At the door Gomez spoke to one of the sentries. “Captain Gomez of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade,” he said. “Can you tell me where to find the headquarters of General Golz commanding the ThirtyFifth Division?”
“It isn’t here,” the sentry said.
“What is here?”
“The Comandancia.”
“What comandancia?”
“Well, the Comandancia.”
“The comandancia of what?”
“Who art thou to ask so many questions?” the sentry said to Gomez in the dark. Here on the top of the pass the sky was very clear with the stars out and Andrés, out of the dust now, could see quite clearly in the dark. Below them, where the road turned to the right, he could see clearly the outline of the trucks and cars that passed against the sky line.
“I am Captain Rogelio Gomez of the first battalion of the Sixty-Fifth Brigade and I ask where is the headquarters of General Golz,” Gomez said.
The sentry opened the door a little way. “Call the corporal of the guard,” he shouted inside.
Just then a big staff car came up over the turn of the road and circled toward the big stone building where Andrés and Gomez were standing waiting for the corporal of the guard. It came toward them and stopped outside the door.
A large man, old and heavy, in an oversized khaki beret, such as chasseurs a pied wear in the French Army, wearing an overcoat, carrying a map case and wearing a pistol strapped around his greatcoat, got out of the back of the car with two other men in the uniform of the International Brigades.
He spoke in French, which Andrés did not understand and of which Gomez, who had been a barber, knew only a few words, to his chauffeur telling him to get the car away from the door and into shelter.
As he came into the door with the other two officers, Gomez saw his face clearly in the light and recognized him. He had seen him at political meetings and he had often read articles by him in Mundo Obrero translated from the French. He recognized his bushy eyebrows, his watery gray eyes, his chin and the double chin under it, and he knew him for one of France’s great modern revolutionary figures who had led the mutiny of the French Navy in the Black Sea. Gomez knew this man’s high political place in the International Brigades and he knew this man would know where Golz’s headquarters were and be able to direct him there. He did not know what this man had become with time, disappointment, bitterness both domestic and political, and thwarted ambition and that to question him was one of the most dangerous things that any man could do. Knowing nothing of this he stepped forward into the path of this man, saluted with his clenched fist and said, “Comrade Marty, we are the bearers of a dispatch for General Golz. Can you direct us to his headquarters? It is urgent.”
The tall, heavy old man looked at Gomez with his outthrust head and considered him carefully with his watery eyes. Even here at the front in the light of a bare electric bulb, he having just come in from driving in an open car on a brisk night, his gray face had a look of decay. His face looked as though it were modelled from the waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion.
“You have what, Comrade?” he asked Gomez, speaking Spanish with a strong Catalan accent. His eyes glanced sideways at Andrés, slid over him, and went back to Gomez.
“A dispatch for General Golz to be delivered at his headquarters, Comrade Marty.”
“Where is it from, Comrade?”
“From behind the fascist lines,” Gomez said.
André Marty extended his hand for the dispatch and the other papers. He glanced at them and put them in his pocket.
“Arrest them both,” he said to the corporal of the guard. “Have them searched and bring them to me when I send for them.”
With the dispatch in his pocket he strode on into the interior of the big stone house.
Outside in the guard room Gomez and Andrés were being searched by the guard.