You will comprehend that Velázquez did not think much of lady journalists and even less of lady photographers. Moreover, he had been seconded to this American base as a kind of liaison officer after surviving an improbable number of combat tours and was not especially happy in that role. He was gruff with me, which I found endearing. He was not exactly handsome and not exactly tall, but he had this oddly graceful stockiness to him, and a brusque, efficient manner that softened by degrees as we toured the hangars and the tower, and he told me what I could photograph and not photograph. At the time, I wore my brown hair cropped short and no cosmetics at all—maybe a swipe of lipstick, when I could find any—and I must have looked like a different species from the sumptuous Polish mistress he kept in London. (Although possibly she kept him; I was never quite clear on that point, and tellingly he had no money except his RAF pay.) Still, despite all that military bristling we ended up sharing dinner at a cheap little café near the air base, where the delighted proprietor kept refilling our glasses with all these magnificent vintages he had kept hidden from the German occupiers for four long years—resistance takes many forms, you understand—so that one thing led to another and we ended up in bed. C’est la guerre, as the French say.

I was so pleasantly surprised! Not only was Velázquez a generous lover, he had the gift of stamina, even on the outside of two or three bottles of wine. We met often over the next several weeks. I used to snuffle the fur on that barrel chest of his and soak up the pungency of him. My Spanish bear, I called him. He taught me the Spanish phrase for that, which I forget. Anyway, one night I mentioned to him that I was breaking a rule of mine, sleeping with a pilot, and he demanded to know why I wouldn’t sleep with pilots when after all they were the best lovers in the entire world, and eventually we got around to the subject of Sam Mallory. He went quiet and reached for his Gauloises, a habit he had picked up when he fled to France, and smoked without speaking for some time. I had far better sense than to interrupt him. When you’ve been chasing photographs as long as I have, you know when your subject is about to reveal some vulnerable secret.

“I knew Sam Mallory,” he said at last. “He taught me how to fly at the beginning of the war, at the fighter school in El Carmoli on the southern coast of Spain.”