The Drifters (25 page)

‘Nope.’

‘It’s quite a spot. If you’re an athletic-looking young blond from Sweden or Germany, you can drift in there and
get yourself pretty well fixed up … for spending money, that is.’

‘I’m not famous for being blond,’ Cato said.

‘That might make you especially attractive.’

‘Are the ground rules rough?’

‘Each man looks out for himself.’

Cato slumped in his chair, studied Jean-Victor, and asked, ‘That how you make it?’

‘Me? I got a girl … we live down by the sea.’

‘You pushing for the … what’s its name?’

‘The Wilted Swan? No, it’s like my deal with the hotel.’ He tapped the card which lay on the table before Cato. ‘I earn my bread through lots of different commissions. You like to give the Swan a try?’

Cato kicked his suitcase and said, ‘Remember? I don’t have a place to stay.’

‘Park it.’ He called the waiter and told him to stash the bag behind the bar. ‘Because with the Swan, you can never tell what might happen. Chances are, you won’t need a hotel.’

Later, when Cato told me about his meeting with Jean-Victor, I was astonished at Cato’s behavior, as if a wholly new young man had emerged in the brief crossing from Philadelphia to Torremolinos, but he justified himself in this manner: Vilma’s death—you ever see a sixteen-year-old girl with her face kicked in?—and the business at the Llanfair church … the commitment involved in each instance. ‘I was torn loose from every mooring and I truly didn’t give a goddamn what happened to me. If the white world wanted me to make my bread at the Wilted Swan, that was okay by me.’

So Jean-Victor led Cato down the main drag and after a short while they spotted the notorious swan, so wilted that it seemed about to fall in a heap on the sidewalk. ‘Whoever painted that sign, they ought to pay him double,’ Cato said.

He was nervous as Jean-Victor led him through the Renaissance doors and into the darkened bar. He stood awkwardly by the door as Jean-Victor scanned the place, then turned back to him, showing disappointment: ‘No one I know. Let’s have a lemonade.’

They sat at one of the tables in the center of the bar, and gradually Cato became aware that from the surrounding booths a good many faces that he could not fully see
were staring at him, and Jean-Victor whispered, ‘This is the best table. Everyone can see who you are.’ To Cato’s surprise, someone rose in one of the booths and walked across the floor to where he sat. It was a woman, in a tweedy suit, and she spoke in rough, manly accents.

‘You from the States?’ she asked, leaning down on the table.

‘Yep.’

‘Give ’em hell. Tear ’em apart. If I were young and black I’d dynamite the subway. I’m in your corner, kid.’ She clapped him on the shoulder and went back to her table.

After a moment a waiter came up to them and said, ‘The ladies in that booth wish to buy you drinks.’

‘Chivas Regal,’ Jean-Victor ordered promptly. ‘Two.’ When the waiter left, he whispered, ‘Those dames are loaded. Order the most expensive drinks there are.’

‘What’s Chivas Regal?’

‘If you don’t like, I’ll drink it.’

They sat for the better part of an hour, during which several men stopped by the table to speak with Jean-Victor, who seemed to know everyone in Torremolinos, and each of the men wished Cato a good time during his vacation. Finally Jean-Victor said, ‘We’d better get you a place to sleep. Fellow I was looking for isn’t coming, apparently.’

‘Who?’

‘Chap from Boston named Paxton Fell. Lots of money. Exquisite taste. He has a swank place on a mountain back of town. Extra rooms … you know.’

‘Not exactly,’ Cato said frankly. ‘I’m a new boy in town. What do I have to do to get one of Fell’s rooms?’

Jean-Victor raised his palms upward and leaned forward till his face was quite close to Cato’s. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’ve arranged for several young men to take accommodations at Fell’s apartment, and I know they live there for nothing and get a little spending money to boot. But what happens when the lights go out … who does what to who … I really don’t know.’

‘Sounds adventurous,’ Cato said.

‘Judge for yourself,’ Jean-Victor replied, pointing over Cato’s shoulder.

Through the brass-studded doors had come a gentleman, perhaps in his early sixties, very tall, very slim, very well dressed. His shoes, Cato noted, were brown, with extra-heavy
soles and the kind of sewing that men paid real money for. ‘I dig those shoes,’ Cato whispered.

‘Mr. Fell!’ Jean-Victor cried. ‘Join us.’

Slowly the newcomer surveyed the bar, peering into the various booths and nodding gravely to those who greeted him. Apparently he found nothing more interesting than this table, so with a kind of genteel reluctance, looking elsewhere as he did so, he sat down. Then slowly he turned to face Cato, and after appraising him, said, ‘We find very few Negroes in Torremolinos.’

‘I saw that on the street.’

‘So we are especially gracious in our welcome to those who do come.’ He paused for Cato to say something, then said petulantly, ‘Come, come. That’s a cue for you to explain how you got here.’

Cato was about to mumble something, not knowing what he ought to say, when the tweed-suited woman who had paid for the drinks moved boldly across the room, ignoring Mr. Fell and grabbing Cato by the shoulder.

‘My God!’ she cried in a shout of triumph. ‘It’s him!’ She slammed onto the table a newspaper clipping of the widely publicized photograph, with Cato, his machine gun at the ready, looking over his shoulder and backing out of the church. ‘You’re that one, aren’t you?’

Everyone in the Wilted Swan gathered about the table while Jean-Victor and Mr. Fell scrabbled for the photograph. Finally Fell gained possession of it, held it up to the light, and compared it to Cato. ‘My word!’ he finally said. ‘An authentic folk hero!’ Then, to Cato’s astonishment, he leaned across the table and kissed Cato twice. ‘You were a genius,’ he said admiringly, to pick the Episcopalians. Laura here is an Episcopalian’—he indicated the tweedy woman—‘and they’re all filthy rich. To take money from them is like being an ecclesiastical Robin Hood. You amazing boy! Did you have to flee the country?’

‘Tell me about it!’ Laura said, ordering drinks for everyone. ‘This is so exciting, I feel like singing “La Marseillaise.” ’ In a loud, clear whistle she offered a few bars of that revolutionary song, then asked, ‘Did you gouge any money from the skinflints?’

While the free drinks were circulating, Jean-Victor grabbed off two whiskeys, downed them rapidly, and as he left, whispered in Paxton Fell’s ear, ‘You will remember that I brought him to you.’

The discussion continued for an hour and a half, at the end of which Laura invited everyone to her place for dinner. She lived in a castle west of Torremolinos, furnished with antiques she had found in rural farmhouses on her excursions through the mountains. The atmosphere of each room had been so tastefully recreated in the old style that one expected Don Quixote to come marching in for his dinner. The chairs were lumbering old masterpieces in oak, no two alike, and the dining table was thirty feet long and eight wide, made of planking hand-hewn more than four centuries ago. The fireplace was enormous and burned logs cut in eight-foot lengths, requiring two men to heft them, and the lights were so constructed that the electric bulbs were invisible. Encrusted candles guttered in the drafts which moved through the castle.

‘Come in!’ Laura shouted, alerting her servants, and while her guests found places about the table, she spread the notorious photograph before them and demanded that Cato explain what it was all about, and as he looked around the circle of faces, he imagined that these self-indulgent expatriates seriously wanted to understand the revolutionary forces that were sweeping their homeland.

By the time dinner ended, at one-thirty in the morning, Paxton Fell was satisfied that in Cato Jackson he had found a literate, well-mannered young man of extreme vitality and charm. He looked upon this exotic Negro as other Caucasian men look upon pretty Chinese girls, as a challenge, and when the guests started to depart he took Cato by the arm and said, ‘Jean-Victor told me you had not chosen a place to stay. I have ample room.’ And he led Cato to his Mercedes-Benz convertible, a car with many special features, and when Cato had sunk into its ample leather he reminded Fell, ‘My bag is still at that bar in town.’

‘Forget it!’ Fell said. ‘I’m sure I can find some extra pajamas and a toothbrush. We’ll get your luggage in the morning.’

With considerable skill he drove the Mercedes down from Laura’s castle and onto the main shore road, where cars from all nations were screaming along at seventy and eightly miles an hour; a good many people were killed in
Torremolinos and the surrounding villages each year, for the most daring drivers in the world frequented the broad, sweeping roads and insisted upon testing their cars and their nerves. Fell drove at eighty, then slowly applied the brakes and turned left up a steep hill that led to an area called Rancho de Santo Domingo, a private domain guarded by a stucco wall, uniformed security patrols and German police dogs. Inside the walls Cato saw a series of spectacular mansions, one challenging the other, and at the edge of the settlement was Paxton Fell’s house.

It was low and neat, whereas the others had been somewhat opulent, but it was apparent that a fortune must have been spent on the landscaping and the touches of exquisite decoration. ‘I want you to get your first glimpse of the place from the terrace,’ Fell said, leading Cato to a garden overlooking the Mediterranean, which lay far below. There was a partial moon, which cast arrows of shimmering light across the water, and in the distance, not far from the shores of Africa, a dimly lit British freighter plowed its way slowly toward Alicante to pick up a cargo of oranges.

‘This is to be your home,’ Fell said, leading Cato inside. The large room into which they stepped was a refreshing change from the castle, for it contained not one extravagant note, except perhaps three magnificent bovedas that occupied most of the ceiling.

Cato had never before seen these Spanish domes, which were constructed of bricks laid in overlapping circles, each round projecting inward from the preceding, until at last, in some mysterious way which the workmen would not explain, a final group of bricks was set in place, closing the opening at the top and locking the whole together. During the month he lived at Paxton Fell’s, he never ceased to wonder at these lovely bovedas, for they formed a kind of heaven, their inverted domes lacking only stars and a moon.

When Cato was telling me, some time later, about his arrival in Torremolinos and how he had made his acquaintance with Paxton Fell, I asked him frankly, ‘What did you have to do to earn your money?’

He told a bizarre story. ‘I was interested, too, because I didn’t know any more than you did. First night, nothing. Second night, nothing, and I was beginning to get worried. Nothing but the best food you ever tasted, prepared by two Spanish cooks, both men. And of course, each afternoon
we went to the Wilted Swan and sat at one of the tables till nearly midnight, when we had dinner. I think Fell wanted to show me off … like he wanted the others to see he could still attract a live one.

‘Third night we had Laura and her gang in for dinner. It was outstanding. Lot of noise, lot of wild chatter. When I go to bed Paxton Fell comes into the room with me and I think: Here it comes. And you won’t believe what he wanted! For me to get undressed and stand in a white marble niche where there should have been a statue but they hadn’t got around to it yet. He had rigged a special spotlight to shine on me, and as I stood there, he said, “Like a Greek statue … like a great masterpiece from Mycenae.” He kept repeating this, and then he did the damnedest thing you ever heard of.

‘From his coat pocket he took a feather—a feather carved from pure silver. Where in hell he found it, I’ll never know. And he came over to the niche where I was standing and with this damned feather he tickled my balls until I got an erection. Then he stood back and gave me some more jazz about the Greek statue and the Mycenae bit. Then he came up again and tickled some more, and finally he said with great conviction, “Oh, Cato! With that instrument you are going to make a score of girls supremely happy.” And that was it.’

‘You mean, that was his bit?’

‘With me, it was. Now he did have some friends—all men—and he insisted upon showing me off to them, and one of them got so excited when he saw me standing in the niche that he busted into my room later that night and crawled into bed with me and gave me a sensational blow job. And another night Fell brought in Laura and her gang of women and they admired me for half an hour, and it was then I figured I better get to hell out of there.’

When Cato decided to quit Paxton Fell’s pleasure dome, he encountered no recriminations from his sybaritic host. ‘You’re a splendid young American,’ Fell said approvingly as they dined together the last night. ‘You have a brilliant future—if you stay away from machine guns—and it’s been a privilege knowing you.’ In the morning Fell drove him into town in the Mercedes and said, in parting, ‘Remember, you’ll always be welcome on the hill. If you
care to stop by now and then, you can leave word at the Wilted Swan.’ He bowed deeply, then drove off, and before the car had disappeared around the first bend, it was doing seventy.

Once more Cato stowed his gear with the bartender—this time with four pairs of expensive shoes given him by Fell—so that he could tour the town to find lodgings, but the spirit of Torremolinos had so infected him that before taking action he decided to rest awhile, and he lounged at the bar, inspecting the new batch of tourists. It was now April and livelier groups were arriving, including many who were determined to swim no matter how cold the sea. As he sat in the sun, the only Negro within the area, he contemplated his position and found it rather promising: In a pinch I can always live at Fell’s … and pick up spending money too. His crowd thinks any black man who can use a fork exotic, so if I need additional cash I can get it from his friends. The fat guy who got into bed with me … the other one from Chicago … or the guy with the poodle. On the other hand, I’m sure I could get some kind of job at the castle. Those rich dames really dig the black boy. They like to have him around—sort of a toy, dangerous but fun. Cato, you got it made. What I mean, you got a safety valve.