afraid so, Dick."
"I'm sorry to see you leave. We figured you'd stay for at least a month. What's so urgent in San Hermano?"
"That's what I mean to find out. All I know is what I read in the papers." He handed the Governor two copies of the San Hermano Imparcial he had found on a library table in the reception room while having a cocktail before dinner. They were the papers which had made him call Harris at Panair.
The first issue was three weeks old. It described the visit of an American Good-Will Commission to San Hermano, and told how the mission was received by Enrique Gamburdo, the Vice-President, rather than by Anibal Tabio, the President. In an oblique manner, the story went on to deny the "widespread rumor" that Tabio had deliberately insulted the Americans by not receiving them personally.
"I don't like the way they denied the rumor," Hall said. "I know that the paper is imparcial on the fascist side only."
The other edition of Imparcial was three days old. It was the latest copy available. It carried as its lead story the news that since Tabio's illness had taken a drastic turn for the worse, Gamburdo had prevailed upon a great Spanish doctor, Varela Ansaldo, to fly from Philadelphia to San Hermano in an attempt to save the President's life.
"And?" the Governor asked.
"I'm not sure. But it looks to me like a deliberate attempt to lay a smelly egg in Tabio's nest. Anyway, I did a little checking with Harris. I figured I'd be able to meet Ansaldo's plane, and I was right. The San Hermano Clipper overnights in San Juan, you know. Ansaldo is sleeping at the Escambrun tonight. Tomorrow we'll board the ship for San Hermano together."
"I still don't get it, Matt. Do you know this Ansaldo?"
"No. But he's evidently been invited to San Hermano by Gamburdo. And I found out a few things about Gamburdo in Havana," Hall said. "Some top-ranking Falange chiefs in the Americas always spoke highly of him in their letters. Especially the letters marked confidential."
"There you go again!"
"Don't. You know I'm not crazy."
"But Matt, neither is Gamburdo crazy. He wouldn't dare do what you're implying."
"Maybe. But I'm not thinking of Gamburdo as much as I am of Tabio. I like Anibal Tabio, like him a lot. I met him for the first time in Geneva in '35, when he was Foreign Minister. Then I met him again in '36, when he and Vayo and Litvinov were hammering away at the fat cats backing Franco. He was a real guy, Dick. One of the few statesmen alive who not only knew that the earth is round but also that the people on this round earth like to eat and wear decent clothes and send their kids to college.
"I remember how in '37, after Halifax yawned all through his speech and then led the rest of the delegates in voting against Vayo's proposals, Tabio sat down with me in a little bar and ordered a light beer and told me very quietly that this was his cue. 'I must go home,' he told me, 'and see that it doesn't happen to my country.' That's how he pulled up his stakes and went back to San Hermano and ran for President."
"He's good, Matt. I know that."
"He's damn good. He's the best of the anti-fascist leaders on the Continent right now, Dick. He deserves all the help he isn't getting from us."
The Governor put the paper down with a sigh. "I'll tell you a secret, Matt," he said. "But it's really secret. You know that there's going to be a Pan-American conference on foreign policy in Havana in five weeks. Well, some of the smarter heads in Washington are getting worried. We're sending a delegation to the conference to ask all the nations down here to break with the Axis. And some of us are afraid that if Tabio is—well, not able to pick the San Hermano delegation, his government will remain neutral."
Hall stood up and began pacing between the couch and the chair. He pulled out a large white handkerchief and mopped the sweat on his face, his neck, his quivering hands. "God damn them all to hell," he said, "they're moving in on us in our own backyard and when you try to say a word in Washington they spit in your eye and tell you Franco is a neutral and a friend."
Dickenson drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly and audibly. "What's it all about, Matt?" he asked, softly. "Where does San Hermano come in?"
"I don't know a mucking thing yet. All I know is that it stinks to high heaven. Listen, Dick, I'm not crazy. You know that. In Washington they act as if I'm crazy or worse when I try to tell them." Hall put his hand to the twitching right side of his face as if to keep it still. His outburst had completely dried his throat. He went to the sideboard, threw some ice cubes into a giant glass, poured soda over the ice.
The Governor watched him swallow the contents in huge gulps. "Better sit down, Matt," he said. "You'll blow a valve."
"I'm all right," he said. He put the glass down on the floor, ran the handkerchief over his neck. "There's one thing I do know, and it's killing me. I know the Falange is in this. It's all I have to know. I remember reading a fascist paper in jail in San Sebastian. There was a big map on the back page, a map showing Spain as the center of the Spanish World. An artist had superimposed the five arrows of the Falange over the face of Spain. The article under the map said that while one of the arrows pointed to Madrid, two pointed to the Philippines and the others pointed to Latin America. They weren't kidding, Dick. When the Japs marched into Manila they decorated the Philippine Falange for the fifth-column job the Falangistas performed for Hirohito. And there are twenty Falangist cells in Latin America for every one cell they had in Manila on December 6, 1941.
"And why not, Dick? It's the Germans who've always run the Falange. Today they run Spain. And they also run the Exterior Falange set-up. Maybe Falangismo as a philosophy is phony as all hell, and maybe its creed of Hispanidad, with all its blah about Latin America returning to the Spanish Empire, is just as phony. Maybe it doesn't make sense to us gringos. I'll grant that. But it is a nice Nazi horse on the dumb Spanish aristocrats who do Hitler's dirty work in the Americas. In German hands it's one of the dynamics of this war. I've seen it in operation, and I know. It's the gimmick that makes rich Spaniards fuel and hide submarines in the Caribbean—you know that for a fact yourself. It's the new amalgam which makes 'em look to Holy Mother Spain as the core of a new empire, it's ..."
"But granting all this, Matt, why must you go to San Hermano?"
Hall swallowed some soda. He put the glass back on the floor, grabbed the San Hermano Imparcial from the Governor's hands. Slowly, he crushed the paper and held it in front of Dickenson's face. "Do you know who publishes El Imparcial?" he asked. "I'll tell you. It's a fascist named Fernandez. In San Sebastian, during the war, he strutted all over town in a Falange officer's uniform browning his nose with all the top-ranking lice, the Germans, the Italians, the Franco crowd. He was there for months, making radio speeches and public appearances and getting cramps in the right arm from holding it up in the stiff-arm salute. I saw him a dozen times, if I saw him once."
"José Fernandez? I met him at a conference in Rio. He seemed like a pleasant enough chap," the Governor said.
"They're all pleasant. They can afford to be. You never met Ribbentrop and Otto Abetz, Dick. They were the most charming men in Europe before the war. But listen, last week in Havana I looked at a collection of pictures taken from the files of the chief of the Falange delegation for the Americas. There was one picture of a banquet held by the Falange in San Hermano late in 1936. It was a secret affair, only insiders and leaders. And there, on the dais, was Licenciado Enrique Gamburdo, big as life."
"Gamburdo!"
"Sure. It was
