Turn Left for Gibraltar

by David Black

  Groupie – Group Captain Mahaddie – was standing peering out of his heavily draped windows down into the street, when Harry was unceremoniously thrust into his presence. He turned, gestured with his chin for ginger-pimples to get out, the way real men do, when real business is to be discussed. Arsehole, thought Harry, as he routinely thought every time he came into contact with Jock Mahaddie.

  Mahaddie, also in his cricket whites, walked deliberately up to Harry until he was invading his space. ‘A wee chookie-burdy’s been whisperin’ in ma lug-hole,’ he said into Harry’s face. ‘Tells me you’re plannin’ tae jump the dyke wi’ yer Wop boyfriend, Luigi the Latin Lover . . .’

  ‘Excuse me, Sir?’ said Harry. ‘“Jump the dyke”?’

  ‘Don’t get fly wi’ me, laddie. You know what Ah mean. Go over the wall. Escape. ’Cause there’s a pair o’ Gestapo clowns in town, want tae pull his toenails oot.’ Mahaddie stopped, and began to pace around Harry. ‘Ah want tae know what yer plannin’ . . .’

  ‘Planning, Sir? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Good. Then ye’ll no mind if I have ye locked up for the next seventy-two hours, will ye.’

  Harry did mind. Very much. He said nothing.

  ‘Ahh. Reconsiderin’ yer position then, laddie. Wise. ’Cause if you’re goin’ aff this island, Ahm goin’ wi’ ye. Or yer no goin’. How’s that fer a snooker?’

  Harry sighed and looked at the ceiling. Suddenly Mahaddie sat down in one of the room’s easy chairs with a flump. He gestured to Harry to sit too. There was a long silence, then Mahaddie, elbows on his knees, and his head looking down into the space between them, said, ‘Ye don’t like me. Ah assure you, the feelin’s mutual. But Ah wouldn’a feel victimised if Ah wus you. Ah don’t like anybody here, includin’ masel’. Look at it from ma point of view. I’m supposed to be oan Malta right now. Deputy Air Officer Commanding. Wi’ a gaggle of Wellingtons and Blenheims and Fleet Air Arm Swordfish under my command, wi’ orders tae stop aw those Axis convoys shippin’ Rommel enough petrol and ordnance to get him tae Cairo. It’s the biggest command I’ve ever worked fer. This is wha’ Ah dae. It’s ma joab. Ahm no a wee hostilities-only pipsqueak like you, laddie. An’ whit am Ah doin’? I’m stuck here. Cause o’ a stupid oil leak on a last-aff-the-production-line-oan-a-Friday-night Lockheed Hudson’s starboard Wright-fuckin’-useless-Cyclone engine!’

  Mahaddie paused to let his fury subside a little. Harry knew better than to interrupt. The man wasn’t being your average, everyday professional Jock any more; his true, Glaswegian origins were showing through and any veneer of gentility about him had gone. Our great contribution to the world, thought Harry. Our education system. We Scots really are quite the egalitarians. He might be an officer now, but Mahaddie probably really had come from up some tenement close. But what had happened to get him from there to here? A bursary to Allan Glen’s School, run by the city’s corporation for the poor but bright? A school that specialised in engineering and science – and then what could make more sense than an engineering qualification and a career in the Royal Air Force, ever the most egalitarian of the three services?

  ‘How d’ye intend to do it, laddie?’ Mahaddie said, eventually, much calmer now, with the veneer returning.

  ‘Steal a yacht, Sir,’ said Harry, now convinced prevarication would be counter-productive. ‘There’s loads of them up the west coast.’

  ‘A yacht? To Malta? Please don’t take the mickey, laddie.’

  ‘No, Sir. I’m heading for Gib. It’s seven hundred miles, give or take the odd yard or two. A straight, clean run, west-south-west. It can be done. I can do it. It’ll take four or five days at the most. Depending on the wind. And the wind is favourable this time of year. Maybe a little too favourable.’

  ‘I thought you were goin’ to steal a plane,’ said Mahaddie, snorting at the idea. ‘Bundle Luigi into the pilot’s seat and hold a gun tae his heid, although from what Ah’ve seen o’ the bugger, Ah didn’t give much for yer chances on that one. He’s a bit too full of himself to be just rollin’ over. Thought I could come in handy there.’

  ‘A plane would be a bit too personal for the Spanish air force, I think, Sir.’

  ‘Whit? Too personal?’

  ‘I think they’d be liable to take offence at us for stealing one of their planes, Sir. And come after us. A rich grocer’s weekend plaything on the other hand – would they care? Would they bother? Probably think we’d end up drowning ourselves anyway. They might be right. That’s what I meant about the wind being too favourable. The tramontane. It’s a cold north-westerly. Funnels down between the Pyrenees and the Massif Central in France, and this time of year it can really get going . . . according to my Russell anyway.’ Harry brandished his Balearic Pilot.

  ‘Well, laddie. Sounds like ye’ve thought of everythin’. All we need to do now is get Luigi tae the boat wi’out him screamin’ murder, polis!’

  ‘. . . three sterrs up!’ said Harry, the words of a children’s rhyme, heard by Harry the student on a Glasgow street, suddenly flashing into his head.

  Mahaddie turned and gave him such a look. ‘. . . The wummin in the middle hoose hit me wi’ a cup . . .’ he said experimentally.

  ‘. . . ma heid is bleedin’, an’ ma face is cut . . .’ replied Harry.

  ‘. . . murder polis, three sterrs . . .’ added Mahaddie, still looking curious.

  ‘Up!’ said Harry, rounding it off with a flourish.

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ roared Mahaddie. ‘Argyll ye said ye came from! Argyll Street, mair like it . . . the wrang end!’

  Harry knocked on Eurico’s door and gently pushed a haughty-looking Fabrizio through it before him.

  ‘He wants to ask you something, Eurico,’ said Harry. Both he and the young Italian were in their ‘stepping-out’ best uniforms, having skipped dinner digestifs to do a quick-change act out of their mess ensembles.

  ‘I will not hide from these people,’ said Fabrizio, as if daring anyone to challenge him.

  ‘We’d like a pass,’ said Harry, by way of clarifying matters. ‘Fabrizio and I have taken a notion to go downtown and listen to that dance band that’s playing in La Calatrava.’

  ‘You’re not afraid, Fabrizio?’ said Eurico, leaning back behind his desk.

  Christ, you’re over-egging the pudding, mate, thought Harry, but he said nothing. Fabrizio’s nostrils flared. If there were even the remotest chance he’d be likely to see sense and decide instead to stay home that night, it was gone now. Eurico saw the nostrils flaring, and took that as his answer. He reached for his pass pad and began filling it in. The plan was panning out nicely.

  ‘When the court of inquiry sits on this,’ Eurico had told Harry earlier, ‘I’m not having any German, or worse, any Army bastard, alleging that any of my men had somehow sneaked him out. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry had said, ‘as long as you leave the keys in the J12, and the boot open . . .’, referring to the Hispano-Suiza air force staff car that was Eurico’s pride and joy, and therefore testimony to the level of sacrifice he was prepared to make.

  Walking out of the hotel, Harry couldn’t believe there were two men in sharp, double-breasted suits waiting for them on the other side of the street. They fell in behind as he and Fabrizio walked towards the town.

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ he said, looking behind to convince himself they were actually being followed. The men were pale and northern-looking, hair shorn with geometric precision; they had to be the Germans. But for them to have been waiting there – they couldn’t possibly have known Fabrizio might be coming out. They must have been hanging around for hours. Playing at being secret agents . . . gumshoes on Sunset Strip. The whole notion was just too ludicrous. Melodrama, except they were playing it for real. It’s just so vulgar, was the thought that immediately flipped into Harry’s mind, followed by Idiots. But what he said to his friend was, ‘I’m Humphrey Bogart. Who do you want to be? Peter Lorre or Sidney Greenstreet?’ before he realised Th
e Maltese Falcon, only just out this year, probably hadn’t made it to Italy, there being a war and all. But Fabrizio was too incensed by the Germans’ audacity to be paying any attention. Harry kept having to tug him by the sleeve to stop him turning around and confronting them, hissing at him, ‘If you hit one of them, it’s only Eurico you’ll get in trouble.’

  They walked on down the narrow, winding tenement streets, thronged with people out strolling; cafés spilling out on to the narrow pavements, their tables choked with couples there to see and be seen; and the noise of shouted orders; coffee, beer and wines, brandies, tapas and darting waiters. And everywhere the spill of lights. The civil war had been over for less than two years, and it had left Spain wrecked and impoverished. But not Nationalist Majorca. Its war had lasted barely two months, and that was back in 1936. An assault, aimed at securing the islands for the Republic, had been driven off with help from Fascist Italy. The devastation that had swept across most of the vast European peninsula to its west had never touched here.

  Fabrizio and Harry, and the two Germans in pursuit, drew out a little comic daisy chain through the night-time crowds: Fabrizio and Harry stopping twice for coffee, then for wine and tapas, and the Germans all but bumping into them as a kerbside table would appear, and our heroes would plonk themselves down to be served. Fabrizio was by now glowing with the triumph of taunting their two shadows, utterly unaware of where Harry was leading him.

  They emerged out of a narrow street on to an open plaza – a small affair, with grass squares and flower beds and benches, with its far end open on to a main road, and beyond that the harbour. A large car, resplendent in EdA markings sat by the roadside, with a bulky big driver, an EdA forage cap perched on his huge domed skull, looking like a pea on a mountain. They could only see the back of his head.

  ‘Oh look,’ said Harry, gripping Fabrizio by the elbow, ‘It’s Eurico. Let’s give these goons the slip good and proper.’ And before his friend could utter a word, Harry was propelling him towards the Hispano-Suiza’s open back door.

  The goons had tried to run after them, but the Hispano, door still open and our two heroes scrambling through it, was accelerating away before they’d gone two steps. Fabrizio craned to look out of the back window at them, caught flat-footed, then rolled back on the big leather bench seat, bellowing with laughter. So it took a number of minutes for him to assess this new situation and realise there was no Eurico in the car. That was when he recognised the bull-like head, sitting in the driving seat, and the huge frame, bursting out of a far too small EdA airman’s shirt – and his face clouded.

  ‘What is all this about?’ he said in a quiet voice.

  ‘And nice tae see ye too,’ said Mahaddie over his shoulder, as he gunned the car back through the town heading for the north road. Fabrizio was not to be pacified. Harry tried to explain: they knew the Germans were here to take him away, and they knew why. He wouldn’t be going back to Italy, to face his accusers and answer their charges. He was going to Berlin, where they’d want names out of him, where they would expect a list of plotters from him. And they would get a list from him, regardless whether anyone on it was involved or not. Of course, said Harry, he knew he would never willingly betray his country, his uniform or his friends. But this wasn’t about duty or honour, or even the war. It was politics. He would give them a list – he wouldn’t be able not to. Didn’t he understand that? Didn’t he realise who he was dealing with? What they were capable of? Did Harry have to spell it out for him? You always give people like that what they want in the end. You can’t not. No one can. But Fabrizio was having none of it.

  ‘I will not capitulate to you English!’ he yelled in Italian. Harry knew Mahaddie didn’t speak Italian, but he’d have understood the ‘English’ bit, and Harry feared for how that might play.

  ‘What about Sybilla?’ Harry said, and then instantly regretted it because Fabrizio looked as if he were about to hit him. They were in countryside by this time, the road dark. Mahaddie stood on the brakes, and Harry and Fabrizio cannoned into the seats in front. Fabrizio was still picking himself out of the seat well, when the back door on his side flew open, and a huge fist flew in and knocked Fabrizio senseless. In a moment Mahaddie was on Fabrizio, and had a pair of handcuffs on his wrists, and then another pair on his ankles.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ said Harry lamely, but Mahaddie just gave him a withering look as he plucked a roll of heavy tape from the front seat and began gagging Fabrizio’s mouth and jaw.

  Harry leaned back, catching his breath. ‘If you hadn’t been going to do that, I was,’ he said, making way so as they could stretch Fabrizio out in the seat well.

  ‘Really,’ said Mahaddie. ‘Well, Ah decided no’ tae wait for the pie and Bovril at half-time. Oanywise, if somebody was gonnae huv tae tap him, Ah’ve got mair psi than you.’

  Harry got into the front seat with the big Scotsman, and they drove on into the night, Harry thinking, Psi – pounds per square inch. Yes. Definitely an engineering background.

  Eurico’s directions had been specific: follow the main road from Sóller town to the port, then not far from the head of the inlet on which it sits, you’ll see a stone groyne running out from the beach. ‘A fisherman who looks like Methuselah, but answers to Pedro, will be waiting,’ Eurico had said. ‘Do as he tells you.’

  Harry, who over the preceding days and weeks, had been learning a little Spanish from his new friend to pass the time, protested that he didn’t know whether his grasp of the language was up to that.

  ‘Well, go where he shoves you,’ an exasperated Eurico had replied. It really was all slap, dash and flung together, their plan, but there had been no time for it to be otherwise, so no point in either of them pointing this out.

  Away from the lights of the town, a half-moon that drifted in and out of the high, scudding clouds – tramontane-driven clouds – delivered a surprising amount of light. They saw their objective clear enough as the road from Sóller town emerged from the gap in the hills, the groyne’s black spine obvious on the moon-dappled surface of the water, and when they pulled up, the lump on the end of it they’d taken to be some sort of cairn, rose and came towards them.

  Pedro, a small, round figure, dressed all in black with a Catalan beret pulled to a peak low on his forehead, had a face the texture and colour of rotting avocado skin. His little coracle-shaped boat, with two thwarts, all insubstantial and more like a giant baby’s bath, was moored in the shadows.

  Mahaddie was in the back of the car. He hauled Fabrizio, now fully conscious and looking wild-eyed, on to the seat. It was the early hours, not long until sunup, but the few houses in the distance were all in darkness, and the port was completely shrouded by the black shadow of the massif behind it. Pedro was in his little boat, waiting to cast off and when Harry returned to the car, Mahaddie was sitting on Fabrizio, pinning him to the car seat. Harry waited.

  ‘Right, Luigi,’ said Mahaddie in a quiet, affable voice, over his shoulder, his gentility all but returned. ‘I’m the senior British officer here and you’re my prisoner. And if you think that means that somehow you might be able to appeal to my better nature, then best of fuckin’ luck tryin’ to find it.’

  Harry translated. Fabrizio’s eyes never left Mahaddie’s half-turned face; he showed no reaction. But Mahaddie wasn’t interested; he clambered off the young Italian, stood and bent over to unlock the handcuffs around Fabrizio’s ankles and dragged him to his feet. ‘Right, we’re gettin’ in that wee man’s excuse for a boat, Luigi,’ he said, then frogmarched him out on to the groyne.

  ‘His name’s Fabrizio,’ said Harry.

  ‘And I’m a Group Captain,’ said Mahaddie over his shoulder, ‘and his name’s what I say it is.’

  Mahaddie ordered Harry to retrieve the stuff in the car boot: supplies Harry had asked Eurico to find. There was a military knapsack filled with tinned food, and four half-gallon water cans. Harry lugged them over in two trips. They all managed to squeeze into the flims
y vessel, and Mahaddie and Harry began to row. Pedro, using a third, stunted oar steered, peering into the pitch black like he knew where they were going. Mahaddie warned Fabrizio about struggling. ‘. . . it won’t take much to cowp this tub, laddie . . . How d’ye fancy yer chances at the freestyle with yer hands cuffed behind yer back?’ After that, nobody talked.

  The yacht was a Bermuda-rigged gaff-sloop, about thirty-five feet long, and Harry could just make out the name Carmen picked out on her stern as they came up on her. Pedro, with surprising agility, used his little oar to reach out and lever them in against one of the sloop’s deck cleats. He then held them tight, hull to hull, and gestured with his free arm for them to get the hell out of his little boat. Harry leapt up first. Mahaddie unceremoniously, hand on Fabrizio’s backside, propelled him on to the yacht, and then began slinging the supplies up, before he too followed. Harry turned to say something, but Pedro was already a dim shape, scooting away and fast disappearing against the black backdrop of the shoreline. They needed to be away too, and out of here before the sun was up and anyone spotted them stealing this boat.

  ‘Stow him in the cabin,’ Harry said to Mahaddie, referring to his friend, and went to set about getting ready.

  ‘You’re tellin’ me what to do?’ said Mahaddie, quiet, but belligerent.

  Harry stopped in mid-movement and drew himself up, so that in the narrow cockpit, he was face-to-face with the big Scotsman.

  ‘We’re on water now,’ he said.

  And in that moment, and in fairness to Mahaddie, Mahaddie understood. Harry went back about his business, his heart still in his mouth at the temerity of what he’d just done.

  ‘Is there anything I can do tae help?’ asked Mahaddie from behind him.

  ‘Don’t rock the boat,’ said Harry.

  It was still dark in the bowl of the harbour, but the sky was light now behind the mountains, as they motored out on the Carmen’s small inboard petrol engine. Harry had dipped the tank and it was a quarter-full. He didn’t know how much manoeuvring that would give them, but it was certainly more than enough to get them out of the harbour. There was also some paraffin for the small stove, and thank God, but the owner was a lazy enough bastard not to have taken her sails in; they were still bent, the mainsail to the jib, and the headsail to the forestay.