22

‘No, they haven’t brought her in yet. Don’t worry, Vlanoc, I know exactly what to do. Salud.’ Jake Starr replaced the receiver on the hook. Yawned. Tired. Dead tired. Need some shuteye.

Yawned again, smelled his own bad breath from too many cigarettes, lay his head on the desk and fell immediately asleep.

He was in Barcelona, in his office, a former shop for reliquaries on Calle Fernando, right off the Ramblas. It was now bare except for the old desk, chair, cot in the rear and a picture of Joseph Stalin, very neat and chipper. Stacked close to Jake’s elbow on the desk lay the leaves of a Joe Garms special, hand-delivered from Paris by one of the American veterans who had left Spain four months before only to return again to resume the fight. As Jake slept he could hear Joe’s gravel voice ejaculating his very unique, clear, and concise sentences …

Dear Comrade Comic Star,

For three months I been rottin’ away yuh dirty crud in this fuckin’ frog city waitin’ for yuh to send Greg Ballard through. So’s Archie Cohen waitin’. You said he would come right away, what’s takin’ so long? I’m warning yuh, Comic Star, you or they touch a fuckin’ hair on his head and there’ll be a new war. He was drinking himself to death in Benacasim and that back a his was killing him from rheumatism and he oughta get out and get home. So hurry it up yuh prick.

Besides that I’m waiting for the party to buy off my U.S. Army desertion papers. A lousy 5 C note and they’re collecting all that money for the heroes of Spain. Well I was a hero too wit’out the voice and the hand.

I’m tired a this frog city even tho I got me a sweet assed broad who picked me up on Jaurès. The same day I got your note I went out and got feeling pretty high and walked into a café and seen a pretty French dame, sat down besides her and told her what I thought a her and her whole goddam family, race, and all, and after about thirty minutes of hard fast talking she put her hand under my chin lifted it up and kissed me square on the mouth. She didn’t know a word what I said but she thought I was wonderful. Anyhow to cut the story I been livin’ with her about 4 weeks and what do you think of that huh? Sonofabitch goddam me if I ain’t crazy about the bitch. I give her my 4 francs a day I get from Asshole Liebman, Paris Comic Star. You bastards is all alike—you stink from shit, all that crap that lays between the voice and the hand. ROTC BOYSCOUT COMIC STARS. With that 4 francs and the couple she makes working as a usher in the movies we live in her clean hole near the St Martin canal muddy as hell. Shit, if it ain’t the San Martin road it’s the St Martin canal. It looks like I ain’t going no place. She’s a real sweet cookie who gives me lots a loving and I give it to her too and I oughta be satisfied. But not me. Y’know what Jakey? I miss the fuckin’ front. That’s the trouble. I love war. My blind eye don’t hurt no more and me other eye is tiptop so I can still shoot fascists. You’re the comic star I love most so send me orders so’s I can come back and join the guys on the Ebro. Tell yuh the truth again I gotta yen to die fighting. That’s all that’s left me after you comic stars took my cherry in old España. My cherry and everybody elses.

How is it guys like Asshole Liebman and all the big comic stars comin’ thru from Spain to Paris have all that dough in their kick—big fat dollars and little ole me and the likes of me, the real fighters, we get a lousy four francs a day? Four francs is twenty cents a day. Merde! And André Marty and his gang stealin’ all that cush in Albacete. I.B. money that the working class of the world chipped in for the men of the International Brigades, gypped, stole, copped by those great leaders Marty and Vidal the crap artist who told us at Villanueva that the fascists would turn and run soon as they saw us. Yeah, they run!

I hear the Limey comrades call Prettyman Murderman too after he sent them up that fascist hill near Quinto tellin’ them it wasn’t fortified when it was like Gibraltar. Another slaughter. The only thing saved them was the fascist avion bombing and strafing their own fortifications. Even the Fascist scum have fuckups it’s good to see. What happened at Gandesa where we lost so goddam many men again? First I hear Generalissimo Prettyman and Brigade Comic Star Mushmouth Moran cowboys and Indians revolutionary with his blue cape shiny boots and silver handled pistol became separated from the troops and end up fascist prisoners. Next I hear one of the communications boys heard Moran call Prettyman it’s time we got the hell out a here, and lots of guys say they screwed off. Then I hear Teddy Heller another comic star told that nice American newspaper reporter 30 commanders and comic stars in one group got separated from the men fightin’ a life and death battle. The Big Boys in one group? Funny. Sad. Archie says it’s the usual—to hell with the rank and file fighting men, Prettyman and Moran must of got lost and ended up in the enemy lines. I bet the fascists cut them up good.

A confidential tip, my comic star friend, after Spain and Paris here’s my line, I’m a Communist, will be till the day I’m pushing up daisies, right now I don’t think very much of the great majority of the party leaders. They are mostly petit bourgeois opportunist bootlickin’ bastards. They better keep out of my way cause I ain’t heard the Marxist interpretation on the rights and lefts to the button and I don’t give a damn how big or small they are. The Proletariat is the vanguard, what a laugh.

Me and Archie got Horton thru okay for you and Hunt Carrington the greatest pol on earth before Horton flipped and got Demoed in Barcelona after we left you in that smelly office. You’re gonna smoke yourself to death boy. We went to eat in a good restaurant north of the Plaza de Cataluña and the head waiter wouldn’t let us in. No hay pan he says lookin’ down his nose on us. A dog. We said we didn’t care if there was no bread we wanted a piece a meat we was hungry three heroes of the I.B. and he wouldn’t let us in. We was gonna pulverize him but he called a guard and I had to pull Archie and Horton away before we ended up in the can. Before we left tho we got a good look in there. All the big brass and their fancy ladies was eating good. No hay pan for us. Spain’s dyin’, we gave our all, but we ain’t dressed good enough—no hay pan for us. And the party’s running Barcelona too. Horton, you know how he’s getting, he says more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie. Right, I says. So we vamosed to a working class joint and got more fried wood and potatoes. Codfish Greg once told me after we ate it for twenty days solid.

Hey, Greg’s bad, get him out pronto. Those days in the hills of Romanillos is killing him. There are things y’don’t know and it’s good y’don’t. It’s like a bullet hitting yuh. You don’t hardly feel it till after, then it hurts, keereist it hurts. It hurts yuh bastid. You know. You oughta know.

It’s dark and we got time to kill and we’re walking down Layetana and we pass the American embassy and who’s standing outside with his gun looking for deserters but Tom Demo the nogood prick sonuvabitch OGPU. He stops us and asks where yuh goin’, Comrades. Archie tells him to haul ass. Horton flips and tells him you piece of scum you destroyed the meaning of the word comrade forever and we start to walk away. That Demo is so trigger happy he pulls his gun on us. So there we are. It’s come to that. After all those months in the line. Fighting fascists. We get a gun pulled on us. Archie Cohen. The best. Horton—a fascist bullet in his fuckin’ head, a walkin’ corpse. Joe Garms. Me. A comrade pulling a gun on me. We stand in front of him the three of us. We ain’t got a gun between us. Archie, he got a bottle a manzanilla in his mitts. He’s holding it by the neck and he’s playing with it. Up and down that fuckin’ bottle goes in his hand. Up and down. Demo’s got that gun pointing right at Archie now. He pulls that trigger, Archie’s a dead man. Archie’s just standing there, that Chicago Jew with his skinny legs and his eyes like diamonds in the dark. You never saw anything happen so fast in your life. Me and Archie is one man. Greg, too. We been buddies in the line off and on for eight months. One can’t think without the other knowin’ it. My foot and Archie’s bottle move like lightning. Demo’s on the fuckin’ ground one of his balls choking his throat, his head bleeding. I was gonna kick his head in but Horton said cut it out I’m not feeling good. So we grabbed Horton and run. Well maybe some deserters got thru to the American consulate that night. Who cares.

We still had an hour to make the train for the border. We’re walking around. Suddenly Archie says he wants to get laid. You know him. We say aw hell save it for Paris. No he says he wants to get laid one more time in Spain. Something special, he says.

What you gonna say when a buddy wants to get laid? Okay, we say.

So we walk down to the Barrio Chino not too far away from your office. He sees a broad near a doorway, goes up to her, whispers in her little ole ear, she shakes her head. One broad, two, six. Whatever he wants they don’t wanna give. It’s getting late, we gotta make that train. Go in an alley and jack off Horton tells him, I’m falling off my feet. No, Archie says. He’s a burro. When he makes up his longeared brain nothin’ but nothin’s gonna move him. Another broad in a doorway, another no. Just when he himself is ready to give up he glims this fat-assed whore and grins. There’s my meat, he says. And sure enough she says yes to whatever he’s askin’. Up they go, his hand squeezing one of the cheeks of her tail like it’s a pot of gold.

Up they go. Ten minutes he’s down and we haul ass to the station. We make it just in time.

What exactly, Horton asks him as we sit down in the train, was yuh looking for. Archie laughs that flute a his. We ain’t heard him laugh that way for a long time. Something, he says, adequate to meet the historical situation.

Well, what was it, I asks, took so long to get?

These Españolas, he says, are real tough. They don’t give in so easy. But like the party I’m very very insistent cause I know there’s always at least one who gives in. And he laughs again. This time real bitter.

Yeah, I know, Horton says, but c’mon, what was it?

And Archie says, a Spanish broad who’d let me ram it up her ass.

The train’s going clickityclick now, real fast. And then Archie yells, Arriba Españolas, and begins to cry.

Hermanos hermanos, oh yeah.

That’s how we left Spain, three heroes of the I.B.

Now get this in your fuckin’ head, Jake Starr. Get Greg Ballard out a there if yuh wanna live.

Joe Garms, Hero

P.S. I forgot to tell you something. I suppose cause I don’t wanna tell yuh. Me and Archie ain’t talkin’. We’re enemies. He quit the party and I told him he’s a fuckin’ nogood renegade and he said I’m so fuckin’ stupid I don’t know when I’m being screwed and being taken for a trip around the world. I love the bastard, he’s a good friend, one a the best I ever had, but he quit and the party’s all I got, I ain’t got no place to go. I ain’t blew the whistle to Liebman cause then they won’t give Archie his 4 francs a day and he’d starve, they wouldn’t even give him his fare home when he goes but he won’t go cause he’s waitin’ for Greg just like I am. And the funny fuckin’ thing is when Greg comes out he’s gonna be enemies with me too. Y’know what he said before I left him in Benacasim? You guys do the bravest things a man can do, go out and fight for freedom but you ain’t got the livin’ guts to see that your party is a shitass prison. That’s not for me.

Maybe he’s right, Jakey, huh?

Joe

Jake Starr slept, listened to Joe’s clear and concise sentences, moaned and groaned, and was not a little scared.

Sarah Ruskin, walking wearily between two carabiñeros from the train station, was very scared. And why not? Two days before she had finally left Rolfe Ruskin for good in Valencia, left him fuming; without a salvo conducto she had taken the train to Barcelona, hoping somehow to reach and cross the border. When she arrived in Barcelona these two men were waiting for her and they asked her to please come along quietly. When she asked them to whom they were taking her, they told her it was el capitán. And took her by each elbow. Violently she jerked her arms free. One of the men turned to her, coldly said, ‘Por favor, compañera, come along without any trouble,’ then roughly pushed her ahead.

And Greg Ballard was no less scared. In Benacasim, in a white villa on the beach, a guard called at his room just as he was turning in. It’s come, Ballard thought. ‘Dress,’ the guard ordered. Ballard dressed. ‘Gather your things together.’

‘I’m wearing them,’ Ballard said. But he didn’t forget the bottles lined up for parade on the console.

Out into the dark, the sea a soughing sigh, he marched before the rifle of the guard, then into a car with a chauffeur just for him, the guard in the back, an old beat-up khaki car driven by a demon of a boy. The boy said his name was Dionisio, and he had a face like that of a shrunken head in a dirty cobwebbed window of a curio shop.

‘Where to?’ Ballard asked him, as they left Benacasim behind, heading north.

‘Barcelona.’

‘Roegen?’

The shrunken head laughed sourly, the pygmy shoulders dancing violently under the skinny neck. He had pointed ears, pointed eyes, a pointed chin. He drove very swiftly, the car skittering around curves, pounding into potholes. Every once in a while it seemed the car had run wild. But the boy always caught hold of it, then slipped into that sour laugh. Behind them the guard snorted. Ballard was sure he was on his way to hell. He began to drink in earnest from the bottles cradled carefully in his lap, a drunk fondling his habit. His spinal discs seemed to be grinding on each other. The Spanish kid just hit the gas pedal harder and the car literally slammed down the potholed macadam road. Soon Ballard hardly cared, his brain awash with bad brandy—bottled dynamite—his bones and joints aflame, his head a slimy bit of flotsam being annihilated by an endlessly raging sea. Soon he would be dead and he would at last rest his nigger head.

Violence without end. Broken bodies. Pouring blood. The world existed in the hardcased nose of a bomb.

They ran, he holding her hand to lead her somehow ahead of the cracking explosions which approached closer more quickly than he had calculated. Once Sarah stopped for rest; looked back over her shoulder and saw the flames at their backs and a building caving in, the screams of its inhabitants lost.

He allowed her a moment, then pulled her urgently forward; a half block ahead, off the Rambla de las Flores, there was a massive stone building whose cellar he knew to be a shelter against the bombs.

Earlier, flying across the short span of sea from the Balearics, the planes had cut their engines as they had approached the city to surprise it; now their engines roared dully above the cracking explosions. It seemed there were hundreds of planes but he knew there were probably no more than ten. He had counted six passing overhead, soaring now, empty of their burden, and with luck he could get her to the refuge of stone before one of the still laden planes would bank over Tibidabo and return to catch them in the naked black fired boulevard.

But she could go no farther, fatigue and fear having stretched her heart beyond its strength; another step and breath would tear it to shreds.

The pounding and cracking explosions crescendoed, closer, and he could hear the heavy plane motors straining as they banked over the mountains north-west of the city.

Sarah was heavy to his urging, but it was only a few steps more and he held tightly to her hand, pulling her ruthlessly forward; then they were caught by a sudden brilliant flash of white flowering flame—it appeared now that the entire city was afire—at their backs, huge white spear-like petals, and the planes were overhead and they could hear the screeching of the bombs as they fell away, and there was no time to go farther, so he threw her and himself to the foot of a stone wall at their side, half atop of her to shelter her between himself and the bombs screeching at their backs like cables in a hurricane, cracking suddenly, lifting the city from its roots.

Sarah flung her arms about him, crouching under and against him, and he held her tightly straining with all his strength to hold her to him as the screaming bombs fell closer and closer filling the boulevard above them with their howling whine, bursting beyond them and there was nothing left in the city, the world even, but the screeching and cracking explosions and her heart beat heavily, her lungs choking, and she held him, crouching like an animal, he half lying on her muttering muted curses which fell on her ears like harsh caresses. Her head found his heart, and soon she began to hear his heart’s beat; she concentrated wholly on it—a thumping beat, fast and raucous; if they were to die she was bitterly joyous it would be together.

The explosions stopped. A strange muteness filled the city for a brief moment, followed by a steady crackling from the roaring fire over its streets and in the distance the steady whirr of the plane motors as the Capronis fled over the sea to their lair in the Balearics.

Sarah and Jake lay quietly in one another’s arms at the bottom of the stone wall, almost lifeless with the fatigue which follows massive fear. Then slowly they began to come alive, the clang and clamor of ambulances and fire wagons a few blocks away destroying their isolation.

As they stood, straightening their clothes, he observed her intently. She was calm now. Indomitable. ‘You’re a remarkable woman, Sarah. A little mad, but remarkable.’ She smiled through her disheveled hair which fell about her face. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘If the tracks are intact, the train will leave. The one for the border’s the only train in all Spain which leaves on time—flood, fire or air raid.’

His words reminded her of the misery of the past few days, and he saw it on her face, the laughter dying in his throat. A bone. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The train.’

Holding hands, they walked through the now deafening silence of the city along the Ramblas, stalls shuttered in for the night, towards the Columbus statue, then left down the Paseo Colon towards the train station, the flames at the harbor long frenzied orange fingers beckoning them on. They walked without speaking, sadly. Once he raised her hand to his lips and kissed each finger-tip. They were soon at the terminal, dark except for a wan moon and the trainman’s blue lantern at the coach’s iron steps. As they stepped onto the platform, Sarah tripped over a loosened alpargata thong and he knelt to tighten and tie it. For a solitary moment he lost control and clutched at her thighs, burying his head in the folds of her skirt, and her hands gently caressed his head until he regained control and stood.

He meant it, he meant every bit of it.

Steam escaped from the old locomotive’s pistons, the last of the passengers—old peasants, young sleepy children, militiamen—were aboard. ‘Stay away from the milicianos,’ he demanded in mock sternness, smiling, as they approached the trainman. She said nothing, merely tightened her fingers on his.

‘The fascist dung didn’t hit the tracks,’ the Catalan answered Jake’s query; ‘we leave in three minutes.’

Sarah showed him the papers Jake had given her; he examined them quickly under his lamp, nodded approval. General Ernesto’s very own stamp.

They stood at the iron steps and spoke to one another as lovers do at parting. He reminded her for the tenth time that evening, ‘Go directly to the Hôtel d’Azur at the dock in Port Vendres, call the nearest British consular office to let them know your whereabouts. Don’t speak to anyone else and stay put.’

‘You will come soon?’

‘Yes; it’s a matter of a few days. I have to be careful.’

She of course believed him.

And why not? After the carabineros had left her with Jake, and they were alone, she and he faced one another in the bare shop. She was disheveled, her face white with anger, her eyes blue ice. ‘You once promised to help me leave Spain,’ she said coldly. ‘Now I am your prisoner.’ He could see she despised him. So he must tell her quickly.

‘I love you more than life—more than the party, history, everything on earth. I love you, Sarah.’

Her eyes widened and she had to step back from him, to bite her lips to keep from crying out. Then she spoke harshly. ‘Against myself, despite myself, I love you. Life’s nothing to me without you, which is the way I suppose human beings love. With their life. But you are an assassin; despite all your great beliefs, you are a murderer!’

‘Yes,’ he answered, stepping as close to her as he dared, fearing she would repulse him. ‘I must tell you what I have done, so you will know it all.’

‘There are no excuses for murder,’ she said coldly.

‘I know—and I don’t intend to make any. It would be obscene. But I have to tell you because there’s no one else I can tell. You love me and that’s the least you can do—to listen.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

Quickly, without fringe or tassel, he told her all of it, from the moment he’d heard for the first time the talk about the universal city of man and it had filled his hungry belly to this very moment, and she stood and listened to all he said, hearing him to the end. ‘Abeunt studia in mores,’ he quoted her. ‘A man lives like a beast, he becomes a beast.’

So he told her what she could not doubt was the truth, told her without adornment, yet omitted no thought or even shadow of a thought. His memory was a cave strewn with the relics of his life. She loved him and despite herself she was warm with a lover’s pride for him—he had won; her love had worked its miracle.

‘I love you with my life,’ he said, ‘and that’s what I most want to do, love you with my life. That’s why I can tell you now I know there will be no paradise on earth because we are only half-men, half-beasts, striving to become men, and I can tell you this because I love you without sentimentality or romance or kisses or fucking though God knows I love to kiss and fuck you and have dreamt that I lay in your arms night and day.’

They stood in silence in the bare office which was lit only by a dying twilight, she before him, searching his green eyes in his lean strong face. The arrogance was gone from his face, and though it was a face which wore its turmoil and travail heavily, he appeared suddenly younger to her, his own age—a young man who wanted to live even against the circumstances of his life. She moved towards him and they embraced, whispering words of love to one another, tender, yet bitter.

‘You’ll go,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll stay here, serving out my time. It won’t be long.’

‘You can’t come with me?’

He answered nothing. Merely kissed her.

She repeated her question.

‘We better put the black shades down and the lights on. The twilight’s too romantic.’ He smiled as he pulled himself from her arms.

In the dimly lighted office, the black shades down, she looked tired, haggard. He poured some wine for her from an earthen jug, some for himself. They were quiet as she waited for his answer.

‘I can’t leave now, Sarah,’ he finally said. He had to be careful not to frighten her or all would be lost. ‘The depots, the mountain passes are guarded by Roegen’s men, some by Franco’s, and others by both together. Comrades in arms. Do you understand me, Sarah?’

She blanched, nodded. Hesitatingly, she asked, ‘Will your life be in danger from them?’

‘If I’m not careless, no. If you go and I remain, do my work, they’ll assume I’m still one of them even though I helped you get out. They’ll attribute that to my inherited memory of the archaic past. I have to play it their way, or as Vlanoc would say it, horse meat, the glue factory! Ha ha ha.’

Sarah shuddered, but he took her in his arms, warmed her spine with his hands. ‘We’ll have a good life together,’ he promised.

‘Yes, my love.’

They talked, made plans for the future. It became dark outside. She washed in the lavatory in the back, brushed her clothes. He combed and braided her long brown hair as he used to do in Murcia. Then led her through the old Gothic quarter to the Barrio Chino for dinner at a sailors’ bar, they had ample time, the train for the border did not leave until midnight.

After eating the usual fish and rice, he took her upstairs to a dingy room. They had an hour. Soon they would have to say hasta la vista.

Jake disentangled himself from her arms, sat up in the dark room. She started to rise. ‘No,’ he whispered, ‘not yet. I have something to tell you. When I left Paris and reported to Roegen and he had me thrown into the lines to die, you know what I thought, Sarah? I was getting what I deserved. Hadn’t I betrayed the party by falling in love? Now I feel as if I had humiliated not only myself, but you as well. I feel ashamed. The taste in my mouth is a stench.’ She pulled him gently down to her lips, kissed his ears. ‘You know, I found the front boring. Everyone makes so much of it. All it was was death. Death is very boring, Sarah. No challenge—the most simple solution to all the problems of life. Aa, shit, I came to Spain to fight for freedom and I’ve betrayed myself—how could I help but end up betraying freedom?’ She kissed his eyes now, his cheeks, the corner of his mouth, and he could taste her tears. ‘I want to live now, Sarah. To live with you. Is it banal to say, my love, I want to live with you a man with his wife, with music and petty quarrels and all the little things? If it’s banal, I don’t care. That’s what I want.’ She kissed his lips, his throat, his chin, and still he spoke in a hoarse whisper. ‘I don’t speak of you, Sarah, you’ve made an egoist out of me with your love. All I do is think of me being happy with you. Will you be happy with me? Will you ever forgive me—I can feel deep inside you a hatred for me, for what I’ve done—will you ever forgive me?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said in his ear. ‘I just don’t know.’

‘Having destroyed life, and now having found it in a few short hours with you, Sarah, I’m greedy, I want to make life, create it. Am I being foolish?’

‘No, my darling,’ she said, her hands becoming light with hunger, a terrible hunger. ‘Give me your weight then and fill me with your life. Hurry, my love, hurry! and give me life as well …’

It was then they had heard the first bombs falling west of the city and he had forced her to dress so they could leave the fire-trap above the sailors’ bar in the Barrio Chino.

Now as they stood at the iron steps of a coach headed for the border how could she not believe him when he said he would come to her in Port Vendres in a few days?

‘Take care of yourself,’ she whispered as he kissed her cheek.

‘Sure, honey,’ he smiled.

‘Don’t do anything foolhardy,’ she said. His heart was suffocating and he thought perhaps he ought to make a run for it—but only for a moment. The dogs were about, he could smell them.

The brakeman at the cab of the engine swung his red lantern; the trainman at the iron steps swung his blue; the coach wheels squealed tentatively. ‘Pronto, compañera,’ the trainman called.

They kissed once more and she eased herself from his clinging arms.

Salud, Sarah,’ he called after her as she hurried up the iron steps into the blackness of the jolting train.

She turned hurriedly on the platform of the slow-moving train to throw him a lover’s kiss; running alongside he shouted, ‘I love you, Sarah, I love you,’ and then with a great scream and roar the train hurtled off into the black hole of night, and Jake Starr stood watching as it—and she—disappeared.

As he turned to retrace his steps to his office to call Carl Vlanoc, he spoke half-aloud, bitterly. ‘It was all true. I love her.’

Twenty minutes later, in his office, he was connected with Murcia and Vlanoc. ‘She’s gone. She won’t talk—she thinks I’m coming after her.’ As Vlanoc laughed, he waited. At attention.

Then his superior said, ‘And the black boy?’

‘Being taken care of right this minute. They’re probably digging the grave.’

‘Good. Return to Murcia. We have work to do.’

‘The car’s being repaired at the Intendencia. I might need an extra day.’

‘All right. But get your arschloch here fast. No monkey business. Understand!’

‘Yes, Carl,’ he said. ‘K Vozhdyu,’ and he hung up the receiver.

All night Dionisio drove, his foot really hammering that gas pedal, the guard in the rear slept and snored, and Ballard drank and drank until there was nothing more to drink. Who cared? Once he did say to the Spanish boy at the wheel, ‘I could hit you with a bottle and escape.’

Dionisio laughed harshly. ‘How far could you run, el moro? You are marked for life.’ Then Dionisio hid an eye like a brown button behind a puckered buttonhole, and returned his head to the road, and the car pounded on, whining.

Perhaps Ballard was more frightened than he knew. Throughout Loyal Spain and beyond General Ernesto was known as a killer, and also that he ruled Barcelona with a ruthless hand, and it was known of course to Ballard that their revenge was always full and complete. But with the alcohol and the fear he slept, and Dionisio never once stopped, driving the entire night.

When Ballard awoke, the guard was gone and Dionisio’s demon-like face was over his and for a moment Greg thought he had crossed the river Styx. But Dionisio was smiling and he was gently shaking him. ‘We have arrived,’ he whispered. ‘And now you depart.’

Ballard shook his head to clear the frogs from his eyes, and stepped, shaking, from the car. He stood on a precipice. Below were red-tiled roofs hidden among golden mimosa, fresh green cypress standing a guard of honor. Beyond he saw the Mediterranean, yellow crimson from the dawning sun. Dionisio stood at his side, holding a pistol almost as big as himself, and Ballard grabbed for an empty bottle. Dionisio laughed and pointed to their left.

There were the Pyrenees, huge, purple, awesome, and below a railroad station. Port Bou. And there a train waited, headed into the tunnel leading to Port Vendres in France, and his face must have shown what it had just learned.

,’ Dionisio said, and he nodded his pointy chin towards the train. ‘It was a cruel joke, but we did not wish you to look too happy if we were stopped by Roegen’s men.’ He then handed Ballard two envelopes. One contained Greg’s papers, the salvo conducto and false passport, the other he was to open only when he was in France.

‘Now I must leave you,’ Dionisio said sadly. ‘I must thank you for having come to help us in our fight for liberty. El capitán has told me that you fought well, are a brave man. But that is not of great importance; what is important is that you came to fight. It would perhaps have been better if you had fought in a Spanish battalion, not as one of theirs, because we have come to hate them. Jacobito told me you are not of the partido and that is why I have helped you. Free Spain is grateful to all who have come to fight for justice and liberty; she has only hatred for those who betrayed exactly what it is we fight for.’

El capitán knows that you hate his party?’

Dionisio seemed not to hear what Greg had said. He repeated, ‘I must leave. Jacobito has written what he wishes to say in his letter to you. Just remember, despite all the evil he has done—and he has done much, he has been cruel and mindless—to you he has been a friend. Salud, el moro.’

What could Greg Ballard say? They stared into each other’s eyes, three feet separating them. Greg didn’t know what it was at that moment which moved him, he wasn’t a very demonstrative man, had never been—perhaps it was that shrunken Spanish face or the vivid eyes or the fantastically proud carriage of his head or that impish smile—but he wished to embrace him, to beg his pardon for the evil committed in his name. To weep, head bowed before him. He didn’t do any of these.

He merely smiled, his face black and creased and wrinkled from war, from the terrible agony in his back, from that green-white corpse in the hills of Romanillos. ‘Muchas gracias,’ he said. ‘Tell el capitán I thank him but I’ll never forgive him.’

Dionisio shrugged coldly. ‘I myself feel the same way.’

Abajo Franco, arriba España,’ Ballard declaimed and took the Spaniard’s small fist in his.

‘No, no,’ Dionisio said. ‘Down with Franco, up with life. La vida!’ He smiled, then was gone.

And Greg Ballard was on the train. The train was in the tunnel. He was in France.

The air was fresh and the agony in his back let up. Greg sat down on the creaking wooden station platform of Port Vendres and read Jake’s letter written in his firm, square hand …

Dionisio will have got you to the train in time. He gave you a wild ride, I’m sure. He’s an outspoken decent Spanish boy whom I fired from his job because he told me I was a murderer for having executed Daniel Nuñez and his comrades in the dungeon of the Murcia cathedral. He’s going to the front to die. That’s what he wants. Better to die fighting for liberty than to work in sewers, he said. I agree.

… You advised me to go get my girl and make a life together. Not yet. A man doesn’t upend a profound commitment as easily as he changes a pair of sweaty socks. A man doesn’t look upon his life lived to this point, say ‘So sorry’, and serenely go on to another life. Each second of time ahead of a man is burdened with the years behind him. A child, perhaps, skips lightly ahead, not a man. But let me say to you whom I know and admire, I’m sorry. Sorry most for Webster. He didn’t have a chance—we seduced him the way a blind man is seduced by an open elevator shaft.

You suffer, I know. To ask you not to suffer would be stupid and perhaps obscene. Suffer you will—but try to remember that it was we who stuffed him down your throat. You choked near to death on him, so you vomited him up like so much undigested meat. We destroyed him, we destroyed our comrades—live soldiers are the best soldiers, but dead heroes make the best propaganda. I hope we haven’t destroyed you. Of course, if white America hasn’t then nothing will, but time and yourself. From personal experience I can say no one and nothing can do as good an axe job on a man as he can himself. I want to tell you, though, if it had been I, I would have shot the pols, not Webster. But of course I’m more radical than you.

I have to get on with this, I have little time. After the fact, there’s always little time.

At the dock of Port Vendres you will find a small inn, Hôtel d’Azur. There you will also find Sarah Ruskin. It’s my guess she came off the same tunnel train you did and went right there. How she got to France is too complicated to discuss now. It has to do with dealing and double-dealing in the apparatus at which I’ve become a master. I bow with modesty. I was able to use her as decoy while Dionisio was on his way to get you out. They had something else in mind for you. After you convince Sarah—and you must—that she has to leave with you, you must go to the pier and charter a power boat to take you both to Marseilles. Immediately. Vlanoc and Roegen will know within an hour that you have left Spain and that I have broken discipline. You must act swiftly. Before you leave the inn with Sarah phone the American consul in Marseilles and tell him you are in France without your passport and would he please meet you at the dock. Tell him you are in danger. He will be arrogant, he won’t understand, might even be stupid, he will surely be sore, but he will be there.

Sarah knows you’re my friend for I’ve spoken to her about you. Tell her to accept the fact that it is impossible for her and me. Time moves too quickly—there just is no time. Tell her if I beat time, I’ll come to her in England. I write you the truth: I’m scared, real shitass scared. I’m like an old barrel on a runaway truck, I can hear the staves rattling. Tell Sarah to go home and to forget me.

You’re a seafaring man, go to the sea. I’m a roadman on a oneway road, twenty foot unscaleable walls on either side. I’m going to break the walls down, and you know what that means, don’t you? Or are you still Candide in Spain?

Salud! As Dionisio always says, La vida! Life!

There followed a few hastily written sheets which looked as if they had been crumpled together to be thrown away then smoothed out with his hand. Ballard read them, though it became immediately apparent they were written to Sarah …

I was supposed to doublecross you. You ran out on Ruskin at exactly the wrong time. In a few days the party’s going to announce to the world his membership in the party. Spain convinced him. The foremost et cetera has joined the vanguard et cetera. He has insisted no harm be done you—for which you must be thankful. He is still human, but Roegen has been assigned to see that he drops that silly affectation. How bourgeois. It was my job, since the entire world knows you and I were lovers, to trick you into remaining silent long enough so that we could make the announcement to the breathlessly waiting world uncluttered with subsidiary complications. I was able to use your situation to divert attention from Greg for a few days. Now you are both free. Another illustration, Comrade, of the efficacy of the unity of opposites.

Sarah is love is freedom. That’s my new slogan. I told you I love you with my life and that’s what I want most to do, love you with my life. Once I had an idea and it became greater than all life. I killed for it. But I met you. And you became greater than my idea. Sarah is love is freedom. Is that an idea, too? No. Love and freedom are immutable elements of life. And to me you are life. Sarah. I am crying, my love, forgive me.

Oh, Sarah, if by some good fortune or miracle I seeded you with life our last time together, rear him or her to remember always that it is better to stand at the wall than to concede an inch to the alleged realities of our time—or any time. To live, as one of the Spanish philosophers has said, is precisely to have to do something to prevent our circumstances from annihilating us.

I love you, and I shall try very hard to live. Don’t cry, Sarah—no, why do I say that? Cry, my love. Cry.

Greg Ballard sat on the station platform for many minutes, never once looking up to see the faces which belonged to the feet pounding all around him. Finally he urged himself to fold the sheets neatly and to put them in his pocket. He must hurry. He rose from the creaking wood platform and left the station.

It was early dawn and somehow it reminded him of that early day ages ago when he and Archie and Joe had crawled out to get the hand. Gray-streaked dawn like an oyster shell still dripping with sea. Behind him, to the south, he saw the mountains, massive, purple gray, like giant dinosaurs fast asleep. When he reached the waterfront, the gray had begun to recede from the dawn like fading paint. The sea was calm, its grayness merging into a vivid green.

Soon he found the inn, and after some difficulty with the concierge, he got the man to lead him to Sarah’s room. He knocked, and she answered immediately without opening the door, asking who it was. ‘It’s Greg Ballard,’ he called out and in a moment she opened her room, and he could see she had been washing her face.

She looked Spanish to him, not so much beautiful as striking, with a real jaw and a strong nose, softened by long plaited chestnut hair which hung now to below her shoulders, and deeply intelligent blue eyes, reddened by lack of sleep and worry. She was tall and full, and moved with unselfconscious grace; looking at her, he got a feeling of courage and compassion and a fine, sensitive intelligence. He could understand easily why Jake loved her and why it was she had been able to move him, and knew a momentary pang of envy.

For a brief moment he just stared, but she greeted him with a quick smile, her strong face flickering white from the sun’s rays refracted by the sea through the window of her room. ‘I just arrived myself,’ she said softly, as they shook hands. ‘You were on the same train?’

‘Just from Port Bou,’ he said. ‘Jake got me there by car.’

‘You saw him in Barcelona?’

‘No,’ Greg said, wondering how to tell her the news he brought.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked sharply, perceiving his hesitancy.

She wasn’t a woman one patronized, he saw that immediately. ‘We haven’t much time, Sarah,’ he said abruptly, handing her Jake’s letters to read.

Sarah gave him a fresh towel, nodded in the direction of the basin and pitcher, then walked swiftly to the window.

He washed, got rid of the stink of manzanilla and bad brandy, straightened out his clothes, and then, first telling her he’d be right back, went down to the tiny lobby of the inn to call the American consulate in Marseilles. Jake was right, the man was sore at being roused so early, was arrogant, didn’t quite understand, but said he would have someone meet him and Sarah at the dock. Greg spoke to the concierge about hiring a boat to take them across the Golfe du Lion and the man told him there would be no difficulty, stepping to the door and pointing out a dock a few short steps from the inn.

When he returned to the room, Sarah was still at the window, staring at the letters in her hand, committing them to memory, it seemed.

He was impatient; Jake had written that Roegen would know within an hour that they had crossed the border. He had to get her and himself out of Port Vendres. ‘We must hurry, Sarah,’ he said, coming up to her.

She looked up at him, startled, her strong face fragmented by grief. ‘He told me to cry, but I’ve run out of tears.’

No more tears Archie had said after they’d found Mack Berg. Buen apetito. They were at a time of drought. Greg said nothing, knowing that for her and for him there would yet be many tears.

After a short silence, she asked, ‘What will happen to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Greg answered truthfully.

‘He’ll be all alone,’ she whispered.

So was Daniel Nuñez, he thought, and Cromwell Webster. ‘Yup,’ he said quietly, almost coldly, she thought. ‘All alone.’