Pick one, he thought. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a game.
“How can I pick one,” said Florry, with a sudden icy coolness, “when neither is the right chap?”
There was a roar from the courtroom gallery. And then an English cheer. Gupta stared at him. The message was hatred. Florry stared back.
Benny Lal now sat three places down the table, in a blue coat. He was trying, under what must have been instruction from his lawyer, not to smile. Florry’s eyes linked with his in an odd second and beheld, behind the gaze, exactly nothing.
Benny Lal smiled at him.
Three weeks after the murder of U Bat, Benny Lal was to be hanged.
Florry found himself standing in a small group of officials in the muddy parade ground of the prison. It was the sort of thing one could not avoid. The day was hot and gassy and he could feel his tunic clinging to his skin and the prickles of sweat in his hairline under his sun helmet. The prison building, an old hulk of a place that had once been a fort, loomed above them. The latrines were hard by and the stench hung in the air.
“Ever seen a hanging, Mr. Florry?” asked Mr. Gupta, with his bright smile. The lawyer had also come to watch the event.
“No. Isn’t the sort of thing a chap goes to every day.”
“Oh, here he comes,” Mr. Gupta suddenly chirped. “Look, assistant superintendent. The treacherous, the cunning, the despicable villain, Benny Lal, off to meet his just desserts.”
Benny, in the center of a small troop of guards, had emerged in handcuffs from the building. He walked, at an unhurried pace, toward the gallows.
Benny Lal grinned and Florry looked away.
“Certainly cheery about it, isn’t he?” observed Mr. Gupta.
“Well, you’re a cold-blooded fellow,” said Florry with more emotion than he’d intended to show. “He was your client and now he’s going to meet his maker.”
“The British Empire was his maker, assistant superintendent, just as it is his destroyer.”
Florry watched now as the little man climbed the ladder to the platform.
“Mr. Florry, perhaps some day you’ll write a poem about all this. Think of the colorful literary details. the stench, the hot sun, these officials, the ever-obedient Benny Lal—and your own ambivalences.” He smiled wickedly.
“And you, Mr. Gupta.”
“Oh, surely I am too insignificant for poetry,” said Mr. Gupta.
The executioner had placed the hood on Benny Lal. He struggled with the noose and Florry could see Benny lower his head cooperatively to make it easier on the chap.
“Benny Lal, you stand convicted on the capital crime of murder under the Crown’s law,” shouted the warden, in accordance with the ceremony. “What say you in these last moments?”
Benny, hooded, was silent. Then he began to cry. “Please, sirs. Please, sirs.”
The Hindu, his scrawny bound body taut under the frame of the gallows, the cords of his neck standing out in vivid relief, continued to sob.
“Please, sirs. Sirs, I beg you. Sirs, I—”
With a snap, the trap sprang, and Benny Lal hurtled through the opening, disappearing into silence.
“Tally-ho, Benny,” said Gupta.
Florry swore, watching the slow pendulum of the rope, tense with the terrible weight of the dead man, that he would never again work for the Empire.
It was a promise, however, he would not be permitted to keep.
Part I
ROBERT
1
LONDON, LATE FALL OF 1936
MR. VANE AND MAJOR HOLLY-BROWNING FOUND A PARKING space on Woburn Place at Russell Square, just across from the Russell Hotel. Mr. Vane, who drove the Morris with a delicacy that was almost fussiness, pulled into the gap with some grunting and huffing. He was not a physically graceful man or a strong one, and mechanical tasks came to him with some difficulty. He removed the ignition key and placed it in his vest pocket. Neither man made a move to leave the auto. They simply sat in the little car, two drab men of the commercial class, perhaps, travelers, little clerks, barristers’ assistants.
It was a bright blue morning in Bloomsbury, a fabulous morning. In the elms of the square, whose dense leaves had begun to turn russet with the coming of colder weather, squirrels chattered and scrambled; squads of ugly, bumbling old pigeons gathered on the lawn. Some even perched upon the earl of Bedford’s copper shoulders at the corner of the park. The chrysanthemums in the beds alongside the walks had not yet perished, though they would within the fortnight.
“He’s late, of course,” said Vane, examining his pocket watch.
“Give him time, Vane,” said Major Holly-Browning. “This is a big day in his life, and the chap’s sure to be nervous. This chap in particular.”
Major Holly-Browning was in his fifties, ten years older than Mr. Vane, and wore a vague mustache, a voluminous mackintosh despite the clear skies, and a bowler. On closer examination, he didn’t look commercial at all but rather military. He had the look of a passed-over officer, with a grayness to the skin, a certain bleakness to the eyes, and a certain formality to his carriage. He looked like the man who hadn’t quite managed the proper friends in the regiment and was therefore doomed to a succession of grim assignments in the outposts of the Empire, far from the parades, the swirling social life, the intrigues of home duty.
In fact, the major was head of Section V, MI-6, that is, the counterespionage section of the Secret Intelligence Service; he was, in the lexicon of the trade, V (a); Mr. Vane, his number two, was V (b). There was no V (c); they were the entire division. The major took a deep breath inside the little car. One of his headaches was starting up. He touched his temple.
“Tired, sir?”
“Exhausted, Vane. Haven’t slept in weeks.”
“You must go home more often, sir. You can’t expect to remain in the proper health living as you do, those long nights in the office.”
The major sighed. Vane could be an awful prig.
“I suppose you are right, Vane.”
“He is now seven minutes late.”
“He will be here. The bait is far too tempting for him not to swallow.”
“Yessir.”
They sat again in silence.
“Sir! There he is.”
“Don’t stare, Vane.”
The major waited calmly and at long last the object of his well-controlled curiosity appeared. The fellow’d gotten off at the Russell Square tube station, as they’d expected, and come up Bernard Street. He waited patiently for the walk signal, then crossed to their side of the street and ambled by a few feet beyond them: it was the tall, diffident figure of a Mr. Robert Florry.
“The great Julian’s ex-chum. Not an impressive man, is he?” observed the major, who for all his efforts in the matter had not before this second laid eyes upon the man.
“Nobody has ever been greatly impressed with Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane, the Florry expert. “Whatever can such a Robin Goodfellow of Society as the great Julian Raines have seen in him?”
“He only saw it for a bit,” said the major, knowing a little something of the broken-off schoolboy friendship, the cometlike ascension of one of the partners and the disappearance into ignominy of the other.
Florry was turned out, after the fashion of the day, to the maximum limits of his wardrobe, but on his severely limited budget he could only manage to appear a notch beyond the shabby. The coat was almost fifteen years old, a tweed thing that was as lumpy as it was frayed, and flecked with a dozen tawny colors. The rest of Florry’s attire was in perfect accordance with the coat: floppy wool trousers, a gaudy Fair Isle sweater, and a bumpkin’s well-beaten walking shoes. He had on his officer’s khaki service tie and his shirt was of dark blue, worn shiny and limp from countless washings.
“I must confess I’d expected someone with a bit more bearing. The fellow was an officer, wasn’t he?” said the major.
“Of sorts,” said Vane. “More a copper, actually.”
; Florry continued to navigate the sidewalk as he headed toward his destination, which lay on the far side of the square, across still another street. Yet even having cleared this, a final obstacle stood in his way. The early edition of the afternoon Mail had just come out and a news board hawked the leader in a crude child’s scrawl.
MADRID BOMBED, SURROUNDED
HOW LONG CAN REDS LAST?
This information brought the young man to a sudden halt. He stared at it gravely for some time.
“Why on earth did that have to be there?” wondered Mr. Vane.
Florry finally pulled himself away from the announcement and made his way another few yards down the street, where he assaulted the marble steps of a red-brick house at Number 56 Bedford, at Russell Square.
Major Holly-Browning sat back but could not relax. A cold sore inside his lip began to throb and his headache had not abated at all. He believed himself, and not without some evidence, to be quietly disintegrating. He knew now the most difficult part of the day was upon him, the awful waiting while certain steps were taken to bring upon him that most awkward and tender moment of the operation. Florry would be wooed—delicately if possible, brutally if necessary—but at all costs successfully. The major, having partaken in so many similar seductions over the years, had no illusions about the process of recruitment. Florry must be taken and owned and directed. It was more important than Florry himself.
“I say, Vane, can you stay here and keep watch?” the major suddenly said. “I imagine it will still be a bit. I must move. The old leg, it’s beginning to smart up, eh?”
“Of course, sir,” Vane replied.
The major opened the door, pulled himself onto the curb, and closed the door behind him, absorbing great drafts of fresh air in the process. The car had seemed a prison; sometimes, confined, he had the sudden screaming urge come over him to stretch and breathe and feel the cool air in his nose and the soft grass underneath his feet. It was a feeling that could come hurtling over him without warning, until he could no longer stand it. It had begun in Lubyanka, with Levitsky.
The major found his way to a bench near the gigantic old tree that stood at the center of the park. He sat down, trying to calm himself. Yet what returned to him was not calm but memory. Perhaps it was the drama of recruitment being played out at that moment not a hundred yards off in the office of The Spectator, or perhaps it was the sure and steady approach of a moment when he, Holly-Browning, must himself act, the pregnant moment of equipoise, when Florry, perched delicately between worlds and lives, must be nudged into the right one. Or perhaps it was simply time again to remember, for the memory had returned as regularly as a train, twice a week, every week since 1922.
For in that year, he himself had been the object of just such a ritual as was now transpiring so close at hand. His impersonation of one Golitsyn, the furrier’s son and Bolshevik officer of the cavalry, had been penetrated by a clever Cheka agent. The major, who had fought Zulus and wogs before the ’14-’18 show, who’d gone over the top twice in suicidal assaults during it, and who’d fought in seven battles of the civil war in Russia under his fictitious identity, had never until that moment been truly frightened. But Levitsky had sliced through him as a sharp knife goes into a plump goose’s breast.
He could not but think of his own session in the cell. The same shame flooded over him. It came to sit on his chest like an ingot, suffocating him.
Levitsky, he thought, you were so shrewd.
“Sir!”
It was Vane, out of the car.
“Look!”
The major looked across the green park and could see the upper shade of Number 56, the arched window above the entrance: the shade had been raised.
Vane approached, looking flushed.
“He’s bitten. He has taken the hook.”
“He has indeed,” said the major. “And now it’s time to land him.”
The sherry was extraordinary. Florry had never tasted anything quite like it.
“Well, Florry,” said Sir Denis heartily, returning from the window whose shade he had just raised, admitting a shaft of pale London sun, “I can’t tell you how delighted we all are here.”
“Nor I, sir,” said Florry, still trembling with excitement.
“The Spectator has never sent a man abroad. Much less to a revolution.”
“Well, you can certainly count on me to master my Spanish politics before I leave, sir. I shan’t mix up the POUM and the PSUD again.”
“No, it wouldn’t do. That’s PSUC, old boy. The Trotsky fellows are the first group, the dreamers, the new architects of society, the poets, the artists. The fashionable folk, if you will. The PSUC would have precious little patience for that. They’re the Comintern lads, the professional Russian and German revolutionaries. Bloody Joe Stalin’s pals. Best not to mingle them together. They hate each other enough as it is. And they may end up cutting each other’s throats before too long. It’s all in the initials. Memorize the initials and the Spanish revolution becomes as clear as a bell. You might read Julian’s stuff in Signature. He’s got it down pat.”
“Yessir,” said Florry, almost contritely. Damn Julian. Of course he’d have it down pat. That was Julian, the art of getting things down pat. The art of the easy success, the swift climb, the importance of connections. Florry felt the old pain, the old hate mixed with regret.
Yet another name from Florry’s complicated past seemed present, in the form of that constant nagging little dog that always told him he didn’t quite deserve that which he was about to receive. This new life, this life he had dreamed about and wanted so badly for so long—no more dreadful nights in dreadful bed-sitters up scribbling away on novels and poems nobody would publish—had developed by virtue of his one piece of professional writing. And a damned good piece it was, too, if effort had anything to do with it: he’d rewritten it over thirteen times until he felt he’d gotten every one of its five thousand words exactly right; still, he’d been dumbstruck when the note from Sir Denis had arrived.
FLORRY:
Your piece on the hanging superb. Delighted to have it. It’ll go in the late February number. By the way, how about dropping by the office Tuesday, half-tennish. I have a proposition for you.
YOURS, MASON
Benny Lal, six years among the worms, was still doing his best to accommodate.
The phone rang. Sir Denis picked it up.
“They are? Fine, show them in,” he said. “Now Florry, there is one small thing.”
“Of course.”
“Two chaps from the foreign office. They’d like a word with you.”
“The F.O.?”
“Or some such. Something governmental. I never pay much attention to that sort of thing. Fellow named Holly-Browning. Knew him at Magdalen. First-rate chap, you’ll like him.”
“Well, I certainly—”
But Sir Denis rose and crossed the room to open the door.
“Hullo, James. Vane.”
“Denis. And how are you?”
“Ah, the same. And how’s Marjorie?”
“Blooming.”
“You married the most beautiful woman of our time, that’s for certain, James.”
“She’s still quite beautiful, but I see her so infrequently these days, one forgets.”
“Is he working too hard as usual, Vane?”
“Yessir. To midnight, most nights, and later even on many others.”
“Good heavens, James, after all you’ve been through! Well, here’s young Mr. Robert Florry, our new Spanish political correspondent.”
Florry rose to encounter a large, sad man, dourly turned out, with huge hands and a hulking body. There was something implacable about him, and his beaten but pugnacious face somehow held the promise of secret zealotry that Florry sensed immediately. Florry knew one other thing instantly, having been one himself for five years: he knew he was among coppers.
“Florry, I’m Major Holly-Browning. This is my assistant Mr. Vane.”
&nb
sp; “Ah, pleased—” began Florry, extending a hand that nobody seemed to notice.
Sir Denis had quietly slipped out and Florry discovered himself being ushered to a window alcove, where three old leather chairs sat about a low table full of African masks and old numbers of The Spectator.
“The F.O., do I understand?” said Florry.
“His Majesty’s government, shall we say. Please sit. Tea?”
“Er, yes, thanks.”
“Vane, see about some tea, will you?”
Florry, sitting, felt his exultation begin to transform into confusion.
“May I ask, Mr. Florry, are you a red?”
At first Florry thought he had said “Are you well-read?” and he’d begun to compose what seemed an intelligent reply, when it occurred to him that that wasn’t it at all.
“But what possible business is it of yours?”
The major stared at him levelly, admitting the light of no surprise into his dim eyes.
Florry wasn’t fuddled. Though tense and suddenly aware he was in murky waters, his mind flooded with lucidity. “Is this how they do it, nowadays, major? In my time, we were a little subtler. I was a copper. Been in on a few sessions like this myself. I know how it works. The affability and good companionship to put the poor fellow at his ease. Then, with no warning, a hard question. Catch the poor bastard off guard, goad him into something silly. Yes, I can see it now. Perhaps we could spare each other the poking about and get right to it.”
Something very like a little smile crossed the major’s pug face.
“Here’s tea,” sang Vane, wheeling in triumphantly with a tray. “I also found some marvelous buns. Care for a bun, Mr. Florry?”
“No,” said Florry.
“One lump or two, Mr. Florry?”
“One should do, I would think.”
“One it is, then.”
“Vane, I’ll have two. And lots of milk.”
“Yessir.”
“And a bun. Are they crisp?”