Tapestry of Spies

33 ARRESTED

Sylvia sat in the Grand Oriente from noon to two every day waiting. It was a clean, pretty place and the afternoons were lovely with sun. She sat outside and watched the people on the Ramblas. There were no more parades, because the Russians didn’t permit them. But she didn’t care about parades. She sat and tried to make sense of the rumors.

The rumors were about death, mainly. The Russians could control everything except the rumors. The rumors said that Nin had been killed in some phony “rescue,” led by the ominous Comrade Bolodin of the SIM. The rumors said that hundreds of POUMistas and Anarchists and libertarians had been buried in the olive grove of the Convent of St. Ursula, but nobody could get close enough to the place to find out. The rumors said that the Russians had secret checas all over Barcelona, and that if you criticized Stalin, you’d be taken out at night to one and never come back.

Sylvia sat and had a sip of blanco. Then she lit a cigarette. Before her, across the Ramblas, she could see a wonderful old palm tree, its bent scaly trunk arching skyward toward a crown of leaves. She had, in the last seven days, grown very fond of the palm. She loved it and knew it like a friend.

The other rumors were the more troubling. They insisted that a big attack had been canceled even though English dynamiters had blown a bridge deep in enemy territory. But as to the fate of the dynamiters, the rumors disagreed. Some said they’d been killed, everybody had been killed. Others said they had been captured, then executed. In other accounts, they simply vanished. There was also talk that it was a setup from the beginning, a betrayal, some more dirty business by the Russian secret police. But what had really happened? She had to know.

It was all so different now, the new city of Barcelona. Every third man was said to be a Russian secret policeman and nobody would talk. Most people just looked straight ahead with lightless eyes. There were no more red nights, with singing and parades and banners and fireworks. The posters had all been ripped down. Asaltos with machine pistols stood about in groups of three and four.

She shivered, feeling cold though it was a warm day. She looked at her palm tree and out, at the dull glow of the sea which she could just pick out beyond the statue of Columbus at the end of the Ramblas.

“Señora?”

“Yes?”

“Something more, señora?”

“No, I think not. Thank you.”

The old man bowed obsequiously as any English butler and with the oily, seasoned, professional humility of the servant class, backed off.

She lit another cigarette.

She felt as if she were in a kind of bubble. The events of the city no longer concerned her. She was magically protected; she was watched over. She was also ― she could feel it ― watched.

They knew. Somebody knew and had marked her out. She felt as if she were under observation all the time. She was very careful in her movements and had thought all about getting out. When it came time to get out, she knew exactly what to do.

She was weeping. She had never cried before, and now, under the pressure, she had become a weeper.

God damn them. God damn them all for making her cry. A tear ran down her cheek and landed on the marble tabletop, where it stood bright and solitary in the sunlight.

I’d better get out of here, she thought.

“I hate it when you cry,” said Robert Florry, sitting down next to her. “God, you look lovely.”

“Oh, Robert!” she cried, and reached to engulf him with her arms.

They walked through the narrow, cobbled streets of the Gothic quarter toward the cathedral.

“I wasn’t able to save Julian.”

“It’s definite?”

“As definite as a Mauser bullet in the brain.”

“Did he die hard?”

“No. Julian died as he lived: dramatically, flamboyantly, beautifully.”

“I didn’t think anything could kill Julian.”

“Just a bullet,” said Florry. “Nothing special about it, a silly bullet. I’m just glad we blew the bridge. He would have liked that.”

He held up the ring.

“This is all that’s left of Julian Raines. Pity.”

“You look terrible, Robert.”

“I’m so sorry about Julian, Sylvia. I know he meant a great deal to you. He meant a great deal to me. He was―” He paused.

“He was what, Robert?”

“He was in a certain way not what he seemed.”

“Nobody ever is. Here, let me take that awful coat.”

Florry put the ring in the pocket and peeled off the filthy Burberry, handed it to Sylvia. She was right: it was dusty and wrinkled and looked as if it had been in battle. Though the blue suit under it was also wrinkled, it had held its shape better; and Florry was light-bearded enough so that from the distance his whiskers didn’t show. Without the coat, he looked surprisingly bourgeois.

“After the bridge, we rode for three days through the mountains and forest. They chased us on horseback, a column of Moorish cavalry. We were bombed and strafed twice. The group split up. Finally, it was only myself and this crazy old lady. We got across the lines two nights ago and were stopped by military policemen, but they let us go. We hitched a ride into Barcelona late last night. We were stopped again. They let me go, because I was British. But they arrested her. Because she was in the wrong category.”

“Yes. Yes, if one is in the wrong category, one is in queer street. The Party is against the law. You are a criminal for having your name on the wrong list.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Yes. There’s nothing here for us anymore.”

As they spoke, Lenny Mink watched from a black Ford, which shadowed the two from a distance of about two hundred meters.

They had reached Sylvia’s room in the hotel.

“I’m all packed,” she said. She took his coat and put it in her suitcase. She knew exactly what had to be done; she’d thought about it.

“You’ve got to bathe and clean up,” she said. “The chances are, they won’t stop you if you look middle class. Their enemies are the working-class radical people. If you look like a prosperous English tourist, then you’re all right.”

“God, it’s certainly turned around, hasn’t it?”

“You’ve got to get some sleep, too, Robert. Then tomorrow, we can―”

“Sylvia, it’s my papers. They’ve got bloody POUM stamped all over them. One look at them and―”

“Robert, I can help. I’ve got some―”

“There’s a chap who should be able to help named Sampson, a newspaper chap who―”

“Yes, Robert, listen, I’ve got it all planned.”

“Aren’t you the wonder, Christ, Sylvia. You’ve got it all figured out.” He felt dizzy. He glanced past her, toward a mirror, and saw a stranger staring back, haggard and grayed. Christ, look at me.

It suddenly seemed important to tell her something.

“Sylvia, first I have to tell you something. I’ve meant to for weeks. I want to tell you why I came to Spain and why Julian was so important to me, and what I’ve done to him. Sylvia, listen, I have to explain―”

There was a knock at the door, sharp and hard.

He felt her tense. He pushed her back, reached under his jacket, and slipped out the Webley. And what would he do now? Shoot an NKVD man? Yes, and with pleasure.

“Comrade,” came the muffled voice.

“Who’s there?” he called in English. “I say, who’s there?”

“Comrade?”

“Sorry, old man, you must have the wrong party. We’re English.”

He could sense some confusion outside. But what if they demanded papers? He looked at Sylvia on the bed, her face numb, knowing they’d finally caught up to her. He could see it now. He was death to her.

He bent to her.

“I pulled the gun on you, do you hear? I made you come here. I said I’d kill you. You never saw me before, do you understand?”

“No, Robert, God!”

“No. No, I’m an escaped criminal and I was using you to hide behind. Do you understand? Now scream.”

“No. Robert.”

“Yes, scream, damn it, don’t you see, it’s your only chance.”

“Comrade!”

“Robert, we can―”

“Shut up, Sylvia.” He moved to get away from her. He cocked the revolver and aimed at the door. He’d get the first one sure and maybe a second. No firing squad for him.

“Comrade Florry,” the voice called. “We are from Steinbach.”

Their saviors took them down the freight elevator to the basement of the hotel and into the boiler room. There, behind the ancient furnaces, was a narrow door. It led through an ancient tunnel under the plaza into the deserted cathedral itself. Florry and Sylvia spent the day there, not a hundred paces from their rooms and not fifty paces from the furious SIM stooges outside. But the illusion of safety soon evaporated in the sullenness of their angels, who treated them with contempt. Florry was edgy; the men would not give him back his revolver, which he had yielded in a weak moment, nor were they particularly sympathetic to their plight.

“Cold chaps,” Florry muttered to Sylvia as they huddled in an obscure transept chapel beneath shrouded religious statues, waiting for the time to pass.

“Better than the Russians,” the girl replied.

Florry slept through the afternoon, surrendering at last to his desperate fatigue, but still the day passed with excruciating slowness in the dim space beneath the hugely vaulted roof of the cathedral. It smelled of piss and destruction.

Finally, at twilight, it was time to go. They crept out a back entrance to a truck. Florry and the girl were ordered into the back.

“I suppose you’ll be taking us to our legation now,” Florry said.

The man, a heavyset worker in a butcher’s smock, didn’t answer. He had a German Luger in his belt, evidently a prized possession, and he was given to fondling it, and he now took it out to do so, meanwhile ignoring Florry’s question.

The ride lasted for hours. Twice they were stopped and once there was yelling. But each time the van continued. Finally, it began to climb and Florry could feel the strain against gravity as it rose. He had a wild moment of hope that they were heading through the Pyrenees, but then realized they’d never left the sound of the city.

The truck stopped after what seemed an endless voyage up a narrow, twisting road. The doors were opened. Cool air hit Florry’s lungs; he blinked in the dark and stepped out. He had the illusion of space, oceans of it, and beyond the unlit but somehow nevertheless vibrant tapestry of the city spreading out to the horizon. As his eyes adjusted, he became aware of unreal structures immediately about, as if he were in the center of some dream city, a utopia of crazy, cantilevered streamlines, odd futuristic bulges and girders.

“Good heavens,” he said. “We’ve come to a bloody amusement park.”

“You are atop the mountain of the devil,” said one of the men close by. “From here Christ was offered the world. He did not take it. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of others.”

“Tibidabo Mountain,” said Sylvia. “We’ve come to the park atop Tibidabo Mountain.”

“Yes,” said the man. “Just the place for the trial and execution of the traitor Florry.”

34 BAD NEWS

It fell to ugarte to tell Comrade Commissar Bolodin that the Englishman Florry and the girl Sylvia Lilliford had evidently vanished from the hotel, despite his team’s scrupulous scrutiny. But surprisingly, Comrade Bolodin took the news stoically.

Lenny, sitting in his office at the SIM headquarters in the main police station cleaning his Tokarev, thought this meant they were getting ready to move the gold. Florry was back from his secret job behind the lines, something for the hidden GRU apparat the Englishman, like his crazed master Levitsky, clearly worked for, something so secret it would be all but unknown to the NKVD. He knew it would be harder than it seemed. There was too much at stake.

“Just poof,” said Lenny, “and they were gone?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“You talk to the hotel people?” Lenny wondered, wiping down his slide.

“Yes, comrade. Nobody saw a thing.”

Lenny considered this curiously, ramming a short, stiff brush through the barrel of the disassembled automatic. Then he said, “People go in and out?”

“Comrade, it is a public place. My team was on all sides of the building.”

Lenny nodded, wiping down the recoil spring.

He felt rage blossom like a precious, poisoned flower deep in his head, more precious for its containment. It was delicious. He looked at the Spaniard and had a terrible impulse to squash his head. But he didn’t lose control. He didn’t lose control anymore, he was so close to what he wanted.

“Should we put out some kind of alert so the Asaltos or the police can―”

“No, we should not put out an alert. Then we have all sorts of other people all asking the SIM how it does its business. And I don’t like to answer questions. Do you understand, my friend?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Don’t I take good care of you, Ugarte? Aren’t I a good boss, Ugarte? I’m no mintzer, am I?”

Although the Spaniard couldn’t know the Yiddish word, he answered, “No, boss.”

Lenny rose, embraced the Spaniard, drawing him close with one hand, and with the other gathered between thumb and forefinger a fold of flesh from the cheek. He held it delicately as one would a rose, and felt the man’s terror.

“Scared, Comrade Ugarte?”

“No, comrade,” said the man, trembling.

Lenny smiled, then crushed his fingers together. Ugarte fell weeping to the floor. It was not the first scream heard in those quarters.

Lenny picked the little one up.

“We can’t let this bird fly,” Lenny exclaimed calmly. “You tell your gang, Comrade Bolodin is a very busy man these days, and he expects his special friends in Ugarte’s section to do their very best.”

Lenny could see the terror in Ugarte’s eyes. “Okay? Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Where Lenny’s fingers had come together, a purple hemorrhage now blossomed.

The little man scurried off.

Lenny sat back with his pistol. He knew where Florry would be. He’d have to be with Steinbach, the new number-one gangster of Barcelona, who’d slipped through the big net of June 16 and whose capture was Lenny’s most pressing official business. Clearly Steinbach was being run by GRU; how else could he be so effective? It was a battle between two Russian gangs, he now saw, and he was right in the middle.

When they got Steinbach, they’d get Florry. And Lenny knew they’d get Steinbach. In the spirit of capitalism, the SIM had offered a great deal of money.

And money, Lenny knew, money talks.

35 THE TRIAL

It seemed rather strange, Florry had to admit, that in the heat of its death convulsions, the POUM had chosen to liquidate him. One would have thought they were rather busy for such trifles. But no: this last act was crucial to them. He was surprised to discover how much passion had been invested in such a seemingly ludicrous act.

Sylvia was led off, and the trial began almost immediately in a large maintenance shed at the rear of the deserted amusement park, in which at one time the park’s mechanisms and gizmos had been tended. As a courtroom it was barely adequate, certainly nothing like the elaborate courtroom in which another innocent man, Benny Lal, had met his fate. It was a cavernous old garage, with stone floor and a single bare bulb, almost a cliché of illumination borrowed from the cinema, and it was exceedingly drafty. One could see one’s breath. However, it did seem adequate, Florry had to admit, to the sort of justice being dispensed.

The evidence was indisputable, especially as marshaled in the dry tones of the well-informed prosecutor, none other than the one-eyed Comrade Steinbach whose eloquence held the panel of judges ― three meatpackers, a pimply teenager, and a wild-haired German youth ― spellbound. Steinbach, without so much as a hello to his old chum Florry, pushed ahead with his case, as if he were eager to be done with the business.

“Is it not true, Comrade Florry,” Steinbach said with the trace of an amused, ironic smile on his lips, and his good eye radiating intelligence and conviction, “that on the night before the attack against Huesca on April 27 of this year, you sent a message out from the trenches via a secret post to certain parties in Barcelona announcing the time and direction of our efforts?”

Florry, cold and exhausted and suddenly terrified, knew the answer would doom him. But he supposed he was already doomed.

“Yes, yes, I did. But I was trying to reach―”

And he halted. He was trying to reach Sylvia. To mention Sylvia would be to involve her.

But Steinbach was not interested in explanations anyway.

With a flourish, he reached into his pocket and removed a sheet of paper. Florry recognized it instantly.

Steinbach read it in a dry tone and its romantic conceits sounded absurd in the huge, cool shed.

“Note,” said Steinbach, “how the clever Comrade Florry camouflages the crucial military information among terms of bourgeois endearment. To read it uncynically is to encounter a lover writing to another on the eve of battle. To read it in awareness of its true purpose is to see the nature of the betrayal.”

“The girl has nothing to do with this!” shrieked Florry. “Where did you get that?”

“It was in her purse,” he said.

Damn, Sylvia. You should have thrown it out!

“And is it not true, comrades of the tribunal,” he argued in his public voice, “that the attack was betrayed, our men pushed back, our party humiliated and weakened?”

They nodded.

“You don’t understand,” said Florry weakly. “It was innocent. I love the woman. I wanted to tell her that before the fight.”

“Yet the attack failed, did it not? Because the Communist Brigades of the Thaelmann Column would not move out in support of our men and the Anarchists. Because they had been ordered by Barcelona to stay put. I give it to you, comrade, from one professional to another: a brilliant stroke.”

Steinbach paused, as if to catch his breath.

“Then,” said Steinbach, “there is the curious business of the explosion. Florry goes on the attack and does not come back from it; in the intervening day, an unknown fifth columnist detonates our magazine at La Granja. Then, miraculously, Florry returns with a minor flesh wound. Can this be coincidence? Or can Florry have inflicted his own wound as an excuse to go into hiding because he knew a Stalinist agent, acting on information he had supplied ― and perhaps had been sent to enlist in our militia to obtain ― was planning the potentially dangerous destruction of our munitions?”

Florry saw his chance. Give them Julian, he thought. It was Julian. Give them Julian Raines, spy and traitor, neatly tied and bundled. You believed it yourself. Yet he said nothing.

“Now we come to Comrade Florry’s masterpiece. The masterpiece of the bridge.”

“I almost died on that bloody bridge!” shouted Florry. “Damn you, a hundred good men died that day!”

“Yet the Fascists knew well in advance of the attack that it was planned, did they not?”

“Yes, they did. We were betrayed. But not by―”

“And is it not true that only you ― you alone ― of the attacking party survived?”

“Yes. Yes, but we blew the bloody thing. We dropped it into the gorge―”

“Yet is it not true, Comrade Florry, that the attack on Huesca had already been betrayed? By you? So that the bridge itself was irrelevant? And is it not curious, Comrade Florry, that on that same day the English poet and socialist patriot Julian Raines was murdered? Your own friend. Your own countryman?”

“He was killed by Fascist bullets. He was a bloody hero,” Florry said. “He certainly would never have given up his life for you bastards if he’d have known―”

“We have reports that place you over his body with a pistol in your hand. Did you shoot him?”

“No.”

“Who shot him?”

“An old lady. To put him out of his misery. He’d caught one in the spine and another in the lungs. He was paralyzed and coughing blood.”

“You ordered the woman to shoot.”

“You bastard,” said Florry. “You even turn this against me.”

It’s not too late, Florry thought. Give them Julian. The argument is perfect. Julian is the spy.

“It may interest the tribunal to know that even the poet Raines had his doubts about Comrade Florry. I produce for you now a stanza discovered in his effects from his last poem, alas unfinished, ‘Pons.’ ” He smiled at Florry before reading.

“Now isn’t that interesting, Comrade Florry? It seems he’s describing you, does it not?”

No it did not. It was Julian describing himself and his own secret self.

“Who else, Comrade Florry, could Julian have been describing?”

Florry looked to the rafters. Give them Julian, he thought, but it occurred to him that he was doomed anyway. They didn’t have Julian. They had him.

“I have these many hours pored over the records,” Steinbach continued, “until at last I could see the pattern. I hold myself personally responsible for not seeing it sooner. I am an idiot. Perhaps my trial should begin after the conclusion of this one. But the truth is, wherever Comrade Florry or his lady friend have been and whomever he talks to, they have an odd habit of disappearing. Each mission he is assigned to has an odd habit of failing. And each disappearance and each failure is another nail in the coffin of our party.”

“Sylvia had nothing to do with it,” said Florry. “She’s utterly innocent.”

“And yet, Comrade Florry, is it mere coincidence that when our Comrade Carlos Brea sat at a table in the Grand Oriente, who should show up next to him but the girl? And within minutes, the Russian secret policemen arrive. And minutes later, Comrade Brea is shot dead in the street by parties unknown, in the care of the NKVD?”

Then Florry had an inspiration. “The dates,” he argued. “Look at the dates. I didn’t arrive in Barcelona until the first part of January. Yet the arrests of your people had begun before that. There, does that not prove my innocence?”

But Steinbach was ready for this.

“Actually not. Before January there was no pattern to the arrests. The NKVD was clearly scooping up people blindly. In fact, as one example of their gropings, the category which suffered the most arrests was clearly non-political: it was dockworkers and minor maritime or port officials. Literally dozens of these chaps disappeared. Then Mr. Florry and Miss Lilliford arrive, and as if by magic, the arrests and liquidations of POUMistas begins in earnest.”

Florry stared at him in fury.

“I fought for you people. I killed for you. I nearly died ― I would have died ― for your bloody party. A man I loved more than any other died for your bloody party. The girl worked for months on your silly stinking little newspaper. Why are you doing this to us?”

“You betrayed the comrades at Party headquarters. You betrayed the working classes of the world. You betrayed your countrymen Julian Raines and Billy Mowry. You betrayed the future. You and your master in the Kremlin. Only we have you and not him. So you will have to pay his debt, too.”

When it came time for Florry to address the court, he had it all planned out.

“Comrade?”

“I ask,” he said, feeling very much the fool, “that since you are going to kill me, you at least spare the girl. She had nothing to do with any of this.”

“If you confess, it will help,” said Steinbach. “Help her, that is. You are clearly beyond mercy.”

“I cannot confess to what I have not done,” said Florry. “You ask a great deal of me.”

Steinbach came over to where he was sitting and leaned over to talk more intimately.

“You know,” he said, “you’ll make everybody much happier if you confess. It would put a pretty ribbon on it.”

“I cannot confess to something I haven’t done,” said Florry. “If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me. But let’s be done with the game.”

“It doesn’t really matter in the end. I just thought you might care to help the party out a bit.”

Florry looked at him in dumfoundment. After several seconds his mouth closed.

“I say,” he said, “you do expect a lot! I’m innocent and you know it and you’re evidently going to shoot me. And you have the nerve to ask if I care to pitch in?”

“I suppose it does seem somewhat much. But look at it this way: whether you’re innocent or not isn’t really the point.”

“It is very much to me.”

“But in the larger view. You must learn to see the larger view, though admittedly it’s a bit late in the game for you. The point is, there was a spy. Indisputedly. I know where he was, how he worked. I’ve spent hours on the pattern. Yes, he was there, all right. You, perhaps six or seven others, including the late Julian. The girl even―”

“Stop it.”

“Comrade, please. We have no time for sentiment. It doesn’t matter in the long run, for just as surely as you are doomed, so are we. I am the most wanted man in Barcelona and these others will go down with me. But what is at stake here goes beyond us and beyond Barcelona. You see, there are others in our struggle against Stalin for the soul of the left. Trotsky is one, but again, the man doesn’t matter so much as the idea of the world revolution. It’s worth dying for. The point, however, is this. If we were defeated in Barcelona because our ideas were bad, because we could not compete ideologically, because the people would not believe in us, then our theory is wrong, and we are doomed. On the other hand, if we were defeated because we were betrayed ― because of a Judas planted by Stalin ― then our ideas remain sound and will continue to inspire. They in fact are so frightening to Moscow that Stalin himself leads the fight against us. That is impressive. Thus it is necessary that there be a spy. It doesn’t even really matter if he’s the right spy. Just so that we find him, try him, sentence him, and execute him. Thus, surely you can see how nice it would be for you to leave that confession. That little ribbon for history. Where’s your sense of duty? Surely they taught you that at Eton?”

“Bugger Eton,” said Florry. “I only care about Sylvia.”

“She is a lovely thing. Florry, I was once young myself, and in love. She was killed by Friekorps officers in Munich in ’nineteen. Raped, beaten, shot. It cured me of my illusions. And my eye.”

He smiled.

“Let her live, Steinbach, and I’ll sign something.”

“All right,” said Steinbach. “You’ve made your bargain.”

It took them a while to work something out that Florry could put his name to, but in the end, the document, though more vague than Steinbach would have preferred and more explicit than Florry wanted, was complete.

“This is utterly idiotic,” he said, scratching his name at the bottom.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any event, it shall eventually be run in a leftist newspaper someplace or other as part of our testament. You have managed one thing, Comrade Florry. You have managed to enter history.”

“History is revolting,” said Florry.

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

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

“I’m already numb, you bastard.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How would you know what was obvious?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

“Have you seen the girl yet?”

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

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

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

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

“Es la hora, comrade,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You told me―” Florry started.

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

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

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

The rough teenage boys pushed Florry along.

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

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

“I love you,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“¡Preparen para disparar!” barked the sargento.

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

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

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

“Apunten,” the sargento barked.

“The bastards,” Florry heard himself saying.

Then they heard the noise.

“Esperan. ¿Que es eso ruido?”

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

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

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

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

“Asaltos,” somebody whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

36 TIBIDABO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Explanations,” Lenny barked.

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

“Bring this informer.”

“Ramirez,” the captain shouted.

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

“¿Inglés?”

“Yes, perhaps inglés.”

“With a mustache?”

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

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

“My apol―”

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

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

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

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

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

The boy held up a glass eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was signed, Robert Florry (British citizen).

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

“Is it important, comrade?” asked Degas.

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

“Yes, comrade commissar.”

“And nobody escaped?”

“No, comrade.”

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

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

“Did you investigate?”

“I didn’t see the point.”

“Could they have escaped?”

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

“Have you searched the park?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Everywhere? The woods down the mountain?”

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

He halted.

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

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

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

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

37 PAPERS

Do you know?” she said, awakening, “I had a marvelous dream. I was back in London, in a nice flat. I had a dog. I was listening to the BBC. I was reading Mayfair. It was very, very boring. I hated to leave it.”

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

“Do you see anything?”

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

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

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

“God, I could use a bath.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Robert―”

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

“Robert, please listen to me.”

“Eh?”

“I can get us out of here.”

“What are you talking about?”

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

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

“Yes, well he’s gone.”

“Gone?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Robert?”

“Sylvia, why don’t you take a rest?”

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

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

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

In minutes he was done.

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

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

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

“Well,” he said. “It’s our way out.”

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

“Yes,” he said. “MI-6, actually.”

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

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

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

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

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

Kill me, Julian had said.

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

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

“It’ll look smashing,” he said.

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

He sat down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sylvia―”

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

“Robert―”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They went outside and found a cab.

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

“It was stupid,” she said.

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

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

38 UGARTE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan was simple: Comrade Bolodin of the NKVD/SIM would board the train and Mr. Fenney would emerge to cross the frontier. However, once in France, Lenny had still another identity into which to slip ― he would become one Albert Nelson, citizen also of Great Britain ― and it would be as Nelson, four full identities removed from the scrawny, furious, half-mute East Side Jewboy whose bones and furies he had carried for so many thankless years, that he would close upon and take his quarry and begin his prosperous new life.

He raced for the courtyard car park with extraordinary eagerness for what lay just ahead. He could feel his heart beat and his blood begin to sing. The moment he had glimpsed months back in Tchiterine’s dying confession had finally arrived.

But he did not even get to his car and driver before a shout came from behind to halt. He was more surprised than angered: who dared address the mighty Bolodin in such a haughty and commanding tone? He turned to discover his mentor Glasanov closing on him with a look of terrible desperation, at the same time gesturing to two of the other Russian thugs from the new mob who had arrived in the aftermath of the coup.

Glasanov appeared almost mad with fury. Lenny had never seen him so distraught.

“Bolodin!”

Mink fixed him with the dead eyes, waiting.

“Bolodin,” said Glasanov, “damn you. We found the old man, Levitsky, in the convent. He’s been torn to pieces; his mind is gone. What are you up to? What game are you playing?”

Lenny could think of nothing to say. It occurred to him to remove his Tokarev and put a bullet through Glasanov’s forehead, but the others were closing too quickly in the courtyard and he could feel his driver, reacting to the intensity of the moment, beginning to separate himself from the car and its connection to himself.

Glasanov pointed.

“Arrest the traitor Bolodin,” he howled. “He’s a state criminal.”

39 DETECTIVES

Nobody had been interested in them and now they sat in a kind of numbed silence in the first-class coach, alone and silent. The train smelled of tobacco and use. Now and then, people moved down the corridor outside the open compartment, occasionally an Asalto. Once, one of them peeped in.

“Es inglés, ¿verdad señor?” he said.

“Sí, señor,” said Florry.

“Passport, ¿por favor?”

“Ah. Si,” said Florry, handing it over.

“Muy bien,” said the man, after a brief examination.

“Gracias,” said Florry.

“Buenos días, señor,” said the man, ducking out.

“It was so easy” said Sylvia.

“The Asaltos don’t matter,” said Florry. “In Red Spain, only the NKVD matters.”

He sat back. He felt exhausted. Could it all be done, all of it, Spain, the whole bloody thing? He looked out the window of the carriage and could only see steam, the tops of heads passing by under the level of the window, and, across the via, another train. He looked at his watch.

“We’re late,” he said after a time.

“Does it matter?” she said. “We are on board.”

“I suppose you’re right. Yet I’ll feel a good deal better once the bloody thing gets going. It was supposed to leave five minutes ago.”

“Robert, the Spanish haven’t done anything on time for several centuries.”

Florry agreed and closed his eyes, trying to quell his uneasiness.

But he could not get it out of his head. Why are we not moving?

By now they had almost completely encircled him, guns drawn. Lenny stood in the courtyard, not ten feet from his car, feeling his automatic heavy in the shoulder holster. He had no real image of the doom closing in on him, but he knew he was in big trouble. They’d found the old man. They’d search his case, find the passports and the money. He was a dead man. The impulse came to go out in smoke and flame, the way Dutch Schultz went out: he could feel the hunger for the pistol build in his fingers. He wanted to grab it and start shooting. You always know, when you go into the rackets, you always know something like this may happen: a bigger gang catches you in the open, unexpected, and it’s over. He’d put the lights out on enough guys himself.

“You American scum,” said Glasanov, “I’ve been watching you for some time. I’ve seen your ambition, your deals, the hungry way you look. You profess to be a Communist and are nothing but gangster scum. Now there’s proof you’re pulling something. We’ll get the truth. Take him.”

The men closed to Lenny and Glasanov, led by the two big new Russians.

“Commissar Glasanov―”

“Take the American trash!” screamed Glasanov, close enough to spray up into Lenny’s face. Lenny could see the hairs in the man’s nostrils and the moles on his chin.

“Comrade Glasanov,” said one of the new Russians, “it’s you who are under arrest.”

They surrounded Glasanov.

“You are charged with wrecking and oppositionism. You are in league with the Jew traitor Levitsky whom you let escape and the puppet master Trotsky. You will be returned to Moscow immediately.”

“But I―”

“Take him away!” shouted Lenny. “I can’t stand to look at the traitorous pig.”

The officers lead Glasanov off.

“Comrade Bolodin?” the arresting officer said. It was some new kid Lenny knew was named Romanov. He was a real hotshot, this Romanov. Straight from the big boss himself.

“Yes, comrade.”

“I just wanted you to know Moscow knows you’ve been attending your duties. They are very pleased in Moscow with the big Amerikanski.”

“I’m pleased to serve the Party and can only wait to spread the struggle to my own land.”

“Good work, Bolodin,” said Comrade Romanov.

Lenny turned and walked swiftly to his car.

“The station,” he commanded.

His driver sped along, siren screaming. He ran through the crowd, racing past Ugarte without a word of recognition. They were locking the gate at Via 7, but he got by them and could see it ahead in the bellowing steam as it moved away. He didn’t think he would make it, but from somewhere there came a burst of energy and he leaped and felt his hands close about the metal grip hung in the last door, and he pulled himself aboard.

“Thank God,” said Florry. “Well, I hope that’s the last delay.”

“I’m sure it will be,” said Sylvia.

The train pushed its slow way up the coast toward Port Bou, flanked on one side by the Mediterranean and on the other by the hulking Pyrenees, and after a time, Florry and Sylvia went to dine. They sat in the first-class dining car over a bad paella of dry rice with leathery little chunks that had once been sea creatures and drank bitter young wine and attempted in their game of disguise to make clever Noël Coward repartee for anyone in earshot.

Sylvia seemed quiet, typically distant; some color had returned to her face. Hard to believe two days ago they’d been standing next to their own graves in front of the firing squad. She appeared to have forgotten about it, or to have dispensed with it. It was something about her he liked a great deal: this gift for living only in the absolute present, this wonderful gift for practicality.

Florry looked away, out the window. He tried not to think of the dead he’d left in Red Spain. He tried to think of the bright, beautiful future, he and Sylvia perhaps together at last. He knew if he tried hard enough he could earn his way back. He knew there wouldn’t be the problem over Julian anymore; he felt he could control his jealousy and his sense of possessiveness that had mussed things up over Julian. The future would be theirs and wonderful. They had survived. They would be the inheritors.

“Robert.” There was urgency in her voice. “Detectives.”

He looked and could see them.

“Start chatting,” he said.

They must have come aboard at the last stop. They were heavyset men in raincoats with that sleepy, unimpressible look to their eyes that any copper masters in the first few days of the job.

They came down the coach aisle slowly, fighting the lurch of it upon the rails, choosing whom to examine and whom not to on the basis of some strange, silent code or protocol between them. Florry stared straight into Sylvia’s lovely face without seeing it, keeping the men in soft, peripheral focus nevertheless. Perhaps they’d arrest someone else before they got to him, perhaps that big fellow in the raincoat sitting there, or the ―

But no. With their unerring instinct for such matters, the two policemen came straight to him. He could feel their eyes on him and could hear them thinking inglés and knew how their minds would work: a deserter from the International Brigades or a political prisoner having fled some Barcelona checa.

“I do hope it’s a rainy summer,” he said, trying to think of the most English thing he could say. “The roses, darling. The rain is absolutely topping for the roses.”

“Señor?”

“ ― and we must go to Wimbledon for the championships, I hear there’s a dreadfully good Yank fellow who―”

“Señor?”

He felt a rough hand on his arm and looked up.

“Good heavens. Are you speaking to me, sir?”

“Sí’. ¿Es inglés, ¿verdad señor?”

“Si. Rather, yes. English, quite.”

“¿Era soldado en la revolución?”

“Soldier? Me? Good heavens, you must be joking.”

“George, what do they want?”

“I have no idea, darling.”

The man took his right hand and turned it over to look at the palm.

“Now, see here,” said Florry.

“¿Puedo ver su pasaporte, por favor?” said the man.

“This is most irritating,” said Florry. He pulled his passport out and watched as the man rifled it, examined it carefully.

At last he handed it back.

“You like España, Señor Trent?” he asked.

“Yes, very. The missus and I come each year for the beach. Except last year, of course. It’s nice things have settled down. You have the best sunlight in Europe after the Riviera, and we can’t afford the Riviera.”

“¿No era fascista?”

“Good heavens, of course not. Do I look like one?”

The man’s pale eyes beheld him for just a second and then he conferred briefly with his partner.

“Espero que se divirtiera en su viaje.”

“Eh?”

“To hope you have enjoyed your trip, Señor Trent,” he finally said and passed on.

Florry took another sip of the wine, pretending to be cool. He could see the little rills on its placid surface from the trembling in his hand. The stuff was impossibly bitter.

He reached for a cigarette, lit it.

“That’s the last of the Spanish crew,” he said. “We ought to be very close to the frontier.”

“Why did he check your hand?”

“The Mosin-Nagent has a sharp bolt handle. If you’ve done a lot of firing, you’ll almost certainly have a scab or a callous in the fleshy part of your palm.”

“Thank God you didn’t.”

“Thank God the scab dropped off in the bath last night.”

“I think,” she said, “I think our troubles are finally over.”

Yes, you’re right, he thought. But he wondered why it was he had the odd, unsettling feeling of being watched.

“Are you cold?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“You just shivered.”

40 PAVEL

The right eye was gone. Smashed, shattered, crushed when one of the brutes had kicked him as he lay on the floor of the pen. The surgeon had simply removed it, while wiring up the fractured zygoma, as the bone surrounding it was called. The left eye remained, though its lens had been dislocated in the same terrible blow. The old man could detect a moving hand but he could not count fingers.

The shoulders, of course, were broken from his long session on the rope; and the wrists, too. Additionally, he was bruised, cut, scraped, battered in a hundred places about his old body.

But the significant damage was psychological. His memories were jangled and intense. He was extremely nervous, unable to concentrate. He knew no peace. He had nightmares. He wept for no reason at all. His moods altered radically.

And he no longer talked.

Now he lay incarcerated in plaster and bandages in a private room in the Hospital of the People’s Triumph, formerly the Hospital Santa Creu i Sant Pau, on the Avenida Stalin. The room seemed to be high and bright; it opened to a balcony that had an unrestricted view of ― of something. The sea, perhaps. Levitsky could only recognize the illumination and smell the breeze.

He lay alone ― or, it could be said, alone with history ― on a sweet, cool, late afternoon. The doctor came in, as usual, at four, only this time ― most unusual ― he was accompanied by another man. Levitsky, of course, could see none of this, but he could hear the second, unfamiliar snap of footsteps, and inferred from their speed and precision a certain energy, perhaps even eagerness, as opposed to the grimly proficient rhythm of the doctor’s shoes.

“Well, Comrade Levitsky,” said the doctor in Russian, “it appears you are a tough old bird.” Levitsky could sense the doctor over him and could see just enough movement as the fellow bent. “A man your age, a mangling such as this, so long among the horses. My goodness, nineteen out of twenty would have died on the operating theater table.” Levitsky knew what would occur next ― the flash of pain as the light hit his surviving eye ― and, indeed, a second later, the doctor’s torch snapped on. It went off like a concussive boom in his head.

“He’s stable?” The second voice was harder and younger.

“Yes, commissar. At last.”

“How long before he can be moved?”

“Two weeks. A month, to be safe.”

“You’re sure, comrade doctor?”

“In these times, it wouldn’t do to make a mistake.”

“Indeed. A month, then.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Leave us.”

“He’s still fragile, commissar.”

“I won’t excite him.”

Levitsky heard the doctor walking out. Then there was nearly a full minute of silence. Listening carefully, Levitsky could hear the other breathing. He stared through the milky incandescence of his single eye at the ceiling.

At last, the young man spoke.

“Well, old Emmanuel Ivanovich, your comrades at Znamensky Street send their greetings. You’ve become quite an important fellow. This man is to be protected at all expense, they insist. But I forget myself. Pavel Valentinovich Romanov, of the Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie. Lieutenant commander, actually, at a rather young age, you might say.”

He paused, waiting for a response. Levitsky had none, and so the young man responded himself.

“My pride, you would tell me if you could, will be my downfall. Well, perhaps you are right.” He laughed. “It certainly was yours.”

Levitsky said nothing.

“Now, I know all about you, but you know so little about me. Well, I’ll spare you a list of my accomplishments. But let me just say,” said the young man, with a certain hard edge to his voice, “that if you are the past of our party, one could argue that I am its future.”

The young man went proudly to the window. Levitsky followed his shape with his one good eye. He was a soft, dark blur against the whiter purity of the opening.

“Lovely view! That mountain. Magnificent! Not as beautiful as the Caucasus, of course, but beautiful, nevertheless. Sends shudders up one’s spine, Emmanuel Ivanovich. So, how do you like the room? It’s nice, isn’t it? Indeed, yes, the very best. Do you know that doctor? He’s the best also. London-trained. No shitty Russian medicine for dear old Emmanuel Ivanovich Levitsky. No! Can’t have it! Only the best Western medicine!”

The fellow laughed.

“Well, Ivanch,” he said, allowing himself the intimacy of the romantic diminutive form of address, something permitted under normal etiquette only between family members, “I must be off, but I’ll be back tomorrow and every day until you’re strong enough to travel. I shall guard you like a baby and tend you like a mother.”

Levitsky stared up at him furiously.

“Why?” said Pavel, with a smile. “Because the boss himself has ordered it. Your old revolutionary comrade Koba has taken a personal interest in this. I am, one might say, his personal representative here. Koba wants you back, healthy and sound and chipper in Mother Russia.”

He bent over the old man to complete the thought before walking out.

“ … for your execution.”

41 NIGHT TRAIN TO PARIS

Just before nightfall, Florry leaned against the glass and made out the approach of a small station house that sat above what appeared, in the fading light, to be a seedy beach town spilling away in chalky white desolation down a slope to the water’s edge. The station wore a sign that said, in rusted-out letters, PORT BOU.

“Christ, we’ve made it,” said Florry, feeling a sudden surge of exaltation. “Look, Sylvia, has anything so scabby ever looked so bloody lovely to you?”

The train halted at last and Florry removed Sylvia’s grip from the overhead. It was only a few seconds until they had left the train, edging out among the crowd. Stepping down, Florry smelled the salt air and heard the cries of the birds that must have been circling overhead. Up ahead, he could see that the tracks ended up against a concrete barrier; beyond that, there was a fence; and beyond that, France.

“Do you see? There’s a train,” he said, pointing beyond the wire to the continuation of the track. “It must be the overnight to Paris.”

“You should try to get us a compartment,” said Sylvia. “We are traveling as man and wife; to do otherwise would appear ridiculous.”

“I say, you’ve thought awfully hard about this.”

“I rather want to survive, that’s all.”

“You know, it’s probably not necessary. We’re out. We could stay in separate―”

“Let’s play the fiction out to London.”

He could not help but laugh. “You seem to know more about this business than I do.”

They followed the drift of the passengers toward the guard post, a smallish brick building nestled near the barbed wire by a crude pedestrian gate ― the whole affair had a rough, improvised look to it ― and a line had already formed into which they slipped. It seemed to be a dream play set under the calm Mediterranean moon, the line of passengers filing listlessly into the little shack under the scrutiny of sleeping carabineros ― no revolutionary Asaltos here ― for a cursory examination. If you had the passport you were all right.

Florry handed his and Sylvia’s over to the man, an old-time civil servant, who didn’t give them a second look, except to run mechanically their names off against his list.

“¿Arma de fuego?”

“Eh?”

“Firearms, Señor Trent?”

“Oh, of course not,” said Florry, remembering his vanished Webley and the automatic he’d tossed away.

The man nodded.

“Go on to French customs,” he said.

“That’s it?” said Florry.

“Sì, señor. That’s it.”

They stepped out of the building and through the gate and into another little shed, which turned out to contain two little booths, each with its policeman. Florry got into one line and Sylvia the next and in time they arrived at the tables. The officer game him a quick, lazy glance.

“¿No tiene equipaje a portar de España?”

“Er, sorry?”

“Do you have bags?” the man said in French.

“Oh. My wife has it.”

“You take no bags from Spain?”

“We believe in traveling light.”

The man nodded him on and he emerged to find that Sylvia had already made it through and was waiting with her grip.

“Hullo,” she said.

“Hullo. No problems?”

“No. The fellow opened the bag and began to go through it, but your awful raincoat was in the way and the woman behind made a scene about missing the Paris train. He was a decent chap. Rather, a lazy one. He just waved me on.”

It then occurrred to them that they were standing at the gate into France. They stood in line to present their passports to the frontier gendarme, who made a disinterested examination, and ultimately issued the proper stamp.

“Bien,” he said.

“Merci,” said Florry.

It was that simple: they stepped outside the shed, and they were in France.

“One should feel something,” Florry said. “Relief, or some such. What I feel like is a smoke.”

“I feel like brushing my teeth,” Sylvia said.

The French train up ahead hooted. Near it, a temporary French station had been built, the mirror image of the Spanish installation on the other side of the frontier.

“We must hurry,” she said.

“I’ll get tickets. Darling, see if there’s a tobacconist’s, about, will you, and get cigarettes. American, if they’ve got them. Pay anything. And get some chocolate. I love chocolate.”

He raced for the ticket window.

“Do you have a first-class compartment left open for Paris?” he asked in French.

“Yes. Several, in fact; there’s not many first-class travelers who leave Spain, monsieur. Not since July.”

“I only have pesetas. Can you make the exchange for me?”

“I will only charge a small percentage.”

“It’s only fair.”

He pushed the money across to the man and waited while the fellow figured it out and paid him back with the tickets.

“I only took a little extra.”

“Fine, fine,” said Florry, grabbing them and trying to quell his exuberance.

“You must hurry; this train leaves in a few minutes.”

“Believe me, this is one train I won’t miss.”

He turned and ran toward it, to find Sylvia waiting at the door to the sleeping car.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “God, look at that!”

“It’s only English tobacco, darling,” she said, holding up a pack of Ovals.

“This must be heaven,” Florry said. He could not stop himself from smiling.

“I’m sorry they didn’t have American. The tobacconist had just sold all his American cigarettes to some hulking Yank.”

“It doesn’t matter, Sylvia. We’re safe at last.”

The train whistled.

“Come on, it’s time to get aboard,” he said.

They ate in the first-class dining car, and whatever one could say against the French, the French knew how to cook. The meal was ― or perhaps this was merely an expression of their parched tastes after so many months in Red Spain ― extraordinary. Afterward, they went to the parlor car and had a drink and sat smoking as the train hurled through the darkened countryside of southern France.

“Paris by morning,” said Florry. “I know a little hotel in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. Sylvia, let’s go there. We’ve earned a holiday, don’t you think? There’s enough money, isn’t there? We haven’t to face the future quite yet, do we?”

Sylvia looked at him: her gray green eyes beheld him curiously, and after a bit, a smile came to her face.

“It really is over, isn’t it? Spain, I mean,” she said.

Florry nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Let me think about it will you, Robert?”

“Of course.”

She hadn’t said no ― quite. And it sounded wonderful: a fortnight of luxury in a small, elegant hotel in the most civilized country in Europe after what had been the least civilized. Florry sat back against the comfortable chair, smoking an Oval. Maybe the woman would be his after all. He felt he owed it to himself to begin to feel rather good.

But of course exactly the opposite occurred. A curious melancholy began to seep through him. He seemed to still smell Spain somehow, or still dream it, even when wakeful. He remembered Julian in the dust, begging for death. He remembered the bridge exploding. The blast, for all its fury, had meant nothing after all it had cost them. He remembered the POUM rifles leveled at them, and the comical idiocy of the trial, and the Communist Asaltos heading up the mountain with their Hotchkiss gun. He remembered Harry Uckley’s empty holster. He remembered the night attack on Huesca and firing his revolver into the boy’s face. He remembered the abrupt cold numbness when the bullet struck him. He remembered the ship digging beneath the surface and the flames on the water.

“Robert, what on earth is wrong?”

“Julian,” he said. “I wish I had not let Julian down at the end. I know he meant so much to you.”

“Julian always got what he wanted,” said Sylvia with odd coldness. “And never what he deserved.”

She touched his arm. “Forget the war. Forget politics. Forget it all. Forget Julian.”

“Of course you’re right. Absolutely. One mustn’t let oneself get to brooding on things one is helpless to alter. And I swear I won’t.”

But it was a lie. Even as he saw her pretty face he remembered Julian. Hold my hand. I’m so frightened. Kill me.

“Yes,” she said. “I could not get the American cigarettes, and so I should not feel as if I’ve failed, eh?”

“I say, shall we have another drink?” he said cheerfully.

“Pardon me, folks.”

They turned, and looked up into the eyes of a rather large, almost handsome man in a suit standing in the aisle.

“I hate to interrupt,” he said, “the name’s Fenney. Ed Fenney. I saw you on the train out of Barcelona. I just heard the lady say she’s sorry she missed the American cigarettes. I bought them all. Look, here, take these.”

It was a pack of American Camels.

“Mr. Fenney, it’s really not necessary,” said Sylvia.

“No, I know how you get, missing your best smokes. I just got a little greedy at the border. My apologies, miss. Please, take these. You Brits and us Americans, we ought to stick together. It’s going to be us against the world one of these days, you just wait.”

He smiled. There was something peculiarly intense about him and remotely familiar, but he seemed so eager to please that Florry found himself accepting the cigarettes.

“Well, thanks awfully,” he said. “Would you care to join us?”

“No, listen, after a long day like this, I really want to turn in. I’ve calls to make in Paris tomorrow, have to be sharp. Nice seeing you.” He left.

“Robert, I’m awfully tired, too,” said Sylvia.

“Well, then. That seems to be that. Shall we go?”

It was nearly midnight: they walked through the dark, rocking corridor from car to car until at last they found their compartment. They entered; the porter had opened the bed and turned it back.

“Not much room in here, is there?” he said.

“The French are so romantic,” Sylvia said. She held up a single red rose that had been placed in a vase by the tiny night table that had been folded out of the wall.

Florry pulled the door shut behind him, snapping it locked. When he turned, Sylvia had undressed to her slip and washed her hands and face in the small basin. He went to her bag and opened it. Julian’s ring had fallen out of the pocket of his coat and worked its way into the corner of the case. He picked it up, looked at it.

This is all there is of my friend Julian Raines, he thought. There was little enough to it: a simple gold band, much tarnished, much nicked, as well it should be. The inscription inside it read, “From this day forth, Love, Cecilia.” It was dated 6-15-04.

For luck, Florry thought, and gave it a little secret kiss.

There was a knock at the door.

“Who on earth could that be?” he said.

“It’s Ed Fenney, Mr. Florry,” came the voice through the door.

“Oh. Well, what on earth―”

“Listen, I have an extra carton of Camels here. I might not see you in the morning. I’d like to give them to you.”

“Well, it’s not necessary but―”

“It’d be my pleasure.”

Florry turned, gave Sylvia a quizzical look, and turned to the door.

“Robert, don’t. We don’t know―”

“Oh, he’s just a big, friendly American. Just a moment,” he called, getting the door unlocked, even as he wondered how this Fenney knew his name. “You know, this is awfully damned kind―”

The man hit him in the stomach and he felt the pain like an explosion; he hit him twice again, driving him back, filling his mind with astonishment and, by the power of the blows, his heart with fear.

Yet even as he fell, Florry was trying to rise, for the man had just smashed Sylvia across the face with the back of his hand.

The big man hit Sylvia a second time, killing the scream in her throat, and she dropped bleeding on the bed when Florry, having somehow accumulated a bit of strength, assaulted him with a desperate rugby tackle, but it hurt Florry worse than the other and as Florry slid off, a brute knee rose and met him cruelly flush beneath the eye with a sick ugly sound that filled his head with sparks and scattered his will. He began to crawl away to collect himself, but the man dropped onto his back, pinned him with a knee as one pins the butterfly through the thorax to the board, and had his thick hands under his throat. He pulled his head back. Florry felt the strength and the force. He knew the man could snap his neck in an instant. He could hardly breathe. He was gagging.

“Pleased to meet you, yentzer,” the man hissed. “I’m your new pal.”

Florry was instantly released and felt the man rise off him. Then a powerful kick slammed against his ribs, lifting him against the wall in the tiny room, flipping him. He tried to scream when a short sharp blow delivered with a boxer’s grace and cunning nailed the exact center of his body and the sound was frozen forever in his lungs. He lay back, his eyes closed, sucking desperately at the air.

The man leaned across the bed and pulled Sylvia up by the hair. He slapped her face hard twice to bring her awake to scream, and as her throat constricted in the effort, he rapped her there lightly to trap it. He pulled her over and her head down.

Florry knew he had to help her. He had to get air, and help Sylvia.

“Please,” Florry begged. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do anything. Just tell me. I’ll do it.”

Please him, he thought.

The man dropped Sylvia unconscious to the bed and turned to Florry. Florry seized Sylvia’s suitcase from the corner and desperately hurled it, but it was open and the clothes falling from it crippled the velocity of the thrust. The man elbowed it aside contemptuously. He walked over the litter of clothing now spread about the floor and smashed Florry in the face and Florry wasn’t fast enough to slip the blow. Instead, head a mess of confusion and lights, he went down to the floor. The man sat atop him. Florry could feel the hot, excited breath and the heaving heart and the strength and the totality of him, the overwhelming force of him.

“I know it all,” said the man. “The old Jew Levitsky. The guy at Cambridge. He told me. You’re working for the reds.”

“I–I-” Florry struggled with the idea.

“Yeah. He told me, Levitsky himself, your great buddy. And I got this, too, fucker.”

He leaned back, reached into his pocket, and pulled something out. Florry recognized it immediately. It was the confession he’d signed for Steinbach.

“The gold,” the man said. “Where’s the gold?”

“What? I―”

“Don’t fuck around. The gold! God damn it, the gold.” He pulled something from his pocket, snapped it, and a knife blade popped out. He put the icy-sharp point of the blade into the soft skin under Florry’s eye. “I’ll cut you and cut you and cut you. Then I’ll cut the girl. I’ll cut everybody you ever knew. The gold. The gold!”

Florry knew now he was hopelessly insane, his ideas crazed and pitiful, his willingness to hurt absolute and unending.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” Florry said. “It’s―”

The man’s eyes widened at this defiance and he hit Florry savagely in the face.

“No,” said Florry, gasping and curling, seeking desperately for something to put between himself and the pain, “no. It’s Julian. Take Julian, don’t take me. He’s the one. Leave us alone, please, I beg you.”

But the man stood above him, looming like some titanic statue. Florry watched as the man’s foot came forward until it covered his face with its black shadow and descended onto his face. He could feel the shoe on his nose and lips, flattening and spreading them, and he could taste the grit and filth on the sole, little flecks and curds of it, falling into his mouth.

Florry’s fingers scrabbled desperately at the floor and the clothes littering it as a single thought filled his head: who will help me now?

Nobody, the answer came. You are alone.

“Lick it,” the man commanded in a hoarse, mad whisper. “Lick it, you little fucker.”

Florry’s tongue caressed the sole of the filthy shoe exactly as his fingers, crawling through the clothes on the floor, touched something hard and recognized it before his mind did.

“The gold,” the man said. “Tell me where the gold is, God damn you or―”

Florry raised Julian’s little automatic, thumbing back the nubby hammer, and fired into the crotch above him and felt the boot come off his face and saw the blood spurt. Florry fired again into the lower belly and into the chest, the gun cracking in his hand. The blood spurted and sprayed everywhere and the man seemed to sink back stunned and disappointed, holding his red fingers before him, and Florry shot him in the throat, opening a hideous wound, the larynx blown to shreds even by a small-caliber bullet at this range. He made grotesque mewling noises. He was spitting blood and it was coming out his nose and spilling down his chest. Florry rose, cupping the pistol with both hands, and fired carefully into the face; a black crater erupted in the crack and flash of the pistol under the eye while brain tissue and red fog rose from somewhere and he fired into the eye, shattering it. The slide on the pistol locked back. It was empty.

In the corridor, somebody was shouting. Florry looked down at the little pistol. It had lain in the pocket of the Burberry all those days since the bridge, packed away in Sylvia’s absurd case, a shell in its chamber, because when he needed to, he could not use it to help Julian.

But Julian had helped him.

42 THE GREEN

Holly-Browning studied the problem. It was a question of angle of approach and at the same time of impending obstacles ― a classic, in other words. It called for a peculiar combination of delicacy and power, the perfect equipoise. It called also for firmness of decision. It was not a time for equivocation, for appeasement, for lack of will. The situation demanded his utmost.

“Five iron, I think, Davis.”

“Yessir. Excellent selection, sir. I’d watch the elms on the left. There’s not much air among their leaves.”

“Thank you, Davis,” said Holly-Browning, taking the club. He laced his fingers together about the grip and let the natural weight of the club head pull the shaft down; it fell, with unerring accuracy, to its absolute perfect placement behind the ball.

Holly-Browning paused, concentrating. He let a wave of power build and build in his blood until it almost sang in his veins and he felt the muscles ache and tremble and hunger for release. Yet still he held it, feeling himself ― this was quite odd ― sink utterly into the ball until at last there was nothing, nothing at all in the universe but the white dimpled sphere and the green concave of grass embracing it and his own will, and in a sudden, fluid, Godlike whip of power and ― odd again ― terror, almost, he coiled and unleashed a blow that mashed it to smithereens. The contact was solid and shivered up his arms as the stroke followed its own inclinations through and came to rest all the way around his body.

At last he lifted his head to follow the straight, clean white flight of the ball as it rushed to the green with just the right kiss of loft and just the right pitch of power; it bounced on the fairway, bounced again, and struck the green, rolling slower and slower, its energy decreasing until at last it came to a halt about six feet from the flag.

“Pretty shot, sir,” said Davis.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, sir,” said the major.

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

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

“I seem to be, for some reason, sir.”

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

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

“Damned bad luck, sir.”

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

“You’re out, sir.”

“Yes, I am.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh?”

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

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

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

Holly-Browning didn’t say anything.

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

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

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

“Yessir.”

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

“Yessir, I suppose Jerry is.”

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

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

“Yessir, he has.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A splendid idea,” he said.

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

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

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

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

43 THE HANGAR

The old man grew stronger with remarkable swiftness and was well enough to travel within seven days. The speed of the recovery stunned the British-educated doctor. Pavel Romanov, however, something of a scholar of the lives and times of Emmanuel Ivanovich Levitsky, was not particularly amazed; he knew the old agent to be a man of rare resilience and will.

Yet Levitsky still did not talk.

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

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

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

Romanov felt loquacious.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Levitsky could say nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

He swallowed.

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

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

Levitsky stared passionately at the boy with his good eye.

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

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

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

The young man paused, as if to breathe.

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

The door opened.

“Almost time,” called Pavel Romanov.

The young man came closer and spoke in a whisper.

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

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

Levitsky stared at him.

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

Levitsky said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

“Time,” called Pavel Romanov.

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

The door opened and he could hear Pavel approach.

The boy whispered a last statement.

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

The boy slipped away into the darkness.

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

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

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

44 A WALK IN THE PARK

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

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

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

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

“God, it’s lovely here,” said Sylvia.

“Sylvia, there’s something I have to ask you.”

Sylvia sighed.

“I must say, I knew this was coming. I’m afraid I know what you’re going to say, Robert. That you love me. That you want to marry me. That―”

She turned to him. “Robert,” she said, “you’re an awfully fine fellow. You saved my life. Twice, in fact. But―”

“Actually, Sylvia,” he said, “the question I had was something else: how long have you been working for Major Holly-Browning?”

She missed a beat, then smiled.

“Robert, I’m afraid I haven’t―”

He interrupted her. “You really are a little slut, aren’t you, darling? The major’s whore, sent to make sure poor Florry does his dirty deed. You never cared for me, except as a tool, as someone to be used. Give the old bastard credit, he saw my weaknesses. He knew how vulnerable I’d be to a sweet-faced tart who kept telling me what an impressive chap I was, who’d give me a bloody toss between the sheets. It was quite a performance, darling, especially the way you suddenly veered toward Julian and made me crazy with jealousy and made the job everybody so wanted done seem feasible. God, you deserve some kind of award.”

“Robert, I―”

“You must have thought it quite comical when I confessed I was a ‘British agent.’ You must have felt the contempt a professional feels for a feckless, hapless amateur with delusions of grandeur. But it finally penetrated, Sylvia. Do you know where you went wrong, old girl? The bloody apartment. Sampson had a villa, for some damned reason. I recall him telling me. That wasn’t his place we went to, it was yours. The major had it set up to get you out, not me. That’s how they had your picture for the passport. Yes, you were the major’s little secret weapon, eh?”

“Robert, stop. You’re all wrong, it’s―”

“You pathetic little quim. It must have been hard, Sylvia, hanging around that dangerous city that week, waiting. But you weren’t waiting for me, were you? You were waiting for word on Julian’s death. You had to know. That was the last part of your job, to make certain the poor bastard was dead.”

She stared stonily out across the pond. The terrible thing was that even now she looked beautiful to him. He wished he could hold her to him and make real his last illusion: that a better world could be theirs.

“Then you were too bloody good on the way out! You had it all figured. You’d gone over the route, you knew how to handle everything. You are something, Sylvia, I must say, you are a piece of work.”

She turned back, eyes gray green, face tight and beautiful. She smelled so wonderful.

“I don’t work for your major, Robert,” she said. “I swear to God I don’t.” She took a deep breath. “It’s what’s called MI-5, actually,” she said. “Security Service. We go after traitors, Robert. That’s our job. Yes, I spied on you, because I thought you were my country’s enemy. That is the truth. Without illusions and, damn you, without apologies.”

“Poor Julian. He thought we were both his friends. With friends like us, the poor sot hardly needed enemies.”

“He was a traitor, Robert. You reported so yourself in Tristram Shandy.”

“I was wrong. I leaped to a conclusion. I made a mistake.”

“No, you weren’t wrong. No matter how brave he was at that bridge and how he chummed up to you, he was a Russian agent. No matter what he told you, the truth was, he was working for the Russians. He was a spy, Robert. He was the enemy. And you wouldn’t have had the guts to deal with him if I hadn’t played my little game. Yes, Robert, I made you a killer. You killed Julian because I made you. Because it was the right thing. You couldn’t see your duty, but I saw mine.”

“You and all the rest of the voodoo boys, you’re wrong. About Julian. About everything. Julian was the only one that was right. He knew. In the end, it was just a game.”

“Stop it, Robert. You’re still an innocent.”

“Sylvia,” he said. “You are my last illusion, and my most painful one. God, you’re a cold bitch.”

“Somebody has to be, darling,” she said, turning back to the water, “so that the silly fools like you can write your silly books and feel as if you’ve done something for your country. It’s the Sylvia Lillifords and the Vernon Kells and the MI-5s that make the world safe for the fools like you, Robert. You really are the most perfect ass I’ve ever met.”

But he could see that she was crying.

“Good-bye, darling.”

“No, don’t you leave, you bastard,” she spat at him. “I’ll tell it all. I went to Spain to get them. To get them all, all those clever, bright pretty young people in the Hotel Falcon who think revolution is so beautiful and communism is a new religion. Yes, I got them all, by name and by number, and it all goes back to the MI-5 files. They’re dead in England, and they don’t know it. And I’ll get you, Robert, I will. You think you’re going to write a book about all this, Robert? Well, we’ll stop you. With Official Secrets, we’ll close you down. You’ll never publish anything, Robert. You’re done, before you’ve even begun, God damn you, you’re just like them. Soft, a dreamer, ready to piss on your inheritance.”

Florry looked at her, and realized how full of hate she was, how she was nothing, in the end, except a kind of terrible hate.

“You’ve made me a clever boy, Sylvia. You’ve taught me some very interesting lessons about the future. And I don’t think you’ll stop me writing what I know. The funny thing is, darling, I still love you.”

He smiled, then stood up and walked away, wondering if it would ever stop hurting.

Florry went back to England and presented Julian’s mother with the ring. The old lady was still beautiful and she lived in a glorious town house all hung with pictures of the Raines men down through the ages, but the thing did not seem to mean much to her. She simply put it on the table and did not look at it again. She did not appear to have been crying much, but then weeks had passed since the news.

“Did my son die well, Mr. Florry?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Florry.

“I thought he might have. It’s a gift the Raines men all seem to have,” she said. “They are perfect rotters in life, but they die well. It was true of his father. Would you care for some tea?”

“No ma’am. I’d best be going.”

“Do you know, they’re saying awful things about my son. That he was a traitor. Have you heard these stories?”

“Yes, I’ve heard the stories. They’re untrue. No man knows that better than I.”

“Good. Well, if you know that, it’s a start, one supposes. Are you sure you won’t stay?”

“No, thank you.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Florry.”

“Good-bye, Lady Cecilia.”

And then she added, “Tell the truth, won’t you?”

“I shall try,” he said.

“You do know what the truth is, don’t you, Mr. Florry?”

“I think I do, yes,” Florry said.

“Incidentally, they sent me something from Spain. It was some poetry that Julian was working on before he died. I can’t think why. I always hated Julian’s poetry, and this last I can’t begin to understand. I believe the work was called ‘Pons.’ I’d like you to have it.”

“Well, I really―”

“Please, Mr. Florry. I insist. You gave me the silly ring, now let me give you his last verse, all right?”

Florry waited patiently until the old lady returned, and took the foolscap. Yes, come to think of it, he’d seen Julian scribbling away in their little bunker in the trenches.

He thanked her, took it, and left.

Only later, in his little bed-sitting room, did he look at it.