The Eldorado Network (23 page)

'Oh yes?' The man turned a page. 'Unacceptable, is it? So what are you going to do about it?'

'I've got my own private war,' Luis said. 'I'm against everybody. That's the only victory worth winning.'

'I'll believe that when I read it on the front page.' Now the man was uncomfortable. Luis was one of those normal-looking lunatics you meet in every big city. Bad for business. Luis sensed the discomfort and turned away. A taxi was _ stopping, someone got out. For no reason he could name, Luis took the taxi and rode home to his apartment. When they arrived he sat for a moment and looked up at the dark, silent building. 'Oh, this is no damned good to me,' he said miserably.

'Me neither,' the driver said. 'Can't afford the rent.'

'Hotel Bristol,' Luis said.

'You're sure, now.'

'I'm sure. I think.'

She was in the hotel bar, talking to an American couple, tourists maybe, middle-fifties. Luis stood by the door and watched, monitoring his feelings. Already the chest-tightening had begun; already his eyes seemed more wide-open, his senses more acute. What in God's name caused this? She moved, turning slightly and making a lazy gesture, and the action had such a naturally athletic grace that he instinctively held himself more upright, either in imitation or in envy. She was the leopard amongst the gazelle, all right. Then she turned again and saw him and immediately came over.

His hands were trembling so much that he put them in his pockets. 'Hullo,' he said.

'Hullo.'

He could not look directly at her; his head ducked and dodged and took little glances. 'If it is not too late . . . ' he began.

'I thought you'd been run over by a tank.'

'A tank?'

'Yes. I thought probably the Germans hunted you down with a panzer brigade because of that thing at Dos Amigos.'

'Oh . . . No. I'm fine.'

'You don't look fine. You look lousy.'

Luis got all his strength together and smiled. 'You don't look lousy,' he said. 'You look fine.'

She took his face in her hands and lightly fingered back his eyelids. 'Been sleeping badly?' She asked.

The shock of her unexpected touch made him start, and he saw that she noticed this. 'Oh . . . not well, not badly,' he said. 'Many dreams, you know.'

'Let's go over there.' She nodded to an empty table, remote from the American couple. They went and sat down and he told the waiter to bring them two brandies.

'Luis, my friend, you're not going to like this,' she said, 'but please remember you started it, back there in the embassy with your old-fashioned Castilian courtesy-- you remember?-- so now I'm afraid you're stuck with the appalling consequences.'

'What consequences?' Luis was worried; this was beginning to sound official, governmental.

'I want to make something clear, first.' She rested her arms on the table and edged her forefingers together until they touched. 'When I came to Spain I wanted everything to be simple. I like things to be simple. I'm not a complicated person but the last couple of years have been very complicated for me, what with the war and . . . everything. So. It's best for people if they can have maximum freedom, isn't it? Don't you agree?'

By now Luis was bewildered. What the hell was he being asked to agree to? He gave an unenthusiastic half-smile, half-shrug. The brandies came. He took a good swig.

'Okay.' She smoothed her forehead but almost at once it furrowed again. 'Okay: simplicity, freedom, no entanglements. I'm here in Madrid trying to straighten out my problems. Untie all the knots and chuck out all the junk and start being my own boss again. That's what I'd really like: total independence.'

'Certainly. Your people fought a war about independence.'

'Right. It's worth having, it's very satisfying, very . . . enjoyable. Agreed?'

Luis stared, threw his hands in the air, breathed deeply. 'What has happened?' he demanded. 'Is Spain at war? Have you been arrested? Do you need a lawyer? What the hell is going on?'

'I just want to get the fundamentals straight, Luis, that's all! I just want you to understand, before we both start having a thoroughly miserable time, that it was no part of my plan when I came to Madrid to fall in love with a man like you. No part.'

Luis was first astounded, then when he could put words together he was cautious. 'You say . . . forgive me if I misunderstood . . . you said "a man like me" . . .'

'Oh, Luis, for Pete's sake! I've fallen in love with you, okay? I fell in love with you in that goddam taxi which wasn't being chased by the Gestapo in the bus, and ever since then I think about you all the day and half the night. Is that clear? It's a dumb thing to do and my life would be a million times easier if I hadn't done it but what the hell can I say? It's happened and we're stuck with it.'

'Good. That's very good, that's excellent, because I too have fallen in love with you.' Luis nodded reassuringly.

'Yeah, well, you're a nice guy and all that, Luis, and I don't want to hurt your feelings, but that state of affairs was pretty damn evident a long time ago.'

'Oh.' Luis found reason to blow his nose. 'You knew that I

'Short of going around with coastguard rockets shooting out of your ears you couldn't have made it much clearer.'

'Ah.' More handkerchief work. 'I see.'

'You're not much good at hiding things, Luis.'

'No? Well . . . obviously not.'

'So we're in love with each other, you and me, both of us. But I've been in love before, and I guess so have you. It's nice while it lasts but it never lasts and then it's a real bitch of a bastard.'

Luis saw with a shock that tears were starting in her eyes. He felt besieged, helpless. He signalled the waiter for more drinks. 'Then I suggest,' he said as lightly as he could, 'that we enjoy it while we can.'

'Okay.'

She was silent until the waiter had come and gone. She picked up her glass. 'Oh well,' she said. 'If it had to happen, it couldn't have happened to two dumber people.'

'Agreed,' Luis said, and they drank to that. They sat back and looked at each other with a fresh, undisguised interest.

'As mature, intelligent, educated adults,' she announced, 'I think we should always treat each other decently, don't you?'

Luis nodded.

'Good,' she said. 'And if I ever find out that you're not as nice as I think you are, I'll kill you. Now I'm starving. Let's go eat.'

That happened three days after the scuffle at Dos Amigos and four days after Luis had begun his training at the embassy. The sudden full flowering of friendship with Julie Conroy perked him up enormously just as the work was beginning to grind him down. Now he slept better, felt fresher, had a greater appetite for Franz Werth's eternal Morse lessons, Richard Fischer's painstaking tuition in secret writing (extended to include codes), Otto Krafft's classes on housebreaking (with special attention to wiretapping and the use of hidden cameras) and much more. Luis had a quick brain; he was brilliant at nothing but he adjusted easily to differing demands and he soaked up knowledge with the thirst of a true convert.

Soon he was spending less time on the groundwork of espionage and more on tactical briefings. These interested him because they revealed a sideways glimpse at the way the war was going -- or at least at the way the German High Command thought it was going. A string of military attaches told him what they knew (and also what they would like him to find out) about the British convoy system, about new British aircraft designs, about the pattern of production in British dockyards, about the effect of prolonged bombing on British morale; but not, Luis noticed, much about the British army. The Germans seemed to have decided to defeat the British by sending fleets of bombers to destroy their cities and packs of U-boats to sink their ships while the German army enjoyed a bit of a rest after its whirlwind tour of Europe.

'Commando units,' said one of his briefing officers, a tall, balding major of marines. 'We're always interested in anything you can find out about them. But don't bother us with routine stuff about the British army. So much of that army is already in our prison camps that we know virtually everything we need.'

'What about North Africa?' Luis asked.

The officer smiled. 'Regard it as an extension of the naval campaign. Its main advantage is that it obliges the British to send even more ships into the Atlantic, there to be sunk with a loud splash.'

'Oh.' Luis ran his thumbnail along his teeth. 'I never thought of that.'

' Anything significant on North Africa you might happen to come across, pop it in the post double-quick. But don't go out of your way to hunt it up.'

'I see.'

'It's all sand, you know. Marvellous training ground but not worth capturing because when you've captured it, what have you got? We wouldn't be there now if Mussolini hadn't failed so miserably in the first place. Too much sand for his chaps, far too much sand. Still, it's a useful place to annoy the British, I suppose.'

'I wonder if they think the same thing about you.'

'Shouldn't be surprised. Shouldn't be at all surprised. The Afrika Korps probably isn't doing much good out there but then again it isn't doing any harm, is it? All just sand, you see. Nothing to worry about.'

Luis was towelling himself after a spell with the rubber dinghy in the embassy pool, when Otto arrived to take him to Colonel Christian. 'Watch out,' Otto warned. 'He's liable to bite you in the leg.'

Christian sent Otto away and told Luis to sit down. He looked a bit strained, not quite rattled but definitely preoccupied. His muscular, shaggy face was shadowed with brooding, and his freshly pressed suit was already rumpled and rucked.

'Getting on all right?' he grunted.

'Yes, I'm getting on all right,' Luis said. He watched the colonel pace over to a window and frown at the clear, careless sunlight. 'Are you getting on all right?' Luis asked politely.

'Listen, you little dago bastard, I ought to have you shot,' Christian growled.

'Oh?' Luis's mouth felt suddenly empty, as his throat drained saliva. He swallowed. 'You already did that once,' he pointed out. 'Let's not get into a rut.'

Christian slowly yawned. He turned and walked towards his desk. As he passed he kicked Luis's chair. It was a revolving chair and Luis spun briskly. He caught glimpses of the German going behind his desk, picking up a piece of paper, coming back towards him. Then Christian booted the chair again, harder. Luis gripped the arms and let the room blur into a pastel haze.

'This is a rocket from our Foreign Ministry in Berlin to my ambassador upstairs.' Christian's words boomed and faded like a bad loudspeaker. 'As a result of this rocket my ambassador upstairs put on his heaviest boots and jumped up and down on my stomach.' Luis's chair slowed, and Christian's words began to come together. 'My ambassador is a large man,' he said, 'with large feet.' The chair drifted to a halt. 'And you were responsible for it all,' Christian accused. Luis blinked, and waited for his brain to catch up with his body. 'You cretinous dago halfwit,' the colonel said, 'I must have been insane to let you in here.' He licked his lips.

Luis stood up, brushed his lapels with his hands, and walked unsteadily away. 'I cannot stand angry people with ill-fitting dentures,' he said as he went. 'They spit so much.'

'I do not wear dentures,' Colonel Christian said, hitting the word like a tent peg.

'That makes it even worse.' Luis reached the end of the room and mopped his tie with his handkerchief.   I charge extra for working with spitty people. The cleaning bills, you understand.'

'Insolent little sod.'

'There. You see?' Luis dabbed at his sleeve and stared at the result. 'Have you been eating beetroot?' he asked.

Christian leaned against his desk and inhaled slowly, his head nodding slightly with the effort of self-control. 'If you find working here so irresistibly funny,' he said stonily, 'you can just laugh your way to the street, now.'

Luis felt a great desire to do as he was told: just walk out, smiling, into the street, into the mild, cheerful, undemanding Madrid street, go and find Julie Conroy, sit in the sun with her and relax, forget, enjoy. He felt overworked and weary: was all this effort really worth five hundred pesetas a day? And most of that was danger money. Franz said on average one agent in two got caught immediately. Luis thought: By Christ, they're getting me damned cheap and that doesn't include free insults. He turned his back on Colonel Christian. 'No, no. Dear me no,'he said. 'That's not the proper form at all. This is your office, you get paid for making the decisions. Don't try and shuffle off your responsibility onto me.'

'Why not?' Christian barked. 'You like responsibility, don't you? Bloody hell, you took it upon yourself to decide that Germany should invade Russia, didn't you?'

'Ah!' Luis turned. 'Is that what all this fuss is about?'

'Your idiot joke went all the way up the line, Cabrillo. First it leaked out of the Abwehr and went all around this embassy. Then Spanish Intelligence picked it up. Next thing, their ambassador in Berlin had it. Five minutes later, von Ribbentrop had it from him and nearly choked with gratitude, after all what are friends for, if not to tell you that you're about to invade Russia?'Eh? Especially Spanish friends! D'you know what they call the Spanish Intelligence Service, in Berlin?'

'No,' said Luis.

'The Bungalow.'

Luis thought it over and looked blank.

'Nothing upstairs,' Christian explained savagely. 'God help us all . . .'

Luis perched on the huge, wide window sill and examined his right toecap for scuffs and scratches. He was thinking furiously, driving his brain to guess where Christian was going so that he could get there first and head him off. 'But that doesn't add up,' he said. 'Why should Berlin pay any attention to what Spanish Intelligence says?'

'Because Spanish Intelligence got it from here! And according to them it came from me! So now Berlin wants to know where I got it! What should I tell them? That I got it from a pansy photographer who got it from an amateur comedian?'

'Ah. You found out about Victor, then.'