The Spirit and the Flesh

by Boyd, Douglas

Mercadier spoke from the window. On Eleanor’s instructions, he used English, a tongue which no one in Granada understood. ‘It’ll soon be dawn, my queen. Here they open the city gates at cock-crow. We must be gone within the hour.’

  ‘Will you come with me, Moor?’ asked Eleanor. ‘Will you do this thing for me?’

  Yussef raised a hand and indicated the sleeping town outside the window. ‘Here I am rich and respected. Learned men from Syria and Greece and Egypt brave the danger of the long sea voyage to travel here and talk with me. The emir consults me daily and gives praise to Allah for sending him such a vizier as myself. I have but to ask for a thing and my ruler sends men running to satisfy my whim, be it ice from the mountains to cool my drink in summer or a manuscript from Alexandria or far Cathay to quench my thirst for knowledge. He has given me slaves and servants and a house where my library is replete with all the knowledge of past ages. I am known from Marrakesh to the Ganges as Yussef el-Kebir, Joseph the Great. Yet if I come with you, o Queen, I shall be at best a servant and at worst a mere prisoner in your power.’

  ‘You are a prisoner here,’ retorted Eleanor. ‘The emir does not allow you to leave the city gates, for fear his enemies should snatch you away to make gold for them.’

  ‘A prisoner with honour,’ the Moor agreed.

  ‘I offer you more than honour, Yussef,’ she urged. ‘I offer you the freedom to join me in the greatest adventure the human mind can encompass. And if wealth matters to you, the treasure of Châlus is yours for helping me on my way. You have my word on it!’

  ‘Should I trust the word of a Christian and a woman at that?’

  ‘I’ll swear it on the Cross!’

  Yussef snorted his derision. ‘Melek Ric wore the Cross on both his chest and his back when he murdered the innocents at Acre.’

  ‘Perhaps I misjudged you, Moor,’ said Eleanor. ‘Perhaps you’re not the man to do what I ask. Perhaps indeed it can’t be done by any mortal man.’

  Yussef shook his head. ‘You appeal to my vanity. In truth, fame means little to me now. You offer me gold and jewels; I need them not. Yet my cupidity for knowledge grows greater as my years advance. I’ll come with you to your kingdom in the north. Together we shall find out there whether a spirit as strong as yours may survive the torment of limbo and return to walk this earth in a second flesh.’

  Chapter 10

  Merlin had not smoked for years. He lay on the bed, halfway through a packet of Spanish cigarettes and a bottle of cheap Spanish brandy. The sight of Jay in the restaurant opposite the parador had triggered in him the most violent rage he had known for years. She had been sitting sideways to the window, gazing intently at Kreuz and visibly hanging on to every word he said. Merlin had wanted to wrench the door open, grab Kreuz by the neck and strangle him. The urge had been so strong that he found himself standing in the street, literally quivering with anger and smashing his fist into the wall beneath a street lamp again and again until the pain brought back his self-control.

  The moment of pure blood-lust raked up from his memory banks all the incidents in his life that he most hated, when from some layer deep within his subconscious arose a spectre of violence that clouded all normal judgement and feeling, leaving him – only the Vikings had a word for it – berserk. In the memory buried deepest of all, at My Lai, mowing down the screaming, weeping, pleading villagers crouched over their children in a hopeless attempt to block the bullets with their own bodies, everything had happened in a haze of dope and grief for buddies blown away or maimed for life by the same villagers or people just like them. The whole mindless four-hour tragedy had been like a diabolical Sunday school outing when a group of over-stretched kids went on the rampage. There had been no hatred for their individual victims like the boiling fury that had made him want to kill Kreuz with his bare hands.

  Now that the fury had simmered down, Merlin rationalised his mood as partly anger at himself for spoiling the very special relationship with Jay in the same way that he had spoiled all the other relationships of his life, even to the point of using the same script. Each time, there had been a plane to catch or a rendezvous to keep in some sordid bar when he should have been taking the time to be what Matty Perelmann called a mensch – a human being instead of a news-gathering machine.

  In his smoke-filled bedroom, Merlin’s mind’s eye kept flitting from Oradour to Châlus to Dürnstein to the Valle de los Cantos. And wherever his private video show took him, Kreuz’s pale blue eyes were watching.

  Another brandy was poured, another cigarette lit. Kreuz and Kempfer. Mentally Merlin projected remembered faces and places onto the tobacco haze that wreathed above him. There was a connection somewhere, he was sure. And it wasn’t just a couple of old comrades keeping in touch on the subject of medieval poetry, either.

  Jealousy projected onto the smokescreen the image of Jay talking to Kreuz in the restaurant. She had been leaning forward eagerly to hear what he was saying. What was Kreuz’s fascination for her? Did he have some sexual power over women? Merlin wondered. Or was there some weird connection between him and Jay? What else would explain why she had been so enchanted by Kreuz the previous evening at the Valle de los Cantos? Perhaps Jay had some kind of hang-up about older men as a result of being so close to her father during adolescence? Images of her tormented Merlin: Jay on the airbed in the swimming pool, Jay radiant in the breakfast room at Chartres, Jay sitting naked in bed at St Denis, playing the recorder for him.

  That was it. He stubbed out the cigarette in the full ash tray. Merlin groped for the words of the song by Queen Eleanor’s lover which Jay had played and sung for him, the night before Kreuz walked into their lives. The original words he could not remember. They had been in incomprehensible old Langue d’Oc. But Jay had translated them. The whole song had been a warning from this Bertrand de Whatsit who had been Queen Eleanor’s lover. But a warning to whom? To Eleanor? It didn’t matter. The message was in the warning itself. There had been something about the Cross. And Kreuz, meaning Cross, had arrived in St Denis the very next morning.But it was more of a coincidence than that … Jay had been singing about false wearers of the Cross being as dangerous as the Saracen!

  Merlin swung his feet off the bed and reached for the telephone.

  A woman’s voice answered sleepily, ‘No sé donde está.’

  ‘I left him in a bar a few hours back,’ said Merlin.

  ‘Sin duda,’ she said. ‘Se puede … Maybe he still there, I don’t know.’

  The brandy did not help Merlin’s sense of direction. He got lost several times before finding the bar, from which Guzman had moved on. Merlin tracked his only contact in Granada from bar to bar and finally ran him to earth at two o’clock in the morning. The stringer looked no drunker than when Merlin had said goodbye, hours earlier. The same leg was locked round the leg of this bar stool, keeping him upright.

  Guzman showed no surprise on seeing Merlin again. He called to the barman, ‘Mi amigo quiere pagar la cuenta.’

  Merlin paid the drinks bill Guzman had run up and placed two hundred-dollar bills on the bar, with his hand firmly on top of the notes.

  ‘Kreuz, Hermann. Real name?’

  The stringer smiled a watery smile. ‘You know, Freeman, for two hours I am wondering if you come back to ask me that question.’

  ‘Did he keep the same initials?’

  ‘Kinda funny how often these guys do.’

  ‘Kempfer?’

  ‘First name Heinz. His brother, he live in Austria and got a title of some kind. Dook, baron, I dunno what exactly.’

  ‘I could kiss you.’

  Guzman pushed Merlin away. ‘In this a-town I am known as a harmless, drunken has-been. Nobody know what a mine of information is Bill Guzman. Ees to that I owe great peace of mind.’

  ‘I’ll not breathe a word.’

  Guzman moved fast for a drunk, the dollar bills vanishing into his breast pocket as he pulled Merlin back with the other hand. ‘Freeman! On this story I do not, repeat
not, want a by-line. My dreams of winning a Pulitzer prize are long behind me, amigo. Now I dream only of the quiet life and just enough money to get drunk each day, okay?’

  Merlin walked back to the parador a much relieved man, certain that when Jay heard what he had learned about Kreuz, she would not want anything more to do with the man. He debated knocking on the door of her room as soon as he got back, to give her the news there and then, but decided that might lead to more misunderstandings.

  Opening the window to let out the stale fug in his own room, he reasoned that it would be better to wait until the morning to give her the news. Then they would sort everything out together and life would be good again. He booked a call for 8 a.m. and fell instantly asleep. He was still fast asleep when Jay booked out of the hotel an hour before then.

  Part V

  Chapter 1

  The twelve-hour solo drive from Granada to St Denis passed in a blur. As Jay drove the red Alpine faster and faster over the bleak, depopulated plateau of León, through the snow-capped Pyrenees and the dark and mournful pine forests of Les Landes, more impressions flooded back into her memory with each mile passed. Scene by scene and sequence by sequence they slipped into her mind, displacing the memories that made up the life of Jay French and gradually making up the violent saga of burning loves and passionate hatreds, imprisonment, adventure and murder that had been the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine. There was nothing she could do about it. She had again that sensation of something soft but heavy pressing down inside her skull. It seemed almost laughable that she had been afraid of brain cancer or some other nameable disease when faced with the unspeakable truth of what was really happening to her.

  Her style of driving changed. From being fast but skilful, she found herself taking bends much too fast and overtaking more and more recklessly. Twice she would have died in head-on collisions, had not Spanish truck drivers braked hard to let her get back on the right side of the white line in time. The second time, Jay found herself gripping the wheel and feeling sick while a part of her mind argued arrogantly that she had a greater right to be on the road than the truckers who had given way.

  Just before the French-Spanish border Jay stopped briefly to fill up with petrol and drink enough coffee to keep her going for the rest of the journey. There was a line of drivers queuing to use the telephones. Who could she call for help? What could she say? Only Merlin might understand, but why had he changed from the tender and protective lover to a boorish, argumentative chauvinist pig?

  Jay stood alone and frightened in the noisy truck-stop. She no longer had any illusion what would happen at the end of the journey. She had been seduced by her flute teacher at the Academy halfway through the first term. Aged eighteen, counting herself lucky to be taught by him, hanging on his every word and worshipping his superb instrumental technique, she had thought that her student infatuation was love and that he – a married man thirty years older than her – was in love too. Only a musical prodigy who had never had time for boyfriends could have been so innocent.

  In the hours just before they first made love Jay had suddenly seen the situation clearly, known that it was all wrong, that he did not love her and was just using her. Yet she could not stop herself going to his apartment when his wife was out, knocking on the door in full knowledge of what was going to happen. She had shut her eyes as he pulled her inside the door.

  ‘Look at me,’ he had commanded after kissing her on the mouth and slipping off her coat.

  She had opened her eyes and seen his confident, cocksure smile.

  ‘You can still go,’ he said. ‘I haven’t closed the door.’

  But she couldn’t. Compelled to go on and find out, she had closed the door and let it all happen.

  It was the same now, but a thousand times worse. After a short overnight stop in St Denis, she would head next day for the very place she should avoid like the plague – the place where Eleanor’s spirit would be at its most powerful. At Fontevraud, something awful was going to happen, of that Jay had no doubt, but she could do nothing to stop it.

  *

  It was dusk when Kassim screwed up his courage to walk into the grimy backstreet cafe in Pau. There was the sound of railway stock clink clink clink in the marshalling yard across the road. An articulated truck with a Spanish number plate was being revved up on the waste ground outside while the driver and another man tinkered with the engine. From the exhaust a choking fog of diesel fumes oozed into the cafe through a broken window-pane.

  Kassim’s contact was a woman who used the masculine nom de guerre Ramón. She looked more like a harassed, hard-up housewife than a revolutionary, with her pinched, pale face, badly cut hair and cheap jumper and skirt. She wore no stockings and had on her feet a pair of old espadrilles, the backs trodden down flat. Three years in a Spanish prison had crushed whatever joie de vivre had once shown in her dark eyes.

  Sweat was trickling down the small of Kassim’s back. Inter-group contacts were among the most dangerous moments of a terrorist’s life: it was all too easy to walk into a police trap or to be taken oneself for an undercover agent, with equally fatal results. On both sides of the Pyrenees the Basque Liberation organisation ETA was riddled with informers who worked for the Spanish and French police. Two thirds of the leaders were in gaol; others disappeared on lonely roads and were never heard of again, which made the rank-and-file jumpy.

  The noise of the truck engine woke Ramón’s baby, screaming. She broke off the conversation in French with Kassim in order to jam a piece of cardboard into the broken window in the futile hope of keeping out the worst of the fumes. Then she picked the child out of the pram and comforted it while Kassim continued the cautious identification routine. There were no other customers; he had hung about outside for twenty minutes to be sure of that.

  Ramón gave all the right answers in a surly voice and without a smile even for the child in her arms. A couple of Basque-speaking railwaymen came into the cafe for an eau de vie de marc. She chatted with them equally unsmilingly as she served them one-handed, the child balanced on her hip. The postman arrived with a thin bundle of mail and lingered for five minutes over a glass of Calvados. Not a smile passed between any of them, which worried Kassim who was accustomed to the frequent eye contact between Arab men. The total incomprehensibility of the Basque language unnerved him; they could have been discussing football scores, plotting the assassination of the Pope or arranging his own betrayal.

  When the three customers had gone, Kassim moved back to the bar. To quieten the fretful baby, Ramón sat down at one of the tables and opened her dress, to give it the breast. If the conversation went on much longer, Kassim decided, he would walk out empty-handed and get away fast. His mistrust of women in general prompted him to believe that this one was an informer. For all he knew, the place was already surrounded.

  After a few more questions and answers in French, Ramón went to the door again, still holding the child to her breast. With her free hand she fiddled with the piece of cardboard as an excuse for checking the street. It was empty, the Spanish truck with the dirty exhaust disappearing round the corner. ‘This is the sample.’ She pulled back the baby’s blankets and mattress to reveal a matt black 9 mm. Uzi machine pistol with the collapsible stock that made it into a sub-machine gun.

  Kassim’s pulse quickened. There was no going back once he had picked up the weapon, no chance of talking his way out. He took a paper napkin from the dispenser beside a dish of congealed tapas on the counter and lifted the gun. It was brand new and had never been fired. There were still traces of the manufacturer’s packing grease clinging to the metal.

  He weighed in his hand the legendary Israeli weapon that was probably the best compromise between size and fire-power in the world. ‘It’ll do,’ he nodded approvingly. ‘Ammunition?’

  She pulled the mattress further back to reveal a screw-on silencer and two full 32 round magazines. Kassim scooped them up and stuffed them with the gun into a cheap holdall he had bou
ght that morning on the way to the rendezvous.

  ‘When shall I see you again, for the rest of the consignment?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘We need the money.’ Ramón was thinking of the child’s father, dying in a Spanish jail. ‘With that much cash, we can spring a comrade from prison.’

  With a small gurgle the baby puked over her shoulder. Kassim left her burping it. He walked swiftly towards the city centre, checking regularly that he was not being followed. Once in the crowded city centre he breathed more easily and walked with a spring in his step, despite the injured leg. In a cluster of shoppers waiting to cross the road at some traffic lights, he felt agoraphobic, wanting to flee or at least push them all away from him. He imagined their faces if only he could sling the Uzi round his chest and swagger along the street as he had done for years in his own country. How they would respect him then! How eager they would be to get out of his way, fear showing in their eyes as he glared at them.

  It took a conscious effort not to hurry, not to limp, and to avoid looking anyone in the face. Kassim stopped twice in different bars for cups of coffee which he was too tense to drink. Then he visited several clothing stores, buying one garment in each. In a public toilet he changed all his outer clothes, dumping the holdall full of clothes and transferring the gun to a smart new briefcase that went with the expensive suit he had bought. Satisfied at last that he was not followed, he unlocked the boot of a Renault 25 he had hired earlier and slung the briefcase inside.

  At the Campanile motel outside town, Salem was hungry. Completely out of his depth when he saw Kassim return dressed as a businessman, driving an expensive new car, he started to ask questions. Where are your own clothes? What happened to the pickup truck? Where did you get the money? His questions were brushed aside with a sneer by Kassim, who replied with curt orders to get packed fast and check out of the motel right away.