Undertow

by Desmond Cory

  “And Garcia?”

  “Yes. He’ll take us.”

  “When?”

  “Now,” said Johnny.

  He sat up abruptly. Their bare arms touched, a physical contact as sudden and intimate as an electric shock; Elsa’s lips came half-open. They weren’t looking at each other and didn’t try to do so; it wasn’t necessary. They were looking down the beach towards the mole; where, one by one, the fishing boats were running out from the warm sands to ride on the breeze-ruffled water. Brown singleted figures set the sails and the boats moved away in slow procession, dancing gently as they passed the mole and the current took possession of their hulls; then other brown figures came splay-footed over the sands, heaving another boat down to the water’s edge and splashing heavily through the foam to pull themselves aboard. The morning sun beat smoothly down, striking reflection from the sea’s blue surface; all the world was of colour and of shivering fragments of light, was the scent of the sea and the grittiness of the sand and the salt muscular warmth of Elsa’s skin; and Johnny watched it all for a few moments and then sighed and got to his feet. While Elsa, herself briefly a part of it, sat curled up on the towel, her eyes wide open under the shelter of her hand.

  “I don’t ever want to die,” she said again.

  Fedora looked down at her and smiled. “I know,” he said. “You’re tired of being lonely. It’s a hard life for a pretty girl . . . always was.”

  “And you? Don’t you get tired?”

  “Sometimes, yes. Tired and afraid. But I’m that way by nature. That’s why I can’t do more than . . . help a little. But remember me, won’t you?—when you’re one of them.”

  “It was fun being helped,” said Elsa. “I wouldn’t want to forget.”

  She, too, stood up; and Johnny reached down to pick up the heavy canvas bag that lay behind her, hoisting it with an effort across his shoulders. “It’s all here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you haven’t changed your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Ail right,” said Johnny. “Come on, then.”

  MORENO wasn’t his real name, of course. His real name had long since been forgotten, though it must have been Spanish because his father had been Spanish—a minor administrative official in Tetuan. He had died of typhus, though, when Moreno was four years old, and his Moorish wife—who had then been just nineteen—had taken the child and a small bundle of personal possessions to Tangier; where she had begun to earn her living in a long and draughty house full of closed doors and swinging bead curtains, where lizards moved jerkily over the white walls. He remembered the first-floor room with the truckle bed and its dry, slightly rancid smell; that was where his long sad odyssey had really begun, a journey like an endless pilgrimage to many cities and to many countries; and from that time, perhaps, could be dated his hatred of women and his vast contempt for men. Now Moreno was his name, and that was enough.

  He stood on deck now with his great arms resting on the guardrail, and from behind his thoughtless brown pupils he looked out at the coast of Spain in the morning; the long, sprawled-out coast that the yacht was dragging along behind it, the great grey sweep of the bay, the colourless sand and the faded jagged woodsmoke blue of the mountains. And for once he was thinking of the past; trying to remember just how it had been before and failing to do so, just as he usually failed when he tried to summon the past to his aid.

  Before, of course, it had been dark, or almost dark, an almost moonless night though the whole sky had been prickly with stars, and what he best remembered—almost the only thing—was the roar of engines overhead, the sudden presence of wide wings crowding out the stars and passing swiftly on, the pencil-beam of sparkling light converging on a grey and glistening hull, and then the violent orange corona of leaping flame blistering abruptly upwards from the tortured sea. Explosion: violence: murder. The images echoed in the depths of his vague mind like the twangs of a radar set, reverberating like distant gongs. Violence: murder: death. . . .

  And his thoughts went twisting away like a shoal of little fishes, picking up as they fled the last flash of life in deep surprised brown eyes at the water’s surface; white legs scattering the bubbles; white hands clutching tor the air as his own hands, dark and powerful and quite remorseless, guided in the chisel. Moreno’s lower lip fell open, his tongue slithered loosely over it; his face, with the bright light of morning glancing off the high Arab cheekbones, became as though haunted. Feramontov, coming up at that moment to stand at the guardrail beside him, saw his expression and waited a tactful few seconds before speaking.

  .. Remember anything, Moreno?”

  Moreno smiled; Feramontov wondered why. Then, after a pause,

  “It was different, you see. It was dark. One bit of sea is much like another.”

  Feramontov nodded. “Well, we’re almost there,” he said. “You and Meuvret had better get ready.”

  He lowered his head to light a cigarette, shielding the flame with his hand. “We’ll dive as soon as we possibly can,” he said, looking up again. “There’s no time to waste.”

  “A pity, in some ways,” said Moreno smoothly, “about Elsa.”

  “You two will manage. Meuvret’s done plenty of diving and he has experience of these waters. You’ll have to watch out for the undertow.”

  “I suppose there’s no news?”

  “News?”

  “Of Elsa?”

  “We’re not expecting any,” said Feramontov. “We had best conveniently forget that the lady ever existed.”

  He watched Moreno walk away over the well-scrubbed deckboards; straight back, immense shoulders, high-held arrogant head. Physical beauty, the most perishable of assets in a man or a woman; a pity, he thought, that it should ever have to be destroyed before its time. Yes, it had been a pity about Elsa. Yet no one could be trusted . . . no one at all. . . .

  Perhaps, in the last resort, not even himself. . . .

  THE sea, faintly marbled with foam, slapped and gurgled against the hull of the fishing-boat; it was calm, though, the waves no more than topped by a slow breeze from Africa. The Polarlys, half a mile away’ and drawing steadily nearer, seemed etched against the blue of the horizon, motionless as though painted there. “They’re stopped, all right,” said Garcia, easing the tiller over a fraction. “On a sea anchor, I should think.”

  “Aim to pass her to the north. Not nearer than half a kilometre.”

  “Right you are.”

  Fedora stared for a few moments more at the distant yacht, then moved forward to where Elsa sat with the canvas bag between her slim brown knees. “It looks like this is it. What do you think?”

  “I’d say so, yes. But I’m no navigator.”

  “You’re a swimmer.”

  “Oh, that. Well, it could be worse. There’ll be a hell of an undercurrent, but it’s in our favour . . . as far as getting there’s concerned.”

  Fedora sat down beside her. “Will they have gone down yet?”

  “They wouldn’t wait around.”

  “Moreno and . . . ?”

  “Probably Meuvret.”

  “Not Feramontov?”

  “No.”

  “They’ll miss you, won’t they?”

  “Probably. Three pairs of flippers are better than two. But they’ll manage.”

  “We’d better get ready.”

  “Yes.”

  She opened the bag, began to take out the skin-diving equipment. Fedora took off his shirt and trousers; then they dressed each other in silence. Weighted belt, with sheath-knife and torch; the flippers; the mask; lastly, the canvas carrier with the compressed-air cylinders. Fedora wondered, as he slid the harness over Elsa’s naked shoulders, how it would chafe against the freshly-formed blisters, how the salt water would knife at her burns. Pain, he thought; always pain; he was sick of pain. “It’s going to be cold, you know,” said Elsa, “without a suit.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t wear them.”

  “Nor do
we, usually. But we may have to go down rather deep this time. Still, there it is.” Her fingers moved over the valve control, checking the pressure. “Set yours at five, to start with. The regulator. Right?”

  “Right,” said Fedora, testing.

  “I don’t like suits, anyway. So hard to get all the air out of them before you begin.” She pushed the mask up over her forehead, smoothed the lastex of her swimsuit down past her hips; signs of nervousness, thought Fedora. He could hardly blame her. He leaned forward and ran his lips along the line of her cheek, touching with the tip of his tongue the warm salty skin. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll get you there.”

  “You’re just afraid it may be a one-way trip.”

  “I wish it wasn’t Moreno down there. That’s all.”

  “If it wasn’t Moreno,” said Johnny, “I doubt if I’d feel much like going.”

  He watched her thinking about Moreno. Her dislike of him, of course, was mostly instinctive: as was her dislike of certain flat-headed, bulbous fish that it cost her an effort to touch. She did touch them, though; she dissected them; she drew little diagrams of their inner organs. Now she leaned over the bulwarks of the little boat beside Fedora, her elbow within an inch of his, and stared down into the swirling depths beneath her. “I’ll bet,” she said, “that no one’s remembered to feed my jellyfish.”

  “Never mind. There’s as good jellyfish in the sea as ever came out of it.”

  “I still think it’s a shame.”

  Rope-soled feet scraped on the coaming above them. One of the Garcia brothers looked down at them, nodded briefly, then turned away. “Well,” said Fedora. “Here we go.”

  He touched her arm lightly; then seated himself on the gunwale, toppled himself quickly over backwards and sank like a stone.

  AT five fathoms’ depth a dimness enveloped him, a gloom like a blue-green twilight, though he was aware as he swam of a vast refulgence high above him, the tremor of the sunlight on the waves. Elsa he could see as a dark shape swimming below him and slightly to his left, could trace by the chains of bubbles rising from her mask. Now and again he sensed, rather than saw, a fleeting whiteness beneath him as they passed over patches of smooth sand.

  As the minutes moved by, he saw more clearly; the light seemed to filter down through the water, and with it came a semblance of colour. The sands below took on a yellowish tinge, broken by wide green-brown bars of rock; but there was nothing to serve as a landmark, other than the ceaseless pull of the undertow. Here they were on the edge of the Gibraltar Straits, where the great vacuum of the Mediterranean draws millions of gallons daily from the open Atlantic; Elsa had warned him of the strength of that current, but he had never quite realised the vastness of its power. He was relying on that current to carry him eventually to the shore, some four miles distant; Fedora was a fairly good swimmer, but he had never swum so great a distance in his life, and was well aware that—even with the help of flippers, aqualung, and current, even with Elsa’s guidance—the risk he was taking was considerable. The air in the cylinders would probably give out before he reached the land; and the surface currents, unlike those of the depths, were unpredictable.

  But Elsa swam on unhesitantly, and Johnny followed her. Far to the right a shoal of fish pivoted and moved away, their bodies gleaming dully as they turned like the fuselages of banking aeroplanes; then they disappeared into a sudden shimmer of vague colour, the fringes of a huge seaweed forest. Long bare shoulders of rock came wriggling now towards him, building out of nowhere a pattern of grey and black shadows; the scenery was changing. He-wondered for how long a time they had been swimming, and looked at his wrist-watch. Twelve minutes. It seemed rather longer.

  Then he saw Elsa signal with her hand, and he rolled half over in order to look upwards. A long fishlike shape, outlined in winking diamonds of water; this time he knew at once what it was. The Polarlys, forty feet above them. He realised that Elsa was beginning to circle, though he had no real sense of any change of direction; not until, three minutes or so later, they turned full into the current and it was like trying to swim against a moving and invisible wall. But it was at that moment that the first faint vibrations came to them through the water—the feel, rather than the sound, of a slow, rhythmic tonggggggk, tongggggk, tongggggk. He saw Elsa’s sunbrown body turning against the undertow, her hands outstretched now as though in search of that vast, dim throbbing; then she dived and again he followed her, sinking fast with the sweep of the current towards the ocean floor.

  The tall rocks rose around them. The darkness increased noticeably, and so did the pressure against his eardrums. Then he saw the light. Not the splintered fragments of light he had grown used to, sparks reflected downwards by the waves far above him, but a bright, steady, focused beam, such as he might have seen on land. It seemed to move, to grow and then to diminish in intensity as they swam towards it; it was lower even than they were, at the sea’s very bottom. Another light suddenly shone full on him, took him in the eyes with a terrible intensity, then turned away; he saw, as it turned, the sea bed, white sand and black rock, a phantasmagoria of twisted shadows some fifteen feet below him. He hadn’t been seen, he told himself: here, he was just one moving shade amongst a thousand others. Only the leaping bubbles might give him away. . . .

  Down now amongst the rocks, huge shapes crawling about him; invisible yet threatening presences, like ghosts of extinct monsters; sixty feet beneath the surface, at least, in the lost dim world of Atlantis. Davy Jones’ locker, thought Fedora, sculling himself on from rock to rock; dark, cold and dismal; the floor of the Mediterranean, powdered with the dust of sailors’ bones; the skeletons of Phoenician merchants, of Moorish corsairs, of German submariners and of English sailors, all ground to powder by the underwater tides. That light again, directly in front of him now; first one torch, then the other; and suddenly he saw the great long grey whalebacked sand-scoured sunken shape, enormous in the pencil-beams, hulking broken-spined on the torturing rocks; and he sank noiselessly to shelter among the seaweed fronds, clutching at their shiny straps with his hands to hold himself in place against the constant, wearying pull of the current. The U-boat lay before him, its battered conning-tower not twenty feet away and its long streamlined hull stretching away inimitably to either side. Two figures moved in the water, hovering just above the conning-tower, and the torches spread their pallid stains of light over the dull metal as the figures circled. The hammering had now stopped. The hatch had been forced open. Nosing downwards like browsing fish, the hovering figures disappeared, one by one, inside.

  FULL marks, then, to Feramontov for his navigation. And, of course, to Elsa. She had found the U-boat; had arrived, moreover, very opportunely. Fedora found himself wondering exactly what to do, now that he’d got there. Of course, he told himself savagely, he hadn’t come all that way just to watch. On the other hand, he couldn’t pretend that he much fancied his chances if it came to an underwater tangle with Moreno; clearly, it would be sensible to weigh the odds in his own direction as much as he possibly could. To use, in fact, surprise as a weapon. He turned his head, peered sideways through the mica of his visor. Elsa was there, a few feet to his left, wrapped almost to invisibility in the writhing seaweed. He signalled to her with his hand and began to swim forward.

  Go in after them? Or wait till they came out? That last way, he could take them one by one. Yes, but it was only Moreno he was really worried about. And within the confines of the U-boat hull, Moreno would have less chance to use his superior skill as a swimmer. They might even have to fight in darkness, which would neutralise at a stroke all Moreno’s natural advantages. There was no doubt about it, really. Fedora flippered his way up to the conning-tower and entered the U-boat as the others had done, edging his way in head downwards, Elsa close behind him.

  Inside, the darkness was almost complete. He felt his way uncertainly down into what he knew must be the control room; he could hear once again faint vibrations, was aware of glints of reflect
ed light, of nearby movements. The blackness oppressed him, closed in upon him like the walls of a tomb; he risked a quick flash from his own torch, and saw the periscope pillar jump into reality directly before him, tall and shadowy, crusted in sea-acorns yet slimy to the touch. He pulled himself down beside it, felt for Elsa and pressed her down close against him. Farther down the hull, the lights flickered dimly, then grew stronger.

  A sudden flicker of greenish-silver as a bucketful of tiny fishes came fleeing past them. Elsa’s hand on his wrist, holding him tightly. Then a great stream of light that seemed to pin them both to the periscope column, a whirling vortex of shadows, the twin torches returning fast down the companionway.

  Fedora glanced up at the strings of shining bubbles that rose from their hiding-place towards the conning-tower, glistening in the hard white light. They would see those bubbles, of course— they couldn’t miss them—but they couldn’t be sure as to their cause. A pocket of air, maybe, trapped for years within the U-boat and released by their movements. . . . They would investigate, surely, and that would be his chance; perhaps his only chance, insofar as Moreno was concerned. Johnny braced his flippered feet against the slippery floor, seeking a firm purchase; his right hand drew the knife from his weighted belt. When they rounded the column, that would be the moment. . . .

  A torch suddenly appeared before him, bright as a sun, staring straight into his face, and instantly he launched himself at it with all his force. He held the knife gripped with both hands in front of him, and the shock of its impact ran through his arms and shoulders. A few brief seconds of confused and shadowy whirling in the floodlit water and then he was clear, his victim falling away from him in almost comically slow motion, arms thrashing spasmodically at nothing and a great streamer of blood swinging magically outwards from his riven chest. Johnny was momentarily horrified at the ghastly effect of the blow, at the nightmare-like silence in which his opponent was dying; but already he knew that his luck was out, that he had killed the wrong man. Moreno had been bringing up the rear.