Playing Dead

by Jessie Keane

  ‘I have you to thank for that.’

  ‘De nada.’ It’s nothing.

  ‘Can you show me the spot? The exact place where you found me?’ He wanted to see it; maybe it would jog some hidden memory, who knew?

  ‘Sí,’ said Jaime, and headed off down the path to where it grew rockier, more difficult to traverse. The man felt his freshly healed ankles twinge in reproach as he scrambled after the boy, going off the main path and out over the crashing dark blue ocean to a small ledge.

  At last, Jaime stopped, pointed. ‘Here. Here is where I found you.’

  The man looked at the place where he had almost lost his life. It was a narrow ledge, rocky, treacherous. If he had fallen from above, he could so easily have missed it altogether, and gone straight down onto the rocks and then into the ocean far below.

  ‘Do you think you fell, señor?’ asked Jaime, holding up an arm to squint against the sun.

  ‘Must have done,’ said the man.

  ‘From right up there, at the top,’ said Jaime. ‘You think?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  The man looked up too; the sun dazzled him. He raised an arm, peered upwards. He thought he could see a low wall, way up there above the crags and rocky outcrops, but the blinding intensity of the light made it difficult to be sure.

  ‘What’s up there?’ he asked Jaime.

  ‘I never go up that far,’ said Jaime, shrugging.

  The man decided right then and there that he would.

  It was days later when he managed to find the time to go up the track where it continued into the more mountainous terrain beyond the monastery. He was busy helping the brothers with the digging in their vegetable garden, wanting to pay them in kind since he had no other way to earn his keep.

  When he got a spare hour or two and the brothers were at prayer, he washed, slipped on clean shorts and a shirt, and started walking up the track. It was a hot day, baking; the heat haze shimmered on the rough road ahead of him. One of his ankles gave a twinge, but behaved itself. He breathed in the fresh mountain air and felt liberated, at peace as he strode along. Yet still there was that niggling feeling of suppressed urgency, of something missing, something that should be found.

  It took nearly three-quarters of an hour to reach a closed set of intricately fashioned, high wrought-iron gates. They were padlocked and there was a thin strand of barbed wire across the top of them. He stared at the gates; seemed in some unplumbed part of his brain to know them. He looked to left and right. All was still and silent. A lone buzzard circled lazily overhead, but no other living thing disturbed the peace of the place. He was alone.

  The man took off his shirt and threw it over the top of the gates, then scrambled up and – using his shirt as protection against the barbs – levered himself over the top and down the other side.

  He pulled the shirt down, put it back on and started to walk down the driveway. Into his brain, sharp as the scent of lemons, drifted a name: Rufio.

  There was a small gatehouse on his left.

  Rufio lives here, he thought. With . . . with Inez.

  Now he had a picture in his mind of Rufio, middle-aged and beaming smiles in all directions, shinning up the date palms with his machete to make them neat and pristine every year.

  And Inez . . . gently smiling Inez, gabbling away in fast Mallorquin while she prepared lunch for . . . but there the memory stopped.

  He paused by the little finca. Jesus, I know the people who live here. Rufio and Inez.

  He stored the names away like a pirate storing treasure, adding them to the bank of memories – the luxurious Jaguar car, the beautiful dark-haired girl – that he was beginning to accumulate.

  Then he stepped onto the terrace under the rickety old pergola at the side of the finca. A vivid magenta bougainvillea was tumbling over the tired-looking structure, shading the terrace beneath it. After a moment’s hesitation, he tried the old door, which was painted a faded sky-blue. It was locked.

  ‘Hello?’ he called, and knocked on the door.

  Only silence answered him.

  A car – shouldn’t there be a car? Rufio had driven one, he somehow knew that, but he couldn’t remember the make. There was no car here. He stepped out from the terrace and walked on down the drive, each step giving him the weird feeling that he had trodden this path before, that everything about it was familiar . . . and yet now so strange.

  There was a big villa down here, way down around a bend in the drive, hidden from the track. As he approached it he could hear the rush and suck of the sea far off down the mountainside. He could see the big freeform swimming pool, which was empty of water. He stepped onto the terrace between the villa and the pool, looked at the four sun beds set out so neatly. All empty. The whole place was empty. There was no one here, except him.

  Suddenly he felt dizzy. He sat down on one of the beds, clutching his head. Images swirled into his brain with nauseating force. He looked up, his eyes watering, across the empty pool to where there was a low wall. He staggered to his feet and went over there, looking over the wall at the rocks below, the sea battering them far down there at the base of the cliff.

  A big man, very strong, dark eyes. Implacable. Set on killing him.

  There had been two of them, grabbing him, throwing him over. His hands clutching wildly at the wall, his feet dangling in space. Heavy feet crushing his fingers so that he fell . . . and fell . . . and fell.

  He remembered the fall. Oh shit, he remembered the fall. Hideous, never-ending. And then the impact; the bone-crushing collision of flesh on rock. Shattering pain shooting up his arms and his legs, and then blackness followed by hours of baking, merciless sun. How long had he lain there? He couldn’t even guess.

  The world spun. He sat down on the wall. Looked around him. The pool house, there had been a pool house, but now it was missing. There had been an explosion. Screaming. A shot. More pictures thundered into his mind, a crazy ghost-whirl of faces and scenes and bodies. A blonde girl, shrieking. And . . .

  He sank his head into his hands and a loud sob escaped him.

  Jonjo.

  His brother.

  Jonjo had died here. He could see now how it had been: the shot fired, the red flower blooming between Jonjo’s rapidly glazing eyes. Screams and shouts and a child singing a French song.

  The man stiffened and shot to his feet. A child, there was a child, a girl, his girl.

  Layla.

  He looked around him wildly, his cheeks wet with tears.

  ‘Layla!’ he roared at the top of his voice.

  And there was a woman. There was that woman again, in his brain. He half fell and half ran over to the door of the villa and beat upon it with his fists.

  ‘Annie!’ he shouted.

  Then he stopped hammering at the door and stood there, amazed, staring at the tiles of the terrace and thinking, with total clarity, Annie Carter. My wife. Layla. My daughter. My brother, Jonjo, and there was a blonde with him.

  And I . . . oh fuck, I’m Max Carter.

  ‘I’m Max Carter!’ he shouted to the uncaring world.

  He wasn’t a soldier, although commanding troops was meat and drink to him. He knew who he was, he knew where he’d come from. He thumped the door again, uselessly. He knew there was no one here. But they should be here . . . shouldn’t they?

  But time had passed. So much time.

  What the fuck happened? he wondered crazily.

  Annie, Layla and the blonde.

  The men had killed Jonjo. They thought they had killed him, too. The blonde? Who knew? The little girl, his daughter, Layla . . . where was she?

  And Annie. The woman was there in his mind again, beautiful, alluring . . . his woman. And where the hell was she? What could have happened to her? Over two years had passed, so now where was she? Where was his child?

  With a bellow of rage and frustration, he shoulder-charged the door.

  Chapter 29

  Inside the villa it was so cool, so quiet. Every s
tep he took filled him with an eerie sense of déjà vu. He knew this place; he had lived here. He could be blindfolded and he would know where the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom was.

  It was to the master bedroom that he went first, pausing inside the door to stare at the double bed. Images again. His body locked in love with a woman, his wife: Annie.

  He went over to the bed and sat down on the side of it, running a shaking hand over the remembered silkiness of the purple bedspread. The colour was familiar too, he knew it; knew how luminous her skin looked against its jewel-like darkness.

  He sat there and thought about all the time that had passed. In February 1970 he had been thrown to his death. Now it was 1972. So much time. Where was she? Had the men killed her, killed Layla? If they hadn’t, if she was somewhere whole and well with his child, had she searched for him and been unable to find him?

  There was so much he didn’t know.

  He reached out for the drawer on ‘his’ side of the bed. There would be . . .

  There would be a gun in there. An old Smith & Wesson revolver, with a box of bullets.

  It wasn’t there.

  Keys too. There should be keys, and a ring – he remembered the ring he had worn now, gold with Egyptian cartouches on either side of a square slab of lapis lazuli.

  The keys weren’t there. Neither was the ring.

  Had the men taken all that? Robbed them, killed them all – and believed they had killed him, but by some miracle they had failed to succeed in that.

  Annie and Layla could be dead.

  He faced that, felt a howl of anguish building at the back of his throat even at the thought.

  He got to his feet, went over to the wardrobes. Empty.

  He slammed them shut again.

  Robbers, killers.

  He pushed the thought of Annie and Layla suffering, being hurt, being abused, being killed from his mind; it filled him with impotent, gut-churning anguish to contemplate that. Time had passed, so much time. What had become of them?

  He’d been an invalid for far too long, unable to even think, let alone act. And now . . . oh Christ, now his brain was full of horrific imaginings, his wife and child in pain and torment.

  Don’t think about it, he told himself. You mustn’t think about it.

  He relaxed, tried to focus. Breathed deeply. Steadily. In, out, in, out. Slower, slower. He looked down at his hands and realized that the nails were digging into his palms so hard that there were small crescents of blood rising there.

  As he calmed down, it came to him. Quickly, he left the bedroom and went back outside.

  Around the side of the building there was a short, narrow stretch of concrete pathway, and set into the centre of it was a circular drain cover. He knelt down, and levered the thing up, pushed it aside.

  Musty air wafted up, but no one had been in the property recently; there was no fresh stink of sewage. He lay down on the concrete and reached down inside the drain to a depth of six bricks. Stretching hard, he got a grip on one of the bricks lining the right-hand side of the drain and yanked at it. It hadn’t been moved for some time, and it crunched against fragmented mortar as he eased it from side to side, edging it out inch by inch, until he held it in his hand. Then he pulled the brick out and lay it on the grass nearby.

  Again, he lay flat on the path and stretched down into the drain, his fingers searching. They found what they were looking for and he pulled out a sealed transparent plastic bag. He sat up on the pathway and placed it on the concrete beside him. His fingers ripped impatiently at the bag, tearing it open; inside was a white cloth, wrapped around a big wedge of English bank notes, pesetas, keys and a passport. He put all the items back inside the cloth; the bag was beyond saving. Then he carefully placed the brick back down in the drain, and replaced the drain cover.

  After that, he walked all around the property to be sure they weren’t here. He knew in his heart they weren’t. The barbed wire on the locked gates, the sad abandoned air. No one was here. But where would Annie go, if she had escaped whatever mayhem had occurred that day?

  He thought he knew the answer to that one. He thought he knew the answer to everything now. She would go back to London, where Max Carter’s boys ran the streets of the East End, where they could give her shelter.

  ‘I know who I am,’ he told Benito when he found him two hours later, quietly reading his Bible in a shady corner of the physic garden.

  Benito looked up with the same calm, untroubled expression he always wore. ‘Oh? And who are you, my friend?’

  ‘I’m Max Carter,’ he said, slumping down beside Benito and staring out over the sun-dappled shrubberies with unseeing eyes.

  ‘At last we’ve got a name for you. That’s good news.’ Brother Benito gazed at him thoughtfully. ‘It suits you. And what does Max Carter do?’

  Max turned his head and gave Benito a crooked little smile.

  ‘I’m not a good man,’ he said regretfully. Into his mind came more memories, crowding for space. It seemed now that the memories could not get into his brain fast enough. His head was aching with their speed and their impact. Gang fights, characterized by vicious interaction. He could hear cries, screams, could hear the whirr of bicycle chains, see the glitter of knives lit by moonlight.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Benito. ‘Are you a soldier, as I thought?’

  ‘No.’ Max shook his head. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be shocked.’

  He was a gangster. A mobster. He had ruled the East End and people had quailed with fear and grovelled with dread and respect because he had power of life and death over them. He’d run rackets. He’d pulled heists. He’d provided protection and come down hard on those who had baulked at paying it. He told Benito all this, and told him too the things he had remembered up at the villa.

  ‘So you have a wife and child . . . and you have no idea where they are right now?’

  Max shook his head. ‘I have to find them. Benito, I have to leave. The sooner the better. I’ll need to borrow the car, go down into the town and use the phone.’

  ‘Of course. When?’

  ‘Now.’

  Max drove down the hill. He found a phone booth and made the call to the airport, then he went through all the rigmarole of phoning Jimmy Bond, his most trusted lieutenant, in England, but there was no answer. He drove back up to the monastery and joined the brothers for their evening meal.

  He was surprised to find that he felt genuinely sad to leave. There was such a peace to this place, he found himself suddenly reluctant to rejoin the outside world. But he had to.

  Next day, wearing borrowed clothes and with a small package of bread, meats and cheeses from Benito to sustain him, he said his final farewell to the monk who had become his friend.

  Benito shook hands warmly with Max, and Max handed him a large wad of pesetas.

  ‘I can’t—’ started Benito.

  ‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Max, pressing the money into his hand. ‘Buy some new tools for the garden, or whatever you need. And,’ Max fished in his shirt pocket and pulled out more cash, ‘give this to Jaime, will you? He saved my life.’

  ‘He was happy to do it. He doesn’t need a reward.’

  ‘He’s got one anyway,’ said Max, and refused to take any of it back. Without Jaime, without Benito, he would be dead and he knew it.

  Benito clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You take care now, my friend.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Max. ‘And you.’

  Having made his farewells, he set off for London, his heart full of dread, to find his family.

  Long Island

  Chapter 30

  Montauk, Long Island, USA

  August 1971

  After the explosion, the weirdest thing was, Annie couldn’t hear anything. People wearing yellow were bending over her, mouthing words, their faces taut with concern. There was no screaming, there was just this impression of people panicking, milling around, shouting for help.

  Inside her h
ead, there was only silence. She hugged it to her, trying to ignore the sour sickness that held her chest in a tight grip, the horrible cramping pain in her belly. If this was reality – this bewildering, frightening world of smoke and dust and the scent of cooked flesh – then she wanted none of it.

  Strange, dreamlike impressions moved across her vision. Alberto, kneeling in the sand beside her, his face anguished and soot-stained, his mouth working but no sound coming out.

  Oh fuck this.

  She had to get up, had to rejoin the living. But she couldn’t. All her efforts to rouse herself came to nothing more than the twitch of a leg, the faint, troubled movement of a hand.

  A hand.

  Had she really seen that, lying in the sand – that blackened, clawlike thing?

  She turned her head. The thing was gone. Maybe she had never seen it at all.

  But she knew she had.

  She knew she had a world of pain coming to her.

  She closed her eyes, tried to shut it out. Felt her stomach clench again, sharply, and bile surged into her throat. She felt terribly cold and started to shiver. Which was odd, because she knew the deck – what was left of the deck at the back of the house – was alight with hot, leaping flames, its blackening timbers split and ragged, shattered into disarray. Finally, the darkness welcomed her with open arms.

  ‘She’s coming round,’ was the first thing she fully heard.

  Days or weeks could have passed since she lay in the sand, catapulted there by the force of the blast. Annie opened her eyes. Saw white all around, a nurse, and Nico sitting there at her bedside, his thin straggly hair sticking up on end as if he had been dragging his hands through it, his face riven with tragedy. He was still wearing the fancy DJ that he’d had on at the wedding, but the fabric and even his face were smeared with soot. He smelled like a bonfire.

  The blast.

  The fire.

  The blackened claw.

  Annie closed her eyes again, but she couldn’t close her ears.

  ‘Annie? Mrs Barolli?’ the nurse was asking her insistently.