The Sentinel: 1 (Vengeance of Memory)

by Mark Oldfield

  And then he felt the adrenalin surge. Someone was following him. He was sure of it. He recognised the footsteps. He had heard them earlier after he left the comisaría, measured and muffled, keeping a steady pace, accommodating the rhythm of his steps. Pausing by a darkened shop window, Guzmán lit a cigarette, casually turning to look back towards the wide expanse of the Puerta del Sol. The wind drove stinging flakes of snow across his face and the street lamps were now shrouded by heavy falling snow. Guzmán could hardly see.

  But he saw the man. A dark shape in a doorway. Not moving, just watching. Guzmán calculated he was about fifty metres away and began to walk towards him. Then he thought better of it. Turning, he continued down the road, his feet crunching on the thickening snow, ears straining to hear the footsteps behind him. And there they were again. Guzmán looked back and the man melted into the shadow of another doorway.

  The blizzard was so strong Guzmán could see only whirling snow shadows, blurred lights and the dark outlines of the shops and houses in the street. When the wind dropped for a moment he was no longer sure the man was still in the doorway. Reaching the entrance to his building, Guzmán turned his key in the ancient lock of the entrance hall door and stepped inside, closing the door to the street immediately. He groped for the light switch. A dim bare bulb illuminated the hallway, the stone-tiled floors, the solid wood of the apartment doors, the sharp stone of the staircase. Guzmán made his way to the first floor, listening intently.

  His door was large and crossed with iron bands at the top and bottom. It took time to unlock, given that he needed to deal with each of the three locks fitted at shoulder, waist and knee height. Anyone trying to batter down that door would have a long job. It finally opened on carefully oiled hinges. Again the fumble for the light switch and then the pitiful half-light from the tiny bulb.

  It was a spartan room, dark, wood-panelled walls with a threadbare carpet and dusty curtains. It had the air of a property whose owner had gone away suddenly, without making arrangements for its upkeep. Which, in a way, Guzmán recalled, was what had happened. A small kitchen to the left, a bedroom to the right and a small bathroom. A bathroom was still a luxury for many and Guzmán had been pleased to take over the occupancy of such a well-appointed flat. The owner had been on one of the lists sent to Guzmán by Central HQ in manila envelopes. Only the door had needed replacing – there was not much left after Guzmán’s men smashed it down one cold morning an hour before sunrise. Two plain armchairs faced one another by the window. Against the wall was a sturdy table strewn with papers. On the wall next to the kitchen door a gaudy Madonna smiled beatifically from beneath a glowing halo.

  Guzmán took a swig of red wine from an open bottle in the kitchen and then poured himself a large glass, drank it and poured another. He locked the door, securing the three bolts he had fitted, one above each of the locks. Kneeling by the table, he pulled back the carpet. The floorboards beneath were loose fitting and an icy draught rose as he removed them one after another, revealing a large space between the joists below. Two large boxes of papers. Several files, a shoebox full of French francs. A British Webley revolver. Two cartons of ammunition. He reached further under the floorboards, checking the sub-machine gun and the box of extra magazines. All just in case. Guzmán brought out one of the files and looked at the cover. The words were written with a broadnibbed pen in a strong angry hand:

  General Antonio Rodrigo Valverde

  Guzmán put the file on the table. The electric light was too weak to read by. He brought out his matches and lit the lamp. A sudden gust of wind rattled the windows. He put down the glass and walked over to the light switch. The room plunged into shadow with only the spectral glow of the lamp on the table to guide him as he crossed to the window and pulled the curtain aside.

  Snow was falling steadily, blown in irregular patterns by the freezing wind. Guzmán looked down the darkened street. Nothing. Just snow streaming down, blurring the detail of the buildings, hiding the city beyond. Then he saw it. The glow of a cigarette in a doorway, intensifying momentarily as its owner took a drag. Someone was down there in the shadows watching him. For a moment Guzmán continued staring at the doorway. Then he let the curtain fall back across the window. Someone was watching him. But then someone always was.

  BADAJOZ 1936

  The battle had ended but the killing went on. For some of the defenders, it was a long time before they recognised the end had come. In the smoke from the flurries of explosions it was difficult to see which of the darting shapes was Republican and which was Nationalist. The savage ricochet of bullets from the baked ground and the jagged rocks obliged the men to crouch as they made their way back up the hill. Before the last barrage they had seen the Nationalists were gaining ground on their left and the men became increasingly nervous as explosions and clouds of dust to their right told them Franco’s troops were advancing on that flank as well. The political commissar tried to keep the company together, exhorting them to stand fast and hold back the fascist tide, but his words lacked conviction. Some men threw away their rucksacks despite the threats from the political commissar to have them court-martialled. Bullets rattled around them and whined above their heads, increasing their determination to get to the safety of the trees above. Among the trees there would be shelter from the deadly fire of the enemy. Now and then a bullet found its mark and a man would fall, raising a cloud of dust as he slid down the steep slope, back towards the oncoming enemy troops. Paco the sargento died like that: one minute he was next to the kid, helping him upwards, conscious of the lad’s youth and intent on ensuring he kept up, the next there was the shrill whine of the bullet and Paco fell back down the slope, tumbling in a cloud of dust and pebbles until he came to rest against a large rock. The kid looked down at the sargento, the man who had protected him, ensured no one stole his rations and fought off the bullies. The sargento looked back, eyes wide as he realised flight was no longer possible. His rifle lay some six metres away and he stretched out a bloodied arm towards it. He looked back to the kid. But the kid was already climbing again, his boots sending down small dusty flurries of dirt and stones. By the time the sargento died, his last view was of the remnants of the company passing from the scorching day into the welcoming shadows of the trees. Five minutes later, the first Nationalist troops reached him, barely pausing to bayonet the body before they continued their pursuit.

  For a moment, amongst the trees it was quieter. The dull thudding of artillery and the crackle of small-arms fire faded as the men scrambled into the shadows of the little wood. The ground rose steeply and they quickly lost all sense of direction: all they could see were the stunted boughs, their clinging, low-hanging branches impediments to flight as the men struggled beneath the weight of their equipment. Soon, they began to throw off their extra ammunition, even their water bottles, and those who still had their packs dropped them to the ground. The political commissar tried to get them to stay together in a compact group, to fight a rearguard action to hold back the Nationalists until reinforcements arrived, unlikely though it was. He demanded three men remain in the trees to act as snipers, delaying Franco’s men while the others continued the retreat. The men were on the verge of hysteria. They could hear the shouts of the Moors below on the hillside. The political commissar drew his pistol, threatening to shoot one of them as an example to the others. Realising the men were ignoring him, the political commissar fired a shot into the air, bringing down parts of the tree beneath which he was standing and showering those around him with leaves. The crack of the pistol echoed across the hillside. A sudden volley of shots told them the Moors had heard the pistol and were now pursuing them with greater precision as a result. It was then the political commissar was killed.

  3

  MADRID 2009, CALLE DE SAN VICENTE FERRER

  Daylight filtered warm and soft through the shutters. Outside, the bustle of the market and the chaotic tension of traffic were just beginning. It was early, though the heat was already enou
gh to make Galindez kick away the sheet. The air felt cool on her skin as she slipped from the bed leaving the profesora to continue sleeping.

  Galindez idly looked around the bedroom, hearing the street outside coming to life, watching the sun move slowly over the bookshelves. So many books on just one theme, several written by Luisa. The titles all suitably professorial – Forgetting the Past: the grave secrets of the Civil War; Not So Hidden Secrets: war graves and complicity in everyday discourse 1940–1976; Where Do They Lie?: Geographies of Forgetting in Contemporary Spain. She yawned and looked for another book. Luisa continued to sleep. Galindez stretched lazily, suddenly realising she was bored.

  It wasn’t that sex with Luisa wasn’t good. Luisa’s inventiveness was surprising. But something had come between them and, strangely, it was a man. The mysterious Comandante Guzmán. Luisa’s research into the enigmatic police chief had begun to enthuse Galindez as very little else in her adult life had. Even so, something was starting to bother her about the profesora. The night before, Luisa set off alarm bells when describing the methods she used in her research into Guzmán and his activities. For Galindez, Luisa’s most serious failing was her disdain for science: those templates of knowledge Galindez had assiduously incorporated into her life ever since she began to take science lessons seriously in her teens. Although, she thought, peering down at the market through the soft gauze curtain, if she were honest, she owed her interest in science to Señorita Chavez, her science teacher.

  Señorita Chavez enthused her, sharing with Galindez the thrill of seeking out and accumulating data, and then understanding it using complex models of analysis and interpretation. Science gave Galindez a framework of knowledge that eventually inspired her to train as a forensic scientist. And how she had loved that training. Learning how to tackle the challenge posed by intangible, incoherent strands of evidence and rework them, translating the chaos and confusion of the crime scene into a coherent, credible explanation. That challenge, she had realised, was missing in her work for the guardia civil. In fact, her only real challenge so far had been to accept that her junior status doomed her to the crappy jobs. Inevitably, that meant war graves, even though forensic archaeology wasn’t her specialist field. But then, she thought, how much of a specialist did you have to be to wield a spade?

  So far, all she’d done was catalogue sites and excavate remains, even though, very often, local people had known exactly who was in those graves since the day they had been shot. No one cared about the dead. The politicians wanted to be seen to be doing something about addressing the casual slaughter of the War. So the guardia sent her on these futile journeys because of pressure from the politicians. That way, something was seen to be done. Something visible but inexpensive. Her job summed up then: cost-effective but pointless.

  She took one of Luisa’s books from the bookshelf and sat by the window. A faint eddy of warm air moved the diaphanous curtain against her arm. Outside, the sounds of the street grew louder. She skimmed through the book. One heading caught her eye: ‘How Should We Write the History of the Civil War?’ She began to read:

  Most histories of the Civil War are moral and political projections from a contemporary perspective to one from regime, with its self-aggrandising and backward-looking hagiography was to align Spanish political and social life with quasi-mythical events and needs derived from a fictional golden past. This constant re-creation of a contrived and artificial history that justifies contemporary political ends clearly demonstrates the need for a history focused on the ways in which a society understands itself through its understanding of the relationship between ‘now’ and ‘then’. Doing history with practical intent must involve writing a history which needs to be – as Foucault has shown – a history of the present. We need to identify the contribution of the past to the thoughts and deeds of the present.

  A history of the present? Practical intent? The words appealed to Galindez. But the sentences which followed didn’t as she skipped through the turgid, repetitive rhythms of academia in full flow. Where was the clarity? The argument? Why couldn’t academics like Luisa write in plain Spanish? Reading further, Galindez noticed with annoyance that Luisa had little time for individuals in her grand theorising:

  For too long we have accepted the notion that the slaughter of the war resulted from the murderous inclinations of individuals. Yet it is in the realm of ideas and ideologies that the seeds of destruction are sown: treating the war as a patchwork of disparate criminal acts lends nothing to our understanding and creates only a culture of blame intent on individualising culpability and stereotypically labelling its subjects.

  Christ, Galindez thought, Luisa wouldn’t make much of a detective. No role for the individual? Blame culture? She saw the implications clearly. No role for forensic investigation, or detailed inquiry, just a focus on ideas and grand theories. Luisa’s approach rejected the principles of rigour and precision Galindez had worked so hard to apply to her own work. For Galindez, Luisa’s work seemed more like storytelling, taking strands of dubious evidence and weaving them together with vague and insubstantial theories.

  Galindez wondered if she could do it better. Rather than leave people like Guzmán as vague footnotes in the Civil War’s catalogue of death, maybe she could use them as case studies, making their wartime activities public knowledge? She had the technical knowledge. Her background and scientific expertise would give her the necessary gravitas. She began to think about the opportunities: conference papers and journal articles bringing the darkest secrets of the Civil War to light. There would be benefits for others as well as a major benefit for her: a way out of the organisation Papá loved. The organisation that was grinding her down. She could leave behind the endless bagging up of remains, the hours of working alongside sweating men in fatigues who stood back to discuss her culo as she bent over the heaps of bones, debating whether she was a six or a seven.

  Thinking of Papá kindled a familiar sadness. She recalled Tia Carmen telling her stories of how much he loved working for the guardia. Until the day he walked out of the door and climbed into his car without even a cursory look underneath. Why would the Basques want to kill me, he’d laugh whenever ETA was mentioned. There are plenty of guardia nearer the Basque country for them to target. He really thought he was safe. Until that morning when the explosion flung his car into the clear spring air, burning debris falling in an arc of fiery metal rain. The sound of the exploding petrol tank, the smoke, the lurid swell of the flames. Men running, Mamá screaming. Distant sirens. A little girl’s frightened cry. Papá.

  They got away with it, Galindez thought, her nails digging into her palms. No one was going to find his killers now, seventeen years later – least of all her. There were many in the guardia civil who’d tried – why had she ever imagined it could be her who would bring his killers to justice? That had been just an adolescent dream, though the thought that one day she might succeed sustained her through interminable nights of lonely study and revision. Hoping that by tracking down his killers she could become something more than that tragic little girl, Miguel’s daughter. The one faces turned to when she entered a room. That’s her, pobrecita. So sad. First the father, then the mother as well. They say she drank, you know. But look at the child. Poor little thing. Enough. It was time to acknowledge that Papá’s killers had faded into history. Impatiently, she wiped away a tear. It seemed possible when I was fifteen. I’m twenty-five now. Time to get real, Ana María. Time to put that grief aside, although it’s not as if I ever grieved for him really. Not the way people expected. There was an explosion and he died and so did everything I knew up to that moment. It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t cry at his funeral. Or Mamá’s for that matter. God knows enough people tried to make me. Tia Teresa even pinched me to try and get the tears flowing. And afterwards, the shrinks treated me like I was a freak. As if a man in a white coat had the right to try and make an eight-year-old cry.

  But even if she’d never been able to express her gr
ief, that didn’t mean she had to abandon her longing for justice. Uncovering Guzmán’s shadowy activities – and maybe others like him – might still be possible. She began to think about how it could be done. Develop a profile of the man, gather evidence of what he did, how he did it, who he did it to. A comprehensive catalogue of Guzmán’s career. But that was where the problems began. Guzmán was in charge of a secret unit. They didn’t have annual reports, didn’t send out press releases on successful operations like today’s guardia. Guzmán’s secrecy was a challenge in itself, given its resonance with Galindez’s own past: He got away with it just as ETA did when they killed my father. But, if she worked hard, maybe she really could drag Guzmán – alive or dead – into public view, deny him the comfort of hiding in the darkness of Spain’s past, and, by doing that, enable society to recognise and acknowledge the pain he caused. And then move on. Closure. Surely, she thought, that’s what people need. Closure for the lingering scars and the emotional damage of the War. Closure. It was what she wanted, she knew that much. Then she wouldn’t have to struggle on in the guardia, taking the shit, bringing the pay cheque in, trying to show that Miguel’s daughter could hack it. Maybe it might even put an end to the amnesia that blotted out all memory of her life before the explosion. Eight years of her life lost in a moment. Closure. Ironically, Guzmán might be the person to give it to her.

  She looked distractedly at her scattered clothing on the floor as ideas began to spring to mind, light and airy and increasingly ambitious. The air from the window felt warm and sensuous. A car horn blared angrily in the street. Men shouting. Galindez realised she was being watched.

  Luisa’s eyes shone with wakening desire, making Galindez suddenly aware of being naked. She returned Luisa’s smile, though she felt an urge to leave, to join the bustle in the street, to go somewhere, do something new. But Luisa had the key to that something new: Comandante Guzmán and all his works. Those works could also become hers if her plan worked out.