The Tristan Betrayal

by Robert Ludlum

  A moment of silence passed. “Why are you here, sir?”

  Corky bit his lower lip. “Your code name, Stephen. It’s Romeo, is that right?”

  Metcalfe rolled his eyes, shook his head in embarrassment.

  “I often find myself despairing at your lack of restraint when it comes to the fairer sex.” Corky chuckled dryly and munched at a candy. “But once in a while your trail of broken hearts actually benefits our cause.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m referring to a woman with whom you had a dalliance a while ago.”

  Metcalfe blinked. That could describe any number of women, and he didn’t particularly feel like guessing.

  “This woman—this old flame of yours—has taken up with a very important Nazi official.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “No, there’s no reason you should. It was six years ago. In Moscow.”

  “Lana!” Metcalfe whispered.

  He felt a jolt, like an electric shock. Just hearing her name, a name he’d never thought he’d hear again, summoned her, still vivid in his memory.

  Lana—Svetlana Baranova—was an extraordinary woman, impossibly beautiful, magnetic, passionate. She had been the first great love of his young life.

  Moscow in 1934 was a gloomy, frightened, and mysterious place when Stephen Metcalfe, fresh from Yale, first visited the city. The Metcalfe family did a small amount of business in Russia—back in the twenties, the elder Metcalfe had helped set up a half-dozen joint ventures with the Soviet government, ranging from pencil factories in Novgorod to oil exploration in Georgia. When a hitch had arisen, as invariably happened with the Soviet bureaucracy, Metcalfe senior had sent his two sons over to negotiate the dispute. While his stolid brother, Howard, sat through endless, inconclusive meetings with Soviet functionaries, Stephen explored the city with wide-eyed fascination. He was drawn especially to the great Bolshoi Theater, its sweeping colonnade topped with a copper sculpture of a chariot-drawn Apollo.

  It was there, at that vast nineteenth-century edifice, that he found himself transfixed by a beautiful young ballerina. Onstage, she floated, hovered, flew, her ethereal aura heightened by her porcelain skin, dark eyes, and silky black hair. Night after night, he’d watched her effortless, astonishing movements in The Red Poppy and Swan Lake. But never was she more memorable than in her starring role in Igor Moiseyev’s version of Tristan and Isolde.

  When Metcalfe finally arranged for them to meet, the young Russian girl seemed overwhelmed by the attentions of the rich American. But she had no idea how overwhelmed the rich American—though he pretended to be sophisticated and worldly—was by her. After a few months, the Metcalfe sons left Moscow, the family business concluded. Stephen found parting with Svetlana Baranova to be as painful a breakup as he’d ever been through. On the overnight train from Moscow to Leningrad, Stephen had sat up the entire night, grim-faced. His brother, Howard, had slept comfortably, and when he was awakened by the dour old lady serving tea, an hour outside of Leningrad, he joked with his younger brother, poked fun at him. Howard was as sensible and insensitive as only an older brother can be. “Come on, forget her,” he urged Stephen. “She’s a ballerina, for God’s sake. The world is full of beautiful women—you’ll see.”

  Stephen just stared dismally out the window at the forest speeding by.

  “Anyway, you can’t have been serious about her. I don’t want to think about what Father would say if he ever found out you’ve been seeing a ballerina. That’s almost as bad as an actress!”

  Metcalfe grunted, staring out the window.

  “Though I will admit,” Howard said, “that girl was a real dish.”

  “Svetlana Baranova is now a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi,” said Alfred Corcoran. “In the last few months she’s become the mistress of a high-ranking member of the German Foreign Ministry stationed in Moscow.”

  Metcalfe shook his head, as if to clear away cobwebs. “Lana?” he said again. “With a Nazi?”

  “Evidently,” Corcoran said.

  “And . . . and how did you know I’d had a . . . a fling with her?”

  “You’ll recall that when you joined I had you fill out a long and tedious form, some fifty pages long, in which I required you to list all your contacts in foreign countries—friends, family, relations, everyone. You listed relatives in Buenos Aires, schoolmates in Lucerne, friends in London, in Spain. But you didn’t mention anyone in Moscow, though you did list Moscow as one of the places you’d visited. I pushed you on that—how could you spend months in Moscow and not meet anyone? And you fessed up that, well, you did have this fling . . .”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “My New York staff is quite small, as you know, but they’re resourceful. Skilled at cross-referencing names. When a stray intelligence report crossed one of my researchers’ desks concerning an attaché of the German embassy in Moscow named Rudolf von Schüssler and rumors that he might not be entirely pro-Nazi, one of my girls was alert enough to connect two dots. The surveillance report on von Schüssler linked him with a ballerina at the Bolshoi named Svetlana Baranova, and the name struck a chord in my researcher’s memory.”

  “Lana is seeing a German diplomat?” Metcalfe mused aloud, mostly to himself.

  “Ever since Hitler and Stalin signed their nonaggression pact last year, the German diplomatic community in Moscow has been able to socialize reasonably freely with certain privileged Russians. Of course, the German Foreign Ministry is full of old-money, old-line aristocrats—the Social Register isn’t limited to our country, you know—and a number of them are less than discreet about their distaste for Hitler and his rabid Nazis. We’ve surmised that von Schüssler may count himself among those secretly opposed to Hitler. But is this true? And how opposed is he, really? So opposed that he might help out the white hats a bit? That’s what I need you to find out.”

  Metcalfe nodded, feeling the excitement build. Moscow again! And . . . Lana!

  “So here’s what I’d like you to do,” Corcoran went on. “These days it’s fiendishly difficult for a foreigner to get into Russia. It was never easy, but it’s harder than ever now. I suppose it’s not impossible to infiltrate an agent under some sort of cover, but that’s extraordinarily risky. And in any case, it’s not necessary. I want you going over there without cover. In the clear—as yourself. You will have a perfectly plausible reason for going to Moscow, after all. Your family needs to finalize some asset transfer concerning some of the old joint ventures.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you’ll come up with something. Work out the details with your brother. We’ll facilitate that. Take my word for it, if there’s a promise of an infusion of hard currency, the Soviets will be most eager to arrange meetings. Even these days, when they denounce us in Pravda every day.”

  “You’re talking about bribes.”

  “I’m talking about whatever it takes. It’s really not important. The point is to get the Russians to grant you a visa, so that you have a legitimate reason for being in Moscow. While there, you will ‘happen’ to run into your old flame, Svetlana, at an American embassy party. You will get together, as is to be expected.”

  “And?”

  “The specifics I’ll leave to you. Perhaps you’ll rekindle an old romance.”

  “That’s the past, Corky. We ended it.”

  “On good terms, if I know you. All your old lovers seem to regard you with misty-eyed affection. How you do it I don’t understand.”

  “But why?”

  “This is an extremely rare opportunity. A chance for you to spend time in an informal, personal setting, outside official circles, with a very important German diplomat who has a direct line to von Ribbentrop himself, and thus to the Führer.”

  “And do what?”

  “Assess him. See if you can confirm the reports we’ve been receiving—that he’s secretly disaffected.”

  “If you’re recei
ving reports, his feelings can’t be all that secret.”

  “Our American diplomats are skilled at reading nuance. They report subtleties, joking asides, that sort of thing. But that’s not the same as an all-out, close-up assessment and development by a trained intelligence officer. If von Schüssler is indeed secretly opposed to Adolf Hitler’s madness, we may be able to cultivate a most valuable intelligence lead.”

  “You want me to turn him, is that it?”

  “Let’s take this one step at a time, shall we? I want you to apply for a visa in your own name at the Soviet consulate here, on the boulevard Lannes. Even given your family’s privileged status with the Sovs, the paperwork will certainly take a few days to a week. Meanwhile, you’ll tie up your business here in Paris but burn no bridges. Tomorrow you’ll meet with a very clever associate of mine who specializes in some of the tricks of the trade you’ll need in Moscow.”

  Metcalfe nodded. The notion of going to Moscow was enormously exciting, but it was nothing compared to the thought of seeing Svetlana Baranova again—and for such an important reason.

  Corcoran stood up. “Go, Stephen. We have no time to lose. Every day that goes by, the Nazis gain another victory. Invade another country. Bomb another city. They grow stronger, more rapacious, while we sit on the sidelines and watch. We’re short on quite a few things, as you know—sugar and shoes, gasoline and rubber, munitions. But the thing we’re shortest on is time.”

  Chapter Four

  The violinist was playing his favorite piece, Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, but he was not enjoying himself at all. For one thing, the pianist was terrible. She was the dowdy wife of an SS official, only minimally talented: she played like an adolescent at a school recital. She was no musician. She was hammering the keys with no sense of dynamics at all, completely overpowering him in some of the more urgent, sensitive passages. And she had an annoying habit of breaking her chords by playing the left hand an instant before the right. The first movement, the stormy allegro, had been simply adequate. But the old hag had no feeling for the subtleties of the third movement, the andante cantabile, with its virtuosic rhythmic ornamentations.

  Then again, the piece was complex, even for an accomplished musician such as himself. When Beethoven had sent the manuscript to the great Parisian violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, to whom he’d dedicated it, Kreutzer himself proclaimed it impossible to play and never once performed it in public.

  Also, the acoustics here were godawful. This was the home of the violinist’s immediate boss, Standartenführer H. J. Kieffer, the Paris chief of the counterespionage department of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi secret service. The room was carpeted, hung with heavy drapes and tapestries, and the sound just died here. The piano was a very good Bechstein, but it was woefully out of tune.

  Kleist did not know why he had ever agreed to play this evening.

  It was, after all, a very busy time, and the violin was only his avocation.

  A smell suddenly assaulted his nostrils. He recognized the bergamot, orange, and rosemary notes on top of a base of neroli and musk and knew it was 4711, the cologne made by the German fragrance firm Muelhens.

  Kleist knew without even looking up that Müller had just entered the room. Müller, his local control in the Sicherheitsdienst, was one of the very few men in the SD who wore aftershave. Most of the SD men considered such a thing an unmanly affectation.

  Müller had not been at the dinner, nor at the house concert, so he must have had some urgent piece of business on his mind. Kleist decided to skip the repeat and hurry the fourth movement to its conclusion, get the thing over with. There was work to be done.

  The applause was enthusiastic, heartfelt, and loud, given that there were no more than twenty-five people in the room, all of them SD men and their wives or consorts. Kleist nodded his appreciation and hurried to the side of the room, where Müller awaited him.

  “There’s been a break in the case,” Müller said quietly.

  Kleist, his violin in one hand, his bow in the other, nodded. “The wireless station.”

  “Correct. There was an RAF parachute drop in Touraine in the middle of the night last night. Several containers of communications equipment. Our informant alerted us to the drop.” He added smugly, “Our informant has never been wrong. He insists that the drop will lead us to the réseau.” That was the term for a nest, a clandestine espionage ring.

  “The equipment was delivered to Paris?” Kleist said. Someone was lingering nearby, no doubt to compliment him on his performance. Kleist turned, didn’t recognize the woman, nodded brusquely, and turned back to Müller. The woman went away.

  “To a flat on the rue Mazagran, near the Porte Saint-Denis.”

  “That’s the location of the wireless station? On the rue Mazagran?”

  Müller shook his head. “Just a transfer point. An apartment owned by some old whore.”

  “Has the equipment been delivered?”

  Müller smiled and nodded slowly. “Picked up, actually. By an agent we believe to be a British national living here under cover.”

  “Well?” Kleist said impatiently.

  “Our team lost him.”

  “What?” Kleist sighed in disgust. There was no end to the incompetence of the SD’s field teams. “You want me to talk to this whore,” he said.

  “I would not delay,” said Müller. “Your playing was quite nice, by the way. Was that Bach?”

  The whore plied her trade at the base of the grand arch, at the end of the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, which had been built in the seventeenth century to celebrate Louis XIV’s victories in Flanders and the Rhineland. There were five whores gathered there, in fact. They chattered among themselves, turning their faces and bodies toward the pedestrian passersby, harried men rushing home to beat the curfew. She could be any one of them, Kleist realized.

  As he strolled past them in his crisp green SD uniform, he noticed that three of them were too young to be the “old whore” that Müller had described, the one whose apartment had been used to transfer equipment dropped in Touraine by the Royal Air Force. According to Müller, the whore was around forty and had an illegitimate son of twenty-four who was active in the Resistance. She often let her son use her apartment as a transfer site. Only two of the prostitutes here looked old enough to have a twenty-four-year-old son.

  His nostrils flared. He caught the unmistakable mingling of odors that he associated with French prostitutes—the stench of cheap cigarettes, and the cheap perfume they invariably used to mask their lack of hygiene. Their feminine odors came through strongly, along with the smell of male discharges that had not been washed away. Quite revolting, actually.

  They all noticed his uniform, which he had kept on deliberately. Several of them had turned his way, smiling lasciviously, saying good evening to him in bad German. The two who did not were both the older ones, which did not surprise him. The older women probably detested the German occupiers, at least more actively. He stopped, smiled at the women, turned back toward them. He walked more closely past them.

  When he was close enough, he could smell the fear. It was a myth that only dogs could smell fear on human beings, Kleist had learned. He was an amateur student of biology. Turbulent emotion, particularly terror, stimulated the apocrine glands in the armpits and the groin. The secretions came out through the hair follicles. The odor was pungent, musky, and sour, instantly recognizable.

  He could smell her fear.

  The whore didn’t just dislike Germans; she was afraid of them. She saw his uniform, recognized the security police, and she was terrified that her role in the Resistance had been discovered.

  “You,” Kleist said, pointing.

  She avoided his glance, turning away. This was further confirmation, as if he needed confirmation.

  “The German gentleman prefers you, Jacqueline,” teased one of the younger whores.

  She reluctantly turned to meet his stare. Her blond hair had been bleached badly, in peroxide, and not r
ecently. “Oh, a handsome soldier such as you can do much better than me,” she said, attempting a frivolous tone. Her voice was cigarette-raspy. He could hear her rapid heartbeat in the tremor of her voice.

  “I prefer a mature woman,” Kleist said. “A woman who has been around. Who knows a thing or two.”

  The other women tittered and cackled.

  With great reluctance, the blonde came up to him. “Where shall we go?” she said.

  “I have no place,” Kleist said. “I am not posted in the city.”

  The whore shrugged as the two of them walked. “There is an alley very close to here.”

  “No. That will not do for what I have in mind.”

  “But if you have no place . . .”

  “We need a bed, and some privacy.” Her reluctance to take him to her apartment verged on the comical. He enjoyed toying with her like a cat with a mouse. “You have a flat near here, surely. I will make it worth your while.”

  Her apartment building on the rue Mazagran was disheveled, in poor repair. They walked the four flights of stairs to her flat in silence. She took a long time to find her keys in her purse, clearly nervous. Finally she let him in. It was surprisingly large, sparsely decorated. She took him to her bedroom, pointing to the bathroom door. “If you need la salle de bain,” she said.

  The bed was large, the mattress lumpy. It was covered in a threadbare scarlet spread. He sat on one side, and she sat next to him. She began unbuttoning his tunic.

  “No,” he said. “You undress first.”

  She got up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. He listened carefully for the scrape of a drawer, the sound of a weapon being retrieved, but there was nothing except the running of water from the tap. She emerged a few minutes later wrapped in a turquoise dressing gown, which she flapped open briefly to give him a glimpse of her naked flesh. She had surprisingly firm breasts for a woman of her age.

  “The gown, please,” Kleist said.