The Last Goodnight

by Howard Blum

  “What are you doing here?” Arthur demanded. There was no greeting, no acknowledgment of the risks she had taken to find him. “I thought you were with Denise. Taking care of her.”

  If that was the way he wanted to be, Betty decided she would pay him no attention. “I need to see the ambassador,” she announced. Her tone was dismissive and peremptory. She waited in silence until at last he led the way.

  Her report to Sir Henry was precise and professional. She described the dangerous conditions all along the road from the French border and then informed him of her call to the Foreign Office.

  “Do you think they should send a destroyer?” Betty asked disingenuously. She was well-practiced in tiptoeing through risky ground.

  “Yes, indeed. Tell them to send one most urgently.” He tapped the table in front of him as if to underline the sentiment.

  Betty relaxed, and revealed that she had already made the request.

  “Well done!” he exploded. “Well done!”

  Then he gave her instructions. She was to return to France at once. There were several messages he needed to convey to the Foreign Office. He dictated them, and then listened as Betty read them back. “Excellent,” he said. “You must call the Foreign Office as soon as you’re in Biarritz. Tell them what I said. Word for word. I’m counting on you.”

  “As soon as I’m home,” Betty agreed.

  Arthur glowered.

  He waited till they were in the lobby to attack. “How could you risk your life? How could you leave our daughter?”

  Betty knew he wouldn’t understand; she didn’t even try to explain. “Sir Henry is counting on me,” she said, full of her newfound authority. Without another word, she walked off.

  Arthur followed, reluctant to make a scene; unseemly public displays were anathema to him, the sin of sins for a diplomat. And he knew Betty relished a good battle, any time or any place. Stymied, he seethed with a quiet, building anger.

  As Betty crossed the lobby—a sulky Arthur trailing a few feet behind—a group of five young soldiers approached. A tall, thin boy with haunted eyes and hollow cheeks, their leader, apparently, did all the talking.

  “We are Franco supporters,” he explained. “If the Republicans discover us, we will be executed. You have a car; we saw it out front. Can you take us to Fuenterrabía, up by the border? We can make our way to safety from there.”

  Fuenterrabía was in the mountains, a long way from the Santiago bridge that led to Biarritz. It was impossible to know what obstacles lay along that route, but they were easy to imagine.

  Immediately Arthur intervened. All his indignation now boiled over. He began to shout, and for once he did not seem to care if anyone noticed.

  “You can’t do it,” he ordered. “It’s too dangerous. It’s not your concern. Tell me you agree,” he demanded.

  “Yes,” Betty lied.

  Three hours later she left the five grateful soldiers at the side of a dark, winding road in Fuenterrabía. And two hours later she was back in her villa in Biarritz.

  She called the Foreign Office. When the duty officer answered, she repeated the ambassador’s messages word for word. Then she made him read it back. She did not hang up until she was certain he had it all.

  That night, she’d still remember a lifetime later, she enjoyed the soundest sleep of her young and just-burgeoning life.

  Yet in the morning all her newfound joy was shattered. A cable arrived from her mother: her father had died at the Washington Naval Hospital of lung cancer. Betty knew that he’d been ill, but she was still stunned by his death. She had not realized how quickly his condition could deteriorate. And now it was too late. She would never see him again. She never even had a chance to say good-bye.

  Her only solace, she tried to convince herself, was that her father, a battle-tested marine, would have been proud of how his daughter had performed on her mission to San Sebastian.

  IN THOSE TWO DANGEROUS DAYS, and in recognition of the valuable reports she had made to the Foreign Office, Betty had become what her new masters in London called “a symbolized agent.” She wasn’t a full-fledged spy, on neither the Firm’s books nor its payroll. But they had thrown their yoke around her neck; she was one of theirs. No longer were the MI6 wise men in their wood-paneled offices on Broadway in London simply keeping a sharp eye on her. She had become an “asset,” part of a small private army the Service could call on in a pinch. If the situation demanded, she would be their woman in Spain. They knew they could count on her.

  And no less, Betty, she divulged to Hyde, counted on the Service and all it had to offer. Her sense of desperateness, her anguish on losing the single person to whom she had felt bound by an unqualified love had threatened to push her out of control. But in the Service she hoped to find a worthy substitute for the love she had lavished on her father. It was the springboard she’d use to jump forward, and a way to placate her unsatisfied emotions. She still mourned—but, she wanted Hyde to understand, in her heart her duties and allegiances had never been clearer.

  Chapter 18

  FROM THE HILLTOP BETTY WATCHED plumes of dark smoke rising in the distance. Across the river in Spain, Irun was burning. Rather than allow Franco’s advancing troops to capture the city, the Republicans had set it ablaze. Betty was twenty miles away in Hendaye, France, and as the thick gray smoke floated toward her across the starlit night sky, she could feel the war’s danger and intrigue prickle her skin, urging her into action.

  Her last mission had been a revelation; she was still giddy over its success, empowered by what she’d accomplished. Just days after her call to the Foreign Office, the Royal Navy had steamed into the port of San Sebastian. Protected by a gauntlet of His Majesty’s marines, the ambassador and his staff made their furtive escape from the hotel and then scrambled up the gangplanks of the two battle-ready destroyers. The following afternoon, their heads once again held high, the diplomats disembarked at the picturesque French fishing village of Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

  Much to his embarrassment, Sir Henry grudgingly set up a makeshift embassy over a grocer’s shop a few miles away, in Hendaye; it was the closest town on French soil to Spain, just a stone’s throw from the border bridge spanning the Bidasoa River. Arthur and Betty, along with many of the embassy personnel, abandoned the gaudy comfort of Biarritz to find housing in nearby Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a cluster of modest, starkly white seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings that looked straight out on the Atlantic. Their new flat was a low-ceilinged maze of tiny rooms that smelled strongly of fish.

  Betty (#3), Ambassador Sir Henry Chilton (#1), and Arthur Pack (#2) in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France.

  Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill Archives Centre Miscellaneous Holdings, MISC 86

  “We do not know how much longer we will be here,” a gloomy Betty wrote in a letter to Arthur’s sister Rosie. “What a dreadfully heart-breaking and tragic three months this has been. My beloved Spain being so ruthlessly tortured . . .”

  Although she was safe in France, the war’s horrors still weighed heavily on her mind. “Some of their atrocities are beyond the bounds of imagination,” Betty wrote in another dispirited letter from Saint-Jean-de-Luz. “In Barcelona they split open the abdomens of pregnant women and put these women in shop windows saying ‘these women are nuns.’ In one province little children were hung by feet downwards and left to die of hunger and thirst. And there are many other such crimes to their infamy. It is a nightmare.

  “Worse,” she complained, focusing now on her own predicament, “the life to which we settled down was one of waiting.”

  What was Betty waiting for? As she passed her empty days in a quiet French fishing village, as nearly the entire northwest Spain fell into Nationalist hands, as Madrid and large tracts of the south remained under Republican control, what was she hoping for? Like any agent who had tasted the thrill of the secret life, Betty was looking forward to the summons to her next mission.

  When the call finally came, two separat
e operations were thrown at her. They presented themselves without warning, and each was seemingly unconnected with the other. Yet both, as if by design, played out in tandem. And while one was a mission of mercy, the other was more personal, launched in the name of a deep and abiding love.

  AUGUSTIN, VISCOUNT OF ALTAMIRA, OFFERED the initial opportunity for Betty’s return to the field. A descendant of an ancient and fabled Spanish noble family—Goya had immortalized one young and haughty ancestor as his “boy in red”—Altamira was passing through France on his way back to Spain to join up with Franco’s soldiers and, with nothing else to do on a quiet night in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, had invited Betty to dinner.

  She had first met Altamira, a suave charmer who had inherited his family’s crisp, angular good looks as well as their well-bred manners, during her time in Madrid. He was another of the handsome faces that appeared at the same parties as she did, a traveler in the carefree set who, happily tipsy, would greet the dawn on the crowded dance floor at Jimmy’s. From her memories of those now too ancient days, she recalled a slightly bemused vagueness, a man who seemed only to lift himself from the depths of his perpetual weariness to light the cigarette of an attractive woman.

  But the war had energized the viscount. The man Betty now encountered was determined to fight to preserve the title and traditions that were, he emphatically affirmed, his birthright. It was 170 miles from the border to the medieval cathedral city of Burgos where the Nationalist forces were massing, and Altamira had made up his mind to get there.

  The journey promised to be a tense one: well-outfitted Republican troops still held many of the roadways. Altamira’s plan, as he explained it with undaunted confidence over their long seaside dinner, was to stay off the main routes, and instead drive through the perilous backcountry mountain roads. If the car didn’t skid off a rock-strewn curve and fall hundreds of feet into an abyss, it was also possible, he acknowledged with an indifferent shrug, that Republican gunners would spot the vehicle and use it for artillery practice. Yet no sooner had he finished laying out the obstacles he’d be facing than he offered Betty the chance to come along too.

  If the danger wasn’t inducement enough, Altamira, without even realizing it, had conveniently already suggested another rationale on which Betty could hang her decision. Earlier in the course of dinner, the viscount had talked about the primitive conditions in the field hospitals. Scores of people died unnecessarily. With the proper medical supplies—antibiotics, surgical equipment, anesthesia—lives could be saved, he reported gravely. Betty had listened with horrified attention.

  When Altamira threw out his invitation, Betty in an instant cut the orders for her next mission: she would tour the hospitals surrounding Burgos; find out what they needed; and then, expense and logistics be damned, somehow obtain the supplies and get them to the war zone field stations.

  “I’d love to accompany you,” she told the viscount as he walked her home that night along the beach, the waves lapping against the sand, the autumn moon lighting the way.

  Neither Arthur’s predictable objections nor her responsibilities to her young daughter gave Betty any pause. All the reasonable, cautionary arguments against returning to a barbarous, unpredictable Spain, she promptly decided, were not worth a moment’s thought. This unexpected opportunity was precisely what she’d been waiting for, and that was all that mattered.

  Then, as Betty was enjoying the prospect of this new chance for adventure, the operational gods, with a sudden generosity, dumped another mission into her lap.

  There was a knock on the front door of the house in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Betty opened it to find Carlos’s wife, Carmencita. But she too had become a different person. Carmencita’s flight from Madrid and her long journey to France had been an ordeal. The woman Betty quickly welcomed into her home, once so gay, so chic, had become another of the war’s victims—ragged, penniless, and bereft.

  After Carmencita had bathed, changed into one of Betty’s dresses, and sat down at a table swiftly covered with plates loaded with an assortment of cheeses and cold meats, she shared her sad story. Between ravenous mouthfuls and long swallows of wine, Carmencita reported that Carlos, along with his brother officers in the Spanish Air Ministry, had been “taken away in the night.” She had tried to discover what had become of him, but it was impossible. No one would tell her anything. For all she knew, Carlos could still be suffering in a Republican prison, or he might have been put up against a wall and shot. Either fate was very possible, she conceded tearfully. When she finally accepted that there was nothing she could do, and that the Republican avengers would probably come for her next, she ran.

  Betty listened, and tried to steady herself. Even as Carmencita spoke, Betty’s mind flashed on images from her intense, sultry afternoons with Carlos in their penthouse hideaway. They had been in love, or at least that was what she’d told herself at the time, and now the possibility that he might be wasting away in a dank Republican jail left her shaken. Who would help him?

  There was no one else; she would go search for him.

  Even as she made the decision, she realized that she had no clues, no starting point for her investigation. The possibility that Carlos was dead was too sad to contemplate, and so she dismissed it. No, she told herself firmly, he was alive. In the course of her mission with Altamira, she would start asking questions, making inquiries. She would somehow find him, just as she had found her priest and then her husband.

  There was, however, one immediate problem: Arthur forbade her to go with Altamira. Not only, he insisted with good reason, was it too dangerous, but as a British diplomat’s wife, Betty could not be seen to support the Nationalist faction. Although the sympathies of many in the embassy, including the ambassador, were with the conservative and royalist forces, His Majesty’s government had endorsed the democratically elected Republican regime. The Foreign Office would be enraged, Arthur sternly lectured, if they learned that his wife was assisting Nationalist field hospitals. His career would be destroyed.

  Betty didn’t argue. There was no point; her mind was set. She was quite prepared to tell him anything he wanted to hear and then slip away in the night. But as she began plotting her escape, Arthur was summoned to London. Whitehall had scheduled a two-week conference to discuss commercial issues, and his presence was essential.

  So early one morning Betty accompanied Arthur to the train station; kissed him good-bye; promised that she would take good care of Denise; and then hurried home to scribble a quick note informing him of her departure. Leaving it on the dining room table, she drove off minutes later with Altamira.

  “COME WITH ME, SEÑORA, AND you can see for yourself what we need.”

  It was Betty’s second day in Burgos. The three-day trip through the mountains had been blessedly uneventful. They had not encountered a single Republican patrol. No whistling bullets. No pounding cannons. Even the dirt roads twisting through the peaks had proved surprisingly manageable. And now Altamira, proudly outfitted in a well-tailored colonel’s uniform, had escorted Betty to the headquarters of the Red Cross. As promised, he introduced her to his old friend Dr. Luis Valero, the head of the Spanish branch of the international medical organization.

  The doctor was a tall, painfully thin man with a bushy mustache that spread across his face like the wings of a bird in flight. Betty quickly explained why she had come; her plan was to learn what the hospitals needed, purchase the items with money she would raise from her well-heeled friends in Biarritz, and then return to Burgos with the supplies. She spoke with certainty and conviction, as if it would all be as simple as that.

  Dr. Valero could not dare to doubt her; he was desperate. His response, heartfelt and immediate, was an invitation to accompany him, “to see for yourself.”

  “What I saw was heartbreaking, even for a field hospital,” Betty would decades later tell Hyde. “In makeshift conditions, wounded and dying in every stage of suffering lay on the floor, their bandages improvised from any kind of
paper at hand.”

  Afterward the doctor gave her a long list of what was required—drugs, antiseptics, cotton wool, gauze, surgical instruments. He spoke with the wishful optimism of a timid child asking for Christmas presents, doubting that his grandiose request could be fulfilled, yet at the same time fervently hoping. When Betty promised that she would return shortly with all the supplies, she suspected that he was trying very hard to believe her.

  Only on the trip back to France did Betty begin to wonder how she might accomplish all that she’d promised. It would be very expensive, far beyond her own resources. Yet there were many wealthy Spaniards sitting out the war in Biarritz. How could any of them refuse to assist soldiers wounded while fighting on their behalf? And how could any of these hot-blooded Latin aristos turn down an attractive woman’s ardent plea?

  She traveled straight to Biarritz and, unannounced, appeared at the grand villa of an immensely wealthy Spanish refugee. An element of surprise, she had decided, would work in her favor.

  The man was old enough to be her father, but he had flirted energetically with Betty for years. On the dance floor at Jimmy’s he had held her very close, and from time to time his heavy hands would carelessly wander. Betty had responded to these advances with an indulgent smile; she’d long ago come to the conclusion that men were silly, helpless creatures, and that old men were the worst. But now the time had come to collect on the many petty indignities she’d endured with such playful good nature.

  It was all surprisingly easy. As with many habitual flirts, especially those of a certain age and a dubious virility, the Spaniard’s lustful attentions had, Betty suspected, little to do with genuine desire. In fact, Betty would say, he seemed astonished that she had come to him, that his persistence had actually succeeded.

  He was content to share a glass of wine, sit next to her on the sofa, and no doubt silently congratulate himself that his playboy charm had not faded with the passing years. Besides, he was a married man, and his life was already sufficiently complicated by one demanding mistress.