The head-man pointed to the aircraft skeleton. He smiled at me, but his eyes were fixed on my chest, on the wallet in my breast pocket. Already his hand was slightly outstretched. For all his small size, he looked as dangerous as a wild dog.
I took out my wallet and handed him a single bank-note, worth more than he could earn in a month. Perhaps because the denomination was meaningless to him, he pointed aggressively at the other notes.
I fended him off. ‘Look — I’m not interested in this aircraft. It’s the wrong one, you fool…!’ When he stared uncomprehendingly at me I took the airline tag from my pocket and showed him the picture of the huge passenger jet. ‘This one! Very large. Hundreds of bodies.’ Losing my temper, and giving way completely to my outrage and disappointment, I screamed at him: ‘It’s the wrong one! Can’t you understand? There should be bodies everywhere, hundreds of cadavers… He left me where I was, ranting away at the stony walls of this deserted ravine high in the mountains, and at the skeleton of this wind-blown reconnaissance plane. Ten minutes later, when I returned to my car, I discovered that the slow puncture I had suspected earlier that afternoon had flattened one of the front tyres. Exhausted now, my shoes pierced by the rocks, my clothes filthy, I slumped behind the steering wheel, realising the futility of this absurd expedition. I would be lucky to make it back to the coast by night-fall. By then every other journalist would have reported the first sighting of the crashed airliner in the Pacific. My editor would be waiting with growing impatience for me to file my story in time for the evening newscasts. Instead, I was high in these barren mountains with a damaged car, my life possibly threatened by these idiot peasants. After resting, I pulled myself together. It took me half an hour to change the wheel. As I started the engine and began the long drive back to the coastal plain the light had begun to fade even here at the peak. The village was three hundred yards below me when I could see the first of the hovels on a bend in the track. One of the villagers was standing beside a low wall, with what seemed to be a weapon in one hand. Immediately I slowed down, knowing that if they decided to attack me I had little hope of escape. I remembered the wallet in my pocket, and took it out, spreading the banknotes on the seat. Perhaps I could buy my way through them.
As I approached, the man stepped forward into the road. The weapon in his hand was a crude spade. A small man, like all the others, his posture was in no way threatening. Rather, he seemed to be asking me for something, almost begging.
There was a bundle of old clothing on the verge beside the wall. Did he want me to buy it? As I slowed down, about to hand one of the bank-notes to him, I realised that it was an old woman, like a monkey wrapped in a shawl, staring sightlessly at me. Then I saw that her skull-like face was indeed a skull, and that the earth-stained rags were her shroud.
‘Cadaver…’ The man spoke nervously, fingering his spade in the dim light. I handed him the money and drove on, joining the road leading to the village.
Another younger man stood by the verge fifty yards ahead, also with a spade. The body of a small child, freshly disinterred, sat against the lid of its open coffin.
‘Cadaver—’
All the way through the village people stood in the doorways, some alone, those who had no one to disinter for me, others with their spades. Freshly jerked from their graves, the corpses sat in the dim light in front of the hovels, propped against the stone walls like neglected relations, put out to at last earn their keep.
As I drove past, handing out the last of my money, I could hear the villagers murmuring, their voices following me down the mountainside.
‘The man’s playing some sort of deranged game with himself.’
From their balcony on the tenth floor of the empty hotel, Forrester and his wife watched the light aircraft taking off from the runway at Ampuriabrava, half a mile down the beach. A converted crop-sprayer with a silver fuselage and open cockpits, the biplane was lining up at the end of the concrete airstrip. Its engine blared across the deserted resort like a demented fan.
‘One of these days he’s not going to make it — I’m certain that’s what he’s waiting for…’ Without thinking, Forrester climbed from his deck-chair and pushed past the drinks trolley to the balcony rail. The aircraft was now moving rapidly along the runway, tail-wheel still touching the tarmac marker line. Little more than two hundred feet of concrete lay in front of it. The runway had been built thirty years earlier for the well-to-do Swiss and Germans bringing their private aircraft to this vacation complex on the Costa Brava. By now, in the absence of any maintenance, the concrete pier jutting into the sea had been cut to a third of its original length by the strong offshore currents.
