Faye and Renata walked for a time, talking in low voices, circumnavigating the rooftop. The rain had stopped, though lightning still flickered over the Guadarrama. They talked about life, laughing at times. At moments like these, Faye felt she was looking down at the entire world, that it was all laid out for her. Her urge for such flights had been dealt with rather summarily at Pembroke—those professors she'd thought to be sympathetic would listen stoically for an hour, then turn her head forcefully back to learning, study, the obligations of womanhood. Everything substantive, hard and demanding. She'd sensed a long line of romantic girls like herself, extending out the doors of the little cottages where the faculty offices were located, sent home to study, marry, pray, bathe in cold water—anything but life in its purest, most abstract twirls and adagios, which was what she loved to think about. Renata was willing to talk to her on any level she chose and Faye was more than grateful to be found worthy of such attention: she needed to be taken seriously and she knew it.
“When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,” Renata said at one point.
They turned a corner.
“I think that is what I believe,” Faye said. “I think. But perhaps not. Sometimes I feel I'm like a …” She stopped. Moved to the parapet of cracked plaster that closed in the roof. Stared out across the city. Renata caught up and stood by her side.
“Isn't that strange,” Faye said.
“What is?”
“Perhaps it is a lover's signal.”
“What?”
“The blue glow. Over there. Across the street, then one, two, three blocks—no, two blocks, three streets.”
“I don't see anything.”
“Here, look, squint your eyes and follow my finger.”
“God in heaven,” Renata breathed, then turned away quickly, calling “Félix” in a loud, urgent stage whisper.
He arrived at a trot, sorrowful eyes peering from beneath a wool muffler knotted around his head. Renata spoke to him in rapid French, then pointed. He said a few words back. She gave him what sounded like an order and he turned on his heel and left in a hurry. “I have sent him for the street map,” she explained.
The blue light moved suddenly, then came to rest in a new, more visible, position. It disappeared for an instant, as a shape moved past it, then glowed again.
“There's somebody there,” Faye said.
“Yes, there is. Have you your pistol?”
“Yes.”
“Give it to me.” She thrust out a hand.
“We'll go together.”
“No! The post may not be abandoned—it must be two to work the gun. Listen, please. When Félix returns, you must remain here. I will go and see about this light. Now please, the pistol.” Her eyes intense behind the gold spectacles, she wiggled her fingers impatiently.
Faye got angry. “You're the one on guard,” she said, voice rising. She glanced at her watch, a tiny thing her grandmother had brought from Russia. “It is two-twenty,” she said triumphantly. “And I'm the one who's going.”
“Faye, no!” Renata shouted and hurried after her.
Faye opened the door to the hatch, started to climb down. Renata held the door and watched her descend. “Amen, then,” Renata said. “Be careful.”
The door clicked shut and she was in darkness. It gave her heart a twinge. She'd expected Renata to argue further, finally to insist on going along. Holding the revolver tightly so that it wouldn't fall through her waistband, she galloped down the marble staircase. As she reached the door, she heard Félix running down the hall, somewhere above her.
Lieutenant Drazen Kulic, Second Section, Fourth Directorate (Special Operations), NKVD, had waited three days for the thunderstorm in the Guadarrama. With the lightning as cover, he intended to make a great flash of his own. Without the storm, the great flash would bring down Nationalist units from everywhere, there would be a ratissage—literally “rat hunt,” a counterinsurgency sweep—and he had little confidence in his guerrilla band's ability to elude it. They were not mountain people. They were railroad workers and boilermakers and machinists, UGT communists to a man and very brave, but they did not know this terrain. If they had to move too quickly through the forests there would be lost weapons, excessive noise and sprained ankles. Those who could not keep up would have to be sacrificed and, worse yet, it would have to be done by hand, since a pistol shot was unthinkable. He'd seen townspeople attempt to fight in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and he was damned if he was going to add one more ghastly scene to the tragicomedy of the Spanish war.
Earlier that day, he'd sent his least valuable man down the road. Disguised as a cripple—they'd cut him a primitive crutch from a tree branch—he'd walked up to the roadblock carrying a newspaper packet of dried beans. They'd done the thing right—it was even a Nationalist newspaper, ABC, the Monarchist daily—but to no avail. The sentries at the roadblock wanted a password. They were very sorry, they knew how bad things were in the village, that his poor sister needed the habichuelas, but—no password, no going down the road. They took the beans, saying they would take them to the sister, but they hadn't even asked her name.
The convent schoolhouse in the village was being used as a Nationalist armory, logistical support for the Falangist columns in their advance on Madrid. The radio message sent to Kulic's group in the Guadarrama from the Soviet base in Madrid had been specific: Take the armory. Well, he couldn't take it, with twenty machinists, but he could blow it up, and that he intended to do.
He had fourteen time pencils—virtually the same explosive device that had accidentally killed T E. Lawrence's lover and bodyguard, Dahoud, as he tried to blow up a train. After Arbat Street, Kulic had attended a special school deep in the Urals, and he'd had to read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom very thoroughly. What Lawrence did to the Turkish supply columns in World War I, he was now trying to do to Franco's fascists. With time pencils manufactured in 1914. No matter. He would find a way once they broke into the armory. Theoretically, you could sink a battleship with a candle. Theoretically.
But first he had to get his people down a road. For that, he needed to steal the password. Thus, at 4:00 P.M., as the mountain skies darkened and the wind blew hard from the west, they'd set up their own roadblock two miles east of the Nationalist sentries. Along came two Guardia in a small truck. Kulic's men, acting like normal sentries, had demanded the password. “Rosas blancas” came the answer. White roses, a Carlist symbol of purity.
At 10:30 P.M., with the storm very close, a light rain pattering down on the road, they marched to the roadblock, gave the password, and walked into the village. A company of Navarrese infantry was assigned to hold the area and protect the armory, but the rain had long since driven them back into the Convent of the Sacred Heart, where they were billeted. Kulic set up his machine gun facing the doors of the convent and sent a small ambush team back down the road to wait for the sentries, in case they returned once the gunfire started. A shipfitter, an agile little spider of a man accustomed to riveting in the steelwork of half-built freighters, climbed a drainpipe to the roof and set the convent on fire by dripping gasoline down the chimney. As the soldiers ran out—the sixteenth-century abbot who designed the place knew that the greatest security lay in a single access point—they were killed. Those who remained inside died in the fire.
The convent schoolhouse—a separate building—was piled to the rafters with rifle and machine-gun ammunition, but what most gladdened Kulic's heart were eighty cases of artillery shells for the Nationalists' 105 mm field guns. He now had the power for the explosion, but no lightning. A few minutes after 11:00 P.M., there was gunfire on the road and the ambush team returned, having chased the Nationalist sentries into the forest. At 11:30, the thunder and lightning finally started. By 12:05, after four failures with the time pencils, Captain Drazen Kulic had his big flash. A burning school desk spun brilliantly through the rainy air, high above the village, trailing smoke and sparks before it fell to earth and disappeared from view. Kulic and his band vanished into the mountains. A number of villagers died in the explosion. It couldn't be helped.
Faye Berns moved through the dark streets of the city, hemmed in by buildings that rose steeply above her, like a corridor in a dream. A small wind, suddenly warm, touched her face. A dog was barking some distance away. She could tell it had been barking for a long time—its voice was almost gone. But, she realized, it doesn't know what else to do, so it barks. A sense of infinite, indescribable loss rolled in from the night and filled her heart.
If I were Catholic, I'd cross myself.
She did it anyhow, quickly, a rapid figure-four in the style of the Spanish women. There was something malefic in Spain, that she knew for a surety, and it was out that night. From the apartments high above her came a sense of restless sleep, disturbance, unquiet, as though every man and woman dreamed they heard a door click open. Spirit wanderers are out, she thought, who cannot find their way home. Perhaps her own ancestors, burned alive in the Inquisition. The blood carried more than oxygen, more than anyone knew and, once the streets were dark and deserted, the bad memories of this place returned. Too many terrible things had happened here. Walking in the center of the narrow street, she could hear water running in the drains, and with every breath came the chill odor of anciently decayed masonry.
Three streets. Two blocks.
From down here, she would never find the blue light, it was like being in a deep canyon. But she would find it. She listened to her footsteps, tried to walk more softly. Her fingers crept beneath the sweater and touched the butt of the revolver. She seemed alone in the world, but maybe that wasn't so bad. The Republican Checa—modeled on, and named after, the Soviet intelligence Cheka—often roamed at night through the neighborhoods. It was better not to meet them.
Calle de Plata.
Where the medieval silversmiths had kept their workshops. Her cousin Eric, who graduated third in his class at Erasmus High, took jewelry-making at the Art Students League. Now he was a communist. Like Renata and Andres. Was she one too? No, she didn't think so. She was a passionate idealist, in love with the idea of democracy. Certainly she dreamed, like Andres, of a world without oppression and cruelty. She had come to Spain to put one more hand on the wheel that turned toward justice. Were all Jews communists? Hitler said so. Her father grimaced at Hitler's name. “Why don't you kill him?” he asked the sky. Jews hated injustice, that was what it was. Fania Kaplan, a Jewish girl not much older than herself, with family in Brooklyn, had shot Lenin through the neck because he betrayed the Revolution. But Lenin survived. She would like to shoot Hitler through the neck. They would, she knew, march her in glory up Flatbush Avenue if she did that. Even Mr. Glass, of Glass Stationery, and he was a Republican.
Avenida Saldana.
There was a big market here on Thursdays. An old lady with a mustache gave her something free every time—radishes, parsley. The fishstall man had once picked up a red snapper and bobbed it up and down as though it swam toward her, and everyone had laughed and made Spanish jokes. Now the street was deserted. On the roof of one of the buildings across the street, she had seen a blue light. She had come here to find it. Of course, she could turn around and go back and tell Renata that she couldn't find it. Nobody would be the wiser. In all likelihood, the light didn't mean anything at all, simply one more inexplicable event in this inexplicable country. So go home.
No.
Well, perhaps. But at least, she told herself, examine the buildings.
The numbers ran differently here, but the third one from the corner, 52 Avenida Saldana, roughly corresponded to 9 Calle de Victoria. That meant she might be on the wrong street, because 52 Avenida Saldana was a two-story factory where they made wooden chairs.
54 Avenida Saldana. That was a possibility. She counted up six stories.
Number 56 was not a possibility. An old hotel for commercial travelers, it had a steep roof sheathed with green copper. Number 58 was a rather smart private house, with little balconies and French windows, three stories high.
It had to be 54.
That's good, Faye, you figured it out. Now go home. Report the incident to the Checa, let them worry about it.
She crossed the street. Avenida Saldana was a bit fancier than Calle de Victoria, narrow sidewalks ran along its edges. She stood at the base of the building and stared straight up. No blue light. But on the top floor, just below the roof, a window was open a few inches and, very faintly, she could hear a woman singing. She had heard the song before, mothers sang it to babies to put them to sleep.
Good, darling, very good. Her upbringing came through loud and clear. And brave? In the middle of the night. In Madrid. All alone.
With only Nana's watch and a big Spanish gun. Such a gun. Myself, I'd be afraid to touch it.
Which was probably why, more or less, she simply went into the building and up to the roof. Because the blood did carry more than oxygen. Because there was something there that—when it was crystal clear that retreat with caution was the only sensible path—took the first step and the second step and all the rest of the steps. She had some help, on the order of I'm an American and I can go anywhere I want, but she had something a little older than that as well. It didn't precisely have a name, or maybe it had too many names, but it got her up to the roof. And, surprise of surprises, at a time when so much bravery bled itself out into nothingness, it turned out to matter a great deal that she went there. It saved lives.
First she removed her boots. Leaning against a cold wall in the dark hallway, she worked them off and tied the laces together and hung them around her neck. Drew the pistol from her waistband, cocked it, held it before her with a finger hooked securely around the front of the trigger guard. Put her left hand on the wall and walked slowly in her socks up the stairs to the roof, the sound of the lullaby getting closer as she climbed.
The door to the roof was chained and the chain was padlocked.
Breathing hard from the climb, she stood there frozen, so deeply enraged that her cheeks were hot. After all that!
She'd seen her friend at Pembroke, Penelope Hastings of Hyde Park, New York, fiddle a lock with a hairpin. Two problems. She didn't have a hairpin. And it wasn't that kind of lock. It was like a bicycle lock, with a combination. Olive green. Scratched and worn as though it had been well used: first to lock up a bicycle, perhaps at a place like a college where unlocked bicycles were frequently “borrowed,” then to secure a big trunk, which had to travel aboard a transatlantic liner to Europe. That sort of lock.
The sort of lock that, if you turned four right, sixteen left, and twenty-seven right, snapped open, though it took one last little jiggle, requiring a practiced twist of the hand, to make it spring cleanly.
It was, she was sure, her very own lock, which she'd put in the back of a drawer some months earlier, thinking it was something that she didn't need then but would desperately want the minute after she threw it away. She was shocked to find it, but there was something much too eerie to contemplate in such a coincidence and she had no time to think about it anyhow. Explanations would have to wait.
In the silence at the top of the stairs, she could hear the singing woman one floor down. A child coughed. The woman murmured in Spanish. Then began humming softly, a song without words made up as she went along.
Faye put the lock and the gun between her feet. Slipped one hand beneath the chain, drew it slowly, link by link, across her palm until it was free of the door handle, then laid it silently on the floor, kneeling slowly. Retrieved the gun and held it in her right hand, then put the lock inside one of the shoes hanging around her neck. Took a breath, and pushed gently against the door with her left hand.
The door made one small squeak as it opened. The humming stopped. Faye took a step onto the roof.
She was wound tight as a spring, but not frightened. She didn't think it through, but some part of her mind was trying to let her know that when a door is chained and padlocked on one side, there is rarely anybody on the other side. At least not anybody who wants to be there.
The roof was deserted.
On one wall stood a blue lantern. A device used, perhaps, on a ship or in a railroad yard. She could see the shape of the flame burning behind the blue glass. She went up to it. Opened the little door. And blew it out.
Squinting against the darkness, she peered out over the intervening rooftops but could not make out her own building. Then, close to where she thought it might be, a match flared. The flame lingered for an instant, then disappeared.
Renata!
No signal had been arranged, but she knew absolutely that Renata had been watching the blue light, had seen it go out, and had contrived to make a visible acknowledgment.
Now she flew.
Lantern swinging from her left hand, gun clutched in her right, shoes banging against her breasts, she ran down the stairs and out into the street. Her socks got wet and her feet hurt but she wasn't going to stop for anything. Pumping her arms, hair flying, she tore down the side street, past Calle de Plata, into Calle de Victoria, almost slipping as she went around the corner, into the building past her bomb shelter alcove, up the stairs, up the ladder, onto the roof, rushing into Renata's arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, yelling with triumph.
In Seville, it was the custom of Hauptmann Bernhard Luders, of the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion, always to have a woman the night before he flew a mission. Such sport maintained the traditions of that city, where Don Juan had been born and raised and where, as a young man, he had observed with horror that the corpse in a funeral procession was his own, and resolved to fight death with lust from that day forth.
It cooled him, Luders said. Left him calm and level-headed for work the following day. It gave him, also, a reputation, and that he enjoyed immensely. He was twenty-one years old, with a small angry face and a small transparent mustache. At his direction, Feldwebel Kunkel, his batman, would sit in a gilded, red plush chair outside the room at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, an apparent guardian of lovers' privacy but in fact an advertisement for the heated Wurstverstecken (hide-the-wiener) games being played on the other side of the door.
After midnight, when the officers came upstairs from drinking in the hotel bar, they would nod to Kunkel. He would rise and salute. “He is in tonight?” someone would always ask. “Yes sir,” Kunkel would answer, “but he flies tomorrow.” Ahh, they would nod approvingly, aware of his custom, then add the obligatory joke: “We shoot by night that bomb by day.”
In response to the joke, Kunkel, a man who understood loyalty at its root, would offer the obligatory response: a slow raising of the hands and eyes to heaven. What lovers these pilots!
Luders's latest was sixteen.
Evangelina. Evangelina. To Luders, even her name reeked of Spain, of Catholicism, of darkness, ignorance, superstition as black and wild as the unruly bush between her marble legs.
She drove him insane.
He had frolicked a bit at university in Heidelberg, among the properly raised dough-maidens of the city's aristocracy, but nothing had prepared him for what he took to be the true Spanish passion. The Mediterranean Süden, the South, tickled his Northern European fantasies to begin with—it was so hot and filthy and poor, one could do anything. Anything. The little witch would crawl about the hotel carpet wearing nothing at all, catch hold of his boot and plead with him. It was Spanish, the pleading, but somehow the meaning worked its way through. She was defiled, worthless. He had led her into the Temple of Sin and now she was lost in its vast recesses, a maddened novitiate. She could think of nothing else. Nothing. All day long, devils whispered in her ear, of practices so demonic she dared not speak them aloud. For such thoughts he must punish her. Now. For if he did not staunch this frightful thirst she would tear her hair in frenzy. She sobbed and moaned and wriggled like an eel and begged him to put out the fire that burned her alive.
Poor Kunkel.
He had to sit there and listen to it night after night—and privately wondered how the man ever got any rest. Also, it fell to him to ferry a constant stream of gifts to Evangelina's family, who lived in a neighborhood that frightened him, in a house that made him ill. He had not joined the air force with such adventures in mind, but what was one to do. Hauptmann Luders wasn't a bad sort, a smart Rhenish lad with a rigid back and a taste for a fight who liked his stinky little cigars. Yet he had plunged into the Spanish mysteries up to his very neck. Ah well, these Condor Legion pilots believed themselves to be of a higher order. Perhaps they were.
At 1:30 A.M., Kunkel knocked discreetly at the door. It was time. Luders disentangled himself from the girl, washed quickly, and arrived at the airfield, a little north and west of the city, a half hour later. There was excellent coffee in the briefing hut, and Von Emel went through the usual drill: weather, situation on the ground—little enough happening, although someone had blown up an armory in the Guadarrama—and mission. But some things were not as usual. There were two SD types in attendance, from the Nazi party's foreign intelligence service. Small men in expensive suits, sharp-eyed and silent. Luders did not mind the Abwehr—they were military and had kinship with the airmen—but these two made him nervous. They stared at him. The other variation concerned the mission itself. Von Emel handed him a circled street map of Madrid and explained at length.
He rather hurried the takeoff, because he had to reach Madrid while it was still dark. That would require some fast flying, but Luders was an excellent pilot and his Messerschmitt had airspeed tucked here and there that only he knew about. Willy Messerschmitt himself had come to Spain in August, to tour behind Nationalist lines and visit the places where his planes would be tested, and proven. In fact, the 109 was well suited to what Luders would ask of it. The five-hundred-pound bomb slung beneath the belly of the plane didn't slow him down, though it did drink a little extra gas.
Just before sunrise, the dawn no more than a faint blur behind him, he came skimming in over the city from the east. He could not hear the rattle above the engine noise, but a few yellow pinpricks of anti-aircraft fire were evident as he flew over the Paseo del Prado; however, he was really too low, and going too fast, for the Spanish gunners to have any patience with him. He steadied his foot on the bomb-release pedal and kept a light thumb atop the joystick where the machine-gun button was located. You never knew what was waiting on the rooftops—it was wiser to sweep up as you went.
He moved closer to the window, body tensed for action. He had been born with the eyesight of a hawk, and now scanned the dark blocks below until he found what he was looking for. A pinpoint of blue light. From there it was all instinct. He banked hard, came sideways through the turn, the aeroplane slicing neatly through the bumpy air above the city, wound up in a shallow dive with the nose of the plane in perfect line with the beacon.
Then several things happened very quickly. A red flickering that seemed almost to come from the beacon itself. He drove his thumb down hard, but the joypoint, the angle where his tracer bullets came together, was high. He corrected. The red flickers got much larger. There were three figures on the roof—one of them perhaps a woman? Shoved his foot to the floor, felt the plane kick free of its dead weight, then banked hard to the south, laying all the juice he had into the engine.
It took quite some time before he realized that he had a problem. Nothing like a six-second bombing run to ice over the nervous system. But, as he flew over a small forest of pine and cork oak, he discovered that his right foot was throbbing like a giant clock. He looked down, moved the foot, saw a pfennig-size half moon of rushing treetops flanked by two bright red droplets. As sweat stood suddenly on his brow, he clutched frantically, testicles first, at his body. Even as the throbbing became hammering, he breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God, an honorable wound and no more. He climbed to make sure the 109's innards were not damaged, waggled the wings, and headed for Seville.
Something else had gone wrong, but that he did not notice for some time, and by then the Nationalist airfield at Almodóvar was out of the question. He tapped the gasoline gauge, but it refused to change its mind. Actually, he'd been extremely lucky. A bullet had ruptured his gasoline tank, and by rights he should have been blown all over Madrid. As it was, he'd simply showered the rooftops with aviation gas.
He spent only a moment hating himself for not checking the gauge, then concentrated on surviving the error. He needed a field. Not a potato field. Too bumpy—the 109 would hammer itself to pieces before he could get it stopped. Prevailing pilot-mess opinion was that the smoothest emergency landings were made on wheat fields. The ocher patches were detectable from the air and, by late September, the wheat was cut and the ground tended to be smooth, without surprising contours to wreck you just when you should be rolling to a safe stop. And, looking down, he was in luck. Everything was going to work out, after all. The early sun lit up a few yellow squares beneath him and he chose one and hoped it was lucky. He had to keep his attention focused, the foot was beginning to gnaw and bite, and he didn't want to stall on the way down. It would be an excellent emergency landing. He'd fly again as soon as the foot healed, and the aeroplane could be trucked back to Seville. Since there was hardly any gas, the danger of fire on impact was minimal. In a way, his luck held.
It held all the way down the chute to the field. It held as he bounced. It held as he braked with the flaps. Held as the 109 rolled to a stop. Everything seemed to flood out of him at that moment, and he fell back against the seat and let his hands dangle and closed his eyes. The engine had stalled. He turned the key to off. Listened as the birds began to sing again. It had been a woman at the machine gun, he was sure of it now. The long hair stayed printed on his memory. These Spanish women, he thought. You had to admire them. Still, it would be wiser to leave that fact out of his report. That was the sort of story that got around and stuck to your career like glue.
He came to suddenly. Had he blacked out for a moment? Somehow he had to find a telephone. Recollecting his error, he wondered idly if he had not been ever so slightly unprepared for the mission. Too much Evangelina, perhaps. A fighting man could not leave his wits in bed. He moved the foot and grunted with pain. He needed a doctor. That thought got him moving, and he shoved the canopy back, grabbed the sides of the cockpit and hoisted himself to a sitting position directly above the wing. And, luck held, here came some people to help him. Peasants, no doubt, in their dark blue cotton shirts and trousers. These must be the peasants who cut the wheat, he reasoned, for they are carrying scythes. But, he looked around to make sure, the wheat was already cut.
He briefly fingered the flap of the holster holding his sidearm, but there were at least twenty of them, so he threw his hands into the air and called out, “Rendición, rendición,” meaning that he surrendered. But at this they only laughed.
Faye shut her eyes when Señora Tovar, the janitor's wife, soaped her breasts—despite herself, she was very embarrassed to be touched in this way—and the woman noticed and said “Scha!” in amazement at American notions of privacy. Did this girl not know that it was a woman's destiny to have her hands in everything unsacred, from placenta to horse manure and all that flowed from babies and wounds and old men? That by the time a woman was twenty there was nothing in the world she had not touched? She shrugged, smiled, and moved the girl's delicate little washing cloth to spread lather across her shoulders. Just down the street, at 14 Calle de Victoria, three women were hard at work on her clothing, rubbing it furiously on washboards as the fume of gasoline rose in their faces.
As the glorious hot water poured down on her, Faye bubbled inside. It had been the most exciting day of her life. It had to be shared! But with who? Her parents would be frightened, badly frightened. Penelope Hastings? Penny would be most deliciously envious, but she would, Faye knew, show the letter to her mother, an endearingly foggy society lady who always asked Faye, “Is there, dear, um, anything you don't, um, eat?” Poor Mrs. Hastings, entirely flustered by the fear of feeding something wrong to Penelope's Jewish friend from college. And poor Mrs. Hastings was just the type, she was certain, who would simply have to telephone the child's mother.
The Pembroke alumnae magazine?
Fran Bernstein ('33) pens a note from sunny Spain to say she's enjoying her visit with Bolshevist elements of Republican forces defending Madrid. Recently our Franny shot it out with a Nazi fighter plane and got herself doused with aviation gasoline in the process! A victory celebration followed as ladies of the neighborhood forced the janitor to turn on the water, at which time shy Fran was unceremoniously stripped down and washed.
Obediently, she let Señora Tovar turn her around and scrub her back. Her eyes still burned; she knew they'd be bright red for days. Andres, of course, would suggest visits to doctors. Would insist.
This was a less than happy thought. She would have to tell him about her bicycle lock, and she knew this would create great stir and turmoil. Clearly, somebody in the building was a traitor, a Fifth Columnist. And a sneak thief.
She had told the excited men of the neighborhood Checa that she'd found the lock open. One of them, she knew from his cold stare, had not believed her. But he had said nothing. She was the hero of the hour. Not only had she retrieved the lantern, she had helped to shoot up a plane—though the damn thing had flown away to safety—and certainly, everybody said, spoiled the Nazi's aim. The bomb had fallen in the street, breaking every window for a hundred yards but sparing the gas and water mains, which allowed, when the Checa men had been shooed away, the triumphal procession first to Tovar the janitor, then to the aqua tile bathroom on the third floor.
Number 54 Avenida Saldana, it turned out, was a Republican armory, a secret one. If the blue lantern had been left in place, half the neighborhood would have gone skyward, and the people in the building—including the humming mother and her child—would have gone with it. When Faye had returned, ecstatic, to the rooftop, Renata had lit the lantern and placed it on the parapet. “Let us discover who seeks such a light,” she'd said grimly, running the bolt on the Hotchkiss gun and centering it on the trapdoor to the roof. When the plane came, though, it was Faye who grabbed the handles and Renata who fed the belt. Curiously, she had heard nothing. Had seen the twinkling on the 109's wings but had never, she admitted to herself, realized what this meant. Had, in fact, moments later, burned her fingers on a silvery lump half buried in the roof tar, and only then had her mind made the connection that sent a single wracking shiver from shoulders to knees. Renata too had been soaked by gasoline but, being ever and truly Renata, had insisted on her own bathing arrangements.
“Eres limpio, yo creo,” Señora Tovar said, stepping back to admire her handiwork.
“Gracias, mil gracias, señora,” Faye said, turning the water off and taking a rough, clean towel that had appeared from a hand in the doorway.
The woman waved away the thanks, singing, “De nada, de nada,” as she left the room to an uproar of Spanish from friends waiting without.
Faye's bare feet slapped down the marble-floored hallway toward the staircase that led to the room under the eaves. Life was better than a short story, she rather thought, with an O. Henry twist at every turning that caught the heroine unaware and stunned her with the peculiarity of fortune. Could anyone have predicted that in the fall of 1936 a machine gun would buck and vibrate beneath her hands as a German plane swooped toward her from the sky? Not with any Ouija board she'd ever heard of. That her best friend would be a German communist named Renata? No, no, no. That her lover would be a forty-two-year-old Spanish draftsman from Ceuta named Andres Cardona? No a thousand times!
Oh if they could only see her now.
It was a narrow lane, barely one car wide, that wound its way up to San Ximene, and Khristo drove slowly, conscious of the roadside vegetation—lush and bursting weeds in every shade of purple and gold—as it whispered against the doors of the Citroën.
At this speed he could hear the whirring of insects, could study gates made of twisted boughs that appeared from time to time, guarding dirt paths that wandered off into the fields. Once a week they drove to San Ximene, and he was beginning to recognize individual gates. Each one was built of twisted boughs, crossed and braced in every conceivable style. Once a week was probably too often to visit a safe house, but Yaschyeritsa had ordained the schedule and his word was law. Sascha, after a dreadful week, had at last discovered that vodka could be replaced by Spanish brandy and was his old self again. “Flies for Yaschyeritsa!” he would call out as they started off. Not so loud, Khristo thought, but said nothing. Sascha was a spring river in full flood, which went where it liked.
Khristo loved this car. A 1936 Citroën 11 CV Normale. Its long hood suggested luxury, its short, boxy body suggested frugality, and the curved trunk in the rear suggested yet another French preoccupation. The sober black body was accentuated by fat whitewall tires in open wells and shiny headlamps. The spacious windshield seemed to draw every yellow bug in Spain, but he kept the glass immaculate with wet, crumpled copies of La Causa. Soaked newspaper was the thing for cleaning car windows—he'd learned that from a former Riga taxi driver who forged travel documents for the Comintern office in Tarragona. Even the car, he thought ruefully, had a file. The Citroën had been donated to the Comintern by a furniture manufacturer in Rouen. Amazing, really, how the rich in this part of the world worshiped the revolution of the working classes.
He loved driving—he was the first Stoianev ever to operate a motor vehicle. He'd learned quickly, mastered the gearshift after a few head-snapping stutter stops brought on by a popped clutch. It was fortunate that he loved it because he spent a great deal of time behind the wheel. Intelligence operations, he had discovered, consisted principally of driving a car for hundreds of kilometers, sifting through an infinity of reports and memoranda, endlessly locking and unlocking the metal security boxes assigned to each officer, and writing up volumes of agent-contact sheets. In the latter regard, thank heaven for Sascha. The drunker he got, the better he wrote. And he had such mastery of Soviet bureaucratic language—a poetry of understatement and euphemism—that Yaschyeritsa mostly left them alone. That was fine with Khristo.