The Five Arrows. Chase Allan

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      Hall moved both the chair and the jug of hot coffee. From his new position, he could see that the leather folding frame on the desk contained two photos of what was evidently one person. One photo showed a young man of twenty-odd standing near a stone wall in what was undoubtedly England; the other photo was the young man as a laughing child in a pony cart.

      "I lost my boy," Fielding mumbled, absently. He tapped the ashes from his pipe out into an ash tray on the window sill, filled it again with new tobacco from a worn ostrich pouch. Hall could see a thin, rheumy film cover the Englishman's eyes.

      "The war?" Hall asked, softly, but if Fielding heard him he gave no indication that he had.

      Fielding held a lighted match over the filled bowl of his pipe, started it burning with deep, sucking draughts. "Ah, your book," he said, when the pipe was burning. "You are a man of courage, Hall. You showed real guts. The kind of guts our Nellie Chamberlain didn't have when England needed them most."

      Hall poured fresh coffee into both his and Fielding's cups. "Thank you," he said. "I tried to do it justice." He told him what the British censor in Cairo had said when he saw the manuscript.

      The grizzled Englishman took the pipe out of his mouth, looked at Hall with amazement and disgust. "British grit, my foot!" He bellowed. "The Revenger was doomed the day Nellie Chamberlain decided to back Franco. I'm talking about your other book, Hall, Behind Franco's Lines. Any fool can get a battleship shot out from under him, but it takes a man ..." Suddenly he stopped, because both Hall and he were looking at the photos of the young man who was once a laughing boy in a canary-colored pony cart.

      He opened the folder. A photostat of a multi-paged typewritten report lay on top of the neat pile of papers in the folder. "Now then, Hall, to get to the point. When I read that you had arrived in San Hermano, well, frankly, Hall, I thought it was the answer to my prayers. I know I'm a garrulous old man, but that comes from talking into the prevailing winds for so long that I just can't help myself."

      "I know what you mean," Hall said. "Only I never thought of it in that way. I thought of it in terms of talking to a blank wall."

      "Be it as it may, Hall, I don't think I'll be talking at a blank wall when I speak to you. As I said, there is a point to this meeting, and the point is brief. Hall, the Falange is in San Hermano, and it is up to much trouble."

      "The Falange!"

      "Oh, I know what you are thinking. Tabio made it illegal and it had to disband and all that. But Tabio's government never threw the whole Falange crowd into jail, where they belong, and they are still getting their orders from the Spanish Embassy."

      Hall passed a hand in front of his smarting eyes. "Did you say they're up to trouble?" he asked.

      "I said just that, Hall. Did you ever hear of the Cross and the Sword? Sounds like the name of a ha'penny thriller. Have you seen one of these since you arrived in San Hermano?" He handed Hall a gold lapel emblem; it was a sword with a blazing hilt, the letters ATN engraved across the cross piece of the hilt.

      "The ATN stands for Acción Tradicionalista Nacional, but no one calls them that any more than they call the Nazis by their formal name. You know, National German Socialist something or other. It's a bad business, Hall, a very bad business. The Cross and Sword, alias the Falange Española."

      "Are they very strong?"

      "They don't parade around the streets in their blue shirts as they did until Tabio clamped down in '40, and they don't pack the Cathedral in their Falange uniforms any more to hold special masses for the rotten soul of that young snot old Primo de Rivera whelped. The Cross and the Sword is not like that. But go to the San Hermano Country Club or a meeting of the Lonja de Comercio or to a fashionable party in the country and every tailored jacket you see will have a Cross and a Sword pinned to the lapel.

      "Go to a little country village the day after the local school teacher was murdered on some lonely dark road. The campesinos stand around muttering 'The Cross and the Sword is guilty,' and the next night the home of some local Spanish landowner goes up in smoke. Then it's only a matter of hours before the Cross and Sword members in San Hermano are raising hell because a fellow Cross and Sword member had his house burned down. They tell everyone that's what happens when you have a Red regime which forces a gentleman to sell his land to the government and then sells the land back to the peasants who have to borrow the money from the government to pay for the land."

      Hall turned the Cross and Sword emblem over in his fingers. "That's what happened in Spain," he said. "It happened in just that way."

      "Of course it did, Hall. Of course it did. Now look here. Look at this." From the bottom of the pile of documents in the folder, Fielding extracted a map of the nation's coastline.

      "Here," he said, "is the coast. Now note these islands. I have numbered some of them in red ink. Now take this island, Number Three. Looks like an ink blot, doesn't it, now? Not much of a place for anything. Just a bunch of volcanic caves and some quite useless land. Good for grazing a few head of sheep, but not too good even for that. Belongs to a chap named Segundo Vardenio. Been in his family for years, over three hundred years. Own the island, own thousands of acres on the shore facing the bloody island. I know the whole family. More Spanish than the Duke of Alba, that family.

      "Well, sir, they were all in the Falange. Segundo Vardenio was one of the big leaders of the Falange in the country. Used to wear his blue shirt and his boots and give his damned stiff-arm salute all over the place. And what do you think goes on at his island, Hall? I'll tell you. Oil and submarines, submarines and oil. The Vardenio lands on the shore are in sugar. They have a narrow-gauge Diesel railway of their own on the estates. Understand, Hall, a Diesel railway? The locomotives and the submarines burn the same type of oil."

      "German subs?"

      "Hun subs and only Hun subs, Hall. Look here. Look at this report. I sent it to the chief of Naval Intelligence at our Embassy. On the 29th of September, 1940, a Hun sub anchored off Vardenio's island. A small launch belonging to the Vardenio family towed the sub into the largest of the sea caves on the island. The sub took on a load of Diesel oil, fresh fruit, meat, cigars, razor blades and a sealed portfolio. I don't know what was in that portfolio. Three days later, the British freighter Mandalay, carrying beef and copper from San Hermano, was torpedoed and sunk by a Nazi submarine at approximately this point." Fielding held a ruler between an X mark in the ocean and the island.

      He continued to read the report aloud, running a bony finger under the words as he read them, pausing now and then to sneer at his detractors in the British Embassy or to chuckle at some particular sarcasm written into the report.

      The facts in the report were set forth in great detail. They dealt with other submarine anchorages, with the role of the Cross and the Sword on the waterfront, and with the beginnings of an organized ring of sabotage. The report ended with the account of the events which followed the visit of the Ciudad de Sevilla, a Spanish liner, to the port of San Hermano.

      "Look here, Hall," Fielding said. "Listen to this. On the twentieth of September, '41, the Ciudad de Sevilla docked in San Hermano at four-ten in the afternoon. At approximately five o'clock, the radio operator of the Spanish liner, one Eduardo Jimenez, left the ship and proceeded to a bar on the Paseo de Flores, the bar known as La Perrichola. There he met with two unidentified men, one of whom was later identified as a provincial leader of the Cross and the Sword. The three men went to a brothel near the waterfront, and at exactly ten o'clock left the brothel and got into a waiting sedan which, by a roundabout route, took them to Calle Galleano 4857, a quiet СКАЧАТЬ