Death in the Sun by Adam Creed Page B

wall. How could he afford such a thing?’
    ‘I never knew the Englishman. I remember the funeral. It was a big thing. You want to know about Barrington, just ask your friend, Edu. He was there.’
    ‘There?’
    ‘At the funeral. It was a big thing. I just wish I could have been there; seen everything.’
    ‘But Edu didn’t like Barrington.’
    ‘Secrets,’ says Manolo, paying for the drinks. ‘I need the toilet. And then we should leave.’
    ‘What were you and Jackson arguing about that night in his cortijo ?’
    ‘I can’t remember; it’s a mystery to me.’
    As he goes, deadly earnest, Manolo says, ‘If secrets are meant to be revealed, they will be, but friends should behave like friends. Friends will do anything for each other. Anything, right?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Manolo slaps Staffe on the shoulder and smiles thinly, with sad eyes. ‘Then we are friends. We all have secrets. Even friends. But I will tell you what you need to know. If I can, I will do it. And that, my friend, is a promise.’
    Staffe waits at the bar and finishes his drink, busies himself with eating his tapa of sardines. He is getting better at leaving no flesh, just the spine and head, which the locals seem able to do by simply putting the whole fish into the mouth and immediately withdrawing it, through closed lips.
    He turns to watch a young man in the corner who is singing. He has a dirty face and knotted, shoulder-length hair; wears a white shirt open to the waist and tight black jeans, high Cuban heels which he stamps on the off-beat. The barman claps out a rhythm and the young man closes his eyes, sings a soleá . When he is done, the singer leaves, reaching down, adjusting the fit of the long-bladed knife in his boot.
    Staffe looks around for Manolo. The toilet is a tiny cubicle with room for only one person at a time. He walks across, presses the door. It swings open, empty.
    Manolo is not in the bar, nor is he in the plazeta opposite, where a gang of heroin-thin, swarthy men have gathered, swigging from bottles of beer and sucking on joints. When he pays, Staffe asks the bartender if he saw his friend leave.
    ‘If he left without saying goodbye, he’s not your friend,’ is all he says, trousering the money and nodding to the street as if to say, ‘Go on, it’s time you left. You’re not our type’.
    Outside, the evening has become night. Staffe mulls what Manolo had said about being friends and secrets being revealed; saying he will tell him what he needs to know. What might he need to know?
    There are fewer people now and those who are left on the streets are local, male, and in groups of three and more. They talk closely to each other, scrawny-shouldered and hunched. They all wear the sharp boots with heels and room for more than a leg. He tries to avoid their eyes and puts his hand in his pocket, on his wallet, has the other in a fist, cocked.
    He works his way left and right through the maze of narrow, winding streets, but comes full circle to the gitano bar, which is full now. He goes the other way down the hill and every chance he gets, he takes the steepest lane down, knowing that his hotel, the Ladrón del Agua, is on the front line to the Rio Darro, which is, surely, at the bottom of the hill.
    When he gets to the church at the top of the steep streets of the Arab market, the gitano singer is leaning against a shut-up shop. He steps out in front of Staffe, asks him what he is looking for. Does he want coke, or is it a fuck?
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘We all want something.’ He reaches down.
    Staffe thinks the man is going for a knife and walks quickly away. When he gets to the bottom of the next flight of steps, he turns, sees the singer is still watching him. He takes the next flight two at a time towards the lights of the Plaza Nueva just below.
    The city becomes warmer the lower he gets, and in the rhythm of his footsteps on the old stone, shiny in the streetlights, he replays Manolo’s words, ‘Friends will do