Franco's Map

by Walter Ellis

  Bramall stuck out his jaw. He was starting to resent the impression Croft had formed of him. “You won’t win that bet,” he said. “When I get back from Madrid, you’re going to take me to dinner, with champagne – Veuve Cliquot – to celebrate my accomplishments. What do you say?”

  Croft rolled his eyes, exposing a faint network of veins, like an electrical circuit map. “You’re on,” he said. “Only you’ll pardon me if I don’t put the order in just yet. For here’s the thing: we don’t fix the timetables, the timetables fix us. Same with priorities: we don’t choose, we get chosen. Once you get the Duke safely out of your hair and into mine, you’ll have all the time you need to sort out Gibraltar – which ain’t going to be easy, I promise you. Until then, snap to it. Know what I’m saying?”

  “Go on.”

  “Looking after the Duke will give you the sort of entrée into Falange and Nazi circles money can’t buy. Spaniards are mad for royalty, and as his equerry you’ll get more than your share of reflected glory. It’ll be a crash course in who’s important and who’s not in downtown Madrid, and it’ll put your face about.”

  Croft was sweating pretty badly now, but he sounded like he could go on forever on this topic. Bramall realised that he probably didn’t get the chance that often to pass on his experience. Then, all of a sudden, he stopped and stared hard at Bramall. “Bloody hell! You’ve got to have worked this out for yourself. I mean, you’re not fucking stupid … are you?”

  Bramall returned the stare. “No,” he said, “I’m not fucking stupid, and I had worked it out. But if the future of this war should happen to turn on whether or not the Duke of fucking Windsor buys his shirts in London or Berlin, then I’m afraid I’ve missed the bloody point.”

  Just for a moment, a smile, or at least the semblance of a smile, crossed Croft’s haggard features. “I can’t argue with that. Unfortunately … “

  “– I know. Ours not to reason why. So let’s just get on, shall we? Any chance of a cup of tea?”

  “Yeah, why not? Always time for a cuppa. You fill the kettle, I’ll light the gas. When are you off?”

  “There’s a plane tonight.”

  “That soon? Right, then, no time to lose. We’ll start with Serrano. What do you know about him? Fuck-all would be par for the course.”

  Madrid, the Ritz Hotel, June 25

  The flight from Lisbon took nearly two hours. As the aircraft, a De Havilland Dragon Rapide, crossed the border at Badajoz, Bramall could make out the peaks of the Sierra de San Pedro, then, the long, fertile valley of the Tajo, stretching as far east as Toledo and Aranjuez, after which the plane veered sharply north for Madrid.

  He hadn’t set foot in Spain since February of the previous year, on the eve of Franco’s final victory. But he could recall the entire experience as if it were a love affair. His last day had been spent in Figueres, north of Barcelona, on his way back to London. He put his fingers to his mouth, remembering how on that bitterly cold afternoon his lips had split on contact as he lit a cigarette. He had drawn the blood down into his throat with the smoke. The sky was too clear for snow to fall, but the temperature in the mountains had plummeted ten degrees, halting the streams, weaving icicles into the wool of the few sheep that had not been butchered and eaten.

  Roads leading in and out of the town were packed with refugees fleeing Franco’s vengeance. Everyone who could escape was doing so. Trucks, motor cars, mule-carts, donkeys laden with sacks were being used to carry the defeated army of the Republic and their families over the high passes to sanctuary in France.

  The flag of the Republic, with its horizontal stripes of red, yellow and purple, fluttered limply from the tower of the Castell de Sant Ferran. Once a recruitment centre for the International Brigades, the ancient fortress was staging the last-ever meeting of the Republican parliament, which had fled north in the face of the deepening chaos in Madrid and the Fall of Barcelona. Only a handful of deputies had turned up for the wake. The rest were already running for their lives. For the last two years, Europe had seemed to turn on the result of the war in Spain. The long, internecine struggle excited passions not just within governments, but among ordinary people. But then the world had moved on, preoccupied with greater fears. Those who slouched over the hills to France were already the forgotten heroes – los olvidados.

  He had watched the drama playing out in front of him as if it were a scene from a particularly bleak grand opera. There was Martínez Barrio, leader of the Cortes, his thin grey hair swept back from his forehead, and President Manuel Azaña, a man whose hold on power had long since disappeared. Both wore heavy camelhair overcoats on top of crumpled suits and ties. Their shoes, of finest Spanish leather, were scuffed and stained. Azaña’s dark, sloping eyes, peering out through gold-rimmed spectacles, registered the deep depression into which he had sunk in recent months. Not far behind was Prime Minister Juan Negrín, once the socialist strongman, whose betrayal by Stalin was a blow from which he would never recover. They were beaten men, shivering in the sub-zero conditions.

  Bramall had shut his eyes, unable to confront the pathos, as members of the Cortes, their breaths ascending like lost souls, broke into a pathetic rendition of the anthem, Himno de Riego.

  Children of El Cid,

  The Mother country

  calls its soldiers to combat.

  Let us swear by her

  To win or die.

  As the last refrains of the anthem died away, the huge, steel-reinforced doors of the fortress had swung shut with a bang that still echoed inside his skull. He remembered tossing the remains of his cigarette onto the frosted cobbles of the courtyard, then noticing there was blood, like lipstick, on the discarded tip – all of him that would remain.

  Except that now he was back.

  The final descent into Madrid was an anti-climax. The sun was so strong that he had to pull down the shade and look away. The plane made a perfect three-point landing and taxied the short distance to the terminal. In the makeshift aerodrome, still battered from the fighting, customs and immigration officials examined his papers and led him straight through to where a car was waiting. The advertisements on the walls were faded and torn, promoting luxury items that hadn’t been common currency in Spain for more than five years. The fact that he held a newly issued diplomatic passport embossed inside with the royal crest actually brought one official to attention. His letter of introduction, signed by the King’s private secretary in London, did not prove necessary, however, and remained in his pocket.

  The drive into the city as night fell was a reminder of what he had missed over the last 18 months. When he had first visited Spain, after Cambridge, rural Castile was depressing enough. Spain was going through a belated industrial revolution, and with the flight of young people to the cities there was less concentration on agriculture and what passed for traditional life. The gentry owned the land and maintained order, often with great cruelty, using the Guardia Civil, the courts, which they controlled, and the Church. A bit like Ireland today, it occurred to him. Even so, the land was tilled and there was food on the tables. Today, central Spain was a dustbowl. There were few animals in pasture, and those there were scrawny, with little meat and certainly no fat on the bone. Many of the fields that ought to have been green with maize were brown and dry. It was like the surface of the Moon.

  A gang of prisoners, with shackles on their ankles, was digging a ditch between two large, open fields. They looked drugged, as if all resistance had been purged from their systems. Their arms rose and fell mechanically, driving in the entrenching spades, then pulling back. Guards with shotguns, wearing broad-brimmed hats, looked on vacantly, occasionally drinking water from leather bottles.

  The car turned off the airport highway into the outskirts of the capital, halting for several minutes to allow a convoy of lorries to pass by, on the sides of which was the slogan, “Sp
ain’s food surplus for the workers of Germany.” Someone obviously still had a sense of humour. He watched a group of women a little back from the road washing clothes in zinc baths outside their front doors. They looked exhausted. Children ran naked between the hovels, pursued by swarms of flies that congregated around the refuse heaps. A pair of vultures was feeding from a pile of rotting refuse, their claws scrabbling, their beaks tearing at a smear of decomposed offal with a liquid snap. A little after, as they reached the suburbs, the dereliction was worse than anything he could remember. Slums were endemic to the major urban centres, which had grown at frightening speed during the manufacturing boom brought on by the Great War. Now, though, Madrid was like Madras. Bombs or shellfire had destroyed many of the 1920s housing blocks. In their place were long rows of huts, made from corrugated iron, between which shallow trenches, gouged out of the mud, drained off water and sewage. Next to a boarded-up butcher’s shop, a donkey drawing a cart loaded with straw relieved itself on the street, sending up a cloud of steam so that a cat, toying with a mouse in the gutter, was startled and ran for cover. Somewhere, a radio played, its crackling report of what sounded like a football match overlaying the monotonous, leaden clamour of an Angelus bell. The prevailing aroma that would once have contained quince and lavender and, here and there, a hint of orange blossom had given way to the stale odour of decay.

  As the car picked its way through the older suburbs, the lack of trees struck a chord in his memory. He cast his mind back. Thousands of trees, some of them hundreds of years old, had been cut down for fuel in the terrible winter of 1937-38, when Franco’s Army, camped outside the city, refused to let goods in or out. Artillery shells landed every couple of minutes, terrorising the population and denying them sleep. Madrileños that winter had suffered the most appalling hardships. It wasn’t only the trees that disappeared: furniture, books, even paintings, were thrown onto fires as people struggled to stay alive in temperatures that each night fell well below freezing. Now, a year on, as his official limousine scrunched through the barrios of Ciudad and Ventas, he noticed how many doors were missing as well. How cold and desperate did you have to be, he wondered, before you would rip your own front door off its hinges and burn it, knowing that next day there would be no door and no fuel either? In fact, he knew the answer. When the Fascists finally shouldered their way in, through the corpses of the Communists and what remained of the Army of the Centre, they were entering a virtual city of the dead.

  The car halted at a junction guarded by a set of traffic lights that had probably last worked in 1936. They had reached the broad Avenida de la Paz and were about to enter the city centre. Downtown Madrid, in spite of some ominous-looking gaps, was a different kind of place. There were beggars all right, mostly from the South by the look of them, but also throngs of “normal” people, no doubt revived after their siesta and looking for somewhere to enjoy dinner and a couple of drinks. He had his views on inequality, but even so, this was more like it. He could feel his spirits start to lift. When the car drew up outside the Ritz, he realised he had worked up quite an appetite. There were bright lights, people laughing, traffic. The dissonance of horns filled the air with brass. He was reminded of the last summer he had spent in England, in 1936, following his return from Buenos Aires. There’d been a brief affair with a girl called Sophie just before the Mosley nonsense. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if in memory of freedom and simpler times, then grabbed his bag and sprang from the car.

  His embassy driver, from the English Midlands, informed him he should report to the Duke as soon as he checked in. It turned out that a suite with private bathroom had been reserved for him on the sixth floor, below the Duke’s no doubt palatial quarters. How long would it be, he wondered, before he was moved to some squalid hostal? Three weeks, he reckoned. In the meantime, there was a telephone in each room, a wireless and a gramophone – the latter, he noted, with a selection of Spanish and American disks. From the window there were views across the Plaza de la Lealtad towards the Retiro.

  He washed his face and hands and combed his hair before making his way back to the lifts. A note pinned to the landing wall informed him that only one of the four lifts permitted access to the royal suite and that to take that he had first to descend to the lobby. He took the stairs. In the ornate reception area, a uniformed guard asked him for his papers. He produced his letter of introduction, written in Spanish as well as English, before being frisked and permitted to enter the reserved car, in which a uniformed attendant stood waiting. Moments later, the fellow stepped out on the sixth floor and directed him towards a set of double doors. Once again he showed his papers, this time to a British official.

  “Aah, Mr Bramall,” said the man, who couldn’t have been more than 25, with startlingly blond hair. “His Royal Highness is expecting you.”

  Inside, draped across an elaborate chaise longue, beneath the steady drone of a ceiling fan, sat the small, immaculately dressed figure of the Duke of Windsor, a gin and tonic in his left hand, an empty cigarette holder in his right. He was certainly handsome, in an arthritic, upper class kind of way, but he seemed to Bramall to have a fatally weak chin. He was talking to someone, evidently a Spaniard, who sat bolt upright on a fancy salon chair.

  Bramall coughed politely and the Duke looked up. “Name’s Bramall, Sir,” he said. “In from London. I’m here as arranged to provide liaison with the Spanish.”

  “Of course, of course. They told me to expect you. Sorry I wasn’t able to give you more notice.” The voice of the former monarch, whose interrupted destiny had been to be, by the grace of God, King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Emperor of India and Defender of the Faith, was light and reedy. “To tell you the truth, Bramall, I’m not quite sure what it is you’re supposed to do for me, but I’ve no doubt you’ll do it awfully well.”

  Bramall bowed ever so slightly, feeling a fraud as well as a fool. “Your Royal Highness,” he said, as if that were a statement in itself.

  “You’re General Bramall’s son, are you not?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “Irish!”

  “Born and bred.”

  “But didn’t stay on after independence. Fled to England, that it?”

  “Not much choice in the matter.”

  “Hmm. That’s what they all say. But you know Spain, I gather.”

  “Yes, sir. I spent a year in Madrid as an undergraduate and covered the war from the Nationalist side for the best part of two years. I speak the language and studied Spanish culture and politics.”

  The Duke wiped a speck of lint from the sleeve of his jacket. “Well, that’s something, I suppose. So what do you have in mind for me?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bramall caught sight of the Duchess, standing in the adjacent bedroom next to a vase of red roses, which immediately made him think of Ribbentrop. He tried to work out how many stems there were. After eleven he got confused and lost count. She was holding a dress up against herself and studying her reflection in a mirror. She had good legs, he would give her that, but her expression, fixed in the glass, was cold as a Narvik winter. He turned away. The Duke, who didn’t appear to have noticed the unintended act of voyeurism directed at his American wife by his newly arrived equerry, looked puzzled.

  “Bramall! Are you listening?”

  “I’m sorry, Sir. Just a bit tired, that’s all.”

  “Well, pay attention, man. I said, what’s next on the agenda?”

  “Oh! Well, the reception at the embassy is just a few days off. There’s a lot to do by way of final preparation. Also, I shall be talking with officials in Madrid about issues of security and protocol that may arise during your stay.”

  From the bedroom, the Duchess offered a smile of the sort that Bramall imagined a female preying mantis would offer to her mate before eating him, then closed the door with her heel.

 
The Duke still didn’t look to have noticed anything. “If you really want to know what’s happening, perhaps you should start with my guest, Don Miguel Primo de Rivera, governor of Madrid – an old friend assigned to me by the Caudillo to see to it that everything is sweetness and light.”

  The Spaniard offered a fractionally raised eyebrow. He reminded Bramall of the maitre d’ at a Brazilian nightclub he’d visited once. “Don Miguel,” he said, once more inclining his head. “An honour.”

  Primo de Rivera, who Croft had assured him was a perfect conduit to Franco but otherwise a waste of space, extended his right hand in such a way as to imply that Bramall should make only brief contact with the ends of his fingers. It was as if he were a medieval bishop and the younger man was required to demonstrate fealty.

  “Señor Bramall,” the Spaniard said, withdrawing his hand like a snake retracting its tongue. “Be assured that His Royal Highness is in safe hands and will receive the fullest protection of our Government.”

  “Of that, Sir, I have no doubt.”

  The Duke sat back on his chaise longue and took from his pocket a gold cigarette case, from which he extracted what looked to Bramall like a Dunhill’s. A sly smile ran across his features. “I am informed, Mr Bramall, that you were once an associate of Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts.”

  Primo de Rivera’s ears pricked up at this.

  “That is true, Sir,” Bramall replied, remembering his training. “But it was several years ago. In my present capacity, I am required to be apolitical.”

  “Is that similar to being asexual?” Primo de Rivera asked, adjusting the line of his trousers across his knees. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  Bramall brought the ends of his fingers together and smiled thinly in a manner that he hoped conveyed his true feelings on the observation. “I wouldn’t presume to say, Sir.”