Angel in Red

by Christopher Nicole

  *

  It was one of the least enjoyable meals of Anna’s recent life. But at last Greta needed to powder her nose. Having made this announcement, she waited for Anna to accompany her, but as Anna made no move to do so, she set off by herself, steam emanating from the back of her head.

  ‘I think we are in for a difficult time,’ Anna said, stirring her coffee. She had had several glasses of vodka, and now had to contemplate some extremely poor brandy. With her training it took a good deal of alcohol to make her tight, but it could easily make her irritable.

  ‘Please do not let her upset you.’ Meissenbach’s hand slid across the table to hold hers. ‘Anna, I adore you. I must see you again.’

  ‘Aren’t you seeing me now?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Listen, I will come to you tonight.’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘There is nothing to be afraid of.’ He flushed. ‘I don’t suppose you would be afraid, no matter what happened. But Greta takes a sleeping pill every night when travelling; any motion, either from a train or a boat, keeps her awake. Midnight.’

  Anna looked past him at Greta, just entering the car, and withdrew her hand. But Greta had enjoyed her discomfort over the vodka, not to mention her obvious distaste for caviar. She had it coming. ‘I shall look forward to that,’ she said softly.

  *

  Thanks to the alcohol she fell into a deep sleep, and awoke with a start at the knock on her door. This time she had locked it and had to get out of her couchette. It was a double compartment, and Birgit had thoughtfully laid a dressing gown on the other seat. She put this on, opened the door, and was immediately in his arms. He was certainly anxious; Anna had to reach past him to close and lock the door, and switch on the light.

  While she was doing this, he got inside the dressing gown to caress her naked flesh. ‘How I have dreamed of this,’ he said into her ear. ‘You and I on a train together, making love.’

  Having sex, she thought. ‘Why, Heinz, I thought you had gone off me.’

  He sat beside her on the bed, continuing to caress her, moving the dressing gown from her shoulders so that it slipped down her back. ‘I was overcome. I admit it. And then Gabriella . . . The way you kissed her.’ He gazed at her with wide eyes.

  ‘It is my way,’ Anna smiled. She had anticipated this question at some stage. ‘She was a pretty woman. I like pretty things.’

  ‘But you also like destroying them?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You are a woman to fear. But then, to be loved by you . . . Anna, will you hold him, as you did in Prague?’

  That seemed a quick solution to his problem. She slipped her hand inside his pyjamas, and only a few seconds later was washing it in the basin, while he lay back with a sigh. ‘Anna, you are a goddess! Anna, if I were to divorce Greta . . .’

  Anna dried her hands and sat beside him. ‘Dear Heinz, we are going to Moscow to work. I am, anyhow.’

  His eyes, which had been closed, now opened. ‘No one has ever told me what that work is. When I think of what you can do . . . You do realize that if you were to shoot someone in Russia, it could lead to an international incident?’

  ‘I told you, I am not being sent to Russia to shoot anybody. I am assuming that there is no one in Russia who is going to try to shoot you.’

  ‘I should hope not. But you are not going to pretend you are really coming as my aide. Can you type? Can you file? Can you handle public relations? Make appointments, refuse appointments without giving offence, which is often the more important?’

  Anna squeezed in beside him on the narrow bunk. ‘I have not been trained to do any of those things, but you must pretend that I am indispensable. I am going to Russia to observe and report. General Heydrich, which means the Secret Services, which means the highest level of the Reich Government, wishes to know how the Russians are thinking. He also wishes,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘to learn whatever he can of the relations between the Russians and the British and the French. So you see, I need to mingle with the diplomats of all of these countries.’

  ‘How do you propose to do that?’

  She kissed him. ‘You are going to arrange that, Heinz. I wish to be included in all receptions thrown at the Embassy. I wish to be found invitations to all receptions thrown by other embassies, or by Russian diplomats and politicians, to which any Germans are invited.’

  ‘That is a tall order.’

  ‘If it proves at all difficult, I wish you – and your wife, of course – to throw a succession of parties. Dinner parties would be best, to which you will invite anyone of the least importance. I am sure you agree that I will be an attractive guest.’

  ‘I don’t know that Schulenburg will be pleased with that. As for Greta . . .’

  Anna again slid her hand inside his pyjamas. ‘You will be doing it for the Reich. And for me, of course.’

  *

  Belinda Hoskin opened her door to the knock, and gazed at her visitor in astonishment. She had met Billy Baxter before, and she knew that he was Clive’s boss, but he had never attempted to contact her before. Now she immediately knew he was the bearer of bad news. ‘Mr Baxter?’

  ‘May I come in?’

  ‘Of course, do forgive me.’ She stepped back, and closed the door behind him. ‘It’s about Clive.’

  Baxter advanced into the room, looked at the sideboard. ‘Shall we have a drink?’

  Belinda poured two scotches. ‘Tell me.’ Baxter sat down and took a long sip. Belinda also sat, the glass held in both hands. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘He’s in hospital. His plane was shot down, and he is suffering from extreme exposure, as well as various other injuries. I am informed that his condition is not life-threatening, but it may be a little while before he is fit again.’

  Belinda had an instinctive feeling that he was lying. ‘Shot down? Where was he shot down?’

  ‘Now, Miss Hoskin – Belinda – you know I cannot tell you that. I can tell you that he was on a mission for the Department.’

  ‘And shot down. Am I allowed to see him?’

  ‘Ah . . . I’m afraid that is not practical.’

  ‘Why not? You mean . . . My God, he’s burned!’

  Baxter took his pipe from his pocket, regarded it for a few seconds as a drowning man might regard a lifebelt that had suddenly been thrown to him, and then replaced it in his pocket. ‘Clive has not been burned, to my knowledge.’

  ‘You mean you have not seen him either? He’s in intensive care?’

  ‘I understand that he was in intensive care, yes. But as I have said, he is now off the danger list.’

  ‘But he was on it. And I’m not allowed to see him.’

  ‘It is simply not practical.’

  ‘So when will he be coming home?’

  ‘As I told you, not for some time.’ Baxter finished his drink and stood up. ‘I just felt that you should understand the situation.’

  ‘I do not understand the situation. Who was with him on this plane?’

  Baxter could tell where her thoughts were heading. ‘I am not in a position to give you that information. But I can tell you that there was no one on the plane that you know, or have ever known. I will be in touch when I have some more information.’ He closed the front door behind himself.

  Belinda stared at it for several seconds then hurled the still full glass of whisky at it.

  *

  ‘This place is a dump,’ Marlene complained.

  Anna had to agree with her. The Kremlin was starkly dramatic, but lacked any suggestion of architectural beauty. At the top end of Red Square were the magnificent, multi-coloured onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, but they seemed an ornament stuck on the front of a very plain face: the church was no longer used for any religious purpose, and in any event, she had been educated at the Vienna convent to regard Russian Orthodoxy as even more obnoxious than Protestantism.

  Surrounding the square were some substantial buildings, such as the GUM dep
artment store, open only to non-Russians as long as they spent their own currency, and the Historical Museum, but neither of these was the least attractive to look at. On the west bank of the Moscow River were several other large buildings that could almost be called palaces; these were, in the main, the foreign embassies. For the rest, there were endless streets of very ordinary houses, and worse, on the outskirts of the city were a mass of drab high-rise apartment blocks.

  ‘It is utterly soulless,’ Marlene continued.

  ‘Sssh!’ Anna recommended, for their Intourist guide was approaching them; it had been decided that their first duty was to be shown the sights of the city.

  He was a nervous young man named Dmitri who spoke German with a pronounced accent. ‘Now here, Frauleins, is Red Square, the centre of the city.’

  ‘Why is it called Red Square?’ Birgit asked. ‘There is nothing red in it.’

  ‘Red does not refer to the colour,’ Dmitri said severely. ‘In Russian red means brave, courageous, bold. Now, I am going to take you on a tour of the Kremlin. You will see all the art treasures, as well as the great bell and the huge cannon with which our ancestors repelled the Mongols.’

  Anna reflected that they were going to get a very one-sided view of history: to her knowledge the Russians had never succeeded in repelling the Mongols.

  ‘But first,’ Dmitri went on, ‘we will visit the tomb of our great leader.’

  ‘Herr Stalin is dead?’ Marlene asked.

  Dmitri raised his eyes to heaven. ‘I am referring to Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Communist State. Over here.’

  He led them across the cobbles to the Kremlin wall towering some forty feet above them. Let into the wall were a series of niches, each fronted by a portrait. ‘In those,’ he explained, ‘are the ashes of all our great leaders, who have sadly departed from this world.’

  Anna could not resist the temptation. ‘You mean men like Marshal Tukhachevski and Nicolai Bukharin?’ They were two of the Bolshevik leaders executed by Stalin three years before.

  ‘I was speaking of our great leaders, not criminal deviationists,’ Dmitri said stiffly.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. I always thought that Marshal Tukhachevski was the greatest of all Soviet soldiers.’

  ‘A criminal deviationist,’ Dmitri insisted firmly. ‘Come along, Frauleins.’

  ‘This is going to take all day,’ Marlene muttered as they approached the wall and the end of a long line of people.

  Anna had to suppose she was right. But Dmitri merely led them up the line to the front, repeating in a loud voice, ‘Intourist! Intourist!’ and everyone immediately stepped aside.

  ‘Pays to have friends in high places,’ she murmured.

  There were two armed soldiers slowly goose-stepping up and down outside the entrance to the tomb. Inside the darkened chamber there were more armed guards. The three young women were escorted to the railing to look down past the glass casket at the dead hero reclining on his back with his hands on his chest. He wore a three-piece grey suit and black shoes, and his goatee beard reminded Anna of Reiffel.

  ‘Gosh!’ Birgit said. ‘When did he die?’

  ‘Sixteen years ago,’ Dmitri told her.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘He’s embalmed, silly,’ Marlene said.

  As they left the tomb it began to rain. ‘This is going to be a long winter,’ Anna commented.

  *

  Weather-wise she was absolutely correct. At the beginning of September it started to rain seriously; at the beginning of October it started to snow and by the beginning of November the temperatures were well below zero.

  ‘How long does this last?’ Marlene enquired of one of the Embassy staff.

  ‘It may start to thaw in April,’ he told her.

  ‘Jesus!’ she muttered.

  Yet they were not uncomfortable, certainly within the Embassy. Anna was given a spacious apartment, to which she was shown by Countess von Schulenburg herself, who explained that this was a wing of the building which had been recently modernised. It contained three bedrooms, the master bedroom being en suite, while the other two had a bathroom between them, a sitting room with a dining table at the far end, and its own small kitchen, so that they did not have to attend meals in the mess hall unless they wished. The original heavy furniture and tasselled brocade curtains remained.

  Nor were they bored, at least for a while. In keeping with the role Anna was required to play, Meissenbach allotted her an office of her own where she and Marlene could be surrounded by typewriters and filing cabinets, and even found them work to do, handling various internal affairs of the Embassy. In the evenings they were often escorted to the Puppet Theatre, or the Bolshoi ballet, or concerts at the Moscow Conservatoire, which sometimes included performances by Shostakovich.

  To Anna, brought up in Vienna, the work of even the Russian genius was heavy and unexciting, probably due to the fact that everything he wrote had to be approved by a Party official. This applied even more to the film industry, which produced an endless succession of bowdlerised and turgid romances about young women falling in love with young men who were heroes of the Soviet Union for having dug five tons of coal more than their comrades.

  The overall word for the society in which she found herself was grey. Even the cocktail parties to which Meissenbach saw that she was regularly invited were grey affairs in her opinion. The liquor consisted mainly of vodka and Russian ‘champagne’, which was hardly more than fizzy water. The conversation was so carefully non-committal as to be puerile. Nor did the various commissars appear terribly responsive to her charms. In fact she got the strong impression that the average Russian did not like the average German. Or even the exceptional German.

  The atmosphere was slightly better, overall, at the small parties Meissenbach threw in his own quarters, but from Anna’s point of view they were rendered less than attractive by the presence of the hostess, whose dislike for her became more evident every day.

  But the most important, and disappointing, aspect of her situation was that she was not getting any real work done, on either front. She thought her big moment had come at a party in early October when almost as soon as she entered the room she recognized Chalyapov, standing some distance away, smoking a cigarette and talking to several men. As the young Embassy official who was escorting her obviously did not know who Chalyapov was, and therefore could not be asked to provide an introduction – and as Heydrich had warned her not to be forward, but to let events take their course – she could do nothing more than slowly work her way closer to her target and wait to be noticed. But suddenly, when she was still some ten feet away from him, with quite a few people between them, Chalyapov left the room, apparently without seeing her at all. She scanned the guest lists for every Embassy party, but his name was never on it, while on the one occasion she managed to get hold of a list of staff at the British Embassy, Clive Bartley was also not to be seen. Nor was any attempt made to contact her.

  Which was not to say that she lacked male attention. Count von Schulenburg himself clearly enjoyed the view, although equally clearly he was far too much of an old-fashioned gentleman ever to consider taking off after an employee, however attractive. The Count was also disturbed by her very presence. ‘This is most unusual and irregular, Countess,’ he had remarked when he received her in his office. ‘We have never had an SD agent here before, and these instructions that you are to have carte blanche, as it were . . .’ He peered at her. ‘I mean, you are really very young to be given such responsibility, and, well . . .’

  ‘I am also a woman, sir,’ Anna said softly.

  ‘Isn’t the SD a counter-espionage department? I had no idea they employed women at all.’

  ‘That is one of their secrets, Your Excellency, and we are, after all, a secret department. As regards both my gender and my age, I am merely carrying out my orders. As we are all required to do.’

  He frowned at the implied rebuke. ‘And I am not to know what those orders are. That is
most unsatisfactory.’

  ‘I am sorry, sir. You are of course quite entitled to take the matter up with Herr von Ribbentrop, or indeed with General Himmler, if you so wish.’

  ‘I may take that under consideration, Countess. But I will say this: I will allow you carte blanche to pursue your allotted task, but I will not have the workings of this Embassy – and even more the good relations I have established with Monsieur Molotov and the Soviet Government – in any way disrupted. Please remember that. Good morning.’

  *

  If that was ominous, what was even more disturbing was the fact that she definitely did attract Hans Groener. Even if he had no idea what her mission was, there could be no doubt that he had a predatory eye for beauty. Sadly, with his tall, lanky frame, his moon face, and his bristly Prussian hair cut, he was not the least attractive as a man.

  He made his move early on, summoning her to his office only a week after her arrival. ‘You understand, Fraulein, that I am in charge of Embassy security. And in this regard I require absolute compliance from every member of the staff.’

  ‘That must be very interesting,’ Anna said agreeably, sitting before his desk with her knees crossed.

  Groener opened the file in front of him. ‘There are a few things I need to verify.’

  ‘One of them should be that I am the Countess von Widerstand,’ Anna said.

  He regarded her for several seconds. ‘You are Anna Fehrbach. You are a secretary in the Gestapo. It says so here. Thus you are my junior. But I am informed that you are here in a special capacity, which places you outside my jurisdiction. I wish to know what this is.’

  ‘I am here as Personal Assistant to Herr Meissenbach in whatever capacity he requires of me.’

  Another long stare. ‘What possible assistance could he expect from a Gestapo secretary?’

  Anna smiled at him. ‘You will have to ask him that, Herr Groener.’ She decided to drop Heinz into it, as that was the easiest solution for her. ‘He arranged for the posting.’

  Groener’s nostrils twitched. ‘You have known Herr Meissenbach a long time?’