Tapestry of Spies by Stephen Hunter

Author:Stephen Hunter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Suspense, Spain, Historical, Thrillers, Espionage
ISBN: 9780440221852
Publisher: DELL
Published: 1997-01-01T07:18:11.157962+00:00

Night was falling as Levitsky hurried along the creek bed. He almost froze. He had no exact idea where he was headed other than east, away from La Granja. He shivered as the cold rose to penetrate his coat. The creek bed crossed under a country road after a while, and he chose the road, his feet acquiring an urgency that seemed almost involuntary. On either side in the twilight, the empty fields fell away, their crops unharvested, their farmers driven away. Several miles off a shell or a bomb exploded and now and then came the crackle of shots outside Huesca, but otherwise there was no sign of war in the strange, empty stillness of the land. The Pyrenees off on the left had become indistinct, a wall. Beyond them lay France, and freedom.

You cannot walk across the mountains, old devil, he told himself.

When it grew too dark to continue, he found a deserted stone barn and hid in the straw for warmth. He awoke early the next morning and proceeded on, the hunger gnawing away at his stomach. He was stopped once by a squad of forlorn militiamen who cared more whether he had food to share with them than for his papers. Twice more he came across groups of militia, but they paid him no attention. Finally he came to a larger road. Before him, he could see the plain stretching out for miles, bleak and flat, gnarled here and there with clusters of rock. Who could want such desolation?

He waited by the side of the road until at last a vehicle came along, an empty lorry driven by two men. He hailed them.

“Comrades?” he asked.

“Sprechen sie Deutsch, Kamrade?” came the reply from one of them, a youth of about twenty.

“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 naïfs, 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.

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