Conspiracy (29 page)

“Well, Senõr Palermo,” the gypsy named Rojas said, “it is time for us to be going. How do you wish to travel?”

Keith thought of running then, but his mind quickly rejected the idea. The road was dark and deserted. Behind him was a high unscalable wall that looked to Keith to be a fortress of some kind and was in fact part of the
Generalife
, the ancient walled summer retreat of the Moorish princes. On the other side of the road was the hill Rojas had called the Sacromonte. 

The pathway Rojas had spoken of was obscured by darkness. Keith felt weakened and rubber-legged from the drug he had been given. Here and now he would stand little chance against three armed men who knew the area. Later perhaps he would feel better and be able to make a move. They had been told to treat him well.

“I’ll walk,” he said.

“You are wise to cooperate.” Rojas moved two folded cotton scarves from his pocket. “I regret the necessity for these, but we shall be passing near enough to some of the caves for a shout to be heard over the noise of the dancing.”

They walked slowly, single file, Keith second in the procession. He was to keep his hands in his pockets, Rojas had ordered, and Keith kept them there, even though it made for difficult balance as he picked his way over the rocks in the dark. The narrow pathway they followed seemed to bypass most of the caves, leading directly to the top of the hill. 

Keith saw a man and woman emerge from one of the caves, momentarily silhouetted in the light from the entrance. With them was a smaller figure, a boy who led them down the trails toward the one on which Keith walked. Rojas saw too, and held up a hand. The boy guide stopped. He waited with the couple until Rojas and the others had passed the intersection of the pathways before continuing. 

The incident told Keith two things: that Rojas did not want others coming close enough to recognize him, and that Rojas had power to make others on the hillside obey. The latter realization disturbed Keith, for it cast doubt on the story that the men who held him captive were strangers to Spain. Foreigners would not command allegiance with an upraised palm. And natives to the area would not want Keith returning to identify them.

Another trail joined their pathway a short distance ahead. Along that trail, several of the caves were lit. Beyond them, the mountain was dark. If Keith was going to alert anyone to his presence, he would have to act quickly. 

But what could he do? There were two men watching him from behind. If he tried to remove the gag from his mouth, they would stop him before he could raise his arms. The couple he had seen reminded him of the celebration he was to have had with Sharon tonight. He felt worse to think that even now she was probably waiting for a phone call, some word of explanation. And here he was with no way to reach her.

Then he had an idea. At the next large rock he came to on the trail, he gave a fairly convincing performance of stubbing his toe, losing his balance, and falling to his hands and knees. Instantly the two behind him were at his sides, hands under his arms, lifting him up again. He shrugged them away and made a show of dusting off the knees of his trousers, shaking his head as if disgusted with his own clumsiness. Then he put his hands back into his jacket pockets and nodded that he was ready to continue.

Rojas had been watching the other trail. No one was in sight for the American to have signaled; therefore it appeared that the fall had been genuine. “Be more careful, my friend,” he said. “Or for the remainder of the distance we shall have to drag our companion who has drunk too much wine.”

A few minutes later they reached their destination, the second cave of Agustin Vavra. The entrance, crumbling white limestone, was framed in unpainted timber. The interior, a space perhaps double the size of Keith’s hotel bathroom, was furnished with a single folding chair and a mattress that lay directly upon the dirt floor. “You may take the kerchief from your mouth,” Rojas said. “At this distance, no one would hear you if you cried out once. And believe me, Senõr Palermo, you would not be able to cry out a second time.”

Keith looked around. “This is what you call treating me well?”

“You will have food, exercise, and rest,” Rojas replied. “I can assure you that others have been treated much less favorably.” He motioned to the taller of the other gypsies, pointing at something farther back in the cave. The man moved quickly. Soon he was with them again, carrying two woven baskets, which he opened to reveal loaves of bread, cheese, and bottles of dark red wine. 

Rojas indicated that Keith was to sit on the mattress, the others on either side. Rojas himself took the folding chair.

Before the four men had finished eating, partway down the Sacromonte one of the cave entrances gleamed briefly as Tobin Yamada and his wife, touring Spain from Tokyo, made their exit. The Yamadas had been warned against the light-fingered gypsies of the caves, and refused the repeated offers of two small boys to guide them along the pathway back to the road. Consequently they were paying close attention to where they walked. As they reached the place where Keith had fallen, Mrs. Yamada stopped and bent down. “Look, dear,” she said to her husband in Japanese, and handed him a letter. The envelope was folded in half and smudged with dust where Keith had concealed it under his shoe, but the two addresses, childish scrawl and printed label, were plain. “New York,” said Mr. Yamada as he examined the envelope. “And then forwarded on to Madrid. I wonder how it came to be here in Granada?”

13

About eight o’clock Sunday morning, Wally Murray of the AP wire service showed up for his breakfast interview with Keith Palermo. He waited.

Shortly after ten o’clock, Gabe Alexander, the young press secretary of the U.S. soccer team, admitted to Wally that he hadn’t the faintest idea where Keith Palermo had been since the previous afternoon. Wally asked whether the Madrid police had been notified. When told they hadn’t, he made the call himself. Then he filed his story.

The AP sports editor on duty in New York was finishing up her night duty. She knew the ways of soccer stars on the road, especially after a victory, and wired back for Wally to run a followup later in the afternoon. She saw no point in embarrassing yesterday’s hero by crying wolf before the poor guy had time to sleep it off. Wally reacted to this delay by phoning UBC, which was known to be one of Keith’s favorite haunts because of a certain lady producer.

Sharon was working on the camera setups for Calderon Stadium. She had left instructions with Molly’s relief operator on the switchboard that any calls concerning Keith Palermo were to be directed to her personally. Her talk with Wally lasted about five minutes. He had nothing to tell her about Keith that she did not already know; in fact, she and Gabe Alexander had already exchanged several phone calls earlier, both hoping to locate Keith. 

However, at the close of the conversation Wally Murray said, “I just don’t get it. A guy carries the team higher than they’d ever dreamed, and when he disappears, nobody seems to want to do anything.”

Sharon thought about what Wally had said for perhaps ten seconds after she had hung up. In those few moments, it seemed to her that the work she had kept herself occupied with during the night and morning had been useless papers, fleeting electronic images, meaningless numbers. Without Keith, what would the future hold but more of the same? She had reacted to his absence last night in her usual way, immersing herself in work, but what if that defense mechanism of hers was actually hurting Keith? 

She realized that if she believed in Keith, she had to believe that something or someone had kept him away against his will; there was no other way to explain the fact that he hadn’t called her.

And here she was, fiddling with a diagram of camera placements.

“Get me Wayne Taggart,” she told the switchboard operator.

When he came to the line, Sharon told him the news. This afternoon he was going to get his chance. When the UBC cameras came on for the Russia-Uruguay game, Wayne Taggart would be both producer and director.

Then Sharon left her office and took a cab to the Madrid police station.

Also in Madrid that morning, Raul drove to his apartment and told his wife, Maria, that he had worked another overtime shift doing plainclothes work. He showered, changed, and reported to his post at Bernabeau Stadium exactly at noon. He was tired, but as the time drew near for the
Patrón’s
man to arrive, his senses sharpened.

The guard on duty with him, a younger man, was following the Soviet-Uruguay game on his pocket transistor. The other guard took a special interest in the contest because the outcome would decide who played Spain in the semifinals next Wednesday. He cheered, not so much for one team or the other, but for injuries, hoping for a battle-weary opponent that would be easy meat for his countrymen. Raul thought him a typical Spanish pig who sought victory without honor.

When he saw Eugene Groves approaching his gate, Raul ticked off the man’s description against the one the woman had given him. Sandy hair, 1.8 meters in height, Nordic features. A UBC cameraman’s uniform. 

Raul took a step forward so as to forestall a greeting by his co-worker that might impede the agreed-on verbal check. He felt confident; the other guard was immersed in the announcer’s vivid description of a bone-crushing Soviet tackle that had fractured a Uruguay defenseman’s wrist.

“Why aren’t you across town with the others?” Raul asked Groves.

“I just go where they tell me,” Groves replied in Spanish. He held a small portable camera unit, and carried a huge metal-encased container on a backpack frame.

“What’s in the backpack?” Raul held out a hand for Groves’s papers.

“My battery. Juice for the camera. Without it I couldn’t take any pictures of the empty stadium.”

“How long do you plan to remain?”

“Twenty minutes—half hour, tops.”

Raul shrugged and prodded his co-worker. “You want to check the Americano’s papers?”

The guard lowered his transistor set from his ear and nodded. He gave the documents a solemn inspection. “Okay, hombre,” he said after a few moments’ silence, just enough to show that he was not someone to take his work lightly. “You may pass.”

“I’m going to keep an eye on that fellow,” said Raul, as Groves walked on. “I want to see what kind of pictures anyone would want to take of an empty stadium.”

“Maybe you’ll learn something,” said the other guard. He put his radio to his ear again.

Raul and Groves walked through the concrete tunnel into the vast oval-shaped bowl. Raul surveyed the stands with distaste. They were still littered with the debris of yesterday’s game: yellowing paper cups—shot-glass size for brandy, big ones for beer—wrappers that had once held raisins, sunflower seeds, plantain chips; cigar butts and metal tubes; cigarette stubs. All sodden with overnight dew and fragrant with the heat of the day. 

“Spanish economy,” Raul said, his words heavy with irony. “They work the grounds crew across town today for the Soviet game. This garbage will sit here till the end of the week.”

Groves was not much interested in Spanish groundskeepers. He pointed across the field to an enclosed area on the second deck. The gold-painted framework around the enclosure glittered in the afternoon sun. A white-and-gold awning covered the central portion; above the golden fringe at the front of the awning was a golden insignia. 

“That’s the place?” Groves asked.

“The royal box,” Raul said with some satisfaction. He was thinking of the afternoon a week from today, when King Juan Carlos would die in that box along with one hundred twenty thousand others.

They walked there together. When Raul was certain no one was watching, he showed Groves the space beneath the seating platform where a man could hide unnoticed until darkness fell.

Fifteen minutes later he walked back to his post. “I let him out the west end,” he said. “The stupid Americano wanted pictures of the stadium litter. For what reason I cannot imagine.”

Raul’s partner nodded knowingly. “It’s four-two for the Soviets,” he said. “Volnikov just hurt his ankle.”

Shortly after the game ended—a seven-two victory for Russia— Wally Murray called in his followup story on Keith Palermo. This time the editor on duty sent it out. All over the English-speaking world, AP tickers clattered onto their rolls of yellow paper: “MADRID POLICE OFFER NO CLUE TO MISSING U.S. SOCCER STAR.”

14

Sharon was not in the UBC office to read the news. She was downtown in Madrid, haranguing an officer of the Spanish Guardia Civil.

By Monday morning the Madrid police, the Spanish government’s Ministry of Culture, and the Guardia Civil had each received telephone calls from several different organizations concerning the missing Keith Palermo. None, of course, had any connection with Raul and the gypsies of the Granada Sacromonte. They had simply heard of Palermo’s absence on the radio and, wishing to obtain publicity and status for their organizations and goals, called Spanish officials and news media to claim responsibility. 

The Young Workers League offered to release Palermo in exchange for thirty-five political prisoners. The Libra-Toros, a left-wing fringe group based in the port city of Vigo, offered freedom for the American if the government would nationalize the fishing industry. One call came from Las Palmas in the Canaries, maintaining that Palermo would remain hostage until the Islands were given independence from Spain.

As the most visible American presence in Madrid, UBC had received its share of calls from these publicity seekers. At her switchboard, Molly had at first diverted these calls to Sharon’s phone. Later on in the morning, however, she realized that Sharon had not yet come in for work. Someone called from the office of the Ministry of Culture, the governmental agency of Spain in charge of
futbol
matters and the World Cup. The caller wished to complain that a woman claiming to be an employee of UBC had been harassing responsible officials. This woman called herself Sharon Foster and contended that unless His Majesty’s government did more to find the missing Palermo, she would broadcast a report even more critical than the one UBC had aired Sunday night.