The General's Dog

by James Garcia Woods

  ‘Around the village?’

  ‘No, again. We left the village and walked towards the front line. We were discussing what strategy we thought it would be best to adopt when we begin the push towards Madrid.’

  ‘Can you confirm that, Captain Hemández?’ Gómez asked.

  ‘Indeed I can, Major.’

  ‘So, of course, you saw nothing either.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  The pattern which had started to emerge continued throughout the rest of questioning. None of the officers in the church had been alone at the time when Lieutenant Anton met his end. None of the groups of officers had seen or heard anything. The meeting lasted for almost an hour, and at the end of it Paco was no wiser than he had been at the beginning.

  *

  Paco and Major Gómez sat at a table outside what had become firmly established as the officers’ bar on the Calle Mayor. To their left, a couple of military policemen were in the process of breaking up a fight. On their right, a group of drunken soldiers had filled a bucket with beer, and were unsuccessfully attempting to persuade a tethered donkey to drink from it.

  ‘So tell me, Inspector, do you still think there’s a chance that I might be your murderer?’ Major Gómez asked, and tonight the notion seemed to amuse rather than anger him.

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ Paco confessed. ‘Were you surprised by the answers you were given in the church?’

  ‘Not really,’ Gómez replied.

  ‘Well, I was,’ Paco told him. ‘I’ve interviewed hundreds of men in my time, and even the ones who’ve led the most sociable of lives have never been able to produce an alibi which satisfactorily covers every minute of their time. “I was on a bus, travelling to my mother’s house,” one will say. “I didn’t know any of the other passengers.” Or another might tell me, “I stopped for a couple of drinks in a bar I’ve never been to before. The barman might recognize me, I suppose, but he was so busy I don’t think he even looked me in the face.” And the fact that they haven’t got alibis doesn’t automatically make them guilty! The first man may really have been on a bus, the second could be telling the truth when he says he was alone in a strange bar. These things happen.’

  ‘What exactly is the point you’re trying to make?’ Major Gómez asked guardedly.

  ‘I would have expected some of the officers you questioned to have had alibis,’ Paco said. ‘But not all of them.’

  ‘In war, men are often too afraid to be in their own company for long,’ Gómez replied.

  ‘And did you notice that it was the officers with quarters looking out over the mountains who were at home when Anton was killed,’ Paco continued, ignoring the major’s comment, ‘while the ones whose rooms had a view of the square were invariably out?’

  A look of rage suddenly filled Gómez’s face. ‘Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?’ he demanded. ‘Because if you are, then you’re deliberately insulting almost the whole officer corps of this regiment, and that is something I cannot allow to happen.’

  ‘You can put on a good act when you have to,’ Paco said, ‘but you don’t fool me. You were the man who didn’t mind me calling his general a butcher, remember. Besides, you’re far too intelligent not to have noticed the same things I did – and to have drawn the same conclusions. So why don’t you drop the act, and tell me what you really think?’

  The anger drained from the major’s face almost as quickly as it had appeared. He took a reflective sip of his wine. ‘You’re right. I have reached the same conclusions. There will have been officers without alibis, so some of those men were obviously lying. But it was not, as you seem to be starting to think, a deliberate attempt to block your investigation.’

  ‘You’re saying we might both have seen the same thing, but you understood what was going on in there better than I did?’

  ‘Naturally. I’m one of them. I know how they think. You’re nothing but an outsider.’

  ‘And, of course, you can’t explain to me how they think,’ Paco said caustically. ‘It’s like the business of when you post a sentry outside Valera’s house all over again. If I want to know the logic behind it, I’ll have to find out for myself.’

  Gómez sighed. ‘You’re not going to let go of this, are you, Inspector?’ he asked. ‘Unless I explain to you exactly what you’ve witnessed, you’re going to keep coming back to it like a dog worrying a dead sheep.’

  ‘Probably,’ Paco agreed.

  ‘Very well, I’ll give you your explanation,’ Gómez said. ‘But before I do that, I want to make it quite clear to you that I do not think that any of the men in the church was capable of killing Lieutenant Anton.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘There is a certain spirit in the army – a spirit which is born out of the fact that we all depend on each other. You may have felt a little of it yourself during your military service, but let me assure you, you will only have got the slightest whiff of the real thing.’

  He looked at Paco as if he expected some reaction. ‘I’m still listening,’ the ex-policeman said, deadpan.

  ‘The phrase “brother officer” is not as meaningless as most phrases of that nature are,’ Gómez continued. ‘In battle, we rely on each other absolutely – trust each other without reservation. And, as a result, we will do anything we can to protect each other anywhere the need arises. That’s what you’ve just seen demonstrated in the church. If it is a conspiracy, as you seem to have decided it is, then it’s nothing more than a conspiracy of men who believe in the integrity of their comrades-in-arms, and will do anything to preserve it.’

  ‘Even if it means shielding a murderer.’

  Gómez shook his head exasperatedly. ‘Don’t you understand what I’ve just said? It is impossible for any of those men to imagine that a brother officer could be a murderer. Besides,’ he hesitated for a second, ‘as well as personal loyalty, there is the honour of the regiment to consider.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean that since a dishonourable action by the one reflects on the rest, it is perhaps best that the dishonourable action does not come to light. Which means, in its turn, that any man who betrays a brother officer is shunned from then on – both by his equals and his superiors.’

  ‘So we’re back to the fact that they’d willingly shield a murderer,’ Paco said stubbornly.

  ‘No!’ Gómez replied sharply. ‘We would never shield a murderer – that would only be to protect one living brother officer at the expense of a dead one. We would deal with the killer – but we would deal with him in our way.’

  ‘I’ve heard some self-serving bullshit in my time,’ Paco said, ‘but I really think that takes the prize.’

  Gómez shook his head. ‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ he asked. ‘You have absolutely no idea of the way we think or of our approach to life. Shall I tell you what I would do if I discovered that Lieutenant Anton’s killer was a brother officer?’

  Paco shrugged. ‘Why not? I might even believe you.’

  ‘The very next day, I would arrange for him to be sent into the thick of the battle. He might well return that evening – many men do – but if he did, then the day which followed I would send him out there again. And the day after that. He could not survive for ever. Every man’s luck runs out in the end, and eventually, he would be one of those who was posted as dead.’

  Paco looked first up, then down, the street. The military policemen were dragging away a couple of swaying, handcuffed privates, and the soldiers who had tried to get the donkey drunk were now clearly regretting the fact that they had wasted money which could more wisely have been spent on wine.

  ‘What you’ve just said is very interesting, Major,’ he told Gómez, ‘but when you examine it carefully, it doesn’t really hold water. You claim you would send the guilty man out to the front, but since you’re totally incapable of believing your brother officers to be guilty of murder in the first place, that would never, in fact, happ
en.’

  ‘I said that the officers I spoke to in the church were incapable of believing their comrades-in-arms would commit a murder,’ Gómez countered. ‘I never claimed to be naïve myself.’

  ‘Yet you’ve already told me that you’re sure none of the men in the church killed Anton.’

  ‘That is correct. I don’t think they were involved.’

  There was a code behind his words, Paco thought – a code which he obviously expected an ex-policeman to be able to understand. ‘So what are you saying?’ he asked. ‘That while those particular men had nothing to do with the murder, that doesn’t rule out all the officers stationed in the village?’

  ‘I’m not the detective, Inspector Ruiz,’ Gómez said. ‘It’s your role to investigate. Mine is to do no more than see to it that you’re allowed to do the work you’ve been trained to do without undue hindrance.’

  ‘You’d never have said what you have if you weren’t toying with some kind of theory,’ Paco insisted. ‘Why don’t you tell me what that theory is?’

  Major Gómez stood up, produced some coins from his pocket, and uncharacteristically threw them on the table without even counting them. ‘It’s getting late,’ he said. ‘I think it’s about time I returned to my quarters.’

  ‘Do you have an alibi for the time Lieutenant Anton was murdered?’ Paco asked.

  Gómez smiled, and Paco got the distinct impression that he had been expecting the question – had perhaps even been manoeuvring the conversation in such a direction that it was bound to be asked.

  ‘No, I don’t have an alibi,’ the major said. ‘I’m like all the men in those old cases of yours which you talked about earlier. I was walking around the village entirely alone. It’s possible that some of the soldiers might have seen me, but the state most of them were in, I doubt they will remember. Do you have any more questions before I go?’

  Paco leant back in his chair, and took a measured sip of his wine. ‘Do you think that Colonel Valera will have an alibi?’ he asked – and the moment he had put the question he realized that that was what Gómez had been steering him towards all along.

  ‘Colonel Valera!’ the major repeated. ‘You’re aiming high, my friend. Perhaps far too high.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you want me to do?’ Paco asked. ‘And you still haven’t answered the question. Do you think Valera’s got an alibi?’

  ‘I believe that the colonel will have one,’ Gómez said. ‘But whether he would ever be willing to produce it is quite another matter.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Morning. The military trucks rumbled across the main square under a sky of the deepest Castilian blue. It was going to be another beautiful day – a day which would seem to have no other aim than to show to the people of the mountains how wonderful it was to be alive. But before the sun finally set again, Paco thought, as he crossed the Plaza Mayor, many young men would already have died under that perfect sky.

  He stopped by the fountain and lit a cigarette. Enough of thinking of the young men who would be slaughtered like cattle, he told himself. He had problems enough of his own.

  He was desperately worried about Cindy Walker. Throughout the whole of her ordeal, she’d shown a courage and resilience which had almost taken his breath away. But even for someone with her magnificent spirit, the strain of being locked up all day – and under virtual sentence of death – had eventually begun to tell.

  He had to find a way to get her back behind Republican lines soon. Private Pérez would help him – the rat-faced young man didn’t have any choice – but Pérez, for all his cunning, wasn’t enough. What Paco really needed was someone more powerful on his side. And there the choice seemed to be restricted to either the devious Major Gómez or the vicious Colonel Valera.

  The first thing he saw as he left the square and turned on to the Calle Mayor, was a group of black-clad women huddled together around the doorway of one of the humbler houses. Some of the women were weeping loudly. Others were talking in low, urgent voices. Even from a distance, it was obvious that such a scene could only mean there had been a death.

  Paco felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. People could – and did – die all the time. There was absolutely nothing to say that this particular death had anything to do with his case. Yet his instinct, backed by the experience of years of investigating violent crime, told him that this wasn’t an ordinary death – that, like the murder of Lieutenant Anton, it would never have occurred if he hadn’t happened to be in the village.

  He reached the edge of the small crowd. The women were so wrapped up in their blanket of grief that they didn’t even notice his arrival. He laid his hand gently on the shoulder of one of them. The woman looked up to see who had touched her. She had a wrinkled face and nut-brown skin, and though she must have seen many deaths in her time, her eyes still glistened with tears.

  ‘Who died?’ Paco asked softly.

  ‘It was C . . . Carmen Sanchez,’ the old woman blubbered. ‘Her mother’s a cousin of mine.’

  ‘So she wasn’t a very old lady?’

  ‘Old? No! She was barely more than a girl.’

  Paco eased his way through the crowd to the front door, brushed aside the bead curtain, and entered the house. He found himself in a single large room, which had a kitchen with a wood-burning range at the back of it. In the centre of the room was a rough wooden table, and at it sat an old woman with her head in her hands – almost definitely the cousin of the mourner outside. Another woman, probably not more than forty herself, sat at the old woman’s left, and was whispering earnestly into her ear. A white-haired parish priest, who plainly felt useless in this women’s world of sorrow, stood awkwardly in the corner.

  The younger of the two women looked up when she heard Paco’s footsteps. ‘I recognize you,’ she said dully. ‘You’re that detective from Madrid. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to find out what’s happened,’ Paco replied sympathetically. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Isabel Cordobés.’

  ‘A relative?’

  ‘No. Not a relative. A neighbour. I’m just here to offer Rosa what comfort I can.’

  The older woman lifted her hands from her face. ‘There can be no comfort for me!’ she wailed. ‘My poor, misguided daughter has taken her own life, and now she will burn in hell for all eternity.’

  Paco looked across at the parish priest, who merely shrugged at him as if to say, ‘What can I tell you? The poor woman is quite right.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ Paco asked.

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ Isabel Cordobés told him.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ Paco agreed. ‘But we should be able to pin it down roughly. When was the dead woman last seen alive?’

  ‘She was fine when her mother and I went to the church at eight o’clock,’ Isabel told him. ‘She said she’d have some coffee waiting for us when we got back. But there was no coffee and we . . . we found her hanging from the ham hook in the bedroom.’

  ‘The ham hook?’ Paco repeated, mystified.

  ‘Rosa has a great fear of thieves,’ Isabel said, stroking the old woman. ‘When she’s draining a ham, she always does it upstairs.’

  It made sense, Paco thought. A leg of jamon serano was probably the greatest luxury that a peasant woman would ever indulge herself in. What better place to keep it at night than in the security of her bedroom?

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ the dead woman’s mother moaned. ‘If the hook hadn’t been there, she’d never have done it.’

  ‘Did she leave a note?’ Paco asked.

  Isabel shrugged. ‘I don’t know whether she did or not. We didn’t look. What does it matter, anyway?’

  ‘Can I see her, please?’ Paco asked.

  ‘Why should you want to do that?’ Isabel asked, suddenly suspicious of this stranger.

  Paco was not sure he even knew the answer to that question himself – except that he couldn’t throw off the feeling that this dea
th was somehow connected to those of Anton and the dog. ‘I’d just like to pay my respects,’ he said.

  The younger woman looked questioningly at the older one, who nodded her head apathetically.

  ‘She’s upstairs on her mother’s bed,’ Isabel said. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Paco told her. ‘Which room is it? The one on the left of the stairs, or the one on the right?’

  ‘The one on the left.’

  Paco climbed the wooden stairs and opened the left-hand door. The room he entered had whitewashed walls, and was furnished only with an iron bed, a washstand, an old wardrobe and a stool which was lying on its side. A mirror was mounted on the wall facing the bed, and over the bed itself hung a large crucifix.

  The woman lying on the bed was dressed in black, and had been in her early thirties. Even someone who was seeing her for the first time would have been able to guess that though she was past her best, she’d been very pretty in life. But Paco wasn’t seeing her for the first time. He’d caught a glimpse of her once before – when she was standing in the doorway of Colonel Valera’s office.

  Why would a woman who had seemed perfectly normal the day before choose to hang herself at around half past eight on this beautiful summer morning, he asked himself. Why would a woman who’d promised to have the coffee made for her mother’s return suddenly decide, instead, to greet the old woman with her own lifeless body?

  He looked up at the wooden beam which ran the length of the bedroom ceiling. The ham hook, made from a single piece of what was probably steel, was firmly embedded in the centre of the beam, and hanging from the hook was part of the twisted bed sheet which Carmen had used to strangle herself.

  Paco searched around for the rest of the sheet, and found it on the floor beside the bed. He took it over to the window, so he could examine it in better light. The noose was tied in a very professional way, he noted. But what did that prove? All peasants began to learn how to tie knots as soon as they could walk, and Carmen Sanchez would have been no exception.