Law of Return, page 6
“So you thought so, too?” her father asked, after a sidelong glance to make sure that she was not going to say anything further.
Elena took a deep breath. “Yes. Actually, I . . .” her voice was a croak, and for a moment she felt again the rage and terror of that darkened street in Madrid. “Actually, I thought it was a bit funny, the way he tipped over the chair.”
The professor laughed. “It’s a treat to see them trip up once in a while, isn’t it?” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “I only wish it happened more often.”
Notwithstanding his white hair and distinguished appearance, the professor spoke with the undisguised glee of a schoolboy. Elena bit her lip. The worst part of telling her father that she knew the lieutenant would be reliving her brief encounter with the Falangist soldiers. But it would not be easy to admit that she had sobbed out her fear and confusion in Tejada’s arms either.
María was waiting for them when they returned home. She immediately demanded news of Guillermo’s interview with the Guardia Civil, and the brief meeting was dissected minutely. Elena sat without listening and let her parents’ voices wash over her. I have to tell them, she thought. He’ll see papa again next week. And if he says anything . . . For the first time, Elena wondered what the lieutenant had thought of the meeting. She was sure he had recognized her. Perhaps he had already known that she might be there. Her father’s file must include the names of his family. It was even possible that the Guardia Civil had started a file on her in Madrid, although going to so much trouble over a mere schoolteacher with left-wing sympathies seemed unlikely. Maybe he won’t say anything, if he didn’t today. Elena was too nervous to judge whether this was a reasonable hope. It did not occur to her that Lieutenant Tejada might have been as embarrassed as she was, albeit for slightly different reasons.
“. . . can’t think of a better idea,” her father was saying.
“What do you think, Elenita?” her mother asked.
Elena blinked. “Sorry, what?”
Her mother looked at her with concern. “I was saying that if we do manage to make this trip to San Sebastián, we’ll have to figure out a way to house our Theoklymenos. Your father thought maybe Hipólito could help.”
Elena considered for a moment. “I’m sure he would,” she said at last. “But I don’t see how he can, exactly.”
Guillermo frowned. “It depends on Meyer’s passport, of course. If he can book a passage, then I thought Hipólito could meet him at the other side. If someone could arrange his entry into Mexico. . . .”
“What about money for the passage?” Elena asked.
“That was what I said.” María’s triumph was muted by worry over her daughter’s apparent inattention.
“I don’t know how much he’ll be able to afford,” the professor admitted, troubled. “And even if he has money, it’s illegal to send it out of the country.”
“And then there’s the question of other expenses,” Elena added dryly.
Her mother smiled at her. “We can feed him, Elenita.”
Elena felt a flash of annoyance at her parents’ naiveté. “I meant false papers,” she said baldly. “And bribes, if necessary. You don’t know the state of his passport, and unless you’d like to walk into the sergeant’s . . . the lieutenant’s office and ask about visas, I suggest you double the amount necessary for a legal emigration.”
Guillermo winced and Elena’s spark of irritation was snuffed out by guilt. It was cruel to play on her father’s fear of the Guardia. Her mother moved on to another problem. “It’s all very well to speak of a passage to Mexico, but even if money weren’t a problem, where could he sail from? Even if the Guardia approve a trip to San Sebastián, they’ll be suspicious of a request to travel to a port immediately afterward.”
“He doesn’t require a chaperone, María.” The professor spoke with a certain grim amusement.
“Does he speak Spanish?” his wife countered.
Guillermo, whose conversations with Joseph Meyer had been essentially in classical Greek punctuated by French or German when necessary, blinked sheepishly. “He knows French and Latin quite well,” he offered.
“Very helpful if he wants to communicate with monks!” his wife retorted.
Elena shook her head, trying to clear her mind of the memory of Tejada’s voice saying with amused incredulity, “Surely you don’t actually know Latin?” Her parents saw the movement, and turned to her expecting a comment. “Can’t he stay here?” she asked. “One border crossing is complicated enough.”
“Without a ration card?” her father asked.
“Mama said we could feed him.”
“For the short term,” the professor amended, looking at the sharply drawn planes in Elena’s face, wondering if a generous impulse to a colleague was about to take food from his only daughter’s mouth. “And it would be impossible to keep him in hiding indefinitely.”
“I don’t see how you plan to get rid of him though.” María’s voice was taut with strain.
Guillermo, who had the increasing conviction that he should never have replied to the fugitive’s letter, did his best to speak reassuringly. “Maybe we won’t have to. It’s too early to tell yet. We’ll have to see what happens in France.”
“You’d send him back?” María asked sarcastically, knowing the answer as she spoke.
“The Germans only reached Paris last week,” Guillermo replied in what he hoped was a placating tone. “And in the north the French relied too much on the Maginot Line. It may be different in the south. The Provençals are Catalans, really. Good fighters.”
To the professor’s relief, his wife and daughter seemed willing to let this shaky comfort stand. The Fernández family continued to worry intermittently about this topic throughout the evening, but little progress was made. Guillermo, whose courage was always at its peak on Friday evenings, when his next interview with the Guardia Civil was furthest away, promised to ask for permission to take “a family vacation” in San Sebastián the following week. Elena wondered uneasily if he was relying on her presence at the Guardia post the following week, and then, with a little spurt of alarm, remembered that she would have to invent an excuse to avoid Lieutenant Tejada in the future. María watched her husband’s return to equanimity with pleasure, but was slightly worried by her daughter’s withdrawal.
Professor Fernández’s tenuous optimism was destroyed the following afternoon. The family was assembled in the living room after a depressingly frugal lunch. María was writing to Hipólito. Elena was rereading, somewhat listlessly, a novel that had been a childhood favorite. Guillermo was reviewing his monthly bank statement, a task made more interesting by the Guardia Civil’s propensity for temporarily freezing his account without warning. The professor punctuated his calculations with occasional whistles between his teeth when perturbed. This had been an uneventful month though, and the task was finished relatively quickly, and with fewer whistles than usual. “Do you mind if I turn on the radio?” he asked, closing his accounts with a satisfied air, and pushing himself to his feet.
“Hmmm? No, it’s fine.” María glanced up, and returned to her letter. “Do you want to add anything to my letter?”
“Of course. When you are finished.” The professor crossed the room to the radio, and paused with his hand on the knob. “Any requests, Elena?”
His daughter shook her head. “No, oh, music, I suppose.”
“News is always bad,” María agreed with a smile.
Guillermo flicked the switch and static filled the air, followed in rapid succession by the high singsong tones of General Franco, a combination of horns and strings that sounded vaguely jazzlike, static again, and the clipped English of the BBC. “Let me know when to stop,” the professor said, still spinning the dial slowly, as a woman’s voice crooned the last strains of a love song, and a warm bass said, “You’re listening to Radio Española.”
“Something less sentimental,” María requested.
There was another burst of static, and then the precise tones of a newscaster: “Once again, the surrender of Maréchal Petain’s government to the German forces has been confirmed. In a statement made earlier today, the Maréchal said, quote . . .”
There was a thud as Elena’s book slid out of her lap unheeded. Guillermo Fernández stood, one hand poised over the radio, as if frozen by some latter-day Medusa. María’s pen slid in her shaking hands, blotting half a line. Their preference for music forgotten, the Fernández family listened intently to the news. Only when the announcer began detailing the casualties resulting from a bridge collapsing over the Ebro did Elena say, “It’s mostly lies, probably.” Her voice trembled only slightly. “Radio Burgos broadcast lies about Madrid all through the war. Remember, I told you.”
“They managed to get the date of the surrender right though,” Guillermo muttered.
María shook her head. “It doesn’t seem possible that they’ve conquered France. I mean . . . France . . . it’s . . . it’s not a small country.”
Her husband looked grim. “Give me that letter,” he ordered. “I think it’s a good idea to write to Hipólito about all this.”
María handed over the paper, but with a pleading look. “You’ll be discreet?”
“Of course.” The professor smiled briefly, paternal pride glowing through current worry. “The boy knows enough Greek to read a simple message.”
“But—”
“I’ll use quotes, María. Hipólito knows his Homer. And even a literate censor will have trouble following if I slip something extra into a citation.”
The professor spent the better part of an hour writing to his son. By the time he finished the letter, it was too late to go to the post office. He accepted the delay with unexpected calm, and proposed to his wife a stroll around the plaza. She accepted, and Elena, feeling that her presence was unnecessary, stayed home, ostensibly to read but actually to brood. Guillermo’s calm was unimpaired that evening, even though his wife had noted that they were being discreetly tailed by a guardia civil.
María was almost unnerved by the change in her husband over the next few days. In spite of the alarming news from France, and in spite of the fact that the Guardia had almost certainly stepped up their surveillance again, he seemed more decided and more contented than he had been in years. He’s glad that Meyer wrote to him, María thought resignedly. It’s like that business with Don Miguel all over again. It was noble of Guillermo to take risks to help colleagues. His generosity was one of the things she loved about him. But she sometimes suspected that it would be more restful to have a husband who was content without taking insane risks. It was, María supposed, merely the law of averages that Elena seemed to be falling to pieces just as Guillermo pulled himself together. A family vacation! María thought, as her husband began to talk of writing to hotels in San Sebastián. It will be a wonder if we all come out of this one alive!
Guillermo’s good mood received an abrupt check when the mail arrived on Wednesday afternoon. The postman had brought only one envelope. It was crumpled, but the address, in Professor Fernández’s own handwriting, was still legible: 12 Rue de Lafayette, Toulouse. One end had been slit, and resealed with the stamp of the Spanish censors, but the seal on the envelope remained untampered with. Stamped across the back of the envelope were the words: UNDELIVERABLE: SERVICE SUSPENDED, and a black stamp of an eagle perched over a swastika, its wings spread, with the words: OBERKOMMANDO DER WEHRMACHT.
Guillermo brought the letter into the kitchen without speaking, and held it out to María. She looked at the envelope that her husband had mutely offered for her inspection, half hoping that Guillermo’s newfound and possibly suicidal determination would falter under this blow. Then she raised her eyes to his face. “Perhaps the mail is only disrupted for a few days,” she suggested gently. “After all, a lot has happened lately.”
Guillermo sank into a chair, shaking his head. “Wasn’t that what you said about Madrid?” he remarked.
It was his wife’s turn to wince. The nightmare months of Guillermo’s imprisonment, when she had tried over and over again to write to Elena, too frightened to telephone her, and never certain if the letters went through, were all too vivid. “Try again in a few days,” she pleaded, forgetting that she had hoped that the problem of Joseph Meyer might be solved by continued postal delays. “You don’t have anything to lose.”
“I suppose not.” The professor sighed, and leaned his forehead on his hand. “But I don’t see the point.”
“We’ll find a way.” María spoke soothingly, and tucked the offending letter into the cookbook she had been reading, as if it were a bookmark, so that it would be out of her husband’s sight.
“I don’t see how.”
The gist of this conversation was repeated at intervals during dinner, until Elena thought that she would go mad. She had noted the impending approach of her father’s Friday interview with the Guardia Civil with increasingly guilty dread. Now, adding to her guilt, was the feeling that she should have been helping her mother to cheer her father.
“The letter to Hipólito was sent without any difficulty,” María reminded him. “And Friday you’ll ask about San Sebastián. . . .”
“My God!” The professor shuddered. “I’m not looking forward to that either.”
“Perhaps you could ask the lieutenant if he knows anything about when the mail will be back to normal,” Elena suggested without thinking.
Her parents turned to stare at her, and she flushed as she recognized the absurdity of her idea. But she succeeded in striking a spark from her father. “You ask him,” he said, wryly, “since you’re so at ease in his company.”
Elena was grateful for the note of humor, but decided somewhat unhappily that this was not the best time to explain that she wished to avoid another meeting with the lieutenant.
Chapter 7
Tejada spent a good deal more time than he would have liked thinking about his encounter with Elena Fernández over the next few days. He told himself that he was merely worrying about her to take his mind off of his work, which was proving irritating. He might, however, have devoted even more mental time to the professor’s daughter had he not been so busy. Circumstances certainly seemed to conspire to bring her to mind.
In the absence of actual clues to Arroyo’s whereabouts, Tejada had fallen back on careful scrutiny of the records of Arroyo’s fellow petitioners. He instinctively and unconsciously avoided scrutinizing Guillermo Fernández’s too closely, until a chance comment made by Sergeant Hernández on Monday morning about the failure to check on Fernández’s associates made him aware of the oversight.
“What do you want me to do?” he snapped. “Send to Madrid to see if there’s a file on his daughter as well? I’m sure that will help with Arroyo!”
“No, sir,” the sergeant replied quickly. Hernández had quickly come to like the lieutenant, and he had not expected the sharp note in Tejada’s voice. Because he liked Tejada, however, he risked another question. “How did you know she was in Madrid, sir?”
Tejada deposited the Fernández file in the filing cabinet, and slammed the drawer shut with slightly more violence than necessary. “Because, Sergeant,” he said with careful formality, “you may recall that I interviewed Fernández on Friday and, despite your apparent opinion, I did my best to avoid negligence.”
“Understood, sir.” The sergeant knew when not to ask more questions.
To satisfy his conscience, Tejada persuaded himself that there was no evidence that any of the petitioners had had any contact with Arroyo recently. It was far more likely that his wife or his employer knew something about his whereabouts. The idea of another interview with Señora Otero de Arroyo was not attractive. Tejada looked up the address of Arroyo’s employer, and set out to meet the man who had hired Professor Arroyo after his enforced retirement from the university.
Tejada found the law offices of Doctor Eduardo Crespo without difficulty. They were on the Rua Mayor, in what had been a wealthy neighborhood, halfway between the Plaza Mayor and the university. Like all of Salamanca, the row houses along the Rua Mayor were made of yellow-gold sandstone. Unlike much of the city, they were in excellent repair, clean and golden, instead of sooty. A discreet and highly polished brass plaque proclaimed that Eduardo Crespo, Doctor of Jurisprudence, would be found on the main floor of number eight. The concierge who opened the door bowed the lieutenant up the stairs to a large set of rooms overlooking the street.
A fair-haired man in a gray suit sat behind a desk in the outer office, typing something. He was not an expert typist, and his index fingers hovered over the keys like pistons, pouncing occasionally. He was apparently absorbed in what he was doing. Tejada coughed to get his attention. The man looked up. His eyebrows rose as he took in the lieutenant’s uniform, but all he said was, “Yes, Señor Guardia? Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Eduardo Crespo.” Tejada did not waste words.
“Do you have an appointment, Señor?”
“I am here in an official capacity.” Tejada’s voice was absolutely calm, but he was somewhat puzzled. People very rarely asked uniformed guardias civiles if they had appointments. Crespo’s clerk (or secretary, or junior partner) was either exceptionally brave or exceptionally stupid.
The fair-haired man held Tejada’s gaze a moment longer, and then stood up. “I’ll see if he’s available.”
“Thank you.” Tejada, watching the young man’s progress towards an oak-paneled inner door, noticed a slight limp. War wound, thought the lieutenant, revising his estimation of the clerk.
