The Foreign Correspondent

looked at him. “Por favor,” Kolb said politely. “Importante! ”

The militiaman said something to his companion, who shrugged and began to button his fly. Then he grabbed Kolb by the shoulder and hauled the three chained men out the door and into the cafe. The Checa officer had a well-dressed man, head down, standing before him, and was making a point by tapping his finger on the table. “Senor!” Kolb called out as they headed for the door. “Senor Comandante!”

The officer looked up. Kolb had one chance. “Oro,” he said. “Oro para vida.” Kolb had worked this out while standing in the WC, trying desperately to assemble odd scraps and snips of Spanish. What was gold? What was life? The result-“gold for life”-was terse, but effective. The officer beckoned, Kolb and the anarchists were dragged up to the table. Now sign language took over. Kolb pointed urgently to the seam of his trouser leg and said “Oro.”

The officer followed the pantomime with interest, then extended his hand. When Kolb just stood there, the officer snapped his fingers twice and opened his hand again. A universal gesture: give me the gold. Hurriedly, Kolb unbuckled his belt and undid the buttons and managed, with one hand, to take his pants off and hand them to the officer, who ran a thumb down the seam. A very good tailor had been at work here, and the officer had to press hard to find the coins sewn into the material. When his thumb found a hard circle, he stared at Kolb with interest. Who are you, to arrange these matters with such care? But Kolb just stood there, now in baggy cotton underdrawers, gray with age, attire that made him, if possible, even less imposing than usual. The officer took a flick knife from his pocket and produced, with a snap of the wrist, a bright steel blade. He cut the seam open, to reveal twenty gold coins, Dutch guilders. A small fortune, his eyes widened as he stared at them, then narrowed. Clever little fellow, what else do you have?

He sliced open the other seam, the fly, the waistband, the cuffs, and the flaps on the back pockets, leaving the trousers in shreds. He tossed them into a corner, then asked Kolb a question he didn’t understand. Rather, almost didn’t, because he recognized the expression that meant “for all.” Did Kolb mean to ransom himself, or the two anarchists as well?

Kolb sensed danger, and his mind sped over the possibilities. What to do? What to say? As Kolb hesitated, the officer grew impatient, dismissed the whole business with a cavalier wave of the hand, and said something to the militiaman, who began to unchain Kolb and the anarchists, who looked at each other, then headed for the door. On the table, Kolb saw his passport-his briefcase, money, and watch had disappeared, but he needed the passport to get out of this accursed country. Meekly, with the greatest diffidence he could manage, Kolb stepped forward and took the passport, nodding humbly to the officer as he backed away. The officer, gathering up the coins from the table, glanced at him but said nothing. Heart pounding, Kolb walked out of the cafe.

Outside, the waterfront. Burned-out warehouses, bomb craters in the cobbled street, a half-sunk tender tied to a pier. The street was crowded: soldiers, refugees-sitting amid their baggage, waiting for a ship that would never arrive, local citizens, with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. One of Barcelona’s horse-drawn fiacres for hire, with two elegantly dressed men in the open carriage, moved slowly through the crowd. One of the men looked at Kolb for a moment, then turned away.

Well he might. A little clerk of a man in his underpants, otherwise dressed for a day at the office. Some people stared, others didn’t-Kolb was not the strangest thing they’d seen that day in Barcelona, not by a great deal. Meanwhile, S. Kolb’s legs were cold in the wind off the bay, should he tie his jacket around his waist? Maybe he would, in a minute, but for the moment, he wanted only to get as far away from the cafe as he could. Money, he thought, then a train ticket. He walked quickly, heading for the corner. Should he try to return to the riding stable? Hurrying along the waterfront, he considered it.

3 February, Paris.

The weather broke, to a false, cloudy spring, the city returning to its normal grisaille-gray stone, gray sky. Carlo Weisz left the Hotel Dauphine at eleven in the morning, for a meeting of the Liberazione committee at the Cafe Europa. He was surely followed once, perhaps twice.

He walked over to the Saint-Germain-des-Pres Metro, on his way to the Gare du Nord, stopped to look at a shop window he liked, old maps and nautical charts, and, out of the corner of his eye, noticed that a man at mid- block had also stopped, to look, apparently, in the window of a tabac. Nothing unusual about this man, in his thirties, who wore a gray peaked cap and had his hands in the pockets of a tweed jacket. Weisz, done with looking at Madagascar, 1856, continued on, entered the Metro, and descended the stairs that led to the Direction Porte de Clignancourt side of the tracks. On his way down, he heard hurrying footsteps above him, and glanced back over his shoulder. At that moment, the footsteps stopped. Now Weisz turned around, and caught a glimpse of a tweed jacket, as whoever it was reversed direction and disappeared around the corner of the stairway. Was it the same jacket? The same man? Who in the world went down Metro stairs, then up? A man who had forgotten something. A man who realized he was on the wrong Metro line.

Weisz heard the train coming, and walked quickly down to the platform. He entered the car-only a few passengers this time of the morning. As he went to take a seat, he saw the man in the tweed jacket again, running for the car closest to the foot of the stairway. That was that. Weisz found a seat and opened a copy of Le Journal.

But that was not quite that. Because, when the train stopped at Chateau d’Eau, someone said “Signor,” and, when Weisz looked up, handed him an envelope, then went quickly out the door, just before the train started to move. Weisz had only a brief look at him: fifty or so, poorly dressed, dark shirt buttoned at the throat, a deeply lined face, worried eyes. As the train picked up speed, Weisz went to the door and saw the man hurrying away down the platform. He returned to his seat, had a look at the envelope-brown, blank, sealed-and opened it.

Inside, a single folded sheet of yellow drafting paper with the carefully drawn schematic of a long, tapered shape, its nose shaded dark, a propeller and fins at the other end. A torpedo. Extraordinary! Look at all the apparatus the thing contained, lettered descriptions, in Italian, ranged along its length-valves, cables, a turbine, an air flask, rudders, fuse, drive shaft, and plenty more. All of it fated, alas, to blow up. On the side of the page, a list of specifications. Weight: 3,748 pounds. Length: 23 feet, 7 inches. Charge: 595 pounds. Range/speed: 4,400 yards at 50 knots, 13,000 yards at 30 knots. Power: wet heater. Which meant, after he thought about it for a moment, that the torpedo was driven through the water by steam.

Why was he given this?

The train slowed for the next station, Gare du Nord, blue tile set in the curve of the white tunnel wall. Weisz refolded the drawing and put it back in the envelope. On the short walk to the Cafe Europa, he tried every way he knew to see if somebody was following him. There was a woman with a shopping basket, a man walking a spaniel. How was one to know?

At the Cafe Europa, Weisz had a quiet word with Salamone, saying that a stranger on the Metro had handed him an envelope-a copy of a mechanical blueprint. The expression on Salamone’s face was eloquent: this is the last thing I needed today. “We’ll look at it after the meeting,” he said. “If it’s a…blueprint? I better ask Elena to join us.” Elena, the Milanese chemist, was the committee’s adviser on anything technical, the rest of them could barely change a lightbulb. Weisz agreed. He liked Elena. Her sharp face, long, graying hair worn back in a clip, her severe dark suits, did not especially reveal who she was. Her smile did; one corner of her mouth upturned, the reluctant half smile of the ironist, witness to the absurdities of existence, half amused, half not. Weisz found her appealing and, more important, he trusted her.

It was not a good meeting.

They’d all had time to brood about Bottini’s murder, about what it might mean to them, to be targets of OVRA-not as giellisti, but as individuals, trying to live their daily lives. In the first flash of anger, they had thought only of counterattack, but now, after a discussion of articles for the next issue of Liberazione, they wanted to talk about changing the location of the meeting, about security. They believed themselves to be skilled amateurs, at newspaper production, but security was not a discipline for skilled amateurs, they knew that, and it frightened them.