by Sam Eastland
The animal was tracked to its lair and brought down with spears tipped with bone from the reindeer it had killed. Then its corpse was tied to a V-shaped trellis made from birch trees and dragged back to the village. That night, meat from the bear was cooked over a fire made from the same trellis used to haul him in.
The taste of it, Pekkala told her, was rank and sour and, when no one was looking, he spat it back into the fire, where the fat burned with a flame like polished brass.
The next morning, the bear was buried in a hole as deep as the bear had been tall and even though the animal had been cut to pieces for the feast, his bones were now arranged in exactly the way he had carried them in life.
The place where they buried the bear was at the edge of a grove of trees where the People of the Twilight lived. But there were no houses to mark their property or any sign at all that they were there. The name of this tribe was the Sajvva, and they lived in a parallel world, making themselves known only when they had to. They were said to be tall and beautiful, and their skin appeared to radiate a glow like that of polished wood. The Sajvva lived much as Pekkala’s people did, catching their own fish from the lakes and tending their own herds of reindeer. These animals they did not share. Only the bear lived in both of their worlds; serving as an emissary between the Twilight World and that of men. They buried his bones with respect, not only for the animal itself but for the Sajvva who considered him a friend.
In time, when he was ready, the Walker would rise up from his grave and piece his body back together, bone by bone, until he was himself again, so he could carry on his ceaseless wandering between the worlds of gods and men.
He had told her that story one evening as they stood at the edge of the Façade Pond, with the Alexander Palace at their backs. The palace had been lit up and the moon had just risen above the trees, casting its mercury light across the still water.
‘What strange names they have for things up there,’ Lilya had remarked.
‘They would have a name for you as well,’ Pekkala told her.
She turned to him, smiling. ‘Oh, really?’ she asked. ‘And what name would that be?’
‘They would call you,’ he began, and then he paused.
‘Yes?’
‘Your name’, said Pekkala, ‘would be “She Whose Hair Glows Softly in the Moonlight”.’
Even though the words had just rolled off his tongue, there was something both ancient and haunting about them, as if the name had been waiting for her much longer than she’d waited for the name.
The last thing she heard of Pekkala, after the Revolution drove them apart, was that he had been sent to the labour camp of Borodok, in the valley of Krasnagolyana. As years passed, and only silence reached her from the forests of Siberia, she began to wonder if Pekkala was still alive.
At times like that, she would return to the stories he had told her, until it seemed to her that Pekkala had transformed into the Walker in the Woods, striding through the veil between the worlds of gods and men with no more effort than a sigh.
And then she would not worry any more.
While he waited for Pekkala to arrive, Professor Swift sat in a chair across from Stalin’s desk, nervously fingering his gold Dunhill lighter. In the other hand, he held an unlit cigarette, which he was desperate to smoke but did not dare to do in Stalin’s presence. Although Swift was well aware of Stalin’s tobacco habit, he had been warned by his station commander not to light up before the Boss himself saw fit to fill the room with smoke.
Stalin seemed to know this. Balanced between his yellowed fingertips was one of the many Markov cigarettes he puffed away each morning, often switching to a pipe come afternoon. He tapped the stubby white stick upon the leather blotter of his desk, letting it slide up between his fingers before turning it around and tapping it back down the other way.
‘Pekkala appears to be late,’ remarked Swift.
Stalin responded with a grunt.
Another minute passed.
Swift could feel perspiration sticking the shirt to his back. ‘Perhaps I should come back later,’ he suggested.
Stalin fixed him with emotionless yellow-green eyes.
‘Perhaps not,’ Swift corrected himself.
From the outer office an irregular clatter of typewriter keys, which seemed to pause now and then, as if the typist – that little bald man with a shifty expression – were listening for any words that passed between them.
Just when Swift was about to flee from the premises, he heard voices in the outer office. ‘Thank God,’ he muttered.
The doors to Stalin’s study opened.
Poskrebychev swung into the room, his hands touching both door knobs, which caused his arms to spread as if he were some large featherless bird in the moment before it took flight.
Pekkala and Kirov followed on his heels.
Swift was struck by the air of lethal efficiency these two men seemed to exude. He, himself, felt clumsily unprepared. The pretence of his job as sub-director of the Royal Agricultural Trade Commission was, by now, nothing more than an afterthought. The Soviets seemed to have known exactly who he was before he even arrived in the country and the charade that SOE’s concern for agent Christophe was purely humanitarian had also crumbled to dust. He felt like a man in a poker game who had bet everything on a bluff, only to realise that he’d been showing his cards all along.
On seeing Pekkala walk into the room, Stalin’s whole demeanour seemed to change. He smiled. The stiffness went out of his shoulders. He wedged the cigarette between his lips and lit it with a wooden match which he struck against a heavy brass ashtray already crowded with that morning’s crumpled stubs. ‘You are going to Berlin!’ he announced. ‘I hear it’s very nice this time of year.’
‘And me?’ asked Kirov.
‘You as well,’ confirmed Stalin, ‘along with a guide who will lead you to a safe house in the city. There, you will meet agent Christophe and bring her back across the Russian lines to safety.’
‘Who runs the safe house?’ asked Pekkala.
‘We do,’ answered Swift. Before continuing, he paused to light a cigarette, flooding his lungs with smoke. ‘It belongs to one of our contact agents, who is employed at the Hungarian Embassy.’
‘You will be provided with papers’, explained Stalin, ‘indicating that you are Hungarian businessmen who have been stranded in the city by the bombing and are staying with a member of the embassy until you are able to leave Berlin.’
‘Neither of us speaks Hungarian,’ said Kirov.
‘And nor, in all likelihood, will any policeman who stops and asks for your papers,’ answered Swift. ‘The contact has been told to expect you. If the police check with him, he will verify your story. There is one other thing.’
‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.
‘We have just learned from an informant in the German Security Service that Hitler has assigned a detective, a former member of the Berlin police, to root out a spy whom Hitler is convinced is operating from within his own headquarters. It’s possible that they are closing in on Christophe, so the sooner you can get her out of there, the better.’
‘A detective?’ asked Pekkala. ‘But surely they have a Security Service protecting the headquarters?’
‘Indeed they do,’ confirmed Swift. ‘It is headed up by a former Munich policeman named Rattenhuber.’
‘Why not use him?’ asked Kirov.
‘Hitler no longer knows whom to trust,’ Swift explained. ‘That’s why he chose someone from the outside: an old comrade of his from the Great War.’
‘Who is this man?’ asked Stalin.
‘His name is Leopold Hunyadi.’
‘Hunyadi!’ muttered Pekkala.
‘You know him?’ asked Swift.
‘By reputation, yes. Hunyadi is the best criminal investigator in Germany. When did Hitler assign him to the task?’ asked Pekkala.
Swift shook his head. ‘We’re not sure,’ he confessed. ‘It must be at least a
few days.’
‘Then we are already behind schedule,’ said Pekkala. Turning to Stalin, he asked, ‘How soon can you get us to Berlin?’
‘If all goes well,’ he replied, ‘I’ll have you walking the streets of that city by the day after tomorrow.’
The ash on Swift’s cigarette was now precariously long and he began looking about for somewhere to tap it out. Stalin made no move to offer up his own ashtray and so, with gritted teeth, Swift tapped out the hot ash into his palm.
‘I’ll get a message through to agent Christophe,’ said Swift. ‘She will be waiting for you at the safe house upon your arrival in Berlin.’ He made his exit, still carrying the ash on his palm.
The men who remained waited until they heard the clunk of the outer door closing before they resumed their conversation.
‘There’s something he just told us which doesn’t make sense,’ remarked Stalin.
‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.
‘One of our sources in the Berlin Justice Department informed us that Leopold Hunyadi was condemned to death more than a month ago.’
‘What did he do to deserve that?’ asked Kirov.
‘It’s not clear,’ answered Stalin. ‘All we know is that Hunyadi was sent to the prison camp at Flossenburg to await execution.’
‘Maybe they got the name wrong,’ suggested Kirov.
Stalin slowly opened his hands and then set them together again, to show that it was anybody’s guess.
‘If Swift is right, however,’ said Pekkala, ‘then it will not be long before Hunyadi tracks her down. Lilya’s only chance is for us get there first.’
‘You depart tonight,’ said Stalin. ‘The appropriate weapons have been set aside for you at NKVD Headquarters, as well as those false identification papers provided by the British. All you have to do is pick them up and be ready to go by six o’clock this evening.’
As both men turned to leave, Stalin loudly cleared his throat to show he wasn’t finished with them yet.
Both men froze in their tracks.
‘A word with you in private, Inspector,’ said Stalin. ‘Major, you can wait in the hall.’
At that same moment, in the Flossenburg Concentration Camp in southern Germany, Leopold Hunyadi was preparing to meet his maker.
He was of medium height, with thinning blonde hair and a round and cheerful face. Hunyadi was in the habit of tilting his head back when he spoke to people, at the same time narrowing his eyes, as if to hide whatever emotions they might disclose. He was not a man who had ever been prone to physical exertion and now, as a result, possessed a belly that sagged over the old army belt he still wore, whose buckle was emblazoned with the words ‘In Treue Fest’, from his time in the Great War, when he had served as a sergeant in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment.
In 1917, in a battle near the town of Zillebeke in Flanders, he had saved the life of another German soldier who had become entangled in barbed wire while attempting to deliver a message from the trenches to a battery of artillery located just behind the lines. Due to a miscommunication, the battery had opened fire on German trenches, instead of the English lines. In the course of this bombardment, several soldiers were killed and the radio lines had been cut. In desperation, an officer scribbled out a message ordering the artillery to cease fire, handed it to a nearby corporal and told him to deliver it as quickly as humanly possible.
The name of this corporal was Adolf Hitler. Shortly after leaving the trenches, he was blown off his feet by an incoming shell and, although unwounded, became stuck in a nest of barbed wire.
At that same moment, Sergeant Hunyadi emerged from the bunker where he had been seeking shelter from the guns. Seeing the corporal tangled like an insect in a spider’s web, and hearing the man’s cries for help, he used a pair of pliers to cut the soldier loose from the snare of rusty talons.
When the war was over, Hunyadi went on to become one of the most successful detectives in the history of the Berlin police force.
Even though he had refused to join Hitler’s newly founded National Socialist Party, an act which would normally have guaranteed the swift termination of his career, Hitler never forgot the debt he owed Hunyadi and refused to have him dismissed.
Although frustrated by Hunyadi’s stubbornness, Hitler allowed the detective to continue his work unhindered by any lack of political affiliation.
But Hitler’s patience with his old friend came to an end in 1938, when he was informed by his intelligence service that Hunyadi’s wife, Franziska, a woman of legendary beauty in Berlin, had been born into a family of Sephardic Jews, who had emigrated from Spain generations before.
Hunyadi was summoned to the Berlin Headquarters of the Security Service. There he was informed that he should immediately begin divorce proceedings against his wife. An excuse would be provided by the courts. The paperwork would be expedited. The whole thing would be finalised within a week, after which his wife would receive permission to leave the country.
When Hunyadi protested, saying that he would rather leave the country with his wife than divorce her and remain in Germany, he was told that this was not an option. His services were required in Berlin. Any failure to carry out Hitler’s wishes would result in the arrest of his wife and the certainty of transport to the women’s concentration camp at Belsen.
Faced with this ultimatum, Hunyadi had no choice but to agree. The divorce papers were drawn up, Hunyadi signed them, and Franziska departed for Spain, where she was taken in by distant relatives.
With Hitler’s blessing, and under his personal protection, Hunyadi continued his work as an investigator, adding to his earlier reputation with a string of successful cases. Hitler himself called upon Hunyadi to undertake a number of investigations, including one in which a British major with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist had washed up on the coast of Spain. It appeared that the dead man, whose name was William Martin, had been killed in a plane crash off the Spanish coast. Although Martin had managed to make his way into a damaged life raft, he succumbed to injuries and drowned before reaching the shore, where he was found by fishermen as they prepared to set out their nets. Spanish authorities, being sympathetic to the German cause, had allowed German intelligence to open and photograph the contents of the briefcase before turning the body over to the British Embassy. The documents turned out to be a complete work-up of a planned invasion of Sardinia, signed by several members of the Allied High Command. In spite of the fact that Martin had been carrying tickets to a London theatre production, as well as a letter from his fiancée – details which did as much to convince the German High Command as the contents of the briefcase itself – Hunyadi’s recommendation was to treat the whole thing as a trick.
Disregarding the detective’s warning, Hitler ordered more than 20,000 combat troops to Sardinia, where they prepared for the imminent arrival of the Allies. By the time they figured out that Major Martin and his battle plans had indeed been a decoy all along, the invasion of Normandy had already begun.
Even before Hunyadi had returned from Spain, it came to Hitler’s attention through an informant in the Spanish government that the detective had secretly met with Franziska and, in a private ceremony, married her a second time.
Seeing this as a personal betrayal of the trust he had placed in Hunyadi, Hitler ordered the detective to be arrested, stripped of his membership in the Berlin Police Department and sent to Flossenburg. There, he was to await a trial whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.
In November of 1944, Leopold Hunyadi was dragged from his cell, and hauled before a magistrate in an improvised courtroom at the Flossenburg mess hall, where he received the news that he had been sentenced to death by hanging.
From that day to this, Hunyadi had lived in a kind of suspended animation, never knowing which day was to be his last. In the beginning, each time he heard footsteps in the hall outside his cell, his heart would clench like a fist at the thought that they were coming for him now. This happened so many hu
ndreds of times that he grew numb to it, as if a part of him had already departed from his body and was waiting, somewhere beyond the concrete wall, for the rest to follow.
Although the tiny window in his cell was too high up for him to have a view, he could sometimes hear the wooden trapdoor of the gallows clunking open in the courtyard just outside his room. Rather than terrifying Hunyadi, the sound gave him comfort, because it meant that the Flossenburg gallows was operating on a drop system, which would kill its victims quickly, rather than a different method, also in use, by which men would be hoisted up a pole and left to dangle while they slowly choked to death.
To pass the time, Hunyadi made contact with the men on either side of him. He could not see or speak to them, so he employed a system known as the Polybius Square, which separated the alphabet into five rows of five letters, each letter in its own box, and with C and K in the same box. By tapping a heating pipe that ran through the rooms, the first set of taps indicating the horizontal position and the second set showing the vertical position within the box, it was possible to spell out letters.
Hunyadi had learned the system early in his career and had often eavesdropped on conversations between prisoners when carrying out investigations, sometimes even using the system to communicate with prisoners he had arrested, who mistook him for another prisoner and often divulged information that they would never have told the police.
Men came and went; all of them high-ranking officers, government officials or political prisoners. From this, Hunyadi came to understand that this particular prison block at Flossenburg had been selected as the final destination for those whose exits from this world had been decreed by the Führer himself.
From newcomers, Hunyadi learned about the advance of the Allied armies, and he guessed that it would not be long before either the Russians or the Americans overran the camp. While his fellow prisoners tapped out their messages of hope that the Allies would save them, Hunyadi realised that the approach of these armies would only hasten their deaths.
