Three boxcars of live steers had traveled with the train, en route to the markets of Tarragona, and a number of animals had been injured in the wreck. Some of them had managed to make their way into the fields, where they lowed ceaselessly with pain and terror, drawn-out pleading calls from the darkness. The policeman tried to ignore it but he could not and finally, to everyone's silent relief, a detail of surviving wounded had been given pistols and sent off, limping and shuffling, wandering through the mist and smoke, to find the animals and put them out of their misery. Thus there were shouts and pistol reports throughout the long night.
Toward dawn, a train from the east had passed slowly on the remaining track, reinforcements headed for the Madrid front. All wore red scarves. They stuck their heads out the windows and gave clenched-fist salutes to the workers on the road, called out “No pasarán” and other slogans. In one car they were singing the “Hymn of Riego.” Khristo had observed this before—a train of wounded passing a train of new volunteers—and he did his best, with shouts and salutes and smiles, to help them not see what was on the road.
At daybreak they were relieved by a company of infantry quartered nearby and the two collapsed against the side of the car, sitting in the weeds by the side of the road. Khristo stared sorrowfully at his hands, black with axle grease, soot, and dried blood, two nails split all the way to the base, a slice across the palm that had bled itself dry. It had been a long time since he'd really worked, every muscle in his back told him that. He sat quietly, in a kind of stupor, hypnotized by light as the first sun found the river. He watched the mist burning off, the pale green water moving lazily in its autumn flow. It looked so clean to him, the way it changed itself instant to instant, brushing along its banks, running to the sea. He wanted to go up next to it, put his aching hands in for as long as he could stand the cold, but he was too exhausted to move. By his side, Sascha picked with great difficulty at the sealing tape on the neck of a brandy bottle.
“Surely,” Khristo said, “there will be trouble over this.”
“Oh yes,” Sascha answered. “Our orders are clear. Do not meddle, do not become involved, NKVD business precedes all else. For me, of course, it no longer matters, so I shall take the brunt of Yaschyeritsa.”
“Sascha, please, for once be real. Truly you are leaving?”
“Recalled,” Sascha said. The word seemed to hang for a long time. “ ‘Recalled to Moscow.' That is the phrase.”
He put the bottle down, reached over and tore up a handful of weeds. “Let me see, we have here hemlock and wild mustard, chicory, allium, and here is the legendary asphodel, a wildflower of great antiquity. I took a year of horticulture in university. With the famous Academician Boretz. See over there? Those are crown daisies, there is fennel I think, and field marigolds. Good old Boretz, never hurt a fly, couldn't walk without bumping into the ground. But a Trotskyite, or worse. So, that was Boretz. They are going to kill me, Khristo.”
He went back to work on the bottle, at last getting it open and taking a few delicate sips, then offering it to Khristo. The brandy tasted like fire, but the bitter strength of it kicked some life back into him.
“Why do you not run away?” Khristo asked quietly.
“Yes, it occurs to one. But it would be futility itself to try. They hunt you down, my friend, they always hunt you down. And before they dispense with you, they make you sorry you ran. They brought one fellow back to Moscow and let us see him in the morgue, just his face, mind you. One would not think it physically possible to open a mouth that wide.”
Khristo watched him carefully, but his face, coated with oily dirt, was empty. “What has happened,” he said, “is that Yagoda is finished. Now it is Yezhov, the dwarf, who runs the service. Yagoda has been accused of murdering the writer Maxim Gorky by spraying poison on his walls. Also, he is accused of complicity in the affair of Kirov. Rumor has it that the scythe is out in Moscow for real—this one will make the events of '34 seem like the nursery. So, fine fellow, what you've seen of Sascha's useless life is what there will be.”
Khristo tried to take this in. The utter lack of drama in Sascha's demeanor somehow acted to balk understanding. “A dwarf,” Khristo said.
“Yes. The Great Leader exceeds himself in whimsy.”
“My God.”
“The curious part is that I don't care. Oh, later on, in the Lubianka, I shall kick and scream and plead for mercy—hug their boots and all of it. It is expected of one to do that—they demand their theater. But now, right now, I feel nothing at all.”
“Sascha, this cannot be.”
“Don't worry, I'll await you in hell. There we will keep track of the devils—who works, who doesn't, who makes secret plots with angels. You shall see, it won't be as bad as you think.”
At last the old Sascha. He was relieved. “Those devils must be watched—they stab the Revolution in the back! Perhaps I should accompany you?”
Sascha smiled gently at his efforts to play along with the mood. “Application refused,” he said, “reapply in thirty days.” He thought for a moment. “Thirty days in truth, Khristo Nicolaievich. I am only the first to go—there will be others. Many others.”
“You are serious?”
“Yes. In their eyes we have been ruined, you must understand. We have seen the world, and we must not be allowed to tell others what we have seen. Or perhaps we have consorted with the enemy. Who among us has remained pure? Impossible to know, so safety lies in throwing out the whole batch and starting anew.”
Khristo felt his pulse quicken. This was not Sascha the mad poet spinning dreams. This was the Sascha who told the truth. He turned to look back at the river for a moment but heard an odd noise and saw that Sascha was crying, hiding his face in his hands. Beyond him, out on the road, the policeman was watching them. His eyes met Khristo's and he shook his head, slowly, back and forth. He did not understand them, or the world, or the carnage on the road. Nothing.
“You have achieved virtually nothing, Lieutenant Stoianev.”
Colonel General Yadomir Bloch—Yaschyeritsa—touched the tip of his index finger to the end of his tongue and turned the page. It was brittle, transparent paper that crackled as he smoothed it down on the left side of the file folder.
“Not here,” he said, eyes running over the print. Moistened the finger again, “Nor here.”
The rezidentura was in an old hotel near the docks, and though the drape was closed Khristo could hear bells and whistles as the night stevedore crew unloaded cargo. The boat had been there for two days, a rusty old Black Sea freighter, its name swabbed out with gray paint.
“As you have no doubt heard, Colonel Alexander Vonets has returned to Moscow at the request of the Directorate, so you will have to carry on, but …” Finger to tongue, a new page. “Mmm … yes.” It was dark in the office, lit only by a tiny bulb in a desk lamp. Shadow hardened the planes of the face, sharpened the angles, cloaked the slanted eyes set deeply in the head.
“Such praise. ‘Attentive.' ‘Meticulous.' ‘Intelligent.' ” A new page, turned back for a moment, then turned again. “I don't believe it,” he said. He closed the file, rested his chin on folded hands and stared into Khristo's eyes.
For a long time there was only silence, intensified by the low rumble of noise from the docks. “We have problems, Lieutenant,” he finally said. “You agree?”
“I am not aware of the problem, comrade Colonel General.” “Problems, Lieutenant, the plural. Don't fence with me.” “I am not aware of any of the problems, comrade Colonel General.”
“You consider yourself an able officer?”
“I am doing my best, comrade Colonel General.”
Colonel General Bloch seemed to be sitting still, then Khristo noticed that his body rocked slightly, back and forth, as the last answer hung in the air. The longer he rocked, the less true the answer seemed, as though the credibility of the statement melted away with the motion.
“Very well. I choose to believe you, and we have seen your best. The air is cleared, the mystery resolved, this attentive, meticulous, intelligent, able officer has given us his best effort. One cannot ask for more.” He glanced at his watch. “It is now fourteen minutes after two. The Neva will be ready to sail at six-thirty this morning. You will gather your effects and be on it. I will have my aide assign you a berth. Good evening, Lieutenant. I appreciate your frankness.”
With long, thin hands he squared the file, opened the bottom drawer of the desk, and set it carefully among others. Looking up, finding Khristo still staring at him in apparent disbelief, he seemed surprised. “Dismissed, Lieutenant,” he said and kicked the drawer shut with his boot.
“Comrade Colonel General,” Khristo cleared his throat, “I believe your criticism would enable me to improve my performance.”
“What performance? You fucking parasite, get out of my office before I have you thrown out!”
Crawl, Khristo's mind told him. Crawl for your life. He stood up, came to attention. “Colonel General Bloch, I entreat you to assist me in the better performance of my duties, that I may better serve the objectives of my service. I entreat you, comrade Colonel General.”
Bloch stood and leaned across the desk. “How you whine,” he said, “like your friend Sascha Vonets, of the prominent Vonets family. You are all boot-kissers at the last, aren't you. Self-satisfied little kings who drive about the countryside in fine clothes and fuck the Spanish whores, while in Moscow people eat potato peels and give thanks for one more day of existence. Oh you should have heard him. The intellectual. What promises he made. The moon and the stars. But it was too late. Too late. Your Armenian spy, Roubenis, sits in Madrid with his American girlfriend and reports on morale. Morale? What morale? These odious little Spaniards have lost their war. They're finished, done with. Because all they've ever done is hold their pricks in their hands and dream of their freedom and liberty. Generalissimo Franco will give them freedom, all right, he'll free them of their mortal souls and they'll go dreaming to their Spanish heaven. Morale, indeed. Is that what you think we are here for? Is that why Russia feeds you and clothes you with roubles it does not have? You foolish boy, to think we don't know such tricks. At the age of seventeen, I led a mutiny aboard the battleship Sevastopol. We chained the officers to their steamer trunks full of uniforms and threw them into the sea. They too pleaded. A great deal of pleading in 1917, one grew bored with it.”
Abruptly, he sat down. Swiveled his chair away from Khristo and pulled the curtain back from the window. The Neva, working lights fixed to her booms and superstructure, stood hawsered fore and aft to the dock. A wooden platform on cables slowly lowered a JSII tank to the quay.
“Sit, Lieutenant,” he said. “You wish not to sail on the Neva? It is not uncomfortable. You might spend a day or two in Odessa before transit to Moscow. No? Not appealing?”
“Comrade Colonel General, my brother was murdered by the fascists.”
“So it says in your file. But then, both my parents were knouted to death by the White Guard. Your parents, on the other hand, have found it expedient to connect themselves to the fascists, by way of your sister's marriage. This too it says in your file. Come to think of it, expediency rather defines you, doesn't it. It was expedient for you to leave Bulgaria in her agony. Expedient to do well at Arbat Street. Expedient to serve Sascha Vonets in his drunken self-pity. Very well. Look out the window. See where expediency leads.”
“What must I do, comrade Colonel General, to improve my performance?”
“Go to Madrid. The time for safe houses is over. Find this Roubenis and put your boot up his ass. He attends these Cagoulard meetings—the Falange in their hoods. Well, enough of that. Put some men in the street. Find out who these people are, where they live, get their names. Wire those names to me—there must be ten, at least. Use the wireless at our consulate, in Gaylord's Hotel near the Retiro Park. We'll take care of it from there, believe me. The American girl. I want to know who she is, what of her relationship with Roubenis. Take her to bed if you have to—if Roubenis objects, tell him to get out of your way. She must have American friends, or English. Get me something I can use. I wish to hear no more meowing about morale. Is this understood?”
“I understand, comrade Colonel General. I will do it.”
“When? How many days?”
“Twenty days. A fortnight.”
“I will hold you to that.”
“It will be done, comrade Colonel General.”
“You leave here at five o'clock sharp this morning. I will assign you a sublieutenant—observe his commitment, you can learn something from it. Now, before you go, one small matter. Tell me, Stoianev, you have heard me referred to by a certain nickname?”
“No, comrade Colonel General.”
“A stupid lie, but let it pass. The name in question refers to a particular reptile. Let me just point out to you that it depends, for its survival, on a special principle, which is that its prey always believes itself to be beyond reach. Keep that in mind, will you?”
“Yes, comrade Colonel General.”
“Now get out.”
By the time Khristo reached his tiny room, in another dockside hotel, his hands were shaking. Looking in the mirror, he saw that his face was gray with fear. He sat on the edge of the bed, drew his Tokarev from its holster and stared at it for a time, not entirely sure what he meant to do with it. He noticed, finally, an unusual lightness to the weapon and ejected the magazine. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours somebody had unloaded it. He ran the bolt back and inspected the chamber. It was empty as well. In the Guadarrama, Thursday had come to be known as Día de las Esposas, Wives' Day, in the course of which the guerrilla band of Lieutenant Kulic did those chores that, in normal times, would have fallen within the province of their wives—excepting, of course, the happiest chore of all, which would have to await their return to home and the marriage bed. They shook out and aired their blankets, sand-scrubbed the cooking utensils, washed their clothing and hung it in the trees to dry, and for the grand finale washed themselves—swearing a blue streak in the icy mountain water and splashing each other with childish glee. Kulic's time in the Serbian mountains had taught him the critical importance of domesticity in the context of partizan operations. Being dirty and uncared for, men quickly lost respect for discipline, and operations suffered accordingly. As Kulic phrased it to himself, the more you lived in a cave, the less caveman behavior could be tolerated.
They had found the deserted village quite by accident, but it was perfect for a guerrilla base: no road led there, the approaches were well covered by dense tangles of underbrush, and it lay high enough in the mountains that radio communication with Madrid Base could be maintained on a more or less regular basis.
There was not much left of the village: a few huts—all but three open to the stars—built of dry-masoned stone native to the mountains. They often speculated about the place—perhaps it had been the home of the early Visigoths, western Goths, who had populated Spain in ancient times. It was not difficult to imagine. They would have hunted bear and wild pig in the mountain forests, with spears and dogs, and worn wolf pelts against the weather. Or perhaps another race, unrecorded and unremembered, had died out in the village, the last survivors wandering down onto the plains to become part of other tribes. In any case, with time the piled stone walls and weedy vines had achieved a harmonious truce, leaving the village a sort of garden gone wild and an excellent hideout.
On the Thursday following the destruction of the Nationalist armory, while most of the band was occupied with housekeeping, there was a small commotion at the perimeter of the camp. Kulic, walking down the hill to see what the shouting was about, found his two sentries with rifles pointed at Maltsaev, the political officer from the Madrid embassy.
He was a dark, balding young man with bad skin and a sour disposition, a man much given to sinister affectations. He wore tinted eyeglasses and a straw hat with top creased and brim turned down, and spoke always as though he were saying only a small fraction of what he actually knew. He had arrived alone, on horseback, having left his car in the last village before the mountains, some twenty kilometers distant. Thus it was immediately apparent to Kulic that this was anything but a casual visit. To protect his city clothing during the journey, Maltsaev had worn an immense gray duster coat, which, with the hat and glasses, gave him the look of a Parisian artiste of the 1890 s. An appearance so strange that Kulic was a little surprised his lookouts had not dispatched him on the spot.
They sat together on a fallen pine log at the edge of a small outcrop above the village. From there, they could watch the guerrilla band shaking blankets and capering in the stream, and strident voices—cursing, laughing, joking—rose to them. This was Kulic's thinking place. When the sun came out, the scent of pine resin filled the air and blue martins sang in the trees.
“You don't have it so bad,” Maltsaev said, looking about him.
“It is Día de las Esposas today,” Kulic answered, taking off his peaked cap and smoothing his hair. “We rest and gather our strength. It is a little different when we fight.”
“One would suppose so. Now look here, Kulic, I won't beat about the bush with you. My mission is not a happy one.”
“It's a long ride up here.”
“Too long,” Maltsaev said ruefully. “And I'm a city boy, a Muscovite, I admit it.”
He took off his left shoe and pulled the laces apart. From the pocket of his duster coat he produced a razor blade and began cutting open the leather tongue, finally revealing a yellow slip of paper. “And I had to come through the fascist lines,” he added, in explanation.
“A nervous time for you, then,” Kulic remarked.
“Yes. And I am unappreciated,” Maltsaev said. “My poor backside has no business on a horse.”
He handed the paper to Kulic, then pressed the layers of the shoe tongue back together again as best he could. “Of course,” he said, almost to himself, “one may not carry glue.” Kulic noted that he wore fine silk socks.
“What's this?” Kulic asked, studying the paper. There were four names on it. Four of his men.
“We have discovered a plot,” Maltsaev said.
“Another plot? Shit on your plots, Maltsaev, these men are not Falangistas.” He thrust the paper back at Maltsaev, who was busy putting on his shoe and declined to take it.
“Nobody said they were, and please don't swear at me. Give me a chance, will you. You field commanders have short fuses. A little bad news—and boom!”
“Boom is what it will be,” Kulic said.
“Shoot me, comrade, by all means. There'll be ten more tomorrow, Spetsburo types, Ukrainians—just try reasoning with them.”
“Very well, Maltsaev. Say your piece and ride away.”
“If that's how you want it. These four are members of POUM—there's no question about it, we have copies of the lists, right from Durruti himself.”
“Durruti? The anarchist leader? He claims these men?”
“Well, from his office.”
“And so?”
Maltsaev made his hand into a pistol—bent thumb the hammer, extended index finger the barrel—then pulled the trigger with his middle finger.
“Are you insane? Is Madrid? Moscow? These men are fighters, soldiers. You don't execute your own soldiers. Only for cowardice. And these are not cowards. They've stood up to gunfire, which is more than I can say for some people.”
“Yes, yes. I'm a coward, please do abuse me, I don't mind. But you must take care of the problem—that's an order from Madrid.”
“Marquin, the second name on this list, climbed to the roof of a convent and poured gasoline down the chimney, which enabled us to blow up a Falangist armory. Is this the behavior of a traitor? Besides, all these men are of the UGT, not the POUM.”
“Kulic … no, Lieutenant Kulic, you've been given an order. Have a trial if you like—just make sure it comes out right. The sad fact is that the POUM—Trotskyites, to give them their proper name—are fouling up this war. Sometimes they refuse to fight. They won't take orders. They roam about like a herd of wild asses and cause everybody trouble. Generalissimo Stalin has determined to purify the Spanish effort, and Director Yezhov has ordered that the POUM be purged. These four men claim UGT association, but their names appear on POUM membership lists obtained by our operatives in Barcelona.”
“You're ruining me—you know that, don't you?”
“Four men amount to nothing.”
“You believe the other sixteen, having witnessed their comrades' unjust executions, will fight on?”
Maltsaev thought about that for a time, studying the ground, pushing a pebble around with the toe of his shoe. “Your point has merit,” he said. Then he brightened. “One could report, ahh, yes, well one could report that the disease has spread throughout the group, and it was determined to be of no further operational use. I could try that, Kulic, if it would help you. They would transfer you elsewhere, but your record would be clean at least. Better than clean, now that I think about it. Fervor. That's what it would show. It's just the sort of thing Yezhov likes, you know, going it one better.”
Kulic stared down the hill at his men. A word to Maltsaev and they'd all be dead. Julio Marquin, the spiderlike little shipfitter who'd climbed the convent drainpipe, was poking at a pot of rice over a bed of coals. They cooked by day—there could be no fires at night in the Guadarrama. The fool! Why had he gone and gotten his name on the wrong list? He despaired of the Spaniards, their instinct for survival had been eaten alive by their political passions. The Spanish Legion, under Yagüe, had a regimental hymn announcing to the world that their bride was death, and the Republican side was no better. Thus they slaughtered each other. What did it matter if four of them went to heaven early? His own pride was in his way, surely. How he protected his men. Took every care to protect them, to keep them from getting hurt.
He recalled, suddenly, that he'd killed his first man when he was fifteen, in a tavern brawl in Zvornik. Such strength and determination it had taken to do that. Where was it now?
“Well,” Maltsaev said, “how shall it be?”
“The best time,” he took a deep breath, “is during battle. All sorts of things happen. It could not be arranged for all four at once, of course, but over time, in a few weeks say, they would be honorably slain in action against the enemy.”
“I'm sorry. I appreciate your thinking, but it just won't do.”
“Who gave this order, Maltsaev?”
“I can't tell you that and you know it.”
“Then you do it.”
“Me? I'm a political officer. I don't shoot anybody.” He took off his straw hat and examined the inside of the crown; the leather band was sweatstained and he blew on it to dry it out.
Kulic knew he was trapped. He wanted to cut Maltsaev's throat. But then they would all die. The Ukrainians would come and, once they arrived, all the talking was over. So it was four now, or twenty-one tomorrow.
He stood up. “Sergeant Delgado,” he called. Delgado stood up naked in the stream. He was a boilermaker by profession, a man in his forties. His arms and neck were burned by the sun, the rest of his body was white.
“Yes, comrade?” the sergeant called up the hill.
“I need a patrol of four men,” he answered in his rough Spanish. He called out their names. “To gather wood,” he added.
“We have plenty of wood,” the sergeant responded.
“Sergeant!” Kulic yelled.
Nodding to himself that officers were crazy, Delgado picked his way delicately among the rocks in the streambed and went off to gather the patrol.
Maltsaev was finished blowing on his hat. “You'll see,” he said, “everything will work out for the best.” He put the hat back on, carefully adjusting the angle of the brim so that his eyes were shaded from the sun. They went up the mountain to gather firewood. Kulic was armed with his pistol and, slung over his shoulder, a Spanish bolt-action Mauser rifle, the basic weapon of the Spanish war. The four men were not armed, the better to carry the wood. They chattered among themselves, enjoying their holiday, drawing pleasure from the work detail. Now and then they looked over their shoulders at Kulic, but he waved them on. At last he found what he was looking for. A small glade, an utterly peaceful place where no people had been for a long time.
They began to gather wood, snapping dead limbs off fallen trees, bundling up twigs and sticks for kindling. They worked for an hour, tying the wood with hempen cords in such a way that it could be harnessed to their shoulders, leaving their hands free. It was the way he had taught them to do it. He knew, also, that once they were laden in this way, it would be nearly impossible for them to rush him successfully.
When they were ready to go, he held up a hand and unslung the rifle, holding it loosely at port arms. They stood there for what seemed like a long time, watching him, their faces slowly growing puzzled. One of them finally said, “Capitán?”—a term of honor they had granted him.
“I am sorry,” Kulic said, “but I must ask you to sit down for a moment.”
Carefully they knelt, balancing their loads, then sat, lying back against the wood bundles.
“I am told, by the Russian who came to the camp this afternoon, that you are members of the organization known as POUM, an anarchist group. Is this true?”
“Our politics are complicated,” Marquin answered, making himself spokesman for the group. “We are members of the UGT, the Communist party, but we have all attended meetings of the POUM in order to hear the thoughts of comrade Durruti, who is a greatly gifted man and a fine orator. ‘If you are victorious,' he has said to us, ‘you will be sitting on a pile of ruins. But we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall … and it is we who built the palaces and the cities, and we are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.' ”
Kulic was impressed with the speech. “You can remember all that?”
“All that and more. So many of us do not read or write, you see, that memory must serve us.”
“But you are not members.”
“No, but we do not disavow them. They too are our brothers in this struggle. We attended their meetings, before we came out here to fight the fascists, gave them a gordo for the coffee, signed petitions in favor of freedom for the working classes. Can this have been wrong?”
“I am afraid so.”
Sitting next to Marquin was a fat man. How he had managed to remain so, despite forced marches and the unending physical demands of partizan life, Kulic had never been able to figure out. He had, when he spoke, the piping voice of a fat man. “Then we are to be shot,” he said.
Kulic nodded yes.
Two of the men crossed themselves. Marquin said, “We are ready to die, it is in the nature of this work we do. But to die dishonored, by the hand of our leader …” The pause became a silence as he realized that nothing he could think of would finish the thought.
“You are not dishonored, and I myself do not understand this, and I do not agree. I am, like you, a soldier, and I have been given an order, and because I am a good soldier, I will carry out that order even though I believe it is wrong. All I know is that we are involved in a great revolution. It began a long time ago, far from here, and it will go on for a long time after we are gone. The POUM is in the way, it would seem, of victory in Spain. A sacrifice will have to be made. That is everything I can say.”
One of the men struggled suddenly to get up but the wood borne by his shoulders held him back, and the fat man, seated next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it impossible for him to move. “No, no,” the fat man said, “let it be. Our enemy is not in this place.”
Marquin spoke up, his voice absolutely calm. “I wish to be the first,” he said, “but I want to stand up.” He wrestled the load of wood from his shoulders and stood. Straightened his mono overall so it hung properly, combed his hair into place with his fingers as though his photograph were about to be taken. His eyes looked directly into Kulic's. Kulic worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it to his shoulder, sighting on the man's heart. He had never known the name of the man in the tavern in Zvornik—that had all happened too quickly for any but a perfectly instinctive reaction. The man had rushed at him with a piece of wood, Kulic had plunged a knife into the very center of him, he had seemed to swell up suddenly to the size of a giant, then twisted away, wrenching the knife from Kulic's hand and falling upon it so that the steel hilt banged against the cement floor. After that there was only the sound of the last breath rushing from his lungs. Kulic tightened his finger on the trigger. The Spanish Mauser was a simple weapon, made to work for a long time, and there was nothing delicate about its mechanism. The trigger was on a hard spring and it had to be pulled with force.
Slowly, Kulic lowered the rifle. He forced the bolt back and, as the ejected cartridge spun into the air, caught it cleverly in his right hand. Then he put it in his pocket.
Slowly at first, and then more rapidly as they understood what was happening, the other three men unburdened themselves and stood up. Kulic nodded his head toward the west. “Portugal is that way, I believe.”
“But we have no guns,” one of the men said.
“You will draw less attention without them,” Kulic said.
He was not to hear Marquin speak again. The man studied him as his friends walked slowly west along the curve of the mountainside. There was no gratitude in his eyes. Perhaps a veiled smile, perhaps the faintest hint of contempt. It occurred to Kulic then that Maltsaev might have been right in ways he had not understood, but it was much too late to have thoughts like that so he turned his attention to other matters.
He waited until he could no longer hear the departing men and, when the forest was again silent, waited another twenty minutes, sitting with his back against a tree and smoking a cigarette. He enjoyed the cigarette immensely. When it was finished, he took the clasp knife from his pocket, used it, then put the cartridge back in the rifle, stood up, and fired into the air. This act he repeated three more times. His remaining men could make a small but important difference behind the lines in this war, but they could not keep a secret. As the echo of the final shot rang away down the side of the mountain, he shouldered the rifle and headed for the camp. Looking back for a moment, he saw four bundles of well-bound firewood arranged in a line in the middle of a clearing. Whoever might chance to come this way would find them and think himself lucky that day. In all likelihood, he would make no sense at all of the Cyrillic letters and numerals carved into the trunk of a pine tree. A 825.
At five in the morning, Khristo made his way to the Citroën, parked in front of the hotel. Across the street, the Neva's stacks showed curls of dark smoke as the boiler room got up steam for the 6:30 departure. He had not really slept—Yaschyeritsa's face and voice hammered against his consciousness all night long—and had climbed out of bed in the last hour of darkness with a sick stomach and hot, sandy eyes. At the car, the new sublieutenant awaited him, sitting at attention behind the wheel.
“Good day to you, Lieutenant Stoianev. Allow me please to introduce myself. I am Sublieutenant Lubin, reporting for duty.” It was rehearsed and formal, a squeaky little whine of a voice. Khristo took a step backward and stared at the boy in the car. He had the face of a malevolent baby—a grossly overfed baby—with rat-colored hair combed and pomaded to a stiff pompadour that rose above his glossy forehead and tiny china-blue eyes. A mama's boy, Khristo thought, perhaps seventeen, who would sit on Yaschyeritsa's knee and tattle at every opportunity.
“Yes, hello,” Khristo managed. “Usually I drive,” he added.
“Begging your pardon, Lieutenant Stoianev, but I have been instructed, by Colonel General Bloch, that as junior officer it is my duty to drive the car. Let me assure you that I have been trained extensively in the proper driving of automobiles.”
At a steady twenty-five miles per hour they left Tarragona at dawn, Lubin holding the wheel with both hands and driving like a puppet, correcting—Khristo counted spitefully—eight times in a single slow curve. They would be all day getting to Madrid.
“Stoianev. I believe that is a Bulgarian name?” Lubin said.
“Yes. I am Bulgarian.”
“Then you will not have heard of my family. My father is associate director of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Leonid Trofimovich Lubin is his name. Is it known to you?”
“No,” Khristo said, “I don't know it.”
“It is not important.”
As Khristo stared glassily ahead at the endless road, however, he did recall something of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Sascha had one evening told him the story of one of its most prominent members, O. A. Yanata, the Ukrainian botanist who had set up the first chair of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could be used for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot.
At the end of an hour, Lubin pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He got out of the car, walked around it three times, then returned and drove away.
“Why did you do that?” Khristo asked.
“A rule of driving, Lieutenant,” Lubin answered proudly. “To maintain concentration, one must dismount the vehicle hourly and exercise lightly.”
Khristo put his head in his hands.