Part 8

There was the rustle of paper, followed by the padded footsteps. Then someone--Hall guessed it was Marina--sat down in a creaky armchair. The man with the shoes got up and walked in the direction opposite from Hall's room. Hall heard a door open, followed a few seconds later by the rush of water into a tub. He remained in his chair, his stethoscope still against the plaster.

The phone near Hall's bed started to ring. He got up very quietly, tiptoed over to the bed. He hid the stethoscope under his pillow before he answered.

"Hello, it's me."

"Yeah, Jerry."

"Speak louder. I can't hear you."

"Sure." He went on speaking with his hand around the mouthpiece to muffle the sound. "Can you hear me now?"

"Just about. Listen, I've got lots to tell you. I was with Doctor when he examined the President, and he was magnificent!"

"The patient?"

"No, you dope. The doctor. What are you doing now?"

"Nothing. Getting dressed."

"Me too. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it."

"Right now?"

Jerry laughed.

"I know," he said. "You're not wearing a thing at the moment."

"Just a second. There. Now you're right about one thing, anyway."

"Don't tempt me," he warned. "I might decide to check up for myself."

"Not now you won't! Meet you downstairs in about twenty minutes. O.K.?"

Hall finished his shave and dressed, toying all the while with the notion of walking down the corridor to Jerry's room before she had a chance to leave. Pepe would heartily approve, he thought, and, besides, since that hour in the woods on top of Monte Azul, Jerry had not exactly indicated that he would be unwelcome if he made a try. But while he speculated, Jerry phoned him again from downstairs. "Daydreaming?" she asked, and he answered, "Yes, about you."

She met him at the elevator in the lobby. "Come on," she laughed, "let's go to that place in back of the Cathedral. The little Dutch drip was around here a second ago. He wants to tell you the story of his life, he told me."

"O.K. Let's just keep walking."

She took his arm as they left the hotel. "Miss me?" she asked.

"I did."

"You're a liar."

Hall winced. "Is that the best you have to say? How about the magnificent doctor?"

"He's really good, Matt. I'm not kidding. I've worked with some corking medics in my day, but this guy is tops." She told Hall about the masterly way in which Ansaldo had taken command of the situation, kicking all the San Hermano doctors out of the sick room and examining Tabio only in the presence of Marina, Jerry and Tabio's son.

"What's the matter with him?"

"Ansaldo has an idea. But he has to make certain."

"What does it look like to you?"

"It could be many things. What's good to drink here?"

"Anything. Scotch and soda?"

"Oke. But really, Matt, you should have seen Doctor in that sick room." She launched into a long and enthusiastic account of the doctor at work.

The girl was on the point of repeating herself when Hall cut her short. "Listen," he said. "Let me tell you something about Anibal Tabio and his generation of young democrats who walked out of jail and started to make history." He told her of the schools and the hospitals which had been built in the country in the last decade, of the minimum-wage laws, of the work of Tabio followers like Dr. Gonzales.

He told her how he first met Tabio in Geneva. "His was supposed to be just a small voice in the League; a little South American dressing to make the whole show look good. But a month after he got there, Mussolini started to pop his goo-goo eyes at Ethiopia. Hoare and Laval and Halifax were so nice and ready to give the Italian steamroller a healthy shove downhill to Addis Ababa. Then one afternoon Litvinov got up to fire some heavy shots. But that was expected. Then del Vayo started, and the fun began. Because, when Vayo was through, it was Tabio's turn. And lady, what Anibal Tabio did to hot shots like Hoare and Laval without even raising his voice was just plain murder."

Jerry put her hand on Hall's arm. "I suppose I read about it in the papers at the time. It didn't mean much to me then. I'm afraid it didn't mean much to me until right now, Matt."

"Weren't you interested in what happened in the world?"

"Not too much, I'm afraid. I was interested in myself. I was making up my mind to go to Reno, and then I sat in Reno for six weeks cramming on my old school books, and then I was off to nursing school."

"Didn't Ethiopia, and later Spain, make any impression upon you?" Hall's question was very gently stated.

"Of course it did, Matt. I was sorry for the Africans and I was sorry for the Spaniards. I wanted Mussolini to get licked and I wanted the Loyalists to win. But most of all I wanted to get through nursing school and then earn enough money to study medicine."

"In other words, if Geraldine Olmstead got her M.D., all would be right with the world, eh?"

She avoided his eyes. "It sounds stupid and mean," she said. "But I guess I deserve it. I'm afraid that was the idea."

"When did the idea die?"

"About ten seconds ago, when you put it into words," she admitted. "I never thought of it in that way before. But I wasn't the only one, Matt."

"Hell, no! You were in a majority when the war started. The whole country was sitting back and, as it thought, minding its own business. We thought we were wonderfully immune until the bombs began to drop on Pearl Harbor."

"Now you're being gallant," she laughed. "There were plenty of people in the country like--like you, Matt. Have we time for another drink?"

Hall was staring into space. Suddenly he exploded. "_Madre de Dios!_ Now I remember!"

"Remember what? You look like you've seen a ghost."

"I have." Hall tapped his head. "In here."

Jerry laughed. "I wish someone would come along and tell me what this is all about."

"There's no time. Let's get back to the hotel. I've got to change clothes and there's a guy I want to see before I go to the party."

"But what's it all about?"

"I'll tell you later."

Walking back to the hotel, he asked Jerry if she had ever found the solution to a problem in a dream. "Because just now I did. Do you remember when you woke me up this morning that I sounded like a guy in a fog? Well, I was. But just a few minutes ago at that table on the sidewalk, the fog lifted."

"And now you feel better?"

"Sure. It's all over."

"I think you're lying. I think that whatever it is, it's just beginning."

"No. It's over."

Jerry was right. But what she did not know was that the fog had lifted on Dr. Varela Ansaldo. The doctor was the Spanish officer of Hall's dream, the one at whose back Hall hurled the knife. And at the table, sipping his second drink, Hall had recalled in a flash where he had seen Varela Ansaldo before. It had happened in Burgos, in April of 1938, during a review of the 12th Division of the fascist army. Ansaldo, wearing the uniform of a Franco major, with a big Falange yoke and arrows sewn over the left breast pocket, had shared a bench on the reviewing stand with an Italian and a German officer. Directly behind them, on that day, had flown the flags of Imperial Spain, The Falange, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Hall remembered the tableau vividly, remembered so clearly perhaps because while watching the review from the sidewalk he had been annoyed by the staff photographer of Franco's _Arriba_, who must have shot a hundred pictures of the officials in the stands that day and who had also shoved Hall aside or stepped on his toes before shooting each picture.

"I'll see you at the Embassy tonight," he said.

"Oke. But get that scowl off your face first," she smiled. "You promised to be nice tonight, and right now you look as if you are planning to kill someone with your bare hands."

_Chapter six_

The American Embassy was three blocks beyond the Presidencia. Hall wanted to walk to the party, but when he reached the street he became self-conscious about his palm-beach tuxedo jacket, and he hailed a strange cab.

The Embassy was housed in an old Spanish palace which a former Ambassador had left to the United States Government in his will. After the first World War, when the government had taken title to the palace, Washington sent an architect and an office efficiency man to San Hermano to redesign the structure. The outside remained more or less intact. But inside, many changes had been effected. The spacious street floor, designed as the slave quarters in the seventeenth century and later converted to storerooms and servants' quarters, was now a hive of offices and waiting rooms. The second floor was devoted largely to a tremendous ballroom, a state dining room, and the tapestried private offices of the Ambassador himself. The living quarters of the Ambassador took up the third floor, while the low-ceilinged fourth floor, originally designed for soldiers, was now given over to servants' rooms.

A secretary at the entrance checked Hall's name off against a list on a teak table. He took the carpeted stairs to the ballroom. Two butlers stood at a screen in the doorway to the big room. The first butler announced his name, but not loud enough to disturb any of the Ambassador's two hundred-odd guests. The second butler nodded to Hall, and led the way through a maze of dignitaries, diplomats' wives, and young people trying to dance to the music a rumba band was producing from a bandstand in a corner. Hall followed him patiently, looking for a sign of Jerry's red hair. The butler nodded gravely at a young girl dancing with a thin Latin in tails. She left her dancing partner and advanced on Hall with an outstretched hand.

"Mr. Matthew Hall, Miss Margaret," the butler whispered.

"I'm so glad you came, Mr. Hall. I'm Margaret Skidmore." Her hand, thin and remarkably strong, was covered with a white net glove that reached to her elbow.

"It's nice of you to have me," Hall said.

Margaret Skidmore took his arm. "We must get you a drink," she said, "and introduce you to some of the more interesting people here. And oh, yes, to my father. But I warn you, he's not in the first category." She was short; much smaller than Jerry, Hall thought, but a bird of a different color. As they crossed the room, a wisp of the black hair piled on top of her head dropped over her eye. Hall was amused by the way she blew the hair to one side twice before deciding to lift it with her gloved hand.

"This is my Dad's favorite punch," she said at the buffet table. "I forgot to tell you that the party is to celebrate the third anniversary of his mission."

Hall ladled out two cups. "Here's to the next three years," he toasted.

"The next three years are the ones that will count," Margaret Skidmore said. She was smiling at Hall and at some other guests when she said it, but it was not polite banter.

"The Press Secretary of the Embassy is sore at you," she said. "He's angry because you tried to get to Gamburdo without him."

"I'm sorry," Hall said. "If you'll introduce me to him, I'll try to make amends."

"Don't bother," she laughed. "Smitty's a stuffed shirt who needs to be taken down a peg or two. But I must say that you look a lot different than I thought you would, Mr. Hall."

"I know. I'm supposed to look like a hero and I have the face of a mugg. Or a gorilla." He was still looking for Jerry. "You're a surprise, too."

"Am I so different?" There was coquettish amusement in her hazel eyes. She tilted her fragile doll's nose, forced a haughty cast to her small-girl's face. "Is an Ambassador's daughter supposed to be a high-and-mighty lady like this?"

"No. I like you better the other way."

"Thanks. It's my only way."

Hall spotted Jerry on the dance floor with Varela Ansaldo. Jerry looked very happy, and Ansaldo had lost some of his undertaker's grimness. He tried in vain to catch her eye.

"Here comes my father."

Hall found himself shaking hands with a portly, middle-aged American who wore tails as if to the manor born. J. Burton Skidmore had the most imposing head of wavy gray hair in the entire hemisphere, and he knew it. His face, still ruddy and youngish, was pink and smelled of fine cologne.

"_Con mucho gusto_," the Ambassador said, holding Hall's hand and bowing slightly from the waist.

"I'm glad to meet you, sir," Hall said.

"Father, Mr. Hall is an American. He is Matthew Hall, the writer. You know. Matthew Hall." The childish, well-bred-daughter smile on Margaret Skidmore's face could not conceal the acid contempt in her voice. "Mr. Hall is an American, from New York."

"Oh, yes, oh, yes, indeed. Hall. Of course, Mr. Hall. Been in San Hermano long, Mr. Hall?"

"No, sir. Less than a week."

"Fine place, Mr. Hall. Fine people. Have you met Smitty yet? Dear, have you seen Smitty? I think he and Mr.--Mr. Hall could find much in common, Margaret."

"Tomorrow," Margaret Skidmore said, and the Ambassador helped himself to a cup of punch.

"_Amigo Mateo!_"

Without turning around, Hall said, in Spanish, "Only one man in all the world has a scratchy voice like that," and then he turned around and embraced Felipe Duarte.

"What brings you to San Hermano?" he asked Duarte.

"I am now a diplomat. First Counselor of the Mexican Embassy in San Hermano and guest professor of literature at the University."

Hall and Duarte had last met in Spain, where Duarte had served as a Lieutenant-Colonel with the regular Spanish People's Army. "_Coronel_ Pancho Villa" was the name his men gave him, and the thin, gangling Mexican scholar had fought like a terror to live up to this name. Of Duarte, the General Staff officers said that he was as bad a strategist as he was brave a man, which would have made him one of the worst strategists in military history. But during the Ebro retreat, Duarte had taught the veteran professional officers a few things about the tactics of guerrilla warfare which raised his standing as a soldier.

Duarte took Margaret Skidmore's hand and raised it to his lips. "_Enchante_," he sighed, and she knew at once that he was laughing at her.

"Senor Ambassador," Duarte said, speaking rapid Spanish, "this is one of the most magnificent parties I have ever attended. How do you manage to give such splendid parties with only your chit of a daughter to help you shove food down the ulcerous throats of these sons of whore mothers, dear Senor Ambassador? It is stupendous. It is colossal."

The Ambassador smiled, shook Duarte's hand, and bowing slightly, he murmured, "_Con mucho gusto_." Then, still smiling, he turned and walked away.

"Don't let this guy fool you," Hall said to the Ambassador's daughter. "He speaks English as well as we do."

"Better," Duarte said. "Ah learned mah English in Texas, Ah'll have yo'all know, suh. And Mateo, don't let Margaret's innocent smile fool you. She knows almost enough Spanish to know what I just told her distinguished papa."

"Some day I'm going to know enough," Margaret laughed. "And when I do, you're going to get your face slapped in front of everyone, I'm afraid. Tell me, Mateo, does _hijos de la gran puta_ mean what I think it does?"

"That sounds like slang to me," Hall said. "I learned my Spanish on the Linguaphone."

"You're a fast boy, Matt," she said. "Call me Margaret, if you wish." She straightened Hall's tie with a perfumed glove. "I'll give you a little time with Felipe, and then I'll steal you back. There are many people here tonight who want to meet you."

"Hurry back," Duarte said. "He bores me stiff when I have him on my hands too long."

"You bastard," Hall said. "You're a diplomat now. Don't you ever stop clowning?"

"Sure. When I kill fascists I am very serious. You know that, Mateo. But here, if I did not clown, I would die of boredom. For example, when Skidmore gives a party, the politicos in my Embassy, they all find reasons for being out of town. I am not a politico. I am a professor of literature and a killer of fascists, by profession; a diplomat because someone wanted to do Lombardo a favor and at the same time remove my face from the domestic scene. _Claro?_ So it is clown or die. And if I must die, I prefer to die having a second crack at Franco."

"_Claro, amigo._ But must you wear a suit like this one?"

Duarte's evening clothes were his cloak of independence. He wore a cheap tuxedo he had bought in New York for twenty dollars and a pair of worn patent-leather shoes that creaked as he walked. On state occasions, he wore the medals he had earned on the battlefields in Spain. For private parties, he simply wore an enameled gold Mexican flag on his lapel. Tonight, he wore only the flag.

All this he explained to Hall in his gay, rasping Spanish. "When the Falangist Embassy was still on good terms, I wore my Republican medals all the time. But just before Don Anibal took sick, he insulted the Caudillo in a speech before the University faculty, and when the Franco Ambassador called to ask for an apology Tabio told him that the truth called for no apologies. So the Caudillo got sore and he called his Ambassador home. The Embassy is still open, but a clerk is in charge, and there isn't a Spanish diplomat in San Hermano of high enough standing to be invited to any Embassy."

Jerry joined them, and when Hall presented her to Duarte, the Mexican kissed her hand and murmured, "_Enchante_."

"Miss Olmstead is Dr. Ansaldo's nurse," Hall said.

"How very interesting," Duarte said. "May I have this dance with the nurse of Dr. Ansaldo?" and before she had a chance to say that her feet were killing her, the dexterous Duarte was guiding her through the steps of an intricate rumba he improvised at that moment.

Hall took another glass of punch. Duarte was his friend, but at the moment he wanted to break his neck. He wanted Jerry for himself, and he hated the idea of admitting or showing it. He watched them so intently that he failed to see Margaret return to the punch bowl.

"Deserted?" she asked. "Our friend Felipe would desert his mother for a redhead."

"He's quite a guy," Hall laughed.

"Come on," she said. "There's a crowd that's been dying to meet you. The country's biggest publisher and some of the more important business men."

"Fernandez?"

"That's right. He publishes _El Imparcial_. Confidentially, his paper is getting the Cabot Prize this year. Dad arranged it."

Fernandez was standing with a group of three Hermanitos and a blonde fortyish woman in a tight dress whom Hall recognized instantly as an American. "I'm Giselle Prescott," she said, her smile revealing flecks of lipstick on her yellow teeth.

"Take care of the amenities, will you, Gis?" Margaret Skidmore said. "Dad is flagging me over at the other end." She picked up her skirts, hurried to her father's rescue.

Giselle Prescott introduced Hall to Jose Fernandez, tall, handsome, in his early fifties. Fernandez presented him to Segundo Vardieno, Francisco Davila, and Alfonso Quinones. Davila was a man of one age and build with Fernandez, the other two were shorter and about ten years younger. Breathlessly, Giselle Prescott told Hall that Vardieno and Quinones were among the ten largest landowners in the nation, and Davila its leading attorney. They all made modest denials.

Quinones asked Giselle to dance, and she accepted gladly. Her myriad blonde ringlets neatly blocked her partner's forward view.

"Very accomplished writer," Hall said. "In the popular magazine field, Miss Prescott is supreme."

"She is very able," Davila said. Like Quinones and Vardieno, he wore the emblem of the Cross and the Sword in his lapel. Fernandez wore only the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor.

"My niece told me that you had some difficulties at the Press Bureau today," Vardieno said.

"Your niece?" Then he remembered the golden Cross and Sword dangling from the thin golden chain. "Oh, yes, the young lady who speaks English so well."

Vardieno explained to Fernandez that Hall had been unable to arrange for an interview with Gamburdo. "Don't you think you could help Senor Hall?" Davila asked, and Fernandez assured the three men that the matter would be taken care of in the morning. Of course, it might not be possible until after the Congress convened, but then politics in San Hermano being what they were, the illustrious colleague from North America would surely be understanding.

"What's the inside on the political picture?" Hall asked, and the three men, talking in unison and talking singly gave him one picture.

Their picture was very detailed. "El Tovarich--our Red President, you know," had lined up the unruly elements behind a dangerous program of confiscating the estates of their rightful owners and turning them over to communist gunmen. In addition to this land-piracy scheme, Tabio also intended to drive the Catholic Church underground and impose heavy penalty taxes on the parents who sent their children to Catholic parochial schools. To aid in this program, Tabio was throwing open the gates of the nation to Red agitators disguised as Jewish and Spanish refugees.

"So it's as bad as that," Hall said.

"Worse." Fernandez looked around him. "Come closer," he said. "There's something I must tell you about your own safety."

"My safety?"

"Yes, Senor." Fernandez had his right hand on Hall's shoulder. "Late this afternoon I received a confidential information that the Communist Party in San Hermano had privately denounced you to its members."

"Denounced me? But why?"

"Yes, Senor. And it was a most dangerous denunciation, too. A prominent communist leader telephoned the editor of the official Red paper and denounced you for being an enemy of Tovarich Tabio and a supporter of Senor Gamburdo."

Hall smiled. "But that couldn't be so bad," he demurred. "The Reds are always denouncing someone. Tomorrow the Communist Party paper will attack me as a fascist, and I guess that will be the end of the whole thing."

"No, that is not what will happen," Segundo Vardieno insisted. "Tell him the rest of the information, Don Jose."

Again Jose Fernandez looked around to make sure that he was not being overheard. "Senor Vardieno is right, my friend. You see," he said, "the Red who phoned the _Mundo Obrero_ ordered the editor _not_ to print a word about you--yet. Do you understand what that means?"

Davila, the lawyer, explained. "What Don Jose means," he said, "is that a secret denunciation generally precedes an assassination. You see, Senor Hall, if the Reds denounce you in their press, you would be marked before the world as an enemy of the Tovarich. Then, if anything happened to you--they are not only blameless, but even after killing you they can make great propaganda about how the alleged fascists killed you because you are a noted American patriot who stands for free enterprise."

"Pretty clever," Hall said.

"Jewish cleverness!" Segundo Vardieno was shaking with rage. "Give a Jew a hundred pesos and in a day he has a thousand and you'll never know how he did it. But will he apply his cleverness for the good of the country? No! Only for communism."

"Is Tabio a Jew?" Hall asked.

"Confidentially," Vardieno answered, "El Tovarich is a Sephardic Jew. But we're not making it public because we are gentlemen."

"And only because we are gentlemen," Fernandez added. "I don't think El Tovarich will be among us much longer."

"Is he really that sick?"

"Oh, yes," Davila said. "You know what happened to him, don't you? No? Well, it's almost like the Hand of Divine Retribution." He told Hall that Tabio had turned over to one of his henchman a vineyard confiscated from an old family, and that in gratitude the henchman had started to distill a special brandy for the Tovarich. "And now, the excess alcohol from too much of the stolen grape has taken its toll."

"Well, what do you know!" Hall said.

"It is the gospel truth," Fernandez said. "I have ways of confirming the story."

"Some mess, isn't it?" Hall said.

"It is filled with dangers," Vardieno said. "Your calmness is admirable, Senor Hall, but you had better watch out. The Reds are out to kill you."