Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  “Tchiterine, it’s pointless to resist. You’ll sign the confession either here or in the Lubyanka. You’ll go on trial. You’ll be found guilty. You’ll die. Your generation must pass on now. That’s what history has written.”

  The old man’s face had been greatly damaged by the punishment. It looked like a piece of mashed fruit, swollen and bruised and caked in blood. The blood was everywhere. He croaked something through his swollen lips.

  “Eh?” asked Glasanov.

  “Fuck Koba,” said Tchiterine, somehow, and Comrade Bolodin hit him a cruel, powerful blow in the side. Of the many, this was perhaps the most devastating, for it ruptured the old man’s appendix. In his bounds, Tchiterine commenced to struggle as the pain and numbness rocketed through him. In time he lapsed into a waxen coma. His breathing was imperceptible.

  “You hit him too much. Your zeal gets the best of you. Discipline. Remember, above all, discipline. Strength, passion, commitment, they are all fine and absolutely necessary. The great Stalin, however, says that in discipline lies the key to the future.”

  “I apologize, comrade.”

  “You Americans,” Comrade Glasanov said.

  Comrade Bolodin’s true name was Lenny Mink, and his last fixed address had been 1351 Cypress Avenue in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, but he was to be found more frequently at Midnight Rose’s, a candy store at Livonia and Saratoga streets, that served as the unofficial headquarters for his company, which went by the name Murder, Inc. He had left New York at the urging of certain parties, as police curiosity concerning his involvement with the deaths by shooting, bludgeoning, ice picking, and drowning of several witnesses due to deliver evidence against Lepke Buchalter had reached embarrassing proportions. Lenny, like his peers Pittsburgh Phil, Gangy Cohen, Pretty Levine, Jack Drucker, and his bosses Mendy Weiss, Dandy Phil Kastel, and Bugsy Siegel, killed people for two reasons: because he was good at it and because he was paid for it.

  “Well, he’ll be out all night,” said Glasanov. “Get him back to his cell. Wash him off, clean him up. Get him some brandy. We’ll work on him some more tomorrow.”

  “Yes, comrade,” said Lenny Mink, still in Russian.

  “Tough old fellow,” said Glasanov. “They had to be in those days. He’s right, you know, what they did was extraordinary. Fighting the Okrana and the Cossacks and later the western armies and Kolchak. My God, they were tough.”

  Lenny looked at the old guy. Yeah, tough. Tougher than any nigger, and when he was young, Lenny had fought a nigger for almost an hour down by the docks until both men had been too exhausted to continue and nobody took the kitty. Later, some whore used a razor on the guy.

  “Be careful with him, now. Comrade Koba wants him back in Moscow, understand?”

  “Yes, comrade.” Lenny kept his Russian simple and polite.

  “I’ll be in my office. Wake me if anything occurs.”

  Lenny, alone with the old man, reached into his pocket and removed a switchblade, popped it, and cut the bonds. The body fell; he caught it. Tchiterine had once been an important man, the Comintern agent in charge of imposing Party demands on the often unruly dockworkers’ unions in the port of Barcelona. Now look at him.

  Lenny, six-three and well over two hundred pounds, had no trouble getting the old guy up in his arms. The American had a blunt, sullen, nearly handsome face, though it was pocked. He seemed to carry his big bones slowly and had a kind of cold force to him—he liked to hurt people and people understood this of him almost instinctively, and tended to become uncomfortable in his presence, an effect he enjoyed. He had always had it. In fact, in his youth, in the Diaspora before he had come to America, his shtetl nickname had been “Cossack,” after the rumor that he’d been begotten, not by his nominal father, a butcher, but by a Russian raider in a pogrom.

  He rarely spoke. He appeared to listen intently. People often considered him stupid, which was a mistake. He simply wasn’t clever with words, although he spoke imperfect versions of English and Russian, having learned the latter during a two-thousand-mile walk from Minsk to Odessa when he was eleven years old, a remarkable journey. He had made the trip on his own, after another pogrom, the one in which his mother and father and all his brothers and sisters had been killed. His best language was Yiddish, the language of his boyhood, although he was picking up Spanish rapidly. When he had presented himself at the International Brigade clearinghouse in Paris, in hopes of finding suitable employment in the natural venue for a man of his profession—a war—the NKVD had scooped him up. The NKVD had plans for Barcelona, and Lenny looked to be the perfect instrument.

  He took old Tchiterine’s body into the harsh light of the newly wired bulbs and down the empty corridor of the prison, which at one time had been the novitiate’s wing of the Convent of St. Ursula. The place had been vandalized, as had all Church properties in the first crazed days of the July Revolution, and rioters had smashed everything and painted slogans everywhere. Shards of broken glass still lay on the floor. Yet the place also had a sense of newness to it; recently occupied by elements of the NKVD, which clearly needed both privacy and security, it had been painted roughly, rewired for electricity, patched, and repaired. It smelled of paint and new wood and also of piss and despair.

  Lenny reached Tchiterine’s cell and set him on the bed. The old man breathed roughly. His swelling completely disfigured his face. Lenny covered his nakedness with a blanket. He went to a bucket, brought it over, and wet his handkerchief. He began to wipe the dried blood off the face. He’d really gone a little nuts there—a problem of his. Sometimes he couldn’t hold on to himself. He just liked the way it felt when he hit people. Discipline, this Russian boss was always saying. Discipline was the secret of history. He actually believed that shit.

  The old man moaned suddenly.

  Lenny jumped.

  “Ya!” he yelped in Yiddish. “You scared me, old man.”

  One yellow eye came open. The other was swollen shut.

  “Vasser,” the old man begged through his ripened lips. “Please,” he begged in Yiddish, “a little, please.”

  “You old yentzer” Lenny laughed. He cupped some water in his big hand and let it dribble into the old man’s mouth. The old man lapped it up greedily.

  “I don’t feel so good in my gut,” he said.

  “What’d you expect, from the smashing you got?”

  “Help me,” the old man said then. “I can pay you.”

  “Pay what? You got a treasure stuck up your old asshole? You’re making me laugh, you old putz.”

  Lenny stood to leave. The old man looked like one of those bums you find on Seventh Avenue after the Harlem niggers got done rolling him: all beat to shit, beat to craziness, not good for nothing. Naked, shivering, in the straw, his face punched to shit. It made Lenny sick. He was so big once, this old man, and now look at him.

  The old man fought to get a word out. It came in a whisper, racked and hoarse.

  “Whaaaa?” said Lenny.

  “G-g-g-g-gelt,” the old man finally spat out. Money.

  Lenny bent. Maybe the old guy had a stash somewhere.

  The old man’s feeble hand flew up to Lenny’s shoulder. It felt like a perched bird.

  “Save me, nu? Save an old Jew?”

  “How much? Talk a figure.”

  “Lots. Would I lie?”

  “Everybody lies.”

  “Gelt! Lots and lots, I’m telling you.”

  “Where, up your asshole?”

  “Gold, by the ton.”

  “A ton of gold. In a mountain somewhere, no? Old putz, talking dreams.”

  Lenny had an urge to kill him. Put the thumb to his throat, press it in; he’d be history in a second.

  “In 1931, me, Lemontov, Levitsky, we worked in England as spies.”

  “It’s old business.”

  “Listen. Listen.”

  “So fucking talk.”

  “Levitsky found a student at a fancy university.”

 
; “Who’s this Levitsky?”

  “Teuful.”

  “Devil?”

  “Shayner Yid. Devil Himself. The old revolutionary. The master spy. He was head of Comintern. A real important guy.”

  Lenny was growing interested. But what was the money angle?

  “Go on, you old fuck,” he said.

  The old man told him swiftly, croaking the story out of his swollen lips in little bursts as he grabbed on to Lenny’s arm with his tight hand, about the boy in England, the gentile boy who would rise, and yet was bound in special ways to old Levitsky, the spy.

  “The Devil Himself owns the boy’s soul,” the old Jew said.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Lenny wanted to know.

  “I don’t know it. I only served Levitsky, the man is a genius. I never knew any of the real secrets. Lemontov didn’t know. But I saw him once. The boychik, I saw him. When I was in a place I shouldn’t have been.”

  “Where’s the dough you’re talking about?”

  “He’s in Spain, five years older, this boy, now grown to a man. Working for the Russians, nu? I’ve seen him with my own two eyes. I can point him out. He’s in the cafés every night.”

  “So what’s this talk of a ton of gold, old man. You pulling my putz?”

  “Listen good. The Russians took gold off these Spaniards. To pay for guns, they said. It was shipped out, they said. And everybody thinks it’s gone. But at the last minute, they got scared when the Italian submarines started sinking ships. I know, I found out in the harbor. Those ships they loaded up with gold, they were empty. They hid the stuff. Somewhere in this city. They’re going to take it over land, through Europe. This Englishman, it’s his job, I tell you. He’s here to move the gold, because the Russians don’t trust their own people. This Englishman, he knows where the gold is. When he moves, the ton of gold moves too.”

  Lenny looked at him, feeling something working in his head. A ton of gold. Moved secretly. An Englishman. Who would suspect an Englishman moving Spanish gold for the Russians?

  Lenny thought it over. A ton of gold! Ripe for picking. With only an Englishman for a guard.

  Lenny liked the idea of a lot of money; it meant you went to the clubs and everybody knew you and you had a swell dame and guys were always coming by and asking how you were, the way they did with Lepke.

  “One thing. We got to protect Levitsky. He’s family, nu? He’s one of us. He’s one of us. He’s shayner Yid, and we don’t give him away.”

  “Ah, he’s off in Russia somewhere drinking vodka with his pals.”

  “No, I’m telling you. He’ll check in on his boychik, he will. He’s the smartest man in the world, a chess champion, a genius, not like us. Hah, he—”

  He made a sudden strange, gurgling sound.

  “I don’t feel so good,” the old man said. “When you hit me, the last time, in the side; my gut hurts.”

  “You’re okay.”

  “No, get me a doctor. You gotta get me a doctor.”

  “There ain’t any doctors in this joint. What, a stomach ache? In the morning, you’ll be—”

  But the old man had gone gray almost incredibly and he continued to choke and gurgle and tremble.

  “Help me!” he said, his one eye opened wide. His hand flew to Lenny and grabbed his arm desperately. “Help me!”

  “Fuck you,” said Lenny, but he was talking to a corpse.

  And fuck me, too, Lenny Mink thought, with his dream of a ton of gold as dead as the body before him.

  A few days later, Lenny received a bit of unusual news. He was told to proceed, in daylight, to Glasanov’s office in the Main Police Building on the Via Layetana, not far from the port. This was quite peculiar. Lenny had never been there before.

  Some German drove him from the convent to the station. It was a big, square, white building in the middle of a busy city street, just a few blocks from the Ramblas. The revolutionary slogans and painted initials, the rippling banners, the huge posters of old men with goatees could not quite disguise the grandeur of the place, its link to a time when Spain had been ruled by about six guys who built everything to look like a wedding cake. It was maybe nine stories tall, and each window had a little balcony under it, all the way up. You went in through a main gate under a banner that said LET US GO FORWARD INTO THE MODERN AGE which took you into a courtyard and then you went in a set of double doors which took you into a big corridor and then you went up four flights to find Glasanov’s office.

  Glasanov, Lenny understood, was some kind of “adviser” to the Barcelona police department, which meant he ran it. He was helping them organize what they called the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the SIM; Lenny also understood that the SIM was a Spanish version of the NKVD; or, rather, that it was the NKVD. It was like gangs anywhere: one gang got control and they tried to take over everywhere. A tough gang stayed tough by squashing any gang that thought it was tougher.

  Yet Glasanov’s office turned out to be a modest arrangement at the end of a hall. He walked in to find Glasanov standing. Glasanov looked a little like a German because he was so pale and blond. He was not smiling, but he never smiled, because he took his responsibilities so seriously. His cheeks had an almost artificial color to them, which the Russians called the “midnight look,” because it seemed to show up on the faces of officials who spent the nights in their offices.

  “Comrade Bolodin. Our Amerikanski.”

  Lenny had never liked the revolutionary pseudonym; he still had to think twice when one of the Russians called him by it.

  “Comrade commissar,” Lenny responded. He hated the comrade shit, the talk of history, the endless lectures on scientific Marxism and the necessity for building a better world. But when you worked for a boss, you played it his way. Until you got yours.

  “A drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Excellent. A man who controls his appetites. I like that.”

  “Is this about the old guy? Look, it wasn’t my fault he croaked.”

  “No, no. An accident. A terrible accident. He was in ill health. Moscow understands.”

  Lenny waited. What was the story?

  “Here. I have something for you. It’s time, I think, for you to take a more active role in the processes of enforcing Party discipline here in Barcelona. This is why I asked you to come by.”

  He handed over a card.

  Lenny realized it was an ID naming him a captain in the SIM—making him, in other words, an official secret policeman and giving him all the rights and responsibilities thereof, which included the right to make spot arrests and searches, to confiscate property and vehicles in the service of the state, to command units of the Asaltos, or assault police, to extract immediate cooperation, not to say obedience, from all civil authority.

  “There’s much work ahead,” Glasanov went on. “There are traitors everywhere, do you understand? Even in Moscow in the heart of government, among the oldest and most trusted of the revolutionary fighters. Every day, they confess their crimes in the dock, or flee.”

  “So I hear,” said Lenny Mink.

  “The late Comrade Tchiterine,” said Glasanov, “for example, was under the control of a famous revolutionary fighter named Levitsky, who was the worst. Tchiterine, a man named Lemontov who has disappeared, and this Levitsky, they formed a terrorism center, working at espionage to betray us. Levitsky was second only to Trotsky. Did Tchiterine, by chance, mention Levitsky?”

  “He didn’t mention anybody. He just died.”

  “Umm. I had thought they might have been in contact. They seem to have been in some sort of plot together.”

  Lenny grunted, thinking What plot, you fuck?

  “First Lemontov disappears—that should have been the tipoff. At least we were fast enough to nab Tchiterine.”

  “What about this guy Levitsky?”

  “Ah. A wily old fox. They call him the Devil Himself, for certain colorful exploits. He’s gone. He disappeared from Moscow even as the s
ecurity people were coming to arrest him.”

  Lenny nodded. The old fucker was out!

  “I tell you this to encourage your vigilance. We are preparing to move against our enemies here. The days of café sitting will soon be coming to an end.”

  “You can count on me,” said Lenny.

  “Of course. You are an extraordinarily valuable man.”

  Glasanov handed him a piece of paper. On it was written a name.

  “An oppositionist. He leads the propaganda battle against us in his newspaper. His organization is powerful, and he is one of its leaders.”

  It was just like at Midnight Rose’s. The word came, and you took somebody for a ride.

  “You want him killed.”

  “Ah—”

  “Believe me, he’s gone.”

  “There will be others. Some to be arrested and interrogated, some to be liquidated. You must cut off the head of a beast before you dispose of its body. A period of great struggle is coming, and I am personally charged with commanding our forces.”

  But Lenny wasn’t really listening, nor was he thinking about the man he would pop that night.

  He was thinking of what old Tchiterine had told him.

  He’ll check in on his boychik.

  Lenny smirked in triumph. He knew what none of them knew. He was ahead of this smart Russian, he was ahead of everybody in the world. He knew where this Levitsky, this teuful, would head. The Devil Himself, eh?

  Well, the old guy was coming straight to Barcelona, to check up on his boychik. And he’d lead Lenny to him. He’d lead him to the gelt.

  “Comrade,” said Glasanov. “To the future.” He handed him a small glass of vodka. “You must not refuse me.”

  “Let us go forward into the modern age,” said Lenny, throwing the vodka down his throat.

  He hated vodka.

  4

  MR. STERNE AND MR. WEBLEY

  FLORRY MET HOLLY-BROWNING THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY on a bench in Hyde Park. The older officer had a bag of peanuts for the pigeons and a briefcase. Mr. Vane sat quietly three benches down the walk, looking blankly off through the trees.

  The major sighed, his eyes settling on some obscure object in the far distance. He shelled a peanut, launched it to the walk, and a doddering, scabby old pigeon contemptuously gobbled it off the concrete.