When she was in the man made as though to climb in beside her, his dark eyes lecherous and searching. She stopped him. “In front with Garcia,” she said curtly.
The man protested, smiling at her now ingratiatingly, white teeth visible in the dark face. “But, señorita—”
“Out!” She spoke quietly, but there was steel in her eyes. “I do not wish to be pawed all the way to Vercín by you, Massias, my friend!”
Sulkily the dark man backed from the door and got into the front seat again. As he did so Karina noticed the snout of the sub-machine-gun wedged down beside the seat. That was comforting. Neither of the two men spoke again; they knew their orders. They drove at normal speed through the difficult streets of Ronda; when they were outside the city limits Karina leaned forward, eyes hard.
“Fast now,” she said harshly. “We may have little time. But drive carefully also. I do not wish to end up smashed against a tree like the others.”
The driver inclined his head. The car gathered speed, became a scarlet, silver, and black bullet descending from the dark heights of Ronda to the thin white strip of roadway which wound away beneath them.
Shaw, speeding out from Torremolinos for the frightening hairpin bends of the San Pedro road, was still a long way behind when the headlights of Karina’s car swept on to the wreckage around that cork-oak below Vercín, and sent the night-birds soaring in a whirl of wings.
At a word from Karina her driver eased down and stopped alongside the wreck.
Karina looked out at the broken, twisted bodywork of the car. She saw no movement; the wreckage was empty and lifeless. The dead men had gone, probably taken by the Civil Guard up to Vercín at the same time as the man Ackroyd. Karina felt contempt for the two dead Spaniards — it had been their own fault for travelling at such speed on that shocking road, when by using the San Pedro road to Ronda they would have in fact made better time, even if the distance was greater — and would have been alive, and she and Ackroyd away from Spain by now. She had no pity. Her face was like a mask, then — expressionless. As she watched a red lantern winked from out of the scrub off the roadway to the right, and animation came back to her. She reached out a hand and switched on the car’s interior light briefly — once, twice, three times. One more answering flash came from the red lantern.
Massias dropped a hand towards the grip of the automatic. As he brought the weapon up to his knees Karina said with contempt, “Massias, you are quite safe. It is only El Caballero.”
Massias muttered something about every one being bandits’ meat in Spain, kept his hand on the gun. Karina’s window was wound down now, and she leaned out, feeling the cool night air on her cheek. She saw a man approaching out of the shadows, mounted on a thin, scraggy horse — a mere bag of bones, it looked; behind him, their faces dimly visible as lighter blurs against the dark countryside, were more mounted men. Moonlight brought up silver streaks on the metal fittings of rifles, on bandoliers. Karina called softly:
“El Caballero?”
“Si, señorita.”
The voice was calm, deep, authoritative. The kind of voice which expects, and gets, obedience. Karina had never met El Caballero, but she had heard plenty about him. She studied him as he dismounted and came up to the car window. He appeared to be a small man, thin and wizened. A thick white thatch of hair waved on his head in the light breeze as he came forward, giving him a ghostly aura, making an almost spectral figure on that lonely road, a road where even in daylight the number of cars passing in as long as a week could be numbered on the fingers of a hand. His face was strong, and burnt almost to blackness by years of exposure on the Adalusian hills, in fierce sun and sometimes in biting wind and cold and snow.
Karina knew, from all she had heard, that El Caballero was a man of culture. Once, before the Civil War, he had been Professor of Russian History in Madrid University; he had been a gentle man, and kindly, with a wife and three sons whom he adored. He had kept open house in his Cha-martin home for a variety of friends and colleagues who were, like himself, liberal-minded men and women, and among whom was represented a fair sprinkling of the arts; he had enjoyed the theatre, the opera, good reading, and afternoons spent lingering over the paintings in the Prado; he had been a Member of the Academy of History and a Knight of the Order of Alfonso XII. But with the Civil War all that had very quickly gone — had changed, in fact, almost overnight, and the Professor of Russian History had become an outcast. His wife, the three boys — all had disappeared in the first fighting, and to this day El Caballero did not know what had happened to any of them. Sometimes even now, when things were bad with him and he lay sleepless on some lonely hillside or in the comparative comfort of the cave in which he and his companions lived, he would think horrible things, his mind would be filled with dreadful imaginings, visions of small bodies on the points of bayonets, of a once beautiful woman held at the mercy of the soldiery, drunken men, under the ceaseless sound of the guns.
After his tragedy had happened, the gentle professor had turned man of war. He had fought with extreme gallantry at Teruel; and later, when the Civil War was over, with the Falangista firmly in the saddle, a price had been placed on the head of the former professor who had by then taken to the hills. He had been in the hills ever since, and he was still there; still the almost legendary, revered leader of a dwindling band of some two dozen outlawed men — many of them men of learning like himself — men who were now bandits, brigands who shared that mainly frugal, occasionally spendthrift, existence fraught with danger to their lives. They kept themselves going by pillaging isolated farms and tiny villages for food for themselves and for their stolen horses, and occasionally attacking the opulent cars of the few — the very few — tourists who ventured upon that road, which was really no more than a track, from Ronda to San Roque via Vercin, and happened to stop or fall into an ambush near El Caballero’s operating base; which was simply a series of interlinked caves in the rocky hillsides.
His cave was now as much home to El Caballero as had been the comfortable house in Chamartin so many years ago. It even had rough bookshelves on which El Caballero had rather more than the, nucleus of a good library, and on the stony walls were fine hanging of Granada cloth and one or two quite good pictures. He and his band were reasonably — safe from interference, for, though the Madrid Government would dearly have loved to have cleaned up these isolated and so-persistent ‘pockets of resistance’ who regarded themselves in some odd way as soldiers still carrying on the Civil War, El Caballero was free with his pesetas when he had any, and the local authorities, such as they were, had become quite compliant as a result. And Vercin was such a very long way from Madrid. And the local authorities spent much of the day in siesta anyway, while during the waking hours there were more important things to attend to than rounding up a few brigands — things such as sitting in the shade drinking an aperitif, or making love to one’s wife, or someone else’s wife — or even attending to the civic affairs of the locality. And, of course, even in Madrid, that comparative hive of industry, they appreciated that there was such a thing — always, always such a blessed thing — as mañana.
All of this Karina knew.
El Caballero had a rifle levelled at the car as he came up. It was an old-fashioned thing, that rifle, but in excellent condition. El Caballero, whose life so often depended on his weapons, always kept them well greased and free from rust and ready for instant use, as he had been trained to do by English instructors in the International Brigade. Now a heavy odour of some wonderful scent met him as he lowered the rifle and saluted the face at the car’s window. By the Holy Virgin, he thought, it is a beautiful face — and with that so delightful perfume… nombre de Dios! Almost it reminded him of the old times. Bringing his heels together, he bowed formally.