by John Wilson
“If you do, you’re on your own,” Laia said. “Your war wound is not all you’d have to show off to go for a swim.”
We laughed. “I still can’t believe we ended up in a naturist resort. Maybe we can get our swimsuits and go down to the beach for a swim?” I suggested.
“That sounds like a better idea. I’d certainly enjoy washing this dirt off.”
We walked in silence for a while. “I know you don’t think Grandfather was a traitor,” I said eventually, “and I don’t either, but someone obviously did, and we haven’t found anything that proves he wasn’t. That bothers me.”
“Maybe DJ and the others have found out more.”
“I texted DJ last night,” I said, suddenly remembering that I hadn’t turned my phone back on this morning. I took it out and turned it on.
“I’ve only got one bar,” I said, looking at the screen. The phone pinged as it downloaded text that I’d missed. “It’s from DJ,” I said, holding the phone so Laia could see it.
Hope things are going well. We broke the code—sort of–-and it might work for your entries as well. Frequency of letters. 1 = e, 2 = t, 3 = a, 4 = o. You get the idea. Look up the rest. Gotta sleep. Good luck.
“Sounds as if DJ’s code is different from ours,” I said, putting the phone back in my pocket. “I wonder if everyone got a different code.”
“We were lucky you worked out that the key was Lorca’s poem,” Laia said. “We could still be completely in the dark.”
“But there’s still a lot that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “It looks like Grandfather was a spy, but who for? He came to Spain, but where else did he go?”
We walked on in silence, both deep in thought. I still hadn’t come up with any answers when the red scooter shot around the bend ahead of us and skidded to a halt. We stopped and stared at the rider, who peered at us over his scarf. “What do you want?” I shouted, stepping forward.
The scooter engine roared, but instead of turning back down the hill, the man accelerated past us in a cloud of dust. When it settled, I looked back up the hill and saw the scooter stopped a couple hundred meters from us; the rider was talking into a cell phone.
“I don’t like this,” Laia said.
“Me neither. Let’s get down to the main road as quick as we can.” We hurried down the hill, the scooter keeping its distance behind us. I had a horrible sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it only got worse when a white panel van appeared on the road ahead. The van slewed sideways across the road and the doors slid open. Right then I would have been happy to see Scarface and Tattoo Head, but three men we’d never seen before jumped out and ran toward us. There was nowhere to go. I put my arms around Laia. The men grabbed us and hustled us into the van, where our hands and feet were bound and rags were tied around our eyes. The van lurched, and I rolled painfully against the side. “Are you okay?” I heard Laia shout.
“¡Callate!” A voice ordered us to shut up.
“I’m okay!” was all I had time to reply before someone hit me hard on the side of the head. We had been kidnapped for the second time in as many days and were helpless in the back of a strange van, going who knew where. The whole thing had taken only seconds.
FIFTEEN
The trip in the van was a nightmare. Because of the blindfolds, every bump and swerve came as a surprise. Because we couldn’t brace ourselves to prepare, we were thrown around mercilessly, often crashing into each other and cursing our captors, who simply responded with kicks. In no time, the only part of me that wasn’t bruised and sore was my back. Our abductors hadn’t bothered to remove my daypack, and now, with my hands tied behind me, I couldn’t have got it off even if I had wanted too. It afforded some protection, but my fear was worse than the pounding I was taking.
I had expected our kidnappers to take us down the hill, back toward town. Instead, the slope of the van floor and the increasingly bumpy road suggested that we were heading farther into the hills. We were totally at the mercy of these people, and the thought of moving away from civilization terrified me. Images of stopping at some remote location, being hustled out of the van, shot and buried in a shallow grave haunted me. Our bodies would never even be found—Felip, Sofia, Mom, DJ and the rest of the world would never know what had happened to us. And I had no idea why this was happening.
After what seemed like a lifetime but could have been no more than ten or fifteen minutes, the van stopped. I heard the door slide open. The binding on our feet was taken off, and we were pushed unceremoniously out of the van. “Laia?” I asked.
“I’m here,” she said. Rough hands grabbed us and dragged us over bumpy ground. We were pushed against a wall. We were going to be shot. I moved sideways until my shoulder touched Laia’s. “I love you,” I said.
“¡Siéntate!” We were ordered to sit. The voice was harsh, but the order was comforting. You didn’t shoot people when they were sitting down—did you?
We slid our backs down the wall until we were sitting. Footsteps receded. After a few minutes of silence, I risked speaking. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, apart from some cuts and bruises. You?”
“The same.” Encouraged by the fact that no one had kicked us or ordered us to shut up, I went on. “Who are these people, and what do they want?” I was scared, but trying to work out what was happening calmed me down.
“I don’t know,” Laia replied. “I don’t think they have anything to do with Blue Eyes. I don’t think this is the way he works.”
“Neither do I. The guy on the red scooter must have been following us.”
“But he didn’t do a very good job. He was obviously surprised to see us when he came around the corner.”
“So he’d lost us,” I said. “When he saw us, he got on his cell phone and called the white van up there.”
“That means they were planning to kidnap us all along.”
The thought didn’t make me feel any happier. “So they were following us ever since we got to Palomares, just waiting for a chance to take us.”
“It looks that way,” Laia agreed, “but that doesn’t get us any closer to knowing who they are or what they want.”
I leaned closer to Laia and lowered my voice. “Do you think it has anything to do with Grandfather’s notebook and what we found behind the rockfall?”
“Maybe,” Laia said. “What we found is certainly valuable, but how could they possibly know about your grandfather’s notebook?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they want to hold us for ransom.”
“Maybe,” Laia said again, but she didn’t sound convinced. “With all the rich tourists around here, I’m sure there are better targets than us. It could be something to do with Felip’s work, either digging up the past or helping the people in Palomares get proper compensation.”
“Could be,” I acknowledged. None of our theories sounded convincing, but I didn’t want to dwell on the other, less pleasant ideas I’d been having. “Where do you think we are?”
“We certainly headed farther into the hills,” Laia said. “Judging from my bruises, the van was being driven fairly fast. Even if we were only traveling for ten minutes, we could be ten or fifteen kilometers away from where they picked us up. That means we could be almost anywhere. There are dozens of tracks cutting through these hills—old roads leading to abandoned mines and hunters’ trails.”
“The wall we’re sitting against could be a ruined mine building,” I suggested.
“Quite possibly. My blindfold lets through a bit of light, and it didn’t get darker when we were brought to this wall, so if we’re in a building, it has no roof.”
We sat in silence for a while, and I thought over what had happened. We had been abducted by strangers for some unknown reason, bound and blindfolded, and we were being held in an abandoned building somewhere in the hills above Palomares. The only encouraging aspect was that we weren’t already dead. We were waiting for something, but what?
“Did you mean what you s
aid?” Laia asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“When?”
“When we were brought in here and pushed against the wall.”
I had said I loved her. “Yes. I did mean it. I thought they were going to shoot us.”
“So you love me,” Laia said, a hint of laughter in her voice, “but only when you think we’re about to die.”
“No. I mean, yes.” I took a deep breath. “I love you all the time,” I said. “When I’m sleeping and awake, eating, studying for exams, on planes with boring people like Chad and when I think I’m about to die.”
Laia leaned into me and rested her head on my shoulder. “And I love you too,” she said.
Despite our situation, in that moment I was blissfully happy. But this was new emotional territory for me. What was I supposed to say next? Before I had a chance to think of anything, I heard tires crunching on gravel nearby and doors opening and closing.
“¡Párate!” We struggled to our feet.
“Quite el antifaz.” A new voice, softer than the others, was giving orders. Someone moved toward us and removed our blindfolds. The first thing I did was look at Laia. She was even grubbier and more disheveled than before, and there was a bruise forming on
her cheek, but she was looking at me and smiling. I smiled back.
“Young love. How romantic.” I looked at the source of the voice. We were in the remains of a square stone building, the ruined walls no more than two meters high. Across from us, in what had once been a doorway, an old man stood and stared at us. He was well-dressed and leaned on an elaborately carved walking stick. He had a full head of hair, but it was snow-white, and his face was heavily wrinkled. He only had one arm.
“I am sorry to keep you waiting,” he said in heavily accented English, “but I do not get around as easily as I did in my younger days. I hope you have not been too roughly treated.”
“What do you want?” I asked as confidently as I could manage.
“Ah, the impatience of youth.” The man took a step into the room and said something over his shoulder. One of the men who had bundled us into the van appeared and set up a folding chair. The old man sat down and placed his stick between his knees. “We shall get to what I want in the fullness of time, but first I must tell you a story, and for that I need to sit. You shall remain standing.
“I was a twelve-year-old boy in Barcelona when the Fascist army rebelled in 1936. My parents were both Anarchists. My father was killed at the barricades in the street fighting in Barcelona in the first days of the war. My mother joined Buenaventura Durruti’s militia column and was killed in the fighting for Caspe in Aragón.”
Despite talking about the death of his parents, the old man spoke in a monotone, as if he were giving us a lecture on ancient history. I had no idea why he was telling us all this, but I listened intently. The shallow grave was still in the back of my mind.
“The Anarchists were brave, but they were stupid,” the man went on. “They were good at street fighting, but they were a rabble. You do not defeat an army by sending poorly armed women and boys with no tanks or planes against regular soldiers with machine guns. For that you need organization and discipline. I never forgave the Anarchists for the death of my mother.”
The old man fell silent, and his gazed drifted off. Laia and I waited patiently. I wondered what would happen if our storyteller died in the middle of his tale. Would our captors let us go or kill us? Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out.
“The Communists were the answer,” he went on eventually. “They were organized, and their discipline was like iron. I was living on the streets, and they took me in. I lived in their barracks as a kind of mascot. During the fighting in Barcelona against the Anarchists in 1937, I was a messenger, helping keep the central authority and the fighting units in contact. I was proud to be a part of the destruction of those who had been responsible for my mother’s death.
“In 1938, things were not going well for us, and I persuaded the commissar to allow me to join a unit and take part in the great attack across the Ebro River. I was assigned as a replacement to the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the Fifteenth Brigade.”
My head snapped around to look at Laia to see if she had picked up the reference to the unit Grandfather had fought with. She nodded and continued to stare at the old man.
“I see you have heard of that unit,” he said. “It was very famous. I was honored to be a part of it and to help in the attack that would turn the tide in the war. This was not going to be like the attack that killed my mother two years before. We were a real army, and I thought we would win. Unfortunately, we did not, and I did not get a chance to be a part of it.
“I crossed the river with the second wave on the morning of July 25th. We were organizing ourselves to continue our advance when a Fascist shell exploded on the hillside nearby. Several men were killed, but I was lucky.” He waved the stump of his missing arm. “I only lost an arm.”
A vague memory of something Laia and I had read in Grandfather’s war journal was struggling to surface in my brain. Before it could, the old man went on. “I was in shock, of course, and disappointed that I could not be a part of the battle, but as I was being led back down the slope to the boats, I passed a young Canadian International Brigader. He was not much older than me and he looked scared, but our eyes met and the look of sympathy he gave as I passed is something I will never forget. It was only later that I learned that this young Canadian soldier was your grandfather, David McLean.”
SIXTEEN
“How?” It was all I could manage to stammer. There were so many questions swirling around my head that I wasn’t even sure which one I was asking. How did he know it was my grandfather? How did he know I was coming to Palomares? How did it all tie together with the coded notebook?
“You have many questions,” the man said. “That is normal. All will be answered in time, but first I think we should drink.” He turned to one of the younger Spaniards who had been hovering nearby. “Agua por favor.” The man stepped outside and returned with three bottles of cold water. He handed one to the old man. I thought for a moment that he was going to untie our hands so we could drink, but he simply uncapped the bottles and held them to our mouths. It was messy, and much of the water splashed down my shirt front, but it tasted good.
“Gracias,” I said before I realized I was thanking someone who had kidnapped me and quite possibly had worse in store.
“De nada,” the man said as he walked away.
“I regret that I cannot untie you,” the old man said, “but I find it is usually best to take a minimum of chances.”
“Who are you?” Laia asked.
“That is a very good question. I have had many names. Perhaps I shall tell you some as a part of my story. For the moment, should you wish to be sociable, you may call me Gorky.”
“Gorky!” Laia and I exclaimed. This old man sitting across from us was the mysterious man that Grandfather had hidden the bomb from. The man who must not find it because it was too dangerous.
“I see you know the name,” the man said with a faint smile. “I know that you are Steve and your companion is Laia, so now that we are introduced, I shall continue with my tale. I did not think so at the time, but I was very lucky on the banks of the Ebro that day in 1938. Had I not been wounded, I doubt I would have survived the weeks of fighting that were to come, and had I not been wounded so close to what few medical facilities we had, I would have bled to death long before a doctor saw me.
“As it was, I was ferried back across the river I had crossed with such high hopes less than an hour before. At the field hospital, a doctor cleaned the stump of my arm and tied off the severed blood vessels. I was sent back to Barcelona in an ambulance, a journey that I have little memory of, thankfully, and put in a hospital on the Ramblas to recover.
“For the first few days, I was feverish, but my arm healed well. Imagine my surprise when I became aware of my surroundings and found that I was in the bed n
ext to the young Canadian soldier who had looked at me so sympathetically. He had made it all the way to Gandesa, as far as any of our forces made it in that battle, and had been wounded much less seriously than I. He had broken ribs and gave up his bed to a more serious case within a few days.
“He was there with a companion who had a piece of shrapnel in his shoulder, and they and a young nurse attended to my needs most generously. I think you might know who these people were?”
I nodded. The young Canadian was my grandfather, his friend was Bob (the other survivor of their group at Gandesa), and the nurse was Maria, Laia’s great-grandmother. “David, Bob and Maria,” Laia said under her breath.
“Exactly,” Gorky said. “We became quite close, and I was sorry when David and Bob were repatriated. Maria continued to care for me, but it was a long recuperation. By the time I had recovered, the war was almost over, and I joined the flood of refugees heading for the camps in France. It was obvious that I could not return to Spain, so I prepared for a new life in France. I contacted the local Communists and, when France fell to the Nazis, took to the countryside to work for the Resistance. On one side, my lost arm was a handicap. But on the other, I could play the role of a disabled veteran, which gained me sympathy and made me seem unthreatening.
“I survived the war by good luck and spent several years drifting. I was still a young man, but what could I do? I was disabled and had no training other than war. I could pass for a Frenchman easily enough, but I was always aware that I was far from home. I survived through odd jobs and petty crime, changing identities as it suited me.
“By the 1950s, the Cold War was at its height. I still kept in touch with other Spanish refugees and with the Communists, but did not particularly care that America was now the enemy. One evening I went to listen to a Canadian, Robert Carlyle, speak about his experiences in Spain. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be Bob, your grandfather’s friend from the hospital in Barcelona. After a few drinks and some reminiscences about the old times and what we had done with our lives since 1938, we parted.
