A Murder of No Consequence

by James Garcia Woods

  He had reached the pavement. He stopped, pulled the brick out of the bag, and took careful aim.

  ‘Only one chance!’ he gasped.

  Only one chance – and this was it. He hurled the brick at one of the high windows.

  As his hands dived into the bag again, he heard the sound of breaking glass and a voice from the main entrance shouting, ‘What the fuck . . .?’

  He flicked back the hood of the lighter and held the flame to the crude fuse which was sticking out of the bottle. When he was sure it had caught, he threw the bottle at the smashed window.

  He could hear the guards coming, running down the street at a furious rate. He began to run himself, heading for the alley which lay beyond the one in which he’d been hiding.

  ‘Long live the Republic!’ he screamed over his shoulder. ‘Down with the fascist Herrera!’

  He was ten metres from the alley when the first bullet whizzed past him and buried itself in the brickwork, five when the second hit the ground in front of him. And then he was safe, shielded from their pistols by a solid brick wall.

  But only temporarily safe. It would take him at least another ten seconds to reach the next street, and if the guards arrived at the top of the alley before he’d managed to reach the bottom of it, he’d be a sitting target.

  He raced on up the alley, kicking up dirt and sending tin cans flying. His lungs were on fire, yet he knew it would be fatal to slow down.

  ‘Keep going,’ he urged himself. ‘Keep going for just a little bit longer.’

  He could see the light of a street lamp shining on the pavement of the road which ran parallel to the one in front of the silk factory. He had only to reach that, and he would have a fighting chance.

  There was a loud explosion from the other end of the alley. Paco threw himself to the ground a split second before the bullet flew by over him. He was crawling on his belly now, less than half a metre from the bottom of the alley. Less than quarter of a metre. There was another shot, but by then he had wriggled around the corner.

  He climbed quickly to his feet. His car was still where he had left it, parked just beyond the street lamp. He rushed to the far side of the vehicle, pulled out his revolver, and crouched down.

  ‘Come on, you sons-of-bitches, come on!’ he gasped. ‘Let’s see how you do when somebody’s shooting back.’

  But there was no sound of pursuit, and after a minute had passed, he knew they had given up the chase. Part of him, the rational part, had always expected this – had understood that catching an anarchist would be of secondary importance to putting out the fire that the anarchist had started. But there had been no room for rationality when he’d been running down the alley, trapped like a wooden duck at a shooting range.

  He checked his heart. Beating fast, but that was only to be expected after all that running. He looked down at his hands, and saw they were trembling. Well, weren’t they entitled to tremble? He’d just been shot at, for Christ’s sake.

  He stripped off the overalls and threw them on the back seat of the car. Paco-the-anarchist-fire-bomber’s part of the plan was over. The next phase called for a very different Paco, who had to be much more respectable.

  ‘It’s my last chance to walk away, Felipe,’ he told the warm night air. ‘If I go through with the next part of the operation, there’s no turning back.’

  He checked his heart again, and found it had slowed down a little. That was one good sign, anyway. Slipping his pistol back into his jacket pocket, he made his way back up the street.

  The moment the guard at the main entrance to the silk factory saw the man in the trilby turn the corner, his hand automatically went down to his holster. The man’s progress was irregular, the guard noted. For a few steps he would walk perfectly normally, then he would stagger slightly to the left or the right. Drunk, the guard decided – drunk, but trying to pretend that he wasn’t.

  The man in the trilby drew level with the entrance. He stopped, and swayed slightly. ‘Bewiful night, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Really bewiful, bewiful night.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ the guard answered.

  The man in the trilby drew himself to his full height. ‘Theresh no need to take that attitude,’ he said, with drunken dignity. ‘Here I am, making pleasant conversation about wha’ a bewiful night it is, and there’s you . . .’

  The guard took a step forward to push him away. Paco pulled the pistol out of his pocket by the barrel, and brought the butt down hard on the other man’s head.

  For a split second, the guard just stood there, a look of surprise on his face. Then his legs gave way, and he fell in a crumpled heap on the pavement. Paco bent over him, opened his jacket, and found his wallet. There were a couple of bank notes inside. Paco slipped the money in his pocket and threw the wallet down on the ground next to the unconscious guard.

  The door was shut. Paco prayed it wasn’t locked from the inside – prayed he hadn’t risked his life for nothing. He turned the handle and gave a gentle push. The door opened slightly. He gave a second push, and stepped through the gap.

  The scene inside the factory was almost surreal. The area by the door was in near darkness, but the far end of the room was lit up by a ravenous fire which was gorging itself on two wooden looms. And standing around the looms, glowing in the flames like demons from hell, were the five guards, cursing at the tops of their voices as they tried to deaden the blaze by beating it with pieces of sacking.

  Paco looked around the long, eerily-illuminated room. Nearest to him were the reeling machines. Beyond them were the water baths and dyeing tanks. On tiptoe, he moved quickly to the nearest water bath, and squatted down behind it.

  Perhaps a minute ticked by, the light growing fainter all the time. The thwacking of the sacks on the looms was becoming less regular, too. Then it stopped altogether.

  ‘If I could get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch who threw that fucking bomb . . .’ said a voice in the darkness.

  ‘There’s no chance of that,’ said a second man. ‘He’ll be long gone by now.’

  Beams of light cut through the air, and there was the sound of five sets of footsteps as the guards made their way back to the door. Paco held his breath.

  ‘We’re not going to get into trouble for this, are we, Miguel?’ one of the guards asked worriedly, as they passed less than a metre from Paco’s hiding place.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Miguel replied, equally concerned. ‘You know what Don Carlos is like when he gets into one of his rages.’

  Don Carlos again! Back in Madrid, Méndez had seemed a pale figure, constantly under the shadow of his sister and brother-in-law, but here in Andalusia, he appeared to be a force to be reckoned with.

  ‘It’s . . . it’s not as if the anarchist bastard had fire-bombed the other side of the building,’ the first guard argued.

  ‘True enough,’ Miguel agreed, sounding as if he was attempting to reassure himself as much as the others. ‘Like Arturo says, that would have been a real fucking disaster – specially since the lorry for Madrid’s making a pick-up tomorrow night.’

  The footsteps stopped. Paco heard the door swing open, then one of the guards shouted, ‘Roberto’s on the ground! Somebody’s shot him!’

  ‘Nobody shot him,’ Miguel said. ‘But he’s been attacked all right. I can feel a bump on his head the size of a duck egg.’

  ‘So what happened? Did that anarchist arsehole come back?’

  ‘He must have done.’

  ‘Then he could . . . he could be in the factory! He could be right inside the fucking factory!’

  ‘What are you doing, Miguel?’ asked Arturo.

  ‘I’m going to turn the lights on.’

  ‘You know it’s policy not to . . .’

  ‘I don’t give a shit about policy. And neither will Don Carlos. If the anarchist’s in there, I want to see him.’

  Paco edged his way around the water bath. Suddenly, the room flooded with light, blinding him.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said
Arturo.

  ‘He’s here all right,’ Miguel told him. ‘I can almost smell the bastard.’

  ‘But I can’t see—’

  ‘You don’t expect him just to give himself up, do you? He’s hiding – behind one of the water baths or the dyeing tanks.’

  His heart back in overdrive, Paco slid his pistol out of his holster. His vision had returned to normal now, but he only had six bullets and there were five guards. It wasn’t very good odds by anybody’s standards.

  ‘Roberto’s been robbed,’ said one of the guards who hadn’t spoken before.

  ‘He’s what?’ Miguel asked.

  ‘Roberto’s been robbed. Look, this is his wallet.’

  The man on the pavement groaned. ‘Bastard took me by surprise,’ he said.

  ‘The anarchist?’ asked the worried guard.

  ‘No, not the bloody anarchist. Some bloke in a suit and a hat. Didn’t look like a robber – that’s how he was able to catch me off-guard so easily.’

  ‘Where’d he go?’ Miguel asked.

  ‘How the hell am I supposed to know that? From the moment he hit me, I was out cold, wasn’t I?’

  ‘We’d . . . we’d better help him up,’ said Arturo.

  ‘Yes, help me up,’ Roberto said. ‘And you can close that fucking door as well.’

  The factory was plunged into darkness again, and there was sound of the door being slammed shut.

  Paco took a deep breath. Phase Three of the operation had been completed, and he was still alive. He wondered how much longer his luck would last.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Paco came cautiously out of his crouch and stretched his cramped muscles. It had been over ten minutes since the guards had closed the main door, eight minutes since he’d heard footsteps as the two teams had resumed their patrols around the perimeter of the building. All of which meant that it was about as safe for him to make his move as it was ever going to be.

  The brief glance he’d had in the light of the blazing looms had been enough to tell him that the silk factory took up about two-thirds of the building. But it wasn’t this factory which interested him. He’d risked his life to discover what lay beyond the brick dividing-wall – a wall which almost definitely hadn’t been there before the silk workers’ strike of ’34.

  Walking on tiptoe, with his torch pointing at the floor, he slowly picked his way between the reeling machines, towards the end of the silk factory. There was only one door in the dividing wall, he discovered. The lock did not look complicated. But then why should it? With six armed guards on duty outside, any intruder should have been stopped before he ever entered the factory, so why bother with any extra security inside?

  Paco took a handkerchief out of his pocket, unwrapped it carefully, and extracted his set of skeleton keys. Holding all but one tightly in his left hand, he inserted the remaining key into the lock with his right. He turned gently. It was obvious immediately that the lock was not going to budge.

  The second key did not work, either. Nor the third. He was trying the fourth when he heard the lock click. He froze and listened. There were no shouts of alarm from the guards. No sound of movement at all. He wrapped the keys up in his handkerchief, returned the bundle to his pocket, and eased the door open.

  He didn’t dare shine his torch in a sweeping movement round the room, for fear it would be seen outside. So, instead, he explored little by little, creating one small island of light, examining what was caught in it, and then moving on. At the end of half an hour he had covered the whole room and, having all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in his mind, fitted them together to make a complete picture.

  There were no looms or water baths in this second room. Instead there were metal-working benches and industrial lathes, wood-shaping equipment and lengths of steel piping.

  What he had seen told him why Méndez had refused to let the workers back into the factory.

  ‘And it tells me something else, Felipe,’ he whispered into the darkness. ‘It tells me why María had to die.’

  *

  He had his answers at last, but as long as he was effectively a prisoner in the building, he couldn’t make any use of them.

  ‘Should have thought about how to get out before I got in, shouldn’t I, Felipe?’ he said.

  But he knew that if he’d done that, he might well have lost his nerve.

  He considered his options. Leaving the way he’d entered was clearly out of the question, so he’d have to escape through the back. He glanced up at the high windows. They looked as if they’d be big enough to squeeze through, and with any luck he could drop to the ground without hurting himself.

  He waited until the foot patrols were round at the front of the building, then quickly placed a ladder against the wall and climbed up to one of the windows. He groped around for the catch, and couldn’t find one.

  ‘Shit!’ he said, under his breath.

  The window was solid bloody glass – no opener at all!

  Though he examined the rest of the windows in turn, he knew, after he’d found no catch on the third one, that they’d all be the same.

  He sat down on one of the work benches. He badly needed a cigarette to calm his nerves, but even though the risk that the smell of his smoke would drift to the men outside was minimal, it was a risk he couldn’t take.

  Could he break the thick glass? he wondered. Perhaps – but even if all the guards were around the front, they’d be bound to hear the noise, and by the time he’d cleared all the shards away and got down to the street, they’d be on him. If he’d had someone on the outside to cover him – if Felipe had been out there – he’d have risked the glass. Alone, it was impossible.

  He looked at his watch. It was nearly half-past four. It would be light soon. He wondered what time the workers reported for duty, and wished he could have a cigarette.

  *

  The sun was already starting its daily climb. At the top of the ladder, Paco held his chisel against the mortar which held the window frame in place, and tapped it gently with his hammer. He worked for exactly half a minute – the half-minute the guards on patrol would be furthest away from the window – and then stopped.

  He had been doing the same thing for nearly an hour. Half a minute’s chiselling, five and a half minutes’ rest. Half a minute’s chiselling, five and a half minutes’ rest. Even with just thirty seconds, there was a chance the guards might hear him, but balanced against the fact that the workers might arrive at any moment, he didn’t have a choice.

  He stopped tapping and examined what he had achieved. There was still one hell of a lot of mortar still in place. He would kill for a cigarette.

  *

  The lorries rumbled up the street, and came to a halt in front of the silk factory. While two teams of guards watched the street, the remaining team unchained the tailboards. Once the tailboards were down, the dark-skinned men climbed off the lorries and headed for the factory’s main door. Another day’s work was about to begin.

  In the hidden factory behind the partition wall, Paco lifted the hammer in his sweating hand, and chipped away the last piece of mortar.

  The factory’s main door swung open, and the Moors streamed in. When they saw what had happened to the looms, they all started talking at once.

  Paco tried to ease the window free. There was nothing to hold it in place now, but the bloody thing still refused to budge.

  ‘Now listen to me, you ignorant foreign bastards,’ Miguel the guard shouted at the jabbering Moors, ‘I know we can’t make any more silk until we get some new looms, so half of you are going to have an easy day of it. But that’s no reason for the others – the one’s who are doing the real work – to start slacking. So stop fucking talking and get fucking working.’

  After all its initial resistance, the window came away from the wall with such unexpected ease that Paco almost lost his balance. But it was out, thank Christ – at last it was finally out. He was just starting to descend the ladder when he heard the
key being inserted into the lock in the door that divided the silk factory from the secret one.

  The Moor tried the key once more to check that it was working properly, then said something to his companion in Arabic.

  ‘What’s wrong now, you idle bastard?’ Miguel called from across the room.

  ‘Door not open.’

  Miguel sighed. ‘Bloody hell, do I have to do everything for you sodding monkeys?’ he asked. He strode across to the door. ‘Give the key to me. I’ll soon have it open.’

  Paco had reached the bottom of the ladder, and laid the window carefully on the floor. How long would it take Miguel to realize that the reason the door wouldn’t open was because it was bolted from the inside? he wondered. And what would the guard do once he had worked it out?

  Miguel turned the key. ‘See? No problem,’ he said.

  ‘Door not open,’ the Moor persisted.

  ‘Door not open,’ Miguel mimicked. ‘Of course the door will bloody open now I’ve unlocked it.’ But when he pushed, it remained resolutely shut. ‘Funny,’ he told the Moor. ‘It should be opening unless . . . Bloody hell! That anarchist bastard!’

  Paco’s legs and trunk were already out of the window, but however much he twisted and turned, his shoulders refused to go through. He was caught like a rat in a trap, just waiting for the guards to come and find him. And when they did find him, would they shoot him in the head, or through the balls?

  ‘Go and tell one of the other guards to come here,’ Miguel told the Moor.

  ‘No understand.’

  ‘I want to speak to one of the guards outside. It’s very important!’

  ‘Still no understand.’

  ‘Bloody hell, there’s no getting through to you people. I go, you stay here. If anybody unbolt door from other side, you come tell me, damn quick.’

  A final twist did it. Paco was free of the window, and falling to the ground. The impact jolted his spine, but the second his feet made contact with the pavement, he began running.

  He’d left it too late, he told himself as he ran. He should have chipped at the mortar one full minute out of six. Even forty-five seconds instead of thirty would have made a difference. He wondered, briefly, if he’d hear the shot before it hit him, or if he’d just suddenly feel as if he’d been struck in the back by a runaway lorry. And all the time, he kept running . . . running.