“A sparrow drinks more than you,” Captain Ressler said contemptuously.
Alexsi had spent the afternoon listening to the women Abwehr clerks speculate that the whip and the dog and the strutting walk and the baby face and the Hitler moustache all had to belong to the owner of the world’s smallest penis. They all said, Come out with us tonight, Walter, not with that bastard. You wouldn’t think so after Aida, and the way the NKVD had taught him to use them, but Alexsi liked women so much more than men. After all that, he had to work to keep the grin off his face whenever he looked at Ressler. “Life is all about your perspective, my friend,” he replied. “Just think of all the beer you haven’t had to buy, and be cheerful.”
“A philosopher lieutenant,” Ressler grumbled, turning his attention back to the action.
A female hand came to rest on Alexsi’s shoulder. Another club employee, a table girl. She had her blond hair in two large braids, and she was wearing the traditional German dirndl dress. For some reason it was like an aphrodisiac for German men, though Alexsi had to bite his tongue to keep from laughing every time he saw one. Here it was more of a naughty housewife thing. This girl’s dress had a lace-up bodice that was very loosely laced up over quite a bodice.
“This isn’t to your interest, is it?” she asked him.
“How could you tell?” Alexsi replied.
She laughed. “Would you like to buy me a glass of champagne?”
Alexsi smiled back, though he didn’t see the point in paying a girl to pretend that she really wanted to fuck him. A whore was just like the girls in the Baku who flopped on their backs and let you fuck them because you had food for them to eat. No need for that with all the women around Berlin, and the men off in the army. “I’d love to, dear, but I’m just a poor lieutenant. You’ll have much better luck with one of these wealthier fellows.”
Her mask fell away for a moment, and she said, quietly enough so only the two of them could hear, “They get all excited and just want to tear something apart.”
“A hard living,” Alexsi said, placing a sympathetic hand over the one on his shoulder.
She examined his face and then just plopped down on his lap. “I have a few minutes to persuade you until they call me away. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” Alexsi said. “We can talk about the first thing that comes up.”
That made her laugh uproariously and, Alexsi thought, genuinely. As if a reward for his wit, she gave a little squirm in his lap. “What’s your name?”
“Walter,” Alexsi said.
She said, “I’m Heidi.”
Now it was Alexsi’s turn to laugh loudly.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded, still smiling at him.
“Nothing,” Alexsi replied, resting one hand on her hip. “Let’s both pretend that’s really it.”
She laughed again and flipped a braid the size of a cable back over her shoulder. If Alexsi hadn’t ducked he might have been concussed. While they had been talking the audience had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the desultory action from the wrestlers. “I’ve had enough of this shit,” Captain Ressler announced.
He stamped toward the ring, and the pimp who was playing the part of the fight manager grew visibly concerned at the sight of an SS officer bearing down on him. Ressler handed him some cash, and punctuated his orders with an outstretched finger stabbed into the pimp’s chest. The man dipped his head submissively, and when Ressler was done held up the money and barked something at the girls in the ring.
One of them saw him before the other, and understood immediately. She stuck her heel behind the leg of the other girl and pushed hard, sending her backward into the mud. The girl hit with a splat, and the front-row tables had to duck as the mud sprayed up at them.
The mud boiled and heaved, and the girl who had gone under popped up with a look of surprise and anger on her brown face. But her opponent wasn’t about to relinquish her advantage. She leaped on her, driving her back under the mud.
The crowd was on its feet. Captain Ressler was shouting, “That’s it! That’s it!”
Two hands shot out of the mud, one grabbing the dominant girl by the throat and the other by the hair. A good hard yank pulled her off.
“Does this happen often?” Alexsi asked Heidi-in-his-lap.
“Sometimes,” she said enigmatically.
“I believe it’s about to turn ugly,” he said.
“Now there’ll be bad blood in the dressing room for a week,” she said, sighing.
But this time the wrestling had degenerated into kicking and scratching and mud throwing. The audience was going mad. Captain Ressler was standing on his chair.
“I have to go,” Heidi said.
Alexsi looked over. A massive lesbian in a suit, who ran the table girls and with whom he wouldn’t have dreamed of arguing without a knife handy, was gesturing angrily in their direction.
“Do you have a pen?” Heidi asked.
Alexsi reached into his jacket and handed it over.
Heidi wrote something on a napkin, then folded it and handed it back along with the fountain pen. She kissed his cheek and was gone.
It had finally gone too far in the ring. Two of the pimp referees were prying the girls apart and dragging them away to neutral corners before there was real bloodshed. The audience was screaming abuse at them for ruining the fun.
Captain Ressler jumped down from his chair. “Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Just wonderful!” Then he looked at Alexsi intently. “Shultz, you have lipstick on your cheek.”
“Do I?” said Alexsi, wiping it away with the napkin.
“Did that slut give you her telephone number?” Ressler demanded.
Alexsi unfolded the napkin, took a look at it, smiled, and tucked it away in his jacket. “It would seem so.”
“I can’t believe it,” Ressler said. “You didn’t pay a single mark for her time, and she wants to fuck you for free.”
Still smiling, Alexsi said, “Did I thank you for bringing me here?”
Ressler grabbed his beer mug and drained it. “Another round!” he bellowed into the air, slamming the mug onto the table. “And let’s get some more action going! What are we paying you for?”
A few more matches and a few more rounds of beer, and Ressler’s head was dropping onto his chest. Alexsi seriously considered leaving him there, but decided that would just create more problems than the fleeting satisfaction was worth.
Ressler came back to life in the cold air of the autumn night. He was able to walk fairly well while gripping Alexsi’s shoulder. “You’re a fine fellow, Shultz,” he slurred. “You don’t drink worth a damn, and you’re more snotty than any lieutenant has a right to be, but all in all you’re a fine fellow.”
“Thanks, so are you,” Alexsi said, humoring him. The last thing he wanted to finish off the night was an SD man vomiting on his boots. At least they’d been sitting far enough away that he didn’t have any mud on his uniform.
“I have to piss,” Ressler stated. “Where can I piss, Shultz?”
“Hang on,” Alexsi said. “There’s an alley up ahead.”
He stood guard at the entrance while Ressler leaned against the brick wall. It took an agonizingly long time, but Alexsi wasn’t about to urge him to hurry.
Ressler finally staggered into view. “I feel much better,” he announced. “I should have gotten one of those girls. Shultz, let’s go back and get a girl.”
“I’m afraid the club’s closed by now,” Alexsi lied.
“Shit,” Ressler muttered. “Let’s go find a house.”
“All right,” Alexsi said, humoring him again. He was positive that any use of the word “no” would cause open hostilities to be declared. He’d get Ressler to his rooms, and then if he wanted to crawl out on his hands and knees looking for brothels that was his business.
They staggered down the street. As they closed on the next intersection, a little boy came running blindly around the corner and crashed into their legs.
>
“What’s this?” Ressler demanded. Then, showing more dexterity than Alexsi would have given him credit for in his condition, he bent over and grabbed the boy by the shoulders. The child gave a little squeak of terror. He seemed to Alexsi about seven years old.
“Look at you,” Ressler said warmly. “You look just like my son.” He picked the boy up bodily and gave him a long, emotional hug. “My little Petie is in Hamburg,” he said into the boy’s ear. “I miss him so much. And when I see a fine German boy like you it makes me miss him even more. Here, let me show you.” He set the boy down and went hunting in his jacket for his billfold.
The force of Ressler’s embrace had opened the boy’s jacket. Alexsi saw the point of a yellow star poking out. Now he knew why the boy’s legs were shaking in terror. It was past the Jew curfew, and he must have borrowed a jacket to hide the yellow star, which the law said had to be worn so it could be seen at all times, in order to get home without being arrested. And there he was staring up at the totenkopf, the death’s head skull badge mounted to the front of an SS officer cap.
Alexsi leaned over and buttoned the jacket up tight. He put a finger to his lips, and the boy, nearly paralyzed by fear, was able to nod.
By now Ressler had his billfold out and produced a photograph. “See, Shultz,” he said, holding it up next to the boy’s face. “He looks just like my little Petie.”
“He does,” Alexsi agreed.
Ressler turned the photo around so the boy could see. “You look just like my little son.”
The boy, in his terror, was able to nod.
“He must be late for home,” Alexsi said.
“Yes?” said Ressler, as if realizing the time. “Out late. Mother will be worried.” He wagged a finger at the boy, then pinched his cheek roughly. “But boys will be boys.” He put the photo back into his billfold and took out some money, slipping it into the boy’s pocket. “Here is a present. You make me miss my boy. Now run on home, like a good boy.”
The child dashed away from them as if he’d been shot from a cannon.
“A good boy,” said Ressler, struggling to get the billfold back into his jacket.
“A good boy,” Alexsi agreed. He helped Ressler get the billfold back into the inside pocket, and straightened his jacket.
“Now, a woman,” Ressler said.
Alexsi had been afraid he’d remember that. But if he got Ressler home before he sobered up any more, it wouldn’t be an issue.
They continued their march. And at the next street over, just south of the Tiergarten, a figure loomed out at them from out of a darkened doorway.
Alexsi almost went for his knife before he realized it was a woman. The tallest woman he had ever seen. She had to be over 180 centimeters, a towering German blonde wearing a long black leather coat, cinched at the waist with a wide leather belt and a shiny buckle to accentuate her jutting bust. And high black leather lace-up boots. More severe than pretty. Another woman he’d think twice about taking on without a weapon in hand. She looked them both over and said, “Who’s been a bad boy tonight?”
Ressler immediately came to life. “I have,” he announced.
Alexsi turned his attention from the streetwalker to the SS captain and said, only, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Ressler shoved him away with one hand. “You have your slut’s number. This one is mine.”
The Amazon glared at Alexsi, as if daring him to interfere with the transaction. Alexsi made a surrendering gesture of “all yours,” and turned on his heels.
Ressler had gone out without his whip tonight, but she probably had a collection of them. The Nazis had moved all the whores off the streets and into brothels, and sent the ones who resisted organization to concentration camps. But there were always a few die-hard independents in every trade.
His uncle had sat him down and told him about the signals the girls used. Not, as Alexsi thought at first, to order him off. Hans Shultz just didn’t want his nephew getting into any trouble. So along with a present of a box of condoms came a few well-chosen words of advice about Berlin’s ladies of the evening. Black boots meant you were going to get your buttocks cropped. At least. Which was good to know, because Alexsi didn’t see anything sexy about getting his ass whipped. He’d had an entire childhood of it, and no one was ever going to do it to him again without a fight to the death.
As he walked home, thankfully alone now, Alexsi pondered the mystery of the Germans. If Ressler had caught sight of the yellow Jew star on the boy he embraced so warmly, he probably would have smashed the child’s head into the nearest wall. Alexsi wouldn’t credit a particular German love of brutality, since in his experience all people loved brutality. But the Germans were unique in other ways. It could have just been naked girls wrestling, but no—it had to be in the mud because they were scrupulously clean but fantasized about filth. They wrapped themselves in rules but longed for anarchy. They worshiped order but dreamed of riot. It was the way they denied themselves what they really wanted.
Alexsi stopped walking and stood stock-still as he realized for the first time that Hitler understood his countrymen perfectly. Hitler understood that war would unleash them. And they would be capable of anything. They would be terrible.
He shivered in the darkness of Berlin.
35
1940 Berlin
Alexsi checked his watch. It was a few minutes before 6:15 in the morning. Moving the tuning dial a millimeter at a time, he tried to sharpen up the reception. It was the best radio he could find in a German shop, a Telefunken. In addition to the local broadcast radio it could also pick up long-distance shortwave. It was amazingly compact—just slightly bigger than a bread box. And at 295 marks it was a good thing the Russians had given him enough money to buy it. There were no radios in Russian shops, no matter how many rubles you had, while German shops were full of radios but you had to have the Reichsmarks to buy them.
He tapped the dial just a hair, and the clear stream of Morse code flooded in from Moscow. Alexsi adjusted the volume, but with the earphones plugged in only he could hear the station. No worries on this. He was only listening, not transmitting, so no one could find him.
The dots and dashes just kept rattling on. Messages to other agents, dummy traffic to confuse anyone monitoring the frequency, he had no idea. Finally he picked out the call sign D7Y, D7Y. That was him. After repeating that a few times to let him get ready, the numbers came in. Alexsi copied them onto the ready sheet of paper in the usual five-number groups. Finally the call sign repeated, and the message came in again. Alexsi checked it against his original work to make sure he’d gotten it down right. When the message repeated for the third time, he switched the radio off.
Alexsi opened his industrial almanac to the page, line, and column indicated by the five-number key group in the message. French steel production in 1929 was 10,428,286 metric tons. Alexsi subtracted 10428286 from his numbers groups, then used the staggered checkerboard system to convert the numbers into letters. The decoded message gave a reference date to his report on a German invasion of the Soviet Union. It read: YOUR CONCLUSIONS ARE RIDICULOUS. CONFINE YOUR REPORTING TO FACTUAL MATTERS.
Alexsi couldn’t believe it. He’d risked his life for this? He hadn’t necessarily been expecting praise—that wasn’t how his countrymen went about their business. He had been expecting demands for more information, not to be told that he was an idiot. The only hope the Russians had to avoid the fate of the Poles, the Norwegians, the French, the Belgians, and the Dutch was to be ready for what was coming.
He was sorely tempted to leave it at that. He didn’t think the Germans could conquer the Soviet Union. First of all, Stalin would have no qualms about sending everyone in the country off to their deaths. There were a great many more Russians than Germans, and unlike the Tsar’s armies, which fell apart in the Great War, the NKVD would be holding machine guns right behind them to make sure they fought like heroes. But mainly the Germans had no idea of the vastness, th
e kind of space that swallowed up entire armies. And it wasn’t like France, where they could drive their lorries down paved roads and fill the panzers up at the service stations when they ran out of petrol. When it rained you couldn’t even walk a horse down a Russian road without the animal sinking half out of sight. And then there was the winter. It had nearly killed him, and he’d been living in a nice warm apartment, not a trench.
His problem was, it might be like Napoleon who had taken Moscow in 1812 only to be run out again. The Germans getting just far enough in to capture the NKVD files with his name on them and put him up against a wall.
And if the Germans didn’t win, he knew the NKVD. They wouldn’t blame themselves for ignoring his warnings and telling him to fuck off—they’d blame him for not working harder to convince them. And that kind of blame would come in the form of a bullet.
Alexsi kept looking at the message and trying to figure out a plan. The best thing for him would be if the Germans were stopped right at the beginning, and everyone settled down in the trenches for a nice long war, like 1914. And he was safely out of the way recruiting spies in Iran.
Somehow he would have to obtain the kind of detailed information that would convince the Russians.
36
1940 Berlin
“Shultz!”
Each time it happened poor little Dagmar, the clerk at the desk next to his, still stiffened up in terror. Alexsi said, “Ah, Captain. Good to see you. Where’s Gunnar?”
Captain Ressler was without both dog and whip this particular day. He acted as if he hadn’t heard a word. “I need you.”
“Again?”
“Yes.”
Alexsi sighed. “Then I have to lock up these documents. Meet you at your office?”
“I’ll wait.”
Alexsi moved all the files on his desk to his shelf in the office safe. He made a point not to hurry.
In the hall outside he said, “What’s going on?”
Ressler said, “I require your Russian again. You’ll find this interesting.”
“I’m sure,” Alexsi replied, not very earnestly.
A Single Spy Page 21
