Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  “No, no, no.” Christian’s hand cut through the air like an underscore. “I can’t wait while you find your feet, d’you understand? I want results. You and Mercury together should be worth more than double.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll damn well do it.” Colonel Christian insisted on the point. Eventually Luis gave in. “But if the bastard betrays me,” he said, “I shall expect a written apology.”

  Chapter 31

  Luis spent the rest of the day getting ready for his journey. He bought clothes, luggage, a soft leather toilet case, a portable typewriter, a traveling clock, a set of hair-brushes, and the smallest camera he could find. He collected a new passport and a new driver’s license, from government departments which treated him with wary respect: the effect of a discreet request from the German Embassy that he be given maximum priority. He changed most of his money into traveler’s checks, and found out from the bank what were the currency-exchange regulations between Spain and Britain. He had a haircut.

  After that there was nothing to do but wait.

  He killed the evening at a restaurant and a cinema. Although he could stop himself thinking of Julie Conroy, he was aware that she would not therefore leave him. The ghost in his mind was wearying but unarguable. He was glad when the film ended so that he could go home to bed and, for a while, stop having to forget.

  *

  Next morning Otto and Luis were waiting in the anteroom, while Colonel Christian was on the phone.

  They had allocated Luis a codename: Eldorado. No special significance, Otto said; it was the next on the list, that’s all. In communications between them, Madrid would be code-named Tomcat.

  They had covered the procedure for contacting Mercury: Luis had memorized his address, telephone number, and several code words; these varied according to the day of the week. The information was now stored in his head. Otto had described Mercury: a grave, middleaged, bookish man, no sense of humor, set in his ways, extremely cautious; he always thought three times before he did anything, even before he put salt on his egg. Luis nodded, and stored that away too.

  There was nothing else to be said about Mercury.

  When Colonel Christian opened his door and waved them in, he was chuckling with jubilation. “By God, you were absolutely right, Cabrillo,” he said, punching him amiably on the shoulder. “We’ve just invaded Russia. It’s curtain-up on the last act. Berlin say they expect to finish Russia in six weeks.”

  “Good Lord. That’s faster than France,” Otto said.

  “It had to come,” Luis remarked.

  “Let’s hope it’s an omen for your mission.” Christian was so pleased that he could not keep still. “Naturally, it’s put your stock up several points.”

  “I hope that means I shall get paid more,” Luis said.

  “It means that Britain is isolated. Just concentrate on that, help us to bring the British to their knees, and your reward will follow.”

  Luis waited for a moment, and watched Christian pace the carpet. “I still hope that means I shall get paid more,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” Christian chuckled.

  “I’m not worrying. I just want to be damned sure that what you mean by reward is the same as what I mean by reward.”

  “Money, for God’s sake! Money, money.” Christian dropped into a chair with such a crash that it jolted backward, its castors furrowing the carpet. “Money! Does that satisfy you? What arrangements have we made to get all these cartloads of cash to Mr. Cabrillo?” he asked Otto.

  “He has two new bank accounts, one in Zurich and one in Lisbon. We set them up yesterday.”

  “And you’ve made a will?” Christian asked. Luis nodded. “Good, good. Well, you might as well push off, mightn’t you? Have a good trip, and give my best wishes to Mercury. And to your invaluable friend in the Spanish Embassy, of course. If I knew his name I’d write him a nice letter.”

  “If he thought I might tell you his name,” Luis said, “he’d never speak to me again.”

  They shook hands, and Luis went out. Otto escorted him down to the street and walked a short way with him. “It’s a pity about this Russian thing, in a way,” Otto said. “Now the Colonel will expect even more from you.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Luis asked.

  Otto’s eyes flickered. “Well, supposing you can’t satisfy him. Supposing you hit a bad patch. He may feel cheated and become very angry.”

  “He’ll just have to be patient.”

  “He wasn’t patient with Ryan.”

  “That was completely different. Besides, I shall be in England.”

  Otto merely looked at him, as expressionless as a man could be. “Yes, of course,” he said. They strolled to the corner. “You’ve worked very hard, Luis. You certainly deserve to succeed.” It was the first time Otto had called him Luis, “I hope your luck is good. I very much hope we meet again.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  They shook hands, and for a moment Luis sensed that Otto had something else to say. But he merely twitched his mouth in a wry smile, and said goodbye.

  Luis got home to find a message from the caretaker asking him to contact Mrs. Conroy. He went out and used a telephone in a café. As he dialed the Hotel Bristol he found himself wondering about Otto, not Julie. Otto’s remarks had been odd. Perhaps Christian had told Otto to say what he did in order to stimulate him to work harder, take bigger risks. If so it was a crude device. But then sometimes Christian was remarkably crude—

  Julie answered.

  “I had a message to call you,” he said.

  “Yes. Thanks. Something’s kind of … weird.” She sounded tense. “Can we meet? Not here. Outdoors, somewhere.”

  Luis named a place, a small park behind a church. She was waiting at the gate when he got there.

  “Angela came to see me last night,” she said, and most of his secret pleasure at seeing Julie was immediately wiped out. “She’s very worried about Freddy. Do you know where he is?”

  “No, I don’t know where he is.” That was true. Not honest, but true.

  “He was supposed to meet her but he didn’t turn up. No message, no nothing.”

  Luis took her arm and they walked along the flagstoned path. “Maybe he had to make a sudden trip.”

  “I doubt it. We went around to his apartment and got the building manager to open it up. Somebody had packed all his bags! They were standing in the middle of the room, lined up like dominoes.”

  “What d’you mean, ‘somebody’?” Luis kicked a piece of pebble ahead in order to give himself something to look at. “Why couldn’t Freddy have packed his own bags? Maybe he decided to move.”

  “Without telling the building manager? His rent’s paid three months in advance.”

  “It’s curious, I agree.”

  “Angela thinks he’s dead.”

  Luis missed the pebble, and had to stop and kick it again. “That probably says more about Angela than about Freddy,” he said.

  “I don’t think so. We opened a couple of the suitcases. Everything had been packed, absolutely everything: books, letters, dirty laundry, medicines, and even some things that belonged to Angela. Souvenirs and photographs and stuff. Why the hell would Freddy pack all that?”

  Luis said nothing. They reached the end of the path, and stopped. A high brick wall made a long, easy curve which trapped the sun and harbored magnolias and flowering vines. He wondered whether the German Embassy or the British Embassy had done Freddy’s packing. There was nothing to be said, but he had to say something. “Did Angela take her things?” he asked.

  “No, she didn’t want to. She’s very upset.”

  “There’s no actual evidence—”

  “You’re damn right there’s no evidence. I went back to the apartment this morning. The bags are gone. Somebody came in the night and took them.”

  They discussed it for another ten minutes, until Luis began to feel slightly sick with the guilt of dis
honesty, and he changed the subject abruptly. “I have to go to England,” he said. “A business trip, probably for quite a long time.”

  “When d’you leave?”

  “This afternoon.”

  That shocked her a little; more than a little, as the realization sank in. “Madrid’s getting kind of empty,” she said.

  “Yes. I suppose it’s all come to an end sooner than we thought.”

  “Will you come back?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. Would you still be here if I did?”

  She gave a small, lopsided grin. “You’re right. One dumb question deserves another.”

  Three very young children came racing up the path, shouting out long, happy screams just for the pleasure of doing it. They reached the end, found nothing to do there, and raced away, still shouting.

  “How can they shout and run at the same time?” Luis asked.

  “They can’t. It’s impossible. But they don’t know that yet, so they go right out and do it.”

  “We could always write,” he said. “If we thought we wanted to.”

  “How would we know if we wanted to?”

  “We could write and ask.”

  “Oh, Luis …” She gave a gentle, defeated sigh. “You may be a crook but at least you’re a friendly crook. Okay: you know my address. How do I reach you?”

  “Care of my Lisbon bank. Banco Espirito Santo,” He wrote the address on a card and gave it to her. “I have an arrangement. The bank forward everything, airmail.”

  They shook hands, their grip tightening. “I miss Freddy,” she said. “I only met him once but I miss him a lot. Don’t get killed in England, Luis. Promise?”

  “I promise.” He very much wanted to kiss her but he was afraid that it would be unfair. She released his hand and he walked away, quickly, while he still had control of himself.

  Two hours later he was in the smoky, clamorous bustle of the Estación del Norte, watching a porter stack his luggage in a first-class compartment of the Lisbon train. He felt great excitement and great sadness at the same time, and he wished that Julie Conroy were there to share his emotions. In fact she was sitting by the grimy window of the station buffet, nursing a fizzy drink and studying him in his new clothes, in his last few minutes in Madrid. Something stopped her going over to him. Perhaps she had seen too many movies. Smoke, steam, locomotive noises. Whistle blows, flag waves, door slams. Final embrace. Train moves, the big bad world separates yet another pair of doomed lovers, crescendo the soundtrack. Pass the popcorn.

  A whistle blew, a flag waved. Luis glanced around, stepped up into the train and slammed the door. He knew that she had done the correct and sensible thing by staying away. She was an intelligent, sensible woman; it was part of her great attraction. The train moved.

  Julie Conroy watched it go. It left a great gap in the station and a great gap in her heart. Bum script, she told herself. Corny corny corny.

  *

  “All right, what are we going to do if Eldorado lets us down?” Christian asked.

  Wolfgang, Franz, Otto and Richard considered the question seriously and waited for each other to answer.

  “You must agree he has a record as a loser,” Christian said. He flicked through Luis Cabrillo’s file. “If he goes on losing, what then? Huh? Do I just go to my good friend Mullen with a light laugh and say awfully sorry sir, we did our best sir, and please sir can I have another great big sackful of money?”

  Nobody had an answer to that.

  “I can tell you now, there are no more great big sackfuls of money,” Christian said. “Until we get some good, solid return, the bank is shut.”

  “He did do rather well over this Russian business,” Franz said cautiously.

  “All picked up through neutrals.”

  “I honestly can’t see Eldorado sending us anything really solid for at least three months,” Richard Fischer said. “It’ll take him a month just to get settled and as long again—”

  “I can’t wait three months,” Christian said. He looked for other answers. Wolfgang cleared his throat. Christian stared at him.

  “If Eldorado doesn’t find his feet,” Wolfgang said, “you could always stand him on his head and see what falls out of his pockets.”

  Christian rotated his little finger inside his ear and examined the tip. “Explain,” he said.

  “Eldorado fails. You signal Mercury. Mercury turns Eldorado over to British Intelligence. Anonymously. They find his transmitter and codebook. Immediately British Intelligence start sending us false intelligence, posing as Eldorado.”

  There was a pause while they reviewed the idea.

  “Misinformation is better than no information,” Richard Fischer remarked.

  “Sometimes you can reverse it,” Franz said, “and see what the enemy is trying to hide.”

  “Of course Eldorado would deny everything,” Otto pointed out.

  “They’d hang him all the faster,” Wolfgang said. Christian softly drummed his fingers on the desk and thought.

  The meeting ended. As he walked along the corridor, adjusting his pace to Wolfgang’s limp, Otto said: “The way I see it, young Cabrillo either acquires for us a great number of valuable secrets by taking insane risks at enormous speed, and therefore inevitably gets himself caught, or we betray him. Is that the way you see it?”

  “A fair summary,” Wolfgang said.

  “There’s not a lot of hope for him, then.”

  “My dear Otto,” Wolfgang said, “there’s never any hope for idiots like Cabrillo from the moment they step eagerly out of the womb and trip over the umbilical cord. That doesn’t mean we should feel sorry for them. Cabrillo’s a very necessary part of the system. Without losers like him, there couldn’t be winners like us.”

  “You’re a great comfort, Wolfgang,” Otto said.

  “What are friends for,” asked Wolfgang, “if not to fill you up with lies?”

  Part Three

  Chapter 32

  The telegram arrived at 11 a.m. while Julie Conroy was in the hotel pool. She swam a lot these days. For one thing it helped to give her an appetite, and for another thing it helped her to sleep. A further advantage was that it made it difficult for people to talk to her.

  Difficult but not impossible. The youth who carried messages for the hotel receptionist kept walking around the pool and calling her name until the sound penetrated the bubbling rush of water. She let her backstroke fade to nothing and looked at him. He held up the silver tray.

  She swam across, rested her elbows on the side, and took the envelope. It held a telegram. The paper got wet and sticky as she unfolded it, so she pasted it on the smooth tiles like a tiny poster. At once the ink began running, and this gave the words a crude irony, like a film-director straining for effect. FLYING MADRID TOMORROW FOR BARBER BEANO HANG ONTO YOUR HAT LOVE HARRY.

  She sucked in a deep breath and looked up. The youth had chestnut-brown eyes and a neck like a stick of celery. He was very happy to have delivered the telegram. Now he polished the tray with the sleeve of his hotel-uniform jacket.

  “Thanks for nothing, buster,” she said.

  “Por nada, senora.”

  “I said it first.”

  She left the thing pasted onto the tiles and swam slowly away. The wrong man had sent the wrong telegram. For months she had been trying to trace Harry so that she could straighten out their future, begin the divorce, start to free herself. Now he was on his way back to her and she didn’t want to see him. He wouldn’t want to face reality. Harry wasn’t much good at being serious. He always evaded bad news, unless it was the other kind of news, newspaper-news. Harry would light up and sparkle at the first hint of an international disaster but he wouldn’t face a serious talk with his wife.

  Julie floated in the middle of the pool, arms and legs outstretched in a star-shape. She wondered where he had been when he sent the telegram. Also when. Yesterday, perhaps? Did “tomorrow” mean today? A couple of strokes took her to the side, but
the ink had bled until all its meaning was lost in a soft, fading blur. The telegram tore when she tried to peel it off. Barber Beano, she thought; what the hell was that supposed to mean? Trust a newspaperman to confuse you. They can do almost anything with words except make them sit up and talk.

  She was in her room, wondering whether lunch was worth the effort of going somewhere, when the phone rang.

  “Langham at the American Embassy, Mrs. Conroy.” A New Yorker’s voice, calm, confident, vastly reassuring. “My apologies for this late notice, but the Ambassador hopes very much that you’ll be able to attend our reception this afternoon. It’s in honor of Senator Barber. Four o’clock.”

  “Senator Barber? What’s that dinosaur doing here?”

  “A fact-finding tour. He’s chairman of a Senate Committee which—”

  “Forget it. That guy makes my skin crawl.”

  “The senator has a very individual political style, to be sure, Mrs. Conroy.” The warmth and strength of Langham’s voice impressed her. It was as firm and friendly as the clasp of old leather.

  Barber Beano, she thought. “I guess Harry’s going to be there,” she said.

  “You are right, Mrs. Conroy.”

  “Has he arrived?”

  “Not yet. He’s expected soon. Is there any message, in case I see him first?”

  “Yes, tell him … No, never mind, I’ll tell him myself.”

  She had something very specific to tell Harry: her money hadn’t arrived. Normally, the New York agency for which he worked sent her a check every month. This month, no check. That angered her. Harry was going to get hell over that.

  An angry monologue went on in her head all the way to the embassy. All Americans weren’t jokers, so how come she’d picked this comedian? Why couldn’t she have married a guy like Langham, a man you could at least talk to without a lot of wisecracks? Langham’s voice had reminded her of all that was good and strong about America; none of this fluty, European gabbling; he said what he meant and what he said was sturdy and yet sympathetic too. All of a sudden she felt a great yearning, not so much for Americans as for Americanism: things like real icecream and big cars, and singing commercials on radio, and freight trains as long as you could see, and kids so freckled they looked as if they’d been stenciled. At that moment Julie wanted to be back in America so utterly that she had to pause and take a deep breath before she could go up the embassy steps.