The Guardian of Secrets: And Her Deathly Pact (65 page)

“Yes, Mama and Papa are doing fine,” she told him for the third time.

Pedro said worriedly, “I’ve heard that monasteries and convents have been burned and that priests have been murdered in some republican zones. I’m worried about Marta. I will feel a lot better when she gets out of that damn place and into a safe zone.”

“She is safe at the moment, Pedro, more at peace than you or me,” María lied, but with a certain amount of hidden truth.

“Yes, well, I still think arrangements should be made. It’s only a matter of time before revenge rears its ugly head at her convent… Someone should get her now.”

Pedro lay down in the corner of the trench and closed his eyes. He was exhausted and happy but also filled with a sadness he had never known. Lying there, he couldn’t help but wonder if fate was predetermined, as his mother had always maintained. Was it? Or was it simply a fact that in the crazy madness of the world they lived in, wonderful coincidences came about to make people believe in the divine power of miracles. Faith and hope were what kept most human beings from giving up entirely. He sighed, relaxing his body’s heavy muscles, and thought again about Hans. The tiny corner in the hole he had shared with him was now empty and cold, yet he could still hear Hans’s voice talking about his family and Germany. He could still remember Hans’s plans, his dreams, and his desire to raise a family free of oppression after the defeat of fascism. Tears converged on his eyelids, and he wiped them away with mud-stained fingers, then covering his face with his hands. He cried a while longer, this time with joy. He had seen his love and his sister and felt as though his loneliness had been washed away. He did believe in miracles and would continue to believe in them!

Pedro heard Harry Miller’s heavy unbalanced stride. He kept his eyes closed and thought about La Glorieta, where the only sound was that of birds at sunrise. He concentrated on that sound, hoping against hope that Harry Miller would pass him by and leave him alone.

“Peter, fancy a cup of coffee?” he heard Miller ask. “I’ve brought one for you.”

“No,” Pedro told him.

“Where’s your German friend? Hans, isn’t it? I brought one for him too,” Joseph insisted.

“Not now, Miller. I’m trying to sleep.” Just his luck, Pedro thought. Harry Miller was the last person he wanted to see. Jesus, the man wouldn’t leave him alone. If it wasn’t a game of cards he wanted, it was answers to nosy and unwanted questions about his family.

Pedro opened his eyes, unable to ignore the presence any longer. “I said not now! We’re moving out in a couple of hours. Go and get some sleep and give me a bit of peace, for Christ’s sake.”

Joseph stooped low testing the ground with his feet in the darkness and then joined Pedro in the trench. He sat down, gulped one mug of coffee down in one, and shook his head.

“Touchy, touchy, touchy!” he half sang, half spoke. “That’s no way to treat a comrade in arms, now is it? Not very grateful either, not after I’ve risked my life to get you the fucking coffee in the first place. So I’ll drink it. Can’t let it go to waste, can we?”

Joseph lifted the second mug and tilted it towards his mouth, raised his head upwards, and let the last drop of coffee drip on to his tongue. Afterwards, he said, “Did your mother never teach you not to waste anything?”

No response.

“No, I bet she didn’t. You probably had everything you wanted growing up, probably too much. If I was a betting man, I’d say you were you were a spoilt rich brat given whatever your heart desired… Am I right, Peter? I bet you grew up with a load of fucking servants doing your bidding. Your mother was like that, liked the grand life, and from what I hear, still does.”

Pedro bolted upright and stared into the shifty eyes staring back at him. Miller spoke about his mother as if he knew her, had met her. Then he realised that he was always asking about his family, always digging for information about them. Fear gripped him. Something about Harry Miller had bothered him right from the first time they’d met. Miller was a puzzle. He was a man who didn’t make friends easily, was disliked for his crudeness, yet he hadn’t left him alone since Madrid and couldn’t do enough for him. He had never been comfortable in Miller’s company. Hans had hated him, and Hans was a good judge of character. Miller’s face was familiar too, he thought. Lookingat Joseph for the first time, it was as though he knew him, had some connection with him, though he’d never said as much to Hans. He would have thought him crazy.

“What’s with the questions, Miller? Why are you talking about my mother?” Pedro asked.

“Ah, so the pin’s dropping?”

Pedro stared stupidly at Joseph.
The
pin’s
dropping?
Was he supposed to know this man? Did he know his mother?

“What are you talking about? What pin?”

“The fucking pin that’s dropping on your thick skull!” Joseph said sarcastically.

“Miller, just tell me what you want from me and then get lost, will you? I’m not in the mood for puzzles.” Pedro lay back down again, loath to hear anything else.

“Take a good look at my face boy, a really close look. What do you see?” Joseph said, clearly unwilling to be dismissed.

“I see an old man with too much time on his hands. I see a nosy bastard who has no business talking about my family. I see a pain in the arse that’s going to make me forget my generally good nature. That’s what I see!”

Pedro breathed heavily; he was tired, grieving, and afraid. He held the man’s staring bloodshot eyes with his own, hoping that he had said enough to end the conversation.

Joseph laughed, demeaning, cynical, and infuriating. His bad breath forced Pedro to look away.

“You really don’t know, do you, boy? You can’t see what’s plain on both our faces,” Joseph eventually said with a lopsided grin.

Pedro sat up again. Warning bells rang in his head. He fumbled for answers, but none came. He stared at Joseph again. “Who are you?” he asked with a sense of foreboding that made his stomach churn.

Joseph laughed again moved closer to Pedro, stretched out his legs comfortably, and sighed with the satisfaction of someone who’d just beaten the odds and won all the money.

“Peter, Peter, Peter. A name that has haunted me for years.” He sighed again. “I knew a Peter once. Did I tell you that? Peter, Peter, Peter… He was like my father, only
in-law
 . . . Pin dropping now?”

Pedro held his breath. The pin was dropping, but until the words were spoken, he wouldn’t believe them, couldn’t believe them. It was impossible!

Joseph grew serious and leaned in closer again, almost touching Pedros face with his own. “And I did know your mother… That’s right, don’t look so shocked. I knew her, married her, fucked her, and you’re the result… Say hello to your father.” He held out his hand. “Name’s Joseph Dobbs.”

Pedro could barely breathe, and when he did, it was in short sharp breaths, causing the dirt-filled trench to spin in front of him. Joseph Dobbs! The filthy, toothless, wrinkled man in front of him was Joseph Dobbs, his father! He wanted to breathe properly so that he could think straight. Kill Dobbs. Take off his belt and whip his back with it, just like Dobbs had done to his mother. He wanted to bang the murdering bastard’s head into the dirt and to smother him with it, shove it down his throat until he had no breath left in him! If only he could breathe, think! He wanted…

“I know what you’re thinking, Peter. You’re thinking that I’m not quite what you expected. Did you never wonder about me, about when I’d show up?”

Pedro shook his spinning head, and Joseph threw him a surprised look.

“No? Well, why wouldn’t I? You’re my son. I was bound to look for you at some point.”

Pedro shook his head again, trying to clear it. “You’re dead! They told me that you died. They hanged you in nineteen thirteen. How can this be?” he asked him in a stupid daze.

“This can be because this is what it is. So Celia told you I died, did she?” Joseph laughed now and in a bizarre display of tawdry ridicule cocked his head to one side, closed his eyes, and stuck a slackened tongue out the side of his mouth:

“Hung by the neck till I was dead, is that it? No, Peter, as you can see I’m very much alive. Did she tell you that she fucked up my life and was a rotten wife! Did she tell you that? Did she tell you that she took everything, including you, without my permission, eh? Did she tell you that her Jew cousin forced me into divorcing her at gunpoint? No, I bet she didn’t. She was always a good fucking liar!”

Pedro slunk into the corner like a wounded animal. His head was screaming the name Joseph Dobbs, killer! He saw his mother’s face, her scars, her lifelong fear of violence of any kind, and the terror that still sat in her eyes every time Joseph Dobbs’s name was spoken. He saw her naked back and the criss-cross scars that marked it like a brand of ownership. He lifted his pistol lying beside his blanket on the ground and pointed it at Joseph’s head. His arm was outstretched. His hand shook so much that he had to use his other to steady his wrist, and all he could think about was killing him.

The pistol danced in front of Joseph’s eyes. Pedro cocked it and then gripped it so tightly that his only thought at that moment was that it might break in his hand. He heard Joseph’s laughter echoing in the dark, and then a man’s voice shouted out.

“Shut up! Some of us are trying to sleep!”

He knew what he had to do. His hatred of the man sitting beside him was overwhelming, so much so that he thought he would vomit. He was going to do the job the hangman failed to do. He placed a shaking finger on the trigger. He was going to kill him, for his mother, for his family…

“Kill me and your family dies,” he heard Joseph say casually in his ringing ears.

Pedro looked at the pistol. He steadied his breathing and the pistol’s aim. His finger was now solid and sure on the trigger. He was going to do it!

“What?” Joseph’s words had suddenly sunk in. His hand began to shake again. “What did you say?”

“I said, kill me and your family dies. Don’t do it, Peter. Kill me and you lose everyone. Roderick Smyth Burton, an old friend of mine from my Paris days, has strict orders to kill your mother, the Spanish bastard she married, and dear old Aunt Marie fucking Osborne if he doesn’t hear from me before a certain time.”

“You’re lying!” Pedro spat, still pointing the gun at Joseph’s head.

Joseph ignored him. “He will shoot them, stab them, or strangle them. I don’t know which, as I left the choice to him. He’s an assassin and a very professional one at that… I’m not a liar, Peter. I know where your whoring mother and the rest of them are holed up: Mayfair. My friend Roddy is watching their every move, just waiting for my instructions.”

Pedro lost his voice. There was so much he wanted to say and do, but he didn’t know how to take all this in. How did Dobbs get out of prison? How did he go undetected all these years? How did he find him, find his parents? He was so tired, tired and filled with dread, but his mind was clearly echoing the words ‘Your family will die’, and those words were what he had to concentrate on. He took a deep breath and said, “What do you want from me, Dobbs?”

Joseph lost his smile. His eyes were now dangerous and threatening. “Well, first off, I want you to put down the fucking gun.”

Pedro took his finger off the trigger, put the safety pin in place and laid it on the ground. He still wanted to kill him, but instead, he said, “I’m listening. You have my attention.”

“Good boy. Now give me the gun.”

Pedro lifted the gun carefully and handed it handle first to Joseph. If Dobbs had wanted him dead he would have killed him by now, he thought.

“Dobbs, just say what you came here to say,” Pedro said in a dead voice.

“No orders, boy! You are on my time now,” Joseph told him.

Pedro nodded, and Joseph threw him a victorious toss of his head.

“I want revenge for all the dirty tricks your family played on me and for the time I nearly rotted in a prison cell while your mother was fucking a Spaniard! I want back the life I could have had, the life that was stolen from me by your mother’s co-conspirators, and most of all, I want to see your mother suffer! That’s what I fucking want.”

Pedro now saw first-hand the evil brute that his mother had married, and at that moment, he thought about beating the life out of him. Instead, he remained tight-lipped.

“You know, I was going to kill you, Peter, but then I wondered what good that would do. You’d just be another dead soldier on a battlefield. Your mother would whine for you, but she wouldn’t know that it was me that did it, and I’d just end up as poor as I am now. Where’s the fun in that?”

Pedro had his wits about him now, and his initial shock had now turned to calculated anger. “And this revenge you’re looking for—how do you intend to get it?”

“Money, I want money, a lot of it, and you’re going to get it for me. Call it compensation.”

Pedro laughed sarcastically, not surprised that it was all coming down to money. “We’re on a battlefield. I don’t see any banks, do you?” he said, patronising Joseph. “Anyway, why should I give you anything? What have you ever given me?”

“I am your fucking Father. I gave you life; that’s what I gave you. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to write a letter for me, and I’m going to read it. I will then give it to the next supply convoy that’s heading to London. In that letter, you’re going to tell your mother to put funds in an envelope for you, enough to pay for my way out of here in the easiest and safest way possible. Then you’re going to tell Celia to open an account in the Banque de France in Paris, under the name of Harry Miller. Fifty thousand pounds should be enough to begin with. When you get the money here, you’ll give it to me, all of it, and then when the rest is in the account and it’s confirmed that it’s there, I’ll get out of this shit hole and get to the nearest fucking border. You’ll never see me or hear from me again, and in return, I promise to leave your mother and the rest of your family alone. This is what I want, and this is what I’m going to get.”