Free Horse Under Water by Len Deighton Page B

watched the waves moving down on to the shore. Each shadow darkened until one, losing itsbalance, toppled forward. It tore a white hole in the green ocean and in falling brought its fellow down, and that the next, until the white stuffing of the sea burst out of the lengthening gash.
    Charly and H.K. emerged from the kitchen with a big tray of glasses and a jug with can-can girls and vive la différence painted on them in gold.
    As they came through the door H.K. was saying,’ ‘… it’s the only thing I really miss of the New York scene.’
    ‘But I’ll do them for you,’ Charly said.
    ‘Willya really honey? I sure would be grateful. Just one a week would be great. My girl can do the cotton ones O.K., it’s the synthetic fibres that they burn. They have the iron too hot, y’see.’
    Then Charly said in a loud clear voice, ‘Mr Kondit – Harry I mean – has made us all a special Martini, and he has got a refrigerator after all.’
    ‘Now you promised that that would be a little secret between the two of us,’ H.K. said in a mock stern voice, and he pinched Charly’s bottom.
    ‘That’s an un-American activity,’ said Charly.
    ‘Oh no,’ said H.K., ‘we still got a couple of things that have to be done by hand.’
    Outside, the waves were tripping over, crashing on to and falling through the foamy, hissing scar-tissue of their predecessors. I wondered how long before we would begin doing the same.

15 Reaction in the market
    It was another hot sunny day on Monday. I stayed behind in the house, which Charly described as ‘just cosy’. I said I thought that she had her hands full of H.K. and Giorgio and she said how did I know it wasn’t the other way about. I didn’t. Charly borrowed my comb, fixed her hair and returned the comb within one minute and a half. We walked down to the market place. She had established terms of easy familiarity with the men while not alienating the women. She spoke Portuguese with a natural fluency, even knowing the local names for some of the vegetables and fish. The women saw in her the emancipation they all sought, while the men watched her and wondered if she was something they could deal with over either table or pillow.
    She wore a pale-pink sleeveless dress that made her arms look very tanned. Her hair was an unbleached white, the colour of Portland stone. She paused to pat a dog that sat in the middle ofthe hot road. She whistled after the gas man, and the vegetable boy let her work the shredding machine, piling cabbage into heaps of wire wool and sending razor-blades of carrots and pumpkin to join the hairpins of beans.
    She cleaved the yellow hands of bananas with a jab of the knife, criticized the garlic, prodded the tomatoes and put nail marks into the beans. They liked her.
    We walked through the fish market. The flat concrete benches were ashine with bream and gilt-head, pilchards, sardines and mackerel. Outside, the sun reflected off the sea with a million flashing pinpoints of light, as though every bird was sitting there on the ocean top flashing angry white wings.
    The painted fishing boats were drawn up high from the water’s edge and packed as densely as the finish line at Ford’s. Most of them were a vivid ultramarine-blue inside. Outside were bands of light green, faded pink, black, and white. On the prows signs were painted: an eye, a horse or a name. Some carried a big mop of animal hair for luck. The boats that had been out in the rain on Sunday night now, their headsails slackly raised, made an encampment of pointed canvas shapes. Here and there were men checking the nets for holes or rearranging them under the hot sun.
    As we left the fish market the little bell clanged for the tax assessor. In the sunlight moray eel was drying, and on the cobblestones a man in a shirt either dark-blue with light-blue patches or viceversa was scrubbing the big wooden fish-weighing machine. Charly asked him if he had sold out. He said ‘yes’, and when she called