Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  Holly-Browning nodded politely. But something vexing occurred to him, clouding his smile. Who had informed MI-5?

  20

  TARRAGONA

  BELIEVE ME,” SAID JULIAN, HOLDING UP A GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE and blinking in the sun, “I’ve been dead and I’ve been alive and alive is better.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Florry, hoisting his own glass.

  “To life, then, darlings, the death of us all,” Julian toasted.

  Even Sylvia drank, though not as lustily as her two companions.

  “And how’s the neck, Robert?” she asked.

  Florry looked at her shyly. She had not said much to him.

  “It’s on the mend. Another inch or so and he’d have nipped an artery. But he missed, it whizzed through, and here I am.”

  “To Spanish marksmanship!” said Julian grandly, “which accounts for the presence of a full two-thirds of this lovely grouping.”

  “We were just awfully lucky,” said Florry. “Halfway through the second day, a foraging party was less than fifty paces off. We were cooked.”

  “And then some wonderfully ingenious fifth columnist touches off the POUM magazine at La Granja, and all the Johnny Fascist types totter off to watch the smoke rise and cheer for their team.” Julian greedily drank more champagne. “Here’s to luck, Julian’s wonderful luck,” he toasted again, this time removing his father’s wedding ring from under his shirt and holding it, on its chain, out for them to see. “This little beauty didn’t do him much good, but it’s come in handy for us, eh, Stink?”

  Florry smiled wanly. “Indeed,” he said.

  “Well put, old sport.”

  “Do they treat you decently in that awful hospital?” Sylvia asked politely.

  “The Spanish, it seems, can do nothing well except cook,” said Florry, somewhat relieved to turn to a neutral subject. “Three times a day, they wheel in huge steaming, wonderful meals. Meanwhile men die because nobody thinks to change their bandages.”

  “The future is definitely behind schedule in Spain,” said Julian. “I don’t believe the present has even arrived.”

  Florry sat back in the wheelchair. Sylvia and Julian had contrived to spring him from his great bay of bleeding boys for this outing, and they wheeled him down the two blocks of Tarragona’s own Ramblas here to the Esplanade high above the sea. Before him stretched a mile of white sand, a rumpled mess of a Roman arena, and the sleepy, tepid Mediterranean. A few bathers dabbled in it, a few more lay in the sun. The breeze was fresh and salty; gulls flipped and fluted on it. A statue of Christopher Columbus stood proudly atop its pedestal, as at the foot of Barcelona’s Ramblas.

  “It’s lovely here,” said Florry.

  “An odd town, Tarragona,” Julian said. “It seems the revolution hasn’t quite reached it. Or if it has, it got rather bored and left early, like Noël Coward at a dreary party.”

  Florry looked past Julian, in a splendid white linen suit, to Sylvia. Damn you, he thought. Her gray green eyes were sleepy yet lively; she’d done something to her hair, giving it a kind of frilly, lacy delicacy, and she’d put away her blue overalls and found a pretty dress. How had she met Julian? What was she doing with him while Florry lay in his bed? Was she with him?

  He looked back to Julian, slugging down the champagne.

  Damn you, Julian. You just go on, don’t you?

  “Barcelona is no longer a party Noël Coward would enjoy,” she said. “The city’s ugly. There’s a vileness to it. Someone shot Carlos Brea right outside the Café Oriente. It was horrible. Someone shot him from a car. The bullet hit him in the head. They don’t know who did it, but everybody says it was the Russian secret police. Poor Carlos.”

  “Carlos Brea?” said Julian. “The POUM intellectual? Poor sot. Spoke to him at length. Wanted to use it in a piece.”

  “Julian, you’re such an awful cynic,” she said, and Florry thought he could hear the love in her voice and see a radiance in her eyes.

  They seemed such a wonderful English couple, the tall, blond, elegant poet-soldier who just as easily could have been a banker or a diplomat, and his beautiful, fair woman, as cool and poised as an impeccable statue. They looked so good together that Florry envied them their perfection.

  “Have some more of the bubbly, old boy,” urged Julian. “Do you think it was easy to find this stuff? Good God, I had to pay a fortune.”

  “Bottoms up,” said Florry, finishing the glass, feeling the buzz in his nostrils.

  “Look, you two,” said Julian, “eat up and enjoy. I’ve got to be off.”

  “Where are you going?” Sylvia asked.

  “To see about a car. I’ll be back. I told the chap I’d see him at two. Besides, you two must have scads to talk about.”

  He rose from the bench with a smile and darted off down the Ramblas. Florry watched him slide along, graceful and fair. Then he turned back to the sea. Now, just the two of them, he felt all ridiculous.

  “Is it so hard to be alone with me?” she said. “We were alone together for quite a while, as I recall. You were never so tongue-tied.”

  “You must think me an awful fool.”

  “Why ever do you say that?”

  “The note I sent you. You received it?”

  “Yes. It was lovely. I still have it.”

  “The soldier lad’s last declaration before battle. God, you must think me the idiot.”

  “I think nothing of the kind. Do you want me to push you along the promenade?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want some more champagne?”

  “No.”

  “What about some of this food?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what do you want, Robert? Tell me straight out.”

  “You, of course.”

  She said nothing.

  “Or have you forgotten?”

  “I haven’t forgotten. It was quite lovely, wasn’t it?”

  “It was the best.”

  “Should you tax yourself, thinking about these things? Shouldn’t you concentrate on—”

  “Stop it. Don’t say that. It’s all I think about. You’re with him now, is that right?”

  “Oh, Robert, you’re such an idiot. He’s a charming man. He’s no more interested in me than in the man in the moon. Julian’s quality. I’m just a daughter of the bourgeoisie with a bit of inherited money for a year’s adventuring. He likes you better than he likes me. He loves you, in fact.”

  “But you’d be with him instead of me if that’s what he wanted?”

  “Please, Robert. Don’t put yourself through this. There’s no point to it.”

  “Thinks have become complicated.”

  “Not if you don’t permit them to, Robert.”

  Florry could no longer look at her. Her beauty was hurting him more than his throbbing neck would. He could feel her very close and very still. He could smell her. He could not get the night at the Falcon out of his mind: he remembered how good it felt, how it seemed to straighten the world all out for him.

  “I suppose you’d best wheel me back now, Sylvia,” he said. “I find I’m quite weary.”

  “Of course, darling. May we visit you tomorrow?”

  We!

  Florry wished he could say simply no, damn you, and be done with it. But he heard himself saying yes, yes, of course, it would be great fun, and as she wheeled him around, he saw Sampson across the street, watching.

  It took a day or so, but at last Sampson managed it. He applied for permission with the Republican Propaganda Department to do a profile of wounded Englishmen fighting valiantly on the side of Justice, and the office itself suggested a series of possibilities. Florry was the third of them, and he lay in the bay and watched as Sampson came in with his official escort and plopped down beside one of the other boys and proceeded to interview him at grindingly boring length. Even the lad himself, an ex-miner from Wales who’d been hurt fighting with the International Brigade near Brunete, soon grew uninterested in his own an
swers. By halfway through the second interview, the Republican press officer had given up in disgust, muttering darkly about English pedantry, and thus when, late in the afternoon, Sampson finally approached Florry it was alone and in privacy; most of the other patients in the bay had been wheeled out to watch the sunset, their one pleasure, and those that remained were beyond caring.

  “Ah, Florry,” said Sampson with a smug yet prim grin, “and how’s the wound?”

  “It’s all right,” said Florry bleakly. “They’re going to let me out in a bit. No bones broken, no arteries smashed. There’s very little they can do now they’ve drained it except let it heal. A scratch, really.”

  “I shouldn’t imagine it felt like a scratch at the time.”

  “No, it did not.”

  “Look, I brought you a present. A copy of Tristram Shandy, by your friend Mr. Sterne. God, I despise literature. Full of nonsense, if you ask me, but I thought you’d like it.”

  He handed the book over and Florry took it gruffly.

  “Ah, old sport. They’re beginning to wonder in London if perhaps you haven’t forgotten why you’re out here.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “Good. Then do you think it would be possible—”

  “Look, I spent five bloody months with Julian Raines, day in and day out. In battle, he was the bravest of us all. Now would a Russian spy risk everything for … for nothing? For his enemies? By all odds he should be dead. Tell your bloody major to find another candidate. Now go away.”

  “Robert, you’ve been such a wicked boy. No reports, no communications, no anything. I’ve had to keep awfully busy covering for you. But far worse, you’ve allowed yourself to become utterly sentimental about all this. I had expected so much. I thought you were the stuff of heroes. You were my idol.”

  “Sampson, it wears thin. I’m terribly tired.”

  “Look, Florry, old sport, sorry to be such a bother. Just a few minutes more, all right? Let me put some things to you?”

  “Christ!”

  “The attack was betrayed. The attack you fought in. Did you know that?”

  “I’ve heard rumors, yes. But there’s—”

  “Look here, I was up there. It was quite clear that the general headquarters issued attack orders quickly, if for no other reason than to prevent the Communist brigades from getting counterinstructions from Barcelona as to whether to obey the orders or not. Yet the Communists nevertheless knew to tell their troops not to go. Somehow they knew, eh? They’d gotten the word. Because someone had reached them. Ah, see? It all fits together.”

  Florry looked out. Yes, the damned message. Julian and his “boy” who disappeared with the message.

  “Then there’s the issue of the magazine. Somebody blew the POUM magazine, eh? Someone knew where to plant a bomb. The explosion of that magazine all but ends POUM’s chances for a spring offensive. And where would the saboteur have gotten the information? Why, from a helpful chap potting about at La Granja.”

  Florry said nothing.

  “Now as for one other thing. There was a chap called Carlos Brea, who was coming into prominence in the POUM party. Yes?”

  Florry said nothing.

  “Anyway, this chap was murdered. Suddenly one night. Damned strange. But not strange when you consider that someone had interviewed him and realized how important he was becoming. And who was that chap?”

  It was Julian.

  “It means nothing.”

  “Julian is communicating with Levitsky, somehow. Robert, I can see it in your face. Like a cloud. Robert, in your heart, you know it to be true. You’ve felt it in him. Down low, down, far, far away. A reserve. A coldness.”

  “They would risk him to betray a silly attack and to kill one man? It’s nonsense,” he said, wishing he believed it utterly.

  “Perhaps there’s a bigger job. A job we can’t even begin to imagine, old man. But don’t you see, he’s giving us no choice in the matter. He’s here for the Russians. He spies on their enemies for them. And when he goes back to England, he’ll spy on us for them. You can see it, can’t you, old man?”

  “I can’t see anything.”

  “He’s fogged your brain, old man. With the woman. That’s the point of the woman, to keep you utterly befuddled and from seeing him perfectly for what he is. He understands where you’re weakest and he’s got you there. You look at him, and all you see is the man who’s bedding down with your—”

  “Stop it! You go too far.”

  “Robert, listen to me. He’s to be stopped. No longer just stopped in the general sense, but stopped in the most specific sense. You can do it, can’t you? At the front? You’re going back to the front, you can see that it happens. You can see that it’s your duty to—”

  “Sampson, old man, I’m going to tell you one more time. Leave. If you don’t, so help me, I’ll call the guard and tell him who you really are and they’ll put you against a wall and shoot you.”

  Sampson looked at him for the longest time. Then a small smile played across his face.

  “All right, Robert. I’ll go. But watch, old man. Keep your eyes open. And you’ll see who owns the heart of Julian Raines.”

  Florry was permitted to leave the hospital in the next days and given a convalescent leave of two weeks. In the lobby, Sylvia was waiting for him. And so was Julian.

  “You and Sylvia must come on holiday with me,” said Julian. “I’ve found a beautiful old resort down the coast at Salou. It’ll be great fun. Come along, old man. You owe me. You saved my life and therefore you cannot deny me anything.”

  “Julian, I’m still awfully spent. I wouldn’t be much company. I just want to sit in the sun.”

  “Then sit in the sun you shall. I’ll bring you champagne and caviar every day. Sylvia will read to you. Go on, put it on your furlough form, right there at the bottom. Oh, don’t be a prig, Stink. It’ll be fun. Look, in two weeks, we’ll be back in the trenches.”

  “Robert, you look so pale,” she said. “It would be so good for you.”

  They arrived, by Julian’s car, that afternoon. It was a glorious old hotel, isolated against a blue bay on a broad lip of sandy beach, under a stony cliff. The hotel was an old villa, rambling and white under its mandatory crown of red tiles; the staff were old men, mostly, who called the few guests comrade awkwardly, as if they wanted no part of the future. They preferred the ordered past, and pretended revolution had never happened.

  Florry settled into a huge room with a balcony overlooking the sea. Each day when he awoke he’d find a pot of thick coffee and a pot of hot cream and a red rose in a vase outside his door. It was a civilized way to begin the day, after the trenches. He’d sit out on the balcony with a book—besides the Sterne, Sylvia had brought him Dickens and Kipling, which he preferred—and read in the sunlight, losing himself in the thickets of literature and the hot and healing sun. At eleven, the howls of delight would rise from the spongy clay tennis courts where Julian and Sylvia, who occupied suites down the hall, would play, their yelps punctuated by the hollow plunk of the ball on the racquet.

  At noon, the three would lunch together on the veranda where they were fed fish and rice and a crisp blanco. Then they’d change and bathe by the sea, lazily wasting the afternoon stretched upon the white sand. The war seemed far off, and almost by mutual consent they excluded it from the frame of their consciousness. There was only the sun and the sea, the balmy breezes, and one another. The afternoons were long and slow, under flawless weather. The sky curved overhead in azure radiance, cloudless and immense. The water was calm and warm.

  It seemed to be so lovely, and yet it was not. A peculiar rhythm soon established itself, almost like a tide, remorseless and implacable. Yet what was so peculiar about it all was that it went, like the larger war, completely unspoken of, as if by compact.

  One half of the rhythm was the Florry rhythm: on a Florry day, she’d hang on his every word, her eyes radiant with attention. She’d ask him questions about eve
ry aspect of his life, his school, his parents. He found himself divulging intimacies and secrets he had told no one in years. He found himself at night thinking of new stories he could tell her to make her squeal with laughter and delight.

  “I just love to hear you talk,” she said.

  But there were also Julian days, not so many at first and not quite vivid enough, when they did come, to merit comment; yet still they occurred, and Florry would seem not to exist to her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes and she’d hang on Julian. He could see her seem to bend toward him, as if to absorb him. They had their little secrets, Sylvia and Julian, their little jokes, and on these days he could see a light in her eyes he never saw when she was talking to him. She seemed to be achieving a total oneness with Julian, as if, somehow, she were sinking into him.

  Damn you, Julian.

  He began to think how perfect the world would be if Julian were not around. If only by some stroke Julian could be removed, and not exist at all.

  Yet the next day, she was his again and he felt the pleasure and the triumph of her attentions.

  One afternoon, he felt unusually strong and asked if anybody cared to come with him on a walk. Julian said no, he’d prefer to try to drink the world dry of bubbly, but Sylvia rose with a smile for him. It was a Florry day.

  They walked down the beach. They reached the base of the cliff in a matter of minutes and walked along it. The sand under their feet was white and dry and fine. The cliff towered above them, chalky and wrinkled, its crown bridged in greenery a hundred feet up. Florry felt prickly and unsure of himself.

  “How’s the neck?”

  “Oh, it seems all right. It’s stiff, but if I understand the doctor correctly it will always be stiff.”

  “You’ve got some nice color now. You seemed so pale in the hospital. You looked so awful there. With those other wounded boys about.”

  “I hated the hospital. I’ve already put it out of my mind. I keep thinking about the battle.”

  “Julian says you were very brave.”

  “Julian cares about that. About being brave. Do you know, I really don’t. It has no interest for me.”