Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  At last Bolodin spoke.

  “You know,” he said, speaking in Yiddish. “I’ve seen guys like you. They had ’em in New York. Tough, I give you that. Smart, too. Guts. Lots and lots of guts. Now I could have this kid here smash you until morning. When he gets tired, I could do the smashing myself.”

  Bolodin laughed again.

  “And that’s just what you want. You’re one of these guys, the more you get smashed, the more stubborn you get. You feel pure. The pain makes you clean. You’re a pilgrim, the blood you shed gets you into heaven. Sure, I know. I’ve seen plenty of it before.”

  * * *

  He took a deep breath. The old man’s head didn’t move.

  Lenny studied him carefully. The old man was still.

  “You’ve got a piece of information,” Lenny said. “The name of a guy. It’s your most precious treasure. It means more than your life. I want it. I got to figure a way to get it out of you, right? So I ask myself, what does this old Jew fear? Everybody fears something, even the Devil Himself. I have to find something so special to you, so much a part of you, so deep in you that getting away from it becomes even more important than your treasure.

  “So what would this be? Pain? Nah! Torture? For most, not for you. Death. The fear of death? No. If you die before I get what I want, you win. You’d love that, wouldn’t you? It’s how your mind works. I’ve thought a lot about that, how you think. I’m the world’s greatest living Levitsky expert. Nights I stay up thinking about how to get this piece of information out of Levitsky.

  “And then I figured out where to look.”

  Lenny paused again, still enjoying his discovery.

  “You know where? I’ll tell you, this is really interesting.

  “I looked inside … of me. You and me, Levitsky, we’re the same guy. Jewboys born in that cunt Russia. We left her, went somewhere else to make a better life. We learned to be hard. We learned to do what was necessary. We learned to look and see the world for what it was and deal with it as it was. We learned not to be afraid. We learned how to hurt. We became big shots. We forgot everything. Or almost everything. But when I’m a kid and even when I’m a young shtarker in the gangs and even when I’m making my hits and everybody in the city is scared of me and even when I come over here and get in this racket, there’s one thing I don’t ever forget. Because always it scares me. I don’t like it now, even. Being this close to it makes me nervous. And I bet you don’t like it so hot either.”

  He smiled.

  “Remember, old man. What, fifty years ago? With me it was only thirty years ago. But you remember it just like I do. They came in on the horses. Always with the horses. The horses so big and so tall they could smash a kid to pieces in the snow. And there was no place to run and maybe you were lucky because they only felt like doing a little killing or maybe you were unlucky because they wanted to do a lot of killing. And they came galloping through. And I remember the horses. Big as a house, all muscle and steam and power. I saw my two brothers go under the hooves, old man. Just sucked under and gobbled up, like a machine, and they come out the other end, all smashed into the snow.”

  At last the old man spoke.

  “That was in the time before there was a revolution. We changed all that. We made a revolution.”

  “Yah! A revolution! Get him! Tonight, old man, tonight there’s no revolution. It’s 1897, it’s forty years ago. And the horses are coming, old man. They’re coming.”

  He ripped the blindfold off.

  Levitsky saw he was in the loft of a stable, over a pen. It was maybe twenty feet to the ground and as he watched, a gate was opened.

  In they came.

  “The Spanish have lots of cavalry, old man. They like horses, and there are plenty of them left around. These beauties are mean as hell. They haven’t been fed in a week. Instead, I got a guy, he comes in and he whips ’em. He whips ’em hard. He plays sirens for ’em and he honks horns at ’em. Oh, these horses are mad. These horses are crazy. You never saw any horses like this, old man.”

  He brought Levitsky to the edge of the loft.

  Beneath him, the old man could see them. They bucked and jostled and rubbed together, a seething, almost singular thing. Their cries came up at him and their dusky smell and their ugly violence.

  “You want to go down there, old man? You’ll drive ’em crazy. They’ll crowd in over you. Their hooves are really sharp. Old man, you want to go pet the horsies tonight?”

  He held Levitsky farther out.

  What am I, Levitsky thought, an old man. God help me, I’m no devil. He’s going to throw me down there. God help me.

  He remembered them smashing through the village. It was so long ago.

  “Hah, old man. You going to talk? I’m getting tired of holding you.”

  Levitsky spat in his face and Lenny threw him into the pit.

  He fell for a long time, screaming, but then the rope caught him and jerked him backward with a terrible explosion of light and pain; it was tied to the manacles. He hung in the pen, his shoulders wrenched the wrong way, the pain radiating out from the pressure. But worse, he was in the center of the horses, only the rope preventing him from descending the last few feet to the muddy floor of the pen.

  A horse’s breath, steamy and rancid, flushed across his face. The beast nudged him with its big head and as it nudged, the pain was terrible on his shoulders. Another horse smashed its flank against him. He swung on the pendulum of his rope and shoulders, bashing against another beast which screamed, leaped to its hind legs, and kicked savagely at Levitsky, crushing against his sternum. The horses were being driven into a frenzy; they were everywhere around him, nipping and bucking and kicking him. They were so huge; he was so weak.

  He remembered the Cossacks. It was a day when they felt like a lot of killing. He remembered the animal bucking over his father and saw the flash of blade, the spurt of blood. He smelled the burning huts, but most of all he remembered the cries and screams of the horses …

  He awakened.

  He lay on the floor of the barn. Bolodin was over him.

  “You passed out, old man. You fainted. I must be right. You must be plenty scared.” He turned. “Get him up.”

  They lifted Levitsky and brought him back to the edge of the loft. The horses had quieted.

  “The lamp,” said Bolodin.

  The one called Ugarte picked the kerosene lamp off a table.

  “Go ahead,” commanded Bolodin.

  The boy threw it into the pen; it smashed and the kerosene, flaming, spread across the floor. The horses went insane. They twisted and leaped and yelped in their terror of the fire. The flames rose, showing red in their mad eyes and against their sweaty flanks.

  “Okay, old devil. Back you go.”

  The rope was tied to his manacles. Bolodin held him out over the animal pen, which had become the site of grotesque frenzy.

  “They’ll rip me apart!” shrieked Levitsky.

  “Down you go, old devil. To your own private pogrom.”

  “No. No. Please. Please.”

  It seemed as if an incredible light had come into his mind. He struggled to tell the man what he wanted to know, but it was as if he could feel himself being sucked down. It was as if his mind were shattering. He would not go.

  “Please. Please, don’t do this to me.”

  They laid him down.

  “So talk,” said Bolodin.

  He looked up at Bolodin as if at a stranger. He had no idea what the man wanted. Nothing made sense. The light in his mind was growing in its blinding intensity.

  “He’s not saying anything,” said Ugarte.

  “Water,” said Bolodin.

  The liquid, icy cold, flooded over him, into his eyes and throat. He felt it going into his nose and entering his body. He was dying. It was all slipping away, in a confusion of water and pain and horse’s screams and the freezing wind and the straw beneath him.

  “The name, old man. The name of the boy you recru
ited.”

  The question was crazy, it made no sense.

  Levitsky thought he was drowning. He could feel the fluid in his lungs and the will to surrender choking through him. There was nothing else. He was drowning, the water was sucking him down. He could see only lights flashing. His life was over; he was barely conscious. He was sinking.

  Then strong arms had him. They gripped him tightly and pulled him up. He could feel a man’s hands on him, bringing him to air. The pain was so bad. There was so much pain, endless and unyielding. The hands had him.

  “Florry,” he gasped. “God, Florry, it’s you.”

  Lenny checked the list he’d made from Glasanov’s files. Yes, Florry, a Brit, in the POUM, a journalist originally. It all fit. He was one of the two guys who’d been at the seaside hotel, too, the one Levitsky had probably been trying to reach. He figured the guy would be at the Falcon.

  “Comrade Bolodin?” The call came from down below.

  “Yes,” Lenny called back in Russian.

  “Commissar Glasanov says it’s time to go.”

  Lenny looked at his watch. Yes, it was 0430. It was time to move on the Falcon.

  “Comrade, what do we do with the old one?”

  Lenny looked back to the old man, naked and shivering, his eyes black and crazed and staring madly into nothingness.

  “Give him to the horses,” he said.

  29

  THE OBERLEUTNANT

  JULIAN PLUCKED THE REVOLVER FROM FLORRY’S HAND. He had a queer light in his eyes and seemed wickedly, marvelously excited.

  “You fool, the Guardia will be—” Florry began.

  “Oh, I hardly think so, what with those bells coming along to mush all our noise. No, this is a fine and private place, Stink, for our little talk.”

  Florry could see the muzzle of the small Webley .25 automatic upon his chest.

  “Where were you going to shoot me, Stink? Head, I’d bet. Well, then, that’s where I shall shoot you.”

  “You bastard,” Florry said. “You sold us all out to bloody Joe Stalin and his goons. God help you, Julian. No one else will. It doesn’t matter. Shoot me and be done. They know in London. I’ve told them. You’re a dead man.”

  Julian smiled softly in the pale, weird light of the cathedral.

  “Were you going to give me a chance, old man? No, I’d bet not. Just pot me, eh? I wouldn’t even know what hit me; I would simply cease to exist.”

  “Damn you, you—”

  “God, wonderful,” he said. “It’s priceless. Stink, you’re such a rotten actor. I could see the loathing in your eyes since you arrived here. God, Stink, you’d never make a spy.”

  Florry just looked at him, thinking How do I get at him? He tried to gauge the leap. It was too far.

  “Any last words for Sylvia, Stink?”

  “You filthy swine,” said Florry. “There’s nothing you can give me you’ll not catch yourself. You’re a dead man.”

  “I’ll tell her something quite heroic, old man. She’ll be devastated, of course. I’ll comfort her. I can feel her hot tears and her trembling shoulders. We’ll be all alone. Perhaps my hand shall accidentally brush against her breast. It’ll be quite embarrassing, but of course at moments like those one doesn’t worry about propriety, does one? And perhaps I should happen to feel her nipple grow hard. Perhaps I shall hold her tight and as I’m squeezing her my penis will get quite lumpy. And yet, rather than drawing away from it, as one would expect, why, the grief-stricken thing actually presses her mound against it. Perhaps then as I kiss the tears away from her sweet cheeks, I shall encounter—good heavens, can this be a tongue!”

  “You filthy—”

  Julian raised the weapon. Florry saw its dark shape rising. Julian was not trembling. You swine, Florry was thinking in the raging urgency of it all, you bloody swine.

  “Bang,” said Julian. “You’re dead.”

  Julian was pointing at him with his pipe.

  Florry looked at him.

  Julian opened Florry’s revolver, tilted it, and the cartridges emptied into his hand. He flicked it shut and handed it back.

  “Thought I’d take it because you were so swollen with triumph you might turn the bloody thing on me.” He snorted with contempt. “Robert, I was so disappointed to learn that you were merely human. Among your good many qualities there are some bad ones. Among them, your evil stupidity and your blindness. I suppose it’s that underneath it all you hated me so for cutting you at Eton. And then Sylvia came into it.”

  “Look, you—”

  “Hush, Robert. You’re so thick. Listen and learn the ways of the world. In the first place, I know all about your smelly little job with the voodoo boys at Whitehall. MI-5 or -6? Don’t suppose it matters. I knew it would happen. All sorts of people have been telling me about the ‘questions’ that have been asked, the delicate inquiries back in London and at Trinity. Then there’s your awful chum Sampson, the world’s most revolting prig. He was at university, you know, one of those awful chaps who had a brief flirtation with the Apostles and then veered right. Everybody knew he’d signed on with the voodoo boys. I must say I was crushed you’d agreed to join them.”

  “They say you’re a spy. They have proof. I have proof!”

  “And you believed it. Still, one supposes that it’s remarkable you didn’t pot me when you had the chance in the trenches. May I ask, old man, why not?”

  “I had to have proof. Then I heard you with the Russian—”

  “Oh, tiptoeing about in the dark, are we? How seedy, Robert. How sadly seedy, like some two-bob-a-day private inquirer who specializes in divorces for the smart set.”

  “I heard you tell Levitsky that—”

  “Is that what he’s calling himself these days? When I knew him best, he was Brodsky the poet. He was a wonderful poet, by the way. Met him in ’thirty-one at Trinity. Sent me a note admiring some verses and included one of his own. Well, one thing led to another. When I ran into him at the hotel he said he was a journalist for Pravda. We had a jolly good reunion. He’s quite a chap—”

  “He’s a bloody GRU—”

  “Listen, chum. Listen and face the ways of the world. He was my lover, old boy. My first, my best. I’m queer, you blind sot. God, Robert, you are so thick sometimes.”

  Florry looked at him. He felt his mouth hang open. He blinked, thinking perhaps it was some dream. Something odd and chilled and huge moved through him, a glacial sense of regret, white and vast and glazed with ice.

  “I say, don’t look so stricken. Why on earth do you think I cut you at school, Robert? I bloody found myself wanting you. Your body. I wanted to do things. It was more than I could stand, and I had to get away. Who do you think I was writing to the night of the attack? My current lover, a sailor in the merchant fleet whom I had not seen in a devilish long time.”

  “But the women,” Florry said, still half disbelieving.

  “Of which there have been exactly one, old man. A chambermaid who rather insisted when I was thirteen. It was disgusting.”

  “But all the lies. All the boasts. Why?”

  “Florry, chum, being a queer, in case you don’t know, is illegal. One can end up in the Scrubs. And there’s Mother, whom it would kill, and there’s the hallowed memory of Father, the martyred hero of the Somme. There’s all manner of relatives. And there’s the bloody will, old man. Brilliant Julian does not need to lose his little chunk of England by being branded the Oscar Wilde of 1937. Actually, I rather like girls. They’re perfect fools, but enjoyable in their silly ways. They usually have wonderful senses of color, which I admire deeply. Men have no sense of color at all.”

  Florry wasn’t sure he believed him.

  “All right, old man. You think I’m lying? All right, here, I’ll prove it. Put out your hand and close your eyes, and you shall get a big surprise.”

  “Julian, I—”

  “Don’t worry, old man. It won’t be John Thomas. Now there’s a good boy, you needn’t bother wit
h the eyes.”

  He put something in Florry’s hand.

  It was the small automatic.

  “It’s all cocked. It’s only been fired once, into that Dyles fellow. Now, Robert, if you still believe Brilliant Julian is a terrible Comintern nasty, then you must do your duty. England demands it. Come on, now, make up your mind, old man. This is, after all, the second chance I’ve given you.” He made a show of closing his eyes.

  Florry felt the pistol grow heavy in his hand.

  Finally, he handed it back. “You fool,” he said.

  “We’re all fools,” said Julian.

  “I cannot wait to see the look on Sampson’s face when—”

  “No, I don’t quite think that would do, chum,” Julian said darkly. “I don’t really care to explain myself to the Sampsons of this world. It’s not something I’m terribly keen about. Actually, Robert, there is one other thing that needs to be straightened out. The bridge, eh? Let’s not forget the bloody bridge.”

  “No, Julian. No, I haven’t forgotten the bridge.”

  “You know, Stink, I don’t think it makes a pig’s whisker’s worth of difference as to who really wins out in Barcelona, the bloody POUM or the bloody Russian lads. The truth is, I’m not even sure I could tell you the difference. But do you know I’ve never really finished anything in my life? My masterpiece ‘Pons’ is the perfect example. I am a man of brilliant beginnings. And I find that what I would like to do more than anything is finish something. I would like to blow that fucking bridge into the next world. Would you care to join me, old man?”

  “Yes. Yes, let’s do it. You know you always get what you want, Julian.”

  “Perhaps it’s only that I want what I know I can get. But see here. There is a technical difficulty. Look at this.”

  He handed over a document.

  “Good Christ,” said Florry.

  “Poor Dyles had it over his heart. It was not as effective in that regard as a Bible.”

  It was the travel authority, sodden with blood. It was utterly worthless.