Midnight in Madrid (4 page)

“I’ll call you from Madrid, Mike. Thanks.”

“Oh, and finally,” he said. “You’ll love this part. This missing piece? It’s called the
Pietà of Malta.
Do you like that, the Malta part? Shades of Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor? You know the old movie, right?”

“I grew up in California and went to UCLA, Mike. How can I not? Peter Lorre and fat old Sidney Greenstreet. No tuxedo for Bogie, no Sam at the piano, and no fake fez for Greenstreet, but what the heck?” she added. “And I’ve read as much Dashiell Hammett as anyone under thirty.”

“And no falcon, either,” Gamburian said. “But still kind of cool, huh?”

“Maybe a little. Depends on who ends up shooting at me this time.”

“Enjoy yourself, Alex,” he said. “Travel safe. And thanks.”

SCHWARZENGEL GLACIER AND ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, SEPTEMBER 5

A
late summer thaw had come to the mountains seven kilometers south of Saint Gallen. Drip by drip, trickle by trickle, the Schwarzengel Glacier had re-created itself, advancing and retreating, some of it so slowly that no one might have noticed other than the geologists who monitored the area. In this one remote spot, it was noticed only by those who took note of the changing snowscape and stared hard into the ice near Koizimfrau Ridge.

There, a heat wave had floated a glove up to the surface, one of those gloves with wool on the inside and leather on the outside, but with the fingers cut away. And then a dead Chinese national was found not far behind the glove.

Yuan was unmistakable. He was still big and strong, still wearing his parka, still bound in his tight head gear. Underneath his parka, among other layers of clothing, was a Euro Disney sweatshirt bought from a gift shop in Paris.

Donald Duck in French. The perfect absurd touch.

Yuan’s dark hair was still thick too. His right eye carried a star fracture to the pupil, damage that he probably sustained in his rough trip from the basement of the monastery to this isolated location. His blue leather Hermès wallet was zipped in the pocket of his navy parka.

The wallet contained a Swiss phone card, his health card, his social-insurance card, three credit cards issued in Hong Kong, and his international driver’s license, for which he’d had his picture taken two days before he left China.

His passport was there too, valid and issued in Beijing. It indicated that he was fifty-five years old and further revealed that he traveled on official Chinese government business.

Yuan wasn’t alone. The heat wave had been extreme.

Also found during the melt was a twenty-year-old man who had said goodbye to his wife and newborn baby in 1995, gone snowboarding in late spring, and turned up now along with Yuan in the big thaw, his red hair still matted down on his forehead and a wedding ring still on his hand. And there was the Australian hiker, missing since 1977.

None of this by itself was unusual. The previous year, there were the two climbers who had remained roped together for more than thirty years, a man and a woman, their black leather boots still tied tight to their feet, their wooden skis still waxed and strapped to their backs. It had become part of the Alpine summer routine in this area, watching faces and corpses emerge from the big melt.

As always, the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale was ready for the reappearance of the people who had been taken in by these mountains. They kept lists of those who were missing and waited for them to come forth.

That was the first unusual thing that the local police noticed about Yuan when his body had been found on the morning of September 5. Yuan’s name was not on any of the lists. The second thing they noticed was that there was no record of him being in Switzerland or anywhere in the European Union, diplomatic passport or not. Then a third thing: under his parka was a fully loaded semiautomatic, a Glock G18.

What the Glock had to do with snowboarding or mountaineering or hiking was anyone’s guess, but Lieutenant Rolf Hunsicker, who drew the investigation that would follow into Yuan’s death, spent little time on that question. After all, the dead Chinaman had obviously been killed somewhere else not that long ago and then dumped in a remote area.

That conjured up three questions which would vex Lieutenant Hunsicker until they were resolved.

Dumped:
How? Why? And by whom?

The cantonal police sent Yuan’s remains by helicopter to a medical examiner’s office in Zurich. An autopsy was performed that same evening.

Cause of death, suffocation. From smoke. And that hadn’t happened out in the snow. There were also some strange bruises, and the funny configuration of the body when it had been found, as if it had been taken by helicopter to that place and then dumped from above. Well, stranger things have happened. But if they had a chopper, that also suggested that Yuan must have had some wealthy powerful enemies. Then again, almost everyone in Switzerland had wealthy, powerful enemies as well as wealthy, powerful friends.

Sometimes they even overlapped.

BARCELONA, SPAIN, SEPTEMBER 6, MORNING

A
lex stood on a platform at Estació de Sants in Barcelona, waiting for the train that would take her to Madrid. The station, built in the latter part of the twentieth century, was surprisingly modern, with none of the soaring vaults of the older Estació de Françia, the next depot down the line. And the subterranean waiting platforms were new, clean, and functional, having been constructed for the high-speed line that went into operation in 2008. The “AVE,” La Alta Velocidad Española, the train that would take her to Madrid, was a marvel of modern rail technology. It glided smoothly into the station exactly on time at 10:16 a.m., looking like a beige spaceship.

She was playing along with Michael’s paranoia. No air travel, which could be easily traced. Instead, she had paid cash for her one-way ticket to Madrid and would travel across southwestern Europe with complete anonymity.

She wore a tan skirt and a blue blouse. She scanned the platform as the train pulled in. Any followers? From long habit, she always had one eye to her back. Nearby there was a group of couples, eight people in all, that appeared to be tourists. She cocked her ear. They were speaking French. Not far from them there was a trio of American college students, a boy and two girls. Backpackers. One had an Ohio State sweatshirt and another girl had a Chicago Cubs cap with a ponytail pulled through the back.

She stepped back from the crowd and let others board first. Then she moved quickly along the platform to the next car to see if anyone would follow. She was one of the last to board.

Good. No followers. Her back was clean.

The car was crowded. She walked toward the back of the train, intentionally passed her assigned seat, then turned back. Again, no followers. She took her reserved single seat by a window. With a slight lurch, the train pulled out of the station.

Train and airline trips often lent themselves to reflection for Alex. She would carry a book but tend to ignore it after an hour. Today, however, she would dial up on her iPod music appropriate to her mood and spend the voyage in thought.

She gazed out the window and, beyond the tracks, at the farms and fields of Catalonia, followed by Aragon, then Castille. She watched an unveiling of the whitewashed walls of elegant Spanish villas wreathed in bright bougainvillea. They basked in a sunshine that was so intense that Alex put her sunglasses on. Then she watched a scattered array of medieval castles, Islamic palaces, and Gothic cathedrals pass by, interspersed with smaller towns and cities that conjured up more old than new.

Sometimes the landscape was flat and barren. She conjured up images from the literature of Spain. Don Quixote, tilting at windmills on the plains of La Mancha, even though those plains were to the south of Madrid.

She sighed to herself.

To understand modern Spain, she knew, meant to understand the past. Having studied history well and spent time in Europe at several points in her life, she was no stranger to modern Spanish history. And Spain, like so many others, was a country and a people torn by civil war.

Beginning in 1923, the government was held in place by the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Following de Rivera’s overthrow, the Second Republic was declared in 1931, a coalition of the left and center. over the next five years, tensions rose in all parts of Spain.

On September 17, 1936, a nationalist-traditionalist rebellion began, igniting a civil war. General Francisco Franco assumed command of the insurgent nationalists. Franco’s supporters portrayed the conflict as a battle between Christian civilization on the one hand and communism and anarchy on the other. But on the other side, Republican sympathizers proclaimed the Civil War was a struggle between fascism and tyranny on Franco’s side and democracy and liberty on theirs. Many non-Spanish young, committed reformers, and communist revolutionaries joined the International Brigades to fight against Franco. Meanwhile, the troops of the International Brigades represented the largest foreign contingent of troops fighting for the Republicans. Thousands were from the United States.

Both Fascist Italy, under Benito Mussolini, and Nazi Germany, under Adolf Hitler, sent troops, aircraft, tanks, and other weapons to support Franco and his army of
nacionalistas.
The Italian government provided the Corps of Volunteer Troops,
Il Corpo Truppe Volontarie,
and Germany sent the Condor Legion,
El Legión Condor.

The Soviet Union backed the Republicans and sent Soviet “volunteers” who often piloted aircraft or operated tanks.

In October of 1936, Franco’s troops launched their first major assault on Madrid. The Republican government fled to Valencia. When Franco’s forces failed to take the capital in ground fighting, however, Franco bombarded the city relentlessly from the air, then withdrew.

Franco made another attempt to capture Madrid in January and February of 1937 but failed again. The city of Málaga was taken on February 8. On March 7 the German Condor Legion arrived in Spain; on April 26 the Legion massacred hundreds of Spaniards, including numerous women and children, at Guernica in the Basque countryside. The bombing was committed forever to notoriety in a stunning mural by Picasso that he began painting just fifteen days after the event.

On March 9, Franco’s army overran the city.

Less than three weeks later, with the help of pro-Franco forces inside the city, Madrid fell to the Nationalists. When the last of the Republican forces surrendered, Franco proclaimed victory in a radio speech aired on April 1.

Like most wars, this one was ugly. Tens of thousands of people had been executed, most killed by their countrymen. Atrocities were common. These included the aerial bombing of cities carried out on Franco’s behalf. In the early days of the war, more than fifty thousand people who were caught on the “wrong” side of the lines were murdered. Victims were taken from their refugee camps or jails by armed people and shot outside of town. The corpses were abandoned or interred in graves dug by the victims themselves. Local police knew better than to intervene. Probably the most famous victim was the poet Federico García Lorca.

Mass graves are still being unearthed today.

The Republican authorities arranged the evacuation of children. These Spanish War children were shipped to Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union, other European countries, and Mexico. Those in western European countries returned to their families after the war, but many of those in the Soviet Union remained in Russia after the Iron Curtain descended.

Atrocities by the Republicans were known as Spain’s “red terror,” and among them were hundreds of attacks on Catholics. They were unspeakable in their cruelty. Nearly seven thousand clerics were killed. Thirteen bishops and more than four thousand diocesan priests were murdered. Nearly three hundred nuns were murdered. There were accounts of Catholics being forced to swallow rosary beads or being thrown down mine shafts, as well as priests being forced to dig their own graves before being buried alive.

Other actions on the Republican side were committed by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The crimes committed by the NKVD were even-handed—they butchered everyone. They carried out executions not only against Nationalists, but also against all those who did not share their Stalinist ideology, even if they were fighting on the Republican side.

After the end of the war, thousands of Republicans were imprisoned and at least thirty thousand were executed. Many others were put to forced labor, building railways, drying out swamps, digging canals, or constructing monuments to Franco. Hundreds of thousands of other Republicans fled abroad, especially to France and Mexico.

In all, there were about half a million deaths during the Spanish Civil War. Ten percent of all soldiers who fought were killed, including almost one thousand Americans, most of whom were buried in Spanish soil.

In the ensuing decades, Spain remained a closed corner of Europe, a nation that had once had an empire and great artists like Goya, Velasquez, and Picasso, but which had also turned inward from the outside world. It was not until the 1950s, when the United States was seeking allies in the fight against communism, that Spain rejoined a Western alliance. Control of the Straits of Gibraltar and permission to place American air bases in Spain were no small part of the equation.

And now after seven decades, feelings in Spain have not completely healed. In late 2007, Spain finally passed a law that families wanting to unearth bodies of relatives killed during the Spanish Civil War should now receive full cooperation from the state. And the government mandated that every province in the country must remove remaining monuments to Franco.

As the train sped for Madrid, however, Alex’s mind flickered from the distant past to her own personal events of a more recent coinage. Her fiancé, a member of the United State Secret Service, had been killed recently in the line of duty. She remained angry and unsettled with God at the events that had befallen her. Deep down, she had not yet learned how to forgive the people or forces that had caused Robert’s death. In terms of what she now wanted from life, she remained undecided.

Like this very mission. Why accept it? Then again, why not?

Soft route, indeed.

Outside in the distance, she saw a small church and churchyard and for a fleeting half a minute, she could see a funeral in progress. She was somehow touched by the feelings of sympathy, empathy, and sorrow for the people gathered there.

It was a rural ceremony. It brought to mind a memory of her own, when she was a little girl, visiting her mother’s childhood home in Mexico. Her grandmother’s health had been failing for two or three years. But during this summer, when Alex was nine, her grandmother had suddenly started to run a high fever. Overnight, her breathing became difficult. The family wanted to move her to the hospital, but the nearest facility was a hundred miles away.

“Tu abuela se está murienda,”
her mother explained. Your grandmother is dying.

“No. Ella no puede,”
Alex answered, in denial. No! She can’t!

Alex went to her grandmother’s bedside. She placed her hand on the old woman’s, then upon her forehead as her eyes welled with tears.

“Por favor,”
Alex cried. “Don’t leave us.”

Her
abuela
managed a weak smile. Across three generations, they spoke to each other in Spanish, in the accents of Oxipalta, where the old woman had lived as a girl.

“Remember, Alex, there is a purpose to everything, a time for everything. The Creator has seen to that. Many years ago, I was young and strong. But now I am tired. I must rest. It’s what God intended.”

By her bedside was a small white paper bag with sand in it. The sand supported a small candle.

“Be my little angel,” Alex’s grandmother had said. “Light the luminaria for me. Through the light of the luminaria, my Lord Jesus will find me.”

Alex sobbed and kissed her grandmother. She told her how much she loved her. She fumbled with some matches and lit the luminaria. Her grandmother smiled, closed her eyes, and never spoke again.

Alex’s mother sat by the bed. A few hours later, the old woman passed away.

The next day, Alex sat by the open coffin. A young priest from the local parish said Mass in Spanish. Afterward, the family and the priest buried
abuela
in the
camposanto
by the churchyard. They laid her to rest next to her husband, who had died ten years earlier.

It was Alex’s first brush with death, the first time she had tried to comprehend it. But in Alex’s mind and in her heart, another luminaria had been lit, one of faith, and it still burned.

It was like that with Robert, her late fiancé, too, Alex realized. The luminaria, the simple candle, still burned. But it hadn’t receded in memory as much as her grandmother’s, and the flame had been lit much more recently. And yet, in the same way, Alex had moved on.

What alternative was there, really?

The final two hours of the trip passed uneventfully. Her seat companion was a gray-haired Spanish woman twice her age who was deeply engrossed in a novella. For a while, Alex gamed on her iPod, with only a casual eye on the scenery. Eventually, the train passed a glorious castle about forty minutes outside of Madrid, then through the surprisingly third world shanties of gypsies that ringed the city. Then it pulled into Madrid Atocha at quarter to three. She disembarked. Here too the station was surprisingly modern, the original nineteenth-century one serving as a kind of trainless winter garden. Gradually the familiar faces from the train disappeared into the crowds at the station and ceased to be a part of her day.

She took a taxi to the hotel, which was only about fifteen minutes away. “The Prado,” the driver said as they passed the famous museum, although she had visited it many times on previous visits. As they approached a fountain with a figure of Neptune, they turned onto a crescent with a little park in the middle called the Plaza de la Lealtad and pulled up in front of the Ritz, a building that looked to be straight out of Paris.

“The stock exchange is on the other side of the square,” the taxi driver said. “Maybe not a coincidence,” he added with a laugh. “No poor people here.”

The Ritz had been Madrid’s most prestigious hotel since it opened at the beginning of the twentieth century. King Alphonso XIII, grandfather of the current King Juan Carlos II, invested his personal money into its construction. Alex had stayed there once before, about five years earlier.

The lobby was grand and immaculate. A fortuitous error had taken place in booking, and she was bumped up from a single room to a small suite. The suite not lacking for comfort, from king-sized beds to plush carpets, to reading chairs, two phones, Internet connection, and an antique desk. She opened a pair of twin windows to view the city, even though the air-conditioning was humming quietly and efficiently.