Birds of Prey by Amado Hernandez & Amado Hernandez

Author:Amado Hernandez & Amado Hernandez [Hernandez, Amado]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2021-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

XXXIII

Mando remained an early riser. Ever since he worked at the Monteros’ before the war, he would rise at dawn. And more so as a guerrilla in the Sierra Madre.

But the next morning at the Ritz Hotel, he hadn’t even brushed his teeth when the telephone rang. It was Helen, a Spanish-Irish mestiza who was born in Intramuros, Manila, but was in Europe during the war. Helen had lost both parents and became a cosmopolite traveling on the continent. She lived on her earnings as an agent for anything saleable, from a fort in Gibraltar to the crown of King Farouk. When she was younger, it was said that she was used to receiving offers for her smooth and alluring body for a night at the Grand Hotel or a week at the Riviera, instead of her wares.

Mando met Helen in Geneva on business. There the Spanish-Irish Filipina adventuress helped Mando sell his jewels at a good price. He gave Helen five percent of any cash sales, and her commission was not small. To a young king in the Near East, she sold a set of jewels worth a million dollars. This was a gift to a Hollywood star with whom he was infatuated. The king and the star met at a vacation place in Switzerland, and Helen guessed right away what spell could attract both the king’s gold, which came from his petroleum mines, and the heart of the actress. In that transaction, Helen earned fifty thousand dollars.

In his notebook, this was one of the biggest sales. In Madrid, he sold to a famous Spanish millionaire from Manila who was vacationing in Spain some jewels which he bought without haggling at the original quoted price of half a million. Mando heard that these were given at the wedding of a daughter of the caudillo, and in exchange, he received a gold medal and a citation for his deeds in honor of Spain in the former colony.

Cleopatra’s collar was bought by a bank of the Rothschilds in England at six hundred thousand pounds sterling—about two million dollars. The bank official expected to profit by no less than fifty percent for its investment in the storied collar, which it sold to a multimillionaire collector in Chicago.

Before the bank of the Rothschilds bought the famous collar, Mando’s agent first offered it to the English government.

“Such a collar and similar jewelry are only for aristocrats,” said the spokesman of the Socialist government. “We won’t waste a single penny on anything not needed by the country, but any amount for food, housing, and coal.” If it were not for his moral responsibility, Mando would have given the collar as a gift to the Socialist government in London. He felt then that the gap between the new government and the old conservative regime was like that between heaven and earth. After a time, he was startled to learn that the opposing parties were both made up of politicians. They were two faces of the same lead coin.

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