The Watcher in the Pine Page 15

  Tejada dropped his eyes. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said quietly. He left, wondering if he had avoided telling her about the raid because he did not want her to worry about his possible danger or because he was afraid of her disapproval. I’ll tell her everything tomorrow morning, he promised himself.

  Two pairs of guardias from Unquera and one pair from Panes arrived on Tuesday afternoon. Tejada went over the operation with them, and showed them maps of the area, although the success of the raid would depend on the actual knowledge of the terrain by the Potes guardias. They ate an early dinner together at the post, and then set off for Argüébanes. They parked in front of the church and started through the town on foot. Tejada hoped that their presence would not be remarked on by the residents of Argüébanes since he strongly suspected that they were in sympathy with the bandits. A fat wedge of moon lit their way making the flashlight Battista was carrying unnecessary. The corporal switched it off, glad to avoid advertising their presence.

  The climb up into the hills above the village took about half an hour. The path through the forest was lit by muffled moonlight, which dappled the leaves of the trees. It was after eleven when the faintly sweet smell of the night breeze in the chestnuts gave way to the sharper scent of wood smoke, and the sound of singing floated through the chilly air. The trees thinned and gave way to meadow, and patches of yellow light spilled out of the windows of an ancient adobe structure.

  Battista, Ortíz, and the guardias from Unquera circled through the woods to take up positions behind the cabin. Tejada took the remaining guardias and crept out into the open meadow, carefully avoiding the puddles of light. He dropped to his stomach in the high grass, and inched forward on his elbows. The guardias fanned out and followed his example. When they had arranged themselves in a semicircle, they lay still, weapons cocked.

  “Shit,” the guardia next to him exclaimed softly.

  “What’s the matter?” Tejada murmured, without turning his head.

  “Sheep shit, sir.” The guardia sounded embarrassed. “I’m lying in it.”

  Tejada smiled, but gestured the man to silence. Talking was an unnecessary risk. They settled down to wait. The ground was damp, and the breeze was cold, although it was a relatively mild evening. Tejada reminded himself grimly that he had been in more uncomfortable places. Still, he resented the snatches of song and laughter that reached the guardias in their hiding places, along with the scent of roasting meat. He wondered if Domingo Santiago was inside enjoying the meal and the warmth. And my cigarettes, he thought. Oh, well, let them have one last fling. They won’t be so cheerful in a few hours.

  It was after eleven when the door in front of Tejada opened. A figure emerged, silhouetted against the light. He turned back to wave, and someone inside called a good-natured farewell. Tejada strained his eyes, trying to recognize Domingo Santiago. The door closed behind the lone figure. The man took a few unsteady steps and then shook his head, as if trying to clear it. He stood still for a moment, and then half-turned back in the direction he had come. Tejada tensed. The man had not given the signal Domingo had agreed on, and he was behaving oddly. If he’s seen us, the lieutenant thought, we’ll have to attack right away. And Santiago’s still in there. Damn.

  He was about to give the signal when the figure in the moonlight resolutely turned his back to the house, raised one hand to his head, and took off his cap. He flapped it slowly back and forth, as if fanning away mosquitoes, a ridiculous gesture in the cold darkness. The man seemed to grow tired of fanning himself. He pressed the cap against his face for a moment, as if holding back a scream. Then, almost too quickly for Tejada to follow the motion in the dim light, he tapped his chest and shoulders in rapid succession and hurried down the path without looking back, almost at a run.

  The grass beside Tejada rustled. “Wait!” he hissed. “Give them five minutes, so they don’t identify us with Santiago’s leaving.”

  Someone in the cabin began to sing, a light tenor loud with wine, but not unpleasant. “You are tall and slender, like your dark-eyed mother.” Other voices chimed in and the words became clearer. “I’ve spent all night thinking of you, my darling.” It was an old folk song that Tejada remembered as a lullaby from his childhood. He had sung it once, teasingly, to Elena, because he thought that the words were apt. When the music stops, he thought, we move in.

  The song ended in a round of applause, then there was a moment of stillness. Tejada wondered if the people in the cabin had been dancing, and were now catching their breath, perhaps even sweating a little from the exercise. The fire must have warmed the small cabin thoroughly by now, and they had eaten and drunk heavily. Or perhaps they were simply quiet and staring into the heart of the flames, wondering whether the next singer would pick a love song or a war song. They were probably happy. Relaxed. Off guard. “Now,” he said.

  The quiet of the mountains was shattered by a burst of machine-gun fire that pockmarked the adobe and shattered the windows of the cabin. Inside, someone screamed. As the echoes died away, Tejada raised his voice. “Guardia Civil! The house is surrounded. Throw out your weapons, and come out with your hands over your heads!”

  For a few tense moments there was silence. Then the lights went out in the cabin, and there was a burst of return fire. Tejada flattened himself against the earth as bullets rained around him. “You’re making it worse for yourselves!” he called, as soon as there was a pause. There was another round of firing. The shots came considerably nearer this time. They were aiming at his voice. Tejada edged himself a little farther out of range, and spoke up again. “If you give yourselves up peacefully now, I give you my word it will weigh in your favor at trial.”

  The cabin’s inhabitants fired again, and Tejada heard a grunt to his right. Then one of the guardias from Panes said softly, “I’m hit in the shoulder, sir.”

  “Get out of range,” the lieutenant ordered. “And stay low. We’ll take care of them.”

  “Yes, sir.” There was a sob in the man’s voice, but he began dragging himself backward.

  “Last chance,” Tejada yelled. “Come out now, or we come in shooting.”

  He waited thirty seconds, and then started firing. The echoes of the guns multiplied, as Corporal Battista and the guardias on the other side of the house began shooting as well. After perhaps five minutes, the door to the darkened cabin opened, and a figure emerged, crouched, and running in a wild zigzag. He seemed to have the Devil’s own luck in dodging bullets, and he made it almost twenty meters down the path. Tejada wasn’t sure which of the guardias finally hit him. The guardias crawled forward, still firing rapidly. The return shots became more infrequent, and finally stopped. There were no more casualties among the Guardia, and after a few more minutes, Tejada called a halt. “Had enough?” he shouted. There was no answer. Cautiously, he pushed himself to his knees. “Anyone still alive in there?”

  Again, the only answer was the whistling of the breeze. “All right,” the lieutenant said in a low voice. “Carvallo, you and I will take the door. The rest of you, cover the windows. Be prepared for a trap.”

  They reached the walls of the cabin without incident. It was designed for housing sheep, and the door opened outward. Cautiously, Carvallo reached over to the handle and pulled the door open. No one emerged. The unwounded guardia from Panes and one of the guardias from Unquera were flattened on either side of the windows. Tejada took a deep breath, and then stepped into the black hole of the cabin’s doorway, strafing the floor as he did so. He was rewarded by a sudden cry. “Light!” he yelled.

  The faint beams of Battista’s flashlight helpfully flickered through a window on the other side of the cabin. The firelight on the hearth was brighter. It illuminated a bare room with an earth floor, empty except for two long wooden benches and several bales of hay stacked along one wall. Empty bottles of wine lay on the floor, along with a confusion of tin plates holding cheese rinds and the bones of well-gnawed lamb chops. Two men were lying dead beside the windows.
One of them still clutched his machine gun. A third was obviously the one who had cried out at Tejada’s entrance. He had been crouched at one side of the door, probably holding the hunting knife that now lay beside him. He was now clutching a wound in his thigh.

  The guardias quickly occupied the little space. “The magazines are empty, sir,” Carvallo reported after checking the guns. “They must have come without spare ammunition.”

  Tejada relit the lamp that the bandits had blown out when they were attacked. The unwounded guardia from Panes jerked the wounded man’s hands away from his leg and handcuffed them. “The others are dead, sir, right?” he said. “So it’s just this one.”

  The harmony of the voices raised in song came back to the lieutenant and he shook his head. “Search,” he said briefly. “There should be a woman as well.”

  They found her hiding behind the bales of hay, with mud on her dress and straw in her hair. Her eyes were enormous, and in the flickering light she looked very young. “Pedro!” She jerked her elbow out of Carvallo’s grasp and flung herself at the wounded man with a cry.

  “Stand away from him!” one of the guardias said sharply.

  “It’s all right.” The man she had called Pedro spoke at the same time. His teeth were clenched and he was sweating, but his voice was soothing. “It’s just a scratch. I’m fine.”

  She began to cry, still kneeling by him. “I said stand away!” The guardia cocked his pistol.

  “Put that away!” Tejada snapped, and moved to stand in front of the girl. He took her by the shoulders and dragged her to her feet. “Come on, Señorita. Perhaps you can identify these men for us?” He turned the girl toward the first of the dead men as he spoke, and felt her sway in his grip, racked by dry sobs. “Stop bawling. You obviously know who he is. We just need a name.”

  “Rafa-Rafael,” she choked, twisting away from the sight of the corpse. “Rafael Campos.”

  “Thank you. And this one?”

  “Oh, no,” she whispered. “Oh, no. No, no, no, please, God, no.”

  Tejada frowned, wondering why she refused to name the dead man and also why the man’s face looked vaguely familiar. “That’s Luis Severino,” the voice came from behind him. It was the wounded Pedro. “And you might spare his daughter the chore of identifying him.”

  Tejada stared at the corpse and suddenly remembered Bárbara Nuñez saying, “Good night, Luis,” as the wagon that had brought him to Potes drove off into the night. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place as he remembered his first encounter with Luis Severino at the railway station in Unquera. “To Argüébanes, sir. I live there. See, here are my papers.” No wonder he hadn’t wanted to take a pair of guardias as passengers, Tejada thought, grimly amused. Ortíz was already going through Severino’s pockets, while one of the guardias from Unquera did the same to Campos’s body, under Corporal Battista’s direction. Another guardia from Unquera was searching Pedro. The wounded man’s eyes were closed, and his face was drawn in pain. His leg was still bleeding heavily.

  Tejada handcuffed the girl, but left her wrists in front of her so she would be less uncomfortable, speaking as he did so. “Carvallo, Guardia Riera—from Panes—was hit. Take his partner and get him back to the post as quickly as possible. Take one of the trucks. The rest of you, move it. Make sure you take the weapons with you when we go.”

  They left the cabin quickly, two guardias dragging the semi-conscious Pedro, and Tejada still escorting Severino’s daughter. The town was dark and still, and Tejada wondered if any of the neighbors had heard the gunfire in the forest, and what they had thought of it if they had. Everyone was keeping their windows shuttered. “What are we going to do with the girl, sir?” Battista asked as they reached the remaining truck.

  “Put her in one of the cells for the night,” Tejada said. “We have an extra one. And they have facilities for female prisoners in Santander.”

  The guardia who had searched their other prisoner laughed. “No need to worry about the little lady’s virtue, Lieutenant,” he said. “Her friend Pedro had condoms in his pocket.”

  “Interesting.” Tejada raised his eyebrows and turned to look at Pedro’s slumped form. “You’ve been over the border recently then?” The wounded man did not reply.

  “You won’t get anything out of him now. He’s out like a light,” a guardia said. “You’re sure we shouldn’t question the girl? Find out what such a cute little thing was doing unprotected up there in the mountains?” He gave their prisoner an appraising glance that made her shrink back against the seat.

  Ortíz saw the glance, opened his mouth, and then closed it again, looking unhappy. Half-buried memories of wartime slithered out of the muck like crocodiles, making Tejada’s stomach clench. “No,” he said. “Put her in one of the cells. And don’t touch her.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. At your orders.” The guardia shrugged, philosophical. Ortíz and the girl both heaved silent sighs of relief as Tejada turned the key in the ignition, and the little convoy rolled out of Argüébanes, and back to the post.

  Chapter 13

  How late did you get in last night?” Elena kept her eyes on the flow of coffee into the cup and her voice neutral.

  “Not late. A little after one.” Tejada hesitated, and then added, “I’ll tell you about it, if you like. But I wonder if you’d do me a favor?”

  Elena had expected him to be reluctant, or even ashamed, but she had not imagined he would ask for her help. She looked up, forgetting her reservations. “Of course. Why? What’s the matter?”

  Tejada hastily summarized the night’s adventures. Elena was frowning heavily by the time he finished, but when he said, “So I thought, maybe—Severino’s daughter doesn’t look more than eighteen, and we have no female wardens,” she instantly understood him.

  “Of course I’ll visit the poor girl,” Elena interrupted.

  “I thought you might be willing to search her,” Tejada explained, embarrassed. “I don’t mean a strip search or anything,” he added quickly, seeing that she was about to object. “Just go through her pockets. It’s really a formality. But I thought she might prefer having another woman do it. In case she’s carrying—how should I know?—something private. And of course you could stay and talk to her a little. I’m sure she’d be grateful for the company. The poor kid’s just lost her father, after all.”

  Elena scoffed. “Delicate attention from someone who’s just blown him away! Oh, you don’t need to worry,” she said impatiently. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

  “You’re a woman in a million.”

  “I know,” Elena retorted. “The other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine wouldn’t put up with you.”

  That was why after breakfast Elena found herself retracing the steps of her first day in Potes, over the ancient stone bridge to the Guardia’s makeshift headquarters and up the stairs to the long hallway where two of the doors stood locked, with Guardia Torres on guard outside. Tejada had remained downstairs in his office, but had obviously informed the rest of the post about Elena’s errand. The guardia saluted when he saw her. “Good morning, Señora. You’re here to see the prisoner?”

  Elena nodded. “How is she doing this morning?”

  Torres shrugged and sneezed. “How you’d expect, I suppose. I’ll let you in.” He unlocked one of the doors and pushed it open, saying cheerfully but not unkindly, “Morning, sweetheart. You’ve got company. Call if you need me,” he added to Elena as she stepped through the door and it swung shut.

  The cell was bare except for a cot and a basin and pitcher in the far corner. The cot had no sheets, but someone had left a pillow and a folded blanket across one end. The girl had been curled up on the cot, her face buried in the pillow, but she sat up as the cell door opened, and watched Elena, wide-eyed. Unruly ringlets of hair escaped from the knot at the back of her neck and frizzed wildly over her head. Her face was smudged with dirt and tears, and the fingernails clenched in the pillow she was clutching to he
r stomach were grimy. Her skirt was an ankle-length plaid, the clothing of a schoolgirl, not a grown woman. She stood up, a little clumsily, as Elena approached. “You—are you a prisoner, too?”

  Elena felt a surge of pity for the girl’s grief and confusion, and thought that Carlos had probably overestimated her age. “No,” she said gently, putting one arm around the girl’s shoulders. “My name is Elena Fernández. I’m the lieutenant’s wife. My husband thought you might like company.”

  The girl shivered. “I have to go home.” Her voice was pleading. “I’m the oldest. Concha can’t get breakfast for the boys without me. And they’ll be up by now, and see that I’m not there. Or Papa.” Her voice died.

  “I’m sure your mother . . . ” Elena began.

  “My mother died three years ago. I have to go home!”

  “I’m sorry,” Elena said quietly, sitting down and drawing the girl down beside her. “I’m sure the neighbors will take care of your little siblings for today. But I’ll take them a message if you like. What should I say?”

  The girl screwed up her face. “Tell Concha that Juan and Avelino should stay with Marcial and keep working, and that she should take the babies to Uncle Nino in San Vicente until I can send word. And tell them I love them.”

  “I will,” Elena promised. “What’s your name?”

  “Dolores. Dolores Severino.” The girl took a deep breath. “Señora Fernández?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “I don’t know,” Elena said honestly. “I think you’ll be taken to Santander for trial. You might go to prison. But from what I heard, you didn’t participate in the shooting and—how old are you?”

  “I’ll be sixteen in April.”

  “I don’t think anyone would consider you a dangerous criminal,” Elena said encouragingly.

  Dolores gulped. “Papa told me not to go,” she whispered. “He said he’d bring a message for me if I wanted to say hello to—if I wanted to say hello. But I wanted to see everyone so badly. I baked bread for them.” Her voice warbled around a sob. “They all said they liked my bread. And then when Rafa was hit, Papa yelled at me to get down behind the hay and hide.” She was crying openly now. “I was so scared. I put my head down and put my fingers in my ears and I didn’t help them! I didn’t help them.” The rest of her sentence was unintelligible.