It took time to undo the damage Dominguez had inflicted but in the end the Basque’s story came out. He had not seen any faces, only the Arab robes of three figures; a fourth man in some sort of uniform. Arriving on the coast in a hearse. Mendes had been a few hundred yards up the beach, walking from the boat basin to his home which was above the dunes not far from the breakwater where the hearse had drawn up. It had come without headlights; it was met by a dinghy from a boat lying close to shore.
The three Arabs and the man in uniform had carried a coffin from the hearse to the dinghy. Someone—a fifth one, unseen by Mendes—had driven the hearse away. The others had gone aboard the boat with the coffin and the boat had set out to sea.
Plainly it was not all Mendes had to say. Lime waited him out, not prompting; the man’s agreeability was fragile, the wrong question might close him up.
Finally it came in a blurted rush: Mendes had recognized the boat.
He had agonized; it troubled him deeply; the boat belonged to a friend, a colleague, and in Spain a Basque did not inform on a fellow Basque—yet it had to do with the kidnapping of the presidente.…
“We understand,” Lime breathed sympathetically.
The friend was Lopez, his boat the Maria Linda after Lopez’s wife. An old boat, somewhat the worse for age, but you would recognize her easily by the smokestack—she had this raked stack, comprende? Like a miniature ocean liner. You couldn’t miss her, there wasn’t another like her on the Costa Brava.
Maria Linda had not returned to Palamos since that night, Mendes said sadly. Assuredly it was a long voyage, wherever she was bound.
Lime turned, raised his eyebrows at Chad Hill. After a moment Hill came to; bounced away in belated obedience to start the machinery in motion for the wholesale search for Maria Linda.
Lime kept at Mendes, his question-hammers wrapped in courteous padding. Details emerged; no further startling developments. He kept it up for an hour and sent Mendes away with his thanks, having learned a few things of possible interest: chief among them an address and Lime sent a runner immediately to locate Lopez’s wife.
At quarter past ten she appeared, Maria Lopez, a tired woman gone to stoutness, the vestiges of beauty remaining in black eyes and long-fingered hands. Lime was straightforward with her: he told her of the seriousness of her husband’s predicament, he offered her money—ten thousand pesetas—and he asked his question: what did she know of the Arabs her husband had taken off the beach on Monday night?
He had given her ten thousand; he held twenty thousand more in his hand. The woman spoke without moving her eyes away from the money. Lime listened coolly to the interpreter. They had approached Lopez Sunday after church, three Arab men and an Arab woman with a veil. They said they were from Morocco. Their brother had died in Barcelona but they could not get official permission to remove the body from the country. They said it was important to Bedouins to have their dead buried in family ground. They admitted it was a smuggling thing, against the law, but they appealed to Lopez’s sympathies and they offered a great deal of money. Lopez knew what it meant to be buried in consecrated ground of course. Mrs. Lopez was not sure how much money was involved but it was possibly fifty thousand pesetas or more, plus fuel and expenses.
Had she seen the Arabs up close? No she had not seen them at all; Lopez had described them as four Arabs—three men and a woman. She spread her hands toward Lime: it was winter, a fisherman’s life was thankless. They had known nothing of any kidnapping.
Chad Hill intercepted him at the garage door: “For Christ’s sake,” Hill complained.
“What?”
“They’ve had it twenty-four hours.”
“Had what?”
“The boat. The Maria Linda.”
It was a fifty-minute helicopter ride from Palamos up the coast to the beach where Spanish coastguardsmen had found Maria Linda Wednesday morning impaled on a shoal in the lee of a breakwater. She hung at a vertiginous angle, anchor-chain taut. It looked as though she had sought shelter in a storm and been smashed aground. But there had been no storm Tuesday night and the weather since then had been blowy but not monstrous.
By the time Lime’s chopper set him down a captain of Guardia had arrived to meet him with everything the Spanish police had collected on the case. Ordinarily it would have taken much longer but ordinarily no one was holding a blowtorch to the Guardia’s backside.
The body had been removed to the police morgue in Barcelona. Lopez had been found dead on the beach within sight of the grounded boat, hidden by dunes from the coast highway which ran close along the Med at this point: they were north of Cape Creus, the French frontier was only seven kilometers away.
Lopez had been stabbed several times, with more than one knife. The weapons had not been found. The murder case was being investigated but until now there had been no connection with the Fairlie kidnapping and therefore it hadn’t been brought to Lime’s attention.
A few latent fingerprints had been found on the polished wood surfaces of the boat’s interior; photos were included in the folder just delivered to Lime. The prints were being processed in Madrid; as soon as Hill’s call had alerted the Guardia, copies of the prints had been forwarded to Interpol and Washington. It was assumed most of the prints were Lopez’s but everything was being checked: fingerprints were being lifted off the corpse for purposes of comparison and elimination.
The Guardiano was a captain by rank, a precise cop with a professional voice. It droned on, filling Lime in, while a cool gray wind ruffled the sea and blew sand in Lime’s face. Tire tracks had been found between the highway and the beach, indicating that a vehicle had pulled off the road and driven up onto the small promontory overlooking the beach. It had parked there, pointed toward the sea, possibly to flash its headlights out to sea in signal. High tide had come and gone between the murder and the discovery; the only footprints found were high up, near the body and the tire tracks. The vehicle had been considerably heavier when it left than it had been when it arrived, and the departure tracks merged with the highway in a southerly direction, indicating the vehicle had arrived from the south and departed toward the south, retracing its course. Unfortunately the sand was too soft to reveal a tread pattern. The width between tires indicated a standard wheelbase for medium-sized automobile or small van.
As for the reason for the abandonment of the boat, it appeared the engine-oil line had rusted through; the oil had leaked out and the engine had seized up.
To Lime there was only one clue in all this that wasn’t ambiguous; it was a straightforward indication of the kidnappers’ intent. The Lopez boat had cracked up north of its point of departure. Assumption: they had been heading for France, or Italy.
It was there in plain sight and because the kidnappers weren’t careless men it had to be assumed they meant it to be seen: they could have sunk the boat easily enough and left no traces. That was the thing. They had put it on display, they hadn’t concealed it. Lopez’s body, the boat. These had been meant to be found.
He had to read something into that. They told him they were heading north. Now it was a question whether they wanted him to hunt north or, conversely, whether they wanted him to think that far ahead and hunt south.
There were many layers of bluff. First level: if a clue appears it should be believed. Second level: if it is an obvious clue it must be a red herring designed to waste time and resources; it is so obvious it had better be dismissed. Third level: if it is so obviously an invitation to dismiss it and do the opposite then perhaps it ought to be obeyed after all because the kidnappers made it blatantly obvious just to confuse. Fourth level: the kidnappers, anticipating this dilemma in his mind, want him to think it through all the way to the end and then go ahead and investigate the clue exhaustively because, all other things being equal, a clue is a clue and even if it is a deliberate plant it may give away something it wasn’t intended to reveal.