"I'm afraid so, Dick."
"I'm sorry to see you leave. We figured you'd stay for at least a month.
What's so urgent in San Hermano?"
"That's what I mean to find out. All I know is what I read in the
papers." He handed the Governor two copies of the San Hermano
_Imparcial_ he had found on a library table in the reception room while
having a cocktail before dinner. They were the papers which had made him
call Harris at Panair.
The first issue was three weeks old. It described the visit of an
American Good-Will Commission to San Hermano, and told how the mission
was received by Enrique Gamburdo, the Vice-President, rather than by
Anibal Tabio, the President. In an oblique manner, the story went on to
deny the "widespread rumor" that Tabio had deliberately insulted the
Americans by not receiving them personally.
"I don't like the way they denied the rumor," Hall said. "I know that
the paper is _imparcial_ on the fascist side only."
The other edition of _Imparcial_ was three days old. It was the latest
copy available. It carried as its lead story the news that since Tabio's
illness had taken a drastic turn for the worse, Gamburdo had prevailed
upon a great Spanish doctor, Varela Ansaldo, to fly from Philadelphia to
San Hermano in an attempt to save the President's life.
"And?" the Governor asked.
"I'm not sure. But it looks to me like a deliberate attempt to lay a
smelly egg in Tabio's nest. Anyway, I did a little checking with Harris.
I figured I'd be able to meet Ansaldo's plane, and I was right. The San
Hermano Clipper overnights in San Juan, you know. Ansaldo is sleeping at
the Escambrun tonight. Tomorrow we'll board the ship for San Hermano
together."
"I still don't get it, Matt. Do you know this Ansaldo?"
"No. But he's evidently been invited to San Hermano by Gamburdo. And I
found out a few things about Gamburdo in Havana," Hall said. "Some
top-ranking Falange chiefs in the Americas always spoke highly of him in
their letters. Especially the letters marked confidential."
"There you go again!"
"Don't. You know I'm not crazy."
"But Matt, neither is Gamburdo crazy. He wouldn't dare do what you're
implying."
"Maybe. But I'm not thinking of Gamburdo as much as I am of Tabio. I
like Anibal Tabio, like him a lot. I met him for the first time in
Geneva in '35, when he was Foreign Minister. Then I met him again in
'36, when he and Vayo and Litvinov were hammering away at the fat cats
backing Franco. He was a real guy, Dick. One of the few statesmen alive
who not only knew that the earth is round but also that the people on
this round earth like to eat and wear decent clothes and send their kids
to college.
"I remember how in '37, after Halifax yawned all through his speech and
then led the rest of the delegates in voting against Vayo's proposals,
Tabio sat down with me in a little bar and ordered a light beer and told
me very quietly that this was his cue. 'I must go home,' he told me,
'and see that it doesn't happen to my country.' That's how he pulled up
his stakes and went back to San Hermano and ran for President."
"He's good, Matt. I know that."
"He's damn good. He's the best of the anti-fascist leaders on the
Continent right now, Dick. He deserves all the help he isn't getting
from us."
The Governor put the paper down with a sigh. "I'll tell you a secret,
Matt," he said. "But it's really secret. You know that there's going to
be a Pan-American conference on foreign policy in Havana in five weeks.
Well, some of the smarter heads in Washington are getting worried. We're
sending a delegation to the conference to ask all the nations down here
to break with the Axis. And some of us are afraid that if Tabio
is--well, not able to pick the San Hermano delegation, his government
will remain neutral."
Hall stood up and began pacing between the couch and the chair. He
pulled out a large white handkerchief and mopped the sweat on his face,
his neck, his quivering hands. "God damn them all to hell," he said,
"they're moving in on us in our own backyard and when you try to say a
word in Washington they spit in your eye and tell you Franco is a
neutral and a friend."
Dickenson drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly and audibly. "What's it all
about, Matt?" he asked, softly. "Where does San Hermano come in?"
"I don't know a mucking thing yet. All I know is that it stinks to high
heaven. Listen, Dick, I'm not crazy. You know that. In Washington they
act as if I'm crazy or worse when I try to tell them." Hall put his hand
to the twitching right side of his face as if to keep it still. His
outburst had completely dried his throat. He went to the sideboard,
threw some ice cubes into a giant glass, poured soda over the ice.
The Governor watched him swallow the contents in huge gulps. "Better sit
down, Matt," he said. "You'll blow a valve."
"I'm all right," he said. He put the glass down on the floor, ran the
handkerchief over his neck. "There's one thing I do know, and it's
killing me. I know the Falange is in this. It's all I have to know. I
remember reading a fascist paper in jail in San Sebastian. There was a
big map on the back page, a map showing Spain as the center of the
Spanish World. An artist had superimposed the five arrows of the Falange
over the face of Spain. The article under the map said that while one of
the arrows pointed to Madrid, two pointed to the Philippines and the
others pointed to Latin America. They weren't kidding, Dick. When the
Japs marched into Manila they decorated the Philippine Falange for the
fifth-column job the Falangistas performed for Hirohito. And there are
twenty Falangist cells in Latin America for every one cell they had in
Manila on December 6, 1941.
"And why not, Dick? It's the Germans who've always run the Falange.
Today they run Spain. And they also run the Exterior Falange set-up.
Maybe Falangismo as a philosophy is phony as all hell, and maybe its
creed of Hispanidad, with all its blah about Latin America returning to
the Spanish Empire, is just as phony. Maybe it doesn't make sense to us
gringos. I'll grant that. But it is a nice Nazi horse on the dumb
Spanish aristocrats who do Hitler's dirty work in the Americas. In
German hands it's one of the dynamics of this war. I've seen it in
operation, and I know. It's the gimmick that makes rich Spaniards fuel
and hide submarines in the Caribbean--you know that for a fact yourself.
It's the new amalgam which makes 'em look to Holy Mother Spain as the
core of a new empire, it's ..."
"But granting all this, Matt, why must you go to San Hermano?"
Hall swallowed some soda. He put the glass back on the floor, grabbed
the San Hermano _Imparcial_ from the Governor's hands. Slowly, he
crushed the paper and held it in front of Dickenson's face. "Do you know
who publishes _El Imparcial_?" he asked. "I'll tell you. It's a fascist
named Fernandez. In San Sebastian, during the war, he strutted all over
town in a Falange officer's uniform browning his nose with all the
top-ranking lice, the Germans, the Italians, the Franco crowd. He was
there for months, making radio speeches and public appearances and
getting cramps in the right arm from holding it up in the stiff-arm
salute. I saw him a dozen times, if I saw him once."
"Jose Fernandez? I met him at a conference in Rio. He seemed like a
pleasant enough chap," the Governor said.
"They're all pleasant. They can afford to be. You never met Ribbentrop
and Otto Abetz, Dick. They were the most charming men in Europe before
the war. But listen, last week in Havana I looked at a collection of
pictures taken from the files of the chief of the Falange delegation for
the Americas. There was one picture of a banquet held by the Falange in
San Hermano late in 1936. It was a secret affair, only insiders and
leaders. And there, on the dais, was Licenciado Enrique Gamburdo, big as
life."
"Gamburdo!"
"Sure. It was a secret affair, all right. Not a word in the papers, and
everyone present sworn to secrecy by a Bishop who was among the honored
guests." Hall dried the sweat on his hands again. "But always at these
affairs there's a man with a camera. Usually he's a Gestapo Heinie.
Sometimes he's a Gestapo Spaniard or even a Gestapo Latin-American. A
picture, just one picture, has to be made. It goes to the German consul
or the Falange chief of the country and they have to forward it to the
Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. The pictures back up the reports,
you see, and, besides, when you have a picture of a deacon trucking with
a doxie in a bordello it's a good thing to threaten to show the deacon's
wife if the deacon decides to return to the paths of righteousness."
"But are you sure, Matt?"
"I'm a good reporter. My job is to remember unimportant things, and to
remember them well when they become important. If I'm wrong, I'll find
out for myself in San Hermano."
The Governor accepted one of Hall's cigars. "God," he said, "I hope
you're wrong, Matt."
Later, back in his hotel room, Hall stripped to his shorts, ran cold
water over his wrists and the back of his neck. He poured some Haitian
rum into a glass, drenched it with soda from the pink-and-green night
table.
Outside, in the darkness, four boys were playing tag. Hall listened to
the whispered padding of their bare feet as they flew from cobblestones
to trolley tracks. He went to the wrought-iron balcony, stood there
watching the undersized kids chasing each other up and down the narrow
street. Two freighters rode at anchor in the harbor, their gray noses
pointing at the pink Customs House. A soldier lurched down the street,
barely missing the feet of an old _jibaro_ sleeping in the doorway of a
dark store.
Hall returned to the desk. He wrote a short note to a friend in a
government bureau in Havana--merely to say that he was leaving for San
Hermano and that for the time being could be reached in care of Pan
American Airways there--and a similar note to Bird. He decided to let
his other letters wait until he reached San Hermano.
The kids who were playing tag disappeared. The only noise which broke
the silence of the night now was the soft pounding of the presses in the
newspaper plant up the street. Hall sealed his letters and started to
pack his bags.
The four boys reappeared with a whoop. They carried freshly printed
magazines this time, and, as they ran down the street, first one then
another took up the mournful cry: "_Puerto Rico Ilustrado!
Il-us-traaa-dooohhh!_" They were no longer to be seen when Hall ran out
to the balcony to look.
He took a cold shower, then lit one of his Havanas. The mosquito net
which completely covered his bed annoyed him. He put out the light in
order not to see the bars of the net frame. Silently, he railed against
the sugar planters and their kept politicos for leaving the island prey
to malaria. He had to remind himself that the net was his protection
against malaria before he could crawl under the frame, but even then he
climbed into bed with a cigar in his mouth.
The cigar was his protection, his secret weapon, against the
claustrophobia the _mosquitero_ gave him. There were no cigars in
Franco's prisons, no cigars and no cool sheets and coiled spring
mattresses, no soft breezes floating in from a harbor as ancient as the
Conquistadores.
He lay under the net, naked and uncovered, blowing smoke rings at the
cross bars above him. He thought of Anibal Tabio in Geneva, thin as a
reed, his slender hand pointing to the pile of German and Italian
documents del Vayo had brought to the League. He thought of Tabio and he
thought of his three years in Spain and, thinking, he got worked up all
over again.
It was not easy to think of the months of being trapped like an animal
in a cage, of being pushed around by smirking men who had the guns, of
watching the metal inkstand in the hands of the German major the second
before it crashed into his own face. No, it was not easy, and the memory
of San Sebastian led to the scarlet memory of the afternoon on the
Malecon in Havana less than a month ago when Sanchez had pointed out to
him two leaders of the Falange at a cafe table and he started out to
bash their heads together right then and there. Luis and Felix had had
to grab him and wrestle him to the sidewalk, laughing and playing at
being just three jolly boys who'd had a drink too much instead of two
Spanish Republicans keeping a frenzied American from killing two men
they detested and would gladly have killed themselves.
Hall sat up, shaking, covered with sweat. He crawled out of bed, stood
barefooted on the tiled floor. An overwhelming feeling of loneliness
came over him. He was lonely in his person, lonelier still in his
inability to make any of his own people understand the gnawing hates and
fears which had taken him first to Havana and then to San Juan and
now--_quien sabe_? And then, realizing with an amused start that he was
thinking in Spanish, he tore the net off the bed, threw the cigar away,
and went to sleep.
_Chapter two_
Dr. Varela Ansaldo was traveling with his assistant, a young Dr. Marina,
an American nurse named Geraldine Olmstead, and a Dominican passport.
This much Hall was able to observe at the ground station, before the
passengers for San Hermano and way points boarded the Stratoliner.
The Dominican passport interested Hall. He knew that the passports were
for sale at an average price of a thousand dollars. Refugees starved and
borrowed and sold their souls to scrape together a thousand dollars for
one of the precious passports. When you met a Spaniard with a new
Dominican passport, you seldom had to ask questions; you knew you were
meeting a man whose life was not worth a nickel in Spain. And yet, in
the day-old issue of _Time_ the Clipper had flown in from Miami, the
biography of Ansaldo carried no hint of the doctor's being in disfavor
with Franco. Nor did the biography mention the physician's Dominican
citizenship.
Hall read the _Time_ biography again. _Scrupulously impartial during the
Spanish Civil War, Ansaldo took no sides, remaining at his post as a
healer under both nationalist and loyalist flags. With the end of war,
Ansaldo accepted a Chair offered by the Penn Medical Institute in
Philadelphia, assuming new position in October, 1939._ The story went on
to describe some of the new operations Ansaldo had since performed.
Hall unbuckled his seat belt. He had a single seat on the left of the
plane, the third seat from the front. Ansaldo's nurse had the seat in
front of his. She sat across the aisle from Marina and Ansaldo, who
shared a double seat. Hall sat opposite a pink-cheeked Dutchman of sixty
who shared a seat with a very dark Brazilian. A State Department courier
had the seat in front of the nurse. The other passengers included the
wife of an American Army officer, some Panair officials, two Standard
Oil engineers, and some quiet Latin American government officials on
their way back from Washington.
Most of the passengers, now that the plane had gained altitude, were
trying to sleep. The little Hollander was wide awake, virtuously and
happily wide awake with the morning heartiness of a man who has been
going to bed and rising early all of his life. He beamed at Hall. "I see
you and I are the only ones who had a good night's sleep, Mr. Hall."
Then, laughing, he explained that he had recognized Hall from the
picture on the jacket of his book before he had even heard his name
announced by the steward on boarding ship. His accent was slight, but
definite.
"Yesterday," he said, gesturing at Hall's seat, "Miss Prescott--a
charming lady, by the way--and today another American writer. Ah, well,
the damn wheel turns and comes up twice with the same value. Oh, I
forgot. My name is Wilhelm Androtten."
Hall extended his hand across the aisle, gripped the hand Androtten
offered him. It was a pudgy little hand, soft and white and pink.
"Yes," Androtten sighed. "I have quite a hell of a story of my own to
tell about enemy actions. I too have been an actor in the drama. But of
course I'm not a writer. Ah no, Mr. Hall," he waved a stiff little index
finger back and forth in front of his glowing face, "I'm not going to
suggest that you write my story. To me it is important as hell. But to
the world? It is not as dramatic as the sinking of the _Revenger_. A
thousand times no!"
The Hollander pulled an immense old-fashioned silver cigarette case from
the pocket of his brown-linen suit. "Have an American cigarette? Good.
Yes, mine is only the story of how the damn Japanese Army drove a poor
coffee planter off his estates and then out of Java. And that is all,
sir, except that as you may have guessed--I was the planter. Now I am,
so to speak, a real Flying Dutchman, flying everywhere to buy coffee
from the other planters and then flying everywhere to sell it again. But
I try to be jolly as hell and to bear my load like a Dutchman should,
Mr. Hall."
"That _is_ a story, Mr. Androtten," Hall said. "A real one." The strong
light above the clouds rasped his sleep-hungry eyes. He put on his dark
glasses, leaned his head back against the padded roll of the reclining
chair.
"Do you really think my story is worth while, Mr. Hall? I would be
honored as hell to tell you the whole story with all the damn facts, if
you desire. I ... Are you getting off at Caracas?"
"No. I'm sorry. I go all the way through to San Hermano."
"Good, Mr. Hall. I go to San Hermano myself. Do you know the Monte Azul
bean, sir? It's richer than the Java. A little Monte Azul, a little
Bogota, some choice Brazilians--and you have a roast that will delight
the rarest palates. Yes, San Hermano is my destination. San Hermano and
the damn Monte Azul bean."
Hall gave up trying to stifle a series of yawns. "I'm sorry," he said.
"I guess I didn't get enough sleep after all."
"Please sleep," Androtten said. "We'll have plenty of time to talk in
San Hermano."
"Sure. Plenty of time." Hall opened the collar of his shirt, sank into a
light sleep almost at once. He slept for over an hour, waking when the
Standard Oil engineers in the rear seats laughed at a joke told by the
Army officer's wife. The steady drone of the engines, the continuing
sharpness of the light made remaining awake difficult. Hall closed his
eyes again but there was no sleep.
Androtten and the Brazilian had found a common tongue, French, and in
the joy of this discovery had also discovered a common subject. The
Brazilian was holding forth on the exotic virtues of one rare coffee,
the huge diamond on his finger ring catching and distributing the light
as he gestured. Androtten was trying to describe the various blends of
Java.
Hall thought of Ansaldo and Marina and the nurse. Marina was about
thirty, too dapper, too fastidious, his plaid sports jacket fitting too
snugly over his rounded hips. On boarding the plane, the nurse had
brushed against his arm, which he withdrew with a subconscious gesture
of revulsion. Hall watched him now, buffing his nails with a chamois
board. Ansaldo had also awakened, was reading one of the pile of medical
magazines he had carried into the plane. The nurse was a blank, so far.
All he could see of her was the soft roll of strawberry hair. She had a
few faint freckles on her nose and full lips and it was ten to one that
she was from the Midwest. But a blank.
The older doctor, Ansaldo, was about fifty, and had a stiff correctness
that Hall had noticed immediately in the airport. He wore glasses whose
horn rims were of an exaggerated thickness. His iron-gray hair, cut
short and combed straight back, had an air of almost surgical neatness.
He had the long horse face of an El Greco Cardinal, and behaved even
toward his assistant and his nurse with a detached politeness. Marina's
obvious and fawning devotion to the older man seemed to bounce off
Ansaldo without effect. Hall put him down as an extremely cold fish, but
a cold fish who would bear watching for reasons Hall himself could not
quite define.
When the plane stopped in Caracas for refueling, Ansaldo, carrying a
thick medical journal with his finger still marking his place, took a
slow walk in the shade, Marina following at his heels like a puppy. Hall
got out and lit a cigar and when he noticed the nurse looking at the
exhibit of rugs and dolls set up in a stand at the edge of the airfield
he walked to her side. "Indian-craft stuff," he said. "If you'd care to,
I'll be your interpreter."
The girl took off her dark glasses, looked at Hall for a moment, and
then put them on again. "I can't see too well with these darn things,"
she laughed. "Do you think I could get a small rug without giving up my
right arm?"
"Your right arm is safe with me around, Madam. Perhaps you never heard
of me, Madam, but in these parts I'm known as Trader Hall. Matthew
Hall."
"You're hired. My name is Jerry Olmstead."
They sauntered over to the stand. The afternoon sun ignited the fires in
her hair. She was taller than most women, and though her white sharkskin
suit was well creased from travel, Hall could see that she had the kind
of full shapely figure which made poolroom loafers whistle and trusted
bank employees forget the percentages against embezzlers. Feature for
feature, Jerry Olmstead's was not the face that would have launched even
a hundred ships. Her forehead was too high, and it bulged a bit. Her
blue eyes were a shade too pale for the frank healthiness of her skin.
Her nose was straight and well shaped, but almost indelicately large.
When she smiled, she displayed two rows of glistening healthy teeth
which were anything but even and yet not uneven enough to be termed
crooked.
Hall helped her select a small rug, agreed at once to the price asked by
the Indian woman at the stand, and then had a long discussion in Spanish
with the peddler about the state of affairs at the airport before giving
her the money. "You see," he said to Jerry, "unless you bargain with
these Indians, you're bound to get robbed." The rug cost Jerry something
like sixty cents in American money.
"You'll be able to pick up some wonderful beaten-silver things in San
Hermano," Hall said. "I'd be glad to show you around when we get there.
In the meantime, can I get you a drink?"
"I'd love one."
The only drinks for sale in the canteen were cold ginger ale and
lemonade. They had the ginger ale, and Hall learned that this was the
girl's first trip out of the United States. "It's all so different!" she
said, and Hall thought he would grimace but then the girl smiled happily
and he watched the skin wrinkle faintly at the bridge of her nose and he
smiled with her. "You'll like San Hermano," he said. "And I'd like to
show it to you when we get there."
"Did you spend much time there?"
"Only a few days. I took a freighter back from Cairo two years ago and
it put in at San Hermano."
"Say, what do you do, anyway?" Jerry asked.
"Don't sound so surprised. I'm a newspaperman."
"Were you a war correspondent?"