The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  * * *

  ‘Bernard! It’s me.’

  Winter rapped the door again, more insistently this time. The sound of his knuckles rang along the landing of the dark-walled apartment building in the Belváros district.

  Finally there came a shuffle of footsteps from inside the second-floor flat. Winter pressed his eye to the peephole above the brass numerals, trying to peer into the hallway. He saw Bernard Gately’s eye, looming dimly in the convex glass.

  ‘Open the door, Bernard.’

  The door parted an inch, the silver latch chain dangling in the gap. Gately’s breath was all high-tar cigarettes and black Hungarian coffee.

  ‘Winter?’ The word rose in surprise.

  ‘There’s been a complication. You have to let us in.’

  Gately’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘I thought I wasn’t meant to be seen with you…’

  Winter heard a faint sibilance on the word seen. The man on the other side of the door was nervous. ‘We’re already compromised. Let us in.’

  The chain slid and dropped. Gately reluctantly drew the door open. He looked from Winter to Alessandra then cast a glance along the corridor before letting the pair of them in. ‘Alright,’ he sighed. ‘But you’re breaking protocol. I want that noted.’

  ‘Duly,’ said Winter, dryly.

  They entered the living room. It was a scholarly clutter of books and pens and half-drained cups. A window was open to the city and a nicotine-faded net curtain fluttered in the sunlight. Distractedly, Gately turned from his visitors and began to tidy a stash of The Economist that had spilt across the coffee table.

  ‘So what happened? I set up the dead drop just like…’

  The sentence died in his mouth. He found a gun pressed to the nape of his neck.

  ‘You certainly set us up, Bernard.’

  Winter pushed the tip of the barrel deeper into the soft flesh above the collar.

  Gately started to shake his head then stopped, as if afraid of provoking the gun. He kept his voice calm and his eyes on the wall. ‘You’re mistaken.’

  ‘They knew the location. They were waiting for us. I’d say that qualifies as an ambush, Bernard, wouldn’t you? Coincidence is what happens to civilians, remember.’

  ‘I swear I had nothing to do with it.’

  Winter disengaged the safety catch, ensuring Gately registered the sound before he spoke. ‘The dead drop was bait. You told them exactly where to find us. I take it the money’s better on their side? Almost as good as journalism?’

  A muscle tremored in Gately’s cheek, just below the eye. ‘What can I say to convince you?’

  ‘I’m already convinced.’

  ‘So why even threaten me with that bloody gun? I’m going to keep telling you I had nothing to do with it. And then I imagine you’ll get bored and you’ll kill me.’

  Winter withdrew the gun and spun Gately around by the shoulder. The man’s forehead was beading with sweat. ‘I take it you have a car, Bernard?’

  * * *

  The blue Fiat 1100 saloon hugged the back roads, sunlight playing on its chrome trim. Bernard Gately was at the wheel, profoundly aware of the gun pointed at him from the passenger seat. No one in the car had spoken for the last twenty minutes. Alessandra winched down one of the rear windows, as much to disperse the crush of silence as the summer heat.

  They had left the hub of Budapest behind and were now climbing into countryside, heading west past the paprika fields. The roads were shoddier this far from the city, the hot tarmac cracked and neglected. There was precious little traffic and only the occasional tumbledown farmhouse signified life.

  Gately had been instructed to take them towards Tatabánya. Now, as they passed a gated track, Winter told him to stop the car instead. He did so wordlessly, without eye contact, his face giving no reaction. Winter took the keys from his hand as he was about to pocket them. Only then did the two men exchange a glance.

  The gate opened with a grind of weatherworn metal. The three of them followed the track, their shoes kicking up clouds of dusty soil. Soon they were at the top of a parched slope, standing on grass that had been burnt from the earth in patches.

  ‘You’re going to kill me, I know,’ said Gately, perspiring freely now in his unseasonal tweed blazer. He was attempting to sound defiant but there was a catch in his throat that undid his bravado.

  Winter levelled the pistol. ‘Be quiet.’

  A wasp darted past on the thinnest of breezes. The trees in the distance were static as a painting, their branches motionless. If there was a still, quiet centre to the world, this was it.

  Gately made to raise his hands. Then he thought better of it and let his arms fall to his sides. The tic beneath his left eye had returned.

  ‘Look, I’m not in this for ideology,’ he blurted, the prospect of a bullet finally prompting a confession. ‘I’m no friend of Marx. They gave me money. You can understand that, can’t you?’

  Winter didn’t blink. ‘Betrayal’s a free market, Bernard. You’re just an old-fashioned capitalist, right?’

  ‘Moscow’s already marked you. Do you want to know why?’

  Winter kept the gun steady in his hand. ‘Don’t overestimate my curiosity.’

  Gately kept talking, bartering for his life now. ‘I was fully briefed. You were mixed up in something during the war. A joint operation that went sour, right?’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Well, there’s more to it. You killed one of our own. Someone on the British side, for God’s sake.’

  Alessandra looked to Winter. His face gave nothing away.

  ‘So don’t talk to me about betrayal. They told me what you did. And they know about the house in Venice, too. Il Portone. They’re on their way.’

  Each word was a last, wretched bargaining chip. Winter knew that.

  ‘My past is dead,’ he stated. ‘Turn around.’

  A sound rose in Gately’s throat as he turned. There were rags of cloud in the morning sky. Shrikes circled the sprawl of fields.

  ‘Tatabánya’s that way,’ said Winter. ‘I’d start walking if I were you.’

  Gately tilted his head, the edge of his spectacles flaring as the glass caught the sun. He took a moment to absorb what Winter had said. And then, seizing the opportunity, he began to walk.

  ‘Bernard…’

  Gately stopped mid-stride and turned to face him.

  Winter put a bullet between his eyes.

  * * *

  By noon the Fiat had brought them to Sopron, a medieval miniature of a city at the edge of Hungary’s western border. The little municipality lay in the green foothills of the Alps, close enough to breathe the air of Austria. Here, close to the shimmering expanse of Lake Fertö, it was easy to forget the miles of high-voltage fence that ringed the country like an electric snare.

  Winter eased the car into the northern end of the main square, letting it idle in the long shadow of the Firewatch Tower, the tallest building in Sopron. He leaned into the dashboard, resting his chin on the tortoiseshell wheel. The sun was unpleasantly warm through the windscreen.

  Alessandra had found a bag of black cherries in the glove compartment. She bit into another one, her teeth slicing through the skin. ‘I assume you do actually have a plan?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Winter’s voice was detached, his mind otherwise engaged.

  ‘We can’t cross the border by train? We’re so close to Mattersburg here.’

  ‘No chance. They’ll be searching every carriage in the country for us.’

  ‘By road, then?’

  Winter grimaced. ‘Your new identity papers are worse than useless. That name they gave you will be red-flagged at all the border crossings.’

  Alessandra spat the cherry stone through the window. ‘So how do you propose we actually get out of this country?’

  Winter stared directly ahead, into the heart of the square. A man in a high-collared grey jacket was standing in front of a white Trabant. A leather strap crossed his ches
t, clipped to a belt that held a baggy leather holster. He wore a peaked cap, its enamelled red star the symbol of the Hungarian police.

  ‘Like this.’

  Winter was already out of the car. Alessandra tossed the bag of cherries to the seat and followed him across the square.

  The policeman acknowledged them with a smile, ready to dispense a little local knowledge to a couple of tourists from Budapest. He was young, still with a smattering of acne on his chin.

  Winter smiled back, equally brightly. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Christopher Winter. I’m a fugitive British Intelligence agent. This is Alessandra Moltini. She’s a traitor to the state and trying to defect to the West. Would you care to arrest us?’

  The policeman stared at him, nonplussed. He was on the verge of a grin.

  ‘I mean, if it’s not too much trouble…’ added Winter. ‘Hate to be a bother.’

  The officer allowed himself the grin.

  ‘Check your briefing,’ Winter urged him, indicating the clipboard he had spotted through the window of the white Trabant. ‘We’re very much hot property. In fact I believe this could be a career-making move for you.’

  The young man’s eyes were wary now. He glanced, uncertain, at the telex he had left above the dashboard of his police car, the one that had arrived a matter of hours before, informing him of two fugitives, presently on the run.

  ‘I know,’ said Winter, persuasively. ‘How much good fortune can one man have? It’s barely even midday.’

  ‘Promotion,’ added Alessandra, her dark eyes twinkling. ‘Definitely a promotion.’

  For a moment the three of them stood in a profoundly awkward silence. And then the policeman gingerly unclipped his holster. Winter nodded, encouragingly, watching as the young officer leant inside the Trabant and plucked the two-way radio. There was a confused, static-filled conversation with a superior and then Winter and Alessandra found themselves waved inside the car at gunpoint.

  The Trabant exited the square with a growl of its two-stroke engine and a cough of blue exhaust. Winter sat in the passenger seat while Alessandra bounced in the cramped rear. She was sat directly behind the young policeman, close enough to lean in and kiss a breath into his ear.

  He shouted at her to remain still, but her hands were at the nape of his neck, teasing the skin with delicate, languid strokes. Concentrating on the road he tried to shrug her away but she coaxed a shimmer of sweat to the surface. Soon the pulse in his throat was drumming against her fingers. Winter glanced at the rear-view mirror and saw a telltale flash of gold.

  Ten minutes later the policeman lay in a wooded lane, gagged with a seamed stocking and bound with his own handcuffs. Winter was wearing the man’s uniform, the cuffs riding a little too high on his wrists. He adjusted the peaked cap.

  ‘You’d better get down,’ he told Alessandra.

  She curled into the back seat, pressing her face against Winter’s abandoned suit.

  Winter searched the dashboard, eventually locating the switch that summoned the car’s siren. The beacon on the roof began to twirl, throwing glimmers of blue light against the trees. As the siren howled the branches gave up a panicked flap of birds.

  It wasn’t far to the checkpoint. Winter could already see the soldier waiting in the wooden hut, the men with rifles standing by their dogs, the spiked wire crowning the walls either side of a zigzag barricade.

  He kept the needle steady at thirty, coaxing a fair clip from the dismal box of a car. The distance to the checkpoint narrowed beneath the Trabant’s wheels.

  There was only one way to play this, Winter knew. Absolute belief. He fixed his eyes on the guard in the hut and gave a sharp, comradely nod.

  The soldier found himself with seconds to make a decision. Persuaded by the impatient shriek of the siren he hit the button that opened the gate.

  The barricade shuddered and rose. Winter threw the man a salute as the Trabant sailed through.

  Alessandra sat up as Austria swept past them in a green rush of freedom. ‘How far to Salzburg?’ she demanded.

  Winter shifted into fourth gear. ‘Not as far as Venice, that’s for sure.’

  9

  The Boeing 727 banked over the green-glass waters of the Adriatic, commencing its descent to Marco Polo airport. Winter leaned into the cabin window, peering past the sunlit scratches on the Perspex. The Venetian Lagoon was beneath them, the low tide exposing a brackish expanse of marshland.

  The wing tilted, its shadow passing over waves and sandbanks. Now the city was revealed. The six sestieri of Venice, glittering and sinuous, an ornamental maze of palaces, churches and quaysides carved by the Grand Canal. From the air the city’s original grandeur was intact, the slow decay of the past centuries simply a vicious rumour.

  Winter saw the redbrick palazzos come into view, their marble veneers shining in the early evening sun. Up close, he knew, they would be crumbling, victims of saltwater erosion. For now they were the memories of the buildings they had been. This was a dying city, a drowning city, and Winter already sensed it welcomed ghosts.

  Had he been here before? Not as Christopher Winter, certainly. But there was something terribly familiar in the twisting pattern of canals and alleyways below. For a moment he saw Venice as a vast magical symbol, the serpentine slash of water that divided its six districts a sigil waiting to be unlocked.

  Winter blinked the image away. He kept having thoughts like that, thoughts he was sure had belonged to Tobias Hart. Sometimes it felt as if his skull was somebody else’s attic and he was sweeping a torch through its eaves. Memories drifted like dust in the light, impossible to catch.

  Maybe that was why he had come to this city. He had told Bernard Gately that his past was dead but those were big words he didn’t entirely believe. No, he needed to know more about his time with Operation Paragon. That void in his head bothered him. It was a black hole into which all sorts of potential guilts were tumbling. ‘You killed one of our own,’ Gately had said. Was that true? He had to know.

  Winter took his eyes from the window. The more he thought he had buried Tobias Hart the greater the itch to exhume the bastard.

  Alessandra was in the seat next to him, the latest issue of LIFE spread glossily on her lap. London already knew they wouldn’t be keeping the rendezvous in Salzburg. Yesterday Winter had made contact via a relay station secreted above a candle shop in Vienna. He had informed Century House that they were heading to Venice in the interests of national security – he had relished that line; it was so hard to argue with. The Soviets had reactivated Operation Paragon. He was pursuing the intelligence trail. They would hear from him in due course. That was the beauty of a one-way transmission: he sent the facts, someone exploded later, an agreeably long distance away.

  He watched as Alessandra turned the pages of the magazine, pausing at a full-page advert for Dial Soap. The black-and-white photograph showed a woman’s face in tight, ecstatic close-up. She was showering, her perfect teeth bared as the water pummelled her. Alessandra traced her fingers over the image, as if trying to absorb some of that sensual pleasure through the ink.

  Winter realised he hadn’t seen her sleep, not once in the past two days. He had snatched a handful of hours on a couch in Vienna; stirring in the night he’d found her standing by the window, staring out across the city’s lights. She’d still been there when he’d surfaced at dawn. She could pass for human but there were times when it seemed like camouflage.

  What he had witnessed in that hotel room in Pest still perturbed him. The sight of Alessandra perched upon that man, her hands embedded in his flesh as he lay there, mute and shuddering. It reminded Winter of something he had once spotted on a pavement in London: a wasp mounting a butterfly, its stinger skewering the underbelly of its prey. For a moment the insects had seemed to be one, a chimera of a creature. There was an intimate cruelty to that coupling, just as he had seen in the room.

  That morning, on the bus to Vienna International, he had asked her outright.
/>   ‘What do you do to people?’

  ‘I told you, we feed. Your ecstasies are our sustenance.’

  ‘But you’re willing to hurt them.’

  ‘It needn’t hurt. All we do is open a vein to the senses. It can be a mutual pleasure, if we’re careful. I didn’t hurt you, did I?’

  ‘Gately told me you’d taken lives in Budapest. Political assassinations. You didn’t just work honeytraps.’

  She had met his eyes then. ‘Sometimes the state insisted I be less than careful.’

  Winter felt the 727 plunge.

  ‘So how well do you know this contact of yours?’ he asked, a communal fug of cigarette smoke still skulking in the cabin as the plane dropped altitude.

  Alessandra continued to flip through the magazine, the parade of images boring her now. ‘Gideon? I haven’t seen him in years. Not since I found I couldn’t get out of Hungary.’

  ‘What makes you so sure he’ll be in Venice?’

  Alessandra smiled, and Winter thought he detected a hint of private amusement there. ‘It’s not as if he has much choice.’

  He chose not to follow that up, not yet. ‘And you think he can help?’

  She folded the magazine and tucked it below the seat in front of her. ‘If anyone in Venice can help us, he can.’

  Like all field agents, Winter had once had a working knowledge of key informants in the major European cities. It was a network of tipsters and snitches, some acting out of loyalty to the Crown, others bleeding information for money or leaking secrets in exchange for the British government turning a blind eye to their other, less patriotic activities. All of them operated in a state of twilight but their names were known in London. The Whisper Index, SIS called it.

  ‘Gideon Jukes. I’ve never heard of him. So either he’s very, very discreet… or I imagine he’s dead by now.’

  The jet’s undercarriage unfurled, juddering against the onrush of air.

  ‘Oh, he’s definitely dead,’ said Alessandra, matter-of-factly. ‘I killed him myself.’