Winter in Madrid

by C. J. Sansom

  ‘Do you remember that first Christmas after we met?’ he asked her, a hard mocking expression in his eyes.

  ‘Yes. When you went away on business, and couldn’t come back till after Christmas.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He smiled. ‘Only I could have. We finalized the deal before Christmas, I could have come back. But I knew that if I stayed away you’d realize how much you needed me. And I was right.’

  She stared at him, she felt shocked and then furiously angry. ‘So you manipulated me,’ she said quietly. ‘Manipulated my feelings.’

  He looked at her across the table, seriously now. ‘I know what people want, Barbara, I can sense it. It’s a gift, very useful in business. I see below the surface. Sometimes it’s easy. The Jews, for instance, they just want survival, they tremble and shake in their desperation to survive. The people I work with, what they want is usually money, though occasionally it’s something else. Whatever it is I try to help oblige them. You wanted me and you wanted security, only you couldn’t quite bring yourself to see it. I just helped bring that to the surface.’ He inclined his head, raised his glass.

  ‘And what about you, Sandy? What do you want?’

  He smiled. ‘Success, money. Knowing I can cut the mustard, make people give me what I want.’

  ‘You’re a shit sometimes, Sandy,’ she said. ‘You know that?’

  She had never spoken to him like that before and he looked taken aback for a moment. Then his face set.

  ‘You’ve been letting your appearance go lately, you know. You look a mess. I hope working at that orphanage will help you pull yourself together.’

  She felt the words like a blow even as she realized he had chosen them because they would hit her where she was weakest. Something cold and hard came into her mind and she thought, don’t react, the facade needs to be kept up for now. She got up, laying her napkin carefully on the table, and left the room. Her legs were shaking.

  PART TWO

  THE BEGINNING

  OF WINTER

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE PSYCHIATRIST was a tall thin man with spectacles and silver hair. He wore a grey pinstripe suit. Bernie hadn’t seen anyone wearing a suit for three and a half years, only the prisoners’ boiler suits and the functional guards’ uniforms, both a drab olive-green.

  The doctor had been installed in the room under the comandante’s hut, behind a scratched table brought from the offices above. Bernie guessed he hadn’t been told what the room was used for. It was just like Aranda’s macabre sense of humour to put him here.

  Agustín, one of the guards, had been waiting for Bernie when his work detail returned from the quarry, with orders to take him to the comandante. ‘It is nothing to worry about, not trouble,’ he whispered as they crossed the square. Bernie had nodded his thanks. Agustín was one of the better ones, an untidy young man who liked a quiet life. The sun was low and a cold wind blew down from the mountains. Bernie kept track of the days and knew this was the first of November; winter was almost here. The shepherds were starting to bring their flocks down from the high pastures. Working on the quarry detail was hard but at least you got some sense of the rhythms of the outside world. He shivered, envying Agustín the heavy poncho he wore over his uniform.

  Comandante Aranda sat behind his desk. He stared up at Bernie with his hard eyes, a humorous expression on his long handsome face with its luxuriant black moustache.

  ‘Ah, Piper,’ he said. ‘I have a visitor for you.’

  ‘¿Señor?’ Bernie stood rigidly to attention, the way Aranda expected. A spasm of pain went through his arm; his old wound hurt after a day moving rocks.

  ‘Do you remember in San Pedro de Cardena, you were evaluated by a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Si, señor.’ It had been a bizarre interlude, a joke in hell. San Pedro was an abandoned medieval monastery outside Burgos. Thousands of Republican prisoners had been crammed in there after the Jarama battle. One day they had been given thick questionnaires to fill in. They were told it was for a project about the psychology of Marxist fanaticism. Two hundred questions, varying from his reaction to certain colours to his degree of patriotism.

  The comandante lit a cigarette, studying him through a curling haze of smoke with his cold hazel eyes. Aranda had been in charge of the Tierra Muerte camp for nearly a year. He was a colonel, a veteran of the Civil War and before that the Foreign Legion. He enjoyed cruelty and even Bernie wouldn’t have dared be insolent with him. As always the comandante was immaculately dressed, his uniform ironed into knife-edge creases. The prisoners knew every line and curve of his handsome bronzed face with its waxed moustache. If he was frowning or wore his pouting childish look, someone could be in for a beating.

  This evening, though, he looked amused. He blew smoke at Bernie; at once Bernie’s craving for tobacco returned and he found himself leaning forward slightly to catch another whiff.

  ‘They are doing a follow-up study, prisoners of special interest. Dr Lorenzo is waiting for you downstairs. And Piper, be sure to cooperate with him, ¿vale?’

  ‘Sí, señor comandante.’

  Bernie’s heart was thumping as Agustín led him down to the basement room, opening the heavy wooden door. He had never been there but had heard the room graphically described.

  The psychiatrist’s face was cold. ‘You may leave us,’ he told Agustín.

  ‘I shall be outside, señor.’

  The psychiatrist waved a hand at a steel chair in front of the desk. ‘Sit down.’ Bernie slumped into it; he was very tired. An oil stove had been put in a corner and the room was hot. The psychiatrist ran a silver pen down the columns of a questionnaire. Bernie recognized his own writing. The lice in his beard stirred, roused by the heat.

  The psychiatrist looked up. ‘You are Piper, Bernard, English, age thirty-one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am Dr Lorenzo. Three years ago, when you were in San Pedro, you answered a questionnaire. You recall?

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  ‘The purpose of the study was to determine the psychological factors that cause people to embrace Marxism.’ His voice was even, monotonous. ‘Most Marxists are ignorant working people of low intelligence and culture. We wish to look again at the people who did not match those criteria. You, for example.’ He studied Bernie keenly.

  ‘What brings people to Marxism is simple,’ Bernie said quietly. ‘Poverty and oppression.’

  The psychiatrist nodded. ‘Yes, that is what I would expect you to say. And yet you can have been subject to none of those things; I see you attended an English public school.’

  ‘My parents were poor. I got a place at Rookwood under a scholarship.’ Bernie found his eyes straying to the corner of the room, where a tall object was covered by a tarpaulin. Lorenzo tapped the desk sharply with the silver pen.

  ‘Pay attention, please. Tell me about your parents – what did they do?’

  ‘They worked in a shop someone else owned.’

  ‘And you felt sorry for them perhaps? You were close to them?’

  A picture of his mother came into Bernie’s head, standing in the parlour wringing her hands. ‘Bernie, Bernie, why do you have to go to this awful war?’ He shrugged.

  ‘They may be dead now for all I know. I’ve never been allowed to write.’

  ‘You would write if you could?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Lorenzo made another note. ‘This school, this Rookwood, that would have brought you into contact with boys of a higher culture. It interests me that you rejected those values.’

  Bernie laughed bitterly. ‘There was no culture there. And their class was the enemy of mine.’

  ‘Ah, yes, the Marxist metaphysic.’ The psychiatrist nodded reflectively. ‘Our studies show that when intelligent, privileged people are drawn to Marxism it is because of a character defect. They are unable to understand the higher values, like spirituality and patriotism. They are innately antisocial and aggressive. The comandante tel
ls me, Piper, that you reject the camp’s rehabilitative efforts, for example?’

  Bernie laughed quietly. ‘You mean the compulsory religious instruction?’

  Lorenzo studied him as though he were a rat in a laboratory cage. ‘Yes, you would hate Christianity. A religion of love and reconciliation. Yes, that is quite clear.’

  ‘We get other lessons as well.’

  Dr Lorenzo looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘This is the torture room. That cupboard behind you will be full of rubber truncheons and pails for mock drownings.’

  Lorenzo shook his head gently. ‘Fantasies.’

  ‘Then take the tarpaulin off the thing behind you,’ Bernie said. ‘Go on.’ He realized his tone was becoming insolent and bit his lip. He did not want a complaint to Aranda.

  The psychiatrist gave a little grunt of annoyance, then stood and lifted the tarpaulin. His face set as he saw the tall wooden stake with the metal seat, the restraining straps and neck collar, the heavy brass screw with its handles behind.

  ‘The garrote vil, doctor. They’ve had six executions since I’ve been here. They line us up in the yard, bring out the garrote and make us watch. You hear the man’s neck break, there’s a loud crack, like a shot.’

  The psychiatrist sat down again. His voice was still calm. He looked steadily at Bernie, then shook his head. ‘You are an antisocial,’ he said quietly. ‘A psychopath.’ He shook his head. ‘Men such as you can never be rehabilitated; your minds are abnormal, incomplete. The garrote is needed, I am afraid, to keep those like you in check.’ He made a note on the questionnaire, then called out to Agustín. ‘Guard! I have finished with this man.’

  Agustín led Bernie away. The sun had gone below the horizon and a red light bathed the wooden huts lining the earthen square. The searchlights in the watchtower above the barbed-wire fence would soon come on. Against the mess hut a large cross stood, six feet high, ropes hanging from the arms. It looked like a religious symbol, but it wasn’t: they hung men from the ropes as a punishment. Bernie wished he had mentioned that to the psychiatrist.

  It was time for roll-call; three hundred prisoners were shambling into lines around the little wooden platform in the middle. Agustín halted, shifting his heavy rifle on his shoulder.

  ‘I have to fetch another five to the mad-doctor tonight,’ he said. ‘It will be a long evening.’

  Bernie looked at him in surprise. The guards were not supposed to talk with the prisoners.

  ‘The doctor looked displeased,’ Agustín added.

  Bernie looked at him, but the guard’s thin face was turned away. ‘Be careful,’ Agustín said quietly. ‘Better times may be ahead, Piper. I can say no more now. But be careful. Do not get punished now, or killed.’

  BERNIE STOOD next to his friend Vicente. The lawyer’s thin face, surrounded by its shock of grey hair and matted beard, looked drawn and ill. He smiled at Bernie then coughed, a liquid gurgling sound deep in his chest. Vicente had been having chest infections since the summer; he seemed to recover but then they would hit him again, worse than before. Some of the guards let him do light work in return for helping them fill in forms, but this week the sergeant in charge of the quarry detail was Ramirez, a brutal man who had had Vicente sorting rocks all day. He looked as though he could hardly stand.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he whispered to Bernie.

  ‘They’ve got a psychiatrist here, he’s interviewing some of the people from San Pedro. He said I was an antisocial psychopath.’

  Vicente smiled wryly. ‘Then that proves what I have always said, you are a good man even if you are a Bolshevik. If one of these people says you are normal, then is the time to worry. You’ve missed dinner.’

  ‘I’ll manage,’ Bernie said. He must be sure to get a good night’s sleep if he was to be fit to work tomorrow. The rice they fed the prisoners was awful, the sweepings of some Valencian storehouse mingled with gritty dust, but to be able to work you had to eat all you could.

  He went over what Agustín had said. He didn’t understand. Better times? Was there some political change in Spain? The comandante had told them Franco had met Hitler and that soon Spain would be in the war, but they knew nothing of what was actually going on outside.

  Aranda stepped out of his hut. He carried his riding crop, tapping it against his leg. This evening he was smiling and all the prisoners relaxed slightly. He vaulted on to the platform and began calling out names in his clear sharp voice.

  The roll-call took half an hour, the men standing rigidly to attention. Towards the end someone a few rows away fell down. The man’s neighbours bent to help him.

  ‘Leave him!’ Aranda called out. ‘Eyes to the front.’

  At the end the comandante raised his arm in the Fascist salute. ‘¡Arriba España!’ In the early days of Bernie’s captivity, at San Pedro, many prisoners had refused to respond, but when a few were shot they had complied, and now there was a dull ragged response. Bernie had told the other prisoners about an English word that sounded almost the same as ‘arriba’ and now it was ‘Grieve España’ that many called back.

  The prisoners were dismissed. The man who had fallen was lifted by his neighbours and they carried him back to his hut. It was one of the Poles. He stirred faintly. On the other side of the barbed-wire fence a figure, shadowy in the dusk in his long black robe, stood watching.

  ‘Father Eduardo,’ Vicente muttered. ‘Come for his prey.’

  They watched as the young priest came through the gate and walked towards the Pole’s hut, his long sotana stirring up little eddies of dust from the yard. The last of the light glinted on his spectacles. ‘Bastard,’ Vicente muttered. ‘Coming to see if he can terrify another good atheist into taking the last rites by threatening him with Hell.’

  VICENTE WAS an old Left Republican, a member of Azaña’s party. He had been a lawyer in Madrid, providing cheap services to the city’s poor, until he joined the militia in 1936. It was a romantic gesture, he had told Bernie. ‘I was too old. But even rationalist Spaniards like me are romantics at heart.’ Like all his party Vicente had a visceral hatred for the Church. It was almost an obsession with the Left Republicans; a liberal-bourgeois distraction, the Communists said. Vicente despised the Communists and said they had destroyed the Republic. Establo, leader of the Communists in Bernie’s hut, disapproved of Vicente and Bernie’s friendship.

  ‘In this camp you have only your convictions to keep you going,’ Establo had warned Bernie once. ‘If they are eaten away your strength will go too, you will give up and die.’ Establo himself looked as though it was only his beliefs that kept him alive. He was in his forties but looked sixty; his skin yellow and sagging, scarred with the marks of scabies. His eyes, though, were still full of fire.

  Bernie had shrugged and told Establo he would end by converting Vicente, that the lawyer had the seeds of a class perspective. He had no respect for Establo; he hadn’t voted for him when the twenty Communists in the hut elected their leader. Establo was obsessed with control and couldn’t bear disagreement. During the war it had been necessary to have such people but it was different here. By the end of the Civil War the parties that made up the Republic had all hated each other, but in the camp the prisoners needed to cooperate to survive. Establo, though, tried to maintain the Communists’ separate identity. He told them they were still the vanguard of the working class, that one day their time would come again.

  A couple of days before, Pablo, one of the other Communists, had whispered in Bernie’s ear. ‘Beware of mixing with the lawyer, compadre. Establo is making an issue of it.’

  ‘He can go fuck himself. What’s his authority, anyway?’

  ‘Why court trouble, Bernardo? The lawyer will die soon, anyone can see that.’

  THIRTY PRISONERS shuffled into their bare wooden hut and threw themselves down on the straw mattresses covering their plank beds, each with one brown army blanket. Bernie had taken the bunk next to Vicente when the last occupant died. It w
as partly an act of defiance against Establo, who lay on his bunk in the opposite row, staring across at him.

  Vicente coughed again. His face reddened and he lay back, gasping.

  ‘I am bad. I will have to plead sickness tomorrow.’

  ‘You can’t. Ramirez is on duty, you’ll just get a beating.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can work another day.’

  ‘Come on, if you can stick it out until Molina is back, he’ll put you on easy duty.’

  ‘I will try.’

  They were silent a moment, then Bernie leaned over on his elbow, speaking quietly. ‘Listen, the guard Agustín said an odd thing earlier.’

  ‘The quiet one from Sevilla?’

  ‘Yes.’ Bernie repeated the guard’s words. Vicente frowned.

  ‘What can it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. What if the Monarchists have toppled the Falange? We wouldn’t know.’

  ‘We’d be no better off under the Monarchists.’ Vicente thought a moment. ‘Better times may be ahead? For who? He might have meant just for you, not all the camp.’

  ‘Why should they do me any favours?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Vicente lay back with a sigh that turned into a cough. He looked ill, miserable.

  ‘Listen,’ Bernie said, to distract him. ‘I stood up to that bastard quack. He told me I was a degenerate because I couldn’t be converted to Catholicism. I remember that scene last Navidad. Remember, the doll?’

  Vicente gave a sound between a laugh and a groan. ‘Who could forget it?’

  IT HAD BEEN a cold day, snow on the ground. The prisoners were marched out into the yard where Father Jaime, the older of the two priests who served the camp, stood dressed in a green and yellow cope. In his regalia in the bare snowy yard he looked like a visitor from another world. Beside him young Father Eduardo, in his usual black, looked uncomfortable, his round face red with cold. Father Jaime was holding a child’s doll, a baby made of wood, wrapped in a shawl. There was a silver circle painted round its brow that puzzled Bernie for a moment until he realized it was meant to be a halo.