The Eldorado Network (21 page)

You see, we have tried politics and we have tried music, and there is no doubt about it: music kills far fewer people. The figures are most impressive. Last year, for instance, in the whole of Spain only one trombonist herniated himself, while rehearsing The Ride of the Valkyries. Compare that with our losses during the Civil War! And this year's record will be even better, now that the government has banned the dangerous parts of Wagner. So you see what a marvellously humanitarian country Spain has become.'

'Bullshit.'

'Yes, you are right, but we are all shovelling our bullshit in time to the music, which you must admit is a great step forward.'

'I think all this Red Cross work has scrambled your brains,' she said. 'Have you had a hard day?'

'Oh . . . average.' Luis looked strong and dependable. 'Tracing refugees is a long, slow job. One learns patience.'

'I'm sure. Tell me who you've found lately.'

Luis looked into her alert, grey eyes and briefly considered refusing on the grounds that it was all confidential information. She widened her eyes a fraction. 'Mainly Poles and Czechs,' he said, flicking a bit of fluff from his sleeve. 'They got lost when the Germans overran Europe. For instance, I traced a Polish orchestra to a French prison in Bordeaux; they had been locked up for ten months because they could not pay their hotel bills. Nobody knew they were there.' Luis shrugged. It was easy once you got started.

'That's pretty good going,'Julie said. 'I mean, a whole orchestra.'

'They're in Italy now,' Luis said. 'We fixed them up with an opera house.' He drew a little whirlwind on the tablecloth with the blunt end of his fork. 'The Germans are really very helpful,' he said.

'Saved any Jews lately?'

Luis accepted the challenge. 'A few. The Polish orchestra had a Jewish conductor and two Jewish violinists.' For several minutes Luis expanded on the detective-work of the International Red Cross, re-uniting Greek parents with their lost children in Rome, tracking down French prisoners-of-war in Bavaria, rescuing an amnesiac Czech businessman from a mental hospital in Luxembourg. It was good, solid, detailed, humanitarian stuff, and Julie listened intently. 'The Russians are the most difficult,' he told her, now well into his stride, 'and the Cossacks are the most difficult of the Russians. Somewhere in Lithuania an entire brigade--'

'Hokay, hokay!' It was the waiter with their food. 'Gooda morningk, I yam 'appy. 'ow moch is zatin dolleurs, sank you, necks time I peench your hass, hokay?' As he spoke he unloaded the plates from his arm.

'That's a steak? Julie exclaimed.

'Where's the fish?' Luis asked. 'Donde esta mi bacalao?

The waiter ignored her, and answered him with scorn. Whether it was scorn for the fish or the chef or Luis, or for all three, she never knew. Meanwhile she had time to look at her bistec. It was thin, and it curled like bacon; walnut-brown in colour; lacking any fat; and grained like weathered fencing. She tried to cut a piece off the corner. The knife skidded. 'What the hell is this?' she demanded, pronging it with a bouncing fork', 'Franco's conscience?'

'No politics? Luis hissed angrily. The waiter turned his head slowly and sneered at her down his long and twisted nose. Deliberately, he slid one hand into his pocket and waved his other hand above the steak. 'Esta muy bueno,' he said. 'Esta excelente! Esta magnifico!'

'Esta crap, 'Julie said, and slapped the meat into his open palm.

He took a short pace backwards and stared at her, his lips working, his brows twitching. Then he reared up on his toes and stretched his arms full length above his head. His fingers curled around the rejected bistec, squeezing and crushing until a little stream of bloody gravy spattered the floor. 'Caramba!' he shouted.

'They really do say that, huh?'Julie said. People all over the restaurant were standing to get a better view. Luis began to feel exposed and vulnerable.

'Let's not have a big fight, okay?' he suggested The head waiter bustled his meaty hips up to their table, rapped out a curt question, and made the mistake of gesturing as he did so. The waiter, now pale with fury, slapped the damaged bistec into the widespread hand. The head waiter looked at the tattered meat and without hesitation slapped the waiter's face with it, hard, twice, left and right. Oles and handclaps broke out all around. Upstairs, people were leaning over the balcony and whistling through their fingers. The waiter lurched against a chair, toppled it, grabbed, missed, and fell over, landing on his bony backside with a crash that forced up long, thin spurts of dust between the floorboards. The head waiter ripped the bistec in half like a dishonoured cheque. Appreciative cheering broke out. 'I think we should perhaps go,' Luis said. The head waiter stooped and murmured in his ear. 'He think we should perhaps go,' Luis said. Julie picked up her red rose. 'Maybe we'd better not stay," she said. The waiter was holding his head in his hands and weeping. She succeeded in treading on him twice as she left the table.

The crowd went back to its tables and its interrupted meals, pleased with the brief entertainment. As Luis and Julie walked across the restaurant, the trumpeter played them out with Laurel and Hardy's silly signature-tune: de-dum, de-dum: de-dum, de-dum . . . He broke off when he saw a waiter signalling and pointing to the door. Four German officers had arrived, high-ranking, tall-walking men in well-cut uniforms and good tempers. Two wore monocles. At once the trumpeter marshalled the rest of the band and they launched into the opening bars of Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles. They played it straight. No jokes, no mockery. Plenty of enthusiasm, but no exaggeration.

Julie stopped, and watched the arrivals basking in the band's attention.

'What happened to tradition, all of a sudden?' she asked.

'The same as happened to the dinosaur,'  Luis said.

'Changing circumstances killed it.' He didn't particularly want to meet the Germans. He glanced around for another exit, and saw Julie give the trumpeter a look of loathing. The man was leaning back with his eyes shut and his cheeks as hard as apples. His lungs were full and he was reaching for the climatic high note when she snatched up a bottle of wine and rammed it neck-first into the bell of the trumpet. Like the waiter, the trumpeter lost his balance and fell, wine spraying in a great red curve. Luis glimpsed the startled faces of the officers and saw the head waiter turn from them with a smile that became suddenly savage. The restaurant was silent. 'You're all full of shit!'Julie shouted. 'They serve it, you eat it, he plays it, and those bastards--' She pointed at the Germans, '-- they drop it from their airplanes!'

Luis seized her and hustled her away from the onrushing head waiter, back towards the kitchens. They banged through the kitchen doors a few yards ahead of him, but Julie had a message for the chef. 'You call that a steak?' she shouted at him. 'You ought to be ashamed!' The whole kitchen staff paused, expressionless, at the sight of this angry, handsome, incomprehensible woman. Then the doors crashed again and their heads swivelled to the pounding, glaring head waiter. Luis shoved Julie hard towards the back. There was food all around; he grabbed at random and lobbed stuff at the head waiter: half a chicken, a melon, a cucumber, a handful of kidneys; and while the man was catching and dropping and ducking, Luis fled into the back alley. The cooks let him go: they did not fight waiters' battles. 'Run, run!' he bawled at Julie. They sprinted along the alley, Luis knocking over garbage bins and piles of boxes, to block any pursuit. The head waiter got one shot at them with the melon, but the light was bad, and the last they heard was his strident cursing above the gloomy thunder of the garbage cans. Then they were around the corner and lost in the crowds.

'I guess I'm sorry,' she said.

They were sitting beside a fountain and eating roast chicken, tomatoes and bread, all bought from a grocery store. There was also a flask of wine. The fountain was sending up a changing pattern of spouts and plumes, like a juggler working on a new act. Beyond it the night was a rich, inky black, as definite as a dome. Luis felt at ease and at home: nothing was likely to go wrong here. He pulled some more meat off the chicken and saw the wishbone. 'I'm not sorry,' he said. The wishbone came away and he snapped it into three parts. She pointed at the bits and looked questioning. 'I don't believe in luck,' he said. 'And I don't believe you're really sorry either.'

'No, I'm not. But I've got no right to involve you in my bad temper, have I? I didn't realise quite how much I hate Nazis until I saw those four heelclickers come in.'

'America's neutral.'

'That's Washington, I'm me. Anyway, I was feeling mad long before they turned up. The trouble with me, Luis, is I'm not too crazy about Europe. To tell the truth, the whole damn place annoys me. I'm sick of everything being so goddam foreign all the time. I'm sick of always having to change what I want, because you can't get that in Europe, lady. Or madame or senora or frau or what the hell. The food's foreign, the language is foreign, the money's foreign, I spend my whole life adapting and translating and converting, and it's got to stop, because I, Juliet Francis Conroy, am not bloody foreign!'

'You are to us,' Luis said.

'I know. I'm being childish. But if I don't stamp and shout and insist on what I want every now and then, I'm afraid I'll disappear completely.'

They ate for a while and watched the fountain polishing its act.

'The food was not important,' Luis said. 'That restaurant has got much worse, I shall never go back. But as long as I work for the International Red Cross, I cannot afford to anger the Germans.'

She looked at him very thoughtfully, and nodded. 'You can't, can you?' she said. 'So maybe we'd better not see each other any more.'

Luis ate the last tomato.

Luis had the feeling that they both knew they were talking nonsense, but he decided it would be safer not to say so.

They washed their hands in the fountain and he walked her back to the hotel. She kissed him goodnight. On the cheek. Thoughtfully.

They worked Luis hard, in the German Embassy.

Each morning Otto picked him up at a different rendezvous and drove him into the embassy garage. For the next seven or eight hours a series of tutors crammed him with knowledge or coached him in skills. He spent at least two hours a day learning Morse from Franz Werth. There were many sessions with Dr Hartmann, a small, bespectacled expert in radio, who was shocked and dismayed to find that Luis was completely ignorant of elementary physics. 'But you must at least comprehend the principles of electricity,' he said urgently. 'It is not possible to grow up in the twentieth century and remain unaware of the basic principles of electricity.' He polished his glasses and squinted fuzzily while Luis dredged up everything he knew about electricity. 'You're not supposed to stick your finger in the light socket,' he told the German. 'That's fairly basic, isn't it?' Hartmann put his glasses on and searched Luis's face for signs of humour. There were none. 'Really, I should have been warned of this,' he said. 'My field is research. High-frequency modulation. I find it difficult to know where to start, . . Presumably you know the difference between positive and negative?' Luis nodded. 'Good,' Hartmann said, thought himself back into a condition of scientific simple-mindedness in which he and Luis could discuss electricity as equals. He succeeded. Within a week Luis had a good grasp of the subject. He could also assemble the Abwehr's standard radio transmitter and receiver, operate it, tune it, change frequencies, make small repairs, even take it to bits with his eyes shut. Hartmann was good.

Other men taught other skills. In the embassy gymnasium, the assistant air attache showed Luis the correct way to fall when landing by parachute. In the embassy swimming pool, a breezy, bearded instructor shouted advice on how to paddle a rubber dinghy, while the boat rocked and lurched to the surging waves made by embassy staff leaping into the water all around him. Luis never mastered the rubber dinghy. 'Never mind,' said the instructor. 'There's a lot of England. Keep thrashing away and you're almost bound to hit some of it sooner or later.'

Otto instructed him in housebreaking, and a series of men in white overalls tried to teach him the use of firearms. He showed promise as a locksmith, but not as a marksman: he could never fire a gun without flinching.

After a few days, Colonel Christian mentioned this to him. 'It can't be the noise, can it?' he said. 'You even flinch when the silencer is on.'

'I know. The trouble is I don't feel that I am in control of the gun. Whenever I fire it, I think that really the gun did that damage, not me. I just held it.'

'But you pull the trigger. You make the decision.'

Luis propped his head on his hand, twisting his face out of shape. 'It's too much power for one man. I have no right to be able to destroy so easily, just by pointing. If I feel strongly about killing someone I should go and do it myself. Actually do it with my own hands.'

Christian stood in front of the fireplace, dead now that summer was near, and rattled the change in his trouser pocket. 'What if the other fellow has a gun?' he asked.

Luis sighed and looked away. 'You're right, of course. But . . . I'm afraid that's just not my kind of war. Too remote. Meaningless, really. I mean, if you never actually meet the man you're trying to kill, you might just as well fight one another by correspondence. It's so petty to stand far away and send a bloody little bullet to do your dirty work for you. What does it prove? The man you kill doesn't even know it was your bullet, does he? Meaningless.'

Christian walked past and patted him on the shoulder. (Now that their financial arrangements were sorted out, the colonel seemed to have forgotten all his contempt. He was friendly, even fatherly. Luis wondered whether this attitude was genuine or calculated; either way, he decided, it was not to be relied on.) 'You're a romantic, Cabrillo,' he said, 'you think everyone is entitled to some sort of fair chance, don't you? That wouldn't appeal to Berlin. The whole point of having a war is to give the other side no kind of chance at all.'