by Walter Ellis
Bramall ran a hand across his brow. Britain’s Army was beaten. It had nowhere to go – not unless Egypt and the empire came into the picture. And for that it was essential that Gibraltar remain out of enemy hands. He sat back in his chair, exhaled deeply and crossed his legs at the ankles. He knew when he was beaten. “So when do I start?”
Braithwaite purred with satisfaction. He had got his man. “This afternoon,” he replied, taking his pipe out of his pocket. “It’ll take a fortnight or so to bring you up to speed. I take it your Spanish still cuts the mustard.”
Bramall looked faintly surprised, as if he’d been asked if he knew how to tie his shoelaces. “Mostaza, Senf, moutarde … I cut all three.”
The Yorkshireman sucked air through his pipe, then made a face as a sliver of tar shot into his mouth. He swallowed hard and grimaced before regaining his composure. “And arrogant with it,” he said. “Just like it says here.” He tapped the dossier in front of him. “Your life in one slim volume. Still … welcome aboard. Let’s just hope you live up to your billing.”
Madrid: Malasaña Quarter, June 20
The old woman’s eyes looked infinitely sad. She was dressed entirely in black. Her woollen dress, stretched tight across her ample belly and buttocks, was black. Her stockings were black and torn and the soles of her black shoes had worn through, exposing black, calloused feet. Her headscarf was black. Even her teeth were black, matching her eyes. She looked up from the steps on which she was squatting and glanced across at the young woman opposite. If she was curious about the good shoes of the Señorita – made from the finest Spanish leather, like the pair she herself had owned on the day of her wedding – she didn’t register the fact. Nor did she look to be interested in the sheen and obvious good condition of the stranger’s hair, or in the radiant whiteness of her teeth. Such details might have aroused her suspicions a year or two ago, when her family was still alive and spies were a constant threat. But now? What did she care? Everyone she had ever loved was gone from her and there was no more “they” could do to her. She would have got up and shuffled away, but her legs ached when she put her weight on them. It was her hips. Like the rest of her, they had given up. She turned away, losing herself in the ache of memory.
So far as her mother knew, Isabella Ortega, 21-years-old, her eyes as green as the Asturian countryside in which she had been raised, was in Malasaña to distribute food to the poor and dispossessed, watched over by Father Rojas from the church of Santa María de Real de Montserrat.
Cardinal Isidro Gomá, the Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, had been one of Franco’s strongest supporters during the War, which he saw as a crusade against wickedness and the godlessness of Russia. But after the fighting stopped, he had called on the victors to show compassion for the people, who had suffered much and needed to be guided back to righteous living by the example of a Christian administration and priesthood. Gomá, now 70 years-old and unwell, knew that he would never win Franco over to his point of view. That was why, having previously endorsed public masses, often held on street corners, at which the people of Madrid were implored to seek forgiveness for their sins, he had ordered his priests to demonstrate greater pastoral care and to work with charitable institutions in the relief of poverty. The rich were as baffled as the Caudillo. Their preference was for forced labour. All over the country, “penal detachments,” made up of former Republican combatants and their families, were worked almost to death in the construction of bridges, dams and irrigation channels. Isolated buildings throughout the country had been turned into makeshift prisons in which the inmates were subject to torture, starvation and the firing squad. The bodies of these fallen were buried without honour in mass graves, covered with quick lime and left to rot,
Father Rojas, 32 years-old and so pinched he looked perpetually surprised, was no Republican sympathiser. From good family in Seville, he saw Church and State working hand in hand as the proper instruments of God’s purpose. But he dared not defy the Cardinal and thus, working mainly with women of the better class, he reluctantly distributed alms each week to the mothers, wives and children of the vanquished. That morning, Isabella had arrived at his presbytery at Santa Maria to offer her services. It was the first time in her life she had set foot in Malasaña, a tightly knit quarter north of the Gran Via. Known to her mother’s generation as the Barrio de Maravillas, or District of Wonders, it was one of the most deprived in the city, and also one of the most dangerous.
Isabella looked pale and anxious as she handed out small portions of stale bread and olive oil, plus a few onions and tomatoes that her mother considered unfit for the table. Though she was pleased to help the destitute, the real reason for her presence in Malasaña was one that she could never mention to Father Rojas, let alone her mother. Her childhood friend, Teresa Alvarez, was in desperate need of her help and, to her shame, she was a day late in responding. Teresa’s father, Colonel Eduardo Alvarez, was a wanted man, one of those who had organised resistance to Franco in the capital in 1936. He had later served as an adviser to the Socialist Prime Minister Juan Negrín. As a consequence, every member of the Guardia Civil carried his picture in his breast pocket. It was even said that Franco, irritated beyond measure by the capital’s Republican leaning, blamed it on Alvarez and would tighten the garrotte himself.
The colonel and Isabella’s own father had once been close. They had gone through the military academy together and served as brother officers during some hard times in Morocco in 1921. Later, when they were both majors, serving under the regime of the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, their daughters attended the same school in Oviedo. Teresa was the brainy one. She quickly learned to speak French, German and Italian and declared her interest in going to the Sorbonne, where she would read literature and philosophy. Isabella was also capable, but less interested in books. She shared her friend’s capacity for foreign languages – in her case French and English – but truly excelled at sport, where she became captain of the netball team in her final year and won medals for swimming.
It was on July 17, 1936 that news came in of a rising by troops in Morocco. Franco had been the leading light then, as he was now, and both girls had been horrified by tales of rapes and mutilations carried out by his Moorish troops. Isabella had protested to her father that Franco was a brute and a tyrant. He told her not to listen to rumours and insisted everything would be fine. Six months later, he had sent her out of Spain into the care of his brother Rafael in Argentina. Isabella had not seen Teresa since.
It was not yet nine o’clock in the morning in Malasaña, but the summer heat was building and the streets stank. Refuse piled up on the pavements, spilling over onto the roads. The sewers had not worked properly in years. A dog, its ribs showing through its wizened flanks, snuffled in the gutter among the debris, searching for a rat that suddenly emerged and sped across the street before disappearing into a drain. The dog looked disappointed, then sat down wearily and buried its nose in its rear end. A number of the shops and houses, dating mainly from the Enlightenment, 150 years earlier, were marked by shell holes, patched up with sheets of sacking. Most of the windows were cracked or shattered. There were few young men left in the barrio. Mothers and children made up the majority of those who crowded the narrow streets, and old women, like the one who had just averted her eyes. They looked hungry. The eyes of the children, as they waited next to their mothers for their handouts from the rich, were ravenous, causing Isabella, as she distributed her small parcels, to feel a brief, unseasonable chill and to pull her cheap shawl, borrowed from a housemaid, closer about her shoulders.
Two days before, she had met Teresa in the Arco de Cuchilleros, a bar, famed for its old-style flamenco, carved into the rock beneath the Plaza Mayor. Her friend had telephoned her from the local post office. Isabella had been shocked to take the call. She had always assumed that Colonel Alvarez had got his family out at the end of the war, probably to
France or England. She had no idea they were still in Spain, where they risked imprisonment or worse. Now it turned out that the Colonel had been badly hurt in the fighting around Madrid in the last days and forced to go into hiding. Would she meet her? Teresa wanted to know. She must. It was a matter of life and death.
Isabella hadn’t known what to say. It was late, and her parents did not approve of her going out alone in the daytime, still less in the early hours of the morning. In the end, though, she had agreed. She had no real choice in the matter. She told one of the serving girls who was about to go to bed that the police officer guarding their villa looked cold and hungry. “You should take him out some bread and olives,” she said, “and maybe a glass of wine.” The girl had looked startled, but Isabella had noticed them talking on several occasions in the course of the day. It was obvious the girl was attracted to the handsome young officer and she did as she was asked. As the two flirted innocently at the front of the house, Isabella made her way out the back gate and down the steps of the alleyway behind, towards the Calle Yeseros, 10 minutes from the city centre.
Once in the Arco de Cuchilleros, she had only minutes to wait. Teresa looked terrible, causing Isabella to gasp when she saw her. Her skin was yellow, almost jaundiced, and her cheeks and eye sockets sunken, as if she hadn’t had a proper meal in weeks. Her hair, once lustrous, hung in dark hanks. It was in the end the clothes Teresa wore that alarmed her most. She had always been a fastidious dresser; now she was virtually in rags. Isabella hugged her friend, averting her nose to the smell, and undertook to return the following day with money, medical supplies and bandages.
“We need money to buy food and clothes. – and to pay a doctor if we can find one who will dare to treat my father. Then we must find a counterfeiter to forge documents for us so that we can leave Madrid and make it safely across the border with Portugal. After that – who knows?”
The situation was getting worse by the day, Teresa said. They had no money and her father’s condition was deteriorating. Luisa, her mother, had been driven practically mad with worry. Worst of all, the nightly patrols of the secret police, fronted by the Guardia Civil, were sweeping Malasaña and closing in on their location and it was certain they would be discovered soon. That was when Isabella had burst into tears. Giving her friend the few banknotes and the small change she had in her purse, she promised to bring more next day, as well as whatever medical supplies and bandages she could lay hold of. Teresa took the money without a word. Then she wrote out her address on a piece of paper and fled into the night.
But Isabella had not kept her promise. The next morning, having got back to the Calle Beatriz Galindo a little after two, she was awakened early by her mother, who informed her that they were due at a special mass in the cathedral at ten to solemnise the Government’s proposal of a permanent memorial to the Fallen. The mass, which would last two hours, would be followed by a reception at the Escorial Palace and dinner at the Pardo with Franco and his ministers.
There was no way to avoid it. It was simply too big an occasion. But the Alvarezes had survived this long, she told herself. What real difference could another 24 hours make? The important thing was that her help, when it came, would get them out of Spain before they could be arrested.
The barrio was a sprawling, ugly place. Her two companions – daughters of a university professor and a lawyer – were obviously nervous and stayed close to Father Rojas and the two Guardia Civil officers who accompanied them on their mission. Only by carefully choosing her moment did Isabella managed to break free from the group.
She had with her 200 pesetas in cash that she had withdrawn that morning from her bank account, as well as the entire contents of her mother’s medicine cabinet. Having consulted a street plan published before the war, she thought she knew where she was going, but ever since the siege few roads and alleyway in the quarter were marked and within minutes she was lost. After a while, a boy, aged about 12 or 13, sidled towards her, reminding her of pictures she had seen in a childhood edition of Oliver Twist, by the English writer Charles Dickens. Thrusting a handful of céntimos into his mud-caked palm, she told him the name of the street she was looking for and said there would be more if he could take her there. He nodded sullenly and indicated with a movement of his head that she should follow him.
Minutes later, he stopped outside the ruins of what had once been a bakery
“Is this it?” she asked. “Are you sure?”
“That’s the address you gave me. Now where’s my money?”
She handed him a few pesetas, He spat on the coins, gripped them in his fist and turned away.
An open gate next to the bakery’s front door led into a stinking alleyway. Flies were swarming around something unidentifiable lying on the ground, causing her to look away. A mouse scuttled past and disappeared into a crack in the wall. Isabella felt a lump rise in her throat. At the end of the alley was a set of stone steps leading down into a cellar. Ignoring the stench of urine and rotting flesh, she made her way to the top of the steps and looked down.
That was when a man’s voice called out to her.
“You looking for the old fellow with the broken leg?” he said. “Him and his wife and the girl?”
“That’s right.” The speaker sounded old and bronchial – 70 if he was a day. He was standing with the sun behind him and she had to squint to return his gaze.”
“You’re too late,” he said. “The police came for them last night. Turns out the father was something high up in the old government. They’ll have shot him by now – or garrotted him more likely. His wife, she was screaming at them. The daughter, too. Didn’t do no good. If they’re not dead, they’ll be on their way to a labour camp, which is the same thing, only slower. There’s nothing you can do – nothing anybody can do. Light a candle for them if you’re that way inclined. Otherwise, go home and forget about them.”
For the second time in less than a day, Isabella burst into tears.
The old man stared at her for several seconds without saying anything. Then he began to cough convulsively, sounding as if his chest was full of soot. Each paroxysm was worse than the last. Eventually, he hawked something dark green onto the earth floor of the alley and turned away, fighting for breath. “Take my advice,” he said, holding both hands to his chest. “Leave well alone. The dead and the dying are beyond our help. It’s the living you have to watch out for.”
Isabella stood up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She couldn’t believe it. She had failed them and now they were dead. It was all her fault. If only she had told her mother that she was too unwell to attend Franco’s celebrations. If only she had managed to get back to Madrid in time to do what she had promised. But she hadn’t. Instead, she had sat within ten metres of the man responsible for their deaths and looked on in silence as her father drank a toast to the Fallen. Now it was too late. She threw her head back so that the sun, as pitiless as Franco’s mercy, shone directly into her eyes. For a second she let the searing light burn into her retina. Never again would she believe anything that came out of the mouths of the Falange and its agents. From this moment on, she was at war.
Madrid: German Legation, June 21
The German Ambassador to Spain, His Excellency Baron Eberhard von Stohrer, tugged at the front of his frockcoat as he waited to receive the visit of Foreign Minister Juan Beigbeder and Interior Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer. The ebullient, six-feet four-inch Stohrer was a practical man, not a Nazi. Like many whose families were recent additions to the pages of the Almanach de Gotha, Germany’s Debrett’s, he believed in class and privilege and civilised warfare. The louche Beigbeder was a man after his own heart. Serrano was something else. There was about the Caudillo’s brother-in-law a smell of greasepaint, as if he was made up for the occasion. He was clever – brilliant even. There was no doubt about that. And he was ruthless. Yet there was, as well, a
certain archness about him, reminiscent of Göbbels, that made the Bavarian in Stohrer wonder what really drove him.
Normally, the Ambassador would have reported to Serrano at the interior ministry in the Puerto del Sol. But Beigbeder wasn’t happy with that. After all, he was supposed to be in charge of foreign policy. Besides, today’s three-way get-together gave Stohrer the chance to show off his magnificent new premises – Germany’s largest overseas representation, big enough to dwarf most Spanish ministries.
Franco had indicated three days ago that he was finally prepared to come off the fence and join the armed struggle. The spirit had always been willing; it was the flesh – specifically the state of the armed forces and the economy – that was weak. In the end, it was the fall of France that convinced him the colonial dream could be realised after all. The problem for the little Spaniard was how to get on the stage while the play was still running. That was why he had occupied Tangier, hoping to impress the Führer – a case of too little too late.
Still, the picture was not all black. So far as Hitler was concerned, Spain remained an ally of sorts and could still be of value as the war developed, particularly in the East. Stohrer, for his part, saw no point in being deliberately rude. He had served in Spain for much of his career and generally enjoyed the experience. The population at large might be suffering from famine and other shortages, but for him and the circles in which he moved, there was nothing but good food, excellent parties and entertaining intrigues. At the moment it looked highly likely that Germany would win the war. Indeed, it was hard to see any other outcome, and if Spain assisted the process, so much the better. But the career diplomat had grown to manhood in the Great War, which the Kaiser and his government believed Germany would prevail right up until the moment their armies turned around and ran for home. He would believe in the thousand-year Reich in the year 2933, not before. In the meantime, he would do the best he could to hang on to his job.
