Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  The words rushed out in Stalin’s thick Georgian accent, so that Johnny missed a few, but not the terrifying thrust of the argument.

  “Hitler must see this!” The Vozhd shouted. “He must be made to see it!”

  Manuilsky nodded, his hands folded piously in his lap.

  “We’ll show him who’s running Russia,” Stalin went on. “And we’ll make him respect us. There is a big German community in Brazil. If we succeed in Brazil, he’ll take notice. What do you think?”

  “There’s no question about it,” Johnny agreed.

  Everything he had learned since he had first turned the stiff, water-stained pages of Heinz Kordt’s diary should have prepared him for this revelation. But when it came, the raw cynicism and power lust of Stalin’s statements left him breathless. Stalin lampooned the most famous advocates of the Popular Front he called the French writers “shit-eaters” — and heaped contempt on the democratic leaders in the West. He saw enemies on all sides. He quizzed Johnny for material to add to the prosecutor’s dossier on Piatnitsky and other “deviationists” in the Comintern. Johnny obliged, so far as memory and imagination would serve him. He was sure that Stalin would not have bared his deepest instincts unless he had been informed by Manuilsky that Johnny was 100 percent reliable. Johnny made every effort to live up to that reputation. One false note after Stalin’s revelations, and he would join Piatnitsky in the bowels of the Lubyanka.

  The conversation ended after three in the morning.

  Johnny came away convinced that the Brazil operation was different in kind from the Comintern’s previous revolutionary adventures. The South American bureau wasn’t being sent to make a revolution. It was being sent to Rio to stage a coup d’etat — to impress Hitler and to cut the ground from under the feet of those who argued that, in a world that contained Hitler and Mussolini, the Communists must make common cause with all the forces opposed to Fascism.

  Part II - A COUNTRY OF GODS AND MEN (1934-1936)

  Walk slowly in processions or the saint will fall.

  -BRAZILIAN PEASANT PROVERB

  6 - Our Man in Rio

  We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book.

  -RUDYARD KIPLING.

  Kim

  1

  There was a mournful sameness about railroad hotels, Johnny thought. The same sense of transience, of imminent loss. The beds always looked as if someone had just got out of them. The whores in the street were brisk and business-like, seeking out clients who had time to kill, but not enough to start living. In the Grand Hotel in Copenhagen — railroad hotels always had names like that — Johnny’s room had a pitch pine dresser, a two-bar radiator that crackled as if it were frying insects, a mud-coloured portrait of an unknown burgher and twin beds. The bed nearer the window had the lumpier mattress, but he picked it for the view of the great gabled roof of the central station, mottled and grey. On top was a spire out of Grimm’s fairy tales and a clock that had stopped at the precise hour they had left Moscow.

  “Hurry up!” Helene rattled the door handle from outside. “I’m starved!”

  “Coming!” Johnny called back. He closed his suitcase and shoved it into the closet. There was no point in unpacking. They had been given forty-eight hours in Copenhagen — just enough time to call at the Westbureau and collect travel papers and final instructions before the onward journey to Genoa and a “spaghetti boat” full of Italian emigrants bound for Rio.

  When Manuilsky had told him that Helene would accompany him to Brazil, Johnny had protested that she wasn’t well enough to do the job. Manuilsky had pointed out that she had made a remarkable recovery after her return from Shanghai, which was true. Johnny had explained that there were personal problems. When he had requested point-blank that Sigrid should be sent in her sister’s place, Manuilsky had lost his temper.

  “Do you think we’re sending you to Brazil to screw in the sand dunes?” Manuilsky yelled at him.

  “I think I’ve earned the right to choose my own assistant.”

  “The choice has been made. What’s the matter with you? You know we don’t tolerate romantic attachments. Get a new woman. If you don’t like it, give me your papers. There are plenty of others who would give their left ball to go.”

  That had silenced Johnny.

  I have to get to Copenhagen, he had told himself. At least that far. Colin Bailey would be waiting for him; Johnny had mailed the postcard, and a courier from Bailey had met him at the Arbat metro station. But there was something more urgent. Sigrid was in Copenhagen. He had to find her. He must try to get her away from Max — if she would still have him.

  That first night in Copenhagen, he sat with Helene at a restaurant table in front of an open fire. The wood smoke carried the smell of sour apples. The food was wonderful — a soup made from morels, ham in puff pastry, little delicacies of the sea — but Johnny didn’t notice.

  Helene looked up and said, “I’m sorry it’s me. I didn’t ask to go to Brazil. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know.”

  She pushed the crumbs on her plate into little stepped pyramids. “You’re still in love with Sigi, aren’t you?” she challenged him.

  “I haven’t changed,” he conceded. “I don’t know about her. There was a letter — not a good letter.”

  “You went looking for her today, didn’t you?”

  He hesitated. He had spent nearly three hours after they’d arrived trying to find Sigrid. He had asked about her at the Vesterport, a big, blocky construction in the centre of town. The Westbureau of the Comintern had its secret headquarters on the third floor, behind the brass plate of an obscure engineering firm. Johnny’s contacts had professed never to have heard of Sigrid. He had gone to Smollett, the Fourth Department man, who had been transferred from London. Smollett knew nothing about Max’s operations but had volunteered to ask about the girl. He had warned that it might take some time. In his frustration Johnny had even gone to Wollweber, the German boss of the Westbureau, a vulgar bully with eyes like slits in a bulging gourd. He had gone even though Smollett had warned him that there were nasty rumours about Wollweber — specifically, that the German had been trading information with Gestapo agents, ratting on comrades who had presumed to criticize his leadership. Johnny had found Wollweber cordial to begin with, and liberal with his akvavit. But when Johnny had asked about Sigi and Max, the Comintern chief had jabbed a finger at his chest and cautioned him not to go sticking his nose into business that didn’t concern him.

  Johnny met Helene’s eyes.

  Can I trust her?

  There was a bond between them. In Shanghai it had saved her life. In London it had saved him from arrest. Helene felt something for him — not love, perhaps, but loyalty and affection. But surely that was a reason for her to stand between him and Sigi, not bring them together, especially if she could sense the force of the temptation that had been tugging at him since he arrived in Copenhagen: the temptation to abandon a life of loneliness and lies, to sweep Sigrid up and take her somewhere they could be simply man and woman, without counting the cost to others. And beyond all of that, she still belonged to Max.

  “Did you find her?” Helene prodded.

  He thought, what have I got to lose? If I leave Copenhagen without seeing Sigrid, God knows if I’ll see her again.

  “Nobody admits to knowing her,” he reported. “Wollweber told me to piss off.”

  “That sounds like him.” She took a slim panatella out of her bag and held it over the candle. “Would you like me to find Sigi for you?” she asked coolly.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly serious. If you’re sure it’s what you want.”

  “But why?”

  “You’ve lived for thirty-five years,” she said through the white haze, “and you’ve managed to learn absolutely nothing about women.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s accurate.”

  “Not quite.
I’ve learned that you’ll never cease to surprise me.”

  2

  Tiny lights winked on and off in the trees like swarms of darting fireflies. Colin Bailey paused to inspect the strings of lights that were threaded through the drooping branches of a blue spruce.

  “The Danes say every bulb in the Tivoli Gardens works,” he remarked to Johnny. “Do you suppose it’s true? I can’t find a dead one on this tree. Good Lord, there must be millions of them—” his glance took in the copses of illuminated trees, a blazing Persian palace, a Chinese theatre where the light shimmered on a curtain shaped like a peacock’s tail, the bright pavilions and peep-show arcades. “They’re a meticulous people, the Danes. Something German in that, I suppose. And yet not like the Germans at all. What about over there?”

  Bailey pointed with his umbrella to a beer garden by the lake. The water looked very black, the swans inanimate — decoys sliding on glass.

  “Whatever you say,” Johnny responded.

  They sat at a table in the open air. On the other side of the beer garden a troop of husky young Germans were booming out drinking songs in their own language, making their trestle tables rock like rowing boats on the swell. They looked like a group advertisement for the Hitler Youth, but they were probably harmless, Johnny thought. Tourists looking for beer and girls. He was grateful for the uproar. It would make it very hard for anyone to tune in to his conversation with Bailey.

  A bouncing waitress came with their beer. She wore a plunging bodice despite the nip of winter in the air, and Johnny smiled at her.

  Habit or nervousness? Bailey asked himself. Johnny was the reverse of relaxed. Bailey sensed that his nerves were stretched taut.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more notice,” Johnny said when they were alone.

  “I’ve been waiting for your message since we got confirmation you were safely out of Shanghai. That went all right, did it?”

  “No complaints.”

  That’s two borders we’ve helped you across, Bailey thought. We’ll have to watch it the third time.

  “Your reports from China were flawless,” Bailey told him. “If Uncle Joe had read them, he might have learned something.”

  “They weren’t exclusive. I sent almost identical reports to Moscow. They changed nothing, as you know. In Moscow, there are two categories of facts — convenient facts and inconvenient ones. My assessments came under the second heading.” He took a pull on his beer. “By the way, I met Stalin last week. He’s not very tall.”

  Bailey sat riveted while Johnny recounted the story of his nocturnal call on the Vozhd.

  I’ll go to Winston with this, Bailey promised himself when Johnny described the depths of Stalin’s longing to impress Hitler. The London clubs — including the cabinet room were full of comfortable chaps who held that the Nazis and the Russians could never make a deal, almost as many as believed that Hitler meant no real harm. That same week, he had listened to a Tory peer who had insisted that Hitler’s territorial appetites could be satisfied with a nice little slice of Portuguese Africa.

  Johnny started to explain his new mission.

  “Brazil?” Bailey echoed him. “What the devil do the Russians want with that?”

  Bailey’s knowledge of Brazil was — to put it charitably — sketchy. He knew that Brazil was a very large and very green chunk on the map of South America, that it spoke Portuguese instead of Spanish because of a fifteenth-century Pope, and that slavery had been legal until long after the American Civil War, when a homegrown Brazilian emperor had abolished it just before the slaveowners kicked him out. He dimly remembered one or more articles on Brazil that Kipling had published in the Telegraph before the Great Crash. They were about jolly native festivals and thundering hydroelectric turbines; Kipling was rather good on manmade thunder. Then there was that planter fellow Bailey had once met in Kuala Lumpur, a man grown fat and florid and whiskery in the tropics, who clapped his hands to summon the servants. This Malayan planter had spun a long-winded tale about how he had struck a tremendous blow for Britain — not to mention his own pocket — by smuggling rubber plants down the Amazon in the teeth of. crocodiles, piranhas and manhunters with rifles and machetes who had orders to kill anyone who tried to break the, rubber monopoly. The man had complained bitterly, a quarter of a century after the event, that he deserved a peerage, or a knighthood at least, and had implored Bailey to intercede with the King.

  Oh, yes, there was that polo player. Carlos something. Pal of Diana’s. Goes about reeking of pomade and making eyes at girls. No. On second thought, he was an Argentinian.

  This, then, was the sum of Bailey’s knowledge of Brazil. The store was not increased by service reports he might have forgotten or overlooked. In 1935 British Intelligence did not have one single case officer en poste anywhere in South America. Bailey thought it would be injudicious to divulge this inconvenient fact to Johnny.

  The way Johnny explained things, Stalin had set his sights on Brazil for two reasons: to blow his critics in the Comintern out of the water and to show Hitler that he was no slouch when it came to grabbing Lebensraum.

  “How much of a chance do you suppose the Russians have got?”

  “They’ve got a front man called Prestes. He doesn’t look like anything much, but he talks a lot less than most South Americans, and to better effect. He’s something of a national hero. As long as he doesn’t go about draped in the red flag, he could pull in quite a following.”

  Johnny explained the master plan for the revolt, as it had ripened in Moscow. Geography was important. The country was vast, the rivers ran the wrong way and the mountain ranges were in the wrong places; over huge areas, land communications were non-existent or agonizingly slow. It would probably be impossible to seize the whole country with a single blow. At the same time, if the revolution succeeded in several regions — above all the north, where the peasants were starving and ready to risk everything it would take months for the government to organize a counterattack. If a rising in the north were combined with lightning coups in the capital and major cities like Sao Paulo, the counterattack might never come at all. The Russians were confident that Prestes had enough friends who wore epaulettes — even generals at the Ministry of War — to make that happen. The Brazilians weren’t fighters. To be sure, they were not averse to killing each other in knife fights in the slums, or in land wars between peasants and the hired guns of the backlands “colonels,” or in pursuit of bizarre millenarian visions. But when it came to deciding who was going to sit in the presidential palace, the rival factions would line up their forces in fierce military array and set to frantically counting noses. Then the weaker side would discreetly abandon the field.

  “I begin to see,” Bailey remarked. “They say the Portuguese don’t kill the bull. Your people are ready to kill the bull, and that makes everything different. So you’ll be the military adviser?”

  “The military specialist,” Johnny modified this. “I have been appointed to the South American bureau. It means that with Emil and Prestes — and the Argentinian — I would take part in the strategic decisions.”

  “Excellent!” Bailey steepled his fingers, trying to calculate the effects of a wrecking job on the Soviet gang in Rio. It would give a definite boost to British influence in South America. It would be a stinging humiliation for Manuilsky and all of Stalin’s cronies in the Comintern. It would probably help the Reds like Willi Münzenberg and the French lot, who were campaigning for a Popular Front against the Nazis and had been getting kicked in the teeth up till now. Bailey’s mind ranged over the reverse scenario. If Stalin succeeded in turning Brazil into the second Communist power, a whole continent would be in jeopardy. The Americans could probably be counted out as allies in a future war; they would be too busy having kittens over what was going on south of their border. There was also the chance that Stalin would do a cynical swap with Hitler. You take Brazil, with its million-odd Germans. We’ll take the Baltic states and a nice chunk of Poland..
.

  It dawned on Bailey that there might, just might, be something even bigger at stake.

  “For God’s sake,” he burst out. “This is Uncle Joe’s private hobbyhorse. If it all blows up in his face, on top of the way he’s treating all the Old Bolsheviks in Moscow—”

  He cut himself off just as he was about to add: we might be able to put the skids under the bugger.

  He kept the completion of the thought to himself, not because of the jumbling of metaphors, though that was scarcely pardonable in a Wykehamist, but because these were very early days and it simply wouldn’t do to get overexcited. He hadn’t even worked out how he was going to service his agent on the other side of Rio.

  He said merely, “It’s splendid. You’ll hold all the strands in your two fists. You can make or break this revolt whenever we choose.”

  “I could,” Johnny remarked.

  Bailey did not like this repeated use of the subjunctive.

  “Something’s worrying you, Johnny. Let’s have it.”

  “I’m not going to Rio.”

  Bailey stared at him. “Would you care to amplify that?”

  “I’ve decided to get out.”

  Bailey sat very still. “Is this a — sudden decision?”

  “You could say so. I decided today. Will you help me?”

  Bailey hesitated.

  Steady, he cautioned himself. The man is close to breaking. I mustn’t put on the screws, mustn’t scare him worse than he’s scared already. Not unless I have to.

  “I might help if I knew the circumstances,” Bailey suggested mildly. “Are you under suspicion?”