by Jeremy Duns
By the end of August, four of the targets were dead. But the final name on the list was the one Father wanted most: Gustav Meier. He was an SS officer, and there was compelling evidence that he had raped and tortured the families of suspected members of the Resistance in France, including children. We hunted for him throughout September, but with no luck. Father was acutely aware that the chances of finding him were fading with every day that passed: he might have jumped on a boat to Argentina by now. But in the last week of September, there was a breakthrough. Father returned from a long excursion and barged into my room. ‘I’ve found him!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve found the bastard!’
He had discovered from the papers of one of Meier’s colleagues that he had relatives living near Hamburg, right across the road from a British army barracks. We had conducted surveillance on the area for several days, but to no avail. But Father had returned for another look and had chanced to spot Meier as he had driven through the nearest village. He was working as a gardener, and further enquiries revealed he had been living with the family under an assumed name.
Father had come back to the farmhouse for a very particular reason. On the two previous targets, he had found pea-sized suicide capsules hidden in their clothing, similar to the potassium cyanide ‘L-pills’ SOE gave its agents. Himmler had bitten into one when he had been captured in June, and Father was determined not to allow any of our targets to take the same way out: he didn’t want them to have that control, and I suppose also felt they deserved to know that vengeance was being served on them. Some reports had claimed that Himmler had been equipped with two capsules – one in his clothing and one that he had kept in his mouth. Although they were rubber-cased to avoid accidents – they could be swallowed with no harm done – there was clearly a danger that in a tussle someone might bite down without meaning to. Father wanted very much to deal with Meier on his own terms, so to be doubly sure no accidents happened, he needed another pair of hands: mine.
That evening, he came up with a plan. It involved me dressing up as a displaced person and him as a policeman. We would approach Meier and I would accuse him of some crime – a petty theft. Meier would naturally protest and, taking the opportunity of surprise, I would pretend to fly into a rage and pounce on him: in the resulting mêlée, either Father or I would retrieve any capsules he had on his person. As soon as this was done, Father would ‘arrest’ Meier, and it wouldn’t be until we were some distance away that he would realize what had happened.
After going over it several times, we set out for Hamburg the next afternoon. We found Meier soon enough, working in one of the gardens as he had been the previous day. We approached him in our respective garbs and I claimed that the tools he was using were mine, stolen from me the previous week. But either Father’s plan wasn’t as clever as we’d thought or my acting was poor, because he saw through it at once and made a dash for it across the garden and into a nearby field. We had no choice but to go after him, but when I caught up and leapt on top of him, I found that he didn’t have any capsules on him – but he did have a knife. Where he had hidden it, I don’t know, because he had been dressed in very little in the afternoon sunshine, but I felt it go in, and it was the last thing I remembered when I woke in the sanatorium.
*
I have very little recollection of the first few days after the stabbing: I was blacked out for most of it. I do remember being forced to drink endless amounts of a tepid broth that seemed to stick in my throat. And I was occasionally lucid enough when being given a bath or being taken to the bathroom to feel enough residual shame at the indignity of being exposed to strangers that I lashed out at a few people who, after all, were only trying to help me.
One of those was Anna, but I only became aware of her once I had fully regained consciousness and was already a fair way along the road to recovery. She had explained how I had been brought there by a British officer one afternoon with a great gash under my kidneys, and had given me the letter from Father, still sealed in its envelope. The letter enraged me, because he had couched his abandonment of me in a mixture of military jargon and euphemisms: I was now ‘on the bench for the remainder of the game’ – that sort of thing. As an emergency measure, he left encoded directions for a dead drop near an abandoned well a few miles from the hospital. He said he would check this each day as long as he was in the area, which should be a few weeks more. But the main message was clear: recover, return to England, and forget I’d ever been to Germany.
I disliked Anna at first – or rather, I disliked myself for finding her attractive. Although not long out of boyhood, I was no stranger to the opposite sex, and had had my share of flings along the way. But none of the girls I’d known were anything like this. She was twenty-six, a Georgian with dark, rather flamboyant looks, but there was an unforced grace to her manner that set her apart. After five years of blood and battle, this fit, efficient woman, with her tanned arms, long lashes and perfectly set features seemed almost like a goddess to me. She seemed to belong to another world, where everything was bright and calm, and I wanted to jump through the looking glass and join her in it – but what hope had I of that? I knew that her beauty and job would mean she had probably long become tired of being mooned over, especially by patients, so I resolved not to fall for her, while, of course, at the same time hoping that my aloofness would make me more attractive than more obvious suitors.
My resolution barely lasted a couple of weeks, partly because my wound was so messy that it required almost constant attention, and I was isolated in my own room. While she administered medicine and changed my linen, I had discovered she spoke excellent English. After a few tentative exchanges, I dared to ask if she would mind arranging for me to have some books from the mess library. This she did, and I soon discovered she was very well-read, so after that we began to discuss literature: she was shocked I had never read any of the Russian greats, and proceeded to feed me all the English translations she could find.
I soon found that she was also passionate about the state of the world – when I asked her what she thought the future held for the new Europe, she openly condemned the British for pursuing what she saw as an openly anti-Communist policy so soon after the Soviet Union had, as she saw it, almost single-handedly defeated the Nazis. ‘It’s not you, Paul,’ she would smile, ‘but your government is really doing some despicable things. I thought we were allies.’
I tried to steer us away from such topics at first, but she was clever and eloquent – and I was happy just to be able to talk to her. We wrangled good-naturedly, with her usually taking the line that Marxism was the only way ahead and me desperately trying to remember all the reasons I’d been taught that that was wrong. But I couldn’t catch her out: her answers were always lucid and thought-provoking. She was very good at sticking to abstract concepts. Whenever I brought up problems, such as the Moscow show trials and executions, she would fix me with her calmest gaze, concede that humans had misunderstood and abused the ideology, then solemnly insist that the world would only be bettered when class and states had been completely abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken their place. She used the language of Communist ideology with such a straightforward faith in Peace and Brotherhood that most of the time I acquiesced, simply not to appear a cynical beast and thereby lose her friendship. But when I felt particularly bloody-minded and pursued her on such points, her apparent innocence and naivety vanished and she would counter-attack, questioning British policy in India, for example, or picking out some other apposite situation to prove her point. I realized with growing surprise and admiration that her view of the world had rather more consistency and logic to it than my own, and over time had to concede that, in many areas, I was far more naive and ill-informed than she.
But politics was only one subject of our many conversations that autumn. Anna taught me about Russia, but also about herself. She was a born storyteller, giving vivid and moving accounts of her upbringing and her experiences in the war: she
had been with the Red Cross all the way through it, which was why she was now working in the British Zone, rather than the Soviet one. Our friendship soon developed into one of those intimate affairs where you stay up all night talking; we ranged over every subject imaginable, skipping from one to the other like pebbles skimming across a lake. She would often visit me for an hour or so between her shifts on the wards, and it was on one of these occasions that I first kissed her.
Love is a fast worker, especially first love, and so it was that, barely three months after being admitted into the sanatorium, I found myself in bed contemplating proposing marriage to my nurse. I could scarcely imagine how Father would react at the news! The instructions in his letter had been clear: I should not visit the farmhouse again unless it was an emergency, but I was past caring – and well enough to leave the hospital. I had been well enough for a couple of weeks, in fact, but had been loath to leave for fear of letting go of Anna. Now I knew she loved me, I made up my mind to propose to her and, if she agreed, journey out to see Father and tell him the news before taking her back to England.
All my dreams evaporated later that evening, however, when she came to visit me after her usual rounds. I was sitting up smoking a cigarette and I sensed the change in her the moment she entered the room.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Paul,’ she said, looking up at me with a strange panic flooding her eyes. ‘I am so sorry.’
I gestured for her to take a seat next to me. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ She was usually so controlled.
She walked into the room and closed the door, but didn’t move any nearer to the bed. ‘I have lied to you,’ she said simply.
‘What have you lied about?’ A cold feeling had begun creeping through me.
She looked down at her hands. ‘My name is not Anna Maleva,’ she said quietly. ‘My real name is Anna-Sonia Kuplin, and I am an agent of the Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del. Two months ago, I was instructed by my superior, a man in the DP camp at Burgdorf, to seduce you and recruit you to our cause.’
She seemed to be talking at me through a fog or a dream. I looked at my hands and was surprised to see they were shaking. I couldn’t seem to stop them. ‘Why?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Why… were you asked to recruit me?’
She walked over to the bed and stood by the edge of it. ‘My superior wants to know about all my patients, but he was particularly interested in you,’ she said. ‘He knew of your father, and of his hatred for Communism. Your experience in intelligence and your youth were also seen as… attractive qualities.’ She grimaced at this, but made herself continue. ‘I was told to work on the bitterness you feel against your father to persuade you to join us.’
The blood was rushing around my head, and my chest was heaving.
‘So all of this…’ I said, gesturing futilely at the room where we had spent so much of our time together in the previous weeks, where we had made love, even. ‘All of this was because you wanted me to spy for you?’
‘It was also thought that once I revealed the true nature of your work here, you would be more interested in hearing our proposals.’
‘What work?’ I said, rage suddenly sweeping over me. I leaned over and grabbed her by the wrists, then thrust my face into hers. ‘You can’t possibly know what my bloody work involves, you… you little Russian whore!’ I brought up my hand to slap her, then stopped myself. She hadn’t flinched.
‘I know more about it than you,’ she said quietly, her eyes facing the floor. ‘You have been deceived by your father. He was a prominent member of several British fascist groups before the war, and is now part of a secret movement intent on waging a new war against the Soviet Union. The men you were hunting down and murdering were not Nazi war criminals, but Soviet agents.’
She looked up at me for a moment, desperately trying to hold my gaze. But it was too late. There was nothing there for me any more: she wasn’t my Anna. I had an almost overwhelming desire to take the pillow from the bed and place it over her face so she wouldn’t be able to utter any more lies. ‘So that was meant to be enough to turn me, was it?’ I said, finally. ‘A few fireside chats about politics and a half-baked story about a fascist conspiracy and you thought I’d sign up for Uncle Joe’s brand of storm-troopers? How dare you accuse me of such a thing? And did you really expect me to believe that our side’s made up of blood-thirsty savages and you’re all pure as the driven—’
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me tell you it is true.’
‘It is not true,’ I said coldly. ‘And you are the one who has been deceived. I read the orders given by these men. I read the witness reports.’
She had recovered something of her old composure now, and was prepared to fight back. ‘Such documents can be easily forged, as you must know. Would anyone else be able to confirm that your mission was legitimate, or did your father perhaps tell you it had been deemed too secret to go through the usual channels?’ She looked up, saw the confirmation in my eyes, and continued. ‘The first couple of men would have been bona fide, to persuade you. But after that, did you see all the files of the men you killed?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Meier,’ she said. ‘Did you read the file on him?’
‘Yes, Anna, and he was a rapist! He raped children. How can you do this?’
‘I can’t!’ she said, and her eyes began to well with tears. ‘Don’t you see? I told my superior to go to hell. I love you, Paul, more than I ever thought it was possible to love someone, and I want us to start again. To forget this.’ She stood up and walked towards me. ‘I thought at first not to tell you, just to ask that we leave this place, with no explanations. But I don’t want any secrets between us, Paul, none at all. Don’t you see? I had to tell you.’ She let her arms open, beckoning me. ‘Please.’
I looked at her and part of me wanted more than anything to take a step forward. But that, I knew somewhere deep in the core of me, was weakness, and the kind of immature sentimentality that had led me into this situation. Without looking at her, I told her to leave. She refused at first, continuing to plead with me to listen to her. But I had detached myself, and after a few minutes she saw it. She ran from the room, and I listened dispassionately to the sound of her sobs echoing down the corridor. Then, taking great care not to lean on my wound, I manoeuvred my way down from the bed and started dressing.
*
It was my first taste of fresh air in a long while, but I hardly noticed it. I stopped thinking about Anna’s betrayal of me and started focusing on what it meant. She knew about Sacrosanct – and, presumably, so did her handler in Burgdorf. Father had said in his letter that he would continue the operation for a few more weeks. If he had done so from the same location, as seemed likely, he could be in great danger.
As I started heading for the house, a terrible thought occurred to me. Anna’s allegation that Father had mounted a rogue operation and was running around murdering Russians was clearly fantasy, but she had still known a great deal about the operation: the name Meier, for instance. Only two other people had access to that information: Pritchard and Father – and Pritchard had left months earlier. Perhaps Father had risked venturing into the Soviet Zone, and been taken into custody. Under interrogation, he could have revealed Pritchard’s and my involvement, and even our locations. Pritchard was surrounded by commandos in the French Zone, so they wouldn’t pursue him, but I was alone, and injured. Anna had been assigned as my nurse a few days after I had entered the sanatorium – perhaps the idea for her to recruit me had stemmed from knowledge they had gained from questioning Father.
It all seemed horrifyingly plausible: I couldn’t think how else she could have known about the operation. And if I was right, Father was almost certainly dead, and they would soon be hunting me. They would probably be waiting for me at the farmhouse, in fact.
I slowed down, and started walking in the other direction. Father’s letter to me had still been firmly sealed, and I guessed Anna had not dared
open it for fear of losing my trust early on. The drop, then. I headed for it at once, and left a message that Anna Maleva, a nurse in the Red Cross hospital in Lübeck, was an NKVD agent, and knew about Sacrosanct.
*
A few hours later, I was holed up in a cabin halfway up the mountains, shivering in a wooden cot in the dark. Father had come across the place one day when we had been tramping across the Zone looking for clues. It had been used before the war by local mountaineers as a resting stop on their way to higher climes. Later, the Hitler Youth had taken it over for their excursions, and there were still signs of their occupation, from the insignia above the entrance to graffiti they had carved on the walls: the same sort of obscene phrases and drawings teenage boys make all over the world, for the most part, but disturbing nonetheless. I had immediately thought of the place, because it was well away from the main paths and still within easy walking distance of the nearest town if I needed food. There were no amenities for cooking, or anything else, and it was a lot less comfortable now than it had been during July, when we had come across it. But it was shelter.
I had placed my clothes in one of the cots for padding and tried to sleep as soon as I had reached it. But it was no use. Although still seething over Anna’s betrayal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had missed something in her allegations against Father, something in the tone of them. As daylight began to seep through the wooden slats of the walls, I finally realized what it was: despite trying to resist it, part of me could not help recognizing the ring of truth. He had been a fascist before the war, and was ardently, even fanatically, anti-Communist. And even if the Ukrainians had been guilty of the most horrendous crimes, we had nevertheless murdered them – did it make any difference in what cause? But the thing that kept pushing to the front of my mind was Father’s obsession for protecting the operation at all costs: his insistence that nobody could ever learn of it.
