THE SPANISH WAITER: SEVEN

Can someone be killed twice? Eve if he is a special agent of the sate? Or shoud Ivan get in first?

Later that day Ivan was in the bar with Geraldine. The coach party, which included the mysterious Gaddy Carter, had departed for a destination in Portugal where they planned to enjoy the wines and treats of that splendid country and with the exception of a few locals who popped into the restaurant, the hotel Pyramido was just about deserted.

Which meant that Ivan could watch the tourists depart as close to Geraldine as seemed decent, which back home wouldn’t have been devent at all. The two of them were more or less hiding in plain sight, pretending to be lovers though plainly too old to be behaving like love-struck teenagers and yet in the same of subterfuge almost squirming together at the height of unbelievable passion. It wasn’t as difficult as it might have been: Ivan found Geraldine to be a very desirable woman and she more than once had told him that she couldn’t believe his wife Caroline had left him.

So from the clinch they put themselves into both Ivan and Geraldine watched as the UK party bound for Portugal found its slow way onto their coach, its driver laughing and joking with a smallgroup of elderly ladies who had spent the previous evening enjoying the contents of the hotal bar..

“That’s him!” hissed Ivan when the man he’d identified as the late lamented Gaddy Carter sauntered to the coach doorway, dragging his overnight case on wheels behind him. He looked nonchalant, but Ivan noticed that the two who had been with him last evening were never far away from him, almost as if they were his eyes and ears.

“Are you sure?” whispered Geraldine, and she added “I’ve seen photos of him and I agree, it’s either him or his double.”

“And I’d swear that couple with him played the part of the goons supporting him at the time I allegedly murdered him,” added Ivan. “They look like nothing more or less than a team. Yet back in the nineties he was the ruffian and they were a pair of thickies apparently out for a bit of fun watching him bully hia way through me,”

“That couple? He in the jeans and she in the shorts? I see. Yes, she could easily be taken for a man if she wore the right clothes,” agreed Geraldine. “They’re probably a unit from one of the secret services, and may even be out on a hush-hush mission.”

“Like keeping an eye on me?”

“Could be. When you were behind bars you were nothing to them, but now that you’re free do go wherever you want they might think you need watching on the odd chance you want to pay them back for a huge chunk of your life.”

Ivan nodded. “They cost me twelve years, and I’ll never forgive them,” he muttered as the coach they were watching slowly pulled away. The last thing he noticed was the man who’d enjoyed the nickname of Bonehead seemed to be staring straight at him through the window before the coach disappeared from sight.

“I think he saw me,” he told Geraldine, “the ay he was staring.”

She nodded. “It looked that way. But you’ve changed a lot since you offered to help him mend his old banger!” she murmured, “your beard? Your hair-line? Or were you on your way to being bald back then?”

He grinned at her. “I resent that!” he exclaimed, “I had a fine head of hair and it’s only worry that has made it start falling out!!

“Por you. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she grinned.

“But he might have a recent picture of me, just in case,” countered Ivan, “you know, Geraldine, I languished for twelve long years behind bars and someone in power might reckon I could be after the truth, waging a one-man war against them.”

“Against the secret services? You should be so brave!”

“I’d like to knw whether he saw me or someone he thought looked a bit like me,” suggested Ivan.

“He was certainly staring this way,” she confirmed, “but back when he knew you, you said you were clean shaven and only grew that fungus you call a beard to discourage silly neighbours from recognising you, though how that would have worked is hard to work out.. He probably thinks you’re no more than a look-alike, and if you’re actually you, what on Earth are you doing in Spain?”

That conversation had been earlier in the day, almost breakfast time as the British guests had made an early start in order to arrive at their final hotel. Now most of that same day had passed and evening was not so far away. The image, tough, of the man Gaddy Carter, and he was sure it was him, wouldn’t stop playing in his mind.

Now the evening beckoned and he was still worried. If someone from MI5 or one of the hush-hush services was keeping an eye on him, had vene come to Spain in order to .do exactly that, he knew that he had every right to be worried

He and Geraldine were enjoying their drinks as Ivan had little to do in the way of waiting or tending the bar, the hotel being virtually unoccupied. Geraldine was having an evening off before returning to the UK the next day. Tomas said that he wasn’t paying Ivan for doing nothing, and so he was keeping an eye on the bar and wandering to it on the rare occasion his services were wanted.

One or two guests, and there were only one or two, were joined by the odd local who found the drinks in the quiet of the Pyramido Hotel to their taste.

He was serving a local at the bar, trying not to seem too foolish when it came to the Spanish names for drinks he knew full well in English, when he heard Geraldine coughing violently. And then e sensed rather than saw her as she rushed to the bar, clearly anxious.

“Look!” she asked, “near the door!”

And he saw that she was right being agitated. Because standing there, leering as if he had a huge and wonderful little plan and was about to gleefully execute it, was the man known back home as Bonehead.

And behind him, nonchalantly lounging against a wall, were his two rather familiar friends.

© Peter Rogerson 31.10.22

...