The Guardian of Secrets and Her Deathly Pact

by Jana Petken

  “That may be so,” Pedro told him, “but the fact remains that there is not one penny coming your way. John Stein told me everything, everything! Told me that he’s been looking for you for over twenty years, said he’d never stop looking until he knew for certain that you were dead.”

  Pedro stopped talking, turned his back on Joseph, and faced the enemy to his front. He’d had enough of Dobbs’s face.

  Joseph stared into space, Pedro’s words echoing in his head. No letter? No money waiting for him in Paris? John Stein the Jew had ruined everything for him again! His mind flashed with what-ifs, and then reality sank in. What the fuck was he supposed to do now, he kept thinking. No money meant he had no future and no place to run to. Jesus Christ, he was well and truly fucked! His glazed eyes bore into the back of Pedro’s head. He didn’t care if he died now. He had nothing left to live for. The Merrills had taken from him everything he’d ever worked for. They were the plague that had cursed his life. Another stomach cramp hit him, and he grabbed his belly and moaned. There was no fucking time to get to the toilet. He was going to shit his pants!

  He stared again at the back of Pedro’s head. I’ll be dead soon, he thought, almost looking forward to the moment. But before he died, he’d make sure his son was well and truly dead too. He raised his knife and teasingly stuck the pointed end into Pedro’s back.

  “Who’s holding the weapon now,” he said with eyes blazing. “You’re going to die, and as soon as I finish you off, I’m going to get the fuck out of here and head straight for your mother.”

  “You won’t get a hundred feet before you’re shot down, and you know it. Look at you. You’re sick, a sick old man,” Pedro told him, unafraid.

  Joseph grunted. “I might be sick, but I’m the one holding the knife to your back. You shouldn’t have double-crossed me. No one does that to Joseph Dobbs,” he said, sweat and tears pouring down his face. “Turn around. I said turn around and face me!”

  Pedro felt the knife graze his back and gingerly turned to face Joseph, saying, “Are you mad? We’re in a fight for our lives here. We’re both going to die anyway, whether you like it or not. They’re going to start shooting any minute now so don’t be so stupid. You’ve won! You’ve made my life miserable. Is that not good enough for you?”

  Joseph put the knife to Pedro’s throat and looked Pedro in the eye. “Say it. Give me my title! Say ‘father’. I want to hear the word. Say it … or I’ll slit your throat wide open right now!”

  Pedro swallowed, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. By the looks of him, Dobbs has obviously gone stark raving mad.

  “Kill me, then, because I’ll not call you by that name,” he said.

  “Say it … I want to hear it … Say it!” Joseph insisted with a crazed look.

  “Okay, Dobbs, you’re my father, a father who murdered his father, his mother, and my grandfather – who raped my mother and scarred her for life when she was no more than a girl.” Pedro smiled a sarcastic smile laced with undisguised hatred. “All right, I’ll call you father and any other title you want to hear, Dobbs, but at the end of the day, you’re just a sick murderer, a drunk, and a coward. Father, kill me. Go on. Do it! I’ll be dead and mourned, but you’ll have the blood sucked out of you in this field, and no one will ever remember you without revulsion. The great Joseph Dobbs, hated by all who ever knew him! You were a useless bastard when you met my mother, and you’re still a useless bastard. You’re nothing, a piece of shit who’ll die and rot in Spain.”

  “I might be nothing, but I made you cry … Boohoo, boohoo, poor Hans!”

  Pedro felt his stomach lurch. “What are you saying? What about Hans?”

  Joseph laughed, laughed until he had to hold on to his sides with the force of it. “Seems I’ve got hidden talent. I should have become a sniper instead of a supply man … I shot at him three times, hit him twice. Not bad.”

  Pedro pounced on Joseph, knife forgotten, enemy ignored. He landed on top of him with such force that the knife flew out of Joseph’s hand. Pedro couldn’t see, hear, or feel anything except for grief, hatred, and despair that war had brought. Hans’s lifeless body and Joseph Dobbs’s laughter and his ugliness, inside and out, converged in his mind. Even the violence he was inflicting wasn’t enough to avenge his friend, his mother, and all the others Dobbs had hurt and killed. He punched and scratched, digging fingernails so deeply into his skin that he had to jerk them out. He grabbed Joseph’s ears and banged his head onto the ground, then punching him again. Something pulled at him from behind, but still he didn’t feel anything but the desire to kill. He was still screaming when his jacket was being tugged and arms encircled his neck. Suddenly, he felt himself being pinned to the ground beside Joseph.

  The brigade’s commanding officer knelt above him with two others. It had taken three men to get him off Joseph, yet Pedro had hardly felt them. Slowly he came to his senses, and the fog lifted. He focused on his surroundings.

  “Sir,” he said lamely.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Merrill?” the officer asked him. “Fighting’s over. I’ve just given the order to surrender. Take it down the line. We won’t survive another attack. We don’t even have enough ammunition to go round. It’s all over so get up off your arse and follow my orders before I shoot you myself!”

  Pedro glanced over at Joseph’s semi-conscious figure on the ground. His head was bleeding, and his top and bottom lips were split open. His cheek was a river of welts, his nose resembled a squashed tomato, and his blackened eye was closed above a jaw swollen to three times its size. Pedro smiled; he couldn’t even remember doing all that. He smiled again, still catching his breath and feeling better than he had in a long time. Then he remembered his orders.

  “Surrender … Surrender! Put down your weapons!” he shouted down the line.

  Joseph looked up from the ground and groaned with pain. All he could think about in his feverish world was that he was going to be saved. They were giving in, and he would probably be taken prisoner but then set free because he was a foreigner. Only the Spanish would be killed, and he’d be told to leave the country. That was the worst that would happen to him. He would leave the country, and then he’d kill Celia.

  “It’s all over,” Pedro repeated to his men farther down the line. “Lay down your arms and surrender … Surrender!”

  White flags were raised in the air above the shallow trench, which had not been an effective deterrent in stopping the onslaught of enemy ammunition. The commanding officer climbed out and stood with his lieutenant, and the rest of the brigade remained in the trench, with heads peeking out and hands in the air. The nationalists advanced en masse, and when they reached the republican line, they covered the ground for as far as the eye could see with trucks, tanks, infantry, and the dreaded Moorish regulars that Pedro knew so well.

  Pedro found Joseph sitting where he’d left him and hunched down beside him. “Dobbs, this will be the last time we speak. Don’t come near me again,” he told him in icy tones. “Don’t threaten me or my family. Don’t walk beside me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t let me see your face, because if we die today, I don’t want you to be the last person I see. Is that clear enough for you?”

  Joseph held his head in his hands and nodded.

  Pedro’s commanding officer officially surrendered and handed over his weapon to his counterpart on the other side. The remnants of his brigade were then told to sit on the ground with their hands behind their heads whilst the nationalist soldiers took weapons, knives, and anything else they could find. At that moment, Pedro believed that they would all be killed. It never entered his mind that they would be taken as prisoners of war or that he would survive with his life, for he had rarely seen live prisoners survive more than a day or two.

  The brigade and the remnants of the Spanish republican soldiers were marched for hours without food or water through the dusty cornfields and were flanked by nationalist soldiers carrying weapons, prepared to use them on anyon
e who tried to escape. It was ironic, Pedro thought, walking near the front of the line, that he was once again under the command of the very people he’d run from a year earlier. It was also paradoxical that he felt safer now with them than he had in his own battalion with an unseen enemy within. He was disillusioned by the communist ideology. He now didn’t care for either side, and it didn’t really matter where he was or whom he was with. All that mattered now was that he’d survived to see Lucia again and that he lived long enough to see Joseph Dobbs die.

  The holding camp, set up weeks earlier, came into view, and Pedro assessed it quickly. It was not really a camp at all; it was more like a corral surrounded by barbed wire and towers that sat at each corner, manned by soldiers with machine guns. There was no shade from the sun or rain, no blankets on the ground, and no ablutions to relieve themselves.

  They were herded like sheep into a pen and were hit with rifle butts when they didn’t move fast enough. Afterwards, the guards outside threw pieces of bread and water cans over the high fence. The water cans emptied in mid-air, but the men inside ran like a pack of dogs, arms outstretched in the afternoon heat, determined to catch even a single drop of moisture in the air.

  For two days, they languished in the open, periodically being fed scraps of food and routinely insulted by the nationalist guards. Pits were dug so that their waste could congregate, filling the air with an ever-growing putrid smell. Men too weak from malnutrition died quickly, and others, who had been wounded in the earlier fight, began to stink in the gangrene-filled air. Pedro sat in a corner, inches from the wire, and wondered what would eventually happen if they were left there for an indefinite period. He found it hard to believe that his own countrymen could have the stomach to treat them in this way, but then it dawned on him that he was one of the few Spaniards there. They were being treated as a foreign foe fighting illegally on Spanish soil, not as Spaniards fighting for their legitimate government. But, he wondered, would they be treated better if they were all Spanish?

  After three days, a senior nationalist officer entered the corral and stood with an arrogant, victorious stance, his arms folded across his chest. Four soldiers, eying up the prisoners with greedy eyes, stood behind him with guns in their hands. Pedro swallowed hard, and his heart began to pound against his chest. He searched the faces of the other prisoners and saw that they too had come to the same conclusion: their fate had been decided. He looked across the length of the corral and spotted Joseph Dobbs sitting at the far end of it. Pedro smiled; he had not come near him since the surrender. Joseph sat with his head hung low, body shaking, and arms cradling his stomach. His face was swollen like a balloon and multicoloured from the bruising that Pedro had inflicted. He was a man defeated by rotten plans, rotten intentions, and a soul rotten to the core. He had nothing left, not even a drop of brandy, to stop his sweats or his guts from cramping. Pedro allowed himself to gloat. Joseph Dobbs was finished and would be a broken man for the rest of his miserable life, no matter what happened here today.

  Pedro turned his attention back to the nationalist officer. He was speaking in whispers to his men who were obscured from sight. The officer continued to whisper softly, and the soldiers’ heads seemed to nod in obedience at something he had said. Pedro tried to hear even a single word, anything that would tell him what was going to happen, but he was some distance away from the huddled group and heard nothing but muffled whispers.

  The sound of truck engines firing up and the smell of diesel fumes filled the air. There were ten trucks waiting by the entrance to the corral, and nationalist soldiers were already in two of them; another platoon of men was in the process of getting belongings together in order to move out. Pedro watched the movements for a minute and suddenly knew instinctively what was going to happen next.

  “Español o extranjero … Spanish or foreign?” the nationalist soldiers asked down the line of cross-legged prisoners.

  Only a handful of Spaniards were in the ranks, as the majority of the group of weary prisoners were mostly fragments of a larger force of the International Brigades killed in the fighting. Pedro concentrated his eyes on his shoddy boots, but his mind was racing. He would have to make a decision soon, as the soldiers were closing in on the spot where he sat with his foreign counterparts, and they would ask him the same question. Was he Spanish or foreign? He looked around him at the faces of the men he’d fought with. They were all from countries dotted around Europe, and he had told them right from the beginning that he was Peter Merrill from Kent. He wondered who would survive the day. Would the nationalists kill the foreigners, or would they take their revenge on the Spaniards loyal to the republican government? They were getting closer. Spanish on the trucks to be shot in some dusty field and foreigners to be executed where they sat? He kept asking himself which he was. He was born in England of an English mother and father, yet he had been adopted by a Spaniard, the only father he’d ever known and had ever wanted to know. Would he now abandon the International Brigades who had accepted him as one of their own, or would he stand and join the Spaniards already on the trucks? A soldier’s boot connected with his outer thigh, and he winced.

  “Are you Spanish or foreign?” the voice asked him.

  Pedro stared up at the soldier’s face, open-mouthed, still unable to decide.

  “By the look of you, you’re foreign.” The soldier kicked him again.

  “He’s Spanish. I heard him talking earlier. He’s from Valencia … talked in that bloody stupid Valencia dialect used there by all the commie peasants,” another voice said.

  Pedro shielded his eyes from the white sunlight and searched the face belonging to the second voice. His mouth opened even wider. Carlos stood in front of him, gun pointing and legs slightly apart, with eyes that showed no hint of recognition whatsoever. Carlos, the man his sister loved, the man she had followed into battle. The man he had grown up with and who had called his father master!

  The first soldier looked Pedro over from feet to head and settled his eyes on his hair.

  “He’s got the hair of a German … Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” Carlos told him.

  The first soldier turned back to Pedro. “Well, are you a communist from Valencia or a fucking foreigner? What’s your family name …? Say something?”

  “No, I’m not a communist. Yes, I’m from Valencia and Spanish born and bred. My father’s name is Ernesto Martinéz de Amo, and I am a soldier in the army of the republic, the rightful government of this nation.”

  The soldier nodded and then laughed scornfully. “Where did you get that hair, then? Did your whore of a mother have a poke with a commie German, eh?”

  “No, sir. Guess I’m just a freak of nature.”

  The soldier turned to Carlos. “He sounds Spanish enough to me. Right, get him on the truck.”

  Pedro stood on shaky legs and kept his eyes on the ground as he walked slowly through the lines of men. He didn’t look at the questioning faces of comrades, nor did he acknowledge Joseph Dobbs, now on his feet and staring intently at the scene. Carlos walked behind Pedro, poking him in the back with his rifle butt. Pedro’s mind was a blur of questions: Why was Carlos there? Was he one of them? No, he couldn’t be. He was a registered communist, had been for years. Why did Carlos tell the other soldier that he had heard him speaking Spanish when clearly he hadn’t? Did he know something? He felt sick to his stomach as he stumbled over legs, not knowing if he was going to his death or if he was leaving death behind, but as they got closer to the truck, he realised that for whatever the reason, Carlos would be his saviour on this day. And if he was being saved, chances were that Joseph Dobbs would be killed.

  “Oy, you, wait a minute! That’s my son there, and he’s no bloody Spaniard. He’s as English as I am!” Joseph shouted as they neared the place where he stood.

  Pedro and Carlos walked on.

  “I said to wait up. I’m Joseph Dobbs. That’s my son, Peter!”

  “Sit down!” Carlos shouted to
Joseph in Spanish.

  Joseph reached them, ignored Carlos, and tugged sharply on Pedro’s shirtsleeves.

  “Where do you think you’re going without me?” he asked, still ignoring Carlos with the gun. “We’ve still got scores to settle.”

  Pedro refused to make eye contact with Joseph; instead, he continued walking with his eyes on the ground, knowing that he would be safe only when he got onto the truck. Joseph followed, holding his aching belly and zigzagging on unsteady feet.

  “Hold up, I said!”

  Carlos spun round and hit Joseph in the face with his rifle butt, and a gash opened up on his swollen cheek. Joseph moaned, wiped the blood away with the back of his hand, and scowled through unchecked tears of pain.

  “Where are you taking him?” he shouted again. “He’s my son. Take me too! Me papa, padre … Me father! Do you understand?”

  Carlos pushed Pedro and both continued to march towards the truck. Joseph was right beside them again, and Carlos noted that prisoners and guards alike were now watching and listening to Joseph’s protestations.

  “Halto … Halt.”

  Carlos hissed to Joseph in a dangerously quiet voice this time. “One more word and I will kill you.”

  Joseph grabbed Carlos by the arm. Joseph’s eyes were seething with anger and crazed with thirst and fever. His body, panting and breathless, raised itself in height and stood eyeball to eyeball with the taller man. All reason was lost to him, all measure of sanity gone. He stepped closer and wiped the blood from his face again; nobody ignored him! He was Joseph Dobbs, and he was going to get out of here with his son, even if he had to kill every fucking enemy soldier on the way! His son was his passport. Without him, he wouldn’t stand a chance, and he couldn’t go to his grave knowing that Celia was living and, worse, happy. He couldn’t survive without the boy either now. He would be able to use his Spanish to save them both. Then, when it was over, he would kill the bastard. He would kill the entire Merrill line!