A minor actress from a humble background, and she talked that way, Paco thought. But, of course, it was mainly because of her background that she did. No one is more afraid of slipping down the social scale than the people who have had to painfully claw their way up it.
‘Purifying the Fatherland will be a bloody business, yet it must be done,’ the general’s wife continued. ‘And you, my husband, could be at the forefront of it.’ Her voice dropped, but not so low that Paco couldn’t still hear it. ‘When this war is over, when right and justice have triumphed, the country will be looking for new leaders. And who do you think those new leaders will be?’
‘Perhaps Mola and Franco,’ the general suggested tentatively. ‘They have been the ones who—’
‘The new leaders will be the men who fulfilled their duty with the utmost zeal!’ his wife interrupted him. ‘The men who have dispatched the most of the enemy to eternal hellfire.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, my dear,’ the general said. ‘And I’ll make sure to do just as you say. But listen, I’ve taught Reina to do a new trick today. She can roll over and play dead. Would you like to see her do it?’
‘There’s only one death I’m concerned with at the moment,’ his wife said relentlessly. ‘I want to see that Communist scum of a militiaman outside this door taken down to the Plaza Mayor and executed!’
‘All in good time, my dear,’ the general assured her soothingly. ‘All in good time.’
‘Oh, you’re impossible!’ the general’s wife screamed. ‘You have an ideal opportunity in this war to really make your name for yourself, and all you seem to be concerned about is teaching the dog to fetch and roll over. Sometimes I wish you were more like Major Gómez.’
‘Gómez is a good officer—’ the general began.
‘Gómez is nothing more than a scheming snake,’ his wife cut in. ‘In fact, I would sooner trust any snake than trust him. But one day – perhaps sooner than you think – he will be a general in his own right. And then where will you be?’
A renewed clicking of her heels – angrier than it had been before – told Paco that she was leaving the office again. He braced himself for the worst. The woman closed the door after her. Paco was aware that she was standing directly in front of him, but he continued to stare at a spot on the opposite wall, high above her head.
‘Look at me!’ the general’s wife commanded. ‘Look at me, you godless bastard.’
Paco lowered his own eyes until they met hers, which were flashing with the deepest kind of hatred. ‘Did you hear what I’ve just been telling my husband?’ she asked.
‘No, señora.’
‘Liar!’ she screamed, slapping him hard across the face. ‘Bloody liar! You heard every word of it. And you heard what he said to me – that he will keep you alive for the moment, but when the right time comes, he’ll have you executed. So now you know you’re a dead man whatever you do.’ She stepped back a little so he could get the full effect of her haughty expression. ‘A real man wouldn’t just wait around until the firing squad came for him,’ she hissed. ‘He would try to make his escape whenever he saw his opportunity. But then you aren’t a real man, are you? You’re lower than a guttersnipe.’
She had had her say, and now she turned and walked away. Paco lifted his hand up to his stinging face. It was interesting that she had left the door open while she’d ranted at the general, he thought – and even more interesting that she had closed it before talking to him.
*
The fat little general sat behind his huge desk, and glared at Paco. ‘Do you know why I’ve had you brought here?’ he asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘I had you brought here because it has been drawn to my attention that you’ve been spreading a vicious rumour around the village that a woman who hanged herself this morning was, in fact, murdered. And what I want to know is this – exactly what was your purpose in telling such fantastic lies?’
‘They weren’t lies,’ Paco replied. ‘Someone knocked her out, and then strung her up. There was a bruise on the back of her head. Anyway, she wasn’t tall enough to have tied the bed-sheet to the hook she was hanging from herself’
The general slowly absorbed this new information. ‘Then what you are saying is that there have been two murders since you began your investigation into poor Principe’s death?’
‘Yes, señor.’
The general’s already piggy eyes narrowed even further. ‘How do I know that you were not involved in the murders yourself?’ he asked.
‘If I killed Carmen Sanchez, then surely I would have been a fool to go around telling the people who had already accepted it as a suicide that it was, in fact, a murder,’ Paco pointed out.
‘True,’ the general agreed, nodding his round little head. He sighed. ‘This is a very sorry state of affairs indeed. I’m expecting to be leading part of the big push on Madrid within the next couple of days, and I need this unfortunate matter cleaning up by then. That is why it is imperative that you find the killer of my poor little dog – and, of course, the murderer of my officer and that unfortunate peasant woman – within the next twenty-four hours.’
For a second, Paco considered trying to trade the name of the killer for a safe passage out of the village. But that wouldn’t work, because the truth he’d have to deliver to the general would be so unpalatable that Castro would probably have him shot anyway, whatever he’d promised beforehand. No, the only way to escape would be to threaten, rather than negotiate – and he had nothing he could threaten the general with.
‘Haven’t you anything to say for yourself?’ the general demanded. ‘No whining excuse for why you have failed to complete the task I set you?’
‘You have to understand my position, sir,’ Paco replied. ‘If I were back in Madrid, I would have access to the forensic lab, a team of other officers whom I could use to check out—’
The general dismissed his argument with an impatient wave of his podgy hand. ‘You are making difficulties where none exists,’ he said. ‘If I had the time, I could find the man myself – and I am a soldier, not a policeman.’
‘You could find him?’ Paco asked, before he could stop himself.
‘Of course,’ the general replied. ‘The murderer must obviously be someone from the other side of the front line . . .’
‘We have no evidence of that.’
‘. . . because no one but a godless Republican would commit such terrible deeds. And once we have grasped that one simple idea, it should be very easy to spot the guilty party, shouldn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid that I don’t understand your line of reasoning, sir,’ Paco confessed.
The general sighed at the ex-policeman’s obvious stupidity. ‘Even if he is in disguise – as I expect he is – surely the man capable of such wickedness will show it in the very way he carries himself,’ he said.
He had swallowed his own rhetoric – or rather his wife’s rhetoric – Paco realized with utter astonishment. As far as the general was concerned, all Republicans were nothing more than shifty-eyed, nun-raping devils, while the Nationalists were all straight and true and virtuous.
‘In fact,’ the general continued, ‘the more I think about this matter, the more convinced I become that you have already discovered the guilty party, but, for reasons of your own, are conspiring to keep him hidden.’
He was getting too close to the truth – far too close to it. ‘I have some good leads,’ Paco said. ‘If you’ll just give me a little more time—’
‘Silence!’ the general squeaked. ‘It is obvious to me that you need a stronger incentive to make you carry out your work diligently. Very well then, I’ll give you one. If the guilty party is not brought to me by eight o’clock tomorrow morning at the very latest, I will have this woman of yours handed over to my officers for their amusement. When they are bored with her, she’ll be passed on to the enlisted men, and when even they’ve finished with her, I’ll have her shot.’
He couldn’
t mean it, Paco thought, horrified. Even a man like the general couldn’t be contemplating such a monstrous deed. But deep down inside himself, he knew that the general could. It didn’t matter if his men raped Cindy, because she was from the Republican side, and hence a whore already. It didn’t matter if he had her shot, either – since she was little more than vermin in his eyes.
‘Let her go!’ Paco pleaded. ‘Let her go, and I promise you on my honour as a Spaniard that I will have the case solved by morning.’
‘Your honour as a Spaniard,’ the general said contemptuously. ‘You have no honour, or you would be fighting on our side. I’ve already told you what will happen if you don’t bring me the results I require. Now get out of my sight!’
*
Out on the street once more, Paco took in a lungful of the fresh mountain air, and tried to will his racing heart to slow down. Though he had killed in the past, he had never actively wanted to kill anyone before he came to this village. Now he had a list which was growing by the hour, and the little general had just placed himself right at the top of it.
He took another breath of air in an attempt to clear from his body the foetid atmosphere of corruption and bigotry which existed in Castro’s office. After the gloom inside the palacio, the bright sunlight on the Calle Mayor was almost blinding. Paco shaded his eyes, and looked down the street. There were a few soldiers around, but most of them had gone out to the front line which the general confidently expected to start advancing towards Madrid within the next two days. He wondered again how many of the boys who had left for battle that morning would come back in the evening. He prayed, fervently, that Private Pérez would be one of those who returned – because he would need the rat-faced soldier if the desperate plan he had still only half formulated was to have even the slightest chance of working.
Chapter Twenty
Darkness fell over the sierra, and with it came another day’s lull in the fighting – another chance for the men who knew just how expendable they were to drown their fears in alcohol for a few short hours. For Paco, the arrival of the evening had a very different significance. It offered him his one and only chance to see his plan through to success, and it served as a painful reminder that if the plan didn’t succeed, Cindy would be handed over to the soldiers soon after the light had returned.
He threaded his way through the crowd along the Calle Mayor. Drunken soldiers, hardly aware of where they were, stumbled into him. Prostitutes, attracted by the fact that he was wearing a suit, propositioned him every few metres, their voices crooning hoarsely, their breaths smelling of cheap brandy, as they offered him forbidden pleasures at bargain prices.
He reached the church steps and was more than relieved to see Private Pérez sitting there, smoking a cigarette with his usual care.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked the soldier. ‘Waiting for Jiménez to stop praying, so the two of you can spend his wages?’
‘Something like that,’ the rat-faced soldier agreed.
‘You’re a liar,’ Paco told him pleasantly. ‘We both know that Jiménez isn’t here to pray.’
Pérez held up his cigarette, and examined its glowing end against the night sky. ‘If Jiménez’s not here to pray, then why is he here?’
‘Because he’s the one with the reputation for being religious – so he’s the one you can send to check up without anyone getting suspicious.’
Pérez’s eyes narrowed. ‘Check up?’ he said. ‘Check up on what?’
‘On whether they’re still there, of course.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ Paco suggested.
Pérez shook his head. ‘I’ve told you before, I don’t hold with none of that religion.’
‘But you like money,’ Paco pointed out. ‘And you place a considerable value on that miserable skin of yours. So bearing those two things in mind, perhaps it would be wise to do as I say.’
Reluctantly, the private rose to his feet, and stood aside to let the ex-policeman enter the church.
‘Oh no!’ Paco said. ‘After you.’
Private Jiménez was kneeling down in his customary pew near to the Virgin. Paco walked down the aisle, only coming to a halt when he was standing directly over the country boy. ‘Listen, lad, there’s no need to keep up that pretence any longer,’ he told him.
Jiménez lifted his head, and Paco could see the puzzled expression on his face. ‘I beg your pardon, señor?’ the young peasant said.
Perhaps it wasn’t pretence at all, Paco thought. There was no reason why the private couldn’t be both praying to the God his mother had drummed into him and doing the job that Pérez had sent him in to do.
Pérez! his brain screamed. The rat-faced soldier should have been right there beside him – and he wasn’t. Paco looked quickly around the church. There was no sign of the man he’d once arrested for murder.
He cursed himself for being so careless. ‘There’s no need for games, Pérez,’ he said loudly. ‘If I’d meant to do you any harm, I’d never have been so foolish as to come here alone.’
His words echoed around the high rafters over his head. ‘Alone . . . alone . . . alone . . .’
There was a slight noise from somewhere near the back of the church – almost a scuttling sound. Perez was on his hands and knees, a rat-faced soldier who could actually move like a rat when he needed to.
‘Have you got a knife on you, Private Pérez?’ Paco asked. ‘Your sort usually does have one. Or do you prefer to use a razor? Whichever it is, you won’t be needing it tonight. I’m here to help you. Why don’t you come out of hiding so we can talk about it?’
‘You talk about it, then I’ll decide whether or not I’m coming out,’ Pérez said.
The sound of his voice had pinned him down more accurately than his scuttling had done, but he would be long gone from that spot by the time Paco reached it. Besides, if he could not win Pérez’s co-operation with words, he could not win it with anything.
Paco walked towards the altar, then turned round again slowly, so as to make it obvious that he wasn’t playing a trick on Pérez. ‘The soldiers who searched the village were looking for a dog’s collar,’ he said. ‘They shouldn’t have been. What they should really have been looking for were the things which gave the collar its value – the jewels which were set in it. What did you do with the collar once you’d taken those jewels out, Pérez?’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ the private said – and now his voice sounded much closer than it had before.
‘It doesn’t really matter what you did with it,’ Paco said. ‘A strip of leather and a buckle would have been easy enough to destroy. But you still had the problem of the gemstones on your hands, didn’t you? Where could you hide them? I expect it was Jiménez who gave you the idea.’
‘You’re still not making any sense to me.’
Paco turned his attention to the still-kneeling Private Jiménez. ‘Do you ever tell your drinking friends in the Calle Mayor about the village you come from, son?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes,’ the boy admitted.
Of course he would. What else would someone like him – a peasant with little imagination – have to talk about? ‘And what, exactly, do you tell them?’
Words were not the country boy’s forte, and he had to struggle hard to find the right ones. ‘I . . . I tell them about how the sun shines on the houses, and the wind blows in from the mountains,’ he said finally. ‘I tell them how, when it rains, the water can soak right through to the bones.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I talk about the livestock we have at our little farm, and the crops that my family grow . . .’
‘And you tell them about your village Virgin, don’t you?’ Paco interrupted. ‘About how your Virgin is so beautiful that, though the people of the villages around yours would never admit it, they envy you.’
Jiménez bowed his head, and was silent.
‘D
on’t you?’ Paco insisted.
‘Yes,’ Jiménez confessed.
Naturally he did. Even non-believers took pride in their village Virgin and considered her far above any of her local rivals. ‘What did you say about her?’ Paco asked.
‘That she has the most wonderful expression on her face. That she has as much gold paint on her cloak as any Virgin from the big town . . .’
‘And that her jewellery looks almost real?’
‘Yes.’
Pérez had heard the country boy’s words and – when they were standing over the murdered dog with its expensive collar still around its neck – that had been the inspiration for his plan.
‘Look at this Virgin, Private Jiménez,’ Paco said. ‘Infinite care has been taken over the carving and the painting – except with the jewellery. There, the craftsman was as clumsy as a beginner. The pattern’s irregular. The shape – the flow of the whole statue – is destroyed by the way he’s placed the jewels. Now why do you think that should be?’
‘You tell us,’ said Private Pérez – and now he seemed altogether too close for comfort.
‘Because while some of the stones are merely carved and painted, some of them are the real things,’ Paco said. He ran his finger over one of them, removing the layer of dust which had been artfully placed there, and even in the dim light of the church, it sparkled. ‘How did you fix the jewels on to the statue, Pérez?’ he asked. ‘With glue?’
‘I didn’t want to do it!’ Private Jiménez blubbered. ‘I said it was wrong from the very start. But Pérez told me that the Virgin only helps those who help themselves.’
‘Shut up!’ the rat-faced soldier said viciously.
But the country boy was not to be silenced. ‘I prayed to her every day to see if she minded us using her like that,’ he sobbed. ‘Every day! But she never gave me an answer.’
‘There are two of us – and only one of you,’ Pérez said, from somewhere not far from Paco’s right shoulder. ‘We could kill you here and now, and nobody would ever be the wiser.’
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