Sunburn (5 page)
Of the three guests, I had met Tony before. He was getting a doctorate somewhere in Spanish literature. He’d been up to the house several times before, and I liked him. He wore dark slacks, loafers, an open shirt. A handsome Spaniard, he was olive-skinned, slim, with a woman’s hands, and yet not effeminate, but somehow rugged. His voice was abnormally deep. I remember having been surprised when I’d learned he was a student, so far was he from the scholarly type. The last two times he’d been by, we’d all gotten drunk and told filthy stories. Now, when Lea and I entered the room, he rushed to embrace us both, laughing contagiously.
“Come,” he said, “meet my friends. Tonight we’ll be more sedate, eh?”
“He means under sedation,” Sean put in.
The woman was young, possibly not yet eighteen, and very pretty, dressed in a white shift and sandals, medium-length dark hair surrounding her face.
“Marianne is just in from France. She studies anthropology. And this,” said Tony, presenting the other guest with a smile, “is Michael Barrett, our chaperon.”
“He is not that,” said Marianne. “We don’t need a chaperon.”
Tony winked at us. “Ah, innocence.”
We all laughed politely and began making small talk, but shortly I noticed that Michael had sat back in his chair, seemingly content to be left out. He was an American, from Seattle originally, who’d been in Europe for several years. Somewhere in his early twenties, I imagined. He was rather tall and well built, with dark hair that was long but not unkempt.
I thought it odd that someone so young should be so reserved. It might have been shyness, but there was more a brooding quality about him—an inner quietness, maybe even a sense of solitude. When he did speak, he was, to my mind, forcedly polite, and in Sean’s relaxed front room it was out of context, leaving a tension like an unresolved chord.
Lea must have felt it, too. She was in a positive hurry to help with the drinks.
Of course we all had gin and tonics. No other drink, even sangría—especially sangría—is so typically Spanish. We drank from tall glasses filled with ice and a wedge of lime. Outside, it still hadn’t completely darkened, and a slight warm breeze came through the open front door.
Lea was over talking to Sean, Kyra was in the kitchen getting more ice, and Michael, now Mike, sat sipping his drink. Marianne harangued Tony about something in French, then got up from the couch and crossed to where I stood, near the liquor cabinet. She really looked enchanting.
“Why are you standing over here alone?” she asked.
“I’m an observer,” I said.
She turned and looked at Mike, now talking with Tony. “We have too many of them here already. Come over and talk to us.” She reached out her hand to me—cool and very small—and led me over to the sofa.
“What shall we discuss?”
“Anything you like,” I said.
Tony stood next to her and put his arm around her waist.
“Would you get me another drink?” she said to him. Then, to me, “No one seems to pay much attention to the women here,
n’est-ce pas?
”
n’est-ce pas?
”
At that moment, Kyra came back in from the kitchen with the ice. She was wearing a floral print which fell loosely from her neck to the floor. It was open at the sides, clasped by a pin just above the waist, and she wore nothing under it. She was a fine-looking woman, if only she would not flaunt it so blatantly. She walked over to Tony, who was fixing Marianne’s drink, and hugged him from behind. Lea and I looked at each other and shook our heads, and when I turned to continue talking with Marianne, she had crossed over to Tony and stood possessively clutching his arm.
I sipped my drink and joined Sean and Lea. Mike had gotten up and now the younger people were standing in a group and talking.
“Have you known Mike long?” I asked Sean.
“We were just talking about him, too,” said Lea.
“Met him a few times. There is something about him, though, isn’t there?”
Lea stared at him. “He seems a bit . . . I don’t know. I can’t place it at all.”
Lea took my hand and squeezed it.
“He works at a bar in town,” said Sean. “I’m not sure if he’s the bartender or waits tables, but he’s a nice enough guy. Plays a hell of a game of chess.”
“So you do know him.”
He shrugged. “The way one knows people here. He happened to be having a drink with Tony when I ran into them and asked them up.”
“He seems perfectly normal now,” said Lea,
“but just when he was sitting there, so quietly, it was . . . it was eerie, I suppose.”
Sean laughed. “It’s this Spanish twilight. Alters all the shadows until they’re not quite recognizable.”
“Or creates shadows out of nothing?”
He remained smiling. “Maybe. But that’s the romance of this place. You sense a shadow, a mood, a mystery somewhere, but when you examine it, you find it was either the sun, or the heat, or the gin.”
“There’s no real romance here, then?” I asked.
“Depends on what you mean by real. It’s all real enough at a distance, so the trick, if you’re after romance, is to keep it there. If that movement in the bushes seems somehow strange, don’t walk out to the woods and find out it’s a bit of cloth dangling from a branch. Stay by your window and believe it’s a demon watching you.” He took a long drink. “Also depends on what you want to see.”
Lea spoke. “So we imagined whatever it was about Mike?”
“Just what was it you might have imagined?”
“Well.” She paused. “I can’t really put my finger on it.”
“Doug?”
“I don’t really know, either.”
“There,” he said, “you see. But go on believing anything you want. It makes life so much more interesting. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go hurry Berta.” He bowed, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Lea looked at me. “I suppose he’s right, but it did seem . . .” She stopped. “It seemed, whatever it was, real enough to me.”
Four
He turned out of the rutted backstreet and into the main road. Beside him on the seat was an open bottle of
tinto,
and from time to time he’d tip the bottle back as he raced along the curving road. He was anxious to get to the main road that ran out of Blanes, and get to his destination near Perpignan before daybreak.
tinto,
and from time to time he’d tip the bottle back as he raced along the curving road. He was anxious to get to the main road that ran out of Blanes, and get to his destination near Perpignan before daybreak.
Already it was nearly four a.m. The bar had closed up late, and Victor, their singer, had stayed around to drink and swap songs for nearly an hour. Mike finally had to get him drinking Pernod laced with illegal absinthe, so that he’d get drunk and leave. Then there’d been the usual checking up to see that the
graffa
bottles were corked and ready for tomorrow. Luckily, it had been a quiet night. No one had been exceptionally drunk or obnoxious.
graffa
bottles were corked and ready for tomorrow. Luckily, it had been a quiet night. No one had been exceptionally drunk or obnoxious.
That, at least, had been a relief. When he’d last gone to Perpignan, he’d spent all his closing time cleaning vomit from the floors. This cheap liquor really wasn’t the best thing to get drunk on. He took another swig of the
tinto,
and the trees whizzed by.
tinto,
and the trees whizzed by.
Occasionally he’d see lights approaching and have to slow down. He didn’t know whether he preferred the private cars that tended to drift over into his lane, or the taxis that would always turn on their brights as they came closer, leaving him half-blinded as they sped past.
He was no slouch behind the wheel himself. Even with the oncoming traffic to contend with, he made it from Tossa to Blanes in around twenty-five minutes. Then he hit the autoroute and really began to move. The white Citröen compact wagon quickly got to cruising speed; then he set the throttle, had a long drink of the wine, and lit a cigarette. Looking at his watch, he smiled. Should make it now, he thought.
When he reached customs at the French border, the eastern sky was already light gray. There were no problems, of course. He got out his passport, and had it stamped, talked to the guard briefly and was passed through and into France. He drove a few more miles, then turned off the autoroute and up away from the sea flats into the foothills. On either side of him grew carefully tended stretches of vineyards. The sun came up behind him and lit up the countryside before him. Here and there patches of mist hung over the vineyards, and already he could see the workers moving in the rows.
Presently he rounded a slight curve and came upon a group of small white structures huddled up against the side of a hill. In front of them stood two men smoking cigarettes, stamping their feet against the cold.
Mike pulled up and braked too quickly in front of them, skidding along for ten feet or so over the graveled road top. Then he opened the door and got out.
“Hey, ’Ligio.”
One of the men walked over to him and they shook hands. With a minimum of words, they went back into the huts and took out two long, heavy boxes. These they put into the back of the Citröen, under the floor and carpet. In less than ten minutes, Mike was back on his way out of the foothills, heading down to Perpignan, and then to Barcelona.
This was not the best way to deliver guns and ammunition, but larger quantities were correspondingly dangerous. The fewer people involved, the less chance of being caught, and if it took longer than large-scale shipments by, say, fishing boats, it was nevertheless almost foolproof. Also, if any one person were caught at the border or on the road, only a few guns would be lost, as opposed to a shipload.
In spite of the speed of the operation, which was to be expected anyway with experienced men, this morning had not gone well. The guns were all right; he’d seen to that. But the whole feel of things had been wrong. They had not taken his money, as they always had before, but rather had given him an address in Perpignan proper where, they’d said, he should go and find Monsieur Leclerc, obviously a phony name, and pay him.
He was tired. He rolled down the side window, squinting into the sun, and lit himself a cigarette.
No, something was wrong.
At twenty-five, with quite a bit of hard living under his belt, Michael still was a strange mixture of awareness and naïveté. People constantly described him as close-lipped or mysterious, but to his own mind he was merely cautious. No one would have called him a warm person, yet a stubborn romantic streak would occasionally surface. And it was this romantic part of him, he knew, that really controlled his life.
When he’d first arrived in Spain, he’d been attracted by the idealistic fanaticism of some of his Basque acquaintances. Being a bartender, he met more people under looser conditions than he would have under other circumstances.
They would sit in the bar until closing time, drinking wine and brandy, toasting themselves and the coming death of Franco, when there would be revolution and finally independence for the Basques. He couldn’t help overhearing most of what they said, and they gradually came to trust him. Eventually, more to give himself something to do than out of any political convictions, he volunteered to help them deliver guns to their comrades.
He had his own reasons for this step, even though it was motivated by his sense of adventure. He wanted to become familiar with parts of the Mediterranean underworld, and he thought that this would be a good place to start. Why he wanted to do this remained a mystery even to those who thought they knew him. But he did his job quietly and well, and no one really cared about his motives. They remarked, however, on his fearlessness. He seemed to be pursuing death at every turn, never quite going so far as to attempt suicide obviously, but driving recklessly, almost tempting the police to pull him over and discover the carload of guns.
Once a Gypsy knife thrower had come into the bar, and Mike had volunteered to be the target. The Gypsy outlined his body with knives thrown into the wall opposite the bar. He hadn’t flinched, and afterward had tipped the Gypsy one thousand pesetas. His fearless acts were not done with the careless bravado of the drunk or the show-off, but rather with a calm concentration that made them all the more impressive, an effect he couldn’t have cared less about.
Another time he had been up at the fort above Tossa during a winter rainstorm with some acquaintances, and had decided to walk the parapet, about a foot wide, which circled the fort and dropped sheerly to the water three hundred feet below. They tried to persuade him to stop, but he had mounted the wall and started walking.
“The wind is too strong,” they said. “The walls might crumble with your weight. It’s too slippery.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
Dying was one thing, but being caught and spending twenty years in jail quite another. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out of the car. There was a tree nearby and he went and sat under it.
No, he didn’t like it.
It made no sense to him, and that, in turn, made him nervous. The sun was fully up now, and beginning to get hot. He took off his sweater and smoked two cigarettes. Then he got up and back into the car.
In Perpignan, he parked just inside the city limits and walked into the first café he came upon. He ordered a double espresso and a shot of brandy, then looked at the newspaper until he’d finished both, trying to think of nothing until he felt refreshed. The piece of paper they’d given him with the address on it was stuffed into his front pocket, and he took it out and flattened it on the table. He was to pay Leclerc at 10 Avenue de la Gare, #3 as soon as he could. He memorized the simple address, then set fire to the paper and watched it burn in the ashtray. Leaving change on the table, he left the café, but did not walk in the direction of the car.
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