The Drifters

  ‘Get the police immediately,’ Gretchen advised as soon as she saw the body, and Yigal went in search of them.

  When the police came they shrugged their shoulders and placed the murder as the latest in a long list. They were disposed to believe the young people when Monica insisted that three of them had been asleep in the apartment and two in the car without having heard a thing. The police asked if the body could have been dragged from some other place, and Britta said, ‘As Joe and I were coming home we did see two men disappearing down there,’ and the police looked down the empty street.

  Each spring, as the flood tide of tourism began to sweep in, crowding Torremolinos with vacationers from all parts of the world, police took steps to clean the place up. They marched through the town, apprehending any man who wore a Jesus haircut, any girl who looked as if she had not bathed within the last three months.

  ‘Out,’ they said.

  ‘But where …’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Where can we go?’

  ‘Out by nightfall … or spend the summer in jail.’

  Then the mournful exodus would begin. Lucky ones would slip across the Mediterranean to Morocco. Others would disappear into the mountains of Spain and lie low until September, when the flood of tourists would subside. Those who had airplane tickets would hitchhike their way in to Málaga airport, and a scruffy lot they looked when standing beside scrubbed Scandinavians on their way back to Copenhagen. A few, unable to find an alternative, would go to jail.

  Clive was the first of the group to be nabbed. ‘Out of Spain by nightfall,’ the police said. Expecting protest, they growled, ‘With that haircut you’re not welcome.’

  ‘All right! I have my ticket to Tangier.’

  ‘Use it.’ In their records they saw that he had been in the pop-top on the morning of the murder, and said, ‘You know you’re still under suspicion for murder.’ He maintained a grave demeanor and said he hoped they would soon catch the real culprit. Gravely they nodded and made a small concession: ‘You can have till tomorrow night.’

  ‘I’ll be gone,’ he promised. But then he had to smile, adding, ‘And next October I’ll be back.’ The policemen nodded and said, ‘Next October it will be all right.’

  I went with the others when they accompanied him to the airport. It was the riffraff of Europe, in shaggy hairdo and tattered dress, that he was joining. Some of the most disreputable were guarded by policemen, whose job it was to see that this or that particular visitor got aboard the plane and stayed there. Others were accompanied by girl friends with whom they had been living through the winter and whom they would probably never see again; such departures were apt to be tearful like those at any airport. In the coming months Torremolinos would look more orderly than it had during the winter, and I suspected that winter was better. The world cleans up too many places for the benefit of tourists, builds too many Potemkin villages.

  Clive left us with no rancor. ‘I’ve stayed beyond my schedule as it is,’ he said, looking at Gretchen as he spoke. ‘We’ll be meeting somewhere … spin a few disks together.’ He kissed the three young men, embraced Britta and Monica, and shook hands with Gretchen. When he reached me he said, ‘If you could join me for a year, you’d catch the hang of our music’ He shook my hand and disappeared into the mob, a frail young fellow carrying only a purple carpetbag and a shaving kit.

  Before our group could work its way back to the pop-top, we were stopped by a policeman, who took Joe by the arm and said, ‘Tomorrow … out!’

  ‘What have I done?’ Joe protested.

  ‘Out.’ From this curt decision, reached in the flash of a moment and occasioned only by Joe’s haircut, there could be no appeal. The policeman noted in his book: Bar El Alamo. Fuera.

  The young people were despondent. There was not only the question of who would care for Jean-Victor’s bar if Joe had to leave so abruptly, but also the problem of how Joe would live, for he had saved little money. Yigal and Cato were reluctant to see him go, and Britta was most unhappy, for the amiable life she had devised for herself would now go smash.

  Cato was driving the pop-top in silence, with none of us having any good ideas, when Gretchen snapped her fingers. Apparently she had been doing sums in her head and was now satisfied with her financial prospects, for she said, ‘Why don’t we all leave Torremolinos? I mean it. We could rig up two additional bunks in here … You could do that, couldn’t you, Yigal? And we’d go to Italy.’

  ‘Using what for money?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I am hiring you, this instant, to drive the pop-top and care for the luggage.’ She placed her hand on his arm and said, ‘Please say yes. We need you.’

  Joe tugged at his beard, could think of no better prospect, and said yes.

  Now Gretchen became excited. ‘I know that Cato and Yigal get money from the States. You told me so. And you have some, don’t you, Monica?’ The three nodded, and Gretchen said, ‘So you’d have no problems.’ Instinctively, all of us except Cato turned to look at Britta, who blushed deeply. ‘How about you, Britt?’ Gretchen asked.

  ‘Broke,’ she said.

  This provoked silence, which ended when Gretchen said quietly, ‘You’re the dearest friend I’ve ever had. You’re not broke.’

  From this impulsive beginning the six young people constructed an intricate program for touring Europe together, and by the time we reached the outskirts of Torremolinos, Yigal and Joe had decided what was required to build two more bunks into the pop-top, so when we entered the town we drove directly to the large hardware store near the post office, where the men purchased a variety of bolts, springs and canvas strips.

  I was about to leave them there, for I had to keep an appointment with the Greek shipowners at one of the Chinese restaurants, but as I started to walk away, Joe stopped me and said, ‘With me and Britta leaving, somebody will have to tend bar till Jean-Victor gets back. Will you find someone, Mr. Fairbanks?’ And he tossed me the keys.

  If Susan Eltregon had no luck in enlisting either Gretchen or Cato, she did establish good contacts with the Negro enlisted man; he was to meet her in St. Louis as soon as he left the service and would in the meantime distribute Haymaker literature at the army base.

  Her big success, however, came with Monica Braham. After prudent observation, Susan had satisfied herself as to Monica’s character and potentialities, so on the last night before their forced departure, when the gang was sitting in the bar lamenting with old friends whom they would no longer see, Susan suggested that they pop along to Laura’s for farewell drinks. I said I couldn’t join them because I had to find someone to run the bar, and this caused Susan no disappointment.

  Joe assured me, ‘I’ve cabled Morocco. Jean-Victor’ll be here within a couple of days.’

  ‘Peddling marijuana?’

  ‘Guy has to make a buck.’

  ‘What about Britta? Who takes her place?’

  Joe looked around. ‘Who?’ he repeated, waving his right arm toward the center of Torremolinos. ‘There must be five thousand girls out there looking for a job. Pick one.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘One with good legs. This is a bar.’

  When he was gone I made the capital mistake of confiding to the soldiers my responsibility for finding a reliable bar girl, and within fifteen minutes, parading before me was the most lethal collection of doxies I had ever seen. There were girls from Australia with missing front teeth, tramps from Paris, weather-beaten blondes from Stockholm, Fräuleins who could speak no English. At one point I was tempted to remind them that I was staffing a bar, not an abattoir; instead I chickened out and said, ‘I’ll let you know tomorrow.’ But as to what I would do tomorrow, I had no idea.

  I kept the place open till about three o’clock, at which time, unlike the younger crowd, I was getting sleepy, but I was not destined for bed, because when I was about to lock the door Joe ran up, shouting, ‘Fairbanks! We need your help.’

  ‘What’s happened?’


  ‘Monica!’

  ‘What’d she do?’

  ‘Look!’

  Down the alley came Monica, stark naked and surrounded by a mob of cheering night people. Behind her, in jockey shorts and nothing else, came Cato, holding a broom over her head as if he were an Egyptian slave protecting her from the sun. She was lost in a drugged trance, blowing kisses left and right as if she were royalty, and in my first horrified sight of the procession, I could think only of those lurid Sunday supplements in boyhood Indiana; they had taught me whatever I knew about sex. I had cherished one picture in which a near-naked Queen of Sheba approached King Solomon, attended by palm-waving blacks—and Monica looked like such a queen.

  ‘She won’t listen,’ Joe cried with urgency. ‘The cops are bound to get her.’

  I ran to where she was about to turn a corner that would take her into the heart of the town, with policemen on the various corners. ‘Monica!’ I shouted.

  She turned toward my familiar voice, looked at me with uncomprehending eyes, regally pushed me aside, and moved on toward the police. I grabbed Cato and shouted, ‘What’s going on?’ but he too, looked through me, shoved me aside with his elbow, and followed the white queen, being careful to keep his broom over her head.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I yelled to Joe.

  ‘The fucking Eltregon,’ he shouted.

  Without trying to figure out what he meant, I ripped off my shirt, ran ahead, and wrapped it around Monica. At this same time I pulled her away from the main thoroughfare, but not before a policeman two blocks away spotted the confusion, if not its cause. He started running toward us, so I passed Monica along to Joe, who lifted her off the ground and retreated with her down the alley. This left me with no shirt at three o’clock in the morning in the middle of Torremolinos, so I darted into a narrow hiding space near the bar and waited until the policeman had run past me. Then I came out, and ran right into an American woman and her husband.

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ she asked as I looked about for something to take the place of my shirt. ‘At your age?’

  From another hiding place Cato appeared, and when I joined up with him, hoping to ascertain what had happened, I found him in a stupor, unable to give me any answers, let alone logical ones; but soon Gretchen and Yigal ran up, yelling, ‘Where’s Monica?’

  I grabbed Gretchen’s arm and asked, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘That damned Susan Eltregon. Saw a chance to get her hooks into Monica. Fed her some LSD. Laura and her gang have been using it.’

  ‘Joe has Monica in tow,’ I said.

  Yigal now led us through the alleys to the big plaza at the post office, and there Joe stood, with a nearly naked Monica locked in his arms.

  When Gretchen reached them she asked, ‘What did you do with the car?’ They were clearly unable to answer coherently, so she told me, ‘They undressed in the living room at Laura’s and ran onto the beach. Laura’s gang thought it very funny, but first thing you know, they had climbed into the pop-top and were roaring off toward town. I yelled at them to stop, but Laura said, “What can happen?” and I said, “They can get killed!” and she said, “The car’s insured, isn’t it?” I suppose it’s cracked up against a telephone pole somewhere.’

  We found the car in an unlikely place. Cato had driven it into the lobby at the Northern Lights, where the Swedish manager was holding the key. Slowly we collected the group, but when we got everyone back to the car and Gretchen had paid for the damage to the hotel, Monica and Cato were still unaware of what had happened or of the condition they were in.

  ‘It’s so magnificent!’ Monica assured me. ‘You see colors … so brilliant … they embrace the world.’ She collapsed into unconsciousness, and I asked with some apprehension, ‘What should we do?’ and Joe, who had handled LSD cases at the bar, said, ‘Put her to bed.’

  We did so, and I asked Gretchen, ‘Why did Miss Eltregon give them LSD?’ and Gretchen said, ‘She knew that Monica was taking something. She felt that if she encouraged her she might get a leverage to make Cato join the Haymakers.’

  After we had tucked the pair into bed we sat in the apartment, discussing how near they had come to being arrested, and Gretchen said, ‘Before we go to Italy, I think we ought to find some quiet place away from pot and LSD and sort of unwind.’ She looked at me as if I would know such a place, and the thought occurred that they would enjoy what I had always considered the gentlest, loveliest part of Europe, that remote and undiscovered southern end of Portugal called Algarve.

  When I told them of the sweeping beaches, the almond-covered hills and the small forgotten towns with Crusader castles—and especially when I mentioned the cheapest prices in Europe—their eyes widened and they agreed that this was what they were looking for. ‘Algarve,’ I told them as dawn began to break, ‘is a more beautiful Torremolinos, two hundred years ago,’ and they decided to head for it.

  At eight in the morning, when Monica and Cato had recovered from the effects of the LSD, the six young people piled into the yellow pop-top. Joe was at the wheel, for he was now the official chauffeur, and the others were tucked away in various imaginative positions. The regular bunks that came with the car were stowed, while the improvised ones were secured to the ceiling by ropes and pulleys. Considering all the gear—the books, the cans of Spanish food, the bottles of wine—I doubt that even a pussycat could have jammed into that vehicle. Joe sounded the horn. Gretchen leaned out to shout goodbye to the neighbors who had been so kind to her, and old women stood in their doorways to wave farewell.

  At the top of the hill a policeman halted the pop-top, checked to see that Joe and his Jesus beard were leaving town, and waved the car on its way.

  VIII

  ALGARVE

  A Spaniard is a Portuguese with brains; a Portuguese is a Spaniard with character.

  There isn’t very much in Spain, or Portugal either, to get excited about if you’ve already seen Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.

  Nature is seldom wrong, custom always.—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

  If I did not have a mirror, nor a memory, I would think I was fifteen years old.—Jane Digby, at age 44, when

  about to marry an Arab sheik

  The best way to change society is to replace it one man at a time.

  Children are amused by games; the lower classes diverted by bullfights; gentlemen are entertained by noble discourse.

  Oui, c’est elle!

  C’est le déesse plus charmante et plus belle!

  Oui, c’est elle, c’est la déesse

  Qui descend parmi nous!

  Son voile se soulève

  Et la joule est à genoux!

  —Les Pêcheurs de Perles

  I think society must protect the right of the university professor to free speech, but when someone comes up with the theory that condemns a whole race of people—and it’s just a theory with no proof—then I think the professor should not be allowed to wrap himself in the robes of academic freedom. He ought to be dragged right down into the marketplace, and if his theory is wrong he should have his teeth kicked in. Of course, I’m referring to Dr. Shillington’s thesis that Italians are inherently defective in moral codes and intuitively mafiosi.

  Never refuse him anything he asks. Observe a certain amount of reserve and delicacy before him. Keep up the honeymoon romance whether at home or in the desert. At the same time do not make prudish bothers, which only disgust and are not true modesty. Never permit anyone to speak disrespectfully of him before you, and if anyone does, no matter how difficult, leave the room. Never permit anyone to tell you anything about him, especially of his conduct with regard to other women. Always keep his heart up when he has made a failure.—Isabel Arundel’s memorandum to herself on the eve of her marriage to Richard Burton.

  Hieronymus Bosch is a fink. He paints the Establishment that is to be.

  A bachelor is a man who comes to work from a different direction every day.

  ‘Last night I lay in a we
el-made bed,

  Wi silken hangings round me;

  But now I’ll lie in a farmer’s barn,

  Wi the gypsies all around me.’

  —Child 200

  My mother always told me: ‘Son, you can’t buy happiness!’

  She never told me I couldn’t rent it.

  Be considerate. Look at it from her point of view. No man can be considered really old who has $500,000,000.

  People who live in grass houses shouldn’t get stoned.

  When I’m lonely, dear white heart,

  Black the night or wild the sea,

  By love’s light my foot finds

  The old pathway to thee.

  —‘Eriskay Love Lilt’

  Chicken Little was right.

  The trip from Spain to Portugal would exert a critical influence on two of the travelers.

  Joe, at the wheel of the pop-top, saw for the first time the desecration that Spain had promoted along that stretch of shoreline reaching westward from Málaga to Gibraltar. As he picked his way through the traffic that jammed it, he was forced to look at what had happened to the small towns which had made this one of the most pleasant roads in Europe.