More and more like attempting to reanimate dead flesh, this here is yet another attempt to get the recalcitrant The Family Plot to jump into life. Whether or not this will lead to anything we shall have to see. I think what we need is more voltage. Raise the antenna, Igor.
I nodded awake suddenly. I was in a large hotel lounge that had walls of glass on three sides looking out towards an infuriated sea that foamed beneath a purple evening sky – the hotel occupied a headland that jutted into the sea like the prow of a ship. A road ran around the headland and the sea flung itself angrily up over the sea wall and onto it, the spray from the shattered waves flew the fifty yards between the sea and the hotel and was lashed against the plate glass by the wind which wailed around the corners of the lounge. Further inland, I could see a black tongue of tarmac extending from beneath the yawning concrete porte-cochere of the hotel to the seafront road; between the seafront road and the hotel drive there was a magnificent row of thick-trunked palm trees, their branches flailing in the wind like bereaved women, and a row of five flagpoles that waved in the strong wind. The flags were supposed to represent, I suppose, the international flavour of the hotel: there was the loud and tasteless star-spangled banner of the United States, the complicated perspective-defying mess of the Union Jack, the logical stripes of Germany, the somehow jauntier French tricolour and some others that I did not recognise. Perhaps they were the flags of local businesses – there certainly was one showing the stern logo of PICC, whose plant dominated the town at that time.
The fourth wall of the lounge was panelled in dark smooth wood, the effect endeavouring to mesh with the faintly oriental feel that pervaded the hotel and not quite managing to do so – here and there were fretwork screens, potted bamboos and framed embroideries of peasants toiling in paddy fields; in the lobby, I remembered, there was a small ornamental lake with tiny pagodas and bridges and where, when the hotel was new, there had been bonsai trees. Now there were only bonsai stumps. Remembering the lobby recalled me to myself. I could not remember how I had come to be in the lounge: I had suffered a long and trying journey. I supposed, felt, imagined, that I had been left here to await something or other – my bags, which I felt sure should be with me, were not. People stood among the low green velvet upholstered sofas and armchairs of the lobby talking in hushed tones and sipping coloured drinks from tall glasses. The lights were on low and the light outside was failing quickly. For the first time I noticed a large ship in the bay beating against wind and tide to stay off the beach – it was this that the people in the lobby appeared to be discussing.
I could not worry about the ship now, though. I had seen also that the telephone cables to the hotel had been pulled down by the wind and lay in a tangled knot across the hotel drive. Periodically the wind ripped a branch from the palms and hurled it at the front of the hotel. Salt spray hissed angrily at the window. The lights in the lounge flickered timorously. The street lamps went out. I strode across the lounge purposefully, intending to discover what was going on – I wanted my room to be arranged before the power went off, as it surely must. Also, I was becoming more worried that I could not recall where I was – well, let me clarify: not more worried, more irritated. I travelled a lot in those days and often I would wake and be unsure of my location. Normally, though, it was after a night’s sleep and in a darkened bedroom that I was placeless, now though it was in the failing daylight after only a brief catnap brought on by exhaustion. I wanted a proper sleep. I wanted my room.
I did not reach the lobby. I was compelled to request a shabby-looking man to stand aside to let me pass through a narrow gap between the velvet furniture, but he misinterpreted my softly placed hand on his shoulder and murmured apology as a desire to talk to him. Worse, he seemed to know me.
“Ah, Caine,” he said, “found your brother yet?”
I assumed that he was drunk. My brother, I thought at that time, was dead. He was dead. The man, whoever he was, had a glass in his hand – empty.
The man saw me looked at his glass and realised what I had assumed. He extended his hand and said, “Name’s Arthur Stone, we met last year at the Strada day in Turin.”
I pretended to know what he was talking about and looked out at the ship to try to deflect his attention.
“Bad business, that,” Stone said. “There’s no way she’ll clear the Fangoso running against that tide.”
“The what?”
“The Fangoso,” repeated Stone as though he’d assumed I simply hadn’t heard him. He noticed my continuing puzzled expression and gestured at a line of enormous waves that extended out into the ocean from the tip of the headland. “Those waves there,” he explained, “are breaking over the jagged jaw of the Fangoso Rock. That ship is the Turaco, on board are two-hundred and four Espagnol Flamingos for the American market. She left early this morning for San Francisco but the hurricane has driven her back against the coast and she’s trying to get back into the harbour here. Gruber’s beside himself.”
Stone looked into the middle distance. I looked at the blackening silhouette of the ship through the salt spray and wondered whether this really was a hurricane and whether all these people had gathered to watch a shipwreck. It seemed so. There was an air of expectancy and they each glanced to the ship from time to time to confirm that they had missed nothing.
“Gruber?” I asked, aiming to fill that gap in my knowledge. I knew what an Espagnol Flamingo was: two- or four-door saloon or five-door station wagon, three cylinder wet-sump two stroke, four speed rear-mounted transaxle, front double wishbones with torsion bars, rear swing axles on semi-elliptic leaf springs. Quad headlamps, reclining seats, heated rear window, reversing lamp. Made in Tierra Del Mar. Crap.
Stone looked at me as though I had said something quite stupid. “Espagnol CEO,” he explained. “He’s here for the reception although I expect there’ll not be one if the Turaco goes down. He’ll probably go into the library with a revolver or whatever it is that krauts do.” He paused and examined me critically for the first time. “You’re looking a bit worn,” he observed. There wasn’t really any detectable emotion in his voice. It was a statement and it was true. “Odd about your brother,” he went on. I waited to see whether the garrulous Stone would explain what needed to be explained.
He didn’t and so I patted his arm filially and wandered through one of the doors in the panelled wall to the enormous reception lobby. Two walls of the room were of the same timber panelling as the lounge, of the other two, one was of glass and was perforated by the glass main entrance doors that were guarded by an elderly commissionaire with a white walrus moustache and a great deal of gold-braid, the other wall was behind the reception desk and was of the same pale marble as the floor. The ceiling was stippled plaster that made me think of a cave I had once been in. It wasn’t much like the cave – it was too smooth and white and high and warm, but the feeling of a relationship between the lobby and the cave was there. In the centre of the lobby were three new Espagnol cars, each polished to a ludicrous shine that showed off the rippled bodywork and colossal panel-gaps that were the mark of poor quality in those days: there was a two door saloon in blood red, a four door saloon in royal blue and a five door station wagon that was the colour of English mustard, though Espagnol called the colour Desert Sunset. Someone had left a sandwich on the roof of the station wagon, and all three cars were entirely ignored.
Apart from the commissionaire, the only people in the lobby were behind the desk. One of them, an elderly man, waved to me and I went across to lean against the desk. He bid me a good evening and I returned the sentiment. A girl in the uniform of a chambermaid read a magazine in Spanish and did not look up. The old man, who I discovered from his name badge to be called Lionel Stillings, emerged from behind the desk by way of a little concealed door and pressed his hand against my shoulder to guide me to the glass by the doors. A stream of cold came off the glass, which here, beneath the porte-cochere, was not lashed with such ferocity by the storm. Water poured from the roof of the porte-cochere where the wind had pulled away a drainpipe and slapped heavily on the concrete flags. The wind had uprooted marigolds and pansies from the pebbledashed planters that separated the porte-cochere from the lawns that had the flagpoles and the palms set in them and scattered them across the wet tarmac of the drive. Stillings and I gazed at the weather for a moment, flinching together whenever a strong gust shook the glass doors.
“We still have not been able to discover your brother’s whereabouts,” whispered Stillings, presently. He looked about to go on but did not, instead he looked from me to the commissionaire and back several times. Eventually he seemed to reach a decision and said to the commissionaire: “Erast, you may take the rest of the evening off – I think with this weather no more guests will be going out and no more will arrive.” He peered at the seafront road and said almost to himself, “the road is quite flooded.”
Erast clicked his heels together and then clicked away on them to the lounge, presumably to watch the ship meet its almost certainly messy end on the Fangoso rock.
“I say,” I said, suddenly conscious that I’d heard the word Fangoso somewhere before, “what does Fangoso mean? It sounds familiar.”
Stillings looked wrong-footed. “I don’t know,” he eventually said, “I suppose it could be from the Old English…” he trailed away into nothing, trying to maintain a knowledgeable expression. The he said, confidently, “I expect it’ll be from the same root as the river’s name.”
“The river,” I asked, “what river?”
“Ah, yes, I had forgotten that you have only this afternoon arrived: the river flows into the sea immediately to the south of us beyond the headland. Its estuary is our little town’s harbour. It is called the Rio Fangoso.”
“That sounds Spanish,” I said. I didn’t mean anything else by it. It did, I thought, sound Spanish. I did not think I was in Spain, though – indeed, I was certain that I was not, but still I could not recall where I was. I was irritated afresh: I could scarcely establish my whereabouts by a process of elimination. I automatically discounted Australia and then automatically changed my mind – this could be southern Australia, couldn’t it? It wasn’t, though.
Stillings nodded at my statement. He wore a confused expression now also. “There is a motorcade coming up the drive,” he said, and clicked away across the marble. He was right. There was a motorcade coming up the drive – two motorcycle outriders with flashing blue lights, a black Lancia Flaminia with blue lights behind the grille and flags (lime green and blood red in three stripes – the outermost red, the centre green) fluttering from the front wings, a black Lancia Trevi with a blue light rotating on its roof, an Alfa Romeo Guiletta police car and two more motorcycle outriders identical to the first. They all swept to a stop under the concrete porte-cochere and four large men leapt out of the Trevi with guns and pointed them at the storm. The driver of the Flaminia got out and opened the rear passenger door to release a cloud of cigar fumes and a small swarthy man in an olive drab uniform that was immaculately creased. At his left side dangled a presumably ceremonial rapier, on his right side there was a pearl-handled revolver, on his head there was a peaked cap, across his chest were the telegraphic coloured stripes of innumerable military decorations. He wore, despite the fact that night had by now fallen, large black sunglasses and he was swagged with metre upon metre of gold braid. He was not unlike the commissionaire.
Stillings had reappeared at my elbow and let out a small cry of indistinct meaning.
“Oh God,” he whimpered, revealing that the cry had not been one of joy, “it’s President Ortega!”
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