Tapestry of Spies

1 LONDON, LATE FALL OF 1936

Mr. Vane and major Holly-Browning found a parking space on Woburn Place at Russell Square, just across from the Russell Hotel. Mr. Vane, who drove the Morris with a delicacy that was almost fussiness, pulled into the gap with some grunting and huffing. He was not a physically graceful man or a strong one, and mechanical tasks came to him with some difficulty. He removed the ignition key and placed it in his vest pocket. Neither man made a move to leave the auto. They simply sat in the little car, two drab men of the commercial class, perhaps, travelers, little clerks, barristers’ assistants.

It was a bright blue morning in Bloomsbury, a fabulous morning. In the elms of the square, whose dense leaves had begun to turn russet with the coming of colder weather, squirrels chattered and scrambled; squads of ugly, bumbling old pigeons gathered on the lawn. Some even perched upon the earl of Bedford’s copper shoulders at the corner of the park. The chrysanthemums in the beds alongside the walks had not yet perished, though they would within the fortnight.

“He’s late, of course,” said Vane, examining his pocket watch.

“Give him time, Vane,” said Major Holly-Browning. “This is a big day in his life, and the chap’s sure to be nervous. This chap in particular.”

Major Holly-Browning was in his fifties, ten years older than Mr. Vane, and wore a vague mustache, a voluminous mackintosh despite the clear skies, and a bowler. On closer examination, he didn’t look commercial at all but rather military. He had the look of a passed-over officer, with a grayness to the skin, a certain bleakness to the eyes, and a certain formality to his carriage. He looked like the man who hadn’t quite managed the proper friends in the regiment and was therefore doomed to a succession of grim assignments in the outposts of the Empire, far from the parades, the swirling social life, the intrigues of home duty.

In fact, the major was head of Section V, MI-6, that is, the counterespionage section of the Secret Intelligence Service; he was, in the lexicon of the trade, V (a); Mr. Vane, his number two, was V (b). There was no V (c); they were the entire division. The major took a deep breath inside the little car. One of his headaches was starting up. He touched his temple.

“Tired, sir?”

“Exhausted, Vane. Haven’t slept in weeks.”

“You must go home more often, sir. You can’t expect to remain in the proper health living as you do, those long nights in the office.”

The major sighed. Vane could be an awful prig.

“I suppose you are right, Vane.”

“He is now seven minutes late.”

“He will be here. The bait is far too tempting for him not to swallow.”

“Yessir.”

They sat again in silence.

“Sir! There he is.”

“Don’t stare, Vane.”

The major waited calmly and at long last the object of his well-controlled curiosity appeared. The fellow’d gotten off at the Russell Square tube station, as they’d expected, and come up Bernard Street. He waited patiently for the walk signal, then crossed to their side of the street and ambled by a few feet beyond them: it was the tall, diffident figure of a Mr. Robert Florry.

“The great Julian’s ex-chum. Not an impressive man, is he?” observed the major, who for all his efforts in the matter had not before this second laid eyes upon the man.

“Nobody has ever been greatly impressed with Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane, the Florry expert. “Whatever can such a Robin Goodfellow of Society as the great Julian Raines have seen in him?”

“He only saw it for a bit,” said the major, knowing a little something of the broken-off schoolboy friendship, the cometlike ascension of one of the partners and the disappearance into ignominy of the other.

Florry was turned out, after the fashion of the day, to the maximum limits of his wardrobe, but on his severely limited budget he could only manage to appear a notch beyond the shabby. The coat was almost fifteen years old, a tweed thing that was as lumpy as it was frayed, and flecked with a dozen tawny colors. The rest of Florry’s attire was in perfect accordance with the coat: floppy wool trousers, a gaudy Fair Isle sweater, and a bumpkin’s well-beaten walking shoes. He had on his officer’s khaki service tie and his shirt was of dark blue, worn shiny and limp from countless washings.

“I must confess I’d expected someone with a bit more bearing. The fellow was an officer, wasn’t he?” said the major.

“Of sorts,” said Vane. “More a copper, actually.”

Florry continued to navigate the sidewalk as he headed toward his destination, which lay on the far side of the square, across still another street. Yet even having cleared this, a final obstacle stood in his way. The early edition of the afternoon Mail had just come out and a news board hawked the leader in a crude child’s scrawl.

This information brought the young man to a sudden halt. He stared at it gravely for some time.

“Why on earth did that have to be there?” wondered Mr. Vane.

Florry finally pulled himself away from the announcement and made his way another few yards down the street, where he assaulted the marble steps of a red-brick house at Number 56 Bedford, at Russell Square.

Major Holly-Browning sat back but could not relax. A cold sore inside his lip began to throb and his headache had not abated at all. He believed himself, and not without some evidence, to be quietly disintegrating. He knew now the most difficult part of the day was upon him, the awful waiting while certain steps were taken to bring upon him that most awkward and tender moment of the operation. Florry would be wooed ― delicately if possible, brutally if necessary ― but at all costs successfully. The major, having partaken in so many similar seductions over the years, had no illusions about the process of recruitment. Florry must be taken and owned and directed. It was more important than Florry himself.

“I say, Vane, can you stay here and keep watch?” the major suddenly said. “I imagine it will still be a bit. I must move. The old leg, it’s beginning to smart up, eh?”

“Of course, sir,” Vane replied.

The major opened the door, pulled himself onto the curb, and closed the door behind him, absorbing great drafts of fresh air in the process. The car had seemed a prison; sometimes, confined, he had the sudden screaming urge come over him to stretch and breathe and feel the cool air in his nose and the soft grass underneath his feet. It was a feeling that could come hurtling over him without warning, until he could no longer stand it. It had begun in Lubyanka, with Levitsky.

The major found his way to a bench near the gigantic old tree that stood at the center of the park. He sat down, trying to calm himself. Yet what returned to him was not calm but memory. Perhaps it was the drama of recruitment being played out at that moment not a hundred yards off in the office of The Spectator, or perhaps it was the sure and steady approach of a moment when he, Holly-Browning, must himself act, the pregnant moment of equipoise, when Florry, perched delicately between worlds and lives, must be nudged into the right one. Or perhaps it was simply time again to remember, for the memory had returned as regularly as a train, twice a week, every week since 1922.

For in that year, he himself had been the object of just such a ritual as was now transpiring so close at hand. His impersonation of one Golitsyn, the furrier’s son and Bolshevik officer of the cavalry, had been penetrated by a clever Cheka agent. The major, who had fought Zulus and wogs before the ’14-’18 show, who’d gone over the top twice in suicidal assaults during it, and who’d fought in seven battles of the civil war in Russia under his fictitious identity, had never until that moment been truly frightened. But Levitsky had sliced through him as a sharp knife goes into a plump goose’s breast.

He could not but think of his own session in the cell. The same shame flooded over him. It came to sit on his chest like an ingot, suffocating him.

Levitsky, he thought, you were so shrewd.

“Sir!”

It was Vane, out of the car.

“Look!”

The major looked across the green park and could see the upper shade of Number 56, the arched window above the entrance: the shade had been raised.

Vane approached, looking flushed.

“He’s bitten. He has taken the hook.”

“He has indeed,” said the major. “And now it’s time to land him.”

The sherry was extraordinary. Florry had never tasted anything quite like it.

“Well, Florry,” said Sir Denis heartily, returning from the window whose shade he had just raised, admitting a shaft of pale London sun, “I can’t tell you how delighted we all are here.”

“Nor I, sir,” said Florry, still trembling with excitement.

“The Spectator has never sent a man abroad. Much less to a revolution.”

“Well, you can certainly count on me to master my Spanish politics before I leave, sir. I shan’t mix up the POUM and the PSUD again.”

“No, it wouldn’t do. That’s PSUC, old boy. The Trotsky fellows are the first group, the dreamers, the new architects of society, the poets, the artists. The fashionable folk, if you will. The PSUC would have precious little patience for that. They’re the Comintern lads, the professional Russian and German revolutionaries. Bloody Joe Stalin’s pals. Best not to mingle them together. They hate each other enough as it is. And they may end up cutting each other’s throats before too long. It’s all in the initials. Memorize the initials and the Spanish revolution becomes as clear as a bell. You might read Julian’s stuff in Signature. He’s got it down pat.”

“Yessir,” said Florry, almost contritely. Damn Julian. Of course he’d have it down pat. That was Julian, the art of getting things down pat. The art of the easy success, the swift climb, the importance of connections. Florry felt the old pain, the old hate mixed with regret.

Yet another name from Florry’s complicated past seemed present, in the form of that constant nagging little dog that always told him he didn’t quite deserve that which he was about to receive. This new life, this life he had dreamed about and wanted so badly for so long ― no more dreadful nights in dreadful bed-sitters up scribbling away on novels and poems nobody would publish ― had developed by virtue of his one piece of professional writing. And a damned good piece it was, too, if effort had anything to do with it: he’d rewritten it over thirteen times until he felt he’d gotten every one of its five thousand words exactly right; still, he’d been dumbstruck when the note from Sir Denis had arrived.

Benny Lal, six years among the worms, was still doing his best to accommodate.

The phone rang. Sir Denis picked it up.

“They are? Fine, show them in,” he said. “Now Florry, there is one small thing.”

“Of course.”

“Two chaps from the foreign office. They’d like a word with you.”

“The F.O.?”

“Or some such. Something governmental. I never pay much attention to that sort of thing. Fellow named Holly-Browning. Knew him at Magdalen. First-rate chap, you’ll like him.”

“Well, I certainly―”

But Sir Denis rose and crossed the room to open the door.

“Hullo, James. Vane.”

“Denis. And how are you?”

“Ah, the same. And how’s Marjorie?”

“Blooming.”

“You married the most beautiful woman of our time, that’s for certain, James.”

“She’s still quite beautiful, but I see her so infrequently these days, one forgets.”

“Is he working too hard as usual, Vane?”

“Yessir. To midnight, most nights, and later even on many others.”

“Good heavens, James, after all you’ve been through! Well, here’s young Mr. Robert Florry, our new Spanish political correspondent.”

Florry rose to encounter a large, sad man, dourly turned out, with huge hands and a hulking body. There was something implacable about him, and his beaten but pugnacious face somehow held the promise of secret zealotry that Florry sensed immediately. Florry knew one other thing instantly, having been one himself for five years: he knew he was among coppers.

“Florry, I’m Major Holly-Browning. This is my assistant Mr. Vane.”

“Ah, pleased―” began Florry, extending a hand that nobody seemed to notice.

Sir Denis had quietly slipped out and Florry discovered himself being ushered to a window alcove, where three old leather chairs sat about a low table full of African masks and old numbers of The Spectator.

“The F.O., do I understand?” said Florry.

“His Majesty’s government, shall we say. Please sit. Tea?”

“Er, yes, thanks.”

“Vane, see about some tea, will you?”

Florry, sitting, felt his exultation begin to transform into confusion.

“May I ask, Mr. Florry, are you a red?”

At first Florry thought he had said “Are you well-read?” and he’d begun to compose what seemed an intelligent reply, when it occurred to him that that wasn’t it at all.

“But what possible business is it of yours?”

The major stared at him levelly, admitting the light of no surprise into his dim eyes.

Florry wasn’t fuddled. Though tense and suddenly aware he was in murky waters, his mind flooded with lucidity. “Is this how they do it, nowadays, major? In my time, we were a little subtler. I was a copper. Been in on a few sessions like this myself. I know how it works. The affability and good companionship to put the poor fellow at his ease. Then, with no warning, a hard question. Catch the poor bastard off guard, goad him into something silly. Yes, I can see it now. Perhaps we could spare each other the poking about and get right to it.”

Something very like a little smile crossed the major’s pug face.

“Here’s tea,” sang Vane, wheeling in triumphantly with a tray. “I also found some marvelous buns. Care for a bun, Mr. Florry?”

“No,” said Florry.

“One lump or two, Mr. Florry?”

“One should do, I would think.”

“One it is, then.”

“Vane, I’ll have two. And lots of milk.”

“Yessir.”

“And a bun. Are they crisp?”

“Very crisp, sir.”

“A bun, then. I’ve just asked Florry if he’s a red.”

“Oh?” said Vane distractedly, pouring tea and sorting buns, “and what did he say?”

“He wouldn’t answer. Got his back up.”

“Bully good for him, I say. Now don’t let the major push you about, Mr. Florry. He can be an awful brute.”

“Now then, Florry,” said the major, “suppose we were on the lookout for just such a chap. Let’s say, for a matter of argument, a genuine red. Oh, I’m not talking your harmless parlor revolutionary, all hot air and castles in Spain, your blowsy English eccentric who likes to stand on soap boxes in Hyde Park on Sunday and harangue the passers-by. No, let’s just suppose that somewhere there is a fellow who in his heart of hearts really wants Uncle Joe Stalin to come over here, lock us in chains, turn his secret policemen loose, and teach our children to read Russian. Do you follow me so far?”

“Where is all this heading?” said Florry warily.

“We have information from a source we’re not permitted to reveal that such a chap as we’re describing in this highly theoretical conversation may in fact exist.”

It suddenly dawned on Florry. These men were spies! In the service, they’d been called “politicals,” though perhaps the term had gone out of use by now. These were the chaps that Kipling wrote about in Kim, the great game fellows.

“You’re smiling, Mr. Florry. Something funny here?”

“No.”

“Ever hear of the Official Secrets Act, Mr. Florry? Nasty bit of legislation, went into effect in ’thirty-two. Could put a chap away for seven years in the Scrubs. What I’m about to tell you is protected by the Official Secrets Act, Mr. Florry. It must never leave this room. Understand?”

“I must say, I don’t see how I can be of any help to you.”

“Oh, you can be of great help, Mr. Florry. Now listen closely. In 1931, while you were off having adventures in Burma for the Crown, a Russian secret intelligence operative named Levitsky recruited a Cambridge University student ― young, gifted, clever, a lad with connections, with charm, with immense potential ― to spy for Russia. As the first step of bringing Uncle Joe and his ways over here.”

“Why, that’s revolting,” blurted Florry, not quite sure himself how he meant it.

“Indeed it is,” said the major.

“But what has all of this to do with me? I never went to Cambridge. I can’t help you find him.”

“Oh, we need no help in finding him, Mr. Florry,” said Vane cheerfully. “We know who he is, of course. What we need is somebody to ― oh, what’s a nice term? To stop him, shall we say? To disconnect him. Did the major tell you, he went to a hanging once, too, Mr. Florry. In East Africa, wasn’t it, sir? Before the Great War?”

“In ’eleven, actually,” the major said. “Ghastly thing. One of the boys got drunk on honey wine on safari and actually attacked the mem-sahib with a panga. Cut her on the arm, left a scar. They had to make an example of the boy. Still, necessary as it was, it was horrid.”

“What do you mean ‘stop’?” Florry said. “I can tell you, I don’t like the sound of that word.”

“Play chess, Mr. Florry?”

“Some. A little. Not very well.”

“Ever read Sacrifice Theory by E. I. Levitsky? Published in German in Leipzig in 1901?”

“Haven’t read it, no.”

“Written by a young Russian political exile who’d just won an important tournament. Don’t play myself, although I ran into the author some years later under peculiar circumstances. They say sacrifice is what makes a chess genius a chess champion. The shrewd calculation of present loss against future gain. It’s what Levitsky specializes in, the best part of his game. They call him the Devil Himself; that was his nickname as a chess player back at the turn of the century. Brilliant. Quite an opponent.”

“Major Holly-Browning, I wonder if―”

But the major silenced him with a stout finger, as a prefect silences a particularly rambunctious sixth-former, and launched ahead. “Levitsky operated in this country during most of 1931, our information relates. He was at that time head of the Western European Bureau of Comintern, and a lieutenant colonel in the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence department. Comintern is their apparatus for coordinating world propaganda and espionage. According to our source, early in that year Levitsky became acquainted with and began to cultivate a chap who was perfect for his purposes. Levitsky was talent hunting. He was on safari, one might say, hunting for that perfect young Englishman with a penchant for treason. At any rate―”

“Major Holly-Browning, I’m certain all of this is perfectly interesting to you but I can’t quite―”

“Oh, he’s just about there, assistant superintendent,” said Vane sweetly.

“Yes, Florry. Another second has it. At any rate, this Levitsky, our source says, ultimately came in contact with a group of clever lads called ― perhaps you’ve heard the name; it’s a secret club, fashionable left-wing dons, that sort ― called the Apostles.”

So that was it. Florry sat back. He took a deep breath with some difficulty. He felt the prickles of sweat begin to tingle in his hair.

“Interesting, eh, Vane? Speak the magic word and the impatient, thick-hided young writer instantly loses his color and begins to perspire.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Florry. “It isn’t every day one is asked to inform on one’s best friend.”

“Yes, he’s made the leap,” said Vane. “You said he would, sir, and he did. But Mr. Florry, don’t you think it would be more accurate to say ‘former best friend’?”

Florry rose. “I think you are making a grave and foolish mistake. You are acting reprehensibly. We never treated the wogs this crassly out East, and you are talking about an Englishman of unimpeachable reputation and accomplishment.”

The major stared at him quite placidly.

“Some more tea, sir?” said Vane. “Or a nice bun. They’re very, very crisp, and I was able to find cinnamon.”

“I do not want a bloody cinnamon bun. I want to leave, thanks.”

“Florry, best to sit down.”

“Julian Raines is a poet of distinction as well as a brilliant scholar. He graduated with starred double-first at Trinity College, Cambridge. His poem ‘Achilles, Fool,’ is one of the key texts in the modernist movement. His―”

“Yes, I’ve read it. ‘In the end, it’s all the same/In the end, it’s all a game.’ May I ask, do you agree with those sentiments, Florry?”

“He wouldn’t spy for a batch of bloody Bolshies in overcoats twelve sizes too big. Good heavens, he wouldn’t even have tea with them.”

“He certainly treated you as if you were a figure in a game, wouldn’t you say, Florry? You simply ceased to interest him and he cut you bloody dead. We’ve checked, Florry. You weren’t worth much after that, eh? Went off and hid in the coppers in Burma, right? Couldn’t face life without the great Julian at your side? Bit of a schoolboy crush. Happens all the time, Florry. Only with you, it cut to the bone.”

“He wouldn’t do it,” said Florry. “Yes, Julian’s a bastard. Yes, he likes to hurt people. But he wouldn’t do anything like―”

“The facts are very clear. Of the Apostle Circle of the year 1931, Julian is certainly the boy who fits most perfectly with our source’s description of Levitsky’s recruit. As you say, he was brilliant. His mother is wealthy as well as well connected to the upper-strata political and artistic people of the country. She could get her dear Julian any position he wanted in a liberal or socialist government somewhere down the road. He would have access to the very most important circles.”

“Julian is an artist, a writer. A true artist. He’s not interested in bloody politics.”

“Julian Raines is many men. It simply won’t do to fit him into an absolute category. He’s a brilliant dabbler. At everything he tries he succeeds. And perhaps in this lofty sense of brilliance, he’s come to see himself beyond the rest of us poor blokes. His analysis of history, for example, would be just that much keener. Who’s to say he hasn’t decided to have a dabble at the spy business, Florry, and make the success of it that he made of poetry and that he now makes of journalism?”

“Who is saying these awful things? Some ugly little man in a trench coat?”

“Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane, “you were a copper. You know that we’ve got to use informants.”

“A Russian. A secret policeman. Fleeing Stalin’s executioners, that’s all we can tell you,” said the major.

“Some seedy little Johnny Red on the bloody run from his bosses. The bastard would say anything to get himself into the country.”

“Actually, he’s not in the country. He’s in the United States. He’s told his story to the Americans and they believe him.”

“The awful Yanks, yet! Good Christ, this gets seedier as it goes on.”

“More tea, Mr. Florry?”

“I think it’s necessary for me to leave.”

“One last factor, Mr. Florry. Our Russian tattletale worked in Amsterdam. He said his last job for his employers involved opening a special, secret communications link to Barcelona. He concluded from the rush and risk involved that the link could only be to service a secret, most sensitively placed agent. This happened on five August; Julian Raines arrived in Barcelona on four August. And of the Apostle group, he and he alone is in Spain.”

“You see, Mr. Florry, it is quite clear.”

Florry shook his head.

“What we need is somebody to go out to Spain and establish an especially close relationship with Julian Raines. We need somebody to keep watch over him; we need reports on his whereabouts, his chums, his little jobs for the Russians. We need evidence.”

“And then?”

“And then do the necessary. As the necessary has been done before, Mr. Florry, by brave young Englishmen.”

“To kill him?”

“One stops one’s enemies as one can or as one must.”

“Good Christ.”

“Were you in the war, Florry?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, I have been in several. One learns to do what one must.”

Florry saw now that the whole thing was a sham: Sir Denis and The Spectator working in concert with His Majesty’s government in the subtle, cozy, pleasant, particularly English way of doing such things. Offer Florry the life he wants; in exchange, take only his soul.

“No,” Florry said. “You force me to be somewhat moralistic about this. It’s simply wrong.”

“But surely, Mr. Florry, one’s country counts for more than―”

“One’s friends are one’s country; or rather, without them, one’s country is meaningless.”

He got up to leave. “I’m sure you will inform Sir Denis of my decision.” He turned smartly and walked to the door. It wouldn’t open.

“Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane with some embarrassment, “there’s a rather large constable from Special Branch out there at our request. It’s his bulk that is blocking the doorway and he has his instructions.”

“To arrest me, I suppose. On the charge of Refusal to Take Part in Ugly Plots.”

“Mr. Florry, I must say, it’s your sanctimony that I find the most difficult to bear,” said the major at long last. “Vane, tell the moralistic Mr. Florry what the constable has in his pocket.”

“It’s a warrant. And it is for your arrest. But the charge is perjury.”

“Perjury?”

“You do remember Benny Lal, do you not, Mr. Florry?” asked Vane.

Something ripped at Florry’s chest.

“One would think so. You wrote about him quite eloquently. Although you left out certain details, assistant superintendent,” said the major.

Florry looked at the man, hating and fearing him at once.

“Last year, another man confessed to the murder of U Bat. He was a member of the Burmese Po Ben Sien, or Freedom Party, a militant nationalist group that we believe to be controlled by Julian’s friends at Comintern. The movement eliminated U Bat when they realized he was secretly reporting to one of our politicals in the area. They killed him and tried to place the blame on us.”

“So you’ve got me. Some years ago, I made the mistake of telling less than the truth, and now you’ve got me.”

“Well, the option is a term in the Scrubs. Four years, I believe, is the term for perjury in a capital case. And Mr. Florry, even in the Scrubs there are cell blocks that might be pleasant and cell blocks that might be dreadful for such a handsome chap as you. I might go so far as to use what little influence I’ve got to see you end up among nellie-boys and poofs of a particularly aggressive nature. Not a pretty fate for a public-school boy.”

“I say, you are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“As a writer, you enjoy irony, don’t you, Florry? Here’s one for your collection. I have no doubt you did exactly the right thing in the matter of U Bat. It was necessary to close that case swiftly. At the same time, I have absolutely no compunction against using it against you now, to force you, once again, into doing the right thing. Your duty. We are quite prepared to see charges placed.”

“I’d go to the press.”

“With Official Secrets, we can shut the press down.”

Florry could only look off, through the window. He could see the London skyline, looking very much as it had looked in Dickens’ day, a flat, neat vista of little houses and chimneys. It looked like a set of parcels laid out on the postman’s table, and among the buildings crept, anonymous, huddled, bent, hustling, the citizens of the British Empire, faceless and nameless, in whose cause he had just been dragooned.

“I had no idea the British government could be so ruthless.”

“The world has chosen to give us ruthless enemies, Florry.”

“It really does have to be you, Mr. Florry,” said Vane. “You are a writer and have cause to travel where he travels. You know him well. At a point, you knew him very well, in the ways that public-school boys can come to know each other. Those old school ties, Mr. Florry, they count for something. You know they do. Then, you are an ex-policeman, experienced in security matters. You do fit the ticket, Mr. Florry. And it is, sir, something of a duty.”

“And one other thing, Florry,” said the major. “You hate him. Or you should.”

Julian, thought Florry, why did you hurt me so? He remembered the boy he’d loved and the boy who’d almost killed him.

Yes, I hate you. It was true. By some subtle alchemy of the emotions, his passion had turned abjectly to loathing. He could remember Julian cutting him for the sheer amusement of it all.

“We’ll be in touch concerning details, Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane. “We’ll provide everything, of course, No need to do this thing on a miser’s scale.”

Florry looked up to see that his two new employers had risen and put on their coats.

“Good day, then, Florry. Glad to have you aboard,” said the major. Florry shut his eyes. He heard the door close and the quiet pad of feet down the hall. After a bit, he left, too.

2 THE LUX

By late 1936, the most terrifying sound in all Moscow ― in all Russia, for that matter ― was the sound of a single knock. It always came at night-late. And it always meant but one thing.

The young men from the organ of state security, the NKVD, were invariably polite, though a bit distant, as they stood there in their green overcoats and their fur-muffled winter caps with their hands on the Tula-Tokarev automatics in the holsters at their belts. Mercifully, they kept the formalities to a minimum: they read the charges, they allowed the accused a last word with his loved ones, a chance to grab his coat, and then they removed him ― forever.

It was the time of Yeshov ― Yeshovchina, in the Russian ― after Nikolai Yeshov, the dwarfish chairman of state security. But the process of purification represented by this massive wave of arrests surely originated with the general secretary, whom most of the old revolutionaries remembered as Koba. Koba sought to scour the party clean, to make it a precise, scientific instrument, to do away with the last remnants of bourgeois sentimentality so that the future could be faced with strength and will and resolve. Koba most certainly sought also to make certain he was never arrested.

In one Moscow building the arrests were greeted with something beyond even fear and despair, something unique to the city: irony. The building stood on Gorky Street, hard by Pushkin Park, not three-quarters of a downhill mile from the Kremlin itself, in the very center of the city. It was an ornate, Italianate construction, rich in marble and brass, and its upper floors on the western side provided a grand panorama of the Kremlin’s domes. The place bore the name HOTEL LUX, on a brass plate untouched since 1917. Once, in the early years after its construction in 1907, Russian and European nobility, American entrepreneurs, German adventurers, Jewish diamond merchants, and exceedingly expensive courtesans had occupied its stately rooms. These days, the Lux appealed to a different clientele.

It had degenerated into a dirty, dingy ruin, its marble pitted and brass unpolished, but the dreams dreamed in its bohemian corridors and cabbage-stinking rooms boasted as much scale and romance as any dreamed by capitalists. For the Lux served as the unofficial headquarters of Comintern, or the Communist International, which, while a direct apparatus of the GRU, was at the same time, since having been decreed into existence in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin, the coordinating organ of the World Revolution.

Its inhabitants now comprised almost a Party congress of famous, infamous, notorious, and violent European leftists, men who had lived their whole lives underground, in the swirl and fog and rat hunt of revolutionary conspiracy. The revolution achieved, it was seized from them; they became its victims. Thus the nighttime visits of the young policemen ― they were frequent at the Lux ― had a special bitterness.

And how the old revolutionaries talked of this! Their lives had become almost pure language. They argued endlessly, like old rabbis at yeshiva. It obsessed them. What was Koba doing? What was his vision? By what theoretical underpinnings did he justify the killings? How did Yeshovchina fit into the ultimate trajectory toward socialist victory? And who was taken last night?

But one man, in all that noise, said nothing.

He did not complain. He had no theories. He had no grudges or secret fears, or so it seemed. He did not mingle in the lobby or participate in the endless debate. Nor did he care to comment upon the justice of it or the pathology of Koba and his dwarf Yeshov.

Rather, he stayed behind his doors, emerging only for his afternoon constitutional. On those occasions, he strode briskly through the lobby with an aristocratic aloofness upon his face, as if any consideration beyond the ancient lift that would haul him to his rooms was utterly beneath him. He looked neither left nor right and issued no greetings to old comrades, nor, by his iciness, did he expect to receive any. He dressed as if a dandy in the last century, in spats, a velvet smoking jacket, well worn but beautifully fitted, a white silk scarf, and a lustrous mink coat. He acted as if, by special compact to the highest authority, he was invulnerable to the nighttime visits of Koba’s killers.

He had been called many things in his interesting life, but one of them clung even to this day and to this circumstance. He was called, not only by his peers in the Lux and by his enemies in the Kremlin, but in the capitals of the West, the Devil Himself.

For a legend, he seemed rather vigorous. At fifty-nine, E. I. Levitsky still had a taut, lively face. His mouth retained its unusual thinness. It was a clever, prim mouth, as the eyes above it were also clever. They carried the electricity of conviction. He wore, after Lenin, a little goatee, purely an affectation. His head was glossily balding from the forehead back to the crown, though extravagant with bushy peppercorn hair beneath it, as if the black and gray individuals that comprised this mass were violently divided among themselves as to their ultimate direction and destiny. He had a lanky, surprisingly long body, wiry, and long, pale, exquisite fingers. He looked exceptionally refined, as if he’d spent his life in the higher realms of culture. He also looked hard in a peculiar way: hard, unmalleable, an alloy, not a base metal.

In his hand, he held a pawn. A blunt, smooth little soldier. It expects only death and in this humble aspiration is ever so frequently rewarded. Pawns are made for sacrifice; this is their function; this ennobles them.

As he gripped the ancient chess piece in his hand, a name came to him, a name whispered that afternoon in a hurried but not quite accidental encounter in Pushkin Park, on a bench under the great trees.

“It’s Tchiterine, Emmanuel Ivanovich. Your old comrade. Remember, he saved your life in the war?”

Yes, Levitsky remembered Tchiterine, another noble pawn.

It wasn’t the sort of thing a man forgot: he lay out in the snow, thrown by his treacherous horse, the Maxim bullets clipping away at him. They struck close by with a stinging spray. He tried to shrink into the snow. All the while Kolchak’s Death Battalion, with the eighteen-inch spike bayonets fixed to their rifles, advanced at the trot from the left, finishing the wounded as they came. No, one doesn’t forget a memory such as that, or the moment when brawny Tchiterine had come slithering through the fire and with one strong hand taken him and pulled him into a ravine and safety.

“The old ones. Koba is taking the old ones. It’s clear now.” The rue in the mysterious comrade’s voice had been almost operatic with passion.

“He can watch out for himself,” Levitsky had said, concentrating on the lacy patterns the snow-heavy limbs formed against the bright blue sky. “He’s no child. He’s in Spain now, isn’t he?”

“He’ll never leave Spain. Koba is reaching into Spain now. Tchiterine has just been arrested in Spain. They say he’ll be shot.”

The comrade sighed. “Tchiterine, he was the best. You even took him to England with you. An inspiration.”

“Yes, England,” said Levitsky, aware that the fellow was well informed.

Then the man said, “Lemontov was the smart one.”

“Lemontov was always smart. That’s why he put a bullet in his head,” Levitsky responded.

“No, haven’t you heard? I just heard today. He’s not dead, like they said he was. He went over. Can you believe it?” He shook his head as if in wonder.

Levitsky said nothing. However, he took a deep breath in acknowledgment that his life and fate had just altered radically. The message had been well delivered. His breath came in quiet, harsh little spurts. He could feel his head begin to throb, as the comrade spoke.

It turned out that it hadn’t been Lemontov’s body, prune wrinkled and pulpy, they’d pulled out of the canal at all. It was a ruse, using some Dutchman’s corpse. They say Lemontov had gone over to the Americans. He was the smart one. He was the only one to beat hungry old Koba. The Americans will give him lots of money and he will live in Hollywood and fuck Greta Garbo all night long.

No, Levitsky thought. He paid them. In information. Lemontov. Yes, Lemontov was the smart one.

Levitsky, in his room, set down the pawn. He went swiftly to the bottle, poured himself another brandy. Then, his nerves soothed, he walked back to the table and picked up the pawn again. It was from a German set, which he’d won in Karlsbad in 1901. He fingered the piece, clutching it tightly to his palm.

So soon.

Oh, Lemontov, you clever, treacherous bastard. Of them all, my brave boys whom I taught so well, I should have foreseen it would be you. Tchiterine was hardworking, dull, brave, a zealot. Another was nakedly ambitious, a stupid peasant boy dead set on rising above himself by sheer will. Still another was a coward, a schemer, a weakling. You, Lemontov, you were the brilliant one. A Jew like myself, of course. So smart, so full of ideas, so crackling with insight and enthusiasm.

If Lemontov had fled to the Americans, the Americans knew. And the Americans would tell the British. About the agent code-named Castle. Castle, Levitsky’s lasting legacy to the revolution, the one thing not even a maniac like Koba could steal. His Castle at the center of the British establishment.

This meant the game had begun years earlier than it ought to have, and on the enemy’s terms, and that, worse, it would have to be improvised in the middle of Koba’s terror, thrown together with madcap dash. Somebody in the GRU saw that the buried Castle had suddenly became vulnerable, and knew that NKVD, crazy with the bloodlust, didn’t care. And somebody knew only the man who had recruited Castle could help. Thus by secret approach, a last mission for the Devil Himself.

Save Castle.

At once an impulse seized him. He rose, strode back across the carpet of his shabby room, and sat at the table before an empty chessboard. No emotion appeared on his studious, ascetic face. He stared at the glossy, checkered surface.

It seemed immense. Its sixty-four squares described a universe of possibility; an illusion, of course. There was, to begin with, a remote mathematical limit on possibility. More to the point, however, possibility was strictly a function of position: you could only go from where you were ― that was Levitsky’s first principle of reality, and it was more binding and absolute than any law in physics.

He therefore began to solve his problem by defining the positions.

What, for example, did Lemontov know? Did he know Castle’s name, his identity? No, Levitsky had been exceedingly careful about the mechanism from the start, shielding Castle from his staff; only two men other than Levitsky and Castle himself knew of the arrangement: two high-ranking officers in the GRU, Red Army intelligence, men of unimpeachable honesty and honor, sworn only to reveal the information upon Levitsky’s death. What Lemontov, therefore, could provide was only a description: a set of credentials and possibilities, a year (1931), a place (Cambridge), which would define perhaps more than several hundred young British men of a certain age and social standing and potential. It would be a British problem, then, to winnow these possibilities down to several specific candidates. And then, from among these, find the right one. Not an easy task, particularly in a democracy, where security services were notoriously hamstrung by sentimental notions of privacy and respect for individual rights.

He stared at the pattern on the board, absorbed. Was there time in the world to save Castle?

From far below on this still, late Moscow night, Levitsky heard the buzz of a motorcar. It pulled up to the hotel and halted. Doors opened, closed with a metallic slam. Men walked toward the hotel, their boots striking crisply on the pavement.

Levitsky looked at the clock on the mantel. It was 4 A.M., the hour of the NKVD.

He looked back to the board and, with an urgency that bordered on despair, reopened the leather-bound case. The figures were beautifully carved, with an ornate, quite possibly decadent skill that nothing in the Soviet Union could now equal. He plucked the pieces out and arranged them on the board, two white ranks, two red ranks.

From somewhere deep in the building, he heard the clang of the lift gate.

It’s the time of sacrifice, he thought.

His fingers pushed a piece out from its rank. His humble rook’s pawn, the red. Levitsky looked at the dowdy little thing. O hero pawn! Brave, willing to sacrifice yourself up in the furnace of the game for larger considerations.

Levitsky smiled, hearing the climb of the lift through the building. He remembered 1901. In that year, in the great hall at the Karlsbad Casino, against the best in the world, the humble pawn had been the key to Levitsky’s greatest victory in the single master’s tournament he had allowed himself before disappearing forever in the underground. And in the fortnight, the bespectacled young exile had become the mysterious Devil Himself, vanquisher of all …

He heard the lift stop at his floor. The gate opened. He heard the boots on the tile.

Schlecter, the German, suddenly sat across from him: a dandy, wordless little genius who wore carnations and plaid suits of English cut and had watery eyes and eczema and sported a flowery cologne and fought like a Cossack. Schlecter would not look at him. Schlecter preferred to avoid personalities. To him it was just the movement of pieces on the board.

Levitsky had the opening and pushed his queen’s pawn into the fourth row and Schlecter matched him. Then he swiftly brought his knight into play, moving it to king’s bishop three. Schlecter paused, a bit nonplussed, but not exactly near panic; then responded dramatically by moving his bishop forward to bishop’s four. Strange: even Schlecter himself seemed controlled by some mysterious energy in the air then, as if strange forces, dyb-buks, had been released to ride the currents of the vast space over their heads.

Levitsky was twenty-four; he was young and lean and furiously bright. He was only becoming gradually aware, however, of his gift.

He exploited the seam opening in the center of the board with that lone pawn, advancing him to bishop’s four. Schlecter considered a long time ― he was, after all, the drawmaster, more renowned for not losing than for winning ― and ultimately shrank from the challenge with the conventional pawn to queen’s bishop three.

Levitsky waited just a second, then reached down and shoved his queen through the gap he’d opened in his own ranks and pushed her out to knight’s three; he heard the gasp and smiled, and felt himself almost blush as the gasp rose to a cheer.

Schlecter, of course, did not look up, as if to meet Levitsky’s eyes would somehow be to submit to his power. He studied the pieces in perfect silence and then almost languidly brushed his blue-veined old hand across the table and yanked his own queen out to knight’s three.

The tumult was enormous; neither player acknowledged it. Time for some blood, old man. Levitsky took a pawn, exposing his queen.

Schlecter quickly replaced Levitsky’s queen with his own, and less than one second later, Levitsky had Schlecter’s lady himself with a pawn; and he still had his lead pawn out there, achingly alone in center board.

Schlecter saw the open rank, and he hurled his bishop down the gap to take the suddenly defenseless knight; but it didn’t matter, for Levitsky was able to spring the trap he had so ingeniously engineered. He took Schlecter’s solitary pawn and dared Schlecter to expose his king by taking the pawn out with his knight.

“Herr Levitsky,” Schlecter asked in the quietest German, “do you wish me to play it out, or would you prefer that I resign now?”

“It is up to you.”

“It was brilliant, young man.”

“Thank you. I was very lucky.”

“No, it was more than luck. I’ve played against enough luck in my time to know luck.”

Schlecter took his pawn with a rook and Levitsky completed the action: he moved his lead pawn into the back rank, thereby castling it. In the back row it acquired extraordinary force; it was born again. It mated Herr Schlecter’s poor king. The theme had been a variation on the idea of the brave pawn, an exceedingly unusual phenomenon in international play, where the odds against a single pawn surviving a charge into the enemy’s last rank are forbiddingly rare. Yet Levitsky had brought it off because he had the hardness of spirit and the sheer guts to pay the price as the combinations developed, feeding his own pieces into the maw to advance the pawn.

That was it: the erratic, the brilliant fluctuation of it, the fascination of it ― the humble pawn, suddenly castled in the back rank, suddenly made the most powerful piece on the board, planted in the soft underbelly. A humble pawn has become all powerful and any sacrifice, or any orchestration of sacrifice, is worth it.

Levitsky sat back. He had worked out his solution. It all turned then, on a single bright young Englishman. Levitsky remembered him with fondness, love even: bright, fair, gifted, pleasant, charming.

It’s time. After all the years, it’s time.

He heard the NKVD men knocking.

“I’m INNOCENT!” The scream pierced the narrow walls of the Lux.

A door slammed. Feet dragged and snapped in the hall. Levitsky heard the lift gate clank shut, and heard the machine descend.

Another for your hunger, old Koba.

The face of the young Englishman returned to his mind. He would be in Spain, of course, for Spain was all the fashion of his set. Spain would attract the golden lads of this world as a lamp attracts the moths.

Spain, then. The game of pawns and rooks and deaths must be played in Spain. It all turns on the position of the pieces, on the willingness, the nerve, for sacrifice.

3 BARCELONA, LATE 1936

Comrade Bolodin,” instructed comrade Glasanov, “break his nose. But be careful of the mouth.”

Comrade Bolodin walked to the naked old man who was bound to the chair. He studied the problem with dispassion while the old man looked up at him, as if he didn’t seem too sure of what was happening. He looked dazed. Bolodin, who was exceedingly strong, drove a sharp, perfect blow into his face. The meaty thud filled the cell. He felt the nose crack and splinter in its flesh in the split second before the head snapped back.

“Well done, comrade,” said Glasanov.

The old man’s head lolled forward on his chest. Snot and blood ran from his face and spotted his white, scrawny body. Glasanov lifted the head gently and stared at it. The nose was crushed almost flat but the bruising and the swelling had not yet begun. Glasanov waited for the focus to come back into the eyes, and for the fear to appear.

“Listen, why do you make us hurt you?” he asked with genuine curiosity. “Why must we go through this? Can you not begin now to understand the gravity of these charges?”

“Osysvorf,” the old man cursed, but the language was unfamiliar to the Russian.

“He’s delirious,” he said. “He’s praying in Hebrew.”

“No,” said Comrade Bolodin, “that’s Yiddish. And it isn’t a prayer. It’s a curse. He said you were garbage.”

Glasanov did not take the insult personally; he never did.

“You cannot win,” he pointed out to the old man. “Surely you understand that. And not just in this room, where you are doomed, but in the larger sense, the historical sense.”

Glasanov talked frequently of history; he loved history. Each night, when they were done or before they had begun, they sat in the Café Moka on the Ramblas sipping Pernod and rijos among English newsmen and fiery young Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists and POUMistas and other assorted but quite colorful riffraff that an out-of-control revolution throws up. Glasanov would explain at great length to his assistant Bolodin about history.

“Fuck history,” said the old man, in Russian.

“Hit him,” said Glasanov. “In the body. The ribs. Hard. Several times, please, comrade.”

Bolodin walked to the bound figure, feeling the old Yid’s eyes on him the whole way. Jesus, they could be tough, these old birds. Without a great deal of emotional involvement, Comrade Bolodin threw a flurry of short, penetrating blows into his ribs and chest. He could hear the crack of his fists against the body as the old man jerked spastically in the ropes. But he would not scream.

“All right,” said Glasanov. “It’s very clear, Comrade Tchiterine. The charges are clear and they are obvious. You are a wrecker and an oppositionist. You have constantly worked to undermine the Party and betray the revolution. In England in 1931, you and Lemontov and Levitsky entered into an agreement with the British Secret Service, so you are also a spy. And all of this is under the control of your leader, the Jew Trotsky.”

The old man raised his head slowly. His skin had gone almost the color of slate. Blood showed on his lips.

“Fuck your sister, you cowshit peasant. The Great Lenin himself gave Levitsky and me medals.”

“And what if it’s true, old Tchiterine? It’s irrelevant to history. Hit him hard.”

Comrade Bolodin hit him in the ear and the face. He hit him in the mouth, smashing out his teeth. He hit him in the temple, then hit him again and again under the eye, in the face. The sound of the blows was slippery and wet and dense. He hit him in the ―

“BOLODIN! Enough, Christ, enough. You forget yourself.”

Bolodin stepped back. He sometimes had difficulty stopping.

“Tchiterine, it’s pointless to resist. You’ll sign the confession either here or in the Lubyanka. You’ll go on trial. You’ll be found guilty. You’ll die. Your generation must pass on now. That’s what history has written.”

The old man’s face had been greatly damaged by the punishment. It looked like a piece of mashed fruit, swollen and bruised and caked in blood. The blood was everywhere. He croaked something through his swollen lips.

“Eh?” asked Glasanov.

“Fuck Koba,” said Tchiterine, somehow, and Comrade Bolodin hit him a cruel, powerful blow in the side. Of the many, this was perhaps the most devastating, for it ruptured the old man’s appendix. In his bounds, Tchiterine commenced to struggle as the pain and numbness rocketed through him. In time he lapsed into a waxen coma. His breathing was imperceptible.

“You hit him too much. Your zeal gets the best of you. Discipline. Remember, above all, discipline. Strength, passion, commitment, they are all fine and absolutely necessary. The great Stalin, however, says that in discipline lies the key to the future.”

“I apologize, comrade.”

“You Americans,” Comrade Glasanov said.

Comrade Bolodin’s true name was Lenny Mink, and his last fixed address had been 1351 Cypress Avenue in the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn, but he was to be found more frequently at Midnight Rose’s, a candy store at Livonia and Saratoga streets, that served as the unofficial headquarters for his company, which went by the name Murder, Inc. He had left New York at the urging of certain parties, as police curiosity concerning his involvement with the deaths by shooting, bludgeoning, ice picking, and drowning of several witnesses due to deliver evidence against Lepke Buchalter had reached embarrassing proportions. Lenny, like his peers Pittsburgh Phil, Gangy Cohen, Pretty Levine, Jack Drucker, and his bosses Mendy Weiss, Dandy Phil Kastel, and Bugsy Siegel, killed people for two reasons: because he was good at it and because he was paid for it.

“Well, he’ll be out all night,” said Glasanov. “Get him back to his cell. Wash him off, clean him up. Get him some brandy. We’ll work on him some more tomorrow.”

“Yes, comrade,” said Lenny Mink, still in Russian.

“Tough old fellow,” said Glasanov. “They had to be in those days. He’s right, you know, what they did was extraordinary. Fighting the Okrana and the Cossacks and later the western armies and Kolchak. My God, they were tough.”

Lenny looked at the old guy. Yeah, tough. Tougher than any nigger, and when he was young, Lenny had fought a nigger for almost an hour down by the docks until both men had been too exhausted to continue and nobody took the kitty. Later, some whore used a razor on the guy.

“Be careful with him, now. Comrade Koba wants him back in Moscow, understand?”

“Yes, comrade.” Lenny kept his Russian simple and polite.

“I’ll be in my office. Wake me if anything occurs.”

Lenny, alone with the old man, reached into his pocket and removed a switchblade, popped it, and cut the bonds. The body fell; he caught it. Tchiterine had once been an important man, the Comintern agent in charge of imposing Party demands on the often unruly dockworkers’ unions in the port of Barcelona. Now look at him.

Lenny, six-three and well over two hundred pounds, had no trouble getting the old guy up in his arms. The American had a blunt, sullen, nearly handsome face, though it was pocked. He seemed to carry his big bones slowly and had a kind of cold force to him ― he liked to hurt people and people understood this of him almost instinctively, and tended to become uncomfortable in his presence, an effect he enjoyed. He had always had it. In fact, in his youth, in the Diaspora before he had come to America, his shtetl nickname had been “Cossack,” after the rumor that he’d been begotten, not by his nominal father, a butcher, but by a Russian raider in a pogrom.

He rarely spoke. He appeared to listen intently. People often considered him stupid, which was a mistake. He simply wasn’t clever with words, although he spoke imperfect versions of English and Russian, having learned the latter during a two-thousand-mile walk from Minsk to Odessa when he was eleven years old, a remarkable journey. He had made the trip on his own, after another pogrom, the one in which his mother and father and all his brothers and sisters had been killed. His best language was Yiddish, the language of his boyhood, although he was picking up Spanish rapidly. When he had presented himself at the International Brigade clearinghouse in Paris, in hopes of finding suitable employment in the natural venue for a man of his profession ― a war ― the NKVD had scooped him up. The NKVD had plans for Barcelona, and Lenny looked to be the perfect instrument.

He took old Tchiterine’s body into the harsh light of the newly wired bulbs and down the empty corridor of the prison, which at one time had been the novitiate’s wing of the Convent of St. Ursula. The place had been vandalized, as had all Church properties in the first crazed days of the July Revolution, and rioters had smashed everything and painted slogans everywhere. Shards of broken glass still lay on the floor. Yet the place also had a sense of newness to it; recently occupied by elements of the NKVD, which clearly needed both privacy and security, it had been painted roughly, rewired for electricity, patched, and repaired. It smelled of paint and new wood and also of piss and despair.

Lenny reached Tchiterine’s cell and set him on the bed. The old man breathed roughly. His swelling completely disfigured his face. Lenny covered his nakedness with a blanket. He went to a bucket, brought it over, and wet his handkerchief. He began to wipe the dried blood off the face. He’d really gone a little nuts there ― a problem of his. Sometimes he couldn’t hold on to himself. He just liked the way it felt when he hit people. Discipline, this Russian boss was always saying. Discipline was the secret of history. He actually believed that shit.

The old man moaned suddenly.

Lenny jumped.

“Ya!” he yelped in Yiddish. “You scared me, old man.”

One yellow eye came open. The other was swollen shut.

“Vasser,” the old man begged through his ripened lips. “Please,” he begged in Yiddish, “a little, please.”

“You old yentzer” Lenny laughed. He cupped some water in his big hand and let it dribble into the old man’s mouth. The old man lapped it up greedily.

“I don’t feel so good in my gut,” he said.

“What’d you expect, from the smashing you got?”

“Help me,” the old man said then. “I can pay you.”

“Pay what? You got a treasure stuck up your old asshole? You’re making me laugh, you old putz.”

Lenny stood to leave. The old man looked like one of those bums you find on Seventh Avenue after the Harlem niggers got done rolling him: all beat to shit, beat to craziness, not good for nothing. Naked, shivering, in the straw, his face punched to shit. It made Lenny sick. He was so big once, this old man, and now look at him.

The old man fought to get a word out. It came in a whisper, racked and hoarse.

“Whaaaa?” said Lenny.

“G-g-g-g-gelt,” the old man finally spat out. Money.

Lenny bent. Maybe the old guy had a stash somewhere.

The old man’s feeble hand flew up to Lenny’s shoulder. It felt like a perched bird.

“Save me, nu? Save an old Jew?”

“How much? Talk a figure.”

“Lots. Would I lie?”

“Everybody lies.”

“Gelt! Lots and lots, I’m telling you.”

“Where, up your asshole?”

“Gold, by the ton.”

“A ton of gold. In a mountain somewhere, no? Old putz, talking dreams.”

Lenny had an urge to kill him. Put the thumb to his throat, press it in; he’d be history in a second.

“In 1931, me, Lemontov, Levitsky, we worked in England as spies.”

“It’s old business.”

“Listen. Listen.”

“So fucking talk.”

“Levitsky found a student at a fancy university.”

“Who’s this Levitsky?”

“Teuful.”

“Devil?”

“Shayner Yid. Devil Himself. The old revolutionary. The master spy. He was head of Comintern. A real important guy.”

Lenny was growing interested. But what was the money angle?

“Go on, you old fuck,” he said.

The old man told him swiftly, croaking the story out of his swollen lips in little bursts as he grabbed on to Lenny’s arm with his tight hand, about the boy in England, the gentile boy who would rise, and yet was bound in special ways to old Levitsky, the spy.

“The Devil Himself owns the boy’s soul,” the old Jew said.

“What’s this guy’s name?” Lenny wanted to know.

“I don’t know it. I only served Levitsky, the man is a genius. I never knew any of the real secrets. Lemontov didn’t know. But I saw him once. The boychik, I saw him. When I was in a place I shouldn’t have been.”

“Where’s the dough you’re talking about?”

“He’s in Spain, five years older, this boy, now grown to a man. Working for the Russians, nu? I’ve seen him with my own two eyes. I can point him out. He’s in the cafés every night.”

“So what’s this talk of a ton of gold, old man. You pulling my putz?”

“Listen good. The Russians took gold off these Spaniards. To pay for guns, they said. It was shipped out, they said. And everybody thinks it’s gone. But at the last minute, they got scared when the Italian submarines started sinking ships. I know, I found out in the harbor. Those ships they loaded up with gold, they were empty. They hid the stuff. Somewhere in this city. They’re going to take it over land, through Europe. This Englishman, it’s his job, I tell you. He’s here to move the gold, because the Russians don’t trust their own people. This Englishman, he knows where the gold is. When he moves, the ton of gold moves too.”

Lenny looked at him, feeling something working in his head. A ton of gold. Moved secretly. An Englishman. Who would suspect an Englishman moving Spanish gold for the Russians?

Lenny thought it over. A ton of gold! Ripe for picking. With only an Englishman for a guard.

Lenny liked the idea of a lot of money; it meant you went to the clubs and everybody knew you and you had a swell dame and guys were always coming by and asking how you were, the way they did with Lepke.

“One thing. We got to protect Levitsky. He’s family, nu? He’s one of us. He’s one of us. He’s shayner Yid, and we don’t give him away.”

“Ah, he’s off in Russia somewhere drinking vodka with his pals.”

“No, I’m telling you. He’ll check in on his boychik, he will. He’s the smartest man in the world, a chess champion, a genius, not like us. Hah, he―”

He made a sudden strange, gurgling sound.

“I don’t feel so good,” the old man said. “When you hit me, the last time, in the side; my gut hurts.”

“You’re okay.”

“No, get me a doctor. You gotta get me a doctor.”

“There ain’t any doctors in this joint. What, a stomach ache? In the morning, you’ll be―”

But the old man had gone gray almost incredibly and he continued to choke and gurgle and tremble.

“Help me!” he said, his one eye opened wide. His hand flew to Lenny and grabbed his arm desperately. “Help me!”

“Fuck you,” said Lenny, but he was talking to a corpse.

And fuck me, too, Lenny Mink thought, with his dream of a ton of gold as dead as the body before him.

A few days later, Lenny received a bit of unusual news. He was told to proceed, in daylight, to Glasanov’s office in the Main Police Building on the Via Layetana, not far from the port. This was quite peculiar. Lenny had never been there before.

Some German drove him from the convent to the station. It was a big, square, white building in the middle of a busy city street, just a few blocks from the Ramblas. The revolutionary slogans and painted initials, the rippling banners, the huge posters of old men with goatees could not quite disguise the grandeur of the place, its link to a time when Spain had been ruled by about six guys who built everything to look like a wedding cake. It was maybe nine stories tall, and each window had a little balcony under it, all the way up. You went in through a main gate under a banner that said LET US GO FORWARD INTO THE MODERN AGE which took you into a courtyard and then you went in a set of double doors which took you into a big corridor and then you went up four flights to find Glasanov’s office.

Glasanov, Lenny understood, was some kind of “adviser” to the Barcelona police department, which meant he ran it. He was helping them organize what they called the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the SIM; Lenny also understood that the SIM was a Spanish version of the NKVD; or, rather, that it was the NKVD. It was like gangs anywhere: one gang got control and they tried to take over everywhere. A tough gang stayed tough by squashing any gang that thought it was tougher.

Yet Glasanov’s office turned out to be a modest arrangement at the end of a hall. He walked in to find Glasanov standing. Glasanov looked a little like a German because he was so pale and blond. He was not smiling, but he never smiled, because he took his responsibilities so seriously. His cheeks had an almost artificial color to them, which the Russians called the “midnight look,” because it seemed to show up on the faces of officials who spent the nights in their offices.

“Comrade Bolodin. Our Amerikanski.”

Lenny had never liked the revolutionary pseudonym; he still had to think twice when one of the Russians called him by it.

“Comrade commissar,” Lenny responded. He hated the comrade shit, the talk of history, the endless lectures on scientific Marxism and the necessity for building a better world. But when you worked for a boss, you played it his way. Until you got yours.

“A drink?”

“No thanks.”

“Excellent. A man who controls his appetites. I like that.”

“Is this about the old guy? Look, it wasn’t my fault he croaked.”

“No, no. An accident. A terrible accident. He was in ill health. Moscow understands.”

Lenny waited. What was the story?

“Here. I have something for you. It’s time, I think, for you to take a more active role in the processes of enforcing Party discipline here in Barcelona. This is why I asked you to come by.”

He handed over a card.

Lenny realized it was an ID naming him a captain in the SIM ― making him, in other words, an official secret policeman and giving him all the rights and responsibilities thereof, which included the right to make spot arrests and searches, to confiscate property and vehicles in the service of the state, to command units of the Asaltos, or assault police, to extract immediate cooperation, not to say obedience, from all civil authority.

“There’s much work ahead,” Glasanov went on. “There are traitors everywhere, do you understand? Even in Moscow in the heart of government, among the oldest and most trusted of the revolutionary fighters. Every day, they confess their crimes in the dock, or flee.”

“So I hear,” said Lenny Mink.

“The late Comrade Tchiterine,” said Glasanov, “for example, was under the control of a famous revolutionary fighter named Levitsky, who was the worst. Tchiterine, a man named Lemontov who has disappeared, and this Levitsky, they formed a terrorism center, working at espionage to betray us. Levitsky was second only to Trotsky. Did Tchiterine, by chance, mention Levitsky?”

“He didn’t mention anybody. He just died.”

“Umm. I had thought they might have been in contact. They seem to have been in some sort of plot together.”

Lenny grunted, thinking What plot, you fuck?

“First Lemontov disappears ― that should have been the tipoff. At least we were fast enough to nab Tchiterine.”

“What about this guy Levitsky?”

“Ah. A wily old fox. They call him the Devil Himself, for certain colorful exploits. He’s gone. He disappeared from Moscow even as the security people were coming to arrest him.”

Lenny nodded. The old fucker was out!

“I tell you this to encourage your vigilance. We are preparing to move against our enemies here. The days of café sitting will soon be coming to an end.”

“You can count on me,” said Lenny.

“Of course. You are an extraordinarily valuable man.”

Glasanov handed him a piece of paper. On it was written a name.

“An oppositionist. He leads the propaganda battle against us in his newspaper. His organization is powerful, and he is one of its leaders.”

It was just like at Midnight Rose’s. The word came, and you took somebody for a ride.

“You want him killed.”

“Ah―”

“Believe me, he’s gone.”

“There will be others. Some to be arrested and interrogated, some to be liquidated. You must cut off the head of a beast before you dispose of its body. A period of great struggle is coming, and I am personally charged with commanding our forces.”

But Lenny wasn’t really listening, nor was he thinking about the man he would pop that night.

He was thinking of what old Tchiterine had told him.

He’ll check in on his boychik.

Lenny smirked in triumph. He knew what none of them knew. He was ahead of this smart Russian, he was ahead of everybody in the world. He knew where this Levitsky, this teuful, would head. The Devil Himself, eh?

Well, the old guy was coming straight to Barcelona, to check up on his boychik. And he’d lead Lenny to him. He’d lead him to the gelt.

“Comrade,” said Glasanov. “To the future.” He handed him a small glass of vodka. “You must not refuse me.”

“Let us go forward into the modern age,” said Lenny, throwing the vodka down his throat.

He hated vodka.

4 MR. STERNE AND MR. WEBLEY

Florry met Holly-Browning the following Tuesday on a bench in Hyde Park. The older officer had a bag of peanuts for the pigeons and a briefcase. Mr. Vane sat quietly three benches down the walk, looking blankly off through the trees.

The major sighed, his eyes settling on some obscure object in the far distance. He shelled a peanut, launched it to the walk, and a doddering, scabby old pigeon contemptuously gobbled it off the concrete.

“I wonder if this is quite necessary,” said Florry impatiently.

“Oh, there’s not much to say, Mr. Florry. The technical business is quite easily taken care of. We try to keep things simple. You’ll find this is useful.” He handed over a package, which Florry opened quickly. It was a thick, densely printed book.

“Tristram Shandy? I loathe it. I loathe Laurence Sterne. I never was able to finish it.”

“I haven’t met anybody who has. And that’s the point. But it will do for an introduction to a chap in Barcelona called Sampson. David Harold Allen Sampson―”

“The Times writer?”

“Yes, indeed. You’ve seen his dispatches?”

“He’s awfully dull, I think. Julian’s stuff is much better.”

“Sampson represents our interests there, and through him you’ll keep us informed. He’s got an office on the Ramblas, Number 114 Rambla San Jose. He can reach us quickly via the consulate wireless. Can you remember that?”

“Of course.”

“Show him the book. It’s a way of saying hullo, we’re in the same firm. He’ll guide you to Raines.”

“I’m sure I’ll have no trouble finding Julian.”

“And there’s this.” From the briefcase he withdrew another bulky package, something heavy wrapped in oilskins. Florry took it in his lap and began to pull apart the rags.

“Not here. Good Christ, man, somebody might see―”

But Florry plunged ahead: he got enough of the material apart to penetrate to the center of the treasure. Wrapped in an elaborate leather rig there was a vaguely familiar object, and as his fingers flew across it, he recognized it immediately. He put his hand on the grip and pulled it out.

It was a well-oiled Webley Mark I, a big revolver with a short octagonal barrel.

“God, you’re not joking about all this, are you?” Florry said.

“Put it away, Florry. Somebody could come along.”

But Florry continued to look at it, fascinated. He experienced the weapon’s heft and weight and perfect easy feel. He’d carried much the same thing in Burma, though in a slightly later model. With a dexterity from memory that surprised him, he hit the latch to break the action and the barrel obediently dropped to expose the cylinder. Six gleaming brass circles peeped out, like six coins on a pewter plate.

“Loaded,” he said.

“The bloody things are useless without bullets. That’s a shoulder holster, by the way. It’ll hold the weapon neatly out of sight under a coat or cardigan. And as you know, the four-five-five will knock down anything on two feet at close range. Now put it away, Florry. Someone could come.”

Julian? What would a monster like a Webley do to vivid, charming, cruel Julian? It would blow his guts in quarts across the landscape.

He shook his head, quickly replaced the pistol in the holster, wrapped it in the cloth, and put it back in the briefcase. Mr. Sterne and Mr. Webley were to be his companions in Spain.

“I suppose that’s it, then?” he said. “A revolver and a code book. It is a game, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a game, Mr. Florry. Never think of it as a game. Think of it as life and death.”

“I wonder if I could ever do the final thing.”

“You’ll do what’s necessary. You’ll see your duty.”

“I suppose you’re right. And that is what frightens me.”

Florry turned and issued the major a look that was either stupidity or shock. The major had seen it before, but not since 1916. It was the look of men in the trenches, about to go over the top, who didn’t believe their moment of destiny had finally arrived. Florry got up and walked away gloomily.

The major peeled another peanut and turned it over to the hungry pigeons. Soon Mr. Vane joined him.

“I trust it went well, sir?”

“It went as well as could be expected, Vane. Given the circumstances.”

“Did you think he’s up to it?”

“Not yet. That’s Sampson’s job.”

“Yessir.”

“We’ll have to play Mr. Florry very carefully, won’t we, Vane?”

“Yessir.”

“Levitsky can make a traitor of anyone. Can I make a murderer so easily?”

They watched as Florry, now a small figure, disappeared in the traffic.

5 BARCELONA

Most nights, in obedience to his instructions, Comrade Captain Bolodin of the SIM went out with his men and made arrests. The instructions were perfect: the addresses were always right, the criminal always available. Comrade Captain Bolodin and his men were always on time; they never had any trouble. Nothing worked well in Republican Spain except the NKVD and nothing worked better in the NKVD than Comrade Captain Bolodin.

Sometimes the criminals were imprisoned, sometimes merely liquidated. A libertarian lawyer, for example, author of a wickedly scatological anti-Russian poem for his four-page party newspaper, paid for this crime with a bullet in the neck; a Polish trade unionist also died, as did a French intellectual who wrote scathing editorials, and a German Social Democrat who had published an unkind article in a Norwegian socialist newspaper. A Cuban, however, was simply reeducated in the political realities of Barcelona by an administration of Comrade Captain Bolodin’s fists for an excruciatingly long evening.

But under this political drama another one was running. Certain of the arrestees of a peculiar age and range of experience were spared the more furious applications of Koba’s justice and ― although this was quite unknown to Koba’s official representatives, particularly the aggressively moral Glasanov ― were escorted into an obscure cell for a private interview with Comrade Captain Bolodin. The subjects were always the same.

The first was a certain shipment of gold, said to have left the Barcelona port in November of 1936 on four Russian steamers. Had this material actually been loaded on the ships and sent out to Odessa, as official records insisted? The answers varied, and the arrestees, mainly dockworkers and low-ranking Spanish port officials, were at great pains to please their interrogator. Some swore yes, they’d seen Russian tankers loading the material that the Spaniards had not been able to get near to. But others said the entire affair was quite odd, because the Russians had insisted on being so public about it; they wanted the world to know they were moving the gold. One man said the ships rode awfully high in the water for all the weight they were said to be carrying. But if the gold remained hidden in Barcelona, where could it be? None of Lenny’s many arrestees had an opinion.

For these men, the fate was always the same. They had learned, from their ordeal, of Mink’s real interest. It was the most dangerous knowledge a man could have in Barcelona. They died, usually with a 7.62 mm slug from Lenny Mink’s Tula-Tokarev in the back of their skulls.

The other subject that Lenny Mink examined at length was a certain category of arrestee’s acquaintance with the legendary Levitsky, or “Devil Himself” as he was called in certain quarters.

These questions met with a variety of responses.

Some, for example, would not talk at all without severe assistance. It took Lenny the best part of one whole evening to pry out of one old man the story of Levitsky’s youth, and how the Cossacks had, one bloody morning, liberated the boy from responsibility to parents and shtetl by slaying the former and burning the latter, all before his terrified twelve-year-old eyes, an event which forever propelled him to the revolutionary course. Lenny listened gravely to this account, having some familiarity with the materials himself.

Of Levitsky’s early exploits in the underground of the nineties at a very young age, his first contests with the Okrana, and his eventual abandonment of anarchism for the tenets of Marx, no reliable witness could be found, though several alluded to it.

What they remembered most of Levitsky was the long period between the failed revolution of 1905 and the successful one of 1917 in which he roamed Europe making his legend as a cunning strategist and a fighter of great bravery. It was primarily his enemies from these days who remembered him and frequently hated him still and were ready, even eager, to speak. They remembered his ruthlessness, his cunning, and even his brilliant chess.

“He could have owned the world, it was said,” one man informed Lenny. “Instead he chose to change it.”

He planted bombs in Bucharest, he organized strikes in Turin, he robbed banks in Zagreb; wherever the Party needed him, he went; whatever price the Party demanded, he paid. He was arrested half a dozen times, usually escaping, most spectacularly from the terrible Constantinople Hall of Darkness. Three times, maybe four, the Okrana tried to kill him.

He surfaced, again briefly, in the incredibly hectic years of the revolution, from 1917 to 1921. In this period, an old veteran recalled, he was remembered mainly as a soldier: a great battlefield tactician who, unlike the cowardly Trotsky in his armored train, rode at the head of every charge and was once unhorsed three times in a single afternoon. He fought in all the battles around Kazan and was wounded twice; he was a brigade commander, a counter-intelligence officer, and a leader of cavalry. He rode with the Red Cossacks ― he, whose parents had been butchered by Cossacks ― out of the hills on June 3, 1919, in the battle that spelled the end for Kolchak. He fought against Yedenitch in the north and Denekin in the south. This was particularly impressive to all who remembered it because Levitsky hated horses as he hated nothing on earth. It was a sheer triumph of will.

After the war, he again passed from view as he returned to the secret life of the conspirator. Few facts were forthcoming on this period, though Comrade Captain Bolodin sought them with special fervor. At the point of death, an old Rumanian confessed that he had heard that Comrade Levitsky had arranged assignment to the Otdyel Mezhunarodnoi Svyazi, the International Liaison Section of Comintern, where he could privately pursue his goal of world revolution and safely ignore Koba as he ransacked the revolution. Comintern, it was also stated, was really but an arm of the GRU, Red Army Intelligence, whose policies it pursued with an almost noble integrity. It was said that Levitsky carried a high, secret rank in the GRU. It was said that when the GRU lost favor to the NKVD, Levitsky’s magic protection began to wither away, his freedom to say unkind things about Koba, his ability to shock at social gatherings with his imitation of Koba at the chessboard, all these disappeared. He was being watched. But they were, on the whole, mysterious years: no witnesses knew enough to tell Lenny more than he already knew.

The arrests began in 1934. Koba arrested him then, and again in 1935; he spent time in Siberia, six frozen months as a zek in one of the prison camps, before “rehabilitation,” and returned from the East with his particularly forbidding dignity, which most interpreted as pessimism and which, most agreed, doomed him; his last days were spent in the Lux Hotel, waiting for something … or waiting for Koba’s final justice. Whether he was affiliated still with GRU was unknown.

These shreds of fact and bits of legend Lenny accumulated over a few weeks; for them all, the payment was the same: the bullet in the skull. And from them, he determined where he might be able to find what he needed most in his quest.

It was a steelpoint etching from a quick sketch done in 1901 in the Great Hall of the Casino at Karlsbad of the champion of the chess tournament. It has been printed within the pages of Deutsche Schach-zeitung, the German chess magazine. It was a picture of a fierce young Jew, and the caption under had read, Der Teuful Selbst, E. I. Levitsky.

It took Lenny a week to find it in an antiquarian bookstore in the Gothic Quarter.

6 THE AKIM

Late in the morning, a calm fell on the tired old scow. No breeze furled the flat sea; the sky was cloudless, but white and dull with oppressive radiance. It was a warm, almost tropical day.

Sylvia noticed it first.

“We seem to be dead in the water,” she observed, looking up from her copy of Signature. “I hope nothing is wrong.” She sat on a canvas chair on the Akim’s small passenger deck beneath its battered bridge and single stack with her two fellow passengers.

“Perhaps they wait for a clearance or something,” said Count Witte, the Polish correspondent.

“Can we be that close to Barcelona?”

“I don’t know, dear girl,” he said.

“What do you make of it, Mr. Florry?” she asked.

It was another in the constant barrage of questions she had for him. She was a young Englishwoman of his own age and the middle class, who had, if he understood correctly, come into some money, picked up a taint of fashionable leftist politics, and was now headed to Barcelona for adventuring. Though her questions were generally stupid, it pleased him to be asked them. She had so many!

Florry, also sitting on a deck chair, put down Tristram Shandy and said, “With this lot of amateurs one can never tell. I suppose I ought to go check.”

“If you can make yourself understood,” said the count, an aristocratic old man in a yellow panama hat and monocle. “These monkeys are hardly human.”

The count had a point: the crew of the old steamer consisted largely of semicivilized Arabs, wily, barefoot primitives in burnooses and filthy whites who scuttled about her rusty chambers and funnels like athletes and spoke in gibberish. The officers were only slightly better: two smarmy Turks who always needed a shave and spoke in impenetrable platitudes in answer to any query. Tell them their hair was on fire or some fellow had stuck a knife between their shoulder blades and they’d have answered the same: All is well, all is well, and praise to Allah.

“I suppose I shall have to ask the bloody steward,” Florry said. “At least he’s European.”

“Good heavens,” said the count, “if you consider that chap European, Mr. Florry, you have extremely low standards.” He made a face as if he’d just swallowed a lemon, and followed it with a quick wink.

“Keep the pirates off Miss Lilliford, will you, count?” Florry called, leaving them.

He set out in search of the steward, but of course the old fellow was not always that easy to find. He was a seedy but kindly chap officially charged with attending to their needs on this short voyage from Marseilles to Barcelona and, more important, charged with helping the cook. He was not the sort of man who took duty seriously, however; he spent his time affixed to a secret flask of peppermint schnapps, for he wore the odor of the liquor about him like a scarf.

Florry climbed down through the hatchway and made his way into the oily interior of the craft. Twice, he stopped to let jabbering Arabs by. They salaamed obsequiously, but he could see the mockery in their bright eyes. He pressed on, and the temperature rose and the atmosphere seemed to thicken with moisture; it was actually steamy.

He finally found the old man in the galley, where he sat hunched in his filthy uniform, slicing onions into a large pot and weeping copiously. As Florry approached he realized Gruenwald had really been on a toot this morning, for he smelled like a peppermint factory. He also gleamed with sweat, for the temperature in this room was even more grotesque than in the passageway. Florry mopped his face with a handkerchief, which came away transparent.

“I say, Mr. Gruenwald. The ship is no longer moving. Do you know why?”

“Hah?” replied old Gruenwald, scrunching up his face like a clown’s. “No can I quite hear.”

“We’ve stopped,” Florry shouted over the clamor of the engines. “In the water. No propeller. No move. Understand?”

“Stopped? Wir halten, ja?”

“Yes. It’s upsetting. Is anything wrong?”

“Ach. Nothing is. Is nothing. Nein, is nothing.”

Old Herr Gruenwald leaped out of the galley ― the Arab cook cursed him to Allah as he rose, but he paid no attention ― and pulled Florry out through a hatchway onto a rusty lower deck ― ah, fresh blast of salt air! ― where he settled into the lee of a rotting lifeboat and bade Florry collapse beside him.

“Hah. You some schnapps want, ja, Englischman?”

“No, I think not. Awfully nice of you though,” Florry said. Take a swig of that? Revolting!

“Ach. You should relax, no? Relax. Old Gruenwald, he take care.” He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his flask, swiftly unscrewed the lid, and took a swallow. His bony old Adam’s apple flexed like a fist as it worked. He handed the flask to Florry. “Go on. Is gut.”

Florry looked at the thing with great reluctance but in the end didn’t want to seem an utter prig, and so took a swift gulp. It was awful. He coughed gaspingly and handed it back.

“Good, nein?”

“Delicious,” Florry said.

“We stop because the Fascists sometime bomb docks in daylight. We stop here until five, ja. Then we go in in dark. So? Is okay?”

“Yes, I see.” Florry looked out across the flat, still water.

“Not so long to wait, eh, Herr Florry?”

“Not if safety’s the issue. I’d hate to think of what a bomb would do to this old tub.”

“Boom! No more tub, ja?” The old man laughed merrily, took another swig from his flask. “The Queen Mary, nein, eh, Herr Florry?” he said conspiratorially, gesturing down to the paint-flecked, rust-pitted deck.

“Nor, I trust, the Lusitania.”

The old man laughed.

“I had a brother killed in the Unterseeboots. Ja. 1917.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Ach. No matter. He vas bastard, anyhow. Hah!”

Florry nodded sweetly, seeming to pay attention, and then said, “Come on, now, old fellow. The true reason. Don’t let’s play games.”

Gruenwald professed indignation and shock at the accusation.

“Hah. Gruenwald tell truth. Ja, Ich―”

“Now, now, don’t get excited. Perhaps you are. On the other hand, I can’t imagine the owners of this wonderful oceangoing paradise would be too pleased to have it inspected terribly closely, would they? Unless my nose deceives me ― and I’ve got a very good nose ― I think I make out the undertang of tobacco amid the general welter of odors available below decks. Tobacco’s contraband, I believe, in Spain. That, I believe, is the reason for our delay. So that we can sneak in under cover of darkness. Damned interesting.” Florry gave the old man a sly look.

Gruenwald was gravely offended. “Herr Florry, you must zay nothing of zis! You keep your nose clean. Ja? You are at risk if you go about―”

“Don’t worry, old fellow. I personally don’t care what’s done with the stuff, just so it doesn’t inconvenience me unduly. All right?”

“Herr Florry, you be careful. Barcelona is very dangerous.”

“Why, there’s no fighting there anymore.”

“You listen gut, Herr Florry, I like Englisch peoples, even if they kill my brother in 1917. Hah! You be careful. The man who own zis boat, he is very powerful. He would not like young Englisch gentleman go around town talk about tobacco. Ja! Bad trouble for someone who do this. There are many ways to die in Barcelona.”

“Well, that’s a fair warning given, and I shall take it to heart. Thank you, Herr Gruenwald.”

“Ja, Gruenwald not zo zmart these days. I vas vunce real zmart. But in here, now, ist ― how you say?” ― he tapped his head and leaned close to Florry, his pepperminty breath flooding all over the Englishman ― “luftmensch. Ah―”

“Crazy, we would say.”

“Ja! Ja! Crazy, I got blown up by the Frenchies in the great war. In here metal ist. A big plate. Like as you would haben die zup ― eat your dinner off. Ja, metal in the head, ja!”

“Good heavens,” said Florry.

“In the war. The war was very bad.”

“Yes, I know.”

“How would you know, Herr Florry? You are too young for zuch things.”

“Yes, I suppose I am,” said Florry.

The old man took another swig on his flask and then another. His eyes seemed dead.

“Mr. Florry, where on earth have you been?” she asked, as he at last returned.

“I am sorry,” he said.

She lounged on a chaise in the pale sun. Count Witte, his jacket off and folded, a pair of circular sunglasses perched comically across his face, lay beside her. He was reading a book in Polish.

Florry quickly explained. “And so we sit,” he concluded. “I suppose if you choose a vessel that asks you no questions, then you must not ask questions of it.”

“A good principle, Mr. Florry,” called Count Witte. “It’s as true of political parties as well. And also” ― he added with another wink ― “of women.”

“Count Witte, you are such an old charmer,” said Sylvia.

“Miss Lilliford, you make me wish I were a young charmer.”

“Well,” said Sylvia, “at least it will give me a chance to get all this read by landfall.” She meant her pile of magazines. “At least then I shall have some understanding of things.”

“It is exactly when one thinks one understands a revolution,” said the count, “that the revolution changes into something that cannot be understood.”

“I certainly understand the basic principles,” boasted Florry. “They are threefold. It there’s shooting you duck and if there’s yelling you listen and if there’s singing you pretend you know the words.”

“Exactly,” said the count. “Mr. Florry, we shall make an international correspondent of you yet.”

The girl laughed. Florry pretended not to notice, as he’d been pretending not to notice since he came aboard three days earlier and discovered her on the deck. She was as slender as a blade, with a neck like a cocktail-glass stem. She had a mass of tawny, curled hair. She was about his own age, with gray green eyes. He did not think her terribly attractive, but nevertheless found himself taking great pleasure in the sound of her laughter or the sense of her attention when he talked politics with the sardonic old Witte.

“Oh, Mr. Florry,” she had said, boldly speaking first, “you know so much.”

Florry knew it not to be true, but found himself smiling again.

By five, the Akim had begun to move again, and shortly before nightfall, the passengers could see the long, thin line of the Spanish coastline.

“Look, Mr. Florry,” Sylvia called from the rail. “There it is. At last.”

Florry went to her.

“Hmm, just looks like the other side of the Thames to me. One supposes one should feel some sense of a great adventure beginning. I’d rather spend a night in a bed that doesn’t rock quite as much as this one.”

She laughed. “You’re such a cynic” ― and she gave him a slightly oblique look from her oddly powerful eyes ― “except that you aren’t.”

“I tend to put my own comforts first, I suppose. Before politics and before history. And before long, I hope.”

She laughed again, which pleased him. Then she said, “I don’t feel the adventure, either, to tell the truth. What I feel is a sense of confusion. This war is a terrible mess. Only this fellow Julian Raines, the poet, can seem to make any sense of it. Did you read his piece on Barcelona?”

The name struck him uneasily.

“Brilliant fellow,” he said uncomfortably, hoping to be done with the subject.

“His explanations are the clearest,” she said with what seemed to be a kind of admiration. “What an extraordinary place it must be. On the occasion of the army rebellion, the armed workers beat them down. Then they refused to turn the guns over to the government and established a revolutionary society and are preparing for the next step. Which would be the establishment of a true classless society.”

“God, what a nauseating prospect,” said the count. “No, my dear, you’ll see. The tension will mount between the Russian Communists and the libertarian, anti-Stalinist Anarchists and Socialists, and there’ll be an explosion.”

“In which case,” Florry said, “we all obey Florry’s First Rule of Revolution, which is: when the bombs go bang, find a deep hole.”

They both laughed.

“You make it sound like a war, Mr. Florry. You have been reading your Julian Raines, too. He’s very pessimistic about the Popular Front. He feels that―”

“Yes, I know, Sylvia. I have read all of Julian’s pieces. He’s awfully good, I admit it.”

“It’s a surprise, actually. I loathe his poetry. I loathe ‘Achilles, Fool,’ the poem about his poor father on the wire. My father also died in the Great War, and I don’t see it as a game at all.”

“Julian inspires passions,” said Florry, looking out across the sea at the dark jut of land, profoundly aware that he himself did not.

“Oh, do you know him, Mr. Florry?” She squealed with delight, vivid animation coming into her eyes. Florry stared at the life on her face, hating it.

“We were at school together,” he said. “Rather close, at one time, actually.”

“He must be the most brilliant writer of his generation,” she said. “Oh, could you possibly introduce me. He could teach me so much.”

“Yes, I suppose. One never knows, of course, how these things will work out, but I suppose I might be able to. He’ll be quite busy, of course. As will I.”

“Oh, of course. As will I.” She laughed. “To imagine, learning from both Robert Florry and Julian Raines. What an unusually lucky chance. The correspondent from The Spectator and from Signature.” She laughed again. “I feel so lucky.”

Florry looked at her. There was something about her slim neck that attracted him enormously. I’m the lucky one, he thought and watched her go back to her cabin.

Florry stood at the railing, nursing his vague feeling of unease, and was there still several minutes later when Count Witte approached.

“Mr. Florry, I must say I envy you. That’s a lovely young woman.”

“Yes, she’s quite special, I agree.”

“I envy you her feelings for you.”

“Well, it’s not gone to that. She seems to be drawn to adventure. She’s evidently got some money for travel. She says she wants to be a writer.”

“Whatever it is, I must say I can think of better spots to take a beautiful young woman than a volatile city like Barcelona. Perhaps she is the sort who feels most alive in danger. Still, I’d be careful if I were you.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

With that comment, the old count went to his cabin.

Florry turned back to the sea. It was almost dark now; the sun had left a vivid smear where it had disappeared into the ocean; the Spanish coast looked much closer now. Florry knew he ought to go to his cabin and pack.

But he looked at it one more time. Spain. Red Spain, in the year 1937.

What the devil, he thought, am I doing here?

Then he went back to his cabin to pack for the arrival.

Florry gathered his tweed jacket about him, wishing he had a scarf. He could feel the ludicrous revolver hanging in the ludicrous holster under his arm. He lit a cigarette. The night was cool and calm, full of moon which reflected off the sea in a gleam that was incandescent, fluttering, almost mesmerizing. It was absurdly beautiful, almost as bright as day. Before him, he could see the land mass, looming larger. He could see the light of the harbor and make out in the light what appeared to be the hulk of a low mountain off on one side, Monjuich it would be called. There was another mountain, one behind the city, called Tibidabo, but he could not see it.

He leaned forward on the railing, wondering how in the world he’d handle it with Julian.

Julian, old man.

Robert, good God, it’s been bloody ages.

Been reading your stuff in Signature. Damned good. I’m out for The Spectator myself.

Oh, and how’s the bloody awful Denis Mason? Hated that man.

Been absolutely topping with me, old sport ―

No, that wouldn’t work. So much between them. Julian, once I loved you and then you hurt me and now they’ve sent me out here to betray you. How on earth can I ever look upon your face? He took a deep breath, happy at least for the solitude. He flipped the cigarette out into the dark, wondering if he had the force to deal with Julian. Something powerful about Julian: it almost frightened him. The city, a few miles beyond, looked serene and peaceful in the moonlight. It looked like some sort of silly, romantic painting.

“Mr. Florry. Staring into the future?”

He turned. It was the girl.

“Yes, well, you’ve caught me at it.”

“How long now until we dock?”

“Well, not a goodly while. You can make out the quay. We slip through the breakwater, then wherever these Arab monkeys choose to tie up, and we’ll be on dry land.”

The moon touched her oval face and made it shine. She smiled and the moon turned her teeth blinding white, small perfect little pearls, little replicas of itself. Had she ever really smiled at him quite like this before? He didn’t think so. The radiance of her look overwhelmed him.

“You’ve changed your clothes.” She now had on some sort of purple dress.

“Yes. The adventure begins, that kind of silly nonsense.”

“It’s quite appropriate, I assure you.”

He could see her hand on the rail, her fair face in the white moonlight. He could smell her. It was lovely, something musky and rather dense. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but felt incapable of even commencing such a move. A squawking of Arabic rose from the bridge ― two sailors cursing each other.

“I’m actually glad I caught you here alone,” she said. “You’ve been awfully kind to me. I wanted to thank you for it.”

“Believe me, Miss Lilliford, it doesn’t take much effort to be kind to you.”

“No, you’re just one of the decent chaps of the world. I can tell. Fewer and fewer of them around, and you’re one.”

“You exaggerate my decency, Miss Lilliford. Scratch my surface and you’ll find the same brute underneath in any man.”

“I can’t begin to believe it.”

It occurred to him he ought to kiss her. He had, actually, never kissed a white woman before.

“There you are,” said Count Witte, coming out onto the deck. “Good heavens, I’ve just had the most terrible altercation with that awful old Gruenwald. The man is completely drunk. He smells as if he’s bathed in peppermint. He was trying to get my trunk up and banging it around terribly. It was most upsetting.”

Florry turned.

“Oh, he’s a harmless old fellow. Worthless, I suppose, but harmless,” said Florry tightly.

“Oh, I say ― am I disturbing you or something? I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Oh, no,” said Florry, “it’s nothing―”

“But it is. I can tell from the startled look on Miss Lilliford’s face. I shall beat a hasty retreat.”

“Please, Count Witte. Our conversation can wait. Mr. Florry and I have plenty of time ahead. Come out and watch the ship sail into the harbor.”

“Yes, do come on, Count Witte.”

“Well, you English are so wonderfully polite I don’t know if you mean it or not, but I will come. Yes. Do you know, we must get together for dinner in the week to come. There used to be some wonderful restaurants in Barcelona, though I shouldn’t be surprised if the revolutionaries have closed them all down in the spirit of equality. But―”

Amazingly, it had begun to rain!

Florry had the distinct impression that the air itself had suddenly liquefied and then, oddly, all sound had vanished from the earth: the slosh of the prow through the water, the clank and groan of the old engine, the chatter of Arabic from deep inside the ship.

Or no: there was sound. There was, in fact, nothing but sound, huge in his ears. Sound and liquid ― sound and water ― sound and chaos.

A shock seemed to slither through the guts of the ship. Its very relationship to the shiny sea began to alter crazily; the deck, which had until this second seemed as secure as the surface of the earth, issued a great animal shudder; Florry, in his mind, thought of a dying elephant he’d once seen, that moment when the bullet plunges home and every line is somehow terribly changed as the consciousness of doom suddenly imprints itself upon the beast. He stood bolted to the rail, trying to make sense of it all: water and roar, everywhere; Sylvia’s dress plastered with hideous immodesty against her body as the shock spread from the ship to her own face, in the form of total panic, which flashed whitely in the wet moonlight; old Witte, gobbling in terror like an ancient bird before the ax, his jowls heavy and flopping, his wet hair curled, his monocle fluttering about. And suddenly also a tide of demented, howling voices, a guttural mix of Arabic and Turkish and all the dialects of the Mediterranean.

And Florry, attempting in the first second, with what he felt was icy calm but was in fact the beginning of bone-deep panic, to sort all this out, became aware of yet another and perhaps more frightening phenomenon. That is, the angle of the deck to the horizon had begun to shift radically. We’re sinking, he realized. We’re sinking.

7 MI-6, LONDON

Major Holly-Browning took tea late at his headquarters that same night. He sat in his little fifth-floor office in the Broadway Building off a corridor that led only to a rear stairwell. Perhaps it looked a bit more like a publisher’s cubicle than a spy’s: he was surrounded by an almost endless collection of books and pamphlets of poetry, clipped newspaper reviews, glossy and not-so-glossy literary quarterlies, reproductions of paintings, tutors’ reports, the minutes of meetings of long-abandoned undergraduate political committees, broadsides, handbills, and the like. It all dated from the year 1931 at Cambridge University.

Where another, more sympathetic mind might have divined from the rubble a new generation of promising voices attempting to define and make itself heard, Major Holly-Browning saw most of it as infernal gibberish, a bloody Playfair cipher without a key, whose maze was therefore sealed off forever from his entrance. It represented a private language, a chattering of pansy aesthetes; it filled him, also, with melancholy.

He’d seen so many of these young fools’ fathers die in the ’14–’18 show, cut down by the German Maxims, or blown to shreds by Krupp explosives, or choked, their lungs browned and shriveled in the mustard, or mutilated by the serrated upper edges of the ghastly Hun bayonets. And for what? For this? For “In Excelsior Pale Grows the Mould”? For “Nocturne in Shades of Gray”? For “A New Theory of Spanish Radicalism”? For “The Pacifist’s Litany”? For Julian’s hated “Achilles, Fool”?

The poem, originally published in the February 1931 number of Denis Mason’s foolish rag The Spectator and later the title of Julian’s sole collection of verse, from Heinemann in November of the same year, was never far from the major’s consciousness. He could recite it.

Julian’s father had died on the Somme, hung up on a wire for a long day’s dying. The major had heard Capt. Basil Raines over the artillery barrage that day. He screamed for hours. But not to be rescued. He screamed at his men to stay away, because he knew they would die if they came for him. The major touched the bridge of his nose, which was tender with pain.

“May I get you something, sir?”

“Vane, are you still here? Perhaps you could go down to Signals and see if Florry’s ship has reached Barcelona yet. Sampson said he’d inform us.”

Vane darted out. Major Holly-Browning turned back to the sea of paper before him. He had mastered with sheer, dogged persistence nearly everything the pile contained. It was not a happy experience. He had become a kind of reluctant expert on the culture of 1931, its torrents and enthusiasms and excesses, its pacifism, its ideologies, its brilliances, its ugly insistence on secret conformism. And most of all, running beneath it like a hidden current, its spies.

Yes, there were spies. The climate almost demanded it. The postwar euphoria had long since worn off, and with the coming of economic hard times, a certain sensibility flourished, a sensibility of doubt. Despair seemed somehow fashionable. Peculiar sexual styles became smart. And the brightest lads were the worst: dandy boys, cleverboots, know-it-alls, fellow travelers; they climbed aboard the Soviet Russian bandwagon, toot-toot-tooting all the way. They loathed their own country. They simply, in their glib and fancy way, hated it, as had no other generation in English history. They hated it for its smugness and complacency. They hated it for being English and they hated it for making them comfortable while it was unable to feed its own poor. They regarded the very presence of the poor as a priori evidence of the corruption of the society. And they loved what little Koba, the red butcher, was doing in his worker’s paradise. It was this, finally, that so infuriated the major: their willed, forced, self-induced self-deception.

Major Holly-Browning touched the pile. It was there. He had dug it out, assembled it, bit by painful bit, as an Etruscan artist must have assembled a mosaic, in which no one piece has any meaning, but the pattern was everything!

The evidence was irrefutable. The dates, the places, the reports: they meshed so perfectly. It seemed that Levitsky, who nowhere else in his career had behaved with anything but utmost care, had been utterly sloppy around Cambridge in 1931, so contemptuous was he of our lazy security, our comforting veil of illusion, our pious stupidity.

Levitsky’s prime blunder had been a botched come-on to a clerk in the F.O. in February of ’31; from that time on, he’d been identified as a Bolshevik agent, though it had been assumed from the clumsiness of his approach that he was a low-ranking, incompetent one. He had been routinely surveilled on a weekly basis for the next seven months by Section V, until he left the country for parts unknown. His special watering hole, the MI-6 investigators noted, was Cambridge. He made trips there nearly every weekend for the entire seven months. He was hunting for talent, it was clear. But what talent? Who did he see? Where did he go? One investigator could have supplied the answers in a weekend at Cambridge.

He was never followed. In those days, Section V never worked weekends!

But twice Levitsky had not gone when he had been scheduled to. On April 12–15 and May 11–13; and both weekends, Julian Raines had appeared at prominent London society parties as part of a set of bright young things that so caught the public’s eye that year!

Then there was the matter of the arrest. Levitsky had been picked up by the Cambridge constabulary late on a Saturday night in March. The copper, mistrusting his foreign accent and his peculiar ways, had hauled him off to jail. And who had, the next morning, bailed him out? The copper, five years later, had recognized the picture.

It was the famous poet, Julian Raines.

And then there was the holiday. In June, Julian had taken off a week to rusticate in the south of France, Cap d’Antibes, to be exact. That same week, Levitsky, according to Passport Control (which kept impeccable records) left the country, too; his stated destination was … southern France.

Julian’s face seemed suddenly to appear in front of Holly-Browning: that smug, handsome face that seemed to be sweet reason and aesthetician’s grandeur. How he hated that face!

You little bastard. You smirk at your own father hanging on the wire, trapped in his own guts, too far to reach, his screams louder in the sulfurous vapors of the attack than the sound of the Maxims or the Krupps. The major closed his eyes. He could hear those screams still.

Your father died to give you everything and you in turn give us to the Russians.

Julian. Julian in 1931.

Yes. In discreet interview after discreet interview, they all agreed. Some time during 1931, Julian changed, his friends said. He became graver, odder, more private, more profligate, sloppier. His own easy brilliance seemed undercut with what one of his oh-so-sympathetic chums called “tragic self-awareness.” His gaiety was “forced.”

What had happened to dear Julian?

Holly-Browning knew. It’ll weigh a man down, deciding to betray his country.

The dates told the rest of the story. Julian had gone out to Spain on August 4, 1936, three weeks after the outbreak of rebellion. According to the defector Lemontov, an urgent flash had come to him from Moscow, graded Priority One, the highest, which ordered him to establish a radio hookup in a safe house with a transmitter in Barcelona, and to service it with a code expert, to use the Orange Cipher, the GRU’s most private, most impenetrable, most highly graded secret language. He was then to prepare to funnel the same information almost immediately back to Moscow via a second radio link. He was not to decode the information himself. That’s how secret it was. The date of the flash? August 5, 1936.

Lemontov had buckled. Making such arrangements was not only expensive and time consuming but risky. And this one seemed utterly unnecessary. After all, there were already enough OGPU and GRU operatives in Spain to ―

Lemontov was curtly ordered to return to Moscow. The implication was clear. Someone very high was running a special, sensitively placed agent and trusted (wisely) none of the usual security arrangements. It had to mean that a long-term asset was involved, and who but this old master Levitsky would run long-term assets on a private channel through Amsterdam to Moscow?

Lemontov realized that Levitsky was running the agent he’d recruited five years earlier, in England, and that the job was very important. And Lemontov realized that to return with this information was to die in Koba’s purge.

Julian Raines, you bloody bastard. A stooge for the GRU, for old Levitsky. You’ve sold us out. But now we know. And now we can stop you.

“Sir.”

It was Vane, silhouetted in the doorway. Something in his voice immediately unsettled Holly-Browning.

“Yes, Vane. What is it?”

“Sir, I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”

Holly-Browning sighed. He waited a heartbeat and said, “Go ahead, please.”

“The ship is evidently overdue.”

“Is that all? Does he send details?”

“No, sir. But there is another bit of news. Signals also monitored a communication between the Italian diesel submarine D-11 and its home port at the naval station at Palma on Majorca.”

“Yes, Vane?”

“The D-11 claims a kill off Barcelona.”

8 THE WATER

We’re sinking,” he announced, trying to sort out what the bloody hell to do. “We’re sinking,” he repeated, as if to convince himself, but at that moment a sailor leaped off the bridge down to them, bounded by, and launched himself into the darkness.

“Robert, oh God,” Sylvia screamed. He held her tightly. Steam had added itself to the spectacle and curled up everywhere from the decks and out of hatchways. One of the Turks hollered at them from the bridge but it was all gibberish. Above, the stars reeled and whirled through the rising steam.

Florry found himself yelling, “Lifeboat! Lifeboat aft.” Yes, he’d seen it with old Gruenwald that afternoon. “It’s this way, come on.”

He pointed in the darkness, aware suddenly that the destination his finger described also seemed to be the destination of the ship as it slid into the sea.

He grabbed Sylvia and they began to wobble down the slanting deck, the old count close behind. The Akim’s relationship to the surface had grown exceedingly tentative. She lurched under their feet as she fought for some leverage against the sucking waves and the hole in her own guts that dragged her down. She’d begun not merely to slant but to tilt, corkscrewing into the sea.

As they moved they found themselves not walking on the deck proper, but on the juncture between deck and bulkhead, one foot on each, with the awkwardness of working their way down a gutter. A garish fire blazed up ahead. It was almost purple in the dark. Florry felt the heat pressing up from the boards beneath his feet. Smoke and steam mingled in the atmosphere. He breathed, getting smoke, and coughed. He pulled her hand along.

“Just a little farther.”

“We’re going to die.”

“Not if we keep our heads.”

A sudden BOOM blew a gout of flame out of the hatchway just ahead of them.

The count screamed.

Chairs and crates plunged about the deck like missiles. Steam continued to gush from the blown-out hatchway and suddenly a man crab-walked out in scalded agony, pulled his way to the rail uttering the name of God ― or blaspheming with it ― and hurled himself over. The boiler had ruptured and the live steam was cooking the engine-room crew. Another man groped in the steam’s murk and Florry grabbed for him, but he fell back and was gone. Florry could hear the screams from inside.

“Come on, damn it,” Florry yelled, for Sylvia had seemed to settle back, and behind her poor old Witte looked numb with shock. The ship, meanwhile, was steadily rising behind them, seeming to encourage their progress. Florry yanked her past the hatch, which, as they fled by, made them wince for the heat it poured out.

“Come on, count,” Florry called. “Come on.” The old man managed to get by the opening and the energy seemed to liberate him; now he led them on their plunge through the smoke and steam.

“No. No. Nooooooo.”

He stopped and felt to his knees.

“It’s ruined. God, it’s ruined,” and he lapsed into Polish.

And so it was: just ahead, the empty lifeboat hung limply off one davit, enmeshed in a tangle of ropes. At least a dozen Arabs squawked and fought and scampered about it, some beating ineffectually on the jammed pulley, others simply howling insanely against their fates.

“Oh God, we’re finished,” said Sylvia.

“No,” shouted Florry, but even as he insisted, a new burst of steam ripped up from the decks, and the ship seemed to groan once again in pain and slipped farther into the water.

“It’s no use,” sobbed Witte.

Suddenly, with a freakish crack, the second davit broke and the lifeboat plunged toward the sea. It struck the water with great force in a roar of foam and flailing lines. Yet even as the foam subsided, it seemed to emerge intact and afloat and squirt across the surface.

“Can you swim? Sylvia, listen, can you swim?”

“Yes,” she muttered through trembling lips.

“Swim for the boat. You’ll be safe in the boat.”

“Come on, Robert.”

“You go. I’ll get this old man out.”

“Good-bye then.”

She lunged to the railing, and with a dive that was almost a jump, she disappeared over the side.

Florry tugged the old man to the railing.

“Can you swim?”

The old man clung to him tenaciously.

“No,” he gulped. “No, I can’t.”

“Look, you’ll die here for certain. Don’t you see? The water is your only hope.”

“Ah, God. To end like this. I ― ah, God, it’s so―”

“Look, when you hit the water, look about for wreckage. Perhaps you can thrash your way to it. Now take off your coat, Count Witte, and get going. I’ll be over next and I’ll help you.”

“God bless you, Florry.”

“Hurry. We’ll both be gone if you don’t move.”

The water was littered with planks and bobbing heads in the purple flicker of the flames.

“Good luck, old man,” Florry said, and rolled him off. He fell screaming and hit the water with a crash.

The ship yielded further still, and Florry felt it begin to gather momentum as it descended. He took a last look around and could see that the stern had broken off and was low in the sea about fifty yards off, amid hissing bubbles and steam. The stench of petroleum lingered everywhere and fire moved across the water itself.

Florry shucked his own jacket, kicked off his shoes, and leaped. He seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, until finally the sea’s green calm claimed him. Utter quiet assailed him after the chaos above. In the cold thick murk, bubbles surrounded him. He fought against the water, but was not entirely sure which way was up. His legs cramped and knit. His clothes became leaden, pulling him down. His lungs filled with panic, which spread to his brain, arriving with an urge to surrender. But instead, in a spasm of clawing, he broke the surface. He could see a dozen other bobbing heads and the lifeboat, as yet tantalizingly empty, just ahead.

He looked about for the girl but saw nothing.

“Sylvia!”

“I’m all right! Where’s the old man?”

“Make for the boat! Hurry!”

“Yes. Yes.”

Florry looked back toward the ship, which had become nothing but a low silhouette lit by spurting flames and rising vapor; it had settled almost entirely into the water. A few small oil fires burned on the surface, amid crates and chairs and other wreckage. The ship gave a final shudder and slid under the water. It went in backward, its prow last, as if with infinite regret. From all about, there rose shouts and screams.

“Count Witte!” he shouted. “Count!”

There was no answer.

Florry paddled about a bit. It seemed to have gotten calm suddenly.

“Count Witte!”

There was still no answer. He looked about. The old man was gone. Damn the luck, he thought bitterly. Gone, gone, gone. Something brushed against Florry’s face in the water. He reached out to touch it with his finger: it was a rotting cigarette. He looked about in the flickering light: the surface of the water was jammed with millions of the things, forming a kind of tobacco scum.

“Ahhh.”

It was the old man, clinging to a floating portion of the railing. Florry thrashed over to him. His face, covered with oil, kept flopping forward in the water.

“I have you. I have you. It’s just a little ways. You’re going to be all right.”

But the old man slipped away. Florry got to him in the water and struggled oafishly with the limp body; both kept going under. He could feel his will ebbing. Dump him, he thought. Dump the old fool and save yourself. But at last he seemed to get the old count properly situated, with his arm under the man’s oily neck, and he began to pull himself with a long stroke through the water toward the lifeboat.

He thought bitterly of Julian, for whom it was always so easy. Lucky Julian. Julian, why did you hurt me?

He shook his head at the idiocy of it all and continued to plunge ahead. It seemed to take forever, the long passage through the salty, ever-colder, every-heavier sea, which grew soupy and finally mushy as his arms weakened in their thrashing. Twice the salt water flooded his lungs and he broke stroke, coughing and gagging and spitting, the snot running from his nose. The old man groaned at one point and tried to fight away.

“Stop it, damn you,” Florry shrieked, tasting sea water.

The old man gargled in agony but seemed to settle down. Florry pressed on, growing more numb and more insane; at last, nothing seemed left of the whole universe except the rotten-ripe heaviness of his arms, the ache in his chest, and the sea water leaking into his nose and throat. His eyes stung themselves blind and his muscles seemed loose, unconnected to his bones, which nevertheless continued in their mechanical clawing. Yet when he at last allowed himself to look, the surprise was mighty: he had made it. The lifeboat bobbled in the water, looking immense, a mountain, against the dark horizon.

He got one weary hand up to the gunwale while holding the old man close to him, and gasped, “Christ, help us.”

Quickly, a strong set of hands had him, and then they were pulling Witte aboard. Florry was slipping away; he was beginning to see things in his head, odd spangles of lights, patches of colors, whirling patterns of sparks and flashes. Then the hands had him too, and up he went.

He came to rest with an awkward bang on the floor of the boat, and was aware of bodies all about him.

“Praise to Allah, all is well,” said the man who’d rescued him, who turned out to be the captain.

“Robert!”

“Sylvia, thank God ― I got him. Christ, I got him.”

He pulled himself up to a sitting position.

“Is he all right? Is the count all right?”

Two Arabs were working on the old man, slapping him about rather roughly to get him back to life. Florry saw the old oil-soaked body stir into a convulsion and he heard the sound of wretching and gagging and then a cry.

“He’s alive,” said Sylvia. “You saved him, oh, Robert, he’s alive!”

The count sat up.

“Ohhh,” he groaned.

And then Florry smelled something so peculiar it made him wince: peppermint.

He had saved Gruenwald.

As they huddled together in the flickering light they could see bobbing heads, which gradually disappeared; perhaps some of the Arabs had managed to cling to floating wreckage, perhaps not. They could not steer into the flotsam to save the occasional screamers because they had no oars and the rudder of the lifeboat had rotted away.

Florry sat in numb exhaustion among the perhaps ten or fifteen others who had made it to the boat; he wanted to die or curl up and surrender to sleep. He could not seem to get his mind working properly. Sylvia sat very close to him. It seemed he was shaking and she was holding him, or perhaps she was shaking and he was holding her.

“God,” she said. “My mother insisted that I take swimming lessons. I always hated her for it. Oh, Mother, you were so wrong about so much, but you were so right about the bloody swimming. She’s dead, you know, the poor idiot.”

Florry could hardly understand her. Meanwhile, of them all, it was Gruenwald who recovered with the most amazing speed. He scuttled perkily through the craft, hopping over the survivors like the lead in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, shouting orders, bellowing crazily to the stars, commenting acidly on Arab seamanship. The captain cursed him in Turkish but the old man only laughed at him and at one point a sailor made a lunge, and Gruenwald squirted away.

“Hah! Nein catchen Gruenwald!”

“A madman,” said Florry. “Poor Count Witte.”

“Hah. Herr Florry, in za var, much worse. Ja, pretty Englisch lady. Boats mit kinder, kiddies, go down. Men die in war. Torpedo kill.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Sylvia wanly. “Mr. Gruenwald, do you think you could spare us the history lesson.”

“Yes, please shut up. We all feel rather terrible.”

“Hah. Should feel gut. Ve ist alive, nein? Hah!”

The first boats to arrive were fishing vessels, and it occurred to Florry, in watching the fleet spread out across the water, that the fishermen were more interested in salvage than survivors. The captain hailed them, but they ignored the call. Soon, however, a large official boat reached the scene and made straight for the lifeboat. It only took seconds before they were hauled aboard and wrapped quickly in blankets.

The trip into the harbor was largely anticlimactic. By the time they arrived, the sun had begun to rise. Florry’s first glimpse of Barcelona was disappointing: he could see the city on the low hills and the port beginning to come alive in the early light. He could see palm trees but it was still cold and he shivered.

“If I don’t get some sleep,” said Sylvia, “I think I shall die. They can’t expect much of us when we get there, can they?”

“I hope not,” said Florry, unsure of what exactly awaited them.

It turned out not to be much. There were some policemen at the dock and some officials from the Maritime Commission with a brief to talk to the officers and some first-aid attendants. Florry found himself explaining in the Maritime Commission Building, to which they had been removed, who and what he was to a largely uninterested Spanish youth who gradually ceased taking notes. It occurred to Florry that they were done with him.

“Where should I go?” Florry asked him.

“Find a party,” said the boy. “Barcelona, many parties. Parties everywhere. Then you can march in our parades.”

Florry wasn’t sure what this meant ― party as in political or party as in celebration, or possibly, both ― but before he could seek an explanation, he was summarily dismissed and found himself escorted to the street and abandoned under a palm tree, with only a pair of ill-fitting plimsoles in place of his lost shoes to prepare him for the ordeal ahead. By this time, his clothes had largely dried on his body, even though the breeze still brought the goose pimples to his skin.

He was standing there with Sylvia, discussing their next move, when it occurred to him that he still had the silly revolver in the shoulder holster under his sweater. It had hung there through the ordeal!

“Good heavens,” he said to her, “can you believe I still have my pistol! Isn’t that amazing?”

But she was suddenly not listening. Florry looked and saw that she was watching as first-aid workers were applying bandages to Mr. Gruenwald.

“Well, it’s off to the hospital for him,” said Florry, yet something was particularly odd about it all. For one thing, Gruenwald had been unhurt, and for that reason it seemed unnecessary to bandage him, particularly about the eyes. His hands were bandaged too, but behind his back.

“I wonder if that’s necessary,” said Florry.

“You’d best stay out of it,” said Sylvia. “I don’t like the way it looks.”

The head doctor, an enormous man in a black leather coat with cold eyes and pitted skin, had just thrown the old man against the side of the ambulance, which, Florry now realized, was no ambulance at all.

It said POLICIA.

9 THE INTERROGATION

Glasanov had a prediction. He was in a jaunty mood, close to humor. His life was filled with good cheer and possibility and with something as close to amusement as Lenny had ever seen on his face. They were walking through the prison toward the old man’s cell.

“He won’t sign a thing,” predicted Glasanov. “Not a thing. He’ll be intractable. You’ll pound your fists to pulp on his skull, Bolodin, before he confesses.” He was almost giddy.

“No,” he continued in his lecture-hall manner, “we shall have to break him down. Assault his illusions, dismantle his vanities, force him to see reality as it is. Brick by brick, we must disassemble his brain. Oh, it’ll be a test. It’ll be a struggle, Bolodin, as you’ve never seen. But what fun! Imagine, the old dog himself here, in our humble jail.”

Lenny nodded dumbly, as if he were the moron Glasanov clearly believed him to be, and then issued a grunt of imprecise meaning that Glasanov took to be stupefied agreement and enthusiasm. Yet, looking at Glasanov, he recognized a man caught in some vision of higher glory, some scheme of higher ambition: you saw it in Brooklyn all the time. A dreamer, full of fancy ideas of what tomorrow would bring.

“I want him sent back to Moscow split,” said Glasanov. “I want him confessed and repentant, not merely captured. Eh, Bolodin, how’s that for a challenge? It’s not old Comintern unionists we’re dealing with here, but the GRU’s best, a man of iron will, a legend.”

They had now reached the corridor that led to Levitsky’s cell.

“Get some water. It’s time to wake our charge from his baby sleep.”

Lenny fitted a bucket under a faucet set in the wall and filled it brimful with icy water.

It was dark and damp down here, as in fairy tales, all old cobwebs and ancient stone. The walls showed cruciforms where religious icons had been smashed down in the first crazed days of the July victory; a number of grotesque revolutionary admonitions had been painted on the stone and they stood out like wounds in the harsh glare of electric bulbs that hung crudely jerry-rigged from the ceiling. Glasanov produced a key, an ancient thing, and with some effort got the stiff old tumblers of the massive door open. Inside, the old man slept under a thin blanket on a straw mat under another raw cruciform denoting a smashed symbol of the untrue faith. The old man wheezed thinly. He looked vulnerable and pale and in the bad light his skin seemed like old parchment.

Glasanov studied the man for a second without emotion, then nodded to Lenny, who dashed the water on him. Levitsky sat up instantly with a howl of pain and a massive, marrow-deep shiver, all naked animal hurt and outrage. His eyes snapped instantly alert, displaying confusion and panic for just a second, but the man quickly controlled them, and as Lenny, standing just behind Glasanov, watched, they seemed to dilate down into something tightly focused.

“Stand up, old man,” Glasanov said with theatrical heartiness miles outside his character, “we’ve got work to do.”

The old man stood next to the bed, soaked, staring straight ahead. His eyes were fixed and blank.

“We’ll get you singing before long,” Glasanov said. “We’ll have you singing like a bird. We’ll have all the crimes out on the table.”

Levitsky looked up at his tormentor.

“Glasanov, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I’ll ask the questions, comrade,” said Glasanov.

“Nevertheless, it is Glasanov. Nikolai Illyich, if I’m not wrong. I remember you from the Baku Conference in ’twenty-seven. You were on Glitzky’s staff. They said you were bright.”

“Old man, I’ll run things here. This comrade here is quite brutal and I haven’t time for you to impress me with your memory. I’ll have him beat you to turnip mash if you give me cause.”

“We both know how absurd that would be. Beat me to turnip mash and you’ll have nothing to ship back to Moscow ― except turnip mash.”

Lenny, watching the two Russians pick at each other, heard a sigh, perhaps even involuntary, escape from Glasanov’s lips.

“They said you’d be sly. The Devil Himself.”

“I’m not sly at all, Comrade Glasanov. I’m an old man without much in the way of strength or guile. I simply adhere to my beliefs exactly, and they give me a foundation that careerist scum can never shatter.”

“Oh, I’ll break you, Comrade Levitsky. I’ll split you for Moscow, don’t doubt it. Time, after all, is all on my side. Time, and the considerable skills of Comrade Bolodin here.”

“Your vanity, Glasanov, will kill you sooner than my idealism will kill me.”

“The ribs,” said Glasanov. “But not too bad yet.”

Lenny went to the old man, hit him hard, once, in the ribs, sending a spasm through him. As he twisted, Lenny put two more swift right hands into his solar plexus. He shrieked, falling. Trying to halt himself, he clung to Lenny, who brought his knee up quickly, catching him between the legs. The old man slipped loose and went to the floor. He lay there, wet and trembling. His lips were white. He coughed and heaved wordlessly, his face drawn in the pain.

“See how quickly the mighty Levitsky is reduced to nothingness,” said Glasanov. “Bolodin exposes you for what you are, Levitsky: pathetic. With your feeble, ancient disguise, which Comrade Bolodin penetrated with comical ease. Your pretend accent. You stink of the peppermint schnapps even now, you pitiful old fool.” Glasanov shook his head, as if in great disappointment. “I had expected so much more from the Devil Himself. Instead I get an obsolete comic actor from a nineteenth-century operetta. It actually disgusts me.”

He bent over Levitsky and spoke quickly into his ear.

“Now. I ask the questions and you give the answers. If I like the answer, we go on. If not, Comrade Bolodin here, with his American efficiency, will hit you in the ribs. He is inexhaustible and indefatigable and without a brain in his muscular head. Do you see, old man, how it is to be?”

Levitsky rolled over. His face was gray. His eyes would not focus on anything in the cell. Glasanov leaned close.

“Now, der Teuful Selbst, tell me, to begin with. Why Spain?”

Levitsky spat in his face.

In the evening, he lay against the gray cobbles of the cell floor, breathing raspily. He had been beaten expertly. The ribs were not broken yet the pain was extraordinary. Bolodin knew how to take him to the very edge, then bring him back. Bolodin knew how to inspire the thought that the future would forever and ever be pain.

He concentrated on not trembling. He tried to will the pain from the center of his body, tried to drive it out.

Come on, old Devil.

He laughed bitterly. Some devil. Old, infirm, lying beaten in a Spanish cell, attended by rats. And so this was how the great adventure ended; thus it was with all vain and foolish crusades. His plot came to an end as did his odd, perhaps senile quest, doomed from the beginning, he now saw, to play in life, in history, in flesh, what he had once played on the chessboard. The march of folly! the pyre of vanity! the absurdity of ego!

Too many enemies. You, Koba. And you, Glasanov, Koba’s minion. You, dreadful Amerikanski, with your thunderous fists and your murderous eyes. And you the English spy-catchers, somewhere lurking in the distance.

You all want me. You all want Castle.

Castle was doomed. He saw it now. In check. They were closing on him and would dog him down. Like me, he will cease to exist.

He felt the sweat running down his body, leaving icy tracks. He tried to sit up but the pain came instantly, seizing him. He tried again and managed to get himself up against the wall. A victory, a giant victory!

Why fight them? You’ll confess in the end, everybody does. Why not give Glasanov his moment of glory, his tiny triumph? He, too, is doomed, if not this year then the next. Koba will have him because he stinks of ambition. The better he does, the more arrests and executions, the more efficiency with which he routs Koba’s enemies, the more completely he dooms himself. So smart in so many things, Glasanov, can you not see this one thing?

Then he heard the approach of steps on the stones outside, the click of the old lock. The door swung open in the dark.

Beyond surprise, Levitsky at least had the capacity for stupefaction. The figure silhouetted in the harsh corridor light filled the frame.

For a big man, he moved with a rare grace. He moved swiftly, hauling the door shut behind him, and came to Levitsky. The old man watched him come, not scared but awed. What? What could ―? The Amerikanski bent and with his strong hands he lifted Levitsky’s skull from the stones and turned it this way and that, a queer gentleness in his fingers.

“You stink of the shtetl after all these years,” the American said, and it occurred suddenly to Levitsky that he was speaking in Yiddish. The language flooded back upon him; it had once been his only language, years ago, ages ago, in the time before there was time.

“Jud, nu?” asked Levitsky.

“Yes. One of the chosen. Raised in a little shit-smelling village. And, like you, old fuck, I remember the day when Cossacks came.”

So long ago: Ural Cossacks, Levitsky remembered, in fur hats and upturned boots, with curved sabers, on great black steaming stallions. They came out of the trees at daybreak, after a night’s drinking. He remembered the bright blood, the smells of huts burning, the screams, the heat of the flames, his brother’s sobs. He remembered his mother, butchered, his father, hacked, the bright blood, the woodsmoke, the heat, the screams. He remembered the horses, brutes that stank of death and would smash you to nothingness …

“So we changed all that,” Levitsky said. “We made a revolution.”

“Fuck the revolution.”

Levitsky stared at the huge shape above him. Had he been sent to kill him? He could do it easily, with his thumbs. But why now, in the dark? Why not with the pistol?

“So what do you want, comrade? A confession? You should fuck goats.”

“To help you.”

“Excuse me, I’m hearing things, no?”

“To help you. I help you, you help me. A deal. Between two Jews.”

“So talk. I’m not going anywhere.”

“A certain name, old man. Give the name, and I’ll get your ass out of here.”

“What name?” said Levitsky.

“The name that no one speaks. The English boy, whose soul you own, old devil.”

“What boy?”

“You call him Castle, after a chess thing. Surprised? You didn’t think anybody knew. But I knew!”

Levitsky felt the closeness of the huge man. He let the moment linger. He felt an awful stillness settling through him. A new player on the board.

“What bo―”

“Don’t play with me. I can kill you in a second. Or in a second you can walk out of here to America. You can be a writer for the Daily Forward, huh? And sit in the park with all the other East Side dreamers and talk revolution. Give the name!”

Levitsky tried to concentrate, to calculate the chain of possibilities. How could he know? What had he learned? Who told him? Who sent him?

“I have no names.”

“You have a bellyful of names. In England in ’thirty-one, with Tchiterine and Lemontov. Lemontov’s gone and Tchiterine’s in the ground a few hundred feet from here. Give me the name of this English boy, or so help me I’ll put you in the ground alive and you can die by slow degrees you never dreamed of in this world.”

And so Levitsky saw his chance. The big American Bolodin had made his mistake. He had revealed exactly how important the information was to him.

“Kill me, and you’ll never know anything. But give me a night to think and maybe there’s this deal you keep telling me about.”

“After tomorrow, there may not be enough to give an answer.”

“I may surprise you, Bolodin. I may surprise you.”

The American snorted.

“I’ll go easy. But I’ll come back at night for the answer, and if it isn’t the right answer, then I’ll go so hard you’ll pray for death. And God doesn’t work this neighborhood.”

At dawn, Levitsky lay on his pallet. He knew he had two simple choices: suicide or escape.

Consider: a locked cell in some sort of Spanish monastery. In a few hours, Glasanov would arrive and the beatings would begin anew. Another day’s torture would leave him just that much weaker and less able to escape or resist, and the Amerikanski would be back at night for his answer. But there really was no answer: if he told, the Amerikanski would kill him quickly. If he didn’t, the Amerikanski would kill him slowly. Either way, Levitsky perished, and with Levitsky gone Castle was open to assault.

It occurred to Levitsky that he had reached the climax of his life. The chess master, designer of elegant combinations and strategems, now faced his greatest test, and it was a simple puzzle. He looked about, as if to study. This puzzle might not have a solution. The cell was vaulted; it had one barred window; it was, at least, at ground level. Levitsky ran his fingers painfully over the mortar of the old stones. No, it was solid, undisturbed except by tears for centuries. He turned his attention to the window. The iron of the bars felt ancient and cold, tempered in medieval fires and set in the stone to last until the arrival of God the Father on earth. His hands locked about and tested each. They had no give at all. Next, the door. It, too, seemed ancient, a collection of polished oak slats, massively thick and heavy, held together with iron bands. The hinges were on the outside, beyond reach. The lock only remained. He bent to it. Hmmmmm. It was not at least a dead bolt, but a tumbler mechanism, old iron, black and hard. Well-oiled. It could be picked, perhaps, with a pick. But he had no pick.

His examination of the physical possibilities of the cell had exhausted him. His bruised ribs hurt furiously. He closed his eyes: sleep came toward him. He fought it off ― or did he? For an instant he was back in the water after the ship had gone down, knowing he would die, until the Englishman’s strong hands had pulled him back to life.

For this?

I should have died, nu?

He blinked awake: the same cell. How much time had passed, how much time had he lost?

He went to the window: the sun was coming up. He could see they were on a hill on the outskirts of the city: he could see across the way a chapel, now abandoned, desecrated, the doors blasted off, the interior blackened by flame, all the windows shattered. It was a dead building. The Church, enemy of the people, enemy of the masses, at last feeling the full brunt of their wrath. The nuns raped and beaten, perhaps shot; the processes of history were never pleasant and only made sense in the longer view.

Another cracked smile passed over Levitsky’s face. Old nuns, old mother superior, facing the workers’ bayonets and the hour of your death, how just you’d see it that a man like Levitsky should perish on the same blasphemed ground. You’d cackle at the perfection of it ― an old revolutionary professional, me, der Teuful Selbst, devoured by the very forces he’d thought to understand and master and that he’d liberated.

He turned away from the window and stared at the scab left in the stone where an old cross had been beaten down from the wall. It was, he now saw, a room of death. What was a cross except a way to kill a man in slow, horrible agony, a long day’s dying. Maybe that’s why the Jews could never make sense of it: worship an execution device. Strange, these Christians.

He might not be the first Jew in this cell. Others, four hundred years ago, may have been held here, facing the same choice he would face: renounce your faith of die. Which was really, renounce your faith and die. They would have been men like his father, men of decency but without weapons. What would they, having squandered their gifts for analysis and dialectic on the Talmud in five thousand years of hushed, devotional study, have made of their torturers?

Levitsky felt it sliding away. He had trained himself so hard over the years to a certain pitch of revolutionary toughness: to see only what was real, what was important. Always to move to the heart of the issue. Always to be without illusion. Never to waste time in pointless bourgeois memory, nostalgia, and sentiment. To be, after the Great Lenin, a hard man. Now, when he needed them most, these difficultly acquired disciplines had simply vanished.

He sat down, under the mocking cruciform. The crucifiers were coming. It was another memento mori, teasing him, a monument to the dead ―

“The sleep will have done him some good,” said Comrade Commissar Glasanov. “He’ll see the hopelessness of his situation. He’ll see the inevitability of surrender, the rightness of it. You know, Bolodin, I’m somewhat disappointed. I had expected something more impressive.”

Lenny nodded as if a stupid man.

“These old Bolsheviki, at least they were realists. They understood what was required.”

They reached the end of the corridor in the yellow morning light. The door, solid and massive, lay before them.

“Open it,” said Glasanov.

Lenny took the big brass key and inserted it into the hole and felt the tumblers yield to his strength. He pulled the door open. They entered.

“Well, Comrade Levitsky, I hope―” began Glasanov, halting only when he realized Levitsky was gone.

10 ON THE RAMBLAS

Florry slept for a day and a half in a room on the sixth floor of the Hotel Falcon, which he and Sylvia chose, in their delirium, on the strength of one of Julian’s pieces, which had described it as the “hotel of the young and bold.”

When he finally stirred from his dreamless sleep, it was night. Someone was with him in the room.

“Who’s there?” he asked, but he knew her smell.

“It’s me,” she said.

“How long have I been out?”

“Quite some time. I’ve been watching you.”

“God, how boring. I’m ravenous.”

“There’s a curfew. You’ll have to wait for morning.”

“Oh.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine, Sylvia. I’m rather pleased to be alive, come to think of it.”

“I am too. Robert, you saved my life. Do you recall?”

“Oh, that. Good heavens, what a terrible mess. I think I was saving my life and you just happened to be there.”

She sat on the bed.

“We’re all alone.”

She was very near.

“Do you know, Sylvia,” he said, “I’m rather glad I met you.” Then, surprised at his own boldness, he took her to him and kissed her. It felt like he always knew it would, only better. She stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m undressing,” she said.

He could see her in the dark, a blur. She was quickly shedding her garments with a kind of athletic simplicity.

She stepped out of her chemise and he could see her breasts in the dark and sense their weight. They were very small and pearshaped and lovely. Her hips were slim, her belly flat and tight. She walked to him and he could smell her sweetness. She had his hand.

“Touch me,” she said, moving it to her breast. “Here. Feel it. Hold it.”

It was warm and full. Beneath it, her heart beat. She was so close. There was nothing else in the world except Sylvia.

“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he could hear himself saying.

Their mouths crushed together; Florry felt himself losing contact with the conscious world and entering a new zone of sensation. Sylvia was tawny, sinewy, and athletic ― very strong, surprisingly strong as she pulled him to the bed. Florry was surprised that in his fumbling rush in the moon-vivid room and among the thunder of images and feelings and experiences that raced across him he didn’t want to miss anything, anything at all. Her breasts, for example, upon which he suddenly felt as if he could spend a lifetime. They were a marvel of economy and grace. He wanted, strangely, to eat them, and he tried eagerly.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, sprawled beneath him. “Oh, God, Florry, that feels so good.”

She became increasingly lyric yet increasingly abstract: he was astonished that she had enough sense to talk ― for she continued, in a froggy voice, to comment upon events ― when language had been banished from his mind.

He put his hand into her cleft, feeling the moist surrender, the eagerness, and it was quite something, the extent to which she’d become smooth and open and liquefied to him; her whole body had liquefied and then began to tense and arch and crack like a whip.

And then there came a time to shut her up at last with a kiss and it felt as if he were at the center of an explosion, so plummy and sweet, so crammed-full, so bloody perfect, like a line of poetry against his skull.

“Hurry, darling,” she whispered. “I can’t wait. God, Florry, hurry.”

He raced on to the act’s finale, entering her and falling through into a different universe.

“Do it,” she commanded, and he completed the exchange, sinking in further, rising to gather strength to sink again. It had become a thing of rising and sinking: high, off, and distant followed by the giddy plunge, the surrender to the gravity of pleasure, and then climbing back up again.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she was saying and the last bond of restraint snapped and the whole universe seemed to transmute into a phenomenon of optics: lights, lights, lights, lights. He felt a screeching moment in which he seemed at last to slide beneath the surface, while at the same time exactly clinging to her as she was to him, as if in recognition that each had only the other in protection against the world.

“Do you know what’s odd?” Sylvia asked the next morning. “It’s the history. It’s everywhere. Can you feel it? One is actually at the center of history.”

Florry nodded dreamily, although at the moment he would have preferred to find the center of his overalls. They were roomy, Spanish things of one huge piece, rather like an aviator’s or a mechanic’s suit. They were of worn, rough, blue cotton, and they had been donated to the cause of his depleted wardrobe by the POUM, which turned out to control the Hotel Falcon.

POUM stood for the Party of Marxist Unification, in the Spanish, which was more colloquially and less tendentiously translated into English as the Spanish Worker’s Party; its initials were everywhere in the city, as it was one of the largest and most enthusiastic of the several contending revolutionary bodies within Barcelona proper, but it did not quite control the city. It did not even control itself; it did not control anything. It was something more than a splinter group but perhaps not quite a mass movement on the scale of the gigantic union organizations that had dominated Barcelona for so long. In a sense it simply was, in the way that a mountain is there. It was more a monument to a certain pitch of feeling than an actual political movement: it stood for how things would be, as opposed to how they had been. Florry understood it to be loosely affiliated with the Anarcho-Syndicalists, another large, dreamy, semi-powerful group, equally enthusiastic, equally long on vision for the next century while short on vision for the next day. In fact if the POUM and the Anarchists stood for anything beyond a set of vague words like victory and equality and freedom, they seemed to stand for having a smashing time while trampling the rubble of the old.

Down with what was; what would come simply had to be better, even if nobody had any good idea what that was. The POUMistas, nevertheless, had taken control of the Falcon, here on the Ramblas. What was more, they sponsored the largest of the militias, the Lenin Division, now entrenched outside of Huesca two hundred fifty miles to the east in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the closest authentic “war” to Barcelona.

But Florry, still sluggish after the business of the night, understood what she meant.

“Yes, it is odd,” he replied. There was something particular in the air, and to come to it, straight out from tidy England, was to feel its power in a particularly undiluted dosage. They’d heard the theories all these years, the fashionable arguments, the intellectual fancies spun in cigarette-smoke-filled rooms, the shouted dreams, the fevered visions. The optimism of it was like a virus, the hope like a fantasy. Yet here it was, or at least one early model, clearly clunky, a wheezing, puffing, whirling gizmo, but the thing itself: the classless society.

“It fills one with hope,” Sylvia said. “It’s how things could be; it’s how they should be.”

Florry nodded, unsure of the feelings in his own heart just then, but somehow in agreement with her. They sat in the sunlight at a table at the Café Moka, which occupied the ground-floor corner of the Hotel Falcon, surprised at the warmth and sunlight of January, which in its way was oddly appropriate. They sipped café con leche and watched the parade. For the revolution was a parade.

Down the Ramblas, a wide thoroughfare that ran a mile from the Plaza de Catalunya to the port, in never-ending columns, the revolutionary masses tramped. To watch it, one felt, was almost a privilege; it was quite a moment for the tired old world.

“God, look at them,” Sylvia said, her face flushed, her eyes vivid.

“It’s the biggest parade there ever was,” said Florry, speaking the truth, but leaving unsaid and unanswered the question of ultimate destinations.

And for this parade, Barcelona had tarted herself up in a new garb, as if part of the joy were in the costumes; the whole population had become workers, it seemed. It was, for the first time in the history of the world, fashionable to be a worker. Everybody wore the blue monos of the working class, or the khaki of the fighting militias. Even the prosaic public transportation contrivances wore costumes: the trams up and down the Ramblas moved like vast floats, pulling their cargo through the crowds; all wore a gaudy red-and-black scheme and all of them sported the giant initials of their particular political affiliations. At the same time the autos and trucks had been liberated to political purpose and they, too, wore their allegiances as proudly as old guardsman’s chevrons. It was a Mardi Gras of revolutions, a reveler’s revolution. The air was full of confetti and music and history. Festive banners flapped from the balconies of the buildings to the leafless trunks of the trees of the Ramblas or were strung in crudely painted, sagging, dripping majesty from balcony to lamp pole, offering a cheerful variety of exhortations to the duties that still lay ahead.

Huge portraits from the revolutionary pantheon hung everywhere, heroic, kind, knowing faces, the faces of saints. Florry knew the key figures: Marx and Lenin, the woman called La Passionaria, an intense intellectual fellow named Nin, head of POUM; and some other Spaniards whom he didn’t recognize. Only the Soviet Man of Steel, Stalin, was missing, unwelcome down here among the unruly libertarians; but he held great sway not half a mile away at the vast Plaza de Catalunya, where the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, under Russian guidance, had taken over the Hotel Colon and turned that ceremonial space into a small block of downtown Moscow.

There was noise, too, on the Ramblas, noise everywhere: a din of singing and gramophone recordings, the clash of a dozen different tongues, Spanish and Catalonian the most popular only by a narrow margin, the others being English, French, German, and Russian. The air had filled with sunlight and the dust and the noise and the smell of flowers and petrol and horses and sweets. Sensation piled atop sensation, sight atop sight.

“It’s like a new world,” Sylvia said. “It’s like a different world altogether. It’s like some year in the future.”

Florry didn’t know what to say. The extent of her passion somewhat astonished him. She had not referred to last night.

“I want to believe in it so much,” Sylvia said. “It explains so many things to me.”

She was quite right, of course. So pure was the sense of revolution, the ether of justice deferred for so long but arriving at last, that to breathe it was to endorse it: the joyous madness of Starting Over, of Doing Right, of the Just State. To be in the birthing room of history, as a new age attempted to wrench itself into life! Florry, sitting there, could feel the sentiment move through his bones.

Yet even now, in the blooming ardor, with the mood of purpose as heavy as perfume all about him, Florry could not prevent the coming of doubts. How much, one could ask, of all this was simple illusion. Parades, speeches, leaping peasants: the future?

Or was the future old Gruenwald removed by the police for reasons unknown? What about poor, drowned Witte, lost in the night, and the hundred unknown Arab crewmen sucked under the black water?

“Your face is so long, Robert.”

“I was thinking of Count Witte.”

“Dead and gone,” she said. “The poor man.”

“Yes.” He reached over and took her hand.

“I was also thinking of us, Sylvia. Not of history, not of progress or justice. No, us. Is that fair, Sylvia? Do I have that right?”

“I like it when you touch me,” she said. “I like it very much.”

“Here we sit, Sylvia, in the brave new world. And you tell me you like it when I touch you. Are you part of my illusion, Sylvia? Tell me, please. Am I misreading you? Am I weak and sentimental and seeing things that aren’t there?”

Her face clouded in the sunlight. There was a particular burst of music from somewhere, so loud it made him wince. A haunted look came to her face.

“I just wonder if there’s time for us,” she said. “In all this.”

A troop of khaki cavalry was moving down the Ramblas, the horses’ hooves clattering on the cobblestones. From this distance, they looked fierce and proud, a conceit of glory and destiny.

“I like you so very, very much. I just want time for this. Not the revolution really, but the experience of it. I’ve never been anyplace so exciting, I’ve never been so close to history. I never will again. I want some time to … to have my experiences. That is what I came for, for my experiences. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Well, Sylvia, I suppose I do. Still, the truth is ― God help me for finding the courage to face it at last ― I suppose the truth is that I love you. Comical, isn’t it? Well, let’s do be grown up about the whole thing. Yes, let’s do be friends.”

“Last night was wonderful. Do you see? But there’s so much more to it than just the simple business of how we feel.”

“I suppose there is.”

“There’s so much to do still.”

Florry said nothing. Yes, he had things to do, too.

“Your friend Julian has joined up. I talked to some of the party members. He no longer represents his little magazine. Now he represents the People. With a capital P, one supposes. He’s joined the POUMista Lenin Division. He’s out in the trenches at Huesca. He’s in the war. God, Robert, now there’s a man.”

The admiration in her voice almost killed him.

“Well, Sylvia,” he heard himself saying, “well, then you may get your introduction to the great Julian after all. Because I shall be there, also.”

“Yes,” said David Harold Allen Sampson, “yes, I suppose you are Florry, even if you don’t have the item.”

Sampson turned out to be a youngish, gray chap with flat eyes and a vaguely chilly manner, though handsome in a certain pampered way. He had a toneless, measured BBC announcer’s voice and when he talked he tended to look away, into space, as if fixed on the stars. He looked as if he’d seen nearly everything there was to see in the world, even if he was only thirty.

“I say, Sampson, with the ship sinking and people dying all about, one would hardly have headed down to one’s cabin to dig up Tristram Shandy.”

“It’s your rudeness that convinces me. Only Eton could teach it and the bloody Bolshies haven’t got good enough yet to turn out bogus Etonians. Yes, I suppose I must believe you are Florry.”

He took a sip of his whiskey. They sat on hard chairs at a marbletopped table in the dark and smoky interior of the Café de las Ramblas, an old-fashioned place of high Mediterranean style much favored by the English press in the wearying heat of the afternoon when the Spaniards laid aside their furious revolution for the age-old custom of siesta.

“And now you propose to go off to the front. As a common soldier, no less. God, Florry, one would think after that awful experience with that damned boat, you’d want nothing but two weeks in hospital.”

“That’s not important. What’s important is Julian.”

“Good heavens, they didn’t tell me you were cut of such heroic stuff,” Sampson said, manfully restraining his excess enthusiasm.

“I simply want to get the business over.”

“I shall so inform them. We shall see what they say.”

“I certainly am not going to wait about,” said Florry, “for the major and his fruity assistant to make up their minds. I’m going to the Lenin barracks first thing tomorrow. Is that understood?”

“Florry, you needn’t be bloody shirty in this matter.”

“You see, I’m anxious to be on with it. Do you know why?”

“I suppose I cannot prevent you from telling me.”

“Because I am sick of the whole thing. I want to do what must be done and get on with it.”

“Good,” Sampson said. “You should know that we believe that Julian’s signup is another step in the proof, so to speak. Another whiskey? Boy! Good heavens, I’m supposed to call him ‘comrade,’ as if he’s an old school chum. Comrade! Another round, please.”

The sounds of gaiety had suddenly begun to pick up from the out-of-doors. Florry could hear a snatch of music, the rush of many voices. The afternoon sing had begun.

“Wonderful sentiments, eh?” said Sampson, with his tight, prim, fishy smile. “It’s a pity they go about murdering chaps, isn’t it?”

“Get on with it, Sampson. The game isn’t amusing anymore.”

Sampson smiled. He was enjoying the game immensely.

“We have been aware for some time that the Russian secret police’s intelligence on its factional rivals ― the POUM, the Anarchists, the trade unions, the bloody parade marchers ― has been exceedingly good. In fact, there seems to be a secret war going on. Key people in the opposition disappear in the dead of night; they turn up dead, or they never turn up at all, they simply vanish. It’s just a racket, isn’t it? One mob of gangsters rubbing out another. But the Russians have got to know who to take, eh? Can’t just take anybody. And so who better to go among the enemy than a seemingly innocent British journalist with a brilliant, wondrous, easy charm? It fits with what we know. He wouldn’t report to anybody here, except some control fellow, who would send his information straight back to Moscow via the Amsterdam route that was so important to them. Then the orders go out from Moscow; there’s no direct contact between Julian and the local goons. He’s never compromised. It’s quite clever.”

Florry stared at him.

“So it’s murder, then? Yet another level of debauchery.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. Now it appears this secret war may be moving into another, perhaps ultimate, phase. What better way, really, to get to the inner workings of POUM than to place their best agent among its militia, near to its military headquarters at La Granja? And, for the record, it doesn’t appear that he’s in any great danger. The real fighting’s still around Madrid. Out near Huesca, it’s mostly potting about in the mud. If one keeps one’s bum down, one has an excellent chance at surviving. The only thing he’s really given up is his abundant corps of female admirers. Still, one has to do what one must for the wonderful revolution, eh?”

“You’re as cynical as a whore.”

“The profession inclines one thus. And it is, come to think of it, rather a brothel. And I must say I take the cynic’s pleasure in another’s discomfort: the idea of Julian Raines potting about in the mud is quite amusing. At university, he and his lot were such dandies.”

“You knew him?”

“Everybody knew him. He has a gift for getting known, quite apart from other gifts.”

Florry took a drink of the whiskey.

“So if you must go off and be a hero for that lovely girl, then, go,” said Sampson. “Perhaps it may even work out for the best.”

It suddenly dawned on Florry how much Sampson had thought about all this. “I’ve made it easy on you, haven’t I?” he said.

Sampson smiled. Florry hated him.

“I suppose you have. You rather conveniently started where I had hoped to finish. The major’s most recent communication reached me last night. He said it was imperative that you join the Lenin Division. He left it to me to engineer a way. You spared me that, old man.”

“You are a whore, Sampson.”

“Of course I am. But one likes to think of oneself as a good whore. But let’s not part enemies, old man, even if we did go to different public schools. If you’ve a mind, do drop in, and bring that girl. I’ve rented a villa out in the Sarrea district. Big, damned drafty place, rather nice. They go for a song these days. I’ll have my man do up a nice meal. We’ll have a bash.”

Florry got up to leave. “Er, it sounds fine. Let me give you a ring on it or something.”

“Splendid. By the way, there’s one other interesting little tidbit that might be of some help to you,” Sampson said.

He turned back.

“Yes. There’s a rumor afoot that Julian’s old friend Levitsky is in Barcelona. You might keep your eye open.”

“And how would I know Levitsky? Do you think me a mind reader?”

“Good God, no. But you would know him because you arrived with him. He traveled undercover on that ship. He survived the sinking too, evidently.”

Florry looked at the fishy young Englishman who smirked up at him. Yet what he suddenly felt was the memory of an odor.

Peppermint.

11 IGENKO

Levitsky, from the window, watched Igenko approach.

The man was prissy, a bit pudgy. His white suit wore immense, dark crescents under the armpits. He needed a shave. He looked desperately uncomfortable.

Come, little one, Levitsky thought.

The man wandered with not a small amount of trepidation the winding, evil-smelling, narrow streets of the Barrio Chino, which was just beginning to fill with customers as the night began. Even the revolution had not halted the practice of certain ancient professions and in the Barrio Chino, in the warren of overhanging buildings, balconies bright with wash, amid the smell of garbage and piss, amid the little bars where Spanish men stood and ate and talked the nights away, the tarts had come out, mingling with sailors, soldiers, politicians, and revolutionaries; a hundred little nightclubs had half-open doors that promised certain otherwise unavailable delights inside.

As Levtisky watched, prim, chubby Igenko tried to melt into the cosmopolitan crowd, evidently terrified first that he was under observation by the NKVD and second that he might be stopped by an Anarchist patrol. For the Anarchists controlled the Barrio Chino, which is why it was able to flourish, but the Anarchists were not terribly fond of Russians.

But the man was stopped by no one, fortunately, and after a time consulted a watch. He seemed to take a deep breath, as if in search of his courage, and, with a last glance at the world around him, ducked out of sight.

Levitsky waited. He could imagine poor Igenko’s ordeal as he negotiated the protocols of the brothel. In time, Levtisky knew he approached: he could hear the girls cooing.

“Hey, sugar tits, come see me, I’ll make a man out of you.”

“Put your little thing in a woman’s hole, princess.”

“Lick my titties and I’ll show you things you never saw in your life, dolly.”

Poor Igenko, pretending to stoicism. Teenage boys frequently yelled things at him and the whores knew, too. Levitsky wondered ― how did they know? So surely, how did they know? How did everybody know?

Outside the door, they stopped.

“In here,” Levitsky heard the girl say. “Now give me the money.”

There was a pause, as Igenko dug through his wallet.

“You Russians,” she said. “Through the eyes and the nose, you all look the same. Fat or thin, you all look the same.” She left him.

Igenko opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

“Ivanch? Ivanch, are you there?” he called, using the most intimate abridgment of Levitsky’s middle name.

“Were you seen?”

“Ivanch, thank God you’re all right.”

“Close the door!” Levitsky hissed.

Igenko closed the door. There were another few seconds of silence and then the light came on.

“God, Ivanch. You look dreadful.”

“God had nothing to do with it, I assure you,” said Levitsky. He held himself with grave care, because the pain was still intense. His face was pinched and drawn.

Yet it was Igenko who seemed close to coming apart. He sat on the bed, heaving and breathing wretchedly, struggling for his breath, his pallid skin becoming chalkier. “It’s so terrible. They beat you?”

“Of course they beat me. They’re serious about their work.”

Igenko began to weep. He covered his eyes with his dainty handkerchief and made sniveling sounds.

“Is it really that awful?” said Levitsky.

“You were such a handsome man. To see you like this is almost more than one can take.”

“Don’t concern yourself. It’s nothing I won’t recover from.”

“We heard that you were here. There were rumors. That the NKVD had―”

“What about my escape?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. That is why I was so stunned when your note reached me.”

Levitsky laughed harshly, through pain.

“Glasanov has gotten himself into a terrible mess. He can’t let anybody know I’m gone or he’s on his way back to Moscow for a bullet in his neck. So he must catch me without officially admitting I’ve flown. Let’s see him bluff his way out of this!” He enjoyed it immensely.

“Ivanch, how did you manage to―”

Levitsky laughed again.

“Don’t concern yourself. One simply does what one must.”

But it had been quite simple. Levitsky laughed at the memory. They are so stupid, these new fellows. Some inheritors! He looked about the cell in his hour of need and noted by the variation of color on the stone that for centuries a crucifix had been hung above the pallet. He reasoned that surely such a device must have been affixed to the stone in some fashion or other. It didn’t take much cunning to find a nail sunk in the crevices of the stone ― an ancient thing, there for centuries. A strong tug and it was his.

He felt his trophy in his pocket now ― a wicked lance of black iron, perhaps four inches long.

He used it to pick the lock. Then, reasoning he had no chance to escape in full daylight, he simply slipped into the cell next door, where his hardest problem was to stifle his laughter during the great Commissar Glasanov’s rage. When he and his Amerikanski finally left, Levitsky went back to his original cell, figuring that it would be the safest place. He waited there until nightfall, then made his way out.

“I suspected that an Anarchist neighborhood would offer the least chance of NKVD observation, and so here I am. Safe, if not quite sound,” he told Igenko.

“You are brilliant, Emmanuel. As usual. You always were.” Igenko’s little eyes shone with respect and admiration.

He reached and touched Levitsky on the knee, with a weak, hopeful smile. “I’ve always been your staunchest supporter. Your greatest admirer. You know that.”

“I need help, Ivan Alexyovich. I need it badly.”

“I understand. You can trust me. I owe you so much. I will do anything for you.”

“Yes.”

“Anything. Use me in any way to advance your plan.”

“All right. All right, Alexyovich.”

Igenko began to weep. He put his head down on the bed and cried. Levitsky stroked the back of his fat neck and crooned to him gently.

“It’s been so long,” Igenko said.

“So many years. Since 1919. Come on, wipe your tears, old Ivan Alexyovich. Stop whimpering.”

“I’ll be all right, now that you’re here.”

“Of course you will.”

“I know I can help. I’m a clerk in the Maritime Commission. I know people in the port. People owe me things. I’ve done favors. I can get you out. I can get you on a ship. To Africa maybe, to America, even.”

“No.”

“Emmanuel, they’ll kill you. Glasanov and his monster Bolodin. They’re feared everywhere in Barcelona. The Comintern people dread them. The radicals and the Anarchists are terrified of them.”

His voice rose in pitch; he was verging on hysteria.

“Listen, Ivan Alexyovich, please. Calm yourself, and listen. I need money. And I need a place to go to earth for a while. It’s only a question of a few days before they begin to run down the brothels, even in the Anarchist neighborhoods.”

“Glasanov controls the SIM, and the SIM is everywhere.”

“I know. That’s why time is so desperate. But mostly I need papers. Above all, I need papers. I need to be somebody.”

“I can give you money. I have twenty pieces of gold. I’ve had them for years. I can sell them. And I can find a place where you can hide. And as for the papers ― well, it’s not my line, but I can certainly try.”

“And one last thing. That watch. The watch is important to me.”

“Why, yes. Of course. You gave it to me, of course. I give it back.”

“Thanks, old friend.”

Levitsky took the thing from Igenko, quickly strapped it to his wrist.

“Here. Take what little money I have now,” Igenko said. He pushed over a wad of pesetas. “I’ll get the gold tomorrow.”

“Are you observed?”

“Everybody is observed. The NKVD is everywhere, just like the SIM.”

“They are the same, one supposes.”

“I am not observed regularly. I’ve some freedom.”

“All right. I’ll move to another bordello tonight. Can you get back to me tomorrow?”

“I–I think.”

“On the Ramblas, across from the Plaza Real. Among the stalls in the center. There’s one where an old lady sells chicken on a spit. Do you know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

“Meet me there at seven. Carry a briefcase. You have a briefcase?”

“Yes.”

“If you think you’ve been followed, carry it in your right hand. If you know it’s safe, carry it in your left. Do you understand?”

“Yes. Right, danger; left, safe.”

“As it once was in politics.”

“Please be careful, Ivanch. Please.” He touched Levitsky’s thigh in an absentminded way.

“Ivan Alexyovich, if you help me, we can both get away. You and me, we’ll get out, in just a few days. We’ll go to America together.”

“Yes.”

“Go now. Hurry, so that you aren’t missed at the Colon.”

Igenko stood to leave, but paused. “Ivanch, it’s wonderful that you’re here.”

The fat man smiled. “And I want you to know, whatever you do. Whatever. It’s all right. Do what you must. Do you understand?”

Levitsky looked at him. “I’ll do what I have to, Ivan Alexyovich.”

Igenko hurried out.

Levitsky stood up slowly, feeling the ache in his ribs. You are an old man. You are nearly sixty, much too old for this.

He turned and saw himself in the mirror. He snapped the light out quickly, for he could not look upon his own face.

It was a question of timing, of careful calibration. Levitsky had decided that six was the ideal hour; an hour later and they would have too much time to think, to plot out the various possibilities, to counterplan against his game. An hour earlier and they might not be able to bring it off: the system would break down somewhere and he’d pay his dear price for nothing.

Accordingly, he left the barrio at five the next afternoon, at last reaching the crowded Ramblas and turning up it, toward the Plaza de Catalunya. Oh, the cafés were jammed this bright late afternoon, beginning to fill up for another evening of celebration. All revolutions always love themselves first; it is a rule. As he climbed along the central strip, walking among the trees and benches and stalls and street lamps, the busy density of the place momentarily dizzied him. The hunted man is safest in crowds, and here the masses were a torrent. Bright banners, heroic proclamations, bold portraits flapped off the buildings. Several of the cafés had been reconsecrated to political usage, as well as alcoholic: the UGT had one, and so did the FAI and the POUM; it was like a bazaar of crazed political ideas. He continued, until he reached the splurge of freedom of the open space of the plaza itself, where the last of the great battles of July had been fought and students and workers and slum boys had overwhelmed the army’s final position at great loss. He traversed the martyred ground, avoiding the Hotel Colon on one side, with its PSUC banner and its huge picture of the great Koba and its smart NKVD troops at their machine-gun nests behind the sandbags and the barbed wire. He headed instead to another key building in the fighting, the Telefonica, whose façade was still pocked with bullet marks from the battle. It was the central telephone exchange, and who controlled it, controlled all communications in Barcelona. But before he reached it, Levitsky stopped to check Igenko’s watch: quarter to six. He was early. He sat on a bench. A parade started up as Levitsky waited. He looked at it with some contempt.

Parades!

He watched as the ragtag Spanish cavalry marched down the street. The beasts were not well-trained, and the troopers had difficulty holding them in the formation. He could see them scuffle and pull at their reins. A shiver passed through him. Horses were such terrible creatures.

At precisely six o’clock, he crossed the wide street and entered the exchange. He found himself in a vast central office. A man came up in the uniform of one of the crazy anarchist groups. Anarchists running a telephone exchange? It was madness.

“Business, comrade?”

“Of the most urgent kind,” Levitsky said.

“You are foreign. Come to help our revolution or to loot it?”

“Does this answer?” said Levitsky, and he rolled up his right sleeve to show a tattoo on his biceps. It was the tattoo of a black fist.

“You are one of us, then. Salud, brother. It looks as if it’s been there a few years.”

“Almost as long as the arm itself. From the time before there was time.”

“What business have you?”

“To place a call.”

“Go on, then. While it’s there. When at last we tear down the government we will also tear down the telephone lines, and then all men will be free.”

“And so they will,” said Levitsky. God: the Anarchists. They were still the same dreamers!

He went to the counter.

A girl came up.

“How much?” he asked her. “Rather, how much, comrade?”

She smiled, so young and pretty.

“Ten pesetas.”

“The Anarchists have not yet outlawed money?”

“Perhaps tomorrow, comrade.”

He paid her.

“Number six.” She pointed to a wall where twenty-five or so numbered phones were mounted, most of them in use. He went to number six, picked up the earpiece ― still warm ― and hit the receiver several times. As in Moscow, the connection was terrible, but after a time a voice came on the line.

“¿Número, por favor?”

“Policía,” he said into the speaker.

“Gracias,” came the reply; there were clicks and buzzes and then another voice arrived.

“¡Policía! ¡Viva la Revolución!”

Levitsky cursed him in Russian.

There was confusion and chatter from the other end, as the speaker demanded in Spanish to know what was going on. Levitsky cursed again and again, and after a time and some confusion, at last a Russian speaker came on.

“Hello. Who is this?”

“Never mind, who is this?”

“I ask the questions, comrade.”

“What is your name, comrade? To whom do I speak?”

“Speshnev,” the man said. He sounded very young.

“The Speshnev who works for Glasanov? Of NKVD?”

“Identify yourself.”

“Listen, Speshnev, and listen good. I’m only going to say it once. I wish to denounce a traitor. A secret Trotsky pig and a wrecker.”

“Most interesting.”

“He’s third assistant secretary in the Maritime Commission. One Igenko. But he’s a fat cocksucking rat. He’s sold us out to the Jews.”

“And you have proof of these charges?”

“Of course. This Igenko was a comrade of the traitor Levitsky. Do you know of this Levitsky, Speshnev of the NKVD? You should. Second only to Trotsky.”

“Keep talking.”

“Igenko’s trying to get papers together so he and his loverboy Levitsky can take off. They’ll fly the coop tonight. They’re going to meet on the Ramblas across from the Plaza Real tonight, near the stall of the lady who sells chicken on a spit. Don’t ask me how I know. It’ll be at seven. Just show up and nail the two butt-fuckers yourself.”

“Who―”

Levitsky hung up. He felt as if he were going to vomit.

“There,” said the second undersecretary, wiping the sweat off his face. It was excruciatingly hot in the tailor’s shop, on the Ramblas, overlooking the entrance to the Plaza Real, and the steam from the presses in the back room hung heavy and moist in the air. “The fat one, with the sour look, in the mottled white suit, comrade commissar.”

“Yes,” said Glasanov. “Do you see, Bolodin?”

Lenny Mink, standing next to him, nodded. He could see the fat guy through the window and down across the street, standing in the crowded thoroughfare with a nervous tightness, an aching discomfort on his mug. He was obviously a nellie, too, with his mincing walk, and his big ass stuck out like a girl’s. His face was milky and unshaven.

“He was exceedingly distracted today, comrade commissar,” said the second undersecretary. “So much so that had not your phone call come when it did, I would myself have most certainly reported it. One can tell when a man is guilty, even if one―”

“Yes, that’s fine,” said Glasanov. “I’ll note it in your record. Your record will reflect your service to Security, you may rest assured. Now the driver will take you back. And I think you’d best tell your staff the workload is going to increase.”

“Of course, comrade commissar. We are only too happy to make any sacrifice for the good of―”

“No shooting, Bolodin,” said Glasanov. “Tell your people. I want Levitsky alive. Anybody who harms Levitsky is to be severely disciplined. Is that understood?”

The fifteen other men in the room nodded.

“Bolodin, do you think you can get down and into that stall? Stay back. We don’t want Levitsky to see you. But when he approaches, you can knock him to earth. You knock him down, do you understand, and pin him to the street. The others will be there in seconds. But he’s a clever old wolf; he will have found a weapon by this time, perhaps even a revolver. He will not hesitate to use it.”

Lenny nodded again. He’d like to see that old guy try something smart with him. He took off his leather overcoat. He wore the blue overalls of a POUMista, and he pulled out a black beret and put it on his head.

“I’ll be here, of course. Watching it, you understand.”

“What if he bolts?” asked Speshnev, the young Russian. “These jobs can go all to hell if the rabbit bolts. Why, in Moscow―”

“If he bolts, I’ll catch him and snap his legs,” said Lenny Mink, and nobody disagreed with him.

“All right. Now go, go quickly. This may be our best chance, our only chance.”

They began to file out, and just as he left for the stairway, Lenny felt Glasanov’s hand on his shoulder and felt his breath warm and quick in his ear. He turned, to see the man’s eyes almost aflame with urgency.

“Comrade Bolodin, for God’s sake, don’t fail.”

Lenny grinned and proceeded to walk on his way.

He came out of the stairway onto the sidewalk, waited for a break in the traffic, then darted across to the broad center strip of the Ramblas. Keeping his face low, he pushed his way through the throngs, past somebody selling birds and somebody selling flowers and somebody selling militia hats, sliding through soldiers and revolutionary women and young intellectuals, and approached the old lady’s chicken stall on the oblique, maintaining it between himself and Igenko.

He ducked into it.

“Eh, señor?” The old lady looked at him. “What is ―?”

“Beat it,” Lenny Mink said. “Take a hike.”

“Ahhh. Who―”

“Here, take this, old one,” said Ugarte, Lenny’s best boy, who had discreetly slid in behind Lenny. He handed the woman a hundred-peseta note. He told her to have a nice cool drink at a café for a while.

“You take the counter,” said Lenny, and Ugarte moved past him, throwing on an apron lying on the table. Lenny drew back, into the shadows. He could see the fat man in the white suit real good. The distance was about thirty feet The fat man had a briefcase in his left hand.

Come on, old devil, he told himself, looking around nervously. Come on.

Just inside the main police station courtyard, Levitsky encountered two Asaltos with German machine pistols who demanded abruptly and impolitely to know who he was and where he thought he was going. They insisted on papers. Levitsky let them carry on for a few seconds in Spanish, full of their own toughness and importance, then halted them with a Russian curse.

“NKVD, comrade,” he said, fixing his eyes on the eyes of the bigger of the two, who immediately melted like a chocolate soldier in the sun.

“Comrade Russki?”

“Da. Sí,” said Levitsky. “De Madrid, no? Comrade Glasanov?”

“Russkis?”

“Sí, Russkis. Glasanov, NKVD?”

“Ah, sí, sí. Primo Russki.”

“Da,” said Levitsky in a dead voice.

The man pointed up the building to the fourth floor. He showed four fingers.

“Gracias, comrade,” said Levitsky. He turned, went into the building through a set of double doors under one of the porticos, found some stairs, and walked swiftly up them. He passed several policemen, but nobody challenged him.

At the fourth floor, he turned down the dank hall until at last he found a huge poster of Stalin and a desk. The air was thick, where men had been smoking, but now only a single woman sat at her desk, and near her a hulking Spanish youth lounged proudly with his machine pistol, an American Thompson.

He walked to the woman, whose eyes rose as he approached.

“Comrade,” he announced in a clear, commanding, humorless voice, “I’m Maximov. From Madrid. You have my wire. Where is Comrade Commissar Glasanov? Let’s get going. I’ve had a long and dusty drive. I have come to take possession of the criminal Levitsky.”

He watched a great range of emotions play across her face in what seemed to be a very short time. Finding at last her breath and her way out of her shock to some kind of coherence, she leaped up and shouted, “Comrade! It’s a pleasure to meet you and―”

“Comrade, I asked a question. I did not come by for meaningless chitchat of a social nature. Where the bloody devil is Glasanov? Didn’t he receive the wire?”

“No, comrade,” she stammered. “We received no wire. Comrade Commissar Glasanov is off to arrest―” And she halted, terrified.

“Arrest whom?”

The woman could not begin to tell Levitsky that Levitsky had escaped.

“No, it’s―”

“It doesn’t matter. Please arrange to have me taken to Levitsky at once. I have explicit orders.”

“I–I-I-”

“Can it be, comrade, that Levitsky is gone? Has Levitsky escaped from Glasanov? Comrade, tell me.”

The girl was almost white with terror.

“I have my sources,” said Levitsky coldly, staring furiously at her. “I can tell you, comrade, that Madrid ― and Moscow ― don’t appreciate being made to look silly by an old man. It sounds like wrecking, deviation, and oppositionism.”

“I can assure you, Comrade Maximov―”

“What is your name, comrade?”

“I am Comrade Levin, comrade.”

“Comrade Levin, it is most urgent that I speak with Comrade Commissar Glasanov on this matter of Levitsky. This is not a playful request, I assure you, comrade. I have a report to file. I am under extreme pressure from Moscow myself. I would hate to have to tell the committee secretary that in Barcelona our representatives are sluggish and inefficient, given to Spanish ways. It almost makes me think―”

“Comrade, accept my apologies, please. You must understand how hard we work here, how difficult the problems are.”

“And let me tell you, comrade, that in other areas of Spain our policies are pursued with much greater Party discipline and control. Our detention houses are everywhere. There are no Trotskyite columns, no open denunciations of the general secretary, no Anarchist oganizations patrolling the streets, no opposition newspapers. Moscow has noticed the comic opera here in Barcelona. We have our sources. We are not surprised.”

“But comrade, the problems are so different here. Only here, in the early days―”

“The problems are no different, but perhaps the quality of the personnel is different.”

“Comrade, I can assure you the arrest is imminent. Even now, the commissar is―”

“This would seem his only arrest.”

“Oh, no. No, comrade, begging your pardon. No, we have been very diligent. Our commissar works like the very devil himself. Night after night. Look, Comrade Maximov, I’ll show you. Come, please.”

She took a key from her desk and led him back into Glasanov’s inner office.

“I’ll prove it to you,” she said. “I’ll show you the records.”

Lenny Mink watched the fat man shift the briefcase back and forth. He kept asking people for the time. He was a mess. Lenny could almost smell the fear. It was five past.

Come on, Teuful. You’re dead in Spain without papers. Without papers, the Asaltos shoot you. Come on, old devil, come to me. This is your only hope. Now, when it’s crowded, when the soldiers move down the street, when you think it’s safest.

There was a sudden pop in the air.

Lenny, startled, looked about. Pop, pop, pop. His eyes shot back to the fat Igenko, who stood on the verge of panic amid the suddenly frozen crowd, peculiarly reddish, as if ―

Flares. The twilight sky had filled with red flares, like small pink suns that hung, floating, against the dusk. Music rose tumultuously in the weird spectacle; it was the Internationale.

“Boss―” It was Ugarte.

“Shut up,” Lenny said, shooting his eyes back to the frightened Igenko, afraid he’d fled. No, he was still there.

Soldiers. One of the militias must have been heading out to the front. Igenko stood in the pink night as the soldiers swept along the Ramblas, on either side of him, and the crowd surged toward them to line the way, and Igenko, against his will, was caught in the human tide.

“Fuck it,” said Lenny, just as Igenko was hurled out of sight in the masses. Trust the devil Levitsky to pull something like this.

He vaulted the counter smoothly and his long, powerful strides took him through the running people. He bowled a man over, shoved others aside, knocked a woman down.

Someone grabbed him.

“Hey, comrade―”

“SIM,” he barked. The grabber fell back instantly. Lenny pulled the automatic from his mono and pushed on. He hated the idea of failure. Rage filled him. Where was the fat man?

There, yes. He’d had a glimpse, through the troops and beyond the crowd on the sidewalk on the other side. He was right at the Arco de Teatro, about to disappear through the arch and vanish in the winding, messy old streets of the Barrio Chino, which the Anarchists controlled.

Lenny dashed across the way, pushing through the mob of soldiers.

He could hear them yelling sporting things at him.

“Hey, come to war with us, comrade, if you’re so eager.”

“Come and kill the Fascists with us, brother.”

“He can’t wait. Come on, the POUM needs fighters like you.”

But Lenny pushed through their ranks and on to the other side, ducked through the Arco himself, and ran down the narrow street. The buildings loomed over him: the road seemed to split and split again into a maze, but a maze jammed with human riffraff. He halted, breathing hard. There was no illumination, though up ahead, here and there, red lights shone on the sides of the buildings.

But then he saw him. Just a glimpse of heft and mince, darting ahead in utter fright. Lenny didn’t stop to consider the fragility of the connection: he had looked down the right street at the right moment.

He caught him in a lonely pool of red light.

“Ivanch …?” The fat man turned, his face warm with expectation. But when he saw Lenny, his expression fell apart into something ugly with terror.

“Swine,” Lenny said, hitting him in the fat mouth with the pistol. Igenko fell into a mewling heap.

“Hey. Hey, what are you doing, comrade?”

Lenny looked up; three Anarchist patrolmen were unslinging their rifles and heading over.

“SIM,” barked Lenny.

“Fuck the SIM, comrade,” yelled the first. “Russian swine had better stay out of―”

Lenny threw the slide on his Tokarev, jacking the hammer back, and said in English, “Another step, motherfucker, and you’re dead meat.”

Igenko was crying.

Ugarte was next to him, pistol out, and then another man arrived and another and another, and then Glasanov himself. The Anarchists began to back off.

“These are simply records,” said Levitsky. “A list of names. This means nothing.”

The woman’s eyes fell.

“I assure you, Comrade Maximov,” she began, “each name on that list is an enemy of the state and each has been dealt with by Comrade Glasanov. We are moving even closer to―”

“You show me a list of names on a paper and you say, here, here is your revolution, this paper. Meanwhile, opposition newspapers are published condemning the general secretary, slandering him, and armed dissenters swagger in the streets and drink wine in the cafés, laughing at him.”

“Look,” she said, opening a drawer. “Look! Do you see! This is not a list! These are our enemies’ lives!”

She pulled the pouch out.

“All these passports. They each represent an arrest. And they will be sent back to Moscow Center by diplomatic pouches. Our agents will be able to use them to penetrate the Western democracies in the years to come. Look, see for yourself.”

She handed the pouch over to Levitsky; he rifled it quickly. Passports and plenty more: official papers, work records, confiscated identification cards, the remains of the Tomas W.’s and the Carlos M.’s, and the Vladimir N.’s of Glasanov’s assiduous underground campaign against oppositionism.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it appears to be impressive. One must not judge too hastily, however.”

“Examine them, comrade. They are our evidence. We are tireless in our efforts. We broach no treason. Comrade Glasanov is a gifted, inspirational leader. He is a Party worker who doesn’t know the meaning of fatigue.”

Levitsky studied the matter gravely.

At that moment a flare popped outside filling, the office with pink light. Another detonated, then another. They looked to the window and could see the spangled patterns of the starbursts glossy and spectacular against the night sky, dwarfing even the moon.

“A parade,” she said. “Men are going off to fight at the front. But we fight here, too, comrade. We have no interest in parades.”

Levitsky realized that the stupid girl was in love with Glasanov. He was probably fucking her every night.

“Perhaps the matter deserves more study,” he said. “I shall return to my quarters at the Colon. Tell Glasanov to expect me tomorrow at nine A.M. Sharp. He had better have the criminal Levitsky by then. In the meantime, I’ll review these documents tonight so as to better understand the situation here and the difficulties Comrade Commissar Glasanov faces.”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll tell him. Oh, listen. Listen.”

Music. It was the Internationale.

“It’s quite beautiful,” he said. “Truly inspirational sentiments. Good day, comrade. You serve your superior well. I shall keep my eye on you. Perhaps the right word in the right ear.”

“Thank you, Comrade Maximov, but my work is pleasure enough. I have no desires except to serve my nation and my party.”

He left quickly.

In the street, he melted into the crowd and departed the area, heading into an Anarchist neighborhood, his cache of identities under his arm in the stocky leather pouch. The extent of the triumph was stunning, far greater than he had hoped for: he had wanted out of his sortie some sort of identity card, and he had come away with an encyclopedia of personalities. He could easily sell half of them on the black market, where genuine papers were a prized item, and the others would give him extraordinary operating latitude, made more deliciously useful by Glasanov’s inability to acknowledge the loss of the documents.

In the revolutionary mob he hurried along, the sound of music ringing in his ears, the sky behind him still pink and hot with light. He tried not to think of Igenko.

When Igenko died at 4:05 A.M. that morning in the prison at the Convent of St. Ursula, after sustaining the inevitable massive internal injuries, it was greeted by his captors as something less than a tragedy. He died badly, screaming. He had told them, as much as he could, everything. But he didn’t make a lot of sense.

“He knew nothing,” said Glasanov. “That raving, that terror. He was worthless.”

But Lenny was thinking that Igenko was a clerk in the Maritime Commission, which handled shipping. And he was thinking of Igenko’s dying words, the ones that had confused poor Glasanov.

“The gold,” he had screamed. “Emmanuel came for the gold and he betrayed me for the gold.”

12 THE PARADE

By god, thought florry, if i live another fifty years, I’ll never forget this night. He shifted the lumpy hulk of the Moisin-Nagent rifle from one shoulder to another ― in a POUM formation, it made no difference which shoulder one braced one’s rifle against, just as it made no difference whether one marched in step or in uniform; all that mattered was mass and direction. Around him, men churned ahead. In the sky above, flares burst and hung, hissing. Each was a small sun, burning its image into the retina, bleeding its color into the sky behind it. It was the red night, el noche rojo, and he was part of it.

It seemed that all Barcelona had either wedged itself onto the Ramblas to cheer the soldiers or had found space on the balconies above, and half the musicians of Spain had been conscripted to provide music by which to send the soldiers off to war. Flowers and confetti fell upon them; petals drifted pinkly in the illuminated air. It was a theater of light. Shafts rose and flashed against the sky like saber blades; fireworks burst and crackled as the parade swept down the Ramblas.

“To Huesca! To Huesca!” came the cry from the crowds.

“Long live the World Revolution!” somebody up ahead yelled in exuberant English.

A wineskin, circulating among the militiamen, finally arrived at Florry.

“Here, inglés,” said a boy, handing it over.

Florry took the warm thing and held it close to his mouth and squirted in a brief, pulsing jet of wine. Blanco. A little bitter, yet vivid all the same. Yes. He swallowed and passed it on. He noticed that the rifles had spouted roses and that women had come among them.

“Hey, inglés, not so bad, eh?” someone yelled to him.

“Yes, bravo,” shouted Florry back, feeling excited and cynical at once. He’d spent two crude weeks tramping about in the mud with broomsticks with these boys ― the rifles were only issued recently ― and yet he felt a part of it. What a jolly show! What a spiffy send-up! It was like ’14, wasn’t it, everybody off on a bloody crusade. Pip, pip, do one’s best, and all that.

At the bottom of the Ramblas, the parade wheeled to the left in an unending torrent under the watchful, cool eye of Christopher Columbus at the top of his pedestal, and headed along the broad boulevard at the lip of the port until it arrived at the station, a grand Spanish building, all monument and stern purpose and majestic self-importance.

Within its sooty portals, however, the Spanish talent for disorganization reasserted itself aggressively after the relative precision of the parade. Florry found himself stalled under a vast double-vaulted ceiling filled up with steam and noise. Half the lights in the big cavern were off and searchlights prowled about, illuminating rising columns of steam theatrically. It was a near riot. Suddenly, the queue began to move. Florry advanced to the train and then the movement broke down again, abandoning him in the throng right at the portal of the car. He stood, one boot up on the step, his heavy rifle over his shoulder, his kit on his back and a water bottle at his belt, like a 1914 victory poster. He felt absurd. Could not the Spaniards do one thing efficiently?

It seemed to take forever. Good Christ, how can they hope to win a war and finish a revolution if they cannot even fill up a train in an orderly fashion?

“Robert! Oh, Robert. Thank God!”

Her hair was pulled back severely under a black beret and she still wore the sexless mono and plimsoles, but her eyes had that special, sleepy grace, and when she smiled as she fought her way through the soldiers to him, he felt a burst of pleasure scalding as steam and thought he’d faint. Yet he also felt himself pulled up short and breathless with anger. Sylvia, off to watch her little hero do his bit.

“Hello, Sylvia,” he said, unsure what else to say, possessing no opinion as to what would happen next.

“I had to see you. I hated the way you just went off.”

He was surprised at the anger he felt.

“God, Sylvia, is this scene really necessary?”

“¡Vámanos, inglés!” a sergeant yelled from the car. He was holding up the line. He stepped out to let the others file by.

“I have to go,” he said gruffly. “They’re getting ready to go out.”

“Robert, I had to see you one last time.”

“What nonsense! You were the one who pushed me away. You were the one who wanted some room. You were the one who had to have experiences. You paid your debt, Sylvia. Florry had his fun, bloody good fun it was, too. You owe me nothing.”

“I owe you everything,” she said. “I want you to know how much I respect you for this. Like Julian, you’ll write history rather than about it.”

“What rubbish! You’ve been reading too many posters. Nothing’s happened up there in months. The only attacks are launched by the lice. It’ll simply be a time without bathing, that’s all. Just like Eton, actually.”

“Robert―”

“¡Vámanos, inglés, amigo!” the sergeant called again. “Es la hora. El tren sale. ¿No quieres ser ejecutado?” The train whistle rang through the air, echoing against the stones of the station.

“Stop that damned crying and let me shake your hand,” Florry said. “You shall have your adventures and I shall have mine.”

She tried to smile but it was wrecked by the intensity of her emotion. Florry took her hand and meant to shake it primly and ironically and angrily after their sweet night together. But he surprised himself by pulling her to him. Everybody on the train was cheering and making suggestions of what to do with a lovely young girl and he didn’t give a damn. He could see her eyes widen in surprise as he brought her close and he brought her closer, feeling all the war gear on his back encumbering him, but he didn’t care about that, either. He crushed her body in his arms, taking pleasure in it, feeling the give and yield of her slight bones, smelling the soft sweetness of her, and he kissed her, hard, on the mouth.

“There,” he said, speaking quite brutally. “Now that’s a proper send-off for a soldier boy, eh? Now smile. Show Florry some teeth, darling.”

She looked at him, shocked.

The train whistled and began to move.

“Good-bye, Sylvia. I’ll put in a good word for you to Julian. Perhaps you and he can have tea when this is finished.” He jumped up on the doorstep of the train as it pulled out of the station. He hung there until he could see her no longer, and then they pulled him aboard, cheering and happy for the romantic Englishman.

He hated her. He loved her.

Damn the woman!

13 THE MAJOR

In London, it was well after midnight. Holly-Browning had become almost a vampire: he lived by night, as if the sun’s touch were lethal. He sat, isolated, chalky complected, his eyes black-ringed, working with furious concentration on the message Vane had so recently brought up from Signals.

The major had a gift for codes, or at least an enthusiasm for them. The message was encrypted in the standard Playfair cipher of the British army, and he had no difficulty pulling its meaning from the nonsense of the letter groups that faced him. He merely compared them against a square formation ― five letters by five letters ― from the key group and extracted, off the diagonal, the bigram of each two-letter unit. The key group, curiously enough, was always drawn from a verse of standard English poetry; the code was made secure by changing the key ― the verse ― each week, by prearranged schedule. That week’s verse happened to be from one of the major’s favorites, Rupert Brooke. “If I should die, think only this of me,” it went, “there’s some foreign field that’s forever England.”

Sampson’s dispatch yielded its secrets and its purposes swiftly and cleanly as the letter groups tumbled into words, the words into sentences. When the major was done, he sat back. It was a longish document, nicely crafted, tightly constructed, succinctly covering recent developments.

Yet it struck the major with a peculiar, cold authority. He looked to the fire, which had burned low, and felt the shame come across him like a shudder.

A soft noise sounded in the darkness and he looked up to see Vane standing silhouetted against the illumination of the open door.

“Yes, Vane?”

“Sir, I wondered if there’s a reply?”

“No, I think not,” said the major, and as effortlessly as he had arrived, Vane began to slip away.

“Vane, stop. Do come in.”

“Sir, I―”

“No, I insist.”

Vane padded vaguely through the darkness and took the leather chair opposite Holly Browning’s desk.

“Drink, Vane?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve got some very fine brandy. I’ve some whiskey. I’ve got a bottle of scotch barley somewhere and I’ve―”

“Thank you, sir, but―”

“No, that’s fine. Suit yourself.” He removed the bottle and a glass from his desk, poured himself a finger of brandy, brought it up, and swallowed it quickly. He remembered the stuff from 1916, when extra rations had been issued before the big jump-off at the Somme. It had certainly came in handy that day.

“It’s very good, Vane. Are you sure you won’t have any?”

“No, sir.”

“As you wish. Good heavens, these have been long days, haven’t they?” He had no idea how to make conversation.

“Yessir. If I may say, sir, you really are working too hard. Wouldn’t want to damage one’s health.”

“Working?” the major said, pouring himself another finger of the brandy. “Actually, I’m not working at all. Sampson’s doing the work. Sampson and poor Florry.”

“Perhaps you should take a holiday, sir.”

“Er, perhaps I should. Perhaps I will, too. Vane, tell me. Have you ever been to Moscow?”

“No, I haven’t, sir.”

“All right. Come with me. I’ll show you something.”

The major rose and walked from behind his desk to the window, a journey of just a few paces. There, he threw the heavy curtain. They looked from MI-6’s old Broadway offices just a few blocks toward the Thames and the gaudy, crenellated buildings of Parliament. It was utterly peaceful, a serene composition off a Yule card. The moon, a bright half circle, shone in the sky at the center of a blur of radiance and its cold chill touched everything, especially a sheath of new-dusted snow that lay upon the roof of Westminster Abbey.

“Vane, what do you see?”

“Nothing, sir. Silent London. That’s all.”

“Look over at Whitehall.”

“One can hardly see it, sir. All the lights are out.”

“They are, indeed. Think of it, Vane, all those empty offices, locked and silent. All those chaps gone home, now in bed or reading or working at their hobbies or off to the theater, what have you. But the truth is, at this precise moment, so certain is the British government of its place in the world and the stability of its empire, it can actually afford to cease to exist for a full twelve hours. Every day, the British government disappears for twelve hours. Extraordinary, isn’t it? A daylight government.”

Vane said nothing, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

“Vane, in Moscow in the winter of ’nineteen and again in ’twenty-three, the lights were never out. They blazed away each evening until dawn. Those chaps were figuring out ways to beat us. They were, Vane. Strategems, ploys, plots, subversions. They were like Wells’s Martian intelligences, cool and implacable. It used to haunt me, those burning lights. Our people in Moscow with the embassy, they tell me that the lights burn brighter than ever these nights.”

“Surely, sir, they are merely attempting to figure out ways to get their electric plants to cease from conking out every two weeks or learning how to get their harvests in on time under that terrible―”

“No, Vane. They are burning with fury, with fire, to destroy us. To have what we have. Or, rather, to take what we have from us. It obsesses them. It obsesses this man Levitsky, the master spy.”

“I’m sure you are his match, sir.”

The major issued something very like a chuckle. Levitsky’s match? How rich!

“If I am very lucky,” he said, “and if my people perform up to their very, very best, then yes, perhaps I have a chance against Levitsky.”

“You knew him well, sir?”

Another jest. Poor Vane had no idea how inadvertently droll he had become.

“Levitsky and I had quite a few sessions in the cellar of the Lubyanka in 1923,” said the major, remembering. “A number of highly interesting conversations.”

“I’m sure you taught him a thing or two, sir.”

The major looked at the moonstruck landscape. Oh, yes, he’d taught Levitsky a thing or two! He shook his head. A set of memories unspooled in his skull and he remembered the passionate conviction in the Jew’s eyes, the emotional contact, the intensity, the glittering intelligence.

“May I ask, sir, what brings Levitsky to mind?”

“He’s in Spain,” said the major. “He’s in Barcelona, or so Sampson reports.”

“Yessir.”

“Yes, you see how it all fits, how I said it would fit. His agent goes to Spain and communicates with home base via Amsterdam. But there comes a time when communication isn’t quite enough; the campaign has become more complex, the plans more intricate, the possibilities more numerous. And thus does Levitsky travel undercover to Barcelona to confer with Julian Raines. God, Vane, if Florry could catch the two together! That’d be it. No one in government could deny Raines’s complicity. And we could take Florry the last step. We’d then be done with it altogether!”

“Yessir.”

The major was trembling with repressed wanting. He felt himself so terribly, terribly close.

“Let me tell you, Vane, what sort of a man this Levitsky is. So you have some idea as to what it is we’re up against. Within days after his arrival to take over the NKVD operations, he claimed his first victim. He ordered the arrest of a Soviet clerk named Igenko. Igenko was picked up, interrogated, and is surely dead by this time.”

“Yessir.”

“It sounds quite mundane, doesn’t it, Vane, the Soviet Russian system in normal operation. A clerk is suspected of vague ‘crimes,’ and in days he’s dead.”

“It’s revolting, sir.”

“Actually, it’s quite a bit more than revolting, Vane. You still don’t know the half of it. I remember Igenko, too, from 1919. It was so long ago.”

“This Igenko and Levitsky: they were connected?”

“Yes. And surely that was Igenko’s ‘crime.’ He knew Levitsky, and thus he was a risk to Levitsky’s operation. Levitsky is so important he must be protected at all costs.”

“Could they have been comrades, sir?”

“More than that, Vane.”

“Lovers, perhaps, sir? Would they be poofs?”

“More again, Vane,” said Major Holly-Browning, looking out at the dark halls of government, the sleeping city under its lacy snow, its bone-cold, moonstruck radiance. “They were brothers.”