Serrano lived just long enough to experience a crushing blow as he landed on the reeking mudflats at the river’s edge. There he lay supine, straddled across a mound of debris left over from the demolition of the former road bridge, while his universe contracted to a black, disembodied singularity.
Working largely by feel, and guided by Julio, Alonso took off his own shirt and used it to pad a shallow diagonal slash across the driver’s torso. He re-buttoned Julio’s own shirt over the top of the makeshift bandage and instructed him to hold it firmly in place. Then they cautiously made their way back across the viaduct, the unknown attacker’s presence telling them clearly enough that Jack’s escape plan had been second-guessed.
All the same, thought Julio, it had been smart tactical thinking on the Englishman’s part. And now that the manhunt would be focused on the Mundaiz peninsula – an extensive park and academic campus cut off from the city by a broad loop in the river – there was some hope of safety back in the heavily populated grid-pattern streets of the ensanche.
They picked their way back across the darkened viaduct, but as they neared the opposite bank the precariousness of their situation hit them again. At the side of the road, in the wash of artificial light from a nearby residential street, they could make out the shape of a large SUV. There was a whispered conference among the two police officers and the driver, following which Jack was instructed to stay out on the viaduct while the three of them worked their way forward.
He remained in the rear as they came to the last few yards of the catwalk, where they stopped and waited. Minutes crawled by as they stood in silence, until at last Jack felt a faint but soothing vibration through the soles of his tired feet. The tremor gathered strength, and then he could make out the sound of a train on its way down from the station. As the massive engine thundered onto the far end of the viaduct, the roar and the juddering movement in the steel girders rose to a crescendo. Caught in its headlight, Jack feared that he would be seen by anyone in the SUV, but a moment later the front of the train had passed him by. He squeezed his eyes shut as a seemingly endless stream of carriages swept past inches from his face.
By the time the train had gone he had lost visual contact with his three companions, but he guessed that they were using the speeding carriages as cover to dash past the car and come at it from behind. He peered anxiously into the gloom in a vain attempt to see what was going on. There was nothing for several minutes, but then his heart leapt into his mouth as he heard a sharp impact followed by the sounds of a scuffle.
“You can join us now, Jack,” came Miguel’s voice from out of the darkness, “but mind the drop.”
Jack would never forget that drop as long as he lived. He had once shown off to friends by jumping from sleeper to sleeper the whole width of the river, and the memory still figured in fever dreams. He moved carefully until he had reached the end of the catwalk, then sent stones skittering as he gingerly picked his way down off the track bed.
There was now a little knot of people beside the SUV. Alonso had his sidearm levelled at a dazed but heavily muscled stranger who was kneeling beside the vehicle, his face cut and bleeding. The policeman’s body language suggested that he was itching for an excuse to start blasting, but he acted on Miguel’s order to open the tailgate and stow the prisoner in the load area.
Jack saw that one of the rearmost side-windows was smashed. “What happened?” he asked.
“Textbook manoeuvre,” replied Julio, who had fresh abrasions to his face and neck and considerably more blood spreading across the front of his shirt. The driver had rarely spoken so far, and Jack listened intently for more information. “We didn’t know how many were in the car,” Julio continued. “So Alonso and I waited behind it with our guns out while the Chief here threw a chunk of railway ballast at the window. Then the door flies open, and out jumps this iron-pumping steroid junkie with the piece of artillery you can see on the ground over there. But before he can line it up, I step forward and tap him on the side of the head with a little persuader I carry around. Just as effective as a gun at close quarters, and much less noisy. Of course, anyone else would have gone straight down, but I guess it took a while for the shock to get through all the muscle to his brain. So we had a little set-to, and I hit him again, and after that he let us put the cuffs on him.”
“Have you quite finished posturing, Julio?” asked Miguel.
“Yes, Chief, sorry,” replied the driver.
“Then we need to get moving. Can one of you spare a shirtsleeve to gag him with? With the window out, we don’t want him attracting attention. And while you’re at it, a vehicle like this ought to have rings in the floor for securing dangerous loads. I think our friend could be quite a dangerous load when he wakes up properly, even in handcuffs. Why don’t you run another pair through one of the rings – stop him moving those meaty arms around too much.”
Handcuffs. Chains. “Hey! Do the bracelets really tight!” Jack blurted out in response to a sudden, unwanted recollection.
The uniformed officer unhooked a pair of cuffs from his belt, went round to the rear of the SUV and opened the tailgate. The muscle-bound prisoner was more alert than when Jack had first set eyes on him, but still dazed enough that there was little difficulty in gagging him and immobilising the impressive arms. Alonso then took the driving seat with Miguel beside him in the front, while Jack sat behind him with Julio to his right. The prison remained hunched up in the luggage area behind them, breathing shallowly and reeking of ketosis.
Jack glanced across at Julio as Alonso pulled away, and saw that their regular driver’s face was white; he had been bleeding more heavily since his clash with the prisoner, and needed medical attention.
“Julio, you need to see a doctor and possibly a surgeon,” announced Miguel as they cruised through well-lit residential streets at the southern edge of the city. “Alonso, you need a shirt, and so will Julio once he’s been patched up. We have to ditch our friend somewhere he can’t make a nuisance of himself. And as for you, Jack, we need to finish getting a statement.”
“I must say, I’ll feel safer once we’re inside your HQ,” answered Jack. “All the running around makes it hard to concentrate on getting the story straight.”
Miguel was silent for several seconds. “It’s still too dangerous to bring you in,” he said at length, “and at the moment I’ve no idea where to take you. But as soon as we’ve dropped Julio at the hospital, we’ll look for somewhere out in the sticks where we can rest up for a few hours. If I might borrow your phone, there’s a charger in the front here. I’ll report in and see if they can come up with a safe location. What the hell have you done, Jack? We haven’t seen a paramilitary mobilisation on this scale in a decade or more.”
CHAPTER 3
The right career exists for everybody, or so one of the priests – one of the kinder ones – had once said to him. He had never quite believed it, and had expected to end up bitter and frustrated working in a factory or a warehouse, perhaps even a farmyard. The archaic Basque inheritance tradition meant that he would never be more than a wage-earner, even coming as he did from a wealthy family.
Then had come the abomination, impressions of which still returned to him in waves of psychic and sometimes physical pain. Then the other torment, and the shame and guilt that went with it. And finally – salvation! – a stern guardian uncle who had appreciated his unusual gifts, given him a vision and taught him the skills he would need to pursue it.
He did not know if there was really a God up there, and his experiences of those blessed with theological certainty were on the whole negative. Still less was he sure that the God they believed in would listen to someone like him—a maimed, angry young man who had regularly broken the laws of both church and state. Even so, he offered up thanks – to anyone or anything that might be listening – for his uncle and for the path that the old warrior had set him on.
JAMES
The weather was changeable throughout the spring an
d early summer. It was certainly better than my family were getting back in England, and there were many glorious afternoons on the beach long before the tourists arrived. But days that started off sunny could turn stormy later and a strong, chill wind could get up without warning. Ominously, and symbolically as it turned out, you could sometimes hear the rumble of thunder coming in from the Bay of Biscay even when the sky overhead was blue.
However, our first full day in San Sebastián was as warm and bright as we could have wished. And as the two dozen of us kept a prearranged rendezvous in the college bar we experienced something quite novel: a sense of shared excitement and mutual belonging that for a few days transcended all the cliques and personal rivalries we’d brought with us from home.
We’d known that our teachers would be priests, and we had a good idea of what to expect. Thus we were somewhat taken aback when we met our course tutor. Tall, lean and muscular despite his age, his clerical garb immaculate in its blackness and his iron-grey hair cropped close to the scalp, Father Ignacio cut a scary figure. The clerical dog-collar only seemed to emphasise the aura of quiet danger that surrounded him. It was easier to imagine him as the Grand Inquisitor turning the screws on a screaming heretic, or as a modern-day Van Helsing purging an infested crypt with a glowing crucifix clenched in his fist, than presiding at the altar or the confessional.
Officially we were enrolled on a Spanish studies course, but the priest had an agenda of his own. He clearly intended that none of us should go home without a grasp of what he called the particularity of the Basque people. And while there’s no denying that the Basques are racially and culturally distinct from the rest of Europe, to Ignacio it meant more than that. He saw them as occupying a special moral high ground, owing to the incredible age of their culture and the persecution they’ve suffered over the…
JACK
Jack hesitated in mid-sentence as Miguel put down the pencil with which he had been scribbling occasional notes in a spiral-bound pad. The Englishman had been in some kind of comfort zone with this part of his story, and was clearly irritated by the interruption. The little red light on the voice recorder continued to blink.
“So, this priest,” began the detective. He glanced down for a moment at his notes. “This Father Ignacio. Would you describe him as an ardent Basque nationalist?”
Jack paused before answering, taking in the drab, institutional décor of the modest compound to which he been brought. He thought back to what he remembered of an immensely complex man, full of contradictions. But the answer to detective’s question was sufficiently clear-cut. “Yes, very much so,” he responded at length. “Being a priest, we were surprised how reluctant he seemed to condemn the militants. He never openly supported violence, but he tended to make excuses for it. As I said a moment ago, he was one scary individual.”
“Well that doesn’t endear him to any of us here,” remarked Miguel sourly. “Julio is the only one of us with so much as a zurito of Basque blood in his veins, and even he dismisses them as a bunch of raving fanatics. Isn’t that right, Alonso?”
Alonso looked across at Jack with the hint of a sneer on his lips. “Yes, for all his lanky build, Julio’s got a touch of Basque in his genes. But he doesn’t speak their abomination of a language, and it’s not something he talks about. If people know about it, they’re going to assume he’s got mixed loyalties, and you can’t survive in the police with that sort of baggage.
“General Franco bribed thousands of people from all over Spain to move up here. He gave them all the top jobs in industry and the public services. The Basques themselves didn’t get a look-in. My grandfather relocated here, so I’ve got deeper roots in the region than Miguel, but the ethnic Basques don’t trust us and we don’t trust them.”
“They’re Europe’s Red Indians,” responded Jack, rather defensively. “Direct descendants of Cro-Magnon stock. They speak the world’s most ancient living language. And until Franco banned their government and their language and their traditional music, they were an independent people. Can you blame them for being angry?”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” cut in Miguel. “It’s hardly surprising you feel sympathetic, Jack. But do you feel the same about the IRA?”
“Different situation entirely,” responded Jack curtly. “If Harold Wilson had declared total war on the Irish Republic and persuaded the Russians to come and bomb the shit out of Dublin, then I’d have had some sympathy. That’s the equivalent of what Franco did through his pact with Hitler. And that’s what fuelled Ignacio’s anger.”
“I guess he was old enough to have been involved,” admitted Alonso.
“I can remember his story as if I only heard it last week,” confirmed Jack. “It was the day after his twenty-first birthday. He’d spent the evening in a bar with friends and still had a hangover on the Monday afternoon. He lived no more than ten kilometres from the centre of Gernika, close enough to hear the bombs going off. He lost three members of his family and two close friends.”
“That was the Germans though—a division of the Luftwaffe,” retorted Alonso.
“Yes and no. There was an argument in one of our lessons—part of a feud involving two of the girls. One of them had German parentage, and during a debate in one of the lessons the other one threw Gernika in her face. She’d grown up in Coventry which suffered some of the worst bombing of the war, and she said that was typical German behaviour. When Ignacio couldn’t stand any more, he leant forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Let me tell you, young lady,’ he said, ‘something I don’t normally tell my students, because if my comments got back…’ He looked around at the rest of us. ‘I had a close friend who saw the orders for the bombing of Gernika with his own eyes. They were written on the official notepaper of General Mola, Franco’s second in command.’”
“Worth a thousand textbooks, a teacher like that,” muttered Alonso. “I don’t like his politics, but he had some guts talking like that.”
Jack smiled faintly. “Yes, he had guts alright. He kept himself tightly bottled up. He never smiled, never frowned, and I never heard him raise his voice. But that conveyed more anger and grief than any amount of ranting could have done. I began to develop a healthy respect for him, even a kind of wary affection. And a few weeks later, when things got really dark, it was to him that I turned for help.”
Miguel coughed and looked down at his notes. “Interesting character, Jack. I assume from the time you’ve spent talking about him that he becomes a major player later in the story. But can we get back to the main narrative? What I still need to understand is how your criminal but fairly innocent exploits with the young Santiago Ibarra dragged you into what I gather to have been a nightmarish experience. Don’t leave out anything that might be relevant – remember that we’re building up a witness statement from you in relation to the death of your friend Antonio – but please try to be brief.”
The detective’s attempt to move the narrative on backfired, because Jack was badly shaken by this fresh reminder of his friend’s death and needed to excuse himself for a while. Events and conversations had begun to unlock deeply buried images and impressions. So attractive were some of these that it was tempting to dwell on them, but even the most enticing of them had negative associations from which his mind recoiled.
The view from the upstairs window, out over the hills towards the twinkling lights of Hernani, brought other unwanted sensory impressions flooding back. Carbolic soap. Petrol. Smoke. But were they altogether unwanted? Was there, this time, a ripe and meaty taste of satisfaction in his mouth—the barest hint of something dark, inadmissible, but distinctly appealing? Dear God, what could he have hoped to achieve by coming back and puncturing this seething bubble of memory? Perhaps the very process of planning this reunion with an old friend had summoned up a monster.
He turned from the window and made his way back to the living room, if the Spartan communal area could be described as such, where someone had brewed a jug of coffee.
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JAMES
Foolish pride was the catalyst for what happened—initially Steve’s pride but ultimately my own.
The Bar Alarra was something of an institution back then, and I hear it’s still going strong today. Apart from a tiny dance floor in the basement it was no different from most of the other drinking haunts in the Old Quarter—little more than a large area of floor adorned with a sprinkling of sawdust and a few stools. However, it boasted a tiny basement dance floor and kept the longest hours of all the city’s drinking haunts. From around 2 a.m. onwards it was the last port of call—the place people ended up when everywhere else had closed and they weren’t ready to call it a night. On show night after night was a cross-section of society that mixed innocence and cynicism in equal parts: local revellers, tourists, students, predators, victims, in fact the universal assortment of urban night-creatures.
I was in the Alarra with my colleague Steve and a small group of local teens, some time in early June, when the conversation turned to their new folk-hero Txako and his miraculous escape. Steve had been drinking more heavily since our friend’s departure, and in a careless moment he gave away what had so far been a closely guarded secret: that we had set up Txako’s exodus and escorted him across the border.
THE ENGLISH WITNESS Page 4