And there was Nin in Fleming's novel, quite near the beginning, it didn't take me long to find him, Wheeler had marked the paragraph as he had in the Doble Diario and in other books, a meticulous, attentive and, at the same time, impulsive reader, he wrote mocking interjections in the margins, or scornful notes to the author (he never let a piece of false reasoning pass, or a lie or ignorance or sheer stupidity, issuing terse, emphatic judgements such as 'Silly' or 'Foolish'), or, now and then, enthusiastic ones, as well as comments intended merely as reminders to himself, and exclamation marks or question marks when he did not believe something or thought it unintelligible, and occasionally he had scribbled 'Bad' (deceitful and incompetent writers, Tello-Trapp or whoever, had incurred quite a few of those), indicating with an arrow the statement condemned by his shrewd mind and his exacting mineral eyes, or 'Excellent' when a phrase seemed right to him or moved him, 'Quite moving', I read once, in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia I think. 'Quite right', he sometimes wrote approvingly, in Benet's book for example, and 'Quite true' occurred often in Thomas, whom he must have known in person since the latter taught at a university very near Oxford, Reading, a place famous for its old prison and for the ballad written there by prisoner C.3.3., not another alias exactly.
The paragraph came towards the end of Chapter 7, entitled 'The Wizard of Ice', which, in Spanish, would be an untranslatable pun on The Wizard of Oz. 'Of course', I read in that paragraph:
Rosa Klebb had a strong will to survive, or she would not have become one of the most powerful women in the State, and certainly the most feared. Her rise, Kronsteen remembered, had begun with the Spanish Civil War. Then, as a double agent inside POUM – that is, working for the OGPU in Moscow as well as for Communist Intelligence in Spain – she had been the right hand, and some sort of a mistress, they said, of her chief, the famous Andreas Nin. She had worked with him from 1935-37. Then, on the orders of Moscow, he was murdered and, it was rumoured, murdered by her. Whether this was true or not, from then on she had progressed slowly but straight up the ladder of power, surviving setbacks, surviving wars, surviving, because she forged no allegiances and joined no factions, all the purges, until, in 1953, with the death of Beria, the bloodstained hands grasped the rung, so few from the very top, that was Head of the Operations Department of SMERSH.