by John Wilson
“The whole process was very polite and civilized,” Laia went on. “Of course, I was upset at the time, but there were no arguments that I ever heard and neither blamed the other. Felip has always been the rational intellectual, taking time to think things through before making a decision. Sofia is much more emotional and tends to react immediately. I think they simply grew apart over the years. They’re still friends.”
“Which are you?” I asked, “emotional or intellectual?”
“A bit of both,” Laia said with a smile.
“But you miss Felip,” I said.
“Yes, very much. We used to have wonderful long conversations about all kinds of things, from politics and religion to football and mystery novels. Now that he’s in Seville, that doesn’t happen so often. I miss our conversations.”
“I love mystery novels,” I said.
“There is no shortage of mysteries in Spain.” Laia tilted her head and looked at me in that quizzical way she had. “I think you are very like Felip. You think about things and try to work them out.”
I was pleased by the compliment. “I hope that’s not the only reason you hang out with me.”
Laia laughed and punched me playfully in the ribs. “Of course not.” She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “I hang out with you because surrounding myself with dumb people makes me seem smarter.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting Felip,” I said, grinning like a fool.
My phone pinged with a text from DJ. I checked my watch: 9 PM. That would make it 3 PM in Ontario, so it was probably to tell me he’d arrived at Grandfather’s cottage. It was, but it said something else as well.
Arrived at the cabin. Discovered stuff. Need to think. Will email tomorrow. DJ.
“Is DJ stuck in a snowdrift?” Laia asked.
“He’s at the cabin,” I said, my thumbs working the keypad of my phone. W@ u mean discovered stuff? W@ stuff?
“He says they’ve discovered something at the cottage,” I explained as I sent my text.
“What?” Laia asked.
“That’s what I’ve asked him. The only thing you might find at the cottage would be a nest of mice.”
“Sounds delightful,” Laia said. “Maybe it is just something like a mouse nest.”
I shook my head. “DJ said he had to think about what he’d found and that he’ll email me tomorrow. If DJ has to think about something, it’s important.”
My phone pinged again. Money, fake passports, coded messages. I will send scans of Spanish stuff tomorrow. DJ
I stared at my phone screen for a long time. What was going on? Was this a joke? I turned the phone so Laia could see the screen. She looked at me questioningly. I shrugged. “It must be some kind of joke DJ and the others have cooked up.”
LOL :-D Spencer’s idea? I replied.
A response came back almost immediately. No joke. Weird stuff. Grandpa was a spy. We need to figure it out. More tomorrow.
Dnt lve me hanging, bro, I texted. A SPY?????
“What does it mean?” Laia asked. “Was your grandfather really a spy?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “We know better than anyone that Grandfather did things in his youth that he didn’t tell anyone about.” I felt my brow furrow as I concentrated, trying to remember anything that would help make sense of what little information I was being fed by DJ.
“After I got home from Spain last summer, I told Mom all about Grandfather’s time in Spain. I also asked her a whole bunch of questions. I only knew him as an old man, but I also got to know him as a teenager through his war journal, and I wanted to fill in the bit between.”
“Did your Mom think he might have been a spy?”
“No. This is the first anyone’s mentioned that. Maybe DJ’s got it wrong,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. DJ didn’t get things wrong. “Mom said he was away a lot when she and her sisters were growing up. She didn’t know what he did exactly, just that he was a businessman in some kind of import/export company.” The phrase import /export rang a bell in my brain, but I couldn’t place it, and I had too many things to think about now to follow that train of thought. In any case, my phone was pinging.
Too much to send in text and I need to scan Spanish passport and codes. I will also send cash to your PayPal account. Letter says Grandpa was a traitor. It must be a lie. We need to clear his name. MTC. DJ
Both Laia and I stared at the screen, but could think of nothing to say before another text came through.
We’ve each chosen a place Grandpa was and the pages from his code book that seem to fit. Spain is one place and since you’re there and like codes and mysteries, I’ll send that to you. See what you can do. We’ve got a week to clear his name. Email tomorrow. DJ.
Laia and I stared at each other, and I blurted out, “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
Laia regarded me curiously for a moment. “Why not?”
I took a few seconds to organize my feelings into words. “Because I feel invaded. I’m on holiday, with you. I didn’t ask to be involved in whatever DJ and the others have found. DJ’s being overly dramatic. A week to clear his name? What does that mean? It’s DJ not wanting the wonderful image he has of Grandfather to be tarnished. I just want to meet your father and have a holiday with you, not go running off on some wild-goose chase.” I was surprised by my reaction and by how strongly I felt, surprised that I really didn’t want DJ intruding on my life this much.
Laia looked at me thoughtfully. “You are involved now, whether you want to be or not,” she said. “Maybe DJ is overreacting, but false passports, codes, money and someone calling your grandfather a traitor? It doesn’t sound as if DJ’s making stuff up.”
“Maybe not,” I agreed reluctantly, “but I don’t want this to overwhelm our holiday.”
“It won’t,” Laia said with a smile, “and isn’t there a tiny part of you that wants to know what it all means? After all, you do love mysteries. And didn’t we have a wonderful time finding out what your grandfather did in the war?” I nodded. “Did that interfere with our time together?”
“No,” I replied. “It gave us a chance to get to know each other. But it’s different now.”
“Yes, it’s different now, and part of that difference is that through the journal and what we did last summer, I have come to know your grandfather. Because of his love for my great-grandmother, he’s part of my past as well. I don’t want to think of him as a traitor, and if he came back to Spain, even as a spy with a false name, I want to know about it.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “And if I’m honest, there’s a part of me that is intrigued by what DJ says.”
“Okay,” Laia said. “Let’s see what DJ sends tomorrow. If he is exaggerating, we can ignore it. If the code is meaningless and we can’t see anything that makes sense, then that’s an end as well. But if it interests us, we can do some digging. It might be fun, and we’ll be doing it together.”
Laia squeezed my hand and gave me a smile that made me feel weak. “Okay,” I agreed. The train slowed and pulled under the curving glass arches of Santa Justa station. I tried to push DJ’s texts into the back of my mind. I would worry about all that tomorrow; now it was time to meet Laia’s father.
FIVE
“We in Spain have created a culture of forgetting,” Felip said. He was a short, intense man with black hair, olive skin and dark eyes that seemed to bore into me when he spoke. The intensity made everything he said sound important. “Half a million people filed past Franco’s coffin when he lay in state in 1975. Now it is impossible to find anyone who admired or supported him.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked. Felip’s bright, open, modern apartment in the center of Seville was the opposite of Sofia’s centuries-old place in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. We sat at a polished aluminum table, breakfasting on croissants and drinking the best latte I’d ever tasted.
“It is good that people are not trying to bring the dictatorship back, but they are re
pressing their feelings. Not only that, but they are not allowing others to remember. Tens of thousands were systematically killed in Franco’s repression after the war. Many, women and children included, were hauled from their beds in the middle of the night, driven out of their villages, shot and buried in ditches somewhere. Their families were never allowed to grieve. Now the victims’ grandchildren want to give their ancestors a decent burial.”
“Like Lorca,” Laia said.
“Lorca?” I said.
“Federico García Lorca,” Laia reminded me, “the poet who wrote the book Sofia gave you. He was Spain’s most famous poet, but he was a socialist and a homosexual, so when the Fascists came to Granada, they took him out onto a hillside, murdered him and buried his body secretly.”
“And his family wants him found?” I asked, feeling vaguely guilty that I hadn’t read any of the poems yet.
“Oddly,” Felip said, “his family doesn’t want Lorca reburied; even they want to forget. It is the families of the other men who were shot with him who want to know what happened.”
“It’s complex,” I said, struggling to understand all that I was being told.
Felip shrugged. “Spain is a very complex land with a very rich history. Sometimes I think we have too much history. But forgetting it isn’t the answer. We must accept what we have done in the past before we can move on. Do you not have a similar situation in Canada with the Aboriginal people and the residential schools?”
“I suppose we do,” I said. “I’ve never thought of it that way before.”
Felip smiled. “See how easy it is to forget.”
“Laia said that you were also working on getting compensation for the villagers where the four nuclear bombs fell,” I said. I wanted to talk about Spain, not Canada.
“Palomares, yes. There are still a lot of questions about what happened there in 1966, but we’re making progress. The Americans are close to agreeing to finish the cleaning they began at the time. In fact, I’m meeting an American investor there tomorrow to talk about the possibility of purchasing the contaminated land after it’s cleaned up. Land is very valuable all along the coast, and hundreds of acres have been fenced off at Palomares for nearly fifty years.”
“What’s the contamination?” I asked. “Uranium?”
“Mostly plutonium,” Felip said.
“Laia said that there was no nuclear explosion at Palomares,” I said.
“That’s right,” Felip agreed. “We were lucky.”
“Why didn’t the bombs go off?”
“It’s hard to be precise, because the design of the bombs is still classified information, but we think that the heart of the bomb was a plutonium core surrounded by uranium. It probably looked a bit like a soccer ball, a sphere made up of hexagonal sections. Each of those hexagons contained regular explosives. For the plutonium part of the bomb to explode, every single one of those explosive charges had to go off at exactly the same time. That would be unlikely, unless the bomb was armed by the plane’s crew, and none of the Palomares bombs were.”
“Okay,” I said, frowning with concentration, “so at Palomares, only some of the regular explosives went off. Not enough to trigger a nuclear explosion, but enough to spread the plutonium around the area.”
“Exactly,” Felip said. “That’s how the soil around Palomares became contaminated with plutonium.”
“Plutonium’s one of the most poisonous substances on earth,” Laia said, her voice rising with anger, “and it lasts for thousands of years. The Americans have to do something to clean it up.”
Felip smiled. “Laia, like her mother, can be quite dramatic. But she’s right,” he went on quickly before Laia could say anything. “As long as the plutonium remains in the soil, it’s relatively safe. You can place a piece of plutonium on your skin without too much problem. The danger is if the plutonium becomes dust in the air and you breathe it in. Then it is extremely deadly. Only a few thousandths of a gram can kill you if it gets into your lungs.”
“So plowing the land on a dry, windy day wouldn’t be a good idea,” I said.
“Probably not,” Felip acknowledged. “I doubt if there are high concentrations of plutonium in the soil, but we don’t know for sure. Much was kept secret in 1966, but stories keep cropping up. For example, there’s a persistent rumor that there was a fifth bomb that was never found.”
“There’s still a plutonium bomb lying around somewhere?” I asked, horrified at the thought.
“Maybe not a complete bomb, but perhaps the plutonium core from one of the bombs that broke apart.” Felip shrugs. “It’s probably just a story. Secrecy is always a mistake. It breeds suspicions and provides a fertile ground for all kinds of wild conspiracy theories to grow. I don’t think there ever was a fifth bomb. The Americans searched a huge area very thoroughly. I think they would have found something the size of a soccer ball, but the story got started somehow. There was too much secrecy back in 1966—and too many spies.”
“Spies!” I exclaimed.
“Oh yes,” Felip said. “A Soviet spy ship sat offshore watching everything that went on. There were probably spies on the mainland as well. Have you ever seen the James Bond movie Thunderball?”
“Is that the old one about the stolen nuclear bombs?”
“With Sean Connery, yes. It came out in 1965, and after the Palomares accident, everyone worried about the Soviets stealing the lost bomb before it could be found. It was all very exciting and dramatic, but then, Spain is a very popular place for spies. The English spy Kim Philby lived just two doors away from here during our civil war. He spent most of the war as a journalist on the Fascist side. His open sympathy for Franco allowed him to travel all over Spain, but he was really spying for the Soviets.”
“Wait till I tell my cousin Spencer. He’s really into spies and espionage,” I said. “Didn’t Philby go on spying for the Soviets after the war?” I asked, vaguely remembering a TV show I’d seen on famous spies.
“There were five of them,” Felip said. “Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt and an unknown man. They were called the Cambridge Five, although there were probably more. All were high up in the British Secret Intelligence Service, but were passing what they knew to the Russians. Burgess, Maclean and Philby fled to the Soviet Union and Blunt died in 1983.”
“The number five seems to be the theme here,” Laia said. “A lost fifth bomb, an unknown fifth man. Maybe your grandfather was the fifth man.” She said the last bit with a laugh, but the thought had crossed my mind as well.
“Your grandfather was a spy?” Felip asked.
“No,” I answered instinctively. “DJ and the others have found something at my grandfather’s cabin that might have something to do with spying. He’s going to send me what he’s found in an email today.”
Felip nodded. “Many strange things happened in secret during the Cold War, especially in Spain when Franco was the dictator.”
“You said you’re meeting an American tomorrow about buying land?” Laia asked.
“Yes, I’m going to drive down to Palomares to show him around. If an American businessman wants to invest in Palomares, it might help speed the cleanup process along. You two are welcome to come with me, or you can stay here while I’m gone and see some more of Seville.”
I kind of liked the idea of us having the apartment to ourselves for a few days, but Laia said, “I’d like to come with you. Palomares is close to Cartagena, and maybe we could stop at Granada on the way back.”
She looked at me with raised eyebrows. What could I say? “Sure. Sounds good. We can look for lost bombs and unknown spies.”
Felip laughed. “I’m afraid it won’t be that exciting, but we can go to Cartagena. It’s just up the coast.”
“There’s lots to see there,” Laia added happily. “Hannibal and his elephants set off from near there to cross the Alps and defeat the Romans at the Battle of Cannae. And Granada too? I’d love to show Steve the Alhambra. And we can visit the
house where Lorca lived.”
Laia grinned at me, her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.
“Sounds awesome,” I said, and I meant it. I’d gladly ride one of Hannibal’s elephants over the Alps as long as I did it with Laia.
After breakfast, we went out to see some of Seville’s sights—the cathedral, palaces, gardens. Felip even drove us across the river to the ruined Roman town of Italica, where the emperor Trajan was born. It was a great day, warm and sunny, but two things distracted me. The ancient history was wonderful, but, after talking to Felip, I kept wondering why there were no monuments to Spain’s more recent history. I also couldn’t stop imagining what DJ was going to email me that day. He could hardly have done a better job of piquing my interest.
I was disappointed when we returned, tired, to the apartment to find no email. We took a late siesta, showered and headed out to do the rounds of the tapas bars. Spaniards eat very late and nibble a lot. We moved around, ordering a bewildering variety of foods—Laia even convinced me to try snails with garlic—and meeting and talking to the people at nearby tables. It was a lot of fun. Felip could have written the Wikipedia entry on Spanish history, and he was interested in everything. Laia and I told him about our scooter tour following in Grandfather’s footsteps. I had brought Grandfather’s journal with me and promised to let him read it.
When Felip started asking about Canadian history, I began to feel as if I were sitting an exam and wished I’d paid more attention in history class. After a few stories about explorers, the War of 1812, Vimy Ridge and D-day, I was struggling, and Felip always wanted more detail.
When we eventually made it back to the apartment, around two in the morning, I was so exhausted and my brain so full of new information and experiences that I forgot to even look for DJ’s email before I collapsed into bed.
SIX
As soon as I woke up on the 28th, I flipped open my laptop and saw DJ’s email. There were five (that number again) PDF attachments. There was also a separate email from PayPal notifying me that two thousand Euros had been deposited and asking if I wanted it transferred to my bank account. That woke me up fast. If DJ was sending me that much money, how much had there been in the cabin? Where had Grandfather got it? Was it payment for being a spy, or money to carry out some secret operation?
