They sat down on the stone bench under the bougainvillaea vines, with the moonlight shifting in the leaves above their heads. Don Willie had come to the edge of the raised bandstand, and was holding his arms wide for silence. He spoke first in Spanish, and the substance of his remarks was that he had gone to great trouble and expense to provide this entertainment, and that all guests were under an obligation to have a good time. This was meant to be a joke, Beecher decided charitably.
He translated a phrase or two for Laura’s benefit. This gave him a respite from Don Willie’s heavy-handed banalities, and it also give him a chance to look at Laura, and admire the play of humor and intelligence in her face and eyes.
She squeezed his arm impulsively. “It’s all so different from the travel book and guided tours. I’m grateful to you, Mike.”
Don Willie had begun to speak in English. This was a rich jest, his manner indicated; flushed and smiling, with beaded forehead and gleaming eye, he handled the language in a way that reminded Beecher of a baboon playing with a violin. “I must not go into the world in this English,” he was saying. “I am a little boy in English. I say but stupid things. But the music, the paintings, the books, they are locked in my head, and my key...” He paused, blowing hard, apparently beyond his depth. “The key to my treasures is German, not English. It is the only language to speak of such things. English is for business. For making contracts and selling things. Our German is too big and strong for such trifles. They slips through its fingers like little coins. I say bad things about English, because it is natural to love best the language of the fatherland, no? Now we are all friends in my home. I welcome you to my Black Dove.”
To a spattering of applause, Don Willie stepped from the bandstand and hurried off to see about the fireworks.
“That was nice and diplomatic, didn’t you think?” Beecher said. “Can’t talk about music and art in English. Save all the big deep stuff for German.”
She laughed. “He’s so cheerful and happy it doesn’t make any difference.”
“He scolds his Spanish friends for going to bullfights,” Beecher said. “Cruel and barbarous. Nothing like that in the cozy old fatherland.”
“Well, I think I agree with him. About bullfights, anyway. Do you like them?”
“Yes,” Beecher said, and realized with some surprise that he was irritated by her oblique defense of Don Willie.
“I must sound very typical to you,” she said with a little sigh. “Mind all made up, SPCA gleam in my eye. You old Spanish hands must be weary of us.”
“I’m sorry for snapping at you. But it puzzles me why so many tourists come to Spain in a critical mood. They get off the boat or train spoiling for trouble. And they pick on the bullfight as final evidence that Spaniards are childish and savage and sadistic. This, of course, from enthusiastic fans of fox-hunting, cock-fighting, boxing, spear-fishing and any other bloody sport you’d care to name.”
“I’m sorry. You’re angry, aren’t you?”
Beecher smiled at her. “I will be if you won’t come to the bullfight with me Sunday. Okay?”
She smiled back at him. “But you’ve got to explain things to me, and let me leave if I want to. Okay?”
The fireworks started with a roar; an explosion sounded, and a whistling, jet-stream of sound streaked toward the sky. For an instant an expectant silence held the crowd; then a brilliant red and yellow pinwheel flew apart high against the darkness, and there were screams and cries of excitement and approval as the embers flared brilliantly, and died in the night. The fireworks were being set off in a cleared area beyond the swimming pool, and Don Willie was in charge of the preparations, shouting orders to his servants, and clapping his hands like an excited child when the vivid burst of colorful lights exploded against the moonlit sky.
He was assisted by his pilot, Bruno Hoffman. Bruno was an irritable, taciturn man in his middle forties, whose customary expression was that of someone who had just encountered a disagreeable odor. Not much was known of his background, except that he had been a pilot in the Luftwaffe and had joined Don Willie in Spain at the end of the war. He spent little time in Mirimar; most of his flying was done between Spain and various countries in Europe. Beecher had chatted with him several times in the village. Don Willie’s personal plane was a modified B-26, which was still hotter than most of the military aircraft in Europe. Beecher had flown them in Korea, and Bruno enjoyed talking to him about their various modifications and conformations. Bruno was pleasant enough, he had decided, if you discounted his suspicious, sniffing manners, and generally liverish disposition.
Beecher felt contented and happy with Laura beside him. She looked happy too, and he was grateful to Don Willie for that. Maybe the man had his points. Beecher knew he had never given him much of a chance. Lynch’s appraisal was more tolerant, and it just might be closer to the truth. There were two sides to every question. You never knew all the molding forces that shaped a man’s reaction to a moral challenge. And what the hell was moral anyway, he wondered. Dropping A-bombs on the Japanese was moral enough to invoke praise from the pulpits of America, but it probably didn’t look very moral to the thousands who had gone up in smoke at Hiroshima.
He found it easy to be tolerant and philosophical under the circumstances. With a lovely girl beside him, and Don Willie’s drink in his hands, it was simple to conclude that good and evil were relative matters. This made everything so much more pleasant.
After the fireworks a flamenco troupe appeared on the terrace of the villa, and the crowds moved up the garden to watch them dance. This was human fireworks, an explosion of sound and color and motion. There was the hoarse croak of hondo, and fat gypsies in polka dot dresses pounding out rhythms with calloused hands and run-over heels. And the snap of fingers and machine-gunning of castanets, and bare legs flashing, and the slender young men in skintight trousers, waistbands almost up to their armpits, and the guitars sounding like drums and then like the tears of women, and finally the Spaniards in the audience shouting ole! to punctuate the stories being told in music and song and motion.
Laura was smiling with excitement, the soft light gleaming like silver in her hair and eyes.
A slender Frenchman ran from the crowd to join the dancers. With his back arched and fingers snapping, he capered about clumsily but happily. He was very drunk.
“What’s this?” Laura asked Beecher. “Is he part of the act?”
“No, just the inevitable amateur.”
“Do the gypsies mind?”
“They’re used to it. But Don Willie won’t like it.”
The Frenchman’s name was Maurice. He had been around the village for a week or so. Beecher had seen him in the bars and cafés, usually alone, and usually drunk, or getting drunk, gulping down brandies with dedicated haste, and wrangling in a belligerent but mocking manner with anyone who happened to be sitting near him. The waiters had told Beecher he was a bad man, a man in trouble with no money and no friends but the brandy bottle. Maurice had a cold narrow face, and theatrically long black hair, which flowed back from his forehead in carefully sculptured waves. The wings of gray at his temples looked silvery against his dark, flushed cheekbones. He was thirty-eight or forty, Beecher guessed, but it appeared that he had ridden through those years at a full, frantic gallop; his eyes were staring and strange, with a milky shine like that of a trachoma victim, and despite his careful grooming, and slender controlled body, he seemed to be boiling inwardly with hostility and frustration.