Adriane: the sequel to a Taxi Romance continues...

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. Gotson 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 Stalinists, Anarchist and Republican infighting in Madrid, Gotson 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. He felt better off high up in the Pyrenees where his decisions didn’t have to go through a committee.

“There it is …” a young maquisard 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. Gotson admired the ability of these pilots to land on a dime and take off 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 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. Gotson 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 managed to have her released two years before. She had witnessed the assassination of Durruti at the Bridge when she was barely a teen.

“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 unloading his back-pack onto the table. A suitcase was opened to reveal a radio.

‘The rest will be dropped tomorrow night… we have another radio code… the other has been compromised. That is why I’m here.”

Gotson 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 some of the Americans… more than with the British. They 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 Gotson finally recognized the man. He was Harry Baker 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… when Durruti was taken out… It was almost over then. How did you get out?”

“That’s classified, sorry.”

Gotson pulled his Welrod from inside his jacket holding it steady between Baker’s eyes. “This round I put 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 the guy didn’t care one way or another whether Gotson 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.” Gotson had been with Durruti, the leader of the anarchist column, during the drive to Zaragosa.

“It could have been,” the American still hadn’t even 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, Gotson, we have to get moving.”

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

Baker put his hands behind his back without resistance while a cord of sinew bound them. Two hand guns, 9 mm Lugar semi-automatic pistol and MP 40 German machine pistol with a detached shoulder stock, were lifted from inside his heavy jacket along with a peculiar knife. Gotson found a makeshift garrote and two knives in shoulder sheaths. He simply grinned at the girl when she examined one of the odd shaped heavy daggers that were also dropped on the table, “It’s a Smatchet. You can jam that fucker right through an SS helmet. You can have it… I’ll keep the other.”

She nodded in approval as they left the hut but Gotson didn’t put the Welrod down until Baker’s hands were secured. Quietly she snuffed the lamp and the band filed out up the hill and split up into two or three man groups. Iniga took the point while Gotson held back behind Baker.

Gotson stood 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 from there before Gotson 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 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.

Adriane: The sequal to A Taxi Romance: Chapter Nine: The Maquis, Gotson

The year was 1943 and the 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 as the Maginot line collapsed under the relentless forces of Hitler’s blitz. Gotson had crossed the Pyrenees many times from 1936 to 1939. He and Dominic 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 in Madrid and then slipped out, or melded with the population. The confusion and rubble the fall of  Madrid, the Republican dream, his hopes for a liberated Basque Country, all was crushed along with it and he returned to Biarritz.

Having set up a chocolate shop in Biarritz, Gotson retired from the revolution but still longed for the overthrow of Franco’s Falangists. Dominic left the struggle then too and went on to Paris. Both were disillusioned with the betrayals by the Stalinists and the constant infighting... the power struggles between one faction or another in Madrid. Being a witness to the atrocity; the murder of over a thousand Nationalist prisoners ordered by the Stalinist advisor, Koltzov, Gotson became 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 and Madrid. The crimes of the Republic under Soviet usurpation equaled those of General Mola on the other side… No pasaron, indeed.

He'd seen Paris fall to the insanity of another form of fascism and he also saw this as an opportunity to gather forces sufficient to wrest Basque country from Franco. While at the same time he did this, he could put a thorn into the Nazi’s on the French side of the Pyrenees. Nazi oppression would make it easier to organize a guerrilla movement now that France itself had been occupied. After all, Gotson was more talented at organizing guerrillas than he was at managing his chocolate shop. He'd left the shop the year before to a cousin and disappeared from Biarritz before the Gestapo would surely ferret him out and, took  up the fight he’d abandoned in March of 1939.

Adriane: The Sequal to A Taxi Romance: Chapter Eight, Family Connections

CHAPTER 8:

Family Connections

Detective Ryan was at his desk when he got a call on his cell phone from an acquaintance in Langley. He looked perplexed but he answered the call, “Yes, Judge, how’s the family?”

It was chit-chat… he knew what the call would be about; he wasn’t quite ready for this.

The Judge, Marcello, was once an O.S.S. officer during WWII, working with, and utilizing the resistance to Hitler in southern France, throughout the war. He was never a judge in any official sense of the word but people had been calling him the Judge for so long very few knew how he got the name. Harry Baker, Nick’s dad, was also a young agent in the Pyrenees with the Spanish Maquis, helping with the French Resistance to drive the Nazis from Southern France altogether. Later they had been sent to work after the pact of 1953. That pact allowed the US to have the Rota U.S. Naval base and, as part of the deal, the Eisenhower administration covertly sent CIA personnel to help Franco’s forces in the Pyrenees to hunt down the infamous Spanish Maquis, Gotson. This was before the Basque separatist movement had blossomed by the late fifties and there were only small bands of anti-Franco resistance groups scattered in the mountains at the time. Ironically Nick’s dad had long experience fighting alongside of Gotson before. But he had little or no problem when assigned to his new role. Ryan was still a pimply kid on his paper route at that time but the link was there.

Ryan was a good cop. He wasn’t corrupt but he was older, wiser and way too close to retirement to mess with the Judge. He had served with Harry Baker in Viet Nam and had heard enough of the Judge to regard him highly. The Judge was now a retired State Department diplomat who was with the American Embassy in Saigon back in 1968 during the Tet. Ryan had been a Marine intelligence officer working with the, by then, seasoned C.I.A. officer. He mostly knew of the legendary Judge as a voice on the other end of the line. The voice on the other end of the line counted on the bond, a bond that went beyond duty and patriotism. That bond was forged under fire and was nearly unbreakable. However, the strain of dealing with the peccadilloes of Nick Baker had stretched that bond to the limit.

Ryan found it especially distasteful when he found out that Nick had lied about Sean McKee’s role in Adrian’s beating. He was furious and cringed at the prospects of what he might be asked to do; wanting nothing more than to wash his hands of the whole business.

“You know Ryan, I didn’t call to talk about my grand-kids' kids,” as usual, he was not one to skirt an issue.

“Yeh, I know, I was just stalling.”

“I am fully aware of how distasteful this business has been; and, I assure you, we’ll make that up to somehow.”

“Nick has my hands full and I’m not sure how long I can keep his name out of the D.A.’s line of fire.” Ryan sounded exhausted. “We couldn’t get anything on McKee from his hard drive: a little porn, but hey.”

“We owe it to his dad. I promised and so did you.” The voice sounded resigned, “Just keep an eye on this Mick character. A guy like that might be useful to us.”

“Sure…,” Ryan waited for the Judge to say something more until the line went dead. It was a secured line, as usual.

Adriane, the Sequel to a Taxi Romance: Shades and Shadows

I didn’t realize it at the time but it didn’t take a wild conspiracy to explain the reticence of the police to dust for prints. As in all small, affluent, cities like Santa Barbara, the police have their hands full going to calls for burglaries where real items with serial numbers are taken off to Oxnard to be hawked for a fix. A trashed room, and a wrecked computer, doesn’t amount to much as far as the case load goes. Still, I was peeved and saw the workings of Ryan or Richards in the shadows behind all this. I made my annoyance clear by glowering at the cop as he did his job.

“When you find out who these guys are will you let me know tomorrow?” I pouted.

“Hey, will you back off a bit?” the officer pulled a piece of clear tape off the spot he’d dusted, “I don’t know what you expect to come of this but by this time tomorrow your report will be at the bottom of a pile on some corner desk in the assistant D.A.’s office.”

“Won’t you like… run the prints through some list or something?”

“Naw, it ain’t like that at all,” he ripped another piece of tape off of the door and pressed it onto a card. 

“Really, if this was a house in Montecito you’d run ‘em, huh?”

“You know that stack of reports I told you about? They’re mostly from folks who actually lost something… from houses in Hope Ranch and Montecito.” He closed up his print kit, handed me a carbon copy of his report but stopped before going out onto the porch and said, “You can replace that hard drive for less than a hundred bucks.”

“Thanks… are you buying?” My quip went unappreciated as he was already halfway to his car.

It was hard to read his name on my carbon copy but I made it out to be, through the faint ink and scrawl, Schmidt or maybe Schultz. I threw it in a corner and went to work putting things back in order. A mess like this was incentive to clean house so I did that and felt pretty good about it around midnight when I finished.  I called the dispatcher to let him know I wouldn’t be coming in that night and stayed home with my tidy desk and trusty Remington.. I held the phone back from my ear as he cussed me out, put the events of the past few days on paper and then I finally hit the sack by three a.m. 

A couple of days later Adriane called. It was one of those calls I have gotten so many times. She was done with me for awhile as she had other suitors tending to her. I suspect it was Billy, “So are you off the oxy… oh what is it, cotton?”

“Oxycotin… no, I have a few left. But my crater is pretty well healed up and I have someone to run errands.”

“Okay, I’m good with that…” I said that but didn’t believe myself… Never mind convincing her of it.

“I gotta go now, Billy is….” she stopped herself, “Someone is at the gate. I have to see who it is.”

Okay, I thought, one lie deserves another. Billy is back in the picture and it won’t be long…

A Time Ago And Then

This was my first novel. It is a fictional memoir on sale at 25% discount ($3.74) with coupon code: RJ58Y. A free sample, 20% of the book, is also available. I welcome any and all criticism or reviews on this blog. Thank you.

A Time Ago And Then

Ebook By George B Couper
Rating: Not yet rated.
Published: Aug. 09, 2011
Category: Fiction » Literature » Literary
Words: 97636 (approximate)
Language: English

Ebook Description

Max, a USN submariner, is laid up in a hospital with a broken back in the late sixties: there, he begins spiritual journey that takes him through LSD,the Altamont Speedway fiasco, to the communes of New Mexico, Jamaica and drug dealing in Miami. Ending up in Santa Barbara his misadventures touch on the violence, cults and religions of the era as he struggles to find peace within himself.

Tags

homelessness, lsd, alternative lifestyles, mescaline, taos pueblo indigenous culture, rape and its aftermath, alcoholism and recovery, altamont speedway, pre reggae jamaica, taos communes, berkeley politics, religious sixties cults

Adrane: The sequal to A Taxi Romance... The broken wheel

The wheels were turning…

I left her house. A patrol car was parked down the street. Was it Richards?  I suspected so. What was that guy up to and why was he watching me? It isn’t like I had the potential of being anything like a dangerous criminal. Perhaps it wasn’t me he was watching… it could be Adriane. Whoever it was it didn’t seem to me to be official police business. Something stank of this whole thing and I had no idea how I was going to deal with it.

Homer greeted me on the driveway of my place. He led me to the porch, looking back to make sure I was following after I dismounted from the bike. What I saw when I entered was not a pretty sight. The door was ajar and inside was… well… everything was on the floor…. The Remington… and the monitor screen as well as all my papers. I approached the desk to see that the side of the case to the computer was open and the hard-drive was missing. Damn, who? What? Why?

My neighbor, Jack, came down from his apartment upstairs and stood at the door, “Some guys were here… what the hell, I didn’t now they were doing this?”

“What did they look like?”

“I never seen them before… one was tall… a big guy.”

“Did they walk up or did they come in a car?”

“I didn’t see a car; they could have been parked around the side. I didn’t really look… I didn’t know they’d done…” his tone was a little too apologetic. I knew Jack would have stayed low and wouldn’t have done anything to stop it.

“How many were there?”

“Three… I think that I saw one before… like that inspector that was here before.”

That was better. He is at least giving up some useful information. Jack went back up to his apartment. I picked up the phone off the floor and set it on the desk. Shall I call the police and report it? Sure, why not? There were some obvious prints on the door. At least they can dust the place for prints. If it was Ryan, I’m wondering, why would he leave prints? Was he sending me a message? The place was trashed… that got my attention. So, what was I doing that would deserve this much attention and what is on my hard drive that he would want? At that time everything I wrote was downloaded to ‘A’ discs. Where are they? Good… I found them untouched where I kept them in my desk drawer. All the other drawers were pulled out and dumped… What the f…?

There was a knock at my screen door on the porch. My god, I thought, have they come back? I looked out to see two Hispanic young men in suits with brief-cases. It was not the right time for this shit! I’m not sure what I expected of them but I opened the door.

“Hello,” the older of the two greeted me, “We would like to share some information from the Bible...”

“... Oh no, thank you very much but I’m good with it.” I cut him off trying not to be rude I shut the door.

Other times I would have invited them in and offered them some tea. It is always good to be polite when someone has a Bible and the burden of hauling a vision of the dead prophet around. I admire them because they don’t even know me and they are trying to save my soul. I wish them well but I have business to attend... clean up this mess and think. Maybe I should wait ‘til the cops get here.

The police arrived a mere minute or two after I called… like they had to be waiting around the corner: or was I getting paranoid? They did the usual report. I had a few things damaged and nothing but the hard drive was missing… TV, VCR, tapes, discs… all went untouched. It was just a matter of the place being trashed. The uniformed cops took down the information and the value of the ruined computer and started to leave.

“Wait a minute,” I demanded, “Aren’t you going to dust for prints or anything?”

“So,” the #1 cop smirked, “you want us to get the print kit out for this?”

“Sure I do… I want to prosecute the fuckers that did this.” Frustrated I pointed to the prints that were so obvious on the window of the front door. “There’s some right in front of you.”

“Okay, okay… we’ll dust ‘em.” He humored me.

Adrian: the Sequel to A Taxi Romance, continued... revenge.

Three in the morning: What the hell? I didn’t like the feel of it. I could get a ride home from another cab driver but shit, otherwise, it is a bitch to get back downtown at that time of night. I noticed that Richards was parked at the far end of the parking lot when I was released and stepped outside to have a smoke and wait for the cab to show up. That damned S.O.B. followed us until I was dropped off at home and parked down the street in the cul-de-sac after I went into the house. He made no attempt to keep his presence unknown. I tried to sleep but I couldn’t while thinking of Richards out there and wondered what he was up to.

 It was Adriane who bailed me out. She also had the police lift my restraining order. No one was charged with the crime and all charges were eventually dropped. It was very unusual that spousal abuse charges could be dismissed so easily. I was so stunned by this oversight, this lapse, this covert corruption of the justice system that I seriously wanted to do something about it: but what? It was the powerlessness of it that bugged me the most. I was damned if I was going to do nothing but these things become an obsession. Had I spent a week in jail without an apology or anything from the law?

I was able to visit Adriane at her place when she was sent home. Her bedroom was upstairs and it was hard for her to get to the kitchen to help herself. So I used the couch on my time off and helped her change the dressing on the crater left by the abscess and brought chicken soup up to her. My feelings for her were stronger now than ever but I was able to control them. She told me that Nick had served her while I was in jail and that she delighted in making him go up and down the stairs to get this and that for her: bring me a book… go to the garden shack and bring me my drawing board, a cup of coffee, something from the freezer. His guilt motivated him to become her slave and she took out her spite on him in this manner. I thought it was weird and too soft a punishment for him. I told her so but what was I to do? She is the one who could have had him prosecuted.

“Do your folks know about all of this?” I asked, thinking surely her dad would want to do something about it.

“No, I do not want a scandal, they would go nuts and God knows what Gotson would want to do.”

“Who is Gotson again?”

“Gotson was a Basque guerilla when Franco ran Spain,” she spoke so proudly of him that I was almost jealous of her obvious affection.

“Hmm, he must be old now… Franco has been gone awhile now.”

“He is still very healthy and capable of doing some damage to Nick and his connections in the D.A.’s office. I don’t want him to get in trouble.”

I thought, shit, this could be an answer. I wanted vengeance but not so badly that I would end up in prison for it and I wondered if this Gotson character might have some techniques to employ.

“Yes, but Adriane, you have been terribly abused. How can you live with this?”

“He tells them that I am a junkie and that he is only trying to help me and that he gets frustrated at my relapses.”

            “Yes, but can’t you see that he is dangerous and might kill you the next time?’