The Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  Then a piece of luck won him an extra hundred yards. He

  panicked a herd of goats browsing at the roadside, and they

  scattered in the path of the Mercedes.

  He risked a glance in his mirror and saw the car skid broadside. Then he lost it completely behind a bend. Suddenly encouraged, he put his foot down even harder and went flat-out along the next straight. The corner grew near, grew nearer; he delayed braking and changing down to the last possible moment, and then waited an instant more. His high-speed four-wheel drift into the bend was perfect. It was the camber of the road that was all wrong.

  Luis felt the car come unstuck and fly out like a fairground ride, while the road swung the other way and abandoned him. He was flying, then he was falling, diving into a steep and flickering world of trees. Something rose up and bashed him violently in the backside. Before he could recover, something even more violent clubbed the front of the car and smashed it sideways. Luis's hands were torn off the wheel and he was flung across the front seats. His head rammed the door. He lay stunned, glimpsing wavering treetops soaring away, as the car plunged backwards, ricocheting off rocks and bouncing between tree-trunks, until it tried to charge through a two-hundred-year-old oak and failed. The crash was a single, shattering hammerblow. The car crumpled like wet cardboard. The tyres sighed. The springs wheezed. Silence.

  It took Luis a quarter of an hour to make his eyes focus, and another ten minutes to train his legs to get him out and hold him up. After all that, his stomach decided to be sick; but eventually he was able to look around and take stock.

  He was not alone.

  The officer and the Mercedes were nowhere to be seen. Higher up the slope, however, was the wreck of a small grey car. Obviously it too had left the bend at speed, but it had made the mistake of coming down head-first. Both front wheels and the radiator were firmly wrapped around a sturdy pine tree. Most of the engine was in the front seat, and a great deal of the steering column was in the driver.

  He was a balding, chubby man in a brown suit and black gloves. He wore a thin, careful moustache like a small-town bank manager, which was what the cards in his wallet declared him to have been. On the back seat was a jumble of heavy cardboard boxes sealed with strong brown paper tape. They were all stamped Banco de Espana, Guernica, and they were all full of money.

  Evidently the peasants had not been the only ones to suspect that Guernica was a good place to get out of.

  Finding the money did not mark the end of Luis's problems, but it was a good start.

  He knew that the Nationalist officer would soon turn back and organise a search of the woods, and he knew that the Banco de Espana would one day come hunting for its funds.

  He prised the dead driver off the steering column and dumped him in the other car: that would give the officer something useless to chew on. He unloaded the cardboard boxes and hid them a mile away, in the heart of a thicket of laurels. Then he walked into Guernica.

  He had a curious feeling that the money was a gift and a test. It was a comment on the nonsense of war: he might well have been killed in the crash, but instead he was rich; yet rich only if he could contrive to keep and spend the money.

  So the first thing he had to do was find out whether or not the Guernica branch of the Banco de Espana was still in business.

  It was not. The site was a heap of battered bricks and broken beams. Splendid.

  Next, he made careful enquiries about the manager. Nobody had seen him since the day of the bombing. Quite possibly he was still buried in the ruins somewhere. Anywhere. When the bombs fell, people took refuge and often their refuge became their tomb. Luis nodded sombrely, and rejoiced in his heart. If nobody had missed the manager, probably nobody had missed the money. Yet.

  At a stables on the outskirts of town he bought an old donkey with an even older saddle, a dozen sacks and a pair of secondhand overalls, and went back to the woods. For an hour he pottered about, collecting bundles of firewood. When he was sure he was alone he went and looked inside the laurel thicket. Then he threw the firewood away, half-filled a few of the sacks with dead leaves, and shoved the chunky wads of banknotes deep inside. The cardboard boxes burned to a fine grey ash in fifteen minutes.

  For the rest of 1937 he and the donkey pottered across northern Spain. They wandered in an apparently random, zigzag fashion: first north-west to the port of Santander, then back across the mountains and down the valley of the Esla to Leon, followed by a spell of criss-crossing the plain between Palencia and Zamora and Braganca. Luis and the donkey travelled by tracks and trails; he named her Fred Astaire because she had big ears and she never fell over, even on steep and stony paths. The only time they used roads was to go into a town. Once or twice a week Luis entered a town, found a bank, changed a bundle of notes into bills of larger denomination, and got straight out again. He rarely spoke to anyone; he bought his food in little villages; he and Fred slept in empty, quiet places.

  By the end of summer he looked like what he wanted to be mistaken for: a poor peasant. His face and arms were sunburned the colour of mahogany, his hair was lanky, his clothes were patched and stained. Nobody bothered him; few people even noticed him. If by chance the Banco de Espana were still looking for anyone, Luis reckoned to be about as forgettable as a dead tree.

  From time to time he picked up news of the war. Franco was winning, bloodily; but the details of the battles interested Luis no more than the results of last year's football matches. He was waiting for only one event: the fall of Madrid, where he had decided to spend his next few years. He could avoid the secret police there. He could enjoy his money there.

  Madrid surrendered in March 1939, by all accounts in a very bad state. Luis allowed the capital a couple of months to make itself fit for his return. He killed the time pleasantly with Fred Astaire, strolling around the western Sierras between Salamanca and Alcantara. When the period was up he was, in every sense, a very different person from the impetuous youth who had nearly killed himself while fleeing from death. It was over a year and a half since he had slept inside four walls, or taken a bath, or put on completely clean clothes. When he left Burgos for Guernica that would have been an unthinkable prospect. Now he had a different set of values.

  He sold Fred at a slight profit and took the train to Madrid. He knew with certainty what he had to have and what he could do without. He could do without people, politics, sex, tobacco, news, alcohol, uniforms and work. He had to have privacy, physical comfort, and a good book. A suitcase full of pesetas should buy quite a lot of all three.

  The first thing he saw when he got off the train was a poster showing pictures of twenty men wanted by Franco's police. Second row, third from the left, was Luis Cabrillo. He looked young and cocky. Luis walked away from him arid, within an hour, had rented a spacious two-room apartment on the third floor of the Calle Santa Isabel in the old quarter of the town. He called himself Jose Antonio Hernandez, and two years passed before, unwillingly, he came out again.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 11

  Luis Cabrillo shaved, dressed, sat near the window and tried to read a short story by Somerset Maugham. After three minutes he threw the book across the room, not in anger but in despair.

  He was flat broke, and that was inescapable. The fact pursued him like a cold draught. Pointless to sit and pretend that he could entertain himself with fiction, as if today were yesterday. Tomorrow was on its way, very fast. Tomorrow would be a bitch without money. Today was going to be a real bastard, but tomorrow would be an absolute bitch.

  No money. It was shocking, like waking up to discover that you had no feet, or no eyes: suddenly everything was enormously, frighteningly more difficult. Life was not pleasant anymore. The world outside was an enemy. He had no friends to help him; none that he could trust, anyway. Food: what in hell's name was he going to do for lunch? He sucked in his stomach and immediately it sent him a message of a large omelette, firm yet juicy. 'Christ, what's the matter with you?' he c
ried aloud. 'You've only just had your damned breakfast!'

  But no eggs, his stomach reminded him. This is degrading, Luis thought. What am I: a man, or a stomach on legs? His anger carried him to the door and before his fear could do anything about it he was going down the stairs, two at a time. No money . . . Well, hanging around in a third-floor room wasn't going to improve things. If there was any money to be got it had to be out there, in the streets. Where he hadn't set foot for two years. He ran down the last flight and strode across the hallway, heels clicking on the shiny tiles, nostrils twitching to old nostalgic smells: washed floors, the trace of hot bread, a hint of maybe orange blossom. Then he was out in the Calle Santa Isabel.

  It felt good. Even without money, it felt good. Madrid was having a sparkling, spanking day, and after all that time beneath a twelve-foot ceiling Luis saw the streets as grand and glittering canyons. The traffic whizzed and dodged, bold and cavalier, and the people took it all for granted, like the sublime creatures they clearly were. By the time he had walked to the railway station this sudden intoxication was beginning to wear off, but he still felt like a peasant, gawking at the big city, and he made an effort to look more confident and urban.

  His picture was not on the police posters in the railway station because there were no police posters in the railway station. So that was good.

  A newspaper headline caught his eye: Germany had attacked Crete. He picked up a copy and glanced at the opening paragraph while his hand felt in his pocket and found (of course) nothing, not even a button; zero, emptiness. He put the paper back and turned away while the owner of the stall came over, straightened the pile of papers and squinted at him. Luis frowned and checked his watch against the station clock. Two minutes slow. He grunted briskly. Not good enough. He must have money!

  For the rest of the morning he walked around the centre of Madrid. The layout was familiar but the impact was startling: for the first time he saw how damned rich the city was. The Prado had always been just a big art gallery; now he climbed its broad exterior staircase and stroked one of the massive pink columns propping up the noble facade, and he worked out the bill for this whole colossal effort. A fortune!

  This one column alone must have cost ten thousand pesetas. And after that they had to buy all the pictures on the walls inside. Two fortunes, right here in one building! But there were riches everywhere you looked. Next to the Prado was the Neptune Fountain, with a couple of rather slap-happy seahorses galumphing boisterously in the huge pool. and the shaggy old man waving a generous arm towards the Palace Hotel, worth a few million as it stood, and it seemed to be doing good business, too. The whole of Madrid seemed to be doing good business. Most of the damage from the Civil War had been removed or repaired, and Luis saw uniforms everywhere. He stood on the corner of the Calle de Alcala where it joined the Gran Via, and marvelled that so many countries could afford to send so many military representatives to Spain, and in such big cars, too. The Banco de Espana had its headquarters on the corner, sturdy and splendid, and Luis felt pleased to see that his financiers were still prospering. The whole of the Gran Via seemed to be awash with prosperity: he went along in a happy tide of well-dressed shoppers, past stores which were brilliant with goods, and eventually reached the Plaza Espana, a great and tranquil plain of trees and flowers. In the middle stood the Cervantes Monument. Luis strolled over and stared. Posterity had done very well by Cervantes, he thought, but the publishers must be doing even better out of him. There was money in books, if only you could come up with the right book . . .

  Around the corner, then, to the Sabatini Gardens and good God in heaven above, the Royal Palace! What a size! The damn place stretched for ever. Everything was squared-off and balanced, balconies and windows and pilasters multiplying themselves with great discipline, but it was all so bloody big And then Luis realised that he was looking at the end of the Palace. To see the front -- the entire front -- he had to walk across to the far side of the Plaza de Oriente. The view dazed him: how could there be enough money in the world to put up a building like that? How could he have driven a taxi around Madrid and not seen all these fantastic riches? All this phenomenal wealth?

  A combination of fresh air, sunshine, hunger and architectural magnificence began to work on his brain. He walked through the backstreets to the most spectacular square in Madrid, the Plaza Mayor, and stood in its centre, like a drunk in a distillery. The terraced houses rose five storeys high on all four sides, with a colonnaded piazza running around the base. He was in a stadium of balconies far bigger than any bullring, and as vivid as a theatre. If I owned one-tenth of this, Luis thought, one-hundredth even . . .

  He moved on, restless with envy, and found himself in the Puerta del Sol, the Times Square of Madrid. The pulse of the crowds was stronger here, everyone heading for lunch. Only Luis, it seemed, had nowhere to go. He looked for and found the zero-kilometre landmark, the spot representing the nominal centre of Spain, starting-point for all the radial roads. 'This is where it all begins, then,' he said. He looked for, and found, the statue of the symbol of Madrid: the bear and the madrono tree. The beast was standing on its hind legs and eating the fruit. Luis patted a massive bronze paw. 'You have the right idea, friend,' he murmured. 'There is money to be made here. I shall make a lot of it. You want to know how? I shall spy for the British.'

  Chapter 12

  'Now, exactly what sort of agency do you represent, Senor Cabrillo?" asked the British Embassy's assistant commercial attache, unscrewing the cap from his fountain pen.

  'Military intelligence,' said Luis.

  The cap went back on the fountain pen. 'Wrong department,' the man said.

  'Yes, I know,' Luis told him. 'You see, I did not trust the man who met me when I arrived here. He looked . . .' Luis wobbled his hands and tried to think of the English word. 'What is . . .?' He fluttered his fingers. 'Not quite criminal, but . . .'

  'Shifty?' suggested the assistant commercial attache, getting to his feet.

  'Yes, shifty! You have noticed it too.'

  'I must remember to tell him. That was Williams, our head of security.'

  Luis smiled. 'He has a sense of humour, then.'

  'Absolutely none. Stiff as a plank. Wait here, please.'

  Fifteen minutes later a woman looked into the room and offered Luis a cup of tea. He accepted.

  After another ten minutes a tall, thin man came in and introduced himself as Cameron. He wore a doublebreasted blue blazer and very dark grey trousers. 'Now, Mr Cabrillo,' he said, 'I understand you have some secret knowledge of the German war machine which you wish to share with us.'

  'No,' said Luis.

  Cameron stiffened, and gave him a hard look. 'That is not the impression you gave my colleague.'

  'He makes his impressions, Mr Cameron, and I make mine. I did not completely trust him. He looked . . .shifty.'

  Cameron grunted. 'Like Williams, you mean?'

  'More or less, yes.'

  'You will tell me, won't you, if I start looking shifty?'

  'Yes. At once.'

  'You're very kind. If you have no military information to share, why come to the British Embassy?'

  'I wish to spy for Britain,' Luis declared. 'In Germany, preferably. Or in Italy, if you wish.'

  'The grub's better in Italy,' said Cameron thoughtfully. 'There's probably more business to be had in Germany, but I'd pick Italy for the food, and of course for the climate . . . Not that I know the first thing about it.' He got up. 'Not my department, thank God. Wait here, would you?'

  Luis waited for another half-hour, during which a different woman brought him another cup of tea.

  The next man to arrive was a friendly squadron-leader in the RAF, called Blake. He shook hands warmly and smiled jovially, and Luis felt greatly encouraged. At last he was getting somewhere.

  'Right! Now, let's find out something about you. I take it you're . . . Spanish?'

  'Yes.'

  Blake wrote that down. 'And I'm told you're
offering us your services as a sort of a ... That is to say, you'd be involved in ... well, in a sort of intelligence capacity. So to speak. Mmm?'

  'I wish to spy for the British,' said Luis. There had been enough confusion already.

  'Of course,' beamed Blake. Jolly good.' He wrote that down. 'Now, I hope you won't be offended, old chap, if I ask you why?'

  Luis frowned. He had not expected that question. How or when, yes; but not why. This was probably not the time to raise the subject of money. He moved his cup and saucer an inch to the right, crossed his legs, tugged the lobe of his left ear.

  'Porque? Blake added, helpfully.

  'It is a matter of style,' Luis told him. 'I very much admire style, and from what I have seen, British style is second to none.'

  'Style?' Blake looked surprised, but he made a note.

  'I do not mean taste,' Luis said. 'Taste is not style.'

  'Isn't it?' Blake chewed his pen. 'No, I suppose it isn't.'

  'On the other hand, style is never in bad taste.'

  'No, I mean I couldn't agree more, old boy. Not that I know much about that sort of thing, but it's always good to hear someone say something nice about the old country . . . Really, though, what I meant was: why come to us instead of to the Germans?'

  'As I have said -- '

  'Yes, I know, style and all that; but let's face it, your government is much chummier with them than it is with us, isn't it?'

  'I do not support the government,' Luis said. 'As we say in Spanish: I shit on fascism.'

  'Oh,' Blake thought for a moment, wrote something, crossed it out, wrote something else. 'Sounds as if you might have been on the other side in the recent Civil War,' he remarked.