The Eldorado Network (24 page)

'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. They 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 towards 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 double-checked 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 window sill 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.'

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 sudden 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 delivery-man and sent him up to Mrs Conroy's room. 'Hullo,'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.

'What is it?'

She swung her head up and looked him full in the eyes. 'Sex,' she said.

'Oh. Yes, I see.' He nodded thoughtfully. For the last two years he had got along without a sexual companion. This announcement was something of a shock. Like discovering a forgotten bank account with a healthy balance. 'I suppose we ought perhaps to do something about that, some day.'

'That's the point. If we're in love, then we can't avoid making decisions. I mean, if we don't ever go to bed, that's a decision too.'

'Of course.' The more Luis thought about that sort of decision, the less he liked it. His interest swung strongly in the opposite direction; then, with instinctive caution, it swung back again. 'Naturally, one does not wish to rush into a hasty commitment, either,' he said.

'Damn right,' she agreed. 'I make it a strict rule never to jump into the sack without thinking first.'

'After all, we have our whole lives ahead of us.'

'Exactly,' She gave him a swift kiss. 'So what I suggest is we wait five minutes and then, provided we both still feel the same . . . Okay?'

'Excellent solution,' Luis said. 'It combines moderation with initiative. Excellent.'

So it turned out. They shared the hotel's enormous bed for some considerable time, and later they shared its vast bath. Now, as the day died splendidly in the west, they drank palo cortado sherry, dark yet dry, in the courtyard of a restaurant which was so hard to find that Luis was confident no Germans would arrive.

'I know very little about you, Mrs Conroy,' he said. 'Tell me something. How about Mr Conroy, for instance?'

'Yes, how about old Harry?' She made a face. 'What a pain he turned out to be, Harry Conroy sold more aspirin than the Great War and the common cold put together . . . You want to know about my family? I'll tell you the story of great-uncle Eli, the famous American guide and explorer. He got snowed-up leading three men through the Alleghany mountains during the winter of 1874, ran out of food, had to eat the customers. Celebrated case. Old Eli nearly got himself hanged over that.'

'Indeed? For murder or for cannibalism?'

'Neither. Election-tampering, that was the charge. All three men were Ohio Democrats, and the Democrats were pretty thin in Ohio that year.'

'Your great-uncle was a Republican?'

'Hell, no. My people always voted Democrat. Old Eli said himself, when he gave evidence, he said he could never have eaten a Republican, not even to save his life. Said he simply couldn't stomach the taste, it made him sick just to think about it. Powerful speech. Won him a lot of support from the jury. Not enough, but a lot.'

'They found him guilty, then.'

'Sure. Convicted, sentenced, reprieved by the Governor.'

'Who was also a Democrat.'

'No, he was a Republican. Said he couldn't find it in his conscience to hang a man who had set such a fine example to his fellow-Americans.'

'I don't believe a word of all that.'

'Well, that's where you make a big mistake, Luis, because some of it's true. The bit about old Eli never eating Republicans, that's true. Anyway . . . what do I know about you? Come on, tell me something about the Cabrillos.'

Luis stretched his legs and rested his neck against the cool wicker chair. The effect of the sherry was mingling with the pleasant fatigue left by love-making, and gently dissolving it. 'I shall tell you how the Cabrillo family came to be elevated to a position of power and influence by the Spanish monarchy,' he decided.

'Bullshit. I looked you up in Who's Who in Spain, Luis, and you're not there.'

He turned his head slightly and glanced at her through confident, half-lidded eyes. 'Nobody who is anybody in Spain is listed in Who's Who, Julie. One does not seek to . . .' He frowned slightly as he found the word and expelled it '. . . advertise.'

'Hey, that's good. That's terrific,' she said.

'It was in the year . . . Well, never mind the year, it was long ago and the armies of the Moors were attacking Madrid. In fact they were drawn up behind the Palacio Real. The park is still known as the Campo del Moro.'

'I've seen it. Very pretty fountains.'

'A recent addition. The Moors were led by a brilliant general, the Emir Ali ben Yusuf ben Texfin.'

'Flare your nostrils again.'

'Pay attention. And the king of Spain placed the command of his crack troops, the Guardia Civil, in the hands of an unknown lieutenant, Juan Eduardo Joaquin Cabrillo.'

'Lovely flaring. Real arrogance.'

'So young Cabrillo assembled the Guardia Civil. "Forty thousand fanatical Moors threaten Madrid," he said to them, "and only you can save it." '

'MGM could use that line.'

'Then he told them to take off their hats and turn up the brims at the back. "Now that we have our backs to the wall," he said, "our hats must not get in the way." And that is why, to this very day, the Guardia Civil wear those peculiar, varnished hats which they call "dust-shovels", turned up at the back.'

'Who won?' she asked.

Luis sighed. 'You Americans . . . Obsessed with results. Never thinking of style, of manners ...'

'I guess your guys must've won. Otherwise nowadays Madrid would look like an audition for The Desert Song.' She ran her finger along Luis's jawline and tipped his head back so that he looked hawk like and haughty. 'Maybe not, though. Maybe it was a stand-off. You have a touch of the Arab in you, Luis.'

'Well, there is a family tradition that the beautiful daughter of Ali ben Yusuf one day saw Juan Eduardo Joaquin through a telescope and fell in love and got into his tent that night, and they lived happily ever after until shortly before dawn, when she had to go home for breakfast.'

Julie moistened her lips. 'All this talk of food . . . Do they sell any grub here?'

'They serve an excellent gazpacho.'

'That doesn't scare me. I'll take it on my forehand, and you can cut off the volleys at the net.'

They went inside and ate a long, leisurely dinner of gazpacho, herb omelettes and green salad, fruit, and a keen, firm cheese from Navarre. They drank Chacoli, a brisk and bubbly wine from the Basque country, and topped it all with Benedictine and black coffee. As he paid the bill, Luis knew that he could afford to do this sort of thing every night and still save half his income from the embassy. He felt enormously accomplished: he was regularly employed, the work was challenging, the rewards could only get better, and here beside him, touching his hand, was the most exciting woman in Madrid. The future looked golden. He drained his Benedictine, and as the last drops trickled down his throat he realised, with a slight jolt, that he was a little drunk: the glass in his fingers was blurred, the colours of the room were too soft. He blinked hard, and the golden future came into sharp focus. In a week and a bit, his training would be over. Soon the Germans would send him out to spy for them. Then he would be alone, hunted, always in danger. This, now, was just a holiday.