Friday, March 15, 2013

New Beginnings...Old Behaviors

Beyond the Walls of the Citadel
   Promises aside, Nicky had very little contact with his dad after Harry set him up in Charleston South Carolina with his new step-mom, Marilynn. Marylyn and Harry, though still married, were separated and Harry was out of the picture for the most part. Harry was out of the picture because he’d only married Marilyn for Nick’s sake. He had, in spite of his absence, kept his promise to Iniga by trying to assure that Nick would not go wanting. After all, he told himself when the vision of Iniga’s scowl would appear to him late at night; Marilyn’s house was a whole lot better than the way Nick had been left on the orphanage’s porch.

   Nick had taken to studies under a tutor he’d been assigned and even managed to complete prep-school at Bishop England Catholic High School in South Carolina before Harry used his connections to get him into The Citadel. Noting Nicky’s physique and size, Harry hoped Nick would adapt and choose a military career to be primed for life there… better than as a civilian in Ivy League colleges.

   Nick loved the discipline at The Citadel more so than he did the studies and, because he was possibly the most physically intimidating “knob” on campus, he was not hazed as much as other Fourth Class Cadets there. Engineering, mathematics, military history and instruction weren’t for him but, hell, Nick had already been institutionalized and anything, even the rigors of a Catholic prep school and the military academy, were a good deal better than the dumbed-down kindergarten of Los Prietos. He decided, after his first year at the Citadel, he had no desire for a military career nor did he have any academic aspirations. He discovered that a gift for gab and money opened doors for him that even the best colleges couldn’t. By this time, he had taken to the newly discovered privileges of wealth and the prestige that wearing the right clothes, driving the right car and living in the best neighborhoods, could avail him. He felt that he was wasting time sitting in classrooms when there was so much money to be made in the world beyond the walls of the Citadel.

   While Nick was at the Academy, and because Harry was hardly ever around much, Marilynn acquired a Realtors’ license and set up an office in Mount Pleasant. Nick fell right in with her after leaving college and the two; Nick’s natural good looks, glib tongue in conjunction with an innate ability to read other people; together with Marilyn’s pretentious airs and business acumen, made them a good team, tailor made for the polite airs of Southern congeniality. She was a matronly southern-belle whose pretenses were less annoying to Nick than they might have been had he not already spent some time at Bishop England and The Citadel acquiring manners.

  Nick took his libido into town to the gay bars and picked up on an occasional prostitute too. He hadn’t the pedigree for the society girls and he was a twenty-seven year old bachelor with what would be a good prospect anywhere else but Charleston. While sitting at Dandey’s, complaining about his last affair that ended just when he thought he’d arrived, a real-estate acquaintance asked him, “Why honey, are you wasting your time with these stuck-up bitches in Charleston? You don’t have the pedigree for these Southern Belles…”

   “Yeh, that’s true, but if only…”

   “If only… if only, darlin’… if wishes were fishes.” Nicky listened out of boredom but paid attention because this swish with the fishes was on to something when he quoted the Beatles song, “You should get back to where you once belonged… Jo-Joe.”

   “You mean California?” Nick's paranoia had him wondering what this fag knew about his stay at Los Prietos.

   “Oh sweetheart, you are getting warm…” he nuzzled up to Nick’s ear, “C’mon, Nicky, you know Santa Barbara is teeming with trust-fund babies who could care less about class distinction.”

   “What do you know about Santa Barbara?” Nicky wiped the moisture from his ear with his sleeve.

   The friend leaned back on his bar stool slurring, “Oh, they have one of the mo-ossst delightful gay-bars in the whole world, lover boy,” he then stood with his chest puffed out proudly, “go to ‘The Pub’ and be sure to tell Frankie, Donny of Charleston says, ‘Hi there’.”

   Nick’s mind was blank about the night before… he remembered the conversation with Donny about Santa Barbara. His mind raced… putting pieces of memory in place… there was cocaine; making out in the back seat of a cab; a creepy blank space after that. He was there in a strange bed. He turned over on his side to reach over… chiefly, to find out whose bed he was in. His arm fell on cold flesh… Donny was there… face down with wrists tied to bed posts… a silk tie stretched tight around his neck… shit, dead… what? Dead! Oh, God, get out of here!

   He drove to the office, hung-over, replaying the events of the night before in his mind. He remembered making out in Donny’s bed and then the screen went blank… nothing… Oh, shit, what’s going to happen… no one saw me leave his apartment… or did they? Oh, no, everyone at the bar saw us leave together… what the fuck… make up a story now… come up with something. There is sure to be an investigation. Did I leave any evidence?semen... new stuff… DNA… (DNA was in its infancy back then). Should I call Harry?

Thursday, March 14, 2013

The Crisp, Clean, Autumn Air

 I wrote this part of Adriane but didn't know exactly where to put it. It is an important background bit that gives us a sense of exactly who it is we are dealing with. I'm hoping to squeeze it into the novel in such a manner as not to muck it all up.

  A glossary of terms and index will be added by the time I get to the end of the story.



#####

The Maquisards of the Pyrenees
 

   The year was 1943 and fall had brought with it the changing of colors along the Catalonian mountain pass through to Col Du Pourtalet, in the Pyrenees. The Basque Maquis’ heart would have reveled in the crisp cool air of this landscape but he was thinking about how the summer of 1940 had brought bad news in Biarritz when the Maginot line collapsed under the relentless forces of Hitler’s blitz. Then it was just the last summer when the worst betrayal… a reminder of the betrayals by Stalinists in Madrid… the betrayal of Jean Moulin; given up to the Gestapo by another communist, Raymond Aubrac, in Lyon. Word had spread among the anarchist maquisards that no one was to be trusted in the Resistance… no one… especially the communists.

    Alesander Gotson had crossed the Pyrenees many times from 1936 to 1939. He and Marcel Fournier, Adrian’s father, had been in Guernica during the infamous fire bombing, retreating to Bilboa… surviving the War of the North and eventually held out at last in Madrid. Nightmares of squadrons in waves… Junkers, Dorniers, Heinkles, Fiat and Messerschmitt fighters … he could still see the bombs dropping and the strafing. Joining a handful of students led by Francisco Oscuro and his “Dark Ones” they stood up to the Condor Legion as long as they could and then slipped out, or melded with the population, in the confusion and rubble when the city fell with the Republican dream and his hopes for a liberated Basque Country was crushed.

   Having set up a chocolate shop in Biarritz after being released from Camp Gurs, thanks to the influence of Marcel Fournier and fellow maquis, Alesander retired from the revolution. Marcel had escaped, but not untouched, and went on to prosper from the black market in Paris. Both were disillusioned with the betrayals by the Stalinists for the constant infighting and power struggles between one faction or another in Madrid. Being a witness to the atrocities; the murder of over a thousand Nationalist prisoners ordered by the Stalinist advisor, Koltzov, Alesander, the professional guidari (warrior) was more loyal to his people, the Basques of northern Spain and southwest France, than any allegiance to political ideology. Political ideals all sounded good in the propaganda of the time but the sight of such brazen disregard for human life was what he’d been struggling against in the dust and ruins of Guernica, Bilbao and Madrid. The crimes of the Republic under Soviet usurpation equaled those of General Mola on the other side… No pasaron, indeed.


   He seen Paris fall into the dark clouds of insanity for a worse form of fascism, but he also saw the fall of France as an opportunity to help gather forces from Southern France, inflamed by NAZI oppression, sufficient to wrest Basque country from Franco. While, at the same time he did this, he could put a thorn into the side of the Vichey on the French side of the Pyrenees. The Nazis would make it easier to organize a guerrilla movement now that France itself had been occupied and Alesander was more talented at organizing guerrillas than he was at managing his chocolate shop. He’d left the shop to a cousin and disappeared from Biarritz in the Occupied Zone, before the Gestapo found his name on their lists (where it was sure to be), to take up the fight he’d abandoned in March of 1939.

   At nightfall he waited with a half-dozen of his maquisards lined up and ready to light flares illuminating the improvised landing strip. The feint purr of the Lysander in the distant black sky assured him the plane was on time… within seconds... and there would be no waiting around. Alesander didn’t appreciate the help his little band was getting from the British. He didn’t believe in the adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” After dealing with the Stalinist, Anarchist and Republican infighting in Madrid, Alesander observed that the worst enemy of the Resistance was the resistance itself. Why would the British government be free of similar play-pen shenanigans? This was life or death to him while they, at times, seemed to view the guidariki as pawns in the big game. His heart beat freer high up in the Pyrenees where his decisions didn’t have to go through a central committee.


   “There it is …” a young guidari called out. The commander’s attention was on the landing strip…  a black Lysander landed squarely in the midst of two rows of flares, having been lit only moments before, coming to a stop fifty feet from those marking the end of the strip. Alesander admired the ability of these pilots to land on a dime and take off again without a minute lost. He watched as a tall, broad shouldered man with close cropped, blond hair and a huge backpack, jumped to the ground.


   The plane was immediately turned around by his men and headed back down the strip to disappear into the night, “This way,” he said in English and the group darted off into the forest.

   After about a half-hour hike they came to a small hut where a young girl, Iniga, one of maquisards waiting for their return, lit a kerosene lamp and put it in the middle of the table. Alesander thought of her as a fiery angel with a moon face and cupid-bow lips framed by unruly and wild brown tufts tied down under a provocative Basque Beret. She was only seventeen but had already been slated for a train from Gur to Drancy and sure death before he, and the former préfet of Aveyon, Jean Moulin, managed to wrangle her release two years before. Though barely a teen at the time she had witnessed the assassination of Durruti at the Bridge in Madrid and had become a hardened veteran by1943.


   “So, what are we doing… no supplies… no ammo… nothing from you Brits but another face to feed?” She blurted out before the tall muscular, blond man could say anything. He was busy opening a suitcase he’d carried from the plane on the table revealing a compact radio.


   "The rest will be dropped tomorrow night… we have another radio code-book…" returning her glare and adding casually, "the others have been compromised. That is why I’m here.”

   Alesander had heard that accent in Madrid. It was the accent of the Lincoln Brigade he’d fought with in the last days of the Republic in Madrid. He had a kinship with the Americans… more than with the British whose class distinctions made them almost as nasty as the Germans. But, some of the Americans of the Lincoln Brigade were idealists who’d become as disillusioned as he.


   The American pulled another kit out of his pack and put it on the table. Beside two dry cell batteries, there were two thirty-two caliber Welrod pistols with silencers and several boxes of ammo.


    No one used their real names and very few asked, but Alesander finally recognized the man. He was Harry Baker, aka, Perro de Caza... the Bird Dog, and had come to Madrid in the last weeks before everyone with any sense scrambled out of there. He never got to know him but he suspected that Mr. Baker played both sides to his benefit. Madrid was far away but the wounds… the distrust… it never heals.


   After everyone bedded down outside the hut, Baker sat at the table and lit a pipe, “You are familiar… you were in Madrid at the bridge?”


   “Yes, and you were with the International Brigade at Manzanares…” Inga added, “When Durruti was taken out…” She then went back out of the hut.


   After she left, Alesander picked up on what the girl was implying, “It was almost over then. How did you get out?”


   “That’s classified, sorry,” was Baker pulling rank?


   Alesander swiftly yanked his Welrod from inside his jacket, holding it steady between Baker’s eyes. “This round in the chamber is classified too… so tell me Mr. Baker, how did you get out of Madrid?”


   Baker didn’t flinch… there was no reaction. It seemed as though he didn’t care one way or another whether Alesander pulled the trigger. “Let me just say, it was a matter of knowing where the bricks, walls and body parts fell during the bombardments.”


   “They say… some I know to be reliable… they, and there was more than one, I’ve heard them say that it was a Stalinist that shot Durruti.” Alesander had been with Durruti, the leader of the anarchist column, during the drive to Zaragosa.


   “It could have been,” the American still hadn’t blinked.
   

   Iniga burst in the door and came to a halt when she saw the two men poised in an absurd diorama… neither moved. “I hate to interrupt… better put a bullet in his head, Alesander, we have to get moving.” 

   Two more maquisards entered the hut, “Bind him…,” Alesander ordered, “we’ll pick up our conversation later.”


   Baker put his hands behind his back without resistance while Iniga, with a cord of sinew, had begun to bind them. Alesander stopped her from binding him that way, saying, “Tie them to the front, he can move easier that way. We don’t need to have him stumbling in the dark.”


   “Thanks,” Baker nodded in agreement.


   Two hand guns, 9 mm Lugar semi-automatic pistol and MP 40 German machine pistol with a detached shoulder stock,
a makeshift garrote along with two knives in shoulder sheathes, were lifted from inside his heavy jacket. Iniga ran her delicate fingers across the smooth side of the peculiar blade of the biggest one.
 
   Baker grinned at the girl as she examined the odd shaped heavy dagger, “It’s a Smatchet. You can jam that fucker right through an SS helmet. You can have it… I’ll keep the others.”

   She approved as the others left the hut.Alesander still hadn’t put the Welrod down until Baker’s hands were secured. She then snuffed the lamp and the band filed out up the hill, splitting up into two or three man groups. 


   Iniga took the point while Alesander held back behind Baker. He stepped aside and took a stand on an outcrop to pause and check his watch. The column in pursuit would be almost to the hut by this time. He could see a few lights from farm houses in the valley below from his viewpoint but the darkness hid nearly everything else. Had he not known the terrain so well, he wouldn’t have been able to guess where the hut they’d just left might have been… he could hear one of their pursuers loudly complaining that they had to dismount their horses at the hut and hike.

   Alesander left his perch… slinging his British Sten and taking up the rear behind his compliant and strangely complacent captive, he puzzled over what to do now. He could have blown the hut with plastique at this time but he didn’t want to give the Regulares any reason to retaliate with reprisals on the villagers below who had as little knowledge of the actions of the maquis as they did the Guardia Civil. The Regulars weren’t as brutal with reprisals as the Civil Guard, or the Germans in France, but trouble of any kind in the countryside could turn the locals against them and the Maquis sorely needed the support of the villagers.

   They made their way along a path known only to a few; skirting the limestone cliffs that dropped several hundred feet from the barren landscape to wind, below the tree-line, sidelong the steep slopes down and over a crest, forested with firs and some beech trees to a hidden limestone cave where they met the others and stashed the radio. All except the three then dispersed, some down into the town, Jaca: others scattered elsewhere. 


   It is said that the garrison of Jaca’s mutiny against the monarchy and its suppression in 1930 gave birth to the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War. At the cave the three; Iniga, Baker and Alesander, would bind their fates far beyond the immediate circumstances of that day in 1943.

   “Unbind him,” Alesander nodded to Iniga.


   “What, you want to give him a chance to escape?” she sneered indignantly.


   “He could have had that chance a half dozen times by now…” Alesander answered. An uncustomary grin showed the worried features, so weary of warfare, on what ought to have been a youthful face, “You should be a little less eager for blood, my dear one.” But he knew full well how bitterly the savagery of oppression etched itself into the lives of what ought to have been the carefree youth of those times. The Civil Guard had taken her parents to a wall and gang-raped her at fourteen.
She went straight to the front lines in Madrid as a messenger before it fell in '39. Alesander understood because he himself had his first taste of combat as a messenger in '36 when he was fourteen. He was only twenty years of age now but had already been a hardened veteran since the Civil War started a lifetime ago in '36.

   Alesander returned Baker’s weapons, “Sorry, we can’t be too careful with our trust." Gesturing for her to unstrap the sheath, "Iniga, give him back his smatchet.”


   “But he said I could have it…” she pouted intriguingly girlish.


   “We have to set up a drop site…” Baker interrupted.


   “Please can I keep the smatchet?”  Iniga flashed her mock, little girl, pout at Baker and patted her side where under her coat the smatchet was holstered.


   “Sure,” Baker smiled flashing his straight white teeth. He couldn’t figure if she was patting her breast teasingly or the smatchet sheath. He then turned his head up the hill and held his hand out, palm down, to signal silence… he heard voices.


The three fanned out and took cover. Alesander’s took a position above and to the side between a couple of boulders where he could watch the entrance of the cave. That radio in there was crucial for their survival. Ambush strategies and tactics had been worked out long before by the maquisards but Baker had only his well honed instincts to land in a perfect place to observe the approaching column. Iniga found cover a hundred meters up the hill camouflaged behind some scrub beneath some beech trees.
 

   This was an operation with too many problems for Alesander. He preferred quiet operations, where a couple of spikes on a mountain railway track could be dislodged, resulting in a supply train headed for Southern France to derail and tumble into a gulch long after his men would be enjoying a few carafes of wine in Jaca; but this one was suspiciously compromised from the start. Those being his feelings regardless, he would get a chance to gain respect for Baker’s abilities this morning as an ominous mist cast an aura of mystery around the arrival of two Civil Guards and a half-dozen Regulars.

   As the squad approached, Baker let the point pass within feet of his position. Alesander had been in so many ambushes by now that he felt calm and focused. The men looked tired and finally the squad leader ordered a rest. They had to scramble up and down these trails, far from the warmth and security of their post. Dumping their packs, rolling and lighting up cigarettes, each made a tremendous amount of noise. From his position he could see Baker gesture, pointing out the sergeant… claiming him for his own… as he was separate from his squad…. taking a dump. Garrote ready, Baker waited, making sure that the sergeant finished his dump before taking him out. He didn’t want to mess himself up in close quarters like that. He gave Alesander a hand signal to wait.

   Iniga had the smatchet out and poised to use on one of them leaning against the same beech she had been using for cover. He’d taken off his German style helmet adorned with the Franco Eagle emblem, to roll up and light a cigarette.  This bothered her because she wanted to see how that damned blade worked even though he’d set aside his new, and hardly ever used, parade-ground Muaser rifle within easy reach. Still, in spite of her youthful petulance she was disciplined enough to wait for Alesander’s signal. He was in the line of sight for both her and Baker but, of course, she had no idea what the waiting was about.
 

   One of the men spoke loud enough for all to hear, “They are probably in Jaca by now… having breakfast… eh?” there would be no answer from the sergeant.


   Alesander was in position to catch most of the rest with his Sten when Baker made his move. These men were green... Franco had to send his more experienced, so-called volunteer, Blue Divisions to the Russian Front to appease Hitler. The army never recovered from the loss of experienced fighters. Now Spain, with the exception of a few Moroccan veterans, had nothing but barracks mavens to send out on patrol: they looked good for the parade grounds but were of little use in the field.


   It was over before anyone was able to lift a weapon. Everyone had all moved in such precision that only a short burst from Alesander’s Sten made any sound. Baker worried that the sound of that burst might have carried. He had taken out three with a knife as Iniga made short work of two more with one of the Welrods. The three had moved in unison as though choreographed in a deadly dance.

   In the end, Iniga had one pinned against a tree by the Mauser she held casually to her side with the business end of the barrel only inches from the boy’s crotch. He was no older than Iniga.


   “What are we going to do with him?” she almost pled.


   Alesander walked straight up to the quivering kid with tears of fear on his adolescent face, saying calmly, “Its going to be alright…” he assured the boy as he put a silenced round into the side of the youth’s head. The boy dropped to the ground in front of Iniga’s Mauser muzzle.


   She turned to catch Alesander walking away as though he’d only delivered a paper. She understood… no prisoners… but a deep ache welled up in her with tears of her own.She then put the boy's helmet back on his head and slammed the smatchet through it to the hilt.
 

   Jerking away she called out to Baker, “Hey, it went through his helmet like a butter knife!” displaying the bloody smatchet.
 

   Baker kicked the body over, the helmet rolled off to show the wound in the back of the kid's head. The helmet had a hole in the middle of the top, “You did that afterwards.”

   “I had to try it,” she answered coyly and smiled broadly.


   He gave her a pat on the back and the three of them got busy hiding the bodies.

   War… the crisp, clean, autumn, mountain air, now smelled of blood, shit and
urine soaked trousers,from exploded intestines. All three were young and should have been cramming for studies in dorms or playing soccer… but here they were. It had to be accepted… it is unfair… every dead soldier has a grieving family… a mother… a father… a lover… war!

  

Monday, March 11, 2013

Steely Gray Eyes & Blood Red Gladiolas

Now, at sixteen, 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 would have his hands full de-institutionalizing his son but he also had his hands full with his own medical condition. He knew he had four, maybe five years or more, if only he could quit smoking before the emphysema that was gradually drowning him would take him under. He owed it to Iniga… he’d promised her that much… and these were the few kinds of promises men like Harry were honor bound to keep.  

  She was there in the V.A Hospital in Boise after he’d managed to verify, through Marcel Fournier, that she was a veteran of the resistance in France: a concentration camp survivor, Franco’s prisons and, while in the resistance, a rescuer of American pilots during D-Day in Normandy. He’d done so after Alesander reached him through old contacts in the OSS and informed him she had been suffering cancer, under an alias, at a sheep ranch near Boise Idaho. He’d only quit his business a few years before and dropped all his aliases for his real name.

   Coming “out from the cold” then, Harry had married Marilyn to have for once a normal life. The posting of wedding notices in the local paper didn’t escape the attention of Alesander’s associates whose antennae had been out looking for Harry since he’d heard of Iniga’s cancer. Harry then went to work with connections that landed her in the V.A. hospital of Fort Street in Boise.

    He came onto her ward with a bouquet of flowers and a gnawing anxiety. Her skeletal frame was hardly discernible from the tubes, oxygen mask and wires to monitors. He put the flowers, Blood Red Gladiolas, in a vase and sat by her as she slept.


   She awoke with a start, “Hurry?” she slurred…. sedated, trying to say Harry through a thickened tongue, 

   
   “Yes, it’s me.”

   “And, along comes the injustice of God.” She managed a weak smile.
 

  “What, Iniga?”

   “That fate would shove your fuckin’ face in front of my eyes before I die.”


   “Gratitude was never your strong suit…”


   “I am grateful that I can tell you about our son.” Her contempt softened as she said, our son.


   To Harry's uncustomary affectionate mind, the lines of premature age and the darkened skin under her eyes wrought by cancer and had not withered away the beauty of her cupid bow lips or the steely determination of her eyes were steely gray like his: gray eyes that were no longer framed by wild shocks of black Basque hair. They were set deep in the death’s skull of her shaved head: eyes that were pleading. Harry was moved by the sight of Iniga submitting to pain… to see her in physical weakness was... well, he remembered his last vision of her in the bath at their departure in Spain.


   “He is in California…” she paused to take another hit off the oxygen mask; “A boy’s camp of some sort. He still has your name, Papa.”


   “What do you want me to do about him?” Harry could tell, as soon as he protested, that any objections he might have would be vanity, He saw no need to tell her of his own emphysema. but he tried… “He doesn’t know me.”


   “He needs help. I had no idea of his situation…” she arose on one arm and spoke forcefully, “until we tracked down that damned wet-nurse.”


   Harry saw again her fierce determination as she continued, “The cur left him with nuns like a donation … a bag of groceries!” she wheezed…”I was too weak to follow-up…. but I found out where he is now.”


  
If he was honest with himself about it, Harry hadn’t given Nick much thought at all over the previous sixteen years. Love wasn’t part of his vocabulary. It was an expense… a far too costly an investment in time and energy to be committed to it. He had to do what he knew he needed to do now. He needed to do it now because he realized… or allowed the realization… that within the deep recess of buried emotions… he loved Iniga and, in loving Iniga,his betrayal of her years ago required something of him.

   “It is up to you Harry, find him.”
 

   “I will.
 

   “Try to give him a life, Harry.”
 

   “I will.”
 

   “Oh, yes, Harry…”
 

   “Yes…”
 

   “Thanks for the gladiolas. Red glads were the favorites of the nuns at la Ventas.” She turned her head to the side to hide her tears, “Now go away please.”
 

   Harry knew then what the rest of his life would be. He took the first flight from there the next morning and never again see Iniga's steely gray eyes before she died.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

A Sewer of Deceit

   Harry set little Nicky up in another safe-house when he was hatched, until his mama had escaped la Ventas. Three months later she had been taken to the safe house by the bribed Padre. Their first contact was a fiery one. Harry’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 she wouldn’t know of it. It wouldn't be so bad, he thought, that his affair with Iniga would pick 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 Iniga and Harry were lovers, or even friends, dissipated as he crossed the room and opened the bathroom door. He stood in awe, stunned, at the raw beauty of Iniga’s naked body. She looked better, even after the deprivation of prison, than the last time he’d seen her and he longed to hold her in his arms. “La Ventas treated you well?”


   She was still startled at the sudden opening and reached for a gun that was no longer there, as one would have always been before her arrest. “What makes you imagine that you are welcome here?” she spat out the words with contempt.


   “Is this the gratitude I get for bustin' you loose?” 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 the cupid lips he longed to press to his. Those cold steel-grey eyes diverted his eyes to her firm breasts, and then to a newly stitched 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, “Alesander is in Biarritz.”


   “That was your trade?” she looked up at him.


   “Yes,” and his chest ached to lift her… to draw her body to his.


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


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


   “Okay, I’ll keep him for now, but you’ll never see him again.” She countered.


   “You’ll die in the Pyrenees, Iniga, the U.S. 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 before the CIA re-installed the Shah in 1953, “you think they will tolerate a Basque government run by anarchists, or, most likely, Communists?”


   “No, Harry, my time in La Ventas convinced me. My world is not yours,” she then added, “I can’t go back like you and your kind. I can’t drop out and drop in as I please, like you; Alesander and I are guidari. We counted ourselves as dead the minute we picked up a weapon to resist.”


   "Alesander, I have good reason to believe, is retiring in Biarritz. His stay in Carabanchel convinced him," Harry lay down his trump card hoping she'd...

   "He will never retire until he is dead," she fired back with a hand she knew she ought best fold.

   “So, you are convinced you want martyrdom. You want to die in a worthless Jihad and you choose this over motherhood?”



   He could see that he'd hit her in the chest with a hammer and that the blow only caused her face to set in a concrete resolve that no hammer could bust up.

   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 Alesander’s guerrilla group;
a smatchet on her belt,her frame so small that any rifle would outweigh her, but she carried a full pack and a fierce determination he'd just seen again. He let his eyes caress her body one more time before closing the door. 

   He heard her from shout from behind the bathroom door as he left the apartment and his son, Nicky, “Adios, Bird Dog, we are not the same as you say, you are a whore!”

   “Adios, my fiery angel.” He wasn’t used to poetic adieus and he hoped that leaving Nicky with her would temper her revolutionary fervor. She could have left Spain and Franco’s oppression for Southern France like Alesander in Biarritz, but 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. When the wet nurse immigrated to the US with Nicky she put the bastardo, her ticket for immigration, on the steps of a Catholic orphanage with his birth certificate in a manila envelope pinned to his blanket a few days after her feet hit the ground off a Greyhound Bus in Los Angeles. A life begun in the sewer of betrayal, abandonment and deceit, left Nicky with a perspective on life that might be understood under these circumstances.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Settlements

Harry took a seat on a surreal Gaudi bench with Commandante Rojelio at the Park Guell in Barcelona. The Commandant was tamping his pipe when Harry approached, pausing a minute to appraise an old acquaintance, “Senor Perro de Caza, it is good to see you are still alive.”

   “Yes, and you have advanced in rank, Commandant, since I last saw you?” Harry was letting Rojelio know that he had inside information, knowing Rojelio’s rank, even though the Commandant was in plain clothes. He also knew he would have a hard time dealing with Rojelio because the man was one of the few decent and honest people he knew in the Policia Armada.

   “Who are you working for now, Harry?” Rojelio, a deeply religious man, was especially suspicious of Harry Baker. He knew that Harry worked as an independent contractor and that meant he had no allegiance to anything, anyone, any ideology or faith. “You have piqued my curiosity, Bird Dog. are you in love with Iniga?”

   Harry knew his body language would not go unnoticed by the Commandant, “Nothing romantic, I can assure you. I’m doing this one on personal business. I am more interested in the salamander growing in her womb. I know I can’t bend you with money but you can still help me, if you will. Can I say, on humanitarian grounds?”

   “Then you are in love with Iniga, si?”

    “Yes, Rojelio, maybe: and you are a Carlist at heart. You already knew she was pregnant?” Harry was reticent to admit he was in love with her but he was glad that Rojelio came directly to the point. This saved them both a lot of time.

   “Oh good... love is a good thing Bird Dog." his face broke out in a sly grin. "She was fortunate I was her interrogator…” he finally lit his pipe, “I can tell, strangely enough, our Lord and Savior must have a special love for you and that woman.”

   “You can help then?” Harry ignored the usual religious clap-trap. He knew he was known well enough by Commandant Rojelio that he didn’t have to bother with cow-towing. He was relieved that the conversation returned to business.

   “Donate some pesetas to the nuns at la Venta and you can get the child out if you act quickly. An adoption is in order, but I have to warn you, the vultures were circling with bids before Iniga’s belly even began to swell. I’m not so sure what it would take to get her released too, but negotiations...”

   “… I have a marriage certificate.”

   “That might help but I can’t promise anything.”

   “Do you find this park to be disorienting?” Harry didn’t like getting confused and the wavy undulations, swirling lines of the walkways and niches, evoked a touch of vertigo in his gut. Harry’s mind preferred straight lines… or, it could have been the carafes of wine from yesterday.

   “No, it is a glorious tribute to the convolutions of the Catalonian politics we have to engage in to survive.”  He let out a wisp of smoke adding, “You ought to be used to that, Bird Dog, and you also must have known before that, Iniga would have to escape. The only way she will be released would be via the Ley de Fugas,” he added while putting a forefinger to the back of his head. He then paused to consider, "I will pull a few strings if I can."



   The necessity of Alesander’s escape, and Harry’s efforts to spirit him back into France, at the behest of Marcel Fournier, might have been less than an uneasy fellowship: of the betrayed with the betrayer. Nothing tasted worse on Harry’s tongue than his betrayal of Iniga and the certain knowledge that Alesander’s instincts were keen enough to know what was done on his behalf. Regardless, Iniga had to sit with the nuns in La Ventas until Harry could somehow spring her. He was compelled to devote himself whole heartedly to this task using whatever fees he’d earned for managing Alesander’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.

   A few guards that were bribed to look the other way, and the help of the underground to create a diversion, converged to facilitate a rather easy escape. Had she not been able to break free of la Ventas, she would have been shipped to another of the hundreds of prisons to be then let out and unceremoniously shot... another escapee, as had hundreds of others who had disappeared before her.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

The End of Confinement

Before Carabanchel was Razed
   Alesander had endured four years of, solitary confinement and deprivations that can hardly 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… were it not for Alesander’s embarrassing passion.

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

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

    "Down to business. You will be on the train through the Canfranc frontera as an Argentine tourist," he slipped a passport and visa across the table.

   Harry watched, fascinated by the reed of an arm that was barely able to pick up the papers, “Didn’t they try to fatten you up before they released you?”  Harry knew that his negotiations, 1.e., bribes of prison officials, were formally resisted and backhandedly accepted, that Alesander was released: by the guard at the sally-port, blinded by Harry's forged papers and high ranking Policia Armada Officer uniform, pushed the button to open the gate as he, at midnight, escorted Alesander Gotson out to freedom and finally, managed the Maquis’ escape.

   “No, I expected the usual treatment,” setting the cup down and pointing to the back of his head… “You know, a bullet there, the usual treatment: killed while escaping.”

   Harry didn’t marvel at Alesander’s lack of bitterness. Even four years of isolation, sense deprivation, physical and psychological torture did not destroy the quality that preserved him through twenty years of post Civil War concentration camps in France, guerrilla warfare and, now, Carabanchel: he never hated his enemy. Even the Stalinists back in Madrid or the PCE (Communist Party of Spain), when their purges of non-communist leadership, kidnapped and assassinated, summarily judged and shot resistance fighters after the failed assault on the Aran Valley in ‘44; or when the Central Committee of the PCE suspended support for the Spanish guerillas, Agrupacionesor Guerrilleras (the A.G.E.), in’48: Harry had never heard a sour word spoken by Alesander against the Stalinists, Nazis, the Civil Guard, the paramilitary Somaten, or the horrors committed by Franco’s Moroccan division. To Alesander, a soldier was a soldier and soldiers do as soldiers must. The horrors of war hardened him against its cruelty and it didn’t matter how inhumane the atrocities were: even for mad and vicious crimes against humanity by mercenaries like Harry Baker… Alesander didn’t forgive or forget… he just understood.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Iniga: Ley de Fuges

   Iniga was able to reach the street corner and, honed by years underground, her instincts told her she was being followed. Ducking into a shop entrance, she tried the door. Of course, it was locked. Unarmed but for a small butterfly knife, she knew there was no choice other than to toss the knife where she might find it afterward, if there was an afterwards, and to wait and watch. Waiting and watching was a talent developed over years as a guidari in the resistance. There was no traffic, so the tinny sound of the SEAT’s four-cylinder motor approaching came as an alarm. The sedan screeched to a halt with all but the driver’s door swinging open in the early dawning hour of the Barcelona morn.
   
   The irony of the trade-off for the release of Alesander was that Iniga, Harry Baker's closest confidant was his ransom, and, the Guardia Civil set in motion the poetry of doom after Iniga slipped away from his bed into the night. 


   She was politely interrogated at first. Her interrogator offered her a cigarette across the desk-top that was gouged with a hollow protest… “No pasaran!”:  probably scratched in with an edge of a captive’s hand cuffs. He called her by her alias as he opened a file, “Maria Francesco?”

   She knew that her alias would not have such a thick file and at first the ruse was courteously accepted. She had documentation. By all appearances her identity was settled. She had people from the enlaces, unaffiliated with guidari, that could have come to retrieve her but she was not about to implicate anyone else until she could determine the seriousness of her arrest. She played it like an innocent woman, Maria Francesco, caught on the streets in the predawn hour… “Si, senor,” her voice quavered.


   “You were on the street alone tonight… You are puta? No, you don’t look...”


   “No, no, no… no señor. I was going home but my brother couldn’t come for me.” She lifted her eyebrows and let her steel-gray eyes catch his. A woman couldn't be seen unescorted by a male family member in Franco's Spain. To be caught was to suffer a prison term or huge fine; i.e., bribe.


    “You’re eyes and accent, they are Basque? … even unusual for Basque, eh?” He flicked open a Zippo lighter… the US Marine Corps emblem etched on its face flickered little diamond reflections as it click-snapped, “I am Comandante Rojelio.”


   She restrained herself from a snide retort about the American source of the Zippo that would have been uncharacteristic of a woman of good standing. She stayed in character and managed to blush, casting her eyes towards her lap, “Yes, I am Basque.”


   “So, your name… Maria Francesco, it is uncharacteristic of Basque names too, eh?” he was now taking out a yellow legal tablet from the center desk drawer. “I have been honest with you as I have given you my name and rank. It is a futility of horrible consequences to try to deceive me, Iniga?”


   A chill straightened her spine. Her thoughts were clear… focused… sharp. This is where it begins. She knew what was coming. She would be told to list her enlaces (circle of supporters) in lieu of an offer… a chance that her plight might be relaxed. The Law of the Fugitives (Ley de Fugas) decreed a fugitive’s life was dirt. Any fugitive could be generously offered clemency and released. Then, as she walked away, believing to have avoided years of imprisonment, a bullet would be dispatched to the back of her head; thus saving considerable bother for all involved.

Her Trademark Smatchet

   “I’ve wanted to meet you for several years now. It is a curious phenomenon, notoriety, si?” the commandant was authentically moved to meet an adversary that had been a nemesis since he had graduated from the academy in 1948. He’d been on the scene when Alesander was taken and he had seen the only picture of her from a WWII snapshot in a file. She held, in that image, her trademark smatchet in front of her cupid bow lips framed by a face he would have no need to double-check.


   Refusing to list her collaborators assured her that she would be tortured, raped and, most likely, murdered instead. She knew, from morning sickness, that she held one trump card up her sleeve that could reprieve her from further torture… if the Commandant found it to his advantage. “I am embarazada.”


   “So, you want lodging with the nuns at la Ventas? I can assure you that your stay will be most comfortable for your first, what, nine months?” He saw her as a young woman that could have been his own wife or daughter and dreaded the torture and rape that he was sure she would be in store for her otherwise if she weren't pregnant..


   “More like seven or eight,” she thought back to when she first decided not to abort the child and her lips quivered for the first time.


   The Commandant was a practicing Catholic and, as a practicing Catholic, he’d embraced a compassion unfamiliar to those whose ambition pre-empted their devotion to Catholicism.


   “We are ready for whatever you can dish out, Commandant.” She stiffened her resolve and considered that she would indeed be more comfortable than she was sure to be afterwards, rotting in prison.


   “I’m sure you can endure more of it than me, Senorita… or should I say Senora?”


   “It is Senora. I am married to the Basque cause.” She knew that these words were an empty proclamation but had always wanted to say something along those lines if captured again because she was sure that the next time she would most likely be executed. She'd been captured before when she was young: so young that the oblivion of death couldn't be imagined because of the immortality of youth. It was little more than a romantic fantasy before the gears of experience dispelled that delusion.


   The Commandant stood to leave the room and stopped by the door, “You say you are married to the Basque cause, Senora, but the Basque cause has abandoned you. You will find your revolutionary fervor a luxury you can hardly afford from now on.”

   It would be hard for any but the most proficient observer to determine whether Harry harbored any feelings beyond the task he needed to perform. He did, indeed, love Iniga in his own way; but, could it be said he felt that love in the form of an emotion for her? So many years of working within the context of spy-craft didn’t allow his emotions to determine how his operations were executed. He now had to find a way to get Iniga out of prison if he was to have any chance of getting his seed away from being adopted by a wealthy minion of Franco.


   Harry considered what would become Nick; after all, little Nicky would be raised in luxury and live a life of cushy privilege if Harry didn’t act. What would be so bad about that? But, he feared the Franco grip on power was about to slip, or eventually be overturned, and he couldn’t predict how things would turn out for the ruling class in Spain.He had been witness to what happened to collaborators in France when Hitler's SS boys skedaddled
during and after Normandy. He also thought that, if he worked it right, Nicky could have American citizenship and get the hell out of Spain along with Iniga. This would take nothing more than obtaining a forged marriage certificate and bribing a few corrupt prison administrators. Finding the right corrupt prison official wasn’t all that difficult as they were as common as fleas on a cur around Madrid. However, a high-profile Basque separatist such as Iniga posed a problem because she would be slated for a summery execution as soon as she gave birth.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Deals

A Smatchet Madonna
Sitting at a table in a dark corner of a cantina in a seedy side of Barcelona, downing one shot of American whiskey after another, Harry spotted the shady Argentinean enter the room before their eyes met.

   “Senor Baker,” El Estrapo (the black marketeer) slid into a chair at the table, uninvited. “Have you heard Alesander has been ‘rehabilitated’ He signed a denunciation of the anarchists and might be released this week?”


   The creep reminded Harry of a sleazier version of Peter Lorre in Casablanca but he had to humor him. He was, after all, sometimes a good source of information, “Yeh, Strapo, I heard… I haven’t been in a cave all this time.” He thought it almost laughable that Franco’s cheap thugs thought they could get anyone to believe Alesander would have signed any such document… willingly or not.


   “But then maybe you don’t know that Alesander’s Chucha was arrested,” his eyes beamed with sordid glee at the prospect of having something of interest to Harry, “serendipity, or maybe someone made a swap, si?”

 
   Harry shoved his shot-glass across the table and filled it, “Drink? What else can you tell me that I don’t already know?”


   “No thank you, por favor,” he shoved the glass back to Harry, “Oh, nothing much, his Chucha, Iniga was embarazada… heavy you say, with child… no padre.”


   “Pregnant, we say… eh?”


   “Oh yes,” he lied to pique Harry’s interest, “Couldn’t be Alesander’s bastardo, he’d been locked up for the past five years. His loss is my gain though… I already have a lock on someone who pays good cash to the nuns for the little bastardo.”
 

   “And, of course, what is your cut… eh?” Harry sobered up. He didn’t want to give away his hand, that he knew more and was most intimate with Iniga. The price would go up considerably if the shit-head knew he was interested, “Do you know where they are keeping her?”

   “With the Nuns… la Ventas, maybe? It is peculiar… si?” the glint in the trader of misfortune’s eye twinkled, “Some say, among the anarchists, that it was the Bird Dog that knocked her up and betrayed her. If you know of this, Bird Dog, maybe you have lost some cachet with the anarchists.”


   Harry was astute enough about how rumors of this sort made an extended stay in Barcelona a perilous place to hang around,  “Thanks, Jack, even from here in my cave I can see that.”

   There was no use wallowing in doubt or self-pity, for there were strings to pull, plans and bribes: he couldn’t allow this uncustomary remorse to let his child be adopted-out and lost to an upstanding, good Catholic couple of moral and political rectitude. That is what would have been done with Nicky had he been officially termed “huérfano”, or, an orphan. Without an important American father these things were a regular atrocity for the duration of Franco’s horrible oppression… a policy that continued far past the Generalissimo’s death in 1975 into the mid-nineties. And, while Harry wasn’t officially important, he’d enough unsavory connections, bribes, intrigues, and extortions even, to be important enough to the right people.

   Iniga had made first contact with Harry. It was a cold November in Barcelona, the stronghold of anarchists at that time. The Stalinist Communists of the PCE had left guerrilla groups associated with anarchists to fend for themselves in the struggle against contra militias and Guardia Civil, almost everywhere else in Spain. Harry found himself caught between his affection for his old allies and overriding reflexes to personal profit and profit had called for him to take out the leadership of what was once the Maquis in Spain; i.e., the likes of Caracamada and Alesander.


   He had been sitting at a corner table, as was his habit in most cafés, across from the door, pretending to read the newspaper. Headlines featured the word, ‘bandoleros’, always something about this or that successful government action against bands of common criminals. Harry knew that ‘common criminal’ was the euphemism within the jargon of Spanish journalism for ‘maquis’ by government censors in Spain. These were rarely written about unless there was an arrest of a notorious guidari and these days the isolation of anarchist enlaces was nearly complete. He didn’t need to read the paper because he always had inside information on the real news of the day that the papers dared not touch.


   “Perro de caza, what brings you back to this cess-pool?” her voice still stirred him.


   Harry flashed a grin. Only a few knew Harry’s old code-name… Perro de caza or Bird Dog... “Iniga, sit down, por favor, I have some business here.” Harry knew that his use of the word, “business’, carried some weight with Iniga.


   Her eyes scanned the room… “Even here in Barcelona, one has to watch one’s back, eh?” She pulled out a rickety chair from across the table and sat down.


   “Be careful too that you don’t miss what is in front of you,” his guilt about what he needed to do directed his quip. They sat quietly, with eyes fixed on each other, not in longing… checking…, just as they had so many years ago in the Pyrenees.
 

   “You are here on business, aren’t we well aware of what your business is today?” Iniga was never one to hedge; “We no longer have the same alliances, do we?”

   “I've been away from official business since the war ended.” He was also well aware that this was a prevarication. Iniga would let it pass however, as they had more important business to take care of. “You were never all that good at diplomacy, were you, dear girl?”


   “And you are still so good at lying,” she took one of the cigarettes Harry offered, “So, you had nothing to do with Alesander’s capture?”


   “You still blame me for what happened four years ago but don’t give me any credit for his impending release, eh?” Harry could see by the way her eyes lit up that this was news, very good news, to her.


   “Are you sure, we had these hopes built up before?” she was hard pressed to restrain herself from throwing herself at Harry.


   “It was Fournier in France that put the money up. I just passed it on to the right people.”


   “Still, I’ll give you all the credit, Bird Dog. Where is he now?”


   “Slow down, Iniga, he isn’t out yet…” Harry lit another cigarette. His instincts told him that Iniga wanted to reward him personally, “He is still in Carabanchel but any day now…” and he could rot there as far as Harry was concerned.


   “Please, Harry… money wouldn’t be enough, he was scheduled to be executed.” Her voice was a monotone that hardly revealed the emotion deeply buried… moving with great force like an underground river.


   “We traded some Guardia Civil captured from some po-dunk town near Valencia. They were held by one of the enlaces you might be familiar with.” He reached across the table and placed his massive hand palm up in an offering. Iniga was the price he had to pay to get Alesander cut loose but Harry was going to make the best of it as long as he could. That night the salamander that would be dubbed Nicholas was planted in Iniga’s womb.


Harry’s maneuvers were not based on political beliefs: he had none. Nor were there but very few personal alliances that bound him. He was strictly on business and going to his dingy room to bed Iniga was extra-curricular to his business. His business in Spain today was to get Alesander released. There was no hurry as Alesander had languished in Carabanchel for four years… since 1953… he wasn’t likely to die while Harry closed the deal. The fact that he had made up the bit about the enlaces (undercover cells) near Valencia was of little weight on his conscience either. This was all a part of the crafts he’d learned in the OSS … way back when… and a clear conscience was an extravagance afforded only to those who had never been at war.


   After approximately two months he and Iniga started to argue. She would nudge him after he had gone to sleep and ask… “So what is happening with Alesander?” They would argue. Harry would insist that he was powerless over the when and where of it all. It was after such a night, New Years Eve that they argued during their own private cotillones de nochevieja. The clock struck twelve, they shared the twelve grapes and toasted to the New Year. Harry appeared to have passed out about an hour before dawn when Iniga arose from the bed as stealthily as she could. It wasn’t safe for a woman to be on the streets unescorted, as much as for the obvious dangers as it was for the patrols of the Guardia Civil, but Iniga was strong willed and able to take care of herself against anything but… As soon as she shut the door he was up and pulled his window shade up and then down. It was time to make the trade.


   Throughout Franco’s oppression women were the victims of an archaic machismo that filtered far past the demise of the Generismo. Spain went medieval where the rest of the western world tested the warm waters of modernity began before the advent of the past two wars. In the Spain of Franco, women weren’t allowed to leave an abusive husband lest they be charged with ‘abandonment’. Submission to the males in her family was the law. Brothers and fathers managed her finances, and she would have to be escorted on the streets by a male family member any time of the day and certainly after dark. However, Iniga felt safe, as prying eyes from behind barred windows would be closed in slumber by the time she stepped out onto the street before dawn.

Monday, March 4, 2013

The War Was Over

If Alesander was asked, and he often was, he would say that he was never tortured in Carabanchel because no one applied battery cables to his balls or any of the more excruciating methods that evolved in Spain from the times of Goya to Franco's dictatorship; even though Alesander had been awakened and brought to a room to sit on the chair of the garrote with his neck clamped for hours at a time on several occasions. He never considered those to be torture. The garrote goes back to the times of the Grand Inquisition of Torquemada. It was a chair with a metal strap attached at the top of a post that ran up the back around the victim’s neck. A screw from behind would be turned ever so slowly so that the strap constricted the neck of the pour soul condemned to end up strangled or, if done quickly, simultaneously had his spine snapped off at the base of his skull. He never thought being taken out to be placed against a wall to face an execution that never came to be torture. It was frightening... a terror... but torture? no, he'd heard the screams from adjoining cells too often to call it that. Nor did the days, weeks, months and years of sensory deprivation in solitary confinement appear to him to be equal to the horrors he heard from behind adjacent walls of his confinement. Alesander had a focus throughout those four years that held his mind intact. That focus was only strengthened throughout that time. He knew the battle was over for him and he had no reason to hate Harry Baker, Generalissimo Franco, or any other of his so-called enemies. Towards the end of his captivity he was released from solitary confinement into the general population.

   He was treated cautiously by other prisoners… even political prisoners, whose connections with him went back to the battle for Val de Aran or to 1936 in the final street fighting and betrayals of Madrid. Only the young men who weren’t born yet in those times approached him with respect and honor: holding him in the highest esteem as though he was a sacred idol. Though he never said anything about it, his disillusionment with this new generation was affirmed as he heard them boast of murderous campaigns and bombings in the name of “the cause”. What had sustained him in those previous years alone in his cell was that he had let go of his humanity in the sense that it no longer mattered.

   The war was over for Alesander and he saw that his campaign had become a solitary one that had no real effect. He saw that the Generalissimo was old and his regime now functioned only in the sense that it had become a shell of an archaic bureaucracy decaying from within. Even so he knew the bureaucracy was so entrenched that even if his fellow Basque resistance fighters won they would win only the nothing that was left. His fight had always been as much against so called allies as against Franco.

   The one thing that his capture did to Alesander, the nettle under the saddle of the Generalissimo’s white horse for two decades, was this realization that the battle was over. The battle was over but not because he’d given up. The battle was over because the cause he’d been fighting for wasn’t his any longer and the war was won. Most of his fellow maquisards had been executed by order of Franco’s Law of the Fugitives or the PCE Central Committee Stalinists: one was as bad as the other. The battle was over when Eisenhower put a submarine base at Rota with cool cash and CIA contractors such as the Bird Dog to help bolster Spain’s economic stability. There is nothing like prosperity to undermine a regime based on oppression.

   It seemed to him that the young Turks he saw coming into Carabanchel had no real agenda beyond body counts and blowing things up… the means were justified no matter what the end and the end was endless. Alesander and lone wolves like Caracamada were isolated exceptions. To Alesander the struggle no longer mattered because decay was built into what was left of the regime and the rest would take care of itself without his help.

   All the time he’d spent in the field caused him to become detached but not hardened. There was no righteous cause set in stone for him (as it was for the likes of the PCE’s Central Committee Stalinist who’d executed most of the Los Novatos maquisards and CNT Anarchists of the FAI he’d fought along side of since Madrid and the Val de Aran).

   Iniga was one whose thirst for revenge and blood was another thing altogether. She had come of age at a time when the struggle was a matter of life and death against oppression at the hands of the Civil Guard and in the camps of Vichy France from Gur to the towers of Drancy. To her it was about getting even and paying back the ilk of those who had raped and tortured her.  His loyalty for her never wavered because she was not only among the best of the maquisards, despite her small frame, but she reciprocated his with a loyalty that could be depended upon in matters of spy-craft, sabotage and assassination.

   No, Iniga was more than that. She was a vision he held in his mind as best he could. From memory he would recite the first three verses of La Fonte from San Juan de la Cruz in his darkened cell and in doing so she evolved into a sacred icon that kept him sane:


Que bien se yo la fonte que mana y corre,
   aunque es de noche.

Aquella eterna fonte esta ascondida,
que bien se yo do tiene su manida,
   aunque es de noche.

Su origen no lo se, pues no le tiene,
y que cielos y terra beben de ella,
   aunque es de noche.


How well I know that flowing spring
   in black of night.

   The eternal fountain is unseen.
How well I know where she has been
   in black of night.

I do not know her origin.
None. Yet in her all things begin
   in black of night.