Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  I begin to look at everything and the more I look the more I know that Mikhail won’t be here. If Finn had written about Mikhail at all, there would at least be a clue here. And the clue, I knew, would be something that I, and only I, would understand.

  I check the cellar completely and am covered with dust, then finally I empty the waste-paper basket and begin unscrewing the paper. It is mostly old envelopes and scraps of paper torn from his books with a single word on them, or a sentence, or nothing at all. I examine each one and can get no answer from any of the scribbled notes. When I unscrew a piece of paper near the bottom of the basket, a single sheet, I see that one line is written on it.

  It is underlined, like a title, and reads Bride of the Wind. I stare at it. There is nothing else. I swiftly turn out the rest of the basket, unscrewing all the remaining paper, but they are all blank. There is nothing else as clear as this one sheet.

  I turn off the oil heater and ascend the wooden steps again, open the metal door and shut it firmly behind me. I draw the false wall across it, with its built-in fireplace, check the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and assure myself that all is as it should be.

  Then I put on my coat and woolly hat and, clutching the paper in a ball, leave the house again for the second time in two hours.

  Down along the path by the lake where I’d walked the night before to the gasthaus, a brittle layer of ice creeps a few feet into the water. There is a clear sky, it is bitterly cold, and the snow on the path has frozen into crusts. I walk fast to keep warm and because it suits my sense of urgency.

  I come to the first of three lidos, closed up for the winter, the water frozen solid in the man-made harbours. There is a metal rail fence around the lido, and inside the fence plastic covers are pulled over some refreshment stalls.

  By the path, there is a low metal gate in the fence, shut with a chain and padlock. By the gate is a wooden pillbox to fit one person to take the money and dispense the tickets when the lido is open. The stand is closed up with padlocked stable doors.

  It is easy to step over the gate. The fence and the gate are there just to deter summer visitors from entering the lido unnoticed, without paying. I walk past the pillbox ticket office, across the icy wood surface and past the boarded-up refreshment stands.

  Behind them, on a broad wooden slatted deck area, are several dozen upturned rowing boats, sailing dinghies, tenders for larger boats anchored in the lake for the summer–nything that their owners had too little space or too much money to bother to take home with them at the end of the season. Most are covered, but the blue plastic covers are stretched across the hulls in such a way that I can pick out the boats’ names written on the bow or on the transom.

  I walk up and down the rows of boats, pausing to look at names, and lift the flap of a hanging cover, here and there, for a better sight. I translate the mostly German names, the type of silly, fond names that people give boats: Our Boys, Jaws, Titanic, Beautiful Melinda. By the time I reach the end of the last row, I have spent nearly an hour and am cold again. Every name I stop to study; I turn them this way and that, trying to see another meaning, another message from Finn. But it is no good. I leave the lido and hurry further up the path and into the gasthaus for warmth and coffee.

  There is a solitary girl behind the bar at this quiet time of the day. I ask her about the lidos that dot the shoreline. She says that only local people kept their boats in most of them, including the one I had randomly chosen, and that if I am from out of town, the only place I can keep a boat is at a lido in the next village of Rottach-Egern. There, she says, they allow casual visitors to leave boats over the winter. I finish my coffee and take a bus for less than a mile along the lake.

  Rottach-Egern is all but joined to Tegernsee by the scattering of houses and small inns between them. It lies at the edge of the lake and its lido stretches out a hundred metres from the shore.

  It is built in a similar way and there is nobody to prevent me from getting inside, nobody around in winter at all. There is nothing to steal, except boats, and nobody in their right mind would wish to take a boat out at this time of year, even for a prank.

  Again I walk the rows of upturned boats, checking the names. Finally I come to a sailing dinghy, perhaps fourteen feet long and made of wood. I look at the bow and there is no name written there. Its winter cover obscures the stern. I cut the string and lift up the thick plastic. The boat is called Windsbraut, Bride of the Wind. I see that the writing covers another, previous name that has been painted out.

  I untie the rest of the blue plastic cover and peel it away and see a smooth, blue-painted hull with a slit in the centre for a daggerboard. I lift the boat up from the side as far as I can, but it is heavy and I can’t hold it and look inside the hull at the same time. So I let it down and look around for something to prop it up.

  There is the heavy concrete base of a parasol near one of the covered refreshment stalls and I half drag, half roll it over, placing it close to the hull and managing to lift the boat about two feet off the wooden decking to place it precariously on the metal tube the parasol slots into. I get down on my back and worm my way underneath.

  The daggerboard casing takes up most of the centre of the boat, there are coiled wires and a plastic bailer tied on to a thwart. Around the insides of the cockpit are ballast tanks built into the hull. They have four circular black plastic screw tops about six inches across that give access to the tanks. I begin to unscrew each one of them and to pull out the inflated yellow plastic ballast sacks inside. I pull them out one by one and when I’ve finished I worm out from under the boat. There are six ballast sacks in all. I pick up each one until I find which of them contains an object that I can feel sliding up and down inside. The rest I kick back under the hull. I lower the boat back on to the decking, put the parasol base back where I found it and cover and tie the boat again with its plastic sheet.

  I let the air out of the ballast sack until I can fit it, and the solid object I can feel it contains, under my coat.

  I find a taxi and take it to the market square in Tegernsee and walk, carefully again–watching for other interested eyes–until I approach the pink house.

  In the kitchen I study the yellow ballast bag. I see its plastic seams have been carefully parted in order to store an object inside, and have then been melted together again. I rip it open with a knife. Inside is a watertight package and, inside that, an exercise book. I open it up and, from the first lines, see that this story begins with Finn’s alternative history lesson.

  I take it into the sitting room, light the fire, and sit on the sofa.

  ‘Vladimir Putin took up his KGB posting in Dresden,’ Finn begins, ‘in 1980, the year that Oskar Kokoschka died. He occupied a KGB residence two streets away from where Kokoschka held the Professorship of Arts at the Dresden Academy between 1917 and 1924. There the similarities end.

  ‘Putin was one of the guardians of Yuri Andropov’s post-Soviet vision, in which the outmoded, outdated methods of all the years since the Russian Revolution were to be reconfigured, under the watchful gaze of the first KGB president, Andropov. But then Andropov died prematurely. His successor, Chernenko, was a throwback to the Brezhnev era and lasted little more than a year before he, too, died.

  ‘And then they ushered in Gorbachev, who would always have the KGB at his shoulder.

  ‘Putin ran a large network of agents in East Germany. The most important of these was a man named Klaus-Maria Sudhoff. Sudhoff was another Russian-German, like Schmidtke, who had been stationed in Dresden for five years before Putin arrived. Sudhoff, apart from being the conduit between Schmidtke and the KGB, was also the main contact between all of them and Otto Roth.

  ‘Sudhoff knew where all the skeletons were buried. Sudhoff was involved in KGB arms and drugs trafficking and he worked with terrorist groups in the West, particularly in West Germany. His friendship with Putin was described as instant. They hit it off like old friends.

  ‘In January 1990, Put
in began to sign contracts with all his operatives in East Germany which promised them, only a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the KGB would look after its own. Contracts were written and toasted in Sekt, Putin’s favourite wine while he was based in Dresden. Plans were drawn up to give his network new identities, send them to other countries or simply bring them to live in Russia. The deals were sealed with a handshake from Putin.

  ‘But as so often with such plans, the promises were never kept and some agents began to make threats and feel threatened at the same time. Some disappeared, Sudhoff among them.

  ‘One of Putin’s agents, Klaus Zuchold, finally went over to the BND, West Germany’s secret service, and gave the names of fifteen spies in West Germany working for Moscow. But the West Germans decided not to pursue the names he gave them, and they buried them in their attempt to obliterate the complex past, just as they were to sweep Schmidtke under the carpet during the same years.

  ‘Klaus-Maria Sudhoff was among those names. And he disappeared sometime in 1990.

  ‘He was finally found face down in a canal in Berlin in March 1992. He’d consumed a great deal of alcohol, no doubt, but that was only partially responsible for his death. The official record claims the cause of death as “drowning”.

  ‘But I must digress for a moment from Sudhoff to look at the organisation you and your father were assigned to, Anna, Directorate “S”. As well as your job, darling Anna, training subversives- nelegali-to engage in terrorist activities in their own countries, Directorate “S” was actually charged with a far more important role. That role was no less than the preservation of the KGB itself. When Gorbachev was President and before the Wall came down, Directorate “S” was assigned to hold the Soviet state together through the organs of the security services; to put the KGB on ice.

  ‘Independent groups of senior officers in Directorate “S” set about preserving the clan loyalties that ran deeper than any loyalty to Communist cliques or even to the Politburo. In fact, one of the main aims of Directorate “S” in these years was to sweep these fusty, inefficient Communist cliques aside, right up to the Politburo itself.

  ‘Directorate “S” operated with a cell structure, an underground formation, with no centralised control. Central control would have been too risky. Look at what happened in 1991. Kryuchkov and his other KGB associates staged their disastrous putsch against Gorbachev for control of the Kremlin and nearly ruined all the plans Directorate “S” had so carefully laid. It was its cell structure which ensured its preservation. The putsch was a setback for those who knew what the deeper, longer plan was. The Plan. Directorate “S” was playing a far longer game than Kryuchkov and the rest of his dreamers realised.

  ‘When Yeltsin stood on his tank in 1991 and the putsch was defeated, the Plan was disrupted by a chain of events that began with the coup Yeltsin overthrew. The cell structure buried itself still deeper, and waited. Yeltsin could have destroyed the structure by unmasking all Russia’s operatives and all its illegals in the West. But he was afraid to do that, and who can blame him? Yeltsin, however, the one hope for democracy, did gain the upper hand for a while, and the Plan was postponed.

  ‘So their organisation became even tighter. And then slowly, as Yeltsin weakened, these disparate cells began to join together, firstly through the KGB’s reconquest of the Ministry of Defence and then, as Putin’s power grew at the end of the nineties, through other ministries. Shebarshin and Drozdov helped the movement gather strength and to coordinate itself. Then Leonov promoted Sergei Ivanov to Minister of Defence. Once Ivanov became a minister and Putin became head of the KGB, the wagon began to roll at last. As you know, they called themselves- call themselves–“The Patriots”.

  ‘But Directorate “S” was the core, always the core. In the hard times, it was Directorate “S” whose access to vast numbers of illegals abroad–as well as hard cash–held the movement together. In 1991, Directorate “S” was, in effect, a separate country within Russia, funded by the new businessmen they controlled, and by Russians in the West. But they were also funded with even greater quantities of cash by the illegals who were already in positions of great financial power–in private banks and private companies in the West–men like Otto Roth.

  ‘Directorate “S” was integrated on an international level, like any independent country. There are thousands of you out there, Anna. Like you, they have the best education, years of experience in the field. Each officer has up to a dozen illegals at his disposal somewhere abroad; operatives who are self-sufficient and who pay back when told to pay back.

  ‘And they worked in cells, just as they did when it all began before the Revolution, before Lenin returned to Russia in 1917, the year Kokoschka, as it happens, took up his professorship in Dresden. These cells were in the same mould the KGB has always favoured. Even completely cut off from the KGB body, deprived of state financing, left out in the cold, the structure would still survive and prosper.

  ‘And Ivanov and Putin, and the others Putin gathered around him, they knew this—they were, of course, part of it—and when they took power they began to fold Directorate “S” and all its hundreds of cells back into the mixing bowl of Russian politics like cream into a soufflé. They owed their positions of power to Directorate “S” and Directorate “S”, like some precious Holy Grail buried during the dark years of democracy, was ready to change the world when it re-emerged.

  ‘And so, slowly, from 1991, the Patriots have built the economic structures they needed; they have suborned the notionally independent businesses that came to power under Yeltsin, and they have brought the various mafias in under their wing, killing those crime bosses who opposed them. It is the biggest nationalisation of mafia and gangster groups in history.

  ‘And with all these methods, the Patriots have created an overarching state super-business that controls half the world’s energy supplies. The state’s energy supplier, Gazprom, the largest company in the world, is of course at its head. And the Patriots have elided the guiding hand of the Communist Party out of existence, out of history. The Patriots sit at the head of this new economic machine they have created.’

  I get up and put the kettle on the stove but I forget to fill it with water. Then I catch myself and take it off and hold it under the tap until it’s full. I leave the tap on and wash my face with my hands while the kettle heats and I can try to think. Who is Mikhail? Where is Finn?

  I make tea, with a lot of sugar, and sit down at the kitchen table, stirring the tea while I look at how Finn continues.

  ‘Mikhail is very senior in Directorate “S”, Anna. In fact, he is one of the few who knew the structure well enough to bring it all together when the time was right. It was Mikhail who, behind the scenes, raised Putin from being Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg to becoming head of the KGB, then prime minister, before finally helping to elevate him to the presidency.’

  I feel Finn pausing for thought, or perhaps to pour himself a drink, or simply to walk away from what he’s writing and to gaze through a window. But his words continue on the page without pause.

  ‘And so, back to Sudhoff. Whatever body was found in the canal in Berlin, it wasn’t the body of Sudhoff. Sudhoff- his working name in East Germany- was someone else before Sudhoff, and someone else after Sudhoff. He’s been with Putin right from the beginning, long before they “met” for the first time in East Germany. And he was with Putin afterwards. Mikhail is Sudhoff. Codename Mikhail is also codename Sudhoff. He was with Putin in St Petersburg when Putin worked under the mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. He was there when Sobchak met his mysterious death. He came with Putin to Moscow and, I hope with all my heart, he is still with Putin now. I hope his wife still lunches with Lyudmilla Putin. I hope this because Mikhail is one of very, very few hopes we have in the West of seeing what Russia has become and what it will grow to be.’

  I can almost feel Finn’s pen pause in mid-air.

  ‘I can tell you that Mikhail has seen this monster he has helped to
create. And he doesn’t like what he sees. If the Plan succeeds, and Mikhail remains undetected, his statue will probably be outside the Lubyanka one day. But Mikhail is working to stop it and he cannot survive for long.

  ‘And if the Plan does not succeed, it will be because Mikhail has tried to alert the world to what he helped create. He is, you might say, a pivotal figure in history, as great a double agent as there has ever been.’

  There the writing abruptly ends.

  I sit back in the chair, frustrated. He’s dangled a lure, but he hasn’t told me what I want to know. He hasn’t given me the fish.

  I tear the little notebook into pieces and burn them one by one in the fireplace. Then I put on my coat. I exit through the back of the house on the lake side, and I walk until darkness falls.

  What game is Finn playing? He’s explained Mikhail to me under yet another codename, Sudhoff. Why? Why doesn’t he give me his real name? So his wife lunches with Putin’s wife, but that doesn’t narrow it down much further than Patrushev had already narrowed it down in 2000.

  And then, as I stand and stare at the stars that glitter over the lake on this ice-cold evening, I see what Finn is doing. In the past six years he has already offered me my freedom once. Now he is offering me my freedom again, but this time in Putin’s totalitarian Russia. For me to know the real identity of Sudhoff, I will have to take the name to Russia, to tell Patrushev, who will know. I will absolve myself of my sins with the Forest by giving them the name of Sudhoff as my passport back to Russia. Finn is offering me a way to save myself-at the expense of Mikhail, at the expense of the destruction of the Plan. It is Finn’s way of giving me a way back, a way that I thought was closed for good. It is his ultimate trust in me.