Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  Respectfully,

  Raul Cortez

  Von Niehauser didn’t like it. It was much too explicit. It had all the marks of an amateur production. He was surprised the fools hadn’t sent instructions in cipher, so that the Americans—assuming the letter had somehow attracted their attention—could be absolutely sure they were dealing with foreign agents. That was the trouble with working with zealots; they always had such a passion for intrigue.

  He sat on the edge of his bed, reading the letter through a second time. Then he turned it over and studied the back. Then he took out his pocketknife and scraped the stamp off the envelope to see if there was anything underneath. There wasn’t. There was no forwarding address. The whole business was precisely what it seemed. He didn’t like it. If he ever got back to Berlin he thought he just might break Schellenberg’s neck.

  “I don’t like him, but I think he is a man we can trust,” Schellenberg had said. But Schellenberg had said much the same thing about Harry Stafford.

  Von Niehauser decided he would dismiss it from his mind. He would take a shower now, and shave. And then he would take the time to have something to eat. He would be meeting Lautner in a few hours and, the way things seemed to be going, who could tell how that might work out? Perhaps all along the Americans had merely been toying with him. Perhaps they would both be arrested the moment he and Lautner shook hands. He decided he would make a point of enjoying lunch.

  He returned the letter to the pocket of his jacket, which was draped over the back of a chair. He carried his medal in that pocket—he could feel the hard edges of the cross against his fingers—so he took it out and looked at it. It was a reminder that honor was a thing which would admit of no degrees.

  20

  Within three hours after the end of his conversation with George Havens, José Ernesto de Rivera del Suñer was on a plane headed back to Mexico City. Inspector Havens, if somewhat lacking in polish, had struck him as a serious man, a man to be taken at face value. He said he wanted certain information and if he didn’t get it he would go to extremes. It would be a terrible thing for him to do, but the threat had carried conviction. Suñer believed him.

  Like everyone of any political prominence in Mexico, Suñer had witnessed executions. He had seen the men being led out behind a priest; he had seen the bullets tearing little pieces out of their chests. The part that had always struck him as the most distasteful was the coup de grace, the hollow little twang of the pistol shot and the trickling of blood that fell down onto the dust like tears. Suñer had no inclination to end his life in front of a firing squad—his sympathy with the German Fascists did not extend that far. Havens would have his information.

  It had been necessary to charter the plane, and inevitably there would be questions about why he had found it necessary to incur such an expense—he was hardly prepared to absorb the cost himself, and that sort of thing went beyond even the rather lavish limits of diplomatic license—but those were all problems he would deal with at the proper time. He would think of some plausible lie.

  It was the middle of the afternoon before he could look out through his window and see the outskirts of the capital. Suñer disliked airplanes. He was afraid of crashing and he found it impossible to hold any food in his stomach. But the charter company had provided a stewardess and adequate supplies of liquor, so he had been able to keep himself distracted. The stewardess was blond and cooperative; she sat with him during most of the flight and smiled and didn’t object when he slipped his hand up between her thighs. She and the plane would be waiting in Mexico City to take him back, and he had the name of her hotel.

  His wife, thank God, was still vacationing with her sister in Veracruz. He hadn’t notified her of his intention to return.

  It was very cold on the ground. The dry, thin winter air of those altitudes was something of a shock after New York, where you were more sheltered and you were near the sea. There was a film of snow that seemed to have mixed itself in with the dust of the runway, and the few leafless trees that stood by the terminal building seemed to crouch back from the wind like old women shrinking from a blow. Suñer urned up the collar of his cashmere overcoat, squinted at the pale, heatless sun, and wondered if he had any chance at all of discovering the whereabouts of this man von Niehauser, who seemed so very clever and had already killed three men. Havens too struck him as a clever and pitiless man—it seemed a very even contest. Not for the first time it occurred to Suñer that the ground between these two would be dangerous for someone braver and more resourceful than himself, that he had good reason to be afraid.

  One of his servants was waiting for him with a car. Suñer gave instructions about his luggage and sat moodily in the back seat while he waited to be driven to his house. He hardly even knew where to begin.

  When he got home he ordered dinner to be brought to his room, took a bath, and shaved. He noticed, as he watched himself in the mirror, that he was looking older—in less than twenty-four hours he seemed to have aged ten years. His hair seemed grayer somehow and his skin had taken on a yellowish cast, but it was possible that was merely the artificial light. And he looked as if he had lost weight.

  He was being hysterical, that was all. He would have a good dinner and forget all about it.

  Apparently the cook had been so taken aback by his sudden return that she had forgotten herself and hadn’t left the red peppers out of his chicken. Suñer hated spicy dishes, which he regarded as primitive; he preferred the blandness of food in the United States. In large measure, Mexico had almost ceased to be his home. Perhaps, before he left, he would give directions to fire the cook.

  But the dinner was good otherwise, and it was always possible simply not to eat the red peppers. He also had most of a bottle of French white wine, among the last in his cellar—when it was gone, he would have to wait until the end of the war before he could acquire any more. There was almost none left to be had anywhere in Mexico City and, of course, it had been impossible to get in New York for at least a year. Everyone said that the Allies would be invading France sometime during the summer, so perhaps then. . .

  When he was finished he made a few phone calls and discovered that there was a reception that evening at the war minister’s. The minister was a man of agreeably conservative views, and there were bound to be numbers of people there sympathetic to the German cause. It was as good a start as he was likely to make. He would go there.

  . . . . .

  His Excellency lived in one of the old palaces in the center of the city. The walls were made of great blocks of rough hewn stone, and there were no windows on the ground floor; the structure was a survival from the days of the revolutions, when you never knew when the next bandit army would come through, dragging their women and their Gatling guns behind them. There was an iron gate that could be let down over the front entrance —if you looked up, you could see the heavy, pointed tips of the bars—but probably no one had lowered it in twenty years. Probably it didn’t even work anymore. Suñer smiled to himself as he stepped across the threshold. In these times, security was an illusion.

  “Ernesto, I hadn’t expected to see you here tonight. I had thought you were still up north, hobnobbing with the gringos.”

  Ettore Moscardó, whose mother was a cousin of Suñer’s and who was believed by many to be the handsomest and most reactionary man in Mexico, showed his beautifully even teeth in a teasing, contemptuous grin. He was almost a foot taller and gave the impression of being all shoulders in his exquisitely tailored dinner jacket. Suñer managed a smile—he and Ettore understood one another, and one’s family was, after all, one’s family.

  “I am only down for a few days,” he said evenly. “I wanted to be out of the way for a while. The norteamericanos are in a great fright about foreign spies just at the moment, and I thought it would be wiser to be unavailable. How is your mother?”

  Moscardó shrugged. It was an elegant, careless gesture he might have spent hours practicing in the mirror. “Much th
e same. She hardly ever leaves the grounds of her villa anymore.”

  “Yes—she has taken the death of your father very hard.”

  The two men’s eyes met, and for a few seconds the conversation seemed to falter and die. Leonisa del Rivera had been, as everyone knew, a wild girl before her marriage and, almost as soon as she had been led away from the altar, notoriously unfaithful to her husband, the old General Moscardó. Suñer had himself, in his younger days, been one of her lovers. Her retirement had been occasioned by nothing more serious than a certain petulant vanity—she was merely embarrassed at having grown old and lost her beauty—but family honor required other explanations.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t some outraged husband?”

  Suñer looked at his cousin for a moment, utterly at a loss. What was the boy talking about?

  “Is it really the gringo police you wish to avoid, Ernesto, or has your poor wife further cause to complain?”

  “Not so much the police as the movement.” The second secretary frowned. He wished Ettore would stop calling them gringos, as if he had just invented the term and expected you to applaud his cleverness. He had no love for the norteamericanos himself, but he did not like to hear his relatives calling them vulgar names they might have learned from the kitchen help.

  And Ettore should not speak so disrespectfully of other men’s wives.

  “There seems to be a German spy running loose, and I was being watched more closely than usual. I didn’t want anyone coming to me for assistance and ending up under arrest as a return for his confidence.”

  “I see—yes.” Moscardó reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gold cigarette case. For an annoyingly long period of time he seemed totally absorbed by the various operations of opening the case, taking out the cigarette, closing the case, tapping the cigarette against the lid, putting it in his mouth, and accepting a light from his mother’s cousin. Suñer almost decided to give up on him; the man was so clearly an ass. “There has been much talk of that down here. Just rumors, you understand. But it would seem that something is afoot.”

  “Talk? Down here? That is bad.”

  Suñer wished Ettore had thought to offer him a cigarette—he could hardly reach for one of his own without perhaps betraying the enormous excitement that was welling up inside him. He hardly seemed to know what to do with his hands.

  “I would advise you to keep free of it,” he went on, a little surprised by the pitch of his voice. But fortunately Ettore was too absorbed in his own distinction to notice. “At this stage of the war, I shouldn’t imagine the Germans would undertake the risk of inserting an agent into the United States for some trivial purpose. You know the complexion of the present government; they wouldn’t hesitate to curry favor with Roosevelt by throwing a few of us in jail. A wise man will stay out of harm’s way.”

  “Oh, I know that, Ernesto.” The handsomest man in Mexico smiled again, flourishing his cigarette like a cantina woman. “I’m content to be an observer in politics—I leave the conspiracies to your side of the family.”

  . . . . .

  I leave the conspiracies to your side of the family. Ettore, the clownish buffoon, what had he meant by that?

  All the way home, as Suñer sat in the back of his car and considered how little ground he had gained during the whole long evening, he kept coming back to the same question: what had Leonisa’s excessively beautiful man-child intended to suggest by his allusion to “your side of the family”?

  If there had been more to learn at the minister’s reception, Suñer had failed to learn it—oh, there were rumors enough; there was nothing Mexico City loved as much as a rumor. But no one seemed to know anything of substance.

  Or, at least, Suñer hadn’t hit upon a means of getting them to tell him. It was like coming up to a blind wall.

  Your side of the family.

  And then suddenly the solution hit him with all the force of the obvious. He must have grown stupid just talking with Ettore; why hadn’t it occurred to him before?

  In the morning, as soon as he could be sure she was decently awake, he would go pay his respects to the general’s grieving widow.

  Leonisa received him in her bedroom, which could hardly have constituted an invitation because the bed was far too crowded with boxes of chocolates, magazines, small dogs and Leonisa to have room for another occupant. She put out her hand to be kissed and waved to him to sit down on a small gilt chair her maid had drawn up so close that it was already touching the backs of his legs while he leaned forward to brush his mustache across madam’s fingers. She was wearing a smoky pink peignoir that looked well against her pale, olive skin, and her hair had obviously been brushed and arranged with great care. She was even wearing a suggestion of makeup. Suñer was highly flattered until he remembered that she could not possibly have known he was coming. A life of mourning didn’t seem to agree with her; she had grown unattractively heavy.

  “My dear,” he said, releasing her hand and settling himself in his chair, “you are as breathtaking as ever.”

  “And you are as much a liar as ever. Come, would you care for a chocolate?” She held out a huge gold-foil box to him, shaking it so that the contents rattled. There seemed to be almost nothing left inside except tissue paper, so Suñer raised his left hand, with the fingers spread wide, and shook his head.

  “I saw Ettore last evening at the minister’s reception. He does you credit, Leonisa—a young man of great charm. He will go far in the world.”

  “He is a blockhead, like his father—except that I can’t be precisely sure who his father was.” Madam Moscardó allowed herself a tight smile, raising an eyebrow as she admitted her old lover to what was a secret from no one. “It might even have been you, Ernesto.”

  “No, my dear. That was a little before my time.”

  She looked surprised for a moment, then seemed to reflect, and then nodded. “You are quite right, by a year. But he is still a blockhead—his wife, who is a sensible woman, is presently in love with a taxi driver, and Ettore is too vain and too stupid even to imagine the possibility of such a thing. I really sometimes think he might even be the general’s son. . .”

  And she went on and on. Like any woman who has enjoyed the experience of being notorious, Leonisa was a compulsive gossip. Her bedroom, which had once seen traffic of quite another kind, was probably one of the major intelligence centers of the capital. The federal police would have been happy to have discovered half of what was discussed within those four walls. How would Ettore have known anything of German spies unless his mother had told him?

  “. . .And one understands that your poor wife is still enjoying her extended vacation in Veracruz. Tell me, Ernesto, do you not miss your children?” She smiled again. It was the first time she had paused for breath in at least twenty minutes.

  “Yes, I do.” Suñer returned her smile. He kept reminding himself that, just at present, he had need of the old harridan, and squirmed slightly in his chair. “I expect to visit them and their mother if my stay is to be longer than a few days. This, however, is not entirely a matter in which I may please myself.”

  Leonisa was suddenly all attention; one could almost feel the concentration with which she was waiting for the next sentence. And when it did not come, when she was at last convinced by Suñer’s placid silence, she leaned toward him, resting on her knuckles like a sprinter. For a moment the only sound in the room was the creaking of her mattress springs.

  “What has happened, Ernesto?” she asked breathlessly, almost gleefully. “Are you in disgrace?”

  Suñer forced himself to laugh. “No, my pet, I am not in disgrace. The norteamericanos are hunting for a German spy, and I have come home to be out of the way.”

  “Oh—that.” The disappointment was obvious in the heavy lines of her once beautiful face as she allowed herself to fall back against the pillows. “I am so tired of that business—it’s a good thing the war in Europe is nearly over. The Germans are such bores; I am sick o
f hearing about them and their spies.”

  Nevertheless, by the time Suñer had kissed her hand again and taken his leave he had a pretty good idea of what had been going on and who could lead him to von Niehauser.

  “I leave the conspiracies to your side of the family.”

  Item Number One: On the morning of the previous day, Agustin Gomá, millionaire upstart and political dilettante, had abruptly canceled all his engagements for the following week, including a dinner party which el Presidente had been expected to attend.

  Item Number Two: Gomá’s private secretary, who was an unimpeachable source and also a relative of Leonisa’s, had said that the little leather merchant had left for Juarez, supposedly on vacation. Who in his right mind would vacation in Juarez in the middle of the winter?

  Item Number Three: Gomá had lately dropped several hints that as soon as Germany won its war against the gringos (Gomá was precisely the sort one would expect to employ such a word), he personally would be in a position to see to it that Mexico’s ancient grievances would be answered.

  Item Number Four: Gomá’s wife was a first cousin of Suñer’s own.

  Conclusion: By noon, Suñer had sent a telegram to Inspector Havens in Washington and had made arrangements of his own to have the plane he had chartered in New York fly him to Juarez. There was very little time, and Agustin Gomá, to whom under normal circumstances Suñer could hardly bring himself to be civil, suddenly appeared as his last best hope of personal salvation.

  . . . . .

  Gomá was not difficult to find. He was neither rich enough nor sufficiently well liked to have achieved the sort of political influence that can allow a man simply to disappear. All Suñer had to do was to telephone a friend with business interests in Juarez, and within an hour that friend learned through a local politician in his employ that the gentleman in question was staying at the ranch of an acquaintance about sixty kilometers west of the city. Suñer hired a car and was there by five-thirty in the afternoon. He had the impression that Gomá was not terribly glad to see him.