Playing Dead

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The evening stars were winking on up in the blackening heavens. The mariachi band struck up and the bridal couple took to the floor to cheering and clapping. Other couples started to drift onto the dance floor. She saw Constantine in a huddle with several other men, talking intently.

She watched him, concerned. She’d heard the rumbles about the Cantuzzi clan; there had already been trouble. Shit, there was always trouble. But he seemed to handle it well; nothing ruffled him. At least, nothing appeared to. Sometimes she found it hard to equate the two strands of his personality – the cool, controlling Don, and the tender, considerate husband. Sometimes he seemed like two different men entirely.

She went to slip upstairs but, as she passed the doors onto the terrace, she saw that there was no one out there. She went outside onto the decking, and was instantly enveloped in the rush and thunder of the ocean, the stiff breeze riffling through her hair. She walked to the edge of the terrace and looked over the deserted beach, breathing deeply of the fresh, tangy air. The presents were piled up on the table at the end of the terrace, ready for the Don to present them to the couple at ten o’clock.

God, she was tired! The pregnancy was taking a toll on her energy levels. She gripped the rail and looked up at the nearly full moon. It was so weird to think that men had walked up there; that Apollo 15 was in orbit right now, gliding through space.

‘Honey? What are you doing out here all alone?’ asked a voice behind her.

‘Just taking a moment,’ said Annie, turning to smile at Constantine as he stepped out onto the deck and closed the French doors behind him. He looked at the pile of presents and picked up the one at the front of the table, the biggest, with a red bow over sky-blue paper. ‘Hey, wonder what’s in this one?’ he asked, walking towards her.

Then her whole world exploded.

Majorca

Chapter 22

February 1970

The first thing the man knew was pain. Pain, then blinding light. Something was moving through the light. Shapes. Maybe birds.

Buzzards?

They were circling overhead, like in an old Western movie when the gunman’s been laid out to die by the Sioux or the Apache. He’d been laid out to die too, and die he would, because for sure he couldn’t move. Everything was pain. Any movement – oh, and how he had tried to move – hurt like a bastard. So he’d just lie back and let it all unravel. He had decided that was the best thing to do. Let the buzzards come down and pick him clean. Get it over with. No more struggling, no more fighting.

Thoughts, though. His thoughts said move. His guts said move.

Couldn’t. No good.

Images too, drifting through his brain. A shot. A man falling into the pool, a spreading stain of crimson tinting the water. A girl, screaming.

Move, you sod. Come on.

But his body wouldn’t listen to the urgings of his mind. It said no. You kidding? Lie there and die, man, we are all out of alternatives.

His mouth was so dry. His lips felt cracked. The sun was burning him. Burning him up. He closed his eyes.

Bells.

Tiny tinkling bells – now he was hearing things. Maybe this was what it was like, dying; maybe everything went blank, like his mind was blank right now. Why couldn’t he think straight, what was wrong with him . . .? Maybe the blankness came first, and then the bells. They were getting louder. He’d be hearing heavenly choirs next and, frankly, that would be nice. He could just give up, and die.

But for now, it was just bells. Getting louder and louder. And now . . . a little movement, a little wetness nudging at his neck. Something was there. An angel, must be. Bringing him water. He forced his eyes to open.

He looked into slitted eyes, devil’s eyes.

Ah shit.

Not heaven then, and no angel coming to fetch him. He was bound for hell. This was an imp, a tool of Satan, here to bring him home to eternal damnation.

He tried to move again then, to protest, to say no, I’ve been a good man.

But . . . had he?

He didn’t know. Couldn’t think. Again, there was that frightening blankness, pressing upon his mind like a white wall of fog.

The thing’s face was brown, hairy. The eyes were yellow. The face loomed over him, terrifying. Leaned closer, closer, touched his neck again. Coldness, moistness. An icy brush of metal.

Bells.

A bell on the neck of the thing: jangling, deafening.

A groan escaped him and the thing twitched back, startled by the sudden noise.

A goat. He was looking at a goat, not a devil.

He could almost have laughed at that, if he’d had the strength. But he didn’t. All he could do was lie there. Exhausted. Damaged. His eyes fluttered closed, and he hardly even heard the soft footsteps of the boy coming closer. Damned goat nudging him again. His eyes came open, the glare of the sun, buzzards, a nut-brown human face coming in close, blotting out the unbearable heat and light.

‘¿Señor?’ said the face. ‘¿Se cayó?’

He closed his eyes. He understood. Did you fall? the boy was asking him. But he couldn’t answer. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything.

The goatherd gave the man water, then went to alert the monks at the nearby monastery. The boy was shaking with fright because he thought that by the time he returned with the help of the brothers, the man might be dead. But, when they got there, the brothers having struggled and panted and sweated with effort as they traversed the uneven and, in parts, treacherous rocky ground, the man seemed still to be clinging to life, even though his injuries were horrendous.

The brothers looked him over while the boy watched them nervously. They’d brought a stretcher from the monastery’s small sick room, but one look at the man – who wore nothing but a brief pair of swimming shorts – made them doubt he would survive the journey back up to the monastery.

Both ankles were shattered into bloody pulp.

His left arm was broken, the bone protruding through the skin, so bad was the break.

There was a deep, nasty-looking gash on his head. Flies buzzed there, feasting on the drying blood, laying their eggs in the open wound. His lips and the skin on his face were cracked from the extreme heat of the sun. He was feverish. God alone knew how long he had lain there on this precarious rocky platform above the sea, because the man was making no sense. He needed water, and shelter. And even then, the brothers warned his young rescuer, there was every chance that he would die.

‘Be warned, child, he might not get through this,’ one of them told him.

The boy, distressed, looked at the man. He had found him, rescued him. He felt an attachment for him, of course he did.

‘I don’t want him to die,’ he told the monks.

‘God may spare him,’ they said, and they looked at the man and thought that perhaps it would be better if God took him. He looked athletic, fit; he would not, they felt sure, relish a half-life. And they could already see that, if he survived, he was going to live out the rest of his life as a cripple.

Chapter 23

The monks had a long, hard and perilous job getting the man stretchered off the cliff and onto the nearest dirt track of a road. Once there, one of the younger brothers ran ahead to take the one battered old car the monastery possessed down to the village so that an ambulance could be called to take him to hospital in Palma. There was no phone at the monastery.

Brother Benito went with the poor wretch, who seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness, murmuring foreign-sounding words under his breath.

‘Who is he?’ asked the medics.