Death of a Nationalist Read online

  Tejada inspected their prisoner. The sun was shining full in her face, as brightly as an interrogator’s lamp, and he had a good view. She was thin-faced, and the blue overalls that she wore looked too large for her. They looked like the uniforms of the Red militias, and they were much stained and mended. The wind lifted her hair off her neck and outlined her skull. Hunger and grief had bitten lines into her face but Tejada had considerable experience with both besiegers and besieged, and he guessed her to be in her early twenties. A few years older than Jiménez, and a few years younger than himself. She squinted into the sunset at him, with a familiar look of sullen resignation. “Decent women are at home at this hour,” he said mildly.

  “I had an errand to run.” She spoke calmly.

  “She’s a miliciana, sir,” Jiménez broke in with some excitement. “I’ve heard about them. The Reds have their women fight for them. I’ve heard they’re worse even than the men. And whores too, terrible. They. . . .”

  “Thank you, Guardia,” Tejada interrupted, without taking his eyes from the woman. “I’m interested in this errand, Señorita.” And then, as she attempted to push her bangs back from her eyes. “If you move again, I’ll shoot.”

  She bit her lip, and said nothing.

  “Guardia,” Tejada said, still in the same conversational tone. “Will you please keep her covered?” He waited until Jiménez’s pistol was trained on the woman and then returned his own to its holster. “I’m inclined to agree with my colleague,” he continued, carefully giving the prisoner a wide berth, and then approaching her from behind. “You are a miliciana. Drop that, please,” he added, clamping one of his hands over the hand that held a battered notebook and grabbing the prisoner’s forearm with the other. “Or I’ll break your wrist. Thank you. Now, as I was saying, I don’t think we’re in any doubt as to what you are. But I’d like to know why you were fool enough to come back here after killing a guardia.”

  “I didn’t kill him.” The woman’s voice was firm but she gasped slightly as Tejada pulled her arms behind her back.

  “It’s in your best interest to tell the truth, Señorita.” The sergeant began to twist one arm.

  The woman’s breath hissed between her teeth. “The truth?” she repeated, her voice suddenly contemptuous. “The truth is that I wouldn’t have offered him a glass of water in hell but I didn’t kill him. I wish I had.”

  She would probably break down and tell the truth when they got her back to the post, Tejada thought dispassionately. Of course, it would be too late then. It would not bring the man she had killed back to life. Tejada felt the beginnings of distaste. He had no problem with interrogation for information, but there was no question as to her guilt.

  The woman was carefully obeying his command to stand still. The wind was whipping her ragged hair into a dark halo, and her bangs must be blinding her, but she remained inanimate. Loose strands brushed the sergeant’s face, triggering an unpleasant recollection: in the beginning of the war, a little village had defied the command to surrender and held out for another two days under shelling before its defenders finally ran out of ammunition. Most of the Red troops had been killed in the fighting, and only a handful were left as prisoners, including two women. Tejada had guarded the men until the firing squads were ready for them, and seen to it that they had access to an army chaplain. Once the executions were over, he cleaned up the office in the Guardia Civil post that the Reds had tried to destroy. When he emerged into the autumn sunset, a knot of laughing men had drawn his attention. “Join us, sir?” one of his comrades greeted him.

  He remembered drawing closer and realizing that the men were grouped around one of the women who had been captured. He remembered the way a tangle of bloodstained chestnut hair had fallen across the woman’s face in the evening breeze, obscuring eyes that seemed to stare at nothing, just as the Madrid miliciana’s eyes were probably staring at nothing now. He remembered thinking that she must be in pain, and wondering why she was making no sound. He remembered thinking that she must be unconscious and remembered the moment when he had realized that she was dead, and that the others were raping a corpse. He remembered excusing himself abruptly, and then retching in a deserted alley. Thankfully, he remembered very little else, because he had taken the unprecedented step of getting thoroughly drunk that night.

  Jiménez was still regarding their prisoner with a mixture of disgust and fascination. Tejada knew that the boy was only waiting for orders. “Who did kill him, then?” he asked her. “One of your friends?”

  Viviana felt the beginnings of real terror. They don’t know about Gonzalo, she reminded herself, and then cut off the thought, afraid that they would somehow read her mind. “One of your friends, more likely!” she spat. Anger was good. Anger kept fear at bay. “I’m not friends with murderers!”

  “Not the most convincing of statements,” Tejada said, torn between incredulity and disgust. Disgust—with her youth, her mendacity, and the knowledge of what would happen to her if she was arrested—won out, and he made a quick decision. “We don’t have time to play around.” He released her arms as he spoke, thrusting them upward again with such force that she stumbled forward a step.

  Viviana, preoccupied with keeping her balance and puzzled by his last nonsequitur, hardly noticed as he stepped to one side. She was still working out his meaning when, in her peripheral vision, she caught him raising his arm.

  The echoes of the pistol shot bounced off the darkened buildings, making it sound as if a firing squad had been at work, instead of a lone man. Tejada looked at Jiménez, who was still crouched, pointing his pistol expectantly. “Put that gun away, Guardia. There’s no need for it now.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jiménez shook himself out of a stupor. “It’s just I didn’t think . . . I mean . . . She didn’t even . . . You’re very fast, sir.”

  “Practice,” Tejada said briefly, turning past Viviana’s body to crouch by the murdered man. He looked consideringly at his colleague, wondering if the young man had ever seen a woman tortured, and if he was one of those who would enjoy the sight. “How long have you been in the Guardia, Jiménez?”

  “Almost four months officially, Sergeant. My birthday’s the middle of December. But I was in the youth movement before that, sir. And it’s in the blood. My father was a guardia too, and both my grandfathers.”

  The sergeant looked up at Jiménez and marveled for a moment at the gulf ten years created. Or perhaps it had only been the last three. There was some amusement in his voice when he said, “Suppose you help me turn him over, Jiménez,” but it was kindly amusement.

  The young recruit scrambled to obey, afraid Sergeant Tejada had thought that he was cowardly or slow-witted. This, Jiménez thought, as he heaved the body onto its back, is something to tell Durán and Vásquez. I’ve never seen a man so fast with a pistol. Wait until I tell them. “We don’t have time to play around,” and boom. There you are. He didn’t need me at all. Maybe I can ask him about Toledo on the way back. Wait until they hear I went out on patrol with Tejada Alonso y León.

  “Oh, shit,” said the sergeant. “Oh, shit. Paco!”

  Jiménez’s jaw dropped. He was not surprised that Sergeant Tejada seemed to know the dead man. Jiménez would not have been surprised if the sergeant had suddenly demonstrated a knowledge of Chinese. What surprised him was the sergeant’s tone, and the way Tejada was kneeling, with one hand cupping the dead man’s forehead, like a mother feeling for fever in a small child. “You know him, sir?”

  “Yes.” Tejada stared down at the stiff body. Someone was frying something in oil in one of the nearby houses, and he was tempted to arrest whoever was creating such a stench. “He is Francisco López Pérez.” Then, because Jiménez had obviously meant how do you know him, Tejada elaborated. “I knew him in Toledo.”

  Jiménez thought of a number of things to ask. Since most of them sounded, even to his ears, like the questions of a starstruck adolescent, he resisted the urge to say something like, In ’36, si
r? Was he also a hero of the siege, sir? Was he decorated too, sir? Instead, he said simply, “You’re sure?”

  It was Tejada’s turn to hold words back. There would have been no point in saying, As sure as if he were my brother. You don’t forget a man you shared a bunk with during a tour of hell. You goddamn idiot, I would know Paco if he shaved his eyebrows and dyed his hair purple. “Yes,” he said.

  “Do you know his battalion, sir?” Jiménez asked practically.

  “No.” The sergeant sounded slightly dazed. “No, he was transferred to the north, and we lost touch. I didn’t know he was in Madrid.” He looked down at the body, trying to ignore the bullet hole in its back, and the sprawling limbs. I’m off to the Basque country, buddy. Arriba España, and all that good stuff.See you when the war’s over.

  Jiménez was trying to think of a way to ask the sergeant, tactfully, what they should do about the two corpses in the street when Tejada rose, walked over to the body of the miliciana, and kicked it several times, without speaking. Jiménez coughed.

  “Idiot,” Tejada said, his back still turned. “She didn’t deserve to die like that.”

  “But, sir,” the guardia protested. “If she killed Corporal López—”

  “She deserved something much worse for sneaking up on Paco and shooting him in the back,” Tejada said. He gave the woman’s body a final kick, which dislodged the notebook lying under her.

  “What’s that, sir?” Jiménez asked, more to distract his superior than from any real curiosity. Jiménez was not exactly frightened by the sergeant’s reaction, but he was not at ease either.

  “It’s what she took from his body.” Tejada looked down at the notebook, consciously seeing it for the first time. “It was important enough for her to come back and take it, after he was dead,” he added thoughtfully, and bent to pick it up.

  The sergeant said nothing more, and Jiménez, who felt silly kneeling and waiting for further orders, stood up after a moment. He stepped away from the body of Corporal López, and went to peer over Tejada’s shoulder, at the carefully lettered words on the inside cover of the notebook: PROPERTY OF MARIA ALEJANDRA PALOMINO. “That must have been her name,” said Jiménez, pleased. “Maybe it’s a list of Reds and she killed him to get it back.”

  “I don’t think so.” Amusement was back in Tejada’s voice, but it was a good deal less kindly now. “Unless you think our miliciana was in Señorita Fernández’s second-grade class. Look.” He gestured to the facing page, where someone had worked out a series of arithmetic problems, underneath a somewhat smudged heading.

  “It’s dated in January, sir. It could be a code. For troop movements or something.”

  Tejada reflected that the phrase 324-62=262 might conceivably be a code, but if so it was one of the most subtle in existence. It was hard to believe that a mind capable of that kind of encryption would also have the shaky hand of someone just learning to print. He flipped through the pages of the little book. There were several more pages of arithmetic. Then some writing caught his eye:

  GERONA—Gerona was besieged twenty-one times. The French besieged it in 1809. It risisted the siege for seven months. That is why Gerona is called the Imortel. Gerona is besieged now. Dr. Negrín is in Gerona now. We hope Gerona the Immortel will keep risisting.

  In a different hand, someone had written, “Recopy misspelled words 3x.” Jiménez peered at it. “Do you suppose it could have been a school for adults, sir? I mean for illiterates?”

  Tejada shook his head. “I don’t think so. Look at this one.”

  WHEN I WAS LITTLE—When I was little my father took me to the front. There was no Front thenthan and my father was alive. The front was a big park. We played in the park, and ate ice creem cream.

  “But,” Jiménez hesitated. “I don’t understand. Why would she have a child’s book? And why would she kill your frie—I mean, the corporal—to get it back?”

  Tejada shook his head, in puzzlement rather than negation. “I’m guessing that she was the mother of—” he glanced at the cover again—“Maria Alejandra. But for the rest, I don’t know, Guardia.”

  Jiménez also had become aware of the smell of frying oil. It reminded him that there was less than an hour of daylight left, and that his lunch was a distant memory. “What are we going to do with Corporal López, sir? And the miliciana?”

  Tejada forced himself to turn and look down at the body of his colleague. The murdered man’s limbs were already beginning to stiffen. “Go back to the barracks,” he ordered. “Get two men, and bring a stretcher. We can’t carry him back like this.”

  “Yes, sir. And the Red, sir?”

  Tejada was briefly surprised, and then remembered the decade, or aeon, that separated them. “It’s none of our business. Her people will find her in the morning, I suppose.”

  “Sir.” Jiménez saluted, and vanished into the sunset.

  The sergeant squatted on his heels, next to his fallen comrade, and thought about the past. “See you when the war’s over.” “In six weeks, you mean?” “If you’re going to Madrid, make it three.” Tejada wished he had a cigarette. Something to keep his hands occupied. To keep his mind occupied. He turned over the little notebook again. Why had Paco taken it? And had he been killed for that? Or merely because he wore the uniform of a guardia, and the Reds were so blind in their hatred that they shot men for that alone? Jiménez was foolish to think the notebook was in code, of course, but . . . He turned to the last entry. The date was nearly illegible, partly blotted out by a light brown stain that ran along the top of the page and had splattered slightly onto the bottom. It might have been the 30th or the 31st of March. The subject was once again arithmetic. Nicely neutral, in these last few days, Tejada thought wryly. A set of simple division problems had been copied into the notebook, but only the first problem had been completed. Next to the second were the words, “Do at home.” Tejada squinted at the date again, in the fading light. Today’s date, or yesterday’s. Paco could not have had the book in his possession long then. He stared again at the heading. Señorita Fernández, Leopoldo Alas School, Grade 2. It was ridiculous to imagine a man giving up his life for this notebook. He glanced over at the corpse of the woman and wished that he had questioned her more closely. Now he had nothing except the name of a little girl. And the name of her teacher, of course. And, his mind sharpened suddenly, the address of her school.

  When Guardias Jiménez, Vásquez, and Moscoso returned, bearing a stretcher, they found Tejada alert and waiting for them. He gave them their orders with his usual calm, and the stretcher-bearers were convinced that Jiménez had been dramatizing the sergeant’s shock and grief.

  Tejada was silent until they returned to the barracks. When they had set the remains of Corporal López down in the back hallway designated the infirmary, he and Jiménez went to Lieutenant Ramos to make their report.

  Ramos nodded when they had finished. “Excellent. That’s one less thing to worry about. Stroke of luck that you knew him, Sergeant. Dismissed.”

  The two guardias saluted and turned on their heels. Ramos, who made it a practice to seem very busy with paperwork, did not watch them go. He heard the door slam. Then he heard Tejada cough respectfully. “There is one thing, Lieutenant.”

  Ramos hoped that he had not jumped. The sergeant was a good officer. He’d been promoted quickly on his merits, not because of who his parents were, though of course that might not have hurt. But he sometimes had a nasty habit of sneaking up on people. Ramos looked up, trying to pretend that he had only dismissed Guardia Jiménez, so that he could talk privately with a fellow officer. “Yes, of course, Sergeant,” he agreed. “We still don’t know his unit. But thanks to you, that will be easy to find out.”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t what I meant.” Though Tejada was standing at attention, there was an inquiring quality in his stance. “We still don’t know why he was killed, Lieutenant.”

  “I thought you said the killer was a Red?” The lieutenant’s tone was impatien
t.

  “Yes, but she’d taken a notebook from him that doesn’t make much sense.”

  “So?”

  There was a pause. Then Tejada said. “I’d like to apply for some leave, Lieutenant. Three days. Personal reasons.”

  Ramos’s jaw dropped. “Are you out of your mind, Tejada? I can’t spare you now.”

  “I’m sure that Corporals Torres and Loredo can take my place, sir.”

  Ramos stood, and leaned across the desk. “Listen, Sergeant,” he said quietly. “General Franco is going to announce to the world tomorrow morning that Spain is once more at peace, and Madrid had goddamn well better be at peace tomorrow. No one is going on leave now.”

  For an insane moment, Ramos thought that the sergeant was going to argue. Then Tejada saluted and said quietly, “Yes, sir.”

  “Dismissed.” Ramos sat down again. “Oh, and Tejada?”

  “Lieutenant?”

  “I’ll see about leave in a few days, if I can.”

  Tejada made a sound that might have been a snort. Perhaps of gratitude, perhaps not. “Thank you, Lieutenant. I wanted to go to Toledo, and tell Corporal López’s mother in person.”

  The tone was casual, but the words were so unexpected that Ramos found himself without a reply. Tejada was generally about as sentimental as a mule. But he withdrew before Ramos could collect his wits, or the papers floating gently off his desk.

  That evening Tejada sought out Guardia Moscoso. He found him playing cards with a number of other recruits. They eagerly moved aside to make room for Tejada, and offered to deal him in. He declined, but watched the game for a few rounds, intently inspecting Moscoso’s cards and his play. The young man was flattered by this scrutiny, but unnerved. After ten minutes he mumbled an excuse and threw in his cards. Tejada watched him stand and take a few paces away from the game, then rose and followed him. “I wanted to ask you a personal question, if I may, Guardia.”