‘The Lioness?’ August failed to keep the awe out of his voice.
Jimmy nodded.
August whistled. He’d first heard of La Leona from a Basque soldier he’d befriended during the siege of Bilbao. Famous for both her beauty and her ruthlessness, she was every Republican’s – Spanish or foreign – pin-up. He remembered the saying, if you put La Leona, Franco and a bull all in the same room, she would have the bigger balls. For many she became the shimmering Madonna that appeared over the battlefields, the woman you could fight beside during the day, make love to at night and still respect in the morning. Even August, who ridiculed his fellow soldiers’ obsession, had found himself secretly dreaming of the statuesque black-eyed revolutionary who regularly appeared in grainy black-and-white photographs in the Gaceta de la Republica. La Leona herself had disappeared after the defeat in 1939, rumoured kidnapped and executed by Franco’s men, but she lived on as a myth in the minds of many.
This was the first time August had heard her name since then and now it hung in the room like a small red banner only just unfurled, as tantalising as news of an old lover one still secretly loved.
‘I thought she was from Galicia?’
‘No, her late husband was Gallego but Andere herself came from a village in Gipuzkoa, impossible to get to by road, the perfect hideaway. Her real name was Andere Miren Merikaetxebarria. Tyson, our commander, had been liaising with the exiled Basque government in Paris, both him and the US high command had no illusions. They were well aware of La Leona’s reputation and what that alone could muster in terms of later recruitment should the operation succeed.
‘At the beginning things went fantastically well. La Leona and her men were eager to learn new combat techniques, to handle weaponry they’d never had a chance to see before. We gave them state-of-the-art Ryan FR-1s, Winchester M1 Garands, even a small rocket launcher. It was like Christmas and Los Sanfermines had arrived all at once. But you should have seen Andere. I swear she was one of the bravest soldiers I have ever had the honour to meet. We got close, I mean all of us, out there in that forest, we became like family. Maybe that was a mistake, but those people, it takes so long to win their trust that when you have it, it’s like some great profound victory. Your soul falls in love.’
‘Believe me, I remember.’ August poured another whisky out, filled with a sudden desire to get drunk, to forget. Ignoring him, Jimmy continued.
‘We’d been there about six weeks when I realised there was something more between me and Andere than rifle training. I guess I’d finally met my match.’ Jimmy paused, his voice breaking a little. He stubbed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. ‘Well, better to have met your match late than not at all. For the first time in my lousy murder-filled life I felt like a child, all the cynicism fell away and I stepped out like a friggin’ new born angel, me, trembling at the touch, the very presence of this woman. I’ve never been happier, not before, not since. We had four weeks, August. Those weeks defined my life, I swear.’
‘What happened, Jimmy?’
‘One night the three of us ended up around the camp fire, just me, her and Tyson. The others were drunk, already in their tents. It was nearly the end of the training, we were just awaiting an order from HQ that would have okayed our first hit against Franco. Excitement and hope were running high. It was one of those electric full moons, you know, with the halo circling round the old man like the promise of eternity, one of those nights when everyone starts spilling their history like there’s no tomorrow …’ Just then August noticed the way Jimmy glanced at the chronicle and looked away almost like it pained him to look at it. ‘… I can’t remember exactly how it came up but I remember Tyson starting talking about the local beliefs, about their mountain goddess and the forest spirits. He seemed to know an awful lot about it, talking about some witch trial that had happened near there, centuries before …’
‘Logroño.’
‘That’s right. Tyson talked about an old chronicle that was rumoured to have been written around then, sometime in the early seventeenth century, retracing some illustrious mystic’s journey, like a map that if followed would lead you to a great treasure, but the chronicle had disappeared. Andere had been tight-lipped until then, I knew her to be religious but dismissive of the deeply superstitious people around her. But I could feel her getting tenser and tenser, sitting there, listening to all these fairy tales he was spouting. And I tell you, being in the middle of the forest with that moon staring down at us, and the occasional wolf howling in the distance, it didn’t seem so far-fetched. Then Tyson suddenly starts bragging that he has evidence this chronicle never really existed, that some eighteenth-century French prankster invented it to sell a fake antique, a fake that set up a whole mystery and cult around it, tricking people into fruitless searches for two hundred and fifty years.
‘Andere stared at him, I swear I thought she was going to explode or leap across the fire and strangle the guy. But she announces in this serious voice, like she is defending her people’s belief, that “Las crónicas del alquimista exist”. And that’s all she said. There was this silence afterwards in which me, the idiot musician, cracked a joke but Andere had turned to stone. Tyson laughed and it was like the whole thing was forgotten. Water closing over an iceberg.
‘Only later when we were finally alone and in each other’s arms, did Andere confess that her family had been safeguarding this actual book for centuries. I could hardly believe it, but her terror was real and that scared me – I’d never seen fear in her face before. She told me she didn’t trust Tyson and made me promise I would take the book and safeguard it with my life if anything happened to her and her men.’ Jimmy paused, steadying his trembling hand against the whisky glass. ‘A week later the order finally came from US headquarters. Tyson wouldn’t let me read the cable – instead he tricked me into making a false supply trip back to France over the Pyrenees. While I was gone, he gave the order to close down Operation Lizard and destroy all evidence …’
‘They executed Andere and her men?’ August couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice. Jimmy’s face was now ashen with the memory, his voice tightening with emotion. ‘Ambushed them and shot them firing-squad style. They didn’t stand a chance. They were killed and buried.’ He poured himself another whisky and downed it like a dying man. ‘I’ll never forget the date, October the 31st, 1945. I’ve carried it with me all these years.’ He faltered, near tears then pulled himself together. ‘But what Tyson wasn’t calculating on was me making it back to Irumendi alive. I was lucky. Terrified, the rest of Andere’s family had escaped the massacre and had hid, waiting for Tyson to leave. Izarra, Andere’s sister, found me before I reached camp and told me what happened. At first I just wanted to kill Tyson, but the execution was a direct order from OSS HQ – my own government! What could I do? Gus, I’ve never felt so helpless and so betrayed in my whole life. There was no way I could avenge her murder. Instead I took the chronicle back into the forest, back over to France and into the chaos that was post-war Europe. I became one of the disappeared.
‘Since then, the others involved have all died, all except the commanding officer himself, Tyson. One guy went mad, one theoretically killed himself, another died suddenly of some inexplicable disease and the last was killed in an un believable accident – all of them under thirty, all within four years of the massacre. I’ve been hiding ever since. I’m telling you, it’s only a matter of time before they shut me up in the same way. Now I need you to return the chronicle to Andere’s sister.’
‘I don’t understand, why did the US government change their minds over supporting the Basques as a means to overthrow Franco?’
‘Simple. It was Roosevelt who originally ordered the black op, then after he died and Truman met Stalin at Potsdam the whole thinking on post-war Europe changed. Overnight Stalin and Communism became the new threat. They wanted to destroy the operation before it got politically embarrassing.’
Jimmy took a sip of the whisk
y then doubled over, his eyes watering. One skinny arm shot out as he steadied himself.
‘Easy.’ August helped him down onto the couch, the musician’s frame under his hands painfully gaunt.
‘What happened, Gus?’ Jimmy wheezed, staring up at him with bloodshot eyes. ‘You had the strongest moral compass of all of us – when the rest of us were lost we’d always turn to you. Like a damn lighthouse you were, shining in that almighty shitstorm of a civil war.’
‘C’mon, Jimmy, it wasn’t just the ancient weapons, the slaughter of untrained men, it was the factionalism, all that in-fighting between the Anarchists, the Marxists, the Trotskies, the social democrats and whoever had a drum to beat. The Republican movement cannibalised itself and I lost my youth watching it.’
‘Fuck you, I saved your life and you ain’t even living it,’ Jimmy retorted, softly.
August flinched, he was right.
The musician leaned over and put his hand on August’s arm.
‘Look, I know what you’ll be risking by going back into Franco’s Spain. But the chronicle’s worth it. It has properties you’d understand better than me.’
‘Properties?’
Jimmy looked over at the chronicle. In the lamplight the embossed gold-leafed symbol on the cover seemed to be glowing. ‘It’s like it’s possessed. Oh, I know it has all the history of Andere’s death for me, but it’s something else, something far older, far more haunting. Eight years and every day the presence of the damn thing in my mind seemed to grow, like it was trying to propel me into action. It’s like holding a life and a death in your hands and it’s started to scare me. Sometimes I think it might have something to do with the fact that I am dying now. The book’s got a soul, a story, and it wants that story told now. I’m telling you, Gus, you’re the man to crack it.’
2
The musician lay sleeping on August’s couch, his snore a faint drone that washed in and out of the room. He’d asked August to wake him by midday – Jimmy intended to return to Paris that evening, and it was only when August reassured him that he would wake him on the very hour that Jimmy had finally relaxed enough to fall instantly asleep. As August looked down at his aged face, the skin grey in illness, it was easy to see how fine a veil lay between life and death in the musician. ‘Sleep well, old friend,’ August murmured, after laying an old blanket over him, then walked over to the window. Staring out, he wondered whether the flat was being watched, and the idea unsettled him. He couldn’t afford the surveillance, and it was hard not to feel ambivalent about his old comrade’s unexpected visit. August lifted another cigarette to his mouth then, searching for his Zippo lighter, slipped a hand into his dressing gown pocket and discovered a piece of paper and a single gold and amber earring. He unfolded the paper – on it were a couple of lines written in Russian and framed by quotation marks, with the name ‘Yolanta’ scrawled in English beneath. She must have done it last night, when he was sleeping. There was only a smattering of words he recognised from the little Russian he knew – ‘blood’, ‘river’, ‘my heart’ … it looked like poetry. How Russian to leave a poem after a one-night stand, he thought, wryly wondering if it was worth translating.
On the other side of the room Jimmy stirred in his sleep and turned on his side. August glanced over, thankful when he stayed sleeping, then held the earring up to the light. Suspended in the amber was a tiny insect, its bulbous eyes seeming to stare out at August, the veined filigree of its two tiny wings visible through the smoky gold of the stone. The insect’s drowned flight reminded him of how in some profound way his own existence hung suspended, unexamined and unresolved since Spain, since Charlie’s death. He’d been so successful in burying the past, losing himself in the daily drama of navigating a life, but now Jimmy’s arrival had upended all his meticulous reinvention.
Perturbed, August sat down at the battered campaign desk set under the window and pulled open a drawer to take out a small cardboard box. Inside were a dozen single earrings he’d collected over the past five years, twelve nights of transient intimacy with women he’d made a point of never seeing again. But every one of them had left his bed with the same fragment of history that echoed in all his nightmares – the memory of walking Charlie out into the forest, the terrible small talk that barely veiled August’s own bright fear while his revolver burned in his pocket.
August could only remember so far, to the point where they reached the ravine. The rest was too traumatic to recall. But it had made him a murderer, whether or not an army or a set of beliefs or an order had legitimised such an action. August lived with the belief he had killed his friend. This was what he’d never been able to tell Cecily, nor any other woman he’d truly loved. This is mine – my minotaur trapped in the labyrinth.
He put the letter in the drawer, then the amber earring into the box, and closed the lid. Turning back to the chronicle, August pulled the old brass lamp over and switched it on. Under the yellowish light the age of the book was clearly apparent. The vellum was etched with minute cracks and under the heat of the light bulb it now started to emit a musky sweet smell, almost like a perfume. August lifted it to his face and sniffed. It was like a woman urging him into a dangerous seduction, impossible to resist, but fatal to surrender. He hesitated, then reached into a drawer and pulled out a pair of cotton gloves he always used when handling old documents. After slipping them on he carefully opened the chronicle. As he surveyed the pages he noticed that the last page was missing, torn out – in a hurry, judging from the appearance of the frayed spine. August glanced back through the chronicle searching for some clue as to whether this had been deliberate sabotage. There was none.
The first page was covered in an urgent floral scroll, of notes beside sketches of herbs. Most of the paragraphs had been written in an archaic Spanish but some were in what August guessed was Euskara, the language of the Basques. A flower had been drawn at the top of the first page. A carnation in blood red, the frills of its petals delicately etched. Under it ran several paragraphs in Spanish. Translating as he read, August understood the book to be a seventeenth-century standard text on the medical and spiritual uses of the herbs of the Iberian Peninsula.
The carnation is often red. Red is the colour of blood, of anger and sometimes found in the threads of the brown robe of the Dominicans.
Too bland.
There was something about the prose that was too banal, too obvious – it was almost allegorical in its simplicity.
August lifted up a magnifying glass that he kept on the desk and examined the paper. It appeared to have an uneven thickness, heavier towards the middle. The surface looked waxy. Around him the temperature in the flat dropped another degree, the edges of the window now misting. Absorbed in study, August noticed nothing. He reached into another drawer and pulled out a sheaf of almost translucent paper, a small roller and an inkpad. He placed one piece of paper over a page of the chronicle, making sure the fine paper overlapped the edge slightly to ensure he didn’t damage it. He then inked the roller and, with painstakingly slow strokes – almost caresses – drew the roller over the page, covering the paper. Immediately, tiny ornate handwriting appeared in negative, almost as if a spider, its feet dipped in white, were dancing wildly across the paper, trailing the text behind it.
Running down the left side was a column of paragraphs, and opposite it a picture of a small landscape drawn with almost anatomical detail – it was somewhere between a map and a sketch. He peered closer, both through the magnifying glass and with his naked eye.
Latin. He was sure of it. As a classicist, August found it easy to recognise the letters – even in mirror form. He removed the inked paper, making sure he didn’t get any of the ink onto the original chronicle. Then, after placing a blank page over the inked sheet, he took a pressing. Now he had the reverse image of the writing. It stared up at him – no longer an incomprehensible jumble. Translating the first line, August read out loud, his words blooming like exotic flora against the dullness of the heavy
wooden panelling and yellowing wallpaper of the studio flat:
This is the chronicle of Shimon Ruiz de Luna – Alchemist and Physic of ancient ways – his account of his search of a great treasure – a great mystical gift that could change the future of mankind itself. 7th of November, in the cursed town of Logroño, in the year of our Lord 1610.
The drawing opposite the writing appeared to be that of a cave, the entrance of which looked like a dark mysterious mouth. Small arrows indicated how it was hidden in a forest clearing in a valley surrounded by mountains. A scrawled Christian cross pointed to a holy shrine beside the cave – no doubt an early medieval attempt to Christianise a sacred site that was both ancient and pagan, August noted, familiar with the appropriation of such sites from his studies. The language was fascinating, drenched in arcane references and symbolism, while the personality of the physic – a Shimon Ruiz de Luna – shone out from the descriptions. He appeared a passionate young man convinced that the chronicle was of great importance. A desperate urgency ran through his prose and August had the distinct impression Ruiz de Luna was someone running as well as discovering, someone in great danger.
As August read, the shadowy outline of the alchemist seemed to form in the dim light of the room. Narrow-shouldered, the gaunt angles of his aquiline face catching the light, the eyes burning into August’s back, the ghost leaned forward anxiously, pleading to be heard finally. Sensing the presence, August didn’t dare look up, despite his professed atheism. He felt gripped by an urgency directed by some unseen power.
The Map Page 4