Tapestry of Spies (13 page)

“So we changed all that,” Levitsky said. “We made a revolution.”

“Fuck the revolution.”

Levitsky stared at the huge shape above him. Had he been sent to kill him? He could do it easily, with his thumbs. But why now, in the dark? Why not with the pistol?

“So what do you want, comrade? A confession? You should fuck goats.”

“To help you.”

“Excuse me, I’m hearing things, no?”

“To help you. I help you, you help me. A deal. Between two Jews.”

“So talk. I’m not going anywhere.”

“A certain name, old man. Give the name, and I’ll get your ass out of here.”

“What name?” said Levitsky.

“The name that no one speaks. The English boy, whose soul you own, old devil.”

“What boy?”

“You call him Castle, after a chess thing. Surprised? You didn’t think
anybody
knew. But I knew!”

Levitsky felt the closeness of the huge man. He let the moment linger. He felt an awful stillness settling through him. A new player on the board.

“What bo—”

“Don’t play with me. I can kill you in a second. Or in a second you can walk out of here to America. You can be a writer for the
Daily Forward
, huh? And sit in the park with all the other East Side dreamers and talk revolution. Give the name!”

Levitsky tried to concentrate, to calculate the chain of possibilities. How could he know? What had he learned? Who told him? Who sent him?

“I have no names.”

“You have a bellyful of names. In England in ’thirty-one, with Tchiterine and Lemontov. Lemontov’s gone and Tchiterine’s in the ground a few hundred feet from here. Give me the name of this English boy, or so help me I’ll put you in the ground alive and you can die by slow degrees you never dreamed of in this world.”

And so Levitsky saw his chance. The big American Bolodin had made his mistake. He had revealed exactly how important the information was to him.

“Kill me, and you’ll never know anything. But give me a night to think and maybe there’s this deal you keep telling me about.”

“After tomorrow, there may not be enough to
give
an answer.”

“I may surprise you, Bolodin. I may surprise you.”

The American snorted.

“I’ll go easy. But I’ll come back at night for the answer, and if it isn’t the right answer, then I’ll go so hard you’ll pray for death. And God doesn’t work this neighborhood.”

At dawn, Levitsky lay on his pallet. He knew he had two simple choices: suicide or escape.

Consider: a locked cell in some sort of Spanish
monastery. In a few hours, Glasanov would arrive and the beatings would begin anew. Another day’s torture would leave him just that much weaker and less able to escape or resist, and the Amerikanski would be back at night for his answer. But there really was no answer: if he told, the Amerikanski would kill him quickly. If he didn’t, the Amerikanski would kill him slowly. Either way, Levitsky perished, and with Levitsky gone Castle was open to assault.

It occurred to Levitsky that he had reached the climax of his life. The chess master, designer of elegant combinations and strategems, now faced his greatest test, and it was a simple puzzle. He looked about, as if to study. This puzzle might not have a solution. The cell was vaulted; it had one barred window; it was, at least, at ground level. Levitsky ran his fingers painfully over the mortar of the old stones. No, it was solid, undisturbed except by tears for centuries. He turned his attention to the window. The iron of the bars felt ancient and cold, tempered in medieval fires and set in the stone to last until the arrival of God the Father on earth. His hands locked about and tested each. They had no give at all. Next, the door. It, too, seemed ancient, a collection of polished oak slats, massively thick and heavy, held together with iron bands. The hinges were on the outside, beyond reach. The lock only remained. He bent to it. Hmmmmm. It was not at least a dead bolt, but a tumbler mechanism, old iron, black and hard. Well-oiled. It could be picked, perhaps, with a pick. But he had no pick.

His examination of the physical possibilities of the cell had exhausted him. His bruised ribs hurt furiously. He closed his eyes: sleep came toward him. He fought it off—or did he? For an instant he was back in the water
after the ship had gone down, knowing he would die, until the Englishman’s strong hands had pulled him back to life.

For this?

I should have died, nu?

He blinked awake: the same cell. How much time had passed, how much time had he lost?

He went to the window: the sun was coming up. He could see they were on a hill on the outskirts of the city: he could see across the way a chapel, now abandoned, desecrated, the doors blasted off, the interior blackened by flame, all the windows shattered. It was a dead building. The Church, enemy of the people, enemy of the masses, at last feeling the full brunt of their wrath. The nuns raped and beaten, perhaps shot; the processes of history were never pleasant and only made sense in the longer view.

Another cracked smile passed over Levitsky’s face. Old nuns, old mother superior, facing the workers’ bayonets and the hour of your death, how just you’d see it that a man like Levitsky should perish on the same blasphemed ground. You’d cackle at the perfection of it—an old revolutionary professional, me,
der Teuful Selbst
, devoured by the very forces he’d thought to understand and master and that he’d liberated.

He turned away from the window and stared at the scab left in the stone where an old cross had been beaten down from the wall. It was, he now saw, a room of death. What was a cross except a way to kill a man in slow, horrible agony, a long day’s dying. Maybe that’s why the Jews could never make sense of it: worship an execution device. Strange, these Christians.

He might not be the first Jew in this cell. Others, four
hundred years ago, may have been held here, facing the same choice he would face: renounce your faith of die. Which was really, renounce your faith
and
die. They would have been men like his father, men of decency but without weapons. What would they, having squandered their gifts for analysis and dialectic on the Talmud in five thousand years of hushed, devotional study, have made of their torturers?

Levitsky felt it sliding away. He had trained himself so hard over the years to a certain pitch of revolutionary toughness: to see only what was real, what was important. Always to move to the heart of the issue. Always to be without illusion. Never to waste time in pointless bourgeois memory, nostalgia, and sentiment. To be, after the Great Lenin, a hard man. Now, when he needed them most, these difficultly acquired disciplines had simply vanished.

He sat down, under the mocking cruciform. The crucifiers were coming. It was another
memento mori
, teasing him, a monument to the dead—

“The sleep will have done him some good,” said Comrade Commissar Glasanov. “He’ll see the hopelessness of his situation. He’ll see the inevitability of surrender, the rightness of it. You know, Bolodin, I’m somewhat disappointed. I had expected something more impressive.”

Lenny nodded as if a stupid man.

“These old Bolsheviki, at least they were realists. They understood what was required.”

They reached the end of the corridor in the yellow morning light. The door, solid and massive, lay before them.

“Open it,” said Glasanov.

Lenny took the big brass key and inserted it into the hole and felt the tumblers yield to his strength. He pulled the door open. They entered.

“Well, Comrade Levitsky, I hope—” began Glasanov, halting only when he realized Levitsky was gone.

F
LORRY SLEPT FOR A DAY AND A HALF IN A ROOM ON THE
sixth floor of the Hotel Falcon, which he and Sylvia chose, in their delirium, on the strength of one of Julian’s pieces, which had described it as the “hotel of the young and bold.”

When he finally stirred from his dreamless sleep, it was night. Someone was with him in the room.

“Who’s there?” he asked, but he knew her smell.

“It’s me,” she said.

“How long have I been out?”

“Quite some time. I’ve been watching you.”

“God, how boring. I’m ravenous.”

“There’s a curfew. You’ll have to wait for morning.”

“Oh.”

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine, Sylvia. I’m rather pleased to be alive, come to think of it.”

“I am too. Robert, you saved my life. Do you recall?”

“Oh, that. Good heavens, what a terrible mess. I think I was saving
my
life and you just happened to be there.”

She sat on the bed.

“We’re all alone.”

She was very near.

“Do you know, Sylvia,” he said, “I’m rather glad I met you.” Then, surprised at his own boldness, he took her to him and kissed her. It felt like he always knew it would, only better. She stood up.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m undressing,” she said.

He could see her in the dark, a blur. She was quickly shedding her garments with a kind of athletic simplicity.

She stepped out of her chemise and he could see her breasts in the dark and sense their weight. They were very small and pearshaped and lovely. Her hips were slim, her belly flat and tight. She walked to him and he could smell her sweetness. She had his hand.

“Touch me,” she said, moving it to her breast.
“Here
. Feel it. Hold it.”

It was warm and full. Beneath it, her heart beat. She was so close. There was nothing else in the world except Sylvia.

“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he could hear himself saying.

Their mouths crushed together; Florry felt himself losing contact with the conscious world and entering a new zone of sensation. Sylvia was tawny, sinewy, and athletic—very strong, surprisingly strong as she pulled him to the bed. Florry was surprised that in his fumbling rush in the moon-vivid room and among the thunder of images and feelings and experiences that raced across him he didn’t want to miss anything, anything at all. Her breasts, for example, upon which he suddenly felt as if he could spend a lifetime. They were a marvel of economy and grace. He wanted, strangely, to eat them, and he tried eagerly.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, sprawled beneath him. “Oh, God, Florry, that feels so good.”

She became increasingly lyric yet increasingly abstract: he was astonished that she had enough sense to talk—for she continued, in a froggy voice, to comment upon events—when language had been banished from his mind.

He put his hand into her cleft, feeling the moist surrender, the eagerness, and it was quite something, the extent to which she’d become smooth and open and liquefied to him; her whole body had liquefied and then began to tense and arch and crack like a whip.

And then there came a time to shut her up at last with a kiss and it felt as if he were at the center of an explosion, so plummy and sweet, so crammed-full, so bloody perfect, like a line of poetry against his skull.

“Hurry, darling,” she whispered. “I can’t wait. God, Florry, hurry.”

He raced on to the act’s finale, entering her and falling through into a different universe.

“Do it,” she commanded, and he completed the exchange, sinking in further, rising to gather strength to sink again. It had become a thing of rising and sinking: high, off, and distant followed by the giddy plunge, the surrender to the gravity of pleasure, and then climbing back up again.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she was saying and the last bond of restraint snapped and the whole universe seemed to transmute into a phenomenon of optics: lights, lights, lights, lights. He felt a screeching moment in which he seemed at last to slide beneath the surface, while at the same time exactly clinging to her as she was to him, as if in recognition that each had only the other in protection against the world.

* * *

“Do you know what’s odd?” Sylvia asked the next morning. “It’s the history. It’s everywhere. Can you feel it? One is actually at the
center
of history.”

Florry nodded dreamily, although at the moment he would have preferred to find the center of his overalls. They were roomy, Spanish things of one huge piece, rather like an aviator’s or a mechanic’s suit. They were of worn, rough, blue cotton, and they had been donated to the cause of his depleted wardrobe by the POUM, which turned out to control the Hotel Falcon.

POUM stood for the Party of Marxist Unification, in the Spanish, which was more colloquially and less tendentiously translated into English as the Spanish Worker’s Party; its initials were everywhere in the city, as it was one of the largest and most enthusiastic of the several contending revolutionary bodies within Barcelona proper, but it did not quite control the city. It did not even control itself; it did not control anything. It was something more than a splinter group but perhaps not quite a mass movement on the scale of the gigantic union organizations that had dominated Barcelona for so long. In a sense it simply
was
, in the way that a mountain is
there
. It was more a monument to a certain pitch of feeling than an actual political movement: it stood for how things would be, as opposed to how they had been. Florry understood it to be loosely affiliated with the Anarcho-Syndicalists, another large, dreamy, semi-powerful group, equally enthusiastic, equally long on vision for the next century while short on vision for the next day. In fact if the POUM and the Anarchists stood for anything beyond a set of vague words like
victory
and
equality
and
freedom
, they seemed to stand for having a smashing time while trampling the rubble of the old.