Walking back to the hotel, he asked Jerry if she had ever found the solution to a problem in a dream. "Because just now I did. Do you remember when you woke me up this morning that I sounded like a guy in a fog? Well, I was. But just a few minutes ago at that table on the sidewalk, the fog lifted."
"And now you feel better?"
"Sure. It's all over."
"I think you're lying. I think that whatever it is, it's just beginning."
"No. It's over."
Jerry was right. But what she did not know was that the fog had lifted on Dr. Varela Ansaldo. The doctor was the Spanish officer of Hall's dream, the one at whose back Hall hurled the knife. And at the table, sipping his second drink, Hall had recalled in a flash where he had seen Varela Ansaldo before. It had happened in Burgos, in April of 1938, during a review of the 12th Division of the fascist army. Ansaldo, wearing the uniform of a Franco major, with a big Falange yoke and arrows sewn over the left breast pocket, had shared a bench on the reviewing stand with an Italian and a German officer. Directly behind them, on that day, had flown the flags of Imperial Spain, The Falange, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Hall remembered the tableau vividly, remembered so clearly perhaps because while watching the review from the sidewalk he had been annoyed by the staff photographer of Franco's Arriba, who must have shot a hundred pictures of the officials in the stands that day and who had also shoved Hall aside or stepped on his toes before shooting each picture.
"I'll see you at the Embassy tonight," he said.
"Oke. But get that scowl off your face first," she smiled. "You promised to be nice tonight, and right now you look as if you are planning to kill someone with your bare hands."