by Alan Furst
A freezing night in Madrid, bitter cold, and where the water pipes had been ruptured by bombs or artillery shells, rivers of ice ran across the paving stones. Castillo was on his way to the Hotel Florida, haunt of American celebrities, writers and journalists from everywhere, and stray dogs like himself. To keep the hotel from being bombed, the top floor had been crowded with fascist hostages so it was, for the moment, safe enough. Eager to be out of the weather, Castillo took a shortcut through an alley that led onto the Calle Victoria. There was a bar tucked into a tenement building in the alley, a poster taped to its cracked window—there weren’t many whole panes of glass left in the city—showed a man with a green face, listening intently, his hand cupping his ear. A spy! A young woman next to him held an index finger to her lips. Above her head, the message: “Sh! Comrades, not a word to brothers or friends or sweethearts.” Spy mania had become a passion in the city.
When Castillo was halfway down the alley, there was a white flash above the Calle Victoria and the concussion blew his hat off. Other bombs followed, and when their explosions lit the sky, a thousand roosters, mistaking the light for dawn, began to crow. Dust filled the air and something, a metal something, clanked on the street as it came down from wherever it had been. A woman screamed, the dogs began to bark. Castillo stood still—should he run? Throw himself to the ground? Realizing he was bareheaded, he looked around for his hat and finally saw it, upside down, a few yards behind him. Suddenly he shivered with fear and frantically searched his shirt and trousers for bloodstains but found none.
He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and retrieved his hat. Now, how to get back to the hotel. A crowd would gather in the Calle Victoria; people—looking for survivors—digging frantically in the rubble, soldiers, police, ambulances with blue paper concealing their headlights from Franco’s spotter planes. And officials, with authority from some bureau no one ever heard of, whose sole purpose on earth was to demand to see one’s papers, which would lack a validating stamp that no one ever heard of. For Castillo, a frightening prospect. So he began to walk back the way he’d come. This was a mistake, the sort of decision that seems obvious at the time but then turns out to have been wrong, when it’s too late. He had almost reached the end of the alley, then a voice in the darkness said, “You, camarada.”
Castillo stopped dead. From the shadows came a child with a rifle. He had a long look at Castillo: heavy overcoat, blue suit, white shirt, a tie, maybe one of those upper-class Franco sympathizers caught in the city by the war.
“Your papers,” said the child. Who, Castillo now saw, wasn’t a child at all. He was small and dark, maybe fifteen, with a child’s face. His feet were wrapped in rags.
As Castillo reached for his passport and permits, he said, “Who are you?”
“I am the sentry for this alley.”
Castillo handed over the documents, the sentry held the papers upside down and pretended to read them. “Are these your papers?” he said.
“Yes.”
They weren’t.
“Are you a spy?”
“No. Certainly not.”
That was a lie.
The sentry was trying to decide what to do, Castillo could see it in his face. A few, very long seconds went by, then the sentry said, “I will take you to the officer.”
“Of course,” said Castillo. “Which way do we go?” He almost pulled it off—the sentry hesitated because Castillo had done the trick very well, his confident voice just faintly suggesting that the officer might not be pleased when he discovered what the sentry had done. Finally the sentry said, “I’ll take you there, it is not far.” He had best be polite, this man in a suit could be somebody important.
The walk took fifteen minutes and ended at the service entrance to the Palace, the largest hotel in Europe, which had been converted to a hospital. Before the war, most of the hospital nurses in the city had been nuns but they had fled to Franco-occupied territory and the wards were now staffed by the prostitutes of Madrid—their hair growing out black because the city’s supply of peroxide was needed as antiseptic for the wounded.
The sentry led Castillo down one flight of stairs, then another, to a room that had once been part of a kitchen; zinc tubs lined the walls and the still air smelled of grease and sour wine. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness—the room was lit by two candles at either end of a table, electricity was a sometime thing in the city—Castillo could see the forms of men standing in line. As he took his place at the end of the line his stomach clenched with fear, because the man seated at the table was in civilian clothes and he was wearing eyeglasses. Officer of what?
Castillo had come to Madrid eight days earlier. He’d taken the night train from Paris to Toulouse, then flown Air France to Barcelona. From there, he’d caught a ride to Madrid with British volunteers fighting for the Republic. Thus found himself standing, hanging on for dear life, in the back of an old Bedford truck—old enough so that it had to be started with a crank—brought to Spain by the volunteers, who were dockyard workers from Liverpool. To reach Madrid they had to take the single open road, held by the International Brigades, which could only be used at night because of the bombers.
They drove fast, with lights off. After two breakdowns and a flat tire, they made it to Madrid, and Castillo found a room at the Florida.
In the room: one bed and four guests. Two of them, French journalists, slept in the bed while the other two, a Polish Jew who did not precisely say what business he had in Madrid, and Castillo, slept on the floor. The room had a hole in the ceiling—an artillery round had hit the room above theirs—that had been patched with a piece of cardboard on which somebody had written “Art as practiced by General Franco.”
Castillo had come to Spain on his own initiative, using a false identity, because he worked in Paris for the embassy of the Spanish Republic and they would never have allowed him to do what he was doing now. Thus his papers, using the name Cruz, had been provided by a professional forger in Paris. The barman at his café had sent him to see a room clerk at a small hotel in the Marais, who knew a dependable forger—a cobbler, in Parisian criminal argot. With so many émigrés from so many countries flooding into France, business was good for the cobblers.
Now Castillo should have sought help from the diplomats in Paris—some of them surely knew helpful people in Madrid—but the situation at the embassy was beyond complicated: after the attempted coup d’état by Franco and his fellow generals in 1936, the embassy diplomats were asked to declare their loyalty to the elected government of the Spanish Republic, or to resign. Almost all of them stayed, but only some of them were loyal. For others, their hearts with the Franco forces, it was wise to keep quiet and wait to see who would win. So, naturally, looking to the future, some of them had the occasional chat with Francoist operatives in Paris.
Thus, when it became obvious to Castillo that his agent in Madrid, codename Dalia, was in trouble, he had no one to turn to for help, knew that if word of Dalia’s predicament got around the embassy it wouldn’t stop there. An inner voice told Castillo that going to Madrid was a bad idea, but a deeper voice sent him south—he could not leave her to her fate, simple human decency said that this was wrong, and Castillo was perhaps a little smitten by her. But then, who wasn’t?
No conventional beauty, Dalia, but striking beyond description—people stared at her. She didn’t especially care. In her indefinite forties, she was ruled by nobody but herself, could be charming in an honest way, could be abrasive, feared nothing. But none of this would save her if she were arrested. And, worse yet, interrogated. To himself Castillo said, No, this must not happen. Just who was hunting her, and why, he could not even guess. All he knew was that the political cross-currents of the Spanish Civil War were ferocious and now Dalia was caught up in them. So, he would save her.
Poor Castillo—his life never meant him to have anything like a secret agent. When the war started he’d been a curator at the Prado—Spain’s national art museum—a c
urator of nineteenth-century painting, the modern era as far as the museum was concerned. Castillo happened to be in Paris when the civil war broke out in 1936, where he had been trying to establish the provenance of a prince’s portrait left to the Prado by a rich noblewoman. One hot day in July he returned to his hotel, having spent the afternoon at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and there received a telephone call from a friend in Madrid: do not come back here, they are going to shoot the intellectuals. Castillo stayed where he was but a month later, marooned in Paris, money running out, and wanting to support the Republic any way he could, he went to the embassy and asked the second secretary if they needed help.
What happened next was a shock. The diplomat, a second secretary called Molina, offered him a job at a nearby office which worked under the rather opaque title of the Oficina Técnica—the Technical Bureau—which tried to buy armaments for the Republic on the international arms market. Was this a job for a museum curator? Soon enough Castillo learned that the previous incumbent in his job had been a gynecologist from Barcelona, while the new director of propaganda was the Surrealist film director Buñuel. Under attack, the Republic had to improvise: educated and presumably loyal volunteers were welcomed, hired, and told to do their best.
Three months later, a stranger—soon to be known as Dalia—appeared at the bistro where Castillo had lunch and, without a word of explanation, sat down at his table. She did not introduce herself, said simply that she was a Spanish patriot, and had secret information that could help win the war. “And you are …?” he asked. She shrugged and gave him a name, the shrug implying that it wasn’t hers. Very well, Castillo said, such information should be passed along to one Colonel Zaguan, who, um, handled that kind of thing.
“No, not him,” she said casually. “I do not trust him.”
In truth there were questions about Zaguan, head of the embassy office of the Republic’s secret service, known as the SIM, but they were rarely asked out loud. Castillo offered to speak to one of the diplomats. Again she refused. She would give the information only to Castillo himself, and he would have to figure out who could be trusted with it. “Why did you choose me?” Castillo asked. “How do you even know who I am?” She responded with a wicked smile, saying, “I know who everyone is.” Castillo gave in.
Victorious, she unsnapped a slim gold clasp on her purse, drew out an envelope, and handed it over. The unsealed envelope had the printed name and Sixth Arrondissement address of the Hôtel Lutetia in the upper-left corner. Castillo put the envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket, then asked the woman if she would care for a glass of wine. “Next time,” she said. Then, using her wicked smile to say goodby, she stood abruptly and left the bistro.
When Castillo returned to his office, he looked to see what was in the envelope—he would not have been surprised to discover that the woman was mad as a hatter and had brought him a sheaf of senseless newspaper clippings. But this was not the case. What he found, typed on three sheets of hotel stationery, was a list: German names and ranks grouped under the headings Pilots, Flight Crew, Ground Crew, and Administration. He had in his hand the identities of at least some of the personnel who served with the Condor Legion—German fighters and bombers sent to Spain by Hitler, a ready-made air force for Franco’s fascists.
Ten minutes later he was in Molina’s office at the embassy. The diplomat had a corner office with two windows. The second secretary was a professional, seasoned diplomat with the pince-nez and trimmed Vandyke beard to prove it. Technically second-in-command, Molina in fact ran the embassy—the ambassador was remote and unapproachable, a classic bureaucrat who made sure that nobody knew what he thought about anything. Instructions to the staff were communicated through Molina, or Molina issued them himself and left the staff to assume they came from the ambassador.
Castillo told Molina about the woman in the bistro, then handed over the envelope. Molina adjusted his pince-nez in the fussy way he had and read for a time. Finally he said, “This looks real enough.”
Castillo was relieved. He trusted Molina and was almost his friend and didn’t want to appear naive in his eyes. “What’s to be done with it?”
“It should go to the army general staff in Valencia,” Molina said. As Franco’s siege of Madrid intensified, the government of the Republic had fled en masse to the city on the Mediterranean coast. “There are people there who will make use of it, if they can. And maybe this information should come from me, because if they find out you’re involved they’ll put pressure on you for more, and that will be the sort of pressure you won’t like. Or, if this turns out to be some sort of poison … a game, you know, then you’ll come under suspicion and you’ll like that even less.” Molina was for a moment reflective, then said, “But perhaps you wish to have the credit.”
“I don’t,” Castillo said emphatically.
“For the best, I think. Castillo, please don’t tell her anything, because we don’t know who she is and …” Molina paused, then said, “Because this may be some kind of bait, an attempt to acquire secrets from us. Do you see?”
Castillo nodded. He did see, and fervently wished he didn’t. This horrid war would be the end of him. He was a museum curator, not an arms buyer, and surely not a spymaster. In the center of his chest he felt anxiety squeezing him with its nasty, powerful little fingers, so took the first of what he knew would be a future of deep breaths. He chatted with Molina for a time, then returned to the Oficina Técnica.
In time, he found her. He’d begun to think it was hopeless, but then, after six days in Madrid, he found her. Her plea for rescue had come to him written on a bar napkin with a thick pencil, brought by an American foreign correspondent who’d come to Paris from Madrid. “She’s in trouble,” he told Castillo. “I hope you can help her.”
“Where is she?”
The correspondent’s mouth tightened as he shook his head slowly—who knows? “On the move when I last saw her, but if she hasn’t found a hiding place by now, I’m afraid …”
“She could be anywhere,” Castillo said, an edge of despair in his voice.
“She gave me the name of a contact, a Frenchman called Tarbot. He’s head of a labor union in Lyons, works with the Spanish unions in Madrid—basically they’re buying ambulances in Europe and trying to get them across the French border, then to Madrid. They are very passionate about La Causa—the battle against fascism—in Lyons.”
“Yes, I’ve seen that in the newspapers.”
“The hobos of Lyons, dozens of them, tried to enlist as a unit in the International Brigade. But the Brigade wouldn’t take them on.”
“How would one find this … Tarbot, you said?”
“Where you find any of the foreigners, war tourists, journalists, whatever they are. At Chicote’s and Molinero’s, the great bars on the Gran Vía. That’s where you’ll find Tarbot. Just ask the barmen.”
Which was exactly what Castillo did when he reached Madrid. They knew right away who he was looking for.
“Oh yes, Tarbot, a big guy with scars on his face, missing a couple of fingers, that’s Tarbot. He should be in later.”
“He stopped by yesterday, but only for a few minutes.”
“Somebody said they saw him in Barcelona.”
“Isn’t he here? I swear I saw him. No, maybe not.”
“Rumor is he was hit by a sniper.” Secret Franco supporters hiding in Madrid liked to fire a shot or two out the window when they thought they could get away with it and killed a few people every day.
And then, one afternoon as Castillo read a newspaper at the bar, a man came up behind him and said, in poor Spanish, “I hear you are looking for me.”
Castillo told Tarbot about the correspondent, used the name Dalia, described her. Tarbot asked him questions, Castillo tried to tell him as little as possible, said Dalia was an old friend, from Paris. He really didn’t know what had brought her to Madrid.
“Oh they come here,” Tarbot said, then shrugged. Who knows why. “Anyho
w, I’ll give you an address. She was there but you know the way it is, people move around.”
But she was exactly where Tarbot said she was. Living in the attic of a badly bombed building, once a mansion, half its facade gone, a place where nobody could live. When Castillo saw her he flinched. The Dalia he knew was fashionable, perfectly dressed and groomed, poised, and sure of herself. The Dalia hiding in the attic was filthy, and obviously had not bathed for a long time. She had cut her hand badly and bandaged the wound with a dainty handkerchief.
Castillo waited until dark, then returned to the Hotel Florida and, using a razor blade, cut the lining of his overcoat and removed a set of false documents produced by his Parisian cobbler. Then he bought a dinner—lentils with garlic and a little oil and a small chunk of bread, which was what there was to eat in Madrid—wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper, and returned to the bombed mansion. Dalia ate like a wolf. When she was done Castillo said, “Here are your new papers. You’ll have to transfer your passport photograph, do you know how to do this?”
“Did you bring glue?”
“Yes. A brand that was suggested by the man who forged your papers.”
“Then I can do it.”
“And here is a train ticket, from Barcelona to Perpignan—you’ll have to find a way to get from Madrid to Barcelona.”
“There are taxi drivers who will do it—for a price.”
Castillo reached in his pocket and handed Dalia a thick wad of banknotes, pesetas and francs. “I believe this is enough for the driver—also for the train up to Paris.”
“More than enough,” Dalia said. “There’s a safe apartment I can use to clean up a little—now that I can afford to pay for it.”
“Better for travel,” Castillo said.
She nodded and said, “Are you coming with me?”
“No, I have a flight from Barcelona to Toulouse on Wednesday—tomorrow night I will find a ride to Barcelona.”