Read The Milkweed Triptych 01 - Bitter Seeds for Free Online

man’s blood.
    Rudolf stopped shuddering. He died on the spot. Just as Gretel had known he would.
    4 February 1939
    Barcelona, Spain
    T he cashier wrinkled his nose. After a day and a half on the road, the smell of incinerated hotel still infused Marsh’s clothes. It even wafted out of his hair. He expected to find soot streaked on his face when he finally used a real washroom. And he couldn’t work up enough saliva to clear the smoked-pork taste from his mouth.
    Marsh let the cashier glimpse the bundle of cash under his hand. The distaste on the other man’s face turned into greed. He licked his lips. After a moment’s hesitation, he nodded. Marsh slid his hand across the counter. With that, he traded every pound and peseta for a berth on the last British steamer out of Barcelona.
    Marsh shook his head.
Nearly a grand for something that shouldn’t cost one pony. Thank you, Franco
. It would have been easier to use the tickets intended for Krasnopolsky, but someone had been watching him; given the fool’s conduct, Marsh couldn’t risk adhering to the original travel plan.
    And now Krasnopolsky was dead, reduced to so much ash in the span of a few heartbeats, along with most of the information he carried. During his journey from Tarragona, Marsh had emptied the unburned scraps from the valise into an envelope along with the cash and Krasnopolsky’s passport. There wasn’t much left: the lower-left corners from a half dozen pages of a memo or report, written in German; half a photograph; and a jumble of acetate strips. The strips were all that remained of an eight-millimeter filmstrip. The film had been coiled on a reel, but when thevalise ignited, a portion of the film had melted and disintegrated, rendering the rest a jumbled mess of confetti.
    Marsh had pored over it all a dozen times. The legible pages contained no mention of a Doctor von Westarp or children. The visible portion of the photograph showed an unremarkable farmhouse. And the scraps of film were unintelligible to his naked eyes.
    Marsh took the proffered voucher and retreated back through the crowd mobbing the ticket window. A breeze mingled fear, seaweed, rotting fish, and diesel fuel into a stomach-churning mélange. Every port in Catalonia must have been staggering under the influx of refugees as the Nationalists made their final push into the Pyrenees.
    He headed for his pier, scanning the crowd as he went. There wasn’t much time before his ship departed, but Marsh wanted to find something first. He watched a portly well-dressed man pushing a hand truck piled high with luggage. The man stopped on the boardwalk to pull a pair of eyeglasses from his pocket.
    Aha
, thought Marsh.
Those should do the trick.
    The man frowned at his ticket, then looked around in search of a placard. Marsh orchestrated his collision with the hand truck to make it appear as though he’d been too intent on his own ticket to notice it. Luggage clattered to the boardwalk.
    “Hijo de puta!”
    “Lo siento! Lo siento, señor.”
    Marsh swiped the eyeglasses while helping the man gather his things. “
Lo siento muchísimo.
” The man departed with a crack about burying Marsh’s heart in a hole so deep, the Virgin Mary couldn’t find it.
    A piercing shriek echoed throughout the port. The steam whistle on Marsh’s ship, making its penultimate boarding call. People scurried up the gangplank in ones, twos, and threes. Marsh needed to get going, but his curiosity couldn’t be contained any longer.
    A stack of cargo crates formed a passable shelter from the wind and crowds. Marsh hid behind the crates, crouched on a coil of rope. He pulled an acetate fragment from the envelope inside his shirt. What the fire hadn’t destroyed outright it had made very brittle, so he took greatcare when handling the crisp film. Using the eyeglasses as a makeshift magnifier, he strained to identify the images.
    Twenty frames of a brick wall. The second fragment showed an empty field. The