by Robert Moss
He broke off at the sight of her calmly hoisting her nightgown over her head and shoulders. Without shame, she walked back to the bed and stood over him, examining his body as if she wanted to see how each part worked.
“Noch einmal,” she said. “Do it again.”
He stared at her. The light showed the thrust of her breasts, the long, voluptuous slope of her belly.
“You took something from me,” she said. “Something I dreamed of sharing. You owe me something now. I want to know what it feels like to be a woman.”
8
The Austrian passport was two years old. It was dated October 1929, the year and month of the Great Crash. The name of the holder was entered in a confident copperplate hand: Ludwig Dinkelmeyer. According to the information entered on the second page, his profession was Kaufmann — “Merchant” — and he had been born in Vienna in 1894. Oval face, blue eyes, dark blond hair, no visible distinguishing marks.
Johnny’s face looked out of the photograph on page three. He was respectably dressed in a dark suit, his tie perfectly in place, his hair slicked back, the image of a successful tradesman. A matching photograph of Helene, described as his wife, Erna, had been inserted next to his. She wore her hair in tight waves and a dress with a broad collar and fashionably padded shoulders. They shared the imprint of the same rubber stamp.
“The shoes are a nice fit, wouldn’t you say?” the man in the tailor shop remarked to Johnny. “Scotland Yard has a nose for for dummy passports. But they’re not magicians. They’ll never fault this.”
They were in a back room equipped with a pair of ancient Singer sewing machines and piled high with bolts and remnants of cloth.
“Your credentials,” the tailor said, showing Johnny a linen square bearing a dozen lines of black type. “Give me your jacket.”
Johnny handed over his coat, and the tailor inspected the lining. He took a pair of scissors and made a brisk incision around the left armpit. He plied his needle, and in a couple of minutes the job was done. Unless the British customs men decided to tear Johnny’s clothing apart, they would never find his secret credentials from the Comintern.
“What am I selling this time?” Johnny asked.
“You’re in luck, my friend. You’re a wine merchant. I’m only sorry I won’t have the chance to inspect your samples. You’ll pick them up in Hamburg.”
“You’re a woman for life,” he had told her.
And Sigrid had replied, “But you — you’re the man of Sesenheim.”
He had not understood the allusion, so she had had to remind him. Goethe had had a tempestuous affair with an innocent country parson’s daughter, Friedericke Brion. He had made no effort to guard her reputation, flaunting her as his mistress. But when the poet had decided to leave Sesenheim, he had dropped the girl like a plaything he had outgrown. He had met her on horseback and hadn’t even dismounted to say good-bye. He had just leaned over from the saddle and shaken hands. The girl had never looked at another man.
“It’s not true,” Johnny protested. “I’ll come back for you. I’ll find a way for us to be together.”
“Don’t make me any promises,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re a soldier under orders. Isn’t that what you told me? Let’s just live in the time we’re allowed.”
It was stolen time. He had known that all along. So far he had contrived to keep the affair secret from Helene. But in time she was bound to find out. He didn’t feel guilty in relation to Helene; on the contrary, he was ready to stand his ground with her. But he could only guess at what Helene would say to her sister, at the weapons she might use to turn Sigrid against him.
He had found excuses to prolong his stay in Berlin, but the excuses had run out. When the signal to leave for England finally came, it was peremptory. His instructions were to take the express from the Lehrter station — less than two hours away — to keep a rendezvous in Hamburg that same night.
He rushed to the Palace Cafe. Sigrid’s face lit up when she saw him.
“Can you come outside for a minute?” he asked.
She saw his expression, and her face went blank. She asked one of the other girls to take over her post, took off her apron and followed him outside. The bite of winter was in the air.
“It’s now, isn’t it?” she said in a whisper.
“I’m not on horseback.” His attempt at a joke fell like a stone. “I’ll write. And I’ll be back. But I don’t know when. I can’t possibly ask you to wait for me.”
“I won’t wait,” she said. “I won’t even know if you’re alive or dead. But I’ll be here, just the same.”
3 - The Lost Band
Out of the ruins of the
Communist revolution we built in
Germany for Soviet Russia a
brilliant intelligence service, the
envy of every other nation.
-WALTER KRIVITSKY,
in Stalin’s Secret Service (1939)
1
It was raining when Johnny’s plane from Hamburg bumped down onto the runway at East Croydon. It rained steadily over Greater London for the next sixteen consecutive days, out of a sky that closed over the rooftops like a saucepan lid.
His passport raised no questions. The customs inspector waived duty on his case of wine samples. A police constable whose muttonchop whiskers gave him the benign aspect of an Old English sheepdog showed Johnny the way to the train station and asked if he was South African. Everything but the weather was accommodating.
Following instructions, he took the train to Victoria and checked into a small, sooty hotel frequented by traveling salesmen and illicit lunchtime lovers. He bought himself an umbrella, dined on warm beer and cottage pie in a pub up the road and wrote his first letter to Sigrid before he turned in for the night. Two days away from her, he felt her absence as an aching hollow, demanding to be filled.
In the morning he went to the post office to mail his letter. It did not include a return address. He would look for a safe mailing address when he found more permanent lodgings.
When he returned to the hotel, a young man in a rather loud plaid suit was chatting up the girl receptionist. Johnny checked his watch against the clock above the desk-9:27 A.M. He was two minutes fast.
The young man followed Johnny into the elevator, whistling an old music-hall song. He pulled the gate shut behind them and unfolded a copy of the Sporting Guide. It increased his resemblance to a racetrack tout. Then Johnny noticed the date on the paper. It was a week old.
The stranger’s nose popped over the top of his paper. “You wouldn’t have the time, would you, squire?”
“Certainly.” Johnny did not consult his pocket watch. “It is precisely quarter to five.”
“George Mikes,” the young man grinned and stuck out his hand. “At your service.”
George Mikes was as good as his word. For the next two weeks he played guide, chauffeur, drinking crony, racing tipster, amateur pimp and general aide-de-camp. He was the London organizer of the party’s AM Apparat — a word he pronounced to rhyme with “plate.” He had a bedsit in Hampstead, where he brewed Irish coffee over a single gas ring, but he drove Johnny in his little green Austin to new digs on the other side of the river, in Shepherds Bush.
Johnny’s hosts were the Roses — Norma and Ernie. Norma was a big, blowsy, warm-hearted girl, the daughter of a Polish baker in Stoke Newington. Every morning, she cooked huge fry-ups for the two men before boarding her bus to the city, where she had some kind of secretarial job. When it wasn’t raining, Ernie spent much of the day pottering round his pocket-handkerchief garden. On Saturdays, religiously, he went bowling. He told Johnny that he had once worked as a piano player at the cinema down the road, interpreting the moments of passion on the big screen.
But his job had vanished with the demise of the silent movies. Now he did part-time work as a glassblower — a job that seemed to Johnny to have an equally precarious future.
Norma and Ernie were both party members, which
made Johnny uneasy, since he had been warned in Berlin that the British Communist Party was crawling with police spies. He became even more nervous when Norma had a couple of sherries too many and let slip that she knew Johnny was in England on a secret Soviet mission.
The second Saturday, he came back to Shepherds Bush in mid-afternoon in a blazing fury. George had taken him to Paddington to inspect the secret printing press that was used to crank out Soldier’s Voice, a party publication aimed at enlisted men. Johnny approved of the location in the basement below a shoe-repair shop, where the rumble of the press was camouflaged by the hammers and the sewing machines overhead. But he was unhappy about an unexpected discovery. He had found a door, half hidden by piles of newsprint. George hadn’t wanted him to look inside. It was just a storage closet, according to George. He looked inside anyway and found a good-sized room, filled from floor to ceiling with bundles of Soldier’s Voice. The issues dated back more than twelve months. Moscow paid for every copy that was printed — and the British Communists left them to gather dust. They were lazy and corrupt, just as Dimitrov had said. This wasn’t the first evidence he had stumbled across, despite George’s assiduous efforts to divert his attention to pubs and pliable female sympathizers. Johnny demanded a meeting with Pollitt and was reminded that it was the weekend.
“What are you? Shopkeepers?” Johnny exploded. “You get word to Pollitt I want to see him tomorrow, even if it is bloody Sunday. Do you think the revolution has licensing hours?”
He declined George’s offer of a lift and walked to a nearby bus stop. There was a long line and only a few seats on the first bus that came. But nobody jostled or tried to jump the queue. A second bus came, and Johnny climbed on top. The people around him chatted about soccer teams and Christmas shopping.
He remembered a line he had read in Engels. “Even the British proletariat is bourgeois.” He wanted to yell at them, to make a scene.
He changed buses twice and walked the last half mile to the Roses’ terrace house, to make sure he wasn’t being followed. Rounding the corner of Holly Street, he stopped short.
A sleek, powerful car was double-parked in front of the house. It looked like a Bristol. It didn’t belong in that modest street. As Johnny watched, Norma Rose slid out of the passenger seat and blew a kiss to the driver, who pushed his foot down on the gas pedal so hard that the tires complained as he sped off down the street.
Johnny walked round the block, trying to make sense of what he had just seen. A boyfriend Norma had picked up at a cinema or a tea dance? She was a very physical woman, and available — she had suggested that, without much subtlety, to him. Her marriage to Ernie seemed to be fairly sexless. There were no children, and Ernie complained of having to go in for a hernia operation.
The other possibility was the police. But the English police, by Johnny’s observation, did not drive around in Bristol motorcars. And they would hardly be so inept as to show themselves at the front door of an agent of the Communist party.
Johnny decided to confront Norma. He was in the mood for a confrontation with someone.
He let himself in with his key and found her in the bedroom, half out of her dress. She had her back to him. As she bent over, he could see the tops of her breasts, swollen and milky white, in the cheval glass on the far side of the room.
She glanced up, gave a stifled squeal, and clapped her hand to her chest.
“You gave me quite a turn.”
“Have you been out?”
“I had to go in to the office. There’s a bit of a panic on.” She was smiling, but her eyes looked puffy and sore, as if she had been crying.
“Is something the matter?”
“No. ‘Course there isn’t.” She went to the dresser and blew her nose.
“I see you got a lift home.”
For the first time, she looked scared. “You won’t tell Ernie, will you?”
“Why should I?” He paused. “Your friend drives a very fancy car.”
“It’s not his. It’s an export model. He’s trying it out. No harm in that, is there?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Arkady said—”
At the mention of the Russian name, Johnny froze.
“Arkady?”
“Oh, Jeez. I thought you knew.”
“Who is Arkady?”
“He’s my boss. I work for Arcos. Jeez. You’re not having me on, are you? I mean, I thought you’d know, you two being Russians and all—”
Johnny swore in German and stormed out of the room.
His anger was not allayed by the knowledge that it was partly his fault. He had never bothered to inquire where Norma worked; he had counted on George Mikes and his organization to be able to take care of something. As a result, he had been living for nearly two weeks at the home of a woman who was not only a party member but an employee of the Soviet trading company, Arcos, which had been the target for a famous police raid a few years before and was publicly identified by Scotland Yard as one of the centres of Russian espionage in Britain. To cap it all, Norma was evidently having an affair with her Russian boss, whose sense of security was clearly as exiguous as her own.
It would be little short of a miracle, he realized, if the police had not had him under observation since he first lugged his suitcase up the Roses’ front steps.
He decided to move house immediately. And this time he would find his own lodgings.
He found them in the Sunday classifieds — a pair of good-sized rooms in a boarding house in Richmond that seemed to be largely patronized by theatrical gentlemen who wafted around in dressing gowns at all hours of the day. The bohemian atmosphere appealed to him; a man with a foreign accent and unusual hours was unlikely to draw comment. He paid a month’s deposit in cash and moved in with a newly bought suitcase stuffed with newspapers the same day. He told George to collect his bags from Shepherds Bush and meet him on neutral ground. He did not wish to set foot in the Roses’ house again.
George Mikes was nervous and full of apologies that night, as they drove — interminably, it seemed — across south London. Walworth was the name on the last sign Johnny noticed. George parked the Austin in front of a neat semidetached cottage behind a picket fence. There was a doctor’s shingle above the door.
“What is this place?” Johnny demanded.
“It’s all right. The doctor’s a Socialist. He was our candidate in the last general elections.”
Johnny swore copiously. “Haven’t you idiots ever heard of a yafka?” In his agitation, he slipped into the jargon of his training courses in Moscow.
George blinked at him.
“A safe house!” Johnny translated. “Don’t you know what a safe house is? You’ll get all of us arrested!”
“You’ll be safe enough here,” George assured him. The man looked totally bewildered. “Doctor Pratt is a good friend of Harry’s.”
Johnny sighed and went inside the house. He found Harry Pollitt in the sitting room, warming his backside in front of a gas fire. The leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain was smooth and freshly barbered, soberly but smartly turned out in a dark suit that minimized his girth. His greeting was unctuous. He pressed Johnny’s hand for too long.
Pollitt was a former boilermaker, Johnny had read in the files.
Johnny thought, He looks like a minor evangelist getting ready to pass the collection plate.
Pollitt settled himself in an armchair and wasted twenty minutes reminiscing about his visits to the Soviet Union. He waxed eloquent about a holiday at Stalin’s private villa on the Black Sea and dropped the names of a dozen other Moscow officials. The message was crude, but impossible to miss; he wanted Johnny to know he had powerful protectors.
A pretty, dark-haired girl brought tea and biscuits.
As she left, Pollitt winked at Johnny and said, “Good-looking bint, isn’t she? If there’s anything you’re missing to make your stay comfortable, you needn’t be shy with us. Brother George here is just the man to fi
x you up.”
Johnny said nothing, and Pollitt looked at the teapot with mock dismay. “I think our guest must be in need of something stronger, Georgie.”
George Mikes dashed out and returned with a bottle of Dimple Haig.
Johnny accepted a glass but let it sit.
You smug bastard, he thought, watching Pollitt. You’d love to get something on me, wouldn’t you? Something you could use with your big friends in Moscow. I won’t give you that satisfaction.
He resolved to seize the initiative.
“Comrade Pollitt. You know my authority—”
“We don’t stand on ceremony here, brother.”
“—and you know the urgency of my mission. It is possible that Russia will be at war with Japan in a matter of weeks. It is equally possible that the Western Powers will exploit the opportunity to intervene on the Japanese side while the Soviet Union is isolated. It is imperative that we should have a network in Britain that is capable of paralyzing any war mobilization.”
“We know our duty. Our AM Apparat—”
“—Exists only on paper.”
Pollitt appealed mutely to George, who shuffled his feet.
“I’ve seen what you’re doing in the London area,” Johnny pursued. “You’re printing appeals to soldiers and sailors that are never distributed. You haven’t begun to capitalize on the Invergordon mutiny. You don’t have a single party cell inside the barracks.”
“London’s tricky,” George spoke up. “Wait until you see what we’re doing in the provinces.”
“I’ve seen your lists,” Johnny glowered at him. “I’ve also noted you’ve found one excuse after another to delay my visits to Portsmouth and the north.”
“There are always security considerations,” Pollitt observed piously.
“Security!” Johnny snorted. “None of you seem to know what the word means! Since I’ve been here, your people have done everything to blow my cover short of delivering me to Scotland Yard.”
