End of the Road

The man who knocked on an apartment-house door in a dingy corner of Barcelona identified himself as the lampista, the man from the electric company. He entered, and inspected the meter in an apartment occupied by a thin woman and a bearded man who called himself Jose Planas. The lampista noted carefully that the apartment had no back door.

Next morning the lampista, who was Chief Inspector Pedro Polo of the Social Brigade (Spain's FBI), gathered some of his men and went back to the apartment.

They knocked on Planas' door, calling out that it was the postman. When the door was opened, Polo's men, revolvers at the ready, burst into the room. The old-looking man, pale and trembling in a corner, offered no resistance.

"Yes," he mumbled. "I am Comorera.

This is the end of my road, and I'm glad it's over." The Undisciplined. Thus last week Franco's police captured an old enemy: Juan Comorera, 60, once the powerful, dreaded "Lenin of Catalonia" and top man of Spanish Communism in Catalonia.

First a small-town altar boy, then an anticlerical Republican, then a Socialist, Comorera helped found the Catalonian independence movement in the 1930s, a few years later merged it with the Communists and took command. He was Catalonia's Minister of Agriculture and Economy and its strongman when the civil war broke out. Through the war, he commuted regularly between Barcelona and Moscow to relay party orders. He policed the Catalonian party with his own Cheka, men in black leather jackets, crisscrossed by cartridge bandoleers. Their knock on a door in Catalonia usually meant torture and death to the man who answered.

After the Loyalist defeat, he served Communism abroad--in Mexico, where he organized a publishing house as a front for Red Spanish refugees and helped plan Trotsky's assassination; in France, where he ran a school for anti-Franco saboteurs. But Comorera, always strong-willed and undisciplined, became intolerant of Moscow's rule. Reprimanded, he shot back: "We are Spanish Communists, not Russians." He was read out of the party. Even his own Communist daughter attacked him over Radio Moscow. A few months ago, learning that a fellow ex-Communist had been tracked down and killed by Red assassins, Comorera grew a beard and fled Toulouse for Paris. Then he decided that a return to his homeland was a lesser risk than staying in France, and he had himself and his wife smuggled across the Pyrenees.

The Old Urge. Posing as a retired schoolteacher, he tried to remain inactive in Barcelona. But a few weeks ago, hungering for intrigue, he got in touch with old friends, and started printing a clandestine Marxist newspaper. Barcelona police tracked the paper to an apartment house, finally narrowed down to the mysterious man with the dark glasses. Inspector Polo recognized him instantly.

This week the Lenin of Catalonia sat chain-smoking in a cell in Barcelona police headquarters. As an old hand at the game, he knew what came next. But at least he would die at the hands of those he had fought, not of those whom he had so long served.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.