Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  “You took my letter. It’s probably in your briefcase now.”

  “You may well be right. I have a great number of letters in my briefcase, most of which I collected from my bank in Lisbon. I haven’t even looked at them yet, but if yours is amongst them, Mr. … uh …”

  “Cabrillo.”

  “Mr. Cabrillo, then either it’s an order for three dozen meat cleavers, or the bank has made a mistake.”

  He smiled, took a handkerchief from his cuff, and blew his nose. Bruno got bored and went and sprawled in a corner.

  Luis began to feel the rot of uncertainty eat into him. “What were you doing in Lisbon?” he asked.

  “Business. C.A.P. stands for Cozinha, Agricultura e Pesca. Cooking, farming and fishing. Each involves cutting things down or cutting things up. We supply the cutters. May I ask what you were doing in Lisbon, Mr. …” He tapped his forehead to bring the name back. “Sorry. Cabrillo.”

  “You have my hat. Why did you take my hat?”

  It sounded like a silly question, a simpleminded question. For a split second Luis’s brain faltered and he couldn’t remember why his hat mattered. He realized that he was very tired; he wanted to sit down, better yet to lie down; but he dared not move from the center of this room. His clothes clung to him. He noticed that his right trouser leg was still tucked inside his sock. The lights seemed painfully bright.

  “You’re bleeding,” the man said. “Have you hurt yourself?”

  Luis remembered his finger and held it up. The end was slippery with blood. “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “It may be nothing to you but it’s making a nasty mess of my carpet,” the man said. It was true: there were red drops soaking into the gray pile. “You stay there,” he said, and trotted up an open staircase leading to the floor above, “I really don’t know what you’re doing here,” he said as he went, “but we can’t let you go around like that.”

  Luis held his palm underneath his finger to catch the drips, and yawned. He felt dreadful. If this man looked in his briefcase, found the letter and gave it back, the only course would be to apologize and agree that the bank had made a mistake, which was probably the case. The black hat meant nothing; quite possibly this man had lost a black hat, once, and when the bank said … Luis yawned again and looked at the display of weapons all around him. That was another thing: the fellow had had plenty of chance to grab a hatchet and brain him. Instead of which here he was, walking carefully downstairs so as not to spill the hot water on his tray of cut-finger treatments. “Stay, Bruno,” he growled as the dog raised its head. “You should have told me about that finger,” he said, “I’m not terribly concerned about the carpet, but …” He put down the tray and picked up the hot water. “No, it’s not for you,” he told Bruno. “He hasn’t been fed yet,” he said. “My fault. Now then, let’s get the dirt out.”

  Luis held his finger straight and braced himself for the sting of iodine. Only a sudden tightening of the man’s fingertips, and a sharp whiff of something harsher than iodine, saved Luis’s eyes. He ducked as the contents of the bowl were hurled where his face had been. The stink of ammonia fouled the air.

  The man was halfway up the stairs before Luis recovered and gave chase. Bruno charged after them both, baying deafen-ingly. Luis lashed out at the dog with his leg and missed. The man had disappeared when he got to the top but he heard a key rattle in a lock and flung himself at the door. It banged open and smashed the man in the face. He let out a croak of pain and staggered back. Luis barged in and grabbed for him, but Bruno, still baying hard, galloped between Luis’s legs and he fell over.

  The man ran to a metal desk. He was shouting something, an appeal or a threat, it was impossible to say which: he was gasping for breath and blood was splattering from his nose. Luis began heaving himself up as Bruno, in full, hoarse cry, completed a lap of the desk and collided with him and knocked him down again. By the time Luis had shoved the great hound aside, the man was dragging out desk drawers in a desperate search for something.

  A terrible dread of what that something might be gave Luis a fresh burst of energy. The man dodged away from him, blood falling in a long, broken dribble, and seized a deep wooden tray, loaded with papers. As Luis closed in he flailed the tray with furious speed from side to side. Papers flew everywhere and the tray cracked Luis’s knuckles. He roared. Bruno welcomed the competition and barked more thunderously than ever. As Luis backed away from the flailing tray, Bruno leaped up and tried to lick his face. Luis staggered under the weight and the man flung a glass inkpot. It struck just above the right eye, on the bone. The clammy fire of pain raged through his head.

  For a second or two Luis was senseless. When Bruno’s racket penetrated his brain it had a hysterical edge which kept repeating itself like a duplicate shriek. His head cleared and he saw that the man was on his knees, cursing, trying to force a very small key into the lock of a desk drawer. His fingers were wet with blood. It was a double nightmare now: Luis could see the key slipping and stumbling while his own body, drained of strength, refused to move. At last the key turned, the drawer was yanked out and dumped. The man gave a cry of despair which was straight from the jungle. Luis gaped. Bruno galloped joyously up and down the room, skidding on the turns. The man groped for the last desk drawer.

  Luis watched him tug at the handle and felt himself hamstrung by fear. Then the drawer moved an inch, and Luis moved too, lurching forward as if wading. There was a big typewriter on the desk. He got both hands on it, raised it shoulder-high, and swung it at the man’s bowed head. The machine crashed against his ear and knocked him sprawling until his knuckles touched the wall. He lay still, only the blood from his nostrils moving. After a while that stopped too.

  Luis sat on the floor and rested his head on the desk. It was very quiet. He wondered why, and looked up. Bruno saw him look, and came padding across the room. Luis blinked into the dog’s eyes. He was carrying something in his mouth, a gift. Luis let him drop it in his hand. It was the glass inkpot. Bruno’s ears pricked and he gave one soft bark. He wanted Luis to throw it for him. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Luis muttered.

  Bruno recognized the tone of voice. His ears drooped and he went away to sniff the bloody face by the wall.

  When he felt strong enough, Luis crawled over there too. The man was dead; already the blood on his lips and chin was turning black and crusty. Luis crawled back to the desk. He and Bruno looked inside the last drawer. It contained a telephone. “Oh Jesus,” Luis moaned. He had murdered a man who had simply been trying to call for help. It had all been a huge, appalling blunder. He tugged the drawer all the way out. Lying behind the telephone was an automatic pistol, a Luger. It was fully loaded. Luis closed his eyes and sagged with relief.

  He took Bruno for a walk and found the bathroom. He stripped naked and washed off all the dust and sweat, the dirt and oil and blood. His finger began bleeding again, and there was a long cut over his eye. He found a medicine cabinet and stuck plaster dressings on the cuts. His right knee was swollen from the bicycle collision. Bruno licked it.

  They padded into the bedroom. Luis got into fresh socks and underwear and put on a dressing gown. The other room was a kitchen, where he rewarded himself with a large brandy. Then back to the office.

  The brandy turned out to have been a wise precaution. The first shock came when he searched the body and discovered that the dead man’s name was Krafft. Alfred Krafft. Luis covered the lower half of the face and squinted at the eyes. Now that he knew what to look for, the likeness was unmistakable. Those were Otto Krafft’s eyes. Good God Almighty.

  Alfred Krafft’s filing cabinets produced the second shock. One of them was half-full of carbon copies of intelligence reports. They were addressed to “Tomcat” in Madrid, and they were signed “Eagle.”

  Luis made himself a couple of sandwiches, brought the brandy bottle, and read everything that Eagle had ever written. Bruno lay beside him, his massive head on his lap. One of the most recent reports was al
l about the British light-alloy industry and how well it was doing, especially in Scotland. Luis groaned. Bruno cocked an eye, in case he needed help.

  So that was what it was all about. Luis heaved a sigh, and drank what was left in his glass in a toast to the sprawled corpse. Bad luck, Alfred. And bad luck, Otto.

  There was an electric fire. Luis hung his suit in front of it to dry and stared at the glowing bars. He felt drowsy, so he went to sleep in Alfred Krafft’s bed. It was three in the morning when he awoke. The rain had stopped. He shaved with Alfred’s razor but drew the line at using Alfred’s toothbrush. There was a yellow-and-blue bruise fattening one end of his forehead.

  His suit wasn’t completely dry, but it was dry enough. He cooked himself some eggs, and fed Bruno out of various boxes of dogfood. Alfred Krafft’s raincoat was too small but it was better than nothing. Luis stuffed his dirty socks and underwear in the pockets. He collected the Abwehr letter and the big black hat from Alfred’s briefcase, and wedged the front door open.

  Still there was something he had overlooked. Luis stood in the doorway and patiently, carefully worked it out. Money. He had no money. He went back upstairs and cleaned out Alfred’s wallet. Already the body was as stiff and cold as soap.

  The bicycle was where he had left it. He dried the saddle with his handkerchief, tucked his right trouser-leg into Alfred’s sock, and pedaled away. Bruno cantered happily alongside until Luis stopped and ordered him back. The hound wrinkled its huge brow, sat in the road, and miserably watched him go. Luis felt sorry for Bruno, so sorry that there were tears in his eyes.

  He rode downhill until he reached the river, and then rode alongside it until he found a bridge. He pedaled across the bridge, heading south. There was no other traffic. The first signpost he met said that Aveiro was 68 kilometers away. He reckoned that it would be safer to catch a train from Aveiro than from Oporto. It took him four hours to get to Aveiro. The bicycle ended up leaning against a wall near the station, where he was fairly sure it would soon be stolen again. He was in Lisbon by noon.

  Chapter 56

  “Well, I thought you were dead,” Julie said.

  “That’s funny. So did I.”

  He watched her cooking ham and eggs. There was an uncontrollable tremble in his right hand. He wondered whether he would be able to hold his knife. It would look silly if he had to ask her to cut up his food.

  “I had to go to Oporto,” he said.

  She looked over her shoulder. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I hope the weather was nice.”

  “Not very nice. It poured with rain. I got wet.”

  She put the ham and eggs on a plate.

  “You didn’t miss anything,” he said.

  She put the plate in front of him and took a close look at the dramatic bruise over his right eye. “Looks as if something didn’t miss you,” she said.

  Luis began eating. He was ravenous. “All a bit complicated,” he mumbled. “I met this man at the bank and he went to Oporto and we had a fight.” His hand kept losing its grip on his knife. He gave the fingers a puzzled look. “Something wrong there,” he said.

  She took the knife and cut up his food. “I thought you might telephone.”

  Luis sat with his shoulders slumped and watched her work. “Telephone,” he said. There was a good reason why he hadn’t telephoned, but his brain had mislaid it. “You’ll never guess who it was,” he told her.

  “Damn right I won’t. So who was it?”

  He began eating again. The dead man’s name retreated as fast as his memory advanced on it. After a while he shook his head. “Can’t remember,” he said.

  Julie sat on the other side of the kitchen table and watched him carefully. “What can you remember?” she asked.

  Luis stabbed his fork into some egg and pronged a bit of ham. “We had a fight,” he said, nodding and frowning. He put the ham and egg into his mouth and chewed. “Long fight.”

  “And in the end?”

  “In the end …” He swallowed. “That’s right. I killed him with a typewriter.”

  Julie hid her face in her hands. After a while she looked up. “You killed him?” she said. “I mean, dead?”

  Luis nodded. “I had to.”

  “You mean you hit him with a typewriter and …”

  Again he nodded. “I had to. You see, he was going for his telephone.”

  He looked into her eyes for a long moment. “That can’t be right,” he said. “Can it?”

  “Oh, Luis …” She reached across and took his hand.

  “I can’t eat any more,” he said. “I’m sorry.” His right hand was trembling more violently than ever. She helped him into the bedroom, helped him take off his clothes, helped him get into bed. She closed the curtains and went out. Five minutes later, when she looked in, he was asleep.

  *

  Otto Krafft looked dreadful. For a man who had always been so trim and chipper, the change was almost shocking. His eyes looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week, he had no appetite, and his nerves were a mess. “Look, old chap, you obviously can’t carry on like this,” Richard Fischer told him. “Go and see the doctor, for God’s sake.”

  Brigadier Christian noticed his changed condition, too. “What’s the trouble, Krafft?” he asked. “Off your food, or something?”

  “No, sir. I don’t know, sir.” Otto’s thumbs fretted against his forefingers. He looked thoroughly wretched.

  “Well, I don’t want you going around in that state. You make me feel tired. Why don’t you take a couple of days off?”

  Otto chewed his lip. “I was just going to ask you if I might, sir.”

  “Take a week. Get up in the mountains, do a bit of ski-ing. Hartmann can handle your work. Go on, get out of this dump.” Christian watched him trail out. “Overwork,” he said to himself happily. He liked to see his staff trying too hard.

  *

  Luis slept the clock around. It was midafternoon by the time he had bathed and shaved and dressed, so he and Julie went out to have something to eat in one of the spacious tea rooms in the fashionable Rua Garrett, where the settees were comfortably cushioned and the waitresses were dressed in black and white like maids in an English stately home. Luis was hungry. They ordered hot sausage-rolls, pancakes with preserves, and pastries.

  Julie was wearing a new dress of gray silk. It made every other woman in the room seem lumpy. Luis enjoyed looking at her.

  “Listen, Luis,” she said, pouring tea, “just give me the bare facts. Don’t try and gussy it up. The bare facts are bound to be crazy enough anyway.”

  He described what had happened at the bank and how he had followed Alfred Krafft to Oporto. He told her about the bicycle, the room full of sharp edges, Bruno, the ammonia, the chase, the fight, the typewriter. “The silly part about it is that I never wanted to hurt him,” he said. “If only he had explained, we could have arranged something, I’m sure of it. But when he threw the ammonia, I had no choice. As it was he damn near got his hands on the gun before I hit him.”

  “So far, so bad,” Julie said. “Now tell me what he could have explained. And keep it simple.”

  “Oh, this was very simple. Alfred Krafft is related to Otto Krafft. You met Otto at the German embassy. Brothers, probably. When Otto saw how much money Eldorado was making, he reckoned there was room for two in this business, so he invented an agent called Eagle. Alfred was already in Oporto, running his little shop, so Alfred became Eagle, just like me.”

  “Wait a minute … Otto didn’t get this idea from you?”

  “Certainly not. He still thinks Eldorado and company are in England. Otto dreamed up his swindle all on his own.”

  “Coincidence.”

  Luis shrugged. “We both saw the same way to milk the Abwehr, that’s all. Actually, the Krafft brothers had a far better system, because Otto could write to Alfred and tell him what to put in his reports. I saw the letters.”

  “That’s sweet,” Julie murmured. “Sweet and neat and foolproof. So what
went wrong?”

  “One of Eagle’s reports contradicted one of Garlic’s reports. When Christian heard about that, he ordered them to meet—in Manchester, for some reason—and straighten out the confusion.”

  “Oh my God,” Julie said. “Poor old Otto must have filled his pants.”

  “Yes, he must. If he sent the order, Garlic would report that Eagle had failed to keep the rendezvous, and that would be the end of Eagle.”

  “But he had to send the order.”

  “Yes. And as soon as he’d sent it, he telephoned Alfred in Oporto, told him to get the first train to Lisbon and intercept that letter before my man Stork turned up from the Spanish embassy to collect it and send it on to London.”

  Julie shook her head. “That was pretty damn desperate, wasn’t it?”

  “It only seems desperate to us because we know better. All Alfred knew was what Otto had told him: that the letter was going to be claimed from the bank by someone who worked for the Spanish embassy.”

  “I still think it was a hell of a gamble.”

  “Maybe. But what would you have done?”

  Julie sipped her tea.

  “And look at it this way,” Luis went on. “Suppose they’d succeeded. Suppose Alfred stole the letter and therefore Garlic never heard about the rendezvous. Then Eagle could safely report that Garlic failed to appear.”

  “Eagle would be in the clear,” Julie said, “and Eldorado would be in the soup.”

  “It was worth the risk.”

  He ate several sausage-rolls and a couple of pancakes.

  “What now?” Julie asked. “Will you tell Charles Templeton?”

  “I think not,” Luis said. “He would have to inform London. The British intercepted an Abwehr signal about Eagle. I don’t want the Abwehr to intercept a British signal about Cabrillo. No, let’s keep it a secret.”

  “It won’t be a secret in Madrid. They’re going to know that Eagle’s disappeared.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” Luis brightened. “Look, maybe I can help them. Suppose Garlic reports, via Eldorado, that Eagle kept the rendezvous but that he seemed very depressed and he talked of suicide. How’s that?”