The Drifters (54 page)

‘It sounds perfectly thrilling!’ Laura cried. ‘I do wish I were younger!’

‘Our success depends upon the courage of the young people we enlist,’ Miss Eltregon said, looking directly at the Negro soldier. ‘If we can rely on them to blow up, at the crucial moment, ten or twelve cross-country airliners, a handful of electrical relay stations, certain crucial radio and television antennae … do you realize what might be accomplished? If hordes of students are ready to confront the police at the same time? And especially if our gallant blacks take to the streets at that moment?’ She paused, then concluded: ‘I think you can see that America is up
for grabs. It can be captured if we are sufficiently devoted.’

Laura clapped her hands and turned to Gretchen. ‘What role have they given you in this marvelous development?’

‘Me?’ Gretchen asked. ‘To me it’s a bunch of nonsense.’

‘What do you mean?’ Laura cried. ‘We captured Russia with a handful of devoted humanitarians. We can surely do the same in the United States.’

Gretchen reflected on this for a moment, then asked, ‘But if you live here in Spain on funds you receive from Texas, why would you sponsor a revolution that would wipe out those funds?’

‘Darling,’ Laura explained as she motioned for more drinks, ‘no sensible person keeps his funds in Texas. We keep them in Switzerland.’

If in speaking of Torremolinos I have dealt principally with the incandescent young people at the Arc de Triomphe, and the polished sybarites at Paxton Fell’s, and the American soldiers at the Alamo, and the delectable Swedish girls at the Northern Lights, I have not been ignorant of the underground that operated throughout the year.

For some reason which no one understood, the Spanish police—one of the toughest and most efficient in Europe—allowed the resort a freedom known nowhere else in Spain. German Nazis held formal meetings, although not in public places. French, Belgium and Norwegian quislings lived in safe refuge. Drugs flowed in and out of the town on regular delivery routes, and through the alleys there was a constant passage of young people either hopelessly filthy or degenerate beyond redemption. They lived in hovels or slept along the beach, and were prepared for any kind of abnormality. Americans contributed substantial numbers to this drifting population—girls from good colleges and young men whose parents believed they were at some European university—but the majority were German, French and Scandinavian.

Sometimes they were a brutal lot. Each year in Torremolinos there would be four or five unsolved murders: customarily the victims were from the underground. A Belgian bar girl would be found along the beach with her throat cut, and her parents in Liège would cable: ‘Bury the body and send the bill to us.’ For several years they
had considered her dead, anyway. But occasionally the drifters would invade some settled area, or murder someone respectable who had a hotel room, and then the police would try to identify the guilty, but with a large eligible population to choose from, their task would be hopeless. Most of the murders went unsolved.

One morning in late May the group living in Jean-Victor’s apartment had a sampling of this violence. When Joe and Britta returned at five in the morning, after having closed the Alamo and taken some breakfast, they found on the doorstep of their apartment the body of a boy not yet twenty, his head split in half by a cleaver of some kind which had struck him between the eyes. When they first kneeled over him his limbs were still warm, and they started to call for help, thinking that if they could get him to a hospital he might be saved, but when they saw the gaping head, Britta said, ‘That’s that,’ and went inside to ask Gretchen and the others if they had heard anything, and Joe went to the pop-top, where Clive and Yigal were in bed with two Swedish girls, who disappeared as soon as they learned what had happened.

‘Get the police immediately,’ Gretchen advised as soon as she saw the body, and Yigal went in search of them.

When the police came they shrugged their shoulders and placed the murder as the latest in a long list. They were disposed to believe the young people when Monica insisted that three of them had been asleep in the apartment and two in the car without having heard a thing. The police asked if the body could have been dragged from some other place, and Britta said, ‘As Joe and I were coming home we did see two men disappearing down there,’ and the police looked down the empty street.

Each spring, as the flood tide of tourism began to sweep in, crowding Torremolinos with vacationers from all parts of the world, police took steps to clean the place up. They marched through the town, apprehending any man who wore a Jesus haircut, any girl who looked as if she had not bathed within the last three months.

‘Out,’ they said.

‘But where …’

‘Out.’

‘Where can we go?’

‘Out by nightfall … or spend the summer in jail.’

Then the mournful exodus would begin. Lucky ones would slip across the Mediterranean to Morocco. Others would disappear into the mountains of Spain and lie low until September, when the flood of tourists would subside. Those who had airplane tickets would hitchhike their way in to Málaga airport, and a scruffy lot they looked when standing beside scrubbed Scandinavians on their way back to Copenhagen. A few, unable to find an alternative, would go to jail.

Clive was the first of the group to be nabbed. ‘Out of Spain by nightfall,’ the police said. Expecting protest, they growled, ‘With that haircut you’re not welcome.’

‘All right! I have my ticket to Tangier.’

‘Use it.’ In their records they saw that he had been in the pop-top on the morning of the murder, and said, ‘You know you’re still under suspicion for murder.’ He maintained a grave demeanor and said he hoped they would soon catch the real culprit. Gravely they nodded and made a small concession: ‘You can have till tomorrow night.’

‘I’ll be gone,’ he promised. But then he had to smile, adding, ‘And next October I’ll be back.’ The policemen nodded and said, ‘Next October it will be all right.’

I went with the others when they accompanied him to the airport. It was the riffraff of Europe, in shaggy hairdo and tattered dress, that he was joining. Some of the most disreputable were guarded by policemen, whose job it was to see that this or that particular visitor got aboard the plane and stayed there. Others were accompanied by girl friends with whom they had been living through the winter and whom they would probably never see again; such departures were apt to be tearful like those at any airport. In the coming months Torremolinos would look more orderly than it had during the winter, and I suspected that winter was better. The world cleans up too many places for the benefit of tourists, builds too many Potemkin villages.

Clive left us with no rancor. ‘I’ve stayed beyond my schedule as it is,’ he said, looking at Gretchen as he spoke. ‘We’ll be meeting somewhere … spin a few disks together.’ He kissed the three young men, embraced Britta and Monica, and shook hands with Gretchen. When he reached
me he said, ‘If you could join me for a year, you’d catch the hang of our music’ He shook my hand and disappeared into the mob, a frail young fellow carrying only a purple carpetbag and a shaving kit.

Before our group could work its way back to the pop-top, we were stopped by a policeman, who took Joe by the arm and said, ‘Tomorrow … out!’

‘What have I done?’ Joe protested.

‘Out.’ From this curt decision, reached in the flash of a moment and occasioned only by Joe’s haircut, there could be no appeal. The policeman noted in his book:
Bar El Alamo. Fuera.

The young people were despondent. There was not only the question of who would care for Jean-Victor’s bar if Joe had to leave so abruptly, but also the problem of how Joe would live, for he had saved little money. Yigal and Cato were reluctant to see him go, and Britta was most unhappy, for the amiable life she had devised for herself would now go smash.

Cato was driving the pop-top in silence, with none of us having any good ideas, when Gretchen snapped her fingers. Apparently she had been doing sums in her head and was now satisfied with her financial prospects, for she said, ‘Why don’t we all leave Torremolinos? I mean it. We could rig up two additional bunks in here … You could do that, couldn’t you, Yigal? And we’d go to Italy.’

‘Using what for money?’ Joe asked.

‘I am hiring you, this instant, to drive the pop-top and care for the luggage.’ She placed her hand on his arm and said, ‘Please say yes. We need you.’

Joe tugged at his beard, could think of no better prospect, and said yes.

Now Gretchen became excited. ‘I know that Cato and Yigal get money from the States. You told me so. And you have some, don’t you, Monica?’ The three nodded, and Gretchen said, ‘So you’d have no problems.’ Instinctively, all of us except Cato turned to look at Britta, who blushed deeply. ‘How about you, Britt?’ Gretchen asked.

‘Broke,’ she said.

This provoked silence, which ended when Gretchen said quietly, ‘You’re the dearest friend I’ve ever had. You’re not broke.’

From this impulsive beginning the six young people constructed an intricate program for touring Europe together,
and by the time we reached the outskirts of Torremolinos, Yigal and Joe had decided what was required to build two more bunks into the pop-top, so when we entered the town we drove directly to the large hardware store near the post office, where the men purchased a variety of bolts, springs and canvas strips.

I was about to leave them there, for I had to keep an appointment with the Greek shipowners at one of the Chinese restaurants, but as I started to walk away, Joe stopped me and said, ‘With me and Britta leaving, somebody will have to tend bar till Jean-Victor gets back. Will you find someone, Mr. Fairbanks?’ And he tossed me the keys.

If Susan Eltregon had no luck in enlisting either Gretchen or Cato, she did establish good contacts with the Negro enlisted man; he was to meet her in St. Louis as soon as he left the service and would in the meantime distribute Haymaker literature at the army base.

Her big success, however, came with Monica Braham. After prudent observation, Susan had satisfied herself as to Monica’s character and potentialities, so on the last night before their forced departure, when the gang was sitting in the bar lamenting with old friends whom they would no longer see, Susan suggested that they pop along to Laura’s for farewell drinks. I said I couldn’t join them because I had to find someone to run the bar, and this caused Susan no disappointment.

Joe assured me, ‘I’ve cabled Morocco. Jean-Victor’ll be here within a couple of days.’

‘Peddling marijuana?’

‘Guy has to make a buck.’

‘What about Britta? Who takes her place?’

Joe looked around. ‘Who?’ he repeated, waving his right arm toward the center of Torremolinos. ‘There must be five thousand girls out there looking for a job. Pick one.’

‘How?’

‘One with good legs. This is a bar.’

When he was gone I made the capital mistake of confiding to the soldiers my responsibility for finding a reliable bar girl, and within fifteen minutes, parading before me was the most lethal collection of doxies I had
ever seen. There were girls from Australia with missing front teeth, tramps from Paris, weather-beaten blondes from Stockholm, Fräuleins who could speak no English. At one point I was tempted to remind them that I was staffing a bar, not an abattoir; instead I chickened out and said, ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow.’ But as to what I would do tomorrow, I had no idea.

I kept the place open till about three o’clock, at which time, unlike the younger crowd, I was getting sleepy, but I was not destined for bed, because when I was about to lock the door Joe ran up, shouting, ‘Fairbanks! We need your help.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Monica!’

‘What’d she do?’

‘Look!’

Down the alley came Monica, stark naked and surrounded by a mob of cheering night people. Behind her, in jockey shorts and nothing else, came Cato, holding a broom over her head as if he were an Egyptian slave protecting her from the sun. She was lost in a drugged trance, blowing kisses left and right as if she were royalty, and in my first horrified sight of the procession, I could think only of those lurid Sunday supplements in boyhood Indiana; they had taught me whatever I knew about sex. I had cherished one picture in which a near-naked Queen of Sheba approached King Solomon, attended by palm-waving blacks—and Monica looked like such a queen.

‘She won’t listen,’ Joe cried with urgency. ‘The cops are bound to get her.’

I ran to where she was about to turn a corner that would take her into the heart of the town, with policemen on the various corners. ‘Monica!’ I shouted.

She turned toward my familiar voice, looked at me with uncomprehending eyes, regally pushed me aside, and moved on toward the police. I grabbed Cato and shouted, ‘What’s going on?’ but he too, looked through me, shoved me aside with his elbow, and followed the white queen, being careful to keep his broom over her head.

‘What’s happened?’ I yelled to Joe.

‘The fucking Eltregon,’ he shouted.

Without trying to figure out what he meant, I ripped off my shirt, ran ahead, and wrapped it around Monica. At this same time I pulled her away from the main
thoroughfare, but not before a policeman two blocks away spotted the confusion, if not its cause. He started running toward us, so I passed Monica along to Joe, who lifted her off the ground and retreated with her down the alley. This left me with no shirt at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of Torremolinos, so I darted into a narrow hiding space near the bar and waited until the policeman had run past me. Then I came out, and ran right into an American woman and her husband.

‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ she asked as I looked about for something to take the place of my shirt. ‘At your age?’

From another hiding place Cato appeared, and when I joined up with him, hoping to ascertain what had happened, I found him in a stupor, unable to give me any answers, let alone logical ones; but soon Gretchen and Yigal ran up, yelling, ‘Where’s Monica?’