Tapestry of Spies Read Online Free PDF

against you now, to force you, once again, into doing the right thing. Your duty. We are quite prepared to see charges placed.”
    “I’d go to the press.”
    “With Official Secrets, we can shut the press down.”
    Florry could only look off, through the window. He could see the London skyline, looking very much as it had looked in Dickens’ day, a flat, neat vista of little houses and chimneys. It looked like a set of parcels laid out on the postman’s table, and among the buildings crept, anonymous, huddled, bent, hustling, the citizens of the British Empire, faceless and nameless, in whose cause he had just been dragooned.
    “I had no idea the British government could be so ruthless.”
    “The world has chosen to give us ruthless enemies, Florry.”
    “It really does have to be you, Mr. Florry,” said Vane. “You are a writer and have cause to travel where he travels. You know him well. At a point, you knew him
very
well, in the ways that public-school boys can come to know each other. Those old school ties, Mr. Florry, they count for something. You know they do. Then, you are an ex-policeman, experienced in security matters. You do fit the ticket, Mr. Florry. And it is, sir, something of a duty.”
    “And one other thing, Florry,” said the major. “You hate him. Or you should.”
    Julian
, thought Florry,
why did you hurt me so?
He remembered the boy he’d loved and the boy who’d almost killed him.
    Yes, I hate you. It was true. By some subtle alchemy of the emotions, his passion had turned abjectly to loathing. He could remember Julian cutting him for the sheer amusement of it all.
    “We’ll be in touch concerning details, Mr. Florry,” said Mr. Vane. “We’ll provide everything, of course, No need to do this thing on a miser’s scale.”
    Florry looked up to see that his two new employers had risen and put on their coats.
    “Good day, then, Florry. Glad to have you aboard,” said the major. Florry shut his eyes. He heard the door close and the quiet pad of feet down the hall. After a bit, he left, too.

2

THE LUX
    B Y LATE 1936, THE MOST TERRIFYING SOUND IN ALL Moscow—in all Russia, for that matter—was the sound of a single knock. It always came at night—late. And it always meant but one thing.
    The young men from the organ of state security, the NKVD, were invariably polite, though a bit distant, as they stood there in their green overcoats and their fur-muffled winter caps with their hands on the Tula-Tokarev automatics in the holsters at their belts. Mercifully, they kept the formalities to a minimum: they read the charges, they allowed the accused a last word with his loved ones, a chance to grab his coat, and then they removed him—forever.
    It was the time of Yeshov—
Yeshovchina
, in the Russian—after Nikolai Yeshov, the dwarfish chairman of state security. But the process of purification represented by this massive wave of arrests surely originated with the general secretary, whom most of the old revolutionaries remembered as Koba. Koba sought to scour the party clean, to make it a precise, scientific instrument, to doaway with the last remnants of bourgeois sentimentality so that the future could be faced with strength and will and resolve. Koba most certainly sought also to make certain
he
was never arrested.
    In one Moscow building the arrests were greeted with something beyond even fear and despair, something unique to the city: irony. The building stood on Gorky Street, hard by Pushkin Park, not three-quarters of a downhill mile from the Kremlin itself, in the very center of the city. It was an ornate, Italianate construction, rich in marble and brass, and its upper floors on the western side provided a grand panorama of the Kremlin’s domes. The place bore the name HOTEL LUX , on a brass plate untouched since 1917. Once, in the early years after its construction in 1907, Russian and European nobility, American entrepreneurs, German adventurers, Jewish diamond merchants,