“He’s still fragile, commissar.”
“I won’t excite him.”
Levitsky heard the doctor walking out. Then there was nearly a full minute of silence. Listening carefully, Levitsky could hear the other breathing. He stared through the milky incandescence of his single eye at the ceiling.
At last, the young man spoke.
“Well, old Emmanuel Ivanovich, your comrades at Znamensky Street send their greetings. You’ve become quite an important fellow. This man is to be protected at all expense, they insist. But I forget myself. Pavel Valentinovich Romanov, of the Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Upravlenie. Lieutenant commander, actually, at a rather young age, you might say.”
He paused, waiting for a response. Levitsky had none, and so the young man responded himself.
“My pride, you would tell me if you could, will be my downfall. Well, perhaps you are right.” He laughed. “It certainly was yours.”
Levitsky said nothing.
“Now, I know all about you, but you know so little about me. Well, I’ll spare you a list of my accomplishments. But let me just say,” said the young man, with a certain hard edge to his voice, “that if you are the past of our party, one could argue that I am its future.”
The young man went proudly to the window. Levitsky followed his shape with his one good eye. He was a soft, dark blur against the whiter purity of the opening.
“Lovely view! That mountain. Magnificent! Not as beautiful as the Caucasus, of course, but beautiful, nevertheless. Sends shudders up one’s spine, Emmanuel Ivanovich. So, how do you like the room? It’s nice, isn’t it? Indeed, yes, the very best. Do you know that doctor? He’s the best also. London-trained. No shitty Russian medicine for dear old Emmanuel Ivanovich Levitsky. No! Can’t have it! Only the best Western medicine!”
The fellow laughed.
“Well, Ivanch,” he said, allowing himself the intimacy of the romantic diminutive form of address, something permitted under normal etiquette only between family members, “I must be off, but I’ll be back tomorrow and every day until you’re strong enough to travel. I shall guard you like a baby and tend you like a mother.”
Levitsky stared up at him furiously.
“Why?” said Pavel, with a smile. “Because the boss himself has ordered it. Your old revolutionary comrade Koba has taken a personal interest in this. I am, one might say, his personal representative here. Koba wants you back, healthy and sound and chipper in Mother Russia.”
He bent over the old man to complete the thought before walking out.
“ … for your execution.”
41
NIGHT TRAIN TO PARIS
Just before nightfall, Florry leaned against the glass and made out the approach of a small station house that sat above what appeared, in the fading light, to be a seedy beach town spilling away in chalky white desolation down a slope to the water’s edge. The station wore a sign that said, in rusted-out letters, PORT BOU.
“Christ, we’ve made it,” said Florry, feeling a sudden surge of exaltation. “Look, Sylvia, has anything so scabby ever looked so bloody lovely to you?”
The train halted at last and Florry removed Sylvia’s grip from the overhead. It was only a few seconds until they had left the train, edging out among the crowd. Stepping down, Florry smelled the salt air and heard the cries of the birds that must have been circling overhead. Up ahead, he could see that the tracks ended up against a concrete barrier; beyond that, there was a fence; and beyond that, France.
“Do you see? There’s a train,” he said, pointing beyond the wire to the continuation of the track. “It must be the overnight to Paris.”
“You should try to get us a compartment,” said Sylvia. “We are traveling as man and wife; to do otherwise would appear ridiculous.”
“I say, you’ve thought awfully hard about this.”
“I rather want to survive, that’s all.”
“You know, it’s probably not necessary. We’re out. We could stay in separate?”
“Let’s play the fiction out to London.”
He could not help but laugh. “You seem to know more about this business than I do.”
They followed the drift of the passengers toward the guard post, a smallish brick building nestled near the barbed wire by a crude pedestrian gate ? the whole affair had a rough, improvised look to it ? and a line had already formed into which they slipped. It seemed to be a dream play set under the calm Mediterranean moon, the line of passengers filing listlessly into the little shack under the scrutiny of sleeping
Florry handed his and Sylvia’s over to the man, an old-time civil servant, who didn’t give them a second look, except to run mechanically their names off against his list.
“Eh?”
“Firearms, Senor Trent?”
“Oh, of course not,” said Florry, remembering his vanished Webley and the automatic he’d tossed away.
The man nodded.
“Go on to French customs,” he said.
“That’s it?” said Florry.
“Si,
They stepped out of the building and through the gate and into another little shed, which turned out to contain two little booths, each with its policeman. Florry got into one line and Sylvia the next and in time they arrived at the tables. The officer game him a quick, lazy glance.
“Er, sorry?”
“Do you have bags?” the man said in French.
“Oh. My wife has it.”
“You take no bags from Spain?”
“We believe in traveling light.”
The man nodded him on and he emerged to find that Sylvia had already made it through and was waiting with her grip.
“Hullo,” she said.
“Hullo. No problems?”
“No. The fellow opened the bag and began to go through it, but your awful raincoat was in the way and the woman behind made a scene about missing the Paris train. He was a decent chap. Rather, a lazy one. He just waved me on.”
It then occurrred to them that they were standing at the gate into France. They stood in line to present their passports to the frontier gendarme, who made a disinterested examination, and ultimately issued the proper stamp.
It was that simple: they stepped outside the shed, and they were in France.
“One should
“I feel like brushing my teeth,” Sylvia said.
