Franco's Map

by Walter Ellis

  “Don Angel, I don’t know whether you recall our last meeting.”

  “But of course,” the Galician said matter-of-factly. “Salamanca, July, 1937. “You asked me if it was our intention to bomb civilians in Republican villages pour encourager les autres.”

  Bramall laughed to cover his embarrassment. “Did I?” he said. “Did I really?”

  “I told you that it was.”

  “Quite so.”

  There was a brief silence. “Yes. Well, I must be going,” Bermejillo said. “Work to be done, people to bribe.” He laughed slyly, showing a full set of teeth. “I will see you at the embassy party, Señor Bramall. Please tell His Royal Highness that I am looking forward to it.”

  The departure of the Marqués was a signal for the impromptu gathering to disperse. Bramall nodded once more to Le Maitre and stood back as the Frenchman ploughed purposefully towards an Italian Army Officer smoking a pipe. He craned his neck to search out a waiter but instead saw the burly figure of his host, Colonel Ortega, bounding towards him, his face suffused with importance. Immediately behind, radiating a cool, professional indifference, stood the second-most important man in Spain.

  “Señor Bramall,” the colonel began sonorously, “I should like to introduce you to our interior Minister, Don Ramón Serrano Suñer. I know you and he will have much to say to each other.”

  “Minister,” said Bramall, hardly able to bear the unexpected weight of the moment. “An honour.”

  A thin, incredibly sleek hand emerged from an immaculately turned sleeve. “I have heard of you, Mr Bramall,” the Spaniard said in slightly accented English. “You are, I understand, a confidant of Sir Oswald Mosley and the son of Sir Frederick Bramall.”

  Bramall took the hand, which was surprisingly firm. After barely half a second, it withdrew. “That is correct, sir.”

  “A tragedy about Sir Oswald. One that I trust will be corrected in time.” Serrano’s voice was like honey poured across hot buttered toast. His face was that of an ascetic – thin and clear, with cheekbones like a Russian. Its only failing was that it looked slightly too small for his body. Almost imperceptibly, his head altered its trajectory, picking up a remark from the corner opposite. “I trust,” he resumed, “that all goes well with His Royal Highness?”

  “Indeed, sir. He finds Madrid and its society most congenial.”

  “Does he, though? We in Spain have been through a most debilitating time for our economy and culture, but I hope we have not lost our sense of hospitality.”

  Bramall wondered if the condemned lining up each morning for their appointment with a firing squad would agree, but said nothing.

  Serrano looked at his watch. “You have been circulating, I hope. Mingling, I believe, is the word. That is as it should be. But occasions such as this, though agreeable, are not necessarily conducive to statecraft. One can never be quite sure who is listening. That being so, I should be obliged if you were to visit me at my office. There are matters of mutual concern that we might usefully discuss.”

  “Of course, Minister. You should know that I am at your service.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a second. Very well, then. Colonel Ortega will arrange it.”

  There was to be no goodbye. The Minister simply turned on his elegantly shod heels and disappeared in the direction of the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, the colonel trotting behind.

  Perhaps the scent of urine had got to him.

  “Well,” said Isabella Ortega, appearing suddenly from behind where Bramall was standing, “that seemed to go well. But then Don Ramón always did respond to flattery.”

  “So good to see you again, Señorita Ortega.”

  The look she shot back at him was pure vitriol. He couldn’t work out what he had done to deserve it. “Look,” he said, trying to keep his eyes off her cleavage, “we don’t seem to have got off to a good start, which is rather a pity, I think. I’d like to put that right – start afresh. So do you suppose I might interest you in lunch one of these days? Give us a chance to clear up whatever misunderstanding there might be.”

  As a romantic ploy, Bramall thought it almost perfect, and he was taken aback when it fell flat. “Is that really all you’re interested in?” she demanded. “Lunch with the first pretty girl you meet? And then what? An invitation to visit you at your hotel?”

  “At least I know what I want.”

  “And you think I don’t, is that it? You think I am just some privileged plaything to wile away an idle hour.”

  Bramall said nothing. He hadn’t seen a figure like hers outside of the Whitehall Review. In a swimsuit she would be a sensation.

  Aware of his glance, Isabella moved into the sunlight so that, just for a second, he could see her body outlined beneath the thin material of her dress. He felt himself stirring. She glanced back at him, flashing the emerald in her eyes. “There are people in my country who are starving, Mr Bramall. Others are being hunted down like dogs, to be hanged or garrotted, or else worked to death in labour camps. Is that the sort of world you want?”

  He blinked, as if photographing her image in his mind. Once again, he couldn’t seem to find the words. He concentrated, but before he could open his mouth to reply, she was gone.

  Chapter 4

  Madrid: Ritz Hotel, June 27

  Bramall was taking breakfast in his room – a luxury that would have seemed both comic and preposterous only a month before as he and his men prepared for the final assault on Narvik. He virtually spooned the butter onto his tostadas and lifted whole forkfuls of tortilla into his mouth. The egg and potato mix was soft and delicious and he washed it down with hot, dark coffee. Exquisite. This was how life ought to be.

  When he had first arrived in Spain as a journalist, he had expected to find nobility in the midst of suffering. Instead, he had seen Communist mobs baying for the deaths of landowners and their families, as if the excesses of the French and Russian revolutions had been templates, not warnings from history. He saw anarchist groups calling on enemy forces to surrender before shooting them down like dogs, to general approval. In the midst of such carnage, the more decent sorts of Spaniards – democrats, liberals, libertarians – were left floundering. Their small kindnesses and everyday civility got lost in the fog of war, where only the grandest or most grotesque of gestures stood out.

  A shaft of sunlight fell across his face, awakening in an instant the image of Isabella Ortega at the previous day’s reception. He felt himself stiffening. Why did she have to look like that?

  Ten minutes later, feeling relieved and guilty, he stood at his bedroom window and looked down towards the Plaza de la Lealtad. The surviving trees were in leaf; couples walked arm-in-arm in the park; vehicles sputtered by – all under the supervision of the city police and the Guardia Civil. He had read the recent reports of Francoist excess: mass arrests, executions, beatings. He had seen for himself what the historians liked to call the “distressful conditions” of the peasantry on his way in from the airport. There would be much else in the days ahead that would turn his stomach, he had no doubt of that. But was it really worse than when the Left had been in power in 1936?

  He turned back into the room and refilled his coffee cup. It was getting late. Time to get the day underway. He still had the invitation list for Saturday’s reception. If someone turned up who shouldn’t, he knew who would get the blame. After all, he had boasted to Buchanan-Smith that he had the final power of veto. Scooping the file off his bedside table, he began flicking through. At the list of O’s, he paused. There she was, buried in among the diplomats, Falange officials, government placemen, generals, members of the nobility, minor poets and secret policemen: Col. Raoul Ortega y Martinez, accompanied by Doña Vitoria Ortega and their daughter, Señorita Isabella.

  So she was coming to the party after all. He had to admit he was surprised. Perha
ps the Colonel had put his foot down – either that or she couldn’t resist the chance to attend the first proper embassy party in years.

  But he mustn’t get ahead of himself. When they had met at the reception in her parents’ villa she had gone out of her way to display her contempt for everything she thought he stood for. In one sense, this was good. He was, after all, passing himself off as an aide to the Duke and Duchess and a past member of the British Union of Fascists. But it was depressing all the same. There hadn’t been a woman in his life, in any sense, since Manuela Valdés. Two years on from her death, the thought of her still weighed heavily upon his mind. He was not a religious man – never had been – but there were times he envied the Catholics, who with a simple act of penance could put the past behind them and move on.

  It had happened so suddenly, he couldn’t move. He had felt literally rooted to the spot. Ahead of them, a hundred metres or so out from the water’s edge, one of the assault boats took the first salvo from the Messerschmitt. Forty men died in an instant, their helmeted heads falling in sequence. The roar of the raider’s engine and the cacophonous thunder of its guns drowned out the screams of the dying. What happened next was a blank. All he knew for certain was that when the 109 broke off its attack and banked left towards its own lines he was no longer exposed in the open but crouched behind a line of trees. He could hardly believe it. He was alive and uninjured But where was Manuela? Jumping up, aware, abruptly of the sounds of suffering all around him, he had called out her name. “Manuela! Manuela!” What had happened to her? Was she injured? It was inconceivable to him that someone so young, so passionate, so full of life, could have died. And then he saw her and for a moment his whole world stopped. She was lying, face down, in a clearing just beyond the trees. Her entire upper body was covered in blood. One arm stretched out ahead of her, the forefinger of the hand unnaturally extended; the other hand, by her side, still held on to her rifle. Bodies were strewn in a line from the river’s edge far up into the tree line. But it was hers that stood out. A young survivor of the attack, no more than 18, was staring at her, tears streaming down his face. She was pointing, he said, to the far bank of the river, indicating the direction in which they still needed to go. An Army captain, wounded in the neck, the collar of his tunic turned to scarlet, agreed. She had shown the true fighting spirit, he said. She was their Pasionaria and they would never forget her.

  Sitting in his hotel room in Madrid, Bramall wiped the sweat from his forehead. He looked at his hands. They were trembling. To steady his nerves, he fetched a glass of water from the bathroom, took several sips and forced himself to concentrate on the business in hand. Serrano Suñer had asked him to arrange a meeting via Colonel Ortega. He should attend to that straight away. Next, he would brief the Duke on the final guest list for his party and remind him of the absolute need for diplomatic propriety. Looking ahead, there was the small matter of Gibraltar and how to thwart its planned capture by the Wehrmacht. More than enough work, in short, to keep his mind from retreating endlessly into the past, where there was only misery and endless self-doubt.

  He picked up the telephone receiver and rang through to the switchboard. “I wish to speak with Colonel Raoul Ortega at the interior ministry in the Puerto del Sol. He is expecting me.”

  “Si, Señor Bramall. I will call you back directly.”

  Fifteen minutes later, having fixed an appointment to see Serrano, Bramall was making his way through the hotel lobby towards the Duke’s private lift when one of the clerks at reception called out to him. A letter had just arrived, hand-delivered and personally addressed. He tore open the envelope and gasped in astonishment. It was from Klaus Hasselfeldt at the German Legation – the fellow from the bar the previous evening. He peered at the ornate gothic script, intrigued and repelled at the same time. Would Bramall do Hasselfeldt the distinct honour of attending lunch with him at the German embassy the following day, June 28, at one o’clock? “Just turn up”, it added in English. “No r.s.v.p. required.”

  He stared at the elegant cream-coloured notepaper, with its embossed Swastika. He was being invited into the heart of enemy intelligence where the rules that applied were those written in Berlin by men with Death’s Head badges on their collars. The German – or Austrian, or whatever he was – was clearly no slouch. The question was, what did he know about him? Had he been tipped off to expect a potential traitor or a possible double agent? It was impossible to say. He drew a breath. Just minutes before, he had thought dealing with the Duke or Serrano was challenge enough for one day. Now he realised how naïve he was. This was when the game truly began. It was as if his head had been pushed beneath an ice-cold shower and when he came up he was cleared-headed and shaking.

  Vichy: capital of the French Unoccupied Zone, June 27

  Pierre Laval, Deputy Prime Minister of what now passed for the French Government, did not cut a heroic figure, even to himself. A day short of his 58th birthday, squat and hunched, with lank hair, a drooping moustache and teeth that were black and worn, he had survived in politics through will power and perseverance. Other capitulards drew strength from his example.

  Vichy, the town from which he operated, had been declared capital of the unoccupied zone partly because of its insignificance – it had no resonance in French history beyond its links with the leisure pursuits of Louis Napoléon – and partly because of its improbably efficient telephone service. Laval felt no attachment to the place. He was a committed boulevardier. But at least it was a base from which to rebuild his shattered career.

  He bore, he felt, a heavy burden. His boss, the 84-year-old Maréchal Pétain, though perfectly happy to work with the Nazis, and even to follow their example in such matters as the isolation of the Jews, had largely lost interest in the present. His preoccupation was with redemption. He did not favour war with England, which Laval had hoped to present to Hitler as a gift. So far as Pétain was concerned, the British could engineer their own downfall. For him, the exercise of civil authority in the Zone and of military as well as civil power in the Empire was both the limit of his ambition and the focus of his honour. France, he believed, had to expiate its sins, and central to the process was sufferance of German domination.

  Not all were so sanguine. Major Alain Delacroix, a combatant of sorts from the recent war with Germany, was now an aide to Laval and one of those most keen on war with England. Colleagues, already surprised that he had been promoted from captain to major at a time when the Army was being disbanded, professed themselves baffled. Had an Englishman humiliated him in some way? Had there been an unhappy love affair with a girl from the opposite side of La Manche?

  The fact of the matter was that Delacroix had seen something so terrible during the evacuation from Dunkirk that it had changed him utterly. He and his unit of Mechanised Dragoons had been ordered to join the rearguard that protected the allies as they sought to escape to England. It was obvious to him that they were to be sacrificial lambs, intended to draw enemy fire away from the beaches. Over the next two days, half of his company died in attacks by German dive-bombers. As their situation became hopeless, others abandoned their posts and melted into the countryside. Delacroix, issuing orders from the relative security of a church crypt, felt this reflected badly on him, though not badly enough to warrant anything reckless on his part. Believing the old adage that discretion was the better part of valour, he had even tried to surrender at one point, raising a white flag as a Panzer group raced past. The German tank commander wasn’t interested.

  But then, on May 26, just outside the village of Paradis – a name so inappropriate that it could only have been intended by Fate – Delacroix witnessed the murder of 97 British soldiers, members of the Rearguard, who had been taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht. Delacroix, with the remaining members of his unit still in tow, had intended to make it to Dunkirk, hopeful, all else having failed, of being transported across the Channel to safety in England
. Instead, he watched in silent horror as a detachment of what he later learned was the SS Death’s Head Division lined up their captives at the edge of a field and shot them. A few of the English survived the initial fusillade, but these were then dispatched with pistol shots or bayonets. Delacroix felt his entrails turn to jelly, fearing that the same would happen to him, and ordered his men to do nothing. He was trembling violently, and as soon as the coast was clear he locked himself into a nearby shed and threw up. It was terrible. Half an hour later, when he reappeared, he found that his men had abandoned him in disgust, leaving him to begin the long, slow trek south.

  He would never forgive the British for exposing him to his own cowardice and forcing him to hide. “London hopes to add us to their dominions,” he protested to Laval, as the latter returned to his newly appointed office after a frustrating meeting with Pétain. “Surely the Maréchal must see that. But if we rouse the empire and launch a strike against them, we can repay them in kind. We can restore much that has been taken from us and show the world that France is still master in its own house. They will run from us in shame.”

  “My dear Alain,” said Laval, running his fingers through his hair, showering the shoulders of his suit with dandruff, “I do not disagree with you. Though it would be a painful decision, war with England would certainly restore balance to our affairs. The thing is, the Old Man is not focusing on revenge. He seeks survival. To him, our continued governance of the empire and the existence of the French fleet are our only realistic guarantors of honour.”