“But when I gave him the book, he said something quite peculiar. It was the address. He kept repeating it over and over again, in such a way that I’d be certain to remember it. He kept saying, ‘You know you’re always welcome at my place, 126 Calle de Oriente.’ He said it over and over again. Remember, he said, you’re always welcome. Any of your chums, too, always welcome. Robert especially. Bring Robert by any time. Then he told me he was leaving for England, but the invitation was still open. Drop in with Robert, if you’ve a mind, he kept saying, 126 Calle de Oriente.”
Florry thought about it. He thought he remembered something about a pro forma invitation dinner at Sampson’s, but wasn’t that at a villa of some sort? Perhaps he’d moved. But it was queer, was it not? That the priggish, awful Sampson should suddenly come on like an old school chum, so completely out of character. What on earth ??
“Robert, what sort of man was he? It was almost as if he were giving me a message for you. A message that I would?”
“He was telling us where to go,” Florry said suddenly, realizing it. “Yes, yes, he was. He was … he was
There was no answer at the apartment at 126 Calle de Oriente, in a quiet residential block in the shadow of Montjuich to which he and Sylvia had traveled the next morning with surprisingly little difficulty. He knocked again, then ran his fingers up top along the doorjamb.
“Christ,” he said, almost stunned when he found the key.
They stepped into eerie silence. The place looked surprisingly neat, as if it hadn’t been occupied in months. The furniture was coated with dust.
“Sampson didn’t have much of a personal life,” said Florry. “But at least it’s a place to hide out while we decide what to do next. And perhaps we can get that bath.”
“There must be something here,” said Sylvia, with a note of desperation in her voice. “If there isn’t we’re?”
Across the room, in the bookshelf, Florry saw a copy of
He walked swiftly to it, pulled it from the shelf, and pried it open.
“Robert?”
“Sylvia, why don’t you take a rest?”
“No, Robert. I must know. That damned book, it’s followed us through Spain.”
He opened it. In the inside cover, someone had written,
He turned to, held the book against the light, and detected the puncture. He turned two pages and found another.
In minutes he was done.
BEDROOM FLOORBRD 3D ROW 3D SLAT, it said.
He went swiftly into the next room, peeled back the rug, found the board, and tugged at it. With some effort he got it out. There was a paper package. He pulled it out, pried it open. In it were two crisp British passports, a wad of thousand-peseta notes, a wad of pound notes. Florry examined his passport: it was a clever forgery, using the official picture from his copper days. It identified him as a Mr. George Trent, of Bramstead, Hampstead on Heath. Sylvia’s, equally ingenious, identified her as Mrs. Trent.
“God,” she said. “That’s my school photo.”
“Well,” he said. “It’s our way out.”
“And you,” she said sounding stunned. “Robert, you’re a spy.”
“Yes,” he said. “MI-6, actually.”
They enjoyed a curious sense of security in the apartment, a sensation ? on Florry’s part, at any rate ? of having been looked after. It was as if in this one chamber in one building in the revolutionary and political chaos that was Barcelona a kind of separate peace had been obtained. It was something they both needed desperately: a holiday.
The plumbing worked; they bathed. Layers of scum and grime came off Florry and for the first time in weeks he became unaware of his own odor or the terrible sense of crawly things at play in his thick hair. He found a razor ? wasn’t Sampson the thoughtful one? ? and scraped his face clean. He looked with surprise and a sense of shock at the man who greeted him from the steamy mirror. A tall fellow with a thatch of thick hair, its natural lightness beginning to go to gray. Meanwhile, two parentheses had been inscribed into the flesh of the cheeks, seeming to seal off the prim mouth from the rest of it. A network of wrinkles enshrouded the dulled eyes and the cheekbones stood out like doorknobs. A starburst of pink, clustered tissue showed just under his collar line where the bullet had gone through him.
Christ, I’m old, he thought Old and battered. What happened to that silly youth who wrote bad Georgian poetry amid the moths and pink gins of Burma? Where did that fool go? To dust, with his chums in Red Spain.
He went to preparing his kit: he brushed off his suit and hung it out to smooth itself over the night; it had been through so much and looked shiny and baggy, but the English wool was tough. It would survive. It was Julian’s final legacy: aristocratic tailoring, which in fact might get them through.
Julian. You think of everything, don’t you?
Kill me, Julian had said.
Florry turned away from a melancholy recital of his own failures; there’d be a lifetime for that if they got beyond the frontier. He washed out his shirt and watched the grime from it cling to the basin. He hung it on a hanger and hoped it would dry for the morning.
Wrapped in a blanket, he went out into the living room to find Sylvia in the middle of her preparations. She’d brushed and cleaned her dress and hung it out over a pot of steaming water.
“It’ll look smashing,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I can hardly believe that tomorrow we’ll be out of here. We’ve got money, we’ve got papers, we’ve got the proper look. We can buy some luggage. Robert, we’re almost?”
He sat down.
“We haven’t had much time together, although we’ve been in each other’s company for about three solid days. I mean, time for us. That is, if there is an us. Now that Julian’s gone.”
“Robert, let’s just concentrate on getting out of here now, shall we? Let’s make certain there’s a you and a me before we worry about an us.”
He looked at her, her neck, her gray green eyes, her mass of feathery hair. A beauty, but someone else’s beauty. He’d lost her, but had she ever been his to begin with ? or was that merely another Spanish illusion?
“All right,” he said, “I won’t mention it again until we’re out of here. I ? I just wish I could stop thinking about us.”
“If the NKVD catches you, you’ll cease it soon enough, Robert,” she said tiredly.
“There is one other thing,” he said. “I had just thought how nice it would be if we had our
“It’s at the hotel, Robert. The clothes I bought, in a suitcase. But they will be watching the hotel.”
“But can they watch it all the time? I mean, let’s look at the odds. They’re looking for escaping POUMistas, not prosperous British travelers. They’re not looking for
She looked at him, and then explained as if to a child.
“It’s too risky. It’s a straight run to the station by tram or cab and we can make it. If we putt around after silly bags, then we’re fools and we deserve our fates.”
“Sylvia?”
“Robert, for God’s sake, we can make it. Don’t you see? There’s nothing?”
“I told Julian I would give his ring to his mother. His ring is in my coat. My coat is in your bag. Your bag is in the hotel. If I could, I would go myself, alone. But don’t you see, the room is in your name. They wouldn’t let me?”
She shook her head.
