Night Soldiers

team back down the road to wait for the sentries, in case they returned once the gunfire started. A shipfitter, an agile little spider of a man accustomed to riveting in the steelwork of half-built freighters, climbed a drainpipe to the roof and set the convent on fire by dripping gasoline down the chimney. As the soldiers ran out-the sixteenth- century abbot who designed the place knew that the greatest security lay in a single access point-they were killed. Those who remained inside died in the fire.

The convent schoolhouse-a separate building-was piled to the rafters with rifle and machine-gun ammunition, but what most gladdened Kulic’s heart were eighty cases of artillery shells for the Nationalists’ 105 mm field guns. He now had the power for the explosion, but no lightning. A few minutes after 11:00 P.M., there was gunfire on the road and the ambush team returned, having chased the Nationalist sentries into the forest. At 11:30, the thunder and lightning finally started. By 12:05, after four failures with the time pencils, Captain Drazen Kulic had his big flash. A burning school desk spun brilliantly through the rainy air, high above the village, trailing smoke and sparks before it fell to earth and disappeared from view. Kulic and his band vanished into the mountains. A number of villagers died in the explosion. It couldn’t be helped.

Faye Berns moved through the dark streets of the city, hemmed in by buildings that rose steeply above her, like a corridor in a dream. A small wind, suddenly warm, touched her face. A dog was barking some distance away. She could tell it had been barking for a long time-its voice was almost gone. But, she realized, it doesn’t know what else to do, so it barks. A sense of infinite, indescribable loss rolled in from the night and filled her heart.

If I were Catholic, I’d cross myself.

She did it anyhow, quickly, a rapid figure-four in the style of the Spanish women. There was something malefic in Spain, that she knew for a surety, and it was out that night. From the apartments high above her came a sense of restless sleep, disturbance, unquiet, as though every man and woman dreamed they heard a door click open. Spirit wanderers are out, she thought, who cannot find their way home. Perhaps her own ancestors, burned alive in the Inquisition. The blood carried more than oxygen, more than anyone knew and, once the streets were dark and deserted, the bad memories of this place returned. Too many terrible things had happened here. Walking in the center of the narrow street, she could hear water running in the drains, and with every breath came the chill odor of anciently decayed masonry.

Three streets. Two blocks.

From down here, she would never find the blue light, it was like being in a deep canyon. But she would find it. She listened to her footsteps, tried to walk more softly. Her fingers crept beneath the sweater and touched the butt of the revolver. She seemed alone in the world, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. The Republican Checa-modeled on, and named after, the Soviet intelligence Cheka-often roamed at night through the neighborhoods. It was better not to meet them.

Calle de Plata.

Where the medieval silversmiths had kept their workshops. Her cousin Eric, who graduated third in his class at Erasmus High, took jewelry-making at the Art Students League. Now he was a communist. Like Renata and Andres. Was she one too? No, she didn’t think so. She was a passionate idealist, in love with the idea of democracy. Certainly she dreamed, like Andres, of a world without oppression and cruelty. She had come to Spain to put one more hand on the wheel that turned toward justice. Were all Jews communists? Hitler said so. Her father grimaced at Hitler’s name. “Why don’t you kill him?” he asked the sky. Jews hated injustice, that was what it was. Fania Kaplan, a Jewish girl not much older than herself, with family in Brooklyn, had shot Lenin through the neck because he betrayed the Revolution. But Lenin survived. She would like to shoot Hitler through the neck. They would, she knew, march her in glory up Flatbush Avenue if she did that. Even Mr. Glass, of Glass Stationery, and he was a Republican.

Avenida Saldana.

There was a big market here on Thursdays. An old lady with a mustache gave her something free every time-radishes, parsley. The fishstall man had once picked up a red snapper and bobbed it up and down as though it swam toward her, and everyone had laughed and made Spanish jokes. Now the street was deserted. On the roof of one of the buildings across the street, she had seen a blue light. She had come here to find it. Of course, she could turn around and go back and tell Renata that she couldn’t find it. Nobody would be the wiser. In all likelihood, the light didn’t mean anything at all, simply one more inexplicable event in this inexplicable country. So go home.

No.

Well, perhaps. But at least, she told herself, examine the buildings.

The numbers ran differently here, but the third one from the corner, 52 Avenida Saldana, roughly corresponded to 9 Calle de Victoria. That meant she might be on the wrong street, because 52 Avenida Saldana was a two-story factory where they made wooden chairs.

54 Avenida Saldana. That was a possibility. She counted up six stories.

Number 56 was not a possibility. An old hotel for commercial travelers, it had a steep roof sheathed with green copper. Number 58 was a rather smart private house, with little balconies and French windows, three stories high.

It had to be 54.

That’s good, Faye, you figured it out. Now go home. Report the incident to the Checa, let them worry about it.

She crossed the street. Avenida Saldana was a bit fancier than Calle de Victoria, narrow sidewalks ran along its edges. She stood at the base of the building and stared straight up. No blue light. But on the top floor, just below the roof, a window was open a few inches and, very faintly, she could hear a woman singing. She had heard the song before, mothers sang it to babies to put them to sleep.

Good, darling, very good. Her upbringing came through loud and clear. And brave? In the middle of the night. In Madrid. All alone.

With only Nana’s watch and a big Spanish gun. Such a gun. Myself, I’d be afraid to touch it.

Which was probably why, more or less, she simply went into the building and up to the roof. Because the blood did carry more than oxygen. Because there was something there that-when it was crystal clear that retreat with caution was the only sensible path-took the first step and the second step and all the rest of the steps. She had some help, on the order of I’m an American and I can go anywhere I want, but she had something a little older than that as well. It didn’t precisely have a name, or maybe it had too many names, but it got her up to the roof. And, surprise of surprises, at a time when so much bravery bled itself out into nothingness, it turned out to matter a great deal that she went there. It saved lives.

First she removed her boots. Leaning against a cold wall in the dark hallway, she worked them off and tied the laces together and hung them around her neck. Drew the pistol from her waistband, cocked it, held it before her with a finger hooked securely around the front of the trigger guard. Put her left hand on the wall and walked slowly in her socks up the stairs to the roof, the sound of the lullaby getting closer as she climbed.

The door to the roof was chained and the chain was padlocked.

Breathing hard from the climb, she stood there frozen, so deeply enraged that her cheeks were hot. After all that!

She’d seen her friend at Pembroke, Penelope Hastings of Hyde Park, New York, fiddle a lock with a hairpin. Two problems. She didn’t have a hairpin. And it wasn’t that kind of lock. It was like a bicycle lock, with a combination. Olive green. Scratched and worn as though it had been well used: first to lock up a bicycle, perhaps at a place like a college where unlocked bicycles were frequently “borrowed,” then to secure a big trunk, which had to travel aboard a transatlantic liner to Europe. That sort of lock.

The sort of lock that, if you turned four right, sixteen left, and twenty-seven right, snapped open, though it took one last little jiggle, requiring a practiced twist of the hand, to make it spring cleanly.

It was, she was sure, her very own lock, which she’d put in the back of a drawer some months earlier, thinking it was something that she didn’t need then but would desperately want the minute after she threw it away. She was shocked to find it, but there was something much too eerie to contemplate in such a coincidence and she had no time to think about it anyhow. Explanations would have to wait.

In the silence at the top of the stairs, she could hear the singing woman one floor down. A child coughed. The woman murmured in Spanish. Then began humming softly, a song without words made up as she went along.

Faye put the lock and the gun between her feet. Slipped one hand beneath the chain, drew it slowly, link by