Drumbeat Madrid Read online

  Drum Beat – Madrid

  Stephen Marlowe

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  For

  UNA AND CORWIN HUMBERT

  ONE

  The road climbed steeply to the top of the pass, leaving a final stand of wind-stunted pine trees behind like the fading memory of a softer landscape. Ahead loomed wrinkled gray hillsides that resembled the flanks of ponderous old elephants. The road plunged between them toward where a red and yellow Spanish flag was flapping above the border station in the high mountain wind.

  Axel Spade turned to me. “This is going to be good,” he said. He slowed the sleek Jaguar XK-E to a stop in front of the border station. A pair of hard-eyed members of the Guardia Civil hanging around outside gave us the once-over from under their patent leather hats. One of them turned a little, the butt of the machine pistol slung over his shoulder catching the sunlight. He looked at the Jag’s license plate. It was Swiss. He looked at Axel Spade and at me. He hooked a thumb under the shoulder strap of the machine pistol.

  “I mean,” Axel Spade said, “they may not have got word to the Guardia up here in the mountains. They expected us on the coast road at Irún.”

  But in July the coast road had been mobbed with tourist cars heading south. We’d come through the mountains instead.

  “And you’re wanted by the police in Spain,” I said. “What do we do, shoot our way across the border?”

  Axel Spade chuckled. “Naturally,” he said.

  We got out of the Jag and went inside the border station. A gray-haired man in a green uniform stood behind a long counter. A colored photograph of the Caudillo looked down unsmilingly on us. We plunked our passports down on the counter. The gray-haired man thumbed through them.

  “How long will you stay in Spain?” he asked in Spanish. He looked bored.

  “A week or ten days,” Axel Spade said.

  “Have you been to Spain before?”

  “Yes,” I said, and Axel Spade nodded.

  The gray-haired man turned to a bank of file drawers on the wall behind the counter. He pulled out the drawer marked D and flipped through the cards, looking for one with the name Chester Drum on it. I knew he wouldn’t find one. I’d managed to keep my nose clean on previous trips to Spain, not that it was always easy in my line of work. In Axel Spade’s it was impossible.

  The bank of file drawers contained what is called, in a gambling casino, the dirty file. You appear at the reception desk, well-dressed, shoes shined, wallet stuffed with the local currency, and they smile until they find your name on one of those little index cards. You passed a bad check in Monte Carlo. You were noisily drunk in Baden-Baden. You got into a scrap over the dice table in Évian. They all have a card on it. The receptionist’s smile goes away, and so do you.

  Spanish border stations come complete with dirty files too. Ordinarily at the bigger frontier posts like Irún or La Junquera they don’t look at them. But here in the mountains, where they get maybe twenty cars a day, they’re curious. There are plenty of reasons for a foreigner to become persona non grata in Spain. Though mellowing, Spain is still a police state.

  The gray-haired man smiled at me. I had passed muster. He pulled out the S drawer. Axel Spade nudged me with an elbow. He was a guy who enjoyed trouble, provided he could handle it. The gray-haired man lifted a card. His narrow shoulders stiffened. He turned slowly to face us. His nicotine-stained fingers were trembling.

  “You are Axel Spade?” He neither looked nor acted bored now.

  “That’s right.”

  “Axel Spade of New York and Geneva, Switzerland?”

  Spade admitted that too.

  “And you are entering Spain of your own free will?”

  Spade gave him a hard, tight smile. “Nobody is holding a gun at my back.”

  The gray-haired man looked as though he were going to change that. He came around the counter and ducked out the door. In a few moments he was back, leading the two Guardia Civil officers. They had unslung their machine pistols and were holding them at port arms.

  The gray-haired man cleared his throat, pointed a finger at Axel Spade and said, “Arrest that man.”

  “You were sure we’d save time coming through the mountains,” I said to Axel Spade.

  “It would have taken five hours to cross at Irún. Maybe six. You saw the traffic.” Spade didn’t seem worried, even when the two guards advanced on him.

  He raised a hand languidly, like a tired traffic cop at an uncrowded intersection. “I suggest you make one telephone call first,” he said.

  The gray-haired man said, “What you suggest is of no interest to me.”

  “Maybe I don’t understand,” Spade said. “Maybe you’re rich enough to retire without a pension.”

  The gray-haired man ignored that. “Put them both in back,” he told the guards, “as they are traveling together. Then call Madrid. His name is—”

  “—Axel Spade,” Spade said cheerfully. We were ushered behind the counter to a door. One of the guards unlocked it. I saw a bare room with a single cot, two wooden chairs and a barred window that looked out over the mountains.

  Spade turned and said over his shoulder, “Don’t call Madrid. Call Pamplona. It’s closer. The ranch of Don Santiago Sotomayor.”

  “Who?” said the gray-haired man.

  “Santiago Sotomayor. Tell him you’ve arrested me.”

  “Captain General Santiago Sotomayor?” asked the gray-haired man. He looked suddenly nervous. But the door still shut behind us. The lock clicked.

  Axel Spade had come to Spain to get married.

  That may not sound like much, but for anybody who knew him it was plenty. For anybody doubling as best man and bodyguard it was more than plenty. Spade attracts danger the way a heart-shaped red serge cloth draped on a wooden stick attracts a fighting bull.

  Axel Spade gives professional advice to black marketeers and smugglers. His going rates for an interview are a hundred bucks a half hour, and if you need the kind of advice Spade gives, a half hour of his time is the best investment you can make. Spanish taxes on everything from watches to automotive parts being what they are, Spain is a smuggler’s paradise, and Spade had probably schooled half the smugglers who ran contraband from Gibraltar to the Málaga coast.

  If you took a poll of the Guardia Civil, Axel Spade would have been voted the guy they would most like to get in a small, well-lighted room, where they could beat on his head with the butt ends of their machine pistols. Maybe they were going to do it now.

  We had time to smoke a couple of Spade’s thin black cigars before the door was unlocked. The gray-haired man stood in the doorway, stiffly at attention. He had put on a visored cap, and he was sweating. Behind him were the two guards, who had removed their patent leather hats. They looked naked without them.

  The gray-haired man didn’t quite salute. “Welcome to Spain, Señor Spade,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “A thousand pardons for my ridiculous mistake.”

  “No problem,” Spade said magnanimously.

  “If you require an escort to Pamplona—”

  “We’ll manage without one,” Spade said. He was grinning.

  The gray-haired man stamped our passports. The guards flanked us as we walked outside to the Jaguar. They had ditched their machine pistols. They put their hats back on as we climbed into the car, then saluted us and stood in the dust as we zoomed off. Spade took the XK-E to seventy in second gear.

  TWO

  The gate opened and a black and very angry two-year-old bull charged out into the plaza, skidded to a stop and looked around for something to hit with his horns. They weren’t the horns he’d develop in two more years, but th
ey were wide-spaced and already sharply pointed and could do plenty of damage.

  “Diano Segundo,” shouted the vaquero who had opened the toril gate. Even at the age of two years the bull Diano the Second had a formidable hump of muscle running from neck to shoulders, and the black tail shot straight out behind him as he spotted something to attack and lunged into a full gallop again. I began to appreciate the fact that I was seated on a bench behind the protective wooden barrera.

  What Diano Segundo had spotted, as he was supposed to, was a group of four horsemen across the plaza, directly under where I was sitting with Axel Spade. One of the horsemen broke away from the others, trotted toward the bull and then set his mount sideways to the line of charge.

  “This should really be something to see,” Axel Spade told me. “Old Sotomayor will do the pic-ing himself.”

  Captain General Santiago Sotomayor, ex-commander of the Guardia Civil and now a bull breeder, a fighting bull breeder, here in Navarre in the north of Spain, was wearing a picador’s round-crowned and round-brimmed hat, a picador’s embroidered jacket and a picador’s buff-colored trousers, but no protective armor on his right leg. The horse was protected, though, by a thick mattress strapped to his body on the right side.

  As Diano Segundo approached, moving very fast now, Sotomayor leaned out of the saddle, horse and horseman looming over the bull, and shot his vara home. It was a lance, eight feet long, and he drove it into the bull’s back just behind the shoulders. Diano tossed his head, trying to reach the horse with those horns. But at two years he wasn’t big enough yet, nor strong enough, not if the lance had been shot home just right, as it had. But nobody had told him that. He tried, the lance holding him off, and after a while they let the steers into the plaza, and they took him away.

  “Toro,” called out Captain General Santiago Sotomayor, indicating that Diano Segundo had passed his test by charging bravely and not cringing under the bite of the lance. Had he said “carne” instead, Diano’s career as a fighting bull would have ended before it began, and he would have been castrated, fattened on grain and sent to the slaughterhouse.

  When the toril gate had shut behind Diano and the steers, Sotomayor dismounted. That is, two vaqueros helped him from the specially constructed saddle that had made it possible for him to keep his seat astride and settled him into a folding wheelchair which a third vaquero had brought. They rolled it up a ramp to where I was sitting with Axel Spade. Sotomayor was semi-paralyzed from the waist down. Thirty years ago, before the Civil War, he had been a brilliant horseman and a rejoneador—a bullfighter, usually a member of the nobility, who does his fighting on horseback. Now he had enormous chest and shoulder development and sat very straight but could walk only with the aid of canes or crutches. He was sixty years old and had the coldest, most arrogant blue eyes I had ever seen. They looked even colder and more arrogant when his chair had been rolled into the wide aisle next to Axel Spade.

  “I thank you for coming to the testing,” he said swiftly and formally in Spanish.

  Spade answered in the same language, which I understood and spoke as well as he did. “It was a pleasure watching you work, maestro,” he said.

  “That will be much toro, that one,” Sotomayor replied, his eyes briefly going soft. “Could you tell?”

  “The way he kept trying to get at the horse,” Spade said.

  “Yes, and with his lips clamped and no foolish snorting. They don’t test two-year-olds much nowadays. Only the mothers of fighting bulls. It is a pity.” His blue eyes went hard again. “Did you sleep well?”

  Spade said that he had slept well, and I nodded. My nod was a waste of effort. Sotomayor did not like Axel Spade and did not hide his dislike. But I was a hired hand and as such beneath contempt. Sotomayor wouldn’t have asked one of his vaqueros if he’d slept well, nor the over-age picador who was now testing another bull in the plaza. Then why ask a private detective who had come to Spain as Axel Spade’s bodyguard?

  “I regret the trouble you had at the border yesterday.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Anyway, you cleared it up fast.”

  We had arrived at the ranch outside Pamplona late the afternoon before. Sotomayor hadn’t greeted us. His butler saw that we were fed and tucked into a guest suite in the big ranch house, where we found a note saying we could see Sotomayor at the bull-ring in the morning. The note, written in the third person and unsigned, managed to be patronizing. I didn’t think that was because Spade was an outlaw in more than twenty countries on four continents, until yesterday Spain included.

  Spade’s bride-to-be was the niece of Captain General Santiago Sotomayor, which was just a cut or two below being the niece of the Caudillo himself. But that didn’t mean Sotomayor had to like it. His niece would become—count them—Spade’s sixth wife.

  Sotomayor leaned over the barrera and turned his right thumb down like a Roman emperor signaling death for a fallen gladiator. The bull they had just tested, instead of trying to come in under the horse with his horns, had snorted, pawed at the sand with his forehooves, shied away from the first touch of the pic and trotted off. “Carne,” said Sotomayor a little sadly, and the steers came in and led the cowardly bull away.

  I got the impression that the Captain General would turn a thumb down as readily on a human being. Maybe, I decided, that was why Axel Spade had hired me.

  It took some doing to upstage Santiago Sotomayor, but Axel Spade was the center of attention at the party the old Captain General gave in his honor that night:

  The party began late, as most Spanish parties do. It was a big shindig, although smaller than the annual garden party at Buckingham Palace, with maybe three hundred people milling about in the salons of the ranch house drinking Dom Perignon champagne and toasting the groom-to-be, who was present, and the bride-to-be, who was not. Wearing a formal white uniform and a chest full of medals, Sotomayor held court in the grand salon in his wheelchair under the mounted head of a bull he’d fought as a rejoneador thirty years before in the big Plaza de Toros de Madrid. This was Rico, an enormous Miura bull with horns wider around at the base than a man’s biceps, a bull like the one that had killed Manolete, a bull that Sotomayor had killed finally, after dismounting, with a rare and perfect sword-thrust recibiendo that they still talked about after thirty years. That had been the Captain General’s day of glory in a life full of glory, and the toadies surrounding his wheelchair didn’t let him forget that they remembered it.

  At about ten o’clock I wandered over to where he was holding court. By then most of the guests had arrived and Axel Spade didn’t seem to need protection from the bevy of Spanish beauties wearing high combs in their hair and black lace mantillas, that surrounded him. Maybe I was jealous. There are no girls more beautiful than upper-class Spanish señoritas.

  “Yes, of course I await her arrival with a certain amount of … trepidation,” Sotomayor was saying. “It is like dismounting and waiting on foot for the first rush of a bull that you know can charge straight and true as though he were on railroad tracks.”

  “Like the Miura in Madrid, Don Santiago,” a French army colonel, who was his country’s military attaché at the summer capital in San Sebastián, said with an unctuous smile. Sotomayor’s arrogant blue eyes gave him a withering look and he shut up.

  “When will Señorita Robles reach the ranch?” someone asked.

  “Soon, soon. Her brother José is flying her up from Madrid. They have only met this past week, since he grew up here on the Continent and Luz was raised in Venezuela. I of course have not seen her since she was a child.”

  “José,” said the French army colonel, and obviously it wasn’t his night. “That would be the youngest child of your brother Hernando?”

  There came one of those sudden, heavy silences. Even people far across the big room were affected by it, looking in Sotomayor’s direction as though he had conveyed his anger telepathically. His deeply lined face had drained white. His big hands clutched the arms of the wheelchair.
He said in a low, rasping voice, “You will never mention that name in this house again. It is forbidden. It is absolutely forbidden, señor.”

  “I am sorry, Don Santiago,” the French colonel said, flustered. It was a hot night, and his red face was covered with a sheen of sweat. “Naturally I have heard the stories about you and your bro—”

  With a quick, flicking motion of both hands Sotomayor propelled his wheelchair in the colonel’s direction. The Frenchman could either stand his ground and risk being run down or skip awkwardly out of the way. He skipped awkwardly out of the way, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, and Sotomayor rolled by and called a greeting to someone at the buffet table. The conversation under the mounted head of the Miura bull named Rico was desultory after that. I went outside to the terrace.

  Axel Spade was a good enough actor to hide his nervousness. He flashed brilliant white teeth at a quartet of señoritas in mantillas and said, offhandedly, “… cost the French government ten million dollars once it had been decided that the counterfeit coins were nothing more than trinkets.” The mention of that sum brought appropriate oohs and ahs from his audience, and Spade smiled again. Then he glanced at his wristwatch, scowled and pursed his lips. Luz was late and he didn’t like it.

  The brilliant white teeth looked like store teeth but weren’t. To go with the teeth, everything about Spade had a slightly artificial or too well-groomed look—the sleek black hair going to white at the temples and splitting his forehead in a sharp widow’s peak, the dark eyes nesting in crow’s feet, the perfectly cut white dinner jacket, and the studs and cuff-links that bore Spade’s hallmark on a silver background, a black ace of spades. He looked a little too much like the Axel Spade that Artzybasheff had caricatured for a Time cover, smiling faintly at you while an assortment of Rube Goldberg machines all around him were busily ingesting and disgorging a dozen different kinds of currency, all earned illegally.

  “This is my good friend and best man, Chester Drum,” Spade introduced me, only a little reluctantly. “He is a private detective.”