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.

The Convolutions of Catalonia

It is hard 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 had mixed feelings about what would become Nick; after all, Nicky would be raised in luxury and live a life of cushy privilege if Harry didn’t act. 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 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.

Harry took a seat on a surreal bench with Commandante Rojelio at the Park Guell. The Comandante 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, Camandante, since I last saw you.” Harry was letting Rojelio know that he had inside information, knowing Rojelio’s rank, even though the Comandante 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 people he knew in the Policia Armada.

“Who are you working for now, Harry?” Rojelio 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.

“I’m doing this one on personal business. I know I can’t bend you with money but you can still help me, if you will.”

“It is about Iniga, eh?”

“Yes, and you know she is embarazada too.” Harry was glad that Rojelio came directly to the point. This saved them both a lot of time.

“Yes, she was fortunate I was her interrogator…” he finally lit his pipe, “I can tell, strangely enough, God must have a special love for that woman.”

“You can help then.”

“Donate some pesetas to the nuns at la Venta and you can get the child out if you act now. An adoption is in order and the vultures are circling with bids before Iniga’s belly even began to swell. I’m not so sure what it would take to get her released, 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 bit of vertigo in his guts... 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.”

The Poetry of Doom

Misery, distress, indigence, adversity,
calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin.

“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 Caracremada, but any day now…”

“Please, Harry … money wouldn’t be enough, he was scheduled to be executed, wasn’t he?” 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 a 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. That night the salamander that would be dubbed Nicholas was planted in Iniga’s womb.

Harry’s maneuvers were not based on political beliefs as 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 Gotson released. There was no hurry as Gotson had languished in Caracremada 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 near Valencia was of little weight on his conscience either. This was all a part of the crafts he’d learned in the OSS where a clear conscience was an extravagance afforded 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 Gotson?” They would argue. Harry would insist that he was powerless over the when and where of  it all. Iniga would then go back to her place 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.

Iniga thought she left Harry asleep on one such night. As soon as she shut the door he was up and pulled his window shade up and then down. It was time for the trade. She was able to reach the street corner when she felt her instincts tell her she was being followed. She ducked into a shop entrance and tried the door. Of course, it was locked. She was unarmed but for a small switchblade. She knew she had no choice but 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 (pronounced like Fiat) 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.

            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 could not become a judge or even testify in court. She most certainly could not even dream of becoming a university professor.

The irony of the trade-off for the release of Gotson was that Iniga, his closest confidant, was his ransom, and, the Guardia Civil set in motion the poetry of doom after Iniga slipped away 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 but the ruse was courteously accepted. She had documentation and, 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.

“You’re eyes, they are Basque? … Even unusual for Basque… eh?” He flicked open a Zippo lighter with a US Marine Corps emblem on its face, “I am Comandante Rojelio.”

She restrained herself from a snide retort 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. Why would you try to deceive me, Iniga?”

A chill run up 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.

“I’ve wanted to meet you for several years now. It is a curious phenomenon, notoriety, si?” the comandante was authentically moved to meet an adversary that had been a nemesis since he had graduated from the academy in 1948. He had been on the scene when Gotson was taken in and he had seen a WWII picture of her in a file. She held a smatchet in front of her cupid bow lips with 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 held one trump card up her sleeve that could reprieve her from further torture… if the Comandante found it to his advantage. “I am embarazada (pregnant).”

“So, you want to visit 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 lips quiver for the first time and thought of the torture and rape that he was sure she would be in store for her. The Comandante was a practicing Catholic and, as a practicing Catholic, he’d embraced a compassion unfamiliar to those whose ambition preceded their devotion to Catholicism.

“We are ready for whatever you can dish out, Comandante.” 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 imagined she’d say something along those lines when captured.

 He 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.”

Iniga

Harry had understated the complexities behind Nick’s surname. Ventas prison was from Franco’s dark decades as Generalissimo of Spain. Iniga had the misfortune to finally end up in one of the various prisons people like her perished. This imprisonment of the wives and lovers of radicals went on well into the sixties and for some into the nineties. Harry often tried to salve his guilt by reminding himself that the odds were that she’d end up in one of Franco’s jails or be shot down by the Civil Guard, with or without, his collaboration eventually anyway.

Harry was a young independent contractor back when the CIA was formed from the OSS. His physique had him standing-out too much for the CIA or anything but what he was so very good at. He was better suited for “black ops” that were “in and out” affairs of which there would be no official record if he was captured, arrested or killed. In other words, Harry was an assassin that carried under his fifties style crew cut-an encyclopedia of interesting details about the last forty years of the Cold War: details he could count on that no one in the Agency or the State Department would want out on the streets.

Rather than kill Gotson back in ‘53, Harry had informed on the whereabouts of his fellow guidari. Gotson was arrested and disappeared into the maze of Franco’s gaols in spite of Harry’s many connections of his past collaborations. At least Gotson wasn’t shot but he languished in the hell of Caracremada for four years and by coincidence, shortly before his unexpected release, Iniga was finally captured by the Civil Guard and put in with the nuns at la Ventas. Harry had everything to do with Iniga’s arrest; but, regardless, he experienced a deep remorse uncharacteristic of his occupational talents. He was, however, ignorant of the fact that little Nicky was a salamander planted in Iniga’s womb by him and he was disturbingly informed of Iniga’s pregnancy by an old colleague… a black-marketer he ran into while on one of his rare binges of regret.

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

“Senor Baker,” El Estraperlista (the black marketeer) slid into a chair at Harry’s table, uninvited. “Have you heard Gotson has been ‘rehabilitated’ He signed a denunciation of the anarchists and will 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, good source of information, “Yep, I heard… I haven’t been in a cave all this time.”

“Maybe you don’t know that Gotson’s chucha, Iniga, was arrested, serendipity, 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, she was embarazada… heavy you say… with child… without a padre.”

“Pregnant, we say… eh.”

“Oh yes, I already have a lock on someone who pays good cash to the nuns for the little bastardo.”

“And, of course, you get a nice cut… eh?” Harry sobered up. He didn’t want to give away his hand, that he knew more and was most intimate with Iniga, to a man whose living depended upon playing both sides for a pecuniary advantage. The price would go up considerably if the shit-head knew he was interested, “Do you know where they are keeping her?”

There was no use wallowing in doubt or self-pity, for there were strings to pull, plans and bribes: He could not 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.

Iniga had made their first contact a month before in Barcelona, the stronghold of anarchists at that time. The Stalinist Communists in the PCE had left guerrilla groups associated with anarchists to fend for themselves in the struggle against militias, contras, Guardia Civil, almost everywhere else in Spain. Harry found himself caught between his affection for his old allies and overriding reflexes to duty and his duty called for him to take out the leadership of what was once the Maquis in Spain.

He was sitting at his usual 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 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 guidari and these days the isolation of anarchist enclaves 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, you bird-dog, what brings you back to this cess-pool?” her voice still stirred him.

Harry flashed a grin. Only a few knew of Harry’s old code-name… ‘Bird Dog’… “Iniga, sit down, 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,” he quipped. They sat quietly, with eyes fixed on each other, not in longing… checking…, 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 have been away from OSS 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 Gotson’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.

Fiction that Doesn't Lie in Wait

I try:
 I try to write fiction that doesn't lie. I lie in wait of the truth, finding what I know of scraps from experience... hard fought and won... one falling over another.. a mountain stream of consciousness... free of my own prejudices and ideals. Set me down in the ocean of dreams... let me float above in a glass bottom boat... jet ski me across the choppy landscape of waters... land my soaking, naked body on the beach... solid ground of being, past the shifting sands of facts... the atoms of Damocles... Oh,Father Blake, pontiff of my reality... grant me permission to press on... press on through the doors of perception. Am I a dog scratching at evasive fleas... an audience of stars...? Give the idea an ideal to grasp. Grasp the entrails of the unknowable before they slip away dear Zarathustra... speak no more about the Superman... he is a lost vision, goosestepping on a comic-book cover, inked in with kryptonite, banned  by our PC seers... Oh, volital evaporation of truth, let me stretch my fingers around your vapors.... why not... who am I to think I will let go of something that entertains me in the bardo... this breath of life between pauses of the inhaling and exhaling of the cosmos... if I can't dream now... how will I recognize the Dream of the Grand Foopah hereafter? If wishes were fishes they'd do all my dishes... if they did all my dishes I'd have nothing to do in the here and now.

geo, 03/28/2012

Another Dog Watching
the Goddess Play

A Funky Government Car

...the mysterious Iniga Baker
listed as his mother...

Nick secretly longed for what social workers would call "a masculine role model". He was eager to follow this man anywhere but he had mixed feelings. He now had a mother and a father even though they had abandoned him and his mom was dead. He had something to go along with this surname that had been attached onto his birth certificate... the mysterious Iniga Baker listed as his mother…. and this Harry Baker as his dad.

Nick was elated as they rode, father and son, cruising from the camp in a sedan… even if it was a funky government car. He had arrived at the camp in a County Sheriff’s van with a half-dozen other juvenile delinquents. This car was a step up from that.

“So, are you going to tell me more about my mom?” Nick hesitantly probed this strange giant of a man.

“Your mom had been given Baker as a surname. I managed to do that for her… I owed her that much.”

“What do you mean, ‘owed her’?”

“It is too complex to tell you all of it… maybe later. We have more important things to take care of for now.”

“Like?”

“Your education…” He passed a cigarette to Nick. “I knew you wanted one pretty bad, eh?”

Nick muttered, “They had a school at the camp.”

“No, I meant, a cigarette.”  Harry let it soak in that the boy, who had nothing but adversaries up to now, had a friend as his father, if not a good father… perhaps a friendly hand. “The camp has a pretty good school but it won’t look so good on your resume, yes?”

This guy was cooler than he thought, “True that, I guess so.”

They drove in silence a few more miles, headed for Lompoc, before Harry spoke, “I haven’t been much of s father and I know it. I’m not even going to try to make it up to you because there is nothing I can do for the past… but I owe you this much… your future.”

Nick had never heard anyone talk to him this honestly. The events of the day were overwhelming and this Harry dude’s tone put him in the mood to listen. He wasn’t speaking down to him the way parole officers and yard supes did.

“I gave your Mom my name even though we weren’t on the record as married until I found out she was pregnant.” He pulled the car into a convenience store in Buellton, “Need a sandwich or anything?”

"I'd just as soon you tell me how you got me outa camp?" this question had bothered him ever since Harry'd come out of the office... you don't get cut loose when the judge sentences you to sit in Juvie 'til you're eighteen. "You know, just like that?"

"Let's just say, I have sand," and they both laughed at Harry's awkward use of the jailhouse term for influence.

Reunion

It was easy enough to walk out of Los Prietos Boys Camp  and Nick could have done so. He stayed put because he had nowhere to go and, frankly, he liked it there. However, this institutionally friendly life changed one afternoon and, as he leaned against a rake in the yard, he watched a sedan with government plates pull up with an oddly familiar older man in a crew cut, coat and tie. Nick's eyes were fixed on the man as he shook hands with the Supervising Officer. The Soup, who was usually most confident around probation officers and staff, was most cordial and, to Nick’s overly sensitive radar, submissive to this character. His radar was confirmed when Nick was called into the visitor’s area... what the fuck, it wasn’t even visiting hours for the camp.

Rescue

The Soup left them at the table. The man’s hand closed on Nicks in a firm clasp. This was one of the few hands, even adult hands, that diminished his own. He had the same grey-blue eyes and his features could have been his own in twenty years.

“Harry, Harry Baker, Nicholas,” he offered, as the two of them scrutinized each other.

“Uh, same last name… who are you?” Nick found himself wanting to take a leak… maybe to just get away. He wasn’t ever this nervous around anyone, including adults.

“Take a deep breath Nick. I have some news for you…” it was over 95 degrees. He took off his coat revealing, not only the sweat stains on the light-blue dress shirt, but, an empty shoulder holster, as he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a pack of smokes.

“You can’t smoke here.” Nick at once felt awkward for his uncustomary reflex to enforce the rules. "Hey, are you a cop or something?"

Harry lit it regardless, "Or something..." Nick was delighted. Even the Soup, standing off to the side in the shade, had nothing to say.

“You got some sand, eh?” Nick tried to sound cool.

“Nick, I’m your dad.” Harry let out a puff of smoke from the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

“Fuck you, man, I got no dad.” His heart felt like the blood was boiling in it and his stomach ached… the smoke... those three words... but he kept his poker-face.

“I didn’t even know where you might be until I found your mom a few weeks ago.”

“My mom? Now I know you are bull-shittin’ me.” He got up to walk away but this Harry character just reached over the table, put his massive hand on Nick’s shoulder and sat him back down. Nick wanted badly to throw that hand off of him and follow through with a right-hook but thought better of it. The guy was old but he was huge and emitted an aura about him that only a fool would fuck with.

“I found her in Bethesda Maryland a few days before she passed away.”

“Passed away?”

“Yeh, Walter Reed,” flicking the coal off the end of his cigarette and putting the butt back in the pack, he continued, “She had to give you up when you were born. It is a long story and I can tell you all about it but we have more important things to take care of.”

Nick’s head was swimming, “You could have passed that butt to me, Dad.”

Nick’s sarcasm wasn’t missed but Harry was proud of his son. Hell, how would have he taken such news under similar circumstances?

“What the hell do you expect me to do with this information, pa?” Again, there was no affection in the use of the hillbilly expression for paternity.

Harry’s expression didn’t change. His poker face was as stoically unmoved as anything Nick could pull off. Nick hadn’t even noticed a folder Harry had carried to the table. He opened it to several pictures… one was a newspaper clipping showing a young woman with dark curls flowing out from under a beret holding an odd shaped dagger upright in front of her face. The caption was in Spanish and Nick could read some of it. Words like “Basque bandoleros” were easy enough figure out. “detenida”, "Iniga", “Gotson”, and "smatchet-daga", maquisard", "guardari", were words he was not familiar with. Before he could get lost in that image a few others were shown of what looked like the same woman… much older… gaunt… weary and frail. Another was a glossy Eight by Ten that had a red ink Top Secret stamped across its face of her with the same hair but snowy white though looking much healthier. Both sat in silence…

“Your mother was a hero of sorts, you know, depending on whose side… that knife is a smatchet, designed to drive through a NAZI helmet like butter.” 

"She was bad, eh?" Nick felt a taste of pride well up in the form of a lump in his throat.

Harry stood up, “You want to go home, son, or, do you like it here?”