A young lieutenant was sitting at the desk in the anteroom. "Mr. Johnny Green Moon?" he asked, grinning.

"h.e.l.lo," Hall laughed. "You still here?"

"Just a second." The lieutenant pressed a b.u.t.ton on his desk. There was a click in the electric door stop of the ma.s.sive oak and iron door behind the desk. "Go right in, Mr. Green Moon."

Hall pushed the door open, stepped into the Spartan simplicity of Lobo's private office, and quickly shut out the smell of carbolic by slamming the door behind him. Lobo, who had equally good reasons for hating that odor, had installed an American air-cleaning system in his own office.

The young general--he was about three years younger than Hall--was sitting at his tremendous carved desk and studying some papers.

"Johnny!" he shouted. "_Que tal?_" He was wearing a very formal white dress uniform heavy with medals and gold braid.

"h.e.l.lo, Jaime," Hall said. "You look like an American Christmas tree."

"Johnny, you dog! You took me away from a most beautiful reception."

"Beautiful?"

"A dream. Unbelievable! Four and twenty blonde Va.s.sar girls dancing around Lobo and wondering out loud if the handsome spik speaks English.

Sensational!"

Hall had to laugh with the general. He could easily picture the effect of Jaime Lobo's towering dark attractiveness--more than once in the United States Hollywood talent scouts had begged him to sign contracts--in the eyes of the American women one could find at a lavish reception in Havana. "An American sugar king's party?"

"No. The British business colony. It was stupendous." Lobo had lived in the United States for five years, got a great kick out of scattering the superlatives of Hollywood in his speech when he spoke English.

"O.K.," Hall said, dryly. "It was super-colossal." He sat down in the large armchair at the side of the desk, helped himself to one of Lobo's cigars.

"So you don't want to play," Lobo said, sobering and taking his own seat.

"Some other time, Jaime."

"Sounds bad, keed. But tell me, Johnny, is it true that Don Anibal is dying?"

"He may be dead by now."

"Ansaldo killed him?"

Hall started. "What do you know about Ansaldo?"

"I know he's a fascist pig. Why?"

"Why? For the love of G.o.d, Jaime, if you can give me the proof, we can ..." He told Lobo about the plans of Lavandero and the anti-fascists in San Hermano.

"I understand," Lobo said. "I've already sent for the dossier on Ansaldo. It should be here in a few minutes. But while we're waiting, there are a few things I'd like to show you." He opened the drawer in his desk and took out an automatic wrapped in a brown-silk handkerchief.

"Take a look at this gun," he said, "but don't touch. I want to save the fingerprints."

"What about it?" Hall asked.

"Oh, nothing. I thought you might know something about it. The h.e.l.l with it. But tell me, Mateo, when did you get to town?"

"This evening."

"Panair?"

"Sure, why?"

"Then you're staying at the Jefferson, registered as Victor Ortiz Tinoco, eh?"

"My G.o.d," Hall laughed. "That's my gun!"

"That was your gun, _chico_. It is now Cuban Government Exhibit A in the case against your brains. So you had it all figured out, my boy. You'd come to Havana with fake papers, put up at an out-of-the-way hotel, check your gun with the hotel management, shoot the Spanish Amba.s.sador, and then plant the gun in my back pocket and blow town on your diplomatic Mexican pa.s.sport. But you reckoned without two suspicious and smart young second lieutenants from Oriente Province."

"What was my fatal mistake, chief?"

"Your accent and the cardinal stupidity of giving your attache case to the desk clerk. He's a communist from Oriente. The weight made him suspicious, and he called his friends in my office. Only he guessed from your accent that you were a Spaniard, and that the gun was for the purpose of shooting up the Mexican Emba.s.sy."

"You know what Jefferson said about eternal vigilance being the price of liberty, Jaime."

"Sure. Jefferson and the natural shrewdness of a peasant from Oriente Province. Of course the minute I saw the report describing Ortiz Tinoco as a Spaniard with scars on the face, a broken nose, and big feet which took him directly to the Casa de la Cultura, I knew it was Matthew Hall in a beard."

"Yeah. Of course my phone calls every fifteen minutes didn't give you any idea."

"They helped, my boy. I'll admit that." He took the envelope bearing Androtten's pictures and fingerprints from his desk. "Who is this individual? He looks as if he is very seriously dead."

"I brought that envelope here for you, Jaime. He was shot three days ago in San Hermano, but I'm afraid I broke his nose before he died. That other picture of him with his family and the letter from the Dutch Government-in-Exile might be more interesting."

"Wilhelm Androtten? Sounds like a brand of gin. Why did you kill him?"

"He's a n.a.z.i, Jaime. He was trying to kill me."

General Lobo took some notes as he listened to Hall's account of Androtten's role in the Ansaldo mission. "I guess the first thing to do is to find out if the letter from Queen Wilhelmina is genuine. But it still wouldn't prove anything. The n.a.z.i, if he was an agent, could have picked the name Androtten from a casualty list and then written to the Dutch Government in the name of the soldier's father. I'll check the photos and the fingerprints here, and also with American F.B.I. and the British. The F.B.I. has been very good lately. They've helped out terrifically here with technical things."

A green light on Lobo's desk began to flicker. "It's the file room," he said. "I guess they have the Ansaldo dossier." He called the lieutenant on the inter-phone, told him to bring in the Ansaldo dossier.

The dossier was not very long. It told the story how, in the winter of 1938, a prominent Cuban Falangist in the best of health had suddenly taken to bed with a "serious complaint." His family announced to friends that they had sent to Spain for a great doctor, one Varela Ansaldo. They said Ansaldo cured the Cuban, to be sure, but he also had long private sessions with the leaders of the Falange at the Spanish Emba.s.sy and, before he returned to Franco Spain, the Falange in Cuba had undergone a complete shake-up of its leadership. There were pictures of Ansaldo, but alone and in plain clothes.

"Are these the only pictures?" Hall asked.

"Perhaps not. We took about three thousand feet of movie film from the Inspector General of the Falange for Latin America when he tried to escape to Spain on a C.T.E. ship two years ago. Let's look at them, old man." He pressed a key in his inter-phone box. "Pablo," he barked, "set up those Villanueva films in the machine. I'm coming in in ten minutes."

"I didn't think of that film," Hall confessed. "Every time you were supposed to show it to me, something came up, remember?"

Lobo was barking into the inter-phone again. "Teniente, scare up two cold bottles of champagne for the theater, will you? We have a thirst that is killing us."

"Are you screening the film in a theater?"

"No. It's a crime laboratory the F.B.I. installed for us. The whole works. Wait till you see it, Matt. It's just like Hollywood. Colossal!"

"And the champagne?"