Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [96]
‘When were they last seen?’
‘Erm. Anji was at the exchange when the trouble started. Fitz... I don’t know. I need to find them. I need their help.’
‘With this other thing?’
‘Yes. Thanks for coming back. In the last few days we seem to have upset half the friends we’ve made. Whoever turned over our room had help from the hotel.’
Jueves shrugged, kicked at a bit of rubbish. The barricades were vanishing as quickly as they had been created but the streets were still scattered with bricks, discarded bottles. Burnt out vehicles had been shoved fully on to the pavement, clearing the roads of their carcasses.
‘If nothing else, I figure there’s a story in this. I want to find out what’s really going on.’
* * *
She grabbed an armful of clothes and shoved them into a backpack. Glancing about the tiny room, Eleana hurriedly pulled out the drawer of her dressing table and collected her notebooks, adding them to the bag. A final look around. There was nothing else. Her shoulder still wailed in pain as she swung the strap on to it, the weight swinging about. Out on to the narrow balcony. She pulled her door to and locked it automatically. It didn’t matter, none of it mattered. La Batalla had been shut down. The POUM were being outlawed, denounced as traitors and fascist collaborators. People were still being assassinated, going missing. Eleana still wanted to believe, still wanted to fight but more than that, she wanted to live to fight. And she could see what was going to happen. She had heard the whispers from Moscow; the showtrials, the summary executions, the vanishings. She was going to vanish first. Get to France, up to Paris. She knew people up there who would help her. Come back to Barcelona when it was safe, when Franco was defeated.
She paused, then took her key and opened Miquel’s door. Six months gone. His body – and no matter what the officials might say she knew it had been his – had been as mangled as her mind had been until just a few hours ago. Something, someone, had taken him and ripped him apart. Shredded him and then tried to put him back together. All fractured and confused. Some force had done that to him. She’d left his room untouched, never offered it to the group as extra accommodation. She preferred to see it as he had left it. Standing in the doorway, she looked around it for the last time.
A photo caught her eye. It was pinned to the wall next to his bed, along with hundreds of others. This one, though, brought back a hundred memories. He’d taken it, experimenting with the timer function on his then new Leica. He’d posed her carefully, sat on the edge of a fountain, set the camera up and run over. They’d both looked serious, then started laughing at just the wrong moment. It had been in the summer of 1936, in the first euphoric weeks of the revolution. He’d wanted to be sure it worked before using it out in the streets. She stepped in and grabbed the image from the wall, throwing the knapsack on to the bed and carefully rolling the print into a side pocket. She left the photography equipment where it had lain for the last six months, despite the money she could have got for it. It was his. Maybe someone else would find a use for it, or maybe it would be destroyed when the men came for her and found her gone, but she wasn’t going to make money from his death.
On the balcony, she relocked the door. As she hurried down the stairs and into the courtyard, she saw the old couple standing in their doorway, watching her sullenly. Always watching, those two. She narrowed her eyes at them. They continued to watch her, their expressions not changing.
‘Salut! Comrades!’
She raised her fist in the anarchist salute, watched their faces twist with distaste. She turned on her heel and walked out into the street. She took a sidestreet almost immediately, heading down towards Estació de França and the first train towards the border.
* * *
As they walked up and down Las Rambles, talking quietly, the Doctor filled in as much as could to Jueves.
‘So you think this