Изменить стиль страницы

By the sea, where the antique theatre had been dug from the dunes, he could see the white rectangle of the Mercedes parked on the bluff. Below the proscenium, on the flat semi-circle of the stage, the dark figure of Gabrielle Szabo moved to and fro among the shadows of the statues.

Watching her, and thinking of Delvaux’s ‘Echo’, with its triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city, Halliday wondered whether he had fallen asleep on the warm concrete roof. Between his dreams and the ancient city below there seemed no boundary, and the moonlit phantoms of his mind moved freely between the inner and outer landscapes, as in turn the dark-eyed woman from the house by the drained river had crossed the frontiers of his psyche, bringing with her a final relief from time.

Leaving the hotel, Halliday followed the street through the empty town, and reached the rim of the amphitheatre. As he watched, Gabrielle Szabo came walking through the antique streets, the fleeting light between the columns illuminating her white face. Halliday moved down the stone steps to the stage, aware of the chauffeur watching him from the cliff beside the car. The woman moved towards Halliday, her hips swaying slowly from side to side.

Ten feet from him she stopped, her raised hands testing the darkness. Halliday stepped forward, doubting if she could see him at all behind the sunglasses she still wore. At the sound of his footsteps she flinched back, looking up towards the chauffeur, but Halliday took her hand.

‘Miss Szabo. I saw you walking here.’

The woman held his hands in suddenly strong fingers. Behind the glasses her face was a white mask. ‘Mr Halliday — ‘ She felt his wrists, as if relieved to see him. ‘I thought you would come. Tell me, how long have you been here?’

‘Weeks — or months, I can’t remember. I dreamed of this city before I came to Africa. Miss Szabo, I used to see you walking here among these ruins.’

She nodded, taking his arm. Together they moved off among the columns. Between the shadowy pillars of the balustrade was the sea, the white caps of the waves rolling towards the beach.

‘Gabrielle… why are you here? Why did you come to Africa?’

She gathered the silk robe in one hand as they moved down a stairway to the terrace below. She leaned closely against Halliday, her fingers clasping his arm, walking so stiffly that Halliday wondered if she were drunk. ‘Why? Perhaps to see the same dreams, it’s possible.’

Halliday was about to speak when he noticed the footsteps of the chauffeur following them down the stairway. Looking around, and for one moment distracted from Gabrielle’s swaying body against his own, he became aware of a pungent smell coming from the vent of one of the old Roman cloacas below them. The top of the brick-lined sewer had fallen in, and the basin was partly covered by the waves swilling in across the beach.

Halliday stopped. He tried to point below but the woman was holding his wrist in a steel grip. ‘Down there! Can you see?’

Pulling his hand away, he pointed to the basin of the sewer, where a dozen half-submerged forms lay heaped together. Bludgeoned by the sea and wet sand, the corpses were only recognizable by the back-and-forth movements of their arms and legs in the shifting water.

‘For God’s sake — Gabrielle, who are they?’

‘Poor devils…’ Gabrielle Szabo turned away, as Halliday stared over the edge at the basin ten feet below. ‘The evacuation — there were riots. They’ve been here for months.’

Halliday knelt down, wondering how long it would take the corpses whether Arab or European he had no means of telling — to be swept out to sea. His dreams of Leptis Magna had not included these melancholy denizens of the sewers. Suddenly he shouted again.

‘Months? Not that one!’

He pointed again to the body of a man in a white suit lying to one side farther up the sewer. His long legs were covered by the foam and water, but his chest and arms were exposed. Across the face was the silk scarf he had seen Mallory wearing at their last meeting.

‘Mallory!’ Halliday stood up, as the black-suited figure of the chauffeur stepped onto a ledge twenty feet above. Halliday went over to Gabrielle Szabo, who was standing by the step, apparently gazing out to sea. ‘That’s Dr Mallory! He lived with me at Columbine Sept Heures! How did he Gabrielle, you knew he was here!’

Halliday seized her hands, in his anger jerked her forward, knocking off her glasses. As she fell to her knees, scrambling helplessly for them, Halliday held her shoulders. ‘Gabrielle! Gabrielle, you’re—, ‘Halliday!’ Her head lowered, she held his fingers and pressed them into her orbits. ‘Mallory, he did it — we knew he’d follow you here. He was my doctor once, I’ve waited for years…

Halliday pushed her away, his feet crushing the sunglasses on the floor. He looked down at the white-suited figure washed by the waves, wondering what nightmare was hidden behind the scarf over its face, and sprinted along the terrace past the auditorium, then raced away through the dark streets.

As he reached the Peugeot the black-suited chauffeur was only twenty yards behind. Halliday started the motor and swung the car away through the dust. In the rear mirror he saw the chauffeur stop and draw a pistol from his belt. As he fired the bullet shattered the windshield. Halliday swerved into one of the kiosks, then regained control and set off with his head down, the cold night air blowing fragments of frosted glass into his face.

Two miles from Leptis, when there was no sight of the Mercedes in pursuit, he stopped and knocked out the windshield. As he drove on westward the air grew warmer, the rising dawn lifting in front of him with its promise of light and time.

1966

The Impossible Man

At low tide, their eggs buried at last in the broken sand below the dunes, the turtles began their return journey to the sea. To Conrad Foster, watching beside his uncle from the balustrade along the beach road, there seemed little more than fifty yards to the safety of the slack water. The turtles laboured on, their dark humps hidden among the orange crates and the drifts of kelp washed up from the sea. Conrad pointed to the flock of gulls resting on the submerged sandbank in the mouth of the estuary. The birds had been staring out to sea, as if uninterested in the deserted shoreline where the old man and the boy waited by the rail, but at this small movement of Conrad’s a dozen white heads turned together.

‘They’ve seen them…’ Conrad let his arm fall to the rail. ‘Uncle Theodore, do you think—?’

His uncle gestured with the stick at a car moving along the road a quarter of a mile away. ‘It could have been the car.’ He took his pipe from his mouth as a cry came from the sandbank. The first flight of gulls rose into the air and began to turn like a scythe towards the shore. ‘Here they come.’

The turtles had emerged from the shelter of the debris by the tideline. They advanced across the sheet of damp sand that sloped down to the sea, the screams of the gulls tearing at the air over their heads.

Involuntarily Conrad moved away towards the row of chalets and the deserted tea garden on the outskirts of the town. His uncle held his arm. The turtles were being picked from the shallow water and dropped on the sand, then dismembered by a dozen beaks.

Within barely a minute of their arrival the birds began to rise from the beach. Conrad and his uncle had not been the only spectators of the gulls’ brief feast. A small party of some dozen men stepped down from their vantage point among the dunes and moved along the sand, driving the last of the birds away from the turtles. The men were all elderly, well into their sixties and seventies, and wore singlets and cotton trousers rolled to their knees. Each carried a canvas bag and a wooden gaff tipped by a steel blade. As they picked up the shells they cleaned them with swift, practised movements and dropped them into their bags. The wet sand was streaked with blood, and soon the old men’s bare feet and arms were covered with the bright stains.