THE GENERAL’S DOG
James Garcia Woods
© James Garcia Woods 1999
James Garcia Woods has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1999 by Robert Hale Limited.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
This book is for César, Marisol, Pili and Chus, who are not only my oldest friends in Spain, but are also four of the warmest and most generous people I have ever met.
And for my fellow madrileños, who have made this city we share the greatest in the world.
Table of Contents
THE GENERAL’S DOG
James Garcia Woods
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Epilogue
Chapter One
The dog – a large German shepherd named Principe – loped down the dark alley with his tail raised high in the air. From behind him came the sound of pounding feet and desperate, heavy breathing, but the animal was not the least bit disconcerted. He knew his pursuer well, and was sure that he, too, was enjoying this new game.
The man, gasping for air, increased his pace. The dog, in response, put on an extra little spurt which widened the gap between them even more.
‘Stop, Principe! There’s a good boy,’ the man called out, in a voice which betrayed his rising panic.
The dog ignored the plea. His day so far had been filled with wonderful new adventures, and he was still far too excited to consider obeying a man who wasn’t even his master.
Principe turned the bend in the lane. He was not very far from the Calle Mayor now. Maybe he would abandon this particular game when he reached the main street, he thought. Perhaps, instead of playing ‘chase’, he would devote his energies to scrounging bits of chorizo and morsels of sheep’s brains from the uniformed men he was sure to find there.
‘Stop, Principe! Please stop!’ the man behind him croaked.
But the dog only tossed his head from one side to the other, and kept on running.
He had almost reached the corner of the Calle Mayor when he heard the loud explosion and felt the sudden – terrifying – pain in his left shoulder. He didn’t stop moving – his only desire was to run away from whatever was hurting him – but now, instead of travelling in a straight line, he was weaving crazily from one side of the street to the other. With each new stab of agony, the dog howled louder and louder, as if protesting to the whole world that he had been treated unfairly. He was still howling when a second bullet took the top of his head off.
*
There were hundreds of soldiers jostling one another for space around the crowded bars on the Calle Mayor. Some of them were conscripts who had expected to be sent to North Africa, and instead had found themselves less than fifty kilometres from Madrid. Some were professionals, who had seen so much service they could scarcely make a move unless it was preceded by a barked order. And some were recent volunteers, who had received little more than a minimal training while in the Fascist militias. Yet all of them were linked by a common bond. Each and every one had been out on the sierra, heard the angry boom of guns and seen, if only from a distance, the horrors which war can bring. They had experienced the grief of losing comrades in arms, and the almost overwhelming sense of relief that it had been someone else who had died. And now, weighed down with the knowledge that they would have to face it all again the next day, they were determined to get gloriously and forgetfully drunk.
Of the six privates who were drinking together outside the bar closest to the church, it was the small one with a face like that of a cornered rat who was undoubtedly the leader. When he spoke, the others held a respectful silence. When he shook his head doubtfully at what one of his companions was saying, the speaker became so confused that he soon lost track of his argument. Private Pérez, though only a couple of years older than his companions, was a man to be deferred to – a man who had a knowledge of the world outside his own village.
It was Pérez, always on the alert, who heard the first shot, and told the rest of them to shut up and listen. And it was Pérez who started running towards the sound of the second shot, confident, without even looking over his shoulder to check, that his comrades would be right behind him.
There were no lights in the alley which ran alongside the church, and when Pérez first caught sight of the black shape lying awkwardly on the ground, he thought that it was a child. Then, as his eyes gradually grew accustomed to the darkness, he recognised the shape for what it really was. He bent down next to the corpse, and struck a match.
‘Somebody’s shot a dog,’ said Private Jiménez, stupidly, from behind him. ‘Now why would anybody want to do that?’
Pérez moved his blazing match closer to what was left of the animal’s head. ‘I don’t know why anybody would want to shoot it,’ he said. ‘But there’s one thing I am sure of – if they ever catch whoever did it, he’ll be up before a firing squad in no time at all.’
‘Up before a firing squad?’ Private Jiménez repeated. ‘Just for killing an animal?’
‘This is no ordinary animal,’ Pérez explained patiently. ‘This isn’t any old mutt you might kick out at as you’re walking down the street. This, my friends, is the General’s dog.’
*
From his bedroom window, Paco Ruiz looked down on to the Calle Hortaleza. It was close to one o’clock in the morning, but the street was still crowded with people, as it always was during the stifling hot summer nights. Paco recognized most of the men and women below, but that was hardly surprising, because he’d lived in this fourth-floor apartment ever since his discharge from the army. At first he’d shared it with his wife. Then – when her move back to her parents’ house in Valladolid had marked the beginning of their unacknowledged, though undoubtedly permanent, separation – he had carried on living there alone. But he was alone no longer, as the smell of alluring perfume which filled the room only served to remind him.
He continued to observe the scene below his window. His friends and neighbours were going about their business – and their pleasure – just as they had always done, he thought. If anything was different, it was that there seemed to be a little extra touch of gaiety – almost the atmosphere of a fiesta – now that the enemies of the people had fled the city in droves. Yet Madrid had changed in the last few days – changed so profoundly that anyone returning from a short trip would scarcely recognize it.
Only a week earlier it had been a city so conscious of style and appearance that it was an offence for a man who habitually wore a jacket to remove it while on the streets, however hot the weather. But not any more. Since the military had risen in Spanish Morocco, and then rapidly taken control of nearly half the mainland, Madrid had become the city of the people – of the working-class men and women – and to be dressed at all smartly was automatically to attract suspicion
. The mono – a blue boiler-suit – was now the thing to wear, together with a red-and-black check neck-scarf if you were an Anarchist, or a party button if you belonged to either the Communists or the Socialists.
On the radio earlier that evening, he’d heard an announcer claim that the government was still in control of large parts of the country. Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t – who knew what to believe any longer? But it certainly wasn’t in control of the capital. The unions, backed up by their armed militias, were running Madrid.
It was they who tracked down the right-wing snipers operating from the roof-tops and attics of the city. They who ran the businesses which had been abandoned by the rich. All the food which came in by rail from the Levant coast was immediately requisitioned by them, and served up in restaurants where the only charge was the possession of the right union membership card. The system which had grown up almost overnight was haphazard and ad hoc, but at least for most of the time, it seemed to work.
‘Admiring your reflection in the window, aren’t you, you handsome devil?’ asked a teasing feminine voice behind him.
‘No, I was just seeing what was happening out on the street,’ Paco replied truthfully.
But now that the idea of his reflection had been put into his head, he did shift his position slightly, so there was another Paco staring back at him – the Paco whom Cindy Walker would see every time she looked at him.
His was not a remarkable face, he thought. His dark, almost coal-black eyes were his best feature, and he knew that when he wanted to, he could make other people feel as if he was looking right down into the depths of their souls. But other than the eyes, what else was there to say? He supposed it was a perfectly acceptable face – a face which some women in the past had perhaps found attractive – but that Cindy Walker should consider it handsome was just one more of the many truly miraculous things about her.
‘You’re not just looking out, are you?’ Cindy asked, a hint of mock-accusation in her tone. ‘You’re not seeing the street as I, or any other normal person, would. You’re looking at it through the eyes of a policeman.’
He supposed she was right. Supposed, too, that he would never lose the habit of examining things that way, even though he wasn’t a policeman any longer – even though there were no real policemen in the whole country after the chaotic events of the previous few days.
For sixteen years he’d worked devotedly within the criminal justice system. And where was that system now? Gone! Vanished almost overnight! Revolutionary justice was the only justice which counted in the new Madrid. And it was a simpler justice – much more black-and-white – than the one he’d learned to cherish. There was only one real crime – that of having Fascist sympathies – and the punishment imposed by the hastily convened militia tribunals invariably involved a journey out to the scrubby woodland of the Casa del Campo in the dead of night, followed by a bullet through the back of the head.
Yet horrifying as the summary executions were to him, they were nothing compared to the savage acts committed by the other side in the bloody conflict, which was why, with more resignation than hope, he had joined a militia himself that very morning.
He turned away from the window, and towards the woman he had only known for two weeks – but with whom he was already deeply, desperately in love. Cindy Walker was a natural blonde, a common enough occurrence back in her Mid-West hometown, but a rare sight on the streets of Madrid. She had blue eyes, high cheekbones and a generous mouth. She looked as if she were in her early twenties, though she was closer to thirty, and was wearing a man’s shirt and a disturbingly short skirt which barely covered her knees. Paco marvelled all over again that any of this could be actually happening – that she could actually have fallen for him as he had fallen for her.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Cindy asked.
‘A lot of things,’ Paco replied. ‘I’m thinking that from the way people are behaving outside, you’d never guess the rebel army was only fifty kilometres from the city. I’m thinking that only yesterday afternoon, I was a detective inspector arresting a murderer, and now I’m a militiaman. I’m thinking about . . .’
‘About tomorrow?’
‘That too,’ Paco said – and suddenly, he was. How could he not think about it? Tomorrow meant a trip up to the sierra in the back of an open lorry, surrounded by his new comrades. And when he reached the mountains? Then it was his job to seek out the enemy – proper soldiers who at least had some idea of what they were doing – and do his best to kill them.
‘I thought when I finally handed in my rifle at the end of my military service, I’d never have to touch one again,’ he said.
A worried frown crossed Cindy’s brow. ‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ she pointed out. ‘You’ve got influence.’
‘Influence!’ Paco scoffed.
‘I mean it,’ Cindy said earnestly. ‘Your old friend Bernardo is a union secretary, which, these days, makes him an important man. If you asked him to find you a job in the city, I’m sure he’d do it. And who’s to say you wouldn’t be of more use here than you’d be in the mountains? Don’t you think it’s at least worth considering the possibility?’
Paco shook his head. ‘I’d be of no value behind a desk. I never was. But out there on the sierra, there is a part I can play. We need people up in the mountains who’ve actually seen real action, and who won’t treat this war as some kind of glorified day-trip.’
Cindy ran her right hand through her silky blonde hair, and Paco found himself falling in love with her all over again. ‘I know we all like to think that we’re indispensable,’ she said, ‘but I’m sure that the union militias aren’t half as useless as you claim they are.’
‘They take picnics with them, for God’s sake!’ Paco exploded, ‘Not military rations, you understand, but omelettes and stews and goatskins of red wine. And, of course, there’s always a bottle of brandy to help their meals go down. Did you know that most of them come back home in the evenings, because they don’t like the idea of spending a night away from their wives and girlfriends? You can’t fight a war like that!’
Cindy frowned again. ‘From what you’ve just said, am I to take it that you won’t be coming home to me at night?’ she asked.
‘Damned right I won’t be coming home. If nothing else, I can at least try to lead by example.’
Cindy’s frown slowly changed into a warm smile, as it often did when he got so serious. She reached her slim hand up to the top button of her shirt and lazily – sensuously – began to unfasten it. ‘Well, then, if I won’t be seeing you for quite some time, I suppose I’d better give you something really spectacular to remember me by,’ she said.
‘Soldier’s comfort,’ Paco muttered, almost to himself.
Cindy’s smile widened. ‘Oh, you think it’s no more than pity, do you?’ she asked. ‘Does that mean you’re not interested?’
Paco grinned. ‘You know damn well it doesn’t,’ he said, starting to unbutton his own shirt.
Chapter Two
Even at just after six o’clock in the morning, the air on Calle Hortaleza was starting to warm up, and as Paco entered his local bar, the Cabo de Trafalgar, he found himself almost looking forward to the cooler temperatures which would greet him in the mountains.
There was much about the bar that had remained unchanged in all the years Paco had been drinking in it. The two large wine barrels, for example, had always stood in the corner. The zinc counter, on which Nacho the barman rested his huge stomach, seemed so solid and permanent that it was almost possible to believe the building had been constructed around it. Even the tables, their surfaces worn away by the endless shuffling of dominoes, were reassuringly familiar.
Yet though the war was still only a few days old, it was starting to affect life in the Cabo. Bernardo and Ramón, Paco’s oldest friends, who would normally have been there at that hour, were absent – Bernardo because he now had important duties in helping to run the city, and Ramón bec
ause the fact that he carried a briefcase to work had been enough to ensure that he disappeared once the militias had started making their arrests. Nor was there a glorious display of sea food, crabs and oysters, mussels and shrimps, lying on the counter in a bed of crushed ice – the famous marisco trains which kept Madrid supplied with the delicacies of the coasts had now been requisitioned to carry more basic supplies.
But perhaps the biggest change of all was in the men who were standing in the bar at that moment. They were people Paco had known for years – Eugenio the postman, Luis the tailor, Pepe the street-sweeper, and little Alfredo, who had polished gentlemen’s shoes on the corner of the Gran Via. Just days earlier, they had been ordinary folk going about their ordinary lives. Now they had cartridge belts slung across their chests, and could scarcely walk without seeming to adopt a military swagger.
Nacho the barman set up a row of brandy glasses on the bar, half-filled each one with rich brown brandy from Jerez, then topped them up with a pale anis. ‘Sun and Shade’, the locals called the drink, and for most working men in Madrid, it was the only proper way to start the morning. Paco took a sip from the glass that the barman slid towards him, and was not in the least surprised when, a couple of seconds later, a bomb exploded in his stomach and it felt as if someone had hit him on the back of the neck with a shovel.
‘I’ve made some lunch for you chaps to take with you,’ Nacho said. ‘There’s no bread, but I’ve cooked you up some meat and rice. It’ll have gone cold by the time you get to the mountains, but I expect you’ll manage to light a fire somewhere and heat it up.’
‘No bread?’ little Alfredo said, sounding aggrieved. ‘Why isn’t there any bread?’
Nacho shrugged, sending a ripple through the flab of his huge stomach. ‘The baker’s was closed,’ he said. ‘There was a sign outside saying they hadn’t got any flour.’
Of course they wouldn’t have flour, Paco thought. Most of the wheat-growing areas of the country were already under enemy control. And if the rebels also managed to seize part of the railway between Madrid and the coast? Well then, all they’d have to do to bring Madrid to its knees was sit outside it while the people starved to death.
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