De Richleau asked Perez to drink with them while the meal was being cooked and the landlord readily consenting, they sat down under a vine-covered trellis that faced on to the square. From him they learned quite a lot about local feeling. Dom Ignatius, the curé, was a good man; if there were more like him there would be fewer anti-clericals. On the other hand the Capuchin Fathers in the small monastery at the eastern end of the town were very unpopular. Way back in 1837 when the lands of the Church had been taken over by the State, all the Religious Orders had put their money into commercial enterprises. In spite of the laws passed by the Republican Governments of the last few years to restrict their activities they still owned what virtually amounted to monopolies in many industries. The small trader who had to pay high wages could not compete with the monks who, under their vows of poverty, worked for their bare keep. Could it be wondered at that they were hated? The Mayor of Valmojado, Don Rubén Reyes, was very Red. It had been the municipal elections of five years before that had sent the King packing and nearly all such rural bodies were strong supporters of the Left. Nobody wanted Don Alfonso back, anyhow.
The paello, a risotto of rice and chicken, was served by Perez’s daughter, the Señorita Anita, a pretty, smiling girl of twenty-odd who, her father told them, was soon to be married to a local schoolmaster. Perez did not seem too pleased about the matter and they guessed that he probably dreaded a drop in his turnover on her departure as Anita’s good looks must have attracted quite a lot of custom to the inn.
As they were finishing their meal a Sergeant of Police crossed the square towards them. Richard drew out a cigarette and lit it to steady his nerves. He felt certain the assault on the watchman had been traced to them and that the Sergeant was coming to march them off to jail. With acute anxiety he listened while de Richleau and the policeman exchanged several sentences in Spanish, but his fears had no foundation. The Sergeant had learned that they had taken up their residence in Valmojado the night before and seeing them in front of the inn had decided to examine their passports there in order to save himself a journey to the factory.
Having taken the notes he wanted the Sergeant appeared quite satisfied and accepted a glass of cognac. In the meantime a crowd of ragged urchins had gathered round. Perez came out of the inn to drive them away but Richard would not let him and took them over to the nearest grocer’s where, in halting Spanish, he purchased a quantity of sticky sweets for distribution among them. The mothers, once more assembled round the well in the square, watched the proceedings with interest and chorused, “Mil gracias, Don Ricardo, mil gracias,” as he strolled back to the inn. Gossip had even carried his name to them already and his gesture to their children had earned him their good will.
In the heat of the afternoon de Richleau and Richard walked slowly back to the factory. Just before they reached it they met a knife-grinder plying his trade in the deserted road.
“Knives to grind,” chanted the fellow giving them a quick glance. “Knives to grind, Señors. I make ’em so sharp they’ll cut the throat of any Monarchist—or even an Englishman for that matter.”
The Duke caught the almost imperceptible wink which accompanied the last words and taking his penknife from his pocket he went over to the man. “Do you do any business with the factory there?” he asked.
“Some, Señor.” The man took the penknife and applied its edge to his whirring stone before going on softly, “Jacinto Vincente, the foreman is a good customer of mine and his two sons are to be trusted. Jacinto will tell you of others who are with us but watch out for Matias Falcon. He is a spy of Don Rubén Reyes, the Communist Mayor.”
“Thanks,” said the Duke, duly paying up when his blade was handed back to him. “I will remember.”
To Richard, as they walked on, he said, “We’re in luck again. That was Lucretia’s agent and he was evidently waiting for us. He tells me that fine old foreman is an anti-Red and we couldn’t have a man better placed to help us.”
“Good. What’s the next move?”
“I’ve got to get old Jacinto on his own for an hour at least and I’m afraid Coello may be difficult. He’ll probably think I’m trying to get some information to his detriment out of Jacinto and not want to leave us alone. I’m afraid you’ll have to invite Coello to dine with you at the inn.”
“But hang it, I can’t speak Spanish,” Richard protested.
“No matter. It’ll be excellent practice for you. The best way to learn any language is to struggle along trying to make yourself understood by somebody who doesn’t speak a word of your own. You’d have jumped at the chance if I’d asked you to take Marie-Lou out in the same circumstances.”
“That would have been very different.”
“I admit that Coello is a poor substitute but it can’t be helped. After all, he is your manager, so it will seem a pleasant courtesy on your part.”
When they entered the factory office Coello made no mention of the night-watchman. Whether they had found their previous night’s inspection of the books satisfactory seemed to be the manager’s only anxiety. The Duke told him that so far as they had gone all seemed in good order but that several more sessions would be necessary before they could complete their work.
Richard proffered his invitation and it was accepted with almost pathetic eagerness. Coello was an inoftensive little man and his only anxiety was that his petty pilferings, by no means unusual in such a business, should not come to light. He had a Gorgon of a wife and a growing family to support, so dismissal would have meant hell for him in his home as well as an acute financial crisis.
Just as they were leaving the office the manager remarked quite casually that their night-watchman had been discovered half-dead early that morning. With an expressive gesture he spread wide his arms and declared:
“God alone knows where it will all end. Such assaults happen almost daily now that politics have turned every man’s brain. This fellow was a J.O.N. and the Socialists made mincemeat of him. Within a week his friends will take their revenge on one of the U.G.T. people. See if I am not right. You are lucky indeed not to have such strife among your workers in Birmingham.”
When the Duke had translated, Richard said the man was to have every attention and that he would bear any expense in connection with the case. As well as salving his conscience to some extent, this made an excellent impression on the listening clerks. Coello was smiling all over his chinless face as he bowed the two friends out into the factory yard on their telling him that they did not wish to take him from his work but meant to make another tour of the shops.
They soon contacted the swashbuckling old ruffian they were looking for and de Richleau asked him in a quiet aside if he had recently seen the local knife-grinder.
“Yes, Señor,” replied Jacinto. “He’s a good friend of mine, that one, and he told me this afternoon that you would have a word to say to me.”
“Good,” muttered the Duke. “Can you return here at eight o’clock—when we can talk alone?”
“Yes. Where shall I find you?”
“In the office. I will leave the back door open. The rest of the place will be shut and empty.”
When the staff had gone Richard and Coello adjourned to the inn together while de Richleau excused himself from accompanying them on the score of a touch of malaria picked up in the tropics years before but to which he was still subject occasionally. Bed, he said, was the only place for him while his shivering fits lasted but he would be all right again in the morning.
Conversation during the meal proved heavy going but Richard laboured gamely on and Coello was only too anxious to make a good impression. When they were drinking their coffee things cheered up considerably, as the pretty Señorita Anita had noticed their difficulty while she was serving them and, abandoning a group of young men, came over to Richard’s table. She could speak a very little text-book French and her accent was strange, if enchanting, but her laughing attempts to help them understand each other made a much happier party of
it.
If Richard could not speak Spanish he lacked none of the qualities of a good host and soon he was buying drinks for most of the habitual patrons of the place. Coello gained a reflected glory from his new master’s generosity and would not have gone home till morning if it had not been for the awful, gnawing thought of his termagant of a wife who was waiting up for him.
His reluctant departure at a few minutes before midnight broke up one of the wildest parties Valmojado had known for weeks and the ‘mad Englishman’ who had the crazy eccentricity of sleeping on a camp bed in one of the storerooms of his own factory was voted a good fellow by all concerned.
When Richard got back he found the Duke in bed. “Well, how did things go?” he asked at once.
“Talk softly,” the Duke replied. “These floors are only made of matchboard and the new watchman is in the office downstairs.”
“So I guessed from the light. But it’s a thousand to one against his talking English.”
“I’m worried,” the Duke said in a low voice. “Our luck’s so phenomenal that it’s too good to last.”
“Why?”
“Well, from the first everything went like clockwork in Madrid. Then, if I’d worked on it for months I couldn’t have found a more suitable factory than this to shift the goods to—it’s so beautifully off the beaten track. Next we run into Lucretia-José at just the right moment. We get the stuff out here without a hitch and you even get away with near-murder without the least suspicion attaching to you. Now I find that the man who really runs the factory is not only one of us but an absolute top-notcher and he’s guaranteed he’ll see us through the next part of the business. It’s uncanny.”
“Old Jacinto’s turned up trumps, eh?” Richard commented, kicking off his shoes.
“Yes, he comes from Navarre and he’s a Carlist. His father and his grandfather before him were Carlists and he’s a chip of the old block.”
“What exactly is a Carlist? They’re the chaps who wanted to sling out Alfonso, aren’t they?”
“That’s it. After the eccentric and immoral Queen Isabella was deposed in 1868 Spain was very unsettled for a period which included a few years as a Republic. Her younger brother Don Carlos then tried to get the throne but the present Don Alfonso’s father got there first. There was civil war and the Carlists were defeated but they’re just like the supporters of the Stuarts were with us in the eighteenth century, and such loyalties die hard. Later they made another attempt to seize the country which was called the Second Carlist War, and they’re still hoping that one day they’ll be able to put a Carlist king on the throne.”
“They don’t see eye to eye with Lucretia-José and her friends, then?”
“No, but they hate the Reds like poison and they’re staunch Catholics, so they’ll fight like hell to establish National and Catholic Spain.”
“Just what have you plotted with this old tough?”
“I had to trust him absolutely. But I knew I’d have to do that anyway with whatever loyal workmen Lucretia put me on to here. You see, the one thing I daren’t attempt is to rail that gold to the coast as it is. The Customs people would never let it through. We’d lose it for certain. Therefore we’ve got to disguise it somehow. I thought of all sorts of tricks but I came to the conclusion that the best way was to smelt it down and attach it to some other metal so that it could be made to appear as part of various commercial articles which are normally exported out of the country.”
“How about weight?” Richard demanded.
“That bothered me a bit at first but I think I’ve got over it. Take an aluminium saucepan. Say it weighs a pound. Pour thirty-five ounces of gold into its bottom. It will then weigh about three and a half pounds. That’s no more than the weight of an iron saucepan. Paint it over and it will look like an iron saucepan. Get the idea?”
Richard wriggled down into his bed and pulled the blanket over him. “Yes, I get it,” he grinned. “But how many saucepans have you got to treat before you’ve disposed of the Coralles fortune?”
“Between nine and ten thousand.”
“My hat!”
“Yes. It’s hardly the sort of job one can do at a sitting and, of course, It’s all got to be done in secrecy during night sessions and over week-ends when we can get the factory to ourselves.”
“There aren’t anything like nine thousand saucepans in stock though—are there?”
“No. We’re very lucky to have twenty-two gross as it is but we shall use other things as well; buckets, cups, ash-trays, frying-pans, kettles, dust-bins. They can all be given false bottoms of appropriate quantities of gold and painted over. Then we can rail them out as ordinary commercial goods without arousing suspicion.”
“And Jacinto considers this a practical proposition?”
“Yes. His two sons, Carlos and Basilio, are already employed in the factory and he’s prepared to answer with his life for two more men, Esteban Braga and Manuel Dario. That makes seven of us altogether. In a ten-hour shift we ought to be able to deal with somewhere between five hundred and a thousand articles a night.”
“The job sounds simple enough once you’ve got the liquid gold running out of the furnace but there’s the hell of a lot of carrying to be done.”
“That won’t prove difficult because there’s no reason why we shouldn’t unpack it now and bring it over a bar at a time. The bars weigh less than two stone each. Two men humping gold, one on the furnace, three men fetching and removing pots and pans and the seventh painting over the goods when the gold’s cooled off. That’s how we’ll work it.”
“Someone in the office is almost certain to query the shifting of such a large portion of the stock from one place to another and you’ll have to lock the stuff up once it’s been treated.”
“We shan’t move anything but just treat and replace it. Beside, you’re a ‘mad Englishman’, remember. You’ll fly into a frightful temper and threaten to sack everybody if they try to interfere with your crazy notions of running the business. What’s more, you’ll insist on all the stock sheds always being kept locked up.”
“How about the new night-watchman?”
“He’s only a temporary and Jacinto is going to see to it tomorrow that he’s replaced by one of his sons. Whichever it is will still be able to help us.”
“You certainly seem to have thought of everything.”
“I hope so. It means that we’ll all have to half-kill ourselves fetching and carrying for the next fortnight, but if our luck holds we’ll have the gold on its way out of Spain before the end of the month. Now let’s get some sleep. Good night.”
On the Wednesday morning they made a tour of the sheds. Trade was bad owing to the general unrest in Spain and a considerable portion of the goods had been in stock for many months so there seemed no likelihood of their suddenly being required for urgent orders. Aided by Jacinto, they made careful notes of the items which were sticking worst and decided to treat them first.
In the afternoon they received a visit from the Mayor, Don Rubén Reyes, a short, bald-headed man with quick, intelligent eyes. He had failed in his own business owing to the competition of the ‘Church commercial’ and in consequence was a deadly hater of all priests. His interest in local politics had proved his sheet-anchor as he was a shrewd fellow with a ready tongue and a dictatorial manner. He came to size up the new owner of the aluminium factory.
He disapproved of Richard before he even saw him. Don Rubén was well-informed enough to realise that however loudly the English might bang their democratic drum they were all capitalists at heart. ‘A nation of shopkeepers’ Napoleon had called them, and Napoleon had been right. However, Richard made a better impression than might have been expected owing to the serpent smoothness of his interpreter’s tongue.
De Richleau knew that if Don Ruben went away unsatisfied he might cause them all sorts of trouble; a sudden and quite arbitrary strike among their workmen being the least disagreeable thing they would have to face. The Mayor was
just the sort of nasty little political louse who grew fat on ill-educated people struggling for self-expression and he exerted legal blackmail through the power of his office on every available occasion. De Richleau loathed the type yet only honeyed words dropped from his tongue. He said that his master and himself knew little of Spanish politics but they hoped that all concerned in the factory would benefit by the change of ownership. Mr. Eaton was already planning to build a club-room for his employees. He was also of a very charitable disposition and would be happy to contribute five hundred pesetas to local good works if Don Rubén would distribute that sum on his behalf.
Don Rubén accepted without any show of eagerness. He went away making a mental note that the two foreigners were harmless politically and easy plucking for a considerably larger sum than the five hundred pesetas he had in his pocket. He could not know that before he was a fortnight older one of them would stick a large knife through his liver with as little compunction as one kills a rat. In quite a cheerful frame of mind he visited the inn and spent half an hour ogling Anita, who both detested and dreaded him.
That same afternoon Dom Ignatius also called at the factory. He was a gentle old man and came to beg quite openly for the poor of his parish. On Richard’s behalf de Richleau gave him also five hundred pesetas but on the express understanding that he was not to mention the gift to anyone. The Duke was extremely anxious that they should not gain the reputation of being pro-Church as it was most important that they should appear absolutely neutral in the event of a clash. As he remarked to Richard afterwards, “For a total of just under thirty pounds we’ve bought temporary immunity from trouble with the Mayor and the good will of the Priest. We’ll have to do some more palm-greasing later but it’s worth it.”
The Golden Spaniard Page 14