Perhaps I shouldn’t have bothered. If he had gone on thinking of me as an agent of Franco’s secret police, he would have cooperated with me. Instead, I went to great lengths to convince him who I was and I only succeeded in terrifying him. He kept darting stricken looks at the door of his room, as if men with drawn sabers might burst in at any moment and lead us both off to prison.
“But what do you want here?” he kept demanding. “But why do you come to me?”
“I have to go to Turkey,” I explained.
“Am I an airplane? This is not safe. You must go.”
“I need your help.”
“My help?” He glanced again at the door. “I cannot help you. The police are everywhere. And I have nowhere for you to stay. Nowhere. One small bed is all I own, and I sleep in it myself. You cannot stay here.”
“I want to get out of Spain.”
“So do I. So does everyone. I could make a grand fortune in America. I could become a hairdresser. Jackie Kennedy.”
“Pardon me?”
“I would set her hair and make a fortune.”
“I don’t think I-”
“Instead, I rot in Madrid.” He fingered his beard. “I could set Jackie Kennedy’s hair and make a fortune. Lady Bird Johnson. Are you a hairdresser?”
“No.”
“I have had no breakfast. There is a café downstairs, but you cannot go. They will shoot you in the street like a dog. Can you speak Spanish?”
We had been speaking Spanish all along. I was beginning to suspect that Robles was mad.
“There is a café,” he said. “They know me there. So they will not give me credit.” He glanced at the door again. His fear was so genuine that I was beginning to share it. At any moment the Civil Guard would come in and shoot us down like hairdressers.
“I have no money,” he said.
I gave him some Spanish money and told him to get breakfast for both of us. He snatched the notes from me, glanced again at the door, lit a cigarette, smoked furiously, dropped ashes on the floor, then threw himself on the cot.
“If I order breakfast for two,” he said, “they will know I have someone up here.”
“Tell them you have a girl.”
“Here? In this goat pen?”
“Well-”
“They know me,” he said sorrowfully. “They know I never have a girl. You should never have come here. Why did you leave America? Mamie Eisenhower. Who sets her hair?”
“I don’t know.”
“You create trouble. How can we eat? No one will believe you are a girl. Your hair is too short.”
I suggested that he eat breakfast at the café and buy food for me. He leaped from the bed and threw his arms around me. “You are a genius,” he shouted. “You will save us all.”
When he went out, I tried to lock the door. The lock was broken. I sat on his bed and read a poor Spanish translation of Kropotkin’s essay on “Mutual Aid.” He had evidently read it over many times as the text was extensively underlined, but the underlining made no sense at all. He underlined trivia-unimportant adjectives, place names, that sort of thing.
He came back with some sweet rolls and a cardboard container of café con leche. While I ate he told me of his breakfast-four eggs, slices of fried ham, fresh juice, a dish of saffron rice with peas and peppers. I listened to all this while I ate my rolls and sipped the bad coffee.
“I will get another bed,” he said. “Or, if that is not possible, you may sleep upon the floor. My house is your house.”
“I won’t be staying that long.”
“But you must stay! It is not safe in the streets. They would shoot you like a dog.” He smiled engagingly. “You will stay,” he said, “as long as you have money.”
“Oh.”
“Have you much money?”
“Very little.”
He looked at the door again. “On the other hand,” he said, “you would perhaps be uncomfortable upon the floor. And it is not safe here. Every day the police come and beat me. Do you believe me?”
“Yes.”
“You do? You should have stayed in America. What do you want from me?”
“A few hours of solitude. I want the use of your room for several hours and then I want you to take me to someone who can help me get out of Spain.”
“You will go to Portugal?”
“No. To France.”
“Ah. Now you want me to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I want to sleep.”
“In my bed?”
“Yes.”
“It is not sanitary.”
I took some more Spanish money from my wallet. “You could pass a few hours in the cinema,” I suggested.
He was gone like a shot. I closed the door and wished that it had a functioning lock on it. I went to the window and drew the shade. It was badly torn. Through the hole in the shade I looked into a room in the building next door. A rather plump girl with long black hair was dressing. I watched her for a few moments, then left the window and sat on Esteban’s bed and opened my black attaché case. A gift of Providence, I thought. An ideal survival kit for a hunted man. It had everything I might need-money, passports, and documents so secret I had no idea what they were.
Along with the unsigned and unintelligible note, the attaché case had contained a heavy cardigan sweater with a London label, a change of underwear, a pair of dreadful Argyle socks, a safety razor with no blades, a toothbrush, a can of tooth powder made in Liverpool, and a Japanese rayon tie with a fake Countess Mara crest. There was also a Manila envelope holding banded packages of British, American, and Swiss currency-two hundred pounds, one hundred fifty dollars, and just over two thousand Swiss francs. Another larger envelope contained three passports. The American passport was in the name of William Alan Traynor, the British in the name of R. Kenneth Leyden, and the Swiss for Henri Boehm. Each showed a rather poor photograph of the tall man. On the American passport he was wearing glasses. On the other two he was not.
A third Manila envelope, carefully sealed with heavy tape, held the mysterious documents. These, evidently, were the “goods” that I was to deliver to “the right people.” I had attempted to slit the tape with my thumbnail in the manner of James Bond opening a packet of cigarettes. This proved impossible, so I had laboriously peeled off the tape in the privacy of the Dublin lavatory and had a look at the contents of the parcel. It had made no particular sense to me then; now, in the equally dismal atmosphere of Esteban Robles’ dirty little room, it remained as impenetrable as ever.
Half a dozen sheets of photocopied blueprints. Blueprints for what? I had no idea. A dozen sheets of ruled notebook paper covered with either the mental doodling of a mathematician or some esoteric code. A batch of carefully drawn diagrams. A whole packet of confidential information, no doubt stolen from someone and destined for someone else. But stolen from whom? And destined for whom? And indicating what?
When I first opened the case it had scarcely mattered. I had packed everything away and taken a taxi to the Dublin airport. There were no flights to the Continent until morning, I learned, unless I wanted to fly first to London and then make connections to Paris. I did not want to go to London at all, not now. I used the American passport to buy a ticket to Madrid and paid for it with American money. I left the case in a locker and went back into town. At the lost and found counter of the bus station I explained that I’d left a pair of glasses on a bus, and asked whether anyone had turned them in. Five pairs were brought to me, and I would have liked to try them on until I found a pair that wasn’t too hard on my eyes, but this might have aroused suspicion. I picked a pair that looked rather like the ones in William Alan Traynor’s passport photograph and thanked the clerk and left.
By flight time I was back at the airport. I took my attaché case from the locker, lodged the envelope of unidentifiable secret papers between my shirt and my skin, and incorporated the currency with my own small fund of money. I tucked my two extra passports (and Mustafa Ibn Ali’s) into a pocket, combed my hair to conform to the passport photo, and put on the glasses. Their previous owner had evidently combined extreme myopia with severe astigmatism. I hadn’t worn them five minutes before I had a blinding headache.