At some point, it had held prisoners-that was evident from the graffiti scratched into the plaster walls: names, crosses topped by three dots, dates, pleas to be remembered, an address without a city. And it had been used as a field hospital, a mound of used bandages piled up in a corner, bloodstains on the burlap sacking that covered the ancient straw mattresses.
His two companions were already awake; Mary McGrath of the
“Yes,” he said. “Down at Mequinenza.”
“We had better be on our way,” Sandoval said. That in Spanish. Reuters had sent Weisz to Spain before, eight or nine assignments since 1936, and this was one of the phrases he’d picked up early on.
Weisz knelt by his knapsack, found a small bag of tobacco and a packet of papers-he’d run out of Gitanes a week ago-and began to roll a cigarette. Age forty for another few months, he was of medium height, lean and compact, with long dark hair, not quite black, that he combed back with his fingers when it fell down on his forehead. He came from Trieste, and, like the city, was half-Italian, on his mother’s side, and half-Slovenian-long ago Austrian, thus the name-on his father’s. From his mother, a Florentine face, slightly hawkish, strongly made, with inquisitive eyes, a soft, striking gray-a face descended from nobility, perhaps, a face found in Renaissance portraits. But not quite. Spoiled by curiosity, and sympathy, it was not a face lit by a prince’s greed or a cardinal’s power. Weisz twisted the ends of the cigarette, held it between his lips, and flicked a military lighter, a steel cylinder that worked in the wind, until it produced a flame.
Sandoval, holding a distributor cap with dangling wires-the time-honored way to make sure one’s vehicle was still there in the morning-went off to start the car.
“Where is he taking us?” Weisz asked McGrath.
“North of here, he said, a few miles. He thinks the Italians are holding the road on the east side of the river. Maybe.”
They were in search of a company of Italian volunteers, remnants of the Garibaldi Battalion, now attached to the Republican Fifth Army Corps. Formerly, the Garibaldi Battalion, with the Thaelmann Battalion and the Andre Marty Battalion, German and French, had made up the Twelfth International Brigade, most of them sent home in November as part of a Republican political initiative. But one Italian company had elected to fight on, and Weisz and Mary McGrath were after their story.
McGrath screwed the top back on her canteen and lit an Old Gold. “Then,” she said, “if we find them, we’ll head up to Castelldans to file.” A market town to the north, and headquarters of the Fifth Army Corps, Castelldans had wireless/telegraph service and a military censor.
“Certainly today,” Weisz said. The artillery exchanges to the south had intensified, the Catalonian campaign had begun, they had to wire stories as soon as they could.
McGrath, a veteran correspondent in her forties, responded with a complicit smile, and looked at her watch. “It’s one-twenty A.M. in Chicago. So, afternoon edition.”
Parked by a wall in the courtyard, a military car. As Weisz and McGrath watched, Sandoval unhinged the raised hood and stepped back as it banged shut, then slid into the driver’s seat and, presently, produced a string of explosions-sharp and loud, the engine had no muffler-and a stuttering plume of black exhaust, the rhythm of the explosions slowing as he played with the choke. Then he turned, with a triumphant smile, and waved them over.
It was a French command car, khaki-colored but long bleached out by sun and rain, that had served in the Great War and, twenty years later, been sent to Spain despite European neutrality treaties-
As they drove off, a man in a monk’s robe appeared in the courtyard of the chapel, staring at them as they left. They’d had no idea there was anyone in the monastery, but apparently he’d been hiding somewhere. Weisz waved, but the man just stood there, making sure they were gone.
Sandoval drove slowly on the rutted dirt track that ran by the river. Weisz smoked his cigarettes, put his feet up on the backseat and watched the countryside, scrub oak and juniper, sometimes a village of a few houses, a tall pine tree with crows ranged along its branches. They stopped once for sheep; the rams had bells around their necks that sounded a heavy clank or two as they walked, driven along by a scruffy little Pyrenees sheepdog who ran ceaselessly at the edges of the flock. The shepherd came to the driver’s window, touched his beret in salute, and said good morning. “They will cross the river today,” he said. “Franco’s Moors.” Weisz and the others stared at the opposite bank, but saw only reeds and poplars. “They are there,” the shepherd said. “But you cannot see them.” He spat, wished them good luck, and followed his sheep up the hill.
Ten minutes later, a pair of soldiers waved them down. They were breathing hard, sweating in the chill air, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Sandoval slowed but didn’t stop. “Take us with you!” one of them called out. Weisz looked out the back window, wondering if they would fire at the car, but they just stood there.
“Shouldn’t we take them?” McGrath said.
“They are running away. I should’ve shot them.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t have the heart for it,” Sandoval said.
After a few minutes, they were stopped again, an officer walking down the hill from the forest. “Where are
“These are from the foreign newspapers, they are looking for the Italian company.”
“Which?”
“Italians. From the Garibaldi.”
“With red scarves?”
“Is that correct?” Sandoval asked Weisz.
Weisz told him it was. The Garibaldi Brigade had included both Communist and non-Communist volunteers. Most of the latter were officers.
“Then they are ahead of you, I believe. But you had better stay up on the ridge.”
A few miles further on, the track divided, and the car crawled up the steep slope, the hammering of its lowest gear echoing off the trees. On the top of the ridge, a dirt road ran north. From here, they had a better view of the Segre, a slow river, and shallow, gliding past gravel islands in midstream. Sandoval drove on, past a battery firing at the opposite bank. The artillerymen were working hard, carrying shells to the loaders, who put their fingers in their ears as the cannon fired, wheels rolling back with each recoil. Halfway up the hill, a shell burst above the trees, a sudden puff of black smoke that floated off on the wind. McGrath asked Sandoval to stop for a moment, then she got out of the car and took a pair of binoculars from her knapsack.
“You will be careful of the sun,” Sandoval said. Snipers were drawn to the reflective flash of sunlight off binoculars, could put a round through a lens from a great distance. McGrath used her hand as a shield, then gave the binoculars to Weisz. In pale, drifting smoke, he caught a glimpse of green uniform, perhaps a quarter mile from the western shore.
When they were back in the car, McGrath said, “They can see us, up on this ridge.”
“Certainly they can,” Sandoval said.
The line of the Fifth Army Corps strengthened as they drove north and, at the paved road that ran to the town of Seros, on the other side of the river, they found the Italian company, well dug in below the ridge. Weisz counted three Hotchkiss 6.5-mm machine guns, mounted on bipods-manufactured in Greece, he’d heard, and
