The General's Dog
Page 23
Paco shrugged. ‘The general will have the evidence of his wife’s infidelity in his hands by now. He will, of course, want to have Valera shot as soon as possible. But I doubt if the colonel will have waited around to be arrested. I know that if I’d gone back to my quarters to find my sentry tied up in the hallway and a vital piece of evidence missing, I’d have left the village as quickly as I possibly could.’
‘So Valera will get away with it?’
‘Perhaps,’ Paco admitted. ‘But I very much doubt it. The general has been insulted just about as much as any man – particularly any Spanish man – can be insulted. And even though he’s a clown, he still has a lot of influence of the rebel side of the divide. Sooner or later, he’ll find Valera, and when he does, the colonel will be a dead man.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Cindy said, with just a trace of anxiety slipping into her voice.
Epilogue
Night cast its cloak of darkness over the city and the mountains alike, and once again the people of Castile relished their escape from debilitating summer heat.
In dozens of bars around the Puerta de Toledo, drunken militiamen alternately mourned for their lost comrades and boasted to the barely-listening whores about how many of the enemy they would kill the next day.
In one of those bars a small wiry man, his pocket stuffed with peseta notes he’d got in exchange for some semi-precious stones, ordered two more wines. ‘Isn’t it just like I promised, Jiménez,’ he said to his much larger friend. ‘I told you I’d look after you. We’ll have a great time, you and me. This is the best city in the whole world for enjoying yourself.’
But the country boy, instead of sharing in the other man’s enthusiasm, merely nodded vacantly, and wondered what was happening to his family’s little farm.
Further north in the city, Paco Ruiz stood at his living-room window, watching the street scene below.
‘What now, Paco?’ asked a voice behind him.
‘Now?’ Paco repeated. ‘Now, I suppose my detective days really are finally over, and I’m back to being a militiaman.’
Cindy laughed. ‘Your detective days will never be over,’ she said. ‘It’s in your blood. Only you could start by investigating the death of a dog, and end up uncovering a double murderer.’
Perhaps she was right, he thought. Perhaps even in war there would always be room for a trained investigator. He opened the window wider, to allow any cooling breeze that was passing by to enter the room.
There was a cool breeze in the mountains, blowing across the Plaza Mayor of the village of San Fernando de la Sierra, carrying with it the odour of cooking, of black tobacco, and of a thousand sweaty soldiers whose main aim in life was to get as drunk as possible before their money ran out. They were quieter that evening than they had been on previous ones, because what had been made plain to them the night before was that war wasn’t something you could just walk away from when darkness fell – war was everywhere.
In the palacio just up from the square, a tearful woman knelt on the floor at her husband’s feet. ‘You don’t know what it was like,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s you I love, Tubby, you know that, but Valera seemed to have a strange, evil power over me. I tried to resist him, but it was no good.’
‘You’ve made a complete fool of me,’ the general whined.
‘Only if that’s the way you choose to look at it. Once Valera’s dead, only you and I will know what’s really happened.’
‘But the other officers—’
‘They don’t suspect a thing,’ the general’s wife lied. She massaged her husband’s knee. ‘Would you like us to go upstairs?’
‘I don’t know. After what you’ve done to me, I’m not sure I ever want to go upstairs with you again.’
‘But I’ve got some lovely clothes I could put on for you,’ his wife coaxed. ‘I could wear all your favourites. You’d like that, wouldn’t you.’
‘Yes,’ the general said, nodding his head in sad resignation and rising to his feet. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’
Major Gómez sat alone in his quarters, smoking a cheroot. Things had gone exceptionally well, he decided. His conduct during the ‘attack’ on the village had been noted, and even without the gap left by Colonel Valera on the general’s staff, his promotion would be assured. It would be good to be a colonel – to be paid enough to be able to afford a new uniform, to have a house to himself instead of sharing with other officers. And there might be even one more perk to his new position. If he were careful – if he avoided the mistakes Valera had made – then he, too, might soon get to sleep with the most beautiful woman in all Spain.
Out on the high sierra, a man dressed in a cheap uniform lit a cigarette, and shivered. He had lost everything, he told himself. If he had not killed the private who’d become separated from his comrades, he would now not even have a safe identity. He ran through his plan in his mind. When it became light, he would shave off his military moustache, and his disguise would be complete. Then he would stumble into a unit where he wasn’t known, and feed them some kind of story about how all his comrades had been massacred. And so he would become Private Jaime Boaz for a while. But only for a while. As soon as he saw his chance, he would cut loose and embark on his mission of punishing the men who had caused his downfall. He would kill the treacherous Major Gómez first. He would make sure it was a very slow and painful death. And when he’d finished that job, he would go after the detective from Madrid.
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