s
One
I was in Benalmadena looking for Christian Jansen because he owed me three grand from a cage fight where my boy had come through against the odds. The odds were ten to one on the Turk, who was six-two, sixteen stone and hadn’t lost a fight in the last two years; but I laid three hundred on the Chink because I liked the way he danced. He was five two and wiry, but he was quick. Real quick. In the second round he slipped under the Turk’s guard, broke his knee with a back kick, then broke his sternum with an elbow, got his head in an arm lock and broke his neck. My three hundred was suddenly three grand, but when I went to collect, Christian Jansen was gone.
I had met Jansen at the Blues Club on Hanway Street, in London. He was real drunk and looked unhappy. He looked unhappy the way men do when they wake up from their life’s dream and discover that their reality is a nightmare. He was drinking vodka neat and shouting a lot in a mixture of Danish and English about how pretty soon his villa in Manzanilla Avenue, on the Benalmadena golf course, was going to be prime seaside real estate. He was shouting a lot of other stuff too, about how things were going to change, and the power brokers would become princes. It didn’t make a lot of sense, at the time.
Then he started mouthing about how the Turk was going to kill the Chink because all that mattered in this world was power. Everything, he said, was subjugated to power. He was standing next to me at the bar, shouting at anyone who would listen and a lot who wouldn’t, so I asked him if he’d ever seen a TVR Inferno hit a small patch of oil at 200 mph. He asked me what the hell I was talking about and I told him even big power can slip up. He laughed and told me, ‘Satans osse! Ten to one on the Turk! Hashryger!’ I told him three hundred pounds sterling and we shook on it.
If I let every drunk who tried to welsh on a bet get away with it I wouldn’t have an income or a reputation. It took me a long time to get both so I work hard at keeping them both healthy. When Jansen disappeared from the Blues Club I decided to take a trip down to Benalmadena and pay him a visit at his villa on Manzanilla Avenue. Five minutes on the Spanish paginas blancas on my PC back home had given me his house number, and a Hertz car I’d picked up at the airport got me to his address as the sun was starting to bleed over the horizon. Even with the sun going down it was hot, and the air was full of the dry sound of cicadas.
Manzanilla Avenue was in a leafy suburb, and Jansen’s house was a two story villa with a swimming-pool set among palm trees, and an orange tiled roof which was turning pink in the dying sun. The pool was good news. Any man who could afford the water tax on a swimming-pool in an irrigated zone could afford to pay me my three grand. There was an iron gate with a wooden name plate that read ‘Eden’ next to it. The gate was open and there was nothing telling me to beware of the dog, so I stepped through and climbed the steps to the front door.
It was that time in the evening when the heat is still hanging in the air, but the light turns a grainy blue-gray, and, if you’re in the right kind of neighborhood, you start to smell barbequed meat on the air, and hear civilized laughter and the tinkle of ice in tall glasses, while warm light starts to spill from drawing-room windows and patios. Only there was no light spilling from Jansen’s windows, and the only sound was the lapping of the water in his swimming-pool, and the high-pitched grinding of the cicadas in the hot air. I rang the bell and hammered on the door anyway, but there was no reply, so I took a walk round the back and explored his shrubs and flower beds, and stood staring into his pool for a while. Then I opened his French windows with one of my skeleton keys and stepped into his ground floor. It was dark, silent and oppressively warm. I figured the doors and windows hadn’t been opened in a while.
I didn’t put the lights on. I waited for my eyes to adjust and then had a look around. The downstairs was a big dining-room sitting-room affair that opened onto the patio through the French windows. Beyond it was an open-plan kitchen-diner. There was no one there and everything looked clean and tidy, as though it hadn’t been disturbed recently. There was a staircase from the sitting-room to the top floor. I climbed it. It was darker upstairs and I had a prickling feeling in the back of my neck.
At the top there was a landing and a balustrade to hold onto. I could make out doors leading off the landing. They were all closed, except one, but I could see that was the one I wanted. It led into a room that was beginning to fill up with dark blue moonlight which was reflecting off the sea. There were open French windows and the light was making silhouettes out of a balcony, a round table and a chair, and a man who was sitting in the chair looking out over the garden, the pool and the ocean beyond. I walked quietly into the room and stood in the doorway watching him sit in his chair on the terrace. I could see now the moon rising over the sea far below, and his thin, sandy hair moving in the evening breeze. It was the only thing about him that was moving.