Midnight in Europe (2 page)

Ferrar tried to read the newspaper, then folded it up and put it back in his briefcase—at least for the moment he would spare himself the smoke and fume of Europe on fire. He was in Delaney’s to meet his lover, Eileen Moore, so turned his thoughts to the pleasures they would share. As he thought of her, his eyes wandered up to the window and the sidewalk outside where, since the bar was below street level, he could see only the lower halves of people walking by. Could he identify Eileen before she entered the bar? In his imagination he could see her strong legs in black cotton stockings, but she might be wearing something else. Outside it was still snowing, a little girl paused, then bent over to peer through the window until her mother towed her away.

Ferrar had a sip of his drink; then, when he put the glass down, there she was. “Hello, Cristián,” she said, hands in the pockets of her wool coat. He stood, his smile radiant, and they embraced—a light, public embrace which lingered for the extra second that separates friendship from intimacy. Then he helped her off with her coat, finding ways to touch her as he did so, and hung it on a brass hook fixed to the side of the booth. She sat, slid next to the wall, he settled beside her, she rested a hand on his knee, there were droplets of melted snow in her hair.

“It’s been too long,” he said.

“It has.”

“We’ll make up for that,” he said.

Her hand tightened on his knee. Their eyes met, followed by a pair of knowing smiles. Grins, almost.

She had auburn hair, parted in the middle and falling in wings to her shoulders—easy to brush into place, cheap to maintain—and a pale, redhead’s complexion with a spray of freckles barely visible across the bridge of her nose: an Irish girl, raised in the Bronx, now, in her early thirties, living a Manhattan life. She wouldn’t be called
pretty
, but her face was animated and alive and good to look at. She wore a gray wool sweater that buttoned up the front, little gold earrings, no makeup, French perfume he’d bought her in August, black skirt, and the black cotton stockings with a seam up the back.

“Seeing you made me forget,” she said. “I meant to say
buenas noches
. Did I get that right?”

“You did,” he said. Then, “The old greeting—they don’t say that these days.”

By this she was startled. “And why not?”

“It would mean that you were of the upper classes and someone would arrest you. Now they say
Salut
, or
Salut camarada
. You know, ‘comrade.’ ”

“I’m not much of a comrade,” she said. “I marched, back in November, and we have a
Help Spain
coin jar at work, that’s about
as far as I go with the politics.”
At work
meant, he knew, at the Public Library, where she shelved books at night. By day she wrote novels—cheap paperbacks with lurid covers.

“Have you eaten?” he asked.

“No, I’m not all that hungry. What’s on the blackboard?”

“ ‘Chicken à la king,’ it said. Which is …?”

“Pieces of chicken in a cream sauce on toast. If the cook is feeling his oats there might be a pea or two in there.”

“And what king ate this?”

Her laugh was loud and harsh. “You,” she said.

“Let me get you a drink.”

“What’ve you got there?”

“Whiskey and soda.”

“Rye whiskey, in here. Yes, I’ll have that.”

He went to the bar and returned with the drink. Eileen took a pack of Chesterfields from her purse, smacked it twice on the table to firm up the tobacco at the smoker’s end, then peeled back the foil. Ferrar drew a Gitane from his packet and lit both their cigarettes. She raised her glass and said, “
Salut
, comrade,” then added, “and mud in your eye” and drank off a generous sip.

“In my
eye
?” He was being droll, which she really liked. And it sounded good in his accent—vaguely foreign, with a British lilt, because he’d learned his English in Paris, where the teachers were British expatriates.

“Are you still living at the same place?” Ferrar said.

She nodded. “The good old Iroquois Hotel. A room and a hotplate, bathroom down the hall.”

And a bed
, he thought. A fond memory, that narrow bed with a lumpy mattress and iron rails at head and foot. Not much of a bed, but wonderful things happened there. With Eileen Moore he shared two great passions; they loved to laugh, and they loved sex—the more they excited each other, the more excited they became. Attraction was always mysterious, he believed—he didn’t really know what drew her to him—but for himself he knew very
well indeed. Yes, he had a fierce appetite for her small, curved shape, for her round bottom in motion, but beyond that he was wildly provoked by her redhead’s coloring: her white body, the faded pink of her nether parts. He believed, deep down where his desire lived, that redheads had thinner skin, so that a single stroke went a
long
way. In Ferrar’s imagination, amid the crowd in the noisy bar, he recalled how, when he first touched her nipples, her chin lifted and her face became taut and concentrated.
Stop it
, he told himself—it was too soon to leave. He finished his drink and went off to get two more.

Waiting at the bar, Ferrar remembered the first time he’d seen her. She’d been working as a clerk in a warehouse near the Hudson River, there’d been a sudden fire, two of the workers had been injured and were carried out as the building burned to a shell. The owner, a German Jew who’d fled to Paris, had filed a claim with his insurance company, the company stated that the fire was arson and refused to pay, the owner retained Coudert and sued. When Ferrar, in New York for meetings, had deposed some of the workers, Eileen Moore sat across from him at a desk while a secretary recorded the deposition in shorthand. She did not record, but may have noticed, that attraction between Eileen Moore and Ferrar was instantaneous and powerful. Three months later—the insurance company had settled—he was back in the city; he called her, they met at Delaney’s, they went to her room.

Returning to the table, a drink in either hand, he said, “Are you writing a new book?”

“Yeah, I am.
Fatal Friday
did okay, so my editor wanted another. My working title is
Death of a Dame
, what do you think?”

“Well, I’d read it.”

“Aw, go on,” she said.

“I would read it because you wrote it.”

She snorted. “No trace of me on the cover, as usual, at Phoenix Press only men write naughty crime books—that’s the rule.”

“Do you mind?”

“A little, maybe. My friend Dawn thinks I should.” By Dawn she meant Dawn Powell, the reigning novelist of Murray Hill.

“Would you try one with your name on it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe some day.”

“I think you will, Eileen,” he said, touching her thigh beneath the table.

Suddenly she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Damn, I’m happy you’re here.”

He took his hand from her thigh and ran his fingers up under the silky hair on the back of her head. “Have what you want of that,” he said, indicating her glass. He left the rest unsaid, she knew what he wanted.

She finished her drink and then, with mischief in her smile, and that quick nod and glance toward the door which meant
let’s get out of here
, she sped them on their way.

Outside, the snow was sticking here and there as the night grew colder but was no more than a coating on the pavement. As they climbed the steps in front of the bar she took his arm and then, as he transferred the Saks 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 concealing
their 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 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 sentry
had 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.”