The Eldorado Network (38 page)

Julie let the taxi drive away while she thought about tactics. Antonio da Silva sounded like a smooth crook. What would be the best approach? Her imagination revived a string of scenes from 'B' movies. They all involved a lot of leg and a lot of cigar smoke and a lot of saxophone on the soundtrack. Not much use in this sunny, healthy setting. She gave up and went in.

Everything the nurse behind the reception desk had on was starched, including her expression. She creaked when she looked up.

'Doctor da Silva?'Julie said. 'Antonio da Silva, that is.'

'Senhor da Silva,' the nurse corrected. 'Your name?' Her accent was good.

Julie gave her name. The nurse made a telephone call and had a short, rapid conversation in Portuguese. 'Please sit,' she said.

Julie sat.

Nothing happened for fifteen minutes.

The reception area was small and bare. The nurse had some kind of work to do: sorting file cards. Otherwise, only the clock moved.

'Did Senhor da Silva say how long?' Julie asked.

The nurse gave a small, stiff smile.

Another ten minutes of nothing happened. Julie began to worry about the ,time: nearly ten o'clock, and her bags were still at the pensao. This was crazy. The sane thing to do was to get up and walk out. Forget Britain. Go home, while you still can. The guy's not worth crossing the street for. He's a bum, a mercenary bum. Get up now and walk out.

The clock reached ten, and it was the nurse that got up and walked out. She took her handbag and gave Julie a starched half-glance. Off to the ladies' room.

Julie gave her ten seconds' lead and followed. Short corridor, empty. First door on the right revealed a broom cupboard. Second door was a laundry store. Julie moved on, then went back to the store and took a white coat. The sleeves crackled as her arms thrust into them.

Next was a set of double-doors. She pushed them open, walked past some nurses chattering in Portuguese, and went through more double-doors into a broad corridor. The air had the aromatic, disciplined smell of all hospital wards.

The first three rooms were closed. In the fourth she saw a man sitting in a wheelchair. His hands, feet and head were bandaged. She stopped, and he smiled.

'Fax favor,' she said. 'Senhor da Silva?'

'Funny you should say that.' He brightened up even more. 'I mean, I was one of the lucky ones, right?' He was English, from somewhere north, like Yorkshire.

'I'm looking for a man named da Silva,' she said.

'Take poor old George,' he went on happily. 'Silly bugger couldn't swim. Didn't stand a chance, did he? Yours truly knew how to swim, though.' He chuckled warmly.

'Da Silva,' she said. 'He's not a doctor.'

'No, you got to look on the bright side, haven't you? Look on the bright side, I always say.'

He gave a most intense grin. Julie realised that he was blind. His eyes were milkily opaque, unfocusing. She felt helplessly sorry. For some seconds there was silence, while he kept up his strenuous grin.

'Goodbye,' she said; stupidly.

'Funny you should say that,' he answered.

She left, quickly and quietly, walked to the end of the corridor, and took the staircase to the next floor. This was an open ward, and busy. Julie hesitated, looked around for an alternative, and saw the name A. da Silva on a door. What luck! She knocked, tried the handle, and had to use her weight to make the door move. A sigh of cold air slid past her, followed by the tang of chemicals. Inside, a man was bending over a marble slab; she saw a pair of naked feet with a label tied to a big toe.

'Senhor da Silva?' she said.

'Sim.' He paused with his hands resting on the corpse. He didn't look like a smooth crook. He looked like Julie's headmaster in high school: stocky, middle-aged, with a square, intelligent face and a permanent expression of slightly amused surprise. 'Feehe a porta, senhora, faz favor.'

'I'm sorry?' She began to have serious misgivings about the whole damn thing.

'Close the door. Please.'

'Oh, sure.' Of course: to keep the cold in. 'I'm Mrs Conroy. Douglas Evans gave me your name. The journalist . . .'Julie moved forward and caught a glimpse of the body. At once she looked away. Oh Christ, she prayed, don't let me faint.

'Ah yes, Senhor Evans.' Da Silva nodded cheerfully. 'A most interesting man. For what publication do you write?'

'Chicago Tribune,' she said, without thinking.

He looked impressed. 'The hospital is much busier now than when Senhor Evans came here. This of course reflects the increased warfare in the Atlantic. You see here a typical victim.'

It was the last thing she wanted to see. 'Your English is extremely good,' she said.

'Thank you. Most of our patients are British. This young man was . . .' He straightened the label on the big toe. 'Yes, English. About twenty-three years of age. Merchant seaman, almost certainly from a tanker. His injuries are immediately recognisable. You see this phenomenon?'

Now there was no escape. Julie made her head turn and her eyes look. At once her stomach kicked in rebellion, but she swallowed hard, over and over, and kept everything down.

'The skin on the legs has ballooned out as a result of being trapped in intense heat,' Da Silva said. He picked up a double-handful from the thigh. 'We call it the "plus-fours effect". You understand? Like the golfing trousers?' Julie nodded. The mortuary was chilly but she felt like stone. Da Silva said: 'Sometimes men arrive here with their skin hanging below their ankles in big folds. Of course the exposed parts of the body suffer much more severely.' He lifted the left arm. The hand had been burned to the bone; the fingers were black talons. Julie glanced quickly at the rest. The torso was only slightly damaged but the face looked as if it had been blow-torched. She looked away.

'I don't suppose he wanted to live anyway,' she said huskily.

'On the contrary, he put up a good fight,' da Silva replied. 'He was in the sea first, and then in a lifeboat for some days, and finally for a week here. Yes, quite a good fight.'

He took her through the ward. All the beds were occupied by badly burned seamen. Da Silva was responsible only for the morgue, but he explained that he took an interest in all the patients. Julie nodded. She felt numbed by so much suffering. 'Can we get some fresh air?' she asked.

They went outside. The sunshine was gentle, the flowers were innocent, the birds went about doing nobody any harm. Julie felt a huge need to go right away from this terrible place and to be with normal, healthy people again. Da Silva was watching. 'Mrs Conroy,' he said gently, 'are you really a journalist?'

She shook her head.

'Then why did you come to see me?'

She looked at the soft blue sky and decided she'd had much more than enough for one day. 'It doesn't matter any more,' she said.

'As you wish. May I take your coat?'

The starched receptionist telephoned for a taxi. Julie was back at the pensao before eleven o'clock. It was one way to kill a morning.

'Did you remember to warm the pot first?' Colonel Christian asked.

Otto Krafft nodded, and added teaspoons to the cups and saucers.

'The British always warm the pot first,' Christian told the others. 'They say it's the secret of successful tea-making.'

Wolfgang Adler tried another position in his chair. Nothing made his leg comfortable.

'You're not impressed, Wolfgang,' Christian said. 'Why is that?'

'I think Eldorado could find better things to put in the Spanish diplomatic bag than his week's tea ration, that's all.'

'I don't agree,' Fischer said. 'You keep asking for proof. Well, this is proof that our blockade is damn well working.'

'And there is also some evidence,' Wolfgang said, rubbing his fingers, 'that whatever the R.A.F. is dropping on Germany, it is not tea-leaves.'

'What does that matter?" Dr Hartmann asked. 'Their accuracy is pathetic.'

'And of course they don't know that," Wolfgang said. 'So they're not doing anything about it. I see.'

'The fact is,' Franz Werth said firmly, 'we're getting a tremendous amount of good stuff from Eldorado on other areas, particularly convoys. This man Seagull in Liverpool is a goldmine.'

'Time for the tea, I think,' Christian said. He put milk in the cups. Otto poured. 'Franz is right, you know,' Christian told Wolfgang. 'Our U-boat kill-rate in the Atlantic is quite phenomenal.'

'Drowning sailors is an inefficient way to win a war,' Wolfgang said.

'What an impatient chap you are,' Christian murmured. He sipped his tea. 'You're not drinking?'

'Tea with the milk put in first is undrinkable,' Wolfgang said. 'In Britain only the lower classes drink it that way. The upper classes add milk afterwards.'

'Oh dear. Eldorado didn't tell us that.'

Wolfgang grunted. 'It just shows how careless it is to swallow everything he sends.'

Christian hid his smile in his tea-cup, but the others laughed without restraint. Wolfgang sat and watched the steam curling out of the teapot spout as if he were a thousand miles away.

For the first time since she left Madrid, Julie Conroy desperately needed someone to talk to.

She sat on her bed and stared at the grotesquely bleeding multicoloured Sacred Heart. It was shapely and plump, like an air cushion. The dead seaman with the claw for a hand didn't have that kind of heart. His was just a bunch of exhausted muscles. They had worked too hard and too long, until they quit.

Julie had thought she knew all about war. After all: foreign correspondent's wife, all over Europe, first-hand experience, you couldn't beat that. Now she realised that she had seen it all through Harry's eyes; a newspaper war. Sure, some got killed, but they were sprawled uniforms at the roadside, or blanket-covered stretchers being carried away. Victims, casualties, losses. Not people. Not suffering. Not young men having their legs boiled and their heads charred, out in the middle of a heaving ocean, so that Nazi Germany could starve Britain into defeat. That was war. Forget all the crap about dashing tank-battles and thrilling dog-fights. War wasn't just conflict, for Christ's sake. War was hurting people. You didn't spend bullets, you spent pain, other people's pain, screaming, roasting, agonising pain. So that greed and arrogance could conquer half the world.

What made it even worse was the thought that any halfway decent person would help them do it, just for money. That was evil living off evil.

She got notepaper and an envelope from her bag and wrote Dear Luis, and looked at it for ten minutes, until a church clock sounded the quarter-hour, and she nearly panicked. There was too much to say, and all unsayable. In an impulsive, uneven scrawl she wrote: I am sure you don't know what you are doing. Or, if you do know, then I hate you for it.

It looked feeble and childish but she despaired of adding anything worthwhile, quickly signed it, Julie, and addressed the envelope, Sr L. Cabrillo, Banco Espirito Santo, Rua do Comercio, marked: Please forward. That was that. Another door closed.

The man who ran the pensao helped with her bags and found a taxi. Twenty-five minutes to check-in. No sweat.

She watched Lisbon drift past, as sunny and amiable as ever. Unreal.

'A senhora vai para America?

'Yeah.'

'Estados Unidos?'

'Yeah.' She wished he'd shut up.

'Ah . . .' The driver nodded, enviously. They rippled over flattened cobbles. 'Nova York?' he asked, saving the best for last.

'Nova York,' she agreed and saw a red pillar-box. 'Wait a minute,' she called, before she remembered the envelope wasn't stamped; but he was already pulling over. 'I have to nail this.' She showed him the letter.

'Rua do Comercio, sim.' He pulled out again.

'I didn't mean--'

'Compreendo, compreendo. Esta bem!' Horns complained as he bluffed his way across the stream. Julie gave up.

Rua do Comercio turned out to be just off Praca do Comercio, naturally, and therefore not two minutes away. The bank was like all Portuguese banks: marble and mahogany and three-piece suits. She found a counter with a sign saving Secfao Estrangeira and rang its little bell. A three-piece suit came out, frowning. Not frowning at her, just frowning in general. 'Bom dia, senhora.'

She gave him the letter, and said: 'I understand you have an arrangement with Senhor Cabrillo.'

He nodded at once. 'Sim, senhora. I shall take care of it. C brigade, senhora.' The frown lifted a fraction.

Julie hesitated. This was a lousy way to say goodbye: by proxy, standing in a damn bank. 'When will he get it, d'you think?' she asked.

The three-piece suit glanced at a wall calendar Probably this afternoon.'

Julie experienced a tiny shiver of astonishment. She tried to hide it by nodding, slowly, and pursing her lips. 'This afternoon, huh?' she said. 'As soon as that?'

'Oh yes. Tomorrow possibly, but today is usual.'

He waited in case she needed more information, such as what at time the bank closed. She stood, still nodding like a donkey. The rest of Lisbon, the rest of the world, seemed suddenly remote and unimportant. Only this spot mattered. She smiled her gratitude. He allowed a little warmth to creep into his frown. They parted.

Her pro-American driver held the door open. She looked around for a clock. Thirteen minutes to twelve. 'Damn, damn, damn,' she muttered.

Pan Am. Doze horas. Okay.' He smiled reassuringly.

'No, it's not okay. Not any more.' She was still struggling to catch up with the decision she had made back there inside the bank; almost certainly a bad decision and one she'd regret, but all that was irrelevant now. 'Forget New York,' she told him. 'Take the stuff, the bagagem, back to the pensdo. Okay? Pensao Sao Vicente. How much? Quanta custa?

It took a little while before he was convinced that she was serious, but eventually he left, looking disapproving. She began strolling up and down the street, watching the bank. Noon struck at various times from various churches, as if to make a point of repeating what a blunder she'd made. At that moment somebody on stand-by for the Pan Am Clipper to New York was about to be made very happy. Now that the sun was overhead, the Rua do Comercio was getting very hot. Possibly tomorrow, the man had said. She began to fee! hungry. It was going to be a long time until the bank closed. What a way to kill an afternoon.