by Shaun Herron
“I’m an explosives man.”
“Be more specific.”
“Demolition. Barracks,” Urbina said economically.
“Successfully?”
“Why not?”
“You made the Iruña Zarra bomb for my son.”
“Yes.”
“The rest of you?”
Small arms attacks on isolated Civil Guard barracks, two banks, gun-running over the mountains, the dynamite demolition of four widely separated barracks, the passing of men from the mountains to the coast and from the coast to the mountains. Ugalde thought what they told him a queer tale of irrelevant courage, utterly wasted, utterly useless. A few hundred men, girls and boys, in isolated groups, futilely picking with a pin at the blisters on the backside of the body politic. Getting a son out of jail was like opening a major front beside their efforts.
“This will be done my way,” he said strongly.
Paco said, “With great respect, doctor, why should it be done your way? What experience have you of this sort of thing?”
“I’ll tell you, Paco. My son is in there and I want him out. When I get him out, my life and my wife’s and my son’s life in Spain are over. The Ministry of Health will cancel my license to practice. The profession will strike me from the Register. I’ll not be able to practice abroad. We must go and this time there will be no return. So what does it matter that I tell you now what I have hidden? I am of Ramosierra in Castile. From the mountains of Castile to Irun, to the day he died in Huesca, I was with Luis Arrabal. I buried him in the mountains of Huesca after our last action. From Irun to Huesca I was his second-in-command. That is my experience.” He felt an immense sense of liberation, as if a prison he had lain in half a lifetime had opened to let him go free.
Urbina said, “A long time ago.” He was afraid to add, If it is true at all.
“A long time ago. But the best you can call on and the only man you can use who knows that place, inside and out. It will be done my way, or I will do it myself, and for my son alone.” He felt like a strutting actor in a cheap Western, entirely out of character. But he said to Carlos, “Is it to be my way?”
“We shall talk,” Carlos said. “We can find agreement, doctor. Hierro must be brought out.” Carlos appeared to want agreement above all else. He looked at each of his three men in turn and said, “We shall find agreement.” They looked back at him as if thoughts known only to themselves were passing from mind to mind along invisible wires. “Remember that,” Carlos said, nodding his head at them like a father of willful sons. Or a conductor. To Ugalde he said, “Tell us your way and we shall see.”
It was easier than Ugalde expected. He attributed this to his own single-mindedness, his settled will and his determination to dominate them, however high the emotional cost might be. There were moments when he was so conscious of being in command that he felt he could demolish Basa’s Summerhouse with his will alone.
“They have two sources of power,” Ugalde said, “their own and the public supply. Their own takes over automatically if the public supply is cut. They have phone and radio communication. If we cut the public supply and the phone we alert them. At once they alert the whole chain, from here to Pamplona and from here to the frontier. To succeed against them, our timing would have to be perfect and since we cannot tell at what precise moment they would become alarmed, we cannot perfect our timing.”
This was the problem that had defeated him in all his efforts to think of a way into and out of Basa’s Summerhouse without fighting and killing. It was the problem that stirred somewhere in him his whole-cloth solution. “What is your name?” he asked the mechanic from the service station at Zubiri.
“Rof.”
“Well, Rof, you will have to work …”
“I will assign them, doctor,” Carlos said sharply.
Ugalde shrugged. “As you will.” It made no difference and it was a concession to Carlos. But the tone annoyed him. “The first step,” he said, “is to immobilize the entire staff of the Summerhouse and the Guards in the Burguete barracks. If we do that efficiently, we don’t need to think of them getting word out to the Zubiri barracks. And it can be done efficiently.”
Urbina leaned his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. His head was shaking from side to side. Ugalde could hear his deliberately half-muffled laughter. He picked his knife from the floor by his feet.
“Stop him,” he said grimly to Carlos, and knew it to be more in desperation than in anger.
“Urbina!”
The vet sat up solemn-faced with mockery.
“Do you trust that fool?” Ugalde asked Carlos.
“We are also trying to trust you, doctor,” Carlos said. “We want to. So far, we have nothing.” He signalled him curtly to go on.
Ugalde festered with resentment. It was not in his experience that the patient disputed the prescription. “The barracks and the Summerhouse get their meat from the butcher Criado for their Thursday stew,” Ugalde said. “It is part of the program to endear the Civil Guard to the local people. If Paco and his wife will get Criado and his wife out of their house for two hours on Wednesday night, I will deal with the meat.”
“Do not assign us, doctor …”
Ugalde exploded. “Damn you, man, if you say that again I’ll do this myself and leave your man in jail. I know the habits of my patients and their friends better than you do, sitting up here on your Goddamned mountain. Paco will occupy Criado and his wife. Is that clear?”
Paco said, “He’s right, Carlos. We play cards together.”
Carlos said nothing. His hands were tight in an angry grip.
“Criado prepares the meat for them. He cuts it into chunks and it sits in his place on Wednesday night in the kettles it’s cooked in in the kitchens—a big kettle for the Summerhouse, a smaller one for the barracks. They collect it on Thursday morning. I need two hours to doctor it. They eat stew on Thursday nights at nine …”
“They eat in shifts,” Carlos said.
“They work in shifts. They eat at nine—the shift going off and the shift coming on eat at nine, together, and while they do, the place is closed up as tight as a drum. Five hours after they eat, they’ll start going down, very sick men. Very, very sick men—very unpleasantly sick. In a very short time they’ll be immobilized completely, incapable of anything.”
“What will you put in the meat?”
Ugalde said warily, “Leave the medical chores to me, Carlos. When the first few go down, they won’t call Zubiri for reinforcements, they’ll call Pamplona for a service’s doctor. They’ll not ask a civilian to go in there …”
“They asked you,” Paco said.
“Basa asked me. My son is in there now, Paco. Will they ask me again?”
“No.”
“What about the prisoners?” Rof asked. “They’ll be sick too. How do we move sick men?”
“They have a separate kitchen. They don’t eat the same food. You didn’t think the Civil Guard would think your man an equal, did you?”
“All I did was ask,” Rof said, looking at Carlos for support.
“Go on, doctor,” Carlos said.
“They’ll call for a medical officer. As more men go down, maybe they’ll call again. The barracks will call. All they’ll hear is that the medical officer’s on his way. By then, two of us will be over the fences in white coats and hospital masks, we’ll open the gates and the rest is easy. It will take fifteen minutes at most.”
“One of those fences has a charge that kills, doctor,” Carlos said as if Ugalde were an idiot.
“We need a very light sectional ladder—a sectional stepladder that can be assembled and locked by a man as he goes up it and a section he can fit into an upturned V-shaped locking crown and lowered over the other side.”
“And get killed or shot in floodlights,” Rof said skeptically.
“Aluminum. Very light. Strong men can hold it off the wire while it is assembled. There’ll be nobody capable of doing anything
about us. And when relief eventually comes to them the place will be open and empty and there’ll be no explanation.”
They debated it. Rof and Paco agreed that the stepladder could be made and used, providing there were enough men to hold it off the wire while a small, light man assembled it in sections. Paco drew it for them and Rof made suggestions. It could be made by the factory men in Pamplona in a few days, they said. “Our men. Good craftsmen.”
“Do you guarantee the doctored meat?” Carlos demanded.
“It will be effective, Carlos. It will also be cruel. They will suffer.”
“It won’t affect us?”
“Only the smell will affect us. It will be fierce.”
“Shit?” Urbina asked, and Ugalde did not answer. Nobody pressed the point.
“What about the medical officer they send for?” Rof asked.
“Intercept him. Drive his car up here and leave it in the compound and him in a cell.”
“Fifteen minutes in and out?” Carlos was counting. “To cross two fences with this stepladder and get out with the prisoners?”
“Use wire cutters on the outside fence,” Ugalde said. “It isn’t charged. And once we’re in, we’ll be running. Twenty minutes at the outside, but fifteen’s more like it.”
They argued about it for an hour. The arguments wearied Ugalde. They used more energy than an epidemic. In the end only Urbina opposed the plan.
“We want the floor plan of the building,” Carlos said.
“I’ll be there. You don’t need the plan.”
“I want it.”
“You can’t have it.”
The storm lasted for a long time. Ugalde was grimly adamant. No floor plan. “I will direct you,” he repeated monotonously and would not be moved, and his strength drained. I will not, he thought, let them out of my control.
“And now, the price,” he said when they gave up.
“Your son, Mauro. He’s the price.”
“It’s higher than that, Carlos. I want his friends, Haro and Reis, and the girl and secure transport to the coast for all of us and a fishing boat to Bayonne. I have thought a lot about the Fifth Assembly. You’re like the secret police—you’re everywhere.”
It was the longest and fiercest storm of the night. Urbina’s rage was close to hysteria. “They are all police spies,” he yelled.
“That’s a damned lie. Even the police deny it.”
“How do you know that?”
“They told me.”
“You’re still in touch with them? How do we know you’re not one? You’re leading us into a trap.”
Ugalde’s knife whipped before Urbina’s face and they were seized. “Your mouth will kill you yet,” Ugalde screamed, limp and wet and out of control.
“We will have them, you quack! Your own, that’s all you can have.”
When they were safely dragged apart, Ugalde put on his coat. “I can do it without you,” he said. “Hierro can rot.”
Carlos blocked his way to the door. “We have been friends a long time, doctor. Tonight we have been angry. But that’s all. We can agree.”
“If I stay, I will kill that goatherd.”
“If he speaks again, I will do it for you.”
Ugalde stayed. He sat by the fire, his coat on the floor beside him, his knife in his hand. “As much as clear your throat, Urbina, and I’ll put this knife all the way through you. You are the most contemptible scum I have ever known and …”
“Doctor,” Carlos said impatiently. He swept his arm across the room. “The doctor can have the two young men and the girl, along with his son, Mauro. Is that agreed?”
They looked at one another and at Carlos. Urbina put his head in his hands. Carlos nodded to them as if to tell them what to say. They said, “Agreed.”
“I did not say it,” Urbina muttered.
“Urbina!”
There was one more issue. “No guns,” Ugalde said. “There will be no need for guns. There will be no killing, at the barracks or the Summerhouse.”
“Not one man would go into that compound unarmed, doctor,” Carlos protested. “We are going against soldiers. If one of them is only half sick, he would kill us all.”
Ugalde knew it. “Then you and Paco only.” And that was agreed. With surprising ease. But Ugalde was too weary to be surprised. He raised the last two questions.
“Can you have the stepladder for next Thursday?”
“Easily.”
“Then that is the day. How many men?”
“Leave that to us,” Carlos said, and Ugalde was too weary to argue. It could be done by three or four men. If they thought they needed more, that was their business. He had what he wanted. “There’ll be secure transport and a boat,” Carlos said. “Paco will come to see you at your surgery.”
Ugalde put on his coat again. “Are you coming down the mountain, Paco? Rof?”
There was a moment’s awkwardness. “I will sleep here and leave early,” Rof said.
“I’ll come down in the morning,” Paco said. “I’m tired.”
“We will talk some more together, doctor,” Carlos said. “We have other business.”
“But we are agreed.”
“We are agreed.”
Ugalde saddled his horse and went down the mountain. It was snowing heavily now and the track to the dirt road had disappeared. “Home,” he said to his horse, and withdrew into his coat. It was all agreed. No one need die. Mauro and his friends would be free; Basa’s humiliation would be great but not made crushing by the death of any of his men; and they would reach France.
Then what would they do? That was a question for another day, not for the small hours of this weary morning. He dozed inside the high collar of his coat.
Maria-Angeles was waiting in the kitchen. The coffee pot was ready.
“We shall withdraw what little we have from the bank,” he said, “and leave everything we’ve gathered in the past twenty-five years. It will be next Thursday.” The news excited her.
“Good,” she said crisply. “We shall manage, my dear one. Somehow. And we’ll have taken our son from them. They’ll have no more of us.” She poured his coffee. “There are still rich people in France who’ll need a good Spanish cook.”
“Spanish waiters are also in great demand,” he said morosely and pushed the coffee away, “and I am tired. Very, very tired. I must go to bed.”
He dreamed that Urbina had the body of a goat with some sickness in its belly and he asked the men for the chance to operate and they cried in chorus, laughing, “Agreed.”
And he pulled his throwing knife from the back of his coat and they cried in chorus, laughing, “Agreed.”
And he raised the knife to separate the man’s head from the goat’s body and awoke. But he could still hear them in his head, crying in chorus and laughing, “Agreed.”
12
Once the bread is eaten, the company breaks up.
SPANISH PROVERB
Basa no longer drove to Burguete by day.
He went cautiously to the Señora Aloys’ house, parking a long way off and walking the rest of the way. The provincial commander of the Civil Guard, he said.
He went to Burguete at night, in a staff car, with a driver; lying back out of sight when he came to the outskirts of the village. Like a coward, he said. Dion might see me, and wave a greeting to me.
He walked to the señora’s house, deviously, like a horny youth, he said, fearful of adult interception or pursuit.
Not machismo, Julio, not you. You don’t need it.
How do you suddenly not need what at the core of your being you have needed all your life? Your pride? Simple self-esteem? A decent self-image? Your manhood? Am I a beggar, insolently whoring with a defenceless young girl? Am I a man without pundonor, a sense of humor? Am I a sinvergüenza, a shameless one? They have assaulted my pride, he said of his superiors in the corps, and his humiliation deepened with his sense of its shamefulness. Am I, Julio Basa, a guttersnipe? he said, and
his anger grew.
And Dion? Did he ever ask a favor, wish me to deviate from my duty to the corps and to the State, or even now, try to win from me for his stupid son more than the law requires—and does not deliver? “There will be no further communication with the prisoner Ugalde’s family.” They have put it in writing now, in orders. And Dion despised him for it. It is a hard thing to be newly despised by one’s old and only friend.
It was half past ten when Basa’s car reached the Burguete compound. It was ten-forty-five when two guards and the prison commander brought Mauro to the commander’s office, but not without a tension that made Basa uneasy.
“Bring the prisoner Ugalde to me in your office, captain,” he said.
“The prisoners are all down for the night and their lights off for the night, colonel.”
“Well, get this one up, captain, and put his lights on.”
“Yes, colonel.”
“And, captain.”
“Colonel?”
“Shut off all your recording equipment.”
“Shut off …? Yes. Yes, colonel.”
Basa came from behind the desk. One got nowhere with them from behind a desk. One got nowhere with them from anywhere. I don’t know, colonel; that was all. Reis said it, Haro said it, the girl Pureza said it. That Abril said nothing, nothing at all. That was the difference between them; Abril fell short of being a professional without being the absolute amateurs the rest of them were. Abril stood there like Hierro, silent, contemptuous. Abril angered Basa in a way Hierro did not, and he knew why—Mauro Ugalde had never set eyes on Hierro and wouldn’t have recognized him if Basa hadn’t identified him as the occupant of cell number eleven. But Abril was part of the conspiracy that led Mauro into a situation that damaged the lives of his parents … and of Basa. He found it a massive strain on his self-control to hide his rage at the Bilbao mechanic and Abril was in wrist irons now, without bed or bucket, lying on the floor of his cell because Basa wished him to be. “That one I will break,” he told the prison commander, spitting frustration.
