Cocaine Nights

1 Frontiers and Fatalities

Crossing frontiers is my profession. Those strips of no-man's land between the checkpoints always seem such zones of promise, rich with the possibilities of new lives, new scents and affections. At the same time they set off a reflex of unease chat I have never been able to repress. As the customs officials rummage through my suitcases I sense them trying to unpack my mind and reveal a contraband of forbidden dreams and memories. And even then there are the special pleasures of being exposed, which may well have made me a professional tourist. I earn my living as a travel writer, but I accept that this is little more than a masquerade. My real luggage is rarely locked, its catches eager to be sprung.

Gibraltar was no exception, though this time there was a real basis for my feelings of guilt. I had arrived on the morning flight from Heathrow, making my first landing on the military runway that served this last outpost of the British Empire. I had always avoided Gibraltar, with its vague air of a provincial England left out too long in the sun. But my reporter's ears and eyes soon took over, and for an hour I explored the narrow streets with their quaint tea-rooms, camera shops and policemen disguised as London bobbies.

Gilbratar, like the Costa del Sol, was off my beat. I prefer the long-haul flights to Jakarta and Papeete, those hours of club-class air-time that still give me the sense of having a real destination, the great undying illusion of air travel. In fact we sit in a small cinema, watching films as blurred as our hopes of discovering somewhere new. We arrive at an airport identical to the one we left, with the same car-rental agencies and hotel rooms with their adult movie channels and deodorized bathrooms, side-chapels of that lay religion, mass tourism. There are the same bored bar-girls waiting in the restaurant vestibules who later giggle as they play solitaire with our credit cards, tolerant eyes exploring those Unes of fatigue in our faces that have nothing to do with age or tiredness.

Gibraltar, though, soon surprised me. The sometime garrison post and naval base was a frontier town, a Macao or Juarez that had decided to make the most of the late twentieth century. At first sight it resembled a seaside resort transported from a stony bay in Cornwall and erected beside the gatepost of the Mediterranean, but its real business clearly had nothing to do with peace, order and the regulation of Her Majesty's waves.

Like any frontier town Gibraltar 's main activity, I suspected, was smuggling. As I counted the stores crammed with cut-price video-recorders, and scanned the nameplates of the fringe banks that gleamed in the darkened doorways, I guessed that the economy and civic pride of this geo-political relic were devoted to rooking the Spanish state, to money-laundering and the smuggling of untaxed perfumes and pharmaceuticals.

The Rock was far larger than I expected, sticking up like a thumb, the local sign of the cuckold, in the face of Spain. The raunchy bars had a potent charm, like the speedboats in the harbour, their powerful engines cooling after the latest highspeed run from Morocco. As they rode at anchor I thought of my brother Frank and the family crisis that had brought me to Spain. If the magistrates in Marbella failed to acquit Frank, but released him on bail, one of these sea-skimming craft might rescue him from the medieval constraints of the Spanish legal system.

Later that afternoon I would meet Frank and his lawyer in Marbella, a forty-minute drive up the coast. But when I collected my car from the rental office near the airport I found that an immense traffic jam had closed the border crossing. Hundreds of cars and buses waited in a gritty haze of engine exhaust, while teenaged girls grizzled and their grandmothers shouted at the Spanish soldiers. Ignoring the impatient horns, the Guardia Civil were checking every screw and rivet, officiously searching suitcases and supermarket cartons, peering under bonnets and spare wheels.

'I need to be in Marbella by five,' I told the rental office manager, who was gazing at the stalled vehicles with the serenity of a man about to lease his last car before collecting his pension. 'This traffic jam has a permanent look about it.'

'Calm yourself, Mr Prentice. It can clear at any time, when the Guardia realize how bored they are.'

'All these regulations…' I shook my head over the rental agreement. 'Spare bulbs, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher? This Renault is better equipped than the plane that flew me here.'

'You should blame Cadiz. The new Civil Governor is obsessed with La Linea. His workfare schemes are unpopular with the people there.'

'Too bad. So there's a lot of unemployment?'

'Not exactly. Rather too much employment, but of the wrong kind.'

'The smuggling kind? A few cigarettes and camcorders?'

'Not so few. Everyone at La Linea is very happy – they hope that Gibraltar will remain British for ever.'

I had begun to think about Frank, who remained British but in a Spanish cell. As I joined the line of waiting cars I remembered our childhood in Saudi Arabia twenty years earlier, and the arbitrary traffic checks carried out by the religious police in the weeks before Christmas. Not only was the smallest drop of festive alcohol the target of their silky hands, but even a single sheet of seasonal wrapping paper with its sinister emblems of Yule logs, holly and ivy. Frank and I would sit in the back of our father's Chevrolet, clutching the train sets that would be wrapped only minutes before we opened them, while he argued with the police in his sarcastic professorial Arabic, unsettling our nervous mother.

Smuggling was one activity we had practised from an early age. The older boys at the English school in Riyadh talked among themselves about an intriguing netherworld of bootleg videos, drugs and illicit sex. Later, when we returned to England after our mother's death, I realized that these small conspiracies had kept the British expats together and given them their sense of community. Without the liaisons and contraband runs our mother would have lost her slipping hold on the world long before the tragic afternoon when she climbed to the roof of the British Institute and made her brief flight to the only safety she could find.

At last the traffic had begun to move, lurching forward in a noisy rush. But the mud-stained van in front of me was still detained by the Guardia Civil. A soldier opened the rear doors and hunted through cardboard cartons filled with plastic dolls. His heavy hands fumbled among the pinkly naked bodies, watched by hundreds of rocking blue eyes.

Irritated by the delay, I was tempted to drive around the van. Behind me a handsome Spanish woman sat at the wheel of an open-topped Mercedes, remaking her lipstick over a strong mouth designed for any activity other than eating. Intrigued by her lazy sexual confidence, I smiled as she fingered her mascara and lightly brushed the undersides of her eyelashes like an indolent lover. Who was she – a nightclub cashier, a property tycoon's mistress, or a local prostitute returning to La Linea with a fresh stock of condoms and sex aids?

She noticed me watching her in my rear-view mirror and snapped down her sun vizor, waking both of us from this dream of herself. She swung the steering wheel and pulled out to pass me, baring her strong teeth as she slipped below a no-entry sign.

I started my engine and was about to follow her, but the soldier fumbling among the plastic dolls turned to bellow at me.

'Acceso prohibido…!'

He leaned against my windshield, a greasy hand smearing the glass, and saluted the young woman, who was turning into the police car park beside the checkpoint. He glared down at me, nodding to himself and clearly convinced that he had caught a lecherous tourist in the act of visually molesting the wife of his commanding officer. He moodily flicked through the pages of my passport, unimpressed by the gallery of customs stamps and visas from the remotest corners of the globe. Each frontier crossing was a unique transaction that defused the magic of any other.

I waited for him to order me from the car and carry out an aggressive body-search, before settling down to dismantle the entire Renault until it lay beside the road like a manufacturer's display kit. But he had lost interest in me, his spare eye noticing a coach filled with migrant Moroccan workers who had taken the ferry from Tangier. Abandoning his search of the van and its cargo of dolls, he advanced upon the stoical Arabs with all the menace and dignity of Rodrigo Diaz out-staring the Moors at the Battle of Valencia.

I followed the van as it sped towards La Linea, rear doors swinging and the dolls dancing together with their feet in the air. Even the briefest confrontation with police at a border crossing had the same disorienting effect on me. I imagined Frank in the interrogation cells in Marbella at that very moment, faced with the same accusing eyes and the same assumption of guilt. I was a virtually innocent traveller, carrying no contraband other than a daydream of smuggling my brother across the Spanish frontier, yet I felt as uneasy as a prisoner breaking his parole, and I knew how Frank would have responded to the trumped-up charges that had led to his arrest at the Club Nautico in Estrella de Mar. I was certain of his innocence and guessed that he had been framed on the orders of some corrupt police chief who had tried to extort a bribe.

I left the eastern outskirts of La Linea and set off along the coast road towards Sotogrande, impatient to see Frank and reassure him that all would be well. The call from David Hennessy, the retired Lloyd's underwriter who was now the treasurer of the Club Nautico, had reached me in my Barbican flat the previous evening. Hennessy had been disturbingly vague, as if rambling to himself after too much sun and sangria, the last person to inspire confidence.

'It does look rather bad… Frank told me not to worry you, but I felt I had to call.'

'Thank God you did. Is he actually under arrest? Have you told the British Consul in Marbella?'

' Malaga, yes. The Consul's closely involved. It's an important case, I'm surprised you didn't read about it.'

'I've been abroad. I haven't seen an English paper for weeks. In Lhasa there's not much demand for news about the Costa del Sol.'

'I dare say. The Fleet Street reporters were all over the club. We had to close the bar, you know.'

'Never mind the bar!' I tried to get a grip on the conversation. 'Is Frank all right? Where are they holding him?'

'He's fine. On the whole he's taking it well. He's very quiet, though that's understandable. He has a lot to think over.'

'But what are the charges? Mr Hennessy…?'

'Charges?' There was a pause as ice-cubes rattled. 'There seem to be a number. The Spanish prosecutor is drawing up the articles of accusation. We'll have to wait for them to be translated. I'm afraid the police aren't being very helpful.'

'Do you expect them to be? It sounds like a frame-up.'

'It's not as simple as that… one has to see it in context. I think you should come down here as soon as you can.'

Hennessy had been professionally vague, presumably to protect the Club Nautico, one of the more exclusive sports complexes on the Costa del Sol, which no doubt depended for its security on regular cash disbursements to the local constabulary. I could well imagine Frank, in his quizzical way, forgetting to slip the padded manila envelope into the right hands, curious to see what might result, or omitting to offer his best suite to a visiting commandant of police.

Parking fines, building-code infringements, an illegally-sited swimming pool, perhaps the innocent purchase from a dodgy dealer of a stolen Range Rover – any of these could have led to his arrest. I sped along the open road towards Sotogrande, as a sluggish sea lapped at the chocolate sand of the deserted beaches. The coastal strip was a nondescript plain of market gardens, tractor depots and villa projects. I passed a half-completed Aquapark, its excavated lakes like lunar craters, and a disused nightclub on an artificial hill, the domed roof resembling a small observatory.

The mountains had withdrawn from the sea, keeping their distance a mile inland. Near Sotogrande the golf courses began to multiply like the symptoms of a hypertrophied grassland cancer. White-walled Andalucian pueblos presided over the greens and fairways, fortified villages guarding their pastures, but in fact these miniature townships were purpose-built villa complexes financed by Swiss and German property speculators, the winter homes not of local shepherds but of Dusseldorf ad-men and Zurich television executives.

Along most of the Mediterranean's resort coasts the mountains came down to the sea, as at the Côte d'Azur or the Ligurian Riviera near Genoa, and the tourist towns nestled in sheltered bays. But the Costa del Sol lacked even the rudiments of scenic or architectural charm. Sotogrande, I discovered, was a town without either centre or suburbs, and seemed to be little more than a dispersal ground for golf courses and swimming pools. Three miles to its east I passed an elegant apartment building standing on a scrubby bend of the coastal road, the mock-Roman columns and white porticos apparently imported from Las Vegas after a hotel clearance sale, reversing the export to Florida and California in the 1920s of dismantled Spanish monasteries and Sardinian abbeys.

The Estepona road skirted a private airstrip beside an imposing villa with gilded finials like a castellated fairy battlement. Their shadows curved around a white onion-bulb roof, an invasion of a new Arab architecture that owed nothing to the Maghreb across the Strait of Gibraltar. The brassy glimmer belonged to the desert kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, reflected through the garish mirrors of Hollywood design studios, and I thought of the oil company atrium in Dubai that I had walked through a month earlier, pursuing my courtship of an attractive French geologist I was profiling for L'Express.

'The architecture of brothels?' she commented when I told her of my longstanding plans for a book during our rooftop lunch. 'It's a good idea. Rather close to your heart, I should think.' She pointed to the retina-stunning panorama around us. 'It's all here for you, Charles. Filling-stations disguised as cathedrals…'

Could Frank, with his scruples and finicky honesty, have chosen to break the law on the Costa del Sol, a zone as depthless as a property developer's brochure? I approached the outskirts of Marbella, past King Saud's larger-than-life replica of the White House and the Aladdin's cave apartments of Puerto Banus. Unreality thrived on every side, a magnet to the unwary. But Frank was too fastidious, too amused by his own weaknesses, to commit himself to any serious misdemeanour. I remembered his compulsive stealing after we returned to England, slipping corkscrews and cans of anchovies into his pockets as we trailed after our aunt through the Brighton supermarkets. Our grieving father, taking up his professorial chair at Sussex University, was too distracted to think of Frank, and the petty thefts forced me to adopt him as my little son, the sole person concerned enough to care for this numbed nine-year-old, even if only to scold him.

Luckily, Frank soon outgrew this childhood tic. At school he became a wristy and effective tennis player, and sidestepped the academic career his father wanted for him, taking a course in hotel management. After three yean as assistant manager of a renovated art deco hotel in South Miami Beach he returned to Europe to run the Club Nautico at Estrella de Mar, a peninsular resort twenty miles to the east of Marbella. Whenever we met in London I liked to tease him about his exile to this curious world of Arab princes, retired gangsters and Eurotrash.

'Frank, of all the places to pick you choose the Costa del Sol!' I would exclaim. 'Estrella de Mar? I can't even imagine it…'

Amiably, Frank always replied: 'Exactly, Charles. It doesn't really exist. That's why I like the coast. I've been looking for it all my life. Estrella de Mar isn't anywhere.'

But now nowhere had at last caught up with him.

When I reached the Los Monteras Hotel, a ten-minute drive down the coast from Marbella, there was a message waiting for me. Senor Danvila, Frank's lawyer, had called from the magistrates' court with news of 'unexpected developments', and asked me to join him as soon as possible. The over-polite manners of the hotel manager and the averted eyes of the concierge and porters suggested that whatever these developments might be, they were fully expected. Even the players returning from the tennis courts and the couples in towelling robes on their way to the swimming pools paused to let me pass, as if sensing that I had come to share my brother's fate.

When I returned to the lobby after a shower and change of clothes the concierge had already called a taxi.

'Mr Prentice, it will be simpler than taking your own car. Parking is difficult in Marbella. You have enough problems to consider.'

'You've heard about the case?' I asked. 'Did you speak to my brother's lawyer?'

'Of course not, sir. There were some accounts in the local press… a few television reports.'

He seemed anxious to steer me to the waiting taxi. I scanned the headlines in the display of newspapers beside the desk.

'What exactly happened? No one seems to know.'

'It's not certain, Mr Prentice.' The concierge straightened his magazines, trying to hide from me any edition that might reveal the full story of Frank's involvement. 'It's best that you take your taxi. All will be clear to you in Marbella…'

Senor Danvila was waiting for me in the entrance hall of the magistrates' court. A tall, slightly stooped man in his late fifties, he carried two briefcases which he shuffled from hand to hand, and resembled a distracted schoolmaster who had lost control of his class. He greeted me with evident relief, holding on to my arm as if to reassure himself that I too was now part of the confused world into which Frank had drawn him. I liked his concerned manner, but his real attention seemed elsewhere, and already I wondered why David Hennessy had hired him.

'Mr Prentice, I'm most grateful that you came. Unfortunately, events are now more… ambiguous. If I can explain-'

'Where is Frank? I'd like to see him. I want you to arrange bail – I can provide whatever guarantees the court requires. Senor Danvila…?'

With an effort the lawyer uncoupled his eyes from some feature of my face that seemed to distract him, an echo perhaps of one of Frank's more cryptic expressions. Seeing a group of Spanish photographers on the steps of the court, he beckoned me towards an alcove. 'Your brother is here, until they return him to Zarzuella jail in Malaga this evening. The police investigation is proceeding. I am afraid that in the circumstances bail is out of the question.'

'What circumstances? I want to see Frank now. Surely the Spanish magistrates release people on bail?'

'Not in a case such as this.' Senor Danvila hummed to himself, switching his briefcases in an unending attempt to decide which was the heavier. 'You will see your brother in an hour, perhaps less. I have spoken to Inspector Cabrera. Afterwards he will want to question you about certain details possibly known to you, but there is nothing to fear.'

'I'm glad to hear it. Now, what will they charge Frank with?'

'He has already been charged.' Senor Danvila was staring fixedly at me. 'It's a tragic affair, Mr Prentice, the very worst.'

'But charged with what? Currency violations, tax problems…?'

'More serious than that. There were fatalities.'

Senor Danvila's face had come into sudden focus, his eyes swimming forwards through the thick pools of his lenses. I noticed that he had shaved carelessly that morning, too preoccupied to trim his straggling moustache.

'Fatalities?' It occurred to me that a cruel accident had taken place on the notorious coastal road, and perhaps had involved Frank in the deaths of Spanish children. 'Was there a traffic accident? How many people were killed?'

'Five.' Senor Danvila's lips moved as he counted the number, a total that exceeded all the possibilities of a humane mathematics. 'It was not a traffic accident.'

'Then what? How did they die?'

'They were murdered, Mr Prentice.' The lawyer spoke matter-of-factly, detaching himself from the significance of his own words. 'Five people were deliberately killed. Your brother has been charged with their deaths.'

'I can't believe it…' I turned to stare at the photographers arguing with each other on the steps of the courthouse. Despite Senor Danvila's solemn expression, I felt a sudden rush of relief. I realized that a preposterous error had been made, an investigative and judicial bungle that involved this nervous lawyer, the heavy-footed local police and the incompetent magistrates of the Costa del Sol, their reflexes confused by years of coping with drunken British tourists. 'Senor Danvila, you say Frank murdered five people. How, for heaven's sake?'

'He set fire to their house. Two weeks ago – it was clearly an act of premeditation. The magistrates and police have no doubt.'

'Well, they should have.' I laughed to myself, confident now that this absurd error would soon be rectified. 'Where did these murders take place?'

'At Estrella de Mar. In the villa of the Hollinger family.'

'And who were the victims?'

'Mr Hollinger, his wife, and their niece. As well, a young maid and the male secretary.'

'It's madness.' I held Danvila's briefcases before he could weigh them again. 'Why would Frank want to murder them? Let me see him. He'll deny it.'

'No, Mr Prentice.' Senor Danvila stepped back from me, the verdict already clear in his mind. 'Your brother has not denied the accusations. In fact, he has pleaded guilty to five charges of murder. I repeat, Mr Prentice – guilty.'