Chapter 9. 1957 - Negotiations

Rogelio had been tamping his pipe and paused to appraise his old acquaintance when Harry approached the surreal Gaudi bench at the Park Guell in Barcelona.

“Senor Perro de Caza, it is good to see you are still alive.”

“Yes, and you have advanced in rank, Comandante, since I last saw you?” Addressing his rank was more than a courteous formality. Harry was letting Rogelio know that he had inside information, even though the Comandante was in plain clothes. He knew he would have a hard time dealing with Rogelio, a deeply religious man and one of the few decent and honest people he knew of in the Policia Armada.

Rogelio, in turn, was curious though usually suspicious of Harry, “Who are you working for now, Senor Baker?” That Harry worked as an independent contractor meant he had no allegiance to anything, anyone, any ideology or faith and Rogelio found this new found soft spot to be amusing. He teased, “You’ve piqued my curiosity, Bird Dog. Are you in love with Iniga?”

Harry didn’t like the idea that the Comandant already knew that his motives weren’t as commercial as they were personal and vaguely honorable at that. It made him nervous he’d been called out so early in negotiations and Harry Baker wasn’t one to be nervous. He tried looking relaxed, but one foot wouldn’t stop tapping. He knew his body language wouldn’t go unnoticed by the Comandante. “Nothing romantic, I can assure you. I’m doing this one on personal business. I am more interested in the salamander growing in her womb. I know I can’t bend you with money, but you can still help me, if you will. Can I say, on humanitarian grounds?”

“Ah, hah, the child IS yours? Then, you ARE in love with Iniga, si?”

“Yes, Rogelio, maybe… and you are more a Carlist than a falangist at heart: you already knew she was pregnant?” Harry was reticent to admit to anyone out loud that he was in love with her. If his feelings could cause confusion with that word, he might do so, but he was glad that Rogelio came directly to the point. This saved them both a lot of time.

“Oh good… love is a good thing, Bird Dog. But it will ruin you for this business, si?” his face broke out in a sly grin. “She was fortunate I was her interrogator…” He finally lit his pipe, “I can tell, strangely enough, our Lord and Savior must have a special love for that woman and your child.”

“You can help then?” Harry ignored the usual religious clap-trap. He knew that his beliefs… or non-beliefs, were known well enough by Comandante Rogelio. He didn’t have to bother with cow-towing and was relieved, however, that the conversation returned to business.

“Donate some pesetas to the nuns at la Ventas and you can get the child out if you act quickly. An adoption’s in order, but I have to warn you, the vultures were circling with bids before Iniga’s belly even began to swell. I’m not so sure what it would take to get her released too, but negotiations...”

“… I have a marriage certificate.”

“That might help but I can’t promise anything.” Rogelio’s pipe had gone out, he relit it and smiled, “The child is yours, yes? Congratulations, Bird Dog, promise to take her out of Spain.”

“Do you find this park to be disorienting?” Harry didn’t like getting confused and the wavy undulations, swirling lines of the walkways and niches, evoked a touch of vertigo in his gut. He preferred straight lines… or, it could have been the carafes of wine from the day before.

“No, it is a glorious tribute to the convolutions of the Catalonian politics we must engage in to survive.”  Rogelio let out a wisp of smoke, adding, “You ought to be used to that, Bird Dog, and you also must have known before that Iniga would have to escape. The only way she will be released would be via the Ley de Fugas,” he added while putting a forefinger to his temple. He then paused to consider, “I will pull a few strings if I can.”

The necessity of Alesandro’s escape, and Harry’s efforts to spirit him back into France at the behest of Marcel Fournier, was an uneasy fellowship: of the betrayed with the betrayer. Nothing tasted worse on his tongue than the betrayal of Iniga and the certain knowledge that Alesandro’s instincts were keen enough to know what was done on his behalf. Regardless, Iniga would have to sit with the nuns in La Ventas until Harry could spring her. He was compelled to devote himself whole heartedly to this task, using whatever fees he’d earned for managing Alesandro’s release to get her out. It all finally came to a head after the salamander named Nicholas was born in prison. Even Harry’s forged marriage certificate, the testimony by the priest he’d bribed to sign it to verify that the marriage took place, wasn’t enough for the stubborn mother superior.

A few guards were bribed to look the other way, and the underground created a diversion, converged to facilitate a rather easy escape. Had she not been able to break free of la Ventas, she would have been shipped to another of the hundreds of prisons to be let out and unceremoniously shot… another escapee, as had hundreds of others who had been dispatched or disappeared before her.

Harry set little Nicky up in another safe-house when he was hatched until his mama had escaped la Ventas. Three months later she had been taken to the safe house by the bribed Padre. Their first contact was a fiery one and it would be the last he would see of her for over a decade. He’d gotten the news that their efforts were successful via a phone call from the same bribed Padre.

Iniga was taking a bath when the wet nurse led him into the apartment.

“You can wait here, señor.” She gestured towards a straight-backed chair next to Nicky’s cradle.

He didn’t think of lifting the screen over the cradle to look in at his son like any proud father would.

He had counted on his betrayal being a secret and that she wouldn’t know of it. It wouldn’t be so bad. He thought that his affair with Iniga would pick up where it had left off before she was arrested. He sat and waited as the wet nurse knocked on the bathroom door, “Señora, your husband is here.”

“I don’t want to see him!” her muffled voice called out from behind the door.

The ruse that Iniga and Harry were lovers, or even friends, dissipated as he crossed the room and opened the bathroom door. He stood in awe, stunned, at the raw beauty of Iniga’s naked body. She looked better, even after the deprivation of prison, than the last time he’d seen her, and he longed to hold her wet flesh in his arms.

“La Ventas treated you well?”

She was startled at the sudden opening and reached for a gun… a gun that was no longer there. A pistola would have always been there before her arrest. “How do you imagine you are welcome here?” she spat out the words with contempt.

“Is this the gratitude I get for bustin’ you loose?” He knew this was a weak thing to ask but he had no words for the unaccustomed guilt her indignant posture extracted from the gut.

“You are alive now because I have no way to kill you, Harry,” she showed her palms as the hatred seethed from the cupid lips he longed to press to his. Those cold steel-gray eyes diverted his to her firm breasts, and then led to the newly stitched scar that went down the length of her belly: a Caesarian birth, no doubt. The conviction of her words left him with little to say. She knew what had happened. He never usually bothered to explain anything, but he tried just one time. Words weren’t his strong suit, and neither was the expression of emotion, but he got it and it was uncomfortable. He’d never wanted her forgiveness, her respect, even her love, as much as he did in that moment, “Alesandro is in Biarritz.”

“That was your trade?” she looked up at him with a ferocity that defied her nakedness.

“Yes,” and his chest ached to lift her… to draw her body to his.

“We were going to get him out that night… that very fucking night!”

“You would have gotten yourself killed for sure.”

The air was as thick with contempt as the steam from her bath, “I would prefer that to looking at your face now.”

Harry had nothing to say.

“Go, and take Nicholas with you,” she spoke with a determined voice. Her steel gray eyes welled with tears, “I’m going back.”

Harry made a desperate plea to what he imagined to be her maternal instincts, “No, I won’t take him, he needs a mother.”

She countered, “Okay, I’ll keep him for now, but you’ll never see him again.”

“You’ll die in the Pyrenees, Iniga, the U.S. has a base in Rota now,” He had to make this one last argument, though he knew it wouldn’t move her. “The CIA is very good at taking care of insurgents. Even if you win… look at Iran…” All on both sides of this business paid attention to what the USA did to Mohammad Mosaddegh’s parliamentary government before the CIA installed the Shah. “You think they will tolerate a Basque government run by Anarchists or any kind of communists. Fuck, no more than the Brits or the French did before the war?”

“No, Harry, my time in La Ventas convinced me. My world’s not yours,” she added, “I can’t go back like you and your kind. I can’t drop out and drop in as I please like you. Alesandro and I are Maquis, we counted ourselves as dead the minute we picked up a weapon to resist.”

He laid down his trump card hoping she’d fold,  “Alesandro, I believe, is retiring in Biarritz. He’s finally had enough,”

“He’ll never retire until Franco is hanging by his feet like that Italian and his puta,” she fired back.

“So, you’re convinced you want martyrdom. You want to die in a worthless Jihad and you choose this over motherhood?” He knew this plea, or accusation, would go nowhere. He’d hit her in the chest with a hammer. Her body sank as though deflated until he could see her take a deep breath and rise like a breaching submarine in defiance. That blow set her face in a concrete resolve that no hammer could bust up after she restored her composure.

She was only a teen then with Alesandro’s guerilla group when Harry first met her; his smatchet on her belt; her frame so small a rifle would outweigh her, but her petite body carried a full pack on sturdy legs along with a fierce determination he just saw again. He let his eyes caress her body once more before closing the door.

She shouted from behind the bathroom door as he left the apartment and his son, Nicky, “Adios, Bird Dog, we are not the same as you say, you are puta!”

He thought he could hear her sob after that… or maybe he just hoped she had. A memory of the words Harry had heard from Iniga in the shepherd’s cabin in the Pyrenees during the war came back… it was a memory of the words coming out her small frame when she showed a similar detached sense of field expediency, “I hate to interrupt…better put a bullet in his head.”

“Adios, my fiery angel.” He wasn’t prone to use poetic adieus, but he hoped that leaving Nicky with her would temper her revolutionary fervor. She could have left Spain and Franco’s oppression for Southern France like Alesandro to Biarritz, but it would not be so. They would not see each other until Nick was in his teens… as she lay dying.

Little Nicky had been lost to him too. Iniga had arranged for her wet nurse to care for him. When the wet nurse immigrated to the US with Nicky, she put the bastardo, her ticket for immigration, on the steps of a Catholic orphanage with his birth certificate in a manila envelope pinned to his blanket a few days after her feet hit the ground off a Greyhound Bus in Los Angeles. A life begun in the sewer of betrayal, abandonment and deceit, left Nicky with a perspective on life that might be understood under these circumstances.