Tapestry of Spies

“Tibidabo Mountain,” said Sylvia. “We’ve come to the park atop Tibidabo Mountain.”

“Yes,” said the man. “Just the place for the trial and execution of the traitor Florry.”

34 BAD NEWS

It fell to ugarte to tell Comrade Commissar Bolodin that the Englishman Florry and the girl Sylvia Lilliford had evidently vanished from the hotel, despite his team’s scrupulous scrutiny. But surprisingly, Comrade Bolodin took the news stoically.

Lenny, sitting in his office at the SIM headquarters in the main police station cleaning his Tokarev, thought this meant they were getting ready to move the gold. Florry was back from his secret job behind the lines, something for the hidden GRU apparat the Englishman, like his crazed master Levitsky, clearly worked for, something so secret it would be all but unknown to the NKVD. He knew it would be harder than it seemed. There was too much at stake.

“Just poof,” said Lenny, “and they were gone?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“You talk to the hotel people?” Lenny wondered, wiping down his slide.

“Yes, comrade. Nobody saw a thing.”

Lenny considered this curiously, ramming a short, stiff brush through the barrel of the disassembled automatic. Then he said, “People go in and out?”

“Comrade, it is a public place. My team was on all sides of the building.”

Lenny nodded, wiping down the recoil spring.

He felt rage blossom like a precious, poisoned flower deep in his head, more precious for its containment. It was delicious. He looked at the Spaniard and had a terrible impulse to squash his head. But he didn’t lose control. He didn’t lose control anymore, he was so close to what he wanted.

“Should we put out some kind of alert so the Asaltos or the police can?”

“No, we should not put out an alert. Then we have all sorts of other people all asking the SIM how it does its business. And I don’t like to answer questions. Do you understand, my friend?”

“Yes, comrade.”

“Don’t I take good care of you, Ugarte? Aren’t I a good boss, Ugarte? I’m no mintzer, am I?”

Although the Spaniard couldn’t know the Yiddish word, he answered, “No, boss.”

Lenny rose, embraced the Spaniard, drawing him close with one hand, and with the other gathered between thumb and forefinger a fold of flesh from the cheek. He held it delicately as one would a rose, and felt the man’s terror.

“Scared, Comrade Ugarte?”

“No, comrade,” said the man, trembling.

Lenny smiled, then crushed his fingers together. Ugarte fell weeping to the floor. It was not the first scream heard in those quarters.

Lenny picked the little one up.

“We can’t let this bird fly,” Lenny exclaimed calmly. “You tell your gang, Comrade Bolodin is a very busy man these days, and he expects his special friends in Ugarte’s section to do their very best.”

Lenny could see the terror in Ugarte’s eyes. “Okay? Do you understand?”

“Yes.” Where Lenny’s fingers had come together, a purple hemorrhage now blossomed.

The little man scurried off.

Lenny sat back with his pistol. He knew where Florry would be. He’d have to be with Steinbach, the new number-one gangster of Barcelona, who’d slipped through the big net of June 16 and whose capture was Lenny’s most pressing official business. Clearly Steinbach was being run by GRU; how else could he be so effective? It was a battle between two Russian gangs, he now saw, and he was right in the middle.

When they got Steinbach, they’d get Florry. And Lenny knew they’d get Steinbach. In the spirit of capitalism, the SIM had offered a great deal of money.

And money, Lenny knew, money talks.

35 THE TRIAL

It seemed rather strange, Florry had to admit, that in the heat of its death convulsions, the POUM had chosen to liquidate him. One would have thought they were rather busy for such trifles. But no: this last act was crucial to them. He was surprised to discover how much passion had been invested in such a seemingly ludicrous act.

Sylvia was led off, and the trial began almost immediately in a large maintenance shed at the rear of the deserted amusement park, in which at one time the park’s mechanisms and gizmos had been tended. As a courtroom it was barely adequate, certainly nothing like the elaborate courtroom in which another innocent man, Benny Lal, had met his fate. It was a cavernous old garage, with stone floor and a single bare bulb, almost a cliche of illumination borrowed from the cinema, and it was exceedingly drafty. One could see one’s breath. However, it did seem adequate, Florry had to admit, to the sort of justice being dispensed.

The evidence was indisputable, especially as marshaled in the dry tones of the well-informed prosecutor, none other than the one-eyed Comrade Steinbach whose eloquence held the panel of judges ? three meatpackers, a pimply teenager, and a wild-haired German youth ? spellbound. Steinbach, without so much as a hello to his old chum Florry, pushed ahead with his case, as if he were eager to be done with the business.

“Is it not true, Comrade Florry,” Steinbach said with the trace of an amused, ironic smile on his lips, and his good eye radiating intelligence and conviction, “that on the night before the attack against Huesca on April 27 of this year, you sent a message out from the trenches via a secret post to certain parties in Barcelona announcing the time and direction of our efforts?”

Florry, cold and exhausted and suddenly terrified, knew the answer would doom him. But he supposed he was already doomed.

“Yes, yes, I did. But I was trying to reach?”

And he halted. He was trying to reach Sylvia. To mention Sylvia would be to involve her.

But Steinbach was not interested in explanations anyway.

With a flourish, he reached into his pocket and removed a sheet of paper. Florry recognized it instantly.

Steinbach read it in a dry tone and its romantic conceits sounded absurd in the huge, cool shed.

“Note,” said Steinbach, “how the clever Comrade Florry camouflages the crucial military information among terms of bourgeois endearment. To read it uncynically is to encounter a lover writing to another on the eve of battle. To read it in awareness of its true purpose is to see the nature of the betrayal.”

“The girl has nothing to do with this!” shrieked Florry. “Where did you get that?”

“It was in her purse,” he said.

Damn, Sylvia. You should have thrown it out!

“And is it not true, comrades of the tribunal,” he argued in his public voice, “that the attack was betrayed, our men pushed back, our party humiliated and weakened?”

They nodded.

“You don’t understand,” said Florry weakly. “It was innocent. I love the woman. I wanted to tell her that before the fight.”

“Yet the attack failed, did it not? Because the Communist Brigades of the Thaelmann Column would not move out in support of our men and the Anarchists. Because they had been ordered by Barcelona to stay put. I give it to you, comrade, from one professional to another: a brilliant stroke.”