Simon picked up the form and read:
Execute all prisoners taken in Coralles affair institute rigorous search for escaped Condesa detain Ventura as hostage on lines suggested.
He put it down, hunched his narrow shoulders, and peered at the strong face of the man opposite. There was no trace of softness or mercy in it and he knew that Colonel Picón had the reputation of being unbribable.
For a further five minutes they argued and wrangled. Simon reasoned and pleaded but the Malaga military command had suffered a great deal from the activities of Nationalist saboteurs behind their lines. Now that Picón had caught a bunch of them, and had the full weight of Valencia behind him, he was adamant to all appeals for mercy.
Suddenly Simon found that the palms of his hands were wet, and he was filled with unutterable horror at the thought that had come to him. He loathed violence of any kind; even the frequent sight of the dead and dying in this terrible internecine war had failed to harden him. He still felt sick in the pit of his stomach every time he saw the torn flesh of wounded men but, although he had not the least idea of how he was going to do it, he knew with the utmost certainty that he was going to kill Colonel Picón.
For Simon, that meant a premature ending of his work in Spain. The sacrifice of any further chance to help what he believed to be the best elements of the Spanish people in the fight they were waging to maintain their freedom. He must betray those who had faith in him and who had stood shoulder to shoulder to him in the belief that it was better to face death than to bow the knee before the false, man-made gods men call Dictators. Not only must he leave empty his own key-position behind the pitifully thin battle-line, but by a treacherous murder he must take one of their valued leaders from them. Yet he knew that there was no alternative. He had brought Rex into this himself. All his life long he would see Rex’s great heart riddled with bullets. Then Richard, who’d been dragged in by the Duke. Dear, dear Richard. If he died it was as good as killing Marie-Lou too. And that charming, cynical old ruffian, de Richleau, who, he knew, in spite of their differences, still loved him as a son. No, every ideal must go overboard and Colonel Picón must die unless he gave way.
Simon made one last effort. “Listen,” he pleaded jerkily. “The Spanish Government—owes me something. I’ve done a lot for them, you know. Will you hold things up for twenty-four hours—until I can reach Valencia and talk to the people there myself?”
“I will not raise a finger to help you save these blackguards,” Picón said firmly, and with those words he signed his death warrant.
Standing up, Simon produced a letter from his pocket. “This is from Rex van Ryn,” he said. “Like you to see it before you finally say no. It’s the one in which he gave information to the Government now worth one hundred and fifty million pesetas in hard cash.”
Throwing the letter on the desk he moved round to the Colonel’s side, adding, “If your English isn’t too good I’d better translate it for you.”
Picón picked up the letter and glanced at it impatiently. Near his elbow there lay a fifteen-inch shell splinter which he was using as a paper-weight. Simon’s right hand rested on the end of it as he pointed over the Colonel’s shoulder with his left.
De Richleau himself could not have delivered a swifter blow. The long piece of jagged steel flew up and descended on Picon’s head with a horrid crunching sound. He slumped forward on his desk without even a moan.
Simon had struck to kill. He dared not risk an orderly’s finding Picón still alive and bringing him round. They would know who had killed him when they found the body, but that was a different matter. Only the Colonel himself could tell them why he had been attacked and the place for which his attacker was likely to be heading.
With shuddering repugnance Simon lifted the still head, and nerved himself to look sideways into the distorted face. The eyes were wide and staring. Colonel Eusebio Picón was unquestionably dead.
The sweet, sickly smell of the strong perfume favoured by the dead man was strong in Simon’s nostrils. With a gulp of nausea he let the head fall back on the desk. Suddenly he became conscious of the awful silence which had succeeded their heated argument. The house was utterly quiet with the dead stillness of the midnight hours. The orderly was probably dozing again down in the hall, but even there he might notice the abrupt cessation of the murmuring voices in the room above. If he had cause to pay a visit to the landing he would certainly become suspicious of the unnatural silence, knowing that Simon was still closeted with the Colonel. In a jerky, hesitant whisper at first, then more loudly, Simon began to talk; repeating all over again the arguments he had used without success for the freeing of his friends.
For the next ten minutes he worked with frantic speed; continuing as he did so the grim and useless farce of reasoning with the dead body sprawled across the desk. Locking the door, he secured the Colonel’s keys, ransacked the safe until he found the official forms and rubber stamps he wanted, typed out an order for Rex, Richard, the Duke and Cristoval to be turned over to him, and another to the Military Headquarters garage to supply him with a car for his own personal use. He then blacked one side of a piece of paper with a pencil, placed over its clean side a document with Picon’s signature on it which he found in the safe, and under the blackened side, in turn, the two forms he had typed, traced signatures on each and carefully inked them in.
His hands were shaking now and his eyes were bloodshot, but there was still much to be done. Applying the rubber stamps to his two forged orders, he put the form-book and the rubber stamps back in the safe, relocked it and returned the keys to Picon’s pocket. He then nerved himself for the most horrible business of all. Gripping the dead man by the collar of his dressing-gown he pulled him out of his chair and, still going on with his macabre monologue in a slightly louder tone, dragged the body as quietly as he could across the floor into the bedroom.
Pulling down the sheets, Simon got the dead man into a sitting position and, with a heave which required every ounce of his strength, hoisted him up on to the bed. Averting his glance from the staring accusation of the protruding eyeballs in the heavy red face, he rolled the body over on its side, pulled the sheets right up until only the hair was showing, switched out the light and tiptoed back in to the library.
After a last look round to see that nothing there could give him away at a casual glance, he walked to the door, opened it and, thanking the Colonel for granting him the interview, wished him good night.
Except for Simon’s voice the silence remained unbroken, and no one was in sight. Keeping a careful eye on the staircase, he reached back into the room again, knocked up the light switch, removed the key from inside the door, locked it on the outside and slipped the key into his pocket. Rousing the orderly whom he found nodding in his chair downstairs, he told him that the Colonel had now gone to bed and was not to be disturbed except on any matter of the greatest urgency which could not possibly wait until morning.
The man let him out into the street and, after pausing a moment to take another couple of aspirins, he hurried off towards Command Headquarters, his bird-like head thrust forward between his narrow shoulders.
On the production of his forged order at the Headquarters garage, no difficulty was made about providing him with a car. He said that he did not require a chauffeur as he meant to drive himself and there would be no room in the car for the man when be had picked up the party he had been ordered to collect. In five minutes he was out of the town and driving at full speed along the coast road to the west. It had begun to spit with rain and the moon, which would normally have been visible in its first quarter, was hidden by clouds.
On his twenty-minutes drive out to the bay he did not pass a single vehicle, which was just as well, seeing that he was now so shaken with fever that he could hardly keep the car on the road; and his wretched state was very nearly the cause of his complete undoing. Turning up the track to the monastery he skidded and, unable to control the car, ran off the road. Fortun
ately the car was running uphill at the time and there was no ditch on the inner side of the track where it skidded. For an awful moment it rocked and bounced over some small boulders, then came to rest with a loud crash against the cliff-face.
Shaken but unhurt, Simon climbed out to try to assess the damage. Both his headlamps had gone and he had no torch, but he could feel the water trickling from the smashed radiator, and the off fore wheel appeared to be jammed between two rocks. His only course was to abandon it. Stumbling and running he accomplished the mile climb to the monastery.
Actually, in spite of his accident, he had made considerably better time than the yacht, and arrived just one hour after Lucretia-José; but he lost a precious ten minutes severing the telephone wires which connected the monastery with Malaga before answering the challenge of the sentry at the gate.
The sergeant of the guard said that the Commanding Officer could not see him. He mumbled excuses about Colonel Mudra being ill, and added, “The Colonel blasted hell out of me when I went up half an hour ago to report a suicide.”
“Ill or well, he’s going to see me,” Simon snapped, and impatiently waved the order with its Headquarters stamp in front of him. As the man turned away saying that he would see what he could do, Simon followed him straight up the broad flight of old stone steps and thrust his way past him into Mudra’s bedroom.
It was quite true that Mudra was ill, or at least, suffering severely and he presented a far from pretty spectacle. As Simon entered, the Colonel was sitting up in bed with blood all over his hands and face and staining the sheets pulled up about him. His left eye was obscured by a blood-stained bandage, and with a bowl of water beside him, he was endeavouring to staunch the flow of blood from a horrible wound which had half severed his chin.
Simon took no notice of his condition but demanded at once: “Where’re your three foreign prisoners?”
“Who’re you?” Mudra shouted angrily, “and what the devil do you mean by barging into my room like this?”
“My name’s Aron. I’m attached to the Finance Minister’s office in Valencia,” Simon said hastily. “We met in Madrid last month. Reception for the International Brigade; but you may not remember that.”
Mudra groaned and hoisted himself up among his blood-spattered pillows. “Yes, I remember. You were chasing these foreigners then, weren’t you? Well, what the hell d’you want with me?”
“Orders from Headquarters.” Simon waved the form which he still held in his hand. “Where are they?”
“In the lock-up. Where do you expect them to be?”
Simon heaved a sigh of relief. He had arrived in time. His friends had not yet been executed. He said more quietly, “Got an order here for four of your prisoners to be handed over to me.”
Mudra snatched the order and scanned it with his one sound eye. “What’s that fool Picón mean by this?” he bellowed in his aggressive barrack-square manner. “Why put off the shooting of these swine now we’ve got them?”
“Because they’re more useful to us alive than dead,” Simon replied evenly.
“You going to take them into Malaga?” Mudra winced as another spasm of pain caught him.
“That’s my business.”
“All right, smartie, but you’d best keep a civil tongue between your teeth when you talk to me. Brought an escort?”
“No.”
“Well, I can’t spare you one. I’m under strength as it is. Those pansy warriors in Malaga expect me to hold this place with half a company, and the rest of the battalion’s spread out over a ten-mile front. We’d be in a fine pickle if the Rebels made a break-through one night. What’re you going to do about it?”
“Take them without an escort.”
“What! You’re crazy. These toughs would eat a little chap like you.”
“They’ll come like lambs when I’ve told them what they’re wanted for.”
Mudra’s heavy face took on a cunning look. “I believe there’s something fishy about all this,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to phone Malaga.”
“Go ahead,” Simon managed to reply quite calmly although actually his heart had begun to pound like a sledge-hammer. If Mudra, finding the line dead, sent men out to trace the break and they discovered it within a hundred yards of the monastery, he might be suspected of having cut it and Mudra would arrest him pending further inquiries. By the morning at latest he would be wanted all over Government Spain for the murder of Colonel Picón.
With a groan, Mudra picked up the receiver from his bedside-table, frowned and slammed it back again. “That’s the fourth time our line’s been broken this week. What with scores of dirty traitors living behind our front, and engineers who are fit for nothing, how can we be expected to win the ruddy war? Well, you’ll have to wait until morning.”
Simon tapped the paper with his forefinger. “This is an order. It’s stamped ‘Urgent’. If you refuse to carry it out you’ll have to answer for it to the Military Governor in person.”
“Oh, hell!” The wounded man put a hand up to the bandage over his eye from under which the blood was seeping. “What’s the hurry? If you’re on the level you can quite well wait until I get a confirmation of the order.”
“I can’t wait” Simon insisted. “These people are wanted urgently for questioning. I’ve got a car down on the coast road and I can have them back in Malaga in twenty minutes.”
“But they’ll escape! They’ll murder you before you’re halfway down the hill.”
Simon shook his head jerkily. “Know what I’m doing. We’re holding Richard Eaton’s wife as a hostage and they’d do anything to prevent harm coming to her. Besides, I can offer them their lives if they come quietly whereas, if they try to escape, they’ll only be hunted out by search parties and shot within the next few days.”
Mudra closed his sound eye and moaned again. He was evidently suffering intense pain and too racked by it to prolong the argument.
“Oh, all right,” he grumbled sullenly. “Have it your own way. I can’t hand over Cristoval Ventura, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s dead.”
“What!” exclaimed Simon aghast. “But you had no orders to shoot him.”
“I didn’t shoot him. We were only holding him as a hostage because he let that woman of his escape. The crazy fool shot himself.”
“But why?” insisted Simon. “Why?”
“She turned up again here an hour ago—gave herself up so that he should be released—the hellcat! I took her gun off her but the little vixen had a three-inch stiletto in her hair, and look what’s she’s done to me! The chances are I’ll lose the sight of my left eye.”
“But when she gave herself up, why wasn’t Cristoval freed?” Simon asked hurriedly.
Mudra closed his sound eye and let his aching head fall back against the top of the bed. “He was freed but he was nuts on her, of course. We all knew that. I suppose he felt he couldn’t live without her. Anyhow, they came to tell me that he’d shot himself about twenty minutes before you turned up.”
“She still here?” asked Simon.
“You bet she is, and she’s not going to get away again.”
Simon was thinking fast. First, of poor Cristoval whom he had grown to like enormously. What a tragedy that he should have committed suicide on account of this girl; but there was no measuring what love could do to a man if it got him badly, and Cristoval had been crazy about his ‘Golden Spaniard’. Then, of her. She’d tried to save her lover and Mudra had got fresh with her. Then she’d sailed into him with her knife. Serve him damn well right. Of course, in her role she had probably done the Government cause immense damage, but that was no longer Simon’s affair. She was a friend of Richard’s and the Duke’s and a remarkably brave woman. Simon had a great admiration for bravery although he would never have believed anyone who had suggested that he was a very brave man himself. In for a penny, in for a pound, he thought. ‘I doubt if I can do it but I’ll try to save her.’
With an upward jerk of his head he said, “This woman … the Condesa … she’s in the same party as the others. Probably be able to give us even more important information if we can only make her talk. As Ventura’s dead, I’ll take her instead.”
“Oh, no! You ruddy well won’t!” thundered Mudra, his sound eye flashing open. “That order says nothing about her, and I’m having the dirty, double-crossing little slut shot first thing in the morning.”
Simon nodded. He did not dare to plead for Lucretia’s release. He had not got the ghost of a case, and knew it. To do so would only have been to risk Mudra’s changing his mind about the others.
“All right. If you feel that way about it,” he muttered diplomatically.
“Yes, I damn well do!” The wounded man angrily struck a handbell beside his bed, and added, “Now! Take the other three and get to hell out of here.”
When the Sergeant appeared Mudra gave him the formal order to release Rex, Richard and the Duke; then with a sob of pain he turned wearily over on to his blood-soaked pillow.
Ten minutes later Simon had signed receipts for his three prisoners, and the four friends were breathing in the fresh night air outside the monastery gates. They were at last united again and free; but Simon’s heart was heavy as he thought of Cristoval’s useless suicide and the death that the coming dawn would bring to the beautiful spy whom he had known and liked as ‘The Golden Spaniard’.
Chapter XXXV
Who Goes Home?
As they walked away from the monastery, the thought of Cristoval’s death and Lucretia’s coming execution brought the memory of Colonel Picón, lying murdered back there in Malaga flashing into Simon’s mind again. He began to tremble violently and felt he was going to be physically sick. Dimly he realised that his friends were thanking him for having saved them, and questioning him as to how he had known about their plight.
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