Saving Picasso

Mark Skeet

Description

Set in the imagined aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Saving Picasso is a spy story quite unlike any other.Barcelona, 1940. Franco is dead. The communists have emerged victorious from the Spanish Civil War and an uneasy peace resides over Europe. International Brigadeveteran RichardClare returns to Spain to cover the Barcelona Olympic games for The London EveningNews. Broke, restless and adrift since the end of the war,Clare is intent on finding his former girlfriend Montse, from whom he was acrimoniously parted two years previously. But soon Clare finds himself at the heart of a more sensational story - a plot by Picasso to defect to the west...Pitched somewhere between Robert Harris' Fatherland and Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Saving Picasso is an intelligent, gripping read that will appeal to fans of spy thrillers and historical fiction.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 06 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780886824
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

‘ALL IT TAKES IS ONE BOMB TO CHANGE THE COURSE OF HISTORY’
SAVING PICASSO
Mark Skeet
Copyright © 2013 Mark Skeet
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1780886 824
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
For
Sophy, Ava, Lara and Romy
BARCELONA, 1940

1 – Olympic Stadium
2 – Hotel Oriente
3 – Colom
4 – Hotel Comercio
5 – Tennis Club
6 – Montse’s flat
7 – Jordan’s office
8 – SIM torture cells
9 – Passport Office
10 – Carrer Fusina
11 – França Station
12 – Bullring
13 – Football stadium
14 – Miramar
15 – Hospital Sant Pau
16 – Montjuic Cemetery
POBLE OLIMPIC, MONTJUIC

1 – Olympic Stadium
2 – Casa de Prensa
3 – Palau Nacional
4 – Palau esport
5 – Velodrome
6 – Sal esport
7 – Administration
8 – Broadcasting
9 – Plaça España
10 – Font del Gat
11 – Poble Espanyol
* * * * *
On 6 th July 1940, Adolf Hitler called off his threatened boycott of the Barcelona Olympic Games. Hours later, Benito Mussolini issued a communiqué confirming that Italy too would now be sending a team to Spain.
In Washington, President Roosevelt welcomed the news as evidence of a first thawing in relations between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia since the end of the Spanish Civil War. Across Europe, Hitler’s climb down was greeted with widespread relief. For the time being at least, the continent had stepped back from the brink of a second world war.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Wednesday 24th July, 1940
Chapter 2: Thursday 25th July, 1940
Chapter 3: Friday 26th July, 1940
Chapter 4: Saturday 27th July, 1940
Chapter 5: Sunday 28th July, 1940
Chapter 6: Monday 29th July, 1940
Chapter 7: Tuesday 30th July, 1940
Chapter 8: Wednesday 31st July, 1940
Chapter 9: Thursday 1st August, 1940
Chapter 10: Friday 2nd August, 1940
Chapter 11: Saturday 3rd August, 1940
Chapter 12: Sunday 4th August, 1940
Chapter 13: Monday 5th August, 1940
Chapter 14: Tuesday 6th August, 1940
Chapter 15: Wednesday 7th August, 1940
Chapter 16: Thursday 8th August, 1940
Chapter 17: Friday 9th August, 1940
Chapter 18: Saturday 10th August, 1940
Chapter 19: Sunday 11th August, 1940
Chapter 20: Tuesday 13th August, 1940
Chapter 21: Wednesday 21st August, 1940
Chapter 22: Friday 23rd August, 1940
Chapter 23: Thursday 5th September, 1940
Chapter 24: Friday 6th September, 1940
Notes & Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1
Wednesday 24 th July, 1940
A thin veil of black cloud hung low over the Pyrenees, like a cape abandoned by the Gods after a night of revelry. Slowly, as if infected by the lethargy of the morning, the Paris Express passed through the long tunnel linking Cerbère to Portbou, somewhere in the dark crossing over the line that divided France from Spain.
The train ground to a halt, the shadow of the hillside behind cutting a sharp pattern across the platform. Looking out of the carriage – at the militiaman sucking the last from his cigarette, an old woman hawking slices of watermelon, a man in a tatty brown suit wiping his shoes on a loose sheet of newspaper – Richard Clare could see that little had changed since he’d first passed through this frontier station, except of course the face staring back at him from the reflection in the window. A face that four years ago had belonged to a naïve twenty-one year old heading for the Spanish Civil War. And now? It seemed to him more like a mask. His sharp blue eyes, uncombed hair, and casual air giving little hint of the tensions churning his stomach.
Clare turned away from the window. To the five other men in the compartment, he was the special correspondent for The London Evening News on his way to Barcelona to cover the Olympic Games. Peter Wilson from The Mirror , Trevor Wignall of The Express , David Selwyn The Times , Peter Stewart The Herald , and Henry Forsyth The Daily Mail – all in their twenties and already old hands on the sports desk, friendly enough but what they really made of him, Clare couldn’t quite tell. They were journalists and he wasn’t, not really, the few articles he’d written for the paper hardly warranted such a prestigious assignment. The truth was he’d persuaded the editor to give him the job, shamelessly trading on his celebrity, the splash created by his memoirs of the war.
‘I know the place. I speak the language. I can get you interviews,’ he’d told the old man, then somewhat stretching the truth, ‘I can get you Picasso.’ Picasso was big news. The world’s most famous artist and too tempting a prospect for the editor to ignore.
‘Okay.’ The old man had agreed to give it a shot. ‘Rundell stays. You go.’ Guy Rundell was the paper’s chief sports correspondent and a veteran of the last two Olympics. Clare liked the man and was sorry to have taken his “ticket”. He wished he could have been honest with him from the start – about Montse and why he had to get back to Spain – but in the end he’d just left it to the editor to say, ‘I’m sorry, Guy. It’s in the paper’s best interests.’
‘Everybody out!’ The train spewed forth its passengers – most of them journalists, already the odd muttering as to how much more efficient it had been last time round, how at least in Berlin they hadn’t had to contend with this heat. ‘Sandia! Sandia! Hay Sandia!’ The old woman had a ready answer in her mound of watermelon. On the wall, awkwardly plastered over an old advertisement for El Niño condensed milk, a large poster by Picasso leapt out in greeting; vibrant and colourful. A contorted dove rising up out of the city, the legend bold against the sky – XIIth Olympiad. Barcelona, 1940.
‘You speak Spanish. What the hell’s he saying?’ Wignall, who only two minutes earlier had declared Spain about as appealing as a rainy afternoon in Wigan, pointed Clare towards a young man in a loose fitting uniform, officiously herding them towards the main terminal.
Clare translated. ‘He says we’ve got to get our passports checked.’ Since the end of the Civil War, entry into Spain had been restricted to a smattering of journalists and diplomats. The sudden influx of visitors had clearly put the border guards on edge.
‘Well, it wouldn’t hurt for him to show some manners,’ Wignall huffed.
Another day Clare might have laughed. The red star on the man’s epaulettes marked him as an officer of the Servicio de Investigacion Militar, better known as the SIM. A secret police force set up by Orlov during the war, modelled on the Russian NKVD and just as ruthless.
Inside the terminal, there were three queues. At the head of each, more SIM. Plain clothes. Discreetly alert. There only if you knew how to spot them. Nothing to worry about Clare told himself, but still they left him with an uneasy feeling. A sharp reminder of why he’d been forced to stay away from Spain these last two years.
A tannoy informed that the onward train to Barcelona was running forty minutes late. While the conversation disintegrated into predictable Fleet Street banter, names and references that meant nothing to him, Clare found refuge in a two day old copy of The Times . The headlines bleak and depressing. Further violence in Paris – Communist and Fascist gangs fighting pitched battles in the streets around Montmartre. The unrest now spreading to Britain – two dead, eighty-seven injured in a clash between Mosley’s blackshirts and striking dock workers; politicians in both countries beginning to suspect that the violence was being subtly orchestrated from Berlin and Moscow; the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, arguing that the Barcelona Games represented Europe’s best chance of reversing the slide towards a conflict more widespread and devastating than the Great War of 1914-18.
It took another hour to have their visas checked – valid for twenty-one days and restricted to a thirty mile zone around Barcelona – and another hour after that to reboard the train. An endless series of petty delays. Clare leaned back against the hard wooden seat and closed his eyes, if only to avoid having to speak to the others. He knew it wouldn’t be long, now that they were across the border. The questions about the war. Clare, you were here then – what was it like? He could see it in their eyes; the unspoken fascination. He had been under fire, they hadn’t, and they wanted to know what it was like. What it was really like – the stuff he hadn’t put in his book, the stuff that even his friends didn’t know about, the stuff he’d only ever told Montse.
By the time they reached Figueres, Clare was asleep, dead to the spots of sunlight dancing on his eyelids, the sticky warmth of the morning and the countryside flashing past, so that it wasn’t until the bridge over the River Besòs loomed into sight and Wilson gave him a sharp nudge in the ribs – ‘Wake up, man. We’re here’ – that he was alert to the fact they’d finally arrived, the train limping into França with a last wheezing cough of steam.
The authorities had done their best to impress on the visitor a picture of pre-war normality. The platforms had been cleaned of years of accumulated pigeon shit, the broken panes of glass replaced in the vast steel roof, and the revolutionary slogan