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Authors: Stephen Hunter
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left the Barcelona port in November of 1936 on four Russian steamers. Had this material actually been loaded on the ships and sent out to Odessa, as official records insisted? The answers varied, and the arrestees, mainly dockworkers and low-ranking Spanish port officials, were at great pains to please their interrogator. Some swore yes, they’d seen Russian tankers loading the material that the Spaniards had not been able to get near to. But others said the entire affair was quite odd, because the Russians had insisted on being so public about it; they wanted the world to know they were moving the gold. One man said the ships rode awfully high in the water for all the weight they were said to be carrying. But if the gold remained hidden in Barcelona, where could it be? None of Lenny’s many arrestees had an opinion.
For these men, the fate was always the same. They had learned, from their ordeal, of Mink’s real interest. It was the most dangerous knowledge a man could have in Barcelona. They died, usually with a 7.62 mm slug from Lenny Mink’s Tula-Tokarev in the back of their skulls.
The other subject that Lenny Mink examined at length was a certain category of arrestee’s acquaintance with the legendary Levitsky, or “Devil Himself” as he was called in certain quarters.
These questions met with a variety of responses.
Some, for example, would not talk at all without severe assistance. It took Lenny the best part of one whole evening to pry out of one old man the story of Levitsky’s youth, and how the Cossacks had, one bloody morning, liberated the boy from responsibility to parents and shtetl by slaying the former and burning the latter, all before his terrified twelve-year-old eyes, an event which forever propelled him to the revolutionary course. Lenny listened gravely to this account, having some familiarity with the materials himself.
Of Levitsky’s early exploits in the underground of the nineties at a very young age, his first contests with the Okrana, and his eventual abandonment of anarchism for the tenets of Marx, no reliable witness could be found, though several alluded to it.
What they remembered most of Levitsky was the long period between the failed revolution of 1905 and the successful one of 1917 in which he roamed Europe making his legend as a cunning strategist and a fighter of great bravery. It was primarily his enemies from these days who remembered him and frequently hated him still and were ready, even eager, to speak. They remembered his ruthlessness, his cunning, and even his brilliant chess.
“He could have owned the world, it was said,” one man informed Lenny. “Instead he chose to change it.”
He planted bombs in Bucharest, he organized strikes in Turin, he robbed banks in Zagreb; wherever the Party needed him, he went; whatever price the Party demanded, he paid. He was arrested half a dozen times, usually escaping, most spectacularly from the terrible Constantinople Hall of Darkness. Three times, maybe four, the Okrana tried to kill him.
He surfaced, again briefly, in the incredibly hectic years of the revolution, from 1917 to 1921. In this period,an old veteran recalled, he was remembered mainly as a soldier: a great battlefield tactician who, unlike the cowardly Trotsky in his armored train, rode at the head of every charge and was once unhorsed three times in a single afternoon. He fought in all the battles around Kazan and was wounded twice; he was a brigade commander, a counter-intelligence officer, and a leader of cavalry. He rode with the Red Cossacks—he, whose parents had been butchered by Cossacks—out of the hills on June 3, 1919, in the battle that spelled the end for Kolchak. He fought against Yedenitch in the north and Denekin in the south. This was particularly impressive to all who remembered it because Levitsky hated horses as he hated nothing on earth. It was a sheer triumph of will.
After the war, he again passed from view as he returned to the
For these men, the fate was always the same. They had learned, from their ordeal, of Mink’s real interest. It was the most dangerous knowledge a man could have in Barcelona. They died, usually with a 7.62 mm slug from Lenny Mink’s Tula-Tokarev in the back of their skulls.
The other subject that Lenny Mink examined at length was a certain category of arrestee’s acquaintance with the legendary Levitsky, or “Devil Himself” as he was called in certain quarters.
These questions met with a variety of responses.
Some, for example, would not talk at all without severe assistance. It took Lenny the best part of one whole evening to pry out of one old man the story of Levitsky’s youth, and how the Cossacks had, one bloody morning, liberated the boy from responsibility to parents and shtetl by slaying the former and burning the latter, all before his terrified twelve-year-old eyes, an event which forever propelled him to the revolutionary course. Lenny listened gravely to this account, having some familiarity with the materials himself.
Of Levitsky’s early exploits in the underground of the nineties at a very young age, his first contests with the Okrana, and his eventual abandonment of anarchism for the tenets of Marx, no reliable witness could be found, though several alluded to it.
What they remembered most of Levitsky was the long period between the failed revolution of 1905 and the successful one of 1917 in which he roamed Europe making his legend as a cunning strategist and a fighter of great bravery. It was primarily his enemies from these days who remembered him and frequently hated him still and were ready, even eager, to speak. They remembered his ruthlessness, his cunning, and even his brilliant chess.
“He could have owned the world, it was said,” one man informed Lenny. “Instead he chose to change it.”
He planted bombs in Bucharest, he organized strikes in Turin, he robbed banks in Zagreb; wherever the Party needed him, he went; whatever price the Party demanded, he paid. He was arrested half a dozen times, usually escaping, most spectacularly from the terrible Constantinople Hall of Darkness. Three times, maybe four, the Okrana tried to kill him.
He surfaced, again briefly, in the incredibly hectic years of the revolution, from 1917 to 1921. In this period,an old veteran recalled, he was remembered mainly as a soldier: a great battlefield tactician who, unlike the cowardly Trotsky in his armored train, rode at the head of every charge and was once unhorsed three times in a single afternoon. He fought in all the battles around Kazan and was wounded twice; he was a brigade commander, a counter-intelligence officer, and a leader of cavalry. He rode with the Red Cossacks—he, whose parents had been butchered by Cossacks—out of the hills on June 3, 1919, in the battle that spelled the end for Kolchak. He fought against Yedenitch in the north and Denekin in the south. This was particularly impressive to all who remembered it because Levitsky hated horses as he hated nothing on earth. It was a sheer triumph of will.
After the war, he again passed from view as he returned to the
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