‘Only the guilty run.’
‘I’m a woman. One hears stories about … unpleasantness.’
‘Unpleasantness? Committed by a uniformed officer and men of the NKVD? In broad daylight? Beneath the Brandenburg Gate?’
‘You’re not a woman. If you were, you would hear stories too.’
Konstantinov used his two index fingers to snap the matchbox closed. Tonya realised she had already inadvertently handed him something to feed off. He had asked her if she had felt at risk of sexual assault from men of the NKVD. She had refused to rule out that possibility. That was one small strike against her already.
‘Of course, if I had known you were NKVD,’ she added lamely, ‘that would have been something else. But one hears so many things. Germans, former criminals, in stolen uniforms, doing such unspeakable things…’
Konstantinov ignored her. ‘General Sokolovsky permitted a break for lunch. Your attendance was required in the afternoon. We picked you up by the Brandenburg Gate one and a half hours after the lunch break was given.’
‘Yes.’
‘How long is your break normally?’
‘Normally? Perhaps half an hour.’
‘So you were already an hour late. For General Sokolovsky.’
Tonya’s face felt numb and taut. Her hands were spread on the table in front of her, but they hardly felt like part of her at all. Although her mind was racing with thoughts, she seemed disconnected from her body. Even Konstantinov’s questions and her own answers seemed as though they took place in some different dimension. And she had nothing with which to rebut Konstantinov’s point. She shouldn’t have been where she was. She couldn’t deny being there. Any excuse would look feeble. She hadn’t even thought of what to say.
‘Yes sir,’ she said.
‘And walking back would have taken another hour or more. So you would have been two and a half hours late. For General Sokolovsky.’
‘Yes sir. I—’
Tonya began to speak, then tears, coming quite unexpectedly, washed away her words. The thought of Misha, a sudden sense of him, warm and close, an actual living entity not the dream-figure which was all she’d had for so long, came sweeping into her consciousness. Konstantinov and the interrogation suddenly felt like nothing at all: a mere distraction from the only thing about the day that really mattered.
Through her tears, she heard herself saying. ‘The general… I thought he must have a long lunch … my boots are old… I wanted to get some new ones … there was a man selling good boots in the Tiergarten. I didn’t know… I thought the general would have a proper lunch. I thought… I only wanted boots.’
It was a good answer.
Of course, no answers, no matter how ingenious, would help her if Konstantinov knew anything about her work as a spy. But just then, from the room next door, Tonya heard the smash of breaking crockery, followed by the angry noise of a Russian shouting at a German kitchen worker. Even Konstantinov allowed a tiny smile to curl at the corners of his mouth.
And amazingly, despite her situation, Tonya began to relax. They knew nothing. She suddenly felt sure of it. She felt certain that major criminals would never be interrogated in a room like this. Her tears were still flowing, but they felt like no part of her. They felt like a gift from some other place. A gift that allowed her to come across as an innocent woman, frightened and out of her depth. She realised she was nearly old enough to be Konstantinov’s mother. She could make use of that. She could already sense the moves.
‘I only wanted boots.’
5
It was the middle of April. A fine grey rain pattered down over the surrounding fields, muffling sounds and reducing all colours to the same narrow range of greys, browns and muted greens. Somewhere, a long way away, there was the mournful sound of a steam engine whistling.
Down by the railway’s edge, Misha’s shoes squelched in the mud. On the track above, six or seven feet up the embankment, a German businessman, Herr Kallenbrecher, stood wrapped in a raincoat, looking down and smoking.
Misha continued to explore. The siding stood on the new German – Polish border, a few hundred yards from the main rail-line that led east to Moscow. The muddy verge was littered with industrial equipment, torn out of German factories by the Soviets and left to rot there. Some of the machines had been so roughly disassembled by the Soviet reparations crews that Misha could see they were ruined. Still others had been in good condition when they’d been removed, but had become badly rusted and filthy after a winter outside. In theory, the equipment was destined for transport to the Soviet Union, but Misha could see that it would either never arrive there or be useless when it did. The engineer in Misha revolted against buying – or in effect stealing – such rubbish. But he was also a realist. And there was some once-good equipment here. He squelched up and down in the mud. He found a usable furnace lining of an excellent size. He found crucibles, tongs, ladles, hoists, a pair of small workshop cranes and other gear for handling molten metals. He found a decent press and a first-class lathe, which wasn’t strictly necessary but seemed too good to pass up.
Misha looked up. Kallenbrecher had just finished a cigarette and pinged the butt, still glowing, into the mud below.
‘If I wanted to go ahead,’ said Misha, ‘how would it work?’
‘You bring a truck. One, two, however many. You take what you want. You go.’
‘And you provide?’
‘Peace.’
‘From the Russians?’
‘The Russians, the army, NKVD, everyone.’
‘And loading up?’
‘There’ll be men here. And a tractor to pull you out of the mud if you get stuck.’
‘How about transporting the stuff? What happens if I’m stopped?’
‘I can get you clearances for Berlin. Real ones, not faked.’
‘Berlin? Soviet sector or anywhere?’
‘No. Soviet sector only. If you want to take it west, that’s your lookout.’
Kallenbrecher was charging four hundred dollars the lorryload: far too much. But Misha could bargain. And if push came to shove, he thought Hollinger would give him more cigarettes – the basic currency of the occupation. He gazed again at the siding. It looked like a graveyard, but really, Misha thought, it was the opposite: a place of birth and renewal. It would be good to turn such rubbish, the spoils and wreckage of war, into something valuable again. Misha felt a sting of pride, German pride, in his ability to do it.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
6
Tonya would be found guilty, of course.
She’d known all along that no other verdict was possible. NKVD men didn’t swoop to arrest people only to have them found not guilty of all charges. The only issue had ever been of what she would be found guilty.
But the interrogation had never tackled the subjects that had so terrified her to begin with. Konstantinov had tried to hit her hard with the little stuff. He didn’t like her previous association with Valentina. He had accused Tonya of not denouncing her friend for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. He had made a big deal of her being late for Sokolovsky. He had spent a full two hours of the interrogation inquiring into Tonya’s relationship with Marta, and ended up establishing exactly nothing except that Tonya had taken violin lessons from an unlicensed music teacher. And that was it. Nothing about spying for British intelligence. Nothing about a packet of carbon papers which would have killed her if they’d been found.
Following the interrogation, Tonya spent twelve days in an NKVD prison cell in the regimental barracks, while further investigations were made. She was treated perfectly well. For two days, the prison regime – two meals a day, no opportunity for exercise, twice-daily cell inspections – was followed strictly. Then within a further day or two, it lapsed altogether. The guards brought her meals straight from the canteen, and sat with her as she ate them. She offered, to do their sewing, and soon sat with a big pile of mending from all over the barracks. Most of
the soldiers who came to collect their clothes gave her a little present: two cigarettes, some boiled sweets, a newspaper, a carved wooden keepsake. She soon had a little pile of goodies in the cell with her. The most senior guard, a senior sergeant like herself, worried that her little treasure trove might cause problems for them both and took it away, promising to keep it safe until the ‘comrade sergeant’ was released. When Tonya happened to mention having been cold in the night, the sergeant brought her a stack of four thick woollen blankets, apologising for his thoughtlessness.
On the thirteenth day, Tonya was ordered out of her cell. She was driven, under guard, to a disciplinary tribunal held under NKVD auspices in one of their Karlshorst offices. The tribunal consisted of three people: Tonya’s section leader from Mühlendamm, Konstantinov himself, and an NKVD major who had lost one arm in the war and sat with his empty sleeve pinned to the front of his tunic. Tonya was formally charged with various crimes. The first crime mentioned was neglect of her duties as translator. The second crime was indulging in capitalistic black-market activities, a charge relating to her admission that she had intended to purchase a new pair of boots from a Tiergarten vendor. The third charge dealt with her failure to denounce Valentina. The final charge related to her association with anti-Soviet elements – that is to say, that she happened to have taken violin lessons from a German woman not formally licensed to give them. Tonya pleaded guilty to all charges.
She was escorted from the room, while the tribunal conferred. The room she waited in was small. It had a single chair, no table. The walls were chalk-white and bare. Tonya didn’t sit down but stood at the window and gazed out, across the roofs and ruins of Berlin. It was spring now. The snow had all gone. Birds seemed to have returned to the city and Tonya looked out at the rooftops, listening to the birds.
NINE
1
1946. A wet spring crawled slowly into a hot German summer. But though the streets still shimmered with heat, as they did in that first intense summer after the war, the mood in Berlin grew icier with each passing month.
Rumours of arguments in the Allied Control Council spread like wildfire. It was said that the British were reducing their garrison in light of a possible evacuation. It was said that the Americans too were quietly evacuating dependents and retaining only core military personnel.
In one way, the rumours were false, Neither the British nor the Americans – nor even the French, in whom no one had much faith – were depleting their forces in Berlin. But the whispering told a deeper truth all the same. The Russians were becoming increasingly hostile, increasingly assertive. Berlin was surrounded. The Western position untenable.
The summer blazed on. The rumours grew.
2
Misha knocked at the front door.
Behind him, in the neat suburban garden, a shell hole clawed its way into the lawn and fruit trees. Misha waited twenty seconds, then raised his hand to knock again. Before he could do so, the door swung silently open, and a black-coated servant wafted Misha through a ticking marble hall to a flashily luxurious drawing room. The owner, Thomas Brandt, was present, dressed in a dark grey business suit with a loud tie. A leather coat was flung over one of the sofas.
Misha introduced himself: he was a businessman, he said, needing help with supplies. Brandt yawned ostentatiously, and skewed his body around in the sofa to look at Misha better. He shrugged.
‘So? Why come here?’
‘I came because I read one of the British MilGov bulletins. Specifically, the one in which it was mentioned that you had been fined two hundred thousand Reichsmarks for transporting a hundred and fifty tons of pork from Bremen into the French zone and selling it.’
‘One hundred and seventy-five tons. One seven five not one fifty.’
‘All the better.’
‘Drink.’
Brandt spoke the word like a statement not a question. Getting up, he poured whisky into a pair of heavy crystal tumblers, no water, no ice. The whisky was a Scottish brand, expensive and rare.
‘Thank you.’
‘You want to sell or buy?’
‘Certainly buy. Perhaps selling too.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m an engineer. I’ve assembled a foundry. Not first-class, but not bad. We’re ready to start.’
‘What’s a foundry? How did you come by it? I’m not a metal basher.’
Misha began to answer, ignoring Brandt’s derogatory tone, but he could see the businessman’s eyes already beginning to glaze. And in any case, what did it matter? The fact was that Misha had done it. It had taken him months to do it, but he’d done it.
First, he’d got hold of some trucks – four Russian-made UralAZ monsters with huge wheels and formidably low gearing. He’d made a date with Kallenbrecher, gone back to the siding, then loaded his trucks till their rear axles were jammed flat against the suspension. Getting the equipment back to the Soviet sector of Berlin had been simple enough. Moving it through into the British sector had been more worrying, but easy enough in the event. Misha had simply waited until two o’clock in the morning, then covered by a sudden squall of rain, he’d driven straight across the sector boundary.
That had been the easy part. But much of the equipment he owned was in an appalling state of repair, and there were still missing parts to be sourced or fabricated. For fourteen long weeks he and a tiny team had laboured to get his factory set up. He’d drawn on the ‘Central Bank of Cigarettes’, as Hollinger had come to call it. But Misha couldn’t afford to flaunt any sudden wealth. There were Soviet informers everywhere in Berlin. The NKVD and other Soviet security forces were becoming ever more brazen in beating or abducting individuals they didn’t want around. So Misha kept things inconspicuous. He kept his looms going, and had even built four more. As far as possible, he used his existing income to get the foundry built.
But none of that did Brandt need to know.
‘We can make anything,’ said Misha. ‘Prototypes. Specialist parts. Replacement parts. Every manufacturer will need castings sometimes. Some manufacturers will need us all the time.’
‘West zones or east zone?’
‘Both. Mostly east. The Soviets ripped out the foundries, but couldn’t reassemble them. They’re desperately short.’
‘Maybe. But it’s a question of payment. The easy things are the simple ones. Food, steel, coal, paper.’
‘I didn’t come here because I needed help with the easy things. The Soviets are desperate. I have names.’
Misha handed over the slip of paper he’d brought with him. A list of businesses that needed castings. Two thirds of the names were located in the Soviet zone.
Brandt stared expressionlessly at the paper, then waved his guest out into the hall. Misha stood there. From another one of the rooms off the hallway, a door opened and a girl stepped out. She was in her early twenties, German but carefully Americanised from her nylon stockings to her bright crimson lipstick. She was pretty and thin, but also brassy, unbelievable, fake.
She said, ‘Brandt?’
‘He’s on the phone.’
‘Die Scheisse. He’s always on the phone.’
She left again by a different door.
After fifteen minutes, Brandt was done with his calls and he called Misha in.
‘Castings, yes, everyone wants them. You, what do you need?’
‘Coal for the furnace. Metal for the castings.’
‘OK.’ He used the American term. ‘Coal is easy. Metals I can get. You will need to promote your own products. That’s not a business I understand. You’ve got clearance for the Soviet zone? You’re willing to travel there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. I can give you some contacts too. Take samples, but don’t sell anything. Just find out what people have to offer.’
‘You mean money?’
‘Yes, money. Not roubles of course. And Reichsmarks only if we have to. But anything. Food. Timber. Any sort of vehicles. Engines. Barges. Livestock. Scrap metal. Oi
l or coal, of course. Anything. I’ll handle things from there.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You speak Russian?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Misha, avoiding any discussion of his past.
‘It’s better to. It’s the Russians who make the decisions these days. But macht nichts. I’ll handle things.’
Brandt nodded. The conversation was over. The girl came into the room again, and hung on the doorpost, rolling around it with her skinny hips like a dancer in one of Berlin’s new nightclubs.
Once again, Misha felt a jab of his old, unreasonable certainty. Tonya was alive. She was still in Germany. And he would find her. How could he not?
He felt ridiculously sure.
3
Oderbruch, just west of the river Oder.
A place of low, forested hills separated by broad floodplains, small farms and scattered villages. Once, the Oderbruch had been well inside the German border. Germany had continued on to the east, reaching as far as Königsberg on the shores of the Baltic. But that had been before the war. After the surrender, Germany had lost everything east of the Oder. Poland had jumped westwards. Königsberg had become Kaliningrad, part of Russia itself. The Oderbruch now marked the furthest eastward limit of Germany. It felt like a place forgotten by time. It felt like the end of the earth.
Tonya saw the landscape unroll behind the truck. She was in the back, along with four ordinary soldiers and a couple of dozen crates and sacks. The other soldiers – all male and twenty years her junior – smoked and talked among themselves. They didn’t include her in their conversation. She didn’t seek to join in.
More flat fields passed away behind their tailgate. More stone houses and low hills. Then the movement of the truck changed. Instead of the gently curving country roads, the truck made a sudden turn and began accelerating hard down a dead straight track, unmetalled and deeply scored and rutted. The soldiers grabbed the sides of the truck for support as the wooden benches beneath them began to leap and jolt. The conversation died to nothing.
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