11

One does not ask pears from an elm tree.

SPANISH PROVERB

It was snowing again. It was snowing too much too soon this year. With the sort of luck I’ve been having, Ugalde thought, it won’t snow for days before and after we break Basa’s jail—that night the weather will be still and white and as easy for tracking as the reading of large type.

That was why the barracks at Burguete and Zubiri were so important. That was why they were always on his mind. How do you shut them up without killing? If they, or Basa’s Summerhouse, get one chance to speak, the Civil Guard and the army will be so thick on the ground there’ll be no chance for anybody to get away. Everything’s modern, the mechanic at Zubiri said. This was no Arrabal raid of the simple hit-and-run days.

There must be no killing. The thought rhymed in his head. It had to be done without killing. And it came to him all in one piece, how it would be done. It would amuse Basa if they were on the same side. Even his obsession, “timing,” fell away as a problem. The thing was perfect, simple and obvious. Everything’s modern—doctors as well as radio techniques. He felt near to omnipotence and could see no possible objection that anyone might raise.

He was wrapped up, hunched on his horse like a Mongolian nomad, the snow gathering on him as he climbed the mountain to the farm of Carlos Echiverri. There was no hurry. Urbina would be there. He was curious about anybody else who might be at Carlos’ machismo supper. They would eat and sing and dance and drink first. He could do very well without that; he was in no hurry even to talk to them till he had gone over the scheme that came unbidden or out of some psychic reservoir, and understood its details and its needs. It would smash Basa’s professional pride; it would take them in and out without leaving a trace. I’m a bewildered old man, Basa said. Not that old, but plainly wounded and far more moved and distressed by having Mauro in jail than Ugalde had believed possible. Gaunt. Like a mask, his face was. I had to run from it, Ugalde remembered.

He shook the snow and the thought away. The thought was disabling. He wrapped his will around him like a defence against friends, and turned his horse from the dirt road onto the track to Carlos’ farm. If they reject my plan, I can do it alone, without them, and leave Hierro in jail, he thought. It was a threat to use when the arguments began. He could hear the music of the homemade fiddles across the deep silence. Higher up the slope the dim lights of Carlos’ windows were like a cluster of candles. The snow was up over his horse’s hocks. The beast was slow, stepping high, laboring. He gave it time. The meeting itself made him nervously impatient. There’d be argument and his life had been spent without argument; decisions were made, serious decisions, in mutually loving survivors’ talk with Maria-Angeles. This would be different. He took more time in the byre, giving his horse a long rubdown with straw. There were four other horses. Two of them were Urbina’s, two belonged to Carlos. Who used one of Urbina’s horses? The men were dancing when he opened the kitchen door, Urbina making a great leap in a small space, facing the door to the byre.

“The savior is come,” he shouted as he landed, signalling silence.

Ugalde felt the venom boil in his belly. That was the man who seduced his son from the invincible family front. He was sure of it. The Basque language lessons he gave them were Urbina’s cover, and he had never seen it, never even suspected it. And Urbina had been laughing at him all the time. He hated the vet for his own blindness and the man’s disdain. This was the one he felt like killing, for Maria-Angeles’ pain, for his own suffering, for Mauro’s folly, even for Basa’s dilemma. Mauro was his vulnerable flank and this man found it. Survivors ought to forego children. He had never thought so before, but wasn’t poor old Mendez in the same boat, fighting for breath and life and his son in jail—for what? For wanting a trade union to be run by and for its members. His offence—how could it be an offence among reasonable men?—was righteous compared to Mauro’s. And who could help old Mendez? Ugalde stood in the kitchen doorway, blinded by his thoughts.

Carlos elbowed Urbina aside, “Welcome to my house, doctor. Come in and eat. We kept food and wine for you.” He took the doctor by the elbow and steered him toward the kidney-shaped stone fireplace. “Get warm first. The dancing’s over.”

“I had more leaps to show you,” Urbina protested petulantly.

“Leap out of your skull,” Carlos said sharply, and the vet sat down at once on his bench behind the kitchen table. Where the power lay was made clear.

Ugalde ate and drank crouching on a low stool, his earthenware dish of chickpea stew balanced on his knees. Carlos took a pair of bellows from among the pots and dishes keeping warm on the top slab of the fireplace and blew on the fire. It was unnecessary; the fire in the knee-hole well was blazing. Then he pulled a stool close to Ugalde and sat on it.

The other three men were across the kitchen, Urbina behind the table, leaning on his forearms, watching the doctor; Paco, from the truck garage in the village, sat on a homemade chair in front of the table. Paco? That was interesting. How often have I patched Paco’s hands when he’s cut them at his work? Ugalde wondered. They were like the political police, this Fifth Assembly crowd. Who were they? Who knew? The third man sat on a stool near the door into the byre. Yes, they were like the secret police. Everything’s modern, this young man said to him when they drank coffee in the service station down at Zubiri. Like calleth unto like and the politicals and the Fifth Assembly circled one another like wolves before a fight. Poor Mauro, a lamb between wolf packs. Only the fire made a sound in the kitchen. Only Urbina appeared to watch Ugalde. The others stared patiently at the stone-flagged floor, and at the onion and garlic strings slung above, and at the homemade fiddles back on their hooks on the beams, and with their peripheral sight, at the doctor, nearing the end of his chickpea stew. He put his dish on the fire-top, took a long draught of red wine from an earthen pitcher and set the pitcher at his feet. Carlos washed his dish and spoon and put them in a heavy cupboard against the wall. They waited for Carlos and the silence remained. Ugalde studied their dark, weathered faces. Paco was a handsome man with grey hair under a beret, and a short moustache. The young man from the Zubiri service station had a narrow sharp face and a blue chin. His black hair was greased straight back. It shone, under the old lamp hanging from the beam above his head, like black leather.

Ugalde felt his strength grow. There were no doubts in his mind. He knew exactly how to open the Summerhouse without a shot. It would be done his way. He would make small concessions to their experience, whatever it was, but it would be his way. He knew where he intended to begin and how he intended to proceed. He said to Urbina, “What experience have you of this sort of thing?” His right hand stroked the back of his head and his fingers dipped under the collar of his heavy coat on which melted snow was still drying. His tone was the edgy tone of a man trying to pick a fight.

“Experience? You are asking me?” the vet said, pushed upright in derision, his big hands flat on the table.

“Any?” Ugalde said, his hand on the back of his head.

“Tell us about yours,” Urbina said, “in France.” The theme seemed to stay on his mind.

Ugalde bent suddenly forward and his right hand whipped from the back of his neck past his right ear. A knife slammed into the doorframe of the bedrom behind the kitchen. It was no more than two feet from Urbina’s head.

Only Urbina moved. He was flat on the table, his head turned, watching the knife quivering in the frame.

Ugalde stood up and took off his coat. Inside it, just under the collar and nestling in the sheepskin lining was a white sheath sewn against the white lining. He laid the coat along the back of the fire-top and walked across the kitchen to the doorframe.

“Doing that makes me feel juvenile,” he said as he wrenched the knife from the wood. “I haven’t got a melodramatic nature.” He could feel his stomach trembling. I planned that, I provoked him for an excuse to scare him and shut him up and it was cheap and childish, he thought. After half a lifetime of gentle care, his own display stirred feelings of self-dislike. He went back to his stool and laid the knife at his feet. Do it as you planned it, he told himself. Mauro is the prize; these men are the tools. “My father-in-law taught me to use a knife,” he said. “If you will look at the supports on the stalls in my stable you will see that I have kept in practice.” He said to Urbina, who was upright again, “Urbina, bring your clownish mouth under control. You got my son into the Fifth Assembly. Why you did it I don’t know, but I suspect your patriotism is as thin as your courage. I think, in fact, that you had no better reason for doing it than childish jealousy because you are a vet and I am a doctor and by getting my boy into this you scored against the doctor …”

“Doctor …” Carlos said.

“Hear me out, Carlos,” Ugalde said. “I don’t talk much but if you want into Basa’s Summerhouse you will hear me out. Or I can leave now. Which will you have?”

“Go on,” Carlos said, defeated by astonishment.

“Urbina,” Ugalde came back like a challenge to his question, “what experience have you of this sort of thing?” He felt the effort on his nervous energy as if he had lifted a great weight too many times.

“I’m an explosives man.”

“Be more specific.”

“Demolition. Barracks,” Urbina said economically.

“Successfully?”

“Why not?”

“You made the Iruña Zarra bomb for my son.”

“Yes.”

“The rest of you?”

Small arms attacks on isolated Civil Guard barracks, two banks, gun-running over the mountains, the dynamite demolition of four widely separated barracks, the passing of men from the mountains to the coast and from the coast to the mountains. Ugalde thought what they told him a queer tale of irrelevant courage, utterly wasted, utterly useless. A few hundred men, girls and boys, in isolated groups, futilely picking with a pin at the blisters on the backside of the body politic. Getting a son out of jail was like opening a major front beside their efforts.

“This will be done my way,” he said strongly.

Paco said, “With great respect, doctor, why should it be done your way? What experience have you of this sort of thing?”

“I’ll tell you, Paco. My son is in there and I want him out. When I get him out, my life and my wife’s and my son’s life in Spain are over. The Ministry of Health will cancel my license to practice. The profession will strike me from the Register. I’ll not be able to practice abroad. We must go and this time there will be no return. So what does it matter that I tell you now what I have hidden? I am of Ramosierra in Castile. From the mountains of Castile to Irun, to the day he died in Huesca, I was with Luis Arrabal. I buried him in the mountains of Huesca after our last action. From Irun to Huesca I was his second-in-command. That is my experience.” He felt an immense sense of liberation, as if a prison he had lain in half a lifetime had opened to let him go free.

Urbina said, “A long time ago.” He was afraid to add, If it is true at all.

“A long time ago. But the best you can call on and the only man you can use who knows that place, inside and out. It will be done my way, or I will do it myself, and for my son alone.” He felt like a strutting actor in a cheap Western, entirely out of character. But he said to Carlos, “Is it to be my way?”

“We shall talk,” Carlos said. “We can find agreement, doctor. Hierro must be brought out.” Carlos appeared to want agreement above all else. He looked at each of his three men in turn and said, “We shall find agreement.” They looked back at him as if thoughts known only to themselves were passing from mind to mind along invisible wires. “Remember that,” Carlos said, nodding his head at them like a father of willful sons. Or a conductor. To Ugalde he said, “Tell us your way and we shall see.”

It was easier than Ugalde expected. He attributed this to his own single-mindedness, his settled will and his determination to dominate them, however high the emotional cost might be. There were moments when he was so conscious of being in command that he felt he could demolish Basa’s Summerhouse with his will alone.

“They have two sources of power,” Ugalde said, “their own and the public supply. Their own takes over automatically if the public supply is cut. They have phone and radio communication. If we cut the public supply and the phone we alert them. At once they alert the whole chain, from here to Pamplona and from here to the frontier. To succeed against them, our timing would have to be perfect and since we cannot tell at what precise moment they would become alarmed, we cannot perfect our timing.”

This was the problem that had defeated him in all his efforts to think of a way into and out of Basa’s Summerhouse without fighting and killing. It was the problem that stirred somewhere in him his whole-cloth solution. “What is your name?” he asked the mechanic from the service station at Zubiri.

“Rof.”

“Well, Rof, you will have to work …”

“I will assign them, doctor,” Carlos said sharply.

Ugalde shrugged. “As you will.” It made no difference and it was a concession to Carlos. But the tone annoyed him. “The first step,” he said, “is to immobilize the entire staff of the Summerhouse and the Guards in the Burguete barracks. If we do that efficiently, we don’t need to think of them getting word out to the Zubiri barracks. And it can be done efficiently.”

Urbina leaned his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. His head was shaking from side to side. Ugalde could hear his deliberately half-muffled laughter. He picked his knife from the floor by his feet.

“Stop him,” he said grimly to Carlos, and knew it to be more in desperation than in anger.

“Urbina!”

The vet sat up solemn-faced with mockery.

“Do you trust that fool?” Ugalde asked Carlos.

“We are also trying to trust you, doctor,” Carlos said. “We want to. So far, we have nothing.” He signalled him curtly to go on.

Ugalde festered with resentment. It was not in his experience that the patient disputed the prescription. “The barracks and the Summerhouse get their meat from the butcher Criado for their Thursday stew,” Ugalde said. “It is part of the program to endear the Civil Guard to the local people. If Paco and his wife will get Criado and his wife out of their house for two hours on Wednesday night, I will deal with the meat.”

“Do not assign us, doctor …”

Ugalde exploded. “Damn you, man, if you say that again I’ll do this myself and leave your man in jail. I know the habits of my patients and their friends better than you do, sitting up here on your Goddamned mountain. Paco will occupy Criado and his wife. Is that clear?”

Paco said, “He’s right, Carlos. We play cards together.”

Carlos said nothing. His hands were tight in an angry grip.

“Criado prepares the meat for them. He cuts it into chunks and it sits in his place on Wednesday night in the kettles it’s cooked in in the kitchens—a big kettle for the Summerhouse, a smaller one for the barracks. They collect it on Thursday morning. I need two hours to doctor it. They eat stew on Thursday nights at nine …”

“They eat in shifts,” Carlos said.

“They work in shifts. They eat at nine—the shift going off and the shift coming on eat at nine, together, and while they do, the place is closed up as tight as a drum. Five hours after they eat, they’ll start going down, very sick men. Very, very sick men—very unpleasantly sick. In a very short time they’ll be immobilized completely, incapable of anything.”

“What will you put in the meat?”

Ugalde said warily, “Leave the medical chores to me, Carlos. When the first few go down, they won’t call Zubiri for reinforcements, they’ll call Pamplona for a service’s doctor. They’ll not ask a civilian to go in there …”

“They asked you,” Paco said.

“Basa asked me. My son is in there now, Paco. Will they ask me again?”

“No.”

“What about the prisoners?” Rof asked. “They’ll be sick too. How do we move sick men?”

“They have a separate kitchen. They don’t eat the same food. You didn’t think the Civil Guard would think your man an equal, did you?”

“All I did was ask,” Rof said, looking at Carlos for support.

“Go on, doctor,” Carlos said.

“They’ll call for a medical officer. As more men go down, maybe they’ll call again. The barracks will call. All they’ll hear is that the medical officer’s on his way. By then, two of us will be over the fences in white coats and hospital masks, we’ll open the gates and the rest is easy. It will take fifteen minutes at most.”

“One of those fences has a charge that kills, doctor,” Carlos said as if Ugalde were an idiot.

“We need a very light sectional ladder—a sectional stepladder that can be assembled and locked by a man as he goes up it and a section he can fit into an upturned V-shaped locking crown and lowered over the other side.”

“And get killed or shot in floodlights,” Rof said skeptically.

“Aluminum. Very light. Strong men can hold it off the wire while it is assembled. There’ll be nobody capable of doing anything about us. And when relief eventually comes to them the place will be open and empty and there’ll be no explanation.”

They debated it. Rof and Paco agreed that the stepladder could be made and used, providing there were enough men to hold it off the wire while a small, light man assembled it in sections. Paco drew it for them and Rof made suggestions. It could be made by the factory men in Pamplona in a few days, they said. “Our men. Good craftsmen.”

“Do you guarantee the doctored meat?” Carlos demanded.

“It will be effective, Carlos. It will also be cruel. They will suffer.”

“It won’t affect us?”

“Only the smell will affect us. It will be fierce.”

“Shit?” Urbina asked, and Ugalde did not answer. Nobody pressed the point.

“What about the medical officer they send for?” Rof asked.

“Intercept him. Drive his car up here and leave it in the compound and him in a cell.”

“Fifteen minutes in and out?” Carlos was counting. “To cross two fences with this stepladder and get out with the prisoners?”

“Use wire cutters on the outside fence,” Ugalde said. “It isn’t charged. And once we’re in, we’ll be running. Twenty minutes at the outside, but fifteen’s more like it.”

They argued about it for an hour. The arguments wearied Ugalde. They used more energy than an epidemic. In the end only Urbina opposed the plan.

“We want the floor plan of the building,” Carlos said.

“I’ll be there. You don’t need the plan.”

“I want it.”

“You can’t have it.”

The storm lasted for a long time. Ugalde was grimly adamant. No floor plan. “I will direct you,” he repeated monotonously and would not be moved, and his strength drained. I will not, he thought, let them out of my control.

“And now, the price,” he said when they gave up.

“Your son, Mauro. He’s the price.”

“It’s higher than that, Carlos. I want his friends, Haro and Reis, and the girl and secure transport to the coast for all of us and a fishing boat to Bayonne. I have thought a lot about the Fifth Assembly. You’re like the secret police—you’re everywhere.”

It was the longest and fiercest storm of the night. Urbina’s rage was close to hysteria. “They are all police spies,” he yelled.

“That’s a damned lie. Even the police deny it.”

“How do you know that?”

“They told me.”

“You’re still in touch with them? How do we know you’re not one? You’re leading us into a trap.”

Ugalde’s knife whipped before Urbina’s face and they were seized. “Your mouth will kill you yet,” Ugalde screamed, limp and wet and out of control.

“We will have them, you quack! Your own, that’s all you can have.”

When they were safely dragged apart, Ugalde put on his coat. “I can do it without you,” he said. “Hierro can rot.”

Carlos blocked his way to the door. “We have been friends a long time, doctor. Tonight we have been angry. But that’s all. We can agree.”

“If I stay, I will kill that goatherd.”

“If he speaks again, I will do it for you.”

Ugalde stayed. He sat by the fire, his coat on the floor beside him, his knife in his hand. “As much as clear your throat, Urbina, and I’ll put this knife all the way through you. You are the most contemptible scum I have ever known and …”

“Doctor,” Carlos said impatiently. He swept his arm across the room. “The doctor can have the two young men and the girl, along with his son, Mauro. Is that agreed?”

They looked at one another and at Carlos. Urbina put his head in his hands. Carlos nodded to them as if to tell them what to say. They said, “Agreed.”

“I did not say it,” Urbina muttered.

“Urbina!”

There was one more issue. “No guns,” Ugalde said. “There will be no need for guns. There will be no killing, at the barracks or the Summerhouse.”

“Not one man would go into that compound unarmed, doctor,” Carlos protested. “We are going against soldiers. If one of them is only half sick, he would kill us all.”

Ugalde knew it. “Then you and Paco only.” And that was agreed. With surprising ease. But Ugalde was too weary to be surprised. He raised the last two questions.

“Can you have the stepladder for next Thursday?”

“Easily.”

“Then that is the day. How many men?”

“Leave that to us,” Carlos said, and Ugalde was too weary to argue. It could be done by three or four men. If they thought they needed more, that was their business. He had what he wanted. “There’ll be secure transport and a boat,” Carlos said. “Paco will come to see you at your surgery.”

Ugalde put on his coat again. “Are you coming down the mountain, Paco? Rof?”

There was a moment’s awkwardness. “I will sleep here and leave early,” Rof said.

“I’ll come down in the morning,” Paco said. “I’m tired.”

“We will talk some more together, doctor,” Carlos said. “We have other business.”

“But we are agreed.”

“We are agreed.”

Ugalde saddled his horse and went down the mountain. It was snowing heavily now and the track to the dirt road had disappeared. “Home,” he said to his horse, and withdrew into his coat. It was all agreed. No one need die. Mauro and his friends would be free; Basa’s humiliation would be great but not made crushing by the death of any of his men; and they would reach France.

Then what would they do? That was a question for another day, not for the small hours of this weary morning. He dozed inside the high collar of his coat.

Maria-Angeles was waiting in the kitchen. The coffee pot was ready.

“We shall withdraw what little we have from the bank,” he said, “and leave everything we’ve gathered in the past twenty-five years. It will be next Thursday.” The news excited her.

“Good,” she said crisply. “We shall manage, my dear one. Somehow. And we’ll have taken our son from them. They’ll have no more of us.” She poured his coffee. “There are still rich people in France who’ll need a good Spanish cook.”

“Spanish waiters are also in great demand,” he said morosely and pushed the coffee away, “and I am tired. Very, very tired. I must go to bed.”

He dreamed that Urbina had the body of a goat with some sickness in its belly and he asked the men for the chance to operate and they cried in chorus, laughing, “Agreed.”

And he pulled his throwing knife from the back of his coat and they cried in chorus, laughing, “Agreed.”

And he raised the knife to separate the man’s head from the goat’s body and awoke. But he could still hear them in his head, crying in chorus and laughing, “Agreed.”