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.