Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  Levitsky was impressed. Bolodin had penetrated his own motives and taken his inquiries to the hospital, on the belief that Levitsky would be hanging around wounded Englishmen. Now he was up here on the road to Cab de Salou showing the picture of Levitsky from Deutsche Schachzeitung. If he showed it to the boy …

  They walked over to the café and commandeered a table near the sidewalk. Levitsky watched as Bolodin put his feet up on the railing and pulled out a brightly colored pack of cigarettes, plucked one out, and quickly lit it. He did not offer smokes to his companions, who sat on either side with the nervous alertness of bodyguards.

  Levitsky looked at his watch. It was about nine thirty. The boy said the sergeant came in at ten. He looked around the cell for a way out and could see none. The boy sat in the front room with his machine pistol. He looked straight ahead.

  Another locked room. As if the first weren’t terror enough, he had to play the same—

  “Boy. Hey, boy. Come here,” Levitsky called.

  The boy grabbed his weapon and came back. He had sullen, stupid eyes and seemed bull-headedly frightened of making a mistake. His khaki uniform was too big; still, he was lucky to be here, and not out in the trenches somewhere, or caught by opposing factionalists and stood against the wall.

  “Durutti?” Levitsky suddenly asked, naming the Anarchist hero killed leading a column of Anarchist troops in the Battle of Madrid late last year.

  The boy looked at him suspiciously.

  “Sí, Durutti,” he said.

  “¡Viva Durutti!” said Levitsky with enthusiasm. He gave the Anarchist’s double-fisted salute. He’d actually known this Durutti in Moscow in 1935 at the Lux. The man was a hopeless dreamer and lunatic, exactly the sort of uncontrollable rogue who’d become a great hero in the civil war, but utterly worthless at any other time. The Anarchists were all like that: wedded to absurd notions of a stateless society.

  “You’re an Anarchist, no?” he asked.

  “Sí, I’m an Anarchist. Long live Anarchism. Death to the state!” proclaimed the boy.

  Levitsky saw just the slightest chance.

  “I’m an Anarchist also,” he said carefully, hoping his Spanish was right.

  “No,” said the boy. “Russians can’t be Anarchists. Russians are all gangsters. Stalin is the head gangster.”

  “I’m Polish,” said Levitsky. “A Polish Anarchist.”

  The boy looked at him darkly.

  “Revolución sí, la guerra no,” Levitsky added, hoping again to approximate the idea of the Durutti slogan.

  “Sí,” said the boy.

  “Comrade,” said Levitsky. “Por favor. Look at this.” He smiled slyly.

  He rolled up his sleeve, past the elbow. There on his right biceps a black fist clenched in ardent fury, ready to smite the governments and policemen of the world. The tattoo dated from 1911. He and several others of the Party had been trying to organize the Trieste millworkers but at every step of the way they were opposed by an Anarchist organization that loathed Bolsheviks. Levitsky had been directed to stop them, for their irresponsibility could so enflame the policemen of the Continent that revolutionary activity would be impossible for months. He’d penetrated their secret society under an alias and been tattooed with the black fist as part of his rite of passage. When after months of careful maneuver he had finally met the ringleaders in a Trieste café, he’d betrayed them to the police. They were taken off and most of them had died in prison.

  The boy looked at the mark on his arm, his eyes widening in wonder.

  “Salud, comrade,” said the boy.

  “Sí. I salute. I salute Bakunin. I salute the great Durutti. I salute Anarchism!”

  The boy went and got a key and opened the door and embraced him.

  “Está libre, hermano,” the boy said. “¡Libre!” Free, he was saying. “One Anarchist may not lock up another Anarchist. Está libre. ¡Viva la anarquía!”

  Levitsky could see the American Bolodin through the open doorway, sitting at the café, and beyond that he could see an elderly man in Guardia Civil uniform head across the square, and at that same moment, a black Ford, the Twenty-ninth Division staff car, with Julian Raines and Robert Florry in the rear, pulled through the square and disappeared down the road and out of town.

  “¡Viva la anarquía!” said Levitsky, and he meant it, for dark forces had been loosed in the world.

  He embraced the boy and, seconds later, slipped out.

  24

  TRISTRAM SHANDY

  THE MAJOR WAS EXTREMELY NERVOUS. HE COULDN’T concentrate, he couldn’t sit still, he couldn’t take tea. His stomach felt sour and uneasy: dyspepsia, that scourge of the office animal. By the end he had given up all pretense of organized activity and simply stood at the window, looking down the five floors in late afternoon to the street. He stood there for several hours. He felt if he moved he would somehow curse his enterprise and fate it to catastrophe.

  Finally, the black car pulled up and he watched as the queer, eager figure of Mr. Vane popped out. Vane moved with appropriate dispatch into the building. The major thought his heart would burst, but at the same time he felt the killing imperative to maintain a certain formality for the proceedings. Thus he seated himself at his desk, turned on the light, took out and opened his fountain pen, removed from the rubble a sheet of paper, and began to doodle. He drew pictures of flowers. Daffodils. He could draw beautiful daffodils.

  He heard the opening of the lift and the slow, almost stately progress of Mr. Vane, who advanced upon him as a glacier must have moved down from the Pole during the Age of Ice. At last the door to the outer office opened; there was a pause while the orderly and precise Mr. Vane took off his coat, hung it on a hanger—buttoning the top button, of course, for the proper fall of the garment—and hung the hanger on the rack; then put his jaunty little Tyrolean in his desk drawer, the second one on the right-hand side.

  “Sir. Major Holly-Browning?” The man stood in the doorway with the practiced diffidence of a eunuch in a harem.

  “What! Oh, I say, Vane, I didn’t hear you come in. You gave me a start. Back already, then?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, that’s fine. Any difficulty?”

  “No sir. Well, actually, sir, the plane from Barcelona was slow in getting off the ground. Then I must say I had crisp words with an F.O. chap at Heathrow who insisted that he take the pouch all the way to Whitehall before opening it.”

  “You should have called me.”

  “I prevailed, sir.”

  “Then you’ve got it?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, why don’t you set it on the table? Then perhaps you’d like to freshen up, perhaps get a bite. I want to finish this damned report before I get to it.”

  “Yessir. Here it is then, sir. I’ll be back shortly. Please feel free to call me if you want anything.”

  “Yes, Vane. Very good.”

  Vane set the thing on the table near the window. He turned and left and the major did not look up to watch him. He listened to him leave. He continued to play at working for some minutes. He told himself he would wait fifteen minutes. He did not want to rush, to queer the thing with impatience. He had waited quite a bit, after all.

  The last observation had the effect of sending him back. He set the pen down. The daffodils were forgotten. He remembered the dark cellar of the Lubyanka in the year 1923.

  He remembered the Russian sitting across from him, the eyes bright with intelligence and sympathy. It had been a brilliant, patient performance, seductive and terrifying. Levitsky had invited Holly-Browning to resist, to argue; and each argument had been gently and delicately deflected. The man was a genius of conviction; he had that radiant, enveloping charm that reaches out through the brain and to the heart; it enters and commands.

  It was very late in the interrogation, and Holly-Browning was reduced to bromides.

  “The British Empire is the most benevolent and compassionate in the history of the w
orld,” he recalled saying, filled with exhaustion and regret.

  The Russian listened, seemed to pause and reflect.

  “I would never deny that. Of course it is. Yet are you not being awfully easy on yourself? Are you really willing to examine the reality of it for another point of view? I think you may find the results intriguing.”

  The first betrayal had been a betrayal of the imagination. Yes, with Levitsky as his guide, the major had allowed himself to imagine: imagine the Raj from the point of view of a Hong Kong coolie, making do with eleven children on less than a penny a day; or imagine the world of Johnny Sepoy, sent around the globe to die for a king he didn’t know, a faith he couldn’t understand, an officer he didn’t respect, and five rupees a week; or a textile worker, breathing the dust of a Leeds woolen mill, his lungs blacking up, coughing blood at thirty, dead at thirty-five; or …

  “The realities of empire,” said Levitsky, “are considerably different depending upon one’s proximity to the apex of the pyramid of power.” He smiled. Warmth and love poured from his eyes. He touched the major on the shoulder. The major loved the touch. He loved the strength and the courage of the man, he loved him in the way that soldiers in a trench for months on end can come to love one another, in a sacred, not profanely physical, way. Their ordeal in the cellar had joined them.

  “I can feel you trying to understand,” said Levitsky. “It takes a heroic amount of will. You’re probably the bravest man in the world, James; you’ve faced death in battle a hundred, a thousand times. Yet what you do now, that is bravery, bravery of the will.”

  The major felt the passionate urge to surrender to the man. It was so very late and they had been together for so very long.

  “Think about it. You have been offered a chance to join an elite. One does not look twice at an offer to join an elite, and to live a life untainted by corruption and exploitation. It’s a powerful elixir.”

  The truth is, as Major Holly-Browning knew, most men are willing to be spies against their own country. In his way, Julian is not so extraordinary after all; treason, in its way, is quite banal. A careful recruiter, a Levitsky, nursing the grudge and resentment that all men quite naturally feel toward their social betters and toward the freaks of circumstance and luck that explain triumph and failure in the world, can take a clerk and manufacture a spy in a weekend.

  The shame began to suffuse the major. He could feel it building. He was so ashamed. He had been so weak. He had yielded.

  “Yes,” Major Holly-Browning had said to Levitsky in the cellar of the Lubyanka at the end of their very long trip together in 1923, “Yes. I will do it. I will spy for you.” When he spoke, he believed it. At the center of his being, in his heart, in his brain, in his soul: he believed it.

  The escape, coming by freak luck the next day, changed nothing. When eventually, after a series of colorful but now almost completely forgotten adventures, the major reached home, he had taken a convalescent leave and gone to the hills of Scotland and lived like a hermit in a cottage high up for a year. It was a place without mirrors. For a long time, the major could not deal with the image of his own face.

  Now at last, with a timeless sigh, the slow and easeful acceptance of the firing squad by its victim, he rose and with exaggerated calmness walked to the table. He seated himself and looked at the object.

  It was Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne.

  The major reached up to the lamp, deftly unscrewed and removed the bolt holding tight the shade, then removed the shade. He snapped the light on, filling the normally dark old office with unpleasantly harsh light.

  He found a piece of paper, took out his fountain pen. He held the book in his hands and looked at it for some time, trying to remain calm.

  Am I here?

  Levitsky, am I here at last?

  He opened the book to the front endpaper, where Florry had written his signature and a date, January 4, 1931, thus informing the major he had chosen to start at and use the key of four.

  The major opened up the book to. He bent the covers back against the spine, feeling it break. With a straight razor he sliced the page away from the others and held it up to the blinding light from the bulb. Like a star over Bethlehem, a tiny flash winked at the major. It was a pinhole under the letter L.

  The major wrote down the letter L. He turned four pages further into the volume and repeated the process. This time, the tiny, almost imperceptible perforation denoted the letter E.

  The next letter located was V. And then an I.

  “Damned queer,” said Major Holly-Browning. “I should feel joy. Or some such. Triumph. The lightening of the load, all that. Instead, I’m just damned tired.” He had no desire to do anything at all, much less share his triumph with his new partners at MI-5.

  “Can I get you some tea, sir?” said Vane.

  “No. I think I’ll have some brandy. And I’ll get it. Do sit down, Vane, I insist.”

  “Yessir.”

  Vane primly arranged himself on the sofa, a study in rectitudinous angles. Holly-Browning rose, feeling the creak and snap in his joints of so much recent disuse, and went to his side table, opened the drawer. But suddenly, he didn’t feel like brandy. He wanted something stronger. He removed a bottle of Bushmill’s and poured two rather large whiskeys.

  “There,” he said to Vane.

  “But sir—”

  “No. I insist. Whiskey, Vane. It’s a celebration.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Vane, I want you to look at this.”

  “Yessir.”

  He handed over the sheet to Vane, who read it quickly.

  “Well, sir, I should guess that ties it.”

  “Yes, it’s what we’ve been looking for: the final, the irrefutable piece of evidence. The last chink in the wall. Florry spotted Raines reporting to his Russian case officer, overheard the conversation, and took notes. Damned fine job, Florry. Florry worked out, Vane, you know he did.”

  “Yet sir, if I may, it seems to me we got awfully good service out of our man in Barcelona. Young Sampson.”

  “Er, yes, Vane. I suppose I shall have to recommend that he come aboard full time now.”

  “Who knows, major? He could end up sitting in your chair someday.”

  “Not too bloody soon, I trust, Vane,” said Holly-Browning.

  But Vane had lurched on to another topic. “I say, sir, Florry says here, ‘Step to be taken.’ What can that mean?”

  “You know damned well what it means, Vane.”

  “It’s bloody brilliant, sir. You took a vague young fool and made an assassin of him inside a half-year.”

  “So I did, Vane. So I did.”

  “I say, sir, could I have another few drops of the bloody whiskey? Crikey, it’s like an old friend coming home after the war, the taste of it.”

  “Er, yes, Vane. Please, help yourself.”

  Vane went and poured himself a tot, swigged it down aggressively.

  He turned. The major had never seen him quite so flushed and mussed before.

  “Here’s to hell, sir. Where all the bloody-fookin’ traitors belong so as to roast on a spit into eternity. We sent him there, by damn, and by damn I’m proud to be a bloody-fookin’ part of it. And here’s to Major Jim Holly-Browning, best bloody-fookin’ spy-catcher there ever was.” He laughed abrasively.

  “Do you know, Vane, I believe I’ll drink to that,” said Major Holly-Browning.

  Levitsky, he thought.

  It started in the Lubyanka in 1923. Now on Broadway in 1937, I’ve finished it.

  Levitsky: I’ve won.

  25

  BEHIND THE LINES

  THERE,” SAID PORTELA. “DO YOU SEE IT?”

  Florry lay on the pine-needled floor of the forest and studied the Fascist lines across the valley in the fading light. With his German binoculars, he conjured up from the blur a distinct view of the trench running in the low hills, the odd outpost or breastwork. But the terrain was generally bleak and scorched; it had the
look of wasted, untilled land, its farmers fled as if from plague.

  “It’s quiet here,” said Portela, “with all the fighting up around Huesca or down near Madrid. This is where I cross. Zaragossa is not far. My people wait in the hills beyond. You’ll see, comrades.”

  “Good show,” said Julian, theatrically chipper. He stood in the trees like one of Our Gallant Lads at the Front in a 1915 West End melodrama. He had been in such a mood since they left, hearty, solicitous, irrepressibly British. He was almost hysterical with charm.

  “Time to go, comrade?” he called to Portela cheerfully. “My bags are all packed.”

  “Comrade Julian, you are like a hungry dog. I’ve never seen a man so eager. But we must wait until the night.”

  “Blast!” said Julian. “Stink and I want to get cracking here, eh, Stink? Have at the beggars, over the top, that sort of thing.”

  Carrying on like a child. Performing antically for anyone who would pay him the faintest attention. Being Brilliant Julian on the center of a stage designed for him and him alone.

  Florry issued a deeply insincere smile, as if he, too, were richly amused with Brilliant Julian, but he was so poor an actor he could find no words to speak, out of fear of speaking them transparently. Instead, he turned his back, using his pack as a sort of pillow. He could see through the pine needles above a patch of sweet, crisp blue sky. He hunkered against his pack, thinking how odd it was to be wearing a peasant’s rough garb and boots and be sleeping on a pack that contained a Burberry, a blue suit, and a pair of black brogues. Soon he had fallen asleep.

  “Robert?”

  Florry started. Julian loomed over him, staring intensely.

  “Yes, old man?”

  “Look, I want to say something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Portela’s sleeping. That man can sleep anywhere. Look, old boy, I’ve got an awfully queasy feeling that my luck’s run its string. I don’t think I’m going to make it back.”

  You swine, thought Florry. You deserve an award for your performance rather than the four-five-five I’m going to put in your head.