Tapestry of Spies (33 page)

“For me?”

“Yes. Listen carefully. Now, in the time of the revolution, you have been liberated. You work for yourself, correct?”

“I am a free worker.”

“But it was not always so. It was not so before July. Once you worked for a man. A certain man controlled you and all the ladies.”

“Before July.”

“Yes. Before July.”

“Suppose it were so?”

“Suppose this man had a name.”

“He was called only the Aegean.”

“The Aegean is gone?”

“Who knows?”

“This man would leave all he had built up? He would leave it?”

“Leave it or die. His kind was placed before walls in the early days of July and shot.”

“You say he is gone. Yet oddly a ship full of illegal cigarettes attempted to reach Barcelona in January. It was sunk by the Italians. Yet clearly the owner of the ship hoped to make a great deal of money from the contraband. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing this Aegean chap might be interested in. So perhaps this fellow isn’t as far gone as you maintain.”

“I know nothing of such things.”

“And the man who owned that ship. It is said in some quarters that he owned this place—and other places in the barrio.”

“Who is asking these questions?”

“Perhaps this fifty-peseta note will convince of my friendship.”

She took the bill and stuffed it down between her breasts.

“So. A friend.”

“I have something to sell him. But it must be tonight. If it’s not tonight, it has no value. It could make him a very important man in times to come. And it could make the girl who helps him very important in times to come.”

“I’ll be back. I must talk to someone.”

He took out a five-hundred-peseta note, tore it in half, and gave her one piece.

“Show him this. And you get the other,” he said, “when I meet the Aegean comrade.”

Levitsky then sat alone for a time. Two other tarts came by; he shooed them away and ordered another peppermint schnapps.

At last the girl returned.

“Upstairs,” she said. “And you better not be carrying no gun or knife or they’ll cut you open.”

“Salud,” he said.

“My money, comrade.”

He tore the remaining half in half again, and gave it to her. “You get the last piece when I get there.”

They went in the back and up the steps into a decrepit hall leading to a small room.

“The man you seek is behind the door. My money.”

He gave it to her and she left quickly.

Levitsky opened the door and stepped into darkness. A light hit him in the eyes. He heard an automatic pistol cock.

“Search him and check his wallet,” the voice commanded.

A form approached, patted him down, and quickly relieved him of his money.

“You are a very rich man in these revolutionary times,”
said the voice. “Don’t you know that capital is against the spirit of the people?”

“An astute man flourishes in any climate,” said Levitsky.

“So he does. It’s said some weeks ago a certain bold man came to possess a great many identification documents obtained illegally from particular foreign visitors to this country. Some of these documents were sold on the black market for a considerable sum. But you would know nothing of this?”

“How would a poor man such as I know anything of these criminal matters?”

“Perhaps the purchaser of the documents marked the bills with which he paid the anonymous seller. And perhaps the first piece of the bill you gave the girl had the mark.”

“What an amazing coincidence,” said Levitsky.

“It’s said the man removed these documents from the headquarters of the head Russian stooge policeman. I would like to meet this man.”

“He must be an amazing chap,” said Levitsky. “Imagine walking out of the main police station with twenty-eight confiscated passports under the names Krivitsky, Tchiterine, Ver Steeg, Malovna, Schramfelt, Steinberg, Ulasowicz—”

“Very impressive memory.”

“Thank you, comrade.”

“You perhaps have more documents? A very lucrative market. The hills of Barcelona are loaded with aristocrats in hiding who desperately need new identities.”

“Alas, I have no documents today. I have not paid a visit to the police station lately and have no plans to do so in the future. What I have, rather, is a scrap of information.”

“For sale?”

“You would not trust anything given as a present.”

“Probably I would not.”

“I am told that there is in Barcelona a sinister underground antirevolutionary organization called the White Cross. It’s said the White Cross may have ways of reaching Generalissimo Franco’s intelligence staff via a hidden wireless.”

“I, too, have heard of such an organization. They would pay dearly for crucial military information that an astute man had gathered.”

“Yes, they would. I have something to sell you for ten thousand pesetas that you may sell an hour hence to the White Cross for one hundred thousand pesetas, assuming, of course, you have ways of reaching the White Cross.”

“There are always ways, señor. But how can I trust you?”

“Play my trick on me. Give me half the money. That is, literally,
half
. If you fail to make a sale to the White Cross, you can come take it from me and kill me. I’ll wait downstairs. If you
can
sell it, come to me with the money.”

“And why should I not simply take your information and kill you without paying you?”

“Because you would have to tear it from my heart. And you do not have time to do so this night.”

There was a long pause.

“Pedro,” the voice behind the light finally directed. “The money. As he says.”

There was shuffling in the darkness, and the sound of bills being peeled out and torn. It took a few minutes. Then, with a slithering sound, the packet of bills slid across the floor to his feet. Levitsky bent, picked up the wad, made a quick show of counting it off.

He smiled. “I’m sure your friends in the White Cross will be pleased to inform General Franco’s intelligence staff that at quarter to noon tomorrow, sixteen June, two English dynamiters traveling under stolen identity papers in the names of Uckley and Dyles will be present at the new tank bridge at kilometer 132 on the road between Pamplona and Huesca. The point of their presence is to sabotage the gun position for a guerilla attack on the bridge. And at one that same afternoon, the soldiers of the POUM and the UGT and the FAI militias will make another assault on the city of Huesca.”

Julian had told him. And now Julian must die.

Levitsky sat downstairs, having another peppermint schnapps. He felt exhausted. The goal glimpsed that evening in Moscow when his strange companion let slip the information of Lemontov’s defection had at last been achieved. What GRU wanted, GRU had gotten. What happened now—to anybody—did not matter. Levitsky, however, strangely took no pleasure in it. He didn’t feel anything except hollowness. He felt, if anything, only
old
.

It’s getting to you, old man.

Levitsky had not wept in years. Yet he found a last old tear in his dry bones for the dead: Julian and poor Florry. Igenko. The Anarchists in Trieste. Foolish old Witte. Tchiterine. Maybe worst of all his father, dead and gone these many years, slaughtered by Cossacks in the time before there was time.

Tata
. Salud. You were a man.

He had another swallow of the schnapps. He was turning into an old
shikker
, boring and stupid and sentimental, an old fool. It was as if the discipline, the passion, the absolute fury of a life had at last spent itself, leaving nothing.

Then he realized with a start that tomorrow, June 16, was his birthday. He would be sixty years old.

“Old one.”

Levitsky looked up into a set of dark features, smooth and sleek and Mediterranean. “You are right. Our friends were quite impressed. Here is your money.”

“Fuck your money,” said Levitsky.

“And here’s an old friend of yours,” said the Aegean, laughing.

“Hello, old putz. I got you at last.”

Levitsky looked into the face of Comrade Bolodin and then two men grabbed him and took him.

J
ULIAN STOOD IN THE IMMACULATE CIRCULAR PARK WHERE
the Avenida de Carlos III and the Avenida de la Baja intersected in the lovely center of the Carlist city of Pamplona. It was midafternoon, June 15, a glorious day. The sky was Spanish blue, subtly different from English blue in that it is paler, flatter, less voluptuous, more highly polished.

“Sieg heil,”
said Julian, enjoying the theatricality of it, to a fair-haired, blue-eyed young chap who was but one of the dozens of Pamplona Germans, all sleek, smooth-looking professional soldiers with glorious suntans in the crisp blue uniforms of the Condor Legion Panzer companies.

Florry sat on the bench in the park not far from where his partner flirted with the young Jerry, and loathed himself. Another bloody failure. Julian had not come in gun range since they’d separated, until now, except that he was also within gun range of the entire Condor Legion as well. God damn you, Julian Raines, and your absurd lucky ring around your neck: it seemed to sum him up, that foolish talisman against the vicissitudes of reality.
Julian believed in it, and in believing in it, seemed to force the world to believe in it.

Florry watched intently. It was not particularly amazing that Julian could speak so passionately with the young German. To begin with, his German was brilliant and he was himself blond and blue-eyed; but perhaps more important was the force of his performance. It was not just that he was now scrubbed and combed, in a beautiful double-breasted gray pinstripe suit, but it was something deeper. He was too pitch perfect and nuance pure for fiction or artifice. He was not, really, acting. He had simply
willed
himself to become a new and different man on the streets of Pamplona.

After a while, Julian began to show off. He offered the young man a cigarette, lit it for him with his Dunhill, and made humorous observations at which the German laughed heartily. He had even found a pipe someplace, and he gestured emphatically with it.

God, thought Florry.

After a time, Julian and the young officer shook hands, threw each other a
gross deutscher
salute, and walked amiably away from each other. Julian returned and sat down.

“Interesting chap. Says the Jerry armor doesn’t stand a chance against the Russian T-26s. That’s why they’re pulling them out of Madrid for this little show up here.”

“Christ, I thought you’d never finish,” said Florry.

“He’s just been up to the bridge. His unit is near there. Says we must visit; it’s a marvel of engineering. The Führer would be proud.”

Florry shook his head.

“Come
on
, Stink, you’ve got to enjoy this. Think what a tale it’ll make for your and Sylvia’s grandpups. Won’t
believe a word of it, though, the little ghastly rodents. Hate kids, myself. So bloody
noisy.”

“What on earth did you tell him?”

“We’re mining engineers. Out from the fatherland to advise the bloody olive-eaters on their mining techniques. Know a bit about mines, too. My mother owns one somewhere. Any sign of our pals?”

Florry, from his vantage, looked across the fountain and the street, through the leafy trees and to the hotel on the corner. It was an elegant old place, rather Parisian in appearance. It had been his job to keep it watched, while Julian sported about with Jerry.

“Nothing,” he said. “A few Condor chaps. It seems to be unofficial Jerry headquarters,” he said.

“The Moseley brutes will love it. What utter swine. To give up their own country to rub bums with German Java men tarted up in Sigmund Romberg uniforms. I loathe traitors.”

Florry kept his eye on the hotel.

“Sieg heil,”
Julian suddenly blurted, as two more officers suddenly came by in gleaming black jackboots.

“Handsome chaps,” Julian said after they passed. “Pity they’re all such pigs.”

“There,” said Florry suddenly, squinting in the sunlight.

He could see them in front of the picturesque doors of the hotel, a short, squat, and blunt fellow who must have been Harry Uckley and another who must have been his companion Dyles. It was the uniforms that gave them away: they wore their silly Moseley black shirts and jodhpurs and black riding boots.

“What charming uniforms,” said Julian. “So refined.”

Florry felt a queer roar in his mind. No matter what, he’d have at Julian.

“All right,” said Julian. “Time for some real fun now, eh?”

But the fun did not start for quite some time. They followed the two down the wide, tree-lined Avenida de Carlos III at what seemed a prudent distance, perhaps two hundred paces, until at last they reached their appointment: an office off the Calle San Miguel, near the cathedral, which wore the proud banner of the Falange Espagnole, the violent right-wing Spanish brotherhood that, like the POUM, supplied its own militias to the fighting.

Florry and Julian found shelter down the street at a bench under a tree and waited. By 4
P.M
. Julian grew bored and went for a walk. For a time he browsed in the shop windows while Florry sat furiously, vulnerable and absurd, awaiting his return. He was gone about half an hour.