Marty laid it beside the dispatch.
“Comrade Corporal,” Karkov called in Spanish.
The corporal opened the door and came in. He looked quickly at André Marty, who stared back at him like an old boar which has been brought to bay by hounds. There was no fear on Marty’s face and no humiliation. He was only angry, and he was only temporarily at bay. He knew these dogs could never hold him.
“Take these to the two comrades in the guard room and direct them to General Golz’s headquarters,” Karkov said. “There has been too much delay.”
The corporal went out and Marty looked after him, then looked at Karkov.
“Tovarich Marty,” Karkov said, “I am going to find out just how untouchable you are.”
Marty looked straight at him and said nothing.
“Don’t start to have any plans about the corporal, either,” Karkov went on. “It was not the corporal. I saw the two men in the guard room and they spoke to me” (this was a lie). “I hope all men always will speak to me” (this was the truth although it was the corpora! who had spoken). But Karkov had this belief in the good which could come from his own accessibility and the humanizing possibility of benevolent intervention. It was the one thing he was never cynical about.
“You know when I am in the U.S.S.R. people write to me in Pravda when there is an injustice in a town in Azerbaijan. Did you know that? They say ‘Karkov will help us.”
André Marty looked at him with no expression on his face except anger and dislike. There was nothing in his mind now but that Karkov had done something against him. All right, Karkov, power and all, could watch out.
“This is something else,” Karkov went on, “but it is the same principle. I am going to find Out just how untouchable you are, Comrade Marty. I would like to know if it could not be possible to change the name of that tractor factory.”
André Marty looked away from him and back to the map.
“What did young Jordan say?” Karkov asked him.
“I did not read it,” André Marty said. “Et maintenant fiche moi la paix, Comrade Karkov.”
“Good,” said Karkov. “I leave you to your military labors.”
He stepped out of the room and walked to the guard room. Andrés and Gomez were already gone and he stood there a moment looking up the road and at the mountain tops beyond that showed now in the first gray of daylight. We must get on up there, he thought. It will be soon, now.
Andrés and Gomez were on the motorcycle on the road again and it was getting light. Now Andrés, holding again to the back of the seat ahead of him as the motorcycle climbed turn after switchback turn in a faint gray mist that lay over the top of the pass, felt the motorcycle speed under him, then skid and stop and they were standing by the motorcycle on a long, down-slope of road and in the woods, on their left, were tanks covered with pine branches. There were troops here all through the woods. Andrés saw men carrying the long poles of stretchers over their shoulders. Three staff cars were off the road to the right, in under the trees, with branches laid against their sides and other pine branches over their tops.
Gomez wheeled the motorcycle up to one of them. He leaned it against a pine tree and spoke to the chauffeur who was sitting by the car, his back against a tree.
“I’ll take you to him,” the chauffeur said. “Put thy moto out of sight and cover it with these.” He pointed to a pile of cut branches.
With the sun just starting to come through the high branches of the pine trees, Gomez and Andrés followed the chauffeur, whose name was Vicente, through the pines across the road and up the slope to the entrance of a dugout from the roof of which signal wires ran on up over the wooded slope. They stood outside while the chauffeur went in and Andrés admired the construction of the dugout which showed only as a hole in the hillside, with no dirt scattered about, but which he could see, from the entrance, was both deep and profound with men moving around in it freely with no need to duck their heads under the heavy timbered roof.