He didn’t say anything right away. Then he said, “But it would be pointless for me to ask you where?”
“With luck I can reach her by morning.” With luck, I thought, and without any sleep. “Has there been another call from the alleged kidnapers?”
“Yes. It was traced to a public phone in Aranjuez.” Aranjuez is due south of Madrid, and Zaragoza north-east, on the road to Barcelona. At first I didn’t get it, and then I did. Thanks to his father’s line of work, El Macareno II probably had contacts all over the peninsula. He’d have no trouble setting up such phone calls.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The same as before. A rendezvous was made. The old man went alone, except for his chauffeur. The kidnaper never showed up.”
“It was near Pamplona?”
“They were gone less than two hours.”
“Look,” I said, “if another call comes, can you sit on the old man?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Axel Spade said. “You know what he’s like.”
“Well, if another call comes and the drop is still nearby, it probably won’t matter much. If it’s clean out of the province though—”
“Out of the province where?” Axel Spade said quickly.
There was no real harm in telling him that much, I decided. He had to stay put: his job was to keep the Captain General from walking into a deathtrap. “I’m not sure,” I said. “Probably be Zaragoza.”
He took a thoughtful bite out of that piece of information. “The American army base where Moyers and MacNeil Hollister are stationed,” he said, “is just outside Zaragoza. Any comment?”
“No comment,” I said. “Anyhow, if a call comes setting up a Zaragoza rendezvous, you’ve got to stop the old man from keeping it.”
“I can try,” Spade said doubtfully.
“Look, tell him I’m onto something hot. Tell him I was there when his nephew José was shot to death. Tell him there’s a tie-in. And tell him that if he budges from the ranch he’ll screw up my chances of finding Luz. The same goes for you.”
“But if I met you in Zaragoza perhaps together we could—”
“Forget it,” I said. “You’ve got to keep the old man on the ranch. I’ll call you as soon as anything breaks in Zaragoza.”
He was unsatisfied, but he let it go at that. I slipped into the elastic shoulder harness that held my Magnum .44, told myself for the hundredth time that it was uncomfortable, gave the revolver a quick look to make sure the chamber under the firing pin was empty, stuck it in place and called downstairs for a mozo to come around with the Jaguar.
I was parked beside the gas pump at the Poor Country Boy’s Garage just outside Zaragoza on the Madrid highway, smoking the last of my cigarettes and wishing somebody would come to open the joint up. The sun had risen about an hour ago, and I had bean parked there ever since. I took a nip from the bottle of Fundador in the glove compartment, knowing I needed the lift it would give me but wondering how long it would last. I was beat after the long night drive from Madrid, and alcohol will mask fatigue only so long.
I had cased the joint on arrival without any luck. It was a large two-story whitewashed building with an office at one end displaying in its window American motor oil and tires. There was a big vehicular door in the middle and the Johns were around the other side. All the doors were locked.
Flipping my cigarette butt out the window, I watched a big trailer truck hurtle by. It was going to be a hot day. Even at this hour the sun was already strong, baking down on the bare sienna fields and casting stark, craggy shadows on the convoluted gray mountains beyond them. I had a foul taste in my mouth and tried the brandy again. It didn’t help. I folded my arms over the steering wheel and leaned my head on them, hoping to catch a few minutes’ shut-eye.
A motorbike came putt-putting up from the direction of Zaragoza. The teen-age kid astride it pulled into the station and parked the bike in front of the office window.
“Momento, señor, por favor,” he called to me, and unlocked the door and went inside. In a few minutes there was a clattering sound and the kid reappeared swinging the big vehicular door up and back from the inside. He approached the Jag wearing a white jacket and one of those overseas caps you see at gas stations everywhere.
“Pleno?” he asked, unlocking the gas pump.
“Yes, fill it.”
He did so. He made a production of wiping the windshield and windows. He was smiling and nodding. He really liked Axel Spade’s XK-E. Servicing it was a great way to start the long, hot day.
“When does your boss usually get here?” I asked in Spanish. The kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. He was too young to be El Macareno II.
“Usually he is in Madrid. You are Swiss, señor?” he asked after looking at the Jag’s license plate. “I have a cousin, the son of my mother’s sister, who went to Geneva to find work. Many people from Zaragoza go. But it is very distant, beyond France.”
He was standing at the window on my side of the car, peering in eagerly at the dashboard.
“How fast can she go?”
“Pushing two hundred kilometers an hour,” I said.
He whistled. “That is almost the same as flying.”
“Clearly,” I said. “Isn’t your boss here in Zaragoza now?”
“He came yesterday. I think he will be here later.”
I rubbed the beard stubble on my jaw. “Is there someplace I can shave?”
“In the washroom, señor. The key is in the office hanging on the wall near the calendar. But will you do me the favor of moving the car first?”
The key was still in the ignition. “Can you drive?”
“Sí, señor,” he said eagerly.
I got my toilet kit off the floor in back, climbed out of the Jag and said; “Would you do it for me?”
“With much pleasure, señor,” he said, smiling hugely.
I stepped back and he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and slid into the car. He clashed gears once and then got it going with a lurch. I winced and headed for the washroom.
When I returned, the kid wasn’t alone. He was setting up an oil-can display between the gas pumps. An old beat-up Seat sedan had been parked near the Jag. A woman in a tan blouse and black skirt stood near it. She was watching me. Maybe thirty years old, I thought, damn good looking once and still attractive, with dark eyes, a full-lipped mouth and a more than serviceable if slightly chunky body. After thirty, most Spanish women age fast. This one was still hovering.
I went over to the kid. “No sign of him yet?”
“No, not yet,” he said, tight-lipped. I figured the woman had bawled him out for something. “My sister Margarita says he may not come at all.”
“I’ll wait a while if you don’t mind.”
“As you wish, señor.” He looked at the gauge on the gas pump. “That will be four hundred and seventy pesetas.”
I looked in my wallet. There were several hundreds, a five-hundred and a thousand-peseta note, as well as one for five thousand. I took that one out.
The kid looked at it, shook his head and gave it to his sister. “We can’t change that, señor,” she said.
“I’m sorry, but it’s all I have.”
The woman gave the five-thousand-peseta note back to her brother. “Take it to the hotel and change it, Luis,” she said.
The kid pocketed the five-thousand-peseta note, climbed on his motorbike and pedaled it until the motor caught. Then he went putt-putting off in the direction of Zaragoza.
I stood near Margarita while she continued setting up the display of oil cans. “I find it difficult to believe,” she said slowly, “that a man travels through the night with only a five-thousand-peseta note. You came from Madrid?”
“Yes.”
“What do you want with Antonio Lopez?”
“I’ll let him know when I see him.”
I patted the breast pocket of my jacket for the pack of cigarettes I knew I didn’t have. I frow
ned and opened my jacket to explore my shirt pocket, letting her get a look at the butt of the Magnum in its holster. She gasped.
“Do you sell cigarettes here?” I asked.
“No.” She turned away from me and then swung back suddenly. “It was trouble. I knew it. It was bound to be trouble.”
“What was?” I asked.
“Antonio and the stranger. The woman. You’ve got to understand how he is. A good boy, but wild.” Her dark eyes grew soft as she talked about him.
“Where are they now?”
“How can I tell you that? I saw the gun. You are trouble.”
“That’s up to Antonio.”
“The strange woman who came here with him, she is yours?”
“I came here looking for her,” I admitted.
“Sí, sí, I knew it. Oh, the fool. The great fool. Muy lindo, but a fool. What will you do?”
I shrugged. She grasped my lapels then and pulled her face up close to mine. I could smell the perfume in her dark, glossy hair. “Listen to me, señor,” she said. “I beg you. These things do not last with Antonio. Women find him attractive. He has that quality. It goes with having been a bullfighter. He has had many women. He will have many more. He forgets them. They mean nothing to him, except for taking them to bed. Sí, sí, I know. He always comes back to me. I was his first.” She let go of my lapels. “Take your woman and go. He is like a child that way. He has no restraint, but he means no harm. Do not hurt him.”
A Volkswagen Minibus, loaded with luggage and passengers, pulled up to the gas pumps. A very fat man with a red face and beer-rolls on his neck got out and took a picture of the highway and the mountains with a Leica while Margarita filled the gas tank. He paid her and got back in, and the Minibus drove off.
“A kilometer from here,” Margarita said, not looking at me, “just where the road marker says Zaragoza. There is a small house on the right side of the highway. You will find your woman there.”
“And Antonio?”
“He does not inform me of his comings and goings when he is with another. Remember that I did not have to tell you, señor. Do not hurt him.”
I got into the Jag and started the engine. “What about your change, señor?” Margarita called.
“Buy yourself a new dress for when you’re alone with Antonio,” I said, figuring that Axel Spade could afford it.
It was a small, brilliantly whitewashed adobe house with a red tile roof. I had parked on the shoulder of the road a hundred yards away and walked there. Geraniums were blooming in the garden, and two small palm trees stood sentry before the door. I knocked and heard a dog’s low growl inside.
“Who is it?” a girl’s voice demanded. The dog went on growling.
“Antonio,” I said.
“Did you make the phone call?”
“Sí.”
She opened the door about two inches and I caught a glimpse of her eye before she cried out, “You’re not Antonio,” and leaned her weight against the door, trying to shut it. The dog began to bark. I shoved harder than she did and got the door open far enough to slip inside.
“Get him, Diablo,” she said, and I had a brief split-second to catalog the fact that she was not only everything El Macareno had claimed but also the type Axel Spade would flip for, and then close to two hundred pounds of coal-black Great Dane came leaping at me with a slobbering growl, saliva drooling from its jowls. The huge forepaws hit my shoulders hard and I went down, tugging at the Magnum under my arm. I drew it as my shoulders hit the floor. The Great Dane lunged at my throat but I brought my left forearm in front of it just before the huge teeth snapped shut. It was like a vise closing on my arm, but not hard enough for the teeth to penetrate more than my jacket sleeve. Diablo was waiting for a further command. Whether he took a nibble out of my arm now or later was up to Luz Robles.
“Call him off,” I said in English, holding the Magnum at the dog’s ear, “or I’ll blow his head off.”
Luz Robles looked down at me. “You must work for Axel,” she said calmly. “He likes to surround himself with big, brutish types. They make him seem even more urbane than he is.”
“I don’t feel big and brutish now,” I said. “Call off your damn dog.”
She leaned down to stroke the scruff of the Great Dane’s neck and whisper something to him. He let go of my arm and backed off, still growling, his eyes regarding me steadily.
“I’m going to stand up,” I said. “Keep him back.”
She approached the Great Dane. His shoulders came almost to her waist. He looked up at her and stuck out a huge red tongue and began to lick her hand. I stood up and waved the Magnum at a door behind Luz Robles. “Put him in there and shut it.”
“At a word from me he’d tear your throat out.”
“He’d never reach it.”
She opened the door behind her and patted the Great Dane’s rump. He trotted obediently inside. She shut the door.
“Does he have any cute tricks like turning a door knob?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know. I only met him yesterday. He took an immediate shine to me, as you can see.”
We gave each other a long once-over. Only an extremely self-confident dame can get away with that the way a man can routinely. She had reason to be self-confident. She was wearing tight black slacks and a frilly white bullfighter’s shirt open at the throat. Her long auburn hair fell loosely below her shoulder blades. She was a fairly tall girl with long legs and a high narrow waist. Her breasts swelled the frilly white shirt beautifully. She was fair-skinned and had a sullen, voluptuous mouth and the biggest, coldest blue eyes I had ever seen. She was gorgeous and she knew it.
“I take it your lecherous stare means I have your approval,” she said. “What do you do for an encore, roll over on your back and purr?”
“For a kidnap victim who just got herself rescued,” I said, “you don’t seem delighted to see your rescuer.”
“Remind me to thank you some time next year, when I can squeeze it into my calendar.”
“You got any things here? Pack them and let’s get going. But if you have any ideas of turning that dog loose, forget it. Now snap it up.”
“When a man likes me too much when he doesn’t want to like me, he starts getting nasty. Is that your problem, sweetheart?”
“The way you put it, that’s too complicated for me. You already said I was the big brutish type. Snap it up, I said.”
She was right of course, and she knew it, and she must have known I knew it too. You don’t meet a dish like this very often. When you do, if you are at all honest with yourself, you admit that the idea has crossed your mind to make like a caveman and whack her once over the head and haul her off to your cave.
“Make yourself comfortable, sweetheart. I won’t be a minute. There are cigarettes on the cocktail table if you want to work on your cancer while I’m gone.”
She went in where the dog was and shut the door. I sat on the low sofa in front of the cocktail table and put the Magnum down next to the pack of cigarettes and rubbed my left arm, which hurt like hell. I rolled the sleeve up. There were deep tooth-marks but no puncture. The jacket had been torn again though. It was really taking a beating.
I lit a cigarette and was debating making myself a drink with the fixings set out on the cocktail table when I heard a car pull up. I rose, went to the window and peered through a slit in the shutter. A Peugeot station wagon with GARAJE DEL MACARENO, ZARAGOZA painted on its side was parked beyond the geraniums. A sleekly handsome type who figured to be Antonio Lopez, El Macareno II, came sauntering up the garden path whistling Cielo Andaluz through his teeth. He did a little skittering paso doble step and had a look on his face that said he was more than mildly expectant at the prospect of seeing Luz Robles again. I couldn’t blame him. I almost felt sorry he had to see me first instead.
I went to the door and waited with the Magnum in my hand. I heard him hit the stoop, still whistling. The dog began to bark inside. I yanked the door open and the
n things happened very fast. Antonio looked at me and the Magnum and froze with a vacant smile on his face. I heard a click, and then Luz Robles’ voice, low and peremptory, “Get him, Diablo.”
I swung around in time to see Diablo’s great, lithe form tensing to spring. He snarled and came for my throat. I pulled the Magnum’s trigger twice, clearing the empty chamber, and shot Diablo through the mouth. Luz Robles screamed as the dog tumbled toward her with a single final yelp. Something moved behind me and slammed into the side of my head. I fell in the general direction of the floor.
TEN
It was very hot in the room, the kind of oppressive heat where all you can do is lie perfectly still and hope that after a while you will stop sweating.
I was doing that and also hoping that the pain in my head would go away. I was on my back on a bare mattress, wearing only my undershorts with a wrinkled sheet draped carelessly across my legs. I decided to reach up, having in mind to do it gingerly, and touch the left side of my head, where the pain centered. I realized I would have to reach down, not up, and then I realized I couldn’t do it at all. My arms were spread-eagled and my wrists were fettered with heavy twine to the bedposts. I looked around. I saw three dirty whitewashed walls, a not very interesting ceiling with a bare bulb dangling unlit on its cord, a sink with a crumpled towel on its edge, a three-legged wooden stool and a small window, open, which showed a square of painfully bright blue sky. I. heard a man’s voice say, “Fill her up,” and Margarita’s brother say, “Pleno?” and the man say, “Yeah, pleno.” I decided I was in a room above the Poor Country Boy’s Garage. I also decided it would be a good time to holler, while the American tourist was still down there getting his tank filled.
I wanted to shout, “Hey, down there, I need help,” or something like that. I made a faint sound like, “Mrn-mm, mm-mm.” There was a gag in my mouth and tape across my lips. I lay back and looked at the fire in the bright blue sky outside the window and went on sweating.
It was the longest day I ever spent. The gas station building was flat-roofed, and either insulation hadn’t come to Zaragoza or the Poor Country Boy had decided he didn’t need any. It must have been over a hundred degrees in that room. I spent the slow minutes and hours sweating and feeling the strength, such as it was, drain out of me. Cars came and went outside. Sometimes Margarita serviced them and sometimes her kid brother Luís did. I remembered Luz Robles asking me when I was outside the door, thinking I was Antonio, if I’d made the phone call. There was only one phone call it could be. Antonio had probably made it. I wondered if Axel Spade would have any luck keeping the Captain General on the ranch. I strained feebly at my fettered wrists. But they were bound fast, and the more I strained the more the sweat burned under the twine on my wrists. I gave up and lay there in the heat and watched a curious bee fly in through the window. It had a black and yellow body and it buzzed me a couple of times before landing on my upper lip. I didn’t move, but I felt my eyes cross looking down at it. After a while it buzzed away and out the window.
Drumbeat Madrid Page 9