Tapestry of Spies

“You are not fit,” Julian was screaming, “to wear this uniform.” He had gathered it up.

“Bitte, Herr Offizier,” sobbed the boy. “Please. Please don’t do this to me.”

“You will be taken naked, as you deserve, to the civil guardhouse, and there detained among thieves and pimps and Communists until suitable arrangements can be made. Is this understood?”

“Y-yes, Herr Offizier.”

Julian turned to Florry.

“Have you called headquarters for a car?”

“Yes, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer,” said Florry. “It’s on the way. But Herr Oberleutnant Von Manheim wishes to talk with you.”

“That bloody fool,” cursed Julian. “I trust, Herr Oberleutnant, that without your clothes you can be trusted to remain here.”

The boy only wept into his towel.

“Ah!” snorted Julian in disgust. He stepped out and Florry followed as they raced out through the foyer of the bathhouse, stopping only to gather the boy’s uniform and boots, and then headed down the cold street in the moonlight.

30 THE ENGLISH DYNAMITERS

The car was where Portela had said it would be, in a garage, on Ohte, near the Plaza de Toros. Helpfully, it was a Mercedes-Benz, black and spotless, all topped up with petrol.

“Ah, bravo,” crooned Julian, seeing it there, gleaming in the dark. “Splendid. By the way, old man, do you drive?”

“Good God, don’t you?”

“Poorly. Dangerously. I shall smash us up, I’m sure. You must drive. You were in the coppers. Surely they taught you such things.”

“I suppose I drove once. I haven’t driven in years. You’re rich, you’re supposed to have a car.”

“I do have a car. I just never had to drive it. There was a man who drove it. I wish he were here now.”

“I wish he were, too,” said Florry, slipping in behind the wheel. He fiddled with the choke, turned the key, and nursed it into life.

Julian opened the garage doors behind them and Florry edged out into the wet gray street. Dawn was beginning to break. Florry looked at his watch. It was nearly five by now, and he was going on his second day without sleep and the bridge was nearly one hundred kilometers away, and where now was Julian?

Florry looked back. What the devil was he doing? The seconds ticked by as if they weren’t desperately precious until ?

“Achtung!”

The officer who emerged from the garage was imperially thin and blindingly correct in the khaki tunic and trousers of the Condor Legion Tank Corps. He wore a black beret, black boots, and black belt. The Panzer skull- and-crossbones gleamed over the swastika on the front of the beret. He had a riding crop and two utterly pale blue eyes, killer’s eyes. Odd that such a terrifying apparition was a queer poet in love with sailor boys.

“Oh, I wish Morty Greenburg could see me now. What a hoot he’d have!” he said.

“Where did you get the crop?”

“Oh, in there. It’s one of the braces to an uncomfortable chair. Don’t suppose the owners will miss it, do you?”

Julian climbed in back.

“Pip, pip, fellow,” he commanded with his crop on the seat top.

Florry drove through early-morning Pamplona, crossed the river, and headed toward the flat Argonese plain that led to the Pyrenees. The road climbed, but the trim little Mercedes chugged along. Ahead, the mountains were stony and gray, still capped in winter snow.

“Now here’s the plan. I am Herr Leutnant Von Paupel, newly appointed to the front, a special engineering officer. Expert on bridges. You are Herr ? oh, pick a name, old boy.”

“Brown.”

“A German name, Stink. Braun. Herr Braun, of the embassy staff. You’ve escorted me out from Pamplona at the general’s instructions.”

“What general?”

“Just say, ‘the general.’ It will drive Jerry crackers. He’s scared to death of generals. If anybody looks at you hard, merely say ‘Sieg heil,’ and flip up your paw. And believe it. That’s the trick. You must believe it.”

Florry nodded, fascinated. Of course that was the core of Julian: the belief In himself, primarily, and in the primacy of his needs. Julian, the homosexual. Florry pondered it in silence.

If that is what he is, what am I, he wondered.

For I love him, too.

In the mountains, the German military traffic picked up and it became abundantly clear they were entering a war zone. Moorish sentries ? tall, brown, grave men with sour looks and long Mausers slung over their capes ? stood watch at crossroads; trucks full of Moors made a slower way along the road, and Florry, pushing ahead smartly, passed them. When the men saw Julian sitting in sober Nazi regalia alone in the back of the Mercedes, they saluted; he responded blankly, touching the riding crop to his hat.

As they climbed into the Pyrenees, it seemed to get colder. The air was thin and pure. Florry opened the vent and sucked in the air as he kept turning to look at his watch at the fleeting seconds. The mountains were white and massive now, chalky, craggy, rugged peaks and beneath them spread the Argonese plain, a patchwork of buff and slate in the bright sun.

They sped along the Embasle de Yesa, a high, green lake that ultimately gave way to the Rio Aragon, along whose stony banks they passed for some time. The jagged mountains were clearer and bolder than they had ever been from the lowland trenches about Huesca.

I lived in a hole in the mud for five months with this man who now tells me he has sex with boys. I never guessed it. Julian was another illusion, it turned out, a self-created one. Or did I, at some odd level, really, truly know, even if I lie to myself about it now?

Finally, they came to the bridge over the Aragon at the Puenta la Reina de Jaca. It was a fine old girdered thing, as sturdy as a Victorian building, and just beyond it, where the road curled almost due south down through a final splurge of mountains toward Huesca still some fifty kilometers off, the Germans had established a car park ? except that it was a Panzer park, and the things were spluttering into life, ready for the job ahead. These were the PzKpfw IIs, small gray tanks, no taller than a man, with double machine guns mounted in their tiny turrets.

“Of course,” said Julian, “the Russian T-26 would prang these tinpots like the toys they are. But of course at Huesca there are no T-26s. The Russians have seen to it.”

Farther down, men were limbering up some wicked artillery pieces to lorries. The guns, lean and long- barreled, rode on pneumatic tires and crouched behind shields an inch thick.

Julian carried on like the best ROTC candidate in the world, pleased to be good at this, too.

“And that, of course, is the famous eighty-eight-millimeter gun. Supposedly the most efficient long weapon in the world. Extraordinary velocity and penetration. They can use it with a fused shell against planes, with an armor- piercing shell to pot tanks, with canister to make fish and chips out of infantry, or just good old high explosive to smash buildings. God, Stink, I admire the Germans. They really do do things, don’t they? Bloody pity they do the wrong things. Oh, hullo, what’s this. Sieg heil, Herr Major.” He carelessly threw a salute at a man by the side of the road.

“Let’s go, old man,” he commanded.

But Florry, driving slowly by, watching the force assemble itself, wondered in melancholy at the odd link