There were no ‘archies’ at Huesca. A few rifle-shots were fired, he never knew by which side, at his neutral but trespassing plane, and he flew on to Saragossa. There, anti-aircraft guns came into action against him and both sides probably thought him a private adherent of the enemy but their shooting was extremely poor. A couple of Nationalist planes zoomed up to chase him off but he was as much at home in the air as a Pacific Islander in the water. Laughing from sheer joy he plunged a thousand feet down to meet them. Assuming he had a machine-gun they swerved and circled, giving him best owing to his superior height. He flipped up again and flew on.
It would have been easy for him to have flown over peaceful country all the way. As it was, great, sparsely populated areas showed no trace whatever of any line separating Nationalist from Government territory, but Rex always had an itch to see places so he followed the straggling, often broken, battle line right down the river Jalon, through the mountain corridor near Medinaceli and so to the high tableland on which Madrid is situated. Leaving the Guadarramas on his right he passed behind the Government lines and flew south by east over the northern suburbs of the capital. From his high altitude he could see no traces of any damage that it had so far suffered or, somewhat to his surprise, any sign of fighting on the banks of the Manzanares. He then realised that it was half-past one, right in the middle of the siesta, and that, so strongly is the custom of the midday rest engrained in the Spanish people, both sides had tacitly agreed from the very beginning of hostilities that the war should be called off each day during the siesta hours.
One railway ran south-west from Madrid and another almost due south. Valmojado was on neither but lay, with two or three other small towns, in the angle between them, so, after a glance at his map, Rex had no difficulty in picking up his destination.
Coming down to a thousand feet he circled over the town, saw the solitary factory chimney on its western edge, and near it something he was far from expecting; a row of hangars. Evidently Franco’s air staff had felt that the flat fields west of Valmojado would make a good forward air-base from which to bomb Madrid and their decision to establish one there had doubtless been influenced by the fact that the aluminium plant would prove invaluable for minor repairs.
An airfield being ready to hand solved the problem of landing but, as Rex did so, half a dozen angry men ran out towards him from a hut. His arrival had disturbed their siesta and they were not at all pleased to see him. This was a military landing-ground, they said, and he had no right to have come down there. Who was he? Where had he come from? What was he doing, cruising about the battle-zone in a neutral plane?
Rex gave them the Fascist salute and his big, friendly smile. In voluble but ungrammatical Spanish he apologised for waking them up and asked them to take him to their Commanding Officer at once.
This, it appeared, was impossible, as Colonel Salvador de Lopez Escandalera could not be woken from his sleep, and they had no intention of bringing the wrath of the officer of the day down on their heads by rousing him either.
After Rex had offered cigarettes relations became more friendly and it was decided that there could be no objection to his sitting outside the guard hut until the officers were about again.
Some of the men went back to their interrupted nap but two remained with Rex chatting about the war and its progress. Both were sublimely confident that their side would be victorious. It was only a matter of time, they said, before they slit the throat of every blasted Communist in the country. Franco’s Moors were actually in the southern outskirts of Madrid fighting for the passage of the Manzanares; they would have been in the city itself by now if the International Brigade had not held them up, but that was only a temporary check.
As they talked Rex had a good look round. There were seven hangars, including two very big ones, all obviously quite recently erected, since builders’ materials littered the place in all directions, and several more hangars were in course of construction further along the line. A number of wooden hutments had also been run up to house the personnel of the air unit.
A little after three, doors began to slam and the peace of the place was broken by snatches of song as the airmen and mechanics started to emerge and set about their business. Rex was led to another hut where a young, smooth-faced officer questioned him courteously. His story was that his cousin and partner, Richard Eaton, had bought the factory just before the outbreak and had since disappeared. At the time Rex, or William Eaton as he now presented himself, had been in America, where he handled all their business and spent a good part of each year. Richard was believed to be in hiding from the Reds somewhere in Madrid but they could get no certain news of him. William had now arrived to try to trace his cousin’s movements and to ascertain what was happening to their property. He handed over his British passport in the name of William Eaton and the two letters purporting to have been written by Richard which the skilful Simon had faked up for him.
The young officer was non-committal and, remarking that the matter should have prompt investigation, sent him back to wait in the guard room for nearly four hours, at the end of which time he was taken to another hut and led before the Commandant of the air base.
Colonel Salvador de Lopez Escandalera was a fine old gentleman with an enormous white moustache and a pair of shrewd black eyes. To assist him in his inquiry he had the young officer whom Rex had already interviewed, his adjutant and a civilian; a thin, sharp-nosed man with the narrowest head Rex had ever seen, who was referred to as Don Baltazar.
Rex repeated his story all over again but evidently it had already been gone into as the Adjutant was helpful. He said that when the factory had been taken over, a fortnight before, the advance party had reported it to him as flying the British flag, and inquiries that afternoon had established the fact that its absent owner’s name was Eaton. Rex’s British passport was in order and there was nothing against him.
The Colonel said that as the aluminium plant was now being used for war purposes it would be quite impossible to return it to its owners, and if he wished for compensation he must take the matter up with the proper authorities at Burgos.
Rex replied that he quite understood the situation and was perfectly willing to leave the question of compensation until later. He would, however, like to inspect the plant thoroughly in order to facilitate his claim, and receive permission to make inquiries among the workmen as to his cousin’s last known movements.
These requests were freely granted and the friendly adjutant, Captain Ramon de Leon, took Rex into the mess for a drink. The gaunt Don Baltazar joined them a few moments later. He did not drink but he talked a great deal, principally about the iniquities of the enemy, and Rex gained the impression that he had something to do with the Nationalist Intelligence and Press service. With his high, narrow, bald skull and thin, beaky nose he had the appearance of a human vulture and he seemed greatly disappointed that Rex, having flown direct from Marseilles, could give him no accounts of Red atrocities witnessed en route in Barcelona or Valencia.
The question arising as to where Rex was going to be accommodated for the night, he suggested that perhaps there was somewhere he could doss down in the factory. De Leon said they were using the offices for their own clerical staff but he believed that on taking over, all the factory papers had been removed to two rooms upstairs and locked up there. Perhaps a shake-down could be arranged for Rex in one of them.
A visit to the room concerned revealed the camp beds Richard and the Duke had slept on, now half buried under heaps of ledgers and letter-files. An orderly was sent for to tidy up and de Leon, who had taken an immediate liking to Rex, invited him to dinner.
The mess consisted of about twenty Spaniards and six German pilots. If Rex had been able to reveal his own name, he would have been known to many of them for he had broken several records and was something of a celebrity in the flying world, but the fact that he was a good fellow and obviously an aviator of some experience was quite sufficient to ensure
him a warm welcome from this brotherhood of the air, and he spent the jolliest evening with them that he had had for a very long time.
Having watched a couple of planes set off to bomb Madrid he went to his new quarters over the factory office to turn in, and discovered the four suitcases left by Richard and the Duke. There was nothing in them which gave any clue to the place in which the gold was hidden, but he found both the deeds by which Arturo Gomara had assigned the factory to Richard Eaton, and the balance of those magnificent Hoyos which de Richleau had imported into Spain. Feeling that he had made an admirable beginning for his investigation Rex turned in and slept the sleep of the just.
Next morning de Leon gave orders to a sergeant that Rex was to be allowed access to all parts of the factory and rendered every assistance in his inquiries about his cousin. The sergeant handed him over at once to the factory foreman, a wiry, bright-eyed young fellow named Matias Falcon, and the two of them spent the rest of the forenoon making a thorough inspection of the whole property.
Falcon spoke freely of Richard and his French interpreter, Hypolite Dubois. He gave, with fair precision, the dates they had been in Valmojado, as far as he was aware, but said nothing of the Syndicate Committee which had taken over the factory and of which he had been the instigator. As far as Rex could judge by tactful probing, Falcon was not a member of any union but in sympathy with the Fascists. He closed up like an oyster whenever Rex started to talk politics and would only say that naturally all the remaining workers in the factory were good Nationalists, anxious for a speedy victory over the Reds. During the inspection Rex saw nothing whatever to give him any hint where the treasure might be concealed, but he was not unduly depreca as he had not expected to walk straight into it.
He had lunch at the inn, which was now running again under new management. As Valmojado was on one of Franco’s lines of advance, troops of all kinds were continually passing through it. Guns, limbers, ambulances, staff cars, motor-cycle messengers, supply columns, soldiers on horse and foot, regulars in Spanish Army uniforms, Carlists in their scarlet berets and Falangists in their jaunty forage-caps all went to make up the cavalcades moving to and from the twenty-mile-distant battlefront. Rex saw his first Moors pass in a fleet of lorries. They were big, sinewy chaps, olive-skinned but, to his surprise, little darker than the Spaniards.
The inn was crowded almost entirely with men of the Nationalist Army but after lunch Rex got into conversation with a group of locals and learned of the vicissitudes through which Valmojado had passed during the Civil War. After the first Red massacres it had quietened down until mid-October when the Government troops had fallen back on it. This had been followed by three days’ shelling and a further slaughter of civilians before the Reds abandoned the town. The Nationalists had retaliated by machine-gunning over a hundred and fifty Government sympathisers who had been foolish enough to remain in Valmojado until its capture.
Rex led the conversation to the factory. Apparently it had been running under a Committee for some months. Its manager, Señor Coello, and the office staff had been butchered in the last Red Terror, but not by their own workers. The majority of these, as far as was known, had refrained from taking up arms for either side.
After the siesta Rex wandered round the factory casually questioning many of the hands. He found that now it was being used for war purposes most of them were new men brought up from the cities of the south to fill the gaps in its personnel caused by the Revolution. The old hands confirmed and amplified the accounts he had collected already, but they were extremely reticent on the subject of politics. Several of them, however, mentioned the old foreman, Jacinto Vincente. He had virtually run the place, they said, but he was an invalid now, having had his left foot taken off by a shell splinter when the Nationalists were bombarding the town before they took it.
Rex decided at once that Jacinto would probably be able to tell him more of his friends’ activities while in Valmjado than anyone else left alive there, and went to visit the ex-foreman that evening.
It was three weeks since Jacinto had been wounded but he was still laid up and suffering severely from cramp which seemed to afflict his left foot although this had been amputated. Propped up in bed with his gold rings still in his ears, his fine moustache which rivalled that of Colonel Salvador de Lopez Escandalera and his tasselled woollen nightcap perched at a rakish angle on his head, the old chap looked more like a pirate than ever.
When his wife told him that a Señor Eaton had come to see him he almost bounced out of bed for joy, but his face dropped comically when Rex’s huge frame bulked in the low doorway of the room.
Rex told his story well and he never knew how near he was during the next few moments to learning the truth about the gold; but he made two errors. First, he spoke as if Richard and himself really did own a big factory in England; secondly, he admitted to Jacinto’s pressing that he had good reasons for believing Richard and Hypolite Dubois to be still alive.
The old man knew nothing about the private lives of Richard and Dubois but he was quite certain they were not factory owners. Their ignorance of simple technicalities on their arrival at Valmojado had clearly shown him that. In consequence he knew Rex was lying on one point at least and, therefore, was not exactly what he represented himself to be, Jacinto might still have spoken had he been assured that Richard and Dubois were dead, since having seen Rex’s passport and heard him speak with such obviously intimate knowledge of them both, he was persuaded that Rex was some relative of Richard’s; but as they were still alive and Rex had brought no written instructions from either of them, Jacinto decided it was his duty to take no chances with their secret.
He was polite and talkative but Rex could get nothing out of him that he did not know already. Questioned about various men at the factory and their political sympathies, Jacinto would only say that they were all good fellows but simple workmen who did not concern themselves much with politics. Asked about Matias Falcon, he said that the young man who had taken over his job was a keen worker, efficient, and a good choice. Rex had a feeling that such an intelligent-looking old chap must be able to recall some episode which would give him a line, but after an hour’s chat he had to retire no wiser than he had been before.
It took Rex three days’ solid work to get any further. During that time he became staunch friends with a number of the officers in the Air Force. He took his own machine up and stunted with it in such a daring fashion that his audience was filled with admiration and delight. More, when Captain de Leon needed a plane to carry an urgent despatch to Burgos and his own fighters were all occupied, Rex lent his for the purpose.
After the first few days he had no valid excuse for staying on at Valmojado but he said that, although he had not been able to obtain any useful information about his cousin Richard, since the Nationalist forces were certain soon to take Madrid, he might as well remain at Valmojado till they did, and his new friends in the mess agreed with him.
Only Don Baltazar appeared to continue suspicious of him.
The lean, cadaverous Intelligence Officer was always popping up unexpectedly to Rex’s embarrassment when he was having quiet little chats with the factory hands. It seemed that Don Baltazar could not get it out of his head that he had met Rex somewhere before and he had a quite unnecessary and extremely unnerving habit of saying at least once a day, “What did you say your name was? William Eaton? No, that really doesn’t convey anything to me.”
Rex had a great many of those quiet little chats with the factory hands. He had not the Duke’s flair for seizing on essentials swiftly, or Simon’s subtle reasoning power, or Richard’s occasional flashes of inspiration, but he was an extremely persistent person, and on the evening of his fourth day at Valmojado he had pieced together a remarkably accurate picture of all the events which had taken place at the factory since mid-July and the people principally concerned in them, with the one exception of the operations carried out by Jacinto’s secret squad.
He was
on quite friendly terms with Matias Falcon and on that fifth evening of his inquiry he invited the young foreman to come up and knock off a bottle of wine with him in his room.
Matias, not suspecting anything unusual, readily accepted, but he became uneasy directly he saw there was no bottle waiting to be consumed and that Rex, having gently closed the door, was leaning his broad back up against it.
“Now, my lad,” said Rex, breaking into the strange jargon he used as Spanish, “you’ve no need to be scared. No one’s going to hurt you as long as you tell the truth, but the truth it’s going to be. You’re an Anarchist, aren’t you?”
Within a second Matias had his knife out and had flung it.
Rex was expecting that because, by this time, he knew something of the habits of angry Spaniards. He just side-stepped and the knife stuck quivering in the door.
“Naughty!” he said grinning. “Naughty Matias. Uncle’ll have to smack you if you start any more of those tricks, and this uncle smacks mighty hard.”
Matias only glowered as Rex went on. “You don’t have to be scared of me. I’m on your side though I’ve got no means of proving it. You’ll have to take my word for that. You’re an Anarchist and I know it. Never mind how. In just four minutes from now I’m taking you out of here by the scruff of your neck to have you shot, unless you come clean.”
The young Spaniard’s face was a study in indecision but eventually he muttered angrily, “What d’you want? Who are you?”
“I’m on your side,” repeated Rex gently, “and I’m here to get the low-down on certain things that have been happening in this dump since mid-July. You and some other ginks took the place over round about the end of that month and you were the chief mover. How you’ve managed to save your neck since the Nationalists crashed Valmojado I haven’t an idea and I’m just not interested. But you’re going to tell me what Eaton and Dubois were up to here, and anything cock-eyed that old foreman Jacinto Vincente’s done since. Come on, now! What d’you know?”
The Golden Spaniard Page 40
