Rocks, The (24 page)

G
erald didn’t spend
a moment thinking about going. He put down the telegram and thought only of what he might need to bring.

He got out an ancient blue sail bag. He rolled up and placed at the bottom of the bag a change of clothes, underwear. Then his blazer, a good shirt, and tie.

What else? In his old canvas rucksack he placed the deed and description of the property known as C’an Cabrer. His passport with Spanish residency stamp. Aegina’s birth certificate. Some photographs.

Some impulse made him grab two bottles of his olive oil from the larder.

Gerald took the sail bag and rucksack down to his car, a tinny 1955 Simca Aronde Commerciale station wagon.

He drove into town and stopped in front of the Banco Santander. Inside, to the astonishment of Barbara, the teller, he withdrew twenty thousand pesetas in cash, almost all he had in his account. Barbara looked at him in alarm. Gray-blond hair windblown about his head, blue eyes dancing anxiously in his tanned face, glancing at his watch. He appeared to be in flight.

“¿Qué pasa, Señor Rutledge?”

“Todo está bien,”
said Gerald, smiling tightly, his callused hands stuffing the bundles of notes into his rucksack.
“Bien, bien.”

“¿Seguro?”

“Seguro. Gracias, Barbara.”

He drove across the island to Palma. At 6:45 p.m. a
marinero
waved the Simca aboard the Alicante ferry. The ferry pulled away from the dock at eight p.m. It would reach Alicante at six the next morning. He would get to Algeciras sometime tomorrow.

Gerald watched as the huge stained-glass
ensaïmada
of a window in La Seu Cathedral, lit from within, bulking over the city in the old town, grew smaller and yellower and older as the ship rounded the breakwater and steamed, rolling and shuddering in periodic rhythm, out into the dusk over the purpling sea.

He was at sea again. Not often in the last twenty-two years. But here he was and he let himself look down at the water frothing past the steel hull of the ferry. He went with it, just for a moment, where he would once have gone: east and south around the boot, across the Ionian Sea, doubling Cythera and Malea’s stormy cape, into the Aegean—

With a jolt, Gerald looked up from the water and around the deck at the other people standing by rail. Lulu would no doubt have been informed. She might even be on this ferry.

•   •   •

H
e slept restlessly,
aware all night that he was at sea, dreaming a cascade of disturbing dreams that tumbled away like a ship’s wake. Once he left his cabin to go on deck and watch and hear the sea rushing alongside the hull. He saw the lights of fishing boats in many directions.

He came on deck again as shades of azure and deeper blues dimmed the stars above the ship’s port quarter, and the mainland of Spain was a spotty line of radium against a black horizon ahead. He was curious to see this coast from the sea once more. He had sailed past here twice: bound for Malta on HMS
Furious
in the spring of 1942, rolling atrociously in a
leveche
gale, after a fueling stop at Gibraltar, and after the war, in 1947, considerably more slowly in the tiny engineless
Nereid
. In those days, the best landmarks, identified and ticked off on the chart one by one as the navigator passed them, were the round stone coastal
torres vigía
, small lookout towers often no higher than twenty feet, many erected by the Moors during their occupation of Spain, others built after the Reconquista, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to repel the Moors. As the sky lightened, Gerald recognized the dark silhouette of Monte Benacantil hulking above Alicante, and, closer, the Castillo Santa Bárbara turning pink across the mountain. But beneath it, Alicante was now a city. Serried rows of apartment blocks covered the narrow coastal plain below the mountain like a reforestation plan. The
torre
on the shore near the port, when he at last found it, was lost against a backdrop of shipping containers.

It took him eleven hours to cover the 670 kilometers to Algeciras, all of it on the A-7 Nacional within sight of the sea. He stopped in Motril and bought bread and cheese and water for his lunch and ate and drank while driving. The sea was flat, the wind just as he remembered along this coast in summer—too light, frustrating under sail—but ashore all was changed. The coast west of Málaga to beyond Marbella, which Gerald remembered as a dusty stretch of coastal hills as tawny as a lion’s flank, was now an uninterrupted stretch of contiguous, densely clustered villa-and-golf developments.

Mostly he saw Aegina, always beyond the fly-spattered windscreen, incarcerated in a Guardia Civil jail.

The whole notion of going to Morocco to buy shirts had sounded very unlikely, dodgy even—he’d imagined camel-borne brigands and rapists—but he could see the appeal, the lure of the Moorish fountainhead, and his fears for Aegina had been marginally allayed by the fact that Luc would be with her. The money she said she hoped to make was very little, not enough to make much of a dent in what she’d need over the next few years in art school, and he’d been working on his own plan for that—he’d just sold another small parcel of his land near the bottom of the drive to a Spanish couple from the mainland—but it was admirable and enterprising of her to try to make some money on her own and that had persuaded him.

He reached Algeciras after dark. It felt as big as Palma, but not pretty, heavily industrial. He had no idea where she was being held. He drove on, immediately lost in the town and not seeing anywhere to stop. Looming over the end of many streets floated the familiar anomalous marvel of the Rock of Gibraltar, which Gerald knew lay immediately south of the town across Algeciras Bay. He steered for that until, like a cygnet finding its way to water, he found himself in the commercial fishing port, on a street of decrepit pensions which conformed with his notion of the right sort of place to stay. The rates would be reasonable, and no one of sound mind would trouble with his Simca on the street.

Tired after the previous night and the long day, he slept better to begin with, but again he was awake early, now intent on finding Aegina and, however he could, helping her.

A
egina sat on her bunk
with her back pressed into the corner of her cell, reading. The position offered no privacy from the grid wire in the door, but she liked feeling the two walls at her back. She was on her second James Bond book,
From Russia with Love
.

Nobody would tell her anything. She’d tried asking the guards what they thought she had done, what was going to happen to her—and when—but they would only shrug.

Twice a day she was taken outside to a concrete-walled space for half an hour. She met the other women there, older, haggard-looking, chain-smoking. “What are you here for?” they asked her. She told them she didn’t know. She’d been in a car coming off the ferry—

“Aie,”
they said, shaking their heads,
“las drogas.”

“No,” Aegina said, “I had only shirts.”

“Shirts!” cackled one of the women, and they all laughed.

She’d seen the way Rolf and Minka looked as the customs agents began going through the car. Then the
guardias
took them all into an office and immediately separated them.

One of the women offered her a cigarette. Aegina thanked her but she didn’t smoke, she said. She asked the women why they were there. “Aie, this one!” they said, and laughed some more.

She was alone in her cell, although it had two beds, and a toilet without a seat behind a partition that shielded it from view through the wire in the door. She heard the other women in cells down the hall, talking and laughing; sometimes they talked long and quietly and she couldn’t make out the words.

On the second morning, she asked the gangling young
guardia
who mopped the floors if there was anything to read, in either Spanish or English. He went away and come back with two Spanish
novelas
whose covers showed women with torn shirts running from, on one cover, a man on horseback, on another, a steam engine, and three books in English:
You Are All Sanpaku
, a book extolling the virtues of a macrobiotic brown rice diet, and two James Bond paperbacks. Aegina had heard girls talking about James Bond books in school. They weren’t at all as she’d imagined. There was hardly any sex. Mostly it was traveling and killing and descriptions of watches, cars, train rides, the Bahamas, Istanbul. It took her out of the cell.

But it didn’t stop her thinking about Luc for long. She’d believed him, as she was sick, vomiting, exploding with diarrhea, lying helpless on the floor, at her very worst, when he’d said, “I love you so much . . . Like this most of all.” She’d believed him. At that moment, she’d loved him too.

And then she remembered how he had knelt down beside Minka when she was vomiting next to the car outside the customs building, and wiped her face with a piece of cloth he’d torn from his shirt. So, the way he’d been with Aegina—the sweetness toward someone who was being sick—was nothing special. A dog, sniffing smells, would have behaved the same.

O
nce Lulu finished
speaking with Luc on the phone, it had been impossible to get any more information from the Guardia Civil in Algeciras. Nobody knew anything, except, of course, that it was
muy grave
, very grave,
señora
, making it sound like murder.

She believed Luc when he said he and Aegina hadn’t been foolish enough to try to smuggle drugs, but they’d been stupid enough to get a lift in a car whose panels had been filled with hashish. It was not a good time to be stopped with drugs. The Spanish newspapers were filled with lurid stories featuring the highly visible efforts of the Guardia Civil or the agents of the
aduana
at apprehending hippies who apparently couldn’t go anywhere without kilos of marijuana. What smuggler wouldn’t want to cloak himself with a pair of hapless children to give the appearance of a holidaymaking family? The silly fools.

Lulu knew, by instinct and preference, that she would get nowhere trying to deal with the authorities in Algeciras or enlisting lawyers either there or in Mallorca. She needed to go to the top, to someone with immense clout who, with a few words, or the correct conduit of pesetas, in the right quarter, would bring the matter to a speedy conclusion.

She knew such a person. She dialed a telephone number.

“Hello, Barty. How are you?”

“I am well, Lulu,” replied the deep, cigar and single-malt voice that sounded inordinately pleased to hear from her. “How very charming it is to hear from you. How are you?” He spoke in fluent English, his
madrileño
accent barely apparent.

“I’m afraid I’m not ringing you about anything pleasant, Barty. I have a problem.”

“I am sorry to hear it,
querida
.” Bartolomé Llobet’s voice conveyed true sympathy. “What can I do?”

Lulu outlined the situation. Luc and a girl arrested getting off the ferry in Algeciras for being in a car packed with drugs—

“What drugs,
querida
?”

“You know, pot. Hashish, or kif, whatever it is that everyone gets caught with now.”

“Nothing else? Not heroin?”

“Good lord no, certainly not that I’ve heard of. It wasn’t theirs, they were simply being given a lift by the smugglers.”

“Of course. When did this happen, Lulu?”

“Yesterday afternoon. I only got a call from Luc just now.”

Llobet said: “Algeciras . . .” Bless him, Lulu could actually hear him writing down the details. “. . . and the ferry came from Tangier or Ceuta?”

“Tangier, Barty.”

“
Bueno.
I will do what I can,
querida
. It should not be too bad if there are no other drugs involved. It depends of course, on the circumstances, who these other people are, what have you.”

“Barty, you sound as if you know something about it.”

“
Claro.
I have children, no?”

“They haven’t been in trouble, not like this, have they? I’ve never heard anything.”

The quick breeze of air through a forest of nostril hair in the phone’s mouthpiece—an amused exhalation. “Exactly.
Bueno
, I will call you this afternoon.”

“You’re a lovely man, Barty.”

“
Sí.
Well, I was once, no?”

“Of course, you still are.”

He clicked off.

That should do it, thought Lulu.

•   •   •

O
f course,
you must absolutely go, Lulu,” said Milly. “Tom and I will manage everything.”

They were having breakfast on the terrace outside the sitting room. Milly was a large woman—six feet tall and built like a letter box—dressed in efficient English holiday mufti: Aertex shirt, cotton skirt, enormous plimsolls. Tom, sitting nearby with an old newspaper, looked like a scoutmaster. There was no question of their ability to manage the Rocks for a few days. India had been run for a hundred years by such people. Now they were doing perfectly well without an Empire. Bankrolled by Milly’s inheritance, Tom had recently built a machine that popped out thousands of plastic punnets to package and protect fruits and vegetables. His company was now selling machines and punnets that had revolutionized the transport and sale of supermarket produce all over England, and he was getting rich. However, they always found the time to come down to Mallorca. There was no one else Lulu would have left in charge of the place.

“We’ll keep the fires stoked, the animals fed,” said Tom.

“Bless you,” said Lulu. “I won’t go yet, though. No point being there until Barty’s done his job. Then I shall go and bring him home.”

W
e are conducting
an investigation,” Teniente Coronel Ruiz told the Englishman, making it sound like a procedure at the highest level of Interpol. “I cannot tell you what will happen to your daughter, Señor”—he looked down again at the sheet in front of him . . . the names of these English—“Señor Ruteleje. She will remain in custody for now, until such a time that the investigation is concluded, when she will face a trial or she will be freed, or fined perhaps, depending on the charges.”

“I understand, Teniente Coronel,” said the Rutledge. “So she has not yet been charged with any offense?”

Astonishingly, the
inglés
had correctly determined Ruiz’s rank from the insignia of his epaulettes. “No. As I say, this is pending the outcome of the investigation. I can tell you, however,” said Ruiz, looking balefully across his desk at the Rutledge, “that she and her friend, the American Franklin, crossed from Algeciras to Tangier on the same ferry as the owner of the car, the German Zenf, one week ago. Did you know this?”

“No,” said the Rutledge, looking newly alarmed.

Ruiz shrugged. “It may be only a coincidence, but it could indicate a design, a plan.” That was all he needed to say—normally something he would have enjoyed imparting—but for some reason he felt himself unbending. “It does appear however, that there is no previous connection between your daughter and Franklin and this Zenf and his companion, the Montenegrin woman”—he looked down again, another impossible name—“Kovačević, who have been traveling together for some time. On the face of it, their story that they were simply given a ride when their car met with an accident—we are checking with the Moroccan police for verification of this accident—sounds not entirely unreasonable. It will depend if the association is considered circumstantial rather than complicit. Probably it will be more a question of some proof that will appear, or not, to implicate them, rather than that they will have to prove their uninvolvement.”

“I understand. Can I see my daughter?”

The Rutledge was even wearing a tie. A man of modest means, Ruiz realized, taking in the cloth and cut of his blazer, which appeared to be the sort of garment that sold for a few hundred pesetas at the Saturday market. “Of course. Cabo Primero.” Ruiz instructed his corporal to take the
inglés
to the cells to visit his daughter.

“Thank you,” said the Rutledge.

Very polite, respectful. Unlike the demanding and threatening Llobet, who had called again about the American Franklin, this time invoking the name and influence of a
senador
of the Junta de Andalucía if Ruiz could not provide details of any movement in the case. The Llobet did not seem aware of the Rutledge girl’s being involved, or even the Zenf and the other woman or any of the basic facts of the apprehension. He just wanted results for the Franklin. Ruiz, like any proper official at his level, was a master of dissembling obfuscation, and assured the Llobet that he was pursuing every avenue of the furtherance of the case of the American Franklin.

On the third afternoon, Rutledge came in, nodded at Ruiz and said,
“Bona tarda,”
slipping, absentmindedly it seemed, into Catalan, instead of his usual
Buenas tardes
.

“Bona tarda, Señor Ruteleje,”
Ruiz responded. “We have heard from the Moroccan police. They have found a vehicle, a Renault, with French license plates, severely damaged, inoperable. This conforms to statements made by your daughter and the American Franklin, and indeed the German and the Montenegrin woman. This could be seen as a corroboration of the innocence of your daughter and her friend.”

“Wonderful,” said Rutledge. “May I see my daughter?”

“Of course. Cabo Primero.”

The corporal, normally at a desk in the adjoining room, did not respond. Ruiz craned his head to see through a door. He stood up. “I will take you up myself, Señor Ruteleje.”

They climbed stairs to the second floor and walked down a linoleum-floored corridor to the holding cells. Ruiz instructed the
cabo
at the duty desk to bring the female prisoner Ruteleje to the visitor’s room. He waited for a moment with the Englishman.

“Have you had much trouble with her?” Ruiz asked.

“My daughter? No, never. Nothing like this. She is an artist. Her interest is in painting.”

The
cabo
returned with the prisoner. Ruiz had observed some of the interrogation of the Zenf but he had not encountered any of the others in the case. He was surprised to see that the sandy-haired Englishman’s daughter looked absolutely Spanish. As dark as any local girl. When she saw the Rutledge, she said, “Hallo, Papa.”

“This is your daughter?” asked Ruiz.

“Yes,” said Gerald. “Aegina”—still speaking Spanish—“this is Teniente Coronel Ruiz. He was kind enough to bring me up to see you.”

With her few simple words of thanks, Ruiz placed her accent—and now the Englishman’s, which he had remarked several times but it had been harder with him. The nasally flattening of the vowels: Catalan from the Balearic Islands.

“Pues, bona tarda,”
Ruiz said to both of them.

“Bona tarda,”
said the girl pleasantly, acknowledging the shift to Catalan.

An hour later, when Gerald came downstairs, Ruiz said: “One would say that your daughter is absolutely Spanish.” He held up Aegina’s British passport, looking at the photograph and details in it. “She was born in Mallorca. She is truly your child?”

“Oh, yes,” said Gerald. He set his rucksack on the floor and pulled out the envelope of papers he had brought from home. He knew from long experience the midlevel Latin official’s pathological inquisitiveness and devotion to documentation which, when offered in the right circumstances, could particularize and humanize a subject under the power of such an authority. He now handed Aegina’s birth certificate to Ruiz, who took it and scrutinized it intently.
Aegina María Rutledge y Puig
; Madre:
Paloma Teresa Puig y Froix
; Padre:
Gerald Desmond Anthony Rutledge
; Fecha:
13 mayo 1952.
Lugar:
Cala Marsopa, Mallorca, España.

Gerald spread some photographs on the desk, and Ruiz looked through them with unguarded curiosity. Black-and-white with serrated borders, mostly of the little girl with her mother, a handsome woman, in whom Ruiz saw the daughter he had seen upstairs. Several of the three of them: the younger Englishman, stick thin, at a restaurant with the woman and the girl, now aged about five or six, their faces and the tabletop overexposed with flash, a dark
bodega
in the background. Another photo showed them perched on rocks above the sea, a bottle and some bread around them. They looked happy.

“My family,” said Gerald.

“Very attractive,” said Ruiz. “The mother is
mallorquina
?”

“Yes. She was. She is dead.”

Ruiz’s face clouded. He looked at Gerald. “I am sorry for you.”

“Thank you.”

“And you still live in Mallorca?”

“Yes,” said Gerald. He reached down and drew an unlabeled liter bottle of olive oil from his rucksack. He placed it on Ruiz’s desk. “I have a small farm. I make olive oil. With your permission, I would like to give you this bottle.

“It is not necessary, Señor Ruteleje.”

“I understand, but I would like you to have it. You’ve been very sympathetic. Besides, it’s good. You will like it.”