“Obbrigado, Senhora.”
I slammed the phone down, grabbed Astrid’s arm, and lugged her with me to the outside. As we ran to the car, she said: “But for heaven’s sake...” and I told her: “You’d better stay with me, I don’t like the way things are shaping up. I don’t like it at all.”
Would it have been safer to have left her there? I just don’t know. All I knew was that something was happening—had perhaps happened already—that I should have expected and been prepared for.
I pushed the starter button, reared round in a tight U-turn, and headed straight down the hill. I kept my finger on the horn and went fast down Rua da Regueira into the impossibly tight alley of San Miguel, the walls of the houses no more than an inch from the sides of the car, swung into Beco do Meixas, and bit the square at the bottom at sixty miles an hour. I braked hard and skidded over the cobbles where the water was running down the steps, past the vegetable stalls there where a man leaped back in the nick of time and shouted an obscenity at me, and pushed her hard out into the wide street of the Trigo.
We’d gone no more than a few yards, but we’d dropped a few hundred feet as well, and Astrid took a deep breath and asked plaintively: “Couldn’t we just get out and walk?”
The streets were heavy with traffic now, and we had to fight donkey carts and push barrows till we got to the broad and beautiful Praca do Commercio, the stateliest square in Europe, with its huge quadrangle of pale-green painted buildings and the fine white marble statues of Vasco da Gama, Alvares and Viriatus and the Marquis of Pombal on top of the Arch of Triumph, lit now by the bright beams of the floodlights. I speeded up and shot past an angry traffic cop, and hit the Avenue of the Fourth of July at seventy-five; and once we passed the beautiful Tower of Belem, where the traffic was thinning out, I put my foot down and pushed her really hard.
The powerful motor hummed, but the Michelin radial-ply tires, steel bound, hung tight to the road as we left the town and hit the highway along the coast. I heard a siren behind me, and saw two motorcycle police coming up fast in the wing mirror, so I pushed a bit harder and lost them when we topped a hundred and ten. I switched on the long-range driving lights, the Lucas Flame Throwers that light up the road ahead as bright as day for a mile or more.
We by-passed Estoril by taking the second-class road, then slowed to eighty to go through the back of the little fishing town of Cascais, taking the inland road through the pines to by-pass the traffic, and braked savagely to a skid round the bend to hit the coast again; and two minutes later we saw the lights of the lagosteria.
I took a short cut by jumping the ditch at the side of the road and pulled up under the brilliant overhead flare that was meant to keep away intruders and let the watchman see anyone who might come sneaking round the tiny growing lobsters in their dark deep caverns; lobsters are expensive now, even in Portugal, and the guard always carried a shotgun.
Only he wasn’t there. And I had a premonition of disaster.
I said to Astrid, whispering: “Stay here in the car. Keep the engine running, and at the first sign of anything you don’t like the look of, head for home, fast. You know how to drive with a stick shift?”
She nodded. “But can’t I...can’t I come with you? I’m scared.”
I hesitated. The danger was nebulous, inexplicably worrying; there’d been no evidence that anything was really wrong, and yet...I had a nasty feeling that someone, somebody, knew of my interest in whatever it was I was supposed to be interested in here. I couldn’t explain it, even to myself; but I always play my hunches, it’s wiser. I wished I’d brought the General’s tough little servant with me to look after Astrid.
I said, a little dubiously: “All right. Stay close to me, all the time.”
She said fervently: “I will, don’t worry about that.”
I reached into the glove compartment and took out the flashlight, and we went quickly down the steep slope of the sandy bank towards the broken rocks of the beach.
The Bocca do Inferno, the Mouth of Hell, is well named. When the wind is in the southwest, as it was not now, thank heaven, the driven sea beats into a monstrous complex of caves that lead from a tight funnel at sea level down under the hundred-foot cliff. There’s a gorge that cuts through the middle of it all, well-wired off at the top to keep the curious tourists away, and the sides of the gorge are pitted with smaller caves and tunnels, some of them boring deep down into unexplored recesses deep under the cliff.
A party of spelunkers had been there last year to explore the deepest of these. They reached a depth of four hundred and eighty feet before the ground gave way beneath their feet and buried all six of them, five young students from the geology class at the University and their teacher. Now, this tunnel too has been wired off.
We gave it all a very wide berth and moved along the beach to where the lagosteria is. It is part of the same complex of caves, but far enough away from the Bocca itself to be quite harmless, unless you’re fool enough to lose your footing. Here, there’s a deep slice into the cliff that is man-made, a squared off passage that was cut by hand, no one knows how long ago or why, that opens up into a huge chamber, some eighty feet square and fifteen feet high, with a smooth floor of ancient cement. When the cavern was first discovered, they found that the cement used was made with egg whites, which presupposes the work was done by the Romans; but some say that the Phoenicians carved it out while they were on their way to build Gadir, the “wall fortification” in Spain, that later became known as Cadiz; that was eleven hundred years before Christ.
Be that as it may, some of the minor caverns, the safe ones, have now been put to a more prosaic use; lobsters are bred there. The owners of the various lagosterias have cut great square holes in the concrete floor, below which—and a few feet down—the water of the sea is gentle and subdued, in surprising contrast to the fury of the turmoil just round the corner, where the waters of the Bocca are driven up sky-high through the deep cleft in the rock.
In this huge backwash, several hundred square yards in area, the young lobsters come by the hundreds, and they are trapped here by a series of heavy wire grills and left to feed on the thousands of dying fish which are trapped by the rise and fall of the tide. It is as though a false floor of concrete had been built across the uneven floor of the ocean, some two or three feet above it—a great deal more above it in parts, where the bottom drops away into natural reservoirs—so that there is easy access from a sensibly stable platform into the dark and murky depths below. The cut holes, in turn, are covered with massive slabs of concrete which are moved aside, when collection time comes, with a simple rope and winch, and as many lobsters as are required can then be hauled up by hand. It is a profitable business, and the heavy slabs are there to make sure no inquisitive explorer goes home with his rucksack full of lobsters at twenty escudos a head.
These are not true lobsters, of course, not the Homaridae whose major legs terminate in crushing claws; these are the Palinuridae, the spiny lobster or crawfish that taste so well when they’re cooked in a mixture of court bouillon and cognac, or grilled over an open hearth and brushed with black butter. But they crowd their confined homes here by the hundreds, scarcely moving in the darkness except when the rising tide deposits their food for them and then falls back to leave it there.
I shielded my eyes against the glare of the big lamp at the top of the cliff and waited for someone to yell out and ask what I was doing there; there was only the boisterous sound of the sea, and I wondered where the watchman was; down there himself?
I went quickly down the sand-blown concrete steps that have been cut into the side of the cliff, with Astrid nervously following, and the spray coming up and soaking us both, and landed in the relative quiet at the bottom to find the wooden door that leads to the cavern ajar; the padlock was open with the key still in it. I turned the bright beam of the flashlight over the cavern and studied it.
High in the roof, the water was dripping slowly; we could hear the sound of the wash below our feet, and the flashlight showed me why—one of the huge concrete slabs had been pulled away on its winch to open up a trap. We skirted it carefully, peering down into the murky depths of the water below, and swung the light down each of the many tunnels that led God knows where, one after the other. There was a sign on the rock wall, painted in red letters on white near the entrance to one of the many subsidiary tunnels that lead down into the black silence there; it said: Caution, the roof is unstable, do not make noise. I called out none the less: “Guarda! Watchman!” Some rubble trickled down from the roof, and my voice echoed back a dozen times, the sound dying away slowly, reluctantly. I called again, louder; only the echoes came back; and more rubble.
I swung the beam of the light slowly over the walls. An electrical cord ran along the ceiling, with bare bulbs hanging from it at intervals, and I followed its line and found the switch and flicked it on. The bulbs lit up and cast their eerie shadows over the red and yellow rocks.
And there, swinging from an iron support in the ceiling, swaying still at the end of a rope, was the body of General Queluz.
CHAPTER 4
Astrid’s scream reverberated through the chamber, a scream that went on and on and on as she clutched at me and buried her face in my chest.
I said: “For God’s sake!” I tried to stifle the sound, and before I could say another word, another small shower of stones and rubble fell from the ceiling. She gasped.
I said gently: “There’s nothing we can do, and screaming won’t help. You’ll just bring the roof down on us.” She turned back to stare at the swaying body, staring as though hypnotized, and I said roughly, trying to throw some sense into her: “You’ve seen dead men before, in your business.”
Her voice was a whisper: “Yes, but not...not like that.”
I broke away from her and went to the body and touched it; it was cold. And then, in the terrible silence, I became aware of something that shouldn’t be there. I moved swiftly to the light switch and flicked it off, and in the darkness I heard Astrid gasp; she whispered urgently: “No, no, not the darkness.”
I felt for her and took her arm and guided her carefully back the way we had come. She began to say something, and I put a finger on her lips and held it there, feeling her freeze. I put my mouth very close to her ear and whispered: “No sound at all.”
Very carefully, very slowly, we moved together, step by slow step, towards the iron gate; I tried hard to visualize just where that gaping hole was in the floor, and reached out an arm to search for the rope of the winch in the darkness. I found it, and we skirted the entrance to the trap and moved on.
The scent that had alarmed me was stronger now; the ripe, sweet scent of tobacco.
I don’t smoke, myself, and I can smell a cigarette a long way away. The General was a nonsmoker too, and if it was the watchman, why hadn’t he answered my call?
There was no alien sound, just the murmur of the water, a faint lap-lap in slow cadence. The darkness, after the bright flare of the lights, was impenetrable, and Astrid’s lithe body was stiff as she walked beside me, trying hard not to make a noise, walking on the tips of her toes and the leather scuffling the concrete floor. And then, suddenly, the lights went on again.
We’d come to within a few feet of the wooden door, and there they were, two of them, with their weapons pointed straight at us.
One of them was a tall, gangling man, with cadaverous cheeks and an unhealthy pallor to his skin, a man with lank hair falling over his forehead and dark, resentful eyes. He wore an off-white sweatshirt and khaki trousers, with a broad leather belt and a loosely-cut jacket of worn-out Bedford cord, and he carried a sawed-off shotgun very easily and nonchalantly in one hand, with the butt tucked under a bony elbow and the barrel pointed straight at my stomach.
