Текст книги "The Second Son"

Автор книги: Jonathan Rabb

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Duck down,” Gabriel said. “They won’t hit anything, but just in case.” He tossed his cigarette out the window and accelerated.

Without thinking, Hoffner pulled Mila close into him and the two slid low on the seat. Gabriel held the wheel with two hands and angled his head back against the cab wall as far as he could take it. Hoffner imagined them caught like a rat in a lantern’s beam, scurrying toward the darkness and helpless against the naked light. Then again, a rat has an instinct for survival: not much chance of finding that in a truck heading west to the hills of Zaragoza.

The first pingcame from behind them, then beyond, then in a wild series that seemed to stretch out in all directions. Hoffner’s eyes darted aimlessly with the shots until he found himself fixed on a spot outside Gabriel’s window. It was off in the distance, turrets, ancient and stone, clawing at the sky like raised talons. He felt Mila’s body against him. She, too, was staring out.

Gabriel swung the truck hard to the left and the turrets vanished. A last wave of shots flew by and then fell away. Hoffner waited another half minute before pulling himself up. Mila sat with him.

“What was that?” he said.

Gabriel tried his best not to mock. “Boys with guns?”

“No,” said Hoffner. “On the hill. The turrets.”

Gabriel flipped on the headlights, and Mila said, “Montblanc. The old city wall.”

“And they don’t mind the shots at night?”

Gabriel said, “No one’s shooting at them.” He downshifted, and the gears ground out with a sudden kick.

“Besides,” said Mila, “they’ve had worse. They say it’s where Saint George killed his dragon. You live through that, you live through anything, don’t you?”

A Man In The Ground

At just after midnight, Gabriel shut off the engine. Three jars of gasoline remained, but he knew he would have to keep a watch on them. Gasoline had a tendency to go missing with so many militiamen roaming about. Not that they had much use for it-a fire burned better with wood, a kerosene lamp might explode from the added heat-but these were anarchists. They had spent a lifetime scavenging. Why should a bit of freedom get in the way now?

Truth to tell, Osera de Ebro was not the most logical place to have set up the front. Zaragoza was still another thirty kilometers on, but this was as far as the weapons had taken them. Even so, Buenaventura Durruti-the great anarchist leader, the man who had given them Barcelona and would send Franco back into the sea-was insisting he could mop things up. The rebels had at most fifteen hundred troops inside the city. They were requetes-beret-wearing, priest-toting Navarrese monarchists who saw this as a last holy crusade-but why be daunted by that? Truth and fashion stood in equal measure on either side of the line. No, it came down to discipline and experience and weapons, and while these were all firmly in the hands of the requetesas well, Durruti still had one card to play. He had numbers, twice as many men-four times that by the end of the week-each fighting with something perhaps even more essential: a sense of the inevitable. Barcelona had proved that God had forsaken His own. Discipline and weapons be damned.

Remarkably, even the requetesknew this of their foes. In fact, the only person who seemed unaware was a Colonel Jose Villalba. Sadly, Villalba was the leader of the Republican forces and spent most of his time shuttling back and forth between Barcelona and his Aragon headquarters in Bujaraloz. Bujaraloz was another thirty-five kilometers behind the Osera line; in order to reach it, Villalba chose to take the train. The railroads were still under the workers’ control, and he reasoned that he could use the time to study maps and charts and piece together what little information he had on the men who might be dying for him. Had he decided to look out the window he would have seen that the fighting along the way was more skirmish than full-on battle, but Villalba kept the curtains drawn. It was better for the heat, he said. Reading his reports, he decided it was too early to bring the other Republican columns up to the front. He told Durruti-a colonel telling a man who disdained rank, commissions, an equal among equals-that, valiant as he was, he had plowed on too quickly. They would have to strategize together. And so Durruti began to spend much of his own time shuttling back and forth between Osera and Bujaraloz in order to convince the colonel that the time was ripe. There were no trains this far out, which meant that, with all the driving, Durruti needed to get his hands on some gasoline.

Gabriel decided to sleep in the back of the truck.

The smell of day-old flesh woke him at just after six. Gabriel looked over at the dead German nearer him and noticed that a string of flies had made camp below the right eye. Odd that they would have begun there, he thought. The back of the head was so much easier a way in.

He hoisted himself up and pulled back the flap. The heat had yet to take root, but it was already stale enough to bring a sheen to the face. Outside, the small square proved only slightly better in daylight. A few cars and motorcycles stood in a not-terribly-convincing line; two large guns-French 75s, he guessed-sat on the back of trucks, looking as if they hadn’t been fired since the last war; and surrounding it all was a huddle of two-story buildings, hunched and leaning toward defeat. It might have been the burden of insignificance or the thought that they might actually be called upon to serve some larger purpose, but either way they carried their future like the weight of an unwanted boon: Why us, why now-why?

Gabriel saw a bit of movement across the square. It was inside the house that had promised beds for the German and the woman last night. He hopped out of the truck and headed over.

As it turned out, the beds were nothing more than a few flat sections of floor with a collection of equally disappointing straw mattresses laid over them; the word “mattress” might have been kind. There were perhaps eight of them placed at odd angles, with men strewn across in various states of sleep.

Hoffner was just opening his eyes when he saw Gabriel step through the door.

“Did you sleep?” said Gabriel.

Hoffner propped himself on an elbow and shook his head.

Gabriel said, “Is she up?”

They had set up a small barricade around Mila’s piece of the floor. She said it was unnecessary-she would be sleeping in her clothes-but the woman whose house was now the makeshift barracks had insisted. It might be a new kind of war, but not that new.

Hoffner pointed over to the chest of drawers-with the three chairs and blankets spread over them-and said, “She’s in the master suite.”

Gabriel stepped over and rapped a hand against the wood. “Good morning, Doctor.”

He rapped again, then a third time, and Mila’s voice came from behind him. He turned to see her coming through the front door. She was carrying a tray.

“I’ve found some coffee,” she said, “and something that looks like cheese. They said it was cheese. I’m hoping it’s cheese.”

Hoffner sat up. She looked clean, as if she had found a washbasin. The face, though fresh, showed the weight of the night, the age lines more creased as they edged out from the eyes. She had taken care with little else, her hair pulled back to mask its wildness, and the neck speckled pink from exhaustion or the sun. It was a completely unadorned Mila who maneuvered her way through the beds, and it was this careless, untended beauty that brought a tightening to the muscles in Hoffner’s gut.

She set the tray down and handed him a cup. He found himself staring into the dark liquid.

“You’re up early,” he said.

“Four was early,” she said, as she gave another to Gabriel. “You didn’t hear the boy come in?”

Hoffner shook his head.

“He was whispering through the blanket before he finally pulled it back,” she said. “I think he was hoping to catch a glimpse of something.”

“Did he?” Hoffner drank. The coffee tasted of cheese.

“It was dark,” she said, “but let’s hope.” She pulled over one of the chairs and sat. “There was an arm that needed patching. They have a sniper-at night-somewhere up in the hills. It wasn’t so bad.”

Hoffner said, “And they don’t have a doctor of their own?”

“I’m guessing he likes his sleep.”

This was something he would have to remind himself of. Places like this held no surprises for her, at least when it came to the doctoring.

She picked up a wedge of cheese, sniffed it, and took a bite. “I told them I needed to get into Zaragoza. They said it was impossible. I mentioned you.” She sipped at the coffee as she stared at Hoffner. “They said they’re very eager to meet you.”

With no basin or water in the barracks, Hoffner was forced to do what he could to rub the sleep from his face. His eyes felt swollen and his mouth tasted of red onion as he followed Gabriel and Mila across the square and into a one-room shack. Funny, but he hadn’t had onions in days.

The place was dirt-floored and smelled of cooking oil and something sweet-crushed sugarcane or three-day-old sweat, it was impossible to say which. A woodstove stood at the back, tin cups, and a coffeepot resting on top. The exhaust pipe drove up through a hole in the ceiling that was just too wide for its spout. Had it been raining, there would have been no point in lighting it. Then again, it was August; why light the thing at all?

Three men stood leaning over a small table near the stove. Their backs were to the door, and they were pointing at various positions on a map. From the look of the clothes and the rank smell in the air, Hoffner was guessing they had been up all night.

The tallest of the three was the first to turn. He was somewhere in his twenties with a handsome face, a wild, full beard-a beard that inspired confidence-and arms the size of unstripped logs. The hair was thick there as well, as were the tufts climbing up through the top of his open shirt. Two thin suspenders kept his trousers above his narrow waist.

The man kept his eyes on Mila for a moment too long. Hoffner chanced a side glance and saw it in her face as well, a look of complicity, recognition in the light of day. Neither showed regret. Neither showed anything beyond this single moment.

The man turned back and said to one of the others, “Tura. He’s here.”

Hoffner chafed at his sudden feelings of betrayal. They were ludicrous. He had said nothing to her, nothing to himself about her, except perhaps that she was his to protect. And maybe that was most ludicrous of all. He forced himself to keep his eyes on the men at the table.

The man called Tura continued to speak quietly to the third in their company: there was an occasional murmured response, a shake of the head, but this was how it passed for nearly a minute. Hoffner thought the big one might interrupt again, but instead they all stood waiting until the third man finally nodded and headed to the door. Only then did the one called Tura reach for his cigarette-a weedy, self-rolled thing propped on the edge of the table-and turn to the room.

It was a hard face, square and lined, and with a day’s growth to make the cheeks seem even more brittle. There might have been something oafish to it-the wide brow and high forehead-but the eyes were too focused and the color too deep a brown to hide the raw intelligence. This was a stare of perfect conviction. It held Hoffner’s gaze even as the cigarette smoke drifted past him.

“You’re the German,” the man said. It was a peasant voice, guttural and crackling.

“And you’re Buenaventura Durruti.”

Hoffner had seen too many of the posters across Barcelona, photographs in every newspaper from Moscow to London, not to know him at once. Strange to come face-to-face with the soured breath of an ideal.

Durruti looked over at Gabriel. “Sleep hasn’t improved you, Ruiz.”

Gabriel nodded. It was as much as he had brought to the conversation.

Durruti took a pull on the cigarette. “So. You have a son in Zaragoza, and you’d like to find him.”

Hoffner took a moment. “No,” he said.

Durruti was not one to show surprise. The eyes moved to Mila, then back to Hoffner. Smoke trailed from Durruti’s nose. “You have a son?”

“Yes.”

“But not in Zaragoza.”

“No.”

Durruti took another pull and nodded. “I must have misunderstood.”

“Yes.”

Durruti finished the cigarette and dropped it to the floor. “And yet you’re eager to make your way into a city garrisoned with more than a thousand rebel troops.” He crushed it out under his boot. “That would be reckless even by my standards.”

Hoffner said, “The doctor has a brother-”

“Yes,” Durruti said. “I know. The doctor and I are old friends.” He pulled back his shirtsleeve and showed the bandage; the bullet had hit him just below the elbow. “The fascists have good aim. They’re also smart with a target. I’ve been told they’re even better in daylight.” Stepping to the stove, he picked up the coffeepot; he kept his back to Hoffner as he poured. “So this son-the one not in Zaragoza-he knows something about guns. Tell me about these guns.”

Hoffner looked again at the big one; he was standing by the map, his arms crossed at his chest. He, too, was forcing himself to keep his eyes on the table. Hoffner said, “I’d take a cup of that coffee if you have it.”

Durruti handed him the one he had just poured and looked at Mila. “Doctor?” She shook her head, and Durruti went back for another. Again he kept his back to them.

“They’re German,” said Hoffner.

“Yes,” said Durruti, “I know.” He took hold of a can and dripped some thick milk into the coffee. “And they’re in Zaragoza?”

“I told you, my son isn’t in Zaragoza.”

“That’s right.” Even with something this simple, Durruti was taking no chances. He stirred the coffee. “But they do have guns in Zaragoza. German guns.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I would.” Durruti set the spoon down and turned. “That’s why I’m telling you-so when you take your doctor in to find her brother, you won’t be surprised when you get shot by one of your own.”

Hoffner watched as Durruti drank. Hoffner said, “You know where they’re coming from?”

“What, these German guns? My guess: Germany.”

Anywhere else, Hoffner would have resented the taunt; here it seemed justified.

He took a drink and then said, “Teruel. My son is in Teruel.”

“With guns?”

Hoffner said nothing.

“And you know this for certain?”

“No.”

Durruti nodded once for emphasis. “ ‘No,’ ” he repeated. The eyes sharpened as he stared across. “You’re very close to being helpful, then not. Why is that?”

“Tell me what it is you want to hear.”

An unexpected half smile creased the thick lips, and Durruti set the cup down. “Well-I might like to know that you’ll be bombing the munitions factory once you’re inside, or that you’ve a trainload of rifles up the road. Or that maybe you’re doing all this because you truly believe in the revolution and not because it’s something so meaningless as saving a boy’s life. But you can’t tell me any of that, can you?”

Hoffner gave Durruti the moment. “No, I can’t.”

The smile remained. “At least you’re honest.”

“I’ll take the explosives if you want.”

“Will you? That’s kind. I don’t have any, so I’ll save you the trouble.”

Durruti’s power lay not in his arrogance but in his utter lack of pretense. It was an honesty not meant to impress.

Hoffner pulled out his cigarettes. He offered them to Durruti and Durruti took one. Hoffner lit it, then lit his own.

“That’s good,” said Durruti. “At least you know the first rule.” Hoffner said nothing, and Durruti explained. “A stranger in Spain-you should always offer a man tobacco.”

“And the second?”

Durruti took a pull. He glanced at Mila, then back at Hoffner. “You’re not so good on that one.”

Hoffner held the pack out to Mila, even as he said to the big one by the table, “You know these rules too?”

The man looked up. It was clear now how much of a boy he still was. He glanced at Mila but said nothing.

Mila took a cigarette and said to Durruti, “He’s fine on both.” She let Hoffner light hers. She gave nothing away. “So, can you get me inside the city?”

Durruti had watched all this with mild disinterest. He took another pull and said, “They’ll shoot you, then him, and then where will his son and those guns be?”

Mila said firmly, “In Teruel. He won’t be coming with me. You’ll get your guns.”

“Ah,” said Durruti. “So now they’re myguns.” He nodded slowly. “There areno foreign guns in Spain. You know this, of course.” He seemed to take pleasure in showing his cynicism. “The French won’t come in-Blum’s already said it-not with the Rhineland slipping away. Why provoke more of that? And the English?” He took a pull and shook his head. “Not much money to be gained here either way. They’ll leave it alone. Which leaves us with the Russians.” Even the smoke seemed more aggressive through his nostrils. “They’ll be the ones to send us rifles and colonels, just to make sure we know how to be good Bolsheviks, but the guns will be shit. So will the colonels. They’ve all signed their pieces of paper, those promises to stay away. They’re doing it to keep the Germans and Italians out. Wouldn’t want it to break into a real war, now, would they? And we all know how good you Germans are with a promise.” Durruti took another pull.

Hoffner had expected another bandit anarchist-bullets and ideology ablaze-but Durruti showed a much subtler mind. He knew that his Spain, anarchist Spain, was on its own.

Durruti said, “So no, they won’t be myguns. The only hope I have is to end this war before all those German guns find their way through.”

Mila said, “He’s not coming with me.”

“But that’s not true,” Durruti said. He took a last pull and dropped his cigarette to the floor. “He’s the only way I get you inside Zaragoza.” Not waiting for a response, Durruti looked past Hoffner to Gabriel. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

Gabriel had been leaning quietly against a wall. He pushed himself up and said, “I was sure last night. Why should it be different now?”

Durruti nodded. He looked back at Hoffner. “You still have the German clothes you came in?”

It took Hoffner a moment to answer. “Yes.”

“Good. You’ll need to change.”

It made perfect sense. Hoffner was looking for fascist guns and he was looking for Germans. Why not be a German fascist and see where it took him? Mila was less convinced.

“And Gabriel?” she said.

Durruti was placing bricked explosives inside a hollow in the backseat of an old Mercedes sedan. He leaned farther in. “You’ll need someone to shoot the checkpoint guards if the passes fail,” he said. He was making sure each one had a fuse.

Mila stood outside the door. “I could do that.”

“No-you couldn’t.” Durruti brought the cushion down and bolted it by pulling a lever near the window; it looked like a hanging strap. “Neither could your German. It’s why you need Ruiz.”

Hoffner was sitting back against the car’s bonnet. He was almost halfway through a pack of cigarettes and it wasn’t even ten o’clock. At some point in Barcelona, Mila had washed his shirt. It smelled of lavender. The rest of him wasn’t quite so floral.

She stepped over and sat next to him. They had said nothing to each other since the shack. Closing her eyes, she tilted her head back and let the sun fill her face. She said, “He’s wrong, you know.”

Hoffner tossed his cigarette to the ground and stared over at a group of men who were in line for something-food, toilet, maybe both. They each had a rifle slung over a shoulder or a pistol strapped to a belt. There were berets, metal helmets, an airman’s cap that had frayed at the back, but nothing to say they belonged together. They didn’t stand like soldiers. They didn’t smoke like soldiers. But they talked like soldiers-that hushed, half-joking pose of false hope and unexamined fear. It was good to be brave, thought Hoffner, good to believe in this beyond all else. He looked again at Mila. It was good to believe in something.

Durruti closed the door and stepped over. He took a cigarette from Hoffner’s pack and leaned in for a light.

Hoffner said, “And you really don’t care where we set them off?”

Durruti pulled a piece of tobacco from his tongue and flicked it to the ground. “You won’t have enough to do any real damage. You do it to make them know we can. The real destruction will come from the aeroplanes.”

“If the bombs ever manage to go off.”

“That was bad luck.”

Mila still had her eyes closed. “For whom?” she said.

Durruti forced a tired smile. “Don’t make me think twice about this.”

“I’m glad you’ve thought about it at all.”

Hoffner shook out another cigarette; what else was there to do? He lit up. “You really want to bring it all down to rubble, don’t you?”

Durruti was now looking over at the men. There was nothing in the eyes to show the pain or pride he felt. “I want a free Spain,” he said. “I want collectives-purpose. I want all of what was to be gone. This socialist government won’t give me that. They might even kill me once I get rid of the fascists for them. So it all has to go.”

“And then?”

“We rebuild.” This was something Durruti had thought long on. “We destroy because we’re capable of building. We were the ones who built the palaces and the cities. We’ll build them again, this time better. We’re not afraid of ruins. We have a new world-inside-in our hearts.”

A man emerged from a nearby building and spoke as he made his way over. “It’s Colonel Villalba,” he said. “He’s on the telephone.”

Hoffner said to Durruti, “They have a telephone here?”

Durruti said under his breath, “It’s why we picked the town.” He looked at the man. “Do I need to take a drive?”

“He wants to come here.”

For the first time, Hoffner saw genuine surprise in Durruti’s face. Mila opened her eyes.

“And why is that?” said Durruti.

The man did his best to hide his disgust. “He wants to see what the enemy looks like up close.”

“You’re joking.”

“It was my fault,” the man said. “He asked what we were up against.”

“And?”

“I said the rebels.”

“And?”

The man shrugged. “He wanted to know who exactly, what forces, how many cannons and machine guns, do they have cavalry?”

They all waited until Durruti said, “And what did you tell him?”

“I told him that they’re the enemy because they don’t report their troops or forces. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be the enemy.”

Hoffner couldn’t help a quiet laugh, and Durruti said, “I thought you were a baker, not a comedian.”

The man said, “I’m a soldier.”

“Bravo. A soldier keeps his mouth shut. Tell him I’ll come to the telephone. Don’t let him hang up.”

The man headed off, and Hoffner said, “He has a point.”

Durruti tossed his half-smoked cigarette to the ground. It was his only moment of frustration, but it was enough. “I should be in Zaragoza by now,” he said. “Villalba knows it. All this waiting.” He looked around. “Where the hell is Ruiz?”

Gabriel had insisted on burying the Germans. He had taken three men with him almost an hour ago.

Hoffner said, “It takes time to put a man in the ground the right way.”

“It takes time,” Durruti said sharply, “because he’ll want the same for himself. Gabriel might not believe in a God but he believes in a balance to things.”

Up to this moment Hoffner hadn’t known what to call it with Gabriel, but this made perfect sense. He said, “And he thinks he’ll be with the fascists when he needs burying?”

“He knows it.” Durruti had no reluctance for the truth. “He’s dead if he goes back to Barcelona. The patrullasor your German friends will finish him-or track him here. There’s not much good in that. So he’ll take you to Zaragoza, get you in, and while you and the doctor find what you need, he’ll plant the fuses. And when you get yourselves out, he’ll set them off. If he tries it earlier, he knows none of you make it out. Now you know why he takes his time.”

Durruti spat a piece of tobacco to the ground, and Mila-realizing what Durruti had meant-said, “He’s heading home. To fight in Gijon.”

“Yes. But first he fights here.”

“You mean first he dies here.”

Durruti took his time before answering. “He’ll set off the fuses. He’ll get out. And then he’ll fight in Gijon.”

“I don’t think you believe that.”

“No?” said Durruti. “I’ll tell him when he gets back. I’m sure that’ll make a great deal of difference to him.”

Hoffner said, “There’s no reason for that.”

“There’s no reason for any of it,” said Durruti, “but none of us have that luxury.”

As if to save them all, Gabriel appeared from around one of the houses across the square. Three other men were with him, and Gabriel raised his hand in a single wave.

Durruti started out toward him, but the sudden pingof bullets forced him instantly to the ground, two shots, then a third. Hoffner grabbed hold of Mila and pulled her down behind the car as Durruti began to crawl his way back. The square was filled with shouting. Half the line of men were diving through doorways and windows. The other half stood frozen. Another two shots, and then silence. Durruti drew up next to them and leaned his head against the car.

“Our sniper’s getting bold,” Durruti said. “Broad daylight.” There was a hint of respect in the voice. He shouted over to the men who had yet to move. “Get down!”

The men quickly ran for cover, but there was no point. Ten seconds was as much mayhem as the sniper could muster. Nonetheless, Durruti edged his way up to the bonnet and began to fire out into the trees. He was joined by several others along the houses until he shouted, “Enough. Save your bullets.”

The echoes faded, and Durruti listened for another half minute. He continued to look out beyond the village.

“He’s running,” he said. “That’s what I’d be doing.” He stood upright and stepped out from behind the car. Slowly, others began to make their way out.

“It’s done!” he shouted. “We need a patrol.”

Durruti waited for more of the men to move into the square before he turned and extended a hand to Hoffner.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Just be glad he didn’t hit the explosives.”

Hoffner took the hand, then helped Mila to her feet. She seemed completely unruffled.

She said, “You’re all right?”

Hoffner nodded. He was about to say something when he saw a single figure lying unmoving in the square. The body had fallen forward, the shot clean to the back of the skull. A line of blood had curled down to the mustache.

Even a blind pig.

Hoffner stared at Gabriel’s body and knew that Mila, too, was staring out with him.

An Act Of Faith

“No,” said Hoffner. The force in his tone surprised even him. “We still go.”

“Then you take my man,” said Durruti.

“No.”

They were in the shack. The bearded twenty-year-old stood silently at the door. Mila was sitting by the stove.

Durruti said, “Then you don’t find your son.”

Hoffner looked over at Mila. She was refusing to help him. She was agreeing with Durruti.

Hoffner said, “Gabriel was willing to kill himself for this. Fine. Your man isn’t. It would be for show-you said it yourself. The explosives stay here.”

“And I give you a car and gasoline and bullets because I’m feeling generous? No. You take the explosives-with or without my man-and you plant them. What you do after that is no concern of mine.”

“My son-”

“You think your boy is more capable than Gardenyes or Ruiz?” Durruti let this take root. “They took Gardenyes. They had Ruiz. They nearly killed him. These guns from the Germans will find their way into my country no matter what you or your boy do. We’re done.” He looked at his man. “When the others return, send them out to find the shooter. They buried Ruiz. They’ll want his killer.”

The man nodded and headed out. Durruti turned to the table and, with as much focus as he could, began to study the map.

Hoffner said, “So either I let you sacrifice your man, or I sacrifice myself and the doctor. That’s quite a way to win a war.”

Durruti refused to turn. “It’s the way we win this war.”

“I’ve heard. Men charging at cannons, refusing to dig trenches.” And with perhaps too much bitterness, “Better to be shot full in the chest, in plain view, than to survive like a coward.”

Durruti stood unmoving. When he turned, his face was empty, the heat gone from him.

“These men,” Durruti said. “My men.” It was a rare admission. “For every fifty, I have one who knows how to fight. The rest have passion, daring-what they take for quality. Arrogant men because they fight with ideals, not guns. And it’s these ideals that tell them not to think, not to question, not to die. Sit them down in a trench-where they can learn to flatten themselves against a wall at the first sound of an aeroplane engine or feel the terror of hours trapped in a mudhole with guns and fear staring back at them-and they become nothing. Then they arenothing but sacrifice. And if that’s what they are, this war is already lost.”

Hoffner had misjudged Durruti. The venom wasn’t pride; it was a need to shut out the inevitable. “Then turn them into soldiers.”

Durruti snorted dismissively. “A German speaks. We haven’t time for that. We have numbers-now-and somewhere we have guns: Spanish, Russian. The rebels inside Zaragoza-those troops with all their years of training and killing in Asturias and Morocco-they’re happy to wait. Happy because while they wait my bricklayers and bakers and peasants come to understand what they themselves truly are. So I sacrifice one, and he sacrifices himself, and the passion and daring go on.”

Hoffner stood with no answer. There was no answer for any of this, and Mila asked, “Did you know Gabriel well?”

It took Durruti a moment to remember she was in the room. He looked at her. “Yes.”

“And Gardenyes?”

Durruti hesitated. “Why do you ask this?”

“Because I didn’t,” she said, “and I feel the pain.” She stood. “We do it ourselves, and you keep your man. Show us on the map.”

She stepped passed him. There was a moment between Hoffner and Durruti before they both stepped over. Durruti picked up a wax pencil and began to mark.

She had changed into a silk dress, flower print, sleeves long to the wrist. And her hair was pulled up in a bun.

Durruti had shown them how to get north of the city. It would have made no sense to soldiers at an outpost to have a car coming from the east: How would a German fascist and his lady friend have made it through? Durruti had promised two hours, maybe three, of dirt that passed for tracks and roads, but at least they were avoiding the river.