Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

“No, Sigi. What about the room at the back? The sewing room?”

  “There’s just a sofa. And it’s such a mess—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Sigrid ran lightly ahead of them down the corridor, gloomy in the half-light with its suffocating, wine-red wallpaper. They found her gathering up canvases, turning an easel to the wall.

  “This is your studio,” Johnny said. The room was small and bright and smelled of oils and turpentine. The blend was not unpleasant. Johnny wanted to look at the pictures, but Sigrid hoarded them shyly under her arm.

  “Helene.” The new voice was husky, even deeper than Helene’s.

  Johnny turned and saw an extraordinary apparition. The woman’s body seemed slender and supple as either of her daughters, but her hair was completely white. The face was Helene’s, seen in a cracked mirror.

  A stocky man with a red, jowly face barrelled into the doorway beside her.

  “So she’s back, is she, the little slut?”

  “Shut up, Hermann.”

  “She’s not staying here with her fancy man.”

  Johnny looked anything but fancy, in his hat and shapeless overcoat.

  “He’s my husband,” Helene said.

  Johnny saw no reason to amend this statement.

  “Probably a fucking Red, like you.”

  “It’s my room,” Sigrid interjected. “I told them they could stay.”

  Hermann Eckhardt appealed to his wife. “For all we know, they’ve got the cops on their tails. I’m not having them under this roof.”

  “Shut your face,” Helene’s mother said. She looked at him like something that ought to be trodden underfoot. “I’ll decide.”

  “It’s just for a few nights,” Johnny spoke up. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience. Of course, we’ll pay for your trouble.”

  “Bloody right you’ll pay.”

  “Go to bed, Hermann.” The mother’s voice was oddly compelling. It wasn’t the anger or disgust it might have conveyed; it was the absence of emotion.

  Hermann grunted and shuffled off along the corridor, muttering to himself.

  Clara Eckhardt looked from Helene to Johnny. “You’ve come from Russia,” she said. It was not a question. “You mustn’t bring any of that into this house. There are no Communists here.”

  “We won’t,” Johnny promised.

  “Sigrid,” she instructed her daughter, “bring sheets and towels.”

  As soon as the girl was gone, she said to Helene, with sudden ferocity, “And you leave her alone, do you hear me? Don’t go putting anything in her head. Things are hard enough for her as it is.”

  There wasn’t room for both on the sofa, so Johnny lay on the floor, his head resting on his bundled overcoat, and watched the moonlight slanting through the window. He started rehearsing what he would say to Dimitrov when he kept his appointment later that morning. But he found that Sigrid kept drifting in and out of his thoughts. She had something of her sister, but it was softer, unstudied. Something a man could hold on to. Helene reached down and snapped her finger against his cheek.

  “What my mother said was meant for you, too,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “About Sigi. I saw how you looked at her.”

  “Well?”

  “She’s not like us. She can be hurt. I want you to leave her alone.”

  It was the first time Johnny had ever seen Helene play the big sister, the protectress. He liked this human side, this confession of weakness, and instead of sleeping he made love to her eagerly in the early light. But when he let his eyelids fall, the face he saw was Sigrid’s.

  4

  The offices of the Führer-Verlag were on the Wilhelmstrasse. Civil servants and foreign diplomats from nearby chanceries would pause on their way to lunch to peer into the windows of the ground-floor bookshop. Johnny would not be mistaken for one of them in his tweed coat, soft collar and comfortable gabardine trousers. But he might very well pass for a writer on his way to discuss a contract. He walked through the bookshop, nodded at the man in a cubbyhole at the back and went up by the service stairs.

  There was an atmosphere of frenzied activity on every floor — couriers and copyboys coming and going, typewriters clacking, telephones jangling. There were armed men posted on every landing, because this building housed the headquarters of the Westbureau, the nerve centre of Comintern operations in Europe.

  Georgi Dimitrov’s sanctum smelled and looked more like a cigar humidor — a very expensive one, with sides of dark, polished wood — than a Turkish bath. A portrait of Bismarck in a funereal black frame hung over the immense mahogany desk. The Iron Chancellor looked like a petulant bulldog. There was a glass-fronted bookcase filled with rich leather bindings, the kind of volumes that are ordered by the meter.

  The figure that blossomed from behind the desk was sleek and olive skinned, dandyish in a silk smoking jacket. Dimitrov advanced in a haze of tobacco and attar of roses and extended a plump hand garnished with an enormous ruby ring. His eyes were moist. His whole body moved with the rhythms of his speech.

  He waved Johnny into a studded leather chair and dipped into a plain manila file.

  “You’ve travelled a good deal, Johann Lentz,” he addressed Johnny. “Romania. Scandinavia. France. South America. The Far East. You’ve never been to Great Britain?”

  “No.”

  “Britain is a special hobby of mine. I asked Moscow to find me a man who has no record with the British authorities. I asked for a military expert, the best available expert in the area of AM measures. They sent me a list of candidates, and I picked you. Did I make the right choice?”

  “I’m honoured, of course.”

  “AM” stood for “Anti-Military.” Under the statutes of the Comintern, every Communist party was required to maintain its own AM Apparat. These secret networks were responsible for recruiting sympathizers and inciting mutiny inside the armed forces, under guidance from Moscow. In his years as a Comintern military adviser Johnny had directed AM operations against the Romanians, the Belgians and the French.

  “Do you know why I picked you?” Dimitrov went on. “Not because of that Romanian mess. No, don’t say a word. I know it wasn’t your fault. I picked you because you’re a sailor and because your record doesn’t start with Costanza, or even with Hamburg. It starts with the mutiny in the Kaiser’s fleet. I want you to go to England and do the same thing in the Royal Navy.”

  “That’s quite an undertaking.”

  “It’s quite an opportunity,” Dimitrov corrected him. “Do you read the newspapers? Do you know what’s going on in England?”

  “I know there was a mutiny in the British fleet. At a base in Scotland.”

  “At Invergordon. The government tried to cut the sailors’ pay, and a strike was called. For several hours, the battle fleet was paralyzed. The British lion was changed into a helpless pussycat. Then the government panicked. It restored full pay and tried to hush everything up. The ringleaders were removed without publicity. And do you know when I received the first report from our comrades in the Communist Party of Great Britain? Four days afterwards!”

  Dimitrov got up and waved his cigar like a baton.

  “Think of it, Lentz!” he went on. “We had a historic opportunity! What holds the British Empire together? The navy! For a few hours the empire lost its sword and shield. The situation demanded strong, ruthless leadership, the shooting of officers, action to bring things to a boil. And what did our British comrades do? They sat in their semidetached cottages swilling their tea. I know Comrade Pollitt and the rest of that crowd. The British Communists are sluggish and complacent. They run their party like a grocery store. They think that revolution is good business.

  “I want you to go and light a fire under them. Don’t be scared to throw your weight around. Your credentials are being prepared now. I want you to examine them closely. You are going to Britain as an inspector of the Comintern. Do you know what that means? It means that you, Joh
ann Lentz, have the power to issue any orders you like. If you tell Pollitt to shine your boots, he’s obliged to do it. If they give you any trouble, hit them where their hearts are — in their hip pockets! Tell them you’ll chop off their subsidies. That will bring them around in short order! Every letter they send to Moscow ends with a chiselling demand for money. Tell Harry Pollitt we want value for money, and if he won’t give it we’ll find someone who will!”

  Dimitrov threw himself down on the sofa and inspected his audience.

  “Well? What have you got to say?”

  “I’d rather be doing the same job in Germany,” Johnny said quietly.

  “You needn’t concern yourself with Germany,” Dimitrov responded, with faint annoyance. “The German party has a quarter of a million members, and this department is not exactly idle.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be bothering Hitler,” Johnny ventured. The remark bordered on open insolence, but he was determined to test what Kordt had told him about the party line on the Hitler movement. He recounted Kordt’s story about the Bremen congress, trying to keep his emotion in check.

  The Bulgarian’s eyelids narrowed. “Where did you hear these things?”

  “Friends.”

  “You should be more cautious who you talk to,” Dimitrov warned him. “The German party is a snake pit.” He made an effort to revive his earlier bonhomie. “Look, I know you’re German. And you’ve been away from home for a long time. Naturally you’re concerned about certain things. But you’re really in no position to pass judgment. A foot soldier doesn’t see what a general can see.”

  But the general’s mistakes are much deadlier, Johnny thought. Didn’t the war teach us that?

  “I’ll tell you something in confidence,” the Bulgarian pressed on. “Just in case you imagine we’re asleep at the wheel. I have it from an irrefutable source, a man high up in the General Staff. If Hitler is ever in a position to attempt to seize power, the Reichswehr will prevent him by force. You see? Hitler is a marionette. He can be broken like that.” He snapped his fingers and looked triumphantly at Johnny.

  Johnny knew at that moment that it was useless appealing to this man. Dimitrov was part of the problem.

  I mustn’t push it any further, Johnny told himself. Not here. That was Emil’s mistake.

  Perhaps, after all, he would be better off in England.

  He walked north up the Wilhelmstrasse in the perfect afternoon light. It played on the decorations of bankers and high officials and the jewels of their expensive women as they streamed from their phaetons to a grand reception at the Adlon. In the shadow of the great hotel, on the side next to the kitchens where there was an inescapable aroma of cooking oil, the British flag flapped on its staff in front of the former mansion of a railroad millionaire.

  A man came out of the side entrance of the embassy and walked briskly towards a waiting sedan. Johnny glanced at him through the wrought-iron gate. Tall, straight-backed, he wore his civilian clothes like a military uniform: homburg, dark chesterfield with a velvet tab on the collar, scrolled umbrella. He moved with utter self-assurance, the model of a defender of the Raj. This is the enemy, Johnny thought, as he watched the Englishman swing into his car. He had had it drilled into him in countless briefings and study sessions in Moscow: Great Britain was the main enemy. His Majesty’s Intelligence Service, which had tried to overthrow Lenin, was still the most ferocious of the secret opponents of the revolution. The Englishman was speaking to his chauffeur. There was something enviable about the man’s total composure.

  Johnny quickened his stride as he turned up the wide boulevard Unter den Linden. He barely registered the romantic triumph of the Brandenburg Gate, flung up against the sky. He needed time and space to sort out his emotions. He had instructions to go to a house in Granewald, where the Westbureau hid its British section, to start his detailed briefings. That could wait till tomorrow. He rambled on into the Tiergarten without fixed purpose.

  5

  He stopped at the zoo on his way back to the family flat in Charlottenburg. He found something relaxing in the presence of wild animals; possibly it had to do with their simplicity, their lack of a moral sense. He spent some time inspecting a small herd of blackbucks from southern Africa. The dominant male was distinguished by his black face and neck. As he grew older and weaker, one of the younger bucks would start to acquire this distinctive colouring as he rose in status. One young buck in this herd was well advanced; his head and neck were almost completely black. The old leader watched him warily, waiting to lock horns with his own death.

  Johnny rambled on toward the cages of the big cats. There was a girl bent over a sketchbook on one of the benches. She wore a loose beret over her fine-spun red-gold hair. Her ankles were neatly crossed under the calf-length skirt. He knew her before he even saw her face. She looked up from her stub of charcoal to the animal that was padding silently around the narrow ambit of its cage, its shoulders rising and falling rhythmically. It was a panther, black as diamond dust.

  He walked quietly along the slope of the path till he was standing just behind her. He stared at the white curve of her neck, at the hunted eyes of the panther, and recited

  Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe

  so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.

  Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe

  und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

  His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

  She turned without haste, without fear, and studied him as if she were considering him for one of her sketches. He felt awkward with his big hands dangling at his sides.

  “You don’t look like someone who would know Rilke,” Sigrid said.

  “And you look like a woman who does.”

  One of his yawning afternoons in the schoolroom in Hamburg had been brought alive by a young teacher who had introduced his class to Rilke, reciting from the Neue Gedichte with the fire of a convert. The terrifying image of the panther behind bars had lived with Johnny ever since.

  He sat down beside her on the bench, so close he could feel the warmth of her thigh. She did not draw away, but he felt her body tense, her legs press together.

  “May I?”

  He seized the sketchbook before she could close it.

  The drawing of the panther was arresting; you could see the muscles rippling beneath the hide.

  “You know what it’s like to be caged,” he said. He looked at her with such intensity that she turned away from him. She didn’t exactly blush, but he could sense the heat in her face. It excited him.

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “You have a gift. Have you been to art school?”

  She shook her head. “Father’s been out of work for so long,” she said by way of explanation. “And now I have to work in the restaurant. When I get a half day off, I come here or go to the exhibitions.”

  “Will you show me your paintings?”

  “If you like.”

  “I don’t know much about art. But I met Grosz once.”

  “Georg Grosz? His work is wonderful but — so brutal.”

  “He’s an educator. He trains us to see things as they are. And to see why things have to be changed.”

  “I couldn’t draw that way. Not to pass judgment.”

  “The artist can’t be neutral. Neutrality is an illusion. To be neutral means to be on the side of the powers that be.” He instantly regretted this statement. It sounded clumsy and pontifical.

  She weighed this for a moment. “Is it true what Father says — that you’re a Red?”

  “I’m a member of the Communist party.” He smiled. “Does that offend you?”

  “I’m not political. I don’t find it easy to take sides. Father votes for the Social Democrats, though I don’t know whether he will next time. He says Stalin’s worse than Hitler.”

  “He d
oesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “You met Helene in Russia?”

  “Yes.” He saw no reason to tell Sigrid about her sister’s early life in Hamburg.

  “You know, she ran away from home.”

  “You must have been very small.”

  “I remember her bending over my bed, late at night. She left me with something of hers, something that was close to her. A teddy bear with one eye missing. I still have it. She sent letters, sometimes, from all over the world. She never mentioned you. How long have you been married?”

  Johnny hesitated. “We’re not married.”

  “But Helene said — oh. I see.” She dropped her eyes, embarrassed.

  “It’s not quite what you think. We’re partners, workmates if you like. You see, the party is our family.”

  Sigrid’s face brightened. “You’re involved in secret work, is that it?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Let me see your hands.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let me see your hands.”

  He held them out obediently. She bent over them, studying the ridges and raised veins. She turned them over and traced the lifeline with her finger. Her hand looked small and soft as a child’s inside his broad, calloused palm.

  She said, “I’d like to paint you.”

  “Really? Like your models in the zoo? I’m flattered. Tell me, which of your animals do I resemble?”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” she replied. “That one.” She pointed at the panther. “Strong, very dangerous — but caged.”

  Startled by her own boldness, she slammed her sketch-book shut. A loose page flew out, and she darted after it. Johnny moved faster.

  As he handed it to her, he let his arm graze her waist, as if by accident.

  He said, “Are you sure the bars will hold?” and she started to blush as though she felt he was comparing her, not himself, to the animal in the cage.

  6

  “Kipling’s books are decorated with swastikas,” Max Fabrikant remarked. “They spin the other way from Hitler’s, anticlockwise. The swastika is a very ancient symbol of the oriental mystics. I am told it is also a symbol of the Freemasons — hence, perhaps, Kipling. There are even those who maintain that the Christian cross is a sawn-off swastika.”