The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

‘He’s a lush. I’m meeting him in a bar.’

  ‘And I’m not invited?’

  Merlin shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t be a good idea. If there’s a bit of skirt around, Bill doesn’t concentrate.’

  Jay had put up with Merlin’s moody silences on the journey, but this was too much. ‘Is that all I am now, a bit of skirt?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant, Jay.’

  ‘I think it’s exactly what you meant, Merlin’ Jay placed herself between him and the door so that he could not avoid her eyes. ‘I’ve stopped making excuses for you. Last night, you did your best to ruin the conversation with Dr Kreuz, but I let it go. Now you’re treating me like some tart you picked up in a bar. You go off to spend a boozy evening with some old pal and I’m supposed to wait patiently here until you return.’

  ‘Have a look round the shops, or something,’ Merlin suggested. ‘I won’t be more than an hour or two and then we’ll go out and find some nice restaurant for dinner.’

  Jay let her exasperation show. ‘You are getting worse with every sentence. Who do you think you’re talking to?’

  Merlin caught in mid-air his jacket which Jay threw at him, then bent to pick up his contact book which had fallen onto the floor.

  ‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve had enough of you treating me like this. You bring me to this beautiful city without a word of explanation what you’re up to. You expect me to make love when you’re in the mood and then just switch off and shut up when you want to play reporters. Well, I’m not that sort of girl, Merlin. I happen to have an identity of my own, d’you hear?’

  Hands raised in surrender, he tried to placate her. ‘Now look. I know I haven’t explained anything.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’

  ‘Because I’m onto something, but I don’t know what it is.’

  Baffled, she made a peace offer: ‘Then let’s work on it together.’

  He shook his head, wishing she could understand. ‘I always work alone. That’s the way it is, so you’ll have to get used to it.’

  ‘I don’t have to get used to anything!’ she snapped. ‘Get that into your head, Merlin Freeman.’

  He pulled a grimace and left the room without another word. Jay took off both her shoes and hurled them at the door after him. ‘Well, fuck you!’ she screamed.

  When she was certain Merlin was not coming back, she threw herself on the enormous four-poster bed. What’s wrong with him? she asked herself. Our last day in St Denis and the journey through Spain were an idyll of happiness in which we shared each second. I told him all my thoughts and plans and hopes. It felt as though we should never have a secret from one another, lying on the airbed together twenty-four hours ago, wrapped in tenderness and intimacy.

  She sat up on the bed and tried to work out exactly when Merlin had changed. The problem was that the whole of the previous evening which they had spent with Kreuz was a blur in her memory – a blur dominated by the hooded figure with his pale blue eyes fixed on hers. Somehow during those hours a psychic wedge had been driven between her and Merlin.

  She thought of picking up her bags which were not yet unpacked and just walking out of the hotel. But that would be like a defeat. First, Merlin owed her an apology for his behaviour. Jay curled up and lay on top of the bed, staring out of the window at the Moorish fantasy on the hill above, turned blood-red by the setting sun. Somewhere nearby, a church bell started to chime the hour.

  *

  ‘Close the window,’ commanded Eleanor. ‘Since Richard’s death, I’ve come to hate the sound of praying. Be it by monks or Moslems, the prating sound they make grates in my ears.’

  ‘I’m no lady-in-waiting,’ growled William the Marshal, getting up from his meal and closing the window. The voice of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from the minaret of Granada’s mosque, was cut off in mid-wail.

  They were staying in the house of a Jewish merchant who let rooms to Christians and pagans – non-Moslems who were in Granada on business and whom no devout believer wished to have under his roof. Eleanor’s room was large but sparsely furnished: a bed covered in furs, a trestle table and two chairs of wood and leather. Light came from candles on the table and a flaming torch in a wall bracket. For sanitation, there was a crude earthenware chamber pot in one corner.

  The only access was through another room where six other men from Eleanor’s small retinue were lodged. Another two retainers slept with the horses in the stable beneath, their mounts saddled, ready to leave in a hurry.

  ‘Here, Madam, you’re supposed to be a knight.’ William reminded the queen good-naturedly that she was wearing male clothing. ‘When travelling without servants, men close the window for themselves.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to be anything,’ she corrected him. ‘Clothes don’t alter the fact that I’m still your queen and you are mine to command, Marshal. It just happens that I discovered in my youth the safest way for a woman of rank to travel is dressed as a knight, riding astride and with a small, well-mounted escort. The risks are less than waiting for times of truce or begging letters of safe conduct, for truces can end swiftly and letters be revoked the day after they are granted.’

  ‘Don’t put too much faith in disguise,’ William advised her. ‘Remember the last time you were caught when thus attired.’

  It was a reference to the fatal day when Henry’s men had caught Eleanor fleeing across the scorched and wasted landscape north of Poitiers from the wreckage of her rebellion against him. She had been only a few hours’ ride from the safety of the French court at Paris when trapped by the stroke of misfortune that had cost her fifteen years’ imprisonment.

  ‘I wasn’t caught,’ snapped Eleanor. ‘I was betrayed to Henry by one of my own vassals.’

  ‘The result was the same.’

  ‘No,’ she disagreed. ‘The bitterness was twice as hard to bear.’

  William listened to the ribaldry in the next room. ‘I’ll tell the Jew’s steward to give the men no more wine. We’ll need to be in the saddle tomorrow as soon as the Moors open the city gates at dawn – and we shall have to ride fast all day if we are to spirit away this witch the heathen devils value so highly.’

  ‘The man’s no witch, good William,’ laughed Eleanor. ‘He’s a scholar, learned in strange matters. No more a witch than I am.’

  William moved to the window at the sound of the street gate being opened. He peered down into the courtyard and announced, ‘It’s the Jew returned with that rogue Mercadier.’ He made no secret of his dislike for Richard’s old mercenary captain whom Eleanor had insisted on bringing to Granada. Half the men-at-arms carousing in the next room were Mercadier’s men who owed no allegiance to the queen if Mercadier should change sides.

  The marshal had begged Eleanor to bring anyone rather than Mercadier on this trip but she, reared in the quasi-Byzantine intrigues of the court of Aquitaine, preferred always to set one servant off against another. So Mercadier had been chosen expressly because of the hatred between him and William. Eleanor knew that, if it became necessary to fight their way back to the nearest Christian territory, each of these two redoubtable warriors would strive to excel the other in deeds of valour.

  ‘I wish that I might escort you tonight,’ said William. ‘I mistrust the thought of you alone among these heathen with only that brute to guard you.’

  The queen laughed at his concern. ‘If I left Mercadier to guard my treasure chest, ere we returned it would be empty and he’d be far away.’

  In Christian countries and on the recognised pilgrimage routes to and from the Holy Land, the Templars acted as bankers, honouring letters of credit. Because there was no Templar commandery in Granada the queen carried gold and jewels enough to pay for her needs, all locked securely in an iron-bound chest. Opening it now, she counted coins from a dozen countries into a small leather bag and pulled the draw string tight. ‘Give this to the Jew as we leave tomorrow morning, but not a moment before.’

  ‘That means I’m last to
leave.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Eleanor confirmed. ‘But if I entrusted this small task to Mercadier, he’d stab the Jew and keep the gold, and we’d have half the emir’s guard on our heels before we’d left the city gates.’

  *

  A second had passed, no more than the lapse between two chimes of the church clock. Jay shook her head. Mingled with the last chimes was the tinkle of coins in a leather pouch. She wished now that Merlin had not gone and left her alone. Remembering that he had said he was going to see a man called Guzman, she reached for the telephone directory beside the bed but lacked the energy to open it. Then the telephone rang beside the bed. She picked it up and listened, half-asleep, to a voice she had not expected to hear again.

  Chapter 8

  Flabby, with the cough of a heavy smoker and the bloodshot eyes and blotchy face of a hard drinker, Bill Guzman balanced on the high bar stool like an overweight stork, one leg on the ground and the other wrapped around the leg of the stool to anchor him in position.

  ‘I a-hear you are in town, Freeman,’ he grinned. The Mexican accent and syntax were pure Hollywood, as was the Zapata moustache.

  Merlin lifted his glass and swallowed. ‘What is this fire-water you drink, Bill?’

  ‘Spanish brandy. Is not a-cognac but is a-cheap.’ The stringer lit another cigarette from the unfinished stub.

  Merlin was angry with himself. I must be crazy, he thought, walking out on Jay to spend the evening with a slob like this. I could at least have explained to her that there’s a loose end which has been nagging at me ever since I talked with Baron Kempfer. He thought of picking up the phone behind the bar and calling Jay at the parador to apologise for shouting at her, but that wasn’t his style. He preferred to sort things out face to face when he got back.

  ‘You know anything about a Dr Kreuz, first name Hermann?’ he asked.

  A vague gesture of Guzman’s hand was interpreted by the barman as a command for another generous measure of Centenario brandy splashed into the stringer’s glass. ‘Maybe,’ he admitted. ‘Whassa story?’

  ‘Anything that would connect him with Oradour, June 1944?’

  The stringer swallowed and pushed the glass forward with a nod to the barman. ‘Sounds to me like Freeman is still a-writing that book of his.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Guzman laughed and ended up coughing. ‘I tell ya, ya gotta be real smart to tie Kreuz in with that massacre. Sure, he is ex-SS and ex-Das Reich, but he don’t a-talk to no journalist.’

  ‘I had dinner last night at his ranch.’

  Guzman’s laugh ended in a coughing fit. ‘How wassa steak?’

  ‘It grew on a tree.’

  Behind the boozy eyes, the stringer’s brain was at work. ‘What was in it for him, I wonder?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’ And that’s the truth, thought Merlin.

  ‘Well, don’t push your luck,’ was the advice. ‘Der ehemalige Stunnbannfuhrer hat noch gute Kamaraden. Capito?’

  ‘You mean those blond bodyguards of his?’

  ‘So you really have been out there, to that crazy hideout in the Valley of Songs?’

  ‘Are they what you meant by his friends?’

  More brandy disappeared down Guzman’s throat. ‘Few months back, this a-poacher got beat up on Kreuz’s spread. The guy is hurt bad, okay? So the police, they arrest two of those guards. Now what happen?’

  ‘You tell me, Bill.’

  ‘Do these guys spend a coupla months inside waiting for trial? No, sir! Kreuz, he make a coupla phone calls. Those two guys are on the afternoon flight back to der Vaterland. Nothing, pero nada, in the papers here. Me, I am writing a piece for the Frankfurter Allgemeine. They spike it. Kreuz, he has friends everywhere.’

  ‘Where do all the blond clones come from?’

  ‘The guards? Forget ’em, Freeman. They just come here for a one-year contract. They hand-picked by some old buddy of Kreuz – a guy who runs a security and courier service in Vienna.’

  ‘Maybe I could find where they hang out off-duty and buy them a few drinks.’

  ‘You wasting your time. They don’t a-drink, those boys. They well paid and well trained. They don’t a-talk. Not to you, not to anyone.’

  It was the knowing leer in Guzman’s eye that prompted Merlin’s next question: ‘If they’re here for a year, what do they do for women?’

  Guzman laughed and choked on a mixture of brandy and cigarette smoke. ‘Well, they sure don’t get so much as a sniff of the pussy that Kreuz uses.’

  Merlin recalled the blonde masseuse who had accompanied Kreuz to St Denis. ‘What’s the story there?’ he asked.

  ‘Those girls. They are supplied by the same outfit in Vienna. They come two at a time. I don’t know whether Herr Doktor Kreuz get fed up with them or they can’t a-stand being locked up down in that valley, but they stay only six months. Then they go home.’

  ‘Locked up, you said? They don’t leave the place?’

  ‘Nevair. Kreuz meet them at the airport when they arrive. He take them back there at the end of their stint. And Freeman …’ Guzman leaned perilously sideways to talk into Merlin’s ear in a lowered voice. ‘Once I hear this a-rumour, several of these a-girls, they been pregnant when they get back to Austria.’

  ‘That never made any scandal?’ Merlin wondered aloud. ‘The guy’s over seventy by my reckoning.’

  Guzman rocked the stool back onto an even keel. ‘Seems like Kreuz adopt the kids and pay the mothers mucho dinero.’

  ‘The randy old goat!’ Merlin was remembering the way Kreuz had stared at Jay all evening. ‘And what does our Dr Kreuz use for money?’

  Another nod to the barman brought Guzman another drink. ‘On his carta de residencia it say Kreuz, he is president of Santa Maria Hotels, SA.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Issa property company that own some hotels on the Costa del Sol. They got shares in marinas, that sort of thing. If you wanna know whose money, I save you research, Freeman. Santa Maria is wholly owned subsidiary of Valhalla Investments in Zurich.’

  At last something added up. Merlin remembered the name. ‘So the Das Reich gold is now financing package holidays on the Costa del Sol?’

  ‘My lips are seal.’ Guzman made what he thought was a knowing gesture, tapping his nose. He missed and poked a finger into one eye, making it water.

  Merlin tried another tack. ‘Kreuz puts out that he’s a scholar and an art historian. What’s that all about?’

  Guzman’s hand was now clamped around the bottle. He was serving himself liberally. ‘You try every angle, Freeman. But you won’t get nowhere with that story.’

  ‘With what story, Bill?’

  ‘The fake antique business.’

  Merlin smiled. The fresco, the chalice, the mirror were probably all fakes, he thought. ‘He sells them?’

  ‘Nah. Kreuz too clever for that.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘For the right price, Dr Kreuz sell attributions, Freeman. Clever, huh? He cost a lot but some of these things go for millions in the saleroom and I ain’t talking pesetas.’

  Merlin played with his empty glass and waved away the bottle when Guzman took it as a hint.

  ‘Why, Bill?’ he asked. ‘If Kreuz has all the Das Reich money to play with from the Valhalla set up in Zurich, why fart around with fake antiques?’

  ‘Boredom. Kreuz, he is very clever man,’ said Guzman. ‘The SS had some of the best brains in Europe, and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You wanna know what I think? I think it amuse Kreuz to go up against big-time experts and prove them wrong when he knows all the time they are right.’

  Merlin peeled two thousand peseta notes from a roll and stood up to go.

  The stringer picked the notes off the counter. ‘Is this the going rate for all my help?’

  ‘It’s for the drinks,’ said Merlin, ‘but you can keep the change. I’ll share the by-line with you, if you’re a good
boy.’

  Bill Guzman lurched to his feet angrily. ‘You a cheap bastard, Freeman, you know that?’

  Merlin had not stopped to listen. He was in the street, hailing a taxi, with an uneasy premonition that he should not have left Jay alone so long. It would serve me right, he rationalised, if I got back to the hotel and found she’d walked out on me.

  There were two dark-haired men signing the register as Merlin hurried up to the reception desk of the parador. Without paying them any special attention, he grabbed his key and hurried upstairs, two at a time, then ran along the corridor. The door was locked. He undid it and found the bedroom empty and Jay’s bags gone. Merlin leaned against the door jamb, cursing himself for being so stupid as to pick a fight with her. He ran back along the corridor towards the stairs, to see whether her car was still in the parking lot. Halfway to the stairs, he bumped into Jay coming out of another bedroom. She had changed into a dress he had not seen before.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he gasped, out of breath.

  ‘None of your business,’ she said curtly.

  Merlin fell into step alongside her, eager to explain. ‘I thought you’d checked out of the hotel.’

  ‘I thought about it. I’ve moved to a room of my own.’

  All he wanted was to smooth things over. ‘Okay, whatever you like. But listen, Jay. About Kreuz. I’ve found out …’

  ‘Leila was right.’ Jay stopped. ‘She said you journalists never give up. Haven’t you understood yet, Merlin, I don’t care what you’ve found out? I don’t care where you go, who you talk to, what you do. You get right on with your life and I’ll get on with mine.’

  He spun round and stood in front of her. ‘I don’t believe this is happening!’

  ‘You’re blocking my way and holding my arm. Please let go.’

  Merlin took a pace backwards. ‘Jay, please! At least let me buy you dinner, to say I’m sorry.’

  ‘The invitation is too late,’ she said. ‘I’m having dinner with someone else.’

  ‘You don’t know anyone else in Granada!’

  ‘As it happens, I do. Now get out of my way!’