What Happened When the War Was Over; further stories of Gonzalo Llorente and Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon

What Happened When the War Was Over

Further stories of Gonzalo Llorente and Carlos Tejada Alonso y León

Rebecca Pawel

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010, Rebecca Pawel

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Table of Contents

Author’s Note

The Big Picture (New York, 1949)

Hostages (Madrid, 1981)

The New World (San Juan, 1983)

Last Twenty Four Hours (Madrid, 2002)

*****

Author’s Note

The stories in this collection were written over a period of several years, mostly to satisfy personal curiosity about the fates of the two protagonists of Death of a Nationalist, Carlos Tejada the fascist guardia civil, and Gonzalo Llorente, the socialist soldier whose path crosses Tejada’s so fatefully.

I have continued to receive feedback from readers who are also curious, asking if there will be any more novels after The Summer Snow. Most readers accept my reasons for ending the series, but I am touched that they are as invested in the characters as I am, so I have decided to make these stories available so that those who loved and hated the characters in the novels can find out my idea of what happened afterward.

While the stories were not written in chronological order, I have tried to make them fit together. Those who are not familiar with the characters in Death of a Nationalist, or with the other novels featuring Tejada, should be able to read these stories with relative ease. Be warned, however, that if you have not read Death of a Nationalist or its sequels there are a considerable number of spoilers ahead. If you choose to read these stories without reading the books, I hope that they pique your curiosity. In any case, I hope that you enjoy them.

-- Rebecca Pawel

New York, March 2010

*****

The Big Picture

How’s it going, m’ijo? I heard about Chris. Listen, don’t beat yourself up, ok? You did all you could for him. Some we win and some we lose, but when the dealers get involved we almost always lose. Hell, we’re not in this business to win, just to put up a good fight…Why do I do it, then? Habit I guess. Or maybe ‘cause I like fighting. And once in a while we do win one…My first case? Hell, hijo, you make it sound like one of those old PI movies, with some gringo running around in a trench coat. Although now I think of it, the beginning actually was a bit like that…Well, I’ll tell you then, but I get to tell it like an old movie, ok? Humor an old man. And you’ve got to picture Humphrey Bogart playing me...

It started like the best of the old movies, with a scream in the dark, and then a frightened girl bursting in on the hero while he was nursing a hangover. Trying to nurse a hangover anyway. At the corner of Lexington and 116th you were right between the New York Central on Park Avenue to the west and the old Third Avenue El to the east and they were nicely timed so that one or the other was practically always going by. An El train in 1949 wasn’t exactly calculated to rest a throbbing head. On top of that Mr. Ortiz, the owner of the bodega on the corner, was angry about something, and when Mr. Ortiz was angry he could pretty well drown out the Central and the El combined. He was drowning one of them out now.

"Cabrón! he was yelling. Te va a cogel, cabroncito! You think is funny? I show you! No, señora, le cogí, y voy a pegale bueno!"

On top of Mr. Ortiz’s bellowing was a woman screaming something about her baby Juanito, and what sounded like a child crying. It must have been just after five in the morning, but the entire building was up, and probably most of the block as well. Some of them were yelling out the windows to be quiet, and some had probably gone down onto the sidewalk to see what all the fun was about.

Mr. Ortiz expected me downstairs in the bodega to start opening up at six, so I should have been getting up and dressed and shaved, but since I hadn’t gone to bed anyway I was just sitting with my head on the table and my hands over my ears (for all the good that did) when someone pounded on the door yelling my name.

I didn’t yell at the pounder to go away for three reasons. First, my head was in no condition to take any more noise coming out of my mouth. Second, I could tell that the person calling me was Lydia, and I knew that she would go right on pounding and yelling until I opened the door. Third, the fact that I’d just realized that Lydia could do pretty much whatever she wanted with me had been one of my motives for going through half a bottle of bacardi the night before. The other motive had to do with a newspaper article I’d seen, in which some asshole congressman praised our Spanish friends fight against Communism.

Actually, the two causes were related. I’d agreed to chaperon Lydia to a dance up at City College the night before. (Lydia was Mr. Ortiz’s oldest daughter, and there was no way he was letting her out in the evenings without a chaperon. They’d compromised on me as a substitute older brother, and it would have taken a braver man than I was to turn the two of them down once they were set on something.) I’d turned Lydia over to the boys her age, and sat against the wall re-reading the article about General Franco’s fight against Communism and getting angry all over again. Then she asked me to dance a slow dance with her, and at the end of the dance I realized that I’d forgotten all about how angry I was. I’d just read the elected representatives of this goddamn democracy singing the praises of the fascists who’d destroyed my country and killed the only woman I could ever love, and all I was thinking about was how Lydia’s hair smelled and the weight of her body in my arms. That was when I decided to get drunk.

I pulled on a clean shirt, splashed some water on my face, and opened the door hoping that Lydia would think that I just hadn’t had time to shave and brush my teeth yet. I could have saved myself the trouble. She was too intent on her errand to notice how I looked. "Gonzalo! Come quick! It’s Johnny Toledo and my dad will kill him if you don’t come."

Standing up to Mr. Ortiz when he was angry wasn’t something I enjoyed doing even when I was feeling my best, and doing it now for a problem child like Johnny Toledo was the last thing I wanted to do. But Lydia Ortiz had a little of her father’s overwhelming personality, and she was a lot prettier. Besides, I was pleased that she came to me when she was in trouble, even if she just thought of me as a much older brother. So I followed her down the stairs, trying to compromise between keeping up with her and not breaking my neck since the landlord didn’t bother to replace all the burnt-out lightbulbs.

The brownstone where I rented a room was right next door to the corner where the Ortizes lived over the store. A couple of my neighbors were on the stoop, checking out the crowd gathered outside the bodega. It was the end of the school year, maybe May, and the sky was all light blue already, even though the streetlights were still on. The colors all had that washed out look they have in dawn light, and the people looked washed out too. I felt washed out.

Lydia pushed her way to the front of the crowd, and I followed her, and found Mr. Ortiz, holding a screaming kid by the forearm with one hand and whacking him with the other, yelling all the while. The kid’s mother, a fat woman in a faded flowered housecoat, was screaming louder than either of them. It would have been a good scene for an opera. The bass lyrics would have been Mr. Ortiz: "Tu pinta’ la bodega! Tu la pinta? You paint my store I break your face! The alto would have been the kid’s howls: I didn’t do nothing, Mister! Por favor, Mister! While the mother could have been a coloratura soprano: Ay bendita Virgen Santísima! Ay Dio’ mío! Ay Dio’ mío!" The crowd around them served as a chorus, shouting not particularly helpful encouragement to all sides.

I recognized the kid. His mother and his half siblings lived in the same crumbling brownstone I did. His name was Johnny Toledo, and he was one of those poor disasters who you know will end up as a client of ours by the time he can toddle.