A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “Quelle surprise! Look at you. I hear you’re a commander now, a real war hero,” Pierre fumbled. He stuck out a friendly hand, but it was trembling.

  “What are you doing in Berlin?”

  Pierre shrugged, rummaging in his shirt for a pack of cigarettes to buy time. Elías saw the outline of a German gun beneath the clothes piled on a chair.

  “You know I’m not going to answer that question, right? We’re little fish, each in their own pond, but it’s all the same sea. I, however, can guess what you’re doing in my room and why you paid the girl to leave the door open. This is how it works, I know that. Just a little unexpected, caught me off guard.”

  Elías quickly glanced around the room, assessing his options. The window opened onto an alley running parallel to the river. That would be a good place.

  He pulled out a slip of red paper and placed it on the bed. “It’s got your name on it.”

  Pierre weighed the chances of snatching his gun before Elías had time to react. Dismally low.

  “So you know.”

  Yes, Elías knew. During the time he’d been in Argelès, Elías had been spending much of his time doing things for Pierre that the Party knew nothing about. The red and blue papers, it turned out, were often edicts made out of self-interest.

  “Why the boy, why Tristán? What did he ever do to you?”

  It had been personal. Pierre sat down on the bed and looked at the paper, as though to ensure there was no mistake.

  “Too happy-go-lucky, too good-looking, too seductive. I’ve never liked men who look like they walked out of an American movie. But it seems my wife did.”

  Elías swallowed. People always thought they’d been called to a higher mission, something greater than themselves. But time after time, they succumbed to their own self-interest.

  “I could have spoken to him, convinced him to stop seeing her if that’s what was bothering you.”

  Pierre laughed bitterly. “You don’t get it, do you? It was him, his existence, that bothered me. Women like my wife are easy to come by. But men like that kid…I just couldn’t stand it.”

  The next morning, the military police found Pierre’s body in the alley, his throat slit, no documentation on him. By the time they figured out who he was, Elías Gil would be in Paris on his new posting with papers proving that he was a harmless civil engineer. He was finally going to be reunited with Esperanza.

  He’d forgotten how much he loved her dark nipples. And the smell of her sex, the touch of her fingers. It was like starting over, slowly reconquering a lost territory. Speaking without embarrassment, without the unpleasant sensation of having interrupted a life that no longer needed another presence by its side. Esperanza was the same, but different. Like the set of matryoshka dolls he’d brought her as a souvenir. Hiding, secret, but more and more real the deeper he went. Sometimes from the window ledge where she often perched like a gargoyle, watching rain fall over Paris, she observed him walking around the apartment naked with what might have been a look of astonishment. The first few days she didn’t even dare to take off his eye patch, and it was like making love fully clothed, or with the lights turned out.

  They recounted their lives to each other, what had happened over the course of those years, although really Esperanza was the one who spoke. Elías listened absently, wearing an innocent smile, as she told him of the casting calls she’d gone on for a film producer. They made no mention of what had happened in Argelès; it was as though one horror simply replaced another, like a child’s game.

  “Would you like to go back to Spain?” he asked out of the blue one morning, walking in with his feet soaking wet, the newspaper drenched.

  Esperanza gazed sadly at him. He hadn’t even considered the fact that if she went with him, her future as an actress was over. It was true that from 1946 to 1947 she’d made only a couple of movies with very minor roles, but she hadn’t lost hope. People said that Esperanza had talent and all she needed to do was to be patient and determined. Elías wasn’t concerned in the slightest. He was on a mission and was going to carry it out, whether Esperanza followed him or not.

  “It would be dangerous to return.”

  “If things were too calm, we’d be bored to tears,” he said playfully, and they both smiled. And that smile put the seal on it.

  But Elías hadn’t asked to be sent to Spain because he was bored in France.

  Two weeks earlier he’d had a shocking encounter in front of the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. A beggar taking shelter from the rain beneath the portico had attracted his attention, banging on a tin pot. Elías looked away and continued down the road, but then something about the man made him retrace his steps. The shadowy light of the arcade distorted the beggar’s face when he stood, as though in a trance, contemplating a gargoyle spouting dirty water from its mouth. The man’s head jerked spasmodically, as if he’d lost control of his body. He was wrapped in a filthy military cape, his nose and reddish eyebrows sticking out, dripping rain onto his pointy chin.

  “Martin?” The beggar turned sideways and squinted, then wordlessly rushed off through the plaza, turning in alarm every few steps to see that Elías was still following him.

  “Martin, wait! It’s me, Elías Gil.”

  The beggar stopped. For a second, the sun going down behind the bell tower cast a surreal reddish glow on his face. It had been so long since anyone called Martin by his name that he dropped his bundle, trembling with emotion.

  Two hours later, after showering at an old pension on Rue du Dragon, Martin stared at the filthy clothes he’d been wearing continuously for the past several months. The contrast between the tattered rags and his now clean, soap-smelling skin made him feel smaller and more insignificant than he had in a long time.

  “You should have just left me alone, pretended you didn’t recognize me,” he said reproachfully.

  Elías stared at Martin’s wounds, both the old scars Igor Stern’s torture had left on his body and the clear marks and bruises of more recent fights and beatings. Life on the streets must have been so hard, and Martin obviously had paid the consequences. For an hour, the Englishman recounted his travails since the two of them had parted ways in 1934. The tale of those thirteen years was horrifying, and in truth Elías got a better picture of how bad it had been from Martin’s telling silences than from the words he spoke. Elías asked only a few questions about things he could make no sense of.

  “Didn’t you enlist in the British army at the start of the war?”

  Martin flashed a bitter smile. There was little left of the sweet, naïve seventeen-year-old Elías had met on that train to Moscow in 1933.

  “After the Soviets deported me, the embassy treated me like a leper. I don’t know what they found most troubling—that I was a Communist, that I’d escaped the gulag, or my sexual tendencies. I’m inclined to think, though, that the latter is what made them declare me unfit for armed service.”

  He was choked by fear and sorrow, trying to explain the things he’d been forced to endure for being homosexual. Describing the scenes filled his eyes with panic and he looked half crazed, reliving the horror and momentarily forgetting where he was, his mind focused on nothing but the nightmare he’d been through.

  “They played with me like a toy, passed me around from hand to hand, I suffered things no man could endure. And then I suppose at some point I had a change of heart: I went from feeling tormented to feeling like a tormenter. I worked for some really shady characters in London, earned some money, broke a few bones, and made dangerous enemies. So I had to run, and this is the only place I felt safe.”

  “In occupied France?”

  “The Nazis weren’t as scrupulous as SS officers liked to make out. When it came to recruiting informers, they cared very little about one’s race, religion, or sex life. I had a lover who was a lieutenant, and I can’t say I’m sorry about it. I collaborated
with the Gestapo, turned in a few spies planted in the German rear guard…I guess you could say I got by.”

  Martin stopped talking to gauge Elías’s reaction. His old friend seemed to be making judgments, deeming his crimes voluntary, when the truth was there had been no other way to keep his head above water. No one had called him back to Moscow, decorated him, given him the chance to erase his past on Nazino with a Tommy gun in one hand and his ideals in the other. Unlike Elías, Martin had been spat out by the sea, washed up on the shore like detritus.

  “After ’45 came the hour of vengeance—executions, reprisals against the collaborators. It’s funny: When the Germans were marching down the Champs-Élysées, the heroes were nowhere to be found, hiding under the brims of their hats; but the moment liberation came, the arbiters of justice crawled out from under their rocks. You had to point fast and furious at all the guilty before they pointed at you. In the end, you could say I was lucky: I was jailed in Bordeaux for eight months, raped, humiliated, treated like scum in a cell with eight other men who’d lost all measure of humanity except for their cruelty. No one ever imagines how twisted people become when put in the role of executioner, how cruel and sadistic they are, what pleasure they take in torturing their victims. How proud they are, how wild their cries. I experienced every facet of the disease that turns men into monsters—but they didn’t hang me. I made it out alive, if breathing counts as life. And now here you are. You’ve found me and judged me and are here to treat me with the victor’s hypocritical mercy. Isn’t that right?”

  Elías looked away, unable to hold Martin’s gaze. It was true that he didn’t know what his old friend had been through, nor did he want to imagine it. Martin no longer bore any resemblance to the young man he used to know. This one was lost in his own bizarre, obsessive world as he buttoned the clean shirt Elías had bought him. He was a stranger.

  “I’m not the victor, Martin. Since Nazino, there are no failures and no victories.”

  Martin stiffened and gazed warily at Elías, as though in his paranoia he’d somehow imagined that Elías was trying to wheedle information out of him.

  “I’ve seen him. He’s here, in Paris.”

  “Who?”

  “Igor Stern. I can show you the hotel where he stays, the restaurant where he has breakfast every day with his two bodyguards.”

  Martin smiled broadly, noting that he’d captured Elías’s attention. He tucked in his shirttail and realized, self-consciously, that there weren’t enough holes on the belt to fit his waist, so emaciated had he become.

  “Anna is with him, you know.”

  The bistro was deserted, rain pooling on chairs at the outdoor tables and forming puddles on the ground. From a window, Elías sat observing the hotel’s gray façade.

  “Here he comes.” Martin pointed to a hunched figure making its way wearily up the hill toward the steps of Sacré-Coeur. One man protected him from the rain with an outsized umbrella, while the other walked a few steps behind, turning constantly to make sure no one was following them. The three of them walked up to the hotel but only one entered. The other two stayed outside beneath the marquee.

  “I know his room number. We could do it now, his goons wouldn’t even realize.”

  Elías wondered how Martin had managed to find out what room Igor was in but decided not to ask. Beneath that shock of red hair, his glassy eyes looked feverish, insane. He really was out of his mind if he thought they could simply walk up to Igor Stern’s room and bump him off, just like that. It wasn’t that easy. Stern today was a thousand times more dangerous than he had been on Nazino. He was rich now, and far more powerful and sadistic. He was backed by the Politburo, and half of the diplomats in Europe owed him favors that he knew how to call in. Besides, there was a chance that Anna was in the room with him.

  “I assumed you’d hate him as much as I do,” Martin said contemptuously, after hearing what sounded like clumsy excuses.

  Oh, Elías hated him. Of course he did. But not for the reasons that Martin or anyone else who knew what had happened on Nazino might imagine. And part of him—a part that he refused to recognize or listen to—admired Igor Stern. He was the only truly free man Elías had ever met in his life.

  Over the course of years, Elías had been forced to work with him on various operations devised by Beria, and this had provided the opportunity to study him up close, to come to understand him. Despite never for an instant forgetting his compulsive urge for vengeance, he realized that Stern was different from any other man he’d ever come across. Different not only in his way of being and thinking but also in his way of feeling. Igor’s thoughts, desires, and emotions were never hindered by any sort of morality whatsoever.

  Killing, stealing, lying, manipulating—they were all means to an end he pursued with cold and relentless calculation, never veering in the slightest from his meticulous plan. He derived neither pleasure nor displeasure from the crimes he committed, nor did he boast about what he was or blame the world for having made him that way. He looked down on his fellow men for being bound by ties that he couldn’t feel. And that made him a better opponent than Elías, who was incapable of letting go of the festering memories that weakened and undermined him more each day.

  “You’re no better than me,” Igor had said to him after they’d murdered a Gestapo informer in Kursk. Igor had killed the man with his bare hands, and then they’d both watched his body execute a tragic pirouette after being hurled from the balcony and crashing against the cobblestones below. Observing the unnatural position he’d landed in, Igor smiled sadly. “I bet you’re responsible for more death, abuse, beatings, and torture than I am, Commander Gil. The difference resides in the fact that you serve a cause, whereas I serve only myself. But we both know it’s a false distinction. I don’t feel the need to throw myself into the trenches to defy death, because I’m not ashamed of what I am. I’m not proud either—both are useless emotions. We are what we are and should simply accept it. We fight for our place, seize it, defend it tooth and nail, and then, one day, age and exhaustion make us weak and we’re defeated by others who have become more powerful. That’s the way it goes, always has and always will. No point making a big deal of it. But you insist on fooling yourself, refusing to accept that your true nature is actually identical to mine. You could be me, and you’d enjoy it. What a terrible paradox it must be, Commander—to admire your tormenter.”

  Igor’s words were as true as they were horrific. Elías’s moral superiority, his silence and loyalty, left some sort of evil aftertaste. Something about the way he accepted orders and carried them out that made it clear that one day he was going to explode. He wasn’t capricious or anarchic like Stern; he knew that the fear he inspired was in fact based on the opposite: the conviction that the punishment he meted out was never arbitrary. But deep down he often longed to be given a valid reason to behave as cruelly as Igor himself. And when he did, Elías became merciless. And therein lay his weakness. Igor had nothing to prove, nothing he yearned to be forgiven for. He had no regrets, no memories, no guilt. When it was required of him, Igor both obeyed and demanded obedience. It was something he’d long grown accustomed to, like a trained dog. For Elías, on the other hand, lurking beneath the cruelty were anguish and remorse.

  He blamed his weakness on Irina. It was an irresolute feeling, one that was tearing him apart. His memory of her had become a maddening obsession, the embodiment of all that was odious and despicable about Elías, a monster he had to keep under wraps at any cost. Each time he was awarded a medal, given a pat on the back or any form of congratulations, each time his comrades in arms praised his performance in battle, the image of Irina drowning in that river defiled the moment, reminding him of what he truly was—a coward who hadn’t hesitated to consider eating her daughter, just as he hadn’t hesitated to kill Irina and hand over Anna to Igor in order to save his own miserable life.

  One day he’d seen a gi
rl on the outskirts of Warsaw. She wasn’t very tall, but she looked like Irina—the same open defiant expression, same long face and tantalizing mouth and a mop of hair that hung halfway down her back. Elías paid her for sex and spent hours covering part of her face with her hair so that he could see only one mysterious eye. He realized, then, that he’d looked for Irina in all women, to an almost depraved extreme. He was turning her ghost into flesh and blood, surrendering to an obsessive ritual of possession that frightened his lovers, who in the end always fled, refusing the role he’d assigned them. And then would come a period of self-loathing, the shame over the absurd extremes of his game, and he would try to free himself of Irina, disavow her, hate her for making him feel weak. Elías would then throw himself into his work to show the world—and himself—that he was free of her memory. And that was when he became more unpredictable, more violent, more taciturn.

  Igor Stern knew all of this and delighted in using it against Elías. He often turned up accompanied by Anna, who was slowly becoming a young lady as attractive as her mother. She looked so much like Irina that Elías had to turn away, offended, when Igor grabbed her by the waist and kissed her neck obscenely, despite still forcing her to call him Papa.

  “I know what you feel, Gil. It scares you so much that you don’t dare name it, but I can see it in your eye when you look at her, thinking no one can see you. She reminds you so much of Irina that you can’t help wanting her, even if only to destroy her, to erase her from your mind. Isn’t that so? I could give her to you, you know. Would you sleep with her? With Irina’s daughter? I’m sure you would, and then like a hypocrite you’d jump off a bridge into the river or stick a gun in your mouth. Because you’re weak and phony. You’re nothing but a clay hero…Commander.”

  “We could go right now. We could kill him, Elías.”

  Elías Gil parted the lace curtain and looked through the enormous window at the front of the hotel. It was raining even harder, torrents of water flowing down the gutters. Igor’s henchmen stood smoking irritably, squeezed tightly into their coats.