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And his next words were like a bomb exploding at my feet. "Perona is offended, Grant. But I promise you, his natural personal prejudice will not affect my investigation. Of course he is prejudiced, since he is to marry Spawn's daughter, the little Jetta." I started involuntarily. This pomaded old dotard! This perfumed, ancient dandy!
"And find all Nareda's police bribed by Perona? I'll get Porto Rico. We have an hour or two; the patrol can reach you in an hour." The bandits were preparing to leave here. Two or three of them had gone to the flyer. Perona and De Boer were parting. "... Well, that is all, De Boer." "Right, Señor Perona. I will start shortly." "On foot, by the street route to Spawn's "
"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, Señorito?" An irony was in that Latin diminutive! He spread his pale hands. "Your United States officials perhaps exaggerate.
He will be there, fear not. Will you go?" "Yes." "Hah! That is the De Boer I have always admired!" I could see them in the moonlight across the pit. Perona now standing up, the giant figure of the bandit towering over him. Hanley's microscopic voice cut in: "Getting it, Phil? To seize you for ransom!" "Yes. I hear it." "This girl. Who ?" "Wait, Chief. Off " De Boer: "I will do it! Fifty thousand."
It was dark in the archway, but a glow of moonlight in the bowl beyond showed me its tumbled floor and the precipitous, eroded walls, like a crater-rim, which encircled it. The men whom Perona had met were across the bowl near its opposite side. I could see the group of them, five hundred feet from me, by a little moonlight that was on them; also by the sheen from the spots of their hand-lights.
I was about to enter the front gate when sight of a figure passing under the garden foliage checked me. It was a man, evidently coming from the house and headed toward the side gate. He went through a shaft of light that slanted from one of the lower windows of the house. Perona! I was sure it was he. His slight figure, with a gay, tri-cornered hat.
What could Perona, a Minister, be engaged in, wandering off alone into this black, deserted region? It was black indeed, by now. The village was soon far behind us. A storm was in the night air; a wind off the sea; solid black clouds overhead blotted out the moon and stars. The crags and buttes and gullies of this tumbled area loomed barely visible about me.
Damnably interesting. We're being cheated, what? It looks that way. Sit down, Perona." This was Greko Perona. Nareda's Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn 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.
Hanley's hurried voice came back: "I've sent the call to Porto Rico." The guard had moved again. He was no more than forty feet away from me now standing up gazing directly toward where I was crouching over my tiny instruments in the shadows of the rocky arch. A footstep sounded behind me, on the path outside the arch. Someone approaching! A tiny light bobbing! Then a voice calling, "Perona!
De Boer!" The guard took a step forward; stopped, with levelled weapon. Then the voice again: it was so loud it went through my opened relay, flashed up to New York, and blew out half a dozen of Hanley's attuned vacuums. "Perona!" Spawn's voice! He was coming toward me! I lay prone, my little grids switched off. I held my breath. Spawn's figure went past within ten feet of me.
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