Tapestry of Spies (14 page)

Down with what was; what would come simply
had
to be better, even if nobody had any good idea what that was. The POUMistas, nevertheless, had taken control of the Falcon, here on the Ramblas. What was more, they sponsored the largest of the militias, the Lenin Division, now entrenched outside of Huesca two hundred fifty miles to the east in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the closest authentic “war” to Barcelona.

But Florry, still sluggish after the business of the night, understood what she meant.

“Yes, it is odd,” he replied. There was something particular in the air, and to come to it, straight out from tidy England, was to feel its power in a particularly undiluted dosage. They’d heard the theories all these years, the fashionable arguments, the intellectual fancies spun in cigarette-smoke-filled rooms, the shouted dreams, the fevered visions. The optimism of it was like a virus, the hope like a fantasy. Yet here it was, or at least one early model, clearly clunky, a wheezing, puffing, whirling gizmo, but the thing itself: the classless society.

“It fills one with hope,” Sylvia said. “It’s how things
could
be; it’s how they
should
be.”

Florry nodded, unsure of the feelings in his own heart just then, but somehow in agreement with her. They sat in the sunlight at a table at the Café Moka, which occupied the ground-floor corner of the Hotel Falcon, surprised at the warmth and sunlight of January, which in its way was oddly appropriate. They sipped
café con leche
and watched the parade. For the revolution
was
a parade.

Down the Ramblas, a wide thoroughfare that ran a mile from the Plaza de Catalunya to the port, in never-ending columns, the revolutionary masses tramped. To watch it, one felt, was almost a privilege; it was quite a moment for the tired old world.

“God, look at them,” Sylvia said, her face flushed, her eyes vivid.

“It’s the biggest parade there ever was,” said Florry, speaking the truth, but leaving unsaid and unanswered the question of ultimate destinations.

And for this parade, Barcelona had tarted herself up in a new garb, as if part of the joy were in the costumes; the whole population had become workers, it seemed. It was, for the first time in the history of the world,
fashionable
to be a worker. Everybody wore the blue monos of the working class, or the khaki of the fighting militias. Even the prosaic public transportation contrivances wore costumes: the trams up and down the Ramblas moved like vast floats, pulling their cargo through the crowds; all wore a gaudy red-and-black scheme and all of them sported the giant initials of their particular political affiliations. At the same time the autos and trucks had been liberated to political purpose and they, too, wore their allegiances as proudly as old guardsman’s chevrons. It was a Mardi Gras of revolutions, a reveler’s revolution. The air was full of confetti and music and history. Festive banners flapped from the balconies of the buildings to the leafless trunks of the trees of the Ramblas or were strung in crudely painted, sagging, dripping majesty from balcony to lamp pole, offering a cheerful variety of exhortations to the duties that still lay ahead.

Huge portraits from the revolutionary pantheon hung everywhere, heroic, kind, knowing faces, the faces of saints. Florry knew the key figures: Marx and Lenin, the woman called La Passionaria, an intense intellectual fellow named Nin, head of POUM; and some other Spaniards whom he didn’t recognize. Only the Soviet Man of Steel, Stalin, was missing, unwelcome down here among the unruly libertarians; but he held great sway not half a mile away at the vast Plaza de Catalunya, where the PSUC, the Communist Party of Catalonia, under Russian guidance, had taken over the Hotel Colon and turned that ceremonial space into a small block of downtown Moscow.

There was noise, too, on the Ramblas, noise everywhere: a din of singing and gramophone recordings, the clash of a dozen different tongues, Spanish and Catalonian the most popular only by a narrow margin, the others being English, French, German, and Russian. The air had filled with sunlight and the dust and the noise and the smell of flowers and petrol and horses and sweets. Sensation piled atop sensation, sight atop sight.

“It’s like a new world,” Sylvia said. “It’s like a different world altogether. It’s like some year in the future.”

Florry didn’t know what to say. The extent of her passion somewhat astonished him. She had not referred to last night.

“I want to believe in it so much,” Sylvia said. “It explains so many things to me.”

She was quite right, of course. So pure was the sense of revolution, the ether of justice deferred for so long but arriving at last, that to breathe it was to endorse it: the joyous madness of Starting Over, of Doing Right, of the Just State. To be in the birthing room of history, as a new
age attempted to wrench itself into life! Florry, sitting there, could feel the sentiment move through his bones.

Yet even now, in the blooming ardor, with the mood of purpose as heavy as perfume all about him, Florry could not prevent the coming of doubts. How much, one could ask, of all this was simple illusion. Parades, speeches, leaping peasants: the future?

Or was the future old Gruenwald removed by the police for reasons unknown? What about poor, drowned Witte, lost in the night, and the hundred unknown Arab crewmen sucked under the black water?

“Your face is so long, Robert.”

“I was thinking of Count Witte.”

“Dead and gone,” she said. “The poor man.”

“Yes.” He reached over and took her hand.

“I was also thinking of us, Sylvia. Not of history, not of progress or justice. No,
us
. Is that fair, Sylvia? Do I have that right?”

“I like it when you touch me,” she said. “I like it very much.”

“Here we sit, Sylvia, in the brave new world. And you tell me you like it when I touch you. Are you part of my illusion, Sylvia? Tell me, please. Am I misreading you? Am I weak and sentimental and seeing things that aren’t there?”

Her face clouded in the sunlight. There was a particular burst of music from somewhere, so loud it made him wince. A haunted look came to her face.

“I just wonder if there’s time for us,” she said. “In all this.”

A troop of khaki cavalry was moving down the Ramblas, the horses’ hooves clattering on the cobblestones. From this distance, they looked fierce and proud, a conceit of glory and destiny.

“I like you so very, very much. I just want time for this. Not the revolution really, but the experience of it. I’ve never been anyplace so exciting, I’ve never been so close to history. I never will again. I want some time to … to have my experiences. That is what I came for, for my experiences. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Well, Sylvia, I suppose I do. Still, the truth is—God help me for finding the courage to face it at last—I suppose the truth is that I love you. Comical, isn’t it? Well, let’s do be grown up about the whole thing. Yes, let’s do be friends.”

“Last night was wonderful. Do you see? But there’s so much more to it than just the simple business of how we
feel.”

“I suppose there is.”

“There’s so much to do still.”

Florry said nothing. Yes, he had things to do, too.

“Your friend Julian has joined up. I talked to some of the party members. He no longer represents his little magazine. Now he represents the People. With a capital
P
, one supposes. He’s joined the POUMista Lenin Division. He’s out in the trenches at Huesca. He’s in the war. God, Robert, now there’s a man.”

The admiration in her voice almost killed him.

“Well, Sylvia,” he heard himself saying, “well, then you may get your introduction to the great Julian after all. Because I shall be there, also.”

“Yes,” said David Harold Allen Sampson, “yes, I suppose you
are
Florry, even if you don’t have the item.”

Sampson turned out to be a youngish, gray chap with flat eyes and a vaguely chilly manner, though handsome in a certain pampered way. He had a toneless, measured
BBC announcer’s voice and when he talked he tended to look away, into space, as if fixed on the stars. He looked as if he’d seen nearly everything there was to see in the world, even if he was only thirty.

“I say, Sampson, with the ship sinking and people dying all about, one would hardly have headed down to one’s cabin to dig up
Tristram Shandy.”

“It’s your rudeness that convinces me. Only Eton could teach it and the bloody Bolshies haven’t got good enough yet to turn out bogus Etonians. Yes, I suppose I must believe you are Florry.”

He took a sip of his whiskey. They sat on hard chairs at a marbletopped table in the dark and smoky interior of the Café de las Ramblas, an old-fashioned place of high Mediterranean style much favored by the English press in the wearying heat of the afternoon when the Spaniards laid aside their furious revolution for the age-old custom of siesta.

“And now you propose to go off to the front. As a common soldier, no less. God, Florry, one would think after that awful experience with that damned boat, you’d want nothing but two weeks in hospital.”

“That’s not important. What’s important is Julian.”

“Good heavens, they didn’t tell me you were cut of such
heroic
stuff,” Sampson said, manfully restraining his excess enthusiasm.

“I simply want to get the business over.”

“I shall so inform them. We shall see what they say.”

“I certainly am not going to wait about,” said Florry, “for the major and his fruity assistant to make up their minds. I’m going to the Lenin barracks first thing tomorrow. Is that understood?”

“Florry, you needn’t be bloody
shirty
in this matter.”

“You see, I’m anxious to be on with it. Do you know why?”

“I suppose I cannot prevent you from telling me.”

“Because I am sick of the whole thing. I want to do what must be done and get on with it.”

“Good,” Sampson said. “You should know that we believe that Julian’s signup is another step in the proof, so to speak. Another whiskey?
Boy!
Good heavens, I’m supposed to call him ‘comrade,’ as if he’s an old school chum. Comrade! Another round, please.”

The sounds of gaiety had suddenly begun to pick up from the out-of-doors. Florry could hear a snatch of music, the rush of many voices. The afternoon sing had begun.

“Wonderful sentiments, eh?” said Sampson, with his tight, prim, fishy smile. “It’s a pity they go about murdering chaps, isn’t it?”

“Get on with it, Sampson. The game isn’t amusing anymore.”

Sampson smiled. He was enjoying the game immensely.

“We have been aware for some time that the Russian secret police’s intelligence on its factional rivals—the POUM, the Anarchists, the trade unions, the bloody parade marchers—has been exceedingly good. In fact, there seems to be a secret war going on. Key people in the opposition disappear in the dead of night; they turn up dead, or they never turn up at all, they simply vanish. It’s just a racket, isn’t it? One mob of gangsters rubbing
out another. But the Russians have got to know who to take, eh? Can’t just take anybody. And so who better to go among the enemy than a seemingly innocent British journalist with a brilliant, wondrous, easy charm? It fits with what we know. He wouldn’t report to anybody here, except some control fellow, who would send his information straight back to Moscow via the Amsterdam route that was so important to them. Then the orders go out from Moscow; there’s no direct contact between Julian and the local goons. He’s never compromised. It’s quite clever.”

Florry stared at him.

“So it’s murder, then? Yet another level of debauchery.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound. Now it appears this secret war may be moving into another, perhaps ultimate, phase. What better way, really, to get to the inner workings of POUM than to place their best agent among its militia, near to its military headquarters at La Granja? And, for the record, it doesn’t appear that he’s in any great danger. The real fighting’s still around Madrid. Out near Huesca, it’s mostly potting about in the mud. If one keeps one’s bum down, one has an excellent chance at surviving. The only thing he’s
really
given up is his abundant corps of female admirers. Still, one has to do what one must for the wonderful revolution, eh?”

“You’re as cynical as a whore.”

“The profession inclines one thus. And it is, come to think of it, rather a brothel. And I must say I take the cynic’s pleasure in another’s discomfort: the idea of Julian Raines potting about in the mud is quite amusing. At university, he and his lot were such dandies.”

“You knew him?”

“Everybody knew him. He has a gift for getting known, quite apart from other gifts.”

Florry took a drink of the whiskey.

“So if you must go off and be a hero for that lovely girl, then, go,” said Sampson. “Perhaps it may even work out for the best.”

It suddenly dawned on Florry how much Sampson had thought about all this. “I’ve made it easy on you, haven’t I?” he said.

Sampson smiled. Florry hated him.

“I suppose you have. You rather conveniently started where I had hoped to finish. The major’s most recent communication reached me last night. He said it was imperative that you join the Lenin Division. He left it to me to engineer a way. You spared me that, old man.”

“You
are
a whore, Sampson.”

“Of course I am. But one likes to think of oneself as a
good
whore. But let’s not part enemies, old man, even if we did go to different public schools. If you’ve a mind, do drop in, and bring that girl. I’ve rented a villa out in the Sarrea district. Big, damned drafty place, rather nice. They go for a song these days. I’ll have my man do up a nice meal. We’ll have a bash.”