Tapestry of Spies (21 page)

Julian gave him one, lighting it. Florry could see his hands tremble and feel his eyes upon him, hot and bright, almost sad.

Florry inhaled, the glow suffusing the narrow space with weird, ominous illumination for an instant. His head ached, and he was ravenously hungry.

“Stinky,” Julian said, “tonight we attack. After five bloody months of waiting, it’s the big one. The Anarchists on the other side of the city go at nine, then the German battalion at ten, and we jump off at ten-thirty. It’s a terrible plan, one of those fancy, clever things that Royal Marines couldn’t pull off with a month of
rehearsal, a three-pronged, clockwork masterpiece that’ll be a ball’s up from the start. This time tomorrow we’re dead. But I must say, I feel rather good about it. No more of this awful mudbath living. It’s over the top for us, Stink.”

Florry felt a curious sense of relief slide through him. Yes, he welcomed it, too, to be done for a time with the damned trench and also with his other confusions.

All right, Florry thought. If you’re truly a spy, you won’t risk your bloody neck in a battle for a silly Spanish city that nobody ever heard of.

“Well, it’s bloody wonderful, if you ask me,” said Florry. “I’d like a fair chance at the bastards in a fair fight.”

Julian laughed.

“Damn you, Stinky, your Eton fairness will get us both kippered. If you’ve a chance, shoot ’em in the guts with your rifle and stick ’em in the throat with your spike and maybe you’ll come out of it.”

“I wonder why
now,”
said Florry. “One supposes it was in the cards ever since we got up here, but why
now
, so suddenly?”

“Who knows how their brains work?” wondered Julian. “Generals are all the same, you know. Ours or theirs, it makes no difference. But listen here. I’ve hired a boy who’s about to leave for the rear. I’ve some messages to send, perhaps you’d like to say something to lovely Sylvia before the balloon goes up, eh? Say it quick. He’s leaving shortly.”

He slid out, leaving Florry alone. Florry pawed through his kit, found paper and pen, and, squinting in the candlelight, quickly scrawled his message.

He folded it and scratched Sampson’s address on the Ramblas.

He crawled out and found Julian chatting with a boy in the lee of the trench.

“Can he take another one?” he whispered. “A professional thing to a
Times
chap I’d signed up to do a piece with.”

“I suppose. Why not?” said Julian. He spoke quickly to the boy in Spanish and Florry was mildly surprised to learn that he spoke it so well.

The boy folded the messages into a pouch on his belt and at last darted off.

“Where on earth did you find him?”

“Oh, I’m smashing at scrounging up things, Stink, old sport.”

“Will he get through?”

“Oh, Carlos will get through. He’s very good at that sort of thing. Used him before, he’s always made it. Well, Stinky, ready for the big parade?”

“To march at the head of it, in fact,” Florry said, happy at last.

T
HE CAFÉ GRAND ORIENTE WAS PACKED THAT NIGHT
with the children and the ideals of the Revolution. But there was also murder in the air.

Someone will die tonight, Levitsky thought. He felt the violence in the atmosphere, rich and potent. There would be blood on the pavement and screaming women and furious men with drawn revolvers. But for him at least, the long wait underground was over. It was time after the months of boredom to move.

He took a sip of the green schnapps. It was wonderful. The girl sat with a group of young POUMistas at a table near the bar. They were all gay and lively, full of everything, themselves mostly, but hope and politics, too; or maybe it was only fashion for them, a game. They wore their blue overalls and had militia caps tucked into the epaulets. Yet still the girls were slender and quite lovely, especially the Lilliford girl, the loveliest of them all. But she held the key to the next step on the way to Julian Raines.

Levitsky was well behind them, sitting with his back to the wall. Getting to the Oriente had been easy, once he
left his shelter in the Anarchist neighborhood. SIM agents were everywhere with their NKVD advisers, and he’d been stopped twice by Asaltos, as the Revolutionary Assault Troops brought in from Valencia were called, but in each case his papers had gotten him through. Still, it was frightening. How tight was Glasanov’s net? Well, it was a net, that was clear, but was it not drawn and gathered? Perhaps it had been at the start; but Levitsky knew the longer he waited, the looser it would become.

Now, a clever man, a man with his wits and a little presence and a nice selection of identities, could get through. It must be driving poor Glasanov insane. With a battalion of NKVD troops, he could have closed the city down and gone through it like an archivist, examining each alley, each hallway. In days, he’d have him back. However, with only a skeleton of NKVD people, but mostly earnest, unpracticed Spaniards, Glasanov was doomed.

Glasanov, I will be the death of you, Levitsky thought with a wicked little smile.

“Comrade? Another schnapps?” asked the waiter.

“No, I think not.”

“We close soon, comrade. The curfew. Not like the old times.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“You look as though you’ve had a rough time of it, comrade.”

“Some Anarchists. Working men who a year ago never spoke above a whisper. They were feeling mighty about their new world a few days ago and demonstrated their enthusiasm to an old man who wouldn’t sing their song or dance to their tune in an alley. They said I looked too bourgeois for my own good.”

“Ay. Crazy ones, they’re all over the place. These are terrible times, comrade.”

“But interesting,” said Levitsky.

He took a last look about the room. The smoke in here made his eyes smart. Behind the bar, the mirror stood streaked with grease. The light was amber, almost yellow, shining off the walls and from the flickering candles and the weak bulbs in the glass cups mounted near the ceiling. The place was crowded—all the better—with men and women in uniform, with braids and berets and caps, with automatic pistols and boots, the fighters nut-brown from their days in the sun out at the firing line, the theorists pale from long days of argument and negotiation. They were all getting drunk and the air seethed with boasts and charges and challenges and lyrics and verses. He knew it: of course, easily. It was Petrograd in ’17, while the great Lenin was waging his war of bluff and maneuver against Kerensky and the provisional government.

He looked back to the girl’s table. He didn’t think any of them at the table were NKVD. He could not, of course, be certain, but after so many years, he believed he knew NKVD on sight: something furtive and sly in the eyes, a certain inability to relax, a certain sense of one’s own authority.

No. The waiter, maybe. Surely he informed for someone, but purely out of opportunism, not ideology. Who else? Perhaps that man over there in the black Anarchist’s beret who was, Levitsky had noticed, less drunk than he pretended, and whose eyes never ceased to roam.

But Levitsky had to move. Fifteen minutes to curfew. Yes, it was time for the devil to move to the girl.

He got up, edged through the crowd, standing patiently when a couple rose between himself and her and he
waited for them to pass by. When they were gone, he proceeded meekly. He slipped next to her and bent to her; she had not yet noticed.

She was a lovely girl, but he could see the gaiety was forced, she was not happy at all, as were the other young POUMistas. They were all excited about an upcoming battle.

“The battle is an imperative process of history,” a young man was saying. “Your friend must take his chances like any comrade.”

“If we take Huesca tonight, we take Barcelona tomorrow,” said an older man, some sort of POUMist leader.

“And the revolution lives,” said the boy.

“I just hate the waste,” he heard her say.

“Ah. Fraulein Lilliford?” Levitsky said pitifully.

She turned quickly, looking up.

“Good lord, Sylvia, who on earth can
this
be?” someone at the table inquired.

“Herr Gruenwald, no?” he said. “From the ship, the
vasser
, the boat,
ja?”
He began to jabber in excited German.

“Herr Gruenwald, my God. Oh, you look so different. I
do
apologize for staring. It’s—”

“Ja
, Missy Fraulein.”

“Look, do sit down—”

“Sylvia—!”

“This man was in the sinking with us. He’s been through a lot,” Sylvia said tartly. “Sit
down
, Herr Gruenwald. You look terrible. I’d heard that you’d been arrested by—”

“Ja. Polizoi!
Old business, a mistake, hah! Really hit an old man. My head—it vasn’t zo good before, but now is
kaput
. Krazy in der head! Hah!” He laughed abrasively
and looked about the table to enjoy the shocked befuddlement of Sylvia’s new friends.

“Well, it sounds
dreadful”
said Sylvia.

“Good heavens, Sylvia, your collection certainly grows by the day. A mad, decrepit German cabin boy!”

“Shut up, Stephen,” said the older man at the table. “The old fellow has had a rough enough time. One can tell from looking at him.”

“Mr. Gruenwald, you look famished. May I buy you something to eat? What are you going to do?”

“Ach!
Ich
—er, Gruenwald wait for papers, zen ship out.
Nein
, missy, I
haben zie
—haf place to stay. Und food. Ah, my head, it aches so bad zumtimes. Bombs. The Great War. To end all
wars, ja?
Metal plate,
ja?”
He tapped his skull, smiled broadly.

“Missy Fraulein, it’s, ach, zomething zo stupid. It’s
mein frau
. My wife,
ja?
She is still in Deutschland and, ah, I have no vord from her. And of course,
here
, hah! politics gets in da vay. Dere is no Deutschland embassy—”

“No, of course not. They are for the other side.”

“I vish to zumhow send vord dat—dat I am all right.
Ja
. I remember from boat. Mr. Florry a journalist; he vas goink to zee Mr. Raines, another journalist.
Ja?
Perhaps such an intelligent fellow, Herr Raines, the journalist, he know a vay to reach my poor
frau
in Deutschland,
ja.”

“But Herr Gruenwald, I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

Levitsky, looking past her in the mirror, saw four men in overcoats enter. The largest of them was Glasanov’s Amerikanski.

“Julian Raines and Robert Florry have joined the militia. They are at the front, at Huesca.”

“Ach, a fighter,” Levitsky said, thinking,
the fool!
The utter idiot!

Bolodin stood with his men at the front of the room, looking through it.

Levitsky could not look at Bolodin in the mirror. Bolodin would have that extremely fine-tuned sense of being observed; he would feel the eyes upon him and swiftly locate their owner.

“Look here, let me make some inquiries for you,” Sylvia said. “There are many Germans in our party. Perhaps I can locate somebody who knows a method of communication.”

Bolodin was moving through the crowd. Levitsky kept his face down, his body hunched as if in rapt attention to what she was saying. He tried to concentrate on exits. He could dash for the back; no, they’d have him, strong young Bolodin would have him and smash him down. Bolodin approached; there were suddenly secret policemen all around.

“Comrades,” somebody was saying, “you’ll excuse if we ask to see your papers.”

“And who are you,” one of the POUMistas said defiantly. “Perhaps it’s
we
who should ask to see your papers.”

“I am Ugarte, of the Servicio de Investigación Militar. We are responsible for the security of the revolution. You excuse this boring formality, of course. One has to take so many precautions these days. There are so many spies about.”

“The revolution is in far more danger from Russian secret policemen than from anybody in the POUM,” said Sylvia. “You show us
your
papers.”

“There are no Russians here. I don’t understand why our brothers and sisters in the Marxist Unification Party are so difficult,” said the policeman. “One would think they hadn’t the revolution’s best interests in mind.”