What Happened When the War Was Over
Further stories of Gonzalo Llorente and Carlos Tejada Alonso y León
Rebecca Pawel
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2010, Rebecca Pawel
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Table of Contents
Author’s Note
The Big Picture (New York, 1949)
Hostages (Madrid, 1981)
The New World (San Juan, 1983)
Last Twenty Four Hours (Madrid, 2002)
*****
Author’s Note
The stories in this collection were written over a period of several years, mostly to satisfy personal curiosity about the fates of the two protagonists of Death of a Nationalist, Carlos Tejada the fascist guardia civil, and Gonzalo Llorente, the socialist soldier whose path crosses Tejada’s so fatefully.
I have continued to receive feedback from readers who are also curious, asking if there will be any more novels after The Summer Snow. Most readers accept my reasons for ending the series, but I am touched that they are as invested in the characters as I am, so I have decided to make these stories available so that those who loved and hated the characters in the novels can find out my idea of “what happened afterward.”
While the stories were not written in “chronological” order, I have tried to make them fit together. Those who are not familiar with the characters in Death of a Nationalist, or with the other novels featuring Tejada, should be able to read these stories with relative ease. Be warned, however, that if you have not read Death of a Nationalist or its sequels there are a considerable number of “spoilers” ahead. If you choose to read these stories without reading the books, I hope that they pique your curiosity. In any case, I hope that you enjoy them.
-- Rebecca Pawel
New York, March 2010
*****
The Big Picture
How’s it going, m’ijo? I heard about Chris. Listen, don’t beat yourself up, ok? You did all you could for him. Some we win and some we lose, but when the dealers get involved we almost always lose. Hell, we’re not in this business to win, just to put up a good fight…Why do I do it, then? Habit I guess. Or maybe ‘cause I like fighting. And once in a while we do win one…My first case? Hell, hijo, you make it sound like one of those old PI movies, with some gringo running around in a trench coat. Although now I think of it, the beginning actually was a bit like that…Well, I’ll tell you then, but I get to tell it like an old movie, ok? Humor an old man. And you’ve got to picture Humphrey Bogart playing me...
It started like the best of the old movies, with a scream in the dark, and then a frightened girl bursting in on the hero while he was nursing a hangover. Trying to nurse a hangover anyway. At the corner of Lexington and 116th you were right between the New York Central on Park Avenue to the west and the old Third Avenue El to the east and they were nicely timed so that one or the other was practically always going by. An El train in 1949 wasn’t exactly calculated to rest a throbbing head. On top of that Mr. Ortiz, the owner of the bodega on the corner, was angry about something, and when Mr. Ortiz was angry he could pretty well drown out the Central and the El combined. He was drowning one of them out now.
“Cabrón!” he was yelling. “Te va a cogel, cabroncito! You think is funny? I show you! No, señora, le cogí, y voy a pegale bueno!”
On top of Mr. Ortiz’s bellowing was a woman screaming something about her baby Juanito, and what sounded like a child crying. It must have been just after five in the morning, but the entire building was up, and probably most of the block as well. Some of them were yelling out the windows to be quiet, and some had probably gone down onto the sidewalk to see what all the fun was about.
Mr. Ortiz expected me downstairs in the bodega to start opening up at six, so I should have been getting up and dressed and shaved, but since I hadn’t gone to bed anyway I was just sitting with my head on the table and my hands over my ears (for all the good that did) when someone pounded on the door yelling my name.
I didn’t yell at the pounder to go away for three reasons. First, my head was in no condition to take any more noise coming out of my mouth. Second, I could tell that the person calling me was Lydia, and I knew that she would go right on pounding and yelling until I opened the door. Third, the fact that I’d just realized that Lydia could do pretty much whatever she wanted with me had been one of my motives for going through half a bottle of bacardi the night before. The other motive had to do with a newspaper article I’d seen, in which some asshole congressman praised “our Spanish friends” fight against Communism.
Actually, the two causes were related. I’d agreed to chaperon Lydia to a dance up at City College the night before. (Lydia was Mr. Ortiz’s oldest daughter, and there was no way he was letting her out in the evenings without a chaperon. They’d compromised on me as a substitute older brother, and it would have taken a braver man than I was to turn the two of them down once they were set on something.) I’d turned Lydia over to the boys her age, and sat against the wall re-reading the article about General Franco’s fight against Communism and getting angry all over again. Then she asked me to dance a slow dance with her, and at the end of the dance I realized that I’d forgotten all about how angry I was. I’d just read the elected representatives of this goddamn democracy singing the praises of the fascists who’d destroyed my country and killed the only woman I could ever love, and all I was thinking about was how Lydia’s hair smelled and the weight of her body in my arms. That was when I decided to get drunk.
I pulled on a clean shirt, splashed some water on my face, and opened the door hoping that Lydia would think that I just hadn’t had time to shave and brush my teeth yet. I could have saved myself the trouble. She was too intent on her errand to notice how I looked. “Gonzalo! Come quick! It’s Johnny Toledo and my dad will kill him if you don’t come.”
Standing up to Mr. Ortiz when he was angry wasn’t something I enjoyed doing even when I was feeling my best, and doing it now for a problem child like Johnny Toledo was the last thing I wanted to do. But Lydia Ortiz had a little of her father’s overwhelming personality, and she was a lot prettier. Besides, I was pleased that she came to me when she was in trouble, even if she just thought of me as a much older brother. So I followed her down the stairs, trying to compromise between keeping up with her and not breaking my neck since the landlord didn’t bother to replace all the burnt-out lightbulbs.
The brownstone where I rented a room was right next door to the corner where the Ortizes lived over the store. A couple of my neighbors were on the stoop, checking out the crowd gathered outside the bodega. It was the end of the school year, maybe May, and the sky was all light blue already, even though the streetlights were still on. The colors all had that washed out look they have in dawn light, and the people looked washed out too. I felt washed out.
Lydia pushed her way to the front of the crowd, and I followed her, and found Mr. Ortiz, holding a screaming kid by the forearm with one
hand and whacking him with the other, yelling all the while. The kid’s mother, a fat woman in a faded flowered housecoat, was screaming louder than either of them. It would have been a good scene for an opera. The bass lyrics would have been Mr. Ortiz: “Tu pinta’ la bodega! Tu la pinta? You paint my store I break your face!” The alto would have been the kid’s howls: “I didn’t do nothing, Mister! Por favor, Mister!” While the mother could have been a coloratura soprano: “Ay bendita Virgen Santísima! Ay Dio’ mío! Ay Dio’ mío!” The crowd around them served as a chorus, shouting not particularly helpful encouragement to all sides.
I recognized the kid. His mother and his half siblings lived in the same crumbling brownstone I did. His name was Johnny Toledo, and he was one of those poor disasters who you know will end up as a client of ours by the time he can toddle. He was a skinny, dark-skinned, gangly little boy, the type who hangs around with a bad crowd and always gets caught, because he’s too dumb to run away. He was about ten, and the official story was that his father had been killed in the Pacific when he was a baby. His mother had two younger daughters by a guy who was supposedly stationed in the Philippines (she had a weakness for men in uniform), and then a baby boy by her third “husband” who had gone back to the Island “for family reasons.” She was between steady men at the moment, which was why she’d given up screaming for someone to stop that brute murdering her baby, and why none of the local young bloods were whaling on Mr. Ortiz.
Lydia went up to Johnny’s mother, and slapped her hard to shut her up. Then she put one arm around her and gave her a handkerchief. I knew she was relying on me to do the rest. “Buenos días, Señor Ortiz,” I said, quietly because I felt like someone was pounding a pistol butt on the back of my skull, and because my throat was raw from the last night’s rum. “¿Qué pasa aquí?”
It’s a good trick to talk quietly, because people tend to respond in the same tone of voice. Mr. Ortiz switched to Spanish, probably more for his own convenience than mine, but without the strain of trying to make sure that the American-born Johnny understood he calmed down a little. “This little brat vandalized the bodega!” he said, jerking Johnny around by the shoulders, but not hitting him anymore. “I caught him red handed! Look!”
“I didn’t do nothing!” Johnny repeated in a whine.
It wasn’t the world’s smartest comment. The kid wasn’t actually red handed but white handed. His hands and clothes were spattered with a white paint that matched the shade of the can kicked over on its side, currently making a puddle on the sidewalk that it was my job to keep clean. The metal shutters of the store, already tagged up in various colors too dark to see properly in the early morning light, had been embellished by a carefully drawn white silhouette of a palm tree, and an elaborate script that ran around and through the existing letters and proclaimed, just legibly: TOA ALTA BOYS. Actually, the effect of the bright white lacing in among all the colored scribbles was kind of pretty. I sighed, and said the first thing that came to mind. “You’re making work for me, Johnny. You enjoy this so much why don’t you come by after school and help me scrub it off.”
“Oh, no!” Mr. Ortiz was indignant. “I’m not having this thief anywhere near my bodega! He doesn’t need to clean it. He needs his bottom tanned.”
He was still speaking Spanish, but Johnny must have understood him. “I ain’t a thief!” he squealed in English, just as angry as Mr. Ortiz.
I heard a wail of protest about little Juanito being called a thief and the bendita Virgen Santísima again in the background. I closed my eyes, and tried to think of a way to get everyone to drop back down to the normal level of noise in East Harlem. And then in the distance I heard a siren.
In a movie everyone would have frozen as the siren came nearer and nearer, wailing ominously. But you know as well as I do that sirens are mostly false fire alarms or ambulance drivers who are in a hurry to pick up their takeout, so of course the only notice anyone took of the siren was to talk a little louder so it wouldn’t drown them out. “Look, Mr. Ortiz, Johnny,” I began again, trying to keep my voice low. “I’m responsible for keeping the bodega clean and safe on my shift, right? And I’m no good at scrubbing those shutters. My back acts up. So why not have Johnny do the scrubbing? I’ll keep an eye on him, and make sure he doesn’t touch anything he’s not supposed to. And if he can’t get them clean, he can repaint them.”
“I’ll do it,” Johnny agreed. “But I gotta go to school now.”
“You ain’t go nowhere ‘til you clean my bodega,” snapped Mr. Ortiz.
The siren had been getting nearer, and now it attached itself to a police car coming down Lexington, that pulled up outside the bodega. Two officers got out. That did silence the crowd. A lot of them discovered urgent business elsewhere. Like finding out who the bastard was who had called the cops about being woken up at an ungodly hour, instead of just yelling out the window to be quiet like any normal person. I would have made myself scarce too, but I was standing a bit conspicuously in the middle of the circle. And Lydia was still there watching me. “We got a complaint,” one of them began.
Johnny’s mother launched herself at the taller of the two officers. “I complain! He killing my baby!” she proclaimed, pointing at Mr. Ortiz.
Mr. Ortiz snorted in outrage and disbelief. “You look what he done to my store!” he shouted, gesturing to the painted shutters. “He paint on my property!” Then, seeing that the policemen were looking doubtfully between him and Mrs. Toledo. “This is a crime! You arrest him!”
Johnny started snivelling again at the threat of arrest, and Johnny’s mother began shrieking in Spanish. This was a tactical error because the cop who she’d been clinging to was Irish and didn’t like spics. He loosed himself, and inspected the shutters of the bodega. Then he looked at the paint can, and at Johnny, who was trying to cower behind Mr. Ortiz. He turned to his partner. “Looks pretty clear to me. What do you think, Russo? Should we take him in for prints?”
Russo shrugged. He was maybe fifteen years younger than his partner, and he’d probably grown up in the neighborhood. He looked like it hadn’t been so long since he’d been fighting street battles with the Puerto Rican kids trying to mark off the Italians’ territory. “What the hell? Do him good, probably.” He turned to Mr. Ortiz. “You want us to arrest the little melanzana? Give him a good scare?”
Mr. Ortiz hesitated. He probably knew that when an Italian called someone a melanzana it didn’t mean anything good. I guessed that he was trying to figure out what the phrase “give him a good scare” meant. I was trying to figure it out too. I hadn’t dealt much with the NYPD in those days, but cops are cops, and I didn’t like the idea of handing over a kid to them. Especially a small frightened kid. I was about to say something when the bodega owner thrust Johnny forward. “Here,” he said gruffly. “You arrest him. You tell him he can’t paint my store.”
Terror gave Johnny strength, but it didn’t give him brains. He managed to twist out of Mr. Ortiz’s grasp and make a run for it, but he ran straight into Russo. The cop grabbed him, but didn’t bother to cuff him. The cuffs would probably have fallen off. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to take a little ride over to the precinct.”
Mrs. Toledo began to sob. “Ay, se le llevan, se le llevan a la Tumba!”
Of course all she meant to say was that they were jailing him. “La Tumba” was Spanglish for the Tombs, the slang for central booking. But I didn’t know that in those days, and it gave me a chill. I’d seen enough people taken away to their graves by armed men in uniform. A couple of the women who’d been comforting Mrs. Toledo started crying also, and Lydia gave me that big-eyed look she gets when she’s scared. “Papa...” she murmured.
Mr. Ortiz shuffled his feet. “Tiene que aprende’l re’peto,” he muttered, looking at the drops of white paint on the sidewalk. He has to learn respect.
The cops bundled Johnny into the backseat of the car, and Russo turned to Mrs. Toledo. “Are you his mother, ma’am? Can you come along w
ith us so he has a parent or guardian with him?”
“¡Se llevan mi Juanito a la Tumba!” They’re taking my Juan to his grave. Mrs. Toledo was crying too hard to answer, and possibly to understand the question.
“Wait. I’ll go with him,” I said, in English, so that I was sure the cops would understand.
The Irish one swung around to look at me. “You his father?” His tone of voice made it pretty clear that he wouldn’t believe me if I said yes, and wouldn’t think any better of me even if I were telling the truth. I could see him and Russo looking between me and the kid dubiously. Like I said, Johnny was a morenito, and I hadn’t exactly been working on my tan.
“No,” I said. “I’m-I’m his uncle.”
Mrs. Toledo stopped crying, and I could see Lydia hanging on to her so she wouldn’t throw her arms around my neck. She contented herself with muttering rapid blessings. I wished I believed that the blessings were as effective as she did, because I was scared stiff. I saw the two cops exchange glances. “His mother works,” I said, lying shamelessly. “She can’t pick him up. I bring him back uptown when you’re done with him.”
That did the trick. If there’s one thing most of the world’s police forces can’t stand, it’s the idea of getting stuck with extra work. I climbed into the back of the car next to Johnny while his mother babbled blessings. The last thing I heard was Mr. Ortiz saying in Spanish. “Ok, Llorente, I’m giving you the day off.”
It was quiet in the car for a little while. Johnny was hunched in corner trembling, too scared to talk. And the officers weren’t saying anything. I decided I’d better say something before I started remembering things I didn’t want to remember just then. “Where are we going?” I asked.
What Happened When the War Was Over; further stories of Gonzalo Llorente and Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon Page 1