A Murder of No Consequence

by James Garcia Woods

  ‘You can’t prove I killed María, either,’ Méndez said.

  ‘Don’t be so sure of that,’ Paco told him. ‘You had the motive, the means and the opportunity. I’ve got a lot of circumstantial evidence I could present if I had to. But,’ he shrugged, ‘that won’t be necessary. They’ll convict you on the arms charge, and that will be enough. You’re not going to deny you tried to smuggle weapons into Madrid, are you?’

  ‘No, I would never deny that,’ Méndez said fiercely. ‘I’m proud of what I’ve done for the Cause. My only regret is that the guns didn’t get through.’

  Paco stubbed his cigarette, lit a new one, and offered Méndez the packet. The señorito shook his head, as if to say that he wanted nothing which had been provided by his enemy.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ Méndez demanded. ‘You’ve handed me over, and now your job’s finished.’

  ‘I’d like to talk about María for a while,’ Paco said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m still a policeman, and it will satisfy my professional curiosity.’

  And because, somehow, he still couldn’t quite force his mind to separate María from Reyes, the girl he had loved so long ago in Spanish Morocco.

  ‘So you want to talk about María, do you?’ Méndez asked. ‘And if I refuse? What will you do then – have some of your thuggish friends come in here and beat it out of me?’

  ‘No,’ Paco said. ‘If you won’t talk, I’ll simply go away. And you’ll be taken back to your cell, where you’ll have nothing for company but your thoughts.’ The cigarettes still lay on the table. He looked down at them. ‘For God’s sake, have a smoke, Don Carlos.’

  Méndez looked longingly at the cigarettes, then took one out of the packet, and lit it. Paco waited until he had inhaled, then said, ‘How did María happen to meet your brother-in-law?’

  Méndez sneered. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Anything that ever happened to Eduardo happened because I arranged it.’

  ‘Why did you arrange it?’

  ‘Because that was what he wanted. He was tired of spending money on prostitutes, and he told me to find him a mistress,’ Méndez said with disgust. ‘A cheap mistress. So I found him one. María was working in a sweat shop at the time—’

  ‘I know. I talked to her sister.’

  ‘She told me she was finding life very difficult in Madrid, but, like the fool that she was, she had too much pride to go back to her shack in the mountains.’

  So only the rich are allowed pride, are they? Paco thought. But aloud he said, ‘You decided that she fitted the bill, and set about corrupting her.’

  Méndez shrugged. ‘You make it sound so difficult. It wasn’t. Women – all women – are natural putas. They’ll sell their bodies at the drop of a hat.’

  ‘Even your sister?’

  ‘Even my sister,’ Méndez said viciously. ‘Eduardo’s father used to bow when my father passed by. Do you really think my sister could have married a man like him – a man who came from nothing – for love? Of course not. If he hadn’t been so filthy rich, she’d never even have looked at him.’

  ‘And what about you?’ Paco asked.

  The question seemed to take Méndez completely by surprise. ‘Me?’ he repeated.

  ‘Didn’t you live off your brother-in-law’s money as well? Didn’t you fetch and carry for him? And doesn’t that make you just as much a puta as everyone else?’

  Méndez smiled a superior smile, one which indicated just how stupid he thought Paco was being. ‘Whatever I did, I did for the Cause,’ he said. ‘Eduardo had the money and the influence, but he didn’t have the stomach to do the real work. And so it was left to me to order the beatings and the political assassinations, to labour day and night to bring the so-called government down. And I have succeeded.’

  ‘Have you?’ Paco asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Méndez replied. ‘What do you think caused the military revolt? All the hot air Eduardo spouted? Or the fact that there was no order in the country any more?’

  There was no denying he had a point. Though he was undoubtedly claiming more credit than he was due, it was people like him, not Herrera, who had convinced General Franco that the army must take over.

  ‘I had you fooled, didn’t I?’ Méndez demanded aggressively. ‘You thought I was just an impoverished aristocrat living off his rich brother-in-law’s hand-outs. Watered-down stock! I could see it in your eyes the day you came to the apartment. “Look at the way he jumps to his feet to obey his sister’s commands,” you said to yourself. “See how she interrupts him as if he were a nobody.” Why, you even thought I was afraid of Luis, a lackey who would gladly have laid down his life for a man of my quality.’

  Yes, it had been a good act, Paco thought, but even so he should have seen through it – if not before, then at least on the day of Calvo Sotelo’s funeral. Don Carlos had run after him and begged him to leave the family alone. First he had argued that his brother-in-law had no reason to kill the girl, then that his sister also lacked a motive. And finally he had spoken of Luis.

  ‘He has no alibi for the time of her death,’ Paco had said.

  Don Carlos had shaken his head. ‘He has no alibi he’s prepared to produce.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘Check the records of the police station closest to the bullring, and you’ll find out for yourself.’

  And because he’d been fixated on the murderer being one of his three prime suspects, Paco had missed the obvious point. Luis would never have told Don Carlos about being arrested, any more than he would have told Eduardo Morreno, so how had he found out? There was only one way: someone had reported it to him. And once you saw him as a man who was reported to, then the whole act of insignificant brother-in-flaw collapsed like a badly built domino tower.

  ‘When the history books are written, there will be pages and pages on me. Eduardo will be only a footnote,’ Don Carlos said, cutting into his thoughts.

  ‘Let’s get back to María, shall we?’ Paco said. ‘Whose idea was it to use her as a courier?’

  ‘Mine,’ Méndez told him, proudly. ‘We needed to communicate with our supporters in other parts of Spain, but we knew they were being watched, both by the so-called government and by the left. That’s why María was so perfect for the job – she wasn’t just acting the part of a simple country girl, she actually was that girl. No one would ever have suspected her of being a part of a sophisticated political conspiracy.’

  ‘Did she know what she was doing?’

  ‘Of course not! I told her she was just helping with Eduardo’s business dealings.’

  ‘And she believed you?’

  Without asking, Méndez lit a second cigarette from the butt of his first. How easy it was, having once compromised your pride, to go on doing it, Paco thought.

  ‘Until that last trip down to Seville, she believed me,’ the señorito said.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘You know what happened.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  ‘She delivered things to the silk factory. Sometimes it was just messages, at other times it was money. On her last visit, one of our people must have been careless and left the door to the arms workshop open. She only got a brief glance of what was going on inside – but it was enough.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘She had enough sense not to say anything at the time, but the second she got back to Madrid, she phoned me up. She didn’t know what to do, she said. She didn’t want to get Eduardo into trouble, but on the other hand, she was afraid that if she didn’t report what she’d seen to the police, she’d land in trouble herself.’

  ‘So she rang you for advice,’ Paco said, a hard edge slipping into his voice. ‘Because she trusted you.’

  ‘I expect that was it,’ Méndez answered, indifferently. ‘At any rate, I told her not to worry. I said that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for what she’d seen, but it was too complicated to go into over the pho
ne . . .’

  ‘Then you went round to her apartment and strangled her . . .’ Paco could see Méndez’s thin, but strong hands clamping on to her white throat; could imagine the look of astonishment in María’s trusting eyes, a look which changed to pure terror when she realized all this was real and she was going to die ‘. . . strangled her and dumped her body into the Retiro.’

  ‘I should have thought about the dress,’ Méndez said. ‘I removed everything else which might have identified her, but I forgot about the dress.’

  ‘Don’t you feel any remorse at all for murdering her?’ Paco asked.

  Méndez turned the idea over in his mind. ‘I come from a very old family with a long tradition of service,’ he said finally. ‘What I did, I did for Spain.’

  Paco suddenly felt as if he’d laid a ghost to rest, felt that finally, in some way he couldn’t quite define, he’d paid off a debt. Leaving his cigarettes on the table for Méndez, he stood up. ‘We won’t be meeting again,’ he said.

  He didn’t hold out his hand, and was sure the other man would not have accepted it if he had. Yet from the troubled expression on Méndez’s face, it was plain that there was something that the señorito wanted from him.

  ‘I’ve answered all your questions,’ Méndez said. ‘Now I’m going to ask a few of my own.’

  It wasn’t a request. Even now, in his prison, Carlos Méndez was issuing orders as if he owned the world. But why not answer his questions? A man facing death in a few hours was surely entitled to that. ‘What do you want to know?’ Paco asked.

  ‘You could have been killed when you took part in the storming of the Montaña barracks, couldn’t you?’

  ‘That’s true,’ Paco agreed. ‘A lot of people were.’

  ‘Was your only purpose in taking part in that storming to arrest me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when you found me in the courtyard, you realized that I was about to be shot?’

  Paco laughed. ‘The militiaman had his rifle pointing at you. It was pretty obvious what he intended to do with it.’

  ‘So you put your life at risk again in order to stop that from happening.’

  ‘My life was really in your hands, not theirs,’ Paco pointed out. ‘You’ve wanted me dead for quite a while, but when you had your opportunity – when all you had to do was say I was your friend – you wouldn’t take it. Why?’

  ‘It was too high a price to pay,’ Méndez said coolly. ‘But that’s not important. I am asking the questions now, not you. And what I want to know is this. If you were intending to hand me over to people who would execute me anyway, why try to stop those militiamen? Was it because you thought they’d just meekly hand me over?’

  ‘No,’ Paco said. ‘I could see they were out of control. I wasn’t surprised when one of them pulled a gun on me.’

  ‘So I repeat: why take the risk when without your intervention, the result would have been exactly the same?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ Méndez said angrily.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Paco agreed. ‘But you’re as incapable of seeing the world through my eyes as I am of seeing it through yours.’

  ‘Try me,’ Méndez challenged.

  Paco sighed. ‘It would have been wrong to let those two half-crazed militiamen kill you,’ he said. ‘You had to be dealt with by the proper authorities.’

  ‘The proper authorities!’ Méndez repeated. ‘Do you call the rabble who run this place the proper authorities?’

  ‘Yes,’ Paco said. ‘The government has recognized them as such so they must be.’ He walked to the door, then turned to look at Carlos Méndez one last time. ‘It may not be much of a system of justice I’m handing you over to,’ he told the señorito, ‘but in these troubled times, it’s the best I can do.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Felipe had half a dozen tubes running in and out of his body. He looked down at them with disgust. ‘This is how they feed me,’ he said. ‘Liquids! And there’s not even any kick in them. What I wouldn’t give for a plate of chorizo and a decent glass of Rioja.’

  Paco smiled fondly at his partner. ‘You’re looking a lot better than you were the last time I saw you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m losing weight,’ Felipe complained. ‘I must be.’

  ‘You can afford to drop a few kilos,’ Paco told him.

  ‘I’ve got used to being fat,’ his partner countered. ‘Try saying Thin Felipe. It just doesn’t sound the same, does it?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Paco agreed.

  ‘Still, when I’m back on my feet, we’ll do a tour of the bars,’ Felipe said, cheering up. ‘A few raciones, a couple of platos del día, maybe a little seafood and a couple of generous helpings of empanada, and I should be my old roly-poly self again.’

  Paco wondered if there’d still be the raciones Felipe dreamed of when he got out of hospital – or even the bars to serve them. ‘I’ll go now,’ he said, rising from his seat. ‘Give you a chance to rest.’

  ‘You showed them, though, didn’t you, jefe,’ Felipe said. ‘You showed all those fancy señoritos that they can’t push us around.’

  ‘Yes, I showed them,’ Paco replied, opening the door and stepping out onto the corridor.

  *

  A small crowd had gathered on the corner of Hortaleza and San Mateo, and the people who composed it – mostly old men – were gazing up at the rooftops of the other side of the street.

  One of the onlookers on the edge of the crowd was a bald man with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. Paco tapped him on the shoulder. ‘What’s been happening here?’ he asked.

  The bald man turned briefly to look at him, then returned his eyes to the roof, as if he were frightened of missing something. ‘There’s a fascist sniper somewhere up there,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Just shot three people further down the street. But don’t worry – the militia are after him. He won’t get away.’

  The old man’s words bounded around Paco’s brain as the sound of bullets echoed around the narrow streets. ‘Just shot three people further down the street. But don’t worry – the militia are after him. He won’t get away.’

  It didn’t take long for war to twist the way people thought. The sniper’s bullets had claimed three victims, but that didn’t matter – because he’d be made to pay for it. And so it went on. Atrocities on one side led to atrocities on the other, and all that counted was getting even.

  Paco could see the militiamen now. There were six of them. Three were picking their way slowly across the tiled roofs from the left, the others were carefully edging their way along the guttering from the right.

  ‘They’ve got him caught like a rat in a trap,’ the bald man said, with evident satisfaction.

  Paco eased his way through the crowd. He had seen enough killing for one day. What he needed now was a drink.

  The balconies along his route to the Cabo de Trafalgar were crammed with women – women fanning themselves, women drinking iced coffee, women knitting. All of them had their eyes fixed on the rooftops, and all had the same expression of excited anticipation they would have displayed at a bullfight.

  ‘It’s like a game to them,’ Paco said to himself. ‘Nothing but a fucking game.’

  But it was a game in which real people spilled real blood and ended up dead. The siege of the Montaña barracks had shown that well enough.

  The victims of the sniper’s fire lay where they had fallen, at the corner of Calle Farmacia. As the bald man had told him, there were three of them. One was a middle-aged woman in a long black dress, the second a girl Paco recognized as one of the local flower sellers, and the third a white-haired man in a shabby blue suit. None of them wore an armband or any other indication of belonging to a political party. They hadn’t been shot because of who they were, but because of where they were. They had died for having the temerity to live in a socialist barrio.

  Two young militiamen were standing guar
d, their rifles at the ready, as if they were expecting someone to attempt to steal the corpses. Seeing Paco’s red armband – and recognizing him as the old man of thirty-six that he was – they made a clumsy attempt to come to attention.

  ‘At ease,’ Paco said awkwardly.

  The Cabo de Trafalgar was now only a couple of hundred metres away, and he could almost taste the drink he so badly needed. From the rooftops behind him came the sound of renewed shooting, but Paco did not stop to look. He did not even turn his head.

  *

  The Cabo de Trafalgar was normally full of thirsty workmen at that time of day, but when Paco pushed the door open, he saw that the only person inside was Nacho.

  ‘Salud,’ the barman said.

  ‘Salud,’ Paco replied, walking over to the bar, and sitting down on one of the big wooden stools. ‘Where is everybody, today?’

  ‘They’ve all gone to the mountains.’

  ‘The mountains? Why?’

  Nacho raised his eyebrows, amazed by the extent of Paco’s ignorance. ‘They’ve gone to fight the fascists, of course. Haven’t you heard? The bastards have already got as far as Villalba and Guadalajara.’

  It was hard to imagine the lads he usually drank with – Pepe the plumber, Eugenio the postman, and little Mauricio the cobbler – out in the sierra battling the army. ‘What time did they set out?’ Paco asked.

  ‘About half an hour ago. Before they left, I cooked them a big tortilla to eat when they got there. And you can be sure I gave them plenty of wine to go with it.’

  Paco remembered how the campaigns had been planned in North Africa – how the supply lines had been the most important part of any operation they were engaged in. And the lads from the bar had gone off to the mountains with nothing more than a potato omelette and a few bottles of wine.

  ‘What will happen when the tortilla runs out?’ he asked Nacho.

  ‘I’ll cook them another one.’

  ‘And take it out to the mountains?’

  Nacho snorted. ‘Of course not. Why do that when they can come in here and pick it up themselves?’