Tapestry of Spies (48 page)

The big man hit Sylvia a second time, killing the scream in her throat, and she dropped bleeding on the bed when Florry, having somehow accumulated a bit of strength, assaulted him with a desperate rugby tackle, but it hurt Florry worse than the other and as Florry slid off, a brute knee rose and met him cruelly flush beneath the eye with a sick ugly sound that filled his head with sparks
and scattered his will. He began to crawl away to collect himself, but the man dropped onto his back, pinned him with a knee as one pins the butterfly through the thorax to the board, and had his thick hands under his throat. He pulled his head back. Florry felt the strength and the force. He knew the man could snap his neck in an instant. He could hardly breathe. He was gagging.

“Pleased to meet you,
yentzer,”
the man hissed. “I’m your new pal.”

Florry was instantly released and felt the man rise off him. Then a powerful kick slammed against his ribs, lifting him against the wall in the tiny room, flipping him. He tried to scream when a short sharp blow delivered with a boxer’s grace and cunning nailed the exact center of his body and the sound was frozen forever in his lungs. He lay back, his eyes closed, sucking desperately at the air.

The man leaned across the bed and pulled Sylvia up by the hair. He slapped her face hard twice to bring her awake to scream, and as her throat constricted in the effort, he rapped her there lightly to trap it. He pulled her over and her head down.

Florry knew he had to help her. He had to get air, and help Sylvia.

“Please,” Florry begged. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything. Just tell me. I’ll do it.”

Please him
, he thought.

The man dropped Sylvia unconscious to the bed and turned to Florry. Florry seized Sylvia’s suitcase from the corner and desperately hurled it, but it was open and the clothes falling from it crippled the velocity of the thrust. The man elbowed it aside contemptuously. He walked over the litter of clothing now spread about the floor and smashed Florry in the face and Florry wasn’t fast enough
to slip the blow. Instead, head a mess of confusion and lights, he went down to the floor. The man sat atop him. Florry could feel the hot, excited breath and the heaving heart and the strength and the totality of him, the overwhelming force of him.

“I know it all,” said the man. “The old Jew Levitsky. The guy at Cambridge. He told me. You’re working for the reds.”

“I-I-” Florry struggled with the idea.

“Yeah. He told me, Levitsky himself, your great buddy. And I got
this
, too, fucker.”

He leaned back, reached into his pocket, and pulled something out. Florry recognized it immediately. It was the confession he’d signed for Steinbach.

“The gold,” the man said. “Where’s the gold?”

“What? I—”

“Don’t fuck around. The gold! God damn it, the gold.” He pulled something from his pocket, snapped it, and a knife blade popped out. He put the icy-sharp point of the blade into the soft skin under Florry’s eye. “I’ll cut you and cut you and cut you. Then I’ll cut the girl. I’ll cut everybody you ever knew. The gold. The gold!”

Florry knew now he was hopelessly insane, his ideas crazed and pitiful, his willingness to hurt absolute and unending.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Florry said. “It’s—”

The man’s eyes widened at this defiance and he hit Florry savagely in the face.

“No,” said Florry, gasping and curling, seeking desperately for something to put between himself and the pain, “no. It’s Julian. Take Julian, don’t take me. He’s the one. Leave us alone, please, I beg you.”

But the man stood above him, looming like some titanic statue. Florry watched as the man’s foot came
forward until it covered his face with its black shadow and descended onto his face. He could feel the shoe on his nose and lips, flattening and spreading them, and he could taste the grit and filth on the sole, little flecks and curds of it, falling into his mouth.

Florry’s fingers scrabbled desperately at the floor and the clothes littering it as a single thought filled his head: who will help me now?

Nobody, the answer came. You are alone.

“Lick it,” the man commanded in a hoarse, mad whisper. “Lick it, you little fucker.”

Florry’s tongue caressed the sole of the filthy shoe exactly as his fingers, crawling through the clothes on the floor, touched something hard and recognized it before his mind did.

“The gold,” the man said. “Tell me where the gold is, God damn you or—”

Florry raised Julian’s little automatic, thumbing back the nubby hammer, and fired into the crotch above him and felt the boot come off his face and saw the blood spurt. Florry fired again into the lower belly and into the chest, the gun cracking in his hand. The blood spurted and sprayed everywhere and the man seemed to sink back stunned and disappointed, holding his red fingers before him, and Florry shot him in the throat, opening a hideous wound, the larynx blown to shreds even by a small-caliber bullet at this range. He made grotesque mewling noises. He was spitting blood and it was coming out his nose and spilling down his chest. Florry rose, cupping the pistol with both hands, and fired carefully into the face; a black crater erupted in the crack and flash of the pistol under the eye while brain tissue and red fog rose from somewhere and he fired into the eye, shattering it. The slide on the pistol locked back. It was empty.

In the corridor, somebody was shouting. Florry looked down at the little pistol. It had lain in the pocket of the Burberry all those days since the bridge, packed away in Sylvia’s absurd case, a shell in its chamber, because when he needed to, he could not use it to help Julian.

But Julian had helped him.

H
OLLY-BROWNING STUDIED THE PROBLEM. IT WAS A QUESTION
of angle of approach and at the same time of impending obstacles—a classic, in other words. It called for a peculiar combination of delicacy and power, the perfect equipoise. It called also for firmness of decision. It was not a time for equivocation, for appeasement, for lack of will. The situation demanded his utmost.

“Five iron, I think, Davis.”

“Yessir. Excellent selection, sir. I’d watch the elms on the left. There’s not much air among their leaves.”

“Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning, taking the club. He laced his fingers together about the grip and let the natural weight of the club head pull the shaft down; it fell, with unerring accuracy, to its absolute perfect placement behind the ball.

Holly-Browning paused, concentrating. He let a wave of power build and build in his blood until it almost sang in his veins and he felt the muscles ache and tremble and hunger for release. Yet still he held it, feeling himself—this was quite odd—
sink
utterly into the ball until at last there was nothing, nothing at all in the universe but the
white dimpled sphere and the green concave of grass embracing it and his own will, and in a sudden, fluid, Godlike whip of power and—odd again—terror, almost, he coiled and unleashed a blow that mashed it to smithereens. The contact was solid and shivered up his arms as the stroke followed its own inclinations through and came to rest all the way around his body.

At last he lifted his head to follow the straight, clean white flight of the ball as it rushed to the green with just the right kiss of loft and just the right pitch of power; it bounced on the fairway, bounced again, and struck the green, rolling slower and slower, its energy decreasing until at last it came to a halt about six feet from the flag.

“Pretty shot, sir,” said Davis.

“Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning, handing back the club.

“Sir, may I say, it’s an honor to see a man who knows how to play the game.”

“Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning.

It was a bonny bright day full of elms and summer under a lilac English sky. Major Holly-Browning’s spikes gripped the moist turf as he walked.

“I say, Holly-Browning, well-struck,” C called out, not without some bitterness, for his own second shot had come to rest a good twenty-five feet below the green. But that was as it had been and should be.

“Thank you, sir,” said the major.

In the past, Holly-Browning, an excellent golfer, had held back when playing with his service chief, out of respect for the protocols of rank. It was how one rose, or so many believed. But not today.

“Well, Holly-Browning, I daresay you’re playing well,” said C, falling into step beside him.

“I seem to be, for some reason, sir.”

“Good to get you out on the links after all that time hibernating in the office. Now that awful business in Spain is finished and we are well quit of our bad apple.”

They reached C’s ball. The old man took an eight iron from his boy and, with a great, grunting effort, chopped a shot too high; it rolled way beyond the cup, coming to rest on the apron at the far side of the green, easily (given C’s gracelessness) three putts’ distance off.

“Damned bad luck, sir.”

“Ah, bloody gone. Sometimes it’s there, sometime’s it’s not.”

“You’re out, sir.”

“Yes, I am.”

C took the putter and went to his ball. After what seemed an interminable period bent over studying a trajectory whose subtleties he could never hope to master, he rose, addressed the ball, and, with a show of concentration, patted at it weakly. The ball rose over a hump in the green, picked up speed, and began to veer crazily off, finally petering out still a good ten feet from the cup.

“Blast!” said C. “It’s certainly not my day! Go on, putt out, Holly-Browning.”

Holly-Browning moved to his ball and crouched to study his own course to the cup. Then, having swiftly settled on a strategy, he climbed back up and faced the little white thing, crisp and immaculate as a carnation before him. He tucked his elbows and locked his wrists and willed his chin to sink, almost submerge, into his chest, and with the barest, most imperceptible of motions, he tapped the ball toward the cup. It hugged the contours of the green, seemed to roll and glide of its own volition, and once almost died, but then picked up a final spurt on the downward side of the green’s last little bulge
and dropped in with the sound of a wooden spoon falling onto a wooden floor.

“Good heavens, you’re playing well today, Holly-Browning. Been taking lessons?”

“Actually, I haven’t touched a club since July of last year,” said Holly-Browning.

If C caught the reference to the beginning of the Spanish War and the defector Lemontov’s flight to the Americans, he didn’t show it. He bent and patted out another dud of a putt, which still left him a solid three feet shy.

“Damn. My chap keeps telling me to keep my head locked but I always seem to look
up
. What do you recommend, Holly-Browning? What’s your secret?”

“Just hard work, sir. Practice, all that.”

“Yes, indeed. By the way, James, I thought I ought to tell you. It seems there may be a bit of a stink.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, nothing really. It’s that MI-5 bunch. They seem to have found out all about it. I thought I was done with them.”

“I thought in principle they agreed with our handling of the case, sir.”

“It’s not a question of
that
, old man. It’s just that their interrogators never got a crack at the inside part of Julian’s head. Now bloody Sir Vernon has his dander up. A terrible bother.”

Holly-Browning didn’t say anything.

“They’ve put it out that it was a
personal
thing between you and Raines, with poor Florry just the errand boy in the middle.”

“That quite simplifies things, sir,” said Holly-Browning, stung at the injustice of it all.

“I know that, Holly-Browning. But that’s what these
damned security people
are:
simplifiers. Everything’s black and white to them.”

“Yessir.”

“And, I should tell you, there are those in our own house who think Section V ought to leave the red lads alone and concentrate on the gray lads. Jerry’s the next big show, eh?”

“Yessir, I suppose Jerry is.”

They had reached the next tee. Birds sang, tulips bloomed, still ponds reflected the sun’s gold touch, and vivid butterflies hung in the light. The sky was cobalt blue, a purity the bizarre English clime permits rarely enough. Ahead, several argyle-clad figures in plus-fours and caps putted out on a par three, 108 yards out.

“Damn this fellow Hitler. He really has confused the world, hasn’t he?”

“Yessir, he has.”

C planted his ball on the tee, took his three wood, and addressed the thing with a waggle of his rear end, knotting his fingers into a confusion of sausages about the club.

“And that’s why I’m placing you in charge of a key operation, James. It’s a big move, James.”

Holly-Browning showed nothing on his face. He simply nodded.

“It’s a big job, James. Take your wife and daughters out if it suits. It’ll get you away from Broadway. Most bracing change, I say. You shall have Jamaica station. Damn, I must say, I
envy
you. Jamaica!”

The bloody colonies! An island full of niggers and flowers!