‘Tomorrow,’ he said and pointed at us, as if the word contained the terror of fate itself. ‘Tomorrow will be the end.’
Everyone else in the casino was waking from their unconscious state, bleary-eyed and confused, and getting to their feet. There was a general bubble of commotion in the room again, this time infused with gasps of wonder and muttered questions.
Alberto frowned at his daughter. ‘We can’t just let him go. He just tried to kill you…He is a killer.’
‘We can stop the hotel,’ Marta said. ‘There will be enough people. And we can get the money, we don’t need much more. We can get it. The casino doesn’t close…’
As Art Butler reached the door he glanced around at all the humans staring at him. He was about to say something else. I sensed a big monologue, half-formed, waiting unhatched behind his twitching lips. But he thought twice about it, and then he simply walked away, out into the foyer, beyond the security guards, into the emerging day.
We watched him leave, doing absolutely nothing about it because of all the witnesses. I then returned to the poker room to collect my chips, thinking, That was a little too easy.
Because, of course, it was.
The Gathering
Marta was speaking beside a lake, in the shimmering heat. Sun scattered light across the water like a thousand jewels.
The lake was a small one, in the Parc de la Pau, where we and all the protesters had arrived following a slow and noisy thronging through the streets of Ibiza Town.
The Diario de Ibiza would later say that more than twenty thousand protesters came to the streets of Ibiza Town that particular Thursday afternoon. Indeed, the actual figure was twenty-seven thousand, four hundred and fifty-two.
There was every type of person you can find in Ibiza there. The old and the young. Hippies and business owners. Locals and foreigners. Rich and poor. Clubbers and yogis. Modernists and traditionalists. Radicals and reactionaries. The hyper-healthy and the eternally hungover. The shouters and the silent. Winners and losers. Families and friends and loners. And drummers. Lots of drummers. I could have done without the drummers, I have to be honest.
I will give you a roughly translated extract of Marta’s speech:
‘When me and my friend Christina went online and asked for people to protest against the development on Es Vedrà, I expected about a hundred people. To see all of us here is truly remarkable. Ibiza is a special place. And I wish Christina could be here today. She would have loved to see this sight. She would have wanted to thank you all for coming. Today is the day we make a stand and tell the people with power that nature is something we want to protect…Because when they destroy nature, they destroy a part of us. Today is the day we tell Sofía Torres we don’t want flowers to go extinct. We don’t want goats to be shot. We don’t want any more agreements to destroy the most precious parts of this island. We don’t want any more of Art Butler and his Eighth Wonder Resorts stamping all over this island. Because what is good for this island is good for us too. We will keep protecting what makes this place special. We will keep rising like the sea…And we have risen. And we will walk to Sofía Torres and Art Butler and make sure she fulfils the promise, that if we turned up before the start of her press conference with more than twenty thousand people and eighty thousand euros she would withdraw her support for the Es Vedrà deal. Which would mean her party would too. Which would mean there would be no deal at all. So that is what we will do! We will walk to the Eighth Wonder hotel in Talamanca, beside Talamanca beach, and we…’
She was good at this. She walked back and forth, pumping her fists like a rock star. The crowd cheered at the right moments. Everything was going well. And we had eighty-one thousand euros, in cash, in my beach bag.
Again, I was enjoying myself. People think of a protest as something angry, or something earnestly hopeful, but it can also be something quite meditative and healing. It is about being part of something bigger. A kind of selflessness, in the true sense of the word. The way a herring must feel swimming in a school with her fellows.
All we had to do was walk the crowd down to the hotel in Talamanca before the start of the Eighth Wonder press conference at five p.m., show the money and the people to Sofía Torres, and she would uphold her bargain, or face the wrath of the whole island.
But something was wrong. There was a note of discord within the plan.
Something I only picked up on because I was standing near to a journalist – Rosa Piera, thirty-eight years old, hypochondriac, recently divorced, mind like a hectic funfair in the rain – and she had just received a WhatsApp message from a colleague telling her the press conference would be taking place at Cala d’hort in half an hour. On the actual beach.
Alberto realised. ‘We have to tell everyone.’
‘No. Think about it. It’s a twenty-minute drive. If everyone here heads there, we’ll never make it. The roads will be blocked. And what if Art does something to them? It’s too big a risk. Let’s wait for Marta and go.’
Alberto sighed. I knew what he was thinking. He’d heard Marta’s speech and it was long.
‘We need to go now. Right this minute. Let’s leave Marta here. We can handle this. More than twenty thousand people already turned up to the protest, so that part is done. We just need to show Sofía the money and film us doing so, and if Art is a problem, we will deal with it. ¡Vamos! ¡A la playa!’
A Bag of Sand
The press conference was about to start.
There was a small stage set up on the beach, with journalists sat in chairs on the sand and a little aisle between them. Like a wedding. Or a funeral. Es Vedrà loomed large in the background, dark and powerful and beautiful, like a shadowy and inescapable truth.
Sofía Torres and Art Butler were seated on the stage, behind a table garnished with papers and water bottles, with Art Butler’s PR person ready to do the compering. Sofía was looking at her watch.
Alberto was striding across the sand, shouting in a cocktail of Spanish and Catalan and English and Alberto for them to stop the press conference.
Art Butler’s PR, a brittle-minded person called Alison, just looked over to a hired security guard on the back row and clicked her fingers.
‘Paco?’
‘I am not going to cause any trouble,’ continued Alberto, as I tried to keep up with him across the sand. ‘I just have something important to tell Sofía Torres. There is a video of her on the internet agreeing to prevent the development of Es Vedrà if we managed to get her twenty thousand protesters and eighty thousand euros. Well, I can confirm that there are many more people than that currently walking the streets of Ibiza Town. And in my good friend’s bag we have eighty-one thousand euros in cash, which—’
Sofía was deeply uncomfortable. She undid her water bottle. ‘We will discuss this after.’
‘No,’ Alberto said, stepping forward. ‘We will discuss this now. You made a promise.’
The smattering of journalists were looking at us. I felt their focus on me the way a flower feels a press, but I stayed firm. I looked around. There was no one else on the beach, I realised. The beach boutique was empty. Even the restaurant was empty. I noticed a new tank now. And new lobsters. Alberto’s boat was there, though. The rickety old Neptuno. Bobbing in the waters. And his even older rowing boat, once his grandmother’s, perched high up the beach in the distance.
Sofía turned to Art. ‘I’m sorry about this.’
Art smiled. The smile disconcerted me. I couldn’t understand it. It had taken me an hour to get inside his mind last night. But I was pretty sure the smile was genuine. I remembered him leaving the casino voluntarily the previous night. Too easily. This was all a trap. ‘It’s over, Mrs Winters.’
That did it. I stormed over and put my bag on their table. I opened it and showed them the cash. ‘It’s all there.’
‘It’s too late,’ said Sofía, her hand cupped over her microphone. ‘The deal has been signed.’
‘No,’ said Alberto, backing me up. Putting another useless ‘no’ into the air. ‘We have the money. We have the money, Sofía.’
‘Unfortunately, you don’t,’ said Sofía.
