Tapestry of Spies (26 page)

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

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

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

“Comrades?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, yes?”

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

“Go on.”

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

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

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

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

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

T
HEY KEPT HOLLY-BROWNING WAITING FOR MORE THAN
half an hour. He sat with the coats in the anteroom under the cold, unimpressed eye of the doorman, awaiting his soft summons. He sat ramrod stiff on the hardback bench—no soft waiting-room chairs for him, thanks—and kept his eyes fixed furiously on a blank point in space some six feet ahead.

At last the doorman came for him.

“Sir James?”

“Yes.”

“Will you follow me please, sir.”

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Look, do sit down.”

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

“James, you know Sir Vernon.”

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

“By reputation,” said Holly-Browning.

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

“Of course, sir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And right now?”

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

“I quite agree,” said C.

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

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

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

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

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

B
ELIEVE ME,” SAID JULIAN, HOLDING UP A GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE
and blinking in the sun, “I’ve been dead and I’ve been alive and alive is better.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Florry smiled wanly. “Indeed,” he said.

“Well put, old sport.”

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

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

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

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