Tapestry of Spies (22 page)

It suddenly occurred to Levitsky: they mean to kill these children. It’s part of Glasanov’s—

“I don’t think we need to resort to extreme methods,” said the smooth young secret policeman. “If, perhaps, we could all go outside and get this settled quickly and quietly with a discussion, then—”

Bolodin stood at an oblique angle to Levitsky, his face impassive, his eyes hooded, almost blank. He had not looked at Levitsky at all. He was looking instead at the older man called Carlos.

“I am Comrade Carlos Brea, of the executive committee of the Party of Marxist Unification, and I will not—”

“Comrade Brea, your reputation proceeds you. Surely you can understand the point of a few mild security precautions. We mean nobody any harm; we mean only to establish identities and then walk away.”

Bolodin quietly separated himself. Levitsky watched as he pushed his way through the crowd and exited into the street.

“Well,” said Brea, “I’ll go with you to our headquarters. Let the others stay. They have worked hard enough for their pleasure.”

“That’s the spirit of cooperation. Indeed, the comrade is to be congratulated. Who says the different workers can’t function together?”

“Carlos, don’t go,” said Sylvia.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m sure the SIM can guarantee my safety in front of witnesses.”

“Of course, Comrade Brea.”

“Carlos, some of us will go along.”

“Nonsense. Stay here. I’ll be off; the rules, after all, must apply to everyone.”

He rose and, with a smile for the youths at the table, threaded his way out with the policemen.

“I don’t like it at all,” said one of the men. “They are getting more and more brazen. It’s a very disturbing trend.”

“We ought to arrest a few of
them
and—”

Sylvia turned to Levitsky. “Perhaps you could meet me someplace tomorrow night, Herr Gruenwald. In the meantime, I’ll make some inquiries and—”

Then they heard the shots from the street and a second later a woman came in shrieking, “Oh, God, somebody shot Carlos Brea in the head, oh Christ, he’s bleeding on the pavement!”

In the panic, and the grief, and the outrage, Levitsky managed to slip away. He knew he had to get to the front now to get to Julian. And he also knew who had shot Carlos Brea.

T
HEY COULD HEAR THE DIVERSIONARY ATTACK OF THE
Anarchists on the other side of the city: the heavy clap of bombs, followed by the less authoritative tapping of the machine guns. The plan called for the Anarchists to go in first, from the west. The Fascists would rush reserves over to meet that assault; then the POUMistas and the Germans of the Communist Thaelmann Brigade would jointly rush the city from the east.

Florry shivered in the rain: it had turned the trench floor into mud and made its walls as evilly slick as gruel. It would be a terrible ordeal to scramble up and out. He peeked over the parapet. In the mist and dark, the Fascist lines were invisible.

“Do you think they know we’re coming?” somebody asked.

“Of
course
they know we’re coming,” said Julian cruelly. “D’you think they can keep a secret on the Ramblas? That’s the
fun
of the evening.”

“Julian, do be quiet,” said Billy Mowry strictly. “It’s only a few minutes now.”

“Yes, commissar, of course, commissar,” said Julian.
“Do you know,” he said to Florry, not dropping his tone a bit, “in the Great War they kicked footballs toward the Hun. Perhaps we ought to kick copies of the bloody great
Das Kapital.”

“Julian, damn you, I said stuff it,” yelled Billy Mowry.

“Touchy chap,” Julian said. “I was feeling quite gallant, too. Best to go into battle with a quip on one’s lips, eh, Stinky?”

“I’m too wet for quips,” said Florry.

“Yes, well I’m too frightened
not
to quip. Hush me if I bother you. But I cannot seem to stop chatting. Dear old Julian, never at a loss for words.”

It
was
odd; the wait affected each differently. Florry felt sleepy with dread; he could not force himself to think about what lay ahead. Julian, on the other hand, could not think of anything else.

“Gad, I wonder which will be worse. The machine guns or the wire. In France, the men hated the wire. It would snare them and they’d be hung up like department-store mannequins. The more one struggled, the more one was sucked in. My poor father at the Somme ran into a bit of the stuff. Ghastly, eh?”

“I know about your father. Can’t you recite some poetry or something?” Florry said.

“Ah, poetry. Yes, poetry before battle. How
English
. And I’m supposed to be rather good at poetry, aren’t I? How about, ‘In the end, it’s all the same/In the end, it’s all a game.’ Hmmm, no, all wrong. Somehow it doesn’t
feel
much like a game about now. What about, ‘We are the hollow men/We are the …’ No, that’s not appropriate either. Er, ‘If I should die, think only this of me, there’s some corner of a foreign field that’s forever POUM.’ Good heavens, how appalling! Trouble is, they don’t write any good war stuff anymore. It’s out of
fashion. They only write antiwar stuff, no help at all to a bloke about to go over the top, eh? I feel like something cheerful and powerfully seductive, something that would make me hungry to die for somebody else’s party and someone else’s country.”

“I don’t believe that poem has been written.”

“Hasn’t, has it? Well, you haven’t read the great ‘Pons’ yet. If I ever can put a tail on the beast, it’ll move me from seventh greatest living poet on up to third. And if bloody Auden should drop dead of a dose of clap from some Chineeboy, why then I’m
second
. Gad how exciting!”

“Recite a line, then.”

“Hmm. All right.

Florry waited. “Go on.”

“Out of words, old man. That’s where it stops.”

“God, it’s brilliant, Julian.”

“What’s it mean, Jules?” said the man on the other side of Julian.

“Now, Sammy, don’t you worry. It’s just words.”

“Ready boys,” came Billy Mowry’s call through the rain. “It’s almost time.”

“How’s that for inspiration! At least in an aristocratic army, the officers can quote a line of verse at the key moment. ‘These in the hour when heaven was falling’—”

“That’s about mercenaries, old boy,” Florry said through chattering teeth, “who took their wages and are
dead. We are not mercenaries. At any rate, if we are, the pay is bloody low.”

“Au contraire
, chum, it’s bloody high. A clean soul. Freedom from one’s little secrets, eh? From the little men inside one who are always clamoring to get out, eh?”

“All right, lads,” Billy sounded calm in the rain, “it’s time.”

“Good heavens, it is, isn’t it?” Julian said. He reached inside his tunic and pulled out what appeared to be a ring on a chain, brought it swiftly to his lips and kissed it. “There, now I’m all safe,” he said. “My old dad was wearing it at the Somme day he cashed in. Wedding ring. It’s my lucky piece. Never done me wrong. Care for a smooch, Stink?”

“Thanks, no. I don’t think my lips are working.”

“Tally-ho, then. Good hunting, and all that rot.”

“Luck to you, old man,” said Florry, unsure how he meant it. “I’ll tell you
my
secrets one day, too.” And he became lost in the struggle to get himself up the wall—he’d lost some strength—but with a sliding, grunting kind of athletic twist, he suddenly achieved it, staggered onto wet but solid ground, and found himself standing up, pretty as you please, in front of the trench in which he’d cowered for weeks. It was both a curiously liberating and curiously vulnerable sensation. All up and down the line, in the ghostly mist, men were rising, shaking themselves off like wet terriers, unslinging their rifles, and facing their death. They were like the children of the Hydra’s teeth, Florry thought, his fancy education delivering him a fancy metaphor at just the right time: half-mythical creatures slouching out of some dimly remembered far ago time and place. A hideous joy cut through Florry as he slid the great bayonet-heavy Mosin-Nagent from his shoulder and brought it to the high port.
Bombs—grenades—hung on his belt and he wore his Webley at his hip.

“Pip, pip,” said Julian, next to him, with a wicked smile that Florry could see through the murk. “I do believe the glorious adventure is about to commence.”

Indeed it was. The line, like some kind of creature itself, began to move out across no-man’s-land.

Florry no longer felt the cold or the wet and once or twice stepped into a huge cold trough, the water slopping over his boot tops, but it meant nothing. They moved steadily through the mist, toward the Fascist lines. He could feel the incline beginning to rise under him and the heavy, sloshy weight of the clinging mud grow at his feet.

The plan was simple yet dangerous: to approach silently—the rain helped them here—to the wire at the outer limits of the Fascist lines, cut it, get inside it, and hurl a wave of bombs, then leap into the trench before the Fascists had a chance to recover from the blasts. It all, therefore, depended most fragilely on surprise, but the soldiers moved like knights to Florry’s ears, clanking and lumbering in the dark. Yet from beyond there was no response.

They seemed to have been walking for hours. Had they lost direction like souped-in aviators and now headed the wrong way? These thoughts nagged at Florry as he fought through a mass of brush and up a little gulch; for a moment, he was entirely alone. He felt as if he were the last man on earth.

“Jolly fun, eh?” Julian, close at hand, muttered in a stage whisper.

At last they got through the vines and Florry realized with a start that they had covered the ground and had made
the wire, which curled cruelly before them in the steady rain. It all had an underwater slowness to it, the steady pelt of the rain, the soaked, heavy clothes, the mud-heavy boots, and now men crouched with the deliberation of scientists to ready themselves for the final few feet. In the slanting sheets of water that descended out of the sky upon them, Florry made out the figure of one fellow scurrying ahead with a kind of lizard’s urgency. Billy Mowry, a hero as well as a leader, took it upon himself to scamper up the slope to perform the most dangerous task, the cutting of the wire. He lay on his back under the evil stuff and Florry could see the snippers come out and begin to twist and tug at the strands. Florry knelt, the fingers of one hand nervously playing with his rifle. With his other, he pulled a bomb off his belt. It had two pins. Cradling his rifle against his shoulder, he pulled the easy one out and let it drop. Now he had only to yank the hard one and throw it in four seconds.

With each snap of Billy Mowry’s clippers another strand of the wire popped free. Florry could feel his own breath rasping in his chest. His knees felt like warm jelly. How could he be so hot and so cold, so dry and so wet, at once? He could feel each raindrop individually strike against his skin; a million, a trillion of them. And from the Fascists, there was still nothing, though they were less than thirty-five or forty paces away, gathered about their cooking fires.

Hurry, damn you, Billy Mowry, Florry thought.

Sylvia came into his mind suddenly. We had a night, didn’t we, darling. Whatever there wasn’t, there was that. He could feel the tension in his thighs like steel springs cranking tighter and tighter. The bomb was growing in weight, deadening his arm. The rifle leaning against him seemed a long ton of coal.

Hurry, damn you, Bill Mowry,
hurry!

The last snip sounded and Billy Mowry pulled himself up, peeling back the wire. He wore heavy engineer’s gloves. His face, even in the dim light, shone with mad excitement and zealotry. He looked insane, like Jack the Ripper.

Julian dashed through the gap first. All right, that’s one for him. Would a spy risk the first bullet, the first thrust of bayonet? Florry rose and scrambled after, feeling a singing in his ears. He could feel men clumping through behind him, slipping and straining in the mud. A wonderful strangeness passed over them all: it felt like some huge opera, all stylized and abstract and mighty with song and mass and chorus. It seemed incredible; they were doing it! The excitement poured through Florry’s veins and a great hope blossomed like an exotic flower in his imagination and—

The first shot seemed to come from very close by. It was a spurt of flame just at the horizon, accompanied by a loud percussion. Perhaps there was a yell, too, with the noise of the rifle. And then an instant of horrified silence as if each side were unwilling to believe what was about to happen. A second later, a hundred shots spattered out, an attack of fireflies, brief novas of light and sound in the whizzing rain.

Florry was astounded by the cold beauty of the gunfire. He seemed suddenly to be among clouds of insects and could not quite understand what was happening. The bullets struck all about him, kicking up puffs of spray.