Hurricane Gold (26 page)

‘Don’ fall in there, Jaime,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘You slide all the way down to the sea.’

In fact everywhere was slippery. The smell of damp and mould was very unpleasant, and it was mixed with a choking, fishy stink that James couldn’t identify.

Their job was to replace the worst of the stone with new blocks they had painfully lugged behind them all the way from the entrance. James was in charge of mixing the cement for the mortar, while a couple of the men cut the new blocks to size.

There was nowhere to stand fully upright and James felt like his back was going to break. Today, though, the men worked quickly, anxious to be gone from this foul place. The old stones were eased out and the new ones fitted into place faster than James thought possible.

‘What’s on the other side of the door?’ he asked Moises when he got the chance. He had noticed that the men were fearful of it, and didn’t like to go too close.

‘Is a monster,’ said his friend. ‘Hun Came. He is in big pool of water.’

James climbed carefully over the sluice and shuffled over to the door for a closer look.

‘Can you open it from the other side?’ he asked.

‘No, only here.’

The fishy smell was stronger here and was obviously coming from the tank. James looked up. There was a sort of chimney stretching about 20 feet to the sky. He stood up inside it and noticed a gap in the wall where a small stone had been removed. He tried to peer through into the tank, but it was too dark to see anything, and the fish smell was appalling.

‘Don’ stick your nose through there, Jaime,’ Moises shouted across to him. ‘He will bite it off.’ He then said something in his own language to the other men and they all laughed.

James heard something move in the dark water and he shuddered.

Precious had been right.

It would be an act of utter madness to go into the rat run.

But what choice did he have?

27

Mexican Hat Dance

Precious hated it in the laundry. Already her hands were red and raw from being constantly immersed in soapy water. She looked at the other women, leaning over the huge sinks, scrubbing dirty sheets with their big, powerful arms and pictured herself like them in ten years’ time, old and tired-looking.

She could see her life draining away down the plughole with all the filthy, grey water. She used to dream of what she was going to be when she was grown-up. Working in a laundry was not one of her dreams.

As well as washing she also had to do cleaning duties, usually in the guest rooms, but on the same morning that James was working in the tunnels beneath the rat run, she was sent up to El Huracán’s residence. One of the girls who usually worked there had been taken sick, and, just as the men were reluctant to go into El Huracán’s tunnels, the women were scared to go into his house. Precious was given the job of filling in for the sick girl.

She crossed the plaza with three short, stout women, none of whom spoke any English and none of whom seemed to particularly like her. Halfway there she nearly bumped into one of the guests and recoiled in horror when she saw it was Mrs Glass. She was wearing a dressing gown and had a towel wrapped around her head. She had evidently just been for a massage and beauty treatment at El Huracán’s clinic. She looked Precious up and down with an expression of utter contempt.

‘Well, well, well,’ she said coldly. ‘Look who it is. One of Huracán’s little domestics.’ She tilted her head back and laughed. The sound was like shards of broken glass falling on a stone floor.

Precious bowed her head and hurried to catch up with the other cleaners. She saw them pause in El Huracán’s doorway and cross themselves before going fearfully over the threshold, for all the world as if they were entering the gates of hell.

Once inside they steered Precious towards a toilet and gave her a mop and bucket, a cloth and a stack of clean hand towels.

The toilet was the largest Precious had ever seen and was spotlessly clean. She nevertheless resented having to clean it.

So this was what she had come to:
a toilet cleaner
.

Well, she wouldn’t do it. She was Precious Stone, Jack Stone’s daughter.

She sat on the toilet, folded her arms stubbornly across her chest and stared at the framed picture on the wall opposite

After a while she realised with a jolt that she was looking at a drawing of ‘
La Avenida de la Muerte
’. She stood up and went across the tiled floor to look at it more closely. Yes. It appeared to be the original design for the rat run. It was hand drawn, possibly even by El Huracán himself, and showed all the passageways and chambers with notations for each one.

Her heart was thumping in her chest. She quickly looked at the other framed pictures in the room. They were all different drawings of the building works on the island, but none of them showed the rat run.

She locked the door, took the picture off the wall and carefully removed the drawing from its frame. She folded it up inside a dirty towel and swapped the empty frame with another one that looked similar.

Then, quickly and diligently, she cleaned the room, changed the dirty towels for clean ones and stacked the used ones into a neat pile.

The day seemed like it would never end, but at last she got away, the map now hidden under her clothes, and ran to meet James on the beach.

‘You were right,’ she said breathlessly, when she saw him. ‘I can’t go on like this. I was miserable, that’s all, but I won’t give up. And I won’t let that woman have the last laugh, James. I won’t.’

So saying, she pulled out the drawing and gave it to James.

He hugged her when he saw what it was.

‘I tell you, it’s fate,’ said Precious. ‘I was sitting there and there it was. This was meant to happen. We’re going to do it. We’re going to get off this island, and somehow we’re going to get those stolen plans back.’

‘The plans…’ In his obsession with escaping, James had forgotten all about the plans.

Well, for now they would have to wait. They would be locked safely away in El Huracán’s bank. There was no way on earth James could ever get them out of there. The important thing right now was to plan their escape. They would have to come back for the plans later.

The drawing was not as detailed as it had first looked. Each chamber was referred to by the god it was named after rather than by what it contained. But there were enough clues for the two of them to work out what a lot of it meant. There were even measurements and dimensions for each part.

‘Look,’ said James, pointing to a spur that went off to the side at one end.

‘This is where I was working today. It’s a drainage sluice.’ He told her all about the
túneles
. ‘Whatever Hun Came is, whatever’s in that big tank, must be the final challenge.’

They started planning right there and then.

First they made a copy of the drawing, and in the morning Precious took it back into El Huracán’s residence hidden among some clean towels and returned it to its frame. Then the following evening she and James met at some dilapidated ruins in the trees behind the beach that they had decided would be the perfect place to build a copy of the rat run.

They cleared away the vines and creepers and piled fallen stones on top of each other. They paced out measurements. They used fallen branches and small palms and lengths of pilfered rope and string. And when it was done they practised running and jumping and climbing. They raced to see who could slither fastest on their belly. They dashed through the trees trying to avoid branches and sharpening their reflexes. They looked at possible short cuts and cheats. They worked on ways to get past each obstacle. They talked long into the night about what they might have to face, in the hope that talking would make it all seem familiar and not something to be terrified of. Because they knew that the hardest thing they would have to face would be their own fear. If they could only keep level heads and not panic, they would have a much better chance of making it through alive.

It was fun, the two of them working together. They could pretend that it was all just a game. The fire had come back into Precious. She was toughening up and getting stronger, the muscles were hardening in her arms and legs. Her eyes were bright, her hair glossy and her skin clear. Each night they crawled into their beds, dog tired but feeling that they had achieved a little more, and as their heads hit their pillows they fell instantly into a deep, refreshing sleep.

During the day, James worked as hard as he could with the repair gangs, swinging pickaxes and sledgehammers, hoisting sacks of sand and cement, digging, lifting, hammering, chopping. Building up his strength and his stamina. He would have to be perfectly fit if he was to have any chance of surviving the run.

He had quickly created the impression that he was an energetic, reliable worker; the first to volunteer for the more unpleasant jobs and last to quit work in the evenings. Morales grew to trust him and gave him his own key to the big stone shed where all the equipment was kept. Every type of tool imaginable was stored in the shed. There was even a strongroom at the back for explosives, which were occasionally used to break up big rocks.

Metal chests containing sticks of dynamite and neat coils of fuse wire sat on concrete shelves, ready to be used. James remembered Whatzat showing him how to use the stuff back at the abandoned oilfield and a plan started to form in his head.

After work, he would carefully clean all the tools his gang had used and return them to their proper places. He always left the shed immaculate. He wanted to be Morales’s star labourer. He didn’t want anyone to suspect what he was up to.

One evening, after their training session, as they sat on the beach cutting shapes out of some pilfered steel sheeting, James was idly scratching his shoulder where the botfly maggot had made its home. It was still covered with the tape that the doctor had put on it.

‘Does it hurt?’ asked Precious.

‘Not nearly as much as it did,’ said James, ‘but it itches like mad.’

‘Do you suppose it’s dead yet?’ said Precious.

‘It must be,’ said James. ‘I can’t feel it moving around any more.’

‘Let’s look,’ said Precious excitedly.

‘It might be pretty horrible.’

‘So?’ said Precious. ‘I like horrible things. Come on, I’ve been dying to see.’

‘All right.’

James ripped off the bandage and carefully peeled back the strip of blackened bacon beneath it. There was the white head of the grub, nestling in a hole in his flesh. James was too disgusted to do anything more.

‘Let me,’ said Precious, and with a look of mixed horror and delight she pressed the edges of the wound together until the dead maggot was squeezed out. She flicked it into the sand where a crab quickly scuttled over, picked it up in its claws and popped it into its mouth.

‘Eurgh,’ said Precious. ‘That’s revolting.’

She paused a moment and then asked if she could do the one in James’s back.

When she was done she suddenly leant over and kissed him.

‘What was that for?’ said James.

‘For luck,’ said Precious.

‘Luck?’

‘We can’t put it off any longer,’ said Precious. ‘We’re as ready as we’re ever going to be. I’m beginning to think about it too much, and if I do that I’m liable to change my mind. What about you?’

‘I’m ready,’ said James, jumping up and brushing the sand off his trousers. ‘We stick to our plan, yes?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Precious.

‘All right,’ said James ‘It must be about eight o’clock. There’s one last thing I have to do. Get yourself ready and I’ll meet you in the plaza in an hour.’

James watched Precious go and then walked into the trees. About 50 yards back from the beach was a hollow under a tree covered with a pile of dead branches and palm fronds. He moved them aside and took his stuff out of hiding. He checked it all and double-checked it before setting off towards the entrance to the tunnels.

It was a Saturday night. The busiest night of the week. The plaza was packed with people. A mariachi band was playing lively dance music. Trumpets blared, guitars strummed, strong voices sang out in unison. There was an air of fierce jollity among the guests. It was another night, another party, a party that would never end.

James turned up at nine, as arranged, and looked for Precious. As he was pushing through the crowd milling in the square, he bumped into Mrs Glass. She was wearing a gaucho outfit, with loose trousers and a wide hat. The ring of golden hair that showed beneath the hat was immaculate as ever, but she looked older. She had put on a little weight. Her face was puffy. The soft life was not suiting her. She appeared to be drunk.

‘Well, if it isn’t James Bond,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know Huracán allowed the help to mix with the guests.’

‘There’s nothing you can say that will upset me,’ said James. ‘Because I’m getting away from here.’

‘Don’t make me laugh,’ said Mrs Glass. ‘There’s no way off this stinking island.’

‘Not for you, maybe,’ said James. ‘You’re condemned to rot here for the rest of your life, I’m afraid. But I’m off. Maybe I’ll send you a postcard.’

Mrs Glass laughed. It was a shrill, bitter, grating sound, like an angry gull.

James stepped closer to her. ‘Take a good look around you,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘Tell me if you see any old people,’ said James.

Mrs Glass scowled at him, but did as he suggested. ‘What of it?’ she said.

‘Why do you think there are no old people here?’ said James.

‘Dunno.’ Mrs Glass shrugged. ‘Don’t much care. Never given it any thought.’

‘What do you think happens when you run out of money?’ said James and Mrs Glass narrowed her eyes at him.

‘What are you saying?’

‘I’ve seen them,’ said James. ‘The old people. The ones who’ve been here too long and run out of money. El Huracán works them to death on his farm. Enjoy your stay.’

Without warning, Mrs Glass grabbed James by the throat.

‘I should strangle you right here and now,’ she said. ‘You’ve been nothing but trouble for me.’

James held her wrists and tried to pull her hands away, but she held on with an unbreakable grip. James couldn’t speak. He could hardly breathe.

He realised it was useless trying to release her hands and decided that attack was the best form of defence.

He kicked her shin.

She snarled but still didn’t let go. She was smiling now, and there was a wild gleam in her eyes.

James swung hard at her face and she took a hefty backhanded slap across the cheek that whipped her head round and swept the hat off her head.

Mrs Glass screamed and let go of James as if he had suddenly grown red hot. She glanced desperately around for the hat, which had flown into the crowd.

James saw for the first time why she always kept her head covered. The ring of immaculate hair that always showed beneath her hat was all the hair she had on her head. Above it she was completely bald. And not only bald. The pale, hairless skin on the top of her skull was ridged like a ploughed field.