I jumped the few feet across the gap onto the next roof, worked my way around to the other side, and stood there looking down into the tiny courtyard. The Chao Salgado.
I’d never seen the monument from this high angle before. It looked like a slender spear pointing up at the sky, its top a few feet below me and ten yards or so away.
And then, I saw him.
He was less than five hundred feet away from me, crawling along the lower edge of a steep roof, ready, I thought, to slip at any minute; there was no abutment to break his fall if he should find a couple of loose tiles there. He was reaching for a rope, a long manila rope that was wound once around the chimney stack and dropped down into the street, left there by the workmen cleaning some yellow and blue tile work when they’d been herded away by the police. I saw him haul it up and unhook it from its mooring, and he flung it almost like a lasso, slinging its loop over a cast iron sewer vent on the roof of the house opposite. He missed on the first throw, and on the second as well; but the third try was successful. He put his weight on it and swung out and down, swinging fast like Tarzan on the end of a vine.
He slammed into the opposite wall with an awful force, but he was climbing again immediately, climbing high onto the rooftops once more. He jiggled the rope till the other end was free, and ran fast towards me till he came to the end of the building. I saw him look down into the street and pull back quickly. Following the direction of his look, I saw that five or six policemen were down there, looking up towards him; I didn’t know whether they’d seen him or not.
I heard a shout, and Loveless looked round. Three soldiers were crawling along the steep roof-pitch towards him, three houses away, crawling on hands and knees with their rifles across their backs. There was more shouting down on the street below, and I looked down and saw Fenrek there, his white face staring up at me, Estrilla and Astrid were with him, and then they started running into the courtyard of the salted ground itself.
And now, Loveless was getting close. Worming his way along the roof on hands and knees, his rope trailing behind him, his shotgun still in his hand, he was directly opposite me now, less than fifty feet away. Between us, the tiny courtyard was a chasm, the monument poking its morbid spear into the air and looking, from this angle, somehow insignificant. He was groping his way along with a fine disregard for the danger he was in, when a tile fell and crashed to the courtyard below, he paid it no attention at all.
And then, he saw me. He raised his head and our eyes met. I was standing up in full view, because there just wasn’t any cover; he would have seen me long before if he hadn’t been looking back over his shoulder to where the three soldiers were approaching him. For a moment, he stayed there on his hands and knees, looking me full in the face. And then he stood up and looked to his right; two men there, a house and a half away, were running on a flat roof towards him. To his left there was a wide gap he could never hope to cross, not even with his rope, and a man on the roof there yelled for support anyway. He was still yelling as some men came clambering up on a ladder to join him.
Loveless stood up then, and came to the edge of the roof, his arms held out for balance, walking towards me till we faced each other across the thirty-foot gap that was the Salted Ground. On opposing edges of the buildings, high above the courtyard, we faced each other across the monument, and waited.
He held out his gun in both hands, in front of his body, and broke it open and laughed shortly; it was empty. He said: “Need a good gun, Cain? I’ve no more use for the bloody thing.”
He swung it once round his head and hurled it at me. I ducked, and it smashed into the steep roof behind me, shattering tile with its force, and slid noisily down the slope to crash in the courtyard below. I saw a police officer run and pick it up; it was Loureiro. I saw Fenrek down there put out a preventive hand as someone raised a rifle.
Loveless slung the loop of his rope, then, and it fell on the first throw over the urn on top of the monument. He leaned back and pulled it tight, and said calmly: “I’d liked to have taken you with me, Cain.”
An ambiguous remark, if ever I heard one.
And then, quickly, not wasting any time, he slipped the other end of the rope round his throat, knotted it, tugged it tight, and stood there, a man with a gallow’s rope round his neck. He stood quite still for a moment, not looking back at the men who were approaching, not even when he must have heard two of them clattering across onto the roof he was standing on. His fists were at his waist, his feet wide apart, his head thrown back. He looked me full in the face for a moment or two, looked around at the crowded, sunlit rooftops, looked at the tightly packed houses teeming with life, looked back at me and shrugged, and half smiled...And then, he jumped.
Just before the sound of Astrid’s screaming, I heard the slight, infinitesimal crunch that was his neck breaking. He hung there on the column, his feet no more than a yard from the ground, his head twisted round and his sightless eyes staring up at me.
I turned away and began the slow climb down back across the red and grey tiled rooftops to where the ladder was. And by the time I reached the courtyard, they’d cut the Major down and decently covered his broken, wretched body with a blanket.
◆◆◆
We drove up to the Alentejano that night, Fenrek in a couple of casts and still gloating from the roasting he’d given them at the hospital when they expected him to stay there for a few days. He had a pair of shiny aluminum crutches which he was delighted with, like a child with a new toy.
He said: “It’s a fine thing to be a cripple, if you’ve got the leisure and patience for it.”
We had thin scallops of pork, tightly rolled and stuffed with squid and sautéed in Madeira, and there were six bottles of Dao on the table for the four of us.
It was a wine sort of night, a night when a great deal would be drunk and not much said, the kind of night when the wine would take us, first, through the sharpening of the senses and then through their blunting, with all of us knowing that there was very little that was left to be said now.
No one mentioned the Bocca, nor the Alfama, nor the Salted Ground; we talked, instead, sporadically, of the beaches at Estoril, of the fountains that play in the Garden of Jeronimos, of the horse-drawn carts that lumber their way across the river on the big flat ferry that goes to Cacilhas. We talked of the flower market in the Rossio, of the ancient wrought-iron elevator that takes you down the Baixa to the Upper Quarters, of the splendidly ornate railway station where the trains leave from upstaiss...
◆◆◆
Estrilla was happily slicing her Colonel’s meat for him, fussing over him like an over-zealous nurse, while Astrid sat close to me and stroked my knee under the tablecloth.
The night was cool and friendly, the scent of honeysuckle strong on the air; and through the trellis work of the patio the sea was blue-white down there in the gleam of the moon. That strange light was hanging over the mountains, the full moon clear as day, casting deep and luminescent shadows among the flowers of the garden. The wind was gentle and fresh, bringing with it the sweet aroma of the pine trees.
Midnight came, and went. We sat back in our chairs, some of us regurgitating gently, and listened to the sad-sweet notes of the fado. The dark-haired woman, her fingers tightly clasped, her eyes half closed, her brows drawn down, standing straight and proud, was singing softly:
...the fado is fire and ashes, love and jealousy, grief and sin...And if you want me for your mistress you must tell me, for my lover died last night...If you call me by my name, I will come to you...
The hours slipped by, and soon, there were just the four of us sitting there among the candles under the trees. It was getting cold now, and the wind was swinging round to the southwest. Soon, down there at the Bocca, the waves would be playing tricks again, spewing out their fury to the skies.
But here, and now, there was only peace, and the comfortable quiet of the Lisbon night.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Lyle-Smythe was born in Surrey, England. Prior to World War II, he served with the Palestine Police from 1936 to 1939 and learned the Arabic language. He was awarded an MBE in June 1938. He married Aliza Sverdova in 1939, then studied acting from 1939 to 1941.
In January 1940, Lyle-Smythe was commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps. Due to his linguistic skills, he transferred to the Intelligence Corps and served in the Western Desert, in which he used the surname “Caillou” (the French word for ‘pebble’) as an alias.
He was captured in North Africa, imprisoned and threatened with execution in Italy, then escaped to join the British forces at Salerno. He was then posted to serve with the partisans in Yugoslavia. He wrote about his experiences in the book The World is Six Feet Square (1954). He was promoted to captain and awarded the Military Cross in 1944.
Following the war, he returned to the Palestine Police from 1946 to 1947, then served as a Police Commissioner in British-occupied Italian Somaliland from 1947 to 1952, where he was recommissioned a captain.
After work as a District Officer in Somalia and professional hunter, Lyle-Smythe travelled to Canada, where he worked as a hunter and then became an actor on Canadian television.
He wrote his first novel, Rogue’s Gambit, in 1955, first using the name Caillou, one of his aliases from the war. Moving from Vancouver to Hollywood, he made an appearance as a contestant on the January 23 1958 edition of You Bet Your Life.
He appeared as an actor and/or worked as a screenwriter in such shows as Daktari, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (including the screenwriting for “The Bow-Wow Affair” from 1965), Thriller, Daniel Boone, Quark, Centennial, and How the West Was Won. In 1966-67, he had a recurring role (as Jason Flood) in NBC’s “Tarzan” TV series starring Ron Ely. Caillou appeared in such television movies as Sole Survivor (1970), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972, as Inspector Lestrade), and Goliath Awaits (198I). His cinema film credits included roles in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962), Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion (1965), The Rare Breed (1966), The Devil’s Brigade (1968), Hellfighters (1968), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977), Beyond Evil (1980), The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) and The Ice Pirates (1984).
Caillou wrote 52 paperback thrillers under his own name and the nom de plume of Alex Webb, with such heroes as Cabot Cain, Colonel Matthew Tobin, Mike Benasque, Ian Quayle and Josh Dekker, as well as writing many magazine stories.
Several of Caillou’s novels were made into films, such as Rampage with Robert Mitchum in 1963, based on his big game hunting knowledge; Assault on Agathon, for which Caillou did the screenplay as well; and The Cheetahs, filmed in 1989.
