Tapestry of Spies (6 page)

The tumult was enormous; neither player acknowledged it. Time for some blood, old man. Levitsky took a pawn, exposing his queen.

Schlecter quickly replaced Levitsky’s queen with his own, and less than one second later, Levitsky had Schlecter’s lady himself with a pawn; and he still had his lead pawn out there, achingly alone in center board.

Schlecter saw the open rank, and he hurled his bishop down the gap to take the suddenly defenseless knight; but it didn’t matter, for Levitsky was able to spring the trap he had so ingeniously engineered. He took Schlecter’s solitary pawn and dared Schlecter to expose his king by taking the pawn out with his knight.

“Herr Levitsky,” Schlecter asked in the quietest German, “do you wish me to play it out, or would you prefer that I resign now?”

“It is up to you.”

“It was brilliant, young man.”

“Thank you. I was very lucky.”

“No, it was more than luck. I’ve played against enough luck in my time to know luck.”

Schlecter took his pawn with a rook and Levitsky completed the action: he moved his lead pawn into the back rank, thereby castling it. In the back row it acquired extraordinary force; it was born again. It mated Herr Schlecter’s poor king. The theme had been a variation on the idea of the brave pawn, an exceedingly unusual phenomenon in international play, where the odds against a single pawn surviving a charge into the enemy’s last rank are forbiddingly rare. Yet Levitsky had brought it off because he had the hardness of spirit and the sheer guts to pay the price as the combinations developed, feeding his own pieces into the maw to advance the pawn.

That was it: the erratic, the brilliant fluctuation of it, the fascination of it—the humble pawn, suddenly castled in the back rank, suddenly made the most powerful piece on the board, planted in the soft underbelly. A humble pawn has become all powerful and any sacrifice, or any orchestration of sacrifice, is worth it.

Levitsky sat back. He had worked out his solution. It all turned then, on a single bright young Englishman. Levitsky remembered him with fondness, love even: bright, fair, gifted, pleasant, charming.

It’s time. After all the years, it’s time.

He heard the NKVD men knocking.

“I’m INNOCENT!” The scream pierced the narrow walls of the Lux.

A door slammed. Feet dragged and snapped in the hall. Levitsky heard the lift gate clank shut, and heard the machine descend.

Another for your hunger, old Koba.

The face of the young Englishman returned to his mind. He would be in Spain, of course, for Spain was all the fashion of his set. Spain would attract the golden lads of this world as a lamp attracts the moths.

Spain, then. The game of pawns and rooks and deaths must be played in Spain. It all turns on the position of the pieces, on the willingness, the nerve, for sacrifice.

C
OMRADE BOLODIN,” INSTRUCTED COMRADE GLASANOV,
“break his nose. But be careful of the mouth.”

Comrade Bolodin walked to the naked old man who was bound to the chair. He studied the problem with dispassion while the old man looked up at him, as if he didn’t seem too sure of what was happening. He looked dazed. Bolodin, who was exceedingly strong, drove a sharp, perfect blow into his face. The meaty thud filled the cell. He felt the nose crack and splinter in its flesh in the split second before the head snapped back.

“Well done, comrade,” said Glasanov.

The old man’s head lolled forward on his chest. Snot and blood ran from his face and spotted his white, scrawny body. Glasanov lifted the head gently and stared at it. The nose was crushed almost flat but the bruising and the swelling had not yet begun. Glasanov waited for the focus to come back into the eyes, and for the fear to appear.

“Listen, why do you make us hurt you?” he asked with genuine curiosity. “Why must we go through this? Can
you not begin now to understand the gravity of these charges?”

“Osysvorf,”
the old man cursed, but the language was unfamiliar to the Russian.

“He’s delirious,” he said. “He’s praying in Hebrew.”

“No,” said Comrade Bolodin, “that’s Yiddish. And it isn’t a prayer. It’s a curse. He said you were garbage.”

Glasanov did not take the insult personally; he never did.

“You cannot win,” he pointed out to the old man. “Surely you understand that. And not just in this room, where you are doomed, but in the larger sense, the historical sense.”

Glasanov talked frequently of history; he loved history. Each night, when they were done or before they had begun, they sat in the Café Moka on the Ramblas sipping Pernod and
rijos
among English newsmen and fiery young Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists and POUMistas and other assorted but quite colorful riffraff that an out-of-control revolution throws up. Glasanov would explain at great length to his assistant Bolodin about history.

“Fuck history,” said the old man, in Russian.

“Hit him,” said Glasanov. “In the body. The ribs. Hard. Several times, please, comrade.”

Bolodin walked to the bound figure, feeling the old Yid’s eyes on him the whole way. Jesus, they could be tough, these old birds. Without a great deal of emotional involvement, Comrade Bolodin threw a flurry of short, penetrating blows into his ribs and chest. He could hear the crack of his fists against the body as the old man jerked spastically in the ropes. But he would not scream.

“All right,” said Glasanov. “It’s very clear, Comrade Tchiterine. The charges are clear and they are obvious. You are a wrecker and an oppositionist. You have constantly worked to undermine the Party and betray the
revolution. In England in 1931, you and Lemontov and Levitsky entered into an agreement with the British Secret Service, so you are also a spy. And all of this is under the control of your leader, the Jew Trotsky.”

The old man raised his head slowly. His skin had gone almost the color of slate. Blood showed on his lips.

“Fuck your sister, you cowshit peasant. The Great Lenin himself gave Levitsky and me medals.”

“And what if it’s true, old Tchiterine? It’s irrelevant to history. Hit him hard.”

Comrade Bolodin hit him in the ear and the face. He hit him in the mouth, smashing out his teeth. He hit him in the temple, then hit him again and again under the eye, in the face. The sound of the blows was slippery and wet and dense. He hit him in the—

“BOLODIN! Enough, Christ, enough. You forget yourself.”

Bolodin stepped back. He sometimes had difficulty stopping.

“Tchiterine, it’s pointless to resist. You’ll sign the confession either here or in the Lubyanka. You’ll go on trial. You’ll be found guilty. You’ll die. Your generation must pass on now. That’s what history has written.”

The old man’s face had been greatly damaged by the punishment. It looked like a piece of mashed fruit, swollen and bruised and caked in blood. The blood was everywhere. He croaked something through his swollen lips.

“Eh?” asked Glasanov.

“Fuck Koba,” said Tchiterine, somehow, and Comrade Bolodin hit him a cruel, powerful blow in the side. Of the many, this was perhaps the most devastating, for it ruptured the old man’s appendix. In his bounds, Tchiterine commenced to struggle as the pain and numbness
rocketed through him. In time he lapsed into a waxen coma. His breathing was imperceptible.

“You hit him too much. Your zeal gets the best of you. Discipline. Remember, above all, discipline. Strength, passion, commitment, they are all fine and absolutely necessary. The great Stalin, however, says that in discipline lies the key to the future.”

“I apologize, comrade.”

“You Americans,” Comrade Glasanov said.

Comrade Bolodin’s true name was Lenny Mink, and his last fixed address had been 1351 Cypress Avenue in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, but he was to be found more frequently at Midnight Rose’s, a candy store at Livonia and Saratoga streets, that served as the unofficial headquarters for his company, which went by the name Murder, Inc. He had left New York at the urging of certain parties, as police curiosity concerning his involvement with the deaths by shooting, bludgeoning, ice picking, and drowning of several witnesses due to deliver evidence against Lepke Buchalter had reached embarrassing proportions. Lenny, like his peers Pittsburgh Phil, Gangy Cohen, Pretty Levine, Jack Drucker, and his bosses Mendy Weiss, Dandy Phil Kastel, and Bugsy Siegel, killed people for two reasons: because he was good at it and because he was paid for it.

“Well, he’ll be out all night,” said Glasanov. “Get him back to his cell. Wash him off, clean him up. Get him some brandy. We’ll work on him some more tomorrow.”

“Yes, comrade,” said Lenny Mink, still in Russian.

“Tough old fellow,” said Glasanov. “They had to be in those days. He’s right, you know, what they did was extraordinary. Fighting the Okrana and the Cossacks and later the western armies and Kolchak. My God, they were tough.”

Lenny looked at the old guy. Yeah, tough. Tougher than any nigger, and when he was young, Lenny had fought a nigger for almost an hour down by the docks until both men had been too exhausted to continue and nobody took the kitty. Later, some whore used a razor on the guy.

“Be careful with him, now. Comrade Koba wants him back in Moscow, understand?”

“Yes, comrade.” Lenny kept his Russian simple and polite.

“I’ll be in my office. Wake me if anything occurs.”

Lenny, alone with the old man, reached into his pocket and removed a switchblade, popped it, and cut the bonds. The body fell; he caught it. Tchiterine had once been an important man, the Comintern agent in charge of imposing Party demands on the often unruly dockworkers’ unions in the port of Barcelona. Now look at him.

Lenny, six-three and well over two hundred pounds, had no trouble getting the old guy up in his arms. The American had a blunt, sullen, nearly handsome face, though it was pocked. He seemed to carry his big bones slowly and had a kind of cold force to him—he liked to hurt people and people understood this of him almost instinctively, and tended to become uncomfortable in his presence, an effect he enjoyed. He had always had it. In fact, in his youth, in the Diaspora before he had come to America, his shtetl nickname had been “Cossack,” after the rumor that he’d been begotten, not by his nominal father, a butcher, but by a Russian raider in a pogrom.

He rarely spoke. He appeared to listen intently. People often considered him stupid, which was a mistake. He simply wasn’t clever with words, although he spoke imperfect versions of English and Russian, having learned the latter during a two-thousand-mile walk from
Minsk to Odessa when he was eleven years old, a remarkable journey. He had made the trip on his own, after another pogrom, the one in which his mother and father and all his brothers and sisters had been killed. His best language was Yiddish, the language of his boyhood, although he was picking up Spanish rapidly. When he had presented himself at the International Brigade clearinghouse in Paris, in hopes of finding suitable employment in the natural venue for a man of his profession—a war—the NKVD had scooped him up. The NKVD had plans for Barcelona, and Lenny looked to be the perfect instrument.

He took old Tchiterine’s body into the harsh light of the newly wired bulbs and down the empty corridor of the prison, which at one time had been the novitiate’s wing of the Convent of St. Ursula. The place had been vandalized, as had all Church properties in the first crazed days of the July Revolution, and rioters had smashed everything and painted slogans everywhere. Shards of broken glass still lay on the floor. Yet the place also had a sense of newness to it; recently occupied by elements of the NKVD, which clearly needed both privacy and security, it had been painted roughly, rewired for electricity, patched, and repaired. It smelled of paint and new wood and also of piss and despair.

Lenny reached Tchiterine’s cell and set him on the bed. The old man breathed roughly. His swelling completely disfigured his face. Lenny covered his nakedness with a blanket. He went to a bucket, brought it over, and wet his handkerchief. He began to wipe the dried blood off the face. He’d really gone a little nuts there—a problem of his. Sometimes he couldn’t hold on to himself. He just liked the way it felt when he hit people. Discipline, this
Russian boss was always saying. Discipline was the secret of history. He actually believed that shit.

The old man moaned suddenly.

Lenny jumped.

“Ya!” he yelped in Yiddish. “You scared me, old man.”

One yellow eye came open. The other was swollen shut.

“Vasser,”
the old man begged through his ripened lips. “Please,” he begged in Yiddish, “a little, please.”

“You old
yentzer”
Lenny laughed. He cupped some water in his big hand and let it dribble into the old man’s mouth. The old man lapped it up greedily.

“I don’t feel so good in my gut,” he said.

“What’d you expect, from the smashing you got?”

“Help me,” the old man said then. “I can pay you.”

“Pay what? You got a treasure stuck up your old asshole? You’re making me laugh, you old putz.”