by Alan Furst
“Todavía?” Still?
“Siempre!” Always!
Sign and countersign, called quietly across the roof, were peculiar to 9 Calle de Victoria—each building had its own passwords. The city was awash with secret signals, codes, posters, banners, pronunciamenti painted feverishly on walls—hammers and sickles with drip lines to the sidewalk. The fiery Basque orator La Pasion-aria made daily speeches to the city over a network of public address systems wired together through the streets. Her words—It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees—were repeated everywhere. Constantly she reminded the women of Madrid that their traditional weapon, boiling oil hurled from a basin, was not to be put aside when the enemy arrived.
At the top of the hatchway to the roof, Faye Berns paused for a moment and looked out over the city. It was black and cold, the faint outlines of cathedral spires pointed shadows in the darkness.
“Faye?” Bundled in a large, shapeless army coat, Renata moved toward her through the gloom.
“It’s me.”
“Can it be time?”
“No. I came for company.”
Studied closely, feature by feature, Renata Braun was something of a covert beauty, subtle and finely made, though the impression left on the world at large was that of a woman whose surface was fashioned by the exigencies of a life lived in difficult times and places. She was fortyish, with salt and pepper hair hacked off short, a delicate nose that reddened in the cold, and severe, gold-rim spectacles that were continually removed so that she could rub the dent marks where they pinched. A Berliner, she carried with her the sophisticated aura of that city and was sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, often to the edge of cruelty. Renata was Andres’s friend. Faye was Andres’s lover. They had, over a few months’ time, worked it out from there, becoming, finally, closer than sisters, a friendship in time of war.
Renata took her hands. “Ach, ice.”
Faye shrugged and smiled. She had given her gloves away and Renata knew it. She squeezed back for a moment, then put her hands in the deep pockets of her skirt. “How goes the night?”
Renata made an ironic little gesture with her mouth. “Very slow,” she said. “With der Sphinx at one’s side.”
Faye looked past her, saw the dark shape of Félix, the Belgian journalist who never spoke if he could help it, sitting slumped on an upturned crate beside the machine gun. The position was backed up against the wall of a shed—so that the roof overhang kept the rain off the gunners—and “protected” by a semicircle of meagerly filled sandbags. The machine gun lay back on its tripod, muzzle pointed at the sky.
“Hallooo, Félix,” she called out quietly. Needling him, knowing he thought her an atrocious American brat, knowing he agreed with those stern Spanish commanders who, echoing Winston Churchill, called the foreigners in Madrid “armed tourists.”
“The poor thing,” Renata said, shaking her head.
Faye could not see his face, but she could imagine it. A sneer compounded of disgust—specific; and ill-temper—general. Félix was obsessed with doom. He had come to Madrid as correspondent for a Christian Socialist newspaper in Antwerp, then stopped filing stories, stopped doing much of anything. He wanted to leave the city, somehow he could not, yet he seemed to loathe everything about it. Mostly the frenetic tension of the place, which drove people into hilarious, slightly crazed companionship. Live today, for tomorrow we die. You could be married at any militia office in five minutes. And divorced as quickly, though many declined to bother with official sanctions in any way at all. There was an army, a real army, with tanks and planes and artillery, a few miles to the west. When the battle came, everybody in Madrid would simply pick up a gun and walk out to meet it. Such courage made them saints, of a modern kind, and they knew it. They cared enough about something to die for it, and a sweet, delicious madness blew through the city like a wind. To be a Madrileño was a privilege, an honor. Only a few, like Félix, could find no joy in it.
Or were there, in fact, more than a few.
The Moorish brigades and Spanish Legionnaires of General Mola were aimed at the city in four columns. Mola had been asked, by a foreign reporter covering the Nationalist side, which column would have the glory of leading the attack against Madrid. “I have a fifth column,” Mola had boasted, “inside the city, and it is they who will lead the attack on Madrid.”
This might have been a deception, meant to sow suspicion among allies of wildly different passions: Basques and Catalans seeking their own nationhood, communists of several disciplines, anarchists, democrats, idealists, poets, mercenaries, and those moths who were forever seeking the flame of the hour in which to immolate themselves.
Or it might have been said merely to torment the inhabitants a little. Civil war is not unlike a fight between lovers: each side knows precisely how to infuriate the other. During the Nationalist siege of Gijón, the water supply of the defending Republicans gave out, and they suffered terribly from thirst. Quiepo de Llano, the Nationalist general, went on Radio Seville every night, drinking wine and smacking his lips into the microphone. After that, he boasted of the sexual prowess of his soldiers—the women of Gijón must be ready! It was a powerful station, and all across Europe people tuned in for the nightly show.
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.