Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  “No. But we can’t stay here much longer.”

  “What time is it?” she asked. “I feel like I’ve slept for several days.”

  “It’s nearly nine. The sun has been down about an hour.”

  “God, I could use a bath.”

  “I admire your sense of self, though I must say it’s a queer time to think of bathing.”

  “I hate to feel dirty,” she said. “I absolutely loathe it.”

  Florry continued to look out the dark window. His eyes burned and the fatigue threatened to overtake him. He was gripping the pistol far too tightly. A few minutes back something had snapped in the house and he’d almost fired crazily. He knew he was getting close to his edge.

  “It’s the papers,” he said, “that will kill us. Or rather, our lack of them. We can get spiffy, I suppose, or at least spiffy by Spanish standards. We can clean up and look the right proper travelers. But if we get to the station and the Asaltos stop us or some NKVD chaps, then we’ve bought it.”

  He could feel his teeth grinding in the bitterness of it all.

  Papers. Authentication. Perhaps the consulate … no, of course not, the NKVD would be watching the consulate. Perhaps they could buy the bloody things somewhere in the quarter. But how to make contact? How to raise the money? How to make sure one wasn’t being observed or that one wouldn’t be betrayed? Florry had always run with the hunters when he was a copper. Now he was running with the hunted. He shook his head. There were no rules, as there were in the daylight world: you simply did what you had to, that was the only rule.

  “I suppose we could try to walk to the frontier, traveling by night. It’s only about a hundred miles north. We might make it undetected. Then we could make it across the Pyrenees—Good God, half the International Brigades marched over the Pyrenees, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to make it. Or we—” But he stopped.

  It was absurd. One hundred miles without papers, neither of them speaking the language with any authority, the NKVD in full command of the police and hungry for foreign spies to put against the wall.

  “Robert—”

  “The port, Sylvia. I think that would be our best bet. I’ve been thinking about it. If we can get down to Barrio Chino, perhaps I can make some sort of contact with a foreign seaman and arrange a passage …”

  “Robert, please listen to me.”

  “Eh?”

  “I can get us out of here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Do you remember that chap of yours you borrowed the book from. The newspaper fellow. Sampson?”

  “Yes.” Sampson! Bloody Sampson, of course!

  “Yes, well he’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. Yes, briefly to Madrid, then back to England. His assignment was over, he said.”

  Florry said nothing. Yes, it would be over, would it not? Sampson, back safe and sound, leaving them in the lurch.

  “But when I gave him the book, he said something quite peculiar. It was the address. He kept repeating it over and over again, in such a way that I’d be certain to remember it. He kept saying, ‘You know you’re always welcome at my place, 126 Calle de Oriente.’ He said it over and over again. Remember, he said, you’re always welcome. Any of your chums, too, always welcome. Robert especially. Bring Robert by any time. Then he told me he was leaving for England, but the invitation was still open. Drop in with Robert, if you’ve a mind, he kept saying, 126 Calle de Oriente.”

  Florry thought about it. He thought he remembered something about a pro forma invitation dinner at Sampson’s, but wasn’t that at a villa of some sort? Perhaps he’d moved. But it was queer, was it not? That the priggish, awful Sampson should suddenly come on like an old school chum, so completely out of character. What on earth—?

  “Robert, what sort of man was he? It was almost as if he were giving me a message for you. A message that I would—”

  “He was telling us where to go,” Florry said suddenly, realizing it. “Yes, yes, he was. He was … he was saving us.”

  There was no answer at the apartment at 126 Calle de Oriente, in a quiet residential block in the shadow of Montjuich to which he and Sylvia had traveled the next morning with surprisingly little difficulty. He knocked again, then ran his fingers up top along the doorjamb.

  “Christ,” he said, almost stunned when he found the key.

  They stepped into eerie silence. The place looked surprisingly neat, as if it hadn’t been occupied in months. The furniture was coated with dust.

  “Sampson didn’t have much of a personal life,” said Florry. “But at least it’s a place to hide out while we decide what to do next. And perhaps we can get that bath.”

  “There must be something here,” said Sylvia, with a note of desperation in her voice. “If there isn’t we’re—”

  Across the room, in the bookshelf, Florry saw a copy of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne.

  He walked swiftly to it, pulled it from the shelf, and pried it open.

  “Robert?”

  “Sylvia, why don’t you take a rest?”

  “No, Robert. I must know. That damned book, it’s followed us through Spain.”

  He opened it. In the inside cover, someone had written, November 2, 1931.

  He turned to, held the book against the light, and detected the puncture. He turned two pages and found another.

  In minutes he was done.

  BEDROOM FLOORBRD 3D ROW 3D SLAT, it said.

  He went swiftly into the next room, peeled back the rug, found the board, and tugged at it. With some effort he got it out. There was a paper package. He pulled it out, pried it open. In it were two crisp British passports, a wad of thousand-peseta notes, a wad of pound notes. Florry examined his passport: it was a clever forgery, using the official picture from his copper days. It identified him as a Mr. George Trent, of Bramstead, Hampstead on Heath. Sylvia’s, equally ingenious, identified her as Mrs. Trent.

  “God,” she said. “That’s my school photo.”

  “Well,” he said. “It’s our way out.”

  “And you,” she said sounding stunned. “Robert, you’re a spy.”

  “Yes,” he said. “MI-6, actually.”

  They enjoyed a curious sense of security in the apartment, a sensation—on Florry’s part, at any rate—of having been looked after. It was as if in this one chamber in one building in the revolutionary and political chaos that was Barcelona a kind of separate peace had been obtained. It was something they both needed desperately: a holiday.

  The plumbing worked; they bathed. Layers of scum and grime came off Florry and for the first time in weeks he became unaware of his own odor or the terrible sense of crawly things at play in his thick hair. He found a razor—wasn’t Sampson the thoughtful one?—and scraped his face clean. He looked with surprise and a sense of shock at the man who greeted him from the steamy mirror. A tall fellow with a thatch of thick hair, its natural lightness beginning to go to gray. Meanwhile, two parentheses had been inscribed into the flesh of the cheeks, seeming to seal off the prim mouth from the rest of it. A network of wrinkles enshrouded the dulled eyes and the cheekbones stood out like doorknobs. A starburst of pink, clustered tissue showed just under his collar line where the bullet had gone through him.

  Christ, I’m old, he thought Old and battered. What happened to that silly youth who wrote bad Georgian poetry amid the moths and pink gins of Burma? Where did that fool go? To dust, with his chums in Red Spain.

  He went to preparing his kit: he brushed off his suit and hung it out to smooth itself over the night; it had been through so much and looked shiny and baggy, but the English wool was tough. It would survive. It was Julian’s final legacy: aristocratic tailoring, which in fact might get them through.

  Julian. You think of everything, don’t you?

  Kill me, Julian had said.

  Florry turned away from a melancholy recital of his own failures; there’d be a lifetime for that if they got beyond th
e frontier. He washed out his shirt and watched the grime from it cling to the basin. He hung it on a hanger and hoped it would dry for the morning.

  Wrapped in a blanket, he went out into the living room to find Sylvia in the middle of her preparations. She’d brushed and cleaned her dress and hung it out over a pot of steaming water.

  “It’ll look smashing,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “I can hardly believe that tomorrow we’ll be out of here. We’ve got money, we’ve got papers, we’ve got the proper look. We can buy some luggage. Robert, we’re almost—”

  He sat down.

  “We haven’t had much time together, although we’ve been in each other’s company for about three solid days. I mean, time for us. That is, if there is an us. Now that Julian’s gone.”

  “Robert, let’s just concentrate on getting out of here now, shall we? Let’s make certain there’s a you and a me before we worry about an us.”

  He looked at her, her neck, her gray green eyes, her mass of feathery hair. A beauty, but someone else’s beauty. He’d lost her, but had she ever been his to begin with—or was that merely another Spanish illusion?

  “All right,” he said, “I won’t mention it again until we’re out of here. I—I just wish I could stop thinking about us.”

  “If the NKVD catches you, you’ll cease it soon enough, Robert,” she said tiredly.

  “There is one other thing,” he said. “I had just thought how nice it would be if we had our own luggage, Sylvia. After all, you must have had some—”

  “It’s at the hotel, Robert. The clothes I bought, in a suitcase. But they will be watching the hotel.”

  “But can they watch it all the time? I mean, let’s look at the odds. They’re looking for escaping POUMistas, not prosperous British travelers. They’re not looking for us. They’re looking for a certain category. We are no longer in that category, don’t you see? Thus, it occurs to me how easy it would be to simply pop in and get your bag on the way to the station. Don’t you see?”

  She looked at him, and then explained as if to a child.

  “It’s too risky. It’s a straight run to the station by tram or cab and we can make it. If we putt around after silly bags, then we’re fools and we deserve our fates.”

  “Sylvia—”

  “Robert, for God’s sake, we can make it. Don’t you see? There’s nothing—”

  “I told Julian I would give his ring to his mother. His ring is in my coat. My coat is in your bag. Your bag is in the hotel. If I could, I would go myself, alone. But don’t you see, the room is in your name. They wouldn’t let me—”

  She shook her head.

  “Two weeks ago you hated him. Now you love him. Now you’ll risk yourself to perform some foolish romantic gesture in his memory. You really are a fool, Robert. But you certainly won’t risk me.”

  “He was my friend. I must help him. Very well, I’ll go by myself. Perhaps I can talk the chaps into letting me in. I’ll see you at the station. We can travel by—”

  “Robert—”

  “I must get that ring!” he shouted. He had never shouted at her before and she was stunned. He felt himself shaking.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have raised my voice. It’s just that—”

  “God, Robert, the virtue in you is appalling. It’s actually quite repugnant.”

  “You have no idea how many times I let him down, Sylvia. How I let him down, how I betrayed him. How at the moment when he asked me for one thing, I could not do it. Perhaps we had better leave separately tomorrow. You go your way, and I’ll go mine. I’m going to get that ring one way or another.”

  “Robert, you are such a bloody fool. I shall get your bloody ring for you then, if it means so much.” She was quite angry.

  They left early the next morning, a doddering, nittering couple, fascinated into open-mouthed dumfoundment by all they saw about them. They pointed gawkishly at soldiers. They asked foolish questions loudly, in English. They tried to find a good cup of tea.

  It was only a matter of hours. The train for the frontier left at one. They took a tram across town.

  “Salud, señor,” said the conductor, accepting Florry’s peseta piece.

  At the hotel, it went with surprising ease. Sylvia’s bag had been stashed and they went to look for it. Florry stood in the lobby stupidly, waiting until it came. It was a mahogany room, full of flowers, quite civilized in feeling. He looked about. There seemed to be no one of interest in the lobby. There were no secret policemen or Asaltos. At last the bag was produced.

  “Splendid,” said Florry heartily, and he gave the boy an enormous tip.

  They went outside and found a cab.

  “There,” he said, “you see, it was easy.”

  “It was stupid,” she said.

  “It took us a bloody five minutes. It cost us nothing. We’ve done it. We’ve made it. We’ll be at the station in minutes. Nobody saw us.”

  He was almost right. One man had seen them standing outside the hotel, and only one. Unfortunately, it was Ugarte.

  38

  UGARTE

  UGARTE’S CHANCE TO REDEEM HIMSELF IN THE EYES OF HIS boss came at around twenty minutes to one. He was sitting slouched like the pimp he’d once been on the steps of the cathedral watching the hotel; all sensibly gave him wide berth, for he was a dangerous-looking man, chewing a toothpick with the arrogant sullenness of one who is willing to commit violence. As he brought his eyes up in a lazy scan of the crowd—it was that close, another second and he’d have missed them entirely—he saw a tall gentleman of obviously foreign extraction and his missus blinking confusedly as they attempted to negotiate, bag in hand, their way toward the street and eventually a cab.

  Ugarte’s eyes beheld them, almost dismissed them, then almost lost them in the crowd, and then at last brought them into focus for study as they bobbed awkwardly through the crowd: yes, perhaps. They looked older and graver, somehow; he’d been expecting glossy, beautiful children, and these two dodderers were gray and halting. Yet as he watched them he became aware of how much of the illusion of age was merely the result of profound fatigue, amplified by the gauntness of hunger. And that, furthermore, there was a queer theatrical dimension to them: he sensed their strain. They were not, not quite, who they seemed to be.

  Ugarte’s dilemma became vivid. Comrade Bolodin’s instructions had been precise: observe, but do not intercept unless absolutely necessary. At first chance, contact headquarters. Retain observation. Do not apprehend.

  Ugarte was most anxious not to offend the great Bolodin, whom he loved and feared as no man he’d ever met in his life. Yet he watched with a sort of hypnotized dolor as they entered the vehicle, closed the door, and it pulled away. His eyes felt hooded and sleepy, his brain damaged. What was involved here was something quite beyond his experience: a decision. Carrujo, what to do? His misery increased.

  Then, without willing it, his feet begin to move. He found himself racing back through the crowd, pushing his way into the street. He waved down a car and pulled his SIM card. Terrified eyes met his.

  “The station!” he shrieked, “or it’s your death!”

  When he got there, he could not find them. He had a moment’s terror. It occurred to him he could lie about the whole thing. He could deny it had ever happened. Bolodin would never know. That’s what he would—

  Then he saw them. As they pushed their way through the crowds, they moved with uneasy tentativeness that was almost their best disguise. He watched as they made their way. They reached Via 7 where a huge train was loading. They showed their tickets at the gate and were admitted. Ugarte looked up to the black sign under the numeral seven that displayed destinations and saw a long list, the last entry in which was PORT BOU (LA FRONTERA).

  Ugarte leaped ahead through the crowd. He pushed his way along, under the few revolutionary banners that nobody had gotten around to removing yet, and made his way toward the set of iron stairs against the far wall of the station whic
h led up to a balcony, a door, a window, clearly some sort of station headquarters. At the top, there stood a young Asalto with a machine pistol.

  “¡Halto!” screamed the boy, quaking at the apparition of the crazed man flying toward him.

  “Fool,” yelled Ugarte, shaking with excitement. He pulled out his SIM card again, feeling very much like a real policeman. “Do you know what this means? I could have you shot! I could have your family shot! Out of the way!”

  The boy, a Valencia bumpkin, seemed to melt, and Ugarte pushed his way into the room where several bored and seedy but vaguely official-looking men sat at desks.

  “I command you in the name of the people,” said Ugarte, who had heretofore only commanded low women in the name of his wallet, “to delay train number seven. Now, where’s a telephone?”

  Lenny did not panic when the call came, nor did he stop to quiver at the closeness, the tentativeness, of the connection to his quarry. He simply knew what had to be done next and set about to do it. He knew that if Florry were leaving, the gold was leaving, presumably among his effects, or perhaps by way of a shipment, melted down in some innocuous way. He knew that the gold was most vulnerable when it was being moved, because guile, not armed guards, were the essence of the GRU operation. Whatever, he knew that the answers rested with the man Florry, who had to be persuaded, somehow, to share his knowledge. Lenny did not doubt that he could convince Florry to cooperate but what terrified him was the danger of discovery. He wanted to separate Florry from his secrets at his leisure, far from inquiring eyes. He had decided, therefore, to allow the man to leave the country and to take him in France.

  Lenny left instantly for the station. In fact, he was packed and ready in more ways than any of the men who worked for him or any of the men he now worked for could possibly know. He had planned toward this day for some time, and the planning was exquisitely complete. It was not merely a question of a bag, a change of clothes, and a tin of toothpowder; he had such a bag, but sewed into its lid were, first, a British passport in the name of Edward Fenney, an expensive forgery, and, second, fifteen crisp thousand-dollar bills U.S., his savings from various unofficial activities in Barcelona.