Winter in Madrid (60 page)

‘Barbara,’ Harry said quietly. He coughed, for a moment he couldn’t find his voice. ‘I know about this.’

‘What?’ She looked at him blankly. Sofia stared at him.

He laid his hands on the table. ‘I’m with intelligence. I’m a spy. It was my fault that man died.’

Barbara’s expression was shocked, aghast.

‘You told me what you did was not dangerous,’ Sofia said, her voice sharp as a whip.

‘I never wanted to do this. Never.’

He told the two women everything: his recruitment in London, his meetings with Sandy, his trip to the mine, his slip that had cost Gomez his life. They listened in horrified silence. From the kitchen they heard occasional sobs from Paco, soothing noises from Enrique.

‘A gold mine?’ Barbara said when he had finished. She looked Harry in the eye. ‘You bastard, Harry.’ She didn’t shout, she spoke in low sorrowful tones. ‘These last two months you’ve been coming to dinner and meeting me for lunch and all the time you were spying on Sandy. On me as well, presumably!’

‘No! No, when I came over to Spain I’d no idea you were with him. I’ve hated deceiving you, I’ve hated the whole bloody business if you want to know. Hated it!’ he said, so loudly and bitterly Sofia looked at him in surprise.

‘And what about the danger I was in?’ Barbara continued. ‘You knew about Gomez and you didn’t warn me!’

‘I didn’t know for certain till Friday. Though I said you should go home.’

‘Oh, thanks, Harry, thanks so bloody much!’ Barbara took off her glasses and ran her hands across her face. ‘Your name was
mentioned when I overheard Sandy on the phone. I couldn’t believe you could be involved in murder. And yet you were a spy all the bloody time.’

Harry looked at Sofia. She had turned her face away.

‘It’s over, please believe me. Listen, they’re kicking me out because of Gomez. I’m glad.’ He took a deep breath. ‘They’re trying to recruit Sandy now.’ Looking at the two women’s shocked faces he thought, oh God, what have I done to them?

Sofia turned back to him. ‘That man Gomez was at Toledo. Where the streets ran red with Republican blood and the Moors took heads as trophies. You need not mourn a man like that.’

Barbara turned to her. She looked shocked. Sofia met her eye. ‘You should go back to England,
señora
, away from here. You could stay in a hotel till you can get a boat or an aeroplane.’ She gave Harry a firm look. ‘We will help you, won’t we, Harry?’

‘Yes, yes.’ He nodded eagerly, grateful for the ‘we’. ‘Sofia’s right, Barbara, you should go home as soon as you can.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ To his surprise she laughed, a hard bitter laugh. ‘I can’t go home yet. My God. You don’t know the half of it.’

Something in her voice chilled Harry. ‘What do you mean?’

She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders. ‘You don’t know about Bernie. Bernie’s alive. He’s being held in a labour camp near Cuenca and I’m involved in a plan with an ex-guard in Madrid to get him out. To rescue him. On Saturday, in six days’ time.’ She stopped, looked at him. ‘There, it’s your turn to be shocked, isn’t it?’

Harry’s mouth had fallen open. Barbara laughed again; shrilly, with that hysterical edge he’d heard before. Harry had a mental picture of Bernie, laughing as they walked down a Madrid street, green eyes full of excitement and mischief.

Sofia looked puzzled. ‘Who is Bernie? You mean your friend who came to fight here?’

‘Yes.’ Harry looked into Barbara’s eyes. ‘God, this is true, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, yes.’

Sofia was looking at him, her large dark eyes shining with emotion. Hell, Harry thought, I’ve ruined everything. She won’t forgive me for the way I’ve treated Barbara.

‘So that’s it,’ Barbara concluded. ‘I have to stay here till this Saturday.’

‘You could still leave that man,’ Sofia said.

‘No. He’d come after me, he wouldn’t just let me go. There’d be a terrible hue and cry. He mustn’t know.’ Her mouth set hard. ‘If he found out he might get his friends to do something to Bernie out of spite.’

‘You could get someone else to go to Cuenca.’ Sofia gave Harry a searching look. ‘Us, perhaps?’

Barbara looked at her in surprise. ‘Why should you put yourself in danger?’

‘Because it would be helping someone who fought for us. And something against these bastards who rule us now.’ She looked at Harry. ‘I keep my loyalties. They are important.’

‘It wouldn’t work,’ Barbara said. ‘If a stranger turned up to meet Luis, the ex-guard, he’d run off, he’s nervous enough already.’ She told them of her plan, from the first meeting with the journalist in October. They listened in silence. At the end she said quietly, ‘No, I’ll have to go back to Sandy. I’ll pretend I’m ill, say I’ve got the flu and ask for a separate room. He won’t mind, he’ll probably take that girl into our bed.’

‘It’ll be a bloody hard week,’ Harry said. ‘Pretending to Sandy all the time.’

‘Well, you’d know!’ she replied angrily. ‘I can almost feel sorry for him knowing how you’ve treated him.’ She sighed and put her head in her hands. ‘No, that’s wrong,’ she said more quietly. ‘He let himself in for all this.’ She looked up. ‘I think I can do it, if it means getting Bernie out.’ She looked at the newspaper again. ‘It was just the shock of finding out about that man, it’s been going round in my head.’

Sofia was looking at the photographs on the wall, her mother and father and her uncle the priest. ‘You should not go to Cuenca by yourself,’ she said. ‘As a foreign woman on your own you will stand out. It is a remote town.’

‘You know it?’

‘I visited it often as a child. We come from Tarancón, which is the other side of the province, but I had an uncle there. You should not go alone,’ she repeated.

Barbara sighed. ‘I haven’t even got a car to go in unless I can take Sandy’s. That’s the other problem.’

‘I could help there,’ Harry said. ‘I could take out an embassy car and let you have it.’

‘Wouldn’t that be against the rules?’

Harry shrugged. He didn’t care. If Bernie was alive—

Sofia leaned forward. ‘We could take you, me and Harry. Yes, it would work. Harry could be a diplomat taking two friends on a day out. A car with diplomatic plates.’

Sofia looked at him. Harry’s heart pounded. He thought, this was mad, if they were caught it would be the end of Sofia’s chances of getting out of Spain. He and Barbara might be expelled but Sofia— He looked at her. He sensed she wanted him to say yes, to redeem himself. And if Bernie was alive, if they could get him out—He turned to Barbara. ‘Are you sure this Luis knows what he’s doing?’

‘Of course I am,’ she answered impatiently. ‘Do you think I haven’t questioned everything, these last weeks? Luis is no fool, he and his brother have thought this out carefully.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come with you. But not you, Sofia, you’ve got too much to lose.’

Barbara looked surprised. ‘What if the embassy found out? You could get into trouble, couldn’t you, especially with – what you’ve been doing?’

He took a deep breath. ‘To hell with them. You’re right, Sofia, about loyalty. You’ve helped me lose a lot of my old loyalties, did you know that?’

Anger flashed in her eyes. ‘You
should
lose them.’

‘I suppose my loyalty to Bernie’s the oldest of all.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve heard rumours about these secret camps.’

Barbara was frowning with concentration. ‘We could bring Bernie back in the car and leave him at a phone box near the embassy. They’d send someone to fetch him, wouldn’t they?’

Harry thought a moment. ‘Yes. Yes, they would.’

‘He could say he’d hitched a lift from Cuenca, no one need ever know you were involved in the rescue.’

‘Yes. Yes, that could work.’ He sighed. He faced losing everything
over this, but he had to do it. For Sofia. And for Bernie. Bernie, alive—

‘I will come too,’ Sofia said determinedly. ‘I will guide you.’

‘No,’ Harry said. He laid a hand on her arm. ‘No, you mustn’t come.’

‘Listen, Harry. It will be far less risky for all of us together. I tell you, I know the town. We can go directly where we need to, without looking at maps and attracting attention.’

‘Sofia, think—’

She sat up. Her voice was quiet but there was a light in her eyes now. ‘I have felt so guilty, at the thought of running away from my country. I did not tell you but I have. But now I have a chance to do something. Something against them.’

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
the men were dragooned into spending an evening in the church watching propaganda films. Last year they had watched Franco’s victory parade, a hundred thousand men marching past the Caudillo as the German Condor Legion flew overhead. There had been films about the rebirth of Spain, battalions of Falange Youth helping in the fields, a bishop blessing the reopening of factories in Barcelona. More recently, they had seen film from the Hendaye meeting, Franco walking past a guard of honour with Hitler, his face aglow.

The freezing weather had continued unabated. The deer, desperate for food, continued to be drawn to the camp by the smell of cooking. The guards had more venison than they needed; they shot the deer now just to relieve their boredom.

The prisoners shuffled into the church hall, glad at least of the warmth from the stove. They sat on the hard wooden chairs, shuffling and coughing as a pair of guards manhandled the ancient projector into position. A screen had been set up against the wall and Aranda stood before it, his uniform immaculately pressed, twirling a swagger stick in his hands as he looked impatiently at the projectionist.

Bernie sat huddled in his coat, massaging his shoulder. It was the ninth of December now; five days until the escape. He was careful not to look at Agustín, who was on duty by the door.

At a nod from the projectionist, Aranda stepped forward, smiling. ‘Many of you foreign prisoners will be keen for a glimpse of the outside world. Our own Noticiario Español is therefore proud to present a film about events in Europe.’ He waved his stick at the screen. ‘I give you – Germany Victorious.’ He’s an actor, Bernie thought, all the things he does, from this to torturing people, it’s all about him being centre stage. He was careful not to catch
Aranda’s eye, as he had been ever since his refusal to become an informer.

The film began with newsreel of German troops marching into Warsaw, shifted to tanks smashing through the French countryside, then Hitler looking out over Paris. Bernie had never seen any of it before; the scale of what had happened was terrifying. Then a bombed and smoking London appeared on the screen. ‘Only Britain has not surrendered. She ran away from the field of battle in France and now Churchill sulks in London, refusing either to give battle or surrender honourably, believing he is safe because Britain is an island. But revenge comes from the skies, destroying Britain’s cities. If only Churchill had followed the example of Stalin and made a peace that would benefit both him and Germany.’

The images shifted from a burning London to a room where Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov sat at a desk signing a paper, while Ribbentrop stood laughing as Stalin patted him on the back. Seeing it was a shock to Bernie. So often he had wondered why Stalin had made his pact with Hitler last year instead of joining the Allies, it had seemed crazy. The Communists said that only Stalin knew the concrete realities, you had to trust his judgement, but seeing him celebrating with Ribbentrop sent a shiver down Bernie’s spine.

‘Through its pact with Germany, Russia now not only occupies half of Poland but has a booming trade with Germany, receiving foreign exchange in return for its raw materials.’

There was a shot of a huge goods train being checked at a border, German soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets looking through manifests with greatcoated Russians. The film went on to laud German achievements in the occupied countries; Bernie’s attention drifted away as Vidkun Quisling welcomed a German opera company to Oslo.

At the quarry that afternoon, he had complained to Agustín of diarrhoea. It was a trial run to establish Bernie had a problem. ‘You’d better go behind the bushes then,’ Agustín said loudly. He shackled Bernie’s feet and led him round the side of the hill. From there the land sloped downhill, there was a vista of white rolling hills. It was a cloudy day; the light starting to fade.

Bernie looked at Agustín. His narrow face was set in its customary gloomy, worried expression but his eyes scanned the landscape with
keen intelligence. ‘Go to that fold in the hills first,’ Agustín said quietly, pointing. ‘There’s a path, you can just make it out through the snow. I have been down there on my days off. There are some trees – hide among them until it’s dark. Then just keep going straight downhill, follow the shepherds’ tracks. Eventually you come to the road alongside the gorge.’

Bernie looked across the unbroken expanse of snow. ‘They’ll see my footprints.’

‘Perhaps the snow will have gone. But even if it hasn’t, if you go late in the afternoon they will not be able to start a proper search before dark. Your tracks will be harder to follow then. The guards will send someone down to the camp to raise the alarm but by the time Aranda has sent a search party out you should be almost in Cuenca.’

Bernie bit his lip. He had a vision of running downhill, the sound of a shot, crashing down to the earth. The end of everything. ‘Let’s see how the weather is on Saturday.’

Agustín shrugged. ‘You may only have this one chance.’ He looked at his watch, then glanced round nervously. ‘We should go back. Study the landscape, Piper. If we come back here a second time before the day someone may think it odd.’ He hitched his rifle over his shoulder, giving Bernie an uneasy, unhappy look. Bernie gave a wicked grin.

‘Perhaps they’ll think we are making a marriage, Agustín.’

Agustín frowned, indicating with a sharp gesture with his rifle for Bernie to walk back to the quarry.

T
HE FILM DRONED ON
, showing German engineers modernizing Polish factories. A damp unwashed smell rose from the prisoners. Some had fallen asleep in the unaccustomed warmth, others sat staring sullenly ahead. It was always like this during propaganda films and church services: miserable, resentful sullenness. Could even Father Eduardo believe those services had any value? They were like the films, just another type of revenge, punishment. Bernie glanced at Pablo, sitting further along the row. Since the crucifixion he had been withdrawn, hollow-eyed, his arms gave him much pain. Sometimes he had the look of one who had given up – Vicente had had an expression like that towards the end. Establo treated Pablo
with surprising kindliness. His strength was failing and he got Pablo to help him with things; Bernie suspected to give Pablo something to do, stop him sinking into depression.