He paused, watching as that sank in, looking for signs of doubt; there was not one who did not seem still determined.
‘Back here in an hour and be warned – I will inspect you and chuck in the gutter anything I think you don’t need. Some of those who came to the Olympiad will want to get out, so ask them to gather here as well. This will be our rendezvous point till we find out how the land lies.’
Taking Florencia by the arm, he headed back towards the centre of the city. Vince, professional as he was, had already got together the kit he knew he needed and was on their heels.
The crowds were no longer just milling about; as an indication of how serious matters had become many were busy building barricades and doing so with an impressive professionalism. Instead of just a jumble of various artefacts hastily thrown together, they were being constructed with care, a bus or a truck the centrepiece, the paving stones ripped up from the streets not just thrown in a rising heap, but laid carefully and angled, so that any shot striking them would ricochet upwards and over instead of smashing them to pieces, with rifle slots at the crest, offset for aiming right and left to protect the men who would use them.
Florencia explained, when Cal expressed his admiration, that such skill was honed by experience, Barcelona being a city well versed in the mechanics of revolt, not least in an event they called the Semana Trágica – twenty-five years past but still a beacon for socialist memory – when the government, the army and the Civil Guard, using artillery, had crushed a major uprising.
The workers would not make the same mistakes of shoddy construction now as they had made then; the barricades were designed to cope with such assaults. At the same time, lorries and cars, horns blaring, flags flying, armed men on top, were racing around the city carrying food, some already with makeshift armour plating fixed to windscreens and sides.
All had big white letters painted on their bodywork to denote which of the myriad left-wing organisations they belonged to: UGT, POUM, PSOE, PCE, and the biggest and most numerous, the group of which Florencia was a member, the syndicalists and purist anarchists of the CNT-FAI, two groups who had fallen out over political purity and had recently come together again.
The Spanish left, not too dissimilar to those on the right they opposed, consisted of a plethora of shifting unions, cooperatives, labour fronts and political affiliations too confusing for a mere visitor to comprehend, despite Florencia’s best efforts at enlightenment, accompanied, when not praising her own CNT-FAI colleagues, with spitting insults, the most vehement against the Popular Front government in Madrid, made up of lily-livered socialist democrats and far-left backsliders seduced by power.
They all hated each other with a passion, as groups sure their brand of socialism was the route to some political utopia, and each tried to poach members from the other, which did nothing for inter-union rivalry. The Trotskyists of the POUM saw themselves as the true heirs to Karl Marx and loathed the Stalinists and Moscow lackeys of the communist PCE. Both laughed at the far-left trade union outfit called the UGT, big in Madrid and at one time part of the government, who stood as the main rival to the equally union-based anarcho-syndicalists of the CNT.
The Federación Anarquista Ibérica, to which Florencia belonged through the women’s organisation the Mujeres Libres, preached pure, unadulterated anarchism as voiced by Mikhail Bakunin: no money, no government, no police, no judges and no prisons, each person responsible for and contributing to the greater good. The POUM believed in a Spanish form of communism that had nothing to learn from Leninism or the Communist International, which gave instructions to their rivals, orders that came straight from the Kremlin.
The social democrats believed in liberal capitalism, and in amongst that and just to complicate matters, many, of whatever hue, were, in Barcelona, Catalan Nationalists seeking regional autonomy from Madrid. Yet faced with a fascist revolt, all their differences would be put aside to face what they knew to be a common enemy.
Florencia led Cal and Vince to the main meeting place of the members of both the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. Nothing could have been more inappropriately named that day than the Café de Tranquilidad. It wasn’t tranquil now, it was like a very busy and disturbed hive, crowded, noisy and bordering on mayhem, with bees arriving to yell bits of news, or departing to carry instructions to some part of the city where their leaders expected they would need to act, and all the while, to add to the air of unreality, waiters swanned through bearing platters of food or trays of beer or coffee.
Florencia was nothing if not determined and nor, Cal later found out, was she shy in exaggeration when she got a hearing from the faction leaders. He thought he had not told her much about his past, but over two weeks of being constantly in each other’s company, walking, dining and pillow talk, it amounted to more than he could recall.
She blew up what he had imparted about his military experience out of all relation to the truth, so that far from being a peripheral figure seeking information as to how he and the Olympiad athletes could help, he was soon surrounded by eager faces and, named by Florencia as a famous military genius, bombarded with questions about what these inexperienced fighters should do.
Language was a real problem, not aided by the fact that no one who posed a question was prepared to wait for an answer, and nor were their comrades, who either had contrary opinions or a query of their own. It was an uncoordinated babble of indeterminate noise in which he tried to do more listening than talking, that not easy either, as his fiery mistress was wont to interrupt any interpretation with a mouthful of Catalan abuse aimed at anyone who proposed a suggestion she disagreed with.
It was during one of these tirades that Cal tried to bring a confused and less-than-impressed Vince Castellano up to date. ‘They need guns and the government won’t give them any.’
‘I got that much, but I’m not sure I would either, guv. This lot look like they’re not sure who to shoot, an’ the way they’re carrying on it could be each other.’
‘Did you get that a revolt started in Morocco yesterday?’ Vince nodded. ‘It was a bit of a mess, but the officers have risen up all over Spain and are trying to seize the main population centres.’
‘Here is important to us, guv,’ Vince said, as behind them a furious, passionate and utterly incomprehensible argument became, if possible, even more vicious.
‘If I’ve got it right, so far the soldiers are still in their barracks, and it seems the Catalan government are trying a bit of negotiation.’
‘A bullet in the brain works wonders,’ Vince joked.
‘This lot,’ Cal replied, jerking his thumb, ‘are sure they will fail, so the army will march out either today or tomorrow to take over the city and they have machine guns and artillery. There’s a general called Goded flying in from Majorca to take command. The real question is what the armed police will do, the Civil and Assault Guards, and right now that is an unknown quantity.’
Vince was confused and he was not alone; the Civil Guard they both knew as the everyday near-military coppers, with their funny black hats, green uniforms and miserable expressions – they acted as if smiling was a punishable offence. Neither were certain about the latter group called the Assault Guards, which had been set up fairly recently to police the towns and cities, the places most likely to explode into organised revolt. But, in truth, names made no difference; both were fully armed and trained, while the workers who might have to oppose them were not.
‘So weapons are the priority.’