Jerry looked into her glass. "I know it sounds terrible," she said, "but
I haven't read a book in years. Was yours about the war?"
"Let's talk about it in San Hermano. Do I show you the town?"
"It's a date."
"That bell is for us," Hall said. "We'd better get back to the plane."
They left the canteen. Ansaldo and Marina were still walking in a slow
circle. "Come on," Jerry said. "Meet my boss."
She approached Ansaldo. "Dr. Ansaldo," she said, "I'd like you to meet
Mr. Matthew Hall. He's a newspaperman from the States. And this is Dr.
Marina.
"Mr. Hall is showing me around San Hermano when we get there."
"How nice," Ansaldo said, and from his tone Hall knew that he meant
nothing of the sort.
"But now we must hurry," Ansaldo said. "The plane is about to depart."
He took Jerry's arm and they walked on ahead of Marina and Hall.
"Senor Hall, if you are going to write about the doctor's forthcoming
operation," Marina said, "I would gladly help you. The doctor is the
greatest surgeon of our times, perhaps, who knows, of all times. He is
magnificent. In his hands, the scalpel is an instrument of divinity. It
is more, it is divinity itself. I must tell you the story of the
doctor's greatest operations, although all of them are great. I will
help you. You will write a great article about the great operation."
"I am very grateful to you, doctor. I hope that in San Hermano you will
have enough time to give me your counsel. After you, doctor." Hall took
a last drag at his cigar as Marina climbed the plane ladder.
* * * * *
There was a mountain--the Monte Azul which produced the beans of
Androtten's rhapsodies--and a plateau in the clouds and below the
plateau lay the ocean and the city of San Hermano. The lights were going
on in the city when Flight Eighteen ended on the airport in the plateau,
for the city was five miles farther from the sinking sun of the moment.
On the plateau, the airport lights blended with the brown-orange shades
of dusk; in the city the lights cut through the classic blackness of
night.
A smartly dressed colonel and a top-hatted functionary of the Foreign
Office were waiting with two black limousines for the Ansaldo party. The
man from the Foreign Office had cleared all the passport and customs
formalities. Jerry had just enough time to tell Hall that she and the
doctors were to stay at the Bolivar before the cars started down the
winding hill to San Hermano.
Hall rode to town with the rest of the passengers in the sleek Panair
bus. He and Androtten were also bound for the Bolivar.
Riding into the valley, the bus descended into the night. It was a night
made blacker by the war, as were the nights in San Juan and Havana and
New York. San Hermano was the capital of a nation still at peace, but
the maws of the war across the seas reached for the oil and coal of the
world, and San Hermano could not escape this world. Three lights in
every four on the Plaza de la Republica were out, for coal and oil
furnished the power for the city's electricity. Two years earlier, Hall
had asked Anibal Tabio why coal and oil had to turn the city's dynamos
when the nation abounded in thousands of mountain streams which could be
harnessed by men with slide rules and logarithm tables, and the gentle
President had answered him in a sentence. "Because, my dear Hall, San
Hermano has been in the twentieth century for barely a decade, while
your own nation has been in our century for forty years." And tonight,
looking at the ancient Plaza from the window of his room on the third
floor of the Bolivar, Hall remembered Tabio's words with disturbing
clarity.
From the balcony of his hotel room, Hall could see both San Hermanos,
the Old City and the New. Everyone spoke of the two cities in these
terms--the geographers, the tourist guides, the inveterate _Hermanitos_
themselves.
The Old San Hermano had been founded by the Conquistadores in the
sixteenth century, a walled speck on the shores of an ocean, a fortress
and a thatched church, a handful of flimsy huts. In a century, the
thatched church became a proud, gloomy Cathedral; one of the walls was
knocked down, and in its place was the cobbled Plaza de Fernando e
Isabel. The Plaza was Spain in the New World; opening on to its cobbles
stood the huge Moorish stone palaces designed by architects brought over
from Seville, the palace of the Captains-General who served as colonial
governors, the fortified mint, the Cathedral, the home of the Governor's
elder brother, the Duke of La Runa. Enslaved Indians and later chained
Negroes from the African coasts had carried on their backs the square
stones Spanish masons cut and formed for the edifices of the Plaza,
first the Cathedral, next the Governor's Palace and the Mint.
Then, in the days of Hidalgo, Bolivar, and San Martin, the ancient Plaza
of the Conquistadores became the Plaza de la Republica, and for a few
glorious hours the new nation was in tune with its century. But the
great Liberators of the times were to die in embittered exile, far from
the scenes of their brightest victories. For one swing of the pendulum
the liberated lands teetered on the dizzy heights of freedom, and then
the pendulum swung back and stopped swinging for a century. The land
remained in the hands of the Spanish nobles, and they won their war
against the Industrial Revolution, and all that remained of the hour of
triumph was the name the Liberators had given the old Plaza and a hollow
Republic controlled by the landowners.
In ways more subtle, but no less real than the old ways, the Republic
became a colony again, except that the nation was no longer ruled by a
crown but by new and even more potent symbols: the sign of the pound,
the sign of the dollar, the sign of the franc. The new order brought a
new San Hermano, a new Western city built around the rims of the old
fortress seaport. It was a strange and often beautiful melange of French
villas and British banks and American skyscrapers and German town
houses.
The old Constitution of the Liberators gave way to a series of native
dictators who waxed rich as the servants of the foreign owners of the
metals and minerals discovered under the nation's soil, of the foreign
business men who never saw San Hermano but built vast abattoirs near the
wharves where skinny _Hermanitos_ earned a few pennies a day for
slaughtering and then loading endless herds of native cattle in the dark
holds of foreign ships.
They were ruthless men, the dictators who sat in San Hermano as
pro-Consuls of the foreigners and the landowners, ruthless men who, for
their share of the profits of the foreigners, of the endless rivers of
pesetas the landowners sent to Spain, maintained armies of cutthroats to
put down any attempt at rebellion against the new existing order.
The last of these dictators to sit in San Hermano was General Agusto
Segura. More than a decade had passed since Segura had died in bed and a
junta of professors and miners wrested the control of the nation from
Segura's henchmen. There had been little bloodshed when the Junta took
over; after thirty years, the Segura regime, or what was left of it, had
just collapsed of its own rottenness.
Hall thought of Segura, and the state he had ruled, and then, again
thinking about Tabio while he stared into the shadows of the darkened
Plaza de la Republica, Hall remembered Tabio's quiet remark about his
country's having been in the twentieth century for barely a decade. A
slim decade, which began with a world in confusion and was now ending
with a world in flames. But if the country weathered these flames, it
would be because Tabio, instead of running for the Presidency after the
revolution which swept out the remnants of Segurista power, had chosen
to serve as Minister of Education for nearly ten years. Hall was willing
to stake his life on this, ready to bet that the phenomenal free
educational system Tabio had set up for children and adults would, in
the final analysis, be one of the nation's chief bulwarks against
fascism.
He changed his clothes and went out for a walk through the crooked
streets of Old San Hermano before turning in. Many lights were burning
in the fourth floor of the Presidencia, the floor on which the President
had his apartment. Military guards were standing listlessly at the
entrances to the gilded building.
Hall walked along the Plaza until he came to the Calle de Virtudes,
which led to a little cafe on the street opposite the rear entrance of
the Presidencia. It had no windows but giant shutters which were folded
against the wall when the cafe was open for business. The cafe itself
stood on a corner, the sidewalks on both sides of the place covered with
tables and chairs. Wooden lattice fences, painted a bright orange,
screened the tables from the pedestrian's section of the sidewalk.
Inside, near the bar itself, two boys with guitars were playing and
singing the tragi-comic peasant songs of the south.
He took a sidewalk table, ordered a meat pie and a bottle of beer, and
then went to the small hotel next to the cafe to buy a sheet of paper,
an envelope, and an air-mail stamp. He asked for a telephone book,
looked up the names under Gomez, copied the address of one Juan Gomez,
and returned to his table. There he bought a newspaper from a boy
peddling the latest edition of the evening. The front page carried a
story about Ansaldo: the distinguished visiting medico was to spend the
next day conferring with local doctors who had been treating the
President. In one of the back pages, under Arrivals, there was a line
about the illustrious author and war correspondent Dr. M. Gall who
reached San Hermano by Clipper; Dr. Gall was the noted author of _The
Revenger_, even now being produced in Hollywood.
The paper was put aside for the meat pie. When he was done with the
food, Hall pushed his plates away and spread his sheet of lined writing
paper on the table before him. He called for some ink, filled his
fountain pen, and wrote a letter in Spanish to a "Dear Pedro."
It was a rambling, innocuous letter which started out with family gossip
about a forthcoming marriage of a cousin, the marriage prospects of the
writer's eligible daughter, the letter received from Cousin Hernando who
was happy on his new ranch and whose good wife was expecting another
child soon. Then the letter went on to say that "I suppose you have read
in the Havana papers that our President is ailing. Today there arrived
in our city the distinguished Spanish doctor Varela Ansaldo. He is to
treat the President. Perhaps I am very stupid, but is he not the surgeon
who operated so well on the throat of your dear Uncle Carlos?" The
letter then continued on for another page of family gossip and regards
and requests that Pedro embrace a whole list of dear cousins and aunts.
It was signed, simply, "Juanito."
Hall read the letter twice, sealed it, and addressed the envelope to
Pedro de Aragon, Apartado 1724, La Habana, Cuba. Pedro de Aragon was a
myth. Mail at this box was picked up by Santiago Iglesias, an officer of
the Spanish Republican Army whom Hall had met again in Havana. Iglesias
did at one time have an uncle named Carlos; the uncle had died on the
Jarama front from a fascist bullet that tore through his throat and
killed him instantly. Hall had arranged to write to Iglesias under names
chosen from the phone books of different cities if the need arose. He
scribbled the name and address of Juan Gomez on the back of the
envelope, left some money on the table, and walked back to the Plaza.
There he dropped the letter in a mailbox and continued on his way to the
Bolivar.
There was a new clerk on duty when Hall reached the hotel, a wiry man of
forty-odd whose yellow silk shirt clashed with both his black mohair
jacket and his long, lined face. Hall asked for the key to Room 306 in
Spanish.
The clerk cleared his throat and answered in English. "There was
messages," he said, handing the key to Hall with a sheaf of slips. "And
also this." From under the counter he drew a sealed letter written on
heavy paper and bearing the neat blue imprint of the American Embassy at
San Hermano on the envelope.
Hall frowned and tore open the envelope.
"Senorita the Ambassador's daughter telephoned twice," the clerk said.
"Thank you."
"It's on this slip, Mr. Hall."
"Thanks again." He read the few handwritten lines of the letter. It was
an invitation from the Ambassador's daughter, Margaret Skidmore, to
attend the Ambassador's party at the Embassy on the 5th. That was two
nights off.
There was a message from Jerry Olmstead. She had phoned from her room to
leave word that she had retired for the evening but would meet him in
the dining room at ten for breakfast. Hall noticed that the clerk was
watching him intently as he read the girl's message, but when he started
to read the next slip the clerk interrupted him.
"It's from Mr. Roger Fielding," he said. "I took the message myself. He
is a very nice person. An Englishman."
On the slip the clerk had written, "Mr. Fielding is very sorry you were
not in because it is important. He will call you again."
"My name is Fernando Souza," the clerk said, extending his hand. "I am
very happy to meet you."
Hall put the papers down on the desk and shook hands with the clerk.
They had a meaningless chat about the rigors of wartime travel and the
dimout in peaceful San Hermano and Hall learned that the Englishman
Fielding was in the tall Lonja de Comercio building and very decent. "I
have been at this desk for many years and in this position one meets
many people," the clerk said, and he went on amiably chatting about what
one could see on different one-day tours from the city.
"It is very sad about the President," Hall said, and then the clerk
reddened and he forgot to speak English. "The Educator must live,"
Fernando Souza said. "If the Educator goes, the nation goes."
"I know," Hall said. "I admire Don Anibal greatly."
"_Momentico, Senor. El telefono._" After nine, the night clerk had to
handle the switchboard at the Bolivar.
It was Fielding again. Hall picked up the phone on the marble counter.
"Yes, Mr. Fielding," he said, "I'm sorry I missed your first call."
"Not at all, old man. Not at all. Damned decent of you to answer my call
now, what with the hour and all that." The voice which came through
Hall's receiver was the raspy, crotchety, bluff voice of a movie
Britisher, the diction almost too good to be true. "I must say it was a
good surprise, a good surprise. The paper tonight, I mean, even if they
called you Dr. Gall. But what can they do if the H is silent in
Spanish?"
"I've been called Gall before."
"Of course you have, of course you have." The man at the other end of
the wire cleared his throat with a loud harumph. "What I'm calling
about, Mr. Hall, is--well, damn it all, what with the war and all that I
guess we have a right to keep a tired traveler from going to bed the
second his plane reaches the end of his road. I think it rather urgent
we have a bit of coffee and a bit of a chat tonight. Really, old man, I
think it is urgent."
"At what time?" Hall asked.
"I'm at home now," Fielding said. "I can get to Old San Hermano in an
hour. Souza can tell you how to get to my office. Nice chap, that Souza.
Straight as a die."
"Good."
"The office is about ten minutes from the Bolivar by cab, if Souza can
get you a cab. Suppose I ring you at the Bolivar when I reach the
office?"
"That will be fine. See you soon." Hall put the phone down and turned to
Souza. "He said you are straight as a die," he said.
"Mr. Fielding is a very decent Englishman," Souza said. He offered no
further information about Roger Fielding, and Hall decided against
asking any questions.
"If you are meeting him at his office, I had better get you a cab,"
Souza said, and then, sensing the hesitation in Hall's eyes, he quickly
added, "it would be better. Walking at night is dangerous, especially in
Old San Hermano, since the lights went out. There are many--accidents."
"O.K.," Hall said. "Look, I'm going upstairs to catch a little sleep.
When Fielding calls back, get me that cab and send up a pot of coffee.
And it's been good meeting you, even if Fielding does say you are
straight as a die."
Souza did not get the joke, but he knew that Hall was trying to joke and
he laughed.
Hall went to his room, took off his shoes and his suit, and fell across
the bed. He dozed off wondering why he had agreed so readily to meet the
man with the tailor-made British diction.
At ten-fifteen his phone rang. "Mr. Fielding called ten minutes ago. I
have your cab ready now. He is a very reliable driver."
"Good. How about my coffee?"
Souza laughed. "The only waiter on duty is a _cabron_, Senor. Mr.
Fielding will have much better coffee for you, anyway."
Hall chuckled as he washed the sleep out of his eyes with cold water and
combed his hair. The waiter is a _cabron_! There was one for the book.
Hall made up a song while he dressed, a song about yes we have no coffee
today because the son of a gun is a dirty _cabron_ so we have no coffee
today.
Souza slammed his palm down on the bell twice when the elevator let Hall
into the lobby. "Pepito!" he shouted.
The biggest cab driver Hall had ever seen outside of the United States
bounded into the lobby from the blackness of the San Hermano night. He
advanced toward the desk in seven-league strides, wiping his right hand
on the blouse of his pale-blue slack suit and taking off his white
chauffeur's cap with the other hand. He hovered over Hall like a mother
hen.
"Pepito," Souza said, "this is Senor Hall." This he said in Spanish. In
English, he again told Hall that the man was a very reliable driver.
"_Con mucho gusto_, Senor 'All. _Me llamo_ Delgado." Sheepishly, the
giant offered his hand to Hall.
"I am much pleased," Hall said. "Shall we start now?"
Pepito Delgado led Hall to a blue 1935 LaSalle parked in front of the
Bolivar. "She is my own machine after I make the last payment next
month," Delgado said. "I am glad you speak Spanish. It is the only
language I know." He drove Hall to the ten-story Comercio building in a
few minutes.
When Hall tried to pay him, Delgado shook his head happily. "You'll pay
me later," he smiled. "I'll wait for you."
"But I may be hours," Hall protested.
Delgado called upon the Saints in a series of genially blasphemous
exhortations. "Mother of God," he said, "it is bad luck not to make a
round trip with the first American of the season. I'll wait and not
charge you more than two pesos for the whole trip."
"I do not wish to rob you," Hall said. "Wait, and we shall make a fair
price later."
He entered the Comercio building, but as the doors of the elevator
closed and he started on his way up to the seventh floor Hall knew that
Delgado was only playing the fool and was in fact no man's fool at all,
and it bothered him. The right side of his face twitched slightly as he
left the car and walked down to the bend in the hall leading to Room
719.
_Chapter three_
The frosted glass door of Room 719 bore the words, "Roger Fielding Y
Cia." The anteroom was dark, but Hall could see the dim form of a man
sitting in a lighted inner room. He knocked on the glass without trying
the knob. In a moment, the light snapped on in the anteroom, and the man
from the inner office opened the hall door.
"Mr. Hall?" he asked. "I'm Roger Fielding. Welcome to San Hermano. And
please come inside."
Fielding fitted to the last detail the mental image Hall had conjured of
the man on the phone. Genial, peppery, he not only talked like a
Hollywood Englishman, he was a casting director's dream. Let the call go
out for a man to play a retired India colonel, a British Ambassador, the
Duke of Gretna Green, the popular professor of Chaldean Culture at
Oxford, the Dean of Canterbury or the Chief of Scotland Yard, and
Fielding was the man who could slip into the role without even changing
from street clothes to costume. Fielding was the man, complete to the
faintly grizzled face with the gaunt features, the dazzling plaid
jacket, the thick-walled Dunhill pipe with the well-caked bowl.
He ushered Hall into the inner office, whose shades were all drawn to
the sills. There was a large mahogany desk at the window; against the
wall stood a long table bearing a row of glass coffee makers, a tray of
demi-tasse cups, and a series of earthen canisters. On the wall above
this table hung a large sepia-tinted photograph of London, taken about
1920. It faced a large print of a cottage and a brook in the Shakespeare
country. This engraving hung over a row of four filing cabinets with
steel locks. The walls were further decorated with framed certificates
of Fielding's membership in coffee associations of San Hermano, Rio and
New Orleans.
"Sit down, sit down," Fielding urged, pulling a comfortable leather
chair to the side of his desk for Hall, and taking the swivel chair
behind the desk for himself. The highly polished desk was bare, except
for a calendar pad and a folded red-leather picture frame whose picture
faced Fielding.
"I'm in coffee, you see."
Hall glanced up at the certificates and the long table. "I see," he
said.
"How was your trip? Not too tiring, I hope? That's the sad thing about
planes. Faster than ships, but rather confining."
"It was not too bad," Hall said. "Besides, I stole an hour's cat nap at
the hotel while waiting for you to get to town."
"Good for you," Fielding said. "I like a man who can steal an hour's
sleep when the spirit so moves him. May I make you some coffee to keep
you awake, though?"
"If it's not too much trouble."
The Englishman was already at his coffee table. He took the pipe out of
his mouth, pointed with the end of the curved stem at one of the
canisters. "I guess we'll mix you a little of that Monte Azul with some
of this light roast from the south," he said. "If that doesn't sit well,
I have two dozen other roasts you can try."
Hall asked him how good a blend would result from the mixture of Monte
Azul, Bogota, and the various Brazilian growths Androtten had described
to the Brazilian on the plane.
"Ah," Fielding smiled, "so you know coffees, too?"
"Not at all. My education started on the plane." Hall described
Androtten, and told Fielding of the Dutchman's experiences in Java and
his theories of the perfect blend.
Fielding set some coffee and water into one of the vacuum makers, put a
match to the alcohol burner. "Androtten," he mumbled. "I don't remember
meeting him before. However, if it's the Monte Azul bean he's after,
I'll venture he'll be in to see us before the week is over. Let me see,
Androtten ..." He picked up his phone, asked for a local number.
"Hello," he said into the phone. "Sorry to call so late, old man. About
a chap named Androtten. A Hollander. Blitzed out of Java by the Nippos.
Of course. In coffee. Came in tonight on the Clipper to buy Monte Azul
for blending. Know him? I see. Well, thanks, anyway."
The Englishman put the phone away. "One of my countrymen," he explained.
"He's not in Monte Azul and I'm not in southern crops. We help one
another in a case like this. Incidentally, he never heard of your
Androtten." He chatted aimlessly about the coffee business until the
coffee in the vacuum maker was ready, then he poured it into a small jug
and brought the jug and two demi-tasse cups to the desk. "Sugar?" he
asked.
Hall had lost his taste for sugar in San Sebastian. "I have it black and
pure," he said.
"That's the only way to enjoy real coffee, Mr. Hall." Fielding took a
key from his pocket and went to the first filing cabinet. "However," he
said, "it wasn't to talk about coffee that you were generous enough to
come here tonight. Not to talk about coffee." He pulled a brown-paper
portfolio out of the file and returned with it to the desk. He undid the
strings that bound the portfolio, removed a manila folder.
"I think you had better pull your chair around and sit next to me here,"
Fielding said. "We have to look over some things in this file."
Hall moved both the chair and the jug of hot coffee. From his new
position, he could see that the leather folding frame on the desk
contained two photos of what was evidently one person. One photo showed
a young man of twenty-odd standing near a stone wall in what was
undoubtedly England; the other photo was the young man as a laughing
child in a pony cart.
"I lost my boy," Fielding mumbled, absently. He tapped the ashes from
his pipe out into an ash tray on the window sill, filled it again with
new tobacco from a worn ostrich pouch. Hall could see a thin, rheumy
film cover the Englishman's eyes.
"The war?" Hall asked, softly, but if Fielding heard him he gave no
indication that he had.
Fielding held a lighted match over the filled bowl of his pipe, started
it burning with deep, sucking draughts. "Ah, your book," he said, when
the pipe was burning. "You are a man of courage, Hall. You showed real
guts. The kind of guts our Nellie Chamberlain didn't have when England
needed them most."
Hall poured fresh coffee into both his and Fielding's cups. "Thank you,"
he said. "I tried to do it justice." He told him what the British censor
in Cairo had said when he saw the manuscript.
The grizzled Englishman took the pipe out of his mouth, looked at Hall
with amazement and disgust. "British grit, my foot!" He bellowed. "The
_Revenger_ was doomed the day Nellie Chamberlain decided to back Franco.
I'm talking about your other book, Hall, _Behind Franco's Lines_.
Any fool can get a battleship shot out from under him, but it takes a
man ..." Suddenly he stopped, because both Hall and he were looking at
the photos of the young man who was once a laughing boy in a
canary-colored pony cart.
He opened the folder. A photostat of a multi-paged typewritten report
lay on top of the neat pile of papers in the folder. "Now then, Hall, to
get to the point. When I read that you had arrived in San Hermano, well,
frankly, Hall, I thought it was the answer to my prayers. I know I'm a
garrulous old man, but that comes from talking into the prevailing winds
for so long that I just can't help myself."
"I know what you mean," Hall said. "Only I never thought of it in that
way. I thought of it in terms of talking to a blank wall."
"Be it as it may, Hall, I don't think I'll be talking at a blank wall
when I speak to you. As I said, there is a point to this meeting, and
the point is brief. Hall, the Falange is in San Hermano, and it is up to
much trouble."
"The Falange!"
"Oh, I know what you are thinking. Tabio made it illegal and it had to
disband and all that. But Tabio's government never threw the whole
Falange crowd into jail, where they belong, and they are still getting
their orders from the Spanish Embassy."
Hall passed a hand in front of his smarting eyes. "Did you say they're
up to trouble?" he asked.
"I said just that, Hall. Did you ever hear of the Cross and the Sword?
Sounds like the name of a ha'penny thriller. Have you seen one of these
since you arrived in San Hermano?" He handed Hall a gold lapel emblem;
it was a sword with a blazing hilt, the letters ATN engraved across the
cross piece of the hilt.
"The ATN stands for Accion Tradicionalista Nacional, but no one calls
them that any more than they call the Nazis by their formal name. You
know, National German Socialist something or other. It's a bad business,
Hall, a very bad business. The Cross and Sword, alias the Falange
Espanola."
"Are they very strong?"
"They don't parade around the streets in their blue shirts as they did
until Tabio clamped down in '40, and they don't pack the Cathedral in
their Falange uniforms any more to hold special masses for the rotten
soul of that young snot old Primo de Rivera whelped. The Cross and the
Sword is not like that. But go to the San Hermano Country Club or a
meeting of the Lonja de Comercio or to a fashionable party in the
country and every tailored jacket you see will have a Cross and a Sword
pinned to the lapel.
"Go to a little country village the day after the local school teacher
was murdered on some lonely dark road. The _campesinos_ stand around
muttering 'The Cross and the Sword is guilty,' and the next night the
home of some local Spanish landowner goes up in smoke. Then it's only a
matter of hours before the Cross and Sword members in San Hermano are
raising hell because a fellow Cross and Sword member had his house
burned down. They tell everyone that's what happens when you have a Red
regime which forces a gentleman to sell his land to the government and
then sells the land back to the peasants who have to borrow the money
from the government to pay for the land."
Hall turned the Cross and Sword emblem over in his fingers. "That's what
happened in Spain," he said. "It happened in just that way."
"Of course it did, Hall. Of course it did. Now look here. Look at this."
From the bottom of the pile of documents in the folder, Fielding
extracted a map of the nation's coastline.
"Here," he said, "is the coast. Now note these islands. I have numbered
some of them in red ink. Now take this island, Number Three. Looks like
an ink blot, doesn't it, now? Not much of a place for anything. Just a
bunch of volcanic caves and some quite useless land. Good for grazing a
few head of sheep, but not too good even for that. Belongs to a chap
named Segundo Vardenio. Been in his family for years, over three hundred
years. Own the island, own thousands of acres on the shore facing the
bloody island. I know the whole family. More Spanish than the Duke of
Alba, that family.
"Well, sir, they were all in the Falange. Segundo Vardenio was one of
the big leaders of the Falange in the country. Used to wear his blue
shirt and his boots and give his damned stiff-arm salute all over the
place. And what do you think goes on at his island, Hall? I'll tell you.
Oil and submarines, submarines and oil. The Vardenio lands on the shore
are in sugar. They have a narrow-gauge Diesel railway of their own on
the estates. Understand, Hall, a _Diesel railway_? The locomotives and
the submarines burn the same type of oil."
"German subs?"
"Hun subs and only Hun subs, Hall. Look here. Look at this report. I
sent it to the chief of Naval Intelligence at our Embassy. On the 29th
of September, 1940, a Hun sub anchored off Vardenio's island. A small
launch belonging to the Vardenio family towed the sub into the largest
of the sea caves on the island. The sub took on a load of Diesel oil,
fresh fruit, meat, cigars, razor blades and a sealed portfolio. I don't
know what was in that portfolio. Three days later, the British freighter
_Mandalay_, carrying beef and copper from San Hermano, was torpedoed and
sunk by a Nazi submarine at approximately this point." Fielding held a
ruler between an X mark in the ocean and the island.
He continued to read the report aloud, running a bony finger under the
words as he read them, pausing now and then to sneer at his detractors
in the British Embassy or to chuckle at some particular sarcasm written
into the report.
The facts in the report were set forth in great detail. They dealt with
other submarine anchorages, with the role of the Cross and the Sword on
the waterfront, and with the beginnings of an organized ring of
sabotage. The report ended with the account of the events which followed
the visit of the _Ciudad de Sevilla_, a Spanish liner, to the port of
San Hermano.
"Look here, Hall," Fielding said. "Listen to this. On the twentieth of
September, '41, the _Ciudad de Sevilla_ docked in San Hermano at
four-ten in the afternoon. At approximately five o'clock, the radio
operator of the Spanish liner, one Eduardo Jimenez, left the ship and
proceeded to a bar on the Paseo de Flores, the bar known as La
Perrichola. There he met with two unidentified men, one of whom was
later identified as a provincial leader of the Cross and the Sword. The
three men went to a brothel near the waterfront, and at exactly ten
o'clock left the brothel and got into a waiting sedan which, by a
roundabout route, took them to Calle Galleano 4857, a quiet villa in the
west suburb.
"The villa belongs to Jorge Davila, a lawyer for some of the great
landowning families of the south. Davila's record as one of the leaders
of the now illegal Falange and an organizer of the Cross and the Sword
has been covered in my previous report, dated July 7th of this year."
Fielding poured some fresh coffee for Hall and himself. "Tomorrow or the
next day I can show you the report in question, Hall. But to proceed
with this report.
"At Davila's home, a group of Cross and Sword leaders were waiting for
the three men in the sedan. They had a long meeting, lasting over five
hours. Then eight men, including the Spanish ship's officer, left the
house and entered two fast cars of American make. The cars proceeded to
the town of Alcala, in the sugar lands some seventy miles from San
Hermano.
"In the morning, there was no trace of the eight men in Alcala. That
night, the sugar fields of the English planter, Basil Greenleaf, were
set on fire by incendiary flames started in over twenty different parts
of his acreage at the same time. Two of Greenleaf's employees who were
attempting to fight the blaze in the east field were killed by rifle
fire. One of them lived long enough to stagger to the road where he told
his story to the Greenleaf foreman, a man named Esteban Anesi.
"I must call your attention, sir, to the fact that Greenleaf was the
only planter in the Alcala region who had contracted to sell his crop to
Great Britain, and that the fire took place exactly two weeks before the
harvest time.
"Eduardo Jimenez was next seen in San Hermano the day after the fire,
when he appeared in the Municipal Police Headquarters in what was
evidently a state of extreme intoxication. He complained that on leaving
his ship on the twentieth, he had gone to a bar for a drink, met up with
two pimps, and had then been taken to a brothel where, after two days of
drunken revelry, he had been cleaned out of his life's savings and then
been carried out to sleep it off in an alley off the Calle Mercedes.
Having made his complaint, he passed out. A police doctor examined him,
recommended a good night's sleep."
Fielding held his finger under the word _sleep_. "Hah," he roared. "Damn
clever, the bastards! Now then, where was my place? Oh, yes, good
night's sleep. Yes."
"In the morning, Jimenez awoke, vomited, and started to yell for the
jailer. He wanted to know what he was doing in a cell, and when shown
his complaint, he expressed innocent amazement. He could not recall a
thing. The warden gave him a hearty breakfast and sent him on his way.
Jimenez joined his ship, which sailed for Spain that afternoon with a
cargo of beef."
The case of Eduardo Jimenez was the last in the report. Fielding put the
copy aside and leaned back in his chair. "Was this worth your while,
Hall?" he asked.