The private elevator in the Presidencia was both carpeted and bullet-proof, as it had been in General Segura's day. But the magnificent bronze friezes of General Segura's capture of San Hermano had long since been melted down to make medals, and in place of the martial friezes there now hung a series of water colors painted by grade-school children in the small villages. Every year, Hall explained to Jerry as the car climbed to the fourth floor, a committee of the Republic's leading artists chose twenty water colors submitted by the schools for a place in this elevator. The students whose pictures were chosen received medals made from the bronze frieze which had originally hung in their places.

Gonzales was waiting for them at the fourth-floor landing. "Are you all right?" he asked Jerry, and without waiting for an answer he took Hall's arm and started to walk down the long gilded corridor toward the private library of the President.

The library was large, perhaps forty feet square, the four walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. In one corner was an immense mahogany writing table, clean now except for a drinking glass packed with sharpened pencils and a large yellow foolscap pad. When Tabio was well, this table was always piled high with books, most of them opened and kept in place by an inkwell, a heavy watch, or another book. Today there were no books on Don Anibal's table; instead, almost as if in explanation, a padded steel and aluminum wheel chair stood empty near the little corridor which led to the door of the President's bedroom.

"Please, sit down." Gonzales indicated two leather chairs.

"I'm in the way," Jerry said. "I don't belong here."

"I had to take her along," Hall said. "It was a matter of her life. Is there some place where she can rest while we—while we talk?"

"Excuse me. I will make the arrangement." Gonzales stepped out of the room.

"What's happening?" Jerry asked.

"I don't know. It looks bad. Whatever it is, don't cave in on me now. It won't do anyone any good."

"I'm all right now. But I'll probably have nightmares about today for the rest of my life."

Gonzales returned to the library with a middle-aged maid in a simple uniform. "Please, nurse," he said, "this lady will escort you to a quiet apartment. You will find brandy and a bed. I hope you will forgive us and find comfort." His blue lips tried to smile at Jerry as she followed the maid out of the library.

"You're not well," Hall said.

The blue lips tightened. "I'm a cardiac, you know. But it is not of importance. Simon Tabio will join us in a moment. It is very serious, compaÑero."

"Don Anibal?"

"Yes. Simon will tell you about the new development. He is young, but he is very strong. He knows that Gamburdo is a traitor."

"Has he told Don Anibal?"

"The mere telling might kill him. We must have the proof before we tell him."

"The proof?" Hall started to tell the ailing doctor about Androtten when Simon Tabio entered the library.

"Ah, Simon. This is CompaÑero Mateo Hall."

"How do you do?" the boy said, in English. "I regret that we must meet under such sad circumstances."

"El habla castellano, chico," Gonzales said.

"The sorrow weighs with equal weight in my own heart," Hall said.

"CompaÑero Hall was on the point of telling me some important news when you came in, Simon. I think you should hear it."

"I would like to hear it," Simon said.

"Do you know about Corbeta the Falange agent and Jimenez the C.T.E. radio operator being at the Gamburdo ranch with Ansaldo?"

"Yes. Segador has kept me informed."

"There was one other man at the ranch with them, a Nazi. An agent of the Ibero-American Institute named Androtten. At least that was the name he used. He reached San Hermano on the same plane which brought Ansaldo and me." Hall told them of Jerry's accidental discovery and of the events which followed and brought about the death of the Nazi. He told it in very few words, his eyes taking in the uncanny resemblance between Simon and his father.

"My father is very ill, seÑor. We must be able to prove your story for him."

"He is my friend," Hall said. "He will believe me."

"He is very ill. I believe you, of course. But what proof have we for my father that Androtten was a Nazi agent? If you know my father at all well, seÑor, you must surely know his passion for the truth. And we must remember that in his illness ..." The boy's voice trailed off to nothingness, and he turned away from his elders.

"I think," Gonzales said, gently, "I think that you had better tell CompaÑero Hall about what happened this morning."

Simon Bolivar Tabio dabbed at his reddened eyes with a white handkerchief. "They are killing him," he said, brokenly. He paused to swallow the painful lump in his throat, ashamed before the friends of his father for his weakness.

"There are many tears in San Hermano for Don Anibal," Hall said. "You should be proud of your own."

"This morning," Simon said, "Dr. Marina arrived here with a written message for my mother from Dr. Ansaldo. The surgeon refused to operate without the written permission of the entire Cabinet. He says in the note that he refuses to predict how long my father can live without an operation. He says that the operation must be performed immediately."

"It is murder," Gonzales said. "Every doctor in San Hermano who has examined Don Anibal swears that he is too weak to undergo an operation right now."

"He sent a copy of the note to each member of the Cabinet," Simon said. "They refuse to discuss the question without my father's permission."

"The dirty bastard," Hall said.

"We were discussing you this morning," Gonzales said. "Lavandero and Simon and myself. We think that if we get no further actual proof, we will have to place a great burden on your shoulders, CompaÑero Hall. Don Anibal trusts you."

"Do you want me to tell Don Anibal what I know?"

"Not immediately. It would be too great a shock. Don Anibal would demand proof even from you. But if he hears from you that you are here to investigate the Falange and then if, say tomorrow, you come back and tell him that you have run across some important information, perhaps ..."

"But have we time to break it to him in easy stages? Is his—health—adequate?"

"It is a chance we are forced to take," Simon said. "My father's health is not—adequate—for a sudden shock."

"You may be right. I have already notified Segador about Androtten. Perhaps by tomorrow he will have established Androtten's real identity."

"Then you will see my father now?"

"I will do anything you ask, compaÑero."

"Excuse me, then." Simon left the library.

"Don Anibal is not going to live," Gonzales said when the boy left. "Not even a miracle can save his life."

The doctor was tearing the stopper from a small vial of adrenalin. He held the open mouth of the vial to his nose and breathed deeply.

"Adrenalin?" Hall asked.

"It is nothing, compaÑero. Say nothing to Simon, please." A corner of his blue underlip was growing purple in tiny spots. "I hear him now, Mateo."

The boy carried his shoulders proudly when he returned to the library. "My father is sitting up in bed," he said. "He is preparing a radio speech to the entire Republic."

Dr. Gonzales was incredulous. "Are you sure, chico?"

Simon touched his right eye with his index finger. "I have seen it at this moment. My father is a great and a brave man. He says that we should bring CompaÑero Hall in at once."

The door leading to Tabio's room was opened by an armed army sergeant. "The President will see you now," he said.

Hall followed Simon and Gonzales through the small corridor which took them to the sick room. The shutters were opened, and the sun streamed into the chamber, bathing everyone and everything in its gentle light. Anibal Tabio was sitting up in bed, his hand raised in a familiar gesture as he dictated to a secretary who sat on a stool near his pillows.

"Neutrality," he was dictating, "neutrality is either abject surrender to Hitler or an open admission of complicity with the fascist Axis or a sinful combination of both..."

The swarthy Esteban Lavandero was, as always, at Tabio's side, his fierce Moorish face twisted with pain and love. He stood behind the girl secretary, one black hairy hand resting on the carved headboard of the ancient bed, his ears cocked for every word which came from Tabio's pale lips.

Tabio's wife and two doctors in white coats stood on the other side of the bed. The prim white collar of her dark dress matched the streaks of white in her long black hair. Her luminous mestiza's eyes, swollen from quiet weeping, were now bright and clear, and when Anibal Tabio looked to his wife after turning a particularly telling phrase in his speech her generous lips parted and she smiled at him the way she had smiled to reward his earliest writings three decades ago.

"The great North American martyr to freedom, Don Abraham Lincoln, a man of great dignity whose humor was the humor of the people from whose loins he sprang, was a man who many years ago described such neutrality. Lincoln was not a neutral in the struggle between slavery and freedom. And when some fool insisted that most Americans were neutral in this struggle, Lincoln replied with the anecdote of the American woman who went for a walk in the woods and found her husband fighting with a wild bear. Being a neutral, this woman stood by and shouted, 'Bravo, Husband. Bravo, Bear.'

"And then, Lincoln said ..."

"Don Anibal," one of the doctors said, gently, "I must implore you ..." The restraining hand of Tabio's wife made him stop.

"It is no use, doctor," Tabio smiled. "At a time like this, if a President can speak at all, he must speak to his people. Tonight you will type my speech, and tomorrow you can bring the microphone right into this room, and right from my bed I shall talk to the people. If I am to die in any event, it will not matter much. And if I am to live, doctor, the speech will not kill me."

Simon, who was standing next to Hall in the doorway, whispered that Tabio's eyes were too weak to distinguish them at that distance. They started to walk toward the bed on their toes, and Hall, glancing at Tabio sitting up in the old bed in a white hospital gown surrounded by the burly Lavandero and his wife and son, was suddenly struck by the similarity of the scene which was before him and the DorÉ engraving of the death of Don Quixote. It was all there, even to the faithful Sancho Panza figure of Lavandero, and at that moment Hall knew why Spanish savants had for hundreds of years written scores of books on the true significance of Cervantes' classic. Here were the two great impulses of the Hispanic world, the fragile, gentle, trusting dreamer of great new horizons and at his side the broad-backed practical man of earth who threw his strength into the effort of implementing the dreams and making them the new realities. Here was the visionary Juarez and the young soldier Porfirio Diaz, when the warrior was still a man untainted by his own betrayal of a people's dream. Here was the romantic poet JosÉ Marti and one of his durable guerrilla generals, Maximo Gomez or Antonio Maceo, whose white and black skins, blended, would have yielded a skin the color of Lavandero's. (Was it any wonder, then, Hall thought in those fleeting seconds before Tabio recognized him, that Tabio as a young exile went to Cuba to write a biography of Marti while his faithful fellow-exile spent the same months in Havana writing an equally good study of Maceo?)

At that moment Tabio saw Hall. "Viejo!" he said, happily. "Mateo Hall, a good friend and thank God never a neutral. SeÑorita, give him your stool. Come, sit down, Mateo."

Hall took his hand, tenderly, for fear of hurting him. It was a thin hand, bony and fleshless; cold, as though Death had already touched it.

"Viejo," Tabio said. He might have been genially scolding a favorite child. "Say something, old friend, and don't sit there staring at me as if I were already a corpse. Tell me about yourself, Mateo. We've come a long way since Geneva and Madrid and the day they fished you out of the ocean, eh?"

"It has been a long time," Hall said. "A very long time, Don Anibal. A century."

Tabio smiled. "Time is of no matter. It is the present and the future which counts, eh, viejo?"

"Of course, ilustre."

"My family and my good friends are afraid that I am dying," Tabio said, smiling as if at some secret joke he wanted to share with Hall. "I am an old dog. An old prison dog. Tell them, viejo, tell them that our breed doesn't die so easily, no?"

Hall could only nod and pat the sick man's hand.

"Do I sound like a dying man?"

Hall swallowed hard, managed to grin. "You? What nonsense, Don Anibal! I was at the Congress the other day. I watched you and listened to you speak. It was a great speech, Anibal."

"It was not a great speech. But it was good because I spoke the truth. And do you know, Mateo, that the truth is better than any great speech?" Tabio was breathing with increased difficulty. He slumped back against the pillows, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the doctors quicken, and he turned to them and winked. "Not yet," he smiled. Meekly, he allowed one of the doctors to hold a tumbler of colored liquid under his mouth. He sipped some of it through a bent glass tube, then turned to Hall again.

"Where were you sitting?" he asked.

"In the diplomatic box with Duarte and the Mexican Ambassador. Don't try to talk to me, Anibal. Save your strength. I'll be here for a long time, and when you're out of bed and on your feet again, perhaps we can have a real visit and sit up all night talking as we used to talk."

"Mateo! You talk like a child. I will never be on my feet again. But just the same," and he winked impishly at his wife, "I'm a long way from dying."

"Of course you are," Hall insisted.

"There, you see?" Tabio said to everyone in the room. "Mateo can tell you. He knows how tough our breed is. Tell me, Mateo, is it true that the American Ambassador considers me to be the most violent Bolshevik outside of Russia?"

Lavandero laughed, and Hall laughed, and when Tabio, laughing, turned to his wife and son, they laughed too.

"He is such a pompous fool, that Ambassador. Oh, I am being terribly undiplomatic, viejo, but to think of an old-fashioned bourgeois reformer like me being compared to Lenin and Stalin! It is the height of confusion. But if you ever meet him you can tell him that I admire Stalin and the Russian people. Your Ambassador and I were together at a State dinner the day the Nazis invaded Russia and he said that the Soviets would be crushed in a month and that he was glad. I told him then that the Red Army would destroy the Nazi war machine and I told him that before the war was over the United States would be fighting on the side of Russia and that therefore it was dangerous of him to say he was glad so many Red Army soldiers were being killed. And you can tell him that some day when I speak to Mr. Roosevelt again I will tell him what the American Ambassador to our country said openly in June of 1941."

"Please, Don Anibal," one of the doctors begged, "you must save your strength."

"For the speech," Lavandero added, quickly, motioning to Hall that it was time for everyone but the doctors to leave the room.

Hall stood up, again patted the blue-veined hand of the President. He watched Tabio, pausing to gain strength, mutely protesting with glazed eyes the obvious stage directions of the doctors who ended this visit.

"I must go now, Don Anibal," Hall said, softly. "If you wish, I will be back tomorrow or the next day."

"Matthew," Tabio said, and he began to address Hall in English, "you were in Spain. You saw. Tell them it does not matter if one man lives or dies. I have no fears for truth. I have come a long way on truth. Tell them, viejo, tell them what a miracle truth is in the hands of the people. You have but"—the words were coming with great difficulty—"you have but to make this truth known...."

Tabio's jaw sagged open. He fell forward against his knees. The doctors took him by the shoulders and moved him into a prone position. His eyes, still open, stared at everything and nothing, glass now.

"CariÑo mÍo!" his wife sobbed, but at an unspoken order from one of the doctors Simon led his mother to a chair in the corner and kept her still. Lavandero, Gonzales and Hall left the chamber for the library.

"What happened to Anibal?" Lavandero asked Gonzales.

The doctor shook his head. "It is the end," he said. "Don Anibal will never speak again."

"You lie!"

"No, Esteban." He turned to Hall. "His last words were to you, compaÑero."

"Christ Almighty!"

"For God's sake, tell me what happened to Anibal!"

"He fell into a coma. I think it is a stroke." Gonzales sat heavily in one of the leather chairs, began to fumble in his pocket for another adrenalin vial. His fingers began to become frantic in their impotence. "I—I ..."

Hall caught his head as he started to collapse. He reached into the doctor's pocket, found the adrenalin and used it.

"It is a stupid way to live," Gonzales said. "To have your life depend always on your being a vegetable with a bottle. Thank you, compaÑero. Just let me rest here for a few minutes."

Throughout all of this, Lavandero stood over Tabio's table, staring down at the jar of pencils with a dark, ugly face. He clenched opened clenched opened clenched his fists, his fingers working to no definite rhythm, and then he looked at his fists opening and closing and for a few minutes it seemed as if he looked upon his own hands with loathing. Then, straightening up, he put his hands in the pockets of his blue jacket and turned to Hall and Gonzales. "This is no time to plan personal violence," he said. "It would be exactly what the fascists wanted."

"I am at your orders," Hall said. "I think you know that."

"I am counting on you."

"What do I do now?"

"Keep out of sight for a few hours. I think you should go to Gonzales' house. I'll get you an official car and a chauffeur."

"I'm not alone," Hall said. He told Lavandero about Jerry and the death of Androtten.

"Madre de Dios, take her with you! And keep her hidden." The sweat pouring down his face betrayed Lavandero's excitement; his voice was calm and steady. "I'll send an armed guard with you."

"I'll get the nurse," Gonzales said.

"No. Don't get up. Tell us where she is."

Lavandero had taken over. Later, Hall knew, the man would allow himself to fly into a wild rage, but he would do it alone, where no one could hear or see him. And Hall knew, also, that soon Lavandero would be engaged in a battle with Gamburdo and the fascists for control of the nation.