by Ben Pastor
Walton wasn’t listening. Hiding his agitation was difficult, and Chernik was already becoming inquisitive. Stepping away, he said, “The place is done for. Day after tomorrow, we move to the inner sierra.”
“OK. But why not tomorrow?” Chernik called after him.
“Because I said so.” Stepping away would take less effort than keeping Brissot from noticing the state he was in. I won’t fool him, so why try? I’ll admit to some fear if it comes to it, and let the devil take what’s left.
He hadn’t got five steps away from Chernik when he crossed paths with Valentin. Seeing him grin made his defences rise again. “What’s so funny?”
The broken tooth showed like a fang in the gypsy’s laughing mouth. “Mosko’s glasses got broken during the attack – he can’t see shit without them. He took me for Iñaki until Iñaki told him to go to hell from behind!”
Brissot can’t see me. Walton’s need to vent his amusement was obscene under the circumstances, but more than he could resist. Hot damn. He burst out laughing. Scrape it all you want, there’s still enough dirt left in the world for secrets to be hidden away.
TERUEL
Herr Cziffra was having a cup of hot chocolate, the first visible sustenance Bora had seen him take. Lips on the cup’s rim, he listened to the report of Bora’s morning ride as if the heat of the drink were foremost in his mind.
It was raining outside, a tentative rain that would have to try harder to be convincing.
From behind his desk Cziffra said, by way of commentary, “Were you struck on the way to Damascus? Yesterday you were all blunders, and today, paradoxically, you see clearly through the biblical dark glass! Hot chocolate?”
“No, thank you.”
“Everybody has hot chocolate late on Sunday mornings. Fried pastry? No? Oh, very well.” Careful not to fog his glasses, Cziffra took a quick sip. “Let’s hear these hypotheses of yours.”
Bora amused him by asking for a blank sheet of paper and a pencil. “You found my misgivings about Don Millares naive, sir, but admittedly he had plenty of freedom to act, and he was deeply hostile towards Lorca and Soler. How was I to know when I saw him on Calle Nueva that the threat I perceived from him was not aimed at me, but at Captain Mendez Roig?”
“Indeed.” Cziffra gleefully stirred his chocolate. “But you chose Roig over Millares, because he wears a uniform. What else?”
“Well, Roig rode to the sierra as far back as the fifteenth, officially on duty, most likely to check on Lorca’s body. He found the body gone and Lorca’s poems in my room, and may have sensed a connection between the two when I reacted to his presence. Millares can tell you better than I whether he was spying on me whenever I was in Teruel. What alarmed Roig was my plan to see the place where Soler had died, so he made sure he was the one who took me there.”
Cziffra took a dainty bite out of a chocolate-dipped churro. “And you went, despite knowing that he was the murderer?”
“What choice did I have? It would have been dishonourable to pull back. I had to go.” On the sheet of paper, Bora had drawn coin-sized circles connected to a larger one, in which he had written the name “Lorca”. One of the smaller rounds read “Cadena”. Pointing with the pencil to the latter, he said, “On the day I found Lorca’s body, Colonel Serrano observed something to the effect that ‘doubts and solutions begin at home.’ That’s certainly the case here. Walton mentioned that Cadena was afraid: sheltering a relative who was officially dead but still had powerful enemies put him and his family at risk. When I held Soler at gunpoint he admitted there were often arguments in the house, until Cadena and Lorca agreed it was better to part company. At this point, whether or not he knew of Lorca’s connections on the sierra, somehow Cadena fell in with Captain Roig of SIFNE, who was all too familiar with Cadena’s political past. I believe Roig terrified Cadena into action, making him believe that if he helped to secure Lorca’s internment somewhere, any political risk to his family would vanish. Walton had no details, but I suspect it was Roig who tailed Lorca when they met in Valdecebro.”
Seemingly having lost interest in his breakfast, Cziffra set the cup aside and looked at the third circle, which bore Mendez Roig’s name. “We know what ‘internment’ means these days. What else?”
“As far as I can reconstruct, on the evening of the twelfth, Lorca leaves home. He says nothing to Luisa. To Soler, he says he plans to visit the sierra, although there might be an understanding between them that he’ll try to escape Teruel. After all, you offered to have him escorted away from town.”
“Not on that night. You were obsessed with the Ansaldo for a time: where does that come in?”
Bora drew two rectangles at the top of the sheet, writing “A” in one, and “F” in the other.
“The Ansaldo: Cadena hires it because he’s agreed with Roig that he’ll ride with him and Lorca to a place of confinement; he tells his family and the garage that he’s going to Alfambra overnight, a routine trip for him, apparently.”
Bora pointed to the other square. “The Fiat: I first thought the page stripped from the ledger recorded the Ansaldo’s entry. Now I know the repairs to Roig’s Fiat 509 were registered on it. On the fateful night, having induced Lorca to travel with him out of town, Cadena anticipates that after a moment of anguish his cousin will not oppose Roig’s presence. Along the way, he plans to convince his cousin that internment is the best choice, and Roig tells him he will reassure Lorca. So Cadena remains in Teruel until evening, waiting for Lorca in an appointed place.” Bora looked up from the sheet of paper, meeting Cziffra’s bespectacled eyes. “What’s important is to keep Lorca from travelling under your escort. Heartened by his cousin’s presence, he might at first agree to be spirited away.”
Cziffra leaned with his elbows on the desk to see what else Bora was sketching. “So far so good. What then?”
“Well, Roig has a more permanent solution in mind for Lorca. Cadena is a witness and has to be brought along. Roig comes to the appointment in his Fiat, probably driven by an orderly who knows to keep his mouth shut. That’s the small question mark in the circle here. And it’s into the Fiat that they suddenly push Lorca. Roig forces Cadena to drive. There must have been an interesting conversation going on, reassuring in some ways and dreadfully threatening in others. Cadena now fears for his own life as much as for Lorca’s, but there’s nothing he can do. The Fiat takes off with him at the wheel, Lorca seated in front alongside him, and Roig, possibly but not necessarily displaying a weapon, in the back seat. The other driver follows in the Ansaldo.”
“What does not follow is why they’d drive to the sierra, of all places.”
Bora rested his pencil on the zigzag line marked “Sierra” at the lower edge of the paper.
“Faced with internment or worse, Lorca may have pleaded for the alternative of being allowed to disappear on his own and suggested the destination he meant to reach all along. Did Roig deceptively agree, seeing it as the perfect spot to dispose of two corpses? We can only imagine what was going through Antonio’s terrified mind at this point. The two cars reach the lonely bend at the foot of the sierra, where they stop. What happens next is conjecture like the rest, but probable. Roig forsakes all pretence and puts a gun to the back of Lorca’s head. Cadena … well, either he tries to intervene and there’s a scuffle, or he tries to save himself.”
Cziffra stared at the ceiling. “There’s a difference. Which reaction do you subscribe to?”
“I’d like to think he tries to help.”
“Go on.”
“Be that as it may, a shot is fired inside the Fiat and kills Lorca where he is, seated in the front seat. Walton’s informant spoke of a ‘muffled shot’. Blood flows straight down Lorca’s back. Next, Roig orders Cadena to remove the body with the help of his driver. They drag Lorca to the verge of the road, and some confusion ensues.” Bora drew a short arrow from Cadena’s circle. “I think Cadena tries to escape. A second shot is fired at him – the shot in the open air, whose shell
I found – but it misses its mark. Cadena scrambles back to the Fiat and takes off. He doesn’t stop until he reaches Muel, over a hundred and twenty miles away, when he unwisely tries to run through a roadblock.”
“I’m surprised he got that far.”
“Well, he did. The soldiers manning the checkpoint fire against the car, shattering the windshield and wounding Cadena. It must have taken some doing, but as a member of SIFNE Roig manages to retrieve his car, no questions asked. I saw the Fiat being repaired in the public garage in Teruel. Had I known the role it played in all this, I’d have searched it for the bloodstains I didn’t find in the Ansaldo.”
“Roig and his driver were lucky they brought the Ansaldo along, or else they’d have been stuck in the middle of nowhere.” Cziffra fastidiously checked his immaculate clothes for chocolate stains. “I know the rest. They toss Lorca’s belongings in the bushes to stage a robbery. But why undo Lorca’s clothing?”
Bora looked away. “The lieutenant who discovered Soler’s body shared a detail Roig and Serrano left out. Namely that after shooting him in the head, they undid his trousers and fired a bullet into his genitals. A signature, perhaps, or a form of contempt.”
Cziffra pulled the spoon out of his cup and rested it on the saucer, concave side down. “You’re fortunate that Roig didn’t kill you.”
Bora doodled around the central circle. “Something, perhaps overhearing the mulero Walton spoke of, keeps Roig from inflicting the same on Lorca’s body. He leaves in the Ansaldo with his man, and in fact the reading on the odometer is consistent with a round trip to the sierra. Then he has to wait until news comes of Cadena running into one checkpoint or another, so sure that will happen that he doesn’t bother to pursue him. Once he recovers his Fiat, Roig disposes of the ledger page detailing its repairs and the rental of the Ansaldo.”
“Ah, but there’s a fly in the ointment. The mulero mentioned only one car!”
“There’s room off the bend to park a car, even a good-sized Ansaldo; the cane grove screens it from view. At night and with its lights off it’d be invisible to a distant observer. And on the subject of cars, may I know who was supposed to provide the escort for Lorca, and by what means?”
“No.”
“Was it Millares?”
“You should know better than to ask me the same question twice.” Having taken the pencil from Bora’s hand, Cziffra tapped it on the circle bearing Soler’s name. “What else about him?”
“Poor Soler. He was probably shadowed from the day of Lorca’s death. They searched his flat for letters or evidence of his relationship to Lorca. When we met near the huerta, Roig was close enough to see us. The meeting convinced him of two things: that Soler had to die, in case he said anything about Lorca’s (or Cadena’s) fears, and that I was involved in the investigation somehow.”
“Why wouldn’t he have killed both of you there and then?”
“I could say I’m not as easy to kill, Herr Cziffra, but I actually believe Roig feels no innate antipathy towards me.”
“Nor have you directly accused him yet.” Cziffra took a long sip of hot chocolate that steamed up his glasses. “Still, you haven’t answered this: why would Roig kill Lorca and Soler?”
Bora did not answer at once. He folded the sheet of paper, studiously pressing down the crease with his fingernail. “That is something I had to reconstruct piecemeal. Before meeting you yesterday, I returned to the seminary, where I first heard about Soler’s misbehaviour and expulsion. Father Iginio wouldn’t give me the time of day, so I had to go to confession in order to approach someone else there. As luck had it, I found a former Tercio chaplain on the other side of the grid. He was receptive to the extent that he absolved me from sins I’d doubted would be remitted, and saw nothing wrong in telling me that the other boy expelled from the seminary with Soler was called Mendez Roig. According to the chaplain, a teacher at the time, Roig was not charged with any misconduct, only implicated because of his friendship with Soler. Both were sent packing, however.” From the middle point of the crease, Bora again folded the paper, one side at a time, into equal triangles.
Cziffra watched his motions. “Really?”
“Really. Interesting, but of no great use to me until, in the middle of the night, I recalled Walton saying that Lorca had been followed by someone in a uniform. Why couldn’t it have been Roig? And then there was the Fiat 509 without its windshield in the garage. You heard by phone that Cadena was shot in a Fiat 509. That it belonged to Roig only made my conclusions inescapable.”
“That’s circumstantial evidence, not a motive. Unless you infer that Roig had a passionate hatred of Soler and homosexuals in general for causing his dismissal.”
Starting at the centre of the crease, Bora folded the paper down the middle, backward this time, forming two trapezoids which he bent into sharp wing-like shapes.
“The Miraculous Horseman, Soler told me, was in the same vein as other recent plays by Lorca, provocative enough to include same-sex flirtation. Some of the costumes Soler was designing included ‘girlish seminarians’ and ‘mariquitas in uniform’. It may have had nothing to do with Roig, but Roig – who, as other Nationalists in town knew, was aware of and tolerated Lorca’s presence – must have scented the subject of the play and felt personally outraged.”
“There might have been more between the two seminarians than even your priests suspected.”
“You may wish to ask Don Millares about that. He seems much more interested in the subject than I.”
Cziffra reached for the paper plane in Bora’s hand and sent it flying nose-down across the room. “It all goes to prove that even in the Abwehr we may strain at gnats and swallow camels.” Out of his desk he pulled a manila folder marked MENDEZ ROIG, FIRMÍN, which he handed to Bora. “Born in Alcañiz in 1903,” he quoted from memory. “Graduated from the General Military Academy in Toledo in 1925, commissioned as second lieutenant at twenty-two, just in time to join the fight in Morocco against the Riffs. Not a bloody word about his younger days.”
Bora read from the folder. “It does say here that he displays ‘staunch opposition to all forms of left-wing activism and fanatical contempt for sexual deviance’.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not if it means ‘summary execution of prisoners suspected of inversion, as evidenced by incidents in Tétouan and Badajoz’. Lorca’s entire life was an outrage for Roig. Add to it his involvement in left-wing propaganda … The only detail he ignored is that Lorca was working for you. But I’m sure he removed from the body those papers about the defences around Teruel – the ones you concocted to deceive Walton.”
Cziffra simpered. He reached into the same drawer and pulled out a manila folder marked JÍNETE. “Here, I know you’ve been itching to take a look.”
Eagerly Bora opened the file. “Where is the rest of it?”
“The rest of it?”
“There are only two pages in here.”
“That’s all there is.” Dunking the tail end of his churro in his cup, Cziffra took a bite before speaking. “Lorca never worked for me. He probably never would have done, and I certainly would never trust someone like him.”
“But you led me to believe —”
“Nothing. You chose to believe what fit your mindset or served you best. As for saving his life in Granada, well, we have our weaknesses. Murdered poets make for bad public relations.” Cziffra chewed the fried cake, swallowing politely. “Put all you reported in writing and it will join the two pages in the JÍNETE file.”
Bora returned the folders to Cziffra’s desk. “Do I have your support in filing official charges against Captain Mendez Roig?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Am I to seek Colonel Serrano’s, then?”
“Out of the question.”
“Someone must confront Roig with the evidence!”
Cziffra stood behind his desk. A look of annoyance had come upon him, reproachful more than dismissive. “And do what? Prosecute
him for killing Federico García Lorca?”
“I don’t see why not. There’s still rule of law among us.”
“Consider this: you’ll move on to your next military duty, allowing him to assume that you informed Luisa Cadena, so he can vent his anger against her and her children. How irresponsible can you get?” Cziffra seemed suddenly disinclined to give more time to this encounter. “Truly, Lieutenant, you have lost your sense of proportion. You may admire Lorca’s poetry and regret that he came to such a sad end, but don’t forget he was just a queer.”
Bora knew he was raising his voice, and his effort to control it only half-succeeded. “If redress is out of the question, I consider myself at liberty to walk out of here and kill Roig myself.”
Cziffra’s face underwent as much of a transformation as Bora was ever to see in him. Red blotches formed on his cheeks, bright like bruises. “Serrano is right; it’s not just brainless insubordination you’re guilty of. Except that I’m no Spaniard. I don’t take any lip from subordinates, and don’t give a damn about your baronial stock either. Take off your pistol belt and leave it here when you go. If you’re to be this much of a problem, you can forget about working in Intelligence in the future and about glowing performance reports, I assure you. The gun, Bora.”
“Herr Cziffra, I don’t —”
“It is Colonel Cziffra to you, and there’s nothing more to discuss. Your gun. The clip, too.”
Bora went only as far as unlatching his holster. He was sure he looked as mortified as he felt. “I’d rather not turn in my weapon, Colonel.”
Cziffra let him agonize for the better part of a minute, clearly enjoying whatever satisfaction there was to have. He remained deaf to Bora’s pleas, ostentatiously locking away the files. “I don’t need your grovelling apologies, either.”
“Will you then at least bear in mind that Roig knows I’m on to him, and may try to act upon it?”