Classic Spy Novels 3-Book Bundle (23 page)

He waited until he could no longer hear the departing men and,
when the forest was again silent, waited another twenty minutes, sitting with his back against a tree and smoking a cigarette. He enjoyed the cigarette immensely. When it was finished, he took the clasp knife from his pocket, used it, then put the cartridge back in the rifle, stood up, and fired into the air. This act he repeated three more times. His remaining men could make a small but important difference behind the lines in this war, but they could not keep a secret. As the echo of the final shot rang away down the side of the mountain, he shouldered the rifle and headed for the camp. Looking back for a moment, he saw four bundles of well-bound firewood arranged in a line in the middle of a clearing. Whoever might chance to come this way would find them and think himself lucky that day. In all likelihood, he would make no sense at all of the Cyrillic letters and numerals carved into the trunk of a pine tree. A 825.

At five in the morning, Khristo made his way to the Citroën, parked in front of the hotel. Across the street, the
Neva’s
stacks showed curls of dark smoke as the boiler room got up steam for the 6:30 departure. He had not really slept—Yaschyeritsa’s face and voice hammered against his consciousness all night long—and had climbed out of bed in the last hour of darkness with a sick stomach and hot, sandy eyes. At the car, the new sublieutenant awaited him, sitting at attention behind the wheel.

“Good day to you, Lieutenant Stoianev. Allow me please to introduce myself. I am Sublieutenant Lubin, reporting for duty.” It was rehearsed and formal, a squeaky little whine of a voice. Khristo took a step backward and stared at the boy in the car. He had the face of a malevolent baby—a grossly overfed baby—with rat-colored hair combed and pomaded to a stiff pompadour that rose above his glossy forehead and tiny china-blue eyes. A mama’s boy, Khristo thought, perhaps seventeen, who would sit on Yaschyeritsa’s knee and tattle at every opportunity.

“Yes, hello,” Khristo managed. “Usually I drive,” he added.

“Begging your pardon, Lieutenant Stoianev, but I have been instructed,
by Colonel General Bloch, that as junior officer it is my duty to drive the car. Let me assure you that I have been trained extensively in the proper driving of automobiles.”

At a steady twenty-five miles per hour they left Tarragona at dawn, Lubin holding the wheel with both hands and driving like a puppet, correcting—Khristo counted spitefully—eight times in a single slow curve. They would be all day getting to Madrid.

“Stoianev. I believe that is a Bulgarian name?” Lubin said.

“Yes. I am Bulgarian.”

“Then you will not have heard of my family. My father is associate director of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Leonid Trofimovich Lubin is his name. Is it known to you?”

“No,” Khristo said, “I don’t know it.”

“It is not important.”

As Khristo stared glassily ahead at the endless road, however, he did recall something of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Sascha had one evening told him the story of one of its most prominent members, O. A. Yanata, the Ukrainian botanist who had set up the first chair of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could be used for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot.

At the end of an hour, Lubin pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He got out of the car, walked around it three times, then returned and drove away.

“Why did you do that?” Khristo asked.

“A rule of driving, Lieutenant,” Lubin answered proudly. “To maintain concentration, one must dismount the vehicle hourly and exercise lightly.”

Khristo put his head in his hands.

Buenas noches, mis amigos. Buenas noches, todos los peleadores bravos que puedan oír ma voz. Y buenas noches, Madrid. Hay
veinte horas, y la hora para el jazz hot. La selección primera esta noche es una canción del Norteamericano, Duke Ellington, lla-mada
“In a Sentimental Mood,”
con Louis Vola tocando el vio-lón, trum-trum-trum, Marcel Bianchi y Pierre Ferret en guitarras, Django Reinhardt en la guitarra sola, y, entonces, el grande Stephane Grappelli tocando el violín. Gusta bien, todo el mundo, gusta bien
.

The Emerson, in a tan wooden case with white dials and a little light that made the station band glow green, played best on a table beneath the window. Faye angled it slightly to the left, then fiddled with the tuning knob until the signal came in clear. Andres had gone out to yet another meeting, she was exhausted, and she was going to wrap herself up in a quilt, listen to the radio, and read a Djuna Barnes novel that Renata had discovered somewhere. All day at work, mailing out fund-raising letters for various defense committees, she had planned to spend the evening this way. She really liked the Ellington song, it boded well for the radio program, and for her private evening. Lately too many people, too many rumors, too much jittery bravado. The antidote: spend some time alone, doing things one liked, the more the better, and do them all at once. She would have made herself a cup of tea, but lately, inexplicably, there was no tea to be found. She would go to bed early, she didn’t have to man the machine gun until 5:30 the next morning, and that was hours away.

“In a Sentimental Mood.”

The music that Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli made was very spare—compared to the lush crooning of the big bands it was thin and plain, hardly anything at all. The rhythm guitars and bass plunked away on the same note; a one-two, one-two beat on the chord that changed rarely, and the tempo of it was peculiar. Should you dance to it in an embrace, you’d have to move quickly, a foxtrot in a hurry. But if you danced apart, like the Charleston, it would be much too slow for the dancers to do any tricks at all.

Soloing above the rhythm was first Reinhardt, a Gypsy guitarist with three fingers burned off in a wagon fire, then Grappelli, a classically trained musician who played nightclub violin—take away the other instruments and he sounded like a violinist at a wedding—
all perfumed sentiment. Reinhardt’s playing was jazzy; long, rhythmic runs, the perfect counterpoint to the too-sweet violin. The two men were, Faye thought, opposites bound together, tenderness and cold passion. She wondered if they liked each other.

The record had been made at a bistro in Paris called Le Hot Club. Listening to the song, she could see it. Dark and smoky and close, a tiny dance floor, a thin woman in pearls with vacant eyes, barely dancing. Faye looked up from her book, head propped on elbow, and had at that moment a premonition: there would come a day when this song would bring back everything of her time in Madrid. It made her—a bizarre trick—long for a past that was still in the future. She burrowed deeper into the quilt, returned to her book.

Sometime during the last flourishes of the violin—Grappelli playing notes that sounded like musical tears, a crazy kind of sadness that wasn’t serious at all yet hurt in a special way—the door opened.

Andres came in but she did not see him, not really, she saw the man who stood by his side. Immediately she began writing short stories about him, because his presence came to her in metaphors.
Eyes like tank slits
. He had blue eyes hidden away in there, and black hair and pale skin and square hands. He wore a dark blue shirt buttoned at the throat and a soft gray suit, and when he leaned over, formally, like a Slav, to shake her hand, she could see an automatic pistol holstered at his waist.

Andres was so dear to her, he approached her always like a clumsy man asked to hold—but only for a moment or two while its owner was occupied—a priceless glass vase. She lived in this body every minute of every day, it was just herself. But to him she was treasure. He ran his soft hand along her body and said
silk
. To be glass and gold and silk was a great honor, she knew, but she also knew it took living up to.

The curious thing about Andres was that he was two people. Quite distinctly two people. Andres at a distance was a malleable, hesitant man who moved invisibly in the crowd. But when he spoke, he changed. He was, then, the opposite of malleable and
hesitant. Spending time alone with him in a room, you met the strange thing that lived inside him: a fierce and clever animal, a beast that might hunt you down if it decided you’d somehow hurt it.

For some reason, Andres had not expected her to be there. He was unpleasantly surprised and his eyes moved around too much. For the sake of appearances he introduced the other man, but gobbled his name so that it was simply a syllable or two. The man took her hand briefly—here and gone. His face seemed closed with tension. The two of them, Andres and his friend, made together a magnetic field of such exclusionary force that she was surprised her very body did not fly right out the window.

But they could go to hell.

She too fought in this war and what she had learned about war was that slowly but surely it sucked your strength right down to the marrow. She held this ground. And her forces were arrayed about her. The jazz on the radio, the quilt, the book, the bed—the two men would attack at their peril.

So they left. Andres mumbling something or other, the Slav honoring her with a little bow. His eyes were curious, she noticed, finding everything in the room, taking a few notes, and finding her as well.

Toward the end of October the weather turned sunny and soft for one last spell before the fall rains set in and during that time the city of Madrid began to die.

The consulate people at Gaylord’s Hotel managed to find a cot for Khristo and set it up in a hallway, and there he snatched a few hours’ sleep when he could, couriers and code clerks and military attachés rushing past him at all hours of the day and night.

Lubin, whining incessantly of his family connection, was nonetheless dispatched to a nearby apartment building where a junior officers’ dormitory occupied the upper floors. His days were filled with researches through Madrid’s birth and marriage records, land-ownership deeds and tax rolls, as he built up dossiers on a long list
of Spanish citizens compiled for him by Khristo and Andres. “These individuals represent the gravest threat to world socialism,” Khristo told him, “you must get me everything you can. And tell nobody what you are doing.” The names had been picked at random from Madrid telephone directories. Lubin, naturally, wanted to tail them from home to office and wherever else they went, but Khristo warned him that these dangerous persons must not be alerted to NKVD interest.

At the consulate, Khristo had a day-by-day view of the war, and visitors represented a cross section of the Soviet intelligence and military elite. Walter Ulbricht, head of the German division of the NKVD, passed through, as did no less than three Russian marshals—Konev, Malinovsky, and Rokossovsky—who had come to Spain to learn all they could of German tactics and, most especially, the capabilities of German aircraft and weapons. People at the consulate also kept track of the other side. Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr was known to be based near Madrid, sent to Spain by Hitler to study the effects of aerial bombing on a civilian population. This had never before been tried in Europe—Mussolini had used the tactic in Abyssinia but that proved nothing—and the Germans urgently wanted good intelligence on the subject. Thus, beginning in late October, the bombing of Madrid began in earnest. What happened when you bombed a hospital? A school? A column of refugees on a road? With the aid of the Condor Legion pilots, flying Junkers-52 and Heinkel-51 bombers, these questions were soon answered.

By October 20, in an attempt to relieve the pressure being applied by Mola’s four columns, Republican forces attacked the town of Illescas, west of Madrid. Singing and chanting slogans, some fifteen thousand fighters rode out from staging areas on double-decker city buses to attack Moroccan and Spanish Legion forces under Barrón. The Republican forces fought bravely for three days and gave not one inch until, on October 23, they were outflanked by a relief column of cavalry under Tella that came north from Toledo, and they had to retreat back to the city. Seeing the bloody, exhausted fighters returning, the city’s population began to feel that the end might be nearer than anyone would admit.

This same Nationalist cavalry column was then confronted, in the streets of Esquivias, by Russian tanks under Pavlov. A Republican victory was sorely needed, and this was one way to get it. But the tanks—impossible to maneuver in the narrow streets—could not hurt the cavalry, and the horsemen could not hurt the tanks, so the confrontation was at best a draw.

But for those who could read the signs, two particular events signaled the beginning of the end: the national gold went out, and the refugees began to flow in.

The gold, some sixty-three million British pounds in value, was taken first by rail to Alicante, then on to Odessa by Russian freighter. Those who were responsible for guarding and counting the gold soon disappeared. Some time later, the Soviet Union announced major gold strikes in the Urals and, for the first time, began to sell gold on the world markets.

The refugees from outlying towns fled to the streets of Madrid and there set up housekeeping, amid pigs and goats and dressers and mirrors, building small fires to cook whatever food they could lay their hands on. There was, it seemed, less available every day.

The battle at Illescas was plainly audible on the streets of the city and, on October 23, Azaña, the prime minister of Republican Spain, fled the city in secret—his cabinet was not told he was leaving. He made his way to Barcelona, as close to the safety of the French border as possible, and declared the government of the country officially relocated. The exit of Castello, the minister of war, was even less illustrious. He went mad and had to be carried, foaming at the mouth, from his office. The rest of the government would stick it out for two weeks, then they too would head east. They left the city in a caravan of cars, loaded down with state ministers, bureaucrats, government records, wives and children and pets. A little way outside Madrid, the caravan was halted by a group of hooded men carrying rifles.
Go back
, they were told,
and lead the people of Madrid in their hour of crisis
. The caravan turned around, went west a few miles, turned again, and, achieving maximum speed, went barreling through the roadblock.