The Lieutenant's Lover

by Harry Bingham

  ‘So?’

  Hollinger waited till the coffee arrived and the door was closed again. And then he began to speak. About Antonina Kornikova, his source inside the SMAD. He described her position, the documents she had access to. He didn’t mention her name or anything that could identify her, not even her sex. Bauer had seemed almost to hold his breath while Hollinger was speaking. Then he blew out, saying, ‘You got yourself a sweet little source there. Do we get any of the juice, or you just want me to sit and admire your fieldcraft?’

  ‘We’ve already given you a lot of the juice.’

  ‘Right, only you haven’t told us where it’s come from, so when our intelligence assessment guys sit around, they look at each other and say this stuff’s probably come from some Limey faggot who’s copied it out of the Tägliche Rundschau and made a few copying errors along the way, so we end up throwing the whole thing into the garbage.’

  ‘Right, except now I’ve told you.’

  ‘Right, except now I’m not allowed to say.’

  ‘You’re allowed to say it doesn’t come from a Limey faggot and the Tägliche Rundschau. In any case, most of our faggots are already on the Soviet side of things. Either there or the Foreign Office. Not MilGov Berlin.’

  Bauer grinned – this splitting of the thick lips and exposure of the solid, crammed-together teeth bore no other name – and picked up the baseball again.

  ‘Gives and gets, buddy. It’s a big give.’

  ‘It’s a big get. I’ll give you – you personally – access to all the source material. You can vouch for its quality to your assessment people.’

  ‘OK. It’s a deal.’ Bauer picked up the slip of paper on which Hollinger had written the name. ‘Mikhail Ivanovich Malevich. We’ll take a look.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Bauer looked at Hollinger, weighted the baseball in his hand, and waited for a small nod from the Englishman. Then Bauer threw the ball – hard – across the room. Hollinger caught it, one-handed; paused a second, then returned the missile hard in the opposite direction. The ball made a smacking sound as it flew from palm to palm. Then, without breaking off the game, Bauer said, ‘Normally, if we have a source, we pay hard American dollars. Maybe offer a passport. We don’t offer to trace the untraceable.’

  Thwack – thwack – thwack went the ball.

  ‘Same with us, only obviously we prefer to pay in milk coupons.’

  Thwack – thwack.

  ‘She a dame? Only a dame would want to trace a guy.’

  Thwack.

  ‘She is, yes,’ said Hollinger, stopping abruptly. ‘A very brave one.’

  Bauer responded to the change in tone.

  ‘This can be a tough game, huh?’ he said quietly.

  Hollinger rubbed his face with his free hand, the one without the ball.

  ‘In war, it was easy. Their men were killing ours. Our men were killing theirs. Whatever we were able to do by way of intelligence was all directed towards winning the war. The morality was pretty simple. I never bothered with it much.’

  ‘There’s still a kind of war going on.’

  ‘Yes, you think so and I think so, though not everyone agrees with us. But whatever it is, it’s not a shooting war. This girl’s already been to the Gulag once. I don’t know, but I get the feeling she’s already lost a lot of those close to her. I almost can’t stand to think about what would happen to her if they found out.’

  ‘I understand. You won’t find me telling tales out of school.’

  ‘No, I know.’

  ‘It’s her call, buddy. She knows the risks.’

  ‘I tell her we’ll keep her safe.’

  ‘And so you do.’

  ‘But we both know I can’t.’

  The two men fell silent. It was the constant moral predicament of their jobs. On the one hand, both men knew that the Soviets were planning for the communist takeover of Germany. Of all of it, east zone and western zones together. From Berlin to the North Sea coast. And the Soviets had to be stopped. Both men knew that their task now was little less vital to the safety of the world, than it had been all through the years of war. But on the other hand, it was harder now to ignore the casualties. The individual agents who, for reasons of money or conviction, threw their lot in with the western intelligence agencies. Bauer and Hollinger protected their agents as well as they could for as long as they could. But there was a limit to what they could do. They had both lost agents in the past. They both knew they would again. Whether their agents succumbed to the bullet or the labour camp was never known. They had simply dropped out of sight, never to return. It was a fate too awful to think about – except that Hollinger never stopped thinking, and of one agent in particular; a woman with remarkable green eyes and two fingertips missing on her right hand.

  Bauer understood the mood. He spoke quietly, saying, ‘If Malevich is in our zone, I’ll find him. If I can, I will.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Hollinger took the ball and tossed it in a gentle rising curve towards the American. Bauer hardly had to move his hand to catch it. Once he’d got it, he made no move to throw it back.

  ‘Howzat?’ he said, in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.

  6

  One day, not long after her trip to Leipzig, Tonya found herself accompanying a group of senior officers from the SMAD to a cluster of military security facilities in the scatter of lakes and woodland between Fürstenwalde and Halbe. On arrival there, it turned out that the only Germans present were fluent Russian speakers and Tonya was told that her services were not required. There was no car available to take her back to Berlin; and even if there had been, as a mere corporal, Tonya was never going to be allowed that privilege. But there was a wooden canteen building, where Tonya could wait until her superiors were ready to return.

  She entered the building, expecting it to be empty. But it wasn’t. As well as the bare tables and the uncurtained windows letting in the wide forest light, there was a woman there, around Tonya’s age, sewing.

  ‘Guten Morgen,’ said Tonya, nodding.

  ‘Morgen.’

  The woman was dark-haired and quiet. Tonya sat down not far from her. There was a cast-iron stove in the room, but the fire in it was small and mostly useless. Both women sat in dark civilian coats and hats. After a while, Tonya spoke.

  ‘You haven’t anything to read, have you?’

  ‘No, but you can help with my sewing if you’d like.’

  The woman was embroidering a white cotton handkerchief, and indicated a basket which held further sewing things. Tonya was about to accept the offer, when she noticed what the woman was sewing: a hut on chicken-leg stilts, the house of Babba Yaga, the witch of countless Russian fairy tales. The handkerchief was obviously intended for a child back home.

  ‘You’re Russian?’ exclaimed Tonya.

  ‘Of course – you?’

  The woman pulled open her coat a little way, to reveal her Red Army uniform underneath. They quickly switched to Russian and began to talk rapidly. The woman’s name was Valentina. She had been a driver in the Red Army, then had been ordered to stay on after the victory. Valentina asked if Tonya wanted to take a walk in the woods around about and Tonya leaped at the chance.

  They walked and talked, keeping either to the vehicle tracks that curved through the snowy wood, or occasionally branching off onto the trails used by hunters or woodsmen. The woods were mainly pine, and the red trunks, high canopy and filtered sunlight reminded both women irresistibly of Russia. Tonya didn’t know what it made Valentina think of, but for her such forests were and always would be about Petrozavodsk, and that magical winter she’d spent with Misha.

  For a while they kept to carefully neutral topics. The senior echelons of the SMAD were shot through and through with NKVD men and informers. Anything political was a dangerous topic. Likewise any opinion not endorsed by the Party itself opened the speaker up to possible risk. But at last, and only when they were out of sight of everyone and every
thing, Valentina raised a topic.

  ‘In the canteen, before you put your gloves on, I noticed your hand…’

  ‘Yes. I had frostbite…’

  ‘Was it…?’

  ‘In the Gulag? Yes. I was there—’

  ‘Oh, me too. When were you sent? What article? How did you get out? You weren’t in a shtraf battalion too, were you?’

  Suddenly a dam was broken, and both women began to speak rapidly of their experiences. Tonya had been sentenced for ten years under the most serious article of the criminal code. Valentina had been denounced by a neighbour who’d been jealous of her apartment. She’d been accused of everything, of course, but only convicted of a minor offence and been sentenced for just three years. Her experiences had been bad, but nothing like as bad as Tonya’s. All the same, it was a vast relief to them both to talk woman to woman, political undesirable to political undesirable. They walked for four hours. Before they arrived back at the little cluster of buildings, the two women hugged and vowed to keep in touch as best they could back in Berlin.

  Then they arrived back. Valentina’s services were wanted – she was reprimanded for being late, in fact – she waved to Tonya and shot away at the wheel of her UAZ jeep. Tonya, on the other hand, was kept waiting another six hours, and was half-frozen before the time came for her too to leave.

  But something had happened. She’d half-known it already after her last meeting with Thompson. And that something was dangerous. For twenty-five years, ever since Misha had been forced to flee for his life, out of the country and out of Tonya’s life, she had taught herself to suppress hope, to avoid optimism, to keep strict limits on the amount of human interaction she could allow herself.

  And that old dam had suddenly broken. Mark Thompson had broken it. A blue and gold passport and the hope of seeing Misha again had broken it. Of course Tonya knew that the odds were heavily against her ever seeing Misha again. Perhaps he had been killed in the Civil War. Perhaps he’d died of gunfire, cold, disease, hunger, wild beasts, or any of a dozen other possible causes. Even if he’d succeeded in escaping, he might never have come to Germany, or even Europe. He might have been killed in the war, or died in a camp, or been bombed sleeping quietly at home. And if he had made it all the way to Germany, then he would surely have married at some point, had children, moved on… But none of that was the point.

  The point was this. For two and a half decades, Tonya had avoided hope, because she knew that too much hope could crush those who held it. Now hope was alive again: spontaneous, eager, combustible, dangerous. After so long, she had begun to trust.

  7

  ‘Zavenyagin?’ said the doorman, spitting accurately into the wastebin between his boots. ‘That shit.’

  ‘He was that bad?’

  ‘It was all shout and scream for hours on end. We could hear him down here.’

  The doorman had a tiny wooden kiosk inside the entrance to the Leipzig Faculty of Agricultural Sciences. On a wooden shelf to the side, a simple wick dipped in paraffin made a stove on which a tin of water was beginning to boil.

  ‘Do you want coffee?’

  ‘You have coffee?’

  ‘No, no. Erstaz-coffee, of course. But not so bad. This one has some real barley.’

  The doorman indicated that Misha should enter the little booth. Misha didn’t quite see how he could, but crammed himself in anyway. The doorman nodded approvingly and made the coffee. He began to complain about Zavenyagin – ‘der Herr Scheisse-Zavenyagin’ – and about the Soviet occupation in general. Misha agreed with most of the complaints, but he was never really sympathetic to the self-pity of some of his fellow Germans. Did these people really not know what their own countrymen had done in Poland and Russia, the Baltics and the Ukraine? But Misha said all the things the doorman wanted him to say, approving every complaint, affirming every tale of woe.

  Gradually, Misha brought the question around to the woman who had been accompanying the general.

  ‘Ach! Some campaign floozy, I expect. A bit of skirt to cheer him up away from home. Our girls are better looking than those Moscow sourpusses.’

  Misha prodded further, and placed a whole pack of American cigarettes on the wooden shelf by way of encouragement, but the doorman knew nothing more.

  ‘She must be deaf as a nut, though,’ he commented, ‘to put up with the way that man shouts. One of the cleaners here, Frau Fassbinder, she said he shouted so loud that—’

  The doorman ran on, but Misha was no longer listening.

  ‘Frau Fassbinder?’ he asked. ‘Did you say Fassbinder?’

  8

  To begin with, Tonya saw little of Valentina. The first time they met up was for an evening meal at the echoing military barracks where Valentina had her sleeping quarters. The canteen was full of male soldiers, male voices, male laughter, and the two women ate quietly and quickly together, enjoying themselves hardly at all. But the connection had been made, and they persisted with their efforts to meet. Sometimes, if Valentina’s duty rosters permitted, they were able to meet for lunch, eating cooked ham and pumpernickel bread, and walking down by the bank of the Spree.

  And they talked. Not about everything of course. Tonya didn’t say anything about Misha. She certainly didn’t hint at the activities which brought her into contact with Mark Thompson of British intelligence. They avoided any discussion of politics. They were both careful to keep anything which might be construed as a comment on Party leadership dutiful and respectful. But otherwise they talked freely; about their experiences in the Gulag, about their families, about their times in the shtraf battalions, their fears of dying, their relief to have escaped Siberia. It was a particular relief to Tonya to talk about her daughters, Yana and Yuliya. She knew she would almost certainly never see them again – even worse, that she shouldn’t even try to get in contact – but they remained in her heart and her thoughts as strongly as Misha did himself. It was nice to be able to tell someone about them. She possessed no photo or picture of the two girls – she had been taken to Siberia with nothing at all beyond her prison uniform – and Tonya felt that talking about them somehow kept her link to them alive.

  The two women came to see each other most evenings when their schedules permitted. They spoke Russian together. They embroidered items to send to Valentina’s niece back in Minsk. They laughed. They remembered again what ordinary friendship felt like.

  Then one day, Tonya was carrying a bundle of documents down to the basement for copying by the typists there, when she remembered something Valentina had said the night before. She chuckled to herself. She was still chuckling, when, at a turn in the stairs, she met an NKVD captain, Arkady Konstantinov. The captain was tall, had glossy chestnut hair that he wore daringly long, and wide observant eyes.

  ‘Something funny, Comrade Kornikova?’

  ‘No, sir, nothing.’

  Tonya’s hands were a bit too full with the documents and a couple of files slipped from the top.

  ‘You are taking these down to be typed?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Then I’ll help.’

  Konstantinov took the two files that had fallen and left her to carry the rest. He walked half a pace behind her, so she was very aware of his presence, but couldn’t see him. The stairs were wide enough that they could easily have walked abreast.

  ‘You laugh at nothing?’

  ‘Only something a friend said yesterday.’

  ‘A friend?’

  ‘A Russian, sir. A comrade driver with the 12th Guards Rifle Division.’

  ‘Ah.’ They were downstairs now, in the basement. There must have been damp-proofing once, but if so it had been split or cracked in the shelling, and the basement was heavy with damp. ‘The name of your friend?’

  Tonya told him, along with name, rank and unit. She felt scared now, though for no reason she could think of. Konstantinov nodded slowly. He slipped his two files on top of the stack that she already carried, and left silently, his footsteps inaudible on th
e soft linoleum.

  Tonya felt a wave of fear so strong, she almost retched.

  9

  Konstantinov climbed the stairs again.

  There had been nothing in his conversation with the interpreter, or almost nothing. But Konstantinov was good at his job. He felt the prickle of the almost, the way a hunter knows when a stag is hidden in a thicket. At the same time, Konstantinov knew that the interpreter had been thoroughly checked already. She wasn’t a Party member, it was true. She had been in the Gulag and in a shtraf battalion, but in some ways that kind of past stood as a guarantee of present loyalty …

  Konstantinov fingered the phone on his desk, toying with the idea of doing nothing. But he was a man who always preferred action to idleness. Knowing that the phone call would almost certainly come to nothing, he made it anyway. He called the unit whose name Kornikova had just given him. He confirmed that there was indeed a corporal driver who served there. The woman’s name was as the interpreter had given it. But there was something else too. The driver had also been in the Gulag, had also been in a shtraf battalion.

  Konstantinov replaced the handset with a tiny smile. The doubt that had been almost but not quite present had widened into something larger – still small, of course, but big enough now to be worth investigating. It was all very well releasing these men and women from the Gulag, but it was not preferable that they should spend unsupervised time together afterwards. Those with a tendency towards political dissent should be very careful about keeping themselves away from corrupting influences.

  Konstantinov pulled a sheet of paper towards him and scribbled an instruction. The issue was a minor one. There was almost certainly no need for any action, beyond perhaps a formal warning from an appropriate Party authority. But the interpreter worked with some highly sensitive documents. No precaution could be too much.

  Konstantinov wrote some instructions and signed them, then threw the sheet at his wire out-tray. The whole business was probably a distraction. He had more important things to worry about.