Tapestry of Spies (37 page)

As they climbed into the Pyrenees, it seemed to get colder. The air was thin and pure. Florry opened the vent and sucked in the air as he kept turning to look at his watch at the fleeting seconds. The mountains were white and massive now, chalky, craggy, rugged peaks and beneath them spread the Argonese plain, a patchwork of buff and slate in the bright sun.

They sped along the Embasle de Yesa, a high, green lake that ultimately gave way to the Rio Aragon, along whose stony banks they passed for some time. The
jagged mountains were clearer and bolder than they had ever been from the lowland trenches about Huesca.

I lived in a hole in the mud for five months with this man who now tells me he has sex with boys. I never guessed it. Julian was another illusion, it turned out, a self-created one. Or did I, at some odd level, really, truly
know
, even if I lie to myself about it now?

Finally, they came to the bridge over the Aragon at the Puenta la Reina de Jaca. It was a fine old girdered thing, as sturdy as a Victorian building, and just beyond it, where the road curled almost due south down through a final splurge of mountains toward Huesca still some fifty kilometers off, the Germans had established a car park—except that it was a Panzer park, and the things were spluttering into life, ready for the job ahead. These were the PzKpfw IIs, small gray tanks, no taller than a man, with double machine guns mounted in their tiny turrets.

“Of course,” said Julian, “the Russian T-26 would prang these tinpots like the toys they are. But of course at Huesca there are no T-26s. The Russians have seen to it.”

Farther down, men were limbering up some wicked artillery pieces to lorries. The guns, lean and long-barreled, rode on pneumatic tires and crouched behind shields an inch thick.

Julian carried on like the best ROTC candidate in the world, pleased to be good at this, too.

“And that, of course, is the famous eighty-eight-millimeter gun. Supposedly the most efficient long weapon in the world. Extraordinary velocity and penetration. They can use it with a fused shell against planes, with an armor-piercing shell to pot tanks, with canister to make fish and chips out of infantry, or just good old high explosive to smash buildings. God, Stink, I admire the Germans. They really do
do
things, don’t they? Bloody
pity they do the
wrong
things. Oh, hullo, what’s this.
Sieg heil
, Herr Major.” He carelessly threw a salute at a man by the side of the road.

“Let’s go, old man,” he commanded.

But Florry, driving slowly by, watching the force assemble itself, wondered in melancholy at the odd link between him and his chum. He thought of Sylvia, perfectly innocent of it all. He wished she were there. What a laugh they would have once had over something quite this silly! He gunned the car past the vehicles, fled by a sign that said
HUESCA 44 KM
, and pushed ahead. The road was relatively clear for a time, but after a bit they came to a small garrison town called Baiolo, and pulled into it, under the watchful eyes of several Moorish sentries.

“God, it looks like Berlin,” said Julian.

Indeed it did; the square was jammed with gray Jerry vehicles, not only the tanks but armored trucks with machine guns and tank tracks on them. German specialists stood about barking orders stoutly to their assistants who translated into Arabic. For of the vast population of the village, nearly three-quarters were Moorish infantry, now loading aboard the trucks with the grave look of men headed into battle.

“These would be the shock troops headed for Huesca,” Julian said.

“We’d best get going,” said Florry. “It’s drawing near. The bridge must be just ahead.”

“You. You there!” a voice screamed at them with great authority and Florry could see an ominous figure in black leather raincoat and helmet approach with a forceful stride.

The man, some sort of senior officer, leaned into their car and said to Florry, “Who the devil are you?”

“Herr Colonel, I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” said Julian
from the back. “Von Paupel, Panzer Engineers. Poor Braun here of the embassy staff to help me was rather hurriedly pressed into service.”

“Jawohl,”
barked Florry earnestly.

“I’ve got to get to that damned bridge,” said Julian nonchalantly. “They’re worried that the thing might last only a few hours under beating from the tanks. I must say, I had no idea Panzer Operations had such a show planned up here.”

Florry could feel the colonel’s breath warm upon him.

“You damned engineers, if you can’t build a bridge that’ll hold up my tanks, I’ll see you in the guardhouse.”

“Of course, Herr Colonel. But we want to get it down pat. When we move across the Russian plains, we won’t have time for mistakes. You bring your Panzers and I’ll build a bridge to hold them.”

“In future, Herr Leutnant, the Panzers will get bigger,” said the colonel.

“And so will the bridges, Herr Colonel,” said Julian tartly.

“Go on then. Fix that bridge. I’m planning to liberate Huesca by suppertime.”

“Yessir.”

“And keep your damned eyes open, Von Paupel. We’ve received word saboteurs are about, English dynamiters. It seems the reds have fifth columnists also.”

“Jawohl
, Herr Colonel.
Sieg h
—”

“Please, leave that paperhanger’s name out of it. This is a war, not some Bohemian’s political fruitcake. Now, get going.”

He waved them on brusquely, and Florry pressed the gas, the car shooting with a squeal through the square, narrowly missing a queue of Moors filing into a huge iron boat of a vehicle. He slipped into another lane and began
to zip along. He took the Mercedes-Benz south. The country was scruffy and severe. Off on the left an immense mountain, looking like an ice-cream cup, bulked up, gleaming with impossible whiteness in the sun.

“Hurry,” said Julian, looking at his watch. “It’s after eleven.”

“Somebody betrayed us,” said Florry.

“Oh, Robert, rubbish. Keep driving.”

“They knew. ‘English dynamiters.’ If we’d have come on with Harry Uckley’s credentials, we’d be dead. Your Russian chum. Did you tell him?”

“He’d never do such a thing.”

“You’d be surprised what he’s capable of.”

“Robert, he’d never do such a thing. I won’t talk of it. Some lout at Party headquarters talked too loud in a Barcelona café—”

“It was your bloody Russian chum who—”

“HE WOULDN’T!” Julian screamed. Florry was stunned at the passion. “He’s above that, don’t you see? He’s a
real
artist, not a poseur like me. I don’t want to hear another bloody word.”

They drove on in silence. Florry could hear Julian breathing heavily in the back seat.

“He’s
different
, don’t you see?” said Julian. “All this is squalid and base. Politics, compromise, bootlicking: it’s all dung. Brodsky wouldn’t—”

“When I knew him he was a bloody German cabin boy. With a plate in his head. Good Christ, Julian, the man can—”

“Stop it. I won’t hear another WORD! Not another word, unless you want to turn back now, chum.”

Florry said nothing.

In time the land changed, yielding its arid, high stoniness
to pine forest, which spread across rolling ridges and gulches and crests like some kind of carpet.

“What time is it?” Julian asked at last.

“It’s half past eleven,” he said.

“Oh, bloody hell, we shan’t make it.”

But they came suddenly to a slope, and a half mile down the tarmac, flanked by stately green pines and high, shrouded peaks on either side, they saw it: the bridge.

A
t
0600 ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 16, TWO ARMORED
cars equipped with water-cooled Maxim guns in their turrets pulled up the Ramblas and halted outside the Hotel Falcon. The range between the gun muzzles and the hotel’s ornate façade was less than thirty meters. Two more armored cars went to the hotel’s rear. Down the street lorries unloaded their troops of Asaltos, and German and Russian NCO’s formed them into action teams.

At 0605 hours, the machine guns opened fire. Three of the four guns fired approximately three thousand rounds into the first two floors of the old hotel; the fourth gun jammed halfway through its second belt, perhaps the only Russian setback of the day. Still, the firepower was adequate. Lead and shrapnel tore through the hotel, shattering most of the glassware in the Café Moka, ripping up tiles and woodwork and plaster in the hotel meeting rooms and offices, cutting through the chandeliers and the windows. In seconds the three guns transformed the lower floors of the building into a shambles of wreckage and smoky confusion.

“Bolodin,” said Glasanov, watching as the armored vehicles at last ceased fire, “take them in.”

Lenny Mink nodded, pulled his Tokarev automatic from his belt, and gave the signal to the troops. He himself began to rush through the smoke toward the shattered hotel; he could feel the men behind him, feel their energy and tension and building will to violence. They were screaming. Lenny reached the bullet-splintered main door first, kicked it open. There were two bodies immediately inside, a man and a woman. He stepped over them. A wounded man behind the desk tried to lift his rifle toward Lenny; Lenny shot him in the chest. Another man, already on the floor, moaned, tried to climb to his feet. Lenny smashed him in the skull with his gun barrel.

“Go, go,” he screamed in Russian as the assault troops began to pour through the building. He could hear them on the stairs already and hear the screams beginning to spread through the hotel as they pounded through, beating indiscriminately, threatening, screaming curses, smashing furniture, and in all other respects attempted to shatter the will of their victims.

He went up the stairs himself to the second-floor offices of the Party. The Asaltos had already been there. Torn papers and shattered furniture were everywhere. The smell of burned powder hung heavily in the air. The walls had been ripped with gunfire. Two men were dead and two others wounded. Lenny went to one of the wounded, a redheaded runty fellow bleeding from the leg and from the scalp.

“Nationality?” he demanded in English.

“Fuck you, chum,” said the man, in a heavy Cockney.

“A Brit, huh? Listen,” he spoke in English, too, the
English of Brooklyn, “listen, you know a guy named Florry? A Brit, I’m looking for him.”

“Fuck off, you bloody sot.”

Lenny laughed.

“Look, you better help me. You’re in a shitload of trouble.”

The man spat at him.

Lenny laughed.

“You a soldier boy, huh? Nice suntan. Spend a lot of time in the trenches. Look, tell me what I want, okay?”

“Bugger off, you bloody scum,” the angry Brit said.

“Okay, pal,” said Lenny. He shot him in the face and began to roam through the building in search of somebody who had a line on this Florry.

Meanwhile, Asalto units neutralized other targets around the revolutionary city. The Lenin barracks was held the most important, because its arsenal was the largest and its troops held to be the most dangerous in Glasanov’s mind. This turned out to be an illusion; most of the arms had been moved to the front and the soldiers were largely illiterate peasant youths who’d joined for the promise of steady meals. They surrendered in the first minutes.

Among the other targets were the main telephone exchange on the Plaza de Catalunya, guarded originally by Anarchists but since the fighting in May by POUM fighters; the Anarcho-Syndicalist headquarters; the offices of
La Batalle
, the banned POUM newspaper whose physical plant was still a gathering place for dissidents; the offices of
The Spanish Revolution
, the POUM English-language newsletter; the radical Woodworkers Guild; and the Public Transportation Collective, a number of former estates seized by the youthful radicals for a variety of political purposes. In every location
it was the same: the swift shocking blast of gunfire, the brutal rush by the well-trained Asaltos, and the mopping up.

The prisoners, who accumulated rapidly and were the principal booty of the operation, were swiftly separated into three categories. Leadership, including Andres Nin, POUM’s charismatic chief, and thirty-nine other intellectuals and theoreticians, were taken to special, secret prisons called, in the colloquial,
checas
, for careful and extensive interrogation, in preparation for what was expected to be a series of show trials very like the ones that had so shocked the world when they had been performed in Moscow. The second category, the militant, bitter rank-and-file—that is, mostly the fiery young anti-Stalinist European leftists of all stripe and coloration that had flocked to the POUM banner—was taken to the Convent of St. Ursula, which would rapidly earn, in the next few days, its nickname in history: the Dachau of Spain. These men were interrogated, though rather perfunctorily and without much nuance or subtlety, and then shot. The executions, as many as five hundred in the first several hours (though estimates vary), were carried out in the graveyard near the convent, hard by a grove of olive trees under a little bluff. The shootings were done in batches of as many as fifteen or twenty by special NKVD death squads, using Maxim guns mounted on the backs of old Ford lorries. The bodies were buried in mass graves gouged into the meadow.