Alan Furst: The Foreign Correspondent

“Shouldn’t we take them?” McGrath said.

“They are running away. I should’ve shot them.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t have the heart for it,” Sandoval said.

After a few minutes, they were stopped again, an officer walking down the hill from the forest. “Where are you going?” he asked Sandoval.

“These are from the foreign newspapers, they are looking for the Italian company.”

“Which?”

“Italians. From the Garibaldi.”

“With red scarves?”

“Is that correct?” Sandoval asked Weisz.

Weisz told him it was. The Garibaldi Brigade had included both Communist and non-Communist volunteers. Most of the latter were officers.

“Then they are ahead of you, I believe. But you had better stay up on the ridge.”

A few miles further on, the track divided, and the car crawled up the steep slope, the hammering of its lowest gear echoing off the trees. On the top of the ridge, a dirt road ran north. From here, they had a better view of the Segre, a slow river, and shallow, gliding past gravel islands in midstream. Sandoval drove on, past a battery firing at the opposite bank. The artillerymen were working hard, carrying shells to the loaders, who put their fingers in their ears as the cannon fired, wheels rolling back with each recoil. Halfway up the hill, a shell burst above the trees, a sudden puff of black smoke that floated off on the wind. McGrath asked Sandoval to stop for a moment, then she got out of the car and took a pair of binoculars from her knapsack.

“You will be careful of the sun,” Sandoval said. Snipers were drawn to the reflective flash of sunlight off binoculars, could put a round through a lens from a great distance. McGrath used her hand as a shield, then gave the binoculars to Weisz. In pale, drifting smoke, he caught a glimpse of green uniform, perhaps a quarter mile from the western shore.

When they were back in the car, McGrath said, “They can see us, up on this ridge.”

“Certainly they can,” Sandoval said.

The line of the Fifth Army Corps strengthened as they drove north and, at the paved road that ran to the town of Seros, on the other side of the river, they found the Italian company, well dug in below the ridge. Weisz counted three Hotchkiss 6.5-mm machine guns, mounted on bipods-manufactured in Greece, he’d heard, and smuggled into Spain by Greek antiroyalists. There were, as well, three mortars. The Italian company had been ordered to hold an important position, covering the paved road, and a wooden bridge across the river. The bridge had been blown apart, leaving charred pilings standing in the riverbed, and a few blackened boards, washed up on the bank by the current. When Sandoval parked the car, a sergeant came over to see what they wanted. As Weisz and McGrath got out of the car, he said, “This will be in Italian, but I’ll translate for you later.” She thanked him, and they both produced pads and pencils. That was all the sergeant needed to see. “A moment, please, I’ll get the officer.”

Weisz laughed. “Well, your name, at least.”

The sergeant grinned back at him. “That would be Sergeant Bianchi, right?” Don’t use my name, he meant. Signor Bianchi and Signor Rossi-Mr. White and Mr. Red-were the Italian equivalent of Smith and Jones, generic names for a joke or a comic alias. “Write whatever you want,” the sergeant said, “but I have family back there.” He strolled off and, a few minutes later, the officer arrived.

Weisz caught McGrath’s eye, but she didn’t see what he did. The officer was dark, his face not handsome, but memorable, with sharp cheekbones, beaked nose, inquisitive, hooded eyes, and a scar that curved from the corner of his right eye down to the middle of his cheek. On his head, the soft green cap of a Spanish infantryman, its high top, with long black tassel, flopped over. He wore a heavy black sweater beneath the khaki tunic, without insignia, of some army, and the trousers of another. Looped over one shoulder, a pistol belt with a holstered automatic. On his hands, black leather gloves.

In Italian, Weisz said good morning and added, “We are correspondents. My name is Weisz, this is Signora McGrath.”

“From Italy?” the officer said, incredulous. “You’re on the wrong side of this river.”

“The signora is from the Chicago Tribune, ” Weisz said. “And I work for the British wire service, Reuters.”

The officer, wary, studied them for a moment. “Well, we’re honored. But please, no photographs.”

“No, of course not. Why do you say ‘the wrong side of the river’?”

“That’s the Littorio Division, over there. The Black Arrows, and the Green Arrows. Italian officers, enlisted men both Italian and Spanish. So, today, we will kill the fascisti, and they’ll kill us.” From the officer, a grim smile-so life went, but sad that it did. “Where are you from, Signor Weisz? Your Italian is native, I would say.”

“From Trieste,” Weisz said. “And you?”

The officer hesitated. To lie, or tell the truth? Finally, he said, “I am from Ferrara, known as Colonel Ferrara.”

His look was almost rueful, but it confirmed Weisz’s hunch, born the instant he’d seen the officer, because photographs of this face, with its curving scar, had been in the newspapers-lauded or defamed, depending on the politics.

“Colonel Ferrara” was a nom de guerre, use of an alias common among volunteers on the Republican side, particularly among Stalin’s Eastern European operatives. But this nom de guerre predated the civil war. In 1935, the colonel, taking the name of his city, had left the Italian forces fighting in Ethiopia-raining mustard gas from airplanes onto villages and native militia-and surfaced in Marseilles. Interviewed by the French press, he’d said that no man of conscience could take part in Mussolini’s war of conquest, a war for empire.

In Italy, the fascists had tried to destroy his reputation any way they could, because the man who called himself Colonel Ferrara was a legitimate, highly decorated, hero. At the age of nineteen, he’d been a junior officer fighting the Austro-Hungarian and German armies on Italy’s northern, alpine, border, an officer in the arditi. These were shock troops, their name taken from the verb ardire, which meant “to dare,” and they were Italy’s most honored soldiers, known for wearing black sweaters, known for storming enemy trenches at night, knives held in their teeth, a hand grenade in each hand, never using a weapon effective beyond thirty yards. When Mussolini launched the Fascist party, in 1919, his first recruits were forty veterans of the arditi, angry at the broken promises of French and British diplomats, promises used to draw Italy into the war in 1915. But this ardito was an enemy, a public enemy, of fascism, not the least of his credentials his wounded face, and one hand so badly burned that he wore gloves.

“So I may describe you as Colonel Ferrara,” Weisz said.

“Yes. My real name doesn’t matter.”

“Formerly with the Garibaldi Battalion, Twelfth International.”

“That’s right.”

“Which has been disbanded, sent home.”

“Sent into exile,” Ferrara said. “They could hardly go back to Italy. So they, with the Germans and Poles and Hungarians, all of us stray dogs who won’t run with the pack, have gone looking for a new home. Mostly in France, the way the wind blows lately, though we aren’t much welcome there.”

“But you’ve stayed.”

“We’ve stayed,” he said. “A hundred and twenty-two of us, this morning. Not ready to give up this fight, ah, this cause, so here we are.”

“Which cause, Colonel? How would you describe it?”