He sniffed. He thought he could smell cigarettes, something foreign. He frowned, trying to make sense of the pattern of pleats and wrinkles above his head. Then he tried to move, to ease the ache in his shoulders, and as he did so he realised he was on the rear seat of a car, not a big car, his long body carefully jigsawed to fit the space, his knees pressed hard against the back of the seat in front. Where had he come from? Who had engineered him into a position like this? And, even more important, where were they now?
He struggled slowly upright, trying to remember the last time he’d been conscious. Then, he had a memory of nakedness. Now, his fingers confirmed a shirt, buttons, trousers, probably serge, and when his vision had cleared enough to penetrate the gloom, a pair of shoes, brogues, maybe even his own.
Very softly, he called out.
‘Hello?’ he whispered.
Nothing. Just the birdsong.
Bolder now, he struggled upright and peered out of the window. The car was parked in some sort of clearing. He could see a stretch of rising ground through the trees, and a bristly pelt of heather. Brown, he thought. Autumn. He massaged the feeling back into his legs and then tried to find a door handle. After several minutes, feeling foolish, he realised the search was hopeless. No door.
He bent forward on the rear seat, gazing at the dashboard. The steering wheel was on the left and he recognised the emblem on the boss. This was a Peugeot, a French car. He’d driven something similar before the war, in Germany. It had belonged to a French friend from Alsace Lorraine, attached to the Humboldt University in Berlin. He permitted himself a smile, not because he’d even got the name right – Alain – but because his memory worked at all. More recently, everything was still a blank, an impenetrable wall of fog, a thick grey blanket tossed over lost days, maybe weeks, maybe longer.
Out, he thought. I have to get out.
That memory again. The little spring-loaded catch you had to depress to push the seat forward. His fingers found it. The back of the passenger seat hinged towards the dashboard. He reached for the door handle. To his relief, it worked. Moments later, limb by limb, he’d negotiated his way out of the car. It was a Peugeot 302, in deep maroon. He gazed down at it for a moment, perplexed by the French registration plates.
It was daylight now. He looked around. A rough track led towards the promise of a metalled road. Overnight rain had pooled in the ruts and he watched a sparrow washing itself in a frenzy of wingbeats before he took an exploratory stride towards the treeline. Everything seemed to work. He gazed at the frieze of trees, looking for signs of life, but there was no one to be seen. His bladder was uncomfortably full, but habit and modesty drove him to the shelter of the trees before he unbuttoned and sought relief. Somewhere in France, he thought. Somewhere out in the sticks beyond the reach of the Germans. Normandy? Brittany? One of the many forests further south? He shook his head and buttoned up. Impossible to be sure.
Back at the car, he opened the door on the driver’s side, gladdened by the sight of the keys dangling from the ignition. When he bent in to turn the key, and bring the instruments to life, even better news: a nearly full tank of petrol. Simple, he thought. Drive down to the road, find the nearest village, and make enquiries. The thought of a conversation, the presence of other human beings, brought a smile to his face. This was France. He was deep in the country. These people had access to fresh food, eggs, bread, maybe even bacon. For the first time, he realised how hungry he was.
Then he saw the envelope. It was lying on the driver’s seat, impossible to miss. He picked it up, weighed it in his hand. Light as a feather, he thought. Was it empty? Was this some kind of joke? Another mystery to taunt his feeble brain? He studied it a moment longer, then slipped a thumbnail under the gummed flap. Inside was a single photograph. He shook it out and stepped back into the golden slant of the rising sun for a proper look. Then, as he recognised the face, his blood froze. Bella, he thought. Bella against the darkness of some room or other. Bella, bald as a coot, her bare scalp bloodied.
He stared at the face, shaking his head, wondering if the darkness had taken him again, his mind collapsing inward. Was any of this real? A real car? A real Peugeot? And, if so, then what on earth was he doing in France? And why should someone leave an image like this where he couldn’t fail to find it?
He looked in the envelope again and saw the folded sheet of paper. On it, in a Cyrillic typeface, was a message that meant nothing. У каждой жизни есть цена. He stared at it, deeply frustrated. It was Bella, definitely. But what had happened to her glorious hair? Where was she? And how would he ever find out?
Now, more than ever, he knew he had to stir the car into life. He slipped behind the wheel, laying the photo on the passenger seat beside him, easing the car into gear, and bumping slowly down the track towards the road. The car was light and responsive. He swung left onto the road, remembering to keep on the right-hand side. Almost immediately, the road plunged into yet more trees, the spill of the rising sun suddenly gone.
At first he drove carefully, 30 kph on the speedo, but in the absence of traffic he became bolder, hugging the right hand of every bend, sparing longer and longer moments to glance down at the face on the passenger seat, the face he remembered from Berlin, from the Glebe House, from the depths of his wrecked memory.
Russia, he thought. She’d gone back to Moscow. That’s where she lived. That’s where she’d made her new life. That’s where, God willing, he might one day find her.
The thought warmed him, and he stole another glance, and then another, failing even to register the presence of the oncoming lorry, on his side of the road, until the huge radiator filled his windscreen and it was far, far too late. The moment of collision took him briefly back to his training days with the Royal Marines on an unforgiving stretch of Dartmoor. Thunderflashes, he thought. Live mortar rounds. Even the bark of field artillery.
Moncrieff did his best to brace his arms against the steering wheel. Then his head hit the windscreen and quite suddenly there was nothing. Not even birdsong.
17
THURSDAY 25 SEPTEMBER 1941
Ilya Glivenko had saved the last of his cigars for the first of this morning’s explosions. A small circle of sappers were enjoying the first rays of the rising sun through the canopy of trees. They’d now been on Trukhaniv Island for a full week, stretching their meagre rations to the very limit, saving their last bottle of vodka to toast the first full day of operations. That had come to an end last night with the spectacular demolition of Kyiv’s tallest building, the fifteen-storey Ginzburg Skyscraper.
While daylight lasted, Glivenko and fellow sappers in other platoons had outwitted the Germans. They relied on constant reports from Soviet agents still in place in the city. While rescue and fire crews rushed to the scene of the first explosion, Glivenko would order radio transmissions to trigger a second, and then a third, trying to lure the city’s new masters into blast traps as they tried to fight fire after fire.
This lethal game of chess, with German killed and wounded now in three figures, had delighted Glivenko’s men. In the frenzied chaos before the evacuation, they’d worked day and night, laying huge quantities of high explosives in location after location, and the lazy days that followed on the safety of the thickly wooded island had been more than welcome. Glivenko had always insisted on waiting for the occupation to bed itself in. The Germans needed to make themselves at home, he said. They needed to feel secure, organised, even relaxed. Only when they’d lowered their guard would the moment come to hammer them.
And so it had proved. Yesterday’s operation had opened with the attack on the Khreshchatyk, but a moment of pure delight had arrived with a neighbouring platoon’s designs on a viewing platform in the grounds of the Pechersk Monastery, built on a bluff above the river. The platform was in clear view from Mikhail Tatarsky’s men, hidden on the island. Through binoculars, they’d watched groups of German soldiers gathering to gaze down at the long bend of the Dnieper. T
hey arrived every half-hour or so, dozens of them, and Tatarsky had managed to bag at least twenty, blowing them to pieces as they enjoyed the autumn sunshine and a last cigarette. Then had come a second attack, this time on the Kyiv’s old Arsenal building, also under observation, and low growls of applause had greeted the news from the agents across the water that the death toll included the Artillery Commander of the 29th Wehrmacht Corps.
Glivenko knew that trophy scalps like these would really hurt the Germans, but best of all, in his view, had been the Ginzburg Skyscraper. By eleven in the evening, the exhausted Germans were beginning to assume that the worst was over, precisely why Glivenko had kept the biggest bang until last. A nod in the darkness to Vassily, crouched over the transmitter, and the flash of the huge explosion through the trees had briefly illuminated the entire city centre. Then, as the darkness returned, thunder rolled across the water, engulfing the island, masking the cheers from the watching sappers. Glivenko had broached the vodka shortly afterwards, passing round the bottle, toasting a day’s work that had exceeded his wildest expectations.
‘The Ginzburg wasn’t to everyone’s taste,’ he murmured. ‘So maybe we’ve done them a favour.’
Now, with the smell of charred timber still hanging in the trees, he was thinking about the NKVD headquarters. He knew the building well, partly because he’d shared a secured office on the third floor during the long weeks of target selection and detailed planning, and latterly because he’d supervised the installation of four tons of high explosive in the sub-basement. As he knew only too well, the building was now under new management, a gift to SS officers eager to put NKVD interrogation suites to work again, and the only issue he had to resolve in his own mind was when, precisely, to trigger the explosion.
The vodka bottle now empty, the discussion had raged until the small hours. The building would already be full of prisoners. Inevitably, most of them would be killed. Was it kinder, more humane, to blow them up in their sleep, before they faced interrogation and torture, or would it make better sense to wait for the working day to begin properly, with dozens of SS officers at their desks? In the end, Vassily had consulted the agent in the city who seemed best informed about the working habits of the Schutzstaffel.
‘The bastards sleep in their offices,’ he radioed back. ‘Give them an early wake-up call.’
Good advice. Once again, Vassily was crouched over the transmitter, waiting for Glivenko’s signal. The Big House had been their last installation job before leaving for the island and it felt good to be gifting the Germans yet another little present.
Glivenko checked his watch. Five past seven. His last cigar was a Montecristo, a souvenir from his brief stay at Fort Halstead. His bosses in the Big House had forbidden him to share any details of the Kyiv operation but most of them, on the basis of his shopping list, had worked out the operational task for themselves. The little man who enlivened mess evenings at the piano was undoubtedly in the business of blowing stuff up. Where this might take place was anyone’s guess but on his final day, the president of the mess had given him a box of cigars.
‘Share these with your men,’ he’d said, ‘but save the last for the target that really matters.’
Glivenko smiled at the memory. There were still lots of targets awaiting their attention – the State Bank, the Opera House, the Museum of Lenin – but the one that really mattered was the Big House. The Germans had grabbed it, put their smell on it, assumed it was theirs for eternity, and now they would pay the price. Never take anything for granted, he thought. Especially in a war like this.
‘Ready?’ He glanced down at Vassily. The Kazakh nodded, his finger reaching for the transmission switch.
Glivenko waited a moment, rolling the fatness of the cigar between his fingers.
‘You want a match for that?’ It was Vassily.
‘I do,’ Glivenko nodded at the transmitter. ‘But do your business first.’
*
Bella felt the first of the morning’s explosions before she heard it. For a moment, she thought the apartment building might collapse. She was still lying on the bed, dazed, hurting, defiled. Then came the thunder of the explosion, a noise impossibly loud, the building first shivering, then swaying as the blast wave swept across the city centre. She’d never been in an earthquake but this, she thought, must come close: one of Larissa’s pictures at a crazy angle on the wall, a bottle of perfume sliding off the dressing table, a distant tinkle as the remaining glass in the window shattered on the street below. Close, she thought. But not quite close enough.
She waited for the aftershocks to subside. She could hear the howl of a siren in a neighbouring street, then came the urgent clanging of a bell and distant shouts, first of warning, then of distress. Finally, unmistakably, a woman screaming. This was very close, disturbingly close, so close it could have been the room next door.
She lay back, shutting her eyes, trying very hard to block her mind to the flood of images that threatened once again to engulf her. At Kalb’s invitation, or perhaps insistence, Valentin had raped her a second time. Kalb himself had departed, too busy or too bored to watch, and for this small act of deliverance she’d been thankful. On this occasion, Valentin had lasted and lasted, still urgent, still making the bile rise in her throat, but she’d lost the energy, or even the will, to fight back. When he’d finally finished, the pain had left her semi-paralysed, barely able to move, but the knowledge that this had been a private act, unwitnessed, unaccompanied, had been a kind of solace.
While the man was getting dressed, she’d managed to ask him what might happen next. Had the SS finished with her? Did Kalb accept that she knew nothing? Or was she to be dragged off somewhere else for more humiliation? To these questions, Valentin had no answer. Instead, he’d just shrugged. Maybe they’d take her to the Big House. Maybe not. Then he’d left the bedroom without a backward glance, a satisfied client in the brothel of his dreams, and from the wreckage of the room next door Bella had caught a brief murmur of conversation and a sudden cackle of laughter before the key turned in the lock. She’d become a prisoner in Larissa’s bed, she thought, left to stew in Valentin’s juices, a parting gesture from Kalb to bring the evening’s revels to a close. Even the NKVD would have drawn the line at that.
Now, lying motionless with a hint of sunshine through the billowing clouds of smoke over the neighbouring rooftops, she wondered what might happen next. The last explosion had been undeniably close. Another hotel? One of the business blocks commandeered by the Germans? More rubble? More casualties? Just a dribble of water from hosepipes half severed by partisans down by the river?
She moved slowly, with great caution, knowing it would be a while before she was able to walk properly. Moscow had taught her the meaning of helplessness, of having to surrender to the iron grip of the Vodzh and his million acolytes, but last night, mercilessly intimate, had been far worse. She could still smell Valentin, taste him, feel the bulk and bristle of the man against her face. Sex, she knew, would never be the same again. Maybe the next bomb, she thought. Or the one after that. One day, she told herself, Kalb would meet his maker and if there was just an ounce of justice in the afterworld, he’d burn in hell.
Moments later, she heard the scrape of a key turning in the lock of the bedroom door. She struggled half-upright, the counterpane clutched against her chest, praying that Valentin hadn’t come back for more. Instead, she found herself looking at a face she knew only too well, perhaps a year or two older, a decade or two more exhausted, but definitely the same man.
‘Schultz,’ she said.
‘Me,’ he agreed.
She looked him up and down. In Berlin she’d never seen Wilhelm Schultz wear anything but a battered leather jacket, and now was no different. The last time she’d met him, barely weeks before the outbreak of war, he’d had more hair but the eyes were the same – watchful, pouched in the wreckage of his face – and she remembered, too, the way he held himself. Valentin had been a wrestler, imprisoned
in his own bulk, but looking at Schultz, Bella remembered a phrase of Moncrieff’s. Willi Schultz, he said, had the wit and the guile of a decent boxer. Valentin would crush you to death but Schultz – in Tam’s phrase – would keep you at arm’s length, jabbing and jabbing until the hook you never saw coming would put you on the floor.
‘You OK?’ Schultz hadn’t moved.
‘No. There’s a man called Kalb.’
‘I know Kalb.’
‘And?’
‘The man’s an animal. He belongs in a zoo.’ He paused, sniffing. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘His bodyguard. He raped me last night. Twice.’
Schultz gazed at her, seemingly impassive, but Bella thought she caught a flicker of disgust in the brief frown.
‘And Kalb?’
‘He watched. And if you want the truth, watching is probably worse.’
‘For who?’
‘For me.’
Schultz nodded. Then he motioned for her to move and made himself comfortable on the end of the bed.
‘I’ve read that file of yours,’ he said. ‘Quite a journey.’
Bella stared at him. In the numbness that had engulfed her, a proper conversation was out of the question. Yet this man might represent just a flicker of hope. That Tam thought the world of Schultz was all that mattered. Whatever happened, she had to force herself to reach out, to connect, to try and make a friend.
‘Journey?’ she whispered.
‘Defecting to the Ivans. Be honest with me. Do you like it in Moscow?’
‘Moscow’s awful and the rest of the country’s probably worse,’ she briefly closed her eyes and swallowed hard. ‘Was I expecting that? No. Does it matter? Not in the least. It’s the idea that counts, or that’s what Stalin tells me.’
‘You know him?’ Schultz looked briefly impressed.
Kyiv (Spoils of War) Page 17
