Death of a Nationalist (25 page)

A few weeks later, Lieutenant Ramos received notification that he had been promoted to captain and was going to be transferred to command of the Alcalá post. Now, standing in his office at Manzanares, surrounded by piles of boxes, and with his desk unnaturally bare, he looked slightly sheepish. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “But thank you.”

“It’s nothing, Captain.” Tejada enjoyed watching the way Ramos’s lips tugged upward at their corners whenever he heard his new title.

“Oh, and Tejada.” Ramos leaned absentmindedly on the desk, and it rocked.

“Captain?”

“When this came through I recommended you for a promotion, too. It won’t go through this time, I’m afraid. But I wanted you to know.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Tejada said, touched. “That’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all,” Ramos said, coming around the desk and holding out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure to work with you. And honestly, I think the only reason the higher-ups didn’t go for it was because of that business with Llorente.”

“Yes, sir.” Tejada kept his face carefully blank.

“I understand perfectly, you know,” Ramos went on, confidentially. “And I told them that there were mitigating cir- cumstances. Off the record, of course. So I don’t think it should hurt your prospects permanently.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Well.” Ramos smiled. “We’re all human. We make mistakes. They shouldn’t have to be fatal.”

“No, sir,” Tejada agreed sadly, following the captain out of the room. “They shouldn’t have to be fatal.”

Acknowledgments

This book would never have been written without many people, but a few outstanding contributions should be mentioned.

First and foremost, my eternal gratitude to Persephone Bra-ham, for giving me the idea, and encouraging me to actually write the book, and to Chalcey Wilding for giving me chapter-by-chapter critique and encouragement.

Then to my parents, for putting up with my obsession with postwar Madrid, and to everyone at Columbia’s Administrative Information Services for giving me time to indulge it.

Finally, my thanks to Aurelio Mena, and the other creators of the magnificent Web site, “
La guerra de nuestros abuelos
” (http://platea.pntic.mec.es/~anilo/abuelos/primera.htm) for making available so many oral histories of the Spanish Civil War and the postwar period, and to the Madrid Metro’s official site (http://www.metromadrid.es) for the history of the Metro during the war.