Elsinore (10 page)

“Phippsy, does this hotel ever come alive?”

“It's alive. But it isn't partial to tourists. The town sort of keeps to itself.”

“But it has a beach.”

“For the locals, Sid.”

“Then why are we here?”

“To sit down with the general. He happens to be holding bonds of mine.”

“Who's the general?”

“Forgot to tell you, Sid. He's the hero of the whole province, but he hangs out in Pescadores. You could say he owns the town.”

“And this hotel. What's his name?”

“Well, that's disputable. He lost it fifty years ago, in the Spanish civil war. There was a price on his head. He had his own army, and he was younger than Joan of Arc. Sixteen. They called him Bibo. He shot Franco's men to pieces. He held this town, Sid, until the very end.”

“And Franco let him live?”

“El Caudillo didn't have much of a choice. The boy was too damn popular. And how would it have looked for Franco's regime to blindfold a boy general and shove him in front of a firing squad? There would have been uprisings every year on the anniversary of his death. El Caudillo exiled him to this town. And the boy has never stepped outside its perimeters, even after El Caudillo died. But they wrote each other letters for years. I think Franco admired him, as one general to another. But I'm not sure.”

“And how did you get involved in all this?”

“Well, I sold ball bearings to both sides during the civil war. But I saved my best stuff for the Basques and the boy general. I was awful fond of Bibo. And I had one or two things on him after the fighting stopped.”

“You blackmailed him?”

“Sort of. That's why he's been holding my bonds. Bearer bonds. Any imbecile can cash them in.”

“Don't you believe in banks, Phippsy?”

“Biggest thieves in the world, bankers are. Pious too. Wouldn't trust my personal fortune with them.”

“Now tell me about the boy general's big sin.”

“He pussied around with the Germans.”

“After 'forty-one? Suppose he was doing Franco a little favor? The boy's war was over, wasn't it? What else was there for an anarchist to do?”

“Ah, but he pussied around earlier than that. During the civil war. In the thick of all that blood. He was a bit of a German spy. Didn't compromise his own troops. But he fed the Nazis information. That much I know. I swiped a few papers from Hitler's secret service. And so Bibo's been sitting on my bonds.”

“And you've come to claim them?”

“Exactly.”

“In his hotel.”

“Why not? Pick any room you like. No one stays here.”

Holden carried the baggage up a flight of stairs. He expected dust and cobwebs and little secretive mice at the Hotel Carlos Marx, but he found none. He chose two adjoining rooms for the billionaire and himself. Some invisible maid must have arrived before Holden did. The linen was fresh. The mirrors had been polished. The toilet was impeccable. The entire hotel had been scrubbed down, room after room. And it wouldn't have mattered which door Holden had decided on. The boy general had been waiting for their visit. He was much too neat for an anarchist.

Phippsy took a nap, and Holden went downstairs into Pescadores. He followed the Calle Don Quijote to a little garden near the beach. The garden was filled with old women who looked at Holden as if he were some sea animal. Holden returned to his room.

The billionaire rose at seven, had a bath, drank a Coke from his minibar, put on a linen suit with a sweater underneath to guard him from a chill, and knocked on Holden's door.

“It's time to meet the general. Did you bring a gun?”

“No.”

“That's a shame. Because Bibo already has the advantage of his home town.”

“Phippsy, how could I have gotten a gun through the goddamn metal detector?”

“I'm not that foolish, Sid. I could have arranged for a pickup in Bilbao.”

“We would have had to monkey with the Basques.”

“It's better than being empty-handed. Come on.”

They went toward the harbor. Holden saw a beggar playing a bagpipe. He saw gypsy children. He saw fishermen standing on the seawall. There was a cow's head in the water. Holden didn't care. The head seemed benign.

They went up an old, winding hill, arrived at streets whose names had been removed from the walls, and Holden realized: This is how the general likes it. He erases all tracks of himself. Has his own enchanted town, where old women gossip near the beach, and men live out their lives inside the dark of a door.

They entered a crumbling palace. Holden heard the whine of motorbikes. Brats of fourteen and fifteen with rifles slung around one shoulder, and wearing brown shirts stolen from the Guardia Civil, were racing across the general's gigantic living room. Their bikes caromed off the general's furniture. And Holden groaned. He'd had to go up against seventy-five-year-old men in Chappaquiddick. Minot and Paul. And now he'd have to face an army of children with carbines and bad teeth.

The general met them in his library. He had a seam down one side of his face, a long pocket of skin that was more like an act of nature than the rotten sewing job of some anarchist surgeon. He still looked like a boy. His chin line was as firm as Holden's. He smoked cigarettes with tobacco strong enough to destroy Holden's mouth. The general didn't seem to mind the roar of bikes around him.

He'd already signaled to the old man. And Frog understood right away that Phippsy was closer to the general than he liked to reveal.

“I'm starving,” the general said.

Phippsy grunted at him. “Jesus, it's not even dinnertime. And this is your town.”

“I'm always hungry,” the general said.

“Bibo, you must have eels up your ass. They're feeding on your blood. You won't find a restaurant open at this hour. It's not London or New York. It's Pescadores.”

“And in Pescadores dinnertime is whenever Bibo wants to eat.”

“But I'll get embarrassed if you start shouting at the waiters. I won't be able to stand the stress. Have an aperitif. We'll whistle away a couple of hours.”

“Viejo, I want to eat now.”

They walked out of the palace, dodging the fourteen-year-old bikers, who hissed at the general, and Holden wondered if that was how all anarchists behaved. They entered a tiny restaurant across from the palace. El Pescador, with an octopus painted in the window. But no one stirred for the general. El Pescador was only a darkened cave. All those years of exile must have hurt Bibo's grip on this crazy town. He sat in the cave, said nothing, and slowly men emerged from the blackness. El Pescador had a barman and a chef. Candles were lit. And the scar on Bibo's face, that flap of skin, had a kind of gorgeous color.

“Old man,” Bibo said, “what would your bodyguard like to eat?”

“He's not my bodyguard. He's my companion, Sid Holden. He's the president of his own company.”

“I know who he is,” Bibo said. “El Presidente, what would you like to eat?”

“Paella,” Holden said. That's all he ever had in Spain, no matter what town he was in.

“This is Asturias,” the general said. “I would insult the cook and his brother if I asked him to prepare a dish from another province. We are soldiers who live near the sea. Paella doesn't sit well under the heart. I can bring you some fisherman's stew … and red beans.”

“Sid asked for paella,” the old man said. “I didn't bring Sid here to disappoint him over a dish.”

“I'm starving. Do you know how long we'll have to wait for his paella?”

“It's your country, Bibo. It's your house. You solve the problem. We're only guests.”

Bibo wailed at the chef in a language that was so sad, Frog wished he could forget about his passion for paella. “General, I changed my mind. I'll have the red beans.”

“No,” Bibo said. “If we cannot give you the best paella you have ever had, I will close El Pescador.”

The barman arrived with a bottle of cider and three tall, thick drinking glasses. But Holden wasn't allowed to pour for himself. The barman held the bottle behind his shoulder, took Holden's glass, and poured. Half the cider spilled between Holden's legs. The other half splashed against the lip of the tall glass. “Drink,” the general ordered. And Holden gulped down all the cider that had gone into his glass. It was sweet as God. His head pulsed with the taste of cider. He couldn't stop watching the barman, who held the bottle behind him like a bullfighter's sword. The barman never broke that horizontal line. The bottle didn't waver once. Holden had six long gulps before the paella arrived in a huge round shallow pot with pieces of cloth stuffed into the handles so the chef wouldn't burn his fingers. “Paella por tres.”

“Por todos,” the general said. “Honor our table and eat with us.”

“Bibo, I cannot sit with strangers.”

“But you've met the viejo before. Señor Phipps.”

“It's the other one, Bibo.”

“Señor,” the general said to Holden. “My people are frightened of you. Enjoy the paella. But please don't come here again. You will make ghosts of us all.”

“I thought anarchists didn't believe in God or ghosts.”

“This is Spain, señor. We haven't come to such perfection. I myself am very superstitious.”

Frog dug his nose into the paella pan. The hot perfume of pimentos and yellow rice was driving him insane. He almost didn't want to ruin the mosaic of yellow and green and red. But he was much too hungry. He ate like a horse. The chef appeared with a basket of country bread and bottles of black wine. Holden had never eaten such paella in his life, not in Madrid, or even Valencia where paella was born. There was no glue in the paella pan. Holden could see every kernel of rice. He ate much more than the general. And the billionaire picked at a morsel of yellowed chicken. He was too old to have an appetite, or too depressed, or too worried about the state of his bonds.

Frog didn't leave a kernel of yellow rice in the pan.

He drank three bottles of wine and started to snore at the table. He was still awake, but he couldn't stop snoring. His ears seemed to grow out of his head. He thought of Elsinore and his darling who was lost to him. And then his shoulders dropped and the bumper fell into his own kind of peace, which was like oblivion.

He woke in his room at the Carlos Marx. He was wearing silk pajamas that didn't belong to him. There was a pot of coffee beside his bed. Cookies on a silver tray. A flower from one of the gardens of Pescadores. Holden was beginning to feel like an anarchist. He wouldn't have minded a week in Bibo's town, a rest from Aladdin. And he admired this hotel, with its magic room service. But as he drank his coffee, he could hear someone singing in the courtyard below. He didn't understand a word. But the song was so full of grief, so lamentable, that Holden wanted to hurl himself from the window, give his body to the siren's call. He paddled downstairs in his new silk pajamas, with pesetas in the pants.

The siren was a shivering young man who sat cross-legged in the yard. Something was wrong with his face. His eyes seemed to wander in all directions. He gathered the phlegm in his mouth as he sang. It looked like a ball.

“Please,” Holden said. “You can have all my pesetas if you'll stop. I love the song. It's beautiful. But it makes me want to jump out of my skin.”

He left his pesetas in the siren's little cup and marched back upstairs to his room. But when he picked up a cookie to put in his mouth, the singing started again. “Damn,” Holden said. “You pay and pay and it's never enough.”

The singing destroyed whatever chance of breakfast Holden had.

He knocked on the billionaire's door. “Phippsy, it's me. Your servant, Sid.” But the billionaire wouldn't answer him. Phippsy didn't like to sleep late. Holden knew that. He walked into the room. Phippsy wasn't there. And he didn't have any coffee beside his bed. Phippsy had never returned from El Pescador.

Frog got into his clothes. He was preoccupied with the missing old man and never even noticed that the singing had stopped. He went down to the Jaguar. The siren was sitting on the hood. He didn't have his beggar's cup. He was wearing a carbine now. He was one of the general's biker boys.

“El Presidente, I have a message from Bibo. He would like it very much if you would leave Pescadores. He has put ten thousand cash dollars in the red car. And he promises to you that no hurt will come to Señor Phipps. He knows you are an assassin, but we can also be assassins, señor.”

“Where did you learn your English?”

“Not at school, El Presidente. Bibo is our teacher.”

“Then you can tell him that I won't leave without the viejo.”

“I am sorry, señor, but I will have to assassin you.”

Jesus. He couldn't get Phippsy back without battling an army of children. He blamed himself. No more jobs. He was near enough to throttle the boy's windpipe. But he wouldn't destroy a siren just like that. He pulled on the boy's trousers, grabbed the carbine away, and while the boy rolled in the grass outside the Carlos Marx, Holden played with the Jaguar's gears, shot across the Calle Don Quijote, and drove into the heart of Pescadores.