Berlin Red

by Sam Eastland

  Elizaveta was in her mid-twenties, head and shoulders shorter than Kirov, with a round and slightly freckled face, a small chin and dark, inquisitive eyes.

  Few outsiders were ever permitted past the iron-grilled door which served as the entrance to the records office. But Kirov had that privilege. Thanks to Elizaveta, Kirov had been welcomed into their miniature tribe.

  They retired to what had once been a storage room for cleaning supplies used by the maids at the hotel. The space had been converted by the three women who managed the records office, led by the fearsome Sergeant Gatkina, into a refuge where they could smoke and drink their tea in peace.

  Elizaveta, wearing a tight-collared gymnastiorka tunic, dark skirt and navy-blue beret, sat upon a filing cabinet placed on its side against the wall.

  Kirov paced about in front of her, animatedly describing his promotion. He expected that, at any moment, Elizaveta would leap up from her makeshift seat and embrace him.

  But this did not happen.

  All she said, at first, was, ‘Stalin is no fool.’

  ‘How strange,’ remarked Kirov. ‘That’s just what the Inspector told me!’

  ‘Stalin is not raising you up,’ she told him, leaning forward and lowering her voice, as people often did when mentioning the name of Stalin. ‘In fact, he might as well have sentenced you to death.’

  ‘You’re not making any sense!’ blurted Kirov. ‘I have been promoted!’

  ‘In order to do what?’ she demanded. ‘Give orders to Pekkala? That’s just not possible. As soon as you cross the border into enemy territory, that Finn will do exactly as he’s always done.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘Whatever he chooses,’ she replied, ‘and if that choice is to simply vanish off the face of the earth like some phantom in a fairy tale, who will be held responsible?’ She raised her eyebrows, waiting for the answer which both of them already knew.

  ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ said Kirov. ‘He’s knows the kind of trouble I’d be in.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ answered Elizaveta, ‘and that’s what Stalin’s banking on. You are his insurance policy against Pekkala’s disappearance, but do not think for a minute that you are actually in charge of this mission.’

  ‘If that’s what you think,’ Kirov said indignantly, ‘then maybe I’ll surprise you.’

  ‘That may be so,’ she told him, ‘but there’s something I still don’t understand,’ she added.

  ‘And what is that?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘Even if you do find this woman, does Pekkala really think they stand a chance of getting back together?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he answered honestly. ‘I do know he still loves her.’

  ‘And how do you know that?’ she demanded. ‘Has he told you so?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  ‘Then what makes you think it is true?’

  ‘Pekkala used to send her money every month,’ explained Kirov. ‘You see, he knew exactly where she lived in Paris, at least until the war broke out. After that, he lost track of her.’

  ‘So they were communicating up to that point?’

  ‘No,’ Kirov told her. ‘He never told her where the money really came from.’

  ‘Well, where did she think it was coming from?’

  ‘It was transferred from a Moscow bank under the name of Rada Obolenskaya, the headmistress of the school where she had worked before the Revolution. According to Pekkala, Comrade Obolenskaya had always taken good care of Lilya and so she had no reason to doubt that Obolenskaya was actually the source.’

  ‘But why on earth wouldn’t he tell her?’ Elizaveta exclaimed in exasperation.

  ‘Until today, when Comrade Stalin told him otherwise, Pekkala was under the impression that Lilya had got married, and that she even had a family. He did not want to take the risk of damaging the new life she had made for herself. But he never fell out of love with her and I don’t think he ever will, whatever happens when we reach Berlin.’

  ‘If he thinks he can just pick up where he left off,’ said Elizaveta, ‘then he is just a dreamer.’

  ‘There are worse things to be,’ Kirov answered defensively, ‘and maybe he just wants to save her life. After all, that’s what I’d do for you.’

  Only now did she rise to embrace him. ‘I want you to make me a promise,’ she said.

  ‘What would that be?’ asked Kirov.

  ‘If it comes down to you or Pekkala,’ she said, her voice muffled against the chest of his neatly pressed tunic, ‘promise you’ll make the right decision.’

  ‘All right,’ Kirov told her softly. ‘I will.’

  When the money first started arriving in her account, back in the summer of 1933, Lilya Simonova thought that somebody had made a mistake. After receiving her statement in the mail, and seeing that there was considerably more in her account than should have been there, she went to the bank manager to find out what had happened.

  ‘Everything is in order,’ he assured her. ‘The money has been wired from Moscow.’

  ‘But by whom?’

  ‘Rada Igorevna Obolenskaya,’ replied the manager. ‘Does that name sound familiar to you?’

  ‘Why yes,’ said Lilya, still confused. ‘Yes, it does, but . . .’

  ‘I am given to understand,’ interrupted the manager, ‘that additional amounts will be deposited each month.’

  ‘For how long?’

  The manager shrugged. ‘No limit has been set.’

  ‘And is there any message from Rada Igorevna?’

  ‘None that I know of.’

  ‘What should I do about this?’ Lilya wondered aloud.

  ‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do,’ said the manager. ‘Take the money. Take it and be glad.’

  The next month, just as the manager had said, another deposit arrived from Moscow. And it continued to arrive, without fail, for the following eight years.

  Lilya Simonova attempted to make contact with her former employer. She had no idea where the headmistress might be living but wrote to the address of the school where they had worked together, hoping that she might still be there or that someone who remembered her might be able to forward it. But she received no reply and, after many attempts, she finally gave up.

  In 1937, at a place called the Café Dimitri, where expatriate Russians often gathered to drink tea, Lilya ran into someone she had known in Petrograd before the Revolution. Her name was Olga Komarova and her children had attended the school where Lilya taught. When Lilya mentioned to her the gifts which had been sent by Rada Obolenskaya, a strange look passed over the face of her friend.

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ said Olga Komarova. ‘The school was burned to the ground, right at the beginning of the Revolution. It couldn’t have been more than a day after you left.’

  ‘Well,’ replied Lilya, ‘that explains why no one got the letters I sent. But Rada was a woman of means. I don’t think she needed her job to survive financially. Even with the school gone, I’m sure she still had money tucked away.’

  Olga Komarova reached across and rested her hand upon Lilya’s. ‘No,’ she said softly, ‘you don’t understand. The poor woman was in the school when the Red Guards came to burn it down. They told her to leave, but she refused, so they burned the school anyway, with her inside it. Lilya, she’s been dead for years.’

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ Lilya insisted.

  ‘But I’m not,’ said Olga Komarova. ‘I saw them drag her body from the ashes. She was still holding that camera of hers. Aside from you and that school, I think it was the only thing she valued in this world.’

  The next day, Lilya Simonova went back to the bank manager and told him what she had learned.

  ‘There’s a simple explanation,’ said the man. ‘She must have left it to you in her will. The executors of her estate must have arranged for these payments to be made.’

  Lilya took him at his word but, even though it was a tidy explanation, her suspicions were
never completely laid to rest. Then, in June of 1941, when the German army launched its campaign against Russia, banking routes between Moscow and Paris, which had been occupied by Germany for the previous year, shut down and the money stopped coming in as abruptly as it had first appeared.

  An hour after leaving Lubyanka, Kirov was back at the office on Pitnikov Street.

  There, Pekkala informed them that a car was already on its way to transport them to a military airfield on the outskirts of Moscow. As yet, neither of the men knew exactly how they would be arriving in Berlin.

  Gloomily, Kirov slouched in the chair by the stove. Little clouds of raw cotton peeked from the chair’s tattered upholstery. Kirov’s condition did not look much better than that of his chair. He had already traded in his uniform and was now dressed in the Hungarian clothes he had been given. He looked depressingly shabby, unemployed and unemployable.

  ‘You don’t look so bad,’ said Pekkala, trying to cheer him up.

  ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ grumbled Kirov. ‘You get to wear your own kit.’

  ‘It’s because I have a certain universal quality,’ Pekkala announced grandly.

  ‘He said you were a barbarian.’

  ‘There are worse things to be called.’

  Realising that he was never going to gain the upper hand in this conversation, Kirov turned his attention to the pistol given to him by Lazarev. ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘You have to sign for everything in that place! And you get in all kinds of trouble if you don’t return every little scrap of equipment you are issued. Why would they change their minds, all of a sudden?’

  ‘What would be the point of having you sign for a gun you will never return?’ asked Pekkala.

  ‘But of course I would return it!’ protested Kirov.

  ‘Not if we don’t make it back,’ replied Pekkala.

  Kirov stared at him in amazement. ‘Do you mean they don’t expect us to survive?’

  ‘It looks that way to me.’

  Kirov launched himself to his feet, as if he meant to march back to NKVD headquarters and demand an explanation. Then, realising the futility of such a gesture, he slumped back into his chair.

  Just then, they heard the squeak of brakes.

  Pekkala walked over to the window and glanced down into the street. ‘It’s time for us to leave,’ he said.

  As Kirov and Pekkala set off on their journey to Berlin, Inspector Leopold Hunyadi had only just arrived in the city, still wearing the rags of his prison uniform.

  Now he stood face to face with Adolf Hitler.

  For this meeting, Hitler had chosen the rubble-strewn Chancellery gardens, where he was in the habit of walking his German shepherd dog, Blondi, at least once every day. He had dismissed his usual escort of armed guards, determined to keep his time with Hunyadi as secret as possible.

  ‘Hunyadi,’ muttered Hitler, drawing out the man’s name like a growl. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

  Hunyadi had no idea what Hitler was talking about, but it occurred to him that if he so much as asked, he might find himself on the next plane back to Flossenburg. So, for now at least, he held his tongue.

  Hitler began to walk along the pathway, which had once been lined with flowers but now resembled a gangplank laid across a cratered field of mud. The dog walked on ahead, straining at its leash.

  ‘There is a spy,’ continued Hitler.

  Hunyadi looked around at the jagged teeth of broken windows. ‘Here?’ he asked. ‘Now?’

  Hitler shook his head, then jerked his chin towards the ground. ‘Down there, in the bunker.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Information has leaked out. The Allies are broadcasting it on the radio, as if to taunt me for my ignorance. I cannot allow it to continue. That is why I brought you here.’

  ‘You want me to find the spy?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But what about your own security service?’

  Hitler breathed out sharply. ‘If Rattenhuber and his gang of Munich Bulls had done their jobs when they were supposed to, you would not be standing there now.’

  ‘No,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘I would be dead.’

  Hitler glanced at him and shrugged. ‘Death awaits us all, Hunyadi.’

  Hunyadi cleared his throat. ‘If I may ask, why call on me for this? I do not see why you would place your faith in me, especially since you yourself ordered my execution for what you have termed crimes against the state.’

  ‘Ah!’ sighed Hitler, resting his hand briefly on Hunyadi’s shoulder. ‘Yours was a crime inspired by love, misguided of course, but understandable in the circumstances. It is because of this love that I know I can trust you to carry out your task.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Hunyadi.

  ‘At my request, your wife Franziska has been taken into custody by some friends who have remained loyal to me among the Spanish authorities.’

  Hunyadi felt the bile rise in his throat. ‘On what charges?’ he spluttered.

  ‘I am sure they have come up with something,’ remarked Hitler.

  ‘Why don’t you just take me back to Flossenburg and hang me?’ demanded Hunyadi. ‘Why must you put me through this?’

  ‘Because, my old friend, I no longer know whom to trust,’ Hitler stamped his heel into the sandy soil, as if to trample out a fire which had broken out beneath his feet, ‘down there in the bowels of the Reich. If I give this mission to a member of my own security, who is to say I am not entrusting an investigation to the very people who should be investigated? No, I needed someone from outside. Someone I know will not smile in my face and then stab me in the back, as others have tried to do. Don’t you see, Hunyadi? It is your hatred which convinces me that you are the right man for the job, and your love for that woman which has guaranteed your loyalty.’ Now he fixed Hunyadi with a stare. ‘Do you honestly mean to turn me down?’

  ‘Under the circumstances,’ answered the detective, ‘I don’t see how I can.’

  Hitler nodded with satisfaction. ‘Then it is settled.’ He reached into his tunic and removed a thick envelope. ‘Here is everything I know about the case.’ He handed the envelope to Hunyadi.

  ‘If what you say is true,’ said the detective, ‘I may need to question some very high-ranking people.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I doubt they will appreciate the intrusion.’

  ‘Indeed they won’t, but you have my word they will endure it. In the envelope I have just given you,’ said Hitler, ‘you’ll find a number that will connect you directly to the main switchboard in the bunker. If anybody tries to obstruct you in your duties, no matter who they are, just have them call and I will personally explain the situation.’

  They had reached a place where they could go no further. The path was blocked by a huge piece of smashed masonry and the ground beyond had been cratered by explosions.

  From the moment he had set eyes on Hitler that day, Hunyadi’s first thought had been to kill the man, with a rock, with his bare hands, with his teeth, and then to simply vanish among the ruins. But what Hitler had said about Franziska paralysed him. He had no doubt that, even with the Allies and the Red Army closing in upon Berlin and the German army little more than a heap of wreckage propped up by pensioners and teenage boys, there were some still prepared to carry out their Führer’s wishes. When these men learned of what he’d done, Franziska would be dead within the hour.

  He wished he could go back in time, to that moment when he had emerged from his bunker and found the young corporal ensnared by the rusting barbed wire. He wished he could have turned his back and walked back down again into the musty earth, leaving the man to be torn to shreds by their own artillery.

  The fact that this had even occurred to him, a man who usually confined himself within a world of fact, not dreams, showed him just how powerless he was.

  And Hitler knew it, too. Why else would he have dared to meet Hunyadi alone and without his usual escort of a
rmed guards?

  Now, in one last attempt to reason with the man, Hunyadi reached out and took hold of Hitler’s arm.

  Hitler was startled. Few people ever touched him. Even his mistress seemed to hesitate before allowing her pale flesh to brush against his own, still paler skin.

  The dog began to growl, lips curling up around its teeth.

  Realising his mistake, Hunyadi let his hand slip away. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘We have been bound together all these years by the debt you think you owe me. Allow me to absolve you of that now. Just let us go, me and my wife, and if you cannot do that, then at least let her go free. Don’t hold this over me. It may well be that we no longer share that friendship, but at least there was a time when we did not think of each other as enemies. I beg you to remember that.’

  Hitler stared at him. A look of intense curiosity spread across his face.

  For one brief moment, Hunyadi convinced himself that his wish might be granted, after all.

  ‘The debt I owe you is mine to repay,’ said Hitler. ‘I will decide when the slate has been wiped clean, and I will decide how it’s done.’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘It will be night soon,’ he said. ‘Time for me to head back underground. I will leave you here, Hunyadi. You can find your own way home.’ With those words, Hitler turned and made his way back towards the Chancellery entrance. The dog followed close upon his heels.

  As the sun set over the ruins of the city, the brassy evening light suffused with yellow dust, Hunyadi set off towards his flat on the Kronenstrasse. No one seemed to notice him as he shuffled along in his dirty prison clothes. He looked like just another refugee, of which there were thousands roaming the streets in search of shelter and food.

  In spite of the fact that Hunyadi had not been home in weeks, he found the door to his apartment still locked and everything inside untouched since the moment of his arrest. The air was musty and still. In spite of the cold, he opened the windows, then sat down at his desk, turned on the light and read through the report Hitler had given him.

  When he had finished, he sat back in the chair, laced his fingers together and set his hands on top of his head. For a long time, he just stared at the open window, watching how the night breeze brushed against the curtains. There must be some way out of this, he thought. Lost in the caverns of his mind, he searched for a solution, but there was none. Hunyadi was utterly trapped. There was nothing to do but proceed with the task he had been given.