Space Gladiators, page 15
“I know, I know. And we can’t afford anachronisms such as Falange. It is later than we think.”
He turned back to the room. “What did you have in mind, if and when we are able to locate the trial papers pertaining to our subversive colleague?”
Helen plopped herself into a chair and frowned prettily. “We didn’t take it any further than that.”
At the dinner table in the hotel restaurant that evening, Pierre Lorans stared down at the soup plate the waiter had put before him.
“What,” he demanded, “is that?”
The waiter said anxiously, “It is gazpacho, Senor Lorans. The chef is awaiting your verdict.”
“Then,” Lorans said ominously, “he will wait until Mercury freezes over.”
Martha said, “Now, Pierre.”
Helen giggled.
Lorans ignored his family and held up his fingers to enumerate for the squirming waiter.
“Gazpacho is without doubt the most superlative cold soup ever devised. It is basically oil and vinegar, but it is not gazpacho until finely strained tomatoes, garlic, bread crumbs, chopped cucumber, green pepper and sometimes onions are added. I myself am not strongly opinionated on the matter of the onions; over the years I have vacillated. Immediately before serving the gazpacho, croutons are added.”
The waiter squirmed, his eyes went around the dining room. Those at the nearer tables were listening. Lorans was making no attempt to keep his voice low.
“Yes, Senor Lorans,” the waiter said. And he made the mistake of repeating, “The chef is anxious to have your opinion.” “My opinion is that he is an idiot,” Lorans said flatly. “Where, in the name of the Holy Ultimate, are the cucumbers!” “Cucumbers?”
The plump man glared at him.
The waiter closed his eyes in suffering and said, “I do not know what these cucumbers are.”
Lorans took a deep breath, as though restraining himself. “I am sure you don’t. Please, take this swill away. No eels on this forsaken planet, no dried cod, and now no cucumbers! Away with it. Away!”
The waiter took up the plate of chilled soup and began to return in the direction of the kitchen.
Lorans said imperiously, “And that for my wife and daughter as well. I refuse to allow them to eat swill.”
“Now, Pierre,” Martha said. “It isn’t as bad as all that. I tasted it.”
“Silence. I insist. No swill.”
Helen giggled. “I don’t like soup anyway,” she tinkled. She evidently spotted Dr. Dorn Horsten for the first time. He was seated at a table on the other side of the room.
Helen waved at him. “Uncle Dorn! Uncle Dom!”
It seemed to all but break his face, but he managed a stolid smile and a slight wave in return. He was evidently nearly through his meal.
The Lorans table maintained a chilly quiet while awaiting the next course. Even the exuberant Helen seemed frozen to silence by her father’s irritation.
When the waiter returned he was accompanied by the head waiter, who hovered about while his underling served the new dish.
“And what is this?” Pierre Lorans demanded.
The headwaiter bowed. “The Posada’s specialty, Senor Lorans. Pastel de Pescado.”
“Fish pie, eh? Then you do have fish on this forsaken world?”
“Yes, Senor Lorans. If I am not mistaken, the white fish utilized by the chef in Pastel de Pescado is remarkably similar to the sole of Earth.”
Pierre Lorans touched the plate the waiter had put before him and seemed somewhat mollified when he found it so hot as to be almost untouchable.
He waited until the others had been served and then cautiously tasted. The headwaiter held his breath. Lorans tasted again.
Martha and Helen were eating rapidly, as though they had been through this before and knew what was coming.
Pierre Lorans, his face expressionless, put down his fork. He said to the headwaiter, “lam willing to give the chef the benefit of the doubt. Everybody has an off day. Undoubtedly it is an off day. Possibly he is seriously ill. On the verge of death. Martha! Helen!”
He came to his feet.
Martha and Helen, both with a sigh, put down their own utensils and stood also.
The headwaiter wrung his hands, his Iberian face in agony.
Lorans said, “We shall resort to our emergency supplies.” He turned and stalked toward the door, followed by Martha, apology all over her face, with the rear brought up by Helen who had snagged a hard roll from the table before leaving.
All eyes followed the interplanetary celebrated chef. Half the guests looked down into their dishes, suspiciously, which was not missed by the headwaiter, who once again closed his eyes in agony.
Pierre Lorans hesitated at the table of Dr. Horsten. He stared down at the dessert the other was about to eat. “Is that supposed to be Spanish flan?” he said.
The doctor looked a bit startled. “Why, I believe so.” He looked at the menu. “Yes,flan.”
“My dear Doctor, it will poison you. I am convinced. Do me the honor to adjourn to our rooms with us. I have been through this before. We never travel without our emergency supplies. Among other items I have a few tins of Camembert. Real Camembert from Normandy. I have also a bottle or two of stone age Martell cognac. You can finish your, ah, meal with us. Camembert, rather than pseudo -flan. While we make do as best we can.”
‘‘Why … why—” the doctor hesitated.
Behind her husband, Martha was nodding emphatically for the other to accept the invitation. On the face of it, she didn’t want to be alone with her enraged spouse.
“Very well, very gracious of you, 1 am sure,” Dorn Horsten said, putting down his napkin and coming to his feet. ‘‘Very old Martell, eh? Imagine that. It’s been years. Actually real cognac, not the synthetic?”
Pierre Lorans looked at him, his lips beginning to go pale.
The doctor cleared his throat. “Hm-m-m, yes, of course. It wouldn’t … ah, couldn’t be anything else but genuine cognac.”
Lorans turned on his heel and marched out, followed now by Martha, then Dr. Horsten, with Helen bringing up the rear. She managed to snag another roll from the doctor’s table as she passed. Obviously, Helen was an old hand at this emergency.
In the Lorans’s suite, Pierre Lorans darted a look up at the bug he had smashed earlier. He looked at Helen, then Dorn Horsten, even as he was talking at full pitch about something involving eels, codfish and cucumbers.
Helen hissed, “Allez oop!”
The hulking doctor grabbed her about the waist and tossed her aloft. Her head all but touched the ceiling, a chubby hand went out and, briefly, grasping the chain that held the chandelier, she seemed to be poised in the air.
She said, ‘‘It hasn’t been repaired,” twisted her body and fell gracefully into the arms of the big man beneath.
Lorans, still mouthing his rage and dwelling now upon the allegedly inedible fish pie he had been served, darted a look at his watch.
“Allright,” he whispered. ‘‘Fifteen minutes.” Then he went back to his loud monologue which most certainly could have been heard through the suite’s door to the hall.
Dr. Dorn Horsten went over to the window, flung it open and vaulted out.
Martha winced. “I’ll never get used to seeing him do that,” she said.
Helen jumped up on the windowsill and peered down. “It’s only four floors,” she said. “Besides, there’s a lawn down there. After all, he comes from a high-gravity planet. Bye, bye.”
She launched herself after Horsten.
And Martha winced again.
Down below, the doctor caught his diminutive partner neatly and they started hurrying their way through the small park that edged the Posada San Francisco on this side. He didn’t bother to put her down. Her small legs weren’t up to the pace.
He said, “How in the world did they locate this place? Sheer luck?”
“Evidently couldn’t have been easier,” Helen said. “They took a tour of the city, and one of the first things the guide pointed out was the Policía Secreta headquarters. Pierre and Martha were suitably impressed and the flunky blabbered out just about everything they wanted to know; they had no trouble guiding his conversation. They asked why it was necessary to have such a large police, and he told them all about the subversives who had recently been caught. Standing there in the street, he pointed out a window where interrogations were alleged to take place. Pointed out a window which was the only one, evidently, opening into the vaults where the police archives were kept. Oh, he was most helpful.”
The doctor grunted. He was walking at a rapid pace now, the girl on his shoulder. A passer-by would probably have smiled at the pleasant picture they made. However, there were no other pedestrians at this hour. The Falangists supped late and went almost immediately to bed afterwards.
“I hope we find what we’re looking for,” he said. “But I doubt it. You brought that supposed toy of yours, didn’t you? The rings that actually unfold into a set of knuckledusters?”
“You think I’m stupid, you big lummox?”
“No,” Dorn Horsten sighed. “I don’t think you’re stupid. But I’m certainly glad you’re the size you are.”
“Why?” she said suspiciously.
“Because if you were my size, I might ask you to marry me, and the very thought changes my muscles to water.”
“Why, you overgrown oaf!”
“That must be it, up ahead,” he said. “No other building would be quite so large and quite so grim looking. Now, let me remember how Martha told me to locate that window.”
They found the spot from which the Lorans had observed the building earlier.
Helen said, “You think there’s a guard there?”
“Evidently. It’s one of the few windows in the building with a light. This whole wing is dark except for it.” He sized up the situation. “I hope they didn’t repair the window as yet.”
Helen was on the ground now, chubby fists on her hips. “Not in this country. One of the things they brought from Terra most enthusiastically was the do-it-manana philosophy. I’ve already noticed that. How in the world did Pierre manage to break it, anyway?”
Horsten was still casing the situation. He said absently, “You know him. He simply waited until nobody else was around, and then, while Martha distracted the guide’s attention, he reached down, picked up a half brick or some other stone, and heaved it. Evidently, a few minutes later a couple of Guardia Civil came dashing from the building, but didn’t even bother to question the Lorans. The guide was mystified by them. When they pointed out the window, high above, the guide said reasonably that nobody could throw a brick that high, and anyway, they hadn’t seen any young people, or criminal types loitering around.”
He came to a decision. “I think I can make it up that wall, the gravity on this planet seems to be a mite less than even Earth and that brickwork will give hand- and toeholds. However, I can’t go into that window and get down into the room beyond if there’s an armed guard there. He’d zap me before I could get to him.” “Funker,” Helen sneered. “Put all the strongarm stuff onto a little girl.”
“All right, all right,” he said, “Got any better ideas?” “No,” she said. And then, “Allez oop!”
He swung the miniature gymnast and acrobat around several times before releasing her. She sailed in an impossible flight to the iron bars that sheltered the small window. Tiny hands shot out and grasped them.
There was ample room to squeeze her childish body through. She paused a moment there, turned and made an age-old gesture to the man below, a circle with thumb and forefinger. He lumbered quickly to the wall and started scrambling up. He could see her tiny body swing through and cursed beneath his breath that she had gone on ahead before he arrived on the scene.
He reached the ten-story high window and, supporting himself with one hand, tore the iron bars off with the other. He knocked what was left of the glass out of the way and squeezed through. He dropped to the floor.
Helen stood there, absently shining the brass knucks on her chubby right hand with the palm of her left. She said, her voice at its most childish treble, “Where’ve you been so long, you slow-moving cloddy?”
He stared about the room. It was obviously devoted to special records. A sort of file-within-files arrangement. He looked down at the uniformed man who was stretched out on the floor.
“What did you do to him?” he said.
“Nothing much,” Helen said modestly. “He was somewhat startled to see me dropping out of the heavens.”
Horsten grunted. “What I wanted to know was, will he revive fairly soon?” He squatted next to the Falangist guard and slapped his face back and forth stingingly.
The other’s eyes opened and at first expressed disbelief and then suddenly widened into terror. He reached clumsily for his side arm.
Horsten took it gently from his hand. It was a long barreled 9 mm military pistol of a period so remote that on Earth it would have taken its place in a museum. Horsten bent the barrel and made a knot in it and handed it back.
He said to the guard gently, “Where are the records of the subversion trial of the Earthling?”
The other was bug-eyeing the gun.
Horsten said, “Please, Senor, you would not want me to have to …” He let the sentence dribble away.
The guard said, “No. No, no. I do not know what you want. But it is impossible.”
“What’s impossible?”
“I do not have the combination.”
Horsten took the gun back again and bent the barrel into a sort of pretzel shape, to the other’s horrified fascination.
“I didn’t ask you that, did I?”
The guard pointed weakly at a large, iron safe. “Those are the top secret files pertaining to attempts to overthrow the government of El Caudillo.”
Horsten came to his feet, and looked down at the other contemplatively. Helen had been scouting the room, now she took her place beside him.
“We should crisp him,” the scientist muttered.
She took a deep breath and held her elbows tightly against her sides, in feminine rejection.
He looked at her in disgust. “All right, all right, I haven’t got the guts either.” He bent quickly and seemingly tapped the fallen man across the jawbone. Eyes rolled upward.
Horsten growled, “Look around for some wire, or rope … anything to tie him with.”
“Telephone over here,” she said.
He went over and ripped it out and returned to tie the guard.
Moments later, that worthy revived enough, once more, to see his assailants leaving. The man with the six hundred pound safe under one arm, the little girl seated on a shoulder.
She saw the eyes open and waved and lisped, “Goo’ bye, Mr. Policeman.”
He closed his eyes again and started in on several prayers he had not said since childhood.
IV
Colonel inspector Miguel Segura looked about the room unbelievingly. His eyes finally came back to the Guardia Civil private. He said, “The story again?”
“Senor Colonel, I do not know how many of them there were, nor even where they came from. I was here, wide awake. Suddenly, they were upon me. There must have been at least six.” One of the colonel’s assistants said, “I would think so, if they managed to get that safe out of here and all the way down and out of the building.”
The colonel growled, “Quiet, Raul. Go on with the story.” “I fought as best I could. There were too many. They beat me unconscious and tied me. When I awoke, the safe was gone.” The colonel looked at the other unbelievingly and uncompre-hendingly. He pointed to the broken window above. “The bars are broken from that window. Why? How? Surely they couldn’t have done that without you hearing. But even if they could have, why? The safe was too large to have been let out there.” “Senor Colonel,” the Guardia Civil told him. ‘‘I do not know. It is all as though the work of devils.”
The colonel sighed deeply. “If it was not for the fact that the safe has been found, the door torn off, in the park, I could hardly credit a word of this.”
Another aide came in. The colonel inspector looked at him. “Yes?”
“The clerks have been through the papers contained in the safe. There are only a very few missing.”
“Well?”
“They pertained to the recent trial of the suspected Section G agent and his accomplices.”
The colonel shook his head and stared at the guard. “Where did you say they came from? Supposedly the door was locked from inside, but you say they burst suddenly upon you.”
The subject of interrogation squirmed. “Senor Colonel, I do not know. The door was locked. Uhhh, it was as though they descended from the heavens.”
Colonel inspector Miguel Segura—chief inspector of the Nuevo Madrid Policía Secreta and rumored to be one of the handful of men who spent their evenings with El Caudillo in the Presidential Palace playing cards, sipping sherry and Fundador imported from Terra, and being entertained by flamenco dancers noted more for their pulchritude than their competence at the Iberian entertainment—had sent his card in formally.
He was in full uniform and accompanied only by his youthful aide, Teniente Raul Dobaiganes, also in formal attire. Their manner was grave and, if anything, overly polite.
Dr. Horsten had been located and brought to the Lorans suite so that all could be addressed at once. They were seated, save Helen, who stood, toes pointed in, and staring up at Teniente Dobarganes, unblinkingly. It had to be admitted, the dress uniform of the Policía Secreta was not exactly drab.
The two police officers had hardly more than presented their stiff bows than Pierre Lorans shot to his feet dramatically. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I confess,” he blurted. “I admit everything.”
Inspector Segura stared at him. “You do?”
“Yes! Everything! I should never have come to this barbarian planet. Police everywhere. No freedom for the artist. I should have known better. It is impossible for me to equivocate. Impossible. I am a Nouveau Cordon Bleu chef. I am willing to die.”
