The Sentinel: 1 (Vengeance of Memory)

by Mark Oldfield

  ‘Be at the comisaría within the hour,’ Peralta called from the doorway. He stepped out into the cleansing cold of the night. Flakes of snow whirled through weak light. Like lost souls, Peralta thought in a moment of poetic invention. How nice it would be to read poetry again, to lose himself in the rhythm of words, their angular abstractions and emotional ambiguities. He apologised, shaken from his reverie as he bumped into a man in a dark overcoat. The man seemed vaguely familiar, but when Peralta looked back to see if he could recognise him, the man had gone.

  Guzmán looked up as Peralta entered his office.

  ‘Don’t you ever knock, Acting Teniente?’

  ‘I did knock,’ Peralta snapped. And then he could keep it in no longer. ‘Why, in a country awash with priests, use someone like him for this work? The man’s a drunk.’

  Guzmán grinned. ‘And the rest. Thief, paedophile, you name it. But he’s all we can afford.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Peralta said, ‘you’re shooting fifteen men and you send them to their deaths with that bastard giving them the last rites?’

  Guzmán looked at him. ‘Firstly, Teniente, those men downstairs don’t believe in God. They fought on the side that killed priests and burned their churches. These men supported communism and foreign corruption. Secondly, these are the fifties. The younger priests were only kids when the war began. They don’t want to be involved in the work we do. And even some of the older priests no longer want to be involved with these things either. So we have to take what we can get. And we can only get what we can afford and what we can afford is Father Vasquez.’

  Peralta exhaled angrily. ‘I don’t think it’s right. There should be some dignity in these things.’ He turned on his heel and went out into the corridor.

  Guzmán looked at the closed door and smiled. ‘Dignity?’ His voice was edged with contempt. ‘You’ll see fucking dignity once the shooting starts. Lots of it. Spilled all over the fucking ground. A drunken priest is nothing compared to that.’

  But Peralta had gone. Guzmán lit a cigarette and returned to staring at the wall. His breathing slowed as he drifted into a self-induced trance with only the slow monotony of the old clock on the wall to disturb him. Guzmán was getting ready.

  Peralta heard the crash of boots on the stone of the corridor as he sat in the mess with a cup of lukewarm coffee. Several guardia civiles entered, followed by the dissolute figure of the sargento. One of the men was carrying a large bucket.

  ‘Evening, Teniente,’ the sargento grinned toothlessly.

  Peralta watched with slight curiosity as the guardia civiles produced several large bottles of brandy and began to pour them into the bucket.

  ‘Making punch, Sargento?’ Peralta asked, exasperated at having to ask what was going on.

  ‘Not one you’d care to try, sir,’ the sargento said. ‘At least not in a minute or two.’ He placed several small cardboard boxes on the table. ‘Sleeping pills, sir. For the prisoners. We dose the brandy, they have a last drink. Bingo. They go off happily. More or less.’

  ‘Almost humane, Sargento. That will make them easier to manage, I imagine?’

  ‘They’ll be good as gold, sir’ – another glimpse of rotten teeth – ‘be all over before they know it.’ He continued to fill the bucket with brandy. The smell was overpowering. ‘Care for a glass, sir – before I dope it?’

  Peralta shook his head. ‘I don’t think brandy would agree with me just now.’

  The sargento laughed. ‘It’ll agree with those bastards a lot less. But I think I’ll have a quick nip. How about you boys?’

  The guardia civiles quickly agreed and waited while the sargento dipped a chipped cup into the brandy. Peralta wondered for a moment about the regulations concerning drinking on duty but decided this was not the time to raise the subject.

  ‘Fuck, that’s rough,’ the sarge said, gulping down a large mug of the neat spirit. ‘Down to business then.’

  He opened a box, removed the bottle from inside and tipped its contents into the bucket. He repeated the measure several times. Peralta looked into the bucket. The dark brandy was covered with a white powdery scum from the dissolving tablets. The sargento stirred the mixture with a long wooden spoon retrieved from a drawer next to the stained, cracked sink.

  ‘They won’t drink that,’ Peralta said. ‘They’ll see there’s something in it.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s dark down in those cells,’ the sargento grinned. ‘Besides, they’re desperate.’ He hoisted the bucket by its handle and walked to the door. ‘Pass me a cup, Rodriguez, I’m going to serve our guests.’

  The sargento and the guardia civiles clattered down the corridor towards the stairs to the cells. They were laughing.

  Peralta straightened up as Guzmán strolled into the mess room.

  ‘Comandante, a sus—’

  ‘My office. Now,’ Guzmán ordered.

  Once in his office, he motioned for Peralta to take a seat and opened a carton of cigarettes, lighting one. He put the carton back down on the desk before he saw Peralta looking at it wistfully.

  ‘Christ, you can always buy some, you know.’ He pushed the carton across the desk, and waited until Peralta had lit up. ‘I don’t expect too much from you tonight, Acting Teniente.’ Guzmán exhaled thick smoke. He waved away Peralta’s protests that he would strive to do his duty. ‘None of that counts. It isn’t pretty and only some people ever get used to it. The sarge, he’s used to it. But then he’s fucking crazy anyway. You’d better bear that in mind when you’re talking to him, by the way. My advice is never upset him, and if you do, don’t turn your back for a second.’

  ‘The man’s a non-commissioned officer,’ Peralta said. ‘He should obey his superiors, surely?’

  Guzmán laughed. ‘He’s loyal and he does what he’s told. By me, anyway. And in return, I excuse his little eccentricities. Usually.’

  ‘And when you can’t excuse them?’

  ‘Then I beat him unconscious,’ Guzmán said cheerfully.

  ‘Comandante, is there anything I can do to help tonight?’ Peralta offered. ‘Help the men draw lots for the firing squad, for instance?’

  Guzmán looked curiously at Peralta. ‘Those arrangements are taken care of. Most of the lads tonight know what to do. I want you to observe and learn. Keep the priest in order. Make sure he does the absolution without attacking anyone.’

  Peralta frowned. ‘That man is a disgrace. He has no business in a house of God.’

  Guzmán grinned. ‘No, I suppose not. Although it was in the house of God where the Reds castrated him. Cut off his balls and left him to bleed to death. Except he didn’t.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Peralta spat.

  ‘He crawled several kilometres, at night, with his balls in his hand,’ Guzmán continued. ‘He thought the doctor at the guardia civil garrison would sew them back. When he’d recovered – physically anyway – he accompanied the guardia in the search for the Reds. They captured several. They say the priest killed four of them by hand. Slowly.’

  Peralta shook his head in disbelief.

  Guzmán nodded. ‘It’s hard to believe, I know. But then Father Vasquez claims he killed seven. He and the sargento. Mad. The war affected a lot of people, Acting Teniente.’

  ‘I had heard,’ Peralta said sarcastically. Guzmán’s glare silenced him.

  ‘Have some respect, Teniente. Someone has to do this job and our men are the best at what they do. Most of them have killed with their bare hands. I certainly have. Know what makes you able to kill someone like that? Someone you’ve never met before, never spoken to, no idea what they’ve done. Sometimes they might chat to you over a beer, show you pictures of their families. But at the back of your mind are the orders. So you get another beer, laugh at their jokes, eat tapas. And then you go to take a piss and they come into the toilet still laughing, still your friend. And they die with their dick in their hand. Or choking on vomit with your hands around their throat. And then you go back into the bar and f
inish your drink, pay the tab and stroll out. It’s easy enough. If you know how to do it, people die very quickly. As long as you have the right attitude, you’ll come out all right. But there’s one thing you have to really want.’

  ‘What?’ Like a rabbit caught in headlights, Peralta’s eyes fixed on Guzmán with anticipatory horror. Guzmán smiled and pulled hard on his cigarette. He exhaled slowly. Peralta waited, rigid and tense, not wanting to be part of this discourse on death and yet, simultaneously, enthralled by it.

  ‘You have to want them dead,’ Guzmán said at last. ‘You really have to want them to die by your hand. By any means necessary. And after, you have to be pleased they’re dead. They may be good fathers, wives, mothers. No matter. Orders are orders, and you carry them out properly, because otherwise you fuck up. And then they might kill you instead. That’s all there is to it. You do a good job or not at all.’

  Peralta no longer felt the anxiety and foreboding he had experienced earlier. Now it was much, much worse: the feeling of awakening from a nightmare to find it wasn’t a bad dream at all but was real, very real. It was bad now and it was going to get worse.

  ‘Look on the bright side, Acting Teniente.’ Guzmán smiled. ‘We’ve got a reception to go to at the capitán-general’s later. Perhaps your uncle would like to hear all about what kind of a day you’ve had at work? He probably would, because he was never one to look away when the killing started. In the bullring at Badajoz, the blood was so thick by midday our feet were squelching in it. There was this one bloke, when the machine gun fire hit him, it cut him in—’

  Peralta didn’t ask for permission as he fled the room. He could still hear Guzmán’s booming laugh as he reached the toilet. Holding his head over the evil-smelling hole set between two concrete footprints in the floor, Peralta noisily brought up the excesses of lunchtime. It took a while. Afterwards, he tugged the chain. Nothing happened. He waited for a moment, trying to compose himself but the smell of vomit combined with the ever present odour of shit started him retching again. When it was finally over, he slunk back to his temporary office and continued his paperwork, ensuring the night’s executions were at least in order administratively.

  The darkening shadows of evening merged into night and gusts of wind blew snow against the windows. For some time now, Peralta had been aware of increasing activity outside his office. He heard the low rumbling of heavy vehicles in the street, guardia civiles stamping noisily along the corridor, the sargento barking orders, reeking of brandy and swearing even more freely than usual. Boots clattered on the stone steps leading to the cells. He pulled on his overcoat and walked down towards Guzmán’s office. Before Peralta reached the door, Guzmán appeared. He was wearing a trench coat and heavy boots, his neck swaddled in a scarf. When Peralta asked for orders, Guzmán seemed strangely distant.

  ‘Just go with the sarge,’ he said. ‘He’ll show you the ropes.’

  Two guardia civiles came towards them from the cells, a drugged man slumped between them. Similar trios followed. Peralta saw the prisoner’s faces: uncomprehending, eyes unfocused, their thoughts somewhere beyond the echoing stone walls of the comisaría. He saw the sargento approaching, wrestling a prisoner along the wall of the corridor.

  ‘You come with me, Teniente,’ the sarge said, struggling to keep the prisoner on his feet. ‘The comandante said to look after you. You can give me a hand with this one.’

  Peralta grabbed the prisoner by his arm. The man was a dead weight. Soon he would just be dead. The prisoner didn’t struggle. His head hung loose, his eyes opening and closing, vacillating between a desire for sleep and a vague wish to know what was happening. The worst of both worlds, Peralta thought. Neither conscious enough to reflect coherently as his life moved towards a brutal close nor sufficiently drugged to be entirely unaware of what was happening. Instead, the man staggered drunkenly towards his death, bereft of even the dignity of being able to walk out in front of the firing squad without assistance.

  ‘I surrender,’ the man spluttered, drool hanging from his lips.

  Clouds of greasy exhaust fumes met them as they bundled the prisoner through the front doors. Three drab green military trucks waited, backed up close to the doorway. At each end of the street a cordon of guardia civiles blocked access until the condemned men had been loaded into the vehicles.

  ‘Here we go,’ the sargento said, nodding towards one of the vehicles. A civil guard reached down to help get the prisoner into the truck. The man was a dead weight and it took some effort before he was rolled into the truck alongside the other bound and stupefied prisoners. Peralta was panting with exertion and a bead of sweat trickled down his face. He was shaking. He had been shaking for most of the afternoon.

  It took a while to load the prisoners. Peralta watched and occasionally helped, as the drugged men were manhandled into the vehicles. There was no resistance. With all the prisoners loaded, the curses and shouts of the civil guards were replaced by a tense stillness. Only the low grumbling of the trucks’ engines disturbed the freezing night, exhaling thick, stinking clouds of exhaust fumes into the dark air. Desultory flakes of snow fluttered in the headlights. Peralta saw the red pinpoints of cigarettes in the dark as the guardia civiles waited for orders. At the rear of each truck, troopers with sub-machine guns kept a watch over the comatose prisoners. A short walk away was the city, Peralta thought, lighting another cigarette. People living their lives. Getting by. Life went on. Here, all this activity centred not around life but death.

  Guzmán emerged from the front entrance of the comisaría. The atmosphere changed, suddenly charged with renewed purpose. With Guzmán, hands bound and wearing only a light jacket, was el Profesor. He was clearly not tranquillised like the others. Guzmán pushed him towards one of the trucks with a meaty grip on the man’s arm. Behind them staggered the priest, a black scarecrow in his flapping cassock, carrying his small bag, a squashed biretta jammed onto his lank tangle of hair. He had difficulty getting into one of the trucks and was finally manhandled into the vehicle by a burly guardia civil. The guardia retrieved the priest’s hat from the ground and brushed the snow from it before handing it up to him.

  ‘God bless you, my son.’ The priest made the sign of the cross haphazardly over the trooper. ‘God bless us all.’

  ‘Vamos, Sargento, we’ve got a party to go to, once this is over,’ Guzmán said.

  ‘In we get, Teniente.’ The sargento opened the door of the truck and Peralta slid across the seat towards the driver. The sargento clambered in next to him and slammed the door.

  Peralta sat, trapped between the driver and the sargento, his leg jammed painfully against the gear stick as the truck manoeuvred slowly past the other parked vehicles and bumped over the snow-covered cobbles at the end of the street. The other vehicles followed, lights flickering balefully in the rear-view mirror. Ice was a problem and the driver swore repeatedly as he struggled to prevent the vehicle skidding. The convoy proceeded slowly through the back streets, scarcely noticed by the few passers-by braving the snow. The surfaces were slippery and the drivers cautious. After a while the street lights finally petered out as they nosed their way out into the countryside and began to climb uncertainly into the hills.

  The road rose steeply and they saw only the dark shadows of trees, picked out in the limpid beams of the headlights. Inside the cab the air was thick with tobacco smoke. The three men sat in a shared silence that transcended the belching noises of the engine as the truck fought its way up the frozen country roads to higher ground. Peralta looked at his watch. Almost an hour had passed. It seemed much longer.

  ‘This is terrible weather to come out here,’ he said, peering with concern down the jagged side of a ravine.

  ‘We’ll make it, sir,’ the sarge said. ‘We had the road checked this morning. A couple of the lads drove there and back with no problems.’ He exhaled cigarette smoke. ‘Anyway if it had been too bad, the comandante had Plan B.’

  ‘Which was?’

 
The sargento turned awkwardly in the cramped cab to face Peralta. ‘Kill them in the cells. But then it gets messy. And someone has to bring the bodies up all those stairs and with all that blood we’d have to clean everywhere up and—’

  ‘Gracias, Sargento, I get the picture.’ Peralta once more felt the panic building.

  ‘Mind if I ask you something, sir?’

  Peralta did mind, but nodded anyway.

  ‘You been involved in anything like this before?’

  Peralta shook his head. The sargento continued, ‘Well, a word or two of advice, if you don’t mind then, sir. Just so you know what’s coming. So you behave yourself properly, if you know what I mean?’

  Peralta nodded. He had no idea what the sargento meant and no intention of asking.

  ‘Firstly, let us do the job – you don’t have to. All the lads know what they have to do, when to do it and what happens next. It’s like a machine, almost. What I’m saying, Teniente, is that it would be easy to get in the way and disrupt things. Like if you was sick or something.’

  ‘Does that happen often at these things?’

  ‘All the time, sir. Especially when people are new to the game. Sometimes they’ve seen active service, which always helps, but often they haven’t. Like those Falangists who came along on the raid. They can get a bit disturbed by it all, seeing it close up. And killing one person, let alone a bunch together, well, it can make you, you know, funny.’

  ‘I don’t see anything funny in it at all, Sargento,’ Peralta snapped.

  ‘Oh you’d be surprised,’ the driver chimed in.

  ‘Callate coño. Speak when you’re spoken to. Me Entiendes?’ The sargento leaned across Peralta and glared at the driver. The man stared ahead at the road.

  ‘Anyway,’ the sargento continued, ‘all I’m saying is stand well back. Watch if you want but if you feel sick, fuck off out of the headlights where you can’t be seen. The comandante wouldn’t like it if you did that in front of the lads. Let the side down, so to speak.’