Night Soldiers (16 page)

Three streets. Two blocks.

From down here, she would never find the blue light, it was like being in a deep canyon. But she
would
find it. She listened to her footsteps, tried to walk more softly. Her fingers crept beneath the sweater and touched the butt of the revolver. She seemed alone in the world, but maybe that wasn't so bad. The Republican Checa—modeled on, and named after, the Soviet intelligence Cheka—often roamed at night through the neighborhoods. It was better not to meet them.

Calle de Plata.

Where the medieval silversmiths had kept their workshops. Her cousin Eric, who graduated third in his class at Erasmus High, took jewelry-making at the Art Students League. Now he was a communist. Like Renata and Andres. Was she one too? No, she didn't think so. She was a passionate idealist, in love with the idea of democracy. Certainly she dreamed, like Andres, of a world without oppression and cruelty. She had come to Spain to put one more hand on the wheel that turned toward justice. Were all Jews communists? Hitler said so. Her father grimaced at Hitler's name. “Why don't you kill him?” he asked the sky. Jews hated injustice, that was what it was. Fania Kaplan, a Jewish girl not much older than herself, with family in Brooklyn, had shot Lenin through the neck because he betrayed the Revolution. But Lenin survived. She would like to shoot Hitler through the neck. They would, she knew, march her in glory up Flatbush Avenue if she did that. Even Mr. Glass, of Glass Stationery, and he was a Republican.

Avenida Saldana.

There was a big market here on Thursdays. An old lady with a mustache gave her something free every time—radishes, parsley. The fishstall man had once picked up a red snapper and bobbed it up and down as though it swam toward her, and everyone had laughed and made Spanish jokes. Now the street was deserted. On the roof of one of the buildings across the street, she had seen a blue light. She had come here to find it. Of course, she could turn around and go back and tell Renata that she couldn't find it. Nobody would be the wiser. In all likelihood, the light didn't mean anything at all, simply one more inexplicable event in this inexplicable country. So go home.

No.

Well, perhaps. But at least, she told herself, examine the buildings.

The numbers ran differently here, but the third one from the corner, 52 Avenida Saldana, roughly corresponded to 9 Calle de Victoria. That meant she might be on the wrong street, because 52 Avenida Saldana was a two-story factory where they made wooden chairs.

54 Avenida Saldana. That was a possibility. She counted up six stories.

Number 56 was not a possibility. An old hotel for commercial travelers, it had a steep roof sheathed with green copper. Number 58 was a rather smart private house, with little balconies and French windows, three stories high.

It had to be 54.

That's good, Faye, you figured it out. Now go home. Report the incident to the Checa, let them worry about it.

She crossed the street. Avenida Saldana was a bit fancier than Calle de Victoria, narrow sidewalks ran along its edges. She stood at the base of the building and stared straight up. No blue light. But on the top floor, just below the roof, a window was open a few inches and, very faintly, she could hear a woman singing. She had heard the song before, mothers sang it to babies to put them to sleep.

Good, darling, very good
. Her upbringing came through loud and clear.
And brave? In the middle of the night. In Madrid. All alone
.

With only Nana's watch and a big Spanish gun. Such a gun. Myself, I'd be afraid to touch it
.

Which was probably why, more or less, she simply went into the building and up to the roof. Because the blood did carry more than oxygen. Because there was something there that—when it was crystal clear that retreat with caution was the only sensible path—took the first step and the second step and all the rest of the steps. She had some help, on the order of
I'm an American and I can go anywhere I want
, but she had something a little older than that as well. It didn't precisely have a name, or maybe it had too many names, but it got her up to the roof. And, surprise of surprises, at a time when so much bravery bled itself out into nothingness, it turned out to matter a great deal that she went there. It saved lives.

First she removed her boots. Leaning against a cold wall in the dark hallway, she worked them off and tied the laces together and hung them around her neck. Drew the pistol from her waistband, cocked it, held it before her with a finger hooked securely around the front of the trigger guard. Put her left hand on the wall and walked slowly in her socks up the stairs to the roof, the sound of the lullaby getting closer as she climbed.

The door to the roof was chained and the chain was padlocked.

Breathing hard from the climb, she stood there frozen, so deeply enraged that her cheeks were hot. After all that!

She'd seen her friend at Pembroke, Penelope Hastings of Hyde Park, New York, fiddle a lock with a hairpin. Two problems. She didn't have a hairpin. And it wasn't that kind of lock. It was like a bicycle lock, with a combination. Olive green. Scratched and worn as though it had been well used: first to lock up a bicycle, perhaps at a place like a college where unlocked bicycles were frequently “borrowed,” then to secure a big trunk, which had to travel aboard a transatlantic liner to Europe.
That
sort of lock.

The sort of lock that, if you turned four right, sixteen left, and twenty-seven right, snapped open, though it took one last little jiggle, requiring a practiced twist of the hand, to make it spring cleanly.

It was, she was sure, her very own lock, which she'd put in the back of a drawer some months earlier, thinking it was something that she didn't need then but would desperately want the minute after she threw it away. She was shocked to find it, but there was something much too eerie to contemplate in such a coincidence and she had no time to think about it anyhow. Explanations would have to wait.

In the silence at the top of the stairs, she could hear the singing woman one floor down. A child coughed. The woman murmured in Spanish. Then began humming softly, a song without words made up as she went along.

Faye put the lock and the gun between her feet. Slipped one hand beneath the chain, drew it slowly, link by link, across her palm until it was free of the door handle, then laid it silently on the floor, kneeling slowly. Retrieved the gun and held it in her right hand, then put the lock inside one of the shoes hanging around her neck. Took a breath, and pushed gently against the door with her left hand.

The door made one small squeak as it opened. The humming stopped. Faye took a step onto the roof.

She was wound tight as a spring, but not frightened. She didn't think it through, but some part of her mind was trying to let her know that when a door is chained and padlocked on one side, there is rarely anybody on the other side. At least not anybody who wants to be there.

The roof was deserted.

On one wall stood a blue lantern. A device used, perhaps, on a ship or in a railroad yard. She could see the shape of the flame burning behind the blue glass. She went up to it. Opened the little door. And blew it out.

Squinting against the darkness, she peered out over the intervening rooftops but could not make out her own building. Then, close to where she thought it might be, a match flared. The flame lingered for an instant, then disappeared.

Renata!

No signal had been arranged, but she knew absolutely that Renata had been watching the blue light, had seen it go out, and had contrived to make a visible acknowledgment.

Now she flew.

Lantern swinging from her left hand, gun clutched in her right, shoes banging against her breasts, she ran down the stairs and out into the street. Her socks got wet and her feet hurt but she wasn't going to stop for anything. Pumping her arms, hair flying, she tore down the side street, past Calle de Plata, into Calle de Victoria, almost slipping as she went around the corner, into the building past her bomb shelter alcove, up the stairs, up the ladder, onto the roof, rushing into Renata's arms and yelling at the top of her lungs, yelling with triumph.

In Seville, it was the custom of Hauptmann Bernhard Luders, of the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion, always to have a woman the night before he flew a mission. Such sport maintained the traditions of that city, where Don Juan had been born and raised and where, as a young man, he had observed with horror that the corpse in a funeral procession was his own, and resolved to fight death with lust from that day forth.

It cooled him, Luders said. Left him calm and level-headed for work the following day. It gave him, also, a reputation, and that he enjoyed immensely. He was twenty-one years old, with a small angry face and a small transparent mustache. At his direction, Feldwebel Kunkel, his batman, would sit in a gilded, red plush chair outside the room at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, an apparent guardian of lovers' privacy but in fact an advertisement for the heated
Wurstverstecken
(hide-the-wiener) games being played on the other side of the door.

After midnight, when the officers came upstairs from drinking in the hotel bar, they would nod to Kunkel. He would rise and salute. “He is in tonight?” someone would always ask. “Yes sir,” Kunkel would answer, “but he flies tomorrow.” Ahh, they would nod approvingly, aware of his custom, then add the obligatory joke: “We shoot by night that bomb by day.”

In response to the joke, Kunkel, a man who understood loyalty at its root, would offer the obligatory response: a slow raising of the hands and eyes to heaven.
What lovers these pilots!

Luders's latest was sixteen.

Evangelina.
Evangelina
. To Luders, even her name reeked of Spain, of Catholicism, of darkness, ignorance, superstition as black and wild as the unruly bush between her marble legs.

She drove him insane.

He had frolicked a bit at university in Heidelberg, among the properly raised dough-maidens of the city's aristocracy, but nothing had prepared him for what he took to be the true Spanish passion. The Mediterranean
Süden
, the South, tickled his Northern European fantasies to begin with—it was so hot and filthy and poor, one could do anything.
Anything
. The little witch would crawl about the hotel carpet wearing nothing at all, catch hold of his boot and plead with him. It was Spanish, the pleading, but somehow the meaning worked its way through. She was defiled, worthless. He had led her into the Temple of Sin and now she was lost in its vast recesses, a maddened novitiate. She could think of nothing else. Nothing. All day long, devils whispered in her ear, of practices so demonic she dared not speak them aloud. For such thoughts he must punish her. Now. For if he did not staunch this frightful thirst she would tear her hair in frenzy. She sobbed and moaned and wriggled like an eel and begged him to put out the fire that burned her alive.

Poor Kunkel.

He had to sit there and listen to it night after night—and privately wondered how the man ever got any rest. Also, it fell to him to ferry a constant stream of gifts to Evangelina's family, who lived in a neighborhood that frightened him, in a house that made him ill. He had not joined the air force with such adventures in mind, but what was one to do. Hauptmann Luders wasn't a bad sort, a smart Rhenish lad with a rigid back and a taste for a fight who liked his stinky little cigars. Yet he had plunged into the Spanish mysteries up to his very neck. Ah well, these Condor Legion pilots believed themselves to be of a higher order. Perhaps they were.

At 1:30
A.M.
, Kunkel knocked discreetly at the door. It was time. Luders disentangled himself from the girl, washed quickly, and arrived at the airfield, a little north and west of the city, a half hour later. There was excellent coffee in the briefing hut, and Von Emel went through the usual drill: weather, situation on the ground—little enough happening, although someone had blown up an armory in the Guadarrama—and mission. But some things were not as usual. There were two SD types in attendance, from the Nazi party's foreign intelligence service. Small men in expensive suits, sharp-eyed and silent. Luders did not mind the Abwehr—they were military and had kinship with the airmen—but these two made him nervous. They stared at him. The other variation concerned the mission itself. Von Emel handed him a circled street map of Madrid and explained at length.

He rather hurried the takeoff, because he had to reach Madrid while it was still dark. That would require some fast flying, but Luders was an excellent pilot and his Messerschmitt had airspeed tucked here and there that only he knew about. Willy Messerschmitt himself had come to Spain in August, to tour behind Nationalist lines and visit the places where his planes would be tested, and proven. In fact, the 109 was well suited to what Luders would ask of it. The five-hundred-pound bomb slung beneath the belly of the plane didn't slow him down, though it did drink a little extra gas.

Just before sunrise, the dawn no more than a faint blur behind him, he came skimming in over the city from the east. He could not hear the rattle above the engine noise, but a few yellow pinpricks of anti-aircraft fire were evident as he flew over the Paseo del Prado; however, he was really too low, and going too fast, for the Spanish gunners to have any patience with him. He steadied his foot on the bomb-release pedal and kept a light thumb atop the joystick where the machine-gun button was located. You never knew what was waiting on the rooftops—it was wiser to sweep up as you went.

He moved closer to the window, body tensed for action. He had been born with the eyesight of a hawk, and now scanned the dark blocks below until he found what he was looking for. A pinpoint of blue light. From there it was all instinct. He banked hard, came sideways through the turn, the aeroplane slicing neatly through the bumpy air above the city, wound up in a shallow dive with the nose of the plane in perfect line with the beacon.