The Sentinel: 1 (Vengeance of Memory) (52 page)

‘That’s close enough. Keep away from her.’

Diego Aguilar was standing ten metres up the road, his pistol in a two-handed grip, aimed at Sancho. ‘I’ll shoot if I have to. Back away.’

Sancho looked at Diego venomously.
‘Hijo de la gran puta.
Look who it is. Mess me about and I’ll fuck you up,
puto.’

Diego shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. That’s not an opinion: my friends agree with me.’

Three men in black combat gear holding automatic rifles emerged from the shadows behind Diego. Sancho cursed angrily. Benitez shrugged and Galindez heard him telling Sancho to be cool.

‘Drop the file in the night safe,’ Galindez whispered to Tali.

Sancho heard her. ‘No. Do not let her put that file in there, Galindez. Don’t—’

He took half a step forward and Galindez moved towards him, both fists raised.

Tali let the flap close and the package slid into the steel-plated safety of the safe.

Sancho shouted in exasperation and punched the palm of his hand. There was a muttered argument with Agustín for a moment and then the two of them splashed away down through the grey rain. Streaming water infused with surreal neon reflections lacquered the black surface of the road as Sancho and Agustín turned the corner. Then they were gone.

‘We did it.’ Tali’s voice trembled.

‘Go that way,’ Diego called, pointing in the opposite direction to Sancho and Agustín Benitez, ‘I’ll make sure those two don’t follow you.’

‘Thanks, Diego. I owe you one.’ Galindez walked past him, one arm around Tali’s shoulders. Diego looked at them impassively. ‘We look after our own, Dr Galindez.’

Galindez and Tali kept walking. The rain was easing now and they could hear the distant pulse of traffic again. The silence after the prolonged rain was strangely unsettling.

‘What’s Diego’s problem?’ Tali asked, once they were out of earshot.

Galindez shrugged. ‘I’ve got a feeling it’s me.’

18

MADRID 1953.

Alicia Martinez opened her eyes. It was dark. A sharp, piercing pain lanced through her head and she felt an urge to vomit. Her senses came back slowly, and as they did so, fear began to surge through her, her terror made all the worse as she began to remember the violence of her abduction. She was lying in pitch darkness on damp cobblestones. She remembered the men and the car, the sickly smell of the chloroform. It was hard to think. She moaned, feeling handcuffs tight against her wrists. It was difficult to sit up with her hands pinioned behind her. She struggled to her knees, uncertain where she was. Then footsteps, the sound of a key turning in a lock.

The door opened, flooding the cell with a sickly light. Weak though it was, the light was too much for her eyes, making the pain in her head throb with malicious intensity. She had never known her heart beat so hard, not even during the shelling of Madrid at its worst. She opened her eyes. They waited in the doorway, black outlines in the pallid light from the corridor.
Señora
Martinez wanted to demand an explanation but her tongue felt too thick and dry to speak. She tried to stand, staggering drunkenly as one of them seized her by the arm. Her hands were numb with cold and pain. She realised her shoes were missing, the awareness provoking a sudden sense of loss as she felt the damp cold stones beneath her feet. The man turned the key in the handcuffs, the blood flowing painfully into her hands as he removed the cuffs.

‘Don’t say anything yet,
señora
,’ the one at the door said. ‘Just listen. I’m going to ask you some questions. I want you to answer them. If you don’t tell us the truth, things will go very badly for you.
Entiende?’

She was shaking. Strangely, despite the cold, she was sweating heavily. She couldn’t see his face, just his angular outline in the ghost-light from outside the room. The other man was an ominous presence behind her, forbidding her to turn round, ordering her to address the man in the door.

‘We want to know who gave you a letter to deliver to Guzmán,’ the man said.

Señora
Martinez was happy to tell them and told them repeatedly, first calmly and then later, in a voice verging on hysteria, about the man in the black coat and hat. About the letter. The money he had paid her. How she met the
comandante
when he arrested her neighbours. She told them in detail, though she omitted his attempt to force her to go to bed with him.

‘There’s something you aren’t telling us,’ the man at the door said. ‘You must cooperate,
señora
. Otherwise things will get worse.’

Alicia Martinez hung her head, struggling not to cry. She had told them everything they needed to know. Why couldn’t they believe her? She tried to speak again but couldn’t.

‘Right.’ The exasperated voice of the one standing close behind her. Too close. She could smell him: sweat and tobacco. ‘Before we begin,
puta,
you’re not dressed properly for this.’

Her shaking became more violent. The man called her
tú
, as if addressing a child.

‘Come on,
pendeja
,’ the man spat. ‘Get undressed.
Rápida, puta.
Don’t keep us waiting. Get your kit off and throw it over there by the door.’

Alicia Martinez felt her world sliding into nightmare. Sweat dribbled down her face, her clothes were soaked with her fear. Disbelief turned to a debilitating terror as the man slapped her in the face. Shocked, she tried to protest but all that came was a low moan of fear and pain. He slapped her again. Another couple of slaps and she began to beg. He pulled her around the cell by her hair, pushing her into the wall, shoving her towards the door and then dragging her back by her hair into the darkness. She began to scream.

The man released her and she slumped against the wall. She heard his ragged breathing. The one at the door said nothing, waiting impassively as the man began to hit her, striking her first in the stomach, then a punch to her breast. A blow to her ribs. Backhanded slaps to her face. Tears and snot poured from her nose and she gasped for breath, feeling the strange dryness of her tongue as she did so. The man continued shouting, cursing her, striking her with hard, sudden blows. Her world was collapsing. Her world. A world of routine and work but at least one in which she made choices and decisions. Here, she was trapped in an uncertain world of pain and humiliation. There was nowhere else but this damp patch of stone on which she stood. Nowhere to hide from the blows raining down on her, the insults ever more obscene and threatening. He was the one who told her what happened in this world. What she must do. And now, he was shouting, she had to remove her clothes. Shouting it again and again, each time reinforcing the order with a slap or a punch. She cowered against the wall. The man lifted his hand to strike her again. She could take no more. She began to undress.

She was dizzy, her head ached and nothing made sense any longer. They had left her sprawled on the damp stone floor while they went for a smoke. She had names for them now: Slapping Man and Watching Man. And they had only just begun. Slapping Man had said so. ‘Don’t go away,
pendeja
, we’re coming back and when we do, we’ll really get started.’

Señora
Martinez crouched in the far corner of the cell. She was dressed only in her slip. Her other clothes were strewn around the floor: Slapping Man had even made her take off her stockings, laughing as she struggled to do so, giving her a running commentary of what he was going to do to her once she had confessed.

She could see no way out. Beatings, rape, even death. No one knew she was here. Nor would they. In this country, people could just disappear off the face of the earth. She had no idea who these men were. She knew nothing except their interest in the
comandante
. Why did she ever take that letter? What a fool she’d been. If only she could warn him. Let him know about these people. Her mind boiled, overloaded with thoughts, balancing on the edge of incoherent hysteria. Too many thoughts. To think, earlier she had been daydreaming like a schoolgirl about the
comandante
’s offer to take her out. She would have accepted. God, if only he knew where she was, he would help her. Tears ran lazily down her cheeks. They were going to come back, take away the rest of her clothes and then hurt her again. And no one would know. Not the
comandante
, not Roberto,
nadie.

She felt the stone wall against her back. Maybe she could leave a trace behind. Some evidence that she once existed. But she had nothing to make a mark on the stone with. She rubbed her hands together for warmth, felt her wedding ring. The one she had reclaimed from the pawn shop with the
comandante’
s money. She slid the ring off and turned to the wall. It was too dark to see so she had to work carefully. Just her name. Her name and the date. The memory of a person inscribed in stone. When she had finished, she traced the letters with her fingertips. It was a small sense of achievement and it lasted until she heard them coming back.

“Señora,
is there anything else you want to tell us about the man who asked you to give the letter to the
comandante
? Perhaps you forgot something before?’ Watching Man asked.

‘Please, please stop.’ She was almost hysterical, sitting in the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest, eyes swollen and red, her nose running and her limbs shaking uncontrollably. ‘Please. I have to get home for Roberto.’ She gasped for breath. ‘I told you, the man came and asked me to give a letter to
Comandante
Guzmán. He gave me money.’ Her hands clasped in supplication. ‘I took the money. I’m poor. I did nothing wrong. You can have the money. All of it. It’s at home. I’ll get it for you. I promise.’ Her voice broke under the weight of her fear. What more could she do? She’d told them the same details each time. The same details she had told them willingly even before Slapping Man began to work on her.

‘You won’t be going home,’ Slapping Man snarled, confirming her worst fear. ‘Ever.’ He poked her with his boot, trying to push the hem of her slip higher up her thigh. ‘Know what we’ve got outside the door for you?’

‘No.’

‘Castor oil,’ he gloated. ‘Litre bottles of it.’

Señora
Martinez continued to cry, her shoulders heaving with the exertion.

‘When you’ve drunk one of those,’ the man said, ‘you’ll have this cell awash with shit in ten minutes. And then we’ll give you another. Before that though,
puta
, I think we’d better have your
bragas
off.’ He reached down and lifted the hem of her slip, reaching up to grasp the waistband of her pants.

‘No, don’t. Please.’ Her voice was incoherent with fear, as if she no longer possessed an adequate vocabulary of protest. In any case she now knew they would take no notice of what she said until she confessed. And maybe not even then.

‘And we’ve got the bucket.’ Slapping Man was still struggling to pull off her pants. Alicia Martinez doubled up on the cell floor, desperately clutching her underwear with both hands. ‘The bucket,’ Slapping Man said, pulling again, dragging her a metre along the cell floor, while she vainly struggled to keep her pants on. But he was stronger than her and he finally wrestled her pants down and dragged them over her resisting legs, throwing them towards the door. ‘We call it the
baño
. Not because it’s a real bath, but because it’s full of water. We’ll hold your head under, you bitch, and you’ll tell us anything we want to know. Anything. You’ll see. I’ll hold your head and this gentleman will hold your feet. They say it’s like dying. Only worse.’

Señora
Martinez was approaching hysteria, shaking her head uncontrollably, trying to make them see, to understand her innocence but her powers of communication had broken down in the face of this last onslaught.

‘We’ll have that off as well.’ Slapping Man tried to slide the strap of her slip down. She flinched, huddling into the corner, trying to press herself into the cold stone. He reached forward and flicked the strap from her shoulder. She hunched, arms clutching her chest to hold the material in place, whimpering.

Slapping Man was panting now. ‘Take it off or I’ll do it for you.’ He reached out again, reaching for the strap, engrossed in his work. So engrossed that he was unaware of Guzmán in the doorway, pushing Peralta aside and striding into the cell. By the time the sarge looked round, Guzmán’s fist was already swinging towards him. There was a sharp crack and the sarge’s head snapped back as he fell, hitting the wall before sliding unconscious to the floor.

‘What the hell is going on here,
Teniente
?’ Guzmán shouted, rounding on Peralta, eyes blazing. ‘I’ll have you both arrested for this.’

‘They will be severely punished,
Señora,’
Guzmán repeated in his most conciliatory voice. He was sitting next to Alicia Martinez, as she shivered by the stove in his office. Consoling people was not the strong point of a man whose usual professional vocabulary was one of pain and death. On a personal level, consolation had never really been required of him and he had never needed to offer it. Until now.

He was pleased. Pleased because she was grateful. Guzmán had saved her. She had said so. There were a lot of tears and when he offered her his handkerchief, she took it gratefully. Her eyes were puffed up – but only from tears: the
sargento
had been careful not to land too many blows on her face.

‘No need to cry now,’ Guzmán said. ‘They won’t hurt you any more. I promise you.’

‘I can’t help it,’ she sniffed, ‘they, he…’ Her voice broke in an anguished sob of pain. ‘He would have…’ She was unable to finish. Luckily for her, she had only a vague grasp of what the
sargento
might have done had he been given the word.

‘A disgrace,’ Guzmán said. ‘Spanish men behaving like that. Incredible.’ Lying was much more his forte. Lies could be presented much more easily than the truth. And usually to better effect.