A Shadow on the Sun Read online

  But driving there had been a mistake. The vast distance had made him weary and stale and its endless, featureless monotony had revived his thirst for a drink. He had driven along the coast to San Diego and then headed east towards the fringes of the Sonoran Desert. Then he’d taken a route southward roughly parallel with the coast, with the waters of the Gulf of California occasionally glittering to his right and the foothills of the Sierra Madre undulating through heat haze to his left. There was no radio in the car. He drove to the sound of the big Ford engine labouring noisily under the hood and the spatter of occasional insects against the windshield. He reached Culiacan with the fine sand that was blown from the roads in his hair and under his eyelids and in his throat. By the time he got to Mazatlan, the engine of the Ford sounded as thirsty as he felt.

  Bill pressed on towards Guadalajara and the mountains and the sight of the bruise-coloured peaks in the distance saddened and depressed him. He had never been here before. Mexico was where Gable and Wayne came, it was said, for nights with dark-blooded women. And he had heard that Flynn crossed the border sometimes for boys. Bill had never been to Mexico before. But he had been to Colorado with Martin and Lillian Hamer before the war. And being close to the mountains brought back memories of happy times he would visit again only ever in memory. He drove and he thought of the past. And the grit under the lids made his eyes water and forced him to take one hand from the wheel and wipe them.

  After his first day of driving he stopped for the night at a fishing village about fifty miles south of Hermosillo. The village was a stumble of dark shacks at the edge of the sea with its boats pulled up on the sand above the tide line. Exhausted, he was reconciled to sleeping in the car. But there was enough light coming from one of the larger buildings to give him the optimism to investigate.

  The cantina was four clapboard walls under a roof made from corrugated steel. The glow of light he’d seen from the road came from a pair of hurricane lamps. Their wicks were thick and filled the one room with a damp, paraffin smell that forced a brief, bitter nostalgia into Bill’s mind before he banished it to take a look around. Three tables. No customers. A bar made from nailed-together pieces of driftwood timber atop a row of oil drums. The drums were rust coloured. On one of them, Bill could make out the ghost of the Shell symbol in faded yellow paint. The proprietress sat knitting in an armchair beside the bar. She was an old woman, knitting something for a child. When she rose and put the work down on her chair, he saw that her knuckles were purple and arthritic. But the knitting was very neat work. He doubted, over the decades, whether many of the fish enmeshed in them escaped the nets that had ruined her hands in their making.

  He asked in Spanish if he could buy anything to eat.

  She replied in English that he could.

  ‘A room?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not much of a room,’ she said.

  ‘Worse than sleeping in the car?’

  She smiled, without showing her teeth. ‘A bed, at least,’ she said.

  He ate fish stew spiced with searing peppers and served with a flat, sour bread. He drank two bottles of cold Mexican beer and cradled his exhaustion, watching the beads of condensation form on the cold glass and dribble down the sides of the bottles, with their unfamiliar labels. He listened to the sea break in ponderous night waves a few feet away. The woman resumed her knitting. Other than for the sound of the sea and the clack of bone needles, the village was silent.

  It was camping that he remembered the paraffin smell from. It was being snug under canvas at Thanksgiving or Easter with his wife and daughter, with his family in Yosemite, or Banff, or pitched on the cool pine carpet of a Maine forest.

  Bill called for Mescal and the old woman jumped and he apologized in his flawless Spanish for startling her. She brought the bottle and a glass to his table and he complimented her on the excellence of the food. Truly, he could not remember when he had eaten better.

  She bowed stiffly at the compliment, obviously pleased, the fright he’d given her forgotten. She cleared away the debris of his meal. He was a big man. He had always been a big man and so his size and strength were natural to him and sometimes he was careless of the effect he could have on strangers. Most of the time he was gentle, too. Most of the time, anyway.

  Bill looked at the Mescal bottle and the thick little shot glass on his table. The glass was scored with a million infinitesimal scratches, opaque with wear, with time, with use. He’d just have one, he told himself. He had to get away from the smell of those wicks. He was very tired. He’d just have one, and then he’d find his bed.

  His second night on the road was spent inland, in the city of Guadalajara. Here, there were more hints than he was used to seeing that a large part of the world was at war. Mexico was no more involved in the war than was the United States. But the city still seemed full, to Bill, of heavily armed police foot patrols. And twice, from a seat at the same pavement café, he saw convoys of troop lorries rumble by. The fact that they travelled, portentous, bristling, in opposite directions from one another, seemed slightly farcical to Bill. But the expressions on the faces of the soldiers did not encourage laughter. They had that light, empty look of young men eager to pick a fight.

  He thought that Guadalajara was what travel writers would be inclined to term a vibrant or exotic place. Bill thought it frenetic, loud and probably pretty dangerous. He hated the blare of the maharachi bands and the constant hoot of car horns and found the sight everywhere of wild dogs in scabrous, whining packs depressing. He didn’t fear dogs and the thought of rabies never truthfully occurred to him. But watching them, with a drink in his hand, seeing their pack hierarchy determined and enforced by the endless snarls and scuffles among vicious and mangy animals, he found himself uncomfortably reminded of many of the people he had met and knew in Hollywood.

  Uncomfortable on the street, unwilling to retire for the night to his room at a perfectly acceptable hotel, Bill eventually found a bar whose cavernous depths were cool and dark. Discrete lights were strung along its length. The furniture was made of some dense hardwood carved and polished in black and amber whorls. Several brands of tequila competed in jewelled bottles for the palate and there were cigars on display in humidors with plate glass lids. Best of all, though, it was a refuge from the gaudy chaos of the streets outside. Bill bought a drink and sat down at a vacant table. He sat alone with his thoughts and his fatigue. The concierge at the hotel had been tipped – with the promise of more later – to garage the car somewhere they could be trusted to change the oil and water, wash and wax the body and fill the almost empty tank. He would drive the remainder of his journey to Mexico City in the morning. All he had to think about, to trouble over, was his encounter with Julia Smollen. And so he pondered on that, reclining at his solitary table in a leather chair, looking at the oily yellow liquid in his glass. He tried and failed to picture the woman, unable to put a face to the fraught voice he had heard only over a long-distance telephone line. His only confident speculation was that she would be dark. He imagined dark, straight hair falling lifelessly to her shoulders. He saw thin, carmine lips. And her eyes were a brown in his mind, so dense they were almost black. Fierce and unreadable, her eyes, he thought; furious, lightless jewels.

  Anger was all he had got from her. No fear, just anger. Anger at what had happened to her and the predicament it had put her in. It occurred to Bill there, in Guadalajara, that maybe Julia was angry, too, about what had happened to Martin Hamer. But he didn’t know whether she was or she wasn’t. Maybe she’d been simply indignant, inconvenienced by a death badly timed. He studied the viscous surface of his drink in the scant light from the bar and saw no point in giving Julia the benefit of any doubt until he met her and was able to come to an accurate judgement. He hadn’t liked the sound of her. But maybe that was only because what she’d had to say had been such horribly unwelcome news.

  He looked around the bar he was in, trying to determine what it was that made the place so foreign. Except t
hat maybe foreign wasn’t exactly the right term. Hollywood successfully achieved foreign all the time, and not just in the plasterboard exoticism of the studio back-lots. The scope and scale and story of film demanded a cast from all over the world and the money and the glamour – or at least the promise of these – delivered them. Pockets of LA were cosmopolitan enough. And if you had the money, you could eat in France and you could eat in Tahiti or London in southern California. But none of that felt foreign. The foreignness of Hollywood came in familiar clichés a person could feel comfortable with. But Guadalajara wasn’t like that at all.

  It was the temperature, for one thing, which even in this subterranean tunnel of leather and wood, forced sweat to ooze from his skin. It was the decor, too. Bill saw skulls etched everywhere on glass and bottles and table-tops, carved deeply into the pillars supporting the roof. At once Catholic and pagan and piratical, the skulls were, he knew, a crucial part of the culture of Mexico. But despite his excellent Spanish, it was a culture of which he was entirely ignorant.

  And the skulls reminded him of Germany. They reminded him of the grinning SS troops he’d seen in movie newsreels and in pictures in the newspapers. They wore the same death’s head symbol. It was part of their insignia, on the collars of their uniforms. Its intention in Germany was to chill and intimidate. Whatever the intention in Mexico, the effect on Bill was the same.

  It was the clientele. There was a table full of South Americans to his left. He guessed from their sleek and haughty manner and their tailored, European clothes, that they were from Argentina. They had the sallow, smooth look on the skin that only a cut-throat razor could achieve in a shave. They spoke Spanish and wore their hair carefully brilliantined and parted and shouted aggressive toasts and there seemed to Bill more challenge and threat than honest amusement in their laughter.

  It was the danger. There was a volatility about Mexico, about Guadalajara, anyway. There was a trigger-happy mood of something unexpected and dreadful just about to happen. It was a place of feral pack dogs and truckloads of sullen soldiers and the tireless, insistent beat of the maharachi band. Bill had not disliked a place so much since visiting Germany in 1937 to attend the funeral of his best friend’s wife. He had buried the friendship, too, on that visit, after what he had seen there. Maybe it wasn’t Mexico at all, he thought, looking into the yellow residue that was all there was left of his drink. Maybe it was the news about Martin, afflicting his mood and souring his senses. Maybe that was all it was.

  Just then a man carefully attired in a black lounge suit and tie approached his table and requested on behalf of the establishment that Bill finish his drink and leave. The request was made in careful, accented English. But it was firmly put. They weren’t about to serve him up a complimentary dinner and crack a vintage bottle in his honour. They wanted him out of the place, now.

  But Bill wasn’t really in the mood to co-operate. Events had put him in a frame of mind bad enough to border on mean. And Bill was a man very capable of being mean. At Yale, he’d compiled a tackle record on the football team so formidable that, to this day, it remained unbroken. At Fort Bragg, training for the war in which he never got to fight, he had become army heavyweight champion, winning the tide by stoppage over eight brutal rounds. That was better than twenty years ago, of course. But he had not exactly allowed himself to run to fat. He’d been good enough in recent years to hold his own sparring with Martin Hamer. And Hamer had been a force of nature, had possessed a big cat’s attributes of strength and lethal speed.

  Bill got to his feet. He stood six-four and two hundred and twenty pounds in the lightweight suit he had taken from the overnight bag in the trunk of the Ford and changed into in his Guadalajara hotel room. He faced the man who had asked him to leave and, behind the man, the bar. Tables and chairs would clutter the path of anyone trying to rush him from left or right and he could cover the approach from his rear in the big mirror behind the bar. He was obscurely glad he had left his pistol at the bottom of the bag on the hotel room bed. He held a firearms licence and was comfortable enough with guns. But he didn’t habitually carry one and considered this a country in which things could very easily escalate.

  ‘I’ll leave when I’m good and ready,’ Bill said.

  ‘Please,’ the man in the black suit said. He smiled. His manner was deferential and hostile at the same time, a combination Bill could not remember having encountered before.

  Bill shrugged. ‘Give me a reason to go.’

  The man’s eyes flicked towards the well-barbered quartet seated to Bill’s right, a couple of tables away. They were quiet now. There was a lull in their laughter and toasts. ‘It is rude in this country to stare,’ the man said. ‘You are making other customers feel uncomfortable.’

  Bill knew this to be bullshit on two counts. If it was rude to stare in Mexico, he had been on the receiving end of some appalling etiquette ever since he crossed the border. And he had not stared at the Argentine party. He was a very observant man. But looking without being seen to do so was a necessary skill in a lawyer, one he had long honed and mastered in the courtroom. He looked over at the Argentines; they did not look directly back. He grinned at them and raised his glass; none of them chose to meet his eyes. Part of him wanted to go over there and haul them out of their leather chairs and decorate the place with them. He was drunk and angry and upset and wanted to break bones and splash blood because, Christ, he’d feel better after doing some honest damage.

  Yeah, for about five minutes, the sane and sober part of his mind insisted. And you’ll wake up with raw knuckles and a sore head in a Mexican jail cell with the Polish woman stranded and pregnant and conspicuous and here illegally and by now probably broke. And wouldn’t that be fucking clever?

  He placed his almost empty glass carefully on his table and turned and walked out of the place, onto the hot, lurid emptiness of the street. He gathered his bearings breathing Guadalajara’s exhausted air and then walked back in the direction of his hotel. It would be something to do with the war, he supposed. The further south you went in the continent of America, the more sympathetic became the people to the Axis cause. Opinion at home had been pretty cut and dried since Pearl Harbor. Everyone except maybe Joe Kennedy and a few Chicago beer and frankfurter barons knew and pretty much accepted they were fighting for a just and necessary cause. But that wasn’t a point of view popular in Buenos Aires. It had been about the war. The Argentines had scented an enemy and hadn’t liked the smell.

  In his room, awake in bed, Bill was pretty sure he had been followed back to his hotel. The altercation, the possibility of violence, had entirely sobered him. In truth, he hadn’t really been able to surrender to proper drunkenness since hearing the news of Martin Hamer’s death. He’d been alert, on the walk back, to the footfalls, to the odd, clandestine rhythm of pursuit. In an odd sort of way, he’d enjoyed it. It had dissipated his anger, given him something else to think about. Now, he lay in bed and thought about the mechanics of tomorrow and his meeting with the Polish woman with the black eyes and the carmine lips and his friend’s child growing in her belly. Thirty-five. Hamer would have been thirty-four or thirty-five, by Bill’s reckoning. It was no age to be killed, was his last conscious thought, before sleep claimed him.

  *

  She had green eyes. They were sun-smitten, her eyes, with the sparkle of dew. Her hair was short and shaggy, growing out from a crop exacted as punishment in the camp where she’d been held. Her lips were red, blood-bitten. And she was missing an ear lobe. The wound had scabbed where the lobe had been roughly severed. The lobe had been taken as a trophy, she explained to him, by a man Martin Hamer had subsequently fought with and killed.

  ‘He was an accomplished killer,’ Julia said. ‘It was something he was practised at. It came easily to him.’

  ‘He had other accomplishments.’

  ‘I’m sure he did, sir. I didn’t have the luxury of spending sufficient time with him to discover them.’

  ‘Please
don’t call me sir,’ Bill said. ‘What did Martin call me?’

  ‘Bill. Always my friend Bill.’

  Bill swallowed. ‘And that’s what you call me.’

  She smiled.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘The land of the brave and the home of the free,’ she said. ‘Where everyone is equal.’

  ‘Except that we aren’t in the land of the brave and the home of the free. Not yet, we’re not. We’ve got to get there.’

  ‘More running,’ she said. And he saw in the hard sunlight then how tired the grief had made her.

  ‘Are you up to it, Julia?’

  ‘I have to be,’ she said. She looked at Bill. ‘We’re being watched, you know.’

  He nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘I have to be up to it,’ she said. ‘For the baby.’ Her fingers rose and skated the cheap cloth surface of the book on the table. ‘And for him.’

  She made him feel crude, lumbering, hapless. She had escaped a labour camp in an occupied country and outwitted her Nazi pursuers. He’d arrived here full of churlish suspicion and unleavened grief and come face to face with Julia Smollen, with her torn ear and chopped hair. With her beauty and great sorrow and resolution.

  ‘Come on,’ Bill said. He said it gently. He got up from the table and held a hand out to her. The gesture was courtly. But anyone watching closely would have considered the effect spoiled by the way his eyes searched the windows and balconies and roofs around the square rather than resting on the comely woman who was his companion.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the home of the brave,’ Bill said. ‘To the land of the free.’

  Out of Mexico City, he drove a route that skirted Guadalajara, heading for the coast. They reached sight of the Pacific slightly north of Puerto Vallarta, Bill averaging fifty despite the roads, nothing in his mirrors except dust, fairly sure they were not being tailed after eighteen straight hours of driving, his passenger asleep across the back seat for much of the journey under a plaid picnic blanket he’d taken from the trunk.