Island Operation (Part IX)

This time Vania received a liter and a pack of CAMEL cigarettes. I told him that today he was my best man. He was happy, but I felt that he was also full of suspicion.

I told him now, too, that for several days I would work among these Teutonic texts, because I wanted to look over all of them and pick some out and, as he knew well, there were very many of them there. Again he was shocked.

Until three twenty five I operated like a worker on the assembly line at Ford working on some Studebaker and again I gutted twelve boxes. This time the transporting was not so bad, because returning from the pool the day before I dropped by to one of my friends, who was just entertaining her aunt. Aunt Aurelia drove a taxi.

As a former, presently dispossessed landowner, she could not get any normal well paying job, and with one of her last diamonds, sold at an undervalued price, she bought a large, solid personal automobile and took up the lucrative business of ferrying passengers.

We got to talking and it ended up that the next day at four thirty I would wait in the vicinity of the bridge and she would drive me with the goods to Nowobogacky.

Unfortunately only that one day, because afterwards she was leaving her car for the week to get repaired and she herself was leaving somewhere as well.

Working hard, from time to time I went to the books to pick out something interesting. I selected five, each thematically linked to the Spanish Civil War, of course in the form of Goebbelsian propaganda. As a joke I wanted to offer these books to Bławat. The titles were as follows:

Franz Spielhagen SPIONE UND WERSCHWOREN IN SPANIEN

Herman Kohl DEUTSCH FLIEGER UBER SPANIEN

Karl Keding FELDGEISTLICHER BEI DER LEGION KONDOR

DEUTSCHE KAMPFEN IN SPANIEN

Erich Ludendorff DER TOTALE KRIEG

The frustrated Vania again could not believe it, but at last he said that the next day he would stand here normally again.

And then in a hurry to the bridge to see Bronco.

The whole time my mind stuck on what if something happened to Bronco? What if, for example, he broke his leg on the way or while crossing the roadway fell under some truck carrying cabbage?

From time to time I got stuck on a horrible and calamitous picture: I would get there, Bronco would be nowhere to be found, and under the bridge would float forty eighty larger rectangular pieces and twenty four smaller square pieces of unclaimed cork.

Very nervous and unsettled I ran down the cement stairs. But everything was in top shape. Bronco was pulling the last sheet out of the water, which I had just a moment ago dropped into the channel. 

The rest waited calmly and conspicuously in various hiding places in the pockmarked walls of the bridge, some of them even already packed in paper and tied with string. I made the rest of the packages myself and when the taxi arrived punctually, everything was ready. 

The car turned out to be very spacious. It was an American NASH from the tail end of the thirties. I sent Bronco walking home, while in ten minutes I arrived at Nowobogacky’s with the goods, on the way requesting from Aunt Aurelia full discretion, that if someone were to ask her where she picked me up to tell them from the botanical garden. 

Nowobogacky invited me to his office and paid me forty eight thousand, meaning thirty six for the goods I brought now plus twelve for the two packages I picked up from the station storage and left him in the morning. 

He asked me how much more cork I had, because he was settling now his long-term production schedule and currently I was his only supplier. 

I told him that what I’ve sold him so far stood as some fifteen to twenty percent of the total I could offer. He was visibly pleased. 

We arranged also that I would try to get all of it to him within the next ten days to two weeks.