“This is where we’ll put it,” said the Duke. “Fortunately the lorries can get right up to that end door, so our friends won’t have far to carry it. The fact that the door is only secured by a padlock is not of much importance. The stuff is much too heavy for anyone to run away with, and if anyone decides to break in deliberately, just to find out what’s here, they’ll do it whatever locks we have on the door.”
“Why not bury it while we’ve got the chance?” Richard suggested. “We’ll have the men here to help us and they needn’t lug it further than the edge of that ploughed field over there.”
De Richleau shook his head. “No, my friend. Bringing it here is only another stage in the bullion’s Odyssey. I shan’t be happy till I’ve got it out of the country. You’ve heard of the alchemists, of course, the old fellows who spent their lives trying to transmute base metals into gold. I propose to reverse the process and I hope to be more successful.”
Having locked up again they strolled along to the little hotel, where de Richleau arranged about a meal for Richard; after which they sat drinking Vermouth et Sippon, with a slice of lemon, together until the bus arrived.
When he got back to Madrid the Duke went straight to the Atocha Station where, for a peseta tip, he secured from an obliging porter a few railway labels bearing the printed word ‘BARCELONA’.
On reaching the Palacio he placed the labels on the big table in the salon where any curious person would be certain to see them. Next he stole quietly up to the fourth floor in order to ascertain if Pédro was behaving himself. There was no sound of scraping or battering so presumably the caretaker was not attempting to escape. De Richleau waited for a little while until he heard the prisoner noisily clear his throat, then, having satisfied himself that the man was still there, he tiptoed quietly downstairs again, Setting his alarum-clock for twelve-fifteen he arranged himself comfortably on a sofa and was instantly asleep.
When the alarum roused him from his all-too-brief slumber he refreshed himself with a wash and by twelve-thirty he was downstairs waiting to receive the help that Lucretia-José had promised to send him.
Two minutes later the lorries drew up before the door with a punctuality quite un-Spanish; but they were manned by officers who were preparing to risk their necks in a desperate endeavour to get control of their country and this was all part of the same business, which made a difference.
Their Chief was a grizzled, elderly man with the scar of an old wound on his cheek. He wasted no words. “Your orders, Señor?”
“You have six lorries with you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Bring in your men. We shall need them all. I wish them to form a human chain. The goods they have to load are heavy so that will be quicker than carrying them.” De Richleau led the Chief straight down to the basement while his followers spread themselves out with quick efficiency. Four remained outside on the steps and pavement, twenty straddled the hall, a dozen took the stairs and the remainder began to heave up the long line of cases.
Several stumbled and nearly fell as they took the weight of the first box to reach them but they all braced themselves to the strain and almost tore their muscles out in an endeavour to show each other that they were quite as capable of heaving ammunition around as the troops they had so often seen at the same job.
In a few minutes everyone of them was sweating profusely but the boxes were moving along the chain much quicker than the Duke had dared to hope.
“This is what I want done,” he said to the grizzled leader. “Directly the first lorry is loaded with thirty-seven boxes, send it off under your second-in-command. He is to pull up at the side of the road four hundred yards past the last house in Carabanchel-alto and wait until the other five lorries join him there. The next four will follow immediately their cargo of thirty-seven boxes each is on board and we will travel on the sixth with the remaining eighteen.”
“Very good.”
“Are your men armed?”
“Yes.”
“Send six men with each of the first five lorries. Give the officer in charge of each party orders that he is not to stop for anybody. If necessary he is to fire on anyone who tries to prevent him carrying out his instructions.”
The Chief turned away and issued his orders. The first lorry moved off. The second took a little longer to load, the third longer still and the fourth and fifth were the very devil owing to the progressive decrease in the number of loaders and their increasing exhaustion. Gritting their teeth, panting and stumbling, the remaining twenty-five men manhandled the last eighteen boxes on to the sixth lorry and the job was done.
In the meantime de Richleau had gathered together his belongings, the four suitcases, the tinned delicacies and the many tins of paint. With the Chief and the balance of the sweating officers he clambered up into the lorry and as half-past two chimed from a near-by church it moved away from the ancient Palacio.
At the end of the street they passed one of the little groups of Guardia Civile who had kept them free from those crowds of curious people who collect even at night. No sign was exchanged between the Guardia in their picturesque uniforms and the officers in civilian clothes. They picked up the rest of the convoy, which had arrived without incident at the rendezvous beyond Carabanchel-alto, and proceeded at a steady pace to Valmojado.
Not a light was to be seen as they passed through the sleeping townlet and Richard was pacing slowly up and down the road outside the factory waiting for them.
With aching backs but no signs of shirking the officers set about a renewal of their labours. De Richleau took the Chief aside and asked, “Did the person who sent you say anything about another consignment of boxes?”
“Yes, we are to pick them up at a certain address on our way back to the lorry park. My further instructions were to come from you.”
“This is what I wish you to do. Have a label written out for each box addressed to The Condesa de Cordoba y Coralles, care of the Manager, Credit Lyonais, Barcelona. Give those labels to some of your least trustworthy privates to stick on. It is important that information about this second consignment should trickle through to the other side. You will then send them quite openly to the Atocha Station and despatch them by goods train to Barcelona.”
“That shall be done.”
The unloading, direct into the shed, was much quicker than the loading had been as all hands were able to form squads which relieved each other every ten minutes in tackling the loads as lorry by lorry drove in. By half-past four all the bullion had been stacked in the corrugated-iron shed. There were three casualties, men upon whose feet boxes of that damnably heavy gold had been dropped, but the officers were a resolute lot and piled into their lorries without a murmur about the gruelling night’s work they had accomplished. With a word of thanks the Duke gripped the hand of their grizzled Chief. The first flush of the early summer dawn was showing faintly in the eastern sky as the lorries rattled off through Valmojado.
De Richleau stretched himself wearily but there was a little note of triumph in his voice as he said, “Richard, my friend, we’ve done the worst half of our job now we’ve got that damned gold out of Madrid. And the whole thing’s been carried through without a single hitch.”
“That’s all you know,” retorted Richard. “You were wrong about their not having a night-watchman here. He let himself in with his own keys and when I got back from dinner I found him sitting in the office.”
“The devil you did! And how did you get rid of him?”
“I didn’t,” Richard gulped. “I’m afraid I’ve killed him.”
Chapter XII
The Storm Breaks
“Poor old boy,” said de Richleau gently. “That was rotten for you.”
“It isn’t me!” Richard burst out. “You know well enough it’s not the first time I’ve killed a man—but before it’s always been an enemy. Somebody who would have killed us if they’d had half a chance. This was different. Just a poor devil going about his duti
es.”
The Duke put his arm round his friend’s shoulders. “I’m terribly sorry I let you in for this. Try to remember, though, that one life doesn’t count very much in a game where we shall save thousands—if only we can win it.”
“Yes, if! But this enormously increases the odds against us.”
“I know. We can’t abandon ship because we’ve no means of taking the gold with us, and how we’re going to explain this fellow’s death or disappearance utterly defeats me at the moment.”
Richard nodded. “Perhaps I ought to have told you before they started unloading the bullion, but I worked it out while I was waiting for you that the one vital thing was not to upset your plans for getting it clear of Madrid.”
“You were right there. Now things have reached boiling-point we should have risked everything by taking it back to the Palace. There was nowhere else to cache it and if we’d cut and run from this place with the lorries we should have had the police after us for murder. Tell me exactly what happened.”
“When I got back from the inn, about half-past ten, I saw a light in the clerk’s office. Using my own key I let myself in and tiptoed down the passage. By standing on a chair I got a peep through the skylight over the office door. There was this chap settled down for the night, apparently. He was lying back in one chair with his feet up on another. Beside him on a third were some bread and garlic, half a litre of wine, a bunch of keys, an ordinary alarum-clock and a night-watchman’s clock. He had a newspaper spread over his face to protect it from the light and as I listened I heard him snoring. After I’d done it I found the alarum-clock was set for twelve so evidently he was in the habit of snoozing between his rounds. I suppose he was a bit late this evening in turning up and Coello forgot to tell us about him in the excitement of the take-over.”
As Richard paused the Duke said quietly, “Go on. What did you do?”
“I tiptoed out of the building again and sat down here on the road-side to think things out. I didn’t know what time you’d turn up but I judged it might be any time after two. By then he’d got to be got rid of somehow.”
“Yes.”
“The devil of it is I can’t speak more than a few words of Spanish, If I could have, I felt I might have mugged up some yarn to persuade him to clear off. Then I realised that as he arrived after the others had left he wouldn’t even know that I’m supposed to be the owner of the place. My next idea was to go and find Coello. But I hadn’t the faintest notion where he lived. It occurred to me that if I went back to the inn and said his name often enough somebody might eventually lead me to him. By that time it was nearly half-past eleven. It meant rousing the people at the inn and, as I suddenly saw, even if I did succeed in getting hold of Coello through them, I couldn’t speak Spanish to him either.”
“You were certainly in a bad fix, Richard,” de Richleau agreed. “I suppose you then decided to knock the watchman on the head?”
“More or less. You know how obliging these Spaniards are—and how argumentative. It seemed to me that if I once started anything they’d try and dig out all sorts of people who know a few words of French or English. I visualised half a dozen of them congregating here and disputing among themselves as to what I wanted—added to which I couldn’t think up any plausible excuse for sending the watchman home for the night, anyhow. The chances were I’d only collect a nice little crowd that would still be there talking when you turned up with the bullion, and I couldn’t afford to risk that.
“I didn’t intend to kill the fellow but he was a big chap—darned nearly as big as Rex—and if we’d got to grips he’d have throttled me with one hand. I dared not chance mucking things up by not outing him at the first blow. I found a handy length of old iron in the yard, tiptoed in again just before midnight and let him have it good, hard and proper.”
“You had your gun,” said the Duke mildly. “You might have held him up and locked him in somewhere.”
“Yes, I might have,” Richard agreed sarcastically, “but I didn’t. If I had, you’d now be faced with the jolly little job of murdering him in cold blood.”
“Why?”
“For one thing because there’s nowhere here I could have shut him up from which he wouldn’t have heard the lorries arriving and, for another, because I couldn’t have done it without showing him at least part of my face. He’d have learnt too much for you to free him or risk trying to keep him hidden in a place like this where there are scores of people about every day.”
“Quite true. Your decision to stun him was best. And since he didn’t even know what hit him we might have persuaded him that it wasn’t one of us—if only you hadn’t overdone it. Let’s go and look at him.”
The watchman was still spread out on the two chairs just as he had been sleeping except that his arms now dangled limply.
“Have you touched anything?” asked the Duke.
“Nothing except the catch on the alarum-clock, which I pushed back to prevent its ringing, and, of course, it was by feeling his chest that I found his heart had stopped beating.”
De Richleau lifted one of the man’s hands and let it drop again. “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet,” he remarked, “although it’s getting on for five hours since you hit him. He’s not cold yet either. Give me that mirror off the wall.”
As Richard unhooked a toilet-glass from above one of the clerks’ desks the Duke moved round to get a better view of the wound in the man’s head. It was a long depression in the thick, curly, black hair, now matted with dried blood, on the top and a little to the side of the cranium.
Taking the mirror de Richleau held it over the man’s lips. After a moment a faint mist appeared on it.
“Good God!” exclaimed Richard. “He’s still living.”
“Yes, we’re in luck. If you’d hit him a blow like that on the temple or base of the skull he’d be dead as mutton. But I suppose as he was lying back asleep he presented the top of his head to you and that’s what saved him.”
“Can we bring him round—d’you think?”
“No. He’ll probably remain unconscious for a couple of days and when he does come to he’ll have such bad concussion that all his memories will be hopelessly confused. He won’t even be able to swear to it that he ever reached this office.”
“If only he doesn’t die after all.”
“He won’t die. Look at the strength of him. We’re in luck, I tell you. If you’d deliberately judged the force of that blow you couldn’t have done better. We’d have had endless trouble if he’d come round to find himself tied up. As it is he knows nothing at all and all we have to do is to get him out of here.”
“Where to?”
“We’d have carried him up the street if it had been a little earlier but that’s too risky now. We’ll have to put him out in one of the factory yards, face down as though somebody had attacked him.”
“Sounds pretty brutal but I suppose it must be done.”
“It’s summer time so there’ll be no change of temperature to affect him and the hands will be coming to work in an hour. Ha! Look at this! The very thing to provide a motive.”
De Richleau had been fishing about in the man’s pockets and he triumphantly waved a membership card of the Spanish National Socialist Party. “This chap’s a J.O.N.”
“What’s a J.O.N.?”
“A Spanish Nazi. They’re tied up with the Fascists now and the whole boiling are known as F.E. de las J.O.N.s.”
Ramming the papers back in the watchman’s pockets the Duke grabbed a letter-file from a near-by shelf and ran through it until he found a blank half-sheet. Tearing it off he picked up a pen and printed across it in bold capitals ‘U.H.P.’
“What’s that for?” asked Richard.
“‘Up the Proletariat’ is a free translation. It’s the general war-cry of the Reds. We’ll pin this on his back and when his friends find him they’ll think he’s been attacked by his political enemies. The police won’t even bother to hunt for finger-prints in a cas
e like this and we’ll set the hands of his alarum-clock at nine-fifteen, then smash it. You were at the hotel having dinner then and they’ll believe it gives the time of the assault because it’ll look as if he broke the clock in his fall.”
“How about his night-watchman’s clock?”
“Nothing to worry about there. Fortunately you laid him out before he made his second round. The card’s only punched round eight o’clock so it gives nothing away. I’ll fix the alarum-clock. You pick up all his other things with your handkerchief and stuff them into his pockets.”
The watchman weighed a good sixteen stone but ten minutes later they had him outside, lying forward on his face as though he had fallen like that after being struck down.
Returning to the office they straightened things up and cleared away all traces of his presence there. Fortunately he had bled little and, owing to the angle at which he lay, most of the blood had become congealed in his thick hair. After a last look round they locked up downstairs and mounted to the room above where two of the camp beds had been set up for them. Half dead from fatigue they dropped straight off to sleep.
When they awoke sunlight was streaming through the uncurtained windows but no sound of work penetrated to them from the near-by factory or the office below; they had slept right through the morning into the siesta.
“No news is good news,” said the Duke cryptically and, as the events of the previous night flooded back into Richard’s mind, he knew the remark inferred that as the watchman must have been found hours before and they had not been awakened, they were not suspected.
The offices were deserted and having made the best toilet they could in the clerks’ wash-place they locked their temporary bedroom and set off for the centre of the town. At the sleepy little inn the landlord, a big, dark-eyed man wearing a picturesque sombrero, received them courteously and agreed to have a paella cooked for them although it was long after the usual hour of the midday meal. The Duke had had no chance to talk to him the previous evening but they soon found that Gaspar Perez already knew all that anyone in Valmojado knew about them, gossip being the main recreation of the place.
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