At the desk there was no one about so he pressed the plunger marked ‘Atención.’ The receptionista came from the inner office and peered at him through thick lenses. ‘Señor?’
‘Puedo tener la Cuenta … may I have my bill?’ he said. ‘Numero doscientos tres.’
‘Ah, Señor Black.’
‘Si, señor.’
When he’d settled the bill he said he’d call back for the raincoat and suitcase, and walked out on to the Plaza de Cataluña, into the cold air and warm sun of a spring day.
The steamer for Ibiza was not sailing until seven so he had three hours to get rid of. He did some mental arithmetic. Passengers must embark half an hour before sailing. Allow half an hour to pick up the suitcase and take a taxi down to the docks. That was one hour. And the other two? He knew Barcelona too well to go sightseeing, and anyway he wasn’t in that sort of mood. He was suffering, he knew, from loneliness. If he’d had a constant companion in the last three months it had been loneliness. Humbly he realised there wasn’t anyone who was missing him. Rael? Not really. There were too many other things and people in her life. Maybe she thought of him occasionally. Perhaps even with affection. The uncommitted affection of an old love long dormant. A Pompeian affair. An ancient volcano, never again to erupt.
There would be perhaps half a dozen people thinking of him professionally, wondering what he was doing, and waiting. Sharing his task vicariously, but waiting: to congratulate him if he succeeded, to repudiate him if he failed. But that was not unique to him or his situation. It applied to many people doing many things in many places.
Two hours to get rid of. He crossed the Ramblas and the bright colours of a news kiosk drew him as the flash of a kingfisher draws a fish. He read the titles. Il Giorna, La Stampa, the Daily Telegraph, Kurio, La Nazione, Il Messagio, Bolero, Wochen End, Stampa Sera, 
l’Humanité, Politiken, Corriere Della Sera, Tribuna Illustraka, 
Life, Ya, Newsweek, Elle, Quick, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, The Times, Das Neue Blatt … Heavens, was there no end to them?
After the newspapers, the paperbacks. He compared Spanish, French, German and English titles to see if there was any pattern of literary tastes and decided there wasn’t. Presumably they represented demand. Or did they? It was cheaper to publish two hundred thousand of one well-known name, than twenty thousand each of ten not so well-known names. He flipped through the glossies, bought Art International and Studio and felt good because he hadn’t disappointed the tired looking woman in the kiosk, and they were the latest numbers and it was important he should read them.
He walked to the centre of the plaza, on to the red, white and blue of its paved geometry, and watched the tourists feeding the pigeons. The Plaza de Cataluña, Trafalgar Square, St. Mark’s, Times Square, St. Peter’s, Notre Dame and the rest: pigeons, tourists, seedy nut salesmen. ‘Look, honey!’ ‘Oh, look, daddy!’ Photographers, cameras, cinés. ‘Stay right there, honey!’ ‘Hold it!’ ‘Wait till he settles, darling!’ ‘Oh poof!’ ‘Gee that’s lucky, I do declare!’
Later he went up past the fountains and then down the Metro steps to clean his shoes at the slot machine. Then up again and across the Ronda Universidad to the café on the corner. He chose a table where the sunlight struck through the glass.
A waiter brought him black coffee and he stirred it unnecessarily, looking round the room and noting on the edge of his mind that Spaniards drank more wine and beer at that hour than coffee and tea. The insistent clamour of traffic drowned the speech around him and muffled his thoughts, leaving only a visual awareness: the blue and white neon sign on the corner, El Corte Inglese, beneath it a department store; Banco de Vizcaya on another high building; Venticolor Champi on a passing bus; and way across the Plaza, in big letters, Uve Pana Supiel. But he knew he was looking for something else that should be there. No square of importance was without it. Like pigeons and tourists. Coñac y Jerez, very nice too, but that wasn’t it. Bertola. No. Ah, there it was … Todo va Mejor con Coca-Cola. He felt reassured. The traffic was not yet at its peak but getting that way. He started counting makes. Few big cars, mostly small, and Seat had it all the way. Even the stream of black and yellow taxis, numerous as Smiths in a London telephone directory, were Seat. He ordered another coffee and with his mind coasting he stared at a passing girl. Their eyes met momentarily and she switched hers away, tossing her head. He grinned.
In front of him a slim smart woman knocked her glove off the table as she poured tea. He leant forward and picked it up and she turned and thanked him in Spanish, her brown eyes using the brief moment of communication to read his face.
The glove dropping wasn’t intentional, he decided. But after it she was classifying him as women did. I’m no good to you, he thought. I’m not rich and I sail—he looked at his watch —in one hour and ten minutes, and I cannot be deflected from what I have to do. The waiter came across and gave him the bill. As he went out he smiled at the owner of the gloves, and with the smallest movement of eyes and lips, gravely discreet, she acknowledged him.
Back in the Regina Royale he collected the suitcase and raincoat, tipped the porter and walked out through the glass doors, waving away the commissionaire who tried to take the bag and refusing his offer of a taxi. Absurd, he thought. Why have I to use an intermediary who has to be rewarded for a service I don’t require of him. He walked down the Calle de Pelayo until a taxi set down a fare near him, and he got in and told the driver to take him to the harbour, to the steamer for Ibiza. Wrapped once again in his thoughts, he sat back as the taxi pulled out into the traffic.
At the end of the warehouse the taxi stopped and he paid it off. He took the steamship ticket from his wallet and when he reached the head of the gangway showed it to an ageing bucolic sailor who blinked a ‘Bueno, señor,’ at him and exuded the smell of raw wine and garlic. The cabin number was on the ticket, and he went to the foyer and then down the staircase. He stopped at the bottom and checked the arrowed numbers. Twenty-seven was at the end of an alleyway on the starboard side. It was a dingy little cabin smelling faintly of disinfectant and urine and stale vomit. Two doors down a lavatory gave off the same odours more pungently. God, he thought, I mustn’t try to sleep until I’m dead tired, or drunk. A typed ticket over the right-hand bunk read Señor Charles Black. He put the raincoat and suitcase on the bunk. The ticket on the other bunk read: Señor Juan Bolle. He wished Senor Bolle no harm but hoped he’d miss the ship.
He went up to the deck lounge. It was crowded. Mostly young people, a few old, Spaniards and foreigners in equal parts, and a sprinkling of soldiers. Some of the faces were familiar, people he’d seen on the island, but most were strangers. Not one so far whom he really knew. He bought a Campari and soda and stayed at the bar. The tables were full. Near him a young German painter he’d often seen outside the Montesol was talking quietly to a girl in a sheepskin coat, pale with unkempt flaxen hair, a baby on her arm. Wife? Girl friend? Sister? Who cared?
Next to him a young man with dark glittering eyes, tall and elegant, rolled up the left sleeve of his black jersey and caressed a hairy forearm as if it were a girl’s. A red silk scarf accentuated his darkness, and the blue denims stretched tightly round his thighs were like muslin round a ham. There were two Frenchmen with him and an English girl. Their clothes, their hair and ornaments, typed them. Drop-outs, hippies, flower people, maybe junkies. But they were all right, he decided: quiet, unpretentious, unconcerned with the other passengers. Make love not war. They believed that. But it was pure fantasy. Everything in his experience contradicted it. The next megalomaniac who came along thinking he was God wasn’t going to be bought off with flowers. I’m thirty-five, he thought, they’re not much more than half that. He sighed for lost youth.
A middle-aged man and his wife came up to the bar beside him. She had calm grey eyes and a skin like alabaster. He wore a high-necked jersey, a black beret, and a necklace of shark’s teeth. It was Jan Ludich, a Czech painter, and his wife. The Czech saw him and grinned. ‘Hola, Charles. Qué tal?’—and she said, ‘Hi, Charles, where’ve you been?’
‘Muy bien,’ he said. ‘Madrid. For de Salla’s vernissage.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Good, I thought.’
‘You writing something about it?’
‘Yes.’
He didn’t know the Ludichs well but it was pleasant to have someone to talk to. They stayed at the bar chatting until the ship had cleared the harbour and the Czechs said they were going down to their cabin before dinner. By then he’d swallowed a good many Camparis.
The steamer was feeling the wind and sea and when he got to the dining-saloon it was less than half full. He sat at an empty table laid for four and divided his attention between the Art International he’d bought in Barcelona, the menu, and his fellow travellers. The chief steward showed a young Spanish couple to an adjoining table. Black nodded to them briefly. Later, from their shy inhibited conversation, he gathered they were going to Ibiza for their honeymoon. In a detached way he wondered if he would ever have a honeymoon.
A steward came up with the wine, balancing the tray against the roll of the ship. Black tasted the wine and nodded, and the steward filled his glass.
The Ludichs came by and soon afterwards he heard Kyriakou’s loud voice and the Greek came in, large and florid, looking like a caricature of a bookmaker, brash check suit, cigar in mouth, red carnation in buttonhole. Kirry Kyriakou interested those who didn’t know him, who thought they saw a colourful personality. Those on Ibiza who knew him well feared him, for he was influential and ruthless. It was whispered—whispered because he was rich—that a recent suicide—a girl’s—could be attributed to him.
With Kyriakou was a younger man, Tino Costa, a tough Cypriot recently acquired by the Greek and rumoured to be his strong-arm man. Costa was big and craggy with hooded eyes, deep-set in a rubbery face. He claimed to have been a croupier at Las Vagas before he came to the island, and spoke with a North American accent.
Predictably, the third member of Kyriakou’s party was Manuela Valez, a Puerto Rican, dark, fragile and handsome. They went to a table ahead of Charles Black, and the Greek and the girl sat facing him, but his view was partially obscured by Tino Costa’s broad back. Black watched them with detached irony. Everything the Greek did was flamboyant, from the way he shot inches of starched white cuff—heavily weighted with gold nugget links—to the exaggerated ceremonial as he tasted the champagne, to which Tino Costa insisted on adding vodka. Kyriakou made a fuss because there were no flowers on the table, and when the chief steward explained that it was because of the weather, he brushed this aside and demanded flowers. When the chief steward gave in and had organised them, supporting the vase with sugar bowls, the Greek flourished a snake-skin wallet, peeling crisp one hundred peseta notes from it, each coming clear with an audible zip, to be passed to the chief steward with a grandiose flourish. As if he were knighting him, thought Black.
Though he had not met her, Black had, during his time on Ibiza, heard the island gossip about Manuela Valez, just as she had heard that about him.
Like him she was a comparatively recent arrival, a painter of sorts. He’d seen some of her pictures and thought little of them: crude attempts at a Miro-like spideryness, unconvincing abstractions, indifferently executed. She lived in a flat in the barrio sa Peña on a scale which, though modest, could not have been supported by the proceeds of her painting. Some said she lived on remittances from a well-to-do father in Puerto Rico, others that she had good alimony, but the rumour favoured was that Kyriakou supported her. She admitted to being on hash and LSD, but her detractors suspected more, notwithstanding her denials, and since the Greek was thought —or so the whispers went—to be involved vicariously in drug trafficking, her dependence on him seemed logical.
Black had been on the island long enough to know that the rumours which circulated in its café society were often inaccurate, often malicious, and he wondered how much of what he’d heard was true. And it happened that Manuela Valez was at that moment thinking about him and making much the same reservations. Since she faced him, she was obliged to look at the sun-bleached Englishman with the hawkish bearded face whom she had seen at times sitting outside the Montesol, sometimes with members of the artists-writers colony and their hangers-on, but more often alone. None of her friends seemed to know him well, and in her three months on the island she had not found herself in the same party. So while she talked to Kyriakou a part of her mind recalled what she had heard about Black: that he was artistic, charming but shiftless, drank too much and existed on a modest remittance from England supplemented by the proceeds of occasional contributions to art journals.
Not surprisingly, because he was seldom seen with women, he was rumoured to be a homosexual. She wasn’t interested and so didn’t care, but it had occurred to her that he wasn’t often seen with men either, so perhaps he just didn’t like people. Which wasn’t difficult for her to understand, because she wasn’t at all sure she liked people. At least not those she seemed to see most of these days.
Her last thought about him was interrupted by Tino Costa who was pawing at her knee under the table. She pushed away his hand, glared at him and turned to Kyriakou who was filling the Cypriot’s glass for the fourth time.
‘Don’t give him any more,’ she said. ‘He’s getting above himself.’
‘Wadya mean?’ Tino was red-eyed and hoarse.
‘You know what I mean,’ she said.
He stared at her, wondering how much she’d say in front of the Greek and deciding through an alcoholic haze not to take any chances with the boss who was a mean bastard if crossed.
The moment of tension passed Kyriakou by, and he continued his story of an art-forger friend and went on pouring the champagne as if nothing had happened.
The meal proceeded with Kyriakou doing the talking while Tino sulked. Manuela listened to the Greek with half attention, while she thought of other things. Towards the end of the meal he stood up. ‘You two wait here.’ He dabbed at his lips with a table napkin. ‘I’m going down aft to see how Benny’s getting on. Back soon.’
Manuela looked sad. ‘Poor Benny,’ she said.
Tino Costa snorted. ‘How come a guy who claims he was an Olympic swimmer, pukes his heart out for a few waves?’
‘A man can’t help it if he’s seasick,’ said Kyriakou. ‘He’s not God.’ The Greek took Manuela’s hand and with an exaggerated bow kissed it before making an exit which included hand-waves, smiles and shouted ‘Allo’s’ in several directions. Black noticed that he himself was not among the recipients. Not long afterwards Tino Costa took over the Greek’s empty chair and Black saw him slant towards the girl like a toppled sack of potatoes, sliding an arm along the back of her chair and whispering hoarsely.
She drew away, but a large hand pulled her back and the whisper continued. Whatever it was he was saying, the Puerto Rican girl didn’t like it. She tried to get up but he pulled her back. This time she let fly and the noise as she slapped his face was like the muted crack of a whip. Tino’s mouth fell open with surprise. He swore at the girl as she pulled free and moved away from the table.
As she came abreast of where Black was sitting the Cypriot caught up with her, grabbed her arm and said, ‘You goddam bitch. You don’t get away with that…’
Black had no intention of intervening. There were good reasons why he shouldn’t mix in a brawl, but when she turned to him, eyes bright with fear, and whispered, ‘Please help me,’ her appeal was so urgent that he got up awkwardly, hating the involvement, and said to the Cypriot: ‘Cut it out, chum.’ He tried to sound friendly, to keep his voice free of animus, but Costa had drunk a lot of wine and was in no mood to let this Englishman stop him dealing with a woman who had publicly insulted him.
He put his free hand on Black’s shoulder and pushed him away, and only the roll of the ship saved the Englishman from the table behind him. ‘Keep outa this,’ the Cypriot warned hoarsely.
Conversation in the saloon stopped, all eyes on the two men while stewards hovered nearby. But even they did not see what Black did. In a quick movement he slipped between the Cypriot and the girl and the next moment Costa let go his hold, staggered back and clapped a hand to his arm, grimacing with pain. Recovering, he moved forward and squared up to Black just as a voice from the saloon door shouted, ‘Quit that, Tino!’ The big man dropped his arms, looking like a dog called to heel. Kyriakou pushed into the small group, jaw out-thrust, and glowered from Manuela to Black to Tino.
The girl said, ‘He tried to get fresh, Kirry. I slapped his face. Then he wanted to hit me.’
Kyriakou turned on Tino. ‘You goddam sonofabitch. Put one hand on that girl and I break you in leetle pieces. Understand?’
The Cypriot shook his head. ‘I didn’t get fresh, boss. She got me wrong.’
‘Like hell she got you wrong,’ Kyriakou’s eyes dilated. ‘You’re drunk. Get to hell out of it.’ He pointed imperiously at the door.
Tino Costa’s perspiring face was agitated. Kyriakou had cracked the whip, and, befuddled though he was, Tino knew he had to obey. Shaking his head, muttering, he lumbered out of the saloon. At an adjoining table a thin man with dark glasses and a christ-beard got up and followed.
Manuela looked at Charles Black and then away. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her breath coming in small gasps. ‘You stopped him. He’s crazy.’ Black liked her soft foreign accent, the inflections of Caribbean Spanish with North American undertones. Somehow the way she said them, expressed more than the words she used.
He hitched his shoulders. ‘It was nothing.’
But he was thinking that it might have been if Kyriakou hadn’t turned up. The Cypriot wasn’t all that drunk. It would have been a brawl by any standards. He didn’t really doubt his ability to deal with Tino, but these things couldn’t be done neatly among the tables and chairs of a swaying dining-saloon.
Kyriakou turned off his rage like a tap, and became in an instant all smiles and geniality. ‘Fine, fine, old chap,’ he beamed, rubbing his hands and looking round to see who was in the audience. ‘So you protect my leetle Manuela. Ah. Very nice. I am so much grateful.’
‘I’m not your Manuela,’ said the girl. ‘And I wish you’d keep your friend Costa on a leash.’
The Greek’s eyes flickered but he laughed as he took Black’s arm. ‘Ah. She make leetle joke, hey? Come along. Join us for a dreenk. We soon forget Tino’s nonsense. He take too much vodka. Make him angry.’
Black hesitated, was about to refuse, when he remembered the dingy cabin. He wasn’t tired enough for that. Besides these two might have some information, however little, that could help him. The girl saw his hesitation. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘We would like you to.’
So he accepted, saying that he would join them when he’d settled his account with the chief steward.
After that he went across. Kyriakou had unbuttoned his coat and was sitting back smoking a cigar, shirt buttons straining across the round of his stomach.
‘Aha! Sit down Mister …? Forgeev me. I forget.’
‘Charles Black,’ said the Englishman.
Kyriakou’s white teeth flashed under the black moustache. ‘Of course, of course. The art critic. Yes?’
Black nodded and sat down. Kyriakou beckoned to a waiter. Black ordered a coñac. Manuela wouldn’t drink, and the Greek ordered an Oso.
‘You know Manuela Valez?’ he asked, knowing perfectly well that Black didn’t.
Black smiled at her. ‘Hallo,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ she replied and her dark eyes seemed to be trying to read his mind.
The Greek was preoccupied, and Black and the girl did most of the talking. The tables emptied and the stewards hovered, until Kyriakou lifted himself out of his thoughts and said: ‘What say we go to the bar?’
Black was enjoying himself. Manuela Valez was not the person he had imagined her to be. She was intelligent and sympathetic. Most of the time they discussed Ibiza and he was amused by her gossip about the Ibizencan painters and writers, and though he’d not gleaned anything new he wasn’t anxious to face the disenchanting cabin. It was not long after ten, so he said, ‘Yes. Good idea.’
For the next hour or so they sat at the bar. She didn’t drink, but somehow they laughed a lot, and Black wasn’t sorry when on two occasions Kyriakou left them for one reason or another.
It was close to midnight when the party broke up, and by then they were all on first name terms. Black looked at Manuela. ‘See you to-morrow.’
‘Surely,’ she said, and he wondered if she meant it and found to his concern that he hoped she did.
His last thought before going to sleep was to regret the fracas in the dining-saloon. It had been stupid and undignified, and it had made him conspicuous.