Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  “Better than the Russians,” the girl replied.

  Florry slept through the afternoon, surrendering at last to his desperate fatigue, but still the day passed with excruciating slowness in the dim space beneath the hugely vaulted roof of the cathedral. It smelled of piss and destruction.

  Finally, at twilight, it was time to go. They crept out a back entrance to a truck. Florry and the girl were ordered into the back.

  “I suppose you’ll be taking us to our legation now,” Florry said.

  The man, a heavyset worker in a butcher’s smock, didn’t answer. He had a German Luger in his belt, evidently a prized possession, and he was given to fondling it, and he now took it out to do so, meanwhile ignoring Florry’s question.

  The ride lasted for hours. Twice they were stopped and once there was yelling. But each time the van continued. Finally, it began to climb and Florry could feel the strain against gravity as it rose. He had a wild moment of hope that they were heading through the Pyrenees, but then realized they’d never left the sound of the city.

  The truck stopped after what seemed an endless voyage up a narrow, twisting road. The doors were opened. Cool air hit Florry’s lungs; he blinked in the dark and stepped out. He had the illusion of space, oceans of it, and beyond the unlit but somehow nevertheless vibrant tapestry of the city spreading out to the horizon. As his eyes adjusted, he became aware of unreal structures immediately about, as if he were in the center of some dream city, a utopia of crazy, cantilevered streamlines, odd futuristic bulges and girders.

  “Good heavens,” he said. “We’ve come to a bloody amusement park.”

  “You are atop the mountain of the devil,” said one of the men close by. “From here Christ was offered the world. He did not take it. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others.”

  “Tibidabo Mountain,” said Sylvia. “We’ve come to the park atop Tibidabo Mountain.”

  “Yes,” said the man. “Just the place for the trial and execution of the traitor Florry.”

  34

  BAD NEWS

  IT FELL TO UGARTE TO TELL COMRADE COMMISSAR BOLODIN that the Englishman Florry and the girl Sylvia Lilliford had evidently vanished from the hotel, despite his team’s scrupulous scrutiny. But surprisingly, Comrade Bolodin took the news stoically.

  Lenny, sitting in his office at the SIM headquarters in the main police station cleaning his Tokarev, thought this meant they were getting ready to move the gold. Florry was back from his secret job behind the lines, something for the hidden GRU apparat the Englishman, like his crazed master Levitsky, clearly worked for, something so secret it would be all but unknown to the NKVD. He knew it would be harder than it seemed. There was too much at stake.

  “Just poof,” said Lenny, “and they were gone?”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  “You talk to the hotel people?” Lenny wondered, wiping down his slide.

  “Yes, comrade. Nobody saw a thing.”

  Lenny considered this curiously, ramming a short, stiff brush through the barrel of the disassembled automatic. Then he said, “People go in and out?”

  “Comrade, it is a public place. My team was on all sides of the building.”

  Lenny nodded, wiping down the recoil spring.

  He felt rage blossom like a precious, poisoned flower deep in his head, more precious for its containment. It was delicious. He looked at the Spaniard and had a terrible impulse to squash his head. But he didn’t lose control. He didn’t lose control anymore, he was so close to what he wanted.

  “Should we put out some kind of alert so the Asaltos or the police can—”

  “No, we should not put out an alert. Then we have all sorts of other people all asking the SIM how it does its business. And I don’t like to answer questions. Do you understand, my friend?”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  “Don’t I take good care of you, Ugarte? Aren’t I a good boss, Ugarte? I’m no mintzer, am I?”

  Although the Spaniard couldn’t know the Yiddish word, he answered, “No, boss.”

  Lenny rose, embraced the Spaniard, drawing him close with one hand, and with the other gathered between thumb and forefinger a fold of flesh from the cheek. He held it delicately as one would a rose, and felt the man’s terror.

  “Scared, Comrade Ugarte?”

  “No, comrade,” said the man, trembling.

  Lenny smiled, then crushed his fingers together. Ugarte fell weeping to the floor. It was not the first scream heard in those quarters.

  Lenny picked the little one up.

  “We can’t let this bird fly,” Lenny exclaimed calmly. “You tell your gang, Comrade Bolodin is a very busy man these days, and he expects his special friends in Ugarte’s section to do their very best.”

  Lenny could see the terror in Ugarte’s eyes. “Okay? Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” Where Lenny’s fingers had come together, a purple hemorrhage now blossomed.

  The little man scurried off.

  Lenny sat back with his pistol. He knew where Florry would be. He’d have to be with Steinbach, the new number-one gangster of Barcelona, who’d slipped through the big net of June 16 and whose capture was Lenny’s most pressing official business. Clearly Steinbach was being run by GRU; how else could he be so effective? It was a battle between two Russian gangs, he now saw, and he was right in the middle.

  When they got Steinbach, they’d get Florry. And Lenny knew they’d get Steinbach. In the spirit of capitalism, the SIM had offered a great deal of money.

  And money, Lenny knew, money talks.

  35

  THE TRIAL

  IT SEEMED RATHER STRANGE, FLORRY HAD TO ADMIT, THAT in the heat of its death convulsions, the POUM had chosen to liquidate him. One would have thought they were rather busy for such trifles. But no: this last act was crucial to them. He was surprised to discover how much passion had been invested in such a seemingly ludicrous act.

  Sylvia was led off, and the trial began almost immediately in a large maintenance shed at the rear of the deserted amusement park, in which at one time the park’s mechanisms and gizmos had been tended. As a courtroom it was barely adequate, certainly nothing like the elaborate courtroom in which another innocent man, Benny Lal, had met his fate. It was a cavernous old garage, with stone floor and a single bare bulb, almost a cliché of illumination borrowed from the cinema, and it was exceedingly drafty. One could see one’s breath. However, it did seem adequate, Florry had to admit, to the sort of justice being dispensed.

  The evidence was indisputable, especially as marshaled in the dry tones of the well-informed prosecutor, none other than the one-eyed Comrade Steinbach whose eloquence held the panel of judges—three meatpackers, a pimply teenager, and a wild-haired German youth—spellbound. Steinbach, without so much as a hello to his old chum Florry, pushed ahead with his case, as if he were eager to be done with the business.

  “Is it not true, Comrade Florry,” Steinbach said with the trace of an amused, ironic smile on his lips, and his good eye radiating intelligence and conviction, “that on the night before the attack against Huesca on April 27 of this year, you sent a message out from the trenches via a secret post to certain parties in Barcelona announcing the time and direction of our efforts?”

  Florry, cold and exhausted and suddenly terrified, knew the answer would doom him. But he supposed he was already doomed.

  “Yes, yes, I did. But I was trying to reach—”

  And he halted. He was trying to reach Sylvia. To mention Sylvia would be to involve her.

  But Steinbach was not interested in explanations anyway.

  With a flourish, he reached into his pocket and removed a sheet of paper. Florry recognized it instantly.

  Steinbach read it in a dry tone and its romantic conceits sounded absurd in the huge, cool shed.

  “Note,” said Steinbach, “how the clever Comrade Florry camouflages the crucial military information among terms of bourgeois endearment. To read it uncynically is to enco
unter a lover writing to another on the eve of battle. To read it in awareness of its true purpose is to see the nature of the betrayal.”

  “The girl has nothing to do with this!” shrieked Florry. “Where did you get that?”

  “It was in her purse,” he said.

  Damn, Sylvia. You should have thrown it out!

  “And is it not true, comrades of the tribunal,” he argued in his public voice, “that the attack was betrayed, our men pushed back, our party humiliated and weakened?”

  They nodded.

  “You don’t understand,” said Florry weakly. “It was innocent. I love the woman. I wanted to tell her that before the fight.”

  “Yet the attack failed, did it not? Because the Communist Brigades of the Thaelmann Column would not move out in support of our men and the Anarchists. Because they had been ordered by Barcelona to stay put. I give it to you, comrade, from one professional to another: a brilliant stroke.”

  Steinbach paused, as if to catch his breath.

  “Then,” said Steinbach, “there is the curious business of the explosion. Florry goes on the attack and does not come back from it; in the intervening day, an unknown fifth columnist detonates our magazine at La Granja. Then, miraculously, Florry returns with a minor flesh wound. Can this be coincidence? Or can Florry have inflicted his own wound as an excuse to go into hiding because he knew a Stalinist agent, acting on information he had supplied—and perhaps had been sent to enlist in our militia to obtain—was planning the potentially dangerous destruction of our munitions?”

  Florry saw his chance. Give them Julian, he thought. It was Julian. Give them Julian Raines, spy and traitor, neatly tied and bundled. You believed it yourself. Yet he said nothing.

  “Now we come to Comrade Florry’s masterpiece. The masterpiece of the bridge.”

  “I almost died on that bloody bridge!” shouted Florry. “Damn you, a hundred good men died that day!”

  “Yet the Fascists knew well in advance of the attack that it was planned, did they not?”

  “Yes, they did. We were betrayed. But not by—”

  “And is it not true that only you—you alone—of the attacking party survived?”

  “Yes. Yes, but we blew the bloody thing. We dropped it into the gorge—”

  “Yet is it not true, Comrade Florry, that the attack on Huesca had already been betrayed? By you? So that the bridge itself was irrelevant? And is it not curious, Comrade Florry, that on that same day the English poet and socialist patriot Julian Raines was murdered? Your own friend. Your own countryman?”

  “He was killed by Fascist bullets. He was a bloody hero,” Florry said. “He certainly would never have given up his life for you bastards if he’d have known—”

  “We have reports that place you over his body with a pistol in your hand. Did you shoot him?”

  “No.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “An old lady. To put him out of his misery. He’d caught one in the spine and another in the lungs. He was paralyzed and coughing blood.”

  “You ordered the woman to shoot.”

  “You bastard,” said Florry. “You even turn this against me.”

  It’s not too late, Florry thought. Give them Julian. The argument is perfect. Julian is the spy.

  “It may interest the tribunal to know that even the poet Raines had his doubts about Comrade Florry. I produce for you now a stanza discovered in his effects from his last poem, alas unfinished, ‘Pons.’ ” He smiled at Florry before reading.

  “Under the outer man, with his gloss, his charm,

  under the skin, the hair, the teeth,

  among the bones, the blood, the grief,

  there’s another man, a secret man, who would do harm.”

  “Now isn’t that interesting, Comrade Florry? It seems he’s describing you, does it not?”

  No it did not. It was Julian describing himself and his own secret self.

  “Who else, Comrade Florry, could Julian have been describing?”

  Florry looked to the rafters. Give them Julian, he thought, but it occurred to him that he was doomed anyway. They didn’t have Julian. They had him.

  “I have these many hours pored over the records,” Steinbach continued, “until at last I could see the pattern. I hold myself personally responsible for not seeing it sooner. I am an idiot. Perhaps my trial should begin after the conclusion of this one. But the truth is, wherever Comrade Florry or his lady friend have been and whomever he talks to, they have an odd habit of disappearing. Each mission he is assigned to has an odd habit of failing. And each disappearance and each failure is another nail in the coffin of our party.”

  “Sylvia had nothing to do with it,” said Florry. “She’s utterly innocent.”

  “And yet, Comrade Florry, is it mere coincidence that when our Comrade Carlos Brea sat at a table in the Grand Oriente, who should show up next to him but the girl? And within minutes, the Russian secret policemen arrive. And minutes later, Comrade Brea is shot dead in the street by parties unknown, in the care of the NKVD?”

  Then Florry had an inspiration. “The dates,” he argued. “Look at the dates. I didn’t arrive in Barcelona until the first part of January. Yet the arrests of your people had begun before that. There, does that not prove my innocence?”

  But Steinbach was ready for this.

  “Actually not. Before January there was no pattern to the arrests. The NKVD was clearly scooping up people blindly. In fact, as one example of their gropings, the category which suffered the most arrests was clearly non-political: it was dockworkers and minor maritime or port officials. Literally dozens of these chaps disappeared. Then Mr. Florry and Miss Lilliford arrive, and as if by magic, the arrests and liquidations of POUMistas begins in earnest.”

  Florry stared at him in fury.

  “I fought for you people. I killed for you. I nearly died—I would have died—for your bloody party. A man I loved more than any other died for your bloody party. The girl worked for months on your silly stinking little newspaper. Why are you doing this to us?”

  “You betrayed the comrades at Party headquarters. You betrayed the working classes of the world. You betrayed your countrymen Julian Raines and Billy Mowry. You betrayed the future. You and your master in the Kremlin. Only we have you and not him. So you will have to pay his debt, too.”

  When it came time for Florry to address the court, he had it all planned out.

  “Comrade?”

  “I ask,” he said, feeling very much the fool, “that since you are going to kill me, you at least spare the girl. She had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “If you confess, it will help,” said Steinbach. “Help her, that is. You are clearly beyond mercy.”

  “I cannot confess to what I have not done,” said Florry. “You ask a great deal of me.”

  Steinbach came over to where he was sitting and leaned over to talk more intimately.

  “You know,” he said, “you’ll make everybody much happier if you confess. It would put a pretty ribbon on it.”

  “I cannot confess to something I haven’t done,” said Florry. “If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me. But let’s be done with the game.”

  “It doesn’t really matter in the end. I just thought you might care to help the party out a bit.”

  Florry looked at him in dumfoundment. After several seconds his mouth closed.

  “I say,” he said, “you do expect a lot! I’m innocent and you know it and you’re evidently going to shoot me. And you have the nerve to ask if I care to pitch in?”

  “I suppose it does seem somewhat much. But look at it this way: whether you’re innocent or not isn’t really the point.”

  “It is very much to me.”

  “But in the larger view. You must learn to see the larger view, though admittedly it’s a bit late in the game for you. The point is, there was a spy. Indisputedly. I know where he was, how he worked. I’ve spent hours on the pattern. Yes, he was there, all right.
You, perhaps six or seven others, including the late Julian. The girl even—”

  “Stop it.”

  “Comrade, please. We have no time for sentiment. It doesn’t matter in the long run, for just as surely as you are doomed, so are we. I am the most wanted man in Barcelona and these others will go down with me. But what is at stake here goes beyond us and beyond Barcelona. You see, there are others in our struggle against Stalin for the soul of the left. Trotsky is one, but again, the man doesn’t matter so much as the idea of the world revolution. It’s worth dying for. The point, however, is this. If we were defeated in Barcelona because our ideas were bad, because we could not compete ideologically, because the people would not believe in us, then our theory is wrong, and we are doomed. On the other hand, if we were defeated because we were betrayed—because of a Judas planted by Stalin—then our ideas remain sound and will continue to inspire. They in fact are so frightening to Moscow that Stalin himself leads the fight against us. That is impressive. Thus it is necessary that there be a spy. It doesn’t even really matter if he’s the right spy. Just so that we find him, try him, sentence him, and execute him. Thus, surely you can see how nice it would be for you to leave that confession. That little ribbon for history. Where’s your sense of duty? Surely they taught you that at Eton?”

  “Bugger Eton,” said Florry. “I only care about Sylvia.”

  “She is a lovely thing. Florry, I was once young myself, and in love. She was killed by Friekorps officers in Munich in ’nineteen. Raped, beaten, shot. It cured me of my illusions. And my eye.”

  He smiled.

  “Let her live, Steinbach, and I’ll sign something.”

  “All right,” said Steinbach. “You’ve made your bargain.”

  It took them a while to work something out that Florry could put his name to, but in the end, the document, though more vague than Steinbach would have preferred and more explicit than Florry wanted, was complete.

  “This is utterly idiotic,” he said, scratching his name at the bottom.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any event, it shall eventually be run in a leftist newspaper someplace or other as part of our testament. You have managed one thing, Comrade Florry. You have managed to enter history.”