Birth of Our Power by Victor Serge Richard Greeman Page B

cigarette in a nickel ashtray. “Hello? Ah, it’s you. Very good.” At the other end of the line, a constrained voice was battling against the fa-la-las of an orchestra. Hard little heels hammering rhythmically on the boards made a din like thick hail beating down on that prudent voice. The man was evidently calling from the wings of a dance hall. The Deputy Commissioner listened with great attention. “Himself! Well, well. At Lloria’s?
Calle
Jeronima, number 26? Just a minute … On the second floor, you say? The room is on the right, under the stairs, at the end of the hall. The nearest window is on the courtyard? That’s it?—Good-by.” The insidious voice fell silent over the receiver. The Deputy Commissioner turned a switch and the room was flooded with light. The full-dress portrait of the King appeared, set off by a massive gilt frame, between the safe and a strongbox containing the informers’ dossiers: a feeble smile and a sidewise glance hanging in the air behind the policeman. Don Felipe looked through a big file:
“Lloria,
married to Sarda, Maria (Lolita), aged 27 …” From another file containing the plans of houses occupied by the activists (“extremely dangerous”) entered on list #A-2, Don Felipe withdrew a more interesting card: the doors, the heights of the windows, the turnings of the corridors, everything fell clearly into place before his eyes, and this perfect layout, carefully drawn up by a prize student of the School of Art and Design, became the blueprint for a trap … With the point of his pencil, Don Felipe, pensive, slowly traced a circle on the plan, in the room where Dario was sleeping. Then, still completely absorbed, he put in three little dots—the tiny, schematic representation of a face.
    â€œOf course. Of course.”
    The pencil point mechanically traced another circle, sketching another head, somewhat smaller, hugging the first one: a slightly heavier line representing the mouth. Only then did the policeman come out of his dream: Two men in the courtyard. Two men in the street. Three to make the arrest. No exit. A perfect trap. Very good. Don Felipe rubbed his hands together. He was about to ring, to close this trap with a mere push of the finger in the shadows. The King approved silently from his shining frame and purple velvet backdrop above. But, but …
    But the anger of those thousands of workers, tomorrow, in the back streets, the cold fury of all those men in File #A (“dangerous”) would haunt the city, invisible, controlled, vehement yet ready to explode in an outcry or, worse still, in the dry crackle of pistol-shots. Two or three officers would be dead by nightfall, without any doubt. Don Felipe peered into the future. And after that?—After that was the great unknown of the masses’ anger.
    And then this man, asleep in the rectangle now marked by two circles … “Hmmm,” thought Don Felipe in spite of himself (one thought crossing another en route from the depths where the light never penetrates), “two heads, one against the other …” The Regionalist League feared him more than anybody. Arrest him? Enrage the workers, calm the regionalists. Self-interest added its ounce of gold to the dark nugget of fear on the invisible scales.

    The next day we buried Juan Bregat. He killed himself accidentally while handling a Browning with a child’s delight and clumsiness. Some comrades had left his body in an empty bystreet, and most people believed it had been a crime of the police. We knew better. The bullet made a hole in his forehead above the left eyebrow: and this hole, black at the edges, plugged with a cotton wad, gave him the look of a young victim of the firing squad. The totally tragic character of his death was apparent in the attenuated sharpness of his features, the greenish tint of his skin, the stale odor given off by that livid flesh—virile only