THE ENGLISH WITNESS (20 page)

I picked up the pistol on the way over to
his car, and I did think I could use it. On a 25-yard range I could hit small coin
nine times out of ten or better. Whether I could hit a more distant target with
an unfamiliar weapon, perhaps under incoming fire, remained to be seen. As for
the ethics of shooting a living person, I don’t think I expected to get that
far.

I drove southwards in Miguelito’s Citroen
2CV, chewing ravenously on the fatty, spicy chorizo. I was utterly on my own
now, a sheltered middle-class student chasing a trained killer many years my
senior. That sounds ridiculous now, even to me. But it wasn’t courage or even a
desire for justice that now drove me on, as much as tunnel vision—a single-minded
determination that veiled every alternative future. Every now and then I
stopped to check the map that Miguelito had sketched for me, but my eyes were
tiring rapidly. Before long, I had the confusing sense that I was stationary
while the trees, fences and occasional buildings were moving past me.

All the compelling beauty of Alzaibar was cloaked in darkness, but as I
walked the last few hundred metres in silence my night vision recovered enough
to confirm that Adolfo had been here. The first piece of evidence was a
crookedly parked SEAT with the passenger door half open, its driver slumped
forward in his seat surrounded by the chief’s blood and his own. Then, as I entered
the monastery itself, I stumbled across a robed figure lying face-down in a
dark pool of liquid.

Fighting the temptation to run back to the
car and drive away, I continued as quietly as I could to the tall, tapering bell-tower
that overlooks the complex. The plaza at its base was deserted, but as I used
Miguelito’s torch to explore the arched cloisters along one side I discovered
two more inert figures. My stomach rose and filled my mouth with the taste of
bile and chorizo as I saw that one of them had the back of his head blown open.
The other was bleeding from the abdomen and didn’t try to move, but was able to
talk.

“I’ll get help as quickly as possible,” I
whispered.

“No, no police!” he protested hoarsely.
“He’s one of them.”

“I know,” I answered. “No police. But you
need a doctor.”

“Yes, yes, soon enough. But not now. The
Lendakari
is more important. He’s going to die if you don’t do something.”

“I don’t understand. Who’s going to die?”

“The
Lendakari
. Oh God, you’re just
a boy. The President.”

“The President?” I queried, dumbfounded.
“What on earth is he doing here? And why does Adolfo want to kill him? I
thought he was one of Franco’s biggest supporters.”

“Not Franco,” protested the monk, actually
rolling his eyes. “Our president. The Basque president.”

I remembered now, seeing the Basque
president-in-exile on TV a year or more previously: a thin-faced, dry looking
man with a beaky nose and glasses; an academic and a respected literary figure
in his own right; a man who had first-hand experience of political oppression
and wanted freedom rather than revenge. A good man, and I remembered his name.

“Señor Leizaola? I’ve heard of him, but
doesn’t he live in France?”

“Yes, but he’s here now, in secret. The
madman knows he’s here, and has gone looking for him.”

I hated leaving the wounded man, but he
was right. If Leizaola was here, his safety was the first priority. If he died
there’d be mass uprisings throughout the region, the armed forces would be sent
in to restore order, and there’d be a bloodbath. But where should I look? Even
in daylight it would take hours to search the complex thoroughly. It was pitch
dark, and I had minutes rather than hours. It might be too late already. And once
again I felt responsible for what was happening.

If I went hunting around the sprawling
complex for Adolfo, I’d never find him in time. The alternative was for him to
come looking for me. That would distract him from whatever he was doing and draw
him out into more open terrain. But what kind of distraction would be dramatic
enough to draw him away from his self-assigned mission?

I jogged back down towards the old Citroën,
and when I passed a bicycle leaning against a concrete bollard, I took it to
save time. The car felt pleasingly warm as I climbed in – the nights were
getting chilly – and I vividly remember how relieved I felt at being reunited
with Adolfo’s gun. Now that the bigger picture had emerged, and the need for
quietness and agility had passed, I wanted it with me. Heaven knew four bullets
weren’t going to get me very far, but now that I knew the stakes involved I had
little compunction about using them.

I laid the gun back down on the floor of
the car, and I went round to the back to make some important preparations. Pulling
my shirt out of my waistband, I tore off a wide strip of fabric, uncapped the five-litre
can of petrol, and stuffed the piece of cotton firmly into the neck making sure
it was well soaked in fuel. I checked that a cigarette lighter I‘d been
carrying in my pocket ever since Granada was working, and wedged the makeshift petrol
bomb behind the front seat to prevent it from falling over. I wasn’t sure how
well it would work, but I already had an idea as to how I’d use it.

Finally I got back into the driver’s seat,
revved the engine as aggressively as possible and let the clutch up with a
jolt. The wheels span for a moment, making a sound that must have been audible
for hundreds of metres through the still night air. Then with a bunny-hop or
two the tyres gained traction, dragging me up the hill with the engine roaring in
bottom gear and advertising my presence to anyone in the convent who was still
alive.

Three minutes later I was parked by the
tower. A steep embankment nearby, clad with dense scrubby growth, marked the outer
limit of the monastery grounds. Leaping from the car with the engine still
running, I retrieved the can of petrol from behind the front seat, lit the
soaking cotton wick, and quickly hurled the can into the mass of woody growth.
A luminous trail of flame followed it through the air, but when it landed I thought
for a moment that the fire had been blown out. Then a flicker of flame was
visible, and I wisely took several steps backwards and shielded my eyes.

For a moment as the pressure built up
inside the can a jet of flame two or three metres long ripped out of the neck.
Then the seam blew open. It made a report that reverberated around the hills
and released a blast of heat that singed my hair and eyebrows. The car was
still rocking from the concussion as I slid in. Revving the engine, I drove it
round the right-hand side of the main building and left it parked with the key
in the ignition. From there, a footpath sloped down across a neat lawn towards a
parapet marking the opposite edge of the grounds. Taking Adolfo’s pistol, I walked
back to the corner of the building around which a flickering, orange glare was
coming.

Peering round the corner, I could see that
my handiwork had exceeded my wildest expectations. The fire had spread quickly
up the bank and the courtyard was lit up like day. But the day in question was
the Day of Judgement. Dense clouds of acrid smoke from the moist, living
vegetation reduced visibility to a few metres, while the richly coloured,
convulsing flames under-lit the great curved prow of the main complex and filled
the intervening space with restless shadows. There was no way that anyone could
be unaware of what was going on.

The disadvantage of such a success was
that my voice would not be heard more than a few dozen metres away. I had
created a bright and noisy distraction, but the opportunity for a direct verbal
challenge had most definitely passed. I had got Adolfo’s attention, but how
would I draw him off his pursuit of the President? What could I do that would
be audible above the noise of the conflagration, and would have a chance of
upsetting his priorities?

There was only one answer. I raised his
pistol into the air and fired twice. That only left me with two rounds, but the
thin cracks would carry much further than the steady background noise from the fire
raging a few metres away. And I guessed that it was a sound very special to the
killer. Like a mother’s ear for her baby crying in the night, I thought he
would hear it through all the background tumult, perhaps even in his sleep.
Whatever weapon he had taken off Juantxo would be of a larger  calibre and
capable of doing more damage at close range. But in the light of what I’d
learned about Adolfo’s past, I suspected that this particular weapon served him
as a symbol of virility. He was going to want it back, and with hindsight I
think that my use of it threw down the gauntlet more effectively than any words
in any language.

Without warning, a piece of stonework flew
off the corner of the building. As it did so, an angry hornet buzzed past me at
impossible speed. An appreciable moment later, the sound of a gunshot from way
across the plaza hit my eardrums. It was a deeper, rounder sound than the one I
had made, and resembled the kind of report I was familiar with from my
range-shooting days. The accuracy had been terrifying for a pistol over that
kind of range. In panic, I leapt over a nearby ornamental wall, finding to my
shock that there was a longer drop on the far side than I’d expected.

I was lucky that the ground beyond the low
wall shelved down so shallowly at that point, as only a few metres further
along the drop could have been fatal. Even so, it took me several moments to
get my wind back. And as I crouched in the cold darkness below the reach of the
fire I’d started, it dawned on me that the incoming bullet couldn’t have come
from a handgun. A sense of defeat came close to overwhelming me at that point. ‘When
a man with a rifle meets a man with a pistol, the man with the rifle will win.’
Everybody who’s ever seen A Fistful of Dollars knows that. I’d got Adolfo’s
attention. But he had got a rifle.

The pistol I’d been carrying seemed
undamaged as I picked it up off the rough grass where it had fallen, and I found
that just a few metres to my left the slope of the land brought it closer to
the top of the low wall over which I’d jumped. It left me with no more than a
metre and a half to scale. Cautiously, I raised myself almost to standing
position and peered over the top. Instantly another bullet smacked into the far
side of the wall just below the top, making me shrink back down behind it. The
shot was quickly followed by Adolfo’s deep voice booming above the continuing
sound of the fire: “Kaixo, my little friend James. I would like my gun back
undamaged. It has great sentimental value to me and is no use to you at all. If
you come over here and hand it to me right now, you can get back in your
borrowed 2CV and head home.”

I considered this offer for a moment, and it
was very attractive. But I knew for certain that Adolfo would kill me if he had
the chance and make it slow if he had the time. Then there was the question of the
Basque president, Señor Leizaola, and the hundreds perhaps thousands of his
friendly, hospitable, proud, stubborn compatriots who would die if he did. I
was about to shout out a reply, but realised that he’d be unlikely to hear.

I knew the only way anti-clockwise round
the site was via an impassable precipice. The clockwise route provided scant
cover, but there was no point in putting off the inevitable. Taking great care
to keep my finger outside the trigger guard, as I was afraid to apply the
safety catch in case I fumbled it in a moment of need, I began to creep along
the back of the wall in the direction of the tower. I remembered that there was
a row of cloisters in which I had found the two monks whom Adolfo had shot, and
thought the stone arches might provide me with a covered position from which I
could return fire. I just had no idea how to get across the open space without making
myself an easy target.

Over the next few minutes I picked and
scrambled my way round the perimeter of the monastery grounds. I dived across the
more exposed patches, crawling where necessary underneath the taller stands of
vegetation, nervous all the time in case a sudden change in the breeze blew the
fire in my direction. At every second I expected to feel the impact of a bullet.
Eventually I drew level with the tower, and once again surveyed the plaza. I’d fantasised
as I scrambled round from my earlier position that I might get round behind the
shooter, but there was no sign of Adolfo anywhere.

Then for a moment I looked up at the tower,
and the light from the fire was still bright enough that I could see a dark oblong
patch near the top where one of the vertical louvres had been taken out. In an
instant, I knew where Adolfo had set up his sniping position, and with an
ecstatic gasp of relief I saw that he had made a tactical mistake; if I kept
close to the base of the tower, he would never be able to angle his fire low
enough to hit me.

Scrambling out of cover, I sprinted across
to the arched cloisters and flattened myself against the rear wall. It was not
as dark there as I would have liked, but the row of pillars gave me some
protection. I paused in the shadow of one of them to give my eyes time to
adjust to the lower light. Then, a few feet further along, I noticed as if for
the first time the two monks I had seen before lying still on the cold stone.
There was no more bleeding now from the second man, the one who had informed me
of the Señor Leizaola’s presence, and I guessed that he was now resting in
peace. I was just stepping over to see if he was still alive when I caught a
faint odour of raw sewage. Then Adolfo stepped out in front of me from behind
another pillar, a wicked looking combat rifle held under his arm and pointing
at my chest.

“Good evening, James,” he said, the grin
on his lacerated, blood-streaked face looking demonic in the flickering light
of the fire. “You know, you really are a most annoying child.”