A Necessary Action (38 page)

He felt no fear. He saw with lightning speed that he was past and still had a chance to get through. First he could drive away from them, and then there were dozens of ways of tricking
them. He could turn off anywhere. He could stop at the first suitable hiding-place, unload the arms and turn back and then fetch them again later. He could …

Three hundred yards below the barrier a bicycle was leaning against the cliff-wall. A little farther up the mountain lay the middle-aged civil guard with a sleepy face and a stubby grey moustache. He aimed calmly and shot Willi Mohr at less than fifty yards range with an ordinary six millimetre grooved army carbine.

The bullet hit him head on, shattering his breast-bone and leaving his body about an inch to the left of his spine. Willi Mohr was already dead when he pulled the steering-wheel hard over to the left so that the truck swerved and hit the low stone wall.

The air was light and clean after the long spell of rain and so Sergeant Tornilla heard the shot. He was standing two kilometres farther away, at the cross-roads where the old coast road from the puerto joined the main road.

He looked at his wristwatch and unscrewed the top of his fountain pen. Then he wrote down the time on a small piece of paper, folded it up and thrust it into his breast pocket.

‘Twenty-eight minutes to three,’ he said to himself.

Soon after that he saw a thin pillar of swirling smoke rising in the still air.

Sergeant Tornilla turned round and went over to an ancient hired car that was parked under the tree.

‘Uhuh,’ he mumbled. ‘That’s that then. But it’ll get worse. We’re beginning to be alone.’

The civil guard standing nearest to him thought he had missed an order.

‘I didn’t catch that,’ he said, standing to attention.

‘What? No, it was nothing. Come now, let’s get back.’

Several months later, Hugo Spohler and Sergeant Tornilla were sitting under the awning outside the Café Central, drinking an aperitif before dinner.

Hugo Spohler had come to the puerto on the fifteenth of April and on the following day had taken the mail-bus to the town to go through Willi Mohr’s belongings. The police had put them all into a wooden box which was standing in an outhouse in the back yard at the guard-post, and Sergeant Tornilla himself had gone with him to unlock the door and break the seals. The day was hot and the heat in the tin shed appalling, but Tornilla did not seem to notice it, although he was wearing leather boots and a white shirt and a stiff collar with his well-pressed uniform.

‘That should be the lot,’ he said. ‘He had a pistol too, and a dog and a cat. We were obliged to impound the pistol, the dog was shot by the police and they couldn’t catch the cat. It’s still around I suppose, if the Basques up there now haven’t already eaten it.’

‘In Russia in forty-four, cat was counted as a delicacy,’ said Hugo Spohler.

‘That’s quite correct.’

‘Oh, were you there too?’

‘Blue Division, Third Brigade.’

‘SS. Fifth Panzer Regiment.’

Hugo Spohler emptied the box of its contents and was sorting things into heaps on the floor.

‘Most of this can just be chucked away,’ he said. ‘The pictures are the only things worth anything, really. But he hasn’t painted very many, considering he’s been here for a year and a half.’

‘I got the impression that he had grown more and more depressed during the months before the accident.’

‘You knew him?’

‘Yes, we met several times.’

‘He never had much zest for life.’

He spread the canvases out on the concrete floor and looked at them appraisingly.

‘This interests me,’ said Sergeant Tornilla. ‘We talked several times about my coming over to look at his paintings, but nothing came of it.’

‘Do keep one if you’d like to.’

‘Do you mean that seriously.’

‘Of course. Take which ever one you want.’

‘I like that one there with the house and cactuses very much. It’s most realistic. Very well done.’

‘Yes, he was clever. Take that one, by all means.’

‘On one condition only. That you do me the honour of dining with me and my wife.’

‘Thank you very much. I’d like to.’

Later, at the Café Central, Sergeant Tornilla pointed at the rolled canvas and said: ‘That’ll really be the only souvenir I’ll be taking with me from here. So I’m doubly pleased.’

‘Are you moving?’

‘Yes, in a few weeks time, to Asturia. I belong to a special department and you’re often moved about. It’s a bit difficult if you’ve got a family. I’ve got two sons, twelve and nine. You’ll soon be meeting them.’

‘I’ve got two children too, a boy of three and a girl of twelve months. There’s nothing like family life.’

‘You’re absolutely right there.’

‘Tell me, it’s struck me, there was one thing I’d hoped to find in that box of his things. A kind of diary which he promised to write.’

‘Unfortunately I can’t help you there. It wasn’t amongst his things. Perhaps he had it on him. You see, the truck turned over in the accident and whatever was on it was thrown off. Then it hurtled down a ravine and caught fire. The body was badly burnt.’

The dinner was excellent and afterwards they drank a glass or two of Jaime Primero in the shady patio behind the house. Sergeant Tornilla had taken off his uniform jacket and exchanged his boots for slippers. His wife and children had withdrawn, and the two men were sitting in comfortable basket-chairs, digesting their food.

‘The Blue Division,’ said Hugo Spohler, ‘was an excellent unit. Fine fighting morale and good tactical leadership. If all sectors of the front had been held by such first-class soldiers the result would’ve been a very different story.’

‘That’s true. The reserves never came up to scratch. I was thinking especially about the Italians. Their discipline was poor and even the officers lacked any will to fight. They couldn’t get their men to stay lying down under fire, and panic was a reaction which was always near to hand. We noticed that quite early on here, during the Civil War.’

‘There were others who were just as bad. On our right flank we had a Rumanian regiment. Their tactical leadership was wretched and the standard of men almost worse. I assure you the officers strutted about in their shiny boots twenty or twenty-five miles behind the front. When the counter-offensive began, it was just as if there had been no one there at all. The Bolsheviks went straight through the front and made a gap of ten kilometres in less than an hour. That was the tragedy of it. To have failed because of useless allies.’

‘You’re right, the war needn’t have been lost. If we’d been able to hold the front through the winter, we’d have broken the backs of them during the next summer offensive, and then things would have been very different. But to hold a line in which every third sector was being held by Italians and Hungarians and Rumanians wasn’t easy.’

‘Naturally there were some strategic mistakes too. If the Fuehrer’s idea of one line of attack instead of three had not been tampered with by the General Staff, we’d have taken Moscow that first autumn.’

They continued discussing the subject for another hour or so.