The British Cross

by Bill Granger

  And silence. Why was there no response from Hanley? A defector named Tartakoff wanted to bring out a man who was supposed to be dead named Tomas Crohan. And now the British were probing the matter as well.

  Devereaux suddenly felt intensely foolish, as though he had become so careless that he had allowed the numbing routine of the past weeks of inaction to make him an easy setup for a trap. He had been intended to find the body and he had been so careless that he had been followed. Not only by Sims but by the man who had killed Sims.

  Why didn’t Tartakoff make contact? Why didn’t Hanley answer?

  Devereaux turned and left the room quietly. He walked along the deserted corridor to the soft-drink machine in the middle of the hall. He fished out the two identification cards he had taken from the body as well as the wallet full of British pounds. He put the cards in the wallet and then tipped back the edge of the heavy soda machine and slipped the wallet beneath it. He took the stairs next to the ice machine to the fifth floor and his own room. Down another empty corridor. The hotel was always silent, always seemed empty, even though it was usually full of business travelers. The silences were intentional: The hotel was built with heavy simplicity, heavy walls and doors and thick-paned windows.

  He turned the key in the lock of his own door and opened it.

  There was someone in the room.

  For two weeks, he had not even carried his pistol with him. The routine had numbed him as surely as the weather.

  The room was dark but there was someone in the faint shadows cast by the perpetual light on the clock at the bedside.

  Would it be a knife?

  He felt awkward in that moment, painted in outline against the lights of the corridor. He saw in his mind’s eye the disemboweled body of Sims in the sauna.

  “Mr. Dixon?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Or should I call you Mr. Devereaux?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I will turn on the lights.”

  Devereaux said nothing. The lights went on. Devereaux blinked. In front of him was a short man with a bull’s neck and thick fingers extending from a thick palm. He wore a dark coat that might have been blue. His face was flat and his eyes were small like unburned coals.

  He held a pistol in his hand. It was a Walther PPK automatic and he held it at the level of Devereaux’s belly.

  “What is your real name then? Dixon? Or Devereaux?”

  “Who are you?”

  “You have to tell me eventually, you know. That’s the rules of the game.” His English was not without accent but it had an ironic note to it that implied a deep understanding of the language.

  Devereaux waited.

  “My name is Kulak,” the thick man said. “I am the police, Mr. Dixon or Mr. Devereaux. Do you see?”

  And slowly, without a word, Devereaux came across the room until he stood near the other man. They stared at each other but the policeman named Kulak did not lower the barrel of the deadly black pistol held loosely in his massive hand.

  9

  LONDON

  Wickham awoke, felt the beard on his face as though feeling the fur of an unexpected animal. How long had it been? But there was no time in this place. There were no windows, no passage of day to night, no passage of weeks. He slept, he awoke, he slept in no order at all. He felt his life ebbing away from him in his sleeps. He was dying because he slept; and so he struggled to stay awake but the utter boredom drove him to sleep again as a refuge. Perhaps that would be death, he thought suddenly; a sleep accepted at the end and even yearned for.

  The single door in the windowless, shallow room opened and Wickham turned but he could not rise because he was handcuffed by one wrist to the edge of the steel cot.

  The man was Victor. He knew their names. They never actually told him names but he had to give them names so that he could distinguish between them. Victor was the harsh one. Victor had beaten him the first night. Yes. It had been night, it was dark, Rogers stopped the automobile, Rogers got out.…

  “Wickham. Get up and come over to the table.”

  Victor uncuffed his wrist. He felt the blood tingle back into the hand. He went to the table and sat down. He was naked except for the undershorts he had been permitted to keep but not to change.

  He looked at Victor but did not speak.

  Victor put the photographs in his briefcase on the table. He stared at Wickham. Wickham looked at the photographs.

  Vile things.

  In the first, Wickham was in a lavatory stall. He was performing fellatio on a young man. The identity of the young man could not be seen but it was clearly a lavatory and the young man was seated on a toilet. The picture was not clear but Wickham could make out the figures well enough.

  The second photograph was equally unspeakable.

  Wickham looked at Victor.

  “I didn’t do those things.”

  “Of course you did.”

  “No one will believe those photographs. Photographs lie.”

  “Do you remember everything you’ve done?”

  “I would remember.…” He paused. Of course he would remember.

  “The photographs were sent this morning to the Sun.”

  “They’ll never print those photographs.”

  “Of course not,” Victor agreed.

  “What is the purpose of these photographs?”

  “I wanted you to see them. Before you were shown them.”

  “Why did you do those things?”

  “Your clothes are in the closet there. Get dressed. We have to take you home.”

  “What?”

  “We have to take you home,” Victor said.

  Relief mingled with fear. The two emotions commingled chilled him.

  “Why…”

  “Your clothing, Mr. Wickham.”

  He dressed slowly, carefully. He felt tired and dirty. He did not understand. They meant to kill him, didn’t they?

  “Good. Now Mr. Wickham, here is a blindfold. I will take you down myself.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Cooperate.”

  “But what about those photographs?”

  “Nothing about them. They speak for themselves.”

  They speak for themselves.

  Wickham accepted the blindfold almost gratefully. Victor led him out of the room. He was on stairs. He bumped his shin on the banister at the top of the flight.

  “Careful,” Victor said.

  But of course his name was probably not Victor at all.

  10

  LENINGRAD

  A light always burned in the night in the corridor outside Ward 7 of the ninth section of the KGB psychiatric hospital attached to the grounds of the Kresty Prison complex in the city, off the River Neva and not five hundred meters from the Finland Station where the statue of Lenin held the plaza ground. The light was oddly reassuring, as though the inmates were children who feared the ghosts hidden in the darkness beyond.

  The night in the ward was never silent. There were sounds of inmates wrestling with dreams that would not be silenced. They groaned in the darkness and sometimes they screamed. There were snores of those without dreams. There were other unexplained screams that came from other wards and penetrated the thick plaster walls. The screams from far away always seemed more frightening. Sometimes, some of the inmates would wake suddenly in the middle of the night and begin to cry. Some of the others would try to silence the crying ones with muttered threats that made the noise even worse. If it had not been for the comfort of the single light in the corridor, the prisoner who lay awake now and contemplated the noisy chaos around him thought he might have gone mad.

  Even the screams could be ignored in the light. Even sleep could come because of the comforting, mothering light.

  They had brought him here one year and six days before. He was very good at remembering time.

  Was he mentally ill?

  Tomas Crohan lay on his bed and considered the question he had posed to himself.
Mentally ill?

  Perhaps. They had discovered in the camp in Siberia that the commandant was mentally ill. They had discovered it quite by accident one afternoon when they visited the camp and saw the prisoners working in the snow naked. The commandant had explained to the visiting commissar that the coldness brought the best efforts of the men and that nakedness made them docile. The camp in Siberia had not been visited for a long time but when the visitors, who were from Kiev, noted the conditions of the camp with their own eyes, they ordered the prisoners to go inside their sheds. Tomas Crohan had watched from the window and been pleased with the way the visitors from Kiev had dealt with the mental illness of the commandant of the camp.

  That was certainly mental illness, Crohan thought, staring at the blackness pierced by a single naked bulb hanging in the corridor.

  There was a sound of crying in that moment and then the muttered threats. With what could you threaten a man who cried in the night because he awoke and found himself inside the Kresty Prison, so close to the city of Leningrad and yet so removed from that he would never see it unless he had a job in the cardboard factory on the grounds and could peer at the beautiful towers from the window?

  There was nothing to threaten.

  The Jews, of course, presented a singular problem to the authorities in the treatment of their particular aberrations.

  They thought they were Jews. That was the explanation of Kronenbourg, who was another old prisoner like Crohan. Kronenbourg was from the Alsace-Lorraine, which he claimed was German but which Crohan had shown him was actually in France. He had wept for days to think he might be French and then Crohan, in his mercy, had relented and allowed Kronenbourg to believe he was German and that he had not been on the wrong side in the war.

  So few remembered the war anymore. There were almost no survivors. It was just as well to let Kronenbourg have his delusions.

  Crohan smiled to himself in the darkness. He was a thin man; most of the older ones were thin. If you were going to survive at all, it was best to be thin. It was a theory of Crohan’s that he lectured about when he was asked to do so. His face was a mask. His skull pushed at the folds of the mask. His forehead was high because most of his hair was gone. Oddly, his skin was able to support enormous patches of tough whiskers that required great diligence in shaving each morning. The hospital provided the luxury of shaving facilities and shaving time. He had not been so fortunate in the Siberian camp where the commandant was demonstrably mentally ill.

  The Jews. He was thinking about the Jews.

  What had Kronenbourg said? Well, much of what he said could be put down to his anti-Semitism in any case. He wanted to be a good Nazi as he thought he had not been in the war. He had been captured, after all, on the eastern front in 1944.

  The Jews. The Jews. What was the line?

  Crohan frowned in concentration. It was easier to concentrate at night like this, lying in the comfortable darkness and relative warmth of the ward while the Russian winter beat beyond the walls. Snow and snow and snow; it never ceased to snow. And yet the life was not too bad. He should have become mentally unfit many years earlier.

  But then, he had nothing to say about his mental status.

  The Jews thought they were Jews and that was proof of their mental aberration. Who could be a Jew except a madman?

  That was it.

  Crohan smiled again. Kronenbourg had put it neatly.

  “What if I told you I was a Jew?”

  “But you aren’t. You’re Irish.”

  “All right. What if I told you I wasn’t Irish?”

  “But you are,” Kronenbourg had said. “Anyone can see that.”

  “What if I told you I was English?”

  “But that’s impossible. If you were English, you could get out of here. You wouldn’t be what you said you had been. Besides, we would be enemies then, wouldn’t we?” Kronenbourg had smiled in a superior way that irritated Crohan but he had long ceased to show his irritation with the peculiarities of others. Prisoners or camp commandants.

  “You were on our side in the war. That’s why you’re in here,” Kronenbourg had said after an uncomfortable silence.

  “What if I told you I was an American?”

  “An American? But then they would have segregated you, with the other Americans.”

  “What if I told you I was a Swede?”

  “Like Wallenberg? I have heard about him but he must be dead.”

  “All right. What if I told you I was a German?”

  Kronenbourg had frowned at that, wrinkling his dark forehead and smoothing his dry remains of hair like a farmer spreading dry hay over the frosty ground. “You could not be German. Don’t be annoyed. You are my friend, Tomas. But if you were German, then you would never have denied it. Who does not want to be a German?”

  “A Jew,” said Tomas Crohan and they had laughed at that though the joke was slightly beyond Kronenbourg’s understanding.

  Now there’s a mental problem, Crohan thought. Kronenbourg was not a bad fellow but he had definitely lost his mind. He was good at small things. He folded the boxes in the cardboard factory. It was the lowest sort of work.

  The Jews would not admit they were mentally unstable.

  That is the problem, Natasha Gulonov had told him once. She was the medical assistant who gave them their pills each morning. The pills were a reward and a punishment. The pills enabled one to make it through the day but they made the night unendurable and there were no pills given for night. The night was faced naked. Like prisoners working in the snow of a camp run by a madman. Definitely mad. His name had been Fodoroff. Mad as a hatter.

  Hatter. What an interesting image. Where had that come from?

  Crohan turned in his cot and faced the light beyond the rows of cots containing restless, sleeping men.

  Natasha Gulonov said the Soviet Union had many peoples, many tongues. Only the Jews appeared mad, she said.

  “Baptists,” Crohan had replied.

  “What did you say?”

  “Jews. And Baptists. The three fellows we had at Number 19 in Kiev about six years ago. Baptists. They baptized me three times in the barracks.”

  “Madness,” Natasha Gulonov had said.

  “It was a way to get a bath,” Crohan had replied. “They saved the rainwater and they would not drink it. They baptized all the prisoners before they died. I was baptized three times.”

  “You should not make a joke of religion,” she had said.

  “Why? Do you think God will be angry with me?”

  “There is no God.”

  “Of course not. So there is no reason to think he will become angry with me.”

  “But it is not good for you, Tomas.”

  “Doctor—”

  “I am not a doctor. Yet.”

  “The Jews are mad,” he had said. “Because they wish to be Jews?”

  “No. Because they do not accept the State.”

  “Is everyone mad who does not accept the State?”

  “No. Some are traitors.” She talked to him as though he were a child. Tomas Crohan had become her pet. Sometimes she allowed him to give pills to the prisoners. Once she gave him a small cache of extra pills which he could sell for cigarettes.

  “I accept the State,” Tomas Crohan had said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How can I still be mad?”

  She had turned away from him that morning. “Don’t speak of such things. Go away, Tomas, you make me angry.”

  The Jews, at least, had an instinct for survival inside the camps. Crohan could not understand how some of the others would just give up suddenly. Take the Finn. What was his name? Unpronounceable in any case. He had been brought to Novo Gordunov—what was it? ten years ago?—and he had raged so greatly they nearly shot him right away just in self-defense. That would have satisfied the Finn. He wanted it over with. But when they didn’t shoot him, he became indifferent, even to food. Naturally, the other prisoners stole his food. And his clot
hing. If the fellow wasn’t going to make a protest, then it was too bad for him. The Finn died in the summer. Hardly anyone at Novo Gordunov died until October came and the first snow. The Finn did not have an instinct for survival, Crohan realized. But the Jews always did. Once you are willing to die gladly at the hands of the guards, then you are dead already.

  An instinct for survival was not such a common thing. And it was not simple. Crohan could lecture on the subject and did from time to time, to fill the restless days. For example, resistance was useless and therefore counterproductive. Do not resist; survive. A very thin line, a fine point, wouldn’t you agree?

  Darkness.

  Crohan blinked; the restless night ward was suddenly still.

  Crohan blinked again but he could not bring back the light. And then he saw the two men at the door of the ward blocking the light. He turned in his cot to stare at them. The ward was deathly silent; all tears, all screams had ceased. Night visitors, and they always brought bad luck with them. Sometimes they took prisoners away and the prisoners were never seen again. Sometimes they gave patients midnight examinations, as they were called. A day or two days later, the exhausted patient would be returned to the ward, covered with bruises, his face hideously reshaped by the pounding blows of the examiners.

  They had paused at the door and now one of them, at the direction of the night nursing guard, had started to walk through the tangle of beds in the ward.

  Crohan closed his eyes. It was always best not to be too curious. It was best to pretend the matter of the night visitors was a bad dream and that when one opened one’s eyes, the dream would be ended.

  “Crohan.” The voice was harsh, low.

  My God, he thought and shivered and held his eyes tight. It was just a dream.

  He felt the rough warm hand on his shoulder. He was being pulled up. He opened his eyes and saw the flat face before him. The night visitor had steel teeth that glittered in his mouth in the thin light from the single bulb in the corridor.

  “Come,” he said.

  “What have I done?”

  “Come,” he said.

  And Crohan’s feet somehow found the cold floor. In a moment, he was out of the ward, in the light of the corridor. He blinked because of the light, because of the fear that wrapped itself around him. From the dark womb of the ward came the sounds of night again, so comforting and so beyond his reach now: screams and the familiar sounds of men crying in the darkness.