‘I haven’t come to kill you.’
In the suspicious silence that followed, Jamie could almost hear the wheels turning in the old man’s brain. ‘Why not? Am I of so little danger to you now? Not that I ever was, of course, but that didn’t matter to you. A denounced man is a dead man, isn’t that what you used to say?’
‘I’m not the secret police. I only want to talk to you about the old days.’
‘You have cigarettes?’
The abrupt change of subject was designed to give the other man time to think, but Jamie was happy to accommodate him. He fumbled in his pockets. Knowing the fondness of elderly Russians for the kind of cigarette that would choke a donkey, he’d bought two packets from the hotel bar. Still, he thought it was worth pointing out the ‘no smoking’ signs that decorated the walls.
‘Pouf,’ the old man grunted. ‘You think a nail is going to kill me now? Or any of these old fools I share this cell with. If anybody objects I tell them to go and fuck their mother.’ Jamie shrugged and handed him one of the thin cardboard tubes and produced a cheap disposable lighter, tucking the lighter and pack beneath his blanket when he’d done. The Russian inhaled with a long, whistling appreciative sigh and the thin lips twisted into a smile.
‘What were we talking about?’
‘The old days.’
Kaganovich choked on a cough of chesty laughter. ‘When you are as old as I am there are many old days. Do you mean the old days when I was young and fought in Manchuria? Or when Stalin himself noted my facility for languages and made me a diplomat and sent me to meet the beast Hitler?’
‘Yes, I—’
But Kaganovich wasn’t going to be interrupted. The voice became harsher. ‘Or when I came back and was denounced by that crooked bastard thief Berzarin? Berzarin, who had me sent to the gulag, ruined my life and destroyed my family. I always vowed that one day I would piss on Berzarin’s grave, but it is too late for me now. Maybe I will tell you what you want if you promise to piss on it for me, huh? Is it Dimitri the human mine detector you want to hear about? Or Dimitri the war hero who smashed the Fascisti on the Seelow Heights and marched into Berlin. Or perhaps it is Dimitri the traitor to the Motherland who ended up working in the same mines as the Fascisti he had been killing, because that cocksucker Stalin remembered his name, may he rot in a thousand hells.’
His strength spent, Dimitri lay back with his eyes closed and the cigarette drooping from his lips, the smoke spiralling up in wispy ribbons to form a cloud below the nicotine-stained ceiling.
Jamie gently removed the cigarette. ‘Why don’t you tell me about Hitler and Berzarin?’
It must have been five minutes before the old man started speaking.
‘I can’t remember taking a piss in the morning,’ he began in a voice that shook with effort, ‘but I remember those days like they were yesterday. It was just after that bastard Hitler had made his backstabbing treaty with the Yipponski, the Japs. Berzarin, who was my chief, called me into his office and told me we were both ordered to the Kremlin. I remember his hands were shaking and the sweat was pouring off him,’ the haggard features took on a semblance of a smile at the memory, ‘not that I wasn’t shitting my pants myself. This was at the start of the Great Purge. There were already plenty of rumours going round about people, loyal people, being pulled in and never being seen again. So you have to imagine us, Berzarin and me, shaking in our shoes as we drive there in one of those fancy new ZiLs—’ He was interrupted by a shout from the bed by the door, followed by a string of muttered curses that died away to be replaced by a desperate gasping struggle for breath. Jamie automatically turned to help the other man. ‘Do you want to hear my story or not?’ Dimitri rasped. ‘He’ll soon be dead, and good riddance.’ Reluctantly Jamie turned his attention back to Kaganovich. ‘Good.’ The old man nodded. ‘We saw Litvinov first. He wasn’t a bad fellow for a Jew, but all he told us was that our mission was deadly secret. We must reveal its existence to no one, not even our wives – not that I had one then. The Boss would tell us the rest. So we’re feeling a little braver when we go in to see him, knowing we’re not going to the Lubyanka after all. He’s in a good mood, the Boss, all jovial and friendly. There’s been a big mistake, he says, the fucking Yipponski have persuaded the Nazis we’re some kind of threat to them. You’re going to Berlin to convince Hitler different. Tell him that Stalin is his best friend and that the Soviet Union has no interest in German spheres of interest (which wasn’t entirely true, because everyone in the Foreign knew the Boss had his eye on Bessarabia and so did Hitler). We’ll share technology and we’ll share information for an assurance that the Anti-Comintern Pact has no military dimension.’ He smiled at the memory and the ravaged features resembled a crow-pecked skull. ‘He has this big deep belly laugh, and he does it now. Hitler doesn’t like German Communists, he says, I don’t like them either; tell him we don’t care how many of them he kills. In fact, we’ll give him a list if that’s what it takes. Hitler’s a pragmatist, he says, he’s not going to rock the boat for a bunch of Mongolian by-blows.’ There followed a long silence, but Jamie knew better now than to hurry the old man. Sometimes it seemed he was finished, but eventually he would take up the story again, as if he’d only been drawing a long breath.
‘Then it’s back to Litvinov for the details,’ Kaganovich continued. ‘More or less what the Boss had said with the rough edges smoothed off. Next day we flew to Berlin in time for Christmas, which, let’s face it, even for a party loyalist like me was a fucking sight better than a freezing Moscow apartment with a couple of old farts and a family with four kids.’
His chest started to heave and he was racked by a paroxysm of coughing that shook his whole body, wave after wave until Jamie thought he would surely die. Slowly, it subsided to a dry wheeze and the old man hacked something from his throat and spat it beside the bed.
‘Not long now,’ he whispered. ‘The last doctor these lousy Chechens brought to examine me said a build-up of fluid is putting a strain on the heart and pressure on the lungs. Next step renal failure. Of course, that’s if the black bastard knows what he’s talking about.’
‘You were talking about meeting Hitler.’
Kaganovich nodded. ‘They kept us waiting for a week.’ He grunted what might have been a laugh. ‘Meetings with clerks and endless visits to their fucking boring museums. Some secret, eh? Everywhere we went they offered us things. Free tickets to the theatre. A Swiss watch. Hampers of food. Jewellery for the wife or girlfriend. Even bits and pieces from the museums if you saw something that took your fancy. I didn’t touch a thing, but Berzarin was a man with deep pockets, as they say. Nothing was too small or too large for him. He thought it was Christmas every day. Stupid bastard. Of course, I reported everything to Sergeev, our NKVD minder. What—’
‘Do you remember what sort of things Berzarin chose from the museums?’
‘I thought you wanted to know about Hitler?’
‘Later.’
‘Mostly gold, but other small portable stuff.’
‘Anything from the South Sea Islands?’
‘Who knows, at my age you expect me to remember the details? They sometimes split us up, but you could bet one thing: if it had value Berzarin wouldn’t refuse it. He hid his loot in a big chest he thought I didn’t know about in our apartment off Wilhelmstrasse. I couldn’t figure out how he was going to get it all home until much later.
‘One day a car drew up outside the apartment, complete with an SS driver and a Hauptsturmführer with a Death’s Head badge on his uniform cap. He was square jawed and blond, like you see in the pictures, and he looked at us as if we were shit on his shoe. Berzarin had more clout than me and he didn’t like it much, but he knew this was the day, so he kept his fat mouth shut. Well, they took us to the back door of the Reich Chancellery – the old one, where they built Hitler’s bunker under the gardens. We were escorted up endless flights of stairs to a big office where a Nazi bigwig called von Neurath was waiting. Berza
rin managed to hide his disappointment – we’d been briefed that von Neurath was already on the way out, and Ribbentrop was the man to get results – but he said his piece. He was just finishing when a door opens and this figure dressed in a grey business suit walks in. You want to say that when you first met Adolf Hitler the room went cold, or he gave off an aura of terrible power.’ He shook his head. ‘Just this ordinary fellow in a suit, with a silly moustache. “You must tell Comrade Stalin that Germany and the Soviet Union will always be friends,” he says in this quiet voice, not like the newsreels at all. “The pact is a purely diplomatic instrument, with no military dimension.” He made to leave, but turned back for a second. “Tell him I believe we have much in common, he and I.” Then he was gone. The Great Dictator? Adolf Hitler was more like a used-car salesman, and just about as honest, huh? So we had what we came for and we went home to Moscow. Only Kaganovich didn’t get home. As soon as we got off the plane they took me to one side and opened my luggage. Surprise, surprise, eh? What do we have here, Comrade Kaganovich? Gold coins. Nazi propaganda. Hashish. “It seems you are a Nazi spy, comrade.” I turn to Berzarin and Sergeev for help, but they’re looking at me as if they knew all the time, and then Berzarin smiled – a sort of I-told-you-so smile.’ He shrugged. ‘They walked away and I never saw either of them again. I denied it, of course, but in those days they just beat you and beat you until you admitted anything just to make them stop. A two-minute trial and twenty years’ hard labour. Only the war came. I ended up in a punishment battalion where I was expected to atone for my crimes by becoming dead. But Kaganovich fooled them. Kaganovich lived and in time Kaganovich the survivor became Kaganovich the legend, then Kaganovich the hero. Four wounds and you were sent back to a regular unit. When I knocked out three machine guns holding up the regiment’s attack on the Seelow Heights, they put me in for the Order of Lenin. Of course, I think that’s it, Kaganovich is back, but Stalin had a long memory. They came for me as soon as the war was over and it was back to the gulag for another eight years for my impudence, and then the next thirty spent scraping a living any way I could find without the right papers. Shit jobs every one, and then,’ he emitted a harsh cackle, ‘just when you don’t think life can get any worse, you end up in a fucking place like this.’
‘Do you know what happened to Berzarin?’
‘I’d like to say someone put the bastard’s nuts through the ringer like they did mine, but Berzarin the betrayer naturally prospered. When I was released from the gulag I looked for him, but all I know is he ended up running some district out east, where no doubt he robbed honest men blind and had his hand stroked by the other crooks. He’s dead now, of course, but I find it comforting to think of him spending a few years lying in his own piss like me, before he went.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Now I’m tired. Unless you have another packet of nails, please fuck off and leave me to die.’
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Kaganovich.’
‘Yob tvoyu mat. Just remember. If you find Berzarin, you will piss on his grave for old Kaganovich.’
XVI
Jamie was so focused on Kaganovich’s testimony that the issue of his lack of transport didn’t occur to him until he walked through the doors into the open air. He reached into his jacket for his mobile phone, thinking that at least the hotel would send a car. In the meantime he had the choice of standing in the open under the wolfish and no doubt acquisitive eyes of the teenage gangsters he’d seen earlier or returning to the sweet-scented corridors of the care home, neither of which was terribly appealing. It wasn’t until he punched in the hotel’s number that he realized he was alone in the open space between the flats. Where there had been fifteen or twenty youths and four or five older men under the trees, all that remained were empty beer cans and fast food wrappers blowing in the breeze like tumbleweed.
Was the stillness in the air, or inside him? As he saw it, there were two possibilities. Either they were waiting for him somewhere, alerted by Mikhail who had been so impressed by the fistful of rubles, or something had scared them. And if something had scared the locals, self-preservation suggested that maybe Jamie Saintclair should make himself scarce too. He scanned the area for the threat he was certain was out there and he didn’t have to wait for long. A big Mercedes SUV slid round the corner where it had been shielded by the trees and drove slowly towards him. He backed towards the doorway, but the sharp snick of a lock being engaged told him he’d find no sanctuary there. He looked to his left, in the opposite direction to the approaching Mercedes and cursed as a second car emerged from a car park between the blocks of flats.
On one level the big Mercs provided a certain reassurance. Nobody driving a quarter-of-a-million-ruble car was going to cut his throat for the contents of his wallet. On the other hand, in his experience, big cars meant big trouble. Just because they were wearing Moscow number plates didn’t guarantee they contained Russians, even if, on balance, it was the most likely probability. That left one of two possibilities.
The first Mercedes drew up in front of him and two men didn’t so much step from the car as flow from it; one from the front passenger door and the other from the rear. Hard men in smart suits, confident in their ability to deal with any situation, but alert just the same, the suits cut just so to accommodate the pistol of choice in a neat little holster under the left armpit. They stopped in front of Jamie, one a little to the right, the other to the left, pausing only to glare at the driver of an ancient rust-bucket of a Lada that cruised past.
‘Mr Saintclair? You will come with us please.’
The words were in English with a distinct Russian accent, and they came from behind him. He must be losing it. He hadn’t even heard them get out of the other car. The man on his left moved aside and nodded towards the rear door of the Mercedes, but Jamie stood his ground.
‘Perhaps you’d care to identify yourselves first. My mother warned me about getting into cars with strange men.’
Just the right tone. Polite, but firm, with a little bit of humour to keep the situation from turning rough. A miscalculation as it turned out. The fist that caught him in the right kidney sent a bolt of lightning into his brain and paralysed him in the same instant. With an ease that said they’d done it a hundred times, the two men in front caught him as he fell, taking an arm each and dragging him towards the car, the toes of his shoes scraping across the concrete. Another man was waiting inside the back of the Mercedes with two pairs of manacles. Before Jamie knew what was happening, his wrists and ankles had been shackled. The manacles were linked by a chain and the man hauled it tight until the prisoner’s hands were between his knees and fixed it to a bolt on the floor of the car. Black leather seats, he noticed through the waves of pain that still flowed outwards from his lower back, ever so handy for cleaning up after an accident.
Someone pulled a hood over his head and he felt a moment of claustrophobic panic. It wasn’t as if he was in a position to see where he was going, looking at his toecaps as he was, but that wasn’t why they’d done it. It was part of the softening-up process. And that was what made it all the more frightening. Softening up for what?
Two options. In Russia that meant the State or the Mafia, which was actually a combination of options each more unpleasant than the one that went before. But the chilling monosyllabic professionalism and, let’s face it, relative restraint, told him he was in the hands of the State. And that meant, for the moment at least, there was no point in howling indignation or demanding to see the British consul, even if he’d been foolish enough to risk another kidney punch. The men in dark suits were just low-level functionaries doing a job and it didn’t matter to them who he was. Smart hotel or not he was part of the state system now, the same system that had swallowed Dimitri Kaganovich, chewed him up and, unlike several million less fortunate Russians, spat him back out again. OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, KGB were just a series of bland initials if you weren’t aware of the brutal reality behind them. Now they had been succeeded by the FSB, the Federal Secu
rity Service. For the people who’d lived under the old Soviet Union they were, and always had been the Cheka, the faceless secret police. Even now a knock at the door at the wrong time of the night triggered a moment of terrifying uncertainty.
Just to make sure you got the point, the FSB continued to use the old KGB headquarters complex at Lubyanka Square where tens of thousands of men and women, many of them innocent of any crime, had screamed their guilt to their torturers before walking the long basement corridors anticipating the bullet that would end their lives. To most tourists the Lubyanka meant the big honey-stoned edifice facing the square, but the true functional hub of the FSB was an anonymous grey lump of Stalinist concrete on the north-west side and Jamie guessed that was where he would eventually be taken. He hoped they’d get there soon.
The worst of it was the pain in his wrists and ankles where the metal edges of the manacles rubbed against bone with every turn of the steering wheel. He heard one of the men grunt something about a tail, and he was puzzled until another joked that it would save them a lot of trouble if it followed them all the way home. Eventually the familiar stop-start rhythm of inner-city transportation told him they’d left the ring system. A few minutes later the car descended what felt like a steep ramp and came to a halt, before the squeal of another set of tyres confirmed the arrival of the second Mercedes.
Someone unshackled him from the bolt and the ankle irons were removed, but the hood stayed. Hands that were almost considerate guided him from the car and along a series of corridors, a bewildering maze of lefts and rights, until he heard the sound of a metal door opening. The hands guided him four steps forward and worked at his wrists to remove the cuffs, making him gasp as the circulation began to return. His watch and the contents of his pockets were removed. Another pair of hands lifted the hood from his head and he almost staggered as the light blinded him. It took a few moments for his surroundings to swim into vision: a bare cell, perhaps eight feet by six, the floor and walls of flaking grey concrete. To one side stood a metal bed with a thin mattress and a single sheet. The toilet in the corner and the tiny sink attached to the wall told him he must be in the VIP wing, which was a relief for several reasons. A single bulb in the ceiling provided light, set behind inch-thick glass so you couldn’t break the bulb and use the shards to cut your wrists. One of the dark-suited men from the Mercedes stood watching him, beside a stocky figure dressed in black uniform trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The second man gestured to Jamie’s jacket.
The Samurai Inheritance Page 11
