all right. Not a word in the papers, and everyone present sworn to secrecy by a Bishop who was among the honored guests." Hall dried the sweat on his hands again. "But always at these affairs there's a man with a camera. Usually he's a Gestapo Heinie. Sometimes he's a Gestapo Spaniard or even a Gestapo Latin-American. A picture, just one picture, has to be made. It goes to the German consul or the Falange chief of the country and they have to forward it to the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. The pictures back up the reports, you see, and, besides, when you have a picture of a deacon trucking with a doxie in a bordello it's a good thing to threaten to show the deacon's wife if the deacon decides to return to the paths of righteousness."
"But are you sure, Matt?"
"I'm a good reporter. My job is to remember unimportant things, and to remember them well when they become important. If I'm wrong, I'll find out for myself in San Hermano."
The Governor accepted one of Hall's cigars. "God," he said, "I hope you're wrong, Matt."
Later, back in his hotel room, Hall stripped to his shorts, ran cold water over his wrists and the back of his neck. He poured some Haitian rum into a glass, drenched it with soda from the pink-and-green night table.
Outside, in the darkness, four boys were playing tag. Hall listened to the whispered padding of their bare feet as they flew from cobblestones to trolley tracks. He went to the wrought-iron balcony, stood there watching the undersized kids chasing each other up and down the narrow street. Two freighters rode at anchor in the harbor, their gray noses pointing at the pink Customs House. A soldier lurched down the street, barely missing the feet of an old jíbaro sleeping in the doorway of a dark store.
Hall returned to the desk. He wrote a short note to a friend in a government bureau in Havana—merely to say that he was leaving for San Hermano and that for the time being could be reached in care of Pan American Airways there—and a similar note to Bird. He decided to let his other letters wait until he reached San Hermano.
The kids who were playing tag disappeared. The only noise which broke the silence of the night now was the soft pounding of the presses in the newspaper plant up the street. Hall sealed his letters and started to pack his bags.
The four boys reappeared with a whoop. They carried freshly printed magazines this time, and, as they ran down the street, first one then another took up the mournful cry: "Puerto Rico Ilustrado! Il-us-traaa-dooohhh!" They were no longer to be seen when Hall ran out to the balcony to look.
He took a cold shower, then lit one of his Havanas. The mosquito net which completely covered his bed annoyed him. He put out the light in order not to see the bars of the net frame. Silently, he railed against the sugar planters and their kept politicos for leaving the island prey to malaria. He had to remind himself that the net was his protection against malaria before he could crawl under the frame, but even then he climbed into bed with a cigar in his mouth.
The cigar was his protection, his secret weapon, against the claustrophobia the mosquitero gave him. There were no cigars in Franco's prisons, no cigars and no cool sheets and coiled spring mattresses, no soft breezes floating in from a harbor as ancient as the Conquistadores.
He lay under the net, naked and uncovered, blowing smoke rings at the cross bars above him. He thought of Anibal Tabio in Geneva, thin as a reed, his slender hand pointing to the pile of German and Italian documents del Vayo had brought to the League. He thought of Tabio and he thought of his three years in Spain and, thinking, he got worked up all over again.
It was not easy to think of the months of being trapped like an animal in a cage, of being pushed around by smirking men who had the guns, of watching the metal inkstand in the hands of the German major the second before it crashed into his own face. No, it was not easy, and the memory of San Sebastian led to the scarlet memory of the afternoon on the Malecon in Havana less than a month ago when Sanchez had pointed out to him two leaders of the Falange at a café table and he started out to bash their heads together right then and there. Luis and Felix had had to grab him and wrestle him to the sidewalk, laughing and playing at being just three jolly boys who'd had a drink too much instead of two Spanish Republicans keeping a frenzied American from killing two men they detested and would gladly have killed themselves.
Hall sat up, shaking, covered with sweat. He crawled out of bed, stood barefooted on the tiled floor. An overwhelming feeling of loneliness came over him. He was lonely in his person, lonelier still in his inability to make any of his own people understand the gnawing hates and fears which had taken him first to Havana and then to San Juan and now—quién sabe? And then, realizing with an amused start that he was thinking in Spanish, he tore the net off the bed, threw the cigar away, and went to sleep.
Chapter two
Dr. Varela Ansaldo was traveling with his assistant, a young Dr. Marina, an American nurse named Geraldine Olmstead, and a Dominican passport. This much Hall was able to observe at the ground station, before the passengers for San Hermano and way points boarded the Stratoliner.
The Dominican passport interested Hall. He knew that the passports were for sale at an average price of a thousand dollars. Refugees starved and borrowed and sold their souls to scrape together a thousand dollars for one of the precious passports. When you met a Spaniard with a new Dominican passport, you seldom had to ask questions; you knew you were meeting a man whose life was not worth a nickel in Spain. And yet, in the day-old issue of Time the Clipper had flown in from Miami, the biography of Ansaldo carried no hint of the doctor's being in disfavor with Franco. Nor did the biography mention the physician's Dominican citizenship.
Hall read the Time biography again. Scrupulously impartial during the Spanish Civil War, Ansaldo took no sides, remaining at his post as a healer under both nationalist and loyalist flags. With the end of war, Ansaldo accepted a Chair offered by the Penn Medical Institute in Philadelphia, assuming new position in October, 1939. The story went on to describe some of the new operations Ansaldo had since performed.
Hall unbuckled his seat belt. He had a single seat on the left of the plane, the third seat from the front. Ansaldo's nurse had the seat in front of his. She sat across the aisle from Marina and Ansaldo, who shared a double seat. Hall sat opposite a pink-cheeked Dutchman of sixty who shared a seat with a very dark Brazilian. A State Department courier had the seat in front of the nurse. The other passengers included the wife of an American Army officer, some Panair officials, two Standard Oil engineers, and some quiet Latin American government officials on their way back from Washington.
Most of the passengers, now that the plane had gained altitude, were trying to sleep. The little Hollander was wide awake, virtuously and happily wide awake with the morning heartiness of a man who has been going to bed and rising early all of his life. He beamed at Hall. "I see you and I are the only ones who had a good night's sleep, Mr. Hall." Then, laughing, he explained that he had recognized Hall from the picture on the jacket of his book before he had even heard his name announced by the steward on boarding ship. His accent was slight, but definite.
"Yesterday," he said, gesturing at Hall's seat, "Miss Prescott—a charming lady, by the way—and today another American writer. Ah, well, the damn wheel turns and comes up twice with the same value. Oh, I forgot. My name is Wilhelm Androtten."
Hall extended his hand across the aisle, gripped the hand Androtten offered him. It was a pudgy little hand, soft and white and pink.
"Yes," Androtten sighed. "I have quite a hell of a story of my own to tell about enemy actions. I too have been
