by Alan Furst
Weisz knelt by his knapsack, found a small bag of tobacco and a packet of papers—he’d run out of Gitanes a week ago—and began to roll a cigarette. Age forty for another few months, he was of medium height, lean and compact, with long dark hair, not quite black, that he combed back with his fingers when it fell down on his forehead. He came from Trieste, and, like the city, was half-Italian, on his mother’s side, and half-Slovenian—long ago Austrian, thus the name—on his father’s. From his mother, a Florentine face, slightly hawkish, strongly made, with inquisitive eyes, a soft, striking gray—a face descended from nobility, perhaps, a face found in Renaissance portraits. But not quite. Spoiled by curiosity, and sympathy, it was not a face lit by a prince’s greed or a cardinal’s power. Weisz twisted the ends of the cigarette, held it between his lips, and flicked a military lighter, a steel cylinder that worked in the wind, until it produced a flame.
Sandoval, holding a distributor cap with dangling wires—the time-honored way to make sure one’s vehicle was still there in the morning—went off to start the car.
“Where is he taking us?” Weisz asked McGrath.
“North of here, he said, a few miles. He thinks the Italians are holding the road on the east side of the river. Maybe.”
They were in search of a company of Italian volunteers, remnants of the Garibaldi Battalion, now attached to the Republican Fifth Army Corps. Formerly, the Garibaldi Battalion, with the Thaelmann Battalion and the André Marty Battalion, German and French, had made up the Twelfth International Brigade, most of them sent home in November as part of a Republican political initiative. But one Italian company had elected to fight on, and Weisz and Mary McGrath were after their story.
Courage in the face of almost certain defeat. Because the Republican government, after two and a half years of civil war, held only Madrid, under siege since 1936, and the northeast corner of the country, Catalonia, with the administration now situated in Barcelona, some eighty-five miles from the foothills above the river.
McGrath screwed the top back on her canteen and lit an Old Gold. “Then,” she said, “if we find them, we’ll head up to Castelldans to file.” A market town to the north, and headquarters of the Fifth Army Corps, Castelldans had wireless/telegraph service and a military censor.
“Certainly today,” Weisz said. The artillery exchanges to the south had intensified, the Catalonian campaign had begun, they had to wire stories as soon as they could.
McGrath, a veteran correspondent in her forties, responded with a complicit smile, and looked at her watch. “It’s one-twenty A.M. in Chicago. So, afternoon edition.”
Parked by a wall in the courtyard, a military car. As Weisz and McGrath watched, Sandoval unhinged the raised hood and stepped back as it banged shut, then slid into the driver’s seat and, presently, produced a string of explosions—sharp and loud, the engine had no muffler—and a stuttering plume of black exhaust, the rhythm of the explosions slowing as he played with the choke. Then he turned, with a triumphant smile, and waved them over.
It was a French command car, khaki-colored but long bleached out by sun and rain, that had served in the Great War and, twenty years later, been sent to Spain despite European neutrality treaties—nonintervention élastique, the French called it. Not élastique enough—Germany and Italy had armed Franco’s Nationalists, while the Republican government received grudging help from the USSR and bought whatever it could on the black market. Still, a car was a car. When it arrived in Spain, someone with a brush and a can of red paint, someone in a hurry, had tried to paint a hammer and sickle on the driver’s door. Someone else had lettered J-28 in white on the hood, someone else had fired two bullets through the rear seat, and someone else had knocked out the passenger window with a hammer. Or maybe it had all been done by the same person—in the Spanish war, an actual possibility.
As they drove off, a man in a monk’s robe appeared in the courtyard of the chapel, staring at them as they left. They’d had no idea there was anyone in the monastery, but apparently he’d been hiding somewhere. Weisz waved, but the man just stood there, making sure they were gone.
Sandoval drove slowly on the rutted dirt track that ran by the river. Weisz smoked his cigarettes, put his feet up on the backseat and watched the countryside, scrub oak and juniper, sometimes a village of a few houses, a tall pine tree with crows ranged along its branches. They stopped once for sheep; the rams had bells around their necks that sounded a heavy clank or two as they walked, driven along by a scruffy little Pyrenees sheepdog who ran ceaselessly at the edges of the flock. The shepherd came to the driver’s window, touched his beret in salute, and said good morning. “They will cross the river today,” he said. “Franco’s Moors.” Weisz and the others stared at the opposite bank, but saw only reeds and poplars. “They are there,” the shepherd said. “But you cannot see them.” He spat, wished them good luck, and followed his sheep up the hill.
Ten minutes later, a pair of soldiers waved them down. They were breathing hard, sweating in the chill air, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Sandoval slowed but didn’t stop. “Take us with you!” one of them called out. Weisz looked out the back window, wondering if they would fire at the car, but they just stood there.
“Shouldn’t we take them?” McGrath said.
“They are running away. I should’ve shot them.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t have the heart for it,” Sandoval said.
After a few minutes, they were stopped again, an officer walking down the hill from the forest. “Where are you going?” he asked Sandoval.
“These are from the foreign newspapers, they are looking for the Italian company.”
“Which?”
“Italians. From the Garibaldi.”
“With red scarves?”
“Is that correct?” Sandoval asked Weisz.
Weisz told him it was. The Garibaldi Brigade had included both Communist and non-Communist volunteers. Most of the latter were officers.
“Then they are ahead of you, I believe. But you had better stay up on the ridge.”
A few miles further on, the track divided, and the car crawled up the steep slope, the hammering of its lowest gear echoing off the trees. On the top of the ridge, a dirt road ran north. From here, they had a better view of the Segre, a slow river, and shallow, gliding past gravel islands in midstream. Sandoval drove on, past a battery firing at the opposite bank. The artillerymen were working hard, carrying shells to the loaders, who put their fingers in their ears as the cannon fired, wheels rolling back with each recoil. Halfway up the hill, a shell burst above the trees, a sudden puff of black smoke that floated off on the wind. McGrath asked Sandoval to stop for a moment, then she got out of the car and took a pair of binoculars from her knapsack.
“You will be careful of the sun,” Sandoval said. Snipers were drawn to the reflective flash of sunlight off binoculars, could put a round through a lens from a great distance. McGrath used her hand as a shield, then gave the binoculars to Weisz. In pale, drifting smoke, he caught a glimpse of green uniform, perhaps a quarter mile from the western shore.
When they were back in the car, McGrath said, “They can see us, up on this ridge.”
“Certainly they can,” Sandoval said.
The line of the Fifth Army Corps strengthened as they drove north and, at the paved road that ran to the town of Serós, on the other side of the river, they found the Italian company, well dug in below the ridge. Weisz counted three Hotchkiss 6.5-mm machine guns, mounted on bipods—manufactured in Greece, he’d heard, and smuggled into Spain by Greek antiroyalists. There were, as well, three mortars. The Italian company had been ordered to hold an important position, covering the paved road, and a wooden bridge across the river. The bridge had been blown apart, leaving charred pilings standing in the riverbed, and a few blackened boards, washed up on the bank by the current. When Sandoval parked the car, a sergeant came over to see what they wanted. As Weisz and McGrath got out of the
car, he said, “This will be in Italian, but I’ll translate for you later.” She thanked him, and they both produced pads and pencils. That was all the sergeant needed to see. “A moment, please, I’ll get the officer.”
Weisz laughed. “Well, your name, at least.”
The sergeant grinned back at him. “That would be Sergeant Bianchi, right?” Don’t use my name, he meant. Signor Bianchi and Signor Rossi—Mr. White and Mr. Red—were the Italian equivalent of Smith and Jones, generic names for a joke or a comic alias. “Write whatever you want,” the sergeant said, “but I have family back there.” He strolled off and, a few minutes later, the officer arrived.
Weisz caught McGrath’s eye, but she didn’t see what he did. The officer was dark, his face not handsome, but memorable, with sharp cheekbones, beaked nose, inquisitive, hooded eyes, and a scar that curved from the corner of his right eye down to the middle of his cheek. On his head, the soft green cap of a Spanish infantryman, its high top, with long black tassel, flopped over. He wore a heavy black sweater beneath the khaki tunic, without insignia, of some army, and the trousers of another. Looped over one shoulder, a pistol belt with a holstered automatic. On his hands, black leather gloves.
In Italian, Weisz said good morning and added, “We are correspondents. My name is Weisz, this is Signora McGrath.”
“From Italy?” the officer said, incredulous. “You’re on the wrong side of this river.”
“The signora is from the Chicago Tribune,” Weisz said. “And I work for the British wire service, Reuters.”
The officer, wary, studied them for a moment. “Well, we’re honored. But please, no photographs.”
“No, of course not. Why do you say ‘the wrong side of the river’?”
“That’s the Littorio Division, over there. The Black Arrows, and the Green Arrows. Italian officers, enlisted men both Italian and Spanish. So, today, we will kill the fascisti, and they’ll kill us.” From the officer, a grim smile—so life went, but sad that it did. “Where are you from, Signor Weisz? Your Italian is native, I would say.”
“From Trieste,” Weisz said. “And you?”
The officer hesitated. To lie, or tell the truth? Finally, he said, “I am from Ferrara, known as Colonel Ferrara.”
His look was almost rueful, but it confirmed Weisz’s hunch, born the instant he’d seen the officer, because photographs of this face, with its curving scar, had been in the newspapers—lauded or defamed, depending on the politics.
“Colonel Ferrara” was a nom de guerre, use of an alias common among volunteers on the Republican side, particularly among Stalin’s Eastern European operatives. But this nom de guerre predated the civil war. In 1935, the colonel, taking the name of his city, had left the Italian forces fighting in Ethiopia—raining mustard gas from airplanes onto villages and native militia—and surfaced in Marseilles. Interviewed by the French press, he’d said that no man of conscience could take part in Mussolini’s war of conquest, a war for empire.
In Italy, the fascists had tried to destroy his reputation any way they could, because the man who called himself Colonel Ferrara was a legitimate, highly decorated, hero. At the age of nineteen, he’d been a junior officer fighting the Austro-Hungarian and German armies on Italy’s northern, alpine, border, an officer in the arditi. These were shock troops, their name taken from the verb ardire, which meant “to dare,” and they were Italy’s most honored soldiers, known for wearing black sweaters, known for storming enemy trenches at night, knives held in their teeth, a hand grenade in each hand, never using a weapon effective beyond thirty yards. When Mussolini launched the Fascist party, in 1919, his first recruits were forty veterans of the arditi, angry at the broken promises of French and British diplomats, promises used to draw Italy into the war in 1915. But this ardito was an enemy, a public enemy, of fascism, not the least of his credentials his wounded face, and one hand so badly burned that he wore gloves.
“So I may describe you as Colonel Ferrara,” Weisz said.
“Yes. My real name doesn’t matter.”
“Formerly with the Garibaldi Battalion, Twelfth International.”
“That’s right.”
“Which has been disbanded, sent home.”
“Sent into exile,” Ferrara said. “They could hardly go back to Italy. So they, with the Germans and Poles and Hungarians, all of us stray dogs who won’t run with the pack, have gone looking for a new home. Mostly in France, the way the wind blows lately, though we aren’t much welcome there.”
“But you’ve stayed.”
“We’ve stayed,” he said. “A hundred and twenty-two of us, this morning. Not ready to give up this fight, ah, this cause, so here we are.”
“Which cause, Colonel? How would you describe it?”
“There are too many words, Signor Weisz, in this war of words. It’s easy for the Bolsheviks, they have their formulas—Marx says this, Lenin says that. But, for the rest of us, it’s not so cut-and-dried. We are fighting for the freedom of Europe, certainly, for liberty, if you like, for justice, perhaps, and surely against all the cazzi fasulli who want to run the world their way. Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, take your pick, and all the sly little men who do their work.”
“I can’t say ‘cazzi fasulli.’” It meant “phony pricks.” “Want to change it?”
Ferrara shrugged. “Leave it out. I can’t say it any better.”
“How long will you stay?”
“To the end, whatever that turns out to mean.”
“Some people say the Republic is finished.”
“Some people could be right, but you never know. If you’re doing the sort of job we do here, you like to think that one bullet, fired by one rifleman, could turn defeat to victory. Or, maybe, someone like you writes about our little company, and the Americans jump up and say, By God that’s true, let’s go get ’em, boys!” Ferrara’s face was lit by a sudden smile—the idea so far beyond hope it was funny.
“This will be seen mostly in Great Britain and Canada, and in South America, where the newspapers run our dispatches.”
“Fine, then let the British do the jumping up, though we both know they won’t, not until it’s their turn to eat Adolf’s wiener schnitzel. Or let everything go to hell in Spain, then just see if it stops here.”
“And the Littorio Division, across the river, what do you think about them?”
“Oh, we know them, the Littorio, and the Blackshirt militia. We fought them in Madrid, and when they occupied the Ibarra Castle, we stormed it and sent them running. And we’ll do it again today.”
Weisz turned to McGrath. “Anything you want to ask?”
“How is it so far? What does he think about the war, about defeat?”
“We’ve done that—it’s good.”
From across the river, a voice shouted “Eià, eià, alalà.” This was the fascist battle cry, first used by the Blackshirt squads in their early street battles. Other voices repeated the phrase.
The answer came from a machine-gun position below the road. “Va f’an culo, alalà!” Go fuck yourself in the ass. Somebody else laughed, and two or three voices picked up the cry. A machine gunner fired a short burst, cutting down a line of reeds on the opposite bank.
“I’d get my head down if I were you,” Ferrara said. Bent low, he went trotting off across the hillside.
Weisz and McGrath lay flat, McGrath produced her binoculars. “I can see him!”
Weisz took a turn with the binoculars. A soldier was lying in a patch of reeds, his hands cupped around his mouth as he repeated the battle cry. When the machine gun fired again, he slithered backward and vanished.
Sandoval, revolver in hand, came running from the car and flopped down beside them.
“It’s starting,” Weisz said.
“They won’t try to cross the river,” Sandoval said. “That comes tonight.”
From the opposite bank, a muted thunk, followed by an explosion that shattered a juniper bush and sent a flock of small birds flying from
the trees, Weisz could hear the beating of their wings as they flew over the crest of the hill. “Mortar,” Sandoval said. “Not good. Maybe I should get you out of here.”
“I think we should stay for a while,” McGrath said.
Weisz agreed. When McGrath told Sandoval they would stay, he pointed at a cluster of pines. “Better over there,” he said. On the count of three, they ran, and reached the trees just as a bullet snapped overhead.
The mortaring went on for ten minutes. Ferrara’s company did not fire back, their mortars were ranged in on the river, and they had to save what shells they had for the coming night. When the Nationalist fire stopped, the smoke drifted away and silence returned to the hillside.
After a time, Weisz realized he was hungry. The Republican units barely had enough food for themselves, so the two correspondents and their lieutenant had been living off stale bread and a cloth sack of lentils—known, after the Republican finance minister’s description, as “Dr. Negrín’s victory pills.” They couldn’t build a fire here, so Weisz dug around in his knapsack and produced his last tin of sardines—not opened earlier because the key needed to roll back the metal top was missing. Sandoval solved that problem, using a clasp knife to cut the top open, and the three of them speared sardines and ate them on chunks of bread, pouring a little of the oil over the top. As they ate, the sound of fighting somewhere to the north, the rattle of machine guns and rifle fire, rose to a steady beat. Weisz and McGrath decided to go have a look, then head northeast to Castelldans and file their stories.
They found Ferrara at one of the machine-gun positions, said goodby, and wished him luck. “Where will you go, when this ends?” Weisz asked him. “Perhaps we can talk again.” He wanted to write a second story about Ferrara, the story of a volunteer in exile, a postwar story.
“If I’m still in one piece, France, somewhere. But please don’t say that.”
