Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  “More likely the deputy assistant.”

  “Even worse. Then I tell him what I really want, but of course he knows nobody in that department.”

  “Of course. The less he knows, the better.”

  “And two hours later, after another three abortive meetings, I might reach your office. If I’m lucky.”

  Krafft regarded Luis thoughtfully over his arched fingers. “Is there a moral to all that, d’you think?” he asked.

  “Perhaps nobody expects a spy to be honest.” Luis was amazed at the calm and competent way he was handling this discussion. Evidently that skirmish with those unprofessional buffoons in the British Embassy had done him good.

  “Do the British have a secret weapon called ‘Elephant’?” Krafft asked.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. But I’m perfectly willing to find out.” Luis buffed his fingernails on his sleeve and glanced about him at the furnishings of the room, trying to disguise his mounting exhilaration. Now he was out of the shallows and into deep water. Nobody had made him do it; nobody would try to save him. It was a hell of a long way down, and that knowledge made his loins tingle with joy and dread. Terrific. Onwards!

  When he looked again, Krafft was leaning back, hands cupped behind his head. This time he spoke in English.

  “You wish to spy for Germany,” he said.

  “It has been my ambition,” Luis told him, also in English, “ever since I was a toddler.”

  That enormously amused Krafft. “A toddler! Imagine that!” He jumped up and dragged open a filing cabinet. “And now, Mr. Cabrillo, you want to toddle over to England and toddle around their army camps and toddle lots of lovely secrets back to us. Is that right?” He came back with a thick buff form.

  “Oh no,” Luis said. “Certainly not. I’m not a toddler any more, Mr. Krafft. I might slink, I might snoop. I might even, at a pinch, sneak. But let me assure you, Mr. Krafft: my toddling days are over.”

  Krafft chuckled. “Surely you wouldn’t sneak, Mr. Cabrillo. That would be very un-English.”

  Luis gave himself the luxury of not smiling. He then gave himself the extra reward of not even replying. He merely looked at Krafft: an I’m-ready-when-you-are look.

  “I take it you have previous experience in the intelligence field, Mr. Cabrillo.”

  “During our own civil war, of blessed memory, I made my living as a spy.”

  “For whom?”

  “For the Nationalists, naturally.”

  “And you reported to …?”

  “To Colonel Juan de la Vega,” Luis said flatly. Vega had died in an air crash in 1938.

  “Humm. You must then be skilled in the use of shortwave radio, invisible inks, and so on.”

  “No. I always reported in person. One of the luxuries of a civil war, you see.”

  Krafft asked him several more questions: family background, marital status, education, where he learned such good English, police record, state of health, experience of firearms.

  “Not much,” Luis said. “They’re too noisy and too messy. You can’t pick a lock with a gun, and—”

  “Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.” Krafft rapidly completed the form, blotted it briskly, and slapped the pages shut. “And it doesn’t matter in the slightest, because nobody ever looks at these things.” He slung the form into a wire basket. “I don’t mind telling you, the German reputation for thoroughness can sometimes be a pain in the head.”

  “Neck,” Luis said. “Pain in the neck.”

  “So? You suffer from it too.” They laughed, and Krafft opened the door for Luis. “You don’t know it, Mr. Cabrillo, but you arrived here at exactly the right time. We need a man with your qualifications,” he said, as they strolled along the corridor, “and we need him urgently.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Luis had been considering how much money to ask for; he doubled his estimate. “I’m ready to start work as soon as we can reach an agreement.”

  “Splendid.” Krafft led him down two short flights of stairs and around a corner. “Wonderful. I can’t believe my luck. This morning I was very, very worried, but now …” He opened a steel door and signaled Luis to go in. A plump, middleaged man in new white overalls got up from a steel chair behind a steel table. The whole room was steel. “This is Mr. Cabrillo, Franz,” Krafft said in the same optimistic voice. “He is a British spy. Shoot him.”

  He went out and closed the door. It shut with a firm, well-made chunk.

  *

  It was a joke, of course; Luis saw that at once from the expression on Franz’s face: a gentle, reassuring smile, like that of a father about to take his child down a toboggan run for the first time. He reminded Luis of the railway official who had brought him the news of his parents’ death: both men blinked too much.

  “Now please don’t worry about anything young Otto may have told you,” Franz said, fumbling in a deep desk drawer. “He gets carried away sometimes. This won’t hurt a bit, I promise.” He came up with a black automatic pistol so heavy that it bent his wrist.

  “I don’t understand,” Luis said. His voice was calm but his stomach was twitching. “I told Otto that I have no use for firearms. None at all.”

  Franz made a wry, apologetic face, and began screwing a silencer onto the pistol. “It’s my fault,” he said, “I should have had everything ready for you. Would you like to shut your eyes?”

  Involuntarily, Luis did shut his eyes for a second, but he opened them wide, and stared. “This is insane!” he cried, “You’re behaving like lunatics!”

  Franz thumbed a clip of ammunition into the weapon, wincing at the effort. “I merely do as I’m told,” he said. “Now if you wouldn’t mind stepping over—”

  “Listen, I’m not a goddam British spy!” Luis told him furiously.

  “Well now,” Franz said mildly. “You would say that, wouldn’t you?” He pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, and Luis realized—with a jolt that made him inhale sharply—that Franz was inspecting him for execution.

  “But I’m not!” Luis insisted; and even to his own ears the claim sounded childish. “For God’s sake, I came here to work for your people!”

  “That’s as may be, my love.” Franz carefully disengaged the safety catch, and Luis felt himself slipping and sliding helplessly to his doom. Why didn’t you knock the silly bastard down before he got that thing loaded? he asked himself, bitterly and uselessly. “I just do what they tell me,” the German said. A touch of heartburn made him beat a chubby fist against his breast. “Would you mind standing up against that wall?”

  “But what good does it do you to kill me?” Luis pleaded. He was acutely conscious of his clothes thinly protecting his body, of his skin shifting wretchedly under his clothes.

  “I can’t see that a British spy is any use to us alive,” Franz pointed out. “Can you?” He braced his legs and bent at the knees.

  Tell him anything, Luis’s brain ordered frantically. Tell him you’re a British spy, tell him you know all their secrets, tell him anything, everything, don’t let him kill you! But the rest of his body seemed to be locked in paralysis. He stood with his chin up and his teeth clenched, and counted the pulse beating in his head, booming away like a clock that was trying to strike infinity. Franz held the pistol in both hands, at arms’ length, raising it steadily to shoulder height. “You really should stand against the wall,” he murmured. Luis clenched his teeth until the muscles hurt. He was afraid, but he was also stiff with rage at the colossal stupidity of these people. He saw the barrel stop climbing. It wavered fractionally. The German closed one eye. Luis felt sick. There was a bang like a book falling off a shelf. Something smashed Luis in the chest and he fell backward, arms flailing; but already darkness had driven out light. Franz had been right: it didn’t hurt a bit.

  *

  “All right, then, I didn’t get a bulls-eye,” Franz said. “But I got an inner. Definitely.”

  Otto made a thoughtful, noncommittal noise and drummed his fingers on L
uis’s ribcage. “You’re quite sure the heart is all the way over there? Almost in the middle?”

  “Yes, of course it is.”

  “So why do most people think their heart is on the left, I wonder?”

  “No idea. Does it matter?”

  “Probably not.”

  Luis was stretched out on the steel table, face upward, his feet overhanging the end. A wide dribble of saliva was rapidly drying on his chin and neck.

  “Come on, come on,” Franz said. “I’ve got work to do.” He took a pin from his lapel and pricked Luis on the wrist. A shining seed of blood grew on the spot. Luis twitched and his throat made a gruff growl. After a moment he opened his eyes and turned his head.

  The two Germans appeared to be standing horizontally, with their feet attached to the wall. They were fuzzy in outline and shimmering, as if seen through water. He watched Franz lift one foot from the wall and take a pace forward without falling on his head. Clever people, these Germans. Very well organized. Then he remembered the pistol, the bang, the smash in the chest, and he sat up. Otto and Franz swooped through a quarter-turn and stood erect, less fuzzy now but still wavering whenever the breeze ruffled the water. He looked at them and they looked back. Already a part of him was in panic, screaming at his brain to wake up and start running, because he was late for the race and the others wouldn’t wait, they’d race off and leave him lumbering behind, lumbering like this stupid brain, which was too stupid to know how stupid it was, so he could never win, which made him wildly angry with it, and with them, and with everyone; and at last the blood came pumping vigorously up into his head, driving the panic away and clearing his senses like a flag slowly unfurling. “Now I expect you could do with a glass of brandy,” Krafft said.

  “Schnapps,” Luis said croakily. He had never drunk schnapps but this seemed like a good time to start scoring points. His shirt was open and there was a small bruise in the middle of his chest. He thought hard and said nothing.

  Otto gave him a glass of clear liquid. It smelled like nail-polish-remover and tasted like hot nothing. He drank it and buttoned his shirt. The schnapps trickled south and slowly burned itself out. He got to his feet and knotted his tie and smoothed his clothes. “I see you searched me,” he said.

  “How can you tell?” Franz asked.

  “Handkerchief’s in the wrong pocket.”

  “Ah.” Franz looked gratified. “We wondered if you would notice, Mr. Cabrillo.”

  “You’re doing very well,” Otto said. “Very well indeed.”

  Luis put his handkerchief in the right pocket, and gave Otto a grim, sideways glance. “I don’t like the sound of that,” he said.

  They laughed politely, and led him upstairs.

  Chapter 14

  Colonel Christian’s office was on the third floor, and as’ an office it made an elegant drawing room: embossed lime-green wallpaper, pale lemon-yellow sofas and chairs, a light gray rug, and a white baby grand piano tucked away in a corner. Cream-colored venetian blinds sifted the afternoon sunlight and admitted a few select rays of gentle birth and good manners. It was all very civilized and soothing and it was completely wrong for the man.

  Christian was about fifty, tall, craggy-featured, with shoulders that might have been happier heaving barrels off a brewer’s dray. His face was so hard and square that the mustache and eyebrows seemed unnaturally bushy, like clumps of grass rooted in a rockface. Because he was incapable of keeping still for more than a minute, his well-cut brown suit was as rumpled as an old parcel. But his voice was quiet and quick, and he shook Luis’s hand without crushing it. Then he set off on an endless tour of the room. “So Mr. Cabrillo is not in the employment of the British government,” he said.

  “No, sir,” said Krafft.

  “That’s good.” Colonel Christian waved Luis to a seat. “I don’t need you,” he told Franz. “Go and organize some coffee … And you want to spy for us. What is your opinion of spying?”

  “It’s a job,” Luis said.

  “Very boring job. I was a spy, you know. In the Great War. Dreadful hours, but it wasn’t the hours, it was the hanging around, waiting, waiting … How do you know if a troop train has gone through Paris? Or if a squadron has left Boulogne?”

  “Wait and see,” Luis said.

  “Boring hours. And you meet such boring people. Soldiers don’t want to talk about war. So you have to talk about football. Hours and days and weeks of football, just to pick up some gossip about a new rifle.”

  “I know football,” Luis said. “Center-forward, goalkeeper, offside, corner kick.”

  “Sailors are even more boring. Sailors talk sex. Endlessly.”

  “I don’t know sex,” Luis said. “But I’m willing to learn.”

  “And the paperwork. It’s like being a traveling salesman.” Colonel Christian prowled over to the baby grand, sat, played the opening chords of the funeral march, got up, resumed his tour. “But perhaps you enjoy paperwork?” he asked.

  “No, it bores me,” Luis said.

  “Rotten food, out in all weathers, and the surroundings are drab as drab can be. Garrison towns. Factory towns. Seaports. Dockyards. All grim.”

  “It’s a job,” Luis said.

  “Rotten job.”

  “Perhaps that is what makes the money so good,” Luis suggested.

  Colonel Christian paused by the fireplace. “Are you interested in money, Mr. Cabrillo?”

  “I’m interested in a lot of money.”

  Franz came in with the coffee. “Thank you,” said Christian, “and goodbye. What sort of information will you give us for our money, Mr. Cabrillo?”

  Luis was almost trapped into a foolish answer. He was thinking of saying something impressive, like new aircraft performance figures or locations of ammunition dumps, “I’ll give you what you ask for,” he said. “You know what you need, I don’t.”

  Otto poured the coffee. “How will you get to England?” he asked.

  “If that means you don’t want to make the arrangements,” Luis said, “then I would travel as a neutral businessman. Presumably England and Spain are still allowed to trade?”

  “We might want you to recruit another agent once you get established in England,” Christian said. He took a cup of coffee in passing. “Maybe even two.”

  “Provided the money is available to pay them, I see no difficulty.”

  “I do,” said Otto Krafft. “I see the British secret service. They will be looking for people like you. What will you do if they start to suspect?”

  Luis sipped his coffee. “That depends. It is best to carry on normally, if possible; otherwise a change in one’s pattern of behavior simply confirms their suspicions.”

  “Things get worse,” Christian said. One-handed, he turned a chair upside down and examined its legs. “They’re on to you.”

  “Then it’s all over. I get out.”

  “How?”

  “That’s my problem.”

  Christian reversed the chair and put it back. “You are an independent soul, Mr. Cabrillo.”

  “I’m an independent businessman, colonel.”

  Otto suddenly clapped his hands, “I have a wonderful idea!” he cried. “We make Mr. Cabrillo a captain in the German army! Then his pay can safely accumulate here, and if he has to return prematurely he will still be employed.” He spread his arms, eagerly.

  “Why not a major?” Christian asked. “Major Cabrillo. Yes?”

  “No,” Luis said. “I don’t want a salary. You pay me by results. And you pay on delivery.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Cabrillo,” Otto said coldly. “Colonel Christian has no shortage of volunteers. Many men would be willing to pay for the honor and privilege of serving Germany.”

  Luis said nothing, but he helped himself to more coffee and loaded it with sugar to pacify his hunger. There was a perpetual trembling under his heart, and from time to time a pulse in the side of his head throbbed so powerfully that he was afraid the others mig
ht notice it. Yet his hands were steady, his voice was even. He wished Christian would stop bloody well tramping around the room. And he wished he knew exactly what, if anything, they had done to him downstairs. If he had been drugged, the drug seemed to be doing him a power of good; if not, he was tougher than he thought … The silence persisted. He glanced up and saw that they were watching him. He watched them back. That was something he could do without strain. Otto had a mole on his neck. Christian’s ears were lightly freckled.

  Otto grunted. He sounded a little weary. “I see,” he said. “Devotion to duty, patriotism, sacrifice—all these things mean nothing to you.” He turned away. Christian still stared, his eyebrows occasionally working.

  “I am not going to argue about it,” Luis said. “If you think your splendid volunteers can do a better job than I, and also pay you for the privilege, then why waste your time on me?” Oh, oh, that’s a bit reckless, he thought as the words left his mouth.

  Christian stretched a long arm and pointed a slightly crooked finger. “Why do you waste your time on us? We have already won. We control Europe. Go and spy for the British. They are desperate for help.”

  “Desperate men make bad employers. And you have not quite won, colonel, have you? There is still Britain.”

  “A matter of time.”

  Christian let the finger go slack, the arm fall. He began bouncing on the balls of his feet, like a long-distance runner loosening up. Otto’s back was still turned. He seemed to be slumped in gloom: head down, shoulders bowed. Luis watched curiously, and received the surrealist impression that Christian’s jogging was meant to revive Otto. It was a sort of psychic pump-action. At any moment, Otto’s shoulders would straighten, his head would rise, and Christian would have to ease off before Otto began snapping his fingers and tap-dancing onto the furniture.

  No such luck. Otto remained slumped, and Christian slowed to a bored halt.

  Luis stood. The over-sweetened coffee had left a tacky aftertaste. He wondered where he had gone wrong. He wondered whether or not there was any point in trying the Italian Embassy. Or the Japanese Embassy. Or the Abyssinian Consulate. Or anywhere, “If you’ll excuse me, then,” he said, as if he had somewhere to go.