A couple stopped next to him. They stared out for a few moments and then moved on. Somewhere, a lute began to play.
The sun spread across the few clouds, and Hoffner bent over and began to film. It would make a nice opening shot, Montjuic in the distance, the sky the rust of early sunset, and the first lights beginning to shimmer inside the buildings. Hoffner panned slowly across the city until he heard footsteps on the gravel behind him. They stopped. He heard the flare of a cigarette lighter, then the snap of the top as it clicked shut.
“Hello, Georg.”
Hoffner stopped the crank and slowly stood upright. He turned.
A tall man with a shock of white hair stood staring at him. The man let out a long spear of smoke and offered Hoffner a cigarette.
“Thanks, no,” said Hoffner.
The man nodded once. The hair might have been white, but he was no more than fifty, and his arms in shirtsleeves showed lithe, taut muscle.
His name was Karl Vollman, and he was an Olympic chess player. A German. The two had shared a bottle of whiskey a few nights back. Vollman slid the pack into his shirt pocket and took another long pull.
“It’s a beautiful view,” Vollman said.
“Yes.”
“Just right for your sort of thing.” Vollman deepened his voice. “City of lights, city of dreams-Olimpiada Popular, and Pathe Gazette is there.” He smiled to himself and took another pull.
“No chess tonight?”
“There’s chess every night. Later. Down in the Raval. Seedy and smoky. Just right.”
“I met a Bulgarian who finds it rather silly-chess as sport.”
“I find Bulgarians rather silly, so I suspect we’re even.”
Vollman had spent the better part of the past ten years in Moscow, teaching something, playing chess. He said he liked the cold.
“You just happened to find yourself in Park Guell tonight?” Hoffner said.
“They say you can’t leave the city without seeing it. Here I am. Seeing it.” Vollman looked past Hoffner to Barcelona. “Peaceful, isn’t it? Sad how we both know it won’t be that way much longer.”
Hoffner measured the stare. Whatever else Vollman had been doing in Moscow, he had learned to show nothing in his face.
Hoffner said, “I’m sure they’ll have a wild time of it when the Olimpiada starts up.”
Vollman’s stare gave way to a half smile. “Oh, is that what I was talking about? The Olimpiada.” He finished his cigarette, dropped it to the ground, and watched his foot crush it out. Thinking out loud, he said, “I suppose it’s what you’re here to film, what I’m here to do. Much simpler seeing it that way.”
Hoffner had felt a mild unease with Vollman the other night. This was something more.
Vollman said, “I don’t imagine either of us will be in Barcelona much longer, do you?” He looked directly at Hoffner. “All those fascist rumblings in the south-Seville, Morocco. Only a matter of time.”
Again, Hoffner said nothing.
Vollman pulled out the pack and tapped out a second cigarette. He lit it and spat a piece of tobacco to the ground.
“Fascist rumblings?” Hoffner said blandly. “I hadn’t heard.”
Vollman’s smile returned. “Really? A German, working for the English, in socialist Spain just at the moment the fascists are thinking of turning the world on its head, and he hasn’t heard. How remarkable.” He gave Hoffner no time to answer. “What are you, Georg, twenty-nine, thirty?”
Hoffner was twenty-five, but why give Vollman more ammunition?
“Something like that,” Hoffner said.
“Then you’re still young enough to take some advice.” Vollman spat again. “We both know why you’re in Barcelona. Which means the Spanish know why you’re here. And if the Spanish know-well, wouldn’t you think the Nazis would know as well?”
Hoffner didn’t like the shift in tone. “And do the Nazis know why you’re here?”
Despite himself, Vollman liked the answer. Again he smiled.
“English, Russians,” he said, “Italians, Germans. Aren’t we all just waiting for the Spaniards to figure it out for themselves? And when they do”-Vollman shook his head with as much pathos as a man like him could muster-“that’s when we take sides. And that’s when the real games begin.” He took a last pull. He was oddly quick with a cigarette.
Hoffner said, “You mean when they start killing each other.”
Vollman hesitated even as he showed nothing. He tossed his cigarette to the ground and then bobbed a nod out at the city. “You keep on getting whatever it was you were getting. When you need more, you know where to find me.”
Vollman started off.
“It’s Paris,” Hoffner said.
Vollman stopped. He turned.
“The city of lights,” Hoffner said. “Not good to be confusing Paris and Barcelona these days.”
Vollman waited. There was no telling what he was thinking. He said nothing and moved off. Hoffner watched as Vollman stopped for a few moments by the lute player, dropped a coin in the man’s hat, and headed for the stairs.
Back at his room, Hoffner was finishing his third glass of whiskey when he placed an empty sheet of paper on the desk. His head was spinning-from Vollman, from the booze-but there was always one place he could go to clear his mind.
He began to write.
A ladder?
Brilliant, Papi. Make sure the gardener doesn’t take a shovel to your head the next time.
It’s past eleven. They’re all heading off for dinner, so you’re the best I can do for company. Don’t pat yourself on the back. I’ve had a few, and we both know what that does to my letters to Lotte. You won’t tell her.
I can’t promise coherence. Then again, there isn’t a lot about Spain these days that inspires it, so I think I won’t worry. Oh, and there’s nothing else to tell about the police, except that their hats are ludicrous. I’d try to draw you one, but it would come off looking like a dying bat or a headless peacock. Wonderfully appropriate but not terribly accurate.
So that leaves the politics. Yes, the politics. At last. Just for you. I can hear you laughing. I had a strangely unnerving conversation tonight-the place seems to thrive on strangely unnerving conversations-but there’s no point in going into that. Still, it put me in the frame of mind.
You’d feel right at home. It’s like Berlin after the Kaiser, except here the Lefties manage it without a dinner jacket or soap. They take the worker thing very seriously. Lots of shirtsleeves and bandanas. It’s Mediterranean Marxism, which has a kind of primitive feel to it-everyone sweating and opening shirt buttons and going without shoes. They have rallies all the time and write large, imposing posters with lots of dates on them. Women wear trousers a great deal, which seems to go counter to the whole heat-inspired politics of the Left. Wouldn’t a dress be cooler? It makes you wonder how much the cold had to do with paving the way for Hitler, but that’s for another time. (If the line above is blacked out by the censor, I probably deserved it, so don’t worry.)
I’ve met anarchists and socialists. I’ve eaten with Communists and anarcho-syndicalists and Marxist-nihilists, and something simply referred to as a non-Stalinist Soviet. I thought the person introducing me was talking about a kind of napkin until a very earnest young woman began to spew in a much-too-quick Spanish for me to follow. Best recourse is just to nod.
The bizarre thing is that they all seem to think they’re the ones running the show. Not together, of course. That would be asking too much. (At least Weimar got that right for a while.) The socialists hate the anarchists. The anarchists hate the Communists. And the Communists have no power whatsoever and seem to hate even themselves.
I think there’s a central government somewhere, but Barcelona doesn’t like to admit that. The Lefties they elected in February-socialists calling themselves a Popular Front, which is bizarre when no one really likes them and they’re well behind the curve at every turn-are a kind of mythological beast that shouts at everyone from Madrid and tells them how to be proper Lefties-who to adore, who to hate. This week, I think it’s the anarcho-syndicalists-I still have no idea what that means-whom we’re all supposed to be burning in effigy. And that’s just the boys who are in their own camp.