The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Five Arrows, by Allan Chase This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The Five Arrows Author: Allan Chase Release Date: April 19, 2011 [eBook #35904] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIVE ARROWS*** E-text prepared by Mark C. Orton, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) Transcriber's Note: Extensive research indicates the copyright on this book was not renewed. THE FIVE ARROWS BY ALLAN CHASE RANDOM HOUSE - NEW YORK CONTENTS Chapter one Chapter two Chapter three Chapter four Chapter five Chapter six Chapter seven Chapter eight Chapter nine Chapter ten Chapter eleven Chapter twelve Chapter thirteen Chapter fourteen Chapter fifteen Chapter sixteen Chapter seventeen Chapter eighteen THE FIVE ARROWS Chapter one The governor's wife pointed across the bay to a speck in the black sky. Ground lights in Catanzas were focusing their blue shafts on the speck, moving as the plane moved, one light trying to lead the ship. A thin stream of glowing red and orange tracer bullets soared up at the plane from the Catanzas side of the bay. A moment passed before the Governor's guests on the terrace of La Fortaleza could hear the muffled thud-thud of the distant ground batteries. Someone, the wife of a visiting government official, exclaimed, "My goodness, I've only seen this in the newsreels before!" Now the plane veered, slowly, and the lights from the San Juan side joined the Catanzas batteries in pinning the plane to the dark clouds. The sleeve target fastened to the tail of the plane could now be seen from the terrace. Most of the Governor's guests gasped as the first bright jets of tracers missed the silver sleeve and sailed into the black void above it. The ack-ack batteries were speaking with more harshness now; one of them, planted between two brick buildings, added crashing echoes to their own reports as the guns went off. The bombing of Pearl Harbor was still very much a topic of conversation on the island; the submarine nets in the bay were joked about at the dinner table, but the jokes arose from a profound sense of gratitude for the nets, the planes, the ships which were the island's defenses against the undersea raiders that stalked the sea lanes between the ports of the mainland and San Juan. The plane shifted course again, now headed directly toward La Fortaleza. Through the increasing din of the ground guns, the Governor's young military aide, Lieutenant Braga, could barely hear the ring of the telephone nearest the terrace. He took the call, then returned to the terrace and tapped one of the guests on the shoulder. "It's for you, Mr. Hall," he said. "It's Tom Harris at Panair." Matthew Hall stood up quietly and walked into the cavernous reception room. He walked carefully, with the steel- spring tread of a man who seems to expect the floor to blow up under him at any moment. For thirty-three years Matthew Hall had walked as other men. Since he was not conscious of his new walk, he could not say when it had become part of him. His friends had first noticed it in Paris, in '39, but had expected it to wear off as soon as the prison pallor disappeared. The pallor had gone; the walk remained. Hall's head and shoulders and hands were part of this walk. He moved with his head forward and his shoulders hunched, with his hands slightly cocked, almost like a fighter slowly advancing to mid-ring. The shoulders were broad and thick, so broad that although Hall was of more than average height they made him appear shorter and chunky. The face of Matthew Hall had changed, too, with his walk. There were the obvious changes: the deep channel of a scar on his broad forehead, the smaller one on his right jaw. The nose had changed twice, the first time in 1938 when it was broken in San Sebastian. It had swelled enormously and then knit badly and nearly two years later a New York surgeon had done an expensive job of rebreaking and resetting the nose. Some bones had been taken out and the once classic lines were now slightly flattened. The scars and the dented nose blended strangely well with the jaws that had always been a bit too long and the soft brown poet's eyes which had so often betrayed Hall. With his eyes, Hall spoke his contempt, his anger, his amusement, his joy. The eyes unerringly spoke his inner feelings; they were always beyond his control. Changes more subtle than the scars and the flattened nose had come over Hall's face within the past few years. It now had a queer, angry cast. His lips seemed to be set in a new and almost permanent grimace of bitterness. Also the right side of his face, the cheek and the mouth, had a way of twitching painfully when Hall was bothered and upset. And yet, as Governor Dickenson had already noted, Hall was not a completely embittered man. More often than not, his eyes would light up with a look of amused irony, the look of a man much moved by an immense private joke he would be glad to share with his friends if he but knew how to tell it properly. When Hall had risen to leave the terrace, the Governor noticed that his cheek was twitching, but once he was alone in the reception room, away from the sight of the tracers and the target plane, Hall's face grew calm again. He sat down in the green armchair near the phone, picked up the receiver. "Yes, Tom," he said, "any luck?" "Sure. I busted open a seat for you on the San Hermano plane for tomorrow at six." "Was it much trouble, Tom?" "Not much." Tom Harris laughed. "We had to throw Giselle Prescott off to make room for you. Know her?" "God, no! But thanks a lot." "I'll pick you up in the morning then. Good night, Matt." Hall put the receiver back on the cradle. He sat back in the soft chair, oblivious of the crashing guns, the hum of the plane's engines, the others on the terrace. Only one thing was in his mind now—San Hermano. It was some time before the young Puerto Rican lieutenant slipped gingerly into the room. "Mr. Hall," he said, softly, "everything O.K.?" Hall smiled warmly. "My God," he asked, "you don't think the guns drove me in here?" The officer blushed. "Fix you a drink?" he asked. Hall shook his head, drew two Havanas from his jacket. "No, thanks. Cigar? It's from the one box I remembered to buy in Havana." The boy was a non-smoker. He lit a match for Hall, waited until the older man relaxed with the burning cigar. Politely, he said, "I know you've been through plenty, Mr. Hall. I'm a soldier, but if ..." "Plenty? Me?" The lieutenant nodded. "The Revenger," he said, hesitantly. "I—I read your book." "Oh, that," Hall said. "The Revenger." So The Revenger was plenty! "If there's anything I can get you ..." The boy's voice seemed to come from far away and Hall realized that he himself was staring into space and that the lieutenant must have sat there for a full minute waiting for an answer. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm really sorry. I guess I just get this way once in a while." "It's my fault," Braga protested. "I should have known how hard it must be for you to talk about—it." "De nada," Hall laughed. "I made a lecture tour last year and spent five nights a week talking about it for months. It's just that I'm—well, that I just catch myself staring at nothing at the craziest times. Maybe I do need that drink. What's in the shaker there—Daiquiri? Good." He poured two Daiquiris from the jar on the sideboard, handed one to the lieutenant. "I know you don't drink, either," he said. "But I'm having this drink to toast victory—and you're a soldier." When they touched glasses, the boy saw that amused look in Hall's eyes, the look he had seen earlier at the dinner table when one of the visiting officials had expressed such innocent amazement at the enormity of his first taxi bill in San Juan. "I'd better go back out there when I finish this drink," he said. "I'm glad nothing's wrong with you." "You're a right guy, Lieutenant. Thanks for looking in." Hall returned to his chair as the boy walked out to the terrace. So The Revenger was plenty! And the kid, how old was he? Twenty? Not a day more. Which made him eighteen when the Nazi torpedo planes peeled off over the African skies and then roared in to send their tin fish into the guts of His Majesty's own Revenger. Which made him fourteen when the fighting began, fourteen when the German pilot officers clicked their heels and mouthed the new phrase "Arriba España" and flew the Moors from Spanish Morocco to the mainland and touched off the shooting stages of World War II. "Ay, Teniente," he muttered, "you've made me feel old as hell. Older." Hall leaned back in his chair, tried to blow a series of smoke rings. He thought: But I'm not old. I've just seen things and done things and had things done to me. I'm not old at all. After years of anonymity in various city rooms in the States, a brief turn as a byline correspondent in Washington, a still briefer career as a Broadway playwright, Matthew Hall had drawn an assignment as third-string man for the World Press in Paris. That was in 1935, when he was crowding thirty. The job had introduced him to Europe, and carried him to Geneva, to Belgrade, to Bucharest, to Stockholm. Paris was the journalistic capital of the Continent; when things happened outside of Paris, it was a Paris man who was sent to the scene to cover. There he would find that the office had adequate coverage in the permanent man, and if he had any curiosity or craftsman's pride he would try to get the story behind the story. Hall had both. They led him to the strange half-world of tipsters, hounded opposition leaders, minor officials of ministries who would talk and produce documents for a fee, candid and cynical free-lance agents, wise old frightened politicians who sensed the coming catastrophe in their bones, correct and stiff Nazi advance agents and politely lavish native fascists who mixed queer brews for foreign correspondents. They were the sources close to a key ministry, the influential elder statesmen, the prominent industrialists whose names cannot be used who figured so prominently in the inside-Europe dispatches of the era. July, 1936, had found Hall in Nice spending a long week-end as the guest of a prominent refugee banker from Germany. The banker was the "inside" prophet of the month in Parisian newspaper circles. His gospel was the slightly shopworn one about German industry being fed up with Hitler and willing to settle on Goering, Danzig and a few worthless colonies in Africa as the price for eliminating the "extreme Nazis" and returning to the family of Europe. "He's a damned Nazi himself," Hall had declared when the invitation reached his office, but the bureau manager was missing no bets. "I don't care what he is, Matt. He's a story. He's news. He's what they want to read about in Washington and in London and in Paris." Hall never wrote his story on the refugee banker (who later turned up as a Nazi economist overlord in Denmark). On a blistering Sunday Paris had called him by phone. Hell was popping in Madrid. The regular Madrid man was vacationing in the States. "Get to Madrid, Matt. Looks like you'll be busy there for a couple of weeks until it blows over." Like many of his American colleagues, Hall traveled to Madrid during that first week of the war with the idea that in less than a month one side or another would have been installed in power and he himself would be back in Paris listening to the latest faker peddling the newest line of disguised Nazism from Berlin. But Hall was an honest man. What he saw interested and then intrigued and then enraged him. "This is no Spanish Civil War," he wrote to the Paris office in a confidential memo sent by courier. "This is the start of the second World War. It's the Germans and the Italians against the Spaniards. Maybe I'm crazy, but it looks to me like the British and the French are backing the fascists, while the Russians are trying to help the Republicans. How about sending someone in to cover the shooting for a week while I write a big story along these lines?" He was answered in due time. "Stick to the military conflict between the Nationalists and the Loyalists. And don't send us any Red propaganda." That was in October, when Caballero was preparing to quit Madrid in panic, and the Fifth Army was calmly preparing to hold the city, Caballero or no Caballero. Hall had long since lost his magnificent WP objectivity. Through the open mails he sent a letter of resignation to Paris. Antin in the Censura held the letter up, sent for Hall. The Spaniard hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat a dozen times and then he got up from his desk and embraced Hall and told him to sit down. Hall's Spanish was pretty good by then, good enough for Antin to speak to him in fluent Spanish rather than halting English. "The English I can read with my eyes. The Spanish I speak with my heart." Was it that Hall was resigning because he loved the Republic? Yes, I guess you could call it that. (You could also call it a good craftsman's stubborn ideas about how to cover a war, but you didn't.) Did Hall realize that, if he quit, an enemy of the Republic might be sent to take his place? No, Hall didn't think. Come to think of it, though, the office had Cavanaugh and Raney available and those two Jew-haters and Mussolini-lovers would be no friends of the Republic. You are a friend, a compañero, it is right that you know. We have so many problems with the foreign press. McBain from New York, we know he is a spy, he has links with the Falange. If we arrest him, the world hollers Red Terror. So we watch him, keep all his letters, hold up his cables. Thank God he is a drunkard; two SIM men keep him drunk most of the time. Maybe his office will fire him. You are a friend. You write the truth. Even a little truth by a friend whose editor chops up his cables helps the Republic. Hall tore up his letter of resignation. When the Republic captured thousands of Italians after Guadalajara and Bruejega, Hall filed long stories based on interviews with the Blackshirts. When the Republic captured Nazi Condor officers and men at Belchite, Hall sent photographs of their documents to Paris with his stories. New York kicked, and Paris warned Hall repeatedly. Finally Paris transferred him to the Franco side. That was at the end of '38, when the Republicans had seen their hopes dashed at Munich and the only thing that kept them going was the feeling that they could hold out until the Nazi Frankenstein finally turned on London and Paris. "Then France will have to rush arms and maybe a few divisions to us and the British fleet will have to patrol the Mediterranean and the Russian planes, unable to get through now, will be able to come in through France and through the Mediterranean." Antin figured it out that way, told it to Hall the week before some nice clean crusaders for Christianity let him have it with a tommy gun in the back in a Barcelona café. The Falangistas were very glad to have Hall behind their lines. Their friends pulled some wires in New York and Washington and, after two months, Hall was fired, but by then his notebook was growing thicker and he elected to stay as a free lance. He was seeing the face of fascism for the first time, he wrote, and seeing it at close range. He would stay, job or no job. He stayed, and the Gestapo in San Sebastian wrote out an order and a rat-faced little aristocrat with an embroidered gold yoke and arrows on his cape was studying Hall's notes and smirking like a villain in a bad movie. There were no charges and no explanations. They just slapped Hall into a cell in solitary, and once a day they handed him a bucket for slops and once a day he got a chunk of bread or a thin chick-pea stew. In the beginning he had hollered for the American consul, but the German guard would grin and say, "No entiendo Español, Ich sprech kein Englisch," and finally Hall just settled down to waiting for the end of the war. Every now and then a smooth German major would have him brought out for questioning; that scar on his head and the scar on his chin were grim mementos of those sessions. The Spaniards were bad but the Germans were worse. The Italians were just hysterical. There was the day the Italian officer made the mistake of getting too close and Hall clipped him with a weak right hook. The Blackshirt screamed like a woman and clung to his eye; that was when they tied him to the wall and let him have it with the steel rods on his back. And then, in April, the Republic keeled over in its own blood and the fascists decided to be generous to celebrate their victory. The Axis was now openly boasting that it had run the Spanish show; the worst that Hall could do would be to play into their hands by writing about how tough fascism was on any man fool enough to oppose the New Order. They were generous, they were fair. They gave him a practically new suit of clothes, they returned his three hundred odd dollars, they even returned his notebook with nearly all of its original notes. Hall went to Paris. He spent a week soaking in warm baths and eating and avoiding the WP crowd. During the week he cabled a New York book publisher he had met in Madrid in '36, when he had joined a group of American intellectuals attending an anti-fascist congress. He offered to turn out a book on his experiences as a correspondent and a prisoner in Franco Spain. It was a week before he got an answer, but the answer came with a draft of five hundred dollars. The swelling had gone down in his nose by then, but he still had to breathe through his mouth. A doctor who'd looked at it wanted a hundred bucks for operating, but it meant two weeks of doing nothing but getting fixed up, and Hall hated to wait. "Later," he said, "later, when I finish my book." He poured his notes and his guts into the book, and finished it in a month. When he was done he borrowed some money from a friend in the Paramount office and got a Clipper seat to New York. His publisher, Bird, liked the book and rushed it to press. He also gave Hall another five hundred and sent him to his own doctor to have his nose fixed up. It was a good book, perhaps good enough to justify Bird's gamble, only it reached the critics three weeks after the Nazi panzer divisions were ravaging Poland and the smart boys in Paris were wearing smarter correspondents' uniforms and filing fulsome stories on the genius of Gamelin and Weygand. "We'll have to face it, Matt," Bird said, "no one but you and I give a damn about Spain right now. I'm taking back copies left and right from the booksellers. No, the hell with the advances. The war's far from over. You'll do another book for me, and we'll make it all up." Through Bird, Hall got a job as a war correspondent for a Chicago paper. They shipped him to London, where he stewed in his own juices for months, and then to Cairo to join the fleet. Hall was assigned to the Revenger and, when the Nazis sank her, he spent some three days on a raft with a handful of survivors. One of them died of his wounds on the raft, and another went raving mad and slit his own throat with the top of a ration tin. Hall filed a story on the experience when he was brought back to Cairo, and Bird cabled "That's your new book." It was an easy book to write. He took a room at Shepheard's and pounded it out in three weeks. The British censors liked it as "a tribute to British grit" and arranged for a captain attached to a military mission bound for Washington by plane to deliver the manuscript personally to Bird. The story was still hot when the script reached New York. Bird sold the serial rights to a big national weekly that same day for thirty thousand dollars. A lecture agency cabled offering a guarantee of a fantastic sum for a three-month lecture tour. A book club chose The Revenger, the critics sang its praises, and Bird bought himself a house in the country. Hall quit his job and made the lecture tour and wound up with a fat bank account and a permanent appreciation of the value of a chance plop in the ocean. For the first time in his life, he found himself with enough money to do exactly what he wanted to do. The Army doctors had shown him to the nearest door, but he had offers from magazines and syndicates to return to the war zones, and the radio wanted him as a commentator. It was Bird who first learned of Hall's new plans. And Bird understood. "The Spanish War was round one," Hall told him. "South America was one of the stakes. The Falange had an organization in the Latin countries. The Heinies used to brag about it to me in San Sebastian. I'm going to South America to see it for myself. Maybe there's a book in it, maybe there isn't. I can afford to find out." Cuba had been the first stop on this odyssey. There Hall had had some tough sledding, met some Spanish Republicans who knew him from Madrid, won the aid of a group of young Cuban officials and written two angry and documented magazine pieces. From Havana, Hall had flown to Puerto Rico. Hall had stopped thinking. The reverie into which the lieutenant had plunged him passed into a rapt consideration of the imperfect smoke rings he was blowing toward the ceiling. Dickenson joined him. "Well?" he asked. "Is it San Hermano tomorrow?" "I'm afraid so, Dick." "I'm sorry to see you leave. We figured you'd stay for at least a month. What's so urgent in San Hermano?" "That's what I mean to find out. All I know is what I read in the papers." He handed the Governor two copies of the San Hermano Imparcial he had found on a library table in the reception room while having a cocktail before dinner. They were the papers which had made him call Harris at Panair. The first issue was three weeks old. It described the visit of an American Good-Will Commission to San Hermano, and told how the mission was received by Enrique Gamburdo, the Vice-President, rather than by Anibal Tabio, the President. In an oblique manner, the story went on to deny the "widespread rumor" that Tabio had deliberately insulted the Americans by not receiving them personally. "I don't like the way they denied the rumor," Hall said. "I know that the paper is imparcial on the fascist side only." The other edition of Imparcial was three days old. It was the latest copy available. It carried as its lead story the news that since Tabio's illness had taken a drastic turn for the worse, Gamburdo had prevailed upon a great Spanish doctor, Varela Ansaldo, to fly from Philadelphia to San Hermano in an attempt to save the President's life. "And?" the Governor asked. "I'm not sure. But it looks to me like a deliberate attempt to lay a smelly egg in Tabio's nest. Anyway, I did a little checking with Harris. I figured I'd be able to meet Ansaldo's plane, and I was right. The San Hermano Clipper overnights in San Juan, you know. Ansaldo is sleeping at the Escambrun tonight. Tomorrow we'll board the ship for San Hermano together." "I still don't get it, Matt. Do you know this Ansaldo?" "No. But he's evidently been invited to San Hermano by Gamburdo. And I found out a few things about Gamburdo in Havana," Hall said. "Some top-ranking Falange chiefs in the Americas always spoke highly of him in their letters. Especially the letters marked confidential." "There you go again!" "Don't. You know I'm not crazy." "But Matt, neither is Gamburdo crazy. He wouldn't dare do what you're implying." "Maybe. But I'm not thinking of Gamburdo as much as I am of Tabio. I like Anibal Tabio, like him a lot. I met him for the first time in Geneva in '35, when he was Foreign Minister. Then I met him again in '36, when he and Vayo and Litvinov were hammering away at the fat cats backing Franco. He was a real guy, Dick. One of the few statesmen alive who not only knew that the earth is round but also that the people on this round earth like to eat and wear decent clothes and send their kids to college. "I remember how in '37, after Halifax yawned all through his speech and then led the rest of the delegates in voting against Vayo's proposals, Tabio sat down with me in a little bar and ordered a light beer and told me very quietly that this was his cue. 'I must go home,' he told me, 'and see that it doesn't happen to my country.' That's how he pulled up his stakes and went back to San Hermano and ran for President." "He's good, Matt. I know that." "He's damn good. He's the best of the anti-fascist leaders on the Continent right now, Dick. He deserves all the help he isn't getting from us." The Governor put the paper down with a sigh. "I'll tell you a secret, Matt," he said. "But it's really secret. You know that there's going to be a Pan-American conference on foreign policy in Havana in five weeks. Well, some of the smarter heads in Washington are getting worried. We're sending a delegation to the conference to ask all the nations down here to break with the Axis. And some of us are afraid that if Tabio is—well, not able to pick the San Hermano delegation, his government will remain neutral." Hall stood up and began pacing between the couch and the chair. He pulled out a large white handkerchief and mopped the sweat on his face, his neck, his quivering hands. "God damn them all to hell," he said, "they're moving in on us in our own backyard and when you try to say a word in Washington they spit in your eye and tell you Franco is a neutral and a friend." Dickenson drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly and audibly. "What's it all about, Matt?" he asked, softly. "Where does San Hermano come in?" "I don't know a mucking thing yet. All I know is that it stinks to high heaven. Listen, Dick, I'm not crazy. You know that. In Washington they act as if I'm crazy or worse when I try to tell them." Hall put his hand to the twitching right side of his face as if to keep it still. His outburst had completely dried his throat. He went to the sideboard, threw some ice cubes into a giant glass, poured soda over the ice. The Governor watched him swallow the contents in huge gulps. "Better sit down, Matt," he said. "You'll blow a valve." "I'm all right," he said. He put the glass down on the floor, ran the handkerchief over his neck. "There's one thing I do know, and it's killing me. I know the Falange is in this. It's all I have to know. I remember reading a fascist paper in jail in San Sebastian. There was a big map on the back page, a map showing Spain as the center of the Spanish World. An artist had superimposed the five arrows of the Falange over the face of Spain. The article under the map said that while one of the arrows pointed to Madrid, two pointed to the Philippines and the others pointed to Latin America. They weren't kidding, Dick. When the Japs marched into Manila they decorated the Philippine Falange for the fifth-column job the Falangistas performed for Hirohito. And there are twenty Falangist cells in Latin America for every one cell they had in Manila on December 6, 1941. "And why not, Dick? It's the Germans who've always run the Falange. Today they run Spain. And they also run the Exterior Falange set-up. Maybe Falangismo as a philosophy is phony as all hell, and maybe its creed of Hispanidad, with all its blah about Latin America returning to the Spanish Empire, is just as phony. Maybe it doesn't make sense to us gringos. I'll grant that. But it is a nice Nazi horse on the dumb Spanish aristocrats who do Hitler's dirty work in the Americas. In German hands it's one of the dynamics of this war. I've seen it in operation, and I know. It's the gimmick that makes rich Spaniards fuel and hide submarines in the Caribbean—you know that for a fact yourself. It's the new amalgam which makes 'em look to Holy Mother Spain as the core of a new empire, it's ..." "But granting all this, Matt, why must you go to San Hermano?" Hall swallowed some soda. He put the glass back on the floor, grabbed the San Hermano Imparcial from the Governor's hands. Slowly, he crushed the paper and held it in front of Dickenson's face. "Do you know who publishes El Imparcial?" he asked. "I'll tell you. It's a fascist named Fernandez. In San Sebastian, during the war, he strutted all over town in a Falange officer's uniform browning his nose with all the top-ranking lice, the Germans, the Italians, the Franco crowd. He was there for months, making radio speeches and public appearances and getting cramps in the right arm from holding it up in the stiff-arm salute. I saw him a dozen times, if I saw him once." "José Fernandez? I met him at a conference in Rio. He seemed like a pleasant enough chap," the Governor said. "They're all pleasant. They can afford to be. You never met Ribbentrop and Otto Abetz, Dick. They were the most charming men in Europe before the war. But listen, last week in Havana I looked at a collection of pictures taken from the files of the chief of the Falange delegation for the Americas. There was one picture of a banquet held by the Falange in San Hermano late in 1936. It was a secret affair, only insiders and leaders. And there, on the dais, was Licenciado Enrique Gamburdo, big as life." "Gamburdo!" "Sure. It was a secret affair, all right. Not a word in the papers, and everyone present sworn to secrecy by a Bishop who was among the honored guests." Hall dried the sweat on his hands again. "But always at these affairs there's a man with a camera. Usually he's a Gestapo Heinie. Sometimes he's a Gestapo Spaniard or even a Gestapo Latin-American. A picture, just one picture, has to be made. It goes to the German consul or the Falange chief of the country and they have to forward it to the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. The pictures back up the reports, you see, and, besides, when you have a picture of a deacon trucking with a doxie in a bordello it's a good thing to threaten to show the deacon's wife if the deacon decides to return to the paths of righteousness." "But are you sure, Matt?" "I'm a good reporter. My job is to remember unimportant things, and to remember them well when they become important. If I'm wrong, I'll find out for myself in San Hermano." The Governor accepted one of Hall's cigars. "God," he said, "I hope you're wrong, Matt." Later, back in his hotel room, Hall stripped to his shorts, ran cold water over his wrists and the back of his neck. He poured some Haitian rum into a glass, drenched it with soda from the pink-and-green night table. Outside, in the darkness, four boys were playing tag. Hall listened to the whispered padding of their bare feet as they flew from cobblestones to trolley tracks. He went to the wrought-iron balcony, stood there watching the undersized kids chasing each other up and down the narrow street. Two freighters rode at anchor in the harbor, their gray noses pointing at the pink Customs House. A soldier lurched down the street, barely missing the feet of an old jíbaro sleeping in the doorway of a dark store. Hall returned to the desk. He wrote a short note to a friend in a government bureau in Havana—merely to say that he was leaving for San Hermano and that for the time being could be reached in care of Pan American Airways there— and a similar note to Bird. He decided to let his other letters wait until he reached San Hermano. The kids who were playing tag disappeared. The only noise which broke the silence of the night now was the soft pounding of the presses in the newspaper plant up the street. Hall sealed his letters and started to pack his bags. The four boys reappeared with a whoop. They carried freshly printed magazines this time, and, as they ran down the street, first one then another took up the mournful cry: "Puerto Rico Ilustrado! Il-us-traaa-dooohhh!" They were no longer to be seen when Hall ran out to the balcony to look. He took a cold shower, then lit one of his Havanas. The mosquito net which completely covered his bed annoyed him. He put out the light in order not to see the bars of the net frame. Silently, he railed against the sugar planters and their kept politicos for leaving the island prey to malaria. He had to remind himself that the net was his protection against malaria before he could crawl under the frame, but even then he climbed into bed with a cigar in his mouth. The cigar was his protection, his secret weapon, against the claustrophobia the mosquitero gave him. There were no cigars in Franco's prisons, no cigars and no cool sheets and coiled spring mattresses, no soft breezes floating in from a harbor as ancient as the Conquistadores. He lay under the net, naked and uncovered, blowing smoke rings at the cross bars above him. He thought of Anibal Tabio in Geneva, thin as a reed, his slender hand pointing to the pile of German and Italian documents del Vayo had brought to the League. He thought of Tabio and he thought of his three years in Spain and, thinking, he got worked up all over again. It was not easy to think of the months of being trapped like an animal in a cage, of being pushed around by smirking men who had the guns, of watching the metal inkstand in the hands of the German major the second before it crashed into his own face. No, it was not easy, and the memory of San Sebastian led to the scarlet memory of the afternoon on the Malecon in Havana less than a month ago when Sanchez had pointed out to him two leaders of the Falange at a café table and he started out to bash their heads together right then and there. Luis and Felix had had to grab him and wrestle him to the sidewalk, laughing and playing at being just three jolly boys who'd had a drink too much instead of two Spanish Republicans keeping a frenzied American from killing two men they detested and would gladly have killed themselves. Hall sat up, shaking, covered with sweat. He crawled out of bed, stood barefooted on the tiled floor. An overwhelming feeling of loneliness came over him. He was lonely in his person, lonelier still in his inability to make any of his own people understand the gnawing hates and fears which had taken him first to Havana and then to San Juan and now —quién sabe? And then, realizing with an amused start that he was thinking in Spanish, he tore the net off the bed, threw the cigar away, and went to sleep. Chapter two Dr. Varela Ansaldo was traveling with his assistant, a young Dr. Marina, an American nurse named Geraldine Olmstead, and a Dominican passport. This much Hall was able to observe at the ground station, before the passengers for San Hermano and way points boarded the Stratoliner. The Dominican passport interested Hall. He knew that the passports were for sale at an average price of a thousand dollars. Refugees starved and borrowed and sold their souls to scrape together a thousand dollars for one of the precious passports. When you met a Spaniard with a new Dominican passport, you seldom had to ask questions; you knew you were meeting a man whose life was not worth a nickel in Spain. And yet, in the day-old issue of Time the Clipper had flown in from Miami, the biography of Ansaldo carried no hint of the doctor's being in disfavor with Franco. Nor did the biography mention the physician's Dominican citizenship. Hall read the Time biography again. Scrupulously impartial during the Spanish Civil War, Ansaldo took no sides, remaining at his post as a healer under both nationalist and loyalist flags. With the end of war, Ansaldo accepted a Chair offered by the Penn Medical Institute in Philadelphia, assuming new position in October, 1939. The story went on to describe some of the new operations Ansaldo had since performed. Hall unbuckled his seat belt. He had a single seat on the left of the plane, the third seat from the front. Ansaldo's nurse had the seat in front of his. She sat across the aisle from Marina and Ansaldo, who shared a double seat. Hall sat opposite a pink-cheeked Dutchman of sixty who shared a seat with a very dark Brazilian. A State Department courier had the seat in front of the nurse. The other passengers included the wife of an American Army officer, some Panair officials, two Standard Oil engineers, and some quiet Latin American government officials on their way back from Washington. Most of the passengers, now that the plane had gained altitude, were trying to sleep. The little Hollander was wide awake, virtuously and happily wide awake with the morning heartiness of a man who has been going to bed and rising early all of his life. He beamed at Hall. "I see you and I are the only ones who had a good night's sleep, Mr. Hall." Then, laughing, he explained that he had recognized Hall from the picture on the jacket of his book before he had even heard his name announced by the steward on boarding ship. His accent was slight, but definite. "Yesterday," he said, gesturing at Hall's seat, "Miss Prescott—a charming lady, by the way—and today another American writer. Ah, well, the damn wheel turns and comes up twice with the same value. Oh, I forgot. My name is Wilhelm Androtten." Hall extended his hand across the aisle, gripped the hand Androtten offered him. It was a pudgy little hand, soft and white and pink. "Yes," Androtten sighed. "I have quite a hell of a story of my own to tell about enemy actions. I too have been an actor in the drama. But of course I'm not a writer. Ah no, Mr. Hall," he waved a stiff little index finger back and forth in front of his glowing face, "I'm not going to suggest that you write my story. To me it is important as hell. But to the world? It is not as dramatic as the sinking of the Revenger. A thousand times no!" The Hollander pulled an immense old-fashioned silver cigarette case from the pocket of his brown-linen suit. "Have an American cigarette? Good. Yes, mine is only the story of how the damn Japanese Army drove a poor coffee planter off his estates and then out of Java. And that is all, sir, except that as you may have guessed—I was the planter. Now I am, so to speak, a real Flying Dutchman, flying everywhere to buy coffee from the other planters and then flying everywhere to sell it again. But I try to be jolly as hell and to bear my load like a Dutchman should, Mr. Hall." "That is a story, Mr. Androtten," Hall said. "A real one." The strong light above the clouds rasped his sleep-hungry eyes. He put on his dark glasses, leaned his head back against the padded roll of the reclining chair. "Do you really think my story is worth while, Mr. Hall? I would be honored as hell to tell you the whole story with all the damn facts, if you desire. I ... Are you getting off at Caracas?" "No. I'm sorry. I go all the way through to San Hermano." "Good, Mr. Hall. I go to San Hermano myself. Do you know the Monte Azul bean, sir? It's richer than the Java. A little Monte Azul, a little Bogota, some choice Brazilians—and you have a roast that will delight the rarest palates. Yes, San Hermano is my destination. San Hermano and the damn Monte Azul bean." Hall gave up trying to stifle a series of yawns. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I didn't get enough sleep after all." "Please sleep," Androtten said. "We'll have plenty of time to talk in San Hermano." "Sure. Plenty of time." Hall opened the collar of his shirt, sank into a light sleep almost at once. He slept for over an hour, waking when the Standard Oil engineers in the rear seats laughed at a joke told by the Army officer's wife. The steady drone of the engines, the continuing sharpness of the light made remaining awake difficult. Hall closed his eyes again but there was no sleep. Androtten and the Brazilian had found a common tongue, French, and in the joy of this discovery had also discovered a common subject. The Brazilian was holding forth on the exotic virtues of one rare coffee, the huge diamond on his finger ring catching and distributing the light as he gestured. Androtten was trying to describe the various blends of Java. Hall thought of Ansaldo and Marina and the nurse. Marina was about thirty, too dapper, too fastidious, his plaid sports jacket fitting too snugly over his rounded hips. On boarding the plane, the nurse had brushed against his arm, which he withdrew with a subconscious gesture of revulsion. Hall watched him now, buffing his nails with a chamois board. Ansaldo had also awakened, was reading one of the pile of medical magazines he had carried into the plane. The nurse was a blank, so far. All he could see of her was the soft roll of strawberry hair. She had a few faint freckles on her nose and full lips and it was ten to one that she was from the Midwest. But a blank. The older doctor, Ansaldo, was about fifty, and had a stiff correctness that Hall had noticed immediately in the airport. He wore glasses whose horn rims were of an exaggerated thickness. His iron-gray hair, cut short and combed straight back, had an air of almost surgical neatness. He had the long horse face of an El Greco Cardinal, and behaved even toward his assistant and his nurse with a detached politeness. Marina's obvious and fawning devotion to the older man seemed to bounce off Ansaldo without effect. Hall put him down as an extremely cold fish, but a cold fish who would bear watching for reasons Hall himself could not quite define. When the plane stopped in Caracas for refueling, Ansaldo, carrying a thick medical journal with his finger still marking his place, took a slow walk in the shade, Marina following at his heels like a puppy. Hall got out and lit a cigar and when he noticed the nurse looking at the exhibit of rugs and dolls set up in a stand at the edge of the airfield he walked to her side. "Indian-craft stuff," he said. "If you'd care to, I'll be your interpreter." The girl took off her dark glasses, looked at Hall for a moment, and then put them on again. "I can't see too well with these darn things," she laughed. "Do you think I could get a small rug without giving up my right arm?" "Your right arm is safe with me around, Madam. Perhaps you never heard of me, Madam, but in these parts I'm known as Trader Hall. Matthew Hall." "You're hired. My name is Jerry Olmstead." They sauntered over to the stand. The afternoon sun ignited the fires in her hair. She was taller than most women, and though her white sharkskin suit was well creased from travel, Hall could see that she had the kind of full shapely figure which made poolroom loafers whistle and trusted bank employees forget the percentages against embezzlers. Feature for feature, Jerry Olmstead's was not the face that would have launched even a hundred ships. Her forehead was too high, and it bulged a bit. Her blue eyes were a shade too pale for the frank healthiness of her skin. Her nose was straight and well shaped, but almost indelicately large. When she smiled, she displayed two rows of glistening healthy teeth which were anything but even and yet not uneven enough to be termed crooked. Hall helped her select a small rug, agreed at once to the price asked by the Indian woman at the stand, and then had a long discussion in Spanish with the peddler about the state of affairs at the airport before giving her the money. "You see," he said to Jerry, "unless you bargain with these Indians, you're bound to get robbed." The rug cost Jerry something like sixty cents in American money. "You'll be able to pick up some wonderful beaten-silver things in San Hermano," Hall said. "I'd be glad to show you around when we get there. In the meantime, can I get you a drink?" "I'd love one." The only drinks for sale in the canteen were cold ginger ale and lemonade. They had the ginger ale, and Hall learned that this was the girl's first trip out of the United States. "It's all so different!" she said, and Hall thought he would grimace but then the girl smiled happily and he watched the skin wrinkle faintly at the bridge of her nose and he smiled with her. "You'll like San Hermano," he said. "And I'd like to show it to you when we get there." "Did you spend much time there?" "Only a few days. I took a freighter back from Cairo two years ago and it put in at San Hermano." "Say, what do you do, anyway?" Jerry asked. "Don't sound so surprised. I'm a newspaperman." "Were you a war correspondent?" Hall nodded. "I even wrote a book." Jerry looked into her glass. "I know it sounds terrible," she said, "but I haven't read a book in years. Was yours about the war?" "Let's talk about it in San Hermano. Do I show you the town?" "It's a date." "That bell is for us," Hall said. "We'd better get back to the plane." They left the canteen. Ansaldo and Marina were still walking in a slow circle. "Come on," Jerry said. "Meet my boss." She approached Ansaldo. "Dr. Ansaldo," she said, "I'd like you to meet Mr. Matthew Hall. He's a newspaperman from the States. And this is Dr. Marina. "Mr. Hall is showing me around San Hermano when we get there." "How nice," Ansaldo said, and from his tone Hall knew that he meant nothing of the sort. "But now we must hurry," Ansaldo said. "The plane is about to depart." He took Jerry's arm and they walked on ahead of Marina and Hall. "Señor Hall, if you are going to write about the doctor's forthcoming operation," Marina said, "I would gladly help you. The doctor is the greatest surgeon of our times, perhaps, who knows, of all times. He is magnificent. In his hands, the scalpel is an instrument of divinity. It is more, it is divinity itself. I must tell you the story of the doctor's greatest operations, although all of them are great. I will help you. You will write a great article about the great operation." "I am very grateful to you, doctor. I hope that in San Hermano you will have enough time to give me your counsel. After you, doctor." Hall took a last drag at his cigar as Marina climbed the plane ladder. There was a mountain—the Monte Azul which produced the beans of Androtten's rhapsodies—and a plateau in the clouds and below the plateau lay the ocean and the city of San Hermano. The lights were going on in the city when Flight Eighteen ended on the airport in the plateau, for the city was five miles farther from the sinking sun of the moment. On the plateau, the airport lights blended with the brown-orange shades of dusk; in the city the lights cut through the classic blackness of night. A smartly dressed colonel and a top-hatted functionary of the Foreign Office were waiting with two black limousines for the Ansaldo party. The man from the Foreign Office had cleared all the passport and customs formalities. Jerry had just enough time to tell Hall that she and the doctors were to stay at the Bolivar before the cars started down the winding hill to San Hermano. Hall rode to town with the rest of the passengers in the sleek Panair bus. He and Androtten were also bound for the Bolivar. Riding into the valley, the bus descended into the night. It was a night made blacker by the war, as were the nights in San Juan and Havana and New York. San Hermano was the capital of a nation still at peace, but the maws of the war across the seas reached for the oil and coal of the world, and San Hermano could not escape this world. Three lights in every four on the Plaza de la Republica were out, for coal and oil furnished the power for the city's electricity. Two years earlier, Hall had asked Anibal Tabio why coal and oil had to turn the city's dynamos when the nation abounded in thousands of mountain streams which could be harnessed by men with slide rules and logarithm tables, and the gentle President had answered him in a sentence. "Because, my dear Hall, San Hermano has been in the twentieth century for barely a decade, while your own nation has been in our century for forty years." And tonight, looking at the ancient Plaza from the window of his room on the third floor of the Bolivar, Hall remembered Tabio's words with disturbing clarity. From the balcony of his hotel room, Hall could see both San Hermanos, the Old City and the New. Everyone spoke of the two cities in these terms—the geographers, the tourist guides, the inveterate Hermanitos themselves. The Old San Hermano had been founded by the Conquistadores in the sixteenth century, a walled speck on the shores of an ocean, a fortress and a thatched church, a handful of flimsy huts. In a century, the thatched church became a proud, gloomy Cathedral; one of the walls was knocked down, and in its place was the cobbled Plaza de Fernando e Isabel. The Plaza was Spain in the New World; opening on to its cobbles stood the huge Moorish stone palaces designed by architects brought over from Seville, the palace of the Captains-General who served as colonial governors, the fortified mint, the Cathedral, the home of the Governor's elder brother, the Duke of La Runa. Enslaved Indians and later chained Negroes from the African coasts had carried on their backs the square stones Spanish masons cut and formed for the edifices of the Plaza, first the Cathedral, next the Governor's Palace and the Mint. Then, in the days of Hidalgo, Bolivar, and San Martin, the ancient Plaza of the Conquistadores became the Plaza de la Republica, and for a few glorious hours the new nation was in tune with its century. But the great Liberators of the times were to die in embittered exile, far from the scenes of their brightest victories. For one swing of the pendulum the liberated lands teetered on the dizzy heights of freedom, and then the pendulum swung back and stopped swinging for a century. The land remained in the hands of the Spanish nobles, and they won their war against the Industrial Revolution, and all that remained of the hour of...