The
Resistance was busy preparing for the Allied invasion of Normandy on the
northern coast, while the Basque Maquis seized almost all of the Southern
Atlantic France from the Occupation. The Germans were also distracted
simultaneously by the rebellion on the high plateau of Auvergne. By 1945 Stalin
pushed the Germans to surrender Berlin in a messy arrangement with the Allies
at the cost of a free Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Balkan States.
The French busied themselves purging collaborators and recovering what they
could from what was left of the nation while the Provisional Government of the
leader of the Free French, Charles De Gaulle, pushed to separate France from
Anglo-American domination. Stalinist style membership of the Communist Party of
France (the PCF) had gained almost a half-million members and purged itself
either by censure or, in extreme cases, selective assassination.
A French
journalist, Marcel Fournier and his wife Johanna, traded stocks, embezzled and
defrauded currencies in the underground economy during France’s post-war
“Hungry Years”. Most of this was done to the hidden accounts and assets of
Nazis and their Collaborators throughout Europe as well as South America. The
Soviet Union was aware that it was being done and searched their files for
possible grifters, but Johanna and Marcel had done well to hide from the
scrutiny of every international policing agency.
By 1954
Charles De Gaulle was retired to a supposed obscurity while an uprising in
Algiers simmered in the background. Change was also in the air for Franco’s
regime in Spain. The war that continued between the Basque Maquis of Spain and
the Falangist movement had outlasted both Hitler and Mussolini. However, the
Spanish nation was broke, its currency worthless, and its state run economy
flat. Franco’s regime sputtered on into the fifties. The romanticized Maquis
that held out in the Pyrenees became known as banditos, separatists, and
terrorists, to the international press as well as at home. Hope was renewed for
Franco’s Dictatorship after the USA agreed to an infusion of cash and President
Eisenhower came to call on the Generalissimo in 1953. It was just one of
several Cold War deals on the chess board brought about to check the Soviet
Union. They seemed to have the initiative across the squares of the world at
that time. The USA and the NATO Alliance had good reason to fret because, as a
result of the War, insurgents worldwide had been trained and equipped for whatever
adversity the powers-that-be could throw their way.
The post-war
forties and fifties witnessed the insurgencies of Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Minh,
Kim Il Sung and nationalists elsewhere. It would be later seen that these used
the language of Marxist ideology but employed the pseudo-revolutionary tactics
of fascism once established. The Civil War in pre-war Spain continued and
became another pawn in a stand-off between the capitalism of democratic
republics of Europe, and the USA, against state sponsored capitalism of the
USSR, China, and their proxy states. WWI and WWII were only battles in a civil
war where the West devoured itself and closed the chapter on Marxist versions
of any workers utopia as power accumulated West and East in an unprecedented
arms race towards Armageddon.
The signing
of the Pact of Madrid with the Eisenhower Administration established relations
and further propped up the regime. Franco retained his grip on Spain with a
Naval Base in Rota and Air Force Bases in Morón, Torrejón, and Zaragoza. This
kept Spain from another civil upheaval and becoming a client state of the USSR.
The bandito, Alesandro Gotson Otxoa, had been betrayed, captured and taken to
Carabanchel, a notorious prison built by and for insurgents: i.e., liberal
democrats, Free-Masons, homosexuals, atheists, non-government trade unionists,
democrats, communists and anarchists, former Spanish Maquis, Basque and Catalan
Separatists.
Ávila was a
small city that was as familiar to Alesandro as every arroyo and limestone cave
in the Pyrenees. Even so, he was reluctant to come down out of the mountains
for this meeting with the Bird Dog, Harry Baker. Alesandro’s face was almost
unknown but for one in the thick file of the Gestapo transferred to the
International Criminal Police Commission. The stoic image of him in a Basque
beret with Marcel Fournier in Madrid, or the shaved head of a mug-shot from
Camp Gurs, was all that was known of him by the ICPC that would become
Interpol. The Civil Guard was everywhere in the streets but Alesandro was just
another man passing other people in the simple disguise of a business suit and
a fake mustache.
Alesandro,
staying close to the cover of buildings, always alert, came near to the
Cathedral at Ávila where he was to meet the Bird Dog. Cautious, he had turned
down offers of amnesty by the authorities of both Spain and France. The C.I.A.
was all over Spain, helping to corral the remnants of resistance by Basque and
Catalonian Separatists on behalf of the regime that was coming out of its isolation.
It was with no little irony that Alesandro was meeting an American independent
ex-C.I.A. contractor in order to make a deal. He knew Harry Baker had access to
arms, munitions and C-4 plastic explosives and, as shady as Harry Baker was,
Alesandro trusted him more than the Soviets. He would find this trust betrayed
too but that was always a risk in Alesandro’s vocation.
Alesandro
stealthily approached the cathedral within the old town’s walls choosing a side
street, Calle Pocillo, when his right shoulder exploded with force from behind.
He spun around, meaning to pull his pistola out from a shoulder holster, but
his arm wouldn’t go where his reflexes would have it go. Conscious as he hit
the ground, he never caught sight of his assassin. The buildings across the
street faded as though a film… a shade was drawn masking his vision… he blacked
out from pain for a second before he heard the tinny, clacking, motor of a
government made SEAT.
Sweeping up
close to Alesandro, Harry Baker stepped out of the sedan and over the crimson
puddle growing on the pavement next to the immobilized body. He had chosen to
take Alesandro alive and would have never missed that shot from where he was
perched but something made him flinch as he pulled the trigger. Something held
him back… sentiment… He would be paid as much whether he killed or captured the
Maquis. Perhaps Alesandro would be worth more to turn him in disarmed.
“Don’t try
to move,” Harry Baker commanded, as he ripped a sleeve from the blood soaked
white shirt, folded it to make a temporary cold press, and wrapped Alesandro’s
tie over the wound to hold it together.
Alesandro
recognized the voice, “Bird Dog?”
“Nevermind
that.” Harry tried to comfort him, “You’ll be okay. I’ll take you to the
Cathedral.”
Harry easily
lifted Alesandro and threw him over his right shoulder as though he was no more
than a sack of grain.
Alesandro
knew a sympathetic Carmelite priest who would keep him safe in one of the
crypts beneath the floors of Ávila’s fortress cathedral where he was supposed
to meet Harry. He came-to as the priest was nursing the torn ligaments of the
bone-shattered right shoulder. He couldn’t move his right arm. There was no
memory of the past few days… an image of Harry Baker’s face shifted through his
mind… the street… blank… but he knew the priest. He was one of the clergy
Alesandro had protected during the purges in the last months of the Republic by
his fellow anarchists nearly two decades ago.
He asked,
“What happened?”
Then he tried to get up off the fold-out
canvas cot and immediately fell back on it.
“Someone
shot you. The entry wound is from the back. You lost blood… we can apply
amateur first-aid but that wound needs medical attention.”
Alesandro’s
mind recovered quickly as he assessed the situation. He was able to shoot well
enough with his left hand, but his right arm and hand were useless. A fever
left him weak, his shirt wet, soaked in sweat and then he realized his pistol
was gone from the suit’s vest.
Alesandro
was assured by the monk, “Rest, no one will think to look in the crypt of the
Cathedral at Ávila or violate its sanctuary for an anarchist. We have sent for
a sympathetic doctor.”
“How did I
get here?” he asked, though he did have a cloudy recollection of Harry Baker
lifting him off the street.
“An old
friend of ours,” he said, with a hint of sarcasm in his tone… “The American,
brought you here, Gotson.”
“Damn…”
collapsing…the pain shot through his shoulder after he tried to lift himself on
one arm.
It was
fitting, Alesandro thought, that he’d be isolated under the cathedral where San
Juan de la Cruz had taken refuge and where he had been betrayed four centuries
ago.
Alesandro
resigned for the first time in his career to the helplessness of his
predicament. It could have been the
fever but he had begun a vague dissimulation of ideals before he caught what he
thought was a vision. To the monk that was no longer there he said aloud, “This
too is where I will be betrayed.”
Darkness
enveloped him… he awoke to the noise of splintered wood from the frame and
door’s latch as the door crashed open through the protests of his protector
monk being shoved aside… it wasn’t a doctor’s house-call. Through the mind-mist
he made out the uniforms of the Guardia Civil. Taken from there he was brought
out into the light of day to the plaza between the lions at the front of the
cathedral where the pummeling began. One blow after another… shrieking pain
shot through his body until he couldn’t feel at all.
One of the
Guardia was shouting to a gathering crowd… “Here is your hero, Gotson Otxoa!
Here he hides in the sanctity of the church he would burn! Anarquista,
Anticristo, Escoria communista!”
Thus,
Alesandro disappeared into the maze of Franco’s jails despite, or because of,
Harry’s connections from past collaborations. He remembered little of his
arrest and beating as he was as close to unconscious as one could be before he
was taken to Carabanchel without trial according to the Fugitive Law; a law written
and enacted especially for the likes of Gotson Otxoa.
Alesandro’s
eyes adjusted to the light in the cell, his right arm shattered by the sniper’s
shot. Leg irons bruised and bloodied his ankles he’d worn since he’d been
captured. His right arm was plastered into a sling and a cast from the shoulder
to his wrist after he had passed out from the initial beating. The bloody shirt
sleeve, Harry Baker's improvised compress, was gone. His suit jacket was gone
but still wore the shirt with one sleeve. He also had his shoes, slacks, vest
and even a box of matches in its pocket.
“This is
good,” he said, as though there was someone else to hear him. Holding the small
match box between his knees he barely managed to light a match with his good
hand to check out his new abode. Mind calm… senses sharp… now composed as
always, and at all times, for the need to be centered. A cockroach scurried
from the revealing light. Alesandro carried matches or a lighter but he didn’t
smoke. They were only for lighting fuses and camp fires. Cigarettes and cigars
smothered his sense of smell and carried the scent of smoke long afterwards
that was strong enough for even a human nose to catch. The odors of an unbathed
body to a caution trained nose in the wild won’t carry as far as cologn or a
coat worn while smoking.
“Say, little
friend, may I call you Poncho?” he said to the roach, “You will be here long
after I’m gone, Poncho. I might not make it ‘til morning. Until then, shall we
be friends?” The light from the match faded.
Alesandro’s
despair laughed. The hallucinations of fever had Alesandro hearing Poncho
answering, “Si, ‘til mañana?” His
thoughts turned to where he sat and whether or not he’d ever get out. “Do you
ask, what do I mean, make it ‘til morning?”
He waited
for the roach to answer but he answered himself in the dark, “No, my friend, I
will likely be shot before morning and then your cousins, the worms, can do
with me what they will.”
He painfully
bent to take off his shoes, tucking them under his head to make a pillow, and
drifted-off into a semi-comatose sleep. Someone came into the cell… a
hypodermic injected a dreamy sleep into his arm.
Alesandro
Gotson Otxoa, the Maquisard of the Pyrenees, drifted off certain he heard
Poncho scoff, "You are no longer Gotson. That's what your penalty,
Alesandro, for comparing my family to worms."
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