The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (2 page)

To his surprise he heard an engine and made out the dim outline of the dinghy close to the tumbled rocks where the end of the old causeway rose from the bay; it was bumping against the boulders, out of control with the propeller still turning over. The Pair of the Civil Guard seemed to have just arrived at the other end of the causeway. Presumably they had hurried over to the villa after assuming that the criminal had escaped and then had also noticed that the engine was running but not moving away. They were now trying to wade over to the island, slipping on the weed, splashing into unseen pools and doing a poor best to keep their curses from echoing through the night. Bernardo Brown said that never since that night had he heard such vivid abuse of the Holy Family. Being recruited from men of unquestionable devotion to the Church, the Civil Guard had all its technicalities to play with.

There was a body lying on the bottom boards of the dinghy, whether dead or unconscious he did not know. What leapt to his mind was that if he could drag or float the boat over the causeway he was clear. Given enough fuel in the tank, he need not even worry that he had missed the last bus.

The engine was an old-fashioned, reliable, single-cylindered Kelvin. He threw out the clutch and waded about looking for
a passage. The Pair were some two hundred yards away and there was never any doubt of their position. One was complaining of what God and the limpets had done to his backside and the other had lost his carbine. Meanwhile Bernardo found a helpful slope with two linked pools beyond it and quickly manhandled the boat over the causeway, attracting only shouts and wavering torch beams which had not the range to reach him. It was amazing, he said regretfully, what a sturdy but quite ordinary fellow could accomplish in youth without suffering more than a few aches next day.

He was over and away. The bar at the river mouth which was taking the force of a restless Biscay swell caused some peaks in his continuous chart of panic—not so much from the breakers as the hollows between them which slammed the dinghy on the sandy bottom. However, he got through and headed straight out to sea. When Lequeitio was well astern he turned west and closed the coast—or where he hoped the coast would be. He could handle a boat but knew damn-all about navigation.

He was also much occupied by the corpse. When he tried to revive it or bandage it or do whatever decency required, he found that it had bled to death. A bullet low down between the shoulders had pierced something essential, probably a main artery. The bottom of the boat and the thwarts were still all sticky with blood in spite of the water he had shipped in crossing the bar and the frantic bailing when he was over. While attending to his passenger he had paid little attention to the tiller, let alone the stars.

The tank ran dry before dawn, and he was left rocking in a faintly phosphorescent blackness. He had planned to make the Guernica River during the night and to beach the boat in some quiet marshy creek on the left bank from which he could easily walk to Bilbao. As it was, daylight showed him that he was miles from the coast. He could only recognise the high bluff of Cape Machichaco.

Well, he had at least a pair of oars. For the moment the
worst risk was that a fishing boat might pass close and see the corpse. He propped it up as if squatting on the bottom boards and supported the lolling head in a credible position by means of the suitcase jammed firmly between a thwart and the engine housing. He hoped that the dead man would pass as a lazy fellow fast asleep while his companion rowed.

It was a long pull. By midday, blistered and very thirsty, he was rowing along the iron-bound coast with not a hope of landing except in the little fishing port of Arminza or on the beach at Baquio. He could of course have thrown his idle companion overboard but intensely disliked so drastic a solution; the dead should be found and identified even if nothing else could be done for them. Anyway the boat was pickled in blood. He was bound to be questioned, whether or not the villages of the coast had been warned to look out for him.

The only remotely possible landing place he could see was at the foot of a rock fall which centuries of Biscay rain had smoothed into a climbable gully. Outlying black boulders appeared in the suck and vanished in the swell like hungry whales. He would have been very glad, after all, of some help in sight, but there was only a fishing boat steaming north, sometimes a dark rectangle higher than his horizon, sometimes showing only a speck of funnel and a plume of smoke. If its skipper spotted the boat at all, he probably assumed that some daring longshoreman was profiting from settled weather to drop a few lobster pots close under the cliffs.

Bernardo rowed hard for the rocks, hurdling one on a breaking crest and smashing broadside into the next. A third sea left the sinking dinghy precariously balanced on a longer reef beyond which was more sheltered water. He dived in and swam ashore on a triangular beach of huge pebbles, followed at intervals by the oars, the rudder and the forepart of the dinghy; the stern half, weighed down by the engine, had been rolled off into deep water by the tremendous backwash, and the corpse hurled into a pool where it was floating among weed. When Bernardo had drunk his fill of
the fresh water seeping down from the gully he had at last leisure to consider his position.

Absent from the office and not at home? Well, a good, believable excuse would have to be invented. Corpse and boat? It was unlikely that either would ever be found. Would it be known that two persons, not one, were in the boat? That also seemed unlikely. The Pair could not know that the wanted man was dead; they were bound to assume that when he ran his boat into the causeway he had taken to the water in a panic but had swum back again after being picked up by the searchlight and finally heaved the dinghy over into the river.

So Bernardo could stroll home without a care provided there was a way to be found up the cliff which appeared to have plenty of ledges and chimneys between the perpendicular crags. He felt some compunction at leaving his late passenger in the heaving weed to be eaten by crabs and dragged him up the beach—if one could call it a beach—where he lay curled up and safe from anything but the spray of high seas.

It was not easy to spot the gully which had been so obvious from the boat and ended somewhere among the great boulders which towered over him. He scrambled up them and was then faced by a climb so monstrous that it would only have been attempted by an optimistic young man with no alternative. It was more than doubtful that he could ever get off the beach again in one piece, and even if he could there was nowhere else to land.

He worked his way up the gully, sometimes taking the broken rock of the sides, sometimes digging toes into the slippery mud. At the head of the fall he was relieved to find jagged rock. The cliff was climbable, and a slip would only carry him down to his starting point with nothing worse than skinned hands and knees.

The easiest route was out to his right. He was extremely careful to take no risks and to concentrate on every step and handhold. This absorption in the very immediate future was
too successful. When he stopped on a ledge to consider the way off it he nearly fainted then and there. Below him was no saving gully but a sheer drop into the sea with a pair of planing ravens emphasising the vast emptiness of the air.

So back in a cold sweat to the cracks and chimneys. Now again he had the gully beneath him, though so far beneath that it would break him up if he crashed into it. To his left was a steep arête which he climbed by the suicidal method of tufts of grass. The top was so narrow that he could totter to rest with a leg in space on each side of it. Below the outer precipice of the arête white streaks of foam wrote Arabic from rock to rock; on the inner side was a deep cleft where he might remain alive if not too badly hurt but would certainly remain for ever.

The arête ended in a buttress which an experienced rock climber would, he assured himself, find as easy as a ladder. What about the cliffs of Kanchenjunga? To hell with ropes! Great care was all one needed. Bernardo clung to it, half circled it, zig-zagged up it, forcing himself to ignore the sheer drop beneath which was now nearing the full four hundred feet.

He reached a bit of a platform the size of a tea table and again rested. He could not see what was above him, but at least grass, bushes and a large clump of sea pinks were protruding over the edge of something which might be a terrace or might be the top. The last twenty feet of loose stones embedded in earth were vilely unsafe but held fast. He was up though still not quite home and dry, for he had arrived on a vertical slab of hanging cliff which might fall that day or stay put for a hundred years. However, one had only to drop into the fissure which separated the slab from the rest of Spain and scramble up the other side. The gradient of the solid land when he reached it was about one in two, but with enough gorse and shrub to catch him whenever he slid on the short, too smooth turf. Then at last the slope flattened and his eyes could rest on the green Vizcayan countryside, miles
and miles of it with nothing perpendicular until one came to the crags of Mount Gorbea in the distance.

It was over. He dropped on the grass, welcoming the sun after that clammy, north-facing cliff while he got his breath back and the muscles of arms and legs gradually stopped their involuntary quivering. When he stood up and shook off whatever mud and dust would leave his wet clothes before setting out on the simple walk back to Bilbao, he saw somebody observing him through binoculars. A ruined wall which must once have kept sheep and cattle from straying too near the edge ran up and down well inland from the line of cliffs. The man was standing on the highest visible section of wall, quarter of a mile away, from which he would have a view of a considerable stretch of coast.

It was disturbing to be examined through binoculars, but Bernardo decided not to arouse suspicion by running away. After all he had nothing to explain; he could well be taking an innocent, meditative walk along the cliffs.

The man lowered his glasses and strode decisively down the hill towards him. He carried himself well—a proud, athletic sort of chap with a bald head, in spite of appearing in his early thirties, and a clear, sunburnt complexion etched with deep lines.

‘Not so common as to-day,’ old Bernardo said. ‘Now, there’s a change for you! Any European with a good, ruddy tan was almost certainly engaged in agriculture.’

Features and colouring were not those of a Spaniard. He put down the stranger as a foreign visitor walking for his pleasure and likely to sympathise with anyone doing the same. The man looked as if he ought to have a knapsack on his back, but evidently preferred to keep tooth brush and spare socks in his pockets which bulged.

‘What were you doing down there?’ he asked Bernardo in bad Spanish, waving a hand at the sea.

That was startling. The utter destruction of the boat could not have been seen, nor the beach nor his climb, but there
was no hope of denying—against those powerful binoculars—that he had rowed a boat in to some sort of landing place.

‘Catching lobsters.’

‘And your companion?’

‘What companion?’

‘I have been watching you for the last two hours.’

‘Oh, that one!’ Bernardo answered as casually as he could. ‘He’s down below at the foot of the cliff.’

‘And where do you come from?’

‘Baquio.’

‘You are not dressed like a fisherman.’

‘Man, can’t one fish for pleasure? Yesterday, I remind you, was Sunday.’

‘Good! Then let us walk to Baquio where you can identify yourself.’

‘But I can’t leave my companion down there.’

‘Your companion is dead, friend. Did you kill him or was he shot at Lequeitio?’

Bernardo Brown threw out his palms in a gesture of incomprehension. It did him no good. The foreigner pulled one of the bulges from his pocket, ordered him to link his hands behind his head and searched him thoroughly, taking his wallet in spite of Bernardo’s protests. Twenty-five pesetas, his address book and the signed photograph of a strip dancer who had performed a month earlier at the Bilbao music hall were no great loss, but his identity card was. For the first time he experienced the feeling, later to become familiar, that he had lost all personality in a world no more controllable than a dream.

‘And now his suitcase! Lead the way!’

‘But look here!’ Bernardo shouted. ‘There is no path!’

‘Then how did you get here?’

‘I climbed.’

‘The cliffs are unclimbable. Don’t waste my time with lies! We will go down the way you came up.’

Bernardo began to object excitably and in detail, but was cut short. The man had reason on his side. The cliffs were indeed unclimbable; therefore there was a practicable path, and Bernardo must know it as well as the discreet landing place.

‘No nonsense, and lead the way!’ the stranger repeated. ‘I remind you that if I kill you here no one will ever know.’

That was very true. It also cut the other way. Bernardo put the thought out of his mind which was normally peaceable and introverted. But unless this lunatic stopped insisting on his goat track, smugglers’ path or whatever he had in mind before it was too late, the leader was surely going to die, and the follower probably.

‘It’s incredible what a man will do for money when he is used to heavy doses of the stuff and can’t live without it,’ old Bernardo said. ‘Of course at the time I knew nothing of his character and his motive. I just saw a reckless nihilist with one idea in his head. He never considered the risk that I might be telling the truth, only the physical risks. Every criminal takes those. What about gangsters as ready to face a tommygun as any devoted soldier? And the risk this well-muscled tough was prepared to take was not, from his point of view, at all unacceptable. The route down to the landing place was hair-raising all right. He knew that. But if I could do it, he could.’

The first part, down through the steep furze, was easy enough. At the edge it was difficult to see what was below, and Bernardo was far from sure of the exact point at which he had returned, as it then seemed, to life. He worked his way along the border between turf and eternity until an outward curve of the cliff brought the clump of sea pinks into view. That at least marked the top of his route. He could also see from this angle exactly what he had climbed and nearly went over the brink with vertigo. It had affected him only once when clinging to the face.