Vendetta in Spain

by Dennis Wheatley

On arriving in Madrid, de Quesnoy booked a sleeper on the night express to Granada, then had an early dinner at Boca’s, choosing for his main course a dish for which the ancient restaurant was famous—a boiled chicken which was served covered with a yellow sauce made from eggs and sherry, and having some resemblance to a zabaione. His first-class sleeper was old-fashioned but spacious and comfortable, so he slept well and arrived in Granada early in the morning on Wednesday the 29th.

  He had never before been to this famous city from which for centuries a line of Caliphs had dominated south-eastern Spain, and which later, after the Moors had been driven out, had been greatly embellished by the Catholic Sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella. It was set in a vast, fertile plain enclosed by great ranges of mountains, and no finer view of it could be obtained than from the new de-luxe hotel to which the Count had wired from Madrid for rooms.

  When he had had a bath and changed he went out on to the balcony. The hotel had been built on the very edge of the precipitous south-western slope of a high plateau that divided the modern city and the old Christian quarter from the original Moorish town. His room looked out over the former and from the balcony on which he stood he could have pitched a peseta down into the nearest street which lay two hundred feet below. The city lay sizzling in the sun but the air up there was cool and invigorating, and the atmosphere crystal clear. Beyond the great huddle of spires, domes and roofs the plain stretched away interminably, walled in on either side by unbroken chains of lofty mountains, those to the left having snow on their peaks gleaming white against the cloudless azure sky.

  He took out the photograph that Sanchez had dropped and studied it again. It was a three-quarter length of a sultry-looking beauty. She was wearing a black, flat-crowned, wide-brimmed Andalusian hat tilted sideways on her head, and a fringed silk shawl twisted tightly round her body. Her pose was that traditional with Flamenco dancers: one hand on hip, the other crooked above her head holding castanets. The name of the photographer, which was stamped below the portrait, was Elio, and his studio was in the Calle de San Jerónimo.

  De Quesnoy hired a carriage and had himself driven down to the studio. Judging him to be a possible customer of means Señor Elio willingly supplied him with such information as he could. He remembered the woman well. She had not been wearing fancy dress but was a professional Flamenco dancer known as La Torcera—which de Quesnoy later learned meant ‘The Wriggler’. The photograph had been taken about six months ago, and on referring to his ledger Señor Elio said that he could not give her address because she had called for the prints. He added, however, that she was certainly a gipsy, so the Count should have no difficulty in finding her if he made enquiries at the gipsy settlement on the hillside beyond the old Moorish town that lay on the far side of the city.

  Having thanked him, de Quesnoy declined the suggestion that he should have his photograph taken, and decided to spend the rest of the morning sightseeing.

  To his surprise he found the Cathedral to be hidden away behind tall buildings in one of the main streets, and the entrance to it through first a small private house then a tiny patio; but once inside, it was a glory of brightness; all its walls and pillars being made of pure white stone. Having admired a magnificently carved interior door—the great masterpiece of the sculptor Siloe—and the famous Virgin Chapel, he went into the adjacent Capilla Real.

  Nearly a third of this much smaller edifice he found to be occupied by four enormous tombs with the most beautiful carvings imaginable. They were those of Ferdinand and Isabella and of their successors, the mad Queen Joan and Philip the Fair of Burgundy, by whose union half Europe fell under the sway of their son, the Emperor Charles V.

  A beadle, hovering for a tip, pointed out to de Quesnoy that the stone pillow under Queen Isabella’s head had a deeper depression in it than that of King Ferdinand, and told him the amusing legend that it had been deliberately sculpted so because she had had more brains than her husband.

  Having a wide knowledge of European history, the Count could well believe that she had; for, although it was Ferinand who had driven the Moors out of Spain, his Queen had acted as his Quartermaster-General, and without the extraordinary feats of organisation she performed he could never have achieved his victories. It was Isabella, too, who had had the vision to finance Columbus’ voyage to America. The tragedy was that a woman so brilliant and so good in herself should also have been so much under the sway of pitiless priests that she had allowed them to found the Holy Office, and encouraged the terrible work of the Spanish Inquisition.

  The beadle then took him down a flight of steps to a level below the huge tombs, where there was a glass panel through which he could see the actual dust-covered coffins of these two sovereigns who, by their marriage, had brought Spain under one crown and made her a great nation.

  In the sacristy he saw the crown, sceptre and mass-book used by Isabella, and King Ferdinands sword. Then, having had enough of churches for the day, he went out to wander round the streets of the old town. The Moorish bazaar delighted him, as it consisted of a series of open arcades criss-crossing one another, and each lined on both sides with shops only the width of a single narrow arch, in which craftsmen of all kinds were still plying ancient trades.

  On returning to his hotel he asked the hall-porter to find out for him if a dancer known as La Torcera was still living in the gipsy settlement and, if so, how he could locate her habitation. After lunch he slept through the afternoon, then before dinner he went for a walk through the woods which covered the greater part of the Alhambra height, on which the hotel was situated.

  He was thinking only of Gulia, and wondered what he had better do about her. To disclose frankly to de Cordoba that they had fallen desperately in love and intended to run away together was certainly not as despicable as entering on an adulterous liaison behind his back; yet it seemed to de Quesnoy that even the former course was highly reprehensible since, had his friend not shown his trust in him by allowing him to spend so much time alone with Gulia, the present situation would never have arisen.

  There was another side to the matter, too. If Gulia was right in her belief that her husband was indifferent to her entering on an affaire, provided she was discreet, and José found out that they had become lovers, he might not mind very much; whereas he might mind very much indeed if his whole life were disrupted by his wife being taken away from him.

  With a wry smile de Quesnoy thought how, in his case, history was repeating itself, in that for the second time in his life he should be contemplating running away with a married woman. He recalled the many times he and Angela had wrestled with the pros and cons of an elopement. In her case he would not have had the least scruple about taking her from her villainous husband, but she had had a greater sense of loyalty than Gulia and had insisted on remaining with her husband until he could surmount his financial difficulties. Gulia, on the other hand, was willing not only to sacrifice a much greater name and position for him, but also to share with him the uncertainties of a soldier’s life in South America—a thing that Angela would never have agreed to even after they were legally married.

  ‘Legally married’; he repeated the words in his mind. It was over the difficulty of their becoming so, as long as Angela’s husband had been alive, that had caused them such harassing doubts about whether they should gamble everything by her cutting loose and their first living together openly in, so-called, sin. And that, now, would apply equally with Gulia. There could be no divorce, and de Cordoba might quite well refuse to countenance an appeal to Rome for an annulment of their marriage. Even if he did not obstruct the appeal the Church might refuse to grant it. At best it would take two or three years to come through. And in the meantime Gulia would be living a furtive existence with him under an assumed name, and—a thought that made him see red—be in constant dread of being subjected to slights and insults from people who knew that she was not ‘legally married’ to him.

  After a two hours’ walk he decided that, grea
tly as he desired her, he was neither prepared to disrupt the life of his friend nor place her in such an invidious position; and that he was certainly not going to go back on his original refusal to betray his friend’s trust by taking her in secret as his mistress.

  Having made this resolve it followed that in no circumstances should he again become a member of the de Cordoba household, either at San Sebastian or in Madrid; for to do so could result only in placing an appalling strain on both Gulia and himself. His first job was to hunt down Sanchez. After that he would have to appear at the Barcelona trial, but that was now barely a fortnight away; so it would be easy to make some excuse for not returning to San Sebastian in the meanwhile. When the trial was over he would spend six or eight weeks with his father in Southern Russia, then he would go to South America and see whether, in a year or so, he could not after all achieve his life-long ambition to be given command of a Cavalry Division.

  That evening the hall-porter reported that La Torcera was still living in the gipsy settlement and working in the best troupe of Flamenco dancers, who gave displays in the biggest cave for the wealthier tourists. He then asked if de Quesnoy would like a guide to take him there at ten o’clock, when the dancing started.

  The Count replied that he would not be going there until the following evening, and then he would not require a guide but only a carriage to take him to the settlement and bring him back.

  The porter pressed him to take a guide, giving as his reason that unless strangers were properly sponsored the gipsies could prove troublesome, as the men were a lawless lot and had been known to demand money with menaces before they would let solitary visitors leave their settlement. But de Quesnoy had no intention of saddling himself with a companion, and he assured the porter that he was quite capable of looking after himself.

  His reason for delaying for twenty-four hours before getting in touch with La Torcera was based on a nicely balanced assessment of possibilities. Assuming that after Sanchez’ flight from Barcelona he had been living with this woman and, following his stay in San Sebastian, intended to return to her, since he had not caught the Madrid express he could not have got back to Granada before that evening at the earliest. On the other hand, if he meant to return he should be back for certain by the following night. To have questioned La Torcera about him before he arrived would have meant running a grave risk, even if she were heavily bribed, of her warning him directly he did put in an appearance that his hide-out had been discovered; upon which it was certain that he would disappear and again become very difficult to trace.

  If Sanchez was living with the gipsies it seemed most unlikely that he would show himself at any of their performances, as to do so would have been to risk some police agent among the spectators identifying him; so while strangers were about he would most probably lie low in the woman’s hut. De Quesnoy’s hope was that he would be able either to fool or bribe La Torcera into betraying Sanchez by pointing out her hut to him. He could then go straight to it, take Sanchez by surprise and, at the point of his revolver, compel him to give up the incriminating negative.

  Next morning, as he had another day to kill, he decided to spend it up on the Alhambra height visiting the world-famous Moorish Palaces with which it was crowned.

  First he went to the Generalife, one of the smaller palaces which had been used as a summer residence by the Caliphs and was said to have the loveliest gardens in Spain. He found its long walks of tall clipped hedges a pleasant sight, but no better than those he had seen in similar formal gardens elsewhere. There were, too, roses in great profusion, though their beds were ragged and ill-kept; and by and large he considered the garden of the Alcazar in Seville to be much more beautiful. However, the Generalife possessed one unique feature that it had been well worth coming to see—a very long narrow canal with a hundred fountains playing into it from either side and so forming a continuous arcade of sparkling water-drops rainbow-hued in the brilliant sunshine.

  On the other side of the plateau he found that the great palace of the Alhambra more than rivalled the Alcazar in Seville. The buildings, lakes and gardens within its walls covered several acres and from the main fortress-palace a huge square casbar towered up to the sky. From its top one could see many miles in every direction, and the great ranges of mountains in the distance made the panorama superb. On the ground level its principal courts were gems at which to wonder. To construct the Court of the Lions and the Court of the Ambassadors, with their delicate pillars of different coloured marbles and incredibly intaricate lace work carved from stone, must have taken an army of skilled craftsmen years of devoted labour.

  History as written by the Western world accounted it a great triumph that the Moors had been driven out of Europe. It had been for the Christian faith; but in no other way. These cultured people, with their high standard of living and scrupulous bodily cleanliness, had been replaced by Europeans who were little better than barbarians: their highest caste still inhabiting bitterly cold and uncomfortable castles, ignorant, unwashed, lice-ridden, a prey to witchcraft and superstition, and dominated by priests whose cruelty had not been equalled since in ancient times the priests of Moloch had also appeased their God by consigning human victims to the flames.

  Pondering upon this, de Quesnoy wondered whether, had the Moors defeated the Christians and, in due course, having become the masters of Europe, carried their culture north, humanity might not have been spared the endless wars between Catholics and Protestants, which had caused such appalling suffering and, perhaps, enjoyed the benefits of science and hygiene several hundred years earlier than, with the Christian victory, had proved the case.

  While going through the upper floors of the palace he came to the apartments of the Harem. One of the largest rooms was made delightfully airy from one of its walls being composed only of a row of arches, which gave on to a wide covered balcony. Going out on to it he remained there for a few minutes enjoying the view. The wall of the palace and the cliff on which it was built fell almost sheer to a gorge two hundred feet below. On the far side of the gorge lay the old Moorish city; a huddle of white, red-roofed buildings still surrounded by ancient crenellated walls.

  Beyond it the ground rose in a rugged slope pitted with caves and dotted here and there with small clusters of low, white-painted walls that were evidently living quarters built against the hillside. From a few of them smoke spiralled up. In some places it also rose from what, in the distance, looked like short posts set up on parts of the rock where it was fairly flat, but actually they were chimney pots to carry off smoke from cooking fires in caves hidden below them. It was the gipsy settlement.

  That night, after he had dined, de Quesnoy had himself driven out there. He was wearing informal evening clothes under a long black cloak and a flat-crowned sombrero. Behind his right hip, hidden by the cloak, he carried de Cordoba’s revolver, fully loaded. Behind his left hip, similarly hidden, he had slung a leather bag contining a considerable sum in Spanish gold coins. In his pocket he had another, smaller, bag of gold and a number of loose pieces for immediate expenses.

  The driver set him down at the entrance to one of the clusters of low white buildings on the hillside. He gave the man ten pesetas and told him to wait, adding that in no circumstances was he to allow anyone else to hire him, even temporarily for a trip into the city and back, or to send him away, and that on their return to the hotel he should receive four times that sum.

  Delighted at the thought of receiving two whole gold pieces for his night’s work, the driver declared that for such a munificent caballero he would wait a week. He then drove off to a sheltered gully in which were lined up several carriages that had already brought visitors.

  Meanwhile de Quesnoy made his way past a low enclosure that held a herd of goats, and through a narrow passage between two of the hutments that were built into the cliff face. Beyond it there was an open space the size of which surprised him. A natural cave had evidently been enlarged until it formed a rough horsehoe with
the roof at its widest part about ten feet high. In it were a dozen wooden tables, all of which had been set round its walls to leave a circle of sanded floor in their centre free for the dancers. It was lit by half-a-dozen acetylene flares each of which, in its immediate vicinity, gave off a terrific heat.

  No dancing was going on at the moment and all the tables were occupied, but only about half of them by visitors; at the others sat one or more of the women of the troupe. The Count was fulsomely welcomed by the Maestro of the establishment: an elderly gipsy whose greasy black locks were streaked with grey, and who sported both gold ear-rings and a gold front tooth.

  With many bows the Maestro led him to a table at which one of the prettier girls was seated. She was rather plump-faced and had black kiss-curls plastered flat on the upper parts of both her cheeks. The rest of her hair was piled high and held in place by a big tortoiseshell comb from which hung down a black lace mantilla. From her shoulders rose many-layered puffs of gauzy material, below which her well-made arms extended; she had a slight cast in one eye.

  De Quesnoy made her a smiling bow, which she acknowledged with an inclination of the head, then he sat down beside her and told her that his name was Jaime Avila. She replied that she was known as La Conchita and had only recently been made a member of the troupe. A hunchback appeared in front of their table carrying a goat-skin containing wine. Skilfully he squirted a quarter of a litre of the wine into each of the earthenware mugs that stood before them and, with a grin, scooped up the pesetas pushed across to him in payment. The Count lifted his mug to his companion, murmured ‘Salud, Madonna’ and tried the wine. It was a little thin and slightly acid but quite drinkable.

  His excitement rising now he felt that he was most probably sitting within a hundred yards of Sanchez’ hide-out, he took stock of the other occupants of the cave. They numbered altogether about twenty-five, of which ten men, including himself, he put down as visitors. At the far end of the cave was the band, consisting of two men with guitars who, at the moment, were talking to a very fat middle-aged woman. The remaining dozen were made up by the Maestro, the hunchback waiter and the dancers.