She was still asleep when his eyes opened. There was the sound of plates or cups being stacked on a shelf somewhere beyond the door and down the stairs, but Hoffner lay quietly. She had pulled the sheet to just above her waist, her bare back to him, curved to the pillow, and her hair loose against her neck. The shoulder rose almost to her cheek, and he saw the two long scars he had traced with his fingers through the darkness last night. She had said nothing, his thumb gliding along the small of her back and across the spine, the raised skin like jagged lines of wire against the pale smoothness of the rest. He brought his face toward her neck, and she said, “You hardly move when you sleep.”
She turned and looked up at him. It would have been so easy to show the expectation of a kiss, that dizzying and ageless hope of a first morning together, but instead they simply stared. It was effortless, and Hoffner nearly mistook it for the hollow comfort of a shared loneliness. That at least would have been familiar. But this was other. It brought a softening to his face, and she smiled, and he felt its warmth like the distant pull of an unknown faith.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “I had to listen to make sure you were breathing.”
“I’ll remember to make more noise.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead and brought his legs over the side. He sat.
“Coward,” she said.
He looked back and was thankful for the smile. “Yes. Petrified.” He stood and pulled on his shorts, then reached for his cigarettes. He tapped out two and lit them. “Do you think they’ll have eggs? For some reason I’m wanting eggs.”
She pulled back the sheet and propped her head on an elbowed hand as she rolled on her side. He imagined he had never seen this kind of perfect beauty, not for the litheness of her shape or the delicacy of her face, but for the absolute peace she felt in her own uncovered body. It brought him back to the bed, and he sat, and she took a cigarette.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“The cigarette.”
“Oh-yes.”
“What else did you think I was saying?” This was payment for the kiss on the forehead. “Was the young captain helpful?”
Hoffner took hold of the water jug and poured out a glass. He handed it to her. “Yes.”
“You must be very good at what you do.”
“You don’t need to be so good.”
She took a drink. “You should stop saying that. It’s not the truth, and it’s not all that endearing. He would have shot you.” She finished the glass and held it out to him. He poured a second, and he drank.
She said, “I’ll need to find a place to wash some clothes.” She sat and moved to the edge of the bed. She picked up her chemise and dress from the floor. “I can do it in Teruel while you”-she had to think a moment-“do whatever it is you’ll be doing there.”
Hoffner watched her slip the clothes over her shoulders. She reached back to button the collar of the dress, and he said, “You don’t have to come, you know. It’s probably safer if you head back to Barcelona.” At least he was trying to sound noble.
She reached for her hose and began to slide them on. “So it’s this you’re not terribly good at.” She finished and looked back at him. “I don’t want to go back to Barcelona, Nikolai. And I don’t think you want me to, either. Do you?”
He waited and then shook his head.
“You see? That wasn’t so hard.” She stood.
Hoffner was suddenly aware he was sitting in nothing but his shorts. He stood, found his shirt, and began to button the buttons with a newfound resolve.
She reached over and picked up his pants. She held them there and waited. “There’s no rush, Nikolai. The pants aren’t going anywhere.”
He nodded absently, took them, and slid them on.
She said, “You’re not going to tell me you don’t do this sort of thing, or that you haven’t for a very long time, or ever-are you?”
He looked across at her and, not wanting to betray himself, again shook his head.
“Good.” She moved closer and brought his suspenders up and over his shoulders. She smoothed them against his chest. “Even if it’s true, what would be the point in saying it? Love isn’t meant to stand back and stare at its past.”
She gazed up at him and then stepped over to her shoes. She slid her feet in and bent over to buckle them, and Hoffner-aware of a sudden and deep numbing at the back of his head-stared across at her and let himself believe in all things possible.
Teruel was in a state of mild panic. Sitting a thousand meters above sea level-and now with no telephone lines to the north-it had become an island of misinformation at the southern tip of Nationalist Aragon. The Civil Guards who had secured the city for the rebels strode about in their capes and tricorn hats as if the future of Europe lay in the balance. They coughed out orders, looked out through field glasses onto an endless horizon, and smoked cigarettes that gave off the smell of soured bark. All this was understandable. They had spent the better part of the last week staring off in the other direction toward Valencia-another pointless exercise-where rumor had it that anarchists were opening up the prisons and filling their ranks with rapists, murderers, and thieves. It might not have been the truth-most of the inmates were of the political variety-but always good to parade out the apocalypse when trying to stir up a bit of vigilance. Now, with Teruel’s imagination well beyond reason, the Guardia had positioned fifty of their own and one hundred of the town’s bravest caballeros inside buildings, along the old aqueduct, and atop the red ceramic roofs. Three hundred eyes, give or take, stared out silently at the Zaragoza road.
Remarkably, Hoffner and Mila drove up the slope without a single shot being fired. It was either a miraculous show of self-restraint or a level of cowardice as yet unknown in Spain. Hoffner was undecided as he sat behind the wheel and spoke with the sergeant in charge.
“Yes,” Hoffner said, “the road was completely empty.” For some reason Teruel was a good ten degrees hotter than anywhere else in Spain. “The telephone lines were untouched.”
“And you left Zaragoza this morning?”
It was the third time the man had asked, although this attempt came off more as a hope than a question; the Safe Conduct papers and the mention of Captain Doval had placed Hoffner on something of a pedestal. Hoffner was a man with connections, prestige, which meant he had answers. For a sergeant in the Guardia it was simply a matter of asking enough times before he heard what he wanted to hear.
“No,” said Hoffner, a bit more forcefully. “Not this morning. Last night. We were at a tavern this morning.”
“In Albarracin.”
“Yes,” said Hoffner. “That’s right. In Albarracin. You can telephone-” He caught himself. “Obviously you can’t telephone. We left there an hour ago. No one was on the road. I need to see your commanding officer.”
“So you think sending out a group would be all right? To check the lines?” The man’s hope had become faith in this German.
Hoffner knew it would take them two hours to find the downed poles, another two to remount them-if, in fact, they were clever enough to take shovels, wire splicers, and whatever else one needed to resurrect the dead. That would give him until early afternoon to find Georg in a town filled with anxious Spaniards. Then again, Captain Doval might already have sent out a crew to fix the wiring, but what was the point in worrying about that?
“Good, yes,” Hoffner said. “Send out a group. Absolutely. Now, where do I find someone in charge?”
The man shouted over to one of the other guards. “The colonel here says the road is clear.”
Hoffner hadn’t mentioned a rank; still, it was nice to hear he had merited a promotion.
“Take five men,” the sergeant continued, “rifles, a spool of wire, and find someone who knows what he’s doing with the lines.” He looked back at Hoffner and said quietly, “They like to think it’s coming from someone with clout. You know-a little pull.” Hoffner understood why the SS would have no trouble fitting in here. The man said, “You’ll want Alfassi. He’ll be having something to eat down in the Plaza del Torico. Ferrer’s. Straight on. You can’t miss it.”
Maybe it was the heat or the height or the horror of what lay just beyond the walls, but fascist Teruel was showing a good deal more spirit than had Zaragoza. The square was cluttered with people and animals; stands were filled with fruit and foods, some of which Hoffner had never seen-large gourds, and thin stalks with a kind of yellow flower sprouting along the sides. He imagined they were all edible, but why shatter the mystery? Planted in the middle was a small fountain and column, with a bronze bull standing atop it. A few children were howling up at the bull, while a young priest, dressed in full cassock, sat on the edge of the fountain and rinsed his eyeglasses under one of the spouts. Without warning, the priest howled back, and the children darted off. Laughing, the priest shouted after them and a woman crossed herself as she walked past. The priest nodded piously and began to wipe his glasses on his sleeve. Murderers at the gate, and this was all the comfort Teruel required.
Hoffner had parked the car on one of the side streets. He and Mila were now walking toward a narrow building on the far side of the fountain. As with everything in this part of the world, it was an odd mixture of styles, thin alabaster columns along the second floor facade, and a pink Mudejar tower peeking out at the top left. As the floors climbed, the windows moved from simple rectangles to arches to half-moons, with the usual ironwork balconies stretching out below them. It was the perfect place to meet a Spaniard called Alfassi.
Hoffner opened the door and Mila led them inside. The thick stone walls resembled a fortress grotto, damp and cool, although here there were hanging bulbs and tables and chairs, and a wooden bar that ran the length of the wall. Animal parts hung from metal hooks above, with two large pig heads the centerpieces of an otherwise ragtag display. As in the square, Hoffner was hard-pressed to define what most of this was-a few legs of something that seemed caught between a cow’s and a goat’s-but the conversation was light, the smells surprisingly good, and the presence of the Guardia almost nil. There was only one, sitting across from a gray-haired woman, his tricorn hat propped on the table between them. She was dressed all in black and, except for the face and hands, showed only two slivers of skin on each of the wrists. From the expression on the man’s face, she seemed to be in the midst of a nice harangue. Even with the rifle leaning against the table, he looked utterly helpless.
Hoffner followed Mila through. There were the expected stares, none more than a few seconds, before they arrived at the table. The woman was instantly silent, and the man looked up. Not wanting to offend, and not sure how the Guardia divvied up their ranks, Hoffner stole a page from the sergeant at the gate.
“Colonel Alfassi?” he said.
The man continued to stare. Hoffner thought he might have overreached-did the Guardia even have colonels? — when a voice a few tables back said, “Did you say Alfassi, Senor?”
Hoffner turned and saw a small spectacled face, tan summer suit, gold cuff links, and a thin red tie sitting over a bowl of soup. The man was perfectly bald, save for the neatly cropped strip of hair just above the ears. After a week of anarchists and soldiers, Hoffner found it almost jarring to see a man of wealth, especially in these surroundings. No surprise, then, that he was sitting alone. He held a newspaper which, from the look of the weathered edges, was at best a week old.
Hoffner said, “Yes, Senor,” and the woman went back to her harangue.
Hoffner and Mila stepped over, and the man introduced himself as Rolando Alfassi, a timber merchant whose time was now spent as chief member of the recently established Committee of Three for Public Honor. It was why the sergeant had sent them to him. Hoffner suspected that the honor in question might have more to do with the purging of Teruel’s remaining leftists, but why argue semantics with a man who had just ordered them a plate of jamon and two more glasses of lemon water? The pulp was thick enough to chew when the glasses arrived.
“From Zaragoza?” Alfassi said, as he cut slowly through a thin slice of the ham. He ate with great precision. “You know, we lost all telephone contact with Zaragoza last night.” He sniffed at the meat and ate it.
“Yes,” said Hoffner. “The sergeant at the gate mentioned it once or twice.”
Alfassi smiled. It was a simple straightforward smile. “And you’ve heard nothing about the south?”
The telephones were clearly not a concern for Alfassi. He was reading a week-old newspaper: Whatever information was meant to find him would find him.
“No, Senor,” said Hoffner. “We’ve been only in the north.”
Alfassi nodded as he worked through a second piece of the ham. “Then you’ve seen the atrocities, the nuns and the desecration. They say it was terrible before the soldiers stepped in.” He ate.
It was an odd place to begin a conversation: the quality of the road, the weather, the number of burned carcasses strewn across the church steps. Hoffner could have told Alfassi that, only yesterday, he had refused a tour of Zaragoza’s bodies still awaiting burial-the slaughtered workers with their union cards pinned to their shirts-but that might not have gotten Hoffner a second plate of the ham, which was really quite delicious.
“No,” said Hoffner. “I was traveling with the senora.”
“Of course.” Alfassi seemed genuinely remorseful. “Forgive me, Senora.”
Mila said blankly, “Have you buried your own?”
Alfassi stared for a moment, and it was only then that Hoffner realized Zaragoza had been very different for her. She had thought only of her brother: the truth of the war had been set aside for an afternoon. Here, she had no such luxury. He was inclined to remind her of the washing she had promised to do, but instead he said, “The senora is a doctor. She’s been attending to the wounded. She worries about disease.”
“A doctor finds all killing horrific,” said Alfassi. It was surprising to hear the compassion in his voice. “It must be difficult.”
“Yes,” she said, “it is.”
Alfassi leaned in and said quietly, “I find it all quite horrible myself.” It was as if he knew he wasn’t meant to admit it. “We have many, many bodies. Soon we’ll have more. It’s a terrible time.” He sat back and took another piece of the ham on his fork. “It’s never really a question of knowing God’s will, is it? But at least He’s there. To say He isn’t, or never has been, or shouldn’t be-” He slipped the fork into his mouth and shook his head. “Some choose to act impetuously, I know-every war has its excesses-but surely God has a right to protect Himself. What is Spain without God? What is God without Spain?” Alfassi swallowed and said, “Have they buried the bodies in Zaragoza?”
To call wholesale murder impetuous was unforgivable. Even so, it was clear that Alfassi’s fight was not about control or power. It was about fear-the simple fear of losing his God. And, as with all men who live through fear, he was looking for guidance. Holy vengeance was something new, at least in this century. Cleaning up after it was still open to debate.
Hoffner said, “I wouldn’t know.”
Alfassi nodded and cut another piece. “It’s a good point-disease. There’s enough to think about without that.”
“And these bodies,” Mila said. “How many exactly?”
Hoffner tipped over his glass-an accident-and water spilled to the lip of the table. Instinctively Mila pulled back, and Hoffner quickly apologized. He tried to stop it with his napkin.
“You’re all right?” he said. She said nothing and Hoffner looked at Alfassi. “It’s very good. The lemons are fresh.”
“Yes,” said Alfassi. “Don’t worry. Someone will clean it.”
A man appeared with a rag and quickly mopped up what remained. He poured Hoffner another glass and moved off.
Hoffner said, “I’m not a Spaniard, Senor.”
“Yes, I know. A thousand years ago, neither was I. The name: it means ‘from Fez.’ ” He enjoyed this little nugget. “You’re a German.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve had quite a few of you through here in the last week.”
“None causing any trouble, I hope.”
There was a roll on his plate. Alfassi took it and ripped it open. “Am I to be expecting more of you?”
“I’m interested in just one, Senor, a journalist with the Pathe Gazette Company. He would have been carrying a moving film camera. He was sent to bring back newsreels.”
Alfassi buttered the roll and took a bite. He nodded. “Also called Hoffner. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, is it?”
Hoffner tried not to show a reaction.
Alfassi had known all along, and he had taken his time. It was now unclear whether this had all been for show-a bit of pious propaganda for a visitor-or something more sinister. Hoffner wondered if the Guardia with the rifle was always just a few tables down.
Hoffner said, “No coincidence, Senor. You met him?”
Alfassi continued to chew. “Briefly. I don’t trust foreign journalists. It’s always so easy to pass judgment from a distance.” He swallowed. “At least with our own, we know if they’re right or wrong before we read them.”
“My son isn’t the kind to judge.”
Alfassi reached for his glass. “That would depend on what he chooses to film, wouldn’t it?” He drank, and Hoffner waited for the conversation to take its unpleasant turn. Instead, Alfassi added, “I don’t think he was in Teruel long enough to have made many choices. Three or four hours. He didn’t eat the ham.”
Hoffner had the strangest sensation, an image of Georg sitting across from Alfassi, probably at this very table. That Georg was already gone was only a momentary disappointment. The boy was alive. That was enough for now. Georg would be heading west, along the route outlined in Doval’s wires. Hoffner was less clear on where Alfassi might be leading them.
“His loss,” said Hoffner.
“Tell me, Senor.” There was something caught in Alfassi’s tooth. He ran his thumbnail through it. “Why is it that all these Germans are interested in your journalist son, and why do they all come to Teruel to find him? Surely Zaragoza, Barcelona, or Madrid are far more interesting these days.”
Alfassi’s tone was almost impenetrable. The words seemed to threaten, then not. Hoffner couldn’t decide if this was charm or guile or simply the residue of an unflappable faith. What he did know was that the SS was tracking Georg-“all these Germans.”
Hoffner said, “I’m not a journalist, Senor. I wouldn’t know. How many Germans exactly?”
Alfassi took the last of the ham on his fork. “You’re both so interested in numbers.” He sniffed and ate.
“Yes,” said Hoffner.
“I have a son,” said Alfassi. “Not much younger than yours.” The faint echo of compassion returned. “I suppose I would ask the same questions, follow the same course.”
“I suppose you would.”
“And when you find your son, Senor, you’ll take him out of Spain? Immediately?”
Hoffner was trying to understand the last few moments. This was more than compassion, and while he had no idea how much Alfassi knew, or wanted to know, it was clear that the man was struggling with this. Whatever the reason, Hoffner nodded.
“Good.” Alfassi also nodded. “There were two Germans. One four days ago, the other yesterday-an unusual German, that one. And now you.”
“And you told them-”
“Neither was his father. I told them nothing.” Alfassi’s eyes grew more focused; when he spoke again, he made clear why every Guardia and every visitor to Teruel knew exactly where to find him. “We won’t win this war without the Germans. We know it. That doesn’t mean we become like them.” Again he picked up his glass. “You ask about bodies, Doctor. How many more do you think we’d have if we’d listened to these Germans? Not that any of us needs encouragement these days, anywhere in Spain. We can kill each other quite well on our own. But we know why we do it, and why it will stop, one way or the other.” He drank and set the glass down. “These Germans see it differently. For them it’s terror, not truth; power, not faith. And while I’d be foolish to say that terror and power don’t serve other ends, they can’t be the only reasons we do this. At least not in my Spain.” He looked again at Hoffner. “I don’t believe this is your war, Senor, nor the senora’s-at least not here. More important, I don’t believe I want your son getting in the way of it. We understand each other?”
Alfassi knew exactly who they were and why they had come. He was also a man of conscience, limited as it might be. That he was choosing to find his penance in Georg was all that stood between Hoffner, Mila, and the rifle two tables down.
Alfassi said, “He was looking for a Major Sanz, a new man. I don’t know him. He’s at the Guardia Station. I’m sure you can find him there.”
There had been no mention of a Sanz in the contact list from Captain Doval’s wires. In fact there had been no one to contact in Teruel. Maybe, thought Hoffner, that was because Teruel was already fully under fascist control.
Hoffner nodded and said, “Thank you.”
Alfassi picked up his newspaper. “Get out of Spain, Senor. Quickly.” He was already reading, and Hoffner pushed back his chair and followed Mila to the door.
She pulled her arm from his hand the instant they were outside. He knew to keep his eyes ahead of him as they walked.
“You treated him with such respect,” she said, the disdain stifled but raw. “The great man who finds killing impetuous. You have no idea what this war is about, do you?”
“He knew who we were.”
“He knew nothing.”
They walked along a cobblestone ramp, smooth and yellow like an old man’s teeth. Above, iron flakes peeled like dead skin from the rusting balconies, while washing hung loose in the courtyard below. It laced the air with the taste of vinegar. Somewhere, the muffled pitch of a mass was being sung.
“It was my mistake,” Hoffner said. “A woman doctor. He knew that could mean only one thing.”
“You think he did this out of compassion? One father to another? Are you really that blind?”
Hoffner stopped and took her arm. He held her there, afraid to see the hatred-or, worse, the betrayal-and all he could think to say was, “Yes. I am. What would you have me do? He’s letting me find my son. If that doesn’t earn him a little something-” Hoffner hadn’t thought this through. Her eyes were growing unbearably distant. How long had it been since he had felt this need? “Don’t do this,” he said. It was the ache in his own pleading that took the breath from his voice. “Don’t make me defend what I do to find him.”
Hoffner stared into her eyes, not knowing if in this infinite moment he had condemned himself to a life he already despaired of. To have it this close-
She said, “Do you think that’s what I’m asking? Do you think I don’t see that?”
Hoffner had no bearings for this. His head was suddenly light, the sound of voices behind him-somewhere-beginning to vibrate unrelentingly. He felt his arm go weak, then his legs. He let go of her and reached for the wall, the scarred stone scraping into his hand, the pain a momentary relief. He heard his own breath-deep and heavy-saw himself crouching, then sitting on the stone. He had an instant of nausea and then great thirst. His eyes tried to find their focus, movement somewhere in front of him, when he saw her, on her knees. She was doing something with his neck or throat or tie. It was the tie. And then the cold tin of the canteen on his lips, and water, the stream of it flowing down to the pit of his stomach. He looked at her as she doused his handkerchief with water and set it at the back of his neck. His head throbbed.
She turned to the courtyard below and said, “The heat. He’s not used to it.” Hoffner noticed people behind her. They were staring, nodding. She said, “I’m a doctor. It’s fine.”
They moved off, and Hoffner felt his arms again. “It’s not the heat,” he said.
She moved the handkerchief to his brow and squeezed it, and the water ran down his face. “I know,” she said. “But maybe it is just a little.”
He took her hand and felt the dampness of it.
With her other, she placed two fingers under his jaw and felt for his pulse. Hoffner looked into her face, the color gone, the beads of sweat creasing her cheeks and lips. He said, “I won’t choose-”
“You should stop talking.”
“You don’t understand.” He needed her to know this. “I won’t have this be a choice.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“No. You have to see what I’m saying, what I need from you.”
She stopped and stared into his eyes. “What you need from me you have. What you need from me isn’t a question. There are no choices.”
“I have to find him.”
Her gaze softened. “You really don’t understand this, do you?” Hoffner tried to answer, and she said, “Of course we find him. What did you think-just because I tell you you’re an idiot when it comes to a man like Alfassi it means more than that? You are an idiot when it comes to Alfassi, and you have no idea what this war is about, but why would that change anything? Wouldn’t it have been worse if I hadn’t screamed a little after that?”
Hoffner felt a relief he had no hope of understanding. “I thought-”
“Yes. I know. But I’m allowed to tell you how sad and desperate this war makes me, Nikolai. And I need to know you won’t collapse every time I do.” She handed him the canteen again. “But I’m glad you thought it was a choice. Now drink.”
Hoffner drank and felt his strength returning. He waited another half minute and drank again.
She said, “You’re all right?”
He took a last drink and handed her the canteen. He nodded and got to his feet.
He said, “It’s nice to know I’m an idiot.” His legs felt heavy but at least they were there.
“He’s a Spaniard with a conscience. It’s easy to be fooled.” She took a drink and saw something down in the courtyard. She slipped her arm through his. “We should get you something with salt. I could use some myself.” They began to walk.
He said, “So when did conscience become such a terrible thing?”
“You’ve been living in Germany too long. The fascists there don’t bother with it.”
“And here?”
She slipped her hand farther down his arm and took his hand. “Here Alfassi has God and truth and what he takes for compassion. His is a fascism that breeds inspiration.” Her fingers curled through his, and Hoffner gripped at them. “If he manages to win this war, you can be sure he and his friends will be here long after your thousand-year Reich is dust. Alfassi knows it-brutality as brutality runs its course-but a man of conscience, gentility, kindness? He can breathe life into brutality again and again and make it seem almost humane. It’s a particularly Spanish cruelty and we’ve had centuries to become very, very good at it.”
They came to a little awning, two tables and three chairs. A curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door to keep out the flies. They sat, and Mila said into the curtain, “Two beers and an order of migas, please.”
A voice grunted acknowledgment. Hoffner didn’t know migas.
“Bread crumbs,” she said. “Like porridge, with bacon or chorizo or whatever they have lying around. It’ll be good for you.”
He nodded and pulled out his cigarettes.
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “Not until you get something in your stomach.”
Hoffner set the pack on the table. He kept his eyes on it as he placed his hand on hers. The knuckles were wonderfully smooth.
He said, “You don’t expect this, do you?”
He waited for her to answer. When she didn’t, he looked up. She was staring across at him. Hoffner felt his head go light again, until he saw the smile curl her lips.
She said, “And what is it you didn’t expect?”
For some reason he had no idea what he had been meaning to say. None. He shook his head quietly, and watched as her smile grew.
“It must be terrible,” she said easily, “to feel something and not have the courage to admit it, even to yourself. I’m not asking you to. I have no such cares about love. It doesn’t make me weak or sad or hopeful or carefree. I’ll leave that to the young. All I know is when it comes. And how rare it is. And that makes it even more certain.”
Hoffner felt her hand under his, and he found his voice. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. I think … that’s right.”
The bamboo beads swayed, the plates arrived, and they ate.
Major Sanz proved to be a man of little conscience. He was cut from the same cloth as Captain Doval and kept his interviews brief.
And so, knowing that the telephone lines might reengage at any moment-and perhaps still a little lightheaded-Hoffner barreled on. He showed Sanz the Safe Conduct papers, he mentioned Alfassi and Doval, and he explained his role with the contact names in each of the cities to the west.
Naively, Sanz said he thought Georg had been a journalist. Hoffner quickly disabused him of this: Georg was a member of German Intelligence-why not? The SS had lost track of him. He had been heading into Republican territory to secure the routes and the contacts.
Major Sanz was only too happy to confirm them.
More remarkable, though, was Sanz’s request for thinner crates. Naturally, Hoffner had no idea what the man was talking about.
“For the rifles,” Sanz said, as if speaking to a child. “You’re getting twelve-not even that-into each one.” Hoffner’s expression prompted further details. “The wood is too thick. Use a thinner wood and you get maybe eighteen, even twenty inside. It’s not so important here in Teruel. We can leave the crates out in the open, have as many as we like. Who’s going to care? But you go west-Cuenca or, my God, think of Toledo-and the more crates you have, the more difficult it will be to keep them hidden. You see what I’m saying?”
Hoffner did not, until Sanz showed him the printed packing slip that had accompanied the crate.
At the top, in an official script, was the crate’s origin: Tetuan, Morocco. Just below, in the same script, was the name of the company that had shipped it: Hispano-Marroqui de Transportes, Sociedad Limitada. Elsewhere on the slip, the company was simply referred to as Hisma.
Hoffner stared at the word. It was the final name from Georg’s wire, the name connected to Bernhardt and Langenheim.
Hoffner said, “You have other papers from the company, Major?”
The man hesitated.
“In your files,” said Hoffner. “I need to make sure you have the proper paperwork, should anyone come asking for it.” What could be more convincing? thought Hoffner. A German asking for paperwork. He looked directly at Sanz. “You see what I’m saying?”
Again Sanz hesitated before he began to nod. “Yes-yes, of course. I have it all here.”
Sanz retrieved various sheets from the bottom drawer of his desk and handed them to Hoffner.
“I believe that’s everything.”
Hoffner quickly peeled through the stack until he came to the fourth page. It was there he read the announcement of incorporation for the Spanish Moroccan Transport Company, a company intending to ship medical supplies and engine parts and farming equipment-the list went on and on. It was a general partnership, with a Johann Bernhardt as its chief officer. The funding, though vague, had come from Berlin. How or when this had happened was, of course, not made clear on the pages in front of Hoffner. Perhaps that was where Langenheim had played his role.
That said, it was Bernhardt who had created a legitimate private company as a front for supplying weapons. Along with the shipments from Germany to the primary base in Morocco, Bernhardt and his cohorts were planning on sending rifles and ammunition directly to recently formed Hisma outposts throughout Spain. Teruel had been the testing ground. So far, three shipments had passed through unimpeded. The weapons were coming encased in old turbine and piping crates, some even in medical supply boxes. Thus far it was only enough for two or three squads, but expand it to the other cities on Doval’s list-that straight line across Spain-and Hoffner could only imagine what a few thousand stockpiled rifles could do for a conquering army. Franco would simply need to get to the city gates, and the guns would be waiting for him-or, better yet, turned on the men still inside.
“Thinner crates,” Hoffner said. “Of course. I’ll put it in my next report.”
There is a kind of madness that lives on the plains of La Mancha. It settles on the mind in the last of the afternoon, when the sun perches between the passing sails of the windmills and seems to wink with every turn of the blade. It isn’t the billowing itself that sparks the delusion-that, they say, requires a nobler kind of madness-but the sudden and unrelenting sense that this might be the last time the sun will make such an effort. La Mancha begs for indifference, or at least a disregard from anything still clinging to life. Even the trees know it. Hobbled by their own weight and bent toward senility, they peer out across the burned earth and laugh through parched bark at anyone foolish enough to remain out under this sky. It is, if He would admit it, the only place where God gazes down and wonders if even He has something still to learn. Maybe, then, the madness is His, for what else could God possibly have to learn, especially from a strip of land ready to shred itself on the truth.
Driving through the heat, Hoffner gazed into the bleached red of the sky, the color of blood mixed with water, although here it was clouds sifting through a dying sun. He had lost track of time, more so of which Spain he was in. This far east, La Mancha gave no aid in defining lines of defense or offense. It was simply men in the distance, a signal to pull over, rifles and pistols raised, and a determined effort to produce the right papers. Neckerchiefed soldiers became uniformed ones became neckerchiefed ones again, even if the stares and faces all looked the same. A wrong turn and it might have been another platoon of young requetes-a few more hours lost to the fitful infancy of war-but at some point Mila convinced him that they had seen the last of the Nationalists. They changed their clothes. Hoffner scratched a large CNT-FAI across the car door. And Mila found a well and filled the canteens. They were back in Republican Spain, although Hoffner had a sense that there was little hope of finding Barcelona’s arrogance anywhere in here.
In those timeless stretches of road, Hoffner began to see where Georg had been leading him. Han Shen had given him Vollman. Vollman had sent him to Teruel. Teruel had given him Major Sanz and the names and the cities where Hisma would be setting up shop. Hoffner ran through those names in his head, over and over, until a single image began to form: Cuenca, Tarancon, Toledo, Coria-a straight line of some six hundred kilometers to the Portuguese border. Add Badajoz to the list and the shape took on the form of an inverted skillet, with Badajoz at the base of its handle, and Madrid perched just above at the center of the pan. Madrid. The key to Spain. Arm these hidden pockets of rebellion with rifles and ammunition and they would crackle like tinder to light the flames and swallow Madrid whole.
Somewhere in those six hundred kilometers was Georg. It was now a race to Badajoz.
Oddly enough, Hoffner and Mila seemed to be the only ones moving with any urgency. Where the coast road to Barcelona had seen fish and fruit baskets carried in twos, here it was mule trains, three or four in a line, with carts in tow painted all manner of bright colors. They overflowed with charcoal and firewood, wineskins and gossip, and, while the wheels were as tall as a man, they never seemed to move more than a few kilometers an hour. They had known Spain well before Hannibal, well before God, and looked none the worse for it: men with flat Siberian faces, heavy coats even in this heat, and never so much as a glance for the Mercedes as it raced by. Why show wonder at something as momentary as an elephant warrior or a suit of steel? “This too shall pass” seemed to echo in the plodding groan of the wheels.
Two hours in, Cuenca came and went. To Hoffner, it was a city unlike any he had seen before, a modern Babel perched high on a slab of rock between two narrow ravines. Where reason would have told it to build bridges so as to step beyond the rock, Cuenca had chosen to climb ever higher, its buildings spiraling up to hang like wireless birdhouses over the water below. Unsteady as they looked, they gave a perfect view of the bodies now lying across the bottom of the ravine-Guardia, landowners, priests. There was always a priest.
Hoffner and Mila had sat in one such place, a tavern of sorts, and listened to the story of a man called Guzman, a good honest tradesman, who had treated his workers with justice and had thus survived the first days of the fighting. Somehow, though, poor Guzman had been found hiding holy objects taken from the cathedral. Clutching at these little crucifixes and chalices, he had said it was a simple misunderstanding. He was planning on melting them down. He was a businessman, after all, not a fascist. So, taking him out into the square, the militiamen had insisted he do so-now, at this very moment. Guzman had nodded several times, looked at his wife, and broken down and prayed. He cursed the rabble, told them they would burn for their heresy, and refused to give up even one of his treasures until he was beaten senseless. He was then shot and tossed over the wall.
This was only one of a handful of stories making the rounds, but luckily it was the first Hoffner and Mila heard. Guzman was the contact name on Captain Doval’s list, the name confirmed by Major Sanz back in Teruel. Guzman was the Hisma liaison. Had Hoffner gone asking for this man, he and Mila might now be resting alongside him on the rocks.
There had been no point in looking for Georg. Guzman had been dead days before Georg could have gotten there. With no Hisma liaison to question, Georg would have moved on.
Surprisingly, Georg’s absence was not the reason they were now back on the road. Mila had refused to stay in the city for the night. Hoffner thought it an odd reaction, especially given her outburst about Alfassi, but he kept it to himself. He knew she would be finding fewer and fewer places to sleep if stories like these continued to trouble her.
The first stars came quickly through the dusk. It was only minutes before they filled a sky the color of charred cork, with a moon so low on the horizon it looked as if it might loose itself and roll across the plains and hillocks. The air was cooler, and the smell sweet like pressed grass.
It was pointless to think they would find beds tonight. Tarancon was still another sixty kilometers on. Arriving in the middle of the night in a Mercedes driven by a German, no matter how pure his Spanish, would only complicate things. And the villages along the way wanted nothing to do with anything or anyone unknown. It left the backseat of the car as the only choice until Mila said, “There,” and pointed out into the middle of the darkness.
Some fifty meters off, a small fire was burning at the center of some rocks. In the shadows stood three mule carts, the mules tethered to the side.
“You won’t get a word in,” she said, “but they’ll let us sleep. You’ll also drink the strangest wine you’ve ever tasted. Flick the lights and stop the car.”
Hoffner did what she asked and then followed her across the brush grass toward the flame. The coolness in the air had turned to chill. He draped his jacket across her shoulders.
Two men sat around the fire. They were interchangeable save for the misshapen hands, fingers broken at odd angles, badges of honor from the hoof of a mule or a wheel rolling backward in the mud. How they managed to keep a grip on anything remained a mystery. They were drinking from a porron, a glass bottle with a pointed spout. Tipped up, it remained just beyond the lips-much to Hoffner’s relief-and sent a thin jet of wine spurting into the mouth. They passed it back and forth while a tin pannikin sat over the fire and cooked something smelling of meat.
“Salud, friends,” Mila said, as she and Hoffner drew closer.
Neither man looked over. One drank while the other stirred. The one stirring said, “Tonight it’s ‘Salud.’ Last night we had ‘Most gracious senors.’ I think I liked last night better.”
Mila said, “You ate with soldiers last night?”
“We drank with soldiers last night. And you?”
“A bed in a tavern.”
“Very nice. Nicer than this.”
The other stopped drinking and handed the porron up to Mila. She took it, drank, and handed it to Hoffner. He drank and handed it back. The taste was like oranges left too long in the sun, with a burning at the base of the throat. Hoffner knew this was more than wine.
Mila said, “May we sit, friends?”
The one stirring said, “What do you bring?”
She drew her arms closer across her chest and said, “Warm bodies and conversation.”
The one stirring smiled and said, “Not so warm.” He nodded over to the other. “Get them blankets.”
The other stood and walked slowly back to the carts. Mila and Hoffner stood close by the fire. When the man returned, the blankets were a soft wool-softer than Hoffner expected-and smelled of camphor oil. Mila and Hoffner both sat on the same one and pulled the other over their legs.
The one stirring said, “A man who lets a woman do all the talking.” The smile remained. “I’m not sure I like this kind of man.”
Hoffner said, “It saves time.”
Only now did either of the men show a reaction. They both turned and looked at Hoffner. The stirring stopped, then slowly started again. The one stirring said, “You speak a Spanish not of Spain.”
“Not of Spain, no,” said Hoffner.
“Hers has a Catalan,” said the man, “but she’s sat like this before. Not you. She knew to drink first, then sit. You’re lucky to be with a woman who knows these things.”
The hands might have been battered, but the ears were remarkably fine-tuned. Hoffner nodded. “Yes.”
“Have you come to fight these soldiers? They’re very eager to fight.”
“No,” said Hoffner.
“They tell me they have only a few more weeks of this, and then the fighting will stop. They’ll have taken what they want.”
“They’re soldiers,” said Hoffner. “They have to believe that.”
“Yes,” said the man. He stopped stirring and gingerly pulled the tin from the flame. “The others say Franco is dead, so it’s hard to know who to believe.”
The name of Franco was the last thing Hoffner had expected to hear. Evidently the war was not so young if it had reached this place.
Mila said, “Franco is dead?”
The man tipped the meat onto another dish and passed it to the other. “Drowned trying to come across from Africa. It’s a long, long swim.” He set the pannikin over the flame and pulled something from a leather bag. “Goat. Tough but fresh.”
“Good,” said Mila.
The other passed Hoffner the porron and began to gnaw at his meat. Hoffner drank. It was already finding his head. He handed it to Mila and she passed it to the one stirring.
He said, “Next go-round you’ll drink again.”
“Yes,” said Mila.
The one who stirred talked and talked-about the age of his mules, the men in Jabaga who had refused to let him enter the town-“But you know me…” “We know no one”-and the rifles he had seen stacked along the walls and ready to be fired, if only they could find a way to scrub thirty years of rust from a barrel. The other chewed and swallowed, swallowed and chewed, and glanced at Mila each time his friend mentioned guns or dying. They had seen their share of it, men left for dead in cars, propped up behind a wheel at the side of the road and still gasping for breath. Rich men, with wide neckties and fat cheeks and mouths dried with blood where the butt of a rifle had taken out the teeth. And when Mila finally shivered from the cold, he stopped and told her to drink and sent his friend to the cart for a wrap to sleep in.
“Franco is dead,” the man said again. A car passed in the distance. “That’s what I tell them. It makes the men think twice about what they do.”
The wrap folded over on itself and had a zip fastener. Inside was flannel.
“We have only one,” the one who stirred said. “It can fit two.” His friend was already by the carts. They had slung hammocks between the wheels, and the other now dropped himself into one.
The stirrer built the rocks higher around the flame and then, in a way Hoffner had never seen, brought the flame low, though not completely out. It was suddenly much darker, but he could still feel the heat. The man stood and weaved his way to his hammock. Hoffner thought, All men should speak so well this drunk.
Hoffner pulled off his boots and slid in next to Mila. He reached down and pulled the fastener up and felt her body press close against his. He lay back, and they stared up at a sky infinite with night.
She said, “If the sun comes again, you’ll forget it can look like this. The ground will forget as well.”
“The sun will come.”
“It seems a shame, though, doesn’t it?”
Maybe it was the wine, but the stars momentarily shuddered, and Mila turned on her side to him and pressed her lips to his cheek. Her hand moved across his chest, then her arm, her torso until she was slowly above him.
She saw it in his eyes and said, “They’re already sleeping.”
Her lips found his again, the warmth of them and the coolness of the air, and beyond a cradling of stars, and Hoffner let his hands glide across the smoothness of her back, her legs, the clothes unloosed and his own body freed, and he felt her chilled skin across his own like the pale breath of absolute need.
He would love her. He knew this. He would find this life and he would love her.
They arrived in Tarancon by mid-morning. Hoffner learned to play a game with a stick, something with the words dedo and pelota, although even the men and boys who played with him seemed to have any number of opinions as to what it was called. They sweated under the sun in the courtyard of a small clinic-little more than the front room of a house-while a woman and a girl lay dying inside of burns from a house fire. It had been a terrible thing, quick, and nothing to do with the fighting. In fact, Tarancon had seen almost none of the fighting. The Guardia had quickly pledged themselves to the Republic and had even stepped in to make sure the killing was kept to a minimum. Tragedy remained a thing of fires and falling trees and a boy drowned in early spring-as it had been for as long as anyone could remember. It was so much easier to understand than the news of the horrors sprouting up everywhere around them. The two inside were dying. Infection had set in. And the comfort of a woman doctor-so strange and yet perhaps a miracle (although no one would have called it such a thing)-gave them peace as they slipped quietly away through the morphine.
It was hours before Mila emerged from the house, walking with a man a good deal older. He had come the night before from Cuenca. He was a doctor as well, but the woman and the girl had already been fighting the burns for five days-why had it taken so long to send a boy on the two-day ride for him? — and there was nothing he could do. He hadn’t slept and was grateful that Mila had been there to take the two to the end.
Hoffner tossed the ball to one of the boys, then ran his handkerchief over his neck as he walked toward her.
“They’re both gone,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” said Hoffner.
“No, it’s better. It should have happened three days ago.” She introduced the doctor. He said he was tired of watching peasants die this way. He needed to sleep and get back to Cuenca. He left them to each other.
She said. “He was a good doctor, but he would have tried to keep them alive.” They sat on a bench. Hoffner’s hat was lying on it.
He said, “You need to eat something.” She said nothing, and he added, “Some of the men remembered Georg. ‘The man with the camera’ they called him. They said he was here for a few hours. The day before the house burned. They don’t remember anyone else.”
She stared across the courtyard. She nodded distantly.
He said, “I didn’t mention any names.”
Again she nodded. Finally she said, “The name from the contact list, here in Tarancon.” Hoffner had shown her everything from Captain Doval and Major Sanz. She had memorized the names as well. “He was called Gutierrez,” she said. “What was the first name?”
He knew she knew it, but he answered anyway. “Ramon,” said Hoffner. “Why?”
It took her another moment to answer. “Because he was in the room with me the entire time. Because the woman was his wife, and the girl was his daughter.”
Hoffner had trouble looking at the man, not because Gutierrez hadn’t bathed or shaved in five days, or that his face was bloated from the crying, or even that his left arm to the shoulder was an oozing scar of blisters and flaked skin beneath a thin wrapping of gauze. It was because he sat there, unaware that he damned Georg with every breath he took.
Hoffner imagined the crates, the guns, the fire set to destroy them all. Had Georg really been capable of this? Had he been so callous, so cowardly, as to slink off in the night knowing that this was to come? Hoffner wore his son’s shame as if it were his own.
Gutierrez continued to stare across at the sheeted bodies, his good elbow on his knee, his body leaning forward, hand pressed against his brow. Hoffner had no idea if the man was even aware they had stepped inside the room.
Mila knelt down next to Gutierrez. She ran her hand across his back and spoke softly. Slowly, Gutierrez began to nod. He looked at her. His eyes moved to Hoffner, then the sheets. With her hand still on his back, Mila helped him past the curtain and down the hall. She led him to a chair by the door to the courtyard, and Gutierrez said, “I want the air. We’ll go outside.”
“No,” she said. “Outside isn’t good until they dress your burns again. You should sit here.”
Gutierrez seemed aware of his arm only now. He looked at it as if someone had just handed it to him, a thing to be studied: an arm had been burned, flesh, but whose was it and how? Gutierrez sat and asked for water.
There was a table across from him with a pitcher and two glasses. Mila filled one and handed it to him. Gutierrez held it but did not drink.
Hoffner was a few paces down the hall, breathing air heavy with the smell of rotting limes and soap. So this was the scent of burned flesh, he thought. He stepped over and filled the other glass. He drank.
Hoffner said, “You should drink as well.”
Gutierrez’s gaze was fixed on the wall, mindlessly searching for something. “Should I?”
Hoffner was glad to hear the anger. It colored Gutierrez’s despair and gave it purpose. The man would find his way back.
Hoffner said, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Gutierrez barely moved.
“There was a man with a camera,” Hoffner said. “A German. A few days ago.”
Gutierrez showed nothing.
Hoffner repeated, “There was a man with a camera-”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“You know why I ask.”
Gutierrez continued to stare at the wall. Finally he said, “Yes.” He was unrepentant. “I know why.”
“He came about the crates, about Hisma.”
“Yes.”
Hoffner waited and then said, “Did he set the fire?”
The question came so effortlessly-questions like these always did-even if every moment beyond them lay in their grasp.
Gutierrez’s stare hardened. “You mean did he murder my wife and daughter?”
And there it was. Why not call it what it was. A low humming began to fill Hoffner’s ears, but he refused to look at Mila. “Yes.”
Gutierrez said, “You ask only about the one with the camera. Why not the other?”
“The other is not my concern.”
“No? He also wanted the one with the camera.”
There was a pounding now in Hoffner’s chest, the urge to grab Gutierrez by the arm, scream in his face-Was this Georg? Was this what my son has become? — but instead he asked again, “Did he set the fire?”
Gutierrez waited, his cruelty unintended.
“No,” he finally said. “That is my misfortune. Are you here to rid me of my burden?”
Hoffner felt his breath again. He said, “Then the fire was an accident?”
“There are no such things.”
“And the guns?”
“Guns,” Gutierrez said, with quiet disbelief. “What guns? We have no guns. There will be no guns.” Self-damning made such easy work of the truth. He refused to look at Hoffner. “You need something more from me, you tell Sanz to come and get it himself. He does me a favor. Otherwise no more messengers, no more visitors, no more questions from this German, that German, talk of those crates”-his voice trailed off-“make room for those fucking crates.”
Gutierrez shut his eyes, trying not to see it.
“A can of oil”-it was little more than a whisper, the creases of his eyes wet from the memory-“a tiny can of oil and all that heat.” The tears ran and he forced his eyes open. He looked at Hoffner. “God has sent His message, and I damn Him for it.” Gutierrez looked upward. “Viva la Republica,” he said. “Viva la Libertad. Do you hear?” He looked again at Hoffner. “My cause is no longer yours. No longer Sanz’s. No longer His. Either shoot me or get out of my town.”
Gutierrez stood. He moved past Hoffner to the curtain. He was about to step through when Hoffner said, “The other German. When was he here?”
Again Gutierrez’s gaze hardened. He peered into the room. This time, though, he hadn’t the strength for it. He was suddenly aware of the tears, and he wiped them. “I don’t know,” he said. “Two days ago, three.”
“He came to ask about the one with the camera?”
“Yes.”
“In this place?”
Gutierrez nodded.
There was no point; the man had nothing more to give.
Hoffner nodded and turned to Mila, and Gutierrez said, “He was strange, that German.” Hoffner looked back and saw Gutierrez staring at him. “Not like the others,” said Gutierrez. “Not like the one with the camera. He had death in the eyes.”
“There are Germans like that now.”
“No.” Gutierrez shook his head. “Not SS. Not soldiers. Something else with this one.” It was as if he were seeing the man in front of him. He stared a moment longer and then pushed through the curtain, and Hoffner watched as the cloth puckered and grew still.
That night they stayed in Tarancon.
The days were slipping by, but Hoffner let them go. He might have convinced himself it was to keep them safe: they had been lucky last night; driving after dark seemed beyond even a Spaniard’s arrogance. Or he might have said it was for the time he could take with Mila, hours to sit or walk or stare up from a rusted bed and wait for the breeze to find its way into a room so small that the ledge of the window served as table for both pitcher and glass.
But the truth was easier than that. Hoffner simply believed Georg was alive. He had no idea why he believed this, or why he knew Georg would still be alive when he found him, but time was no longer a concern. There was nothing he could point to in the last days to make this sudden certainty real, and yet here it was.
Hoffner had felt it only once before, this kind of ease, in the same heat, the same silence, the same taste of soured milk in the air. It sat deep in his past and yet lay quietly by his side, and Hoffner chose not to ask why.
He sat up and took a sip of the water, brown with silt. He stared out through the window and saw the hills under the moon.
Mila said, “He’s out there.”
He had thought her asleep. He nodded and lit a cigarette.
She said, “You thought he’d set that fire.”
Hoffner felt the heat of the room on his face. He let the smoke spear through his nose. He said nothing.
She said, “And what if he had?”
Hoffner took another pull as he stared out. “But he didn’t.”
“No-he didn’t. So you don’t have to save him from himself.”
He looked at her. “What does that mean?”
“The way you do with the other boy. Sascha. That’s the one you think you need to save. Georg didn’t set the fire, so it wasn’t your fault.”
He continued to stare at her. “That’s a stupid thing to say.”
“Is it?”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right, I don’t.” She reached out and took his cigarette. “So I’m left to bring out the trite and the obvious.” She took a pull. “I’m thirsty.”
Hoffner handed her the glass and watched as she drank.
He said, “I made him what he is.”
“No one makes anyone else into anything.”
“He was sixteen. A boy. I had a girl on the side.”
“A boy with a cheating father. What a remarkable story.”
“I threw it in his face.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Then you’d be wrong.”
She held the glass up to him and he took it. He turned and set it on the ledge. And he stared out and knew that somewhere people were sleeping.
“It was at a railway station,” he said. “This girl. Sascha was there. He saw us together. There were words. I didn’t see him for eight years after that. It’s been another nine since.”
“Because he saw you with a girl?”
“You don’t see it. It sounds … different now. Small. It wasn’t. It’s what I was. It’s what he knew I was.”
“And what you were makes him what he is now? That must be so much easier to believe than anything else.” She reached across him and tapped her ash out the window. Her hair played against his chest, and she lay back.
He said, “So you want me to be blameless?”
“No. You’ll never have that. I loved my husband, even when he had a woman in Moscow. He stopped it, and we went on.”
It took Hoffner a moment to answer. “It’s different.”
“Why? Because you think a woman needs to forgive? Because your wife forgave you every time she knew you had another one?”
“He was a boy.”
“My husband wrote me at the end. He said he deserved to be dying. Freezing to death, and he needed to tell me it was because of what he had done to me. How much he regretted it. Can you think of anything more stupid than that?”
Hoffner hadn’t the strength for this. “No. I suppose not.”
She sat straight up and forced him to look at her. “Don’t do that. Don’t ask to be forgiven because you can’t forgive yourself. You’re here for Georg. You risk everything for Georg. But it doesn’t make you a better man that you do. You do it, and it’s enough.”
Hoffner stared at her. “And it’s enough for you?”
She looked at him. Hoffner thought to hold her but she lay down. He lay beside her and brought her back into his chest.
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
And he slept.
“He let him die.”
The man behind the bar set the glasses down in front of Hoffner and began to pour. “His own son,” he said, a tinge of respect to mask the shock. “That’s who sits up in the Alcazar now.”
It was eleven in the morning, and the hundred kilometers to Toledo had been dry. They required a drink, something with a bit more bite than wine. This was brandy from the south, Jerez, the last bottles Toledo would be seeing for quite some time. It felt good to have this kind of burning at the back of the throat. Hoffner told the man to refill his glass. He then joined Mila outside. She was on a bench, staring up through the tiled roofs along the narrow street. She took her glass and drank, and Hoffner peered up.
There was no escaping the gaze of the massive fortress on the hill, stone and towers and windows in perfect line. The Alcazar had watched over Toledo for nearly five hundred years. Now it was Toledo that stared up and wondered how soon the stones would fall.
The talk in the bar had been of the fascist rebels inside. There were a thousand of them: cadets, Guardia, their wives and children, and all those fat ones who had scampered up to the gate, pounded on the doors, and begged to be let in the moment it had all turned sour for them. The Republican forces had taken the city, and the fascists were now holed up with no hope of surviving. The Alcazar had become a little city unto itself, with thick walls and iron gates to keep the fascists safe inside, while outside the Republican militias plotted and tossed grenades and waited for the end.
And how had this all come to pass? Because the man keeping the fascists calm inside was a colonel by the name of Jose Moscardo. Moscardo hadn’t been part of the July 18 conspiracy; he hadn’t known of Franco and Mola and Queipo de Llano. But he did know which Spain was his. And so, seizing the moment, he dispatched the entire contents of the Toledo arms factory up the hill and into the fortress before the Republican militias could stop him. It was an unexpected coup.
Save for one small point. While Moscardo might have shown remarkable savvy in ferreting away men and soldiers and guns and children, he was less astute at protecting his own. Somehow, in all the mayhem, he forgot his sixteen-year-old son Luis outside the fortress walls. Within hours, the boy was taken hostage by the militias, who promised to shoot him if his father refused to surrender. It was a brief conversation on the telephone, at which point Moscardo asked to speak to his son.
“They have me, Father,” said Luis. “What shall I do?”
Moscardo thought a moment. “If this is true, commend your soul to God, shout ‘?Viva Espana!’ and die like a hero.”
“That,” said the boy, “I can do.”
It was an act of uncommon bravery. Word of it had spread to the south and the far north, where Moscardo and the Alcazar were already things of legend for the rebel fascist soldiers: the new Abraham, they called him, although this time God had failed to reach out to save his Isaac. This time, faith had truly been tested.
The fascist soldiers chanted their names, and the great fortress became the bastion of all that was good and true in Spain.
Hoffner said, “The barman said we’d do best with a group headquartered near the cathedral.” He tossed back the last of his drink. “Republican army. Slightly more organized than the Communists.”
“That’s no great surprise,” said Mila.
“The man said ‘slightly.’ I don’t think this is going to be files in triplicate.”
“Is he sending someone to take us?”
“Why?”
“Because it’s Toledo. He could draw us a map and we’d never find it.” She finished her glass and stood. “And I’m all out of bread crumbs.”
Mila was right. It would have been impossible to maneuver through the city without a guide. The boy was no more than ten years old, his canvas rope-soled shoes worn through with a few toes sticking out, but he moved them along at a nice clip. The streets were narrow and dark and slipped from one to the next, turning, then rising up a hill, before seeming to double back on themselves. Hoffner expected the bar to reappear each time they turned a corner-a sheepish look from the boy, a recalculation-but the streets poured on in endless variation: smooth stone against jagged rock, box windows of iron or wood. And always the balconies-barely enough room for a man to stand, rails only tall enough to a keep a child from falling.
The trio arrived at a large building on one of the more sunlit squares-crucifixes and shields emblazoned in the stone-and the boy motioned to the door. He offered a quick nod, shouted the requisite “?Viva la Libertad!” and raced back to the bar. Three weeks ago he would have been beaten or paid for his services, depending on the client. This seemed better all around. Hoffner led Mila in.
There was a strange similarity to Zaragoza in the look of the large receiving hall and stairs along the walls to the upper floors, but the smells and sounds here were completely different. Barked conversations, along with the crackle of a radio, swirled above, while men sat in half-back wooden chairs, leaning against whitewashed walls and playing at games of cards or pennies. Some were in uniform, most not. Hoffner could almost taste the oregano in the air and something sweet, like the oil of pressed almonds. Odder still was the sound of laughter in the distance, husky laughs with tobacco and age grinding on the throat. Things were getting done. What that might be, though, was anyone’s guess.
A uniformed soldier walked over. He wore the brown-on-brown of the Republican army, with a thick black belt and buckle at the waist, both in need of repair. The belt holstered a pistol and a small leather satchel behind. He was at most thirty, and his hair hung loose to the brow.
“Salud, friends,” he said. “What is it you need here?”
Before Hoffner could reach for the papers, Mila said, “We have a car filled with explosives. We bring them from Buenaventura Durruti. Viva la Republica.”
Bombs were more persuasive than papers. They gave any and all questions about Georg the army’s full attention. The car was brought around, lieutenants sent off to uncover the whereabouts of a German and his movie camera, and Hoffner and Mila were invited to eat. The stories of Captain Doval and Major Sanz made for lively conversation.
“Christ, I like hearing that.”
A large captain sat at the end of an oak table and laughed through a mouthful of stew. It was potatoes and leeks and something with the taste of cinnamon, although there was too much heat on the tongue for that. Hoffner watched as the large captain dipped a fat wedge of seeded bread into the broth, waited for the crust to turn a nice oily orange, and then shoved it in. The man laughed again, and a chunk of venison popped from his mouth and back into his bowl. He apologized even as he continued to laugh.
“Gentlemen soldiers,” he said. “All idiots. You say he put gasoline in the car?” Hoffner chewed and nodded, and the large captain laughed again. “And with the explosives right under his nose? That’s marvelous.”
Four others sat with them-younger, trimmer-but it was clear they deferred to the large one. He had the thickest mustache, the fattest cheeks, and a jaw that reached out beyond the ears before turning in for the chin. It was a massive face, with warm, thoughtful eyes. He shoveled another spoonful of meat and carrots into his mouth.
One of the others, quiet to this point, said, “And you do all this just to find your son?”
Hoffner took a taste of the wine and again nodded.
The large captain said, “Just to find?” His face was more serious despite the chewing. “Is there anything more heroic? This is what a father does if he’s a man.” He scooped up another spoonful.
The other said, “And Moscardo? He makes half the country call him a hero.”
“Moscardo is a traitor,” said the captain, “and a coward. He hides himself away and lets his son pay for his cowardice. A true caballero would have offered his own life.”
“And we would have taken it?”
“For a boy of sixteen? Of course.” The large captain looked at Hoffner. “The son is alive, by the way. Unlike Moscardo, we don’t kill a boy for his father’s failings. But of course we can’t say it, otherwise Franco or Queipo de Llano would think we’re weak. They’d want to see if they can come and try and finish us. Or they might come to avenge the boy anyway, so however it goes, this business with Moscardo is bad for us. Nothing we can do about it now, though.”
Franco, as it turned out, had proved to be a fine swimmer. He was already moving up to Seville, according to the large captain, although the reports were still a bit vague. Meanwhile, Toledo’s fate was being tossed around like so many mouthfuls of venison boiled too long in a pot. Maybe Barcelona’s arrogance did extend this far. Maybe it had to.
The younger one was not done with Hoffner. “And Durruti,” he said. “He gave you these explosives so you could find your son? Why would he do that?”
Arrogance and mistrust-the only way to win a war. Hoffner said, “He wanted me to use them in Zaragoza.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“And if you had, you’d be dead.”
“More than likely, yes.”
“So he expected you to die.” This was where the young one had been leading them.
Hoffner said, “I imagine he did.”
“And the senora?”
“I imagine her, as well.”
Which left only one logical answer: “So the explosives weren’t really to help you find your son, were they?”
Hoffner said evenly, “Durruti told me my son was dead. I knew he was wrong. I chose to make fools of the requetes instead.”
The young one refused to back down. “Fools can still shoot rifles and drive tanks. Maybe better to have used the explosives.” He finished his glass and stood. “Good luck finding your German son who takes pictures. I’m sure it will be a tender reunion.” He pushed his chair back, nodded once to Mila, and headed off.
Watching him go, the large captain said, “He has a brother and two sisters in the Alcazar. Our hero Moscardo keeps hostages of his own. It makes it difficult. My lieutenant doesn’t have the same choices you have in how he tries to save his family.”
Hoffner refused to feel the guilt. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course not. But you bring explosives, so maybe we give Moscardo something to think about.”
By early afternoon there was still no word on Georg, although two of the soldiers had yet to report in. Talk of the explosives and the Alcazar continued. What better way to spend the time? With a few more glasses of wine, the large captain suggested it was time to drive up to the fortress and make good on the deposit.
“No, no, no-don’t worry,” he said. “It’s completely safe. They only shoot when they’re shot at. They need to save their ammunition.”
Naturally, Mila and Hoffner were given no choice but to join him. Nonetheless, the large captain decided they would all three ride up in an old Bilbao armored car just behind the Mercedes, its 7mm gun aimed backward. Why provoke anything?
Inside, the grind of the engine was deafening and the seats smelled of piss.
The large captain shouted, “We make a pass three times a day in this. They’ll look a little funny at the Mercedes, but they won’t do anything.”
Hoffner peered out through the slits and saw the mounting destruction as they climbed. Entire walls lay in rubble, while gnarled iron railings stretched across the stone and looked like claws trying to work their way through. Sandbag barricades remained planted in the middle of the streets, with bullet holes strafing across them and stray caps and canteens lying at odd angles. Evidently the retreat to the Alcazar had not been a quiet one.
Where the cobblestone had given way, the driver slowed and weaved his way around the newly formed ditches and mounds. All this had been on view in Barcelona, except total victory there had made the wreckage distant, an artifact of daring and pride, easy enough for a boy to stand atop and declare his absolute mastery. Here desolation and death still lived in the rock and waited on a final reckoning. It forced Hoffner to pull back even as the streets passed in empty silence.
The car lurched and heaved and finally pulled to a stop. The engine cut out, and the large captain, reaching for the handle, said, “You come too if you want. They won’t be able to see us down here.”
He pushed open the door and the sun streamed in, along with a spray of air that was breathable. Mila and Hoffner followed him.
They were perhaps thirty meters from the wall, safely behind the bombed remains of a house, an outpost of sorts, with enough of a view to see the spire of one of the fortress towers high above. Part of the fortress roof had been torn away-a few well-tossed grenades from an aeroplane-but for the time being, the Alcazar remained sufficiently intact. A man sat with a machine gun, while the driver of the Mercedes stood a few meters higher up the incline, pulling the explosives from the car and laying them on the grass. Another two remained behind the car, their rifles aimed up at the wall, the barrels moving slowly back and forth along the line of windows and ledges. For men who were convinced the rebels would be taking no notice, they were showing remarkable caution.
The man finished unloading the explosives and began to dart up to the base of the tower, keeping low, a brick in each hand. Five trips in, a man at the car shouted for him to stop. Something had caught his eye. Hoffner inched out and tried to see where he was looking.
Twenty meters above, a group of four women were being forced out onto a ledge, terror in their faces as they clutched at the stone. The barrel of a rifle appeared among them, followed by the shout of a man’s high-pitched voice: “These are your socialist whores! Move off or they join you down there!”
One of the women screamed and the large captain barked to his man to pull back to the car. The pile of explosives remained by the wall. The women pressed themselves into the siding and tried vainly to keep their dresses from billowing up in the wind.
The large captain said quietly to the man at the machine gun, “They’ve done this before?”
The man shook his head. “I didn’t think they knew we were here.”
“Then you were wrong.” The large captain stepped closer to the edge of the house and peered out. He shouted up to the wall, “My man is back.”
The voice shouted, “Don’t be smart. The explosives as well.”
The large captain shouted, “This is what you do, hide behind women? You’ll be dead in a week. Ask your God if this is what you want on your gravestones.”
“It won’t be me who’ll be rotting,” the voice shouted. “Take the bombs or you’ll be taking four more dead ones back with you.”
The large captain waited. He looked back at his men, then up to the ledge. “Is it easy to be such a coward?” he shouted.
“If these were women and not whores, I could tell you.”
It kept on like this, and Hoffner had no idea what the point was in staying. The explosives were barely enough to put a dent in the wall. It was empty posturing on both sides, until the crack of a bullet rang out and a single body fell from the ledge.
The silence was pure and instantaneous. Screams followed. The large captain yelled to his men not to fire, then shouts and threats echoed back and forth. It was unclear whether this had been intended or a mistake. Mila had suddenly begun moving to the edge of the house, to the dead woman, eyes blank, when Hoffner grabbed her and held her close. Mila’s body was rigid, her breathing short; it was all he could do to keep her with him.
Two more rifles appeared in the window, more threats, more screams, when a voice by the Mercedes shouted, “I will remove the explosives!” Everything fell silent.
Hoffner looked out and saw a soldier standing upright, his arms raised high. He held his rifle in the air and tossed it to the ground in front of him. He was staring up at the window.
“I will remove them,” he shouted again. “Take the women inside.”
A low wind moved across the grass. The soldier stood firm, his legs like thick stalks planted on the rise.
Slowly the rifles pulled back, and the voice said, “Get the explosives.”
The soldier made his way up. He raised the first of the bricks above his head and moved back to the car. He turned and repeated, “Take the women inside.”
This time the women were permitted to climb through. The soldier placed the explosive in the car and began to make his way up again.
Twenty minutes later, Hoffner sat with Mila and the large captain and the smell of piss as the cars made their way down the hill. No one had said a word. Her eyes remained empty, her face unmoving. Her breathing was quieter, but it was a stillness without calm. Hoffner had taken her hand-she had let him-but there was nothing in her grip.
A ditch in the road jolted them high off their seats, and Mila said, “You have a traitor in Toledo.” The sound of her voice jarred, even as her eyes remained empty. “A man who hides guns for the fascists. In crates. Thick crates.” The captain started to speak, and she said, “His name is Rivas. I have the address. You must find him and shoot him.”
They found Rivas. They found the wires from Bernhardt and the papers from Hisma. And they shot Rivas and his wife and his son, all three against a wall outside the house. There was no talk of the women at the Alcazar, nothing of explosives, only silence, as the large captain beat Rivas with such savagery that he was forced to prop the man beside his wife before stepping back and shooting them. There was blood on the captain’s trousers when he returned.
Mila and Hoffner saw the blood. They said nothing.
Georg was no longer in the city. A guard at one of the barricades had remembered the large camera and the German papers. He remembered because Georg had put him on film. It was two days ago. Georg was heading west.
The large captain told them that the Mercedes would stay in Toledo. The town of Coria lay within Nationalist Spain; there was no point in taking the car. Not with CNT-FAI scrawled across its doors. They found an old Ford for them, two seats, with a cracked windscreen and no paint on the side.
It was nine hours to the first of the Nationalist outposts. The large captain wished them good fortune and went to clean his trousers.
Hoffner drove, dirt and rock and distance ahead of them, and somewhere the darkness to come. It was hours of unbroken silence.
Finally Mila spoke. “I killed him.” She was staring out, her voice brittle like sand. Hoffner felt it on his cheek.
“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”
“The wife and the son.”
“No.”
“The girl fell and I-”
Hoffner brought the car to a sudden stop. The dust rose up, but she refused to look at him.
He had repeated the words a thousand times in his head, but still they caught in his throat: I brought her to this. I alone. She is guiltless; she will always be guiltless.
“There is nothing,” he said, “no moment you can point to and say, This is why a man is dead. Not now. Not in this Spain. This wasn’t for you.”
“No.” She continued to stare out. “You don’t understand.” At last she turned, her eyes clear and focused. “I saw the girl fall and I chose for Rivas to die. I would choose it again. The wife. The son. This isn’t guilt, Nikolai. I feel no sadness or despair. This is what it is to be in Spain; I know this now.” She stared across at him. “What I don’t know is if you can see it and choose to stay with me.”
Hoffner stared into the eyes, dry and spent. And he saw hope. Hope for himself. He had never imagined it.
“There is no choice,” he said. “I love you.”
He took her in his arms, and her face came up to his own. He knew he had given himself to her, and nothing as fleeting as doubt would ever enter his mind again. So he waited and let the unbearable sentiment of it take him. He kissed her. He felt the slenderness of her waist, the need in her hands as they pressed deep into him. And he found his breath and pulled back.
“I love you,” he said again.
She waited. “I’m glad of it.”
Hoffner clasped the wheel and took the car back onto the road.
There was a village inn for the night, and they slept, and in the morning they crossed just this side of Plasencia. It was a small platoon, papers glanced through, passage permitted. One of the soldiers asked where Hoffner had gotten the car. Stolen, he said, from a peasant using it for chickens. The men laughed and watched them drive through.
In Coria, he told her it would be better if he went to the headquarters alone: no need to explain a woman or the second Safe Conduct. It would be a German looking for Germans. She agreed, but they both knew he was doing it for her. She would sit in a church and wait.
At the headquarters Hoffner met little resistance. He was shown to a sergeant, who escorted him to a lieutenant, who finally took him to see a captain. The man was on the top floor, and when he turned from the window, he struck Hoffner across the face with such force that Hoffner went careening into the arms of the waiting lieutenant.
The captain-recently arrived from Zaragoza, and with a red mark below the eye that he wore like shame-smoothed back his hair and waited for Hoffner to regain his feet. He struck him again.
“Where is the woman?” Captain Doval said.
Hoffner straightened himself up. His mouth was full with blood. He turned and spat and said, “What woman?”
Doval struck him a third time. “Not so clever now.” He turned to the lieutenant. “Get this filth out of here and start looking for the woman.”
His cell smelled of mint. It made no sense. The walls were more mildew than stone, and the bars along the window peeled up in petals of iron and rust. There was a pot in the corner for his shit, and a cot with two chains holding it to the wall. For twenty minutes a day, a strip of sunlight crept up along the iron door, settled on the bolt, and then vanished, leaving behind a mist of heat and decay. At night there were screams, muffled cries of “?Madre!” and “?Socorro!” and always the sounds of a single shot and laughter.
Save for the pain from his beatings, Hoffner felt remarkably at peace. It was time now to sit and wait and die, and while Doval might have thought this a kind of torture, Hoffner lay with his back against the wall and understood that here, at the end, there was nothing to regret. He might have come up short in finding Georg, but the boy was alive.
Doval was proof of that. Hoffner had no doubt that Doval had made the second call to Berlin. He now knew what a fool he had been. If Georg were dead, Doval would have paraded the boy out, just to see Hoffner’s face. Georg was alive. As was Mila. These were pleasures Doval would never have denied himself.
Isolation, then, and the sometime wailing of a distant voice were all the solace that Hoffner needed. He was having trouble closing his left eye, and his hands were swollen, but such was the price for a quiet mind.
To be fair, it had taken him a day or so to get to this point. The first night had been a struggle not to lose himself. They had marched him out three times to a wall, set him against the wet bricks, and placed a blindfold over his eyes. Someone had fired a shot. Standing there, Hoffner had waited for the pain. Surely there was pain, he thought, and yet, could it be this quick, this deliberate? A guard had laughed and said, “You’re not dead, not yet,” and a hand had gripped his arm and taken him back to his cell. There, two others had spent a good hour battering his face.
“Now you’re ready,” one of them had said, and out to the wall again, the blindfold but no shot. Hoffner had waited for hours, his legs buckling, his eyes wet with tears, and he had heard the guards laugh, and again the rough grip on his arm as he was pulled back to his cell so they could work on the hands.
The third time, with the sun just coming up, there had been no blindfold, no guards. They had placed him across from the entrance gate, opened it, and left him there alone, twenty meters from the outside. Staring through, Hoffner had seen two women move across the square, a cart rolled into place. A man had filled a bucket with water. And Hoffner had looked up to see the figure of Doval in a window, staring down. Hoffner had kept himself perfectly still. When his legs finally gave out, the guards returned and dragged him back to his cell.
It was only on the third or fourth day that Hoffner realized they never asked any questions. The beatings were silent but no less vicious for it. There was nothing they hoped to learn from him, save perhaps for the time it took a man to sit and wait to be cracked across the face before begging to be killed. Hoffner decided to leave that choice in their hands. He respected the silence, everything beyond his own groans and the sound of his vomiting.
He thought of Mila-of course-and Georg, and little Mendy with his picture of the badge and the scrawl. These were obvious thoughts. Hoffner expected others to follow, the ones where a man sets his life in order before he knows he will die, but such things never came. Instead, it was brief images of Martha and Sascha, the water of Wannsee in the late summer, and the bludgeoned face of a man he had caught in the act of raping a woman nearly thirty years ago. There was nothing to them, no coherence. Hoffner wondered if perhaps this was the way a life settles itself, not with meaning or purpose but with memories recalled despite themselves. A beckoning to God might have brought some sense to it, but Hoffner knew there was nothing for him there.
Instead, he kept his mind on Mila. She had come at the end. She had been better than anything he had ever known. There had to be something in that. He pictured her back in Barcelona, and it was enough.
The bolt to his cell released, and the hinges creaked as the door opened. Hoffner sat patiently waiting for the order to stand. He had gotten up on his own two days ago and had received a fist to the groin. Better to wait.
The man barked, and Hoffner stood. Hoffner then stepped out into the hall and fell in behind the second guard.
Hoffner was now familiar with the curve of the wall, the number of paces between each cell, and the sounds of weeping and prayers behind each door. He thought, Shouldn’t the praying make it all right, not for the soul but for the soldiers passing by: the echo of a prayer, confirmation of a good Catholic waiting inside? Wasn’t that enough for a fascist to set a man free?
They came to the steps that led down to the large courtyard, where the wall awaited him. A light shone from a wire high above, and another was fixed to the wall. Hoffner placed it at somewhere between three and four in the morning. There had been rain and no moon, and the lights spread out in two wide ovals across the mud and tufts of wild grass. The air still smelled of rain and brought a welcome moistness to his lips.
The guards placed him by the wall and stepped to their positions across from him, rifles held at their chests. They waited. Minutes passed before a door in the distance opened and a man emerged. It was difficult to see him through the glare, but Hoffner knew it was Doval.
Doval stepped across to the main gate, opened it, and began to make his way back. He was in full uniform, his boots high to the knee. Hoffner hadn’t seen him this close since that first afternoon. Doval moved past the soldiers and up to Hoffner. He had been drinking.
“You’re dismissed,” Doval said to the two soldiers, as he stared at Hoffner.
The men turned at once and headed for the door. Doval waited for the sound of the latch before stepping closer.
“No one to stop you from going,” Doval said, his words loose. “Look around. No one.”
Hoffner stared ahead and said nothing.
Doval stepped back and pulled his pistol from his belt. He waved it toward the gate.
“Go,” he said. Hoffner continued to stare ahead, and Doval shouted, “Go!”
Hoffner began to walk, and thought, So this was how it was to be. A bullet to the head, quick and painless. Doval was too good a shot not to have the first find its mark. Hoffner kept his eyes on the gate. He felt his legs move. He tasted the rain on his lips, but he heard no sound. It was an odd sensation, the gate closer and closer, and all he wanted was to hear something-anything. Even his feet seemed to drag along the ground in perfect silence. His legs began to pitch, the anticipation of death like the ache of first love, but still he moved. It would come at the gate. This he knew. He needed only to make it to the gate.
He drew closer, and the square beyond widened in front of him. Hoffner saw a fountain off to the side. The back of his neck lifted, and the hairs rose as if they knew it was time. He thought to close his eyes, but why not take it all in?
Beyond him, out in the square, he saw a figure move from the shadows. Hoffner felt a moment’s hitch in his step. He heard the trickle of the fountain. The certainty of only moments ago slipped away, and Hoffner forced his mind to focus. The figure remained obscured, and still Hoffner drew closer.
He was at the gate. He was through it and into the square, and the figure was now in front of him. There was a glare on the face, a man, tall and narrow.
“Hallo, Inspector,” said the voice.
Hoffner stared. He saw the pale blue eyes of Anthony Wilson. Wilson was wearing short pants and climbing boots, and Hoffner felt his legs drop out from under him.
It was English whiskey.
They had patched his eye, and there was liniment on his knuckles and wrists. The right hand was wrapped, but it had been a quick job, the gauze already peeling up from his palm.
“Rough go of it, I imagine,” said Wilson.
Wilson was standing over Hoffner, holding the glass. The room was small, a bed and a desk and a few oil lamps keeping the shadows low. Hoffner was on the bed. He could feel the springs through the mattress. Wilson leaned in, and Hoffner took another sip.
He heard a rag being wrung out and looked beyond Wilson. Mila stood at a basin by the window. She stepped over and brought the rag to his head. She had a welt under her eye, and her lower lip was cracked. Hoffner reached up to touch it, and Wilson said, “An overeager guard yesterday. Just before we got here. I think the doctor is fine.”
Mila continued to press the rag against Hoffner’s head, and he ran his thumb along her cheek.
“Yes,” she said, “the doctor is fine.”
Hoffner kept his hand on her skin. She was warm and alive, and there was nothing that could have moved his fingers from her.
Wilson said, “Doval’s a nice piece of work.”
Hoffner continued to stare at her. She was concentrating on the cuts and bruises, and a large bump that had come courtesy of a pistol to the side of his head. He winced and she looked at him. She leaned in and kissed his mouth. It was only a moment, but it brought him upright, and Mila went back to the basin. Wilson had stepped over to the table, and Hoffner said, “What are you doing here, Wilson?”
Wilson poured another whiskey. “I don’t think they would have shot you.”
“What are you doing here?”
Wilson stepped over and handed Hoffner the glass. He retreated to the desk and poured one for himself. “I hear it was quite a performance in Zaragoza. Obviously you still have a few tricks left.”
Mila was back at his head with the rag, and Hoffner gently pushed her hand away. She tossed the rag onto the table and sat next to him. He took her hand and said, “Any chance I might find out why you’re here?”
Wilson took a sip. “Saving your life, I think.”
“I thought they weren’t going to shoot me.”
“Then saving the doctor’s.” Wilson took the bottle and pulled over a chair. He sat. “They found her yesterday morning, in a church of all places. Hell of a time convincing them to let her go. God it’s hot.” He drank.
Hoffner wanted to ask her, but not with Wilson in the room. He felt her thumb across his hand, and he drank.
Hoffner set the glass down. “I didn’t know the English and the fascists were on such good terms.”
“The Admiralty’s on good terms with everyone.” Wilson tossed back his glass. “We’re even quite chummy with the anarchists in Barcelona, although the Communists are proving a bit much. I imagine they always do.”
Wilson refilled the glasses, and Hoffner said, “And Captain Doval was happy to hand me over to you?”
The sweat on Wilson’s head had beaded at the brow. A single drop began to make its way down to the cheek. “Did he look happy?”
“No. He looked drunk.”
“Good. He might have shot you a few days ago. We had to get General Mola himself to put in a call to save you. God, I would have loved to have seen Doval’s face during that conversation.” Wilson drank again and smiled.
“And why would General Mola have cared one way or the other about me?”
“Because we told him to.”
“And the fascists are inclined to take orders from the English these days?”
“If they want us to keep quiet about what’s going on here, yes.”
Hoffner didn’t follow. “I thought you wanted to expose the Nazis.”
Wilson lapped at the last drops in his glass. “Then you thought wrong.”
Before Hoffner could answer, there was a knock at the door. Wilson put up his hand and turned to listen. The knock repeated. It came a third time, and Wilson stood. He moved to the door and opened it. Karl Vollman stepped into the room.
Vollman was dressed in peasant clothes, loose pants and a shirt smeared in oil and grit. He smelled of pine oil and manure. He had gotten some sun in the last week, making the white hair seem whiter still.
Wilson closed the door, and Vollman set a package on the desk. Vollman then turned to Hoffner.
“Hello, Inspector. Shithole attics and used-up men. Quite a life, isn’t it?”
Vollman, as it turned out, had been the first German to reach Teruel after Georg. That was over a week ago. He had met with Alfassi. He had seen Major Sanz. He had bypassed Tarancon and Toledo. Why, he said, was unimportant. What was clear was that he and Wilson were on very friendly terms.
Hoffner said, “Nice to see the English and Russian intelligence services working so closely with each other.”
“Soviet Intelligence,” Vollman corrected.
Hoffner’s hand was stiff from holding the glass. He felt it begin to slip, and Mila took it from him. She then took his hand.
Hoffner said, “It still doesn’t explain why General Mola would have been happy to keep an old German cop alive. Any chance you can answer that one, Vollman? Wilson here seems less than willing.”
Wilson’s bald knees had grown pinker in the heat. They stared up at Hoffner even as the man himself remained perfectly still. Finally Wilson said, “A great deal can change in twelve days.”
“A straight answer,” Hoffner said. “I think you owe me that.”
Wilson continued to stare. He glanced at Vollman before saying, “Georg was meant to get the information about the weapons and then come home. Where they were being shipped. How the Germans were planning it. He wasn’t meant to go after them.”
“You mean he wasn’t meant to stop them,” said Hoffner.
“No, he wasn’t.”
“And yet he decided to do that.”
“Nobility’s a dangerous thing in naive hands.”
“So you’re keen to let the Nazis destroy Spain.”
“If that’s what they want, yes.”
Hoffner felt Mila’s grip tighten, and he said, “I’m not sure I like it that you’re on my side. Either of you.”
“Actually, you do,” said Wilson. “You just don’t understand why. Twelve days ago Georg was missing, Franco was losing precious time in Morocco, and the anarchists were on the verge of beating back the rebellion. The rest of us were agreeing not to get involved.”
“I’m aware of all that.”
“Good. Then you’ll know it wasn’t true. The Germans were looking to find a way to get their guns and tanks in. The Americans at Texaco were working out how they could supply oil for the fascists and make their money. The Russians were shipping over what they could to keep the Reds afloat. And the French were doing what they always do-slipping into their turtle shell and hoping no one noticed that they lie directly on the road between Berlin and Madrid.”
“So much for a straight answer,” said Hoffner. “You’ve left out your English, by the way.”
“Yes,” said Wilson, “I have. There has to be someone who steps back and sees what’s really happening.”
“And that is?”
Wilson blinked several times. The sweat had caught in his eyelashes. He wiped it away, and said, “Can’t you see it, Inspector? We’re simply not ready to call the Nazis’ bluff. We’re not all that eager to see if they’ll pull back. It’s not Franco and Mola we have to worry about. If they destroy Spain-unsavory a choice as that might be-so be it. We can debate ethics another time. But if we start exposing gun routes and secret companies and drop-off points, we humiliate our German friends and everyone starts posturing. Then it’s Europe that hangs in the balance.”
Hoffner was tasting the bile in his throat. “And it’s only in the last twelve days that you’ve realized you have this ethical dilemma?”
Wilson’s jaw momentarily tightened. “I wouldn’t play that card, Inspector. You’re the ones who elected these people three years ago. I think we’re well beyond questions of ethics. You want me to admit it, fine. Our fighter bombers aren’t up to par just yet. We haven’t the stomach to dive back into full-on war quite so soon. So it’s the practical dilemmas we worry about. Twelve days ago the word came down from the Admiralty to step back. Do nothing to embarrass our German friends. The Admiralty knew Georg was in. They knew he’d taken a camera, and they were very insistent that nothing on that film find the light of day. So they needed someone to bring him back.”
This last bit seemed laughable. “And I just happened to walk into your office?”
For the first time Wilson showed confusion. Just as quickly his expression turned to muted amusement.
“You?” he said. “You think we would have crossed our fingers and hoped you knew what you were doing? I think Herr Vollman here was a slightly better candidate, don’t you?”
It took Hoffner a moment to let this sink in. He looked at Vollman. The man was crushing his cigarette against the leg of the table. He dropped it and brushed off his hands.
Hoffner said, “You really are working nicely together, aren’t you?”
Vollman said, “Our aeroplanes and tanks aren’t quite up to standard yet, either. The anarchists are going to find that out very soon.”
Hoffner tried to forget that Mila was hearing every word of this.
Wilson said, “We knew the Russians had sent Vollman in. We knew he was looking for the same things we had sent Georg to find-German guns. And we knew the two of them had made contact in Barcelona. So we approached the Russians and told them it would be best if their man found Georg and pulled him out. And while we were waiting for their response, you walked into my office.”
Hoffner would have liked to have had some booze in his glass. “And yet you sent me in after him anyway.”
“Yes,” said Wilson. “I did.”
Hoffner knew there was only one reason for it. He turned to Vollman and motioned for a cigarette. Vollman handed him one and lit it. Hoffner felt the smoke at the back of his throat.
“I was the decoy,” Hoffner said.
Wilson had the bottle and was pouring out another two glasses. “Yes. You were.”
“You send me in. If anyone is interested in Georg, they start following me, leaving Vollman here free to do what he wants.”
There was no need to answer. Wilson handed the glasses to Mila and Hoffner.
Hoffner said, “And what if I hadn’t figured it out in your office-you and the Admiralty?”
Wilson finished pouring for himself, then Vollman. “You really think that was going to happen? I’m surprised it took you so long to come to me in the first place.” He handed Vollman his whiskey. “To tell the truth, I never imagined you’d be as good at this as you were. Spanish and Catalan. And links to Gardenyes and his crew. Who knew? And then finding the Hisma outposts.” He raised his glass. “Well done.” Wilson drank.
Hoffner hated Wilson for his glibness. “So you knew about Hisma-knew that it was a company-even before I left Berlin.”
“We had an inkling. We found it through Langenheim.” He lit a cigarette.
Langenheim, thought Hoffner. The one name in Georg’s wire Hoffner had never figured out.
As if reading his thoughts, Wilson said, “Langenheim heads the Ausland Organization in Morocco. Consul general of sorts in those parts. He eats well and promotes the Reich. Always hardest to track down an obscure bureaucrat. That’s a piece I don’t think you had.”
It was time for Wilson to show how clever he was. Hoffner hadn’t the strength to stop him. “The Ausland reports to the SS,” Hoffner said.
“Yes.”
“So Bernhardt is SS?”
Wilson shook his head. “Bernhardt’s a businessman. He’s just after the money. About ten days ago he and Langenheim flew from Morocco to Bayreuth to meet with Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess. It’s where they presented the bare bones of their idea for the dummy corporation to ship in the guns. We knew that Bernhardt had been a personal acquaintance of Franco’s for some time. He’s also chummy with several of the other Spanish generals. Obviously, Hess was impressed. He took Bernhardt and Langenheim to see Hitler himself-between curtains of the Meistersinger, I hear-and they signed the agreement. Hitler gets to send his guns to Franco without ruffling any international feathers. The Spaniards sign over most of their raw materials to Hitler as thanks for the guns. And Bernhardt and Langenheim make a great deal of money. It’s all rather ingenious.”
“And the nephew?”
“Little Bernhardt?” Wilson gave a mocking smile as he took a long pull on the cigarette. “Not so ingenious choosing a heroin addict and his Chinese friends to ship in guns and ammunition. I imagine two weeks ago that made sense. Apparently your Nazis are learning as they go.” He took a last pull and let the cigarette fall to the floor. “The nephew’s dead. The SS took care of that themselves. I don’t imagine Bernhardt Senior was too terribly put out by it. But what you managed to do by compromising those outposts”-again Wilson raised his glass in genuine admiration-“that was a little tougher for them to swallow.” He drank.
Hoffner drank as well. Things were coming clearer by the minute. “So the Hisma outposts in Cuenca and Tarancon-”
“And the one in Toledo?” Wilson nodded. “Bit difficult to ship in guns when there’s no one there to receive them. Amazing how you managed that. I hear Franco was rather upset. We, of course, were delighted.” He noticed the cigarette still lit on the floor and crushed it out under his boot. “You’ve slowed them down. Franco is actually going to have to earn this, which will keep our Nazi friends occupied for a bit longer and give us some time to work on our own aeroplanes and tanks.”
Hoffner couldn’t help a momentary bitterness. “How very nice for you.”
“Not to worry. Franco’s resilient. It’s all going to come through Morocco now, or Portugal in the next day or so. He’ll get his guns and tanks, and someone to fly in his men. He’s a pragmatist. Franco will make do.”
Hoffner sat with this for a few moments, and tried to piece it together backward in his head-Toledo, Teruel, Zaragoza. He had been right in Barcelona. It was a boy’s playground game. And he had been elected the class fool.
“Georg’s wire,” Hoffner said, “with the names and the contacts. He never sent it, did he? That was a little invention of your own.”
Wilson finished his glass. He took his time setting it on the floor. “We had to give you something to go on. Couldn’t have you wandering about without something real to draw their attention. I decided to give you the names. It seemed the best choice.”
“So where is Georg?” It was the most obvious question, and the one Hoffner had taken too long to ask. He stared across at both men.
Wilson stared back. He was about to answer when Vollman said, “You know, it’s less than three hours in a plane from Aragon to Morocco. If you can find someone stupid enough to make the flight.”
Hoffner took a moment before turning to Vollman. Vollman was almost through his second cigarette. He took a pull and waited while the smoke speared through his nose. He stared down at the plume.
“It’s not the landing or the takeoff that’s the difficulty,” Vollman said. “There are plenty of places you can do that. The real problem is holding on to the plane once you leave it on the ground. Best not to be around if and when the Legionnaires find it. Not that a single-propeller four-seater is going to bring the Army of Africa over to Spain, but that’s not really the point. So you have to hide the plane well, and that takes time and money-for some reason, the Republican loyalists in Morocco like their money-and you have to hope that the plane will be there when you get back. Luckily mine was.”
Vollman finished the cigarette and pulled out his next. His tone was more pointed when he spoke again.
“You see, by the time I flew down, your Germans were already doing most of the work, and a little four-seater was hardly worth their time. They had all those Junker 52s and Heinkel fighter-bombers sitting in Tetuan. And there was a fellow named von Scheele, nice enough, who came with a group of German tourists from Hamburg the week before. Except this von Scheele was a major in the Wehrmacht, and his tourists were the men sent to fly the planes.” He lit up. “So you can see how a boy with a camera and his devoted father might not have been our primary concern at that point.”
Hoffner watched as Vollman reached for the nearest glass. There was still a bit of whiskey in it, and Vollman tossed it back. He poured himself another and drank. Wilson was oddly quiet.
“So where is he?” said Hoffner. Wilson remained silent. “Did I manage to distract the SS well enough for you?”
Vollman said, “The SS wasn’t following this.”
“Really?” Hoffner needed one of them to look at him. “I saw two of them dead in the back of a truck in Barcelona.”
“Then they were the only ones,” said Vollman, still focused on his cigarette. “I would have seen them.”
“You’re wrong,” said Hoffner. His chest began to pound. “Alfassi mentioned a second German three days after you left Teruel. The man in Tarancon mentioned the same German. You must have missed him during all your flights back and forth to Morocco.”
“It wasn’t SS,” Vollman said. “The SS don’t kill a man the way Georg was killed.”
It was said with so little care, so little effort. It was said because it had been in the room all along.
Vollman took another pull and flicked his ash and his humanity to the ground.
Hoffner sat unmoving.
The taste of vinegar filled his mouth as images of the boy ran through his mind, stares of joy and disappointment and distrust. They vanished as quickly as they had come, leaving only a burning at the base of his throat. Hoffner followed the beads of sweat sliding down Wilson’s brow. He felt his own lips purse, his eyes grow heavy, but there was no hope of finding a breath. His chest suddenly collapsed on itself, and Hoffner gasped for air. He held it, waiting, until the breath slowly pressed its way through and out. There were tears, not his own, and he heard himself say, “You know this for certain.”
He felt Mila’s arms on him, her head against his chest, but there was no weight to her.
Wilson finally met Hoffner’s gaze. “Yes.”
Hoffner felt the blood drain from him. “You have the body?”
“Yes.”
“I need to see him.”
It was a room filled with ice, boarded-up windows, boxes and shelves. Wilson had said something about a church, the smell, this the only place to keep him. Hoffner had listened and walked and heard nothing. It was a room with breath in the air, and a boy laid out on a bier of planks and crates.
Hoffner stood over his son and looked at the chalk-white face. He placed a hand on Georg’s shirt and felt the scrape of frozen cloth, rigid and sharp. There was a single deep hole at the temple, the knuckles ripped and raw, the neck swollen and red. The blood on the face and shirt had gone black, with little ridges and mounds where it had caked from the freezing.
Hoffner leaned closer in, let his hand glide across the cheek-the skin was so cold and soft-and stared at the untouched face. Hoffner tried to hear words, recall the sound of his son’s voice, but it was already gone. How cruel, he thought. How cruel to stand so perfectly alone without even the comfort of memory. He imagined this was God’s great purpose, to hold off the solitude at moments like these. Perhaps Georg had died with that? Hoffner heard nothing.
His legs tightened, and his knees ached from the pain, but still he stared and knew there would never be anything beyond this room.
He saw a piece of grit at Georg’s ear and gently swept it away. He pressed his hand to the cheek again, held it, and then brought the cloth up and covered him.
Upstairs, Wilson and Vollman were standing and smoking in what passed for a kitchen. Mila sat at the table and drank from a chipped cup. It was coffee, and the sun was just coming up.
Hoffner took the last of the steps and moved through the doorway. All three looked over.
He pulled back a chair from the table and sat.
“I’ll take a cigarette,” he said.
Mila held his hand, and Vollman shook one from the pack. Hoffner reached for it and waited for a light. He barely tasted the smoke in his throat.
“When?” he said.
Wilson was leaning against a wooden counter. He finished his cigarette and dropped it to the floor. “Two days ago,” he said, crushing it under his boot. “He was left on the church steps.”
Hoffner stared.
Two days, he thought. Georg had been alive two days ago. The idea of it-sitting in his cell, the stupidity of having let himself get tossed away while the boy had been here-Hoffner had to push that torture from his mind. It was another few moments before he realized the strangeness of what Wilson had said.
“The church steps?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?” said Wilson.
“Why would the Spaniards have put him there?”
Vollman said, “It wasn’t the fascists.” He took a pull.
Hoffner turned to him. “What do you mean, it wasn’t the fascists?”
“He means,” said Wilson, “they would have told us.”
Hoffner hadn’t the strength for this. “And you would have believed them?”
“Yes,” said Wilson, “I would.” He was trying his best at compassion. “They knew we were pulling him out. They knew we were playing along. What could they possibly have to gain by lying to us? We had more reason to kill him than they did.”
The carelessness of Wilson’s cruelty might have been impressive if not for the short pants and the knees. Hoffner tried to keep his focus. “And did you?” he said.
Wilson’s tone was cold when he spoke. “No. We’re the ones trying to preserve the body so you can bury him.” Wilson pushed himself up and began to open cabinets, peer inside, close them. It was restlessness, nothing more. “We thought at first it might have been someone from the fire in Tarancon, someone who had followed him, but Georg wasn’t the one who set it, so that didn’t make much sense.” He moved to the drawers, and his frustration spilled out. “We have absolutely no idea why Georg has a bullet in his skull.”
“Not that the bullet killed him,” Vollman said. He was dropping a cigarette to the ground. He crushed it out under his foot. “He was strangled,” he added, no less casually. “Then shot. That’s not the way the SS does it.”
Hoffner sat one floor above his dead son and knew there had never been any hope of saving him. That was agony itself, but to hear he would never know why the boy had died-that was even more unbearable.
Wilson tried sympathy. “I can’t imagine how this must be for you, but you have to understand it’s no less maddening for us.”
Hoffner stared at the table. He tried to find his voice. “So you have nothing.”
“We have the camera,” Wilson said, “and we have the film. There’s nothing in either of them.”
Hoffner continued to stare. The table was chipped wood, and there were burn marks across it. He set his thumb on one. It was strangely smooth.
“You’re sure of that?” he said.
Wilson watched as Hoffner rubbed deep into the wood. “I am,” he said. “But you’re welcome to take a look.”
* * *
Ten minutes later Hoffner sat with three film canisters in front of him. Wilson had set the first of the reels on a device with a crank that ran the film past a lens and a light. It was crude but effective.
“This is the only one with anything on it,” Wilson said, as he stepped back.
Hoffner had watched aimlessly-the wires for the battery, the threading of the film, anything to keep his mind distracted.
The first sequences came quickly, images of Barcelona, the games, the little street where Han Shen stood. There were workers with guns down by the docks, militiamen in marching lines of disarray, trucks filled with anarchists shouting their way out of the city. Hoffner saw fields, a single aeroplane along the horizon, and the long drive up into the hills of Teruel-the same priest, the same glasses, the same fountain.
There were other towns, other priests, and in Toledo Hoffner recognized the soldier who had stood sentry at the gate. The man marched with great seriousness, back and forth, back and forth, before he broke into sudden laughter and aimed his rifle up into the trees. He did a strange, wild dance, laughed again, and then walked quickly to the camera and disappeared.
The next pictures were from a different hand, and Hoffner slowed the reel. The motion of the film jerked, and Hoffner then saw Georg standing at the gate. The boy was wearing the soldier’s hat. He held the rifle on his shoulder. He marched and turned, marched and turned, before glancing over and smiling for the camera.
Hoffner stopped. He stared at the ragged clothes, the misheld rifle, and the quiet smile of a boy he would never know again. The picture began to lose focus, and Hoffner rubbed his eyes. His hand was wet when he took hold of the crank.
More trucks passed, more soldiers, until Hoffner recognized the town of Coria. This time it was the church, the shops, a few houses, and finally the prison fortress. The camera continued to pan across the square until it came to a sudden stop on an image. Hoffner’s hand tightened on the crank. It was by the well. Hoffner couldn’t be sure he had seen it correctly, and he began to move the crank slowly as the camera drew closer. He was almost to it when the film went black. Hoffner reversed and saw the image again.
Standing by the well and staring at the camera was Sascha.
His son. Sascha.
Nine years since Hoffner had seen him, yet he couldn’t deny it. The hair was all but gone, and the body too thin, but it was the same face, the same look of empty defiance. Sascha gave an awkward wave and the film cut out.
Hoffner closed his eyes, even as the boy remained in front of him.
My God, he thought. The two of them together.
The throbbing returned to his head, and Hoffner felt his head lighten and his body go limp.