The plan was simple: Comrade Bolodin of the NKVD/SIM would board the train and Mr. Fenney would emerge to cross the frontier. However, once in France, Lenny had still another identity into which to slip—he would become one Albert Nelson, citizen also of Great Britain—and it would be as Nelson, four full identities removed from the scrawny, furious, half-mute East Side Jewboy whose bones and furies he had carried for so many thankless years, that he would close upon and take his quarry and begin his prosperous new life.
He raced for the courtyard car park with extraordinary eagerness for what lay just ahead. He could feel his heart beat and his blood begin to sing. The moment he had glimpsed months back in Tchiterine’s dying confession had finally arrived.
But he did not even get to his car and driver before a shout came from behind to halt. He was more surprised than angered: who dared address the mighty Bolodin in such a haughty and commanding tone? He turned to discover his mentor Glasanov closing on him with a look of terrible desperation, at the same time gesturing to two of the other Russian thugs from the new mob who had arrived in the aftermath of the coup.
Glasanov appeared almost mad with fury. Lenny had never seen him so distraught.
“Bolodin!”
Mink fixed him with the dead eyes, waiting.
“Bolodin,” said Glasanov, “damn you. We found the old man, Levitsky, in the convent. He’s been torn to pieces; his mind is gone. What are you up to? What game are you playing?”
Lenny could think of nothing to say. It occurred to him to remove his Tokarev and put a bullet through Glasanov’s forehead, but the others were closing too quickly in the courtyard and he could feel his driver, reacting to the intensity of the moment, beginning to separate himself from the car and its connection to himself.
Glasanov pointed.
“Arrest the traitor Bolodin,” he howled. “He’s a state criminal.”
39
DETECTIVES
NOBODY HAD BEEN INTERESTED IN THEM AND NOW THEY sat in a kind of numbed silence in the first-class coach, alone and silent. The train smelled of tobacco and use. Now and then, people moved down the corridor outside the open compartment, occasionally an Asalto. Once, one of them peeped in.
“Es inglés, ¿verdad señor?” he said.
“Sí, señor,” said Florry.
“Passport, ¿por favor?”
“Ah. Si,” said Florry, handing it over.
“Muy bien,” said the man, after a brief examination.
“Gracias,” said Florry.
“Buenos días, señor,” said the man, ducking out.
“It was so easy” said Sylvia.
“The Asaltos don’t matter,” said Florry. “In Red Spain, only the NKVD matters.”
He sat back. He felt exhausted. Could it all be done, all of it, Spain, the whole bloody thing? He looked out the window of the carriage and could only see steam, the tops of heads passing by under the level of the window, and, across the via, another train. He looked at his watch.
“We’re late,” he said after a time.
“Does it matter?” she said. “We are on board.”
“I suppose you’re right. Yet I’ll feel a good deal better once the bloody thing gets going. It was supposed to leave five minutes ago.”
“Robert, the Spanish haven’t done anything on time for several centuries.”
Florry agreed and closed his eyes, trying to quell his uneasiness.
But he could not get it out of his head. Why are we not moving?
By now they had almost completely encircled him, guns drawn. Lenny stood in the courtyard, not ten feet from his car, feeling his automatic heavy in the shoulder holster. He had no real image of the doom closing in on him, but he knew he was in big trouble. They’d found the old man. They’d search his case, find the passports and the money. He was a dead man. The impulse came to go out in smoke and flame, the way Dutch Schultz went out: he could feel the hunger for the pistol build in his fingers. He wanted to grab it and start shooting. You always know, when you go into the rackets, you always know something like this may happen: a bigger gang catches you in the open, unexpected, and it’s over. He’d put the lights out on enough guys himself.
“You American scum,” said Glasanov, “I’ve been watching you for some time. I’ve seen your ambition, your deals, the hungry way you look. You profess to be a Communist and are nothing but gangster scum. Now there’s proof you’re pulling something. We’ll get the truth. Take him.”
The men closed to Lenny and Glasanov, led by the two big new Russians.
“Commissar Glasanov—”
“Take the American trash!” screamed Glasanov, close enough to spray up into Lenny’s face. Lenny could see the hairs in the man’s nostrils and the moles on his chin.
“Comrade Glasanov,” said one of the new Russians, “it’s you who are under arrest.”
They surrounded Glasanov.
“You are charged with wrecking and oppositionism. You are in league with the Jew traitor Levitsky whom you let escape and the puppet master Trotsky. You will be returned to Moscow immediately.”
“But I—”
“Take him away!” shouted Lenny. “I can’t stand to look at the traitorous pig.”
The officers lead Glasanov off.
“Comrade Bolodin?” the arresting officer said. It was some new kid Lenny knew was named Romanov. He was a real hotshot, this Romanov. Straight from the big boss himself.
“Yes, comrade.”
“I just wanted you to know Moscow knows you’ve been attending your duties. They are very pleased in Moscow with the big Amerikanski.”
“I’m pleased to serve the Party and can only wait to spread the struggle to my own land.”
“Good work, Bolodin,” said Comrade Romanov.
Lenny turned and walked swiftly to his car.
“The station,” he commanded.
His driver sped along, siren screaming. He ran through the crowd, racing past Ugarte without a word of recognition. They were locking the gate at Via 7, but he got by them and could see it ahead in the bellowing steam as it moved away. He didn’t think he would make it, but from somewhere there came a burst of energy and he leaped and felt his hands close about the metal grip hung in the last door, and he pulled himself aboard.
“Thank God,” said Florry. “Well, I hope that’s the last delay.”
“I’m sure it will be,” said Sylvia.
The train pushed its slow way up the coast toward Port Bou, flanked on one side by the Mediterranean and on the other by the hulking Pyrenees, and after a time, Florry and Sylvia went to dine. They sat in the first-class dining car over a bad paella of dry rice with leathery little chunks that had once been sea creatures and drank bitter young wine and attempted in their game of disguise to make clever Noël Coward repartee for anyone in earshot.
Sylvia seemed quiet, typically distant; some color had returned to her face. Hard to believe two days ago they’d been standing next to their own graves in front of the firing squad. She appeared to have forgotten about it, or to have dispensed with it. It was something about her he liked a great deal: this gift for living only in the absolute present, this wonderful gift for practicality.
Florry looked away, out the window. He tried not to think of the dead he’d left in Red Spain. He tried to think of the bright, beautiful future, he and Sylvia perhaps together at last. He knew if he tried hard enough he could earn his way back. He knew there wouldn’t be the problem over Julian anymore; he felt he could control his jealousy and his sense of possessiveness that had mussed things up over Julian. The future would be theirs and wonderful. They had survived. They would be the inheritors.
“Robert.” There was urgency in her voice. “Detectives.”
He looked and could see them.
“Start chatting,” he said.
They must have come aboard at the last stop. They were heavyset men in raincoats with that sleepy, unimpressible look to their eyes that any copper masters in the
first few days of the job.
They came down the coach aisle slowly, fighting the lurch of it upon the rails, choosing whom to examine and whom not to on the basis of some strange, silent code or protocol between them. Florry stared straight into Sylvia’s lovely face without seeing it, keeping the men in soft, peripheral focus nevertheless. Perhaps they’d arrest someone else before they got to him, perhaps that big fellow in the raincoat sitting there, or the—
But no. With their unerring instinct for such matters, the two policemen came straight to him. He could feel their eyes on him and could hear them thinking inglés and knew how their minds would work: a deserter from the International Brigades or a political prisoner having fled some Barcelona checa.
“I do hope it’s a rainy summer,” he said, trying to think of the most English thing he could say. “The roses, darling. The rain is absolutely topping for the roses.”
“Señor?”
“—and we must go to Wimbledon for the championships, I hear there’s a dreadfully good Yank fellow who—”
“Señor?”
He felt a rough hand on his arm and looked up.
“Good heavens. Are you speaking to me, sir?”
“Sí’. ¿Es inglés, ¿verdad señor?”
“Si. Rather, yes. English, quite.”
“¿Era soldado en la revolución?”
“Soldier? Me? Good heavens, you must be joking.”
“George, what do they want?”
“I have no idea, darling.”
The man took his right hand and turned it over to look at the palm.
“Now, see here,” said Florry.
“¿Puedo ver su pasaporte, por favor?” said the man.
“This is most irritating,” said Florry. He pulled his passport out and watched as the man rifled it, examined it carefully.
At last he handed it back.
“You like España, Señor Trent?” he asked.
“Yes, very. The missus and I come each year for the beach. Except last year, of course. It’s nice things have settled down. You have the best sunlight in Europe after the Riviera, and we can’t afford the Riviera.”
“¿No era fascista?”
“Good heavens, of course not. Do I look like one?”
The man’s pale eyes beheld him for just a second and then he conferred briefly with his partner.
“Espero que se divirtiera en su viaje.”
“Eh?”
“To hope you have enjoyed your trip, Señor Trent,” he finally said and passed on.
Florry took another sip of the wine, pretending to be cool. He could see the little rills on its placid surface from the trembling in his hand. The stuff was impossibly bitter.
He reached for a cigarette, lit it.
“That’s the last of the Spanish crew,” he said. “We ought to be very close to the frontier.”
“Why did he check your hand?”
“The Mosin-Nagent has a sharp bolt handle. If you’ve done a lot of firing, you’ll almost certainly have a scab or a callous in the fleshy part of your palm.”
“Thank God you didn’t.”
“Thank God the scab dropped off in the bath last night.”
“I think,” she said, “I think our troubles are finally over.”
Yes, you’re right, he thought. But he wondered why it was he had the odd, unsettling feeling of being watched.
“Are you cold?”
“Of course not,” he said.
“You just shivered.”
40
PAVEL
THE RIGHT EYE WAS GONE. SMASHED, SHATTERED, crushed when one of the brutes had kicked him as he lay on the floor of the pen. The surgeon had simply removed it, while wiring up the fractured zygoma, as the bone surrounding it was called. The left eye remained, though its lens had been dislocated in the same terrible blow. The old man could detect a moving hand but he could not count fingers.
The shoulders, of course, were broken from his long session on the rope; and the wrists, too. Additionally, he was bruised, cut, scraped, battered in a hundred places about his old body.
But the significant damage was psychological. His memories were jangled and intense. He was extremely nervous, unable to concentrate. He knew no peace. He had nightmares. He wept for no reason at all. His moods altered radically.
And he no longer talked.
Now he lay incarcerated in plaster and bandages in a private room in the Hospital of the People’s Triumph, formerly the Hospital Santa Creu i Sant Pau, on the Avenida Stalin. The room seemed to be high and bright; it opened to a balcony that had an unrestricted view of—of something. The sea, perhaps. Levitsky could only recognize the illumination and smell the breeze.
He lay alone—or, it could be said, alone with history—on a sweet, cool, late afternoon. The doctor came in, as usual, at four, only this time—most unusual—he was accompanied by another man. Levitsky, of course, could see none of this, but he could hear the second, unfamiliar snap of footsteps, and inferred from their speed and precision a certain energy, perhaps even eagerness, as opposed to the grimly proficient rhythm of the doctor’s shoes.
“Well, Comrade Levitsky,” said the doctor in Russian, “it appears you are a tough old bird.” Levitsky could sense the doctor over him and could see just enough movement as the fellow bent. “A man your age, a mangling such as this, so long among the horses. My goodness, nineteen out of twenty would have died on the operating theater table.” Levitsky knew what would occur next—the flash of pain as the light hit his surviving eye—and, indeed, a second later, the doctor’s torch snapped on. It went off like a concussive boom in his head.
“He’s stable?” The second voice was harder and younger.
“Yes, commissar. At last.”
“How long before he can be moved?”
“Two weeks. A month, to be safe.”
“You’re sure, comrade doctor?”
“In these times, it wouldn’t do to make a mistake.”
“Indeed. A month, then.”
“Yes.”
“All right. Leave us.”
“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 romanti
c 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.”