"No. I was returning from a mission. I was over Manchester, as a matter of fact."
She sighed. "Well, I suppose that makes a difference."
"It was eight hundred years old," he said gloomily. "It had taken three generations of labourers and artisans to build it. I found all this out later, of course. They all had to go to confession before starting work in the morning. Each stone was put into place by men with theoretically spotless souls. Think of it! Then I fly by, mooning about steaks and beer and girls, and drop a bomb on it. The bomb-release mechanism is secured by throwing a switch to the right. To the right! That's printed in block capitals in the manual. I yawned and threw it to the left. My silly name made it all the more ghastly."
"I don't understand."
"Churchman. Peter Churchman. I'm not particularly religious or anything. But something is definitely wrong when a man named Churchman destroys a cathedral. It made me feel the butt end of a very stupid joke, I can tell you."
"You poor dear. Only an exquisite sort of person would grieve about a thing like that."
"Well, I decided to send them a contribution. It seemed the least I could do. I went into business, at which I was no good at all. Then I had an inspiration. I saved some money and tried my luck at Monte Carlo. I didn't see how I could miss. I was doing the Lord's work. God was my partner. But I lost every dime. And I never heard from God at all."
She smiled and touched his cheek. "He was a silent partner, darling."
Peter felt a stab of envy. How nicely that would have looked in his journal! The irrelevance of his thoughts depressed him, for he knew at heart he wasn't a serious man; in the profound recesses of his being there sat a child grinning at comic books.
"I do understand now," she said gently. "You robbed the banks to pay for the cathedral."
"Yes. I deducted only my expenses. Of course, I had no way of determining the value of a cathedral. Costs have risen a lot since it was built, you know. But I settled on a million dollars. I collected that and sent it to the City Council of Manchester, with my apologies."
"Oh, Peter. Did you tell them who you were or anything?"
"I couldn't do that. I just said it was from a repentant airman, and hoped they realised it had been a mistake and so forth."
The light in her eyes was like a bonfire whipped by high winds, splendid and exciting.
"Darling, how magnificent!"
He moved her dress and kissed her bare knees. Suddenly he felt much better; confession had eased his soul. He listened to the mounting tempo of his heart, and decided that things were quite all right again.
Things were unbelievably good once more, he realised, as his fingertips slowly rounded the delicious curves of her legs.
"Darling, lock the door."
"Why?"
"I would love to merge with the infinite."
"Oh, how sweetly you put things."
She locked the door, undid straps and stepped from her dress and sandals. The light in the room was the colour of pearls now, the colour of southern seas at dawn, and through this shimmering translucence she came to Peter like a stately white clipper under gentle homing winds.
***
Mr. Shahari fled up an alley. Morgan cunningly plotted his probable course, waddled along side streets and caught him near the church square.
"Now look. About my father. I got that wrong. It was my uncle who died. But I'll have the money next week. There's no doubt of that. None at all."
"I wish you happiness with it. But I am not going to Pamplona. This is my area. This is where I work."
"Ah, come on. You'll have fun." Morgan winked and moved closer to Mr. Shahari. "Let me tell you about the girls who come down from Biarritz."
Mr. Shahari backed away from the vast rounded prow of Morgan's stomach. He sat down abruptly in the burros' drinking fountain.
"Damn you, great fat fool! No, no, no."
Morgan told Quince about it later. "He put on a good act, but he's got the hook in his mouth. He'll come to Pamplona, don't worry. And there we shall kill him, eh Quince! With ritual and spectacle, eh Quince?"
Quince was silent. He believed he had already expressed himself more than adequately on this subject.
CHAPTER FOUR
Peter worked with speed and precision in Pamplona. Time was his challenge and his enemy, but he deliberately made himself stand apart and examine the problem from a viewpoint that was nearly academic in its detachment and serenity. He analysed possibilities and calculated risks with surgical dispassion; this had always been his great strength, this ability to choose plans as if they were going to be executed by robots while he himself was off taking the sun on safe and distant beaches.
He would have liked weeks to study this job. Instead he had only days, only hours, to decide on a scheme that might save his old friends from Angela's reprisals. No, he couldn't be choosy; Peter was quite willing in fact to settle for anything that was not demonstrably suicidal.
He gave a list of things he might need to the desk clerk at his hotel.
"Yes, senior I'll attend to it. Street maps. And films of San Fermin. Yes, I can have them sent over from the photographer's shop."
"I'll also need a sixteen millimetre projector and screen."
"I'll attend to everything."
"You're very kind."
"It's a pleasure, senior Since you love San Fermin as I do, we must be compadres "I was only here once and I did love it. But that was long ago."
"Never mind. The pictures will bring it all back. And time stands still for those with passion"
"Thank you. That's a comforting thought. Will you send the things up to my room, please?"
"I'll take care of everything, senior."
"Thank you so much."
The clerk beamed after Peter: it was a pleasure to serve a gentleman, a compadre. Such a rare pleasure.
***
Ten minutes later Peter sat across a desk from an officer of the Banco de Bilbao.
"I don't much like the idea of opening an account in Spain, Senor Galache. You never know what can happen. It's like South America. But I've got to. Tell me: You got a statement of your current financial position?"
"But of course, Mr. Clay."
"Okay." Peter accepted a booklet, put it away in his pocket without looking at it. "Now, you got any banking facilities in the Far East?"
"Yes. In Hong Kong. May I ask the nature of your business, Mr. Clay?"
"Heavy equipment. Earth movers, cranes, bulldozers, that sort of thing. Your vault's from Samsons in London, I see. It's the old Model X-fifty, I suppose."
"No, it's rather more modern. It's the X-one hundred."
"Yeah? Well, I'll look at your statement. If it's all right, I'll be back after lunch."
"Are you staying in Pamplona for the Fiesta of San Fermin?"
"No."
"That's a pity. It's very colourful. Since you're right here, why not wait over till next week?"
"Next week? Hell, I'll be in Calcutta then."
The Spaniard thought: I don't care where you will be, Mr. Clay. Leave your American dollars but take your American manners far away.
"In that case, may I wish you a pleasant trip?"
"Sure. So long."
Peter disliked the role he had played; it made him quite gloomy, in fact. That it had been necessary hardly made it more agreeable. Peter had forced the pleasant young Spaniard to concentrate on his bad manners, so that he wouldn't wonder at his questions about the number and model of the bank vaults. Clever, oh yes, he thought. But he didn't enjoy behaving like that. He sighed and wondered if he had become too sensitive for this sort of work.
***
For the next few hours Peter strolled leisurely about the town, deliberately absorbing its texture and atmosphere. This seemingly aimless tour was essential to his preparations, and he knew from experience it wouldn't pay to hurry it; time was precious, but so was information about which way the streets ran, and where the policemen stood at given h
ours, and when the crowds would be thickest in the squares and market places.
He liked the old Basque stronghold. He liked its yellow buildings and stone fortifications, its avenues and monuments, and the briskly sturdy look of its people. He found the street of the Thousand-Broken-Heads where Ignatius of Loyola had received the wound that turned his steps and reflections to sainthood, and he carefully measured and studied the Calle de la Estafeta, through which the foolhardy and courageous of all ages would run before the encierros of bulls each morning during the fiesta of San Fermin.
Peter stopped for a glass of beer at one of the cafes that ringed the Plazz de Castillo. The great square was now quiet and orderly but next week it would be the joyously thumping heart of the fiesta; thronged with dancers, musicians, merrymakers; trembling with the explosions of rockets and fireworks; all the cafes mobbed, every table sprouting thick clusters of bottles and glasses and saucers.
After a bit Peter left some coins for the waiter and went back to his hotel.
***
At the wheel of a grey Citroen parked in the Plaza de Castillo, a man in a black raincoat looked after Peter with a frown that delicately rearranged the pattern of scars on his forehead. Seated beside him was a short stocky man with silvery white hair and features so hard and seasoned that they might have been hacked from a block of mahogany.
The man in the black raincoat said, "I don't understand it, sir. He's drifting about like a tourist."
"Not quite, Phillip. Tourists shop for things. Postcards, souvenirs, and so forth. Not Mr. Churchman. He is looking at things. And looking very carefully."
"I see. That didn't occur to me, Colonel."
"Well, I was paid to notice such things, and you weren't, Phililip."
"Yes, Colonel."
"Please, Philip. That's all over."
"It's difficult, sir. It's a strong habit, sir."
"Would it help if I made it a direct order?"
"Yes, I'm sure it would, Colonel."
"Do not address me by rank again, Sergeant Lemoins. That is an order."
"Very well, sir."
The colonel glanced at his watch. "We must talk to Mr. Churchman soon. But first I suggest we have our lunch. Did you like the place called The Four Crowns?"
"Very much, sir."
"Then let's go there, Phillip."
"Yes, Colonel."
***
Peter spent much of that afternoon in his darkened hotel room studying films taken the previous year during the fiesta of San Fermin. He watched daredevils in the Calle de las Estefeta fleeing before fighting bulls; saw amateur toreros ca ping bony and frantic young oxen in the Plaza de Toros; followed snake-lines of exuberant dancers looping and curling through the crowds in the Plaza de Castillo.
Something else caught his eye and he quickly stopped the action on the screen.
High above the crowds in the Plaza de Castillo floated gigantic heads, their mouths stretched wide in fiercely cheerful smiles.
Peter studied them intently, while a tantalisingly amorphous idea began to take shape in his mind. He remembered those huge, gaily painted heads from his first visit to Pamplona. And what else? Did time really stand still for those with passion? He remembered the bulls and the fireworks and the men dancing in the street, the bad news on the radio and the goatskins of wine raised high through all the reeling night, the funny, unpronounceable names of the towns in Poland, and a sudden wistful knowledge that passion and excitement died with the loss of innocence.
He was oddly disturbed by his memories. Very well, he thought sadly, let the innocent weep for such things; sinners know the value of peace and a bottle of good wine.
He made himself concentrate on the heads. They were called Cabezudas, he remembered, or Gigantes. Peter stood abruptly, as if physical activity might be a specific against his strange gloom, and measured the heads immobilised on the screen. As nearly as he could judge by using the human figures in the scene as a scale the eyes of the Cabezudas were ten or twelve feet above the ground, and their foreheads were about three feet wide. The heads were constructed, it appeared, of lacquered cloth or leather stretched around wooden frames. The men who supported them were concealed by flowing robes which dropped from the shoulders of the Cabezudas. Eyeholes cut in the cloth allowed the men to guide themselves safely through the streets. For several minutes Peter stared at the silent screen, a frown shadowing his eyes.
He was wondering how much strength and stamina one would require to carry a Cabezuda about the city for an hour or so… At last he rose and made himself a drink. Gripped by mounting excitement, he paced the floor and stared at the grinning heads frozen on the screen. An idea flickered and danced about the dark corners of his mind like a will-o'-the-wisp. It was so audacious that his first impulse was to put it straight from his mind, to fling it away as he would a ticking bomb.
But this element was precisely what appealed to Peter, for his strange genius warned him that the problem he faced could not be solved by prudent and cautious means. In such a situation, danger was often the finest camouflage. Peter respected the police of all countries profoundly; otherwise he would have been in prison long ago. But he knew from experience that the police at times fell into the error of confusing the criminal mind with their own, declaring, in effect: "Only a fool would take such a chance!" What they forgot, or had never known, was that men and women who went about breaking into banks and museums were fools, and quite naturally should be expected to behave like fools. Words such as 'suicidal' and 'foolhardy' and 'impregnable' were frequently the thief's most valuable ally, for they created the climate of official complacence in which the seeds of a plan might sprout, undetected and unsuspected, into lovely and profitable blooms.
No, Peter thought, danger was an asset. The problem was timing! How to mesh frail and erratic human nerves and reflexes with the impersonal, inexorable sweep of a second hand… Stimulated by the challenge to his professional skills, Peter put his glass aside, scooped up his hat, and left the room.
Twenty minutes later he stood in the gathering darkness near a bridge and looked across the river towards the corrals of the bulls. Lights winked below him on the sluggish water. The area was now deserted and quiet; only an occasional worker strolled by to break the stillness with the damp and hollow ring of boots on the old cobblestones.
Peter stood with a stop-watch in his hand, and allowed his formidable imagination to create pictures against the night. How would it be next week during the fiesta of San Fermin? The hands of an official would grip a plunger, while his eye watched a second hand sweeping towards six o'clock. At the stroke of the hour a deep, booming roar would shake the city. Birds would fly screaming from the spires and steeples of the churches, and the runners packed in the Calle de la Estefeta would know that the fighting bulls had been released from their corrals.
Peter imagined the seven dark shapes trotting out to a false freedom in the early dawn, their shoulder muscles cresting ominously as they shadow-boxed the air with lethal horns. Flanked by massive, imperturbable oxen, the bulls would quickly calm down and bunch themselves into a protective encierro; in this fashion they would begin their race through the barricaded streets to the appointed place of their execution that afternoon, the Plaza de Toros at the foot of the Calle de la Estefeta.
The instant they formed an encierro and started running, a second blast would shake the city; and the daredevils in the streets would know that the bulls were loose and on their way.
Peter clicked his stop-watch, turned, and sprinted up the street. The first stretch was a difficult two hundred yards over treacherous cobblestones to the small plaza in front of the Ayuntamiento, Pamplona's city hall. Arriving there, Peter leaned against a wall to catch his breath, and waved off sympathetic offers of air from several concerned Spaniards. Then he looked at his stop-watch. It would be tight, very -tight, he realised grimly.
He inspected the plaza. During the running of the bulls all its openings and passageways would be sea
led off with double wooden barriers. Every window with a view of the square would be packed with faces; crowds would throng the top of the barricades; the square itself would be occupied by a few dozen suicideros, those insanely courageous, or insanely neurotic, young men who would not take to their heels until they actually saw the bulls thundering up that two-hundred yard stretch from the river banks.
Fortunately, considering certain elements of his plans, Peter was quite certain that no one in the crowd would have eyes or thoughts for anything but the arrival of those bulls. The noise would mount in wild waves, and these would break into sheer pandemonium when the first dark and murderous shapes topped the rise of the street and exploded into the plaza. And that was fine, Peter thought.
He strolled across the square and went into a passageway between two buildings. It was narrow and dark and damp, and smelled of rust and old mortar. Peter played the beam of his flashlight over doors and windows. Moisture glistened slickly on the walls. The noise of the town was muted and indistinct; the passageway was like a narrow tomb stretching off to a gloomy infinity.
Peter felt the old excitement creeping over him. Steel bars and vaults were a gauntlet flung in his face, a challenge he couldn't resist. He went carefully along the passageway until he came to a solid brick wall. There was no turning right or left. This was the end. The windows at the base of the wall were guarded with clusters of iron grille work Peter inspected them carefully under the beam of his torch, programming their measurements into data for the computers in his mind. But even as he worked he experienced a certain sadness, a certain guilty gloom, for he realised now how much he had missed this sort of thing, and how pleased and excited he was to be back at it. And he couldn't help wondering if he had really been honest about wanting to make restitution for the colossal error he had committed during the war. Or had he simply been rational ising a need to steal? Or to prove, perhaps, that he was cleverer than the police?
The Caper of the Golden Bulls Page 5