Tapestry of Spies

We are the tendentious generation, Achilles,
Fool. No wires for us; our lips will stay
Our own. We know the final truth:
In the end, it’s all the same.
In the end, it’s all a game.

Julian’s father had died on the Somme, hung up on a wire for a long day’s dying. The major had heard Capt. Basil Raines over the artillery barrage that day. He screamed for hours. But not to be rescued. He screamed at his men to stay away, because he knew they would die if they came for him. The major touched the bridge of his nose, which was tender with pain.

“May I get you something, sir?”

“Vane, are you still here? Perhaps you could go down to Signals and see if Florry’s ship has reached Barcelona yet. Sampson said he’d inform us.”

Vane darted out. Major Holly-Browning turned back to the sea of paper before him. He had mastered with sheer, dogged persistence nearly everything the pile contained. It was not a happy experience. He had become a kind of reluctant expert on the culture of 1931, its torrents and enthusiasms and excesses, its pacifism, its ideologies, its brilliances, its ugly insistence on secret conformism. And most of all, running beneath it like a hidden current, its spies.

Yes, there were spies. The climate almost demanded it. The postwar euphoria had long since worn off, and with the coming of economic hard times, a certain sensibility flourished, a sensibility of doubt. Despair seemed somehow fashionable. Peculiar sexual styles became smart. And the brightest lads were the worst: dandy boys, cleverboots, know-it-alls, fellow travelers; they climbed aboard the Soviet Russian bandwagon, toot-toot-tooting all the way. They loathed their own country. They simply, in their glib and fancy way, hated it, as had no other generation in English history. They hated it for its smugness and complacency. They hated it for being English and they hated it for making them comfortable while it was unable to feed its own poor. They regarded the very presence of the poor as a priori evidence of the corruption of the society. And they loved what little Koba, the red butcher, was doing in his worker’s paradise. It was this, finally, that so infuriated the major: their willed, forced, self-induced self-deception.

Major Holly-Browning touched the pile. It was there. He had dug it out, assembled it, bit by painful bit, as an Etruscan artist must have assembled a mosaic, in which no one piece has any meaning, but the pattern was everything!

The evidence was irrefutable. The dates, the places, the reports: they meshed so perfectly. It seemed that Levitsky, who nowhere else in his career had behaved with anything but utmost care, had been utterly sloppy around Cambridge in 1931, so contemptuous was he of our lazy security, our comforting veil of illusion, our pious stupidity.

Levitsky’s prime blunder had been a botched come-on to a clerk in the F.O. in February of ’31; from that time on, he’d been identified as a Bolshevik agent, though it had been assumed from the clumsiness of his approach that he was a low-ranking, incompetent one. He had been routinely surveilled on a weekly basis for the next seven months by Section V, until he left the country for parts unknown. His special watering hole, the MI-6 investigators noted, was Cambridge. He made trips there nearly every weekend for the entire seven months. He was hunting for talent, it was clear. But what talent? Who did he see? Where did he go? One investigator could have supplied the answers in a weekend at Cambridge.

He was never followed. In those days, Section V never worked weekends!

But twice Levitsky had not gone when he had been scheduled to. On April 12–15 and May 11–13; and both weekends, Julian Raines had appeared at prominent London society parties as part of a set of bright young things that so caught the public’s eye that year!

Then there was the matter of the arrest. Levitsky had been picked up by the Cambridge constabulary late on a Saturday night in March. The copper, mistrusting his foreign accent and his peculiar ways, had hauled him off to jail. And who had, the next morning, bailed him out? The copper, five years later, had recognized the picture.

It was the famous poet, Julian Raines.

And then there was the holiday. In June, Julian had taken off a week to rusticate in the south of France, Cap d’Antibes, to be exact. That same week, Levitsky, according to Passport Control (which kept impeccable records) left the country, too; his stated destination was … southern France.

Julian’s face seemed suddenly to appear in front of Holly-Browning: that smug, handsome face that seemed to be sweet reason and aesthetician’s grandeur. How he hated that face!

You little bastard. You smirk at your own father hanging on the wire, trapped in his own guts, too far to reach, his screams louder in the sulfurous vapors of the attack than the sound of the Maxims or the Krupps. The major closed his eyes. He could hear those screams still.

Your father died to give you everything and you in turn give us to the Russians.

Julian. Julian in 1931.

Yes. In discreet interview after discreet interview, they all agreed. Some time during 1931, Julian changed, his friends said. He became graver, odder, more private, more profligate, sloppier. His own easy brilliance seemed undercut with what one of his oh-so-sympathetic chums called “tragic self-awareness.” His gaiety was “forced.”

What had happened to dear Julian?

Holly-Browning knew. It’ll weigh a man down, deciding to betray his country.

The dates told the rest of the story. Julian had gone out to Spain on August 4, 1936, three weeks after the outbreak of rebellion. According to the defector Lemontov, an urgent flash had come to him from Moscow, graded Priority One, the highest, which ordered him to establish a radio hookup in a safe house with a transmitter in Barcelona, and to service it with a code expert, to use the Orange Cipher, the GRU’s most private, most impenetrable, most highly graded secret language. He was then to prepare to funnel the same information almost immediately back to Moscow via a second radio link. He was not to decode the information himself. That’s how secret it was. The date of the flash? August 5, 1936.

Lemontov had buckled. Making such arrangements was not only expensive and time consuming but risky. And this one seemed utterly unnecessary. After all, there were already enough OGPU and GRU operatives in Spain to ?

Lemontov was curtly ordered to return to Moscow. The implication was clear. Someone very high was running a special, sensitively placed agent and trusted (wisely) none of the usual security arrangements. It had to mean that a long-term asset was involved, and who but this old master Levitsky would run long-term assets on a private channel through Amsterdam to Moscow?

Lemontov realized that Levitsky was running the agent he’d recruited five years earlier, in England, and that the job was very important. And Lemontov realized that to return with this information was to die in Koba’s purge.

Julian Raines, you bloody bastard. A stooge for the GRU, for old Levitsky. You’ve sold us out. But now we know. And now we can stop you.

“Sir.”

It was Vane, silhouetted in the doorway. Something in his voice immediately unsettled Holly-Browning.

“Yes, Vane. What is it?”

“Sir, I’m afraid the news isn’t good.”

Holly-Browning sighed. He waited a heartbeat and said, “Go ahead, please.”

“The ship is evidently overdue.”

“Is that all? Does he send details?”

“No, sir. But there is another bit of news. Signals also monitored a communication between the Italian diesel submarine D-11 and its home port at the naval station at Palma on Majorca.”

“Yes, Vane?”

“The D-11 claims a kill off Barcelona.”