Gibraltar Passage by T. Davis Bunn Read Free Book Online

came to you, and not me.”
    â€œMaybe she was afraid,” Jake said.
    Pierre picked up speed and called out over his shoulder, “Why would any woman be afraid of me?”
    As they entered the crowded market area, Jake felt himself lifted and carried along by the general sense of contagious excitement. The air was charged with rediscovery. Still, there were ruins and want and decay and loss. Yet the people seemed to draw hope from this very hopelessness. They were seized by a wild spirit of reconstruction. They were free of the fascists’ grip. The blindfold was off. What they saw was painful, yes, but at least they saw .
    Jake balanced his bicycle outside the cafe and waited by the side wall while Pierre popped into numerous doorways and asked his questions. The cafe’s barkeeper came out to clean the two rusted roadside tables and set chairs in place. He ignored Jake completely.
    Jake turned his face to the sun. The roofs of the surrounding buildings were steep-pitched and clay-tiled. The walls were mostly of dressed stone. The roads were dusty clay or crumbling asphalt or bricks smoothed to glassy roundnessby decades of hard use. Even in the middle of the city, the air was sweet with awakening springtime. The sky was an open, aching blue. Jake could not get enough of the air, the sky, the scent of sea.
    Eventually Pierre returned, his face creased with thought. “All right. We leave our bikes here and go on by foot.”
    â€œNo luck?”
    Pierre hesitated. “I have the feeling . . .”
    â€œWhat?”
    Pierre struggled with words that made no sense even to him. “I have the feeling that they are all waiting.”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œMy friends. The homecoming celebration is over, or so it seems today, and now they are waiting. All of them. Everyone I knew and some I didn’t. Watching me and waiting.”
    â€œWaiting for what?”
    â€œThis is what confuses me most,” Pierre replied. “It is as though they think I already know.”
    â€œYou realize,” Jake pointed out, “that what you’re saying makes no sense at all.”
    â€œThey are waiting,” Pierre insisted. “I felt it at home this morning as well, but did not think of it at the time. They give me only half a greeting. Half a welcome. The other half they hold in reserve.”
    Jake thought of the way Jasmyn had been bowed from the cafe the night before and said nothing.
    Pierre started forward. “Come. Let us see if the smugglers can make more sense than my friends.”
    Their way paralleled the harbor. Two streets farther along, the cramped orderliness gave way to ruin. The dwellings had been flattened as with a giant’s hand. Streets were buried under a field of rubble. A few chimneys rose in mournful monument to what once was. In the distance, a pair of buildings stood isolated and naked, the only surviving structures in the vast acreage of desolation.
    Grimly Pierre surveyed the specter, then said simply, “Le Panier.”
    Something tugged at Jake, a thought that remained only half-formed. “And you say nobody was hurt when the Nazis did this?”
    â€œA mystery, yes?” Pierre turned and started down the lane bordering the destruction. “I must ask my friends how that came to pass.”
    The lane meandered along the brink of devastation. The buildings lining its right side looked out over a vast field of dusty stone and sorrow. Pierre stopped in front of a glass door and said, “I wish we were armed.”
    Jake glanced at the utterly silent glass-fronted shop. Overhead were the vestiges of a name painted long ago, now so covered in dust and time that it was illegible. “We’re going in there?”
    â€œWe must.” Pierre reached for the door. “Full alert, my friend. Watch both our backs.”
    They entered a narrow cafe, and were enveloped in gloom.
    The pair of cramped windows flanking the door were so coated