The Time in Between: A Novel (35 page)

“Whenever you like I can prepare another pass for you, sweetheart.”

I didn’t stop. I just clenched my fists hard, and almost without realizing it I was revisited by a shadow of my former self. I turned
my head a few inches, just enough for my reply to be heard loud and clear.

“Better save that for your whore of a mother.”

As luck would have it I ran into the commissioner on the street, far enough away from the police station that he didn’t invite me to return with him. It wasn’t hard to bump into anyone in Tetouan, where the street grid of the Spanish
ensanche
didn’t stretch too far and everyone was constantly coming and going. As usual he was wearing a light-colored linen suit and smelled recently shaved, ready to begin his day.

“You don’t look happy,” he said the moment he saw me. “I imagine things at the Continental didn’t go well.” He looked at his watch. “Come, let’s get a coffee.”

He led me to the Spanish Casino, a beautiful corner building with white stone balconies and big windows open to the main road. An Arab waiter was lowering the awnings with a squeaking iron rod as two or three others were putting out chairs and tables on the sidewalk in the shade. There was no one in the cool interior, just a large marble staircase in the entry and two big rooms, one on each side. He invited me into the one on the left.

“Good morning, Don Claudio.”

“Good morning, Abdul. Two coffees with milk, please,” he requested, seeking my agreement with his eyes. “Tell me,” he then said.

“It didn’t work. The manager is new, he wasn’t the same one from last year, but he knew all about the matter. He wasn’t prepared to negotiate at all. He just said that their terms had been more than generous and that if I didn’t make the payment by the designated date, he would turn me in.”

“I understand. And believe me, I am sorry. But I’m afraid I can’t help you now.”

“Don’t worry, you did enough by getting me a year.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“Pay right away.”

“And the thing with your mother?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing. I’ll keep working and saving, though by the time I’ve
gotten together as much as I need, it might be too late and they will have halted the evacuations. For now, as I said, I’ll clear my debt. I have the money, there’s no problem there. That’s just why I came to see you. I need another pass to cross the border and your permission to keep my passport for a couple of days.”

“Keep it, there’s no need for you to give it back to me again.” Then he brought his hand to the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a small leather case and a fountain pen. “And as for the safe-conduct, this will do,” he said as he removed a card and uncapped the pen. He scribbled a few words on the back and signed it. “Here.”

I put it away in my handbag without reading it.

“Are you planning to go on the Valenciana?”

“Yes, that’s what I’d planned.”

“Like you did yesterday?”

I held his inquiring gaze a few seconds before replying.

“I didn’t go on La Valenciana yesterday.”

“So how did you manage to get to Tangiers?”

I knew that he knew. And I also knew that he wanted me to tell him myself. But first we each took a sip of our coffee.

“A friend gave me a lift in her car.”

“Which friend?”

“Rosalinda Fox. An Englishwoman, a client of mine.”

Another sip of coffee.

“You do know who she is, don’t you?” he said then.

“Yes, I do.”

“So just be careful.”

“Why?”

“Just because. Be careful.”

“Tell me why,” I insisted.

“Because there are people who don’t like the fact that she’s here with the person she’s with.”

“I know.”

“What do you know?”

“That there are certain people who aren’t too pleased about her personal life.”

“Which people?”

I’d discovered already there was no one like the commissioner for squeezing, crushing, and extracting the very last drop of information.

“Certain people. Don’t ask me to tell you what you already know, Don Claudio. Don’t ask me to be disloyal to a customer just so you can hear from my mouth the names you already know.”

“Fine. Just confirm one thing for me.”

“What?”

“The names of these people—are they Spanish?”

“No.”

“Perfect,” he said simply. He finished his coffee and looked at his watch again. “I have to go, I have work to do.”

“So do I.”

“Indeed you do, I’d forgotten you were a working woman. You know you’ve earned an excellent reputation for yourself?”

“You hear about everything, so I’ll have to believe you.”

He smiled for the first time, and the smile took several years off him.

“I only know the things I need to know. But I’ll bet you hear about an awful lot of things, too: women always talk a lot to one another. And you deal with ladies who no doubt have interesting stories to tell.”

He was right, my clients did talk. They talked about their husbands, their businesses, their friendships, about the people whose houses they frequented, what various people did, thought, or said. But I didn’t answer yes or no to the commissioner; I simply got up, ignoring his observation. He called to the waiter and sketched a flourish in the air. Abdul nodded: no problem, the coffees would go on Don Claudio’s tab.

Settling the debt in Tangiers was liberating, like having a rope freed from my neck. It was true that I still had the lawsuits in Madrid to resolve, but from this distance it all seemed terribly far away. Paying the debt at the Continental allowed me to free myself of the burden of my past with Ramiro in Morocco and to breathe differently. More calmly, more freely. The mistress, now, of my own destiny.

Summer progressed, but my clients still seemed lazy about contemplating
their autumn wardrobes. Jamila remained with me, looking after the house and doing small jobs in the workshop. Félix came around to visit almost every night, and from time to time I would go over to see Candelaria at La Luneta. Everything at peace, everything quite normal, until an inconveniently timed cold left me without the strength to leave the house or the energy to do any sewing. I spent the first day lying prostrate on the sofa. The second in bed. The third I’d have done the same but for an unexpected appearance. As unexpected as it always was.

“Siñora Rosalinda say Siñorita Sira get up out of bed immediately.”

I went out to meet her in my dressing gown; I didn’t bother to put on my never-changing suit or hang the silver scissors around my neck, not even to straighten my tousled hair. But if she was surprised at my disheveled state, she didn’t let it show: she had come to deal with other more serious matters.

“We’re going to Tangiers.”

“Who?” I asked, wiping my runny nose.

“You and me.”

“What for?”

“To try to resolve this thing with your mother.”

I looked at her halfway between disbelief and amazement. I wanted to know more.

“Through your . . .”

A sneeze prevented me from finishing the phrase, which I was grateful for as I wasn’t sure how to refer to the high commissioner, whom she always spoke of by his first name.

“No, I’d rather keep Juan Luis out of it: he has a thousand other matters to worry about. This is mine, so his contacts are out. But we have other options.”

“Which are?”

“Through our consul in Tangiers I tried to find out whether they’re making these sorts of arrangements in our embassy, but without any luck. He told me that our legation in Madrid has always refused to give asylum to refugees, and besides, since the Republican government moved to Valencia that’s where the diplomatic officials have been based.
All that’s left in the capital is an empty building and some minor staff member to look after it.”

“So then?”

“I tried with St. Andrew’s, the Anglican church in Tangiers, but they weren’t able to help me either. Then it occurred to me that some private firm might know something, so I asked around here and there, and I managed to get hold of a tiny bit of information. Not a great deal, but we’ll see if we’re lucky and we might get a bit more out of it. The director of the Bank of London and South America in Tangiers, Leo Martin, told me that on his last trip to London he heard people in the bank’s headquarters talking about someone working in the Madrid branch who had some kind of contact with someone who’s helping people get out of the city. I don’t know any more than that; all the information he was able to give me was very vague, very imprecise, just a comment that someone made that he overheard. But he’s promised to check things out.”

“When?”

“Inmediatamente—right now. I was there a couple of days ago, he told me to return today. So you’re going to get yourself dressed right away and we’re going to Tangiers to see him. I imagine he should have had time to find out a bit more.”

I tried to thank her for her efforts, between coughs and sneezes, but she played it all down and just pressed me to get myself ready. The trip was a whirlwind. The road, dry plains, areas covered in pines, goats. Women in big striped skirts with their walking slippers, laden down under their large straw hats. Sheep, prickly pears, more dry plains, barefoot children who smiled at us as we passed and raised their hand to wave good-bye. Dust, more dust, yellow plains to one side, yellow plains to the other, passport control, more road, more prickly pear cacti, more palm trees and sugarcane plantations, and in just an hour we’d arrived. Again we parked in the Place de France, again we were welcomed by the broad avenues and the magnificent buildings of the city’s modern quarter. In one of them the Bank of London and South America awaited us—a curious alloy of financial interests, almost as strange as the pair Rosalinda Fox and I made.

“Sira, allow me to introduce you to Leo Martin. Leo, this is my friend Miss Quiroga.”

Leo Martin could very easily have been Leoncio Martínez, had he been born just a couple of miles from where he actually was. Short and dark, if he hadn’t been shaved and wearing a tie he could have passed for a tough Spanish farmhand. But his face gleamed clean of any shadow of a beard, and a serious-looking striped tie rested on his belly. And he wasn’t Spanish, or a peasant, but an authentic subject of Great Britain: a man from Gibraltar capable of expressing himself in English and Andalusian with equal facility. He greeted us with a shake of his hairy hand, offered us a seat, and gave the old crow who served as his secretary an order not to disturb us. Then, as though we were the bank’s wealthiest clients, he proceeded to inform us eagerly about what he’d been able to find out. I’d never opened a bank account in my life, and Rosalinda probably didn’t have a single pound saved from the allowance that her husband sent her whenever he was in the mood, but the rumors about my friend’s amorous pursuits must have reached the ears of this little man with the curious linguistic abilities. And in these turbulent times the director of an international bank couldn’t miss an opportunity to do a favor for the lover of the man in charge next door.

“Well, ladies, I think I have some news. I’ve been able to speak to Eric Gordon, an old acquaintance of mine who was working at our branch in Madrid shortly after the uprising; now he’s been reposted to London. He told me he knows someone personally who lives in Madrid and who is involved in these sorts of activities, a British citizen who worked for a Spanish firm. The bad news is that he doesn’t know how to contact him; he’s lost track of him in the last few months. The good news is that he’s supplied me with the details of someone who is familiar with his whereabouts because he was living in the capital until recently. He’s a journalist who’s gone back to England because there was some problem; I think he was injured, but he didn’t give me the details. Well anyway, this person might be prepared to put you in touch with the man who is evacuating the refugees. But he wants something first.”

“What?” Rosalinda and I asked in unison.

“To speak to you personally, Mrs. Fox,” he said, turning to the Englishwoman. “The sooner the better. I hope you won’t consider it too forward, but, given the circumstances, I thought it appropriate to let him know who it was who wanted this information from him.”

Rosalinda didn’t reply; she just looked at him, alert, her eyebrows arched, waiting for him to continue talking. He cleared his throat uncomfortably, doubtless having expected a more enthusiastic response to what he had said.

“You know what these journalists are like, don’t you? Like carrion birds, always after something.”

Rosalinda took a few seconds to reply.

“They aren’t the only ones, Leo dear, they aren’t the only ones,” she said a little sourly. “But anyway, put me in contact with him. Let’s see what he wants.”

I shifted in my seat, trying to hide my nerves, and blew my nose again. Meanwhile, the British director with the body of an earthenware pot and the accent of a bullfighter gave the telephone operator an order to connect the call. We waited a long while. They brought us coffee; Rosalinda regained her good mood and Martin his composure. At last the moment arrived for the conversation with the journalist. It only lasted three minutes, and Rosalinda spoke so softly I didn’t catch a word of it. What I did sense, however, was the serious, sharp tone in my client’s voice.

“Done,” was all she said when it ended. We bade farewell to the director, thanking him for his help, and went back out past the intense scrutiny of the hawkeyed secretary.

“What did he want?” I asked anxiously as soon as we were out of the office.

“A bit of . . . I don’t know how you say it in Spanish. When someone says they’ll do something for you only if you do something in exchange.”

“Chantaje—blackmail,” I said.

“
Chantaje
,” she repeated.

“What form of blackmail?”

“A personal interview with Juan Luis and a few weeks of preferential
access to official life in Tetouan. In exchange he would commit to putting us in contact with the person we need in Madrid.”

I swallowed before formulating my question. I was afraid she’d say that only over her dead body would anyone impose such extortionate conditions on the highest dignitary in the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, much less an opportunistic journalist she didn’t know. All in exchange for a favor for a simple dressmaker.