Message From Malaga (2 page)

* * *

In the courtyard, the music quickened. The guitarist brought the last surge of rippling notes into a falling diminuendo of one, listening to its last sigh as intently as the people sitting before him. The note faded slowly into nothing. There was a long moment of silence, all eyes watching the stage—a giant table, almost twelve-foot square and a hand span thick, with four massive barrel legs—that was backed against the end wall of the courtyard. The applause broke out, crisp, brief, critically measured. It pleased the guitarist enough, though. He inclined his head gravely, his gaunt face relaxed a little, intense dark eyes lingering only briefly on his audience as if they scarcely existed. He was good, and they knew it, and that was sufficient.
He lifted his narrow-backed chair in one hand, swung it lightly into place at the end of a row of six others before the bare plaster wall.

“No encore?” Ferrier asked. “Or didn’t we clap loudly enough?”

“He has plenty to do later on.” Reid glanced at his watch, then back at the stage, where the guitarist had sat down again and was concentrating on some silent fingering. Reid looked at the open doorway near them, a narrow space without any light tacked overhead, shadowed still more by a cascade of bougainvillaea. There was no sound of women’s voices, no movement from inside the door, no one gathering there to join the guitarist on the stage.

“One o’clock,” Ferrier verified from his watch. “Isn’t that when the show really gets moving?”

Reid said lightly, “Oh, you don’t keep account of time in Spain. Ten minutes here, half an hour there, what does it matter if you are with friends?” And delays happened: dancers’ dressing-rooms had more than their share of tantrums and temperament. But, Reid wondered, was this the beginning of a natural wait? Or was it being carefully engineered by Tavita to last precisely fourteen minutes? If so, then it was no ordinary delay, but a warning signal from Tavita—one that only Reid in all that crowded courtyard could understand and act upon. (It had been Tavita’s idea of how to preserve security—one that had amused him at first, even embarrassed him, but he had let her have her way. She had confidence in it. And it had been successful. No one had ever noticed. What more did he want?) Well, he thought as he controlled his rising tension, if this is the beginning of an alert, I’ll know in exactly fourteen
minutes. And what do I do then, with Ian Ferrier sitting beside me? Just as I usually do, I suppose: wait until the dancing starts and all eyes are riveted on the stage and I can slip away. And Ian? My God, it would have to be tonight that an emergency happened... All right, all right let’s wait and see if this turns out to be a signal. Just wait and see. Meanwhile, talk. “We’re in luck,” he told Ferrier. “Usually there are six chairs on that stage. Tonight, seven. So Tavita is dancing. For my money, she is one of the best in Spain, but it is only at the weekend that we can get her down from Granada. That’s where she lives.”

“Oh?” Ferrier was definitely interested.

“Not in a cave with the gypsies,” Reid added. “She has a house on top of a hillside, not far from the Alhambra. An artist left it to her when he died—his paintings of her are all over the place. Yes, she’s quite a girl.”

“Nice going; lives in Granada, dances here. But why not in Granada?”

“Since the tourists get taken by the hundreds in the gypsy section of town? No, not for Tavita. She’s a purist. Flamenco is something she really believes in. She dances in Seville, mostly. On Fridays, she dances here.”

“But why?” In Málaga? And was I just another gullible tourist in Granada? Ferrier wondered. He supposed that idea was good for controlling his ego, but he didn’t enjoy it.

“Out of sentiment. Also—” a smile spread over Reid’s face—she owns El Fenicio.”

“Nice going. I placed
him
as the owner.” Ferrier nodded discreetly in the direction of the middle-aged man with a thin and furrowed face, thick black hair, large dark eyes, who stood near the main entrance. He had greeted Reid with a handshake
and Ferrier with a restrained bow.

“Esteban? He manages El Fenicio for Tavita—he’s one of her old bullfighter friends. Tavita got her start as a dancer here when she was fourteen. It was a wineshop with a staircase down to a small cellar in those days. She never forgets it, though.”

“And they don’t forget her?” Ferrier looked around him. There were only a few women, quietly dressed, obviously married, well guarded by a phalanx of males. And the men? A mixed crowd, in age and appearance, but whether their clothes were cheap or expensive their appearance was well brushed and washed, either as a compliment to El Fenicio or as a matter of self-respect. The contrast between them and a group of four young men who had just arrived in bedraggled shirts and stained trousers was so marked that the newcomers might just as well have entered shrieking.

“All dressed for a hard day’s work in the fields,” Reid said, and looked away from the group. They were being led to the last free table in a back corner, and didn’t think much of it. Their protest didn’t have much effect on Esteban: take it or leave it, his impassive stare said; preferably leave it. “They’d have to be American,” Reid added with a touch of bitterness, as he listened to their voices. “Just hope those two tables of dockworkers down front don’t decide to move back and have some fun. They’re allergic to people who make a mockery out of poverty. That’s how they see the fancy dress. If these kids were poor and starving, they’d give them sympathy, even help. But the poor don’t travel abroad; the poor can’t afford cafés and night clubs; the poor don’t have cheques from home in their pockets.”

“Kids?” Ferrier asked with a grin. The one with the beard might be in his teens, but two others—one white, one black—
were certainly in their twenties; and the fourth, who wore his dark glasses even in moonlight, might be closer to thirty. “You know, I think I’ve seen one of them before.” Thin beard, young unhappy face, drooped shoulders and all. But where? Today... Not in Granada. Here in Málaga, when I was driving around searching for numbers on a street: Reid’s street, in fact. Almost at Reid’s gate, that’s where I saw him. “No importance,” he said. “He was just like me—another lost American.” But he’s still lost, Ferrier thought, lost in all directions. Then, his attention was switched away from the back-corner table to the doorway beside him. Another guitarist had emerged to make his way slowly to the stage. He was followed by a white-faced man, middle-aged, plump, whose frilled shirt was cut low at the collar to free the heavy columns of his neck. The singer, of course. A young man came next, one of the dancers, tall and thin, with elegantly tight trousers over high-heeled boots and a jacket cut short. He disdained the three rough steps that led up to the stage, but mounted it in one light leap without even a footfall sounding. Control and grace, admitted Ferrier, but how the hell does he manage to look like a real man even with a twenty-inch waist? Strange ways we have of making a living. My own included. Who among all these Spaniards would guess what I do? And here I am, the most computerised man among them, yet less formal than most of them in dress and certainly less controlled. No one else was showing any impatience. The two guitarists had started a low duet, a private test of improvisation between them; the dancer, standing behind them along with the singer, was tapping one heel at full speed, quietly, neatly, as if limbering up; the singers looked at nothing, at no one, perhaps concentrating on a new variation
in tonight’s
cante jondo
; the tables continued their quiet buzz of talk, a few men rose to talk with friends or make their way to the lavatory, and all Reid had done was to glance casually at his watch. Ferrier concentrated on the Spaniards around him. “Who are they? Longshoremen and who else?”

Eight minutes to go—if this was an alert. Reid’s attention swung away from the questions in his mind and came back to the courtyard. “Well, of the regulars here, I can pick out fishermen, a lawyer, a couple of bullfighters, some business-men, an organist, several artists, workers from the factories across the river, shopkeepers, and students. And a policeman.” He dropped his voice judiciously. “That’s him, the man in the light-grey suit at the table just in front of our four fellow citizens.”

“State Security?”

Reid nodded.

Ferrier, sitting sideways at the table, could glance briefly, toward the back corner of the courtyard without swerving his head around. He saw a man in his mid-thirties, small, compact, cheerful, with dark complexion and curling hair. He seemed to be concentrating on his companions, who were talking volubly. “Who are the two men with him?”

“A journalist, and a captain of a freighter that docked this morning. From Cuba.”

“And where’s that?” They exchanged smiles, remembering the missile crisis, a tricky situation indeed, that had brought them together in a strange way. Reid had been one of the flyers who had volunteered to take photographs, at a low and dangerous level, of Khrushchev’s rocket installations in Cuba. Ferrier had been one of the intelligence group who had analysed the original photographs taken at high altitude, discovered the
area that seemed to deserve closer attention, called for some low-altitude shots, and found the sure proof. “We ought to work together more often,” Ferrier said.

“We certainly called Papa Khrushchev’s bluff that time.”

“Do you do any flying nowadays?” Ferrier’s question was purposefully casual. He wondered for a moment if he’d ask Jeff outright why he had resigned from the Air Force. Sure, he had had a bad smash up, still flying too low, still taking dangerous chances for a more closely detailed photograph. At the time, he had said he didn’t want to be pushed into a desk job, and with his injuries that was certainly where he was heading; but what was a business-man except someone attached to a desk? That separation from his wife had something to do with it. He had moved abroad soon after, which was one way of definitely putting distance between himself and Washington where Janet Reid lived. But I can’t ask him about that, either. Not directly. Several of Jeff’s friends had lost him completely, trying to nose into that puzzle. And now Jeff wasn’t even answering his question except with a shake of his head. So Ferrier backed off tactfully, tried another angle. “Interesting town, Málaga. I begin to see how you enjoy it. Plenty of action, movement in and out.”

Reid looked at him sharply, then relaxed. “Oh, we get a bit of everything wandering through here, from honest tourists to strayed beatniks and travelling salesmen.”

“Not to mention all those freighters along your docks, packed like cigars in a box. Stowaways and narcotics and smuggling in general?”

“All the headaches of civilisation. But at least there has been peace and growing prosperity. I’ll take that, headaches and all,
over war any day.”

“And civil war, at that,” Ferrier said quietly. He was looking at the packed courtyard, a mass of faces waiting expectantly as they talked and laughed and listened to the guitars’ improvisation. Incredible, he was thinking, how people can look so damned normal as they do, when they’ve been through so much. Sure, it was thirty-odd years ago, another generation, and yet... He shook his head and added, “I keep remembering what you told me about it, on our way here—”

“If you must talk about that, keep your voice down.”

“It’s down. We are both mumbling like a couple of conspirators.”

“And that,” Reid said, trying to look amused, “is not too good either.”

What’s wrong? Ferrier wondered. Jeff is suddenly on edge. And that’s the third time he has glanced at his watch. What’s worrying him? Does he think that Tavita may decide not to dance, after all, and the whole evening becomes a letdown? Not just for me. These quiet faces around me—how would they react? “Okay,” he said. “Voices back to normal. No more questions about their civil war. I asked you enough of them, anyway.”

“It wouldn’t be the old Ian if you didn’t,” Reid said, but he made sure of changing the subject by starting some talk on the history of this courtyard. Its name, El Fenicio, was a reminder of the Phoenicians who had founded Málaga, long before the Romans had even got here.

Ferrier listened, but his own thoughts were wandering. His mind kept coming back to Jeff’s answers to his questions this evening as they had driven down through the city towards the
wineshop.

* * *

Ferrier had looked at the busy streets through which they were travelling slowly, at the bright lights, the crowded cafés, the masses of people on the sidewalks. “They’ve forgotten,” he had said. “Or didn’t the Civil War touch them much?”

Reid had stared at him. “They haven’t forgotten. That would be difficult,” he had added grimly.

“Was it as bad as that here? In Málaga?”

Reid had nodded. “That’s why they don’t talk much about it. Not to me, not to—”

“But you’ve lived here for almost eight years.”

“I’m still
el norteamericano
when it comes to politics; let’s not kid ourselves about that. There’s such a thing as an experience gap, you know. We didn’t go through what they suffered.”

“Some foreigners did.”

“Only for a couple of years. They weren’t here before the war started, or after it ended. They didn’t live through twenty years of misery.”

“Twenty?” Ferrier had been disbelieving.

“I’m not even including the years when grudges and hate were built up, long before the violence really started.”

“And when did it?”

“In Málaga? 1931. Forty-three churches and convents burned in two days. A pretty definite start, don’t you think?” Ferrier had been puzzled. (As someone who had been brought up on Hemingway and graduated to Orwell, he thought he knew something about Spain.) “Have you got your dates right?” he asked half-jokingly. “There was an elected government in
power then. Newly elected, too. It didn’t have to burn and terrorise. It had the votes.”

“And couldn’t control its anarchists. Not in Málaga, certainly. Those burnings took place just one month after the Republic was declared.”

“But that doesn’t make sense!” Anarchists and communists had been on the side of the Republic. “Unless, of course,” Ferrier said thoughtfully, “it was some kind of power grab.”