Dennis Wheatley - Vendetta in Spain

'Yes,' he nodded. 'That would be quite a different matter. But think of the implications.'

'I did, for most of the night. I love you, Armand. I would go anywhere with you; and I'd like to go to South America.'

He shook his head. 'I'd love to take you there. But I couldn't, Gulia. It's out of the question. You are a Roman Catholic; so you can't get a divorce. How could I expose a woman like you to social ostracism when it leaked out that we were not married?'

T don't see why it should become known out there if we planned things carefully.'

'Such things always do. But, Gulia, we really mustn't attempt to settle anything without giving the whole matter most careful thought. And I must go now, or I'll miss my train.'

'Very well, then. Kiss me before you go.'

As he took her in his arms she put hers round his neck and drew his face towards hers. Their mouths met in a long, rich kiss. For a full minute they held one another in a firm embrace, then she released him and murmured, 'Go now, dear love. May God protect you and bring you safely back to me.'

Half dazed by the heady emotion her kiss had aroused in him, he gave her a lingering smile, then turned and walked quickly from the room.

in the gipsy's cave

Looking after him, she put her hand upon her wildly palpitating heart, while saying to herself, 'I've put my seal upon him. He doesn't realize it yet, but he is now mine.'

12

In the Gipsy's Cave

De quesnoy had intended to arrive at the station half an hour before the train was due to leave. Gulia's having waylaid him had cut down that margin a little but he still had plenty of leeway. After buying his ticket he sent a porter ahead with his bags and to keep him a first-class corner seat as near the rear of the train as possible; then he took up a position behind a newspaper kiosk from which he could watch, without making himself conspicuous, the passengers going through the barrier to the Madrid express. It was not until the barrier was about to be closed that he darted through it, ran down the platform, threw a tip to his porter and jumped up into the train.

He had satisfied himself that during his twenty minutes' vigil no one remotely resembling Sanchez had passed the barrier; but there was still the possibility that the anarchist had reached the station before him. As it was an express to the capital from Spain's most fashionable summer resort, the train had no third-class carriages and the firsts and seconds were the newly-introduced corridor coaches. Having taken his seat and given the passengers and attendants time to settle down, he made two slow progresses, first up to the front of the train, then to the guard's van, and back. It took him nearly half an hour, as he paused at every compartment to scan its occupants; but when he had finished his inspection he felt certain that Sanchez was not travelling on the express.

That did not surprise him, for he knew that although the younger Ferrer brother had no great brain he was well endowed with peasant cunning; so he had probably walked or driven during the night to some small town ten or fifteen miles from San Sebastian and would begin his journey south by catching an early-morning local train from there.

On arriving in Madrid, de Quesnoy booked a sleeper on the night express to Granada, then had an early dinner at Boca's, choosing for his main course a dish for which the ancient restaurant was famous - a boiled chicken which was served covered with a yellow sauce made from eggs and sherry, and having some resemblance to a zabaione. His first-class sleeper was old-fashioned but spacious and comfortable, so he slept well and arrived in Granada early in the morning on Wednesday the 29th.

155

He had never before been to this famous city from which for centuries a line of Caliphs had dominated south-eastern Spain, and which later, after the Moors had been driven out, had been greatly embellished by the Catholic Sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella. It was set in a vast, fertile plain enclosed by great ranges of mountains, and no finer view of it could be obtained than from the new de-luxe hotel to which the Count had wired from Madrid for rooms.

When he had had a bath and changed he went out on to the balcony. The hotel had been built on the very edge of the precipitous south-western slope of a high plateau that divided the modern city and the old Christian quarter from the original Moorish town. His room looked out over the former and from the balcony on which he stood he could have pitched a peseta down into the nearest street which lay two hundred feet below. The city lay sizzling in the sun but the air up there was cool and invigorating, and the atmosphere crystal clear. Beyond the great huddle of spires, domes and roofs the plain stretched away interminably, walled in on either side by unbroken chains of lofty mountains, those to the left having snow on their peaks gleaming white against the cloudless azure sky.

He took out the photograph that Sanchez had dropped and studied it again. It was a three-quarter length of a sultry-looking beauty. She was wearing a black, flat-crowned, wide-brimmed Andalusian hat tilted sideways on her head, and a fringed silk shawl twisted tightly round her body. Her pose was that traditional with Flamenco dancers: one hand on hip, the other crooked above her head holding castanets. The name of the photographer, which was stamped below the portrait, was Elio, and his studio was in the Calle de San Jeronimo.

De Quesnoy hired a carriage and had himself driven down to the studio. Judging him to be a possible customer of means Senor Elio willingly supplied him with such information as he could. He remembered the woman well. She had not been wearing fancy dress but was a professional Flamenco dancer known as La Torcera - which de Quesnoy later learned meant The Wriggler'. The photograph had been taken about six months ago, and on referring to his ledger Senor Elio said that he could not give her address because she had called for the prints. He added, however, that she was certainly a gipsy, so the Count should have no difficulty in finding her if he made inquiries at the gipsy settlement on the hillside beyond the old Moorish town that lay on the far side of the city.

Having thanked him, de Quesnoy declined the suggestion that he should have his photograph taken, and decided to spend the rest of the morning sightseeing.

To his surprise he found the Cathedral to be hidden away behind tall buildings in one of the main streets, and the entrance to it through first a small private house then a tiny patio; but once inside, it was a glory of brightness; all its walls and pillars being made of pure white stone. Having admired a magnificently carved interior door - the great masterpiece of the sculptor Siloe - and the famous Virgin Chapel, he went into the adjacent Capilla Real.

Nearly a third of this much smaller edifice he found to be occupied by four enormous tombs with the most beautiful carvings imaginable. They were those of Ferdinand and Isabella and of their successors, the mad Queen Joan and Philip the Fair of Burgundy, by whose union half Europe fell under the sway of their son, the Emperor Charles V.

A beadle, hovering for a tip, pointed out to de Quesnoy that the stone pillow under Queen Isabella's head had a deeper depression in it than that of King Ferdinand, and told him the amusing legend that it had been deliberately sculpted so because she had had more brains than her husband.

Having a wide knowledge of European history, the Count could well believe that she had; for, although it was Ferdinand who had driven the Moors out of Spain, his Queen had acted as his Quartermaster-General, and without the extraordinary feats of organization she performed he could never have achieved his victories. It was Isabella, too, who had had the vision to finance Columbus's voyage to America. The tragedy was that a woman so brilliant and so good in herself should also have been so much under the sway of pitiless priests that she had allowed them to found the Holy Office, and encouraged the terrible work of the Spanish Inquisition.