I paid the clerk, and checked my watch: it was half past twelve, and I was done in Sevilla. I needn’t have gone back to the hotel. I had left nothing there that was irreplaceable, and they had a print of my credit card to take care of my room charges. There was nothing stopping me hailing a taxi and heading straight for the airport, except, when I thought about it, that my phone charger was still on the dressing-table. It might be difficult to replace that at short notice, and I was beginning to feel out of touch already, after only an hour without my mobile. I decided I could afford to go back, give it a quick charge, then check out properly.
I took a circuitous route to the hotel, one that didn’t take me past the ayuntamiento, where I might just have bumped into friend Caballero, or past Calle Alvarez Quintero forty-seven, where that greasy bastard of a shopkeeper might have spotted me and shouted, ‘Policia!’, ‘Puta!’ or something equally inconvenient and embarrassing. Given my slow rate of progress, it was well after one when I got back, and by that time the streets were quiet, the shops having closed for lunch and the punters having gone home or off to a tapas bar. I looked around as Las Casas de los Mercaderes came into sight. The entrance to the narrow, pedestrianised street was all but blocked by a big black car, but at that hour it wasn’t causing any problems; even if it was still there when I called a taxi, there was plenty of room for it to get past.
Mind you, I thought, as I picked up my key, that’s if I go to the airport. The idea of fronting up Bromberg hadn’t gone away completely. But as I considered it afresh, I decided that there would be precious little point. Frank was gone, and possibly dead, as Macela/Gresch certainly was. As I saw it, the chances might even be that Councillor Caballero was tying off all the loose ends and that Lidia could be running for her own life.
Only. . As I stepped out of the lift, Mark Kravitz’s final words came back to me, those he had been in the middle of forming when my mobile died on me. ‘If Frank’s mother’s been kidnapped, that means. .’
I had just realised what it meant as I opened my door, and saw that decisions on my immediate future had been taken out of my hands.
Seventeen
For some reason, I’d been carrying a mental image of Lidia Bromberg as a Nordic type, a leggy blonde. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She was small, five-two tops without the heels, voluptuous but edging towards fleshy, and with a head of thick, jet-black hair, razor-cut, I guessed, as I stared at her. She wore white shorts that ended just above the knee, and her formidable bosom was crammed into a sleeveless pink top that was barely fit for purpose, to quote a former politician.
She wasn’t alone. Caballero was standing beside her, still in his lightweight cream suit, and in his hand he had a brutish-looking gun, made even uglier by a silencer. Okay, so they hadn’t come to sell me a share in the casino project.
If I’d been more alert, and if I hadn’t been hampered by a toe that I was not certain was cracked, maybe I’d have slammed the door shut and legged it, but staring down a gun barrel does have a certain hypnotic effect. So, instead, I stepped into my room.
That’s not to say I was completely stunned. ‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded. ‘There’s no wagon outside so you can’t be chambermaids, and you don’t fit my image of hotel-room thieves.’
‘I think you know who I am, Mrs Blackstone,’ Bromberg replied. ‘I believe we have spoken, yes? The way things stand, it looks as if you are going to be late for a meeting with me, yes?’
‘I’d decided to give that a miss. I had you checked out, you see, by a friend of mine, a security consultant, so I know that the whole project’s a con. I don’t really fancy pouring my money into a suitcase for you bastards to run off with.’
‘You’re totally off your head,’ said Caballero, angrily, in Spanish.
‘That’s been remarked upon before,’ I told him, in his own tongue, ‘but it’s never proved to be true. I’m clever enough to have made sure that my friend knows exactly where I am right now. I’d guess that in the last hour he’s tried to call me a couple of times on my mobile.’ I took it from my bag and held it up for him to see. ‘The battery’s dead; I only came back here for the charger, but he’s not to know that, is he? By now, he’s either called the police, or he’s about to.’
‘In that case, we’d better not delay,’ he said roughly. In that moment, I believed, truly, that he was going to shoot me. Instead, just as I felt my legs start to give under me, he picked up the charger from the dressing-table and tossed it to me. I caught it, one handed. ‘You’d better take this. We might want you to call your friend, to reassure him, and it’ll be most convincing if you do it on your mobile. Now this is what we’ll do,’ he continued. ‘We use the service list and we go out of the side door, to my car, which is parked outside.’
‘Maybe it’s been towed by now,’ I suggested helpfully.
He treated me to a small smile; he wasn’t a bad-looking bloke and I found myself reacting to it, clinging to it in the hope that he wasn’t all that bad in any respect. ‘My car doesn’t get towed in Sevilla,’ he advised me. ‘Now be good and come with us quietly. Killing you would be a last resort, but you have been a Goddamned nuisance, so I won’t feel too bad if I have to.’
So long, Mr Nice Guy! I looked at the gun, and considered it. Of course it could have been a replica, but it looked real enough, and when it comes down to it one doesn’t bet one’s life on such chances. There was also the silencer; it occurred to me that I’d seen fake firearms often enough in shops in L’Escala, and real ones in shops in the US, but I’d never seen a silencer, real or pretend, on display. The thing was like an exclamation point, emphasising my peril.
That was when I realised that I can’t do the Wonderwoman stuff any more. I have known a couple of moments. . and I’m not including the plane crash. . when my life could have come to a sudden, painful conclusion. On each occasion I took my chances, and came through. But things are different now. No reward could ever balance the risk of not seeing my son grow up, watching him turn from a boy into a man through his teenage years, feeling my chest swell with pride as he becomes a doctor or a scientist, or whatever. I realised in that room how much I’m looking forward to crying at his graduation, and at his wedding, and later on, to holding my grandchildren in my arthritic, stiffening fingers while I still can. No reward could ever make up for all that, and I hadn’t even gone south in search of one. I was doing a favour for an aunt I had barely known for much of my life and for a cousin who didn’t bloody deserve to have her as a mother. Bugger it! I was even paying my own air fare and hotel bill.
‘Okay,’ I said submissively, tucking the phone charger away in my bag. ‘You’re the dealer, whatever you say.’
‘Smart woman,’ Bromberg sneered. I really didn’t like her, I decided. She reminded me of someone I’d seen in a TV sci-fi drama a few years before, a character who’d worn an attractive human skin to conceal the voracious creature within. That wasn’t the moment to tell her, though. That wasn’t the moment to say anything more.
Instead I stood quite still as they came towards me, flanking me as she opened the door and took a quick look into the corridor. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, then took my elbow, pulling me roughly after her. I will tell you at this point that in the second half of my twenties, when I signed on as a nurse in an African war zone, I decided I should learn how to take care of myself, so I took up mixed martial arts. I was quite good, and trained with a couple of the UN soldiers in my base while I was away. They also taught me to shoot. Since then I’ve kept up my skills at classes, whenever I could. Maybe I was exaggerating with the Wonderwoman claim, but at another time, I might have broken a couple of Lidia’s fingers for the way she grabbed me.