to watch but knew better than to interfere with the police.
Jean-Claude told more lies but told the truth about his home address, which he now knew might not be safe to go back to. He was registered with the local authorities, as required by law. A lie here would have raised even more suspicion. The sweat continued to roll off him. Then the first cop stepped back a pace and did something that Jean-Claude liked even less. He pulled out a small digital camera and took Jean-Claude’s picture, so fast that Jean-Claude couldn’t object, not that it would have mattered.
The cop checked the image he had taken, then put the camera away.
Jean-Claude glanced at his watch. There was a quiet moment.
“Late for something?” the second cop asked.
“Just wondering about the time,” Jean-Claude explained.
“Why would it matter?” the cop asked.
“It doesn’t,” said Jean-Claude.
“Then why did you look?”
“I just looked. That’s all.”
Jean-Claude held his tongue. Then he felt the detonation. He was certain! He had felt a small shock wave, a small rumble, from the point of impact about a hundred feet away. It was much like the feeling of a truck rumbling by on a city street, or the sensation New Yorkers feel when a subway train rumbles under a building. Then it was gone, the rumbling, vanishing as abruptly as it had arrived.
He had heard it. Or thought he had. He glanced around in every direction, the second cop still fixing him in his gaze. Much as Jean-Claude was thrilled by the explosion, he felt as if he had guilt written all over him. He half expected to see some kind of commotion on the street, people asking questions, people wondering. Like New York after September 11, like London after the horrible attacks on the transportation system in September of 2005, Madrid had remained a city on edge, a city jittery at the sound of any strange, loud noise.
But there was absolutely no notice being taken here on the streets.
None. The pipe bomb had contained itself, at least for now.
Then the lead cop put the computer away. “Esta bien,” he said.
He returned the ID card. The second cop tossed the knapsack back to the ground, still open, the tools rattling, the cop still glaring.
The first cop looked him up and down. “You don’t belong here. People here wash. This isn’t a bar for workmen or riffraff.”
“
Jean-Claude held them in his gaze and suppressed everything he might have wanted to say. “I can drink here like anyone else,” he said.
“Then drink,” said the cop.
It was only then that Jean-Claude realized he had never touched his coffee.
“I will,” he said softly. And he did, as the cops departed and the cafe settled down again.
Jean-Claude drew a long breath and exhaled. Not far away, just up the block, loomed the United States Embassy and all the security that surrounded it. Jean-Claude glared at all the Americans around him, glanced away, then fully understood why he had been questioned and why he would have to be much more careful in the coming days.
And that photo! Where was
He knew the whole equation for him in Spain had now changed. He knew the explosion he had set off that day would have kicked up massive amounts of dust and smoke. And there still could be a collapse on the streets or a fire. But there could be no question of moving forward, as rapidly as possible.
That photograph. Time was limited!
FORTY-FOUR
OUTSIDE MADRID, SEPTEMBER 11, 1:47 P.M.
By noon they had come to their first destination, the austere gray palace of Escorial, built more than four centuries earlier by King Felipe II. Unlike many of the great palaces of Europe, this one had its macabre touch. The inner courtyard had been conceived as a contemplative retreat and as a mausoleum. It had served as a final resting place for the revered Carlos I of Spain, Felipe’s father, who had also been the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
They took the official tour, which lasted less than an hour, and then spent another hour exploring the architecture by themselves. The gigantic building, with its almost three thousand windows, was situated on the slopes of the Guardarrama mountains. From its top floors, it offered a view in every direction of what had once been the Spanish Empire, from Italy to the south, to the Netherlands to the north, and to the Americas in the west.
Walking these grounds put Alex in touch with centuries of Spanish civilization. Peter, always wishing to add to his knowledge of Western culture, observed critically and with great interest, asking questions of the guides when necessary.
They paused for a late lunch at a cafe in the nearby town of Santa Cruz, after which Alex glanced at her watch. “We still have time for the Valley of the Fallen,” she said. “It’s more modern. I have a feeling I’ll relate to it better. Still game?”
“Still game,” he said. “What is it, this place where we’re going?”
Moments later, they stood by the roadside outside the restaurant. Alex scanned the horizon and found what she was looking for. A white stone cross stood many stories high on a peak ten miles in the distance. “See that?” she asked. “That’s where we’re going.”
They slid back into the car and she took out a map. They drove southward for another half hour on a winding highway that passed by bulls, those reared for bullfights, grazing in green fields. Then the road abruptly rose into a hot, foggy mountain. The road led into Santa Cruz del Valle de los Caidos, the Valley of the Fallen, where Franco’s most megalomaniacal monument had been built.
During the 1950s in this place, thousands of prison laborers, many of them who had been prisoners of war from the Civil War, tunneled hundreds of yards into a granite mountain ridge to build one of the world’s biggest and most sinister basilicas. The church was now part of a Spanish Civil War memorial. It stood beneath a cross nearly fifty stories high, a cross that on a clear day can be seen from scores of miles in every direction.
The site had expressed Franco’s desire for national atonement in the 1950s when Spain made her first shaky steps of returning to the world community. Franco’s rule, as Franco himself liked to see it, was not a victory of the Falange, the Spanish version of fascism, but of a traditional Catholic conservative Spain. Franco, on his crusade to save Christian civilization in his homeland, had modeled himself after monarchs like Philip II. To Alex, the site brought to mind the architecture of the Third Reich.
Alex and Peter Chang solemnly walked the grounds of the basilica and the giant cross. The day was brutally hot. In this place, the remains of murdered Republicans were unearthed from mass graves and trucked to the valley to be mixed with dead Nationalists, so it could be designated a place for all Civil War victims.
Here also was the tomb of Franco and the founder of the Falange Party, Franco’s onetime rival, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, son of the dictator of the 1920s. The site culminated at the high altar with the graves of those two men. As Alex and Peter stood before it in silence, they noticed several fresh bouquets of flowers laid on each tombstone. A young Spanish family meandered glumly through silence, gazing up at the glowering statues of soldiers and saints. On the plaza outside, there was a view toward Madrid. Above their heads, a series of dark rain clouds moved in and the top of the giant cross disappeared within the sky.
“Okay,” Alex finally said around five in the afternoon. “I’ve had enough for one day.”
“Me too,” Peter said.
A few minutes later, they were back on the road. Several kilometers into the return trip, Alex spoke
