A is for Alsatian

By DS Holmes

When a prize- winning yellow lab is stolen in Spain, Rodrigo and Samantha hit the road with a former shelter dog named Silver. The Alsatian's nose for Amarillo's scent leads the Dog Finders to North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, in one adventure after another for the amateur detectives. In the end they encounter a miracle amidst the ruins of an ancient city. This story is also available as G is for German Shepherd.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Holmes
• Release date: Jun 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386365747

Book preview

Chapter 1

Rodrigo, come quickly, a girl called from the back of a whitewashed ranch house. The dog is gone!

The Spaniard was walking past his stucco cottage, an adopted Alsatian at the heel position. When Rodrigo heard the Moroccan teenager’s voice, he broke into a run, half-a-step behind his canine companion. Up the sloped yard, across a semicircular drive and around the large one-story villa he found Samantha leaning against the kennel’s unlocked gate. He took in the scene—overturned water dish, broken lock on the concrete floor of the covered chainlink enclosure, and no sight of his employer’s prize-winning yellow Lab. An English-bred Labrador Retriever, Amarillo—often called Yeller, after the courageous dog of book and movie fame—was Don Miguel’s pride and joy.

The three-year-old female had delivered a litter of pups, fittingly, on January 17, celebrated in Spain as the Day of St. Anthony, patron saint of animals. As a favor to a generous patron of the Roman Catholic Church, Monsignor Zerolo of the Seville Cathedral had visited the Don’s sprawling estate west of the Andalusian city and blessed his dogs and horses. Now it was April and the vibrant festivities that accompanied Semana Santa had taken over the capital of Andalusia. Holy Week meant that over a hundred floats carrying religiously-themed effigies were paraded through the streets of the southern province’s largest city. The members of dozens of brotherhoods—known as nazarenos—donned flowing robes and tall pointed hats and, early on Good Friday, formed a procession at the Basilica de la Macarena around the revered statue of the Virgen de la Macarena. Visitors from America were often struck by the resemblance of the penitent’s costumes to that of the Ku Klux Klan in America, but that movement of racial hatred had never shared any spiritual relationship with the devotion the Spanish nazarenos offered up to the Holy Mother of Christ.

All of these thoughts, and more, swept through Rodrigo’s mind as he entered the empty kennel and carefully looked around. He knelt to scoop up a handful of raw meat by the dish and spread it out on an open palm. Getting up, he spotted a thick thread of sacking material caught on the door’s hasp. With his other hand, he pulled the thread off, grabbed a man’s scarf off the top of the gate and walked slowly from the kennel. Bent over, he examined a trail of shoe prints in the chalky soil.

What’ve you found? Samantha asked.

Have you seen Beni today?

He got the day off, personal reasons.

Not to attend the fiesta in Seville. He’s not a Catholic.

Believe it or not, there are Roman Catholics in Morocco.

Beni’s not one of them.

He’s not a terrorist either.

I know that, Sami. I also know that Beni Jilali was a thief.

Once a thief, always a thief? she challenged. Dressed in black slacks and a black blouse, wearing black lipstick and plenty of mascara to compliment her shoulder-length raven hair, Sami looked every bit the part of a young Goth woman.

Ask Moshe ben Jelloun, your Jewish friend in Tangier, about Beni Jilali. Don Miguel, in his wisdom, disregarded ben Jelloun’s advice and hired the man. Giving someone a second chance is one of our employer’s least known but finest attributes, one that his dog handler seems to have taken advantage of.

Sami studied the Spaniard’s tanned features, his muscular yet trim body and his dark eyes. She saw him as a modern-day version of a thirty-year-old Charles Bronson, the now-deceased American actor who was greatly admired by European filmgoers. As for herself, Samantha Zafzaf was eighteen. Until recently a lifelong resident of Morocco, she was the daughter of an American Vietnam veteran and a Moroccan mother, accustomed to living the free life of a street kid. Last year she had come to Seville on business for ben Jelloun and had invited herself along on a road trip with Rodrigo and his ailing dog, Blackie. At the end of the journey, the Black Lab had died, but not before Rodrigo had learned many important lessons in faith and love. Though the ex-prizefighter still had a hard edge at times, his heart had softened noticeably. She knew that he was trying to work out exactly what had happened and what to do about it.

"Yesterday Beni asked me to take Yeller for his usual morning walk through the Don’s olive grove. Even though I’ve been busy helping the horse trainer prepare Blanco, and a few others, for a display of dressage at Jerez de la Frontera’s Real Escuela Andaluza de Arte Escuestre, I promised I’d exercise Amarillo."

Rodrigo pondered this information. In his early years he, too, had lived as a tough kid on the streets, but in Seville not Casablanca. For some unexplained reason, Don Miguel de Goya had taken a liking to him and gave him progressively more responsible jobs in his far-flung operation. In addition, for a full year of high school, Rodrigo had stayed with a sister in Brooklyn. That experience provided him a kind of fluency in English, though not the type spoken at Oxford or Harvard.

His primary role in the Don’s many illegal businesses involved locating people who did not want to be found. While Don Miguel was back in London for treatment of a longstanding medical problem, Rodrigo had taken on additional responsibilities on the ranch. He lived in a small cottage below the main villa in the company of a five-year-old Alsatian, an orphaned dog once consigned to the city’s animal shelter after its German master had died in a traffic accident on a secondary road in the Sierra Norte Mountains, thirty miles north of Seville. The German businessman had been an associate of the Don’s, sharing a minority ownership in a vineyard and winery in the French province of Alsace, one of Don Miguel’s growing number of legitimate enterprises. The Frenchman who ran the place also raised farm breed Alsatians, related to but larger than the classic German Shepherds which often functioned as police dogs. The Don had taken in the homeless dog and presented it to Rodrigo. A priceless gift, he had renamed the dog Silver after its distinctive silver-tipped fur that stood out from the otherwise tan-and-black coat.

Okay, kiddo, this is what I’ve got so far, Rodrigo began. "The food was drugged, proably a fast-acting sedative. That’s why no one heard the dog bark. That and the presence of Beni Jilali—’’

He stole the dog? That ungrateful wretch! Her remarkable eyes—one blue, the other green—flashed angrily. I’d like to get my hands on him.

That is precisely what I intend to do, Sami. He dangled the thread. His partner in crime probably put sacking over the dog and carried her to a vehicle, a delivery van from the looks of the wheelbase and width left in the dirt. There are boot prints left by the second man.