"Please, viejo, I am in a hurry. Is anyone trying to take Don Pascual's place?"
"Ha!" The old man shifted in his chair. With withering scorn he raised his arm and pointed a handful of gnarled brown fingers at a door marked Prensa. There were many other men in San Hermano who pointed to things with just that gesture. Hall recognized the gesture at once. He had seen it for the first time in Geneva, when Anibal Tabio rose to make that gesture toward the pile of captured Italian and German military documents with which the Spaniards had tried to impress the League.
Hall smiled with compassion at the figure of the old man imitating the gesture of his idolized President.
"Go in, go in," the old man said, petulantly. "Go in and see that burro of a dolt who is trying to take Don Pascual's place."
"And has this burro a name?"
"The burro has a name. It is Valenti. Now you made me say the unspeakable name! Please, chico, in the name of my sainted mother and the Educator, go away!"
The old man's attitude told Hall more about what Gamburdo had already done to the Press Bureau than he could have learned in a week of routine digging. He handed the old man a cigar and a box of matches and walked through the door to Valenti's office. He found himself in a small anteroom facing a dark-haired girl pecking genteely at the keys of a typewriter with creamy fingers whose long nails were painted a deep blood red. She was immaculately groomed and pretty.
"I would like to see Señor Valenti," he said.
"Your name, Señor?"
So you had voice training, too, he thought. "Matthew Hall," he said. "I am a journalist from New York."