Tapestry of Spies

14 HUESCA

In the cold rear of a truck hauling him from the railhead at Barbastros to the firing line, and amid a crew of largely drunken militiamen, Florry remembered the last time he had seen Julian Raines. It had been in June of 1928, nine years earlier, Honors Day at Eton, a June afternoon. The sixth-formers, liberated that morning at matriculation from the rigors of the college, had gathered with their parents on the lawn of one of the yards, near the famous Wall, for a last mingle or whatever before commencing with the lives to follow. These lives usually meant university or something promising in the City or at Sandhurst; however, not for Florry. He knew by then he’d spend the summer boning up on engineering and math at a place that tutored dim boys just furiously enough to get them by the India service exam. He knew, in other words, he’d wasted it all.

A bright and lovely day it had been, too, a touch warm, under a sky of English blue and a breeze as sweet as a perfect lyric ― or was this his wretched memory playing its wretched trick on him, in the way a generation insisted that the summer of ’14, wet and hot and muggy, had been a rare masterpiece of temperate beauty? Florry didn’t know. What he remembered was the misery and shame he felt, in counterpoint to a gathering so full of hope and ambition and confidence ― the earth’s natural heirs pausing for just a second before assuming their rightful place ― and had stood off, the failed scholarship boy, with his mousy mother and his uncomfortable clerk of a dad while glossier types laughed merrily and quaffed great quantities of champagne on the lawn and told school stories.

“Robert, can’t you introduce us to your friends?” his mother had said, but before he could answer, his dad ― surprisingly sensitive, in retrospect ― had replied, “There, it isn’t necessary.”

“Well, now he’s all fancy Eton, you think he knew dukes and the like,” his mum said. “He talks like one.”

“Sir, maybe the three of us could go off and get a pint,” he’d said. “They’ve a nice pub in the town.”

“Robert, can’t say as I have a thirst,” his dad said. “But if you’d like. Just the three of us, to celebrate our Eton chap.”

Florry then led them on an awkward pilgrimage through the crowd with an excuse-me here and a beg-pardon there, his eyes down, his face hot and drawn. He was exceedingly worried that his hated nickname ― “Stinky,” from a bad spell of bed wetting when first he’d arrived ― would come up at him within his parents’ earshot.

But something far worse happened.

“Good heavens, Robert, can these be your parents?”

It was the first time that Julian had spoken to him in six months, and Florry looked up in weird, passionate misery. Julian stood before him, having appeared from God knows where, having suddenly, magically materialized ― it was a gift for dramatic entrances, uniquely Julian’s ― blocking the way. Julian’s skin was flushed pink and his fair hair hung lankly across his forehead, nonchalant in a way that many younger boys imitated, from under an Eton boater worn atilt on his head. He had on one of those absurd, smug little Eton jackets, too, with its white piping, and it looked dashing and perfect.

It had been most peculiar. Julian, the form’s swankiest boy, had taken up Florry abruptly, been his closest and most trusting friend for nearly three years, then six months earlier had just as abruptly dropped him. It still hurt; in fact, it absolutely crushed Florry and he’d watched helplessly as his studies disintegrated and his chances at a university scholarship, once so close, had simply vanished.

Thus Julian’s sudden appearance was at once wonderful and terrifying. Was this to be a sort of reconciliation, a readmission to favor? Florry’s knees began to shake and his breath came sharp as a knife.

“I say, Mr. and Mrs. Florry?” Julian bent forward, past Florry, and Florry was yet unable to identify the tone and did not know what course the next moment or so would take. “I’m Robert’s friend, Julian Raines.”

He paused, as if to tighten the suspense.

“I wanted to say hello to you. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Julian bowed, shook dad’s slack hand and kissed mum on hers. Florry could see the poor woman’s eyelashes flutter: a gent like Julian had never paid any attention to her.

“I must say,” said Julian, “it’s a shame Robert mussed his opportunity here. It’s not often that a chap from your class has the chance. We’d all so hoped Robert would prove out. But alas, he hasn’t. Off to India, Stink?” Julian smiled in the excruciating silence of the moment. “Well, it’s probably better that way. You won’t be dogged by it, old man. Well, best of luck.”

And with that little masterpiece of destruction, he was off. He had not looked at Florry after the first second, yet in less than a minute he had transformed Florry’s failure from a general one to a specific one, given it special shape and meaning and inserted it forever into his parents’ memories.

But Florry surprised himself by not crying. He simply swallowed and led his parents onward.

“You’re lucky to have such fancy friends,” his mum said. “Did you see how he kissed my hand? There, nobody’s ever done such a thing.”

“A bit cheeky, you ask me,” said his father. “Robert did graduate, did he not? First of our lot to get even half so far. Well, Robert, there’s still India. You’ll get your chance yet. What’s that he called you?”

“It’s nothing, Dad,” Florry said. “Just a schoolboy name.”

“Damned silly,” his father said.

Florry managed a dry heroic smile, but ― and later he hated himself for this last weakness ― looked past him back into the mob one last time: into Eton through the gates and the crowd of boys and their parents ― and he’d seen Julian amid the form’s handsomest youths, laughing, sipping champagne … and then lost sight of him, and that was the end of it.

Thus when the truck halted and the driver came back and shouted, “Inglés. Sí, inglés. ¡Vámonos!” and he’d climbed down to find himself hard by a seedy, battered old country house, he discovered in himself a curious mixture of apprehension and loathing. He knew he was at La Granja, near the English section of the line around Huesca. Somewhere hereabouts he would find his friend and enemy, the man he was sent to stop.

Mobs of soldiers loafed about in the sun, most of them scruffier looking than hobos. In the yard, a dozen different languages filled the air. The largest crowd had formed up about a fire, where a cook was ladling out huge helpings of some sort of rice dish. Near the great house, a tent had been set up with a huge red cross painted on its roof, and Florry could make out wounded soldiers lying on cots. The house itself bore the marks of battle: one wing was smashed to rubble and most of the windows had been broken out. The ubiquitous POUM initials had been inscribed across its façade in garish red paint, in a spidery, gargantuan penmanship. Yet for all the noise and the numbers of men, the scene was strangely pastoral: it had no sense of particular urgency or design. It was as so much of the Spanish revolution, that is, primarily improvised and quite ragtag. No sentry questioned him or challenged him and there seemed to be no office for new arrivals. He simply asked the first several men he saw about the English, and after a time, someone pointed him in more or less the right direction.

He was directed beyond the house, through an orchard, and across a meadow, perhaps a mile’s walk in all. At last he came to a dour little redhead sitting on an appropriated dining-room chair in the middle of a field, sucking on a pipe, and hacking at what proved to be an ancient Colt machine gun.

“I say,” Florry called, “seen a chap about calling himself Julian Raines? Tall fellow, rather fine-boned. Blond.”

The man didn’t bother to look up.

After a time, Florry said, “Er, I was addressing you, sir.”

The man at last raised his face, fixing Florry with shrewd, dirty-gray eyes.

“Wouldn’t have a spare potato-digger bolt on you, mate? This one’s about to bleedin’ snap.”

“I assume ‘potato digger’ is slang for the weapon?”

“You got it, chum. They said they’d send one up.”

“No, they didn’t say anything about that.”

“Public-school man, eh?”

“Yes. My bloody accent, is it? Afraid I can’t much help it.”

“Your pal’s up top the hill, chum. Just go on up.”

“Oh. Thanks. Thanks awfully.”

“Think nothing of it, chum.”

Florry marched up the hill, dragging his rifle with him. At the crest, he saw before him a broad brown plain and beyond that a range of glorious white mountains and halfway between himself and the mountains there lay a doll’s city of brown structures crouching behind a wall from which there issued, lazily, a few columns of smoke. Huesca itself, the enemy city.

Florry looked down the hill where a group of men huddled around a cooking fire behind a rude trench, and cupped his hand to his mouth and ―

The tackle sent him hurling down, rolling with bone-crunching racket, over rocks and bushes and branches. He came to a rest against a stunted tree, all tangled up in his equipment, hurting and scraped in a half dozen places. There seemed to be a flock of birds fluttering through the trees.

“You bloody idiot,” someone nearby was shouting at him.

Florry blinked in shock.

“What on earth―”

“Them’s bullets whippin’ about, you bloody fool,” screamed his assailant, no less than the redheaded runt of the other side of the hill. “Blimey, mate, don’t you know a bloody prank? Don’t they have bloody humor at that awful school of yours? Christ, ’e goes and stands against the crestline!”

“Eh?”

“Come on, then.”

Florry, in his confusion and embarrassment, became aware of a circle of faces above him.

“Billy, you awful toad, playing games with some innocent swot,” came a voice of piercing familiarity. “Good heavens, fellow, don’t just lie there like the fallen Christ awaiting resurrection. Get your scrawny bones up and give us some account of yourself.”

A lovely apparition in mud and pale whiskers stood above him. He wore a small automatic pistol at his waist and some kind of many-buckled leather Burberry. He looked like a Great War aviator, all dash and style, more than any kind of infantryman, even to the scarf ― silk, naturally ― and the puttees and the hollow, noble sunburned face. His hair was almost white-blond from the outdoor living, the eyes still their fabled opaque blue.

“Hullo, Julian,” said Florry, in spite of himself excited. And a little nervous.

“Good God, it’s Stinky Florry of the old school. Stinky, can it really be you?”

“ ’E said ’e was a chum of yours, Julian,” said the runty redhead. “If I’d known it for a fact, I wouldn’t have knocked ’im down before Bob the Nailer invited him to tea.”

“Had Bob the Nailer known he was an Eton man, Billy, I’m sure he would have shown a degree more politeness,” said Julian with what Florry began to see was a kind of mock snootiness that must have been his style up here. “Robert, you’ve already met the disgusting Billy Mowry, who actually calls himself a commissar. He’s the only man I’ve ever known who’s actually read Das Kapital, which is less impressive than it seems because it’s the only book he’s read. He’s not read my book, for example. He’s not even heard of me, or so he claims.”

“Comrade,” said this Commissar Billy to Florry, “if you can work out a way to keep your fancy chum’s mouth glued tight, you’ll have served the revolution heroically. Anyhows, glad to have you here. We need all the fighters we can find, whatever the class. I reckon you’ll bleed just as red as any of us. I’m boss fellow, or so it says somewhere. Don’t ask me why; these foolish fellows elected me.” There was something like warmth ― though not much of it ― in his voice.

“Only to shut him up about Karl Bloody Marx, his patron saint. Come on, dear boy, to my quarters. You can meet these other fellows later; they’ll be the first to admit they’re not important enough to waste our time now.”

There was much laughter, and Florry saw that part of Julian’s job here in the trenches was to make the boys laugh.

“Now,” said Julian, drawing him off, “tell Julian why on earth you’ve come halfway across Europe to die in mud among louts and lice. I thought one fool in our form was enough. God, Stinky, you can’t have turned into a bloody Communist, can you? You don’t believe all their nonsense, do you?”

“Christ, Julian, it’s good to see you,” Florry surprised himself in suddenly blurting. He could feel Julian’s charm like a tide sweeping in to engulf him.

You hate him, he told himself. You’ll destroy him, he told himself.

“Look at me, Stink. Yes, by God, it is you. And what a present from God you are. Let me tell you, old man, this bloody giving oneself to the revolution is a good bit of trouble. It’s a picnic in the mud among Java men. Good fellows, but the blokes haven’t even read Housman, for God’s sake. And with your usual flair for the dramatic, you’ve managed to come upon something unique in history: it’s the only time a city has besieged an army. Why, it’s―”

“Julian, before we go any farther, I must tell you something.”

“Oh, God, I do hate it when someone says they must tell me something. From the look on your face, you’re about to tell me you’ve managed to get yourself listed ahead of me in Mother’s will. I can forgive you anything, Stinky, except that. Now keep low here. First rule: never stand against a crestline. Bang, Bob the Nailer has potted you. Now, what was it you were going to tell me. Can it wait at least until―”

“Please, no. I must get this out. You must know.”

“Lord, you’re not still ticked at me for the awful thing I said on Honors Day. Stink, I’d just had a rare turn-down from a bloody trollop ― Jack Tantivy’s sister, as I recall, awful girl ― and I was drunk and looking for somebody to hurt. Lord, Stink, how I’ve often regretted that. You’re not out here for revenge, lo these many years later? Here―”

He pulled out the little pistol, snapped it prime, and handed it to Florry.

“Go on then,” he said dramatically, closing his eyes. “Do the deed. I deserve it. I can be such a cad. I hurt people all the time, Stink. Pull the trigger and rid the world of the awful Julian.”

“You bloody idiot.”

“Ah, Stink, that’s the spirit. Give as good as you get.”

Florry saw that the pistol was the little Webley automatic, in.25 caliber.

“Here. Take the bloody toy. I’ve a Webley myself. The big revolver. When it comes to shooting, I could blast the moon out of the sky.”

“A four-five-five! Topping! Now that I envy you. A bloody big four-five-five! Christ, I’d love to turn it on a Moorish sergeant. Or pot a Jerry or an Eyetye captain. What fun! War’s great fun, Stink. Better than school … better even than poetry.”

Florry exploded. “Julian, I hate your poetry! I hate ‘Achilles, Fool.’ You’ve destroyed the talent you had at Eton with debauchery and sloth. You haven’t written a good verse in years.”

Julian’s blue eyes held his for the longest time. Then he smiled.

“Well spoken, Stink. Hate it myself. It’s no bloody game when it’s your own rump they’re shooting at. Yes, as a poet I’m finished, I agree. I’m halfway through an awful poem called ‘Pons,’ and I’ve no end at all for it. It’ll remain forever undone. Come on, we’ll have a tot and I’ll show it to you and we can have a good laugh over its utter dreadfulness. And some day we’ll go back to Barbastros to the whorehouse. Now that’s a pleasure you’ll have to experience. These revolutionary tarts, Stink, they’re utterly enchanting. They take your shooter in their bloody mouths! Extraordinary!”

“Julian.” Florry idiotically, wearily, repeated.

“Now, Stink, there is one thing I absolutely have to know.” He paused. “How is Mother?”

Some days, Bob the Nailer was more active than others; like so many things Spanish, it seemed to depend entirely upon the whim of the sniper himself. If he awoke in an indifferent mood, he might prang away indiscriminately, manufacturing only enough noise to keep his own sargento and priest off his back. If he awakened with the fire of zealotry moving in his bones, he might crawl close enough to do some real damage, and make things in the English section’s crude trench at least interesting.

Curiously Florry soon came to hope for interesting days. For Bob the Nailer was like a morale officer; he made the time in the trenches bearable, because when you are ducking bullets, you may be risking death but you are also blissfully unaware of rain, cold, mud, and all the other disgusting elements of the life of static warfare.

It was ’14–’18, again, the cold, wet living in mud hovels scooped from the earth, with only the occasional scurrying patrol into no-man’s-land to liven things up, the occasional calling card from Bob to keep you honest. It was as if the tank hadn’t yet been invented, and in a certain way it hadn’t. Jerry couldn’t get his PzKpfw IIs down here, Billy Mowry allowed, because the Spanish stone bridges were too old; the rumbling of a heavy vehicle upon them would bring them crashing down, dumping Jerry and his tin toy in the drink. And of course bloody Joe Stalin wouldn’t allow any T-26s up here where it was largely a POUMista show. But Florry almost wished for a tank or two; like Bob the Nailer, they’d make things more interesting ― and boredom was almost as dangerous as the Fascists.

There was only one cure for boredom. It was Julian, who, whatever his horrors of the past, his history of cruelty, would not allow himself to be hated any more than he would allow anyone about him, particularly Florry, to appear put out.

His flamboyance and natural outrageousness seemed to cloak him in special grace and he was always happy, happier even than Billy Mowry, a true believer.

“I say, Billy, do you know why I joined this POUM thing of yours?” Julian baited on a day so like every other day it would have no place within a week or on a calendar.

Billy Mowry, sucking on a pipe while filling sandbags, delivered up the sour face of a man about to face an execution, paused, and finally sprang Julian for the pounce.

“No, comrade. Pray tell us.”

“Ah. You see, it happened like this. I saw the bloody great initials POUM on the banners outside this hotel on the Ramblas where I was rusticating one summer’s day, and I said to myself, why, these silly buggers cannot even properly spell the word POEM, and as our century’s fifth greatest living poet, I went in to correct them and the next thing I knew, here I was picking lice as big as hobnails off my balls.”

Everybody laughed. God, Julian.

Julian’s true enemy, however, wasn’t fascism or party politics or even war in general: it was time. Julian was the only one of them who could vanquish time. He could turn the months into weeks, the weeks to days, the days to hours. He could rip through the numbers on the clock and the pages of the calendar; he could make them forget where they were and how long they’d been there and how long they would be there. That was his special, most lovely gift. And as Florry settled into the troglodyte life it was Julian who freed him from his bondage to the calendar: and when Florry looked at such a document in what seemed to be his third or fourth week on the line he was stunned to discover that not only had January turned to February but February had turned to March and that March was soon to turn to April. It was, however, still 1937.

“Ain’t we low on wood?” Commissar Billy asked, part of the ritual of the sameness of days. “Whose bloody turn is it to scrounge some up?”

“I’ll go,” said Julian, shucking his blanket.

“Here, I’ll come along,” said Florry, grasping his first chance to confront Julian alone.

“Stink, you do have a use then, don’t you?”

But it wasn’t a joke. The night was coming and without wood there’d be no fires and no warmth. But by this time there was damned little wood. The ground behind the trenches had been picked clean for hundreds of yards.

With their comrades’ best hopes along as baggage, and a godsend from Bob the Nailer ― sprang! the bullet rattled off the rocks a goodly distance away ― the two clambered out of the trench and began to wander about the thickets and over the hills that lay behind them.

Florry steeled himself toward the hatred he felt he properly ought to feel and set out to trap Julian into some sort of acknowledgment of his treason.

“I say, Julian, I hope when the revolution’s secure here, it’ll move to England. Chance to set things right at last.”

“You do?” said Julian. “That’s a bit lefty, isn’t it, old man? I think it’s a revolting idea. I mean, Billy Mowry is a natural-born leader but if he tries to take my mother’s coal mine from her and give it to some committee, I’m afraid I’d have him hanged from the nearest willow.”

“But justice is―”

“Justice is ten thousand a year, free and clear, and lots of pretty, idiotic young ladies with whom to do nasty, lascivious things. That’s justice, old man. No, inside this revolutionary, there’s a Tory who’ll inherit a nice little chunk of England some day.”

“Well, why on earth are you here, then?”

“Why, I just wanted to count, thank you very much.”

“You always counted, Julian. If anyone counted, Brilliant Julian did.”

Julian drew a great charge out of that!

“Hah!” he laughed. “Yes, that’s what everybody always said, which just goes to prove how bloody little everybody knew! Bloody Brilliant Julian, everybody’s favorite cleverboots. Lord, Stinky, how I hated that boy. That’s why this war is such a godsend. I wasn’t the young beauty anymore, except of course to Mother. But to the rest of the world, I’d become an adult with little crinkles on my pretty face. How awful. I kept expecting to do something great ― great beyond my little book of absurdly famous verses ― and the others kept expecting it too. Yet it somehow never happened.”

“But, Julian, everybody loves you,” Florry found himself saying, half in admiration and half in hate.

“Oh, not everybody, Stink. Even Brilliant Julian’s picked up his enemies. If you only knew.”

“What enemies?” Florry pressed. “Who could hate Julian?”

“I’ll never tell,” Julian said coyly.

“Unburden yourself, old man. Bob the Nailer could prong you at any mom―”

“I say, Stink, speaking of unburdening, have you had a woman recently?”

“Julian!”

“I thought not. Your type never does. Too bloody noble or decent, or some such. Listen, chum, take it when it’s offered, that’s my advice. You can sort it all out later. Take it when it’s offered. That’s all you owe anybody.”

“Actually,” said Florry, feeling that Julian had somehow maneuvered him into spilling his secrets, but unable to stop himself nevertheless, “yes, I did. I met a young woman on the boat. We had an adventure together. We ended up … well, in the―”

“In the sack. Stink, boy, that’s the way! And what’s this lovely creature’s name? I may look her up myself, you wouldn’t mind, would you?”

“Sylvia. Sylvia Lilliford,” Florry confessed uneasily. “I’m actually rather gone on her. I thought I might even marry her if it all works―”

“Marry her! Good heavens, you can’t be serious. Why, I absolutely forbid it, not until I’ve had my way with her. I shall steal her from you, Stink. I’ll make her mine, you’ll see. Tell me, does she have nice fat titties? Which way do they point? When she scrunches them together for you do they seem somehow bigger? I’ve noticed that―”

“Stop it, damn you.” Florry was surprised to discover the passion in himself. “You’re being quite unpleasant.”

“Oh, look what I’ve gone and done. I’ve made the poor lovesick bastard angry with me. Florry, mate, your Julian’s only jesting, surely you can see that, can’t you?”

“You shouldn’t speak of her that way.”

“Ah, Stink, you’ve more Eton in you than even a prig like me, who was born to it. God, I envy you your illusions. Listen, here’s a smashing idea. Suppose we all go on furlough together. That is, the three of us. To some little seaside place. We can have a nice holiday. I’ll pay for it. I swear to you I’ll not touch the lady. I may even bring one along for myself, a dusky dark Spanish girl with a mustache and titties the size of cabooses. And she and I will drill ourselves dizzy while you and your Sylvia have tea and discuss Auden. It will be delightfully civil ― Hello, what’s this?” He had stopped suddenly and pointed off, and Florry followed his finger into a mass of brambles where there seemed to be a kind of bundle or something.

It was a statue of a saint ― and it was wood.

“A saint. The Lord has sent us a saint to rescue us our trespasses,” Julian preached.

“It looks old,” said Florry. “It could be worth a fortune.”

“Up here, it is worth more than a fortune,” said Julian, in theatrical reverence. “It’s worth a night in front of a warm fire, which is as rich as a trench rat ever gets. A saint has brought us the gift of fire. We thank thee, O Lord, in your munificence.”

And Florry felt his chance to pin down Julian slither away.

There was to be an execution. It seemed that a patrol had captured three Fascist soldiers and their officer digging potatoes in no-man’s-land. The soldiers, peasant louts without politics, were rapidly converted to the Republican cause. The officer, after interrogation, was to be shot.

“Oh, won’t it be fun. We’ll actually see one of them die. Oh splendid,” sang Julian. And as it happened, the shooting was to occur on a day after Julian and Florry had undergone sentry-go and so they were free to watch the fun. Uneasily, Florry acceded to Julian’s demand. The next morning, after a few hours of sleep, they followed a path through untended orchards, unplucked rows of corn, fields of hypertrophied mangoes and sugar beets, now pulpy beyond use. The war had come just before harvest and the fruit and vegetables lay everywhere, rotting and corpulent. It was something Florry hadn’t noticed before, and now, a little bleary from fatigue, he saw the unharvested bounty as a sort of curse on their enterprise. He was surprised to discover how nervous he was.

When they at last reached the great house, it was almost too late. Crowds of soldiers milled excitedly in the courtyard, but nobody quite seemed to know what to expect. At last, they located a higher officer stretched out upon a chaise longue in the orchard, his muddy riding boots splayed listlessly before him as he wrote in a notebook with furious intensity. In fact, his wrist and the tight grip on an old pen seemed the only thing intense about him: his knuckles were white as the pen flew across the creamy pages of the book.

They stood, waiting to be noticed, but for the longest time no such recognition came, and at one point Julian took a breath as if to speak, but the man halted him with a finger raised suddenly like a baton, without bothering to look up.

At last he lifted his eyes and confronted them. His face was one of those ancient, wise creations that only wars or revolutions seem to manufacture: it was a mass of fissures and erosion, all pain, fatigue, and thought. All the lines in it pulled it downward, as though gravity had a special influence.

“Yes, comrade?”

“Would you be Steinbach?” asked Julian.

“I would.”

“I’m Raines.”

“English, are you?” The man spoke with a sort of vague European accent. He was balding and thick and looked almost like the abandoned tubers they’d seen rotting in the fields. His belly bulged tautly through his open, sloppy tunic. Under the tunic and against the pressure of the stomach there stretched a thick, dirty wool turtleneck sweater which, at his neck, seemed to catch and contain his jowls like a cup placed under a spigot.

“Yes. Yes, I am, comrade―”

“And your friend?”

“English too, comrade.”

“Now, what is it, Comrade Raines?”

“We’ve come to see the show,” said Julian arrogantly, perhaps at his worst. “Nobody out there knows where it’s to be held. Could the comrade perhaps inform us? It’s good to watch one’s enemies perish.”

“You’re very bloodthirsty. The poet, eh? ‘Achilles, Fool,’ isn’t that it?”

Julian was pleased.

“I am he. The world’s fifth greatest living poet.”

“I would have put you seventh, I’m afraid, comrade. In any event, the ‘show’ will be held out front in just a few minutes. You shan’t miss it. I hope you enjoy it.”

Florry’s eyes had beheld Steinbach’s and made an extraordinary discovery. One of them was glass: a dead brown orb floating in a sea of flesh. It’s what gave him the queer, vexing look, as if he were somehow not quite respectable. And the other eye seemed doubly bright, as if to compensate for what was not there.

“You,” Steinbach suddenly said to Florry, having caught the pressure of Florry’s studious glance upon him, “are you a poet, too?”

“No, comrade. A fighter.”

“A believer in the revolution?”

“Yes.”

“A public-school revolutionary!” Steinbach laughed. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Steinbach went back to his notebooks and Florry simply stood there for some time before it occurred to him they had been dismissed. At last he turned. But as he turned, he was astonished to notice what the fellow had been laboring so passionately over in his notebooks.

“Did you see that?” asked Julian. “He was drawing pictures of bridges. Damned curious. Perhaps he was an architect or some such.”

“Coolish fellow. Not exactly inspirational.”

“Something of a legend, however. The intelligence nabob. You’ll see. Seventh! Now sixth I would have accep―”

At that point a flatbed truck pulled into the yard, and the soldiers were drawn to it as if it were to distribute candy or mail.

But instead, after just a bit, a delegation emerged from the stable. At the center, Florry could see a puffy-faced young lieutenant in Fascist gray. His hands were tied behind him. He was led roughly along.

“Julian, I think I’m going to head back. I’m not sure I can watch―”

“Oh, you must, chum. Really, it’ll be a smashing experience. It’ll give you something fabulous to write about. I may even incorporate it into my new poem.”

“I’ve already done an execution piece. I’ve already seen an execution.”

“Why, you are an expert, then.”

Yet Florry thought he’d be physically ill. The fat officer was tugged to the truck, and a dozen or so rough pairs of hands pushed him up where he stood, his knees quaking. He was weeping.

“Fascist pig!”

“You bloody bastard!”

“Blow ’is fookin’ brains out!”

The cries rose.

“I wonder who the lucky chap is gets to pull the trigger,” Julian said.

“Really, this is―”

At that point, somebody climbed aboard the truck. It was the stout, one-eyed Steinbach who’d been drawing bridges in the orchard.

“Death to Fascists,” he shouted.

“¡Viva Cristo Rey!” shouted the tied man, as Steinbach pushed him to his knees. Steinbach had the revolver out and with a cinematic flourish showed it to the crowd, drawing their cheers. He cocked it and Florry, stupefied and mesmerized, watched the physics of the thing: how the fluted cylinder ticked in the light as the hammer’s retraction drew it around so that a charge was placed beneath its fall.

Steinbach pushed the pistol against the quaking officer’s spine and fired. The sound of the shot was muffled in the intimacy between muzzle and flesh. The man pitched forward on the truck bed, face a sudden blank. Steinbach stood over him and fired three more times into the man’s body. Florry could see black splotches where the spurt of flash scorched the uniform. The cheers were enormous.

Steinbach leaped off the truck with surprising agility. “Take the dog away,” he shouted. Meanwhile, the smoking body lay flat and inert on the truck, its total death like an ugly charm that kept the crowd away. Florry watched as Steinbach strode through the men and went back to his chaise longue. He sat down again and began to draw.

“What a piece of work is Steinbach,” said Julian.

The sound of a shell awakened Florry, and he bolted conscious in a shower of dust. He was back in his bunker. He blinked in the flickering candlelight, barely remembering his final collapse into an oceanically vast and dreamless sleep.

“Easy chum,” said Julian, close by.

“What time is it?”

“Near dawn.”

“Good God, I’ve missed sentry-go.”

“No matter. Schedule’s off.”

Julian, in the candlelit bunker, semed queerly agitated.

Florry hauled himself up from the warmth of his sleeping blanket and sat back against the earth wall, amid a welter of hanging water bottles, bayonets, bombs, and knives, and asked for a cigarette.

Julian gave him one, lighting it. Florry could see his hands tremble and feel his eyes upon him, hot and bright, almost sad.

Florry inhaled, the glow suffusing the narrow space with weird, ominous illumination for an instant. His head ached, and he was ravenously hungry.

“Stinky,” Julian said, “tonight we attack. After five bloody months of waiting, it’s the big one. The Anarchists on the other side of the city go at nine, then the German battalion at ten, and we jump off at ten-thirty. It’s a terrible plan, one of those fancy, clever things that Royal Marines couldn’t pull off with a month of rehearsal, a three-pronged, clockwork masterpiece that’ll be a ball’s up from the start. This time tomorrow we’re dead. But I must say, I feel rather good about it. No more of this awful mudbath living. It’s over the top for us, Stink.”

Florry felt a curious sense of relief slide through him. Yes, he welcomed it, too, to be done for a time with the damned trench and also with his other confusions.

All right, Florry thought. If you’re truly a spy, you won’t risk your bloody neck in a battle for a silly Spanish city that nobody ever heard of.

“Well, it’s bloody wonderful, if you ask me,” said Florry. “I’d like a fair chance at the bastards in a fair fight.”

Julian laughed.

“Damn you, Stinky, your Eton fairness will get us both kippered. If you’ve a chance, shoot ’em in the guts with your rifle and stick ’em in the throat with your spike and maybe you’ll come out of it.”

“I wonder why now,” said Florry. “One supposes it was in the cards ever since we got up here, but why now, so suddenly?”

“Who knows how their brains work?” wondered Julian. “Generals are all the same, you know. Ours or theirs, it makes no difference. But listen here. I’ve hired a boy who’s about to leave for the rear. I’ve some messages to send, perhaps you’d like to say something to lovely Sylvia before the balloon goes up, eh? Say it quick. He’s leaving shortly.”

He slid out, leaving Florry alone. Florry pawed through his kit, found paper and pen, and, squinting in the candlelight, quickly scrawled his message.

Drivel he thought, and almost threw it away, but then he thought how much easier it would be to die without regrets, having at least made his idiotic declaration.

Then he felt the need for another note, another bit of unfinished business.

He folded it and scratched Sampson’s address on the Ramblas.

He crawled out and found Julian chatting with a boy in the lee of the trench.

“Can he take another one?” he whispered. “A professional thing to a Times chap I’d signed up to do a piece with.”

“I suppose. Why not?” said Julian. He spoke quickly to the boy in Spanish and Florry was mildly surprised to learn that he spoke it so well.

The boy folded the messages into a pouch on his belt and at last darted off.

“Where on earth did you find him?”

“Oh, I’m smashing at scrounging up things, Stink, old sport.”

“Will he get through?”

“Oh, Carlos will get through. He’s very good at that sort of thing. Used him before, he’s always made it. Well, Stinky, ready for the big parade?”

“To march at the head of it, in fact,” Florry said, happy at last.

15 THE GRAND ORIENTE

The café Grand Oriente was packed that night with the children and the ideals of the Revolution. But there was also murder in the air.

Someone will die tonight, Levitsky thought. He felt the violence in the atmosphere, rich and potent. There would be blood on the pavement and screaming women and furious men with drawn revolvers. But for him at least, the long wait underground was over. It was time after the months of boredom to move.

He took a sip of the green schnapps. It was wonderful. The girl sat with a group of young POUMistas at a table near the bar. They were all gay and lively, full of everything, themselves mostly, but hope and politics, too; or maybe it was only fashion for them, a game. They wore their blue overalls and had militia caps tucked into the epaulets. Yet still the girls were slender and quite lovely, especially the Lilliford girl, the loveliest of them all. But she held the key to the next step on the way to Julian Raines.

Levitsky was well behind them, sitting with his back to the wall. Getting to the Oriente had been easy, once he left his shelter in the Anarchist neighborhood. SIM agents were everywhere with their NKVD advisers, and he’d been stopped twice by Asaltos, as the Revolutionary Assault Troops brought in from Valencia were called, but in each case his papers had gotten him through. Still, it was frightening. How tight was Glasanov’s net? Well, it was a net, that was clear, but was it not drawn and gathered? Perhaps it had been at the start; but Levitsky knew the longer he waited, the looser it would become.

Now, a clever man, a man with his wits and a little presence and a nice selection of identities, could get through. It must be driving poor Glasanov insane. With a battalion of NKVD troops, he could have closed the city down and gone through it like an archivist, examining each alley, each hallway. In days, he’d have him back. However, with only a skeleton of NKVD people, but mostly earnest, unpracticed Spaniards, Glasanov was doomed.

Glasanov, I will be the death of you, Levitsky thought with a wicked little smile.

“Comrade? Another schnapps?” asked the waiter.

“No, I think not.”

“We close soon, comrade. The curfew. Not like the old times.”

“I see. Thank you.”

“You look as though you’ve had a rough time of it, comrade.”

“Some Anarchists. Working men who a year ago never spoke above a whisper. They were feeling mighty about their new world a few days ago and demonstrated their enthusiasm to an old man who wouldn’t sing their song or dance to their tune in an alley. They said I looked too bourgeois for my own good.”

“Ay. Crazy ones, they’re all over the place. These are terrible times, comrade.”

“But interesting,” said Levitsky.

He took a last look about the room. The smoke in here made his eyes smart. Behind the bar, the mirror stood streaked with grease. The light was amber, almost yellow, shining off the walls and from the flickering candles and the weak bulbs in the glass cups mounted near the ceiling. The place was crowded ― all the better ― with men and women in uniform, with braids and berets and caps, with automatic pistols and boots, the fighters nut-brown from their days in the sun out at the firing line, the theorists pale from long days of argument and negotiation. They were all getting drunk and the air seethed with boasts and charges and challenges and lyrics and verses. He knew it: of course, easily. It was Petrograd in ’17, while the great Lenin was waging his war of bluff and maneuver against Kerensky and the provisional government.

He looked back to the girl’s table. He didn’t think any of them at the table were NKVD. He could not, of course, be certain, but after so many years, he believed he knew NKVD on sight: something furtive and sly in the eyes, a certain inability to relax, a certain sense of one’s own authority.

No. The waiter, maybe. Surely he informed for someone, but purely out of opportunism, not ideology. Who else? Perhaps that man over there in the black Anarchist’s beret who was, Levitsky had noticed, less drunk than he pretended, and whose eyes never ceased to roam.

But Levitsky had to move. Fifteen minutes to curfew. Yes, it was time for the devil to move to the girl.

He got up, edged through the crowd, standing patiently when a couple rose between himself and her and he waited for them to pass by. When they were gone, he proceeded meekly. He slipped next to her and bent to her; she had not yet noticed.

She was a lovely girl, but he could see the gaiety was forced, she was not happy at all, as were the other young POUMistas. They were all excited about an upcoming battle.

“The battle is an imperative process of history,” a young man was saying. “Your friend must take his chances like any comrade.”

“If we take Huesca tonight, we take Barcelona tomorrow,” said an older man, some sort of POUMist leader.

“And the revolution lives,” said the boy.

“I just hate the waste,” he heard her say.

“Ah. Fraulein Lilliford?” Levitsky said pitifully.

She turned quickly, looking up.

“Good lord, Sylvia, who on earth can this be?” someone at the table inquired.

“Herr Gruenwald, no?” he said. “From the ship, the vasser, the boat, ja?” He began to jabber in excited German.

“Herr Gruenwald, my God. Oh, you look so different. I do apologize for staring. It’s―”

“Ja, Missy Fraulein.”

“Look, do sit down―”

“Sylvia ―!”

“This man was in the sinking with us. He’s been through a lot,” Sylvia said tartly. “Sit down, Herr Gruenwald. You look terrible. I’d heard that you’d been arrested by―”

“Ja. Polizoi! Old business, a mistake, hah! Really hit an old man. My head ― it vasn’t zo good before, but now is kaput. Krazy in der head! Hah!” He laughed abrasively and looked about the table to enjoy the shocked befuddlement of Sylvia’s new friends.

“Well, it sounds dreadful” said Sylvia.

“Good heavens, Sylvia, your collection certainly grows by the day. A mad, decrepit German cabin boy!”

“Shut up, Stephen,” said the older man at the table. “The old fellow has had a rough enough time. One can tell from looking at him.”

“Mr. Gruenwald, you look famished. May I buy you something to eat? What are you going to do?”

“Ach! Ich ― er, Gruenwald wait for papers, zen ship out. Nein, missy, I haben zie ― haf place to stay. Und food. Ah, my head, it aches so bad zumtimes. Bombs. The Great War. To end all wars, ja? Metal plate, ja?” He tapped his skull, smiled broadly.

“Missy Fraulein, it’s, ach, zomething zo stupid. It’s mein frau. My wife, ja? She is still in Deutschland and, ah, I have no vord from her. And of course, here, hah! politics gets in da vay. Dere is no Deutschland embassy―”

“No, of course not. They are for the other side.”

“I vish to zumhow send vord dat ― dat I am all right. Ja. I remember from boat. Mr. Florry a journalist; he vas goink to zee Mr. Raines, another journalist. Ja? Perhaps such an intelligent fellow, Herr Raines, the journalist, he know a vay to reach my poor frau in Deutschland, ja.”

“But Herr Gruenwald, I’m afraid that’s impossible.”

Levitsky, looking past her in the mirror, saw four men in overcoats enter. The largest of them was Glasanov’s Amerikanski.

“Julian Raines and Robert Florry have joined the militia. They are at the front, at Huesca.”

“Ach, a fighter,” Levitsky said, thinking, the fool! The utter idiot!

Bolodin stood with his men at the front of the room, looking through it.

Levitsky could not look at Bolodin in the mirror. Bolodin would have that extremely fine-tuned sense of being observed; he would feel the eyes upon him and swiftly locate their owner.

“Look here, let me make some inquiries for you,” Sylvia said. “There are many Germans in our party. Perhaps I can locate somebody who knows a method of communication.”

Bolodin was moving through the crowd. Levitsky kept his face down, his body hunched as if in rapt attention to what she was saying. He tried to concentrate on exits. He could dash for the back; no, they’d have him, strong young Bolodin would have him and smash him down. Bolodin approached; there were suddenly secret policemen all around.

“Comrades,” somebody was saying, “you’ll excuse if we ask to see your papers.”

“And who are you,” one of the POUMistas said defiantly. “Perhaps it’s we who should ask to see your papers.”

“I am Ugarte, of the Servicio de Investigación Militar. We are responsible for the security of the revolution. You excuse this boring formality, of course. One has to take so many precautions these days. There are so many spies about.”

“The revolution is in far more danger from Russian secret policemen than from anybody in the POUM,” said Sylvia. “You show us your papers.”

“There are no Russians here. I don’t understand why our brothers and sisters in the Marxist Unification Party are so difficult,” said the policeman. “One would think they hadn’t the revolution’s best interests in mind.”

It suddenly occurred to Levitsky: they mean to kill these children. It’s part of Glasanov’s ―

“I don’t think we need to resort to extreme methods,” said the smooth young secret policeman. “If, perhaps, we could all go outside and get this settled quickly and quietly with a discussion, then―”

Bolodin stood at an oblique angle to Levitsky, his face impassive, his eyes hooded, almost blank. He had not looked at Levitsky at all. He was looking instead at the older man called Carlos.

“I am Comrade Carlos Brea, of the executive committee of the Party of Marxist Unification, and I will not―”

“Comrade Brea, your reputation proceeds you. Surely you can understand the point of a few mild security precautions. We mean nobody any harm; we mean only to establish identities and then walk away.”

Bolodin quietly separated himself. Levitsky watched as he pushed his way through the crowd and exited into the street.

“Well,” said Brea, “I’ll go with you to our headquarters. Let the others stay. They have worked hard enough for their pleasure.”

“That’s the spirit of cooperation. Indeed, the comrade is to be congratulated. Who says the different workers can’t function together?”

“Carlos, don’t go,” said Sylvia.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m sure the SIM can guarantee my safety in front of witnesses.”

“Of course, Comrade Brea.”

“Carlos, some of us will go along.”

“Nonsense. Stay here. I’ll be off; the rules, after all, must apply to everyone.”

He rose and, with a smile for the youths at the table, threaded his way out with the policemen.

“I don’t like it at all,” said one of the men. “They are getting more and more brazen. It’s a very disturbing trend.”

“We ought to arrest a few of them and―”

Sylvia turned to Levitsky. “Perhaps you could meet me someplace tomorrow night, Herr Gruenwald. In the meantime, I’ll make some inquiries and―”

Then they heard the shots from the street and a second later a woman came in shrieking, “Oh, God, somebody shot Carlos Brea in the head, oh Christ, he’s bleeding on the pavement!”

In the panic, and the grief, and the outrage, Levitsky managed to slip away. He knew he had to get to the front now to get to Julian. And he also knew who had shot Carlos Brea.

16 THE ATTACK

They could hear the diversionary attack of the Anarchists on the other side of the city: the heavy clap of bombs, followed by the less authoritative tapping of the machine guns. The plan called for the Anarchists to go in first, from the west. The Fascists would rush reserves over to meet that assault; then the POUMistas and the Germans of the Communist Thaelmann Brigade would jointly rush the city from the east.

Florry shivered in the rain: it had turned the trench floor into mud and made its walls as evilly slick as gruel. It would be a terrible ordeal to scramble up and out. He peeked over the parapet. In the mist and dark, the Fascist lines were invisible.

“Do you think they know we’re coming?” somebody asked.

“Of course they know we’re coming,” said Julian cruelly. “D’you think they can keep a secret on the Ramblas? That’s the fun of the evening.”

“Julian, do be quiet,” said Billy Mowry strictly. “It’s only a few minutes now.”

“Yes, commissar, of course, commissar,” said Julian. “Do you know,” he said to Florry, not dropping his tone a bit, “in the Great War they kicked footballs toward the Hun. Perhaps we ought to kick copies of the bloody great Das Kapital.”

“Julian, damn you, I said stuff it,” yelled Billy Mowry.

“Touchy chap,” Julian said. “I was feeling quite gallant, too. Best to go into battle with a quip on one’s lips, eh, Stinky?”

“I’m too wet for quips,” said Florry.

“Yes, well I’m too frightened not to quip. Hush me if I bother you. But I cannot seem to stop chatting. Dear old Julian, never at a loss for words.”

It was odd; the wait affected each differently. Florry felt sleepy with dread; he could not force himself to think about what lay ahead. Julian, on the other hand, could not think of anything else.

“Gad, I wonder which will be worse. The machine guns or the wire. In France, the men hated the wire. It would snare them and they’d be hung up like department-store mannequins. The more one struggled, the more one was sucked in. My poor father at the Somme ran into a bit of the stuff. Ghastly, eh?”

“I know about your father. Can’t you recite some poetry or something?” Florry said.

“Ah, poetry. Yes, poetry before battle. How English. And I’m supposed to be rather good at poetry, aren’t I? How about, ‘In the end, it’s all the same/In the end, it’s all a game.’ Hmmm, no, all wrong. Somehow it doesn’t feel much like a game about now. What about, ‘We are the hollow men/We are the …’ No, that’s not appropriate either. Er, ‘If I should die, think only this of me, there’s some corner of a foreign field that’s forever POUM.’ Good heavens, how appalling! Trouble is, they don’t write any good war stuff anymore. It’s out of fashion. They only write antiwar stuff, no help at all to a bloke about to go over the top, eh? I feel like something cheerful and powerfully seductive, something that would make me hungry to die for somebody else’s party and someone else’s country.”

“I don’t believe that poem has been written.”

“Hasn’t, has it? Well, you haven’t read the great ‘Pons’ yet. If I ever can put a tail on the beast, it’ll move me from seventh greatest living poet on up to third. And if bloody Auden should drop dead of a dose of clap from some Chineeboy, why then I’m second. Gad how exciting!”

“Recite a line, then.”

“Hmm. All right.

Florry waited. “Go on.”

“Out of words, old man. That’s where it stops.”

“God, it’s brilliant, Julian.”

“What’s it mean, Jules?” said the man on the other side of Julian.

“Now, Sammy, don’t you worry. It’s just words.”

“Ready boys,” came Billy Mowry’s call through the rain. “It’s almost time.”

“How’s that for inspiration! At least in an aristocratic army, the officers can quote a line of verse at the key moment. ‘These in the hour when heaven was falling’―”

“That’s about mercenaries, old boy,” Florry said through chattering teeth, “who took their wages and are dead. We are not mercenaries. At any rate, if we are, the pay is bloody low.”

“Au contraire, chum, it’s bloody high. A clean soul. Freedom from one’s little secrets, eh? From the little men inside one who are always clamoring to get out, eh?”

“All right, lads,” Billy sounded calm in the rain, “it’s time.”

“Good heavens, it is, isn’t it?” Julian said. He reached inside his tunic and pulled out what appeared to be a ring on a chain, brought it swiftly to his lips and kissed it. “There, now I’m all safe,” he said. “My old dad was wearing it at the Somme day he cashed in. Wedding ring. It’s my lucky piece. Never done me wrong. Care for a smooch, Stink?”

“Thanks, no. I don’t think my lips are working.”

“Tally-ho, then. Good hunting, and all that rot.”

“Luck to you, old man,” said Florry, unsure how he meant it. “I’ll tell you my secrets one day, too.” And he became lost in the struggle to get himself up the wall ― he’d lost some strength ― but with a sliding, grunting kind of athletic twist, he suddenly achieved it, staggered onto wet but solid ground, and found himself standing up, pretty as you please, in front of the trench in which he’d cowered for weeks. It was both a curiously liberating and curiously vulnerable sensation. All up and down the line, in the ghostly mist, men were rising, shaking themselves off like wet terriers, unslinging their rifles, and facing their death. They were like the children of the Hydra’s teeth, Florry thought, his fancy education delivering him a fancy metaphor at just the right time: half-mythical creatures slouching out of some dimly remembered far ago time and place. A hideous joy cut through Florry as he slid the great bayonet-heavy Mosin-Nagent from his shoulder and brought it to the high port. Bombs ― grenades ― hung on his belt and he wore his Webley at his hip.

“Pip, pip,” said Julian, next to him, with a wicked smile that Florry could see through the murk. “I do believe the glorious adventure is about to commence.”

Indeed it was. The line, like some kind of creature itself, began to move out across no-man’s-land.

Florry no longer felt the cold or the wet and once or twice stepped into a huge cold trough, the water slopping over his boot tops, but it meant nothing. They moved steadily through the mist, toward the Fascist lines. He could feel the incline beginning to rise under him and the heavy, sloshy weight of the clinging mud grow at his feet.

The plan was simple yet dangerous: to approach silently ― the rain helped them here ― to the wire at the outer limits of the Fascist lines, cut it, get inside it, and hurl a wave of bombs, then leap into the trench before the Fascists had a chance to recover from the blasts. It all, therefore, depended most fragilely on surprise, but the soldiers moved like knights to Florry’s ears, clanking and lumbering in the dark. Yet from beyond there was no response.

They seemed to have been walking for hours. Had they lost direction like souped-in aviators and now headed the wrong way? These thoughts nagged at Florry as he fought through a mass of brush and up a little gulch; for a moment, he was entirely alone. He felt as if he were the last man on earth.

“Jolly fun, eh?” Julian, close at hand, muttered in a stage whisper.

At last they got through the vines and Florry realized with a start that they had covered the ground and had made the wire, which curled cruelly before them in the steady rain. It all had an underwater slowness to it, the steady pelt of the rain, the soaked, heavy clothes, the mud-heavy boots, and now men crouched with the deliberation of scientists to ready themselves for the final few feet. In the slanting sheets of water that descended out of the sky upon them, Florry made out the figure of one fellow scurrying ahead with a kind of lizard’s urgency. Billy Mowry, a hero as well as a leader, took it upon himself to scamper up the slope to perform the most dangerous task, the cutting of the wire. He lay on his back under the evil stuff and Florry could see the snippers come out and begin to twist and tug at the strands. Florry knelt, the fingers of one hand nervously playing with his rifle. With his other, he pulled a bomb off his belt. It had two pins. Cradling his rifle against his shoulder, he pulled the easy one out and let it drop. Now he had only to yank the hard one and throw it in four seconds.

With each snap of Billy Mowry’s clippers another strand of the wire popped free. Florry could feel his own breath rasping in his chest. His knees felt like warm jelly. How could he be so hot and so cold, so dry and so wet, at once? He could feel each raindrop individually strike against his skin; a million, a trillion of them. And from the Fascists, there was still nothing, though they were less than thirty-five or forty paces away, gathered about their cooking fires.

Hurry, damn you, Billy Mowry, Florry thought.

Sylvia came into his mind suddenly. We had a night, didn’t we, darling. Whatever there wasn’t, there was that. He could feel the tension in his thighs like steel springs cranking tighter and tighter. The bomb was growing in weight, deadening his arm. The rifle leaning against him seemed a long ton of coal.

Hurry, damn you, Bill Mowry, hurry!

The last snip sounded and Billy Mowry pulled himself up, peeling back the wire. He wore heavy engineer’s gloves. His face, even in the dim light, shone with mad excitement and zealotry. He looked insane, like Jack the Ripper.

Julian dashed through the gap first. All right, that’s one for him. Would a spy risk the first bullet, the first thrust of bayonet? Florry rose and scrambled after, feeling a singing in his ears. He could feel men clumping through behind him, slipping and straining in the mud. A wonderful strangeness passed over them all: it felt like some huge opera, all stylized and abstract and mighty with song and mass and chorus. It seemed incredible; they were doing it! The excitement poured through Florry’s veins and a great hope blossomed like an exotic flower in his imagination and ―

The first shot seemed to come from very close by. It was a spurt of flame just at the horizon, accompanied by a loud percussion. Perhaps there was a yell, too, with the noise of the rifle. And then an instant of horrified silence as if each side were unwilling to believe what was about to happen. A second later, a hundred shots spattered out, an attack of fireflies, brief novas of light and sound in the whizzing rain.

Florry was astounded by the cold beauty of the gunfire. He seemed suddenly to be among clouds of insects and could not quite understand what was happening. The bullets struck all about him, kicking up puffs of spray.

Billy Mowry, just ahead, rose and hurled a bomb. It detonated behind the parapet with a flash and perhaps there was another scream lost in the ring of the burst. But the fire on the militia did not lapse in the least.

“Bombs, boys,” Mowry screamed, fussing with another. “Throw your fookin’ bombs!”

Florry remembered the treasure he clutched, and yanked on the second pin, certain that at any second a bullet would come along to bash his brains out. The pin would not budge, though he twisted it insanely. He looked down at it: he had been turning it the wrong way! Reversing direction, he got the thing out with a tug and a grunt, and the effort transfigured itself into a toss as he heaved it forward where it immediately disappeared in the dark. He dove back to the earth and it suddenly seemed as if the foundations of the planet had become unbolted. Explosions burst behind the parapet, a chorus of them, three or four or five or six, then far too many to count.

“Again, boys, again!” shouted Mowry.

Florry got the pins out of another bomb and hurled it off, too, feeling all the while the buzz of bullets. He threw himself back and tasted the sandy grit and pebbles of the earth pressing against his lips when suddenly, quite close up, the powerful clap of another bomb shook him. The Fascists were throwing the bloody things, too. The blast was orange and hot and stung him with a harsh spray of pebbles. The echo died reluctantly and he could hear moaning and pleading in the ringing in his ears. Miraculously, he realized he was unhurt. He picked his rifle up, shouldered it, and fired. It bucked against his bones and he threw the bolt quickly, ejecting a spent shell, and fired again.

He was aware that Billy Mowry had risen to fire steadily on the Fascist position with his Luger. Mowry suddenly slipped back, clutching his knee.

Florry felt sick. Without Billy, they were lost.

“Damn!” howled Mowry, coming to rest in his tumble near Florry. “Pranged again. The fookers.” He looked at Florry. “Get going, damn you. You’re dead for certain if you stay here.”

Florry picked up his rifle and began to scramble with the mob toward the ridge. Around him, men were clawing their lugubrious way up the slope through what seemed a sudden, blessed respite in the firing.

Florry reached the sandbag parapet and jumped over, landing heavily in the Fascist trench, ready to get up close and jam his monstrous bayonet into somebody’s guts, preferably an Italian or a Moorish colonel or a Falangist executioner. He was full of murderous exultation and rage; at the same time, he felt terrified. But the trench was deserted; there was nobody to stick. He looked up and down it and could see only his comrades tumbling in like parachutists, as eager for combat as he and as equally disappointed.

Off to the left, there seemed to be a gap in the trench wall of some sort. He moved quickly to discover it was a communications trench, that is, a sort of gutterlike path scooped out of the dirt to facilitate low-profile movement between the different trenches. He began to work his way through the litter and the mud, heading deeper toward the Fascist position, when a shot flashed in the dark and the bullet whipped with a thud into the trench wall near him. He answered with a shot at the noise and got a bomb off his harness. He pulled the two pins and hurled it down the way, falling back. The explosion was as bright as a flare, fragmenting his night vision and filling his ears with a roar. He sat up, dazed, wondering what on earth to do, when someone grabbed him.

“Eh?”

“No, no. Stay here. They’ll be back soon enough.” It was Julian. One arm hung limply at his side.

“You’re hurt!”

“It’s nothing. A piece of shrapnel or something gave me a shaving cut on the arm. Brilliant Julian will never play the viola again. Congratulations on surviving.”

“Terrifying, wasn’t it?”

“Gloriously full of fear. I’m afraid to check my pants. They may be wet and one doesn’t want to humiliate oneself in front of the servants.”

“I’m sure they’re dry as the Sahara.”

“We seem to have won, by the way. That fellow Jones is dead. He caught one in the head and went down as if he’d been … well, as if he’d been shot in the head. Several others are variously messed up, including our beloved Billy Mowry, whose leg has been perforated. But he always gets banged up; otherwise, he’s indestructible. When he was a babe, his mother dipped him by the knee into a pot of socialist marmalade, thus rendering him invulnerable to capitalist bullets.”

“Will they come back, do you think?” Florry asked.

“Oh, shortly. They’ll have to get the priests to whip up their frenzy, but they’ll come. God, if they had mortars, they could wipe us out in a second. If they had tanks, they’d squash us like insects. Lucky for us these chaps don’t know any more about fighting a war than our chaps do. I say, did you get yourself a Fascist?”

“I–I don’t know. Maybe.”

“I caught one with my bayonet. He’s farther down the ditch. Ghastly, but interesting. There was so much blood. I had no idea a man had that much blood in him. You look rather ill.”

“It’s all so―”

“Elemental. Yes, isn’t it, rather.”

A bugle sounded off in the distance where the Fascists had retreated. Florry saw shapes scrambling about far off, yet they were too indistinct to waste bullets on.

“They must be massing for their show. I can’t imagine they’re too happy about all this work on a wet night.”

Dust spurts began to kick to life all about the sandbags, just as the noise of high-pitched, rapid typing rose from the dark. Julian and Florry ducked back, hearing the crack-crack-crack of projectiles rushing through the air above them.

“They’ve a Maxim, damn them,” said Julian. “We’ll not be going any farther tonight. But we’ll have some bloody sport when they attack. Oh, I wish I could get my hands on a Vickers or a Lewis instead of this neolithic implement,” Julian said, clapping his crude Russian rifle with disgust. “Why is it the bloody nasties have all the fancy toys?”

“Florry!” someone whispered.

“‘Eh?”

“Bloody Billy wants to see you.”

“Where is he?”

“Back down the trench, by the bunker.”

“All right. Pass the word, I’m coming.”

Florry crawled off, past the shapes of the other section men in the trench. In time, crawling over litter and junk, he reached the Fascist bunker. He ducked into it, finding it as crude as their own quarters. Billy sat on a cot, his bloody leg up and swaddled before him.

“You all right, commissar?”

“Ah, it’s nothing I won’t survive, the fookers. Listen, old man, I want you to tell the chaps on the left to keep their ears open. Keep track of them, Florry, chum, don’t let them wander away. I’m worried. There should have been a lot of shooting on our left, where the German battalion was to have hit the line farther down. Nobody’s heard anything. I’d hate to think of us in the middle of this picnic by ourselves, eh? And of course our bloody Colt at last snapped its fookin’ bolt, so we’ve no automatic weapons.”

Florry was surprised Billy had chosen him for this tiny smidgen of responsibility; why not the far more experienced Julian?

“And especially watch bloody Julian. You can see the bloody madness in his eyes. He’s liable to get himself kippered on something harebrained. He thinks he’s Lord Cardigan and Winston Churchill rolled up in one. If he’s to die, let him die for something beyond his own bloody vanity.”

“Right-o, Billy.”

“Now get back there, and send word if you hear anything. And get ready. The Fascists are sure to hit us back tonight.”

Florry scurried out.

He went on back and spread the word. But someone had vanished.

“Where’s Julian?”

“ ’E said ’e wanted to do a bit of poking about, and off ’e went.”

“Christ, you let him go?”

“Aw, ’n you could stop ’is majesty when ’e’s got ’is ’eart set on somethin’, chum?”

Florry supposed he couldn’t. He looked down the communications trench through which Julian had purportedly disappeared. The seconds ticked by, turning to minutes. They heard bugles again. The Maxim began to pepper the air over their heads.

“Damn him,” Florry cursed. “And if he’s out there when the bastards hit us, what then?”

“ ’E’s kippered certain, that’s wot. Relax, chum. The bloke figured to catch ’is doin’ somethin’ bloody ignorant. ’E’s too bloody brilliant for this ’ere world.”

Well, here it was. Julian off on some mad toot, sure to buy it in the neck.

Leave him, he thought. Leave him and be done. It solves everything. Your life can continue. Your obligations have been met. Everybody’s happy.

Yet what Florry discovered himself saying surprised himself as much as the men to whom he spoke.

“Look, I’m going to mosey down there a bit, see if I can’t rein him in, all right? Sammy, you keep watch.”

“Florry, chum, no point two fancy gents gettin’ kippered the same night.”

“I told bloody Billy I’d look after the fool.”

“Florry, mate, it’s bloody fool―”

“Shut up!” Florry barked, suddenly furious at the man. “I told damned Billy, don’t you understand?”

“Christ, chum, no need to get so worked up.”

Florry could see nothing down the trench except some broken timbers and eerily reflective puddles. About twenty yards ahead it took a jagged dogleg off to the right and vanished from his vision. He set down his rifle, which would do him no good in close quarters, and pulled out the Webley.

“Don’t be gone long, chum. No tellin’ when Billy’s going to pull us back. I don’t think we’re here for the season.”

“Yes. I’ll just be a while.”

He began to creep forward edgily, feeling his way with his hand in front of him. He advanced for what felt like hours in this fashion ― it was more like fifteen minutes ― while the odd shot popped overhead and the odd bomb exploded in the far distance. He had begun to feel like a Nottingham miner in the deepest, loneliest shaft. He imagined he could hear the groaning of the walls and smell the dust heavy in the air as the cave-in threatened.

Damn you, Julian, where the devil are you? Why do such a foolish thing?

At one point something moved just ahead, and Florry brought his pistol up; it was a rat, big as a cat, with filthy rotten eyes and quivering whiskers. It perched on its hind legs barring the way. Florry hated rats. He felt about on the gummy trench floor for a rock, found one, pried it free, and hurled it at the beast. The throw was off and the thing just stared balefully at him with what seemed to be Oxbridge arrogance. A university rat, eh? A bloody Trinity College rat. Finally, bored, it ambled haughtily off.

Florry was surprised to discover himself breathing hard at the ordeal. Gathering his nerves back in a tight little bundle, he proceeded along, adding rats to his worries. He clambered over a broken timber. A body lay nearby but Florry could make out nothing of it in the dark, so coated with mud as it was; it was like a sack of sodden rags. He went on farther. There was no movement and the only sound was the splashing of the drops into the puddles.

“Julian? Julian?” he whispered.

There was no answer. A fusillade sounded above, and then an angry reply. The Fascists were getting ready to counterattack. At the same time, a mist rose to cling to everything, a kind of ghastly soup lapped everywhere in the trench.

“Julian?” He thought Julian was probably back by this time, full of marvelous stories and having appropriated a flask of Fascist brandy and treated the troops to a sip. Damn you, Julian, so like you! And here I sit out on a bloody limb.

“Julian!” he whispered again. How far out was he? How close to their position? The urge to retire grew heavy and tempting. It was almost an ache. But he knew somehow that he could not. He could not abandon Julian, not here. He was bound to him in peculiar ways.

He squirmed ahead a few more feet, tripping through the mist. He reached another zigzag in the trench. He eased around it.

“Shhh! God, they’re right ahead, Stink.”

“Jul―”

“Shhh! Do you know I heard you the whole way? It’s a good thing they’re not paying attention.”

Julian was crouched in a niche in the wall.

“Thank God you’re all right. Come on, Mowry says they’ll attack any moment.”

“Of course they will. Now listen here, they won’t come through this trench because it zigs and zags so furiously and because they’ll assume we have it covered. They’ll be above, moving through the mist. When they go by―”

“Julian!”

“Just listen, chum. They’ll go by and we can squeeze ahead another few yards or so. It’s not far off. I was almost there. And I’ll chuck a bomb into that Maxim gun.”

“Julian, no. Christ. Listen, Mowry says the attack is all fouled up. We may be out here all by ourselves. The Germans never jumped off. We’re out on a limb.”

“Well, if that doesn’t just prove you can’t get good help any more. The cheeky bastards.”

“Come on, we’ve―”

But Florry was stunned into silence by the awkward shambling noise of a large body of men beginning to move up ahead. Julian pulled him back into the niche and they lay in the mud, enwrapped in each other. Florry could barely breathe. He felt his heart throbbing and his chest aching. He pressed himself into Julian’s chest and sensed the heart pumping madly. They could hear the low squish-slip of boots moving through the mud close by, but Florry was too scared to focus. Whispered commands in Spanish flew softly through the mist like sparrows. There was the jingle and clink of equipment, the occasional harder clack of a bolt being thrown.

Each second Florry knew they’d be discovered. Wave after wave passed by. They must have gotten reinforcements. A whole army seemed to be creeping by above them through the mist.

“Get ready,” Julian commanded, at last disconnecting himself from Florry. He began to slither down the trench with the bomb in his hand. Florry followed, cocking the Webley.

A sudden spatter of shots announced the beginning of the attack. Florry heard the pop and snap of rifle bullets and the bursting of bombs. With the cover of the noise, Julian rose and began to close the distance to the main trench with manful strides. Florry hurried after him.

The Maxim opened fire from quite nearby: its clatter was tremendous. It poured bullets out into the night at an incredible rate and seemed to Florry like some industrial instrument for the manufacture of wickets or camming gears, sparking and laboring mightily in its moorings. He could see Julian pluck the first pin from his bomb and then begin to slide toward the gap that marked the intersection between their trench and the larger enemy one.

What happened next happened fast, particularly after the long, slow miner’s descent toward it. A youth appeared as Julian stepped into the trench and pointed his rifle at him. Florry, just behind Julian, shot the young man in the face.

“Good show!” shouted Julian, bounding ahead and pulling the second pin, as he lobbed the bomb underhand toward the sound of the machine gun. In another instant he was back, knocking Florry flat. The burst, so close, lit the sky with burning fragments and hot wind and hurt their ears. The Maxim quit abruptly.

“Come on,” yelled Julian, clambering past him. Florry rose. There seemed other dark shapes coming from the Fascist position at them and he fired his remaining five chambers of four-five-five at them, driving them back, and turned to race after Julian.

“Come on, Stink,” screamed Julian, pulling him along. He was delirious with joy. “Good Christ, man, but that was bloody marvelous, that was more bloody fun than old Julian’s ever had! Blast, you potted him right in the bloody snout!”

But Florry felt only queasy and ashamed. He’d seen the boy’s face in the spurt of flame and he knew he was perhaps fifteen, with a vague sprig of mustache. The bullet had smashed into his brain, that huge four-five-five, heavy as the Liverpool Express, shattering the whole upper quadrant of his face. He lay in a slop of mud and blood, utterly defunct. Christ, why couldn’t it have been a Moorish sergeant or a German colonel, why a silly, dim little child?

Julian was yanking him along savagely. Explosions and gunfire seemed to be coming from every direction in the dark. Weird illuminations lit the horizon. The trench seemed endless. Bullets pranged into the dirt or thunked against the sandbags, making a peculiar hop-hop sound. Julian suddenly leapt back, pinning him to the ground. He heard, besides the thumping of Julian’s heart, the heavy sound of a mass of men running through the mud. It must have been the attacking party, unsupported since the destruction of the Maxim gun.

“Listen. We’ll never make it back. I think there’s a party of them up ahead in the trench.”

“Ah! The bastards.”

“Yes. Unsporting of them, eh? Why don’t we crawl about a hundred meters or so out on the left. If we stay low, we should be all right. When they pass on by, we can return to our own lines. All right?”

“You clever chap.”

“Brilliant Julian, always thinking. Come on, then.”

Julian pulled himself out of the trench and pivoted to offer Florry a hand. Florry, thus assisted, scrambled out. Julian shimmied away, and Florry began to ―

It was as if he were at the center of an explosion. There was no pain, only the stunned sense of a tremendous blow to the throat knocking him down, filling his eyes with light and drama. He fought for strength but could find none; he put his hand to his wound and was further stunned to discover his fingers were wet and black.

God, he’d been shot. He lay, waiting for death. The blood flowed over his tunic. The numbness and incoherence spread.

Julian appeared, inches from his eyes.

“I’m dying,” Florry said.

“Can you move?”

“I’m dying. Go on, get out of here.”

“Ah, rot, Robert. I’m the hero here, I’ll make the dramatic suggestions, the glorious sacrifice, all right? Lord, you’re a mess, Stinky. You look worse than when you pissed yourself up in fifth form.”

Somehow Julian got him turned over onto his belly and aimed in the proper direction. Florry floundered along ineffectively and Julian shoved him on, half-pushing, half-pulling him. Above them, bullets tore through the night, occasionally popping with a rude sound and a cloud of spray into the wet ground. They seemed to move groggily for the longest time, but at last they reached a less barren area, where gullies and thick brush offered them some protection and Julian got him up and stumbling along.

Behind them, another machine gun opened up.

“Damn them, they’ve brought another gun up. Come on, Stinky.”

But Florry was at last spent.

“I don’t think I can make it.”

“Of course you can, old boy. Here, let me take another look. I don’t even think the thing hit you square. These bloody Spaniards can’t do anything right. A lot of blood, and you’ve messed a very nice tunic, but if you’ll just―”

“Julian, shut up. I can’t make it. I’m going to pass out.”

“Now, none of that. Come along.”

“Please, go on. Go on, damn you, you always were the brilliant one. Julian, why did you cut me? At school, you cut me dead. You filthy bastard.”

“Long story, old sod. No time for it now. Do come on, then, I think I see some of their chaps moving this way. We’re going to end up practice for pig sticking if we don’t―”

“Go on, damn you. Christ, it hurts.”

“Wounds are supposed to hurt. Every sod knows that. Now come along.”

“I–I-”

“Think of England, old boy. Think of the wonderful piece you can write for Denis Mason. You’ll be the toast of Bloomsbury.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Think of Sylvia, old man. Think of the beautiful Sylvia.”

“I can’t think of―”

“Think of her titties, old man. Great soft titties. Think of squashing them about in your fingers while she tells you she wants you to do it harder.”

“You filthy bastard!”

“Think of her wonderful cunt, old man, all wet and fishy and warm. Think of grousing it out as a piggy snorts after truffles. That should revive your interest in living.”

“You filthy fucker, Julian. I ought to―”

“Yes, that’s the spirit, chum. Come along then.”

“Julian, you bastard―”

“Stink, she’s just quim. Damned good quim, I’d bet, but quim just the same. Come on, old boy.”

Up ahead, they saw figures on the crestline coming toward them.

17 COMRADE MAJOR BOLODIN

Lenny Mink felt good, for one thing, in the sour aftermath of the Levitsky debacle, he had received a promotion from the desperate Glasanov. He was now a major in the SIM and had control of his own unit. But he had other reasons for his joy. For in the matter of Levitsky, he had a considerable edge on everybody else. He knew that the chances of spotting the old Jew randomly were almost nil; Levitsky was simply too smart for that, too shrewd, too much the devil. But Lenny knew why he was here. To see his boy.

To get the gold.

Lenny had figured it out. The old Jew was after the same thing he was. What else could explain the desperation and the cunning and the courage of the old man?

Old devil, Lenny thought, you’re not so special. Just another Jew on the track of a big score. You’ll see your boy and he’ll tell you, huh? He’ll point you in the right direction. You’ve just got to find him.

And his boy was English.

Thus it took no great powers of deduction but only simple cleverness to identify and establish surveillance on the several concentrations of Englishmen around Barcelona. For surely the old devil would be found sniffing in their fringes. These were not many: there was, first off, the press corps, a group of gray-suited cynics that gathered each night in the Café de las Ramblas and sat nursing whiskeys and grousing bitterly about their assignments and their editors and exchanging sarcastic bets on the outcome of it all. Lenny ordered that Ugarte, his number one, who did all the talking, take up a nightly position there.

“Suppose I get bored, boss?”

“I break every bone in your body. Every single one, no?”

Ugarte had a particularly unpleasant laugh, more a whinny, which he issued at that point, partially to conceal his extreme nervousness. Bolodin frightened him, too.

“Look,” said the American, leaning across and pinching him playfully. “You do what I say, when I say it, and you’ll come out of this okay. Okay?” He spoke English because among Ugarte’s attainments was the language.

“Sí, yeah, boss.”

Lenny’s other trusted aid was Franco, called Frank for obvious reasons, an ex-butcher who had beaten his wife to death in 1934 and was freed from his life sentence in August of 1936 by the libertarian Anarchists, who did not believe in prisons. Lenny stationed him outside the British consulate.

Both men carried with them hand-drawn copies of the original etching from the 1901 Deutsches Schachzeitung, as adjusted and improved by Lenny’s suggestions after having seen the old man at close range in the cell. It was a reasonable likeness. Lenny knew therefore that if things went as they should, it would only be a matter of time before one of them tumbled across the old man. He had a hunter’s confidence and a con artist’s patience.

He positioned himself on the Ramblas, across from the third and most likely spot where Levitsky might be counted on to appear: the Hotel Falcon, the enemy headquarters, with its flapping red POUM banner. It was full of Brits. These were the idealistic kids who came to take part in the revolution but didn’t quite have the guts to join the fighting. They always came here, no place else. As he sat in the 1933 Ford, he conceived the idea that it was like some kind of fancy college club or something, and there seemed to be a lot of screwing and drinking and singing going on. It was a party or something.

Lenny sat outside it day after day, smoking the Luckies he bought on the black market, quietly watchful, utterly imperturbable, in his blue serge suit, his almost handsome, almost ugly, blunt features calm and under control. He merely watched and smoked.

It was on the third day when he noticed her.

She was pretty and slim and lively. Everybody liked her, he could tell. She was the sort of girl you could like a lot.

I never had a girl like that, he thought.

In time, he grew to hate her. She made him think of who he was, and what he was, and he didn’t like that one bit. It was her eyes, those sleepy, calm, knowing gray green eyes, and the way she stood, so ladylike and refined, and the way she listened so intently. She seemed to work for their English-language newspaper, The Spanish Revolution, which they sent out, and it meant she knew everybody. One night, Glasanov had them do a crash job on some guy named Carlos. They picked him up at the Grand Oriente and the girl was there. Lenny hung back. He didn’t want her looking at him. He was so close to her, yet he kept his face down, not looking at anything because he was somehow ashamed.

The next day, a boy showed up and handed him a note from Ugarte which said he’d seen Levitsky; he’d been calling himself Ver Steeg and claimed to be a Dutch journalist and was heading out to the front. The boss had better get out there fast.

Lenny looked back at the girl. The POUM people were all low today because of poor Carlos.

He thought, You bitch, someday I’ll be really fucking big and then you’ll know who I am.

Some day I’ll have gold. And I’ll have you.

18 NEWS FROM THE FRONT

The intelligence and propaganda commissar of the Twenty-ninth Division, as the POUM militia was called, issued his communiqué about the glorious victory at Huesca a day and a half later at his headquarters at the big, battered house at La Granja. The recipients of the news were a crew of mangy reporters who had spent the intervening hours in transit to the front by any means possible, in the hope of actually seeing something.

The statement was typed and posted on a bulletin board outside militia headquarters. It read,

Our troops advanced in perfect order in a series of well-coordinated movements until in several places around the city, the Fascist lines were broken. In this new situation, they inflicted grievous casualties upon the enemy, taking from his stores much valuable war matériel. It was another example of working people, in service to the revolution, triumphing against all odds and defeating the German-Italian-Rebel Combine. Many prisoners were taken and much of intelligence value was also removed.

Later in the morning, our troops, sensing they had achieved their tactical goals, repositioned themselves so as to consolidate their gains.

“In other words,” said the Reuters man, “it was another bloody muck-up.”

“What I’m wondering,” said the man from the Standard, “is bloody why the whole thing was tossed together at the doubletime. They usually don’t like to move so fast, they like to take their bloody time. Mañana, eh? Always bloody mañana.”

“God, the Spanish. Anytime you’ve got the Spanish and the Italians in the same war, you’ve got the potential for a comic opera on a grand scale.”

There were several reporters, however, who did not take part in the cynical give and take, perhaps because they were new to the front or new to war reporting or new to Spain. One of these was a tall, elderly Dutchman of intellectual carriage named Ver Steeg ― Ver Staig, the pronunciation went, he informed them, his only utterance thus far ― who worked for a Dutch press syndicate. He appeared to listen intently to all that was said and when at last the bulletin’s author, Commissar Steinbach, appeared to answer, however obliquely, questions, this spry old fellow moved to the front of the crowd.

“Comrade Steinbach, we hear rumors that the Thaelmann Column of the PSUC Militia did not enthusiastically support the POUM and the Anarcho-Syndicalists in this attack, even though the worker’s militias have been theoretically combined under one leadership,” the Daily Mail man began.

“Is this an essay or do you have a question, Mr. Janeway?” Comrade Steinbach replied with an icy gleam in his famously bright good eye.

“The question, Comrade Steinbach, is, first, did the Communist militia aid in the attack, and second―”

Steinbach, a witty man whose incisiveness of mind was as famous as his bright eye, enjoyed these sessions, and interrupted swiftly. “Each militia performed its duties outstandingly,” he said. “The Anarchists were brilliant, the Communists heroic, and our own Workers Party troops solid as a rock. There is sufficient glory for each.” He smiled.

“Is it not a fact, comrade,” asked Sampson, the Times man, “that your forces are in exactly the same situation ― that is, the same trenches ― as before the attack?”

“Certain modifications of our positions were necessary late in the attack as a means of consolidating our advances.”

“In order, if I may follow up, to consolidate your advances, you had to abandon them?”

“It is well known that the Times will write whatever it chooses, regardless of the truth, Comrade Sampson, so why bother to press on this issue?” He smiled blandly.

“We’ve heard that the German troops of the Thaelmann Brigade, under the command of Communist Party commissars, never left their trenches, thus isolating your people in the Fascist parapets, and that the slaughter was awful.”

“Good heavens, how do these terrible rumors get started? Fifth columnists, gentlemen, fifth columnists spreading lies. In fact, political solidarity was observed throughout the operation. Losses were acceptable.”

“Why was the attack put together so hastily?”

“The attack was organized at a normal pace.”

“Comrade Steinbach, you know as well as we do these things are prepared weeks in advance. It seems clear this one was thrown together in less than forty-eight hours. What’s the reason?”

“The attack proceeded normally.”

“Is it true that the Twenty-ninth Division ― that is, the POUM militia and the POUM itself ― has staked its survival on breaking the siege at Huesca, and as external political pressure against POUM mounts, so will the pressure to take Huesca?” Sampson asked.

“This is a purely military situation; it has no political ramifications. I suggest you check with the Central Committee at Party headquarters in Barcelona for any political questions.”

“Will we be able to tour the battlefield?”

“In due time.”

“Will you release casualty figures?”

“It would serve no purpose.”

“Were British troops involved in the action?”

“The British Centura of the POUM militia ― excuse me, the Twenty-ninth Division ― had a brave and leading role in the drama. The Centura is a unit of roughly one hundred men, who have been a proud part of the militia since August of 1936. These were among the most ardent troops in the attack.”

At last the Dutch reporter spoke.

“Were there any British casualties?”

Steinbach paused a second.

“It is with deep regret,” he said, “that I announce the death of a revolutionary fighter of great heroism, idealism, and discipline. He was also a great poet and scholar. Julian Raines, author of the famous poem ‘Achilles, Fool,’ was killed in action in the attack against Fascist troops on the outskirts of Huesca.”

There was a gasp.

“Also,” Steinbach continued, “a British writer named Robert Furry perished.”

The press party moved to the trench and Steinbach showed the correspondents the line of attack through a brass telescope.

“As you can see, gentlemen,” he said, “it’s terrible terrain to cross at night, but our brave fighters were able to get within bomb range before being spotted. You can see the redoubt.”

“Keep your ’eads low, boys,” called a redheaded Cockney captain with a bloody leg. “Bob the Nailer don’t give a bloody damn who you are.”

“Is that where the Englishmen died?” asked Sampson.

“Bloody right,” said the runty little man. “Up there. Comrade Julian went out alone to bomb an enemy machine gun. His chum went out after him. They sent the gun to hell, but neither man made it back.”

“I say, captain,” said Sampson, “what’s your name? And what part of England are you from.”

“Legion, chum. And I’m from all over.”

“Hmmm. So there are no bodies?”

“No. But no man could survive up there,” said Steinbach.

“Perhaps they were taken prisoner,” said a young American correspondent ― to some laughter.

“I’m afraid prisoners are seldom taken on this front,” said Steinbach, a special, almost magical vividness coming into his good eye. “We all feel his loss keenly. He was one of those special men. You are all familiar with his poem ‘Achilles, Fool,’ which has been taken to express the confusion of a generation. Well, perhaps by the end, Comrade Raines had solved his confusion.”

“What about this other chap?”

“Only Julian Raines is important, as the symbol of a revolutionary generation who, rather than living his life in the comfortable circumstances of his birth, instead chose to come to Spain and risk everything for his beliefs.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to get one more drop of blood out of the poor wasted sot,” said the Reuters man.

“Gentlemen,” said Steinbach, coyly pretending to shock, “you are too cynical. Let me read you from Comrade Raines’s last, unfinished poem. It’s called ‘Pons’ and was discovered among his effects.”

Steinbach took out a sheet of paper, cleared his throat, and read:

“Good Christ, that’s from the man Auden called the most promising voice of his generation? Come on, Steinbach, get your boys to give it a little distinction before you put it out.”

Again there was much laughter, and even Steinbach seemed to take part in it. He was able to laugh because he knew it was a good story and they’d use it. Salvage something out of this bloody mess, if only one more martyr for the English left.

When it came his turn, Levitsky worked the telescope back and forth across the scaggily vegetated ridge near the city, a good half mile off. He could see brush, gulches, mud, and the Fascist line of sandbags running across the crest. It was, as this sly one-eyed propagandist Steinbach had said, terrible terrain for an attack at night, in the rain.

Julian, you idiot. To die like a flea among millions of fleas in the mudbath of history.

He stepped back, turned for a second, and looked where the Englishman Sampson stood, a hard, trim young man with narrow, suspicious eyes and precise, perhaps military manners and authority. Sampson smoked a pipe and took notes with impressive efficiency and wrote beautifully, it was said. Levitsky, a little shaken perhaps, tried to adjust to the immensity of his loss and, worse, the hideous resonating irony of it.

I was so close. I came so far, I was so close.

It had been snatched away by Julian’s utter stupidity. How could he be so frivolous with his own life? And poor Florry’s, too. God knows, Florry had reason to follow him, but it was all such a bitter waste.

He went back to the instrument. Nothing. It was just the same, scruffy no-man’s-land. Did he expect to see the dead rise?

“Mr. Ver Steeg?”

It was Comrade Steinbach, calling from the group of reporters farther down the trench. “We are returning to La Granja. You don’t want to be left up here if a Fascist bombardment begins.”

“Ah,” said Levitsky. Yet he did not at once move. For if Julian were gone, there was nothing left to do, except save himself.

If Koba’s hounds are to hunt me, let them hunt me hard.

“Best get goin’, chum,” said the little English captain, then turned away and headed back to his men gathered at the other end of the trench.

But Levitsky suddenly felt naked and vulnerable. Without his mission, he was just a man. His death, which might have had political meaning, suddenly had only a personal one. It was as if his life, in all its fragility, had been handed back to him.

He started up the trench and as he was drawing near the ladder, he ducked into a bunker scooped in the wall. It was filled with gear; two men slept noisily.

Several bombs lay on the table, iron eggs with checkerboard surfaces. He made his decision in a split second, and snatched one up and put it into his hip pocket. He gripped the thing out of sight. It felt heavy and authoritative in his hand. He could remember flinging them by the dozens into White positions during the civil war.

“Comrade!”

Levitsky turned. It was the English captain.

“Forgot this, old man,” he said, holding out Levitsky’s notebook. “Sure you ain’t too old for this sort of thing?”

Levitsky smiled, took the notebook, and headed out after the other reporters moving back through the scrubland to La Granja.

By the time he caught up, they had come through the orchard and into a meadow. Ahead, through the line of trees, Levitsky could see the big house with its red tiles.

In the courtyard the reporters milled around amid the soldiers, all of them waiting to be served a meal. The smell of rice and chicken from nearby cook pots filled the air. There was much laughter and camaraderie. Levitsky could see the Britishers teasing the American about his prisoner question and he could see the French reporters arguing strenuously among themselves over some political point.

And he could see Comrade Bolodin, with one man, walking toward him.

His first impulse was to run.

Don’t, he told himself. You old fool, stay calm. Let’s see him pull his NKVD card here, in the center of a POUM encampment.

Levitsky began to slide through the crowd.

The big American was drawing closer. They’d grab him first, then pull the cards ― guns, too, probably ― and haul him away. He only had a few seconds. He put his hand in his pocket and removed the bomb. He held it muffled in his coat and with his other hand managed to get the first pin out. He continued walking through the crowd toward the big house; then, abruptly, he turned aside and headed to one of the three smaller buildings off to the side. A guard saw him coming.

“¡Alto! Arsenal!”

“Eh?” said Levitsky, approaching. “No hablo …”

“¡Arsenal!” repeated the guard.

Levitsky nodded, pulled the last pin, and in one swift motion tossed it through the window. The guard dropped his rifle and began to run screaming. Levitsky ran in the other direction.

The first blast was muffled; the second lifted him from his feet and threw him in the air. He landed, stunned. Men ran in terrified panic. Smoke filled the air. The small house blossomed flames.

“Run! Run! There’s more to blow!” somebody shouted. A pair of hands picked him up. He looked up into the face of the young British reporter Sampson.

“Go on, old man! Get out of here! Run for your bloody life.” Levitsky ran around the side of the big house and through the orchard. Behind him, there was another detonation.

He turned into a gully and began a little jog down the creek bed. The mountains in the distance were cool and white and beautiful.

“¿Amigo?”

A man in a trenchcoat stepped from behind the trees. He had an automatic.

“Comrade Amigo. Manos arriba, ¿eh?” said the man smilingly, gesturing for Levitsky to raise his hands.

“No hablo,” protested Levitsky blandly.

The man smiled and relaxed as he came near and seemed to lower the pistol, and Levitsky knew this meant he was about to hit him. When the man lashed out suddenly with the pistol, meaning to crack Levitsky sharply across the cheekbone, Levitsky broke the blow with one hand and with the other struck upward, driving the crucifix nail into the man’s throat.

The man fell back, gasping, his eyes filled with stunned astonishment that such an old fool could hurt him so terribly. The pistol fell into the dust. The man went to his knees, trying to hold the blood into his throat with his hands. He tried to cry out but couldn’t. He tried to rise, but couldn’t.

Levitsky knelt next to him and carefully placed the point of the nail into the ear canal, and plunged it inward. With a convulsion, the man died. Levitsky quickly plucked his papers from the breast pocket, finding him to be one Franco Ruiz, according to a SIM identity card. He pulled the body into the brush and picked up the pistol, a short-barreled.38 °Colt automatic. He hurried down the creek bed, finding himself surprisingly impressed with Comrade Bolodin. The American was smart, yes, he was. He’d found him, and with a better man than Franco Ruiz, he would have taken him.

Night was falling as Levitsky hurried along the creek bed. He almost froze. He had no exact idea where he was headed other than east, away from La Granja. He shivered as the cold rose to penetrate his coat. The creek bed crossed under a country road after a while, and he chose the road, his feet acquiring an urgency that seemed almost involuntary. On either side in the twilight, the empty fields fell away, their crops unharvested, their farmers driven away. Several miles off a shell or a bomb exploded and now and then came the crackle of shots outside Huesca, but otherwise there was no sign of war in the strange, empty stillness of the land. The Pyrenees off on the left had become indistinct, a wall. Beyond them lay France, and freedom.

You cannot walk across the mountains, old devil, he told himself.

When it grew too dark to continue, he found a deserted stone barn and hid in the straw for warmth. He awoke early the next morning and proceeded on, the hunger gnawing away at his stomach. He was stopped once by a squad of forlorn militiamen who cared more whether he had food to share with them than for his papers. Twice more he came across groups of militia, but they paid him no attention. Finally he came to a larger road. Before him, he could see the plain stretching out for miles, bleak and flat, gnarled here and there with clusters of rock. Who could want such desolation?

He waited by the side of the road until at last a vehicle came along, an empty lorry driven by two men. He hailed them.

“Comrades?” he asked.

“Sprechen sie Deutsch, Kamrade?” came the reply from one of them, a youth of about twenty.

“Yes, of course, comrade. I am Ver Steeg, of the press. I was at the front and missed the lorry back to Barcelona. Perhaps you are headed in that direction?”

“Yes, comrade,” the boy said. “Hop aboard. We’ve got some wine and a little cheese.”

Levitsky squeezed into the cab, and the lorry rumbled on through the bright afternoon. The driver’s companion was another youth; they were two earnest German Jewish refugees who’d come to fight with the Thaelmann Column against the Hitlerites. They were political naïfs, and Levitsky, exhausted, listened with bland interest to their slogans and enthusiasms, their gross misunderstandings and their outright fabrications. They believed Koba and Lenin were great chums, the spirit of the latter filling the heroic skull of the former. The enemies were all “Oppositionists,” who must be tirelessly liquidated, so that the Revolution could be guided by the brilliant Koba. They also thought, somehow, the Anarchists, the bourgeois manufacturers of munitions, and the Catholic church were behind Hitler and Franco and Trotsky. It was the routine nonsense the Party had been grinding out more and more lately. They talked of the big explosion at La Granja. And they talked, finally, of the miracle.

“You’ve heard of the miracle, Comrade Ver Steeg?”

“Alas, no,” said Levitsky, politely, uninterested in miracles.

“The luck of the English, I suppose,” said one of the boys.

“Yes, yes?”

“Talk about resurrections. It’s enough to turn one to priests and nuns!”

“Go on.”

“Two dead Englishmen walked back from the dead. A poet and his comrade. They lay in the brush. The Fascists came and set up a machine-gun post. They lay there, the poor devils, for forty-eight hours, one of them hurt and bleeding. Everyone thought they were dead. A single move, a single breath, and they’d have been shot.”

“What happened?” Levitsky asked laconically. At moments of great excitement he was capable of extreme calm.

“When the second night fell, they crawled in. Two full days after they’d been lost, they returned. They went to the hospital at Tarragona.”

“Tell the comrade what the poet said. He must be an amusing man. It’s on everybody’s lips, a famous line.”

“Yes, he must be witty, even if he fights for the POUMistas. He said, ‘The tea was simply rotten over there and the limes had not been freshly cut, and so we returned.’ ”

19 THE CLUB

They kept Holly-Browning waiting for more than half an hour. He sat with the coats in the anteroom under the cold, unimpressed eye of the doorman, awaiting his soft summons. He sat ramrod stiff on the hardback bench ― no soft waiting-room chairs for him, thanks ― and kept his eyes fixed furiously on a blank point in space some six feet ahead.

At last the doorman came for him.

“Sir James?”

“Yes.”

“Will you follow me please, sir.”

“Thank you.”

The doorman led him to a chap in livery ― Holly-Browning knew him, actually, he’d been in the army, a sergeant, and won the DFC in Flanders in ’15 before catching a lungful of mustard ― who in turn escorted him with elaborate dignity through the study, the dark, almost Moorish bar, the dining hall, and up the club’s stairs to its private suites.

The railing was mahogany, richly polished; the walls silk damask of floral print, exquisite, the stairs carpeted in a Persian pattern dating from the fourteenth century. Yet it was all threadbare, tatty, a bit musty. Things never changed in clubs until they had to or were shocked brutally into it. But in the normal course of events one day was not remotely different from the next; again, that was as it should have been. Indeed, that was the very point.

They reached at long last the top of the stairway and made stately, muted progress down the hall, coming finally to a certain closed door. The servant knocked briskly, heard a quick, “Come in,” and opened the door.

“Major Sir James Holly-Browning,” he announced.

Holly-Browning entered to discover C, as the chief of MI–6 was called, and another man in a beautifully cut suit. The two of them looked as old schoolish as possible; and they were. C’s guest was, like C himself, a former naval officer. He was, like C himself, short and pink and bald and beautifully if conservatively dressed. And he was, like C himself, the head of an intelligence service. But there the similarities ceased: he was director-general of MI-5, which specialized in matters of domestic security where MI-6 specialized in foreign espionage and counterespionage. They were, in other words, opposite sides of the same coin.

The two of them were enjoying enormously big cigars as the debris of their luncheon was cleared away by two Hindu boys.

“James, how very good of you to join us. He’s about to serve the brandy. Would you care for a tot?”

“No thank you, sir,” said Holly-Browning primly. He was shocked to find the two of them together.

“Look, do sit down.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Holly-Browning, taking the open chair.

“James, you know Sir Vernon.”

Sir Vernon was said to be the most affable man in the intelligence departments, though his critics said this amounted primarily to great skill at parliamentary bootlicking. An unfair charge: Sir Vernon had been superbly efficient nabbing Hun spies in the ’14–’18 thing, a coup he’d brought off primarily by opening their mail.

“By reputation,” said Holly-Browning.

“Glad you could join us on such short notice, James,” said C.

“Of course, sir.”

“I told Sir Vernon you’d be glad to update him on the Julian Raines case. It is, after all, an area of domestic concern.”

“Sir, if I may, it is primarily a Section V matter. That is, counterespionage operation against the Soviet Union. It is not a matter of domestic security.”

“Ah. An interesting point,” said Sir Vernon. “I quite see Sir James’s point. But after all, we are not competing, but we are colleagues, are we not?”

“Please, James,” said C. “It’s rather important.”

“Of course, sir,” said Holly-Browning. He turned and as mechanically as possible apprised Sir Vernon of developments in the situation, most crucially the placing of an agent ― whom he did not name ― in Julian’s close company, and summed up the sparse contents of Sampson’s reports.

“And your man is reporting regularly?” asked Sir Vernon.

“He has not been the most habitual of correspondents, no,” said Holly-Browning.

“Ummmmm,” nodded Sir Vernon. “Nicely done. Damned fine job.”

“You can see, Vernon,” said C, “that the fluidity of Raines’s circumstances somewhat prevents us from mounting the kind of thorough surveillance MI-5 would be able to mount at home.”

“Can’t be helped,” said Sir Vernon. “You’ll pardon an Americanism, but you can’t play cards you don’t hold. This fellow up close to Raines. He’s a professional?”

“Alas, no,” said Holly-Browning. “Of no great gifts or brilliance. Under the circumstances, however, he is what was available. He is a card we did hold.”

“And right now?”

“At present, according to our man in Barcelona, Raines and our agent and a curious girl who stands somewhere between them are in Tarragona, a seaside resort fifty miles south of Barcelona. Our agent was nicked at the front; so was Raines. They are recuperating.”

“Well, it certainly sounds encouraging,” said Sir Vernon. “It’s not quite how we would have handled it, but in the main you seem to be doing rather well, Sir James.”

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

“You see, James, Sir Vernon and I have just concluded a rather lengthy session of negotiation. That’s why you are here.”

“Yes?”

C continued. “Sir Vernon thinks the Julian Raines matter should be turned over to Security Service. Of course, we cannot agree. Sir Vernon has suggested that he might approach the Parliamentary Intelligence Committee and―”

“But good lord, sir, if that happened, it would all be out in the second. There’d be a scandal, the left would make a martyr out of Raines, the papers would get a hold of it, the―”

“I quite agree,” said C.

“Gentlemen, I merely want to make certain that all data that is pertinent to MI-5 matters arrives at MI-5 headquarters, that’s all,” said Sir Vernon. “I think we all agree on the ultimate disposition of the case, but it seems equally certain that Julian Raines will have information of great import to us.”

“And so you see, James,” said C, “we have cut a deal. The deal is that we will continue to run the operation and you will continue to do what is best. But all reports must be sent on to MI-5, for their analysts. Is that understood?”

“Yes sir,” said Holly-Browning, furious.

“It’s not really so bad,” said Sir Vernon. “It’s a good deal better than having a bloody MI-5 snoop in the middle of everything, eh, Sir James?” He smiled.

Holly-Browning nodded politely. But something vexing occurred to him, clouding his smile. Who had informed MI-5?

20 TARRAGONA

Believe me,” said Julian, holding up a glass of champagne and blinking in the sun, “I’ve been dead and I’ve been alive and alive is better.”

“Hear, hear,” said Florry, hoisting his own glass.

“To life, then, darlings, the death of us all,” Julian toasted.

Even Sylvia drank, though not as lustily as her two companions.

“And how’s the neck, Robert?” she asked.

Florry looked at her shyly. She had not said much to him.

“It’s on the mend. Another inch or so and he’d have nipped an artery. But he missed, it whizzed through, and here I am.”

“To Spanish marksmanship!” said Julian grandly, “which accounts for the presence of a full two-thirds of this lovely grouping.”

“We were just awfully lucky,” said Florry. “Halfway through the second day, a foraging party was less than fifty paces off. We were cooked.”

“And then some wonderfully ingenious fifth columnist touches off the POUM magazine at La Granja, and all the Johnny Fascist types totter off to watch the smoke rise and cheer for their team.” Julian greedily drank more champagne. “Here’s to luck, Julian’s wonderful luck,” he toasted again, this time removing his father’s wedding ring from under his shirt and holding it, on its chain, out for them to see. “This little beauty didn’t do him much good, but it’s come in handy for us, eh, Stink?”

Florry smiled wanly. “Indeed,” he said.

“Well put, old sport.”

“Do they treat you decently in that awful hospital?” Sylvia asked politely.

“The Spanish, it seems, can do nothing well except cook,” said Florry, somewhat relieved to turn to a neutral subject. “Three times a day, they wheel in huge steaming, wonderful meals. Meanwhile men die because nobody thinks to change their bandages.”

“The future is definitely behind schedule in Spain,” said Julian. “I don’t believe the present has even arrived.”

Florry sat back in the wheelchair. Sylvia and Julian had contrived to spring him from his great bay of bleeding boys for this outing, and they wheeled him down the two blocks of Tarragona’s own Ramblas here to the Esplanade high above the sea. Before him stretched a mile of white sand, a rumpled mess of a Roman arena, and the sleepy, tepid Mediterranean. A few bathers dabbled in it, a few more lay in the sun. The breeze was fresh and salty; gulls flipped and fluted on it. A statue of Christopher Columbus stood proudly atop its pedestal, as at the foot of Barcelona’s Ramblas.

“It’s lovely here,” said Florry.

“An odd town, Tarragona,” Julian said. “It seems the revolution hasn’t quite reached it. Or if it has, it got rather bored and left early, like Noël Coward at a dreary party.”

Florry looked past Julian, in a splendid white linen suit, to Sylvia. Damn you, he thought. Her gray green eyes were sleepy yet lively; she’d done something to her hair, giving it a kind of frilly, lacy delicacy, and she’d put away her blue overalls and found a pretty dress. How had she met Julian? What was she doing with him while Florry lay in his bed? Was she with him?

He looked back to Julian, slugging down the champagne.

Damn you, Julian. You just go on, don’t you?

“Barcelona is no longer a party Noël Coward would enjoy,” she said. “The city’s ugly. There’s a vileness to it. Someone shot Carlos Brea right outside the Café Oriente. It was horrible. Someone shot him from a car. The bullet hit him in the head. They don’t know who did it, but everybody says it was the Russian secret police. Poor Carlos.”

“Carlos Brea?” said Julian. “The POUM intellectual? Poor sot. Spoke to him at length. Wanted to use it in a piece.”

“Julian, you’re such an awful cynic,” she said, and Florry thought he could hear the love in her voice and see a radiance in her eyes.

They seemed such a wonderful English couple, the tall, blond, elegant poet-soldier who just as easily could have been a banker or a diplomat, and his beautiful, fair woman, as cool and poised as an impeccable statue. They looked so good together that Florry envied them their perfection.

“Have some more of the bubbly, old boy,” urged Julian. “Do you think it was easy to find this stuff? Good God, I had to pay a fortune.”

“Bottoms up,” said Florry, finishing the glass, feeling the buzz in his nostrils.

“Look, you two,” said Julian, “eat up and enjoy. I’ve got to be off.”

“Where are you going?” Sylvia asked.

“To see about a car. I’ll be back. I told the chap I’d see him at two. Besides, you two must have scads to talk about.”

He rose from the bench with a smile and darted off down the Ramblas. Florry watched him slide along, graceful and fair. Then he turned back to the sea. Now, just the two of them, he felt all ridiculous.

“Is it so hard to be alone with me?” she said. “We were alone together for quite a while, as I recall. You were never so tongue-tied.”

“You must think me an awful fool.”

“Why ever do you say that?”

“The note I sent you. You received it?”

“Yes. It was lovely. I still have it.”

“The soldier lad’s last declaration before battle. God, you must think me the idiot.”

“I think nothing of the kind. Do you want me to push you along the promenade?”

“No.”

“Do you want some more champagne?”

“No.”

“What about some of this food?”

“No.”

“Well, what do you want, Robert? Tell me straight out.”

“You, of course.”

She said nothing.

“Or have you forgotten?”

“I haven’t forgotten. It was quite lovely, wasn’t it?”

“It was the best.”

“Should you tax yourself, thinking about these things? Shouldn’t you concentrate on―”

“Stop it. Don’t say that. It’s all I think about. You’re with him now, is that right?”

“Oh, Robert, you’re such an idiot. He’s a charming man. He’s no more interested in me than in the man in the moon. Julian’s quality. I’m just a daughter of the bourgeoisie with a bit of inherited money for a year’s adventuring. He likes you better than he likes me. He loves you, in fact.”

“But you’d be with him instead of me if that’s what he wanted?”

“Please, Robert. Don’t put yourself through this. There’s no point to it.”

“Thinks have become complicated.”

“Not if you don’t permit them to, Robert.”

Florry could no longer look at her. Her beauty was hurting him more than his throbbing neck would. He could feel her very close and very still. He could smell her. He could not get the night at the Falcon out of his mind: he remembered how good it felt, how it seemed to straighten the world all out for him.

“I suppose you’d best wheel me back now, Sylvia,” he said. “I find I’m quite weary.”

“Of course, darling. May we visit you tomorrow?”

We!

Florry wished he could say simply no, damn you, and be done with it. But he heard himself saying yes, yes, of course, it would be great fun, and as she wheeled him around, he saw Sampson across the street, watching.

It took a day or so, but at last Sampson managed it. He applied for permission with the Republican Propaganda Department to do a profile of wounded Englishmen fighting valiantly on the side of Justice, and the office itself suggested a series of possibilities. Florry was the third of them, and he lay in the bay and watched as Sampson came in with his official escort and plopped down beside one of the other boys and proceeded to interview him at grindingly boring length. Even the lad himself, an ex-miner from Wales who’d been hurt fighting with the International Brigade near Brunete, soon grew uninterested in his own answers. By halfway through the second interview, the Republican press officer had given up in disgust, muttering darkly about English pedantry, and thus when, late in the afternoon, Sampson finally approached Florry it was alone and in privacy; most of the other patients in the bay had been wheeled out to watch the sunset, their one pleasure, and those that remained were beyond caring.

“Ah, Florry,” said Sampson with a smug yet prim grin, “and how’s the wound?”

“It’s all right,” said Florry bleakly. “They’re going to let me out in a bit. No bones broken, no arteries smashed. There’s very little they can do now they’ve drained it except let it heal. A scratch, really.”

“I shouldn’t imagine it felt like a scratch at the time.”

“No, it did not.”

“Look, I brought you a present. A copy of Tristram Shandy, by your friend Mr. Sterne. God, I despise literature. Full of nonsense, if you ask me, but I thought you’d like it.”

He handed the book over and Florry took it gruffly.

“Ah, old sport. They’re beginning to wonder in London if perhaps you haven’t forgotten why you’re out here.”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“Good. Then do you think it would be possible―”

“Look, I spent five bloody months with Julian Raines, day in and day out. In battle, he was the bravest of us all. Now would a Russian spy risk everything for … for nothing? For his enemies? By all odds he should be dead. Tell your bloody major to find another candidate. Now go away.”

“Robert, you’ve been such a wicked boy. No reports, no communications, no anything. I’ve had to keep awfully busy covering for you. But far worse, you’ve allowed yourself to become utterly sentimental about all this. I had expected so much. I thought you were the stuff of heroes. You were my idol.”

“Sampson, it wears thin. I’m terribly tired.”

“Look, Florry, old sport, sorry to be such a bother. Just a few minutes more, all right? Let me put some things to you?”

“Christ!”

“The attack was betrayed. The attack you fought in. Did you know that?”

“I’ve heard rumors, yes. But there’s―”

“Look here, I was up there. It was quite clear that the general headquarters issued attack orders quickly, if for no other reason than to prevent the Communist brigades from getting counterinstructions from Barcelona as to whether to obey the orders or not. Yet the Communists nevertheless knew to tell their troops not to go. Somehow they knew, eh? They’d gotten the word. Because someone had reached them. Ah, see? It all fits together.”

Florry looked out. Yes, the damned message. Julian and his “boy” who disappeared with the message.

“Then there’s the issue of the magazine. Somebody blew the POUM magazine, eh? Someone knew where to plant a bomb. The explosion of that magazine all but ends POUM’s chances for a spring offensive. And where would the saboteur have gotten the information? Why, from a helpful chap potting about at La Granja.”

Florry said nothing.

“Now as for one other thing. There was a chap called Carlos Brea, who was coming into prominence in the POUM party. Yes?”

Florry said nothing.

“Anyway, this chap was murdered. Suddenly one night. Damned strange. But not strange when you consider that someone had interviewed him and realized how important he was becoming. And who was that chap?”

It was Julian.

“It means nothing.”

“Julian is communicating with Levitsky, somehow. Robert, I can see it in your face. Like a cloud. Robert, in your heart, you know it to be true. You’ve felt it in him. Down low, down, far, far away. A reserve. A coldness.”

“They would risk him to betray a silly attack and to kill one man? It’s nonsense,” he said, wishing he believed it utterly.

“Perhaps there’s a bigger job. A job we can’t even begin to imagine, old man. But don’t you see, he’s giving us no choice in the matter. He’s here for the Russians. He spies on their enemies for them. And when he goes back to England, he’ll spy on us for them. You can see it, can’t you, old man?”

“I can’t see anything.”

“He’s fogged your brain, old man. With the woman. That’s the point of the woman, to keep you utterly befuddled and from seeing him perfectly for what he is. He understands where you’re weakest and he’s got you there. You look at him, and all you see is the man who’s bedding down with your―”

“Stop it! You go too far.”

“Robert, listen to me. He’s to be stopped. No longer just stopped in the general sense, but stopped in the most specific sense. You can do it, can’t you? At the front? You’re going back to the front, you can see that it happens. You can see that it’s your duty to―”

“Sampson, old man, I’m going to tell you one more time. Leave. If you don’t, so help me, I’ll call the guard and tell him who you really are and they’ll put you against a wall and shoot you.”

Sampson looked at him for the longest time. Then a small smile played across his face.

“All right, Robert. I’ll go. But watch, old man. Keep your eyes open. And you’ll see who owns the heart of Julian Raines.”

Florry was permitted to leave the hospital in the next days and given a convalescent leave of two weeks. In the lobby, Sylvia was waiting for him. And so was Julian.

“You and Sylvia must come on holiday with me,” said Julian. “I’ve found a beautiful old resort down the coast at Salou. It’ll be great fun. Come along, old man. You owe me. You saved my life and therefore you cannot deny me anything.”

“Julian, I’m still awfully spent. I wouldn’t be much company. I just want to sit in the sun.”

“Then sit in the sun you shall. I’ll bring you champagne and caviar every day. Sylvia will read to you. Go on, put it on your furlough form, right there at the bottom. Oh, don’t be a prig, Stink. It’ll be fun. Look, in two weeks, we’ll be back in the trenches.”

“Robert, you look so pale,” she said. “It would be so good for you.”

They arrived, by Julian’s car, that afternoon. It was a glorious old hotel, isolated against a blue bay on a broad lip of sandy beach, under a stony cliff. The hotel was an old villa, rambling and white under its mandatory crown of red tiles; the staff were old men, mostly, who called the few guests comrade awkwardly, as if they wanted no part of the future. They preferred the ordered past, and pretended revolution had never happened.

Florry settled into a huge room with a balcony overlooking the sea. Each day when he awoke he’d find a pot of thick coffee and a pot of hot cream and a red rose in a vase outside his door. It was a civilized way to begin the day, after the trenches. He’d sit out on the balcony with a book ― besides the Sterne, Sylvia had brought him Dickens and Kipling, which he preferred ― and read in the sunlight, losing himself in the thickets of literature and the hot and healing sun. At eleven, the howls of delight would rise from the spongy clay tennis courts where Julian and Sylvia, who occupied suites down the hall, would play, their yelps punctuated by the hollow plunk of the ball on the racquet.

At noon, the three would lunch together on the veranda where they were fed fish and rice and a crisp blanco. Then they’d change and bathe by the sea, lazily wasting the afternoon stretched upon the white sand. The war seemed far off, and almost by mutual consent they excluded it from the frame of their consciousness. There was only the sun and the sea, the balmy breezes, and one another. The afternoons were long and slow, under flawless weather. The sky curved overhead in azure radiance, cloudless and immense. The water was calm and warm.

It seemed to be so lovely, and yet it was not. A peculiar rhythm soon established itself, almost like a tide, remorseless and implacable. Yet what was so peculiar about it all was that it went, like the larger war, completely unspoken of, as if by compact.

One half of the rhythm was the Florry rhythm: on a Florry day, she’d hang on his every word, her eyes radiant with attention. She’d ask him questions about every aspect of his life, his school, his parents. He found himself divulging intimacies and secrets he had told no one in years. He found himself at night thinking of new stories he could tell her to make her squeal with laughter and delight.

“I just love to hear you talk,” she said.

But there were also Julian days, not so many at first and not quite vivid enough, when they did come, to merit comment; yet still they occurred, and Florry would seem not to exist to her. She wouldn’t meet his eyes and she’d hang on Julian. He could see her seem to bend toward him, as if to absorb him. They had their little secrets, Sylvia and Julian, their little jokes, and on these days he could see a light in her eyes he never saw when she was talking to him. She seemed to be achieving a total oneness with Julian, as if, somehow, she were sinking into him.

Damn you, Julian.

He began to think how perfect the world would be if Julian were not around. If only by some stroke Julian could be removed, and not exist at all.

Yet the next day, she was his again and he felt the pleasure and the triumph of her attentions.

One afternoon, he felt unusually strong and asked if anybody cared to come with him on a walk. Julian said no, he’d prefer to try to drink the world dry of bubbly, but Sylvia rose with a smile for him. It was a Florry day.

They walked down the beach. They reached the base of the cliff in a matter of minutes and walked along it. The sand under their feet was white and dry and fine. The cliff towered above them, chalky and wrinkled, its crown bridged in greenery a hundred feet up. Florry felt prickly and unsure of himself.

“How’s the neck?”

“Oh, it seems all right. It’s stiff, but if I understand the doctor correctly it will always be stiff.”

“You’ve got some nice color now. You seemed so pale in the hospital. You looked so awful there. With those other wounded boys about.”

“I hated the hospital. I’ve already put it out of my mind. I keep thinking about the battle.”

“Julian says you were very brave.”

“Julian cares about that. About being brave. Do you know, I really don’t. It has no interest for me.”

“Julian says the war is going badly.”

“I suppose it is.”

“Julian says that unless the POUM cracks the siege of Huesca, then the Soviet Union will take over the revolution. God, it’s so confusing. Julian says that―”

“Do you know, Sylvia, I don’t really care what Julian says.”

“Why, Robert, what a terrible thing to say. He admires you so. He’s your closest friend.”

“Ummmm,” was all Florry could think to say.

They walked on in silence.

“What is bothering you, Robert?”

“I’m just tired, I suppose.”

“Well, you shouldn’t say unkind things about Julian.”

“Which of us, may I ask, do you prefer?”

“Why, I love you both, Robert.”

“Do you go to him at night?”

“Robert. What a rude question.”

“Rude or not, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“But then you’re not coming to my room, either.”

“You feel terrible. You’ve told me yourself. You’re too weak. You’ve had a hellish experience.”

“I’m getting stronger.”

“Well, if that’s what you want, then I shall come tonight.”

After dinner, Florry read on his balcony until dark. He was in an odd mood, and thought he might write. He had not thought of writing in some time, when once it had been all he lived for. In his kit, he found paper and pen. He filled the pen and faced the blank paper.

“I came to Spain,” he began, “in the beginning of January 1937 because I wished at last to take a stand against Fascism and Spain seemed to be the only place avail―”

Rot, he thought.

I came to Spain, he thought, because a bloody British major said he’d throw my precious hide into Scrubs if I didn’t. When I got here, much to my ignorant surprise, there was a war on and I’m right in the middle.

He wrote on the page, slowly, and with much deliberation, “I hate Holly-Browning, I hate Holly-Browning.”

Then he crossed it out and wrote the truth.

“I hate Julian Raines.”

He looked at his watch. There was a knock on the door. Florry quickly tore up the piece of paper, and felt embarrassed and silly.

He wondered why Sylvia was so early.

“Stinky, get you out here, for God’s sake,” came Julian’s cry through the door. “You’ll never guess who’s here! You’ve bloody got to see this!”

“God, Julian―”

“This instant, old son!”

Florry threw open the door and discovered himself face to face with a man of aching familiarity. There, chunky and self-effacing, stood a young man in the uniform of a Republican captain. Then Florry placed the face and the body and made the discovery that it was the officer Comrade Steinbach had executed on the flatbed truck at La Granja.

“Salud, comrade,” said the captain, kissing him.

21 THE HOSPITAL

Even in Tarragona, it had changed, Levitsky picked it up immediately; a change, somehow, in the air. Certain fashions had altered: the mono, for example, was no longer the garment of the day. Fashionable people dressed for dinner. Motorcars had been freed from their garages: everybody who was anybody had a shiny black auto. The revolutionary slogans had somewhat faded. A different feeling gripped the city.

The POUM and the radical Anarcho-Syndicalists no longer articulated the spirit of the times; they seemed, somehow, on the run themselves. Instead, the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, which six months earlier had some five hundred members, was the new gang at the top, swollen with membership and influence and ties to the government. The new slogan seemed to sum it all up: “First the war, then the revolution.”

Koba knew: he didn’t want radical regimes spouting off like absurd tea kettles. The truth is, Koba isn’t revolutionary at all, that’s all illusion. He’s a realist, a cynic. Koba wants there to be only one revolution, in Russia, his own.

Levitsky sat in a seedy, dark seaside bar just off the Ramblas and could see a group of bitter young POUMistas in their suddenly outré monos sitting in the gloom, trying to figure out over tinto what was happening. Why were they denounced on the radio, called traitors in the posters, followed ominously by NKVD and SIM goons, eavesdropped upon, wiretapped, strip-searched, hounded? Murdered?

It was beginning. Koba’s emissaries had prepared well. Whatever Glasanov’s failures in apprehending Levitsky ― that sure death sentence if it leaked out ― the man was a professional when it came to organizing terror.

His drink arrived. The schnapps was minty, sweet, almost smoky. If I ever truly become an old man, I’ll do nothing except fuss over chess problems and drink peppermint schnapps. I will drink a lot of peppermint schnapps.

He looked at his watch. It was close to one. All right, old man, time to move.

Finishing the schnapps, he remembered a time when he didn’t need schnapps for courage: his beliefs had been enough. But that was when he was a young man.

He stepped out into the salt air, blinking at the hot sunlight. It was so temperate here; June was a lovely month. Taking a breath, he headed up the street, turned left, and walked another two blocks. He came after a time to the graveyard. The markers, white, without ornamentation, looked fresh as baby’s teeth against the grass. He walked in. It was completely quiet. Levitsky walked the ranks of the dead and came to graves that looked freshest.

“So many,” a voice said.

Levitsky turned, to face an old man.

“Are you the caretaker?”

“Yes, señor. The boys who die at night in the hospital are brought here in the morning.”

“Yes, I know,” said Levitsky.

“You are perhaps looking for a certain person?”

“No. I meant merely to pay my respects to the fallen.”

“So many. I hope they die in a good cause.”

One has, thought Levitsky.

He walked back, stopping once to rest. Getting old. An Asalto gave him a curious look but let him pass. When he reached the hospital, he went in.

“What business, have you, sir?” asked the nurse. Another young German Jew, she did not call him comrade anymore.

“I seek after my son. His name is Braunstein. Joseph. He was fighting with the Thaelmann Column, but I have been told he was wounded.”

“Just a moment, please.”

The girl went to her list. Levitsky sat down on a chair in the lobby. Soldiers milled about.

“Herr Braunstein?”

“Please. We left Germany in ’thirty-three. It’s just Mr. Braunstein now. You have news of my son? He is all right? They told me at Party headquarters in Barcelona that―”

“Mr. Braunstein, I’m sorry to inform you that your son Joseph Braunstein, wounded May twenty-sixth outside Huesca, died last night of his wounds. He never recov―”

“Ahhhhhh. Oh God, no. Oh God, Oh God. Please. I must … Oh, God, I―”

He faltered, dropping to one knee.

“Orderly,” the girl shouted, “call a doctor. This man is ill. Please, please, Herr Braunstein, I’m so sorry. Please. Here, please, come with me. Come in here.”

He stood up.

“They said it was only a minor wound. Oh, God, he was a flutist. He was studying music in Paris. Oh, such a wonderful boy. I told him not to come ― Oh, God, he was such a wonderful boy.”

She led him back into the inner office, where there was a couch. A doctor came by.

“I’m terribly sorry about your son,” he said. “But you must understand, the war is terrible. It kills in the thousands. But it kills for a purpose.”

“Oh, God.”

“Here, take these. Rest here, for a time. Your son died fighting Hitler. Can’t you take some pride in that, Herr Braunstein?”

Levitsky took the pills into his mouth, pretended to swallow. He lay back.

“Look, just stay here for a time, Herr Braunstein. When you feel better, you can move. Perhaps we can find out where they put your son. Then you can―”

Levitsky closed his eyes until they left. He waited another five minutes, then rolled off the couch. Spitting out the pills, he went swiftly to the filing cabinet against the wall, opened the drawer marked F, flipped through the files.

There was no Florry.

Damn the Spanish! Of course their files are out of date. Hopelessly balled up. Damn them, the fools. You’d think with these Germans to help them …!

He sat back down.

Failure. Another failure.

“Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes, miss. I think I had better go.”

“Herr Braunstein, we could perhaps take you someplace? Where are you staying?”

“No. Thank you, miss. I’d best be off.”

She led him out through the outer office.

“Here,” she said, halting at her desk. “I found this for you.”

She opened her drawer and removed something. It was a medal.

“It’s the Cross of the Republic. I thought perhaps you might care to have it.”

“But it is yours.”

“My brother’s. He won it last year. But he died in the defense of Madrid. Here, I want you to have it. Your son earned it, after all.”

Levitsky seemed suddenly to falter again.

“Are you all right?”

“Could I perhaps have a glass of water. My throat feels very dry.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll get it.”

She rushed off. Levitsky could see the file on her desk. It said FLORRY, ROB’T. (BRIT.); 29TH DIV.

He opened it, his eyes scanned the Spanish until at last he came to an entry that read, “Liberación, 5.22.37 Permiso, Cab de Salou.”

When the girl arrived with the water, he drank it swiftly and started to leave.

“The medal. Sir, you forgot the medal.”

“Thank you, miss,” he said and took it.

He left for Cab de Salou later that afternoon. But he stopped at the graveyard and found the old man.

“Yes?”

“This medal.”

“Yes, señor?”

“It belongs to that boy over there, Braunstein. Would you plant it under his marker.”

“Yes,” said the old man, and Levitsky hurried off.

It had not occurred to him to wonder why Florry’s file had been out on the desk rather than in its drawer. The reason was that it had been flagged by express order of SIM. Comrade Major Bolodin himself was on his way to pick it up.

22 THE MISSION

It’s about tanks, comrade Florry. And it’s about bridges. And it’s about our future.”

The speaker was a portly yet studious figure of a man in a turtleneck sweater of bulky knit, whose girth was in no way disguised by the garment, or by the raffish Sam Brown belt complete with heavy Star automatic he sported. He rose to greet Florry with an insincere smile as Florry entered Julian’s room.

“Glad you could join us,” said Comrade Steinbach, his dead eye blank and glitterless, his other fiendishly alive. “How’s the wound?”

“It’s fine,” said Florry, sure Steinbach cared little for the answer. “Stiff. A messy scar, that’s all.”

“You’ve met my friend Portela. Under slightly different circumstances, if I recall.”

“In considerably better shape now than when last seen,” said Florry. “I had thought the Church had a monopoly on resurrection.”

“Nothing so miraculous,” said Steinbach. “It was simple theater, the little charade with the pistol. We had to shoot him, in case there were spies about. No one could know he was my agent, just returned from a long, dangerous passage behind the lines.”

“Welcome back to the living, Comrade Portela,” said Florry.

The dapper young Spaniard clicked his heels together with the precision of a comic general in an operetta, and bowed stiffly at the waist.

“Buenas noches, Comrade Florry,” he said. “It is a pleasure to accept your compliments.” For a brave spy, he was a bit on the pudgy side.

“Why don’t you sit down, Comrade Florry? I believe it will be an interesting evening,” said Steinbach.

Florry sat.

“We’ve figured out how to win the war in Aragon with a bloody big bang,” said Julian. Florry had seen Julian like this before: weirdly animated, beside himself with giddy joy. Julian could hardly control himself. He was still in his dinner jacket, but he paced the room like a panther, clasping and reclasping his arms about himself. Somehow he disgusted Florry.

“As you know from most intimate experience,” said Steinbach, “our militia has taken the leading role in the siege of Huesca, supported most enthusiastically by those organizations such as the Anarchists, who share our political philosophies and our passion for the revolution and our belief in freedom. But because we cannot crack Huesca, we are called traitors, secret Fascists, counterrevolutionaries. The lies are repeated often and loudly; people are beginning to believe them. I need not specify who is telling these lies, but they are the same people who arrest or assassinate our leaders. There was fighting in Barcelona early last month. The pressures against us are mounting terribly. A saboteur destroyed our magazine. My ears are still ringing from the blast! And so we must crack Huesca. Not merely for our honor but for our survival.”

“Huesca,” said Portela, “is the key.”

“We must break the city before the Fascists can lift the siege. To do so would be to considerably lessen the pressures upon ourselves. To do so would be to save the revolution from the men in the Kremlin. And to keep it for the people. Perhaps worth dying for, eh?”

Florry nodded lamely. It seemed all gibberish to him.

Where do I stand on this? he wondered. Whose side am I on? What do I care about? What matters to me?

“Do you know why we attacked Huesca the night you were wounded, comrade?”

“No, comrade.”

“Because Portela reached me with information that a German engineering brigade had almost completed reinforcing a bridge in the mountains on the only direct road between Pamplona and Huesca. When they are done, the bridge will be able to support the weight of the PzKpfw II German tank. We attacked because we had to get into the city before the bridge was finished. We failed. It’s clear now why: the attack was betrayed.”

“And there are tanks?”

“Thick as flies, old man,” Julian said. “Jerry has a bunch of the filthy beasts in the mountains, and he wants to spring them on us. And now he’s fixing the rickety old bridge with a nice bundle of fine Krupp steel. Old Jerry’s using Spain as a bloody lab and he wants to see how his gadgets work.”

“When will this bridge be finished?” he asked because he knew he was supposed to.

“It will be finished three days from today. Today is the thirteenth. And on the sixteenth of June, those tanks will come out of the mountains and they will deploy into an assault formation on the flat plains around Huesca and they will be supported by mechanized eighty-eight-millimeter high-velocity guns and they will chew our militia to pieces. Then they’ll crash through the gates of the city and free it. It will be a great victory for the Fascists. And it will be great victory for the Communists. And we shall pass into history, Comrade Florry.”

“Unless somebody unfinishes that bloody bridge,” said Julian. “Sounds like fun, eh, Stink?”

“Surely this bridge is guarded,” said Florry warily.

“My goodness, yes,” said Steinbach, his good eye wide with astonishment. “The Germans are very thorough, as many of us learned in 1914. They’ve got a special unit of crack troops at the bridge itself as well as a reinforced battalion of very tough Moorish legionnaires bivouacked nearby. But most importantly, they’ve built a concrete bunker at the bridge and fitted it out with a brace of Maxim guns. Any guerrilla attack would fail. And we could never get the Russian bombers to help us by bombing the target.”

“I have a very good idea you’re about to ask me a great favor.”

“Oh, it’s lovely,” said Julian. “Oh, Stinky, you’ll just love it.”

Julian, you idiot, Florry thought. You’ve bought it all, haven’t you? Their propaganda, their insane conviction, their love of themselves and their cause.

“There happen to be in Pamplona two Englishmen in possession of an extraordinary credential. They are representatives of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist Union, on a fact-finding tour in Nationalist territory, and Generalissimo Franco has issued them a carte blanche right-of-travel pass. These two gentlemen may travel unimpeded anywhere they wish in the White zone. Franco himself says it.”

“Imagine,” said Julian, suddenly producing his small.25 automatic, “imagine, Stink, if a sad accident occurred to those two lads and those documents fell into our hands, and we used them to examine this miracle of modern German engineering at the bridge and we just happened to be there when a band of guerrillas led by Lieutenant Portela attacked. And suppose, Stinky, we were able to knock out that gun bunker, so that the guerrillas could come down and plant their lovely little dynamite charges. Poof! As if in a dream, the bridge has vanished and Jerry’s toys are stuck up in the mountains and cannot come to the rescue of Huesca. And the bloody Russian secret policemen in Barcelona have got to explain to their bosses what went wrong.”

“In three bloody days? How? Do we fly?”

“You could make it, Comrade Florry. Just. You leave for the front tomorrow morning. You’ll be there by late afternoon. You cross tomorrow night at nightfall, near Zaragossa. Portela has arranged for a truck to get you into Pamplona by the morning. Sometime that afternoon or in the evening you’ll intercept the two British Fascists. Early the next morning, the morning of the sixteenth, you set out for the bridge by an auto we’ve secured for you. You should make it in three hours. It’s tight, I grant you. But it’s always tight. It was tight in July, when we started this thing. It will be tight till the end.”

“Who are these Englishmen?” asked Florry.

“Chap calling himself Harry Uckley. Ex-British army officer. Actually an Eton man, a few years before us. A footballer, they tell me.”

“From the old school,” said Florry.

“He and a chap called Dyles, sitting pretty as you please in Pamplona with their fine uniforms, hobnobbing with Jerry, guzzling tinto, and chasing the señoritas. Stinky, it’ll be such fun. Do join me. You see, the two who replace the unfortunate Harry and his chum have just got to be old Eton boys. The other Brits in the militia haven’t got the polish. Can you imagine poor Billy Mowry trying to pass at Eton? Good heavens, out of the question.”

“It’s much to ask,” said Steinbach, “but these are hard times. The hardest times, perhaps.”

“It is the right thing, Stink. It really is.”

“A bridge,” said Florry, in private bitterness.

“What say, Stink? What heroes we’ll be. How Sylvia will be impressed with her two brave boyos, and all the rest of the señoritas!” He smiled loonily.

Florry looked at them. Julian, whom he did not know, not really, Portela whom he did not care to know, and finally Steinbach whom he did not like. Fools, all. But he could not face saying no to something Julian had already said yes to. He could not face Sylvia having said no.

Oh, blast, he thought. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“Let’s drop the bastard into the river like a smashed birdcage,” he said.

Later, near eleven, Florry went to her room and knocked.

There was no answer. He knocked again, louder.

After a while, he felt quit idiotic. He went back to his room. But he could not settle down. Where in God’s name was she? He was going off in the morning to risk everything. Where was she?

He went to Julian’s room and knocked. There was no answer. He knew he ought to settle down, what with tomorrow coming. But this business with the girl was going too far. He went down into the lobby.

“Have you seen Miss Lilliford,” he asked the porter, who spoke no English. “Pret-ty la-dy,” he said slowly, as if in adding space between the syllables the man would be able to comprehend him. “Señorita. Mucho bonita señorita.”

“Robert. There you are!”

He turned. The two of them were just coming in.

“We went for a walk. We came looking for you but you’d disappeared.”

“I was in my room.”

“Oh, we thought you’d be in the bar. Time for a last drink, eh?”

“I think not, Julian.”

“Listen, old man, you’ll want to get a good night’s sleep tonight. Busy times ahead.”

“Of course.”

“Well, I must leave you two lovebirds. Goodnight, darling,” he said, and gave Sylvia a kiss.

When Julian had gone, Florry said, “I thought you were coming to my room.”

“I’m sorry. I was on my way when I ran into Julian. Robert, please calm down. You look terribly agitated.”

“Well, where were you? Where did you walk to? What did you―”

“Robert, it was just a stroll. He told me he was leaving tomorrow. And that you were, too. He was very charming but very vague. What on earth is going on?”

“It’s nothing. Yes, we’ve got to go back to the war tomorrow.”

“God, it was over so soon. I’ll miss you both so much. You know, I’ve really had a wonderful time here and―”

“Sylvia, I want to marry you.”

“What?”

“I want to marry you.”

“Robert, don’t be ridiculous. Here? Now? In the middle of this?”

“No, I want you to be my bride.”

“Why, absolutely not. Not until I think about it.”

“We’re going off on a job tomorrow. It’ll be quite dangerous, or so they say. It’s a special thing.”

“For whom?”

“Our old outfit. The POUM people. I can’t tell you more. But I want you to be my wife. I want to marry you when I get back. So that you’ll be mine forever, all right?”

She shook her head in wonder.

“I love you, Sylvia. Do you understand that? Let me tell you, I’m not as charming as he is, but I love you in a way he never will. What he’s good at is getting people to care for him. That’s his special talent. I don’t have it. But in the long run, I’m better for you, Sylvia, don’t you see? Really, I’m―”

“Robert. Please.”

“Do you love him?”

“Yes. But in a different way than I love you. I respect him. It all means so much to him, the revolution, the war. He’s so passionate. That’s a part of his charm.”

“You don’t know him, Sylvia. When he gets bored with you, he’ll cut you loose. He doesn’t really care about other people.”

“Robert, I―”

“Please. I must know. Tell me now. If you want, I’ll go away forever. Just tell me. I can’t stand this business in the middle.”

She looked at him.

“I won’t marry you, Robert, because of Julian. But I shall make love to you. Julian thinks he’s going to die. That is what he told me. I think I’m in love with him, not that it matters to him. But I will make love to you if you promise me you will watch him and protect him on this job coming up tomorrow. I know you want more, but that is the only thing I can give you.”

Their sex had an intensity that was almost brutal. It felt to Florry, after his long hunger and his despair and in his pain, like a battle. It was all muscles and sweat; it was work. He wanted to taste her and he did and it drove her wild, like an animal. He wanted her to taste him and she fought him and he forced her down and made her do it.

When they were done they lay there, smoking cigarettes in the dark. They did not quite touch.

Finally he said, “I love you,” and waited for her to respond and she didn’t.

“I’ve lost you, haven’t I?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know. I’m going to do a lot of thinking. I’ll wait in Barcelona. I have to sort this out.”

“Maybe I’ll get killed and you won’t have to be confused.”

“Don’t talk like such an ass.”

“I think I’m going to my room. I’ve got some plans to make.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to tell Julian about this. I think he should know.”

“All right. Do you want me to come?”

“No. Good-bye, Sylvia. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Florry paused at the door to Julian’s room. Odd, he thought he heard talking.

He waited. No, it was quiet.

He knocked.

“Good God, what fool can be pounding on my door at midnight? Go away, Wee Willie Winkle, the children are fast asleep.”

“Julian, it’s Robert.”

“Stink, there’s plenty of time to talk later.”

“Julian, it’s important.”

“Christ.” There was some stirring inside.

Finally the door opened a bit and Julian, looking frazzled, leaned out. A puff of the warm Mediterranean sea breeze inflated the curtain behind him and mussed his hair.

“Love to have you in, old man, but people would talk. Now what on earth is this?”

“Julian, look, I wanted to tell you. Before tomorrow, before we leave.”

“God, Stink, from the look on your bloody face I believe you have finally succeeded in getting yourself listed ahead of me in Mother’s will.”

“No, Julian, it’s serious.”

“You’ve sprained your thumb and thought better of tomorrow. Odd, I’ve just stubbed a toe and come to the same conclusion. Quite natural, old man, and―”

“Julian, I’ve just come from Sylvia. We’ve been together. Do you see what I’m saying? But I think she would really rather be with you. We’ve actually had a row. I just want you to know.”

“All right, Robert. That’s actually less interesting news to me than you might suppose. Now, good God, go to bed, you fool.”

Florry stood there and started to walk away, thinking about Julian’s luck and his own lack of it. Julian had her and it meant nothing; he’d lost her and it meant everything. He hated Julian for that, most of all: his sublime indifference. And then he noticed what it was that had him feeling odd, feeling peculiar, feeling unsettled about the whole scene.

It was something borne on the sea breeze from Julian’s room.

It was the scent, however diluted, however mixed with other odors, and however much Florry willed it not to be, of peppermint.

Florry stood rooted to the floor. He looked up and down the corridor.

Julian, you filthy bastard, he thought.

And then Florry realized what he must become.

He must become a spy.

He went swiftly to the door next to Julian’s. The hotel was largely empty: the chances were that the room would be empty, too. He tried his own key, which didn’t work. He opened his pocket knife and slipped it into the doorjamb and pushed mightily; the door popped open with a snap. He stepped in, preparing an excuse in case he should have roused someone, but saw instantly the beds were unused and the room immaculate. He pulled the door behind him and walked through the darkness to the balcony. He eased open the french doors and stepped through. Before him, the formal gardens radiated an icy glaze in the patina of the white moon like a dream of a maze. Beyond, the sea, a sheet of dazzled glow, altered its surface microscopically under the pressure of the light. The wind was soft yet sure.

The leap to Julian’s balcony was about six feet and it never occurred to him to look down or to believe he couldn’t make it. He slipped off his shoes, climbed over the railing, hung for just a second as he gauged the distance and prepared his nerve, and then with a mighty push flung himself across the gap, snaring Julian’s railing with his hand and the balcony ledge with his foot. He climbed quietly over, edged along the wall. The door was slightly open.

“You’ve never wavered?”

The bloody voice. Unfilled with jangled Germanisms, unaddled with madness, but the same ― or different. Calm, somehow; the accent vague, the tone sympathetic, assuring, oddly filled with conviction.

“Of course I’ve wavered,” said Julian, distraught. “I’ve hated myself. I revolt myself. Who do you think I am, a bloody saint?”

“No, of course not. You are only another weak man such as myself.”

“Not such as yourself. You’re a bloody inspiration. I’m just sullied flesh.”

“You must be strong.”

“Ah, God.” Julian seemed to arch with agony and disbelief. Florry had never heard him so close to losing control. His voice was full of tremulous emotion.

“You cannot help yourself,” said Levitsky.

“No, I can’t,” said Julian. “I try. But you’ve got me wholly, totally.” He sounded angry now.

“You’ll come in the end to accept your other self, your true self. You’ll see how your mission is the most important part of you. How all the misrepresentations, the lies, the deceits ― how they make you stronger over the longer course. You will understand things you might not otherwise. Your sensitivities are increased, they are keener, more perceptive. It means you are special. You’ll come in the end to define it as a strength.”

Florry could stand no more.

That was it, then ― utterly and irrevocably. Damn them. Damn them both.

He retreated swiftly, slipping back across the gap and quickly put on his shoes. He checked his watch. It was almost one. The car would come at nine tomorrow and by nightfall they’d be off.

It was time at last to read Tristram Shandy.

In the morning, Florry went down to the lobby. Julian and Sylvia were already talking.

“Oh, hullo, Stink. Just saying our good-byes.”

She was watching him talk, her eyes radiant with love and submission. She hardly looked at Florry.

“Well, look, here comes the car and bloody Steinbach and his chum Portela. I suppose I should let you have a last minute alone. May I, Robert?” He kissed Sylvia lightly on the cheek, then backed off. “Good-bye, Sylvia. It was splendid.”

He turned and went out to the car.

“Sylvia, can you do me one favor?” Florry said.

“Yes, Robert.”

“Look here, it’s so silly, I borrowed a copy of Tristram Shandy from this chap Sampson in Barcelona. A newsman of The Times. I know it sounds silly, but I’d like to get it back to him. Do you think you could drop it off? You’d find him at the Café de las Ramblas.”

“Yes, Robert, of course.”

“Thank you. And I shall see you ― ah, the week of the twentieth, shall we say? At the Grand Oriente. At eleven in the morning? Tuesday, shall we say?”

“Yes. I’ll be there.”

He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her.

“This would be so much bloody easier if I didn’t love you so much.”

“I wish I loved you the way you require, Robert. I wish you didn’t feel you had to own me. Watch after yourself. Watch after Julian.”

Florry turned and left for the car. He would not look back. He could feel his Webley against his side in the shoulder holster. He’d oiled and cleaned it. And loaded it.

23 ¡VIVA LA ANARQUÍA!

Levitsky sat in the square at the café. He was very tired. He ordered a cup of café con leche. He looked about. It could have been any village in Spain. It was called Cabrillo de Mar, about ten miles out of Salou on the road to Lerida. Soon a Twenty-ninth Division staff car that would be taking Florry and Julian Raines on their mission would pass through the village on the way toward the front.

He was so tired of traveling. Yet there was one last thing to do.

The coffee arrived. He poured the milk into it, mixed it until it was thick, and then took a sip: delicious. As you get old, certain comforts matter more.

You should get going, he told himself. Back to Barcelona. Finish it. Why wait?

I wait because I am tired. And because I must see.

Go on, old man. Leave.

No. He had to see the car and know they were off. It was the old empiricist in him, that unwillingness to trust what he hadn’t observed. He wondered when he would feel the triumph. Or would he feel it at all? He had done it, after all; but at such cost.

Sacrifices. Old man, you are the master of sacrifice. Let no man ever say the Devil Himself doesn’t understand two things: the theory of history and the theory of sacrifice. However, perhaps in this century they are the same.

He felt eyes on him and looked up. A member of the Guardia Civil was headed toward him. It was a pockmarked boy with a Labora machine pistol slung over his shoulder. He wore a khaki mono and a gorilla cap with a red star on it. He looked stupid.

“Salud, comrade,” called Levitsky.

The boy regarded him, and Levitsky, bleary eyed, could feel the hate. What was it, the battered way he looked? The smell of peppermint? His clear foreignness?

“Your papers, comrade,” said the boy.

Levitsky got out a passport.

“A foreigner?”

“Yes, I’m an international,” Levitsky said, and knew instantly he’d blundered.

“Are you English? Russian?” asked the boy.

“No, comrade. Polish.”

“I think you’re Russian.”

“No. No, comrade. Long live the revolution. I’m Polish.”

“No, I think you’re a Russian.” He swung the machine pistol over onto him.

“Hands up,” he said. “You’re a Russian, here to take over. Get going.” The gun muzzle looked big as a church bell.

Levitsky rose. The boy walked him across the square.

The boy seemed to hate Russians for some reason. Or perhaps it was something else: he had just wanted to parade somebody through the square at gunpoint with his shiny new weapon to show off for the girls of the town.

As he walked he could sense something odd about this place: the slogans smeared on the stucco walls in the hot sun had a kind of stridency to them he hadn’t noticed in other such villages. He translated.

He soon found himself in the Guardia Civil station ― or what had once been a Guardia Civil station and was now littered and looted and clearly in the possession of some sort of People’s Committee for Order. The boy put him in the one cell of the dirty little building overlooking the square.

They were waiting, the boy had explained, for the sargento, who would take care of everything. Levitsky told himself he really ought to get some sleep. You’re an old man, comrade, he thought. Almost sixty; you’ve still got something to do. You need your rest.

And thus he was situated when a car did in fact appear in the square. It was not, however, the car he expected; it was another vehicle altogether, and when it drew to a halt and its door popped open, two thuggish Spaniards in overcoats got out, checked around, and nodded into its dark interior. Comrade Bolodin emerged.

Levitsky drew back. Trapped.

As the two thugs came inside, Levitsky quickly dropped to the straw bunk and turned toward the wall, wrapping himself in the blanket. He heard the two newcomers arguing with the boy. The men kept saying SIM, SIM, over and over. No, the boy kept saying, FIJL, which was the Federación Iberia de Juventudes Liberatatión, the radical anarchist youth organization.

The boy, in short, wouldn’t listen to them because they were the enemy, here to take over the revolution from the people in this small seacoast village.

“Sargento,” he kept saying. “Sargento.”

The two men after a time returned to the car, and Levitsky heard one of them speak in heavily accented English to Bolodin.

“Señor Boss, this snot-nose kid, he say is nothing he can do until his sergeant come.”

“Christ,” said Bolodin. “You show him the picture?”

“Boss, this kid, he is having a machine gun. Is no toy.”

“You moron. I ought to turn him loose on you.”

“Sorry, Comrade Boss.”

“Don’t ‘Sorry, Comrade Boss’ me. I didn’t drive here half the night from Tarragona for the old goat to hear you say you were sorry. Just get over there and wait.”

Levitsky was impressed. Bolodin had penetrated his own motives and taken his inquiries to the hospital, on the belief that Levitsky would be hanging around wounded Englishmen. Now he was up here on the road to Cab de Salou showing the picture of Levitsky from Deutsche Schachzeitung. If he showed it to the boy …

They walked over to the café and commandeered a table near the sidewalk. Levitsky watched as Bolodin put his feet up on the railing and pulled out a brightly colored pack of cigarettes, plucked one out, and quickly lit it. He did not offer smokes to his companions, who sat on either side with the nervous alertness of bodyguards.

Levitsky looked at his watch. It was about nine thirty. The boy said the sergeant came in at ten. He looked around the cell for a way out and could see none. The boy sat in the front room with his machine pistol. He looked straight ahead.

Another locked room. As if the first weren’t terror enough, he had to play the same ―

“Boy. Hey, boy. Come here,” Levitsky called.

The boy grabbed his weapon and came back. He had sullen, stupid eyes and seemed bull-headedly frightened of making a mistake. His khaki uniform was too big; still, he was lucky to be here, and not out in the trenches somewhere, or caught by opposing factionalists and stood against the wall.

“Durutti?” Levitsky suddenly asked, naming the Anarchist hero killed leading a column of Anarchist troops in the Battle of Madrid late last year.

The boy looked at him suspiciously.

“Sí, Durutti,” he said.

“¡Viva Durutti!” said Levitsky with enthusiasm. He gave the Anarchist’s double-fisted salute. He’d actually known this Durutti in Moscow in 1935 at the Lux. The man was a hopeless dreamer and lunatic, exactly the sort of uncontrollable rogue who’d become a great hero in the civil war, but utterly worthless at any other time. The Anarchists were all like that: wedded to absurd notions of a stateless society.

“You’re an Anarchist, no?” he asked.

“Sí, I’m an Anarchist. Long live Anarchism. Death to the state!” proclaimed the boy.

Levitsky saw just the slightest chance.

“I’m an Anarchist also,” he said carefully, hoping his Spanish was right.

“No,” said the boy. “Russians can’t be Anarchists. Russians are all gangsters. Stalin is the head gangster.”

“I’m Polish,” said Levitsky. “A Polish Anarchist.”

The boy looked at him darkly.

“Revolución sí, la guerra no,” Levitsky added, hoping again to approximate the idea of the Durutti slogan.

“Sí,” said the boy.

“Comrade,” said Levitsky. “Por favor. Look at this.” He smiled slyly.

He rolled up his sleeve, past the elbow. There on his right biceps a black fist clenched in ardent fury, ready to smite the governments and policemen of the world. The tattoo dated from 1911. He and several others of the Party had been trying to organize the Trieste millworkers but at every step of the way they were opposed by an Anarchist organization that loathed Bolsheviks. Levitsky had been directed to stop them, for their irresponsibility could so enflame the policemen of the Continent that revolutionary activity would be impossible for months. He’d penetrated their secret society under an alias and been tattooed with the black fist as part of his rite of passage. When after months of careful maneuver he had finally met the ringleaders in a Trieste café, he’d betrayed them to the police. They were taken off and most of them had died in prison.

The boy looked at the mark on his arm, his eyes widening in wonder.

“Salud, comrade,” said the boy.

“Sí. I salute. I salute Bakunin. I salute the great Durutti. I salute Anarchism!”

The boy went and got a key and opened the door and embraced him.

“Está libre, hermano,” the boy said. “¡Libre!” Free, he was saying. “One Anarchist may not lock up another Anarchist. Está libre. ¡Viva la anarquía!”

Levitsky could see the American Bolodin through the open doorway, sitting at the café, and beyond that he could see an elderly man in Guardia Civil uniform head across the square, and at that same moment, a black Ford, the Twenty-ninth Division staff car, with Julian Raines and Robert Florry in the rear, pulled through the square and disappeared down the road and out of town.

“¡Viva la anarquía!” said Levitsky, and he meant it, for dark forces had been loosed in the world.

He embraced the boy and, seconds later, slipped out.

24 TRISTRAM SHANDY

The major was extremely nervous. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t sit still, he couldn’t take tea. His stomach felt sour and uneasy: dyspepsia, that scourge of the office animal. By the end he had given up all pretense of organized activity and simply stood at the window, looking down the five floors in late afternoon to the street. He stood there for several hours. He felt if he moved he would somehow curse his enterprise and fate it to catastrophe.

Finally, the black car pulled up and he watched as the queer, eager figure of Mr. Vane popped out. Vane moved with appropriate dispatch into the building. The major thought his heart would burst, but at the same time he felt the killing imperative to maintain a certain formality for the proceedings. Thus he seated himself at his desk, turned on the light, took out and opened his fountain pen, removed from the rubble a sheet of paper, and began to doodle. He drew pictures of flowers. Daffodils. He could draw beautiful daffodils.

He heard the opening of the lift and the slow, almost stately progress of Mr. Vane, who advanced upon him as a glacier must have moved down from the Pole during the Age of Ice. At last the door to the outer office opened; there was a pause while the orderly and precise Mr. Vane took off his coat, hung it on a hanger ― buttoning the top button, of course, for the proper fall of the garment ― and hung the hanger on the rack; then put his jaunty little Tyrolean in his desk drawer, the second one on the right-hand side.

“Sir. Major Holly-Browning?” The man stood in the doorway with the practiced diffidence of a eunuch in a harem.

“What! Oh, I say, Vane, I didn’t hear you come in. You gave me a start. Back already, then?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, that’s fine. Any difficulty?”

“No sir. Well, actually, sir, the plane from Barcelona was slow in getting off the ground. Then I must say I had crisp words with an F.O. chap at Heathrow who insisted that he take the pouch all the way to Whitehall before opening it.”

“You should have called me.”

“I prevailed, sir.”

“Then you’ve got it?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, why don’t you set it on the table? Then perhaps you’d like to freshen up, perhaps get a bite. I want to finish this damned report before I get to it.”

“Yessir. Here it is then, sir. I’ll be back shortly. Please feel free to call me if you want anything.”

“Yes, Vane. Very good.”

Vane set the thing on the table near the window. He turned and left and the major did not look up to watch him. He listened to him leave. He continued to play at working for some minutes. He told himself he would wait fifteen minutes. He did not want to rush, to queer the thing with impatience. He had waited quite a bit, after all.

The last observation had the effect of sending him back. He set the pen down. The daffodils were forgotten. He remembered the dark cellar of the Lubyanka in the year 1923.

He remembered the Russian sitting across from him, the eyes bright with intelligence and sympathy. It had been a brilliant, patient performance, seductive and terrifying. Levitsky had invited Holly-Browning to resist, to argue; and each argument had been gently and delicately deflected. The man was a genius of conviction; he had that radiant, enveloping charm that reaches out through the brain and to the heart; it enters and commands.

It was very late in the interrogation, and Holly-Browning was reduced to bromides.

“The British Empire is the most benevolent and compassionate in the history of the world,” he recalled saying, filled with exhaustion and regret.

The Russian listened, seemed to pause and reflect.

“I would never deny that. Of course it is. Yet are you not being awfully easy on yourself? Are you really willing to examine the reality of it for another point of view? I think you may find the results intriguing.”

The first betrayal had been a betrayal of the imagination. Yes, with Levitsky as his guide, the major had allowed himself to imagine: imagine the Raj from the point of view of a Hong Kong coolie, making do with eleven children on less than a penny a day; or imagine the world of Johnny Sepoy, sent around the globe to die for a king he didn’t know, a faith he couldn’t understand, an officer he didn’t respect, and five rupees a week; or a textile worker, breathing the dust of a Leeds woolen mill, his lungs blacking up, coughing blood at thirty, dead at thirty-five; or …

“The realities of empire,” said Levitsky, “are considerably different depending upon one’s proximity to the apex of the pyramid of power.” He smiled. Warmth and love poured from his eyes. He touched the major on the shoulder. The major loved the touch. He loved the strength and the courage of the man, he loved him in the way that soldiers in a trench for months on end can come to love one another, in a sacred, not profanely physical, way. Their ordeal in the cellar had joined them.

“I can feel you trying to understand,” said Levitsky. “It takes a heroic amount of will. You’re probably the bravest man in the world, James; you’ve faced death in battle a hundred, a thousand times. Yet what you do now, that is bravery, bravery of the will.”

The major felt the passionate urge to surrender to the man. It was so very late and they had been together for so very long.

“Think about it. You have been offered a chance to join an elite. One does not look twice at an offer to join an elite, and to live a life untainted by corruption and exploitation. It’s a powerful elixir.”

The truth is, as Major Holly-Browning knew, most men are willing to be spies against their own country. In his way, Julian is not so extraordinary after all; treason, in its way, is quite banal. A careful recruiter, a Levitsky, nursing the grudge and resentment that all men quite naturally feel toward their social betters and toward the freaks of circumstance and luck that explain triumph and failure in the world, can take a clerk and manufacture a spy in a weekend.

The shame began to suffuse the major. He could feel it building. He was so ashamed. He had been so weak. He had yielded.

“Yes,” Major Holly-Browning had said to Levitsky in the cellar of the Lubyanka at the end of their very long trip together in 1923, “Yes. I will do it. I will spy for you.” When he spoke, he believed it. At the center of his being, in his heart, in his brain, in his soul: he believed it.

The escape, coming by freak luck the next day, changed nothing. When eventually, after a series of colorful but now almost completely forgotten adventures, the major reached home, he had taken a convalescent leave and gone to the hills of Scotland and lived like a hermit in a cottage high up for a year. It was a place without mirrors. For a long time, the major could not deal with the image of his own face.

Now at last, with a timeless sigh, the slow and easeful acceptance of the firing squad by its victim, he rose and with exaggerated calmness walked to the table. He seated himself and looked at the object.

It was Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne.

The major reached up to the lamp, deftly unscrewed and removed the bolt holding tight the shade, then removed the shade. He snapped the light on, filling the normally dark old office with unpleasantly harsh light.

He found a piece of paper, took out his fountain pen. He held the book in his hands and looked at it for some time, trying to remain calm.

Am I here?

Levitsky, am I here at last?

He opened the book to the front endpaper, where Florry had written his signature and a date, January 4, 1931, thus informing the major he had chosen to start at and use the key of four.

The major opened up the book to. He bent the covers back against the spine, feeling it break. With a straight razor he sliced the page away from the others and held it up to the blinding light from the bulb. Like a star over Bethlehem, a tiny flash winked at the major. It was a pinhole under the letter L.

The major wrote down the letter L. He turned four pages further into the volume and repeated the process. This time, the tiny, almost imperceptible perforation denoted the letter E.

The next letter located was V. And then an I.

“Damned queer,” said Major Holly-Browning. “I should feel joy. Or some such. Triumph. The lightening of the load, all that. Instead, I’m just damned tired.” He had no desire to do anything at all, much less share his triumph with his new partners at MI-5.

“Can I get you some tea, sir?” said Vane.

“No. I think I’ll have some brandy. And I’ll get it. Do sit down, Vane, I insist.”

“Yessir.”

Vane primly arranged himself on the sofa, a study in rectitudinous angles. Holly-Browning rose, feeling the creak and snap in his joints of so much recent disuse, and went to his side table, opened the drawer. But suddenly, he didn’t feel like brandy. He wanted something stronger. He removed a bottle of Bushmill’s and poured two rather large whiskeys.

“There,” he said to Vane.

“But sir―”

“No. I insist. Whiskey, Vane. It’s a celebration.”

“Yessir.”

“Vane, I want you to look at this.”

“Yessir.”

He handed over the sheet to Vane, who read it quickly.

“Well, sir, I should guess that ties it.”

“Yes, it’s what we’ve been looking for: the final, the irrefutable piece of evidence. The last chink in the wall. Florry spotted Raines reporting to his Russian case officer, overheard the conversation, and took notes. Damned fine job, Florry. Florry worked out, Vane, you know he did.”

“Yet sir, if I may, it seems to me we got awfully good service out of our man in Barcelona. Young Sampson.”

“Er, yes, Vane. I suppose I shall have to recommend that he come aboard full time now.”

“Who knows, major? He could end up sitting in your chair someday.”

“Not too bloody soon, I trust, Vane,” said Holly-Browning.

But Vane had lurched on to another topic. “I say, sir, Florry says here, ‘Step to be taken.’ What can that mean?”

“You know damned well what it means, Vane.”

“It’s bloody brilliant, sir. You took a vague young fool and made an assassin of him inside a half-year.”

“So I did, Vane. So I did.”

“I say, sir, could I have another few drops of the bloody whiskey? Crikey, it’s like an old friend coming home after the war, the taste of it.”

“Er, yes, Vane. Please, help yourself.”

Vane went and poured himself a tot, swigged it down aggressively.

He turned. The major had never seen him quite so flushed and mussed before.

“Here’s to hell, sir. Where all the bloody-fookin’ traitors belong so as to roast on a spit into eternity. We sent him there, by damn, and by damn I’m proud to be a bloody-fookin’ part of it. And here’s to Major Jim Holly-Browning, best bloody-fookin’ spy-catcher there ever was.” He laughed abrasively.

“Do you know, Vane, I believe I’ll drink to that,” said Major Holly-Browning.

Levitsky, he thought.

It started in the Lubyanka in 1923. Now on Broadway in 1937, I’ve finished it.

Levitsky: I’ve won.

25 BEHIND THE LINES

There,” said Portela. “Do you see it?”

Florry lay on the pine-needled floor of the forest and studied the Fascist lines across the valley in the fading light. With his German binoculars, he conjured up from the blur a distinct view of the trench running in the low hills, the odd outpost or breastwork. But the terrain was generally bleak and scorched; it had the look of wasted, untilled land, its farmers fled as if from plague.

“It’s quiet here,” said Portela, “with all the fighting up around Huesca or down near Madrid. This is where I cross. Zaragossa is not far. My people wait in the hills beyond. You’ll see, comrades.”

“Good show,” said Julian, theatrically chipper. He stood in the trees like one of Our Gallant Lads at the Front in a 1915 West End melodrama. He had been in such a mood since they left, hearty, solicitous, irrepressibly British. He was almost hysterical with charm.

“Time to go, comrade?” he called to Portela cheerfully. “My bags are all packed.”

“Comrade Julian, you are like a hungry dog. I’ve never seen a man so eager. But we must wait until the night.”

“Blast!” said Julian. “Stink and I want to get cracking here, eh, Stink? Have at the beggars, over the top, that sort of thing.”

Carrying on like a child. Performing antically for anyone who would pay him the faintest attention. Being Brilliant Julian on the center of a stage designed for him and him alone.

Florry issued a deeply insincere smile, as if he, too, were richly amused with Brilliant Julian, but he was so poor an actor he could find no words to speak, out of fear of speaking them transparently. Instead, he turned his back, using his pack as a sort of pillow. He could see through the pine needles above a patch of sweet, crisp blue sky. He hunkered against his pack, thinking how odd it was to be wearing a peasant’s rough garb and boots and be sleeping on a pack that contained a Burberry, a blue suit, and a pair of black brogues. Soon he had fallen asleep.

“Robert?”

Florry started. Julian loomed over him, staring intensely.

“Yes, old man?”

“Look, I want to say something.”

“Yes?”

“Portela’s sleeping. That man can sleep anywhere. Look, old boy, I’ve got an awfully queasy feeling that my luck’s run its string. I don’t think I’m going to make it back.”

You swine, thought Florry. You deserve an award for your performance rather than the four-five-five I’m going to put in your head.

“You’ll make it. The bullet hasn’t been made that could bring down the brilliant Julian.”

“No, no. And my feelings are never wrong about these things. You will. I won’t. Somehow this little gimcrack” ― he held out his father’s wedding ring on its chain ― “has lost its charm. I can feel it. I know it. ‘Pons’ shall go forever unfinished.”

He smiled. His teeth were white and beautiful, his face grave and handsome. He had such high, fine cheekbones and glittery blue eyes. Julian, we mere mortals peep about your bloody ankles.

“I wanted to tell you about Sylvia. I want it straight between us. Do you understand there’s nothing between us? She’s yours. I’d never touch her, is that understood? The two of you: it’s so right.”

“Yes, Julian. Yes, I do understand.”

And Florry did. For he knew that Julian could not betray him for love. But as for politics, that was something else. For Florry, over the long day’s drive, had finally reached the final implication of Julian’s treachery. The bridge attack would fail. And that meant Florry would die. Julian would kill him. Even now as he addresses me, he addresses me as the executioner talking to the victim, assuring him that the drop of the gallows trap is nothing personal, but purely in the best interests of the Party.

“Good, chum,” said Julian. “And when I’m gone, you remember that.”

“I will, Julian,” said Florry, “I will.”

You bastard, he thought, surprised himself at the cold loathing he felt. You betrayed me at school. You betrayed me with Sylvia. Now you will betray me at the bridge. The difference is that I know it this time and I will stop you.

“Sylvia deserves somebody dogged and solid with virtue. And that’s you and it’s grand. Be good to her.”

“I’m sure in twenty years we’ll all get together at the Savoy over cocktails and laugh about this conversation.”

“I’m sure we won’t, ” said Julian.

They crouched in the forest. It was time. Florry found himself breathing heavily.

“Comrades,” said Portela, who had blacked his face out under his black beret. He carried an American Thompson gun. “For you,” he said. “Salud.” He got a flask out from under his cape and handed it over. “From Comrade Steinbach. For the English dynamiters.”

He handed it to Julian, who sniffed at the snout voluptuously. “God, lovely. Whiskey. Wonderful English whiskey. Bushmill’s, I believe. To the bloody future,” he toasted, taking a bolt, “that ugly whore.” He handed the flask to Florry.

Florry threw down a swallow. It was like the brown smoke from a thousand English hearths.

“Shall we go then, lads?” said Julian, and they were off.

Portela led them down the slope and out into no-man’s-land. A mist had risen, and the three men seemed to wade through it. Oddly, up above, the stars were clear and sharp, shreds and flecks of far-off, remote light. Florry was last in the file. He had the Webley in his hand, and a four-five-five in each chamber. He was just behind Julian.

Wait till you get beyond the lines. Wait till Portela leaves you. Wait till you get to the truck. Wait till you’ve changed into your fine English suit. Wait till you’re in the truck and setting off to Pamplona. Then lift and fire. Clean. Into the back of the head. It’ll be much easier than the boy in the trench.

Then what? he wondered.

Then you go on. To the bridge.

That’s absurd.

They waded through the mist. The silence fell upon them heavily. The mist nipped and bobbed at his knees. Portela halted suddenly, turning, and waved them down.

Florry knelt, sinking into the mist. For a second, all was silent and still. Then there came the low slush of boots pushing their way through the wet, high grass, and Florry made out the shape of a soldier ― no, another, three, four! ― advancing toward them in the fog. They were Fascists on patrol, somber men in great coats with German helmets and long Mausers with bayonets. Florry tried to sink lower into the earth, but the men continued their advance, gripping their rifles tightly, their eyes peering about. Florry thought of Julian: had he somehow alerted the NKVD who had in turn alerted the Fascists?

If they find us, Julian, I’ll kill you here, he thought, his hand tightening on the bulky revolver.

It was ghastly, almost an apparition, like a post patrol in some Great War legend, the tall soldiers isolated in the rolling white fog. Florry suddenly saw that they were Moorish legionnaires, huge, handsomely formed men, with cheekbones like granite and eyes like obsidian. Savages. They’d just as soon cut your guts up as look at you. They preferred the bayonet. At Badajoz, they’d put thousands to the blade, or so the propaganda insisted.

Florry gripped his Webley so tight he thought he’d smash it: what an opportunity for Julian, and so early on! A single noise, a cough, the smallest twitch, and the bloody thing was over. Florry brought the revolver to bear in the general direction of Julian. If Julian made a noise, he’d ―

He heard the footfalls growing louder.

He could hear them talking in Arabic. They laughed among themselves only feet away, and Florry fancied he could smell the cheap red wine on their breath.

They halted fifteen feet off.

More laughter.

More chatter.

Florry could feel his heart beating like a cylinder in an engine block. The sweat ran hotly down his face, though the night was cool. He lay hunched on the mist, and its moisture soaked him; he could see the damned glow of the Webley barrel.

The soldiers laughed again, and then began to move away. In minutes they had vanished altogether.

Florry felt a stream of air whistle out of his mouth in pure animal relief. He thought he might begin to tremble so hard he couldn’t move. But before him first Portela with his Thompson and then Julian with his small.25 automatic rose. He came off his knees and creakily climbed to his feet. Julian flashed the old Great War high sign: thumbs up, chum.

Portela began to move up the slope and the two Englishmen followed. In the fog they stayed closer together and Portela motioned for them to hurry. They seemed to be walking in milk and Florry had lost all contact with where they were. Had they reached the Fascist line yet? Shouldn’t they be crawling? What was going on?

Suddenly there was a noise. They sank back into the fog again.

There was the chink of something falling and some laughter. Then Florry heard the sound of running water ― it was a man nearby pissing in the fog.

Something tapped his shoulder: Portela, gesturing him to rise quietly. Florry stood and the three began to walk swiftly ahead. They were on flat ground, it seemed, and ―

They were in the yard of a small house.

“¿Quién está?” came a call.

“Perdón,” Portela answered. “Estamos perdidos. Somos de la Tenth Division.”

“Ha!”

A man leaned out the open window, a cigarette in his mouth.

He yelled something Florry couldn’t follow.

Portela yelled back. The two argued back and forth for some time.

Suddenly another voice screamed out.

“¡Hombres! Calláos, carrajo! ¿Qué pensáis, que es una fiesta?”

The first man said something under his breath. Portela muttered a reply. The two conversed in low tones.

“¿Jode Chingas las muchachas en Zaragoza por mí, ¿eh, amigo? Hay unas guapas allí.”

“Tendré los ojos abiertos,” called back Portela. “Les diré su mensaje.”

“Adiós, amigo.”

“Sí. Adiós, amigo,” called back Portela, and began to walk smartly away. Florry and Julian hastened after.

From inside the hut came the sound of raucous, dirty laughing.

They walked on, climbing a low stone wall, until they found themselves in an orchard. Portela took them down its ghastly ranks, around some deserted buildings, and down at last a road. They halted in the lee of a wall.

“¡Por Dios!” said Portela, crossing himself several times feverishly. “My prayers were answered tonight.”

“I didn’t think you were quite allowed to pray, old man,” said Julian. “That’s for the other side.”

“I have been an atheist since 1927,” Portela said, “but on this night we needed the help of God, and so we got it.”

“How extraordinary,” said Julian. “Do you mean there was actually danger involved in all that?”

“I thought once we passed the patrol we were behind the lines. But then I took us straight to their company headquarters. ‘Hey, where you go?’ a fellow asks me. ‘To Zargossa,’ I tell him. ‘Many pretty girls there.’ ‘You lucky you got leave,’ he says. ‘Fuck one for me.’ ‘You men, shut your mouths,’ yelled the major. God in heaven.”

“Good heavens,” said Julian. “I thought it was all arranged.”

“Come, the trucks are this way.”

Florry slid the revolver out of its holster. It was just a matter of time now. Surprisingly, what worried him most was explaining it all to Portela. He knew he could do the thing: raise the pistol, fire it into the back of the head. Once you have shot a man in the face, you can do most anything.

They reached a farmyard.

Florry saw two trucks.

What ―

“Well, old man, looks like we won’t be able to tell school stories on the way into Pamplona. Ta-ta.” And with that, Julian scurried off.

“It’s safer,” said Portela. “This way at least one man gets through, no?”

“Y-yes,” Florry heard himself saying, as he watched Julian climbing into the rear of the first truck. “Much safer.”

26 THE CLUB CHICAGO

It took Levitsky nearly a full day to get back to Barcelona, and nearly five hours into the evening ― it was the evening of the fifteenth ― until he found the man that he needed.

He began his search in the Barrio Chino, among the gaudy prostitutes and the cheap nightclubs that plied their trade regardless of the official revolutionary austerity imposed on the city. Levitsky was not interested in women, however, or in companionship of any sort. Bolodin would know he had just missed his quarry at Cabrillo del Mar; he would certainly deduce that the running man would seek safety in the one city he knew. Levitsky estimated that he had very little time left.

The wolf is near, he thought.

A girl came and sat at his table in the Club Chicago.

“Salud, comrade,” she said.

She asked him a question in Spanish.

“Inglés, por favor,” he said.

“Sure. Inglés. You wish a girl for the night? Me, maybe? Some good tricks I know.”

“No. But I have some money for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes. Listen carefully. Now, in the time of the revolution, you have been liberated. You work for yourself, correct?”

“I am a free worker.”

“But it was not always so. It was not so before July. Once you worked for a man. A certain man controlled you and all the ladies.”

“Before July.”

“Yes. Before July.”

“Suppose it were so?”

“Suppose this man had a name.”

“He was called only the Aegean.”

“The Aegean is gone?”

“Who knows?”

“This man would leave all he had built up? He would leave it?”

“Leave it or die. His kind was placed before walls in the early days of July and shot.”

“You say he is gone. Yet oddly a ship full of illegal cigarettes attempted to reach Barcelona in January. It was sunk by the Italians. Yet clearly the owner of the ship hoped to make a great deal of money from the contraband. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing this Aegean chap might be interested in. So perhaps this fellow isn’t as far gone as you maintain.”

“I know nothing of such things.”

“And the man who owned that ship. It is said in some quarters that he owned this place ― and other places in the barrio.”

“Who is asking these questions?”

“Perhaps this fifty-peseta note will convince of my friendship.”

She took the bill and stuffed it down between her breasts.

“So. A friend.”

“I have something to sell him. But it must be tonight. If it’s not tonight, it has no value. It could make him a very important man in times to come. And it could make the girl who helps him very important in times to come.”

“I’ll be back. I must talk to someone.”

He took out a five-hundred-peseta note, tore it in half, and gave her one piece.

“Show him this. And you get the other,” he said, “when I meet the Aegean comrade.”

Levitsky then sat alone for a time. Two other tarts came by; he shooed them away and ordered another peppermint schnapps.

At last the girl returned.

“Upstairs,” she said. “And you better not be carrying no gun or knife or they’ll cut you open.”

“Salud,” he said.

“My money, comrade.”

He tore the remaining half in half again, and gave it to her. “You get the last piece when I get there.”

They went in the back and up the steps into a decrepit hall leading to a small room.

“The man you seek is behind the door. My money.”

He gave it to her and she left quickly.

Levitsky opened the door and stepped into darkness. A light hit him in the eyes. He heard an automatic pistol cock.

“Search him and check his wallet,” the voice commanded.

A form approached, patted him down, and quickly relieved him of his money.

“You are a very rich man in these revolutionary times,” said the voice. “Don’t you know that capital is against the spirit of the people?”

“An astute man flourishes in any climate,” said Levitsky.

“So he does. It’s said some weeks ago a certain bold man came to possess a great many identification documents obtained illegally from particular foreign visitors to this country. Some of these documents were sold on the black market for a considerable sum. But you would know nothing of this?”

“How would a poor man such as I know anything of these criminal matters?”

“Perhaps the purchaser of the documents marked the bills with which he paid the anonymous seller. And perhaps the first piece of the bill you gave the girl had the mark.”

“What an amazing coincidence,” said Levitsky.

“It’s said the man removed these documents from the headquarters of the head Russian stooge policeman. I would like to meet this man.”

“He must be an amazing chap,” said Levitsky. “Imagine walking out of the main police station with twenty-eight confiscated passports under the names Krivitsky, Tchiterine, Ver Steeg, Malovna, Schramfelt, Steinberg, Ulasowicz―”

“Very impressive memory.”

“Thank you, comrade.”

“You perhaps have more documents? A very lucrative market. The hills of Barcelona are loaded with aristocrats in hiding who desperately need new identities.”

“Alas, I have no documents today. I have not paid a visit to the police station lately and have no plans to do so in the future. What I have, rather, is a scrap of information.”

“For sale?”

“You would not trust anything given as a present.”

“Probably I would not.”

“I am told that there is in Barcelona a sinister underground antirevolutionary organization called the White Cross. It’s said the White Cross may have ways of reaching Generalissimo Franco’s intelligence staff via a hidden wireless.”

“I, too, have heard of such an organization. They would pay dearly for crucial military information that an astute man had gathered.”

“Yes, they would. I have something to sell you for ten thousand pesetas that you may sell an hour hence to the White Cross for one hundred thousand pesetas, assuming, of course, you have ways of reaching the White Cross.”

“There are always ways, señor. But how can I trust you?”

“Play my trick on me. Give me half the money. That is, literally, half. If you fail to make a sale to the White Cross, you can come take it from me and kill me. I’ll wait downstairs. If you can sell it, come to me with the money.”

“And why should I not simply take your information and kill you without paying you?”

“Because you would have to tear it from my heart. And you do not have time to do so this night.”

There was a long pause.

“Pedro,” the voice behind the light finally directed. “The money. As he says.”

There was shuffling in the darkness, and the sound of bills being peeled out and torn. It took a few minutes. Then, with a slithering sound, the packet of bills slid across the floor to his feet. Levitsky bent, picked up the wad, made a quick show of counting it off.

He smiled. “I’m sure your friends in the White Cross will be pleased to inform General Franco’s intelligence staff that at quarter to noon tomorrow, sixteen June, two English dynamiters traveling under stolen identity papers in the names of Uckley and Dyles will be present at the new tank bridge at kilometer 132 on the road between Pamplona and Huesca. The point of their presence is to sabotage the gun position for a guerilla attack on the bridge. And at one that same afternoon, the soldiers of the POUM and the UGT and the FAI militias will make another assault on the city of Huesca.”

Julian had told him. And now Julian must die.

Levitsky sat downstairs, having another peppermint schnapps. He felt exhausted. The goal glimpsed that evening in Moscow when his strange companion let slip the information of Lemontov’s defection had at last been achieved. What GRU wanted, GRU had gotten. What happened now ― to anybody ― did not matter. Levitsky, however, strangely took no pleasure in it. He didn’t feel anything except hollowness. He felt, if anything, only old.

It’s getting to you, old man.

Levitsky had not wept in years. Yet he found a last old tear in his dry bones for the dead: Julian and poor Florry. Igenko. The Anarchists in Trieste. Foolish old Witte. Tchiterine. Maybe worst of all his father, dead and gone these many years, slaughtered by Cossacks in the time before there was time.

Tata. Salud. You were a man.

He had another swallow of the schnapps. He was turning into an old shikker, boring and stupid and sentimental, an old fool. It was as if the discipline, the passion, the absolute fury of a life had at last spent itself, leaving nothing.

Then he realized with a start that tomorrow, June 16, was his birthday. He would be sixty years old.

“Old one.”

Levitsky looked up into a set of dark features, smooth and sleek and Mediterranean. “You are right. Our friends were quite impressed. Here is your money.”

“Fuck your money,” said Levitsky.

“And here’s an old friend of yours,” said the Aegean, laughing.

“Hello, old putz. I got you at last.”

Levitsky looked into the face of Comrade Bolodin and then two men grabbed him and took him.

27 PAMPLONA

Julian stood in the immaculate circular park where the Avenida de Carlos III and the Avenida de la Baja intersected in the lovely center of the Carlist city of Pamplona. It was midafternoon, June 15, a glorious day. The sky was Spanish blue, subtly different from English blue in that it is paler, flatter, less voluptuous, more highly polished.

“Sieg heil,” said Julian, enjoying the theatricality of it, to a fair-haired, blue-eyed young chap who was but one of the dozens of Pamplona Germans, all sleek, smooth-looking professional soldiers with glorious suntans in the crisp blue uniforms of the Condor Legion Panzer companies.

Florry sat on the bench in the park not far from where his partner flirted with the young Jerry, and loathed himself. Another bloody failure. Julian had not come in gun range since they’d separated, until now, except that he was also within gun range of the entire Condor Legion as well. God damn you, Julian Raines, and your absurd lucky ring around your neck: it seemed to sum him up, that foolish talisman against the vicissitudes of reality. Julian believed in it, and in believing in it, seemed to force the world to believe in it.

Florry watched intently. It was not particularly amazing that Julian could speak so passionately with the young German. To begin with, his German was brilliant and he was himself blond and blue-eyed; but perhaps more important was the force of his performance. It was not just that he was now scrubbed and combed, in a beautiful double-breasted gray pinstripe suit, but it was something deeper. He was too pitch perfect and nuance pure for fiction or artifice. He was not, really, acting. He had simply willed himself to become a new and different man on the streets of Pamplona.

After a while, Julian began to show off. He offered the young man a cigarette, lit it for him with his Dunhill, and made humorous observations at which the German laughed heartily. He had even found a pipe someplace, and he gestured emphatically with it.

God, thought Florry.

After a time, Julian and the young officer shook hands, threw each other a gross deutscher salute, and walked amiably away from each other. Julian returned and sat down.

“Interesting chap. Says the Jerry armor doesn’t stand a chance against the Russian T-26s. That’s why they’re pulling them out of Madrid for this little show up here.”

“Christ, I thought you’d never finish,” said Florry.

“He’s just been up to the bridge. His unit is near there. Says we must visit; it’s a marvel of engineering. The Führer would be proud.”

Florry shook his head.

“Come on, Stink, you’ve got to enjoy this. Think what a tale it’ll make for your and Sylvia’s grandpups. Won’t believe a word of it, though, the little ghastly rodents. Hate kids, myself. So bloody noisy.”

“What on earth did you tell him?”

“We’re mining engineers. Out from the fatherland to advise the bloody olive-eaters on their mining techniques. Know a bit about mines, too. My mother owns one somewhere. Any sign of our pals?”

Florry, from his vantage, looked across the fountain and the street, through the leafy trees and to the hotel on the corner. It was an elegant old place, rather Parisian in appearance. It had been his job to keep it watched, while Julian sported about with Jerry.

“Nothing,” he said. “A few Condor chaps. It seems to be unofficial Jerry headquarters,” he said.

“The Moseley brutes will love it. What utter swine. To give up their own country to rub bums with German Java men tarted up in Sigmund Romberg uniforms. I loathe traitors.”

Florry kept his eye on the hotel.

“Sieg heil,” Julian suddenly blurted, as two more officers suddenly came by in gleaming black jackboots.

“Handsome chaps,” Julian said after they passed. “Pity they’re all such pigs.”

“There,” said Florry suddenly, squinting in the sunlight.

He could see them in front of the picturesque doors of the hotel, a short, squat, and blunt fellow who must have been Harry Uckley and another who must have been his companion Dyles. It was the uniforms that gave them away: they wore their silly Moseley black shirts and jodhpurs and black riding boots.

“What charming uniforms,” said Julian. “So refined.”

Florry felt a queer roar in his mind. No matter what, he’d have at Julian.

“All right,” said Julian. “Time for some real fun now, eh?”

But the fun did not start for quite some time. They followed the two down the wide, tree-lined Avenida de Carlos III at what seemed a prudent distance, perhaps two hundred paces, until at last they reached their appointment: an office off the Calle San Miguel, near the cathedral, which wore the proud banner of the Falange Espagnole, the violent right-wing Spanish brotherhood that, like the POUM, supplied its own militias to the fighting.

Florry and Julian found shelter down the street at a bench under a tree and waited. By 4 P.M. Julian grew bored and went for a walk. For a time he browsed in the shop windows while Florry sat furiously, vulnerable and absurd, awaiting his return. He was gone about half an hour.

“I say,” he said when he returned, “look what I’ve bought. Rather spiffy, eh?”

He opened a small sack and removed a tie.

“I’ve always loved this pattern,” he said. It was a dark green and dark blue arrangement of diagonal stripes. “But it’s the Fourteenth Lancastershire Foot, and if Roddy Tyne ever caught me with his regiment’s tie, he’d have a bloody kitten.”

“It’s quite nice,” said Florry. “I’ve never paid much attention to ties.”

“Nice? Chum, it’s magnificent. Don’t you think it goes well with this suit.” He held it against the gray pinstripe.

“Julian, I’m trying to keep an eye on―”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

“Well, yes, I suppose it does.”

“Good, thought you’d agree.”

He quickly untied the tie he was wearing ― a solid burgundy thing ― and rethreaded his collar with the regimental tie, quickly put a small, elegant Windsor knot into it, and pulled it tight.

“There. Really feel much better. This awful pink thing” ― he held up the burgundy like a rotting fish ― “has been bothering me all day. Can’t think why I bought it. Is the knot centered, old man? It’s a beastly thing to do without a mirror.”

“Julian! Look!”

Harry Uckley and his chum Dyles had emerged in a crowd with a group of Falangists and stood chatting and lounging about two hundred paces down across the street.

“About bloody time,” said Julian.

It had taken almost forever: Uckley and Dyles went off to eat with the Falangists at a large, unruly restaurant down the way. The dinner lasted for hours, and more than a little wine was consumed. Then it was time to sing, and Florry and Julian heard the ringing words of the Spanish National Anthem, the bloody Horst Wessel song, some Italian Fascist ditty, on and on until quite late. When the party broke up at last, it was close to midnight and a light rain had begun to fall. The two Englishmen separated with a last round of hearty good-byes from the Falangists, and headed off down the street. Across the way, from the shadows, Florry and Julian watched as they ambled along, talking animatedly, their boots snapping on the pavement.

Uckley and Dyles passed by directly across from them, and for the first time Florry could see them clearly. Harry Uckley had a thick-set, loutish grace, that pugilist’s carriage that took him forward to the balls of his feet as he walked. He laughed at something the thinner, more ascetic Dyles had said, and it was an ablative little percussion of a laugh.

“I see it now,” said Julian, in a whisper. “The cathedral. They’re off for a bit of praying.”

Of course. Harry Uckley would be Catholic.

“Come on,” said Julian. “While I was off, I spotted a quicker way.”

They dashed across a cobbled street, cut down an alley. The rain was really beginning to fall now. As they moved, they threw on their Burberrys, crossed another street, and then saw it.

It was a Gothic thing and first seen in the dimness looked immense and almost prehistoric, an awesome great hunk of gaudy, lacy stone, its spire climbing toward God himself above.

“Here. We’ll stop them here,” said Julian, slipping inside the gate. Florry watched his hand disappear inside his coat to emerge with the small automatic pistol.

And I’ll stop you, Julian, Florry thought.

“Put this bloody toy to work at last,” Julian said, throwing the slide of the pistol.

Florry felt the Webley somehow come to fill his hand. His thumb climbed the oily cold of the revolver’s spine, curled around the hammer, and drew it back, and he could feel the cylinder align itself in the frame. The hammer locked with a tensile click.

“Here they come now, our lovely Eton boys,” said Julian. It was so. The two men, hunched against the rising chill and the fall of the rain, came across the square in the white cold light of the moon, hurrying to make midnight mass.

Florry stepped beyond Julian, his revolver leading the way. “Beg pardon,” he said, with absurd civility, and stepped from the gate into the moonlight. The two men saw him and seemed to halt for just a second. The street behind them was deserted. From inside the cathedral came the sound of chanting.

“Harry Uckley,” Florry said.

“Who’s that, eh?” called back Harry, still coming on. His voice filled with the sudden cheer of a man who recognizes a companion. “A mate? Christ, Jimmy, that you, blast it all?”

“No it isn’t, old sport,” said Julian.

Harry understood in an instant, much more quickly than poor Dyles. He seemed to make a sudden lurch for his own pistol, but it was all feint, and as Florry, fifteen feet away, brought the Webley up to fire, Harry instead gripped his companion by the arm, catching the poor man in utter surprise, and with a strong thrust whirled him at Florry and Julian in a crazed spin.

Julian’s little automatic fired almost instantly, the sound a tap lost quickly in the vastness of the night, and the man sagged wretchedly as Florry ducked at the collapsing apparition that was between himself and his target and made to re-aim, but saw it was no use. Harry, fleet as the devil, had turned to flee and ran zigzagging like a footballer across the cobblestones in the shadows. Florry took off after him, cursing the man for his cleverness, and got close enough to see Harry hit the stone wall of the graveyard abutting the cathedral and get over it in a single, clawing scramble. He himself careened toward the gate, raincoat flapping like a highwayman’s cape behind him, and slid through it, low.

Damn you, Harry Uckley. If you get away, it’s all up, damn you.

Florry knew he should have just done the job of murder. Just shot him cold; that’s what the job required. But he could no more shoot even scum like Harry Uckley cold than Julian Raines.

Bourgeois decadence again, the soft, yielding custard center of the middle-class man, the slight pause at the moment when pauses were fatal. Florry, you have not learned the lesson of your century: you have not learned to kill.

Florry studied the maze of the graveyard. He could pick out no forms remotely human in the baroque, marble confusion and the weird colors from the stained-glass of the cathedral above it. It was all jumble and shadow. A few candles flickered.

Damn you, Harry!

He began to move through the grass in a duckwalk, feeling absurd and incredibly excited at once, but not particularly frightened. After so much of wondering and doubting and waiting, the elemental simplicity of killing or being killed seemed almost a luxury.

“Chum, I’m going to kill you.”

The whisper was from quite near. Florry halted, freezing up against a marble angel’s wing. Harry was close by, calling softly, utterly confident.

“Come on, now, chum. Just another step.”

The voice was indistinct and blurred but seemed to be coming from a congruence of obelisks off on the left a few feet. Florry peered into the dark, trying to make sense of it. He had an immense urge to stand up and shoot at the voice and be done with the business.

Yet he held back. Patience in these affairs was everything. Harry was the man of action, the pugilist, the footballer; the urge to move would overwhelm his imagination surely. Florry knew he’d come. Come on, Harry, boy, come on.

He lay still, waiting.

“Robert? Robert, are you there?”

It was Julian, standing in the gate in the moonlight like an utter ass, as if he were posing for a sculptor.

“Robert, I say, are you there?”

In the light of the cathedral, Julian made a wonderful target and he knew that Harry Uckley would fire in a second or so. Julian and his insane conviction that the real physics of the universe did not apply to one so charming and brilliant. His bravery, which was also utter stupidity.

Florry heard the snap of a revolver cocking amid the maze of marble slabs, perhaps made louder by the looming cathedral walls above them, and then he heard a tick as the hard butt was steadied against the stone.

“Robert, I say, old man, are you here?” Julian called again.

Florry leaped to his feet, raised the Webley, and fired three times in the rough direction of Harry Uckley. Yet curiously he did not hear the sound of the shots but only felt the sensations: the buck of the revolver, the spurt of muzzle flash out beyond his hand, the sudden flooding odor of burned powder. He did not hear because he heard something else instead, the huge and powerful clanging of the midnight bells whose thrill of vibration seemed to fill the air with a kind of blanket of sound, dense and muffling. He ducked back to earth, the bells continuing: they were up to five now. Florry rolled sideways, sure a bullet would come winging at him, and astonishingly discovered a rampaging shape passing by him headed like a crazed bull toward the gate.

He fired, taking the man down.

The bells tolled twice more, then ceased, their echo lapsing after several more seconds.

“Robert?”

“Yes.”

“Christ, are you all right?”

“Yes, you bloody idiot. God, Julian, you just stood there―”

“The pathetic thing is, they haven’t pistols in those bloody great holsters. Only arsewipe. Let’s see what you have bagged.”

They rose and walked swiftly to the fallen man. Harry Uckley in the grass, a glassy blackness in his eyes, breathed slowly.

“It was a lucky shot that dropped me,” he said. “I’d have had you sure if the bloody olives hadn’t taken my Luger. They didn’t trust us.”

“Are you in pain?”

“No, it’s rather numbing. Cold. You’ll see when your time comes. Are you reds?”

“I suppose,” said Florry.

“I’m damned glad an Englishman pulled the trigger, not one of these olive-eating bastards. They took my Luger, damn their souls to hell.”

“Yes, Harry,” said Florry, aware that Harry no longer breathed. “Well, that’s bloody that,” he said, surprised at the bitterness he felt. “Another great triumph for the Republic.”

Now for Julian, he thought. He cocked the pistol.

“Sorry, old man,” said Julian, just behind him. Florry felt the cold circle of a pistol muzzle against his neck. “There’s to be a change in plans.”

28 MIDNIGHT

They drove through the city for a time, until at last they reached its outskirts. The traffic increased. The road was jammed with armored cars and lorries filled with Asaltos. Twice the vehicle was stopped but Lenny simply pronounced the password ― “Picturebook” ― and they were passed on. Whistles blew; there was the tramping of feet on the wet pavement in the dark. It was a night of ugly, ominous magic, a night of history. Lenny figured even Levitsky, hands manacled, mouth taped, would see that something was about to happen.

Then they pulled into the courtyard of a large house. More troops milled about. But they took the old man straight through the house, across the courtyard, and to a smaller house. The tape was ripped off. He was stripped naked. The manacles, however, remained.

Lenny looked at the old man and was surprised at the body. It was chalky white and mottled with discolorations. His feet and hands were veiny blue and white and hideous. His muscle tone was flabby. His cock was long and flaccid and his balls two dead weights. Where was the strength? Where was the will? This was just an old white-headed geezer who probably couldn’t open a jar of pickles without help. The great Levitsky! Trotsky’s right-hand man. Kolchak’s nemesis, hero of the underground, Cheka terrorist, Yid spy-master! Lenny laughed. A single blow would send his old bones flying apart.

Levitsky looked cold and numb. His face didn’t show much except that he knew he was going to catch it but good. Lenny wanted to hurt him. Lenny felt powerful and beyond fear next to this old geezer.

“Old Yid,” he said in Yiddish, “I’ve got plenty of trouble for you now. You think you’ve seen trouble? Put the blindfold on him.”

Blackness engulfed Levitsky. He felt the thing being tied tight behind him. He was led outside, pulled along by several pairs of hands. His feet crossed mud and straw.

“Step up here,” they told him. He felt himself climbing crude steps. The smell of straw and mud was everywhere. He knew he was in a rough building. It was very cold.

At last Bolodin spoke.

“You know,” he said, speaking in Yiddish. “I’ve seen guys like you. They had ’em in New York. Tough, I give you that. Smart, too. Guts. Lots and lots of guts. Now I could have this kid here smash you until morning. When he gets tired, I could do the smashing myself.”

Bolodin laughed again.

“And that’s just what you want. You’re one of these guys, the more you get smashed, the more stubborn you get. You feel pure. The pain makes you clean. You’re a pilgrim, the blood you shed gets you into heaven. Sure, I know. I’ve seen plenty of it before.”

He took a deep breath. The old man’s head didn’t move.

Lenny studied him carefully. The old man was still.

“You’ve got a piece of information,” Lenny said. “The name of a guy. It’s your most precious treasure. It means more than your life. I want it. I got to figure a way to get it out of you, right? So I ask myself, what does this old Jew fear? Everybody fears something, even the Devil Himself. I have to find something so special to you, so much a part of you, so deep in you that getting away from it becomes even more important than your treasure.

“So what would this be? Pain? Nah! Torture? For most, not for you. Death. The fear of death? No. If you die before I get what I want, you win. You’d love that, wouldn’t you? It’s how your mind works. I’ve thought a lot about that, how you think. I’m the world’s greatest living Levitsky expert. Nights I stay up thinking about how to get this piece of information out of Levitsky.

“And then I figured out where to look.”

Lenny paused again, still enjoying his discovery.

“You know where? I’ll tell you, this is really interesting.

“I looked inside … of me. You and me, Levitsky, we’re the same guy. Jewboys born in that cunt Russia. We left her, went somewhere else to make a better life. We learned to be hard. We learned to do what was necessary. We learned to look and see the world for what it was and deal with it as it was. We learned not to be afraid. We learned how to hurt. We became big shots. We forgot everything. Or almost everything. But when I’m a kid and even when I’m a young shtarker in the gangs and even when I’m making my hits and everybody in the city is scared of me and even when I come over here and get in this racket, there’s one thing I don’t ever forget. Because always it scares me. I don’t like it now, even. Being this close to it makes me nervous. And I bet you don’t like it so hot either.”

He smiled.

“Remember, old man. What, fifty years ago? With me it was only thirty years ago. But you remember it just like I do. They came in on the horses. Always with the horses. The horses so big and so tall they could smash a kid to pieces in the snow. And there was no place to run and maybe you were lucky because they only felt like doing a little killing or maybe you were unlucky because they wanted to do a lot of killing. And they came galloping through. And I remember the horses. Big as a house, all muscle and steam and power. I saw my two brothers go under the hooves, old man. Just sucked under and gobbled up, like a machine, and they come out the other end, all smashed into the snow.”

At last the old man spoke.

“That was in the time before there was a revolution. We changed all that. We made a revolution.”

“Yah! A revolution! Get him! Tonight, old man, tonight there’s no revolution. It’s 1897, it’s forty years ago. And the horses are coming, old man. They’re coming.”

He ripped the blindfold off.

Levitsky saw he was in the loft of a stable, over a pen. It was maybe twenty feet to the ground and as he watched, a gate was opened.

In they came.

“The Spanish have lots of cavalry, old man. They like horses, and there are plenty of them left around. These beauties are mean as hell. They haven’t been fed in a week. Instead, I got a guy, he comes in and he whips ’em. He whips ’em hard. He plays sirens for ’em and he honks horns at ’em. Oh, these horses are mad. These horses are crazy. You never saw any horses like this, old man.”

He brought Levitsky to the edge of the loft.

Beneath him, the old man could see them. They bucked and jostled and rubbed together, a seething, almost singular thing. Their cries came up at him and their dusky smell and their ugly violence.

“You want to go down there, old man? You’ll drive ’em crazy. They’ll crowd in over you. Their hooves are really sharp. Old man, you want to go pet the horsies tonight?”

He held Levitsky farther out.

What am I, Levitsky thought, an old man. God help me, I’m no devil. He’s going to throw me down there. God help me.

He remembered them smashing through the village. It was so long ago.

“Hah, old man. You going to talk? I’m getting tired of holding you.”

Levitsky spat in his face and Lenny threw him into the pit.

He fell for a long time, screaming, but then the rope caught him and jerked him backward with a terrible explosion of light and pain; it was tied to the manacles. He hung in the pen, his shoulders wrenched the wrong way, the pain radiating out from the pressure. But worse, he was in the center of the horses, only the rope preventing him from descending the last few feet to the muddy floor of the pen.

A horse’s breath, steamy and rancid, flushed across his face. The beast nudged him with its big head and as it nudged, the pain was terrible on his shoulders. Another horse smashed its flank against him. He swung on the pendulum of his rope and shoulders, bashing against another beast which screamed, leaped to its hind legs, and kicked savagely at Levitsky, crushing against his sternum. The horses were being driven into a frenzy; they were everywhere around him, nipping and bucking and kicking him. They were so huge; he was so weak.

He remembered the Cossacks. It was a day when they felt like a lot of killing. He remembered the animal bucking over his father and saw the flash of blade, the spurt of blood. He smelled the burning huts, but most of all he remembered the cries and screams of the horses …

He awakened.

He lay on the floor of the barn. Bolodin was over him.

“You passed out, old man. You fainted. I must be right. You must be plenty scared.” He turned. “Get him up.”

They lifted Levitsky and brought him back to the edge of the loft. The horses had quieted.

“The lamp,” said Bolodin.

The one called Ugarte picked the kerosene lamp off a table.

“Go ahead,” commanded Bolodin.

The boy threw it into the pen; it smashed and the kerosene, flaming, spread across the floor. The horses went insane. They twisted and leaped and yelped in their terror of the fire. The flames rose, showing red in their mad eyes and against their sweaty flanks.

“Okay, old devil. Back you go.”

The rope was tied to his manacles. Bolodin held him out over the animal pen, which had become the site of grotesque frenzy.

“They’ll rip me apart!” shrieked Levitsky.

“Down you go, old devil. To your own private pogrom.”

“No. No. Please. Please.”

It seemed as if an incredible light had come into his mind. He struggled to tell the man what he wanted to know, but it was as if he could feel himself being sucked down. It was as if his mind were shattering. He would not go.

“Please. Please, don’t do this to me.”

They laid him down.

“So talk,” said Bolodin.

He looked up at Bolodin as if at a stranger. He had no idea what the man wanted. Nothing made sense. The light in his mind was growing in its blinding intensity.

“He’s not saying anything,” said Ugarte.

“Water,” said Bolodin.

The liquid, icy cold, flooded over him, into his eyes and throat. He felt it going into his nose and entering his body. He was dying. It was all slipping away, in a confusion of water and pain and horse’s screams and the freezing wind and the straw beneath him.

“The name, old man. The name of the boy you recruited.”

The question was crazy, it made no sense.

Levitsky thought he was drowning. He could feel the fluid in his lungs and the will to surrender choking through him. There was nothing else. He was drowning, the water was sucking him down. He could see only lights flashing. His life was over; he was barely conscious. He was sinking.

Then strong arms had him. They gripped him tightly and pulled him up. He could feel a man’s hands on him, bringing him to air. The pain was so bad. There was so much pain, endless and unyielding. The hands had him.

“Florry,” he gasped. “God, Florry, it’s you.”

Lenny checked the list he’d made from Glasanov’s files. Yes, Florry, a Brit, in the POUM, a journalist originally. It all fit. He was one of the two guys who’d been at the seaside hotel, too, the one Levitsky had probably been trying to reach. He figured the guy would be at the Falcon.

“Comrade Bolodin?” The call came from down below.

“Yes,” Lenny called back in Russian.

“Commissar Glasanov says it’s time to go.”

Lenny looked at his watch. Yes, it was 0430. It was time to move on the Falcon.

“Comrade, what do we do with the old one?”

Lenny looked back to the old man, naked and shivering, his eyes black and crazed and staring madly into nothingness.

“Give him to the horses,” he said.

29 THE OBERLEUTNANT

Julian plucked the revolver from Florry’s hand. He had a queer light in his eyes and seemed wickedly, marvelously excited.

“You fool, the Guardia will be―” Florry began.

“Oh, I hardly think so, what with those bells coming along to mush all our noise. No, this is a fine and private place, Stink, for our little talk.”

Florry could see the muzzle of the small Webley.25 automatic upon his chest.

“Where were you going to shoot me, Stink? Head, I’d bet. Well, then, that’s where I shall shoot you.”

“You bastard,” Florry said. “You sold us all out to bloody Joe Stalin and his goons. God help you, Julian. No one else will. It doesn’t matter. Shoot me and be done. They know in London. I’ve told them. You’re a dead man.”

Julian smiled softly in the pale, weird light of the cathedral.

“Were you going to give me a chance, old man? No, I’d bet not. Just pot me, eh? I wouldn’t even know what hit me; I would simply cease to exist.”

“Damn you, you―”

“God, wonderful,” he said. “It’s priceless. Stink, you’re such a rotten actor. I could see the loathing in your eyes since you arrived here. God, Stink, you’d never make a spy.”

Florry just looked at him, thinking How do I get at him? He tried to gauge the leap. It was too far.

“Any last words for Sylvia, Stink?”

“You filthy swine,” said Florry. “There’s nothing you can give me you’ll not catch yourself. You’re a dead man.”

“I’ll tell her something quite heroic, old man. She’ll be devastated, of course. I’ll comfort her. I can feel her hot tears and her trembling shoulders. We’ll be all alone. Perhaps my hand shall accidentally brush against her breast. It’ll be quite embarrassing, but of course at moments like those one doesn’t worry about propriety, does one? And perhaps I should happen to feel her nipple grow hard. Perhaps I shall hold her tight and as I’m squeezing her my penis will get quite lumpy. And yet, rather than drawing away from it, as one would expect, why, the grief-stricken thing actually presses her mound against it. Perhaps then as I kiss the tears away from her sweet cheeks, I shall encounter ― good heavens, can this be a tongue!”

“You filthy―”

Julian raised the weapon. Florry saw its dark shape rising. Julian was not trembling. You swine, Florry was thinking in the raging urgency of it all, you bloody swine.

“Bang,” said Julian. “You’re dead.”

Julian was pointing at him with his pipe.

Florry looked at him.

Julian opened Florry’s revolver, tilted it, and the cartridges emptied into his hand. He flicked it shut and handed it back.

“Thought I’d take it because you were so swollen with triumph you might turn the bloody thing on me.” He snorted with contempt. “Robert, I was so disappointed to learn that you were merely human. Among your good many qualities there are some bad ones. Among them, your evil stupidity and your blindness. I suppose it’s that underneath it all you hated me so for cutting you at Eton. And then Sylvia came into it.”

“Look, you―”

“Hush, Robert. You’re so thick. Listen and learn the ways of the world. In the first place, I know all about your smelly little job with the voodoo boys at Whitehall. MI-5 or -6? Don’t suppose it matters. I knew it would happen. All sorts of people have been telling me about the ‘questions’ that have been asked, the delicate inquiries back in London and at Trinity. Then there’s your awful chum Sampson, the world’s most revolting prig. He was at university, you know, one of those awful chaps who had a brief flirtation with the Apostles and then veered right. Everybody knew he’d signed on with the voodoo boys. I must say I was crushed you’d agreed to join them.”

“They say you’re a spy. They have proof. I have proof!”

“And you believed it. Still, one supposes that it’s remarkable you didn’t pot me when you had the chance in the trenches. May I ask, old man, why not?”

“I had to have proof. Then I heard you with the Russian―”

“Oh, tiptoeing about in the dark, are we? How seedy, Robert. How sadly seedy, like some two-bob-a-day private inquirer who specializes in divorces for the smart set.”

“I heard you tell Levitsky that―”

“Is that what he’s calling himself these days? When I knew him best, he was Brodsky the poet. He was a wonderful poet, by the way. Met him in ’thirty-one at Trinity. Sent me a note admiring some verses and included one of his own. Well, one thing led to another. When I ran into him at the hotel he said he was a journalist for Pravda. We had a jolly good reunion. He’s quite a chap―”

“He’s a bloody GRU―”

“Listen, chum. Listen and face the ways of the world. He was my lover, old boy. My first, my best. I’m queer, you blind sot. God, Robert, you are so thick sometimes.”

Florry looked at him. He felt his mouth hang open. He blinked, thinking perhaps it was some dream. Something odd and chilled and huge moved through him, a glacial sense of regret, white and vast and glazed with ice.

“I say, don’t look so stricken. Why on earth do you think I cut you at school, Robert? I bloody found myself wanting you. Your body. I wanted to do things. It was more than I could stand, and I had to get away. Who do you think I was writing to the night of the attack? My current lover, a sailor in the merchant fleet whom I had not seen in a devilish long time.”

“But the women,” Florry said, still half disbelieving.

“Of which there have been exactly one, old man. A chambermaid who rather insisted when I was thirteen. It was disgusting.”

“But all the lies. All the boasts. Why?”

“Florry, chum, being a queer, in case you don’t know, is illegal. One can end up in the Scrubs. And there’s Mother, whom it would kill, and there’s the hallowed memory of Father, the martyred hero of the Somme. There’s all manner of relatives. And there’s the bloody will, old man. Brilliant Julian does not need to lose his little chunk of England by being branded the Oscar Wilde of 1937. Actually, I rather like girls. They’re perfect fools, but enjoyable in their silly ways. They usually have wonderful senses of color, which I admire deeply. Men have no sense of color at all.”

Florry wasn’t sure he believed him.

“All right, old man. You think I’m lying? All right, here, I’ll prove it. Put out your hand and close your eyes, and you shall get a big surprise.”

“Julian, I―”

“Don’t worry, old man. It won’t be John Thomas. Now there’s a good boy, you needn’t bother with the eyes.”

He put something in Florry’s hand.

It was the small automatic.

“It’s all cocked. It’s only been fired once, into that Dyles fellow. Now, Robert, if you still believe Brilliant Julian is a terrible Comintern nasty, then you must do your duty. England demands it. Come on, now, make up your mind, old man. This is, after all, the second chance I’ve given you.” He made a show of closing his eyes.

Florry felt the pistol grow heavy in his hand.

Finally, he handed it back. “You fool,” he said.

“We’re all fools,” said Julian.

“I cannot wait to see the look on Sampson’s face when―”

“No, I don’t quite think that would do, chum,” Julian said darkly. “I don’t really care to explain myself to the Sampsons of this world. It’s not something I’m terribly keen about. Actually, Robert, there is one other thing that needs to be straightened out. The bridge, eh? Let’s not forget the bloody bridge.”

“No, Julian. No, I haven’t forgotten the bridge.”

“You know, Stink, I don’t think it makes a pig’s whisker’s worth of difference as to who really wins out in Barcelona, the bloody POUM or the bloody Russian lads. The truth is, I’m not even sure I could tell you the difference. But do you know I’ve never really finished anything in my life? My masterpiece ‘Pons’ is the perfect example. I am a man of brilliant beginnings. And I find that what I would like to do more than anything is finish something. I would like to blow that fucking bridge into the next world. Would you care to join me, old man?”

“Yes. Yes, let’s do it. You know you always get what you want, Julian.”

“Perhaps it’s only that I want what I know I can get. But see here. There is a technical difficulty. Look at this.”

He handed over a document.

“Good Christ,” said Florry.

“Poor Dyles had it over his heart. It was not as effective in that regard as a Bible.”

It was the travel authority, sodden with blood. It was utterly worthless.

“Damn,” said Florry. “Oh, balls. Perhaps we could somehow bluff our way to―”

“Won’t work. Perhaps it might with the silly amateur Falangists, but the truth is we’ll be up against German professionals. I’ve seen them. I spent the summer of 1933 in Germany and watched all the Hitler stuff going on. I must say, those lads won’t be easy to fool.”

“Then we’ll―”

“Robert, listen to Brilliant Julian. Englishmen would need papers in order to approach the bridge, and upon that premise was this mission planned. But Germans? German officers? Why, they could get close enough to piss upon the thing.”

“But we are not Germans.”

“Oh, no? Stinky, I speak it like a native and I look it a bit, too, with my blond locks and these terribly blue eyes. You’d do for a Bavarian, a lower, coarser sort of brute.”

“I speak it terribly.”

“But you do understand it?”

“Yes. I read it best of all. And papers. We’d need papers and uniforms. How on earth could we change the whole thing in mid-course―”

“Robert, listen. It’s almost one. In half an hour I’m due to meet a chap in a Turkish bath nearby for a bit of sport. It’s that nice young Oberleutnant that I chatted up in the park. We can tell each other, you know. I rather think we could persuade him to lend us something to wear.”

Florry looked at Julian.

“What choice have we?” he asked.

“That’s the best part. None at all.”

Was he a Nazi ― or just a big stupid young army officer? Florry tried to convince himself of the former. He’d beaten Jews and tortured the innocent, burned books, worn jackboots, carried torches, the whole ugly theater of the thing. It was difficult, however, to maintain this pretense in the face of his actual flesh, which was on the ample side, the freckles in his great white behind, his almost feminine body, soft and shapeless. Quite a difference once the uniform came off: something about a naked man so defenseless that it almost defies action.

He could hear them talking softly; it was infernally hot in here, the steam and everything, even though he wasn’t quite in the steam room proper, but just outside, having come in after the officer. He glanced at his watch. He was dreadfully tired and yet tomorrow rushed upon them swiftly.

“Yes,” Julian was saying, in German, “I have been to Dresden often. The china is so magnificent, the old town with its gingerbread architecture so ordered. Of course this was before the Party era. Perhaps it’s all changed now, all modern and full of factories.”

The two men, swaddled in towels, sat in the steam room.

“No, Karl,” said the officer. “No, it remains essentially a storybook city. One can have the most fabulous dreams in a place like that. It’s a lovely place. My mother and I were very happy there.”

“Yes. It’s good to know some things haven’t changed.”

“It’s so lovely to have found one in whom I can confide,” said the young officer. “You have such lovely eyes. They are so pale and lovely.”

“Thank you,” said Julian. “It’s odd how one yearns for human contact and touch. For gentleness and sympathy.”

“Yes, yes,” said the officer. “Something deeper than comradeship.”

Florry swallowed hard, pulled out Julian’s automatic, and prepared to play out the final lunatic act.

He burst into the steam and began waving the gun about wildly, shouting, “Attention! Attention! You are under arrest. Gestapo. Do not move.”

He pointed the pistol at the young man’s head.

“It’s Dachau for you, liebchen, you homosexual disgrace!” shouted Julian, leaping up, gathering the towel about his slippery body. “That’ll teach you what the German Reich expects of its young men.”

The officer began to cry. He offered no resistance, as if he knew the inevitable had at last arrived. He had gone ashen with shame and terror. He began to tremble absurdly. They brought him out of the steam room and into the locker room. Julian, pulling on his suit, began to assail him for moral turpitude.

“You swine. The army sends you out here to train these people in the arts of war, to gain valuable experience for yourself, and to show the world the finest of German manhood. Yet you spend your time trying to bugger everything that moves. The KZs are too good for you.”

“Please,” the boy begged. “Sir. You must give me an alternative. I am so weak, but I will not fail. Your pistol and I will end it all if only you tell my parents that I died honorably in battle.”

“There is no honor for you, swine.”

The boy crawled to the toilet and became sick. Florry thought that Julian was rather overdoing it. The naked boy wiped the vomit from his face with a towel. The rancid odor of sweat and farts hung everywhere in the steam. The fat boy was such a nauseating sight that Florry began to feel ill at his plight. Julian continued to harangue him with terrifying force, as if it were his own hated flaws against which he was lashing.

“You are not fit,” Julian was screaming, “to wear this uniform.” He had gathered it up.

“Bitte, Herr Offizier,” sobbed the boy. “Please. Please don’t do this to me.”

“You will be taken naked, as you deserve, to the civil guardhouse, and there detained among thieves and pimps and Communists until suitable arrangements can be made. Is this understood?”

“Y-yes, Herr Offizier.”

Julian turned to Florry.

“Have you called headquarters for a car?”

“Yes, Herr Sturmbannführer,” said Florry. “It’s on the way. But Herr Oberleutnant Von Manheim wishes to talk with you.”

“That bloody fool,” cursed Julian. “I trust, Herr Oberleutnant, that without your clothes you can be trusted to remain here.”

The boy only wept into his towel.

“Ah!” snorted Julian in disgust. He stepped out and Florry followed as they raced out through the foyer of the bathhouse, stopping only to gather the boy’s uniform and boots, and then headed down the cold street in the moonlight.

30 THE ENGLISH DYNAMITERS

The car was where Portela had said it would be, in a garage, on Ohte, near the Plaza de Toros. Helpfully, it was a Mercedes-Benz, black and spotless, all topped up with petrol.

“Ah, bravo,” crooned Julian, seeing it there, gleaming in the dark. “Splendid. By the way, old man, do you drive?”

“Good God, don’t you?”

“Poorly. Dangerously. I shall smash us up, I’m sure. You must drive. You were in the coppers. Surely they taught you such things.”

“I suppose I drove once. I haven’t driven in years. You’re rich, you’re supposed to have a car.”

“I do have a car. I just never had to drive it. There was a man who drove it. I wish he were here now.”

“I wish he were, too,” said Florry, slipping in behind the wheel. He fiddled with the choke, turned the key, and nursed it into life.

Julian opened the garage doors behind them and Florry edged out into the wet gray street. Dawn was beginning to break. Florry looked at his watch. It was nearly five by now, and he was going on his second day without sleep and the bridge was nearly one hundred kilometers away, and where now was Julian?

Florry looked back. What the devil was he doing? The seconds ticked by as if they weren’t desperately precious until ―

“Achtung!”

The officer who emerged from the garage was imperially thin and blindingly correct in the khaki tunic and trousers of the Condor Legion Tank Corps. He wore a black beret, black boots, and black belt. The Panzer skull-and-crossbones gleamed over the swastika on the front of the beret. He had a riding crop and two utterly pale blue eyes, killer’s eyes. Odd that such a terrifying apparition was a queer poet in love with sailor boys.

“Oh, I wish Morty Greenburg could see me now. What a hoot he’d have!” he said.

“Where did you get the crop?”

“Oh, in there. It’s one of the braces to an uncomfortable chair. Don’t suppose the owners will miss it, do you?”

Julian climbed in back.

“Pip, pip, fellow,” he commanded with his crop on the seat top.

Florry drove through early-morning Pamplona, crossed the river, and headed toward the flat Argonese plain that led to the Pyrenees. The road climbed, but the trim little Mercedes chugged along. Ahead, the mountains were stony and gray, still capped in winter snow.

“Now here’s the plan. I am Herr Leutnant Von Paupel, newly appointed to the front, a special engineering officer. Expert on bridges. You are Herr ― oh, pick a name, old boy.”

“Brown.”

“A German name, Stink. Braun. Herr Braun, of the embassy staff. You’ve escorted me out from Pamplona at the general’s instructions.”

“What general?”

“Just say, ‘the general.’ It will drive Jerry crackers. He’s scared to death of generals. If anybody looks at you hard, merely say ‘Sieg heil,’ and flip up your paw. And believe it. That’s the trick. You must believe it.”

Florry nodded, fascinated. Of course that was the core of Julian: the belief In himself, primarily, and in the primacy of his needs. Julian, the homosexual. Florry pondered it in silence.

If that is what he is, what am I, he wondered.

For I love him, too.

In the mountains, the German military traffic picked up and it became abundantly clear they were entering a war zone. Moorish sentries ― tall, brown, grave men with sour looks and long Mausers slung over their capes ― stood watch at crossroads; trucks full of Moors made a slower way along the road, and Florry, pushing ahead smartly, passed them. When the men saw Julian sitting in sober Nazi regalia alone in the back of the Mercedes, they saluted; he responded blankly, touching the riding crop to his hat.

As they climbed into the Pyrenees, it seemed to get colder. The air was thin and pure. Florry opened the vent and sucked in the air as he kept turning to look at his watch at the fleeting seconds. The mountains were white and massive now, chalky, craggy, rugged peaks and beneath them spread the Argonese plain, a patchwork of buff and slate in the bright sun.

They sped along the Embasle de Yesa, a high, green lake that ultimately gave way to the Rio Aragon, along whose stony banks they passed for some time. The jagged mountains were clearer and bolder than they had ever been from the lowland trenches about Huesca.

I lived in a hole in the mud for five months with this man who now tells me he has sex with boys. I never guessed it. Julian was another illusion, it turned out, a self-created one. Or did I, at some odd level, really, truly know, even if I lie to myself about it now?

Finally, they came to the bridge over the Aragon at the Puenta la Reina de Jaca. It was a fine old girdered thing, as sturdy as a Victorian building, and just beyond it, where the road curled almost due south down through a final splurge of mountains toward Huesca still some fifty kilometers off, the Germans had established a car park ― except that it was a Panzer park, and the things were spluttering into life, ready for the job ahead. These were the PzKpfw IIs, small gray tanks, no taller than a man, with double machine guns mounted in their tiny turrets.

“Of course,” said Julian, “the Russian T-26 would prang these tinpots like the toys they are. But of course at Huesca there are no T-26s. The Russians have seen to it.”

Farther down, men were limbering up some wicked artillery pieces to lorries. The guns, lean and long-barreled, rode on pneumatic tires and crouched behind shields an inch thick.

Julian carried on like the best ROTC candidate in the world, pleased to be good at this, too.

“And that, of course, is the famous eighty-eight-millimeter gun. Supposedly the most efficient long weapon in the world. Extraordinary velocity and penetration. They can use it with a fused shell against planes, with an armor-piercing shell to pot tanks, with canister to make fish and chips out of infantry, or just good old high explosive to smash buildings. God, Stink, I admire the Germans. They really do do things, don’t they? Bloody pity they do the wrong things. Oh, hullo, what’s this. Sieg heil, Herr Major.” He carelessly threw a salute at a man by the side of the road.

“Let’s go, old man,” he commanded.

But Florry, driving slowly by, watching the force assemble itself, wondered in melancholy at the odd link between him and his chum. He thought of Sylvia, perfectly innocent of it all. He wished she were there. What a laugh they would have once had over something quite this silly! He gunned the car past the vehicles, fled by a sign that said HUESCA 44 KM, and pushed ahead. The road was relatively clear for a time, but after a bit they came to a small garrison town called Baiolo, and pulled into it, under the watchful eyes of several Moorish sentries.

“God, it looks like Berlin,” said Julian.

Indeed it did; the square was jammed with gray Jerry vehicles, not only the tanks but armored trucks with machine guns and tank tracks on them. German specialists stood about barking orders stoutly to their assistants who translated into Arabic. For of the vast population of the village, nearly three-quarters were Moorish infantry, now loading aboard the trucks with the grave look of men headed into battle.

“These would be the shock troops headed for Huesca,” Julian said.

“We’d best get going,” said Florry. “It’s drawing near. The bridge must be just ahead.”

“You. You there!” a voice screamed at them with great authority and Florry could see an ominous figure in black leather raincoat and helmet approach with a forceful stride.

The man, some sort of senior officer, leaned into their car and said to Florry, “Who the devil are you?”

“Herr Colonel, I’m sorry to be a nuisance,” said Julian from the back. “Von Paupel, Panzer Engineers. Poor Braun here of the embassy staff to help me was rather hurriedly pressed into service.”

“Jawohl,” barked Florry earnestly.

“I’ve got to get to that damned bridge,” said Julian nonchalantly. “They’re worried that the thing might last only a few hours under beating from the tanks. I must say, I had no idea Panzer Operations had such a show planned up here.”

Florry could feel the colonel’s breath warm upon him.

“You damned engineers, if you can’t build a bridge that’ll hold up my tanks, I’ll see you in the guardhouse.”

“Of course, Herr Colonel. But we want to get it down pat. When we move across the Russian plains, we won’t have time for mistakes. You bring your Panzers and I’ll build a bridge to hold them.”

“In future, Herr Leutnant, the Panzers will get bigger,” said the colonel.

“And so will the bridges, Herr Colonel,” said Julian tartly.

“Go on then. Fix that bridge. I’m planning to liberate Huesca by suppertime.”

“Yessir.”

“And keep your damned eyes open, Von Paupel. We’ve received word saboteurs are about, English dynamiters. It seems the reds have fifth columnists also.”

“Jawohl, Herr Colonel. Sieg h―”

“Please, leave that paperhanger’s name out of it. This is a war, not some Bohemian’s political fruitcake. Now, get going.”

He waved them on brusquely, and Florry pressed the gas, the car shooting with a squeal through the square, narrowly missing a queue of Moors filing into a huge iron boat of a vehicle. He slipped into another lane and began to zip along. He took the Mercedes-Benz south. The country was scruffy and severe. Off on the left an immense mountain, looking like an ice-cream cup, bulked up, gleaming with impossible whiteness in the sun.

“Hurry,” said Julian, looking at his watch. “It’s after eleven.”

“Somebody betrayed us,” said Florry.

“Oh, Robert, rubbish. Keep driving.”

“They knew. ‘English dynamiters.’ If we’d have come on with Harry Uckley’s credentials, we’d be dead. Your Russian chum. Did you tell him?”

“He’d never do such a thing.”

“You’d be surprised what he’s capable of.”

“Robert, he’d never do such a thing. I won’t talk of it. Some lout at Party headquarters talked too loud in a Barcelona café―”

“It was your bloody Russian chum who―”

“HE WOULDN’T!” Julian screamed. Florry was stunned at the passion. “He’s above that, don’t you see? He’s a real artist, not a poseur like me. I don’t want to hear another bloody word.”

They drove on in silence. Florry could hear Julian breathing heavily in the back seat.

“He’s different, don’t you see?” said Julian. “All this is squalid and base. Politics, compromise, bootlicking: it’s all dung. Brodsky wouldn’t―”

“When I knew him he was a bloody German cabin boy. With a plate in his head. Good Christ, Julian, the man can―”

“Stop it. I won’t hear another WORD! Not another word, unless you want to turn back now, chum.”

Florry said nothing.

In time the land changed, yielding its arid, high stoniness to pine forest, which spread across rolling ridges and gulches and crests like some kind of carpet.

“What time is it?” Julian asked at last.

“It’s half past eleven,” he said.

“Oh, bloody hell, we shan’t make it.”

But they came suddenly to a slope, and a half mile down the tarmac, flanked by stately green pines and high, shrouded peaks on either side, they saw it: the bridge.

31 THE SUPPRESSION

At 0600 on the morning of June 16, two armored cars equipped with water-cooled Maxim guns in their turrets pulled up the Ramblas and halted outside the Hotel Falcon. The range between the gun muzzles and the hotel’s ornate façade was less than thirty meters. Two more armored cars went to the hotel’s rear. Down the street lorries unloaded their troops of Asaltos, and German and Russian NCO’s formed them into action teams.

At 0605 hours, the machine guns opened fire. Three of the four guns fired approximately three thousand rounds into the first two floors of the old hotel; the fourth gun jammed halfway through its second belt, perhaps the only Russian setback of the day. Still, the firepower was adequate. Lead and shrapnel tore through the hotel, shattering most of the glassware in the Café Moka, ripping up tiles and woodwork and plaster in the hotel meeting rooms and offices, cutting through the chandeliers and the windows. In seconds the three guns transformed the lower floors of the building into a shambles of wreckage and smoky confusion.

“Bolodin,” said Glasanov, watching as the armored vehicles at last ceased fire, “take them in.”

Lenny Mink nodded, pulled his Tokarev automatic from his belt, and gave the signal to the troops. He himself began to rush through the smoke toward the shattered hotel; he could feel the men behind him, feel their energy and tension and building will to violence. They were screaming. Lenny reached the bullet-splintered main door first, kicked it open. There were two bodies immediately inside, a man and a woman. He stepped over them. A wounded man behind the desk tried to lift his rifle toward Lenny; Lenny shot him in the chest. Another man, already on the floor, moaned, tried to climb to his feet. Lenny smashed him in the skull with his gun barrel.

“Go, go,” he screamed in Russian as the assault troops began to pour through the building. He could hear them on the stairs already and hear the screams beginning to spread through the hotel as they pounded through, beating indiscriminately, threatening, screaming curses, smashing furniture, and in all other respects attempted to shatter the will of their victims.

He went up the stairs himself to the second-floor offices of the Party. The Asaltos had already been there. Torn papers and shattered furniture were everywhere. The smell of burned powder hung heavily in the air. The walls had been ripped with gunfire. Two men were dead and two others wounded. Lenny went to one of the wounded, a redheaded runty fellow bleeding from the leg and from the scalp.

“Nationality?” he demanded in English.

“Fuck you, chum,” said the man, in a heavy Cockney.

“A Brit, huh? Listen,” he spoke in English, too, the English of Brooklyn, “listen, you know a guy named Florry? A Brit, I’m looking for him.”

“Fuck off, you bloody sot.”

Lenny laughed.

“Look, you better help me. You’re in a shitload of trouble.”

The man spat at him.

Lenny laughed.

“You a soldier boy, huh? Nice suntan. Spend a lot of time in the trenches. Look, tell me what I want, okay?”

“Bugger off, you bloody scum,” the angry Brit said.

“Okay, pal,” said Lenny. He shot him in the face and began to roam through the building in search of somebody who had a line on this Florry.

Meanwhile, Asalto units neutralized other targets around the revolutionary city. The Lenin barracks was held the most important, because its arsenal was the largest and its troops held to be the most dangerous in Glasanov’s mind. This turned out to be an illusion; most of the arms had been moved to the front and the soldiers were largely illiterate peasant youths who’d joined for the promise of steady meals. They surrendered in the first minutes.

Among the other targets were the main telephone exchange on the Plaza de Catalunya, guarded originally by Anarchists but since the fighting in May by POUM fighters; the Anarcho-Syndicalist headquarters; the offices of La Batalle, the banned POUM newspaper whose physical plant was still a gathering place for dissidents; the offices of The Spanish Revolution, the POUM English-language newsletter; the radical Woodworkers Guild; and the Public Transportation Collective, a number of former estates seized by the youthful radicals for a variety of political purposes. In every location it was the same: the swift shocking blast of gunfire, the brutal rush by the well-trained Asaltos, and the mopping up.

The prisoners, who accumulated rapidly and were the principal booty of the operation, were swiftly separated into three categories. Leadership, including Andres Nin, POUM’s charismatic chief, and thirty-nine other intellectuals and theoreticians, were taken to special, secret prisons called, in the colloquial, checas, for careful and extensive interrogation, in preparation for what was expected to be a series of show trials very like the ones that had so shocked the world when they had been performed in Moscow. The second category, the militant, bitter rank-and-file ― that is, mostly the fiery young anti-Stalinist European leftists of all stripe and coloration that had flocked to the POUM banner ― was taken to the Convent of St. Ursula, which would rapidly earn, in the next few days, its nickname in history: the Dachau of Spain. These men were interrogated, though rather perfunctorily and without much nuance or subtlety, and then shot. The executions, as many as five hundred in the first several hours (though estimates vary), were carried out in the graveyard near the convent, hard by a grove of olive trees under a little bluff. The shootings were done in batches of as many as fifteen or twenty by special NKVD death squads, using Maxim guns mounted on the backs of old Ford lorries. The bodies were buried in mass graves gouged into the meadow.

The last category of prisoners ― those not on Glasanov’s leadership list and those lacking the fiery believer’s spark in their eyes ― were dispersed to a number of hastily improvised disciplinary centers for further interrogation and incarceration until their destinies could be determined. Included in this category were the “Milicianas,” or female members of the POUM. In many cases, these prisoners had no idea what was going on and were completely certain it was some idiotic misunderstanding that would in some way be straightened out. In this group was Sylvia. She was removed with several dozen other Milicianas of POUM and the other groups of women, many of them internationals, and taken to a wire stockade in the courtyard of a small convent near Bardolona, just north of the city. It was a jaunty, uppity mob in whose company she found herself, who bandied with great sarcasm at their Asalto guards.

“Hah. Fascist sister, how about a nice fuck?” the tough young men would call.

“Fuck your face. Or fuck your cow saint, La Passionaria,” the women would call back through the wire.

“Fascist cunts,” the soldiers chimed merrily, “can’t wait to screw Moors and Nazis.”

“I’d sleep with ten Moors and ten Nazis before I’d sleep with scum like you, with a shooter so small it would fall out.”

There was much laughter.

Sylvia did not share it. It wasn’t that the banter upset her, but she had a profound mistrust of men with guns. Although it did not occur to the others that there was danger, Sylvia was quite uneasy. She didn’t like the way the soldiers joked with them, unafraid to say anything; she did not like the loose, confident way they carried their rifles; she did not like the coarseness of the experience or the absurdity of the situation.

In the stockade, there was surprisingly little political rhetoric, as if everybody was by this time quite exhausted with politics. At the lunch hour they were brought a little wine and some bread ― no less, really, than their guards, who seemed as confused as they were ― and everybody waited patiently until somebody showed up to set it all straight.

An hour after lunch, five of the women were called out by name ― two Germans, a fiery Frenchwoman named Celeste, who seemed to be the spirit of the group, and an Italian anarchist who had actually fought at the front as a man ― and taken over to the wall and shot.

Their heads flew apart when the officer leaned over each and fired a pistol bullet into the ear as a coup de grace. Sylvia didn’t scream, although most of the others did; she simply cursed her luck and tried to figure a way out.

An hour later, another six women were led out and executed. The survivors had become by this time exceedingly morose. A few wept and were comforted by the stronger. Sylvia sat by herself, with her arms wrapped around her, and though it was warm, she felt her teeth chattering.

Then her name was called.

She stood.

“Be brave, comrade,” said one of the Belgian women. “Don’t let the bastards see your tears.”

Hands all around touched her. She was smothered in a kind of love that had been transformed radically from the generally political into the specifically personal. A woman hugged her and held her tight and told her to be brave.

“Spit in their faces,” she was told.

“Don’t give them the pleasure of seeing you beg. Long live the revolution.”

“Yes,” said Sylvia, though it had a kind of irony to her, “yes, long live the revolution.” She turned to face her suitors, two stony Asaltos with submachine guns.

They led her from the courtyard into the church, over to one of its axial chapels, where a young man with gray eyes sat writing at a small table.

“Comrade, ah, Lilliford,” he asked, not really looking up. As soon as she saw that he wouldn’t look up, she knew she was in trouble. When a man didn’t look at her, it meant he’d already seen her and been somehow hurt by her beauty, and would therefore go to great lengths to show her how unimpressed he was, or how indifferent he could be.

At last he looked up. He had pale, pimply skin and blondish hair and large circles under his eyes. Though he wore the khaki Asalto mono and a brace of pouches and holsters and belts about him, he was clearly not Spanish but some kind of Russian or European and rather pleased with his own authority.

“Yes?” she said, hating herself for the way her voice quavered.

“Please. Sit down.” He gestured to a wooden chair adjacent to his table.

“I think I’d rather stand, actually,” she said.

“As you wish.” He smiled charmlessly, showing bad teeth. “You travel on a British passport?”

“Yes. I am a British citizen. Would you please tell me on what authority you hold me and what charges have been pressed, if any.”

“No. What specifically is your connection with the Party of Marxist Unification?”

“I’m a volunteer on their newspaper. I help with the page layout and I do some proofreading for them.”

“You are not specifically a member?”

“I am not a joiner.”

He considered this for a time. “Do you sleep with the boys?”

“You can’t expect me to answer that.”

“Why would an Englishwoman become involved with Fascists and Trotskyites and―”

“These people aren’t any more fascist than I am. I don’t know where you got your ideas, but―”

The young commissar smiled deeply, his eyes merry with condescension. It was his huge sense of moral certitude that she loathed.

“My dear lady,” he said through his grin, “could we not argue this all day? Perhaps if I refrain from attacking the POUM, you could refrain from defending it. Cigarette?”

“Thank you. No.”

“You’re a very attractive woman.”

“What on earth does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do only with my romantic nature. A weakness for which I consistently apologize. So then. Let me ask you this. Could you explain your true relationship to this illegal organization.”

“It wasn’t illegal until this morning.”

“Times change, Miss Lilliford. Answer, please.”

“I said all I care to on the subject.”

“You know, it would help if you would look upon me as a friend or at least an interested person. I’m not without a certain amount of sympathy in these matters. Could I have from you please a list of all the names of your ― look, why don’t you sit? I feel quite silly sitting in your presence.”

“Then why don’t you stand?”

He smiled again. His eyes took on the aspect of a person about to deliver a treasured and much-rehearsed witticism. “Why are pretty women so headstrong? All my life I have wondered this. I think that your daddies did not spank you enough.”

“Will you please get to the point?”

“Forgive my little jokes. I am not as serious as I should be. So: will you be prepared to provide a list of the names of your coworkers over the past six months. If you would list the names of all the people you have―”

“You must be joking.”

“In my private life, Miss Lilliford, I joke all the time. I am indeed proud of my sense of humor, which is said to be rather keen. In this matter, pretty lady, alas, no, I do not joke. Serious charges have been raised. It’s not our policy to make jokes.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“You’ll cooperate?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You could end up against the wall. Such a shame, a pretty woman like you.”

“You are an exceedingly slimy young man.”

“You are brave now, but when the Asaltos are getting ready to shoot you, you may find your courage somewhat reduced.”

“I’m sure you are right. You are probably an expert; you have probably sent many women to their death. But I’m not frightened now. Not of an ugly little man like you.”

“Well, no matter,” he said.

“I demand to see the British consul.”

“Miss Lilliford.”

“This is an illegal detention. I demand to see my consul or representative of my government.”

“I am sorry to report that such a demand cannot at this time be accommodated.”

Another volley of shots crashed out; Sylvia jumped.

“You had better get used to the sound of gunfire, Miss Lilliford, if you expect to be a revolutionary.”

The three coups de grace came immediately.

“Why?” she said. “For God’s sake, why?”

“It’s a matter of discipline, one supposes. These things are ugly. I’ve seen them before.”

“It’s so pointless and awful.”

“It is indeed awful, Miss Lilliford, but it is never pointless. Now let me ask you one more question. Now wait, don’t interrupt me. You may even be surprised. The question is: If I let you go, will you do me the favor of leaving Spain as quickly as possible?”

“I―”

“You have friends, it seems, in high places. I will have a driver return you to the city. Please, please, leave Spain as fast as you can make the arrangements. As charming and lovely as you are, I have no desire to repeat our conversation. I might not be able to enjoy myself as much if I had to shoot you. And one word of advice: get out of that mono. Wear some womanly things. Be pretty. Return to the bourgeoisie. You will be safer.”

Sylvia thought it some crude Russian prank. But in fact, at the young commissar’s nod, two guards took her outside to an unmarked car, and a driver took her swiftly and without incident into the city. He told her there was a nice hotel across from the cathedral; would she like to go there? Yes, she said. She went and had no trouble getting a room. Then she went into the Gothic quarter and found a small dress shop and she bought a dress. They let her change in the rear.

She went back to her room and locked the door and sat breathing heavily. Occasionally through the night there was the sound of shooting, but in all other respects the city seemed much calmer. The sense of oppressiveness had vanished. There was no longer any feeling of waiting for something ominous to happen. It had.

Sylvia thought she’d been lucky. Some bureaucratic slip-up had somehow spared her. She looked at her calendar; June 16 had been a long day.

She might not have slept nearly so soundly as she did that night had she known that her escape from the firing squad occurred not by virtue of a slip-up. In fact, somebody in high places did know her, or had that day learned of her. It was Colonel Bolodin, commander of the SIM.

32 THE BRIDGE

Now Lili,” Julian said, “Lili was a rare beauty. Her father’s estate, near Breslau, had this wonderful hunting schloss, where the old brute went to shoot boar in the winter ― and Lili and I had some exquisite weekends there. In the spring. Oh, it was wonderful.”

Florry nodded enthusiastically. His breath was ragged and dry.

They had passed unnoticed beyond the first construction sheds, where the Spanish workers had been quartered during the rebuilding. Up ahead there was some kind of guard post and beyond that Florry could see the bridge, an ancient rough stone arch, now buttressed smartly with a gaudy framework of Krupp steel. Beneath it, a surprisingly mundane little river cut its muddy way through a deep gorge, but neither Florry nor Julian cared for a glimpse. Rather, they had by this time seen the low concrete blockhouse that had brought them all this way.

It seemed so utterly nondescript, a prosaic little cube of concrete ranged with gun slits. They were too far to see, but Florry guessed the Germans had at least four Maxims ― one for each slot ― in the little fort. Against and upon it now, a batch of Condor Legion troopers lounged in their undershirts, smoking and telling jokes. Indeed, all about the bridge, Condor Legion officers could be seen.

“They certainly don’t look as if they’re expecting raiders,” said Florry. He glanced at his watch. It was five to twelve.

“Now Suzette,” Julian was saying in German, “Suzette had wonderful, wonderful breasts.”

“You! You there!” The voice had a commanding ring to it.

“Why, yes,” replied Julian, turning mildly.

“Just who are you?” The officer, whose hair was cut short as peach fuzz, had a set of ball-bearing eyes and a scar running down his face as if his head had been once disassembled, then reassembled, though hastily and somewhat inexactly. On the one side of the line, the skin had a dead, plastic look, an abnormal sheen.

“Herr Leutnant Richard Von Paupel, Combat Engineers Section, Condor Legion, at your disposal, Your Excellency,” said Julian crisply, snapping off a salute ― the army’s salute, not the Party thing.

The half-faced officer returned the snap perfunctorily.

“I’m here as an observer, Herr Colonel,” Julian said coolly.

“Ah! And for whom, may I ask?” the officer demanded.

“Certain elements, sir.”

“And what is that supposed to mean? Or do you mean to have me play a little guessing game?”

“Perhaps I’d best just say not only is the general staff interested in the outcome of this afternoon’s exercise, Herr Colonel, but equally so are certain elements in Berlin. They have requested an independent report on the outcome.”

“You’re from Security?”

“I’m not Gestapo, Herr Colonel.”

“If you were, I’d get you a seat on the lead tank into Huesca. And your skinny friend in the raincoat. You’re out of uniform, Herr Leutnant,” said the officer. “Your boots are not shined.”

“You’ll find, Herr Colonel,” Julian took up and threw back the challenge, “that the new German hasn’t time to shine his boots, he is so busy climbing the stairway of history, as our leader directs.”

“Papers, Leutnant. Or I’ll have to call my guards to escort you off the bridge. You may watch from the guardhouse. Perhaps you’re the English dynamiters the Spaniards fear so adamantly.”

He nodded to two noncoms, who reacted instantly and hurried toward them with machine carbines in hand.

“Herr Colonel,” Julian began ― but at that instant a roar arose in a sudden surge, and everybody looked for a cause and could see, just a the top of the slope, a column of dust.

“The panzers are coming,” somebody yelled.

They must have left just after we did, Florry thought. They were fast. He glanced at his watch. It was a minute till noon. The blockhouse was still almost fifty yards away. They hadn’t even reached the bridge. If Portela attacked now ―

“My papers,” said Julian, “are my blond hair, my blue eyes, my embodiment of the racial ideal. My credentials are my blood, sir.”

“Your blood is of very little interest to the German army, Herr Leutnant.”

“And this―”

Julian reached into his tunic and removed a document and opened it up.

“There,” he said, handing it over. “I think that should do the trick.”

The German colonel looked at it intently for some seconds.

“All right, Herr Leutnant,” he finally said. “You may of course position yourself where you want. But don’t get in the way. I’d hate to wire Berlin its representatives had been squashed into Strudel.”

“Thank you, Herr Colonel. Your cooperation will be noted.”

Julian smartly walked past the man, and Florry trailed along behind. In seconds they had moved beyond the last guard post and were on it, on the bridge itself.

“What in God’s name did you show him?”

“My party card. When I was in Germany in ’thirty-two I actually joined up one night as a drunken lark, under the name of a chap I was quite close to at the time, to see if I could get away with it. It was felt to be clever in the set I was running with at the time. I used to show it off at parties in London for laughs to prove how bloody stupid it all was. It’s a very low number, I’m told; impressive to chaps who understand how such things work.”

They turned to look at the brown water forty feet below, which trickled under the bridge.

“Robert, old chum, I’ve got that funny buzz again. About the next several minutes.”

“Stop it,” said Florry.

“I think my magic ring is fresh out of tricks. Tell my foolish old mother I loved her dearly.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Julian.”

“Say tally-ho to all my friends.”

“Julian―”

The first shot sounded, from high in the pines.

“Shall we go, old man?” whispered Julian, removing his pistol.

A klaxon sounded from somewhere, and the call “Partisans! Partisans!” in German arose. Yet panic did not break out among the professional German soldiers, who instead responded with crisp, economic movements. Or maybe it was that for Florry the entire universe seemed to slip into another gear: a monstrous, strange slowness somehow overcame and then overwhelmed reality. More shooting began, rising in tempo from the occasional bang of a bullet to, several seconds later, what seemed like a crescendo of fire.

Julian ran toward the blockhouse just a few feet ahead, his automatic out. A bullet kicked up a puff of dust nearby and then another and then another. A few of the Germans were already down. From the blockhouse there came a noise that sounded like strong men ripping plywood apart, and Florry realized one of the German machine guns had begun to fire. Yet still he could make no sense of events: he could not see the guerrillas, and in fact could see nothing except some stirred dust down the road.

“In, in,” yelled Julian, and they ducked into the dark little entrance of the blockhouse, immediately finding themselves in subterranean blackness.

“Hold your fire, god damn it,” somebody was shouting in the closeness of the fortification. An electric light snapped on; Florry heard the snap and click of gunbolts being set and head the oily rattle of belts of ammunition being unlimbered. The officer with the half-dead face was shouting crisp orders, telling his gunner to prepare to engage targets at a range of about four hundred meters. Florry watched the gunners lift the weapons to their shoulders and move to adjust their positions against the firing slots. He recognized immediately that these weren’t heavy Maxim guns at all, but some frighteningly streamlined new weapon, supported at the muzzle by a bipod, yet with a pistol grip rather like a Luger’s and a rifle’s buttstock.

“Well, Herr Leutnant,” said the colonel, “you’re in luck and so are we. I was afraid our guests might not take the bait. But they’re right on schedule. You’ll get to see the new Model 34 in action against some Spanish guerrillas who think their horses are a match for hot steel. It should make an amusing few minutes.”

Julian shot him in the throat.

Florry got out his four-five-five.

Julian shot the gunner, then he shot one of the guards. Florry shot the other guard.

The pistol shots in the close space were painfully loud. There were six Germans left and Julian said very calmly, “Gentlemen, please drop your weapons or we shall kill all of you.”

Florry saw something in the eyes of one of the other gunners and he shot him in the arm. He went quickly to the machine carbine one of the guards had dropped and picked it up, swinging it about on the remaining men.

“If anybody so much as breathes heavily,” said Julian, “my nervous companion will shoot you all down. You stay absolutely still, do you hear? Absolutely still.”

They waited, almost frozen in the dicey intensity of the moment. Outside the firing seemed to rise, and then there was a banging at the iron door to the blockhouse.

“What’s going on, damn you? Fire, you bastards, get those machine guns spitting.”

“Easy lads,” said Julian. “Just hold it still as little mice and maybe you’ll see tomorrow.”

“English fucker,” said one of the Germans.

Julian shot him.

“Who’s next?” he said. “I’ll shoot each and every man here if I must.”

The firing outside had ceased. The pause seemed to last forever, and then there was a hoot or yelp of sheer giddy joy, and Florry heard the thunder of hooves as the air seemed to fill with dust. A few more shots sounded, until at last someone else pounded at the door.

“¡Inglés! Dios te ame, ven acá!”

Julian went swiftly to the iron door and unlocked it. Portela, looking like some kind of buccaneer in a cape with crossed bandoliers on his chest and a long-barreled Mauser automatic, ducked in.

“Get these bastard out,” yelled Julian.

Florry backed off and let the Germans file past him. When the last man had vanished, he himself climbed out.

“Go on, run, you bastards,” yelled Julian in English, firing a shot in the air. The Germans began to flee across the bridge.

“God, Stink, look at them run!” yelled Julian joyfully. “Christ, old sport, we bloody pulled it off.”

“They’ll be back,” said Florry darkly, for he knew the Germans would recognize in minutes and take the offensive. Yet even as he spoke he was astounded by the strangeness of what was happening. The bridge seemed to swarm with an astounding crew of gypsy brigands, all in leather and dappled with an assortment of bullets, bombs, daggers, strange obsolete weapons, incredibly colorful costumes, all of them stinking evilly of sweat and garlic and horses. Their leader, a hideously ugly old man swaddled in the most absurd of all the outfits, a voluminous dress under his leather coat, immediately threw his arms about Florry and hugged him violently, and only when Florry felt breasts big as any wet nurse’s under the leather did he realize she was a woman. Her face seemed carved from ancient walnut, though her eyes were bright and cunning; she had nearly half her teeth.

“Ingléses, me permiter a verles. Que bravos. Que cahones estos hombres tienen. Mira los héroes, cobardes,” she crooned into his ears, her breath flatulent with garlic.

Florry had no idea what she was saying.

“Pleased indeed,” he said.

“Gad, what a spectacle,” said Julian. “What an extraordinary woman. Is she not a woman, Stink? She reminds me rather too much of Mother.”

“Let’s not chat,” said Florry. “Let’s blow this bloody thing and get quit of this place.”

“Yes, let’s go,” called Portela, already shed of jacket and preparing to monkey climb down the bridge’s new scaffolding to plant his charges.

“Where’s the bloody dynamite?” said Florry.

“¡La dinamita está aquí!” screamed the old lady, and one of her men came ambling over with a scabby horse laden with crates.

“It’s very old,” said Portela, “from the mines. But when she goes, she’ll go with a bang that’ll be heard in Madrid!”

“Yes,” said Florry, unnerved by the old stuff, when he’d been expecting gear somehow more professional and more military, “well, let’s get bloody cracking.”

“Stink, old man, I’ve found a wonderful toy,” said Julian. Florry looked to him to see that he’d just climbed from the blockhouse with one of the German light machine guns. He’d chucked his Condor Legion tunic and wrapped himself with belts. “Light as a feather. Bloody German genius for engineering. I’d say the perforations along the barrel housing keep it cool from the air.”

“Perhaps you’d best take some chaps down the bridge and watch for Jerry,” said Florry. “I think I’ll help with the poppers.”

“Good show, old man,” said Julian, who dashed down the bridge, the oily belts clinking and jingling as he ran.

“¡La dinamita!” yelled the old lady.

“Yes, splendid,” said Florry, and he grabbed the reins of the horse and tugged him to the bridge. “Here, Portela?”

“It will do,” said the officer.

Florry shot the horse in the head; it bucked once, then sank on its knees, its great skull forward. Florry pried a case from its harness with some difficulty, then beat it open with the butt of his Webley grip. The dynamite lay nestled inside, waxen and pale pink, looking like a batch of fat, oily candles. It smelled peculiar.

“God, it looks ancient,” he said to no one in particular.

“This is a detonator,” said Portela, producing something similar to a cartridge from the pouch at his belt. “You press it into the end of one of those sticks. Then you wire up the leads and run it back to the box. Then you prime the box and push the lever and send the spark over the wire. Then you get your big bang.”

“And who’s to lash the stuff to the bridge? This fat old lady?”

“I’ll rig the one side,” said Portela. “Perhaps Comrade Florry could help on the other. We must have two charges for the great destruction.”

Somehow this was a detail that Steinbach had neglected to mention. “And I suppose those guerilla boys wouldn’t be able to wire it up?”

“Alas, no.”

“Bloody hell. Well, then, let’s get going, eh?”

At that moment, the first sniper’s bullet struck near the bridge, followed by two more.

“Christ,” said Florry, as the old lady rose, selected a weapon from her bewildering assortment ― a broom-handle Mauser ― and fired off across the bridge into rocks near the treeline. Shots opened up from all around. Florry heard Julian’s machine gun begin with that absurd, fast, ripping yelp.

He lugged the box to the railing and slung himself over it. For just a second, he thought he’d gone too far; he almost lost his grip and could see himself hurtling down, screaming for Sylvia as he fell, until he was smashed to pulp on the stones below. But then he had himself and hung for just a minute, gathering his breath. The old lady, her eyes dark with love, touched him on the hand.

“Bien hecho, inglés,” she said, and laughed, showing her black stumps.

Christ, you beauty, was all Florry could think, would you be my last vision? But he lowered himself onto the abutting structure of steel, reaching foot by foot, finding a grip and then lowering himself again and again by the same laborious, experimental process, trying all the while not to look down or believe those actually were bullets whanging against the metal or kicking into the old stone of the bridge with a bang and a puff of dust, until at last he found himself perched like some grubby ape in a monkey house on a gym apparatus, surrounded only by bars and space. He clung tightly to the girders with his legs, hoping the sweat ― he had begun to perspire wretchedly ― would not run into his eyes. He was now in a forest of German iron and the word KRUPP darted before his eyes. A shot banged off the metal. Up top he could hear heavy firing. He tried not to look down.

“Dynamite!” he screamed.

“¿Eh, inglés?”

“Dynamite, damn you!” he screamed, and in his urgency forgot his vow not to look down. Far below the stream seemed like a green, scummy ribbon of tin foil breaking over pebbles strewn by a child. He felt the vertigo buzz through him. He clung more tightly than ever. A bullet ricocheted nearby with a metallic clang.

“Aquí están los cachivaches.”

Something swung blurrily before his eyes: it was a peasant’s basket on a cord. Weakly, with one hand, he plucked at it, pulled it close, and pinned it to his body with an awkward elbow. He reached in to find two bundles of six waxy sticks of the explosive. He pulled one out and wedged it into the nearest joint in the girders he could find. He jammed the other bunch in atop it and wrapped it tight into a ligature with some long strands of electrician’s tape somebody had thoughtfully included in the basket. It looked dreadfully sloppy, the tape wrapped in a messy sprawl about the uneven nest of sticks.

“Hurry!” someone else under the bridge called. He looked over to see the fat Portela similarly astride a girder on the other side, working just as desperately as he was.

What the devil does he think I’m doing? he wondered, bewildered and flooded with bitterness.

Florry was halfway through the next load when the bullets sent his way seemed to increase dramatically. One pinged off the girder inches from his face and he felt the sharp spray of fragments, winced, and almost fell. Evidently a Moorish party had worked its way down the gorge, descended it, and had begun to move along the creek bed toward him. Another bullet exploded dangerously close to his head.

He twisted to see them two hundred meters away, shooting quite calmly, three gray-uniformed, lanky figures who seemed to be potting pigeons.

“THE LEFT!” he shouted. “THEY’RE ON THE BLOODY LEFT!” Another bullet whizzed by. “Damn you, there, there on the left!” he screamed again, feeling the panic squeak through his limbs. Oh Christ, Christ, Christchristchristchrist!

Above him the machine gun spoke rapidly, raining spent shells over the railing, and the three Moors collapsed in a lazy string of bullet spurts that kicked up clouds of dust and slate at their feet.

“Do hurry, old man,” yelled Julian. “Jerry’s getting ready for a push.”

Florry now had only the detonator to insert. He plucked it from his pockets and awkwardly plunged it into the exposed end of one of the sticks, felt it crumble into the chalky stuff.

There! Ah! Now for the bloody wire. If only … ah! He unspooled the blasting wire and with his fingers tried to locate the posts on the detonator. It was tricky business. Florry kept thinking there should be an easier way. Twice he … almost had it … blast, the loop coiled off. The damned raincoat felt heavy and constricting; he wished he’d chucked the bloody thing. He could hear the chatter of Julian’s weapon and some others and suddenly an awesome WHOMP as an artillery shell detonated hard by. Florry shivered, shrank, and almost lost his grip on the metal. Shrapnel sang in the air and the odor of smoke hung heavily. He had trouble breathing.

“Stink, damn it, hurry,” Julian called. Florry looked and saw that Portela had vanished, either killed or done. Damn him. He didn’t think he could find the strength. Finally, with a great lurch, he managed to get the wire twisted about one of the posts and proceeded to desperately knead it tight. He found the other one and duplicated the process, all the while experiencing the terrible sensation of doing sloppy work, but at that second the whole river gorge seemed to break out afresh with fire, as new troops apparently reached it. He hoped he’d done it right, but there simply was no time to check.

He scrambled up the framework, the bullets popping nearby, and he knew that at any moment he’d catch one in the spine or skull, but the Moors shot no better than the Spaniards and he managed his destination and with a last push swung himself over.

“Thank God,” said Julian, crouched near him, the hot gun in his grip.

“Your hand, Christ,” said Florry. Julian’s hand was pink and scalded where he’d been holding the barrel.

“Nothing, old man,” said Julian, and Florry looked down the bridge to see at least fifty Moorish bodies on the road.

“Get going, sport,” said Julian. He pushed at Florry and Florry was off, sprawling toward a ditch beyond the bridge. As he ran, he payed out the wire from the spool. He reached the ditch and skidded into it, the coat flapping around him as he went. He looked back.

Julian was alone now, the fool, the machine gun tucked against his hip. He fired a long burst at the hidden troops across the way and they returned his fire, their bullets cracking at the dry soil and the gravel around him. His hair blew free and his face and shirt were smeared with grime.

“¡Venga, inglés, corra como el diablo!” someone yelled. A man took the spool of wire from Florry and was twisting it to the contacts on the exploder box, an ominously crude-appearing wooden machine with a plunger thrusting out of it.

“Come on, Julian!” Florry screamed over the edge of the gully.

Julian at last seemed to hear him, and turned and ran, just as the first Panzer swung into view atop the far crest.

The bullets struck around him and for whatever reason his luck held yet again, and except for a bit of a scrape above his eye, he arrived with a mighty vault and leaped into the gully just as the first PzKpfw II began to advance.

“Blow the bloody thing,” Julian shouted merrily. His hand looked like some hideous lobster paw, puffy red and pussy and twisted, still melted to the ventilated barrel of the weapon. He winked at Florry, as if it were some monstrous joke.

The fellow wiring up the box at last seemed finished and gave way to the massive old lady who, her black teeth gleaming, gave the plunger a shove, as they all melted into the earth for protection against the blast.

But there was no blast.

“Damn!” said Julian.

“Again,” Florry shrieked. “AGAIN!”

Obligingly, the old woman lifted the plunger and again fell forward against it.

Florry could just see the connection he’d so desperately jerry-rigged together having come unwrapped or having been improperly done to begin with. A black, gloomy sense of shame came over him.

“I’ve got to fix the bloody thing,” he yelled, and began to claw his way out of the gully.

Julian smashed him to the ground.

“Don’t be a fool.”

“Don’t you see, I’ve botched it!”

“You’ll botch it good if you go down there and get killed over nothing, chum.”

“If only I’d―”

“Shut up, old man. It’s time to get the bloody hell out of here, bridge or no bridge.”

And indeed it was. Across the bridge, the tanks had arrived. They scuttled down the road with their odd, insectlike approach, somehow tentative. Their machine guns began to rake the guerrillas’ side of the gorge. Bullets peppered the earth about the trench. The guerrillas began to edge back until the ditch petered out against the slope; it was almost one hundred meters up the bare ground to the crest behind which, presumably, there were horses.

A shell ― one of the terrifying 88s ― whistled in and exploded against the ridge. The air was filled with noise and dust and whining metal and heat. Another went off farther down.

A Moorish suicide squad had reached the far end of the bridge. An officer urged them across, and they began to move forward. The old lady pulled one of the rifles to her shoulder, fired, and one of the men slid to the earth. The others crouched behind the railing, though one hearty fellow made a mad dash to the cover of the far side of the blockhouse. Farther down the gorge’s edge, figures appeared and broke for the cover of the rocks on the hillside a few hundred meters away. The guerrillas opened fire, dropping a few, but the majority found safety and began to fire on the trench.

“Váyanse, hombres,” the old lady screamed. “¡Corran! ¡Hace demasiado calor aquí!”

“Go on, Stinky,” said Julian, fiddling awkwardly to get his last belt into the open latch of his gun.

“Hurry,” said Florry, scrambling out of the trench, beginning to backpedal with the others up the slope.

It was a feeling of extraordinary vulnerability. His shoes kept sliding in the dust and the bullets whipped and popped all around. Only the terrible Moorish marksmanship and Julian’s counterfire from beneath kept any of them alive that mad, backward scramble up. Insanely, Florry fired the six charges in his Webley at the chaos of running Moors, screaming Germans, and backed-up vehicles on the other side of the gorge, to absolutely no discernible effect.

He finally reached the top, one of the last. With a sigh of relief and disbelief, he sank to the earth, found a rifle, and began to pot away. He could hear the snorts and shuffles of the horses below him in a little draw, anxious to be gone from the commotion, but it didn’t matter; what mattered now was Julian coming up the slope, raking the opposite side of the gorge with a long burst of fire. He didn’t seem to be enjoying it much though; he looked chalky white with terror as the bullets struck around him, but Brilliant Julian continued to climb through the lazy puffs of sprayed dirt. He had almost made it when the bullet took him down.

“God, Julian, JULIAN!” Florry screamed. Florry rose to run, and hands grabbed to hold him back, but he lashed out with his Webley and felt it strike bone and broke free. He raced down the slope.

“Go on, you fool,” Julian said. He was coughing blood. The machine gun had fallen away uselessly.

“No,” Florry said. He tried to pull him up. The old lady was suddenly at his side.

“Inglés, su amigo está terminado. Muerto. Nadie puede ayudarle ahora.”

“NO! NO!” Florry screamed.

He had Julian’s limp body under his arms and tugged it upward. The old woman helped and in seconds other men were helping, too, and they had Julian beyond the crest and out of the line of fire.

“You’ll be fine, I swear it,” Florry was saying, but his hands were wet with blood. The blood seemed everywhere on Julian. He could not yet believe it.

“Well, Stink,” said Julian, “Brilliant Julian’s brilliant luck finally went belly up.”

“No. NO. You’ll be fine, you’ve only just been nicked.”

“Your imagination again, old boy.”

“No. Horses. Damn you, old lady, get the filthy HORSES!”

“Easy on her, old man.”

Up on the ridge line, the firing increased suddenly, and two shells detonated. Florry was trying to wipe the sweat off Julian’s grimy forehead when the old lady leaned in with a water bottle.

“Thank you, dear,” said Julian.

“Inglés, los fascistas cruzan la puente, tonto. Ven, ovídalo. Tenemos que salir. Están por todas partes.”

“A horse,” Florry said. “Bring this man a horse.”

“Stinky, I hate the brutes. Smelly, filthy beasts, moody and sullen and―”

“Shut up, I’ll lash you to me. I’ll get you out of here, you’ll see. You’ve taken care of me, now I’ll take care of you. Get me a HORSE!”

“Stinky, listen. Tell all my friends to be happy. Tell them Julian’s dying from―”

“You’re not dying!”

“Stinky, the bastards got me in the spine and the lungs. I’m half dead already, don’t you see?”

“¡Inglés! ¡Ven! ¡No hay tiempo, llegarán en segundos!”

“She’s telling you they’re almost here. Go on. Get out of here, old sport.”

“I―”

“One thing, please, Stink. The ring. Take it, eh? Take it to my bloody old mother, eh?” He smiled brightly.

Florry grabbed the ring, popped the chain, and stuffed it into the pocket of the Burberry.

“Now the pistol. Take it. I can’t quite ― my bloody arms don’t seem to work. Take that bloody pistol.”

Florry, with shaking hands, removed the tiny automatic from Julian’s holster. It was such a stupid thing; it seemed more like a toy than a weapon, small, almost womanish, difficult to hold in a man’s hand.

“Cock it. I put in a fresh clip.”

Florry snapped the slide back, chambering a cartridge.

“There now. Shoot me!”

He leveled the pistol to Julian’s temple.

“Thanks, Stink,” Julian said. “The bastards won’t use me for bayonet drill. Stinky, God, hold my hand, I’m so bloody scared.”

“¡Inglés!”

“Julian! I love you!”

“Kill me then, Stink. KILL ME!”

“I ― I can’t, oh, Christ, Jul―”

The explosion was huge in his ears; it knocked him to his side. The old lady put down her Mauser rifle. Florry looked to Julian and then away; the bullet had pierced his forehead above his right eye and blown a mess out of the rear of his skull.

“Jul―”

At that moment, and for whatever reason, the bridge exploded in a flash that was an exclamation point of sheer light, absolute, blinding, incredibly violent; the concussion seemed to push the air from the surface of the earth and blow Florry back to the ground. The noise was the voice of God, sharp and total. The bridge literally disappeared in the explosion. Stones and timbers and chunks of girder kicked up dust and splashes in a circle for six hundred meters around. A cloud unfurled from the blast, black and rolling and climbing.

“¡Bravo inglés!” came the cry from the men around him in the stunned second as the echo faded. The Germans had ceased firing. “¡Inglés bravo lo hizo! Derribó la puente. ¡Viva el demoledor inglés!” The old lady was kissing him; others pounded him on the back.

Well, Julian, he thought, looking at the rising cloud of smoke, you finally finished your masterpiece.

He dropped the pistol into his coat and climbed aboard a horse. But he could not stop crying.