Tapestry of Spies (43 page)

“Bugger Eton,” said Florry. “I only care about Sylvia.”

“She
is
a lovely thing. Florry, I was once young myself, and in love. She was killed by Friekorps officers in Munich in ’nineteen. Raped, beaten, shot. It cured me of my illusions. And my eye.”

He smiled.

“Let her live, Steinbach, and I’ll sign something.”

“All right,” said Steinbach. “You’ve made your bargain.”

It took them a while to work something out that Florry could put his name to, but in the end, the document, though more vague than Steinbach would have preferred and more explicit than Florry wanted, was complete.

“This is utterly idiotic,” he said, scratching his name at the bottom.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any event, it shall eventually be run in a leftist newspaper someplace or other as part of our testament. You have managed one thing, Comrade Florry. You have managed to enter history.”

“History is revolting,” said Florry.

The execution was set for dawn; about an hour before, they served him his last meal, some scrawny chicken cooked in too much oil, and a large skin of red wine.

“The chicken isn’t terribly good, I’m afraid,” said Steinbach. “But the wine should prove helpful.”

“I’m already numb, you bastard.”

“Try not to be bitter, comrade. Surely all the men here will join you under the ground in the weeks ahead.”

“It can’t happen too soon for my taste. What about the girl?”

“She’s fine. Tough, that one. I’m impressed. Would you like me to bring her by? A sort of last-minute farewell. It might appeal to your romanticism.”

“No, spare her that. This is hard enough without that. You’ll see that she gets out?”

“We’ll do what we must. Would you like a priest?”

“I’m not a Catholic. Besides, I haven’t sinned. And aren’t you an atheist?”

“In my dotage, I seem to have acquired the habit of hypocrisy. Then, should I tell her anything? The obvious?”

“How would you know what was obvious?”

“I’m not so stupid, Florry. I’ll tell her that you loved her till the end. She’ll have good memories of you, then.”

“She’s lost everybody that she cared about in Spain,” said Florry.

Steinbach laughed evilly. “So has everybody, Florry.”

Florry found he had no taste for the wine, which was young and bitter anyway, but that the chicken was rather good. Steinbach had lied about that as well as everything else. He tried to take a little nap after he was through eating because he was still exhausted, but, of course, he could get no sleep. It was absurd. They were going to shoot him because they needed a demon and he was available. He was in the right category.

Yet as the time of his death neared, he found what he regretted most was not being able to give Julian’s mother her son and husband’s ring. That was the one thing Julian had wanted and the one thing he’d thought of at the moment of his own death. It seemed like one more failure to Florry. It was in the Burberry smashed into the suitcase in the closet of the hotel. He brooded about this obsessively until he could stand it no longer. He banged on the door, and after a while Steinbach came by.

“Yes?”

“Have you seen the girl yet?”

“No. She’s resting. She doesn’t know what’s happening.”

“Look, tell her this for me. Tell her the ring in the coat is for Julian’s mother. She’s to get that to the woman, all right?”

Steinbach said he would, though his look informed Florry he thought it a queer last request. Then he left again. In a bit, a gray light began to filter through the cracks of the closet in which they’d locked him. He heard laughter and the approach of footsteps.

The lock clicked as the key turned in it; the door opened. A boy stood there with a rifle.

“Es
la hora
, comrade,” he said.

Florry rose and was roughly grabbed by three other boys. His hands were tied behind his back. They fell into
formation behind him and led him through the deserted garage.

In the half-light, the deserted mountaintop had turned ghostly. Mist had risen and clung everywhere and the amusement apparatus, scabby ancient machines, loomed through it. The Ferris wheel was a circle of comical perfection standing above it all. The boys led him to the scaffolding that was the base of a roller-coaster.

“Cigarette, Florry?” asked Steinbach, waiting with several others.

“Yes,” said Florry. “God, you’re not going to do it here? In a bloody park?”

“No. The boys will take you down the hill into the forest. The grave has been dug. Actually, it was dug yesterday morning.” He lit a cigarette in his own mouth, then placed it in Florry’s in a gesture of surprising intimacy. Then he added, “Or rather
two
graves.”

He could see her now, in the group of men. They had gotten a cape for her, to keep her warm, but her hands had been tied.

“You told me—” Florry started.

“I argued, old man, but the judges were insistent. You wrote that note to her. She sat with Brea. Clearly she was involved.”

“Oh, God, Steinbach, she’s
innocent
, don’t you see? Tell them, for God’s sake.”

“Take them,” said Steinbach, turning away. “And be done with the filthy business.”

The rough teenage boys pushed Florry along.

“God, Sylvia, I’m so sorry,” he said. “It’s all so unfair.”

Sylvia looked at him with dead eyes. “I knew what I was getting into,” she said.

“I love you,” he said.

“As if that helps,” she replied, with a little shake of her head.

They walked down the steeply sloping road away from the park surrounded by five boys, the eldest perhaps twenty, who was the
sargento
and chief executioner. On either side of the road, the dark, dense forest rose. It was perfectly still, though the sky had begun to fill with light, and the air was moist. The road descended Tibidabo by virtue of switchbacks, and after they had gone around several sharp turns and had traveled perhaps half a mile, the young sergeant halted them.

“This way,” he said in polite English. He had a big automatic pistol; the others had gigantic, ancient rifles.

He took them off the road and through the damp bracken and groundcover of the woods. They followed a path a few hundred feet in, though the going was awkward, given the extreme slope of the land, until they reached a small clearing in the trees, where two shallow graves had been scooped out.

“It’s a pity, isn’t it?” Florry said. “All of it. They’re just bloody fools, doing their worst. Animals, idiots.”

“I say, do you mind awfully shutting up?” she said. “I don’t feel much like chatter.”

The boys got them to the edge of the holes, then stood back to form what appeared to be an extremely amateur firing squad. Each seemed to have a different firearm, and the youngest looked absolutely sick at what was about to happen, not that Florry could spare the wretched boy any pity. The
sargento
was the only one among them who had any sort of self-possession. He busied himself importantly examining weapons and setting caps just right and making sure belts were properly adjusted. He’d make a fine little Bolshevik commissar, Florry thought; too bad he’d picked the wrong party.

Damn
these boys: could they not get it bloody over? Florry’s knees had begun to knock and his breath came in little pinched sobs and his eyes were wide open like upstairs windows into which flew birds and clouds and everything on earth. Sylvia leaned or almost huddled against him; he could feel her trembling and wished he could at least hold her or offer her some comfort in this terrible moment.

“¡Preparen para disparar!”
barked the
sargento
.

The boys attempted to come to a formal position and lifted their rifles to aim. The muzzles wobbled terribly, because the weapons were so heavy. One of the idiot children had even fixed a bayonet to his rifle.

Sylvia had begun to weep. She had collapsed against him, yet he could not hold her because his hands were tied. He looked about. His eyes seemed magically open—the forest, filled with low beams of light and towering columns of mist and soft, wet, heavy air, seemed to whirl about him.

Let it be clean, he prayed. Let it be clean.

“Apunten,”
the
sargento
barked.

“The bastards,” Florry heard himself saying.

Then they heard the noise.

“Esperan. ¿Que es eso ruido?”

At first it was a far-off putter, almost something to be ignored. Yet it rose, persistent, the labored sound of an engine—no, two, perhaps three—climbing the steep road of Tibidabo.

“Es una camion, sargento,”
one of the boys said.

“¡Carrajo! Bueno, no disparen,”
the sergeant said, looking about in confusion. The soldiers let their rifles droop.

Through the trees, they saw the vehicles, big and cumbersome, loaded with troops as they lumbered by.

“Asaltos,” somebody whispered.

Just beyond them, the trucks halted. An officer got out and the men climbed down in their clanking battle gear. Their bayonets were fixed. They formed into a loose attack formation, rifles at the half-port, and began a jogtrot up the hill toward the amusement park. Two men at the rear of the column carried a Hotchkiss machine gun and tripod.

“The Stalinists have caught up with Steinbach,” Florry murmured.

Sylvia collapsed to the ground, but only Florry noticed. At the top of the hill, there was no suspense. The firing started almost immediately. They could hear the dry, rolling crack of the rifles and the stutter of the Hotchkiss gun.

“They’re really giving it to them,” Florry said.

He turned back to the firing squad. The sergeant was clearly bewildered, not sure where his duty lay. But the boys of the little unit weren’t: they were at the point of panic with the gunfire so close.

Florry watched as the sergeant struggled with his indecision. And then he said, as if having at last conquered himself,
“¡No! ¡La hora de su muerte está aquí!”
He pointed at Florry melodramatically.

“¡Muerte!”
he said, raising the pistol. Then he slumped forward with a spastic’s drool coming from his inert face and thudded heavily to the earth. Behind him, the boy who’d crushed his skull stood in shocked horror for just a second before pitching the rifle into the brush and heading out at a dead run. His compatriots studied the situation for perhaps half a second, then abandoned their weapons just as resolutely and fled just as swiftly.

Florry rushed to the rifle with the bayonet, bent to it, and in a few seconds of steady sawing had himself free.
He slipped the bayonet from the gun muzzle and ran to Sylvia to cut her free.

“Come on,” he said, picking up the sergeant’s automatic, “we’ve got to get out of here.”

Up top, the shooting had at last died down. Florry and Sylvia pushed their way deeper into the forest, away from the trucks, and found the going nearly impossible for the bracken and the undergrowth. In time, they were swallowed up by the trees and seemed far away from everything. And soon after, they came to the rusty tracks of the disused funicular, by which in calmer days Barceloneans had traveled to the amusement park and the church up there. Descending its gravel bed was easier than trying to fight their way down through the undergrowth, and by noon, they had reached the base of the mountain. The houses were sparse at first, but within a bit they found themselves in what must have at one time been a fashionable district, on a serpentine street flanked by great houses that now seemed deserted.

They forced the gate on one of these and went out back. The house was secure against the return of the owners in some distant, better future, but in the servant’s quarters, a door gave way to Florry’s shoulder and they were in and safe.

B
Y THE TIME COMRADE COMMISSAR BOLODIN AND HIS
men arrived at the top of Tibidabo Mountain, the fighting was over. As Ugarte pulled the big Ford to a halt by the assault guard trucks a few hundred feet below the gate of the amusement park, Lenny could feel his rage beginning to peak; it seemed to be replacing itself with some other feeling, odd and sickening. Lenny felt as though he might vomit. Suppose, he wondered, the ache in his stomach watery and loose, suppose they were dead? Suppose his deal was all fucked, shot dead by gun-happy assault guards from Valencia “protecting” the revolution from traitors.

“Ah! Comrade Bolodin,” someone said with great smug cheer. Lenny turned to discover a gallant young Asalto officer, his arm in a sling, a cigarette in his mouth, cap pushed back cockily on his head. The youngster looked sunny as a valentine: he couldn’t wait for the compliments to come raining down on his handsome head.

“Captain Degas, of the Eleventh Valencia Guardia de Asalto,” the young officer introduced himself, snapping
his heels together with a flourish and coming to a kind of mocking attention. “You’ll see, comrade commissar, that the problem of the Fascist traitors, chief among them the notorious Steinbach, has been solved.”

“Any prisoners?” Lenny demanded in his rude Spanish.