The waiter had disappeared, Cal did not know why, but he had left the bottle in an ice bucket beside the table, which she grabbed by the neck and it looked as though she was about to crown her old man. That she did not was insufficient to calm him down and it was pretty obvious why – the damn thing was empty, which meant, they having had one glass each, she had drunk at least four. Then the waiter came in with another bottle – which Elena must have asked for – and things really took off.
Cal had to sit back; she still had that bottle in her hand and she looked like she was capable of using it on anyone. He had to admire the waiter, who, with what amounted to a full-blooded screaming match in progress, proceeded with his task – perhaps such screaming matches were common in Greece – the loud plop of the cork being ejected, that worldwide sign of celebration, just throwing fuel on an inferno.
MCG stood up and so did she, towering over him, which would have reduced Cal to tears of mirth if he had not worked so hard to keep his face straight; he needed this little twerp badly and, reluctantly, he would take his side if called upon to do so. Just then MCG smashed his fist on the table, spat out a final declaration and stormed out of the room. With a triumphant look, Elena sat down and calmly signalled for her glass to be filled.
With muttered ‘excuse me’s’ Cal went out after him, to find him outside shaking with fury, literally like a jelly, his fists clenched and threatening the heavens with a punch. Sighting Cal, it was clear he had to fight to calm himself and it took several seconds. With a great effort he stilled his wobbly body and said, in a strained voice, ‘I must leave, Herr Moncrief, but I ask for your indulgence.’
‘My dear chap,’ Cal said, lamely.
‘As you will have seen, my wife and I do not see eye to eye. I have asked her to leave with me, and she has refused. I cannot stay, so I will await your response to what I have proposed to you until you are ready. I thank you for the invitation and apologise for spoiling your evening.’
‘But your wife?’
‘Let her have her food …’ his voice rose a fraction ‘… and her drinks. Please oblige me by putting her in a taxi when she has had enough.’
‘But—’
His voice was almost pleading. ‘Please? Oblige me in this.’
‘If you wish.’
‘I shall go to my club tonight. I do not think I could spend tonight under the same roof as her.’
Cal was wondering if this little tub knew the expression ‘all is fair in love and war’.
‘Whatever you wish.’
He returned to another dazzling smile, to a woman who behaved as if nothing untoward had happened, and as well as that there was a bit of a look in her eye that was nothing less than a come-on. Seduction without words is hard but not impossible, and a willingness on both parts eases those inevitable moments of confusion.
MCG was right, his wife did not speak German, but she had maybe two dozen words of English and a few in French. So they ate slowly, they drank wine – in her case somewhat too quickly – and they stumbled through the steps that led inevitably to his room, where, once inside, conversation became redundant.
He did, as promised, put her in a taxi, outside that same magnificent entrance, but the sky was a dull morning grey at the time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The next weeks were a whirl of travel and activity, checking with Peter Lanchester in London that what he needed would be in place, dealing with the Greek to ensure both the terms of supply and the transfer of the money, once he had seen it shifted to a bank in Athens, none of that made any easier by events in Spain itself.
As for the war, the Republic was still mostly on the defensive. Franco had again failed to take Madrid in the first months of the year, while the last bastion of Republican resistance in the north-west, the Basque region, was under severe pressure from General Mola, who with the help of the German Condor Legion had ushered in a new phase with the bombing and utter destruction of the small town of Guernica, an act which shocked the world when news of the true number of deaths began to emerge.
For all the international protests it had another effect: it showed the power of aerial bombardment on built-up areas and brought home to many in the democracies what they might face should they engage in another war – in short, it strengthened the hand of the politicians keeping up the pretence of non-intervention, who could now ask those more bellicose if they were prepared to see their own cities reduced to rubble.
Regular Italian troops, in an operation sanctioned personally by Mussolini, with massed tanks, artillery and air support, had sought to capture the Guadalajara mountains which rose to the north of Madrid, their tactical aim to gain the heights and so roll down on the capital in conjunction with the Nationalists. It failed, with the Italians suffering heavy losses, not that the International Brigades fared any better.
Franco was not winning, but neither was he losing, yet when Cal Jardine got back to Barcelona, it was impossible to find a voice of the Republican side that even thought of stopping fighting; the problem was not a desire to go on, it was internal.
It was obvious matters had been seething uncomfortably since the death of Juan Luis Laporta, he being something of a local hero – there had even been a group set up to commemorate his name – with accusations flying about that he had been deliberately killed by his political foes, but that only poured oil onto the fires of endemic disputes that had raged for years.
On a hot day in May it came to a head when open conflict broke out in Barcelona between the anarchists and the communists. The latter, using their well-tried-and-trusted methods, had infiltrated and taken control of the Assault Guards in Barcelona too. This paramilitary body had grown in power, encouraged to do so by the Catalan government as a counter to the workers’ militias who, since the generals’ attempt to seize power, had policed the streets while ignoring not only orders to disperse, but any decree with which they did not agree.
The spark was an attempt, robustly repulsed, to try and take over the vital main telephone exchange, the very same building that Cal Jardine had helped to capture the previous July. Despite their superior weaponry, the Assault Guard found the workers impossible to dislodge.
The tocsin was sounded in the ranks of both the CNT-FAI and the POUM. Their members, with their weapons, poured onto the streets to do battle. It was an indication of how the power of the communists had increased in less than a year – they had been something of a fringe party in Barcelona before – now they had numbers and could contest those streets that had seen the regular army defeated.
Given the turmoil, getting a decision on such a vital matter had to be put on hold; Andreu Nin, Cal’s main contact, was heavily embroiled in the fighting, for the very good reason that his party was still most at risk, while García Oliver, who had been despatched from Valencia to try and bring peace to the city, was weighed down by endless meetings and stormy negotiations.
These attempts were not aided by the rhetoric on both sides; the communists wheeled out their most potent propaganda weapon, Dolores Ibárruri, known as La Pasionaria, the woman who had coined the famous slogan during the battle for Madrid, ¡No pasarán! Her views were outré and delivered with bile. They also lacked any grip on the truth, but that mattered less than that there were fools who believed what nonsense she spouted, which was that the internecine conflict was an anarcho-Trotskyist plot engineered on the orders of General Franco.
The counterclaims had more validity and went right to the heart of that in which Cal Jardine was involved, the fact that the Republican government was falling increasingly under communist control, politically, to add to their lock on military action. The workers’ leaders were at pains to ensure their followers were not fooled by the lack of openly communist ministers – that was how the Stalinists operated: in the shadows, like rodents.