Night Soldiers

Riga taxi driver who forged travel documents for the Comintern office in Tarragona. Even the car, he thought ruefully, had a file. The Citroen had been donated to the Comintern by a furniture manufacturer in Rouen. Amazing, really, how the rich in this part of the world worshiped the revolution of the working classes.

He loved driving-he was the first Stoianev ever to operate a motor vehicle. He’d learned quickly, mastered the gearshift after a few head-snapping stutter stops brought on by a popped clutch. It was fortunate that he loved it because he spent a great deal of time behind the wheel. Intelligence operations, he had discovered, consisted principally of driving a car for hundreds of kilometers, sifting through an infinity of reports and memoranda, endlessly locking and unlocking the metal security boxes assigned to each officer, and writing up volumes of agent-contact sheets. In the latter regard, thank heaven for Sascha. The drunker he got, the better he wrote. And he had such mastery of Soviet bureaucratic language-a poetry of understatement and euphemism-that Yaschyeritsa mostly left them alone. That was fine with Khristo.

Colonel General Yadomir Ivanovich Bloch, the illegal NKVD rezident in Catalonia-as opposed to the “legal” military attaches and diplomats under Berzin and the GRU-was secretly called Yaschyeritsa, the Lizard, because he looked like a lizard. He had a slightly triangular head, the suggestion of flatness on top emphasized by stiff hair combed directly back from the forehead. His thin eyebrows angled steeply down toward the inner corners of his eyes, which, long and narrow, were set above sharp cheekbones that slanted upward. Those eyes stared back at you emptily, without expression, watching only to determine if you were easy or difficult prey. Sometimes he licked nervously at his upper lip-the gesture, Sascha claimed, an unconscious throwback to the age when reptiles ruled the earth.

“Flies for Yaschyeritsa!”

Sascha was awake. Where the white boxes of San Ximene towered above them, Khristo rolled to a stop. Sascha brushed the hair out of his eyes and blinked for a moment, then drew the bottle of Fundador from the glove compartment and took a few swallows.

Slowly, he twisted the cork back into place, then slapped it dramatically with his palm.

“Now the colonel is ready for agents and debriefings,” he announced. “The following six measures can be recommended in support of the secure continuance of said operation. One: it is geese who fly the summer night to Sonya’s heart. Right, Stoianev? We trap good flies? The best flies?”

“Only the finest. Served by the finest kitchens.”

“Forward, then.”

The Citroen climbed through the tight maze of alleys to the northern edge of the village. The doorways were covered by cloth-strip curtains. Each one, Khristo suspected, with its own pair of watchful eyes. He knew such tiny villages in Bulgaria. They made your heart go fast. Perhaps the next lost little place was the one where they still drank strangers’ blood in a toast to forgotten gods.

Still, one had to have safe houses, and it was best to have them in the middle of cities, concealed by crowds, or in desolate, out-of-the-way places like San Ximene. The agent they called Andres was doing a dangerous job: infiltrating the Falange. The rezidentura in Tarragona had a long shopping list: names, addresses, planned operations, logistical systems and, ultimately, the discovery of the identities of German intelligence officers in charge of liaison with Franco’s Fifth Column in Madrid.

To prove himself worthy of trust, Andres had to commit an act of sabotage against the Republican forces, his own side. Thus he was vulnerable to friend and foe alike, could, at any time, be executed as spy or traitor, depending on who caught him. And this, Khristo thought, was only what he knew about. There could be more. The Russians had a genius for these games, a love of darkness, a reverence for duplicities that hid deeper strategies.

They came to a small whitewashed house with a tile roof at the end of a dirt street. A cat was sleeping on the windowsill. In a field across the road a few kids in short pants were fooling with a battered soccer ball. The air smelled like onions fried in oil and sun-heated plaster, and a radio was playing music somewhere nearby. The man known as Andres Cardona was down on his knees in the midst of a wild garden of daisies and fuchsia geraniums surrounding an old, twisted lemon tree. As they drove up, he was yanking weeds from the dry soil and throwing them over the garden fence. He stood up, wiped his hands on his pants and called, “Buenos dias, buenos dias,” in the voice of a man pleased to see his employees. Ah yes, there you are, fellows, so good to see you, in your absence I’ve thought of a thousand things we need to do. All of that in the tonality of a simple greeting, the way he stood, the expectation in his eyes. He was, Khristo realized once again, so very, very good at what he did.

“And the name?”

“Farmacia Cortes.”

“Cortes. Refers to what?”

“The name of the square, I suppose. Though it is near the Cortes.”

“The …?”

“The Cortes. The Spanish parliament.”

“Ah. So it is not owned by a man named Cortes.”

“No.”

“Hmm,” Sascha said, tapping the end of the fountain pen against his teeth. “Locate it further for me, will you?”

“The Plaza de Cortes is elegant, fashionable. There is a hotel, the Palace-”

“As in English? Not Palacio?”

“No. Palace as in English. A fine hotel, quite luxurious.”

“Who stays there?”

“Diplomats. Journalists. Those who seek to approach the Cortes.”

“Zolot!” Gold.

“Perhaps.”

“Nothing perhaps. It is certain. Comb this one out, thoroughly, you understand, and there would be treasure. Who has a prescription for heart medicine. Who has the clap. Who must have the laudanum syrup every week. More secrets in a pharmacy than in a woman’s heart! Better than a bank, my friend. So specific.”

“Yes. But one could not comb him out.”

Sascha clicked his tongue and wagged a “naughty” finger.

“Well yes, if you tied him to a chair and all that, of course. But no other way.”

“Not money?”

“Never.”

“Be sure now.”

“I am.”

“He likes women? Girls? Boys? Cats?”

“No. He is purity itself.”

“The pig.”

Cardona shrugged and smiled, a soft gesture that forgave the world everything. “Would you care to hear about procedure?”

“Oh yes. We like procedure. Khristo, you’re getting all this?”

“Yes. Most of it.” He wiped sweat from his face. Because they spoke Russian, the windows were shut tight. The sun beat down on the tile roof and the still air was wet and hot and blue with drifts of smoke. The roll of blueprints he’d taken from the trunk of the car was spread across the table, covered with coffee cups used as ashtrays, half-empty glasses of red wine, and sheets of paper covered with Cyrillic scratchings. One heard rumors of a machine that recorded the human voice on a spool of wire, but it was not to be had outside Moscow.

Cardona lit a Ducado and blew smoke at the ceiling. “The procedure is to enter the Farmacia Cortes on the Plaza de Cortes between four and four-thirty in the afternoon. Go to the rear of the store, inquire of the clerk-always a young woman in a gray smock-if el patron is available.”

“El patron. The owner?”

“Literally, yes. But it’s a grander term in Spanish. The boss.”

“Ah.”

“She goes into the office, then he appears.”