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restaurants. His desire for her never ended, and she told him it was that way for her. But. It would not translate to marriage, children, domestic life, it was a love affair, and they both knew it. She’d married, three years earlier, in Germany, a marriage of money, and social standing, a marriage, he thought, brought on by turning forty and fatigue with love affairs, even theirs. Still, when he was lonely, he thought about her. And he was very lonely.
    He’d never imagined it would turn out that way, but the political maelstrom of his twenties and thirties, the world gone wrong, the pulse of evil and the unending flight from it, had turned life on its wrong side. Anyhow he blamed it, for leaving him alone in a hotel room in a foreign city. Where he fell asleep twice, by eleven-thirty, before giving up on the day, crawling under the blanket, and turning out the light.
      
    28 January, Barcelona.
    S. Kolb.
    So he was called, on his present passport, a workname they gave him when it suited their inclinations. His real name had disappeared, long ago, and he had become Mr. Nobody, from the nation of Nowhere, and he looked it: bald, with a fringe of dark hair, eyeglasses, a sparse mustache—a short, inconsequential man in a tired suit, at that moment chained to two anarchists and a water pipe in the WC of a café on the bombed-out waterfront of an abandoned city. Sentenced to be shot. Eventually. There was a queue, one had to wait one’s turn, and the executioners might not go back to work until they’d had lunch.
    Terribly unfair, it seemed to S. Kolb.
    His papers said he was the representative of a Swiss engineering firm in Zurich, and a letter in his briefcase, on Republican government stationery, dated two weeks earlier, confirmed his appointment at the office of military procurement. Fiction, all of it. The letter was a forgery, the office of military procurement was now an empty room, its floor littered with important papers, the name was an alias, and Kolb was no salesman.
    But even so, unfair. Because the people who were going to shoot him didn’t know about any of that. He’d tried to enter a riding stable, the temporary encampment of a few companies of the Fifth Army Corps, where a guard had arrested him and taken him to the office of the Checa —secret police—at that moment stationed in a waterfront café. The officer in charge, seated at a table by the bar, was a bull of a man, with a fat moon face covered in dark blue beard shadow. He’d listened impatiently to the guard’s story, raised up on one haunch, scowled, then said, “He’s a spy, shoot him.”
    He wasn’t wrong. Kolb was an operative of the British Secret Intelligence Service, a secret agent, yes, a spy. Nevertheless, this was terribly unfair. For he was, at that moment, not spying—not stealing documents, suborning officials, or taking photographs. Mostly that was his work, with the occasional murder thrown in when London demanded it, but not this week. This week, at the direction of his boss, an icy man known as Mr. Brown, S. Kolb had checked out of a comfortable whores’ hotel in Marseilles—an operation to do with the French Merchant Marine—and come running down to Spain in search of an Italian called Colonel Ferrara, thought to have retreated to Barcelona with elements of the Fifth Army Corps.
    But Barcelona was a nightmare, not that Mr. Brown cared. The government had packed up its files and fled north to Gerona, thousands of refugees followed, headed to France, and the city was left to await the advancing Nationalist columns. Anarchy ruled, the municipal street cleaners had abandoned their brooms and gone home, great heaps of garbage, attended by clouds of flies, were piled on the sidewalks, refugees broke into empty grocery stores, the city now governed by armed drunks riding through the streets on the roofs of taxicabs.
    Yet, even in the midst of chaos, Kolb had tried to do his job. “To the world,” Brown had once told him,