by Howard Blum
They sat close to one another and chatted. When in the meandering course of their flirtatious banter, Betty revealed that she’d come to ask a favor, he was prepared to listen. “Anything, my dear,” he agreed with a reflexive charm.
They need medical supplies in Burgos, she said. I have a long list.
“Done!” he said at once. And no doubt he considered himself lucky; jewels were, he knew too well, much more expensive.
Betty moved closer to him on the sofa and clutched his liver-spotted hand. “I’ll need everything tomorrow,” she purred.
“Of course, my dear,” he agreed. Then, satisfied with the way things had gone, he rose and politely walked her to the door.
But now she had to deal with Arthur. On the way to the flat in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, she contemplated the uproar that would break out upon her arrival. An indignant Arthur would castigate her for breaking her promise, abandoning their daughter, and going off to Spain—to help the Nationalists, no less! That, she knew, would be bad enough. But when he learned that she’d be returning tomorrow to Burgos, the full self-righteous force of his anger would erupt. It would be an all-out battle that few marriages could survive. So be it! she decided. Damn the consequences! Nothing was more important than this mission.
But once again, her operational luck held. Arthur had returned from London, only to be sent off to inspect the Republican-held territory in the south. He’d be gone for days.
The next afternoon, her car tightly packed with the medical supplies Dr. Valero had requested, she returned to Burgos.
Three days later she was standing in the garden behind the Red Cross building. Dr. Valero had assembled the staff, and there were tears of gratitude in his eyes. He presented Betty first with a homemade armband with a red cross on a white background, and then with a bouquet of roses picked from a garden that had somehow survived the war.
With great dignity, he delivered a short, earnest speech of thanks. The staff applauded, and Betty, deeply moved, tried not to cry. She held herself tall and erect as she imagined her father had done when he had received his medals.
When the ceremony was over, the doctor unashamedly handed Betty a new and longer list of much needed supplies. He was now a man who believed in miracles.
“I will do my best,” Betty vowed.
She was returning to her car, ready to set off on the long trip back to France, when a military officer approached. “You will be good enough, please, señora, to accompany me,” he said. The words were spoken with an impeccable politeness, but it was clear they were an order. “Your presence is required at the Foreign Ministry.”
“At whose request?” Betty challenged. In wartime there were many grounds for a summons to a government office, and all were cause for concern.
“Señor Don José de Yanguas Messia, Viscount of Santa Clara de Avedillo,” he answered firmly, “would be honored if the señora would graciously permit him a few minutes’ conversation.”
Avedillo was Franco’s foreign minister. If he wanted to speak with her, whether she graciously permitted it or not, Betty knew it would happen.
“Of course,” she said. There was no way out, nowhere to run. She let the officer lead the way, and tried not to think what might be in store for her.
FOR ANY AGENT, ONE OF the cardinal operational rules is not to exceed your brief. Betty’s mission was already twofold: she would deliver medical supplies and at the same time make discreet inquiries about Carlos. That was what she’d set out to do, and it was challenge enough. There was no reason to take on anything else, and put those two formidable missions. But in Betty’s meeting with the foreign minister, common sense deserted her.
Perhaps she felt invincible after her successful delivery of the medical supplies. And Avedillo’s approach was artful. He offered a glimmer of hope just when Betty desperately needed it.
It had come to his attention, the minister began as they sat across from one another in his huge office, that Betty had been making inquires regarding Señor Carlos Sartorius. Possibly he could be of assistance. He’d be glad to have his ministry use its resources, if Señora Pack so desired.
On both her trips into Spain, Betty had asked all those she met if they had any idea of what had happened to Carlos. Despite her persistence, the results had been dismal: no one had heard even a rumor. A well-connected and powerful minister, though, would have more sources. He might get an answer. “I’d be most grateful,” Betty said at once.
“Good,” agreed the minister. “I will see what I can do.”
Now that he had dangled the carrot, Avedillo deftly moved on to explain why he had summoned Betty. He had a sealed envelope he wanted Señora Pack to deliver to Sir Henry Chilton, the British ambassador. With a nonchalance that was either feigned or betrayed a colossal naïveté, he disclosed its contents: it was a request that the ambassador formally recognize the Franco government.
Betty’s first response was disbelief. If she delivered the letter, she’d be assisting a representative of the rebel regime. The Crown recognized only one government in Spain—the Republic. For the wife of a member of the embassy staff, and a lowly one at that, to take delicate foreign policy matters into her own hands—acting on her own initiative to convey an approach from an insurgent government—would create a full-blown scandal. It was wrong in so many ways that even Betty, a master of convenient rationalizations, could find no justification. It was the sort of ill-considered escapade that would leave a permanent blemish on Arthur’s career.
And yet, she reminded herself in the next instant, the minister had offered to help find Carlos. However faint that hope might be, it was enough to overpower all her reservations. Not only would she save Carlos, she exulted, as paradoxical as ever, but Sir Henry would congratulate her as enthusiastically as he had when she’d turned up without warning in San Sebastian. It would become true, simply because she wanted it to be.
Betty took the envelope from the foreign minister.
“I left Burgos,” she told Hyde, “and drove to Hendaye. It was evening when I arrived and the lights were still on so I went in. Someone on the staff told me my husband had returned from his trip and was very angry about my absence. But I did not want to be scolded then as I first had to see the Ambassador and give him the envelope. . . .
“As it happened when the Ambassador had finished with me, nothing my husband had added subsequently mattered. I went back to Biarritz, delivered Dr. Valero’s second list, and lay down on my bed and cried.”
YET BETTY WAS RESILIENT. THE ambassador’s words—she vividly remembered their harsh, imperious tone, but little else from his tirade—had stung. But now she pushed them aside. Betty reminded herself, as she would at countless low moments in her turbulent life, that she was not her mother: She would not be swayed by what other people thought. Only one voice mattered in the unruly chorus singing in her head—her own.
Everything that she believed in was telling her that she must go back to Burgos, deliver the next batch of medical supplies, and find Carlos. That was her mission; as long as it was still possible, she would not abandon it.
Two days later, her car packed with the fresh supplies her benefactor had obediently purchased, she headed across the bridge into Spain. This time the guards ordered her to stop. She must report to the comandancia, they told her firmly.
It was only a short walk to the concrete building, but in those few yards a dozen contradictory possibilities stormed through Betty’s mind. She did not want to end up again in the hole. She saw herself abandoned in a cell crammed with desperate prisoners. Anything but that, she prayed.
Yet in all her imagined scenarios, she had never anticipated that a familiar figure in a Nationalist colonel’s uniform would be in the commandant’s office, standing at attention to greet her.
“You must go back to France. You must go back!” the Viscount of Altamira ordered as soon as she walked in. He was excited, and his usual elaborate courtesy had disappeared.
As she tried to
make sense of what was happening, he continued in a grave but forceful voice. If she refused, he said, he had orders to arrest her.
“On what charge?” Betty finally managed to ask.
“Espionage.”
Betty was stunned. Either her actions in San Sebastian had caught up with her, or, just as likely, the authorities were simply guessing. But she did not delude herself. In wartime, facts were unimportant; only the charges were relevant. And the penalty for spying was death.
Still, there were medical supplies to deliver.
“It just can’t be true,” she said. “Someone has made a mistake.
“I don’t think there is any mistake, Betty,” her old friend said emphatically.
But Betty refused to panic. She pushed away thoughts of a premature death and coolly offered up a compromise. “The only possible thing to do is to telephone military headquarters in Burgos and ask them to check. Tell them I am here with you and have got to get on to Burgos to make my delivery to Dr. Valero. If they want to arrest me there, they can.”
Dutifully, the viscount made the call. He listened, and Betty watched as his face tightened. When he put down the phone, his tone was flat, the resigned voice of a man who has no choice but to follow orders.
“It is as I thought,” he said. “Someone has denounced you.” The military authorities had been informed that the wife of the British commercial counselor was using the pretext of working for the Red Cross to enter Nationalist territory. The real purpose of her trips, according to the charges that had been filed, was to gather intelligence for the Republicans.
“Who could have made such an unfounded charge?” Betty asked, genuinely mystified. “Why?”
“I think I know who it is, and you do too,” Altamira said. He pointed to France and, raising his voice in frustration, shouted, “It’s that woman.”
He spoke a name. As soon as he said it, all the pieces in the puzzle fell into place. It was the wife of the man who had paid for the medical supplies. “She has a cause to be jealous of me,” Betty had to concede. The charm that had made her mission possible, she realized, had become her undoing.
“I have been ordered to escort you back across the border,” Altamira said without ceremony. “If you refuse, I will have no choice but to arrest you.”
Betty understood she would have to obey. But she made one request of her old friend. She asked if he’d take the medical supplies from her car and make sure they were delivered to Dr. Valero.
“Certainly,” he agreed.
IT WAS ONLY AS BETTY and the colonel were driving back across the bridge toward France that he disclosed that the foreign minister had asked him to pass on some news.
There was an unconfirmed report that a group of air force fliers, including Carlos, had been incarcerated in a Republican prison. It was old intelligence, the minister stressed. He had no recent information; there was no way of knowing with any certainty whether Carlos was still alive or had been executed. But since Carlos had been a serving officer, it was very possible, the minister believed, that he’d have been treated as a prisoner of war. He’d be kept alive, a captive in a military jail.
Where? Betty asked, all the day’s disappointments suddenly fading. What prison?
The minister did not know. He had heard it was in Madrid. More than that, he didn’t know. “But you understand, Betty,” Altamira lectured with concern, “you cannot go to Madrid. Now that you’ve been accused of being a spy, you won’t be safe anywhere in Spain.”
Betty was no longer listening. She was planning how she would make her way to Madrid.
Chapter 19
MADRID WAS A CITY UNDER siege. In the bloody summer of 1937, Franco’s troops had advanced from the south while Mola’s army marched down from the north. The plan was to squeeze this Republican-held stronghold until it surrendered.
The Nationalist planes dropped heavy bomb loads on residential neighborhoods. Their artillery shot off barrage after barrage. Their tanks lumbered forward toward the heart of the city, bulldozing whatever lay in their paths. “I will destroy Madrid rather than leave it to the Marxists,” Franco promised.
The Republican militia built fortifications along the banks of the swift-flowing Manzanares River and prepared to defend their homes. Waving their revolvers high in the air, commanders urged their men to die in the trenches rather than flee like cowards. “No pasaran!”—They shall not pass!—became the rallying cry.
Still, it was with a renewed sense of joy, more foolhardy than brave, that Betty planned her circuitous route to this battleground. That she would need to cross through the Nationalist lines and then enter enemy Republican territory did not dissuade her. That the Nationalists considered her a spy and had issued orders to arrest her on sight was not an obstacle. Nor was she deterred by reports that no neighborhood in the city was safe; any block might suddenly be leveled, a sniper could be hiding anywhere, looking down his sights, preparing to pull the trigger. And she certainly was not put off when Arthur boomed, “I forbid you to go.” This was a mission she wanted to save herself as much as to save Carlos. She could not endure another vacant day in the claustrophobic low-ceilinged flat with Arthur, the baby, and the sickening smell of fish.
Although too often rash, in the field Betty turned cool and deliberate. She proceeded with careful tradecraft. First she wrote to the Republican embassy in Paris and requested a visa. This was duly granted—Betty was the wife of a diplomat whose government recognized the Republic—but she needed to drive north to the Spanish consulate in Bayonne to fetch it. Document in hand, she purchased a ticket on the daily early-morning flight from Toulouse, France, to the Mediterranean coast city of Valencia, Spain. The street fighting, for the time being at least, was a long way off, and the Republic had prudently moved its seat of government to Valencia; Great Britain, in a show of support, had set up a chancery in the medieval city. Betty hoped that in Valencia she’d be able to convince a British diplomat to help. Or if for once her charm failed, she’d be close enough—only two hundred treacherous miles or so away—to improvise another way of making the journey to Madrid.
Her timing was shrewd. She waited for a morning when she knew Arthur would be sleeping late; there had been a bachelor party the previous night for a member of the embassy staff. She handed a note announcing her departure to the maid and told her to take it up with her husband’s breakfast; she informed the nanny that she should consider herself in complete charge of the infant until her return; and then she moved quickly. A friend’s car and chauffeur were waiting as instructed down the street, the motor running, and she hopped in. The Toulouse airport was about forty minutes away. “Hurry,” she told the driver.
Betty was soon flying through the clouds to Valencia. Nevertheless, she imagined she could hear Arthur’s wail of rage and frustration as he read her note.
“YOU WILL TAKE THE FIRST plane out of here. I’ll have nothing to do with you,” John Leche, the British chargé d’affaires in Valencia, admonished Betty.
Leche was a career diplomat, a tall, stylishly tweedy man who served the crown with a ruling-class sense of duty to the empire and, no less deeply ingrained, a wry undergraduate irreverence. Just days after his arrival from Buenos Aires, he’d sent a dispatch describing the conditions in Valencia that caused a stir among some of the more fussy umbrella-and-bowler sorts in Whitehall: “I have not yet got over the idea that I have landed in a lunatic asylum. . . . Every crank and busybody in the world, amongst them I regret to say, a great many British, seem to be gathered together. . . . Every kind of fisher in troubled waters of both sexes seems to be collected.” But his supporters—and there were many in the Foreign Office—read the cable as typical Leche: smart, observant, and refreshingly impertinent.
This June afternoon, however, Leche’s cavalier manner had given way to something hotter. That the embassy in Hendaye had sent this woman to ask for his help in getting to Madrid astonished him. Didn’t they know there was a war on? Why, he’d spent the past two
days moving heaven and earth to get two British women out of Spain. And now this silly creature wanted help in getting right into the thick of it! “Hendaye has let you come here on a fool’s errand, without consulting me first,” he barked.
He reinforced his words with the well-practiced stare he used on particularly dim underlings. But if he thought the attractive woman in his office would be intimidated, Leche swiftly realized he’d underestimated Mrs. Pack.
“Hendaye has nothing to do with it,” Betty said matter-of-factly. “I ran away to go to Madrid, and I am going to Madrid.” She let that sink in, and then added with a small, bemused shrug, “No doubt Hendaye is even more furious with me than you.”
Leche was inclined to disagree; no one could be more furious than he was at the moment. But instead, Betty recalled to Hyde, he just plowed on gruffly. “You have placed me in an intolerable position. Madrid is being bombed and shelled day and night. There is no one at the embassy there. If you go and are killed, I shall be responsible and there will be one bloody row. No! Back you go to where you came from!”
But Betty’s mind was set. No one was going to change it. Besides, strident diplomats did not scare her; she charmed them for sport. Without another word, she picked up her small suitcase. Head held regally high, she walked slowly out of the room.
“Just a minute. Where are you going now?”
“Oh, only to have a look around. And then find a place to sleep. I have had no sleep for the past two nights.”
Leche studied her for a long, pensive moment. She really was a splendid-looking woman. Pigheaded. Foolish. But splendid.
“While you are looking around, you had better get yourself a bathing suit.”
His tone remained abrupt and peremptory.
But Betty knew the signs: he was softening.
“A swimsuit?” she shot back with a soft laugh. “Do you think it is necessary for me to swim the river Manzanares in order to enter Madrid?”