Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  He found the Silbermann family in a prayer circle in the sitting room.

  He announced, “I’m going to take you out of this.”

  “The unexpected things decide your fate,” Sigrid said afterwards. “Or perhaps the unexpected is fate. Like shooting over a crossroads at night in a car traveling at high speed, without knowing it was possible to go a different way until the chance is gone.”

  She moved into Johnny’s apartment in Neukölln the same night. The choice was made for her by events. The Brownshirts knew her face, and the manager of the Palace Café, who was not to be relied on, could give them her name. Out of concern for the Silbermanns, who meant nothing to her except a kindly old man who occasionally bade her good morning and a brace of children who were never allowed to play in the street — and the sense of shared humanity — she had committed herself. Not yet to the party, but to a life in hiding. His life.

  Johnny refused to let her go back to the restaurant or her previous lodgings. He sent a messenger to collect her things and settle up with the landlady. She found she had to adjust to the routine of a nocturnal animal. Johnny came and went at all hours, and house guests appeared without warning to camp out on the twin mattresses in the spare room. Their faces sometimes frightened her: the faces of men who had burned their bridges. She sketched them in secret, until she had a collection worthy of Hieronymous Bosch.

  The central figure was missing. She realized that only when he arrived at their doorstep.

  Johnny was away. He had told her not to wait up; he would not be back until morning, perhaps not for another day. This was what she had expected, and she knew it had nothing to do with other women. His overnight absences, and the night callers, were already familiar.

  But this caller was different. In the half light from above, the face was a death mask, with great hollows of darkness under the eyebrows and the flaring cheekbones. Unlike the others, he didn’t bother with a Parole, a password; Johnny made her memorize a new one every few days.

  He merely said, “You are Sigrid. You do not resemble your sister.” The words, oddly grammatical, were delivered in a voice she judged to be foreign not because of any identifiable accent, but because of the utter absence of one.

  “What are you looking at? Are you going to let me in?”

  “Wh-who are you?” she stammered.

  “I am a friend of your sister. Also of Johnny. My name is Max. Perhaps he mentioned me?”

  “No — I don’t think so.” Johnny had said little about his secret work for the party, but he had talked a great deal about a boyhood friend, a sailor from Hamburg with a lust for life who had fought with him on the barricades. She remembered Johnny’s disappointment when he had found that his friend was not in Berlin and could not be reached immediately. She was sure this vaguely menacing stranger could not be the same man. She said, “Is Johnny expecting you?”

  “I wanted to surprise him.”

  He moved forward into the light, and she saw his eyes. They seemed to reach out and touch her.

  She wanted to close the door in his face. She couldn’t do it. She was frightened, but fascinated too. She sensed she was in the presence of a tremendous power, a concentrated force of will.

  “Johnny’s not here,” she said, too sharply. “I’ll give him a message if you like.”

  “I don’t wish to trouble you. I’ll wait for him.”

  The security chain was still in place. She touched it with her hand, making sure. She felt he was watching her fingers, mocking her caution, though his eyes never travelled from her face.

  “It would be pleasant to talk about Helene,” Max suggested. “I saw her only a few days ago. In fact, she gave me a letter for you.”

  He plucked it from the folds of his coat and held it up, so she could see the handwriting on the envelope. It was Helene’s.

  Sigrid released the chain and drew back the door.

  Max lay on the sofa, chain-smoking and drinking Johnny’s whisky. Sigrid perched on the edge of the arm-chair, putting records on the Victrola when he asked for them. She had brought a boxful with her when she moved in. They were mostly classical, which suited Max. His tastes were operatic. Their conversation was now accompanied by the third act of Aida.

  It was less a conversation, she realized, than an interrogation.

  The style of the questioning was casual, even languid. But the flow was unremitting.

  Which of Johnny’s friends did she know?

  Did Johnny talk about his work for the party?

  Had he ever mentioned Heinz Kordt?

  Did she take an interest in politics? What about her parents?

  Helene’s letter said that Max should be treated as one of the family and that his instructions were to be obeyed without question. Max must therefore be a general in the shadow army in which her lover and her sister were enrolled.

  She tried to carry out Helene’s wishes. She answered Max’s questions, played him records and, when he said he was hungry, went out to the kitchen and cooked eggs and sausage.

  The first time she rebelled was when he asked if she would show him her pictures.

  She said, “I’d rather not.”

  She had been working on a portrait of Johnny, a surprise for his birthday. It showed him in a sailor’s blue jacket with the sea behind him.

  “Why not? I’ve heard you have an exceptional talent.”

  “I’d rather not, that’s all.” How could she explain? There was something of the artist in this man, who understood music and quoted Goethe and Heine in between the questions. Yet her whole spirit revolted at the idea of admitting him to the private world of her art, as if she would be letting in something that would blot out the sun.

  “I’ll relent on one condition,” Max announced. “Which is?”

  “That you draw me.”

  The eyes were the hardest part. The pencil could not translate the intensity of that stare. But she persevered until she had a certain likeness. She puzzled over it for a time. It reminded her of someone else. Who was it?

  Of course.

  She scribbled a couplet from Goethe across the bottom and handed him the sketch.

  “You’ve caught something—” He paused over the words, then recited them out loud with his eyes closed:

  When I shall introduce you at this revel,

  Will you appear as sorcerer — or devil?

  Max threw back his head and laughed. “Faust to Mephistopheles!” he exclaimed.

  “My dear Sigrid, I’m flattered!”

  By 2:00 A.M., she could hardly keep her eyes open.

  “Do you mind if I go to bed?”

  “Not at all. Would you like some company?” His tongue flicked lightly at the corner of his mouth.

  “I’m afraid I’m a reactionary,” she responded, making light of it. “My natural proclivity is towards monogamy. Anyway, I’m too tired.”

  It was another little test, she realized. He was probing her, not pursuing something he particularly wanted.

  When he bent to kiss her hand before she retired, his lips never grazed the skin.

  She woke to the murmur of voices from the living room.

  She threw back the shutters. The sun had not yet risen, though the sky to the east, where it was visible between the squat workers’ tenements, was salmon pink.

  She slipped out of bed and crouched by the door, trying to make out what the two men were saying.

  “I would trust her with my life.” That was Johnny. He sounded wounded and angry.

  “You are a fool. You are risking everything.”

  “For God’s sake, Max. She’s Helene’s sister.”

  “But you’re not with Helene. And I am not asking you why. That is immaterial. What matters is the girl is not even a party member.”

  “She’s been doing work for Münzenberg’s operation. She did the artwork for that new poster that’s all over Berlin.”

  “You are evading the issue,” Max went on, implacable. “You are putting me
n’s lives in danger.”

  “What men?”

  “You and me. The others who have been here. Who knows the whole list? Who knows how much you let slip in the course of this — infatuation?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “On the contrary. I understand only too well.”

  Sigrid wrapped herself in the fur-trimmed coat Helene had sent from Russia and burst into the front room.

  “If you have something to say about me—” she challenged Max Fabrikant “—then say it to my face.”

  “You see?” Max turned to Johnny. “She’s spirited. Too spirited to run without guiding reins.”

  “Sigrid — darling—” Johnny moved to hold her, but she stepped around him and pushed up against Max. There was barely a wrinkle in his suit, though he had been lying on the sofa all night long. But a blue-black shadow rose from his jawline all the way to the cheekbones.

  “What do you want of us?” she demanded.

  “I’m sorry we disturbed your rest,” Max responded. “That was thoughtless.”

  “What do you want?” she repeated.

  “You must ask Johnny. He knows well enough.” Max ground a cigarette into the ashtray. “For the moment, you will please get dressed and leave. There are private matters we have to discuss.”

  She was stunned by this sudden brutality. What right did this intruder have to order her out of her own home?

  “It’s not necessary,” Johnny said to Max. “We can go to Mailer’s place. It’s safe enough, and they’ll make you a decent breakfast. Sweetheart, why don’t you go back to bed and get some sleep?”

  “I’m up,” she said coldly. “And I want some fresh air.”

  When she came back, Johnny was alone, and he was so gentle and so patient with her that she knew something terrible had happened.

  He let her exhaust her complaints about Max’s behaviour before he said, “They want you to join the party. It’s not at all a complicated business, if you agree to do it. You’ll be interviewed, of course, but that’s just a formality.”

  He said this matter-of-factly, as if it was a question of catching the right bus. But she could see the anxiety in his face.

  She said, “He gave you an order, didn’t he?”

  “A very direct order,” Johnny said quietly.

  “For God’s sake, what right does that man have to come into our home and tell us how to live? How can he order you to tell me what to do? Does he think I’m your property? What right—”

  “He has every right,” Johnny interrupted her. His tone was soft yet firm. “Listen to me, Sigrid. Max is an extraordinary man, perhaps the most extraordinary man I know.”

  “He’s a spy, isn’t he?”

  “He is a Soviet officer. It is his duty to guard our secrets. From traitors and from — carelessness. The lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women depend on him. In the pursuit of his duty, he is totally honest and absolutely ruthless. In all the years I have known him, I have never known him to do anything for trivial or selfish reasons.”

  “Am I under suspicion? Does he think I’m a police informer?”

  “No, of course not. He knows you belong on our side. But you’re not fully committed. Suppose I told you that I am a major in the Red Army? Suppose I told you that the men who were here the night before last have been smuggling Belgian rifles into Germany so we can fight the Fascists?”

  “Do you think I’d betray you?” she came back fiercely. “Do you think I’d love you any less?”

  “I know you wouldn’t. But to be involved in secret work requires training and discipline. If you are going to share my life, you will have to share the discipline that makes it possible. That’s why Max is right. I suppose I recognized that from the day I fell in love with you. I just wanted to postpone the day when you would have to make your choice. I’ve been ordered to bring you into the party—”

  “And if I refuse?”

  She sat clutching her knees. He lay his hands over hers, covering them. He said, “Then I am ordered to leave you.” He bent and kissed both her hands. “It is your choice,” he pursued. “I can’t make it for you. I love you more than my life. But if you refuse, I will leave you, because I am fighting for a cause that matters more than you or me or the happiness of any individual.”

  She shook herself like someone in a restless dream.

  He did not try to comfort her when she got up and went padding barefoot into the kitchen, her hair tousled and wild.

  There was a constant pounding above his eyes, and his tongue was swollen. It hurt him to swallow. He had spent hours wrangling with the organizers of the Red Front Fighters’ Federation before he came home to face Max. A rapid inspection of the party’s combat units in Berlin and the south had persuaded him that the sanguine reports Willi Leov, the front’s burly president, had been sending to Moscow were lies — more deadly lies than Pollitt’s. Leov told Moscow what he thought would reflect credit on himself, leaving Johnny with the task of trying to turn a paper army into a real one.

  The burden that weighed on his shoulders seemed crushing. But he must not — would not — stumble under it. There were a few of them, only a few, who had the courage and the stamina to overcome the morass of cynical accommodation and appeasement that threatened to engulf the party and deliver Germany to Hitler. Max was one of them. Heinz was another — God, how he yearned to see Heinz, to be with a man who had never run from a battle! Heinz would have known what to say to Sigrid.

  Because they were so few in number, they had to demand vastly more of themselves than other men. That was the penalty for belonging to their order — and the reward. That was why Max was right.

  If only Sigi could understand...

  He leaned back against the arm of the sofa, resting his eyes.

  He woke with a start and had no idea whether he had been asleep for two minutes or twenty. In his dream Putzi, the cat he had played with as a boy, was raking its claws up and down the arm of his mother’s prize sofa, lacerating the crewel upholstery.

  The sound of scratching was coming from the bedroom. Then he remembered the letter and rushed to the door. She was standing in the middle of the room. In her hand was the chopping knife she had used on the Brownshirts outside Silbermann’s store. At her feet were her paintings, hacked to shreds. His own left eye stared back at him from a flapping strip of canvas. At one side he recognized a fragment of Sigrid’s portrait of her sister, rigged out in a silk hat and a man’s tailcoat like the heroine of a Dietrich film.

  Sigrid’s face was flushed, her hair spilling over her eyes.

  Her chest heaved as she turned to confront him.

  She said, “I’m ready now.”

  7

  She joined more than the party, and did so with her eyes open. Already the keeper of a safe house, she became a courier for the underground, ferrying messages around the city on a bicycle, servicing dead-drops. She took to wearing a knife on these missions — not a kitchen utensil now but a switchblade, something worthy of a backstreet hoodlum — taped to her leg under her long skirt. Three nights a week, she went to a special school for members of the Apparat. They taught her ideology, and they taught her how to kill with her bare hands. The rare nights she and Johnny were at home alone together, she immersed herself in the same books he had struggled with years before, when he was still a novice burning to unlock the secret of history.

  Johnny was proud of her; yet the cold frenzy that began to possess her troubled him. He recalled the strange words of warning Helene had used in England. The night she spurned his advances in favour of an unfinished chapter of Lenin, he asked himself whether in winning her to his cause he had not already begun to lose her.

  That’s nonsense, he thought. I can’t be jealous of what I have made her.

  And a hour later, when she crept into his arms, sleepy but loving, he told himself Helene was wrong. Sigrid was his, more completely than before. They had lost nothing; they had added a new dimension.
/>   * * *

  Johnny went to Hamburg to report on the reorganization of the party’s combat units and found the man he most needed to see.

  The newspapers were full of the results of the latest elections. Hitler had stumbled. The Nazis had lost two million votes, compared with the last elections. The Communists had gained ground. Thälmann and the party’s propaganda machine trumpeted the news that six million Germans had voted Communist. They boomed out a new slogan: “Hitler’s ship is sinking!” They did not dwell on the fact that while the party’s strength had increased, it had still attracted only half as many votes as the Nazis.

  “Some victory!” Kordt snorted.

  They walked by the Alster Pavilion in the tawny after-noon light. It was the perfect hour for discreet liaisons. Courting couples twittered along the railings, their conversations masked by the Viennese waltzes that echoed from the bandstand inside the pavilion.

  Heinz had suggested this meeting place. They strolled along the smart promenade to the Binnen-Alster and stood side by side watching the swans and the little screw steamers bobbing on the water. Twenty paces behind, Karl Vogel, the young tough Johnny remembered from Berlin, slouched along with his hands in his pockets.

  “Do you always go around with a bodyguard?” Johnny asked.

  “Always. And I never spend two nights in the same bed. Lucky for me, there are plenty of friendly beds in Ham-burg.”

  He slapped Johnny on the shoulder. “You needn’t look like a dog just pissed on your foot. I still know how to look after myself. You’re the one who should worry. It’s not smart to be seen with me.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Haven’t they told you?” Heinz looked at him quizzically. “They called a special leadership meeting to discuss my conduct.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m a fighter, Johnny. You know that. I judge men by whether I can count on them if I get cornered, not by the smell of their aftershave. I’ve built the best anti-Nazi fighting group in the country. You know what the others are like. Tell me I’m wrong. What the bosses don’t like is, I’ll give a lad a gun even if he can’t tell Uncle Joe Stalin from a boiled potato — as long as he’s ready to use it on a Nazi.”