Tapestry of Spies (18 page)

The major had a gift for codes, or at least an enthusiasm for them. The message was encrypted in the standard Playfair cipher of the British army, and he had no difficulty pulling its meaning from the nonsense of the letter groups that faced him. He merely compared them against a square formation—five letters by five letters—from the key group and extracted, off the diagonal, the bigram of each two-letter unit. The key group, curiously enough, was always drawn from a verse of standard English poetry; the code was made secure by changing the key—the verse—each week, by prearranged schedule. That week’s verse happened to be from one of the major’s favorites, Rupert Brooke. “If I should die, think only this of me,” it went, “there’s some foreign field that’s forever England.”

Sampson’s dispatch yielded its secrets and its purposes swiftly and cleanly as the letter groups tumbled into words, the words into sentences. When the major was done, he sat back. It was a longish document, nicely crafted, tightly constructed, succinctly covering recent developments.

Yet it struck the major with a peculiar, cold authority. He looked to the fire, which had burned low, and felt the shame come across him like a shudder.

A soft noise sounded in the darkness and he looked up to see Vane standing silhouetted against the illumination of the open door.

“Yes, Vane?”

“Sir, I wondered if there’s a reply?”

“No, I think not,” said the major, and as effortlessly as he had arrived, Vane began to slip away.

“Vane, stop. Do come in.”

“Sir, I—”

“No, I insist.”

Vane padded vaguely through the darkness and took the leather chair opposite Holly Browning’s desk.

“Drink, Vane?”

“No, sir.”

“I’ve got some very fine brandy. I’ve some whiskey. I’ve got a bottle of scotch barley somewhere and I’ve—”

“Thank you, sir, but—”

“No, that’s fine. Suit yourself.” He removed the bottle and a glass from his desk, poured himself a finger of brandy, brought it up, and swallowed it quickly. He remembered the stuff from 1916, when extra rations had been issued before the big jump-off at the Somme. It had certainly came in handy
that
day.

“It’s very good, Vane. Are you sure you won’t have any?”

“No, sir.”

“As you wish. Good heavens, these have been long days, haven’t they?” He had no idea how to make conversation.

“Yessir. If I may say, sir, you really are working too hard. Wouldn’t want to damage one’s health.”

“Working?” the major said, pouring himself another finger of the brandy. “Actually, I’m not working at all. Sampson’s doing the work. Sampson and poor Florry.”

“Perhaps you should take a holiday, sir.”

“Er, perhaps I should. Perhaps I will, too. Vane, tell me. Have you ever been to Moscow?”

“No, I haven’t, sir.”

“All right. Come with me. I’ll show you something.”

The major rose and walked from behind his desk to the window, a journey of just a few paces. There, he threw the heavy curtain. They looked from MI-6’s old Broadway offices just a few blocks toward the Thames and the gaudy, crenellated buildings of Parliament. It was utterly peaceful, a serene composition off a Yule card. The moon, a bright half circle, shone in the sky at the center of a blur of radiance and its cold chill touched everything, especially a sheath of new-dusted snow that lay upon the roof of Westminster Abbey.

“Vane, what do you see?”

“Nothing, sir. Silent London. That’s all.”

“Look over at Whitehall.”

“One can hardly see it, sir. All the lights are out.”

“They are, indeed. Think of it, Vane, all those empty offices, locked and silent. All those chaps gone home, now in bed or reading or working at their hobbies or off to the theater, what have you. But the truth is, at this precise moment, so certain is the British government of its place in the world and the stability of its empire, it can
actually afford to cease to exist for a full twelve hours. Every day, the British government disappears for twelve hours. Extraordinary, isn’t it? A daylight government.”

Vane said nothing, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

“Vane, in Moscow in the winter of ’nineteen and again in ’twenty-three, the lights were never out. They blazed away each evening until dawn. Those chaps were figuring out ways to beat us. They were, Vane. Strategems, ploys, plots, subversions. They were like Wells’s Martian intelligences, cool and implacable. It used to haunt me, those burning lights. Our people in Moscow with the embassy, they tell me that the lights burn brighter than ever these nights.”

“Surely, sir, they are merely attempting to figure out ways to get their electric plants to cease from conking out every two weeks or learning how to get their harvests in on time under that terrible—”

“No, Vane. They are burning with fury, with fire, to destroy us. To have what we have. Or, rather, to take what we have from us. It obsesses them. It obsesses this man Levitsky, the master spy.”

“I’m sure you are his match, sir.”

The major issued something very like a chuckle. Levitsky’s match? How rich!

“If I am very lucky,” he said, “and if my people perform up to their very, very best, then yes, perhaps I have a chance against Levitsky.”

“You knew him well, sir?”

Another jest. Poor Vane had no idea how inadvertently droll he had become.

“Levitsky and I had quite a few sessions in the cellar of the Lubyanka in 1923,” said the major, remembering. “A number of highly interesting conversations.”

“I’m sure you taught him a thing or two, sir.”

The major looked at the moonstruck landscape. Oh, yes, he’d taught Levitsky a thing or two! He shook his head. A set of memories unspooled in his skull and he remembered the passionate conviction in the Jew’s eyes, the emotional contact, the intensity, the glittering intelligence.

“May I ask, sir, what brings Levitsky to mind?”

“He’s in Spain,” said the major. “He’s in Barcelona, or so Sampson reports.”

“Yessir.”

“Yes, you see how it all fits, how I said it would fit. His agent goes to Spain and communicates with home base via Amsterdam. But there comes a time when communication isn’t quite enough; the campaign has become more complex, the plans more intricate, the possibilities more numerous. And thus does Levitsky travel undercover to Barcelona to confer with Julian Raines. God, Vane, if Florry could catch the two together! That’d be it. No one in government could deny Raines’s complicity. And we could take Florry the last step. We’d then be done with it altogether!”

“Yessir.”

The major was trembling with repressed wanting. He felt himself so terribly, terribly close.

“Let me tell you, Vane, what sort of a man this Levitsky is. So you have some idea as to what it is we’re up against. Within days after his arrival to take over the NKVD operations, he claimed his first victim. He ordered the arrest of a Soviet clerk named Igenko. Igenko was picked up, interrogated, and is surely dead by this time.”

“Yessir.”

“It sounds quite mundane, doesn’t it, Vane, the Soviet
Russian system in normal operation. A clerk is suspected of vague ‘crimes,’ and in days he’s dead.”

“It’s revolting, sir.”

“Actually, it’s quite a bit more than revolting, Vane. You still don’t know the half of it. I remember Igenko, too, from 1919. It was so long ago.”

“This Igenko and Levitsky: they were connected?”

“Yes. And surely that was Igenko’s ‘crime.’ He knew Levitsky, and thus he was a risk to Levitsky’s operation. Levitsky is so important he must be protected at all costs.”

“Could they have been comrades, sir?”

“More than that, Vane.”

“Lovers, perhaps, sir? Would they be poofs?”

“More again, Vane,” said Major Holly-Browning, looking out at the dark halls of government, the sleeping city under its lacy snow, its bone-cold, moonstruck radiance. “They were brothers.”

I
N THE COLD REAR OF A TRUCK HAULING HIM FROM THE
railhead at Barbastros to the firing line, and amid a crew of largely drunken militiamen, Florry remembered the last time he had seen Julian Raines. It had been in June of 1928, nine years earlier, Honors Day at Eton, a June afternoon. The sixth-formers, liberated that morning at matriculation from the rigors of the college, had gathered with their parents on the lawn of one of the yards, near the famous Wall, for a last mingle or whatever before commencing with the lives to follow. These lives usually meant university or something promising in the City or at Sandhurst; however, not for Florry. He knew by then he’d spend the summer boning up on engineering and math at a place that tutored dim boys just furiously enough to get them by the India service exam. He knew, in other words, he’d wasted it all.

A bright and lovely day it had been, too, a touch warm, under a sky of English blue and a breeze as sweet as a perfect lyric—or was this his wretched memory playing
its wretched trick on him, in the way a generation insisted that the summer of ’14, wet and hot and muggy, had been a rare masterpiece of temperate beauty? Florry didn’t know. What he remembered was the misery and shame he felt, in counterpoint to a gathering so full of hope and ambition and confidence—the earth’s natural heirs pausing for just a second before assuming their rightful place—and had stood off, the failed scholarship boy, with his mousy mother and his uncomfortable clerk of a dad while glossier types laughed merrily and quaffed great quantities of champagne on the lawn and told school stories.

“Robert, can’t you introduce us to your friends?” his mother had said, but before he could answer, his dad—surprisingly sensitive, in retrospect—had replied, “There, it isn’t necessary.”

“Well, now he’s all fancy Eton, you think he knew dukes and the like,” his mum said. “He talks like one.”

“Sir, maybe the three of us could go off and get a pint,” he’d said. “They’ve a nice pub in the town.”

“Robert, can’t say as I have a thirst,” his dad said. “But if you’d like. Just the three of us, to celebrate our Eton chap.”

Florry then led them on an awkward pilgrimage through the crowd with an excuse-me here and a beg-pardon there, his eyes down, his face hot and drawn. He was exceedingly worried that his hated nickname—“Stinky,” from a bad spell of bed wetting when first he’d arrived—would come up at him within his parents’ earshot.

But something far worse happened.

“Good heavens, Robert, can these be your parents?”

It was the first time that Julian had spoken to him in six months, and Florry looked up in weird, passionate
misery. Julian stood before him, having appeared from God knows where, having suddenly, magically materialized—it was a gift for dramatic entrances, uniquely Julian’s—blocking the way. Julian’s skin was flushed pink and his fair hair hung lankly across his forehead, nonchalant in a way that many younger boys imitated, from under an Eton boater worn atilt on his head. He had on one of those absurd, smug little Eton jackets, too, with its white piping, and it looked dashing and perfect.

It had been most peculiar. Julian, the form’s swankiest boy, had taken up Florry abruptly, been his closest and most trusting friend for nearly three years, then six months earlier had just as abruptly dropped him. It still hurt; in fact, it absolutely crushed Florry and he’d watched helplessly as his studies disintegrated and his chances at a university scholarship, once so close, had simply vanished.

Thus Julian’s sudden appearance was at once wonderful and terrifying. Was this to be a sort of reconciliation, a readmission to favor? Florry’s knees began to shake and his breath came sharp as a knife.

“I say, Mr. and Mrs. Florry?” Julian bent forward, past Florry, and Florry was yet unable to identify the tone and did not know what course the next moment or so would take. “I’m Robert’s friend, Julian Raines.”

He paused, as if to tighten the suspense.

“I wanted to say hello to you. It’s an honor to meet you.”

Julian bowed, shook dad’s slack hand and kissed mum on hers. Florry could see the poor woman’s eyelashes flutter: a gent like Julian had never paid any attention to her.