All three went out of the room, this time leaving a man on guard at the door. Shelley went back to the plan of Barcelona. The insurrectionary forces tended to concentrate west of the maindrag, fortifying the lanes between there and the Rond San Antonio. Some streets to the east were also in their possession, and workers from the northern suburbs were moving in. But Government troops were gathering under the hill of Montjuich and preparing to clear the city centre. Which was fine, because workers from the factories of Sans were already filtering behind the hill of Montjuich for an attack in the rear as soon as the army made a move. ‘Uproar in the East, strike in the West.’ It couldn’t fail. Badalona and other suburbs were mobilizing their workers. The uprising in Madrid had failed, but Valencia was in insurrectionist hands. Street names were being changed, and paving stones put back. Workers’ representatives were talking to the sailors at Cartagena. Malaga had gone completely over to the rebels, and was already being strafed by American Sabre-jets. Russia had protested, and Chinese technicians had started flying in from Peking.…
They’d been gone half an hour, and it seemed that the man at the door kept observing Shelley for any sign of nervousness or guilt. ‘Kafka, I love you,’ he thought, taking several drinks at the bottle of brandy and thinking that if they didn’t come back soon he’d be either dead drunk or asleep.
In the meantime the guns had opened up from Montjuich, and soldiers of the loyal garrison were coming down the hill with flamethrowers. Agitators were talking to them through loudspeakers, and one had already gone over to them. A woman with a red bandera had blown another to pieces with a handgrenade and a whole street was burning.
Bad news came, that Valencia had surrendered. The sailors at Cartagena had scuttled their ships. Malaga alone remained, and the whole fascist spite had been turned (as usual) against it. Shelley wondered whether there were a map of Spain in the desk on which to plan a guerilla campaign in the mountains, so that the insurgents could withdraw and carry on resistance from there.
‘It’s a beautiful city, Barcelona,’ one of the plainclothes men remarked pleasantly, handing him his passport. He apologized for having detained him, but said that many people were going around with forged papers. Shelley smiled, understood that he had his work to do. The policeman thought he should be more angry than he was, so apologized again, and this time Shelley didn’t look too pleased, a gruff response that blew away all suspicion from the policeman’s narrow and infantile mind.
The policeman took him back to the street. They shook hands, and he pointed the direction to his hotel. Shelley walked in the sunshine, feeling no malice towards any man or being, as he called a taxi and ordered it to the docks, where he would get out his luggage and head for Tangier. To contact Maricarmen would put her in danger as well. He’d shuttle through Valencia and Granada without delay in case any other autonomous Gestapo unit pulled him in for no reason and decided this time to keep him. He was puzzled and disturbed. Why should they arrest me? I’m guilty, after all. These bastards usually get the wrong ones, though. It’s not cricket, as that swish piece from London said when I laid her in Malaga.
A week later he was in Tangier, at a café in the Place de France thinking about his next excursion south. A date had been fixed, lorry and supplies assembling, but he wanted another head and pair of hands. A face came in from the rain which he knew, and he called out the name that belonged to it.
A shock passed through Frank because the voice that called his name out loud was only half recognized by memory. Shelley set a briefcase down on their table, stood tall beside it, wrapped in the same long overcoat and cumbrous grey scarf. Frank knew him, in spite of the crew-cut and heavily-rimmed glasses that made him look like so many other Americans. ‘And what the hell are you doing in this godforsaken Bidonville?’ Shelley asked.
‘If you’ll sit down and have a drink, I might tell you.’ There were handshakes: ‘I got swacked on your brandy, remember?’ Shelley said, and called the waiter, who seemed to know him well, and came over immediately from another table. He ordered two double cognacs, and more tea for Myra.
‘We ended up here,’ Frank said. ‘After Granada it was the end of the line. We’ve got to hole up for a few months.’
‘It’s a good place,’ Shelley said with a high-powered laugh, ‘but it’s not the end of the line. I know a few places after this, and I don’t mean Casablanca.’
‘What about your girl friend in Barcelona?’ Myra asked. ‘Is she here too?’
‘Hell, no. She works up there, and I do my work down here. Now and again we have a date. I had to pull out quick.’
‘What sort of work?’ Frank asked. Shelley leaned back with a music-hall avuncular look from such contemporary shoulders. ‘Just wouldn’t you like to know? Oh boy, just wouldn’t you?’
‘Maybe I would at that,’ Frank said.
Shelley asked where they were staying. Frank told him: ‘But we can’t bed in that fleapit for ever. We’re looking for a house or flat.’
‘Since independence you can pick up apartments cheap. But a furnished place isn’t so easy.’ The rain eased off, settled to a steady civilized downpour. Traffic livened the dusk, and beggars held out their hands again. Vendors toted hats, flowers, peanuts, purses, wooden puppets. The café lighting served as blinds, rain and dusk neutralizing everything. Myra felt out of time and place, Shelley telling of a flat he knew with four rooms, kitchen, bath and maid’s bathroom not far from the Boulevard Pasteur. ‘Belongs to a Frenchman who tears off six months of every year in Marseilles. I know the agent, a lawyer. Lets for around thirty thousand.’
‘That’s about five quid a week,’ Frank said. ‘We could manage that.’
Shelley took a large diary from his briefcase: ‘Meet me here, nine-thirty, tomorrow morning?’
‘All right,’ Frank said. ‘Why do you need such a big diary in a place like this? Are you in business, or something?’
‘How you bug me, Frank! Sure I’m a business man, but don’t ask me what I sell. It’s too specialized.’
‘Forget it,’ Frank said. ‘And if you can’t forget it, drop dead. I don’t mind if you run a brothel.’
‘Tell me he’s broadminded, Myra,’ Shelley said, beckoning for another tray of drinks.
The agent took them through a palatial entrance and up on a fine lift, four floors high in a modern block to show off the central heating and garbage disposal point. Myra had stayed in bed, so Frank was to decide. The furniture was ornate and heavy, but sparse enough not to be intimidating. Windows looked over the town towards Tetuan. Frank went back to the lawyer’s office with Shelley, signed the six-month contract and paid two months of it. They’d move in that afternoon, and Shelley suggested that since it was only ten maybe they could have breakfast and talk.
Frank agreed. The way he said ‘talk’ made it sound mysterious, but that was Shelley’s way. Cutting up through the streets Frank said the only thing wrong with Tangier was the number of beggars, to which Shelley replied that though they were poor they might be happier than he imagined.
‘Whoever gave you the idea that me poor can be happy?’ Frank retorted, not sure how serious Shelley was being.
‘Who is happy then? The rich?’
‘Nobody’s happy,’ Frank said. ‘There’s no such thing as happiness except when you’re doing work for yourself that at the same time is helping other people.’
‘You don’t want much,’ Shelley laughed, ‘except the Millennium maybe.’ They turned a corner and went into a teashop-patisserie.