Drumbeat Madrid Read online

  “A detective?” two of the señoritas said in unison and on a proper note of awe. Their reaction would have been the same had Spade said a certified public accountant or a chimney sweep. Whenever you need some ego-boosting, go to Spain and meet the señoritas.

  “But isn’t it odd, Señor Spade, a detective and an international financier, friends?”

  Axel Spade and I weren’t really friends. Starting with the time I’d saved the daughter of his first marriage from a homicide rap, I’d handled maybe half a dozen cases for him. It had surprised me when he’d called my Geneva office to invite me down to Spain as best man at his wedding, and he’d sensed that and tempered my surprise by offering me a job as bodyguard as well. I had the notion that there was something besides matrimony up his sleeve. Well, he’d let me know when the time came. Meanwhile I was being paid, and I like Spain.

  “What is it like, being a detective?” one of the señoritas asked.

  “Sometimes it’s work,” I said. “But not now. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “Oh, you looked so serious when you said that.”

  Spade glanced at his watch again, anxiously. “You are right,” he said. “He is a very serious man. He makes a splendid bodyguard.”

  “He is your bodyguard?”

  “I have many enemies,” Spade said gravely, “even here in your country. Perhaps most of all here in your country. But Señor Drum will do my worrying for me. I came here to get married.”

  I said dryly, “I sort of remember the last time you were going to get married.”*

  “We won’t talk about that,” Spade said hastily.

  “And are you married, Señor Drum?” one of the señoritas asked me, her dark eyes flashing.

  “I was. It didn’t work out. I’m divorced.”

  “Qué lástima. What a pity—but for you, not for us. Had it been a girl of Spain, who knows how to care for her man.… But in any event I for one like a man who has lived, who has been tempered by a bad marriage, even though the sisters taught us—”

  “Carmen,” another señorita said, “I think you have had a little, a very little too much of Don Santiago’s splendid champagne.” She turned to me, masking her red mouth with a fluttering black fan. “Will you remain in Navarre long, señor?”

  “A week. Till the wedding.”

  “Then you will see the running of the bulls in Pamplona as well,” said Carmen. “How fortunate.”

  As though Carmen’s allusion to the running of the bulls were his cue, a big man shouldered his way through the French doors that led out to the terrace. He glanced at me, and at Spade, and back at me. With his crewcut and rugged good looks he might have been an All-American fullback who had managed to keep in shape a few years after the final touchdown. He was my size, which is six-one, and just as wide across the shoulders. He looked mad.

  “Which one of your guys is Spade?” he said. Nobody answered right away, but I took a step that brought me between him and Axel Spade.

  “Got to be you,” he told me with a sneer. “You’re about the right age and the type Luz would go for. I ought to know,” he shouted.

  “Why don’t you kind of calm down?” I suggested.

  “I’m MacNeil Hollister, you bastard,” he said by way of calming down.

  I said, “I think you have had a little, a very little too much of Don Santiago’s splendid champagne.” Carmen’s black fan fluttered nervously in front of her red lips. She giggled.

  “I got only one thing to say to you, you bastard,” MacNeil Hollister said to me.

  That gave me the idea that the light approach might not work. “Say that about one more time,” I told him, “and you’ll wake up with a mouthful of loose teeth.”

  He said, “Thanks for making it easy,” and swung at me, powerfully but awkwardly and not unexpectedly. I sighed, went in under the big right fist, turned my back on him, clamped a double wristlock on his arm and applied enough pressure to make him groan.

  “Tough guy,” he said. “She’d also go for a tough guy. You let go, I’ll show you what tough can be.” He had the good sense, though, not to struggle. There is nothing that can soften a pugnacious type more swiftly than a double wristlock. One wrong move and you can break his arm at the elbow like a thin slat of orange crate. There is nothing more ignominious either. MacNeil Hollister had to do his talking to the back of my neck.

  The señoritas had formed a half-circle around us. Their eyes were very big. “This gentleman here is Mr. Spade,” I said mildly. “Mr. Spade, this seems to be a fellow named MacNeil Hollister. He says he has one thing to say to you. I say he can say it and then scram. How does that sound?”

  “Let go of him,” Axel Spade said.

  That surprised me, but I shrugged and released Hollister’s arm. I stood poised, though, ready for trouble.

  Hollister rubbed his right wrist with his left hand. He smirked. “You’re Spade?”

  “I’m Spade.”

  “You? Hell, I can’t fight with an old guy like you.”

  I began to relax. I decided MacNeil Hollister would be a swell guy to play poker with if you wanted to build a bankroll.

  “You’re here for the wedding?” Spade said. “In your place I might not have been so—understanding.”

  “I had to see you with my own eyes.” Hollister shook his head, as though, now that he had seen Spade with his own eyes, he couldn’t quite believe it. “An old guy like you. I bet you’re loaded.”

  Spade smiled a cold, faint copy of the brilliant smile he had flashed at the señoritas. He said nothing.

  “I guess Luz wants some of the good life for herself. I guess she realized she couldn’t get that from a light colonel in the army. Even Uncle Sugar’s army,” he added for the benefit of the señoritas.

  “Yes, of course, the army,” Spade said. “And you’re stationed in Madrid?” All of a sudden he seemed interested in what MacNeil Hollister had to say.

  “No. Zaragoza.”

  “But you came here by way of Madrid? Did you see Luz?”

  “I drove straight through. How the hell could I see her now?” Hollister asked, his voice going querulous with self-pity.

  Spade’s interest waned. “Well, I hope we can be friends.”

  “Take care of her,” Hollister said under his breath.

  “I intend to.”

  “Take care of her.” This time it sounded more like a warning.

  “I said I intend to.”

  “Take care of her,” MacNeil Hollister said truculently, his face about six inches from Spade’s, “or I’ll break your goddamn back. That’s what I came here to say.”

  “Okay,” I told him. “You said it. Now get lost.”

  “Yeah, what are you, his keeper or something?”

  “Beat it,” I said. It is very easy to dislike a tough guy whose muscles are mostly in his mouth, but I felt a little sorry for MacNeil Hollister.

  He left the terrace, grumbling and taking his torch with him. “A colonel,” Axel Spade mused. “In the army. He’s like a little boy.”

  “Luz’s old boyfriend?”

  “Yes. He was the American military attaché in Caracas, Venezuela. They were never officially engaged, and he’d already been transferred to Spain when I went to Venezuela on business. Where I met Luz.” He looked at his watch and scowled. “What time do you have?”

  “Almost eleven-thirty.”

  “They’re very late, Luz and her brother.”

  I looked up at the star-filled sky. “Perfect flying weather. Relax. You know the Spaniards. Punctuality isn’t exactly a virtue with them.”

  “I suppose you are right,” Spade said. For the first time that evening his middle-European accent was pronounced, a sure sign that Axel Spade was worried.

  It was a party like any other jet-set party in Spain or elsewhere until two-thirty in the morning. An Englishwoman named Tyson, a wealthy widow who lived on Mallorca with a retired gigolo, collapsed dead drunk at the buffet table and was carried upstairs b
y a couple of flunkies who managed it as effortlessly as a maid sweeping dust under a corner of the carpet. An American remittance-man couple up from Torremolinos had one of those cold-eyed and harsh-whispered fights where you think they’re going to start swinging or pulling knives any second and the next minute they were dancing plastered against each other from knee to cheek. The band played a paso doble and a bullfighter’s lady got a muleta somewhere and did the pass of death, using a somewhat more drunken MacNeil Hollister as her bull. A sallow-faced old man predicted that the Prince of Bourbon-Parma would be sitting on the throne in Madrid, with Franco’s blessings, before Franco was laid to rest in the Valley of the Fallen. A fat Guardia Civil colonel told the joke about the Russian astronaut who landed on the moon only to find that a Spaniard, a member of the Falange, had beaten him there by building a stairway across a quarter of a million miles of space, using crouching soldiers as risers and prone priests as steps. Four Germans held a long and earnest discussion as to whether bullfighting should be regarded as an art or a sport. They came to no definite conclusion. An American oilman named Perry toppled from the terrace outside the grand salon, had his fall broken by a chirimoya tree and wound up with a badly sprained knee. Three matadors who would fight in Pamplona next week prowled the salons restlessly, giving hot-eyed appraisal to every woman under forty, most of whom liked it.

  At two-thirty, back on the terrace, I heard the drone of a plane. Sotomayor’s vaqueros must have heard it too. In a few moments two long lines of blue landing lights winked on beyond the bull ring. It was quite a ranch.

  Axel Spade poked his head out the French doors. He flashed his brilliant smile, all the worry gone from his face now. “Come on. They’re picking her up in the station wagon.”

  It was a big, four-door Chrysler wagon. Sotomayor was already seated in back, the wheelchair folded on the floor at his feet. Spade joined him. I climbed in front with the chauffeur. That left the middle seat for Luz and her brother José. We went bouncing along the unpaved road past the bull ring.

  The plane, a small two-engine job, was just taxiing up when we got there. The chauffeur unfolded Sotomayor’s wheelchair and the Captain General rolled toward the runway, Axel Spade and I flanking him on either side a couple of paces back.

  The door of the plane opened, and a man got out. He was wearing a light leather jumper and a crash helmet. He stepped down onto the wing and from the wing to the ground. He posed there, holding the wing tip with one hand. A white silk scarf, draped carelessly around his neck, fluttered in the slight breeze.

  We all looked at the gaping door of the plane. We waited. No one else came through it.

  “Good evening, nephew,” Sotomayor said formally. “A good flight?”

  “A good flight, uncle.”

  Axel Spade was still looking at the door of the plane.

  José kept staring at his uncle.

  “Well?” demanded Santiago Sotomayor. He was also looking up at the door.

  “Isn’t she here?” José asked. “Clearly, she must be here.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Sotomayor said in a very soft voice. “If you mean your sister Luz, she is not here. How could she be here, when you were supposed to bring her? Is this some joke? Where is she?”

  “I don’t know, uncle.” José clutched at the white silk scarf, like a man at a funeral conscious of the fact that he cut too dashing a figure for the solemnity of the occasion. “We met in Madrid at the Ritz bar at noon. She had some shopping to do, she said. We were to meet later at the airport. I waited. She did not come. Still I waited. And then, at last, she sent a note saying she was afraid to fly with, her señorito of a brother and had decided to take the train to Pamplona instead. I flew here alone.”

  “She took no train. She never reached Pamplona. Or the ranch.”

  “I don’t get it,” Axel Spade said in English.

  “Señorito. Señorito is right,” said Sotomayor contemptuously. “You will come closer.”

  José took two steps and stood in front of the wheelchair. “Can you do nothing right?” Sotomayor asked him.

  “I am sorry, uncle,” José said.

  The old man’s muscular torso seemed to expand upward. Sotomayor raised his right hand and struck his nephew, hard, on both cheeks. José lurched back, knuckling at a smear of blood on his upper lip.

  “She sent a note,” Sotomayor said. “So you flew here by yourself. No call to me. Nothing. You just flew here. She sent a note.”

  José clamped his lips tight. “I regret that I have displeased you, uncle.”

  “You regret. She sent a note.”

  The other note, the ransom note, reached the ranch in the morning.

  * See Francesca by Stephen Marlowe

  THREE

  Kidnaping, like baseball, is a particularly American pastime. It is a rare crime in Europe and almost unheard of in Spain. Which means that European and Spanish police don’t know how to handle a kidnaping. Which means that the odds against the victim returning alive are increased, and they are bad enough to begin with.

  Axel Spade knew that, and I knew it, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. By eleven o’clock the next morning we had worn a pair of grooves in the carpeting of our suite at Santiago Sotomayor’s ranch. The old Captain General had shown Spade the ransom note, but after that we were out of it. The note was the usual thing, individual letters from various newspapers and magazines pasted on a sheet of coarse yellow paper.

  “They want three million pesetas,” Spade told me. “That’s fifty thousand dollars. Christ, Sotomayor could pay it out of petty cash, or I could. But the important thing is not to scare them, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. “They’re probably watching the ranch.”

  “Of course they are,” Spade said. “And the ranch looks like a command post before a major battle.”

  If anything he had understated it. The ranch looked like a command post before one of the fifteen decisive battles of history. The old Captain General had turned for help to his friends in the Guardia Civil, which he had once commanded. Gray-green uniforms, patent leather hats and machine pistols were all over the place. Fresh squadrons of the Guardia kept roaring up on motorcycles. The sudden appearance of a battalion of heavy tanks wouldn’t have surprised me. The lack of cooperation of the kidnapers and the death of their victim would have surprised me less.

  Spade was chain-smoking small black cigars. He turned from the window and blew a cloud of smoke and said through it, “What would you do?”

  “Two things. Seem to cooperate here at the ranch. I wouldn’t have a man in uniform within fifty miles of here.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Spade said glumly.

  “And retrace Luz’s footsteps in Madrid yesterday. Quietly.”

  “Quietly,” Spade said with bitterness just as a pair of motorcycles came roaring up outside. “But how do you mean cooperate here at the ranch?”

  “They’ll get in touch with Sotomayor again. They have to, to set up the delivery of the money. Unless the Guardia scares them off.”

  “And then what?”

  “You already said it. Sotomayor can afford the ransom. Then I’d pay it.”

  “Is that what the FBI would have recommended?” Spade knew I’d served a two-year hitch in the bureau before hanging out my shingle and going private.

  I shrugged. “They leave that to the family of the victim. They’d probably want to mark the money to show up in cold light, and take the serial numbers too. But they sure as hell wouldn’t go wandering all over the map like an army on bivouac.”

  Spade bared his teeth, more in a grimace than a smile. He headed for the door. “I’m going to see Sotomayor. If I tell him you were FBI, maybe he’ll let you take over.”

  I didn’t point out that it was probably too late for that.

  Spade returned in ten minutes. His face looked gray.

  “Well?”

  “He wouldn’t see me. He’s in his office, with a couple of guards ou
tside. They wouldn’t let me in.”

  We waited through the long, hot afternoon. The household still functioned efficiently. Lunch was brought at two-thirty. Spade picked at his food. I ate hungrily. “Hold it,” Spade told the maid in English when she had finished piling our dishes on a tray. She gave him a blank look and in Spanish he said, almost snarling at her, “Wait a minute. I have something for Don Santiago.”

  He scrawled a note and showed it to me. It briefly outlined my background and urged the Captain General to take me into his confidence. It pointed out humbly, almost with hat in hand, that Spade loved Luz too. The maid took the note and left.

  She returned with cocktail fixings at five o’clock.

  “Did you deliver it?”

  “What, señor?”

  “My letter. To Don Santiago.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  The maid looked frightened. There had been no answer. I mixed us each a martini. Spade just looked at his. “Go on and drink it. Do you good.”

  Spade’s hand shook when he raised the glass. I had never seen him lose his composure before. “That son of a bitch is going to get her killed,” he said. He drank the martini down in two quick gulps. I had made it on-the-rocks and he poured straight gin over the ice in his glass and drank that too. Then he left our suite again. This time he was gone just five minutes.

  “They almost threw me out. Don Santiago wants no interference, they said.”

  The evening shadows lengthened. I stretched out on my bed and smoked and stared at the ceiling and wondered, for the fifth time, if maybe I ought to take off for Madrid now, in Axel Spade’s Jaguar. But I wouldn’t get very far retracing Luz’s steps in the capital without Sotomayor’s blessing. Madrid wasn’t Washington.

  At dusk Spade called me to the window. Our suite was in the front of the ranch house. “Take a look at this.”

  With the aid of his canes, Sotomayor was climbing into the rear seat of the big station wagon. His chauffeur was just getting in front. A couple of other guys held down the middle seat. At least they weren’t wearing uniforms.