Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  “Sounds like you’re trying to get one more drop of blood out of the poor wasted sot,” said the Reuters man.

  “Gentlemen,” said Steinbach, coyly pretending to shock, “you are too cynical. Let me read you from Comrade Raines’s last, unfinished poem. It’s called ‘Pons’ and was discovered among his effects.”

  Steinbach took out a sheet of paper, cleared his throat, and read:

  “… if I should die, think this of me,

  Wher’ere I rest, men one day will be free.”

  “Good Christ, that’s from the man Auden called the most promising voice of his generation? Come on, Steinbach, get your boys to give it a little distinction before you put it out.”

  Again there was much laughter, and even Steinbach seemed to take part in it. He was able to laugh because he knew it was a good story and they’d use it. Salvage something out of this bloody mess, if only one more martyr for the English left.

  When it came his turn, Levitsky worked the telescope back and forth across the scaggily vegetated ridge near the city, a good half mile off. He could see brush, gulches, mud, and the Fascist line of sandbags running across the crest. It was, as this sly one-eyed propagandist Steinbach had said, terrible terrain for an attack at night, in the rain.

  Julian, you idiot. To die like a flea among millions of fleas in the mudbath of history.

  He stepped back, turned for a second, and looked where the Englishman Sampson stood, a hard, trim young man with narrow, suspicious eyes and precise, perhaps military manners and authority. Sampson smoked a pipe and took notes with impressive efficiency and wrote beautifully, it was said. Levitsky, a little shaken perhaps, tried to adjust to the immensity of his loss and, worse, the hideous resonating irony of it.

  I was so close. I came so far, I was so close.

  It had been snatched away by Julian’s utter stupidity. How could he be so frivolous with his own life? And poor Florry’s, too. God knows, Florry had reason to follow him, but it was all such a bitter waste.

  He went back to the instrument. Nothing. It was just the same, scruffy no-man’s-land. Did he expect to see the dead rise?

  “Mr. Ver Steeg?”

  It was Comrade Steinbach, calling from the group of reporters farther down the trench. “We are returning to La Granja. You don’t want to be left up here if a Fascist bombardment begins.”

  “Ah,” said Levitsky. Yet he did not at once move. For if Julian were gone, there was nothing left to do, except save himself.

  If Koba’s hounds are to hunt me, let them hunt me hard.

  “Best get goin’, chum,” said the little English captain, then turned away and headed back to his men gathered at the other end of the trench.

  But Levitsky suddenly felt naked and vulnerable. Without his mission, he was just a man. His death, which might have had political meaning, suddenly had only a personal one. It was as if his life, in all its fragility, had been handed back to him.

  He started up the trench and as he was drawing near the ladder, he ducked into a bunker scooped in the wall. It was filled with gear; two men slept noisily.

  Several bombs lay on the table, iron eggs with checkerboard surfaces. He made his decision in a split second, and snatched one up and put it into his hip pocket. He gripped the thing out of sight. It felt heavy and authoritative in his hand. He could remember flinging them by the dozens into White positions during the civil war.

  “Comrade!”

  Levitsky turned. It was the English captain.

  “Forgot this, old man,” he said, holding out Levitsky’s notebook. “Sure you ain’t too old for this sort of thing?”

  Levitsky smiled, took the notebook, and headed out after the other reporters moving back through the scrubland to La Granja.

  By the time he caught up, they had come through the orchard and into a meadow. Ahead, through the line of trees, Levitsky could see the big house with its red tiles.

  In the courtyard the reporters milled around amid the soldiers, all of them waiting to be served a meal. The smell of rice and chicken from nearby cook pots filled the air. There was much laughter and camaraderie. Levitsky could see the Britishers teasing the American about his prisoner question and he could see the French reporters arguing strenuously among themselves over some political point.

  And he could see Comrade Bolodin, with one man, walking toward him.

  His first impulse was to run.

  Don’t, he told himself. You old fool, stay calm. Let’s see him pull his NKVD card here, in the center of a POUM encampment.

  Levitsky began to slide through the crowd.

  The big American was drawing closer. They’d grab him first, then pull the cards—guns, too, probably—and haul him away. He only had a few seconds. He put his hand in his pocket and removed the bomb. He held it muffled in his coat and with his other hand managed to get the first pin out. He continued walking through the crowd toward the big house; then, abruptly, he turned aside and headed to one of the three smaller buildings off to the side. A guard saw him coming.

  “¡Alto! Arsenal!”

  “Eh?” said Levitsky, approaching. “No hablo …”

  “¡Arsenal!” repeated the guard.

  Levitsky nodded, pulled the last pin, and in one swift motion tossed it through the window. The guard dropped his rifle and began to run screaming. Levitsky ran in the other direction.

  The first blast was muffled; the second lifted him from his feet and threw him in the air. He landed, stunned. Men ran in terrified panic. Smoke filled the air. The small house blossomed flames.

  “Run! Run! There’s more to blow!” somebody shouted. A pair of hands picked him up. He looked up into the face of the young British reporter Sampson.

  “Go on, old man! Get out of here! Run for your bloody life.” Levitsky ran around the side of the big house and through the orchard. Behind him, there was another detonation.

  He turned into a gully and began a little jog down the creek bed. The mountains in the distance were cool and white and beautiful.

  “¿Amigo?”

  A man in a trenchcoat stepped from behind the trees. He had an automatic.

  “Comrade Amigo. Manos arriba, ¿eh?” said the man smilingly, gesturing for Levitsky to raise his hands.

  “No hablo,” protested Levitsky blandly.

  The man smiled and relaxed as he came near and seemed to lower the pistol, and Levitsky knew this meant he was about to hit him. When the man lashed out suddenly with the pistol, meaning to crack Levitsky sharply across the cheekbone, Levitsky broke the blow with one hand and with the other struck upward, driving the crucifix nail into the man’s throat.

  The man fell back, gasping, his eyes filled with stunned astonishment that such an old fool could hurt him so terribly. The pistol fell into the dust. The man went to his knees, trying to hold the blood into his throat with his hands. He tried to cry out but couldn’t. He tried to rise, but couldn’t.

  Levitsky knelt next to him and carefully placed the point of the nail into the ear canal, and plunged it inward. With a convulsion, the man died. Levitsky quickly plucked his papers from the breast pocket, finding him to be one Franco Ruiz, according to a SIM identity card. He pulled the body into the brush and picked up the pistol, a short-barreled .380 Colt automatic. He hurried down the creek bed, finding himself surprisingly impressed with Comrade Bolodin. The American was smart, yes, he was. He’d found him, and with a better man than Franco Ruiz, he would have taken him.

  Night was falling as Levitsky hurried along the creek bed. He almost froze. He had no exact idea where he was headed other than east, away from La Granja. He shivered as the cold rose to penetrate his coat. The creek bed crossed under a country road after a while, and he chose the road, his feet acquiring an urgency that seemed almost involuntary. On either side in the twilight, the empty fields fell away, their crops unharvested, their farmers driven away. Several miles off a shell or a bomb exploded and now and then came the crackle of shots outside Huesca, but other
wise there was no sign of war in the strange, empty stillness of the land. The Pyrenees off on the left had become indistinct, a wall. Beyond them lay France, and freedom.

  You cannot walk across the mountains, old devil, he told himself.

  When it grew too dark to continue, he found a deserted stone barn and hid in the straw for warmth. He awoke early the next morning and proceeded on, the hunger gnawing away at his stomach. He was stopped once by a squad of forlorn militiamen who cared more whether he had food to share with them than for his papers. Twice more he came across groups of militia, but they paid him no attention. Finally he came to a larger road. Before him, he could see the plain stretching out for miles, bleak and flat, gnarled here and there with clusters of rock. Who could want such desolation?

  He waited by the side of the road until at last a vehicle came along, an empty lorry driven by two men. He hailed them.

  “Comrades?” he asked.

  “Sprechen sie Deutsch, Kamrade?” came the reply from one of them, a youth of about twenty.

  “Yes, of course, comrade. I am Ver Steeg, of the press. I was at the front and missed the lorry back to Barcelona. Perhaps you are headed in that direction?”

  “Yes, comrade,” the boy said. “Hop aboard. We’ve got some wine and a little cheese.”

  Levitsky squeezed into the cab, and the lorry rumbled on through the bright afternoon. The driver’s companion was another youth; they were two earnest German Jewish refugees who’d come to fight with the Thaelmann Column against the Hitlerites. They were political naïfs, and Levitsky, exhausted, listened with bland interest to their slogans and enthusiasms, their gross misunderstandings and their outright fabrications. They believed Koba and Lenin were great chums, the spirit of the latter filling the heroic skull of the former. The enemies were all “Oppositionists,” who must be tirelessly liquidated, so that the Revolution could be guided by the brilliant Koba. They also thought, somehow, the Anarchists, the bourgeois manufacturers of munitions, and the Catholic church were behind Hitler and Franco and Trotsky. It was the routine nonsense the Party had been grinding out more and more lately. They talked of the big explosion at La Granja. And they talked, finally, of the miracle.

  “You’ve heard of the miracle, Comrade Ver Steeg?”

  “Alas, no,” said Levitsky, politely, uninterested in miracles.

  “The luck of the English, I suppose,” said one of the boys.

  “Yes, yes?”

  “Talk about resurrections. It’s enough to turn one to priests and nuns!”

  “Go on.”

  “Two dead Englishmen walked back from the dead. A poet and his comrade. They lay in the brush. The Fascists came and set up a machine-gun post. They lay there, the poor devils, for forty-eight hours, one of them hurt and bleeding. Everyone thought they were dead. A single move, a single breath, and they’d have been shot.”

  “What happened?” Levitsky asked laconically. At moments of great excitement he was capable of extreme calm.

  “When the second night fell, they crawled in. Two full days after they’d been lost, they returned. They went to the hospital at Tarragona.”

  “Tell the comrade what the poet said. He must be an amusing man. It’s on everybody’s lips, a famous line.”

  “Yes, he must be witty, even if he fights for the POUMistas. He said, ‘The tea was simply rotten over there and the limes had not been freshly cut, and so we returned.’ ”

  19

  THE CLUB

  THEY KEPT HOLLY-BROWNING WAITING FOR MORE THAN half an hour. He sat with the coats in the anteroom under the cold, unimpressed eye of the doorman, awaiting his soft summons. He sat ramrod stiff on the hardback bench—no soft waiting-room chairs for him, thanks—and kept his eyes fixed furiously on a blank point in space some six feet ahead.

  At last the doorman came for him.

  “Sir James?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you follow me please, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doorman led him to a chap in livery—Holly-Browning knew him, actually, he’d been in the army, a sergeant, and won the DFC in Flanders in ’15 before catching a lungful of mustard—who in turn escorted him with elaborate dignity through the study, the dark, almost Moorish bar, the dining hall, and up the club’s stairs to its private suites.

  The railing was mahogany, richly polished; the walls silk damask of floral print, exquisite, the stairs carpeted in a Persian pattern dating from the fourteenth century. Yet it was all threadbare, tatty, a bit musty. Things never changed in clubs until they had to or were shocked brutally into it. But in the normal course of events one day was not remotely different from the next; again, that was as it should have been. Indeed, that was the very point.

  They reached at long last the top of the stairway and made stately, muted progress down the hall, coming finally to a certain closed door. The servant knocked briskly, heard a quick, “Come in,” and opened the door.

  “Major Sir James Holly-Browning,” he announced.

  Holly-Browning entered to discover C, as the chief of MI–6 was called, and another man in a beautifully cut suit. The two of them looked as old schoolish as possible; and they were. C’s guest was, like C himself, a former naval officer. He was, like C himself, short and pink and bald and beautifully if conservatively dressed. And he was, like C himself, the head of an intelligence service. But there the similarities ceased: he was director-general of MI-5, which specialized in matters of domestic security where MI-6 specialized in foreign espionage and counterespionage. They were, in other words, opposite sides of the same coin.

  The two of them were enjoying enormously big cigars as the debris of their luncheon was cleared away by two Hindu boys.

  “James, how very good of you to join us. He’s about to serve the brandy. Would you care for a tot?”

  “No thank you, sir,” said Holly-Browning primly. He was shocked to find the two of them together.

  “Look, do sit down.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Holly-Browning, taking the open chair.

  “James, you know Sir Vernon.”

  Sir Vernon was said to be the most affable man in the intelligence departments, though his critics said this amounted primarily to great skill at parliamentary bootlicking. An unfair charge: Sir Vernon had been superbly efficient nabbing Hun spies in the ’14–’18 thing, a coup he’d brought off primarily by opening their mail.

  “By reputation,” said Holly-Browning.

  “Glad you could join us on such short notice, James,” said C.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I told Sir Vernon you’d be glad to update him on the Julian Raines case. It is, after all, an area of domestic concern.”

  “Sir, if I may, it is primarily a Section V matter. That is, counterespionage operation against the Soviet Union. It is not a matter of domestic security.”

  “Ah. An interesting point,” said Sir Vernon. “I quite see Sir James’s point. But after all, we are not competing, but we are colleagues, are we not?”

  “Please, James,” said C. “It’s rather important.”

  “Of course, sir,” said Holly-Browning. He turned and as mechanically as possible apprised Sir Vernon of developments in the situation, most crucially the placing of an agent—whom he did not name—in Julian’s close company, and summed up the sparse contents of Sampson’s reports.

  “And your man is reporting regularly?” asked Sir Vernon.

  “He has not been the most habitual of correspondents, no,” said Holly-Browning.

  “Ummmmm,” nodded Sir Vernon. “Nicely done. Damned fine job.”

  “You can see, Vernon,” said C, “that the fluidity of Raines’s circumstances somewhat prevents us from mounting the kind of thorough surveillance MI-5 would be able to mount at home.”

  “Can’t be helped,” said Sir Vernon. “You’ll pardon an Americanism, but you can’t play cards you don’t hold. This fellow up close to Raines. He’s a professional?”

&
nbsp; “Alas, no,” said Holly-Browning. “Of no great gifts or brilliance. Under the circumstances, however, he is what was available. He is a card we did hold.”

  “And right now?”

  “At present, according to our man in Barcelona, Raines and our agent and a curious girl who stands somewhere between them are in Tarragona, a seaside resort fifty miles south of Barcelona. Our agent was nicked at the front; so was Raines. They are recuperating.”

  “Well, it certainly sounds encouraging,” said Sir Vernon. “It’s not quite how we would have handled it, but in the main you seem to be doing rather well, Sir James.”

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

  “You see, James, Sir Vernon and I have just concluded a rather lengthy session of negotiation. That’s why you are here.”

  “Yes?”

  C continued. “Sir Vernon thinks the Julian Raines matter should be turned over to Security Service. Of course, we cannot agree. Sir Vernon has suggested that he might approach the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee and—”

  “But good lord, sir, if that happened, it would all be out in the second. There’d be a scandal, the left would make a martyr out of Raines, the papers would get a hold of it, the—”

  “I quite agree,” said C.

  “Gentlemen, I merely want to make certain that all data that is pertinent to MI-5 matters arrives at MI-5 headquarters, that’s all,” said Sir Vernon. “I think we all agree on the ultimate disposition of the case, but it seems equally certain that Julian Raines will have information of great import to us.”

  “And so you see, James,” said C, “we have cut a deal. The deal is that we will continue to run the operation and you will continue to do what is best. But all reports must be sent on to MI-5, for their analysts. Is that understood?”

  “Yes sir,” said Holly-Browning, furious.

  “It’s not really so bad,” said Sir Vernon. “It’s a good deal better than having a bloody MI-5 snoop in the middle of everything, eh, Sir James?” He smiled.