I waited. Prieto shook his head slowly. “I am delighted with Mr. Axel Spade’s interest,” he said, “but there was nothing Don Hernando could have trusted me with. Nothing.”
I believed him. It looked as if Axel Spade’s dream, like most pipe dreams, was going up in smoke.
“Consider,” Prieto said. “It was November, 1936. The gold arrived in Odessa at night. The ship that carried it sailed with no flag. Even the name on the bow was obscured. The unloading was also done at night, by the N.K.V.D., then the Russian secret police. The gold was shipped to Moscow in an armored train and it took the Gros Bank forever to count it. Meanwhile the Spanish officials whose trust it was could only cool their heels. Then, afterward, they were scattered to the winds. One to Mexico, one to Buenos Aires and the third, I believe, to Washington.”
Prieto leaned forward. “The Russian officials involved were less lucky. Chief of them, the Commissar of Finance, was presently shot. Both the director and the sub-director of the Gros Bank, since they knew too much, were exiled to Siberia. One year later the Russians proudly reported the opening of new gold mines in the Urals, and for the first time in its history Russia became a gold exporter. What I’m trying to tell you, Mr. Drum, is that if you and Mr. Axel Spade think there is some possibility of recovering Spain’s three-quarters of a billion dollars, you are mistaken. Not that it isn’t a fascinating subject for discussion. Not that I haven’t dreamed of it myself, and dreamed of it often. I told you it was my passion. But believe me, Hernando Sotomayor made no provisions for the return of the gold for the very good reason that he could make none. It was a gamble. He was wrong. Spain lost.”
“All right,” I said. “Then that’s what I’ll tell Spade.”
“Unless,” Prieto said, “Mr, Axel Spade knows something I don’t know.”
“I doubt it. He was hoping Sotomayor had taken you into his confidence.”
“Then I’m very much afraid it was a vain hope.”
Carmen came back into the room. She looked at her father.
“Now if you’ll forgive me, Mr. Drum, I had better retire. Otherwise this one will never let me hear the end of it.” Prieto’s glance rested fondly on Carmen. “Would you like me to take you to Pamplona again in the morning?” he asked her.
“You don’t really like it, papa. And you need your rest. I could go with Mr. Drum.”
Prieto’s reaction surprised me. He stiffened and sat erect in the deep armchair. His eyes narrowed. “For that,” he said coldly, “we would have to arrange a chaperone, and there is no time.”
“Papa, this isn’t the Middle Ages.”
“Please don’t make a scene in front of our guest. I will take you.”
“But it’s only a short drive, and I could stay at the Sotomayor ranch.”
“Some young girls,” Prieto said, still coldly, “do not need chaperones. Others do. I leave it to you to decide into which category you fall. Now I am going to bed.”
Carmen turned away quickly, facing the fireplace. Tears had filled her eyes. She didn’t want me to see them.
Prieto got up. He took a deep breath and three short strides toward the doorway. He stopped. He turned his face in my direction and smiled apologetically, like a host who has left the guest of honor’s glass empty too long at a cocktail party. “Carmen,” he said. Then, before Carmen could reach him, before I could, he collapsed and fell forward on his face.
TWENTY
Dr. Martinez came downstairs. It was one o’clock. He had been with Prieto a long time while I sat in the living room with Carmen. She hadn’t talked much, and there was nothing I could do to comfort her. Once she said, “It is his heart, of course. I always thought he exaggerated it, to avoid things he found unpleasant, like a schoolboy who claims on the day of an examination that he has a sore throat. Perhaps he wanted me to believe that. All he wanted was to be left in peace with his work and his books.”
She rose quickly and met Dr. Martinez at the foot of the stairs. He was a tall, very thin man in a dark suit. His long face looked troubled.
“Your father is a very sick man,” he told Carmen gently. He sat down near the fireplace, looking exhausted himself. “A heart attack. He has had two of them before, minor attacks. This time it is a massive coronary thrombosis.”
“Is he going to die?” Carmen asked in a small and lost voice.
Dr. Martinez ignored the question. “I have telephoned for an oxygen tent. If he responds at all, we can think about moving him to the hospital in the morning.”
“If he responds at all? He is going to die, isn’t he? Isn’t he?”
“I have seen men with heart attacks as massive as Don Cayetano’s leave the hospital and lead productive lives for ten or even fifteen years,” Dr. Martinez said. “I have seen others, apparently healthy men—”
“I want to see him.”
“Yes, by all means. He is conscious. He asked for you. Go to your father. It is what he wishes.”
She ran up the stairs. I heard a door shut gently.
“Are you a friend?” Dr. Martinez asked me.
“We’re business acquaintances.”
“I have called for the oxygen. One does that automatically.” He nodded and lit a cigarette. “But I also have called for a priest. There is no hope. Unless a miracle happens, Don Cayetano will be dead before morning.”
“Does he know he’s dying?”
“He could sense it. He is not unhappy. Of the two things he had to complete in this life, he said, he had completed one tonight. Would that be the reason you are here?”
“Yes it would. Did he say what the other one was?”
“The child. He has reason to fear she is a wild one. He would like to have seen her married.” Dr. Martinez sighed. “Now that becomes my problem. I am her guardian, you see.”
We sat for a while in silence. One of the candles on the mantel guttered.
“The hardest thing about dying,” Dr. Martinez said musingly, “is that you must die alone. It is the final act of life, and either the greatest or the most terrible—who can say?—but nobody can share it with you.” He shook his head. “The sins committed in modern hospitals in the name of efficiency: keep the loved ones out of the dying man’s room, they only get in the way. But they are precisely what he wants, what he needs, in his final moments. That is why I permitted Carmen to go upstairs. He wants her with him. It will make dying a little easier, if dying can ever be said to be easy.”
Medical science, such as it was, arrived before salvation. Two men came in and went upstairs with Dr. Martinez and the oxygen equipment. They left in a few minutes, and Dr. Martinez rejoined me. He had a troubled scowl on his face, like a man who couldn’t make up his mind about something.
“Don Cayetano wants you,” he said finally.
“Me?”
“If your name is Drum, yes. He asked for you. It was a matter of the gravest importance, he said. Have you any idea why he wishes to see you?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Would it be important to him?”
“Very.”
Dr. Martinez stood up. He placed a cigarette between his lips and left it there unlit. “The man is dying. He is my friend. We have known each other twenty-five years, and he thought enough of me to name me the guardian of his child. Yet now I’m only a doctor, whose sad task it is to ease him out of this world without too much pain, and he wishes to see you.” Dr. Martinez lit his cigarette and tossed the match into the fireplace. “Go to him. Go to him now, before I change my mind.”
I headed for the stairs. Prieto had remembered something about the Spanish gold, I thought. That was it. That was why he had sent for me.
But I was wrong.
He looked very small under the polyethylene of the oxygen tent. Carmen was sitting at his bedside on a chair she had drawn up close. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was biting her lip.
His head moved a little on the pillow, and he saw me. His lips parted slightly, and there was the gleam of
teeth. He may have been trying to smile.
“You will leave us,” he told Carmen in a faint voice.
“I want to stay at your side, papa.”
“You will do as I say. Leave us for a few moments.”
She got up and brushed past without looking at me. He called out to her when she reached the door. “Carmen? When Father Vicente comes, you will tell him for me it was a fool’s errand. We will talk many times yet of the Ireland he loves so much.”
The door shut behind Carmen.
“Sit down,” Prieto told me, and I did so. “What I said about the priest was for Carmen’s courage. I am no fool. A man knows when he is dying.”
He looked up at me. His eyes were clear and bright. When he spoke it was softly and slowly, but not haltingly. “I have had a good life,” he said, “as much as any man can claim that. I have no fear of death, though I wish I might have seen my beloved England once more—and your country also, Mr. Drum. But America is so big that a man would have to start young there.”
For a while he said nothing else. Then he broke in in the middle of a sentence, as though he had spoken the first part silently in his mind. “—the fortune of my friend Don Hernando. God was good to me. Not only have I lived to arrange the transfer of his wealth, but I met the heirs. A fine young man and a lovely young woman. Don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I am glad. Because the other one, the one that died, I did not like him. It pleases me that these two turned out so well.”
Again he was silent, and again I waited. There was the faint hiss of oxygen escaping from the cylinder.
“Why,” he asked in the same soft and rational voice, “do you suppose Luz Robles wanted to know if the violent death of her brother made any difference?”
That was a good question, because it was an odd question Luz had chosen to ask Kohler. Maybe that fertile mind of hers had been at work. Maybe she wanted to know what would happen if one of the remaining heirs also got himself killed. Kohler had answered it for her: InterKant couldn’t care less.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I know,” Prieto told me. “She was afraid. She was afraid that whoever killed her brother José might make an attempt on her own life. Though her fear was logical, with so much money involved, she was mistaken. The death of José Sotomayor had nothing to do with the legacy left by her father. Nothing whatever. I don’t want Luz Robles to live with that fear. Are you following me, Mr. Drum?” he asked calmly, as though I lay under the polyethylene of the oxygen tent and he had come to my bedside.
I said I was following him.
“Bueno. In a short while my friend Father Vicente will come, and I will confess to him, and he will absolve me of my sins. That is a comfort to me, but it is not enough, as anything I confess to Father Vicente must remain his trust—his and God’s. I will not be responsible for Luz Robles living in fear. There is something she must know. Will you tell her for me?”
“If I can.”
Suddenly he seemed to be talking about something else. “My daughter Carmen has wild blood in her, and it is difficult for her to say no to any pleasure. Perhaps Dr. Martinez, with his wisdom and attention—but no, forgive me, that is not what I wished to say.”
He turned his head away from me, as though unwilling to see my reaction to his words. “Carmen was having an affair with a man, an affair that went on for many weeks. Though she thought I did not know, I am no fool. I am a proud man, Mr. Drum. The knowledge of it was destroying me. It had to stop. I had to stop it. I tried to reason with him, but he laughed at me. ‘She is not in a convent now,’ he said. ‘You are an old man, and you do not understand,’ he said. ‘What she does she does of her own free choice. She likes it.’ Still I tried to reason with him, not once but many times. He taunted me. He said if I persisted in bothering him, he would—tell me in detail what they did together. He laughed in my face. I went to him yet again. He began to say things. I suspected Carmen was there at the time. I was furious. I told him to stop. I demanded that he let me inside. He did neither.”
Prieto’s eyes were shut, his voice toneless. He was panting slightly. “I shot him. Then I went down to the basement of the building, took my car from the garage and left. No one saw me. No one suspected, not even Carmen. I did what I had to do.”
Maybe you did, mister, I thought, but it was in no fit of uncontrollable rage. You brought a gun with you, and there was a silencer screwed into the muzzle. Will you tell that to the priest?
But I said nothing. A dying man has to sit alone in judgment of his own deeds.
“Tell Luz Robles,” Prieto said, his face serene, “that the man who shot José has no, reason to harm anyone else.” He bared his teeth again in what he might have thought was a smile. “By the time you tell her, in fact, the man who shot her brother José will be dead.”
Father Vicente and a small boy serving as acolyte came. They were upstairs a long time giving the last sacrament to the dying man. Then they left. The priest’s face was composed. If he had heard a confession of murder, it hadn’t rattled him.
Carmen spent the night in vigil at her father’s bedside. I sat in the living room talking about nothing in particular with Dr. Martinez. He never asked what Don Cayetano had wanted of me. Just before dawn he went upstairs. In a few minutes he came down and said:
“He is dead. Carmen wants to see you. This time I must insist that you make it brief. I want to put her to sleep.”
She was still seated at her father’s bedside. A small shaded lamp lit the room dimly. Her father was only a vague form under the polyethylene of the oxygen tent.
“He is dead.”
“I know. Dr. Martinez told me. I’m sorry, Carmen.”
“You have the marijuana?”
I waited a moment before answering. “Yes,” I said.
“Then I thank you, and I want you to know this. I was going to ask you for it, but not now. I did much in my life that would have grieved my father, had he known. I will not do this thing now, with him lying dead. I do not want the marijuana. I do not need it.” She said, softly and devoutly, “You saw what he did tonight. My father was a great man.”
“He loved you very much,” I said.
Dr. Martinez was upstairs with her. I was pacing back and forth in the living room, with only the mounted bull’s head for company. I thought about Carmen and her father, and what he had done for her. I thought about Luz, on the road back to Pamplona with Moyers and MacNeil Hollister. I thought about Axel Spade and the disappointing news I would have to bring him. I thought about the Spanish gold.
If Hernando Sotomayor had been as clever as Spade believed, he would have done something to insure its safe return to Spain. It seemed impossible that he would have let it go with no strings attached. But maybe he had been too hurried in the final days before his arrest. Maybe there had been no time to pass along to someone else whatever provisions he had made.
The last act of his life that I had any knowledge of was the legacy he had left in the hands of Prieto for his family. Had there been something else? Something I would never know about? After his visit to Prieto, two days had gone by before his arrest.
Pacing, I turned at the window and headed back toward the fireplace. The eyes of the mounted bull’s head seemed to glare at me. I stopped in my tracks suddenly. I think I smiled. It was probably an inane grin.
I carried a chair over to the fireplace and stood on it. That put my eyes on a level with the bull’s head mounted over the mantel. The huge tongue was hanging out and to one side. The glass eyes went on glaring at me.
Hernando Sotomayor’s final act hadn’t been the legacy. Prieto had received the bull’s head the same day his friend was arrested.
I looked at it. The great head was mounted on wood. I ran my hand around the juncture of wood and thick, bristly hairs. The fit was tight. I looked at the curving horns, as big around as a man’s arm. I grasped the left horn and tugged. Nothing. I grasped the right horn a
nd tugged, I thought I felt movement. It was like pulling a stubborn cork out of a bottle. I tugged again.
The horn came out.
That left a hole big enough to thrust my hand into. Its interior was smooth and hard with lacquer. My fingers felt something soft. That inane grin split my face again.
I withdrew a tightly rolled oilskin pouch, the kind used for pipe tobacco, from the hole. I replaced the horn and got off the chair.
“Of course you would tell me it’s none of my business,” Dr. Martinez said from the foot of the stairs.
We looked at each other. “That’s right,” I said.
“And I must assume whatever you have there is something Don Cayetano wanted you to have?”
That was true enough, though Prieto hadn’t been aware of its existence. “Yes,” I said.
“In fact, it is what he had to see you about?”
“I can’t talk about that,” I said. I put the oilskin pouch in my pocket.
Dr. Martinez said, “I have always been a very curious man.”
I saw no need to reply. I waited.
“It has nothing to do with Carmen?”
“No. Nothing.”
Dr. Martinez’s long face relaxed. He almost smiled. “I believe you. Carmen is my responsibility. Whatever was between you and Don Cayetano will remain your secret, as he wished. Now go, my friend. If you remain in this house any longer I fear I won’t be able to curb my curiosity.”
I left. I drove a few blocks in Axel Spade’s Jaguar and parked under a street lamp. I unrolled the oilskin pouch.
TWENTY-ONE
Fiesta …
You drink too much and sleep too little and there are the seductive pleasures of dancing in the streets and the hissing streams of chalky Spanish wine from the goatskin bags, and because everyone is poised on the thin edge of self-control you can, at the drop of a casual remark, fight a man or seduce a woman. The outside world and time go away. There are only the narrow, crooked streets of Pamplona, and the barricaded run from the corrals to the bullring with the possibility of violent death every morning, and the bullring itself with the certainty of violent death every afternoon. You remember the smell of charcoal and rancid olive oil and how it is in the cool misty morning when the rocket goes off and the bulls are in the street, herded by the steers, and the men, sleepless, full of wine, in white ducks and red sashes, run for their lives. You are like a man with a hangover driving too fast and too far on an endless highway dazzling in the sun. There is a stretch of road and a curve and another stretch of road, and you have been driving that road forever, so that after a time, but there is no time, the road becomes a treadmill and you drive faster and faster and get absolutely nowhere.
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