Midnight In Madrid

THIRTY-ONE

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 10, 2:23 A.M.

Colonel Carlos Pendraza of the Spanish Policia Nacional stood with his arms at his side on the Calle de Balsa and methodically looked at the carnage before him. A dignified man, ill-at-ease to overt manifestations of temper, he surveyed the scene and quietly seethed.

Another horrendous high profile crime on the streets of Madrid. He could tell in an instant that the two men dead in Guardia Civil uniforms were not Spaniards. Not true Spaniards anyway. It was just another example of the international gentuza-the riffraff-bringing their discontent to Spain.

When would it end? he wondered. With what would it end? Certainly the leftists in the government weren’t going to do anything to suppress this stuff. He felt a deep disgust, a deep rage, and a deep helplessness.

And he also felt a sharp echo from the past.

As a young police officer in 1973, Pendraza had been part of the police detail that had protected a man named Carrero Blanco, Franco’s hard-line prime minister and the man seen as Franco’s most likely successor.

But within six months of being named prime minister, Carrero Blanco was assassinated in Madrid by four members of ETA, a Basque separatist organization that was still dangerous in this new century.

To murder Blanco, the ETA had placed close to two hundred pounds of explosives in a tunnel they had excavated under the street. Then they had set off a blast by remote control while Blanco rode from his home to a Roman Catholic Mass. Blanco had traveled in a specially built armored Dodge Dart. Pendraza had been in the second car following the Dart and had been badly injured by broken glass and hugely traumatized by the events of the day.

The blast catapulted Blanco’s vehicle over the church it was approaching. It landed on a second-floor balcony on the other side of the street. In a macabre touch, its twisted remains remained to this day on display, part of a grim memorial at the Spanish army museum. The explosion only took place about a half block from the United States Embassy.

Henry Kissinger, then the US Secretary of State during the Nixon administration, had been visiting Spain at the time. Had Kissinger been Catholic, not Jewish, Kissinger might easily have been in the car with Carrero Blanco at the time, and the ETA would have taken out a US cabinet member as well as their own prime minister.

This incident was the origin of the modern widespread practice of sealing manholes when a high profile procession is to take place.

This assassination, dubbed Operación Ogro by those who carried it out, was in retaliation for the execution of five political opponents by the regime and was applauded by many opponents of Franco’s regime.

In his first speech to the Spanish parliament in February 1974, Carrero Blanco’s successor promised many reforms including the right to form political associations. Though he was denounced by hardliners within the regime, the transition had begun, and it never ceased to gnaw at Pendraza that Blanco’s murder rewarded the purposes of those who had killed him.

But the incident hadn’t ended there either. One of the ETA members who had assassinated Carrero Blanco, a man known only by his nom de guerre, Argala, was himself assassinated by a car bomb in the south of France five years later. The killers this time were a Spanish far-right group organized from inside the navy, assisted by neo-fascists from France and Italy.

Argala, was the only one who could identify the mysterious man who handed to ETA Carrero Blanco’s schedule and itinerary. According to a former member of the Spanish army who participated in the bombing against Argala, the explosives that killed Argala came from an American military base, either stolen or “donated to a good cause.”

This morning, Pendraza had been sleeping soundly with his wife of twenty-six years beside him when his phone had rung to report the shootings on the Calla de la Bolsa. Ripped from a peaceful sleep only half an hour earlier, he now stared forward. Pendraza had had more than enough of the scenes that lay before him. He wondered again where it would all end. Why couldn’t Spain remain the sweet isolated place he had known as a young man? At age fifty-seven, he felt as if he were a hundred.

Behind him, on the other side of the police lines, a crowd gathered. Police had strung crime-scene tape everywhere. Technicians doing their jobs. A couple of ambulances were present to take away the dead, and there were more police cars than Pendraza cared to count, not even including the unmarked ones.

Pendraza’s brown eyes slid uneasily over the death scene. He felt his blood pressure rising.

These days in Spain, he raged to himself, he heard and read a lot of foolish things. A lot of revisions of history. But more than ever, Pendraza felt that the late, great Caudillo, General Franco, had saved this great country, and for that matter la civilización español, from the unwashed Bolshevik hordes. Spain would have turned into Poland or Cuba if the reds and the pinkos had had their way. And today it was no different.

He looked at what had happened on the street, then turned in anger, and went back to his car. Now he was officially involved in this. So officially or unofficially, whoever had been a part of this was going to pay. That was a promise he made to himself, and to the spirit of Franco.