He had been pulled from his car on the nineteenth while trying to find the coast road. His driver had abandoned him at the first sound of shots, and the dentist, always at sixes and sevens when it came to navigating the roads in and around the city, had gotten lost. Two women and a rough man had beaten and then shot him. The dentist had lain very still for nearly an hour before the loss of blood had finally killed him. One of the women had given the car to Gardenyes in exchange for five completely useless Russian rifles, while the other had cursed her friend for being so stupid. In the meantime, both wife and mistress continued to wait patiently, certain that they would soon be resuming their previously well-balanced lives, albeit with a vaguely Venetian flair.
Hoffner was examining a stack of rubber-banded wooden tongue depressors he had found in the pocket next to the backseat when Gabriel turned on the engine. Aurelio was in the seat next to Gabriel, Gardenyes still in the toilet.
Hoffner said, “He doesn’t use any of these, does he, when things go south? I’m thinking he’s more of a bullet-to-the-head sort of man.”
Mueller tossed his cigarette to the street and leaned in as two spears of smoke streamed from his nose. “That’d be my guess, but you never know. I wouldn’t be all that eager to find out.” Mueller leaned in closer and spoke quietly. “Nothing stupid, Nikolai. You don’t know these boys. I don’t know them, and I’ve spent time with them. I’d like to be at each of their funerals.”
Gardenyes appeared at the café door and quickly made his way over to the car.
Mueller said, “They’ll know where to find me.” He stood upright as Gardenyes got in the other side and settled in next to Hoffner. “Three days,” said Mueller.
He was saying something else, but the car was already in gear.
* * *
The third-floor corridor of the Hospital Clinic was like any other—stark, white-walled, and overly sanitized. Hoffner had always found something incongruous in the heavy silence of such places: life-and-death decisions behind each door, and yet never more than a whisper from those making them. Even the air moved hesitantly, peering slowly around each corner, as if coming face to face with a forgotten gurney or a figure slumped listlessly across a chair might be too much. Gardenyes walked with purpose, but it was a false bravura that led the way. He, too, was doing his best to keep the healing stench from his lungs.
The double doors at the end of the corridor were fitted with two square windows, level with the eye and large enough to give a hint of the vast ward that lay beyond them. The word RECUPERACIÓN was set above the doors in thick black tile, though the letters seemed to be mocking themselves, saying, “You won’t find it in here, and you know it.” Gardenyes pushed through and Hoffner followed.
The smell was at once sweeter, and the air seemed to widen as if it were reaching for the corners of the ceiling high above. Eight rows of cots, perhaps twenty in each, stretched to the back wall, where three enormous windows—each a collection of iron-rimmed square panes—tinted the sun a gray-yellow. There were pockets of hushed exchanges between the four or five nurses scattered about, none in white, but what else would they be? The door swung closed behind Aurelio, and the squeak of the hinge echoed before it vanished into the dust.
A woman was sitting behind a desk. She had a rifle propped up against it, but there was little chance she knew how to use it. She wore a green short-sleeved shirt, and when she stood, a pair of brown trousers appeared that hugged her narrow waist. They were held in place by a thin leather belt that ran too long through the loops. Her arms were equally slender, everything long and fine, although the hair was short and too carelessly held to just above the shoulders. Hoffner would have expected the jet black from the coast road this morning, but this had a lighter tint to it and seemed a much better fit for the pale, suntanned face and blue eyes. She might have been thirty, but the eyes had her older.
“ Salud,” Gardenyes said indifferently. “We need to see a doctor.”
The woman looked at all four men. “Is someone injured?”
“No,” Gardenyes said, scanning the room behind her impatiently. He looked at her. “Does this hospital employ doctors?”
“It does.”
“Then I imagine you can go and get us one.” When she continued to look at him, Gardenyes said, “My name is Josep Gardenyes. When and if you find a doctor, he’ll know the name. Tell him I’m waiting to talk to him.” When he saw her still standing there, he drew up his shoulders. “Well?”
Again she looked at the others. “Of course.” She saw Gardenyes reaching for his cigarettes and added, “We don’t permit smoking in here. Not with all the open wounds.” She moved smoothly past them and out the swinging doors.
Gardenyes pulled the cigarettes from his shirt pocket, put one to his lips, and lit up.
Gabriel—who had been complaining about hospitals and the sick and the stink of formaldehyde since the drive over—shivered with too much drama and said, “Someone’s dying in here. You can smell it. It was worse two weeks ago, I can tell you that. Now it’s just the old dead, not the fresh kind.”
Aurelio said, “She’s from León.” He was at the desk, sliding his fingers along the few papers that were spread across it. “The hair and the eyes. People always think I’m Castilian. I’m not, but they always think it. She was pretty.” Finding nothing of interest, he began to open the drawers.
“Leave it,” said Gardenyes. He seemed unable to smoke the cigarette fast enough. He was at the door, staring out, then not. Gabriel might have put a voice to it, but it was Gardenyes who truly hated this place. “What takes so long?” he said, as he dropped the cigarette to the floor. He lit another, and Hoffner stepped over and picked up the stub.
Hoffner said, “So where is it you’re from?”
All three looked over as if he had asked the most idiotic question imaginable. Aurelio shut the drawer, Gardenyes looked back out through the window of the door, and Gabriel simply shook his head in disbelief. Hoffner had no idea why.
Gardenyes suddenly stepped back and moved to the desk. He dropped the half-smoked cigarette to the floor and hid it under his boot as the door squeaked open. Gabriel and Aurelio quickly moved into line. It was like watching three schoolboys waiting for a caning. The woman reappeared, holding several small vials in her hands.
“I’ve found you a doctor,” she said, as she moved back to her chair and sat. She placed the vials on the desk. “Unfortunately, she has no idea who Josep Gardenyes is.” She looked at Hoffner and pointed to his hand. “I told you not to smoke in here.”
Hoffner realized he was still holding the butt. He nodded apologetically. “No, of course not,” and dropped it into the can at the side of the desk. “My mistake.”
She looked up at Gardenyes. “What is it I can do for you?”
Gardenyes was still trying to digest the last few moments. “You’re a doctor?” he said.
“It would seem so, yes.”
“You’re a woman.”
She nodded. “That would also be right.”
Gardenyes was still struggling. “We’re—we’re looking for Germans.”
She said, “Well, that’s two out of three. I know a little Dutch, if that helps?”
Hoffner couldn’t help but smile, and she looked over at him. He thought she might return it, but that would have done neither of them any good. Instead, she looked at Gardenyes and said, “By the way, I’ve saved fascists. The first day, the day after that, yesterday. We all did. We all have. We make no distinctions. So if you’re here to round up—”
“You misunderstand,” said Hoffner. She looked at him, and he explained. “Not Germans. A German. I was hoping you might have records from the last week or two.”
She seemed remarkably at ease with the three bandit anarchists standing over her. It was the strange one at the end—with his even stranger valise and satchel—that was causing the hesitation. Had Hoffner been looking for it, he might have seen something of the familiar in the gaze. Deep and a
biding loss was so readily apparent to those who shared it, but Hoffner had long ago given up looking for such things. It was enough for her to blink it away.
She said, “And I would hand over these records to you because you happen to be in the company of Josep Gardenyes, onetime leader of the anarchist patrullas to whom half of Barcelona owes its safety and undying gratitude.” She looked at Gardenyes. “Yes, I know who you are. I can’t speak for the other half.”
Gardenyes was rather too pleased with himself at this. To his credit, he indulged it only a moment.
She looked again at Hoffner. “It wouldn’t make any difference even if you had Buenaventura Durruti himself standing here. This is Barcelona. We’re led by anarchists. We have no records.”
Gardenyes had fully recovered; he was once again on solid ground. “So you’ll help my friend, then?”
She was still looking at Hoffner. “You call Gardenyes a friend?”
Hoffner recognized the toying disdain in the eyes. Men like Gardenyes were a necessary irritation to a woman like this—a woman who could sit perfectly straight in a ward filled with the dying. It gave her an uncommon strength.
“He calls me one,” said Hoffner. “You can take that as you like.”
Half a minute later the three Spaniards were on their way back to the car. Gardenyes assured Hoffner that he would look into the names and locations Wilson had provided—“Yes, yes, of course, no worries, we’ll be in touch.” It was a flurry of empty promises, leaving Hoffner alone with the desk and the woman behind it.
* * *
She called herself Mila, and he had been right to think her older. Not that much older, but enough distance from thirty to make sense of the steadying compassion she showed as they walked along one of the rows. It was one thing to reassure with a well-schooled, naïve precision. It was another to understand the terror that a bleach-soaked sheet and a paper-thin blanket could bring to a man staring hopelessly up at an endless ceiling.
One of the men propped himself on his elbows as she came closer. His face was full with color, healthy even, and held a look of unbridled hatred. His right hand was thickly wrapped. He glanced at Hoffner and, for a moment, seemed uncertain whether he would say anything. Mila came to the end of his cot, and the hatred got the better of him.
“Did you decide on it?” the man said. “Was it you?”
She stood there, allowing him to stare through her. “Yes,” she said, “it was. It’s a terrible thing. I’m sorry.”
There was a silence, and the man again looked unsure. He had expected more, a reason—the details for why his leg was no longer his. A man would have comforted with such things and forced the hatred to run its course.
“The other will be fine,” she said. “And the hand. But it doesn’t make any more sense of it, I know.”
The man continued to stare up at her; then he turned his head, and his eyes seemed to search for something. Finally, he began to shake his head slowly. “You’re sorry,” he said, but the hatred was already draining from him.
“I am. It’s a terrible, terrible thing.”
Hoffner saw it at once: she knew this one would never give in to self-pity. It was why she could console. She began to walk and Hoffner followed.
Ten beds down, she stopped again. “If he’s here, he’ll be in with these. I heard German from a few of them.”
She left him to it. There were six men—boys, really—all with various degrees of injuries, the worst with half his face covered in white bandages. Traces of red had seeped through where the eye would have been. Georg was not among them.
The interviews were brief. One of the boys had, in fact, been involved with the games, a javelin thrower now living in Paris whose left leg was in plaster up to the mid-thigh. He had taken a bayonet somewhere along the Diagonal but had managed to get a round off before his attacker had done more damage. The loss of blood had kept the boy in bed for over a week.
“Bit ironic,” the boy said. “A bayonet. Just imagine what it would have been if I’d been a hammer thrower.”
Hoffner was glad for the resiliency. “And you were part of the German team?” he said.
“I’m a German. What else would I be?”
The boy remembered no one resembling Georg, no filmmakers. It had all been catch-as-catch-can, half the team making it only as far as Paris before being told to turn back (to wherever they had come from) as a war had broken out. Hoffner ran through the names from Georg’s wire. It was pointless. None of the boys recognized a single one.
Mila was writing out something when Hoffner drew up.
“I thought there were no files,” he said, through a half smile.
She continued to write. “We’d have nowhere to put them even if this was one.” She quickly finished with it, set it to the side, and looked up at him. “Was he your German?”
Hoffner found himself taking a moment too long with the gaze. “No.” He nodded back at the beds. “Nice boy. He wants to get in on the fighting. That’s a shame.”
“Is it?”
“Yes—it is.”
She seemed surprised by the answer. “He’ll have his chance.”
“Really?”
“A leg like that—young and healthy—takes about three weeks. You think we’ll still be singing in the streets three weeks from now?”
“I wasn’t planning on being here.”
“No, I’m sure you weren’t.”
For some reason Hoffner had his pack of cigarettes in his hand. He shook one to his lip and saw her staring up at him. “Right,” he said, and removed it.
She looked over her shoulder and said to the nurse nearest her, “I’m taking five minutes. I’ll be outside.” She opened the drawer, slid the sheets in, and stood. “I’m assuming you have more than one in the pack?”
* * *
It took a bit of muscle to hoist up the window at the far end of the corridor, but she managed it. She stepped out onto the roof, and Hoffner followed.
The view was mostly trees with a few buildings cut in between. The heat lay across the black-tarred roofing like exhaustion and seemed to rise to just below the chin. Hoffner felt his neck instantly wet. He lit her cigarette, and she let out a long stream of smoke.
“You’ve come a long way for one German,” she said, as she stared out across the trees. “You think he’ll mean as much to you when you find him?”
Hoffner lit up. “Nice to hear when. There’s been a lot of if with everyone else.”
“I might have said if, but that wouldn’t make me much of a doctor, would it?”
“Woman doctor. That’s uncommon.”
She ignored the obvious. “So where in Germany?”
He wiped his neck and his fingers grew slick. “Berlin.”
“That’s not a nice place to be these days”—she looked over at him—“or maybe it is? Is it a nice place to be?”
He took a long pull and nodded out at the buildings. “I’m guessing these saw a lot of the fighting.”
She stared at him until she knew he was growing uncomfortable. “No,” she said. “Everyone needs a hospital. They left it alone.”
“You must have been busy.”
“Yes.” She continued to look at him. It was impossible not to let her. “Finding someone in Spain these days. That’s—” The word trailed off. He expected her to say more, but she did well with silence.
He said, “He’s not here to fight. I’m thinking that should make it easier.”
“Easier to keep him alive or easier to find him?”
Hoffner had yet to figure out why she had taken him out here. He imagined it was an answer he might not want to have. “Both, I think.”
“Such is a father’s love.” The words were almost indifferent. She took a pull as she looked out again. It was several long moments before she said, “You speak a beautiful Spanish.”
Hoffner was studying the face. There was a thin line of perspiration above the lip. It pooled in tiny beads. She showed no thought of
brushing it away. “Thank you.”
“That’s also uncommon.” She took a last pull and dropped the cigarette to the roofing. It hissed at the touch of the tar. “Are the rest of the clothes in your valise as ridiculous as the ones you’re wearing?” She gave him no time to answer. “A decent pair of boots, a hat?” She ran her toe over the cigarette. “And I’m sure you’ve got a place to stay?”
“I appreciate the concern.”
“Do you?” She looked directly at him. “You’ll need that and the clothes if you want to find this nonfighting boy of yours. Why did he come, by the way?”
“Does it matter?”
He felt her eyes across him. She offered a quiet smile. “You can’t trust Gardenyes.”
“I think I know that.”
“Good. We have an extra room. And some clothes.”
The suddenness of it caught Hoffner off guard. “You’re being very generous.”
“This is Barcelona. This is what we do.”
“Is it?”
She drew her hand in the air across his chest. “They’ll be a bit big for you here, but the rest should be good.”
“And your husband can do without them?”
“There is no husband.”
“Brother?”
There was a moment in the eyes, and she started for the window. “I’ll write down the address. There should be some food. You look like you could use some sleep.”
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