“You think this is it?” Spade asked.
“Maybe.”
The station wagon took off, without a motorcycle escort.
It was back an hour and a half later. They got the old man out and he rolled his wheelchair into the house. In a few minutes a dozen motorcycles raced off into the darkness.
Ten o’clock. Eleven. The maid brought dinner, a cold Spanish soup called gazpacho and a tureen of paella. There was a small envelope on the tray. Spade opened it, took out a sheet of paper folded once, read it and handed it over.
Neatly typed and perfectly centered was the simple sentence: Don Santiago wishes to see Señor Spade and Señor Drum in his office at once. There was no signature.
The old Captain General sat behind a large mahogany desk with all but the arms of the wheelchair hidden. His powerful hands were toying with a bronze paperweight in the shape of a fighting bull. He wore absolutely no expression on his face, but his usually cold and arrogant blue eyes were lidded. He wouldn’t look up at us when we came in. Maybe that was as close as Santiago Sotomayor came to eating crow.
“Do me the favor of being seated,” he said in what for him was a somewhat subdued voice. “Whiskey, or perhaps an after-dinner sherry?” With a small movement of his hand he indicated the bar built into the wall to the left of the desk. The rest of the wall was lined with leather-bound books.
Spade said, “We’ve wasted enough time already. What do you want?”
Sotomayor took that. He bowed his head a little lower. “They telephoned. From Madrid. The call was traced to a café near the Plaza Mayor. I was given explicit instructions as to where the money should be delivered.”
“When was that?” I asked. I was surprised that they had bothered to make the second contact with all the activity going on at the ranch.
“At about noon. Shortly after the ransom note arrived. The caller specified the hour of dusk and an arroyo twelve miles west of here.” Sotomayor looked up for the first time. His eyes were just blue eyes punched deeply into the lined face of an old man. “They never came for the money. They still have Luz. I have the feeling that they will not contact me again.”
“You have the feeling,” Spade said caustically. “Why didn’t you have the feeling to get some professional help before it was too late?”
“I had the Guardia,” Sotomayor said, but his voice was still subdued.
“That’s right, you did. You had the Guardia all over the place.”
Sotomayor shook his head slowly. “This is not the United States. You do not understand my country. Here, people live in fear of a uniform, particularly the Guardia uniform. What I did was intentional. I wanted to frighten them. It was my feeling that fear would assure the safe return of my niece.”
“What do you think now? What kind of feeling do you have now?” Spade asked.
Sotomayor leaned across the desk. “I will not have you talking to me like that.” His blue eyes, all of a sudden, were cold and arrogant again.
“You earned it,” Spade said flatly.
“It was a mistake sending for you.”
“The trouble with you,” Spade said, “is that you’re all the way up there and everybody else fortunate enough to breathe the same air you breathe is way down here.”
“You will leave this office. You will leave my ranch.”
“That suits me. Let’s go,” Spade told me, getting up.
“Hold your horses,” I said in English.
“What’s the use? He’s an arrogant, egotistical—”
“And you,” Sotomayor said in English, “are a parvenu and a criminal.”
“At any rate I wouldn’t have—”
“You have no right—”
I said, “The kidnapers are three people named Sancho Panza, Y.A. Tittle and Alice B. Toklas.”
There was a silence. Spade looked at me. He sat down and began to smile shamefacedly.
“Señor?” Sotomayor said.
“When two grown men start behaving like a couple of kids, saying something senseless usually lets you get a word in edgewise. Is it okay if I get a word in edgewise?”
Neither one of them said anything. Sotomayor was studying the desktop again.
“Don Santiago,” I said, “you made a mistake this afternoon and you know it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have called us in here. Right?”
“I am listening,” Sotomayor said.
I turned to face Spade. “Will running off at the mouth about how stupid he was help us find Luz?”
Spade shook his head.
Sotomayor asked, “You believe there is a chance we can still find her?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Ordinarily I’d say no. Put a scare in kidnapers like that and they usually kill off their victim and hightail it into the next state. In this case, into the next country.”
“All the border stations are being watched,” Sotomayor said, not quite smugly. “At least that much of my authority remains.”
“But it could be we’re missing a bet if we think this is an ordinary kidnaping,” I went on, ignoring the sop Sotomayor had fed his own ego.
“There is something I do not know?” he asked. “Something perhaps in which Señor Spade is involved?”
“How much money are you worth, Don Santiago?”
He misinterpreted the question. “I assure you that you will be rewarded handsomely for anything you—”
“I’m working for Axel Spade,” I said. “I don’t want your money, I want your cooperation. How much are you worth?”
“I am afraid I cannot answer that question. A man in my position, a former commander of the Guardia—”
“More than a million dollars?”
“Well—yes.”
“More than five million?”
A small nod and a defiant look.
“Shall we try for ten?” I said.
“My net worth is more than ten million dollars.”
I sighed. My own net worth was a few thousand hard-earned bucks the last time I’d remembered to balance my checking account back in Washington. “Well, that doesn’t put you in J. Paul Getty’s class, but I guess you don’t have to worry about where your next buck is coming from.”
“I am not a poor man, no,” Sotomayor said defensively.
“The kidnapers would know that. Don’t you think it kind of strange that all they asked for was fifty thousand dollars?”
“There is a point beyond which no man will pay,” Sotomayor said sententiously.
“Is fifty thousand dollars that point for you, to get Luz back?”
“No, of course not.”
“But it is a lot of money,” Spade told me. “To a Spaniard it’s a fortune.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is that the figure should have been more commensurate with Don Santiago’s ability to pay—or else far lower than it is. Either a well-organized job where all of Don Santiago’s assets are known, or a hit-and-run snatch where a guy wants a few thousand quick bucks to get out of debt.”
“And?” Sotomayor asked.
“And this is neither. It’s too low for the first and too high for the second.”
“I don’t understand,” Sotomayor said.
“Maybe there’s another reason they kidnaped Luz,” I said. “Maybe it isn’t money they’re after at all. Maybe they only want you to think it is.”
“What other reason?” Spade asked.
“Hell, I don’t know. I was hoping one of you would enlighten me.”
“Luz was brought up in Venezuela and San Francisco,” Spade said. “Her foster father was in the import-export business. As far as I know her life was routinely upper-middle-class. There’s nothing.”
“What about some typical Axel Spade financial hanky-panky? Could anybody here in Spain want to get at you through Luz?”
But Spade could think of nothing.
“Politics?” I said, looking at Sotomayor. “What about your brother? He was Luz’s father, wasn’t he?”
The old Captain General gave me a hard and almost vicious look. I remembered the scene last night at the party. “There is no need to discuss my brother. He is dead.”
“Sure, and from the look of it he left some scars.”
“It is forbidden to talk of—”
“I’m no French military attaché making a blunder at a fancy party,” I said. “We’re trying to get a line on Luz. How about swallowing your pride long enough to try?”
Sotomayor rolled back from his desk and banged both his big fists on his blanket-covered legs. “My brother Hernando was with the Loyalists. They did this to me. He did this to me.”
“During the Civil War?”
“Of course during the war. He was captured and executed.”
“Thanks to you?”
Sotomayor’s face darkened. “Well, in a manner of speaking.”
“Go ahead and speak in that manner,” I suggested.
“It was not known he was a secret Loyalist sympathizer. Most members of the upper classes were not.”
I knew something was wrong, and suddenly it came to me. Axel Spade had shown me Luz’s picture often enough. She couldn’t have been out of her early twenties.
“But you knew he was a secret Loyalist sympathizer?” I asked.
“I learned it.”
“And turned him in?”
“It was my duty.”
“When was it your duty?”
“When I found out.” Sotomayor swung his wheelchair around, turning his back to me.
“When was that?”
“I don’t remember exactly when.”
“Try to remember.”
“Well, in the late forties. In 1947.”
“Almost ten years after the Civil War ended,” I said.
“I told you it was my duty.”
“It took you one hell of a long time to discover what your duty was.”
“You have no right to say that.”
I ignored his anger. “You never married, did you?”
“No.”
“Why is Luz so important to you?” I asked. “You haven’t seen her since she was a little girl.”
“She is my brother’s daughter.”
“Sure she is. But you hated your brother.”
“She—in her pictures she reminded me of someone.”
“Her mother?”
The old Captain General said, very softly, “Yes. Of her mother.”
“Your brother Hernando’s wife. Is she still alive?”
“She died in Venezuela.”
The wheelchair swung again. “Your questions, they come at me like machine gun bullets. You are confusing me.” But his eyes were clear and icy cold. They didn’t look confused.
He waited, almost anxiously, for another question. I let him stew. Axel Spade looked at me and lit one of his small black cigars. I played a hunch and asked abruptly, “How long were you in love with your brother’s wife?”
Sotomayor’s hands stiffened on the arms of the wheelchair. “Get out of here. You are lucky, señor. I should have my vaqueros take you out and beat you.”
“Listen,” I said, “when two brothers hate each other, as apparently you and Hernando did, there can be a lot of reasons. But usually it’s money or a woman. You didn’t inherit this ranch from your brother, did you?”
“No,” he said, relaxing visibly, liking that line of questioning better. “We each had our own holdings: His were confiscated by the government after his death.”
“All right. Then that leaves a woman.”
“I warned you to stop.”
“Warn me after we find Luz. Are there any other brothers or sisters, besides José?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Your brother was a rich man, but his holdings were confiscated. Who provided for his children?”
“I have always taken care of José. Luz, as you know, grew up in Venezuela. There is another brother, the oldest, adopted and raised by a norteamericano, a journalist who was my brother’s closest friend and the child’s godfather. The child was called Ramón. He goes by his godfather’s surname now,” the old man said distastefully. “He calls himself Ray Moyers.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the American Army. Here in Spain. He is a friend of Luz’s former novio.”
“They were never novios. They were never sweethearts,” Axel Spade said, first in Spanish, then unnecessarily in English for my benefit.
“I have heard differently,” the old man said.
I surprised him by asking no more questions. “What I’ll need from you,” I said, “is a recent photograph of Luz and some kind of letter saying I’m investigating the disappearance of your niece on your behalf.”
“And why should I give them to you?”
“I was under the impression you wanted to find Luz,” I said, not modestly.
“You are an insolent man,” Sotomayor said.
“I don’t sell insurance. I’m a detective. She’s your niece, not mine. Do I get the letter?”
“You are a man I could come to hate, señor.”
“You’d have to stand in line, General. Nobody likes a private detective, not even his clients. Having to go to him is admitting a certain amount of failure on their parts. And they still run the risk he’s going to uncover some skeletons in the family closet.”
“Do I run that risk?”
“What do you think we’ve been talking about for the past fifteen minutes?”
Sotomayor wheeled his chair to the desk, found pen and paper, scrawled a few lines and said, “I think that, if she can be found, you will find her.” It was my turn to be surprised.
Axel Spade let out a long breath and smiled faintly while I took the letter. It said what I wanted it to say.
“One word of advice, señor.”
I looked at the old man, waiting.
He gave me a small, glossy color photograph of his niece. Luz Robles was a haughty auburn-haired beauty wearing a black mantilla and one of those flashing, provocative señorita smiles that help explain why Spaniards and Latin Americans rarely take foreign wives.
“You said I ran a risk, Señor Drum?”
“Maybe you do.”
“Then perhaps you do as well. I am a man of much pride, señor. What is best hidden is best hidden. Do you understand?”
I just went on waiting.
“And you still wish to work for me?”
“I’m working for Mr. Spade,” I said. “He wants Luz found.”
Our eyes met across the desk. The old man’s torso seemed to expand forward and upward, the way it had when he had struck José. “You have the letter. You have the photograph. Now go.”
This time I did.
FOUR
I was nursing a San Miguel beer at a table on the Ritz terrace, where Luz Robles had met her brother José two days before at noon. The sounds of traffic on the big plaza beyond the terrace wall were muted, almost as though one of the three remaining Ritz hotels in the world could even subdue the noises of a busy city for the pleasure of its guests.
It was not quite five-thirty, still too early for the cocktail-hour rush in Madrid. A scattering of tourists, most of them American, most of them looking weary and footsore, held down a few of the other tables around the fountain.
The head waiter came over. He was a fussy little man in an off-white double-breasted dinner jacket. He leaned down to rearrange the bowl of peanuts and the cocktail napkin on my table a fraction of an inch. He flicked a speck of lint off a corner of the table with a crisp linen cloth. He smiled.
“You wish to see me, sir? There is a problem with the beer?” The fact that I was drinking beer at the Ritz seemed to dismay him slightly.
I got out Luz Robles’ picture. “I was wondering if you remember this girl.”
He studied the photograph. “She was here recently. A face like that is difficult to forget, señor.” He gave me a quick apologetic look, as though fearful he’d said the wrong thing.
I put him at his ease. “You’re right, she’s a real beauty. How recently?”
“Tuesday?”
“You tell me.”
“It was Tuesday at lunch. I’m certain.”
“Was she alone?”
“No, señor.” He looked at the other tables. He was beginning to lose interest in our conversation.
I switched from English to rapid Spanish, and that seemed to please him. “My questions won’t compromise the hotel or your position here, but what you tell me could be very important,” I said. “Who was with her?”
“Don José Sotomayor. He comes here frequently, señor.”
“They had lunch?”
“Just the gazpacho and some wine. A wise choice on a hot day.”
“Did they leave together?”
“No, señor. The lady remained.”
“Alone?”
He fussed with the points of the display handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket. “Señor, you could go on questioning me all day, but I have work to do.”
I took out Santiago Sotomayor’s letter and handed it to him. He read it and refolded it carefully, knife-edging the creases. “She was met by another gentleman,” he said in a conspiratorial voice, as though the letter had recruited him into a secret organization.
“A frequent patron of the Ritz like Don José?”
“No, señor. I never saw him before. He was a military man.”
“Spanish?”
“I believe American. An officer of course. They had a drink and left together, about an hour after Don José.”
“Did the lady seem troubled?”
The question insulted him. “My concern is with what appears on a patron’s table, señor.”
I described MacNeil Hollister. “Was that the man?”
He scowled. “Possibly, señor. But you Americans tend to look so much alike, especially if you are of a size. Big, with clipped hair and an outdoor face.” He smiled apologetically. “You almost could have been describing yourself.”
If it had been Hollister, I wondered why he had lied to Axel Spade, claiming he hadn’t seen Luz in Madrid. I also wondered if he’d have had time to drive north to Pamplona after a late lunch in the capital and still make the party. I decided it was possible.
There was nothing more the head waiter could tell me. I paid for my beer, climbed the steps to the restaurant and crossed the lobby to the reception desk. A man who looked like an American was either following me or else he had decided to leave the terrace the same time I did and dog my footsteps as far as the lobby, where he sat down in a pale gold plush chair and lit a cigarette. The reception clerk could tell me nothing except that Luz Robles had checked out just before four o’clock on Tuesday. As far as he remembered, she had been alone.
Drumbeat Madrid Page 3