Mr Ackroyd’s head lolled; saliva ran from his mouth.
The revolver ground painfully into his side, making him gasp. The big man said, “Quiet, hombre.” The eyes glittered into Mr Ackroyd’s face and the reek of garlic slid into his nostrils as the man leaned close. “It is bad for my nerves, that noise of yours. This gun might go off.”
Mr Ackroyd subsided. The car rushed on.
CHAPTER NINE
La Linea’s bars and pavement cafes exuded sleek, prosperous businessmen drinking their coffee or conac, rubbing shoulders with hombres making do on the cheap vino of the house. Waiters darted, collecting up their little piles of pesetas, their movements and the rapid voices and gesticulations of the patrons bringing the only signs of animation to a scene from which the day’s burning sun seemed, by this early-evening hour, to have drained all physical energy.
Shaw sat in one of those bars, feeling the air heavy and slumbrous.
He was a somewhat more affluent-looking Shaw now than the hombre who had crossed the border the night before, when he had used the gear supplied so short a while ago by Captain Carberry back in London. He sat there in a clean lightweight suit which he’d bought locally that morning, apparently listless, though his eyes were alive and watchful and his nerves were tautly warning him of every little piece of information that might prove valuable. For, as that hot sun declined after burning the cabbage-trees in the Plaza Generalisimo Franco to nothingness, seeming to exacerbate the many stinks of La Linea, and bring them out in a crescendo of insanitariness which offended the nostrils, Shaw had discovered something.
Smells…
The dirty lodging which Shaw had found in a street of no more than normal seediness was full of them — human, comestible, garbage; and Shaw was allergic to smells, could even now recall with a renewed sense of nausea the cooking smells from the galley-flats of those wartime destroyers which, when he was feeling so damnably seasick, had been the last dreadful straw which had brought up what was left of his bile. And (on a very different level) Shaw knew that there is nothing so nostalgic as a smell, for when he’d smelt something heavy and lingering in the still, hot air as he’d walked casually into this bar (which was about the twentieth of a series of bars and cafes which he’d set himself to investigate that day and the night before, as being the most likely places in which to pick up useful information) his mind had jumped back across the years and had brought to him the memory of a perfume, and he’d known, in that instant, that he had very probably picked up a lead to Karina, that she might not yet, as he had begun to fear, have left La Linea.
Je reviens… unforgettable. Unforgettable both in its heady perfume and in the things it brought to his mind, the little things of the days when he and Karina had been so close, and on the same side of the diplomatic fence. Je reviens, that exclusive, wonderful perfume of the world’s capitals, the Paris salons — to catch that scent in a scruffy La Linea bar could mean one thing only to Shaw, with his knowledge that Karina was in or near the frontier town.
For a long time after that Shaw sat very still, sipping his acorn-tasting coffee, eyes shaded by dark glasses even though the sun had gone. Sipping and watching. And waiting for a sign.
At 8 p.m. the previous night Shaw had crossed the British Lines beyond Gibraltar’s airport into the tiny fragment of neutral ground between the fortress and the advanced sentries of Spain, one of hundreds of men and women, Spanish workers heading homeward in that nightly exodus which begins at about six o’clock and goes on until eleven; some in buses, many on foot. A drab line of poverty which had straggled along the road across the airport runway, along the top of the Devil’s Tower Road beneath the sheer face of the towering North Front, curving along from the Water-port and Queensway or Irish Town and Main Street. Men dressed like Shaw in old corduroys and faded blue shirts and berets, smuggled cigarettes concealed about their persons, women whose petticoats hid sugar and flour and tea. Chattering like monkeys, the women’s voices shrill, rising and falling in the blessed evening cool as the star-like lights climbed up the Rock, the ragged column moved on through the check-point out of British territory, past the starched-drill sentries of the infantry battalion quartered on the Rock and the policemen who looked to Shaw just like the village constables back in England. Past the Revenue Inspectors, past the Security Police who examined the stamped passes out of the fortress.
Shaw controlled his burning impatience as the routine rigmarole went impassively through its paces, no one stationed at those gates knowing how vital to their very existence was Shaw’s mission that night. Shaw looked back, up at the towering sheer face of the North Front, wondered how long that great cliff would still be there, with its old siege-galleries to frown across into Spain.
Then, past the sentries of the Spanish Army, and the carabineros in their distinctive blue-green uniforms, with the peaked caps (indicating them as a separate force from, though linked with, the Civil Guard) and holstered revolvers heavy at their belts. Even once away from there, when his Spanish worker’s pass had been cursorily checked and found in order (it showed him as Pedro Gomez, a day workman employed in Gibraltar Dockyard’s engineering shops), Shaw held himself back so that he could pass through the La Linea Customs post farther on in company with a score of others. There was safety in numbers, and it was pointless to take risks at this stage.
He came up to the La Linea gateway, big stone arches thrown across the road into the town. Straight through the gates and he was inside Spain. He felt that sudden sense of aloneness, the kind of feeling that always came to him when the die was cast and he was cut off physically from base. He was so conscious of his inadequacies, of his instinctive distaste for the job he had to do — a distaste which he felt could interfere with his efficiency if he wasn’t careful. The feeling of aloneness didn’t last for long, however (though it was to return on the morrow, when he heard distantly the bugles from the Cambridge sounding off for Colours, and then the Royal Marines Band thundering out “The Queen”—it was an odd feeling, to be so near and yet so effectively cut off that if anything should go wrong he might have been ten thousand miles from British soil) and by the time he was through the aduana search-room to the right of the gateway he was breathing easy. They’d given him the usual quick run-over, but they hadn’t found anything on him, hadn’t spotted the revolver-holster slung uncomfortably between his legs under his trousers.
He came out into the square beyond, walked along the pavement to the left lined with the cabbage-trees; at the end, beyond an orange-piled fruit kiosk in the centre of the square, with its small green patch of gramon, the coarse grass of Andalusia, he stepped off into the roadway. He jumped back quickly as a big black Studebaker swerved violently, tyres screaming, past the street which he had attempted to cross. Shaw cursed after it, fluently and in the colloquial Andalusian dialect. The three men in the car took no notice as the vehicle righted, accelerated, and rushed onward, taking the road to the right of the aduana.
That had been last night.
In the cafe Shaw drank up his second cup of coffee, signalled for a third. He didn’t notice the small boy who had been looking at him from behind the counter. When the waiter came over Shaw made a ribald reference to the heavy smell of perfume which still lingered.