BURGOS, SPAIN

January 11, 1939

4:46 PM

FRANCISCO FRANCO, Major-General of the Spanish Army, the interim Secretary of Armaments, and Chief of Staff to General Sanjurjo, leaned back in his chair and felt his aching spine press against the pliable black leather. He listened idly to the muted operetta emanating from his office radio. At that precise moment, the music cut off, and the Regent of Spain, Duke Javier of Parma, stood before the regal throne in the Cortes chamber, delivering his first and only informe to the assembled dignitaries of the Council for National Salvation.

Well, most of the assembled councilmembers. The more liberal side of the council (mostly the survivors of the previous legislature) had made a point of boycotting the address in protest of the undemocratic nature of the current government (not that they would have been welcomed inside anyway, considering how most of the General Staff saw them). Listening to the Duke of Parma drone through hour three of his speech out of the corner of his eye, Franco was reminded of his own aversion to civilian politics. With his absolute lack of oratorical skills or charismatic touch, Franco knew it would take nothing short of a national tragedy to convince him to run for any sort of office, high or low.

Much like this one.

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Although he was resting his back, the General wasn’t reclining. Reclining was something you earned, a leisurely reprieve, a satisfied man’s respite after a long day’s work. Franco was dithering. He knew that as soon as he faced his desk, he’d have no other choice but to look back at the document, read the dreaded figure printed upon it, sign his name at the bottom and approve the disappearance of yet another unrecoverable slice of Spain's already dwindling national wealth. Probing his sore vertebrae with a tender finger and thinking back to the lectures on physiology he'd taken at the Zaragoza Military Academy, Franco wondered if he could make the paper vanish simply by refusing to acknowledge its existence.

Finally, after exhausting every possible philosophical excuse to avoid it, the Secretary of Armaments and Munitions conceded defeat. He exhaled and threw himself forward, cradling his chin in his hands and sending a jolt of pain scurrying up his spinal cord. Dragging his jaded gaze across the text, Franco found it nearly identical to the hundreds of others he’d processed over the previous two years: a tediously-worded order to deposit a sum of money, or some innocuous amount of gold, from an innocent-looking account at the Bank of Spain to a ever so slightly more suspicious account at the Bank of Canada in Montreal. To an untrained eye, it would have seemed unremarkable but for the sum in question: 7,130,812 Rm. Even to someone who knew not to be surprised that the figure was measured in the German rather than the Spanish currency (no self-respecting foreign government would accept payments in the form of the notoriously unstable peseta), that was a colossal sum. And with every passing month, it grew. Until May, Franco had never signed off on more than two hundred thousand Reichsmarks at a time, and now, here he was, about to flush the lifetime earnings of ten average Spaniards down the financial drain, never to be seen again.

The order was not in and of itself out of the ordinary. These Council-controlled funds (buried deep within the government’s books and obscured from prying eyes) were the lifeblood of the Royalist slush fund, a discretionary reservoir of cash billions of Reichsmarks deep on which thousands of battles had been fought and won. Every local commander who’d been bribed to throw down their arms, every intellectual who’d been silenced with the gift of a silver bullet in the back of the head, every citizen whose support had been bought with the promise of a free radio or a consistent supply of power—all were paid directly from the now-gone King's pockets, at General Sanjurjo's whim.

Personally, Franco strongly disapproved of this system, believing that it had served only to empower a class of 'professional' generals who profited by administering inefficiency in the midst of war. Still, the system being what it was, it was nothing unusual for small quantities of money to travel from the Bank of Spain's ownership to private bank accounts to pay for arms purchases. What was unusual (Franco realized after recovering his mental acuity from the ravages of another spinal offensive) was that now, every centavo was being funneled into a single cluster of non-corporate accounts. Thrice a week for almost a year now, the government had been donating exorbitant sums to just three or four anonymous bank accounts, without any noticeable increase in materiel landing on Spanish shores, all of which were likely controlled by a single entity. And that wasn’t even counting the vast quantities the King, the Regent, or General Sanjurjo could spend without reporting to the Prime Minister's cabinet. Who on Earth could the man possibly be donating hundreds of thousands of public Reichsmarks to on a weekly basis? Only the General's wife and a few of his neo-Aryan officer friends lived in Canada, along with some of the Bourbon royalty exiled from England in 1925.

As he glanced back to the radio and envisioned and heard Javier’s mustachioed mug stammering its way through a poorly-written paragraph about trade deficits and naval losses, Franco was enveloped by a noxious cloud. It filled his nostrils and mouth with the stench of realization and burned his eyes with the sulfur of recognition. It jammed a pair of pincers into his tormented back, causing him to lurch forward in spasm. Franco strained to reach his pen and a fresh sheet of paper. It made the pain even worse to contort himself in this way, but Franco had to do it—he couldn’t continue serving a puppet Regent-King whose controller's only interest was to gluttonize himself on the people’s money.

As he wrote, a curious thing happened: the barbs embedded in his spine gently unhooked themselves and retreated upward, as if being wound up on a fishing line. Reeled in by catharsis, the pain traveled down Franco’s arm and through his fingers. The pen was a magnet, drawing in the pent-up revulsion in Franco’s conscience and depositing it onto the page as black ink. Each stroke eliminated more of the discomfort, and by the time he flicked the tip of the pen back across the page to cap off his signature, the air seemed cleaner, his back relieved, and the Regent’s nauseating voice practically inaudible.

He ascended from his seat, donned his formal dress jacket and strode smoothly out the office door. As he exited the office, he stopped only to deposit the letter onto his secretary’s desk and request that it be delivered immediately.

To His Royal Highness Javier de Borbon of Parma, Regent of the Kingdom of Spain.

I hereby resign the Office of Secretary of Armaments and Munitions, and my commission of Major-General in the Spanish Army.

—Francisco Franco de Bahamonde​