by Lex Lander
‘Mother! Everyone’s looking at you!’
The shocked protest dumped an icy douche on our ardour. I left off gnawing Clair’s neck. Her fevered panting ended abruptly on a rising note, and she heaved me aside, flushed, wild-eyed, as obviously aroused as any woman ever seduced.
Lizzy, dripping salt water, frog-flippers in one hand, snorkel mask in the other, seemed to soar over us like an avenging angel. Her hair was plastered to her scalp, taking the edge off her prettiness and giving her a pinched, shrewish look that was wholly out of character.
‘Sit down, Lizzy,’ I growled, conscious of the stares we were attracting from a young family nearby. ‘No need to make a scene.’
‘I’m making a scene?’ she stormed, but sat down just the same.
Clair took both Lizzy’s hands in hers. ‘Darling …’
That was as far as she got. The required words would not come. Lizzy sat cross legged, with folded arms and glowering expression, immune to blandishment.
‘Let me, Clair,’ I said gently. ‘Look, Lizzy, I can understand it’s difficult for you to accept any man other than your father kissing your mother. But you know how much I like her and believe this or not, that was our first kiss, so you can’t say we’ve been rushing things.’
Lizzy unfolded her arms but only to towel her hair savagely. No softening yet. Clair was looking worried.
‘It wasn’t planned,’ I slogged on, picking my words with the care of a teenage Romeo composing a St Valentine’s poem for his sweetheart. ‘There we were talking about the weather, when suddenly we had this urge to kiss. Some kind of magnetic impulse, I suppose. I guess you could say I’m Power-mad.’
No reaction from Lizzy but a heartfelt groan from Clair.
‘Pur-lease, Andy, spare me the puns on my name. I’ve heard every one in the book and then some.’
‘Sorry. I’m just Power-less in your presence.’
Clair rolled her eyes heavenwards. From under the towel came a giggle. Lizzy emerged, cheeks furnace-bright.
‘Powerless in your presence,’ she echoed. ‘That’s very funny. It may even be original.’ She leaned across and kissed Clair’s cheek. ‘I keep forgetting Mummy is still young enough to want to go out with guys. It still doesn’t seem long since Pops … you know …’
‘Of course, darling,’ Clair said, reaching for her spontaneously. ‘It’s the same for me, it really is.’
They hugged, a small reconciliation. I was touched. Fleetingly, I felt like a voyeur.
‘Let’s celebrate that kiss with an ice cream,’ I said, pointing out the ice-cream vendor in fez and tattered shorts plodding at the water’s edge. His invocation to buy – ‘Ice … ice …’ – competing with the crash of breakers and the general cacophony of squeals and yells that goes with any crowded beach. I grinned at Clair. ‘After all, it was one hell of a kiss!’
She reddened becomingly and delved into her beach bag for some money.
‘Race you there,’ Lizzy challenged me, tucking a banknote in her bikini top.
She won.
As we walked back, ice cream cones already wilting, she looped her arm through mine. Her shoulder brushed my bicep and the heat of it made me catch my breath.
‘Is anything wrong?’ she queried at once.
‘No, no. A touch of indigestion.’
‘Oh.’
Clair waved to us. I returned her wave with a raised cone, like the Statue of Liberty.
‘Actually I’m really glad you like my mother, Alan,’ Lizzy said, looking down at her feet, not at me, and kicking up puffs of sand as we walked. ‘She deserves a break. But what about me?’
‘Yeah, what about you?’
‘No, I mean do you like me too?’
‘You bet I do.’ I wasn’t just humouring her either.
‘As much as you like Mummy?’
‘Sure.’ It came out as a croak. ‘Every bit as much.’
She gave a satisfied little nod.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’d be bloody jealous if you didn’t.’
No messages awaited me at the front desk but, as I turned away, today’s person in charge, an elegant Spanish woman I might have cultivated had Clair not been around, called my name.
‘Telephone call for you,’ she said, her lush red lips curving in a smile. ‘Will you take it in a cabin?’
I was directed to cabin number 1, nearest of a rank of three.
‘A moment, please,’ the Spanish woman said as I put the receiver to my ear. Then a male voice replaced hers and it was a lousy swap as it turned out.
‘Mr Melville? This is Rik de Bruin.’
I almost dropped the receiver. Recovering, I responded noncommittally but with civility. I still wasn’t looking for a fight with this guy.
‘This will be a surprise to you,’ he said, and he wasn’t wrong. ‘I am telephoning to apologise for what I say to you, in the forest. You remember? I was angry.’
It was an unconvincing about-turn.
‘Think no more of it,’ I said blandly.
‘To make amends I wish to invite you to come here, to my villa. We can talk, get to know each other, eh? Possibly do a little business … you are a businessman, is that not so?’
‘Was. Now I’m an ex-businessman.’
His laughter had a hollow pitch. Like his sincerity. I wasn’t so naïve. This was sure to be a come-into-my-parlour ruse. Yet I might be able to make capital out of it. Maybe I could kill him in self-defence.
‘I’m willing to meet you,’ I said. ‘But on neutral ground.’
‘Neutral? Aah … neutraal.’ The Dutch pronunciation was a world away. ‘It is agreed.’ He suggested a café-bar out at the Cap, the “Chico”.
I cut short his attempt at directions. ‘I’ll find it. Shall we say tomorrow, at ten?’
‘Twelve is better. We will have some lunch after, no?’
Which would rule out lunch with Clair, a small enough sacrifice in the interests of peace, yet I grudged it. I sighed and agreed, and that was that.
Nodding my thanks to Spanish Rose, I made a leisurely ascent to the bar where I was to meet Clair for aperitifs. I chose the most secluded of the remaining available tables, ordered a vodka – the first of the day – and the harassed waiter was darting away when Lizzy wandered in, munching a large green apple and wearing a red layered mini-dress that showed a lot of brown leg. I waved and she strutted over.
‘Hi, Alan.’ She took the seat opposite, crunched into the apple, and grinned through bulging cheeks.
‘Hi, yourself. Where’s your mother?’
‘Coming, coming,’ she said airily. ‘Eight o’clock, she said you said.’ She consulted her large octagonal wristwatch. ‘It is now exactly eleven minutes to. So …’ She paused and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I’ve got you all to myself for eleven minutes.’
My mouth opened mechanically but nothing came out.
‘You look like a fish!’ she exclaimed, and aped me.
‘Do you always talk with your mouth full,’ I said, falling back, in my disarray, on a parental-style rebuke.
Unfazed, she bounced to her feet. ‘Do you like my froufrou dress?’ Lifting the hem like a can-can girl, she did a double twirl, exposing more than was good for my good intentions. Nor was I the only male noticing.
‘Sit down,’ I muttered, my cheeks hot.
She subsided back into the chair. Her laugh was low and throaty. I could have sworn the minx was giving me the come-on. Because she was Clair’s daughter I naturally tended to view her more as a child than a young adult. Big mistake.
‘You planning to see Yusuf again?’ I said, a despairing attempt to distract her.
She elevated her nose. ‘Yusuf! He’s a fucking downey.’ Her lapses into expletives and Aussie slang were more frequent when Clair wasn’t around. ‘Didn’t even kiss me the other evening let alone get his fingers sticky. He’s a big boy, mind you. If you know what I mean.’
Over the apple those smoky eyes inspected me. I co
uld only blink back at them. My conditioned responses were not geared to such forthright language from a schoolgirl.
‘You’ve gone all puce,’ she observed. ‘It doesn’t match your shirt at all.’
I withdrew behind a generous swallow of vodka. Ought I simply to disregard her provocative talk on the premise that it would then wither away? Or put a deliberate stop to it and thereby tacitly acknowledge that she was getting through to me, sexually speaking.
Thankfully, the onus was removed by Clair’s entry into the bar, her height and that panther stride setting her apart from the other women there. Ravishing in an ankle-length, dark-shading-to-light-blue crepe dress and a wide choker necklace that was a blazing rainbow of colours, setting off her long neck and well-shaped head with its dark bouncy coiffure. I rose to greet her with a light kiss on the lips; hers were moist, slightly open, newly intimate. By her thermometer our courtship had advanced several degrees. By mine, we were already in tropical climes. I glanced down at Lizzy and was taken aback by the malevolence that was written there.
It looked as if I had more bridges to build in that direction than I had bargained for.
‘So lunch is out tomorrow, I’m afraid,’ I said to Clair, encouraging the last dregs from a bottle of Valpierre rouge into her glass.
It was after eleven and the hotel restaurant was almost deserted though the band played on obligingly for lingerers such as us. Lizzy, as punishment for an unbroken, evening-long sulk, had been banished from our presence.
‘There’s always dinner,’ Clair said, adding, ‘If you can stand another dose of me and my wilful daughter.’
‘Doses of you I could stand for a lifetime.’ I could be gallant when the occasion demanded. ‘Your daughter I would prefer in more rationed quantities.’
Though I knew Clair’s attitude was love me, love my daughter, she was not offended.
‘She does have her moody side, I must say. Fortunately, tonight’s behaviour was exceptional. She just has to get used to you, to us as an item.’
‘Okay, I’m convinced.’
As she laughed gaily, the maitre d’ materialised at my shoulder.
‘Un digestif pour madame et monsieur?’ he proposed.
From a list as long as Magna Carta I plumped for Martell “Cordon Bleu” cognac; Clair, less extravagantly, for a Cointreau liqueur.
‘No sense in acquiring expensive tastes,’ she said.
I handed the list back. ‘And coffee, please. Espresso.’
‘Only three days left,’ Clair said, when we were alone again.
‘Time’s running out,’ I agreed. I looked hard at her, trying to probe her emotions. She returned my scrutiny, unflinchingly, laying herself bare through her eyes. Her hand scuttled across the table to imprison mine.
‘Alan …’
‘Don’t go back to the States, Clair.’ The words jumped from my tongue like a jack-in-the-box. Only I couldn’t stuff this jack back inside and shut the lid, whether it was a serious proposition or merely the consequence of drink and soft candlelight.
The entreaty was incomplete. So I nerved myself to follow through, saying, ‘Come to Andorra; come home with me.’
Nine
When I drove out of the Rif parking lot the next morning, bound for my appointment with Rik de Bruin, Clair’s serenely smiling ‘Let me think about it,’ was still swirling around my mind. So was a certain astonishment. Astonishment, because I wasn’t in love with her. Honest-to-goodness love had been a rare event in my life since Marion’s death. Maybe by accident, maybe by design, I had fended off emotional attachments and stuck to physical ones, with or without money changing hands. A couple of short-lived affairs, the second ending tragically, were the only oases in the desert that was my love life and even they had proved to be mirages. Clair was the first woman I had seriously cared for in a while. She represented a catharsis, an end, possibly, to mourning. It was long overdue.
At a suitable spot, once the suburbs were behind me, I pulled off the road, and despite faultless positioning and a winking indicator, was honked for my temerity by a battered taxi. I suppressed the temptation to retort in kind and waited for the cumulus of dust to disperse before emerging to retrieve the Beretta, the spare magazine, and the box of shells from under the wheel in the trunk. Back inside the car I loaded up: fifteen cartridges in the standard magazine, twenty in the extended version, every cartridge individually examined for defects, for any blemish that might induce a jam. A jammed gun is the assassin’s bogey. Also the reason for my preference for revolvers over automatics. I rejected three rounds and lobbed them out through the window, far from the roadside.
Fitting each magazine in turn into the grip, I worked the slide, jacking every last round into the breech and out through the ejector port into my lap. No jams, no snagging. As satisfied as I was ever likely to be, I reloaded and stowed the gun and the spare magazine under my seat. The box containing the surplus shells went back in the trunk.
Secreting a handgun the size and bulk of the Beretta about the person is always a challenge. You can strap it to your ankle or stuff it down your pants’ waistband, in the small of the back, and that’s about the extent of your options. In the ankle position the gun has to be secured with adhesive tape, making a fast draw impossible. So my preferred option would be the second one, meaning that, heat or no heat, I would have to wear a jacket. To any streetwise villain this would normally be a giveaway. I was banking on de Bruin not being streetwise. About his villainy I was reserving judgement.
Soon after regaining the road I passed a flaking sign bearing the multi-lingual message that the Chico Bar was next on the left, some 500 metres ahead. Which proved to be a bit of a con, because once you were thoroughly committed to the turn-off, a typical Moroccan piste, and wondering if perhaps you had made a mistake, a far less-imposing notice informed you that the Chico was “only” 3km more.
The red top of the Cap Malabata lighthouse hove into sight on my left. Otherwise the landscape was uninteresting, just barren earth, scrubby grass, the very occasional stunted conifer. The road began to descend in a succession of hairpin bends. An ancient station wagon had come to an untidy halt on the second of these bends. Edging past I noticed a spare wheel with a bald tyre lying on the ground. Two North African guys in scruffy shorts and singlets were jacking up the front of the vehicle, on the other side. The sea, rich aquamarine and sun-speckled, made its appearance here and so did the Chico Bar. It was a wooden building tucked into the rock face, and fronted by a paved terrace dotted with tables and parasols, and fenced by tattered palms. Wooden steps that looked unsafe led from the terrace down to a cove and a beach with an oily tide mark. A billboard proclaimed WELCOME in five languages, plus a final line of Arabic squiggle. The place had a down-at-heel ambience.
Three unremarkable cars were parked in a gravelled area, shaded by a rock overhang. I tacked mine on to the end beside a Spanish-registered Alfa convertible, reversing in, anticipating a possible hasty exodus. A routine precaution. Down the waistband went the Beretta. It was a tight fit against my spine and bloody uncomfortable. While still inside the car I shrugged into my jacket, light blue, tropical-weight but still a garment too many for the mid-day sizzle.
De Bruin was already installed at a table, his head obscured by a red and white Pepsi parasol. He emerged from under it to shake hands. For form’s sake only, no warmth in his clasp.
‘Please,’ he said, indicating a chair. He was smoking a gargantuan cigar, and spoke with his teeth clamped on it. ‘Sit down.’
He wasn’t alone. Very much not alone. The girl on his left was maybe a couple of years older than Lizzy, very blonde, very busty, and with a pretty snub nose. Her minuscule halter and short red shorts were cut to emphasize her assets.
‘Hello,’ she said, with a light Nordic lilt married to an engaging smile.
I returned her greeting and that of de Bruin’s other playmate, a younger girl, fifteen at the most. Unattractive brown hair, but with looks that more than comp
ensated for it.
I cast around, as if making a random appraisal. The only other customers were a young, blond guy, built like an athlete, and a brown-skinned type, dazzling in white slacks and shirt.
‘Nice here, huh? You like a drink?’
‘Why not? Vodka with ice.’
He spoke to the younger girl, addressing her as ‘Bea’. The rest was Dutch, which to me is mostly double-Dutch. Bea scuttled off to the bar.
‘You certainly picked an out-of-the-way spot to meet,’ I commented for something to say, resuming my survey. A warm westerly breeze was blowing, rattling the parasol and making the palm fronds clack. Gulls and other seabirds wheeled about like Spitfires and Messerschmitts in a dogfight.
Bea returned with a tray of drinks. A gin for de Bruin by the look of it, to which he added a splash of tonic water. The girls were on smoothies.
‘Prosit.’ De Bruin drank like a man with no tonsils – a single swallow and the glass was half empty. For once, I only wetted my lips. I wanted all my faculties about me.
‘You are not too hot?’ he said, in clear reference to my jacket. Oozing innocence, maybe real, maybe fake.
‘Not at all,’ I replied, disregarding the prickle of sweat on my temples. And the Beretta giving my spine hell.
The buxom blonde girl started stroking de Bruin’s neck. Bea was more interested in her smoothie. Even when de Bruin reached behind her and jerked up her halter top, exposing pale, barely formed breasts, her only reaction was to dip a finger in her glass and give the contents a stir.
‘What do you think of those, hey, Melville?’ he cackled. The girl carried on unconcernedly stirring her smoothie. Her vacant, young-old eyes fastened on me, inquisitorially, as if expecting a gush of admiration.
Faintly embarrassed, I looked beyond her. Maybe girls do graduate to womanhood at an ever-earlier age these days, but reading the statistics in the tabloid press is a lunar journey away from having it shoved under your nose for inspection. Perv I was not.
