by Robert Moss
“We’ve all changed.”
“That’s true enough. Especially in Paris. You’ve come to the right place, Fritz Mattern. Before we know it, the Communists will be sitting in the Mel de Ville and the Elysde! For the first time in our lives, we’re respectable!”
“Then why all the security?”
“That’s because of the Fascists, more than the police. With any luck, we’ll soon be running the police.” He lowered his voice and went on, “I only wish we’d had the sense to do this in Germany when there was still time.”
Johnny said nothing. He stared at the posters and wood-cuts on Münzenberg’s walls, glorifying the alliance of Socialists and Communists that Stalin had banned in Germany. How long would it last in France?
“I heard you were in South America,” the Comintern propaganda chief said.
“Brazil.”
“Ah. That was a nasty business. We have countermeasures organized. Solidarity committees in support of the victims of reaction. We even have some titled English ladies who have agreed to sail to Rio to intercede with the government.”
“You must try to do something for Olga.”
“I want to make her the focus of the campaign. There are some bureaucratic problems, of course.”
“There are?”
“Well, there are people close to the top who would rather not advertise our role in Brazil.”
He means Manuilsky, Johnny thought. Manuilsky and the big boss, Stalin. They got us into Brazil, then they lost their nerve. Now they don’t want to hear about anyone associated with the operation. Let the Gestapo have them. Does a man like Münzenberg, who has more brains, and more guts, than the whole Executive Committee of the Comintern put together, still believe in this gang? How can he? Johnny would have liked to ask, but he had come for something else.
“What can I do for you?” Münzenberg asked.
“I’ve just come back,” Johnny rehearsed his hastily concocted tale. “My companion — Sigrid — has moved from her old address. She told me she would be doing some work for you. I thought you might be able to put me in touch with her.”
Münzenberg’s face clouded. “I think you’ve come to the wrong department, friend.”
“But I know she’s doing work for you. I’ve seen her posters in the street.”
“She’s done a few things,” Münzenberg conceded. “But it’s just a sideline, a hobby. Pity. She has unusual gifts.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
Münzenberg rubbed his nose. He could smell that something was wrong. Johnny counted on the fact that he had no high regard for the chekists.
“You might ask Ana,” he suggested. “She’s in the artists’ group. The two of them used to be friends.”
The new address was an atelier in Montparnasse, down the street from the Closerie des Lilas, where the Symbolists had discussed a revolution of the imagination and where Lenin and Trotsky had plotted a more tangible one in the world before the war.
Johnny took a table in the window and ordered Pernod and black coffee. Waiting for the gate to open between trains at the Sevres-Babylone Métro station, he had sensed someone watching him intently. When he whipped around, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a quite ordinary man in a dark grey suit and matching hat, who disappeared in the rush of passengers as the automatic gate swung open. He did not see the man again.
Bailey had offered to cover him. He had refused. Once Max’s people picked up his scent, they would spot the tail immediately.
There was a cyclist across the street, taking too long to adjust his clips. He waved to a second cyclist, a girl with straw-coloured hair tied up in a scarf. They pedalled away together. Perhaps it was nothing.
His eyes were hot and sore, despite the dark glasses. He couldn’t hold the coffee cup steady. His skin was moist, his body racked intermittently by malarial spasms. He forgot the French cigarette that was glued to his lower lip, and the ash crumbled over his shirt front.
In my mid-thirties, he thought, I’m already an old man.
Seeing him like this, would she feel pity, or simply contempt? He didn’t want either. He wanted some kind of a life. Since their reunion in Brazil on the heights of the Tijuca rain forest, he had known that she had to be part of that life. He had enough money in a London bank account to support them both in reasonable comfort for the rest of their days. They had fought their battles. They both bore the scars. They had earned the right to some measure of happiness.
But would she come? On the boat train from England he had tried to script in his head what he would say to her if he could find her before Max found him. There were tricks he could play, lies he could tell. He had even thought of arranging a setup to convince her that Max was in the pay of the Gestapo. These ruses might get her out of Max’s reach, but they would turn on him later, like hissing snakes, and poison whatever trust had survived between them.
His only chance was tell her the truth and hope that the love they had both been schooled to suppress would prove stronger than doubt.
A girl was coming out of the atelier. Svelte, bobbed hair, dark rain cape. She had a bicycle chained to a railing. She bent to open the padlock.
Johnny tossed some money onto the table and hurried out of the bistro.
“Excuse me. You must be Ana.”
“Have we met?”
She looked wary, and he took off the dark glasses. “I’m Johnny. Sigrid’s friend.”
“Oh. She mentioned you.” Her expression changed to mild curiosity. She looked Johnny up and down as if assessing his potential as a lover.
He smiled. “I’ve got a surprise for her. Do you know where she is?”
“I don’t know where she lives.” Wary again.
“It’s a surprise that absolutely won’t wait.” Johnny winked.
“Well, in that case — we often go sketching together on Tuesdays, and have lunch afterwards. At the zoo.”
“The zoo at Vincennes.”
“Yes. I told her I couldn’t go today, because I’ve got a date.”
“That’s a shame. I hope I get to know you better. Maybe next week?”
“Why not?”
* * *
It took half an hour to find her in the sprawling park. She had set up a folding easel under the trees, in a grassy expanse where African antelopes roamed freely. She had attracted a gaggle of schoolchildren, who were craning over her shoulder to see the picture coming alive.
He came up from behind and started reciting the last stanza of Rilke’s poem about the panther—
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille sich lautlos auf...
and the charcoal broke against the heavy paper.
Some of the children giggled. A solemn little boy in glasses retrieved the stub of charcoal and offered it to the artist.
“You!” The points of colour in her cheeks exaggerated her pallor.
A teacher came bustling over, full of apologies, and shepherded the children away.
“I promised I’d come for you.”
Her lips opened and closed, but no words came out. “Also, I got your letter.”
“How — how could you? Are you mad?” She looked around nervously at a couple eating ice cream on a bench, at a busload of American tourists festooned with cameras, trooping along behind their guide.
She said, “This city is death for you.”
“I’ve come for you.”
She shied from him like a frightened horse.
“I’ve come to take you away. Since that night at the Babylõnia Club, I’ve lived only for this.”
“Don’t talk that way! You don’t have the right!”
“Come.” Gently but firmly, he took her arm. “Let’s talk.”
Reluctantly she packed up her easel, and they sat under a sun umbrella among the school parties and the holidaymakers. He ordered a citron pressé. She left hers untouched.
“What happened to your eye?”
He explained — the prison, the Gestapo, the jailbre
ak, the chase downriver. He omitted Harry Maitland.
“You were luckier than the ones you betrayed,” she flew at him. “How many lives have you destroyed?”
“I didn’t set out to destroy anyone’s life. I did what I had to do.” Jerkily, trying to hold her with his eyes, he began to tell the whole story, starting with the death of Heinz Kordt. He talked of how his glowing belief in the world revolution had been trampled down by Stalin’s secret police, of how the Soviets and the Nazis were joined in an unholy alliance to create a world fit only for slaves.
“You can sit here in France and say things like that!” she burst in. “Here, when the Popular Front is about to change everything!”
“The Popular Front is only a phase, a zigzag along the way. You’ll see. The only man Stalin trusts is Hitler. They’re made for each other.”
Furious, she slammed her fist down on the table, spilling her drink.
“Shit! You’re talking shit!” The coarse word seemed truly foul from those lips. “You think any of this fiction justifies what you’ve done? You sold us to the British for a hundred pounds a month!”
“They don’t pay quite that well. And I didn’t do it for money.”
“Then why?”
“Because a man must have a place on which to stand.” She stared off into the distance.
“And because I heard the screams.”
She was breathing in long, deep drafts, perhaps to master her emotions. When she turned, her face was different. Her features were set. She seemed to have come to a moment of resolution.
“Give me a cigarette.”
It always made him uneasy to watch her smoke. The cigarette was awkward, even obscene, in her fingers. She took shallow puffs that did not reach her lungs.
“Where would we go?” she asked suddenly, and hope fluttered inside him like a wounded bird.
“We’ll go anywhere you want,” he said eagerly. “We’ll change our names, make a new life. We’ll have money, no need to go short—” He broke off. No, better not to dwell on money. “We’ll turn our backs on all of them. You’ll be able to paint. I’ll go fishing, set up a little business. We’ll live like normal people.”
“How soon?”
“We can go today. Tonight. Whenever you like.”
She threw the cigarette onto the paving stones, stood up and ground it underfoot.
“I have some things to collect. I’ll meet you at the Gare du Nord — there’s a coffee shop—”
“I know the one.”
“Seven o’clock.” She said all this without meeting his eyes. She let him clasp her to him, briefly. Their mouths brushed. But there was no life in her. It was like holding a mannequin.
“Sigrid. Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes.”
“What made you decide?”
“I heard the screams, too.”
3
A major train station is not the ideal place for a clandestine meeting. The police tend to be more vigilant than in other parts of the city, and it is harder to spot a tail among droves of transients. But this was not what troubled Johnny as he retraced his steps to the Gare du Nord in the lengthening shadows.
She didn’t ask about Helene. Is it possible she doesn’t know?
Mingling with the last flock of commuters, he made a leisurely circumnavigation of the great station. At 7:00 P.M. sharp, he was seated on a stool within sight of the café, reading L’Aurore, while a boy in a sailor cap polished his shoes.
Around the edge of the newspaper, he saw her arrive. She was carrying a small suitcase.
She sits down. The waiter comes, with his napkin over his arm. She orders coffee. No, the waiter brings cognac. She looks at the clock behind the counter. Then she looks at her watch. She is nervous, flustered. That’s as it should be. There is nobody following her. Nobody I can see.
He gave the bootblack a couple of coins.
“How would you like to earn five francs more?”
The boy looked uncertain. “Monsieur est pede, non?”
“Non.” Johnny moulded his most reassuring grin. “Monsieur is not a pederast. I want you to take a note to the lady in the café. The one sitting by herself.”
“That’s all?”
He scratched a couple of lines on a scrap he tore from an envelope.
“Meet me at platform seven. Five minutes. No cage can hold us. J.”
He handed the boy the message and a five-franc bill. “Don’t talk to her. Just give her the note and leave.”
He slipped away through the crowd and took shelter behind a telephone kiosk.
He saw her take the note and try to call the boy back.
She’s read it. She frowns and summons the waiter. She is leaving. She has not communicated to anyone. Everything is going to be fine.
He trailed her to platform seven, not daring to be sure. She was at the gate, looking lost. She was wearing a blue suit of a brisk, almost military cut and a little matching hat with a visor. She looked like anything but a Comintern agent on the run. She might have walked straight off the Schiaparelli stand at the fashion show. She was superb. She was the only woman in Paris.
He started swimming towards her, through the tide of people.
She glanced up and saw his head, floating above the others.
He was almost close enough to touch her when she put a cigarette in her mouth and snapped a thin gold lighter he had never seen her use before.
In the next instant, two bulky men bracketed him.
“Police,” one of them grunted.
He looked at the bulging face, the dumpling nose. They didn’t make faces like that in Paris.
He wrestled with them, trying to break away.
He felt a sharp jab just above the kidneys. His knees sagged. They were hoisting him up, half-dragging, half-carrying him away.
“Excuse, please. Our friend is sick,” a voice wafted out of an echoing pit.
In his last flicker of consciousness, he saw a woman in blue, walking briskly away. She did not look back.
“I’m disappointed in you, Johnny. I once thought of you as my most brilliant protégé. You end up as a lovesick calf. I warned you against that woman the first time I met her. You should have listened to me then.”
Max was sitting at the end of a long refectory table. A brass chandelier hung down from a domed ceiling. The walls were white and uncomforting, bare except for a few sombre oils of men in dark robes. The place had the air of a former monastery.
They had propped Johnny up at Max’s right hand, in a tall, ladder-backed chair. He was still groggy from the needle they had stuck him with at the station. His abductors were transformed, for the night, into waiters. The service was sloppy, the food of no interest to Johnny. But he noticed from the labels on the wines — a pouilly fuisse, followed by a medoc and a venerable armagnac — that no expense had been spared. “It’s our Last Supper,” Max had announced. The note of blasphemy was enhanced by the spymaster’s appearance. He was wearing a white silk turtleneck inside his black sweater.
Max smoked between courses, during courses, incessantly.
“What have you done with her?” Johnny croaked.
“Me? I’ve done nothing. She’s gone back to Moscow, with my blessing. End of story. Now we have to decide what to do with you.”
“How long did you know?”
Max blew out smoke and watched the circles rise above the chandelier.
“I suspected for a long time. I didn’t have proof until Sigrid gave it to me.”
“You suspected in Brazil. Yet you let me remain in place. Why?”
Max signalled for the two burly waiters to go.
“We are all capable of mistakes,” Max said serenely. “Nothing is that simple with you. You wanted Emil destroyed. Didn’t you?”
“You needn’t exorcise yourself about him.” Max steepled his hands.
“You sit there like a defrocked priest!” Johnny exploded at him. “I hated Emil. Then I saw what those bastards did to him—�
�
“A fit of conscience? From you? That’s rather quaint. I’m afraid it won’t affect your sentence.”
Johnny subsided. Max was right. His outburst was grotesque.
“I was once in Siberia,” Max resumed. “Did you know that? No, I was never a prisoner, if that’s what you’re thinking. But I was out of favour. It was a few years after our first meeting. I had not quite adjusted to the new order of things. I still imagined that Trotsky was some kind of genius. I hadn’t learned whose back to scrub. So in order to educate me they sent me to run a logging camp in the northeast, where the temperature drops to eighty below. I made one friend, just one, in almost twelve months. He was a Chukchi. Have you ever met a Chukchi?”
“No.”
“Well, never take one on in a fight, at least not on his own terrain. They’re an arctic people, primitive, superstitious. They live like wolves in places you would think could never support human lives. One day my Chukchi friend — he was a chief or shaman among the rest, face like a Buddha — invited me to come and watch the wolves. He said there was a lot to be learned from wolves, said they are more like us than any other species. Only a wolf can look a man straight in the eye and sometimes stare him down. I was shit scared, I don’t mind admitting it, but I went with him all the same, in a fur-lined parka and snowshoes, loaded up with guns and ammunition and vodka.
“He took me up into some ranges where you could see for miles and miles. All I could make out to begin with was a white wilderness. I couldn’t tell north from south. Then he pointed out the ravens — the ravens follow the wolves in hopes of feeding off their kills — and then we saw the pack itself. Magnificent, their legs rolling smoothly as wheels.
“There were two wolves loping along behind the rest. They were what the old man had brought me to watch. They were lone wolves, both trying to join the pack. One was an outcast, driven out of the pack for some reason, probably illness. Wolves sense any contagious infection. When they were resting, the outcast would nip at his backside, as if he had worms. The other wolf had come out of the white void. If he got too close to the others, they would bare their teeth and run at him, driving him away. They weren’t inclined to share their food or their territory.
