Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  Tata. Salud. You were a man.

  He had another swallow of the schnapps. He was turning into an old shikker, boring and stupid and sentimental, an old fool. It was as if the discipline, the passion, the absolute fury of a life had at last spent itself, leaving nothing.

  Then he realized with a start that tomorrow, June 16, was his birthday. He would be sixty years old.

  “Old one.”

  Levitsky looked up into a set of dark features, smooth and sleek and Mediterranean. “You are right. Our friends were quite impressed. Here is your money.”

  “Fuck your money,” said Levitsky.

  “And here’s an old friend of yours,” said the Aegean, laughing.

  “Hello, old putz. I got you at last.”

  Levitsky looked into the face of Comrade Bolodin and then two men grabbed him and took him.

  27

  PAMPLONA

  JULIAN STOOD IN THE IMMACULATE CIRCULAR PARK WHERE the Avenida de Carlos III and the Avenida de la Baja intersected in the lovely center of the Carlist city of Pamplona. It was midafternoon, June 15, a glorious day. The sky was Spanish blue, subtly different from English blue in that it is paler, flatter, less voluptuous, more highly polished.

  “Sieg heil,” said Julian, enjoying the theatricality of it, to a fair-haired, blue-eyed young chap who was but one of the dozens of Pamplona Germans, all sleek, smooth-looking professional soldiers with glorious suntans in the crisp blue uniforms of the Condor Legion Panzer companies.

  Florry sat on the bench in the park not far from where his partner flirted with the young Jerry, and loathed himself. Another bloody failure. Julian had not come in gun range since they’d separated, until now, except that he was also within gun range of the entire Condor Legion as well. God damn you, Julian Raines, and your absurd lucky ring around your neck: it seemed to sum him up, that foolish talisman against the vicissitudes of reality. Julian believed in it, and in believing in it, seemed to force the world to believe in it.

  Florry watched intently. It was not particularly amazing that Julian could speak so passionately with the young German. To begin with, his German was brilliant and he was himself blond and blue-eyed; but perhaps more important was the force of his performance. It was not just that he was now scrubbed and combed, in a beautiful double-breasted gray pinstripe suit, but it was something deeper. He was too pitch perfect and nuance pure for fiction or artifice. He was not, really, acting. He had simply willed himself to become a new and different man on the streets of Pamplona.

  After a while, Julian began to show off. He offered the young man a cigarette, lit it for him with his Dunhill, and made humorous observations at which the German laughed heartily. He had even found a pipe someplace, and he gestured emphatically with it.

  God, thought Florry.

  After a time, Julian and the young officer shook hands, threw each other a gross deutscher salute, and walked amiably away from each other. Julian returned and sat down.

  “Interesting chap. Says the Jerry armor doesn’t stand a chance against the Russian T-26s. That’s why they’re pulling them out of Madrid for this little show up here.”

  “Christ, I thought you’d never finish,” said Florry.

  “He’s just been up to the bridge. His unit is near there. Says we must visit; it’s a marvel of engineering. The Führer would be proud.”

  Florry shook his head.

  “Come on, Stink, you’ve got to enjoy this. Think what a tale it’ll make for your and Sylvia’s grandpups. Won’t believe a word of it, though, the little ghastly rodents. Hate kids, myself. So bloody noisy.”

  “What on earth did you tell him?”

  “We’re mining engineers. Out from the fatherland to advise the bloody olive-eaters on their mining techniques. Know a bit about mines, too. My mother owns one somewhere. Any sign of our pals?”

  Florry, from his vantage, looked across the fountain and the street, through the leafy trees and to the hotel on the corner. It was an elegant old place, rather Parisian in appearance. It had been his job to keep it watched, while Julian sported about with Jerry.

  “Nothing,” he said. “A few Condor chaps. It seems to be unofficial Jerry headquarters,” he said.

  “The Moseley brutes will love it. What utter swine. To give up their own country to rub bums with German Java men tarted up in Sigmund Romberg uniforms. I loathe traitors.”

  Florry kept his eye on the hotel.

  “Sieg heil,” Julian suddenly blurted, as two more officers suddenly came by in gleaming black jackboots.

  “Handsome chaps,” Julian said after they passed. “Pity they’re all such pigs.”

  “There,” said Florry suddenly, squinting in the sunlight.

  He could see them in front of the picturesque doors of the hotel, a short, squat, and blunt fellow who must have been Harry Uckley and another who must have been his companion Dyles. It was the uniforms that gave them away: they wore their silly Moseley black shirts and jodhpurs and black riding boots.

  “What charming uniforms,” said Julian. “So refined.”

  Florry felt a queer roar in his mind. No matter what, he’d have at Julian.

  “All right,” said Julian. “Time for some real fun now, eh?”

  But the fun did not start for quite some time. They followed the two down the wide, tree-lined Avenida de Carlos III at what seemed a prudent distance, perhaps two hundred paces, until at last they reached their appointment: an office off the Calle San Miguel, near the cathedral, which wore the proud banner of the Falange Espagnole, the violent right-wing Spanish brotherhood that, like the POUM, supplied its own militias to the fighting.

  Florry and Julian found shelter down the street at a bench under a tree and waited. By 4 P.M. Julian grew bored and went for a walk. For a time he browsed in the shop windows while Florry sat furiously, vulnerable and absurd, awaiting his return. He was gone about half an hour.

  “I say,” he said when he returned, “look what I’ve bought. Rather spiffy, eh?”

  He opened a small sack and removed a tie.

  “I’ve always loved this pattern,” he said. It was a dark green and dark blue arrangement of diagonal stripes. “But it’s the Fourteenth Lancastershire Foot, and if Roddy Tyne ever caught me with his regiment’s tie, he’d have a bloody kitten.”

  “It’s quite nice,” said Florry. “I’ve never paid much attention to ties.”

  “Nice? Chum, it’s magnificent. Don’t you think it goes well with this suit.” He held it against the gray pinstripe.

  “Julian, I’m trying to keep an eye on—”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose it does.”

  “Good, thought you’d agree.”

  He quickly untied the tie he was wearing—a solid burgundy thing—and rethreaded his collar with the regimental tie, quickly put a small, elegant Windsor knot into it, and pulled it tight.

  “There. Really feel much better. This awful pink thing”—he held up the burgundy like a rotting fish—“has been bothering me all day. Can’t think why I bought it. Is the knot centered, old man? It’s a beastly thing to do without a mirror.”

  “Julian! Look!”

  Harry Uckley and his chum Dyles had emerged in a crowd with a group of Falangists and stood chatting and lounging about two hundred paces down across the street.

  “About bloody time,” said Julian.

  It had taken almost forever: Uckley and Dyles went off to eat with the Falangists at a large, unruly restaurant down the way. The dinner lasted for hours, and more than a little wine was consumed. Then it was time to sing, and Florry and Julian heard the ringing words of the Spanish National Anthem, the bloody Horst Wessel song, some Italian Fascist ditty, on and on until quite late. When the party broke up at last, it was close to midnight and a light rain had begun to fall. The two Englishmen separated with a last round of hearty good-byes from the Falangists, and headed off down the street. Across the way, from the shadows, Florry and Julian w
atched as they ambled along, talking animatedly, their boots snapping on the pavement.

  Uckley and Dyles passed by directly across from them, and for the first time Florry could see them clearly. Harry Uckley had a thick-set, loutish grace, that pugilist’s carriage that took him forward to the balls of his feet as he walked. He laughed at something the thinner, more ascetic Dyles had said, and it was an ablative little percussion of a laugh.

  “I see it now,” said Julian, in a whisper. “The cathedral. They’re off for a bit of praying.”

  Of course. Harry Uckley would be Catholic.

  “Come on,” said Julian. “While I was off, I spotted a quicker way.”

  They dashed across a cobbled street, cut down an alley. The rain was really beginning to fall now. As they moved, they threw on their Burberrys, crossed another street, and then saw it.

  It was a Gothic thing and first seen in the dimness looked immense and almost prehistoric, an awesome great hunk of gaudy, lacy stone, its spire climbing toward God himself above.

  “Here. We’ll stop them here,” said Julian, slipping inside the gate. Florry watched his hand disappear inside his coat to emerge with the small automatic pistol.

  And I’ll stop you, Julian, Florry thought.

  “Put this bloody toy to work at last,” Julian said, throwing the slide of the pistol.

  Florry felt the Webley somehow come to fill his hand. His thumb climbed the oily cold of the revolver’s spine, curled around the hammer, and drew it back, and he could feel the cylinder align itself in the frame. The hammer locked with a tensile click.

  “Here they come now, our lovely Eton boys,” said Julian. It was so. The two men, hunched against the rising chill and the fall of the rain, came across the square in the white cold light of the moon, hurrying to make midnight mass.

  Florry stepped beyond Julian, his revolver leading the way. “Beg pardon,” he said, with absurd civility, and stepped from the gate into the moonlight. The two men saw him and seemed to halt for just a second. The street behind them was deserted. From inside the cathedral came the sound of chanting.

  “Harry Uckley,” Florry said.

  “Who’s that, eh?” called back Harry, still coming on. His voice filled with the sudden cheer of a man who recognizes a companion. “A mate? Christ, Jimmy, that you, blast it all?”

  “No it isn’t, old sport,” said Julian.

  Harry understood in an instant, much more quickly than poor Dyles. He seemed to make a sudden lurch for his own pistol, but it was all feint, and as Florry, fifteen feet away, brought the Webley up to fire, Harry instead gripped his companion by the arm, catching the poor man in utter surprise, and with a strong thrust whirled him at Florry and Julian in a crazed spin.

  Julian’s little automatic fired almost instantly, the sound a tap lost quickly in the vastness of the night, and the man sagged wretchedly as Florry ducked at the collapsing apparition that was between himself and his target and made to re-aim, but saw it was no use. Harry, fleet as the devil, had turned to flee and ran zigzagging like a footballer across the cobblestones in the shadows. Florry took off after him, cursing the man for his cleverness, and got close enough to see Harry hit the stone wall of the graveyard abutting the cathedral and get over it in a single, clawing scramble. He himself careened toward the gate, raincoat flapping like a highwayman’s cape behind him, and slid through it, low.

  Damn you, Harry Uckley. If you get away, it’s all up, damn you.

  Florry knew he should have just done the job of murder. Just shot him cold; that’s what the job required. But he could no more shoot even scum like Harry Uckley cold than Julian Raines.

  Bourgeois decadence again, the soft, yielding custard center of the middle-class man, the slight pause at the moment when pauses were fatal. Florry, you have not learned the lesson of your century: you have not learned to kill.

  Florry studied the maze of the graveyard. He could pick out no forms remotely human in the baroque, marble confusion and the weird colors from the stained-glass of the cathedral above it. It was all jumble and shadow. A few candles flickered.

  Damn you, Harry!

  He began to move through the grass in a duckwalk, feeling absurd and incredibly excited at once, but not particularly frightened. After so much of wondering and doubting and waiting, the elemental simplicity of killing or being killed seemed almost a luxury.

  “Chum, I’m going to kill you.”

  The whisper was from quite near. Florry halted, freezing up against a marble angel’s wing. Harry was close by, calling softly, utterly confident.

  “Come on, now, chum. Just another step.”

  The voice was indistinct and blurred but seemed to be coming from a congruence of obelisks off on the left a few feet. Florry peered into the dark, trying to make sense of it. He had an immense urge to stand up and shoot at the voice and be done with the business.

  Yet he held back. Patience in these affairs was everything. Harry was the man of action, the pugilist, the footballer; the urge to move would overwhelm his imagination surely. Florry knew he’d come. Come on, Harry, boy, come on.

  He lay still, waiting.

  “Robert? Robert, are you there?”

  It was Julian, standing in the gate in the moonlight like an utter ass, as if he were posing for a sculptor.

  “Robert, I say, are you there?”

  In the light of the cathedral, Julian made a wonderful target and he knew that Harry Uckley would fire in a second or so. Julian and his insane conviction that the real physics of the universe did not apply to one so charming and brilliant. His bravery, which was also utter stupidity.

  Florry heard the snap of a revolver cocking amid the maze of marble slabs, perhaps made louder by the looming cathedral walls above them, and then he heard a tick as the hard butt was steadied against the stone.

  “Robert, I say, old man, are you here?” Julian called again.

  Florry leaped to his feet, raised the Webley, and fired three times in the rough direction of Harry Uckley. Yet curiously he did not hear the sound of the shots but only felt the sensations: the buck of the revolver, the spurt of muzzle flash out beyond his hand, the sudden flooding odor of burned powder. He did not hear because he heard something else instead, the huge and powerful clanging of the midnight bells whose thrill of vibration seemed to fill the air with a kind of blanket of sound, dense and muffling. He ducked back to earth, the bells continuing: they were up to five now. Florry rolled sideways, sure a bullet would come winging at him, and astonishingly discovered a rampaging shape passing by him headed like a crazed bull toward the gate.

  He fired, taking the man down.

  The bells tolled twice more, then ceased, their echo lapsing after several more seconds.

  “Robert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Christ, are you all right?”

  “Yes, you bloody idiot. God, Julian, you just stood there—”

  “The pathetic thing is, they haven’t pistols in those bloody great holsters. Only arsewipe. Let’s see what you have bagged.”

  They rose and walked swiftly to the fallen man. Harry Uckley in the grass, a glassy blackness in his eyes, breathed slowly.

  “It was a lucky shot that dropped me,” he said. “I’d have had you sure if the bloody olives hadn’t taken my Luger. They didn’t trust us.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No, it’s rather numbing. Cold. You’ll see when your time comes. Are you reds?”

  “I suppose,” said Florry.

  “I’m damned glad an Englishman pulled the trigger, not one of these olive-eating bastards. They took my Luger, damn their souls to hell.”

  “Yes, Harry,” said Florry, aware that Harry no longer breathed. “Well, that’s bloody that,” he said, surprised at the bitterness he felt. “Another great triumph for the Republic.”

  Now for Julian, he thought. He cocked the pistol.

  “Sorry, old man,” said Julian, just behind him. Florry felt the cold circle of a
pistol muzzle against his neck. “There’s to be a change in plans.”

  28

  MIDNIGHT

  THEY DROVE THROUGH THE CITY FOR A TIME, UNTIL AT last they reached its outskirts. The traffic increased. The road was jammed with armored cars and lorries filled with Asaltos. Twice the vehicle was stopped but Lenny simply pronounced the password—“Picturebook”—and they were passed on. Whistles blew; there was the tramping of feet on the wet pavement in the dark. It was a night of ugly, ominous magic, a night of history. Lenny figured even Levitsky, hands manacled, mouth taped, would see that something was about to happen.

  Then they pulled into the courtyard of a large house. More troops milled about. But they took the old man straight through the house, across the courtyard, and to a smaller house. The tape was ripped off. He was stripped naked. The manacles, however, remained.

  Lenny looked at the old man and was surprised at the body. It was chalky white and mottled with discolorations. His feet and hands were veiny blue and white and hideous. His muscle tone was flabby. His cock was long and flaccid and his balls two dead weights. Where was the strength? Where was the will? This was just an old white-headed geezer who probably couldn’t open a jar of pickles without help. The great Levitsky! Trotsky’s right-hand man. Kolchak’s nemesis, hero of the underground, Cheka terrorist, Yid spy-master! Lenny laughed. A single blow would send his old bones flying apart.

  Levitsky looked cold and numb. His face didn’t show much except that he knew he was going to catch it but good. Lenny wanted to hurt him. Lenny felt powerful and beyond fear next to this old geezer.

  “Old Yid,” he said in Yiddish, “I’ve got plenty of trouble for you now. You think you’ve seen trouble? Put the blindfold on him.”

  Blackness engulfed Levitsky. He felt the thing being tied tight behind him. He was led outside, pulled along by several pairs of hands. His feet crossed mud and straw.

  “Step up here,” they told him. He felt himself climbing crude steps. The smell of straw and mud was everywhere. He knew he was in a rough building. It was very cold.