Watcher in the Pine (30 page)

“But”—Ortíz looked up from the letters, hesitant—“Jesulín was tried in the fall of ’37. And Señorita Laura didn’t leave Potes until the following spring. And she wasn’t pregnant when she left, or not that anyone could see. So this little girl she talks about . . .”

“She knew she was expecting,” Bárbara said. “But she made the mistake of telling the lieutenant. He was pressuring her to have an abortion and she was scared. That was why she left. And that was what Anselmo told Márquez.” For a moment her voice was proud, and she smiled, remembering a moment of her husband’s strength. “He told the sergeant to his face that if anyone had made Laura a whore, it was the Guardia.
That
shut him up.”

“He hadn’t known about Calero,” Tejada suggested.

“No, not until Anselmo told him,” Bárbara agreed. “And then he thanked Anselmo, and told him he would take care of it.”

“And a few weeks later Calero was dead?”

“That’s right.” Bárbara nodded. “But he didn’t send a red cent to Laura. Anselmo knew the postmaster and he checked it. He waited two months, and then decided that if the sergeant wasn’t going to pay for his niece it was time to make him pay for the people who were trying to make it safe for her to come home.”

“And that’s when the thefts from Devastated Regions started?”

“That’s right, Lieutenant.”

Tejada considered. He could not condemn Márquez for his role in Calero’s death. Even Anselmo had not objected to that, initially. Of course, Bárbara Montalbán might well be lying about the purity of her husband’s motives. Perhaps he had decided to blackmail Márquez from the moment Laura had placed the two letters in his hands. Perhaps she had given him the letters with the knowledge that he would. But Márquez had left his niece to starve rather than acknowledge a family tie to a Red, and had kidnapped Elena to extricate himself from a compromising position. He was guilty of that. “Would you still be willing to swear to this in court?” Tejada asked.

Bárbara thought for a moment. Then she nodded. “Yes. If you want me to.”

“You’d implicate yourself,” Tejada reminded her, neutral.

She shrugged. “So what? Anselmo’s dead. Jesulín’s dead. Baldo’s in prison in Málaga and I can’t help him. What more can you do to me, Lieutenant?”

Some faint memory of Vargas and Elena held Tejada still for a moment. Then he said slowly, “And what if you implicated other people?”

“I could only name Anselmo and Luis Severino and Rafa Campos.”

“And we can’t ask any of them anything.” Tejada smiled briefly. “I suppose that takes care of Calero and the arms thefts. But—you have my word it won’t go past this room—do you know how Márquez was mixed up with Elena’s kidnapping?”

Bárbara hesitated. “I don’t know the ins and outs,” she said. “But Márquez stopped in here for a drink last week, with a few people I don’t really know. They had something to eat, and they looked like they were having a nice cozy conversation. Then, when he was leaving, he stopped off at the bar and told me I’d better stay closed up that afternoon and not be too nosy about who was coming and going. So I stayed in the apartment all afternoon. But I heard them come in and come upstairs yelling for you, and knocking on your door. Then a few minutes later they came downstairs again.” Bárbara closed her eyes, remembering. “They must have known the sergeant had fixed it with me. They weren’t trying to be quiet. One of them said something like, ‘Damn, she’s heavy. Why don’t we just dump her at your place like Márquez said?’ And then the other said, ‘And what if he double-crosses us? I’m not taking a chance on the Guardia finding her there. We’ll leave her where we agreed.’”

Tejada inhaled sharply. “You wouldn’t recognize their voices or their faces if you saw them again?”

Bárbara shook her head. “No, Lieutenant. Not a chance.” She saw his face working and added gently, “They’re good boys, Lieutenant. They wouldn’t harm Señora Fernández, no matter what the sergeant told them.”

Tejada frowned.
Márquez meant for her to be found
, he thought.
He meant for her to be found right in town, and for us to get the maquis who took her. But they might still have panicked and killed her and Toño when the house-to-house started. Just as well they decided to leave her up at the Cueva Santa unguarded
. He nodded, accepting Bárbara’s omission. “All right. You can come down to the post tomorrow and make a formal statement.”

She stood up. “Will I go to prison, Lieutenant?”

“Anselmo was the one involved in Calero’s murder, and in blackmailing Márquez,” Tejada said, standing also. “And I don’t see how a wife could have gone against her husband under the circumstances.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” She shook hands with him, and then closed the door behind them.

In the stairwell, Ortíz coughed nervously. “Do you believe her, sir?”

Tejada laughed. “Believe? She’s the answer to a prayer! I’d give a hundred pesetas to see Súarez’s face when he gets the news.”

The guardia bowed his head. “I went over to tell her that you were going up to see your wife,” he admitted. “I thought it might make your trip a little safer. She . . . she has a lot of contacts.”

“Obviously,” Tejada said, as they reached the crowded bar and stepped out into the night.

Ortíz looked embarrassed. “H-how did you know about Lieutenant Calero and Jesulín, sir?”

Tejada shrugged and quoted Antonio. “Just gossip.”

“You haven’t really seen the good side of the valley, Lieutenant.” Ortíz spoke apologetically. “But . . . well, we’re not all bad people. And it used to be very nice here. Very tranquil, before the war.”

They had strolled out of the ruined arcade, toward the footbridge. Tejada looked up at the stars. “It’s still tranquil here,” he said, thinking of the Sierra Nevada, where he had spent his summers as a child, fascinated by the stories of the bandits who haunted the peaks. He had wanted to play the outlaws as a child, but his older brother had always taken all the best parts, and made him be the guardia civil. He thought about his brother and the local peasant boys swooping down on him in a thousand intricate ambushes, and about his brother saying to him the last time he had visited home, in a voice half-joking, half-querulous, “Honestly, Carlos, when are you people going to
do
something about the bandits in the hills? They’re a bunch of ragtag peasants. It can’t be that difficult.” He spoke partly to Ortíz and partly to himself. “The mountains are beautiful. And I think people are pretty much the same all over.”

Chapter 24

Y
our attention, ladies and gentlemen, your attention, please. The seven-fifteen express to Madrid from Zamora now arriving on track two.”

The crackling announcement broke the peace of the summer afternoon. Women furled their fans, calling to errant children, and men hastily folded their newspapers. Porters sprang into action as the train crawled to a halt. The crowd surged forward, eager to board as quickly as possible and to greet those arriving.

Their enthusiasm left little space for the elderly couple who had been sitting under the station clock. The lady walked with a stick. The white-haired man beside her was anxious to shield her from the hurrying passengers, and so did not have the arms and energy to devote to clearing a path to the train. They would have been pushed to the outskirts of the crowd had they not had the presence of mind to place themselves directly behind the pair of guardias civiles who had strolled through the station five times since seven o’clock, apparently on patrol, and were now hurrying toward the incoming train. The guardias had no difficulty making their way through the crowd, and they managed almost without effort to secure a place at the left side of the exit of the final coach.

The train stopped, and the conductor jumped down and pulled down the steps with a cry. “Salamanca! Station stop, Salamanca!”

Travelers poured down the steep steps to the platform, the men hopping down with the energy of schoolboys, and women in heels picking their way. Those waiting to greet the train began to wave and call to passengers. “Eulalia! Eulalia,
hija
, over here!” “Papa! Papa!” “Hey, Primo!” The steady flow of people bottlenecked as porters lugged trunks off the train, and disembarking passengers stopped abruptly in the middle of traffic to be embraced by friends and relatives.

The shape of a tricorn appeared in the door of the last car, and the crowd around the steps fell silent for a moment, apprehensive. Then the older of the guardias waiting by the side of the train raised a hand in greeting. “Lieutenant!”

The lieutenant turned his head rapidly at the hail, saw the pair of guardias, and grinned. He waved and then turned sideways on the steps, flattening himself against the narrow opening to help a young woman carrying an enormous bundle of blankets that presumably had a baby somewhere inside them. The white-haired man behind the guardias peered over their shoulders, and then touched his wife’s arm. “There she is! Elena! Elenita!”

Tejada saw his wife safely down the steps and into her parents’ arms and then turned to his colleagues with pleasure. “Hernández! Jiménez! How are you? I didn’t expect an honor guard! What’s happened?”

The younger guardia flushed. “Sergeant Hernández arranged the patrol schedules so we could meet you, Lieutenant.”

Tejada held out both his hands to Hernández, remembering a little wistfully what it had been like to work with men he trusted and who trusted him. “Thanks. Sorry the train was late.”

Hernández vigorously shook his former partner’s hand. “No problem. We’re always delayed on the Plaza de España route. Sorry I couldn’t bring a truck for your luggage.”

Tejada laughed. “We’ll manage. But you haven’t met the most important piece yet.” He put an arm around his wife, drawing her away from her parents. Elena’s father, uncomfortable in the presence of so many guardias, murmured something to his daughter and disappeared. Tejada indicated Elena’s bundle. “This is my son, Carlos Antonio.”

The two guardias leaned respectfully over the baby, and offered their congratulations to the lieutenant. Hernández, himself a father, had the presence of mind to congratulate Elena as well. She thanked him, and then turned to her husband. “Papa’s gone to get us a cab. Can you take care of the luggage?”

“Of course,” Tejada agreed. “Why don’t you take Toño and get away from the crush?”

“Jiménez, help the lieutenant with his bags,” the sergeant ordered. “I’ll take care of your ladies, sir.” He offered one arm to Elena’s mother, who looked at it rather dubiously before taking it.

Tejada felt as if an invisible weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He basked in the warmth of the May afternoon and the attentions of the men who had been his friends as well as his colleagues. Elena’s broad and incessant smile told him that she was as relieved as he was to be back in Salamanca, and even the slightly awkward politeness between her parents and Hernández and Jiménez did nothing to dim his euphoria. The taxi ride to his in-laws’ home was too quick for anything other than conventional questions about how the trip had been and explanations about timing. (“We arrived at seven on the dot even though I
told
Guillermo the Madrid express is never on time.” “We made the connection fine, it was just that there was a twenty-minute delay in Zamora, and then we stopped for no good reason somewhere, not even a crossing, for ten minutes. Who knows what they have on their minds?”) A few minutes before the end of the ride, Carlos Antonio, who had cooperatively slept for the last several hours, woke up and announced his displeasure at being hungry and jolted around. His grandparents admired his strong lungs, and his grandmother explained to Elena that she had set up Hipólito’s old room as a nursery.

When they arrived, Elena retired immediately to nurse the baby, and Tejada busied himself unpacking their trunks. The family assembled for dinner a few hours later, when Toño was fed, changed, and contented. Tejada, always a little uncomfortable around his in-laws, felt the beginnings of constraint, but Elena was blissful, and her voice and face as she sat down and said, “Oh, it’s
good
to be home” did much to make the meal a happy one.

Elena had written regularly to her parents since her arrival in Potes, so the Fernándezes knew most of what had happened since Tejada’s promotion. Most of dinner was taken up with telling the extra details of the last few weeks: the damning evidence of Bárbara Nuñez at Márquez’s trial, the way several neighbors had thawed toward Elena following Corporal Ortíz’s promotion, and the temporary lull in the maquis’ activities.

“So you think things will be easier now?” Guillermo Fernández asked his son-in-law when they had adjourned to the living room, and Elena and her mother had settled down to coo over Toño.

Tejada shifted, uncomfortable. Elena’s parents had not asked about her kidnapping, but behind Guillermo’s question Tejada heard the echo of the old man’s plea the night before his daughter’s wedding: “You’ll take care of her, Lieutenant? She’s all we have left.” Tejada had been certain of his ability to care for Elena better than an old leftist could in the new postwar Spain. “I hope so,” he said aloud. He looked over at Elena. She had handed Toño to her mother, and was leaning over him, smiling. “I’ll know to be careful now, at any rate.”

María de Fernández looked up and beckoned to her husband. “Guillermo, you haven’t even seen Toño properly. Look, doesn’t he look just like Hipólito at that age? The same smile, and the same long-fingered hands.”

Guillermo Fernández got up and considered the baby. “Yes. But he looks like Elena, too. You had black hair just like that when you were a baby,” he added to his daughter.

Tejada suppressed the urge to stand also. He could not quarrel with his in-laws’ admiration, but he had hoped that someone would notice how much his son resembled him. He watched Elena and sought for the thousandth time the words to convey how much he would have missed her if she had been harmed by her kidnappers. He could not say to her in her parents’ presence,
You’re half my life, and Toño has become another quarter of it, and it scares me how little the things that I used to think were worth killing and dying for mean to me now
. He lacked the courage to say,
I should leave you here in Salamanca, because I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you in Potes, but I don’t know if I could bear leaving you behind
, even when they were alone. “Let me hold him again,” he said aloud abruptly.

Elena frowned. “You held him on the train.”

“Only so you could get some sleep.” The lieutenant defended himself. “Besides, he wanted to play peek-a-boo with me.”

María de Fernández raised her eyebrows. “He wanted to?” She smiled wickedly, and Tejada thought that she looked like her daughter, and wished a little wistfully that she would be less rigidly formal when she spoke to him.

“Yes,” he said. And then, stung by the skeptical silence, “Watch.” He retrieved his son and passed a hand in front of the baby’s face. “Peek-a-boo. Peek-a-boo.”

“Aaah,” said Carlos Antonio sociably.

“See,” said Tejada triumphantly. “It works better with a tri-corn. That covers his whole face, and you should hear him laugh when it’s taken away.”

Elena exchanged an amused glance with her mother, and took the baby back. “He’s very clever for his age,” she explained, returning him to María’s arms. “And he’s grown amazingly, too.”

“He’s, what, five weeks now?” Guillermo Fernández asked.

“He’ll be six weeks on Tuesday,” Elena said. “And he’s already on a regular feeding schedule.”

“Well, you look very well,” her mother said. “Nighttime feedings aren’t bothering you?”

Elena laughed and shook her head, blithely denying that she was disturbed at all. Tejada’s definition of torture was beginning to include being startled awake at three-hour intervals, but he said nothing and tried to take comfort in his wife’s happiness. He excused himself a little later and went to sleep, while Elena stayed up, talking to her parents.

Although he was a little resentful of the way they monopolized his son over the next several days, Tejada had to admit that Elena’s parents were useful babysitters. The lieutenant had envisioned the ten-day leave as a chance to introduce the baby to the Fernándezes, and to see Sergeant Hernández again, but he discovered that it was also an opportunity to spend time with Elena, without the omnipresent infant. The Tejadas spent much of their vacation wandering through the old city together, or strolling through the park down by the river Tormes. Sometimes María de Fernández persuaded them to leave a sleeping Toño behind in her care. Sometimes they took along the ancient baby carriage that Guillermo Fernández had dug out of the attic.

The uninterrupted time together was a mixed blessing. It was easy to talk about Toño: about his intelligence, his charm, the clever things he had recently learned how to do, and his undoubtedly brilliant future. But Tejada felt there was a constraint between them when they talked of other things. Elena was so happy to be back in Salamanca that any reference to Potes seemed cruel, and he was nagged by the worry that he had never properly apologized to her for his threat to take Toño away. Besides, staying with her parents made him feel like an outsider, and reminded him again of what she had said about Vargas: talking to him had been “like being at home again.”

Elena also felt the constraint, although she was not sure of the reason for it. She knew that Carlos had started to take long walks by himself when she stayed home to nurse Toño. She had expected him to spend more time with former colleagues, especially Hernández, who had been kind to her just after her marriage, and Corporal Jiménez, who had worked with Tejada for years, even in Madrid. But although he paid them a few duty calls he was in a bad mood afterward, and he seemed to be almost avoiding their company. She knew that Carlos loved the baby, and was glad to be a father. But sometimes she wondered with a little pang if he wished that Toño’s mother was more respectably conservative, or simply more beautiful and less haggard with worry and childbirth and lack of sleep.

All of this was in her thoughts on the warm evening when she and the lieutenant strolled down to the river to watch the sunset, pushing the baby carriage with them. They had only two more days left in Salamanca, and a desultory conversation about packing had carried them past the cathedral and university, as far as the Roman bridge. Tejada lugged the carriage down the steps to the path by the river, without asking if Elena wished to go that way. She followed him, content to take a familiar path one more time. They walked in silence for a little while, passing under the arches of the ancient bridge, until they reached a grassy space, surrounded by trees and leading to the sandy shores of the Tormes. It was a favorite spot for both of them. “Do you want to rest a little?” Tejada asked.

Elena nodded, and lifted Toño from the carriage. Then she sat down, her back propped against a tree, cradling him in her arms. Toño woke up as he was lifted, and gurgled. The lieutenant sat beside his wife, and leaned over the baby to gurgle back. He straightened, and Elena smiled. “I think he’s going to be a linguist when he grows up,” she said. “He likes to communicate so much.”

The lieutenant nodded. “Like your father.”

Elena heard the suppressed bitterness in his tone, and took his arm. “What do you think he should be?”