Undertow Read online

  “Hilarious, isn’t it? Or it would be, if he knew I was here.”

  “Thank God he doesn’t,” said Trout. “That’s all I say.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s the sort of bastard who likes to think of himself as the one and only, that’s why. He’d like to be the top man in his line of business, and it has to rile him a whole lot that he isn’t. . . quite ”

  “Good God,” said Fedora. “He’s welcome.”

  “He’s a nasty piece of work. If you should ever run into him, don’t look round for me. I’ll be under the table.”

  “Well, but he must know that I’ve . . . sort of retired.”

  “In your game, you don’t retire till they drag you off in a coffin. You know that as well as I do.”

  Fedora nodded. “You get bored,” he said. “I’ve always heard that, and it’s true. I’m beginning to wish Jimmy would get down to it and come across with something for us. I haven’t had a job since last year in Amburu.” He swung his feet out from under the table with a movement that, for him, was almost abrupt. “Know what I was thinking, Tiddler?”

  “Yes. That it’d be simply crazy fun to join in the hunt.” .. Something like that, maybe.”

  “Simply crazy is right. If someone was paying for it, it might be different. But helling round after Moreno just for the kicks, it’s just not mature. You’re incredible, you are,” said Trout, shaking his head. “Adriana’s only been away a fortnight, and here you are with surplus energy fairly fizzing out your earholes. We’d better go back to where we came in and find you some talent. Sex is more fun than anything, except making money.”

  Fedora yawned cavernously. “Right now I’m going home,” he said. “I just don’t like what I’ve heard about Moreno— that’s all. Marbella’s my parish, and he’d better not forget it.”

  “He doesn’t even know it,” said Trout. “And it’s just as well.”

  SPECIAL Operatives, whatever their age, sex or nationality, are usually inclined to be fatalistic. Their professional lives are spent, for the most part, in striving to carry out weird and unlikely assignments which, in the absence of definite information, they must assume to form part of a Great Design shaped by the statesmen and governing bodies of their respective countries. Before long, however, they notice that the success or failure of their individual missions has singularly little effect on the Great Design as such, which seems to pursue its own wobbly and erratic course quite independently of all external circumstance. Thus a Special Operative may have spent several months and a considerable sum of money in securing the blueprints of a new patent bottle-washer, only to find on his return that as a result of secret trade plans engineered by another department the machine in question is being manufactured under license in his own country and is available at any of the big chain stores for the price of two shillings and elevenpence. A very few such experiences serve to convince the Special Operative that he, more than other men, must regard himself as the plaything of an inscrutable providence, of an Imminent Will that dispenses O.B.E.’s and bullets in the belly with a grand unconcern. Experienced Special Operatives are Augustinians to a man. The suggestion that success in any field may be the reward of industry and merit rather than of the spin of an invisible and omnipotent roulette wheel will bring forth in them the sardonic smile, if not the sinister chuckle. Fedora and Feramontov saw eye to eye on remarkably few matters, but on this they were as one.

  An O.B.E., of course, is a pleasant thing to have. Trout had been awarded his in 1946. But Adriana was something else again. Adriana was twenty-four. She was principal shareholder and executive director of the Jaguar S.A., an Argentine mining company believed to be tilting the scales at a round two hundred million dollars or so; she was intelligent, passionate, vindictive, charming, impulsive, cool-headed and tough as a root. She liked driving at a speed of a hundred and fifty, or as near to that as might be found convenient. Sometimes, however, she walked, and when she did so invariably left behind her a trail of semi-dislocated necks; j crossing the Gran Via in Madrid just above the Plaza Callao, she once caused three cars to drive straight into one another and a heavy lorry to wrap itself round the traffic-lights. Her dressmaker was Balenciaga; not that that had anything to do with it.

  And that, thought Trout, twisting his brown and nearnaked body into a more comfortable position on the deckchair, that has gone and hooked on to old Johnny. Inexplicable, absolutely inexplicable. Of course, Johnny was an amusing enough fellow in his way, and reasonably goodlooking in a dull light. But having said that, you’d said everything. Why, to do Fedora justice, he seemed as much surprised by it all as anybody. Perplexed, that was the word. Maybe his being a killer had something to with it. If you’ve shot enough people in circumstances of indescribable sordidity, the women seem to wait only for you to look at them before they faint in your arms. According, at any rate, to the writers of that branch of American fiction to which Trout was most addicted. But there might be something in it, all the same. Trout himself had killed a few people in his time, but it wasn’t the same and he knew it. He didn’t look like a killer. And Fedora did. Fedora had death in his eyes. You had to know how to look for it, yes, but a certain kind of woman knew by instinct. And maybe Adriana was that kind of woman, down underneath. Um. Trout raised his left foot from the hot tiles. Scratched his big toe.

  Odd, all the same. Sticking to old Johnny, when she had hundreds of really virile, handsome, muscular, bronzed young men to choose from. Such as Trout himself, for instance. Ah, well. She wouldn’t be back for at least another three weeks; that gave him a chance to look around in the meantime. Then she would see what an opportunity she’d missed. Besides, he was getting a bit tired of playing gooseberry. Two’s company, three’s none.

  . . . Though if one had to play gooseberry, one could hardly hope to do it in more pleasant surroundings. These South Americans knew more than you might suppose about creature comforts. It had taken Adriana two months to do the old place up, two months and he hated to think how much money, but the results were certainly tremendous. She’d picked a nice spot, to start with. Two miles from the village on the Algeciras road, between the sea and the mountains, where a high buttress of land gave shelter from the wind and incidentally a magnificent view across the whole of the Straits of Gibraltar as far as Africa. There were palm trees and umbrella pines to mingle their scents and to offer shade from the sun; behind the clipped privet of the hedges there was mimosa and bougainvillea, gardenias and damas de noche. Steps led down from the pergola to the sea, where there was soft sand and a good bathing beach; farther to the right was a tiled swimming-pool with a high diving-board, a changing room and an enormous refrigerator with about five years* supply of Munich beer stacked away inside it. The house itself had been remodelled by an Italian architect the preceding winter, and was now an opulent dream of pastel-shaded walls, cool cream-coloured floors, ultramodern furniture and gigantic nickel-plated bathrooms in which a carelessly-touched switch might produce a shower of needle-cold water, a fluffy hygienic face-towel, a vibro-massage, an electric razor or the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Ninth. Trout preferred, on the whole, the simpler amenities offered by the swimming-pool and the refrigerator. And, of course, by the Mediterranean sun, now rising above the level of the palmtops, whose beneficial rays he could absorb quite as pleasantly there as anywhere else.

  It was getting late, though; there was the inner, as well as the outer, Trout to be considered. He tilted his wrist, looked at his watch. Yes, five past ten. Time for breakfast. He put on his jazzy green-and-violet beach shirt; examined the bottles on the table at his side and, having successfully detached the only remaining full one from the three dead soldiers beside it, downed its contents in a couple of gulps. He then picked up from the ground at his feet his Ronson, his tooled leather cigarette-case, his pigskin wallet and his copy of Guilty Detective Stories. His sunglasses were on the table; he put them on. His alpagata sandals were lying at the edge
of the pergola. He put them on, too. Then, a shade blearily, he made his way up and along the verandah to the french windows that gave on to the sitting-room.

  Johnny was there inside, planted lugubriously at the Bechstein grand and playing some beastly artificial-sounding muck by lousy old Bach. Trout put his head in through the window. “What about eats?”

  “Whenever you like.”

  Trout entered; plodded importantly over to the table, seated himself and jammed down the buzzer which would, as past experience had taught him, bring about the miraculous appearance of Carmen, a small, neat and delectable maidservant, with the breakfast tray. Carmen really wasn’t bad at all. Trout, who wasn’t snobbish in such matters, might not have bothered to look farther if she hadn’t been a local girl and equipped with a local novio, who, in his turn, was in all probability equipped with a local sheath-knife. As things were, Trout chose to content himself with giving her English lessons, instructing her in the more essential and elementary phrases relative to her profession. “What’s for breakfast?” he asked, as she rustled into sight.

  “Egg,” she said. She put the tray down on the table. “Egg? Good God. What’s for afters?”

  “Yes.”

  “What d’you mean, yes? Oh, all right, skip it. Bring me beer.”

  “Beer, yes.”

  “More beer. Lots of beer. Buckets of beer.”

  “Beer, yes.” She nodded enthusiastically. That word, at least, had sunk in by now. “Bring beer,” she said. And, as an afterthought, giggled. She then retired gracefully as Fedora came mooching round the comer, tastefully dressed in blue denim jeans and a K.D. bush shirt. He sat down heavily opposite Trout, who had already picked up a spoon and was knocking chips off the top of the eggshell. “Where’ve you been?” he asked, with no great show of interest.

  “Oh, swimming. Sunbathing. Loafing. Getting quite a decent tan, wouldn’t you say? Now’s the best time, before the sun gets too strong.” Trout peered approvingly downwards at the yawning gap in his beach shirt above his navel. “You ought to come down there yourself, instead of bashing that blasted piano about all day long. It’d do you good.”

  “I go down there sometimes,” said Fedora. “For target practice.”

  “Target practice?”

  “That’s right. With the Mauser. I’ve got a doofer that chucks plate things up in the air at irregular intervals. Adriana’s idea, that was. I never seem to hit anything. It’s depressing.”

  “Look, don’t you ever relax?”

  Fedora seemed to consider this question as unworthy of any reply. He was staring at the plate directly in front of him, favouring an innocent-looking boiled egg with what Adriana called his Highway Patrol Chief expression. “For God’s sake,” he said. “Do we have to have eggcups with gold rims round the top?”

  “Oh, don’t be such a creep. It’s the proper thing. I mean, you can’t be any old sort of secret agent these days, you got to have social catchit.”

  “I’m not a secret agent. I haven’t been for years.”

  “That’s not the point,” said Trout severely. He lifted up his egg in his fingers, examined the eggcup cautiously. His expression changed. “My God, it is gold. Real gold. My God.” He put the egg back, dug his spoon tentatively into it as though in search of fresh auriferous deposits. “I suppose it does for the holidays, when she’s not inclined to be fussy.”

  “That’s right,” said Fedora glumly. “Don’t try and put it in your pocket when you’ve finished. This isn’t Maxim’s.” Trout looked injured. Carmen reappeared, bearing toast on a salver and two open bottles of beer. “It worries me a bit,” said Johnny, pushing his glass towards her. “It really does.”

  “What?”

  “All this soft living. Maybe it’s the climate as much as anything else. I wouldn’t want to go all mushy.”

  Trout’s mouth opened, as though in stupefaction. “You? Mushy? You?”

  “Well, why not? It happens. You know it does.”

  “I know where all this comes from,” said Trout, reaching for the toast. “What’s this? Caviare? Whacko. No, it’s this chap Moreno. As soon as a fellow in your own line of business hops out of jail and opens up shop with two or three nice juicy knifings, damned if you don’t start absolutely champing at the bit. Harry Hotspur’s nothing to it. If that’s the way you really feel about things, you ought to go and work for the Russians. They’re about the only people nowadays who seem to have a war on, even if nobody else knows about it.”

  “We did get an offer from the Chinese once, didn’t we? Remember old Colonel Yang? My word. What a blister.”

  “Maybe you should have taken him up.”

  “Well . . . it might have been interesting,” said Fedora; so thoughtfully that Trout lowered the piece of toast he was munching and stared at him in horror.

  “You don’t mean you’d work for the other side, Johnny? You couldn’t do that.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Trout resumed his munching. “It would be a lark, at that. Jesus, they’d do their collective nut up at Whitehall, if you did. Burgess and Maclean’d look like last month’s dirty washing. They’d probably even send someone out to get you. . . . Only trouble is, it might be me.”

  “Hell, no. You’d come too.”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t.”

  Fedora shrugged. “Anyway,” he said, “the real reason why I won’t do it is because it’s quite on the cards that nobody’d take the slightest notice at all. And that’d be too damned dispiriting for words. And there again, no one’s asked me.” He pushed back his chair. “Coming into the village?”

  “What for?”

  “The mail.”

  “Oh well. All right.”

  THEY drove into the village and parked, as usual, opposite the Sandua bar. A dozen or so assorted tourists were seated, as usual, at the pavement tables under the red-and-white awning. “Ow,” said Trout suddenly. He’d bitten his tongue.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s the Per . . . the Professor.”

  “Oh Lord. Let’s get out of here.”

  Trout had one hand clapped over his mouth; peculiar mumblings emerged. “Yes,” he said, removing it, “but look.”

  Fedora turned his head and looked. The Professor was there, sure enough, sitting at the nearest of the tables; and next to him, behind a long glass of gin-and-limejuice, was a darkhaired girl in a neat white Irish linen costume. Her long brown legs were visible under the table, and a small group of local layabouts were standing at some ten yards’ distance, commenting upon them in almost-audible undertones. “Bread on the waters,” said Trout reverentially. “That’s what it is, bread on the waters. Where d’you suppose the old devil picked up a humdinger like that one?”

  “I don’t know,” said Johnny. “We could always ask.”

  “Yes. We could. Let’s.”

  They got out of the car and commenced a circumspect approach. The girl—who was listening, chin in hand, to the Professor, and with every outward sign of respectful attention—looked up at them as they reached the table. “Good morning, Professor,” said Trout heartily, contriving to sound like a Rugby footballer just down from Trinity. “A beautiful, beautiful morning. Yes, indeed.”

  “Ah,” said the Professor. “It is you.”

  “And may we join you?”

  “Delighted. Delighted.” The Professor, having overcome his initial difficulty in focusing upon them, indeed seemed to be actually pleased to see them, in a jovial, muddle-headed way; it was even possible, thought Fedora, that he remembered who they were. “Yes, yes, please sit down. We do not observe the formalities. You will join us in a glass of wine?”

  “We should like that above all things,” said Trout oozily, hitching his chair in to the table.

  “You do not know, I think, my good friend and assistant, Miss Weber? Miss Weber is with our expedition. She is a marine biologist.”

  “Oh, I say, not really?” said Trout, sounding more than ever lik
e something out of P. G. Wodehouse. “Marine biology, eh? Slashin’ trade, that.” He leaned forward enthusiastically. “My name is Trout—Sebastian Trout—and this is Johnny Fedora.”

  Miss Weber, who was returning her glass rather hurriedly to the table in order to take Trout’s proffered hand, released it a fraction too early and it tilted over. “Bu . . . Dash it,” said Trout, recovering simultaneously his balance and his equanimity. “No, no, please, it doesn’t matter. Good for the material, actually.” He brushed frantically at the knees of his trousers, shooting a fine alcoholic spray towards the neighbouring tables. “I am so sorry,” said Miss Weber. “It was so clumsy of me, do please forgive me.”

  She produced a large man’s handkerchief from the white handbag on the table; Trout accepted it gratefully and, with it, managed soon to mop up the worst of the damage. “Quite all right,” he said. “Don’t suppose it stains, what? I mean, what was it?”

  “A gin and lime. No, I don’t think it will stain.”

  “Hang on a jiffy, I’ll order you another.”

  Fedora was, on the whole, content to sit back and watch. It was a long time since he had seen anyone even remotely as physically attractive as Adriana, nor was he now ready to admit that this Miss Weber might be, in that respect alone, Adriana’s equal; loyalty apart, however, Fedora’s eyesight was as excellent as ever and undeniably, looking at Miss Weber might well be counted among life’s more pleasant and agreeable experiences. In a way, her beauty was a complement to Adriana’s; she was tall and slim and leggy like a colt where Adriana was . . . how to put it? . . . pneumatic; she had jet-black hair where Adriana’s was uncompromisingly and flamingly red; the tan of her skin would have offset perfectly Adriana’s pearl-smooth paleness. It would be interesting, Fedora thought, to see them both together, so as to. . . . Or no, maybe it wouldn’t. Things perhaps were better as they were. The combination of red hair and Argentine blood makes for a highly explosive mixture, and Fedora chose to take no unnecessary chances.