Hostage to Fortune

by Carolyn McCrae

  He heard rumours of thousands escaping the horrors to the safety of America, England and Canada but he never spoke to anyone who knew more than he did. They were, he had to acknowledge, only rumours. The Fascists would not allow anyone to escape.

  Uncounted and uncountable thousands of men, women and children died in those three years, the majority having no marked grave.

  But Luis was not one of them.

  In February 1939 he was north of Barcelona when his brigade commander, an American, ordered the retreat. Luis joined the desperate withdrawal towards the French border. The Civil War, the Red Terror, was ending and the aftermath, the White Terror, was just beginning. Any Republican sympathiser would be rounded up and imprisoned or summarily executed or sent to a slave labour camp, depending on the whim of their captors. Luis was determined not to be one of them. He found his way over the Pyrenees to Perpignan where he was interned, along with one hundred thousand of his fellow Republicans in a concentration camp at Argelès-sur-Mer.

  But if Luis thought that was the end of the suffering of war he was wrong. The French were not interested in the wellbeing of the inmates and many died of the cold, of disease spread by fleas and mosquitos, or simply from the hopelessness of defeat.

  It was in those months in France that Luis made friends with a man from the Basque Country.

  “Did you have a family, a wife? Children?” The man asked Luis that question before he had even asked him his name.

  “I did. Did you?”

  “A son and a daughter. José Ramon and Maria Carmen.”

  “I had a son, Federico.” He realised too late he had spoken in the past tense.

  “How old was he?” Luis noticed the Basque also spoke in the past tense.

  “I left him on his sixth birthday. And your two?”

  “When I last saw them José was eight and Maria nine. They will be eleven and twelve,” the Basque said with what Luis thought was unfounded optimism.

  “How is that?”

  “When I get out of this dump, and I assure you I will escape, I will return to my home and they will be there.”

  “You are very confident, my friend.”

  “They went to safety.”

  “Safety?”

  “On a ship, the Habana. Back in 1937 they went to England.”

  “There really was a ship?” Luis asked incredulously. “I heard rumours but believed them to be only rumours.”

  “They were true. They sailed to England and will be safe. I will see them again.”

  “Was there only one ship?”

  “I believe so, only one.”

  “How many children?”

  “Over five thousand they say, but I think it will not have been so many.”

  “Maybe my Federico was on that ship.”

  But both men fell silent, knowing the chances were worse than a hundred thousand to one.

  “We must leave here,” Luis said when he had pulled his thoughts away from Federico and Maria and that dreadful day he had hit her and left them alone in the middle of a war.

  Three weeks later, as the camp authorities were rounding up Jews and Gypsies, Luis and his friend, whose name he had by then learned was Rafael, walked out of the camp and headed for Spain.

  They parted company in Barcelona from where Rafael headed west and Luis headed south, to Illora to discover whether his parents had survived, or if, hope against hope, Maria and Federico had returned.

  The house was in ruins.

  As he clambered through the burnt-out wreckage of what remained of his parents’ home he remembered how it had been. He sat down and cried, sitting on a burnt-out beam in what was left of the wing Maria had made their home.

  “It was revenge.”

  Luis recognised the voice of their old gardener.

  “Fernando!”

  “Señor Luis, it is good you have survived the war.”

  “My parents?” Luis asked.

  “Dead. In this.” Fernando waved his arms vaguely around the burnt-out shell of a house.

  “When?”

  “Soon after you left. Days. Your father had many enemies and few friends and even those he believed were his friends were his enemies.”

  “But you have still tended the garden?” Luis asked, looking at the immaculate flower beds and well-pruned fruit trees.

  “This was my life since I was a boy. I could not let it go to ruin.”

  “It looks as magnificent as the day I left.”

  “As the day before you left, Señor Luis.”

  Luis looked at the old man who smiled, conspiratorially, and jerked his neck in the direction of the corner of the garden where it abutted the olive grove. “Did you think I would not notice? I, who knows every square centimetre of this garden as if it were the back of his hand. But don’t worry, your secret is safe. If you hadn’t stolen from your father the men who did this would have had it.”

  “You have looked after it?”

  “I have. The chest is still there. Untouched. Where you buried it. And there it will remain until you remove it.”

  “I can’t take it now, I have nothing to carry it with, but I do need some coins, to start my new life.”

  “You aren’t staying?” Fernando was disappointed.

  “I cannot. There is too much… too much…”

  “History?” Fernando finished his sentence for him.

  Luis nodded. “But now I am no longer I, nor is this house of mine, mine.” He quoted his friend Lorca.

  “Now I must leave you to dig in my garden.” Fernando added, “I have no need to see what it is you have in that buried chest.”

  Luis smiled and held out his hand for his old family retainer to shake as his equal.

  Luis married for the second time soon after England declared war on Germany and the Second Great War had begun.

  It was his son’s ninth birthday but Luis took it to be the beginning of his new life.

  He had known Rosalia during the fighting. She had fought alongside the men with as much passion as any of them but she had not retreated north. She had stayed in the small fishing village, Altea, that had always been her home where she had escaped the notice of vigilantes and those seeking revenge.

  She was the opposite of Maria. Rosalia had little education and less refinement, but she had a boat and she had promised Luis that, if he returned to her after the war was over, she would teach him how to fish.

  Chapter 25: Pat Confesses

  Diane slowly shook her head. “You tell his story well, but how on earth do you know so much about him?” she asked. She had sat for an hour listening, alternately enthralled and horrified at Pat’s account of Luis’s history.

  “He used to talk about his life and his war many times. I told you, we became great friends. It was because of him that Harry and I bought this house and settled here. With his job it didn’t matter where we were, in fact it was better often not to be the wrong side of the English Channel, and then it was warm and far more fun when he was at home.”

  “This is where Luis lived and married and had his second family?”

  “That village down there. He said we’d helped him close that chapter of his life and he’d help us open a new one in ours. He was a lovely man. Especially after Harry died.”

  “When was that? Sorry, I probably should know.”

  “1981, February. We’d been here about five years then so were reasonably well known in the village so everyone was really good to me. Luis especially.”

  “He must have been getting on.”

  “I think he was born in 1900; he used to joke he was older than our Queen Mother by a few days, so he wasn’t really that old then. He was a very nice man,” she ended sadly.

  “When did he die?”

  “Not long after Harry. It was odd. He got one of hi
s sons to drive him up here. We never asked him up, we always just met him in the village. Anyway, he dismissed his son and sat himself down, where you’re sitting now, and he told me about his treasures. I’d known about his war, of course, but he had never told me about what he called his treasure troves. He said he knew his time was nearing the end but, quoting his friend Lorca, As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “You must read Lorca’s poetry, he writes many beautiful things. Now where was I? Ah yes. He said he was disappointed in his sons. They took after Rosalia’s family and were only good to be fishermen. When I delved deeper it seemed that one of them wanted to marry the daughter of a Nationalist and trivialised the hatreds borne out of the war. He was almost in tears at how his sons did not understand their parents and had no idea what their lives had been. He said they did not care. All they cared about was having a good time. He did not want them to have his trove. I thought those stories were the ravings of an old man, but he wrote down careful and very detailed instructions. ‘Do good with what you find,’ he said as he left that afternoon. They were the last words he said to me as he was dead the next day.”

  “How very odd.”

  “Indeed, ‘odd’ is a good word to use. What was so strange was his writing. I had never seen it before; I had had no reason to. It was beautiful. It wasn’t spindly in any way, as you’d expect a man of his age. It was old-fashioned but it showed an education and an appreciation of things that are beautiful that I had suspected but only glimpsed in him. Looking at those sheets of paper made me regret not having known him even better than I did.”

  “Isn’t that often the way? Only after someone is gone do you really appreciate what you’ve missed out on,” Diane remarked sympathetically.

  “Very true.”

  The silence was short lived as neither woman wanted to dwell on the losses that this talk of death brought to mind.

  “You were saying?”

  “About?”

  “About Luis’s troves.”

  “Ah yes. I took it all with a large pinch of salt to be honest. From what he said he had buried his troves before the war, the Civil War that is, really got into its stride. Any chance that he was actually telling the truth and secondly, that the items, were they ever there, would still be untouched, were pretty small.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Diane said in what she hoped was an encouraging voice.

  “Indeed. Anyway, that September, 1982, I went on a road trip. I took my lovely beagles and we travelled south. Obviously the world has changed enormously since 1936, when his troves would have been buried, but not so much inland. If he’d lived anywhere near the coast the chests he referred to would have been buried under a mountain of concrete and multi-storey hotels or urbanizacions of little boxes for ex-pats, but he hadn’t. His home was in an untouched village and the stretch of railway line was almost literally, as he had described it, in the middle of nowhere.”

  “You found them? They existed?”

  Pat nodded.

  “And?”

  “One, the one in his garden by the olive grove, which was what he had stolen from his father was filled with pretty useless bank notes, but of great interest to notaphilists.”

  “Notaphilists?”

  “Collectors of paper currency.”

  “You learn something every day.”

  “But not just those. It contained some of the most exquisite jewellery you have ever seen, and there were items of immense interest to historians. You know, stuff from the time leading up to the Civil War, written denunciations signed by scions of well-known and established families, that sort of thing. But, Diane, the jewellery! It was superb. Gold, diamonds, rubies, it was, indeed a ‘treasure trove’.”

  “Amazing!”

  “But there was more.”

  “More?”

  “In a leather case there were more papers. He had told me he was friends with Federico Garcia Lorca, but I had taken that with a pinch of salt, but in that chest there were drafts of unpublished works, notes against published poems and plays, all the handiwork of Spain’s most renowned poet, a Nobel Prize winner. To some people that satchel of papers would be the most valuable thing in that chest. With the help of a young man who said he was Fernando’s son, as if that meant something to me, I loaded everything in my car and set off to find the railway line.”

  “And did you?”

  “I did indeed.”

  “And?”

  “Two chests this time, heavy metal boxes really, utilitarian, not elaborate in any way, each filled with gold bars and gold coins.”

  “Gold coins?”

  “I did a bit of research when I got home. Apparently in the early days of the war the Spanish government, the legitimate one that is, sent the entire gold reserve to Cartagena to be shipped, for some reason best known to some stupid arse in Madrid, to the Soviet Union.”

  “Where? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not to me either. Anyway, all this gold, in coins and bullion bars, boxes and boxes of it, was sent by train and, surprise, surprise, some got lost on the way.”

  “As you say, surprise, surprise. So what did you do with it?”

  “I loaded it into my car. That was fun! There was no road nearby but there was a track and my old Simca just about managed to get down it without destroying its suspension. I was helped by the fact that they’d been doing some work on the railway and had had to establish some tracks to get some heavy lifting gear close by. I only had to rough it for a few hundred yards. How Luis found his way there in the first place I have absolutely no idea.”

  “So? You got it all home? What did you do with it?”

  “I’ve used it, as Luis told me to, for good.”

  “How?”

  “Not long after, the next year really, I started looking after those war damaged boys. I just helped them get their starts in Civvy Street.”

  “Really! Did Gordon and his lot know?”

  “Don’t be silly. They’d kill me if they knew. It’s against all the rules. Especially as I keep in touch with a lot of them.”

  “Patrick?”

  “Of course.”

  “Others?”

  “Of course. Will you tell Gordon?” Pat realised how carried away she had allowed herself to be. She had never intended to give Diane so much ammunition that could be used against her.

  When Diane gave no assurance that she wouldn’t tell Gordon Pat added, “I wouldn’t tell him if I were you.”

  “Why ever not?” Diane asked, surprised at the threat implied in Pat’s voice.

  “Because if you tell Gordon about my hoards I will tell him that you didn’t trust him, that you’ve been here for two weeks—”

  “That implicates you too,” Diane pointed out.

  “But I’ll also tell him that you were complicit in your own abduction. You were, weren’t you? You knew Barford Eden. You knew he became Brian Cliffe and you knew Guy Cliffe was his son. You probably saw who killed Warwick, you’ve probably known all along. You may even have had a hand in it. And you said nothing. That makes you what?”

  “An accessory after the fact, I think.”

  “At the very least,” Pat continued to threaten. “We will keep each other’s secrets.”

  “I have admitted nothing,” Diane argued.

  “But I’m right, aren’t I? You could have saved a lot of people a lot of time and trouble, not to mention you could probably have saved Ryan’s life and who knows who else’s?”

  “Yes, Pat, I could have said a lot of things a lot earlier than I did. I knew exactly who Guy was when I saw him the first time he arrived in Dartmouth. I have to admit I was curious as to why he was working on that particular yacht. But then he went away and I didn’t worry about anything. There didn’t se
em to be anything to worry about.”

  “Even though you must have known he had good reason to hate Warwick Eden, probably enough to kill him?”

  “Yes, I knew all that and I said and did nothing other than check a few things out on the internet.”

  “You said ‘the first time he arrived’ and ‘he went away’. Why didn’t you say anything when they returned?”

  “There was nothing different. I had to have more information so I kept an eye on the yacht to see what he was up to and, at that time anyway, I wasn’t sure he had anything nefarious in mind.”

  “So you didn’t mention any of this to Gordon?”

  “Only briefly. I know I should have but when Guy had me locked in that cabin I had no idea anyone had died.”

  “But shouldn’t you have said something?”

  “Probably. I was just waiting for Friday, my call day.”

  “So neither of us will say anything to Gordon now? You won’t say anything about my troves and I won’t tell him you’ve been found.”

  Pat stood up, walked to the cocktail cabinet and poured two large gin and tonics.

  She said nothing until she had sat down again.

  “I guess we have each other over a bit of a barrel.”

  “I guess we do.”

  Chapter 26: Fergal and Skye Research More

  “You’re like a ruddy dog with a bone, as my aunt would have said.” Skye shook her head as she watched Fergal staring at his computer screen.

  “I should have been able to find out more about him.”

  “Who?”

  “Federico Jiménez Rodriguez’s father, Luis.”

  “Didn’t you think he must have ended up in a field somewhere?”

  “I did.”

  “Leave it then.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t or you don’t want to?” she asked.

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re on a hiding to nothing, Fergal. If he didn’t end up dead in that ditch he may well have just melted into the background. It seems a lot of men wanted to forget everything they were before 1936 and completely reinvented themselves.”