by Alan Furst
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.
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.
Then several things happened very quickly. A red flickering that seemed almost to come from the beacon itself. He drove his thumb down hard, but the joypoint, the angle where his tracer bullets came together, was high. He corrected. The red flickers got much larger. There were three figures on the roof—one of them perhaps a woman? Shoved his foot to the floor, felt the plane kick free of its dead weight, then banked hard to the south, laying all the juice he had into the engine.
It took quite some time before he realized that he had a problem. Nothing like a six-second bombing run to ice over the nervous system. But, as he flew over a small forest of pine and cork oak, he discovered that his right foot was throbbing like a giant clock. He looked down, moved the foot, saw a pfennig-size half moon of rushing treetops flanked by two bright red droplets. As sweat stood suddenly on his brow, he clutched frantically, testicles first, at his body. Even as the throbbing became hammering, he breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God, an honorable wound and no more. He climbed to make sure the 109’s innards were not damaged, waggled the wings, and headed for Seville.
Something else had gone wrong, but that he did not notice for some time, and by then the Nationalist airfield at Almodóvar was out of the question. He tapped the gasoline gauge, but it refused to change its mind. Actually, he’d been extremely lucky. A bullet had ruptured his gasoline tank, and by rights he should have been blown all over Madrid. As it was, he’d simply showered the rooftops with aviation gas.
He spent only a moment hating himself for not checking the gauge, then concentrated on surviving the error. He needed a field. Not a potato field. Too bumpy—the 109 would hammer itself to pieces before he could get it stopped. Prevailing pilot-mess opinion was that the smoothest emergency landings were made on wheat fields. The ocher patches were detectable from the air and, by late September, the wheat was cut and the ground tended to be smooth, without surprising contours to wreck you just when you should be rolling to a safe stop. And, looking down, he was in luck. Everything was going to work out, after all. The early sun lit up a few yellow squares beneath him and he chose one and hoped it was lucky. He had to keep his attention focused, the foot was beginning to gnaw and bite, and he didn’t want to stall on the way down. It would be an excellent emergency landing. He’d fly again as soon as the foot healed, and the aeroplane could be trucked back to Seville. Since there was hardly any gas, the danger of fire on impact was minimal. In a way, his luck held.
It held all the way down the chute to the field. It held as he bounced. It held as he braked with the flaps. Held as the 109 rolled to a stop. Everything seemed to flood out of him at that moment, and he fell back against the seat and let his hands dangle and closed his eyes. The engine had stalled. He turned the key to off. Listened as the birds began to sing again. It had been a woman at the machine gun, he was sure of it now. The long hair stayed printed on his memory. These Spanish women, he thought. You had to admire them. Still, it would be wiser to leave that fact out of his report. That was the sort of story that got around and stuck to your career like glue.
He came to suddenly. Had he blacked out for a moment? Somehow he had to find a telephone. Recollecting his error, he wondered idly if he had not been ever so slightly unprepared for the mission. Too much Evangelina, perhaps. A fighting man could not leave his wits in bed. He moved the foot and grunted with pain. He needed a doctor. That thought got him moving, and he shoved the canopy back, grabbed the sides of the cockpit and hoisted himself to a sitting position directly above the wing. And, luck held, here came some people to help him. Peasants, no doubt, in their dark blue cotton shirts and trousers. These must be the peasants who cut the wheat, he reasoned, for they are carrying scythes. But, he looked around to make sure, the wheat was already cut.
He briefly fingered the flap of the holster holding his sidearm, but there were at least twenty of them, so he threw his hands into the air and called out, “Rendición, rendición,” meaning that he surrendered. But at this they only laughed.
Faye shut her eyes when Señora Tovar, the janitor’s wife, soaped her breasts—despite herself, she was very embarrassed to be touched in this way—and the woman noticed and said “Scha!” in amazement at American notions of privacy. Did this girl not know that it was a woman’s destiny to have her hands in everything unsacred, from placenta to horse manure and all that flowed from babies and wounds and old men? That by the time a woman was twenty there was nothing in the world she had not touched? She shrugged, smiled, and moved the girl’s delicate little washing cloth to spread lather across her shoulders. Just down the street, at 14 Calle de Victoria, three women were hard at work on her clothing, rubbing it furiously on washboards as the fume of gasoline rose in their faces.
As the glorious hot water poured down on her, Faye bubbled inside. It had been the most exciting day of her life. It had to be shared! But with who? Her parents would be frightened, badly frightened. Penelope Hastings? Penny would be most deliciously envious, but she would, Faye knew, show the letter to her mother, an endearingly foggy society lady who always asked Faye, “Is there, dear, um, anything you don’t, um, eat?” Poor Mrs. Hastings, entirely flustered by the fear of feeding something wrong to Penelope’s Jewish friend from college. And poor Mrs. Hastings was just the type, she was certain, who would simply have to telephone the child’s mother.
The Pembroke alumnae magazine?
Fran Bernstein (’33) pens a note from sunny Spain to say she’s enjoying her visit with Bolshevist elements of Republican forces defending Madrid. Recently our Franny shot it out with a Nazi fighter plane and got herself doused with aviation gasoline in the process! A victory celebration followed as ladies of the neighborhood forced the janitor to turn
on the water, at which time shy Fran was unceremoniously stripped down and washed.
Obediently, she let Señora Tovar turn her around and scrub her back. Her eyes still burned; she knew they’d be bright red for days. Andres, of course, would suggest visits to doctors. Would insist.
This was a less than happy thought. She would have to tell him about her bicycle lock, and she knew this would create great stir and turmoil. Clearly, somebody in the building was a traitor, a Fifth Columnist. And a sneak thief.
She had told the excited men of the neighborhood Checa that she’d found the lock open. One of them, she knew from his cold stare, had not believed her. But he had said nothing. She was the hero of the hour. Not only had she retrieved the lantern, she had helped to shoot up a plane—though the damn thing had flown away to safety—and certainly, everybody said, spoiled the Nazi’s aim. The bomb had fallen in the street, breaking every window for a hundred yards but sparing the gas and water mains, which allowed, when the Checa men had been shooed away, the triumphal procession first to Tovar the janitor, then to the aqua tile bathroom on the third floor.
Number 54 Avenida Saldana, it turned out, was a Republican armory, a secret one. If the blue lantern had been left in place, half the neighborhood would have gone skyward, and the people in the building—including the humming mother and her child—would have gone with it. When Faye had returned, ecstatic, to the rooftop, Renata had lit the lantern and placed it on the parapet. “Let us discover who seeks such a light,” she’d said grimly, running the bolt on the Hotchkiss gun and centering it on the trapdoor to the roof. When the plane came, though, it was Faye who grabbed the handles and Renata who fed the belt. Curiously, she had heard nothing. Had seen the twinkling on the 109’s wings but had never, she admitted to herself, realized what this meant. Had, in fact, moments later, burned her fingers on a silvery lump half buried in the roof tar, and only then had her mind made the connection that sent a single wracking shiver from shoulders to knees. Renata too had been soaked by gasoline but, being ever and truly Renata, had insisted on her own bathing arrangements.
