Tapestry of Spies (10 page)

No, that wouldn’t work. So much between them. Julian, once I loved you and then you hurt me and now they’ve sent me out here to betray you. How on earth can I ever look upon your face? He took a deep breath, happy at least for the solitude. He flipped the cigarette out into the dark, wondering if he had the force to deal with Julian. Something powerful about Julian: it almost frightened him. The city, a few miles beyond, looked serene and peaceful in the moonlight. It looked like some sort of silly, romantic painting.

“Mr. Florry. Staring into the future?”

He turned. It was the girl.

“Yes, well, you’ve caught me at it.”

“How long now until we dock?”

“Well, not a goodly while. You can make out the quay. We slip through the breakwater, then wherever these Arab monkeys choose to tie up, and we’ll be on dry land.”

The moon touched her oval face and made it shine. She smiled and the moon turned her teeth blinding white, small perfect little pearls, little replicas of itself. Had she ever really smiled at him quite like this before? He didn’t think so. The radiance of her look overwhelmed him.

“You’ve changed your clothes.” She now had on some sort of purple dress.

“Yes. The adventure begins, that kind of silly nonsense.”

“It’s quite appropriate, I assure you.”

He could see her hand on the rail, her fair face in the white moonlight. He could smell her. It was lovely, something musky and rather dense. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but felt incapable of even commencing such a move. A squawking of Arabic rose from the bridge—two sailors cursing each other.

“I’m actually glad I caught you here alone,” she said. “You’ve been awfully kind to me. I wanted to thank you for it.”

“Believe me, Miss Lilliford, it doesn’t take much effort to be kind to you.”

“No, you’re just one of the decent chaps of the world. I can tell. Fewer and fewer of them around, and you’re one.”

“You exaggerate my decency, Miss Lilliford. Scratch my surface and you’ll find the same brute underneath in any man.”

“I can’t begin to believe it.”

It occurred to him he ought to kiss her. He had, actually, never kissed a white woman before.

“There
you are,” said Count Witte, coming out onto the deck. “Good heavens, I’ve just had the most terrible altercation with that awful old Gruenwald. The man is completely drunk. He smells as if he’s bathed in peppermint. He was trying to get my trunk up and banging it around terribly. It was most upsetting.”

Florry turned.

“Oh, he’s a harmless old fellow. Worthless, I suppose, but harmless,” said Florry tightly.

“Oh, I say—am I disturbing you or something? I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Oh, no,” said Florry, “it’s nothing—”

“But it is. I can tell from the startled look on Miss Lilliford’s face. I shall beat a hasty retreat.”

“Please, Count Witte. Our conversation can wait. Mr. Florry and I have plenty of time ahead. Come out and watch the ship sail into the harbor.”

“Yes, do come on, Count Witte.”

“Well, you English are so wonderfully polite I don’t know if you mean it or not, but I will come. Yes. Do you know, we must get together for dinner in the week to come. There used to be some wonderful restaurants in Barcelona, though I shouldn’t be surprised if the revolutionaries have closed them all down in the spirit of equality. But—”

Amazingly, it had begun to rain!

Florry had the distinct impression that the air itself had suddenly liquefied and then, oddly, all sound had vanished from the earth: the slosh of the prow through the water, the clank and groan of the old engine, the chatter of Arabic from deep inside the ship.

Or no: there
was
sound. There was, in fact,
nothing
but sound, huge in his ears. Sound and liquid—sound and water—sound and chaos.

A shock seemed to slither through the guts of the ship. Its very relationship to the shiny sea began to alter crazily; the deck, which had until this second seemed as secure as the surface of the earth, issued a great animal shudder; Florry, in his mind, thought of a dying elephant he’d once seen, that moment when the bullet plunges home and every line is somehow terribly changed as the consciousness of doom suddenly imprints itself upon the beast. He stood bolted to the rail, trying to make sense of it all: water and roar, everywhere; Sylvia’s dress plastered with hideous immodesty against
her body as the shock spread from the ship to her own face, in the form of total panic, which flashed whitely in the wet moonlight; old Witte, gobbling in terror like an ancient bird before the ax, his jowls heavy and flopping, his wet hair curled, his monocle fluttering about. And suddenly also a tide of demented, howling voices, a guttural mix of Arabic and Turkish and all the dialects of the Mediterranean.

And Florry, attempting in the first second, with what he felt was icy calm but was in fact the beginning of bone-deep panic, to sort all this out, became aware of yet another and perhaps more frightening phenomenon. That is, the angle of the deck to the horizon had begun to shift radically. We’re sinking, he realized. We’re sinking.

M
AJOR HOLLY-BROWNING TOOK TEA LATE AT HIS
headquarters that same night. He sat in his little fifth-floor office in the Broadway Building off a corridor that led only to a rear stairwell. Perhaps it looked a bit more like a publisher’s cubicle than a spy’s: he was surrounded by an almost endless collection of books and pamphlets of poetry, clipped newspaper reviews, glossy and not-so-glossy literary quarterlies, reproductions of paintings, tutors’ reports, the minutes of meetings of long-abandoned undergraduate political committees, broadsides, handbills, and the like. It all dated from the year 1931 at Cambridge University.

Where another, more sympathetic mind might have divined from the rubble a new generation of promising voices attempting to define and make itself heard, Major Holly-Browning saw most of it as infernal gibberish, a bloody Playfair cipher without a key, whose maze was therefore sealed off forever from his entrance. It represented a private language, a chattering of pansy aesthetes; it filled him, also, with melancholy.

He’d seen so many of these young fools’ fathers die in
the ’14–’18 show, cut down by the German Maxims, or blown to shreds by Krupp explosives, or choked, their lungs browned and shriveled in the mustard, or mutilated by the serrated upper edges of the ghastly Hun bayonets. And for what? For this? For “In Excelsior Pale Grows the Mould”? For “Nocturne in Shades of Gray”? For “A New Theory of Spanish Radicalism”? For “The Pacifist’s Litany”? For Julian’s hated “Achilles, Fool”?

The poem, originally published in the February 1931 number of Denis Mason’s foolish rag
The Spectator
and later the title of Julian’s sole collection of verse, from Heinemann in November of the same year, was never far from the major’s consciousness. He could recite it.

Julian’s father had died on the Somme, hung up on a wire for a long day’s dying. The major had heard Capt. Basil Raines over the artillery barrage that day. He screamed for hours. But not to be rescued. He screamed at his men to stay away, because he knew they would die if they came for him. The major touched the bridge of his nose, which was tender with pain.

“May I get you something, sir?”

“Vane, are you still here? Perhaps you could go down
to Signals and see if Florry’s ship has reached Barcelona yet. Sampson said he’d inform us.”

Vane darted out. Major Holly-Browning turned back to the sea of paper before him. He had mastered with sheer, dogged persistence nearly everything the pile contained. It was not a happy experience. He had become a kind of reluctant expert on the culture of 1931, its torrents and enthusiasms and excesses, its pacifism, its ideologies, its brilliances, its ugly insistence on secret conformism. And most of all, running beneath it like a hidden current, its spies.

Yes, there were spies. The climate almost demanded it. The postwar euphoria had long since worn off, and with the coming of economic hard times, a certain sensibility flourished, a sensibility of doubt. Despair seemed somehow fashionable. Peculiar sexual styles became smart. And the brightest lads were the worst: dandy boys, cleverboots, know-it-alls, fellow travelers; they climbed aboard the Soviet Russian bandwagon, toot-toot-tooting all the way. They
loathed
their own country. They simply, in their glib and fancy way,
hated
it, as had no other generation in English history. They hated it for its smugness and complacency. They hated it for being English and they hated it for making them comfortable while it was unable to feed its own poor. They regarded the very presence of the poor as
a priori
evidence of the corruption of the society. And they loved what little Koba, the red butcher, was doing in his worker’s paradise. It was this, finally, that so infuriated the major: their willed, forced, self-induced self-deception.

Major Holly-Browning touched the pile. It was there. He had dug it out, assembled it, bit by painful bit, as an Etruscan artist must have assembled a mosaic, in which
no one piece has any meaning, but the pattern was everything!

The evidence was irrefutable. The dates, the places, the reports: they meshed so perfectly. It seemed that Levitsky, who nowhere else in his career had behaved with anything but utmost care, had been utterly sloppy around Cambridge in 1931, so contemptuous was he of our lazy security, our comforting veil of illusion, our pious stupidity.

Levitsky’s prime blunder had been a botched come-on to a clerk in the F.O. in February of ’31; from that time on, he’d been identified as a Bolshevik agent, though it had been assumed from the clumsiness of his approach that he was a low-ranking, incompetent one. He had been routinely surveilled on a weekly basis for the next seven months by Section V, until he left the country for parts unknown. His special watering hole, the MI-6 investigators noted, was Cambridge. He made trips there nearly every weekend for the entire seven months. He was hunting for talent, it was clear. But what talent? Who did he see? Where did he go? One investigator could have supplied the answers in a weekend at Cambridge.

He was never followed. In those days, Section V never worked weekends!

But twice Levitsky had not gone when he had been scheduled to. On April 12-15 and May 11-13; and both weekends, Julian Raines had appeared at prominent London society parties as part of a set of bright young things that so caught the public’s eye that year!

Then there was the matter of the arrest. Levitsky had been picked up by the Cambridge constabulary late on a Saturday night in March. The copper, mistrusting his foreign accent and his peculiar ways, had hauled him off to
jail. And who had, the next morning, bailed him out? The copper, five years later, had recognized the picture.

It was the famous poet, Julian Raines.

And then there was the holiday. In June, Julian had taken off a week to rusticate in the south of France, Cap d’Antibes, to be exact. That same week, Levitsky, according to Passport Control (which kept impeccable records) left the country, too; his stated destination was … southern France.

Julian’s face seemed suddenly to appear in front of Holly-Browning: that smug, handsome face that seemed to be sweet reason and aesthetician’s grandeur. How he hated that face!

You little bastard. You smirk at your own father hanging on the wire, trapped in his own guts, too far to reach, his screams louder in the sulfurous vapors of the attack than the sound of the Maxims or the Krupps. The major closed his eyes. He could hear those screams still.

Your father died to give you everything and you in turn give us to the Russians.

Julian. Julian in 1931.

Yes. In discreet interview after discreet interview, they all agreed. Some time during 1931, Julian
changed
, his friends said. He became graver, odder, more private, more profligate, sloppier. His own easy brilliance seemed undercut with what one of his oh-so-sympathetic chums called “tragic self-awareness.” His gaiety was “forced.”

What had happened to dear Julian?

Holly-Browning knew. It’ll weigh a man down, deciding to betray his country.

The dates told the rest of the story. Julian had gone out to Spain on August 4, 1936, three weeks after the outbreak of rebellion. According to the defector Lemontov, an urgent flash had come to him from Moscow, graded
Priority One, the highest, which ordered him to establish a radio hookup in a safe house with a transmitter in Barcelona, and to service it with a code expert, to use the Orange Cipher, the GRU’s most private, most impenetrable, most highly graded secret language. He was then to prepare to funnel the same information almost immediately back to Moscow via a second radio link. He was
not to
decode the information himself. That’s how secret it was. The date of the flash? August 5, 1936.