Tapestry of Spies

Ulasowicz?”

“Very impressive memory.”

“Thank you, comrade.”

“You perhaps have more documents? A very lucrative market. The hills of Barcelona are loaded with aristocrats in hiding who desperately need new identities.”

“Alas, I have no documents today. I have not paid a visit to the police station lately and have no plans to do so in the future. What I have, rather, is a scrap of information.”

“For sale?”

“You would not trust anything given as a present.”

“Probably I would not.”

“I am told that there is in Barcelona a sinister underground antirevolutionary organization called the White Cross. It’s said the White Cross may have ways of reaching Generalissimo Franco’s intelligence staff via a hidden wireless.”

“I, too, have heard of such an organization. They would pay dearly for crucial military information that an astute man had gathered.”

“Yes, they would. I have something to sell you for ten thousand pesetas that you may sell an hour hence to the White Cross for one hundred thousand pesetas, assuming, of course, you have ways of reaching the White Cross.”

“There are always ways, senor. But how can I trust you?”

“Play my trick on me. Give me half the money. That is, literally, half. If you fail to make a sale to the White Cross, you can come take it from me and kill me. I’ll wait downstairs. If you can sell it, come to me with the money.”

“And why should I not simply take your information and kill you without paying you?”

“Because you would have to tear it from my heart. And you do not have time to do so this night.”

There was a long pause.

“Pedro,” the voice behind the light finally directed. “The money. As he says.”

There was shuffling in the darkness, and the sound of bills being peeled out and torn. It took a few minutes. Then, with a slithering sound, the packet of bills slid across the floor to his feet. Levitsky bent, picked up the wad, made a quick show of counting it off.

He smiled. “I’m sure your friends in the White Cross will be pleased to inform General Franco’s intelligence staff that at quarter to noon tomorrow, sixteen June, two English dynamiters traveling under stolen identity papers in the names of Uckley and Dyles will be present at the new tank bridge at kilometer 132 on the road between Pamplona and Huesca. The point of their presence is to sabotage the gun position for a guerilla attack on the bridge. And at one that same afternoon, the soldiers of the POUM and the UGT and the FAI militias will make another assault on the city of Huesca.”

Julian had told him. And now Julian must die.

* * *

Levitsky sat downstairs, having another peppermint schnapps. He felt exhausted. The goal glimpsed that evening in Moscow when his strange companion let slip the information of Lemontov’s defection had at last been achieved. What GRU wanted, GRU had gotten. What happened now ? to anybody ? did not matter. Levitsky, however, strangely took no pleasure in it. He didn’t feel anything except hollowness. He felt, if anything, only old.

It’s getting to you, old man.

Levitsky had not wept in years. Yet he found a last old tear in his dry bones for the dead: Julian and poor Florry. Igenko. The Anarchists in Trieste. Foolish old Witte. Tchiterine. Maybe worst of all his father, dead and gone these many years, slaughtered by Cossacks in the time before there was time.

Tata. Salud. You were a man.

He had another swallow of the schnapps. He was turning into an old shikker, boring and stupid and sentimental, an old fool. It was as if the discipline, the passion, the absolute fury of a life had at last spent itself, leaving nothing.

Then he realized with a start that tomorrow, June 16, was his birthday. He would be sixty years old.

“Old one.”

Levitsky looked up into a set of dark features, smooth and sleek and Mediterranean. “You are right. Our friends were quite impressed. Here is your money.”

“Fuck your money,” said Levitsky.

“And here’s an old friend of yours,” said the Aegean, laughing.

“Hello, old putz. I got you at last.”

Levitsky looked into the face of Comrade Bolodin and then two men grabbed him and took him.

27 PAMPLONA

Julian stood in the immaculate circular park where the Avenida de Carlos III and the Avenida de la Baja intersected in the lovely center of the Carlist city of Pamplona. It was midafternoon, June 15, a glorious day. The sky was Spanish blue, subtly different from English blue in that it is paler, flatter, less voluptuous, more highly polished.

“Sieg heil,” said Julian, enjoying the theatricality of it, to a fair-haired, blue-eyed young chap who was but one of the dozens of Pamplona Germans, all sleek, smooth-looking professional soldiers with glorious suntans in the crisp blue uniforms of the Condor Legion Panzer companies.

Florry sat on the bench in the park not far from where his partner flirted with the young Jerry, and loathed himself. Another bloody failure. Julian had not come in gun range since they’d separated, until now, except that he was also within gun range of the entire Condor Legion as well. God damn you, Julian Raines, and your absurd lucky ring around your neck: it seemed to sum him up, that foolish talisman against the vicissitudes of reality. Julian believed in it, and in believing in it, seemed to force the world to believe in it.

Florry watched intently. It was not particularly amazing that Julian could speak so passionately with the young German. To begin with, his German was brilliant and he was himself blond and blue-eyed; but perhaps more important was the force of his performance. It was not just that he was now scrubbed and combed, in a beautiful double-breasted gray pinstripe suit, but it was something deeper. He was too pitch perfect and nuance pure for fiction or artifice. He was not, really, acting. He had simply willed himself to become a new and different man on the streets of Pamplona.

After a while, Julian began to show off. He offered the young man a cigarette, lit it for him with his Dunhill, and made humorous observations at which the German laughed heartily. He had even found a pipe someplace, and he gestured emphatically with it.

God, thought Florry.

After a time, Julian and the young officer shook hands, threw each other a gross deutscher salute, and walked amiably away from each other. Julian returned and sat down.

“Interesting chap. Says the Jerry armor doesn’t stand a chance against the Russian T-26s. That’s why they’re pulling them out of Madrid for this little show up here.”

“Christ, I thought you’d never finish,” said Florry.

“He’s just been up to the bridge. His unit is near there. Says we must visit; it’s a marvel of engineering. The Fuhrer would be proud.”

Florry shook his head.

“Come on, Stink, you’ve got to enjoy this. Think what a tale it’ll make for your and Sylvia’s grandpups. Won’t believe a word of it, though, the little ghastly rodents. Hate kids, myself. So bloody noisy.”

“What on earth did you tell him?”

“We’re mining engineers. Out from the fatherland to advise the bloody olive-eaters on their mining