The Exile (57 page)

Sweat trickled into her eye. ‘Let the girls go.'

‘I like it when you breathe heavy, Galíndez.'

‘I'm faking. I'm sure most women do with you.'

A sharp click as he thumbed back the hammer. Her body shook with an involuntary spasm as she imagined the damage the shot would inflict.

‘Push your face into the dirt,' Sancho said. She sensed he was grinning.

She turned her face to the grass.

‘Now, say something,' Sancho hissed.

‘Like what?' Her words were muffled by the grass pressing into her mouth.

‘It doesn't matter. I just wanted to hear how scared you are.'

He got to his feet, and moved away. ‘See you later, Galíndez.'

She smelled his cigarette and heard his coarse breathing. She waited for her chance.

‘Come on, you two,' Sancho said to the girls, as if they were on a day out. The tone of his voice was infuriating.

Faint snuffling, sounds of movement. Galíndez raised her face from the grass.

‘Careful, Galíndez,' Sancho growled. ‘You already look a mess without me putting a bullet in your head. That would make this your worst bad-hair day ever.'

‘That's rich, coming from you.' She saw his bulky shape, imprecise in the darkness, the pale shaved head, the glitter of his piercings. ‘If you hurt them...' Her voice faltered. Her throat was too painful to speak.

‘Yeah, yeah, you'll track me to the ends of the earth.' He chuckled. ‘If I was you, I'd stick to babysitting. You're good at that. Isn't that right, girls?'

Inés nodded. Clari clung to her sister, eyes tightly closed.

‘
Vámonos
, señoritas,' he said. ‘Over that wall with you, Ana's taking you home
.
'

Galíndez exhaled slowly, wondering what Sancho was up to.
It's got to be a trick.

The girls were over the wall now. ‘Wait there,
niñas
,' Sancho said. He came back towards Galíndez and she tensed, seeing him standing two metres from her, keeping enough distance between them to make it impossible for her to reach him without being shot.

He lowered his voice. ‘Has anyone ever told you you're a fucking idiot?'

‘Now and again,' Galíndez rasped. ‘But I'm still going to put you behind bars.'

‘Call me naive, but I always think it's best not to piss off someone who's pointing a gun at you.' Sancho moved backwards into the trees, still aiming the pistol at her. ‘Now you've had a little rest, why don't you take those kids and get out of here?'

She heard his voice receding as he backed away into the trees. Beyond that wood were thousands of acres of farmland. She started to get up, wondering about pursuing him.

‘Ana...' Inés called.

‘
Momentito
.' If she let Sancho go now, he would come after her again, she knew that. Even so, the girls had to come first. She couldn't risk leaving them alone again.

She backed away, keeping her eyes on the dark clump of trees until she felt the wall press against the backs of her legs. As she turned, she saw her pistol lying on the wall. Furious, she pushed it into her belt.

‘Right, let's get you two back to
Mamá
and
Papá
.' Galíndez lifted Clari into her arms. Inés stood immobile, waiting for instructions. ‘Hold on to my belt,
querida
,' Galíndez told her as she set off back down the garden. ‘Are you OK?' she asked Clari. The little girl didn't speak. She was staring at the burning house. ‘Inés?
Qué tal
?'

Inés said nothing. Probably in shock, Galíndez guessed.

As they neared the pool of light around the house, figures came towards them. Galíndez saw Machado among them and returned his pistol. ‘There was a guy with them,' she said. ‘Big guy with a shaved head and facial piercings, armed with a pistol. He ran off through the trees.'

Machado started talking into his radio. ‘
Alpha Dos
,
we have an armed suspect on the perimeter of the property, up near the woods. Request back-up.
Cambio
.'

Galíndez left him and continued towards the crowd of police and firefighters gathered by the gate. As she got nearer, the men parted to let her through, all of them staring. Galíndez wondered when someone was going to help her.

‘I'll take the little one, you stay here, Ana.'

It was Mendez, wearing a Kevlar vest over her uniform. Galíndez watched her take the girls over to where Mercedes and Capitán Fuentes were waiting by their car, faces pale and drawn in the glare of the fire.

Galíndez watched the reunion from a distance.
I'm fine, just a sore throat.

Mendez came back with a plastic bottle of water. ‘You need to give a statement.'

‘The boss,' Galíndez croaked, her throat raw. ‘I want him to know I tried my best to protect the girls.' She swallowed the cold water, hoping it would ease the pain in her throat. It didn't. ‘I need to tell them.'

Mendez grabbed her arm and pulled her back. ‘Don't, not now.' Dazed, Galíndez tried to push past but Mendez stood in her way and took Galíndez's face in her hands. ‘Listen to me, Ana, they don't want to talk to you.'

‘I understand.' Galíndez blinked, not understanding. ‘Maybe later?'

Mendez steered her to the patrol car and pushed her into the passenger seat.

‘Why are they looking at me like that?' Galíndez asked as Mendez started the engine.

‘The body count, Ana. There's at least seven dead. Guys don't expect this from a woman. Especially not a
forense
like you.'

‘I did my best,' Galíndez muttered.

‘You did something.' Mendez hit the siren to clear their way to the gate.

As they went up the drive, Galíndez saw the Fuentes family, still standing by their car, staring at her, their faces blank. As if she was a stranger.

27

OROITZ, OCTOBER 1954

The mid-morning sun patterned the mountainside as Guzmán parked the Hispano Suiza near the village. Overnight, much of the snow had melted and the trees and bushes glittered. He scowled, furious at the unpredictable weather as he slung the sniper rifle over his shoulder and drew the Browning to check the action. Together with the big trench knife strapped to his leg, he had all he needed to deal with El Lobo. He'd killed men with less.

He left the village behind, following the dirt path that meandered through dense thickets of gorse and broom up to the fortress. The bright sun forced him to squint and, because of that, he almost failed to see the sudden flicker of light near one of the derelict buildings in the distance. He saw it again, a brief repetitive sequence of stuttering flashes. Morse code directed to an unseen observer in the valley below. He'd been right, then. There was someone up there.

As he continued up the steep path, Guzmán thought once again about Nieves Arestigui, and once again his thoughts troubled him. When he looked at her, it was as if Arantxa had come back to haunt him in the flesh, just as she'd haunted his dreams after the war. It was not the manner of her death that disturbed him, too many people had died around him – or because of him – for death to have any great importance. It was the question she planted that still troubled him seventeen years later.

Maybe she wanted to fuck him up. You could never tell with her. Volatile, that was what one of her clients had called her. Guzmán had called her many things, depending on his mood – and hers. After all this time, he still remembered her words after they'd captured her. Standing with her amid the shattered buildings of the village, each recovering from this mutually surprising encounter. Wondering how it might affect them.

You're the smart one,
chico
. You work it out.
The question tossed to him like a grenade.

Work it out.
For all he knew, she'd said that to many of the men who'd been her clients. But she had shared something more with Guzmán than those furtive transactions in the field brothel. Arantxa had been many things but she had not been a liar. And smart or not, it was easy enough to calculate the time between his last visit to her bed and the child's birth. Though Arantxa hadn't confirmed it one way or the other. She'd just planted the question and left his imagination to do the rest. Not that it had changed anything. She'd died anyway.

And even if Nieves was his daughter, so what? Seventeen years on, what could he do, claim her as his long-lost child and take her back to Madrid? As if she would welcome having a father who worked in the
Policía Secreta
. He'd already heard the way she talked about ‘fascists'. She meant people like him. He couldn't even talk to her about her mother. What could he say?
Your mama was a whore. She let me have credit when I was broke.
Nieves would hardly thank him for that posthumous revelation.

But there were other, better things he could tell her.
She could have betrayed me when she was captured but didn't. She fought and died for a cause she believed in.
Those were things Nieves would be proud of, no doubt. He would certainly omit the worst thing of all, the memory that still stalked his dreams.
She asked for my help and I let her down.
His breathing grew faster at the memory of it. Seventeen years on and the memory of it still burned inside him. He hadn't let her down. General Torres had moved the execution forward, wanting to show he was in command. Whoever had carried out the killings even used the sword the Moors engraved with Guzmán's name. He remembered walking towards the building when he returned from patrol, seeing his sword lying in the grass, smeared with blood. Reaching down for it. And then the sound of footsteps as Ochoa came running up from the cellar, clutching his camera, pale-faced, his eyes widening as he saw Guzmán holding the sword. His scream ringing in the chill air before he fled, spewing.
You fucking murderer.

Things had happened fast that night. No sooner had he left that dank cellar, strewn with the corpses of the anarchists, than Torres announced his posting had been brought forward: he was to leave immediately for General Mellado's column in the south. There was no arguing: the papers came from Franco's HQ. Twenty minutes later, Guzmán was in a staff car, driving past the labourers sealing up the cellar to conceal the slaughter from the visiting journalists.

Guzmán had been powerless to help Arantxa. He'd tried and yet everything had seemed to conspire against him. What hurt most was that his plan to free her and the child failed. He had grown too used to having his own way. Not that he had seen fit to share any of that with Ochoa back then and he had no intention of doing so now. Enlisted men had no right to challenge their superiors.

He paused to light another Bisonte. It was time to put aside his tainted memories. Very likely El Lobo was up in that ruined fortress. If he was, Guzmán had to kill him. There wouldn't be another chance, not after losing five million of someone else's money. Even if he wasn't shot, the price of failure would be professional and social obliteration as he fell through the net of patronage and reciprocal dependencies that held the establishment together. He would fall so far that for the rest of his life he would be something else, something unspeakable. He would be poor.

He threw down his cigarette and ground the butt into the earth with his heel, disturbed by this line of thought. The dead were dead, little use worrying about them now. As for him, he was Guzmán. He was what he always had been. A survivor. So far at least.

OROITZ 1954, MENDIKO RIDGE

Sargento León lay hidden in the gorse, angrily chewing a stalk of grass. This enforced inactivity left him with nothing to do but think and his thoughts were disturbing at the best of times. The more he brooded, the more angry he became, reflecting on a catalogue of grievances both serious and trivial, visualising diverse forms of revenge on those who had offended him. And of those, there were many.

Throughout the morning, León had worked his way down the hillside, crawling through the sharp scrub, tormented by the flies swarming over the cow pats scattered in the grass. Once night fell, he planned to slip into the village and steal a horse. Then he would ride to the border, though with a long diversion south to avoid Çubiry territory. Once across, he would make for Lourdes or Tarbes. He could find work there, he was sure. Maybe he would learn French. It had to be easy: even the children could speak it.

León held his breath, suddenly aware of rustling grass and the sound of rapid breathing. Someone was coming up the dirt path towards him. Just one person, walking fast, from the sound of it. That was good. Someone alone was not a problem for a man with his violent skills. He raised his pistol, peering through the shrubs at the trail as the footsteps came nearer and passed within two metres of his hiding place. He saw a swinging black skirt and white, rope-soled
alpargatas
, their red laces tied around firm tanned calves. As the woman continued up the hill, León rose from the bushes, his eyes glinting with malice as he weighed things up, balancing the risk to himself against other, more base desires. The calculation took only a second. Carefully, he made his way through the gorse and started up the trail, following Nieves Arestigui.

OROITZ 1954, FORTALEZA DE ZUMALACÁRREGUI

The trail petered out a hundred metres from the old fortress. Ahead, lines of crumbling defence works sprawled across the hillside. At the centre of the ramparts was an arched gateway, its wooden gates long gone, the great fallen stones of the arch lying shattered on the ground nearby. He passed through the ruined portal and paused by a large opening in the rocks, edged with brick and smooth carved stone. A long tunnel stretched away into darkness. At the far end he saw an oblique patch of faint light