Midnight in Europe Read Free Page A

you?”
    “I am the sentry for this alley.”
    Castillo handed over the documents, the sentry held the papers upside down and pretended to read them. “Are these your papers?” he said.
    “Yes.”
    They weren’t.
    “Are you a spy?”
    “No. Certainly not.”
    That was a lie.
    The sentry was trying to decide what to do, Castillo could see it in his face. A few, very long seconds went by, then the sentry said, “I will take you to the officer.”
    “Of course,” said Castillo. “Which way do we go?” He almost pulled it off—the sentry hesitated because Castillo had done the trick very well, his confident voice just faintly suggesting that the officer might not be pleased when he discovered what the sentryhad done. Finally the sentry said, “I’ll take you there, it is not far.” He had best be polite, this man in a suit could be somebody important.
    The walk took fifteen minutes and ended at the service entrance to the Palace, the largest hotel in Europe, which had been converted to a hospital. Before the war, most of the hospital nurses in the city had been nuns but they had fled to Franco-occupied territory and the wards were now staffed by the prostitutes of Madrid—their hair growing out black because the city’s supply of peroxide was needed as antiseptic for the wounded.
    The sentry led Castillo down one flight of stairs, then another, to a room that had once been part of a kitchen; zinc tubs lined the walls and the still air smelled of grease and sour wine. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness—the room was lit by two candles at either end of a table, electricity was a sometime thing in the city—Castillo could see the forms of men standing in line. As he took his place at the end of the line his stomach clenched with fear, because the man seated at the table was in civilian clothes and he was wearing eyeglasses. Officer of what?
    Castillo had come to Madrid eight days earlier. He’d taken the night train from Paris to Toulouse, then flown Air France to Barcelona. From there, he’d caught a ride to Madrid with British volunteers fighting for the Republic. Thus found himself standing, hanging on for dear life, in the back of an old Bedford truck—old enough so that it had to be started with a crank—brought to Spain by the volunteers, who were dockyard workers from Liverpool. To reach Madrid they had to take the single open road, held by the International Brigades, which could only be used at night because of the bombers.
    They drove fast, with lights off. After two breakdowns and a flat tire, they made it to Madrid, and Castillo found a room at the Florida.
    In the room: one bed and four guests. Two of them, French journalists, slept in the bed while the other two, a Polish Jew who did not precisely say what business he had in Madrid, and Castillo, slept on the floor. The room had a hole in the ceiling—an artillery round had hit the room above theirs—that had been patched with a piece of cardboard on which somebody had written “Art as practiced by General Franco.”
    Castillo had come to Spain on his own initiative, using a false identity, because he worked in Paris for the embassy of the Spanish Republic and they would never have allowed him to do what he was doing now. Thus his papers, using the name Cruz, had been provided by a professional forger in Paris. The barman at his café had sent him to see a room clerk at a small hotel in the Marais, who knew a dependable forger—a cobbler , in Parisian criminal argot. With so many émigrés from so many countries flooding into France, business was good for the cobblers.
    Now Castillo should have sought help from the diplomats in Paris—some of them surely knew helpful people in Madrid—but the situation at the embassy was beyond complicated: after the attempted coup d’état by Franco and his fellow generals in 1936, the embassy diplomats were asked to declare their loyalty to the elected government of the Spanish Republic, or to resign.