The Summer Snow Page 23

  “It’s all right.” Tejada watched his cousin nod gravely and wondered if Felipe guessed that the apology extended to their last conversation fifteen years ago as well. He hoped so. Felipe held out his hand. “Come again, if you have time.”

  Tejada grinned, pleased his apology had been accepted. He was about to agree enthusiastically when Felipe added, “And bring your family. I’m sure Pepín would like to meet his cousin. And I’d like a look at this girl you’ve been hiding up north.”

  Tejada was already nodding, and he felt a certain embarrassment as he said, “I’d love to come, of course. But . . . well, Elena and Toño may be busy. That is, I don’t know if they’ll be able to.”

  Felipe laughed softly, but his voice was sad as he said, “Still true-blue, aren’t you, Carlos? I had the idea from your parents that maybe your wife wasn’t the sort of convent-bred señorita who’d mind visiting Lili. But if you feel that way—”

  “Oh, no, of course not,” Tejada interrupted, flushing because he did feel that way, but he was old enough now to know that he was hurting his cousin’s feelings.

  Felipe sighed. “Would it make you feel better to know that Lili and I are getting married next weekend?”

  Tejada’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking!”

  Felipe frowned. “No. I thought it over after that yelling match with Mother, and I decided it was the best way to protect Lili and the kids in case someone threatened them. And then, after Mother died and I was thinking about her will, I realized that if something happened to me, Nando and Dani would fight tooth and nail to prevent Lili getting anything more than a pittance. So Lili and I talked it over and we agreed. It’s at San Nicolás next Friday, if you’d like to come.”

  “You don’t think that’s a little . . . extreme?” Tejada said. “I mean, your family will have a fit, you know.”

  “I can imagine.” Felipe grinned suddenly. “I was there for some of your mother’s palpitations after your honeymoon. I’m can’t remember whether her favorite adjective for your wife was ‘red’ or ‘scarlet.’”

  “But at least Elena was never a—” Tejada remembered, barely in time, that he intensely disliked it when anyone made comments about his wife, and that Felipe might feel the same way. “—a dancer,” he finished.

  Felipe went still. “I told you before,” he said, “Lili really could dance. She was a dancer and that’s all she was.” Tejada said nothing, but his skepticism showed in his face, and Felipe added, “I’m not saying she was a virgin when we met. She had a past, but so did I. And it’s in the past.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?” Tejada said, more astonished than censorious.

  “Look.” Felipe’s voice was half rueful and half amused. “When Maya was seven months old I went to San Sebastián for two weeks, for a vacation. I’d been there a week when the war broke out, and I couldn’t get back to Granada until the air base was secured. Even then I had to pull a lot of strings to get on a flight as a civilian. Lili didn’t have a phone, and I couldn’t write because the siege had cut off the mail. There were stories about the Reds taking over the Albaicín and bombing the city, and casualties, and God knows what all. I damn near went crazy with worry. I spent Maya’s first birthday in a hotel room by myself, not even knowing if Lili or my baby were still alive, getting drunk. I finally got home in the middle of January, and when Lili opened the door to the apartment and saw me we just walked into each other’s arms and cried. I haven’t spent more than a couple of nights away from her since then. I haven’t been with another woman. I spend a night on the Gran Vía sometimes, and I have trouble falling asleep because she’s not there. Being without her bothers me.”

  “But now that your mother is dead, there’s no one who would come between you,” Tejada said, and then mentally kicked himself for reinforcing Felipe’s motive for murder.

  “And what happens if I’m hit by a streetcar tomorrow?” Felipe said, with no sparkle of laughter in his eyes or voice. “I’ve acknowledged the children, and my will is in her favor, but can you see Pablo Almeida defending Lili’s rights against Nando and Dani?” Tejada hesitated, and Felipe added vehemently, “You go down and take a look at the orphanage on the Cuesta del Chapiz. It looks like something you people use for prisoners. Half the poor brats in there are the children of Reds who are dead or in jail. I’m not taking a chance on my kids ending up in a place like that because some smart-ass lawyer manages to twist things around to imply they aren’t mine.”

  Tejada hesitated, thinking about the lengths he would go to to protect Toño, and then held out his hand to his cousin. “Congratulations,” he said quietly. “We’ll visit, if we have time.”

  Felipe took his cousin’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, Carlito.” His voice was husky, and Tejada was suddenly sure that protecting the children was only an excuse for his marriage to a Gypsy dancer, an excuse Felipe made perhaps even to himself. “It . . . it would mean a lot to Lili if you came again with your Elena.”

  “We’ll try,” Tejada said, thinking about bringing Elena and Toño through the narrow stinking streets, past the urchins— whom Toño would probably want to play with—and the hostile lounging young men.

  He shook hands with his cousin again, opened the courtyard door, and stepped out into the street. As he turned to close the door behind him, he saw his cousin heaving the abandoned washtub onto his shoulder and heading back toward the stairs. Friday afternoon must be Lili’s wash day. Tejada pulled the door shut, regretting his last glimpse of Felipe. His cousin had strained slightly to pick up the washtub, and the dull metal was sure to leave a mark on Felipe’s shirt. He had looked like one of Potes’s more prosperous farmers: poor, but not starving; vigorous, but starting to feel his age and complain a bit of aches and pains in the cold weather.

  For a moment the bare planks of the door transformed themselves into a red curtain before the lieutenant’s eyes, and he remembered being twelve years old and allowed to go out to the theater with Tío Felipe, resplendent in evening dress. He remembered goggling at the inevitably bare-shouldered and beautiful girls, diamonds flashing in throats and ears, and the intense embarrassment of having them kiss him on the cheek as if he were a baby and coo how cute he was, as Felipe laughingly introduced him: “This is my little cousin, Carlos.” And then the vision disappeared, replaced by Lili wiping her hands on her apron, and the lieutenant knew that the debonair young man who had taken him to the theater was lugging a washtub up a flight of dark stairs to a cheap apartment, to a woman who would probably kiss him on the cheek and remind him that he had promised to fix the blinds this weekend.

  Tejada was not sure whether the laughing young dandy or the middle-aged head of a family was the better man. He knew that he would have found a man of Felipe’s age who still chased after chorus girls and went out drinking until dawn both distasteful and faintly ridiculous. But he had loved his big cousin, although it had been a love tinged with disapproval by the end of his adolescence, and he left the Albaicín with the irrational feeling that the Felipe he had once known had died. He looked at his watch, wondering if he had time to stop and see Elena before going back to the post. He wanted to tell someone about his meeting with Felipe and about Felipe’s incredible plan to marry a Gypsy, but telling a member of the Ordoñez family was out of the question, and even telling Sergeant Rivas seemed like a betrayal.

  It was after four. Remembering his phone call to Rivas, he decided to go straight to the post. He did not take the most direct route back because he could not remember Felipe’s exact path through the Albaicín’s winding alleys, but he did not worry about getting lost. To get out of the Albaicín you just had to keep heading downhill. Sooner or later you hit the solid ground and solid citizens of the plain. He reached the post a few minutes after four-thirty and asked to see Rivas.

  The sergeant was not in his office. Tejada waited for a few minutes, and then decided to make good his promise to Elena. He found Captain Vega’s office and asked to see th
e records relating to arrests made in the summer of 1936, explaining that he was looking for information about two specific people. The captain very nearly laughed in his face. “In ’36, Lieutenant? You’ve got to be kidding. Between the militias and the army and overcrowding, half the people who went through here were never processed.”

  Tejada explained that he was fulfilling a request from his wife, and that merely checking whatever files were available would be sufficient. Vega nodded comprehension. “If you want to go through the motions to satisfy her, you’re welcome to. Here, I’ll write an authorization to take to our archivist.”

  Tejada thanked the captain and left with a brief note addressed to Corporal Méndez, instructing the corporal to let Lieutenant Tejada inspect the arrest and transfer records for 1936 and requesting that he give the lieutenant any necessary aid and assistance in locating files. Tejada checked that Rivas was still not back in his office, left a note on his desk, and headed for the archives.

  The archives of the Guardia Civil were located at the seat of the civil government next door. Granada’s municipal government was housed in an impressive mansion with an echoing entrance hall and a flight of marble steps. A dark and narrow stairwell concealed below the curving stairs leading up to the main floor went down to the archives in the basement. Tejada headed into the depths of the building with a reminiscent smile, remembering his youthful curiosity about what happened in the hidden parts of grand public buildings, like lifting a rock in a forest to see all the little creatures wriggling beneath it in the damp leaves.

  Very little seemed to be wriggling beneath the municipal government building. The Guardia’s archives had been placed to one side of the cellar behind a heavy set of swinging doors, which squeaked as he pushed through them. He found himself confronting a man in a corporal’s uniform who was sitting at a small table, working on a crossword puzzle. Behind the table rose wall upon wall of filing cabinets, arrayed in straight rows like an army. The man looked up, and light gleamed off his glasses. He stood. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Corporal Méndez?”

  “Yes?”

  Tejada handed over the captain’s letter, along with his own identity card, and inspected Méndez as he peered at both pieces of paper carefully. The corporal was one of those men whose age is difficult to guess because they look much the same at sixty as they had at thirty. Heavyset and running to fat, Méndez had thinning hair and a neat little mustache. He looked more like an interrogator than an archivist. The impression was dispelled when he spoke. “The summer of ’36, sir? I’m sorry, I doubt I can be very helpful. We did try to keep things filed, but there was so much disorder. . . .” He sighed.

  “I’m looking for information on two people,” Tejada explained. “The first one is Encinas. Cristina Encinas.”

  “Then your best bet is to see if they have dossiers, rather than combing through all the old arrest records. Why don’t we take a look? This way, sir.” Méndez heaved himself to his feet and padded down one of the corridors of filing cabinets with Tejada behind him. “Here we are: García, N. to Evoras.” He pulled out a drawer and began to riffle through the folders. “Guerrero, Gutierrez, Gutierrez . . . Encinas! Encinas Arriaga, Ubaldo, Encinas Rosado, María Isabel, Encinas Zapatero, Osvaldo. . . . I’m afraid those are the only ones. No Cristina.”

  Tejada sighed. “Oh, well. Thanks. The other name is Esteban Beltrán.”

  “We can look him up, too, if you like, sir,” the archivist agreed. “But what sort of information were you looking for about this Cristina?”

  “Anything we have. Which seems to be nothing.”

  “Not necessarily nothing,” Méndez corrected. “She doesn’t have a separate file, but she might be cross-referenced. Do you know her second surname?”

  “No,” Tejada said, wondering how Elena had managed to leave out so basic a piece of information. But the boy she had mentioned was called Baldo, he recalled, and might have been named for his grandfather. So he ventured, “Her father is probably the Encinas Arriaga you mentioned.”

  “Fine, we’ll start there then.” Méndez spoke with unmistakable enthusiasm.

  “Look,” Tejada interrupted. “I haven’t got that much time. Why don’t we check and see if Beltrán is here, and then I can look at his file while you search for information on Cristina.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Méndez hurried toward another filing cabinet, moving with surprising grace for such a big man. Luck was with the lieutenant. Beltrán Monteroso, Esteban, was neatly filed between Barba and Berrios. The file was thick enough to be promising. Leaving the lieutenant at his table, with a pad and the pencil he had been using for the crossword, Corporal Méndez returned to scanning the archives for references to the elusive Cristina.

  Forty minutes later, the lieutenant had read the entire Beltrán file and filled a page with notes. He was just about to seek out Corporal Méndez again when the archivist returned. “Your Cristina is María Cristina Encinas Rosado,” he said, sounding pleased. “Thirty-three years old, MD from the University of Madrid, appointment to the surgical staff at the University of Granada medical center, February 1936.”

  Tejada nodded. “That’s the woman. Any arrest records?”

  The corporal shook his head. “Nothing definite, sir. But she’s currently listed as ‘missing’ in her parents’ files.”

  “Do you think she’s in hiding?” Tejada asked. “Abroad?”

  “It could be,” Méndez sighed. “But a lot of doctors were picked up in the first months of the Movement. We kept records, of course, but the militias—” He clicked his tongue, a prim gesture at odds with his appearance. “Amateurs, you know.”

  “Is there any way to find out more definitely if she’s alive?” Tejada reflected as he spoke that he had so far found out nothing about Cristina that he had not already known.

  Méndez considered. “If she’s in hiding you might find more about her by looking in the files on the bandits’ activities. They need medical attention after their attacks, and we do sometimes try to trace them through medical supplies bought, or doctors we think are sympathetic. A lady doctor might attract enough attention to be put in a report. If she’s abroad you might look at her family’s correspondence and see if they’ve received anything from her. But her death will be hard to confirm.”

  Tejada was tempted to ask where the files regarding bandits’ activities were kept, but a glance at his watch told him that Sergeant Rivas was probably waiting for him. Besides, Méndez will want a reason for undertaking such an extensive search, he thought. And I can tell him what? That my wife was friends with the woman? That’s hardly a good enough excuse for wasting his time. He had opened his mouth to thank the archivist for his help when Méndez said, “This other guy you wanted, what was his name?”

  “Esteban Beltrán Monteroso.”

  “What’s his connection to the lady doctor?”

  “Colleagues. Possibly romantically involved. Disappeared around the same time.”

  “I’ll take a look in his file, too, if you like,” the corporal offered. “I might see some connections there. And maybe look up the hospital’s records and check out their families. There are a few places. Can I get back to you in a day or two?”

  “That would be wonderful,” Tejada said, surprised. “But I don’t want to put you to too much trouble.”

  “I like doing research,” Méndez answered. “And I think I remember Beltrán’s name from somewhere. I’ll see what I can dig up.”

  Tejada offered his heartfelt thanks and returned to Rivas’s office to wait for him, satisfied that he had done his duty to Elena. The sergeant entered within a few minutes. “Good afternoon, Lieutenant,” Rivas saluted. “I received your message. Were your interviews productive?”

  Tejada shrugged. “Yes and no.” Rivas waited in inquiring silence, so he summarized his meeting with Amparo Villalobos and his lunch with Felipe Ordoñez, suppressing his discovery of Felipe’s copies of Lorca, his own momen
tary suspicion that his cousin had been the poet’s lover, and Felipe’s incredible plan to marry a Gypsy. Rivas listened to the lieutenant, looking increasingly depressed.

  “It’s an awfully good motive,” the sergeant said sadly, when Tejada had finished. “And he had access to cyanide, too. This could get very messy.”

  “You don’t think Felipe’s guilty?” Tejada protested, alarmed. Rivas maintained a tactful silence and the lieutenant added, “His motive is thin, and he told me himself about the cyanide. He didn’t have to, and there’s no way we would have known of his access to it otherwise!”

  The sergeant hesitated. Then he squared his shoulders and said, with the air of a man determined to do an unpleasant duty, “His motive is better than anyone else’s: his mother was threatening a woman he was in love with. And if we had investigated and found out about this girl’s connections to a jeweler, his failure to come forward with the information would have looked very suspicious.”

  “Next you’ll be saying it was suspicious that he knew about the open wine,” Tejada snapped.

  He had the satisfaction of seeing Rivas blush and cough. “The wine. Yes. We got the lab analysis today.”

  Something in his tone made the lieutenant look at him sharply. “Don’t tell me?”

  “It’s perfectly healthy, Lieutenant. No one had tampered with it,” Rivas admitted sheepishly.

  “The smelling salts?” Tejada demanded.

  “Good for reviving fainting ladies, sir.” The sergeant made a weak attempt at a joke.

  “The food samples?” Tejada asked with some desperation.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Tejada sighed. “Oh, well. We’ll find out how it was administered eventually. Has Cordero talked?”

  “A little, sir.” Rivas was not noticeably cheered by this reference.

  “Well?”

  “He admits that he was trying to contact his brother-in-law, but he won’t say where the brother-in-law is. He’s still insisting he’s never seen the propaganda before and has no idea how it got there.”