
“Have you had much trouble with her?” Ruiz asked.
“My daughter? No, never. Nothing like this. She is an artist. Her interest is in painting.”
The cabo returned with the prisoner. Ruiz had observed some of the interrogation of the Zenf but he had not encountered any of the others in the case. He was surprised to see that the sandy-haired Englishman’s daughter looked absolutely Spanish. As dark as any local girl. When she saw the Rutledge, she said, “Hallo, Papa.”
“This is your daughter?” asked Ruiz.
“Yes,” said Gerald. “Aegina”—still speaking Spanish—“this is Teniente Coronel Ruiz. He was kind enough to bring me up to see you.”
With her few simple words of thanks, Ruiz placed her accent—and now the Englishman’s, which he had remarked several times but it had been harder with him. The nasally flattening of the vowels: Catalan from the Balearic Islands.
“Pues, bona tarda,” Ruiz said to both of them.
“Bona tarda,” said the girl pleasantly, acknowledging the shift to Catalan.
An hour later, when Gerald came downstairs, Ruiz said: “One would say that your daughter is absolutely Spanish.” He held up Aegina’s British passport, looking at the photograph and details in it. “She was born in Mallorca. She is truly your child?”
“Oh, yes,” said Gerald. He set his rucksack on the floor and pulled out the envelope of papers he had brought from home. He knew from long experience the midlevel Latin official’s pathological inquisitiveness and devotion to documentation which, when offered in the right circumstances, could particularize and humanize a subject under the power of such an authority. He now handed Aegina’s birth certificate to Ruiz, who took it and scrutinized it intently. Aegina María Rutledge y Puig; Madre: Paloma Teresa Puig y Froix; Padre: Gerald Desmond Anthony Rutledge; Fecha: 13 mayo 1952. Lugar: Cala Marsopa, Mallorca, España.
Gerald spread some photographs on the desk, and Ruiz looked through them with unguarded curiosity. Black-and-white with serrated borders, mostly of the little girl with her mother, a handsome woman, in whom Ruiz saw the daughter he had seen upstairs. Several of the three of them: the younger Englishman, stick thin, at a restaurant with the woman and the girl, now aged about five or six, their faces and the tabletop overexposed with flash, a dark bodega in the background. Another photo showed them perched on rocks above the sea, a bottle and some bread around them. They looked happy.
“My family,” said Gerald.
“Very attractive,” said Ruiz. “The mother is mallorquina?”
“Yes. She was. She is dead.”
Ruiz’s face clouded. He looked at Gerald. “I am sorry for you.”
“Thank you.”
“And you still live in Mallorca?”
“Yes,” said Gerald. He reached down and drew an unlabeled liter bottle of olive oil from his rucksack. He placed it on Ruiz’s desk. “I have a small farm. I make olive oil. With your permission, I would like to give you this bottle.
“It is not necessary, Señor Ruteleje.”
“I understand, but I would like you to have it. You’ve been very sympathetic. Besides, it’s good. You will like it.”
Fifteen
You look seedy, Gerald,” Lulu said, as she sat down at a nearby table. “The jacket and tie don’t help, you know. They make you look like an indigent lining up for alms. How long have you been here?”
“A week. I got here the second day after they were arrested.”
The café was the only one close to the Guardia Civil station; its awning over the outside tables was already necessary at nine a.m. Gerald had come here to sit and read the wretched but compelling Diario del Pueblo with his coffee every morning before visiting hours.
He opened his mouth to say something, but Lulu turned her attention to the waiter who was now standing raptly beside her.
“Un café, por favor.”
“Muy bien, y algo—?”
“Nada más.”
The waiter bobbed his head and spun away.
Gerald had been shocked to see her inside the Guardia station when he arrived at nine o’clock this morning—there would no visiting today, as Aegina and Luc were being released at eleven—and he left, embarrassed, when she began to harangue Teniente Coronel Ruiz about the delay in releasing her son.
Now she sat two meters away, gazing serenely at the stout Spanish women, genetically evolved by eons of domestic practice, moving stolidly like mules with their loaded baskets across the plaza from the large mercado building. Gerald couldn’t take his eyes off her. Apart from a single accidental encounter outside Comestibles Calix a few years earlier, he hadn’t been this close to her for twenty years. Her hair, which he had loved so very much, which had begun to gray before he met her, was now completely white except for a few tendrils of black at the nape of her slim neck beneath the gathered mass held aloft with some sort of spike. She was his age, forty-five, but her skin was taut across her face and beneath her jaw, and her figure, from what he could tell beneath the loose linen trousers and shirt, seemed more wiry than he had known it, the softness now muscle and sinew. He remembered her without the trousers and shirt.
Then he noticed the scar on her chin: so small now, a thin white curve, almost unseen unless you knew to look.
“Did you ever get the film—a roll of film—I gave Milly to give you?” Gerald asked. “You were supposed to develop it.”
She ignored him, or didn’t hear him, as the waiter returned with her coffee. She sipped.
“I lured them away, you know—”
She interrupted him. “And what have you been doing in Algeciras while I’ve been campaigning for their release?”
“I’m sorry . . . you’ve been what?”
“You know they’re being released this morning?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you have any idea why?”
“I think I do, actually.”
“Well you don’t seem very surprised. Or grateful.”
“I’m very grateful to Coronel Ruiz, who’s been quite sympathetic, as a matter of fact. More so than you may know. He’s taken it off his own bat to look into their case and see that—”
“Gerald, you’re an ignorant man. Do you actually think that uniform in there is letting them go because he’s being nice? Done a good little policeman’s job? I have asked friends, Gerald, people you couldn’t possibly know or imagine, who, as a personal favor to me, have interceded at the highest level to effect my son’s release, and, only incidentally, your daughter’s. And what have you been doing? Sitting here for a week like a fly waiting for a
window to be opened. Was that your plan?”
Gerald thought over what Lulu had said. Perhaps she was right, and she’d done it all. “I had no plan actually. Other than to be here for Aegina to do whatever I might for her. But, well, thank you, then, for your intercession, whatever you’ve done to help them out. Well done. Thank you.” Gerald picked up his coffee cup and sipped. He looked down at his newspaper, but he saw instead the hulking cliffs of Sicily and felt a stab of acute shame.
“I lured them away, you know. Those—”
A man approached them. He stopped between their tables and looked at them both.
Abruptly, Lulu rose. She stared at the man, then at Gerald. “This is absurd,” she said. She walked briskly away.
Gerald looked at him. He wore a dark gray suit. Older now, graying—his own age—but Gerald recognized him. The man with the baby along the road . . . eighteen, nineteen years before.
The man held out his hand. “Bernie Franklin. I’m Luc’s father. You must be Gerald. I don’t think we’ve ever met.”
“No.”
“Thanks for being here. I didn’t know anything about it until yesterday. But they’re releasing them today, right?”
“Yes.”
“Can I join you?” asked Bernie.
“Of course.”
They sat down. The waiter came out and they ordered more coffee. They talked about their kids.
• • •
At ten o’clock, Lulu, Gerald, and Bernie were sitting on steel chairs in the office. Gerald had hoped for another chance to speak to Lulu, but Bernie’s presence stopped him. No one spoke. Then one of the cabos brought Luc and Aegina into the office.
Lulu stood up and strode to Luc. “Are you all right?” she said sharply.
“Yes, Mother,” he said. “Sorry for the trouble.”
Bernie walked forward and gripped Luc’s arm. Aegina crossed the office quickly to embrace Gerald. She kept her eyes on her father.
The Rocks Page 24
