ASSASSINATION
Portela led them down the slope and out into no-man’s-land. A mist had risen, and the three men seemed to wade through it. Oddly, up above, the stars were clear and sharp, shreds and flecks of remote light. Florry was last in the file. He had the Webley in his hand, and a four-five-five in each chamber. He was just behind Julian.
Wait till you get beyond the lines. Then lift and fire. Clean. Into the back of the head. It’ll be much easier….
Florry gripped his Webley so tight he thought he’d smash it: what an opportunity for Julian, and so early on! A single noise, a cough, the smallest twitch, and the bloody thing was over….
Also by Stephen Hunter
FICTION
Pale Horse Coming
Hot Springs
The Second Saladin
Time to Hunt
Black Light
Dirty White Boys
Point of Impact
The Day Before Midnight
The Master Sniper
NONFICTION
Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem
Contents
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part I - Robert
Chapter 1 - London, Late Fall of 1936
Chapter 2 - The Lux
Chapter 3 - Barcelona, Late 1936
Chapter 4 - Mr. Sterne and Mr. Webley
Chapter 5 - Barcelona
Chapter 6 - The Akim
Chapter 7 - MI-6, London
Chapter 8 - The Water
Chapter 9 - The Interrogation
Chapter 10 - On the Ramblas
Chapter 11 - Igenko
Chapter 12 - The Parade
Chapter 13 - The Major
Part II - Julian
Chapter 14 - Huesca
Chapter 15 - The Grand Oriente
Chapter 16 - The Attack
Chapter 17 - Comrade Major Bolodin
Chapter 18 - News from the Front
Chapter 19 - The Club
Chapter 20 - Tarragona
Chapter 21 - The Hospital
Chapter 22 - The Mission
Chapter 23 - ¡Viva La AnarquÍa!
Chapter 24 - Tristram Shandy
Chapter 25 - Behind the Lines
Chapter 26 - The Club Chicago
Chapter 27 - Pamplona
Chapter 28 - Midnight
Chapter 29 - The Oberleutnant
Chapter 30 - The English Dynamiters
Chapter 31 - The Suppression
Chapter 32 - The Bridge
Part III - Sylvia
Chapter 33 - Arrested
Chapter 34 - Bad News
Chapter 35 - The Trial
Chapter 36 - Tibidabo
Chapter 37 - Papers
Chapter 38 - Ugarte
Chapter 39 - Detectives
Chapter 40 - Pavel
Chapter 41 - Night Train to Paris
Chapter 42 - The Green
Chapter 43 - The Hangar
Chapter 44 - A Walk in the Park
About the Author
Copyright
This one, as promised,
is for Amy
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank those who gave so generously of their time and their imaginations. First, thanks to Ernie Erber, who actually spent part of 1936 in Barcelona. Thanks to Mike Hill and Joe Fanzone for valuable early consultations; they see their ideas reflected on every page of the book. Thanks to Fred Rasmussen, of The Sun library, for digging out the Spanish Civil War photos that were of so much help; Antero Pietila of The Sun’s Moscow bureau, for unearthing the location, size, and architecture of the Hotel Lux; to another colleague, Matt Sieden, for his kind words and good suggestions. Thanks to my old college roommate, Lenne Miller, for his enthusiasms for the book. Thanks to my mother, Virginia Hunter, and my brother, Tim Hunter, for their comments and patience; and to my brother-in-law, medical consultant, and good friend, John D. Bullock, M.D. Thanks to David Petzal for his reading. Thanks to the night-shift concierge at the Hotel Colón in Barcelona for numerous courtesies and unfailing good humor. Thanks to Jeff Bass, for suggesting the epigram from the Mason book. And to Susan Carnochan and Zita Dabars, for assistance with my Spanish. Thanks especially to my courageous and stubborn agent, Victoria Gould Pryor, who believed in this book from the very start and fought for it as if it were her own; and to my brilliant editor, Barbara Grossman, of Crown, for her quotient of belief and her refusal to accept anything less than my best. And thanks—special thanks—to my wife, Lucy Hageman Hunter, for her glamourless, thankless, and yet heroic efforts on behalf of this book. Needless to say, errors are entirely my own.
The Ruy-Lopez is more popular than any other king pawn opening…. The Gambit is astonishingly complicated, embodying as it does a perpetual intertwining of grandiose strategical planning with an alarming maze of difficult tactical finesses and combinative motifs. It is no exaggeration to affirm that mastery of the Spanish Gambit is a requisite for anyone aspiring to become a strong chess player.
Adapted from James Mason,
The Art of Chess,
London, April 1898
PROLOGUE
THE TRIAL OF THE ASSASSIN BENNY LAL IN THE OLD COURTHOUSE at Moulmein, lower Burma, in February of 1931, caused a bit of a stir in its own day, but its memory has not lingered. It was a forgotten moment in the history of a vanished empire.
Yet a case could be made that it changed the political history of our century, however secretly, however subtly. Still, in the mind of one man, the event was important for exactly what it was, and not for what it eventually made possible. He was, on the last day of the trial, the Crown’s chief witness, a tall, not unpleasant-looking young officer in the service khaki of the India Imperial Police. It was his duty to put the noose around the neck of Benny Lal.
The blades of the overhead fan moved through the air in a stately whirl, yet without palpable effect. Robert Florry stared at the motion, its easy, hypnotic blur fascinating him.
“Assistant superintendent?”
The magistrate’s voice. Florry swallowed awkwardly and, blinking, embarrassed, redirected his vision toward the bench. He hoped his discomfort did not show, knowing of course that it did. He swallowed again. It had taken such a long time for this moment to arrive, but now it rushed at him with the power of the undeniable future.
“Assistant superintendent?”
Florry attempted a wretched smile. The courtroom, jammed with other Imperial Policemen and natives, was as still as a photograph. He could feel their scrutiny: it had the weight of accusation.
“Yessir,” he said. His own voice always bothered him. It was a reedy, thin instrument and tended to disappear in key moments such as this one.
“The man I saw—” he said a bit more smartly, raising his finger to point—
At the defense table, under the slow whirl of the fan, amid a collection of more fortunate members of his race, sat a Hindu.
He was small and had that furtive, shifty, almost liquid swiftness in which the wogs seemed to specialize. He had a shock of thick dark hair and two darting black eyes, his skin so mocha-chocolate that it made his white teeth blaze like diamonds in the firelight. For Benny Lal was smiling; he always smiled. He was an idiot.
“That’s the man,” said Florry, suddenly finding his policeman’s voice. “That’s the man I saw running from the deceased on Tuesday last, half past eleven in the evening, outside the Moulmein officers’ club. Sir.”
He added the bit of recapitulation as if in testimony to his own efficiency, which was on trial here, too. Yet surely every officer and eve
ry native in the courtroom would have known that Tuesday last at half-eleven, a drunken Burmese merchant named U Bat had had his throat opened all over his white suit not fifty paces from the veranda of the club where Florry, nursing his fifth gin of the night, had sat trying to write Georgian poetry in the lamplight, amid moths and fancies. Only slightly drunk, the young officer had rushed to the still form in the dust as a smaller, quicker shape had dashed by him. Perhaps, it was being said in certain quarters, a man with more wit about him (or less gin in him) would have made the pinch right there. But Florry, stunned by the suddenness with which the violence had occurred and a little dotty not only with drink but also with dreams of literature and then still further staggered by his first exposure to the gaudy wreckage of a human body soaking in its own blood in the dust, had let the villain slip away in the shadows of an alley.
A manhunt organized rather like a tiger drive had come upon the naked Benny Lal sleeping in blissful abandon by the side of the road a few miles away early the next morning. It developed swiftly, under blunt methods of investigation, that he had once been a houseboy in the domicile of U Bat and a frequent target of the drunken merchant’s weekly rages. Under questioning Benny Lal, idiot child of the East, neither confessed nor defended himself. He merely smiled pleasantly at everybody and tried not to offend the British.
Was he in fact the guilty party?
If Florry could not really say yes, neither could he really say no. Yet he could not say nothing. These were tricky times, it had been explained to him by a fellow in the Intelligence Department. Already ugly rumors were afoot. The British themselves, it was said, had been behind the slaying. U Bat, in certain quarters, was being inflated into some kind of nationalist saint, not the black brute he’d been in reality. It would do, the chap explained with sweet reason and abundant charm on his side, it would do to be done with this matter quickly. It was a duty; sometimes one had to see the bigger picture.
“You’re certain, then?” said the magistrate.
“I am sure, sir, yessir, I am,” said Florry in a clear, unwavering voice.
“Mr. Gupta? Have you any questions?”
Mr. Gupta, who had been fanning himself this long time, at last arose. He was a tiny Hindu lawyer, up at no fee save mischief from Rangoon to speak for Benny Lal. He offered Florry a broad, extremely pleasant smile.
“How much, Constable Florry, would you—”
Conscious of the contest and eager not to fall behind from the start, Florry corrected the man. “Assistant superintendent please,” he said, and in the instant he said it, realized he’d been snookered.
“Oh!” said the lawyer, in mock astonishment. “Oh, I am begging the officer’s pardon,” his smile radiating heat, “oh, I am so sorry of the mistake. Then you have received so recently a promotion? For duties of spectacular success?”
“I don’t see what the devil dif—” Florry began with an extra measure of sahib’s bluster, but the sudden swell of bright laughter from the unsympathetic Hindus in the back of the courtroom drowned him out.
“Mr. Gupta, the bench does not quite see what relevance the assistant superintendent’s recent promotion has to do with the facts at issue,” said the magistrate coolly.
“I meant no disrespect, your honored self. A simple mistake, in which no harm was meant nor even intended or implied. I congratulate the new assistant. If I have it right, over the year, the difference in moneys is about one hundred pounds, is that not so?”
“Perhaps counsel could explain what relevance to the case of the accused is meant by this?” the magistrate requested.
“Apologies, apologies, many and profuse,” said Gupta, his cynicism as broad as his smile. “I only mean it to remark on the fortune of some and the misfortune of others in this cruel world. I mean never to imply or infer any kind of payment for services ren—”
“Now see here!” began Florry.
“Mr. Gupta, your client’s case will not be helped by impertinence. Indeed, it will most likely be harmed.”
“Then the subject of money shall be forever avoided from this moment onward. Now, Mr. Assistant Superintendent, I understand that you are a poet, is that not correct?”
Florry squirmed. He was a tall man, or boy, actually, twenty-three, with a long thin face, sandy hair, and a husky, big-boned body. He looked strong and English and a bit too decent for anybody’s good. He was an Eton boy—though he’d been wretched there—but of an odd English class. The son of an India Company clerk, he’d gone to his fancy school on account of having been at one time thought promising. He was in service because no university would have him after a disastrous finish to his years at the college. Worse, he felt here, as he felt at Eton—as he felt everywhere—somewhat fraudulent.
“Scribble a verse now and then, yes,” he said.
“Ah,” said the Indian, as if having made a remarkable discovery. “And would you not say that a poet is rewarded for his imagination, Mr. Assistant Superintendent?”
“And his sense of rhyme, his moral vision, his beautiful command of the language, his higher range of exalted thought, his—” Florry looked like a copper but he thought he was a poet, and if he was wholly neither, he was still capable of speaking eloquently on this one subject alone. But the magistrate cut him off.
“See here, Gupta, where’s all this headed?”
“Honored judge of men, I wish only to see if the assistant superintendent is the sort of chappy who sometimes sees things that aren’t there in his poems. Or I wonder if he doesn’t, in the honored tradition of such as Shakespeare and Spenser, sometimes improve the way things are for the sake of the beauty and soul of his no doubt significant poetics. I only mean to find the officer’s sense or definition of the truth.”
Benny Lal smiled. A lick of drool, like a gossamer filament in a dream, drifted from his mouth.
“My poems are my poems,” said Florry sullenly, embarrassed to be depicted as such a dreamy ninny before the other officers, “and duty is duty. Separate and apart. The way it should be.”
“Leaving aside which is the most important to you, let me ask you this, Mr. Assistant Superintendent. You were off duty, relaxing, cooling down at the end of a hot day’s duty in service to your mighty engine of empire. A man in these circumstances, sir, has been known to have a drink of spirits. May I inquire, sir, if you had done so, and if you had, to what extent?”
“A gin,” Florry lied. “Maybe two.”
“You are sure?”
“Quite.”
“Not so much for an Englishman?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know.”
“Your Honor, I have here—ah—oh, yes—here—Assistant Superintendent Florry’s bar chit for the previous month.”
He held aloft the pink form that the young policeman, with sinking feeling, recognized immediately.
“And perhaps in the excitement of the night’s events, the assistant superintendent forgot to sign that night. Yet in the weeks proceeding, it’s quite clear he was accustomed to drinking as much as five gins a night. My goodness, here’s one night when he drank nine! Yet on the night in question, he would have us believe he had drunk only two. My goodness. Perhaps, Mr. Assistant Superintendent, you could amplify.”
“Ah—” Florry began, feeling a tide of liar’s phlegm rising in his throat, “perhaps I may have had more than two. Perhaps I had three. It’s difficult to remember. Four gins is not a lot. Certainly not enough to affect my vision, which is what is important in this matter. My vision was intact, sir, it was. Yes, sir, four, four it was.”
Actually, it had been five. But the curious thing was, it hadn’t really affected him. He could drink grotesque amounts of liquor without much damage.
“Well then, that should clear that up, shouldn’t it?” said the magistrate.
“You see,” hastened Florry, “I had had an idea for a poem that day. And when I write a poem, I never drink a lot. Dulls the senses.”
“Then you had not written a poem for some time
?”
“No,” said Florry, wondering what the little devil was up to.
“And yet, here I have—oh, now where?—yes, here, here it is!—” and the little Hindu milked the theme of the missing document like some bad actor in a West End melodrama for some time until at last—“here it is, indeed. Your postal chit.”
He displayed it triumphantly to the courtroom.
“Yes,” Mr. Gupta continued merrily, “your postal chit. And on Friday before you had dispatched a large envelope—the bill was a pound six—to an address in London. In Bloomsbury. Here it is. Number 56 Bedford. At Russell Square. SW1. Correct?”
“Well—”
“And two weeks before. And a week before that. Would you tell the court what the address is?”
Florry paused bitterly before issuing the grim answer. “It’s the address of The Spectator. A literary quarterly. The best literary quarterly.” They never took his poems. Nobody ever did.
“And so you have been writing poetry and you have been drinking and you were lost in the worlds of your own poetry. You heard the scream. You rushed off the veranda to the body you have just noticed. You have so testified, is this not true?”
“Yes,” said Florry.
“And a shape flies past you. There’s precious little light. And the distance must be thirty feet and the time must be, oh, one would gauge it to be only seconds, eh?”
Florry said nothing.
“Yet you recognized—please point to him.”
Florry raised his finger to point.
Damn the wog.
Two smiling Hindus sat at the defense table. To Florry they were identical. Gupta and his tricks.
Florry’s rising finger grew heavy. Pick one, he thought. Then he remembered a line from a poem: In the end, it’s all the same/ In the end, it’s all a game. Brilliant Julian had written it. It was from the famous “Achilles, Fool,” which had made him such a thing in London these days.
Julian, why did you hurt me so? The pain of it, five years gone, was never adequately buried and now came up like a rotting odor.
Tapestry of Spies Page 1
