Midnight in Europe Read Free

bag to his other hand, he noticed, a little way up the street and on the side opposite Delaney’s, a taxi with its lights off, engine thrumming, two white faces in the front seat.
    “What’s in the bag, Cristián?”
    “Presents for you, but you’ll have to … earn them.”
    “Oh no,” she said. Not that .
    Madrid, 17 December, 1937. Castillo wasn’t the bravest man in the world but he was likely somewhere on the list. No movie hero, Castillo—he was a pudgy fellow, fiftyish, who might have been taken for a bookkeeper at a small factory. On the night of the seventeenth he found himself in the besieged city of Madrid, where he shouldn’t have been. Madrid was a bastion of the Republic, but the city was run by the Communist party; cold, hard, suspicious people uninterested in explanations or excuses, and very dangerous.But Castillo was trying to do a good deed and, as far as he knew, had managed it. Now he had to get out of Spain and go home to Paris.
    A freezing night in Madrid, bitter cold, and where the water pipes had been ruptured by bombs or artillery shells, rivers of ice ran across the paving stones. Castillo was on his way to the Hotel Florida, haunt of American celebrities, writers and journalists from everywhere, and stray dogs like himself. To keep the hotel from being bombed, the top floor had been crowded with fascist hostages so it was, for the moment, safe enough. Eager to be out of the weather, Castillo took a shortcut through an alley that led onto the Calle Victoria. There was a bar tucked into a tenement building in the alley, a poster taped to its cracked window—there weren’t many whole panes of glass left in the city—showed a man with a green face, listening intently, his hand cupping his ear. A spy! A young woman next to him held an index finger to her lips. Above her head, the message: “Sh! Comrades, not a word to brothers or friends or sweethearts.” Spy mania had become a passion in the city.
    When Castillo was halfway down the alley, there was a white flash above the Calle Victoria and the concussion blew his hat off. Other bombs followed, and when their explosions lit the sky, a thousand roosters, mistaking the light for dawn, began to crow. Dust filled the air and something, a metal something, clanked on the street as it came down from wherever it had been. A woman screamed, the dogs began to bark. Castillo stood still—should he run? Throw himself to the ground? Realizing he was bareheaded, he looked around for his hat and finally saw it, upside down, a few yards behind him. Suddenly he shivered with fear and frantically searched his shirt and trousers for bloodstains but found none.
    He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and retrieved his hat. Now, how to get back to the hotel. A crowd would gather in the Calle Victoria; people—looking for survivors—digging frantically in the rubble, soldiers, police, ambulances with blue paper concealingtheir headlights from Franco’s spotter planes. And officials, with authority from some bureau no one ever heard of, whose sole purpose on earth was to demand to see one’s papers, which would lack a validating stamp that no one ever heard of. For Castillo, a frightening prospect. So he began to walk back the way he’d come. This was a mistake, the sort of decision that seems obvious at the time but then turns out to have been wrong, when it’s too late. He had almost reached the end of the alley, then a voice in the darkness said, “You, camarada .”
    Castillo stopped dead. From the shadows came a child with a rifle. He had a long look at Castillo: heavy overcoat, blue suit, white shirt, a tie, maybe one of those upper-class Franco sympathizers caught in the city by the war.
    “Your papers,” said the child. Who, Castillo now saw, wasn’t a child at all. He was small and dark, maybe fifteen, with a child’s face. His feet were wrapped in rags.
    As Castillo reached for his passport and permits, he said, “Who are