‘How long are you going to stay? Your father told me to keep an eye on you.’
‘Relax. I won’t come to any mischief here.’
‘Is that a joke? With this volcano over our heads?’
Vandervell pointed to the stick-dancer. ‘It doesn’t worry him. This mountain has been active for fifty years.’
‘Then why do we have to come here now?’
‘I’m looking for Springman. I think he came here three months ago.’
‘Where is he? Up in the village?’
‘I doubt it. He’s probably five thousand miles under our feet, sucked down by the back-pressure. A century from now he’ll come up through Vesuvius.’
‘I hope not.’
‘Have you thought of that, though? It’s a wonderful idea.’
‘No. Is that what you’re planning for me?’
Cinders hissed in the roof tank, spitting faintly like boiling rain.
‘Think of them, Gloria — Pompeiian matrons, Aztec virgins, bits of old Prometheus himself, they’re raining down on the just and the unjust.’
‘What about your friend Springman?’
‘Now that you remind me…’ Vandervell raised a finger to the ceiling. ‘Let’s listen. What’s the matter?’
‘Is that why you came here? To think of Springman being burnt to ashes?’
‘Don’t be a fool.’ Vandei-vell turned to the window.
‘What are you worrying about, anyway?’
‘Nothing,’ Vandervell said. ‘For once in a long time I’m not worrying about anything at all.’ He rubbed the pane with his sleeve. ‘Where’s the old devil-boy? Don’t tell me he’s gone.’ He peered through the falling dust. ‘There he is.’
The figure stood on the ridge above the road, illuminated by the flares from the crater. A pall of ash hung in the air around him.
‘What’s he waiting for?’ the woman asked. ‘Another dollar?’
‘A lot more than a dollar,’ Vandervell said. ‘He’s waiting for me.’
‘Don’t burn your fingers,’ she said, closing the door.
That afternoon, when she came into the lounge after waking up, she found that Vandervell had left. She went to the window and looked up towards the crater. The falls of ash and cinders obscured the village, and hundreds of embers glowed on the lava flows. Through the dust she could see the explosions inside the crater lighting up the rim.
Vandervell’s jacket lay over a chair. She waited for three hours for him to return. By this time the noise from the crater was continuous. The lava flows dragged and heaved like chains, shaking the walls of the house.
At five o’clock Vandervell had not come back. A second crater had opened in the summit of the volcano, into which part of the village had fallen. When she was sure that the devil-sticks man had gone, the woman took the money from Vandervell’s jacket and drove down the mountain.
Readers hoping to solve the mystery of the Beach Murders — involving a Romanoff Princess, a CIA agent, two of his Russian counterparts and an American limbo dancer — may care to approach it in the form of the card game with which Quimby, the absconding State Department cipher chief, amused himself in his hideaway on the Costa Blanca. The principal clues have therefore been alphabetized. The correct key might well be a familiar phrase, e. g. PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH, or meaningless, e. g. qwertyuiop… etc. Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and a final answer to the mystery, like the motives and character of Quimby himself, lies forever hidden Auto-erotic As always after her bath, the reflection of her naked body filled the Princess with a profound sense of repose. In the triptych of mirrors above the dressing table she gazed at the endless replicas of herself, the scent of the Guerlain heliotrope soothing her slight migraine. She lowered her arms as the bedroom door opened. Through the faint mist of talcum she recognized the handsome, calculating face of the Russian agent whose photograph she had seen in Statler’s briefcase that afternoon.
Statler waded through the breaking surf. The left cup of the brassiere in his hand was stained with blood. He bent down and washed it in the warm water. The pulsing headlamps of the Mercedes parked below the cornjche road lit up the cove. Where the hell was Lydia? Somewhere along the beach a woman with a bloody breast would frighten the wits out of the Russian landing party.
The self-contained face of the bullfighter, part gamin, part Beatle, lay below Quimby as he set out the cards on the balcony table. Whatever else they said about the boy, he never moved his feet. By contrast Raissa was pacing around the bedroom like a tigress in rut. Quimby could hear her wide Slavic hips brushing against his Paisley dressing gown behind the escritoire. What these obsessives in Moscow and Washington failed to realize was that for once he might have no motive at all.
