Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  “I heard about Emil,” Heinz growled. “They put the poor bastard on the grill. Luckily, there are a few of us left who don’t broil so easily.”

  He rattled around, fetching more bottles.

  “We’re having a few problems here, too,” he went on. “I expect you’ve got the picture by now.”

  “I’ve been in Berlin barely a week,” Johnny said. “But I’ve learned one thing. It’s easier to get in to see Stalin than to find Heinz Kordt.”

  The first signal from Heinz had been a message on a piece of rice paper inside a box of matches Johnny hadn’t wanted to buy from a legless street vendor who pursued him on his trolley and pushed it into his hands anyway. Then came a rendezvous with a courier in Neukölln; a last-minute change of address; and finally the assignation in the UFA cinema.

  “I have to watch my back these days,” Heinz grinned. “So, it would seem, do you.”

  “The police?”

  Kordt’s pipe wheezed asthmatically. He blew into it vigorously, scattering ash and live cinders. “The police aren’t my worry. Not here in Berlin, anyway. We’ve got friends on the inside. I can usually count on a tip-off if a big raid is being planned.”

  “The Nazis?”

  “They want my head, all right,” Kordt agreed. “But that’s not the whole story. Some of our comrades would like to give it to them.”

  “Thälmann?”

  “Him for one. He’s the one who denounced Emil. Wollweber’s no better. We’ve got a civil war going on now, inside the party. What it comes down to is that some of us want to fight Hitler and others haven’t got the balls or the brains to do it. Thälmann and his cronies think everything is just fine. They think Hitler’s a bag of hot air, a help to us because he’s helping to drive people one way or the other. They think if Hitler gets too rowdy the monocles and the financiers will sit on him until all the air goes out, phttt! They’re completely out of touch. You ought to go to a Hitler rally, Johnny. The whole thing grabs you by the throat. You want to tear yourself away, but you can’t. It’s like witnessing a sex murder. There’s the whole crowd, made delirious by the lights and the music and the tramping feet, suddenly sunk in a deathly hush as the great man makes his entry between a forest of standards. He plays with them, ravishes them, lashes them to an orgiastic frenzy, until he stands with the body of the crowd at his feet.”

  “Hypnosis was a German invention,” Johnny commented.

  “It has found its master. That’s why Hitler could take the country. The monocles are starting to realize it, too. You heard what just happened? Hindenburg invited the Bohemian corporal — that’s what he calls him — to tea. He turned up like a bandy-legged penguin with his tails flapping over his bum, and people thought it was funny. Well, it doesn’t matter whether the Bohemian corporal knows how to knot his bow tie. He’s a master of mass psychology and a master of organized terror. That’s why he’s going to win — if we let him. There are over a hundred Nazi deputies sitting in the Reichstag, and there could be twice as many after the next elections. He’s getting all the money he wants from Hugenberg and Thyssen and other chimney barons. And what are we doing about it? We spend most of our time smashing up Social Democrat rallies. You know the theology. The Nazis aren’t a threat to us. The Social Democrats are the main enemy of the working class. I believed that when we were fighting in Hamburg and the Social Democrats were attacking us with armoured cars. I don’t believe it any more. If we don’t stop Hitler, he’ll drink our blood.”

  On another occasion, the expression would have seemed ludicrous to Johnny. But he sat silent, hanging on Heinz’s words.

  “If we are going to stop Hitler,” Kordt went on, “we have to do two things. We have to meet terror with terror. Every time they kill one of our boys, we knock off two of theirs. And we’ve got to swallow some of the theology and do a deal with the Socialists. I don’t even rule out a pact with the centre parties. What matters is beating Hitler.”

  He paused to drain his glass.

  “I tried to make Thälmann see sense, but he wouldn’t listen. He talks as if Hitler is the best recruitment agent the party ever had.”

  “I heard that party membership is growing fast,” Johnny observed.

  “Granted. But we’re not growing as fast as the Hitler movement, and we’re not putting down proper roots. We’re just spreading like a ground creeper. We’re losing the veterans, the union men, the sailors who were with you at Kiel. We’re getting trigger-happy kids off the streets like Karl Vogel out there. And I’ll be frank with you about that. It’s just accidental that a tearaway like Karl comes to us instead of the Brownshirts. He’s not like you, Johnny. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t question the reasons for his actions. He was down and out, jobless. He wanted a few kicks. I know other kids like Karl who got bored with us and went off and signed up with the jackboots. But they’re not our problem. Our problem is die Bonzen. The bosses.”

  “Who else have you talked to?” Johnny asked.

  “I talked to Emil. He said he was going to talk to Stalin in Moscow. We saw what came of that.” Angry, Kordt knocked his pipe out against the edge of the table, and hot ashes flew about the room.

  “Did you talk to Dimitrov?”

  “I’m afraid we move in different social circles,” Heinz responded with heavy sarcasm. “You know he’s the boss of bosses here in Berlin. Have you met him? Are you going to see him?”

  Johnny hesitated. He had an appointment with Georgi Dimitrov the following day in the headquarters the Comintern chief maintained behind the urbane facade of a conservative publishing house in the embassy district. Indeed, this appointment was the principal reason for his visit to Berlin. They had told him in Moscow that Dimitrov would give him specific instructions for his next foreign assignment. What harm could there be in revealing this to his friend? But he did not tell Heinz. His recent experience with Emil and the habits entrenched by years of operating under legends and cover names on hostile territory had made him cautious.

  Heinz must have smelled this out, because he rushed on. “Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. No hard feelings, eh? But if you do stop in to see the Bulgarian, be sure to hold your nose. He smells worse than a Turkish bathhouse.”

  He raised another bottle of beer to his lips and sloshed half the contents down his throat. He belched noisily and rubbed his stomach.

  He’s putting on a show, Johnny thought. I’ve offended him.

  “I got a letter from old Georgi the other day,” Heinz sailed on. “A copy went to all the party organizers. I used it for toilet paper. I wish I’d held on to it now. Do you know what Dimitrov said?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Dimitrov ordered united action — those are the exact words, Johnny — united action between the Communist party and the Hitler movement. The aim of this united action—” he half closed his eyes, summoning up the words neatly typed on the page “—is to accelerate the disintegration of the crumbling democratic bloc that governs Germany.” He blinked and fixed Johnny with his stare. “What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know.” Johnny was bewildered. It was hard to believe that Dimitrov, who knew conditions in Germany and was also privy to Stalin’s thinking, could have issued such a directive. But why would Heinz make the story up? “Perhaps there was some misunderstanding,” he suggested hopefully.

  “No misunderstanding,” Kordt was flushed. “I’ve got a story I’ve been saving up for you, Johnny. It concerns an old pal of yours. Do you remember Willi Rausch?”

  Johnny sucked in his breath. The name conjured up the bulging, oily face of the schoolyard bully Johnny had trounced in the winter before the war. He had often pictured Willi Rausch since then, not in school uniform but in the helmet and brassard of a Freikorps officer, stinking of booze as he climbed the steps to the front door of the Lentz family house, crowing as he pumped bullets into a defenseless old man — Johnny’s father.

  “What about Willi Rausch?”

  “I saw
him last month. Not here. In Bremen. I was sent there on a Z job. The Bonzen may not like me, but they know that’s one thing my group does better than anyone.”

  Johnny was familiar with the shorthand. The “Z” stood for Zersetzung, or “Disruption.” The Z-groups, which specialized in terrorizing and sowing confusion among rival political parties and trade unions, were one of the most lethal elements in the underground organization of the German Communist Party.

  “The transport workers were having their national congress in Bremen,” Heinz went on. “It was supposed to be a really big production. The Social Democrats were running everything, so naturally we had to bust it up. Now wait for this, Johnny. The night before the official opening, I got orders to go to a secret meeting with — who do you think? The area Nazi high command. Shut your mouth, Johnny, you’re making a draught. There’s better to come.

  “I thought it could be a trap, so I went with Karl and some of my kids. We all had automatics and machine guns. The Brownshirts weren’t taking any risks either. They picked the right locale — a brewery outside town. The Nazi in charge was a great ugly brute about your age. An Untersturmführer, I think they said. I don’t pay much attention to their comic opera ranks. His name didn’t click straight away either. But I worked it out later when we’d had a couple of beers and he told me he was from Hamburg.

  “I’ll give Willi Rausch credit for one thing. He said he didn’t like his orders any better than me. We pretty much agreed that if we ever saw each other again, one of us was going to end up a dead man.”

  “I don’t understand,” Johnny interjected. “What were the orders?”

  “I’m getting to that. Try to picture this, Johnny. We’re all inside the hall the next day, Rausch and his goons on one side of the gangway, our lot on the other. We’re sprinkled around in groups of four and five, minding our manners, because the stewards have got their eyes on us. The band strikes up, everybody starts singing, and then the chairman is at the rostrum talking about the rights of labour. Then they bring on one of the bigwigs from the Social Democratic party, and I get up on my hind legs and start blowing my lungs out. Soon all my boys are doing the same. The stewards start moving in, and my lads bring out their coshes and iron bars. Someone runs to fetch the police. Things are really livening up, when all hell breaks loose on the other side of the gangway. Rausch jumps up and calls the people on the platform a bunch of ass-lickers, and the Brownshirts go charging at the rostrum. They collared the speaker and threw him out the window. He broke both arms and dislocated his shoulder. They brought the cops in by the truckload, but by that time the congress was wrecked. I got a thank you note from Wollweber later. A job well done, he said. I didn’t feel much like looking at myself in the shaving mirror, though.”

  Johnny sat immobile through most of this, suspended between rage and disbelief.

  “You’re telling me you had Party orders—”

  “Parteibefehl,” Kordt agreed.

  “It’s obscene — it’s criminal—”

  I’ll tell Dimitrov, he thought. Obviously he has not been informed of what is happening. Stalin must be told. He’s been preoccupied with other things — with famine in the Ukraine, with the Japanese invaders in Manchuria who are threatening Russia itself. Stalin and Dimitrov will put things right. Mistakes have been made in Germany. No, worse than mistakes.

  He remembered the Hamburg massacres.

  There are traitors in the German party, he told himself. Stalin must be told.

  “Tell me, Johnny.” His friend had his feet up on the table. “If you’d been me, in that congress hall, what would you have done?”

  For an instant Johnny’s caution abandoned him. “I would have shot Willi Rausch.”

  “You know what? I’d sleep better if I’d done just that.”

  3

  Johnny walked back to the rooms his Comintern contact had arranged. Shaken by his conversation with Kordt, he lost his way twice, and it was past midnight when he found the building, a few blocks east of police headquarters on the Alexanderplatz. The place had the solid, satisfied look of a strongbox. The manager, Frau Hugel, matched the building in appearance, but she was in the pay of the OMS.

  She startled Johnny in the entrance hall.

  “I’ve been waiting up for you, Herr Stoltz.” This was the cover name Johnny had been assigned for his trip to Berlin.

  “Is something wrong, Frau Hugel?”

  “Come inside.”

  He followed her into her kitchen. Copper pots and cast iron skillets marched along the walls in orderly files.

  “The police were here,” his landlady whispered.

  “Looking for me?”

  “No.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed them nervously against her quilted robe. Naked, her eyes were bright and never still, like a magpie’s. “There was a robbery in the house,” she reported. “The widow Teller, on the second floor. The police are questioning everyone in the house. They wanted to search your room.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said I couldn’t permit them unless you were present. They said they’ll be back.”

  “Thanks, Hilde.” Johnny abandoned formality. “We’ll leave tonight.”

  Frau Hugel hooked her glasses over her nose and said, “Perhaps you will take a small glass of schnapps with me, Herr Stoltz. Frau Stoltz is not yet home.”

  “I see.” He glanced up at the cuckoo clock. He had no idea where Helene was or when to expect her back. It was possible she was doing a job for Max. He knew she had seen Max at least once in his absence. It was equally possible she was warming another man’s bed.

  “Just a small one,” he said to Frau Hugel. But he borrowed what was left in the bottle and took it up to his room.

  Afterwards he packed all their possessions into three small suitcases — one for him, two for Helene. It was strange to think that at thirty-one all his property in the world, apart from the books he had left in a steamer trunk in Moscow, could fit into one bag.

  When he had finished packing, he finished Frau Hugel’s schnapps.

  Nearly 3:00 A.M. Helene might not be coming back at all. How long should he give her? Until dawn?

  He was getting angrier with her by the minute. He told himself it was only because her nocturnal habits were exposing them both to unnecessary danger.

  But there was something else. His friend’s story about Willi Rausch had shaken the certainties Johnny had lived and fought by since the war. How could he reconcile his revolutionary faith with the appalling reality of what the party was doing in Germany?

  In that moment of doubt, he felt very alone. He wanted Helene with him. She had never been fully his and never could be. She was her own creature, beautiful but inconstant, shining and remote like a distant star. But their lives had raced close together on parallel tracks. They had shared danger and good times, too. She — and Heinz Kordt — were all the family he had.

  When she slipped in at 3:20, he said mildly, “Nice of you to drop in.”

  “Are you still up?” she responded coolly. “God. It smells like an ashtray in here.” She opened a window and started picking cigarette stubs off the rug.

  “Did you do anything interesting today?”

  “I saw my sister. It’s her birthday this week.”

  This might be a half truth, Johnny decided. Better than an outright lie.

  Helene walked toward the bedroom. She looked as fresh as she had the previous morning.

  “We’re both invited to dinner,” she called back.

  “You told your sister about me?”

  “I said you were a traveling salesman. That’s true, in a way, isn’t it?” She turned on the bedroom light. “Johnny! What have you done with our clothes—”

  “I was going to mention that. Do you think your family would mind if we made it breakfast instead?”

  They could have gone to Alex, Johnny’s Comintern contact, or simply to a hotel. But Alex would be less than overjoyed at being rouste
d out of bed before dawn, and checking into a hotel at an odd hour increased the risk of attracting the attentions of the police. Besides, Johnny was curious to take a look at Helene’s family.

  Their apartment building was on a pleasant street in Charlottenburg with lime trees dotted along the pavement. They arrived shortly after five, after stopping for coffee and the morning papers at the Friedrichstrasse station, where no one except a panhandler swilling wine out of a paper cup appeared to take the slightest interest in them.

  Helene rang the bell. A dog in a neighbouring house started snarling and snapping.

  Johnny rapped on one of the frosted glass panes in the door.

  A light came on inside, and the door opened a crack. “Who is it?”

  “Sigi?”

  The girl inside peered through the crack, disbelieving. Then she pulled the door shut. There was a rattle of chains, the door flew open, and she flung herself into Helene’s arms.

  Over Helene’s shoulder, Johnny glimpsed a face with the soft, smudged beauty of a child just roused from sleep. The sisters moved apart, and the tawny light from the hall lamp played on the bold contours of the girl’s body under the filmy nightgown. She looked up, and the colour rose in her cheeks when she saw how freely the stranger’s eyes ranged over her. She pulled the flaps of her flowered robe together.

  “This is Johnny,” Helene announced.

  Sigrid let him take her hand. Her touch was raw silk. He could see her face more clearly now. It was almost heart shaped, framed by a wild mane of red-gold hair. Her lips were fuller, softer than Helene’s. Her eyes were a magical green flecked with hazel and gold.

  She looked at the suitcases.

  “Sigi, we’re in trouble,” Helene said. “Can we stay?”

  They heard a man’s hoarse voice raised from an inner room. “Sigrid? What is it? Who’s there?”

  “It’s all right, Father,” she called back. Suddenly brisk and practical, she snatched up their bags, dragged them inside, and relocked the door. “The lodger’s got your old room. You can have mine.”