Eldorado Network

by Derek Robinson

  Holiday Haunts had a map of the Great Western Railway routes which showed an island far out in the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man. He looked it up. In the comparatively small compass of this island are great cliffs, delightful bathing beaches, fertile valleys, lush meadows … heart-warming hospitality … exhilarating air … abundance of amusements … Just the place for an overworked overseas medical student. Just the place to put a German prisoner-of-war camp, too. Garlic might as well bring back news of all those Luftwaffe pilots shot down and captured and now—

  Somebody knocked on the door.

  It startled him so much that every muscle jumped. Julie put down the report she had been proofreading. They looked at each other, looked at the door, listened intently. They were listening to someone else’s listening. Nobody had ever visited the office before. It was unnecessary. Nobody had any business to call here. So maybe this was a mistake.

  Somebody knocked again. Confidently, rap ta-ta rap rap.

  Luis tiptoed over to the filing cabinet where he kept the rusted Colt revolver. The drawer groaned and squealed like an angry pig. Julie vibrated with suppressed laughter, but he gave her such a savage scowl that the comedy abruptly evaporated and left an even greater tension. He abandoned the gun, slammed home the drawer, stamped to the door and swung it open.

  The man looked baggy. His aging brown suit was baggy, his sallow face was baggy, even his leather bag was baggy. He looked at Luis with his baggy eyes as if Luis were the electricity meter and he had come to read it. He was a man who knocked on a lot of doors.

  “Senhor Cabrillo?” he said. Luis moved his head in what might have been a nod. “Boa tarde, senhor.” He took a very creased business-card from his top pocket and offered it.

  “Ministério da Fazenda e …” Luis’s head recoiled. The baggy man patiently switched his bag to the other hand. Evidently he was familiar with this sort of reaction. Luis said: “Desculpe-me, mas … Não compreendo. O que …?”

  “Com licenca?” The baggy man made a small and economical gesture of entry. Luis waved him in. “Obrigado, senhor. O gerente, lá em baixo …” the baggy man began, and they were off into a fast exchange of sibilant, switchbacking Portuguese which meant nothing to Julie except that Luis didn’t seem to be winning. After ten minutes he was left moodily holding a long, printed form while the baggy man raised his baggy hat to each of them in turn and went away.

  His footsteps ticked and tocked down the big stone staircase until they merged with their own echoes.

  “Who was he?” she asked.

  “Tax inspector.” Luis sat heavily and stared at the form. “Portuguese government. Ministry of Taxation. Bloody hell.”

  “They can’t be serious. How can they expect you to pay taxes? You’re not a real businessman or anything.”

  “The manager of this building gave him a list of tenants. What am I doing renting this office if I’m not running a business?”

  Julie came over and looked at the form. It was enormously complicated. “What did you tell him?” she asked.

  “Oh … rubbish, nonsense. I said I was only an agent, I was looking for products to sell, nothing doing yet, no income to speak of. He didn’t actually say he didn’t believe me, but he’s coming back next week.”

  “Then we’d better get out, fast. You can keep your files in the apartment.”

  He got up, hands in pockets, and shouldered the door shut. “I hate working at home,” he said. “It doesn’t feel right. This is a business, it belongs in an office. So do I.”

  “You’ll belong in jail if you don’t pay your taxes.”

  He reached up and hung by his fingers from the coat-hook on the back of the door. “Then … I shall have to pay taxes.”

  “Oh, sure.” She wandered across and put her arms around his neck. “And you’re going to register with the Portuguese Government as a foreign spy,” she said into his right ear.

  “That tickles.”

  “Yeah, it’s hilarious.” She chewed gently on a lobe. “They probably have a special rate for foreign spies. After all, Lisbon’s full of them.”

  “Let’s go back to the beginning.” Luis gently rubbed the point of his chin against her neck. “The Portuguese want to tax me because they believe I am doing business. Therefore the answer is to do business so that the Portuguese can tax me. Then they will be satisfied and go away.”

  “What sort of business, Luis?”

  His neck muscles tensed. “You have no idea how much that tickles,” he said. “I don’t know, any sort. Buying things, selling things. Business business.”

  “But Luis, my sweet,” she whispered insistently, “you’ve got no experience in selling—”

  His right ear rebelled, his head jerked sideways, the coat-hook wrenched free under the strain, and they both fell to the floor.

  “I told you that tickled,” he complained. They lay in a heap and looked at the ceiling. “It’s a pretty lousy office where a chap can’t even hang himself behind the door.” He threw the coat-hook at the wall.

  “What it comes down to is this,” Julie said. She made her head comfortable on his chest. “Can you afford to pay real taxes on an imaginary business? How much money are you making now?”

  “Not much. Including Garlic’s pay, about seven or eight hundred dollars a week, I suppose.”

  “Good God.”

  “But it won’t be an imaginary business, Julie. I’ll deal in something genuine, so that if anyone wants to know what I do, there it is. Coal, or olive oil, or plywood, or—”

  “Eight hundred bucks a week? And we’re pigging it in this crappy walk-up on the four hundred and twenty-sixth floor of the most boring office block in town?” She banged her head against his chest until he gasped. “You’re going to move, you tight bastard!”

  “All right,” he wheezed. “All right! We’ll move tomorrow. Jesus, I think you’ve broken a rib.”

  They got up, and Julie beat the dust out of her clothes. “It really is a hell of a thing,” she complained, “when a spy has to actually go out of his way to pay his lousy taxes.”

  Luis wasn’t listening. “Business expenses,” he said. “We’ll need to keep records of them. Receipts, invoices. Postal charges.”

  “It’s not so much the disgrace as the disillusion. Damn it all, doesn’t tradition mean anything anymore?”

  Luis polished his right shoe on his left trouser-leg while he looked at her, seriously. “An accountant,” he said. “Where can I get a good accountant?”

  *

  It took them a week to find and move into new offices. They began the search together, but after a couple of hours Luis began worrying about a report from Knickers (on R.A.F. experiments with a new high-altitude anti-aircraft shell made out of plastic) which would soon be overdue; so he went back to his desk while Julie kept looking. Eventually she found a place in the Bairro Alto, the high ground just to the west of the Rossio. It was the third floor of a newish building; it had a lift and a telephone; it was clean, quiet, carpeted, and decently removed from any embassies, consulates or legations. There were good bars and restaurants within walking distance. Luis signed a twelve-month lease and they shifted their files into the new premises that same night.

  Julie had bought a bottle of wine, to christen the place. They touched glasses, and Luis said: “Well, here’s to… uh … Here’s to …”

  “Yeah, sure, I’ll drink to that.”

  They toasted whatever it was they were toasting. He strolled around, opening doors; glancing at the view across the center of Lisbon to the great, hunched bulk of the castle; testing the pile of the carpet with his feet, “I suppose a business as prosperous as this should really have a name,” he said.

  “Cabrillo and Conroy,” she suggested. “Or Cabroy, for short.”

  “Cabroy is awful.”

  “Okay, call it Universal Enterprises.”

  Luis liked that but he didn’t buy it. He found the 1923 Michelin Guide and searched through it. “Here we are,” he said
. “Bradburn & Wedge. That has the right sound.”

  “Bradburn & Wedge sound like a couple of carpenters who double as undertakers. Where did you dig them up?”

  “Wolverhampton. That’s in Staffordshire. They run a garage. Or they did in 1923. They were agents for Morris, Sunbeam, Austin, Fiat, Bianchi, De Dion Bouton, and Rolls-Royce. Not bad.”

  “I see.” She waited, but Luis had moved off and was testing a light switch. “You wouldn’t rather call it General Motors?”

  “No, no. It has to sound English. The Portuguese are very impressed by anything English. Don’t you think Bradburn & Wedge sound thoroughly English?”

  “I guess so. They remind me of cricket, which is like eternity, only not so exciting.”

  “Well, that’s perfect, isn’t it? We want to appear solid and unexciting. Bradburn & Wedge are a firm you can trust.”

  “Trust to do what?”

  “Well … Look, why don’t you handle that aspect, Julie? I’ll be too busy with all the Eldorado stuff.”

  “Yes, but …” She poured herself more wine. “I don’t know where to start. What are Bradburn & Wedge going to do?”

  The previous tenant had left them a Lisbon trade directory, published by the Portuguese Chamber of Commerce. Luis opened it at random. “Lemonade crystals,” he said. “Highly desirable. Go out and buy lemonade crystals.”

  “And what do I do with them when I’ve bought them?”

  “You sell them, I suppose.” He smiled encouragingly. “What else is there to do? Buying and selling, that’s what business is all about.”

  Chapter 51

  As the summer of 1941 drifted into autumn, and the German offensives in Russia and the Atlantic continued to register steady success, people in beleaguered Britain snatched a quick holiday as and when they could. Garlic, luckier than most, managed a week on the Isle of Man. Seagull visited his pub-owning relatives near Macclesfield: very quiet, after the Liverpool docks, if only those strange planes hadn’t kept roaring around, day and night. Knickers enjoyed a dirty weekend with an old flame in Leicester, where she worked in a parachute factory and told him all sorts of amusing stories about the stealing and corruption that went on there. Even Eldorado took a break and had a day in Cambridge, wandering around the ancient colleges, punting on the placid river, and sampling the local ale at a friendly tavern, where several R.A.F. pilots in civilian clothing were to be heard speaking occasional phrases of elementary Russian.

  There was no holiday for Luis Cabrillo in Lisbon. He rarely left his office, except to take his bulky envelopes to the big post office in the Avenida da Liberdade, or to collect the Abwehr’s slimmer letters from the Banco Espirito Santo in the Rua do Comercio.

  Nevertheless, there was more time for him to think and to plan, now that Julie—her wrist mended, the cast removed—took care of the office routine.

  His first reports to Madrid had required two or three drafts, sometimes more; now, with the confidence of experience, he usually got it right first time. The files were growing fatter, and he made a practice of re-reading them regularly so as to make sure that his sub-agents behaved consistently: if Seagull made friends with an American seaman at the beginning of the month, for instance, they should not meet again until the end of the month, to allow time for two crossings of the Atlantic. Madrid knew that Knickers had escaped military service because of his poor eyesight; this made it unwise for him to report in too much detail about aircraft or equipment he might have seen. And so on.

  Meanwhile Julie found someone in the commercial department of the American embassy who knew about lemonade crystals, as a result of which she bought a thousand dollars’ worth, that being close to the limit of the credit which Luis had arranged for her with the Banco Espirito Santo.

  “Who the hell uses this stuff?” she asked. She had brought back a sample to show Luis. He was munching a few crystals.

  “Who drinks lemonade?” he asked in return.

  “I’ll ask Bradburn & Wedge … You look different, Luis. Has something happened?”

  “How different?”

  “I don’t know.” She put her head on one side. “Chirpier. More buoyant.”

  “Ah, that’s because of Knickers. Knickers has fallen in love.”

  “Wow. And the sheets in Leicester are barely cool. What a man! Who is it this time?”

  “I’m not sure,” Luis said, bouncing on his heels, “but I think her father’s a rear-admiral or something.”

  “Hey, that’s class,” Julie exclaimed. “That should be worth a few bucks.”

  “I’m told she looks like the back of a bus,” Luis said, “but Knickers can’t tell the difference even with his glasses on, so who cares?”

  “Sure. As long as they’re happy.” She put the lemonade crystals away. “They are happy, aren’t they?”

  Luis sucked in his breath, “I’ll be honest with you, Julie,” he said. “The real trouble is, she drinks.”

  “Like a fish?”

  “Like a barracuda,” he said happily. “The family is very worried.”

  *

  Wolfgang turned the pages with his left hand. The numbness in his right fingers made them clumsy and unreliable. He sat with his hand tucked inside his shirt, where the body-warmth to some extent countered the numbness, and he painstakingly scrutinized the file copies of the Eldorado reports. Sooner or later, he knew, even the best tight-rope walker stumbles, even the best trapeze-artist fumbles. Sooner or later Eldorado had to attempt one of his famous triple backward somersaults and land on his famous Spanish ass. It was just a question of time. Wolfgang turned another page, read another paragraph, and twitched with excitement. There it was! The fatal flaw! He skimmed the next paragraph and grinned with delight: another beauty! He raced through the rest of the report and smacked his fist on the page with the third and greatest, deadliest error. “I’ve got the bastard,” he breathed.

  Otto Krafft, who was working at the other end of the room, looked around. “Which bastard is that?” he asked.

  “Both of them,” Wolfgang said. He took his hand from inside his shirt and flexed the fingers. Blood was pulsing through them, tingling the skin like fresh snow.

  *

  Julie found an accountant, a dapper man who actually enjoyed dealing with the Ministerio da Fazenda and who took an undisguised delight in dealing with Julie. He took care of registering Bradburn & Wedge, he took care of the complicated form, he took care of the baggy taxman. The only thing he couldn’t take care of was selling one thousand American dollars’ worth of lemonade crystals.

  *

  Major Schwarz was a liaison officer between Abwehr headquarters and the Fuehrer’s office. When he visited Madrid on a working holiday, Brigadier Christian took the opportunity to polish his apples.

  He began by introducing Otto Krafft, controller of Eagle. Schwarz remarked that he was impressed by Eagle’s apparent freedom of movement in Britain.

  “So am I, sir,” Otto said, with such fervency that they laughed. “Of course, he has two great advantages: he’s an American citizen, and his company trades with Britain, so he can justify his visits to ports or customers all over the island.”

  “Invaluable,” Schwarz said.

  “Eagle is an extremely reticent fellow …” Otto began.

  “Like Gary Cooper,” Christian put in.

  “… so we know next-to-nothing about his background, but reading between the lines of his reports I suspect that he spent some time at an English university. Perhaps even as a Rhodes Scholar. He has visited Oxford twice this summer.”

  Schwarz snapped his fingers. “That would explain some of his influential contacts. You know, by the way, that Operation Bandstand has been confirmed by a couple of other agents?”

  “Has it really, sir?” Otto looked very impressed. “Well, that’s encouraging.”

  “Yes. It wasn’t always called ‘Bandstand’ but that’s not surprising: the British often change codenames during planning.”

  “Yes
, of course they do,” Otto said.

  “And I heard just before I left that we’ve doubled our submarine patrols off Norway.”

  “That’s a pity,” Otto said, “because I’ve just heard from Eagle that Bandstand’s been canceled.”

  “Damnation!” Brigadier Christian smote his forehead. “When did that come in?”

  “Ten minutes ago, sir. I was just reading it when—”

  “You can see what’s happened, can’t you?” Schwarz interrupted. “Churchill’s got cold feet! We move one piddling division into Norway and he calls the whole thing off. He knows we know.”

  “What does Eagle think?” Christian asked.

  As Otto Krafft opened his mouth, there was a knock on the door and Wolfgang Adler came in. He held up a folder, “I have a special report for you to read, brigadier,” he said.

  Christian waved it away. “Not now.”

  “It’s urgent. It won’t wait.”

  Christian glanced at Schwarz with a God-help-us smile. “It’ll wait, Adler,” he said, “it’ll wait forever, if necessary.”

  “I take leave to doubt that, brigadier.” Wolfgang was pale with suppressed anger.

  “Just take leave, Adler.”

  There was a frozen moment while the two men stared. Then Wolfgang turned and went out. As he closed the door he heard Christian’s snort of amazement.

  Later, Otto described the exchange for the benefit of the other controllers. “It was quite extraordinary,” he said. “He really hates the old man, for some reason.”

  “Adler’s a fool,” Franz Werth said. “At this rate he’ll end up cleaning the lavatories. D’you realize that, strictly speaking, he should have been next in line to be controller? He should have had Nutmeg. I bet Christian never gave him a thought.”

  “Nutmeg? Who’s Nutmeg?” Fischer asked.

  “New sub-agent,” Otto told him. “Eldorado just recruited him. Ex-Indian Army officer in Cambridge. Works for the Ministry of Food, hunting black marketeers. Hates Bolsheviks.”