“Yes. I know. But I’m allowed to tell you how sad and desperate this war makes me, Nikolai. And I need to know you won’t collapse every time I do.” She handed him the canteen again. “But I’m glad you thought it was a choice. Now drink.”
Hoffner drank and felt his strength returning. He waited another half minute and drank again.
She said, “You’re all right?”
He took a last drink and handed her the canteen. He nodded and got to his feet.
He said, “It’s nice to know I’m an idiot.” His legs felt heavy but at least they were there.
“He’s a Spaniard with a conscience. It’s easy to be fooled.” She took a drink and saw something down in the courtyard. She slipped her arm through his. “We should get you something with salt. I could use some myself.” They began to walk.
He said, “So when did conscience become such a terrible thing?”
“You’ve been living in Germany too long. The fascists there don’t bother with it.”
“And here?”
She slipped her hand farther down his arm and took his hand. “Here Alfassi has God and truth and what he takes for compassion. His is a fascism that breeds inspiration.” Her fingers curled through his, and Hoffner gripped at them. “If he manages to win this war, you can be sure he and his friends will be here long after your thousand-year Reich is dust. Alfassi knows it-brutality as brutality runs its course-but a man of conscience, gentility, kindness? He can breathe life into brutality again and again and make it seem almost humane. It’s a particularly Spanish cruelty and we’ve had centuries to become very, very good at it.”
They came to a little awning, two tables and three chairs. A curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door to keep out the flies. They sat, and Mila said into the curtain, “Two beers and an order of migas, please.”
A voice grunted acknowledgment. Hoffner didn’t know migas.
“Bread crumbs,” she said. “Like porridge, with bacon or chorizo or whatever they have lying around. It’ll be good for you.”
He nodded and pulled out his cigarettes.
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “Not until you get something in your stomach.”
Hoffner set the pack on the table. He kept his eyes on it as he placed his hand on hers. The knuckles were wonderfully smooth.
He said, “You don’t expect this, do you?”
He waited for her to answer. When she didn’t, he looked up. She was staring across at him. Hoffner felt his head go light again, until he saw the smile curl her lips.
She said, “And what is it you didn’t expect?”
For some reason he had no idea what he had been meaning to say. None. He shook his head quietly, and watched as her smile grew.
“It must be terrible,” she said easily, “to feel something and not have the courage to admit it, even to yourself. I’m not asking you to. I have no such cares about love. It doesn’t make me weak or sad or hopeful or carefree. I’ll leave that to the young. All I know is when it comes. And how rare it is. And that makes it even more certain.”
Hoffner felt her hand under his, and he found his voice. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right. I think … that’s right.”
The bamboo beads swayed, the plates arrived, and they ate.
Major Sanz proved to be a man of little conscience. He was cut from the same cloth as Captain Doval and kept his interviews brief.
And so, knowing that the telephone lines might reengage at any moment-and perhaps still a little lightheaded-Hoffner barreled on. He showed Sanz the Safe Conduct papers, he mentioned Alfassi and Doval, and he explained his role with the contact names in each of the cities to the west.
Naively, Sanz said he thought Georg had been a journalist. Hoffner quickly disabused him of this: Georg was a member of German Intelligence-why not? The SS had lost track of him. He had been heading into Republican territory to secure the routes and the contacts.
Major Sanz was only too happy to confirm them.
More remarkable, though, was Sanz’s request for thinner crates. Naturally, Hoffner had no idea what the man was talking about.
“For the rifles,” Sanz said, as if speaking to a child. “You’re getting twelve-not even that-into each one.” Hoffner’s expression prompted further details. “The wood is too thick. Use a thinner wood and you get maybe eighteen, even twenty inside. It’s not so important here in Teruel. We can leave the crates out in the open, have as many as we like. Who’s going to care? But you go west-Cuenca or, my God, think of Toledo-and the more crates you have, the more difficult it will be to keep them hidden. You see what I’m saying?”
Hoffner did not, until Sanz showed him the printed packing slip that had accompanied the crate.
At the top, in an official script, was the crate’s origin: Tetuan, Morocco. Just below, in the same script, was the name of the company that had shipped it: Hispano-Marroqui de Transportes, Sociedad Limitada. Elsewhere on the slip, the company was simply referred to as Hisma.
Hoffner stared at the word. It was the final name from Georg’s wire, the name connected to Bernhardt and Langenheim.
Hoffner said, “You have other papers from the company, Major?”
The man hesitated.
“In your files,” said Hoffner. “I need to make sure you have the proper paperwork, should anyone come asking for it.” What could be more convincing? thought Hoffner. A German asking for paperwork. He looked directly at Sanz. “You see what I’m saying?”
Again Sanz hesitated before he began to nod. “Yes-yes, of course. I have it all here.”
Sanz retrieved various sheets from the bottom drawer of his desk and handed them to Hoffner.
“I believe that’s everything.”
Hoffner quickly peeled through the stack until he came to the fourth page. It was there he read the announcement of incorporation for the Spanish Moroccan Transport Company, a company intending to ship medical supplies and engine parts and farming equipment-the list went on and on. It was a general partnership, with a Johann Bernhardt as its chief officer. The funding, though vague, had come from Berlin. How or when this had happened was, of course, not made clear on the pages in front of Hoffner. Perhaps that was where Langenheim had played his role.
That said, it was Bernhardt who had created a legitimate private company as a front for supplying weapons. Along with the shipments from Germany to the primary base in Morocco, Bernhardt and his cohorts were planning on sending rifles and ammunition directly to recently formed Hisma outposts throughout Spain. Teruel had been the testing ground. So far, three shipments had passed through unimpeded. The weapons were coming encased in old turbine and piping crates, some even in medical supply boxes. Thus far it was only enough for two or three squads, but expand it to the other cities on Doval’s list-that straight line across Spain-and Hoffner could only imagine what a few thousand stockpiled rifles could do for a conquering army. Franco would simply need to get to the city gates, and the guns would be waiting for him-or, better yet, turned on the men still inside.
“Thinner crates,” Hoffner said. “Of course. I’ll put it in my next report.”
There is a kind of madness that lives on the plains of La Mancha. It settles on the mind in the last of the afternoon, when the sun perches between the passing sails of the windmills and seems to wink with every turn of the blade. It isn’t the billowing itself that sparks the delusion-that, they say, requires a nobler kind of madness-but the sudden and unrelenting sense that this might be the last time the sun will make such an effort. La Mancha begs for indifference, or at least a disregard from anything still clinging to life. Even the trees know it. Hobbled by their own weight and bent toward senility, they peer out across the burned earth and laugh through parched bark at anyone foolish enough to remain out under this sky. It is, if He would admit it, the only place where God gazes down and wonders if even He has something still to learn. Maybe, then, the madness is His, for what else could God possibly have to learn, especially from a strip of land ready to shred itself on the truth.