Free The White Schooner by Antony Trew Page B

keep looking round as if you’re expecting somebody . Are you?’ she challenged.
    ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m just curious. Half the fun of sitting in front of the Montesol is to watch the characters go by.’ Butshe was right, and he resolved to be more careful.
    Kyriakou jiggled his cigar about in his mouth, hooked his thumbs in his braces, and leant back in his chair.
    Ilse Berch said: ‘You’ve met van Biljon haven’t you, Manuela?’
    ‘Once,’ she said. ‘For about two minutes. At the airport. He dropped his ticket and I picked it up. We spoke a little. He was shy, but he was sweet to me. I think he’s a sad man.’
    ‘For Chrissake!’ Kyriakou pushed his feet forward and tipped the straw hat over his eyes. ‘You’ll make me cry. Let’s talk about something different.’
    Manuela said, ‘Like what?’ Black sensed her irritation.
    ‘Anything,’ said Kyriakou. ‘Wine. Women … or whatever.’
    ‘Drugs,’ suggested Black. For an instant the Greek’s facial muscles contracted but he gave no other indication of having heard the remark.
    ‘There’s only one subject which interests him,’ said Manuela.
    ‘What’s that?’ Ilse Berch rattled the ice cubes in her empty glass.
    ‘ Mister Kyriakou,’ said Manuela.
    The Greek jerked himself and the chair back into an upright position and took the cigar out of his mouth. ‘You wanna be careful what you say, baby.’ The way he looked at her, the menacing voice, made Black believe all he’d heard of him.
    Manuela must have realised she’d gone too far. ‘I’m sorry, Kirry,’ she touched his arm. ‘I didn’t mean it. But you were being lousy. I said it to hurt. I’m sorry.’
    ‘Okay,’ said the Greek giving her a long hard look. ‘I’m glad … for your sake.’
    Ilse Berch tried to gloss things over with a change of subject but it didn’t work. The tension between Manuela and Kyriakou, blown up so suddenly, hung in the air like a bad smell. Black decided it was time to leave. He didn’t want to get involved in another fracas like that in the ferry, and he realised that to sit there much longer was tempting fate for it was a high probability that sooner or later Hassan would appear. It was said on Ibiza that if you sat in front of the Montesol long enough you saw everybody you knew go by, and he had every reason to believe it was true. As he walked away he thought of Manuela, and because he was beginning to like her he worried.
    Why was she mixed up with the Greek? They weren’tremotely the same type. What could they have in common? Was it just that he represented a meal ticket, that she liked life on Ibiza, playing at painting, loafing around? And the Greek made it possible?
    She was afraid of Kyriakou, he could see that, so why didn’t she go? Reluctantly he accepted that there was only one rational explanation: she couldn’t break away because she was under some sort of obligation. And it wasn’t too difficult to imagine what that was. She was hooked. Maybe she was one of the Greek’s pushers, just as George Madden was likely to be another.
    And if that was her position, what would happen to her? Life itself didn’t last very long for a junkie. The only comfort he could find in these rhetorical questions was her appearance. Although there were heavy shadows under her eyes and she looked fragile, she didn’t appear to be on the point of collapse, she was not withdrawn, and her morale was good. Maybe it was still only hash and LSD. But if so it wouldn’t be long before it was the amphetamines and heroin. Not if she hung around Kyriakou much longer. Vague notions of rescuing her, of some absurdly quixotic act, floated through his mind until he thought of Kagan and jerked back to reality. He wasn’t on Ibiza to solve the problems of feckless young women, however attractive. He sighed. He hadn’t learnt much about life in his thirty-five years. Least of all where women were concerned.
     
    Soon after Black had gone Kyriakou