A Necessary Action (20 page)

He climbed on until he came to a group of thickish pine trees which grew out from the stones below a perpendicular, rough cliff wall. There he put down the basket and stopped to get his breath back. The puppy with the spot over its eye was whining all the time, quietly, abandonedly.

There was quite a lot of brushwood here, so he took out the bits of rope and put them down on a flat stone. Then he took the basket to a point about three yards from the cliff. He took out the almost black puppy, looked absently at it and then swung it
swiftly against the rock wall. It smacked as if he had thrown a split rubber ball, and the animal fell and died immediately.

The other puppy was still whining, but fell silent the moment he picked it up. He avoided looking at it, but weighed it in his hand and it felt the same as the other one, small and softly alive. It lay on its back and fitted exactly into his half-open hand. He raised his arm to shoulder height and drew back his hand, but either he unconsciously held back or the animal slipped, for the throw was crooked and feeble and the puppy spun round in the air and bounced a bit away from the cliff wall.

He stood still without moving for a long time before he could bring himself to go forward and see where it had fallen.

It had slipped down into a deep wedge-shaped crack between two relatively large chunks of rock, and when Willi Mohr leant forward and peered down, he saw that it was still alive. The pup with the black spot round its eye was lying quite far down with its paws in the air. It moved its legs a little and he could see small pale trickles of blood running from its mouth and nose, which was pink and small and slightly wrinkled.

He put his arm down the crack but however hard he tried, he could not reach the puppy, not even with the tips of his fingers. It was moving more now and a feeble little whine could be heard from below.

Willi Mohr found a broken branch and stuck it down the crack. He could poke the animal but it had evidently got wedged between the stones and he could not move it. He threw away the branch and heaved at the outer rock to see if he could widen the crack, but the rock would not move outwards. But he could move it inwards so that the crack grew narrower.

He took a step back and put his right foot against the jagged stone and pressed on it with all his strength. Slowly it tipped over and he thought he heard the puppy yelp once and then it was crushed. He thrust his foot against the stone, keeping it there for a long time, then let it go and it swung back again.

It was a long time before he had collected himself sufficiently to return to the flat stone where he had put the bits of rope.

Then he slowly and systematically gathered up a large heap of dead branches. He tied them together, slung the bundle on to his back and began to climb down.

He was in no hurry, and about half-way down stopped to smoke a cigarette. As he sat there, he saw a civil guard pushing his bike up the alleyway towards Barrio Son Jofre. Despite the distance, he could see quite clearly that the man had his carbine over his back and that he stopped in the middle of the hill to fan his face with his cap. When the civil guard reached the house, he leant his bicycle against the outhouse and vanished from sight, presumably to bang on the door.

Willi Mohr finished his cigarette, then lifted his bundle of brushwood on to his back again and went on down. He kept his eye on the spot where the civil guard should appear, but the man did not show himself. The bicycle was still there, but after a few minutes he had got so far down that the outhouse was hidden by the almond trees and cactus bushes.

He crossed the crackling field and rounded the house. There was no one in the yard and the bicycle had vanished.

Willi Mohr shrugged his shoulders and went into the house.

On the floor inside the doorway lay a letter, apparently pushed in through the cat-hole by the civil guard. There was nothing written on it, only a blurred stamp in the top right-hand corner. Willi Mohr opened the envelope and took out his passport.

He turned over the pages but there were no new stamps or remarks. Then he shrugged again and put his passport into his back pocket, alongside the notebook.

It was the first of November. Twenty-four days had gone by since the police interrogation and nothing had happened to Willi Mohr.

The days had grown shorter, the nights colder, and it had rained twice during the last weeks, but otherwise everything was as before.

His money had long since come to an end and he had made no effort to acquire any more, although he could well have written to Hugo Spohler, who still owed him quite a sum. The tienda
still gave him credit, as did the Café Central. His bills slowly mounted, although he had reduced his purchases to an absolute minimum and lived exclusively on bread, salted sardines and figs. Now and again he bought a box of Ideales, and by smoking very seldom and saving the ends for his pipe, he could make a packet last several days. He regularly increased his bill at the bar in the square by having a small cup of coffee every evening.

With the exception of the civil guard who had pushed the envelope containing his passport through the cat-hole, no one had come to the house in Barrio Son Jofre. The brown puppy had died three days after he had killed the other two, and he had thrown it on to the rubbish-heap behind the house. The dog came with him on his daily walks through the town again, and although he occasionally got bones and mouldering bits of meat for her at the tienda, she had grown much thinner, as he had himself.

Only the cat remained unchanged. It saw to its keep itself and came and went with a self-sufficiency which made it appear to be the only legitimate tenant in the house.

Willi Mohr did not do any painting, and he had also begun to be careless about some things. He was no longer so particular about washing and shaving and he seldom bothered about making his bed properly. And yet he managed to fill his days with trivial matters, fetching water, lighting the fire or collecting fuel. Unconsciously he did everything at a slower tempo than before and he had no definite impression of being unoccupied or having plenty of time.

He was waiting for Santiago Alemany, but he was not impatient and neither was he feeling nervous about the meeting.

He was convinced that Santiago would come back some time and he had already decided how he would behave when he did.

He would shoot him immediately. Then the matter would be over and his part of the problem out of the way.

He had no further plans for the future and nothing which tied him to this place, so to postpone the execution would simply be pointless.

On the first of November, Willi Mohr got up at nine o’clock. He lit the fire, boiled some water and drank it with two spoons of
sugar and half a roll left over from the previous day. Then he went out and relieved himself behind the camioneta, which was standing in the outhouse, filthy and dusty and unusable.

The tyres were flat and the engine would not start. When he had come back from his trip in May and driven up from the puerto to the town, he had forgotten to put any water in the radiator. The engine had got overheated without his noticing and the steam had blown the gasket. He had only just managed to get back and since then the truck had stood there, not because he could not afford to repair it, but because he considered he no longer had any need for it. Now the chickens lived in it and both the engine and the seats were white with their droppings.

Willi Mohr buttoned his fly and went into tackle his day’s work, the cleaning of his pistol, something he had thought about doing for a long time.

He locked the door and got out the gun from its place under the mattress. There was not much light in the room but what came through the cat-hole and the cracks round the door was quite sufficient.

He spread a piece of cloth out on the floor, sat down on the bottom stair and appraisingly weighed the pistol in his hand. It felt cold and reassuring.

First he pressed the restraining catch and took out the magazine. There were seven rounds in it. He ejected the cartridges and put them in a row in front of him. Another cartridge remained in the breech, so he drew back the action and caught it in his hand. He put it down beside the others, poked out the spring from the magazine and tested the tension in it before putting it down. Then he picked up the cartridges one by one and looked them over carefully.

Willi Mohr had a reserve magazine too. It lay tucked away in the bottom of the rucksack, but as he had no intention of using it, he let it lie there.

When he had looked at the cases without finding any scratches or other visible defects, he set about the pistol itself. He removed the barrel and held it up to the square of light from the door. The bore was oiled. Then he examined the breech face, tried out the striker against his thumb, pressing the spring together, which was hard and tense, and laid the things down on the cloth,
together with the screws and pins and cartridges and the parts of the magazine.

The cat, which had been lying asleep among the bedclothes, woke when two of the metal parts clinked together. At once it was inquisitive, and after stretching itself a couple of times, it went over to the stairs and sat on a corner of the cloth, its head on one side, eyeing the dismantled weapon. Then it raised its right forepaw, dabbed cautiously at the spring, and then sat still again, staring with interest at the spiral wobbling back and forth. Suddenly the cat whipped out its paw again and hit the spring, which rolled across the floor with a metallic rattle. The cat crouched, took two long leaps, landing on it with its claws distended, stood on its back legs with the spring between its forepaws and then threw it backwards over its head.

Willi Mohr sat still, his hands hanging between his legs, and watched the animal playing with the spring. Suddenly the cat lost interest, yawned and went back to the mattress. The spring rolled away into a corner of the room and lay still. Willi got up and went and fetched it.

He got out the oil can and some soft rags from his rucksack and carefully cleaned all the parts before greasing them again. Then he dried the barrel and once again held it up to the light.

Willi Mohr looked for so long down the bore that all sense of proportion vanished. He saw a cold, polished steel tunnel, a reflecting corridor of terror, endlessly extended by the bore’s twisting spiral.

When he finally took the barrel away from his eye, he was almost surprised to find it was so short and light and ordinary, an unassuming little object which could be carried in a breast pocket if necessary.

He put the lid on the oil-can again and began to re-assemble the pistol. Finally he slid the magazine into the butt of the gun, releasing the action to slip the first cartridge into the chamber.

He got up, put on the safety catch and then put the weapon back under the edge of the mattress, on the right and quite far down.

The pistol was a nine millimetre 1936 Walther. Willi Mohr had exchanged it for two tins of meat in Flensburg in the summer of 1945 and since then he had succeeded in smuggling it over all
borders. He had never fired it, but knew both its construction and how it worked very well.

On the twenty-sixth of November, fifty days after the police-interrogation, Willi Mohr spent nearly all day lying on the mattress, waiting. He was weak with hunger, but did not want to go to the tienda, as the old woman had begun to look pityingly at him. When it grew dark, he went to the Café Central where he had pawned his watch. The proprietor was kind and gave him a glass of white wine and two thick slices of bread, soaked in olive oil. He ate them greedily and hurried back to the house in Barrio Son Jofre. He was afraid that Santiago might come while he was out, and dared not be away from home for any length of time.

During the first few days of December, the weather turned very warm, just as it had at the same time the previous year. The man in the house in Barrio Son Jofre had no calendar and did not know the date, having lost count about a week before and not bothered to ask anyone. It might have been twelve o’clock or half-past twelve, to judge by the sun.

Willi Mohr was listening to the sound of a motor-engine which had just swung up into the alleyway, and he knew that it was Santiago Alemany coming. He had already taken out his pistol and clicked off the safety catch with his thumb.

He felt calm and relaxed as he squatted down by the mattress and waited. The gun was aimed at the door and he had his finger on the trigger, but he had lowered the pistol so that the barrel was resting against the mattress. He had also pulled a piece of the blanket over the gun so that it was not visible from outside and would not give his visitor a chance either to flee or throw himself down behind the vehicle.

He would shoot immediately, but not until he was absolutely certain of hitting.

The sound rose slowly, for the alleyway was steep and careful driving was necessary round the sharp corners. The cat had already slunk into the room and taken up its listening-post by the door. Willi Mohr could see the tip of its tail slowly thrashing back and forth behind the edge of the door.

The fish-van drove up into the yard and stopped exactly opposite the open door. Santiago Alemany was sitting in the driver’s seat in blue trousers and a faded striped cotton shirt. When he switched off the engine, it coughed once or twice and he listened thoughtfully to the bubbling sound from the over-heated water in the radiator. The back was loaded with fish-boxes, carefully tied-down. They were quite dry, so Willi Mohr knew that Santiago was driving with an empty load and was on his return journey from the provincial capital to the puerto.

The dog woke and rushed barking through the room, wagging her tail and running round the van.

The cat recognized the visitor and relaxed, indolently strolling out into the sun. On the step outside, it suddenly stopped and started biting itself energetically on its right foreleg.

Santiago threw his half-smoked cigarette away and climbed out of the van.

He bent down and patted the dog and when she turned over on to her back, he scratched her dutifully on the stomach.