— Oh, God. Oh, my God. Right, Nelson’s signal, you’ll be fine. Just get to Gernika and the telegraph. No cringing. Off we go, then.
She found her balance, pedalled.
The bicycle squeaked.
Kostya glared at Misha over the top of Cristobal’s head. —I don’t see why you get to drive.
— I found the lorry, didn’t I?
— You’ve also found every single bump in the road.
— He’s slipping. Move closer. Keep him propped up between us.
Kostya peeked at the dressings on Cristobal’s wound; they’d gone almost purple with blood. —Why in hell didn’t you kill him?
— Because I want you to hear him talk.
Kostya sighed. —We don’t need an interrogation. Look, he’s suffering.
— Since when has that bothered you?
Kostya nodded, acknowledging the point. —It’s messy. Follow orders next time. Bullet to the head, done, walk away.
— Like the nurse?
— Yes.
Between them, Cristobal shook.
Eyes intent on the road, Misha steered around a rock. —Is he convulsing?
— Crying.
Misha switched to Spanish. —Not long now.
Cristobal looked at Kostya and his blood-spattered clothes, then shut his eyes.
Bilbao Docks
Monday 10 May
Temerity noticed his sling first, then the tattered khaki sleeve and the bright wounds on his left ear and neck. She told herself to ignore him. A chance resemblance, nothing more.
Besides, she had a task. She needed to blackmail her prime minister. At least, it felt like blackmail, this succinct yet emotional report on conditions in Bilbao she’d written for Leah Manning, the British politician struggling with Consul Ralph Stevenson to evacuate Basque children. Manning and Stevenson worked in the thick stink of the crisis, Manning, like Temerity, even caught in the Gernika bombardment. Temerity relished her work for the evacuation, as much as it tired her. The work, she acknowledged to herself, hardly lay in her purview as an agent; she considered it more within her moral duty as a human being. Britain’s government had relented and agreed to accept Basque child refugees but only to age twelve, and with the caveats that the children be privately sponsored and Francoists must also be evacuated. Temerity and the others had recognized an immediate problem: the girls. The age cut-off left adolescent Basque girls vulnerable to invading soldiers, whose presence now was only a matter of time.
Seeking a particular British boat and the captain who’d agreed to ferry her report back to London, Temerity glanced back at the injured man. He disappeared within a cloud of delousing gas pumped by a stocky man in a peacoat. As the gas dissipated, the injured man pointed to himself with his good arm, then to the line of boys before him, the boys aged from maybe four to fourteen and wearing cardboard discs around their necks. Temerity could guess what he said. You see? The gas did me no harm. Now it’s your turn. One of the boys stepped forward. Soon a cloud of delousing gas covered him, and he coughed.
Three Basque mothers recognized Temerity and hurried toward her. Surrounded by drawn and worried faces, by tearful pleas to convince England to take their daughters, Temerity wanted to scream. She listened to the mothers’ words, nodded in understanding, and reminded them the committee would do everything in its power, and now could you please excuse me?
Ducking into the crowd, Temerity continued to seek the British boat. She told herself the hunger pangs would settle soon.
Behind her, the injured man called out in Spanish, then in French, his voice almost lost in the dockside racket. —I need someone who can write Russian. Can anyone write in Russian?
She knew the voice. No denying it. As she turned to face it, the speaker surveyed the crowd for a response. His beard, longer now, seemed to sharpen his cheekbones — perhaps that was hunger — and his wavy dark hair stirred in the wind off the sea. The boys stared into the crowd with him.
Kostya called again. —Please, my shoulder is hurt, and I can’t hold the tags. Can anyone write in Russian?
Lost to his sight in the crowd, Temerity strode toward him, approaching the dock as he dug in his jacket for a pencil. Two of the boys pointed at her, and Kostya turned around.
His big eyes shone with pain; the wounds on his left neck and ear flushed a darker red. Staring, he wanted to ask Temerity how she’d reached Bilbao, ask how and why they’d met again. He knew he should demand her silence about the clinic, make some quiet threat to finish the job. He didn’t bother. Such conversations belonged to that time, brittle now in retrospect, before bombardment.
Gesturing to the boys, Temerity spoke in Russian. —Evacuation?
— To Leningrad.
— So few? And only boys?
Kostya pointed behind him to a small fishing boat, its name in Cyrillic letters. —It’s all I can do. And I don’t trust the captain around girls. There’ll be other ships. Soon. They may even get a Royal Navy escort from you British. Solidarity, comrade.
— Just give me the pencil.
He did so, and Temerity knelt before the first boy, reading his name. She switched to Spanish. —Good day, Enrico.
Kostya stood behind her, just to her right, speaking first in Spanish, then repeating his sentence in Russian. —Enrico, you are now Genrikh.
Holding the name tag in her left hand, Temerity wrote the Russian name above the Spanish name with her right. —Next.
Kostya gestured for the line of boys to move. —Eduardo, you are now Eduard. You see? Russian’s not so strange.
Eduardo tried to read his disc upside down, frowned.
The next boy came to Temerity, and Kostya said nothing.
Temerity spoke instead. —Miguel, you are now Mikhail. Perhaps they’ll call you Misha.
Kostya muttered in Russian. —Hurry up.
The twelve boys re-named, Temerity stood up and gave Kostya back his pencil. —This needs sharpening.
Perceiving a tension between the two adults, a tension he could not understand, one of the older boys giggled.
Temerity pointed to her own ear, neck, and shoulder, mirroring the path of Kostya’s wounds. —Gernika?
Voice bland, workaday, he spoke as if commenting on the weather. —Gerrikaitz. The Luftwaffe bombed us first, then Gernika in the afternoon. Were you in Gernika?
— Yes.
— Hurt?
She tugged her hair out of the way and exposed a scabbed bruise on her forehead. —Nothing serious. Cristobal Zapatero?
Kostya shook his head.
— Well, I expected no better.
Kostya stared down at the dock, at the water visible between pieces of wood.
As Temerity turned to leave, Kostya surprised them both by calling to her. —Wait, please.
She faced him, crossed her arms.
He stepped closer. —It’s a long way to Leningrad, and I don’t want to run out of stories. Tell me an English story, so I can share it with the boys later.
Temerity hesitated. —Tam Lin. He fell from his horse, and he should have died, but the queen of fairies caught him, kept him prisoner, and then he lived for hundreds of years. He never aged. One day, the queen of fairies got tired of him and gave him a castle, and he lived there in silence until Lady Margaret, the local lord’s daughter, picked his flowers. After an argument, Tam Lin and Margaret fell in love, Margaret fell pregnant, and the fairy queen got angry. She turned Tam Lin into a snake, a bear, a lion, a wolf, all to frighten Margaret off. Margaret held Tam Lin tight, and together they broke the spell. Then they grew old together and died.
— That’s it?
— That’s not enough?
The man in the peacoat called out to Kostya. He called back acknowledgement, then grasped Temerity’s upper arm, too hard at first, and stared into her eyes. —I have to go, Marya Morevna.