Tapestry of Spies

superintendent,” said the major.

Florry looked at the man, hating and fearing him at once.

“Last year, another man confessed to the murder of U Bat. He was a member of the Burmese Po Ben Sien, or Freedom Party, a militant nationalist group that we believe to be controlled by Julian’s friends at Comintern. The movement eliminated U Bat when they realized he was secretly reporting to one of our politicals in the area. They killed him and tried to place the blame on us.”

“So you’ve got me. Some years ago, I made the mistake of telling less than the truth, and now you’ve got me.”

“Well, the option is a term in the Scrubs. Four years, I believe, is the term for perjury in a capital case. And Mr. Florry, even in the Scrubs there are cell blocks that might be pleasant and cell blocks that might be dreadful for such a handsome chap as you. I might go so far as to use what little influence I’ve got to see you end up among nellie-boys and poofs of a particularly aggressive nature. Not a pretty fate for a public-school boy.”

“I say, you are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“As a writer, you enjoy irony, don’t you, Florry? Here’s one for your collection. I have no doubt you did exactly the right thing in the matter of U Bat. It was necessary to close that case swiftly. At the same time, I have absolutely no compunction against using it against you now, to force you, once again, into doing the right thing. Your duty. We are quite prepared to see charges placed.”

“I’d go to the press.”

“With Official Secrets, we can shut the press down.”

Florry could only look off, through the window. He could see the London skyline, looking very much as it had looked in Dickens’ day, a flat, neat vista of little houses and chimneys. It looked like a set of parcels laid out on the postman’s table, and among the buildings crept, anonymous, huddled, bent, hustling, the citizens of the British Empire, faceless and nameless, in whose cause he had just been dragooned.

“I had no idea the British government could be so ruthless.”

“The world has chosen to give us ruthless enemies, Florry.”

“It really does have to be you, Mr. Florry,” said Vane. “You are a writer and have cause to travel where he travels. You know him well. At a point, you knew him very well, in the ways that public- school boys can come to know each other. Those old school ties, Mr. Florry, they count for something. You know they do. Then, you are an ex-policeman, experienced in security matters. You do fit the ticket, Mr. Florry. And it is, sir, something of a duty.”

“And one other thing, Florry,” said the major. “You hate him. Or you should.”

Julian, thought Florry, why did you hurt me so? He remembered the boy he’d loved and the boy who’d almost killed him.

Yes, I hate you. It was true. By some subtle alchemy of the emotions, his passion had turned abjectly to loathing. He could remember Julian cutting him for the sheer amusement of it all.

“We’ll be in touch concerning details, Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane. “We’ll provide everything, of course, No need to do this thing on a miser’s scale.”

Florry looked up to see that his two new employers had risen and put on their coats.

“Good day, then, Florry. Glad to have you aboard,” said the major. Florry shut his eyes. He heard the door close and the quiet pad of feet down the hall. After a bit, he left, too.

2 THE LUX

By late 1936, the most terrifying sound in all Moscow ? in all Russia, for that matter ? was the sound of a single knock. It always came at night-late. And it always meant but one thing.

The young men from the organ of state security, the NKVD, were invariably polite, though a bit distant, as they stood there in their green overcoats and their fur-muffled winter caps with their hands on the Tula-Tokarev automatics in the holsters at their belts. Mercifully, they kept the formalities to a minimum: they read the charges, they allowed the accused a last word with his loved ones, a chance to grab his coat, and then they removed him ? forever.

It was the time of Yeshov ? Yeshovchina, in the Russian ? after Nikolai Yeshov, the dwarfish chairman of state security. But the process of purification represented by this massive wave of arrests surely originated with the general secretary, whom most of the old revolutionaries remembered as Koba. Koba sought to scour the party clean, to make it a precise, scientific instrument, to do away with the last remnants of bourgeois sentimentality so that the future could be faced with strength and will and resolve. Koba most certainly sought also to make certain he was never arrested.

In one Moscow building the arrests were greeted with something beyond even fear and despair, something unique to the city: irony. The building stood on Gorky Street, hard by Pushkin Park, not three-quarters of a downhill mile from the Kremlin itself, in the very center of the city. It was an ornate, Italianate construction, rich in marble and brass, and its upper floors on the western side provided a grand panorama of the Kremlin’s domes. The place bore the name HOTEL LUX, on a brass plate untouched since 1917. Once, in the early years after its construction in 1907, Russian and European nobility, American entrepreneurs, German adventurers, Jewish diamond merchants, and exceedingly expensive courtesans had occupied its stately rooms. These days, the Lux appealed to a different clientele.

It had degenerated into a dirty, dingy ruin, its marble pitted and brass unpolished, but the dreams dreamed in its bohemian corridors and cabbage-stinking rooms boasted as much scale and romance as any dreamed by capitalists. For the Lux served as the unofficial headquarters of Comintern, or the Communist International, which, while a direct apparatus of the GRU, was at the same time, since having been decreed into existence in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin, the coordinating organ of the World Revolution.

Its inhabitants now comprised almost a Party congress of famous, infamous, notorious, and violent European leftists, men who had lived their whole lives underground, in the swirl and fog and rat hunt of revolutionary conspiracy. The revolution achieved, it was seized from them; they became its victims. Thus the nighttime visits of the young policemen ? they were frequent at the Lux ? had a special bitterness.

And how the old revolutionaries talked of this! Their lives had become almost pure language. They argued endlessly, like old rabbis at yeshiva. It obsessed them. What was Koba doing? What was his vision? By what theoretical underpinnings did he justify the killings? How did Yeshovchina fit into the ultimate trajectory toward socialist victory? And who was taken last night?

But one man, in all that noise, said nothing.

He did not complain. He had no theories. He had no grudges or secret fears, or so it seemed. He did not mingle in the lobby or participate in the endless debate. Nor did he care to comment upon the justice of it or the pathology of Koba and his dwarf Yeshov.

Rather, he stayed behind his doors, emerging only for his afternoon constitutional. On those occasions, he strode briskly through the lobby with an aristocratic aloofness upon his face, as if any consideration beyond the ancient lift that would haul him to his rooms was utterly beneath him. He looked neither left nor right and issued no greetings to old comrades, nor, by his iciness, did he expect to receive any. He dressed as if a dandy in the last century, in spats, a velvet smoking jacket, well worn but beautifully fitted, a white silk scarf, and a lustrous mink coat. He acted as if, by special compact to the highest authority, he was invulnerable to the nighttime visits of Koba’s killers.

He had been called many things in his interesting life, but one of them clung even to this day and to this circumstance. He was called, not only by his peers in the Lux and by his enemies in the Kremlin, but in the capitals of the West, the Devil Himself.

For a legend, he seemed rather vigorous. At fifty-nine, E. I. Levitsky still had a taut, lively face. His mouth retained its unusual thinness. It was a clever, prim mouth, as the eyes above it were also clever. They carried the electricity of conviction. He wore, after Lenin, a little goatee, purely an affectation. His head was glossily balding from the forehead back to the crown, though extravagant with bushy peppercorn hair beneath it, as if the black and gray individuals that comprised this mass were violently divided among themselves as to their ultimate direction