Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  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 signaled 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.”

  Chapter 21

  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 attachés 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. Marvelous 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 toweling 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 toward 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 toward 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 tentpeg.

  “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 t
he 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 windowsill 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.”

  “Right now young Victor is on his way to the Luftwaffe arctic weather station in northern Norway with my boot up his backside to remind him to keep his mouth shut in future.” Christian glowered at Luis, turned away, and seemed briefly to be overwhelmed by an excess of energy: he seized his desk and manhandled it through a half-circle, spilling papers and dumping it with a crash that made Luis blink. “Idiot furniture,” he muttered. “I haven’t decided what to do with you, Cabrillo. There’s no room in the Abwehr for comedians. War is not a joke.”

  “Who said I was joking?” Luis asked.

  There was a silence while the colonel looked at his scattered papers. “You had better explain,” he said without enthusiasm.

  “My information is that Germany intends to attack Russia,” Luis said. “You must understand that I have friends in other embassies.” He swung his legs up onto the sill and stretched out on his back with his knees up. “The report originally came from the Japanese embassy in London, but it has since been independently confirmed by the Swedish embassy in Rome and the Swiss embassy in Ankara.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The American embassy in Lisbon.” Luis scrubbed at the window with the curtain. “These need cleaning, you know,” he said. “You can’t see across the street.”

  Christian sniffed, picked up his papers and worried them into shape. “I think you’re all piss and wind, Cabrillo,” he said.

  “If you don’t believe me, go and ask them yourself.”

  Christian straightened his desk-set.

  “You too have contacts inside those embassies, I take it?” Luis asked.

  “Listen, Cabrillo.” Christian came over, lips grimly compressed, eyes unblinking, demanding full attention. “You’re in deep trouble. The only way you can save yourself now is by going back to your embassy friends and getting definite proof, written corroboration. Not just your word, that’s worth sweet nothing. I want proof, I want it fast, and I want—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Luis propped himself on his elbows and pushed his head toward the colonel. “You don’t have anybody inside those embassies, do you? So I’m not in trouble. You’re in trouble. That means I don’t have to do anything. So I’m not going to do anything.”

  “Oh yes you are. You’re not in Spain, Cabrillo. This embassy is German territory and you’ll damn well do what we tell you.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Luis said amiably, “why don’t you do what I tell you? Why don’t you report to Berlin that you deliberately allowed this information to circulate here in the embassy in order to identify a member of the Abwehr who was leaking stuff to Spanish Intelligence? That way, Berlin’s cable simply confirms your suspicions, and now you can tell Berlin that you’ve got rid of the bad apple.”

  “Who? Victor?” Christian scoffed, but it was a thoughtful scoff.

  “You also put the blame onto Spanish Intelligence for trying to infiltrate the Abwehr in the first place.”

  “That’s too much for anyone to swallow. We have already thoroughly infiltrated them.” For the first time, Christian’s face relaxed. He almost smiled.

  “Of course you have. How else could you have known about this leak? So there’s nothing to worry about. Especially as you can assure Berlin that you have doublechecked the Russian-invasion story, and it’s true.”

  The colonel slowly went back to his desk. He pulled up his chair, and slumped in it so that his chin was pressed against his chest. “Is it true?” he asked.

  “For the love of God,” Luis said flatly, “why should I lie to you?”

  Christian sighed, and heaved his feet onto the desk. “Why you should lie, I don’t know, but you damn well did lie, didn’t you? You lied to Victor.”

  “But that was your idea!” Luis jumped off the windowsill and flung his arms wide. Christian’s eyebrows flickered. “Don’t you remember?” Luis cried. “You told me! In this very room! You told me you didn’t want me to get out of practice! So I went straight off and arranged that little deception.”

  “It didn’t have to involve me,” Christian complained.

  Luis let his arms collapse. “But then you would never have known that I’d done it,” he said.

  Christian stared at him for a long time, so long that Luis had to breathe deeply to keep his shoulders from slumping. When at last the German spoke, Luis scarcely heard him. “Go away,” Christian whispered. “Go away.”

  Luis went away. He shut the door carefully and silently. The long corridor was empty. He tiptoed down it, lengthened his stride, began bounding, running and then let everything go and sprinted flat out. He burst through the revolving doors at the end of the corridor like a boy out of school and fetched up against a wall, sobbing with laughter and gasping for breath.

  An office door opened, and a man with a mouth like a geological fault stared his disapproval. Luis slid down the wall, sat on a bucket of sand and stared back, panting. “No good waiting there,” he said. “Last bus went by ten minutes ago.” The man sniffed and went inside.

  Luis stood up and dusted the seat of his trousers. “All just sand,” he murmured dreamily. “Even when you capture it, what have you got? More sand. Bloody silly.”

  Chapter 22

  The sunset was flame-pink, lightly brushed with streaks of white which bore softly feathered edges, as if fanned by the dying heat of the sun. The white streaks became tinged with blue as they spread up into the arc of the sky, and the blue darkened to an indigo hugeness above the opposite horizon. It was a moment when you could turn your head from the assembling of night to the disintegration of day and back again, and find a new star pin-pricking the darkness. Julie Conroy turned her head once again and watched the flickering of swallows under and around the wide eaves of the courtyard where she and Luis were sitting. The birds were nesting up there, and their sharp wings and pointed tails came and went like su
dden scratches on cine-film, along with a constant conversation of squeaks and squeals.

  “You know, this sherry isn’t bad,” she said. “It’s not as good as booze but it isn’t as bad as for instance kerosene.”

  “I hope you’re not becoming kind-hearted,” Luis warned. He took her hand, and they linked fingers. “I don’t think I could stand that. If you start being kind-hearted, I shall start being gentlemanly.”

  “You already did. Back in the hotel bedroom, you were a perfectly gentle man. Surely you haven’t forgotten?”

  Luis adjusted his tie and cleared his throat. “Was I?” he asked. “How humiliating. That was supposed to be a flood of ungovernable desire, savage and insatiable.”

  “What?” She squeezed his fingers until he looked at her. “Did you just make that up?”

  “No. I saw it outside a cinema.”

  “Ah … Well, you were all that, too, of course.”

  “Good.”

  “Yes, I thought so.”

  She smiled at him with such open pleasure that he smiled back. “Well, that’s all right then,” he said.

  “Yes indeed.” She squeezed his fingers. “I told you it was worth waiting for.”

  Luis had gone to her hotel straight from the embassy. On the way there he bought a very large bunch of flowers, tulips, and the hotel receptionist, flustered by a sudden flurry of business, had mistaken him for a florist’s deliveryman and sent him up to Mrs. Conroy’s room. “Hello,” she said when he arrived. “Are those for me?” She kissed him. “I’ve been thinking about you …” She kept her arms around his neck and looked at his mouth. “I couldn’t remember what your teeth look like, it’s been driving me mad, show me.” He showed her his teeth. “Yes, of course,” she murmured. “Absolutely perfect. Have you been swimming? I smell chlorine.”

  “You haven’t changed a bit since yesterday,” Luis said. “Not a bit.”

  “There’s something we ought to decide,” she told him. “It’s been worrying me all day.” She chewed her lip.