Law of Return Read online

  Her parents exchanged wary glances. “Did we mention that he moved to France?” her father said cautiously. “A few years ago, now. When you were in Madrid.”

  Elena was lively only when she was happy. The more unhappy the situation, the quieter she became. She was still as a statue now. “Paris?” She hardly moved her lips.

  Her father nodded. “Initially, yes. But he’s in Toulouse now.”

  Elena gave a little sigh of relief. “He’s safe, then.”

  “For now,” her father agreed. Her parents exchanged another glance, and Elena had the impression that they were considering whether to tell her something. “He’s just written to me.” Professor Fernández added slowly, “He asks us to play Telemachus to his Theoklymenos.”

  Elena heard her mother’s indrawn breath, and put a hand on her shoulder. The older woman reached up to grasp at the proffered comfort. Elena shared her father’s love of the Odyssey, and identified the characters without difficulty. There was a long silence. “Why did he leave Germany?” the young woman asked.

  “He’s a Jew, Elenita,” her mother explained.

  “He lost his post at the university,” her father said bitterly at the same moment.

  Elena took the third seat at the table, and the scraping of the chair as it moved covered the silence that followed the professor’s statement. His wife and daughter avoided his eyes. The University of Salamanca had been Guillermo Fernández’s life and love. His daughter had been living in Madrid at the time of his forced resignation, four years earlier. She had not been present when the Falangists who had ruled Salamanca since the beginning of the Civil War had ransacked the professor’s library. Nor had she been present for his arrest as a subversive, or his release six months later. She had returned to her parents’ home at the end of the war and found a frightened and embittered old man, who sometimes looked like her father, except for his white hair and stooped shoulders. Most of the time he was simply frightened. It was only mention of the university that made him vitriolic nowadays. “Could he visit us again, maybe?” Elena asked carefully. “I mean . . . would it be legal?”

  Her father frowned. “I don’t know. If he has a German passport, maybe. If he’s become a naturalized French citizen, I don’t know.”

  “What if it isn’t legal?” Elena’s mother spoke quietly, looking down at her hands.

  The only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock. Elena rubbed her finger along the grain of the wooden tabletop. Her father drummed his fingers. Her mother sat absolutely still. “We’ve known each other twenty-five years,” Guillermo said, after nearly fifty ticks. His wife and daughter nodded in unison. “So I guess, if you don’t have any objections . . . ?” Mother and daughter looked at each other, and then shook their heads in response to his question. “I’ll go upstairs and write to him,” Guillermo finished slowly.

  Chapter 2

  You’re late, Lieutenant.” Captain Rodríguez spoke crisply. Everything about Captain Rodríguez was crisp, from his “ neatly trimmed mustache to his polished boots. His uniform was unwrinkled, despite the heat. “You were supposed to be here at thirteen hundred hours.”

  “Yes, Captain. The train was delayed.” Tejada met his commander’s eyes steadily. His voice was neither apologetic nor annoyed, although Rodríguez clearly expected an apology, and Jiménez, hovering in the background, looked indignant.

  “I expect punctuality from all my officers.”

  “Understood, sir.” Tejada did not point out that there was no way he could have avoided the delay. The captain had sent a car to the station to meet them, and the car had waited, patiently, until the train finally arrived. Tejada, who had some experience scheduling patrols, knew that a sudden three-hour delay in one man’s schedule could throw off half a dozen other tasks. Rodríguez had some cause for annoyance.

  “And a military appearance,” the captain continued. “Your uniforms look as if you’ve slept in them!”

  Jiménez’s face, already red with heat, turned purple. Tejada remained impassive, although he considered pointing out that he and the corporal had passed a June siesta in a stalled railway car. The captain was too angry. Either he had not wanted their transfer in the first place, or he was merely putting up a front to impress new subordinates. If the former, defying him could only irritate him further, and if the latter, he would soon relax. “Yes, Captain,” Tejada said.

  Rodríguez glared, as if annoyed at his new lieutenant’s obedience. “Go get cleaned up,” he ordered. “Corporal, you’ll report for night duty at twenty hours. Lieutenant, I’ll see you in my office in twenty minutes. Guardia!” He raised his voice to a bellow. The door opened, and a young man about Jiménez’s age stepped into the room and saluted. “Show them to their quarters.”

  Tejada and Jiménez followed the nameless guardia. No one spoke, although several times Jiménez attempted to catch Tejada’s eye to give his opinion of their new commander. “These are your quarters, Lieutenant,” their guide said, opening a door off a long hallway. “The corporal will be two doors down and across the way. And the bathroom’s down the hall and to your left. Will you need anything else?”

  “No, thank you, Guardia.” Tejada’s eyes were already roaming over the room. Someone had placed his luggage inside. “I’m sorry. Your name is?”

  “Molina, Lieutenant.” He flushed and looked pleased.

  “Thank you, Molina. If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with Captain Rodríguez in fifteen minutes.” In response to the guardia’s stiff salute, Tejada nodded and then disappeared into the room.

  Guardia Molina led the remaining officer down the corridor. “You’ll be sharing quarters with Corporal Méndez and the sergeants, sir,” he explained to Jiménez.

  Jiménez, who was not yet accustomed to being called “sir,” blinked slightly, and decided that he liked Guardia Molina. “Thank you, Molina,” he said, doing his best to sound the way the lieutenant had. He failed miserably, but Molina, a tolerant man, decided that the corporal from Madrid might be a decent officer.

  Jiménez unpacked slowly, giving himself time to think various uncomplimentary thoughts about Captain Rodríguez. In the meantime, Tejada, who had done all that he could to make himself presentable within a short period of time, was also further sizing up the captain. His thoughts were based on more information than Jiménez’s, but they ran along the same lines.

  The captain opened their interview with a statement. “Your file states that you spent much of the war near the front, Lieutenant.” He tapped a heavy manila folder lying on his desk.

  “Yes, Captain.” Tejada glanced rapidly at the desk, and then raised his eyes again, and waited for permission to stand at ease. Permission was not forthcoming.

  “And that you were in Madrid at the end of the war.”

  “Yes.” Rodríguez glared, and Tejada hastily added, “Captain. That’s correct.”

  “Your file,” the captain placed a heavy emphasis on the word, “says that you’ve showed considerable competence in several instances. It seems you’re quite zealous. According to your file,” the captain’s tone conveyed the impression that Tejada’s file was almost certainly a malicious fabrication, “your commanding officers speak very highly of you. During your tenure in Madrid you apparently showed considerable . . . initiative. Which accounts for your quick promotion.”

  “Sir?” Tejada hoped that he sounded respectful. It was difficult to know whether to make a modest denial, or to offer further apologies and explanations.

  “This isn’t Madrid, Lieutenant.” The captain slapped the folder for emphasis.

  “No, Captain.”

  “The people of Salamanca are good, decent, law-abiding citizens.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Tejada said, repressing the urge to add, Then what are we doing here?

  “So, while your initiative may be very commendable in wartime, here you will confine yourself to following orders. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Captain.” Tejada refle
cted that Jiménez was perhaps not alone in his distaste for the more mundane aspects of policing. He had a shrewd suspicion that Captain Rodríguez’s war record, though doubtless exemplary, was undramatic. “At your orders.”

  Rodríguez glared again, but was unable to find fault with the lieutenant’s reply. He began to detail Tejada’s duties in the terse bark of a drill sergeant. The lieutenant received his orders as if they were in fact vital missions, instead of routine paperwork, and saluted smartly when he was dismissed. Then he returned to his room, and unpacked, wondering if the transfer to Salamanca was the stroke of good fortune that it had seemed two months ago.

  Tejada had more cause to wonder over the next few days. Captain Rodríguez seemed to go out of his way to give his lieutenant the most boring assignments possible. Tejada’s promotion meant that he was no longer required to go out on foot patrol, and he found himself regretting the change. At the end of a patrol he felt that he had accomplished something. Four hours of tramping through a city was tiring, but at least it was good exercise, and gave him the opportunity to think. In fact, Tejada was persuaded that he thought better while he was walking. The same four hours spent behind a desk left him irritable, stiff, and irrationally hungry. It’s only for two years, he told himself. And maybe less.

  In the meantime, he began to go for long walks during his time off, to reacquaint himself with Salamanca. It was not the golden city he remembered from his days as a student. It had not been as heavily bombarded as Madrid, of course, but the Red shelling had been effective enough to destroy homes and businesses. Everywhere Tejada went he saw people repairing damaged buildings. Never rebuilding or renovating. Simply making them strong enough to withstand another winter. He found the shoddy repairs nearly as depressing as the long lines for meat and milk. Furthermore, though Tejada would never have admitted it to himself, Salamanca seemed smaller than he remembered it. Had the city been in good condition, its graceful buildings with their uniformly yellow sandstone facades would have been pretty. But they lacked the variety and interest of Madrid’s ruins.

  Still, the walks were the best part of Tejada’s day. His promotion to lieutenant had only come with his transfer, but his work in Salamanca was not challenging. The Guardia Civil in Madrid was short staffed, and Tejada had spent a considerable amount of his time there at a post with no captain. The captain’s duties had fallen to the lieutenant, and the lieutenant’s duties had been divided among the post’s sergeants. Tejada was thus accustomed to performing most of the tasks that Captain Rodríguez had given him. He scheduled patrol routes, and kept track of the lists of citizens requiring new ration books. He reviewed files on prisoners and made sure that they were up-to-date. And he assembled and catalogued the files of those citizens whom the Guardia Civil wished to keep under surveillance.

  If asked, Tejada would have said that this was the most interesting part of his job. At least it occasionally involved dealing with people as well as paper. On his fourth day in Salamanca, Sergeant Hernández handed him a stack of folders with a typed list clipped to the top file. “Thursday and Friday are visiting hours,” the sergeant explained with a slight smile.

  Tejada smiled back. “Visiting hours?” he asked. He liked Hernández. The sergeant was near his own age, and seemed like a serious and competent officer. It was, Tejada thought, a shame that the sergeant was stuck with a commanding officer like Rodríguez.

  “The ones we have on parole,” Hernández explained. “They’re supposed to report weekly. They have appointments. You just see them, and check off here that they’ve come in.” He bent over the lieutenant’s shoulder and indicated a box next to each name. “Also, you record if they ask for permission to travel, a new ration card, anything like that. If they don’t report in, you note it here,” he pointed to another box on the list, “and then you schedule someone to visit them and find out why. Then you . . .”

  “Add that to their file,” the lieutenant finished wearily. “Got it. How many do we have?”

  “About seventy, seventy-five, give or take.” Hernández shrugged. “We can get through them in an afternoon, at a pinch, but it’s easier to follow-up on the paperwork if you schedule them over two days. Your choice though, sir. Should we change the appointments?”

  “No, there’s no need.” Tejada was already counting Thursday’s folders. “Benítez, Vargas, Ortíz . . . aren’t these in alphabetical order?”

  “No, sir. Captain Rodríguez preferred them in the order they were scheduled,” Hernández explained.

  Tejada was grateful for the tactful warning that the folders had been the captain’s province before his arrival. He had opened Juan Benítez’s folder, and was already on the verge of a disgusted comment on its lack of organization. “Very reasonable of him,” he said instead. “But I’d like them alphabetized, Sergeant.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I’ll read through these now.” The lieutenant attempted to remove the top half of the pile of folders, and found that he had removed more than he had intended. As he tried to replace a few of the files, he realized why: a group of them were held together with a thick rubber band. He slid the attached folders out of the pile, and then removed the rubber band. “Why are these together . . . Arroyo, Fernández, Rivera, and Velázquez?”

  “Which? Oh, the petitioners.” The sergeant’s voice was dismissive.

  “Petitioners?” Tejada asked, with some interest.

  “Bunch of professors,” Hernández explained. Seeing that the lieutenant still looked politely quizzical he added, “I don’t know if you heard of the fuss about the university rector, back in ’36, sir?”

  “A little,” Tejada nodded. “He told off General Millán in the middle of a public ceremony, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir. He completely flipped out.” Hernández shook his head. “Started insulting the Movement, the general, everybody. With all the top brass there. And foreign press.”

  “Very embarrassing,” Tejada commented.

  “Ah, well.” The sergeant’s voice was tolerant. “It was probably just softening of the brain. He was an old man, after all. But as you say: embarrassing. He was fired, of course. The Reds made a big thing of it, though they hadn’t been any too fond of him before that.”

  Tejada, who had a few memories of the acerbic autocrat who had ruled the university during part of his student years, smiled slightly. “He wasn’t too fond of them, either. But the petitioners?”

  “I was getting to that. You see, a bunch of professors thought the way he was terminated was a bit high-handed. You know these university types. So they circulated a petition, protesting the treatment of their friend and colleague, after his years of distinguished service, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine the type of thing. We kept tabs on all the signers for a while, but we think these four were the ringleaders. Most of them haven’t been up to anything lately, but we still keep an eye on them.”

  The lieutenant tapped the top folder thoughtfully. “Arroyo Díaz. Manuel Arroyo Díaz . . . wasn’t he in the law faculty?”

  “Yes, sir!” Hernández blinked at the officer with new respect. “How did you know?”

  Tejada grimaced briefly. “I took one of his classes,” he explained, unwillingly. He did not normally mention his years at the university to his colleagues, and he hoped that Hernández would have the sense to keep quiet about them. “As I recall, his specialty was international law?”

  “That sounds right to me, sir,” Hernández agreed, still looking at the lieutenant as if he had suddenly grown two heads. “Do you know any of the others?”

  Tejada glanced at the names again. “Not offhand. What did they teach?”

  The sergeant frowned for a moment. “Arroyo’s the only lawyer. The others were all in the medical school, I think . . . Or, no, no, wait . . . Fernández was philosophy and letters . . . classics, I think.”

  “Then I wouldn’t know them,” Tejada said, fairly sure that he was speaking the truth. Something about a classics professo
r named Fernández fluttered in the peripheral vision of his mind’s eye, but he was unable to focus on it. He had probably simply seen the name listed in a catalogue at some point. Or else he was thinking of someone else. “Guillermo” didn’t ring a bell, and Fernández was a common surname, after all. He looked at the pile of remaining folders. “What time is the first appointment?”

  Hernández responded to the change in his superior’s tone, “Juan Benítez, fourteen hundred hours, Lieutenant.”

  Tejada checked his watch. “Fine. Send him in when he comes. Dismissed.”

  The sergeant coughed. “Err . . . yes, sir. When he comes, sir? At two?”

  Tejada looked up, surprised. “Yes, that gives me a few hours to go through these, so that I know who I’m seeing when they show up. If I get caught up in something I’ll let you know so you can tell him to wait.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hernández looked embarrassed. “Only . . . well, two o’clock’s lunchtime.”

  The lieutenant raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t schedule the appointment,” he pointed out.

  “Errr . . . no, sir. But, well . . . Captain Rodríguez always said it didn’t hurt them to keep them waiting.”

  It was on the tip of Tejada’s tongue to retort that judging from the state of the files, the captain must have taken long and frequent lunch hours, but he contented himself with replying gently, “And he’s quite right. However, I’m afraid that I’m not as efficient as the captain. I’ve found that I generally fall far enough behind schedule to keep people waiting without going to lunch.”

  Sergeant Hernández swallowed a smile and matched his commanding officer’s gravity. “Understood, Lieutenant. But we’re a quiet little post here. After all,” he grinned suddenly, “this isn’t Madrid.”