And he wondered if they would let him try it out. "COME ON, damn you." Joaquin Delgadillo gestured with his rifle. "Get moving. If you were just a stinking Spanish traitor, by God, I'd shoot you right here."
The International sitting in the dirt glared at him. He wouldn't hold a rifle any time soon; a bullet had smashed his right hand. Blood soaked into the dirty bandage covering the wound. "What will you do to me instead?" he asked. Some kind of thick Central European accent clotted his Castilian. It wasn't German. Joaquin had heard German accents often enough to recognize them. But he couldn't have told a Czech from a Hungarian or a Pole.
"They'll want to question you," he answered.
"To torture me, you mean," the Red said.
Delgadillo shrugged. "Not my problem. If you don't start walking right now, I will shoot you. And I'll laugh at you while you die, too."
"Your leaders are fooling you. No matter what you think you're fighting for, you won't get it if that fat slob of a Sanjurjo wins," the International said. "All you'll get is-uh, are-tyranny and misery."
He came very close to dying then. Joaquin nearly shot him; the main thing that kept him from pulling the trigger was the thought that the Red's smashed hand made a good start on torture by itself. The interrogators could just knock it around a little, and the International would sing like a little yellow bird from the Canaries.
If the fellow hadn't got up when Delgadillo jerked the rifle again, he would have plugged him, and that would have been that. But the International did. He stumbled off toward the Nationalists' rear, Joaquin close enough behind him to fire if he tried anything cute. A wounded right hand? So what? He might be a lefty. You never could tell, especially with the Reds.
A bullet cracked past, a couple of meters over their heads. They both bent their knees to get farther away from it. "So you genuflect in that church, do you?" Joaquin said.
"Not many who don't," the International answered. "I want to live. Go ahead-call me a fool."
"If you wanted to live, you should have stayed away from Spain," Joaquin said. "This isn't your fight."
"Freedom is everybody's fight, or it ought to be," the Central European said. "If you don't have freedom, what are you? The jefe's donkey, that's what, with a load on your back and somebody walking beside you beating you with a stick."
That scream in the air was no ordinary bullet. "?Abajo!" Delgadillo yelled as he hit the dirt.
The International flattened out, too. He yowled like a wildcat when he banged the wounded hand, but he didn't pop up again, the way a lot of men would have. The shell-it had to be a 155-burst less than a hundred meters away. Fragments whined viciously overhead. The Nationalists weren't going to take Madrid away from the Republic, not like this they weren't. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign friends had pushed Marshal Sanjurjo's men out of the university at the northwestern edge of town. It was embarrassing, to say nothing of infuriating.
Which only made the International luckier still that Joaquin hadn't shot him out of hand. Sergeant Carrasquel would have told him he was wasteful if he had. That was another good reason to hold back. No one in his right mind wanted a sergeant giving him a hard time.
When no more shells fell in the neighborhood, Joaquin cautiously rose. "Get up!" he snapped.
"What else am I going to do?" The Red pushed himself upright, using his left hand and both feet. Joaquin made him open the good hand-he might have hidden a rock in there. He might have, but he hadn't. A more clever man might have felt foolish at seeing that dirty palm. Delgadillo didn't. Just one more chance he hadn't taken. You had to take too many any which way. Avoiding the ones you could made you more likely to live longer.
"Well, well! What have we here, sweetheart?" That was Major Uribe. That, in fact, couldn't very well have been anybody else. Uribe had been closer to where the 155 went off than Joaquin or his prisoner. Not a smudge, a stain, or a rumpled crease on his uniform suggested that he'd dove for cover. If he hadn't, wouldn't he be ropa vieja right now? (Even thinking of the stew of shredded beef-literally, old clothes-made Joaquin's stomach growl.) Maybe not. He had to be lucky as well as brave, or he would have died long since.
The International stared at him as if he couldn't believe his eyes. Chances were he couldn't. What were the odds of finding not just a faggot but an obvious-no, a flaming-faggot among the Nationalists' officers? Marshal Sanjurjo's whole campaign was about running such riffraff out of Spain, wasn't it? Of course it was-everybody on both sides knew that. But it was about running Reds out of Spain, too. Bernardo Uribe might want to stick it all kinds of places the priests didn't approve of (not that the priests didn't stick it into places like that, too), but he really and truly hated the Reds. Joaquin understood that, having seen him in action. The prisoner hadn't, and didn't.
"Yeah. What have we here, sweetheart?" With that miserable, ugly accent and a deep, rasping voice, the International couldn't coo the way Major Uribe did, but he gave it his best-or maybe his worst-shot.
Joaquin could have told him twitting the major wasn't the smartest thing to do. He could have, but he never got the chance. Uribe didn't even blink. He didn't waste a moment, either. "I'll show you what we have here, darling," he said, and drew his pistol. Raising it, he shot the captive in the face.
Red mist blew out of the back of the man's head. He fell over and scrabbled in the dirt. Uribe watched for a few seconds, then set the pistol by the International's ear and pulled the trigger again. The scrabbling stopped.
"That's what we have here, asshole," Uribe said, holstering the pistol once more.
"?Madre de Dios!" Joaquin crossed himself. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I was taking him back for questioning."
"?Ai!?Que lastima!" Major Uribe exclaimed. And it was a pity-for the International, whose blood still soaked into the thirsty ground. "The One Who questions him now already knows all the answers. And when He gets through with this fellow-it won't take long-the fucker will wish what I did to him was all he got. But he'll have worse, for all eternity."
"Er-yes." Delgadillo also believed in hell. The Bible talked about it, so it had to be true. And he believed Internationals were bound to go there. All the same, he hadn't intended to give Satan this one right then. "I, uh, thought we ought to find out what he knew, Senor."
Uribe flipped his hand, a gesture that magnificently mingled effeminacy and scorn. "I'll tell you what he didn't know, Joaquin: he didn't know how to keep a civil tongue in his head. And I'll tell you something else he didn't know, too: God forgives what you do in bed. He must, or He wouldn't have made it possible to do those things."
"Er," Joaquin said again. Something more seemed called for. "Yes, sir" seemed safe enough, so he tried that. How many priests would have apoplexy if they heard Major Uribe's doctrine? All of them, probably, clear on up to the Holy Father in Rome. If he told Uribe that… He tried not to shiver. He might end up lying in the dirt next to the dead International.
"Don't trouble your head about it, my dear," Uribe said. "Go back up and kill some more of these Communist monkeys. That's all you need to worry about."
"Yes, sir," Joaquin repeated, and he got out of there in a hurry. He'd often been more afraid of Sergeant Carrasquel than he was of the enemy. But Carrasquel would shoot him only if he tried to run away or something like that. The major might do it for the fun of watching him die. If that wasn't a bulge in Uribe's breeches, Joaquin had never seen one.
The Internationals might shoot him, too. He knew that. They'd come too close too often. But it was business for them, not sport. Killing for sport… He'd never been so glad to hurry to the front. Anything, as long as it got him away from Major Uribe. "YOU! Dernen! What the hell do you think you're doing?" Arno Baatz shouted.