Authors: Geoffrey Household
He dismounted smartly and ordered the silence to halt. As it didn’t answer, he strode towards a little ridge which commanded the inadequate cover where we were half hidden, crushing the
heather with severity and unslinging from his back a complicated bit of American lethal machinery, less respectable for a servant of state than the old carbine and possibly less practical, but a
lot more terrifying to the public, including me.
My companion, more experienced than I, saw what was going to happen and started to dodge silently from bush to bush before it was too late. I remained crouched in a wretchedly shallow, dry
arroyo, dithering with indecision. When I dared to raise my head, old Spain was gallantly intent on its duty to smell out the disaffected, while new Spain, in the form of a motor-cycle, glittered a
few yards away by the roadside.
I did not wait to explore unfamiliar controls. I just hurtled down the road in neutral, getting a fair start before the Guardia heard me at all. As I reappeared on the bend below, my
impertinence was too much for his patience and he gave me a squirt from his undignified weapon. Nobody in my quiet life had ever shot at me before. The experience was not so alarming as I should
have anticipated. One has always, I suppose, something else to think about. In my case it was whether or not I was going to skid on the loose gravel of the verge at the pace I was taking the
corners.
I left the machine for its owner at the bottom of the hill and vanished again into country lanes. There were several local inhabitants in the middle distance, but, after all, they could not know
it was not my motor-cycle. I hoped that in any case the outrage would be ascribed to my shady companion. It was quite likely that the Guardia was not aware that there were two of us.
All this meant another hungry night in the open. Since somebody looking rather like me at a distance was wanted by the police, I had to avoid villages and approach Lequeitio with extreme care.
The little port, set in a bowl of the hills, could only be entered by three roads, easy to control. By waiting for low tide I found a fourth, scrambling over the rocky foreshore to the beach and
then walking inoffensively along it to the harbour.
I enjoyed a huge late lunch in a quayside tavern, where nobody used Spanish and I was just an insignificant part of the general noise. The Lequeitio fleet was out. The tall, brown houses with
their splendidly timbered glassed balconies stared down on a harbour fairly empty except for the floating mess which fishermen always manage to leave on any smooth and enclosed piece of water. I
was conscious of too many unseen eyes for my comfort—of bored proprietors and clerks looking out from the dark entrances of the warehouses, taverns and chandler’s shops beneath the
houses, of unseen women behind the panes of the
miradores
.
I walked along the massive paving of the quay and had not far to look for the Breton. Her name was the
Phare de Kerdonis
, registered at Le Croisic. She was tied up alongside the
breakwater with a local boat, also under repair, between her and the fishmarket. On her starboard side was a small launch, about the size of Allarte’s, called the
Isaura
, her skipper
busy with the maintenance of his fixed rods and lines.
Out on the breakwater beyond the houses, where there were no casual idlers, I felt naked and conspicuous. I had not even any determined plan. These things are so much easier for a cop; he can
either employ some slimy individual to buy drinks for his suspect until the man gives himself away, or charge right in and detain him. What I wanted to find out was whether Captain Bozec knew
Vigny. I was ninety per cent certain that he did, but conjecture was not enough. And what was the close association between the two? Close it had to be, for when Vigny after that third brandy which
I had invented for him was wondering whom he could get at a moment’s notice to prepare the way for Livetti, the inspired answer was Bozec.
Blue flashes of welding lit up the engine-room hatch, on the edge of which an obvious Frenchman was sitting with his legs hanging down. Unlike the Basque fishing captains, he wore a peaked cap.
Since he looked authoritative, I took a chance that he was Bozec.
‘Have you been here long, captain?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been here six weeks,’ he answered irritably. ‘And in any other hole of this coast it would be one.’
He spoke idiomatic Spanish with hardly any accent. That explained one thing which had been bothering me: why Araña, who by and large had told the truth, had never said that the man who
did business with him was a foreigner.
‘What’s the trouble?’
‘The trouble is a son of a bitch of an engineer who can’t learn to keep the screw from racing when we’re halfway up to heaven.’
‘There were some nasty blows last month,’ I said.
‘Where do you come from?’ he asked abruptly—for it was obvious that I did not know what all Lequeitio did.
I told him that I lived in Fuenterrabía, which was right on the frontier and would account for my speaking French, if I had to, as well as Spanish. Then I asked him why he had not run for
a French port, Hendaye or St Jean de Luz.
‘Because we were hove to in the gale, friend, with just the fishing jib to keep her head to it and glad to get in anywhere.’
I am no seaman, but I thought his answer insufficient. If the sudden north-west gale had caught him fishing on the Biscay grounds it would have blown him, hove to or not, on to the French coast.
He must have been very much closer than he ought to the merciless capes of Spain. It was true enough, however, that his choice of Lequeitio was forced. He would have found more efficient yards at
the fishing ports of Bermeo or Santurce if he could have made either of them.
‘It’s the hell of an entrance with a high sea,’ I said.
‘Well, it was that or the cliffs. Our only chance was to start up the diesel again and run it until something gave. By God, I didn’t think I would be here more than a week! And then
along came an inspector who wouldn’t let me leave because the shaft wobbled. As if I didn’t know it! But it would have taken us home.’
I could guess what had happened. The Harbourmaster, who must have wondered as I did why he was close enough to the coast to be driven on to it by the gale, was teaching him and his fellows a
courteous Spanish lesson. Fish in territorial waters, would you? Right, you’re a comrade of the sea and we do not want to be hard! But the red tape and the mañana you’ll have to
put up with before we let you go will make you think twice about doing it again.
Bozec’s troubles, however, were now over. His crew, whom he had sent home to France by train, were on their way back. The
Phare de Kerdonis
would sail in a couple of days.
He seemed to find me a sympathetic listener; so I switched to French to give him more confidence still. It was a mistake.
‘You don’t speak like a Gascon,’ he said suspiciously.
‘Why should I? My native language is Basque.’
‘They say it resembles Breton.’
An odd remark. Since he had been in Lequeitio for six weeks, he must have known that there was no resemblance at all. The half-smile on his face showed that he expected a reply from me. I had
the feeling that there was a set answer—some sort of password admitting one to the club of contrabandists. So I made a downright deadly shot in the dark.
‘I have friends at Zarauz,’ I said.
‘Me, too,’ he answered casually, and signalled to the skipper of the
Isaura
who pulled himself up on to the deck of the larger boat. I noticed for the first time that the
Isaura
was registered at Zarauz.
Is this man a Basque?’ Bozec asked.
Bernardino—that was what Bozec called him. I don’t know his surname—engaged me in conversation. Where was I born? Where did I live? Whom did I know? I did not acquit myself
very brilliantly, for I couldn’t play Eibar being already committed to Fuenterrabia. He reported that I was certainly a Basque, but that I did not come from the coast at all.
Bozec, still puzzled, tried me with a remark in Breton—evidently a final chance for me to give an acceptable reply. I couldn’t give any at all. I have never studied the primitive
languages of the Celts. So I just winked at him.
‘Can you go back to Zarauz now?’ he asked the
Isaura
’s skipper.
It wouldn’t be inconvenient.’
‘Then we’ll all go together.’
Five minutes later we were out of Lequeitio harbour and running eastwards along the coast. I knew what Daniel felt like; a den of lions was what I was going to get for praying to Olura three
times a day. But no refusal was possible or wise. I assured myself that, after all, we were not in Algeria or Chicago.
During the three hours which it took to reach Zarauz conversation with Bozec flowed easily, though carefully keeping off the subject of our visit. Each felt, I think, that the other might be a
person whose good will was worth having, but neither was giving anything away. In answer to my compliments on his fauluess Spanish, Bozec told me that his mother was from Asturias and never spoke
anything else with her children. Evidently she had the obstinate pride of many uneducated Spanish women, refusing to master French or Breton and quite content with some jargon which she spoke with
her husband. He—Bozec’s father—had been mate of a coaster trading between Nantes and north Spanish ports, and had fallen in love with a young girl—I did not like to ask
where he had met her—left a helpless orphan by the Asturian revolt of 1934. By that and other remarks I inferred that there was a tradition among the Bozecs of jiggery-pokery in the Bay of
Biscay.
Yet even Bozec could not have openly sailed the
Phare de Kerdonis
into a Spanish harbour, nor could he have launched and sent in a dinghy on the night of July 10th; indeed he would have
hesitated on any night, considering the deep-sea swell breaking on that rock-bound coast. It was a job for a local man who knew the inlets and the few coves which were both remote and sheltered.
Almost certainly he had a rendezvous with a Spanish fishing boat, to which he transferred his passengers at sea.
Could it be the
Isaura
, whose owner was plainly on intimate terms with Bozec? Bernardino was not communicative, prepared to join occasionally in our conversation, but reluctant to speak
Euzkadi with me alone.
At last I caught him out with a casual aside, quite unknown to Bozec, as a calm, green, seventh wave lifted us ten feet and dropped us again. I remarked that it must be a change to have two
French passengers who were not seasick.
‘The poor devil!’ he muttered.
Vigny’s collapse on that night of July 10th must have been memorable and alarming.
The two of us left the
Isaura
at the fishing quay and strolled off along the front. I assumed that we were going to find our friends on some neat terrace above the beach umbrellas where
there could be no uncivilised behaviour. But Bozec walked away from the fashionable hotels and villas, through the old town and out to the edge of open country. We stopped at a square house, dating
from the last century when thick stone walls and heavy timbering were fashionable, and standing in a small garden behind half a dozen thick-stemmed palmettos, ragged with age and neglect.
Bozec rang the bell. The door was opened by Vigny himself.
‘I have brought this type along because he claimed to be a friend of ours,’ Bozec said.
Vigny took a second look at me. His speed of reaction was astonishing.
‘Why, of course!’ he exclaimed, warmly shaking my hand. ‘How are you, professor? I am most grateful to you, my dear Bozec.’
‘Good! That’s all I wanted to know,’ said Bozec bluntly. ‘We came over in the
Isaura
, but I’ll have to go back by taxi.’
Vigny pulled out a 500-peseta note and gave it to him.
‘Take a taxi down in the town,’ he advised. ‘Our friend will stop and dine with us.’
I played his game, too, for want of a better, and said a warm and grateful good-bye to Bozec. He left convinced that we were all on excellent terms. Vigny’s acting was so good that I
myself felt he was genuinely glad to see me and that my suspicions might be wildly exaggerated.
He led me, chatting most amicably, through the hall into the dining-room. It was full of great chunks of local carpentry in light-coloured wood. Evidently Sauche had rented the house, furnished,
from some family of local gentry. It had been built not as a summer residence but to live in all the year round. The small windows and massive walls were intended to keep out the chill damp of
winter. It was a melancholy place, and the scarecrow palmettos made it even darker than it need have been.
The general sat in a tall leather chair, with a tray of drinks at his side. The two were living
en garçon
a little gloomily but in decided comfort. Slightly-built and
inconspicuous, the pair of them: one grey and clean-shaven, one dark and moustached. But the major’s slimness was that of an athlete.
‘A friend to see us,’ Vigny announced.
Sauche also was most cordial.
‘From your appearance one would hazard a guess that you are on the run,’ he said.
‘In a way, yes.’
‘The professor did not come of his own accord,’ Vigny explained. ‘Captain Bozec brought him.’
‘Bozec?’ the general repeated with a military snort in which there was some alarm. ‘Why?’
‘That is what the professor will tell us. Meanwhile I thought it best that Bozec should think we were delighted to see an old friend—as indeed we are. Did you perhaps wish to compare
the grammar of Breton with that of Basque and Berber?’
Feeling an inelegant clot in front of these two well-bred masters of finesse, I pointed out that in the Basque country everybody knew—discreetly—a little of everyone else’s
business, and so I had reason to believe that Bozec might lead me to them.
Vigny let that pass, and poured me a whisky.
‘I don’t think the moustache suits you,’ he said. ‘One is no longer struck by the resemblance to Voltaire. But all the rest is admirable without being exaggerated. I am
experienced in security, yet I should pass you in the street without a second glance.’