Tapestry of Spies

by Stephen Hunter

  “Pretty shot, sir,” said Davis.

  “Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning, handing back the club.

  “Sir, may I say, it’s an honor to see a man who knows how to play the game.”

  “Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning.

  It was a bonny bright day full of elms and summer under a lilac English sky. Major Holly-Browning’s spikes gripped the moist turf as he walked.

  “I say, Holly-Browning, well-struck,” C called out, not without some bitterness, for his own second shot had come to rest a good twenty-five feet below the green. But that was as it had been and should be.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the major.

  In the past, Holly-Browning, an excellent golfer, had held back when playing with his service chief, out of respect for the protocols of rank. It was how one rose, or so many believed. But not today.

  “Well, Holly-Browning, I daresay you’re playing well,” said C, falling into step beside him.

  “I seem to be, for some reason, sir.”

  “Good to get you out on the links after all that time hibernating in the office. Now that awful business in Spain is finished and we are well quit of our bad apple.”

  They reached C’s ball. The old man took an eight iron from his boy and, with a great, grunting effort, chopped a shot too high; it rolled way beyond the cup, coming to rest on the apron at the far side of the green, easily (given C’s gracelessness) three putts’ distance off.

  “Damned bad luck, sir.”

  “Ah, bloody gone. Sometimes it’s there, sometime’s it’s not.”

  “You’re out, sir.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  C took the putter and went to his ball. After what seemed an interminable period bent over studying a trajectory whose subtleties he could never hope to master, he rose, addressed the ball, and, with a show of concentration, patted at it weakly. The ball rose over a hump in the green, picked up speed, and began to veer crazily off, finally petering out still a good ten feet from the cup.

  “Blast!” said C. “It’s certainly not my day! Go on, putt out, Holly-Browning.”

  Holly-Browning moved to his ball and crouched to study his own course to the cup. Then, having swiftly settled on a strategy, he climbed back up and faced the little white thing, crisp and immaculate as a carnation before him. He tucked his elbows and locked his wrists and willed his chin to sink, almost submerge, into his chest, and with the barest, most imperceptible of motions, he tapped the ball toward the cup. It hugged the contours of the green, seemed to roll and glide of its own volition, and once almost died, but then picked up a final spurt on the downward side of the green’s last little bulge and dropped in with the sound of a wooden spoon falling onto a wooden floor.

  “Good heavens, you’re playing well today, Holly-Browning. Been taking lessons?”

  “Actually, I haven’t touched a club since July of last year,” said Holly-Browning.

  If C caught the reference to the beginning of the Spanish War and the defector Lemontov’s flight to the Americans, he didn’t show it. He bent and patted out another dud of a putt, which still left him a solid three feet shy.

  “Damn. My chap keeps telling me to keep my head locked but I always seem to look up. What do you recommend, Holly-Browning? What’s your secret?”

  “Just hard work, sir. Practice, all that.”

  “Yes, indeed. By the way, James, I thought I ought to tell you. It seems there may be a bit of a stink.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh, nothing really. It’s that MI-5 bunch. They seem to have found out all about it. I thought I was done with them.”

  “I thought in principle they agreed with our handling of the case, sir.”

  “It’s not a question of that, old man. It’s just that their interrogators never got a crack at the inside part of Julian’s head. Now bloody Sir Vernon has his dander up. A terrible bother.”

  Holly-Browning didn’t say anything.

  “They’ve put it out that it was a personal thing between you and Raines, with poor Florry just the errand boy in the middle.”

  “That quite simplifies things, sir,” said Holly-Browning, stung at the injustice of it all.

  “I know that, Holly-Browning. But that’s what these damned security people are: simplifiers. Everything’s black and white to them.”

  “Yessir.”

  “And, I should tell you, there are those in our own house who think Section V ought to leave the red lads alone and concentrate on the gray lads. Jerry’s the next big show, eh?”

  “Yessir, I suppose Jerry is.”

  They had reached the next tee. Birds sang, tulips bloomed, still ponds reflected the sun’s gold touch, and vivid butterflies hung in the light. The sky was cobalt blue, a purity the bizarre English clime permits rarely enough. Ahead, several argyle-clad figures in plus-fours and caps putted out on a par three, 108 yards out.

  “Damn this fellow Hitler. He really has confused the world, hasn’t he?”

  “Yessir, he has.”

  C planted his ball on the tee, took his three wood, and addressed the thing with a waggle of his rear end, knotting his fingers into a confusion of sausages about the club.

  “And that’s why I’m placing you in charge of a key operation, James. It’s a big move, James.”

  Holly-Browning showed nothing on his face. He simply nodded.

  “It’s a big job, James. Take your wife and daughters out if it suits. It’ll get you away from Broadway. Most bracing change, I say. You shall have Jamaica station. Damn, I must say, I envy you. Jamaica!”

  The bloody colonies! An island full of niggers and flowers!

  C swung. The ball popped off the tee, bending oddly in the air, its flight weirdly crippled, and sank itself in a trap with a puff of sand.

  “Damn! Damn!” said C. “I simply wasn’t meant to play this bloody game. In any event, I suppose I’ll have to boost your fellow Vane up to Section V head. He’s the right chap, don’t you think?”

  Holly-Browning shuddered at the idea of Vane as V (a).

  “A splendid idea,” he said.

  “And I’ll bring this young Sampson in to help him. He’ll be V (b), eh? He’s a bright chap; he can handle London, don’t you think?”

  “Yessir,” said Holly-Browning, addressing his ball. “Yes. Very good, sir.” He drew back and seemed to lose himself in the rush of the stroke, and felt his four iron meet the ball with the authority of an edict from Stalin. It rose, a pill, white and nearly invisible against the bright sky, and then fell as if dropped from the Almighty Himself. It landed square on the green perhaps two feet above the pin and began to describe a spin-crazed curlicue over the short grass in the general vicinity of the …

  “Good Christ,” said C, “it went in! Holly-Browning, it went in the bloody hole.”

  “Yes, yes, it did, didn’t it, sir?” said Holly-Browning, handing his club to Davis.

  43

  THE HANGAR

  THE OLD MAN GREW STRONGER WITH REMARKABLE SWIFTNESS and was well enough to travel within seven days. The speed of the recovery stunned the British-educated doctor. Pavel Romanov, however, something of a scholar of the lives and times of Emmanuel Ivanovich Levitsky, was not particularly amazed; he knew the old agent to be a man of rare resilience and will.

  Yet Levitsky still did not talk.

  One evening, they drove him by ambulance to the Barcelona airport well after midnight and took him to a special, isolated hangar on the far outskirts of the place, hundreds of meters from the terminal. He was amazed at the activity at the obscure locality; there were armed guards everywhere, Soviet Black Sea Marines with German machine pistols.

  Inside the building, he sat ramrod stiff in a wheelchair, a blanket drawn about him, a pair of sunglasses shielding his damaged eye from the harsh light. He could hardly move, what with his shoulders locked in the plaster, but he could still make out the airplane. It was a giant Tupolev TB-3, a four-engine bomber whose fuselage had the odd
appearance of having been mounted on its sturdy wings upside down and whose landing gear was so primitive it looked like gigantic bicycle tires.

  “A big aircraft,” said Romanov, laughing. “To accommodate both our egos.”

  Romanov felt loquacious.

  “It’s a shame you can’t talk, old man. We could have had some wonderful conversations. I shall have to do the talking for both of us. Did you know this airplane has been specially modified, with fuel tanks added under the wings and through the fuselage. It’s our only bird that can make the straight flight from Barcelona to Sebastopol without refueling. It’s taken us a long time to get it ready for tonight.”

  He looked into the old man’s eye for a hint of curiosity, and convinced himself that he found it.

  “You’re wondering if you are so important a cargo?” he asked. “Well, it’s not quite all for you, old man.”

  Listening exhausted Levitsky. He sat back and settled into his perpetual semidarkness and his silence. With an act of will, he restrained himself from his memories, which sometimes threatened to consume him these dark days. He had ordered himself not to think. To think was to yield to regret, to the infinite allure of what might have been, in another world. Be strong, old one, he told himself. It is almost over.

  They seemed to be taking their time on the plane. One would think they could handle these arrangements with a good deal more precision. He was growing impatient. Perhaps the ground staff were all Spaniards, taken to moving slowly and without—

  It then occurred to him that the mechanics whose vague shapes he had been able to discern scurrying over the vaster shape of the grotesque airplane had vanished. It was strangely silent. Then he heard the arrival of a car, some far-off mutter, and with that, Pavel Romanov dipped behind him, pivoted him, and began to push him across the bumpy tarmac. He could smell petrol and oil as they moved through the hangar, but in time they arrived in a kind of smaller room off the larger one. Pavel opened the door, dropped back, and pushed him through. It was a small place, tight as a coffin, and pitch dark. Levitsky could sense the close press of the tin walls. Pavel did not turn on the light.

  “You have fifteen minutes,” Pavel said. “And then we leave.”

  Levitsky listened to his jaunty footsteps snapping away; the door closed, somehow damping down the air. Levitsky waited and after a bit made out the sound of breathing.

  “Old man.” The whisper reached him from across the room and across the years. “God, what have they done to you? They’ve treated you so terribly.”

  Levitsky could say nothing.

  “I had to come. I had to see you. Once more … before—”

  He let it lapse into silence, and just stared in wonder at the old man.

  “You appear disappointed in me, old man. You sense my doubt.” He stared intently at the old mute. “I know what you’re thinking. I must remember I’m working for the future. I’ve been blessed enough, with that chance. It’s enough to live for. And to die for. One should not look twice at an offer of enrollment in an elite force. One should not hesitate.”

  Levitsky could feel the young man’s gaze and adoration upon him: his ardor and his willingness to learn. He remembered him at Cambridge: young, bright, callow, but incredibly eager.

  He felt the young man rise and come over in the darkness. He felt the warmth of his body, his closeness. The young man bent and touched his hand. “The sacrifices you made. For me.”

  He swallowed.

  “When they were so close … I knew you’d save me. You foresaw that one day they’d be close. You knew that rumors, suggestions, hints, leaks, always get out, even from Moscow, and there would come a time when even the British would begin to see through their illusions and begin to suspect an agent in their midst.

  “And so you recruited two agents. Deep and shallow. Or no. No, I see it now.” He spoke more quickly, with the excitement of a mathematician suddenly understanding more subtlety of calculus that had been beyond him for years. “Julian was not your agent. He was your lover but never your agent. As I am your agent but never your lover. Because you knew that anyone who investigated Cambridge in the year 1931 would uncover you. And so you would have to lead them to Julian and not me.”

  Levitsky stared passionately at the boy with his good eye.

  The boy did not seem to be able to stop talking because he would never talk of it again: it was the pleasure of explaining that he had denied himself and would go on denying himself for years.

  “And when you learned that Lemontov had gone and the British and the Americans knew, it was essential that you confirm for them their suspicion that Julian was the man you had recruited.”

  “And they sent poor Florry. And you crossed hell to reach Julian in Florry’s presence. And Florry informed them of his guilt. Florry validated their own illusions for them. And then you made certain that Julian would die, forever sealed off from their interrogations, forever beyond their reach. The case is closed. Forever. The British have their spy and I have my future.”

  The young man paused, as if to breathe.

  “They are pleased now,” he said. “I’m due back in London shortly. I’m going into their service full time. It’s good, I think, to enter before the war with Hitler. The service will swell, and the ones on the inside will rise.”

  The door opened.

  “Almost time,” called Pavel Romanov.

  The young man came closer and spoke in a whisper.

  “I’ve been reporting to them from Spain. Through a special GRU link via Amsterdam. For the Suppression, the Arrests. It was my information that enabled them to—” But he halted, as if coming at last to the thing that troubled him most.

  “It’s not only that. Do you know what else they’ve had me do? Do you know why I’m here in Spain? For gold, Ivanch. For simple gold.”

  Levitsky stared at him.

  “They had me rent a villa and one night a truck came by with a hundred crates. And then another one and another one. I’ve been the richest man in the world. Romanov said they were afraid to move it by sea with the submarines and afraid to guard it because the Spaniards might change their mind and want it back. So they hid it. In my villa. All these months, my real job has been to babysit gold, until an airplane could be modified. Now they can fly it out, nonstop, over a few nights.”

  Levitsky said nothing.

  “It’s just like the West, Ivanch. It’s for treasure, for loot. There’s no difference. I hate it.”

  “Shhh!” Levitsky hissed, grabbing his hand tightly.

  “I hate it,” the boy said. And then David Harold Allen Sampson began to weep.

  “You must control yourself,” said Levitsky hoarsely. “You must pay the price. You must sacrifice. It is not enough to be willing to die for your beliefs. That’s a fool’s sacrifice. You must be willing to kill for them, too. To free the world of its Cossacks, you must be willing to spill blood now, do you understand? I sacrificed my brother. I sacrificed my lover. I sacrificed the man who saved my life. I sacrificed myself. It’s the process of history, comrade.”

  He grabbed the boy and pulled his head close and kissed him on the lips.

  “Time,” called Pavel Romanov.

  “You must reach the back rank,” said Levitsky, “and give the innocent dead their due.”

  The door opened and he could hear Pavel approach.

  The boy whispered a last statement.

  “I no longer believe in it, Emmanuel Ivanovich Levitsky, in any of it, revolutions, politics, history. It’s all just murder and theft. But I have found a new faith to sustain me over the years. I believe in you. I love you.”

  The boy slipped away into the darkness.

  Pavel rolled the wheelchair across the hangar toward the aircraft, chatting idiotically.

  “I hope that wasn’t too hard on you, old man. He quite insisted. What a hero that one is. You recruited well, old fox. You recruited quality. GRU understands, even if Koba and NKVD do not,” said Pavel. “We will sac
rifice anything to save him, even you, old hero. For that young man is the future.”

  And I am the past, thought the Devil Himself, as they passed under the shadow of the great wing.

  44

  A WALK IN THE PARK

  IN THE END, THE GENDARMERIE CARED LESS FOR THE BODY than the pistol. Florry explained—endlessly—that it had been his assailant’s, that he had never seen it before he was set upon and it was just the sheerest luck that he’d managed to get hold of it in the scuffle. He was detained three nights in Limoges, the next city along the line after the incident, while they tried to figure out what to do with him and while Sylvia recovered in hospital. He was ultimately levied a stiff fine by a skeptical prefecture and admonished to leave the province swiftly, which he proposed to do as soon as Sylvia could travel.

  As for the body of the mysterious assailant, its papers proved false and nobody would claim it and nobody could explain it. Florry offered no precise opinions as to who this person had been: a crazed thief, perhaps, clearly someone with dreadful mental difficulties. The body was disposed of in a pauper’s field without ceremony by an undertaker and his teenage assistant. Its effects—including the grip, which, unknown to them all, contained a good deal of money as well as further false papers—simply disappeared in the uncaring clumsiness of the French rail system.

  Sylvia kept telling Florry to go on and that she would catch up to him in Paris, but he insisted on staying. When her swelling had finally gone down, and she was released from the hospital, he suggested they go for a walk in the park. He had a question, he said, and he had to ask it, he had to know the answer.

  It was by this time July, a gloriously beautiful day, not as hot as the French Julys can be but sunny and bold. No country seems more alive in the sunlight than France, and they spent that afternoon walking around in a beautiful park until at last they came to a bench hard by a pond in a glade of poplars. The air was full of dust and light and the birds were singing.