Tapestry of Spies

Steinbach paused, as if to catch his breath.

“Then,” said Steinbach, “there is the curious business of the explosion. Florry goes on the attack and does not come back from it; in the intervening day, an unknown fifth columnist detonates our magazine at La Granja. Then, miraculously, Florry returns with a minor flesh wound. Can this be coincidence? Or can Florry have inflicted his own wound as an excuse to go into hiding because he knew a Stalinist agent, acting on information he had supplied ? and perhaps had been sent to enlist in our militia to obtain ? was planning the potentially dangerous destruction of our munitions?”

Florry saw his chance. Give them Julian, he thought. It was Julian. Give them Julian Raines, spy and traitor, neatly tied and bundled. You believed it yourself. Yet he said nothing.

“Now we come to Comrade Florry’s masterpiece. The masterpiece of the bridge.”

“I almost died on that bloody bridge!” shouted Florry. “Damn you, a hundred good men died that day!”

“Yet the Fascists knew well in advance of the attack that it was planned, did they not?”

“Yes, they did. We were betrayed. But not by?”

“And is it not true that only you ? you alone ? of the attacking party survived?”

“Yes. Yes, but we blew the bloody thing. We dropped it into the gorge?”

“Yet is it not true, Comrade Florry, that the attack on Huesca had already been betrayed? By you? So that the bridge itself was irrelevant? And is it not curious, Comrade Florry, that on that same day the English poet and socialist patriot Julian Raines was murdered? Your own friend. Your own countryman?”

“He was killed by Fascist bullets. He was a bloody hero,” Florry said. “He certainly would never have given up his life for you bastards if he’d have known?”

“We have reports that place you over his body with a pistol in your hand. Did you shoot him?”

“No.”

“Who shot him?”

“An old lady. To put him out of his misery. He’d caught one in the spine and another in the lungs. He was paralyzed and coughing blood.”

“You ordered the woman to shoot.”

“You bastard,” said Florry. “You even turn this against me.”

It’s not too late, Florry thought. Give them Julian. The argument is perfect. Julian is the spy.

“It may interest the tribunal to know that even the poet Raines had his doubts about Comrade Florry. I produce for you now a stanza discovered in his effects from his last poem, alas unfinished, ‘Pons.’ ” He smiled at Florry before reading.

“Under the outer man, with his gloss, his charm,
under the skin, the hair, the teeth,
among the bones, the blood, the grief,
there’s another man, a secret man, who would do harm.”

“Now isn’t that interesting, Comrade Florry? It seems he’s describing you, does it not?”

No it did not. It was Julian describing himself and his own secret self.

“Who else, Comrade Florry, could Julian have been describing?”

Florry looked to the rafters. Give them Julian, he thought, but it occurred to him that he was doomed anyway. They didn’t have Julian. They had him.

“I have these many hours pored over the records,” Steinbach continued, “until at last I could see the pattern. I hold myself personally responsible for not seeing it sooner. I am an idiot. Perhaps my trial should begin after the conclusion of this one. But the truth is, wherever Comrade Florry or his lady friend have been and whomever he talks to, they have an odd habit of disappearing. Each mission he is assigned to has an odd habit of failing. And each disappearance and each failure is another nail in the coffin of our party.”

“Sylvia had nothing to do with it,” said Florry. “She’s utterly innocent.”

“And yet, Comrade Florry, is it mere coincidence that when our Comrade Carlos Brea sat at a table in the Grand Oriente, who should show up next to him but the girl? And within minutes, the Russian secret policemen arrive. And minutes later, Comrade Brea is shot dead in the street by parties unknown, in the care of the NKVD?”

Then Florry had an inspiration. “The dates,” he argued. “Look at the dates. I didn’t arrive in Barcelona until the first part of January. Yet the arrests of your people had begun before that. There, does that not prove my innocence?”

But Steinbach was ready for this.

“Actually not. Before January there was no pattern to the arrests. The NKVD was clearly scooping up people blindly. In fact, as one example of their gropings, the category which suffered the most arrests was clearly non- political: it was dockworkers and minor maritime or port officials. Literally dozens of these chaps disappeared. Then Mr. Florry and Miss Lilliford arrive, and as if by magic, the arrests and liquidations of POUMistas begins in earnest.”

Florry stared at him in fury.

“I fought for you people. I killed for you. I nearly died ? I would have died ? for your bloody party. A man I loved more than any other died for your bloody party. The girl worked for months on your silly stinking little newspaper. Why are you doing this to us?”

“You betrayed the comrades at Party headquarters. You betrayed the working classes of the world. You betrayed your countrymen Julian Raines and Billy Mowry. You betrayed the future. You and your master in the Kremlin. Only we have you and not him. So you will have to pay his debt, too.”

When it came time for Florry to address the court, he had it all planned out.

“Comrade?”

“I ask,” he said, feeling very much the fool, “that since you are going to kill me, you at least spare the girl. She had nothing to do with any of this.”

“If you confess, it will help,” said Steinbach. “Help her, that is. You are clearly beyond mercy.”

“I cannot confess to what I have not done,” said Florry. “You ask a great deal of me.”

Steinbach came over to where he was sitting and leaned over to talk more intimately.

“You know,” he said, “you’ll make everybody much happier if you confess. It would put a pretty ribbon on it.”

“I cannot confess to something I haven’t done,” said Florry. “If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me. But let’s be done with the game.”

“It doesn’t really matter in the end. I just thought you might care to help the party out a bit.”

Florry looked at him in dumfoundment. After several seconds his mouth closed.

“I say,” he said, “you do expect a lot! I’m innocent and you know it and you’re evidently going to shoot me. And you have the nerve to ask if I care to pitch in?”

“I suppose it does seem somewhat much. But look at it this way: whether you’re innocent or not isn’t really the point.”

“It is very much to me.”

“But in the larger view. You must learn to see the larger view, though admittedly it’s a bit late in the game for you. The point is, there was a spy. Indisputedly. I know where he was, how he worked. I’ve spent hours on the pattern. Yes, he was there, all right. You, perhaps six or seven others, including the late Julian. The girl even?”

“Stop it.”

“Comrade, please. We have no time for sentiment. It doesn’t matter in the long run, for just as surely as you are doomed, so are we. I am the most wanted man in Barcelona and these others will go down with me. But what is at stake here goes beyond us and beyond Barcelona. You see, there are others in our struggle against Stalin for the soul of the left. Trotsky is one, but again, the man doesn’t matter so much as the idea of the world revolution. It’s worth dying for. The point, however, is this. If we