Tapestry of Spies (44 page)

“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:

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.”

D
O 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.