Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  Luis went back to his seat, feeling murderous. “One day I shall kill them for that,” Luis hissed.

  “Forget it, old boy,” Barker said. “They’re just pissed, that’s all.”

  The food came and they ate, while the Germans kept up their gusty, guttural good cheer. Sometimes they sang, sometimes they argued, always they drank. They did everything loudly.

  When the correspondents were finishing their coffee, one of the Germans returned from the toilet and came over to their table. He had a keen, intelligent face, and an athletic-looking body.

  “Newspapers? You work for newspapers?” His English was awkward but adequate.

  Townsend took out a pencil and showed it.

  “Ah. You write. My question: what you say about Guernica?”

  Luis hunched over his cup and refused to look up.

  Barker said: “According to Berlin your Condor Legion had nothing to do with it, so what do you care?”

  “Ja,” agreed the German, “but does Berlin tell exactly how we did not bomb Guernica?”

  Townsend pulled out a chair. The German sat.

  “Here is Guernica.” He tried to draw a square in the middle of the table with his finger, but the surface was wood and nothing showed. He poured some coffee onto the table and, using his finger, shaped the pool into a rough square. “Here—the river.” He found some hot milk in the bottom of a jug and poured a curving trail past the square of coffee. “Also, the railway.” He searched about and saw mayonnaise on a nearby table. The correspondents raised eyebrows at each other while he dumped spoonfuls of mayonnaise between the milk and the coffee in a globular, glistening line. “Is all a matter of communications,” he told them cheerfully. “Of roads, yes?” This time he used a bottle of tomato ketchup and laid two rich red tracks of the stuff, meeting outside the river of milk. Then he poured an even wider strip of ketchup across the river, over the yellow railway, and into the black town. “You see?”

  The correspondents watched with grudging fascination as the colors contaminated each other. Some of the other airmen had strolled over and were watching. “Watch closely,” the German said. “Three squadrons of Junkers fly over, drop their bombs, and bang!” He slammed the palms of his hands down on the mess. A multicolored spray spattered the correspondents’ heads and shoulders and arms. Even Luis, leaning back, got his share of the muck.

  The Germans fell about laughing.

  “So now you know what did not happen to Guernica,” the man said, and went away, mopping his front.

  Luis drove the correspondents silently back to their hotel. Next morning, after breakfast, he took Barker aside.

  “I can get you a photograph of a German bomber flying very low over Guernica,” he said. “Do you want it?”

  “You get it,” Barker said, “and I’ll give you whatever it costs.”

  “It will cost you nothing,” Luis told him stonily.

  “All right.”

  Barker watched Luis get into the car. Touchy bloody people, he thought. Who can understand them? He never saw Luis again.

  Chapter 10

  Driving north, Luis felt confused and depressed. For the first time, he did not care who won the war. Before, he had been impartial but interested, ready to see merit in either side, and wondering how the fate of Spain would affect his own future. Now he knew that his past had been a failure (bad schools, makeshift homes, lost jobs) and he saw nothing better in his future.

  Unusually for him, he drove slowly. The day was overcast, neither sunny nor threatening, and lacked all urgency or enthusiasm. Why was he going back to Guernica? It was a stupid thing to do. He was going back to get a blurred photograph of a clumsy airplane which had helped to destroy an irrelevant town and kill a lot of people nobody would ever miss. Why? Because it was evidence. Which meant that it would convince those who wanted to be convinced, and the rest wouldn’t even look at it. So why bother? Because it made a story, and that was now his job, his skill, his craft: making good stories, whether they were true or not.

  No. Luis knew that was not a good enough reason either. It wasn’t worth going back into Guernica just to get a good story for Barker. So there had to be something else. His honesty had been getting Luis into trouble all his life, and now it worried and nagged him all the way up the road from Burgos until it made him give in and own up. He didn’t care a damn about Spain, about Nationalist lies or Republican propaganda, about truth or loyalty or skill or success. He was doing this stupid thing purely to get his revenge against those Germans who had mocked and humiliated and finally insulted him. That was all. It was an act of spite. This whole war was an act of spite, wasn’t it? All right, then. Getting the photograph would be the first shot in Luis Cabrillo’s private campaign.

  He drove down the hill and crossed the bridge into Guernica, feeling better now that he knew he was acting foolishly for his own selfish reasons. He saw fewer refugees but more soldiers: Mola was getting ready for another push toward Bilbao. Rubble had been cleared from the streets. The fires were out. The smell was fading.

  Luis drifted around the main square, looking for a discreet spot to leave the car. He found a gap outside a scruffy-looking barbershop, between a truck and a bus, and backed into it. His fingers were turning the doorhandle when the officer came out of the barbershop, flicking bits of hair from his tunic.

  Luis made three bad mistakes, one after another.

  First, he let this mild coincidence panic him. He assumed—without checking—that the officer must see him. In fact the man was deep in thought and failed to notice the car until Luis’s hand jumped from the door to the ignition key and made the engine bellow. Even as he did this, Luis knew that he had wasted a stroke of good luck: if he had kept quiet, he could have watched where the officer went and then gone the other way. Too late now. Luis swore, and swung the wheel.

  That was his second mistake. The officer had failed to recognize the car at first. Now he saw the numberplate, and he let out a shout.

  Luis’s third mistake was to hit the back of the bus.

  With the engine roaring in protest he heaved on the wheel and ripped his way out, shedding bits of torn metal and shattered glass. The officer came running alongside, his mouth gaping to reveal a flash of gold, and grabbed at the door just as Luis worked both front wheels free and rocketed into the wide open spaces. The car howled along one side of the square, nearly hit a mule cart at the corner, swerved, and racketed along with two wheels on the curb, soldiers dodging and whistles blowing. He smashed into and over a parked motorcycle, got the car back on the road, and at last found a split second in which to change gear. The engine responded lustily, but as Luis bowled out of the square the officer, in a commandeered Mercedes, was already after him.

  He began catching up before they were out of town. It was inevitable. Luis was clearing the way, blasting the traffic to one side, making the road easy. By the time Luis blared over the bridge, the officer was only fifty yards behind; and in the mirror Luis glimpsed an army truck bucketing along in the Mercedes’ wake.

  The road forked, right to Burgos, left to Bilbao. Luis saw a long, slow convoy hogging the Burgos road and he flung the car, tires screaming and spitting stones, hard to the left, then let the wheel kick back and spin through his palms while his foot slammed the accelerator to the floor. Rear wheels dithered, skittered, at last gripped and heaved the car forward with a thrust that made his head jolt.

  The Mercedes came around the same corner as if on rails, and gained ten yards doing it.

  Over the next couple of miles Luis began to be afraid. His hands were slippery, his eyes were stinging with sweat, his calves and thighs and biceps were bunched and twitching. The officer’s Mercedes had more power and better tires, and probably more petrol. The road was getting worse: twisting and switchbacking through woods. One bad gear-change, one mis-timed corner, and Luis would be dead.

  Then a piece of luck won him an extra hundred yards. He panicked a herd of goats browsing at the roadside,
and they scattered in the path of the Mercedes.

  He risked a glance in his mirror and saw the car skid broadside. Then he lost it completely behind a bend. Suddenly encouraged, he put his foot down even harder and went flatout along the next straight. The corner grew near, grew nearer; he delayed braking and changing down to the last possible moment, and then waited an instant more. His highspeed four-wheel drift into the bend was perfect. It was the camber of the road that was all wrong.

  Luis felt the car come unstuck and fly out like a fairground ride, while the road swung the other way and abandoned him. He was flying, then he was falling, diving into a steep and flickering world of trees. Something rose up and bashed him violently in the backside. Before he could recover, something even more violent clubbed the front of the car and smashed it sideways. Luis’s hands were torn off the wheel and he was flung across the front seats. His head rammed the door. He lay stunned, glimpsing wavering treetops soaring away, as the car plunged backward, ricocheting off rocks and bouncing between treetrunks, until it tried to charge through a two-hundred-year-old oak and failed. The crash was a single, shattering hammerblow. The car crumpled like wet cardboard. The tires sighed. The springs wheezed. Silence.

  It took Luis a quarter of an hour to make his eyes focus, and another ten minutes to train his legs to get him out and hold him up. After all that, his stomach decided to be sick; but eventually he was able to look around and take stock.

  He was not alone.

  The officer and the Mercedes were nowhere to be seen. Higher up the slope, however, was the wreck of a small gray car. Obviously it too had left the bend at speed, but it had made the mistake of coming down head-first. Both front wheels and the radiator were firmly wrapped around a sturdy pine tree. Most of the engine was in the front seat, and a great deal of the steering column was in the driver.

  He was a balding, chubby man in a brown suit and black gloves. He wore a thin, careful mustache like a small-town bank manager, which was what the cards in his wallet declared him to have been. On the back seat was a jumble of heavy cardboard boxes sealed with strong brownpaper tape. They were all stamped Banco de España, Guernica, and they were all full of money.

  Evidently the peasants had not been the only ones to suspect that Guernica was a good place to get out of.

  *

  Finding the money did not mark the end of Luis’s problems, but it was a good start.

  He knew that the Nationalist officer would soon turn back and organize a search of the woods, and he knew that the Banco de España would one day come hunting for its funds.

  He pried the dead driver off the steering column and dumped him in the other car: that would give the officer something useless to chew on. He unloaded the cardboard boxes and hid them a mile away, in the heart of a thicket of laurels. Then he walked into Guernica.

  He had a curious feeling that the money was a gift and a test. It was a comment on the nonsense of war: he might well have been killed in the crash, but instead he was rich; yet rich only if he could contrive to keep and spend the money.

  So the first thing he had to do was find out whether or not the Guernica branch of the Banco de España was still in business.

  It was not. The site was a heap of battered bricks and broken beams. Splendid.

  Next, he made careful inquiries about the manager. Nobody had seen him since the day of the bombing. Quite possibly he was still buried in the ruins somewhere. Anywhere. When the bombs fell, people took refuge and often their refuge became their tomb. Luis nodded sombrely, and rejoiced in his heart. If nobody had missed the manager, probably nobody had missed the money. Yet.

  At a stables on the outskirts of town he bought an old donkey with an even older saddle, a dozen sacks and a pair of secondhand overalls, and went back to the woods. For an hour he pottered about, collecting bundles of firewood. When he was sure he was alone he went and looked inside the laurel thicket. Then he threw the firewood away, half-filled a few of the sacks with dead leaves, and shoved the chunky wads of banknotes deep inside. The cardboard boxes burned to a fine gray ash in fifteen minutes.

  For the rest of 1937 he and the donkey pottered across northern Spain. They wandered in an apparently random, zigzag fashion: first northwest to the port of Santander, then back across the mountains and down the valley of the Esla to Leon, followed by a spell of crisscrossing the plain between Palencia and Zamora and Braganca. Luis and the donkey traveled by tracks and trails; he named her Fred Astaire because she had big ears and she never fell over, even on steep and stony paths. The only time they used roads was to go into a town. Once or twice a week Luis entered a town, found a bank, changed a bundle of notes into bills of larger denomination, and got straight out again. He rarely spoke to anyone; he bought his food in little villages; he and Fred slept in empty, quiet places.

  By the end of summer he looked like what he wanted to be mistaken for: a poor peasant. His face and arms were sunburned the color of mahogany, his hair was lanky, his clothes were patched and stained. Nobody bothered him; few people even noticed him. If by chance the Banco de España were still looking for anyone, Luis reckoned to be about as forgettable as a dead tree.

  From time to time he picked up news of the war. Franco was winning, bloodily; but the details of the battles interested Luis no more than the results of last year’s football matches. He was waiting for only one event: the fall of Madrid, where he had decided to spend his next few years. He could avoid the secret police there. He could enjoy his money there.

  Madrid surrendered in March 1939, by all accounts in a very bad state. Luis allowed the capital a couple of months to make itself fit for his return. He killed the time pleasantly with Fred Astaire, strolling around the western Sierras between Salamanca and Alcantara. When the period was up he was, in every sense, a very different person from the impetuous youth who had nearly killed himself while fleeing from death. It was over a year and a half since he had slept inside four walls, or taken a bath, or put on completely clean clothes. When he left Burgos for Guernica that would have been an unthinkable prospect. Now he had a different set of values.

  He sold Fred at a slight profit and took the train to Madrid. He knew with certainty what he had to have and what he could do without. He could do without people, politics, sex, tobacco, news, alcohol, uniforms and work. He had to have privacy, physical comfort, and a good book. A suitcase full of pesetas should buy quite a lot of all three.

  The first thing he saw when he got off the train was a poster showing pictures of twenty men wanted by Franco’s police. Second row, third from the left, was Luis Cabrillo. He looked young and cocky. Luis walked away from him and, within an hour, had rented a spacious two-room apartment on the third floor of the Calle Santa Isabel, in the old quarter of the town. He called himself José Antonio Hernandez, and two years passed before, unwillingly, he came out again.

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Luis Cabrillo shaved, dressed, sat near the window and tried to read a short story by Somerset Maugham. After three minutes he threw the book across the room, not in anger but in despair.

  He was flat broke, and that was inescapable. The fact pursued him like a cold draft. Pointless to sit and pretend that he could entertain himself with fiction, as if today were yesterday. Tomorrow was on its way, very fast. Tomorrow would be a bitch without money. Today was going to be a real bastard, but tomorrow would be an absolute bitch.

  No money. It was shocking, like waking up to discover that you had no feet, or no eyes: suddenly everything was enormously, frighteningly more difficult. Life was not pleasant any more. The world outside was an enemy. He had no friends to help him; none that he could trust, anyway. Food: what in hell’s name was he going to do for lunch? He sucked in his stomach and immediately it sent him a message of a large omelet, firm yet juicy. “Christ, what’s the matter with you?” he cried aloud. “You’ve only just had your damned breakfast!”

  But no eggs, his stomach reminded him. This is degrad
ing, Luis thought. What am I: a man, or a stomach on legs? His anger carried him to the door and before his fear could do anything about it he was going down the stairs, two at a time. No money … Well, hanging around in a third-floor room wasn’t going to improve things. If there was any money to be got it had to be out there, in the streets. Where he hadn’t set foot for two years. He ran down the last flight and strode across the hallway, heels clicking on the shiny tiles, nostrils twitching to old nostalgic smells: washed floors, the trace of hot bread, a hint of maybe orange blossom. Then he was out in the Calle Santa Isabel.

  It felt good. Even without money, it felt good. Madrid was having a sparkling, spanking day, and after all that time beneath a twelve-foot ceiling Luis saw the streets as grand and glittering canyons. The traffic whizzed and dodged, bold and cavalier, and the people took it all for granted, like the sublime creatures they clearly were. By the time he had walked to the railway station this sudden intoxication was beginning to wear off, but he still felt like a peasant, gawking at the big city, and he made an effort to look more confident and urban.

  His picture was not on the police posters in the railway station because there were no police posters in the railway station. So that was good.

  A newspaper headline caught his eye: Germany had attacked Crete. He picked up a copy and glanced at the opening paragraph while his hand felt in his pocket and found (of course) nothing, not even a button; zero, emptiness. He put the paper back and turned away while the owner of the stall came over, straightened the pile of papers and squinted at him. Luis frowned and checked his watch against the station clock. Two minutes slow. He grunted briskly. Not good enough. He must have money!

  For the rest of the morning he walked around the center of Madrid. The layout was familiar but the impact was startling: for the first time he saw how damned rich the city was. The Prado had always been just a big art gallery; now he climbed its broad exterior staircase and stroked one of the massive pink columns propping up the noble façade, and he worked out the bill for this whole colossal effort. A fortune!