"Russkis?"
"Si, Russkis. Glasanov, NKVD?"
"Ah, si, si. Primo Russki." si, si. Primo Russki."
"Da," said Levitsky in a dead voice. said Levitsky in a dead voice.
The man pointed up the building to the fourth floor. He showed four fingers.
"Gracias, comrade," said Levitsky. He turned, went into the building through a set of double doors under one of the porticos, found some stairs, and walked swiftly up them. He pa.s.sed several policemen, but n.o.body challenged him.
At the fourth floor, he turned down the dank hall until at last he found a huge poster of Stalin and a desk. The air was thick, where men had been smoking, but now only a single woman sat at her desk, and near her a hulking Spanish youth lounged proudly with his machine pistol, an American Thompson.
He walked to the woman, whose eyes rose as he approached.
"Comrade," he announced in a clear, commanding, humorless voice, "I"m Maximov. From Madrid. You have my wire. Where is Comrade Commissar Glasanov? Let"s get going. I"ve had a long and dusty drive. I have come to take possession of the criminal Levitsky."
He watched a great range of emotions play across her face in what seemed to be a very short time. Finding at last her breath and her way out of her shock to some kind of coherence, she leaped up and shouted, "Comrade! It"s a pleasure to meet you and-"
"Comrade, I asked a question. I did not come by for meaningless chitchat of a social nature. Where the b.l.o.o.d.y devil is Glasanov? Didn"t he receive the wire?"
"No, comrade," she stammered. "We received no wire. Comrade Commissar Glasanov is off to arrest-" And she halted, terrified.
"Arrest whom?"
The woman could not begin to tell Levitsky that Levitsky had escaped.
"No, it"s-"
"It doesn"t matter. Please arrange to have me taken to Levitsky at once. I have explicit orders."
"I-I-I-"
"Can it be, comrade, that Levitsky is gone? Has Levitsky escaped from Glasanov? Comrade, tell me."
The girl was almost white with terror.
"I have my sources," said Levitsky coldly, staring furiously at her. "I can tell you, comrade, that Madrid-and Moscow-don"t appreciate being made to look silly by an old man. It sounds like wrecking, deviation, and oppositionism."
"I can a.s.sure you, Comrade Maximov-"
"What is your name, comrade?"
"I am Comrade Levin, comrade."
"Comrade Levin, it is most urgent that I speak with Comrade Commissar Glasanov on this matter of Levitsky. This is not a playful request, I a.s.sure you, comrade. I have a report to file. I am under extreme pressure from Moscow myself. I would hate to have to tell the committee secretary that in Barcelona our representatives are sluggish and inefficient, given to Spanish ways. It almost makes me think-"
"Comrade, accept my apologies, please. You must understand how hard we work here, how difficult the problems are."
"And let me tell you, comrade, that in other areas of Spain our policies are pursued with much greater Party discipline and control. Our detention houses are everywhere. There are no Trotskyite columns, no open denunciations of the general secretary, no Anarchist oganizations patrolling the streets, no opposition newspapers. Moscow has noticed the comic opera here in Barcelona. We have our sources. We are not surprised."
"But comrade, the problems are so different here. Only here, in the early days-"
"The problems are no different, but perhaps the quality of the personnel is different."
"Comrade, I can a.s.sure you the arrest is imminent. Even now, the commissar is-"
"This would seem his only arrest."
"Oh, no. No, comrade, begging your pardon. No, we have been very diligent. Our commissar works like the very devil himself. Night after night. Look, Comrade Maximov, I"ll show you. Come, please."
She took a key from her desk and led him back into Glasanov"s inner office.
"I"ll prove it to you," she said. "I"ll show you the records."
Lenny Mink watched the fat man shift the briefcase back and forth. He kept asking people for the time. He was a mess. Lenny could almost smell the fear. It was five past.
Come on, Teuful Teuful. You"re dead in Spain without papers. Without papers, the Asaltos shoot you. Come on, old devil, come to me. This is your only hope. Now, when it"s crowded, when the soldiers move down the street, when you think it"s safest.
There was a sudden pop in the air.
Lenny, startled, looked about. Pop, pop, pop. His eyes shot back to the fat Igenko, who stood on the verge of panic amid the suddenly frozen crowd, peculiarly reddish, as if- Flares. The twilight sky had filled with red flares, like small pink suns that hung, floating, against the dusk. Music rose tumultuously in the weird spectacle; it was the Internationale.
"Boss-" It was Ugarte.
"Shut up," Lenny said, shooting his eyes back to the frightened Igenko, afraid he"d fled. No, he was still there.
Soldiers. One of the militias must have been heading out to the front. Igenko stood in the pink night as the soldiers swept along the Ramblas, on either side of him, and the crowd surged toward them to line the way, and Igenko, against his will, was caught in the human tide.
"f.u.c.k it," said Lenny, just as Igenko was hurled out of sight in the ma.s.ses. Trust the devil Levitsky to pull something like this.
He vaulted the counter smoothly and his long, powerful strides took him through the running people. He bowled a man over, shoved others aside, knocked a woman down.
Someone grabbed him.
"Hey, comrade-"
"SIM," he barked. The grabber fell back instantly. Lenny pulled the automatic from his mono and pushed on. He hated the idea of failure. Rage filled him. Where was the fat man?
There, yes. He"d had a glimpse, through the troops and beyond the crowd on the sidewalk on the other side. He was right at the Arco de Teatro, about to disappear through the arch and vanish in the winding, messy old streets of the Barrio Chino, which the Anarchists controlled.
Lenny dashed across the way, pushing through the mob of soldiers.
He could hear them yelling sporting things at him.
"Hey, come to war with us, comrade, if you"re so eager."
"Come and kill the Fascists with us, brother."
"He can"t wait. Come on, the POUM needs fighters like you."
But Lenny pushed through their ranks and on to the other side, ducked through the Arco himself, and ran down the narrow street. The buildings loomed over him: the road seemed to split and split again into a maze, but a maze jammed with human riffraff. He halted, breathing hard. There was no illumination, though up ahead, here and there, red lights shone on the sides of the buildings.
But then he saw him. Just a glimpse of heft and mince, darting ahead in utter fright. Lenny didn"t stop to consider the fragility of the connection: he had looked down the right street at the right moment.
He caught him in a lonely pool of red light.
"Ivanch ...?" The fat man turned, his face warm with expectation. But when he saw Lenny, his expression fell apart into something ugly with terror.
"Swine," Lenny said, hitting him in the fat mouth with the pistol. Igenko fell into a mewling heap.
"Hey. Hey, what are you doing, comrade?"
Lenny looked up; three Anarchist patrolmen were unslinging their rifles and heading over.
"SIM," barked Lenny.
"f.u.c.k the SIM, comrade," yelled the first. "Russian swine had better stay out of-"
Lenny threw the slide on his Tokarev, jacking the hammer back, and said in English, "Another step, motherf.u.c.ker, and you"re dead meat."
Igenko was crying.
Ugarte was next to him, pistol out, and then another man arrived and another and another, and then Glasanov himself. The Anarchists began to back off.
"These are simply records," said Levitsky. "A list of names. This means nothing."
The woman"s eyes fell.
"I a.s.sure you, Comrade Maximov," she began, "each name on that list is an enemy of the state and each has been dealt with by Comrade Glasanov. We are moving even closer to-"
"You show me a list of names on a paper and you say, here, here is your revolution, this paper. Meanwhile, opposition newspapers are published condemning the general secretary, slandering him, and armed dissenters swagger in the streets and drink wine in the cafes, laughing at him."
"Look," she said, opening a drawer. "Look! Do you see! This is not a list! These are our enemies" lives!"
She pulled the pouch out.
"All these pa.s.sports. They each represent an arrest. And they will be sent back to Moscow Center by diplomatic pouches. Our agents will be able to use them to penetrate the Western democracies in the years to come. Look, see for yourself."
She handed the pouch over to Levitsky; he rifled it quickly. Pa.s.sports and plenty more: official papers, work records, confiscated identification cards, the remains of the Tomas W."s and the Carlos M."s, and the Vladimir N."s of Glasanov"s a.s.siduous underground campaign against oppositionism.
"Yes," he said. "Yes, it appears to be impressive. One must not judge too hastily, however."
"Examine them, comrade. They are our evidence. We are tireless in our efforts. We broach no treason. Comrade Glasanov is a gifted, inspirational leader. He is a Party worker who doesn"t know the meaning of fatigue."
Levitsky studied the matter gravely.
At that moment a flare popped outside filling, the office with pink light. Another detonated, then another. They looked to the window and could see the spangled patterns of the starbursts glossy and spectacular against the night sky, dwarfing even the moon.
"A parade," she said. "Men are going off to fight at the front. But we fight here, too, comrade. We have no interest in parades."
Levitsky realized that the stupid girl was in love with Glasanov. He was probably f.u.c.king her every night.
"Perhaps the matter deserves more study," he said. "I shall return to my quarters at the Colon. Tell Glasanov to expect me tomorrow at nine A.M A.M. Sharp. He had better have the criminal Levitsky by then. In the meantime, I"ll review these doc.u.ments tonight so as to better understand the situation here and the difficulties Comrade Commissar Glasanov faces."
"Yes. Yes, I"ll tell him. Oh, listen. Listen."
Music. It was the Internationale.
"It"s quite beautiful," he said. "Truly inspirational sentiments. Good day, comrade. You serve your superior well. I shall keep my eye on you. Perhaps the right word in the right ear."
"Thank you, Comrade Maximov, but my work is pleasure enough. I have no desires except to serve my nation and my party."
He left quickly.
In the street, he melted into the crowd and departed the area, heading into an Anarchist neighborhood, his cache of ident.i.ties under his arm in the stocky leather pouch. The extent of the triumph was stunning, far greater than he had hoped for: he had wanted out of his sortie some sort of ident.i.ty card, and he had come away with an encyclopedia of personalities. He could easily sell half of them on the black market, where genuine papers were a prized item, and the others would give him extraordinary operating lat.i.tude, made more deliciously useful by Glasanov"s inability to acknowledge the loss of the doc.u.ments.
In the revolutionary mob he hurried along, the sound of music ringing in his ears, the sky behind him still pink and hot with light. He tried not to think of Igenko.
When Igenko died at 4:05 A.M A.M. that morning in the prison at the Convent of St. Ursula, after sustaining the inevitable ma.s.sive internal injuries, it was greeted by his captors as something less than a tragedy. He died badly, screaming. He had told them, as much as he could, everything. But he didn"t make a lot of sense.
"He knew nothing," said Glasanov. "That raving, that terror. He was worthless."
But Lenny was thinking that Igenko was a clerk in the Maritime Commission, which handled shipping. And he was thinking of Igenko"s dying words, the ones that had confused poor Glasanov.
"The gold," he had screamed. "Emmanuel came for the gold and he betrayed me for the gold."
12.
THE PARADE.
BY G.o.d, THOUGHT FLORRY, IF I LIVE ANOTHER FIFTY years, I"ll never forget this night. He shifted the lumpy hulk of the Moisin-Nagent rifle from one shoulder to another-in a POUM formation, it made no difference which shoulder one braced one"s rifle against, just as it made no difference whether one marched in step or in uniform; all that mattered was ma.s.s and direction. Around him, men churned ahead. In the sky above, flares burst and hung, hissing. Each was a small sun, burning its image into the retina, bleeding its color into the sky behind it. It was the red night, years, I"ll never forget this night. He shifted the lumpy hulk of the Moisin-Nagent rifle from one shoulder to another-in a POUM formation, it made no difference which shoulder one braced one"s rifle against, just as it made no difference whether one marched in step or in uniform; all that mattered was ma.s.s and direction. Around him, men churned ahead. In the sky above, flares burst and hung, hissing. Each was a small sun, burning its image into the retina, bleeding its color into the sky behind it. It was the red night, el noche rojo el noche rojo, and he was part of it.
It seemed that all Barcelona had either wedged itself onto the Ramblas to cheer the soldiers or had found s.p.a.ce on the balconies above, and half the musicians of Spain had been conscripted to provide music by which to send the soldiers off to war. Flowers and confetti fell upon them; petals drifted pinkly in the illuminated air. It was a theater of light. Shafts rose and flashed against the sky like saber blades; fireworks burst and crackled as the parade swept down the Ramblas.
"To Huesca! To Huesca!" came the cry from the crowds.
"Long live the World Revolution!" somebody up ahead yelled in exuberant English.
A wineskin, circulating among the militiamen, finally arrived at Florry.
"Here, ingles," ingles," said a boy, handing it over. said a boy, handing it over.