"Unh—"
Leon woke into grey.
He was flat on his back on wet sand, and the sea was in his lungs, and the world was turning in slow circles above him.
He rolled onto his side and was sick into the sand — seawater, bile, nothing else. There was nothing else left in him.
He lay there for a moment and let the spinning stop.
The memories hit him again as they always did when he surfaced from unconsciousness: two lives pressing against each other, Konrad's and Ryan's, neither of them quite winning. He knew the year. He knew the city. He knew that the Pyrenean crossing had been brutal and that somewhere north of here — somewhere on the other side of that range — Walter Engel and Friedrich Voss and the other six were making their own way south by different roads, as agreed.
He was alone.
That was the plan. Separate on the French side, cross in ones and twos by different passes, meet again on the Spanish coast in thirty days. Simple enough, in theory.
He'd nearly drowned in the execution.
A fishing boat — Catalan, out of some village south of Cadaqués — had been kind enough not to ask questions and unkind enough to drop him overboard half a kilometre short of the beach when the lights of the port came into view. The captain's idea of insurance.
He'd made it. Barely.
"¡Abuela! ¡Hay alguien ahí!"
A girl's voice. Young, bright with surprise.
"¿Está muerto?"
An older voice, steadier. "No lo parece."
Leon got his eyes open.
The sky above him was the pale orange of very early morning, and two women stood ten metres away watching him: a girl and an old woman, both with reed baskets on their backs, both in the dark practical clothes of people who get up before dawn to work. The girl was looking at him with wide eyes. The grandmother was looking at him the way you look at a stray dog — not unkind, just assessing.
He pushed himself up onto his elbows.
The girl grabbed the old woman's arm. "¡Abuela, se mueve!"
"Ya lo veo, Carmen. Ya lo veo."
The grandmother stepped forward. She had a kind face, lined deep by sun and harder things, and she looked him over with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who'd seen worse.
"Young man," she said, in careful, slow Spanish, as if she wasn't sure he'd understand. "Where have you come from?"
"France," Leon said. His Spanish had been drilled into him over thirty days of Walter Engel's pitiless coaching, and it came out reasonably clean, with the French accent he was supposed to have. "I crossed the mountains. I had some trouble at the end."
The grandmother glanced at the sea and worked it out without asking. She didn't press the rest.
"You're French?"
"Yes. León Vidal." He said it as naturally as he could. The first time he'd said it aloud to someone who wasn't one of his eight comrades. "From Lyon."
Leon Vidal. A man from nowhere, with a French name and forged papers and thirty years of the wrong century in his head.
The girl — Carmen — looked about fourteen or fifteen. Thin and sunburnt, hair in two dark braids, with the kind of fine bones that would make her striking in a few years. She was studying him with uncomplicated curiosity, the way children do before they've learned to pretend they're not looking.
"Are you hungry?" the grandmother asked.
He was. He was so hungry it was a physical pain, and he had been on short rations for three weeks in the mountains.
"A little," he said.
The grandmother made a short, decided sound that meant he was coming with them and there was no discussion about it.
"I'm Señora Molina," she said. "My granddaughter Carmen. We live near here. Come, before the sun gets up and you have to explain yourself to someone with a uniform."
---
The house was small and clean, two rooms and a narrow kitchen, in a street of similar houses behind the Barceloneta beach. Señora Molina found him dry clothes — her late husband's, too short in the leg but wearable — and a bowl of something with chickpeas and a piece of bread so hard he had to soak it. He ate all of it and most of another bowlful when she silently refilled it.
Carmen sat across the table and watched him eat with the same uncomplicated directness.
"You're tall," she announced.
"Carmen," her grandmother said.
"He is."
He was. The body he was wearing was well over six feet and built on a scale the Spanish chickpeas were not going to sustain for long. Konrad Adler had been fed on Wehrmacht rations and before that on the best cooking the farmhouse near Rottweil could produce. Leon Vidal, he thought, was going to have to find food.
And after food, work. And after work, everything else.
He sat back and let his mind settle for the first time since he'd hit the water.
He was in Barcelona. He was twenty-eight years old, by the body he was occupying. He had forged papers identifying him as a French civilian, a displaced person, nobody of any interest. He had a small amount of money sewn into the lining of his jacket — French francs, almost worthless here — and nothing else.
He knew this city. Not from Konrad's memories; Konrad had never been to Spain. He knew it from Ryan's, from books and articles and a documentary he half-remembered watching, and from the certainty of a man who knew how this decade ended. He knew what Spain was in 1945: exhausted, hungry, paranoid, run by a regime that had survived by staying carefully neutral while both sides of the war tried to court it. A city full of people who had lost everything in the Civil War, who had learned to keep their mouths shut and their eyes down.
He also knew it would not stay that way.
Spain would change. Slowly. The 1950s, the 1960s — he could see the shape of it from where he was sitting, the way you can see the shape of a road from the top of a hill. The question was how to use that knowledge, starting from a kitchen table in Barceloneta with thirty francs in his lining.
*The same way you always start,* he thought. *From the bottom.*
"If you're looking for work," Señora Molina said, as if reading his silence, "there's the fish market. Men can always find a few hours unloading. It's not much."
"Something is better than nothing," Leon said.
The old woman looked at him for a moment. She had the same quality of stillness Erich Brandt had — the ability to take in a great deal of information without asking unnecessary questions.
"You're not really from Lyon, are you," she said. It was not quite a question.
He met her eyes.
"I'm from nowhere, right now," he said. "I'm trying to be from Barcelona."
A pause. Then she nodded, once, the same way you close a door.
"My husband came from nowhere too," she said. "In 1939. He managed."
She got up and took his bowl away and refilled his bread from a piece she'd been keeping. That was all she said about it.
Carmen, who had been listening to all of this with the attentiveness of a girl who has learned that adults say more in their silences than in their words, looked at him across the table.
"León," she said, trying the name out loud. "Is that really your name?"
"It is now," he said.
She seemed to find this entirely satisfactory.
---
In this part of Barcelona, in this year, a man who was willing to work and didn't ask questions about other people's business could get by. Just barely, but by.
The fish market was real: pre-dawn starts, cold and loud, the smell of the catch and the ice and the men who'd been there all night. Leon showed up the next morning at four o'clock and found the foreman without being told who he was, and looked at him, and the foreman hired him on the spot because his hands were the right size and he didn't look like he was going to cause a scene.
Six pesetas a day. Not much. But it was a start.
He worked without complaint and with his ears open, because that was the most important thing in a new city: listening. Within a week he knew which bars were which, which neighbourhood was whose, which men in the market were simply workers and which ones were skimming something for somebody. The city had its own grammar, and he was learning it.
Barcelona under Franco was not Dublin. It was harder and quieter and more watchful. The Guardia Civil were everywhere, and they were not the Gardaí — they didn't want a bribe, or not always. They wanted submission. There was a difference.
But underneath all of it, underneath the watching and the submission and the hushed voices in the bars at night, there were the same currents he'd learned to read in every place he'd ever been: who had money and who wanted it, who was afraid and of whom, where the power actually sat and whether the men who held it deserved to.
He'd been doing this for twelve years — the body had, anyway — and some of it was already automatic.
What he also had, and Konrad Adler had never had, was the ability to look at where he was standing and see, clearly and with the cold certainty of a man who had read the ending of the book, exactly what was coming.
He intended to be ready for it.
On the sixth morning, coming off the fish market shift while the city was still dark, he checked: the injury from the Pyrenees crossing — a cut on his left forearm, deep and poorly tended — was already closing. Not at a normal rate. Much faster than it should have been.
He wrapped it again and said nothing to anyone.
It was the same thing he'd noticed in the barn, before they split up. The body he'd landed in was not a normal body. He didn't know why. He didn't know if it was something about the transmigration, or something that had always been there in Konrad Adler and he was only now noticing. All he knew was that he healed faster than he should, and his strength was slightly more than it looked, and there was something else he hadn't quite defined yet — a spatial sense, a quality of perception — that he was still working out.
He didn't think about it too much. He had other things to learn first.
---
Señora Molina let him sleep on the floor for the first week without making a matter of it. He got up before her every morning and left money on the table — two pesetas, then three, when he could — and she accepted it without a word.
Carmen brought him his bread in the mornings with the same directness she brought to everything.
"You're going to be rich one day," she told him on the fifth morning, with the absolute conviction of a fifteen-year-old who has decided something.
"Oh yes?" he said.
"You have the look." She said it as if this was obvious. "My grandfather had the look too, Abuela says. He came from nothing as well."
"And was he rich?"
"He died in the war." A pause. "But Abuela says he would have been."
Leon drank his ersatz coffee and thought about that.
"I'll try not to die in any wars," he said.
Carmen considered this seriously. "There aren't any wars left right now," she said. "So you're off to a good start."
He smiled. He hadn't smiled much in eight weeks. It still felt slightly foreign on the face, but less so than it had in the barn.
"León," Carmen said. "What are you going to do next? After the fish market?"
"Find something better," he said.
"Like what?"
He looked out through the narrow window at the street where the city was slowly coming awake, the bread sellers and the water carriers and the men on bicycles with things strapped to the back.
"I haven't decided yet," he said.
That was not entirely true. He had a rough idea. But it would take time, and it would take connections he didn't have yet, and it would require him to understand the shape of this city well enough to see where the openings were.
He had time.
He was twenty-eight years old, he healed fast, he had two lifetimes of knowledge, and he was starting from nothing in a broken city that was going to spend the next forty years slowly rebuilding itself.
There were worse positions to start from.
He finished his coffee, put on his jacket, and went to work.