His first impulse was to run.
Don’t, he told himself. You old fool,
Levitsky began to slide through the crowd.
The big American was drawing closer. They’d grab him first, then pull the cards ? guns, too, probably ? and haul him away. He only had a few seconds. He put his hand in his pocket and removed the bomb. He held it muffled in his coat and with his other hand managed to get the first pin out. He continued walking through the crowd toward the big house; then, abruptly, he turned aside and headed to one of the three smaller buildings off to the side. A guard saw him coming.
“Eh?” said Levitsky, approaching.
Levitsky nodded, pulled the last pin, and in one swift motion tossed it through the window. The guard dropped his rifle and began to run screaming. Levitsky ran in the other direction.
The first blast was muffled; the second lifted him from his feet and threw him in the air. He landed, stunned. Men ran in terrified panic. Smoke filled the air. The small house blossomed flames.
“Run! Run! There’s more to blow!” somebody shouted. A pair of hands picked him up. He looked up into the face of the young British reporter Sampson.
“Go on, old man! Get out of here! Run for your bloody life.” Levitsky ran around the side of the big house and through the orchard. Behind him, there was another detonation.
He turned into a gully and began a little jog down the creek bed. The mountains in the distance were cool and white and beautiful.
A man in a trenchcoat stepped from behind the trees. He had an automatic.
The man smiled and relaxed as he came near and seemed to lower the pistol, and Levitsky knew this meant he was about to hit him. When the man lashed out suddenly with the pistol, meaning to crack Levitsky sharply across the cheekbone, Levitsky broke the blow with one hand and with the other struck upward, driving the crucifix nail into the man’s throat.
The man fell back, gasping, his eyes filled with stunned astonishment that such an old fool could hurt him so terribly. The pistol fell into the dust. The man went to his knees, trying to hold the blood into his throat with his hands. He tried to cry out but couldn’t. He tried to rise, but couldn’t.
Levitsky knelt next to him and carefully placed the point of the nail into the ear canal, and plunged it inward. With a convulsion, the man died. Levitsky quickly plucked his papers from the breast pocket, finding him to be one Franco Ruiz, according to a SIM identity card. He pulled the body into the brush and picked up the pistol, a short- barreled.38 °Colt automatic. He hurried down the creek bed, finding himself surprisingly impressed with Comrade Bolodin. The American was smart, yes, he was. He’d found him, and with a better man than Franco Ruiz, he would have taken him.
Night was falling as Levitsky hurried along the creek bed. He almost froze. He had no exact idea where he was headed other than east, away from La Granja. He shivered as the cold rose to penetrate his coat. The creek bed crossed under a country road after a while, and he chose the road, his feet acquiring an urgency that seemed almost involuntary. On either side in the twilight, the empty fields fell away, their crops unharvested, their farmers driven away. Several miles off a shell or a bomb exploded and now and then came the crackle of shots outside Huesca, but otherwise there was no sign of war in the strange, empty stillness of the land. The Pyrenees off on the left had become indistinct, a wall. Beyond them lay France, and freedom.
You cannot walk across the mountains, old devil, he told himself.
When it grew too dark to continue, he found a deserted stone barn and hid in the straw for warmth. He awoke early the next morning and proceeded on, the hunger gnawing away at his stomach. He was stopped once by a squad of forlorn militiamen who cared more whether he had food to share with them than for his papers. Twice more he came across groups of militia, but they paid him no attention. Finally he came to a larger road. Before him, he could see the plain stretching out for miles, bleak and flat, gnarled here and there with clusters of rock. Who could want such desolation?
He waited by the side of the road until at last a vehicle came along, an empty lorry driven by two men. He hailed them.
“Comrades?” he asked.
“Yes, of course, comrade. I am Ver Steeg, of the press. I was at the front and missed the lorry back to Barcelona. Perhaps you are headed in that direction?”
“Yes, comrade,” the boy said. “Hop aboard. We’ve got some wine and a little cheese.”
Levitsky squeezed into the cab, and the lorry rumbled on through the bright afternoon. The driver’s companion was another youth; they were two earnest German Jewish refugees who’d come to fight with the Thaelmann Column against the Hitlerites. They were political naifs, and Levitsky, exhausted, listened with bland interest to their slogans and enthusiasms, their gross misunderstandings and their outright fabrications. They believed Koba and Lenin were great chums, the spirit of the latter filling the heroic skull of the former. The enemies were all “Oppositionists,” who must be tirelessly liquidated, so that the Revolution could be guided by the brilliant Koba. They also thought, somehow, the Anarchists, the bourgeois manufacturers of munitions, and the Catholic church were behind Hitler and Franco and Trotsky. It was the routine nonsense the Party had been grinding out more and more lately. They talked of the big explosion at La Granja. And they talked, finally, of the miracle.
“You’ve heard of the miracle, Comrade Ver Steeg?”
“Alas, no,” said Levitsky, politely, uninterested in miracles.
“The luck of the English, I suppose,” said one of the boys.
“Yes, yes?”
“Talk about resurrections. It’s enough to turn one to priests and nuns!”
“Go on.”
“Two dead Englishmen walked back from the dead. A poet and his comrade. They lay in the brush. The Fascists came and set up a machine-gun post. They lay there, the poor devils, for forty-eight hours, one of them hurt and bleeding. Everyone thought they were dead. A single move, a single breath, and they’d have been shot.”
“What happened?” Levitsky asked laconically. At moments of great excitement he was capable of extreme calm.
“When the second night fell, they crawled in. Two full days after they’d been lost, they returned. They went to the hospital at Tarragona.”
“Tell the comrade what the poet said. He must be an amusing man. It’s on everybody’s lips, a famous line.”
“Yes, he must be witty, even if he fights for the POUMistas. He said, ‘The tea was simply rotten over there and the limes had not been freshly cut, and so we returned.’ ”
19
THE CLUB
They kept Holly-Browning waiting for more than half an hour. He sat with the coats in the anteroom under the cold, unimpressed eye of the doorman, awaiting his soft summons. He sat ramrod stiff on the hardback bench ? no soft waiting-room chairs for him, thanks ? and kept his eyes fixed furiously on a blank point in space some six
