Golden Fox

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘The telephone is out of order,’ she told herself with conviction, but she hardly slept at all.

  As soon as the airline reservations office opened, she booked a flight back to Málaga, and despite her distress she managed to sleep for an hour during the journey. It was after midday when they landed at Málaga airport.

  The taxi dropped her at the front door of the apartment-block, and she dragged her bag to their front door. With fingers that shook with fatigue and agitation she finally got the key into the lock.

  The apartment was strangely silent, and her voice rang through the open doorway.

  ‘Adra, I’m back. Where are you?’

  She glanced into the kitchen as she hurried to Adra’s room. The room was empty, and she started up the stairs at a run, and then stopped abruptly at the door to her bedroom. It was wide open.

  Nicky’s cot still stood in the alcove opposite the window. It was stripped of sheets and pillows and blankets, that exquisite layette that Michael had sent her from home. The table beside the cot, on which had stood Nicky’s platoon of soft toys, the teddies and bunnies and Disney creatures which she had showered on him, was bare.

  She stepped to the terrace door and glanced out. His pram was gone.

  ‘Adra!’ she cried, and heard the high thin tone of panic in her own voice. ‘Where are you?’

  She raced through the other rooms. ‘Nicky! My baby! Oh God, please. Where have you taken Nicky?’

  She found herself back in the main bedroom beside his empty cot.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she whispered. ‘What has happened?’

  On a sudden impulse, she whirled and jerked open the drawers of Nicky’s bureau. They were all empty. The nappies and vests and jackets were all of them gone.

  ‘The hospital.’ Her voice was a sob. ‘Something has happened to my baby!’

  She rushed down the stairs and seized the telephone and then froze as she saw the envelope taped to the cradle of the instrument. She dropped the telephone receiver and ripped open the envelope. Her hands shook so that she could barely read the words on the single sheet of notepaper.

  However, she recognized Ramón’s handwriting instantly and felt a treacherous rush of relief, which evaporated swiftly as she read the words:

  Nicholas is with me. He is safe for the time being. If you wish to see him again, you must follow these instructions exactly. Do not speak to anybody in Málaga. I repeat do not speak to anybody. Leave the flat immediately and return to London. You will be contacted at Cadogan Square. Tell nobody what has happened, not even your brother Michael. Follow these instructions implicitly. Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky. You may never see him again. Destroy this note.

  R

  Her legs went soft and boneless under her, and she sank down against the wall and sat on the tiled floor with them sprawled out loosely in front of her as though they were disjointed at the hips. She read the note again, and then again, but it didn’t make sense.

  ‘My baby,’ she whispered. ‘My little Nicky.’ And then she read the terrible words aloud. ‘ “Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky. You may never see him again.” ’

  She let the hand holding the note drop into her lap and she stared at the wall opposite. She felt as though the world and her entire existence had been swept away. It left her as blank and meaningless as that empty expanse of brickwork in front of her.

  She did not know how long she sat there, but at last with a supreme effort she roused herself. Using the wall as a support, she regained her feet. Once more, she climbed the stairs to their bedroom and went directly to Ramón’s cupboard. She threw the doors open, and found that it also was empty. Even the coat-hangers were gone. She moved listlessly to his chest of drawers, and opened each empty drawer. Ramón had left nothing.

  She wandered back to Nicky’s alcove, moving like the survivor of a bomb blast, dazed and unco-ordinated, and knelt beside the empty cot.

  ‘My baby,’ she whispered. ‘What have they done with you?’

  Then she saw that something had slipped down between the baby mattress and the wooden bars of the cot. She eased it free, and held it in both hands. Kneeling at the cot as though it were the high altar, she held the sacrament in her hands. It was one of Nicky’s bootees, a scrap of soft knitted wool with a blue satin ribbon as the drawstring for his chubby pink ankle. She lifted it to her face and inhaled the perfumed baby-smell of her son.

  Only then she began to weep. She wept with a bitter ferocity that drained her strength and left her exhausted. By that time, the terrace and the bedroom were filled with the shades of evening and she had only the strength left to crawl to the double bed and curl up on it. As she fell asleep she held the woollen bootee pressed to her cheek.

  It was still dark when she awoke. She lay for long seconds with the dark sense of doom overpowering her, uncertain of its origin or cause. Then suddenly it all came back to her and she struggled upright and looked about her with horror.

  Ramón’s note lay on the table beside the bed. She took it up and reread it, still trying to make sense of it.

  ‘Ramón my darling, why are you doing this to us?’ she whispered. Then, obedient to his instructions, she carried the note to the bathroom and standing over the toilet-bowl tore it into tiny scraps. She dropped these into the bowl and flushed them away. She knew that every word would be graven on her mind for ever; she had no need nor wish to conserve that dreadful sheet of paper.

  She showered and dressed and made herself a slice of toast and a pot of coffee. They were without taste. Her mouth felt numb as though it had been scalded with boiling water.

  Then she set herself to search the apartment thoroughly. She began in Adra’s room. There was no trace left of Adra Olivares, not a shred of clothing, not a pot or a tube of ointment or cosmetics in her bathroom, not even a single hair from her head on the pillow of her bed.

  Then she went over the living-room and kitchen; again there was nothing, except the hired furniture and crockery and the remains of food in the refrigerator.

  She went up to the bedroom. There was a small wall-safe in the back of Ramón’s cupboard, but the steel door was ajar and all the documents were missing. Nicky’s birth certificate and adoption papers were gone with them.

  She sat down on the bed and tried to think clearly, attempting desperately to find a reason for this madness. She went round and round, trying to examine it from every possible angle.

  She was driven remorselessly to a single conclusion. Ramón was in deep trouble. It was some horror from his clandestine life which had overtaken them. She knew that under extreme duress he had been forced to leave with Nicky. She understood that she must do everything in her power to help them, Ramón and Nicky, the two most important elements in her life. She knew that she must do as he ordered her. Their safety and possibly their lives depended upon it. Yet she could not leave it like that. She had to learn more; any morsel of knowledge might be of value.

  She left the apartment and went downstairs. There was a small bakery shop across the street, and over the months Isabella had become friendly with the baker’s wife. The woman was opening the shutters over the shop window as Isabella hurried across the road.

  ‘Yes,’ the baker’s wife told her, ‘after you left on Thursday, Adra went out with Nicholas in the pram. They went down towards the beach and returned just before I closed the shop. I saw them go up to your apartment, but I didn’t see them again, not after that.’

  Isabella went up the street, stopping to question all the tradespeople whose businesses were within sight of the apartment-block. Some of them had seen Adra and Nicky return on Thursday evening, but not one of them had seen them again since then. Her last resort was the shoeshine urchin on the corner of the park. Ramón always allowed the lad to polish his shoes and over-tipped him exorbitantly. He was one of Isabella’s favourites on the street.

  ‘Sí, señora,’ he grinned at Isabella, as he squatted over his bo
x. ‘On Thursday night I work late, because of the cinema and the arcade. At ten o’clock I see the marqués. He came in a big black car with two men. They park in the street and go upstairs.’

  ‘What did the other men look like, chico? Do you know them? Had you see them before?’

  ‘Never. They two tough hombres – policemen, I think. Much trouble. I don’t like police. They all go upstairs, and then soon they come down. They all carry suitcases, big suitcases. Adra come with them. She carry baby Nico; they get into the car, all of them, and they drive away. That is all. I don’t see them again.’

  The two tough hombres confirmed what Isabella had suspected: that Ramón was acting under coercion. She realized that the only source of action open to her was to follow the instruction that Ramón had given her in the note. She went back to the apartment and began to pack up. Her redundant maternity clothes she left lying on the bedroom floor, and her good clothes filled only two cases.

  When she came to the drawer that contained her cosmetics she found that the fat album of snapshots that she had accumulated since Nicky’s birth was missing, together with the envelopes of negatives. It came as a shock to realize that she had no record of her baby, no photograph or souvenir, apart from the single woollen bootee that she had retrieved from his cot.

  She lugged her bulging cases downstairs and packed them into the back of the Mini. Then she crossed the street and spoke to the baker’s wife.

  ‘If my husband comes back and asks for me, tell him I have gone back to London.’

  ‘What about Nico? Are you all right, señora?’ The woman was sympathetic, and Isabella smiled brightly.

  ‘Nico is with my husband. I’ll meet them in London soon. Muchas gracias por su ayuda, señora. Adiós.’

  The drive northwards seemed endless. Each episode of the last few days since last she had seen her son played over and over in her mind until she felt that she was going slowly mad.

  On the cross-Channel ferry, she forsook the loud bonhomie of the crowded saloon and went up on to the boat-deck. It was a cold grey day, with the north wind kicking the tops off the swells in dashing white spurts of spray. The wind and her despair chilled her through, until she was shivering uncontrollably even in her padded anorak. However, in the end it was the ache in her swollen breasts that drove her below. In the women’s toilet she used the express pump to draw off the flow that should have been for her son.

  ‘Oh, Nicky, Nicky!’ she cried silently, as she discharged the rich creamy liquid into the toilet-bowl, and she imagined once again his hot little mouth on her nipples and the smell and the feel of him against her breast.

  She found herself weeping, and with a huge effort controlled herself. ‘You’re losing your grip on reality,’ she warned herself. ‘You’ve got to be strong now. You can’t let go. For Nicky’s sake, you must be strong. No more crying and moping – no more.’

  It was raining when she drove into Cadogan Square, and the flat seemed chilly and uninviting. While she unpacked she thought about the promise that she had made her father. Suddenly she threw down the dress that she held and ran through to the drawing-room.

  ‘International, I want to place a call to Cape Town, South Africa.’

  At this time of night, the delay was less than ten minutes, and she heard the peals of the telephone at the other end. One of the servants answered it, and as she opened her mouth to ask for her father Ramón’s strict injunction came back to her with all its force and threat. ‘Your disobedience will have dire consequences for Nicky.’

  She replaced the receiver on its cradle without speaking, and resigned herself to wait for the promised contact.

  Nothing happened for six days. She never left the flat, not daring to put herself beyond the reach of the telephone. She rang nobody, spoke to nobody except the housekeeper, and tried to keep herself occupied by reading and watching television. The uncertainty aggravated her despair, and she found that, although she stared at the pages of her book or at the small flickering screen of the television set, the printed words and the images were meaningless. Only her agony was real. Only her loss had poignant meaning. Only her pain abided.

  She could barely bring herself to eat, and within three days her milk-flow had dried up. She lost weight dramatically. Her hair, which was one of the high points of her beauty, turned dull and dry. Her face in the mirror was gaunt, her eyes sank into bruised-looking cavities and her golden amber Mediterranean tan became sallow and yellow like the skin of a malaria sufferer.

  She waited, and the waiting was torture. Each hour was an insupportable eternity. Then, on the sixth day, the telephone rang. She snatched it up with desperate haste, before the second peal.

  ‘I have a message from Ramón.’ It was a woman’s voice with an elusive accent, probably mid-European. ‘Leave now, immediately. Take a taxi to the junction of Royal Hospital Road and the Embankment. Walk down the Embankment towards Westminster. Somebody will greet you with the name Red Rose. Follow their orders,’ said the caller. ‘Repeat these instructions, please.’

  Breathlessly Isabella obeyed. ‘Good,’ said the woman, and broke the connection.

  Isabella had not walked further than a hundred yards along the Embankment above the Thames when a small unmarked van passed her, travelling slowly in the same direction. It pulled into the kerb ahead of her, and as she drew level with it the rear door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman in grey overalls sitting on the side-bench of the body of the van.

  ‘Red Rose,’ she said and Isabella recognized her voice from their telephone conversation. ‘Get in!’

  Quickly Isabella slipped into the van and sat on the bench opposite the woman. She slammed the door, and immediately the van pulled away.

  The body of the van was without windows or any opening except for the ventilator in the roof above Isabella’s head. She could not see out and, though she tried to track their course by the turns and stops, she was soon totally confused and abandoned the attempt.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked the woman opposite her.

  ‘Silence, please.’ And Isabella resigned herself. She pulled her collar up around her ears, and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her anorak. They drove for twenty-three minutes by her wristwatch, and then the van stopped again and the rear door was opened from outside.

  They were in a parking garage. She judged from the unpainted concrete pillars that supported the low roof and from the steep access-ramp at the far end of the long narrow chamber that it was an underground parking facility.

  The woman in the grey overalls took her arm and helped her down from the van. The touch of her hand made Isabella aware of just how powerful she was. The hand felt like the paw of a gorilla, and she towered above Isabella with wide meaty shoulders under the grey cloth.

  ‘This way,’ she ordered. Still holding her arm, she led Isabella to the lift doors opposite the van. Despite the painful grip, Isabella glanced around her quickly. There were a dozen or so other vehicles parked in the bays alongside the van; at least two of them had diplomatic number-plates.

  The doors of the lift opened, and the woman pushed Isabella into it. A glance at the control panel showed Isabella that her assumption had been correct. The lighted stage-indicator showed that they were at ‘Basement Level II’. The woman pushed the button for the third floor and they rode up in silence, until the lift stopped with the stage-indicator at ‘Level III’ and her escort urged her out into a bare corridor with cork flooring. They walked down it side by side, and still in silence. The corridor was empty and the doors on each side closed.

  As they approached the end of the corridor, the facing door slid open. Another large female with flat Slavic features, dressed also in grey overalls, ushered them into what appeared to be a small lecture-room or an intimate movie-theatre. A double row of easy chairs faced the raised dais and the screen that covered the far wall.

  Isabella’s escort led her to the chair in the front row centre.

  ‘Sit down,
’ she said, and Isabella sank down on the smooth cold plastic padding. The two women moved around and took up their position, standing behind Isabella. For several minutes, there was silence. Then the small door to the right of the dais opened and a man came through.

  He moved slowly, stiffly, like a frail and sick old man. His hair was dead white, with a yellowish tinge, and hung over his forehead and ears. His features were very pale, lined and seamed with age and suffering, so that Isabella felt a twinge of sympathy for him, until the light caught his eyes.

  With a small jolt of intense distaste she recognized those eyes. Once she had been with her father on a chartered fishing boat out of Black River. Shasa had been trolling a live bonito along the oceanic drop-off under the shadow of Le Morne Brabant on the island of Mauritius when he had hooked into a gigantic mako shark. After a battle which lasted two hours, he had dragged the creature alongside. As its pointed snout broke through the surface, Isabella had been leaning over the rail and she had looked into its eyes. They were black and pitiless, without definite iris or pupil, two holes that seemed to reach down into hell itself. Those were the same eyes that studied her now.

  She held her breath under their implacable scrutiny, until at last the man spoke. Then his voice came as a surprise. It was low and hoarse. She had to lean forward slightly to make sense of the words.

  ‘Isabella Courtney, from now on we will never use that name again in any communication. You will be referred to and you will refer to yourself only as Red Rose. Do you understand?’

  She nodded, not trusting her voice to reply. He lifted the cigarette that smouldered between his fingers and drew deeply upon it. He spoke again through a cloud of exhaled smoke.