by Robert Moss
Helene shook a cigarillo out of its pack and lit it with one hand.
She said, “You don’t look good, Johnny.”
“I’ve felt better. Do you have to point that thing at me?”
“It helps to remind me we’re on different sides,” she replied.
“We don’t have to be. I’ve never done anything to harm you. Or Sigrid.”
“Here,” Helene interjected curtly. “She left you a letter. Read it if you want.”
He took the envelope. The letter inside covered less than a page. It was typed, so he could decipher nothing of the mind of the writer from the script. It appealed to nostalgia, to his most precious memories. Sigrid wrote about the black panther in the cage in the Berlin zoo, about the sonnet by Rilke that he had recited to her.
“Come to me quickly,” Sigrid wrote. “Without you, I am behind bars.”
The words wounded him. He had to assume that she had left this message on Max’s instructions, to lure him into a trap. But why had she invoked something so personal, something that belonged only to the two of them? Was she signalling that she still wanted to be with him, that she was literally a prisoner behind bars?
His hand was shaking when he gave the letter back to Helene.
“What have they done with her?” he demanded.
“Max took her to Paris,” Helene reported, watching him intently. “There’s more. They sent this after she left.”
He glanced at the second message. It was briefer even than the first: the six-line transcription of a radio signal from Moscow Centre. It congratulated him on his performance in Brazil and ordered him to proceed to Paris to receive new instructions.
It was all so transparent he wanted to laugh out loud. Did they believe he was so witless he would buy this at face value?
“I imagine you know what it means,” Helene commented.
“I know.”
It meant more interrogations, a forced march to Moscow, torture at the hands of secret policemen more expert than any Brazilian, the chance of a show trial, the certainty of execution. Unless—
He stared at Helene. There were no accusations in the letter or the telegram. Max wanted to lull him into a sense of false security, using his feelings for Sigrid to bait the trap. Max must have ordered Helene to play along. But she had disobeyed orders.
“You’re not playing your part very well, are you?” Johnny challenged her. “You were supposed to receive me with open arms and shunt me off to Paris as if everything was absolutely fine. You’re letting Max down, my love.”
“Leave Max out of this!” she snapped at him. “I want to know why you did it.”
“It’s a long story,” he began, conscious that there was no longer any point in trying to dissemble. His best chance was to appeal to the bond that still existed between himself and this woman. “It started with Heinz,” he went on. “When Heinz told me that Stalin and Hitler were natural allies, I didn’t believe him. When he showed me how the party was opening the door to the Nazis in Germany, I still didn’t want to believe. Heinz had to die before I was ready to understand. You know how he died? Max split his skull open with a sledgehammer because Heinz was one of the few men left in Germany — or the whole world Communist movement — who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.”
“That’s a lie!” There were bright patches of colour in Helene’s cheeks, and her chest was heaving.
She knows, Johnny thought. She’s heard the screams too. She wouldn’t be so agitated if she weren’t trying to deny them.
“Heinz wasn’t a special case,” he proceeded, keeping his voice low and calm. “In fact, his fate was entirely predictable. Why do you think they are butchering the Old Bolsheviks in Moscow? Why do you suppose Wollweber in Copenhagen gives the Gestapo lists of comrades in Germany who, once in their lives, made the mistake of criticizing the party bosses, or the big boss in the Kremlin? Do you believe the revolution has to be built on the corpses of those who sweat in its service, like the Great Wall of China? Do you imagine that what you are doing for the Russian secret police has anything in common with socialism?”
“Shut up!” she yelled at him.
“Because you don’t believe me, or because you do?”
It was the first time he had ever seen her look terrified. Even in Shanghai, he had never seen her like this.
“You know I’m right,” he said softly. “You don’t belong with these people any more than I do.”
She jumped up and brandished the gun at him.
“Shut your face!”
“Or what?”
The hand with the gun was trembling. She pressed the other hand over it to hold it still.
“You betrayed all of us. I don’t want to hear any more about the reasons. You have lives to answer for.”
“And some that I saved.”
She was crying. She swept the back of her hand across her eyes angrily, to brush this sign of frailty away.
“There is only one honourable solution.” As she stood up, it struck him that — consciously or not — she must be seeking to impersonate her putative Prussian sire.
She held the gun out to him, butt forward.
“What precisely would you like me to do?” he said. “Do you want me to blow my brains out?”
She said nothing.
“Revolutionaries don’t have a code of honour,” he taunted her. “Max taught me that we were supposed to practise Bolshevist elasticity.”
“Do it for her sake,” Helene implored him. “They’ll drag her through all of it otherwise. Her life will be wrecked.”
“You had all of this worked out, didn’t you? That’s why you waited. I’m not a Prussian cavalry officer, darling. I’m not going to do it.”
Her lips were trembling. Her eyes goggled as if she were on the brink of a seizure.
“I won’t do it,” he repeated. “But if you shoot me with my own gun, I suppose it might look like suicide.” He got off the bed and advanced slowly towards her.
“Come on,” he coaxed her. “We haven’t been together in a long time. Let’s stop this charade and talk things over calmly.”
“Don’t come any closer. I’m serious.”
“Go ahead then. You’ll probably do me a favour.”
He moved closer, till he could feel the pressure of the gun barrel against his chest. She still didn’t shoot.
“Let’s lose that, shall we?”
Gently, not rushing her, he took her wrist. At that moment he felt a tremendous warmth towards this woman he had once held and loved. She was a victim, too. He sensed that she was approaching the same crossroads he had reached when he had learned how Heinz had died.
“There’s no fight between us,” he said gently, moving his fingers to pry the gun loose.
She began shaking uncontrollably.
“No!” The word was a bellow of pain, neither male nor female, barely human.
He forced her arm back, so that when she fired, the bullet drove into the plaster above their heads. She was fighting back, clawing at his face.
He did not want to hurt her. He kept murmuring her name like a lover.
She heaved towards him with her lower body and kneed him in the groin.
He buckled in a spasm of unbearable pain but remembered the gun. She was lowering the barrel, aiming for his face. He wrenched savagely at her wrist at the instant she pulled the trigger.
At last she dropped the gun, and fell into his arms.
“Oh, my love. I never meant this.”
The pistol had gone off at the base of her chin, ripping away flesh and bone and vocal cords. She died without a scream.
He rocked with the body like a dancer, careless of the blood that was oozing over his shoulder and the tears that made salty furrows down his cheeks.
He repeated aloud, “We’re both victims.”
13 - The Gift
...neither do the spirits damned Lose all their virtue.
-MILTON,
Paradise Lost
1
The black-headed gulls had returned in twos and threes to St. James’s Park. These were the ones that were barren, Bailey thought, or had lost their eggs or their young. Beyond a white, fragrant cloud of meadowsweet, tufted ducks swam in the pond among their broods. The inconstancy of ducklings had always intrigued him. Cut off from the brood, they would waddle off to join anything with wings. They seemed to have no sense of a separate identity.
Johnny, perhaps, had too much.
Bailey had met the boat at Southampton. Johnny was tanned and gaunt, his leanness exaggerated by the suit that Bradbeer had loaned him, which was too wide and too short. His dark blonde hair had turned gunmetal grey. He was wearing dark glasses, and one of their first calls in London was to an optician who told him he would never see more than shadows out of his left eye. Johnny accepted this with apparent indifference. They went to the Army and Navy Store, where Bailey picked out a few suits that fitted Johnny well enough.
“You can’t go to Paris,” Bailey told him over sandwiches at the flat in South Audley street. “Besides, you’ve got a date with the King. He’s going to pin a medal on you.”
“You can keep your bloody medal.”
Johnny was evasive about what had happened in Buenos Aires, which was a bad sign. After many questions, he said that Helene had killed herself. He could not explain why she had done this with his gun, and Bailey let the subject drop. He could sense that Johnny was tortured by what had happened.
Johnny had plenty of questions of his own about Rio. “There’s some good news,” Bailey reported. “Captain Schmidt has been relieved of his duties.”
“What about Prestes and the others?”
“The police got Prestes. Something to do with his dog. You did say he had a dog, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Principe.”
“He loved the dog too much. Not a bad quality, I suppose. But not very professional.”
There were conflicting accounts of the arrest, Bailey explained. The one he favoured was that, even in hiding, the rebel leader wanted his dog to eat only the best. The police knew that his lair was somewhere in the working-class district of Meier and started keeping a watch on butcher shops in the neighbourhood. They spotted a young black maid who was regularly buying choice cuts of meat and asking for bones. They tailed her to a house on the Rua Honorio and stormed the house in the early hours of the morning. Prestes himself came to the door in his pyjamas. A strapping German girl thrust herself between him and the police, shouting “Don’t shoot! We’re not dynamiters!”
“That doesn’t sound much like Olga.”
“That’s the information we have.”
“What about Nilo?”
Bailey shook his head. “No trace.”
“That son of a bitch has a lot to answer for,” Johnny growled. He was thinking of the pretty little Bahian girl strangled with a clothesline in Nilo’s apartment, and the double game Nilo had played with Doctor Alcibiades and the Fascists.
“They did lock up the snake charmer,” Bailey volunteered.
Johnny merely grunted. Doctor Alcibiades, the most duplicitous of all the Brazilians, was no longer of much consequence to him.
“What will they do with her? With Olga?”
Bailey took a sip of beer. “I’m afraid there’s talk of deporting her.”
Johnny clenched his fists. “You’ve got to stop it!”
Bailey thought, he’s identifying Prestes’ woman with Helene — and with what the Gestapo intended to do to him.
“I don’t see that there’s much we can do. Except possibly to indicate polite concern. It’s not exactly HMG’s style to stick up for Stalin’s agents. And you told us yourself that Olga is a dedicated Communist.”
“Can’t Harry—”
“Harry’s on his way back to England,” Bailey said firmly.
But Johnny wouldn’t let it rest. “A German Jew, a Communist — Can’t you imagine the party the Gestapo will have with her?”
“I can imagine.”
A hundred and sixty pounds of tortured flesh was something other than human. It was on the way to becoming something else: a hero, or an informer, or a madman, like Emil Brandt. Johnny had travelled part of that road. He knew. But his grief and anger over Olga’s fate was more personal, more specific.
In part of himself he still belongs to them, Bailey thought. He is at war with the ideology and the regime, but he won’t abandon comrades who shared the same trenches when he still believed. And he identifies Prestes’ woman with his own. If he could conquer this instinct, he would make a more professional agent. And less of a man.
“I’m going to Paris,” Johnny repeated.
“Yes. Of course you are.”
2
The vaulting roof of the Gare du Nord could not contain the din. Porters rammed trolleys piled high with expensive luggage through the crowd. The first-class travellers who eddied along in their wake babbled about the excitements of the fall collections, the fabulous embroideries of Jeanne Lanvin, the daring cut of Madeleine Vionnet’s crepe evening gowns, the fastidious touch of Mainbocher, the prodigy from Chicago. There were flocks of German and Polish refugees with their possessions on their backs and under their arms. There were men who were racing against the clock and men who were too obviously idling, watching others or watching to see if someone had his eye on them. Some of them were vaguely familiar to Johnny, couriers he had seen in one or other of the Comintern offices in the old days. But there was not a face he could put a name to.
Out in the street somebody pushed a leaflet into his hand. It sang the virtues of the Popular Front, the alliance of Socialists and Communists that was on the verge of taking power. Working men in dungarees trooped past on their way to a union meeting or a demonstration. They chanted the Internationale quite openly, interspersed with bursts of the Marseillaise, and some of the bystanders took up the chorus.
He walked to the Comintern hotel on the Rue d’Alsace. Nothing much had changed. Nobody had touched up the paint or fixed the cracks in the masonry. Only the posters on the outside wall had been updated. In one of them — a caricature of a bourgeois politician sitting in Hitler’s pocket — he thought he saw Sigrid’s touch. The theme was crude, but the wildness of the design gave it unusual power.
It gave him an idea.
The man at the reception desk was the one he remembered. He never seemed to look you in the face, and his fingernails were still sorely in need of attention.
“Bonjour. Est-ce que Monsieur Münzenberg reste toujours ici?” he asked in his faulty French.
“Monsieur?”
He repeated the question. During his last stay in Paris, Willi Münzenberg, the Westbureau’s propaganda boss, had been living quite openly in this establishment. Everyone addressed him by his own name.
But the clerk affected never to have heard of anyone called Münzenberg.
“I need to reach him urgently. It’s a party matter.”
The clerk turned his back on Johnny to rummage among the pigeonholes behind the desk. Without turning around, he said, “Your name?”
“Mattern. Fritz Mattem.”
It was the name he had used inside the German party. It was the name Willi Münzenberg would remember, if he remembered at all.
“Wait.”
The clerk shuffled into the back room. Through an opaque glass door, Johnny could see his silhouette. He was talking — to somebody, or into a telephone. Remembering how Sigrid had once gone looking for Münzenberg at the publishing house and had found Max instead, Johnny almost succumbed to a sudden impulse to rush out the door.
The clerk came back with a travel brochure and slapped it down on the top of the reception desk.
“This will show you the Métro stations, Monsieur,” he said in a loud, disgusted voice, the voice of a man worn out by inane inquiries from tourists.
“Thank you,” Johnny responded in English, equally loud.
He strolled out of the hotel, turned south past the old prison of
St. Lazare and then swung east along the Rue du Paradis. When he was fairly sure that nobody had followed him from the Rue d’Alsace, he turned over the brochure. On the inside back cover he found a scribbled address.
He took the Métro. The line went direct to Odéon, but he made a diversion, changing trains at Chatelet and Jussieu, before he walked up into the perfect spring sunlight of the Boulevard St.-Germain. A girl in a floppy beret was playing Mozart on a violin. A quartet of mimes, their faces chalk white, turned handstands and held out their bowler hats for coins. Tourists and boulevard philosophers thronged the tables along the sidewalk. It was all stunningly normal, which made him feel conspicuous.
He hurried to the Rue Jacob, the address the clerk had given him. It struck him, as he turned the corner, that the house was barely a stone’s throw away from the GPU office on the Rue de Seine.
Trap or no trap, he told himself, I’m not going to stop now.
There was an intercom hitched up to the bell beside the door.
“Mattern.” He gave the same name he had used on the Rue d’Alsace. “Mattern!”
The buzzer sounded and he pushed his way in, to find himself standing in a mousetrap, a boxlike foyer with a sealed door on the other side, from behind which they were presumably taking a good look at him through the peephole.
The door opened and a feral girl with frizzy red hair and a prognathous jaw gave him the once-over.
“Credentials!”
“I don’t have them with me.”
Her lips curled back in a most inhospitable way. But Willi Münzenberg appeared from some other room, looking like an abstracted professor with his lank hair and rumpled corduroys.
“It’s all right, Cilly,” he reassured his assistant. “I know him.”
“I ought to say, I used to,” Münzenberg added for Johnny’s benefit, as he squired him past rows of clacking typewriters into a private office. “You’re different. I would never have recognized you.”
