Tapestry of Spies

his sense of possessiveness that had mussed things up over Julian. The future would be theirs and wonderful. They had survived. They would be the inheritors.

“Robert.” There was urgency in her voice. “Detectives.”

He looked and could see them.

“Start chatting,” he said.

They must have come aboard at the last stop. They were heavyset men in raincoats with that sleepy, unimpressible look to their eyes that any copper masters in the first few days of the job.

They came down the coach aisle slowly, fighting the lurch of it upon the rails, choosing whom to examine and whom not to on the basis of some strange, silent code or protocol between them. Florry stared straight into Sylvia’s lovely face without seeing it, keeping the men in soft, peripheral focus nevertheless. Perhaps they’d arrest someone else before they got to him, perhaps that big fellow in the raincoat sitting there, or the ?

But no. With their unerring instinct for such matters, the two policemen came straight to him. He could feel their eyes on him and could hear them thinking ingles and knew how their minds would work: a deserter from the International Brigades or a political prisoner having fled some Barcelona checa.

“I do hope it’s a rainy summer,” he said, trying to think of the most English thing he could say. “The roses, darling. The rain is absolutely topping for the roses.”

“Senor?”

“ ? and we must go to Wimbledon for the championships, I hear there’s a dreadfully good Yank fellow who?”

“Senor?”

He felt a rough hand on his arm and looked up.

“Good heavens. Are you speaking to me, sir?”

“Si’. ?Es ingles, ?verdad senor?”

“Si. Rather, yes. English, quite.”

“?Era soldado en la revolucion?”

“Soldier? Me? Good heavens, you must be joking.”

“George, what do they want?”

“I have no idea, darling.”

The man took his right hand and turned it over to look at the palm.

“Now, see here,” said Florry.

“?Puedo ver su pasaporte, por favor?” said the man.

“This is most irritating,” said Florry. He pulled his passport out and watched as the man rifled it, examined it carefully.

At last he handed it back.

“You like Espana, Senor Trent?” he asked.

“Yes, very. The missus and I come each year for the beach. Except last year, of course. It’s nice things have settled down. You have the best sunlight in Europe after the Riviera, and we can’t afford the Riviera.”

“?No era fascista?”

“Good heavens, of course not. Do I look like one?”

The man’s pale eyes beheld him for just a second and then he conferred briefly with his partner.

“Espero que se divirtiera en su viaje.”

“Eh?”

“To hope you have enjoyed your trip, Senor Trent,” he finally said and passed on.

Florry took another sip of the wine, pretending to be cool. He could see the little rills on its placid surface from the trembling in his hand. The stuff was impossibly bitter.

He reached for a cigarette, lit it.

“That’s the last of the Spanish crew,” he said. “We ought to be very close to the frontier.”

“Why did he check your hand?”

“The Mosin-Nagent has a sharp bolt handle. If you’ve done a lot of firing, you’ll almost certainly have a scab or a callous in the fleshy part of your palm.”

“Thank God you didn’t.”

“Thank God the scab dropped off in the bath last night.”

“I think,” she said, “I think our troubles are finally over.”

Yes, you’re right, he thought. But he wondered why it was he had the odd, unsettling feeling of being watched.

“Are you cold?”

“Of course not,” he said.

“You just shivered.”

40 PAVEL

The right eye was gone. Smashed, shattered, crushed when one of the brutes had kicked him as he lay on the floor of the pen. The surgeon had simply removed it, while wiring up the fractured zygoma, as the bone surrounding it was called. The left eye remained, though its lens had been dislocated in the same terrible blow. The old man could detect a moving hand but he could not count fingers.

The shoulders, of course, were broken from his long session on the rope; and the wrists, too. Additionally, he was bruised, cut, scraped, battered in a hundred places about his old body.

But the significant damage was psychological. His memories were jangled and intense. He was extremely nervous, unable to concentrate. He knew no peace. He had nightmares. He wept for no reason at all. His moods altered radically.

And he no longer talked.

Now he lay incarcerated in plaster and bandages in a private room in the Hospital of the People’s Triumph, formerly the Hospital Santa Creu i Sant Pau, on the Avenida Stalin. The room seemed to be high and bright; it opened to a balcony that had an unrestricted view of ? of something. The sea, perhaps. Levitsky could only recognize the illumination and smell the breeze.

He lay alone ? or, it could be said, alone with history ? on a sweet, cool, late afternoon. The doctor came in, as usual, at four, only this time ? most unusual ? he was accompanied by another man. Levitsky, of course, could see none of this, but he could hear the second, unfamiliar snap of footsteps, and inferred from their speed and precision a certain energy, perhaps even eagerness, as opposed to the grimly proficient rhythm of the doctor’s shoes.

“Well, Comrade Levitsky,” said the doctor in Russian, “it appears you are a tough old bird.” Levitsky could sense the doctor over him and could see just enough movement as the fellow bent. “A man your age, a mangling such as this, so long among the horses. My goodness, nineteen out of twenty would have died on the operating theater table.” Levitsky knew what would occur next ? the flash of pain as the light hit his surviving eye ? and, indeed, a second later, the doctor’s torch snapped on. It went off like a concussive boom in his head.

“He’s stable?” The second voice was harder and younger.

“Yes, commissar. At last.”

“How long before he can be moved?”

“Two weeks. A month, to be safe.”

“You’re sure, comrade doctor?”

“In these times, it wouldn’t do to make a mistake.”

“Indeed. A month, then.”

“Yes.”

“All right. Leave us.”