Tapestry of Spies (8 page)

It was a well-oiled Webley Mark I, a big revolver with a short octagonal barrel.

“God, you’re not joking about all this, are you?” Florry said.

“Put it away, Florry. Somebody could come along.”

But Florry continued to look at it, fascinated. He experienced the weapon’s heft and weight and perfect easy feel. He’d carried much the same thing in Burma, though in a slightly later model. With a dexterity from memory that surprised him, he hit the latch to break the action and
the barrel obediently dropped to expose the cylinder. Six gleaming brass circles peeped out, like six coins on a pewter plate.

“Loaded,” he said.

“The bloody things are useless without bullets. That’s a shoulder holster, by the way. It’ll hold the weapon neatly out of sight under a coat or cardigan. And as you know, the four-five-five will knock down anything on two feet at close range. Now put it away, Florry. Someone could come.”

Julian? What would a monster like a Webley do to vivid, charming, cruel Julian? It would blow his guts in quarts across the landscape.

He shook his head, quickly replaced the pistol in the holster, wrapped it in the cloth, and put it back in the briefcase. Mr. Sterne and Mr. Webley were to be his companions in Spain.

“I suppose that’s it, then?” he said. “A revolver and a code book. It
is
a game, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a game, Mr. Florry. Never think of it as a game. Think of it as life and death.”

“I wonder if I could ever do the final thing.”

“You’ll do what’s necessary. You’ll see your duty.”

“I suppose you’re right. And that is what frightens me.”

Florry turned and issued the major a look that was either stupidity or shock. The major had seen it before, but not since 1916. It was the look of men in the trenches, about to go over the top, who didn’t believe their moment of destiny had finally arrived. Florry got up and walked away gloomily.

The major peeled another peanut and turned it over to the hungry pigeons. Soon Mr. Vane joined him.

“I trust it went well, sir?”

“It went as well as could be expected, Vane. Given the circumstances.”

“Did you think he’s up to it?”

“Not yet. That’s Sampson’s job.”

“Yessir.”

“We’ll have to play Mr. Florry very carefully, won’t we, Vane?”

“Yessir.”

“Levitsky can make a traitor of anyone. Can I make a murderer so easily?”

They watched as Florry, now a small figure, disappeared in the traffic.

M
OST NIGHTS, IN OBEDIENCE TO HIS INSTRUCTIONS,
Comrade Captain Bolodin of the SIM went out with his men and made arrests. The instructions were perfect: the addresses were always right, the criminal always available. Comrade Captain Bolodin and his men were always on time; they never had any trouble. Nothing worked well in Republican Spain except the NKVD and nothing worked better in the NKVD than Comrade Captain Bolodin.

Sometimes the criminals were imprisoned, sometimes merely liquidated. A libertarian lawyer, for example, author of a wickedly scatological anti-Russian poem for his four-page party newspaper, paid for this crime with a bullet in the neck; a Polish trade unionist also died, as did a French intellectual who wrote scathing editorials, and a German Social Democrat who had published an unkind article in a Norwegian socialist newspaper. A Cuban, however, was simply reeducated in the political realities of Barcelona by an administration of Comrade Captain Bolodin’s fists for an excruciatingly long evening.

But under this political drama another one was running.
Certain of the arrestees of a peculiar age and range of experience were spared the more furious applications of Koba’s justice and—although this was quite unknown to Koba’s official representatives, particularly the aggressively moral Glasanov—were escorted into an obscure cell for a private interview with Comrade Captain Bolodin. The subjects were always the same.

The first was a certain shipment of gold, said to have left the Barcelona port in November of 1936 on four Russian steamers. Had this material actually been loaded on the ships and sent out to Odessa, as official records insisted? The answers varied, and the arrestees, mainly dockworkers and low-ranking Spanish port officials, were at great pains to please their interrogator. Some swore yes, they’d seen Russian tankers loading the material that the Spaniards had not been able to get near to. But others said the entire affair was quite odd, because the Russians had insisted on being so public about it; they wanted the world to know they were moving the gold. One man said the ships rode awfully high in the water for all the weight they were said to be carrying. But if the gold remained hidden in Barcelona, where could it be? None of Lenny’s many arrestees had an opinion.

For these men, the fate was always the same. They had learned, from their ordeal, of Mink’s real interest. It was the most dangerous knowledge a man could have in Barcelona. They died, usually with a 7.62 mm slug from Lenny Mink’s Tula-Tokarev in the back of their skulls.

The other subject that Lenny Mink examined at length was a certain category of arrestee’s acquaintance with the legendary Levitsky, or “Devil Himself” as he was called in certain quarters.

These questions met with a variety of responses.

Some, for example, would not talk at all without severe assistance. It took Lenny the best part of one whole evening to pry out of one old man the story of Levitsky’s youth, and how the Cossacks had, one bloody morning, liberated the boy from responsibility to parents and shtetl by slaying the former and burning the latter, all before his terrified twelve-year-old eyes, an event which forever propelled him to the revolutionary course. Lenny listened gravely to this account, having some familiarity with the materials himself.

Of Levitsky’s early exploits in the underground of the nineties at a very young age, his first contests with the Okrana, and his eventual abandonment of anarchism for the tenets of Marx, no reliable witness could be found, though several alluded to it.

What they remembered most of Levitsky was the long period between the failed revolution of 1905 and the successful one of 1917 in which he roamed Europe making his legend as a cunning strategist and a fighter of great bravery. It was primarily his enemies from these days who remembered him and frequently hated him still and were ready, even eager, to speak. They remembered his ruthlessness, his cunning, and even his brilliant chess.

“He could have owned the world, it was said,” one man informed Lenny. “Instead he chose to change it.”

He planted bombs in Bucharest, he organized strikes in Turin, he robbed banks in Zagreb; wherever the Party needed him, he went; whatever price the Party demanded, he paid. He was arrested half a dozen times, usually escaping, most spectacularly from the terrible Constantinople Hall of Darkness. Three times, maybe four, the Okrana tried to kill him.

He surfaced, again briefly, in the incredibly hectic years of the revolution, from 1917 to 1921. In this period,
an old veteran recalled, he was remembered mainly as a soldier: a great battlefield tactician who, unlike the cowardly Trotsky in his armored train, rode at the head of every charge and was once unhorsed three times in a single afternoon. He fought in all the battles around Kazan and was wounded twice; he was a brigade commander, a counter-intelligence officer, and a leader of cavalry. He rode with the Red Cossacks—he, whose parents had been butchered by Cossacks—out of the hills on June 3, 1919, in the battle that spelled the end for Kolchak. He fought against Yedenitch in the north and Denekin in the south. This was particularly impressive to all who remembered it because Levitsky hated horses as he hated nothing on earth. It was a sheer triumph of will.

After the war, he again passed from view as he returned to the secret life of the conspirator. Few facts were forthcoming on this period, though Comrade Captain Bolodin sought them with special fervor. At the point of death, an old Rumanian confessed that he had heard that Comrade Levitsky had arranged assignment to the Otdyel Mezhunarodnoi Svyazi, the International Liaison Section of Comintern, where he could privately pursue his goal of world revolution and safely ignore Koba as he ransacked the revolution. Comintern, it was also stated, was really but an arm of the GRU, Red Army Intelligence, whose policies it pursued with an almost noble integrity. It was said that Levitsky carried a high, secret rank in the GRU. It was said that when the GRU lost favor to the NKVD, Levitsky’s magic protection began to wither away, his freedom to say unkind things about Koba, his ability to shock at social gatherings with his imitation of Koba at the chessboard, all these disappeared. He was being watched. But they were, on the
whole, mysterious years: no witnesses knew enough to tell Lenny more than he already knew.

The arrests began in 1934. Koba arrested him then, and again in 1935; he spent time in Siberia, six frozen months as a
zek
in one of the prison camps, before “rehabilitation,” and returned from the East with his particularly forbidding dignity, which most interpreted as pessimism and which, most agreed, doomed him; his last days were spent in the Lux Hotel, waiting for something … or waiting for Koba’s final justice. Whether he was affiliated still with GRU was unknown.

These shreds of fact and bits of legend Lenny accumulated over a few weeks; for them all, the payment was the same: the bullet in the skull. And from them, he determined where he might be able to find what he needed most in his quest.

It was a steelpoint etching from a quick sketch done in 1901 in the Great Hall of the Casino at Karlsbad of the champion of the chess tournament. It has been printed within the pages of
Deutsche Schach-zeitung
, the German chess magazine. It was a picture of a fierce young Jew, and the caption under had read,
Der Teuful Selbst, E. I. Levitsky
.

It took Lenny a week to find it in an antiquarian bookstore in the Gothic Quarter.

L
ATE IN THE MORNING, A CALM FELL ON THE TIRED
old scow. No breeze furled the flat sea; the sky was cloudless, but white and dull with oppressive radiance. It was a warm, almost tropical day.

Sylvia noticed it first.

“We seem to be dead in the water,” she observed, looking up from her copy of
Signature
. “I hope nothing is wrong.” She sat on a canvas chair on the
Akim’s
small passenger deck beneath its battered bridge and single stack with her two fellow passengers.

“Perhaps they wait for a clearance or something,” said Count Witte, the Polish correspondent.

“Can we be that close to Barcelona?”

“I don’t know, dear girl,” he said.

“What do you make of it, Mr. Florry?” she asked.

It was another in the constant barrage of questions she had for him. She was a young Englishwoman of his own age and the middle class, who had, if he understood correctly, come into some money, picked up a taint of fashionable leftist politics, and was now headed to Barcelona for adventuring. Though her questions were
generally stupid, it pleased him to be asked them. She had so many!

Florry, also sitting on a deck chair, put down
Tristram Shandy
and said, “With this lot of amateurs one can never tell. I suppose I ought to go check.”

“If you can make yourself understood,” said the count, an aristocratic old man in a yellow panama hat and monocle. “These monkeys are hardly human.”

The count had a point: the crew of the old steamer consisted largely of semicivilized Arabs, wily, barefoot primitives in burnooses and filthy whites who scuttled about her rusty chambers and funnels like athletes and spoke in gibberish. The officers were only slightly better: two smarmy Turks who always needed a shave and spoke in impenetrable platitudes in answer to any query. Tell them their hair was on fire or some fellow had stuck a knife between their shoulder blades and they’d have answered the same: All is well, all is well, and praise to Allah.

“I suppose I shall have to ask the bloody steward,” Florry said. “At least he’s European.”