by Sam Eastland
Pekkala bowed his head. ‘You sent for me, Majesty.’
‘I did,’ replied the Tsar. ‘Where is your fiancée?’
‘Majesty?’
‘Your fiancée!’ he repeated angrily. ‘Where is she?’
‘At home,’ answered Pekkala. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because you need to get her out of here,’ said the Tsar, ‘and as soon as possible.’
‘Out of Petrograd?’
‘Out of Russia!’ The Tsar reached behind him and pulled a folded piece of paper from the pocket of his tunic. He slid it across the desk to Pekkala. ‘This is her travel permit to Paris. She will have to travel via Finland, Sweden and Norway, but that’s the only safe route at the moment. The train leaves in three hours. I have it on good authority that it is the last one on which permits authorised by me will be accepted. After that, my signature will probably be worth nothing.’
‘Three hours?’ asked Pekkala.
The Tsar fixed him with a stare. ‘If you hesitate now, even for a minute, you may well be condemning her to death. The time will come when you can join her, but for now I need you here. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, Majesty.’
‘Good. Then go. And give her my regards.’
Three hours later, Lilya and Pekkala stood on the crowded railway platform of the Nikolaevsky station in Petrograd.
Many of those fleeing had come with huge steamer trunks, sets of matching luggage, even birds in cages. Hauling this baggage were exhausted porters in their pill-box hats and dark blue uniforms with a single red stripe, like a trickle of blood, down the sides of their trousers. There were too many people. Nobody could move without shoving. One by one, passengers left their baggage and pressed forward to the train, tickets raised above their heads. Their shouts rose above the panting roar of the steam train as it prepared to move out. High above, beneath the glass-paned roof, condensation beaded on the dirty glass and fell back as black rain upon the passengers.
A conductor leaned out of a doorway, whistle clenched between his teeth. He blew three shrill blasts.
‘That’s a two-minute warning,’ said Pekkala. ‘The train won’t wait.’ He reached inside his shirt and pulled a leather cord from around his neck. Looped into the cord was a gold signet ring. ‘Look after this for me.’
‘But that’s your wedding ring!’
‘It will be,’ he replied, ‘when I see you again.’
Sensing that there would not be enough room in the carriages, the crowd began to panic. Passengers ebbed back and forth, as if a wind was blowing them like grain stalks in a field.
‘I could wait for the next train,’ Lilya pleaded. In her hands, she clutched a single bag made out of brightly patterned carpet material, containing some books, a few pictures and a change of clothes. As of now, they were her only possessions in the world.
‘There might not be a next train. Please. You must leave now.’
‘But how will you find me?’ she asked.
He smiled faintly, reaching out and running his fingers through her hair. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘that’s what I’m good at.’
The clamour of those still struggling to get aboard had risen to a constant roar. A pile of luggage lurched and fell. Fur-coated passengers went sprawling. Immediately, the crowd closed up around them.
‘Now!’ said Pekkala. ‘Before it’s too late.’
When, at last, Lilya had climbed aboard the carriage, she turned and waved to him.
Pekkala waved back. And then he lost sight of her as a tide of people poured past him, pursuing the rumour that another train had pulled in at the Finland station on the other side of the river.
Before Pekkala knew what was happening, he had been swept out into the street. From there, he watched the train pull out, wagons rifling past. Then suddenly the tracks were empty and there was only the rhythmic clatter of the wheels, fading away into the distance.
For Pekkala, that day had been like a fork in the road of his life. His heart went one way and his body set off another, lugging its jumbled soul like a suitcase full of rusty nails.
‘What is she doing in Berlin?’ Pekkala asked, hardly able to speak. ‘And why is she working for you?’
‘She volunteered,’ Swift replied matter-of-factly.
Now Stalin raised his voice. ‘If she’s working for you, then why do you need us to get her out? Why not just leave her there until Berlin has fallen? I promise it won’t be long now.’
‘We feel a certain sense of urgency,’ Swift replied vaguely, ‘and given your army’s proximity to the city, such a task might better be accomplished by a man such as Pekkala. It is a small gesture in the grand scheme of things,’ Swift said magnanimously. ‘We see it as evidence of the many things which bind us in this struggle against a common enemy.’
‘When do I leave?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Soon,’ replied Swift. ‘Perhaps very soon. Of course we will notify you as far in advance as we can.’
‘Then we look forward to hearing from you,’ said Stalin.
Bowing his head with gratitude, Swift made his way out of the room.
Until that moment, Stalin’s face had remained a mask of unreadable emotions. But as soon as the Englishman departed, Stalin slammed his fist down on the desk. ‘A gesture of solidarity! Who the hell do they think we are? A pack of errand boys?’
Pekkala was still reeling from the news. Stalin’s voice reached him as if through the rush and tumble of waves breaking on a nearby shore.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Kirov.
‘You will do exactly as they say,’ replied Stalin. ‘You will go to Berlin and you will bring that woman back.’
In spite of his confusion, Kirov managed to nod in agreement.
‘But not’, continued Stalin, ‘before you discover the real reason they want her.’
‘The real reason?’ asked Kirov.
‘Whatever her value to the Inspector, do you honestly think they would go to all this trouble to retrieve an agent who is merely supplying them with gossip?’ Stalin swept one stubby finger back and forth. ‘No, Major Kirov, there is more to this than their compassion for a missing operative. She must have got hold of something important, something they want now, or they would simply leave her where she is to wait until the city has fallen. And I want to know what it is.’
‘But how are we to manage that?’ asked Kirov.
Stalin took out a pen and scribbled an address on a pad of notepaper, then tore away the sheet and handed it to Pekkala. ‘Here is the address of someone who might have the answer.’
As soon as he had departed from the Kremlin, Professor Swift made his way to the British Embassy at 46 Ulitsa Vorovskovo. There, in a small, dark room at the end of a long corridor, Swift perched on the end of a stiff-backed wooden chair, nervously smoking a cigarette. The haughty confidence he had put on display before Stalin was now replaced by scowling agitation.
From the shadows came the sound of a deep breath being drawn in. Then a man leaned forward, his face suddenly illuminated by the glow of a glass-hooded lamp which stood upon the desk between them. He had an oval face, yellowish teeth and neatly combed hair shellacked on to his scalp with lavender-smelling pomade. His name was Oswald Hansard and although the brass plaque on his door had him listed as the sub-director of the Royal Agricultural Trade Commission, he was in fact the Moscow station chief of British Intelligence. ‘So you think that Pekkala will help us?’ he asked.
Swift sipped at his cigarette and then exhaled in two grey jets through his chapped nostrils. ‘I think he will follow his conscience, whatever Stalin has to say about it.’
‘I’m sure a good number of men and women in this country have followed their conscience, and I dare say it bought them a ticket to Siberia, if they even made it that far.’
‘It’s different with Pekkala,’ remarked Swift. ‘Stalin seems to take a perverse pleasure in being stood up to by this Finn. Even though he has the power to make Pekkala disappea
r from the face of the earth with nothing so much as a phone call to Lubyanka, he won’t do it.’
‘And why is that, do you suppose?’
‘If I had to guess, I’d say it is because he knows Pekkala doesn’t care. He’s not afraid and there’s nothing Stalin can do about it. If you want my opinion, the only thing keeping Pekkala alive is the very fact that he has placed less value on his life than on his work.’
‘And that work is what they have in common,’ added Hansard.
‘The only thing, I’d say, but it’s enough.’
‘So he will help us?’ Hansard asked again.
‘I think he might,’ answered Swift, ‘for the sake of the woman.’
Hansard sat back heavily, vanishing again into the shadows. ‘But it’s been years since he last set eyes upon her. Surely, he has moved on by now. Any practical person would have done so.’
Swift laughed quietly.
‘Did I say something funny?’ snapped the station chief.
‘Well, yes sir, I think you did. Has there never been someone you loved, from whom you were kept apart by fate and circumstance?’
Hansard paused, sucking at his yellow teeth. ‘In practical terms . . .’
‘And that’s where you really are being funny, sir,’ interrupted Professor Swift.
‘Well, I’m glad to have kept you so amused,’ growled Hansard.
‘What I mean, sir, is that practicality has nothing to do with this. Neither has time itself. Once a love like that has been kindled, nothing can extinguish it. It remains suspended, like an insect trapped in amber. Time cannot alter it. Words cannot undo it.’
Hansard sighed and rose up from his chair. He walked out into the middle of the room. Although he had on a grey suit, and a black and white checked tie, he wore no socks or shoes and his pale feet glowed with a sickly pallor. ‘Highly impractical,’ he muttered.
‘As you say, sir,’ answered Swift, stubbing out his cigarette in a peach-coloured onyx ashtray on the desk, ‘but the world would be a poorer place without people who believed in such things. And besides, in this case, you will admit, it serves our purpose well.’
He gave an exasperated sigh.
The station chief glanced up. ‘Something on your mind, Swift?’
‘Actually, sir, there is. Pekkala asked me how this woman ended up working for us.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I guessed and said she volunteered. The fact is I have no idea.’
‘Nevertheless,’ replied Hansard, ‘you stumbled into the truth.’
‘But what is her story, sir?’
‘I suppose it won’t hurt to tell you now,’ said Hansard. ‘She was first approached by the French Security Service, the Deuxième Bureau, when she was living in Paris back in 1938. At the time, she was a teacher at some small private school in Paris. The Deuxième had been keeping their eye on her for some time. They knew she was Russian, of course, and that her parents had been murdered by the Bolsheviks back in the early 1920s. At the time, the Deuxième were concerned that the entire French government had become riddled with Soviet spies.’
‘And had it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ replied Hansard. ‘Their fears were entirely justified. That’s why they needed someone who could speak Russian, but with enough hatred for Stalin that they could, perhaps, be put to use in ferreting out these infiltrators.’
‘And what did she say to that?’
‘Apparently, she told them she would rather be a school teacher than some kind of glamorous spy.’
‘And yet they persuaded her somehow.’
‘Not until the war broke out,’ said Hansard. ‘As the Germans began their invasion of France, and it became clear that the French army was about to collapse, the Bureau approached her again. This time, it was with an offer to get her out of the country, along with a number of others whom, they believed, might prove useful as agents in carrying on the war effort even after France had fallen. And with France about to fall, the only way they could do that was by delivering those agents to us.’
‘How did they come to choose Simonova? After all, she had no training and she had already turned them down once.’
‘But that’s precisely why they did choose her,’ explained Hansard. ‘The Bureau suspected that lists of its active agents might already have fallen into the hands of German intelligence, so they chose people who had not become operational, or whose identities might have failed to make their way on to the Bureau’s roster.’
‘But that can’t have been the only reason they chose her.’
‘It wasn’t,’ answered Hansard. ‘You see, in addition to French and Russian, she also spoke fluent German. Her father, Gustav Seimann, had been a riding instructor for the Grand Duke of Hesse, a close relative of Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra. When Alexandra, who was herself a German, married Nicholas, she brought in a number of people from her native country to play various roles in her new life among the Russians. The tutor of her children, for example, was an Englishman named Gibbes. There was also a Frenchman named Doctor Gilliard, whom she put on her household staff. And when it came time to teach her children how to ride, she brought in the Grand Duke’s riding instructor. Gustav Seimann settled down in Petersburg and made a new life for himself. He even changed his name to Simonov.’
‘That shows a lot of faith,’ remarked Swift.
‘They were faithful,’ agreed Hansard. ‘Some of these foreigners turned out to be the most loyal members of her retinue. Simonov himself was said to have been killed when he rode out by himself to confront a band of roving Cossacks who had made their way on to the grounds of the Tsarskoye Selo estate. That act of bravery cost him his life, but it shows how he remained loyal right up to the end, and I’m told there are many who didn’t.’
‘I suppose the Deuxième Bureau were hoping for the same kind of commitment from his daughter.’
‘Nothing less would do,’ replied Hansard. ‘By the time they got to her, the situation in Paris had become critical. The place had been declared an open city, and most of those who could flee did precisely that. Given the situation, this time the woman agreed.’
‘How did they get her out?’
‘They drove her straight to Le Bourget airfield, just outside of Paris, loaded her aboard one of those lumbering Lysander planes, the kind with the big wheels that can land on just about anything, and two hours later she was in England. They trained her at our Special Operations camp at Arisaig up in Scotland. From there, she went to Beaulieu, Lord Montagu’s place over in the New Forest. Less than a month later, they sent her back to France, this time on a fishing boat we modified to transport agents to and from the Continent, operating out of the Helford River estuary. She was put ashore somewhere near Boulogne and made her way to Paris.’
‘And nobody became suspicious that she’d been gone all that time?’ asked Swift.
‘So many people had left the city after the Germans broke through the French lines at Sedan that her absence was not considered unusual. The school had closed, temporarily, and the students had all been sent home. People were scattered all over the country. When things settled down a bit and life in Paris began to return to normal, or as normal as it could ever be under occupation, those who had fled began to return. Simonova simply joined the tide of refugees making their way back into the city. The little school where she worked reopened and, after registering with the German authorities, she simply resumed her work as a teacher.’
‘And what then?’ demanded Swift. ‘How did she help the war effort? Did she start bumping off people in the middle of the night?’
‘Hardly,’ answered Hansard. ‘Remember, she could speak German, and we had known all along that the occupation government would need people who were fluent in that language as well as in French. She volunteered and, sure enough, they put her to work.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Nothing too onerous. Typing out translations of public notices. Things like that.’
/> ‘Doesn’t sound like much of a return on our investment.’
‘The thing about being a translator is that, sooner or later, an important document is going to end up on your desk. The people who give it to you might not think it contains any vital information, but even the smallest fragment of intelligence can be built up into something useful over time. Before leaving Beaulieu, she had been given a wireless set which she used for transmitting the information back to England.’
‘And how did we manage to get her to Berlin?’
‘We didn’t,’ said Hansard. ‘The Germans did that by themselves, and we have one man in particular to thank for that. His name is Hermann Fegelein. Before the war, his family managed a riding school down in Bavaria. In the early 1930s, Fegelein joined the Nazi Party and went on to command an SS Cavalry Division on the Eastern Front. In early 1944, he got assigned to Himmler’s private staff as a liaison officer. One of the first places Himmler sent him was Paris. When Fegelein got there, he demanded a secretary who was fluent in German and French from the occupation government.’
‘And they gave her Simonova?’
‘Not right away,’ said Hansard. ‘He sacked the first two people he was offered, probably because he didn’t like the look of them. The thing about Fegelein is that he considers himself a real ladies’ man and it wasn’t until they sent him Simonova that he was finally satisfied. When Fegelein left Paris a couple of months later, she went with him.’
‘As his mistress?’
Hansard shook his head. ‘Only as his private secretary, although I dare say he might have other plans for her in the future. In the meantime, Fegelein has become a go-between for Hitler and Himmler; the two most powerful men in the Third Reich. He was, and still is, present at Hitler’s daily meetings with his High Command. Whatever’s going on, he knows about it.’
‘And so does Simonova, by the sound of it.’
‘Fegelein is no fool. Even if he did trust Simonova, he would not knowingly have given her access to secrets of national importance. More likely, he just gossiped with her about all the various goings-on in Hitler’s entourage. But even gossip has its value and we started broadcasting it back to the Germans, as soon as we had set up the Black Boomerang operation.’
