Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  “History is revolting,” said Florry.

  The execution was set for dawn; about an hour before, they served him his last meal, some scrawny chicken cooked in too much oil, and a large skin of red wine.

  “The chicken isn’t terribly good, I’m afraid,” said Steinbach. “But the wine should prove helpful.”

  “I’m already numb, you bastard.”

  “Try not to be bitter, comrade. Surely all the men here will join you under the ground in the weeks ahead.”

  “It can’t happen too soon for my taste. What about the girl?”

  “She’s fine. Tough, that one. I’m impressed. Would you like me to bring her by? A sort of last-minute farewell. It might appeal to your romanticism.”

  “No, spare her that. This is hard enough without that. You’ll see that she gets out?”

  “We’ll do what we must. Would you like a priest?”

  “I’m not a Catholic. Besides, I haven’t sinned. And aren’t you an atheist?”

  “In my dotage, I seem to have acquired the habit of hypocrisy. Then, should I tell her anything? The obvious?”

  “How would you know what was obvious?”

  “I’m not so stupid, Florry. I’ll tell her that you loved her till the end. She’ll have good memories of you, then.”

  “She’s lost everybody that she cared about in Spain,” said Florry.

  Steinbach laughed evilly. “So has everybody, Florry.”

  Florry found he had no taste for the wine, which was young and bitter anyway, but that the chicken was rather good. Steinbach had lied about that as well as everything else. He tried to take a little nap after he was through eating because he was still exhausted, but, of course, he could get no sleep. It was absurd. They were going to shoot him because they needed a demon and he was available. He was in the right category.

  Yet as the time of his death neared, he found what he regretted most was not being able to give Julian’s mother her son and husband’s ring. That was the one thing Julian had wanted and the one thing he’d thought of at the moment of his own death. It seemed like one more failure to Florry. It was in the Burberry smashed into the suitcase in the closet of the hotel. He brooded about this obsessively until he could stand it no longer. He banged on the door, and after a while Steinbach came by.

  “Yes?”

  “Have you seen the girl yet?”

  “No. She’s resting. She doesn’t know what’s happening.”

  “Look, tell her this for me. Tell her the ring in the coat is for Julian’s mother. She’s to get that to the woman, all right?”

  Steinbach said he would, though his look informed Florry he thought it a queer last request. Then he left again. In a bit, a gray light began to filter through the cracks of the closet in which they’d locked him. He heard laughter and the approach of footsteps.

  The lock clicked as the key turned in it; the door opened. A boy stood there with a rifle.

  “Es la hora, comrade,” he said.

  Florry rose and was roughly grabbed by three other boys. His hands were tied behind his back. They fell into formation behind him and led him through the deserted garage.

  In the half-light, the deserted mountaintop had turned ghostly. Mist had risen and clung everywhere and the amusement apparatus, scabby ancient machines, loomed through it. The Ferris wheel was a circle of comical perfection standing above it all. The boys led him to the scaffolding that was the base of a roller-coaster.

  “Cigarette, Florry?” asked Steinbach, waiting with several others.

  “Yes,” said Florry. “God, you’re not going to do it here? In a bloody park?”

  “No. The boys will take you down the hill into the forest. The grave has been dug. Actually, it was dug yesterday morning.” He lit a cigarette in his own mouth, then placed it in Florry’s in a gesture of surprising intimacy. Then he added, “Or rather two graves.”

  He could see her now, in the group of men. They had gotten a cape for her, to keep her warm, but her hands had been tied.

  “You told me—” Florry started.

  “I argued, old man, but the judges were insistent. You wrote that note to her. She sat with Brea. Clearly she was involved.”

  “Oh, God, Steinbach, she’s innocent, don’t you see? Tell them, for God’s sake.”

  “Take them,” said Steinbach, turning away. “And be done with the filthy business.”

  The rough teenage boys pushed Florry along.

  “God, Sylvia, I’m so sorry,” he said. “It’s all so unfair.”

  Sylvia looked at him with dead eyes. “I knew what I was getting into,” she said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “As if that helps,” she replied, with a little shake of her head.

  They walked down the steeply sloping road away from the park surrounded by five boys, the eldest perhaps twenty, who was the sargento and chief executioner. On either side of the road, the dark, dense forest rose. It was perfectly still, though the sky had begun to fill with light, and the air was moist. The road descended Tibidabo by virtue of switchbacks, and after they had gone around several sharp turns and had traveled perhaps half a mile, the young sergeant halted them.

  “This way,” he said in polite English. He had a big automatic pistol; the others had gigantic, ancient rifles.

  He took them off the road and through the damp bracken and groundcover of the woods. They followed a path a few hundred feet in, though the going was awkward, given the extreme slope of the land, until they reached a small clearing in the trees, where two shallow graves had been scooped out.

  “It’s a pity, isn’t it?” Florry said. “All of it. They’re just bloody fools, doing their worst. Animals, idiots.”

  “I say, do you mind awfully shutting up?” she said. “I don’t feel much like chatter.”

  The boys got them to the edge of the holes, then stood back to form what appeared to be an extremely amateur firing squad. Each seemed to have a different firearm, and the youngest looked absolutely sick at what was about to happen, not that Florry could spare the wretched boy any pity. The sargento was the only one among them who had any sort of self-possession. He busied himself importantly examining weapons and setting caps just right and making sure belts were properly adjusted. He’d make a fine little Bolshevik commissar, Florry thought; too bad he’d picked the wrong party.

  Damn these boys: could they not get it bloody over? Florry’s knees had begun to knock and his breath came in little pinched sobs and his eyes were wide open like upstairs windows into which flew birds and clouds and everything on earth. Sylvia leaned or almost huddled against him; he could feel her trembling and wished he could at least hold her or offer her some comfort in this terrible moment.

  “¡Preparen para disparar!” barked the sargento.

  The boys attempted to come to a formal position and lifted their rifles to aim. The muzzles wobbled terribly, because the weapons were so heavy. One of the idiot children had even fixed a bayonet to his rifle.

  Sylvia had begun to weep. She had collapsed against him, yet he could not hold her because his hands were tied. He looked about. His eyes seemed magically open—the forest, filled with low beams of light and towering columns of mist and soft, wet, heavy air, seemed to whirl about him.

  Let it be clean, he prayed. Let it be clean.

  “Apunten,” the sargento barked.

  “The bastards,” Florry heard himself saying.

  Then they heard the noise.

  “Esperan. ¿Que es eso ruido?”

  At first it was a far-off putter, almost something to be ignored. Yet it rose, persistent, the labored sound of an engine—no, two, perhaps three—climbing the steep road of Tibidabo.

  “Es una camion, sargento,” one of the boys said.

  “¡Carrajo! Bueno, no disparen,” the sergeant said, looking about in confusion. The soldiers let their rifles droop.

  Through the trees, they saw the vehicles, big and cumbersome, loaded with troops as they lumb
ered by.

  “Asaltos,” somebody whispered.

  Just beyond them, the trucks halted. An officer got out and the men climbed down in their clanking battle gear. Their bayonets were fixed. They formed into a loose attack formation, rifles at the half-port, and began a jogtrot up the hill toward the amusement park. Two men at the rear of the column carried a Hotchkiss machine gun and tripod.

  “The Stalinists have caught up with Steinbach,” Florry murmured.

  Sylvia collapsed to the ground, but only Florry noticed. At the top of the hill, there was no suspense. The firing started almost immediately. They could hear the dry, rolling crack of the rifles and the stutter of the Hotchkiss gun.

  “They’re really giving it to them,” Florry said.

  He turned back to the firing squad. The sergeant was clearly bewildered, not sure where his duty lay. But the boys of the little unit weren’t: they were at the point of panic with the gunfire so close.

  Florry watched as the sergeant struggled with his indecision. And then he said, as if having at last conquered himself, “¡No! ¡La hora de su muerte está aquí!” He pointed at Florry melodramatically.

  “¡Muerte!” he said, raising the pistol. Then he slumped forward with a spastic’s drool coming from his inert face and thudded heavily to the earth. Behind him, the boy who’d crushed his skull stood in shocked horror for just a second before pitching the rifle into the brush and heading out at a dead run. His compatriots studied the situation for perhaps half a second, then abandoned their weapons just as resolutely and fled just as swiftly.

  Florry rushed to the rifle with the bayonet, bent to it, and in a few seconds of steady sawing had himself free. He slipped the bayonet from the gun muzzle and ran to Sylvia to cut her free.

  “Come on,” he said, picking up the sergeant’s automatic, “we’ve got to get out of here.”

  Up top, the shooting had at last died down. Florry and Sylvia pushed their way deeper into the forest, away from the trucks, and found the going nearly impossible for the bracken and the undergrowth. In time, they were swallowed up by the trees and seemed far away from everything. And soon after, they came to the rusty tracks of the disused funicular, by which in calmer days Barceloneans had traveled to the amusement park and the church up there. Descending its gravel bed was easier than trying to fight their way down through the undergrowth, and by noon, they had reached the base of the mountain. The houses were sparse at first, but within a bit they found themselves in what must have at one time been a fashionable district, on a serpentine street flanked by great houses that now seemed deserted.

  They forced the gate on one of these and went out back. The house was secure against the return of the owners in some distant, better future, but in the servant’s quarters, a door gave way to Florry’s shoulder and they were in and safe.

  36

  TIBIDABO

  BY THE TIME COMRADE COMMISSAR BOLODIN AND HIS men arrived at the top of Tibidabo Mountain, the fighting was over. As Ugarte pulled the big Ford to a halt by the assault guard trucks a few hundred feet below the gate of the amusement park, Lenny could feel his rage beginning to peak; it seemed to be replacing itself with some other feeling, odd and sickening. Lenny felt as though he might vomit. Suppose, he wondered, the ache in his stomach watery and loose, suppose they were dead? Suppose his deal was all fucked, shot dead by gun-happy assault guards from Valencia “protecting” the revolution from traitors.

  “Ah! Comrade Bolodin,” someone said with great smug cheer. Lenny turned to discover a gallant young Asalto officer, his arm in a sling, a cigarette in his mouth, cap pushed back cockily on his head. The youngster looked sunny as a valentine: he couldn’t wait for the compliments to come raining down on his handsome head.

  “Captain Degas, of the Eleventh Valencia Guardia de Asalto,” the young officer introduced himself, snapping his heels together with a flourish and coming to a kind of mocking attention. “You’ll see, comrade commissar, that the problem of the Fascist traitors, chief among them the notorious Steinbach, has been solved.”

  “Any prisoners?” Lenny demanded in his rude Spanish.

  “I regret to inform the commissar of the Servicio de Investigación Militar that resistance by the traitors and spies was formidable, and that the taking of prisoners proved imposs—”

  Lenny smashed his stupid, smart young face with the back of his hand, watching the man spin backward and drop, a look of stunned surprise and sudden shame running quickly across his brilliant features.

  “Stupido,” Lenny barked. “Idiot. I ought to have shot.”

  He was aware of the Asaltos going silent all around him. He felt their curious and shocked eyes.

  “Explanations,” Lenny barked.

  “We’re stationed down the mountain in Sarria. An informant told us a band of POUM traitors was hiding up here and agreed to lead us to them. We were acting under the strictest revolutionary orders issued by the government and signed by the commander of the Servicio de Investigación Militar, that is, Comrade Commissar Bolodin himself.”

  “Bring this informer.”

  “Ramirez,” the captain shouted.

  A second or so later, a seedy-looking Spaniard in a black jacket was brought over. He held his cap nervously in his hands. Lenny listened as he explained: he was the caretaker of a nearby estate. With the people gone, he got by as best he could and was out late the night before when a truck pulled into the park and he realized that it was being used by traitors. He’d seen a tall man in a suit and a girl get out of the truck.

  “¿Inglés?”

  “Yes, perhaps inglés.”

  “With a mustache?”

  He was not sure. But the man had a dark suit and blondish hair.

  “Pay the man,” Lenny said. “He did his duty. You should have contacted us. It’s you who didn’t do yours.”

  “My apol—”

  “Fuck your apologies. Now get rid of this man, and take us to the bodies.”

  “This way, please, comrade. We brought them out for burial.”

  Degas led him across the yard to the shed. Lenny saw that it was splintered and ruptured by gunfire, one window blackened with flames where a bomb had gone off. The smell of smoke still hung in the air.

  The dead, about fifteen, lay in a row in the sun outside the garage. Most were chewed up rather badly by the machine gun and the bomb and they had the scruffy, ragged indolence of corpses. Flies buzzed about. There were puddles of blood, thick and black, all over the ground.

  “That one was the leader,” said Degas. “The old man in the turtleneck. He yelled that we were Stalin’s killers. He’s the one with this.”

  The boy held up a glass eye.

  The little marble sparkled in his gloved fingers, the pupil open wide and black and blue.

  “Throw the fucking thing away, sonny,” Lenny said.

  He went to look at Steinbach. The old man had been shot in the throat and the chest and the hand. His gray sweater was the color of raspberry ice.

  “We found this, too, comrade,” said Degas. “It is in English. No one here can read it.”

  He handed Lenny a sheet of paper covered with a blue scrawl:

  I, the undersigned, take full responsibility for that which I am about to receive and wish to establish that I was acting under orders from the highest authority. I acknowledge that I have taken from the revolution its most precious treasure and that I, and I alone, am responsible.

  It was signed, Robert Florry (British citizen).

  Lenny looked at it for a long moment, breathing heavily.

  “Is it important, comrade?” asked Degas.

  “It’s nothing,” said Lenny, putting it in his pocket. “And this was all?”

  “Yes, comrade commissar.”

  “And nobody escaped?”

  “No, comrade.”

  “And so what has happened to the tall man and the girl that that fellow told you about?”

  “I-I couldn’t say, comrade commissar.”


  “Did you investigate?”

  “I didn’t see the point.”

  “Could they have escaped?”

  “Not unless it was before my men got here.”

  “Have you searched the park?”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  “Everywhere? The woods down the mountain?”

  “I sent a patrol about to check. Perhaps in the melee some POUMistas scampered away. But I do not think so. We caught them entirely by surprise. They were eating. Chicken with rice. They were in the middle of—”

  He halted.

  “Look, comrade commissar,” he said, his face suddenly brightening. He pointed.

  Three Asaltos were entering the gates. They prodded before them with their bayonet points a sargento in the black mono of the POUM. Blood ran down his face from a wound in his scalp, but it had dried. He had a vacant, stupid look in his eyes.

  “Comrade captain,” yelled one of the soldiers, “come see what we found snoozing in the woods!”

  “Lucky man, Degas,” said Bolodin. “If that guy tells me what I want to know, you’ll get your medal. And you were about to be shot.”

  37

  PAPERS

  DO YOU KNOW?” SHE SAID, AWAKENING, “I HAD A MARVELOUS dream. I was back in London, in a nice flat. I had a dog. I was listening to the BBC. I was reading Mayfair. It was very, very boring. I hated to leave it.”

  “Who could blame you?” he said, aware as he took a quick glance about that he had not been included in the dream. What he saw was what he’d been looking at for hours now: the dust was thick as a carpet, the furniture ruined, the walls bare and peeling. An odor of neglect clung to the room. Outside, or rather of what he could see outside in the dark, there was no movement whatsoever, though occasionally a truckload of Asaltos would heave by. He had been at the window for hours, while she slept. He had the automatic in his hand.

  “Do you see anything?”