Lorenzo shook his head gently. 'Fantasies.'

'Then take the tarpaulin off the thing behind you,' Bernie said. 'Go on.' He realized his tone was becoming insolent and bit his lip. He did not want a complaint to Aranda.

The psychiatrist gave a little grunt of annoyance, then stood and lifted the tarpaulin. His face set as he saw the tall wooden stake with the metal seat, the restraining straps and neck collar, the heavy brass screw with its handles behind.

'The garrote vil, doctor. They've had six executions since I've been here. They line us up in the yard, bring out the garrote and make us watch. You hear the man's neck break, there's a loud crack, like a shot.'

The psychiatrist sat down again. His voice was still calm. He looked steadily at Bernie, then shook his head. 'You are an antisocial,' he said quietly. 'A psychopath.' He shook his head. 'Men such as you can never be rehabilitated; your minds are abnormal, incomplete. The garrote is needed, I am afraid, to keep those like you in check.' He made a note on the questionnaire, then called out to Agustin. 'Guard! I have finished with this man.'

Agustin led Bernie away. The sun had gone below the horizon and a red light bathed the wooden huts lining the earthen square. The searchlights in the watchtower above the barbed-wire fence would soon come on. Against the mess hut a large cross stood, six feet high, ropes hanging from the arms. It looked like a religious symbol, but it wasn't: they hung men from the ropes as a punishment. Bernie wished he had mentioned that to the psychiatrist.

It was time for roll-call; three hundred prisoners were shambling into lines around the little wooden platform in the middle. Agustin halted, shifting his heavy rifle on his shoulder.

'I have to fetch another five to the mad-doctor tonight,' he said. 'It will be a long evening.'

Bernie looked at him in surprise. The guards were not supposed to talk with the prisoners.

'The doctor looked displeased,' Agustin added.

Bernie looked at him, but the guard's thin face was turned away. 'Be careful,' Agustin said quietly. 'Better times may be ahead, Piper. I can say no more now. But be careful. Do not get punished now, or killed.'

BERNIE STOOD next to his friend Vicente. The lawyer's thin face, surrounded by its shock of grey hair and matted beard, looked drawn and ill. He smiled at Bernie then coughed, a liquid gurgling sound deep in his chest. Vicente had been having chest infections since the summer; he seemed to recover but then they would hit him again, worse than before. Some of the guards let him do light work in return for helping them fill in forms, but this week the sergeant in charge of the quarry detail was Ramirez, a brutal man who had had Vicente sorting rocks all day. He looked as though he could hardly stand.

'What happened to you?' he whispered to Bernie.

'They've got a psychiatrist here, he's interviewing some of the people from San Pedro. He said I was an antisocial psychopath.'

Vicente smiled wryly. 'Then that proves what I have always said, you are a good man even if you are a Bolshevik. If one of these people says you are normal, then is the time to worry. You've missed dinner.'

'I'll manage,' Bernie said. He must be sure to get a good night's sleep if he was to be fit to work tomorrow. The rice they fed the prisoners was awful, the sweepings of some Valencian storehouse mingled with gritty dust, but to be able to work you had to eat all you could.

He went over what Agustin had said. He didn't understand. Better times? Was there some political change in Spain? The comandante had told them Franco had met Hitler and that soon Spain would be in the war, but they knew nothing of what was actually going on outside.

Aranda stepped out of his hut. He carried his riding crop, tapping it against his leg. This evening he was smiling and all the prisoners relaxed slightly. He vaulted on to the platform and began calling out names in his clear sharp voice.

The roll-call took half an hour, the men standing rigidly to attention. Towards the end someone a few rows away fell down. The man's neighbours bent to help him.

'Leave him!' Aranda called out. 'Eyes to the front.'

At the end the comandante raised his arm in the Fascist salute. 'Arriba Espana!' In the early days of Bernie's captivity, at San Pedro, many prisoners had refused to respond, but when a few were shot they had complied, and now there was a dull ragged response. Bernie had told the other prisoners about an English word that sounded almost the same as 'arriba' and now it was 'Grieve Espana' that many called back.

The prisoners were dismissed. The man who had fallen was lifted by his neighbours and they carried him back to his hut. It was one of the Poles. He stirred faintly. On the other side of the barbed-wire fence a figure, shadowy in the dusk in his long black robe, stood watching.

'Father Eduardo,' Vicente muttered. 'Come for his prey.'

They watched as the young priest came through the gate and walked towards the Pole's hut, his long sotana stirring up little eddies of dust from the yard. The last of the light glinted on his spectacles. 'Bastard,' Vicente muttered. 'Coming to see if he can terrify another good atheist into taking the last rites by threatening him with Hell.'

VICENTE WAS an old Left Republican, a member of Azana's party. He had been a lawyer in Madrid, providing cheap services to the city's poor, until he joined the militia in 1936. It was a romantic gesture, he had told Bernie. 'I was too old. But even rationalist Spaniards like me are romantics at heart.' Like all his party Vicente had a visceral hatred for the Church. It was almost an obsession with the Left Republicans; a liberal-bourgeois distraction, the Communists said. Vicente despised the Communists and said they had destroyed the Republic. Establo, leader of the Communists in Bernie's hut, disapproved of Vicente and Bernie's friendship.

'In this camp you have only your convictions to keep you going,' Establo had warned Bernie once. 'If they are eaten away your strength will go too, you will give up and die.' Establo himself looked as though it was only his beliefs that kept him alive. He was in his forties but looked sixty; his skin yellow and sagging, scarred with the marks of scabies. His eyes, though, were still full of fire.

Bernie had shrugged and told Establo he would end by converting Vicente, that the lawyer had the seeds of a class perspective. He had no respect for Establo; he hadn't voted for him when the twenty Communists in the hut elected their leader. Establo was obsessed with control and couldn't bear disagreement. During the war it had been necessary to have such people but it was different here. By the end of the Civil War the parties that made up the Republic had all hated each other, but in the camp the prisoners needed to cooperate to survive. Establo, though, tried to maintain the Communists' separate identity. He told them they were still the vanguard of the working class, that one day their time would come again.

A couple of days before, Pablo, one of the other Communists, had whispered in Bernie's ear. 'Beware of mixing with the lawyer, compadre. Establo is making an issue of it.'

'He can go fuck himself. What's his authority, anyway?'

'Why court trouble, Bernardo? The lawyer will die soon, anyone can see that.'

THIRTY PRISONERS shuffled into their bare wooden hut and threw themselves down on the straw mattresses covering their plank beds, each with one brown army blanket. Bernie had taken the bunk next to Vicente when the last occupant died. It was partly an act of defiance against Establo, who lay on his bunk in the opposite row, staring across at him.

Vicente coughed again. His face reddened and he lay back, gasping.

'I am bad. I will have to plead sickness tomorrow.'

'You can't. Ramirez is on duty, you'll just get a beating.'

'I don't know if I can work another day.'

'Come on, if you can stick it out until Molina is back, he'll put you on easy duty.'

'I will try.'

They were silent a moment, then Bernie leaned over on his elbow, speaking quietly. 'Listen, the guard Agustin said an odd thing earlier.'

'The quiet one from Sevilla?'

'Yes.' Bernie repeated the guard's words. Vicente frowned.

'What can it mean?'

'I don't know. What if the Monarchists have toppled the Falange? We wouldn't know.'

'We'd be no better off under the Monarchists.' Vicente thought a moment. 'Better times may be ahead? For who? He might have meant just for you, not all the camp.'

'Why should they do me any favours?'

'I don't know.' Vicente lay back with a sigh that turned into a cough. He looked ill, miserable.

'Listen,' Bernie said, to distract him. 'I stood up to that bastard quack. He told me I was a degenerate because I couldn't be converted to Catholicism. I remember that scene last Navidad. Remember, the doll?'

Vicente gave a sound between a laugh and a groan. 'Who could forget it?'

IT HAD BEEN a cold day, snow on the ground. The prisoners were marched out into the yard where Father Jaime, the older of the two priests who served the camp, stood dressed in a green and yellow cope. In his regalia in the bare snowy yard he looked like a visitor from another world. Beside him young Father Eduardo, in his usual black, looked uncomfortable, his round face red with cold. Father Jaime was holding a child's doll, a baby made of wood, wrapped in a shawl. There was a silver circle painted round its brow that puzzled Bernie for a moment until he realized it was meant to be a halo.

As always Father Jaime's face was supercilious, angry, his hawklike nose with the stiff little hairs on top lifted as though offended by more than the men's rank smell. Aranda called the prisoners into shivering lines then stood on the platform, tapping his crop against his leg.

'Today is Epiphany,' he called out, his breath making grey clouds in the freezing air. 'Today we honour the baby Jesus, who came to Earth to save us. You will offer up homage and perhaps the Lord will take pity on you and shine a light into your souls. You will each kiss the image of the Christ child Father Jaime holds. Do not worry if the person before you has tuberculosis, the Lord will not allow you to be contaminated.'

Father Jaime frowned at the levity in the comandante's tone. Father Eduardo looked at his feet. Father Jaime held the doll up, threateningly, like a weapon.

One by one the men shuffled past and kissed it. A few failed to bring their lips quite to the wood and the priest called them back sharply. 'Again! Kiss the baby Jesus properly!'

It was one of the Anarchists who refused, Tomas the shipbuilder from Barcelona. He stood in front of the priest, looking him in the eyes. He was a big man and Father Jaime shrank back a little.

'I will not kiss your symbol of superstition,' he said. 'I spit on it!' And he did, leaving a trail of white spittle on the baby's wooden brow. Father Jaime cried out as though the baby were real. One of the guards landed a blow on Tomas's head that felled him to the ground. Father Eduardo looked about to step forward but a glare from Father Jaime stopped him. The older priest wiped the doll's brow with a white handkerchief.

Aranda jumped off the platform and marched over to where the big man lay. 'You insult Our Lord!' he cried. 'The Virgin in Heaven weeps as you spit on her child!'

The words were outraged but his tone was still mocking. Aranda took his crop and began methodically beating the Anarchist, starting with his legs and ending with a blow to Tomas's head that drew blood. He called a couple of guards to carry him off, then turned to Father Jaime. The priest had shrunk back, clasping the doll to his breast as though sheltering it from the scene.

Aranda bowed. 'I am sorry for that insult, sir. Please continue. We shall bring these men to religion if the effort kills us, shall we not?' Aranda nodded to the next man in line. Bernie was pleased to see a little fear as well as anger in Father Jaime's eyes as the prisoner shuffled forward and bent his head to the doll. No one else resisted.

'I REMEMBER how that doll smelled,' Bernie said to Vicente. 'Paint and saliva.'

'Those black beetles, they are all the same. Father Jaime is a brute, but that Eduardo is more cunning. He will be in the sick Pole's hut now, sniffing out whether he is about to die, whether he is weak enough to be browbeaten into taking absolution.'

Bernie shook his head. 'Eduardo's not so bad. Remember he tried to get a doctor for the camp? And the crosses for the graveyard?' He thought of the hillside, just outside the camp, where those who died were buried in unmarked graves. When Father Eduardo came in the summer he had asked for crosses to mark the dead. The comandante had forbidden it; those inside the camp had been sentenced to decades of imprisonment by military courts; in practice they were already dead. One day the camp would close and the huts and barbed wire would be removed, leaving no sign on the bare windswept hill that it had ever been there.

'What do crosses matter?' Vicente replied. 'More symbols of superstition. Father Eduardo's kindness is fake, it is all to an end. They're all the same, the black beetles, they'll try to get you when you're dying, at your weakest.'

It was dark outside now. Some in the hut played cards or sewed their tattered uniforms by the light of weak tallow candles. Bernie closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He thought about Tomas's beating; the Anarchist had died a few days later. He himself had trod on thin ice with the psychiatrist this afternoon. It was lucky the man seemed to see him only as a specimen. Part of Bernie wanted to make some fierce gesture like Tomas's, but he wanted to live. If they killed him that would be their final, irrevocable victory.

Eventually he slept. He had a strange dream. He came into the hut with a whole crowd of schoolboys from Rookwood, led by Mr Taylor. The boys examined the wooden pallets then stood around the table made of old packing cases in the middle. They said if this was their new dorm it was jolly rough, they didn't think much of it. 'Don't be downhearted,' Taylor said reprovingly. 'That's not the Rookwood way.'

Bernie woke with a start. The hut was completely dark, he could see nothing. He was cold; he moved the thin blanket down to cover his feet. It was the first really cold night. September and October were the easiest months: the frying heat of summer fading by a few blessed degrees each week, the temperature at night comfortable enough to allow you to sleep easily. But now winter was here.

He lay awake in the darkness, listening to the coughs and mutterings of the other men. There were creaks as some tossed uneasily on their pallets, perhaps feeling the cold too. Before long there would be frosts each morning; by Christmas people would be dying.

There was a whisper from the next bunk. 'Bernardo, are you awake?' Vicente coughed again.

'Yes.'

'Listen,' His voice was urgent. Bernie turned but he couldn't see him in the thick darkness.

'I do not think I will last through the cold weather,' Vicente said.

'Of course you will.'

'If I don't, I want you to promise me something. The black beetles will come at the end; they will try to give me absolution. Stop them. I might weaken you see, I know people weaken. It would betray everything I have lived for. Please stop them somehow.'

Bernie felt tears pricking at his eyes. 'All right,' he whispered back. 'If it ever comes to it, I promise.' Vicente reached across, found Bernie's arm and clutched it with his thin hand.

'Thank you,' he said. 'You are a good friend. You will help me make my last defiance.'

Chapter Twenty-Two.

IN MADRID November the first dawned cold and damp. Harry's flat was gloomy, despite the watercolours of English landscapes he had borrowed from the embassy to cover the blank walls.

Sometimes he thought of the vanished commissar. He wondered what sort of a commissar Bernie would have made if he had lived and his side had won. Harry's job had been to encourage Barbara to talk about Sandy when they met, and they had hardly mentioned Bernie's name; he felt oddly ashamed, as though they had written him out of their pasts. Bernie might have made an efficient commissar, he thought, he had had a hard angry streak along with the social compassion. But he couldn't see him becoming one of those he had heard about, who during the Civil War sentenced soldiers to be shot for grumbling.

He took his tea, Liptons supplied by the embassy, over to the window. He had lit the brasero and a welcome warmth stole from the little stove under the table. Rain dripped slowly from the balconies opposite. He had hated asking Barbara questions about Sandy, ferreting for information, and had been relieved when she didn't seem to know anything. He supposed that didn't make him much of a spy.

Harry had a session translating at an Interior Ministry function that morning, then another appointment with Sandy at the Cafe Rocinante. He had telephoned Sandy the day after his walk with Barbara. He said things were quiet at the embassy, did Sandy fancy meeting up again? He had accepted eagerly.

Harry went down to the street and set off for the cafe. He looked around him carefully, as usual, but there was no sign that Enrique had been replaced by another, more efficient spy.

SANDY WAS already at the Rocinante when Harry arrived, sitting at a table with his foot on a wooden block as a ragged ten-year-old boy cleaned his shoes. He waved an arm at Harry.

'Over here! Excuse me if I don't get up.'

Harry sat down. The cafe was quiet this afternoon; perhaps the rain and fog were keeping people indoors.

'Filthy weather, eh?' Sandy said cheerfully. 'Like being back home.'

'Sorry I'm late.'

'It's all right, I've only been here a few minutes myself. Winter's coming, I'm afraid.' The boy sat back on his haunches and Sandy inspected his shoes.

'OK, nino.' He passed a coin to the boy, who turned big sad eyes to Harry. 'I clean your shoes, senor?'

'No, gracias.'

'Oh go on, Harry, it's only ten centimos.'

Harry nodded and the boy placed the wooden block under his foot and began polishing the black shoes Harry himself had cleaned an hour before. Sandy beckoned the waiter and they ordered coffee. The boy finished with Harry's shoes; Harry passed him a coin and he moved on to other customers, whispering, 'Limpiabotas?' in a sad wheedling tone.

'Poor little bastard,' Harry said.

'He tried to sell me some dirty postcards last week. Awful things, middle-aged whores lifting their knickers. He'd better watch out if the civiles catch him.'

The waiter brought their coffees. Sandy studied Harry thoughtfully. 'Tell me,' he asked, 'how did Barbara seem when you saw her?'

'Fine. We went for a walk in the Casa de Campo.' She hadn't seemed fine at all; there was something closed and reserved about her he'd never seen before but he wasn't going to talk to Sandy about that. It was one loyalty he could avoid betraying.

'She didn't seem preoccupied, worried?'

'Not really.'

'Hmm.' Sandy lit a cigar. 'There's something up with her, has been for a few weeks. She says it's nothing but I'm not so sure.' He smiled. 'Oh well, maybe this voluntary work will take her out of herself. Did she tell you about that?'

'Yes. It sounded like a good thing.'