by Walter Ellis
“The pressures will continue wherever he goes – unless it’s so far away and remote as to be impractical. But Spain is the core of the German operation. As you know, they virtually run this place: the press, mining, national security. It’s Spanish Ministers and Spanish officials who are feeling the heat. If he goes to Lisbon, the pressure will only be on to bring him back.”
The Ambassador swivelled slowly in his chair and looked out the window of his office. There were builders working on the façade of the building opposite, reconstructing the architraves of a set of eighteenth century windows. “What about the German Legation? What have they been saying?”
“They tell me only so much, but they’ve made it clear on which side they expect to find me. The Duke’s not the only one on borrowed time.”
“Quite. Which is precisely why you shouldn’t be here now.”
“I realise that. But I didn’t feel I had the luxury of choice.
The Ambassador knuckled his eyes, which were red-rimmed with fatigue. His brow when he removed his hands was furrowed with concern. “Before you go,” he said, “how are you getting on with the main part of your mission? Any joy?”
“Early days, Sir. I’ve only been here five minutes.”
Hoare harrumphed. “Be that as it may, the whole business of Gibraltar and Spanish neutrality is moving rapidly up the Government’s agenda. Hitler’s too, from what we hear. You know what’s at stake. Suffice to say, if we lose Gibraltar we lose everything. Franco knows this. He’s made it clear there’s an auction in progress, with us and the Germans as the bidders. I’m doing everything I can think of to keep us in play. I won’t go into detail, but it’s not pretty. The point is, diplomacy and economic warfare, as we’ve learned to call it, can only achieve so much at a time when everything, greed included, is magnified and appetites grow by what they feed on. Franco‘s basically a provincial bully – prickly, and cunning as a weasel. He grew up in Galicia and wants to end up master of the Mediterranean. Serrano’s worse: twice the brainpower; three times the radicalism; steeped in envy and hatred – a pinchbeck Robespierre who’d stab us in the back quicker than you could say ‘knife.’”
Bramall swallowed. He was not used to this kind of confessional talk from one of His Majesty’s Ambassadors.
“Ordinarily,” Hoare went on, “it wouldn’t matter. Pair of ’em would be nothing more than piss and wind. But today, with France fallen, Italy climbing on the bandwagon and the future of Europe hanging by a thread, they reckon their hour has come at last. We have to stop ‘em, Mr Bramall. We have to stop ‘em in their tracks. Time for you to practice your trade.”
Remembering his lunch with Hasselfeldt, Bramall felt like asking what exactly his trade was. Instead, he said: “I’ll do my best, Sir. And I’m sorry if I’ve spoiled your evening.”
The Ambassador’s face fell. He was like a helium balloon left around after a children’s party that had deflated and fallen behind a sofa. “Oh, that!” he said. “Only doing your job. I presume you can find your own way out.”
Bramall left the embassy by the main door, clutching his passport, hoping to convey the impression to anyone who might be watching that this had been a routine visit and he had nothing to hide. He was chastened by what he had heard. Hoare, after clinging to the upper sections of politics’s slippery pole for more than 20 years, looked and sounded as if he was at the end of his tether. Negotiation was supposed to be his principal gift. It was said he could coax blood from a stone. If he felt that something new was needed – something outside of the ordinary – in order to preserve Gibraltar and keep Britain in the war, then the situation must truly be serious. But was he, Charles Bramall, that extraordinary something? It seemed unlikely.
Back out on the street, he checked his watch. It was almost time for his rendezvous with Romero. To make sure he wasn’t being followed, he downed a caña at a bar on the Gran Via and made his way to the Plaza Dos de Mayo by the most circuitous route he could think of. Doubling back on himself every two streets or so, he checked reflections in shop windows and one occasion removed his jacket, turning it inside out, so that the lining was what showed, and draping it over his shoulder. Only when he felt well and truly lost in the maze of streets north of the Telefónica did he at last begin to relax.
For more than a century, the Plaza Dos de Mayo was the most atmospheric open space in Madrid, famous as the scene of a heroic stand by two Army officers and their supporters against the French colonial occupiers in 1808. But in the aftermath of the civil war, it presented a sorry spectacle. The once-elegant properties, now strung with washing, that surrounded the square were filled to overflowing with impoverished Madrileños and families of refugees from the countryside. There were beggars on the pavement, ranging from five-year-olds to grandmothers dressed all in black. Groups of men, drinking rough wine ladled into glasses from wooden barrels, ogled the various emaciated and disease-ridden prostitutes who inhabited the shadows, plying for trade. Dogs were everywhere. Flea-ridden mutts that whimpered if approached. But one or two, aware of their strength, snarled at anyone who drew too close.
It was intolerably hot and humid when Bramall stepped onto the square. He made to loosen his tie, then realised he had left it off back at the hotel. Something pungent and fetid wafted into his nostrils. The ground was strewn with rotting vegetables and the sewers were obviously blocked. He could see now why aristocrats in past centuries carried bottles of cologne. Picking his way across the cracked and broken flagstones to the monument commemorating the events of 1808, he stood for several minutes beneath a flickering gaslight. To his left, a man pissed against the stone effigy of a resistente, who looked as if he was used to it. More minutes ticked by.
Maybe Romero wouldn’t come. Maybe something had happened to change his mind.
A Spanish voice, both dry and sultry, broke into his reverie. “Looking for a good time?”
He turned his head wearily. “No thanks, Señorita, not this evening.” And then he had to catch his breath. It was Romero, large as life, standing behind him mimicking the predictable sales-patter of a Madrid whore.
He was a few years older than Bramall – tall, maybe six feet-two, with thick, slightly unruly hair and just the beginnings of a beard. A tiny gold earring hung from his right lobe, so that he looked like a gypsy, or a dancer. When he spoke again, it was in his own voice, honed in the Quays of Dublin, looking across the Liffey to Guinness’s brewery. “How are you, Charlie? Pleased to see me?”
“Eddy Romero, as I live and breathe.”
“Which up to now, you seem to be managing just fine. So how’s it hangin’?”
“Not so bad. And you?”
The Dubliner offered an enigmatic smile. “Who knows?” he said. “Fair to middlin’, I’d say. Depends who’s askin’.”
The two men looked at each other, as if trying to work out what to say or do next. It was Romero who once more broke the silence. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go. There’s this bar I know. It’ll take but a minute.”
The walk from the square took them away from Madrid’s public face. Their destination turned out to be a small, anonymous establishment, of the type known locally as a tasca. It had a black porcelain bull in the window. “Here we go,” said Romero. “Bienvenido, Charlie boy. Welcome to your new home from home.”
The interior of the bar was small, dark and smoky. Bramall looked around and took in the half dozen or so customers. Two elderly men played chess by the window. Four other men, in their fifties, talked in low voices over a bottle of cheap wine. The counter, lit by candles, was about six feet long, made from wood worn smooth by generations of elbows and scrubbing cloths.
The barman, a tall, thin fellow, wore a long green apron. He didn’t say anything, but offered the visitor a plate of olives and a slice of dried, fatty ham that he cut sideways from a shrivelled haunch on the counter.
Bramall nod
ded his thanks. He threw some change down on the counter and asked for a packet of cigarettes. What he got back was Ideales – roll-ups made from heavy, black Cuban leaves. Extracting what he needed, he pushed the packet towards Romero, who was squinting at him as if trying to take him in piece by piece. The veteran Brigadista rolled a cigarette almost without looking, his fingers clearly practised in the technique. “What were the chances of this?” he asked.
Bramall shrugged. Romero inclined his head in the direction of a table in the corner. They walked over and sat down. The barman brought a bottle of wine – a decent label, Bramall noticed. He also brought some ham and cheese, which he deposited on a plate in the centre of the table.
“So tell me about it,” Romero said, helping himself to a full glass. “I thought you were back in London.”
“I was. But I got bored.”
“Bored? With a war goin’ on? Why aren’t you in the Army anyway, giving Jerry a jolly good thrashing?”
They both smiled at that.
“I was,” said Bramall. “Not France, though. My particular shambles was in Norway.”
“Ah! Where you came second in a two-horse race. But at least you lived to run away another day.”
“Well, as you can see, I’m here.”
“True enough,” Romero said, taking everything in, missing nothing. As a Dubliner, he felt he could sum up a person just by looking at them. “Question is, what are you doin’ in this neck of the woods? I take it you’re not in the newspaper game any longer.”
Bramall nodded. “Not for the last couple of years. What about you? How did you know I was here?”
A sly smile crossed the older man’s sunken features. “Just keepin’ an eye out, Charlie. You’re in my territory now. You wouldn’t be forgettin’ that now, would you?”
“What are you talking about?”
Romero pushed out his lower lip, looking for a split second like Mussolini. “Don’t be gettin’ yourself all excited. It’s simple enough. I go uptown most days. Talk with old friends, maybe grab a beer at the Café Gijón – you know it?”
“I remember it.”
“Yeah, well on my way there a few days back, I stops by at the British embassy, just to see how the action’s goin’. Know what I’m sayin’? And who do I see walkin’ out the front door, large as life, but my old comrade and fellow Irishman, Charlie Bramall.”
“So why didn’t you say something?”
“I wanted to know what you were up to. So I followed you. That was when I realised I wasn’t the only one on the trail.”
“The German?”
“Right. You saw him off quick enough, and I thought to myself, hey, he can’t be all bad. So here we are – and sure isn’t it all nice and neat and everythin’?”
Bramall’s mind raced as he tried to absorb this sudden glut of information. Could he trust Romero? He wasn’t working for the Government side – that much he was sure of. He had killed too many of them – soldiers, Guardia Civil, party officials – to be on any list but the death list. The piece he wrote about him had described him as “bloodthirsty” and “hell bent on revenge.” But it also labelled him the Republic’s Robin Hood, so maybe – if he’d read it – he wouldn’t feel too badly done by.
“Well, I have to tell you, Eddy,” he said, “it’s a queer thing finding you here like this. A coincidence. And you know what they say about coincidences – there aren’t any. The war ended more than a year ago and, like the Yanks say, the good guys lost. So what could you possibly hope to accomplish by staying on?” He paused as a sudden thought struck him. “Oh, wait, wait. I get it. You’re one of those sharp-shooting fanatics that gets back at the asaltos and the secret police.”
Romero’s mouth twisted into an amused contempt. “You must think I’m some kind of eejit, he said.”
“But you are an eejit. And didn’t you once tell me you were going to Madrid to rip out Fascism’s heart?”
“I said a lot of things.”
“Including that Madrid wouldn’t be safe for any kind of Government until Franco and his goons were shot by firing squad in the Badajoz bullring.”
Badajoz, where Romero’s father was born, was the scene of the one of the worst massacres of the Civil War. More than 1,500 Republican prisoners were machine-gunned to death in the town’s bullring, mainly by Moorish auxiliaries. Others were hacked to pieces with knives or blown part with hand grenades.
“You remember that, do you? Well, changed times. These days I’ve come to see that one man can’t make much of a difference after all. There’s just too many of the buggers, Charlie. All the good fellas are dead and gone, or else living in exile a thousand miles from here.”
Bramall felt a distinct twinge of disappointment. He had imagined Romero making a last stand, defying the odds, calling out to the asaltos to come and get him as he reloaded his revolver. But he was human after all. “So you’ve put revenge on hold, is that it?”
“Given it up, Charlie. Took up booze and religion instead.”
“Religion? Really?”
“It’s not so crazy. There has to be some explanation that makes sense of all this.”
“I suppose.“
Romero refilled their glasses and began to roll another cigarette. He smoked quickly, like he was in a hurry. “Okay,” he began. “My turn. Where do you fit into all this? First off, what are you doin’ workin’ for that prize fool, the Duke of Windsor?”
Bramall couldn’t hide his dismay at this latest evidence of inside information. His reaction seemed to please Romero. “You sound surprised,” he said. “Well don’t be. I asked at the embassy front desk. Turns out your job isn’t exactly a secret. Anyway, I told myself, there has to be a story there. I mean, come on Charlie, you can’t just have said to yourself one mornin’, ‘hey, there’s a war on, I think I’ll sign up as a royal flunky.’ You know what I mean?”
Romero always did have a turn of phrase. Bramall shifted uneasily in his chair. “The thing is,” he said, running a thoughtful hand down the length of his jaw, “the crisis isn’t about Spain now, it’s the whole damn world. And, yes, as you have obviously deduced, there’s more to my present role than meets the eye.”
Romero lit his cigarette and drew a lungful of smoke into his throat. “Go on,” he said, coughing phlegm into his handkerchief. “I’m listenin’.”
There was a pause as Bramall waited for the other man’s chest to settle. He felt uneasy all of a sudden. It was like he was standing above himself, looking down, and he didn’t much like what he saw. Turned out you didn’t have to torture MI6’s Man In Madrid if you wanted to find out what he was up to. All you had to do was offer him a glass of wine. Still, in for a penny, in for a pound. If Romero loathed Franco – which he did – he had to be spitting teeth over Hitler. And there were times when you had to take a chance, go in with both feet. Otherwise you might as well be selling insurance.
He drew a long breath. “It began when I got back from Narvik”
Romero leaned back, his chest heaving. His eyes were ringed with black as if he hadn’t slept for a week.
Over the next five minutes, Bramall recounted the story of how he’d met Braithwaite and the brief he’d given him to stop Spain launching an attack on Gibraltar. He told him about Hasselfeldt and the pressure he was under to prove his Fascist credentials. He described his unlikely role of royal equerry and the danger that the Duke could end up defecting to the Germans. It was cathartic, he realised. It felt good to talk about it all to someone who wasn’t going to conclude every two minutes that he was letting the side down.
Romero waited all the way to the end, until Bramall was obviously done, before offering any comment. “Feelin’ better now?” he wanted to know.
“I am actually.”
“Good. Only the thing is, I seem to be missin’ someth
in’. You have to keep in with the Germans, right? Find out what they’re up to while arrangin’ tea parties for the Duke of Windsor and that crazy woman he’s with – if she is a woman, that is. Don’t let her fool you into thinkin’ she isn’t crazy. I’ve heard stories about that one that’d make your hair curl. But that’s just the start of it. Now you’ve got to convince Franco to reject a deal with Hitler that would restore Gibraltar to Spanish sovereignty – a key policy aim of every leader of this country, Left, Right and Centre, since whoever it was lost it in the first place. Is that it? Would I be any way close?”
Bramall offered a lame shrug by way of reply.
“Right.” Romero drew deeply on his cigarette. “And your ace in the hole is what exactly?”
Bramall laughed. He needed this. “I wish I knew, Eddy.” He reached for the wine bottle. “I’m waiting for something to break. It’s going to be something to do with North Africa. That much I’m sure of. Franco and Serrano are obsessed with getting the French out of Morocco and Oran. The Generalísimo, they tell me, even talks about expanding further south and creating new colonies down in Africa. As you can imagine, that kind of talk goes down like a bad oyster with Vichy. If I could get something hard and fast that would set those two at each other’s throats, then maybe – just maybe – I could get somewhere.”
Outside, from the direction of the square, there was a distant crackle of gunfire. Romero flicked his cigarette end onto the floor. He closed his eyes and pressed the fingers of his right hand against his forehead.
Just one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Let’s assume it all works out like you say. Franco stays neutral, your crowd hold on to Gibraltar and the war goes on. Why should I care? What’s it to me? The Brits and their fuckin’ empire occupied Ireland for 700 years. Left nothing but blood and poverty in their wake. And what’s their record on Spain? When the Fascists staged their coup, what did your precious English do to protect democratic legitimacy? I’ll tell you, Charlie, fuck-all is what they did.” He ran a languid hand across his brow as though lamenting the unique depth of British perfidy. “No,” he resumed. “Let me correct that. They worked with France from 1936 to 1939 to make sure no arms got through to the constitutionally elected government … while all the time the Nazis and the Eyeties were stompin’ all over the place with their heavy artillery and their bombers and their commando units. Even when they begged for help, London and the empire said no. Just looked on, shakin’ their heads.”