by Shaun Herron
Mauro, now. Mauro was vulnerable. He hadn’t agreed with his Fifth Assembly brothers about the kidnapping. He had indeed subverted it. And there is his family.
“I saw your father the other day, Mauro,” he said.
“How is he?”
That was strange; the tone of the question. It was almost indifferent. It was very strange. “Not very well. And tired. Very, very tired.”
“How is my mother?”
That was different. He heard the anxiety clearly. “Broken.” He watched the effect.
It was visible. “She won’t be strong enough,” Mauro said desolately.
“For what?”
“My thirty years among the rats and the shit.”
Basa couldn’t decide whether it was a calculated counterattack, or self-pity. “It needn’t be thirty years,” he said, preparing his way.
“When will my parents be able to see me?”
It was an inopportune question for Basa. “They won’t.” It was, again, a bending of his judgment to reach a friend’s son. “I have been ordered not to let them visit you.”
“But we’re allowed to have visitors. The law …” Yes, the law. Who keeps it? Not the lawmakers or the law enforcers.
“I know. The law allows it. The authorities don’t, in your case. Don’t push me on it, Mauro—not yet.”
“I’m in your prison, colonel, not you. What are you asking me? That for your comfort with your bosses, I shouldn’t ask the State to keep its own laws?” What was there to lose? Why mind your tongue?
“That is what I’m asking you. For the present. Allow your friends to help you. In turn, help them.”
“Who are my friends, colonel?”
“The Señora Anson is one of them. She is going to speak for you at your trial. She has influential friends and is in touch with them. What she asks for you is not thirty years, not even ten—she is asking them for a maximum of three years on all counts. Give her a chance. Give me a chance. I’m your friend, as your father is mine.” I should have you in irons, he thought. I should have the switch on your back, you stupid bastard. But I need you to talk. I need a success. I need to strike back at them myself—with a spectacular success. “Help me, Mauro,” he said stonily.
“How? I’m locked up in a sealed compartment, night and day.”
“Listen to this.” Basa pressed the play button of his tape recorder and Mauro heard it out. “That man,” Basa said, “the one who threatened you with the knives unless you went through with this kidnapping, who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mauro.”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s a professional?”
“Yes. I think so.” What I know about him wouldn’t hurt a lame mouse.
“You accused him of being safe, across the frontier. Where? Pau?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything.”
“Mauro,” Basa leaned over him. “I want that man. If you get a long term, it will kill your mother. Help her. Show more compassion for her.”
“I don’t know anything. Don’t you believe I’m thinking about my mother?”
“Who recruited you to the Fifth Assembly?”
Pureza. She scraped acquaintance at a medical faculty dance. Where is Pureza? Where are the others? Did they kill Abril? Pureza was dim in his emotions now. There had been too much emotion. But he would not turn her in.
“You knew all about it,” he said. “You had the place bugged.”
“Mieza had your club key for hours. Yes, we knew all about it.”
“Why didn’t you stop it?”
Basa hesitated. He had told this useless juvenile far too much. But maybe it was the way to get what he knew. He seemed to be reasonably relaxed and almost friendly. “It was decided to let it go on and take the lot of you in the act.”
“Señora Anson knew?”
“Yes.”
“She is very brave.” He smiled a little. He probably saved the bitch’s life and she turned him in in the act.
“She says the same about you and your three friends. She will say so at your trial. Who recruited you?”
“Why would she do it? She must have known she could be killed. Did you make her do it?”
“There was no need to make her. She’s a gambler. She puts small horses at seven-meter fences.”
“The Spanish disease?”
“Isn’t that always it, Mauro? Who recruited you?”
He was thinking about Abril. He was remembering Abril. On that tape. It brought back to him the bile Abril stirred in him that night. Abril at the carpark at La Concha. Abril strutting at the señor’s farmhouse. Abril’s sneering professional proletarianism. Abril on raping the wives of rich men. Abril on the three of them. Abril angry. Abril jeering. Abril threatening. Abril solid with the nameless Boar in the club. Abril’s lust for blood. Where was Abril?
“Who recruited you, Mauro?”
Did the Guards have Abril? No. They were ready for every contingency. When Abril and that other man reached the holding-house, the Civil Guard were there. They knew everything—except that Señora Anson wouldn’t be there. When they saw she wasn’t there? Abril and that other gunman would fight. The place must have been alive with Guards. Abril was dead. There was no other possible conclusion. Abril would fight.
“Who recruited you, Mauro?”
He didn’t hate Abril. They had even been friends of a sort. If Abril were alive … Abril couldn’t be alive. He hated too much. Their blood looks just like ours on the street, he said that night at the club. Abril wanted to see it run in the streets. He wouldn’t be taken alive.
“Who recruited you, Mauro?”
“Abril.”
“How? Where? Tell me, Mauro.”
He tried to think clearly, quickly. “I met him Sunday-walking in the mountains. It was very casual. We drifted … you know …? Over a period of time. We talked … you know? We became friends.”
“You weren’t allowed to know much, were you? You weren’t insiders?” Make him resentful now.
“No. We got operational orders.”
“Who gave them?”
“I don’t know. They came through Abril. He was our link.”
“He knew the man on the tape?”
“Yes. There were two of them there that night and a boy on the street, watching. The second man didn’t speak at all.” Stuff like this tells them nothing.
“Describe them all.”
“I only saw the boy in the dark.” But he was back in the club, seeing the other two. He described them. “Abril had no family, I think. Where was he buried?” he asked. A man would at least be given a decent burial. This was a Catholic country, wasn’t it?
“Buried?”
“Yes. Abril. He must have fought at the holding-house. Abril wouldn’t let them take him. The Civil Guards were waiting, weren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Abril hated all of you.” He said it without judgment. “He wanted to fight.”
“He didn’t.”
“He what?”
“The man with him tried. Abril dropped his gun when the man with him was hit in the shoulder.”
“Abril …?” He was draining away. His head was light.
“What?”
“Dead?”
“No. He’s here.”
He was dizzy, holding the seat of his chair to keep from falling off.
“Who was Abril’s link, Mauro?”
Mauro said nothing. Basa was hazy in his sight.
“Are you all right?”
There was no reply. There was no reply to any more of Basa’s questions. “I think he’s sick,” Basa said to the captain when he came with the guards to return Mauro to his cell. “Look after him well and bring the prisoner Abril in here.”
Abril stood like stone while the tape ran in his ears for the third time.
“Who is he, Abril?”
Abril stared.
“We know a lot about you, Abril. Who
is he? Where is he? I can sit for hours, waiting. You’ll stand.”
The room was silent until one o’clock. Basa called the captain and the guards.
“Take his shoes and socks,” he said. “Put him on the wall at full stretch, and turn off the heat in his cell. No breakfast. No water. I’m going to bed. I want him here again at noon tomorrow.”
At noon Abril came slowly. The pain in his naked feet made it impossible for him to walk upright. He walked as he could, bent forward, on the balls of his feet, hirpling, trying to keep his agony from his face; and could not.
“Who is he, Abril?”
Nothing.
He stood for an hour, his feet slowly warming, the movement of blood in them forcing a new agony, the congealed blood on his wrists matting the dark hair, his sleepwalker’s eyes redder than ever before.
“Put him back,” Basa said. “On the wall. No heat, no bucket, no food. I’ll see him again at eight tonight. By God, I will have something from him.”
But he said it desperately, like a man crying for rehabilitation among his own kind.
It was eight o’clock.
“It’s time,” Ugalde said to Maria-Angeles. “They’re at Paco’s.”
Criado’s meat shop was at the low end of the village. They went out their own back door and down the hill, behind the houses. Criado’s back door was not barred. “Paco is good,” Ugalde whispered.
He knew the geography of the house. Criado was accident-prone. He had a finger missing on his left hand and the tip of the thumb on his right hand, and most bullfighters had fewer scars on their thighs. He thought a lot and deeply, often when he was flashing a sharp knife or swinging a meat cleaver. Ugalde expected to see, at least once every year, Señora Criado flying up the hill to his house, crying blood on the floor. His little torch picked out the steel kettles, the cubed meat piled in them; the small one and the large one, side by side on the scarred butcher table. They were ready for collection in the morning.
“Hold the light for me.” Maria-Angeles held it while Ugalde sprinkled half the contents of a phial over the meat; tiny pink crystals of phenolphthalein. “Sixty grams for thirty-five men—twenty-five in the Summerhouse, ten in the barracks. Let’s get the hard work done.”
They cast their outer coats, rolled their sleeves almost to the shoulders and went to work on the meat, mixing and kneading, dissolving the pink crystals till they sank out of sight, as red as the meat. Neither of them spoke except when Ugalde checked their progress by the light of the torch and said either, “More,” or “A little water.”
It was an hour before he was satisfied.
“Is there enough?” Maria-Angeles said.
“God forgive me, I’ll make sure,” he said and sprinkled the rest of the phial of crystals, and they began again. “I hope to God it doesn’t kill any of them, but they’ll all be hospital cases,” he said when ten minutes before the two hours were up, they stepped out into the night and walked on down the hill, turned into the street and started uphill for home.
A car came into the street, around the narrow elbow at the Bar Ibañeta. “Police,” Ugalde said and steered her to the side of the street.
The car came slowly, carefully in the narrow way, and they stood to let it pass.
A man lay back in the back seat, his head resting. The car passed and they walked on.
“That was Julio,” he said.
They were almost at their front door before she spoke. “I suppose that’s the last time you’ll ever see him,” she said. “Are you sorry?”
“Yes. I’m sorry,” he said. They scrubbed the meat juices from their arms, helping one another by the kitchen sink.
“Did he see you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
They went to their room. “I suppose we should both have a bath,” she said. “It may be a while …”
“We ought to.”
“I’ll go first. Come and talk to me.”
He sat on the lid of the soiled clothes basket. “We don’t seem to have much to talk about,” she said.
“But a lot to think about. Half a lifetime in this house.”
“Were we happy here, Dion?”
“Happy? I don’t know what that means. We loved one another, and Christina, and Mauro, and they loved us. We survived where hundreds of thousands didn’t. It was often lonely but we were careful and content with what we had. If that’s happiness, we were happy. It was enough for me. Now we’ll be lonely again.”
“Yes.”
“But we’ll survive again together.”
“Yes.”
When they went to their room he pried up a floorboard and took out a gun wrapped in greasy oilskin. “Just in case,” he said.
“I know.”
He cleaned and loaded the gun, put extra shells in a drawer beside it, and got into bed.
“Will we pack anything?”
“Nothing. Just what money we have.”
“Did he give any sign? Julio, I mean.”
“He looked and moved his hand. I moved mine.”
“Dion.”
“Yes.”
“You never made love to me in any bed but this one in all our life together.”
“Maria, Maria, Maria,” he cried and gathered her in his arms.
It was two o’clock in the morning.
He had seen patients in the surgery all morning on Thursday and gone about on his house calls in the afternoon. The day and the doctor looked normal to his patients and neighbors. To the doctor and his wife it had the quality of a fantasy; figures moved, people spoke, as if behind glass; they were not in the Ugaldes’ world. They were without substance.
“It’s time to go, my love,” he said when the clock in the kitchen said two in the morning. His knife was in its sheath between his shoulder blades; his gun was in his pocket; and their money. “You’ll see him soon,” he said.
It was snowing heavily. It had been snowing since the afternoon.
They glanced at nothing as they left the house and closed the door, leaving it unlocked. Everything in the place was a fragment of their past, fleshed over by love and care and memories. What did it matter? These they took with them. The bare bones to which the flesh had clung would be auctioned and become meaningless. They thought. But they did not believe it. So they looked at nothing and closed the door with their backs to it.
They looked an oddly harmless pair, walking up the street toward the Bar Ibañeta. She took his arm and they walked in step, a middle-sized couple, warmly bundled in sheepskin-lined coats, woollen caps pulled down over their ears, warm boots; walking in the middle of the narrow street, featureless and obscured behind the snow-screen that fell about them. A couple coming home; or two insomniacs, walking themselves to the edge of sleep. They turned right at the Bar Ibañeta, down the lane to the narrow guardless bridge that crossed the river. With solicitude, Ugalde helped her across its slippery surface. Like apparitions they crossed the fields below the monastery, circled the floodlit compound of the Summerhouse well out of the overspill of the glare and walked into the trees at the foot of the wooded hill behind the prison.
Then they were transformed. Maria dropped behind Ugalde, into his tracks. They scrambled up the hill, among the trees, urgently. She followed him as he veered right into a small paddock of deadfall. They sat down, obscured by the dead and fallen trees, Ugalde with his back to the wood, Maria between his bent legs. He put his arms about her.
“We wait,” he said. “No talk.”
The snow whispered. It fell in noisy lumps from the overloaded branches, bringing down more snow in rustling streams. Below, the guards paced in the compound on their appointed rounds, two by two, always in sight of one another before and behind. Now and then a solid lump of snow fell with a plop into the snow on the ground.
Maria watched the guards in the compound. Ugalde sat with his eyes closed, separating sounds.
He said, suddenly, “I can hear your gun, Carlos, coming round the tree.”
&nbs
p; “You have good ears,” Carlos said.
“I have listened a lot lately, sitting here.”
“They are not going down.”
“They will. Soon. Who is up there behind you?”
“Paco. Urbina. Two others.”
“Who?”
“You needn’t know. Rof and two men are waiting on this side of the crown of Cypress Hill. For the medical officer. They have a breakdown in the middle of the road, just past the graveyard gates. I hope this medical officer isn’t superstitious. Who is that with you, doctor?”
“My wife.”
“Why?”
“To greet her son. Why else.”
“This is not work for women.”
“It is for this woman, Carlos,” Maria-Angeles said. “Don’t be an old she-goat yourself.”
“You will regret this. You should not have come, señora.”
“Would you like us both to go, Carlos?” Ugalde asked irritably.
“No.”
“Then leave it.”
He could hear Paco and the men with him, settling in the snow with their backs to trees. The guards in the compound paced out their rounds. The wind stirred a little and snow streamed down. The branches creaked and the falling snow whispered softly; and they watched.
“Look, Carlos.”
One of the guards had dropped his gun and was clutching at his stomach. He went down on his knees, bent double, his head in the snow; he rose and staggered about and started toward the main prison door. His partner picked up his gun and hurried after him, then convulsed suddenly himself and went down; scrambled to his feet, rambled in a devious line, went down again and reached the door on his knees. The cries of the two men rose over the snow.
“They are suffering, Carlos. I increased the dose. I hope to God I didn’t give them too much.”
“What have they got?”
“Diarrhea. Terrible stomach spasms. Fierce pain. When you get inside that place, the stench of human excrement will make you vomit. Men can die from a dose of phenolphthalein. They’ll all end up in hospital. I hope they all come out alive.” He said again, “I gave them too much, I think. I wanted to be sure.”
“Too much of what?”
“I said phenolphthalein. They’re going down inside now, like shot pigeons. Somebody will have phoned for the medical officer by this time. They’ll be terrified.”