But one man, in all that noise, said nothing.
He did not complain. He had no theories. He had no grudges or secret fears, or so it seemed. He did not mingle in the lobby or participate in the endless debate. Nor did he care to comment upon the justice of it or the pathology of Koba and his dwarf Yeshov.
Rather, he stayed behind his doors, emerging only for his afternoon constitutional. On those occasions, he strode briskly through the lobby with an aristocratic aloofness upon his face, as if any consideration beyond the ancient lift that would haul him to his rooms was utterly beneath him. He looked neither left nor right and issued no greetings to old comrades, nor, by his iciness, did he expect to receive any. He dressed as if a dandy in the last century, in spats, a velvet smoking jacket, well worn but beautifully fitted, a white silk scarf, and a lustrous mink coat. He acted as if, by special compact to the highest authority, he was invulnerable to the nighttime visits of Koba’s killers.
He had been called many things in his interesting life, but one of them clung even to this day and to this circumstance. He was called, not only by his peers in the Lux and by his enemies in the Kremlin, but in the capitals of the West, the Devil Himself.
For a legend, he seemed rather vigorous. At fifty-nine, E. I. Levitsky still had a taut, lively face. His mouth retained its unusual thinness. It was a clever, prim mouth, as the eyes above it were also clever. They carried the electricity of conviction. He wore, after Lenin, a little goatee, purely an affectation. His head was glossily balding from the forehead back to the crown, though extravagant with bushy peppercorn hair beneath it, as if the black and gray individuals that comprised this mass were violently divided among themselves as to their ultimate direction and destiny. He had a lanky, surprisingly long body, wiry, and long, pale, exquisite fingers. He looked exceptionally refined, as if he’d spent his life in the higher realms of culture. He also looked hard in a peculiar way: hard, unmalleable, an alloy, not a base metal.
In his hand, he held a pawn. A blunt, smooth little soldier. It expects only death and in this humble aspiration is ever so frequently rewarded. Pawns are made for sacrifice; this is their function; this ennobles them.
As he gripped the ancient chess piece in his hand, a name came to him, a name whispered that afternoon in a hurried but not quite accidental encounter in Pushkin Park, on a bench under the great trees.
“It’s Tchiterine, Emmanuel Ivanovich. Your old comrade. Remember, he saved your life in the war?”
Yes, Levitsky remembered Tchiterine, another noble pawn.
It wasn’t the sort of thing a man forgot: he lay out in the snow, thrown by his treacherous horse, the Maxim bullets clipping away at him. They struck close by with a stinging spray. He tried to shrink into the snow. All the while Kolchak’s Death Battalion, with the eighteen-inch spike bayonets fixed to their rifles, advanced at the trot from the left, finishing the wounded as they came. No, one doesn’t forget a memory such as that, or the moment when brawny Tchiterine had come slithering through the fire and with one strong hand taken him and pulled him into a ravine and safety.
“The old ones. Koba is taking the old ones. It’s clear now.” The rue in the mysterious comrade’s voice had been almost operatic with passion.
“He can watch out for himself,” Levitsky had said, concentrating on the lacy patterns the snow-heavy limbs formed against the bright blue sky. “He’s no child. He’s in Spain now, isn’t he?”
“He’ll never leave Spain. Koba is reaching into Spain now. Tchiterine has just been arrested in Spain. They say he’ll be shot.”
The comrade sighed. “Tchiterine, he was the best. You even took him to England with you. An inspiration.”
“Yes, England,” said Levitsky, aware that the fellow was well informed.
Then the man said, “Lemontov was the smart one.”
“Lemontov was always smart. That’s why he put a bullet in his head,” Levitsky responded.
“No, haven’t you heard? I just heard today. He’s not dead, like they said he was. He went over. Can you believe it?” He shook his head as if in wonder.
Levitsky said nothing. However, he took a deep breath in acknowledgment that his life and fate had just altered radically. The message had been well delivered. His breath came in quiet, harsh little spurts. He could feel his head begin to throb, as the comrade spoke.
It turned out that it hadn’t been Lemontov’s body, prune wrinkled and pulpy, they’d pulled out of the canal at all. It was a ruse, using some Dutchman’s corpse. They say Lemontov had gone over to the Americans. He was the smart one. He was the only one to beat hungry old Koba. The Americans will give him lots of money and he will live in Hollywood and fuck Greta Garbo all night long.
No, Levitsky thought. He paid them. In information. Lemontov. Yes, Lemontov was the smart one.
Levitsky, in his room, set down the pawn. He went swiftly to the bottle, poured himself another brandy. Then, his nerves soothed, he walked back to the table and picked up the pawn again. It was from a German set, which he’d won in Karlsbad in 1901. He fingered the piece, clutching it tightly to his palm.
So soon.
Oh, Lemontov, you clever, treacherous bastard. Of them all, my brave boys whom I taught so well, I should have foreseen it would be you. Tchiterine was hardworking, dull, brave, a zealot. Another was nakedly ambitious, a stupid peasant boy dead set on rising above himself by sheer will. Still another was a coward, a schemer, a weakling. You, Lemontov, you were the brilliant one. A Jew like myself, of course. So smart, so full of ideas, so crackling with insight and enthusiasm.
If Lemontov had fled to the Americans, the Americans knew. And the Americans would tell the British. About the agent code-named Castle. Castle, Levitsky’s lasting legacy to the revolution, the one thing not even a maniac like Koba could steal. His Castle at the center of the British establishment.
This meant the game had begun years earlier than it ought to have, and on the enemy’s terms, and that, worse, it would have to be improvised in the middle of Koba’s terror, thrown together with madcap dash. Somebody in the GRU saw that the buried Castle had suddenly became vulnerable, and knew that NKVD, crazy with the bloodlust, didn’t care. And somebody knew only the man who had recruited Castle could help. Thus by secret approach, a last mission for the Devil Himself.
Save Castle.
At once an impulse seized him. He rose, strode back across the carpet of his shabby room, and sat at the table before an empty chessboard. No emotion appeared on his studious, ascetic face. He stared at the glossy, checkered surface.
It seemed immense. Its sixty-four squares described a universe of possibility; an illusion, of course. There was, to begin with, a remote mathematical limit on possibility. More to the point, however, possibility was strictly a function of position: you could only go from where you were—that was Levitsky’s first principle of reality, and it was more binding and absolute than any law in physics.
He therefore began to solve his problem by defining the positions.
What, for example, did Lemontov know? Did he know Castle’s name, his identity? No, Levitsky had been exceedingly careful about the mechanism from the start, shielding Castle from his staff; only two men other than Levitsky and Castle himself knew of the arrangement: two high-ranking officers in the GRU, Red Army intelligence, men of unimpeachable honesty and honor, sworn only to reveal the information upon Levitsky’s death. What Lemontov, therefore, could provide was only a description: a set of credentials and possibilities, a year (1931), a place (Cambridge), which would define perhaps more than several hundred young British men of a certain age and social standing and potential. It would be a British problem, then, to winnow these possibilities down to several specific candidates. And then, from among these, find the right one. Not an easy task, particularly in a democracy, where security services were notoriously hamstrung by sentimental notions of privacy and respect for individual rights.
He stared at the pattern on the board, absorbed.
Was there time in the world to save Castle?
From far below on this still, late Moscow night, Levitsky heard the buzz of a motorcar. It pulled up to the hotel and halted. Doors opened, closed with a metallic slam. Men walked toward the hotel, their boots striking crisply on the pavement.
Levitsky looked at the clock on the mantel. It was 4 A.M., the hour of the NKVD.
He looked back to the board and, with an urgency that bordered on despair, reopened the leather-bound case. The figures were beautifully carved, with an ornate, quite possibly decadent skill that nothing in the Soviet Union could now equal. He plucked the pieces out and arranged them on the board, two white ranks, two red ranks.
From somewhere deep in the building, he heard the clang of the lift gate.
It’s the time of sacrifice, he thought.
His fingers pushed a piece out from its rank. His humble rook’s pawn, the red. Levitsky looked at the dowdy little thing. O hero pawn! Brave, willing to sacrifice yourself up in the furnace of the game for larger considerations.
Levitsky smiled, hearing the climb of the lift through the building. He remembered 1901. In that year, in the great hall at the Karlsbad Casino, against the best in the world, the humble pawn had been the key to Levitsky’s greatest victory in the single master’s tournament he had allowed himself before disappearing forever in the underground. And in the fortnight, the bespectacled young exile had become the mysterious Devil Himself, vanquisher of all …
He heard the lift stop at his floor. The gate opened. He heard the boots on the tile.
Schlecter, the German, suddenly sat across from him: a dandy, wordless little genius who wore carnations and plaid suits of English cut and had watery eyes and eczema and sported a flowery cologne and fought like a Cossack. Schlecter would not look at him. Schlecter preferred to avoid personalities. To him it was just the movement of pieces on the board.
Levitsky had the opening and pushed his queen’s pawn into the fourth row and Schlecter matched him. Then he swiftly brought his knight into play, moving it to king’s bishop three. Schlecter paused, a bit nonplussed, but not exactly near panic; then responded dramatically by moving his bishop forward to bishop’s four. Strange: even Schlecter himself seemed controlled by some mysterious energy in the air then, as if strange forces, dyb-buks, had been released to ride the currents of the vast space over their heads.
Levitsky was twenty-four; he was young and lean and furiously bright. He was only becoming gradually aware, however, of his gift.
He exploited the seam opening in the center of the board with that lone pawn, advancing him to bishop’s four. Schlecter considered a long time—he was, after all, the drawmaster, more renowned for not losing than for winning—and ultimately shrank from the challenge with the conventional pawn to queen’s bishop three.
Levitsky waited just a second, then reached down and shoved his queen through the gap he’d opened in his own ranks and pushed her out to knight’s three; he heard the gasp and smiled, and felt himself almost blush as the gasp rose to a cheer.
Schlecter, of course, did not look up, as if to meet Levitsky’s eyes would somehow be to submit to his power. He studied the pieces in perfect silence and then almost languidly brushed his blue-veined old hand across the table and yanked his own queen out to knight’s three.
The tumult was enormous; neither player acknowledged it. Time for some blood, old man. Levitsky took a pawn, exposing his queen.
Schlecter quickly replaced Levitsky’s queen with his own, and less than one second later, Levitsky had Schlecter’s lady himself with a pawn; and he still had his lead pawn out there, achingly alone in center board.
Schlecter saw the open rank, and he hurled his bishop down the gap to take the suddenly defenseless knight; but it didn’t matter, for Levitsky was able to spring the trap he had so ingeniously engineered. He took Schlecter’s solitary pawn and dared Schlecter to expose his king by taking the pawn out with his knight.
“Herr Levitsky,” Schlecter asked in the quietest German, “do you wish me to play it out, or would you prefer that I resign now?”
“It is up to you.”
“It was brilliant, young man.”
“Thank you. I was very lucky.”
“No, it was more than luck. I’ve played against enough luck in my time to know luck.”
Schlecter took his pawn with a rook and Levitsky completed the action: he moved his lead pawn into the back rank, thereby castling it. In the back row it acquired extraordinary force; it was born again. It mated Herr Schlecter’s poor king. The theme had been a variation on the idea of the brave pawn, an exceedingly unusual phenomenon in international play, where the odds against a single pawn surviving a charge into the enemy’s last rank are forbiddingly rare. Yet Levitsky had brought it off because he had the hardness of spirit and the sheer guts to pay the price as the combinations developed, feeding his own pieces into the maw to advance the pawn.
That was it: the erratic, the brilliant fluctuation of it, the fascination of it—the humble pawn, suddenly castled in the back rank, suddenly made the most powerful piece on the board, planted in the soft underbelly. A humble pawn has become all powerful and any sacrifice, or any orchestration of sacrifice, is worth it.
Levitsky sat back. He had worked out his solution. It all turned then, on a single bright young Englishman. Levitsky remembered him with fondness, love even: bright, fair, gifted, pleasant, charming.
It’s time. After all the years, it’s time.
He heard the NKVD men knocking.
“I’m INNOCENT!” The scream pierced the narrow walls of the Lux.
A door slammed. Feet dragged and snapped in the hall. Levitsky heard the lift gate clank shut, and heard the machine descend.
Another for your hunger, old Koba.
The face of the young Englishman returned to his mind. He would be in Spain, of course, for Spain was all the fashion of his set. Spain would attract the golden lads of this world as a lamp attracts the moths.
Spain, then. The game of pawns and rooks and deaths must be played in Spain. It all turns on the position of the pieces, on the willingness, the nerve, for sacrifice.
3
BARCELONA, LATE 1936
COMRADE BOLODIN,” INSTRUCTED COMRADE GLASANOV, “break his nose. But be careful of the mouth.”
Comrade Bolodin walked to the naked old man who was bound to the chair. He studied the problem with dispassion while the old man looked up at him, as if he didn’t seem too sure of what was happening. He looked dazed. Bolodin, who was exceedingly strong, drove a sharp, perfect blow into his face. The meaty thud filled the cell. He felt the nose crack and splinter in its flesh in the split second before the head snapped back.
“Well done, comrade,” said Glasanov.
The old man’s head lolled forward on his chest. Snot and blood ran from his face and spotted his white, scrawny body. Glasanov lifted the head gently and stared at it. The nose was crushed almost flat but the bruising and the swelling had not yet begun. Glasanov waited for the focus to come back into the eyes, and for the fear to appear.
“Listen, why do you make us hurt you?” he asked with genuine curiosity. “Why must we go through this? Can you not begin now to understand the gravity of these charges?”
“Osysvorf,” the old man cursed, but the language was unfamiliar to the Russian.
“He’s delirious,” he said. “He’s praying in Hebrew.”
“No,” said Comrade Bolodin, “that’s Yiddish. And it isn’t a prayer. It’s a curse. He said you were garbage.”
Glasanov did not take the insult personally; he never did.
“You cannot win,” he pointed out to the old man. “Surely you understand that. And not just in this room, where you are doomed, but in the larger sense, the historical sense.”
Glasanov talked frequently of history; he loved history. Each night, when they were done or before they had begun, they sat in the Café Moka on the Ramblas sipping Pernod and rijos among Engli
sh newsmen and fiery young Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalists and POUMistas and other assorted but quite colorful riffraff that an out-of-control revolution throws up. Glasanov would explain at great length to his assistant Bolodin about history.
“Fuck history,” said the old man, in Russian.
“Hit him,” said Glasanov. “In the body. The ribs. Hard. Several times, please, comrade.”
Bolodin walked to the bound figure, feeling the old Yid’s eyes on him the whole way. Jesus, they could be tough, these old birds. Without a great deal of emotional involvement, Comrade Bolodin threw a flurry of short, penetrating blows into his ribs and chest. He could hear the crack of his fists against the body as the old man jerked spastically in the ropes. But he would not scream.
“All right,” said Glasanov. “It’s very clear, Comrade Tchiterine. The charges are clear and they are obvious. You are a wrecker and an oppositionist. You have constantly worked to undermine the Party and betray the revolution. In England in 1931, you and Lemontov and Levitsky entered into an agreement with the British Secret Service, so you are also a spy. And all of this is under the control of your leader, the Jew Trotsky.”
The old man raised his head slowly. His skin had gone almost the color of slate. Blood showed on his lips.
“Fuck your sister, you cowshit peasant. The Great Lenin himself gave Levitsky and me medals.”
“And what if it’s true, old Tchiterine? It’s irrelevant to history. Hit him hard.”
Comrade Bolodin hit him in the ear and the face. He hit him in the mouth, smashing out his teeth. He hit him in the temple, then hit him again and again under the eye, in the face. The sound of the blows was slippery and wet and dense. He hit him in the—
“BOLODIN! Enough, Christ, enough. You forget yourself.”
Bolodin stepped back. He sometimes had difficulty stopping.