Saving Picasso by Mark Skeet

Author:Mark Skeet [SKEET, MARK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER 14

Tuesday 6th August, 1940

Programme of the XIIth Olympiad

Fencing, Gymnastics, Yachting, Swimming, Rowing, Basketball,

Boxing, Hockey, Football.

It was the dogs that disturbed him; a distant baying from the other side of the hill.

Clare woke with a start, rising from the hollow where he’d fallen asleep, and scrambled up the hill. Pray God, it was just a party of hunters out for some early morning sport. Shuffling forward over the thorns and sharp stones, he peered out through the sun bleached grass to see a line of soldiers strung out across the field below, slowly beating their way towards him.

Somehow they knew.

Clare doubled back to the road, his one urgent thought now to put some distance between himself and the dogs.

The hum of an engine warned him of an approaching vehicle. Clare flung himself into a ditch that dropped away from the kerb and burrowed under the dried weeds, pressing his face into the dirt. The earth shuddered as the vehicle sped by; Clare could feel the wind on the back of his neck, see the tail boards of an army truck flashing past, full of soldiers, just like the truck that had passed by last night.

A few hundred yards to his left, Clare found a dried river bed, a narrow gully hewn from red rock that lent a cover of sorts. He ran without a care now, fighting a growing stitch in his side, the dust dry in his throat, stinging his eyes.

A second line of soldiers was sweeping up the valley towards him. Because of the lie of the riverbed, Clare failed to see them until they were almost upon him. Behind him, the men with their dogs were already cresting the hill. He was caught in a noose, with no direction left to turn, no option but to surrender.

The soldier that took him in could have been no more than seventeen years old. A timid, slightly built youth, he approached Clare cautiously, an ancient rifle in his hand, a second soldier covering him with his pistol. This man was older. In his early thirties. More sure of himself, not afraid to shoot or set loose his dog. Slowly and clearly, Clare lifted his hands above his head so that they could see he was unarmed. That he was going to come quietly. Without a struggle.

The return journey into Barcelona was swift. Marched to the road at gun point, prodded, poked, and gawped at like some prize exhibit, Clare was bound hand and foot, then lifted into the back of a truck. They stopped only once. To pick up an SIM agent: a thickset man with a broken nose and farmer’s hands, who asked him in a broad Catalan accent to confirm his name, then sat silent for the duration of the journey, chain smoking ducados and drumming his fingers on the wooden slats of the bench.

They took him straight to the SIM offices on Via Laietana. To an interrogation room on the fifth floor, its white walls stained from years of neglect.

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