Ibiza Surprise (26 page)

It was Austin. Janey shrieked. I belted along one narrow passage of oscillating discs of shrill colour, aware, out of the side of my eye, that one of them seemed to be moving. As I ran, I saw it detach itself, a thick eight-foot circle of spiralling yellow and pink, rumbling into deliberate movement. It was making straight for the door. I saw Austin look back once, his eyes white as single-spot dice, before he crashed through the doorway and jumped four at a time down the stairs.

I couldn’t have reached him in time, but the disc did. It thundered through to the landing and, taking off on the top step, sailed down through the air sideways taking my eyeballs, revolving, along with it. Austin had got to the bottom step when it hit him. and he didn’t even give a cry: just a grunt, as it dropped like a lid. He didn’t get up.

Derek, who had propelled it, stood beside me dusting his hands, with an expression of micro-electronics satisfaction under his dripping wet hair.

‘As Paul Klee didn’t say,’ Derek said, ‘art does not render the visible, but renders invisible. Let’s go and pick him up shall we?’

It took three men to lift off the disc and get Austin back to the room. He groaned as we got him into a chair, and groaned again, a bit more, when he opened his eyes and saw the shambles of his Art in the Round. Johnson tied his hands to the arms of his chair and patted Derek on the back.

‘Well done. I don’t suppose you know where he’s hidden the rubies?’

‘I’m a stranger here myself,’ said Derek, who still looked as if he had had four gins in a row. It was the first joke I’d ever heard him make, which explains its unremarkable nature.

‘Look here,’ said Gilmore.

We left Austin in the charge of a masked man who turned out to be Spry and walked through the shop to where Gil was kneeling, in front of a block of wood covered with steel wire and cotton reels, labelled ‘Maternity’. From the area of the right hip he twisted a screw and drew out a small drawer concealed in the thickness of wood. Beside me, Austin shook his head and sat up. Everybody craned over.

‘What a pity,’ said Johnson. ‘It’s empty.’

The shout from Austin distracted us from the movement we should have been looking for. Everyone looked round at Mandleberg, who was sitting forward tugging like a mad thing at his hands, shouting amazing Bronx epithets. I saw Mr Lloyd and Gilmore look at one another.

I don’t suppose anyone really expected the first hiding place they found to be the home of the rubies. The whole collection was presumably honeycombed with secret pockets, large, small, and middling. It was perhaps coincidence or perhaps the fact that, in haste, Austin hadn’t quite rammed home the drawer which caused Gil to spot it. So it seemed to me then. In any case, there was Austin on the verge of a stroke, the veins bulging on his fair, well-scrubbed brow as he howled in a formless outburst of rage and mortification. Johnson came over and slapped him on the face, very neatly, with the flat of his hand.

‘Did you put the collar in there?’

Austin sobbed and, panting, got some words out.

‘Yes! They were there seconds ago! The effing bastard! The double-crossing . . .’

They were the last words he spoke. He was still honking when a spark of flame lit the far end of the room, and there was a sharp pop, a clang, and the zinging noise of a ricocheting bullet. Austin fell back in his chair. One of the steel chimpanzees developed a navel. And the final bagged landscape, shot true in the belly, began to shed slowly out of its lining a drip of Bueche-Girod watches.

Austin was dead. I was looking at him, stupidly – the nice man who had held my hand on the plane to Ibiza – when the impact of a robed body knocked me back on my heels. A hooded figure, the gun still smoking in its hand, flung itself on me, twisted my arm hard up my anoraked back, and shoving me sideways began to carry me with it through the door and off down the stairs.

I saw everyone in the gallery stop moving, suddenly, and realised that if they hadn’t, I was going to be shot. I realised if I struggled, I was going to be shot anyway. The man holding me was powerful enough to drag me as far as the door before he had time to say
‘Walk!’
and to make sure that I did walk by shoving the gun hard into my skin. I stumbled down the staircase beside him and discovered I was squealing, anyway, at the top of my voice. Above, I could hear Johnson’s voice shouting something, an order, in Spanish.

Ahead was the doorway, with an armed policeman in it. He must have heard what Johnson shouted. On seeing me, he dropped his gun and stepped back. Hauling me with him, the Penitent Brother dodged out into the street. Without conscious effort I was still shrilling like an alarm clock; my assailant stopped, for a second, in the dark, echoing street and clouted me once on the ear with his gun.

‘Be quiet.’

I cut out, and with a jerk that nearly took my ball and sockets apart, he started to run.

A roomful of grown, bloody men, and a fat lot of protection they’d been.

Behind, I could hear people pelting down Austin’s tiled hall. Above, here and there, dim faces attracted by the brief screeching looked down, with interest, from the lit balconies. And in the street, one or two knots of people turned around.

The tricky thing was the gun. I could have yelled, or tripped the brute up, if it hadn’t been for the gun. I’m as strong as most men, though this one was big, bigger than a Spaniard, I’d say, and he’d spoken in English. The words, whispered, told me nothing at all. There was no smell of curry.

That, at least, had a negative value. It wasn’t Gil or his father, hastily got up in robes. It wasn’t Spry, because I’d seen him a moment before. It wasn’t Derek, because I know the feel of Derek, and anyway, he’d been the one who caught Austin. And it wasn’t poor Austin. It was someone whom Austin knew – an ally, a partner, who had robbed Austin, in turn, of the rubies Austin had stolen. And who had killed Austin to prevent his name being known.

We were running fast, dodging people, while I was thinking. My Penitent Brother had problems as well. He had to gain enough ground to get out of those clothes without being recognised. Until then, he’d need me as a hostage. Afterwards, he wouldn’t want me at all. Living, that is.

I was gasping. The gun was now in my side, and it tightened when I made to look round. I couldn’t tell if the others were following. My heart was drumming: it seemed to me that bugles rang in my ears, that the music had come back, louder, with the hum of crowds watching. I suppose I realised at the same moment as my captor that it wasn’t a dream. It was eleven-thirty, and the Easter Procession of Silence was on its way back from the Monument, about to enter the Portal, and retrace its weary steps up to the top square again. In a moment, the road we were on was going to be crowded with people.

There were steps on our left, wide cobbled steps with trim marble edges plunging clean down into the dark below Austin’s handsome paved Calle de San Guillermo. The hooded man beside me shifted his grip on my arm and, swinging me round hard against him, drove me before him down the black stairs. I thought I heard, as we went, the sound of running footsteps behind. So long as pursuit stayed quite close, I didn’t see how this man could kill me. The moment he shook it off, he most certainly would.

We went down those stairs like two roller coasters, slewed right round the blank wall of a house, and debouched into a narrow, dirt lane full of uneven white houses with broken steps and poles of washing like ghosts over our heads. A low wall on the left showed, as we flew, a glimpse of tiled roofs, lights of the harbour, and distant hills black against the dark sky. It looked peaceful and free. Turning, I missed my footing and stumbled and for a second was dragged off balance down the black, stony track.

The lane was a cul-de-sac. The hand on my arm spun me round, and we reached the steps again and resumed the headlong rush downward, twisting again and again between narrow, high walls until we reached another flat, stony space in the darkness, lined with dim, peeling houses, their blinds rolled up over rusty railings, the windows all empty except, here and there, for a flickering light and the sound of a child’s thin voice, wailing. A wireless spoke, and a cat, surprised, made a high sound. I thought of the dead rat in the ditch, the night I met Austin, and shivered. The man with me slowed down and stopped. Then, pulling me, he melted into a deep, broken doorway.

It was very dark. A lantern fixed to one of the houses threw a limited light, like dust, on the ground, and a lizard, moving into its circle, rustled off into the rubble. The bugles, starting up somewhere not too far away, were like a sudden scratch on the nerve endings. I felt the man beside me jump too: we were both breathing hard, trying to subdue it, but not hard enough to drown the light patter of steps coming down the stairs we had left and continuing past us. They receded into the blackness below, and the sound vanished with them.

We waited, and I thought: ‘This is it. Goodbye, Sarah.’ A shot through the heart – the crochet wasn’t going to offer much resistance. And then my Penitent Brother, whoever he was, would merely peel off his Penitent clothes, walk up and mix with the crowds, in his usual identity. I felt the hand on my arm beginning to relax and his other hand, his gun hand, lift and alter its grip.

A voice, calling, said: ‘Cassells? Sarah!’ from below, from the foot of the steps.

Not near enough to come back and spot us. But too near for murder.

The man beside me said something under his breath, and the hand on my arm tightened, and the gun muzzle moved back again to my side. Then he said: ‘Run!’ in the same eerie, hoarse whisper and set off, pulling me up, to the main street again.

Just now, I had been lucky. This time, his luck was in. In a burst of torchlight and music, the procession had reached the end of the calle but only just. The drumbeat echoed: Tuck, Tr-r-uck, tru-uck, truck, tuck; and the sound pattered, like shuttlecocks, back and forth along the double row of fine houses. We didn’t wait for the crowd. My hooded friend ran before it, deeper down the dark street, and found the steps he must have been seeking, I realised, the first time. As the main road curled steeply up to the left, a stepped, cobbled lane led downward, past big houses set at different levels, with double doors and light shining bright through their fanlights.

Perhaps I hesitated as we passed. Certainly the gun hurt my ribs, grating against my side as we went, and the hand on my arm was hot and soaking with sweat. The steps were wide, sweeping down between white walls covered with roses. Their scent came plain as the bugles in the quiet night air, and through a wrought-iron gate you could see a garden, the lacework of a trellis, a glimmer of water, and the sparks of two cigarettes being smoked at ease, under the palms. At the bottom was another narrow dirt lane, with a row of low white houses facing us to left and to right, flowers on their deep sills. A lantern, glowing dimly, showed an orange bead curtain, still swaying, and on the left, a bastion of the old wall, on which stood a Gothic gallery, with arched windows and massed flowers in pots.

We swept past it and into an unpaved square with a concrete pump in the middle. Two men, talking in low voices, stood beside it and watched us, with curiosity, as we strode past. A Penitent Brother, called away perhaps in emergency, by his wife or his daughter. It was no use calling out. Not with the gun there.

There was a choice of two lanes. He took the darker one, always sinking, bending down through cobbled steps to the right; taking the right again when it forked to shrink to almost nothing between tall, broken houses, with netting hung in the doorways and the glimpse of a chair and a curious face, here and there, just inside.

On the right was a yard, part cobbled, part dirt, part cement. Broken tiles lined the high doorsteps, and the doors were warped and weathered pale silver, and the windows were broken, rusty, and barred. A falling building, propped up by timber, leaned across a flight of worn steps leading downward, past locked doors and blind, netted windows. The steps disappeared into darkness: only I could see a greater darkness arching over them, and I guessed that they entered a tunnel, made by two joined buildings above. A tunnel with no open doors, no prying eyes in it. The gun moved, and I was driven to the steps and down towards it.

I think, perhaps, I would have attempted to trip him. I certainly was going to scream. I knew this branch of the Cassells line had pretty well come to an end, but I didn’t see why he should rat out of payment. I had my mouth open when I heard the running footsteps again far behind, spaced out, as a man runs when he is taking two, three, four steps at a time. Fast enough to overtake another man before he can disrobe. The grip on my arm propelled me suddenly again into motion, and I saw that the tunnel was just a short archway and that it stood over a perpendicular flight of black steps, whose lower reaches were flooded with clear yellow light.

It led directly into the main square of the Dalt Vila, with the Portal framing the end. And curling round the archway and up the steep cobbles on its way back to the cathedral were the torches, the shuffling figures, the jerking, flickering fitters of the Procession of Silence. The main exit to the low town and safety was closed.

The man beside me looked round. There were people in the square, quite a lot of them. There were people, too, in the steep street to the left which ran, I suddenly remembered, to another gateway, the New Port, on the west. I wondered why we didn’t make for it, and then saw the lamps glittering on the folded black hats of the police. My captor moved and then, without warning, strode straight across the lit square and through the space between two houses opposite. It was wasteland and dark. I stumbled, trying to keep my footing, and was hurried across ridges of half-broken wall and piles of crumbling earth in a darkness which was almost total. Behind, over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the square and the gap through which we had come, empty of following figures. Ahead was a great blackness topped by a dim, irregular line, the wall of the battlements of San Juan, overlooking the town. Above it, the sky was full of stars.