Tapestry of Spies

Beyond surprise, Levitsky at least had the capacity for stupefaction. The figure silhouetted in the harsh corridor light filled the frame.

For a big man, he moved with a rare grace. He moved swiftly, hauling the door shut behind him, and came to Levitsky. The old man watched him come, not scared but awed. What? What could ?? The Amerikanski bent and with his strong hands he lifted Levitsky’s skull from the stones and turned it this way and that, a queer gentleness in his fingers.

“You stink of the shtetl after all these years,” the American said, and it occurred suddenly to Levitsky that he was speaking in Yiddish. The language flooded back upon him; it had once been his only language, years ago, ages ago, in the time before there was time.

“Jud, nu?” asked Levitsky.

“Yes. One of the chosen. Raised in a little shit-smelling village. And, like you, old fuck, I remember the day when Cossacks came.”

So long ago: Ural Cossacks, Levitsky remembered, in fur hats and upturned boots, with curved sabers, on great black steaming stallions. They came out of the trees at daybreak, after a night’s drinking. He remembered the bright blood, the smells of huts burning, the screams, the heat of the flames, his brother’s sobs. He remembered his mother, butchered, his father, hacked, the bright blood, the woodsmoke, the heat, the screams. He remembered the horses, brutes that stank of death and would smash you to nothingness …

“So we changed all that,” Levitsky said. “We made a revolution.”

“Fuck the revolution.”

Levitsky stared at the huge shape above him. Had he been sent to kill him? He could do it easily, with his thumbs. But why now, in the dark? Why not with the pistol?

“So what do you want, comrade? A confession? You should fuck goats.”

“To help you.”

“Excuse me, I’m hearing things, no?”

“To help you. I help you, you help me. A deal. Between two Jews.”

“So talk. I’m not going anywhere.”

“A certain name, old man. Give the name, and I’ll get your ass out of here.”

“What name?” said Levitsky.

“The name that no one speaks. The English boy, whose soul you own, old devil.”

“What boy?”

“You call him Castle, after a chess thing. Surprised? You didn’t think anybody knew. But I knew!”

Levitsky felt the closeness of the huge man. He let the moment linger. He felt an awful stillness settling through him. A new player on the board.

“What bo?”

“Don’t play with me. I can kill you in a second. Or in a second you can walk out of here to America. You can be a writer for the Daily Forward, huh? And sit in the park with all the other East Side dreamers and talk revolution. Give the name!”

Levitsky tried to concentrate, to calculate the chain of possibilities. How could he know? What had he learned? Who told him? Who sent him?

“I have no names.”

“You have a bellyful of names. In England in ’thirty-one, with Tchiterine and Lemontov. Lemontov’s gone and Tchiterine’s in the ground a few hundred feet from here. Give me the name of this English boy, or so help me I’ll put you in the ground alive and you can die by slow degrees you never dreamed of in this world.”

And so Levitsky saw his chance. The big American Bolodin had made his mistake. He had revealed exactly how important the information was to him.

“Kill me, and you’ll never know anything. But give me a night to think and maybe there’s this deal you keep telling me about.”

“After tomorrow, there may not be enough to give an answer.”

“I may surprise you, Bolodin. I may surprise you.”

The American snorted.

“I’ll go easy. But I’ll come back at night for the answer, and if it isn’t the right answer, then I’ll go so hard you’ll pray for death. And God doesn’t work this neighborhood.”

* * *

At dawn, Levitsky lay on his pallet. He knew he had two simple choices: suicide or escape.

Consider: a locked cell in some sort of Spanish monastery. In a few hours, Glasanov would arrive and the beatings would begin anew. Another day’s torture would leave him just that much weaker and less able to escape or resist, and the Amerikanski would be back at night for his answer. But there really was no answer: if he told, the Amerikanski would kill him quickly. If he didn’t, the Amerikanski would kill him slowly. Either way, Levitsky perished, and with Levitsky gone Castle was open to assault.

It occurred to Levitsky that he had reached the climax of his life. The chess master, designer of elegant combinations and strategems, now faced his greatest test, and it was a simple puzzle. He looked about, as if to study. This puzzle might not have a solution. The cell was vaulted; it had one barred window; it was, at least, at ground level. Levitsky ran his fingers painfully over the mortar of the old stones. No, it was solid, undisturbed except by tears for centuries. He turned his attention to the window. The iron of the bars felt ancient and cold, tempered in medieval fires and set in the stone to last until the arrival of God the Father on earth. His hands locked about and tested each. They had no give at all. Next, the door. It, too, seemed ancient, a collection of polished oak slats, massively thick and heavy, held together with iron bands. The hinges were on the outside, beyond reach. The lock only remained. He bent to it. Hmmmmm. It was not at least a dead bolt, but a tumbler mechanism, old iron, black and hard. Well-oiled. It could be picked, perhaps, with a pick. But he had no pick.

His examination of the physical possibilities of the cell had exhausted him. His bruised ribs hurt furiously. He closed his eyes: sleep came toward him. He fought it off ? or did he? For an instant he was back in the water after the ship had gone down, knowing he would die, until the Englishman’s strong hands had pulled him back to life.

For this?

I should have died, nu?

He blinked awake: the same cell. How much time had passed, how much time had he lost?

He went to the window: the sun was coming up. He could see they were on a hill on the outskirts of the city: he could see across the way a chapel, now abandoned, desecrated, the doors blasted off, the interior blackened by flame, all the windows shattered. It was a dead building. The Church, enemy of the people, enemy of the masses, at last feeling the full brunt of their wrath. The nuns raped and beaten, perhaps shot; the processes of history were never pleasant and only made sense in the longer view.

Another cracked smile passed over Levitsky’s face. Old nuns, old mother superior, facing the workers’ bayonets and the hour of your death, how just you’d see it that a man like Levitsky should perish on the same blasphemed ground. You’d cackle at the perfection of it ? an old revolutionary professional, me, der Teuful Selbst, devoured by the very forces he’d thought to understand and master and that he’d liberated.

He turned away from the window and stared at the scab left in the stone where an old cross had been beaten down from the wall. It was, he now saw, a room of death. What was a cross except a way to kill a man in slow, horrible agony, a long day’s dying. Maybe that’s why the Jews could never make sense of it: worship an execution device. Strange, these Christians.

He might not be the first Jew in this cell. Others, four hundred years ago, may have been held here, facing the same choice he would face: renounce your faith of die. Which was really, renounce your faith and die. They would have been men like his father, men of decency but without weapons. What would they, having squandered their gifts for analysis and dialectic on the Talmud in five thousand years of hushed, devotional study, have made of their torturers?

Levitsky felt it sliding away. He had trained himself so hard over the years to a certain pitch of revolutionary toughness: to see only what was real, what was important. Always to move to the heart of the issue. Always to be without illusion. Never to waste time in pointless bourgeois memory, nostalgia, and sentiment. To be, after the