Tapestry of Spies (46 page)

N
OBODY HAD BEEN INTERESTED IN THEM AND NOW THEY
sat in a kind of numbed silence in the first-class coach, alone and silent. The train smelled of tobacco and use. Now and then, people moved down the corridor outside the open compartment, occasionally an Asalto. Once, one of them peeped in.

“Es inglés, ¿verdad señor?”
he said.

“Sí, señor,”
said Florry.

“Passport,
¿por favor?”

“Ah.
Si,”
said Florry, handing it over.

“Muy bien,”
said the man, after a brief examination.

“Gracias,”
said Florry.

“Buenos días, señor,”
said the man, ducking out.

“It was so
easy”
said Sylvia.

“The Asaltos don’t matter,” said Florry. “In Red Spain, only the NKVD matters.”

He sat back. He felt exhausted. Could it all be done, all of it, Spain, the whole bloody thing? He looked out the window of the carriage and could only see steam, the tops of heads passing by under the level of the window, and, across the via, another train. He looked at his watch.

“We’re late,” he said after a time.

“Does it matter?” she said. “We
are
on board.”

“I suppose you’re right. Yet I’ll feel a good deal better once the bloody thing gets going. It was supposed to leave five minutes ago.”

“Robert, the Spanish haven’t done anything on time for several centuries.”

Florry agreed and closed his eyes, trying to quell his uneasiness.

But he could not get it out of his head. Why are we not moving?

By now they had almost completely encircled him, guns drawn. Lenny stood in the courtyard, not ten feet from his car, feeling his automatic heavy in the shoulder holster. He had no real image of the doom closing in on him, but he knew he was in big trouble. They’d found the old man. They’d search his case, find the passports and the money. He was a dead man. The impulse came to go out in smoke and flame, the way Dutch Schultz went out: he could feel the hunger for the pistol build in his fingers. He wanted to grab it and start shooting. You always know, when you go into the rackets, you always know something like this may happen: a bigger gang catches you in the open, unexpected, and it’s over. He’d put the lights out on enough guys himself.

“You American scum,” said Glasanov, “I’ve been watching you for some time. I’ve seen your ambition, your deals, the hungry way you look. You profess to be a Communist and are nothing but gangster scum. Now there’s proof you’re pulling something. We’ll get the truth. Take him.”

The men closed to Lenny and Glasanov, led by the two big new Russians.

“Commissar Glasanov—”

“Take the American trash!” screamed Glasanov, close enough to spray up into Lenny’s face. Lenny could see the hairs in the man’s nostrils and the moles on his chin.

“Comrade Glasanov,” said one of the new Russians, “it’s you who are under arrest.”

They surrounded Glasanov.

“You are charged with wrecking and oppositionism. You are in league with the Jew traitor Levitsky whom you let escape and the puppet master Trotsky. You will be returned to Moscow immediately.”

“But I—”

“Take him away!” shouted Lenny. “I can’t stand to look at the traitorous pig.”

The officers lead Glasanov off.

“Comrade Bolodin?” the arresting officer said. It was some new kid Lenny knew was named Romanov. He was a real hotshot, this Romanov. Straight from the big boss himself.

“Yes, comrade.”

“I just wanted you to know Moscow knows you’ve been attending your duties. They are very pleased in Moscow with the big Amerikanski.”

“I’m pleased to serve the Party and can only wait to spread the struggle to my own land.”

“Good work, Bolodin,” said Comrade Romanov.

Lenny turned and walked swiftly to his car.

“The station,” he commanded.

His driver sped along, siren screaming. He ran through the crowd, racing past Ugarte without a word of recognition. They were locking the gate at Via
7,
but he got by them and could see it ahead in the bellowing steam as it moved away. He didn’t think he would make it, but from somewhere there came a burst of energy and he leaped
and felt his hands close about the metal grip hung in the last door, and he pulled himself aboard.

“Thank God,” said Florry. “Well, I hope that’s the last delay.”

“I’m sure it will be,” said Sylvia.

The train pushed its slow way up the coast toward Port Bou, flanked on one side by the Mediterranean and on the other by the hulking Pyrenees, and after a time, Florry and Sylvia went to dine. They sat in the first-class dining car over a bad paella of dry rice with leathery little chunks that had once been sea creatures and drank bitter young wine and attempted in their game of disguise to make clever Noël Coward repartee for anyone in earshot.

Sylvia seemed quiet, typically distant; some color had returned to her face. Hard to believe two days ago they’d been standing next to their own graves in front of the firing squad. She appeared to have forgotten about it, or to have dispensed with it. It was something about her he liked a great deal: this gift for living only in the absolute present, this wonderful gift for practicality.

Florry looked away, out the window. He tried not to think of the dead he’d left in Red Spain. He tried to think of the bright, beautiful future, he and Sylvia perhaps together at last. He knew if he tried hard enough he could earn his way back. He knew there wouldn’t be the problem over Julian anymore; he felt he could control his jealousy and his sense of possessiveness that had mussed things up over Julian. The future would be theirs and wonderful. They had survived. They would be the inheritors.

“Robert.” There was urgency in her voice. “Detectives.”

He looked and could see them.

“Start chatting,” he said.

They must have come aboard at the last stop. They were heavyset men in raincoats with that sleepy, unimpressible look to their eyes that any copper masters in the first few days of the job.

They came down the coach aisle slowly, fighting the lurch of it upon the rails, choosing whom to examine and whom not to on the basis of some strange, silent code or protocol between them. Florry stared straight into Sylvia’s lovely face without seeing it, keeping the men in soft, peripheral focus nevertheless. Perhaps they’d arrest someone else before they got to him, perhaps that big fellow in the raincoat sitting there, or the—

But no. With their unerring instinct for such matters, the two policemen came straight to him. He could feel their eyes on him and could hear them thinking
inglés
and knew how their minds would work: a deserter from the International Brigades or a political prisoner having fled some Barcelona
checa
.

“I do hope it’s a rainy summer,” he said, trying to think of the most English thing he could say. “The roses, darling. The rain is absolutely
topping
for the roses.”

“Señor?”

“—and we must go to Wimbledon for the championships, I hear there’s a dreadfully good Yank fellow who—”

“Señor?”

He felt a rough hand on his arm and looked up.

“Good heavens. Are you speaking to me, sir?”

“Sí’.
¿Es inglés, ¿verdad señor?”

“Si
. Rather, yes. English, quite.”

“¿Era soldado en la revolución?”

“Soldier? Me? Good heavens, you must be joking.”

“George, what do they want?”

“I have no idea, darling.”

The man took his right hand and turned it over to look at the palm.

“Now, see here,” said Florry.

“¿Puedo ver su pasaporte, por favor?”
said the man.

“This is most irritating,” said Florry. He pulled his passport out and watched as the man rifled it, examined it carefully.

At last he handed it back.

“You like España, Señor Trent?” he asked.

“Yes, very. The missus and I come each year for the beach. Except
last
year, of course. It’s nice things have settled down. You have the best sunlight in Europe after the Riviera, and we can’t afford the Riviera.”

“¿No era fascista?”

“Good heavens, of course not. Do I look like one?”

The man’s pale eyes beheld him for just a second and then he conferred briefly with his partner.

“Espero que se divirtiera en su viaje.”

“Eh?”

“To hope you have enjoyed your trip, Señor Trent,” he finally said and passed on.

Florry took another sip of the wine, pretending to be cool. He could see the little rills on its placid surface from the trembling in his hand. The stuff was impossibly bitter.

He reached for a cigarette, lit it.

“That’s the last of the Spanish crew,” he said. “We ought to be very close to the frontier.”

“Why did he check your hand?”

“The Mosin-Nagent has a sharp bolt handle. If you’ve done a lot of firing, you’ll almost certainly have a scab or a callous in the fleshy part of your palm.”

“Thank God you didn’t.”

“Thank God the scab dropped off in the bath last night.”

“I think,” she said, “I think our troubles are finally over.”

Yes, you’re right, he thought. But he wondered why it was he had the odd, unsettling feeling of
being watched
.

“Are you cold?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“You just shivered.”

T
HE RIGHT EYE WAS GONE. SMASHED, SHATTERED,
crushed when one of the brutes had kicked him as he lay on the floor of the pen. The surgeon had simply removed it, while wiring up the fractured zygoma, as the bone surrounding it was called. The left eye remained, though its lens had been dislocated in the same terrible blow. The old man could detect a moving hand but he could not count fingers.

The shoulders, of course, were broken from his long session on the rope; and the wrists, too. Additionally, he was bruised, cut, scraped, battered in a hundred places about his old body.

But the significant damage was psychological. His memories were jangled and intense. He was extremely nervous, unable to concentrate. He knew no peace. He had nightmares. He wept for no reason at all. His moods altered radically.

And he no longer talked.

Now he lay incarcerated in plaster and bandages in a private room in the Hospital of the People’s Triumph, formerly the Hospital Santa Creu i Sant Pau, on the
Avenida Stalin. The room seemed to be high and bright; it opened to a balcony that had an unrestricted view of—of something. The sea, perhaps. Levitsky could only recognize the illumination and smell the breeze.

He lay alone—or, it could be said, alone with history—on a sweet, cool, late afternoon. The doctor came in, as usual, at four, only this time—most
unusual
—he was accompanied by another man. Levitsky, of course, could see none of this, but he could hear the second, unfamiliar snap of footsteps, and inferred from their speed and precision a certain energy, perhaps even eagerness, as opposed to the grimly proficient rhythm of the doctor’s shoes.

“Well, Comrade Levitsky,” said the doctor in Russian, “it appears you are a tough old bird.” Levitsky could sense the doctor over him and could see just enough movement as the fellow bent. “A man your age, a mangling such as this, so long among the horses. My goodness, nineteen out of twenty would have died on the operating theater table.” Levitsky knew what would occur next—the flash of pain as the light hit his surviving eye—and, indeed, a second later, the doctor’s torch snapped on. It went off like a concussive boom in his head.

“He’s stable?” The second voice was harder and younger.

“Yes, commissar. At last.”

“How long before he can be moved?”

“Two weeks. A month, to be safe.”

“You’re sure, comrade doctor?”

“In these times, it wouldn’t do to make a mistake.”

“Indeed. A month, then.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Leave us.”

“He’s still fragile, commissar.”

“I won’t excite him.”

Levitsky heard the doctor walking out. Then there was nearly a full minute of silence. Listening carefully, Levitsky could hear the other breathing. He stared through the milky incandescence of his single eye at the ceiling.

At last, the young man spoke.

“Well, old Emmanuel Ivanovich, your comrades at Znamensky Street send their greetings. You’ve become quite an important fellow. This man is to be protected at all expense, they insist. But I forget myself. Pavel Valentinovich Romanov, of the Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie. Lieutenant commander, actually, at a rather young age, you might say.”

He paused, waiting for a response. Levitsky had none, and so the young man responded himself.

“My pride, you would tell me if you could, will be my downfall. Well, perhaps you are right.” He laughed. “It certainly was yours.”

Levitsky said nothing.

“Now, I know all about you, but you know so little about me. Well, I’ll spare you a list of my accomplishments. But let me just say,” said the young man, with a certain hard edge to his voice, “that if you are the past of our party, one could argue that I am its future.”