Vendetta in Spain ddr-2 Read online

  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 hts 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 Senor 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 inquiries about ships sailing for Barcelona. Having learned that a two-thousand-five-hundred-ton cargo vessel, the Velez-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 cafes 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 piece 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 Velez-Rubio. There were only two other passengers on board; a doctor named Luque and his wife. They were a middle-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 knew him as Senor 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 Tsarist police were going into the matter. To avoid arrest, and probable exile to Siberia, he had realized 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 Velez-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 Velez-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 pension 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 Nautical 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 cafes and restaurants had been bui
lt 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 patronized some of its sideshows.

  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 organization 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 Vendome; 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 Nar-bonensis 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 fuel 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 Dona Gulia had told the Count that Barcelona was the stronghold of Spanish anarchy - he had good grounds for assuming that, both being subversive organizations, 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 Tsarist 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 hand-grip, 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 organized the French Revolution. Its ramifications spread all over Europe and it had later been responsible for all those bloody upheavals 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.

  In 1904, in collaboration with the atheist War Minister of France, it had launched a great campaign to undermine the strength of the French Army, and de Quesnoy had become a Freemason with the object of exposing this evil combination. Under the name of Vasili Petrovitch, and posing as a Russian political refugee, he had succeeded in doing so; and now, feeling certain that the Spanish Masonic Lodges would be the natural meeting places for anarchists, he had been contemplating on his way to Barcelona an attempt to repeat the process. Unfortunately, however, having exposed the War Minister he had, at the eleventh hour, been exposed himself; and the Freemasons had learned that their betrayer, Vasili Petrovitch, was in fact Colonel the Count de Quesnoy.

  Thus, though remote, there was a slight element of risk in his plan; for although he was using a different Russian name and background, if in a Barcelona Lodge it chanced that he came face to face with a visiting French Mason who had known him in Paris, he would be identified, with results that he did not care to contemplate. In consequence, having had the luck to be made a member of the Somaten, which he felt would serve his purpose equally well, he decided there and then to abandon his idea of again becoming a member of a Masonic Lodge.

  To stimulate and direct the political activities of its members was only a part of the Club's function. It was also a social meeting-ground for the officers of merchant ships, Customs officers and other minor officials of the great port. Drinks could be had there at a bar and cold snacks at a buffet. Cards and dice could be played. It also had a library and a small gymnasium; so, quite apart from his special reason for cultivating the company who frequented it, de Quesnoy found it a useful place in which to kill time. And after Modesto Pelayo's return to duty in his ship on the Monday the Count found time hang heavily on his hands.

  He dared not appear too curious and could only leave it to time to develop his acquaintance with several regular frequenters of the Club, whom he suspected might be anarchists, until one of them either took him into his confidence or, inadvertently, made some incriminating admission. As the Club did not open until after the siesta hour, he was reduced in the mornings to taking long solitary walks or strolling aimlessly along the Ramblas among the colourful crowd that always thronged this p
rincipal shopping street of the old town.

  The old town appealed to him, but it formed only a small part of the great modern city. Of Barcelona the Spaniards, even in other cities, were intensely proud, as it had made almost their only contribution to twentieth-century architecture and town-planning. There were many fine blocks of offices and apartments in it, with electric light, lifts, telephones and other up-to-date innovations, and it was laid out like an American city, in blocks intersected by scores of parallel streets. But de Quesnoy found their sameness both confusing and dreary, and he would have much preferred it had his quest taken him back to the picturesque alleyways of Cordoba or the tranquil, irregular side-streets of Seville.

  For him to have spent a pleasant hour or two in any of the better hotels or restaurants would have been to risk being seen going in or out by some members of the Somaten and so, probably, ruining his build-up of himself as a Russian schoolmaster of very limited means. In consequence, as the only alternative to walks in the woods and gardens on the slopes of Montjuich, which lay at the end of the street in which his pensidn was situated, he again took to sightseeing, but he was always relieved when the hour came for him to resume his role as an unsuspected inquiry agent at the Club.

  Yet, strange as he afterwards thought it to be, it was not there that he picked up his first real lead to the militant anarchists of Barcelona, but through Doctor Luque.