At six a.m. the detritus of the night was examined at police HQ. Of the other three deaths, no one had been burned. One pile of residue still stank of petrol and fire. It included a melted cell phone, a signet ring, a saint's medallion, a watch whose bracelet strap still had fragments of tissue attached and a wallet. The last named must have been sheltered from the flames by the fact that the dead driver was sitting on it. Inside it were papers, some still readable. The driver's license was clearly that of one Juan Cortez. And the frantic lady calling in from Las Flores was Senora Cortez.
At ten a.m., a police officer and a sergeant came to her door. Both were grim-faced. The officer began:
"Senora Cortez, lo siento muchissimo…"-I am deeply sorry. Senora Cortez then fainted clean away.
Formal identification was out of the question. The next day, escorted and sustained by two neighbors, Senora Irina Cortez attended the morgue. What had been her husband was but a charred, blackened husk of bone and melted flesh, lumps of carbon, insanely grinning teeth. The examiner, with the agreement of the silent policemen present, excused her even seeing what was left.
But she tearfully identified the watch, signet ring, medallion, melted cell phone and driver's license. The pathologist would sign an affidavit that these items had been removed from the corpse, and the traffic division would confirm that the body had indeed been the one retrieved from the gutted car that was provably the one owned by and being driven by Juan Cortez that evening. It was enough; bureaucracy was satisfied.
Three days later, the unknown American backwoodsman was buried in the Cartagena grave of Juan Cortez, welder, husband and father. Irina was inconsolable, Pedro sniffing quietly. Fr. Isidro officiated. He was going through his own private Calvary.
Had it been his phone call, he endlessly asked himself? Had the Americans let on? Betrayed the confidence? Had the cartel become aware? Presumed Cortez was going to betray them instead of himself being betrayed? How could the Yanquis have been so stupid?
Or was it just coincidence? A true, terrible coincidence. He knew what the cartel did to anyone they suspected, however feeble the evidence. But how could they have suspected Juan Cortez of not being their loyal craftsman, which in fact he had been to the end? So he conducted the service, saw the earth tumbling on top of the coffin, sought to comfort the widow and orphan by explaining the true love God had for them, even though it was hard to understand. Then he went back to his spartan lodgings to pray and pray and pray for forgiveness. LETIZIA ARENAL was walking on clouds. A dull April day in the city of Madrid could not touch her. She had never felt so happy or so warm. The only way she could be warmer was in his arms.
They had met at a cafe terrace two weeks earlier. She had seen him there before, always alone, always studying. The day the ice was broken, she was with a group of fellow students, laughing and joking, and he was just a table away. Being winter, the terrace was glassed in. The door had opened, and the street wind blew some of her papers onto the floor. He has stooped to pick them up. She bent down, too, and their eyes met. She wondered why she had not noticed before that he was drop-dead handsome.
"Goya," he said. She thought he was introducing himself. Then she noticed he was holding one of her sheets in his hand. It was a picture of an oil painting.
"Boys Picking Fruit," he said. "Goya. Are you studying art?"
She nodded. It seemed natural that he should walk her home, that they should discuss Zurbaran, Velazquez, Goya. It even seemed natural when he gently kiss her wind-chilled lips. Her latchkey almost fell from her hand.
"Domingo," he said. Now he really was giving her his name, not the day of the week. "Domingo de Vega."
"Letizia," she replied. "Letizia Arenal."
"Miss Arenal," he said quietly, "I think I am going to take you out for dinner. It is no use resisting. I know where you live. If you say no, I shall simply curl up on your doorstep and die here. Of the cold."
"I don't think you should do that, Senor Vega. So to prevent it, I shall dine with you."
He took her to an old restaurant that had been serving food when the conquistadors came from their homes in the wild Estremadura to seek the favor of the King to send them to discover the New World. When he told her the story-complete nonsense, for the Sobrino de Botin in the Street of the Knife Grinders is old but not that old-she shivered and glanced around to see if the old adventurers were still dining there.
He told her he was from Puerto Rico, bilingual in English also, a young diplomat at the United Nations, intent one day to be an ambassador. But he had taken a three-month sabbatical, encouraged by his head of mission to study more of his true love, Spanish classical painting, at the Prado in Madrid.
And it seemed quite natural to get into his bed, where he made love as no man she had known, even though she had known only three.
Cal Dexter was a hard man, but he retained a conscience. He might have found it too cold-blooded to use a professional gigolo, but the Cobra had no such scruple. For him there was only to win or to lose, and the unforgivable option was to lose.
He still regarded with awe and admiration the ice-hearted spy-master Markus Wolf who had for years headed East Germany's spy network that ran rings around the counterintelligence apparat of his West German enemies. Wolf had used honey traps extensively, but usually the opposite way from the norm.
The norm was to entrap gullible Western big shots with stunning call girls until they could be photographed and blackmailed into submission. Wolf used seductive young men; not for gay diplomats (although that was not beyond him at all) but for the overlooked, ignored-in-love spinster who so often toiled as the private secretaries of the high-and-mighty of West Germany.
The fact that when finally exposed as the dupes they had been, when it was clear to them the incalculable secrets they had taken from their masters' files, copied and passed to their Adonis, they finished up, drab and ruined, in the dock of a West German court or ended their lives in pretrial detention, it did not worry Markus Wolf. He was playing the Great Game to win and he won.
Even after the collapse of East Germany, a Western court had to acquit Wolf because he had not betrayed his own country. So while others were jailed, he enjoyed a genteel retirement until he died of natural causes. The day he read the news, Paul Devereaux mentally doffed his hat and said a prayer for the old atheist. And he had no hesitation in sending the beautiful alley cat Domingo de Vega to Madrid. JUAN CORTEZ drifted out of sleep by slow degrees, and for the first few seconds thought he might have gone to paradise. In truth, he was simply in a room such as he had never seen before. It was large, as was the double bed in which he lay, and pastel walled, with blinds drawn over windows beyond which the sun shone. In fact, he was in the VIP suite of the officers' club on Homestead Air Force Base in southern Florida.
As the mists cleared, he observed a terry-cloth robe over a chair near the bed. He swung his rubbery legs to the floor and, realizing he was naked, pulled it on. On the bedside table was a telephone. He lifted the handset and croaked "?Oiga!" several times, but no one answered.
He walked to one of the large windows, eased back a corner of the blind and peeked out. He saw tended lawns and a flagpole from which fluttered the Stars and Stripes. He was not in paradise; for him, the reverse. He had been kidnapped, and the Americans had got him.
He had heard terrible tales of special renditions in darkened planes to foreign lands, of torture in the Middle East and Central Asia, of years in the Cuban enclave called Guantanamo.