Brain in Spain

By Michael Demarest

THE ELDORADO NETWORK by Derek Robinson Norton; 409 pages; $12.50

Exam question: What does Spain produce? Well, brave bulls, rough red wine, the only true sherry, paellas, painters, poets, playwrights, flamenco dancers, gypsies, guitarists, terrorists, royalists, fascists. That answer rates 9.5 on the bromide scale. The most spectacular product of Spain, in fact, is and always has been the manic-romantic, the legion of brillants who have ranged from the old salt who convinced the Spanish that he had discovered a passage to India to the faded "conquistador" who tilted at windmills. Not quite in their league, but certainly in the milieu, is Luis Cabrillo, a young disenchanted adventurer who has been kicked out of 23 schools and almost as many jobs. But the semifictional Luis owns one of the best brains in Spain. In The Eldorado Network, the fourth novel by English Author Derek Robinson, Luis becomes a spy for the Germans in World War II, supposedly reporting to his masters from all-but-defeated Britain.

Luis gets his professional start as a driver for three foreign correspondents during the Spanish Civil War, quickly learning the arts of duplicitous reporting. Then he stumbles onto a small fortune in bank notes that have been salvaged from bombed Guernica. Postponing his career in intelligence, he meanders around Spain for most of a year on a donkey named Fred--after Astaire because of its jug ears--and later holes up in Madrid for two years until the cash runs out. It is then that he goes to work for the Abwehr. The Germans like Luis mainly because he speaks English volubly and can make change from ten bob for a threepenny Cadbury's bar. He became fluent in that twisting tongue in order to get his money's worth out of American movies, for which the Spanish subtitle might read "Be gone!" while the sound track said, "I'll kick your teeth past your tonsils." Luis earns the Nazis' trust and the Iron Cross with his prescient reports on British planning. In time, Eldorado (Luis' code name) acquires an imaginary network of agents, all handsomely remunerated by German intelligence, which pours their pay into Cabrillo's Lisbon bank account. The cash from Berlin flows and grows. And Cabrillo never gets closer to England than Oporto.

Superspy Luis winds up working as a double-agent for the Brits, brilliantly predicting from Portugal an Allied invasion of Greece, when the Big One was of course scheduled for North Africa. Despite the deception, the Abwehr concludes that the Cabrillo cabal had spotted every diversionary clue and was blameless.

Confidence in Cabrillo's chance of survival is not so easily maintained. Slaving in his office, Eldorado becomes obsessed with his imaginary network. Derived from guidebooks and railway timetables, the false messages flow to Madrid and thence to Berlin with "authentic" reports on everything from British re search on light alloys to homosexuality in the submarine service. Luis comes closer and closer to a Mauser slug in the chest. In real life, and most fiction, he would be cheaply expendable. Here he is not, because the rise of Luis from Franco's Most Wanted list to nouveau millionaire is too good to end abruptly, not least because his life is joined by Juliet Francis Conroy, a Los Angelena of equally dubious creditability. The American is beautiful and wry, a one-woman survival kit who leads him on to yet another plot . . .

For publishers and reviewers, Eldora do falls into the limbo of espionage-thriller-mystery books. A pity, for the story of Luis Cabrillo deserves consideration both as serious fiction and quasi history. As the author acknowledges, Luis is based on a real-life Spaniard code-named Arabel, who blithely invented espionage in Lisbon for the Germans and worked legitimately for the British during the war. Robinson, 48, a Cantabrigian who lives in a Surrey village Wodehousefully named Chipping Sodbury, worked for eight years as a Madison Avenue copywriter to finance his career as a novelist. The experience appears to have sharpened his sense of irony. He writes lyrically of the terrain of Spain, of the "vast and seamless tent" of sky above Madrid. Like his hero, who never set foot in England, Robinson has never even seen Madrid.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.