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The Five Arrows

by Allan Chase · English · Gutenberg #35904 · 582,532 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Five Arrows

Author: Allan Chase


        
Release date: April 19, 2011 [eBook #35904]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35904

Credits: E-text prepared by Mark C. Orton, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIVE ARROWS ***


E-text prepared by Mark C. Orton, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
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Transcriber's note:

      Extensive research indicates the copyright on this book
      was not renewed.





THE FIVE ARROWS

by

ALLAN CHASE







Random House - New York




_Chapter one_


The governor's wife pointed across the bay to a speck in the black sky.
Ground lights in Catanzas were focusing their blue shafts on the speck,
moving as the plane moved, one light trying to lead the ship.

A thin stream of glowing red and orange tracer bullets soared up at the
plane from the Catanzas side of the bay. A moment passed before the
Governor's guests on the terrace of La Fortaleza could hear the muffled
thud-thud of the distant ground batteries. Someone, the wife of a
visiting government official, exclaimed, "My goodness, I've only seen
this in the newsreels before!"

Now the plane veered, slowly, and the lights from the San Juan side
joined the Catanzas batteries in pinning the plane to the dark clouds.
The sleeve target fastened to the tail of the plane could now be seen
from the terrace. Most of the Governor's guests gasped as the first
bright jets of tracers missed the silver sleeve and sailed into the
black void above it. The ack-ack batteries were speaking with more
harshness now; one of them, planted between two brick buildings, added
crashing echoes to their own reports as the guns went off.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was still very much a topic of conversation
on the island; the submarine nets in the bay were joked about at the
dinner table, but the jokes arose from a profound sense of gratitude for
the nets, the planes, the ships which were the island's defenses against
the undersea raiders that stalked the sea lanes between the ports of the
mainland and San Juan.

The plane shifted course again, now headed directly toward La Fortaleza.
Through the increasing din of the ground guns, the Governor's young
military aide, Lieutenant Braga, could barely hear the ring of the
telephone nearest the terrace. He took the call, then returned to the
terrace and tapped one of the guests on the shoulder. "It's for you, Mr.
Hall," he said. "It's Tom Harris at Panair."

Matthew Hall stood up quietly and walked into the cavernous reception
room. He walked carefully, with the steel-spring tread of a man who
seems to expect the floor to blow up under him at any moment. For
thirty-three years Matthew Hall had walked as other men. Since he was
not conscious of his new walk, he could not say when it had become part
of him. His friends had first noticed it in Paris, in '39, but had
expected it to wear off as soon as the prison pallor disappeared. The
pallor had gone; the walk remained.

Hall's head and shoulders and hands were part of this walk. He moved
with his head forward and his shoulders hunched, with his hands slightly
cocked, almost like a fighter slowly advancing to mid-ring. The
shoulders were broad and thick, so broad that although Hall was of more
than average height they made him appear shorter and chunky.

The face of Matthew Hall had changed, too, with his walk. There were the
obvious changes: the deep channel of a scar on his broad forehead, the
smaller one on his right jaw. The nose had changed twice, the first time
in 1938 when it was broken in San Sebastian. It had swelled enormously
and then knit badly and nearly two years later a New York surgeon had
done an expensive job of rebreaking and resetting the nose. Some bones
had been taken out and the once classic lines were now slightly
flattened. The scars and the dented nose blended strangely well with the
jaws that had always been a bit too long and the soft brown poet's eyes
which had so often betrayed Hall. With his eyes, Hall spoke his
contempt, his anger, his amusement, his joy. The eyes unerringly spoke
his inner feelings; they were always beyond his control.

Changes more subtle than the scars and the flattened nose had come over
Hall's face within the past few years. It now had a queer, angry cast.
His lips seemed to be set in a new and almost permanent grimace of
bitterness. Also the right side of his face, the cheek and the mouth,
had a way of twitching painfully when Hall was bothered and upset. And
yet, as Governor Dickenson had already noted, Hall was not a completely
embittered man. More often than not, his eyes would light up with a look
of amused irony, the look of a man much moved by an immense private joke
he would be glad to share with his friends if he but knew how to tell it
properly.

When Hall had risen to leave the terrace, the Governor noticed that his
cheek was twitching, but once he was alone in the reception room, away
from the sight of the tracers and the target plane, Hall's face grew
calm again. He sat down in the green armchair near the phone, picked up
the receiver. "Yes, Tom," he said, "any luck?"

"Sure. I busted open a seat for you on the San Hermano plane for
tomorrow at six."

"Was it much trouble, Tom?"

"Not much." Tom Harris laughed. "We had to throw Giselle Prescott off to
make room for you. Know her?"

"God, no! But thanks a lot."

"I'll pick you up in the morning then. Good night, Matt."

Hall put the receiver back on the cradle. He sat back in the soft chair,
oblivious of the crashing guns, the hum of the plane's engines, the
others on the terrace. Only one thing was in his mind now--San Hermano.

It was some time before the young Puerto Rican lieutenant slipped
gingerly into the room. "Mr. Hall," he said, softly, "everything O.K.?"

Hall smiled warmly. "My God," he asked, "you don't think the guns drove
me in here?"

The officer blushed. "Fix you a drink?" he asked.

Hall shook his head, drew two Havanas from his jacket. "No, thanks.
Cigar? It's from the one box I remembered to buy in Havana."

The boy was a non-smoker. He lit a match for Hall, waited until the
older man relaxed with the burning cigar. Politely, he said, "I know
you've been through plenty, Mr. Hall. I'm a soldier, but if ..."

"Plenty? Me?"

The lieutenant nodded. "_The Revenger_," he said, hesitantly. "I--I read
your book."

"Oh, that," Hall said. "_The Revenger_." So _The Revenger_ was plenty!

"If there's anything I can get you ..."

The boy's voice seemed to come from far away and Hall realized that he
himself was staring into space and that the lieutenant must have sat
there for a full minute waiting for an answer. "I'm sorry," he said.
"I'm really sorry. I guess I just get this way once in a while."

"It's my fault," Braga protested. "I should have known how hard it must
be for you to talk about--it."

"_De nada_," Hall laughed. "I made a lecture tour last year and spent
five nights a week talking about it for months. It's just that
I'm--well, that I just catch myself staring at nothing at the craziest
times. Maybe I do need that drink. What's in the shaker there--Daiquiri?
Good." He poured two Daiquiris from the jar on the sideboard, handed one
to the lieutenant. "I know you don't drink, either," he said. "But I'm
having this drink to toast victory--and you're a soldier."

When they touched glasses, the boy saw that amused look in Hall's eyes,
the look he had seen earlier at the dinner table when one of the
visiting officials had expressed such innocent amazement at the enormity
of his first taxi bill in San Juan. "I'd better go back out there when I
finish this drink," he said. "I'm glad nothing's wrong with you."

"You're a right guy, Lieutenant. Thanks for looking in." Hall returned
to his chair as the boy walked out to the terrace. So _The Revenger_ was
plenty! And the kid, how old was he? Twenty? Not a day more. Which made
him eighteen when the Nazi torpedo planes peeled off over the African
skies and then roared in to send their tin fish into the guts of His
Majesty's own _Revenger_. Which made him fourteen when the fighting
began, fourteen when the German pilot officers clicked their heels and
mouthed the new phrase "_Arriba Espana_" and flew the Moors from Spanish
Morocco to the mainland and touched off the shooting stages of World War
II. "_Ay, Teniente_," he muttered, "you've made me feel old as hell.
Older."

Hall leaned back in his chair, tried to blow a series of smoke rings. He
thought: But I'm not old. I've just seen things and done things and had
things done to me. I'm not old at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

After years of anonymity in various city rooms in the States, a brief
turn as a byline correspondent in Washington, a still briefer career as
a Broadway playwright, Matthew Hall had drawn an assignment as
third-string man for the World Press in Paris. That was in 1935, when he
was crowding thirty. The job had introduced him to Europe, and carried
him to Geneva, to Belgrade, to Bucharest, to Stockholm. Paris was the
journalistic capital of the Continent; when things happened outside of
Paris, it was a Paris man who was sent to the scene to cover. There he
would find that the office had adequate coverage in the permanent man,
and if he had any curiosity or craftsman's pride he would try to get the
story behind the story. Hall had both. They led him to the strange
half-world of tipsters, hounded opposition leaders, minor officials of
ministries who would talk and produce documents for a fee, candid and
cynical free-lance agents, wise old frightened politicians who sensed
the coming catastrophe in their bones, correct and stiff Nazi advance
agents and politely lavish native fascists who mixed queer brews for
foreign correspondents. They were the _sources close to a key ministry,
the influential elder statesmen, the prominent industrialists whose
names cannot be used_ who figured so prominently in the inside-Europe
dispatches of the era.

July, 1936, had found Hall in Nice spending a long week-end as the guest
of a prominent refugee banker from Germany. The banker was the "inside"
prophet of the month in Parisian newspaper circles. His gospel was the
slightly shopworn one about German industry being fed up with Hitler and
willing to settle on Goering, Danzig and a few worthless colonies in
Africa as the price for eliminating the "extreme Nazis" and returning to
the family of Europe. "He's a damned Nazi himself," Hall had declared
when the invitation reached his office, but the bureau manager was
missing no bets. "I don't care what he is, Matt. He's a story. He's
news. He's what they want to read about in Washington and in London and
in Paris."

Hall never wrote his story on the refugee banker (who later turned up as
a Nazi economist overlord in Denmark). On a blistering Sunday Paris had
called him by phone. Hell was popping in Madrid. The regular Madrid man
was vacationing in the States. "Get to Madrid, Matt. Looks like you'll
be busy there for a couple of weeks until it blows over."

Like many of his American colleagues, Hall traveled to Madrid during
that first week of the war with the idea that in less than a month one
side or another would have been installed in power and he himself would
be back in Paris listening to the latest faker peddling the newest line
of disguised Nazism from Berlin. But Hall was an honest man. What he saw
interested and then intrigued and then enraged him. "This is no Spanish
Civil War," he wrote to the Paris office in a confidential memo sent by
courier. "This is the start of the second World War. It's the Germans
and the Italians against the Spaniards. Maybe I'm crazy, but it looks to
me like the British and the French are backing the fascists, while the
Russians are trying to help the Republicans. How about sending someone
in to cover the shooting for a week while I write a big story along
these lines?"

He was answered in due time. "Stick to the military conflict between the
Nationalists and the Loyalists. And don't send us any Red propaganda."

That was in October, when Caballero was preparing to quit Madrid in
panic, and the Fifth Army was calmly preparing to hold the city,
Caballero or no Caballero. Hall had long since lost his magnificent WP
objectivity. Through the open mails he sent a letter of resignation to
Paris. Antin in the Censura held the letter up, sent for Hall. The
Spaniard hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat a dozen times and then
he got up from his desk and embraced Hall and told him to sit down.
Hall's Spanish was pretty good by then, good enough for Antin to speak
to him in fluent Spanish rather than halting English. "The English I can
read with my eyes. The Spanish I speak with my heart."

Was it that Hall was resigning because he loved the Republic? Yes, I
guess you could call it that. (You could also call it a good craftsman's
stubborn ideas about how to cover a war, but you didn't.) Did Hall
realize that, if he quit, an enemy of the Republic might be sent to take
his place? No, Hall didn't think. Come to think of it, though, the
office had Cavanaugh and Raney available and those two Jew-haters and
Mussolini-lovers would be no friends of the Republic. You are a friend,
a _companero_, it is right that you know. We have so many problems with
the foreign press. McBain from New York, we know he is a spy, he has
links with the Falange. If we arrest him, the world hollers Red Terror.
So we watch him, keep all his letters, hold up his cables. Thank God he
is a drunkard; two SIM men keep him drunk most of the time. Maybe his
office will fire him. You are a friend. You write the truth. Even a
little truth by a friend whose editor chops up his cables helps the
Republic.

Hall tore up his letter of resignation. When the Republic captured
thousands of Italians after Guadalajara and Bruejega, Hall filed long
stories based on interviews with the Blackshirts. When the Republic
captured Nazi Condor officers and men at Belchite, Hall sent photographs
of their documents to Paris with his stories.

New York kicked, and Paris warned Hall repeatedly. Finally Paris
transferred him to the Franco side. That was at the end of '38, when the
Republicans had seen their hopes dashed at Munich and the only thing
that kept them going was the feeling that they could hold out until the
Nazi Frankenstein finally turned on London and Paris. "Then France will
have to rush arms and maybe a few divisions to us and the British fleet
will have to patrol the Mediterranean and the Russian planes, unable to
get through now, will be able to come in through France and through the
Mediterranean." Antin figured it out that way, told it to Hall the week
before some nice clean crusaders for Christianity let him have it with a
tommy gun in the back in a Barcelona cafe.

The Falangistas were very glad to have Hall behind their lines. Their
friends pulled some wires in New York and Washington and, after two
months, Hall was fired, but by then his notebook was growing thicker and
he elected to stay as a free lance. He was seeing the face of fascism
for the first time, he wrote, and seeing it at close range. He would
stay, job or no job. He stayed, and the Gestapo in San Sebastian wrote
out an order and a rat-faced little aristocrat with an embroidered gold
yoke and arrows on his cape was studying Hall's notes and smirking like
a villain in a bad movie.

There were no charges and no explanations. They just slapped Hall into a
cell in solitary, and once a day they handed him a bucket for slops and
once a day he got a chunk of bread or a thin chick-pea stew. In the
beginning he had hollered for the American consul, but the German guard
would grin and say, "_No entiendo Espanol, Ich sprech kein Englisch_,"
and finally Hall just settled down to waiting for the end of the war.

Every now and then a smooth German major would have him brought out for
questioning; that scar on his head and the scar on his chin were grim
mementos of those sessions. The Spaniards were bad but the Germans were
worse. The Italians were just hysterical. There was the day the Italian
officer made the mistake of getting too close and Hall clipped him with
a weak right hook. The Blackshirt screamed like a woman and clung to his
eye; that was when they tied him to the wall and let him have it with
the steel rods on his back.

And then, in April, the Republic keeled over in its own blood and the
fascists decided to be generous to celebrate their victory. The Axis was
now openly boasting that it had run the Spanish show; the worst that
Hall could do would be to play into their hands by writing about how
tough fascism was on any man fool enough to oppose the New Order. They
were generous, they were fair. They gave him a practically new suit of
clothes, they returned his three hundred odd dollars, they even returned
his notebook with nearly all of its original notes.

Hall went to Paris. He spent a week soaking in warm baths and eating and
avoiding the WP crowd. During the week he cabled a New York book
publisher he had met in Madrid in '36, when he had joined a group of
American intellectuals attending an anti-fascist congress. He offered to
turn out a book on his experiences as a correspondent and a prisoner in
Franco Spain. It was a week before he got an answer, but the answer came
with a draft of five hundred dollars.

The swelling had gone down in his nose by then, but he still had to
breathe through his mouth. A doctor who'd looked at it wanted a hundred
bucks for operating, but it meant two weeks of doing nothing but getting
fixed up, and Hall hated to wait. "Later," he said, "later, when I
finish my book."

He poured his notes and his guts into the book, and finished it in a
month. When he was done he borrowed some money from a friend in the
Paramount office and got a Clipper seat to New York.

His publisher, Bird, liked the book and rushed it to press. He also gave
Hall another five hundred and sent him to his own doctor to have his
nose fixed up.

It was a good book, perhaps good enough to justify Bird's gamble, only
it reached the critics three weeks after the Nazi panzer divisions were
ravaging Poland and the smart boys in Paris were wearing smarter
correspondents' uniforms and filing fulsome stories on the genius of
Gamelin and Weygand. "We'll have to face it, Matt," Bird said, "no one
but you and I give a damn about Spain right now. I'm taking back copies
left and right from the booksellers. No, the hell with the advances. The
war's far from over. You'll do another book for me, and we'll make it
all up."

Through Bird, Hall got a job as a war correspondent for a Chicago paper.
They shipped him to London, where he stewed in his own juices for
months, and then to Cairo to join the fleet. Hall was assigned to the
_Revenger_ and, when the Nazis sank her, he spent some three days on a
raft with a handful of survivors. One of them died of his wounds on the
raft, and another went raving mad and slit his own throat with the top
of a ration tin.

Hall filed a story on the experience when he was brought back to Cairo,
and Bird cabled "That's your new book." It was an easy book to write. He
took a room at Shepheard's and pounded it out in three weeks. The
British censors liked it as "a tribute to British grit" and arranged for
a captain attached to a military mission bound for Washington by plane
to deliver the manuscript personally to Bird. The story was still hot
when the script reached New York. Bird sold the serial rights to a big
national weekly that same day for thirty thousand dollars. A lecture
agency cabled offering a guarantee of a fantastic sum for a three-month
lecture tour. A book club chose _The Revenger_, the critics sang its
praises, and Bird bought himself a house in the country.

Hall quit his job and made the lecture tour and wound up with a fat bank
account and a permanent appreciation of the value of a chance plop in
the ocean. For the first time in his life, he found himself with enough
money to do exactly what he wanted to do. The Army doctors had shown him
to the nearest door, but he had offers from magazines and syndicates to
return to the war zones, and the radio wanted him as a commentator.

It was Bird who first learned of Hall's new plans. And Bird understood.
"The Spanish War was round one," Hall told him. "South America was one
of the stakes. The Falange had an organization in the Latin countries.
The Heinies used to brag about it to me in San Sebastian. I'm going to
South America to see it for myself. Maybe there's a book in it, maybe
there isn't. I can afford to find out."

Cuba had been the first stop on this odyssey. There Hall had had some
tough sledding, met some Spanish Republicans who knew him from Madrid,
won the aid of a group of young Cuban officials and written two angry
and documented magazine pieces.

From Havana, Hall had flown to Puerto Rico.

Hall had stopped thinking. The reverie into which the lieutenant had
plunged him passed into a rapt consideration of the imperfect smoke
rings he was blowing toward the ceiling.

Dickenson joined him. "Well?" he asked. "Is it San Hermano tomorrow?"

"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?"

Hall nodded. "I even wrote a book."

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.

Hall grinned. "You have the necessary proof?"

"Absolutely. To the last word, old man. To the last word."

"May I have a copy of your report?"

"Of course. I hope you will get better results, though."

"May I ask an impertinent question, sir?"

"Be as impertinent as you wish. I'm sixty-four years old, Hall, and if I
can't put up with Yank impertinence in this late stage, I deserve no
sympathy."

"Well then, and don't answer if you think me too brash, Fielding, it's
simply ..."

"Hold on!" Fielding held up a restraining hand. "Let me write your
question out on this slip of paper and after you ask it, I'll show you
what I've written." He scribbled a few words on the paper, covered them
with his left hand.

"Are you British Intelligence?" Hall asked him.

Fielding handed Hall the slip of paper. On it was written: _Q. Fielding,
old man, are you a British agent? A. No, my fine impertinent friend.
Believe it or not, I am not a British agent._

He was not smiling when he put a lighted match to the slip of paper and
watched it burn to ashes in the bronze tray. "As a matter of fact," he
said, soberly, "I am not in very good repute at the British Embassy. I
organized a dinner of the more sensible people in the British colony
here in '38 and, after I'd made a blistering speech against Munich and
non-intervention in Spain we all signed a row of a cable to Nellie
Chamberlain. They have me down as a sort of an eccentric and a Red.
Perhaps I am eccentric, but I'm no more a Red than poor Professor Tabio
or your own Mr. Roosevelt."

"I've been called both things before myself."

"I'll bet you have, Hall. I'll bet you have. Let's have another jug of
coffee and look through some more reports. Can you stay awake for an
hour or so?"

"I can stay up all night."

"Well, maybe you can. But I'm not as young as I used to be. We'll finish
the reports in this folder and call it a night. But first--the coffee."

The aroma from the jug warmed Hall's senses. In the cell at San
Sebastian he would awake at night dreaming that he was smelling the
sweet vapors of a fresh pot of coffee boiling away near his pallet.
"God," he said, "I must tell you about what this smell means to me some
day."

"There's nothing like it," Fielding agreed. "Now let me see, here's a
photostat of a letter from the Embassy acknowledging the receipt of the
report I just read, and here ... Ah...." He started to turn the next
letter over, but Hall, reading the letter-head, laid a hand on the
sheet.

"May I?" he asked.

Fielding handed him the letter. It was on the stationery of the
International Brigade Association in London, dated January, 1938.

"The action on the Jarama front ... bitter ... your son Sergeant Harold
Fielding leading squad of volunteer sappers ... missing in action ...
thorough check on records of hospitals and field stations on that
front ... no record of Sergeant Fielding ... we therefore regret ... must
be presumed dead...."

The father of Sergeant Fielding held the picture of the boy in front of
Hall. "This photograph," he said, heavily. "It was taken a year before
he went to Spain. You didn't, by any chance, happen to know the lad, did
you, Hall? He was my only child. Completing work on his Master's in
biochemistry at Cambridge when the Spanish show started. You didn't
happen to know him, eh, Hall?"

Hall studied the photograph.

"He fought with the British Battalion," Fielding offered.

"I was with them in the fighting for Sierra Pedigrosa," Hall said.
"There was Pete Kerrigan, and a boy named Patterson I knew pretty well.
And--but that was after the Jarama fighting."

"The boy is not alive," Fielding said. "I checked with the International
Red Cross after the war, and he was not taken prisoner by the fascists.
I just wanted to find someone who could tell me--who could tell me how
my boy died."

Hall returned the red-leather frame. "I wish from the bottom of my heart
I could help you. But I just can't. I'm afraid I never did meet the
boy."

Roger Fielding read the letter from London for perhaps the thousandth
time, sighed, and placed it face down on top of the pile to the left of
the letters and reports in the folder. "Ah, well," he said. "Now for the
living. Now here's a report I made three weeks ago. Some day those young
stuffed shirts in the Embassy will have to read my reports seriously,
Hall. Perhaps this is the report that will do it."

The second report bore the heading: "Neutrality or Belligerence:
Gamburdo or Tabio."

Hall started. "What's this?" he asked.

"Let's look it over, old man." Fielding cleared his throat and began to
read aloud.

"It is no secret, or it should be no secret to our vigilant intelligence
services, that President Anibal Tabio is a warm friend of the cause for
which the United Nations are fighting. It is no secret that Tabio,
before being stricken with his present tragic illness, was planning to
go before the Havana Conference himself to lead the continental campaign
to declare war on the Axis powers.

"However, the views of Vice-President Gamburdo, who now has assumed the
control of the government, are less well known. Gamburdo's views,
however, are not among the best kept secrets of this war." Fielding
chuckled, waved his pipe in the direction of the Presidencia, and added
the comment, "I should say not! They are far from secret.

"Gamburdo's ties to the Cross and the Sword are very discreet. I have
reason to believe that Gamburdo believes his link with the ATN is not
known by anyone except a few chosen fascist leaders."

Fielding looked up at Hall. "Oho," he laughed. "That must have been hard
to swallow. They don't like to call the Cross-and-Sword bandits
'fascists.' Oh, no. Not the Embassy. They've got them tabbed as
'conservatives' opposed to the extremes of the Red Tabio regime. The
fools!

"Well, now, to continue. Ah--chosen fascist leaders. Oh, yes. But twice
within the past two weeks, for three hours on the twelfth and for a full
day on the fourteenth, Gamburdo was at the ranch of his brother Salvador
in Bocas del Sur conferring with Cross and Sword leaders Jorge Davila,
Segundo Vardenio, Carlos Antonio Montes, and Jose Ignacio del Llano. The
second meeting was also attended by Ramos, the Spanish Consul General in
San Hermano."

"Ramos," Hall commented. "I know something about him. Two years ago
Batista gave him twelve hours to get the hell out of Cuba before the
diplomatic courtesies were forgotten and a cot reserved for Ramos in the
concentration camp for Axis nationals on the Isle of Pines."

"He did come to San Hermano from Havana," Fielding said. "So I'm not so
crazy after all."

"You're not crazy at all."

"Hello!" Fielding exclaimed. "If you know that Ramos was kicked out,
then the Embassy crowd must know it too. Now I begin to see why
Commander New has invited me to have dinner at the Embassy tomorrow." He
took a deep breath, straightened his tie with elaborate mock ceremony.
"Mr. Hall," he said, speaking like an announcer at a royal court, "I
have the pleasure of informing you that Roger Fielding, Esquire, is
about to be released from the insane asylum to which His Majesty's
Ambassador consigned him in September, 1938."

Hall laughed and helped himself to another pipeful of Fielding's
tobacco. "Let's finish this report," he said. "I can't tell you how
important it is to me."

"Here you are, old man." Fielding handed the report to Hall. "I was
reading them aloud to keep you from falling asleep. But I think you're
wide awake now."

Hall smiled warmly at the old man and read the rest of the report. It
was very brief. It described how Gamburdo had shifted nearly the entire
customs staff at San Hermano to other ports or to desk jobs on land, and
replaced them with new customs men who were in many cases proven members
of the Falange or the ATN or both. This move, the report stated, opened
the gates to Axis arsonists assigned to cross the seas on Spanish
liners.

"Cross and Sword members," the report concluded, "are in certain
exclusive bars openly boasting that when Tabio passes away, Gamburdo
will declare the nation a neutral in this war. His family has been
sending copper, hides, beef, coffee, and sugar only to Spanish firms
since 1940. It is an open secret in the Lonja de Comercio that these
shipments do not remain in Spain but are immediately trans-shipped to
Germany. None of the Spanish firms with which the Gamburdo family does
business were in existence before July 18, 1936, the day the Spanish War
started. They are all known in shipping and export circles as German
enterprises. Gamburdo's brother has twice been heard to boast, while in
his cups, that the Nazis are protecting his vast holdings in France.

"The Cross and Sword members in San Hermano business circles speak
highly of Gamburdo and to a man they assert that if Tabio dies, Gamburdo
will impose a foreign policy which in the name of neutrality will bring
prosperity to the landowners and exporters. It will also, of course,
bring vitally needed war supplies from this country to the Axis powers;
a fact they don't even bother to deny."

Hall was puzzled by the report's lack of information on Gamburdo's link
to the Falange during the Spanish War. He remembered that picture of
Gamburdo at the Falange dinner held in San Hermano in 1936, the picture
he had seen in the files of the secret police in Havana. "How much do
you have on Gamburdo?" he asked.

"Gamburdo?" Fielding yawned twice, stretched his arms. "Not as much as I
would like to have, Hall."

"Oh." Hall told him about the picture.

"I'm not surprised," Fielding said. "But it's really news to me. What do
you know that I should know?"

"Nothing much, I'm afraid. How about this doctor who arrived on my
plane, Varela Ansaldo?"

"He's never been in San Hermano before."

"Who sent for him?"

"I don't know. _El Imparcial_ has been giving Gamburdo the credit."

"What do you think of that?"

"I don't know, Hall. I think they might be trying to give Gamburdo
credit for something he doesn't deserve. _El Imparcial_ is very much
pro-Gamburdo, you know."

"Don't I know it! I used to see Fernandez in his Falange uniform in San
Sebastian."

"He's no good."

"Do you think his paper can be right about Ansaldo? I mean about his
being brought to San Hermano by Gamburdo."

"Possibly I can find out."

"What do you think, Fielding? What's your hunch?"

"I have none, old man. But I can see that you have, and I can see what
it is. You think _El Imparcial_ might for once be telling the truth."

"Not the whole truth. I saw _El Imparcial_, too. It also said that
Varela Ansaldo was brought to San Hermano to _cure_ Tabio."

Fielding cocked his head, looked at Hall out of one eye. "And you think
Ansaldo was brought in to kill Professor Tabio?"

"I don't know. I just don't know."

"But you mean to find out?"

"_Quien sabe?_"

"I'll help you. I'll give you all the help I can."

"But you think I'm nuts?"

The Englishman hesitated for a long while. "Ah ... Frankly, old
man--well, damn it all, you could be wrong. But I'd never say you
were--_nuts_ I believe is the word you used."

"Thanks."

"Well, sir, it's been a busy day." Fielding put the letters back in the
folder, then shoved the folder into the portfolio and tied the strings.
"Unless I hear a motion to the contrary, I shall make a move to adjourn.
Ah, the delegate from North America bows. The Ayes have it. Session is
adjourned."

He rose from the desk, put the portfolio back in the filing cabinet,
closed the drawer and tested the lock. "Suppose we meet again after I
have my dinner with Commander New at the Embassy tomorrow night. He's
our new Intelligence man. Understand he took quite a beating from the
Hun at Dunkirk."

"Swell. Same place?"

"I don't know yet, old man. Suppose I give you a ring." The Englishman
suddenly lapsed into a lisping, Castillian Spanish. "Senor Hall? Eh,
Senor Hall? This is Father Arupe. Bless you, my son. Would you care to
come to confession tonight?"

"Then it will be Father Arupe on the phone?"

"Yes, Senor. If I ask you to confession, it means this office in an
hour. If I suggest you attend mass in the morning, drive out to my
house. I'll write the address for you."

"Good."

"Oh, just another word about tonight's reports. If you could help me
bring the facts about the waterfront to your government, I think it
would be most beneficial. Most beneficial, old man."

"I'll do my best."

"I know I can count on you. Knew it before I ever laid eyes on you,
Hall. One of my associates can keep us both posted on the waterfront.
Name's Harrington. Grand chap, Harrington. Straight as a die, and
intelligent."

Hall poured a cup full of cold coffee and swallowed it in a gulp. "God,
that's good coffee," he said.

"How are you going back to the Bolivar?"

"I've got a car waiting downstairs. The driver insisted upon waiting."

"El Gran Pepe?"

"Yeah. I guess it is Big Joe." He described his driver. "And Souza says
he is very reliable."

"Oh, he is, old man. He is. You know, since they turned the bloody
lights down, it's worth your life to cross the streets at night. Awful
lot of traffic accidents and all that, you know. Nothing like a reliable
driver."

"How about you, Fielding?"

"Oh, I'll phone for my own reliable driver. Or better yet, tell Pepe to
come back for me, will you, old man?"

Hall rubbed the right side of his face. "Why don't you ride back with
me, and then continue on out to your house?"

"No. It would be better if you left here alone."

"But how about you?"

"There's no danger, old man. No danger. Besides ..." Fielding reached
into his jacket pocket, took out a small black automatic. "She's loaded,
and I can shoot in the dark, if need be. My Betsy is all I need."

"This is silly," Hall protested.

"Go on, now, old man. No one is going to break in to the office at this
hour of the night. I'm in no danger at all."

"If you say so." Hall got up. "Don't see me to the door. I know my way."

The old man put his arm around Hall's shoulder. "We English," he said,
"we're an undemonstrative tribe. Take pride in our cold hearts. But
underneath the ice some of us have hearts. I'm glad to know you, Hall.
And I'm glad we had this little chat. Good night, and sleep well. You're
all in."

"Good night, Fielding. And thanks. You're swell."

Hall left the office, rode the elevator to the main floor. Outside, the
reliable driver was asleep at the wheel, his right hand under the white
chauffeur's cap which rested on his lap. Hall stood near the open
window, smiling sardonically at Big Pepe. O.K., pal, he thought, we'll
find out about you right now. He cleared his throat, suddenly barked,
"Arriba Espana!"

Big Pepe awoke with a startled growl. The hand under the cap swung up
toward the window. It was clenched around a large nickeled revolver.

"It's me, Pepe," Hall laughed. "Hall."

The driver groaned, shoved the pistol into his trouser-pocket. Then he
also laughed. "Get in," he said. "Get in and thank your stars you're
still alive."

Hall joined him in the front seat.

"Arriba Espana," Pepe muttered, starting the car. "That is no joke in
the heart of any Delgado from the Asturias. That is an abomination."

"You're an Asturiano?"

"Look at me, _companero_. Do I have the face of a Gallego? Do I have the
head of a Catalan? Do I have the eyes of a Madrileno or the soul of a
_puta_?"

"You fought in the war against the fascists?"

"Mother of God, he's asking me if I fought! Always until eternity they
will ask, Delgado, did you fight? And what will I say?"

"Watch out!" Hall screamed. "You'll hit that pole!" He grabbed for the
wheel. Big Pepe's steel arm stopped him.

"_De nada_," the driver laughed. "Didn't Fernando tell you I am a
reliable driver?" The car missed the pole by inches, whirled around a
corner on two wheels, and then rolled casually down the Avenida de la
Liberacion. Another mad turn, and they were at the Bolivar.

"The Englishman, Fielding," Hall said. "He wants you to pick him up at
the office and take him home."

"_Bueno._" Big Pepe put the car in gear.

"How much do I owe you?" Hall shouted.

"_Manana, companero, manana._" Big Pepe had to stick his head out of the
window and look back, while the car moved ahead, to answer Hall. One
more _manana_, the American thought, and the reliable driver would drive
his car through a wall. He watched the car turn the corner on two
wheels.

Souza was still on duty. He handed Hall the key to his room. "You look
very tired, Senor Hall," he said. "I hope you sleep well."

"Thank you. Good night, _amigo_." When he got to his room, he phoned
down to the desk.

"I forgot," he said. "But if that _cabron_ of a waiter is still on duty,
could you send up a bottle of mineral water with the elevator operator?"

"Of course. The operator is no _cabron_."

"Thanks. And by the way, didn't I meet you the last time I was in San
Hermano?"

"No, Senor. But if you will pardon me for presuming, I feel in a sense
as if we are old friends, in a sense."

"Old friends?"

"Yes, Senor. You see, I have read your book."

"My book?"

"_Si, su libro. Buenas noches, companero._"

This time there was no confusion in Hall's mind. He knew which book
Fernando Souza meant. He went to sleep feeling less lonely than he had
in a long time.




_Chapter four_


The alarm in the pigskin traveling clock Bird had given Hall as a
going-away gift went on at eight. Hall shut it off, glanced at the
radium dial, and got out of bed. On the roof tops of the houses in old
San Hermano roosters were crowing. Outside, trolley bells clanged a
block away from the Bolivar. Hall took the half-emptied bottle of
carbonated water into the bathroom, poured it over his toothbrush,
sprinkled the wet brush with powder, and scrubbed his teeth. The charged
water filled his mouth with a vigorous foam. He rinsed his mouth with
the rest of the soda, bathed, shaved and dressed.

There was nothing in his box at the desk. He handed the day clerk the
key and walked out to the street. At a little hole-in-the-wall stand on
Virtudes Street he bought a glass of mouth-puckering tamarind juice. A
few steps down the narrow street there was a newsstand. Hall bought two
morning papers, found a cafe where he had a cup of coffee with hot milk
and a toasted roll. He remained at his table in the soft morning sun,
reading the papers and smoking a cigar, until nearly ten o'clock.

According to both papers, Ansaldo and Marina were to make a preliminary
examination of Tabio, and would then spend the rest of the day
consulting with San Hermano physicians who were attending the President.
There was no hint of what was actually wrong with the President, simply
a repetition of the old statement that Tabio's condition was still
grave.

Jerry was on time for their breakfast appointment. She was wearing a
bright yellow suit of very thin cloth. "Hello," she said. "Still want to
be a tourist guide?"

"More than ever." He caught himself wishing that this could be just an
ordinary date with a girl.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Why?"

"You're scowling."

"Sorry. My mind must have wandered. I'd never scowl at you."

She smiled at him. "Thanks," she said. "I thought for a moment that I'd
pulled a boner. The suit isn't too loud, is it?"

It was his turn to smile. "God, no," he laughed. "It's perfect. Very
hungry? Good. We're eating right here in the hotel."

They took a table near a potted orange tree.

"How do you say ham and eggs in Spanish?" she asked.

"_Jamon y huevos._ Want some?"

"Uh huh. But I want to order them myself."

"O.K. Order some for me, too." Hall hissed for the waiter.

"What's the idea of razzing the guy?"

"Relax, that's the way you call a waiter."

Jerry smiled at the waiter when he reached their table. With a childish
directness, she pointed first at Hall and then to herself. "_Jamon y
huevos_," she said.

"That is all the Spanish the senorita speaks," Hall explained. "I think
we will have toast and coffee, too."

"Well, well," the waiter said in accented English. "The lady speaks
good, no?"

"No," Jerry laughed.

"Well, well," the waiter said, "today is very nice and sunny. Very
nice." He walked into the kitchen.

"I have a perfect itinerary," Hall said. "Old San Hermano first; that's
the historic colonial part of the city. Then, at noon, we take the
funicular railway to the top of the world for lunch. And after
that--well, well, well, as the waiter said."

They walked about San Hermano all morning. Hall showed her through the
old fortress of the Duke of La Runa, which the government had restored
after Segura was overthrown, told her about the early colonial history
of the city. They sat on the old sea wall for a few minutes, while Hall
pointed out the Moorish and Spanish details of the stone houses along
the sea drive above the wharves. The youngest of the houses was a
century old; the tile friezes along their bellies had all been imported
from Spain in sailing ships. Jerry watched the sun do magic tricks of
blue and purple on the surface of the houses. They wandered through the
old market places, deserted that day, but colored by the little stalls
along the sidewalks. Hall bought a large spray of gardenias for the girl
from an itinerant vendor.

"Where are those beaten-silver things you told me about?" she asked.

"Later," he said. "There's plenty of time for that."

"Where do we go now?" Jerry asked. "My feet are killing me."

"From now on we ride." He found a taxi parked near the Cathedral, and
they rode to the funicular railway terminal at the base of Monte Azul.
He told her how the railway was built by Segura, as they rode. "But it
was when the Tabio junta threw the Seguristas out that the damned cable
cars meant anything to the people of the country themselves. You see,
Jerry, Segura gave the concession on top of the mountain to one of his
thugs. The new regime opened it up to the little guys. And wait till you
see what they did to the grounds."

They shared the cable car with an old water colorist, and two other
young couples. "My God," Jerry exclaimed, when she saw the route the
cars followed, "it's like climbing hand over hand up a sheer cliff!"

"Don't worry. It's perfectly safe. In a way, though, I'm sorry this is
such a clear day. On a cloudy day, the tracks just vanish into the soup
up there, and you feel that you are being towed into the clouds."

The cars climbed for five miles, creaking, whining, grunting, but
steadily pushing on toward the peak. From the opened windows, Jerry
could see the Moorish villas at the base of the mountain, then their
red-tiled roofs, then the miles of scraggly wild orange trees. The
sweet, heavy odors of their blossoms filled the car.

"Oh, look," she said, "the town is getting smaller. And the sea is
growing bluer."

"Wait until we get off," he smiled. "Then you'll really see something."

The old artist took out a sketch pad, studied Jerry's excited face, and
made some quick strokes with a charcoal stick. Hall winked at the old
man. "_Hola, viejo. Que pasa?_"

"_La mujer es muy bonita._"

"_Muchas gracias_, Senor. _Es verdad._"

"What are you saying to him?" Jerry asked.

"He said you are very beautiful and I said that's the Lord's gospel
truth. He's sketching you, I think."

"Can we buy it if it's good?"

"I'll speak to him later. Up there."

The car stopped at the terminal on the man-made plateau about a thousand
feet from the actual tip of Monte Azul. A wooden rail ran along the edge
of the plateau for about a quarter of a mile. Within the rail was the
funicular terminal, a souvenir stand, a tiny post office, and a large
open-air restaurant.

"Let's eat," Hall said. "You get hungry as a horse up there."

They took a table with an enameled orange top near the rail. Large
barbecue pits hugged the mountain side of the restaurant, and under a
shed roof three cooks presided over a row of steaming pots. From their
table, they could see the mile-deep belt of mountain flowers which had
been planted in the days of the dictators and expanded by the democrats.
There were flowers of every shape and color, but orange was the color
which spoke most frequently in the cultivated beds. Below the flowers,
the mountainside seemed to be daubed with various shades of green and
brown. "But usually," Hall said, "the mountain is blue. Almost as blue
as the sea."

Jerry looked down at the sea. "I've never seen such a deep blue," she
said.

"I know. This is the bluest water in the world." He hissed for a waiter.
"I'm going to order a hell of a meal, young lady. A side of barbecued
beef and some corn cakes the like of which you never tasted and--just
trust my judgment."

"Can we get drinks here?"

"They have a white wine that beats anything in France."

The food was good and the wine was potent. When they were done eating,
Jerry wanted more wine. "No more wine," Hall smiled. "Nibble on this
cheese, and while you're nibbling I'm going to order a punch I've just
composed in honor of this day. Let's call it Punch _Para Las Mujeres
Bonitas_."

"Whatever that means," Jerry said, dreamily.

"Oh, it's wonderful. Black rum and passion-flower juice and tamarinda
and wild cherry juice and--just wait. I'll be right back." He walked
across the plateau to the outdoor bar and had a long discussion with the
attendants.

Jerry was staring into the sea when he returned. "You know?" she sighed.

"What?"

"Nothing. I was just thinking that I've been looking at the sea and not
thinking at all."

"Cigarette?"

"Uh huh. Thanks for taking me up here. It reminds me of something nice,
but I can't think of what."

"I know," Hall said. "The minute you get here for the first time you
feel as if you've known this place all your life."

The waiter brought a pitcher of scarlet punch and two tall glasses to
the table. Hall paid the check, and added a package of American
cigarettes to his tip.

He filled the two glasses, tried a sip from his before handing one glass
to the girl. "Let's see how this strikes you," he smiled.

"It's delicious!"

"Finish it and then try walking," Hall said, dryly.

"We'll try walking later." They finished the punch in the pitcher, and
then Jerry looked at her face in a pocket mirror.

"Oh, Mr. Hall," she sighed. "It ate away what was left of my lipstick
and I think it gave me a red nose and I suppose I should powder and
paint but I won't."

"Madam," he said, "you are under the influence."

"I may be high, sir, but I'm not drunk."

Hall got up and took her arm. "Shame on you, nurse," he said. "There's
still a thousand sights to see up here."

"Lead on," she commanded. "We'll see who's potted."

Hall pointed to the edge of the restaurant. There was a mountain path at
that end, a graveled path leading into a park of streams and cypresses.
They followed this path until the forest closed in around them, and they
were alone.

"My feet," Jerry said. "These shoes were not meant for serious mountain
climbing."

"My lady." Hall spread his brown gabardine jacket in the moss bank
adjacent to a small stream. She took off her shoes and stretched out on
the jacket, her hands clasped under her head.

"You know," she said, "if I weren't so full of food I'd take my
stockings off and dip my feet in the creek. I just haven't the strength
to move."

Hall lit a cigarette, put it in the girl's mouth. "If you ever dipped
one of your dainty gringo toes in this burbling frigidaire," he said,
"they'd hear your screams twelve miles out at sea."

Jerry sat up and hummed the tune of "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf."
She took off her stockings, started to edge down toward the stream.
"Here, help me up." She extended a hand to Hall, who pulled her to her
feet. "I'm going wading."

There was no scream when Jerry stepped into the water. Her breath just
stopped. She yanked her foot out of the stream as if it were a blazing
inferno, hopped around on the dry foot with tears in her eyes, and then
lay down on the jacket.

"Well, anyway," she said, when she could catch her breath, "I didn't
scream."

"No. You were brave." He took out a large handkerchief, started to rub
the foot which had been in the water.

"I never thought I'd wind up here when I left New York," she said.

"When do you go to work?"

"Tomorrow, I guess. The President is a pretty sick patient."

"Does Ansaldo think he can pull him through?"

"He didn't say."

"Did he find out what's the matter with Tabio?"

"Not yet. That's what he's doing today."

Hall wanted to ask her further questions about Ansaldo, but he was
afraid to betray his interest too openly. "Let's cut it out," he
laughed. "This is a party, and we're talking shop."

The girl sighed in contentment. "Oh, that's nice," she murmured. "I
don't care what we talk about, as long as we stay here."

"Like it here?"

"Right now, I wish I could stay here forever." She had her hands clasped
under her head, was talking to the tips of the cypresses as well as to
Hall.

"Why don't you?"

"It's like Shangri-La," she said. "We should both be two centuries old.
How old are you, Hall?"

"Thirty-six."

"I'm twenty-eight. Honest. Not twenty-one. Twenty-eight. In two years
I'll be over the borderline. Then I'll be an old lady. But right now I'm
not going to lie about my age."

"Right now I don't think you could tell a lie. Not even a white lie."

"No fair, Hall. First you get me drunk--only I'm not high any more--then
you take me to Shangri-La. Can I call you Matthew? Or is it Matty or
Matt the women in your life call you?"

"My friends call me Matt."

"My friends! There's no Mrs. Matt?"

"No. Never has been."

"I had a husband, once. Only I divorced him and became a nurse."

"That when you left Ohio? Or was it Indiana?"

Jerry turned her eyes from the cypresses and looked at Hall, who sat at
her side, his face over hers. "Ohio," she said. "How did you know?"

Hall bent over and kissed her lightly on the lips. She neither resisted
nor returned his kiss. "You sweet dope," he said. "I'm a Buckeye myself.
Cleveland."

"I'm from Columbus."

"Pleased to know you, Miss Columbus. Did you know you have green eyes
and there are little gold stars in each eye?"

"Nope."

"Nope. Sweet dope. No one ever told you."

"He calls me names!" Jerry sat up and put her arms around Hall's neck.
"He calls me names." She put her slightly opened mouth against his lips
and pulled him closer, and together they sank to the ground. They lay
locked in the one kiss, the girl's full breasts pressing against Hall's
chest.

"Don't," she whispered, "please. Ah, don't. Ah, Matt. Darling."

He found her lips again. They were trembling, and he could feel the
tremors which started in the pit of her stomach and rose to her
shoulders. "Please, Matt," she broke from his grip and turned her face
to the ground. "Darling," she said, biting then kissing his hand. He put
his arm around her and kissed the back of her neck. She shuddered
deliciously. "Let's get up," she said.

"We're alone here," he said.

She smiled and kissed his hand. "I'm getting up," she said. "Let me sit
up, Matt."

"Sure," he said. He sat up with her. She ran her hand lightly over his
face, brushing the scars, the flatness of his nose.

"Gorilla," she said, and she kissed him softly on the mouth. "You tore
off one of my buttons, you ape."

"Hello, Miss Columbus," he said, speaking with a Spanish accent. "It is
a very nice day today. Very sunny."

"Yes," she said.

"Still want to stay here forever?"

"Uh huh. Do I look too messy?"

"No. Your hair could stand some combing."

"Will you get me some more of that punch?"

When she had combed her hair, they stood up and he took her hand and
they walked back along the graveled path.

"Can we phone to town from here?" she asked. "Doctor wanted me to check
in at about five."

"Going to work?"

"Don't know yet."

They had their punch. The light danced in Jerry's hair, gave it the same
orange tint which dominated the flower beds. "I forgot to tell you,"
Hall said. "You're beautiful."

Jerry swirled the scarlet drops on the bottom of her glass. "You don't
know a thing about me," she said.

"What should I know?"

"Nothing. But can I tell you, anyway? I want to, Matt."

"I want to know."

Jerry sighed. "I told you I was married before, didn't I? It didn't
take."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I'm not really from Columbus. That is, my home town is nearer
Columbus than to any other city, but it's just a hick village in the
sticks." She told her story in very few words. High school, and then
three years at the State University, and then marriage to a small-town
high-school principal some years older than herself. After five years of
small-town married life, Jerry came into a small inheritance, left the
schoolmaster, and went back to get her degree. "I wanted to study
medicine," she said, "but I didn't have enough money, so I took up
nursing instead. The idea was to earn enough as a nurse to go back to
medical school."

"What happened?"

"New York happened. I couldn't take hospital regimentation, and some of
the doctors were so anxious to sleep with me that they got me some snap
jobs. You know, sitting up with rich lushes and hanging onto the girdles
of deserted dowagers who wanted to jump out of windows and handing the
right scalpel to society surgeons while they carved out a million-dollar
gut."

"It must have paid well."

"Too well."

"And so you became a glamour girl."

"That's a pretty cruel way to put it, Matt. I'm not really a dope, you
know."

"I know."

"I guess I just stopped thinking because I was afraid to think."

"Where does Ansaldo fit into the picture?"

"I came with him because I admire his skill as a doctor. I can learn
things by working with him. He's fantastically good, Matt."

"How long do you know him?"

"Not long. He came to New York about six months ago to operate on a
drunk who'd been my patient for months. The patient had fallen down a
flight of stairs on my day off. Ansaldo invited me to be one of the
nurses when he operated on the patient's spine. Are you interested in
operations?"

"A little. Why?"

"It was amazing. I thought I had seen some good surgeons at work. But
Ansaldo is more than good, Matt. He's great. After that first operation,
I was his nurse for all of his New York operations. And naturally, I
jumped at the chance to come along. I'm a perfectionist, Matt. Some day,
some day soon I hope, I'm going to go back to medical school. I've been
saving every spare penny I could. And what I'm learning from Ansaldo
couldn't be taught in any school."

"You amaze me," he said, honestly. It was hard to doubt her. He prodded
her for details of Ansaldo's skill. She answered him earnestly, and with
increased enthusiasm.

"But wait," she protested, finally. "I don't see why I should be telling
all about myself. I haven't talked like this to any man for years."

"I haven't listened like this for just as long," he laughed.

"But it's not good, I know," she said, her voice abruptly breaking.
There were tears in her eyes, and she turned away. "I've gone and made a
fool of myself."

"Why?"

"I know," she said. "You probably have a wife and nine kids in New York.
I bet you carry their pictures in your wallet."

"Do I?" Hall handed his wallet to Jerry. "Look for yourself. Take out
every picture."

There were three photos in all. The first was of Bird, his wife and
their baby. "My publisher," he explained.

There was a sepia photo of Hall pointing the lens of a camera at a bomb
crater in Madrid. "London?" Jerry asked.

"Yeah," he said. "London."

The remaining photo showed Hall talking to an aged couple on a road
packed with refugees. "France?" Jerry asked.

Hall shook his head. "No. Belgium." Again he lied. The picture had been
taken in Spain.

"Don't hurt me, Matt," the girl said. She was dry-eyed now, but
saddened. "Don't hurt me later."

"I won't hurt you," he said. He wondered at that moment if he would be
able to avoid hurting her.

"Are you really alone?"

"Alone?" He did not laugh. "God! I'm the loneliest sonofabitch in the
whole world."

The girl smiled again. "I have half a mind to believe you," she said.
"Shall we get started back?"

"O.K. It's getting late. Have dinner with me?"

"I don't know, yet. Would you call the hotel and ask if there are any
messages for me?"

"There's a phone in the souvenir stand."

The girl bought a batch of picture sets while Hall was on the phone. "Do
we eat?" she asked when he came out of the booth.

"No. They want you in the Marti Memorial Lab at the University at
seven."

"Shucks."

"I phoned for a driver to meet us at the bottom in twenty minutes. We
still have time for a drive around the nicer parts of New San Hermano."

They went to the terminal to wait for their car. The ticket agent
glanced at Jerry and then he reached under his counter and brought up a
large envelope. "Senor," he said, "the painter left this for the lady."
It was the sketch of Jerry, wide-eyed and happy as the car climbed Monte
Azul. In the lower right-hand corner was an inscription Hall translated
for her. "To a charming visitor--a memento of her visit to our free
city. Horacio."

"It was sweet of the old man," Jerry said. "Tell the guy to thank him
for me, will you?"

"I already did. But this is fantastic. An original Horacio water color
is worth a baby fortune. This sketch is valuable, Jerry."

"Didn't you recognize him?"

"Never saw him before in my life."

Big Pepe was waiting for them with his LaSalle when they reached the
bottom of Monte Azul. "How good are you with tourists?" Hall asked. "I
want to show the senorita New San Hermano."

"I can drive you with my eyes closed," Pepe said.

Hall laughed. "Keep your eyes open. And your four wheels on the
pavement," he said. "Or I'll kill you with your own gun."

"I have no fears of you," Pepe said. "Get in."

Hall held onto Jerry's hand as he described the sights that rolled by
their window. Big Pepe handled the car like a model tourists' chauffeur.
It rolled along smoothly, not too quickly, and when Hall tapped him on
the shoulder he would stop, the motor running softly while Hall made his
explanations to Jerry.

At six, Hall and Jerry agreed to have one last drink before parting for
the night. "Let's ask the driver, too," he suggested. "He's a nice guy."

"Sure. So are you."

"Pepe, how about joining us for a drink at that bar near the Libro del
Mundo?"

Pepe turned around and grinned at them. "With many thanks," he said. "I
will join you."

"If we don't all join our ancestors first. Watch the road, you Asturian
murderer!"

"I take it," Jerry laughed, "you were telling him to keep his eyes on
the wheel."

"You're learning the language, _muchachita_."

They found an empty table on the sidewalk. Hall and Jerry had Scotch and
sodas. Big Pepe ordered coffee. He was very happy to be with them. He
beamed continuously at the girl, and to Hall he swore that never had he
seen a more magnificent woman. "Of course," he purred, "she could stand
more meat, but for a gringo, she is most magnificent."

"He says you're a sight for sore eyes," Hall translated.

"Then tell him to look at my face."

"The woman thanks you," Hall said.

Jerry pointed to the bar. "There's the little Dutchman," she said.

Androtten was standing alone at the bar, a wine glass in his hand.

"I'll call him over. He's a lonesome bastard too."

The Dutchman was delighted to see Hall. "This is indeed a damn
surprise," he said. "Join you at the table? Happy as hell to join you,
Mr. Hall. Ah, the nurse of the great doctor. Tell me, nurse, do you
think the doctor could cure my rheumatism?" This, he made clear by his
gesture of holding his side in mock agony and groaning, was meant to be
a joke.

Hall translated the joke for Pepe.

The driver nodded. "I understood most of it," he admitted. "One doesn't
drive American tourists for a century and learn nothing."

"Aha," Hall said. "Pepe knows a few words of English, it develops."

Jerry turned to the driver, smiled sweetly at him. "Tell me," she said,
"did you ever have your eyes scratched out?"

Pepe grinned, shrugged his huge shoulders. "Did the senorita say I have
nice eyes?" he asked Hall.

"No, Pepe. She said your eyes can bring you trouble."

The Asturiano closed his eyes and drew his finger across his throat,
making the appropriate sounds. "I understand perfectly," he said.

"Let's sit down one of these days," Androtten said to Hall. "I am
willing as hell to give you the damn story of what the Japanese did to
me in Java, if you are still damn willing to listen."

"Oh, I am. Anxious as hell, Mr. Androtten." He explained to Big Pepe
what had happened to the little man. Pepe's face instantly reflected his
deep sorrow.

"I hate to break up this nice party," Jerry said, "but I have to go to
work."

"Can we take you back to the Bolivar, Mr. Androtten?"

"Not just yet. I have a damn appointment here at seven."

Hall put some money on the table and followed Jerry to the car. "I
forgot to tell you," he said. "There'll be a government car waiting to
pick you up at ten to seven."

"The poor man," Pepe sighed. "The cruel Japanese!"

"It's been a wonderful day, Matt."

"When do we repeat it?"

"Can't tell. I'll leave a message for you tonight when I get back."

Hall ate alone after Jerry went to the laboratory, and then wandered
around the dark streets of the waterfront, thinking how he could
organize his work. That was the damned job, always. Planning your moves.
Deciding exactly what it is you're after and then organizing a method of
getting it. The letter to Santiago. That was a good start. With luck,
there would be an answer in a week. But was a week too far away? How
sick was Tabio, and could he hold out for another week? And anyway, was
Ansaldo a fascist?

The face of Varela Ansaldo would not leave Hall's mind. Maybe Fielding
could find out something, anything. At this moment, Fielding was
probably eating a little crow with his dinner at the British Embassy.
But would they tell Fielding anything? Did they know anything? And who
the hell was Fielding and how in hell did he get the dope in his
reports? _No, my fine impertinent friend, I am not a British agent._ He
was the father of Sergeant Harold Fielding who hopped out of the wicker
pony cart and picked up one of those thin rifles and died at Jarama.

Santiago's answer. There was the best bet. If the boys in Havana had no
dope, at least they would tell him who to contact in San Hermano, and it
was a safe bet that when Pedro de Aragon (or would it be a love letter
from Maria de Aragon?) wrote, the letter would lead him to someone who
would know Souza and Pepe Delgado. They were O.K., but just a little
cautious, and this business of squiring Ansaldo's nurse would not set
too well with them unless Ansaldo was not Gamburdo's man at all.

Hall was turning a corner when he first noticed the little man walking
in the shadows of the opposite sidewalk. A little man in a black suit
and a dirty stiff straw hat. Hall slowed his steps, waited for the man
in the straw hat to walk closer to the yellowed street light. The man
slowed down, too. Hall kept walking. He headed for an avenue, found a
cab, told the driver to take him to La Perrichola. He looked around to
see the little man get into the other cab at the stand.

"I changed my mind," Hall told the driver. "Take me to the Ritz
instead."

He walked slowly into the lobby of the Ritz. It was one of the more
modern hotels in New San Hermano. He found a phone booth and called
Souza. "Where's Pepe?" he asked.

"Right outside. Do you need him?"

"Very much. Tell him to pick me up near the back entrance of the Ritz.
I'm too drunk to trust a strange driver."

Souza laughed. "You Americans," he said. "Pepe will be there in five
minutes."

Hall went to the bar, had a short brandy. The little man was sitting
behind a potted palm near the street doorway, his face buried in a
magazine. Hall looked at his watch and walked to the elevator. "Sixth
floor," he said.

He walked through the sixth-floor hall, took the back stairs to the
fourth floor, and then looked out of the window at the landing. Big
Pepe's LaSalle was parked near the servants' door. Hall listened for the
sound of footsteps on the stairs above him. Quietly, he walked to the
basement, nodded at a waiter relaxing on a bench near the door, and
walked slowly to the LaSalle.

"_Que pasa?_"

"Trouble. Drive a few blocks down and then come back slowly toward the
front of the hotel."

"Sit with me," Pepe said. He tapped the pistol in his pocket.

"No." Hall got down on the floor of the back part of the car. "And take
your white hat off."

The car shot down three streets, then Pepe turned the corner, rode a
block, and started to crawl along the street on which the main entrance
of the Ritz opened. "Souza said you were in trouble," Pepe said. "He
says you are not a _borracho_."

"I was followed. Watch for a little man in a black suit and a stiff
straw hat. Park a block from the entrance to the Ritz and keep your
motor running."

"_Claro._"

"I think he tried to sell me perfume this afternoon when I was walking
with that nurse."

"She needs no perfume," Pepe said.

"She is not my woman," Hall said.

"Did you see that other woman who came with the doctor?" Big Pepe
snorted violently. "I hate _maricones_," he said.

"I hate them too, Pepe. Did you know that Franco is also a homosexual?"

"They are all _maricones_. Hitler, Franco. They are all the same."

"_Putas y maricones_," Hall said. "_La Nueva Espana!_"

Big Pepe cleared his throat and spat out of the window. "Arriba Espana."
Hall could feel the low, toneless laugh in the Asturian's throat.

"I think I see your dog," Pepe said. He described him for Hall. "He acts
as if he lost something."

"Me."

"Falangista?"

"I don't know. Ever seen him before?"

"Who knows? _Mira!_"

"I can't look. What's he doing?"

"Hiring a car."

"Follow him. But ..."

"_Mira, chico_, that I can do with my eyes closed. And he won't know me
for the offal on the streets."

"Don't lose him."

"I'd sooner lose my _cojones_." He started the car, slowly. "I am
magnificent at this," he said.

"Good."

"During the war I did this all the time."

"When he stops, watch where he goes but don't stop yourself. Keep going
after he stops."

"Don't worry," Pepe said. "I am not new at this."

"Very good."

"That girl with the nice hair, _companero_. Why don't you take her into
your bed some night? I think she would be very good there."

"Forget the girl."

"That will be very hard."

"Where are we?"

"Still following the little dog. We're moving toward the Plaza."

"Pepe. The Englishman's son. Did you know him?"

"He was very young. I only saw him once. He was very brave, _companero_.
The Centro Asturiano sent flowers to his father when the boy was killed.
He died for the Republic, you know." Pepe slowed the car.

"What's the matter?"

"He's stopping. We're on the Calle de Virtudes. He's going into a cafe.
I'll keep going."

The car covered another block. Pepe turned the corner and stopped. "You
can sit up now," he said.

Hall saw where he was. "Which bar did he go to?" he asked.

"El Siglo. There's another cafe next door. You can sit behind a hedge at
a table there and watch El Siglo. I have done it many times. I'll park
the car across the street and watch for you."

"Do you think we can do this alone?"

"Why not?"

"What do we have to do?"

"Who knows? It is the little dog's next move."

"But could you get some friends now?"

"Yes. How many?"

"A few. I'll keep an eye on El Siglo."

"All right," Pepe said. "But we shouldn't lose the little dog."

"That is a chance we must take. If we lose him tonight, we will follow
him tomorrow. He will be in my footsteps again."

"That is true," Big Pepe said. "I will be back soon." He drove off down
the back street.

Like El Siglo, the cafe where Hall found a table near a boxed hedge on
the sidewalk faced the entrance to the apartments of the Presidencia.
The lights were on again in the fourth floor. Hall wondered if the
doctors were poking poor Tabio at that moment.

He ordered a pot of coffee and sat back to watch the entrance to El
Siglo. A newsboy sold him a late paper, but Hall gave up trying to read
it after a few minutes. He bought a box of wax matches and some cigars,
turning his back to El Siglo when the tip of his first match flared into
flame.

Less than ten minutes after Hall started his vigil, the little man in
the straw hat walked out of El Siglo and sat down behind the wheel of a
Renault parked at the curb. He sat alone in the car, his face turned
toward the Presidencia. Hall looked nervously up the street for a sign
of Big Pepe. He jotted the license number of the Renault down on the
margin of his newspaper.

There was still no sign of Big Pepe.

The man in the Renault pressed the squeaky rubber horn twice. Another
man walked quickly out of El Siglo and got into the back seat of the
Renault. Hall squirmed in his chair and looked vainly for Big Pepe. The
passenger was Wilhelm Androtten.

Hall watched the Renault start to move up the Plaza. It rode around the
entire Plaza, and, as it started to pass the cafes again, Hall saw that
it was following a black limousine which had just left the Presidencia
after picking up two passengers.

The black limousine was doing about thirty, picking its way out
carefully in the half darkness of the old city. As it passed directly in
front of Hall's table, one of the people sitting in the back seat lit a
cigarette. In the light of the match, Hall could see that it was Varela
Ansaldo.

He had to wait another ten minutes for Big Pepe, who returned with two
young men. "We lost him, Pepe."

"_Hijo de puta!_ I told you."

"Relax. I know who he works for. We can find them on our own terms now.
I saw them."

"Who?"

Hall looked at the two young men sharing the front seat with Pepe.
"Introduce me to your friends," he said.

Big Pepe grinned. "That is your right," he said. "This is my nephew
Miguelito, and this is Juan Antonio Martinez. They're school teachers."
The last he said with almost boastful pride.

The teachers were both slim lads in their early twenties. Hall shook
their hands and got into the back of the car. "Let's drive out to the
beach and talk," he said.

"No," Miguelito said. "It would not be wise. There are too many
strangers there."

His colleague grunted. "Your pistol, Miguelito," he said. "Take it out
of your pocket. It is digging a new hole in my arse."

"They talk that way all the time," Pepe said, tolerantly. "But they are
very educated."

"I am sorry if I talk like a worker," Juan Antonio said to Pepe. "My
father was only a miner. I apologize, Your Eminence."

"He is joking," Pepe said. "Miguelito, you are a Bachelor of Arts. Tell
me, do workers joke, too?"

"Quiet, both of you," Miguelito said. "_Companero_ Hall will think we're
all crazy."

Hall laughed. "I've seen boys like you before," he said.

"We were too young to go then," Juan Antonio said. "But if they try it
here, the streets of San Hermano will run with blood before we let the
fascists win."

"Juan Antonio is a Communist," Big Pepe said.

The boy did not deny it. "Remember my words," he said, "the flag of the
Falange will never fly over San Hermano."

"Not if we are still alive," Miguelito added.

"Will you listen to these children?" Pepe asked. "As soon as you turn
your back they put on the _pantalones_ and make the noises of a man!"

"This little dog of a fascist who followed you," Miguelito said, "who is
his superior?"

"I don't know, _companeros_. It could be Hitler...."

"It could be Franco," Big Pepe said.

"He said that," Juan Antonio said. "He said Hitler, didn't he,
Miguelito?"

"Quiet," Miguelito said. "This is no joke. You said you saw him with his
superior?"

Hall smiled at the boy. "Listen, _chico_," he said, "men with more
pistols than you have tried to put words in my mouth before. All they
got from my mouth was my spit."

"_Ole!_" Juan Antonio punched Miguelito's shoulders with glee.

       *       *       *       *       *

Souza was reading a fat book at his desk when Hall returned to the
Bolivar. He greeted the boys with familiarity. "They are reliable," he
said after they left.

"I know. I was sober when I called you before. But tonight your reliable
boys nearly drank me under the table trying to find out who was with the
little dog."

"The one who followed you to the Ritz?"

"The same one. They also told me that you are President of the Hotel
Clerks Union."

"I am."

"Got a cigarette? Thanks. No, I've got matches." Hall looked around to
see if he and Souza were alone. Quietly, he said, "Androtten was the man
I saw with the little dog."

Souza's face grew grimmer. "I don't think I am surprised."

"Who is he?"

"I don't know. But I don't trust him."

"Maybe this will help you." Hall handed him the license number of the
Renault. "It's the number of the car they used."

"It will help," Souza said.

"What time did Ansaldo get in?"

"He did not get in, yet. Why?"

"Androtten was following his car, I think."

"Androtten is out, too."

"Maybe we have something."

"You have a message in your box." It was a note from Jerry. She was
going to work all day and had to attend a party at the American Embassy
in the evening. But she would call him in the morning.

"I am watching her," Hall explained.

The trace of a smile flitted across the long face of the night clerk. "I
know," he said. "Pepe told me."

"I'll kill him," Hall laughed. "I'm going to bed. Leave a note in my box
about when they get in."

He went to his room. When he turned on the light, he saw that a note had
been slipped under his door. It was from Jerry. "Thanks for a lovely
day," it said. "I will call you before I leave for the lab."




_Chapter five_


He was dreaming of the crowds in the bull ring at Badajoz, but there
were no bulls on the sand. It was the day of the massacre, the day when
the Portuguese troops herded the _milicianos_ and their families and
handed them over to the waiting _franquistas_ on the Spanish side of the
border. It was the day the _franquistas_ shoved the Republican families
on to the sand of the bull ring at Badajoz and set up the heavy machine
guns in the boxes and fired away until every human being on the field
lay choking and dying in his own blood. In his dream Hall saw grand
ladies in mantillas in the boxes that day tossing roses and perfumed
kerchiefs to the animals at the machine guns, and in his dream he even
knew that the perfume on the kerchiefs came from a certain shop in
Barcelona.

Then Hall spotted a crowd of German and Spanish officers in another box
and he leaped at them, his right hand gripping the ugly clasp knife in
his pocket. There were nine officers in the box, four of them Nazis and
one a gaudy Italian colonel and the rest were Spanish fascists in capes
and one of them wore a Requete beret, although his cape carried the
golden embroidered five arrows of the Falange. They began to flee from
their box in a panic, but Hall managed to get a quick look at one of the
Spaniards and then flung his knife at the Spaniard's retreating back.
Then the bells began to toll in the churches and carabineros left their
machine guns and ran barehanded after Hall but the clang of the bells
started to blot everything out and the church bells of Badajoz blended
into the steady drone of a smaller bell in Hall's ears and he awoke to
the phone bell which had abruptly brought him back to San Hermano.

"Did I wake you up?" It was Jerry.

"Yeah. What time?"

"Stop groaning. Wash your face and I'll call you back in five minutes."

Later, she asked him if he had been having a bad dream and he said it
had been closer to a nightmare in technicolor. "About the war?" she
asked, and he said it had been about the war.

"Darling," she said, "I wish you never have another nightmare as long as
you live."

"Thanks," he said. "Do we have breakfast together?"

"No. I'm leaving with the doctors in a few minutes. Work all day."

"Dinner tonight?"

"That's out, too. I have to go to a party with the doctors at the
American Embassy."

"Good. I was invited, too. I'll see you there." There was a long pause
at the girl's end of the wire, and Hall said, "Jerry? Are you still
listening?"

"Sure," she said.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. You're a darling. I've got to hang up now. I've got to be out
of here in ten minutes."

"O.K.," he said. "See you tonight."

He reached the lobby at half-past eight. There was no message in his
box, and he could see that Jerry's key was already in the cubicle. "I'll
be in the dining room if anyone phones," he told the day clerk. He
bought a paper from a boy standing near the entrance of the Bolivar and
went in to eat.

Hall was having his second cup of coffee when Androtten entered the
dining room. The little Dutchman smiled happily when he spotted Hall.

"Good morning, good morning," he shouted. "Hell of a nice day, no?"

"It's nice and sunny," Hall said. "Eating alone? Take a chair."

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Hall. Damn nice of you."

Hall wanted to shove the incongruous hells and damns down the pink face
of the Hollander. "Not at all," he said. "I like company." But the
beaming Dutchman brought goose pimples to his spine this morning.

"Excuse me," Hall said, rising. "I'll be back in a minute."

He went to the desk, picked up a pad of cable blanks and an indelible
pencil. Then, at the table, he sat with pencil poised over the pad and
smiled at Androtten. "Mine is a funny business," he said. "When you get
to the capital of a country you can't go right to work, you know. Far
from it, Androtten. First you smooch around the town like a prowler,
talking to taxi drivers and bartenders and ..."

"Pardon my ignorance, Mr. Hall. But _smooch_? Is it a real word or
journalists' slang?"

"I guess you'd call it slang. I mean you have to mingle with the little
people to get an idea of the currents."

"And when you get this idea?"

"When you get the idea, you can go to work." Hall wrote the name and
address of the editor of one of the big weeklies in the States on the
blank. "Vice-President Gamburdo is man of hour here today," he wrote.
"Tomorrow may be man of hour in all Latin America. Arranging for
interview. Can you use? Matthew Hall."

"And now you are working?"

Hall turned the blank around so that Androtten could read the text of
his cable. "I'll let you in on my secret," he laughed.

The Dutchman read the text. "Interesting," he said. "Damn interesting."

"I'm afraid it's just routine."

"Oh, never that." The Dutchman sighed. "When such vital personalities as
Senor Gamburdo are routine to you, Mr. Hall, I imagine that my story has
only a small chance of ever being told. But I suppose that is merely as
it should be."

"Hell, no, Mr. Androtten. I'll tell you what we'll do. As soon as I have
my interview with Gamburdo, we'll sit down and have our chat and then
I'll query the _Saturday Evening Post_ or _Collier's_ and whatever they
offer we'll split down the middle."

"You make me happy as hell, Mr. Hall. But please, money is no object.
Please keep all of the money."

Hall shook his head. "We'll fight that out later," he said. "Cigar?"

Androtten demurred. His heart was not strong enough for cigars that
early in the morning, he explained. "In Java I was healthier than an
ox," he said. "But the damn Japanese ..." He let the rest of the
sentence remain unspoken.

Through the open window of the dining room, Hall saw Pepe's LaSalle
drive up to the Bolivar.

He excused himself with an "I'll be seeing you," and walked out to the
desk. He handed the cable blank to the day clerk. "Send it press rate
collect," he said.

Pepe had a message for Hall from Souza. Ansaldo had returned to the
Bolivar at 3:14 A.M., twenty-three minutes before Wilhelm Androtten.
They had both left calls to be awakened at eight in the morning.

"That all Souza said?"

"That is the complete message."

"Well, it's something, anyway." The papers said that Ansaldo was to
spend the morning at the bedside of President Tabio.

"Where to?"

"Gobernacion Building. But not right away. Drive somewhere where we can
have a coffee together. I'd like to talk to you first."

Pepe took him to a little workers' restaurant on the edges of the
business section of New San Hermano. It was evident that he had had
little sleep.

"Tired?" Hall asked.

The driver whistled, softly. "Like a corpse," he admitted.

An amused grimace distorted Hall's face. "What a corpse!" he said. "Why
didn't you tell the boys who followed the teachers and me from the cafe
last night to be better than the little dog?"

"You saw them?"

"I kept tripping over them all the way home."

Pepe thought it was very funny. "They pledged their lives to protect
yours, the bunglers. Reliable, but clumsy."

"I am not angry," Hall said. "I am grateful."

"For nothing," Pepe protested.

"Pepe, do you know why I came to San Hermano?"

The big Asturian shrugged his shoulders. "You never told me, or
Fernando. Miguelito and his friend said you have the mouth of a clam."

"Do you want to know why?"

"I never question friends. You are a friend."

Hall looked up at Pepe Delgado and wanted to tell him how much he
reminded him of the best of the men he had met in Spain, the best of the
officers and _milicianos_ who never, even in the heat of battle, forgot
the feelings and the sacred _dignidad_ of their fellow men.

"Mother of God!" Pepe laughed. "Don't look at me as if I were that girl
with the red hair."

"You are a good _companero_," Hall said. "In a few days, perhaps I can
tell you."

"I never ask questions of friends," Pepe said.

"I know. Did Souza tell you what I told him last night?"

"No. Only about when Ansaldo and Androtten came back."

"Can you reach Souza today?"

"Of course."

"Then listen. Tonight, he must find some excuse for moving me into the
room next to Ansaldo--if there is such a room. Do you think he can do
it?"

Pepe grabbed the check for the coffee, refused to relinquish it to Hall.
"This is my table," he said with quiet dignity. He also refused to
discuss his fee for driving Hall around San Hermano for days.
"_Manana_," he laughed. "But about the room. I think Fernando can
arrange it. The wife of the owner of the Bolivar is a member of the
Centro Asturiano. She is also a first cousin of Dr. Gonzalez."

"I hope he can do it," Hall said.

"_Hola!_" Pepe boomed. "_Que tal?_" He exchanged loud pleasantries with
a chauffeur who came in and sat down at a table in the corner.

"A Gallego," he explained to Hall. "But otherwise a pretty decent man."

"There are many decent Gallegos," Hall said.

Pepe whistled through his teeth, shook the limp and dangling fingers of
his right hand, and looked behind his back. Hall grinned. Pepe's gesture
was as old as Spain.

"Listen, Pepe," he laughed, "we have much to do. And all in a very short
time. I am going to see the Press Secretary in the Gobernacion. I am
requesting an interview with Gamburdo."

"Gamburdo is a _cabron_," Pepe said.

"I know. In my eyes he is an _hijo de la gran puta_. But for the present
I want Gamburdo and his friends to think that I am an admirer of the
_cabrito_. Clear?"

"I think I understand."

"Good. Tell all of this to Souza when you drop me at Gobernacion. When
can you see him?"

"I will try to see him at once."

"_Bueno._ Let's go, then."

In the car, Hall had a fresh idea. "This young Juan Antonio, the
teacher. Is he really a Communist?"

"Yes."

"Member of the party?"

"Of course. He writes for _Mundo Obrero_ regularly."

"Good. If you see him, ask him to go to the Communist headquarters and
from there to telephone a friend. From there, understand? Tell him to
call any friend. No, wait. Make it a friend in the office of _Mundo
Obrero_. I want him to denounce me to this friend as an admirer of
Gamburdo and an enemy of Tabio."

"But why?"

"I have an idea that Gamburdo has made some changes since he became
Acting President," Hall answered. "If he has, he's got some Cross and
Sword bastards listening in on all Communist phones."

"It is possible," Pepe said. "I will discuss your idea with Juan
Antonio."

"Talk him into it, Pepe."

Pepe stopped the car in front of the Gobernacion building. He promised
to meet Hall at the Bolivar in two hours.

Hall entered the polished marble corridors of the Gobernacion. There was
a popular song about this building. Hall thought of the words, written
by no known poet, and yet so well known in the nation that it had become
the unofficial anthem of the Hermanitos in the guerrilla armies which
had fought the Seguristas. Even today, after nearly three decades, San
Hermano youngsters learned the words from slightly older playmates when
they were barely old enough to play by themselves. Somehow, the kids of
the city sang a slightly less ribald version of the ballad of the
_edificio magnifico_ which cost the nation over twenty million pesos and
which, the song maintained, supported a village full of Don Augusto's
whores and bastards.

"I want to see the Press Secretary," Hall told an attendant in the right
department.

"So do I," the attendant laughed. "He resigned last week."

"Didn't anyone take his place?"

The attendant was a very old man. He leaned back in his chair and with
an eloquent look gave Hall to understand that he had completely lost
patience with the visitor. "_Chico_," he said, "no one could take Don
Pascual's place."

"Please, _viejo_, I am in a hurry. Is anyone trying to take Don
Pascual's place?"

"Ha!" The old man shifted in his chair. With withering scorn he raised
his arm and pointed a handful of gnarled brown fingers at a door marked
_Prensa_. There were many other men in San Hermano who pointed to things
with just that gesture. Hall recognized the gesture at once. He had seen
it for the first time in Geneva, when Anibal Tabio rose to make that
gesture toward the pile of captured Italian and German military
documents with which the Spaniards had tried to impress the League.

Hall smiled with compassion at the figure of the old man imitating the
gesture of his idolized President.

"Go in, go in," the old man said, petulantly. "Go in and see that burro
of a dolt who is _trying_ to take Don Pascual's place."

"And has this burro a name?"

"The burro has a name. It is Valenti. Now you made me say the
unspeakable name! Please, _chico_, in the name of my sainted mother and
the Educator, go away!"

The old man's attitude told Hall more about what Gamburdo had already
done to the Press Bureau than he could have learned in a week of routine
digging. He handed the old man a cigar and a box of matches and walked
through the door to Valenti's office. He found himself in a small
anteroom facing a dark-haired girl pecking genteely at the keys of a
typewriter with creamy fingers whose long nails were painted a deep
blood red. She was immaculately groomed and pretty.

"I would like to see Senor Valenti," he said.

"Your name, Senor?"

So you had voice training, too, he thought. "Matthew Hall," he said. "I
am a journalist from New York."

"How nice!" The secretary switched to English immediately. There was
only the slightest suggestion of an accent to her English, and over the
faint Spanish intonations she tried to impose the broad a's of something
resembling the Oxford drawl. "It is quite a relief to speak English
during office hours, really." She pronounced it as "re-ahl-y."

"Yours is a very good English, Miss ..."

"Vardieno," she said.

"Pick it up in school in San Hermano?"

Miss Vardieno made a mouth of disdain. "Heavens, no!" she said. "Dad
sent me to finishing school in the States. Stuffy old place, but
charming in its own Adirondack way. Besides, I could always sneak down
to town for a week-end when it became too boring."

"Of course," Hall smiled. "Nothing like good old New York to work off a
bore."

"And how! What brings you to this forsaken village?"

"Pan American Airways," he laughed. "There's a flight out of Miami every
two days they tell me."

The girl laughed with him. "O.K.," she said. "I asked for it. I'll find
out if Mr. Valenti can see you now." She pushed her chair back and got
up, pausing mid-way long enough to give Hall a fleeting look at her
breasts with a casualness she had never learned in the Adirondacks. But
Hall had eyes only for the pendant which dangled at the end of a thin
platinum chain. When she sat at her desk or stood erect, Miss Vardieno's
Cross and Sword emblem sank neatly below the neck line of her blue New
York dress.

"There are so many lovely sights in San Hermano," Hall sighed as the
girl walked into the private office.

She was in the private office for quite some time. Emerging, she had
regained her finishing-school poise. "I am so sorry," she said. "Mr.
Valenti is tied up in a conference that will last for hours. Our
Congress opens in five days, you know, and what with the situation being
what it is, Mr. Hall, it is the feeling of the Press Director that it
will be impossible for any writer to obtain an interview with Mr.
Gamburdo until after the Congress convenes."

Nice going, he thought. "An interview with the Vice-President? But how
did Mr. Valenti know that was what I wanted?"

"I don't know, Mr. Hall. I guess he just presumed. Every one wants to
interview Mr. Gamburdo these days. If it keeps up I guess he'll make the
cover of _Time_, don't you think?" She sat down and propped up a flower
sagging over the rim of the crystal vase on her desk. "Our pretty
tropical blooms are too darned delicate, don't you think?"

"Oh, yes," Hall said, thinking not of the broken blossom but of the
speed with which the text of his cable had reached Gamburdo's new Press
Secretary.

Miss Vardieno brushed an imaginary fleck of dust from her skirt. "Well,
anyway," she said in her best bored-with-it-all nuance, "he's going to
be a vast improvement over Tovarich Tabio."

"I'll be seeing you," Hall said.

"Don't be a stranger now," Miss Vardieno said. "It's such a relief to
speak English during office hours."

Hall closed the door behind him and started to whistle the ballad about
the graft that built the marble halls of Gobernacion's _edificio
magnifico_. "You're right," he told the old attendant. "Valenti can
never wear Don Pascual's _pantalones_."

The old man's dry cackle followed Hall down the swirling marble stairs.
Hall walked out to the Avenida de la Liberacion, looked in all
directions for the man who had followed him the night before. The yellow
straw hat was nowhere in sight. He turned his steps toward the
fashionable shopping district directly south on the avenue. If his
shadow were on him, he would flush him by walking down the broad, sunny
avenue.

The shopping district brought no sign of the "little dog." Hall shopped
the plate-glass windows, hoping to catch a tell-tale glimpse of anyone
who might be on his heels. He went into a department store, bought a
tropical dinner suit, and arranged to have it altered and delivered to
the Bolivar at five. Then, after selecting a maroon tie and a shirt, he
found a phone booth and called Fielding's office.

A Spanish-speaking secretary answered the phone. Fielding was in Alcala
at an auction, she said. "Please have him call Father Arupe's
secretary," Hall said.

The hot noon-day sun forced Hall to abandon his ideas of taking a
leisurely stroll to the Bolivar. He found a rickety cab and relaxed on
the dusty cushions. Fielding was the man he needed now, Fielding might
be able to make Androtten show his cards, Fielding might have some of
the answers about the new Press Chief and his brand-new secretary. And
if Souza could find out who owned the Renault Androtten and the little
dog used, maybe Fielding could tie the information into some of his own
data and come up with something. Then when the boys in Havana answered
that screwy letter perhaps they'd all have something to go by. In three
days at the outside there would be word from Havana. Three days of
waiting and accepting Souza and Pepe and even Fielding on faith.

At the Bolivar, the desk clerk told Hall that Pepe had called to say
that he was having some minor engine trouble and would be delayed for
about an hour. Hall noted the word "minor" and put it down to a delay in
reaching Souza or Juan Antonio. He ordered a jug of iced pineapple juice
sent up and went to his room. The long walk down the Avenida de la
Liberacion under the broiling sun had covered Hall with sweat. He
stripped and went to the bathroom. A slow gust of air hissed out of the
faucets when Hall turned the taps. He washed his face with cold water at
the basin while waiting for the pressure to force up the water to the
bath faucets.

But no water came. The hissing ceased, the faucets went bone dry. Hall
phoned the news down to the desk.

"I am so sorry, Senor," the clerk said. "But all the baths on your line
seem to have gone dry. The manager has sent for a plumber."

Hall stretched out on his bed and tried to relax.

The desk clerk phoned him back. "Can I send the plumber up?" he asked.

"Sure." Hall put on his pants and a pair of slippers. More than anything
else, at this moment, he wanted to wallow in a cold tub. The plumber,
who looked enough like Pepe Delgado to be his twin, had other ideas.

"It is very serious, Senor," he complained. "There will be no water from
these rotted pipes in a century." He banged the pipes with one tool and
twisted them with another, cursing them as he worked. "It is very
serious," he concluded. "I can do nothing on them today."

"Mother of God!" Hall said, and then he saw the sly smile on the
plumber's massive face.

"Even She couldn't get any water from these pipes," the plumber said.

"How am I going to bathe?"

"Who knows? Maybe the manager will give you another room where the bath
still works."

"Maybe. Well, thanks for trying."

"For nothing, Senor." The plumber picked up his tools and left.

Hall dressed and joined Pepe in the car. "What did the plumber say?"
Pepe asked.

"Enough. Let's have a quick lunch somewhere."

"Souza is changing your room tonight. He is also changing the rooms of
four other guests. They have no water either."

"Good work. Where are we eating?"

"When I stop the car you'll find out."

"Is the plumber your brother?"

"My cousin. I also spoke to Juan Antonio. He made that telephone call."

"Are you very hungry?" Hall asked. "I want to buy you half a steer."

"I could eat half a steer, _companero_. And I know where to get it,
too." He drove to an old garden restaurant near the beach. "Here they
serve the best meat in San Hermano. And at low prices, too."

Pepe did ample justice to a tremendous steak. He washed it down with a
quart of beer, chiding Hall for confining his luncheon to a simple
roast-beef sandwich. "Such food is all right for little children, Senor
Hall. But you are a man."

"Call me Mateo."

"You should eat like a man, _Companero_ Mateo."

"I don't feel like eating."

"Then go to a good doctor. Or take that red-headed woman into your bed
for a night. You'd eat in the morning, _chico_!"

Hall laughed. "I'd rather see a doctor," he said.

"A doctor?" Pepe grew serious. "Is anything wrong?"

"Who knows? This Dr. Gonzales you mentioned. Is he a medico?"

"Yes. Would you like to see him, _Companero_ Mateo?"

"Could we see him after lunch?"

"Now is the best time. He's surely taking a little siesta, and it is
better not to telephone. His daughter is at school all day. Come on,
I'll drive you over."

They got into the car and Pepe swung into a street with a trolley track
that led them to a middle-class suburb. He stopped in front of a gray
frame house similar to any doctor's house in an American town. A fat and
ancient Persian cat was sleeping in the shadiest part of the porch. Pepe
meowed at the cat. She opened a lazy eye, yawned, and went back to
sleep.

"The cat and her master always take their siesta at the same time," Pepe
explained. "It is a very intelligent cat." He opened the screen door.

"Is there no bell?"

"He disconnects the bell when he naps." Pepe led Hall into a cool,
shaded living room. There was no rug on the highly polished redwood
floor. The furniture was made by native craftsmen of bamboo and wicker,
although the designs reflected the functional modernism of the Bauhaus
school. It was the first modern furniture Hall had ever seen in South
America.

Pepe noticed Hall's interest. "The doctor has many peasant projects," he
explained. "He brought some Spanish refugees from Madrid to the country
to teach the peasants how to make good furniture. They have a big
co-operative shop in the southern province near the Little River. Sit
down in one of these new chairs. I'll get him."

Hall relaxed in one of the low-slung chairs while Pepe went to the rear
part of the house. "He's not on the couch in his office," Pepe said. He
went to the foot of the stairs leading into the foyer. "_Hola!_ It's
Delgado! _Hola!_ Don Manuel, it's Delgado!" His shouts would have roused
the dead. He turned around and winked to Hall. "_Abajo_ Anibal Tabio!"
he shouted. "_Viva_ Gamburdo! _Viva_ Segura! _Abajo_ Tabio!"

Upstairs there was the sound of a book or a heavy shoe dropping to the
floor. "Bandit!" someone shouted, and then a tall graying man in his
stockinged feet shuffled to the head of the stairs, rubbing his eyes and
cursing Pepe with a mock cantankerousness. "_Bulto_," he shouted. "Give
a man a chance to put on his shoes. Show some respect for my degrees!"

Pepe made a low, courtly stage bow. "Forgive me, Your Eminence," he
pleaded. "I am only a simple petitioner."

"_Momentico, companero._" The doctor went to his room for a pair of
huaraches.

"Doctor, I want you to meet _Companero_ Mateo Hall."

"_Companero_ Hall!" The doctor started to speak English. "It is so good
to finally meet you. Don Anibal gave me your book on Spain for Christmas
when it was printed. He spoke to me about you very highly. Please, sit
down. You will find these chairs very comfortable."

"Pepe has been telling me about your co-operative."

"It is not very large. Here, try this chair. It is my favorite."

Pepe reminded the doctor that Hall was in need of his professional
services. "Excuse my bad manners, doctor," he said, "but when you start
to talk about your projects ..."

"He is right," the doctor smiled. "Sometimes I do talk too much. I like
to talk, even when people don't really listen to me. Even in my sleep I
talk. About many things. Art. Weaving. World politics. The war."

"I like to listen," Hall said. "Where did you learn your English,
doctor?"

"My English?" The doctor leaned back in his chair, the smile of a man
enjoying a highly private joke on his face. "I am afraid, _companero_,
that I learned my English in the same sort of a place where you learned
your excellent Spanish. That is, in a dungeon built by the Kings of
Spain."

"In Spain?"

"No. I am not a Spaniard. My grandfathers were Spaniards, but my father
and I were born here." He pointed to a framed flag of the Republic which
hung on the wall over Hall's chair. "That flag hung in my cell in El
Moro for three years, and that flag was in my hands the day Segura's
death opened the prison gates to all of us." The doctor was not aware
that he was now speaking in Spanish.

"The doctor was in El Moro with Don Anibal," Pepe said.

"That is true," the doctor admitted. "Nearly every patriot on the
faculty and so many of the students were there, too. I had just taken my
degree in medicine but I was still at the University as an instructor in
biology when the arrests began. But don't think it was all tears and
terror. Don Anibal and his late cousin Federico formed the so-called
University Behind Bars. We had Chairs in Latin, English, biology,
history, art, literature--everything. The soldiers, who were with us,
smuggled in our books and papers. Later, when the Seguristas were out of
power, the students who were in prison were able to take their
examinations in the University of San Hermano, and the new Regents gave
them full academic credit for their studies at El Moro."

"He is a sick man, doctor," Pepe said. "Examine him first and talk to
him later."

"Pepe is right, _Companero_ Hall. I do talk too much."

"Nonsense. Any man who did three years in jail has a lot of talking to
catch up on when he gets out."

"Will the examination take very long?" Pepe asked. "I have to go back to
town. I can pick you up later."

"Have you an hour?" the doctor asked Hall.

"I have all day."

Pepe got up. "I'll be back in two hours," he laughed. He walked out to
the porch. They heard him meow at the cat. Then the cat screeched and
Pepe howled.

"A cat is never completely civilized," Dr. Gonzales said. "Poor Pepe
refuses to believe it. And now Grisita has scratched him again."

"Your wild beast!" Pepe roared. "She clawed me!"

"Come inside, and I'll fix it, Pepe."

"No, thanks. I've got iodine in my car."

Hall expected the doctor to be amused. Instead, a wave of profound
sadness gripped the man. He took out a pocket handkerchief and ran it
over his forehead. "What's wrong, doctor?"

"Not much," Gonzales said. "I just can't stand the way they spare me.
Since my illness it's been hell. For twelve years I was the National
Minister of public health education. Don Anibal appointed me when he was
Minister of Education. He created the job for me. Now I live on a
pension, and outside of the few hours I put in every week as a
consultant at the University and my handicraft projects, I do nothing.
Biologically I am now a vegetable. And my good friends, the people of
San Hermano ..."

"_Claro._ You mean they are too kind ..."

The doctor nodded. "But they are my friends," he said. "They do not do
this to hurt me. And now, what bothers you?"

"My back. I think that I may have strained it."

"I can examine you better in my office. It's in the next room."

"Thank you. But first, I'd like to talk to you about some other things.
I don't know what's going on, but I do know that something is wrong. I
knew Don Anibal in Geneva, and I know that if he were well, your country
would break with the Axis...."

The doctor sighed. "You are not alone," he said. "Don Anibal is a very
sick man. No one seems to know what is wrong, exactly. He is paralyzed
from the hips down, and he grows weaker every day. The mind is still
strong, but it must rest so much that none of us dare to tax Don Anibal
with worries other than his health. In the meanwhile, Gamburdo has taken
over."

"And Gamburdo? Is he honest?"

"Gamburdo is not a man of good will. He is a clever lawyer and a very
intelligent man. His family prospered under Segura, but the General
seduced a Gamburdo daughter, and that turned them against the
Seguristas. Gamburdo volunteered his services as a lawyer when Tabio and
the Republican junta was in jail. But this offer was a calculating
gamble. He knew that Segura's days were numbered; he knew that the
leaders of the junta would be the new government of the nation. He
joined the Party of Radical Socialism, but when he became its head, he
saw to it that, like himself, the party became neither radical nor
socialist."

"He was for Franco, you know," Hall said.

"I know. He was for Franco and the Falange and against Tabio. But he is
very intelligent. He managed to keep these things nicely hidden. When
Tabio was elected President and created the new government of national
unity, Gamburdo joined forces with Don Anibal--but only to destroy this
unity from within.

"This is the least of his sins. It seems that he has kept all the
Republican doctors from the Presidencia. The only doctors Gamburdo has
permitted are the reactionaries, the old servants of the Seguristas. We
tried to talk to Don Anibal, but you know him and his saintly faith in
the goodness of Man. I think that, deliberately, he has placed his life
in Gamburdo's hands as a lesson to all of his old friends in the need
for real unity. It is as if he means to prove to us, by getting well,
that unity is the most important issue in the nation today."

"And Dr. Ansaldo? Is he really good?"

"He has a great reputation. But it is a gamble for Gamburdo alone. If
Don Anibal recovers, Gamburdo and his friends will say that it was a
Spaniard who saved the President. If he dies--even a great Spanish
doctor could not save him. Either way, Gamburdo stands to gain."

In the office Hall took a chair facing the microscope on the doctor's
white enameled metal desk. He watched the doctor hunt through the
instrument cases along the wall. On a lower shelf, the doctor found his
stethoscope.

"Would you please remove your shirt?"

Hall shook his head. "No," he said. He gently took the stethoscope from
the doctor's hands, carefully folded it and put it away in a small
wooden box he found on the desk. "This is what I really came for,
doctor."

"My stethoscope?"

"Exactly." He explained to the doctor that with such instruments one
could easily hear through an average indoor wall. "I have a queer
feeling," he said, "that with your stethoscope I can perhaps get a hint
as to what is actually wrong with Don Anibal,--or, at least, in San
Hermano."

The doctor gave Hall his hand. "I won't ask you any questions," he said.
"But may I wish you luck?"

"Thank you."

"Now let me fix you a cold drink. I'm not very good in the kitchen, but
we'll see what we can both do."

Pepe returned with news for Hall about the change of rooms at the hotel.
Hall now had the room next to Ansaldo's sitting room. He also told him
that the Spanish Republican societies were planning an _homenaje_ for
Hall. "They formed a committee to arrange it with you, but I told them
that you didn't want to see them until next week."

"I hope you were pleasant," Hall said.

"Of course I was, Mateo. I just thought you didn't want too much noise
about you in San Hermano for the next few days."

"Maybe you're right, Pepe."

"What do you want to do now?"

"Take a bath. I'm going to a party at the American Embassy tonight. But
tomorrow I think we'll have a lot of work to do, _companero_."

"I wonder what happened to the little dog?"

"Maybe I'll know some more about him tonight."

"What have you got in the box?"

"Medicine."

Pepe snorted. "_Mierda!_" he laughed. "What you really need is ..."

"I know," Hall said, sharply. "That girl with the red hair."

"Excuse me," Pepe said. "I am not a doctor."

"You are too modest, _ilustre_."

"Have a good time tonight. I'll be waiting for you in the morning. Or,
if you change your mind, leave word with Fernando."

"Good. Until tomorrow, then." Hall got the key to his new room from the
clerk, as well as the packages he had ordered earlier in the day.

The new room was larger than the other one. His clothes and bags had
already been moved in, and the chambermaid had made a creditable effort
to put them away as Hall had previously done. Hall went to the window,
saw that it looked out on the Plaza. He adjusted his window shutters for
privacy. The wall between his room and Ansaldo's sitting room had only a
bureau against it. Hall moved the chest slightly to one side, made room
for a small, solid chair. Then he took his bath.

He was shaving when he heard Ansaldo return to the Bolivar. He wrapped a
towel around his middle, put the plastic prongs of the stethoscope in
his ears, and sat down on the little chair facing the wall. The hearing
end of the stethoscope picked up only footsteps. The sounds told their
own story. The man in the next room was walking to the window, then
opening the shutters, then sitting on the couch. There were other
footsteps, lighter and less pronounced. Perhaps another person in the
room was wearing soft slippers or going barefooted, like Hall himself.

"Are you tired, _ilustre_?" It was Marina.

"No. Why should I be tired?" Ansaldo.

Marina giggled.

"Did you find out?" Ansaldo asked.

"Not yet, _ilustre_. What was it like to examine Tovarich Tabio?"

Ansaldo laughed. "Let me take care of the Tovarich, please. And don't
act too happy at the Embassy tonight."

"I am not a fool, _ilustre_. Didn't the Caudillo himself personally
decorate me for bravery?"

"Now you are being a boor. I detest boors."

"I am sorry, _ilustre_."

"Try to find out if they are coming in tonight."

"They would not be coming by Clipper," Marina said. "Too dangerous."

There was the rustle of paper, followed by the padded footsteps. Then
someone--Hall guessed it was Marina--sat down in a creaky armchair. The
man with the shoes got up and walked in the direction opposite from
Hall's room. Hall heard a door open, followed a few seconds later by the
rush of water into a tub. He remained in his chair, his stethoscope
still against the plaster.

The phone near Hall's bed started to ring. He got up very quietly,
tiptoed over to the bed. He hid the stethoscope under his pillow before
he answered.

"Hello, it's me."

"Yeah, Jerry."

"Speak louder. I can't hear you."

"Sure." He went on speaking with his hand around the mouthpiece to
muffle the sound. "Can you hear me now?"

"Just about. Listen, I've got lots to tell you. I was with Doctor when
he examined the President, and he was magnificent!"

"The patient?"

"No, you dope. The doctor. What are you doing now?"

"Nothing. Getting dressed."

"Me too. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it."

"Right now?"

Jerry laughed.

"I know," he said. "You're not wearing a thing at the moment."

"Just a second. There. Now you're right about one thing, anyway."

"Don't tempt me," he warned. "I might decide to check up for myself."

"Not now you won't! Meet you downstairs in about twenty minutes. O.K.?"

Hall finished his shave and dressed, toying all the while with the
notion of walking down the corridor to Jerry's room before she had a
chance to leave. Pepe would heartily approve, he thought, and, besides,
since that hour in the woods on top of Monte Azul, Jerry had not exactly
indicated that he would be unwelcome if he made a try. But while he
speculated, Jerry phoned him again from downstairs. "Daydreaming?" she
asked, and he answered, "Yes, about you."

She met him at the elevator in the lobby. "Come on," she laughed, "let's
go to that place in back of the Cathedral. The little Dutch drip was
around here a second ago. He wants to tell you the story of his life, he
told me."

"O.K. Let's just keep walking."

She took his arm as they left the hotel. "Miss me?" she asked.

"I did."

"You're a liar."

Hall winced. "Is that the best you have to say? How about the
magnificent doctor?"

"He's really good, Matt. I'm not kidding. I've worked with some corking
medics in my day, but this guy is tops." She told Hall about the
masterly way in which Ansaldo had taken command of the situation,
kicking all the San Hermano doctors out of the sick room and examining
Tabio only in the presence of Marina, Jerry and Tabio's son.

"What's the matter with him?"

"Ansaldo has an idea. But he has to make certain."

"What does it look like to you?"

"It could be many things. What's good to drink here?"

"Anything. Scotch and soda?"

"Oke. But really, Matt, you should have seen Doctor in that sick room."
She launched into a long and enthusiastic account of the doctor at work.

The girl was on the point of repeating herself when Hall cut her short.
"Listen," he said. "Let me tell you something about Anibal Tabio and his
generation of young democrats who walked out of jail and started to make
history." He told her of the schools and the hospitals which had been
built in the country in the last decade, of the minimum-wage laws, of
the work of Tabio followers like Dr. Gonzales.

He told her how he first met Tabio in Geneva. "His was supposed to be
just a small voice in the League; a little South American dressing to
make the whole show look good. But a month after he got there, Mussolini
started to pop his goo-goo eyes at Ethiopia. Hoare and Laval and Halifax
were so nice and ready to give the Italian steamroller a healthy shove
downhill to Addis Ababa. Then one afternoon Litvinov got up to fire some
heavy shots. But that was expected. Then del Vayo started, and the fun
began. Because, when Vayo was through, it was Tabio's turn. And lady,
what Anibal Tabio did to hot shots like Hoare and Laval without even
raising his voice was just plain murder."

Jerry put her hand on Hall's arm. "I suppose I read about it in the
papers at the time. It didn't mean much to me then. I'm afraid it didn't
mean much to me until right now, Matt."

"Weren't you interested in what happened in the world?"

"Not too much, I'm afraid. I was interested in myself. I was making up
my mind to go to Reno, and then I sat in Reno for six weeks cramming on
my old school books, and then I was off to nursing school."

"Didn't Ethiopia, and later Spain, make any impression upon you?" Hall's
question was very gently stated.

"Of course it did, Matt. I was sorry for the Africans and I was sorry
for the Spaniards. I wanted Mussolini to get licked and I wanted the
Loyalists to win. But most of all I wanted to get through nursing school
and then earn enough money to study medicine."

"In other words, if Geraldine Olmstead got her M.D., all would be right
with the world, eh?"

She avoided his eyes. "It sounds stupid and mean," she said. "But I
guess I deserve it. I'm afraid that was the idea."

"When did the idea die?"

"About ten seconds ago, when you put it into words," she admitted. "I
never thought of it in that way before. But I wasn't the only one,
Matt."

"Hell, no! You were in a majority when the war started. The whole
country was sitting back and, as it thought, minding its own business.
We thought we were wonderfully immune until the bombs began to drop on
Pearl Harbor."

"Now you're being gallant," she laughed. "There were plenty of people in
the country like--like you, Matt. Have we time for another drink?"

Hall was staring into space. Suddenly he exploded. "_Madre de Dios!_ Now
I remember!"

"Remember what? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I have." Hall tapped his head. "In here."

Jerry laughed. "I wish someone would come along and tell me what this is
all about."

"There's no time. Let's get back to the hotel. I've got to change
clothes and there's a guy I want to see before I go to the party."

"But what's it all about?"

"I'll tell you later."

Walking back to the hotel, he asked Jerry if she had ever found the
solution to a problem in a dream. "Because just now I did. Do you
remember when you woke me up this morning that I sounded like a guy in a
fog? Well, I was. But just a few minutes ago at that table on the
sidewalk, the fog lifted."

"And now you feel better?"

"Sure. It's all over."

"I think you're lying. I think that whatever it is, it's just
beginning."

"No. It's over."

Jerry was right. But what she did not know was that the fog had lifted
on Dr. Varela Ansaldo. The doctor was the Spanish officer of Hall's
dream, the one at whose back Hall hurled the knife. And at the table,
sipping his second drink, Hall had recalled in a flash where he had seen
Varela Ansaldo before. It had happened in Burgos, in April of 1938,
during a review of the 12th Division of the fascist army. Ansaldo,
wearing the uniform of a Franco major, with a big Falange yoke and
arrows sewn over the left breast pocket, had shared a bench on the
reviewing stand with an Italian and a German officer. Directly behind
them, on that day, had flown the flags of Imperial Spain, The Falange,
Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Hall remembered the tableau vividly,
remembered so clearly perhaps because while watching the review from the
sidewalk he had been annoyed by the staff photographer of Franco's
_Arriba_, who must have shot a hundred pictures of the officials in the
stands that day and who had also shoved Hall aside or stepped on his
toes before shooting each picture.

"I'll see you at the Embassy tonight," he said.

"Oke. But get that scowl off your face first," she smiled. "You promised
to be nice tonight, and right now you look as if you are planning to
kill someone with your bare hands."




_Chapter six_


The American Embassy was three blocks beyond the Presidencia. Hall
wanted to walk to the party, but when he reached the street he became
self-conscious about his palm-beach tuxedo jacket, and he hailed a
strange cab.

The Embassy was housed in an old Spanish palace which a former
Ambassador had left to the United States Government in his will. After
the first World War, when the government had taken title to the palace,
Washington sent an architect and an office efficiency man to San Hermano
to redesign the structure. The outside remained more or less intact. But
inside, many changes had been effected. The spacious street floor,
designed as the slave quarters in the seventeenth century and later
converted to storerooms and servants' quarters, was now a hive of
offices and waiting rooms. The second floor was devoted largely to a
tremendous ballroom, a state dining room, and the tapestried private
offices of the Ambassador himself. The living quarters of the Ambassador
took up the third floor, while the low-ceilinged fourth floor,
originally designed for soldiers, was now given over to servants' rooms.

A secretary at the entrance checked Hall's name off against a list on a
teak table. He took the carpeted stairs to the ballroom. Two butlers
stood at a screen in the doorway to the big room. The first butler
announced his name, but not loud enough to disturb any of the
Ambassador's two hundred-odd guests. The second butler nodded to Hall,
and led the way through a maze of dignitaries, diplomats' wives, and
young people trying to dance to the music a rumba band was producing
from a bandstand in a corner. Hall followed him patiently, looking for a
sign of Jerry's red hair. The butler nodded gravely at a young girl
dancing with a thin Latin in tails. She left her dancing partner and
advanced on Hall with an outstretched hand.

"Mr. Matthew Hall, Miss Margaret," the butler whispered.

"I'm so glad you came, Mr. Hall. I'm Margaret Skidmore." Her hand, thin
and remarkably strong, was covered with a white net glove that reached
to her elbow.

"It's nice of you to have me," Hall said.

Margaret Skidmore took his arm. "We must get you a drink," she said,
"and introduce you to some of the more interesting people here. And oh,
yes, to my father. But I warn you, he's not in the first category." She
was short; much smaller than Jerry, Hall thought, but a bird of a
different color. As they crossed the room, a wisp of the black hair
piled on top of her head dropped over her eye. Hall was amused by the
way she blew the hair to one side twice before deciding to lift it with
her gloved hand.

"This is my Dad's favorite punch," she said at the buffet table. "I
forgot to tell you that the party is to celebrate the third anniversary
of his mission."

Hall ladled out two cups. "Here's to the next three years," he toasted.

"The next three years are the ones that will count," Margaret Skidmore
said. She was smiling at Hall and at some other guests when she said it,
but it was not polite banter.

"The Press Secretary of the Embassy is sore at you," she said. "He's
angry because you tried to get to Gamburdo without him."

"I'm sorry," Hall said. "If you'll introduce me to him, I'll try to make
amends."

"Don't bother," she laughed. "Smitty's a stuffed shirt who needs to be
taken down a peg or two. But I must say that you look a lot different
than I thought you would, Mr. Hall."

"I know. I'm supposed to look like a hero and I have the face of a mugg.
Or a gorilla." He was still looking for Jerry. "You're a surprise, too."

"Am I so different?" There was coquettish amusement in her hazel eyes.
She tilted her fragile doll's nose, forced a haughty cast to her
small-girl's face. "Is an Ambassador's daughter supposed to be a
high-and-mighty lady like this?"

"No. I like you better the other way."

"Thanks. It's my only way."

Hall spotted Jerry on the dance floor with Varela Ansaldo. Jerry looked
very happy, and Ansaldo had lost some of his undertaker's grimness. He
tried in vain to catch her eye.

"Here comes my father."

Hall found himself shaking hands with a portly, middle-aged American who
wore tails as if to the manor born. J. Burton Skidmore had the most
imposing head of wavy gray hair in the entire hemisphere, and he knew
it. His face, still ruddy and youngish, was pink and smelled of fine
cologne.

"_Con mucho gusto_," the Ambassador said, holding Hall's hand and bowing
slightly from the waist.

"I'm glad to meet you, sir," Hall said.

"Father, Mr. Hall is an American. He is Matthew Hall, the writer. You
know. Matthew Hall." The childish, well-bred-daughter smile on Margaret
Skidmore's face could not conceal the acid contempt in her voice. "Mr.
Hall is an American, from New York."

"Oh, yes, oh, yes, indeed. Hall. Of course, Mr. Hall. Been in San
Hermano long, Mr. Hall?"

"No, sir. Less than a week."

"Fine place, Mr. Hall. Fine people. Have you met Smitty yet? Dear, have
you seen Smitty? I think he and Mr.--Mr. Hall could find much in common,
Margaret."

"Tomorrow," Margaret Skidmore said, and the Ambassador helped himself to
a cup of punch.

"_Amigo Mateo!_"

Without turning around, Hall said, in Spanish, "Only one man in all the
world has a scratchy voice like that," and then he turned around and
embraced Felipe Duarte.

"What brings you to San Hermano?" he asked Duarte.

"I am now a diplomat. First Counselor of the Mexican Embassy in San
Hermano and guest professor of literature at the University."

Hall and Duarte had last met in Spain, where Duarte had served as a
Lieutenant-Colonel with the regular Spanish People's Army. "_Coronel_
Pancho Villa" was the name his men gave him, and the thin, gangling
Mexican scholar had fought like a terror to live up to this name. Of
Duarte, the General Staff officers said that he was as bad a strategist
as he was brave a man, which would have made him one of the worst
strategists in military history. But during the Ebro retreat, Duarte had
taught the veteran professional officers a few things about the tactics
of guerrilla warfare which raised his standing as a soldier.

Duarte took Margaret Skidmore's hand and raised it to his lips.
"_Enchante_," he sighed, and she knew at once that he was laughing at
her.

"Senor Ambassador," Duarte said, speaking rapid Spanish, "this is one of
the most magnificent parties I have ever attended. How do you manage to
give such splendid parties with only your chit of a daughter to help you
shove food down the ulcerous throats of these sons of whore mothers,
dear Senor Ambassador? It is stupendous. It is colossal."

The Ambassador smiled, shook Duarte's hand, and bowing slightly, he
murmured, "_Con mucho gusto_." Then, still smiling, he turned and walked
away.

"Don't let this guy fool you," Hall said to the Ambassador's daughter.
"He speaks English as well as we do."

"Better," Duarte said. "Ah learned mah English in Texas, Ah'll have
yo'all know, suh. And Mateo, don't let Margaret's innocent smile fool
you. She knows almost enough Spanish to know what I just told her
distinguished papa."

"Some day I'm going to know enough," Margaret laughed. "And when I do,
you're going to get your face slapped in front of everyone, I'm afraid.
Tell me, Mateo, does _hijos de la gran puta_ mean what I think it does?"

"That sounds like slang to me," Hall said. "I learned my Spanish on the
Linguaphone."

"You're a fast boy, Matt," she said. "Call me Margaret, if you wish."
She straightened Hall's tie with a perfumed glove. "I'll give you a
little time with Felipe, and then I'll steal you back. There are many
people here tonight who want to meet you."

"Hurry back," Duarte said. "He bores me stiff when I have him on my
hands too long."

"You bastard," Hall said. "You're a diplomat now. Don't you ever stop
clowning?"

"Sure. When I kill fascists I am very serious. You know that, Mateo. But
here, if I did not clown, I would die of boredom. For example, when
Skidmore gives a party, the politicos in my Embassy, they all find
reasons for being out of town. I am not a politico. I am a professor of
literature and a killer of fascists, by profession; a diplomat because
someone wanted to do Lombardo a favor and at the same time remove my
face from the domestic scene. _Claro?_ So it is clown or die. And if I
must die, I prefer to die having a second crack at Franco."

"_Claro, amigo._ But must you wear a suit like this one?"

Duarte's evening clothes were his cloak of independence. He wore a cheap
tuxedo he had bought in New York for twenty dollars and a pair of worn
patent-leather shoes that creaked as he walked. On state occasions, he
wore the medals he had earned on the battlefields in Spain. For private
parties, he simply wore an enameled gold Mexican flag on his lapel.
Tonight, he wore only the flag.

All this he explained to Hall in his gay, rasping Spanish. "When the
Falangist Embassy was still on good terms, I wore my Republican medals
all the time. But just before Don Anibal took sick, he insulted the
Caudillo in a speech before the University faculty, and when the Franco
Ambassador called to ask for an apology Tabio told him that the truth
called for no apologies. So the Caudillo got sore and he called his
Ambassador home. The Embassy is still open, but a clerk is in charge,
and there isn't a Spanish diplomat in San Hermano of high enough
standing to be invited to any Embassy."

Jerry joined them, and when Hall presented her to Duarte, the Mexican
kissed her hand and murmured, "_Enchante_."

"Miss Olmstead is Dr. Ansaldo's nurse," Hall said.

"How very interesting," Duarte said. "May I have this dance with the
nurse of Dr. Ansaldo?" and before she had a chance to say that her feet
were killing her, the dexterous Duarte was guiding her through the steps
of an intricate rumba he improvised at that moment.

Hall took another glass of punch. Duarte was his friend, but at the
moment he wanted to break his neck. He wanted Jerry for himself, and he
hated the idea of admitting or showing it. He watched them so intently
that he failed to see Margaret return to the punch bowl.

"Deserted?" she asked. "Our friend Felipe would desert his mother for a
redhead."

"He's quite a guy," Hall laughed.

"Come on," she said. "There's a crowd that's been dying to meet you. The
country's biggest publisher and some of the more important business
men."

"Fernandez?"

"That's right. He publishes _El Imparcial_. Confidentially, his paper is
getting the Cabot Prize this year. Dad arranged it."

Fernandez was standing with a group of three Hermanitos and a blonde
fortyish woman in a tight dress whom Hall recognized instantly as an
American. "I'm Giselle Prescott," she said, her smile revealing flecks
of lipstick on her yellow teeth.

"Take care of the amenities, will you, Gis?" Margaret Skidmore said.
"Dad is flagging me over at the other end." She picked up her skirts,
hurried to her father's rescue.

Giselle Prescott introduced Hall to Jose Fernandez, tall, handsome, in
his early fifties. Fernandez presented him to Segundo Vardieno,
Francisco Davila, and Alfonso Quinones. Davila was a man of one age and
build with Fernandez, the other two were shorter and about ten years
younger. Breathlessly, Giselle Prescott told Hall that Vardieno and
Quinones were among the ten largest landowners in the nation, and Davila
its leading attorney. They all made modest denials.

Quinones asked Giselle to dance, and she accepted gladly. Her myriad
blonde ringlets neatly blocked her partner's forward view.

"Very accomplished writer," Hall said. "In the popular magazine field,
Miss Prescott is supreme."

"She is very able," Davila said. Like Quinones and Vardieno, he wore the
emblem of the Cross and the Sword in his lapel. Fernandez wore only the
ribbon of the French Legion of Honor.

"My niece told me that you had some difficulties at the Press Bureau
today," Vardieno said.

"Your niece?" Then he remembered the golden Cross and Sword dangling
from the thin golden chain. "Oh, yes, the young lady who speaks English
so well."

Vardieno explained to Fernandez that Hall had been unable to arrange for
an interview with Gamburdo. "Don't you think you could help Senor Hall?"
Davila asked, and Fernandez assured the three men that the matter would
be taken care of in the morning. Of course, it might not be possible
until after the Congress convened, but then politics in San Hermano
being what they were, the illustrious colleague from North America would
surely be understanding.

"What's the inside on the political picture?" Hall asked, and the three
men, talking in unison and talking singly gave him one picture.

Their picture was very detailed. "El Tovarich--our Red President, you
know," had lined up the unruly elements behind a dangerous program of
confiscating the estates of their rightful owners and turning them over
to communist gunmen. In addition to this land-piracy scheme, Tabio also
intended to drive the Catholic Church underground and impose heavy
penalty taxes on the parents who sent their children to Catholic
parochial schools. To aid in this program, Tabio was throwing open the
gates of the nation to Red agitators disguised as Jewish and Spanish
refugees.

"So it's as bad as that," Hall said.

"Worse." Fernandez looked around him. "Come closer," he said. "There's
something I must tell you about your own safety."

"My safety?"

"Yes, Senor." Fernandez had his right hand on Hall's shoulder. "Late
this afternoon I received a confidential information that the Communist
Party in San Hermano had privately denounced you to its members."

"Denounced me? But why?"

"Yes, Senor. And it was a most dangerous denunciation, too. A prominent
communist leader telephoned the editor of the official Red paper and
denounced you for being an enemy of Tovarich Tabio and a supporter of
Senor Gamburdo."

Hall smiled. "But that couldn't be so bad," he demurred. "The Reds are
always denouncing someone. Tomorrow the Communist Party paper will
attack me as a fascist, and I guess that will be the end of the whole
thing."

"No, that is not what will happen," Segundo Vardieno insisted. "Tell him
the rest of the information, Don Jose."

Again Jose Fernandez looked around to make sure that he was not being
overheard. "Senor Vardieno is right, my friend. You see," he said, "the
Red who phoned the _Mundo Obrero_ ordered the editor _not_ to print a
word about you--yet. Do you understand what that means?"

Davila, the lawyer, explained. "What Don Jose means," he said, "is that
a secret denunciation generally precedes an assassination. You see,
Senor Hall, if the Reds denounce you in their press, you would be marked
before the world as an enemy of the Tovarich. Then, if anything happened
to you--they are not only blameless, but even after killing you they can
make great propaganda about how the alleged fascists killed you because
you are a noted American patriot who stands for free enterprise."

"Pretty clever," Hall said.

"Jewish cleverness!" Segundo Vardieno was shaking with rage. "Give a Jew
a hundred pesos and in a day he has a thousand and you'll never know how
he did it. But will he apply his cleverness for the good of the country?
No! Only for communism."

"Is Tabio a Jew?" Hall asked.

"Confidentially," Vardieno answered, "El Tovarich is a Sephardic Jew.
But we're not making it public because we are gentlemen."

"And only because we are gentlemen," Fernandez added. "I don't think El
Tovarich will be among us much longer."

"Is he really that sick?"

"Oh, yes," Davila said. "You know what happened to him, don't you? No?
Well, it's almost like the Hand of Divine Retribution." He told Hall
that Tabio had turned over to one of his henchman a vineyard confiscated
from an old family, and that in gratitude the henchman had started to
distill a special brandy for the Tovarich. "And now, the excess alcohol
from too much of the stolen grape has taken its toll."

"Well, what do you know!" Hall said.

"It is the gospel truth," Fernandez said. "I have ways of confirming the
story."

"Some mess, isn't it?" Hall said.

"It is filled with dangers," Vardieno said. "Your calmness is admirable,
Senor Hall, but you had better watch out. The Reds are out to kill you."

Hall accepted a cigar from Jose Fernandez, took his time about lighting
it before answering Vardieno. "Oh, I don't know," he said, casually.
"Perhaps you might know that earlier in this war, I was on board a
British warship which the Nazis sunk with aerial torpedoes. I not only
survived, but I came through without a scratch. Since then I just can't
get too excited about a threat." He looked at the three men to see if
his braggart's act succeeded. Fernandez was obviously the most impressed
of the three.

"_Bueno! Muy caballero!_" Fernandez said. "But you had better be
careful. The Reds in San Hermano have none of the sporting codes of the
Nazi airman."

"Well, now that you mention it," Hall said, "I did catch some bastard
following me the other day."

In a small voice, Davila asked, "Did you get a good look at him?"

"I most certainly did. He was a big, clumsy brute in the white linen
suit of a respectable business man and a panama hat. But I'll bet a good
box of Havana cigars that he was a longshoreman or a miner. I know the
type."

Davila looked at Vardieno and Fernandez. A slow grin crept over the
lawyer's face, and then the other two Hermanitos were grinning too. "So
they started, eh?" he said. "Well, don't let that big one worry you too
much. Should he, Don Jose?"

The publisher grunted. "No. Don't worry about that one." Hall could
sense that Fernandez was picking up his cue from the lawyer.

"As a matter of fact," Davila said, "I'll wager that you can find the
picture of the man in the white suit in Don Jose's confidential file on
the Reds. He keeps it in his office in the _Imparcial_ building."

"I would be honored if you visited me in my office," Jose Fernandez said
to Hall.

"Perhaps I can make it this week," Hall said.

"Sst," Davila warned. "Miss Prescott is coming back. Let's change the
subject."

"Of course," Vardieno said. "There is no sense in involving her in
this."

"This is quite a turnout," Hall was saying when Giselle Prescott and
Quinones rejoined the group. "I think that every nation is represented
by its Ambassador here."

"Every nation but Spain," Quinones said. "El Tovarich took care of that
by insulting the Ambassador and the Chief of the Spanish State."

"It's true," Vardieno said. "Spain is a good customer for our nation,
but El Tovarich is so angry at Generalissimo Franco for destroying
communism in the Motherland that he is deliberately trying to destroy
this trade in order to get even with Franco."

"He not only insulted Spain," Quinones said. "In his speech to the
University, El Tovarich said that only the so-called fascists in San
Hermano supported Franco."

"Sounds like our pinkos back home," Giselle Prescott said to Hall.

Fernandez exploded. "I am a good Catholic," he snapped. "I am pious.
During the Civil War I supported Franco. I was proud to support him. I
not only supported Franco, but I was delighted to hail Hitler and
Mussolini as noble allies in the struggle against Jewish Bolshevism. But
am I a fascist? I defy any man to call me a fascist or a Falangist to my
face!"

Davila turned to both Hall and Giselle Prescott. "Now don't jump to any
false conclusions about Don Jose," he smiled. "After all, you Americans
are not Reds because you welcome the godless Russian armies of Stalin as
your allies in this present war, are you?"

"Bull's-eye!" Giselle Prescott laughed. "I'm delighted to hear you both
talk like this. Back home only the Reds and the pinkos were for the
so-called Spanish Loyalists during the war." She opened her tiny purse
and found a leather address book. "Gimme a pencil or a pen, will you,
Hall?"

"Sure. What for?"

"I want to put down what Senor Fernandez and Senor Davila just said
before I forget. I'm doing a piece for a mag and these quotes would just
fit in. May I quote you, gentlemen?"

"I have nothing to conceal," Fernandez said proudly.

Davila was very gracious. "Of course you may use these remarks. But
please don't use Don Jose's name in your article. It might be
misunderstood. You see, Don Jose has many enemies in the Jewish and
radical press in your country."

"On my honor as a Girl Scout," she said, "I'll use the quotes but not
the names."

"You've got quite a story there," Hall said. He was looking into the mob
on the dance floor for a sign of Jerry. Her red hair was not to be
found, but Margaret Skidmore, dancing with a bemedaled diplomat, caught
his eye and gestured that she would join him at the end of that dance.
She took him away from the group in a few minutes and led him toward the
American bar she had rigged up for the party.

"They sure were talking at you for a while," she said. "I could see them
giving it to you with both barrels."

"That they were. What is the lowdown, anyway? Are those boys completely
right about Tabio?"

Margaret was amused. "Oh, they're a gang of hotheads, I warn you. But
nice. I suspect that our friend Giselle is going to find Don Jose
particularly nice."

"Meow!"

"I'm not a cat. I just know Giselle."

"Let's talk about San Hermano politics. I think you know plenty in that
little head of yours."

"Oh, I do. But tonight's a party. I've got to be Daddy's good little
Hostess."

"Like it?"

"Bores me silly," Margaret said.

"Perhaps we can talk some other time?"

"Tomorrow would be swell. I have to go to my place in Juarez early in
the morning. Why don't you come out for lunch? It's a two-hour ride by
train from San Hermano. I think you can make a train at eleven."

"Tomorrow?" Hall hesitated.

"I wish you'd make it," the girl said with a sudden intensity.

"It's a date."

"I'll meet you at the station."

They joined her father and one of the Embassy secretaries at the bar.
Hall had a Cuba Libre, and was introduced to a South American painter.
He listened to the painter talk to the Ambassador about the beauties of
Arizona, watched J. Burton Skidmore gravely shake hands with the painter
and mutter, "_Con mucho gusto_." Then the painter asked Margaret to
dance and, when she left, Hall wandered off to look for Jerry.

He found her at the punch bowl with Ansaldo. "May I ask Miss Olmstead
for this dance?" he asked the doctor.

"Just this one dance," Jerry said, "I'll be right back."

She put her cheek against his, softly hummed the tune the band was
playing.

"It's nice to have you in my arms," he said.

"It's nice to be in your arms."

He held her closer. They danced well together. So well that when Jerry
said it would be better if they did not dance again that night, Hall
made up his mind to leave at once. "I can't hang around and watch you
dancing with Ansaldo all night," he said.

"Why, Massa Hall," she said, "Ah swain Ah do believe you-all are
jealous!"

"Did Duarte give you English lessons in one rumba, too?"

"You're a goof," she laughed.

He took her back to Ansaldo, paid his respects to the Ambassador, and
looked for Duarte. The Mexican was talking to the tall young wife of the
Vichy Ambassador.

"Felipe," Hall tugged at Duarte's sleeve, "I am afraid that I must go
now."

"I'll go with you, if you're alone. Madame, _enchante_ ..." He winked at
Hall as he kissed Madame la Comtesse's hand. "Now we must pay our
respects to our host."

"I already have."

"Come with me while I do. I never miss it. He has kept me from
squandering my money. I bet with myself on him, and I always lose. So
Felipe pays Duarte, and Duarte supports Felipe."

"What the hell are you babbling about now?"

"Your Ambassador. He is an original, Mateo. For three years he draws me
to his parties as a lodestone draws baser metals. In three years, he has
learned exactly three words of Spanish: _'Con mucho gusto_.' Of course
he still says them with a gringo accent, but anyone can recognize what
he means.

"For three years I am waiting for him to learn a new word, any word.
_Si. No. Pan. Mantequilla._ Right now, I'd settle for just one new
word.

"In the beginning, when I was green in the business of diplomacy, I was
younger and more optimistic. Then I would not have settled for a word. I
wanted a whole new phrase. Nothing complicated, you understand. Any
simple phrase would have satisfied me. _Tiene usted un fosforo?_ Or
even--_Donde esta la sala de caballeros?_ But no. Tenn

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