The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  Haro went to find the others.

  When he came back, they walked around the bank and past the back door. A Yale lock. The man would probably have a dozen Yale keys in his pockets. It would take time, and they’d take chances, finding the right one. “We’ll do it as we’ll do it on the night,” Mauro said, “and we’ll time it. Pureza has to know roughly how long she’ll have to sit in the road waiting for us.”

  “She’ll drive? Not Reis?”

  “The Civil Guard is more tolerant of women,” Mauro said wisely. “We don’t need a crack driver. We need a good talker.” Dion Ugalde was big in his mind. In his time, they knew everything about the ground before they tried to operate on it. Prepare everything. He was full of the wisdom of that.

  Not the straightest route to the church from the bank. The Civil Guard, walking through, would walk the wider streets. They found the narrow twisting way they needed and came to the church. However they came, they had to cross the square. The Church sat like a fortress in the middle of it. If the Guards came through, they would have to wait for them to pass. There had to be no risks. They had to anticipate everything. “Speed and silence,” Mauro said sagely.

  From the church they walked north, back out of the town. The nearer of the two bridges across the Cadagua was back to the north. Another risk: The river was to the right of the road here, the narrow-gauge railway to the left. The Civil Guards walked two by two between them. They would hope for a dark night and walk beyond the narrow-gauge tracks, risking sprained or broken ankles in the dark.

  They came to the bridge and crossed the river. They would come up here on Friday, in daylight, and hide the guns on the hill on this side of the river. A bike wouldn’t be stopped during daylight, unless a search was on. Carrying a gun any night could be deadly. He explained to Haro. “We’ll need four small handguns—the smallest they can find for us. We’ll use two at the spinster’s place and dump them in the garbage. The other two we’ll use up here. They’ll get two guns back and their share of the money.” It was a reasonable price to pay for the contents of Fuertes’ safe.

  They took to the mountain. It took them two hours, scrambling, one leg short, one leg long, keeping to the trees, to reach Antuñano and walk back on the road to where Pureza was waiting. She was right to stay farther back from the village. Mauro congratulated her on her choice of place. “I stopped here because I needed to use the trees,” she said, and demanded that they eat whatever food they had in the car. They ate cold chicken and bread and drank wine in the car. It was drizzling now. “It will take us at least three hours to get to you in the dark after we leave the bank,” Mauro said. “Four from the time you drop us at the north bridge. In that time you’re bound to see a patrol.” That was something else to work out in the next few days: What was her story if they came on her, parked in the small hours of the morning?

  “I’ll drive slowly to Amurrio and back a couple of times,” Pureza said, working it out in seconds.

  “Don’t run out of gas,” Haro said, “and take care of my car.”

  When they had eaten, Pureza drove them back to Bilbao the way they had come. “I have to know the road,” she said. Mauro sat up beside her, thinking hungrily of her mouth and the thighs that so adequately filled her slacks. Haro sat behind them, thinking sulkily that the least he could be allowed to do was drive his own car.

  It was pouring when they reached the city.

  And Mauro, after all, wore two hats. In those periods between service to the Fifth Assembly of the Basque Homeland and Liberty movement which the rest of the world knew as the ETA, he had other important things to do. There were texts to master, tests to pass, lectures and labs to attend and papers to write. And a little loving. Two hats, not three, because the loving could be fitted in with his service to the Fifth Assembly. Pureza and Mauro shared two passions; the consummated passion for the Basque Homeland, and their unconsummated passion for one another. Pureza was pretty, shapely, gay, intelligent, loving and sensible. She drove Haro’s car to the door of her apartment block, surrendered the driver’s seat, took Mauro up to the apartment she shared with three other working girls who were all doing their Sunday walking in the mountains around Ceañuri and whose bus would not be back till six. At five Pureza said fondly, “That’s all. We still keep the rest for our wedding night and there won’t be one unless you put your head down. I want to now, Mauro—but I want my big night too.”

  And Mauro said desperately, “Four years from now, Pureza?”

  “I love dreaming about it.” She adjusted his dress and hers, showed him the door affectionately, and Mauro flagged a little blue bus and went to his lodgings to put his head down.

  He kept it down until the small hours of Monday morning and in lectures, labs and in his room, until ten o’clock on Tuesday night. Then he got his bike out and rode it around the city, street-touring, casual, a student out to take the air and clear his head after a spell of intense and airless concentration. With his foot on the curb, he read the posters outside the Ayala theater, looked in the windows of expensive shops, sauntered his bike down Allende into Balparda, through the Plaza de Zababuru into Amezaga, around the Plaza de España into Calle Navarra. Plaza-touring. Deep breathing the damp night air. Another look at theater posters, this time outside the Arriaga theater, a turn around the Cathedral-Basilica del Señor Santiago, and why are the streets behind great churches almost always little streets? While he thought of that he rode down one of the little streets onto Ribera and in between the market and the church of San Antonio Abad; in behind the church. His bike was safe from observation in the yard between the church and the river. He walked back across Ribera into narrow Somera, stood in the doorway of number twenty, watching the street for a time, then, reassured, ran upstairs to the second floor and put a large old iron key in the large old iron lock. The plaque on the door said only

  GASTRONOMIC CLUB

  Laughter met him at the door, with the odors of good cooking. Haro and Reis and Abril were working in the kitchen, Haro cooking squid in their own ink, Reis making chickpea stew and Abril pollo a la chilindrón. Each worked on a separate stove; there were three, very old-looking, white enamelled and generously chipped.

  “What did you bring?” Haro asked him.

  “Nothing. I was at the books until I left.”

  “Who’ll you eat off?”

  “Abril’s chicken. All right, Abril?”

  “You do me honor. I make the best in Vizcaya.”

  Around the kitchen were racks of pots and pans, carving and serving knives and forks, dishes of every sort, and drawers of cutlery.

  They ate and drank in the second, larger room, sitting on stools around a low table made from packing cases. There was another long table down one wall. This second table was scarcely wider than the shaky bench in front of it. The end wall carried a row of racks in which were bottles of red and white wine. By the door of the room, a round device like a roulette wheel sat on a large box. Metal sluices had been cut into the wheel. Mauro put coins in the sluices and the coins slid down through holes at the ends of the sluices, and clattered into the box below.

  Their talk was gay and inconsequent, the talk of young men enjoying what Basque men take immense pride in—their cooking.

  “How long did you stay with Pureza?” Haro asked.

  “About half an hour. She sent me home to my books.”

  “Waiting’s harder than work.”

  “If I could win a state lottery we’d get married and put an end to this waiting.”

  “A fat bank would do as well.”

  Reis said, “Why are Basque women like that? They say the women in Malaga pull you on like an old boot.”

  Abril said nothing and did not join in the laughter. He shovelled and swallowed industriously, served Mauro and himself twice, wiped his dish with torn bread, and drowned it all with great draughts of white wine. He stretched and yawned and said,

  “Basque working men don’t talk about their women that way.�
�� Abril liked to listen to their bourgeois chatter and tell them what Basque working men did or did not do.

  “What do they talk about?”

  “Wages, soccer, trade unions and castrating the rich.” He glanced at Reis and the little glitter in his eyes might have been resentment or amusement. They were never quite sure.

  “Why would you castrate them? Why not just line them up against a wall?” As often as not, when Reis asked Abril a question, it sounded like an attribution of intent. “Wouldn’t that solve a lot of the problems you’ll face in the future?”

  “It’s their beautiful soft wives we’ll put up against a wall.” When Abril made a long statement, it was his pedantic habit to state first the full intention of the narrative to follow.

  “Where did you learn this technique, Abril?” Reis asked him. “Did you take classes at some workers’ self-improvement club?”

  “Once,” Abril said, “I was in Pamplona. I went there with a factory bus party …” he waved factory at Reis like a cape, “to see Bilbao play Pamplona. Two of us walked into that big rich men’s hotel—what is it, Mauro? Hotel de los Tres Reyes? Three Kings! My God, it’s a king’s palace. There were two families hanging about the lower lobby, two fathers, two mothers, two lots of children. We stood close to them to hear what people like that talk about. By God, they have nothing to talk about. Nothing! The families were cousins. They were driving up into the Pyrenees above Huesca to some posh lodge they owned. And those two women! God, they were queens. Christ, they were beautiful. The way they walked! They were proud looking, and arrogant and they strutted but it didn’t look like strutting. It was just … just … the way proud beautiful women should walk.”

  It was rhapsodic provocation. He smiled coldly at Reis. “Our working women have big tits and big arses and they’re stumpy and they lumber along like oxen. But those rich beautiful women. That’s why we wouldn’t shoot their men.” He looked at them in turn and there was no humor in his voice. “I’d like to do up a flock of women like that and make their castrated men watch it. Those women would spit on me, they’d treat me like dirt, even under me they’d be arrogant and I’d feel them strutting on their soft backs, and I’d enjoy them all the more because they were spitting at me from under me and I was spitting up them.” He drained another full glass. “That’s what working men think about your beautiful rich women.” His red sleep-walker’s eyes were savage.

  Haro said, “Sometimes I wonder why you let us into the Fifth Assembly, Abril.”

  Abril said, “Sometimes I wonder myself.”

  In Mauro’s head the voice of the country doctor of Burguete murmured at him, “Spain is a desperado among the nations … its national sport is not a game but a ritual of bloodletting.” He shut down thought.

  They were suddenly somber, their heads down, thinking about Abril and the beautiful strutting rich women in the Hotel de los Tres Reyes, and their castrated husbands, whose part in the new and better society was to serve as witnesses to ecstatic acts of social hatred. But Abril was only one. And he had not been chosen by them; he had been sent to them by the Fifth Assembly.

  “I’m sorry,” Abril said contritely, as if to correct a blunder. “I got you the four handguns for Sunday, Mauro.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Under the …”

  “Here?” They all shouted at once and something hard and heavy hammered the door.

  They knew the sound. They had heard it five times in the eighteen-month life of their eating club. They had the old iron lock put on the old door because every member of an eating club should have his own big iron key. Each time they heard the hammering they said the same thing: “Maybe this time his gun will go off and kill the bastard.” But their rule was: humble courtesy.

  This time there was a lethal difference; four handguns under a bed. Their stillness was deep and brief.

  “I’ll open,” Mauro said, “clear away and wash and for Christ’s sake, sing.”

  They scrambled with the dishes to the kitchen. Plates clattered, taps hissed into sinks. Reis hissed at Abril, “You stupid bull’s arse. Why did you bring the guns here?”

  “Where the hell else? He asked for them, didn’t he?”

  “They always wreck the beds.”

  “Leave it and sing, for Christ’s sake,” Haro pleaded. They sang.

  Mauro opened the door.

  The two policemen came slowly in, like a team of cart horses coming abreast into a small stable. They were broad, wrapped-up men with wide dark-red faces that seemed to Mauro to spread across the room like slabs of battered teak. The one who now went forward into the living room they had come to call Skull. For some reason none of them could remember, they called the other one Begoña. Reis suggested once it was because he reminded them of the Virgin of Begoña but Haro claimed it was because so many thirty-ton trucks on the highways were dedicated to the Virgin of Begoña. They had never heard the sound of his voice. He stood back now in the living room doorway, his feet apart, his shoulders almost touching both sides of the door frame. Skull spread himself in the middle of the living room, just beside the low table on which there were still four wine glasses. He put one booted foot on the edge of the table and pressed. It tilted on its side and the glasses slid to the floor. Two of them smashed. “Come out here,” he yelled above the singing.

  They came out of the kitchen, Reis and Haro with drying cloths, Abril with suds to his elbows. Only Abril made no attempt to smile.

  Skull had a routine. It did not vary. It began with the table. It ended with the beds.

  “Always singing,” he said, “always washing dishes.” He never smiled. The whites of his eyes were very white. He seemed to look and not to see. There was in the eyes what Haro called the alertness of a dead fish.

  “We’ve just finished eating,” Reis said unnecessarily, as if he had to say something, with four guns gnawing at his mind.

  “Permit,” Skull said, lowering over the room like a Biscay storm. The room was small enough. Alone, he would have made it seem crowded. He always asked for their permit. They always brought it from the kitchen drawer where they kept it. Then they always took it back. The third time he came they anticipated him and brought also the membership list. “When I ask and not before,” he said, not to be deprived of exercised power.

  “How many members?”

  “Twenty,” Reis said. Skull had created a mould for them. Reis always answered that one.

  “Where are they?”

  “The place is too small for us. We break up into groups with our own nights.” That one was Reis’ also. Skull had said, “You,” or “you,” the first time and the second time. He seemed to remember who should answer what. They had tried switching. Skull said, “You, not you.”

  “Where’s your membership list?” That was Haro’s part. He brought it from the same kitchen drawer. He always took it back.

  Skull did not hand it back. He read it as he always read it and dropped it on the floor. Haro moved to recover it. That was his part.

  “Leave it,” Skull said tonight. Any change in a familiar and hostile police routine is frightening to its victims.

  The four guns haunted them. The change haunted them. Why tonight? They had become so accustomed to his routine that the deviation drained their confidence. Mauro stood between Begoña and Skull, breathing too heavily and too regularly. Reis, Haro and Abril stood across the toppled table from Skull listening to their own breathing. Their lips were tight. They could feel and hear the breath in their nostrils. Only Abril stared without turning his sight from Skull’s face and thought, “You, we’ll hang.”

  “Papers.”

  They produced them. First Haro. Then Reis. The order had not changed. Not so far. The formula also held.

  “Reis?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are employed at the wine company?”

  “Yes.”

  “Namesake?”

  “No. My father is the owner.”

  Then t
he long slow look that might conceal special knowledge or might be a mere technique of intimidation. Who ever knew?

  “Ugalde?”

  “Yes.”

  “Student?”

  Then the demonstrative gathering of saliva and the spit, very precisely, beside Mauro’s boots. A salute to all students.

  “Abril?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mechanic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ahhh …” Another deviation. He looked around them, slowly, turning to stare at Mauro. Back to Abril.

  “Were you at work today?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There is no work.”

  “Why not?”

  “The workers are on strike.”

  “Strikes are illegal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you on strike?”

  Abril drew a long noisy breath, “No.”

  “Are you at work?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to be a cripple.” He stood like a courtier on trial.

  “And that means?”

  “What would I do? Go in by myself? To do what? Nothing. There is nothing to do. And they would cripple me if I did.” His breathing clouded his words. It rustled in his throat like hatred.

  “Who are ‘they’ ”?

  “The workers.”

  Skull bent forward from the hips, his great bulk moving like a falling tree. “Hit me,” he said.

  Only Abril’s eyelids moved.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Here.”

  “Why?”

  “I take care of the place.”

  “Do they pay you?”

  “No.”

  Things were normal again. Skull swung suddenly and walked to the third room, a tiny bedroom. He played his part like an actor in a long run. They followed him. Begoña pressed in on them and pressed them aside. He stood in the doorway, filling it, blocking their view. They saw Skull’s head and shoulders bobbing and weaving, and heard the crash of upended cots. Then he came out, smiling.