Settlements

 

Gotson had endured four years of torture, solitary confinement and deprivations that cannot be described. Harry observed the Civil War guidari, veteran of Guernica and the Battle of Madrid… Los Oscuros (the Dark Ones) with the infamous Galvan (who never surrendered), the Maquis of the Basque struggle, and the Resistance in France and Spain… The list is long and Harry had only respect for the man.

They met in a safe house of one of the enlaces as Harry spoke first to make arrangements… the betrayer with the betrayed, “We meet again, Gotson.”

“It is difficult to say why,” he answered, "but I am glad to see you again, Bird Dog,” Gotson's   frail frame sank into the easy chair on the other side of a small table. 

Harry watched, fascinated by the reed of an arm barely able to hold up the cup of tea Gotson seemed to relish. “Didn’t they try to fatten you up before they released you?”  Harry knew that his negotiations, bribes were resisted until… even for Iniga. The release came as uncustomary as it was unexpected.

“No, I expected the usual treatment,” setting the cup down and pointing to the back of his head… “You know, Ley de Fugas.”

Harry didn’t marvel at Gotson’s lack of bitterness. Even four years of unimaginable torture did not destroy the quality that preserved him through twenty years of post Civil War concentration camps in France, guerrilla warfare and, now, Caracremada: he never hated his enemy. Even the Stalinists back in Madrid or the PCE, when they kidnapped and assassinated, summarily judged and shot, resistance fighters in forty-four; or, when the Central Committee of the PCE suspended support for agrupaciones (guerrillas) in the early fifties: Harry had never heard a sour word spoken by Gotson against the Nazis, the Civil Guard, or the horrors committed by Franco’s Morrocan division. To Gotson, a soldier was a soldier. The horrors of war hardened him against the cruelties of humanity and it didn’t matter how viciously and inhumane they were they earned his respect: even mercenaries like Harry Baker.

The necessity of Harry’s meeting with Gotson to spirit him back into France, at the behest of Fournier, might have been less than an uneasy fellowship of the betrayed with the betrayer; but nothing tasted worse on Harry’s tongue than his betrayal of Iniga. She had to sit with the nuns in La Ventas until he could somehow spring her. He was compelled to devote himself whole heartedly to this task using whatever funds he’d earned in Gotson’s release to somehow get her out. His efforts finally came to a head after Nicholas was born in prison. Even Harry’s forged marriage certificate and testimony by the priest (he’d bribed to sign it to verify that the marriage took place) wasn’t enough for the stubborn mother superior.

Harry set little Nicky up in another safe-house when he was hatched until his mama was freed. Three months later she had been taken to the safe house by the bribed Padre and their first contact was a fiery one. He’d gotten the news that his efforts were successful via a phone call from the same bribed Padre. She was taking a bath when the wet nurse let Harry in the apartment.

“You can wait here, senor.” She gestured towards a straight backed chair next to Nicky’s cradle.

Harry didn’t even think of lifting the screen over the cradle to look in at his son like any proud father would.

 Harry had counted on his betrayal being a secret and that his affair with Iniga would bepick up where it had left off before she was arrested. He sat and waited as the wet nurse knocked on the bathroom door, “Senora, your husband is here.”

"I don't want to see him!"

The ruse that they were a happily married dissipated as he crossed the room and opened the bathroom door. He stood stunned at Iniga’s naked body. She looked better than the last time he’d seen her and he longed to hold her in his arms. She was still startled at the sudden opening and reached for a gun that was no longer there at all as one would always be before her arrest.

“What makes you imagine that you are welcome here?” she spat out the words with a contempt that was quite the opposite of Gotson’s angelic acceptance.

“Is this the gratitude I get for your freedom?” Harry knew this was a weak thing to ask but he had no words for the unaccustomed guilt her indignant posture extracted from his gut.

“You are alive now because I have no way to kill you, Harry,” she showed her palms as the hatred seethed from her cupid lips. Those cold steel-grey eyes diverted his to her firm breasts, wet hair, and then led to a scar that went down the length of her belly: a Caesarian birth, no doubt.

The conviction of her words left Harry with little to say. Words weren’t his strong suit and neither was the expression of emotion. He understood that she knew what had happened but he tried just one time to explain, “Gotson is in Biarritz.”

“That was your trade?” she looked up at him and his chest ached to lift her and press his body to hers.

“Yes.”

“Go, and take Nicholas with you,” she spoke with a determined voice but her steel grey eyes welled with tears. “I am going back.”

“No, I won’t take him, he needs a mother.” Harry made a desperate plea to her maternal instincts.

“Okay, but if you don’t take him you’ll never see him again.” She countered.

“You will die in the Pyrenees, Iniga, the US has a base in Rota now,” he had to make this one last argument, though he knew it would not mover her. “The CIA is very good at taking care of insurgents. Even if you win… look at Iran…” referring to Mohammad Mosaddegh’s parliamentary government, overthrown when oil was nationalized... before the CIA re-installed the Shah, “you think they will tolerate a Basque government run by anarchists or, worse, communists?”

“No, Harry, my time in La Ventas convinced me. My world is not yours,” she then added, “I can’t go back; we are guidari and we are as dead the minute we pick up a weapon to resist.”

Harry remembered the first time he and Iniga met in a cabin in the Pyrenees during the war. She was only a teen then with Gotson’s guerilla group… her frame so small a rifle would outweigh her but she carried a pack… and a fierce determination he just saw again. He let his eyes caress her body one more time before closing the door. He heard her from the bedroom say as he left the apartment and his son, Nicky, “Adios, Bird Dog, I love you,”

“Adios, my fiery angel.” He wasn’t used to poetic adieus and he hoped that leaving Nicky with her would hamper her revolutionary fervor. It would not be so. They would not see each other for over four decades as she lay dying. Nicky was lost to him too. She arranged for her wet nurse to care for him. She immigrated to the US with Nicky and put him at on the steps of a Catholic orphanage with his name on a tag pinned to his diaper a few days after her feet hit the ground off a Greyhound Bus in Los Angeles. A life begun in a sewer of betrayal, abandonment and deceit left Nicky with a perspective on life that can be understood under these circumstances.

Now, at sixteen, as Nick was approaching manhood after bouncing from the orphanage to foster homes… to another foster home… to another foster home… to Los Prietos Boys camp.  Harry Baker had his hands full de-institutionalizing his son.