"Phil? I"ve just raised President Markes, there in Nareda. I"ve been a bit worried about you."
"I"m all right, Chief."
"Well, you"d better see President Markes this morning."
"That was my intention."
"Tell him frankly what you"re after. This smuggling of quicksilver from Nareda has got to stop. But take it easy, Phil; don"t be reckless.
Remember: one little knife thrust and I"ve lost a good man!"
I laughed at his anxious tone. That was always Hanley"s way. A devil himself, when he was on a trail, but always worried for fear one of his men would come to harm.
"Right enough, Chief. I"ll be careful."
He cut off presently.
I did not see Jetta that morning. I told Sp.a.w.n I was hoping to see President Markes on my petroleum proposition. And at the proper hour I took myself to the government house.
This Lowland village by daylight seemed even more fantastic than shrouded in the shadows of night. The morning sun had dissipated the overhead mists. It was hot in the rocky streets under the weird overhanging vegetation. The settlement was quietly busy with its tropical activities. There were a few local shops; vehicles with the Highland domestic animals--horses and oxen--panting in the heat; an occasional electro-automatic car.
But there were not many evidences of modernity here. The street and house tube-lights. A few radio image-finders on the house-tops. An automatic escalator bringing ore from a nearby mine past the government checkers to an aero stage for northern transportation. Cultivated fields in the village outskirts operated with modern machinery.
But beyond that, it seemed primitive. Two hundred years back. Street vendors. People in primitive, ragged, tropical garb. Half naked children. I was stared at curiously. An augmenting group of children followed me as I went down the street.
The President admitted me at once. In his airy office, with safeguards against eavesdropping, I found him at his desk with a bank of modern instruments before him.
"Sit down, Grant."
He was a heavy-set, flabby man of sixty-odd, this Lowland President.
White hair; and an old-fashioned, rolling white mustache of the sort lately come into South American fashion. He sat with a gla.s.s of iced drink at his side. His uniform was stiffly white, and ornate with heavy gold braid, but his neckpiece was wilted with perspiration.
"d.a.m.nable heat, Grant."
"Yes, Sir President."
"Have a drink." He swung a tinkling gla.s.s before me. "Now then, tell me what is your trouble. Smuggling, here in Nareda. I don"t believe it."
His eyes, incongruously alert with all the rest of him so fat and lazy, twinkled at me. "We of the Nareda Government watch our quicksilver production very closely. The government fee is a third."
I might say that the Nareda government collected a third on all the mineral and agricultural products of the country, in exchange for the necessary government concessions. Markes exported this share openly to the world markets, paying the duty exactly like a private corporation.
He added, "You think--Hanley thinks--the smuggling is on too large a scale to be any illicit producer?"
I nodded.
"Then," he said, "it must be one of our recognized mines."
"Hanley thinks it is a recognized mine, falsifying its production record," I explained.
"If that is so, I will discover it," he said. He spoke with enthusiasm and vigor. "For you I shall treat as what you are--the representative of our most friendly government. The figures of our quicksilver production I shall lay before you in just a few days. Let me fill up your gla.s.s, Grant."
The lazy tropics. I really did not doubt his sincerity. But I did doubt his ability to cope with any clever criminal. His enthusiasm for action would wilt like his neckpiece, in Nareda"s heat. Unless, perhaps, the knowledge that the smuggler was cheating him as well as the United States--_that_ might spur him.
He added--and now I got a shock wholly unexpected: "If we think that some recognized producer of quicksilver here is cheating us, it should not be difficult to check up on it. Nareda has only one large cinnabar lode being worked. A private individual: that fellow Jacob Sp.a.w.n--"
"Sp.a.w.n?" I exclaimed involuntarily.
"Why, yes. Did not he mention it? His mine is no more than ten kilometers from here--back on the southern slope."
"He didn"t mention it," I said.
"So? That is strange; but he is a secretive Dutchman by nature. He specializes in prying into the other fellow"s affairs. Hm-m."
He fell into a reverie while I stared at him. Sp.a.w.n, the big--the only big--quicksilver producer here!
The President interrupted my startled thoughts. "I hope you did not intimate your real purpose?"
"No."
We both turned at the sound of an opening door. Markes called, "Ah, come in Perona! Are you alone? Good! Close that slide. Here is Chief Hanley"s representative." He introduced us all in a breath. "This is interesting, Perona. d.a.m.nably interesting. We"re being cheated, what? It looks that way. Sit down, Perona."
This was Greko Perona. Nareda"s Minister of Internal Affairs. Sp.a.w.n had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President"s harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume enveloped him. A ladies" courtier, this Perona by the look of him. His white uniform was immaculate, carefully tailored and carefully worn to set off at its best his still trim and erect figure.
"Well," he said, when at last the President paused, "of a surety something must be done."
Perona seemed not excited, rather more carefully watchful, of his own words, and of me. His small dark eyes roved me.
"What is it you would plan to do about it, Senorito?"
An irony was in that Latin diminutive! He spread his pale hands. "Your United States officials perhaps exaggerate. I am very doubtful if we have smugglers here in Nareda."
"Unless it is Sp.a.w.n," the President interjected.
Perona frowned slightly. But his suave manner remained. "Sp.a.w.n? Why Sp.a.w.n?"
"You need not take offense, Perona," Markes retorted. "We are discussing this before an envoy of the United States, sent here to consult with us.
We have nothing to hide."
Markes turned to me. And his next words were like a bomb exploding at my feet.