I was not allowed to see Mauléon at all, for Zubieta insisted on turning off the road to his farm. I am sure that he shrank, for my sake and his own, from entering still another café with Iragui and listening to him discuss frontiers at the top of his voice. As a bon père de famille he was not going to have us disturb his family either. He parked us on the turf with our backs against a walnut tree and came back from his house with a cheese and a litre of much better red.
A kindly man, he had a natural tendency to believe what he was told. But, once his suspicions were aroused, he was much more subtle in his questioning than the heartier Iragui. He agreed that I was a Basque from Vizcaya and not on my home ground; yet surely I had cousins, friends, namesakes in the Pyrenean districts who could act as a starting-point for my enquiries? I had lost or found it inconvenient to show my passport—good! But what other papers had I got? Iragui, too, expected me to have some credentials. He had decided for himself that I was a courier from Spanish exiles to Spanish republicans.
I felt that Zubieta would be friendly to romance and that Iragui would appreciate sheer, fantastic impudence. So I took a chance and produced my British passport. Even if it was no help, I could hardly be arrested merely because I spoke Euzkadi and wanted to cross into Spain.
The exclamations! The astonishment! The laughter! I received a double dose of esteem. As Frenchmen, they had a respect for learning which is unknown among the English; as Basques, a respect for anyone who could master their language, for they all jealously preserve the absurd myth that it is unlearnable. I gave them the simplest possible explanation of my presence: that because of my left-wing opinions I had been expelled from Spain, could not immediately re-enter it and wanted to see my girl.
They went into a huddle, and Zubieta came up with a promising plan. He delivered vegetables to the hotels of the little frontier town of St Étienne de Baigorry and knew it well. From St Étienne, where the French post was, a narrow road wound over the Izpeguy Pass and down to the Spanish post at Errazu. Nineteen kilometres of no-man’s land separated the two.
It was not this hopeful gap between officials which appealed to Zubieta, for the country was so broken and difficult that if you left the road you would only be forced back to it. No, it was the fact that the road was closed for extensive repairs on the Spanish side. So tourists at St Étienne were permitted to drive as far as the top of the Pass and the actual line of the frontier with few formalities, since it was impossible to go any farther.
That, he thought, might be a useful beginning. But I was bound to run into trouble, dressed as I was. I was plainly no tourist. I was a Spaniard with dubious intentions. Hadn’t I any other clothes? Yes, I had, but at Bayonne.
Well then, I must return and put them on. I must go as far as I safely could in the character of a respectable professor with a love of the Pyrenees, change back into my present clothes whenever I had a chance and mingle unobtrusively with the gangs working on the road. At the actual frontier line there was a fixed post or a patrol, but the guards would not be alert since they had nothing to do day after day but smoke.
My two friends argued it out. Iragui boomed that it was an extravagance and that I hadn’t a chance. Zubieta, as the originator of the scheme, insisted that it was child’s play. I promised to send them a postcard to say which of them had been right. Both agreed—to salve their consciences—that if I were caught it could only mean a day or two in gaol. I was not so sure of that. It could well mean gaol until the Livetti case was cleared up. But I liked the plan. It was not too fixed, and lent itself to improvisation.
Iragui got me a free lift into Bayonne, where I recovered my bags from the railway station and spent an unexpected night of comfort. In the morning I put my baggage back in the consigne and took a train to St Étienne, with a pack on my back containing my less respectable clothes.
By eleven I was on the road to the Izpeguy Pass. The guard on duty at the French post looked perfunctorily at the cover of my passport without making any note of it and told me that the road was closed and there were no facilities for entering Spain, but that I could certainly walk as far as the frontier.
I toiled uphill for an hour and a half over the hot and empty tarmac. I had not foreseen how conspicuous I should be. But after all and at last, there was some traffic. Along came a convoy of three cars, bound for a pleasant picnic while looking down the valley into Spain.
The second car, containing only a Belgian holiday-maker, his wife and an appetising basket with bottles poking their necks out of the white cloth, gave me a lift to the top, where I told them I would have a stroll round before returning to St Étienne on foot. The two guards on duty at the border paid no attention to well-fed tourists, and indeed retired to eat their own lunch without bothering to count the numbers who had arrived in the three cars.
It was easy to vanish and cut straight down the hillside to the next bend. In case I met an unexpected patrol I strolled on as my academic self who had cheerfully ignored the frontier, secure in his innocence and the possession of a valid British passport.
I moved cautiously down the zig-zags, keeping close under the slope of the mountain side. The only traffic was a pair of frontier guards on motor-cycles, coming up to relieve their colleagues at the top of the pass. The roar of their engine in second gear gave me ample warning of their approach.
I still could not see the point where the road was closed for repair, since it was now twisting among crags. I should have walked round a corner slap into the middle of the first and highest gang of labourers if they had not chosen that moment to loose off four blasting charges which startled my guilty conscience into near panic.
To spot the exact position of the works was difficult. Where I was the road had been carved out of the hillside, leaving an unclimbable cliff on my left, and on my right a steep slope of debris without any cover. If I slid down that I should undoubtedly appear in full view of the blasting gang. So there was nothing for it but to go back up the road and take to mountaineering.
I arrived eventually at the top of the cliff, if one could call it a top when the damned thing merely leaned a little farther backwards. Traversing that alarming slope of loose gravel, I remembered how Olura at a rather tricky point in our attempted escape had exclaimed that I would call the ascent of Everest a cross-country walk. That, I imagine, is what an Everest climber would call my slope of scree. I was thankful when I reached a pinnacle of honest limestone where at last I could use hands as well as feet.
The flat and blessedly secure top of this rock provided an admirable view of the road. Just round the corner at which I had halted and turned back were two mechanical shovels loading lorries, a bulldozer clearing up the stone loosened by blasting and a gang of a dozen labourers grey with dust.
Farther down the valley was the main depot: huts, parked vehicles and more machinery with the bright colours and blunt, powerful lines which the Spaniards appreciate. For them a thing of purpose should look purposeful; elegance belongs to leisure.
The advanced party of roadworkers was no use to me. My sudden arrival in their midst could only lead to awkward and unanswerable questions. Obviously what I had to do was to reach a point below the main depot and walk innocently back up the road to it. There could not then be any suspicion that I came from France.
I worked out a route. From my pinnacle to the next bend below the gang was one long slide and scramble, most of it dead ground. After that, trees began but seemed to end in nothing rather abruptly. Still, there must be some roundabout way back to the road.
There was, but only one and that a waterfall. It would have been utterly impassable in spring when the snow water probably shot out in an unbroken sheet. As it was, I could work my way down from ledge to ledge and pool to pool, soaked to the skin but preserving my knapsack by throwing it ahead on to dry rock whenever I had to take a shower bath.
I changed under the bridge where the road crossed the stream, and slung my damp roll of clothes into the undergrowth where
it would soon rot away. My outfit bought in Bayonne was too respectable for a worker on the road. That did not matter, for I had decided that it would be fatal to pretend to be anything but a stranger. All the men in the gangs would know each other and their brothers, cousins, aunts and family friends. Mingling with them, as Iragui and Zubieta had hopefully suggested, would lead absolutely nowhere.
I plodded up the road and into the depot, where I waited around until I heard a foreman speaking Euzkadi. I asked if he had any work. He replied that nobody was hired on site; all his men had to be passed by the police, and he ought to report my presence. That gave me an idea. I said I really wanted to go over into France, and asked for his advice as one friend and countryman to another.
‘You’d be a fool,’ he said. ‘You’d get yourself shot at before the next turning.’
He pointed uphill to the frontier guards I had seen earlier, who were now standing uncertainly by their motor-cycles two twists of the road above us.
‘They are waiting for a foreigner,’ he told me, ‘who was spotted coming down on foot. You can’t move on this road, day or night, without being questioned. My advice to you, son, is to get on back. There’s a truck going down to Elizondo in a moment.’
‘The driver won’t say anything when we pass the control post?’ I asked anxiously.
‘No. Why should he? How was it they let you through?’
‘They didn’t happen to see me,’ I replied with a grin.
‘Jesus! Those chaps think they can take a holiday now that there aren’t any cars! And up here where we have to work, it’s just papers, papers, papers. Where do you come from?’
‘Eibar.’
He took the trouble to check that, or perhaps he only wanted to gossip. Either way I could content him, for I knew several worthies of the town personally and a lot more by name. So he put me in the back of an empty lorry along with a poor devil who had had a couple of toes smashed by a rock, and down we went into Spain with nothing more than a wave-on from a sergeant at the control post who was digging potatoes.
So that was unexpectedly that. A loose, imaginative plan had cohered as it commonly does, whether in scholarship or commerce, into a solid with its own successful momentum. In order to get clear of the frontier before nightfall I walked on to the limit of my legs’ endurance, following a tributary of the Bidasoa westwards and sleeping in the woods at the foot of Mount Eracurri.
The dew dried quickly, for it was one of those glorious mornings when the Basque country is motionless in Mediterranean heat while preserving the green of southern England. I crossed the watershed into the valley of the Urumea and struck down into a village where the morning’s bread had just arrived at the tavern. I had tasted nothing but water for nearly twenty-four hours, and was ravenously hungry.
Full of eggs and red sausage, my aim undetermined, yet relieved for the moment of all sense of urgency and anxiety, I accepted the rest offered by the bank of the Urumea. I put my back against a rock with a twisted oak on it, peaceful as a Chinese painting, and began to think what on earth I should do with such liberty. Free from the hothouse of plots and interrogations, free—intellectually though never emotionally—from the beloved complications of Olura, I could at last draw breath and contemplate the past weeks. I was no longer trapped inside a ring. I was outside it, with time to see what it was made of.
Till then I had not begun to think clearly about Livetti. For one thing, I didn’t like thinking about him at all. It was not that I cared what his relations with Olura had been—blindly indiscreet, if I knew her. She had mentioned trouble with the Press over some Negro dancer in Rome, and Livetti might well have started to persecute her there. No, my aversion from that poor photographer was simply due to puppets, quarries, barrows, the sea and the smell of the boot which would sometimes return to me even in the open air.
In self-protection I had been forced to concentrate on the motive for killing Livetti. But that was futile. I had not the facts and could not know. Even the police, with all their evidence filed, collated and accessible, were reduced to wild guesses. The Police Magistrate considered it very possible that Livetti had been employed by Mgwana to get rid of Sauche. Gonzalez preferred the Cloud Cuckooland of Prebendary Flanders, the Group and London Anarchists.
So leave murder alone and consider Livetti! By a photograph or blackmail he intended to exploit Olura and Mgwana. A private enterprise fully in keeping with his character. Need one look any farther? Yes—since the trio of Sauche, Vigny and Duyker knew of his death and must have been responsible for his presence in the hotel.
How could they be sure that Mgwana would have no security guard? Well, cautious enquiries could have revealed that the Spanish Government had no knowledge of the visit. But Governments act quickly and unexpected. Sauche couldn’t be dead certain until Mgwana was nearly due to arrive.
Therefore no long-term, complicated plot was possible at all. It was unthinkable that experienced conspirators like Vigny and Sauche should plan a murder without knowing what the security set-up was going to be. It was as strong a point in their favour as the alibis.
Then tell me, clear light, clean air, Urumea on your way to the sea, doesn’t the employment of Livetti look like rapid and able improvisation? Just a bit of foul, evil-intentioned mischief which Vigny had conceived after the third brandy and put into practice at once! He knew all about Livetti’s speciality and could have whistled him up in a matter of hours.
The more I looked at this theory, the more I fancied it. A little block of highly probable fact was standing on its own legs like a conjectured word in an undecipherable inscription. And it asked an intelligible question. If Vigny planted Livetti in the hotel in a hurry, whom did he get to do his business with Araña? How could he lay his hands instantly on someone who spoke French and Spanish and had no easily traceable connection with Sauche and himself?
That looked like a good starting-point for me. With all my local knowledge I ought to be able to uncover the identity of Araña’s man-in-a-café. He was not an inhabitant of the district, or the police would have routed him out. But if he was not, he must have talked to someone at Maya familiar enough with the Hostal and its characters to recommend that unfortunate little crook.
Maya. The inn. Elena insisting that she knew Olura was innocent. When Olura reported that, I had taken it as the usual sort of interchange between two emotional women: in fact, mere politeness. But it was strong for mere politeness. Suppose the village did know.
Well, it would certainly keep its knowledge to itself. You wouldn’t choose to land yourself in weeks or months of police interrogation just for the sake of a quarrel between foreigners. And a corollary to that. It would not be only the village which knew; it would be all the elders and the cousins and the in-laws in the immediate vicinity. Talk about the Mafia! The speakers of Euzkadi form an equally powerful secret society, never criminal but marvellously discreet and effective.
The Urumea had decided my route for me. I would walk to the outskirts of Amorebieta and telephone for a taxi. Echeverría must have made it his business to uncover as much of the story as he could, since he was indirectly concerned in it. While he might not say all he knew, I was sure he would be much too amused by my acquittal and reappearance to give me away.
I took the road to Tolosa, where Olura, sleepy, adorable and with a blistered heel which she had forgotten by midnight, had been dragged by me on to the last train. Nowhere had I any fear of recognition. The police were not looking for me, and I had few acquaintances in the province of Guipuzcoa. My dyed hair, bristly face and scruffy appearance were sufficient disguise to back up the native speech. When I stopped to talk by the wayside or entered a tavern to eat and drink I was easily able to account for myself.
It took me the best part of three days to arrive within striking distance of Amorebieta, for I had to give Eibar a wide berth and keep well to the south of all districts where I might be hailed in a loud and astonished voice before I could protest. Calling Echeve
rría was rather more tricky than I had foreseen, since village telephones are always very public, and I was a most unlikely person to be sending for a taxi. I had to address him as cousin and merely say that I was on the main road if he happened to be passing. After blundering about at the other end of the line and demanding what cousin, he at last recognised my voice and shouted that he would drive out at once to fetch me.
He did not recognise me when I waved to him from the wayside—a heartening sign that I fitted into my environment—and was well away down the road to San Sebastian before he stamped on the brake. I came up to find him still exchanging remarks with the lorry driver who had been on his tail.
‘Anywhere that’s quiet,’ I said as soon as I had slid into the seat alongside him, ‘and no waiting by the side of a road.’
Echeverría, though somewhat blunt, was always an interested conspirator. He ran back to a new, plaster-and-paint café put up to catch the motor trade by an Aragonese who did not speak a word of Euzkadi. There he could park the taxi without traffic police taking an interest.
He never drank during the day. When we had settled down with the singularly vile soft drinks of Spain, I said I hoped he had had no serious trouble with the Law.
‘Not the slightest,’ he answered, ‘and no thanks to you! I just kept at it with that Gonzalez that you’d asked me to park where I could block the black Seat and pick up the very distinguised chief of the cannibals. And as you were a friend I did.’
‘He took that?’
‘He had to. It was the truth. He threatened me with losing my licence, so I told him to go to hell. If you have escaped, Ardower, you’d better get over the frontier. I’d know you anywhere.’
I gave him my story: that I had not escaped, but had been turned loose and come straight back again. He made a noise of contempt and reminded me that all women were the same after twenty years. I agreed that his hypothesis was tenable, but that, as a man of learning, I could not accept it without the test of experience. He replied that I was an oddly shaped organ of generation and that if I were really his cousin he’d clear right out of Vizcaya and set up a garage for Madrid homosexuals. Meanwhile what could he do for me?
Olura Page 16