by Robert Moss
Bailey would not, under normal circumstances, have involved himself personally in an approach to a meat porter. However one looked at it, Karl Vogel was a very small fish. Yet he could provide useful bait. There was a chance of catching the Russians red-handed in an assassination attempt. But Bailey’s main interest was in quelling that little devil on his left shoulder. If there were any indication that Karl had been forewarned about his approach, he would have to accept that as proof that his instinct about Johnny was wrong. By informing Johnny of the exact time he would attempt the approach, he had invited the other side to arrange a trap — if Johnny were reporting to them. Bailey had taken certain precautions against that contingency.
“Slumming a bit, aren’t we, darling?” Diana squeezed his arm and leaned over to inspect a heap of blood sausage.
It was perhaps unorthodox to take his wife along, but after all she had been in the game and was much handier with a revolver than he. Furthermore, the expedition was a diversion from the little shops set like jewel boxes along the Rue St.-Honord. Diana had already replaced her entire spring wardrobe and was working her way through the summer collections. In any event, Hennessy from the embassy was loping along on his stiltlike legs beyond the sides of beef. All height and no width, Hennessy in profile looked like a stick insect.
“Is that him?” Diana said, watching the flex of Karl’s muscles as he swung the carcass onto his back.
“That’s him.”
“He’s not bad looking, in a caveman sort of way. But he could do with some care and feeding.”
Karl swung his burden up onto a hook and wiped his hands on his apron.
“Excuse me,” Bailey addressed him in faulty French. “Do you have a few minutes?”
Karl growled something and headed back for the truck. “There’s money in it for you.”
Karl paused and looked at Bailey with cold suspicion. “We could use a healthy young man.”
This was too much for Diana, who started giggling. “That is to say,” Bailey went on, “we have a proposal for you. Perhaps we could have breakfast and talk it over.” Karl shrugged and gestured towards the truck.
“Do you think he understands French?” Diana whispered.
“Karl,” she addressed him in German, somewhat better than Bailey’s French. “I do think you ought to stay and talk with us.”
“Why do you call me Karl?” He glowered at her.
“I think it suits you,” she smiled beatifically. “Do come and talk to us.”
There was something utterly disarming about Diana’s smile. Karl hesitated. It was his foreman who settled things by bawling at him to get back to work. He tore off his apron and hurled it at the man in disgust. The apron snagged on the hat of the portly restaurant buyer, who sailed on, oblivious.
Karl’s eyes darted back and forth between Bailey and Diana as they ate in an all-night café across the road. It was one of those magical places where people who have not yet gone to bed rub shoulders with those who have just finished half the day’s work. What passed for breakfast was not, inevitably, what one would expect at the common table in the dining room at the Senior. Karl devoured an entrecôte steak, more raw than cooked, and washed down with copious draughts of red wine. To Bailey’s alarm, Diana joined in the wine and ordered a crock of onion soup. Bowing to circumstance, Bailey called for coffee and a glass of calvados.
Karl’s table manners were disappointing, but he was no fool. He guessed they were English and — once assured they were not seeking to hire a gigolo — he guessed the rest.
Bailey concluded there was nothing to be lost by bluntness. He made his proposal, and reinforced it with a fat envelope that he placed next to Karl’s wineglass. The boy affected not to see it. A few minutes later, he announced he would need to think things over. He agreed to a second meeting at a couscous dive on the Left Bank, and at a more civilized hour. They let him leave the café first.
“What do you think?” he asked Diana.
“He’s hungry,” she observed, contemplating the plate Karl had scraped clean.
“Yes,” Bailey agreed, noting that the envelope was gone. “I wonder if he’s hungry enough.”
* * *
He had his answer the next morning, when he received a distress signal from Johnny. They met in Notre-Dame cathedral, which was jammed with tourists.
“You seem to be developing a penchant for churches,” Bailey remarked. “Are you planning to convert to Catholicism?”
Johnny explained that Karl had called on him again, highly agitated, and divulged everything that had happened at Les Halles. Once again, Karl had wanted to know what to do.
“So what did you say?”
“I told him to go to Marlowe at once,” Johnny reported. “He was nervous, so I made the arrangements myself.”
“You did the right thing,” Bailey assured him.
The next step was to see whether Karl would keep his appointment at the Algerian restaurant, and whether the Russians would try to play him as a double. Bailey, of course, would attend the rendezvous, to ensure that no suspicion fell on Johnny. Naturally he would take his babysitters. But not Diana. She would be left to make another blitzkrieg assault on the Rue St.-Honore.
Afterwards Bailey told himself he ought to be grateful that the Russians, in the main, were not overly subtle. He suspected that if Max Fabrikant had had charge of the operation things might have worked out rather differently. But Max had apparently left Paris.
Karl kept his appointment at the Casbah restaurant, and they consumed a lunch that later sat in Bailey’s stomach like a slab of cement. Karl was nervous and showed it by talking and drinking far more than seemed natural. He even made an attempt to tell a joke. Bailey was convinced that this, in a German, was a sign that a man was acting out of character.
As before, Karl left first.
Bailey lingered for a bit, drinking coffee in the hope that it might dissolve the weight in his stomach.
When he strolled out into the spring sunshine, they came at him — two heavies in long coats, a third at the wheel of a car with the engine running. He didn’t see the fourth until he backed into him and the man clamped an arm around his throat, blocking off the windpipe, while letting him feel the hardness of the gun jammed up against his ribs.
Hennessy and his men had the drop on the Russians, and they moved fast. But it might not have been fast enough to save Bailey had he not managed to swing his fist back between his attacker’s legs, hard enough for the man’s hammerlock to loosen. Bailey doubled over, wrenching at the arm with the gun, and his assailant toppled over in a clumsy arc and was left wriggling on the pavement like a beetle on its back. The pistol went off in the course of the struggle, and an ear-piercing whine went up from an old Moorish lady, invoking the Prophet.
Bailey surveyed the damage. No serious injuries. His men had their guns on the Russians; but the Russians had their guns out, too. There were police whistles from beyond the Boulevard St.-Michel, and klaxons that were getting louder.
“It’s a standoff,” he announced to Hennessy. “Let’s get out of this quietly while we can.”
In the car, nursing a bruised elbow, he said to Hennessy, “It’s quite fantastic. I believe they intended to abduct me. In the heart of Paris.”
“It’s happened here before,” Hennessy said drily. “Quite often, in fact. I’m afraid they’re simply not house-trained.”
Bailey briefed his Paris man on how to deal with Johnny and on what to say if the striped-pants brigade chose to make waves. Though the approach to Karl had ended in a fiasco, Bailey had the satisfaction of knowing that Johnny had proved his sincerity. The devil at his left ear had stopped clucking. He decided it would be best to leave on the early train, to avoid any embarrassing questions. His mind turned to Diana’s hatboxes. Making room for them on the train might be even more difficult than communicating with Johnny in Moscow.
5 - The Long March
Insurrection is a calculus with very indefinite magn
itudes, the value of which may change every day.
-KARL MARX
1
When Johnny was ordered to return to Moscow alone, he obeyed, though he felt his heart was breaking. He said goodbye to Sigrid at the hotel, so as not to prolong the leave-taking.
“I’ll go to General Berzin,” he told her. “I’ll get you assigned to work with me. You’re not going to refuse, are you?”
“Don’t be silly.”
The tears came then, and he felt her heart flutter as he held her to his chest, so he knew she wasn’t lost to him completely.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” he said with more conviction than he felt.
In Moscow, General Berzin kept him waiting for a week. When he was finally received at the Fourth Department, he requested to be assigned to Paris. Berzin shook his head.
“It’s already been decided,” he said. “We need you in China.”
“Then I request to be accompanied by my companion, Sigrid Eckhardt.”
Berzin made a note of the name. “I won’t promise anything,” he said curtly. “And frankly, you’ll be better off on your own. This isn’t a job for a woman.”
Bitterly disappointed, Johnny listened as the chief of the Fourth Department outlined the urgency of his mission.
The Japanese were in Manchuria, threatening Russia’s back door. A Communist insurrection in China would force the Japanese to turn their attentions south. If the Communists won, they would treble the population under Soviet rule, adding four hundred million Chinese to two hundred million Russians. Then the revolution would be unstoppable.
The Chinese rebels had made themselves a fortress up in the mountains of Kiangsi, where they were running things like the first Bolsheviks. They had shot the landlords, closed the temples, abolished marriage and private property. But their enemies were gathering strength. With money from the financiers and gang lords of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek was mustering troops and planes for an extermination campaign against the Kiangsi Soviet. Hitler had sent General von Seeckt — the man Johnny had once been ordered to kill — as the head of a German military mission that was advising Chiang’s forces. The Communists were desperately in need of weapons, training, organization — and a viable military plan.
“Your first stop is Shanghai,” Berzin told Johnny. “That’s the gun sight through which we take aim at China.” The brains of the insurrection, the Comintern advisers assigned to the Far Eastern Bureau, were in Shanghai. “It’ll be like old times for you,” Berzin added cheerfully. “You’ll be fighting von Seeckt, and you’ll find a lot of your old German comrades in China. The German civil war, ass-deep in the rice paddies. By the way, a particular friend of yours is in charge. Emil Brandt.”
Johnny stared at him.
“It should be quite a reunion,” Berzin suggested.
“It certainly will.”
The mention of Emil revived his spirits a little.
Maybe I’ll find a way to pay the bastard back, he told himself. I’ll have that satisfaction, at least.
“I want you to be completely candid in your reports,” Berzin said, as if he had read Johnny’s thoughts. “Let me know whether I can believe what Shanghai is telling us.”
“Oh, yes,” Johnny said, “I’ll be candid.”
Wherever they send me, he thought, it’s the same play. Only the backdrops change.
He wrote to Sigrid and found a carrier pigeon to take the letter to Paris. His messenger was a voluble Argentinian revolutionist. Like most of the Argentinians who turned up in Moscow, he had an Italian name; everyone called him Verdi because, with his shaggy mane of grey hair and his staring eyes, he looked like a distracted composer. He was en route to Rio and Sao Paulo. Brazil, he told Johnny with amazing confidence, would be the next Communist power. But like other Latin Americans Johnny had met in Moscow, Verdi spent so much energy winding himself up verbally that it was doubtful whether there would be any left when the time came for action. Johnny ventured to say as much. Instead of taking offense, the Argentine said, “You don’t understand the Latin temperament. It’s hard for you wurst eaters, because you come from such a cold climate. You get men to risk their lives by imposing an iron discipline. What do you call it? Cadaver horseshit?”
“Kadavergehorsam,” Johnny corrected him. “The obedience of corpses.”
“In South America, to get men to risk their lives, to make a revolution, we have to talk a lot. That’s how we attain that fever pitch of excitement in which nobody cares what it costs. In that way talk makes action inescapable.”
He makes revolution sound like a crime of passion, Johnny thought. He decided not to prolong the argument, in case something that was said should lose him his carrier pigeon.
His words to Sigrid were tender and full of longing. He asked her not to give up her painting. It’s the artist in her that will bring her back, he told himself. Her conscious mind might be able to rationalize the things she would see in her work for Max into neat, bloodless categories; the artist in her couldn’t.
For more than a week he sat on the Trans-Siberian Express. He rarely stirred from his berth except to go to the lavatory or to visit the dining car, where the tables were embellished with dishevelled bouquets of paper flowers and dusty black bottles of wine that never seemed to be opened. The piles of birch logs along the rail bed were black at the core, silvered along the trunks, as if coated with frost.
Vladivostok looked like a city at war. There were submarines in the harbour and flotillas of radio-controlled motorboats, stuffed with explosives, that could be used like monster torpedoes. In the rail yards he saw freight trains with tanks and howitzers and more submarines lashed to their flatcars. He was subjected to repeated identity checks and practiced, on Soviet soil, the role he would play when he stepped off the steamer to Shanghai.
His papers identified him as one Arne Paulsen, born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The experts at the OMS had assured him that the passport was real enough, the property of an American citizen of Finnish extraction who had decided to migrate to Russia for the sake of socialism and world peace. From Johnny’s viewpoint, it had one flaw. He discovered it only on the voyage south from Vladivostok, when he started trying to forge Paulsen’s signature. Try as he might, the man’s handwriting was almost impossible to reproduce. It seemed as tangled and twisted as a blackberry patch. He did not give up. He needed to be able to toss off a plausible version of Paulsen’s signature, because the OMS had arranged to wire ten thousand dollars in the American’s name to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. He was still scratching away when he saw the skyscrapers of Shanghai rise out of a flat horizon of yellow mud and flooded paddy fields.
He had been instructed to check into the Palace Hotel. Its Victorian facade looked homely amongst the white palaces of the Bund, overlooking the warships and sampans on the muddy river. He discovered a second defect in his passport when he made his leisurely progress, some hours later, along the Bund to the confident domed tower of the Hong Kong Bank. Brass lions guarded its portals, their features rubbed smooth by the hands of numberless Chinamen anxious to absorb the predator spirit they embodied.
A British clerk, impervious to the heat in his starched collar, dark coat and striped trousers, received Johnny with all proper decorum and begged him to take tea while he verified that the sum in question had indeed been transferred for Mr. Paulsen’s benefit. He was gone for less than five minutes and showed no emotion when Johnny informed him that he wanted to have the entire amount in cash.
“Perhaps I might just have your signature, sir. And your passport. I won’t keep you a moment, sir.”
This time, the delay was appreciably longer, and Johnny thought he saw someone — an authoritative-looking individual with muttonchop whiskers and half-moon spectacles — peer at him from a discreet remove beyond a glass partition. He became uneasy as the minutes ticked by. He was half resolved to get up and leave when the clerk came back, polite and impersonal as before.
“I see th
at your passport has expired, sir.”
“Why, yes. I’ve been traveling quite a bit. But I had it renewed.” Johnny was prepared for this. The passport had indeed expired, but the Comintern’s experts had doctored it. It bore the stamp of the American consul in Tokyo, extending it for one year.
“Would you mind very much if I asked why it has been extended for only twelve months, sir?”
Johnny could only guess at the point of this question. “Well, I’ll be going back to the States before it runs out again,” he said lamely.
“I see.”
The clerk rang a bell on his desk. Johnny tensed, but it was only the signal for a cashier to come in with the money, sorted into packets of crisp new bills.
He signed a receipt for the total, minus the bank’s commission, and the clerk returned his passport.
“A pleasure to do business with you, sir.”
“Likewise.”
“Would you like an escort to your hotel, sir? I must warn you, the streets can be quite dangerous for a newcomer.”
“I’m sure I’ll survive.”
2
Shanghai was the perfect setting for intrigue. It was many cities, not one, and in all of them allegiances could be bought and sold as cheaply as a man’s life or the body of a nine-year-old girl. There was the colonial dream of number three, the Bund, home of the Shanghai Club, where the taipans gulped their stengahs at the longest bar in the world. There were the cabarets and stylish villas of Frenchtown. There were the glittering lights and the streetcars of the Nanking Road, with its famed emporiums — the Sun Sun, the Wing On — where the mistresses of Chinese generals and Green Gang mobsters came to shop. There was the stifling, noisy round of the cotton mills, the shoe factories, the silk filatures, where children were worked for fifteen hours a day, or until they dropped. There were the Americanized millionaires who raced around in their big cars with armed bodyguards on the running boards. There were twenty-five thousand women who hawked their bodies. There were followers of every flag in the world — nine flew over the International Settlement, guarded by its fierce, bearded Sikhs — and plenty willing to sell themselves to any or all.
