THE RECEPTIONIST asserted that no one named Page had registered at the Hotel Granada.
“Page,” Del repeated, trying a Spanish pronunciation. “Señor Lewis Page and his daughter Anna?”
“I understand perfectly, señor.” The receptionist was patient. “We have no one of that name.”
“But it is not possible!” Del stared at the clerk in growing dismay. “Señorita Page arrived by the Atacama less than two hours ago.”
“I assure you, señor.” The receptionist shrugged.
“Possibly the reservations are in the name of Julian Page?”
“I am sorry, señor. I cannot help you.”
Del looked round the foyer, but there was no sign of Anne. “Perhaps a message has been left for me,” he suggested, and gave his name.
“Not at this desk, señor, but I will inquire.”
Observing the young man’s distress, the receptionist was sympathetic. He touched a bell, but the head porter could only shake his head. Del described Anne and the dress she was wearing. The porter looked at the receptionist and they both shrugged helplessly, the gesture implying that they would have produced a half-dozen Annes if they had had the power.
Del was moving away in bewilderment when the receptionist called him back.
“One moment, señor.” He turned the leaves of his register. “Ah, yes. I thought the name was familiar. We had a Señor Page here on the seventh of this month. He stayed one night and left by the plane for Trajano next day.”
“Yes, that’s the man,” Del agreed hopefully.
“We have had no application from him since. Perhaps he has gone to one of the other hotels. I might suggest that you try the España. I will telephone, if you wish.”
“Thanks. I’ll go round.”
Del took hope again. The message from Anne’s father had not named the hotel. Anne had assumed it to be the Granada, but there may have been a change of plan.
He tried the España. Then he went on to the remainder of the feasible hotels and his search became more and more a panic action. He returned to the Granada to ask if any message had come in for him since his first visit. The receptionist looked into the anxious eyes of the young man and shook his head slowly.
“Surely it is just an unfortunate mistake, señor,” he argued. “In time you will hear from your friend.”
“In time?” Del looked at his watch. “My ship sails in an hour.”
“I have been thinking. The air line put on an extra flight to Trajano to-day for some important passengers from the Atacama. Perhaps your friends were in a hurry to reach the capital and managed to get seats.”
“But Señorita Page would have let me know.”
“Is it possible that she sent a message to the ship? In the event of a sudden change . . .”
Del cut him short with a word of thanks and dashed for his waiting taxi. In his desperation he was ready to follow any gleam of hope without pausing to consider the probabilities.
He reached the Atacama in a matter of minutes, only to find that no message had been received for him.
“Is there a telephone line to the shore?” he demanded.
There was.
He called up the airport. No one named Page had travelled by the extra plane. It had been reserved strictly for the party of the Minister of Fine Arts, Dr. Byrne, and his son, the famous tenor.
Sebastian!
But the thought and its implications were not to be entertained for a moment. Anne was incapable of duplicity.
There was only one thing left to do, and he might have done it much earlier, if only it had occurred to him.
The name was there, in the Trajano Directory: Page, J., Casa Alta, Rosario 24.
He had to wait twenty minutes before the call could be put through. He asked for Señor Julian Page.
“What is your business with Señor Page?” the voice at the other end of the line inquired.
“I will explain that to him.” Del spoke sharply, moved by his urgency. “It’s personal,” he added. “I’m a friend.”
“Can I do anything for you? I am the estate manager.”
“Listen! My ship is sailing in a few minutes. I must speak to Señor Page.”
“Your ship? I see.” A moment of hesitation, and the voice went on. “I am afraid that you have not heard the sad news. Señor Page died last week.”
“Died? But . . .” Del tightened his grip on the receiver. “How can I get in touch with his brother, Lewis Page? Where is he staying in Santa Teresa?”
“I don’t understand, señor. If you will explain your business, I will try to help. You are an American buyer of our coffee?”
“I have nothing to do with coffee. I’m on my way to Chile. Please tell me where I can find Lewis Page.”
“There seems to be some mistake, señor. I know of no one named Lewis Page.”
“But he has been staying with you at the Casa Alta.”
“No, señor. We have had no guests.”
Del stared at the dead telephone for quite two minutes. Then he made up his mind.
“I’m making a stop-over,” he told the purser. “Please get my baggage through to our agent at Antofagasta. I’ll pack a suitcase.”
“But, Mr. Wayne, we’re sailing in seven minutes!”
“It will take me three. The officials are still on the dock, aren’t they?”
A half-hour later he had left his suitcase at the Granada and was on his way to police headquarters, heavy with despair as thoughts of all he had read or heard of crime and white slave traffic ran in his mind. He had discounted the worst stories as exaggerations or as feasible only under conditions that had been cleaned up, but now, in his disturbed vision, every road led to Buenos Aires.
Frantic as he was, he realised the importance of establishing his identity as a means of securing action.
He gave his name to a dubious-eyed official. He added: “I’m the son of Beckett Wayne of Wayne Copper Mines Incorporated, New York and Antofagasta.”
Everyone in South America knew Beckett Wayne, if only for his eccentricities.
The official jerked to a more respectful attitude, excused himself, and returned in a moment to announce that Inspector Chavez would see Mr. Wayne.
Inspector Chavez was small, thin and tired. He looked like one who has been permanently cheated of his siesta. When his eyes threw off their sleepiness, they took on a satirical glint.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Wayne?” he inquired in precisely enunciated English.
Mr, Wayne told the whole story of his day in full detail. He lingered over his description of the taxi-driver who had boarded the ship, for this man had become the first suspect in his mind and the sallow face with the long nose and the receding chin had acquired a sinister cast.
Chavez turned to the window, wishing, perhaps, to hide the satirical glint in his eyes.
“Have you not thought, señor, that you may be alarming yourself unnecessarily?” he asked.
“I’m telling you the girl has disappeared, vanished. She stepped into this taxi, and no one has seen her since.”
“No one?” Chavez faced his earnest young visitor. With the glint controlled, his eyes expressed only a professional suspicion of the world in general. “It is rather a large assumption that the father did not see her, and she was no doubt under the observation of the friend who met her. Unquestionably a trusted friend, since the father arranged it. You saw him, señor?”
“I saw a figure behind the cab, vaguely. Why did he hide himself behind the cab?”
“Since, as you say, he was waiting on the pavement, he was naturally obscured by the body of the cab.”
“Listen, Inspector! Lewis Page came from London to visit his brother. They say at the Casa Alta that they know nothing about him. The brother dies, and no word is sent to Miss Page. Doesn’t it occur to you that there is something very queer about this?”
“You have a theory?”
“Yes, I have. A gang of some sort is holding Lewis Page. The same gang has kidnapped his daughter.”
“All this because you did not find the daughter at the Hotel Granada?” Chavez gave up trying to hide the glint. The young man was rather amusing. A romantic might have shown him commiseration, he was so patently the victim of a shipboard coquette, but romance had died in Chavez with the birth of his seventh girl and the issue of the latest promotion list.
“Mr. Wayne,” he said, “what do you really know about this Miss Page and her father?”
Mr. Wayne glared. He was becoming more and more the son of his bulldozing dad. The old scoundrel might cut him off without a penny, but there was a legacy that could not be cancelled.
“Miss Page and I are engaged to be married,” Mr. Wayne snapped.
“With the consent of Mr. Page?”
“I have already told you I was to have met Mr. Page for the first time.”
“That is what I have in mind.” The inspector’s patient mildness expressed deprecation of the young man’s violent tone. “Also,” he added, “I am not forgetting that you met the young lady for the first time on this voyage from New York.”
In effect he was saying: “We all know these shipboard flirtations. For a young girl on a holiday, a sea trip is dull without them.”
Del came into his full inheritance. “Goddam it!” he roared. “Haven’t I given you enough of a case?”
“A view, rather than a case, sir.”
“Look here, Inspector Chavez, or whatever your name is, I want you to know clearly –”
The inspector held up a beautifully manicured hand. At the same time his jaw developed a certain pugnacity.
“If you are about to imply that you are the son of Beckett Wayne, I assure you I have already taken the point.”
The hand came down and went quickly to a concealed bell-push between the pedestals of the desk.
“My department will do its best to trace this Englishman and his daughter,” Chavez said. “I suggest that you return to the Hotel Granada and wait till you hear from me. Above all, I recommend that you cease to play the detective.”
Del went back to the Granada with a new sense of frustration weighting his despair. He was convinced that Chavez looked on the whole thing as a harmless comedy and would do nothing. And there was nothing more he could do himself. For all the help he was able to bring to Anne, he might as well be back in the Atacama, speeding down the coast to the next port of call.
Wearily he recalled that he had an obligation to discharge. He wrote a telegram to Antofagasta to say that he was detained in Santa Teresa and would come on by plane as soon as possible. His message to the authority in New York was more personal. The only information it gave was that he had jumped ship and was remaining in San Mateo indefinitely.
Back at headquarters, Chavez was in consultation with his chief.
“I don’t like it,” he complained. “I find it is quite true that this Julian Page died last week. It is also true that the manager at the finca knows nothing of a brother, let alone a brother’s daughter. At least, that is what he claims. Unfortunately the widow is not available. Prostrated by grief, she has left the estate temporarily.”
The chief frowned heavily. “You think this Lewis Page and the daughter are impostors?”
“I think only of the time when Beckett Wayne was kidnapped and held for ransom.”
“But that was in Chile. This is San Mateo.”
Chavez ignored the irrelevance. “That, too, began on a voyage. The trap, you may remember, was baited with a Bolivian actress.”
“Some of these Bolivians are handsome women,” the chief sighed.
“What has that to do with it?”
“Eh?” The chief came out of his momentary dream and was all sagacity. “It points to variations, doesn’t it?”
“Each case has its variations.”
“That’s what I mean.” Thought furrowed the chief’s wide brow. “If this pseudo-English girl was being used as a lure, why is it that she and her supposed father vanish at the moment when the trap should have closed? And why, in the name of all the demons, should the girl claim relationship with an actual English planter in the wilds of Rosario?”
“Verisimilitude,” Chavez murmured. “A girl, travelling alone and without a feasible identity, would be suspect.”
“So she picks on this obscure Englishman?”
“The obscure Englishman is internationally known as an archaeologist.”
“Absurd, Chavez! Is young Wayne interested in archaeology? No! Like his lamentable father, he inclines to biology. The study of the young female.”
“He has not that reputation. He impressed me as being an eminently sincere young man.”
“What impresses me is that nothing makes sense.”
“Thirty years have I laboured in this vineyard,” Chavez sighed. “Never have the grapes ripened according to the laws of agronomics.”
“Where do grapes come into it?” the chief demanded.
“Nowhere, if you put it like that,” Chavez admitted with another and different sigh. “Perhaps the plotters have developed a more subtle technique. Phase one: the innocence of the lure is established by the clever use of verisimilitude.”
“Let us dispense with verisimilitude,” the chief pleaded.
“Phase two: the victim is induced to break his voyage. Phase three: contact –”
“Phase four, five, six!” the chief roared. “If young Wayne is kidnapped, there will be no grapes. The inferno will break loose, as it did in Chile.”
“But this is San Mateo. Young Wayne will not be kidnapped. I have advised him that he must stay in the Hotel Granada till he hears from me.”
“You have advised him! Chavez, I can see only further disappointment for you when the next promotion list comes out. Do you think this fool Americano will heed your advice?”
“I have taken other measures,” Chavez said modestly.