Death in the Sun (15 page)

Somewhere close, the echo of a slap.

Staffe forces his tongue from the roof of his mouth; his lips are cracked and he puts a hand to his chest, feels lint and plasters where someone has patched him up.

The walls are hung with ornately painted plates and framed pictures of swirling dancers and posing, tight-breeched
gitanos
with white blousing shirts and black, Apache hair. A jug of water on a circular table has ice floating on the top, not quite melted away, which tells him someone has been here recently.

He drinks straight from the jug and goes outside, feeling surprisingly fresh. The shadows are long, from a morning sun and he leans against the frame of the low door in the shade of fat vines. Somebody close is knocking out the heavy-hearted, Cuban-heeled rhythm for a
soleá
and he realises the slap is actually a clap. Shoeless children play with a dog-eared ball and he knows he is in Sacromonte. The cypress tips of the Generalife gardens jut the skyline.

Staffe pours the remaining water over his head and slicks back his hair. Next door, a young woman pegs out washing on the terrace, watched by her grandmother. From inside the house, the
soleá
gathers momentum. ‘Whose house is this?’ he says.

The young woman shakes her head. ‘You go. Go now.’

‘I would like to thank them, for offering me a bed.’

‘They didn’t offer.’

The booted beat clatters to nothing, like something disappearing on a breeze, and a long-haired
gitano
appears in the neighbouring doorway which is set into the soft Sacromonte rock. His eyes are heavy and he says, in the laziest, hoarsest Andalus, ‘You must fuck off, my friend. I’d hate to have to cut you. Not in front of the children.’

The grandmother laughs. She says, ‘But the children could close their eyes. And in any case, they have to learn some time.’

*

The thin road from Sacromonte into the city is quiet. Men in sports jackets and overdone cologne take coffee and read the morning
La Lente
.

The fountain in the luminescent patio of the Ladrón del Agua trickles soothingly and Staffe recognises a familiar figure at the desk, checking out it would seem. Pepa sees him as she twists to return her purse to her bag. ‘Where have you been?’

‘You don’t know?’ he says.

‘I left you in that Moroccan café in the Campo de Principe.’

‘I went back to Guadalupe’s place.’

‘I knew you were up to something.’

Yes, thinks Staffe. She knew. ‘And now you are rushing off, without telling me.’

‘I’m not rushing off. Quite the opposite, in fact.’ She reaches for the morning edition of
La Lente
and pokes her finger at the banner. ‘A day and a half, you’ve been gone.’ She takes a step closer, sniffs him. Stands back and looks him up and down. ‘Seems you’ve had a makeover. You’re clean and your eyes aren’t heavy.’ She reaches out to his chest, pulls his open shirt to one side, ‘And finally, you’ve had your dressing changed. What came over you?’

The receptionist reaches out with a folded piece of paper, says, ‘Señor Wagstaffe.’

He takes the note. Reading it, he says, ‘I went to see Peralta. He took me in hand.’

Pepa regards him with suspicion, says, ‘Looking at you, I’d say there’s been a woman involved. Is that who the note is from?’

He says, ‘Let’s stay just one more night.’

Pepa crosses her arms under her breasts, says, ‘No way! I have to get back and file my copy on the secret life of a tongue-tied daughter of a dead painter.’

‘We’ll untie that tongue.’

‘And how will you do that?’

‘She has a lover. A very interesting lover who I’m sure she wouldn’t want the world to know about. There’s a
La Lente
here in Granada as well as Almería?’ says Staffe.

‘We share national and regional news.’

‘So you know people at the office here in Granada. You can get into the archive.’

‘I was there yesterday, reading up on Barrington. You know, towards the end, his style changed. He went kind of looser. It’s his best stuff, they say, but there’s nothing in museums and galleries from his last ten years. It was all snaffled up by the Japanese, and Americans.’

‘Never to be seen. Locked away in vaults, like the wine that’s never drunk.’ Staffe shows Pepa the photograph of Jackson and Barrington in the little gallery in Gabo. In the background are Rubio and his wife, the beautiful Astrid.

‘Who is she?’ asks Pepa, leaning across. ‘She’s beautiful.’

‘But not around any more.’

Pepa takes the photograph, squints. ‘This is the Gabo Gallery. See the bust in the corner?’

‘What do you know about Astrid Cano, Pepa?’

‘Nothing. Do you know her maiden name?’

‘Raúl knew.’ He thinks Raúl made it his business to find out everything about Astrid Cano and he wonders how much Pepa knows of what Raúl was up to. Can he trust her? He recalls the documents from Raúl’s apartment. ‘I think it is Hesse.’

He watches Pepa go off to
La Lente
’s Granada offices and he re-reads the note the receptionist had given him. He is to meet Professor Peralta at the university and is already late.

*

As soon as he is through feeding the spool into the projector, Peralta draws the curtains and sits beside Staffe, says, ‘You have never seen this?’

‘No. How did it come to be in your hands?’

‘It was left in the lodge by a tramp. He stank of beer. Said he was given twenty euros to drop it off and when our porter enquired more of him, he became quite offensive. Shall we?’

The spool begins to turn, clicking. The sound of it reminds Staffe of younger times with Marie and his parents; those eager moments after the film had come back from being developed, weeks after they had got back from a summer in Cornwall or Brittany.

On screen, two figures sit at a dinner table, candle-lit and pulling faces to whoever is behind the camera. The figures are Barrington and Rubio. Barrington is wearing a flat-fronted beret, à la Falange, and Rubio is in a turban. Then the light improves and the camera turns. Carrying lanterns and naked, Jackson Roberts and Astrid walk slowly towards the camera, laughing.

There is no soundtrack, but someone must say something because Jackson and Astrid stop smiling. They lower their lanterns and each place a hand on the back of the other’s neck. They move slowly into a deep, French kiss and the camera gets closer and closer. They raise their lanterns and blow out the flames, and the screen is black, then the film runs out.

‘It’s a shame there’s no sound,’ says Peralta.

‘A shame we don’t know who’s holding the camera,’ says Staffe.

‘And a third shame, besides what is happening on film.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We don’t know who put it into your hands,’ says Peralta.

‘My hands?’

‘Oh yes.’ Peralta hands Staffe a bubble-wrapped envelope. It reads:

FOR SEÑOR STAFFE, c/o PROFESSOR PERALTA, DEPARTMENT OF MILITARY HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA.

‘Let’s watch it again.’

Peralta switches the spools, re-feeds, and as he waits, Staffe ruminates: whoever put the film into his hands would want to somehow damage one of the participants. Certainly, Jackson wouldn’t want it to get out, and nor would Astrid or Rubio; or Manolo – to see his mother carrying on in such a manner. And whoever arranged for the film to come into his hands knows of his acquaintance with Peralta.

The film begins its rerun and Staffe squints, leans forward. Near the end, just before the screen turns black, he says, ‘There! That’s it.’

‘What did you see?’ asks Peralta.

‘Can you get us a better image of a frame?’

‘We have a digital technology department, in the Screen School. Which frame do you want?’

‘The instant before it goes dark. There is a face reflected in the lantern glass. I’m sure of it.’

‘The cameraman?’

‘Or a woman,’ says Staffe. But he is pretty sure it is a man.

*

Pepa is holed up in a tiny, windowless room in the basement of the Granada offices of
La Lente
, having called in a favour from David, an editor. She worked with him on the exposure of a cokehead tennis player a couple of years ago. He is three years older than her, but is a sub-editor – which is what she should be, if she’s ever going to get anywhere.

She puts down the phone to the syndications editor at
Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung
, known as the
HAZ
. Pepa did some work for
HAZ
during the European student games, when a German heptathlete had been drug tested. They had paid her a hundred euros for a couple of days’ work, but it was all about networking she told herself. And now that chicken is roosting. She has a seven-day authorisation into their level 3 non-subscriber archive.

The ‘Astrid Cano’ search yields two results. One is for the marriage of Astrid Hesse to Francisco Cano, and the other is for an article run fifteen years later in which her father, Gustav, had appealed for help in finding his daughter who he hadn’t seen for five years. Astrid had reportedly left her Spanish family to pursue a new life, possibly in Africa.

The article is illustrated by a picture of Astrid with her mother and father. Rubio is there, too, but he stands detached. A large child hugs his mother’s leg. He looks up at her, like a cherub in a piety. In front of him, sitting cross-legged on the floor and smiling mischievously directly into camera is a smaller, fine-featured boy with fair hair. The boys are named Manolo and Agustín.

Pepa types ‘Gustav Hesse’ into the search facility and gets hundreds of responses. Gustav was a minor celebrity in Hannover, until he sold his publishing company to the Handelsmann empire in 1976, just a few months after his only child took her Spanish husband. Gustav netted seven million marks for his company and gradually faded from the pages of
HAZ
, apart from his plea for Astrid, and a later piece in which he was interviewed as part of a larger feature on Germany’s ‘disappeared’.

In that article, Gustav is pictured with his grandson, Agustín, who had returned from his commune in Tangier for his grandmother’s funeral. In the photograph, outside the family home, Gustav looks dead in the eyes. Agustín smiles mischievously, again, and is wearing a Moorish-looking, collarless smock. Pepa squints, leans closer to the screen and notices that Agustín sports a tiny ruby stud in his right nostril.

She notes down: ‘Tangier, nose stud. Manolo not at grandmother’s funeral?’ She checks the remaining articles, which report the death of Gustav Hesse just three months ago. Gustav’s funeral was attended by a couple of notable authors but no immediate family. They mention specifically that his daughter, Astrid, did not attend.

Gustav’s obituary cited his publishing successes and also his love of Africa. Apparently, he worked with one of his Scandinavian authors in helping build a school in Mauritania. Pepa notes down: ‘Last Will and Testament?’ She drags the file into her pen drive and gives up, happy with her booty.

Pepa pops upstairs to thank David.

He says, ‘Tracked down any interesting cokeheads recently?’ Nobody else is in the office and he comes towards her, standing too close.

‘I’ve gone off tennis,’ she says, taking a step towards him and smiling, jutting out her hip so it brushes the top of his leg.

‘They say it’s all about the lines, with that game.’

‘Getting as close as you can.’

‘Without blowing it,’ he laughs.

‘Can you get us close to some lines?’ she says.

‘To get us started,’ he says, picking his jacket from off the back of his chair and placing the flat of his hand on the flesh below Pepa’s hip, guiding her out, down the back stairs.