himself away from the table and walked the few steps to the telephone. He’d become acutely conscious of his surroundings: the silent people in the room, the music on the radio, the rhythmic echo of distant artillery. He held the receiver carefully in his hand, listened to the hum of the open line, and at last said
“No names, please,” said a voice in Russian. He knew the accent, the edgy nasal tone. It was Ilya Goldman.
“Very well,” he answered in Russian.
“I have just cast your horoscope. It says tonight is a good time to travel. It says start as soon as possible. I take this to mean right away.”
“Very well. Thank you for telling me.”
“Your friend is born in the same moon.”
“I understand.”
“The time may come when we should meet again. Is it possible?”
“Yes. Yes, it’s possible. In the north, I think.”
“A good choice. How can we manage it?”
“Our old sign. The one we used with the dog. Initials and numbers. You recall?”
“Ah, yes, very well. Where might such signals appear?”
“Matrimonial ads. In the newspaper.”
“Sorry to see you go, my friend.”
“Join us.”
“Soon, maybe. Not now.”
“Good-bye, then.”
“Good luck.” The connection broke.
He hung up the phone carefully and turned to face the others. Faye saw his face and said, “My God, what is it?”
“They come to arrest us,” he said in English. “Me and Andres. But they will take you also.” He turned to Renata. “And you.”
“The Falange?” Faye said, incredulous.
“No,” Andres said. “Not the Falange.”
They kicked down the door some twenty minutes later-about the time it took to drive from Gaylord’s to the Calle de Victoria. Maltsaev and three assistants, with several more waiting in cars below. The radio was playing jazz and there were cards lying about on a small table and a half bottle of Spanish gin and ashtrays full of cigarettes. One of the men silently unplugged the radio and carried it down to the car. Another one found some women’s clothing from America, and he too left. When his comrade in the automobile saw that he went up himself, but there wasn’t much left-a combination lock and he didn’t know the combination, but he took it anyhow, perhaps it could be traded. Maltsaev went to the telephone but the cord had been sliced in two. Senora Tovar, the janitor’s wife, was brought up the marble stairs with her arm bent nearly double behind her back. She cursed them all the way. These tenants were Fifth Columnists, she was told. But she knew better. Told Maltsaev to let her go or the women of Madrid would hound him to his grave. He nodded briefly and his men released her. They went up to the roof and found Felix and beat him up a little, but he didn’t seem to know much of anything. At last, when they’d removed everything they wanted, they tore the apartment to pieces, but found nothing. Maltsaev and one of his men were the last to leave. “Too bad,” he said. The man nodded in agreement. “One has to learn, of course, who warned them. General Bloch will want someone.”
“Perhaps his sublieutenant, Lubin,” the man suggested.
“A logical choice,” Maltsaev said. “Flies for Yaschyeritsa.”
“What?” the man asked.
Maltsaev dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Such idiots one had to work with in this profession. At least the other one, Kulic, the one in the mountains, would be well fixed. He’d made sure of that. The night’s work wasn’t entirely wasted. Now for Lubin. The family was powerful, but that could be overcome with a confession. He’d get that in a hurry, he was sure.
They could go west to Portugal. The Russians would not expect that because it meant crossing battle lines, then working their way, by bluff or stealth, through hundreds of miles of Nationalist-held countryside. They could go south, through Republican territory, and buy passage on a boat across the Mediterranean to Tangiers, a French possession. They could go northeast, to Port-Bou, the Pyrenees crossing point to southwestern France. But this mountain pass was Republican Spain’s only major overland border access and would be subject to exceptionally heavy surveillance. Crossing the Pyrenees on the smugglers’ routes was not appealing-too many travelers were never heard of again when they attempted that route.
The Russians would use the telephone-the system was operated on contract by American personnel from American Telephone and Telegraph and worked well, for both sides, throughout the war-to alert NKVD units throughout the country, but both Khristo and Andres doubted they would have sufficient time to activate Republican forces. They also doubted the Russians would tell their allies that intelligence officers had gone missing.
They decided to travel north. Khristo had overheard, at Gaylord’s, that the Spaniards were arming fishing boats in Bilbao and using them to bring food into Spain from French coastal ports. Bilbao was two hundred miles away, it would take all night, but the fastest way out of Spain was the best.
Dawn found them still trying to get out of Madrid.
It was a night of madness in the streets. Buildings unaccountably on fire, fire trucks skidding on streets wet with a slow, persistent rain that had started at dusk. They tried the Gran Via but found it blocked by Russian tanks brought up into battery position, their steel sides shiny in the rain, engines muttering and backfiring. Some streets were blocked by refugee campsites-tarpaulins or rain capes rigged upright with broomsticks to keep out the rain. Khristo saw a couple making love under a blanket on a brass bed in a house made of wooden crates. On one of these streets they hit a cat. Khristo slowed instinctively, then realized they could not afford to stop and stepped on the accelerator. When it was almost dawn, they were forced to halt at an intersection as private cars being used as ambulances sped past, coming from the direction of University City. The drivers rang cowbells, mounted on the roof, by pulling on a rope. While they were stopped, an old man approached the car. He wore a formal business suit, with vest decorously buttoned, and carried a tightly furled umbrella on his forearm. His beard was clipped to a precise triangle and a pair of pince-nez sat squarely on the bridge of his nose. He looked, Khristo thought, like a professor of Greek and Latin.
He peered in the window and greeted them as brothers and sisters in freedom. “I have been to war tonight,” he said, “and I have been wounded.” He half turned and Khristo could see blood seeping from a small wound at the back of his neck. “So,” the man said cheerfully, “it’s the hospital for me!” He saluted them with his free hand and disappeared around a corner. A little later they saw, they thought, one of the infamous Phantom Cars, packed with militiamen who arrested and executed suspected Fifth Columnists at night. A rifle barrel protruded from a rear window. Then, when they were almost out of the city, a Checa unit on bicycles stopped them.
Khristo chatted with their leader, holding the Tokarev below the sightline of the driver’s window. He was free. It had come slowly, but when comprehension overtook him his spirit soared with excitement. It was as though a hand had let go of the back of his neck and for the first time in years he could raise his head and see the horizon. So they would not take him back.
The Checa man at the window was very slow-he had all the time in the world. But Khristo drew an invisible line for him and waited for him to cross it and die. Yaschyeritsa would get no more satisfaction from him than dancing on his grave. The man talked on and on. It was interesting about his job that he got to meet so many different kinds of people who walked about in this world, who would have ever imagined that on this rainy night in November he would engage in conversation with a citizen of Soviet Russia, now that was why he found this job so very interesting. Finally Andres leaned across from the passenger seat and whispered that they had only an hour to spend with these girls here before they had to return to the fighting. The man’s face slid gradually into an immense leer. He winked, stood back from the car, and waved them through. Lascivious shouts of
For a time they traveled on the main road to Burgos. But they began to see men in suits standing by cars parked beside the road, so they moved onto the narrow lanes that went through the villages. In some nameless place in the vast wheat heartland north of Madrid the car stopped. They opened the hood and looked inside, but
