Shadow of the Rock (Spike Sanguinetti) (5 page)

Spike looked round.

‘The precise hour. Someone from that bar must have –’

‘Twelve and a half minutes,’ Gaggero said as he came in. ‘You’ll tell your old man that, won’t –’ Gaggero broke off, seeing the carcass of the chair on the ground.

‘One too many
halal
burgers for Mr Hassan, I’m afraid,’ Spike said, giving the chair back a prod with his shoe. ‘It just went.’

Gaggero frowned, then tapped Solomon on the back. As Solomon rose, Spike thought he saw the ghost of a smile on his mouth. Maybe it was a grimace. ‘The girl’s name,’ he said. ‘It was Esperanza.’

Spike nodded, then put away the tape recorder and returned to the office.

Galliano was still out to lunch. Spike sat motionless at his desk until the harsh staccato notes of Caprice No. 9 reached their climax. Then he picked up the phone and placed a call to the court of assizes in Tangiers.

Chapter 8

Spike watched the paintbrush swish back and forth: the cyan sea, the outline of a boat. A moment later, the Rock of Gibraltar began to loom from the centre of the canvas as Rufus’s long thin fingers worked the brush, each tapering down to a dainty nail.

‘It comes to eight pills a day,’ Spike said, looking back down at his list. ‘Four lots of two.’

Rufus began smudging the area beneath the Rock with his thumb, creating the impression of a dark, foreboding shadow cast over the Straits.

‘Dad?’

Rufus winched up his head, frowning like a hermit disturbed.

‘I’ve written down all the times.’

‘Pills, pills, pills,’ Rufus said. ‘Pure buggery quackery.’

‘The fridge is fully stocked, Dad. Any problems, just give me a call. Day or night.’

Rufus peered from behind his bifocals, blue eyes freakishly magnified. Silver hair curled onto his shoulders like the tendrils of the spider plants that grew upstairs in his study. ‘It’s you we should be worrying about, son.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Tangiers. Easy place to get entangled.’

‘I’m just gathering evidence for an extradition hearing. Three nights, max.’

‘City of Perfidy, Jean Genet called it.’

‘I’ll bet he did.’

Rufus laid down his paintbrush. ‘I used to go there every month in the seventies. When the generalissimo had closed the border with Spain. Ferry to Tangiers, transfer, wait, ferry to Algeciras. Ten-hour round trip to go the best part of a mile. A man needs to watch his step. Could run into trouble like the Hassan boy.’

‘I really wouldn’t worry about it.’

‘There’s always baksheesh, of course. Financial inducement. Foul and filthy lucre.’ Rufus combed his fingers through his hair. ‘Maybe I’ll pay a visit to Mrs Hassan. Damned handsome woman.’

‘You just take it easy, Dad.’ Spike stood to help him tidy away the watercolours. He slipped an arm beneath Rufus’s shoulder but he shrugged it away. ‘I’m fine, son.
Entro en pala
.’

Beneath the table, General Ironside’s tail tapped out a steady tattoo before he appeared with a scratch of unclipped claws on cork. Spike fell in behind both man and Jack Russell as they creaked upstairs.

‘Get some sun in Morocco,’ Rufus said, turning once they reached the landing. ‘You look worn out.’

‘I’ll bring you up a cup of tea, Dad.’

Chapter 9

Spike stood in front of the mirror, pushing his dark hair back from his forehead and forcing a smile. Jessica was right. Crow’s feet crinkled the corners of his eyes. He let the smile fall. The resemblance to Rufus was there in his height and blue irises, but his full mouth and dark Latin skin were his mother’s. He rotated his shoulder blades, searching for traces of pain. Fifty-fifty, the Spanish doctor had said, that Marfan syndrome passed from father to son.

Setting the music to low, Spike stretched out on his bed, watching the curtains swirl as the violin strings hit an uncomfortable pinnacle. He’d always been more of a Mozart man, much to Rufus’s disapproval, but now that he’d reached Caprice No. 10, he had to admit there was something haunting in those shrill, tremulous notes.

Through the open window, the terracotta roofs of the Old Town concertinaed down to cranes and high-rise apartments. Luxury tax-exile accommodation built on land reclaimed from the sea. On the far side of the Straits, the lights of Africa pulsed, as though flashing out signals that Spike was supposed to decipher.

He tucked his hands behind his head, thinking back to the doctor’s lame attempts at reassurance. The list of famous people who’d managed to thrive with Marfan’s had not been long. Initially the name of Niccolò Paganini had not stood out; indeed, it was only when Spike had learned that Paganini had originated in Genoa that he’d taken an interest, ordering a collection of the caprices online, twenty-four solo pieces designed, so far as Spike could tell, to showcase the composer’s unnatural capabilities. According to the CD sleeve, he could play up to twelve notes a second, handspan stretching over three octaves.

No. 11 was a caprice too far; Spike reached over to kill the music. A cacophony of karaoke drifted up from Casemates on the levanter. Folding his hands across his chest, Spike pushed the image of Solomon’s bespectacled face to the back of his mind, then willed himself to sleep.

Part Two

Tangiers

Chapter 10

Spike Sanguinetti stood on the wooden deck of the catamaran, watching the Bay of Tangiers emerge from the heat haze. He’d been here once before, perhaps a decade ago, accompanying an English girlfriend on a quest to buy some authentic Moroccan saffron. They’d arrived in the morning and left by the afternoon. Spike hadn’t stuck around long enough to find out if the mother had liked her present.

Much of the city resembled a wasps’ nest – box-shaped, paper-white houses clustered on a hillside. The steepest and brightest part was the Medina, a walled zone that still followed the contours of the ancient Roman settlement, stone towers and minarets jutting towards a blurry skyline. Stretching around the bay were the more modern tenement buildings and broader boulevards of the Ville Nouvelle. Curving in front of both was a dark yellow scimitar of sand.

The breeze fell as the catamaran slowed. The crossing had been calm, belying the dangers Spike knew lurked beneath. British sailors nicknamed this stretch of water ‘The Gut’, due to its hidden, churning currents. The rivers flowing into the Mediterranean replaced only a third of the water lost through evaporation – as a result, extra water was needed from the Atlantic, so speeding up the movement on the surface of the Straits. The denser, more saline waters of the Med, meanwhile, sank down to the seabed and spilled out into the Atlantic, causing the currents at the top and bottom of the Straits to flow in opposite directions. It was what one couldn’t see that needed to be feared.

An announcement crackled through in English on the tannoy. By the time it had been repeated in Spanish, French and Arabic, its information was outdated. They were already at their destination.

Grizzled Moroccans in Western dress began filing onto the deck, yawning as they shielded their eyes from the glare – manual workers who’d spent most of the crossing asleep on the bench seats inside. Gibraltar had opened her borders to them in the 1970s, when Franco had shut the frontier with Spain, and labour had been needed in the commercial dockyard. The younger ones were still employed, and this Friday afternoon catamaran brought them home to their families, bundles of Gibraltar pounds sewn into their trousers, plastic tartan holdalls zipped at their feet.

After passing an industrial mole – cranes, bunkering equipment – the catamaran eased into a buoy-marked lane. From the lower deck, ropes weighted by miniature cannonballs were flung onto a jetty by unseen hands, collected by dark-skinned men in white
djellabas
, who lashed them to iron ringbolts, creating a creak as the hull battled its restraints.

The air smelled of diesel and woodsmoke. Spike leaned his forearms on the railings and looked down into the murky water. Just below the surface, a large grey mullet was swimming in a circle. It kept stopping and flipping onto its side, white belly glinting in the sun. After sinking down a foot or so, it would right itself and swim back up to continue its circle. Its spine was kinked, Spike saw, injured by a boat propeller or malformed through pollution.

The jaws of the catamaran began to gape as the vans and lorries rolled out. Painted on the side of one, Spike saw a cartoon tomato in sunglasses. As he waited for the passenger gangplank to lower, he took a notebook from his leather overnight bag. Below, the kinked fish still described its circle.

Chapter 11

On the far side of customs, families were gathered, women in headscarves trying to sneak a look past each other’s shoulders, toddlers pincering their legs like stag beetles. Spike slid over his passport. The immigration officer had a mongrel look, oily dark hair hanging over a pallid, sunken-eyed face. A Gibraltarian kind of look, Spike thought. ‘
Nulli expugnabilis hosti
,’ he said as he stamped Spike’s passport.

No enemy shall expel us
– the Rock’s official motto. ‘I’m surprised you left then,
compa
,’ Spike replied in a thick Gibraltarian accent.

The officer gave a smile, rubbing his thumb on his first two fingers in the universal gesture of money. Spike pushed on through to arrivals.

The moment Spike entered the hall, a crowd of hawkers surrounded him like a celebrity lawyer leaving a courthouse. The swiftest on their feet wore knock-off Levi’s and trainers, those behind more traditional white tunics and sandals. ‘Hey, Jimmy,’ called one. ‘Hotel? Lovely price.’

‘
Amigo!
’ cried another, scrumming over his rival. ‘Guide for the Kasbah?’

‘DVD film,
mein Herr
?
’

A tangle of arms extended. ‘
Uzbek
,’ Spike said firmly.

The hawkers stared up in puzzlement as a teenager with a downy moustache tugged at the sleeve of Spike’s suit. ‘
Du kif, monsieur?
’ he whispered.

‘
Uzbekistan
,’ Spike repeated, and the hawkers switched their attention to an American backpacker who’d just come in through the gate.

By the main exit, Spike saw a European holding up a placard. He wore a seersucker jacket and mirrored Oakley shades. As Spike approached, he pushed his sunglasses up onto his high freckly forehead. His eyes were watery blue with sandy lashes, the thinning blond hair side-parted.

‘That’ll be me,’ Spike said, indicating his misspelt name. Above it was a logo, ‘DUNETECH’, the ‘N’ stylised to look like a desert sand dune.

The man held out a signet-ringed hand. ‘Toby Riddell.’

‘Spike Sanguinetti.’

‘Crossing OK?’

‘Incident-free.’

Riddell smiled slightly as he walked down the steps. Out in the sunshine, a queue of lorries was waiting to exit the port complex, harbour guards in Aviators checking documentation. Gulls circled above, cackling as though some stale old joke had set them off.

They headed towards a silver Mercedes saloon. A hunched, toothless man emerged from the shadows, fingering a necklace of tasselled fez hats. ‘Special price –’ he began, but Riddell interrupted him with a palm to the forehead, handing him off like a rugby player. The man clattered back against the barbed-wire fence that ran along the pavement.

‘They’re like dogs,’ Riddell said without breaking stride. His shiny black shoes ticked on the flagstones like a metronome.

With a satisfying bleep, Riddell unlocked the Mercedes. As soon as Spike got in, they accelerated away beneath an archway dedicated to private cars. The guard waved them through at once, and they came out onto the coast road, the Medina rising above, various official-looking port buildings to the left. The roadway was divided by a central reservation of dried yellow grass, on which clusters of men in prayer robes sat eyeing the traffic as though plucking up courage to leap before it.