Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  “No, who?”

  “A Spaniard called Priego. Another millionaire. He made most of his money in the war, servicing and supplying U-boats on the Mediterranean run. Well, and Moreno worked for him at one time. Handing on the information to Soviet Intelligence.”

  “Yes, I knew that last bit. I saw his file once. But was he working here?”

  ‘That’s what I don’t know. But it seems likely enough. They call this place El Anteojo—the Spyglass— because it covers the whole damned Straits of Gibraltar as far as Ceuta. “You couldn’t want a better observation post to pick up the Malta convoys.” Fedora pushed open the door of Carmen’s room again, turned to look back at Trout. “The thing I like least is the business of that cache’s having been fifteen feet underwater.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes me think of aqualungs.”

  He sat down heavily on the bed, ignoring the plaintive squeak of the bedsprings. Trout poured out the coffee, and H for a few moments they sipped at their cups contemplatively without saying anything. Eventually,

  “I can see what you’re getting at,” said Trout glumly, j “But the aqualungs on the Polarlys aren’t the only ones i in Spain, you know. It’s a popular sport, round here.”

  “On the other hand, that party of theirs certainly got us , both out of the way very conveniently.”

  “The only thing wrong with that is that they’ve all got ‘e alibis. We were all there together, dammit.”

  “There was somebody who wasn’t. A man called Jaime Baroda. I met him on the way out. A very big man with dark hair.”

  Trout rose to stare out of the window. The sun was tangled now in the tops of the palm trees, spattering his face with a pattern of blue shade. “Moreno?”

  “He could have been. I had a sort of feeling about him, even then. . . . You know what I mean?”

  “I ought to, by now.”

  “Another thing. They’ve got some chisels. We saw them.”

  “Jesus,” said Trout. His head jerked round abruptly into the full glare of the sun. “So we did.”

  “They’ve got a whole lot of equipment. Equipment that you could use for hunting something rather bigger than jellyfish.”

  “Such as . . .?”

  “U-boats, for instance,” said Fedora.

  “...SKIN in the fingernails,” said Valera. “It’s a useful pointer, of course. But I’m surprised, all the same.”

  “It’s very frequent in these cases,” said the Provincial Judge.

  “The man I’m thinking of doesn’t usually give them that much time. Of course, it was dark, and presumably he killed her in the water. Had to get hold of her first. But even so.”

  “It’s a let-out for young Garcia, anyway,” said the Judge.

  “I had him in here first thing this morning. But there wasn’t a scratch on him that was less than a fortnight old. Well, and now you’ve come along with this very disturbing new idea—which I certainly don’t say is likely to be wrong, but which gives us a whole lot of things to think about. Obviously, if you’re right, it isn’t a sex killing at all. Are we supposed to be able to guess at the true motive?”

  He sounded rather bitter, thought Valera. The old complaint, of course. The old, familiar jibes at excessive centralisation, at the reluctance of the Secret Police to hand out information, to let the left hand know what the right hand was doing. “I suppose you’ve had Madrid on the telephone,” he said; wearily, because he was rather tired.

  “Naturally. Oh, we’re here to co-operate, you don’t have to worry about that. This is just the sort of case I’m happy to hand over. But it’s not much fun for us having a fellow like this Moreno on the rampage round these parts—you can see that. I mean, you tell us how to catch him—you give the orders—and the police’ll bring him in. Ail they need to know is what to look for—if you follow me.”

  “It’s not as easy as that,” said Valera. “I wish it were.” He walked over to the window. The canary in its green-painted cage opened one eye and chirruped at him in sudden panic; he drew aside the muslin curtains, looked out into the sundrenched village square. “What about that boat?” he asked.

  “We haven’t located it yet. It wasn’t any of the local fishermen, though—that’s been established.”

  Valera came back, sat down at the old-style mahogany desk with its huge carved legs and leather blotter. He wouldn’t have liked the Judge’s job; not at all. He’d have liked it as little as Acuña’s. The one too big and the other too small. His own job should have been just right for him, but there were times when he didn’t like that, either. “You’ve seen the people who live there?”

  “At El Anteojo? Yes.”

  “What’s your impression?”

  “Well, the place belongs to a Senorita Adriana Tocino. She’s from the Argentine. But she’s not there now. There are only two young Englishmen. The senorita, they tell me, is extremely rich. Her father—”

  “I know what the police dossiers say,” said Valera, inexorably patient. “I’ve just finished looking through them. What I wanted from you was your personal impression of these people.” He didn’t hope for much from it, though. To the judge of a small provincial village, they’d be simply foreigners, Martians, beings from another world. He’d have to go and see them for himself. “How did they react, for instance, to the murder?”

  “Very strangely.”

  “Strangely?”

  “Very calm, very cool, very. . . . Not exactly as though it were a matter of no importance, no, not that, but as though it were nothing really . . . out of the ordinary. One of the men seemed a little angry, I thought.”

  “Which one?”

  “The darkhaired one. His name escapes me at the moment.”

  “Fedora.” Valera pulled reflectively at a hangnail on his fight thumb. “He’s half Spanish, as a matter of fact. His father fought with the Reds in the Civil War, until we had him shot in ’37. We know quite a lot about Sr. Fedora.”

  “But in that case. . .

  “Oh, he hasn’t any other Communist affiliations. Quite the contrary, in fact. In what way, precisely, was he angry?”

  The Judge thought for a few moments. “It seems an odd thing to say, I know, but. . . . Well, he seemed to be taking it as a—a personal affront. I can’t be more explicit.”

  “That’s very interesting,” said Valera.

  “Yes?”

  “Of course it is. Can you think of any reason why he should take a vulgar sex crime as a personal affront?”

  “Not unless his relationship with the girl concerned was also somewhat. . . personal.”

  “Yes. I suppose that’s possible. But there’s been quite a lot about Moreno in the newspapers lately. And if by any chance Fedora has already connected him with this crime, somehow. . . . Well, from what we know of him, I’d say it was quite likely that he’d take that personally, too.”

  The Judge shrugged. “You have information that I haven’t,” he said, “about Sr. Fedora. It may well be so.”

  “Either way,” said Valera, reaching for his hat, “it’s going to be interesting finding out.”

  FEDORA’S fingers moved cautiously over the keyboard of the piano. E flat, E and C as a blues triad; the C minor chord; then down to G on the soft pedal. He played the sequence over and over again, repeating it with infinite concentration and care, a bar and a half of meaningless music aching for the breakaway that never came. The sun came J slanting in through the open windows, entering the room at an angle as though to spotlight the lean brown enraptured hands, the black and white keys, the high polish on the piano’s surface and its reflection of a tousle-haired, unsmiling face staring down at the flawless perfection of the ivory veneer. “Play something, Johnny,” said Trout, “there’s a good chap.” But the piano kept up its mindless, interminable singing of that single interminable phrase; unvarying, intent. Trout moved his feet uneasily on the carpet. Eventually Fedora took his right hand from the keyboard, found a cigarette, put it in h
is mouth and lit it; the piano seemed to Trout still to be humming that same series of notes, so accustomed had his ears grown to it.

  “Pavanne for a dead parlourmaid,” said Johnny.

  He suddenly hit a full chord in C major, played the old sequence at high speed and went on, full tilt, into the blues, Trout listened, aware of that insidious theme still hanging on the fringes of the melody, seeming to parody it horribly, almost gruesomely. “Two nineteen done took my baby ‘way,” sang Fedora, in his curiously throaty black-coffee-ruined tenor. “Two nineteen took my bab’ away, Ol’ two seventeen’ll bring her back some day.” His right hand dissolved into a ripple of fantastic arpeggios, phantasmagoric, chillingly melancholy. The sunlight seemed suddenly to fade around his fingers; he built in swift, haunted arabesques a dark street in a rainy winter, the beat of the water on the low tin roofs, the fan of red light above the door where, in the shadows, a woman smoked a long sweet-smelling cigarette; then let the scene escape with a slow, elaborate figure in the bass like a sudden swirl of fog. Trout sighed. “All the same,” he said, “it isn’t funny, really.”

  “If y’ain’t got a dollar ” sang Fedora, “gimme a lousy dime. Said if y’ain’t got a dollar, well, gimme jus’ a lousy ol’ dime. Now, why does that remind me of General Franco? All right, don’t tell me. I remember.” His hands jittered crazily over the keys, resolving his subject in a series of impromptu and tenuously connected sketches of staggering technical difficulty. ‘There you are. Now I bow, looking modest. You know, looking sort of humble, as though I don’t know what the hell of a great player I am really. And looking tired at the same time, mind you. Worn out by it all. That’s very important. Well, what do you fancy for an encore?”

  “You couldn’t look half as goddam tired as I feel right now,” said Trout pointedly. “I’m getting fed up with sitting round watching you think your great thoughts to yourself. Why don’t you fly right and tell me what’s supposed to be on the ball?”

  “I don’t know what’s on the ball,” said Johnny. “That’s the trouble.” He shook his hands up and down a few times, loosely, from the wrists, then got up from the piano-stool. “What ; do you think we ought to do?”

  “We could always tell the police.”

  “Tell them what?”

  “Well. . . . Your suspicions.”

  “Yes, but the police don’t much care for suspicions. They don’t much care for any kind of volunteered information, as a rule. Better to wait till we’re asked.”

  “You think we will be?”

  “Of course,” said Johnny. “Of course.” He slumped himself bonelessly down into an armchair, let his head flop back on to the cushions. “They’ll be around. Don’t worry.”

  “I thought you didn’t like the Spanish police.”

  “I don’t,” said Johnny.

  “Yet you don’t mind working in with them?”

  “Nobody’s talking about working in with anybody. I want to hear what they’ve got to say, that’s all. Even if it’s only, ‘Get out of our way.’ It looks to me as though we’re butting in on a halma game that’s being played between two other people. And we can’t expect either of the players to like it.”

  “Well, but who are the players? The police versus Moreno?”

  “It can’t be just Moreno.”

  “Not if you’re right about the Polarlys.” Trout turned his head to watch Fedora curiously. “You think this is something big, don’t you, Johnny?”

  “In what way, big?”

  “Big people?”

  “Oh yes. Big people.”

  “Russia?”

  “If I had to make a bet, yes, I’d say Russia.”

  “My God,” said Trout. “I don’t know that I’m especially anxious to tangle it up with the Russians, at my time of life. They play kind of a rough game, you know, particularly their overseas crowd.”

  “They play it the same way as we used to. For keeps.” Fedora smiled, a smile that appeared to be of genuine amusement. “If it comes to that, I don’t much want to tangle with the Spaniards either. They can be a nasty lot to get on the wrong side of. One way or another, I’m beginning to wish I was back in Chicago in the early forties. . . . I was young enough then to play on both sides at once and even like it But I can’t do that any more. They know me, now.”

  “Yes,” Trout agreed. “The penalties of fame. But still, experience counts for something.”

  “For something, yes. We’re both used to trouble. There’s always that.”

  “But not Russian trouble.”

  “It can’t be all that different. A bullet in the belly hurts a Russian as much as anyone else.”

  “There aren’t any Russians on the Polarlys, though.”

  “We don’t know there aren’t.”

  “I suppose not. But we do know there are some Germans. Could be that some of our old ex-Nazi pals are dreaming something up. Spain’s stiff with them, anyway.”

  Johnny shook his head. “It doesn’t smell to me like comic opera.”

  “Hell, it wasn’t comic opera that year in Austria. Don’t you remember Mayer? He was big time.”

  “That was a long time ago. Besides, what could that crowd have cooking in Spain that we wouldn’t know about? No, this is operational stuff, Tiddler. That lot aboard the yacht, they’ve got plenty of backing. That’s obvious.”

  “They could even have too much for us to handle.”

  “Yes,” admitted Johnny. “They could.”

  “And in any case, I don’t suppose they’re going to hang around. If they got what they wanted last night from our pool, they’ll be off like a shot, won’t they? . . . While we’re just sitting round here doing damn-all.”

  “We’re not doing damn-all. We’re waiting. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “For this fellow, probably.”

  Trout, too, had heard the faint thrum of the car engine turning into the driveway. He got up and moved across to the window, where the sunlight formed a halo in his fair hair and cast his shadow against the piano. He saw the car grind to a halt outside the front door; a portly man in a grey suit swung himself out of the back seat and marched up the steps. “You were right,” said Trout, turning back. “Full marks : for once. It’s some kind of a cop.”

  “Plain clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Um,” said Fedora. He began to whistle, between his teeth, the same theme that he had been playing on the piano, and with the same heartbreaking accuracy. The electric door-bell buzzed quietly in the hall; he went out to open the door. Outside was a brown, corpulent man with thinning hair and faded grey eyes; a high, beaky nose over a clipped moustache; carefully polished black shoes and well-creased trousers. He looked at Fedora, and Fedora looked at him; and comprehension between the two of them was somehow at once complete.

  “Sr. Fedora? I am a police officer. My name is Valera.”

  “Yes,” said Johnny. “Come in.”

  MORENO was breakfasting on liver and bacon, while Elsa sat at the far side of the dining-table and watched him. He took no notice, if indeed he was aware of her scrutiny; he seemed entirely absorbed in the act of eating, an act which appeared to demand not only all his attention but the employment of almost all his facial muscles; with the rhythmic movement of his lips and jaws, sinews writhed higher up in his temples, jerked to and fro with the regularity of a nervous tic. The sharp morning light brought his cheekbones into high relief, sculped into a third dimension the outline of wide forehead, broad nose. Eventually he laid down his knife and fork; looked up, not at Elsa but towards the ceiling. “When are we leaving?” he asked.

  “The clearance certificate ought to be ready by eleven.”

  “And then we sail?”

  “That’s for Feramontov to say. Are you nervous?”

  “Do I look nervous?”

  “Not at all. That’s why I ask. I am interested.”

  “I’m not nervous. But I don’t believe in wasting tim
e.”

  “I see. You’re always eager for the next death. . . . Is that it?”

  Moreno wiped his mouth on his napkin. “Somehow it’s not a thing one talks about.”

  “Why not?”

  “One never knows whose the next death will be.”

  “And why should that matter?”

  “A superstition. Call it that, if you like.” He poured himself out a glass of milk from the porcelain jug, began to sip at it slowly. “You’re not the superstitious kind, though,” said Elsa. “You’re a schizo. Aren’t you?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “You killed someone last night.”

  Moreno put down the glass. There was a white smear of milk on his upper lip; his tongue flicked out abruptly and licked it away. “Feramontov,” he said. “He talks perhaps a little too much.”

  “Feramontov didn’t tell me.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “I knew. And it was different to the others, wasn’t it? A woman?”

  Moreno nodded. “There was a girl. Swimming in the pool. And it was necessary to kill her. Afterwards, I cut off her head.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve told you . . . one doesn’t talk about these things.”

  “Was she an attractive girl, Moreno?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Yes, you must have. You must have had to touch her when you killed her, you must have had to hold her. . . . What does it feel like, Moreno, when you touch them and they. . . . What do they do? They scream, don’t they? You wait for them to scream, don’t you? Isn’t that what you do?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Moreno, his tongue coming out again and again in search of a smear of grease that was no longer there. “One doesn’t remember. One doesn’t remember.”

  “Come on. Come on, tell me. What do you do to them? Was it like that time in Buenos Aires? You remember that one, don’t you? That politician and his mistress, that time you caught them in bed together and it was supposed to look like a jealousy murder and a suicide only you went too far and nobody would believe it and they had to get you out of town in a hurry? Don’t tell me you didn’t like touching her, Don’t tell me she didn’t attract you. Was it like that last night, Moreno? Did she have anything on?”