Tapestry of Spies

“He only saw it for a bit,” said the major, knowing a little something of the broken-off schoolboy friendship, the cometlike ascension of one of the partners and the disappearance into ignominy of the other.

Florry was turned out, after the fashion of the day, to the maximum limits of his wardrobe, but on his severely limited budget he could only manage to appear a notch beyond the shabby. The coat was almost fifteen years old, a tweed thing that was as lumpy as it was frayed, and flecked with a dozen tawny colors. The rest of Florry’s attire was in perfect accordance with the coat: floppy wool trousers, a gaudy Fair Isle sweater, and a bumpkin’s well-beaten walking shoes. He had on his officer’s khaki service tie and his shirt was of dark blue, worn shiny and limp from countless washings.

“I must confess I’d expected someone with a bit more bearing. The fellow was an officer, wasn’t he?” said the major.

“Of sorts,” said Vane. “More a copper, actually.”

Florry continued to navigate the sidewalk as he headed toward his destination, which lay on the far side of the square, across still another street. Yet even having cleared this, a final obstacle stood in his way. The early edition of the afternoon Mail had just come out and a news board hawked the leader in a crude child’s scrawl.

MADRID BOMBED, SURROUNDED

HOW LONG CAN REDS LAST?

This information brought the young man to a sudden halt. He stared at it gravely for some time.

“Why on earth did that have to be there?” wondered Mr. Vane.

Florry finally pulled himself away from the announcement and made his way another few yards down the street, where he assaulted the marble steps of a red-brick house at Number 56 Bedford, at Russell Square.

Major Holly-Browning sat back but could not relax. A cold sore inside his lip began to throb and his headache had not abated at all. He believed himself, and not without some evidence, to be quietly disintegrating. He knew now the most difficult part of the day was upon him, the awful waiting while certain steps were taken to bring upon him that most awkward and tender moment of the operation. Florry would be wooed ? delicately if possible, brutally if necessary ? but at all costs successfully. The major, having partaken in so many similar seductions over the years, had no illusions about the process of recruitment. Florry must be taken and owned and directed. It was more important than Florry himself.

“I say, Vane, can you stay here and keep watch?” the major suddenly said. “I imagine it will still be a bit. I must move. The old leg, it’s beginning to smart up, eh?”

“Of course, sir,” Vane replied.

The major opened the door, pulled himself onto the curb, and closed the door behind him, absorbing great drafts of fresh air in the process. The car had seemed a prison; sometimes, confined, he had the sudden screaming urge come over him to stretch and breathe and feel the cool air in his nose and the soft grass underneath his feet. It was a feeling that could come hurtling over him without warning, until he could no longer stand it. It had begun in Lubyanka, with Levitsky.

The major found his way to a bench near the gigantic old tree that stood at the center of the park. He sat down, trying to calm himself. Yet what returned to him was not calm but memory. Perhaps it was the drama of recruitment being played out at that moment not a hundred yards off in the office of The Spectator, or perhaps it was the sure and steady approach of a moment when he, Holly-Browning, must himself act, the pregnant moment of equipoise, when Florry, perched delicately between worlds and lives, must be nudged into the right one. Or perhaps it was simply time again to remember, for the memory had returned as regularly as a train, twice a week, every week since 1922.

For in that year, he himself had been the object of just such a ritual as was now transpiring so close at hand. His impersonation of one Golitsyn, the furrier’s son and Bolshevik officer of the cavalry, had been penetrated by a clever Cheka agent. The major, who had fought Zulus and wogs before the ’14-’18 show, who’d gone over the top twice in suicidal assaults during it, and who’d fought in seven battles of the civil war in Russia under his fictitious identity, had never until that moment been truly frightened. But Levitsky had sliced through him as a sharp knife goes into a plump goose’s breast.

He could not but think of his own session in the cell. The same shame flooded over him. It came to sit on his chest like an ingot, suffocating him.

Levitsky, he thought, you were so shrewd.

“Sir!”

It was Vane, out of the car.

“Look!”

The major looked across the green park and could see the upper shade of Number 56, the arched window above the entrance: the shade had been raised.

Vane approached, looking flushed.

“He’s bitten. He has taken the hook.”

“He has indeed,” said the major. “And now it’s time to land him.”

* * *

The sherry was extraordinary. Florry had never tasted anything quite like it.

“Well, Florry,” said Sir Denis heartily, returning from the window whose shade he had just raised, admitting a shaft of pale London sun, “I can’t tell you how delighted we all are here.”

“Nor I, sir,” said Florry, still trembling with excitement.

“The Spectator has never sent a man abroad. Much less to a revolution.”

“Well, you can certainly count on me to master my Spanish politics before I leave, sir. I shan’t mix up the POUM and the PSUD again.”

“No, it wouldn’t do. That’s PSUC, old boy. The Trotsky fellows are the first group, the dreamers, the new architects of society, the poets, the artists. The fashionable folk, if you will. The PSUC would have precious little patience for that. They’re the Comintern lads, the professional Russian and German revolutionaries. Bloody Joe Stalin’s pals. Best not to mingle them together. They hate each other enough as it is. And they may end up cutting each other’s throats before too long. It’s all in the initials. Memorize the initials and the Spanish revolution becomes as clear as a bell. You might read Julian’s stuff in Signature. He’s got it down pat.”

“Yessir,” said Florry, almost contritely. Damn Julian. Of course he’d have it down pat. That was Julian, the art of getting things down pat. The art of the easy success, the swift climb, the importance of connections. Florry felt the old pain, the old hate mixed with regret.

Yet another name from Florry’s complicated past seemed present, in the form of that constant nagging little dog that always told him he didn’t quite deserve that which he was about to receive. This new life, this life he had dreamed about and wanted so badly for so long ? no more dreadful nights in dreadful bed-sitters up scribbling away on novels and poems nobody would publish ? had developed by virtue of his one piece of professional writing. And a damned good piece it was, too, if effort had anything to do with it: he’d rewritten it over thirteen times until he felt he’d gotten every one of its five thousand words exactly right; still, he’d been dumbstruck when the note from Sir Denis had arrived.

FLORRY:

Your piece on the hanging superb. Delighted to have it. It’ll go in the late February number. By the way, how about dropping by the office Tuesday, half-tennish. I have a proposition for you.

YOURS, MASON

Benny Lal, six years among the worms, was still doing his best to accommodate.

The phone rang. Sir Denis picked it up.

“They are? Fine, show them in,” he said. “Now Florry, there is one small thing.”

“Of course.”

“Two chaps from the foreign office. They’d like a word with you.”

“The F.O.?”