The Tristan Betrayal

by Robert Ludlum

  “Something like that.”

  “Then it’s true what they say about foreigners in Pravda. That you are all spies!”

  “No, that’s propaganda. Most are not.” He hesitated. “I’m not a spy, Lana.”

  “You are doing this for love, then.”

  Was she being sarcastic again? He looked closely at her. “For love of Russia,” he said. “And love of you.”

  “Mother Russia is in your veins,” she said, “as it is in mine. You love her as I do.”

  “In some ways, yes. Not the Soviet Union. But Russia, the Russian people, the language, the culture, the arts. And you.”

  “I think you have many loves,” she said.

  Was there a flicker of comprehension in her face? In the shadows, it was impossible to say for sure.

  “Yes,” he said, drawing her close. He was roiled by passion and by guilt. “Many loves. And one.” It was as close to the truth as he could express to her.

  They lay on the narrow bed in this gloomy apartment of a stranger. Her arm lay across his chest, both of them sticky and sweaty, their breathing slowing now. Her face was down on the pillow; he stared up at the cracks in the plaster ceiling. Their lovemaking had brought him a sense of physical release but not an emotional one. He was still tense, perhaps even more so, and his guilt was swollen in his chest, creating a queasiness in his stomach, a sourness at the back of his throat. Lana had made love with her customary abandon, her eyes closed, her head thrown back. He wondered whether it had taken her away, even for a few minutes, from the terrible anxieties of her life. He didn’t want to do anything or say anything to mar any serenity she might be enjoying. It was bad enough that he was misleading her as he was.

  After a few minutes, she turned her face toward his. He could see the tension still there; it had not gone away.

  “Do you understand about my . . . minder, as I call him?”

  “The one I met at the dacha? Who follows you everywhere?”

  She nodded.

  “You seem quite comfortable with him. Is there something I don’t understand?”

  “I seem comfortable, yes. But I am terrified of him, of what he can do to me. Do you understand what he can do, what they can do? If they think I am meeting with an agent of American intelligence?”

  “Of course,” Metcalfe said, touching her flushed face with his fingertips, her silken skin.

  “I wonder. Moscow is very different from the way it was when we first met. You cannot imagine the purges we have just been through these last few years. No one could believe the nightmare! No one who did not live here, as a Russian, and even we could not believe what was happening.”

  “It’s not over, is it?”

  “No one knows. It is less now than it was two years ago, but no one knows. This was the horrible thing, not knowing. Not knowing when a knock came on the door whether it was the NKVD coming to take you away. Not knowing when the telephone rang if it was terrible news. People just disappeared, no explanation given, and their family was afraid to say anything to anyone about it. If someone was taken away, sent to the camps or executed . . . you would shun their families. You would fear that the families of the victims were contagious—that you might catch this disease from them! An arrest in the family, it is like typhoid fever, like leprosy—you must stay away! And then they’re always telling us to beware foreigners, because the capitalists are all spies. I told you about one of my dancer friends who got too friendly with a foreigner. Do you know what they say she is doing now, this beautiful and talented girl? She works in a camp in Tomsk, and every day she must chip out excrement from the frozen toilets with a crowbar.”

  “Innocence is no defense.”

  “Do you know what they say, the authorities, if you can get one to talk to you? They say, of course there will be the innocent victim, but what of it? When the trees are chopped down, the wood chips fly.”

  Metcalfe closed his eyes, slipped his arm around her.

  “A neighbor of ours—a man with a pregnant wife—he was arrested; no one knows why. He was taken to Butyrki Prison, where they charged him with crimes against the state, and they ordered him to sign a false declaration. But he refused. He said he was innocent. So they brought in his wife, his pregnant wife, into the interrogation room. Two men held him down while two others threw his wife down onto the floor, and they beat her and kicked her, and she screamed and screamed, and he screamed at them to stop, but they would not.” She swallowed. Tears were streaming down her face, dampening the pillow. “And then her baby was delivered, right then, right there. Stillborn. Dead.”

  “Jesus, Lana,” Metcalfe said. “Please.”

  “So, my Stiva, if you wonder why I have changed, why I seem sad, you must know this. While you have been traveling the world and seeing women, this is the world I have been living in. This is why I must be so careful.”

  “I’ll take care of you,” Metcalfe said. “I’ll help you.” And he thought, What am I doing to her?

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “Ah, my poppy,” cooed von Schüssler, “you don’t seem to be listening to me.”

  He had been prattling on and on, as he liked to do, about the petty annoyances at his office, the colleagues who did not appreciate his brilliant ideas, the secretary who habitually came to work late, blaming the difficulty of public transportation in Moscow even though she lived not two blocks away. It was all the most tedious litany of complaints, all of which had just one common theme: none of these little people appreciated his greatness. Von Schüssler never divulged secrets. Either he was more canny than Lana gave him credit for or, as seemed more likely, he simply didn’t really think about anything that didn’t have to do with his own greatness.

  “I suppose I’m a bit preoccupied,” Lana said. They both lay on von Schüssler’s enormous four-poster bed, which he had had sent over from Berlin. Von Schüssler was sipping brandy and gobbling marzipan as he blathered. He was wearing a silk smoking robe and (as she’d had the misfortune to glimpse a few times) nothing beneath it. His body odor—the German was not fastidious about his personal hygiene—was revolting. She felt the usual tightness in her stomach that she felt whenever she was around him, but tonight it was worse. She was dreading the moment when he slipped out of his robe, as she could tell he was about to do, and the sex act began. “Act” it was indeed, she reflected. But her anxiety was worse than usual tonight because of what she was about to do.

  “You must be rehearsing your choreography in your head,” von Schüssler said, stroking her hair as one would pet a dog. “But you must leave your work at work, poppy. Our bed is a sacred place. We must not defile it with our worries about work.”

  She was tempted to ask him why he didn’t observe the same rule, but she restrained herself. “It’s my father,” she said. “I worry about him so much.”

  “Schatzi,” von Schüssler replied tenderly. “Please, my little poppy. Not one word of the dossier will ever get to the authorities here! Haven’t I assured you of that?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s the new job he’s been assigned.”

  “Ah,” von Schüssler said, settling back against a raft of pillows, no longer interested. “Well, then.” He seemed to be waiting for her to change the subject so he could either return to complaining about the little people at the embassy or else, even worse, loosen the belt of his robe.

  “They’ve moved him to a new position,” Lana persisted. “A much more important position in the Commissariat of Defense Ministry.”

  Von Schüssler took another sip of brandy and reached for another marzipan. “Would you like one, my dear?”

  She shook her head. “Father has now been put in charge of overseeing all Red Army expenditures. They have him reviewing all the expenses within the Commissariat, which means he must look over all the troop allocations, weapons expenditures—everything!”

  Von Schüssler emitted only a bored grunt.

  “It’s an impossible job! He basically
must read over the entire Red Army military strategy!”

  Finally, a glint of understanding seemed to dawn in von Schüssler’s watery blue eyes. And was that a hint of porcine greed as well? “Really? That’s quite an important job, then, isn’t it? He must be quite pleased with the promotion.”

  Lana heaved a great sigh. “All these documents he takes home, all these papers he must read late into the night! Those columns and columns of numbers—how many tanks and airplanes, how many ships, how many weapons, how many men . . . My poor father, they are working him to death!”

  “You have seen these documents?”

  “Seen them? They are spread all over our apartment—I trip over them! My dear father, he is a soldier, not an accountant; why do they make him do this?”

  “But have you read any of them?” Von Schüssler was trying to appear casual, but he was not doing a very good job of it. “Do you, er, understand any of them, I mean to say?”

  “Rudi, the writing on them is so tiny it makes my eyes hurt! My poor father—he must use reading glasses, and these papers give him such headaches.”

  “So many papers all over the place,” von Schüssler mused. “He must lose track of where they are, no? Is your father a very organized man?”

  “Organized? Father?” She laughed. “When he was a commander of troops, there was no one more orderly. But when it comes to paperwork, he is a disaster! He’s always complaining to me that he can’t find this paper or that paper, have I seen it, where has he put it . . .”

  “He would not notice if papers were missing, then.” Lana could almost see the wheels in von Schüssler’s mind turning slowly. “Very interesting, my poppy. Very interesting.” The idea—it had become his idea, which was the crucial thing—had finally taken root in the arid soil of the German’s mind. After a few seconds, he seemed to have made up his mind. He was not going to press her just now. He wanted to wait until after they had made love. No doubt he calculated that once he had made love to her, she would feel even more favorably disposed toward him, and then he would make his bold proposal. He reached for one end of the silk belt, whose loose knot sat astride his large belly like the ribbon on a gift. Her stomach clenched as he tugged at the belt and his robe came open, revealing the dark recesses of his crotch, where his minuscule organ was hidden somewhere beneath the tangles of pubic hair.

  He placed his pudgy hand on her head as if to stroke her hair again, but this time he pushed at her head in a gentle, suggestive way, pointing her in the right direction. “My beautiful Red Poppy,” he said. “My Schatzi.”

  For a few seconds she pretended not to understand what he wanted, and then she resigned herself to the inevitable. She had to keep in mind that she was now engaged in a mission larger than herself, a mission that from time to time entailed unpleasant chores, as did all important missions. She moved her face in toward von Schüssler’s groin, and as she did so she forced herself to smile with anticipation and delight, a smile that she hoped would conceal her ineffable disgust.

  The violinist entered the German consulate at Number 10 Leont’yevskiy Lane and gave his name. The receptionist, a middle-aged Frau with peroxide blond hair whose dark roots were showing, gave him a coy smile while he sat waiting for the military attaché. She seemed to find him attractive and seemed to believe that she herself was attractive, which might have been the case several decades ago. Kleist smiled back.

  Lieutenant-General Ernst Köstring, the military attaché of the German embassy in the Soviet Union, was the man in Moscow who was nominally in charge of all German espionage activities within Russia, at least.

  The German military attaché was in charge of local espionage activities against the Soviet Union. On the ground, at least, for he answered to several others above him in the Abwehr and ultimately his boss, Admiral Wilhelm Franz Canaris, the Abwehr chief.

  But to call Köstring a spymaster was, to the violinist, a joke. He was an expert on Russian affairs, having been born and raised in Moscow, and he was fluent in Russian. But he lacked Zivilkourage. His dispatches were legendary for their vacuity. For years he had complained that he was unable to get any information out of the Russians, that they would not let him travel about the country without NKVD escorts. His reports contained no hard information about the Soviet army, nothing you couldn’t get from reading the papers or watching the May Day parades in Red Square. Anyway, the Abwehr was famous for resenting the Sicherheitsdienst, the true spy agency. The Abwehr was threatened by the SD and realized that, in Hitler’s eyes, they did not measure up.

  Köstring, however, knew how the world worked. He knew that the violinist had arrived in Moscow with the personal blessing of SS Gruppenführer Heydrich; he understood that Heydrich was not a man whose enmity one wanted to incur. Reinhard Heydrich was brilliant and ruthless. Hitler once called him “the man with a heart of iron,” which was from the Führer the highest praise, of course. The SD was a competitor agency, but Köstring knew enough to cooperate, or he would face a world of trouble. Simply by requesting a meeting with the military attaché the violinist was playing his strongest card. He would get the intelligence he needed. The petty bureaucrat he’d been fobbed off on could go straight to hell. Kleist had no time for that cowardly, excuse-making, farting nonentity.

  The military attaché received Kleist politely. He was slim and dignified-looking, in his early sixties. He was a busy man and did not waste time with chitchat.

  “I was not very pleased to learn of your arrival in Moscow,” Köstring began. “As you know, since August of last year the Führer has forbidden the Abwehr to engage in any activities hostile to Russia.”

  “That is not my intent,” Kleist snapped. He did not like the way this conversation was starting off.

  “Admiral Canaris has issued a strict directive: nothing must be done to offend the Russians. The admiral is complying with the Führer’s wishes, and so must I. German spies do not operate here. It is that simple.”

  Now Kleist understood why the mealymouthed bureaucrat he’d met with earlier was so fearful. It was against official embassy policy to engage in undercover activities. Such cowards!

  “As Goethe said, a lack of knowledge can be a dangerous thing,” Kleist said. “Surely there are ways around such a prohibition. Particularly for a clever man such as yourself.”

  “On the contrary. I follow the letter of the law. That said, I understand that your commission comes directly from der Ziege.” He permitted the tiniest curl of a smile. Der Ziege, the Goat, was the disparaging nickname for Heydrich. It referred to the spymaster’s high-pitched voice. He had been given this nickname in his college days and had been unable to shake it, and whenever he heard it, he still became furious.

  Kleist did not smile. He let it be known, by the expression in his eyes, that he was not amused.

  The attaché realized that he had made a slip. The gibe would get back to Heydrich. He hastened to repair the damage: “This assignment could not be more authoritative, unless it came from Himmler himself.”

  The violinist nodded.

  “My boss and yours are good friends, you know. Canaris and Heydrich are neighbors; they play croquet together. Heydrich even instructed Canaris’s daughter in the violin. I’m told they play music together.” Unnerved by Kleist’s silence, Köstring went on: “You all seem to be musicians, you men of the SD.”

  “Amateur,” said the violinist. “And only a few of us. The list, please.”

  Köstring opened a desk drawer and drew out a sheet of paper, handed it to Kleist. The list of some twenty names had been handwritten in the strange Roman script of someone accustomed to the Cyrillic alphabet. Kleist read through the names. There were several officials of the Communist Party of the United States, a few left-wing artist types, including a Negro singer and a minor theater director. Some visitors from England’s Fabian Society, a few men who were here with business aims. Along with names, there were dates of arrival and scheduled departure, passport numbers, the names and addresse
s of the hotels where they were staying. Conceivably, any of these people might be agents, here in Moscow under false names, or they could all be here legitimately. No matter: he would make the rounds of the hotels and learn what he could. This was, at least, a good start.

  Kleist stood up. “I appreciate your help,” he said simply.

  “One thing,” the attaché said, an index finger extended. “This we are most strict about. We do not kill Russians.”

  The violinist’s smile was tight, his eyes cold. “I have no intention of killing any Russians,” he said.

  One of the front-desk clerks called out to Metcalfe as he entered the lobby, “Sir? Mr. Metcalfe? So very sorry, but you have an urgent message.”

  Metcalfe took the folded piece of paper the clerk handed him. From Roger? he wondered. From Hilliard? Neither, surely, would use the hotel desk clerk to pass on a message of urgency.

  No. It was not a slip of paper from the clerk’s message pad but a thick sheet of rag paper. At the top was engraved “People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade of the USSR.” The message was a few typed lines:

  Esteemed Mr. Metcalfe!

  You are hereby requested to report forthwith to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Trade for an urgent consultation with Commissar Litvikov. Your driver has already been instructed.

  It was signed with a bold flourish in fountain-pen ink by Litvikov’s chief aide-de-camp. Litvikov, the commissar for foreign trade, was the man with whom he had met, the official who was sponsoring his visit to Moscow.

  Metcalfe looked at his watch. It was late, after normal office hours, though Soviet officials kept strange hours, he knew. Something was up, something serious. Whatever it was, there was no avoiding it.

  Litvikov’s driver was waiting in the hotel lobby. Metcalfe approached him. “Seryozha,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Litvikov’s desk was cluttered with telephones in various colors. Within the land of Soviet officialdom, the more phones you had on your desk, the more important you were. Metcalfe wondered whether one of these phones was a direct line to the General Secretary himself, whether Litvikov had that much power. Behind him were two large portraits, one of Lenin and one of Stalin.