“That was Luz Robles, wasn’t it?” April asked me. “Ray showed me her picture.”
“Yeah, it was Luz.”
“What did she want?”
“The marriage is off,” I said. “I guess somebody had to tell the best man.”
“Are you serious?”
“She told me it was off,” I said.
“But she wouldn’t come here just to tell you that.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Well?” April asked, and then she said, “Uh-oh, if that look in your eye means anything, you’re right back in the middle of a case. Aren’t you?”
“I wish to hell I knew,” I said, remembering how Luz had hauled off and socked me. The kind of guff I’d given her she wouldn’t take from an accomplice, but she might take it from someone she’d lined up as a patsy. Or maybe her thinking was one step ahead of mine.
“Are you—going somewhere?” April asked, disappointed.
“Got to see a guy,” I said.
“Will I see you later?”
“I hope so,” I said, but at the moment my heart wasn’t in it. Luz Robles’ last accomplice or patsy or whatever the hell he’d been before she shot him dead was Antonio Lopez, El Macareno II.
SEVENTEEN
The guy I had to see was Axel Spade. I met him in mid-morning at a café across the street from the main entrance of the bull ring. The corrida was still seven hours off, but scalpers were already wandering from table to table with a furtive air offering tickets at prices that would come down as the day progressed.
Spade looked tired. The crow’s feet around his eyes had deepened and the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. He hadn’t shaved since the night before. The knot of his tie was askew and when he shot his cuff to light one of those small black cigars I saw a smudge of dirt on the starched broadcloth. Spade was usually a three-shirt-a-day man.
We ordered drinks, coffee for Spade and a Tio Pepe for me. “Luz paid me a visit,” I said.
“That doesn’t surprise me a bit,” he said, and sipped his coffee. His hand was shaking.
“She said the wedding was off.”
“That’s right.”
“Mind telling me why?”
Spade watched without much interest as an American couple bought a pair of tickets from one of the scalpers. He sighed. “In Zaragoza,” he said slowly, “I had a lot of nonsense to say on the subject of morality. Do you remember?”
I said I remembered.
“I was whistling in the dark. I couldn’t go through with it on her terms.”
“What happened?”
“We couldn’t talk on the drive back. Sotomayor was in the car. We had what I suppose you’d call a showdown at the ranch. I accused Luz of arranging the kidnaping herself and planning to kill her uncle. She didn’t bother denying anything. When I finished she said, ‘Is that an accusation or are you corigratulating me? After all I almost got away with it.’ Those were her exact words.
“I said I could appreciate her grievance but that appreciating a grievance and condoning an attempt at murder were two different things. She laughed and told me, very sweetly, not to worry. ‘I can’t kill my uncle now,’ she said, ‘thanks to your Mr. Drum.’ I asked her if that were the only reason she wouldn’t try again, and she said of course. She said he deserved to die. We argued. She said I was a pious old fool.” He shrugged. “Maybe I am. I said she had no moral sense. She said morality was just fear of punishment, and that any other explanation, including any I might have to offer, was sheer hypocrisy. I had none to offer. She wasn’t willing to let it go at that. She said people were justified in doing anything they had to, anything at all, if it got them what they wanted. Take Antonio Lopez, she said. She was taunting me.” His face colored, and he looked away from me. “She kept him in line the only way she could. She told me with a smile that it was even pretty enjoyable work, keeping him in line.” He hunched his shoulders and leaned across the table to stare past me at the bullring entrance. “What she did to keep him in line was sleep with him.”
I made no reply. I felt vaguely guilty, wondering if I’d have made love to Luz this morning knowing who she was, and I didn’t know for sure.
“That did it,” Spade said. “I took my ring back.” He pasted an urbane smile on his face. It took some doing. “Not that I really blame her. I wish to hell I could, but she has more than enough reason to hate her uncle.”
He relit his cigar carefully and for the first time really opened up about the girl he had almost married. Luz Robles, then Sotomayor, had been five years old when her father was executed by the regime. His arrest and quick trial, and probably his execution, had come as no surprise to him. One night he gathered the family, even the two-year-old José, and said, “I have made provisions for you in the event that something happens to me. You will be taken care of by my good friend Cayetano Prieto y Azaña. He has been instructed as to what must be done, including the disposition of our wealth.”
That night the Guardia came for Luz’s father. The next day Prieto put nine-year-old Ramón on a plane for the States, where he was met by his godfather, a Baltimore newspaperman named Moyers. After her husband’s arrest, Luz’s mother went into a traumatic state bordering on shock. The servants, fearing for their own safety, left. For a week neighbors cared for the stricken woman and her two remaining children. Then Santiago Sotomayor took José away, claiming he could provide for the boy better than his mother. Luz, ill with some childhood disease, was allowed to remain at home for the time being.
Toward the end of her convalescence, Prieto returned. “Santiago wants the girl too, now that she’s well,” he told Luz’s mother. Luz overheard their conversation and was terrified. She had always been afraid of her uncle. “You are going away,” Prieto said. “At once, today.”
He had arranged everything. They drove all day and all night to Lisbon, crossing at a border station in Estrema-dura where Prieto seemed to know the guards. The woman and the girl boarded a Venezuelan freighter that took them to Caracas. The Robles family, friends of Prieto, met them at the dock.
Luz’s mother’s mental state deteriorated. Before long she had to be institutionalized. Luz’s new family wasn’t wealthy. Robles had a small import-export business and the family divided its time between Caracas and San Francisco. Money came every month to provide for Luz. It was necessary, now that she was part of the Robles household. To live as well as they did they must have spent everything they earned.
When she was about nine, Señor Robles took Luz to court and had her declared his adopted daughter. “Luz was grateful,” Spade told me, “but she always knew that one day she’d return to Spain and claim what was rightfully hers.”
“Her father’s money,” I said, and he nodded.
“She grew up in Caracas and San Francisco and saw her mother no more than once or twice a year. She was living in San Francisco when word came that her mother had slashed her wrists with a broken bottle and died alone in her room at the sanatarium. Luz blames her uncle for that. ‘He had my father executed,’ she said, ‘and he destroyed my mother.’”
“Why was Sotomayor out to get his brother?” I asked. “Because they were on opposite sides of the political fence?”
“That was the most obvious reason,” Spade told me. “The Spanish Civil War was like that, brother against brother. It was enough reason for the Sotomayors to hate each other, but there was more. Luz’s uncle fell in love with her mother. They probably had an affair. Luz’s father found out about it.”
“Which was when the Captain General turned his brother over to the Guardia for old political crimes.”
“Exactly,” Spade said. “Luz lived with that knowledge all her life. There are some places in the world where upholding the honor of your family, even to the extent of murder, is condoned. But the awful thing was that Luz seemed to enjoy her vendetta. She is completely lacking in remorse and in the end I couldn’t live with that.”
The difference, from where I sat, seeme
d to be one of attitude rather than intent, but I didn’t say that. What I did say was, “Prieto’s going to hand over the family fortune. Tonight.”
Spade perked up at that. His dark eyes were gleaming suddenly. “Really? To Luz and Ray Moyers, you mean?”
“That’s Prieto’s idea. He was waiting until José came of age. It isn’t Luz’s idea though. She wants it all for herself.” I told him what Luz had asked me to do.
“Ten percent of the Sotomayor fortune would make you a wealthy man,” he said.
I laughed. “Thanks a lot, buddy.”
“You mean you’re not going to do it?”
“I’ll be there,” I said. “Luz killed Antonio Lopez and she tried to kill her uncle. She might have been the one who shot José as her way of narrowing down the number of heirs. Ray Moyers could be next on her list if he puts up a squawk about the loot, as who the hell wouldn’t? I guess you wouldn’t understand this, but working for you sort of bought me an interest in their lives. I saw Luz shoot Antonio Lopez in cold blood, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it. Or there wasn’t until Luz offered me her little proposition. I’ll be there all right.”
“You’re a strange man,” Spade said. “Don’t you realize you’re trying to take the law into your own hands, just like Luz? Yet you blame her.”
“Who said so?” I asked, a little hot under the collar, and then I realized that I had said so, more than once. I wondered what my reaction would have been if Luz had simply walked up to her uncle and shot him and hopped a plane to wherever they don’t have an extradition treaty with Spain and lived her version of happily-ever-after. Maybe I would have thought she deserved a medal.
“You said so,” Spade reminded me, and for a moment we glared at each other, and then I smiled.
“I kind of did at that,” I said. “But if you had to make up your mind about Luz, I have to call the shots for myself as I see them too. Let’s just drop it, okay? What I don’t get is why Luz came straight to me for help.”
“That’s no problem. On the drive back from Zaragoza she kept asking about you. It was something we could talk about in front of her uncle. He had a lot to say on the subject too. It took him a while to get going, but he’s pretty impressed with you.”
“I wonder what would happen,” I said, “if we told him where Luz and Ray Moyers were going tonight, and why.”
“You can’t do that,” Spade said, shocked. “The government probably tried to get its hands on that money. It could mean Prieto y Azaña’s neck if they found out.”
“Why would that bother you?”
Spade was angry again. “I just don’t see any reason for you to do it.”
I had no intention of doing it, but the suggestion had bothered the hell out of Spade and I wanted to know why. “It might give Luz another crack at the old man. I’ll be there, don’t forget.”
“Playing God,” Spade grumbled.
I got up. “I said I had to call the shots as I saw them.” I took some money out of my pocket and signaled the waiter.
“Wait a minute,” Spade said.
The waiter drifted in our direction. “Two more of the same,” Spade told him, and I sat down again. “What if you were still working for me?”
“I got fired.”
“I could re-hire you.”
“What for?”
Spade looked at his fingernails. He looked at his ace-of-spades cufflink. He took out a gold case that also had his hallmark on it and carefully lit one of those thin black cigars. He cleared his throat and almost opened his mouth to say something but didn’t. The waiter came with another coffee and Tio Pepe. Spade cleared his throat again. The waiter went away.
Finally Spade said, “Would you like to know who would have been my best man if I hadn’t brought you down here instead? Onassis. We’re old friends.”
“I’ll put that in my memoirs,” I said. “I upstaged Onassis.”
“Stop being so damn cynical and listen to me. I thought I might have use for a man with your background. Then it looked as though I wouldn’t, except for the kidnaping of course. Now it seems I might again.”
There was a faraway look in Spade’s eyes. It was the look of an empire builder building empires or a visionary having visions—or the king of international wheeler-dealers getting ready to wheel and deal.
“Almost thirty years ago Hernando Sotomayor arranged the transfer of the Spanish Loyalist treasury from Madrid to Moscow,” Spade said. “Three quarters of a billion dollars in gold held for safekeeping in the Gros Bank. But of course when the smoke of battle cleared, the Loyalists had lost, and since the Russians never recognized the Franco regime, not even as the de facto government of Spain, they never admitted their legal obligation to return the gold to Spain. It’s still in Moscow. Three quarters of a billion dollars held in trust at a reasonable rate of interest for almost thirty years—it would be well over a billion dollars by now. And while it’s stolen money, plain and simple, international financial circles have always regarded it, not without a collective grin, as blocked currency.”
I wondered why Spade was going into all that detail. A moment later I found out when he said, “There’s a standard commission on the international market payable to the successful negotiator of blocked currency. The Spanish government, if someone could get his hands on the gold in Moscow, would cheerfully pay the going rate.” Spade took a deep breath. “The going rate is fifty percent.”
“Of a billion dollars,” I said. It was a sum you could talk about but not really grasp, like measuring the distances between stars in feet and inches.
“Hernando Sotomayor, then the Spanish Minister of Finance,” Spade said, “was no fool. He probably knew there was a chance, a good chance, that the Loyalists would lose the war. He probably also realized that, whether it was the government he would have chosen or not, the government that controlled Spain after the war would still be the government of his country. And maybe he was even far-sighted enough to realize that the repressive measures of the new regime, like the repressive measures of most new regimes after a civil war, would gradually be relaxed. Hernando Sotomayor wouldn’t have liked Franco and what he stands for any more than I do. But had he lived he would eventually have realized that the gold, back in Spanish hands, any Spanish hands at all, would have done the Spanish people a great deal of good.
“There were rumors in international financial circles that he had made provisions for the safe return of that gold, no matter who won the war. But years passed and he did nothing. After his death you heard less and less about it and finally nothing at all. Still, I believe the rumors were right.”
“How could he have done it?”
Spade showed me the palms of his hands. “I don’t have the faintest idea,” he said, but he still had that look in his eyes. “I’m hoping we can find out. I was hoping I could find out when I asked you to be my best man. If the situation had become difficult, I knew I’d be able to rely on you.”
“What makes you think you’re going to find out now?”
“Prieto y Azaña,” Spade said. “He’s an economist and he was Hernando Sotomayor’s best friend. What would you say were the two most important things in Sotomayor’s Life just before he was executed?”
That was easy. “The well-being of his family and the billion dollars of Spanish gold in Moscow.”
“Right. And isn’t it obvious that if he trusted Prieto y Azaña with the first he’d also trust him with the second?”
“That only makes sense up to a point. Where it stops making sense is right here: Prieto would have come to the same conclusions you say Sotomayor must have reached regarding the value of the gold to the Spanish people. But he hasn’t made a move to claim it.”
“Maybe whatever provisions Sotomayor made,” Spade said, “are so involved that Prieto knows he isn’t the man to handle them.”
“You mean Prieto y Azaña’s no Axel Spade, and knows he’s not?”
“If you’ll forgive a lack of modest
y, that’s it precisely.” Spade grinned the old Axel Spade grin. For now at least Luz and his personal problems were forgotten. “And there’s another possibility,” he said. “Maybe Sotomayor was too cagey for him.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Maybe the key that can unlock the door to a billion dollars in gold is right there along with the family fortune, and Prieto hasn’t been astute enough to discover it. Sotomayor was a subtle man in the most subtle of all professions. I wish I’d met him.”
“Prieto corresponded with you about the gold, didn’t he?”
“Only in the most hypothetical terms.”
“Why didn’t you just call him up, make an appointment and go talk to him about it?”
“Yes, I could have done that. But until my engagement to Luz I was never allowed in Spain. Then of course there was the kidnaping.” He didn’t say that bitterly. It was just a kidnaping. He was too excited now to dwell on it. “But now Prieto’s going to turn over their father’s fortune to Luz and Ray Moyers, and you’re going to be right there when it happens.”
Spade sighed and finished his coffee. “If I hadn’t lost my temper with Luz last night, it could have been me. But at least you already know Prieto, and he knows you’re working for me. I’m relying on you to find out what you can. If there’s any possibility of recovering that gold for Spain …” He went into raptures about the consequences, both for the welfare of the Spanish people and for the reputation, not to mention the bank account, of the man who pulled it off, but I was hardly listening. His excitement was contagious. I sat staring into space and thinking about a billion dollars.
“Well?” he asked me.
“Sorry. I lost you.”
“I wanted to know if you’d be willing to follow the trail of the gold—wherever it led. There’d be far more in it for you than a retainer and a daily wage. Far, far more.”
He had that visionary’s look in his eye again. I brought him down to earth by saying, “Let’s take it one step at a time. I’ll see what I can find out in Madrid tonight.”
Drumbeat Madrid Page 15