Seven Days in May

Thursday Afternoon

The thing about the diplomatic service, Henry Whitney thought as he drove out of Madrid, is the strange mixture of good and bad in the jobs they give you.

Here he was on an errand that could only be described as grisly, and it was costing him his first quiet evening at home in three weeks. All because the ambassador thought the situation called for rank, to flatter the White House, even though the most junior officer in Whitney's section could have-and should have-handled it. Politics, that's all it was.

So he ought to be sore about it. But this assignment would take him across some of the country he loved best in all the world, and that thought cheered him as he drove the Mercedes up the main highway leading northwest toward the mountains. He had discovered them when he was a brand-new foreign service officer in his first overseas post, and he still loved them. He would cut off Route VI at Villalba, on the near side of the pass, and climb over to La Granja on the back road. It wasn't the shortest route across the Sierra de Guadarrama, but it was the one he liked, and he hadn't driven it in a long time. He would reach the scene with plenty of daylight left. He could look at the wreckage, do what had to be done with the police, and still have time for a decent dinner and a good sleep. There wasn't any need for him to get back until tomorrow.

Whitney slowed down for Torrelodones and devoted his full attention to threading his way through the customary tangle of burros, casual pedestrians, and gracefully ineffective traffic cops in the center of town. As he speeded up on the other side, he fell to musing again.

What ever possessed old Archie to work up such a flap over this plane crash, anyway? No one else in the embassy had been particularly excited just because the name of a White House aide turned up on the passenger list. Few, indeed, had ever heard of Paul Girard. The first secretary finally caught the name, remembering him as appointments secretary to the President. No one had known he was even in the country. He couldn't have been in Spain long, because Whitney's consular boys had strict, if entirely informal, orders to let him know whenever a White House or Congressional passport turned up at their entry points.

But as soon as Ambassador Archibald Lytle heard about it, just before noon, he got Whitney on the intercom, and half an hour later the consul general had his orders: go up there yourself and see if there's anything left that we should take care of. Whitney asked if there had been orders from Washington. The ambassador said, a little brusquely, no-but it never hurt to let the department, to say nothing of the White House, know that the mission cared about the important little things too. Besides, Whitney should be prepared to cable details on the state of Girard's remains and stand by for instructions from Washington. That, at least, made some sense to Whitney, although it certainly was a job for one of his subordinates.

Well, he thought, that's how Father Archibald got where he is today, and you have to expect him to keep it up, even if it doesn't make sense to think that President Lyman will care much of a damn now about the rank of the consular officer who goes up to collect the remains of his late assistant.

Whitney dropped this line of thought as "counterproductive," to use the department's cherished phrase, wiping it away as he had long ago learned to erase worries that merely wasted his time. There were too many men in the service who had been bleeding incessantly for years over damn-fool little things that would take more time to correct than they were worth.

Instead he concentrated on his driving and on the scenery. He had a wonderful little car-one of the fringe benefits you never told visiting senators about was the low price of good cars here-and it made the twisting mountain road seem like a boulevard. Moreover, Whitney knew no more fetching twenty kilometers in the world than this stretch up to the Navacerrada Pass, down through the woods on the north side and then into La Granja, where the handsome summer palace of the Hapsburgs stood amid its lovely gardens and fountains.

Coming up the road to the pass, the country rose bare and gaunt almost to the top. Just below the divide stood a cluster of ski resorts, shuttered and locked for the summer, their terraces overlooking the wide, flat valleys below. The beauty of the Puerto de Navacerrada was in the contrast between this and the other side. At the very top the mountains seemed to drop away in a great tilted bowl, and instead of the rocks and brush of the southern slopes a deep pine forest covered everything.

Whitney passed the marker at the crest, and now he was into the pines and starting down through the patched light and shadow of the woods where the road turned and turned again, dropping away. This was big woods, the trees well spaced, the ground all pine needles except in the little grassy clearings.

He had hiked here twenty years ago. He drove on down, around the curves and across the white cement bridge that was supposed to be the one the guerrillas blew up in Hemingway's novel about the civil war. Whitney remembered it because he had tucked the book into his rucksack that spring. He had walked through the whole story, full of romance and nostalgia, lacking only a girl to come to his sleeping bag at night.

An hour later Henry Whitney was all business as he climbed a little knoll above La Granja with Juan Ortega, the officer of the local Guardia Civil detachment. They came over the rise to the wreck. In a fat, ugly scar along the ridge, burned and twisted metal still smoked in little piles. A much larger heap marked what must have been the fuselage. Two hundred yards farther along lay the only recognizable piece, the crumpled remains of the cockpit and nose section. He must have gone in with his nose up, Whitney thought, and that piece was thrown out beyond the fire.

"If it would not be a great imposition," Whitney said in Spanish as they picked their way through the mess, "could you perhaps keep a few of your men here until the investigators from the airline arrive? In these matters there is much that trained eyes can see to help discover why it happened, and it is better if nothing is disturbed."

"Certainly," Ortega replied. "As you can see, I have men here now, to prevent the curious from interfering." Three men in the gray-green uniform of the Guardia stood together off to one side, weapons slung over their shoulders. "There will be no meddling. Nothing has been moved, except for a few little things that were scattered about. They are safe in my office, and I will give them to you."

Whitney's stomach turned at the sight of several charred fragments of bodies, and he looked away. He asked if any attempt at identification had been made. Ortega shrugged and said it was impossible, except for the recognizable bodies of three crew members found in the cockpit wreckage.

They walked together down the slope again, climbed into Whitney's car and drove into town. In his office Ortega ordered one of his men to bring sherry, then hauled an old wooden ammunition box out of a corner and set it on the desk.

"This is all, senor," he said. "As you saw, there was a great fire."

It wasn't much. Whitney picked gingerly at two scorched books, a single earring, a ripped flight bag reeking of brandy from the broken little souvenir bottle of Fundador inside, a man's hat, a woman's torn purse, half of a flight steward's cap, and a crumpled cigarette case, its silver cover jammed shut.

Whitney, reluctantly looking at all that remained of forty-eight human beings, felt hot and sickened in the musty office. Dammit, I'm too old for this kind of thing, he thought, that's what the young guys are for. But he sipped the sherry, forcing himself to appear unhurried and unruffled.

"Many thanks," he said when both glasses were empty. "Now I must go. With your permission, I will take the box with me."

"Of course," the officer replied. He rose with his visitor. "I hope I may have the good fortune to meet you again, senor, on a more pleasant occasion."

Whitney walked out of the building. The fresh evening air tasted good. He opened the trunk of the Mercedes, lifted the box in, slammed the lid and locked it. What I need is a slug of good whisky and a quiet meal, he thought. I can go over that stuff later. What I really ought to do is dump it on Archie's desk just as it is.