Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [22]
For this, she was breaking her back on a wooden chair in a room that was already becoming unbearably close. Pia stretched again, glaring at her superior, daring him to say anything. He knew as well as she did that she had worked through the night on this, at his request: that as one of the five Comintern personnel in Barcelona fluent in at least three European languages, she was more than a mere typist. She had seen him look at La Passionora as if she was better off doing a traditional female job, though, and if he thought that of the main firebrand of Spanish Communism, she was hardly surprised that he thought the same of her.
She dragged the return arm over a final time and typed the row of asterisks to indicate the end of an interview. She was careful to be gentle pulling the flimsies out of the machine: to tear the paper at this stage would be aggravating.
‘Comrade, here is the report of last night’s interview with the prisoners.’ She held the flimsy and its copy out to him, hoping he would look up again as he took them. Instead he just nodded to his intray, without taking his eyes off whatever he was reading.
‘Thank you, comrade Samscuro. I will attend to it in due course. We will question the soldiers further this afternoon: please be back on duty then.’
Pia clamped her teeth tight together all the way down the long corridor to the women’s cloakroom, all the way through applying a tiny amount of lipstick in the smeary mirror and all the way across the yard to the gate of the compound. Safely in the street, with no fellow members close by, she allowed herself a few choice swearwords in her native language, knowing the only two Italians anywhere nearby were out of earshot in a cell somewhere.
She took breakfast at a small hotel café on the route back to her lodgings, realising that she would never settle to sleep properly so she may as well eat a good meal before reporting back at noon. She took out a copy of a French novel she was trying to read, letting her mind shut out the events of the night.
‘Pardon, mademoiselle.’ A man in a worn velvet coat was gesturing to the two empty chairs at her table, with a helpless shrug indicating that all the other tables were taken. ‘May we sit here?’
His accent was flawless, Pia noticed, but his phraseology indicated French was a second language. Glancing at the woman stood next to him, she took a guess at their nationality.
‘Of course, comrade,’ she tried in English, ‘it is a free country now, yes?’
The man sat first, smiling broadly, leaving the woman to seat herself. Pia took in his long brown hair, the face that, though filled out slightly, spoke of years of under-eating, and the eager eyes. One of the intellectual ones then. As the waiter came over the woman looked at him hopefully.
‘I don’t suppose you do latte, do you?’
‘Perdoni, comrade?’
‘Café Laa-tay? No, I suppose it’s too early.’ The woman glanced at Pia’s own cup, ‘Espresso? Dos espresso, por favor.’
As the woman leaned back into her chair, she flicked her hair back behind her ears. Pia was surprised at the cut: such a sharply defined bob seemed to belong to another era altogether. The newcomer noticed her attention and held out her right hand. ‘Hi, I’m Anji and this is the Doctor.’
‘Hello,’ the man grinned at her, offering his hand to be shaken as well. Pia ignored them both.
‘Pia. You’re a doctor? Which militia have you been assigned