The Bird in Last Year's Nest

by Shaun Herron

  “This is where you sleep?” he said to Abril.

  “Yes.”

  “Which cot?”

  “The left one.”

  “Why are there two cots?”

  That was Reis’ question. “In case one of us drinks too much.”

  Abril again. “Do you bring women in here?”

  That was new. They could hear their own heartbeats.

  “Women?” Abril said in a curious voice. “I’m an acolyte.”

  Skull leaned forward and stared blankly, then his face lit as if he had understood something obscure and had the answer. “I didn’t know acolytes had no balls,” he said. He seemed satisfied.

  They were gone, marching, leaving the door open behind them. The walls of the room stepped back. Mauro closed the door. Abril did not join the rush to the bedroom. He stood white-faced in the living room, his hands opening and closing. His red eyes were tightly closed like the eyes of an enraged woman about to scream her rage. He could not hear the clatter of iron cots being righted. He could see Skull’s face.

  “They got them. They got them.” Haro came out of the bedroom trailing Reis and Mauro like shadows. He seized Abril by the shirt. “They got them, you stupid cow’s arse. They took them.”

  Abril gripped Haro’s hands and slowly twisted them loose. “They got what?”

  “The guns, you Goddamned fool,” and resentfully, as if Abril owed him an explanation, “Why would they do that? Why didn’t they take us? What’s the game this time?”

  “They’re probably waiting outside for us to run for it,” Reis said, “then they can shoot us down.”

  Abril sat down. “They didn’t get them,” he said wearily, creeping out of his private world.

  “They’re not under the bed!” Haro shouted.

  “For Christ’s sake, stop shouting,” Mauro said.

  “They never were under the bed.”

  “You said …”

  “I didn’t get time to say. Lift the wheel.”

  Reis lifted the money wheel. The guns were underneath it, on the lid of the box.

  “Leave them there,” Mauro said.

  They all sat down, stiffly, slowly as old men sit down and were very still. An alarm in the kitchen ticked like a church clock.

  “Jesus Christ,” Reis said.

  “I’m sorry, Abril, I’m very sorry,” Haro said abjectly.

  “That one,” Abril said in a small gentle voice, “I will do with a knife.”

  Then Mauro spoke of Sunday’s business.

  Their planning was meticulous, as if they now felt more vulnerable than they had done before.

  It rained all day on Sunday. In the evening, at eight o’clock, Haro took the family car and picked up Pureza. Pureza took the wheel, and they picked up Mauro. Haro wore a hat. Normally he affected a beret. Mauro wore a hat and carried an umbrella. Their hats sat oddly high on their heads and looked too tight at the band. Abril stood under his own umbrella in the Plaza San José where they picked him up. They changed seats, Abril up front with Pureza. This was no Sunday excursion. This was the somber business of the Fifth Assembly. Such business must be managed with foresighted cunning. Revolutions are not accomplished by careless dilettantes. Pureza parked the car just beyond the portico of the Carlton Hotel. Haro walked under Mauro’s umbrella into Elcano and along the street to the doorway of Señorita Agesta’s apartment block. He said, “If my stomach doesn’t settle down I’m going to have diarrhea.” Why can’t your system get used to this sort of thing? he once asked Mauro.

  Pureza and Abril went into the hotel, crossed the lobby and walked down the corridor to the bar.

  Pureza carried all their movements vividly in her mind, and saw their actions in pictures, in their proper relation to one another. “Nice orchestration,” she said to Abril, covering her nerves. She would never have used the word diarrhea to Abril. Abril said, “Coordination.” “You mean synchronization,” she said too cheerfully. “I mean just what I said.” He had come to regard Pureza, who was seconded to their unit for some operations, as a silly bitch. He was close to saying so now, under the strain.

  Reis was on his way to Sommorrostro where he was to wait for what they called “the strike force,” now expertly and precisely deployed, with watches set. It had all been timed on Friday: Pureza and Abril knew how long it would take them to reach the bar, order two brandies, dig out a coin with which Pureza would walk to the phone to dial at exactly the right minute Marie Agesta’s number. Unless somebody else had the phone. What other people could do to your operation was sometimes enough to make you …

  “Señorita Agesta?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Meanly: “Tell my husband to put on his clothes and come downstairs. I shall be waiting at the street door and if I have to come up for him, your neighbors and mine will hear what I call you.” Her poised finger slammed the button. She went back to Abril in the bar. If people knew what we’re doing, she thought, they’d think we were cold, confident young criminals. Her nails were digging holes in the palms of her hands.

  When Señor Fuertes opened the door and lurched out in terror of his wife and the ruin waiting for him at the street door, he saw two gloved hands flash down from under the brims of two hats, and two men in stocking masks, one incongruously carrying an umbrella, pushed him back into the apartment.

  “Please? What?” Fuertes said, and saw the guns, and the umbrella and the stocking masks and the hats surmounting them but it was the umbrella that added a peculiar element of terror. It suggested perversions. “Please,” he said pathetically. Señorita Agesta stood in the lobby as still and silent as Lot’s wife, her mind locked. “Please,” Señor Fuertes said again meaning nothing, unable to say more. Their safe and private world was suddenly smashed by random terror.

  It had been incredibly easy; well executed. Mauro was always a little frightened by the vulnerability of the innocent, of the unarmed and unexpecting against the armed and ill-intentioned. It was a disarming concern in the mind of a revolutionary.

  “Go into the señorita’s bedroom,” a disembodied voice said from behind a mask, and two guns waved.

  “Please,” Marie Agesta whispered. It was the only word she could remember.

  “We’ll not hurt you,” the voice said, “if you shut up and do what you’re told. The señor’s wife is also upset.” There was a sort of sad comedy about this pair. They were not, Mauro was sure, thinking about their lives. Fuertes was thinking about his job and exposure. Marie Agesta was thinking about shame and disgrace. Mauro was sorry for them. Abril always laughed about the people Mauro was sorry for.

  The little parade trooped into the bedroom.

  Mauro put his gun away and took the bandaging tape from his pocket. He taped their mouths. The only sounds the pair made were little rabbit noises and they were quickly smothered.

  “Strip to your underwear, both of you, and lie on the bed.”

  They stood, doubly horrified now, but unwilling. Señorita Agesta’s eyes pleaded: Not rape, they said. Haro slapped her smartly across the backside. “You do it or we will,” he said. “We have no designs on you, señorita.” They did it, quickly, and lay down, and were taped, their hands behind them, their fingers also so that they could not pick at their bonds. Their ankles were taped together, their knees together; their feet were taped, their legs bent back and taped to their thighs so that they could not roll and hop. Then they were wrapped in the bedclothes and these were tied around them. Mauro gathered up their clothes and took them into the living room.

  In the kitchen they found white plastic garbage bags and put their stocking masks and Marie Agesta’s clothes into one of them. The white garbage bags were already accumulating under the lamp standards along the street. The garbage truck would come for them soon. They unloaded the guns and wrapped them in a heap of the señorita’s clothes taken from a cupboard and with them filled the white bag. Noise from the street took them to the window. Two men were carrying to one of the lamp stand
ards a white lavatory bowl topped by a fixed white cistern. They laid their burden carefully down among the white garbage bags.

  Fuertes’ pockets had to be emptied. They took all his neatly labelled keys, put everything else back, found the señorita’s keys in her handbag, and left the apartment carrying the garbage and the umbrella. The white bag was deposited in the heap under the lamp standard. They had crossed the street to the side entrance to the Carlton Bar when the garbage truck came round the corner. They watched it from well inside the hotel door. The heap of white bags was flung into the machine which packed and ground them. Two of the garbage men lifted the white throne, swung it joyfully, and let go. It smashed in the street. Two other men brushed the pieces into heaps and shovelled them into the grinders. Then they went down the street, from lamppost to lamppost, disposing of things not wanted.

  It had been incredibly easy; beautifully executed. And the guns were well out of the way. Not a flaw. They had a brandy in the Carlton Bar with Pureza and Abril and listened to a group of businessmen chattering about business and the increase in the number of Japanese seen now in Spain, always in groups “like assault parties.” At ten they left the bar and drove to Sommorrostro. There Abril transferred to Reis’ car and went ahead.

  Next, the bank. At midnight. Driving slowly, with time to pick up the guns from their hiding place across the bridge on the north side of Valmaseda and with Señora Fuertes sound asleep in bed, they’d be in and out and away; a smooth and easy operation, with high profits for the Fifth Assembly. And Mauro noted, with a little self-criticism, that that was the first time in several days he had thought about this bank robbery as a Fifth Assembly operation. It is not just robbery, an excitement, he told himself firmly, and thought it better not to share the odd thought with Haro who might wonder why it had been necessary to reassure himself about that.

  Pureza dropped them at the bridge. “Give me a kiss,” she said to Mauro, and he thought her wonderful and daring and cool and did not read in her eyes either anxiety or fear. “Take care,” he said, as if she were going for coffee. “Kiss me again,” she said, and he did not read her need for reassurance. They were operational. This was no time for a young woman to have doubts—or feelings. Nor was it a time to suppose she had any. Two black cotton bags, one for the unit’s cut, the other for the Fifth Assembly’s money, were stuffed down the legs of his trousers, held by the waistband. “Off you go, Pureza,” he said and obediently she drove away. They crossed the bridge.

  “This isn’t the spot,” Haro said, clawing in the dark among the stones.

  “It is exactly the place,” Mauro insisted.

  “Use the torch.”

  “And send signals? Search the place.”

  They searched. Perhaps it was the place, perhaps not. The guns were not in it. They searched up and down the rain-sodden bank and could not find the guns they had planted on Friday.

  “Christ!” Haro said furiously. “They’ve got to be here.”

  “They’re not,” Mauro said, battering down his fury from the top of his mind into the pit of his stomach. “So we’ll go without them. We don’t need them.”

  But where were they? Who found them? Who was hidden somewhere in the dark waiting for someone to come and get the guns? They sat still in the dark, listening, looking, waiting. There was no sound but the sound of the trees and of the incessant rain and of the rushing river. “We’re running over time,” Mauro whispered. “We’ll have to abort or go ahead. Which are you for?”

  “If there’s anybody watching, we’re dead anyway. If there’s not, we’re sheep without guns.”

  “Against a sleeping woman we won’t even see? We’ll go.” Cold nerve, Mauro instructed himself, is half the battle. The way his stomach had suddenly begun to burn and bubble made him think of diarrhea and this he could not share with a friend who was a subordinate and had the same problem. Leaders did not have their subordinates’ problems. That would not be leadership.

  They came out of the bushes and crossed the bridge, their backs tingling, their ears stretching like cat’s ears. “If they’re here, they’ll watch us right to the bank,” Haro whispered.

  “Keep going,” Mauro said quietly, trying not swallow on his words. Lead.

  In the little streets they stopped again and again, waited, listened and heard nothing. The town was asleep. The Civil Guard walked the roads, but not yet through the streets of the town. Nervous, but increasingly confident and tensely alert, they came round behind the bank. Mauro hauled the black bags out of his trouser legs. “Shoes in them.” They stood on a dry step and put their shoes in the bags.

  The key turned softly, the door opened sweetly, the manager’s office was through a door beside the back stairs. It let them pass like a thumb through butter. Their hooded torch exposed the manager’s desk, the huge old safe, the door into the bank. They locked the office door behind them, unlocked the door into the bank, checked, on hands and knees, behind the counters in the public office, and came back to the safe.

  It opened easily and the heavy old hinges squealed. They listened to their own breathing and the floor above them groaned. It groaned across the length of the ceiling and back, and across again and back, and across and back. Señora Fuertes was not asleep. She was very wide-awake, walking up and down the floor. By the weight and pace of her tread, she was either angry, or anxious, or both.

  “Stuff the bags,” Mauro whispered, “never mind dividing it up. Just stuff.”

  They stuffed. There was a lot more money than they had expected. It was soiled, done up in neat piles, bound with paper strips pinned into place. The bags filled up. They would be impossible to conceal if anybody saw them.

  The phone rang upstairs. The stuffing stopped. Handfuls of paper money were suspended in the air. The woman above must have been caught across the room from the phone. They heard her run. She was heavy. Her voice was shrill. Mauro had a picture of a large shrew. What she was saying they could not hear. That she was angry they could tell.

  “That’s enough,” Mauro said. “We’ll go.”

  They closed and locked the safe while the voice above shrilled on. It stopped with the heart-freezing sound of a car swinging in behind the bank. The woman was thumping heavily down the stairs before the back door bell rang.

  “Into the bank.” They took their loot and crept into the public office. Mauro locked the door behind them. “Lie under the counter.” They lay, stretched out on the floor. It couldn’t be Fuertes. He was too securely bundled up. Could it? Some friend of the señorita’s might have come. With a key to her apartment? It’s the unknown quantity that destroys well-planned operations. And puts good operators in jail.

  The voices carried from the back lobby, the woman’s angry, the man’s, it seemed, trying to explain what she didn’t want to understand.

  “But I called you two hours ago,” the woman shouted. “The barracks just called back this minute and it’s one o’clock now. He’s always home by ten.” Christ! That was something they hadn’t checked. She’d called the Civil Guard. They lay under the counters, their substance draining into the floor.

  “Señora,” a patient voice said, “a man isn’t missing because he’s late.”

  “How late can you be driving from Bilbao—three hours? He’s dead on the road. Why aren’t you searching the roads?”

  “But there’s been no accident, Señora.”

  “He is never late. He’s that kind of man.”

  Somebody tried the door of the manager’s office and their thumping hearts pounded, banging and rustling in their ears. No guns; but in their state they couldn’t have squeezed the triggers. They lay with their faces on the floor pressing them down, without the energy to hope.

  “Don’t be stupid. He’s not here.”

  “Have you a key into the bank, señora?”

  “I have no key.”

  “Why haven’t you phoned his friends in Bilbao?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  “But you
must know where they live, what their names are?”

  “I do not.” That seemed to make her angrier, as if her ignorance implied what she suspected and preferred to conceal. “Do something,” she shouted.

  “Has he been worried lately? Depressed? Anything like that?”

  “No. He’s a nervous man. All he does is go and play cards with his friends.” She was saying more than she wanted to say, covering her suspicions. She was close to wailing tears.

  “Are you sure you have no key into the bank?” The door handle rattled in the room beyond and the sound rattled in their roaring ears.

  “I have not. Why would I have? My husband is the manager, not me. What would he be doing, locking himself in there? He is not here.”

  “When we hear anything, we’ll let you know.”

  “You’ll let me know! That’s all you have to say? While I wait?”

  For a moment all sound died away when the door closed. The woman must be standing, fuming or crying. Then she thumped her way upstairs; the car started and drove away. The place settled. She would hear every creak, every whisper, listening for her husband. She would not sleep till he came. He would not sleep when he came.

  They tested every step on the way to the back lobby. Mauro took Fuertes’ car key and his door key from the ring and slipped the rest of them under the stairs. They were hidden but not well concealed. They would be found. Their presence there would raise questions, start false trails. There were no more problems. Planning paid. They shod themselves again and reached the unlocked south door of the church without impediment, threw one of the Fifth Assembly’s black bags inside for the young priest to gather, and walked to the north bridge, keeping to the trees beyond the narrow-gauge tracks. Their walk was free and easy. Over the bridge and onto the mountain.

  The rain was a steady downpour, the slope under the trees was treacherous, the trees strained but did not stop the rain, their shoes shipped water, their clothes drank it, and the one black paper-filled bag they had kept absorbed the rain and grew leaden. The wet cotton neck of the bag slipped from their fingers. They had to carry it in their arms. It was awkward and their arms ached; their legs were heavy and chafed by wet trousers, their feet were a dragging hindrance; water ran from their hair down their necks and under their clothes. They spoke of their hats and the umbrella, but they were in the car with Pureza. They agreed that the thought was a silly one and did not speak again. And when they reached the Antuñano road after three hours of wearying misery, they were lost. They had overwalked the village. They could not walk on the road carrying the money. They could not walk through the village. There was nothing for it but to take again to the trees and walk around the village. They dragged themselves slowly for almost an hour and came to the place where Pureza was waiting. Two Guards paced slowly in the headlights, walking toward the car. She shut off the lights and the Civil Guards, their guns ready, took up their positions on either side of the car. Their voices carried to the trees.