Mediterranean Nights

by Dennis Wheatley

  I have always thought it one of the best that I have ever written, there was a special reason for this. I have never sought to minimise the great debt that I owe to Dumas, or disguise the fact that my ‘Modern Musketeers’ are modelled on his magnificent originals. The wise and noble Athos was the prototype of the Duke, simple, strong-limbed Porthos of the good-hearted Rex, wily Aramis of the subtle-minded Simon, and the role of gallant D’Artagnan, who had so many qualities, is filled, in some respects at least, by Richard Eaton.

  In Twenty Years After Dumas used the outbreak of the Fronde to divide his quartet. D’Artagnan and the faithful Porthos served the Court Party, while Athos and Aramis sided with the rebellious nobles. Devoted still at heart, but not without bitter differences of opinion, they were then set to pit their wits against each other.

  The Spanish Civil War furnished me with an admirable setting in which to follow once more in the footsteps of the great master. Quite naturally the Duke would be in sympathy with the Spanish Monarchists, and Richard, as a staunch supporter of the best Conservative tradition, would be with him; whereas Simon, the Liberal Jew, and Rex, the Democratic American, would equally naturally espouse the cause of the Spanish Socialists.

  Dividing the friends against each other on a major political issue gave me the chance to state the arguments for both sides in the Spanish War with absolute fairness. The proof that I succeeded in this was proved by an amusing sequel. Immediately the book appeared, the Morning Post, which had given my earlier novels most excellent notices, took me severely to task as a dangerous Communist, while the Daily Worker dubbed me a dyed-in-the-wool Fascist. Happily, the rest of the national Press kept its sense of proportion and praised the book even beyond its deserts as not only a good story, but a well-balanced account of the causes of the Spanish troubles.

  In any case, having once got my four heroes into Spain on such a basis, the rest was easy. Against a background of burning churches, the siege of the Alcazar, and the sack of the Finnish Legation, they lied to each other like troopers whenever they met, schemed, intrigued, and cheated, yet positively had to rescue each other at times of crisis from the fury of the very people they were serving.

  To revert to the present story. Just like its hero I had loved my visit to Madrid and the other old Spanish cities, but everyone I met urged me to go to Barcelona. I did, and found it a lousy town. However, a more recent and longer visit has altered my opinion about that. Twenty years have changed the more modern part of Barcelona into a magnificent city and in the old town there are many places of interest to see. I took the opportunity to do the latter full justice in my recent novel, Vendetta in Spain.

  Anyhow, the Ponce da Leon is a pleasant spot and if you ever go there, maybe you, too, will meet a Golden Spaniard.

  THE GOLDEN SPANIARD

  I WAS at Oliver Watville’s rooms in the Adelphi. His man handed me the evening paper. ‘Mr. Watville will be here in one moment, sir,’ he said, and closed the door.

  I glanced casually at the headlines and then put the paper down. ‘What a pleasant, restful room this is,’ I was thinking.

  ‘Tidy but lived in, and Oliver has such a delightful collection of interesting bits and pieces; nothing of great value, I suppose, but all carefully chosen, and each with its own association.’

  A square casket on the table by my side caught my eye. ‘Hello, that’s new,’ I thought, and picked it up. It was old and a little battered, but a lovely thing. Tortoiseshell, encrusted with gold filigree work and semi-precious stones. I tried to open it, but it was locked.

  Oliver came in at that moment. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘looking at my new box? I’ll give you a dozen guesses as to what’s inside it.’

  I weighed it in my hand; it was a fair size, but very light. ‘Nothing,’ I suggested, with a grin.

  He laughed. ‘You’re wrong, my boy, but you would never guess in a month of Sundays—it’s full of gold!’

  ‘Gold?’ I said incredulously, ‘it can’t be—it would weigh a ton.’

  ‘Fact,’ he nodded, ‘I’ll show you if you like.’ As he spoke he took out a small key and unlocked the casket.

  He was right—the thing was full to the brim of twisting, curling pieces, shimmering and glowing in the late afternoon sunlight. ‘Good Lord—it’s human hair,’ I gasped; ‘wherever did you get it?’

  ‘Off the girl’s head,’ laughed Oliver. ‘Cigarette?’ He offered me his case.

  ‘Thanks.’ I took one and sat down again. I regarded Oliver with a speculative look. ‘What new bit of trouble have you been getting yourself into now?’ I inquired.

  ‘Trouble’s the word,’ he agreed, and he laughed again as he ran his hand over his smooth dark head. Oliver has the most infectious laugh of any man I know.

  ‘I’m just back from Spain,’ he said; ‘that Spanish gold darn’ near landed me in a military prison for a long stretch—not so jolly, eh?’

  I whistled. I’ve always thought that Oliver’s escapades would get him in a real mess one day, but I said nothing, as I was anxious to hear what he’d been up to.

  ‘Ever been to Barcelona?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Well, that’s where I’ve been, and I shan’t risk going back in a hurry, I can tell you. It happened like this.

  ‘I know quite a lot of Spanish people, so I thought I’d take the car and do a trip. I put in a day or two at Biarritz just to get the holiday feeling, then I crossed the frontier at Irun, and set off into Spain.

  ‘My first call was at Valladolid. There wasn’t much to see there, but it’s a nice old town, and the people I stayed with did me jolly well. Of course, they asked my plans. I told them I was going down to Granada for a few days, and then I meant to take in Madrid on the way back.

  ‘ “Oh, but you must see Barcelona,” they said.

  ‘I loved my time in Granada—it’s a gorgeous place, and far enough south really to get the sun. I didn’t know anybody there, so I put up in an hotel; the manager was quite a decent chap and when he saw me off he said: “Of course you’ll go to Barcelona—it’s the finest town in Spain.”

  ‘In Madrid I had a splendid time—I know lots of people there and they did me proud, in spite of the revolution. It’s a lovely city—clean, wide streets, fine hotels, and, of course, any amount of things to see, and the pictures at the Prado are too marvellous. But the Spaniards didn’t seem to think much of it—every one of them said: ‘If only we could live in Barcelona!’

  ‘Well, I really thought there must be something in it, so I decided to put in a couple of days there after I left Madrid.

  ‘It’s a filthy hole—Liverpool and Rotterdam rolled into one. Nothing but factories and shipping, dust and flies, and trams—all the squalor of Marseilles without the picturesqueness of the Vieux Port and the bay; and to make it more depressing it’s built on American lines—hundreds of long straight streets, cutting each other every hundred yards, so that they all look exactly the same.

  ‘I suppose the Spaniards think it’s marvellous because it’s their only modern city, but half an hour driving round in a taxi was enough for me. I ordered the chap back to the Ritz, where I was staying, with a view to drowning my sorrow in “White Ladies”.

  ‘The White Ladies cheered me up a bit, and it was just on six o’clock, so I knew the Thé Dansant would be starting. The hours they do things are jolly queer—it took me a couple of days to tumble to it. Everything is two hours later than with us. Thé Dansant at six, dinner at nine-thirty, theatres start at eleven, and the night places open up about two. Lord knows when the Spaniards go to sleep!

  ‘I took a table in the dancing-room and watched the crush collect. They’re as keen on it as we were just after the war. Of course, no respectable girl is allowed to go; she might run into Papa and his lovely! so there’s no trouble about dancing if you want to, but there’s a special sort of drill. You write a little note and send it over by the waiter to the lady of your choice. If she likes the look of you she smile
s, and everything is all right, but you’d get terribly high-hatted if you just went up and asked the girl to dance.

  ‘They were a smart, expensive-looking lot—the sort you see at Biarritz in the Spanish season—but taken all round they wouldn’t have carried off a beauty prize. I had my eye on one pippin who was rather sweet, and not quite so heavily lipsticked as the rest, so I sent across the usual note.

  ‘Her name was Anita. We jogged round for a bit, and had a drink or two. She was rather a dear, really, and quite a good-looker in her way: matt black hair, and the usual liquid Spanish eyes. I asked her to pity the poor stranger and dine—but she couldn’t.

  ‘It seems she had a banker friend in tow—and times were shocking bad for pretty ladies since poor Alfonso went away. If she cut her date with this bird he might refuse the monthly subsidy for her apartment. Nice, rich boy friends were getting scarcer every day since the revolution, and how she was going to get the money for her annual trip to Monte she couldn’t think.

  ‘As I was English she could talk freely to me, and she was a Royalist to the backbone. She would have been starving altogether if the Communists had had their way. I was sorry she couldn’t dine, but she gave me her card before she left, and made the polite little speech proper to the occasion—foreigners always do it so well.

  ‘There wasn’t another girl in the place worth bothering about, so I ate my lonely dinner and went early to bed.

  ‘In the morning I consulted the hall porter. I really felt that, after all the rhapsodies I’d heard about the place, there must be something worth going to see, but the only suggestion he could offer was that I should motor out to Ponce da Leon for luncheon.

  ‘It seemed that it was a sort of restaurant place up in the hills outside the town. “Verrie reech, verrie chic, verrie mani peoples,” he said. I decided to try my luck.

  ‘The fellow was a liar, of course; the place was all right—quite a luxurious sort of pub, and only built about ten years before. It had a fine view of the Mediterranean, and terraced gardens, newly laid out, running down the hill, but I had the place entirely to myself.

  ‘A surprised-looking waiter turned up after a bit, and I thought I might just as well eat there as anywhere, so I ordered lunch on the terrace. I think they reared the chicken from the egg by the time they took, but it was very pleasant there with a cool drink in the sunshine. There were no trees, or only very young ones, so I could see the whole of the garden from where I sat. At the bottom there was a lily pool surrounded by paving, and when I looked up from my ice I saw that a girl was standing there.

  ‘She was a stunner! Tallish for a woman, about my height—slim, and as chic as they make ’em. She had on a white skirt, a pale blue coat, and a little blue-and-white knitted beret. Sounds simple enough, I know, but it had the Place Vendôme written all over it—and the girl herself—you should have seen her!

  ‘I decided to go and take a look at the lily pool myself. When I got close to her she fairly took my breath away. Her skin was golden brown, and her eyes were golden, too—a kind of tawny colour flecked with yellow—and her hair! Well, you’ve seen her hair—it’s in that box. It was a mass of curls, and the real gold that you could lose sovereigns in. It’s the type of beauty that I’ve often heard of but never seen till then. She was a real golden Spaniard.

  ‘I looked at the lily pool, and then I said quite casually: “It’s jolly hot here, isn’t it?”

  ‘Well, that didn’t seem to go; she didn’t just ignore me as lots of women would, she just looked at me with her big, steady golden eyes until I was forced to look away. I felt an utter fool—that quiet stare was like a douche of cold water down my spine. It knocked me out so completely that I simply hadn’t the guts to go on and try again.

  ‘After a moment she turned away and strolled over towards the gate; I watched her as she stood there, powdering her nose, but I’d seen a thing she hadn’t noticed. When she took out her powder-puff something had fallen from her bag. It was lying on the ground at her feet.

  ‘I walked towards her, and as I went I was racking my brains for something really startling to say to her when I handed her back whatever it was she had dropped. I was terribly keen to talk to her, and I knew that only by surprising her out of herself should I stand a chance.

  ‘It wasn’t any good, though. At that moment a big Hispano roared up the hill; it slowed down when I was still fifty yards from the gate, and the girl jumped for it.

  ‘It didn’t even stop—in a second she’d climbed over the side, plopped down on the cushions at the back, and the car was tearing up the hill in a cloud of dust. I reached the gate just as it disappeared from sight.

  ‘The thing she had dropped was a little black notebook—one of those loose-leaf ones, and the pages were covered with close type.

  ‘I walked back to the restaurant and ordered another drink. Of course, I suppose I ought not to have read the contents of my find, but I bet most people would have done the same in the circumstances. Anyhow, I did, and jolly interesting reading it was.

  ‘There were pages and pages of it, all about reducing the figure. Doctor So-and-so’s safe and certain “course” for getting rid of obesity. Here and there were pasted in pictures of sylph-like darlings who were said once to have had seven chins; the left-hand page was in Spanish and the opposite one a translation in English right through the book, so I had no difficulty in reading it.

  ‘At first I was completely stuck. Lord knows the golden girl had no need of that sort of tripe; but I soon tumbled to it—the thing was a code, and the one kind of code which it it impossible to decipher unless you have the key. I had the whole outfit.

  ‘You may have heard of the sort of thing I mean; the Germans used it a lot in the war. It’s a tremendously elaborate business, because you have to have some sort of commercial concern in both countries to start with, and you have to think out most carefully all the different things you might wish to ask or replies to the other chap’s questions; then you compile the equivalent in terms of your code.

  ‘For instance, I’m in Germany, and I want to know how many planes are being turned out per month by a certain factory. I draft an advertisement with the usual drivel, but I put in a statement that Flora Fatface lost fourteen pounds in a month, and I send it to a general advertising agency for insertion in a certain English paper. You read it, turn up what it means in your little book, and draft another advertisement for insertion in a German paper giving the required information in the form of “Overlopping Lizzie weighed fifteen stone when she was twenty”. Of course, it had to be done through the neutral Press in the war. In this case that wasn’t necessary.

  ‘When I’d read that little book there was nothing I didn’t know about the things in which the Spanish Royalists were interested. I got terribly excited.

  ‘I have always been crazy about lost causes, especially when there are kings with real personality concerned. If I’d lived in the days of the civil wars, the fact that I’d been born as some poor little devil of an over-taxed tradesman would never have stopped me from brandishing a cudgel for the King, and I had always regarded Alfonso as a great man—“I am the King of all the Spaniards”—you know the sort of thing. Not one of these measly little Republicans can hold a candle to him. Have you ever seen him? He’s a tiny chap, but there’s only one man worth looking at when he’s about. He’s a king who is a king in every sense of the word, with all the debonair charm and courage of our Charles II. They’ve got the same blood, if it comes to that; he’s a Bourbon, and Charles II was Henry of Navarre’s grandson.

  ‘Well, the golden girl was mixed up in some Royalist conspiracy, there wasn’t a doubt about that, and if she needed any help to re-establish S. M. el Rey she could count me in. I carefully pocketed the little book.

  ‘The next problem was how to find the girl again. I questioned the tired waiter, but he couldn’t tell me a thing, so I drove back to the Ritz, killed the evening at a cinema, and had another early night.

&nbs
p; ‘Next morning I drove out again to Ponce da Leon, the theory being that she’d probably return to look for her missing book. I sat there drinking iced beer in the sunshine, and sure enough she did.

  ‘I let her hunt around by the lily pool for a bit, and then I strolled down towards her. She saw me coming, and gave me a queer sort of look. I think she suspected at once that I’d got it; anyhow, she stood there waiting till I came up.

  ‘ “It’s jolly hot here, isn’t it?” I said, just as I had done the day before.

  ‘She shrugged her shoulders, and said at once. “Please, have you seen my little book?”

  ‘I thought I would be a clever Dick, so I didn’t give it to her. I just asked what reward she was offering for its recovery. You should have seen those tawny eyes grow scornful as she opened her bag.

  ‘I smiled at her. “I don’t mean money,” I said, “but will you have some lunch with me on the terrace if I return your book?”

  ‘ “You have it?” she replied quickly; “it is mine—please give it back.”

  ‘ “But is it? Could you prove it if I took it to the police?” I said, and directly I’d said it I could have bitten my tongue out; it was a rotten thing to say. In fact, I suddenly felt that I was behaving like an utter outsider in forcing myself on the girl through her misfortune, but you must remember that I’d gone completely off my rocker from the very first moment I set eyes on her, “and all’s fair in love and war”.

  ‘I was just going to apologise and give her back her book when she said quickly: “If I take déjeuner with you, you give me back my book?—Parola Inglese?”

  ‘That means “on the word of an Englishman”; it’s an expression still used in Spain, and dates back to the Peninsula War.

  ‘Well, I agreed like a shot, and we walked up to the restaurant—but she had her own back on me. She lunched with me, it’s true, but I never had a duller meal. I did my damnedest to amuse her, and talked till I was sick, but a perpetual monologue becomes embarrassing, and after a bit I began to feel a complete fool; she just sat there and wouldn’t say a word.