The low-slung, gray granite Lenin Mausoleum sat across the square to his right, up against the Kremlin Wall. Its roof served as the VIP reviewing stand for the big parades each November and May; that is, for those who managed to survive since the last big parade. Now, a long line of the faithful, probably bussed in from the collective farms or one of the big tractor factories out in the sticks, was queued outside the mausoleum. They were waiting patiently to have their carefully supervised one minute to walk slowly and reverently past the twin coffins of Lenin and Stalin. Were they looking at the real bodies, or just wax dummies under glass? Hard to say, but you would not find very many jaded Muscovites in that line. They had better things to do with their lunch hour, such as stroll around Red Square and take in the sun, arm in arm with a friend or lover. Like their vodka, a sunny day in Moscow was one of the very few pleasures the state would not dare take away.
As he set off walking south through the square, behind him stood the tall, blood-red brick Museum of History. To his right, behind the mausoleum, ran the eastern wall of the Kremlin. This tall medieval fortress, also built of red brick, was an awkward triangle that lay on the bank of the Moscow River. One long exterior wall created a side of Red Square. Halfway down to the river and sitting in the southeast corner of the square stood St. Basil’s Cathedral with its eight oddly sized, onion-shaped domes, decked out in bright red, blue, gold, green, and white. Like almost everything else of a religious nature in Moscow, it was now a state-owned museum; but it remained the one Russian landmark people recognize worldwide.
Scanlon stopped near the cathedral’s entry sign, about a hundred feet from its front door. His heart raced as he slowly pivoted and looked around. Hanni’s note said noon on the north side of St. Basil’s, and that was exactly where he was standing. So, where was Hanni, he wondered. The square was crowded with thousands of Russians in shirtsleeves, out for a walk or some quick, lunchtime shopping. Most were women, but that was not surprising. With the millions of men lost during the war, the Russian population remained disproportionately female. At this time of year, with the exception of old widows wearing black dresses and headscarves, most wore colorful, loose-fitting summer print dresses, had their hair tied up in colorful scarves, and carried a shopping bag over an arm in the unlikely event they found something worth buying.
The square did have its share of men. Most were in shirtsleeves, like Scanlon; and no one wore a jacket. Even the unfortunate ones dressed in suits — government workers who had snuck out the Kremlin gate — wore their ties pulled down at the neck and carried their jackets flung over their shoulders. The only ones who had not taken theirs off had to be police or KGB, but they did not appear to be looking at him any more than at the others. Sweat was rolling off him now. His shirt had stuck to his back. With the old beret and a typically Russian cheap shirt, he knew he blended in, at least at first glance. Maybe so, but whether he cared to admit it or not, he knew he was in way over his head this time. He was a senior CIA officer and he was breaking every rule in the book by leaving the embassy and putting himself at risk, even with two “minders.” The note was undoubtedly a KGB setup. Following its instructions to try to find Hanni Steiner, a long-lost Soviet operative, was insane. No, it was more than that. It was suicidal. Yet he knew he had no choice. He had to do it. He had to come.
His eyes swept slowly through the crowd, concentrating on each face he saw. He was looking for that wisp of blond hair with the sun shining through it, for those vivid blue eyes, and for a smile that would not stop; but he could not find them. There were thousands of faces, he realized, thousands of them; and they were all wrong.
Suddenly, his eyes stopped. Ahead, not fifty feet away in the shadows of the onion-shaped domes stood a woman in a faded, yellow and red flower print dress and white blouse. She had her back to him and wore a brown scarf over her head, tied in back, with her hair tucked up underneath, looking like a thousand other women walking around Red Square that day. However, around the edges of her scarf, he saw blond hair sticking out; and his heart began pounding in his ears. Slowly, she turned and he saw her face.
It was Hanni.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The world stopped turning. The years of anguish and loneliness melted away. He saw her face and suddenly there was no one else in Red Square except the two of them. It was no longer noon on a scorching summer day in Moscow. One look into those dancing blue eyes, and it was the middle of a snowy alpine night — a night so cold that they could see each other’s breath on the chill air. She was not wearing a summer dress and scarf. He saw her the way he would always see her, lying naked under a blanket next to him in the hay of that old barn outside Leipzig, and she positively glowed.
Perhaps the sun had baked his brain, but he could not think of a thing to do or say, except to stand there wide-eyed and stare at her. To him, Hanni could never change. She turned, made a quick, furtive glance left and right, and then began walking slowly toward him. He did the same, totally ignoring Art Jensen’s warning, until they stood only inches apart. Her long blond hair was now cut short and streaked with gray; but so was his. She was a bit heavier in the legs and the body now, and time had etched a delicate tracery across her forehead and in the corners of her eyes and mouth. Still, as he looked into her eyes, he saw they had not changed at all. They were the same riveting blue, reaching out to him with the power and intensity of a lightning bolt.
“It is good to see you again, Liebchen,” she began, as her words broke the spell. She spoke in halting, badly accented German, as if she had not spoken it in a long time. Again, she let her eyes dart around the crowd, moving from face to face as if from a well-ingrained habit. “With all these people around, I think it is safe for us to talk for a while,” she said as her eyes turned back and came to rest on him. “So, let us walk, the three of us.”
Hanni took his arm, wrapping hers around his and pulling him close. As she did, Scanlon’s field of vision widened and he saw that she had her other arm wrapped around the arm of a teenage boy. He was the waiter from the party at the embassy, the one who slipped him the note. The boy was a head taller than Hanni, thin and gangly, but with black hair and a pair of angry gray eyes. In that instant, Scanlon understood everything. He now saw what he did not see the night before. It was like looking into a mirror.
He stopped and faced her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded angrily.
“Please,” she ignored his question and clutched them both even more tightly. “You are frightening him, Edward. I do not want that. It has taken far too long to get you two together, and I desperately want you to like each other,” she said as they resumed their slow stroll around the big colorful cathedral, arm in arm, with Hanni in the middle and completely in charge of the men in her life, just as it had always been.
“His name is Georgi,” she told him. “He was born that September and I named him after old Horstmann. I did not think you would mind. I owed that crazy old man everything. Georgi only speaks Russian, so he does not understand what I am saying. Oh, perhaps the smattering of English they teach him in school, like the words he used last night, but that is all. Still, he is a clever boy, very smart, with a short temper and more than a touch of arrogance — just like his father,” she smiled. “And I warn you, he reads faces. He reads people, too; and he worries about me constantly.”
“You knew you were pregnant, didn’t you?” Scanlon said, still not believing.
“Of course, but it made absolutely no difference, nothing did. I tried to tell you that, repeatedly; but you refused to accept things for what they were. Beria had my father and had me by the throat, and there was nothing I could do except follow orders.”
She leaned over and whispered something into the boy’s ear before she pushed him toward a large man whom Scanlon now noticed standing in the crowd about ten feet away. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his huge forearms, and he was watching Ed Scanlon intently. He did not look very happy to be here in Red
Square to begin with, watching Hanni arm in arm with another man.
“That is Pyotr, my husband. He knows all about you. So does Georgi,” she said. “We met in the labor camp after Georgi was born. Pyotr took care of me and saved my life, Georgi’s too. He is a good man. Without him, neither of us would have survived that first winter. In every practical way, he is the boy’s father and the boy is his son. That is why I would never, ever do anything to hurt him, to hurt either one of them. You do understand that, Liebchen?”
Scanlon looked at the big man and gave him a polite nod as they kept walking. He watched her face, still too stunned to speak.
“It truly is good to see you again, Edward, good to know that you are all right,” she said, as she looked away, her eyes casually but continually searching the crowd. Like him, she probably had a little speech all planned. She would have been working on it for years, as he had, spelling out each word on the ceiling above her, practicing, and praying that someday he would come and she would actually be able to say the words to him. Now, meeting her face to face like this, the words vanished like the morning mist under the hot sun.
“It was a terrible thing I did to you,” she said. “I always made you take second place to someone or something, and that was not fair,” she said as she gripped his arm even tighter.
He looked down at her hands. They were rough and scarred, the fingernails chipped and unpainted, and he wanted to cry. “It was the world you built for yourself, Hanni. I wanted to help you break free of it, but you wouldn’t let me.”
“Oh, I knew that, and you were right. God, you were right,” she said as she looked up toward the sky and shook her head helplessly, fighting back the tears. “We both knew Stalin and Beria could never be trusted, but I had to pretend and hope. When I finally made it to Moscow with Raeder, even after everything I had done for them, they tossed me in the Lubyanka for my troubles. Frankly, it is what I should have expected. You know the old fable about the alligator who agrees to carry the scorpion across the river. He gets stung for his troubles, and they both drown.”
“Because it is the nature of the scorpion.”
“Yes, my mistake was giving them what they wanted.” She turned her sad eyes toward him. “Later, months later, I found out my father had died the summer before, in 1944. They shot him for being a ‘foreign subversive’ in one of their many mindless purges, so none of it mattered, the bastards.” He could see the pain in her face as if it had happened yesterday. “They only wanted reliable Germans running their new Germany. Anyone who had lived too long in the west or who had not slavishly toed the party line need not apply, especially a Jew.”
“So they sent you to the Gulag?”
“Yes, for a while. They moved us around to different work camps with no warning and no reason, of course. That is also ‘their nature.’ The first few years were the worst, but soon no one could even remember why they locked most of us up. They had already purged and executed most of the people who had been carrying out the purges, and after Stalin and Beria died, all the records were lost or intentionally destroyed. In the end, they simply let us go, like tens of thousands of others, because they did not know what else to do with us.”
“Why didn’t you go back to Germany?”
“Germany? I am not a German anymore, Liebchen. I do not think I ever was.”
“But you’re sure as hell not Russian.”
“No, but they are,” she said as she pointed toward Georgi and Pyotr with a half smile. “I could not leave them, and we have each other now.”
“You should have come with me, Hanni. I begged you.”
“The past is dead. Here in Russia, they even stuff it, cover it with wax, and put it under glass; so I do not dwell on it. I did what I had to do, and I would not have done it any other way, even if I could have. Neither would you and we both know it." She turned and wagged her finger at him with an amused twinkle in her eye. “But you had your revenge. That was a very dirty trick you played on me with Wolfe Raeder.”
“It wasn’t me, Hanni. You tricked yourself.”
“You knew the truth, though.”
“Not until the very end, on that road, when Von Lindemann told me.”
“I knew it! That snake! It was the loving look in his eyes that fooled me. For the first time in a long time, I let the romantic side of me win out. I let him have the Raeder girl, and look what it got me.”
“I’m sure they thank you every day.”
“Perhaps, but you do realize what you did to them?” she asked.
“Did to whom?”
“Did to them!” she laughed as she pointed at the Kremlin wall. “My God, you are CIA. You mean you really do not know?" She clutched his arm again and resumed her walking. “I was never allowed to see Raeder after I delivered him to Beria. They packed me off to the Lubyanka that very day, and I heard nothing for perhaps two or three years. I was a bit busy trying to stay alive back then, but the strangest things began to happen.” She smiled. “I would get visitors from Moscow, special visitors from the NKVD, or KGB as they call themselves now. At first, it was to punish me, as they always did; but as the months passed, they began to want information much more than they wanted to hurt me. They began to treat me better. I got more food, easier work, and the guards in the camps left me alone, as if someone had told them to be nice. Not all of them were from the KGB, either. I learned later that some of the visitors were from the Army, from the GRU, from other Politburo Members, even from Stalin himself, I suspect. It seems there was a big fish bone stuck in someone’s throat. Whatever, that is what kept me alive. No one wanted to sign the order for my execution or have me die on their watch for fear of being accused of trying to silence me. You see, it became a standoff between various Kremlin factions, all of whom feared and distrusted each other. That is why they kept sending people to question me, sometimes new faces and sometimes the same old ones, asking me over and over again about Raeder, Otto Dietrich, Nossing, Mannheim, the Research Institute, and all the rest. As time went by, they even asked me questions about you, Liebchen. Oh, yes, they wanted to know all about you, more so as you rose higher and higher in the CIA hierarchy. They wanted to know who made the decisions, and whose idea it was to get Raeder to defect to the Soviet Union. As I said, though, the men who asked all those questions were the very ones who ended up being liquidated — and I am still alive.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them the truth, of course. I was following Beria’s orders. After all, Wolfe Raeder had been a professor of aeronautics at the prestigious Berlin University and the head of a big German research institute. Göring and the Luftwaffe handpicked him for the job. He developed the famous Me-262, so who was I to doubt him? Besides, snatching him was all Dietrich’s idea, something he worked out with Beria. That is exactly what I told them. I think it was Beria’s name, the fact he was working on Stalin’s personal orders, the rivalries inside the Politburo, and the fact that I was just a dumb woman to begin with that kept me alive. I never mentioned Christina, because I knew nothing about her and her amazing talents; but the KGB would not have believed me anyway. A young girl? Responsible for all that brilliant mathematics? In this country, that is as unthinkable as her becoming a national chess champion. Years later, they showed me some scientific journals after her new work was published; but it was already too late for them. They fell farther and farther behind America, but no one could ever admit a mistake or a failure. That was also unthinkable."
She laughed to herself as she walked along. “You know how paranoid they were — how paranoid they still are,” she corrected herself. “So, it went on and on for years, but Stalin and Beria had become infallible by then — nothing was wrong and nothing could ever be wrong with their decisions. If Stalin and Beria had swallowed the good Doktor whole, how could anyone blame me? How could all those male geniuses on the top floor of Moscow Center possibly blame the poor, dumb little Steiner girl?”
“You’re lucky they didn’
t kill you just to cover it all up.”
“Oh no, that was impossible. Russians do not like puzzles they cannot solve or chess moves they do not understand — and I think they were all just a little afraid of me. Remember, my orders came from Beria and his came directly from Stalin. What if this was another of Koba’s many tests? What if I was a plant? What if he was merely testing the interrogators, testing the testers? What if I died, and the Boss later changed his mind? Think of the position that would put them in. The doubts? The recriminations? As paranoid as Moscow was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, no one was brave enough to take that risk.“
“So, they bought your story?”
“No, no, but like the fish bone, they were stuck with it, and that kept me alive.”
He studied her face with its wrinkles, the first streaks of gray in her hair, and the small scars. They made him feel guilty. “You were very lucky,” he told her.
Her blue eyes flashed. “Luck had nothing to do with it. Your people were very clever — very, very clever. Looking back on it now, I think Raeder was a magnificent Trojan horse that your people ever so carefully crafted. He was perfect — larger than life, solid, arrogant, and as hollow as a dry gourd. Instead of being full of Greek soldiers, he was full of… well, nothing. He could rattle and make a lot of noise, but there was nothing inside.”
“Hanni, if it was a setup, then they set me up, too.”
“If you say so,” she said as she laid a finger across his lips, “but be honest with yourself. Why do you think they sent you back to Leipzig? Why only you? Why not five good men, or ten, or a hundred, if it was that important? In your day, you were good. However, by the time they sent you back in late March, you were little more than a broken down alcoholic. They knew that, and they were counting on me to succeed and on you to fail. No offense, Liebchen, but someone knew the truth. Perhaps it was the Luftwaffe big shots in Berlin who were working with your OSS bosses, but someone knew. Someone tipped them off about Raeder and the girl. Von Lindemann? Rudy Mannfried? You and I will never know, but like smart shoppers, your people in Washington knew to grab the good stuff as soon as the store opened; and they let the Russians think they were getting an equal share. I love you, but you know in your heart of hearts that what I am saying is true.”
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