Midnight in Europe (7 page)

Ferrar handed over his Spanish passport, the colonel took a fountain pen from a marble stand and began to write the details in a notebook. When he was done he laid it on his desk for a moment.
Ferrar was silent. Zaguan then handed it back to him, saying, “Sorry, I almost forgot.” After a pause for a smile he said, “Please tell me the date of your birth, and where, and the names of your parents and other family.” Watching the colonel’s eyes, Ferrar realized he was reading from a sheet of paper laid flat on top of an open desk drawer, where the person on the other side of the desk couldn’t see it.

When Ferrar had finished answering the questions, Zaguan said, “Thank you. Now, can you tell me something of your politics?”

“My politics?”

“That’s right. For example, would you call yourself a communist? Or, better, would your friends call you that, if they were asked?”

“Certainly not,” Ferrar said.

“Perhaps a socialist? Or a social democrat? A conservative? What would they say, your friends?” His eyebrows rose and he made a soft, interrogatory sound.

“I don’t know what my friends would say, Colonel. I believe in parliamentary democracy, as practiced in France and Great Britain, and I am an anti-fascist. But I don’t spend much time on politics.”

The pen scratched as Zaguan wrote down his answer. “And are you married?”

“I was, I’m not now.”

The colonel was eager for Ferrar to elaborate, but Ferrar had nothing further to say.

“Are you a Catholic, señor?”

“I am.”

“Observant?”

“Yes, I go to mass with my family on Sunday mornings.”

Zaguan moved on to Ferrar’s schooling, then his work. As the questioning went on and on, Ferrar’s answers grew shorter and less informative.

Zaguan, a sympathetic lilt to his voice, said, “I know it’s a bother to give out all this information, but we need to know the
backgrounds of the people who work with us. In Europe, these days, there are those who,
misrepresent
themselves.”

Ferrar nodded.

“Since you will be working with the Oficina Técnica, you will be learning, ahh, sensitive information. I know I don’t have to tell you that you must not talk about what you do. Yes? You agree?”

“I do.”

“And I must warn you that you may be approached, in all sorts of clever ways, by people who wish to learn what they ought not to know. Should something seem not quite right to you, it would be best to report this to me. And only to me.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Ferrar said.

Zaguan didn’t like the answer, but could not counter. “In addition,” he said, “if you happen to discover information which might be of use to the Republic, please don’t hesitate to inform me. Even the smallest detail may turn out to matter a great deal.”

Ferrar nodded. The colonel wrote something in his notebook.

“I’m sure you are tired after a long day, Señor Ferrar, so I will thank you for your patience. And, in the future, we may visit again, from time to time, just to make sure everything is going well.”

They said goodby. Ferrar, once out on the avenue, took a deep breath. What had Molina called the colonel?
A difficult fellow
. He was certainly that. And he’d been, Ferrar sensed, on his best behavior.

NATIONALIST FORCES ATTEMPT TO RETAKE TERUEL
.

Thus the newspaper headlines on the morning of 17 January. At the beginning of the war, Franco and his generals had chosen to be called
Nationalists
, their war cry
Viva España
, while those who remained faithful to the elected government called themselves
the Republic
and answered their enemies with
Viva la Republica!
Such names were useful for politicians and journalists, such names were an element of the propaganda contest that always accompanies the
guns, such names were weapons in what is called
political warfare
. But, in the province of Aragon that day, the warfare was not at all symbolic.

Just before dawn on 17 January, a heavy silence lay over the town of Teruel, the silence of a blizzard. A certain Captain Romar, whose company occupied the basement of the Bank of Spain building, had been ordered on a reconnaissance patrol, so he lit the stubs of a few remaining candles and prepared to distribute the last of his company’s ammunition. This company had been fighting since the Army of the Republic’s attack on Teruel in mid-December, back then there had been two hundred men in the company, now there were twenty-eight. Still, they had captured the town. Franco’s forces had been staging counterattacks for three weeks, and had broken through the Republic’s defense lines two miles outside the city. Now, battalion headquarters had told Romar, Franco’s forces were about to attack the town itself.

By the flickering light of the candles, fixed in wax puddles to the lid of an ammunition box, Romar sorted bullets by calibre. The Army of the Republic, forced to buy its armaments abroad, had to use ten different calibres for their Mauser rifles, so Romar was fortunate in that his men needed only two: the standard 7mm cartridge for the Spanish-made Mauser 93s, and the 7.7mm for the Mauser 98 manufactured in Germany—the numbers indicated year of design, 1893 and 1898.

Romar separated the bullets only with difficulty, the temperature was eighteen degrees below zero and his fingers did not work well. Still, he persisted, and when he was done each man had forty-one cartridges. If they were engaged by the enemy the fight would not last long; they would have to surrender and then, a long tradition on both sides in this war, they would be shot. But, orders were orders. There were surely supplies headed in their direction, somewhere among the six hundred vehicles snowbound out on the road from Valencia to Teruel. But they would not arrive soon—four feet of snow had fallen, filling the trenches, and it continued to fall, the
silence of the blizzard broken now and then by the sighing of the wind.

Romar’s company had a few tins of sardines; these he decided would be shared out before they left the basement, and some of the men still had cigarettes. Romar stood, which meant he had something to say, and the men ranged around the walls of the basement, turned their faces toward him. “We will leave in twenty minutes,” he said. “First we will eat, have a smoke, tend to our rifles. Remember, this is a reconnaissance patrol, so if we see these bastards don’t shoot them, stay hidden. After we go out the door, no talking. Quiet … very quiet. Questions?”

One of the men said, “And which bastards are these?”

“The battalion commanders want to know that. They believe we face the Moors, or possibly legionnaires.” He meant Franco’s Moorish mercenaries from Morocco, or members of the Spanish Legion, something like the French Foreign Legion, which Franco had expanded by emptying the prisons. At the mention of the word “legionnaires” the man who had asked the question turned his head and spat.

Romar was well respected by his men. Two years earlier, when the war started, he’d been an eighteen-year-old mechanic at a textile mill in Barcelona and, when half the army joined up with Franco, the government had armed the labor unions, creating anarchist and socialist militias, who worked out their political differences by shooting each other. Now the government had absorbed the militias into the army, and some of the militiamen, like Romar, turned out to be natural officers who led well.

Outside, the main street of Teruel lay in ruins. A month of artillery fire and bombing had smashed the buildings into piles of bricks. There was no trace of wooden beams or furniture, every scrap of wood in Teruel had been burned in fires as the soldiers attempted to stay warm, to stay alive. On both sides of the street were snow-covered
stacks of frozen corpses—four thousand soldiers and civilians had tried to defend the town from the Republic’s attack, now they were dead.

Romar led his company toward the western edge of Teruel—his guess was he’d find the enemy about a thousand yards beyond the town. They walked in single file, every few minutes Romar rotated the men at the head of the line, who sank in the snow up to their knees as they broke trail for the company. By the time they reached the end of the street, the company was exhausted, their faces past numbness, burning with cold. Even in the blizzard the darkness had begun to wane as the dawn arrived.

Then, from the southwest, a muffled boom.
“Mierda,”
Romar said under his breath. This was, he suspected, Italian artillery, one of Mussolini’s contributions to the fascist cause. There was another report, and another, as the barrage progressed. Which way was it walking? In the distance, the snow exploded and Romar called out “Down!” The men lay flat for a time, but that was as much as they saw—the barrage continued for twenty minutes, then stopped. The men were, for the moment, safe, but the barrage was likely being used to soften up the defenders for an advance by infantry, so the counterattack was real.

The company walked for another ten minutes and then, as the forest on the edge of town came into view, Romar signaled and again they went flat. That’s where the enemy would be hiding. Of course Romar could barely see the forest through the swirling snow, to him it was more like a gray shadow. For a time, he waited to see what might come out of the tree line. Another barrage started up, this one well away to the north. Romar was about to wave his men forward when a soldier came running from the forest. One of Romar’s men fired twice but the man kept running, then he was joined by others, struggling through the snow, some falling then getting up, some had thrown away their rifles.

Romar held up a hand,
stop firing
. For this was not an advance by the Moors or the Legion, and this was not an organized retreat—
this was headlong flight in panic. One of the running soldiers saw Romar’s company and waved violently,
go back
, then called out, “Get away! Save yourselves!” Romar’s company stayed where it was as the last men in flight disappeared in the direction of the town. Then they saw a group of men in Moroccan caps, rifles ready, move out of the trees. The company fired a salvo of rifle bullets, two of the Moorish soldiers fell, the remainder melted back into the forest.

Romar’s company had stayed too long, there was no possibility they could retreat back to Teruel, they moved too slowly in the snow and the Moorish troops would shoot them in the back. So Romar led the company to one side, south of west, then forward into the forest, on the flank—Romar calculated—of the attacking Moors. They could hear gunfire, the Moors shooting at the retreating soldiers, and shouted orders, but they could see nothing. Then they heard the hammering of a heavy machine gun. Romar tried to figure out where it was, then saw a yellow muzzle flash through the trees.

Romar chose two of his men and the three of them, moving from tree to tree, crawled forward toward the machine gun, its position revealed by muzzle flares. Romar moved closer, the machine gun halted briefly as the gunners changed belts, Romar stood, leaned against the side of a tree, and fired four shots. When there was return fire from among the trees, one of his men cried out. Romar, bent double, went toward him at a half run, the best he could manage. He could hear himself breathing, hoarse and panting with effort. He reached his soldier, wiped snow and blood from his face, and saw that he was still alive, his chest rising and falling as he fought for air. Romar took him by the collar and dragged him through the snow. When he reached his other soldier, the man knelt for a moment and said, “He is gone, Captain.”

They left him there and made their way back to where they thought the rest of the company was hiding, though there was little chance they would be able to find them. As Romar stumbled forward,
the boughs of the pine trees released showers of snow. He was about to give up when he heard a low whistle—one of his soldiers had seen them. He counted the men, a corporal had been shot in the foot and leaned on the shoulder of another man.

Romar led them south for a half hour, exhausted now, they moved slower and slower but did not stop. By eight in the morning Captain Romar’s company had reached the town of Teruel and the Bank of Spain basement. From there he contacted battalion command by field telephone and reported the action. The soldiers took off the wounded man’s shoe and bound his foot with strips of rags. That was all they could do.

According to battalion command, the Moorish attack had been stopped. A counterattack was planned for noon. “We are down to twenty rounds a man,” Romar told the officer on the other end of the field telephone. “You’ll have to do the best you can” was the answer. “Until the supply trucks can reach us.”

8 February. Ferrar was at work when the diplomat Molina telephoned from the embassy. “Would you be able to stop by the Oficina Técnica this evening? About seven or so? There’s a fellow there I’d like you to meet, he’s just recently returned to Paris. The office is at 57, avenue George V, two doors down from the embassy.”

“I’ll be there at seven,” Ferrar said.

“He’s called Max de Lyon, the fellow you’re going to meet.”

A few minutes before seven, Ferrar rang the bell beside a gate in the high iron railing that ran between the sidewalk and the entry to the building. A porter let him in and told him that the Oficina Técnica was at the end of the corridor on the third floor. Ferrar knocked on the door, the man who answered said, “Are you Señor Ferrar?” He spoke French with just the bare hint of an accent that Ferrar could not identify.
Slavic, perhaps
, Ferrar thought.

“I am,” Ferrar said.

“Pleased to meet you, I am Max de Lyon.” Something about
the way he announced himself suggested
the
Max de Lyon. De Lyon led him to a small office with a desk, a table, wooden filing cabinets, two telephones, and a few chairs, with a window that looked out on a courtyard. The office was dark, illuminated only by lights in windows above the courtyard. De Lyon turned on a small desk lamp, its beam falling on the desk, so that the first time Ferrar was able to study him he was in shadow. “Do you know who I am?” de Lyon said.