Tapestry of Spies

bell.

Levitsky rose. The boy walked him across the square.

The boy seemed to hate Russians for some reason. Or perhaps it was something else: he had just wanted to parade somebody through the square at gunpoint with his shiny new weapon to show off for the girls of the town.

As he walked he could sense something odd about this place: the slogans smeared on the stucco walls in the hot sun had a kind of stridency to them he hadn’t noticed in other such villages. He translated.

FREE THE LAND

UP THE CNT

FAI FOREVER

THE REVOLUTION NOW

He soon found himself in the Guardia Civil station ? or what had once been a Guardia Civil station and was now littered and looted and clearly in the possession of some sort of People’s Committee for Order. The boy put him in the one cell of the dirty little building overlooking the square.

They were waiting, the boy had explained, for the sargento, who would take care of everything. Levitsky told himself he really ought to get some sleep. You’re an old man, comrade, he thought. Almost sixty; you’ve still got something to do. You need your rest.

And thus he was situated when a car did in fact appear in the square. It was not, however, the car he expected; it was another vehicle altogether, and when it drew to a halt and its door popped open, two thuggish Spaniards in overcoats got out, checked around, and nodded into its dark interior. Comrade Bolodin emerged.

Levitsky drew back. Trapped.

As the two thugs came inside, Levitsky quickly dropped to the straw bunk and turned toward the wall, wrapping himself in the blanket. He heard the two newcomers arguing with the boy. The men kept saying SIM, SIM, over and over. No, the boy kept saying, FIJL, which was the Federacion Iberia de Juventudes Liberatation, the radical anarchist youth organization.

The boy, in short, wouldn’t listen to them because they were the enemy, here to take over the revolution from the people in this small seacoast village.

“Sargento,” he kept saying. “Sargento.”

The two men after a time returned to the car, and Levitsky heard one of them speak in heavily accented English to Bolodin.

“Senor Boss, this snot-nose kid, he say is nothing he can do until his sergeant come.”

“Christ,” said Bolodin. “You show him the picture?”

“Boss, this kid, he is having a machine gun. Is no toy.”

“You moron. I ought to turn him loose on you.”

“Sorry, Comrade Boss.”

“Don’t ‘Sorry, Comrade Boss’ me. I didn’t drive here half the night from Tarragona for the old goat to hear you say you were sorry. Just get over there and wait.”

Levitsky was impressed. Bolodin had penetrated his own motives and taken his inquiries to the hospital, on the belief that Levitsky would be hanging around wounded Englishmen. Now he was up here on the road to Cab de Salou showing the picture of Levitsky from Deutsche Schachzeitung. If he showed it to the boy …

They walked over to the cafe and commandeered a table near the sidewalk. Levitsky watched as Bolodin put his feet up on the railing and pulled out a brightly colored pack of cigarettes, plucked one out, and quickly lit it. He did not offer smokes to his companions, who sat on either side with the nervous alertness of bodyguards.

Levitsky looked at his watch. It was about nine thirty. The boy said the sergeant came in at ten. He looked around the cell for a way out and could see none. The boy sat in the front room with his machine pistol. He looked straight ahead.

Another locked room. As if the first weren’t terror enough, he had to play the same ?

“Boy. Hey, boy. Come here,” Levitsky called.

The boy grabbed his weapon and came back. He had sullen, stupid eyes and seemed bull-headedly frightened of making a mistake. His khaki uniform was too big; still, he was lucky to be here, and not out in the trenches somewhere, or caught by opposing factionalists and stood against the wall.

“Durutti?” Levitsky suddenly asked, naming the Anarchist hero killed leading a column of Anarchist troops in the Battle of Madrid late last year.

The boy looked at him suspiciously.

“Si, Durutti,” he said.

“?Viva Durutti!” said Levitsky with enthusiasm. He gave the Anarchist’s double- fisted salute. He’d actually known this Durutti in Moscow in 1935 at the Lux. The man was a hopeless dreamer and lunatic, exactly the sort of uncontrollable rogue who’d become a great hero in the civil war, but utterly worthless at any other time. The Anarchists were all like that: wedded to absurd notions of a stateless society.

“You’re an Anarchist, no?” he asked.

“Si, I’m an Anarchist. Long live Anarchism. Death to the state!” proclaimed the boy.

Levitsky saw just the slightest chance.

“I’m an Anarchist also,” he said carefully, hoping his Spanish was right.

“No,” said the boy. “Russians can’t be Anarchists. Russians are all gangsters. Stalin is the head gangster.”

“I’m Polish,” said Levitsky. “A Polish Anarchist.”

The boy looked at him darkly.

“Revolucion si, la guerra no,” Levitsky added, hoping again to approximate the idea of the Durutti slogan.

“Si,” said the boy.

“Comrade,” said Levitsky. “Por favor. Look at this.” He smiled slyly.

He rolled up his sleeve, past the elbow. There on his right biceps a black fist clenched in ardent fury, ready to smite the governments and policemen of the world. The tattoo dated from 1911. He and several others of the Party had been trying to organize the Trieste millworkers but at every step of the way they were opposed by an Anarchist organization that loathed Bolsheviks. Levitsky had been directed to stop them, for their irresponsibility could so enflame the policemen of the Continent that revolutionary activity would be impossible for months. He’d penetrated their secret society under an alias and been tattooed with the black fist as part of his rite of passage. When after months of careful maneuver he had finally met the ringleaders in a Trieste cafe, he’d betrayed them to the police. They were taken off and most of them had died in prison.

The boy looked at the mark on his arm, his eyes widening in wonder.

“Salud, comrade,” said the boy.

“Si. I salute. I salute Bakunin. I salute the great Durutti. I salute Anarchism!”

The boy went and got a key and opened the door and embraced him.

“Esta libre, hermano,” the boy said. “?Libre!” Free, he was saying. “One Anarchist may not lock up another Anarchist. Esta libre. ?Viva la anarquia!”

Levitsky could see the American Bolodin through the open doorway, sitting at the cafe, and beyond that he could see an elderly man in Guardia Civil uniform head across the square, and at that same moment, a black Ford, the Twenty-ninth Division staff car, with Julian Raines and Robert Florry in the rear, pulled through the square and disappeared down the road and out of town.

“?Viva la anarquia!” said Levitsky, and he meant it, for dark forces had been loosed in the world.

He embraced the boy and, seconds later, slipped out.