She turned and looked. “The third car behind is a bus,” she said.
“Make it Cuchilleros instead,” Luis told the driver urgently. “This way is better,” he explained to her. “Buses do not use the Calle de Cuchilleros.”
“They don’t use the Calle Cava Baja either,” she said, “especially the one behind us, which is going to the Puerta de Toledo.”
“You would prefer Cava Baja? It is not too late to change.”
“I would prefer my hotel, that’s what I would prefer.”
“There are several excellent bars on Cuchilleros.”
She moistened her lips. “You should have said that first, not last.”
“I do not mean to disparage the bars on Cava Baja, which are also fine bars.”
“Don’t louse things up, friend. We can drink to Cava Baja when we get to Cuchilleros.”
“The bus has gone,” Luis observed with satisfaction. “We have shaken off the bus.”
“Terrific” she said. “Nothing worse than a grabby bus.”
They bounced and swung through some of the oldest parts of Old Madrid, all cobblestones and high, balconied houses. The streets never held a straight line for more than a block; they curved and narrowed into sharp turns only to broaden out into odd-shaped little plazas from which three or four equally twisting streets ran away and disappeared. Occasionally a massive church or a hulking citadel caught the eye, but they were rapidly lost as the taxi turned and turned, and turned again. When it stopped Luis had his money ready. He hurried her into the nearest bar and found a table at the back.
“From here we can watch who arrives,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” She took in the walls, curving inwards to form an arched roof, all beige with smoke and scratched with ten thousand names, messages, slogans; the bar, brown and battered; the clusters of garlic and fists of sausage hanging from the ceiling; and the customers, all talking, none listening. “And what do we do if a couple of gorillas from the Gestapo turn up?” she asked. A man who was thinking of something else brought them two glasses of wine and a saucer of bits of smoked ham, and went away.
“You are safe with me,” Luis said. “As you saw, I am not without influence at the German embassy.”
“Listen, I was safe before I met you.” She ate some ham. “Who the hell are you, anyway? Since you’re not the Count of Thingummy.”
“You seem very sure of that.” Luis stretched his legs, sucked in his cheeks and looked down his nose at the prawn shells littering the floor.
“Sure I’m sure. No Count of Thingummy would walk into a waiting-room, sit down among the peasants, and fill out a form. Right?”
Luis flared his nostrils a little and stored that information away for future use. “It was an alias,” he agreed. “My name is Luis Cabrillo. I am a representative of the International Red Cross, and we are trying to trace persons missing as a result of the recent hostilities.”
“Are you, now?” The information impressed her; she studied his face carefully. “Well, that’s certainly a very decent job to be doing. Damn decent.”
He bowed his head in acknowledgment. “And what brings you to Madrid, Señora Conroy?”
“If you’re going to be Luis, I’d better be Julie … Me, I work for the movies. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. We’ve got a lot of unfinished business in Europe since Hitler took over. Reels of film lying all over the place, that sort of thing. I’m trying to straighten it out.”
“You are American?”
“From California.”
“Ah …” Luis was enormously pleased: far from being a German (even an English-speaking German) she was an American, a genuine Hollywood American. It was the first time he had met anyone from California. Now he understood why she had astonished him at first sight: this was a Californian who worked for MGM! There was a gentle glow about her, a cool aura, like those publicity stills where they fogged the background to make the star stand out. He signaled for more wine.
“I still don’t see why the Germans should want to have you followed,” she said.
“Oh, they follow everybody, they are very suspicious people. You see, my work for the International Red Cross brings me in contact with other embassies. I dislike people interfering with my private life.”
Cigar smoke was beginning to turn the air a silky blue. It drifted in layers, like the ghosts of ancient banners. “What do they put in those things?” she asked. “Apart from bullshit, I mean.”
“Bullshit?” Luis repeated.
“Yes.” He still looked uncertain, so she explained: “Bullshit. The shit of bulls. Bovine dung. Cattle crap.”
“Ah!” Luis exclaimed. “Of course, bull-shit. Yes, I understand. As in horseshit. And chickenshit. Also dogshit.” He beamed his understanding. “All good fertilizer,” he said.
“Not bullshit. That does nothing any good. I should know, I’ve come across enough of it lately.”
“Here? In Madrid?”
“Everywhere. It seems to be Europe’s principal industry, since Hitler took over. You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?”
Luis narrowed his eyes, and probed the air with his outstretched fingers. “The linguistic concept is not unfamiliar,” he said, “although certain nuances—”
“Bullshit. And that’s a good example. The word has a special meaning for Americans, you see, Luis.” She fingered back her hair, dark as wine in the bottle; and when she looked up, her jaw curved to a clean, confident point. “Bullshit is blowing too hard, coming on too strong. Politicians bullshit at elections, right? Detroit bullshits about cars. Bullshit is ballyhoo. Horse-shit, on the other hand, is just bad news.”
“Horseshit on either hand has very little to commend it,” Luis observed gravely.
Julie turned her head sharply, almost fooled by his tone, and smiled. “You said it … Horseshit is lies, deliberate dirty, greedy, selfish lies. Most religion is horseshit. Chickenshit is different again. Chickenshit is God’s way of paying me back for saying religion is horseshit. Burned toast is chickenshit. Soap in your eyes is chickenshit. Menstruation is chickenshit.” She glanced at Luis.
“I know about menstruation,” he said. “I read about it in a book.”
“Yeah? And what did you think of it?”
Luis considered. “I thought it was not a very smart idea.”
“Well … even God made mistakes.”
Luis held his glass up to the light. The wine glowed like a stormy sunset. “You are very lovely,” he remarked.
Pause. “That’s horseshit, I think,” she said. “Or is it bullshit …?” She munched some more ham. “No, I was right first time, it’s horseshit. Nice try, though. You said it beautifully.”
Luis furrowed his brow and saddened his eyes in a show of concern which, he knew from experience, older Spanish women found touching. “Perhaps you are not the best judge of yourself,” he suggested.
“Oh, I think I’m gorgeous. But I also work for MGM, and MGM is in the loveliness business, so I know what I look like. My face rates above the back of a bus and below Rita Hay-worth’s stand-in. Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“You’re looking kind of haggard there. I thought maybe it was the booze.”
Luis erased the furrows from his brow and squared his shoulders. “If you don’t mind, Julie, I should like to move to another bar. It is still possible that German agents are watching this place. We can leave by a side door and thus evade them.”
She finished her wine, observing him over the rim of the glass. “Why don’t you just go out and chuck ’em through the nearest plate-glass window?” she asked. “That’s what MGM would do.”
“Have you ever seen anyone do it?” He put money on the table, and stood up. “I have. During our Civil War. I saw some people try to throw a man through a shop window. It was not easy, he kept bouncing off, those windows are tough. It took them a long time and I’m fairly sure that he was not alive when they finally succeeded.”
He led her to the side door.
“Whose side were they on?” she asked.
“I’m damned if I can remember.”
They went through some back-alleys, pungent with garbage-cans and purple with dusk, and into another cave-like bar.
“You never told me the special American meaning of dog-shit,” Luis said.
“Didn’t I?” Julie eased behind a table and looked up at the baffled, glassy stare of a bull’s-head mounted on the opposite wall. “Well, war is dogshit, Luis. That is all ye know and all ye need to know. Make sure they understand that in the … What did you say? … International Red Cross. Or whatever.”
Later, Luis offered to take her to dinner, but she refused. She went back to her hotel, which turned out to be the Bristol, and he went back to his apartment.
It had been a rich, full day and he was tired, yet he had difficulty getting to sleep. He got up and re-read some of the short stories of Ernest Hemingway. They were less satisfying the second time around. Hemingway, he noticed, was not very good at women. He was first-class at bull-fights, prizefights and big-game-hunting, but he kept women at arm’s-length; which seemed to Luis, in his curiously excited and fatigued condition, to be a waste of women. And therefore a waste of Hemingway too. At last he slept.
Chapter 17
After breakfast, Otto Krafft took Luis to Colonel Christian.
“Good kippers?” Christian asked.
“Fair. They were not oak-smoked,” Luis said. “The best kippers are oak-smoked, you know.”
“I didn’t know. What a waste of a noble tree. Dreadful stuff, fish. All those bones. Like booby-trapped chicken. One good thing about Madrid is it’s such a long way from the sea. Unlike Denmark, for instance. I once did six months in Copenhagen. Fish, fish, fish; I nearly died. I’m sure that if God meant us to eat fish, he would have made it taste like pork with apple sauce.”
“I like fish,” Luis said. “Especially oak-smoked kippers.”
“Depraved,” Christian said. “You must go to Copenhagen one day and indulge yourself. In the meantime, we have this mission to England to arrange.”
“The English like fish,” Krafft observed.
“In that case everyone should be very happy, because one of the things we shall want reports about is the British scale of rations. Do you know the Morse code, Mr. Cabrillo?”
“No.”
“Franz will teach you. Can you operate a radio set? Pick a lock? Use firearms? Take microphotographs? Tap a telephone?”
“No, none of those things.”
“Good, I prefer a man with an open mind. We shall stock it with our skills. In two weeks you will be a trained agent. Have you any talents which we should know about?”
Luis thought hard, while Christian riffled through his morning mail and Krafft wound his watch. Come on, come on, Luis thought, there must be some damned thing you can do … The more he searched his memory, the more he realized that his life amounted to fifteen or twenty lost jobs, a bit of snooping in the Civil War, a year wandering around with a donkey, and two years browsing the random pickings of English literature. Did it have the makings of a spy? Even a trainee spy? “I don’t know whether you’d call it a talent,” he began. Christian and Krafft looked politely interested. “People seem to like me,” he said.
They examined him for a moment, as if he were about to prove it by, for instance, waggling his ears.
“I don’t mean they like me very much,” he explained. “I mean I seem to get on with people quite easily. That can be useful when you want to, you know, make friends.”
“Ah,” Christian said.
“Not that I form any deep attachments as a result. It’s not a weakness, you see, it’s just a … a …”
“A facility,” Krafft suggested.
“Right.”
“And very nice too,” Christian said. “Is that the lot? Very well. You will spend this morning with Franz, forming a deep attachment with the Morse code. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” Luis said; but he paused on his way out. “Nobody around here ever says ‘Heil Hitler,’” he remarked.
Christian looked up at him, peering through shaggy eyebrows. “That’s not a weakness either,” he said. “It’s just a facility.”
For the next three hours Luis sat in a room in a remote corner of the embassy and tapped a Morse buzzer. Franz (whose other name was Werth) was dressed in plus-fours and a fawn cardigan. He still looked pudgy and diffident but he kept Luis working hard. Whenever Luis stretched or yawned, Franz made him run three times around the room. By eleven o’clock he had a rough-and-ready grasp of most of the alphabet, and they paused for coffee.
“You’ve done this before,” Luis said.
“True.” Franz dipped a biscuit and nibbled the soggy bit.
“And you’ve taught other agents? People who went to England?”
Franz blinked a good deal and licked a crumb off his lower lip. “Well, you’re not the first, are you?” he said. “The war’s been going on for two years, nearly.”
Luis played with the Morse key until Franz shuddered delicately and took it away from him. “What sort of luck have the others had?” he asked.
“What do you mean by ‘luck’?”
“I suppose I mean …” Luis cracked a few knuckles. A fly buzzed overhead and he followed its course until his head would turn no more. “Damn. You know very well what I mean. How many got caught?”
“No idea.” Franz tidied the coffee things away and put the Morse buzzers back in place. “I’m not told that sort of information, it’s not necessary.”
“I suppose it would be foolish to pretend that nobody gets caught.”
“Foolish and dangerous. All wars are much the same, you know. I believe that during the ’14–’18 war about half of all spies were captured as soon as they entered the enemy country.”
“About half,” Luis whispered. He sat hunched over the table, fingers gently bound, his smooth, sad face staring at nothing.
“And half were not,” Franz added brightly. He gave the key a brisk, preliminary work-out. “At least, not immediately. Now then, remember to keep the wrist poised but not stiff …”
By midday Luis was sending and receiving very simple messages. His wrist ached and his ears were sick of the probing, peg-legged buzz, but Franz went on and on. Patiently and slowly he tapped out yet another little stream of easy words: How big is new gun?
Luis slumped and stared at the writing on his message-pad. His mind refused to suggest an answer. “It’s no good,” he said. “I’m too bloody hungry.”
“Fine,” Franz told him. “Send that.”
Grimly, Luis took hold of the buzzer and pecked out his reply.
“‘Broody’?” Franz inquired. “What is this word ‘broody’? Please repeat.”
Luis clenched his teeth and thumped the buzzer again. Franz scanned what he had written and nodded. “Ah, bloody,” he said, “I see, you are bloody hangry. Is that right? Are you hangry?”
“Yes,” Luis said furiously. “And no.”
“Please repeat.”
Yet again Luis laboriously spelled out his last, desperate signal. Franz studied the message and smiled. “I expect you are ready for lunch,” he said. Luis grunted.
As they walked along corridors to the embassy diningroom, Franz said: “There’s a lesson to be learned from all that, you know.”
“Yes? What?”
“If an agent wants to eat, he must first send his signals. And not broody hangry signals, either.”
*
After lunch, Otto took charge of Luis. They went to the embassy doctor and Luis was given a long and thorough medical examination. The man weighed and measured him, tested his eye sight and hearing, checked his temperature and the state of his teeth, established that he was free from infectious disease, took samples of blood and urine, X-rayed his lungs and recorded his blood pressure. That much Luis understood. Other tests, involving a lot of cold steel equipment placed against var
ious parts of his body, lasted a further twenty minutes and meant nothing to him. Finally, while he was still naked, a photographer arrived, set up a tripod and took a dozen pictures. “Hold your chin up and give me a nice smile,” the photographer said.
“I also croon and tap-dance a little,” Luis said.
“You can put your clothes on now,” Otto told him.
“What’s the point of all this? I’m not applying for a life-insurance policy. Quite the opposite.”
“We find it helps to know the state of your health.” Otto picked up the doctor’s little rubber hammer and began tapping himself, on the knee, the ankle, the shin. “You could be dying from something incurable, couldn’t you? And obviously that would have influenced your motives. It might have affected your performance, too.”
“I’ve got Quixote’s Disease,” Luis said. “That’s usually fatal.”
Otto glanced at the doctor, who shook his head and went on putting away his equipment.
“It’s all in your own interest, anyway,” Otto said. “Suppose you needed spectacles, or a hearing aid? You don’t want to go searching for medical treatment in England, do you?” He rapped himself on the skull, first cautiously, then more resolutely.
“One tooth requires a small filling,” the doctor said. “Dr. Graumann will do it tomorrow at three.”
“There you are, you see? We have just saved you from torture at the hands of some brutal British dentist.” Otto located his breastbone and tested it.
“Why the photographs?” Luis asked.
“In case we have to get you some special clothing in an emergency. Military uniform, clerical dress, that sort of thing. The tailor likes to know what you look like.”
“Next time I’ll comb my pubic hair.”
“You can wear a spotted bow in it, for all we care. Results are what matter here.” Otto struck himself wristily on the point of his left elbow, and exclaimed loudly. “By God, that hurts!” he told the doctor.
“Pain is nature’s way of telling us to stop hitting ourselves with other people’s hammers,” the doctor said. He removed the hammer.
Luis finished tying his laces. “I take it, then, that I’m not in a state of decay,” he said.
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