The Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  'I should have explained about the Dos Amigos. It's a little bit unusual. The custom here is to insult everybody. The food is excellent but the waiters, the musicians, even the man who does the washing-up, they all insult the customers. It's a tradition.'

  'Uh-huh.'

  'The biggest insult is not to be insulted. That means they really don't like you.'

  'What do they do when they can't stand the sight of you? Throw money?'

  'I'll ask him,' Luis said as the waiter arrived. They talked in rapid Spanish and their talk worked up to a hot exchange, with both men waving their arms in her direction. Eventually Luis pulled the menu from under the waiter's arm, ordered a plate of appetisers and a bottle of wine, and dismissed him. The man went away, making a long and contemptuous remark over his shoulder. The people at the next table stamped their feet and grinned in approval.

  'What did he say?'Julie asked.

  'At first he said that my tie doesn't go with my shirt. Then he alleged that you aren't worth two pesetas. Also he considers that I ordered a totally unsuitable wine.'

  'And what did you say?'

  'As to the wine and the tie, those are matters of opinion. However, I strongly denied that you are not worth two pesetas.'

  'I bet that stopped him cold.'

  'No, he continued to express doubts. It became a point of honour. I swore on my mother's grave that you are, indeed, well worth two pesetas.'

  'Gee,' she said thoughtfully, 'you Spaniards really go out on a limb for a girl.'

  'It is nothing.'

  'It's two pesetas.'

  'A man's honour is worth more than two pesetas.'

  'It is?' She examined his smile for a moment. 'How much more?'

  She leaned back and held the rose at full length, hands resting on the table, and twirled it like a tiny red parasol. Luis enjoyed the smooth and supple line of her arms, the cool hollows shaped by her collarbones, the firmness of her neck, the untroubled balance of her features. During the previous two years he had read a lot of descriptions of a lot of women but none had startled and seized his imagination as much as this reality. She had a measurable "physical effect on him: he could feel his lungs tightening a little, his heartbeat rising slightly; and all the sights and sounds in the restaurant gained in intensity, like a big scene in a film. A small part of his brain told him that it was all to be expected, simply a. necessary biological reaction to ensure that the species reproduced itself, but the rest of his mind was not listening; it was back in the jungle, swinging from tree to tree, delightfully drunk with the prospect of passion . . . Julie stopped twirling the rose. He came to earth. 'A man's honour is beyond price,' he said firmly.

  'Yeah? That's the kind of line MGM gives a guy somewhere in the second reel when it knows he's heading for big trouble. Talking of which, here comes the local agent.'

  The waiter brought the appetisers and the wine, smiled, and made a short, prepared statement.

  'He apologises,' Luis told her. 'He says he spoke in haste, it was not his intention to depreciate you, and after consultation with his colleagues he wishes to make it quite clear that you are not worth four pesetas.'

  The waiter spread his hands in a gesture of reconciliation.

  'Tell him I accept his apology,' she said, 'and ask him if he always walks like that or did his girl-friend tread on his cojones.'

  Luis translated. The waiter did not lose his smile but his smile lost its pleasure. He poured the wine, spilling quite a lot, and went away.

  'His acting reminds me a lot of Valentino,' she said. 'Stubby Valentino, played shortstop for the Dodgers.'

  'That is a baseball team,' Luis said.

  'Well, it's never been completely proved . . . What in the name of Chaplin's bootlace is that?' She forked up something from the appetisers which looked remarkably like a fat bootlace.

  Luis ransacked his memory. 'Eel!' he announced triumphantly. 'Is that right?'

  'Eel.' She put it back. 'Why the hell can't you Europeans eat food for food? Ever since I came over here people keep offering me this weird and gruesome junk. What have you got against good honest grub?'

  'Eel is good.' He fished it out and ate it.

  'Squid, they gave me. And cow's heels. Brains. Tripe. Larks, would you believe! How can you do business in a country where they serve hot larks?'

  Luis shrugged and munched some radishes. 'A bird is a bird. You Americans are very sentimental, you know. If every chicken could sing like a lark, would you set them all free?'

  'Chicken,' she said. 'Now that's genuine food. Do they serve chicken here? Any kind of chicken-- bass, baritone, alto, just as long as it's got good legs. I want a chicken. Tell Valentino I'll cancel his contract if I don't get a chicken. I'll cancel his girl-friend's contract. I'll cancel his cojones' contract.'

  'That reminds me . . . Did you solve your problem in Paris? The missing reel of film.'

  Her eyelids flickered as her mind rapidly adjusted. 'Oh. Gone With The Wind. Yes, that's all straightened out, thanks.'

  'I understand there is now a difficulty in Brussels.'

  'Mmm . . .' She drank some wine. 'Second half of Destry Rides Again went astray. Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich are lying lost and forgotten in some bleak, Belgian warehouse. And them so young. Tragic.'

  'They will soon be freed. I asked the embassy to do all it can to help you. They are working on it right now.' Luis spoke easily, concentrating on finding a good olive.

  'That's very kind of you.' Julie Conroy was briefly silent; Luis chewed cheerfully on his plump olive and enjoyed his success. 'They must think highly of you in the embassy,' she said at last,

  'Well, I am not without influence in the Spanish Government, you see. My family has a tradition of public service.' He ducked his head modestly while he reviewed his family's contributions. 'Communications . . . the arts . . . banking . . .'

  'Yeah? The Cabrillos are a big deal, then.'

  'I can tell you this in all honesty,' Luis said, and paused again while he found something not-too-dishonest. 'Take any train, to any city. A Cabrillo has been there before you and has left his mark. By the way: have you met James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich? What are they like?'

  Just like in the movies. Those legs! Terrific legs, plus that wonderful husky voice. And she isn't bad-looking either.'

  Luis gave her a crooked, one-eyed grin. 'I think you have never met them,' he said.

  'Okay, go ahead and ask me. Ask me anything about anybody in Hollywood. Just ask me.'

  For ten minutes she fascinated Luis with the private lives of the stars. Alan Ladd was so short that sometimes the actress he was doing a scene with had to stand in a hole. Paulette Goddard had a mania for cleanliness and scrubbed her floors three times a day. Errol Flynn drank a bottle of vodka for breakfast. Peter Lorre bred goldfish. Judy Garland really wanted to be a tennis-player and was a terrible bore on the subject. Gary Grant had a curious allergy: he couldn't tolerate anyone with flat feet; it was actually written into his contracts. Groucho Marx once tried to grow a moustache for a bet and failed. Betty Grable ate a dozen oranges a day. Last year Abbott and Costello fell in love with the same girl and the studio had to send her to New Zealand . . .

  'How lucky you are to have such an interesting job,' Luis said enviously.

  'I don't know. People are people, all over the world.' She watched as a new arrival, a fat and ugly woman, was given a sickly-sweet serenade by the trumpet-player. 'Movie-people aren't real, because movies aren't real, but then people don't want reality, do they? People want to be deluded. Me, I just take care of the hardware, the cans of celluloid.'

  'Have you met Bing Crosby?'

  'Millions of times. They have to glue his ears back to stop them flapping in the breeze. Listen, I'm hungry. Tell them to take this junk back to Boris Karloff's laboratory and bring us some real food.'

  'I think you would like ..." Luis studied the menu.'. . . a little fish, perhaps bacalao a la madrilena, and then perhaps some veal al ajo ari
nero, that is with a garlic sauce.'

  'That's good, is it?'

  'Excellent.'

  'You have it. I want a steak, a big baked potato, and a huge salad. Order up.'

  The waiter openly despised their choice. He wrangled with Luis about the fish and veal, and he sneered at Julie as he wrote down her steak. Then he went off, jerking his thumb at them and calling something to the trumpet-player, who broke into a flattened, dirge-like version of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

  'I may kill that man,'Julie said.

  'It means nothing. Only the tradition of this place.'

  'Then I'll start a new tradition: each customer gets one free shot at the trumpet-player. It's what in the United States we call democracy. The fifth freedom: freedom from musicians with lungs of steel and ears of tin.'

  'Spain is different,' Luis said soothingly. 'Here we have no politics any more. Only music. It is much easier, much cheaper, and the newspapers can give more space to futbol.

  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.