“You’d figure something out.”
Hoffner made a move and quickly lost a bishop. He tried to convince himself that he was letting Piera win.
Mila was sitting on the sofa, reading a book. “You need to tell him,” she said.
Piera kept his eyes focused on the board.
She repeated, “You need to tell him, Papa.” When Piera continued to stare, she said, “My father was a chess champion. Quite famous. He’s probably working through a different game in his head while he’s playing you.”
“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” said Hoffner.
“No,” said Mila. “It’s supposed to make him feel worse.”
“You’re not bad,” said Piera. “Not good, but not bad. You should come tomorrow. I play every day. At my club. We could find you an eleven-year-old. You wouldn’t beat him, but it would be good for his confidence.”
His club-renowned as the best in the city-was a little room over a Chinese cafe, down in the Raval section of town. It was called Han Shen’s. Everyone knew it.
Now Hoffner knew. He asked about Vollman, the name linked to Han Shen in the wire. Piera didn’t recognize it.
A boy in the street shouted something over the music. A breeze cut across the balcony, and Hoffner turned to see Mila with her knees still pulled up close to her chest. She said, “I need to sleep.”
Hoffner watched as she uncurled herself from the low chair and stood. She drew up to him and kissed him on both cheeks.
She said, “You need sleep, too.”
She placed a tired hand on his chest and then moved to the balcony door. He watched her step inside and turned back to the city. He looked down to the far end of the street and wondered if there was still enough courage for this left inside him.
Mila was gone by the time he awoke. Piera was in the kitchen, waiting with coffee. There was also a note. It was not from her.
“A little ginger-haired man,” Piera said as Hoffner took it. “I told him there was no point in waking you.”
“Did he say how he found me?”
“He said he came from Gardenyes.” Piera watched as Hoffner opened the envelope. “There was no reason to ask.”
The note confirmed Han Shen.
As for the rest, Gardenyes had found a Karl Vollman on the Olimpiada rolls. A German. He was a chess player.
Perfect, thought Hoffner.
There was nothing else on the man.
The name Bernhardt had proved more interesting, or at least more plentiful. According to Gardenyes there had been nine Bernhardts listed at the Barcelona telephone exchange as of January. Two were printers (brothers), both of whom had left three weeks after the Popular Front victory in February. They had taken five other Bernhardts (sons) back to Germany with them. The last of the listed Bernhardts was a writer living with a Frenchwoman down by the water. Gardenyes had actually dealt with the man. He was a drug addict and most likely dead, but Gardenyes was sending one of his boys to look into it. As for the name Langenheim-and whatever Hisma might be-Gardenyes had come up empty.
Piera said, “You’ve found your boy?”
Hoffner folded the page and slipped it into his pocket. He had the Luger on his belt. “I’m assuming we can walk to this place from here.”
The smell of garlic followed them as they passed the storefronts and drawn metal gates of the Raval’s cramped streets. Why half the shops were closed remained a mystery. According to Piera, a joint order had come down last week from the anarchist CNT and the Communist POUM for everyone to head back to work: the city needed to move again; a few days of gunfire wasn’t going to stand in its way. Workers’ committees were now running the factories, collectives shipping the goods in and out. Then again, maybe the Raval had always been exempt from such things. Places built on corruption and defeat rarely take notice of the world flickering above them.
Even so, Hoffner had expected something a bit more exotic-animal parts dangling from hooks, barrels filled with God knows what-but there was something disappointingly tame to it all. Barrio Chino was little more than a few token lanterns on taut cords and gates here and there with those perfectly upturned oriental roofs; the whole thing felt a bit insincere.
Odder still were the little men and women standing outside or in, sporting their red neckerchiefs in an act of utterly indifferent solidarity. They wore them for security, nothing else. This week it was anarchists. Next it might be fascists. No doubt they had the appropriate colors waiting somewhere in their back rooms.
Piera walked with a stick, the wood as veined as the hand that gripped it. His neck was already beading from the heat.
“I bought this somewhere in here,” he said. “The Chino do well with wood. You can’t speak to them-maybe five words of Spanish among them-but the work is good.”
“They seem to like the neckerchiefs.”
Piera smiled. “It’s ten years since they’ve come here. Can’t see them staying much longer. Mostly roll carts, flophouses, the occasional shop. They work for almost nothing-at least up until a few weeks ago. Don’t imagine the whores get much out of them.”
As if to make the point, a woman emerged from one of the darkened archways. Her dress was pulled down low on the shoulders, the rest too tight around a figure that could best be advertised as replete with extra cushioning. Still, the face looked young even if the hair and skin had both gone an unnatural white-one from a bottle, the other from too many hours lost to needles and men-and there was a kind of girlish enthusiasm in the way she walked and smiled: big pouty lips encircling a remarkably straight set of teeth, and a chest with enough heft to smother a small cat. It might have been the heroin or the pills or whatever else was coursing through her body, but Hoffner let himself believe she took a pleasure in knowing that, despite the recent upheavals, she had never given up the gate.
She steadied herself against a wall, brought her foot up to adjust the strap of her shoe, and broadened her smile for Piera. The little man offered a surprisingly robust nod that seemed to catch even the woman off guard. Piera continued to walk.
“That’s why the anarchists are idiots,” he said. “You think they’ll get a girl like that off the streets?”
Hoffner looked back as they walked. The woman was still watching them, a handkerchief dabbing at the moist folds of skin on her neck. She seemed so much more impressive than a German whore, as if she had expectations of her own: not enough just to hand her the money; there had to be something in it worth her time.
Piera said, “You see.”
He was pointing his stick at a poster plastered across one of the storefront gates. It showed an intoxicated woman in a classic red dress drawn in hard angles, a cigarette dripping from her fat gray lips, her hand roaming into the jacket pocket of some faceless man. Across her chest was written the warning, THE WHORE IS A PARASITE! A THIEF! LET’S GET RID OF HER!
Someone less troubled by the apparent threat had more recently drawn her other hand: it was reaching a bit lower down on the man’s leg, with the words PLEASE! ROB ME! ROB ME! ROB ME! scrawled across the logo for the CNT.
Piera said, “The anarchists promised to close down the brothels.”
“That’s a sad sort of promise.”
“Not to worry. It’s their boys who fill the places every night.”
Hoffner followed him down a few steps and into an open courtyard. Two young boys and a man were kicking
