The Drifters (44 page)

‘Is negotiable,’ I said with complete frankness.

Collectively they sighed. I knew from the study that at seventeen million dollars they would lose substantially; our people had no desire to strafe them and were prepared to escalate to some figure that represented a reasonably fair shake. But what figure? Deciding this would require time and tricky footwork.

So the shipping men left me alone in the luxurious penthouse, and as they retreated to the elevator I realized that this was going to be a protracted negotiation. I suspected that I would be in Spain for at least a month, and the prospect did not distress me, for after the hectic pace I had been keeping—Philadelphia, Vwarda, Afghanistan—I could profit from some prolonged sunbathing.

When I unpacked my bags I found the four large boxes of Bircher
muesli
I had brought with me. They would last about four weeks if I rationed myself prudently, and at the end of that regimen I would be back in condition, for there is no better breakfast in the world than
muesli.
To have a dish of it with cold milk and slices of juicy Valencia orange is the best possible way to start the day; after any long spell of eating greasy Afghan food or heavy American, I take
muesli
not only for breakfast, but for lunch as well. I eat a small dinner at night and in no time I’m
back in shape. My weight has kept at about 170 since I moved to Switzerland, and much of the credit for this goes to
muesli.

What is it? A combination of roasted whole wheat and millet mixed with shredded dried apples, apricots, raisins, hazelnuts and almonds, the principal ingredient being un-milled oat flakes. I get hungry thinking about it and thank the Swiss doctor who invented it. In my Spanish penthouse I poured myself a dish, had it for lunch, then lay down for a nap.

Negotiations with the Greeks dragged along as I had predicted. They knew they were in a hopeless position but were reluctant to surrender. In one sense it would have been easy for them to scrape together the missing twenty-seven million; all they had to do was sell off some of the ships on which they had made their money originally, but to do this would have been insane. If they lost their ships, they would be losing their life’s blood, and they were not stupid.

But what they could not yet bring themselves to face was the collapse of their dreamlike city on the shores of the Mediterranean, so I wandered contentedly about the town and gave them time, knowing that when they read the weekly statements of loss, they would be psychologically prepared to accept our terms. They had to have cash to keep their various shipping companies operating, and the only way they could get it was to unload the buildings to World Mutual. We could wait; they couldn’t.

On my self-enforced diet of Bircher
muesli
I lost weight, restored my energy, and felt ravenously hungry every afternoon at four o’clock. While the Greeks were agonizing over what figure they would accept for their skyscrapers, I agonized over which of the Torremolinos restaurants to patronize that night. Because of its international clientele the town had a plethora of good places: a superb smorgasbord, a fine German restaurant at the Brandenburger, an Indian-curry place that was better than any in New York, six or seven top Chinese restaurants, a French one good enough to rate at least one star in Michelin, and a wonderful old Spanish dive called, naturally,
El Caballo Blanco. It was a pleasure to contemplate these restaurants when one was famished, and I ate better in Torremolinos than in most of the other places in which I worked. Often as I left the penthouse on my way to an evening meal, I said a little prayer: ‘Thank God, I’m not in Afghanistan or Marrakech.’

Nevertheless, my enforced idleness began to pall, for my talks with the Greeks occupied me only a few minutes a day: ‘Yes, we’d consider going three million more … with certain considerations even four … definitely not six.’ As the probable length of my stay increased, I began to look around for something to divert me; a man can read Simenon only so many hours a day and the hundred-odd night clubs and bars grow tiring when one is over sixty. It was in such a mood that I wandered down one of the alleys at about ten o’clock one night and saw above me a preposterous sign: a huge wooden revolver, crudely carved, along whose barrel were the words T
HE
A
LAMO
. Loud noises were coming from it, punctuated by raucous profanity in Brooklynese, and I thought it would be fun to see what the Americans were up to. The door was open and I walked into an extremely small room with three tables and a shabby davenport along one side. The walls were decorated with a variety of nineteenth-century pictures of the old west, now fly-specked and torn loose at the corners. The serving bar was short, crowded at the left-hand end by a record player and a huge stack of disks; at the right, by cases of a bilious-colored orange drink.

And there was something more! Behind the bar stood a Scandinavian girl of seventeen or eighteen with a countenance so beautiful and so unaffected that I had to stop in my survey of the joint to marvel at the perfection of her blond hair and cool complexion. She caught me looking at her and smiled, cocking her head delightfully to one side and disclosing her white teeth. Using only gestures she asked if I wanted a beer, and when I nodded, she poured me one, left the bar and brought it to me. I could then see her miniskirt and shapely legs, and I found myself asking, ‘Swedish?’

‘Norwegian,’ she said simply, and for a reason I could not have explained to myself, except that she was obviously such a delightful human being, I quoted from a famous old barroom ballad:

‘Ssssshhhhh!’ she cried, putting her finger to her lips in mock horror. ‘That’s how fights start. Where’d you learn that?’

‘ “The Siege of Copenhagen.” Everyone knows it:

‘You recite that to a patriotic Swede and he’ll knock your head off,’ she warned.

‘I don’t recite it to Swedes.’

She sat down with me for a few minutes, rose to go back to the bar, changed her mind when a tall American with a heavy beard came to take over, and resumed her seat with me. We talked of many things, for she was a girl with a most probing concern about the world. She asked me particularly if I had ever visited Ceylon. I said no, and she began to hum a piece of music that I had known since childhood. As she hummed the music, I sang the English words:

‘You know it!’ she cried with pleasure. ‘I’ll bet that when you were a boy you had a Caruso record …’ She stopped abruptly, studied me, and said, ‘You are very much like my father. You poor man. I feel so sorry for you.’ She took my right hand in hers, kissed it and disappeared, but not before I saw that she was close to crying.

Later in the evening she came back and we began the first of our probing conversations. She struck me then, as she does now when I recall her, as one of the most vital persons I had ever met. All her senses seemed to work overtime, hauling into her brain observations which she weighed, judged and filed away. In her evaluation of herself she was harsh: ‘Mr. Fairbanks, if I’d had a first-class
brain, do you think I’d have dropped out of education at seventeen? I’d have gone on to become a doctor … or a’—she hesitated, casting about for the precise word and ending her sentence with one I had least expected—‘or a philosopher.’

‘You can go back,’ I said. ‘At eighteen your education’s just beginning.’

‘Yes, but what I also lack is a first-class imagination. I have no originality … I’m not an artist.’

‘Why can’t you just be an educated person?’

‘I’d want to make a contribution … something constructive.’

I should not have said what I did, but I asked, ‘You expect to make one in a Torremolinos bar?’

She did not flinch. ‘I’m like all the other serious ones down here. I am really trying to find myself.’

‘And so far?’

‘I’m satisfied with one conclusion. I was not meant to live away from sunlight. I work in here till about four o’clock in the morning … night after night. The fellows don’t bother me. The American soldiers like to grab at my legs but who cares, it’s a job. But at noon next morning, when the sun is high, I’m on the beach. An hour’s sunshine and I’m rebuilt. That I’ve learned.’

‘And after that?’

‘I’ll keep my looks till I’m thirty.’

‘Long after that,’ I assured her.

‘You don’t know me,’ she corrected. ‘My God, how I like to eat. So if I do last till thirty … well, that means I have twelve good years to look around. That’s a hundred and forty-four months. I’m not stupid. In a hundred and forty-four months I’ll find something.’ She paused, exchanged pleasantries with some of the soldiers, then said, ‘But nothing I shall discover in those months will be bigger than what I’ve already discovered. That I live by the sun. If they sent a commission from Oslo, saying, “Britta Bjørndahl, you have been elected prime ministress of Norway,” I’d tell them, “Move the capital to Málaga and I’ll accept.” Since they would be reluctant to do that, I have given up all hope of becoming prime ministress.’

‘Marriage?’

‘There’s a neat question.’ She pondered it for some time, then said, ‘I like men. I’m not like some girls who crumple if they don’t have a man around. But I like them. However,
if my luck shall be that I’m not to find … I could live without men … that is, without them on a permanent basis.’

‘Have you found anyone here?’

With a nod of her blond head she indicated the tall fellow behind the bar. Her gesture was not deprecatory, but on the other hand, it wasn’t marked with excitement, either. I had asked if she had a man for herself, and she had replied, in effect, ‘Well, yes, you might say. That’s him.’

It was in this way that I first took studied notice of the bartender. He was a tall, lean chap, well built and well mannered. He wore his hair in what the younger generation called ‘the Jesus bit’ or ‘the Kahlil Gibran thing’—that is, his hair came almost to his shoulders and a flowing beard covered his face. He wore tight faded-blue Levis and Texas boots. He was a commanding figure, most gentle in speech and behavior, and he ran a good bar. Britta told me he was an American draft dodger, like so many of the others I would meet in Torremolinos.

Intuitively I liked the young bartender, and was about to say so when she said abruptly, ‘You must forgive my emotionalism when you were singing the song. What do you think of
Les Pêcheurs de perles
 … as an opera, that is?’

‘I’ve seen it only once. It’s about the same as
Norma
and
Lakmé.
A native priestess falls in love, with a European in
Lakmé
, a Roman in
Norma
, and an Indian of some sort in
Pêcheurs.
Of course, there’s a high priest who sings bass and in the end the girl dies. It’s no better than the others, no worse.’

‘I mean the music’

‘Well … that’s another matter.
Pêcheurs
is certainly the poorest of the three. But what you must remember is that Bizet was writing it when he was only twenty-four. It’s a lovely, youthful opera, and at your age you ought to like it.’

‘But I don’t,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a real bore. I just wondered what you thought.’

‘But you were singing it,’ I said, and she told me of the frozen years her father had wasted dreaming of Ceylon and of how his fixation had influenced her. ‘I’d really like to see the place,’ she said. ‘If some young fellow—and he wouldn’t have to be so young either—if he walked in this
bar and said he was going to Ceylon, I’d go along with him tomorrow, no questions asked.’

‘You really have cut loose, haven’t you?’

‘I’ll never go back to Norway. I’ve saved seventeen dollars, which is all I have in the world. Yet I’d go to Ceylon without thinking twice … so long as it had sun.’

It was in discussions like this, as I sat in the Alamo nursing my beer, that I came to understand the new breed of young women who drifted about Europe and whose most attractive representatives congregated in Torremolinos. They were intelligent; they were beautiful; they were grimly determined not to be sucked back into routine; and they were a challenge to all who met them. Since they were a new force in history and a new experience for me, I have often pondered how best to describe them; no device could be better than a sample of the notes which were tacked onto the bulletin board at the Alamo, and at a hundred other spots throughout Torremolinos:

I chose these three notices because I happened to meet each of the girls involved, and any young man in his right mind would have journeyed to the moon with any one of them. It was an exciting time in Torremolinos.

In these first days when Britta Bjørndahl talked with me of Tromsø, I had not of course spoken with Joe; I had only seen him behind the bar, nor was I then aware that four other young people whom I had known in the past
were in town. I supposed that Gretchen Cole was touring somewhere in southern France, and that Cato Jackson was hiding out in Newark or Detroit. I had no idea that Yigal Zmora had quit his father’s university at Haifa, nor that he had visited his English grandparents in Canterbury. As for Monica Braham, the last I heard of her was her flight from Vwarda in the cockpit of a Lufthansa plane. She could be anywhere; Buenos Aires or Hong Kong were logical possibilities.

During my first two visits to the Alamo, I did not happen to run into any of the four. I discovered later that Cato, Monica and Yigal had borrowed a car and were in the mountains on a tour of those three historic cities Ronda, Antequera and Granada. Gretchen, of course, was still cooped up alone in her pop-top.