Sam was not at the airfield. Raoul Velázquez said he’d gone out in the last convoy, to collect wounded and other evacuees. He had made several flights already to take people to the hospitals in Madrid and on the coast—Velázquez couldn’t say exactly how many, because he had been making these flights himself and saw Mallory only in passing—but his airplane had been damaged or shot or broken down in the last run and he had gone to help on the ground while the mechanics attempted to repair it.

By the time Raoul had talked them both into the back of an ambulance, bouncing its way down the cratered road into Guernica, the sun had fallen deep in the western sky. The light was at its most beautiful, which made the devastation around them all the more astounding. Irene peered through the small window at the back of the truck and saw the burned-out remains of a convoy that had been bombed; a house made of rubble; a field populated by a herd of dead cattle; all of them coated in a fine, translucent gold as they might appear in heaven.

The closer they got to town, the more ruins they passed, some still smoking faintly. The doctor beside her said the Germans were still bombing, that they were actually bombing the evacuation convoys, the fucking bastards. He was an American, a Jew from Brooklyn, a Communist. He told Irene all about communism as the ambulance jolted and ground its way to Guernica, how this struggle represented the monumental battle of rich against poor, capitalist against proletariat, Church against man, and that when the door of the ambulance opened and Irene saw what fascism had wrought, she would see all this as clearly as he did. Irene loved him for this ferocious idealism, and because he didn’t seem to recognize her, even when she said her name was Irene.

Raoul was quiet. As they lurched down the road, closer and closer to the center of the devastation, he did not look out the window. He sat with his back to the cab, his knees drawn up against his meaty chest, his fingers linked together like a bridge across them. He stared into space without saying a word, and looked as if he might be praying. Irene remembered about the fiancée and asked him if he had found her yet.

“No. I have searched for her among the wounded. I have asked everyone. Nobody has any news.” He paused. “She is carrying my child. We were supposed to marry next month, before the baby is born.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It is my fault. She wanted to wait until we were married. She is a virtuous girl, very pious. But I thought our families would never agree to let us marry, so I seduced her into bed and made her pregnant, and if she dies now, before I can marry her . . . in a state of mortal sin . . . and my child still a bastard . . .”

“God would not be so cruel as that,” Irene said.

“No, it is God’s will. This is my punishment. My father used to tell me I was too arrogant and too lustful, and God would turn my sins against me.”

“This is not an act of God. This is an act of man.”

The ambulance lurched to a stop, and the doctor rose and shook Irene’s hand and thanked her sincerely. He said she could help carry the stretchers, since she was so tall and strong. She opened her mouth to say that she wasn’t here to carry stretchers, she was here to find Sam Mallory, but she realized they were probably the same thing.

Irene did not turn Communist when she stepped out of the ambulance and saw what the bombs had wrought in Guernica. She already considered herself a pacifist; she hated the idea of people killing each other, and thought the official American policy of non-intervention was probably right. But something had to alter inside her head at the sight of so much rubble, spattered with blood. At the sight of human limbs torn off human bodies, and the carcass of some unfortunate donkey, ribs splintered apart to reveal its stinking viscera. It seemed that not a stone was left in place, not a house neglected. The smell was that of a slaughterhouse. The noise was of souls in purgatory.

She thought, An airplane did this. You could fill your airplane with bombs and kill a thousand people, without ever knowing whom you had killed, with no more pang of conscience than if you had brought down your boot in the middle of an anthill.

When she found Sam, two hours later, it was by accident. She and Raoul carried a stretcher together and had taken a wrong turn, and were trying to climb over the ruins of a house while the woman in the stretcher, whose right arm was a stump bound in blood-soaked bandages, and whose gut had been laid open in an eight-inch gash, screamed in mortal anguish. Irene had actually forgotten all about Sam, or at least forgotten that she was supposed to be looking for him. She did not want to find him; she thought that if she did find him, he would probably be dead. So they turned some corner and met another pair of stretcher-bearers, and she happened to catch the eye of one of them and it was a blue eye, it was Sam’s eye.

It took him longer to recognize her. He hadn’t had the slightest idea she was in Spain, here in Guernica looking for him. He thought she was enjoying her triumph right now, feted in Paris with George Morrow by her side. He caught her eye twice, went right past, heard her shout his name and slipped on a rock, dropping the stretcher. Luckily he had been carrying the lower half. Irene kept hold of her own stretcher but she streamed with tears. Sam was dirty and unshaven and exhausted, his clothes torn and bloodstained, his hands blistered raw. She screamed some curse at him, for being here at all. Then she thanked God that he was alive.

They said nothing in the ambulance, on the way back to the airfield. Sam fell asleep on Irene’s lap. Raoul sat next to them, staring at the wall of the truck. They had not seen his fiancée among the dead or wounded; nobody could remember seeing a woman of her description, seven months gone with child.

By the time they reached Bilbao it was dark, and all the airplanes had been caught in the strafing except Irene’s. She said they could load the patients into the Sirius and fly to Madrid or to the coast, and Sam said all right, but they would have to wait until dawn, because you couldn’t navigate from the air when all the towns were blacked out. They ate some stale bread rolls and hard cheese in what had once been a commissary, and went to sleep on pallets in the hangar, one blanket each, while the wounded begged for morphine on the other side of a line of curtains.

By the grace of God, the Germans didn’t bomb them during the night. Irene woke first and checked her watch, which had a luminous dial. It was half past four. Sam was heavily asleep next to her. She didn’t want to wake him, so she lay perfectly still. The injured had either fallen asleep, or given up, or died, because the hangar was quiet. She stared at the shadow that was Sam’s face until she felt him wake, felt him feel her beside him. Felt him start with surprise and then relax.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. “So it wasn’t a dream.”

The next day, Irene made three flights out of Bilbao, taking wounded to the hospitals in Valencia, stopping only long enough to load and unload patients and refuel the airplane. For the next several days, she and Sam and Raoul flew during the daylight, back and forth, while the mechanics worked to repair their planes at night. When they sat together at night, eating their dinner, Raoul didn’t speak, and Irene knew there was no news; he was just flying and flying, to keep himself from thinking about his fiancée.

When she returned from her last flight on the fifth day, the sun had nearly set, and she had trouble judging the runway in the glare. She came down hard, and the jolt knocked the breath out of her lungs. The orderly in the back thought they were going to crash and screamed. Irene felt her last nerve fray down to nothing. She kept her composure until the ship rolled to a stop. Then she put her head on the edge of the instrument panel and cried.

“You need a rest,” said Sam.

“I’m all right.”

“You’re not. You’re exhausted. You need to eat and sleep.”

“So do you.”

“I’ll see if I can find you a private room somewhere,” he said. “With a real bed. Or a cot at least.”

“That’s not necessary,” Irene insisted, but she was falling on her feet, staggering on Sam’s arm as he led her to the commissary and made her sit. He brought her some food and some red Spanish wine and went to speak to the commandant. When he returned, he told her that the commandant had relinquished his own quarters for her.

“Damn you,” she said. “You told him my name, didn’t you?”