Underground

by Antanas Sileika

  “Why are you invoking fate? Think of all those people who did their duty during the war and died for their trouble. Nobody believes in duty anymore. People matter now.”

  “There are many things people don’t believe in anymore, but that doesn’t make them any less true. No one escapes his time, whether he’s brave or a coward. No woman either.”

  She refused to look at him. He knew he couldn’t console her, so he stood and walked to the window to watch the children playing in the courtyard.

  “Zoly promised to stay in touch with you and to help you with money. If you can, wait for me, but only for a while. If you hear nothing for too long, make another life for yourself.”

  She didn’t answer.

  PART THREE

  TWENTY

  OFF PALANGA, LITHUANIAN

  SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

  NOVEMBER 29, 1949

  THE WIPERS on the window at the bridge irritably slapped at the constant spray off the Baltic Sea. As the E-boat dipped and then rode up on the swell, Lukas made out on the right the glow from the Lithuanian resort of Palanga. A lighthouse blinked on the left, from the Latvian side.

  “Is this the departure point?” Lukas asked.

  The German captain pulled the pipe from between his teeth where he had held it for the last hour, long after it had gone out. “Still too far offshore. I’ll come in closer, but you’d better go out to the raft now. And don’t slip off the deck—we haven’t got the time to go looking for you. Check to make sure the raft’s inflated all right. You’ll be on your own as soon as you touch the water.”

  Lukas nodded to his two men, but neither one seemed all that enthusiastic now that they were so close. Rudis took a couple more puffs on his cigarette before dropping it at his feet without bothering to butt it. He adjusted his black cap so that each curl of blond hair was tucked beneath the cloth. He did not like to show loose strands. It was the sort of casual insolence that no partisan leader would stand for, but Lukas did not have much choice.

  He didn’t like either of his two recruits, but it had been important to get out before the winter in order to make the crossing of the Baltic, and there had been no time for a proper personnel search or training. Lukas had found Rudis waiting on tables in a restaurant. He had deserted from the Wehrmacht in Norway during the war and walked into Sweden. It was not much of a job history, but it did show he knew how to survive. He had been in Stockholm for five years and was still waiting on tables—no ambition to do anything but pick up women with his beautiful hair. To his credit, Rudis was good with a radio and could tap out Morse code at record speed once he had practised for a few days.

  The other man, Shimkus, had been a sailor who could not see past his next shore leave. He was lean and agile, happy with a beer and a smoke, and might have been in it for the money—it was hard to tell. Shimkus smiled easily, though it was unclear if he did it from a sunny disposition or a mind free of excess thought.

  Everything would be all right if the letter Lukas had sent through an old drop box in Poland made it to its destination.

  The Americans were involved in the mission now, along with the Swedes and the British, and as a result Lukas, Rudis and Shimkus were carrying too much materiel: a radio each, MP-44 assault rifles, Walther pistols, ammunition, twenty thousand rubles, a thousand dollars, sleeping pills, cyanide, amphetamines, grenades, penicillin, morphine, aspirin, topographical maps, long folding knives almost as big as bayonets when opened, compasses and secret pencils that wrote in invisible graphite.

  Dunlop had needed Lukas to run the mission, but having been spurned by him once, he was not entirely happy to have him back. “The only reason you returned is because of your Lithuanian wife,” he said, as if accusing Lukas of a crime.

  They had trained out of a summer house on a fjord south of Stockholm, empty now that the summer was over. Dunlop still drank heavily, but his enthusiasm for it had evaporated. He had lost maybe thirty pounds, not so much that he was thin but enough that his skin looked slack.

  “I disapprove of personal motivation,” he continued.

  Lukas was practising with the secret pencil, drawing it flat against the sheet one way and then another, and then laying a sheet on top to write the invisible letters. “You’re the one who passed on the message from Lozorius to me. If you didn’t want me, why did you tell me Elena was alive?”

  Dunlop had no answer to this. He was very drunk. “Personal motivation is fickle, like love.”

  Lukas looked at him closely to see if Dunlop was making a disparaging remark about his two wives. “In the end, personal motivation is all there is. The best causes are the small, personal ones.”

  “I wouldn’t call those causes. I’d call them grudges. If everyone thought like you, we never would have defeated the Nazis. If everyone thinks like you, we’ll never defeat the Reds.”

  “If everyone thought like me, we wouldn’t have either of those two to begin with.”

  By midnight, the E-boat was fifteen-hundred metres from the beach, and the captain gave the order to launch the rubber dinghy. The offshore wind slowed them, but at least it would muffle the noise from the E-boat. Lukas worked the paddle hard, and when he first thought to look back for the E-boat, fifteen minutes had passed and it was already gone. It took two more hours to cover the distance.

  The rubber boat was very heavy, so they cut it up at the water’s edge and then pulled the pieces a hundred metres up the beach, where they hid them in the underbrush. Then they shouldered their fifty-kilo packs and, taking a compass reading, headed inland due east, avoiding farmhouses and crossing meadows where the grass stood bristling with frost. Three kilometres inland they found a forest with a cutline, as marked on their map, and they were deeply into it when dawn began to come up. They went in among some bushes to hide themselves during daylight.

  Shimkus and Rudis fell asleep with their heads on their packs and Lukas took first watch. Even though it was November and the air was damp and cold, it felt good to be back. For all the freedom of France and Sweden, he had been a foreigner there. Now he was home.

  Working in the Swedish summer house with Zoly, Lukas had analyzed Lozorius’s messages out of Lithuania again and again. Why had the man called for Lukas in particular to return to Lithuania? Why not any agents the English could find? There were several possibilities, some better than others. Maybe Lozorius trusted Lukas the way he trusted no one else. Maybe, on the other hand, he wanted to entrap the most prominent representative of the Lithuanian partisans abroad. Some of the Ukrainian partisan spokesmen in Western Europe had already gone missing, and the same was true of the Estonian and Latvian partisans.

  “What else has he been telling you in his radio broadcasts?” Lukas had asked Zoly.

  “He writes that the underground has got weaker. The central control structure has collapsed and the local units barely have any contact with one another anymore. The senior partisans are mostly dead and the new ones aren’t educated. They can’t run the propaganda newspapers that they used to.”

  This information was troubling to Lukas. He was relying on old ties to help him once he got back in. “How did the English like to hear that?”

  “I keep telling you, they’re Brits, not English.”

  “They can’t tell us apart. Why should I bother?”

  “Anyway, the Brits didn’t like Lozorius’s news at all, and they’re not the only ones. The Americans believe Lozorius may have been captured and turned.”

  “On what grounds?”

  “First, because you and others told them there was a whole, solid underground network in place in the Baltics and his news sounds pessimistic, the kind of thing the Reds might want us to believe. The Americans hate pessimism. Next, they believe that the Reds, having developed an atomic bomb, are more confident and beginning to mass troops for an offensive against Western Europe in the spring. But Lozorius says nothing about massed troops or materiel transports heading west. Therefore, he sounds suspicious.”


  Lukas was sitting with Zoly at a table at a window that overlooked the front yard of the house and the sea beyond it. Shimkus and Rudis were being trained for hand-to-hand combat by an Asian Swede. The three looked like sportsmen practising wrestling. The whole session had an air of unreality to it, as if they were playing a game.

  “Maybe Lozorius is pinned down in his bunker and doesn’t know anything,” said Lukas.

  “Maybe. Or maybe he’s sending disinformation.” Zoly said it dispassionately enough, as if he had never known the man in all his charisma. He stood up and took the full ashtray from the table and tossed it on the cinders in the cold fireplace. When he returned to the table, he lit up again.

  “If what you say is true, they’re asking me to walk into a trap,” said Lukas.

  Zoly shrugged. “You have to be prepared for whatever reality you find there.”

  “Or maybe what Lozorius is saying is true, he has not been turned, and the Americans just don’t want to hear it.”

  “That’s also possible.”

  “If they don’t want to hear it from him, they won’t want to hear it from me. I wouldn’t want to be stranded in the country because they doubted me.”

  “I’ve promised to get you out of there once you’ve contacted Lozorius and collected some information.”

  “You’ll have to do better than promise. I have no intention of dying. I’m going in there to get my wife out, and you have to help me.”

  “I said I would.”

  “If it means rowing a dinghy yourself to pick us up, I expect you to do it.”

  “I’ll do everything I can.”

  “You have to do the impossible, Zoly. And if I don’t make it out, you have to watch over Monika and watch over Elena. Get Monika a pension or something.”

  “What am I supposed to do for Elena from here?”

  “I don’t know. Send Elena Red Cross packages, if they’re permitted.”

  “I promise I’ll do the best I can!” said Zoly, throwing up his hands. “Just remember this: the Brits, Americans and Swedes are going to a lot of trouble putting you in there. Remember that you owe something to them. Get some intelligence. Set up a conduit for information. They want to know about troop movements and missile bases. Don’t be quite the high-minded soul you were when you first came out. Help them and you’ll make it easier for me to help you.”

  “All right. There is just one more possibility I’d like to explore.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The possibility that Dunlop has made it all up.”

  Zoly stood and walked into the kitchen to put a kettle on the stove. He came back to lean on the door jamb as he waited for the kettle to boil. “I thought of that too. So I asked to listen in on a recording of Lozorius’s transmission. Dunlop didn’t let me do that. He said there was no recording. But there was a transcript. I looked at that.”

  “Well?”

  “Lozorius does say that your wife is alive, but not much more than that. Maybe he doesn’t want to betray her accidentally.”

  “So you’re satisfied what he said is true?”

  “True?” Zoly laughed. “I saw the transcript, but I can’t prove that he sent it, or that he was telling the truth if he did. The Brits or the Americans might be luring you in to go and test whether Lozorius has been turned. On the other hand, he might be intending to lure you in so the Cheka can take you as a prize. Or it could all be true. Even if it is true, Elena might be under some kind of pressure of her own, something we’re unaware of. We can’t be sure of anything.”

  Too restless to sit still as the other men slept, Lukas walked cautiously along the forest cutline to the point where it ended a kilometre farther along, and there he looked out to where a few farmhouses stood among the autumn fields. The first one, a thatched-roof wooden home, belonged to a man named Martinkus, supposedly a friend and contact. Lukas watched from the distance but did not see anything out of the ordinary about the house or the surroundings.

  When he made his way back, he found Shimkus poised in a crouch with his rifle at the ready. So much for his easygoing attitude. He had been boiling water over a small fire.

  “Where did you go?” Shimkus asked accusingly.

  “I wanted to look around.”

  “Never walk off like that without leaving word.”

  “Why not?”

  “I thought you’d abandoned us.”

  “I didn’t think you were the nervous type.”

  “I’m not from this part of the country. I’d be lost on my own.”

  “Is Rudis still asleep?”

  “I tried to wake him, but he told me to go to hell.”

  Shimkus had an aggrieved air, like someone who nurtured his insults. Lukas resolved to keep an eye on this tendency. You could never tell what a man was like until you were with him in the field. Some became better and some became worse.

  Of the two radios they had brought, only one worked because the other’s batteries had got wet. Rudis was finally woken and came up sullen, but after a cup of tea and a cigarette he was prevailed upon to transmit a signal back to Sweden. They waited for a response but received none.

  At dusk, all three of them went to the farmhouse, where Lukas rapped on the window. A middle-aged man came out.

  “We’re looking for a farmer named Martinkus,” said Lukas.

  The man looked at their weapons and packs. He did not appear to be afraid, but he did not look too happy either. “He’s dead. I married his daughter, but she’s lying inside, pregnant and sick.”

  “We’re partisans come in from Sweden,” said Rudis. “Someone was supposed to meet us here.”

  Lukas did not like it that Rudis spoke out on his own.

  “I don’t know anything about it,” said the man, and he turned to go back inside. But Lukas made him take two of them in, leaving Shimkus on guard outside.

  The pale, frightened wife was lying on a bench in the kitchen, two small children playing around her. Rudis took off his hat and shook out his golden hair and smiled down on the woman. Lukas was astonished that the man imagined he could work his charm here.

  “We mean no harm,” said Lukas.

  “Then please take what you want and go away.”

  Lukas wished he could do that, but he could not. He sat down with his knapsack and began to take things out of it. He showed them a Swedish camera, wonderfully miniature. He took out a bar of chocolate and gave it to the children. They held it in their hands, afraid, so he took it back and unwrapped it, breaking off pieces for the woman and the man as well as the children. He showed them the Swedish wrapper.

  “We don’t have any ties with the partisans,” the man said eventually, “but if you tell me where you’re camped in the woods I can start looking around and send someone there.”

  “Don’t send anyone. We’ll come back tomorrow to find out if you’ve learned anything.”

  “Please,” said the woman, “don’t come to the house. Meet him by the shrine half a kilometre down the road. I don’t want people to see you coming here.”

  They bought eggs, butter and bread from the couple, paying 350 rubles, which seemed high, and then went back to the forest.

  “What do you make of that?” asked Rudis.

  “They were terrified. They thought we might be agents provocateurs.” “She was a nice-looking lady, though, for all her problems.”

  For three days they camped out in different spots, warily meeting the farmer each night. Once they bought bacon and another time bread, eggs and butter. Lukas was beginning to think the farmer had found a useful private market, but on the fourth night he said he had someone for them to meet, a partisan.

  Lukas asked him to bring the man into a clearing in the forest at dawn. He kept Rudis with him and asked Shimkus to stand a little way inside the forest beyond the clearing in order to cover them in case of complications. An hour before the meeting, Lukas and Shimkus combed the forest around themselves, looking for movement of partisans or interior arm
y agents. They saw nothing.

  The man the farmer brought with him was middle-aged, which was a little surprising. Older men did not do well in the partisan movement because the living conditions were so poor. This man had a very straight back and a good, if old, long brown leather coat over his jacket, and he wore a tie as well as a woollen cap. He looked somewhat familiar.

  “This is the partisan I told you about,” said the farmer. “I’ve seen him around before. He calls himself Karpis. I hope you two will straighten out whatever you have to say to one another, but I ask just one thing. From here on in, leave me alone. I have a sick, pregnant wife and two children. My problems probably don’t interest you, but your problems don’t really interest me either.” He walked away without so much as a wave.

  “You see how it is now,” said Karpis. “The people are tired.”

  “Are you armed?” Lukas asked.

  “Just a pistol.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  Karpis pulled a small PPK from a pocket inside his leather coat. “Maybe you and your friend should set down your arms as well.”

  Lukas and Rudis did as he asked, and Karpis knew enough about them to ask where Shimkus was, but they said he was away. Lukas asked Rudis to sit apart from them as they spoke, but Rudis ignored the order and stayed nearby. It was standard operating procedure: no man should know more than he had to. Rudis’s refusal demonstrated his incompetence and his stupidity. Now Karpis would know that Lukas’s men did not follow orders.

  “The farmer tells me you come from abroad,” said Karpis. “How can this be possible?”

  “We landed on the beach in a rubber raft.”

  “Could you show me where you buried it?”

  “I don’t think so. We don’t want to go back there. But look at this.” He took out the folder with the American money in it—a thou-sand American dollars in tens.

  “This shows me you’re rich, but the money could have come from anywhere. Anything else?”