See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  “Did he see you?” Rico asked.

  “Yes, but he was in no position to get up and chase me,” Concho laughed, with the air of a grand strategist. “Don’t worry, he’d never identify me. These beards can be useful.” He then brought out of the bag his father’s militia rifle and the old family shotgun with which his father shot an occasional rabbit or dove.

  Héctor reported that there was an armed guard who sat near the entrance to the bank and occasionally would stroll about; moreover that he deduced from his intensive concentration on the cash teller’s window and the movements of the teller that there might be a pistol hidden but within reach of the teller. Antonio reported that he had observed only two policemen going by, always between nine and ten. He reported that the customers were relatively few between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty, after which they began to crowd in again.

  It was resolved that Rico, using the pistol, would on the stroke of eleven jab it into the back ribs of the guard and disarm him. At that identical moment Antonio would rush through the door with his shotgun, followed by Héctor with the rifle. Héctor would threaten any bystander who obstructed the operation, while Antonio would aim the shotgun at the chest of the bank teller, demand the money, and scrutinize him carefully lest he reach for a weapon.

  “How much money should Antonio demand?” Concho asked. “One thousand pesetas?”

  “No, you fool,” Rico said. “This is no longer merely an enterprise to pay for Raúl’s semester. It is a venture in revolutionary justice. We shall demand all the money.”

  There was discussion about this, and it was resolved to compromise by taking all the money in the till, but not to risk asking the teller to dip into the reserves in the bank’s vaults. “Remember, we have to act quickly,” Rico warned. “In and out.” Concho would be waiting outside in a getaway car that would be stolen that morning, hardly a problem since half the cars parked for a few blocks past the great square outside had keys in the ignitions. Car theft was virtually unknown in Spain in 1922. They would dispose of the car, and then, moving separately, unite in Antonio’s house by three o’clock in the afternoon. Later in the day Héctor would make a deposit with the bursar for the account of Raúl Carrera, and Raúl would be told that an anonymous donor had made it possible for him to continue in school.

  It was in high mood that they broke out one of Antonio’s father’s 1917 gourds of good red wine—“an appropriate color,” Concho said, smiling, “to toast the beginning, in Barcelona, of true revolutionary activity.” They all resolved to sleep in the same house to anneal their fraternal bonds and consecrate the singularity of the historical occasion. “Perhaps someday,” Concho whispered to Rico, who was preparing to sleep on the couch, “this house will be a shrine.” Rico nodded solemnly.

  The money in a pillowcase gripped in his left hand, the shotgun in his right hand, Antonio ran to the revolving door through which they had moments before entered the bank, but the hard thrust of his elbow into the glass pane had the effect not of causing the door to turn, but of rupturing the glass. At that point a shot rang out. The bullet appeared to go right through Antonio’s arm, because he dropped the shotgun in the shatter of glass. Héctor rushed to help Antonio but he too found the revolving door adamantly shut. He wrestled with it while Rico, his own pistol and the guard’s in his hands, ran to help his comrades. Now a second shot rang out, this time penetrating Rico’s right hand, causing him to drop both pistols. Héctor stopped wrestling with the door after a calm voice rang out from somewhere high above them. “You. With the rifle. Drop it.”

  Héctor dropped the gun, and looked over at Rico, who was thrusting his wrist against his sweater to staunch the bleeding. Sitting, his back against the revolving door, Antonio only moaned.

  The voice had come from behind the balcony on the second floor, where the offices were. It was the voice of José Luís Cambray y Echeverría, the sixty-five-year-old president of the Banco del Sagrado Corazón.

  It all had been very easy, he later explained to the press, puffing on his cigar and leaning back in his armchair. The teller, when accosted by the bandit, had simply put his foot over a special buzzer. The president, hearing the alarm ring in his office, depressed a switch that electrically bolted shut the revolving door. He had then reached for his rifle, conveniently situated right by the entrance to his office, opened the door, surveyed the situation below, aimed one shot at the fellow with the shotgun, a second shot at the fellow with the pistol, and was ready with a third shot to take on the rifleman; but that proved unnecessary, Don José said, tapping his ashes into the brass cuspidor.

  At the trial, Rico, Antonio, and Héctor were given ten years of hard labor. Concho and Raúl were given five years as accomplices, never mind that everyone swore that Raúl had been ignorant of the entire proceeding. After searching Raúl’s room and finding all the revolutionary literature, there simply could be no reasonable doubt of his involvement, the prosecutor had argued. The judge, pronouncing sentence, asked that God should forgive the young brutes, and Raúl’s mother, sitting diffidently in the second row, glad for once that her husband was dead, bowed her head and crossed herself.

  Raúl and Concho were sent to work on a mountain tunnel designed to penetrate the Iberian Mountains to permit the construction of a highway. During the day, under heavy guard and dressed in distinctive uniform, they would work in the seemingly endless tunnel, hewing rock and pulling out earth, and at night they would be driven by truck to the prison site at Altamira. A routine deprivation of the Altamira prison was the denial of any reading matter whatever. This vexation very nearly drove Raúl out of his mind, and he and Concho arranged to loiter outside a guard’s office in the few minutes they had, after work and before their supper, to hear the news over the radio. On the day that Lenin died Raúl felt as though he knew what it must have been that the apostles experienced at Calvary. He swore that he would dedicate himself when he got out to avenging Lenin.

  Concho said he did not understand this. “What did Spain do to Lenin that you should avenge Lenin?”

  Raúl explained to Concho that he was not well schooled in revolutionary rhetoric. Any defiance of Lenin—and the whole extra-Soviet world had been in defiance of him—was a defiance that needed to be avenged. Indeed, the cruel treatment given to Rico, Héctor, Concho, and Antonio, to say nothing of Raúl who had been entirely innocent, was so to speak a profanation of Lenin who was not only a leader but a prophet. Concho nodded his head. He said he wished Lenin would be avenged, but that in point of fact he had to confess that during the past three years he had found his revolutionary appetite abated, and he wanted most awfully first to spend a night with a woman, second to have a decent meal, and third never again to have anything to do with the police.

  “Does that mean,” Raúl asked, stroking his clean-shaven chin (the prison authority did not permit beards: “You never know what a beard is hiding,” the warden had pronounced), “that you never want to have anything further to do with me either?”

  Concho tried evasion. “You were not involved with the police.”

  “Answer me, Concho. Have you lost your communist faith?”

  “Well, no,” Concho said. “I’ll be glad when the revolution happens. It’s just that I don’t feel quite as … creative about it as I used to. I certainly”—he added this with heavy enthusiasm—“wish you the best of luck.”

  Raúl knew that but for one factor he would be bitter. That factor, of course, was that Concho had got into this difficulty only because of Raúl. At least that had been the initial impulse behind what had evolved as a comprehensive revolutionary gesture. Although he continued to be friendly with Concho, Raúl Carrera had experienced disillusion.

  When he emerged from prison Raúl Carrera was five years older, on the record. But he was much older than his twenty-seven years, and his political faith was wholly matured. At the railroad station in Barcelona he inquired about the fare to Madrid. He owned one hundred pesetas, his dismissal bounty. The fare to
Madrid was one hundred and twenty pesetas. He turned then from the station and walked to Calle Carmen and entered the public library, where he asked for the periodicals desk.

  He read hungrily the papers for that day, and then the day before that, and then the magazines. The papers, he had noticed excitedly, had made several references to the Communist Party, whose headquarters were of course in Madrid, which was why he wished to travel there. But then he stumbled on what he had subconsciously hoped to find. It was in El Standard: a story about a threatened strike by electrical workers. Their spokesman was Gabriel Ponzillo. And Gabriel Ponzillo was listed as leader of the Electrical Workers Union—and Vice President of the Communist Party of Barcelona.

  Raúl Carrera stood up.

  The Communist Party of Barcelona!

  He looked about him. There was no one in sight. With his fingers he tore out the column from the newspaper, stuck it in his pocket, and walked out, past the great obelisk to Colon, south toward the working district. He went into the Cantina de Milagros, and sat down and asked how much was a liter of red wine, and then put down the seventy-five céntimos on the table. The newspaper column in front of him, he drank the wine, one glass after another, his spirits soaring. The Communist Party of Barcelona!

  One hour later, Gabriel Ponzillo was testing the voltage of one of the auxiliary generators in the hot engine room of the principal electrical plant in the Jardín region. A clerk entered the room and, shouting to be heard against the generator’s loud whining, repeated that a young man demanded to see him and would not leave the premises until Ponzillo spoke to him.

  Ponzillo, a huge man in his late thirties, bearded and sweating in his T-shirt, put down his voltage meter without any change in expression.

  “Where is he?”

  “This way. Just outside the bursar’s office.”

  Wiping his hands and chest with a towel, Ponzillo came out into the dark. It was after ten, and Ponzillo would be on duty until midnight. He stared at a short, slim young man with straight hair and thin lips and eager eyes.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to help you, Señor Ponzillo. I was framed by the police and have been in prison for five years. I was a law student. I have read all of Lenin and Marx. I wish to join your cause.”

  Ponzillo paused, and stared down at Raúl. Another plant? he wondered. He said to him, “I live at 322 Calle Hércules. Meet me there at 12:15.”

  “Tonight?” Raúl pressed.

  “Tonight.”

  Raúl Carrera was there at 12:00, but waited outside, across the street. He saw Ponzillo walk into his own house at 12:10. He waited five minutes and knocked on the door.

  Ponzillo had washed, and now, wordlessly, led Raúl into the kitchen. On the table was coarse bread, red wine, and cheese. Ponzillo sat down and began to eat and drink, making no gestures toward Carrera except to point to a kitchen chair where he might sit down, which Carrera didn’t do.

  “Tell me your story.”

  Raúl did so, giving also one or two details about the gruesome regimen of prison life. He did not speak of the attrition of Concho’s revolutionary stamina.

  “All that for robbing a bank?” Ponzillo commented—his mouth was full of bread and cheese, but his eyes were on Raúl.

  “No sir. All that—without having robbed a bank.”

  “Very well. Tomorrow morning we are going to rob a bank. Will you join us?”

  Raúl Carrera turned pale. He thought of the 1,825 days at Altamira, of five years of rock hewing, of forty thousand hours without reading material. He wavered, but for only a moment.

  “Yes, Señor.”

  Ponzillo pushed his plate of bread and cheese to Raúl’s end of the table.

  “Sit down, comrade.”

  Comrade Raúl Carrera rose rapidly in the fledgling hierarchy of the Spanish Communist Party, and because of his special, quiet eloquence was much used in the academies, which were hot with sentiment for the overthrow of the dictatorship backed by the king. In the turbulent years that followed the overthrow of the dictatorship and the abdication of the king, the election of a Popular Front republican government, and the outbreak of the civil war, Carrera was specifically engaged in attempting to win over, or win back, those who had gone to the Trotskyist party or to the Anarcho-Syndicalists. The pressure from Moscow was considerable to discredit the Trotskyists, and by the summer of 1936 when the war came, Raúl Carrera had been trained to identify the Trotskyists as the principal enemy. Without their sundering influence, he reasoned, the communists would grow in power, take over the anarchists, and then simply swallow up the republicans. And after all that had been accomplished, taking on General Francisco Franco should not be so difficult, though he acknowledged that the opposition was increasingly united and that just as the republicans were receiving massive arms support from the Soviet Union, so Franco was receiving shipments of arms from Mussolini and Hitler.

  In early April of 1937, Raúl Carrera was advised by Party Secretary José Carrillo that he was wanted in Moscow. He went, of course, with great though subdued excitement. Raúl Carrera, as he grew older, grew quieter; in manner, more nearly clerical than flamboyant. But the ideological fires were well banked.

  In Moscow, Carrera was taken to an army barracks which had once been used for junior officers. He was assigned a small room and told that he would be interviewed the following morning by Major Boris Bolgin of the KGB. He spent the late afternoon and evening worshipping at Red Square. It required a two-hour wait in line before he could get in to view the corpse of Lenin. He reminded himself of the pledge he had made thirteen years earlier to avenge Lenin’s death. He stared at that pale countenance with the austere beard, at the black suit and bald head, and but for the guard who brusquely told him to move along, he’d have stayed there throughout the night, or for as long a vigil as was asked of him.

  Outside the monument, Carrera wished that he knew someone who might show him about. He had been studying Russian and could manage to read Russian guidebooks. Indeed he had proved adept at languages, becoming competent in English and in French. As if drawn by a magnet, he thought to move toward the university, and so after studying the subway map he made his calculations, as usual with exactitude; he emerged at the Omsk station and walked over toward the Student Union Building.

  There on the vast ground floor he saw a number of posters against the wall on the left: Stalin with a little girl presenting him flowers on his birthday; Stalin with a peasant, head bowed in reverence as Stalin paternally touches him on the shoulder; Stalin with the troops cheering him at an armed forces festival; Stalin dedicating a naval vessel. Something stirred in Carrera’s memory. It was the talk the year before of Lenin’s “Testament,” in which the communists were warned against Josef Stalin. But he was satisfied to believe that this was a forgery, probably composed by Leon Trotsky, the great enemy of communist unity. He spotted a studious-looking girl, her head bent over a reading table, the day’s paper spread out before her. Perhaps it was because of the exotic circumstances and the loneliness that had hit him that Carrera addressed her.

  “Excuse me, I am Comrade Raúl Carrera from Spain. I am here on official business. May I speak with you?”

  The girl glanced up, unsmiling, and looked at the slim young man, a trace of the Moorish in his complexion and skin. She did not smile, but neither was she clipped in her response.

  “Can I help you?”

  Raúl wondered whether he should ask the routine questions—How to Get to the Main Book Section, or Where did one go to Get Tickets to the Ballet. Instead he said:

  “Would you consent to having a cup of tea or coffee with me?”

  Without hesitation she rose, bundled her bag of books into a canvas case, buttoned her rough woolen sweater about her—it was April and chilly, though not cold. She spoke.

  “You have a little difficulty with Russian, and I do not speak Spanish. Do you speak German or French?” Raúl answered delightedly that he could speak French and
so, conversing in French, they went outdoors. She led him to a little shop a few blocks away frequented primarily by students. The service was cafeteria style; there was a choice of several coarse breads and pastries, sausage, potatoes, carrots, Ukrainian wine, vodka, beer, and tea. Raúl watched to see what his companion would take, intending to follow her example, and was agreeably surprised to see her take some of almost everything available, save the alcoholic drinks. Raúl Carrera took sausage, cheese, and a tenth of vodka.

  Three hours later he had refilled his vodka glass three times, and Katia had taken a glass of wine. She was twenty, studying European history and literature, and she intended to pursue her studies and to teach, preferably back in Kiev where her divorced mother lived.

  “You can hardly blame my mother. Father was sent to Siberia eight years ago and after three years she didn’t hear from him anymore. Dead, I suppose.”

  She had then waited for a complementary recital by Raúl so that they would advance with knowledge of each other more or less pari passu—“My birthplace is Riga, what is yours?” “It is Barcelona. I was born on January 13, 1900. When were you born?” “December 1, 1917.” That kind of thing. Prudent.

  And Raúl complied, while taking care to edit his biography since leaving law school. And she maintained this demand for conversational parity for a full hour when suddenly she found herself free of any suspicion of the intense young Spaniard, whose words were so nicely framed in a French obviously learned at the academy, yet learned with idiomatic finesse.

  She began then to speak with some abandon, expressing frustration at the difficulty of getting books on modern French and German authors she wished to read, for instance Thomas Mann. Carrera volunteered to attempt to get those books—“though it is not easy today to ‘get’ things in Barcelona, but I have a few contacts outside Barcelona.” To which Katia had replied, looking rather patronizingly at her companion, never mind that he was old enough to have fathered her, “How would you, assuming you got the books of Thomas Mann, arrange to get them to me, here?”