by Jeremy Duns
‘I see,’ I said, although it all sounded a little fantastic. ‘But I don’t understand why you think this is the same woman Slavin is referring to. He doesn’t mention what name she was going under in 1945…’ I picked up the folder again and found the place on the page. ‘“During and after the war, Irina Grigorieva, currently the assistant third secretary at the embassy here in Lagos, worked as a nurse in the British Zone of Germany. There she fell in love with a British officer, according to her the one true love of her life. She succeeded in recruiting this man into the NKVD…” It doesn’t say which hospital she worked at, and there must have been dozens in the Zone. Lagos Station’s photograph of her is also a little blurred – what makes you so sure she’s this Maleva?’
‘Instinct,’ he said. ‘Instinct and experience. I’ve spent half the afternoon examining her photograph – I can’t be one hundred per cent certain it’s her until I check its counterpart in Registry tomorrow morning, but I’m fairly close to that. It has to be her.’
He was looking at me expectantly. And that was when I saw what had been staring me in the face since he had answered the door. Why he’d called me out here tonight instead of leaving it until tomorrow morning. Why he was drinking more than usual. And why I had to act now.
‘You needn’t worry, sir,’ I said.
His broad face reddened immediately, and I knew I’d hit the mark. ‘Worry? What makes you think I should do that?’
‘You’re quite right about the interview,’ I said. ‘Whoever translated it got it wrong. In the original Russian, Slavin quite clearly states that the double was recruited while involved in some sort of black operation in Germany at the end of the war. It sounds like he might have been part of Father’s junket and become entangled with this woman. Did Father give you any idea how many people he had out there with him, if any?’
Chief shook his head. ‘He didn’t tell me anything at all about the operation – just that it was vital it continued.’
‘All right. Still, the fact that you were openly working at British headquarters clearly rules you out as the double. I’ll explain the whole thing to Henry as soon as he gets here. When was it you said he was coming over, again?’
‘Henry? Nine.’
I glanced at my watch. It had just gone half eight. Pritchard might even be early, knowing him.
Chief was taking a congratulatory draught of Becherovka: he was in the clear now. He must have read the file this morning and panicked – not that another traitor on his watch would lead to calls for him to resign, but that his being stationed in the British Zone in ’45 might bring him under suspicion of actually being the traitor. His position as Head of the Service was no guarantee of protection: Five’s Deputy Head had almost lost his mind after being investigated by other officers in ’66. Even a Chief could be brought down. He had probably spotted the omission in the translation some time during the afternoon. It exonerated him, but he knew it would cut more ice if someone else pointed it out. Of the officers who would be hunting the double agent, I was the only one with good enough Russian to spot it – outside Soviet Section, ‘Tolstoy’ and ‘Turgenev’ were about all anyone could muster. Additionally, I would have good reason to protect him, as he was a family friend and my father had apparently asked for his help. So he had called me in to get his story straight before tomorrow’s meeting. ‘It can’t possibly be Chief,’ I’d tell them. ‘There’s been a translation cock-up.’ Good old Paul.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘Henry won’t be the only one who will need convincing.’
He looked up, alarmed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Osborne and Farraday,’ I said.
‘Yes, yes, of course. I see that. But can’t you explain it to them, too?’
‘I thought you’d already discussed it with them,’ I said lightly, raising my glass. It was empty, and I made sure he noticed.
‘What? No, not yet.’ He stood up and walked over to the drinks cabinet. ‘I thought it best to sound you and Henry out first.’
‘Very wise,’ I said, lifting my glass. He poured a generous measure, and as he stepped away I took out the Luger, disengaged the safety, aimed between his eyes and fired in almost the same moment. The kick pushed me into the armchair and I felt one of the springs dig into my back as the crystal shattered on the floor and his body slumped to the ground and the liqueur began to seep into the carpet.
It was very quiet then. I could hear the wind whipping against the trees outside and a joist creaking somewhere in the house. My head was pounding, the blood careering around it. There had been a moment, a fraction of a moment before I had fired, when he had stared into my face and I’d thought he might have understood what was about to happen to him – that he had realized who I was.
I replaced the Luger and stood up. Pritchard was due to arrive in twenty-eight minutes, and I had to clear up the mess and be well away before then.
I set to work.
II
Sunday, 8 July 1945, British Zone, Germany
I reached the farmhouse about an hour before dawn and hammered on the door. After several minutes it opened, and a tall, lean figure with piercing blue eyes peered out at me.
‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’ he said, in an unmistakably English accent. He looked exactly the same as he had the last time I’d seen him.
‘You’re English,’ I said, searching his face for a reaction but getting none. ‘That is good news. I’m afraid I’m lost. I’m looking for the British headquarters at Lübeck.’
‘You are lost,’ he said, placing his emphasis equally carefully. ‘It’s a good distance from here. Come in and I can show you on a map.’
It was typical of Father: the war in Europe had been over for two months and there wasn’t a soul for miles around, but he had still insisted on keeping to nonsensical recognition codes with his own son until we were inside the house. As soon as we were, he shook my hand and asked if I had had a safe journey. Barely pausing to listen to my reply, he led me through to a cramped, low-ceilinged room and told me to take a seat. He didn’t ask about Finland, or Mother, or anything else. He had business to attend to.
The area looked as though it had once been a sitting room, judging by the elaborate floral pattern on the wallpaper and armchairs, but it was now inescapably the domain of a military operation, with most of the space given to a row of card tables that had been pushed together and covered in maps and papers. The room was lit by candles – there was no electricity in the house, and wouldn’t be for several weeks.
Against one of the walls was a dilapidated-looking wardrobe, next to which stood a ramrod-straight officer-type. Despite a neat moustache and severe spectacles, he looked only a few years older than me. I guessed that this was Henry Pritchard, a Scot who had been Father’s second-in-command on several operations early in the war. Father confirmed this, and Pritchard extended a bony hand to shake mine, but said nothing.
Father seated himself in one of the armchairs and I did the same. Pritchard remained standing.
‘The first thing I wish to make clear,’ Father said, ‘is that this job is completely off the books. And I mean completely. Only one living soul outside this room knows what we are doing here, and that’s the Prime Minister. Nothing is on paper, nor will it ever be. This goes with us to the grave, or we shall have done more damage than we are trying to rectify. In the hands of our enemies, this information could create the next war. I gave the PM my word, and I intend to stick to it. Do you understand?’
I glanced over at Pritchard to see if it was some sort of a prank. His face was set like stone. Father didn’t go in for pranks, I reminded myself.
‘I visited him in London a couple of weeks ago,’ Father continued. ‘It wasn’t easy to pull off, but I called in some favours. He gave me ten minutes to outline what I had in mind. He didn’t like it at first. Said it would get out, one way or another, and that that would put us in a terrible position.’ He smiled, the first time I’d seen him do so since arriving. ‘He
asked me to leave the building and never come back, actually.’
‘What changed his mind?’
He nodded at Pritchard, who turned to the wardrobe and unlocked it. Inside, someone had placed a shelf where the coat-hangers would normally have been, and on it were several stiff-backed folders. Pritchard took one of these out and handed it to me.
It contained a sheaf of documents telling of the execution of two British commandos at a German concentration camp in November 1943. There were photographs of the corpses and eyewitness accounts, all of which pointed to one man as having ordered the deaths. Bodhan Shashkevich was a Ukrainian who had led an Einsatzkommando—an SS mobile killing unit—that had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women and children. The British commandos had interrupted some of his fun and games, but had been made to pay.
I looked back at the wardrobe, and at the other folders in it. ‘Why do you need me?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t my field.’
Father smiled tersely. ‘Since May, SAS have been building up dossiers on suspected war crimes committed against their men and other British commandos. Last month a team moved into a villa at Gaggenau, over in the French Zone, and started trying to track down the perpetrators in order to bring them to trial. Henry is part of that team.’ He nodded at the younger man, who smiled at me: for some reason, I wished he hadn’t.
‘Henry contacted me while he was on leave in London last month,’ Father continued. ‘He was concerned that some of the guilty parties could evade justice even if they were to be brought before a court. In cases where our men were out of uniform, their lawyers are bound to argue that the conventions did not apply. As a result, they may escape with light sentences, perhaps as little as five or ten years. Worse, some may not even come to trial at all: under the terms of Yalta, most Ukrainians, for example, are being sent back to the Soviet Union. Many of them will be killed on arrival, but the likes of Shashkevich survived the war against strong odds – if they have enough money or other influence, they may yet slip through the net.’
He stood up and walked over to the window. It looked onto a small garden, surrounded by a high wall. He turned back to face me.
‘Henry showed me six files, concerning the very worst offenders. As soon as I read them, I realized it was an intolerable situation: many of the victims were British officers, and we should do everything in our power to see they receive justice. I set about trying to get in contact with the PM, and when he gave the go-ahead, came out and secured these premises. Henry has helped prepare a lot of ground for the job I have in mind – unfortunately, his leave ends on Wednesday, and his absence from Gaggenau would be too conspicuous if he did not return. You, however, are off everyone’s radar, and that, to answer your question, is why you’re here. We will be working very much along the same lines as the team at Gaggenau, with one major distinction: we will not be bringing any of these men to trial. We will have very limited access to supplies, fuel and transport, but Henry has put together papers identifying both of us as members of a British war crimes investigation team, and those should be accepted everywhere apart from the Soviet Zone. Once Henry leaves, though, we are on our own. Do you have any questions?’
I wondered if the two of them had lost their minds and begun weaving fantasies; many were these days. But they didn’t look mad: that was the frightening thing.
Although barely in my twenties, I was already an old hand at the spy game, having been attached to several cloak-and-dagger units over the course of the war. This was something else entirely – an execution squad, pure and simple – and the war in this part of the world was meant to be over. But as I looked into Father’s grim face flickering in the candlelight, I knew I had no choice in the matter, and shook my head meekly.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘We start tomorrow – Henry’s located Shashkevich.’
*
It was a beautiful morning. The air was crisp and clean, and the fields seemed almost to be glowing as the sunlight travelled across them. Somehow it made what we were about to do even worse. Father had briefed me on the day’s job, but he hadn’t told me how I would feel: as we cut our way through the countryside, a chasm of despair opened up in my stomach and I became terrified I would have to ask him to stop driving so I could vomit. For the first time in my life, I felt like a child playing at soldiers.
When we reached the camp, the guard on duty hardly glanced at our papers, waving us through at the sight of our jeep. In the central reception hall, Pritchard showed our papers again and we were led through to an area of stone cell blocks. A young American corporal marched us down a dimly lit corridor, unlocked one of the doors, saluted us, and marched away again without a word.
Shashkevich was seated on the bed, shivering under a rough grey blanket despite the morning sun filtering through the small window set high in one wall. He was still a large man, but the imperious-looking officer of the photographs in his dossier had been all but extinguished. His eyes were now deeply sunken and his skin pitted and sallow. He looked up at us, confusion spreading across his face as he registered our uniforms and berets. He wasn’t shivering, I realized then, but rocking back and forth and mumbling something to himself in his own language. Whether he was reciting a prayer, a list of everyone he had ever met to keep his mind active or the defence he planned to use when he reached court I do not know.
Father told him to get up in Russian, and the fear turned to defiance.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Get up,’ Father repeated, gesturing with his Luger.
After he and Pritchard had cuffed him, I held the door open as they marched him into the hallway and out to the jeep.
We headed out towards Frankfurt, taking small lanes to avoid the delays on the crater-heavy autobahn. It was mid-morning now, and the lines of refugees tramping across the fields, either on their way to DP camps or simply foraging for food, had grown. On the outskirts of the city, we took a turning into deep woods and kept going.
I breathed in the fresh air and tried to fix the moment in my mind: the birdsong, the smell of the trees, the strange emptiness of the sunlit ruined land. The engine stopped. We walked into the middle of a clearing and Father handed me the Luger. I released the safety and pressed the muzzle against the back of Shashkevich’s pale neck. The coldness of it woke him up, and the fear came over him in a rush. His hands started shaking violently and I had to clutch him towards me to restrain him. I called out to him in a voice that sounded surer than the one in my head to stop moving or I would shoot. It was an absurd thing to say, because by now he knew I was going to shoot him anyway, and something in me realized this, but I suddenly couldn’t stomach the position I was in, shooting him from so close. Without even considering it, I let go of him and stepped away, at the same time jerking one of his arms towards me so that he swivelled around as though it were a ballet. It all took place very fast, and contrary to everything we had planned – we hadn’t considered the possibility he might lose control. Shashkevich’s hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his eyes were staring out of his skull like a maniac’s. I thought hard of the photographs I had seen in the dossier and squeezed the trigger.
‘Pockets,’ said Pritchard after. ‘Don’t forget his pockets.’
I leaned down and ripped away some papers and trinkets, then handed them to Father and staggered off into the trees.
*
Pritchard returned to Gaggenau a couple of days later, leaving Father and me to work together. We had five more men to find, and it didn’t appear that any of them were in custody. We began following the clues contained within the dossiers, re-reading the testimonies and tracing possible escape routes on large-scale maps in the makeshift operations room set up in the house. The pace was furious, and we worked all day, every day, and often through the night. We visited scores of rundown barns and cellars all over the Zone, and I grew accustomed to the look in the eyes of children as we questioned their parents and grandparents. On one occasion, a young boy tried
to rush us as we entered a disused stable where he and his family were hiding, and Father very nearly shot him. I began to know what it felt like to be part of an occupying power, and it frightened me. Sometimes I would lie awake in my bed in the attic of the farmhouse and watch the spiders making webs in the beams, thinking back to before the war and dreaming of a future when it would finally be over for me.
Father had no such doubts about the mission, of course. It was his crusade: there was a light shining in his eyes and a spring in his step. He was meting out justice. Although we never spoke of much aside from the work, I was initially pleased that he had felt the need for my assistance, and did all I could to show him I was worthy of his trust. He never mentioned Shashkevich again, and in time I forgot that I had almost botched it and was pleased that I had at least contributed to getting rid of one of them.
It took me several weeks to realize the true nature of my role in the operation. As well as helping him in the field, it was also my job to polish our boots, care for our uniforms and, once we had got the electricity back, cook from the stores in the larder. He never thanked me for any of it, and it slowly dawned on me that this was the primary reason he had wanted me with him. It was his operation, but he needed someone to deal with the household chores and offer support – I was effectively his batman. I felt like I was twelve years old again, lugging his gear around Brooklands. Did he not know what I’d been through in Finland? Hell on earth! Only to be followed by weeks underground in Sweden. And for what? I’d thought he had finally realized that I was now an officer, and a highly capable one at that – but he still saw me as a boy.
My resentment was muted by fear, however: I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a dirty job. With the war over, there were no longer any hard and fast conventions to follow – or if there were, we certainly weren’t following them. I remembered the righteous anger that had overtaken us all the previous year when we’d heard about Hitler’s Commando Order, which said that we could be shot without trial. In avenging the men killed under that order, weren’t we committing the same crime?
