by Ben Pastor
The taller officer, whose striking grey eyes sat in a pockmarked face, said, “I’m Captain Mendez Roig, and this is Captain Olivares. We come from General Dávila Arrondo, and that should be enough for you.” Neither of them would say more. Within minutes they were gone, bound, as Fuentes suggested, for the north-western heights of the Sierra de Albarracín.
“They’ve been here once before, teniente. The top brass sends them up and down the line, but I don’t know that they ever accomplish anything. I bet they’re SIFNE. The area is within their operating range.”
SIFNE? Yes. There was no doubt in Bora’s mind that the officers belonged to Spanish Intelligence, but he kept his counsel. “Has the water risen in the well?”
“No, sir. It’s going to take more than one storm.”
Together, they walked outside to the cleft in the rocky wall. Bora took a razor out of his pocket and started shaving under the rain-enriched trickle of mountain water. He stood with his feet in the mossy slush where moisture had found its way into the rock again. “You seem to know plenty about what goes on in the region, Fuentes.”
“When a man serves in the Guardia Civil he’d better know his countryside. That’s how we kept order in Spain the last hundred years.”
“You should have told me about Tomé.”
Wisps of air twisted the weathervane on the rooftop. Round and round it went, making a grating sound like an old hinge. Bora scraped off the stubble around his mouth in little downward strokes, eyeing Fuentes’ shadow nearby. Soon he was rinsing the blade, his thumb and forefinger carefully running the flat of the flexible metal leaf under the trickle.
“I thought you knew, teniente.”
Bora pocketed the razor. “It should have been obvious to you that I did not know.”
15 July. Evening, at the post.
Tomorrow is the great Feast of the Carmel, Virgo et Genitrix singulari titulo Carmeli. Niceto knows I’m Catholic, and asked me for permission to attend mass at Castellar. I haven’t answered him yet. I don’t want to seem lax to the men, but the real choice is between knowing when they leave the post, and not being told that they do. I’d rather be told, and let them go. Fuentes has nothing but contempt for the lot of them.
The day remained cool, with a steady westerly that Fuentes calls poniente. The horizon is mirror-clear, though it will haze over as soon as the temperature rises again. There have been times today when I’ve distinctly heard the sound of church bells ringing God knows where. Teruel is much too far away from here; perhaps from Libros or Tramacastiel.
The rain has entirely cleansed the flat rock of Lieutenant Jover’s blood. Fuentes says they took him to Teruel the same day he died and shipped him to his mother from there. I told him to use gasoline on my body, just in case. But I wonder if Fuentes even listens to what I say. He’s been preaching about the risk I took facing the American alone, and I don’t seem able to put into words how necessary it was for me to do something exciting for a change.
The American. I don’t think he was a bit afraid, though it must have smarted that I took his gun. I was incredibly curious to hear him talk, but ran out of time. As it was, a couple of bullets whipped right over my head. During the race uphill in that deluge, I kept wondering what he thought of me, although the ‘Man of Perfected Self-Mastery’ doesn’t depend on the judgement of others!
Speaking of judgement, I really don’t believe any of mine shot the man on the mule track. Why would they not admit it (or even brag about it) if they had? On the other hand, why has Colonel Serrano hushed things up? I rather think he believes some here would recognize the body – which probably means the dead man was a political or military figure. Well, he’s buried now, and the rain must have washed away his blood like Lieutenant Jover’s.
The following morning, the brook ran deeper and was frothy with silt. Bora went down to bathe alone, very early. When he climbed back, he saw that Fuentes had been keeping watch from afar in the dull light before sunrise. “Fuentes,” he said, “today I’m going to ride to Teruel. Where does Colonel Serrano live?”
Bora could tell that the sergeant had been just about to impart some good advice about going to the brook alone; the question caught him off guard. “He has a country house just out of town, on the way to Concud. It’s called the Huerta de Santa Olalla, you can’t miss it. Will you stay there overnight, teniente?”
“No, I’ll be back before dark.” Bora glanced at his watch, and then at the east. In the pallor of the sky, a coralline glow marked and set off a point on the horizon where light would soon burst out. Leaving now, he’d arrive in Teruel by nine.
“I could easily fetch a horse in Castellar and ride with you as far as Libros,” Fuentes said.
“You could, but you won’t.” Bora knew he needed to change out of his well-worn colonials into full uniform in order to ride the blistering distance to Teruel, where he expected to meet Colonel Serrano. One step behind him, Fuentes began saying something else, and suddenly his insistence ruffled him. “Why don’t you shut up, Fuentes? I’m not Jover.”
Fuentes fell back, with an apologetic nod. “I’ll saddle the teniente’s horse.”
Bora waited outside the stable, breathing the bone-dry air deeply. High above, the tallest crags of the sierra were starting to look flushed against the white sky. Hawks circled and called to one another near the top. Fuentes led Pardo out, and placed the saddle blanket on his dappled back.
Bora glanced down from the mountain. “Fuentes,” he said, “who is Remedios?”
“Remedios?” Peering at him from under the horse’s belly while he secured the blanket, Fuentes ground his jaw before answering, “Es una bruja.”
Bora laughed. “What do you mean, a witch? Come, tell me: who is she?”
“Just as I told you, teniente. She lives way up the face of the sierra, at Mas del Aire. Even the goats have a hard time climbing that far.” With a pull, Fuentes checked the blanket’s buckle. “Mas del Aire is the right name for the place, too: air is what she must live on. You never see her in Castellar or around here. Never.”
Bora ran his eyes up the rocky wall, bright pink now and verging on orange at the top. Forehead of the sierra, Mas del Aire grazed the sky. “Have you ever met her?”
“No.” Fuentes adjusted the saddle on Pardo’s back and buckled it. “Don’t want to, either.”
“Do men go to see her?”
Fuentes looked straight at him this time. Bora kept his eyes on the mountain, careful to sound non-committal. I’ve got you this time, Fuentes. It’s hard to tell with us northerners. Our faces don’t give us away, and we know how to stay in control. You can’t tell what’s on my mind.
“The American has gone to see her.”
Bora returned his eyes to Fuentes. “How would you know?”
“Before you came, we were posted closer to Castellar. To reach her place the American had to cross a stretch in the open between the two camps. In the moonlight we could see him as plain as day.”
“And you let him? You didn’t shoot at him?”
“He was just going to get himself a lay, teniente. He’s entitled to that like the rest of us. We shot at him, you can be sure of that. It happened twice during my watch, and we gave him a hell of fire when he went up, but on the way down, we let him pass. There’s nothing else but Remedios’ place up that way.”
As the sun rose, the angle of ruddy light came down the Riscal like a curtain rippling against the rocky face. Bora let the colour wash over him, feeling warmth escape the earth as it lost moisture under his feet. The light and warmth might graze Fuentes and the horse and everything on the ledge, but they were meant to envelop and search him. He found unforeseen and troubling intimacy in the mountain this morning, and it was best to get away from Fuentes’ stare. “Give Niceto a three-hour pass to go to Castellar for High Mass.”
“High Mass, my foot!” Fuentes burst into unrehearsed deep laughter. “He’s going to get himself a piece, not religion!”
“Well, whe
ther he gets one or the other, I’m sure God will know the difference.”
TERUEL, CAPITAL OF TERUEL PROVINCE
Just before nine, from a distance the Moorish towers of the churches of San Martín and El Salvador stood out like stubby masts over the outline of Teruel. After Bora entered the town from the south, however, he lost sight of them entirely in the narrow streets. He rode past massive public buildings – the council offices, the hospital – and then he had to ask a Guardia Civil officer for directions.
“That way. If you reach the church of San Pedro, you’ve gone too far.”
Despite this, Bora rode twice past the address given to him by German intelligence in Saragossa because the sign on the house’s front read FÀBRICA DE AZULEJOS VALERA Y PASTOR and no one had mentioned anything about a tile factory. He dismounted and tied up his horse nearby. The door was unmarked, unlocked. Through it, he entered a spacious office with no windows. The light was on, and the air smelled of new furniture. Samples of floor tiles, some hand-painted in watery green, lined the walls. A young woman with short brown hair sat at a desk, typing in the breeze of an electric fan. “May I help you?” she said in Spanish, without interrupting her work.
“I’m here to see Herr Cziffra.”
She looked up, taking a brief inventory of Bora’s appearance. “For what reason?”
“I have news to report to him.”
The young woman pointed to a corridor at the back of the office. Her German, like her Spanish, was impeccable. “Second door on the right. Leave the door open as you go in.”
Bora did as he was told. The back room had walls covered in egg-yellow wallpaper. The framed poster of a Hamburg Line ship hung opposite the door, next to a poster advertising Riquet Cocoa, the silhouette of a mammoth with immense curved tusks. There was no significant amount of paperwork anywhere. An ugly red vase sat in a niche to the left of the desk. The carpet was a faded imitation of a Persian prayer rug. The typing of the short-haired woman outside came in rapid spurts, punctuated by the bell at each return.
“Lieutenant ‘Douglas’, I take it?”
Bora turned in a smart military fashion. “At your orders.”
“That you are.” The Abwehr officer – Herr Cziffra, as Bora knew him – wore horn-rimmed glasses and his sandy hair parted in the middle. The flexing of the muscles in his jaw was evident on his hairless stony face when he spoke. Bora was reminded of teachers he had known, dogmatic and devoid of creativity, but the similarity might only be physical. “So, you’re the young man without whom Germany had to manage in order to win Olympic gold. I was wondering what made you pull out at the last minute. Now I can see that Spain did.”
Bora relaxed from attention. “Lieutenant Pollay did very well, and we won all the equestrian gold anyway.”
“But you’d have made it under 15 points.”
The crumpled linen suit contrasted absurdly with the starchy whiteness of Cziffra’s shirt; Bora thought it a German attempt at looking unassuming. This address and the agent’s name were the sole information he’d been given in Saragossa. What was expected of him was unclear.
“I understand you have news,” Cziffra said.
Bora reported in detail on the finding of the body and all that had transpired since. From memory, he’d made sketches of the location of the grave and of the dead man’s face before the second burial. He took them out of the canvas bag and handed them to Cziffra. “Tell me more,” the Abwehr officer said placidly. While he listened, his eyes never left Bora. Only when Bora finished speaking did he glance at the drawings. “Of course, you know who he was.”
“On the contrary. I have no idea.”
“Serrano didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
Cziffra gave the drawings back. “A good likeness. It’s Federico García Lorca.”
Bora clumsily dropped the sheets he had in his hands. His own voice sounded strange to his ears, as if coming from somewhere else in the room. “The poet?”
“The poet. We assumed that’s what had happened. He’d been gone two days.”
Bora was unable to hide his surprise. “You knew!”
“Knew? I had arranged an escort for him.” Cziffra shrugged. “Win a few, lose a few. Had Serrano cared to enlighten you, he’d have informed you that Lorca was involved with leftist propaganda. Especially the anarchists, as late as last April in Barcelona.”
“But I thought he’d died last year in —”
“Granada? No. Well-placed rumours. It suited all parties concerned not to correct them.”
Bora had no doubt that he looked stupid for not knowing more, but there was no time to worry about details now. “And you provided an escort for someone who wrote enemy propaganda?”
“I had my reasons, and it was the safest of arrangements. But then again, people are killed all the time these days for much less than being a poet, a spy or a queer. Even you and I could be dead ten minutes from now.” Cziffra’s inexpressive face turned to Bora. “You seem confused.”
“Forgive me, but I am.”
“Confusion is an unforgivable failing in my view. Unconfuse yourself.”
“I still don’t see what Lorca was doing on the road at night, with or without your escort.”
“The answer is getting out of Teruel, although he disappeared the night before his appointment with the escort I secured. We know he befriended a former member of the International Brigades on your mountain. An American who calls himself Felipe, likely the same fellow you surprised by the brook. Of him, we only know that he was among the first to arrive in Spain – on the now infamous December ’36 Normandie shipment – but parted ways with his colleagues at Albacete as early as January. He’s to receive from us a false report on the defences around Teruel, since we have reason to believe that in a few weeks the Reds will attempt a major offensive north of here.”
Bora thought of the captains rummaging through his papers. “IS SIFNE involved?”
“Not in our business. As for Felipe, he’s a clever freelancer who operates through couriers and will undoubtedly communicate the fabricated intelligence to his comrades in Valencia and Barcelona. All we can assume for the time being,” Cziffra continued, “is that Lorca must have decided to leave Teruel before the appointed time, and met with trouble on the way.”
Bora swallowed. “Is it possible that he drove himself? There was no car near the body.”
“Correction: you found no car by the body. Whether or not there was a car, or even more than one car, is another matter.”
Bora dropped the subject. He said, sheepishly, “I found these at the edge of the brook. They were underwater, and the ink has nearly washed off. They seem to be a musical score. Should I not have gathered them?”
Cziffra glanced at the sheets and returned them. “No matter. What else did you find?”
“This.”
Nestled in the palm of Bora’s hand, a brass shell attracted Cziffra’s attention for a moment. “Were there more around?”
“I only found this one.”
Cziffra brought the shell close to his face to examine it. “Bergmann-Bayard.” He put the casing in the breast pocket of his linen suit. A hint of a smile crimped his lips. “Well, that’s that. Anything else?”
“I found a pair of canvas shoes in the cane grove. I brought them along too.”
“Let’s have them.” Cziffra examined the shoes quickly and tossed them into a wastebasket. “A naive attempt to make it appear as if those who killed him needed supplies. It’s a botched-up job.”
Facing him, Bora stared at the frayed carpet’s design. He felt as if someone had struck him unawares and he couldn’t work out the source of the pain. “I happened to read some of Lorca’s works. I must admit, it seems out of character for the man to be a double agent.”
“A double agent? That’s your inference, although there are ways of nudging people into accepting uncharacteristic roles. All you need to know for now is that I had arranged for him to leave Teruel. Had you not ru
n into his body, you wouldn’t have been told that much.” Cziffra wrote something in a log which he then slipped into the top drawer of his desk.
Bora watched him pace from his desk to the window, which looked onto a dismal inner courtyard. “Colonel Serrano seems interested in knowing whether our men committed the murder.”
Coolly Cziffra turned from the window. “Has he given you a motive for his concern?”
“No. At first I thought it was because he believed the Reds had done it; now I’m not sure. Certainly, he appears to want to conceal the body or the death somehow. He might know more than he is choosing to share with me. He suspects I work for the Abwehr.”
“Did he tell you that? Ha! He’s a horse’s ass.”
“When I mentioned to him the state of Lorca’s clothing, he also seemed to discount the issue of homosexuality, although it doesn’t exactly seem to have been a secret.”
“There are lots of queers in Spain. It’s typical of intellectuals everywhere to be sexual deviants. Lorca was a self-indulgent pervert.”
“Then why did you use him?”
Cziffra let the hint of a smile cross his face again. “One uses what is available, most promising and most unlikely. As for Serrano, there’s no need for the old monarchist to know more than any of his colleagues. You’ll refrain from sharing that we met, and report to Serrano as you have been doing. The only real change is that now you’ll do some investigating for me. I am curious to know who killed Lorca.”
“Herr Cziffra, my primary goal in Spain —”
Cziffra’s jaw muscles tightened under his hairless skin. “Are you telling me what your primary goal in Spain is? Your goal is to develop the ‘handmaiden of the Lord’ response. All you have to say is ‘yes’. And as in Mary’s case, it will be done with you according to our word. It was you who showed an interest in intelligence work in army school.” He walked to the middle of the room and pointed at the niche in the wall. “Tell me, what’s the object in front of you?”
