The trace of a smile flitted across the long face of the night clerk. "I know," he said. "Pepe told me."
"I'll kill him," Hall laughed. "I'm going to bed. Leave a note in my box about when they get in."
He went to his room. When he turned on the light, he saw that a note had been slipped under his door. It was from Jerry. "Thanks for a lovely day," it said. "I will call you before I leave for the lab."
Chapter five
He was dreaming of the crowds in the bull ring at Badajoz, but there were no bulls on the sand. It was the day of the massacre, the day when the Portuguese troops herded the milicianos and their families and handed them over to the waiting franquistas on the Spanish side of the border. It was the day the franquistas shoved the Republican families on to the sand of the bull ring at Badajoz and set up the heavy machine guns in the boxes and fired away until every human being on the field lay choking and dying in his own blood. In his dream Hall saw grand ladies in mantillas in the boxes that day tossing roses and perfumed kerchiefs to the animals at the machine guns, and in his dream he even knew that the perfume on the kerchiefs came from a certain shop in Barcelona.
Then Hall spotted a crowd of German and Spanish officers in another box and he leaped at them, his right hand gripping the ugly clasp knife in his pocket. There were nine officers in the box, four of them Nazis and one a gaudy Italian colonel and the rest were Spanish fascists in capes and one of them wore a Requete beret, although his cape carried the golden embroidered five arrows of the Falange. They began to flee from their box in a panic, but Hall managed to get a quick look at one of the Spaniards and then flung his knife at the Spaniard's retreating back. Then the bells began to toll in the churches and carabineros left their machine guns and ran barehanded after Hall but the clang of the bells started to blot everything out and the church bells of Badajoz blended into the steady drone of a smaller bell in Hall's ears and he awoke to the phone bell which had abruptly brought him back to San Hermano.
"Did I wake you up?" It was Jerry.
"Yeah. What time?"
"Stop groaning. Wash your face and I'll call you back in five minutes."