María Dueñas - The Time in Between

It didn’t take them long to wake. First I heard somebody moving, with the weary tread of someone dragging along a pair of old slippers. The peephole was opened and on the other side I could see a dark eye full of sleep and surprise. Then I heard the sound of quick, more energetic footsteps. And voices—low, urgent voices. Though they were muffled by the thickness of the solid wooden door, I recognized one of them. The one I was here for. It was confirmed when another eye, lively and blue, appeared at the little hole.

“Rosalinda, it’s me, Sira. Please, open up.”

A bolt— thunk . Another.

Our greeting was hasty, full of restrained joy and excited whispers.

“What a marvelous surprise! But what are you doing here in the middle of the night, querida? They told me you were coming to Lisbon but I wouldn’t be able to see you—how is everything in Madrid? How’s—”

My joy was great, too, but fear made me revert to a state of caution.

“Shhhhhhh…,” I said, trying to contain her. She ignored me and continued with her enthusiastic welcome. Even having been dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning didn’t diminish her usual glamour. Her delicate bone structure and transparent skin were covered by an ivory silk dressing gown that came down to her feet, her wavy hair was perhaps a little shorter, but her mouth was still running on in a jumble of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, just as it used to.

Having her so close to me unleashed a million questions that had long been coiled and ready to spring. What had become of her in the long months since she’d left Spain, what cunning wiles had allowed her to get ahead, how had she taken Beigbeder’s fall? Her house emanated an aura of luxury and well-being, but I knew that the fragility of her financial resources prevented her from affording a place like this on her own. I preferred not to ask. However heavy the pressures may have been, and however dark the circumstances, Rosalinda Fox continued to radiate the same positive vitality she always had, an optimism that could topple any wall, get around any obstacle, or raise the dead if she so willed it.

We walked down the long hallway arm in arm, talking amid whispers and shadows. Upon reaching her bedroom, she closed the door behind us and a memory of Tetouan immediately assailed me like a gust of African air. The Berber rug, a Moorish lamp, the pictures on the walls. I recognized a Bertuchi watercolor: the whitewashed walls of the Moorish quarter, the Riffian women selling oranges, an overloaded mule, haiks and djellabas, and—way out in the background—the minaret of a mosque cut out against the Moroccan sky. I looked away; this wasn’t the time for nostalgia.

“I need to find Marcus Logan.”

“My, what a coincidence. He came to see me just a few days ago: he wanted to know about you.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked in alarm.

“Only the truth,” she said, raising her right hand as though about to swear an oath. “That the last time I’d seen you was last year in Tangiers.”

“Do you know how to find him?”

“No. We left it that he’d come by El Galgo again sometime, that’s all.”

“What’s El Galgo?”

“My club,” she said with a wink, lying back onto the bed. “A brilliant business I’ve opened, going halves with a friend of mine. We’re making a mint,” she finished with a laugh. “But I’ll tell you all that some other time; let’s concentrate on urgent matters for now. I don’t know where to find Marcus, querida. I don’t know where he lives, nor do I have his telephone number. But come now, sit down next to me and tell me the story, and let’s see if something occurs to us.”

It was such a consolation to be reunited with the same old Rosalinda. Extravagant and unpredictable, but also efficient, quick, and decisive even at the break of dawn. Once she’d gotten over the initial surprise and understood that my visit had a concrete objective, she didn’t waste any time asking about matters that weren’t any use, nor did she want to know about my life in Madrid or my assignments for the Secret Intelligence Service, into whose arms she’d thrown me. She simply understood that there was something that needed resolving urgently and she set about helping me.

I summarized the Da Silva story and the part Marcus played in it. We were lit only by the dim light that filtered through a pleated silk lampshade, both of us on her large bed. Although I knew I was going against the express orders I’d received from Hillgarth not to contact Rosalinda under any circumstances, I didn’t worry about letting her in on the details of my mission: I trusted her implicitly, and she was the only person I could run to. Besides, in a way it was their fault that I’d ended up seeking her out: they’d sent me to Portugal so unprotected, so unsupported, that I had no choice.

“I see Marcus very occasionally: sometimes he comes by the club, from time to time we run into each other at the restaurant at the Hotel Aviz, and there have been a couple of nights when like you we’ve crossed paths in the Estoril casino. Always charming, but somewhat evasive about the work he’s involved in: he’s never explained to me what it is he’s up to at the moment, but at any rate I very much doubt it’s journalism. Every time we meet we chat for a couple of minutes and say an affectionate farewell, promising to meet up more often, but we never do. I have no idea what he’s got himself into, querida. I don’t know if his business dealings are clean or whether they’re in need of a little laundering. I don’t even know if he lives in Lisbon permanently or comes and goes from London or somewhere else. But if you give me a couple of days, I can make some inquiries.”

“I don’t think there’s time. Da Silva has already given orders for him to be removed to leave the way free for the Germans. I have to warn him as soon as possible.”

“Be careful, Sira. You might be involved in something shady that you’re not aware of. You haven’t been told what sort of dealings linked him to Da Silva, and a lot of time has gone by since we were with him in Morocco; we don’t know what’s become of his life from the day he left up till now. And to tell the truth, we didn’t know all that much back then, either.”

“But he managed to bring my mother…”

“He was simply a mediator, and what’s more, he did it in exchange for something. It wasn’t a disinterested favor, don’t forget that.”

“And we knew he was a journalist.”

“That’s what we believed, but we never saw a published copy of the famous interview with Juan Luis, which was apparently his motive for coming to Tetouan.”

“Maybe—”

“Or the report on Spanish Morocco that kept him there for all those weeks.”

There were a thousand reasons we might not have seen his published pieces, and no doubt it would be easy to think of them, but I couldn’t waste any time. Africa was yesterday—Portugal was the present. And the pressure was in the here and now.

“You have to help me find him,” I insisted, leaping over all my fears. “Da Silva already has his people on the alert. Marcus at least needs to be warned; he’ll know what to do after that.”

“Of course I’m going to try to track him down, querida, rest easy, but I just want to ask you to be cautious and to bear in mind that we’ve all changed tremendously, that none of us are who we used to be. In the Tetouan of a few years ago, you were a young dressmaker and I was the happy lover of a powerful man; look what we’ve become now, look where the two of us are and how we’ve had to meet. Most probably Marcus and his circumstances have changed, too: those are the facts of life, especially in times like these. And if we knew little about him then, we know even less now.”