Chapter 21 The Deep Roots of Hatred
The Deep Roots of Hatred
Closing the door behind him, Roberto was surprised by the almost sepulchral silence that confronted them. Other people might have been at home, but the sensation at least was that Ramón Docampo and he were completely alone.
“Let’s go up to my study.” The man began climbing the stairs without looking back. “We’ve got a lot to discuss.”
Roberto followed him to a room in one of the wings.
It was a small, tastefully decorated study.
Old lithographs of sailing ships hung on the walls, and there were burnished brass navigation instruments dotted around, their surfaces reflecting the dying embers in the fireplace.
Heavy curtains covered the only window, and a cluttered desk was flanked by a pair of metal filing cabinets.
Ramón pointed him to the armchairs by the fire, between which stood a coffee table. Just as Roberto was about to sit down, the chandelier above them flickered and went out.
“The storm must have overloaded the generator,” the old man muttered as darkness descended. “Just a moment.”
Roberto heard the scrape of a drawer, followed by some rummaging. Ramón Docampo struck a match, and his face was momentarily lit in the darkness. Then, to the gentle hiss of a kerosene lamp, the whole room was bathed in amber light.
Ramón placed the lamp on the coffee table and went over to a bar cabinet in the corner. There was a chinking as he returned to the fireside with a couple of glasses and a bottle of Hankey Bannister.
“Okay,” said Ramón, groaning softly as he sat down. “Now, I want you to tell me what happened. The detailed version.”
“You already heard it from Antía,” Roberto said cautiously. “There isn’t much to add.”
“Antía’s a good girl,” Ramón said as he poured two fingers of whiskey into each glass.
“I’ve known her since she was a child, I’ve watched her grow up.
I think she’s the best in generations of Freires but .
. . she’s still a Freire. I’m sure you’ll understand why I want a version of events from a more neutral party. ”
Roberto nodded and took a sip of his whiskey. It was lukewarm and could have done with a couple of ice cubes, but he guessed such luxury wasn’t for now. He felt the liquor lining his throat and then hitting his stomach in a warm, comforting explosion.
For the second time that evening, he told how he had come upon the man’s body and the state it was in. He also mentioned the macabre gift of the rabbit’s head on the day of his arrival and Elvira Couto’s story.
When Roberto finished, Ramón Docampo was on to his second glass and was watching him inscrutably.
“So, according to you, there’s a monster loose on the island,” Ramón said, speaking the words slowly. “Something out of legend, controlled by some curse, that’s now gone and killed one of my family.”
“I’m not saying that,” Roberto protested.
“I don’t think anything supernatural’s at work, but I do think that someone, taking advantage of the legend, has been going around killing animals, and for a long time.
The rabbit the other day, your son’s chickens, and lots of others besides.
And now, for some reason, it’s gone up a notch, and this person has started killing people. ”
“That’s what you think.” He leaned over the coffee table and tapped his nose a couple of times.
“And you’ll agree that it doesn’t make much sense.
Or that, if it is true, it’s quite the coincidence that it’s all started just now, when there are seventy-five million euros stuffed in a couple of bags behind the church altar. No?”
Roberto faltered. He had given only the outline of a theory, with all sorts of loose ends.
“I’m certain the Freires had nothing to do with it,” he said. “I saw their faces when I took them to the body. They were as shocked as I was.”
Ramón Docampo gave a grim chuckle, shaking his head, and took another sip. “That’s because you don’t know the Freires like I do,” he replied. “You don’t know how treacherous those people can be. The ambition that drives them. What they’re capable of.”
“Killing an innocent man with a hammer to the head, like your son did?” spat Roberto, unable to contain himself. “Like that?”
For a moment, Ramón said nothing, and the fear flashed through Roberto’s mind that the old man hadn’t known of Luis’s crime. But then, a sad smile appeared on the patriarch’s face.
“I know what my son did,” he said simply. “Needs must.”
“Needs must? Have you lost your mind?”
“If Pampín had survived, the authorities would have been called in. The money would have gone with them, and, what’s worse, the rightful owners wouldn’t have believed a word we said when they came calling for it later on.
” He struck another match and lit a cigar.
“I know you won’t understand, but Pampín’s being dead is the best thing for us, for the Freires . . . and for you too.”
Roberto tried to get his head around the man’s twisted logic.
“Life on this island isn’t easy.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Never has been. Let me tell you a story.”
A clap of thunder rattled the windows, and the lamplight flickered. Roberto, feeling uneasy, took another sip from his glass.
“Ons hasn’t always been inhabited,” Ramón Docampo began, his tone teacherly.
“Over the centuries, various people have lived here, and they all ended up leaving the island, for one reason or another. Sometimes it was an epidemic, sometimes on account of war or famine, sometimes pirates coming to plunder. It seems like a paradise to people now, but the location has always put it at the mercy of events in difficult times . . . and believe me, things have often been difficult here.”
You don’t say. Roberto thought of all he’d been through over the previous days, though he chose to keep it to himself.
“About two hundred years ago, the last attempt to colonize Ons happened,” Docampo went on. “That was when the ancestors of both the Docampos and the Freires first arrived, as well as the forebears of everyone else currently resident here.”
“Where’s this heading?”
“Patience.” He took another puff on his cigar. “Those settlers spent decades trying to make a life for themselves here. They cleared land, plowed fields, battled with the poor soil and all the storms—just like this one now—with pretty meager harvests their only reward.”
Roberto remembered the weed-choked ruins he’d glimpsed on his walks over the previous few days.
“Nothing they did was enough, and the little they got from the land had to be supplemented by what they could get from the sea.” He waved his hand vaguely.
“They had to have detailed knowledge of the currents and the winds, and, even so, lives were often lost. But they managed to survive, although it was hardly what you could call the good life.”
“Some didn’t do so badly.” Roberto gestured to the room around them.
“That’s true, but you’re jumping ahead.” Ramón Docampo gave a half smile.
Roberto took a deep breath. The powder keg was going to blow at any moment, and the old man wanted to sit around telling stories.
“As I was saying, life on the island was hard, and the settlers had no choice but to work together.” He interlaced the fingers of his two hands to illustrate the idea. “Unity is strength, and all that.”
“Were the Freires and the Docampos at each other’s throats back then?”
“Not at all. In the beginning, the ties were very close. I’m sure if we went through the old parish book, we’d find dozens of marriages between our two families over the years, just as between many other families.
” A sly smile appeared on his face. “Our blood’s so mixed that it’s only the surnames that differentiate us. ”
“So . . . what happened?”
Ramón Docampo shrugged. “Who knows? When you’re barely managing to subsist, sometimes little things can lead to big disagreements. A farm boundary, a boat that needs repairing, a stray cow . . . only small things. But they build up and one day explode.”
“In other words, you don’t actually know how the conflict started.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ramón Docampo said. “Relations weren’t fantastic, but then something happened that really kicked things up a notch.”
“Okay, when was that?”
Ramón Docampo’s cigar had gone out, and he paused to light it again. He puffed on it a few times, enveloping himself in a bluish smoke, until, satisfied, he resumed his story.
“May 15, 1945. Does that date mean anything to you?”
It rang a bell for Roberto, but much as he tried, he couldn’t see a link and just shook his head.
“World War Two had ended one week before,” Ramón Docampo explained. “The Russians were strolling around the ruins of the Reichstag, the Germans had surrendered unconditionally, and the Allied victory was being celebrated right across Europe.”
“That was all a long time ago, and a long way from here. I don’t see the connection.”
“At that time, my father, Severino Docampo, was just one more man trying to eke a living from the island, like everyone else, including Orlando Freire, Rosalía’s father.
” Ramón Docampo’s mouth twisted contemptuously.
“Orlando! As you can see, the Freires have a liking for pompous names. Well, that morning, my father and Orlando were fishing in the strait between the main island and Onza, the islet out there.”
Roberto nodded, recalling the inaccessible-looking crag he’d seen to the south of the main island.
“According to my father, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, when they had just pulled in the nets, they saw bubbles coming to the surface between the two boats, which were a couple of hundred feet apart. At first, they thought it might be a whale surfacing, but then they found out.”
“What was it?” Ramón’s telling had turned more evocative, and the tale had Roberto in its grip now.
“A metal tower emerged from the water, followed by a long, dark metal tube. Imagine the shock of those two poor islanders when suddenly, right in front of them, a German U-boat appeared.”
Roberto could not help but let out an exclamation. He suddenly pictured the iconic image of a German U-boat, one of those lone wolves responsible for sinking so many ships during the war. “Are you sure? What was a German submarine doing here?”
“During the war, or much of it at least, the port of Vigo was one of their reprovisioning bases,” Ramón Docampo explained.
“Throughout the war, they’d seen them pass by the island, often in the middle of the night, on their way to refuel and restock.
But by the end of the war, that safe harbor no longer existed. ”
“So what happened?”
“According to my father, the sub was in bad shape. The tower was full of holes, and there was a big dent on one side, like it had been kicked by a giant. When they rowed over, they saw that it was leaking oil.”
Roberto nodded pensively. In the closing stages of the war, the Allied pressure on the few remaining German-controlled ports had been ferocious. Ramón’s description perfectly fit a submarine that had narrowly survived a depth charge. To have made it as far as the Rías Baixas was a feat in itself.
Ramón took another puff on his cigar. “One of the officers spoke a bit of Spanish, and he told my father and Orlando Freire that they were aiming for Argentina. While the three of them were talking, a group of men came out on deck for some air. They had different uniforms from all the rest. Apparently, they had skulls embroidered on their collars. Know what that means?”
Roberto swallowed hard. The so-called “ratlines” that had operated toward the end of the war were escape routes used by large numbers of senior Nazi officers to get to South America and thereby evade justice.
There were dozens of known cases but not many firsthand accounts, and here was this man suddenly offering up a description of one such escape.
“They were short of everything.” Ramón tapped the cigar in the ashtray. “Medicines, food, and especially fuel. There would be no crossing the Atlantic without that.”
“And they requested it from your father and Orlando.”
“They didn’t request it.” He shook his head. “They wanted to buy it. They gave them each a one-hundred-gram gold bar to ensure their silence, and promised them much more if they could get them what they needed.”
“And did they?”
“Of course not!” laughed Ramón. “My father and Orlando Freire were poor as anything, and they lived on a remote island. Where were they going to get medicines, supplies, or thousands of gallons of fuel? This was Spain after the civil war we’re talking about. Everything was thin on the ground.”
“I see. And I guess they didn’t notify the authorities either.”
“The authorities would just have confiscated the gold and thrown them in jail.”
“So they kept it a secret and didn’t tell anyone.”
“Well, they did a bit more than that.” Ramón stubbed out the cigar now, crushing it in the bowl of the ashtray with three dabs of the wrist. “They came up with a plan to get their hands on the rest of the gold that was in that submarine.”
“They what?”
“It was a perfect chance to escape a life of poverty.” Ramón leaned back in his armchair. “They were tough men, accustomed to hardship, but they were also used to seizing chances when they came along. And this, without any doubt, was the best opportunity they’d ever had in their lives.”
“Wait a moment,” said Roberto. “Are you telling me that your father and Rosalía Freire’s father stole gold from a bunch of fleeing Nazis?”
“Even better than that.”
“Go on . . .”
“It’s very simple,” he said. “They took them all out.”