Stalin's hammer:Rome aot-4

by John Birmingham

  Ivanov had not spent a great deal of time on the streets of Soviet-controlled Rome. He took in as much detail as he could now, trying not to compare what he saw with what he knew of Free Rome. He needed to understand this part of the city on its own merits, not as a comparison with the Allied sector. It was not easy because the differences were striking. The Italians, as always, were noisy-they haggled and bickered, loudly talking over each other, gesticulating with their hands-but their efforts were less theatrical here than in the south; more earnest, or even desperate. The children were not starving, exactly, but they had the look of hungry animals about them, a pinched intensity that Ivanov was familiar with from his travels through the outer wastes of Stalin’s empire. The eyes of their mothers and grandmothers were hollow and dark, and sunken deep in their faces. They too looked malnourished, but worse than that, they looked ashamed of their inability to feed and properly clothe their half-feral children.

  Despite the palpable air of anger and despair, the city’s Communist overlords had it locked down. Ivanov, with long experience in fomenting dissent and insurrection among people like this, felt none of the dry, explosive tension in the air that preceded an outburst of mass violence. The menacing presence of heavily armed security patrols saw to that. Their reputation for swift and terrible violence guaranteed it.

  He edged back into the darkness as a couple of machine-gun-toting polizia, escorted by four soldiers-paratroopers, by the look of their bloused pants and jump boots-stomped by the entrance to their alleyway. They showed no interest in this hiding place, and Furedi had assured him they would not. “They will not come down here,” he’d said. “The snout of a pig, it can always be drawn to a sweeter-smelling treat.”

  This would have been so much easier on the other side of the Wall. Free Rome was a shambles. A mad, anarchic tangle of locals and foreigners, refugees, migrants, and the soldiers of six NATO divisions all tumbled in on top of each other. Bands of gypsies ran wild there, often battling with Jewish street gangs and Roman sgherri, all of them looking not to get stomped into the pavement by the police or neighborhood mafia enforcers like Franco Furedi. A freak show like that was always easy to hide in. Once you emerged aboveground in North Rome, on the other hand, you were in a great open-air prison camp with guards and patrols everywhere. It was a bleak still life, painted in ashen gray, compared to the riot of color and noise across the Wall.

  “She comes,” whispered Franco.

  Ivanov could see nothing of the girl among the mass of shoppers and stallholders. Having been alerted by his mafioso guide, though, he faded back into the shadows as arranged, hiding himself in the crawl space between two dwellings that almost met at the bend in the alley. Franco calmly strolled into the center of the road surface farther back in the alleyway and lay facedown on the cobblestones.

  He heard the girl a few moments before he saw her. A lilting, singsong voice, but cracked at the edges with a note of distress. She was speaking to someone in Italian, throwing in the occasional word of Russian. Ivanov settled into a comfortable stance, holding the weighted pillowcase in his dominant hand, ready to strike.

  Bedsheets ruffled as the laundry parted to let through the girl and her mark. Ivanov was as still as the dirty, red-washed walls around him now. The girl’s voice grew more frantic, and he saw her hand, one finger extended, pointing at the ground where Franco lay.

  “Eccolo,” she said, sounding scared and upset, “e morto, tovarishch.”

  Like a dream of a small, ragged angel of death, she moved into his field of view, jabbing her finger at the “dead” body and jumping up and down. She made sure to place herself on the other side of her companion, drawing his eyes away from where Ivanov had concealed himself between the two buildings. Good field craft. He wondered how often the girl had done this and what ruses she used to lure men into a trap when her older cousin was not available to play dead. It was hard to tell her age. She looked underfed and might have been anywhere between eight and twelve years old. But she was a good actress. She drew her prey into the killing field and finally Ivanov could see him in the gloom.

  He was alone. A tall man, dressed in civilian clothes under his trench coat-one of the lapels of which, no doubt, the girl had already checked for the small red badge that marked him as an NKVD man. She led the stranger by the hand, leading him toward the “corpse.” He took one step forward, then stopped, seeming to realize where he was. But it was too late. His assailant was already emerging from the black shadows to his left.

  Pavel Ivanov had seen this so many times before: the eyes going wide; the mouth forming an “O.” A sort of electric jolt that shot through the body as it flooded with adrenaline and made ready to flee or fight. All too late. The NKVD man only had time for dying, which he did quietly. The loudest sound would be the sickening wet crunch of his skull smashing onto the cobblestones after the killer blow.

  Ivanov swung the heavy cosh in a short arc. A swift, vicious strike. He felt the mantle of bone collapse like an insect crushed underfoot. Blood spots, a few chips of cranial plate, and flecks of meat sprayed out toward the child, who merely stepped to one side as the black-clad foreigner dropped toward the ground. His body twitched and heaved as Ivanov grabbed him and whipped the twisted rope of the pillowcase around his neck to strangle what remained of his life out of the man. Little remained.

  His bowels let go with a rich stink, and Ivanov cursed, causing the girl to smile.

  “Quick, help me. I need his clothes before they are too soiled,” he said.

  Having peeled himself up off the cobblestones, Franco first hurried over to his young relative, smiling and patting her on the head as if to congratulate the girl on a good report card. He handed over a small wad of American dollars and a couple of boiled sweets. The girl wiped the dead man’s blood spots off her face with one of the sheets hanging across the alleyway. She kissed the back of Franco’s hand and skipped off to find her friends or perhaps her family.

  “A good girl, like I told you,” said the Roman, as he helped drag the body deeper into the alley, tugging off his trousers as he did so. Ivanov heard shouting and a crash from the market square. He tensed, but Franco shook his head, grunting as he heaved at the deadweight.

  “A sweet treat for the pigs-a distraction on the other side of the piazza,” he explained. “You must hurry, Russian, this will give us a few minutes. Nothing more. They will be looking for this man soon.”

  The onetime Spetsnaz officer was already stepping out of the clothes the old woman had brought him an hour ago. Franco was right: Cousin Carlo’s little girl had done well. The dead man was about his size, dressed in a dark-colored suit and shirt, and a black tie and ankle boots. As Ivanov undressed, Furedi stripped the corpse, grimacing at the fecal leakage.

  “It is not too bad,” said Ivanov. “Everyone stinks here anyway … The Russians, I mean,” he added, when the other man frowned at him.

  Only somewhat mollified, Franco searched the clothes for loot before handing the outer garments over to Ivanov. He took money, a fighting knife, some documents for himself or his bosses.

  “I will need those papers,” Ivanov told him.

  Franco considered this for a moment, before nodding. “Si. You will.”

  The dead man’s clothes were a little tight on Ivanov, but they would do. And at least they weren’t overly stained with blood and gore. As he dressed, he could hear the sounds of some mild disturbance in the marketplace, Italian and Russian voices raised in anger.

  “You are certain about this, my friend?” Franco asked. “If you do this, I cannot help you. Nobody from my family, not Marius, not my cousin Carlo’s little girl, will come with you. My family is large.”

  “And helpful,” Ivanov said with a smile, as he did up the buttons on his new shirt. Absentmindedly, he flicked a small blob of gray matter off the collar of his trench coat. “Skarov has two companies of NKVD troopers in the tunnels looking for you and me now,” he continued. “I am better up here. And I still
have work to do. Thank you, Franco.”

  He put out his hand to shake and the Italian took it. The other man’s fingers were long and thin, but they gripped with the strength of a crushing machine.

  “I shall rejoin Marius. No matter what happens up here, Russian, you should not try to follow us. You will be lost underground.”

  “I know,” he said. “I will get myself back through the Wall. But my mission was the man in that hotel. I need to know whether he is dead, whether he left anything behind worth coming here for.”

  “If we kill many Communists tonight, it was worth your coming,” Franco replied. He rolled the corpse up against the base of an apartment building wall and tossed Ivanov’s discarded clothes on top of it. “Be gone now, Russian,” he said finally.

  “And the body?”

  “It will be gone soon too.”

  He walked.

  He walked through streets devoid of any joy. Building up his mental map of the city on this side of the Wall. Taking refuge every now and then down blind alleys or in the entrances to deserted businesses. The farther north he traveled, the less he saw any evidence of urgency and alarm. Skarov was concentrating his search ever closer to the border with the free city, throwing hundreds of men into the hunt both above- and belowground.

  Still, there was danger hereabouts. Without the protective magic of Franco Furedi’s presence to envelop him, Ivanov soon felt the dull glare of Roman hatred. They watched him from behind shuttered windows and twitching curtains. Their eyes burned dark, like cold embers with all the heat squeezed down beneath black layers of carbon. Dressed as he was, he walked the streets not just as a Russian but as an agent of Lavrenty Beria, a minion of the Great Satan, as the NKVD boyar had come to be known in this deeply Catholic and captive nation. An irony that amused the uptimer, in a grim fashion. Another piece of detritus that had drifted into the past and been taken up by the temps without regard for its origin.

  With the occupying forces, he had no trouble at all. To don the cloak of the NKVD was to armor himself in layers of fear and loathing. Even the larger combined patrols of People’s Polizia and Red Army overseers went out of their way to avoid him. Nobody wanted the lidless eye of the Great Satan turning on them. Once or twice he saw others of “his” kind-dark-suited men, inevitably wrapped in long trench coats, often with wide-brimmed black hats pulled down somewhat theatrically to hide their eyes. Just as mere mortals steered well clear of him, Ivanov was vigilant in avoiding encounters with any actual agents of the Soviet secret police. Nor did they seek him out. The purpose of their spectral presence on the streets of the enslaved capital was to intimidate. These figures, all cloaked in black, suddenly appearing on the street in front of one’s home or place of work, helped to maintain a constant, low-grade current of fear among the population of North Rome. “Stalkers” Franco had called them. One more small, broken piece of meaning from the future.

  Only once did Ivanov slip up, later in the evening, well after the 11.30 curfew, when the streets were entirely deserted save for the presence of security patrols. He was walking east along Via Rodi, intending to turn north and head back toward Sobeskaia’s hotel when he judged it prudent. A man emerged unexpectedly, almost on top of him, from behind a marble column.

  “A word, comrade,” he said, startling Ivanov.

  Before he could suppress his reaction, he had turned to face the interloper, a man dressed much like him, stiffening his fingers into a spear hand and …

  Then he opened a small gate in his mind, somewhere deep down inside the ancient reptilian brain centers, and allowed his tension to sluice out.

  “I startled you,” said the NKVD man. “My apologies.”

  “It is the Romans,” Ivanov replied. “I feel them watching me all the time. You know how it is.”

  His “colleague” stepped down onto the footpath and nodded. “I do,” he said. “But I believe the idea is for us to watch them all the time.”

  Ivanov felt ridiculously naked without a hat to obscure his face like this cheap, comic thug. He turned away from his gaze, pretending to search the street as he spoke. No sense letting the man get a good look at him. His picture was all over the USSR; it was probably just the darkness and a lack of context that was protecting him from being outed as one of Beria’s most wanted targets right now.

  “Kuznetzov says they would not dare harm one of us,” the OSS operative said, invoking the name of the NKVD station chief in Rome. “But they seem to take polizia and stupid, farmboy soldiers with impunity.” He pointed off in the direction of the Vatican. “I heard of another corpse in the Tiber tonight. From a patrol I passed earlier.”

  The other man bristled. “Such talk is not helpful, comrade,” he warned. “You should know that. It is defeatist.”

  “It is,” sighed Ivanov, getting into character, but looking all the time for a way to escape this encounter.

  A few moments passed with neither man speaking.

  “I do not believe we have met before, comrade,” the other said at last. “It is odd. I know all the Commissariat men in this district. Are you from Borchov’s detail?”

  “Of course you do not know me,” said Ivanov. “This is not my district. I am carrying a safe-hand message from Colonel-General Skarov for the station chief himself.”

  “On foot, through this part of the city?” The man seemed incredulous at the thought. “Why not dispatch a rider? Is it not urgent?”

  “There are no riders, comrade. Do you not know of what is happening by the Wall-or are you so out of touch in District 3? The colonel-general fights a great battle under the city, with the Americans’ hired gangsters from La Cosa Nostra. All our resources are being poured into that fight.”

  The man stared at him. Saying nothing.

  Ivanov felt the meaning of the world shift, just a little, as recognition finally bloomed in the secret policeman’s eyes.

  “You! Ivano-”

  The former Spetsnaz officer drove an open-handed strike into his throat in one blurred motion. His victim choked out a dying gasp as Pavel Ivanov’s hand closed around his chin and the back of his head, snapping it free of the spinal column with one quick and savage twisting movement. The NKVD goon was dead before Ivanov realized he’d killed him.

  He swore quietly, unaware of just how tense he had been up until that moment.

  A quick check up and down the street, as he lowered the body onto the footpath, revealed no witnesses. Or none that cared. During his time with Franco, he’d come to appreciate that many eyes could follow one’s progress through the occupied city.

  Now he looked about for somewhere to dispose of the body.

  10

  South Rome (Allied sector)

  “Inappropriate and off topic, I know,” said Harry, as the agent led him away from the angry Russians at the reception, “but would you be …?”

  “Plunkett,” replied the David Gower look-alike. “David Plunkett.”

  “David …?”

  “Gower was, would have been, my nephew. By way of my sister. But he’s not been born yet, of course. Perhaps never will be. Does the head in, doesn’t it, Your Highness?”

  “Please. Just Harry. I’m not nearly so high-and-mighty as I once was. The line of succession took a long detour around me in ’49.” Having touched on the issue of his own father’s birth and where that left him, Harry steered the conversation back to the Plunkett family tree. “Don’t you find it a bit difficult in this line of work, having a famous unborn nephew? A doppelganger, really. You could be his twin.”

  They had pushed far enough into Babington’s to have left behind the protests and shouts of Beria’s men but were not yet into the crush and roar of the party proper. A few guests turned and, recognizing Harry, raised their drinks and smiled. Some of the men dipped their heads and a few of the women even curtsied, which wasn’t at all necessary-in fact, it was a breach of protocol, strictly speaking. The Act of Succession that removed him, or rather clarified his irrelevance to the roy
al line in this world, had made all such ceremony redundant. Harry didn’t mind his redundancy one little bit.

  “I’m a declared asset,” said Plunkett. “MI6 liaison to the host government. Wouldn’t have worked out that way originally, from what I’ve been told. But we play the cards as they are dealt.”

  “Or each ball on its own merits.”

  “Indeed,” the not-so-secret agent agreed with a smile. “Her Majesty’s government had already invested considerable time and money in my early training when the penny dropped. Would have been a terrible waste to just let me go when I could play at being the most dangerous concierge in Europe.”

  “Right then, I suppose we’d best not arse around,” said Harry.

  The atmosphere in the restaurant was strange. The waitstaff were under orders to bring out as much alcohol as quickly as they could, especially to any Russians in need of a drink. Nobody offered the prince or Agent Plunkett as much as a shandy, and he doubted they would give him a drink even if he had asked. The Russians too, he noted, in defiance of national character, were remaining resolutely dry.

  “How many of these cheeky fuckers do we have in here?” Harry asked.

  “The Smedlovs? Nine that we are aware of. That’s nine hitters. Half an NKVD snatch squad that got in before we could stop them, and a couple of ring-ins from their embassy’s undeclared-asset list. Plus another five guests here legitimately, from the trade delegation to the conference.”

  Plunkett led him through the heaving press of the crowd. Harry followed close at heel.

  “Can we expect any trouble from the trade-ministry people, Mr. Plunkett?” he asked.

  He was aware of being tracked by two Slavic-looking bruisers, who were keeping pace with him and Plunkett as they moved farther into the venue. The goons were not shy about muscling their way through the crowd. You could track their progress by the drinks they spilled, the elbows they jostled, and by one old dame they nearly knocked to the ground. Under different circumstances, Harry might have hurried over to help her up, and popped the Bolshevik enforcer a good one on the nose for his bad manners. Instead he hurried along just behind the SIS agent. The Russians were sending a nasty vibe throughout the gathering. Harry was alive to it, and increasingly so were the guests.