The Summer Snow Read online

  “And the motive?” Rivas hazarded, reassured by the lieutenant’s tone.

  “Let’s see if Cordero’s story checks out. If it doesn’t, we’ll pull him in and get a motive out of him. He’s got no reason to protect whoever hired him.”

  Rivas nodded, satisfied, then made a mistake. “Who do you think hired him?”

  Tejada went still. “I don’t—” he began, intending to say that he did not have the faintest idea.

  The office window was open, and the faint breeze carried the sound of childish voices and scuffles. The Falangist youth were preparing to parade on their way back to school. The chaotic noises of the schoolboys died suddenly. There was a little silence and then someone in the plaza below shouted, “All right, on three. One, two, THREE!” and the words to “Cara al sol” filtered into the room along with the afternoon sunlight.

  “—know what’s happened to her will, but there’s something fishy there,” Tejada finished slowly, as the wavering soprano voices died away in the distance.

  Rivas remembered the lieutenant’s last words to him that morning and took pains to avoid Tejada’s eyes. “Oh?”

  Tejada looked past the sergeant, to the pattern of sunlight on the wall. “You should be aware that I may not be the best person to head this investigation,” he said quietly.

  Rivas’s silence was a confirmation of the statement. Tejada took a deep breath and began to tell the sergeant what he had learned from his interviews that morning. He did not give any details with respect to his meeting with his father, and Rivas did not ask for them. When he had finished, Rivas said cautiously, “It seems to me, sir, that the important thing is who poisoned the lady. Not who may or may not have taken her will.”

  “You don’t think they’re the same person?” Tejada asked sardonically. “It makes more sense than phantom Reds.”

  “Not really,” Rivas said, and was surprised to hear his own voice sound soothing. A man like him shouldn’t join the Guardia, the sergeant thought. “It sounds to me like someone who didn’t like Doña Rosalia’s will would have just had to wait for her to change it. Stealing it and then killing her doesn’t make any sense. And if it was only stolen after the fact, by someone who was desperate, then it was someone who didn’t know in advance about her murder.”

  Tejada was dimly aware that the sergeant was tactfully trying to tell him that his father was probably guilty of fraud but not of murder. He did not find this theory particularly comforting. “What about someone who did benefit from Doña Rosalia’s will but knew that she was likely to change it?” he countered.

  Rivas sighed. “We don’t know exactly what’s in the will?”

  “The only person who admits to having seen it is her lawyer.”

  “That would be Señor Almeida?” Rivas confirmed. The lieutenant nodded and Rivas added, “You know him, sir?”

  “He’s my godfather.”

  “You don’t think he might cooperate if you asked him as a personal favor then?”

  “I asked him at our first meeting,” Tejada said.

  “But we had no evidence then that Doña Rosalia had been poisoned,” Rivas urged. “Surely he’d be amenable to influence?”

  “Maybe if you dragged him down here and put him in a cell where he could hear the firing squads at work for a few mornings,” Tejada said consideringly.

  Rivas swallowed, his sympathy for the lieutenant severely lessened by the lieutenant’s lack of empathy for his own position. “He’s a personal friend of the mayor, sir.”

  “Then I’m out of ideas,” Tejada snapped.

  The awkward silence that followed this statement was broken by the entrance of Guardia Medina, breathless and excited. “Sir!” He saluted to Rivas, and then gave Tejada a hasty half bow. “It was a Red plot! They killed Doña Rosalia because she’d uncovered a conspiracy!”

  “What do you mean, ‘a conspiracy’?” Rivas replied, embarrassed and furious that Medina had broken the news in front of the lieutenant.

  “Are you joking?” Tejada demanded at the same instant, his voice harsh with the effort of hiding his relief and hope.

  Faced with two apparently angry superior officers, Medina deflated rapidly. “Of course, it might not have been,” he muttered. “But we found this in the bottom of the cabinet.” He held out a crumpled sheaf of papers, which had obviously been rolled into a tight cylinder at one point and still curled upward at the edges.

  The lieutenant took the papers, smoothed them out, and saw that they were actually a pamphlet, crudely printed on cheap newsprint. Large black letters across the top of the cover page proclaimed the title: OUR STRUGGLE. In smaller letters he made out “July 1945.” Below that was a drawing of a peasant carrying a hammer and sickle, drawn in the blocky style popular ten years earlier, and a series of headlines: THE LAST FASCIST GOVERMENT OF EUROPE, OUR BROTHERS IN FRANCE, and THE CALL TO ARMS. His lip curled, and he held out the paper to Rivas without comment.

  The sergeant scanned the pamphlet and gulped. “Jesus,” he murmured, wondering desperately if Lieutenant Tejada would report him to his superiors for incompetence and struggling with a horrible feeling of guilt for having ignored Doña Rosalia’s fears. To gain time, he began to leaf through the pamphlet.

  “I think we can assume that my aunt was not the one reading OUR STRUGGLE,” Tejada said. Only years of training enabled him to keep his face and voice expressionless. He wanted to run and leap and sing with relief. His aunt’s death had been the result of Communists’ actions. He could go back to dealing with the kind of people who read Communist propaganda and talked about the workers of the world and who could be exterminated like vermin, and forget about his father and his family’s friends. “Any guesses as to who in the household might have procured the latest issue?”

  “Cordero,” Medina spoke confidently. “I never liked his looks. And that cook may be in on it, too. I say we bring them in and give them a working over they won’t forget.”

  “Well?” Tejada pointedly ignored Medina and turned toward the sergeant.

  Rivas had quickly skimmed the articles about the liberation of France and Russia’s solidarity with the Spanish people, but a smudgily printed headline, TRAGEDY AND TRIUMPH IN THE ALPU-JARRA, had caught his eye. He had started reading it more closely and become almost deaf to Medina’s voice. Tejada’s sharp question jolted him back to the present. He felt nauseous. He raised his eyes from the pamphlet with relief, but could not bring himself to face his superior. Some shred of self-preservation made him turn to Medina and say, “Is Soler still in the house?”

  “No, sir, he’s working on his report.”

  “Get him,” Rivas ordered, desperate to get Medina out of the room.

  Medina saluted and left. Slimy little bastard, Rivas thought, with unaccustomed violence. Then he was submerged once more in panic. This is grounds for court-martial, he thought. Oh, God, Doña Rosalia warned me. Shit, how do they know all this? He became aware that Lieutenant Tejada was speaking. “Don’t feel too bad. A little of that stuff always gets through. They have presses even up in the mountains, you know.”

  “We need to know who was writing this.” Rivas spoke hoarsely.

  Tejada shrugged. “Someone in a café in Paris, probably. The interesting thing is why it turned up in the Casa Ordoñez.”

  For a moment, Rivas was tempted to accept the lieutenant’s reassurance. But he knew that the situation was too serious for that. He shook his head. “This wasn’t written in Paris,” he said. “It contains details of a major operation our antiterrorism people carried out last spring. With names and places.”

  Tejada took the pamphlet back from Rivas and read the passage indicated.

  On the morning of May 23, cowardly and brutal Fascist spies blockaded the exits of the home of the valiant fighter known as El Tuerto and set fire to it. El Tuerto’s companion, Adela Colón, 43; her daughter, Linda, 20; son Marco, 15; and grandson, Miguel, 2, were burned to death under the gaze of these soulless and pitiless monsters.
El Tuerto himself escaped miraculously and has once more sworn allegiance to the People’s Cause which will give him vengeance.

  Tejada raised his eyebrows. “The stuff about this El Tuerto is accurate?”

  Rivas nodded. “You didn’t get his description, sir? I thought it went out to all the posts in Spain.”

  “In May I was preoccupied by other things.” Tejada retorted. “And we have local boys to worry about.”

  “That’s not the worst of it,” Rivas admitted. “Keep reading. The part about Suspiro del Moro.”

  Tejada followed the sergeant’s shaking finger and read.

  . . . this village stands as a shining example of the liberation that will soon come to all of Spain. On the morning of June 16, its citizens rose up against their oppressors and, supported by Republican troops, disarmed the local Guardia Civil and Fascist authorities and meted out justice to greedy overseers. They set up a fair government . . .

  “True?” Tejada demanded, understanding Rivas’s nervousness for the first time.

  “Well, they didn’t really set up much of a government,” the sergeant mumbled.

  Tejada winced. “How long did they have control of the town?”

  “Two weeks.” Rivas decided to get the worst over with as quickly as possible. “It’s a small post there, because we thought it was a quiet area. They stormed the post, killed two of the guardias, and imprisoned the rest. Then they shot a couple of overseers and then . . . well, not much really, as far as we can figure out. They distributed a lot of leaflets like this one, which didn’t do them much good because most of the people up there can’t read. So they put on a couple of propaganda plays and brought in a doctor from somewhere to give the kids checkups and set all the locals babbling about how the town should have a clinic. And then the army took care of it. They’d raided the Guardia’s ammunition depot, though, so they were pretty well armed and there were a couple dozen casualties.”

  “How many men were needed?” Tejada asked, remembering the Valle d’Aran and desperately wishing that he had time to call Potes and find out how things were at the post.

  “About six hundred, sir.”

  “And how many bandits were captured?”

  “Four. And another ten killed. We think the rest got away.”

  “Was it in the newspapers in Granada?”

  Rivas frowned. “Two inches, on the inside page. ‘Bandits hold town hostage,’ ‘Guardias Slain.’ No details. But this—” He gestured helplessly to the pamphlet. “This looks like it was written by someone who’s read our reports. Or was actually there.”

  Tejada smiled suddenly. “Alberto Cordero asked to go up to the Sierra just now, didn’t he?” he demanded. “And, as I recall, Doña Rosalia owned property around Órgiva.”

  Rivas, who had been too upset to think clearly, heard the satisfaction in the lieutenant’s voice and felt his own brain start working again. “Maybe we should check the dates of his visits,” he suggested, returning Tejada’s smile.

  “Maybe you should invite him down to the post and ask him.”

  The door opened before Rivas could respond, and Medina and Soler entered. Rivas listened to Soler’s report with barely concealed impatience, and then ordered the pair of guardias to go back to the Casa Ordoñez and arrest Alberto Cordero.

  When the door had closed behind Medina and Soler, the sergeant turned back to Tejada. “It’d be a rare thing if it turned out that your lady aunt was right after all this time, wouldn’t it?”

  “Very strange,” Tejada agreed, lighthearted.

  Neither man dreamed of admitting his wild relief to the other. Rivas knew he should feel guilty that his carelessness had perhaps cost Doña Rosalia her life, but even in death, with her worst fears on the point of being confirmed, he could not think of her as anything but a nuisance. It was, he thought, providential that her murder had provided a clue to a dangerous source of propaganda.

  Tejada knew that he was abandoning his investigation of his father’s role in the disappearance of Rosalia’s will too easily but, naturally, subversive propaganda had to come first. Please let it be Cordero, the lieutenant thought. Please, please, something neat, for once. He shared an easy camaraderie with Sergeant Rivas as they pored over the medical examiner’s report, knowing that Rivas felt the same way. “I wish there was something here about where you can get cyanide,” Tejada said. “It might help to have a line on Cordero when we bring him in.”

  “Do you want to question him?” Rivas asked, with less resentment than he would have dreamed possible a few days earlier.

  The lieutenant shrugged. “Not if your people know what they’re doing. We deal with a lot of bandits in the north, but you must also, if they’re active in the Sierra.”

  “The worst is in the Axarquía over toward Málaga, thank God,” Rivas admitted. “We can handle him. But I was thinking, sir, if you didn’t mind not being present for the interrogation . . .”

  “Yes?” Tejada asked, with renewed tension.

  “We’re just across the street from the university,” Rivas said humbly. “I thought if you had contacts there, you could ask someone about where to find cyanide.”

  “Good thought.” The lieutenant relaxed and looked at his watch. It was a quarter to six. “I’ll go over now and see if the library’s still open.”

  He left the sergeant’s office feeling infinitely better than when he had entered it. The familiar rush of energy that accompanied a suspect identified and an arrest put a spring in his step. It was an incredible relief to be dealing once more with smugglers and bandits. This was the work he was used to—hard and dirty, with opponents worthy of his cunning.

  The University of Granada backed onto the plaza where the Guardia Civil had their headquarters. Tejada hurried around the corner humming the tune the children had started singing. The guard in front of the arched entryway saluted him. “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Is the library open?” Tejada asked. “I want to look something up.”

  “First floor. Up the main staircase and you can’t miss it.”

  The guard gestured. Tejada thanked him and moved lightly up the broad marble steps. The building was set around a large interior courtyard, and the stairs curled around the court, leading to a covered patio above. A number of students were leaning on the railing, looking down into the courtyard and chatting. A few of them ducked their heads and murmured to each other when they saw the lieutenant making his way through the building. Tejada ignored them.

  The library was open, although not crowded. The air inside was warm and had the dry dusty smell of old paper. Tejada made his way to a battered central desk, where a lone man sat at a high swivel chair. Behind him rose a cliff of card catalogues higher than the lieutenant’s head. The man in the chair froze as Tejada approached, as if immobility would grant him invisibility. The lieutenant stood in front of the desk for a moment, waiting for the man to speak. The man stared down at the surface of the desk. Finally, Tejada coughed. “Are you the librarian here?”

  “Yes, sir.” The man looked at him with hunted eyes. “I was approved by the director.” He fumbled for a moment and then flipped open a wallet. “See?”

  Tejada glanced at the librarian’s ID and noticed that the man had shown him a membership in the Falange, instead of an official identity card. Lukewarm to the Movement, the lieutenant thought. Probably barely kept his job after the war. “I need information on cyanide,” he said simply. “How can I find it?”

  For a moment the librarian blinked stupidly. Then he pulled himself together. “Toxicology? The medical school would have more on that than the general collection, I’m afraid. But we could look it up.” He swiveled in his chair and then stood, lifting one of the card catalogue boxes to shoulder height and placing it on the desk.

  “I’m not so interested in the medical aspects,” Tejada said as the librarian began to flip the cards with an impressive combination of delicacy and speed. “I want to know how you find it or make it. I can look
under poisons or toxicology while you check there,” he added as the librarian continued his search.

  “Yes, sir.” The man obediently swung the drawer around so it was facing the lieutenant. “It’s in alphabetical order, and if you see a book you want you just copy the number in the corner here—”

  “I know how a card catalogue works,” Tejada interrupted. “Suppose you look under poisons.” He reached the place he was looking for and added, “Or a good encyclopedia might help.”

  “Yes, sir. Are there any cross-references?” The librarian spoke over his shoulder as he pulled out drawers.

  “Amyl nitrite, cyanosis, hydrocyanic acid, poisons,” the lieutenant read promptly. “What is amyl nitrite?”

  “I don’t know. Just a minute.” A researcher’s curiosity was beginning to override his nervousness. He scurried out from behind the desk to a row of reference volumes along a low shelf on the opposite wall. After a moment, he selected one, and opened it. Tejada, patiently copying titles and call numbers that looked as if they might be useful, ignored him. He was recalled from his work a few minutes later by the librarian’s voice.

  “This article might help a little, sir. It says amyl nitrite is the only known antidote for cyanide. But it’s only effective if given immediately.”

  “Interesting,” Tejada admitted. “But not what I was looking for. Does it say anything about how an average person might get cyanide?”

  “Used in electroplating, tanning, and the ‘cyanide process’ of ore extraction,” the librarian read aloud. “Also found naturally in the pits of cherries, apricots, plums, and other plants of the genus pranus.”

  Tejada abandoned the card catalogue. “Perfect. Let me see that article.”

  The librarian rose, leaving the encyclopedia open to the correct page. Tejada sat down and after a few moments took out his notebook and began to copy parts of the article verbatim. The librarian retreated to his desk and replaced the abandoned drawers. The silence descended again, broken only by the scratching of the lieutenant’s pen and the occasional creak of the swivel chair. Half an hour later, Tejada closed the book and stretched, feeling as if he were coming up for air. The librarian looked over at him. “Did you find what you needed, sir?”