The Golden Spaniard

by Dennis Wheatley

  The Mediterranean was blue-green and gentle in the violet light. Rex brought the Flying Sow down on to it a mile astern of the yacht and a little to her leeward side. Richard had opened the sliding hatch of the emergency exit above the control chamber and stood on the ladder, half in half out of it, the rushing wind tearing past as though it would strip his clothes from his body.

  Rex switched off the engines and the great plane raced silently just above the wave crests, losing speed quickly, pancaked on to the sea, lurched to starboard and right over till her wing-tip caught the water. Suddenly she swung right round in a half-circle, her starboard wing half-submerged, her port wing cocked high up into the air at an angle of forty-five degrees. She settled then to a gentle roll, but she was floating and it was clear that they would not be called upon to swim for it.

  The motor-launch was racing to them and as it drew alongside there came a chorus of dear, familiar English voices. “Evening sir! It’s good to see you again. The whole crew’s been like cats on hot bricks since we got your wireless. Had a concert last night to try to cheer up Madam but she’s difficult to cheer with you away. Evening, Mr. Rex. You’re looking fit, sir. You been having a slap at these blasted Boshies, too? Bet you knocked a few of their silly heads together. Teach ’em sense and that’s what they want. Step careful, sir. Give me your hand. That’s the way.”

  Scrambling down from the roof of the plane they slid into the launch, gaily returning the cheerful greetings it was so damnably good to hear. Rex had sailed many times in the yacht and was a great favourite with her crew.

  As he sat down in the sternsheets it suddenly struck him that these bronzed seamen were the very equivalents of the men whose rights he and Simon had been striving to protect in the Spanish struggle. Yet these fellows naturally assumed he was heart and soul with the Nationalists and referred to the Spanish Government as ‘blasted Bolshies’. That was mighty funny; but then Spain was not England.

  The yacht’s gangway had been lowered. Marie-Lou stood at its top. She was a little pale and there were deep shadows under her violet eyes. The months of anxiety through which she had passed had told upon her, and the few days she had recently spent with Richard had done little to ease the strain; but to him, as he took her in his arms, she looked even more divinely beautiful than on that first night they had spent together, six years before, in Vienna.

  After a moment she turned to Rex. “What a lovely surprise,” she said as she stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. “I had no idea you were coming too.”

  “Well, somebody had to bring him back to you,” he grinned. “But apart from that I wouldn’t swear to it I’m altogether welcome.”

  “What nonsense, Rex dear. You know you’re always welcome wherever we are and whatever you do. Your usual cabin is being got ready for you. Run down to it now and clean yourself up. I’ve ordered tankards of Pimm’s No. 1 to be ready for us up in the deck lounge in ten minutes.”

  “You’re a Princess with a real Royal memory when it comes to my favourite drinks,” he laughed. “I’ll be with you.”

  The second his broad back had disappeared down the companion-way she seized Richard’s hands and he felt her nails dig into his flesh. “Richard!” she said in a low, anxious voice as her huge eyes stared up into his. “Tell me it’s finished, This is really the end, isn’t it? You haven’t got to go back?”

  “No—we’re through,” he smiled, trembling with excitement. “We’re through, darling. I’ve got the gold out. The whole darned issue. Close on ten tons of it. You must have seen me let go those bombs. That was it, and they’re all there in the shallow water of the bay. We’ve only got to fish ’em up again.”

  “Oh, Richard,” she leant against him. “How simply marvellous.”

  “Yes, it was pretty good. The best coup I’ve ever pulled off except taking you into Russia as my wife.”

  “And to think you persuaded Rex to help you.”

  He chuckled. “That’s the cream of it. He thinks we unloaded the gold outside Madrid. I fooled him beautifully; but not a word to him till we’ve got the goods safely on board. Isn’t it simply gorgeous? Poor old Rex. Just to think he flew the stuff out for me himself and he doesn’t even know it!”

  That was the only mistake Richard made. Rex did know, and at that moment he was angrily thinking out the quickest possible way of getting his own back.

  Chapter XXXI

  Plot and Counter-Plot

  While Rex enjoyed his pint of Pimm’s out of a silver tankard with Richard and Marie-Lou he did not give the faintest indication of his inward annoyance. He appeared to be in his usual buoyant spirits and declared again and again how delighted he was to have the wretched Spanish business behind him, but all the time he was saying to himself, ‘So you think you’ve made a monkey out of me, Richard my lad, do you? But it’s not going to work out like that. You just wait and see.’

  They decided not to change for dinner as Rex had no clothes on board except those he stood up in and he was much too large for Richard’s spare dinner-jacket to fit him. Instead it was agreed that they should dine comfortably in dressing-gowns, and Richard lent his guest a gorgeous silken garment for the purpose. Returning to his cabin, Rex then proceeded to revel in the luxury of a hot bath. As he lay relaxed, soaking in the soft, carnation-scented water, he recalled with some bitterness all the hectic work he had put in for nothing during the last fortnight at Valmojado.

  From the moment Matias Falcon had told him of Jacinto’s rather unusual procedure in erecting a hen-house for his own use on the factory property, Rex had felt a sudden excitement. Within ten minutes of Falcon leaving him he had scraped the mud and paint off a tiny portion of one of the bricks and was chuckling with glee. All that night he had racked his brains for a way of dealing with the gold, now he had found it, but without result. It was his meeting the following day with the two Communist air mechanics among Matias’s friends which first gave him the germ of his big idea. That evening he had worked out his plan with a skill and care which even the Duke could not have bettered. He remembered how elated he had felt, after discussing it with Matias and the others the following day, to hear them agree that it was perfectly practicable and a sheer stroke of genius.

  As foreman, Matias could secure access to the factory at night, just as Jacinto had been able to before he was wounded; the mechanics, too, could come and go at any hour, without being suspected, from the hangar of the Flying Sow which backed on to the factory property.

  The first operation had been to make some casts of the real bombs, and as the huge projectiles could be moved quite easily on their wheeled trolleys this had not proved difficult. The next step had been to smelt the gold down once more and recast it in the moulds made from the bombs. Twenty golden bombs had resulted, the last of which had to have a few pounds of alloy added to make up its size. So far so good, but the golden bombs weighed nearly twice as much as real five hundred and sixty pound bombs of steel filled with T.N.T., and twenty bombs were not enough to take up in a plane which carried a normal load of forty-eight. Yet Rex could not add real bombs to make up his quota because, had he done so, the total load would have considerably exceeded the lifting power of the Flying Sow.

  Matias had got over that difficulty by casting twenty hollow aluminium bombs of the same size but weighing next to nothing. The whole of the forty fake bombs had been painted over in the right colours so that no one could possibly tell them on sight from the real thing and, since the Communist mechanics had been shrewd enough to know that the fuses were the one thing an Offizier or Unter-Offizier would be certain to examine before the bombs were loaded on to the plane, real fuses had been inserted in their heads. They had used the fuses from the live bombs, hidden these in one of the lock-up sheds of which Matias had the key, and replaced them in the hangar with the skilfully modelled duplicates.

  It had taken one night to make the moulds, four more and a whole Sunday to cast the golden bombs, and another couple of nights for the aluminium on
es. During factory hours the fake bombs had been screened by a mass of straw-filled crates which Matias and his friends piled up against the wall where they rested after each secret session, but the paint had still been drying on them when Richard had put in his unexpected appearance.

  Rex sat up in his bath and swore. Damn Richard! How the hell had he tumbled to what was going on? They had exercised such extraordinary caution before making each move. Their lives had depended on it and Rex was prepared to swear that none of his squad had squealed on him.

  After a moment he guessed the answer. The night of Richard’s arrival had been the critical one on which they had transferred the fuses, removed the real bombs from the hangar and substituted the duds. Having levered the real bombs from their trolleys into a double row on the floor of the lock-up shed, they had piled stakes of cooking utensils on top of them so that they were entirely concealed from view. Next day Richard had made his inspection. In his very thorough search he must have found the forty bombs concealed under the heaps of pots and pans and wondered what the devil they were doing there. That was it, undoubtedly. It was on the night after that he had announced himself satisfied that the gold was not in the factory and his decision to abandon the search because he was so keen to get home.

  The scented water splashed out on to the blue tiles as Rex angrily flopped backwards in the bath again. What an idiot he had been to underrate Richard as an opponent. Was it likely he would be prepared calmly to chuck his hand in and abandon the Duke? Of course not! No more than he, Rex, would have let down old Simon by clearing off without even letting him know he had failed to find any trace of the gold. He was sick of the Spanish war. Damned sick of it. It was such a horrible business with its continual slaughter of women and children by both sides. But he had overdone that angle with Richard, He saw that now. That, and the disclosures of how he intended to make his break for home, coming on top of Richard’s discovery of the bombs in the shed, had given the game away completely. But how had Richard managed to trick him when they were actually in the plane?

  Reaching out a dripping hand, Rex pulled a towel from the chromium-plated hot rail, dried his fingers, took a cigarette from a box on the bathside table and lit it. He knew those bombs had been loaded on to the plane in their right order. He had superintended the hoisting of each into position himself and each had a tiny mark on its tail which indicated to him whether it was made of gold or aluminium, so that there could be no possibility of a mistake. Each had gone into its proper place, gold and aluminium bombs alternately so as to distribute the weight evenly, gold bombs on the bomb releases that had odd numbers and aluminium bombs on the ones that had even numbers.

  The whole scheme was to have been so simple once Rex was in the air. He had not anticipated that matters would be complicated by Spanish and German fighters being sent up to accompany him but that, now, was by the way. Twenty bombs were as many as could possibly be unloaded in one dive and he had never intended to risk more than one dive near Madrid. He had only to drop his golden eggs within a few miles of the city and later notify Simon what he had done; they were much too heavy for anyone who found them to run off with in the meantime. The empty aluminium shells didn’t matter. They could have been dumped anywhere once he was safe from pursuit.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another as he thought what a chump he had been ever to play along with Richard. If only he had stuck to his original plan of offering Matias or one of the Communist mechanics the chance of coming as his bomber, all would have been well.

  But how had Richard pulled a fast one on him? When the first lot of eggs had been dropped outside Madrid he hadn’t felt them go and he had rushed down to the lower deck thinking Richard had muffed the job and that he’d have to do his dive all over again. Yet the bombs had gone, and Richard was sitting there grinning. With his own eyes Rex had seen that all the odd-numbered bomb releases had been properly turned over.

  Never having done any bombing before he had had no standard by which to judge the reaction of a plane to the loosing of a dead load. It had seemed surprising that it was imperceptible, but he had assumed that speed counteracted it and had returned to his pilot’s seat reassured that he had pulled off a most remarkable exploit. Only when they had reached the coast and the plane bounded up almost uncontrollably as the second batch of bombs was released, had he been hit by the infuriating truth. For a second he had thought of trying to swerve out to sea, but had checked the impulse on realising that if he did so the bulk of the gold might be lost irretrievably.

  The more he thought of it the more certain he became that only one explanation was possible. Richard had spent a full day learning all about the bombing apparatus from the sergeant-mechanic, and on that last evening in Valmojado had gone off again to examine the gear on his own. He had changed every bombing lead on the plane, a longish but by no means difficult job. By tapping all the bombs in the hangar the day before with a piece of metal he could easily have discovered that some were solid and others hollow. He knew that gold bombs would weigh heavier than ordinary ones and he had guessed the rest. A screwdriver and an uninterrupted spell alone with the machine, probably secured through the goodwill of the sergeant in charge, were the only things necessary for him to change over the wires, one by one, leading from the odd-numbered levers to the even-numbered release gear and vice versa.

  Rex was quite right; that was just what Richard had done.

  ‘And now,’ thought Rex, ‘what about it? Normally we’d be sailing for home, but the yacht’s not moving at the moment. Richard’s got to get his treasure on board and that won’t prove so easy. Underwater as they are and probably half-buried in the sand, these eleven-hundred-pound bombs will take some lifting. He can’t take his yacht in and use his winches to haul them out because it’s much too shallow here. One could wade out half a mile in this bay and, of course, that’s why clever Master Richard chose it. He’ll have to get help from somewhere, and he’ll almost certainly appeal to the old fox in Madrid. They’ll fix it between them for some of Franco’s Fifth Column guys on shore to come along with lighters, pick up the gold, and run it into an Insurgent port. We’ll probably hang about off the bay till the job is done, then collect the Duke from some quiet spot and sail for England’s green and pleasant land. That’s the scheme, I’ll bet a million.

  ‘Now! As long as we’re in the yacht outside the three-mile limit we’ll be as safe as a cutie in a candy store. Any funny business by the representatives of the legally elected Spanish Government, and a long, low, grey ship will come steaming up from nowhere at fifty miles an hour. A quiet, polite sort of guy in the best brand of gent’s natty navy-blue suiting and a little gold braid will come ashore and hold the whole Spanish Government up at the end of a walking-stick. He’ll say he just hates to be a spoil-sport, by stopping any fun and games that may be in progress, but the instructions of His Britannic Majesty’s Government are, etc., etc. Richard’ll then be handed back his hat, requested to send in a bill of any damage done to his yacht, and the Spanish Government’ll retire with its tail between its legs.

  ‘What about inside the three-mile limit? I doubt the yacht being able to get much nearer than two miles in, anyhow, and Richard won’t go ashore again. Why should he? Besides, if he were mutt enough to try, I’ll be on board to stop him.

  ‘Right, then! Since that’s the way it is, no harm’s coming to my ever-loving cousin of Valmojado or that angelic little devil Marie-Lou if I tip off Simon that his folk can come right along and pick up enough dough to buy an entire Tank Corps off the Russians. If the Government guys and the Duke’s Fascist toughs just happen to pick on the same day and clash on the foreshore—who cares? Not this child. We’ll be sitting pretty out here in the yacht, and—oh, boy! What a kick I’m going to get out of having the last laugh on my old friend Richard after all.’

  The sum total of his reflections cheered Rex up enormously. He was just beginning to realise, too, that for him this Spanish adventure was really over. He wo
uld dine tonight off the best the Mediterranean had to offer, with two of the most charming people in the world, and afterwards sleep between cool, linen sheets untroubled by any thought of dangers or difficulties to be encountered on the morrow.

  He stepped out of the bath and began to dry himself with a thick, warm, blue towel that Richard’s valet had placed all ready for him. Suddenly he stopped rubbing, drew the folds of the huge towel about him, and sat down on the edge of the bath. A worrying thought had struck him. Say the Duke decided to come down from Madrid to take a hand in picking up the gold and Simon’s people arrived on the scene when he was at it. That would not be so hot. In fact, it simply must not be allowed to happen. Any people on the Nationalist side in such an encounter would certainly be killed or captured and executed. Rex would cheerfully have lost all the gold in Christendom and publicly worn a dunce’s hat as well rather than be the means of placing one of those friends of his in such danger. The Spanish Government would just have to continue to want for tanks or planes if the price of them were to be any risk to the Duke.

  He saw at once that, before he took any action he must be quite certain that, having tackled the really difficult end, his friends meant to leave the ostensibly easy finish of the business to the people who had originally drawn them into it.

  How was he going to do that? The answer soon came to him. It was quite certain that Richard would do nothing until he had consulted Marie-Lou. He had unshakable faith in the lightness of her judgment and never made a move without her if it were at all possible to secure her opinion. Now, while they were bathing and changing, he would be telling her about the Flying Sow’s flight from Valmojado and every detail of his recent stay there. Rex could visualise them indulging in that childish mirth which took possession of them both at times. He had seen them sit opposite each other positively rocking with laughter for minutes on end and utterly unable to control themselves, owing to some small thing which they both considered funny. Doubtless they were rolling about on their beds at the moment simply crying with glee at the thought of his discomfiture. They would not have time before dinner to get down to serious business but before they went to sleep that night they would talk.