Part 21 (1/2)

”Yes, of course, comrade. I am Ver Steeg, of the press. I was at the front and missed the lorry back to Barcelona. Perhaps you are headed in that direction?”

”Yes, comrade,” the boy said. ”Hop aboard. We've got some wine and a little cheese.”

Levitsky squeezed into the cab, and the lorry rumbled on through the bright afternoon. The driver's companion was another youth; they were two earnest German Jewish refugees who'd come to fight with the Thaelmann Column against the Hitlerites. They were political naifs, and Levitsky, exhausted, listened with bland interest to their slogans and enthusiasms, their gross misunderstandings and their outright fabrications. They believed Koba and Lenin were great chums, the spirit of the latter filling the heroic skull of the former. The enemies were all ”Oppositionists,” who must be tirelessly liquidated, so that the Revolution could be guided by the brilliant Koba. They also thought, somehow, the Anarchists, the bourgeois manufacturers of munitions, and the Catholic church were behind Hitler and Franco and Trotsky. It was the routine nonsense the Party had been grinding out more and more lately. They talked of the big explosion at La Granja. And they talked, finally, of the miracle.

”You've heard of the miracle, Comrade Ver Steeg?”

”Alas, no,” said Levitsky, politely, uninterested in miracles.

”The luck of the English, I suppose,” said one of the boys.

”Yes, yes?”

”Talk about resurrections. It's enough to turn one to priests and nuns!”

”Go on.”

”Two dead Englishmen walked back from the dead. A poet and his comrade. They lay in the brush. The Fascists came and set up a machine-gun post. They lay there, the poor devils, for forty-eight hours, one of them hurt and bleeding. Everyone thought they were dead. A single move, a single breath, and they'd have been shot.”

”What happened?” Levitsky asked laconically. At moments of great excitement he was capable of extreme calm.

”When the second night fell, they crawled in. Two full days after they'd been lost, they returned. They went to the hospital at Tarragona.”

”Tell the comrade what the poet said. He must be an amusing man. It's on everybody's lips, a famous line.”

”Yes, he must be witty, even if he fights for the POUMistas. He said, 'The tea was simply rotten over there and the limes had not been freshly cut, and so we returned.' ”

19.

THE CLUB.

THEY KEPT HOLLY-BROWNING WAITING FOR MORE THAN half an hour. He sat with the coats in the anteroom under the cold, unimpressed eye of the doorman, awaiting his soft summons. He sat ramrod stiff on the hardback bench-no soft waiting-room chairs for him, thanks-and kept his eyes fixed furiously on a blank point in s.p.a.ce some six feet ahead. half an hour. He sat with the coats in the anteroom under the cold, unimpressed eye of the doorman, awaiting his soft summons. He sat ramrod stiff on the hardback bench-no soft waiting-room chairs for him, thanks-and kept his eyes fixed furiously on a blank point in s.p.a.ce some six feet ahead.

At last the doorman came for him.

”Sir James?”

”Yes.”

”Will you follow me please, sir.”

”Thank you.”

The doorman led him to a chap in livery-Holly-Browning knew him, actually, he'd been in the army, a sergeant, and won the DFC in Flanders in '15 before catching a lungful of mustard-who in turn escorted him with elaborate dignity through the study, the dark, almost Moorish bar, the dining hall, and up the club's stairs to its private suites.

The railing was mahogany, richly polished; the walls silk damask of floral print, exquisite, the stairs carpeted in a Persian pattern dating from the fourteenth century. Yet it was all threadbare, tatty, a bit musty. Things never changed in clubs until they had to or were shocked brutally into it. But in the normal course of events one day was not remotely different from the next; again, that was as it should have been. Indeed, that was the very point point.

They reached at long last the top of the stairway and made stately, muted progress down the hall, coming finally to a certain closed door. The servant knocked briskly, heard a quick, ”Come in,” and opened the door.

”Major Sir James Holly-Browning,” he announced.

Holly-Browning entered to discover C, as the chief of MI6 was called, and another man in a beautifully cut suit. The two of them looked as old schoolish as possible; and they were. C's guest was, like C himself, a former naval officer. He was, like C himself, short and pink and bald and beautifully if conservatively dressed. And he was, like C himself, the head of an intelligence service. But there the similarities ceased: he was director-general of MI-5, which specialized in matters of domestic security where MI-6 specialized in foreign espionage and counterespionage. They were, in other words, opposite sides of the same coin.

The two of them were enjoying enormously big cigars as the debris of their luncheon was cleared away by two Hindu boys.

”James, how very good of you to join us. He's about to serve the brandy. Would you care for a tot?”

”No thank you, sir,” said Holly-Browning primly. He was shocked to find the two of them together.

”Look, do sit down.”

”Thank you, sir,” said Holly-Browning, taking the open chair.

”James, you know Sir Vernon.”

Sir Vernon was said to be the most affable man in the intelligence departments, though his critics said this amounted primarily to great skill at parliamentary bootlicking. An unfair charge: Sir Vernon had been superbly efficient nabbing Hun spies in the '14'18 thing, a coup he'd brought off primarily by opening their mail.

”By reputation,” said Holly-Browning.

”Glad you could join us on such short notice, James,” said C.

”Of course, sir.”

”I told Sir Vernon you'd be glad to update him on the Julian Raines case. It is, after all, an area of domestic concern.”

”Sir, if I may, it is primarily a Section V matter. That is, counterespionage operation against the Soviet Union. It is not a matter of domestic security.”

”Ah. An interesting point,” said Sir Vernon. ”I quite see Sir James's point. But after all, we are not competing, but we are colleagues, are we not?”

”Please, James,” said C. ”It's rather important.”

”Of course, sir,” said Holly-Browning. He turned and as mechanically as possible apprised Sir Vernon of developments in the situation, most crucially the placing of an agent-whom he did not name-in Julian's close company, and summed up the spa.r.s.e contents of Sampson's reports.

”And your man is reporting regularly?” asked Sir Vernon.

”He has not been the most habitual of correspondents, no,” said Holly-Browning.

”Ummmmm,” nodded Sir Vernon. ”Nicely done. d.a.m.ned fine job.”

”You can see, Vernon,” said C, ”that the fluidity of Raines's circ.u.mstances somewhat prevents us from mounting the kind of thorough surveillance MI-5 would be able to mount at home.”

”Can't be helped,” said Sir Vernon. ”You'll pardon an Americanism, but you can't play cards you don't hold. This fellow up close to Raines. He's a professional?”

”Alas, no,” said Holly-Browning. ”Of no great gifts or brilliance. Under the circ.u.mstances, however, he is what was available. He is a card we did did hold.” hold.”