Tapestry of Spies

Conscious of the contest and eager not to fall behind from the start, Florry corrected the man. “Assistant superintendent please,” he said, and in the instant he said it, realized he’d been snookered.

“Oh!” said the lawyer, in mock astonishment. “Oh, I am begging the officer’s pardon,” his smile radiating heat, “oh, I am so sorry of the mistake. Then you have received so recently a promotion? For duties of spectacular success?”

“I don’t see what the devil dif?” Florry began with an extra measure of sahib’s bluster, but the sudden swell of bright laughter from the unsympathetic Hindus in the back of the courtroom drowned him out.

“Mr. Gupta, the bench does not quite see what relevance the assistant superintendent’s recent promotion has to do with the facts at issue,” said the magistrate coolly.

“I meant no disrespect, your honored self. A simple mistake, in which no harm was meant nor even intended or implied. I congratulate the new assistant. If I have it right, over the year, the difference in moneys is about one hundred pounds, is that not so?”

“Perhaps counsel could explain what relevance to the case of the accused is meant by this?” the magistrate requested.

“Apologies, apologies, many and profuse,” said Gupta, his cynicism as broad as his smile. “I only mean it to remark on the fortune of some and the misfortune of others in this cruel world. I mean never to imply or infer any kind of payment for services ren?”

“Now see here!” began Florry.

“Mr. Gupta, your client’s case will not be helped by impertinence. Indeed, it will most likely be harmed.”

“Then the subject of money shall be forever avoided from this moment onward. Now, Mr. Assistant Superintendent, I understand that you are a poet, is that not correct?”

Florry squirmed. He was a tall man, or boy, actually, twenty-three, with a long thin face, sandy hair, and a husky, big-boned body. He looked strong and English and a bit too decent for anybody’s good. He was an Eton boy ? though he’d been wretched there ? but of an odd English class. The son of an India Company clerk, he’d gone to his fancy school on account of having been at one time thought promising. He was in service because no university would have him after a disastrous finish to his years at the college. Worse, he felt here, as he felt at Eton ? as he felt everywhere ? somewhat fraudulent.

“Scribble a verse now and then, yes,” he said.

“Ah,” said the Indian, as if having made a remarkable discovery. “And would you not say that a poet is rewarded for his imagination, Mr. Assistant Superintendent?”

“And his sense of rhyme, his moral vision, his beautiful command of the language, his higher range of exalted thought, his?” Florry looked like a copper but he thought he was a poet, and if he was wholly neither, he was still capable of speaking eloquently on this one subject alone. But the magistrate cut him off.

“See here, Gupta, where’s all this headed?”

“Honored judge of men, I wish only to see if the assistant superintendent is the sort of chappy who sometimes sees things that aren’t there in his poems. Or I wonder if he doesn’t, in the honored tradition of such as Shakespeare and Spenser, sometimes improve the way things are for the sake of the beauty and soul of his no doubt significant poetics. I only mean to find the officer’s sense or definition of the truth.”

Benny Lal smiled. A lick of drool, like a gossamer filament in a dream, drifted from his mouth.

“My poems are my poems,” said Florry sullenly, embarrassed to be depicted as such a dreamy ninny before the other officers, “and duty is duty. Separate and apart. The way it should be.”

“Leaving aside which is the most important to you, let me ask you this, Mr. Assistant Superintendent. You were off duty, relaxing, cooling down at the end of a hot day’s duty in service to your mighty engine of empire. A man in these circumstances, sir, has been known to have a drink of spirits. May I inquire, sir, if you had done so, and if you had, to what extent?”

“A gin,” Florry lied. “Maybe two.”

“You are sure?”

“Quite.”

“Not so much for an Englishman?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”

“Your Honor, I have here ? ah ? oh, yes ? here ? Assistant Superintendent Florry’s bar chit for the previous month.”

He held aloft the pink form that the young policeman, with sinking feeling, recognized immediately.

“And perhaps in the excitement of the night’s events, the assistant superintendent forgot to sign that night. Yet in the weeks proceeding, it’s quite clear he was accustomed to drinking as much as five gins a night. My goodness, here’s one night when he drank nine! Yet on the night in question, he would have us believe he had drunk only two. My goodness. Perhaps, Mr. Assistant Superintendent, you could amplify.”

“Ah?” Florry began, feeling a tide of liar’s phlegm rising in his throat, “perhaps I may have had more than two. Perhaps I had three. It’s difficult to remember. Four gins is not a lot. Certainly not enough to affect my vision, which is what is important in this matter. My vision was intact, sir, it was. Yes, sir, four, four it was.”

Actually, it had been five. But the curious thing was, it hadn’t really affected him. He could drink grotesque amounts of liquor without much damage.

“Well then, that should clear that up, shouldn’t it?” said the magistrate.

“You see,” hastened Florry, “I had had an idea for a poem that day. And when I write a poem, I never drink a lot. Dulls the senses.”

“Then you had not written a poem for some time?”

“No,” said Florry, wondering what the little devil was up to.

“And yet, here I have ? oh, now where? ? yes, here, here it is!?” and the little Hindu milked the theme of the missing document like some bad actor in a West End melodrama for some time until at last ? “here it is, indeed. Your postal chit.”

He displayed it triumphantly to the courtroom.

“Yes,” Mr. Gupta continued merrily, “your postal chit. And on Friday before you had dispatched a large envelope ? the bill was a pound six ? to an address in London. In Bloomsbury. Here it is. Number 56 Bedford. At Russell Square. SW1. Correct?”

“Well?”

“And two weeks before. And a week before that. Would you tell the court what the address is?”

Florry paused bitterly before issuing the grim answer. “It’s the address of The Spectator. A literary quarterly. The best literary quarterly.” They never took his poems. Nobody ever did.

“And so you have been writing poetry and you have been drinking and you were lost in the worlds of your own poetry. You heard the scream. You rushed off the veranda to the body you have just noticed. You have so testified, is this not true?”

“Yes,” said Florry.

“And a shape flies past you. There’s precious little light. And the distance must be thirty feet and the time must be, oh, one would gauge it to be only seconds, eh?”

Florry said nothing.

“Yet you recognized ? please point to him.”

Florry raised his finger to point.

Damn the wog.

Two smiling Hindus sat at the defense table. To Florry they were identical. Gupta and his tricks.

Florry’s rising finger grew heavy. Pick one, he thought. Then he remembered a line from a poem: In the end, it’s all the same/ In the end, it’s all a game. Brilliant Julian had written it. It was from the famous “Achilles, Fool,” which had made him such a thing in London these days.

Julian, why did you hurt me so? The pain of it, five years gone, was never adequately buried and now came up like a rotting odor.

Pick one, he thought. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a game.

“How can I pick one,” said Florry, with a sudden icy coolness, “when neither is the