by Robert Moss
“The whole drama was played out. While the pack was resting, the pariah put his tail between his legs and made another bid for acceptance. He approached the others with his ears flattened back, and we saw him try to lick the muzzle of the alpha wolf. They nipped and snarled at him till he ran away yelping. He saw the lone wolf, the outsider, and all at once his posture changed. His legs stiffened, his jaws opened, and the next second he was hurling himself on the outsider’s neck. They tussled for quite a long time. The pack kept out of it. The pariah took some vicious bites, but finally he had the outsider at his mercy. He killed the way wolves generally kill. By ripping the guts out and letting the victim bleed to death.
“As we watched, he limped back to the pack. He must have thought he had vindicated himself in the eyes of his old comrades by killing the intruder. He didn’t strut. He cowered and fawned, as before. When the alpha wolf snapped at him, he even rolled over on his back, and put his legs in the air. And you know what his old comrades did? They tore him to pieces.”
Max paused and filled two wineglasses to the brim with armagnac.
“Drink,” he urged Johnny. “To our cousins the wolves!”
Johnny took a swallow.
“Do you know why I told you that story?”
Johnny waited.
“Because it’s about Emil. He killed the outsider, he rolled on his back, and they would still have torn him to bits in Moscow if the Brazilians hadn’t got him first.”
“It sounds to me as if the story is about you,” Johnny said quietly. “You did the killing. Heinz Kordt. Miranda’s girl—”
“At whose orders?” Max screamed at him, all his urbanity fled. “At whose instigation?”
“The Gestapo would have given the same orders. There are times when a man has to say no to his orders, or become your wolf.”
Max hurled his glass at Johnny’s head. Johnny bent to one side, and it smashed against the wall.
“I dedicated my life to the cause.” He was on his feet, breathing hard. “When you were crapping in your nappies, I was fighting for the revolution—”
“Do you still believe in it?”
“That’s a stupid question.”
“Do you still believe?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe. There are only two sides, and I am on the side of the party.”
“That’s a stupid answer.”
“You’re not entitled to any answers! I could shoot you now.”
“Go ahead. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, anyway.”
Johnny’s indifference wasn’t feigned. He felt leached of emotion, even fear.
Max sat down and reached for another glass. He gulped the fine Armagnac like water.
“Why did you kill Helene?”
“I didn’t kill her. It was an accident.”
It struck him now that this was what Sigrid was talking about, when she said she had heard the screams.
He stared at Max, who was leaning into the table, his chin resting on his arms.
“Do you believe me? Not that it matters.”
“I would like to believe you,” Max said. “For your own sake. That one loved you better, in her way, than the other. The worst mistake you made in your life was to choose the wrong sister.”
They talked far into the night, and little of the conversation had the quality of an interrogation. Max was violent, nostalgic, philosophic by turns, and his mood shifts became more vertiginous when the Armagnac was gone and he started working his way through a fresh bottle of vodka. By the end of it Johnny found it hard to keep his eyes awake, even though he knew what followed a Last Supper.
He was finally allowed to fling down on the bed in a room with heavy wooden shutters that were bolted from the outside. When he awoke, the room was still dark, and he was amazed to see from his watch that it was past 10:00 A.M. It seemed odd that neither of Max’s house goons had come to rouse him.
He banged on the door. No answer. He rattled the handle and found the door was unlocked. That was even stranger. Surely he had heard the key turn in the lock the night before.
He dressed and set off down the corridor. The house seemed deserted. When he descended the grand staircase and went to the front door, no one came to challenge him. He looked out over a wide terrace to a formal garden that was being rapidly recovered by nature. The lawn was bright with dandelions.
He considered making a break for it, then and there. No, he told himself. They want an excuse to shoot me in the back, to avoid embarrassments in Moscow.
He went back inside and began exploring the house more methodically. Not a retired convent, after all, to judge by the lady in a wimple whose bosom was bursting out of her bodice in a cracked canvas in the hall. He followed the smell of coffee and warm pastry into the kitchen, and found Max Fabrikant breakfasting alone. He was still drinking lukewarm vodka, out of a tumbler. He looked and smelled as though he had been up all night.
“Eat. Drink.” Max gestured to a chair.
“Where are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”
“I gave them the day off. So we could continue our chat.” Max could probably drink half the population of Greater Russia under the table, but his speech was furry, and his eyes looked out of focus. “I thought you might want to hear another story.” The last word ended in a belch, which he made no effort to suppress.
“Of course.” Johnny poured coffee from the pot. Like the vodka, the coffee proved to be lukewarm. Judging that vodka tasted better than coffee at room temperature, he joined Max in a glass.
“One of the greatest witchfinders of medieval Europe,” Max began, “was Nicolai Remigii, the hanging judge of the Duke of Lorraine. When old Nick sat on the bench, he had eight hundred women burned at the stake for witchcraft. He had an infallible technique for telling the guilty from the innocent. He would have his suspect bound hand and foot and thrown into a pond. If the woman sank, she was judged innocent. If she floated, she was consigned to the fire. Elegant logic, wouldn’t you agree? Not unknown in our century, for that matter.”
He drank some more.
“In his dotage, Master Nicolai reached the conclusion that he himself was able to cast magic spells. He was of course a stickler for due process, not to mention a punctilious kraut, my dear Johnny. So he registered himself with the court as a master of witchcraft. And what do you think happened? Did they burn him at the stake? Of course they did. Don’t you find that uncommonly illuminating?”
In his excitement, he had seized Johnny’s wrist.
He’s running a fever worse than mine, Johnny realized. “Are you going to tell me who this story is about?”
“Ah!” Max sprang up and started hopping around in a lunatic jig. “It’s about all of us!”
Johnny waited for him to subside. When Max flopped down, the light went out of him. He rested his head on the table.
After a while, Johnny began to worry that he had blacked out and got up to investigate. But Max snapped back. He sat bolt upright and carried on as if there had been no interruption.
“I don’t have friends, Johnny. You know that. Trust is a weakness in my profession. You were perhaps the closest I had to a friend. You and one other. I don’t think you ever met him. I called him Mishka. He got on the wrong side of Yezhov. Now he has confessed that he was involved in the assassination of Kirov. He wasn’t even in Russia at the time. And he is a Leningrad man. Kirov was his hero. They will shoot him. Naturally.”
The story was almost humdrum compared with what both men had lived, what each could be held accountable for. What intrigued Johnny was that the fate of this un-known Mishka — presumably a fellow chekist — had touched Max in a way that the fates of Heinz and Werner had not. Could it be because he believed that Mishka’s fate presaged his own?
“Max. Something has happened, hasn’t it?”
Fabrikant shrugged and reached for the vodka.
“They’re coming at noon,” he said drowsily.
“Who?”
“I’
ve been summoned back to Moscow. It’s not a friendly invitation.” He swilled the booze around inside his cheeks like a mouthwash. “They planned to spring it on me as a surprise. Fortunately, I still have a few people who owe me favours. I got a call during the night.”
“What will you do?”
Max lifted the crumpled napkin on the table in front of him, exposing a Makarov service pistol.
“Not that.”
Max wiped his mouth with the napkin and laughed. “No, I don’t think so. I haven’t made up my mind.”
“What about me?”
“Take a lesson from old Nick of Lorraine. Be the one that sinks without trace. The door is open, Johnny.”
Johnny started walking toward the door, not quite believing. In the doorway he turned back toward Max.
“Did Sigrid really leave for Moscow?”
Max’s laugh was a dry rattle. “Forget her. Marry an English girl with — how do they say? — peaches and cream in her cheeks. Give her a nice warm fuck for me.”
4
“They shot Max,” Colin Bailey told him. “Put him down like a horse with a broken leg.”
Several months had passed. Time enough for the European dictatorships to find themselves a handy little proving ground in Spain and for Johnny to have his audience with the dying King; he went on to a celebration dinner at the Savoy at which Harry Maitland turned up in tails and insisted on snaring the prettiest girl on the dance floor to partner Johnny.
Bailey had taken Johnny down to the cottage in Devon for a few days, sensing that the German was nearing a new emotional crisis. The Firm had given him a few jobs to do. He had conducted a short training course for recent recruits on sabotage techniques and Comintern methods, which had most of the new boys excited. He had been encouraged to jot down his memoirs, for the files at least; but this literary project seemed to be withering on the vine. The symptoms of Johnny’s malaise were easy to read. He missed the action, and he needed a woman. More than a woman, a friend.
Diana, God love her, had put Johnny on a horse and carted him off to a show, where he caused quite a stir among some of the county girls — at least after Diana hinted that he was a titled archduke traveling incognito. This produced a batch of promising dinner invitations and a rumoured affair which was the talk of the county for a week or so, but it wasn’t even half a step toward solving what a man who had lost his woman and his cause was going to do with the rest of his life.
Bailey was mulling this over one morning when he picked up his blackthorn stick and said to Johnny, “Let’s get some air.”
They drove down to Dartmoor in Diana’s cheeky red roadster. Driving it always made Bailey feel as if he were just coming down from college. Johnny must have caught the spirit. He was smiling and joking by the time they arrived at Two Bridges, which was just an inn and a thatched cottage making eyes at each other from opposite sides of the road.
Johnny’s mood darkened when he heard the news about Max. Bailey had saved it up for a few days, since he had taken the train down from London, not sure how Johnny would react. The man had the right to rejoice. Max Fabrikant had been mixed up with most of the tragedies in his life, including the loss of Sigrid. Yet he reacted to the news as if something in himself had died.
Bailey led them off at a brisk pace, marking the rhythm with his stick, along the river bank to a blackened cottage. Now their way ran beside an ancient wall of granite lumps patched with lichen, held together over the centuries by the gaps the wind whistled through. This was lean, rough country. A few bighorn sheep, their faces black, grazed among deformed clumps of gorse. Crows and ravens turning slow circles overhead greeted the travellers with a parched cackle that reminded Johnny of Max’s parting phrase.
They picked their way over swampy downs to a stile and then a wooden ladder over a farther fence where tufts of sheep’s wool hung down from the rusty prongs of the barbed wire. It was only mid-afternoon, and yet night was closing in. A great, blanketing mist dropped suddenly over the valley, swallowing Beartown Tor, away to the left. From the crest of a hill, peering over the moors, Johnny followed Bailey’s pointing arm and made out what seemed to be a giant oak forest in the far distance.
But there was something awry. The trees tilted crazily down the tilt of the valley, cowering under some irresistible force. Closer up, Johnny realized that the oaks were dwarves, the biggest only three times his height. The wood had survived for centuries, scorned — or, more properly, feared — by the tin miners who had plundered the surrounding moorlands for fuel. The trunks of the tiny oaks were bent over, parallel with the ground. The roots snaked around granite boulders, probing far to find the sparse soil and safe moorings for their eccentric loads. Inside the forest, a cobwebby green haze covered everything.
“They call this Wistman’s Wood,” Bailey explained.
Johnny had to bend almost double to follow him under the dwarf oaks. They found a comfortable perch on a rock and shared a tobacco pouch.
“Is it true that Harry Maitland is joining the Firm?” Johnny asked after a time.
“Yes. As a matter of fact, it is. We’re lucky to get him.”
Bailey did not see fit to add that it had taken a certain amount of arm-twisting. He had not been above suggesting to Major Mackenzie via circuitous channels that, while HMG was duly grateful for the role played by Rio Light and Harry in particular in the recent distressing events in Brazil, it would be no bad thing if young Maitland were sent back to England. He had acquired some powerful enemies, and the change would do him good. Bailey gathered that Maitland had had woman trouble of his own. Luisa had packed up and left, gone back to the steep cobbled streets of Salvador da Bahia, leaving a puzzling message about how they belonged to the gods of their own peoples. With any luck an eligible young bachelor like Maitland, caught up in the social whirl of the West End, would get over it soon enough. Hadn’t Bailey once done the same?
It would be harder for Johnny.
The German turned to look at him through the haze of pipe smoke.
“Was it worth it?” Johnny asked.
“Don’t doubt that for a minute,” Bailey responded fiercely. “If war comes, as it is bound to come—”
“Your politicians in London seem to doubt that.”
“Then damn the politicians! You and I know better. When war comes, we will need Brazil. Not just for the rubber and the coffee, but because it’s the stepping-stone to North Africa, and that is the key to southern Europe. I don’t know what the Americans will do when we have to get rough with Hitler, but just imagine what a difference Brazil would make to them if it were owned by Stalin’s boys. Or Hitler’s.”
He thought about Courtland Bull, the elusive Texan millionaire, financier of Brazilian plots. Bailey’s man in Washington had reported that Bull was now lobbying to get himself appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Bailey intended to put paid to that notion.
“Brazil was a sideshow, all the same,” Johnny said. “The sideshows are often the best things at a carnival. I rate this one of the very best.”
A silence fell between them, punctuated only by the continuous low drone from minuscule winged insects, scaled down like the oaks, barely distinguishable from grains of dust in the filtered light but insistent, aiming for the eyes.
“I need a job,” Johnny announced.
“I’ve been giving that some thought. You know, I had it in mind to send Harry to the Hague. You two got along together pretty well, didn’t you? You might even be able to teach him to order from a German menu.”
Johnny showed no particular interest till Bailey added, “Wolfgang Trott has been appointed first secretary at the German Embassy in the Hague.”
“When do I leave?”
“Steady on. I’ll have to cut through a mile of red tape.”
He sensed Johnny beginning to relax, with the promise of action again in his sights. They smoked and enjoyed the comfortable silence of people who share a language beyond words.
Joh
nny broke it by asking casually, “Why is this place called Wistman’s Wood?”
“Oh, it’s a hoary old West Country yarn. The Wisht-Man was Old Nick, or something very close. He had a pack of bloodthirsty dogs called the Wisht-Hounds, and the locals thought they spied them ranging these moors by night. A dreadful load of piffle, truly. The trail they took — we followed it part of the way was called the Path of the Dead. You see, they used to carry the coffins along that route for burial in holy ground at Lydford. I suppose it made quite a sight in the dead of winter, those lonely columns of serfs staggering along with the boxes on their shoulders.”
“The Path of the Dead,” Johnny repeated.
It wasn’t a scene from West Country folklore that he saw. It was a series of faces rising up out of the mist of his own past. Heinz Kordt. Emil Brandt. Helene. Max Fabrikant. Sigrid. And then came faces scarcely formed, things from the future, the first rough pummelling of the sculptor’s clay.
He raised himself to his full height, pushing back the foliage.
He said, “We’re on the right track.”
Historical Note
This is a work of fiction, but it is based on fact. There was a double agent code-named Johnny who worked for the British in the thirties. One of his many aliases was Franz Gruber. His real name was Johann Heinrich de Graaf, and he was born in the little town of Nordenham, across the River Weser from the port of Bremerhaven, in 1894. His work as an agent inside the Comintern and Soviet military intelligence resulted in some of the greatest and hitherto unrecorded — successes of British secret intelligence in the era between the two world wars.
Through Johnny, the British were able to penetrate Soviet espionage rings in London, Copenhagen, Paris and Shanghai. He provided critical intelligence on Stalin’s bid to make an alliance with Hitler and the Nazi military buildup, although it was ignored by the appeasers who subsequently came to power in Britain. Johnny helped to sabotage Stalin’s ambitious plot to turn Brazil into the first Communist state in the Western Hemisphere.
