Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon (5 page)

It may be just the angle I’m sitting at, or the vague positioning of the driver’s pointing arm, but I get the impression he’s aiming his finger not at any of the lower reaches of the range, but at the highest peaks, the ones reflecting most brilliantly the disappearing sunlight, and, if I’m right, that the villa’s as high as is possible. Knowing Gerald and Les it’s probably balanced on a peak like something out of Road Runner, liable to tip over the edge if you flush the lavatory a bit fierce.

About ten minutes later we get to a small town, the main road going straight through the middle, and this place has a completely different atmosphere to the sprawl we left half an hour ago: a real Spanish village, as Spanish as an English market town is English. The only thing about this place, set out to catch the passing tourists, is a leather-work shop with a lot of hide skins tacked up on the outside wall. I tap the driver on the shoulder and manage to get over that I want him to stop, which he does, and gets out
of the car and runs round the back and opens the door for me, beaming all over his face. I struggle out, and when I’m out I stretch and try and de-crease my clothes and while I’m doing that he’s already half way across the road, making for the leather shop.

“Here,” I call after him.

He stops and looks at me. I shake my head and point to a bar on my side of the road.

“There,” I say to him.

His face falls a bit. No taxi-drop commission tonight. I walk across the broad pavement with the driver padding along behind me and we go into the bar.

The bar has a modern aluminium and glass frontage inset in the old shuttered structure of the building, a miniature version of the airport facade, and inside there are resonances of the airport, leatherette stools and booths, formica topping on the bar. Formica in Spain. I wonder how they pronounce it.

Some of the town’s top guys are sitting on the stools screwed into the floor along the front of the bar, eating sea-food from dainty saucers and drinking beer from bottles that look like they should have Schweppes Ginger Beer inside. You can tell they’re the town’s top guys. There are four of them and at least two of them are obviously brothers, but that apart, they’re all out of the same mould, short, portly, beautifully barbered greying hair, similar kinds of sportswear and slip-ons. Even the frames round their glasses seem to match. But the thing that tells you what they are is the atmosphere they have about them, an air of mild unease, dissatisfaction, only submerged when they are concentrating on their food. It’s an attitude I recognise from my adolescence, among the small builders and the chemists and the haulage contractors who used to gather at the bar of the Conservative Club in Scunthorpe; they all looked somehow disappointed by their success too.

“Vodka and tonic,” I said to the fifteen-year-old behind the bar.

“Vodka tonic,” he says, already half filling a glass with crushed ice. I turn to the driver who’s at my shoulder and I raise my eyebrows to let him know I’d like to know what he’d like. He beams and clears his throat and very carefully he says, “I would like a large gin and a tonic please.”

I smile to myself. When it comes down to essentials, the barman can understand what I want, and the driver can make himself understood. But Christ alone knows what a large gin’s like because the lad behind the bar’s still pouring my vodka. No measures, nothing. I motion for him to stop so’s there’s room for my tonic to go in and then I begin to tell him what the driver wants but he’s already started to take care of that so I just stand there and watch. When he’s finished he puts all the stuff on a tray and while the driver’s taking the stuff to a table I give the lad behind the bar a five hundred peseta note and he rings it up and very carefully counts the change out into my hand. I give him too much back as a tip and then I go and join the driver, who is splashing the tonic in both our drinks. I sit down and the driver raises his glass and downs half his drink as though he’s drinking lemonade.

“Cheers,” he says, smiling broadly.

“Cheers,” I say, and raise my own glass and take a long drink but not as long as his: it takes me all my time not to spit it out all over him because he’s given me the wrong fucking drink. He’s got the vodka and I’ve got the gin. And gin to me is like water to a Jock; it turns my stomach. The smell’s enough to make me throw up. The driver catches my expression and spreads his hands and raises his eyebrows to ask why? I push the glass over to him and get up and order another vodka and tonic and the lad behind the bar puts a glass and bottle on another tray and so I take the second tray back to the table and sit down again and by that time the driver’s finished his drink and started mine as if there’s no difference between the two drinks. Then we both stare out of the plate glass windows at the dusky pink evening. A bus draws up outside the
leather shop opposite and unloads a load of tourists so that they can play a part in supporting cottage industries. The taxi driver makes a gesture at them and grins and I think to myself, yes, and wouldn’t you like the percentage.

The lad from behind the bar comes round to the jukebox which is about two feet away from my right ear and shoves in a coin and there is a whirring sound and then the bar is full of music, Spanish popular variety. I manage about two and a half sides of this Eurovision reject stuff before motioning to the driver it’s time for us to go. He looks disappointed. I wonder if he’s on commission from here too.

Outside it’s a little bit cooler than before. The tourists are still in the leather shop and the bus driver is talking to a representative of the local filth who looks like something out of
Pirates of Penzance
. No wonder they need shooters, with that clobber. Otherwise they’d die of embarrassment from all the verballing they got.

This time I get in the front seat and we’re out of town inside three minutes and making for the mountains again. I try and get out of the driver how long it’s going to take us to get to the villa but all he does is to keep looking at his watch and giving me the fucking time, so in the end I give up before he thinks I’ve gone round the twist.

We carry on in silence for a further twenty minutes until we reach the foothills and a place called Incas. On the outskirts there’s a walled set-up that looks as though it could be the local nick. The driver catches me looking at it and says one word.

“Cemetery,” he says.

I don’t say anything. He points at the walls.

“People, in there,” he says.

I look at him.

“See,” he says, then starts another charade. First he closes his eyes for a second then looks at me and makes a cut-throat gesture. I nod, then he takes his hands off the wheel and mimes digging. I nod. He shakes his head and
digs again, and shakes his head and says, “No.” I nod. Then he points at the walls and looks at me. I nod. He takes his hands off the wheel again, mimes gripping something and pushing it away from him. This time I don’t nod. He sighs and points groundwards and shakes his head. I nod mine. He nods his. He points at the walls, then makes the gripping gesture again. This time I get it. He’s putting something in the walls. But although I am getting it I frown signifying my perplexity and now he beams and nods his head vigorously and goes through the gripping motions again and again points at the walls.

“People, in there,” he says.

I light a cigarette and turn my gaze to other pieces of local colour.

It takes us about ten minutes to get through Incas and then the road begins to rise even more steeply and there’s no choice but for the road to become a never-ending series of hairpin bends rising up and up into the dusk. At the first bend the driver indicates the nub of the corner and points upwards to the top of the mountains.

“One hundred twenty-four,” he says. “One hundred twenty-four.” Then he laughs and reaches down between his legs and comes up with half a bottle of Hine and shoves it in my direction. I look at him and remember the treble vodka and tonic and treble gin he’d knocked back and shake my head. He unscrews the top and takes a long pull and I don’t give a fuck whether there are one hundred twenty-four fucking bends just so long as we negotiate all of the bastards safely.

It’s like a location for a rotten movie. The road dog legs steeper and steeper and the drops get deeper and deeper and the brandy in the bottle gets lower and lower. I begin to look back to the hours spent on the plane almost with nostalgia as the car grinds round each new bend. At one point we meet a tourist coach head-on and so the taxi driver reverses back round one of the bends, faster than the speed he’d formerly gone round it. Then he pulls in
against the slanting face and somehow manages to get a couple of wheels up on the slope. The bus manoeuvres by and the strains of “O Sole Mio” sung in about six different accents drifts through the evening air and finally rattles away into the distance with the slip-stream of the bus, but not before the taxi driver’s caught the melody and started sending his own version across the deepening purple of the canyons. Then, before he crashes back through the gears, he reaches for the bottle again but before he can start unscrewing the cap I take the bottle from him. He looks at me, surprised at first, then grins and gestures for me to take a drink but instead of doing that I take a couple of hundreds out of my wallet and press them into the driver’s hand. It’s time for him to look surprised again but not as surprised as when I roll my window down and hurl the bottle out into the spacious canyon. He begins to speak but I cut in on him.

“Incas?” I say to him.

He looks at me. I say it again.

“Incas?”

He frowns and nods.

“People in walls?”

Another frown, another nod.

I mime him drinking from the bottle and then I point to each of us.

“People in walls,” I say to him.

This time he just frowns. Then he turns away and takes it out of the gearbox and we’re off again. Faster than before. I shake my head and light another cigarette. You can’t win away from home.

Chapter Six

H
ALF AN HOUR LATER
the taxi stops and I half expect the driver to try and have the last laugh by attempting to leave me on the empty mountain road. Because that’s where we are. Nothing but empty mountain road. No obvious features to justify stopping the car. Just silence. I look at the driver. He points at the roadside.

“Villa,” he says.

I look at the roadside. All there is is a load of still foliage and beneath the foliage what must be a small inclined plateau and beyond that the usual sheer mountain sides.

“The villa,” I say.

“Sí, sí,” he says, pointing as if his hand is on an expander. “Villa.”

I look closely at the undergrowth and eventually I manage to detect a darker patch in the uniform gloom of the foliage.

“There?” I say.

“Sí, sí,” he says, then waves his arms, hands limp at the wrists, flapping away from him, to signify beyond and upwards past the gap in the foliage.

“Ah,” I say and sit there for a moment thinking various thoughts. After I’ve thought them I get out of the car, and he gets out of the car and hauls my luggage out onto the
road and stands there. He obviously has no intention of moving any further so I pick up my luggage and begin to move towards the gap. After I’ve taken a few steps I feel a hand on my arm.

“Excuse me,” he says.

I put the luggage down and turn to face him.

“Fare,” he says, “the fare.”

You’ve got to hand it to him, he really is a little trier. I smile at him and take hold of his open neck shirt and lift him up and carry him a few steps back to the car. Then I sit him down on the bonnet and still keeping a grip on his shirt I take my wallet out and lay it down on the car’s warm metal and flip it open and with my thumb and forefinger I slide out a couple of hundred peseta notes and stuff them in the pocket of his shirt. He knows that I know that he’ll already have been squared up by Wally but even at this stage he feels obliged to give me a long spiel whether I understand it or not so I just carry on holding him on the bonnet until he’s finished, until he realises there’s nothing he’s going to say will make any difference, in any language.

When he’s finished I give him two minutes’ silence, just giving him the eyeball contact before I let go of his shirt. He slides his arse off the bonnet and plants his feet on the ground but other than that he doesn’t make any movement. I give him a pat on each cheek, backhand, forehand, then I turn away and pick up my luggage and make for the gap in the undergrowth. Behind me the driver clears his throat and there is the sound of spit hitting the road’s dusty surface with some force but I don’t bother to turn round. He’s lost if he’s got to spit. A minute later the car barks into life and tires scratch the road’s surface as the driver u-turns and begins to make it back down the mountain. The sound of the car dies and dies and so here I am, up in the fucking mountains, in the middle of a road as empty as Gerald’s head. I turn round to look down the mountain at the dark plain stretching away to the flat curve of the sea. The only
way I can tell the difference from land and water is by the endless strip of resort lights. But at least there are lights. Not as heartwarming as the one’s I’m used to. But there are lights. Unlike behind me. I turn round again and look at the foliage and the darkness of the gap and of the mountains beyond. A few more words flow through my altitude-ventilated brain. Then I pick up my luggage and make for the gap. The gap’s well over a car’s width and now I’m up to it I can see that beyond it there’s a track that over here is meant to pass for some kind of drive, a kind of approach road disappearing into the dusk. The fucking taxi driver probably knew about this approach, and fuck him. So I start off down the track. The ground is hard under the skimpy layer of dirt, the sound my feet make is subtle and resonant at the same time. I’m conscious of a slight rise as I progress along the track, and in front of me, although it never seems to get closer, there’s a kind of phony back-lit horizon preceding the genuine silhouette the twilit mountains are making, indicating a small roll in the landscape, concealing a night-reflecting dip.