Tapestry of Spies (2 page)

“Now see here!” began Florry.

“Mr. Gupta, your client’s case will not be helped by impertinence. Indeed, it will most likely be harmed.”

“Then the subject of money shall be forever avoided from this moment onward. Now, Mr. Assistant Superintendent, I understand that you are a poet, is that not correct?”

Florry squirmed. He was a tall man, or boy, actually, twenty-three, with a long thin face, sandy hair, and a husky, big-boned body. He looked strong and English and a bit too decent for anybody’s good. He was an Eton boy—though he’d been wretched there—but of an odd English class. The son of an India Company clerk, he’d gone to his fancy school on account of having been at one time thought promising. He was in service because no university would have him after a disastrous finish to his years at the college. Worse, he felt here, as he felt at Eton—as he felt
everywhere
—somewhat fraudulent.

“Scribble a verse now and then, yes,” he said.

“Ah,” said the Indian, as if having made a remarkable discovery. “And would you not say that a poet is rewarded for his
imagination
, Mr. Assistant Superintendent?”

“And his sense of rhyme, his moral vision, his beautiful command of the language, his higher range of exalted thought, his—” Florry looked like a copper but he thought he was a poet, and if he was wholly neither, he was still capable of speaking eloquently on this one subject alone. But the magistrate cut him off.

“See here, Gupta, where’s all this headed?”

“Honored judge of men, I wish only to see if the assistant superintendent is the sort of chappy who sometimes sees things that aren’t there in his poems. Or I wonder if he doesn’t, in the honored tradition of such as Shakespeare and Spenser, sometimes
improve
the way things are for the sake of the beauty and soul of his no doubt significant poetics. I only mean to find the officer’s sense or definition of the truth.”

Benny Lal smiled. A lick of drool, like a gossamer filament in a dream, drifted from his mouth.

“My poems are my poems,” said Florry sullenly, embarrassed to be depicted as such a dreamy ninny before the other officers, “and duty is duty. Separate and apart. The way it should be.”

“Leaving aside which is the most important to you, let me ask you this, Mr. Assistant Superintendent. You were off duty, relaxing, cooling down at the end of a hot day’s duty in service to your mighty engine of empire. A man in these circumstances, sir, has been known to have a drink of spirits. May I inquire, sir, if you had done so, and if you had, to what extent?”

“A gin,” Florry lied. “Maybe two.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite.”

“Not so much for an Englishman?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

“Your Honor, I have here—ah—oh, yes—
here
—Assistant Superintendent Florry’s bar chit for the previous month.”

He held aloft the pink form that the young policeman, with sinking feeling, recognized immediately.

“And perhaps in the excitement of the night’s events, the assistant superintendent forgot to sign that night. Yet in the weeks proceeding, it’s quite clear he was accustomed to drinking as much as five gins a night. My goodness, here’s one night when he drank
nine!
Yet on the night in question, he would have us believe he had drunk only two. My goodness. Perhaps, Mr. Assistant Superintendent, you could amplify.”

“Ah—” Florry began, feeling a tide of liar’s phlegm rising in his throat, “perhaps I may have had more than two. Perhaps I had three. It’s difficult to remember. Four gins is not a lot. Certainly not enough to affect my vision, which is
what is important in this matter. My vision was intact, sir, it was. Yes, sir, four, four it was.”

Actually, it
had
been five. But the curious thing was, it hadn’t really affected him. He could drink grotesque amounts of liquor without much damage.

“Well then, that should clear
that
up, shouldn’t it?” said the magistrate.

“You see,” hastened Florry, “I had had an idea for a poem that day. And when I write a poem, I never drink a lot. Dulls the senses.”

“Then you had not written a poem for some time?”

“No,” said Florry, wondering what the little devil was up to.

“And yet, here I have—oh, now where?—yes,
here
, here it is!—” and the little Hindu milked the theme of the missing document like some bad actor in a West End melodrama for some time until at last—“here it is, indeed. Your postal chit.”

He displayed it triumphantly to the courtroom.

“Yes,” Mr. Gupta continued merrily, “your postal chit. And on Friday before you had dispatched a large envelope—the bill was a pound six—to an address in London. In Bloomsbury. Here it is. Number 56 Bedford. At Russell Square. SW1. Correct?”

“Well—”

“And two weeks before. And a week before that. Would you tell the court what the address is?”

Florry paused bitterly before issuing the grim answer. “It’s the address of
The Spectator
. A literary quarterly. The best literary quarterly.” They never took his poems. Nobody ever did.

“And so you have been writing poetry and you have been drinking and you were lost in the worlds of your own poetry. You heard the scream. You rushed off the veranda
to the body you have just noticed. You have so testified, is this not true?”

“Yes,” said Florry.

“And a shape flies past you. There’s precious little light. And the distance must be thirty feet and the time must be, oh, one would gauge it to be only seconds, eh?”

Florry said nothing.

“Yet you recognized—please point to him.”

Florry raised his finger to point.

Damn
the wog.

Two smiling Hindus sat at the defense table. To Florry they were identical. Gupta and his tricks.

Florry’s rising finger grew heavy. Pick one, he thought. Then he remembered a line from a poem:
In the end, it’s all the same/ In the end, it’s all a game
. Brilliant Julian had written it. It was from the famous “Achilles, Fool,” which had made him such a thing in London these days.

Julian, why did you hurt me so?
The pain of it, five years gone, was never adequately buried and now came up like a rotting odor.

Pick one, he thought. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a game.

“How can I pick one,” said Florry, with a sudden icy coolness, “when
neither
is the right chap?”

There was a roar from the courtroom gallery. And then an English cheer. Gupta stared at him. The message was hatred. Florry stared back.

Benny Lal now sat three places down the table, in a blue coat. He was trying, under what must have been instruction from his lawyer, not to smile. Florry’s eyes linked with his in an odd second and beheld, behind the gaze, exactly nothing.

Benny Lal smiled at him.

Three weeks after the murder of U Bat, Benny Lal was to be hanged.

Florry found himself standing in a small group of officials in the muddy parade ground of the prison. It was the sort of thing one could not avoid. The day was hot and gassy and he could feel his tunic clinging to his skin and the prickles of sweat in his hairline under his sun helmet. The prison building, an old hulk of a place that had once been a fort, loomed above them. The latrines were hard by and the stench hung in the air.

“Ever seen a hanging, Mr. Florry?” asked Mr. Gupta, with his bright smile. The lawyer had also come to watch the event.

“No. Isn’t the sort of thing a chap goes to every day.”

“Oh, here he comes,” Mr. Gupta suddenly chirped. “Look, assistant superintendent. The treacherous, the cunning, the despicable villain, Benny Lal, off to meet his just desserts.”

Benny, in the center of a small troop of guards, had emerged in handcuffs from the building. He walked, at an unhurried pace, toward the gallows.

Benny Lal grinned and Florry looked away.

“Certainly cheery about it, isn’t he?” observed Mr. Gupta.

“Well, you’re a cold-blooded fellow,” said Florry with more emotion than he’d intended to show. “He was your client and now he’s going to meet his maker.”

“The British Empire was his maker, assistant superintendent, just as it is his destroyer.”

Florry watched now as the little man climbed the ladder to the platform.

“Mr. Florry, perhaps some day you’ll write a poem about all this. Think of the colorful literary details. the stench, the hot sun, these officials, the ever-obedient Benny Lal—and your own ambivalences.” He smiled wickedly.

“And you, Mr. Gupta.”

“Oh, surely I am too insignificant for poetry,” said Mr. Gupta.

The executioner had placed the hood on Benny Lal. He struggled with the noose and Florry could see Benny lower his head cooperatively to make it easier on the chap.

“Benny Lal, you stand convicted on the capital crime of murder under the Crown’s law,” shouted the warden, in accordance with the ceremony. “What say you in these last moments?”

Benny, hooded, was silent. Then he began to cry. “Please, sirs. Please, sirs.”

The Hindu, his scrawny bound body taut under the frame of the gallows, the cords of his neck standing out in vivid relief, continued to sob.

“Please, sirs. Sirs, I beg you. Sirs, I—”

With a snap, the trap sprang, and Benny Lal hurtled through the opening, disappearing into silence.

“Tally-ho, Benny,” said Gupta.

Florry swore, watching the slow pendulum of the rope, tense with the terrible weight of the dead man, that he would never again work for the Empire.

It was a promise, however, he would not be permitted to keep.

M
R. VANE AND MAJOR HOLLY-BROWNING FOUND A PARKING
space on Woburn Place at Russell Square, just across from the Russell Hotel. Mr. Vane, who drove the Morris with a delicacy that was almost fussiness, pulled into the gap with some grunting and huffing. He was not a physically graceful man or a strong one, and mechanical tasks came to him with some difficulty. He removed the ignition key and placed it in his vest pocket. Neither man made a move to leave the auto. They simply sat in the little car, two drab men of the commercial class, perhaps, travelers, little clerks, barristers’ assistants.

It was a bright blue morning in Bloomsbury, a fabulous morning. In the elms of the square, whose dense leaves had begun to turn russet with the coming of colder weather, squirrels chattered and scrambled; squads of ugly, bumbling old pigeons gathered on the lawn. Some even perched upon the earl of Bedford’s copper shoulders at the corner of the park. The chrysanthemums in the beds alongside the walks had not yet perished, though they would within the fortnight.

“He’s late, of course,” said Vane, examining his pocket watch.

“Give him time, Vane,” said Major Holly-Browning. “This is a big day in his life, and the chap’s sure to be nervous.
This
chap in particular.”

Major Holly-Browning was in his fifties, ten years older than Mr. Vane, and wore a vague mustache, a voluminous mackintosh despite the clear skies, and a bowler. On closer examination, he didn’t look commercial at all but rather military. He had the look of a passed-over officer, with a grayness to the skin, a certain bleakness to the eyes, and a certain formality to his carriage. He looked like the man who hadn’t quite managed the proper friends in the regiment and was therefore doomed to a succession of grim assignments in the outposts of the Empire, far from the parades, the swirling social life, the intrigues of home duty.

In fact, the major was head of Section V, MI-6, that is, the counterespionage section of the Secret Intelligence Service; he was, in the lexicon of the trade, V (a); Mr. Vane, his number two, was V (b). There was no V (c); they were the entire division. The major took a deep breath inside the little car. One of his headaches was starting up. He touched his temple.

“Tired, sir?”

“Exhausted, Vane. Haven’t slept in weeks.”

“You must go home more often, sir. You can’t expect to remain in the proper health living as you do, those long nights in the office.”