Watcher in the Pine (27 page)

“Carlos.” Elena’s voice was a thin whisper, but her grip on his hand was almost painfully tight.

“Yes, beloved?”

“Shut up. I need to concentrate.”

Tejada stared, his relief at finding Elena alive suddenly giving way to another fear. He took in the woman on the other side of Elena for the first time. She looked at him with calm amusement. “You’re a midwife?” he demanded, with sharp anxiety.

She snorted contemptuously. “I’ve had eight of my own. I know about bringing babies into the world.” Taking pity on him, she added, “My husband found your lady out in the pasture, and called me because she seemed to be having trouble.”

“I’m sorry, sir.” The lieutenant recognized the voice from the doorway as belonging to the man who had wrestled with him. “Your lady’s told us a bit about what happened to her, and Milagros thought I should be out on guard. I thought it would be best if I didn’t let you out of range until we knew you were really who you said.”

“What happened to her?” Tejada said.

“They’re not the ones who took me,” Elena interjected. “I got away. But then the baby came and I couldn’t get home.”

Tejada’s jaw dropped. “You escaped?”

“It wasn’t difficult. They didn’t even have the cave guarded. The hardest thing was the baby.”

“That’s my Elena.” The lieutenant stroked her forehead, and suddenly remembered that he had a good deal more to apologize for. He leaned over her, ignoring Milagros’s annoyed look. “I’m sorry for this afternoon,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean it. Any of it. I . . . when I thought I wouldn’t be able to tell you . . .” She squeezed his hand, and he stopped, relieved.

Elena said nothing but she smiled and thought that it was easier not to cry now that Carlos was here. Because Tejada had not seen her earlier, he did not realize how much calmer she was, and he was stunned by the way she suffered in the following hours.
This isn’t fair
, he thought, squeezing her hand, and listening to Milagros’ calm instructions.
In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, all right, but this is too much. They have drugs for this
.
In France and England women don’t go through this. If I could have taken her to Unquera she wouldn’t have had to go through this
. Because he could not bear the thought that he might have found Elena only to lose her again, he began to mentally review the pattern he had started to see on his way up the mountain. More details fell into place, but it was hard to put them in their correct order in the face of Elena’s distress.

The growing light in the hut was an aid to his anxious scanning of Elena’s face for the signs of exhaustion. Her eyes were frequently closed now, and he wondered if she even saw him when they were open. He was so absorbed that he hardly heard Milagros’s instructions, and the thin, angry cry of an infant startled him.

“Congratulations,” said the midwife. “It’s a boy.”

Elena dropped her husband’s hand and held out both arms. “Let me see him,” she commanded.

Tejada closed his eyes. He had not slept all night, he could not remember the last time he had eaten, and he did not care. He sat with his head bent as Milagros busily washed the baby and swaddled him, and then placed him in his mother’s arms. The sound of Elena’s voice interrupted the lieutenant’s fervent prayer of gratitude. “Hi, there!” she cooed. “Hello, pretty baby! Hello good, clever baby.”

Tejada looked at his wife. There were circles under her eyes and smudges on her forehead. She was cradling a tiny thing that seemed to be mostly blankets. He shifted position so that he could see the baby, and brushed back the blanket from the top of its head. A tiny hand waved as his finger slid over downy hair. “Look,” the lieutenant said in an awed whisper. “He’s got fingernails and everything.”

“What are you going to call him?” Milagros interjected matter-of-factly.

Elena looked up at her husband and smiled. “Carlos?”

He shook his head, remembering that he had threatened to take away the minute, perfect person nestled against her, and unwilling to do anything that would lessen her triumph. “Your choice.”

Elena laughed faintly. “No. I meant, what do you think of Carlos?”

Tejada hesitated, flattered, unnerved, and secretly a little fearful of giving up too much of himself to the newcomer. “It’s a good name,” said Milagros. “But if he’s named for his father you’ll want to give him a middle name as well, to tell them apart.”

Tejada looked up as she spoke and saw that her husband had come to stand in the doorway. He was outlined against full daylight now. It looked like it was going to be a sunny day. “What is your name?” the lieutenant asked.

The shepherd started. “Me, sir? I’m Antonio, for my saint’s day.”

Tejada looked at his wife. “Carlos Antonio?” he suggested.

She smiled and nodded. The shepherd cleared his throat, embarrassed, but obviously pleased. “That’s kind of you, sir. But—” He broke off, raising his head. “Someone’s coming,” he said in a different tone of voice.

Tejada had already heard the rhythmic drumming of hoof-beats. “More than one, would you say?” he asked, getting to his feet. “I’ll be right back, Elena,” he added.

Antonio stepped out of the house and looked along the line of the woods. Tejada followed him and saw that the heads of the figures riding up the path he had walked the previous night were already coming into view above the ridge. Antonio spat into the dirt. “Tricorns,” he said in a fatalistic tone. “Perhaps you’d better talk to them, sir.”

Chapter 22

T
he two riders came forward silhouetted against the rising sun. “You there!” one of them shouted to Antonio as they came above the crest, “stay where you are!”

“Oh, damn,” the shepherd murmured, almost too softly for Tejada to hear.

“Don’t worry,” the lieutenant said quietly. He stayed in the shadow of the doorway until the pair of guardias arrived and dismounted. One of them was one of the new men. Tejada recognized him after a moment as a Galician named Ferreira. The other was Sergeant Márquez.

Márquez left the guardia to hold the horses and stepped toward Antonio. “You own this property?”

“These are common grazing lands, sir. It was my turn to take the flock up here.”

“We’re doing a register of all houses,” the sergeant said shortly. “We’ll have to check the hut.”

Tejada stepped out of the doorway. “I don’t think that’s necessary, Sergeant. We’ve found what we’re looking for.”

Márquez’s jaw dropped. “Sir!” he exclaimed. “But what are you . . . ? How . . . ?”

Tejada looked at his fellow officer with dislike. “I seem to recall telling you that a house-to-house would be useless without information, Márquez,” he said dryly. “I left Battista in charge of the post, and went to find information.”

The sergeant looked like he had swallowed a very large piece of meat without chewing it. His eyes were bulging slightly. “You . . . found information, sir?”

“Yes. You and Ferreira had better go back to the post, to relieve Battista. I’ll join you as soon as possible, but I’d like to make sure that my wife is comfortable first.” Tejada absent-mindedly took out his pistol. He was not exactly aiming it at the sergeant, but it was not pointing toward the ground either.

Guardia Ferreira cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Lieutenant, but is your wife all right?”

Tejada smiled. “She’s fine, thank you.”

Sergeant Márquez moved toward the lieutenant. “Are you sure you don’t need help with the prisoners, sir?”

“What prisoners?” Tejada asked. Antonio backed up a step.

Márquez stared. “Why . . . this one, sir. And his confederates. Your wife’s kidnappers.”

Tejada shook his head. “These aren’t my wife’s kidnappers,” he said. “They helped her and sheltered her when she got away.”

Ferreira and Márquez wore identical looks of disbelief. Then Márquez said slowly, “She got
away
from her kidnappers?”

Tejada smiled, foolishly proud. “She’s an exceptional woman.”

“Granted,” the sergeant nodded. “But . . . well, have you considered that she might be . . . a bit confused, sir? After all, for a woman in her condition under heavy guard to escape from the maquis? It’s a piece of almost incredible good luck.”

Luck that’s too good to be true
, the lieutenant thought fuzzily.
Luck or divine guidance or human intervention. It all made sense last night. Better not to say anything to Márquez until I have proof. If I can find proof
. “We’ve had a lot of incredible good luck,” he said aloud.

Perhaps because he, too, had been up all night, Márquez did not notice the faint undercurrent in the lieutenant’s voice. He coughed. “Of course, if you’re
sure
that they have nothing to do with it, that’s fine, sir,” he said. “But I’d bring them along for questioning, at least. After all, suppose they were involved with taking her, and then they showed her some kindness and your wife didn’t want to get them in trouble. Her sympathies . . . her sympathetic nature is well known.” The full force of Tejada’s glare hit the sergeant and he continued hastily. “Or suppose she was simply mistaken. They could have told her anything, even that they’d rescued her. She woke up confused, still a little befuddled with chloroform. . . .”

Márquez had no opportunity to finish his sentence. Tejada moved like lightning, reaching out and spinning the sergeant up against the wall of the building, his arms twisted behind him.

Ferreira made a noise of protest. Tejada pulled the sergeant’s pistol from its holster and held it out to Antonio. “Keep Guardia Ferreira covered,” he ordered.

The shepherd gasped, but he obeyed with a competence and speed that Ferreira later found highly suspicious. (At the time he merely found it unnerving.) Tejada handcuffed his sergeant. “That was stupid, Márquez,” he said quietly. “I was willing to let it go. All I had was a series of coincidences that could have just been very good luck. But you had to try to pin it on someone. Was she supposed to be kept under guard, Márquez? Was your arrival going to be the signal to kill her?”

“Sir, are you out of your mind?” Márquez spoke breathlessly, partly because Tejada had punctuated his sentences by slamming his prisoner against the wall.

“
How did you know she was chloroformed, Márquez?
” Tejada demanded.

“I didn’t!”

Tejada slammed Márquez against the wall again, and the prisoner gasped. “I just guessed. After all, logically she had to be unconscious to be taken up here, and you said she was unharmed so I guessed she hadn’t been hit on the head.”

“Good guess,” Tejada said. “But you make a lot of good guesses, don’t you? You know, last night on the way up here, I started thinking that Elena’s ransom must be a replacement for the arms I found when I was taking her up to the monastery. And I started thinking about how I’d found those guns. It was luck, really. We were on the wrong path. You see, Elena found Anselmo Montalbán’s body, and when we walked along the river it reminded her. She pointed out the spot to me. She was upset, so we went on talking and missed the turnoff to Santo Toribio. And last night I remembered passing the spot where Elena told me she’d found Montalbán’s body
before the road to Santo Toribio
. And then I wondered: You came back from that patrol injured and told us to do a house-to-house
toward Espinama and Fuente Dé
. But Montalbán was killed practically on the outskirts of Potes, and if his companions had fled away from the town, they could have taken any one of a hundred roads before Espinama. They could have gone up to Argüébanes, or up Monte Viorna, or even to Mogrovejo. We were all so pleased about finding that missing dynamite that none of us stopped to wonder how your intuition had been so good.”

Márquez made a disbelieving noise. “I’m in trouble for having good intuition, sir? We’ve had a lot of reports of bandit activity around Espinama. Ask Battista, if you like. That seemed like a logical direction.”

“Very true,” Tejada agreed reasonably, letting the sergeant turn away from the wall, but keeping a grip on his collar. “And of course you could have just said that you
think
of that road as the road to Espinama. You weren’t thinking about the side roads. You just make fortunate guesses. But you’re fortunate in other ways, too, aren’t you?” The lieutenant had the giddy feeling of running on pure adrenaline, and he spoke quickly, to keep Márquez from interrupting his fragile chain of thought. He continued speaking rapidly, too tired to judge whether his conjectures made sense. “That shortwave radio of yours. That’s a nice expensive little toy. And you’re very generous about letting other people use it, aren’t you? And yesterday when you wanted the afternoon off to go and look at a motorbike. You said you wanted to see how much the man was asking, but you didn’t ask how much I’d authorize. That wasn’t a motorbike for the Guardia, it was for you personally, wasn’t it? Another nice expensive toy. I know how much a sergeant earns, Márquez. The thing is, I even have a pretty good idea how much allowance a señorito from a well-off family gets in addition. And it doesn’t run to your toys. In a city I’d say you were funneling goods to the black market. But there aren’t enough customers with ready cash here in Potes. Now you might be smuggling, but we’re pretty far inland. But that little operation the maquis had set up: Steal the supplies from Devastated Regions and trade them for weapons.
That
might be a really profitable business. Oh, I don’t know if they gave you a percentage of the cash value, or if they just paid you a lump sum to keep your mouth shut and make sure the Guardia didn’t stumble too close, but either way, it would be a nice explanation of your extra income.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Márquez said calmly. “I would never help purchase arms to be used against the Guardia. It would be digging my own grave.”

Tejada hesitated. He had not planned to accuse Márquez, but the sergeant’s injudicious reference to Elena had made him angry. He had been positive that Márquez was mixed up with the guerrillas, but he could figure out no motive. Tejada was sure that the sergeant’s contempt for Elena’s left-wing sympathies was genuine. In fact, he was almost ready to believe that distaste for her politics had played a role in her kidnapping. But a man of such staunch Fascist loyalty was unlikely to aid the maquis for the sake of pure greed. “You wouldn’t like helping them,” he admitted slowly. “Because you do believe in the Regime, don’t you? But I bet they had something on you. Maybe they tricked you into helping them at first. Put you in a position where you could have been accused of bribery or corruption. And then they came back to you and said, ‘Sorry, Sergeant, we need a small favor from you,’ and they had you over a barrel. Maybe they just asked you to turn a blind eye to the thefts from Devastated Regions. If they were smart, they made you help them with the smuggling so you were pulled in deeper. I do believe you wanted to stop them. That was why you tipped us off to the dynamite, wasn’t it? You didn’t want them to have material for sabotage, and you were trying to bankrupt them. But it was a little late for that. And then I found that cache of Thompsons, and they said, ‘We need help financing a replacement’ and you came up with a nice scheme: ‘The lieutenant’s a fool for his wife,’ you told them. ‘And on top of that she’s expecting a child. Get her and use her as a hostage, and he’ll hand over just what you need.’ And then you told them exactly where and when they could do it and helped them work out the details like chloroforming. But you were planning to double-cross them, weren’t you? You put that little item about the house-to-house search in the ransom note, and then made damn sure that we did a house-to-house, to make it clear that we wouldn’t cooperate. And it was all going to be on my orders.” Tejada heard his voice starting to shake. “You were going to tell them that you’d tried to stop me, weren’t you? That you didn’t know I’d been in Toledo with Moscardó, that you didn’t realize I’d insist on being a hero. I was going to be your excuse to stop working for them.”

Márquez shrugged, as eloquently as it is possible to do while handcuffed. “I don’t quite know what to say, except that it isn’t true, sir,” he said. “Obviously, you’ve been under a lot of strain lately—”

“The Severino girl!” Tejada interrupted. More and more pieces were falling into place as he talked, and he was thinking out loud as much as accusing now. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were all there except one, and he stared the shape of the hole, willing the missing part of the picture to come clear.

“Who, Dolores?” Márquez looked puzzled.

“Not Dolores, her little sister. Elena will remember her name. Dolores asked Elena to take her a message. And the kid asked Elena if the sergeant had sent her. Elena thought it was just a general term for the commander of the post, but it was you, wasn’t it? Luis Severino was the maquis’ contact with the coast. He ran the smuggling part of the operation. When he was killed, they thought you would get in contact to propose another method.”

“No, Lieutenant.”

“Makes sense to me.” All three guardias turned to stare at Antonio, who had spoken in a slow, thoughtful tone, without taking his eyes or his weapon off Guardia Ferreira. The shepherd spoke as if weighing his words. “Lieutenant, I might as well tell you, because you could find it out if you asked the right people anyway. I usually take a dog up here to guard the flocks with me, not a rifle. I took the rifle and not a dog last night because there was a rumor in town that there’d be something going on up at the Cueva Santa that honest men should keep their noses out of, and I didn’t want a dog barking at the wrong time. And then, when your lady told me what had happened, I thought maybe the gossip was wrong. But now I’m not so sure.”

“Kidnapping and extortion aren’t things honest men should keep their noses out of?” Guardia Ferreira said sarcastically.

“It seems to me that this man knows a good deal more than I do about the bandits’ activities,” Márquez said at the same moment.

“What gossip?” Tejada asked.

Antonio looked evenly at Guardia Ferreira. “The gossip was that what was going on up at the Cueva Santa was Guardia business.”

“I don’t suppose this gossip gave any particular information or originated with any particular person?” Tejada asked, but good-humoredly.