The Five Arrows Part 1

The Five Arrows.

by Allan Chase.

_Chapter one_

The governor's wife pointed across the bay to a speck in the black sky.

Ground lights in Catanzas were focusing their blue shafts on the speck, moving as the plane moved, one light trying to lead the ship.

A thin stream of glowing red and orange tracer bullets soared up at the plane from the Catanzas side of the bay. A moment pa.s.sed before the Governor's guests on the terrace of La Fortaleza could hear the m.u.f.fled thud-thud of the distant ground batteries. Someone, the wife of a visiting government official, exclaimed, "My goodness, I've only seen this in the newsreels before!"

Now the plane veered, slowly, and the lights from the San Juan side joined the Catanzas batteries in pinning the plane to the dark clouds.

The sleeve target fastened to the tail of the plane could now be seen from the terrace. Most of the Governor's guests gasped as the first bright jets of tracers missed the silver sleeve and sailed into the black void above it. The ack-ack batteries were speaking with more harshness now; one of them, planted between two brick buildings, added crashing echoes to their own reports as the guns went off.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor was still very much a topic of conversation on the island; the submarine nets in the bay were joked about at the dinner table, but the jokes arose from a profound sense of grat.i.tude for the nets, the planes, the ships which were the island's defenses against the undersea raiders that stalked the sea lanes between the ports of the mainland and San Juan.

The plane shifted course again, now headed directly toward La Fortaleza.

Through the increasing din of the ground guns, the Governor's young military aide, Lieutenant Braga, could barely hear the ring of the telephone nearest the terrace. He took the call, then returned to the terrace and tapped one of the guests on the shoulder. "It's for you, Mr.

Hall," he said. "It's Tom Harris at Panair."

Matthew Hall stood up quietly and walked into the cavernous reception room. He walked carefully, with the steel-spring tread of a man who seems to expect the floor to blow up under him at any moment. For thirty-three years Matthew Hall had walked as other men. Since he was not conscious of his new walk, he could not say when it had become part of him. His friends had first noticed it in Paris, in '39, but had expected it to wear off as soon as the prison pallor disappeared. The pallor had gone; the walk remained.

Hall's head and shoulders and hands were part of this walk. He moved with his head forward and his shoulders hunched, with his hands slightly c.o.c.ked, almost like a fighter slowly advancing to mid-ring. The shoulders were broad and thick, so broad that although Hall was of more than average height they made him appear shorter and chunky.

The face of Matthew Hall had changed, too, with his walk. There were the obvious changes: the deep channel of a scar on his broad forehead, the smaller one on his right jaw. The nose had changed twice, the first time in 1938 when it was broken in San Sebastian. It had swelled enormously and then knit badly and nearly two years later a New York surgeon had done an expensive job of rebreaking and resetting the nose. Some bones had been taken out and the once cla.s.sic lines were now slightly flattened. The scars and the dented nose blended strangely well with the jaws that had always been a bit too long and the soft brown poet's eyes which had so often betrayed Hall. With his eyes, Hall spoke his contempt, his anger, his amus.e.m.e.nt, his joy. The eyes unerringly spoke his inner feelings; they were always beyond his control.

Changes more subtle than the scars and the flattened nose had come over Hall's face within the past few years. It now had a queer, angry cast.

His lips seemed to be set in a new and almost permanent grimace of bitterness. Also the right side of his face, the cheek and the mouth, had a way of twitching painfully when Hall was bothered and upset. And yet, as Governor d.i.c.kenson had already noted, Hall was not a completely embittered man. More often than not, his eyes would light up with a look of amused irony, the look of a man much moved by an immense private joke he would be glad to share with his friends if he but knew how to tell it properly.

When Hall had risen to leave the terrace, the Governor noticed that his cheek was twitching, but once he was alone in the reception room, away from the sight of the tracers and the target plane, Hall's face grew calm again. He sat down in the green armchair near the phone, picked up the receiver. "Yes, Tom," he said, "any luck?"

"Sure. I busted open a seat for you on the San Hermano plane for tomorrow at six."

"Was it much trouble, Tom?"

"Not much." Tom Harris laughed. "We had to throw Giselle Prescott off to make room for you. Know her?"

"G.o.d, no! But thanks a lot."

"I'll pick you up in the morning then. Good night, Matt."

Hall put the receiver back on the cradle. He sat back in the soft chair, oblivious of the crashing guns, the hum of the plane's engines, the others on the terrace. Only one thing was in his mind now--San Hermano.

It was some time before the young Puerto Rican lieutenant slipped gingerly into the room. "Mr. Hall," he said, softly, "everything O.K.?"

Hall smiled warmly. "My G.o.d," he asked, "you don't think the guns drove me in here?"

The officer blushed. "Fix you a drink?" he asked.

Hall shook his head, drew two Havanas from his jacket. "No, thanks.

Cigar? It's from the one box I remembered to buy in Havana."

The boy was a non-smoker. He lit a match for Hall, waited until the older man relaxed with the burning cigar. Politely, he said, "I know you've been through plenty, Mr. Hall. I'm a soldier, but if ..."

"Plenty? Me?"

The lieutenant nodded. "_The Revenger_," he said, hesitantly. "I--I read your book."

"Oh, that," Hall said. "_The Revenger_." So _The Revenger_ was plenty!

"If there's anything I can get you ..."

The boy's voice seemed to come from far away and Hall realized that he himself was staring into s.p.a.ce and that the lieutenant must have sat there for a full minute waiting for an answer. "I'm sorry," he said.

"I'm really sorry. I guess I just get this way once in a while."

"It's my fault," Braga protested. "I should have known how hard it must be for you to talk about--it."

"_De nada_," Hall laughed. "I made a lecture tour last year and spent five nights a week talking about it for months. It's just that I'm--well, that I just catch myself staring at nothing at the craziest times. Maybe I do need that drink. What's in the shaker there--Daiquiri?

Good." He poured two Daiquiris from the jar on the sideboard, handed one to the lieutenant. "I know you don't drink, either," he said. "But I'm having this drink to toast victory--and you're a soldier."

When they touched gla.s.ses, the boy saw that amused look in Hall's eyes, the look he had seen earlier at the dinner table when one of the visiting officials had expressed such innocent amazement at the enormity of his first taxi bill in San Juan. "I'd better go back out there when I finish this drink," he said. "I'm glad nothing's wrong with you."

"You're a right guy, Lieutenant. Thanks for looking in." Hall returned to his chair as the boy walked out to the terrace. So _The Revenger_ was plenty! And the kid, how old was he? Twenty? Not a day more. Which made him eighteen when the n.a.z.i torpedo planes peeled off over the African skies and then roared in to send their tin fish into the guts of His Majesty's own _Revenger_. Which made him fourteen when the fighting began, fourteen when the German pilot officers clicked their heels and mouthed the new phrase "_Arriba Espana_" and flew the Moors from Spanish Morocco to the mainland and touched off the shooting stages of World War II. "_Ay, Teniente_," he muttered, "you've made me feel old as h.e.l.l.

Older."

Hall leaned back in his chair, tried to blow a series of smoke rings. He thought: But I'm not old. I've just seen things and done things and had things done to me. I'm not old at all.

After years of anonymity in various city rooms in the States, a brief turn as a byline correspondent in Washington, a still briefer career as a Broadway playwright, Matthew Hall had drawn an a.s.signment as third-string man for the World Press in Paris. That was in 1935, when he was crowding thirty. The job had introduced him to Europe, and carried him to Geneva, to Belgrade, to Bucharest, to Stockholm. Paris was the journalistic capital of the Continent; when things happened outside of Paris, it was a Paris man who was sent to the scene to cover. There he would find that the office had adequate coverage in the permanent man, and if he had any curiosity or craftsman's pride he would try to get the story behind the story. Hall had both. They led him to the strange half-world of tipsters, hounded opposition leaders, minor officials of ministries who would talk and produce doc.u.ments for a fee, candid and cynical free-lance agents, wise old frightened politicians who sensed the coming catastrophe in their bones, correct and stiff n.a.z.i advance agents and politely lavish native fascists who mixed queer brews for foreign correspondents. They were the _sources close to a key ministry, the influential elder statesmen, the prominent industrialists whose names cannot be used_ who figured so prominently in the inside-Europe dispatches of the era.

July, 1936, had found Hall in Nice spending a long week-end as the guest of a prominent refugee banker from Germany. The banker was the "inside"

prophet of the month in Parisian newspaper circles. His gospel was the slightly shopworn one about German industry being fed up with Hitler and willing to settle on Goering, Danzig and a few worthless colonies in Africa as the price for eliminating the "extreme n.a.z.is" and returning to the family of Europe. "He's a d.a.m.ned n.a.z.i himself," Hall had declared when the invitation reached his office, but the bureau manager was missing no bets. "I don't care what he is, Matt. He's a story. He's news. He's what they want to read about in Washington and in London and in Paris."

Hall never wrote his story on the refugee banker (who later turned up as a n.a.z.i economist overlord in Denmark). On a blistering Sunday Paris had called him by phone. h.e.l.l was popping in Madrid. The regular Madrid man was vacationing in the States. "Get to Madrid, Matt. Looks like you'll be busy there for a couple of weeks until it blows over."

Like many of his American colleagues, Hall traveled to Madrid during that first week of the war with the idea that in less than a month one side or another would have been installed in power and he himself would be back in Paris listening to the latest faker peddling the newest line of disguised n.a.z.ism from Berlin. But Hall was an honest man. What he saw interested and then intrigued and then enraged him. "This is no Spanish Civil War," he wrote to the Paris office in a confidential memo sent by courier. "This is the start of the second World War. It's the Germans and the Italians against the Spaniards. Maybe I'm crazy, but it looks to me like the British and the French are backing the fascists, while the Russians are trying to help the Republicans. How about sending someone in to cover the shooting for a week while I write a big story along these lines?"

He was answered in due time. "Stick to the military conflict between the Nationalists and the Loyalists. And don't send us any Red propaganda."

That was in October, when Caballero was preparing to quit Madrid in panic, and the Fifth Army was calmly preparing to hold the city, Caballero or no Caballero. Hall had long since lost his magnificent WP objectivity. Through the open mails he sent a letter of resignation to Paris. Antin in the Censura held the letter up, sent for Hall. The Spaniard hemmed and hawed and cleared his throat a dozen times and then he got up from his desk and embraced Hall and told him to sit down.

Hall's Spanish was pretty good by then, good enough for Antin to speak to him in fluent Spanish rather than halting English. "The English I can read with my eyes. The Spanish I speak with my heart."

Was it that Hall was resigning because he loved the Republic? Yes, I guess you could call it that. (You could also call it a good craftsman's stubborn ideas about how to cover a war, but you didn't.) Did Hall realize that, if he quit, an enemy of the Republic might be sent to take his place? No, Hall didn't think. Come to think of it, though, the office had Cavanaugh and Raney available and those two Jew-haters and Mussolini-lovers would be no friends of the Republic. You are a friend, a _companero_, it is right that you know. We have so many problems with the foreign press. McBain from New York, we know he is a spy, he has links with the Falange. If we arrest him, the world hollers Red Terror.

So we watch him, keep all his letters, hold up his cables. Thank G.o.d he is a drunkard; two SIM men keep him drunk most of the time. Maybe his office will fire him. You are a friend. You write the truth. Even a little truth by a friend whose editor chops up his cables helps the Republic.

Hall tore up his letter of resignation. When the Republic captured thousands of Italians after Guadalajara and Bruejega, Hall filed long stories based on interviews with the Blackshirts. When the Republic captured n.a.z.i Condor officers and men at Belchite, Hall sent photographs of their doc.u.ments to Paris with his stories.