A Necessary Action

by Per Wahlöö

  He climbed up into the camioneta and drove away.

  Two civil guards were standing at the cross-roads. They were smoking, their carbines on their backs, and one of them raised his arm in a vague gesture which might have been either a greeting or a halt-signal.

  Willi Mohr braked. One of the guards looked idly at his luggage, raised a corner of the blanket and drove his arm at random under the heap of clothes and canvases and other rubbish. The other one came round to the driver’s place and shouted: ‘Are you moving?’

  Willi Mohr leant out of the truck and bent forward to make himself heard over the sound of the engine.

  ‘Yes, but I’m coming back soon. I’m just going down to the puerto to leave the dog.’

  ‘Difficult with bitches,’ shouted the civil guard. ‘I’ll shoot her for you if you like.’

  He laughed and waved. Willi Mohr drove on.

  The side-road was narrow and twisty and stony and the camioneta rocked violently. Just beyond the fork lay the first abandoned farm and six or seven hundred yards farther up the second. Willi Mohr drove into the stony yard and stopped.

  The place had been well chosen, wedged between bushy, inaccessible mountain hills and hidden from sight by the ruined terraced fields. The house was built of rough yellow stones and was half in ruins. The pump pointed crookedly up towards the sky above the dried-up well, like a tombstone commemorating wasted toil.

  The air in the house was oppressive and hot, the mud feet deep after the rain, and a heavy smell and the buzzing of myriads of flies indicated where the boxes were standing piled up beneath the remainder of the staircase.

  Willi Mohr dragged them out one by one, turned them upside down and carried the arms out to the camioneta. The fish and butcher’s offal lay there in heaps, the entrails and pig’s stomachs already crawling with maggots.

  He worked for half-an-hour before he was satisfied with the loading. The weapons, hand-grenades and boxes of ammunition lay well hidden under his own modest possessions. He had one automatic-pistol over and did not dare put it in. As he carried it over to the well, he absently tried to make out the Czechoslovakian inscription on the barrel. Then he dropped the weapon down the well and went back to the truck, lifted down the dog and starting-handle. When he had turned the first bend, the dog was already far behind him.

  The civil guards at the cross-roads had not been relieved. They smiled and saluted carelessly as he drove by.

  Willi Mohr was out on the main road. He jammed the accelerator down to the floorboards and drove into the first serpent-like coil. High above he could see the pass in the mountain range, its outlines shimmering beneath the clear blue sky.

  The camioneta roared and shook, slowly making its way upwards.

  He felt excitement tugging at his diaphragm, making him draw in his stomach and lean over the steering-wheel.

  He considered it unlikely that there would be any more checkpoints in the district at this time of day and if there were one, then it would be on the other side of the pass. On the other side it was downhill, and then he would soon be out of the district and would again be able to benefit from the advantages of being a foreigner.

  He grew calm again and remembered the civil guards at the cross-roads. They would laugh when the dog turned up and would think she had run all the way up from the puerto. He hoped they would not shoot her.

  He was already half way up the series of bends. The pass seemed to lie directly above him. He felt as if he were one with the truck, functioning as an integral part of a rational and purposeful piece of machinery. The old engine rattled and roared, but he knew it well and was sure it would not let him down.

  The sky had cleared and the sun blazed down on his back and shoulders. He drove round the next bend. And the next. And the next. It was slow going but he was nearly up now.

  He knew that for every yard the chances of people from the guard-post taking the trouble to go that far on their bicycles lessened. At that, he immediately realized that he was in the process of committing a crime which they had attributed to him in advance.

  Just before he got to the pass, he overtook a donkey-cart loaded with jumble and scrap-iron.

  He drove round the last bend. He was up.

  The pass was empty.

  He switched off the engine, let the truck roll over the crown, put his foot on the brake and stopped just by the low stone wall.

  On the other side of the crown, the road changed. It did not wind down in snake-like curves, but ran in a long uneven curve along the side of the mountain. From up here he could see several kilometres of it, far into the next district. The whole of the bit that he could see was quiet and desolate, with no vehicles or people.

  And yet he stayed there and listened to the hard metallic clicking from the cooling engine. He waited until the old man with the donkey-cart came past, his head down, moving at exactly the same jog-trot as the donkey.

  ‘Good-day,’ said the old man, without looking up.

  ‘Good-day,’ said Willi Mohr.

  He gazed after the cart until it was nothing but a dark dot which vanished round a protruding rock far away.

  It had been moving at the same even jog-trot all the way. No one had stopped it. The coast was clear.

  Willi Mohr took his foot off the brake and let the truck roll, at first slowly, then swiftly and accelerating rapidly. He smiled and felt the adhesive tape pull at his face. For the first time in his life he was doing something positive, something he found meaningful and with a point to it. He enjoyed the situation and relished controlling the rushing truck. Half the road surface and sometimes even more was dotted with rocks and stones washed down from the mountain. But drive a truck he certainly could, and he avoided them without much difficulty.

  His speed was now quite considerable and at the approaches to the first bend he began to brake. The braking system locked for a fraction of a second, then freed itself completely and the brake pedal sank unresisting to the floorboards.

  He managed to think: It doesn’t matter, I’ll brake with the engine.

  Then he was round the bend and he saw a civil guard rush out on to the road, making a halt-signal thirty yards ahead of him. Two others were standing at the roadside, their bicycles flung down against some low bushes.

  The situation gave him no choice. He drove on. The guard on the road only just had time to leap aside, and then he was past. No shots came from behind.

  He felt no fear. He saw with lightning speed that he was past and still had a chance to get through. First he could drive away from them, and then there were dozens of ways of tricking them. He could turn off anywhere. He could stop at the first suitable hiding-place, unload the arms and turn back and then fetch them again later. He could …

  Three hundred yards below the barrier a bicycle was leaning against the cliff-wall. A little farther up the mountain lay the middle-aged civil guard with a sleepy face and a stubby grey moustache. He aimed calmly and shot Willi Mohr at less than fifty yards range with an ordinary six millimetre grooved army carbine.

  The bullet hit him head on, shattering his breast-bone and leaving his body about an inch to the left of his spine. Willi Mohr was already dead when he pulled the steering-wheel hard over to the left so that the truck swerved and hit the low stone wall.

  The air was light and clean after the long spell of rain and so Sergeant Tornilla heard the shot. He was standing two kilometres farther away, at the cross-roads where the old coast road from the puerto joined the main road.

  He looked at his wristwatch and unscrewed the top of his fountain pen. Then he wrote down the time on a small piece of paper, folded it up and thrust it into his breast pocket.

  ‘Twenty-eight minutes to three,’ he said to himself.

  Soon after that he saw a thin pillar of swirling smoke rising in the still air.

  Sergeant Tornilla turned round and went over to an ancient hired car that was parked under the tree.

  ‘Uhuh,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s that then
. But it’ll get worse. We’re beginning to be alone.’

  The civil guard standing nearest to him thought he had missed an order.

  ‘I didn’t catch that,’ he said, standing to attention.

  ‘What? No, it was nothing. Come now, let’s get back.’

  8

  Several months later, Hugo Spohler and Sergeant Tornilla were sitting under the awning outside the Café Central, drinking an aperitif before dinner.

  Hugo Spohler had come to the puerto on the fifteenth of April and on the following day had taken the mail-bus to the town to go through Willi Mohr’s belongings. The police had put them all into a wooden box which was standing in an outhouse in the back yard at the guard-post, and Sergeant Tornilla himself had gone with him to unlock the door and break the seals. The day was hot and the heat in the tin shed appalling, but Tornilla did not seem to notice it, although he was wearing leather boots and a white shirt and a stiff collar with his well-pressed uniform.

  ‘That should be the lot,’ he said. ‘He had a pistol too, and a dog and a cat. We were obliged to impound the pistol, the dog was shot by the police and they couldn’t catch the cat. It’s still around I suppose, if the Basques up there now haven’t already eaten it.’

  ‘In Russia in forty-four, cat was counted as a delicacy,’ said Hugo Spohler.

  ‘That’s quite correct.’

  ‘Oh, were you there too?’

  ‘Blue Division, Third Brigade.’

  ‘SS. Fifth Panzer Regiment.’

  Hugo Spohler emptied the box of its contents and was sorting things into heaps on the floor.

  ‘Most of this can just be chucked away,’ he said. ‘The pictures are the only things worth anything, really. But he hasn’t painted very many, considering he’s been here for a year and a half.’

  ‘I got the impression that he had grown more and more depressed during the months before the accident.’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘Yes, we met several times.’

  ‘He never had much zest for life.’

  He spread the canvases out on the concrete floor and looked at them appraisingly.

  ‘This interests me,’ said Sergeant Tornilla. ‘We talked several times about my coming over to look at his paintings, but nothing came of it.’

  ‘Do keep one if you’d like to.’

  ‘Do you mean that seriously.’

  ‘Of course. Take which ever one you want.’

  ‘I like that one there with the house and cactuses very much. It’s most realistic. Very well done.’

  ‘Yes, he was clever. Take that one, by all means.’

  ‘On one condition only. That you do me the honour of dining with me and my wife.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I’d like to.’

  Later, at the Café Central, Sergeant Tornilla pointed at the rolled canvas and said: ‘That’ll really be the only souvenir I’ll be taking with me from here. So I’m doubly pleased.’

  ‘Are you moving?’

  ‘Yes, in a few weeks time, to Asturia. I belong to a special department and you’re often moved about. It’s a bit difficult if you’ve got a family. I’ve got two sons, twelve and nine. You’ll soon be meeting them.’

  ‘I’ve got two children too, a boy of three and a girl of twelve months. There’s nothing like family life.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right there.’

  ‘Tell me, it’s struck me, there was one thing I’d hoped to find in that box of his things. A kind of diary which he promised to write.’

  ‘Unfortunately I can’t help you there. It wasn’t amongst his things. Perhaps he had it on him. You see, the truck turned over in the accident and whatever was on it was thrown off. Then it hurtled down a ravine and caught fire. The body was badly burnt.’

  The dinner was excellent and afterwards they drank a glass or two of Jaime Primero in the shady patio behind the house. Sergeant Tornilla had taken off his uniform jacket and exchanged his boots for slippers. His wife and children had withdrawn, and the two men were sitting in comfortable basket-chairs, digesting their food.

  ‘The Blue Division,’ said Hugo Spohler, ‘was an excellent unit. Fine fighting morale and good tactical leadership. If all sectors of the front had been held by such first-class soldiers the result would’ve been a very different story.’

  ‘That’s true. The reserves never came up to scratch. I was thinking especially about the Italians. Their discipline was poor and even the officers lacked any will to fight. They couldn’t get their men to stay lying down under fire, and panic was a reaction which was always near to hand. We noticed that quite early on here, during the Civil War.’

  ‘There were others who were just as bad. On our right flank we had a Rumanian regiment. Their tactical leadership was wretched and the standard of men almost worse. I assure you the officers strutted about in their shiny boots twenty or twenty-five miles behind the front. When the counter-offensive began, it was just as if there had been no one there at all. The Bolsheviks went straight through the front and made a gap of ten kilometres in less than an hour. That was the tragedy of it. To have failed because of useless allies.’

  ‘You’re right, the war needn’t have been lost. If we’d been able to hold the front through the winter, we’d have broken the backs of them during the next summer offensive, and then things would have been very different. But to hold a line in which every third sector was being held by Italians and Hungarians and Rumanians wasn’t easy.’

  ‘Naturally there were some strategic mistakes too. If the Fuehrer’s idea of one line of attack instead of three had not been tampered with by the General Staff, we’d have taken Moscow that first autumn.’

  They continued discussing the subject for another hour or so.