by Robert Moss
“Sweetheart—” he put his arms around her. “I’ve never meant to hurt you.”
“It’s not me who’ll be hurt!” she flew at him.
He steeled himself for the rest — the impassioned, protective speech about the child sister he had seduced and exposed to danger. He was not prepared for what she said next.
“You’re the one who will suffer!”
She had the sun behind her, and he had to squint to look at her. Her eyes were very deep, but clouded.
“You can’t mean what you’re saying,” he said gently. “Sigrid feels for me the way I feel for her.”
“What do you know about her? That she’s a pretty girl who came alive in bed with you like a night flower? That she has dreams? You don’t know her, Johnny. She doesn’t know herself yet. Neither of you can possess what you imagine you see. Bring her into your life, and you’ll find you’re living with a different woman — one you never wanted, one who doesn’t belong to you at all.”
She stopped to pick a late foxglove and crushed it between her fingers.
When Johnny tried to argue with her, she smiled bravely and took his arm.
“You’ll choose your own course,” she said. “I knew that in Berlin. I wanted to warn you, all the same. But I promise not to repeat myself. Now I’d like you to show me the inside of an English pub.”
Another warning from Helene — a warning of a different kind — brought an end to Johnny’s stay in England.
Mr. Hitchcock had given them tickets to the Richmond Theatre for a performance of Bernard Shaw’s Candida.
“You absolutely have to go,” Mr. Hitchcock said. “My friend is in the third act. No excuses, now!”
They agreed to meet at the theatre. Helene was coming back from Cambridge, where Johnny suspected she was servicing an agent for Kagan, the chief of the OGPU in London. She was as tight-lipped as ever about her own work, but Johnny was intrigued by the idea that Soviet intelligence had found an entrée to the privileged world of Oxbridge.
When they dimmed the lights, Johnny was still waiting. He took his seat and tried to concentrate on the play. Halfway through, one of the characters quoted La Rochefoucauld: “There are convenient marriages but no delightful ones.”
It was a fair summation of the years they had spent together, Johnny thought. But perhaps not entirely fair. He had known passion with Helene and later the steady warmth of comradeship. But never full trust, and never the dizzying fusion of spirits he had discovered with Sigrid, when all senses were joined in a single shaft of light.
His mind returned to the conversation he had had with Barry Flynn earlier in the day. If Flynn was right, they were about to make a major breakthrough. Flynn had struck up acquaintance with a Royal Navy lieutenant in a Portsmouth pub. The man expressed socialist leanings and lusted after women and racehorses — and was chronically short of cash because of both these fixations. According to Flynn, the lieutenant was willing to talent spot and to provide information, which could be valuable, since he was an expert on torpedoes. In return for a small advance he had supplied a specimen blueprint that excited Smollett. The lieutenant had already been awarded a code name: “Fisher.”
There was one catch. Though Flynn claimed he had played it all close to his chest, never letting on who Fisher would be working for, the lieutenant had come right out and said he wanted to “deal directly with the Russians.”
It’s a trap, said one voice in Johnny’s head.
Let’s run with it, said another.
He had more or less decided to take the gamble. He had authorized Flynn to set up a meeting with Fisher in Portsmouth in the morning. He would take the early train.
When the curtain came down for the interval, Johnny lingered inside the theatre. He stood up to let a couple pass. Then he felt a light tug on his sleeve.
“Have you given up smoking?” Helene teased him.
He rose and followed her out. She skirted the crush at the bar and went out into the night air.
“Are you enjoying the play?”
“So-so. I haven’t seen Hitchcock’s friend yet.”
“Fine. Then let’s go and find something to eat. My tummy’s rumbling and we need to talk.”
They found a chophouse, and Helene ordered the biggest steak on the menu.
“You’re going to Portsmouth. Am I right?”
“How did you know?” The meeting had only been set up that morning. “Or should I ask, how did Kagan find out?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She tore into her steak and went on talking with her mouth full. “You mustn’t go. You’ve been set up.”
“You mean the man in Portsmouth is a plant.”
“No, that’s not it. One of your friends in the party tipped off the police. You’ve made powerful enemies.”
“Who are you talking about? Not Flynn? George Mikes? Pollitt?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know any names. Someone high up. Someone who’s out to destroy you.”
It could be Pollitt, Johnny thought. The last report I sent stripped the son of a bitch naked. Or someone who’s got his nose out of joint because of the Gupta affair. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past any of them.
Helene’s plate was clean. She speared some potatoes from his and tossed off a glass of claret. Danger always enlarged her appetites.
They collected their bags and moved to the flat in Poplar that Johnny used for his training courses. Fortunately, Mr. Hitchcock was engrossed in one of his cultural evenings. By the time he emerged in his caftan, they were already boarding a taxi.
Johnny tried repeatedly to reach Flynn from a public telephone box down the street. There was no answer. He called Smollett, who said he would try to get a message through and told him to phone again in the morning.
The pubs had just opened the following day, when Johnny heard Smollett say, “Your information was correct.”
“What happened?”
“The police got both of them. You know the procedure.”
They followed Ved Gupta’s path to Leningrad, minus the chloroform and the packing crate. Three days later, they stood in the bow of the steamer, as the storied battlements of the Fortress of Peter and Paul hove into view.
Helene raised her glass and said, “Home!”
5
There were beggars on the slow train from Leningrad and droves of them at the station. Even in Moscow people looked grey and half starved, shuffling to work under giant images of Stalin and triumphal banners proclaiming the successes of the Five-Year Plan. There were disturbing rumours from outlying areas — stories that in the fertile Ukraine, the peasants’ seed grain was being stolen from them by security troops so it could be sold abroad, that millions had been condemned to die of starvation in the midst of plenty.
“Is it true?” Johnny asked Jacob, his friend from the Fourth Department, when they met for lunch at the Hotel Lux.
“It’s all been blown out of proportion by Western propaganda,” Jacob responded. “Besides, you don’t see anyone going hungry here, do you?”
Johnny glanced around at the crowded tables. The Lux had become a miniature League of Nations, packed with Comintern guests from Peru to Indochina and delegations of favoured trade unionists and literati from the West. There were no shortages at the Lux — and no mention of famine on the radio or in the newspapers, which were full of breathless accounts of the horrendous plans for economic sabotage concocted by six British contract engineers who had been arrested as spies.
Johnny had other things to preoccupy him. He had completed his final report to the Comintern on his activities in Britain, and he had not pulled any punches. He accused a member of the national executive of the British Communist Party of betraying him to the police. He had even speculated that Pollitt may have personally authorized this treachery in return for Johnny’s attacks on his leadership.
Johnny did not have to wait long for the Comintern’s response. He received the summons from Piatnitsky two days later.
He f
ound the chief of the Orgbureau in a new office, smaller and untidier than before. Bulging folders tied up with string rose from the floor on all sides of his desk. Piatnitsky’s skin was as pink as a child’s under the mane of white hair.
He pumped Johnny’s hand.
“This is one of the best reports I’ve ever read,” he announced, waving a copy of Johnny’s memorandum. “I sent a copy to the boss.” He half turned his head to the full-length portrait of Stalin hanging on the wall behind him.
“Of course, we will make a full investigation,” Piatnitsky pursued. “But I can’t guarantee what will come of it. Britain, as you observed, is difficult territory for us. And whatever might be said against Comrade Pollitt, you can’t fault him in one respect.”
“Sir?”
“He has an unerring sense for which ass to lick.” His eyes glided to the door, leather-padded like an old chesterfield sofa to foil possible eavesdroppers. “I think you’ve earned a vacation,” he went on briskly. “I’ve given instructions that you are to be permitted to use one our villas near Livadia. The climate is perfect at this time of year.”
“I’m grateful, of course, but—”
“Don’t tell me. You’re the kind that doesn’t take holidays.”
“I’d like to make a request.”
“I’m listening.”
“I request to be reassigned to Germany.”
“Personal reasons?”
“In the sense that I’m a German.” He tried to express his fears about the rise of the Hitler movement, his conviction that he could serve the party best by working to rebuild a fighting organization in his own country. He did not mention the women.
Piatnitsky heard him out and said, “I won’t make any promises, except to mention this to Starik.” Starik was a familiar sobriquet for General Jan Berzin, the head of the Fourth Department. “He may have something for you. But you must make me one promise.”
Johnny waited.
“You’d better not go shooting your mouth off to Thälmann or Dimitrov — the way you did to Pollitt. The boss takes a special interest in Germany.”
From inside his gilded frame, Stalin smiled down on them enigmatically. The snow-capped mountains in the background seemed to elevate him to a heroic height. The pockmarks that disfigured his face had been tactfully air-brushed out.
Piatnitsky was as good as his word. Within the week Johnny was summoned to Starik’s headquarters and briefed on his new mission. The job was the one he knew best: he would serve as an adviser to the underground military arm of the German Communist Party, which had been reorganized as the Red Front Fighters’ Federation, or RFKB. He was informed that he now held the rank of major in the Red Army. He noted that the man who gave him his orders wore four little diamond-studded stars on his collar. The days when Bolshevik commanders wore no badge of rank except the red star of the revolution had long passed.
“You be careful,” Helene said to him through the train window, as the conductors ran along the platform, slamming doors. “I won’t be there to look out for you this time. Here—” she reached up and passed him a coat with a fur collar, something of her own. “Give this to Sigi. You won’t always be there to keep her warm.”
As the great wheels of the locomotive started to turn, he tried not to let Helene see what he felt: a sudden lifting of the heart, the marvellous beating of wings.
6
Sigrid carried out her threat. On the day she joined the Communist party she destroyed her paintings, all the ones that were personal to her. The slashes across the canvas were self-inflicted wounds.
They had been living together for almost a month. They had an apartment to themselves in the Neukölln district—two rooms and a kitchen, which Johnny paid for out of operational funds.
He had had to renew his courtship. The first time she had set eyes on him, she had seemed to glow. But she had held back. Why? And why hadn’t she replied to his last letters? Was there another man?
“Yoti’ll leave me again,” she told him. “You’ll always be leaving. Helene warned me of that. It would be death by a thousand cuts, each one deeper.”
He made promises, argued, implored. When she consented to make love in the cold hollow of the morning, an hour before dawn, she held her body in check, forcing him to use her like a mannequin.
They reached a watershed on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. He had gone round to see her at the Palace Café, where she continued to work, and found Sigrid and most of the customers out in the middle of the street.
“It’s Herr Silbermann’s shop,” Sigrid said to him, pointing. “We have to do something, Johnny. The family is upstairs.”
Half a dozen Brownshirts were gathered outside a second-hand furniture store. They had smashed in the windows and were allowing casual looters to climb in and out, taking what they pleased. They had daubed swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans on the door. There was not a policeman to be seen, and the large crowd of spectators was impassive.
“Come out of your rats’ nest!” the Brownshirt leader bellowed up at the windows above the street. “Come down before we burn you out!”
Johnny saw scared faces peeking out from behind the curtains — faces of children and a man with a heavy beard. The Silbermanns had spent the holy day fasting and in prayers and were assembled for the solemn meal that would be served when the sun went down.
Johnny thought quickly. He could use the telephone in the restaurant to summon help, but there was no telling what would transpire before it arrived. If he tried to step in by himself, he risked being beaten and searched. But he had no compromising documents on his person, except for the scrap of rice paper in the ticket pocket of his trousers that contained several clandestine addresses. And he was armed. He also had one useful item of camouflage: the badge of the Stahlhelm, the militia of the right-wing National Party, under his lapel. It had proved useful in one unexpected encounter with the Berlin police. Perhaps it would help him here.
He moved closer to the back of the crowd around the furniture store. One of the Brownshirts had a bottle bomb. He waved it aloft, with matches in the other hand, threatening to light the wick. Johnny could feel Sigrid’s eyes burning into his face.
He stepped forward and said to the SA leader, “Haven’t you taught those Yids enough of a lesson?”
“What’s it to you?” The tough rounded on him suspiciously.
Johnny flipped back his lapel to show the Stahlhelm badge.
“Just like you shitheads,” the Brownshirt spat. “Not man enough to show your colours.” He slapped his armband and puffed out his chest.
Johnny moved closer and said in a confidential tone, “Why don’t you take care of that shyster Lifshitz, the pawnbroker? I owe him money.” He added a fictitious address to the made-up name.
The SA leader roared with laughter and thwacked his rubber truncheon against his leg.
“We’ll see about Lifsheiss later,” he promised. “I want to finish with these ones first. They’ve got plenty to atone for. Go on, Fritz!”
Johnny saw the flash as the match was struck and raised to the fuse, the Brownshirt’s arm sloping upwards and back. He reached for his Mauser.
“Look out, he’s got a gun!” someone yelled.
As Johnny squeezed the trigger, the troop leader’s truncheon crashed down on his forearm. The shot went wide, and the gun tumbled from his limp fingers onto the road. At the same instant, the bottle bomb exploded inside Silbermann’s store. A sheet of flame swallowed the looters’ debris like dry kindling. A child’s high, plaintive scream carried from the floor above.
Johnny drove his foot into the troop leader’s groin. The man shrieked and was lost from sight as the others flung themselves at Johnny. He dived for the gun, rolling sideways to avoid the first rabbit punch angled at his neck. A jackbooted foot swung at his kidneys, and the pain lanced through his body.
Through the tumult he heard Sigrid’s voice, keen and accusing: “Are you men? Are any of you Germans? Are yo
u going to let those poor people burn to death?”
They were hammering at his back with fists and feet, but he kept rolling and weaving. He got one of them by the leg and pulled him down. Then his hand closed on the butt of his pistol. One of the Brownshirts took a running jump and came down hard on top of Johnny, flattening him under his weight. Gasping for air, Johnny tried to wriggle free. But someone had got his head in a vise. They had him.
“Johnny!” It was her voice again. It seemed very distant. He couldn’t breathe. Everything around him was shaded red and black, pulsing like the coals of a ship’s furnace.
She came whirling into the mass of human flesh that bore down on him, raking with her nails and a kitchen knife that must have come from the café. Taken off guard, the Brownshirt who was trying to break Johnny’s neck released his grip.
In that moment of grace, Johnny rallied his last reserves. He lashed out with the snout of his gun. He heard a hoarse yelp, and the weight on his back was gone. In the next instant he was on his feet, ready to open fire.
But something almost miraculous was happening. Shamed by the girl’s courage, men were coming out of the crowd in twos and threes and attacking the Brownshirts with their fists. The SA men were already outnumbered by better than two to one. Johnny looked at the Brownshirt leader. He had a gun, too. He had also weighed the odds, and found them unsatisfactory.
“I’ll remember you,” he promised Johnny. “You better not show your mug round here anymore.”
He and his toughs straggled away. Half a block on, they launched into a marching song.
“Thank you,” Johnny took Sigrid by the shoulders and kissed her cheek. Her blouse was in shreds, and she had a welt along the side of her neck. He handed her the Mauser. “Here. You stand watch. Remember, the safety is off.”
“With you, the safety is never on,” she said, with a brave attempt at humour.
He covered his nose and mouth with a handkerchief and rushed into Silbermann’s store.
The smoke was worse than the fire. He fought it all the way up the stairs, groping at the bannister until the railing collapsed under his touch.
