The General's Dog

by James Garcia Woods

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you manage to walk a few hundred metres, or will you need some of these other bastards to help you?’

  ‘I can walk,’ Paco said, and he was thinking, I have to walk, because no one’s going to drag me to my death.

  ‘Right, well let’s have you then,’ the sergeant said. He pointed to Alfredo. ‘You first, little man.’

  They stepped out into a narrow cobbled street with a gutter running down the centre of it. The soldiers had already taken up their positions, three slightly ahead, to lead the column, three holding back to guard the rear. It was all very professional, Paco thought. They had obviously done this kind of thing before – probably many times before.

  ‘Move it!’ the sergeant barked. ‘And remember what I told you. No funny business!’

  Paco felt he had more control over his legs now, and his vision was almost back to normal. He looked around him. The plaque on one of the houses said that this street was the Calle de Segovia, but someone had crossed out the name with black paint, and written underneath it Calle de Jose Antonio. So this village had already renamed one of its streets after the leader of the Falange. That showed where the villagers’ sympathy lay. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they were not right-wing, but merely prudent.

  As they marched along the street, Paco noticed that they were being observed from the narrow iron balconies which jutted out from the first floors of the houses. Most of the watchers were women and children. There was no excitement in their eyes. There was not even much curiosity. The war was in its first few days, and already watching men being marched to their deaths had become nothing more than a dull habit.

  He remembered the executions he had seen in Morocco, the way the condemned men – mostly deserters and black-marketeers – had marched on to the parade ground to the sound of a relentlessly beating military drum. He would have appreciated a drum at that moment, he thought, not so much to help him keep in step as to assure him that his death was of some significance – a positive act of war, rather than an exercise in vermin reduction. Yes, he told himself, a drum would have given the whole thing much more solemnity.

  There were two soldiers on guard at the edge of the Plaza Mayor – the main square – and they stood aside to let the column pass. The plaza itself was typical of the plazas in such villages as this. The rows of buildings formed a rough rectangle with an entrance road at each corner. The upper storeys of all the houses stuck out much further than the lower and were supported by stone pillars, thus creating an arcade in which the villagers could shelter from the summer heat or the winter rain. In the centre of the plaza was a fountain, gushing forth water even in dry July.

  During the fiestas, the plaza would be used to stage the village bullfight and the late-night dance which always followed it. But it was hosting a very different kind of function that day. At the far end of the square was a whitewashed wall, glinting in the late afternoon sun. Just beyond the wall was an open army truck – and on the ground next to its tailboard lay a jumbled heap of bodies, all of them dressed in blue monos.

  The sight of the dead militiamen was too much for Alfredo to take. He stopped walking and sank to his knees, his hands clasped tightly in front of him. Behind him, the other prisoners came to an awkward halt.

  ‘Please don’t kill me!’ the little shoeblack begged. ‘I’m not what you think I am. The others only brought me along to cook for them!’

  The sergeant with the bad teeth grasped the collar of Alfredo’s shirt, and tore it roughly to reveal the quaking man’s skin. ‘You got a wedge-shaped bruise on your right shoulder,’ he shouted. ‘Do you want to tell me where that came from?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Alfred blubbered hysterically. ‘I swear to you that I really don’t know.’

  The sergeant stepped back, as if he found the idea of being close to the little man repulsive. ‘You’re a lying son of a bitch,’ he said. ‘That bruise comes from your rifle stock. You’re just as guilty as the rest of this scum.’

  Alfredo turned his head frantically, and his eyes rested on Paco. ‘Shoot him!’ he sobbed. ‘He was the one who killed your men. I saw him with my own eyes. I don’t deserve to die.’

  A major, who had been standing some distance away, approached the grovelling man. He was, Paco noted automatically with his policeman’s eye, in his early thirties, and of slightly less than average height. His brown eyes suggested a quick mind – or at least a cunning nature. His uniform was immaculately maintained, though a little shabby, and his highly polished boots could certainly have done with reheeling.

  The major came to a halt a few centimetres from Alfredo. ‘Get up!’ he said disgustedly. ‘You people are always saying that it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees. Well, now’s the time to prove it.’

  ‘I can’t move,’ Alfredo sobbed. ‘I just can’t.’

  The officer took his pistol out of its leather holster, and jammed the barrel against the back of the little shoeblack’s head. ‘This is your last chance to act like a man,’ he said.

  ‘Please!’ Alfredo implored.

  The major shrugged, then pulled the trigger. There was a muffled explosion, and Alfredo juddered slightly, then slumped forward.

  ‘Oh my God!’ said the militiaman just behind Paco, as if it were only now that he had finally realized what fate lay in store for all of them.

  ‘See where I’m pointing?’ the sergeant bellowed, holding out his arm and indicating the whitewashed wall. ‘I want you all lined up against that pretty damn quick. So jump to it!’

  The five remaining prisoners stepped around Alfredo’s lifeless body, taking care to avoid the blood which had already begun to seep out of his head on to the packed clay ground. Paco forced his eyes to focus on the wall which would be the backcloth for his execution, as – on the evidence of the number of holes in it – it had been the backcloth for so many others.

  As he was the head of the column now that Alfredo had gone, he was the first of the militiamen to reach the wall. He stopped, and turned round so that he was facing the centre of the square.

  ‘Right up against the wall, you bastard,’ the sergeant screamed.

  Paco took a step backwards, and felt the rough brickwork pressing against his shoulder blades. Why was he making things so easy for them, he asked himself, and supposed it was because this was the only way he could meet his death with a little of his dignity intact.

  The other four prisoners had now joined him against the wall. So this was it, Paco thought. The man next to him – the one who had said ‘Oh my God!’ as Alfredo died – was now mumbling the rosary to himself, but Paco had lost his own faith long ago, and could not recapture it even as he faced death. Instead, he intended to spend his last few moments on earth thinking about Cindy. He wished he could have met her earlier – so he would have gone to his grave with even more happy memories. But then, he told himself, he had been incredibly lucky to have found her at all.

  The men who were to compose the firing squad had all dropped down on to one knee. A few more seconds and it would be all over. Paco hoped that the man assigned to kill him would make a clean job of it.

  ‘Ready,’ the sergeant shouted.

  ‘My life was never up to very much anyway,’ said Pepe the road-sweeper. ‘At least now I’m worth a bullet.’

  ‘Aim . . .’

  ‘I helped burn down a church,’ mumbled the man who had been saying the rosary. ‘Oh, dear, merciful Señor, please forgive me.’

  ‘F . . .’

  ‘Wait!’ the major commanded, even as the soldiers’ fingers were beginning to tighten on their triggers.

  The officer strode up to the wall and stopped directly in front of Paco. ‘I’ve been trying to work out since I first saw you why you looked so familiar,’ he said. ‘And now I think I know. What’s your name?’

  Could there be any harm in telling him now? None whatsoever. ‘Francisco Ruiz,’ Paco said.

  ‘And what did you do for a living before yo
u threw in your lot with this Communist rabble?’

  ‘I was a policeman.’

  ‘A detective?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The major nodded. ‘I thought I recognized you. I’ve seen your picture in the papers. You’re the Paco Ruiz who solved the case of the headless corpse in Atocha station, aren’t you?’

  What was all this leading-up to? Paco wondered. ‘Yes, that was me,’ he admitted.

  The major signalled for two of the soldiers standing by the lorry and guarding the corpses, to approach him. ‘Take this man back to the lock-up on Calle Jose Antonio,’ he said. ‘I shall want to talk to him later.’

  The soldiers stepped forward, and each grabbed one of Paco’s arms. ‘Don’t try any tricks,’ said the one on his left, as they frog-marched him away from the wall. ‘You wouldn’t get more than ten metres without being cut down like a dog.’ He laughed. ‘Now that’s bloody funny. Or it would be, if the dog had belonged to anybody else.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Paco asked.

  ‘Never you mind. Just don’t give us any trouble.’

  As if he could, Paco thought. He had been steeling himself up for his own execution, and now it was to be postponed, he felt completely drained – as weak as a newborn baby.

  The soldiers continued to keep a tight grip on him as they marched him across the plaza. They had almost reached the fountain when they heard the sergeant with the bad teeth give his order, and the rifles bark out their messages of death.

  Chapter Four

  The thick bands of black shadow which lay across the floor grew longer and longer, before finally vanishing as the sun sank below the horizon and night began to fall. Paco sat in the corner of the storeroom turned prison, his last cigarette burning slowly away in the corner of his mouth. In some strange way, he felt cheated. If he’d been shot earlier, on the main square, he would at least have died next to Pepe, a man who, with only seconds to live, had still had the spirit to make a bitter joke about it. Now, the chances were that when he died, he would die alone.

  The survivor in Paco rose to the surface. He was still alive and as long as there was life, there was hope. But the real question was, why was he still alive? It had to be because he was a policeman – because, with only a headless corpse discovered in the left-luggage office at the Atocha railway station to work on, he had uncovered a high level conspiracy and ensured that several important government functionaries had gone to gaol. But what use were his detection skills now, he asked himself, when evidence was often nothing more than an anonymous written accusation, the trial was usually over in a matter of minutes, and the punishment dished out was invariably a bullet to the head?

  He was not aware of having dozed off in the middle of his speculations, but if he hadn’t, the sound of the bolt on the door being drawn back would not have come as such a shock. Paco sat upright, and wondered if his moment had come. All he could see at first was the oil-lamp, hanging about a metre above the ground, but as his eyes became accustomed to the light and shade, he managed to distinguish the shape of a man standing behind the lamp.

  ‘Get on your feet, prisoner,’ the man barked. ‘Major Gómez wants to see you.’

  Paco rose to a standing position. ‘So, the major wants to see me, does he?’ he asked. ‘And what if I don’t want to see him?’

  The man with the lantern chuckled unpleasantly. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You make it difficult for us. Make it so we have to use force. After what some of your friends have done to some of my friends out in the mountains today, I’d really like that.’

  It was tempting to take a swing at him, but only a fool gets into a fight he has no chance of winning. ‘I won’t cause any trouble,’ Paco promised.

  ‘I didn’t think you would,’ the man with the lantern sneered. ‘You Reds are all the same – full of brave talk while you’re sitting around in the bars, but completely gutless when you actually see some real action.’ He stepped back into the street. ‘Follow me.’

  There were two more soldiers on the Calle Jose Antonio, both armed with rifles. ‘It’s all right, lads,’ said the man with a lantern, who Paco could now see was a corporal. ‘I’ve had a word with the prisoner, and he’s promised not to cause us any trouble.’

  They took the same route as Paco and his dead comrades had followed earlier in the day, up Jose Antonio towards the Plaza Mayor. The square had been transformed in the hours Paco had been away from it. Though it was night, the place was lit up by countless oil-lamps. Each created a small circle of illumination around itself, but some of the lamps were so close together that the circles merged, seeming to form a magic path across the dark ground. The death wagon and the corpses of the late afternoon were gone, and in their place were hundreds of soldiers in khaki uniforms, dozens of guardias civiles in their green uniforms and three-cornered hats, and scores of Fascist militiamen in whatever battledress they’d been able to cobble together. Some of the men appeared to be happy to stay at one of the dozen or so new bars which had come into existence since the military had taken over the village, others were so restless that they’d rapidly knock back a wine at one and then move on to another. But whichever method they chose, it was still an impressive display of men working hard at getting drunk.

  Prisoner and escort crossed the square, and turned on to a road which was just as busy and lively as the Plaza Mayor had been. ‘This is the Calle Mayor,’ the corporal said.

  ‘So the main street runs off the main square, does it?’ Paco replied. ‘How surprising.’

  ‘You have a very big mouth on you for someone in your position,’ the corporal snarled.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I have?’ Paco asked. ‘A man under sentence of death doesn’t have a lot to lose.’

  The church loomed up ahead, a massive stone building which dwarfed all the dwellings around it. Paco wondered how much further they had to go, and what this Major Gómez would want to talk about when they got there.

  ‘We turn right here,’ said the corporal, indicating a dark alley framed on one side by the church, and on the other by a high wall. ‘This is the Calle Belén.’

  ‘Why are you giving me a guided tour?’ asked Paco, who, despite himself, was becoming intrigued by the strange turn of events.

  ‘I’m giving you a guided tour, as you call it, because those are my instructions,’ the corporal replied coldly. ‘Major Gómez wants you to be familiar with the geography of the village.’ He stopped a few yards down the alley and lowered his lamp over a patch of ground which was darker than the dirt surrounding it. ‘This is where it happened.’

  ‘Where what happened?’ Paco asked, exasperatedly,

  ‘The major says he’ll tell you everything that you need to know.’

  The Calle Belén ran straight for fifty metres, then bent round to the left. Another fifty metres and they had reached a square which, because of the oil-lamps hung outside each house, was almost as well illuminated as the Plaza Mayor. It had a number of pleasant dwellings around its edge, and a fountain in the middle.

  ‘This is the Plaza de Santa Teresa,’ said the corporal, still playing the role of reluctant tour-guide. ‘Most of the officers are billeted here.’

  An armed sentry stood in front of one of the houses. He watched them pass without interest.

  ‘Is that where the commanding officer lives?’ Paco asked.

  The corporal gave a superior laugh. ‘No, the general has done much better for himself than that. Those are Colonel Valera’s quarters.’

  They stopped at a house two doors beyond the colonel’s. The corporal knocked on the door, then, without waiting for a reply, turned the handle. Paco was led into what must once have been a reception room, but had now been turned into an office. Sitting at the table was the major who had shot Alfredo in cold blood, yet had chosen to spare Paco. He had a stack of official documents in front of him, and just beyond them – within easy reach – was his pistol.

  ‘Do sit down, Inspector Ruiz,’ he said genia
lly. He turned to the escort. ‘You can wait outside.’

  Paco sat, and studied the other man. The initial impression he had gained on the square that afternoon was confirmed. Gómez was somewhere around thirty, which was young – but not exceptionally so – to hold his present rank, and the quick, opportunistic brown eyes suggested he was more of a politician than a straightforward soldier.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to see you again, Inspector,’ the major said. ‘You may not yet realize it, but we are colleagues in a way.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Certainly it is. You are a policeman, and I am General Castro’s head of security. You’ll have heard of the general, I expect.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard of him,’ Paco replied. Who had not heard of the man who, even more than General Franco, had been responsible for the bloody suppression of the Asturian miners’ revolt only four years earlier? ‘But you’re wrong to think of us as colleagues. I’m no longer a policeman, and your title doesn’t make you one, either. All head of security means to me is that you do the dirty work for the Butcher of Asturias.’

  Gómez threw back his head, and laughed heartily. ‘The Butcher of Asturias,’ he said. ‘Very good. Very good indeed.’

  ‘Have I said something funny?’ Paco asked, puzzled.

  ‘It always amuses me when people fail to create the effect they intended. You’ve been working out ways to insult me since you entered the room, and have finally decided that your best approach would be to attack my commanding officer. And how did you expect me to react? Did you think I’d go purple with rage, and give you a long speech on how the general is nothing more than a servant of Spain and God?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Paco confessed.

  ‘Only a fool would waste his time trying to convert a man with your obvious stubbornness,’ the major said. ‘So if it makes you happy to keep on thinking of the general as a butcher, please feel free to do so. That will not, in any way, interfere with the task I have set for you.’