I followed him, saying, “Neil, you better clue us in as to what this package looks like so we can conduct a search. I mean, is it bigger than a breadbox?”
“Doctor Neil, to you.”
“Spare me the attitude, pal. You already got a serious problem.”
Darla had me by the arm before I could do something rash, like escort him to the outdoor observation deck this bullet train didn’t have. Mary Beth Lambuth was right behind Darla, saying, “He’s right, Riley. You need to be a bit less cryptic if you expect assistance recovering your property.”
Neil scowled and said, “Very well. It is a manilla envelope a quarter of an inch thick. It contains coded Teletype messages between Madrid and Rome, which I have had decoded at no small expense. The bulk of the material is correspondence between Franco’s and Mussolini’s foreign ministers, respectively Ramón Serrano Súñer and Count Galeazzo Ciano. Serrano Súñer was Franco’s brother-in-law and Ciano was Mussolini’s son-in-law, so confidentiality was presumed. In addition, there is a subsequent, albeit vague, thank-you note from Mussolini to Franco, expressing ‘gratitude for the righting of a historic anomaly.’”
Well, it would be hard to mistake the contents of that manilla envelope for anything else. We went through the bags in the car one by one, with the owners present, even the Spaniards. We looked in the overhead racks and the washroom, too. Nada. Zilch.
Everybody sat back down. Our train had pulled out of Madrid at eight A.M. sharp. We were due in at Seville at ten-twenty. I glanced at my watch: nine-forty. “You didn’t notice Bryce go by us in the aisle earlier?” I asked Darla.
“I didn’t.”
“We’ve gone through some tunnels.”
“Brick, the lights didn’t go out and even if they had, we were through those tunnels in seconds.”
I twitched, reminded again of our terminal velocity. “I know, I know, I know. I was testing you.”
“Riley Neil was convincing,” Darla said.
“The whys and wherefores of his documentation? Yeah, but if you rehearse any story long enough, it rings genuine even if it’s pure, unadulterated guano.”
“Someone from the next car could have stolen the papers. Someone could have torn the paper into small pieces and flushed them.”
“You’re buying his bill of goods, kiddo,” I said sadly.
“Brick, you are such a cynic.”
“That’s the sweetest thing you’ve said to me all day.”
Finally, at long, long last, half an hour later, the train began slowing. We were coming in for a landing at Seville’s Santa Justa station. The conductors opened the doors and I exhaled a deep breath. Then, suddenly, our car was swarming with cops. They had a word with the conductor and let the Spaniards go. They detained us symposium types.
This outfit was the policía nacional, the national police. They wore dark and formal uniforms with white shirts and ties. They were polite, but highly perturbed. I thought they were just being anti-American, a popular sport worldwide. Dobbs talked to them, Darla and her so-so Spanish listening in.
“What’s going on?” I asked her. My Spanish was limited to Otra cerveza, por favor.
“The Seville cathedral received a telephone call this morning stating that Columbus’s bones had been stolen last night. A ten-million-euro ransom was demanded,” Darla said. “The receptacle containing the bones, the litter, didn’t appear to have been disturbed.”
“Have they opened it up?”
“Apparently not yet. There is a dispute among officialdom about disturbing the bones, as it may well be a hoax. They surmise that if the crime occurred, it was an inside job, cleaning people during the night or guards paid to ignore the activity. Every employee on duty yesterday is being interviewed. So far they have no solid information and have made no arrests.”
“What do they know of the caller?”
“He spoke in Spanish, but they think he’s a foreigner, possibly an American.”
An old saying of mine: Nature abhors a coincidence. Our symposium arriving just after this alleged crime happened, to research the allegedly purloined bones. You couldn’t blame the law for being a tad suspicious. They took our statements with a translator.
They went through our luggage again and found no missing bones, and no missing documents.
At the hotel, Darla said, “You have your credentials, don’t you, Brick? In case anybody asks.”
Besides my certificate from the Gumshoe Correspondence Institute of Private Detection, I received a snazzy silver badge. It was a five-pointed star like lawmen wore in the old Westerns. Those points caused me no end of grief at airport security and Darla, once in a rare snide mood, had said it looked like it came out of a cereal box.
“Never leave home without them,” I said. “Why would anybody ask?”
“Well, it has been suggested that we in the symposium conduct a parallel investigation and that you are eminently qualified. We wish to have our names cleared, individually and as a group. Not everyone was enthusiastic, but nobody raised an objection. In fact, Ed Dobbs, who first proposed the investigation, asked me to ask you if you would take on the job for an honorarium.”
My eyes widened as I rubbed thumb against forefingers. “Is an honorarium like a grant?”
“Kind of a mini-grant, an amount to be negotiated.”
“And if I find a member of your symposium under a rock?”
“Let the chips fall where they may.”
I raised my right hand, deputizing myself, threw my left around Darla, kissed her, and said, “Let’s start at the scene of the crime. I’m ready for some heavy-duty culturalizing.”
The Christopher Columbus Symposium had grown to thirty and lurched forward on schedule. The plainclothes police were damn near living with us, one casually looking the other way or at his newspaper whenever you turned around, but nobody was taken downtown or otherwise detained.
I knew zip about this city in advance, except the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he sang “The Barber of Seville.” This cathedral they have got, though, if you’re ever in town, don’t miss it. The Seville cathedral is old and gingerbread-ornate and bigger than a domed stadium. You wear off a half-mile of shoe leather walking the perimeter. It’s got eighty-one stained-glass windows, seventy domes, and twenty-five chapels. What’s up above you is supported by thirty-two columns, some one hundred and eighty feet tall.
Oh yeah, it sports a three-hundred-foot-high bell tower and an enclosed patio that has an orchard’s worth of producing orange trees.
There’s plenty of room for Chris’s bones and there they allegedly are, soon after you enter. These four bronze and alabaster guys in frilly outfits that make you wonder a little about them, they’re holding up a litter that looks like a breadbox made of dark wood and leather. What made the monument strangely modern was the yellow crime-scene tape and the armed and uniformed cops on guard, up-close and personal.
“What’s the point? The horse is long gone from the corral,” I told Darla.
“Perhaps,” she said.
While the gang went off to their Columbus Symposium lectures and panels and workshops, I took the grand tour of the Seville cathedral again. I hung out at Chris’s exhibit so long that I was attracting attention, so I just wandered, thinking how hard it’d be to snatch anything in the cathedral, day or night, and sneak it out.
When the eggheading was done for the day, I cut Darla from the herd and we went to dinner.
Over the first course, she said, “The cathedral received another call, repeating the ransom demand, warning that he’d turn the bone into ash unless the ransom money was raised immediately.”