Vendetta in Spain Read online

  Having listened to de Quesnoy’s plans, the Ambassador thoughtfully stroked his grey mutton-chop side whiskers for a moment, then said, ‘I can well understand how eagerly His Majesty must have seized on the chance to engage a really trustworthy man of your adventurous disposition in such an undertaking, but I am by no means sure that you would not be wise to tell him that, having thought matters over, you wish to be released from it.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’ de Quesnoy asked in surprise. ‘This mission is the very thing I needed to take my mind off the great loss I have suffered.’

  ‘Perhaps; but there are better ways of employing yourself which would do so equally well, and possibly more swiftly.’

  ‘I can think of no better way of using my mind and abilities than in an attempt to bring some of these devilish assassins to justice.’

  The Ambassador nodded. ‘No one would deny the menace that militant anarchism has become to society, and that the men who plan these callous outrages are deserving of death. But to wage war upon and destroy them is a matter for the State, not a private individual.’

  ‘Surely, Your Excellency, it is the duty of every citizen to help protect his fellows by shooting a mad dog, should he be given the opportunity?’

  ‘Of course, but it is not part of our duty to go in search of mad dogs. Or, if you feel that it is, why did you not long since return to Russia, where the nihilists perpetrate more of these bloody outrages than in any other country, and devote your energies to bringing a number of them to the scaffold?’

  De Quesnoy shrugged. ‘There is the difference that the Ocrana are to be trusted, whereas the Spanish Secret Police are not; so it is only here that my help might prove of value. Besides, I am personally concerned in this. These inhuman monsters murdered my poor Angela.’

  The shrewd eyes of the older man narrowed a little. ‘That is precisely the point that I wished you to admit. You are, in fact, proposing to set out on a vendetta, and deliberately ignoring the divine prohibition expressed by the words “Vengeance is Mine, saith The Lord”.’

  ‘I had not thought of it in that light, but I must confess that there is much in what Your Excellency says. I would certainly not have accepted this mission had it not been for the personal motive.’

  ‘Then I beg you, Armand, to reconsider the matter. In my long experience I have never known good come to a man from allowing his bitterness, however well justified, to drive him into taking the law into his own hands. In this case it is true that you will have the law behind you but, even so, should your activities lead to the death of some of these people, it is you who will ultimately be called to account for that by the highest of all tribunals.’

  For some twenty minutes, they argued the pros and cons of the matter, but de Quesnoy could not be persuaded to forgo the opportunity he had been given to avenge Angela’s death and, at length, the Ambassador reluctantly agreed to aid him by supplying him with certain items which, if at any time his belongings were searched, would substantiate his story that he was a Russian.

  Next, after trying several shops that sold secondhand luggage, he succeeded in finding a rather battered trunk that had on it a number of old labels including those of hotels in Constantinople and Athens. Taking it away with him in a hired carriage, he then had himself driven to a number of secondhand-clothes shops in which he bought two suits, an overcoat, shoes, and a variety of other items that were in good repair but of the inexpensive kind that might have been worn by a minor official. Lastly he obtained from a bookshop in the Puerta del Sol five, mostly well-thumbed, books in Russian, two of which were histories, two novels by Dostoievsky, and one a collection of Communist tracts by Engels.

  After lunch he paid another call at the Embassy and collected three partly-used pencils made in Russia, a block of seven Russian stamps in current use, a small wooden frame with wires across it strung with beads—called an abacus, on which all Russians do their calculating—and a bottle of the Eau de Cologne with which many Russians are in the habit of scenting themselves. In addition, the Ambassador had had some of his Spanish pesetas changed into Russian roubles for him, and handed over a list that he had obtained at the Count’s request of all the ships that had called at Valencia during the past fortnight. Among them there was not one that had come from Constantinople, but a Greek ship had arrived on the 6th from the Piraeus; she might have brought him from Athens, which suited him just as well, and having memorised her name he destroyed the list.

  Returning to the Palacio Cordoba, de Quesnoy made a thorough examination of his purchases and removed from the clothes all marks which might give away their Spanish origin. He then soaked off from the trunk all the labels except those showing that it had been in Constantinople and Athens, and another which showed that it had been in Salonika. Having dressed in one set of his new garments he packed the rest and the other items into the trunk, had it corded and taken downstairs, then said good-bye to his host and hostess, who had returned from Aranjuez at midday. A hired carriage took him to the Atocha station where he bought a second class ticket and at a few minutes before seven boarded the night train for Valencia.

  Corridor coaches and restaurant cars had so far been introduced only on luxury trains, and there were no second class sleepers; but the gauge of the Spanish railways being broader than those in other parts of Europe, except Russia, the coaches were somewhat more comfortable. Nevertheless, until night cooled the air a little it was stiflingly hot and, lolling in his corner, with only a bottle of tepid wine to wash down the sandwiches with which he had supplied himself, he found the long journey exceedingly trying.

  Arriving in Valencia on the morning of the 13th, he asked a cab driver to take him to a modest hotel in the neighbourhood of the University, and was set down at one in the Calle Don Juan de Austria. There he checked in as Señor Nicolai Chirikov and said that he wanted a room for only a few nights while he carried out some research in the University Library. After a meal in a nearby restaurant he went up to his room and to bed, to make up during the hot hours of the day for some of the sleep he had lost during his night journey.

  In the late afternoon he went to the University and, on stating that he was a Russian schoolmaster engaged in writing a book on social conditions in Spain, secured a reader’s ticket. He had no intention of writing anything, but put the ticket carefully away as a useful piece of evidence of his new identity. He then drove out to the port and made enquiries about ships sailing for Barcelona. Having learned that a two-thousand-five-hundred-ton cargo vessel, the Vélez-Rubio, that plied between the Mediterranean ports and took a few passengers was leaving in three days’ time, he ran her Captain to earth in one of the better waterside cafés and, to his satisfaction, arranged for a passage in her.

  On the 14th, having nothing to do, he instinctively went to see the Cathedral; but, as was usual in the Spanish churches, the many fine paintings in it by old masters were ill-lit and, having never been cleaned, had become so darkened by time that they were hardly worth looking at. In the Treasury, among the assorted collection of crystal caskets, ornamented with lack-lustre jewels, that contained the bones of Saints, the piéce de resistance was a vessel said to be the Holy Grail and sent to Spain for safe-keeping during the persecution of the Christians by the Roman Emperor Valerian; but he found it difficult to believe that a poor carpenter had been given a green agate chalice from which to drink.

  His walk round the Botanical Gardens that evening was much more rewarding, as between its groups of tall palms it had a wonderful variety of sub-tropical trees, shrubs and plants. Having found it so pleasant he spent most of the following day there re-reading one of the Dostoievsky novels.

  Next morning he left Valencia in the Vélez-Rubio. There were only two other passengers on board; a doctor named Luque and his wife. They were a midle-aged couple who had chosen this means of returning from a holiday with relatives in Cartagena. De Quesnoy’s reason for travelling by sea was that he wanted to arrive in Barcelona with a few people who k
new him as Señor Chirikov, and had he gone by train the opportunity for making acquaintances would have been briefer and much less good. In pursuance of his design, while the ship chugged her way at a modest six knots through the blue waters of the Mediterranean, he sat with the Luques on the after-deck under an awning and soon became on friendly terms with them.

  During the course of the afternoon they told him of the life they led and the ramifications of their family, while he told them the story he had invented about himself as Nicolai Chirikov. He said that he was a bachelor, had been a teacher in a private school in Odessa, and that it had been part of his duties to take the senior classes in history. He had taught his pupils what, as a Liberal, he regarded as the truth about the exploitation of the masses both in peace and war by autocrats for their own selfish ends. Some of his pupils had retailed his views to their wealthy parents, and he had been tipped off that the Czarist police were going into the matter. To avoid arrest, and probable exile to Siberia, he had realised his few assets as swiftly as possible and fled abroad. A Turkish steamer had taken him down to Constantinople. Then, as he had always longed to see Greece, he had gone on via Salonika to Athens. But there was no possibility of earning a living there; so he had accepted an offer by a sea-captain he had met to take him on for a nominal fee to Spain. After a week in Valencia he had decided that he was more likely to find suitable employment in the much larger city of Barcelona; so was going on there.

  The Luques proved most understanding and sympathetic, but it was among the ship’s officers that de Quesnoy had hoped to find a likely type to sponsor him on his arrival in the Catalonian capital, and, later in the day, he found just such a man in Modesto Pelayo, the Vélez-Rubio’s Second Officer. Pelayo, a bearded, bronzed, broad-shouldered man, had started as a seaman before the mast and was now in his early forties; but his lack of general education made it unlikely that he would ever become master of a vessel, and, as he considered himself a thoroughly competent officer, he naturally felt very bitterly about this limitation to his career. That evening, over a bottle of Anis del Mono paid for by the Count, Modesto and ‘Nicolai’ discussed at length the iniquities of the present social system and parted firm friends, the one to go on watch and the other to go to his cabin.

  The following evening the Vélez-Rubio docked at Barcelona. After promising the Luques to let them know how he got on, de Quesnoy accompanied Pelayo ashore and was taken by him to a clean but inexpensive pensión in the Calle de Cabanas, which was not far from the harbour. They then had supper together and afterwards visited a number of bars in each of which they spent an hour or so drinking. In the early hours it was the Count who found a cab and took the befuddled sailor back to his ship in it.

  But Pelayo had not been so drunk that he did not remember his promise to call for his new friend next morning and show him Barcelona. By that the Count had not supposed that the convivial rough-diamond intended to take him round yet one more Cathedral or to look at another gallery of Old Masters; but he had thought it probable that the tour would include those symbols of tyranny, the palaces in the old city, and, almost certainly, as Modesto was a seafaring man, the one-time Arsenal of the Kings of Aragon which de Cordoba had told him on no account to miss, as it was now a National Museum and contained many interesting relics of the great Conquistadores. He was therefore considerably surprised when, a quarter-of-an-hour after they had boarded a tram, he saw that it had left the main streets behind and was grinding its way uphill towards the northern outskirts of the city.

  On his asking where they were going, Pelayo replied, ‘Why, I promised to show you the city, didn’t I, and you’ll get no better view of it than from Mount Tibidabo.’ And he proved unquestionably right. After changing trams in the suburbs, they took a Funicular Railway, but even that did not take them to the top, and for the final lap they had to trudge, with a little crowd of other people who had been in the Funicular, up steep paths through a wood of pines. When at last, breathless and perspiring, they did reach the summit the panorama from it was one never to be forgotten. From a height of sixteen hundred feet they gazed down on the broad coastal plain with the sprawling city spread out with its centre far below them. The air was so clear that they could pick out all the principal buildings and, looking south over many miles of the shimmering Mediterranean, even discern some faint smudges on the horizon that Pelayo said were the Balearic Isles.

  The mountain had a broad, flat top on which a number of cafés and restaurants had been built and, as it was a Sunday, they were crowded with people; but Pelayo managed to secure a table at which they sat drinking iced beer while admiring the view. Up there, too, was a permanent fun fair and, after lunching off spider crabs, they patronised some if its side-shows.

  Late in the afternoon they returned to the city and, much to de Quesnoy’s secret satisfaction, the evening, if less relaxing, proved unexpectedly profitable from the point of view of his mission; for Modesto took him to a club to which he belonged that was a branch of the Somaten.

  Among the subversive pamphlets which had formed part of the papers that Don Alfonso had secured for him there had been some issued by the Somaten, and also a short account of its history; so he was already aware of its activities. It was a disciplined organisation that had been formed by private citizens of Barcelona in the middle ages with the object of maintaining order, and its motto was ‘Peace, peace and again peace’. But in more recent times it had become the spearhead of the movement for Catalan nationalism.

  De Quesnoy had both read the arguments for that in the pamphlets and discussed it with de Vendôme; so he knew both sides of the question. The Catalans’ case was that their stock inhabited the Mediterranean coast on both sides of the Pyrenees, occupying both the whole of Catalonia and a considerable area of southern France including Marseilles, and that at one time they had been one nation. They therefore claimed that as an individual race, neither French nor Spanish, they were entitled to independence. That their language was still a live one was true, although much more so in the Spanish area than the French, and in Barcelona several papers printed in Catalan were among those with the largest circulation. They had also clung most tenaciously to their racial customs and to certain regional rights extracted through the centuries from their Spanish rulers, and on these they based their case for being given self-government.

  The opposite view was that since very ancient times the Catalans never had been independent. Those to the north of the Pyrenees had in Roman times been absorbed into the provinces of Narbonensis and Provence and later became subjects of the Kings of France; while those to the south had been absorbed into the province of Hither Baetia and later become subjects of the Kings of Aragon. Therefore, from the time of the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469, Catalonia had become an integral part of Spain, and should so remain.

  The same arguments applied to the Basques, who were also agitating for independence. On the Atlantic coast their stock had from time immemorial occupied large areas both to the north and south of the Pyrenees, and they even had a language of their own which resembled no other in Europe; but they too had never been a nation and, for many centuries, while those to the north had owed allegiance to the Kings of Navarre, those to the south had owed allegiance to the Kings of Castile.

  One might almost as well endeavour, reasoned the anti-separatists, to make a case for the peoples of Brittany and Cornwall becoming one nation with self-government, for they too come of the same stock and had a root language in common, and Brittany at least was—for a long period—a Sovereign State; yet the English Channel has separated them hardly less effectively than the Pyrenees has both the Catalans and the Basques.

  For the Spanish Catalans and Basques, union with the French elements of their race could obviously be only a long-term aim, but the agitation by both for Home Rule had in recent years greatly increased. This was especially so among the Catalans as they were the most vigorous and industrious of the Spanish peoples, and much fu
el was added to the fire of their unrest by the knowledge that the hard work they put into their commercial ventures led to their having to contribute far more per head in taxation to the central government than did the lazier populations in other parts of Spain.

  Since the aim of the Somaten was to throw off the yoke of the monarchy and that of the anarchists to abolish government of any kind—and Doña Gulia had told the Count that Barcelona was the stronghold of Spanish anarchy—he had good grounds for assuming that, both being subversive organisations, many members of the Somaten were also anarchists. In consequence he spared no pains to make himself pleasant to those members of the Club to whom Pelayo introduced him.

  In their grave Spanish way they responded readily, and when they learned that he was a refugee from Czarist persecution they eagerly crowded round pressing him to tell them about conditions in Russia. He willingly obliged, purposely exaggerating the situation by implying that the whole nation, except for a handful of aristocrats, went about in constant terror of having something pinned upon them by the Secret Police, and that every political exile was condemned to the horror of the Siberian salt mines.

  Naturally, when the question arose, he declared himself heartily in favour of Catalonian independence, and ‘Nicolai Chirikov’ was obviously so much a man with the right ideas that by midnight he had been proposed and accepted as a member of the Puerto branch of the Somaten.

  His original plan had been to join one of the Barcelona Lodges of Freemasons; since once a Mason always a Mason, and having been initiated in Paris two years earlier he would have had only to find, through the secret handgrip, a Brother Mason to introduce him. Unlike British Masonry, Continental Masonry had for long been the principal breeding-ground of atheism and revolt. It had originated in Germany and in the mid-eighteenth century been brought by the mystic Illuminatii to France. There it had spread rapidly, so that there were soon Lodges of the Grand Orient in every town of any size; and its inner council had undoubtedly organised the French Revolution. Its ramifications spread all over Europe, and it had later been responsible for all those bloody unheavals that overturned half-a-dozen governments in the years 1848 and ’49. Fifty years later it was still a great secret power capable of bringing about revolts in most countries at any time.