‘Why?’
‘Because he couldn’t cope, couldn’t function. He did his best to disguise it, pretend nothing had happened, but he was a bag of nerves. Spend any time with him, and it was obvious. Towards the end he wouldn’t even look at me.’
‘The end?’
‘He took his life, Tam. There’s an orchard at the back of the house. Trees? A rope? He’d been gone all night. I found him in the morning.’ Her eyes were moist, and she turned her head away. ‘You understand now?’ she muttered. ‘My missing man? My paradise lost?’
Moncrieff didn’t know what to say. He shook his head and started turning the pages again. Then he stopped. He guessed Giles was dead by now. These images were far more recent. There was no second marriage, no church wedding, no honeymoon, but he recognised the wooded hills beyond the patio, and the hint of a smile on Groenbaum’s face as he posed for the camera.
‘Who are these people?’ He showed her the album. ‘Who is he with?’
Moncrieff turned the pages, going from photo to photo, while Gerri supplied the names. Most of them were foreign: Pieter, Alonso, Manuel, Frederico.
‘Clients?’
‘Potential double agents. Most of them came through your lot, MI5. These were people you wanted to turn but you thought we might take a look at them first. In many cases that was wise. Some of them were crazy. Others were crooks. We passed them through the sieve, as Matheus likes to put it.’
‘We?’
‘We. Myself and Matheus.’
Moncrieff nodded. He’d never heard the faintest whisper of any screening programme. Then he turned another page and stopped. He was looking at a face he recognised at last, and the rumpled jacket, too, and the hint of shyness in the smile. He gazed at it.
‘You know who that is?’
‘Of course I do. It’s our Kim. Kim Philby.’
‘Our Kim? You’re telling me he was a patient here?’
‘Not at all. He popped down from that place at St Albans. He’d heard the kind of results we were getting for your lot and he wanted to look at the set-up for himself.’
‘He approved?’
‘He did.’
‘And has he sent anyone down?’
‘Not so far, but I’m sure it’s just a question of time.’
Moncrieff nodded. Then he turned the pages again, backwards this time, until he was looking at Giles Tice in hospital.
‘That drug again,’ he said softly. ‘That potion. What was the name?’
‘Scopolamine. The Devil’s Breath.’
‘You told me it turned your husband into a zombie. You said it wiped him out.’
‘It did.’
‘Were there other symptoms? When he was taking the stuff?’
‘Yes. He said it made his mouth dry, his throat, everything. He was perpetually thirsty.’
‘And later?’
‘The symptoms went away. Along with the rest of him.’
Moncrieff nodded, said nothing. Then Gerri was kneeling beside him.
‘What’s the matter, Tam?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Be honest. We’re here to help. I mean it. You can sleep with me, or both of us. Your choice.’
Moncrieff stared at her. Then his eyes returned to the album.
‘Did Philby see this?’
‘Yes, he did. He was fascinated.’
‘And you told him everything? Going out to Colombia? The coffee plantation? The accident? The potion?’
‘Yes.’
Moncrieff nodded, then – for the first time – he realised that Groenbaum was standing at the open door. It seemed he’d been there for a while.
‘Leave him alone, Liebling.’ He smiled at Moncrieff. ‘It’ll happen when the time is right.’
28
WEDNESDAY 1 OCTOBER 1941
Early next morning, Bella was roused by Andreas. She and Larissa had spent the night under a couple of blankets in the Leningrad Gallery. Andreas looked down at them. Schultz, it seemed, had ordered him to find them somewhere else in the museum a little more comfortable to live. In the meantime, her presence was required in the basement.
‘Why?’ Bella was struggling to her feet, trying not to wake Larissa. Four hours of fitful sleep on the hard floor had left her exhausted. Everything ached. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Just follow me.’
They were out in the corridor, heading for the stairs. Bella wanted to know what was happening in the city. Andreas shot her a look. The city, they both knew, meant the Yar.
‘The shooting stopped last night. We think it may be over.’
Bella nodded. They were still heading down the stairs. At the bottom, Andreas indicated the door that led down to the sub-basement. Andreas had a torch. At the foot of the wooden steps, Bella sensed movement in the darkness. The beam of Andreas’ torch swept across the trenches the Russians had dug to find the cache of explosives. Beyond it, lit by two candles, stood Schultz. A naked body lay on two planks. Bella recognised the wooden trestles from Yuri’s church.
‘Komm,’ Schultz beckoned her closer. His breath still stank of schnapps but he seemed sober enough. ‘You need to be kind to this man. He’s filthy. We have to clean him up.’
It was Glivenko. Andreas and a couple of other SD aides had recovered his body from the pavement below the top-floor window. The impact of the fall had killed him outright, but a low hedge had spared him serious disfigurement. A pinkish liquid was still oozing from a wound at the back of his head and the lower half of his torso was beginning to darken as the blood settled.
‘His hands and feet, mainly,’ Schultz grunted. ‘But you might wash the rest of him, too. He was a friend, I think. Am I right?’
‘Yes.’ Bella couldn’t take her eyes off Glivenko’s face. Despite a week’s growth of beard, he seemed to have shed years in the fall. The button nose. The gleam of gold in his open mouth. A younger man, she thought, but no less beguiling.
‘Andreas will find you soap and water and maybe a towel. He will also be laying hands on someone who knows about embalming. It’s cold down here but your friend won’t last forever.’
‘Embalming?’ Bella thought she’d misheard. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes. This little man has earned his place in history. It’s the least we owe him.’ He peered at Andreas. ‘Alles gut?’
The two men left together. Bella, sensing she wouldn’t be alone for very long, took advantage of their absence. She looked down at Glivenko’s body, and raised his cold hand to her lips. She’d always had a fear of heights and she knew from conversations on the Halifax that he did, too. High explosives, he’d told her, I can cope with. Vertigo starts at twice my height. She gazed at his face. Someone – possibly Schultz – had had the decency to close the dead man’s eyes, and in the candlelight it was easy to believe he was asleep.
‘You jumped, you brave man,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you for bringing me here. Thank you for saving my life.’
Andreas was back within minutes. He had a bucketful of tepid water and a pebble of soap. Now he was off to hunt for an embalmer.
Bella waited for the thump-thump of his footsteps on the wooden steps to fade, and then began to wash Glivenko’s body. She thought she could still smell the explosives, a sweetness that lingered in the dancing shadows thrown by the candles, but she wasn’t sure. What mattered more was that Schultz had been right. Ilya Glivenko, The Pianist, had briefly raised the Red Flag against the marauding Germans and for that he deserved full credit.
She and Larissa had discussed the mining operation for most of the night. Larissa knew already that she owed her freedom to the article she was about to pen, and when Bella admitted that she’d got nothing in the way of detail from Glivenko, she said it wouldn’t matter. She’d write the piece on the basis of what little she knew, and then invent the rest. Journalists, she said, were good at filling in holes, especially when no one else would be in a position to contest the fiction. What mattered were the piles of rubble that had on
ce been the city’s centre, some of them still warm to the touch. Glivenko and his men had dared and won. No one could argue with that.
Bella finished washing Glivenko’s body before the first of the candles guttered and died. The other one had barely minutes left, and she had no taste for remaining beside a dead body in the dark. Ilya Glivenko had gone. Gravity, and fear of the SS, had taken his life and what remained was nothing but a shell. A brave and noble end, she thought, reaching for him one last time and giving his cold hand a squeeze.
*
Moncrieff rose early. Before going to bed, he’d lodged a chair beneath the door handle. Now, fully dressed, he nudged it free and then returned to the bed for one last look at the photo. He shook it out of the envelope. Even with her head so crudely shaved, even in the numbing chill of some remote Siberian labour camp, Bella Menzies was no less beguiling. This was the woman who had managed to extricate him from the hands of the Gestapo, the face that had taken him closer to happiness than he’d ever dreamed possible. He dwelt on it a moment longer, then left the photo on the pillow. Someone would find it later. It was both an explanation and an excuse. I let them take me for the sake of the one person who ever really mattered. No greater love. Literally.
Moncrieff stepped out into the hall. Groenbaum and his wife slept in the big bedroom at the front of the house. The door was open, and Moncrieff could hear one of them snoring. He paused a moment, motionless in the half-darkness, then tiptoed down the stairs.
Outside, away to the east, the first grey light of dawn. It was still cold, the grass wet beneath Moncrieff’s feet, and once he was clear of the house he broke into a lazy trot. He was glad of the tracksuit Groenbaum had lent him for the weights room, and the tennis plimsolls that had once belonged to Gerri’s late husband were a perfect fit. Another piece of the jigsaw, he thought. No wonder she’s been so keen to bed me.
At the foot of the hill, he picked up the pace a little. This was the first time for months that he’d run in the open air, and after the accident he was surprised at how easy it felt. Deep breaths did nothing for his fractured rib but the moment he reined himself in, the sharpness of the pain went away. He felt good. Not least because – at last – he could sense just a hint of light in the darkness of the last ten days. Be big, he told himself. Be obvious. Look for twigs to step on, drifts of fallen leaves to run through. Make yourself known. Offer yourself. Would he welcome an end like this? The answer, he knew, was yes.
Moncrieff now understood where his missing week had gone. Like Tice, he’d been the victim of a chemical that had wrecked his head. Life was a cliff. You depended on handholds, tiny creases on the rock face, a route to the top you knew you could trust. Scopolamine had stolen all that, robbed him blind, left him exposed to the wind and weather, hanging on for dear life. They must have injected him again and again, he thought. He must have floated on a tide of deadly nightshade, barely conscious of the Devil’s Breath, no pain, no memory, no bearings, not the slightest clue of who or where he might be, while all the time they checked on him, paid regular visits, made sure the Satan inside him was still alive and breathing.
They?
He didn’t know. Couldn’t be sure. Except that he’d been right, after all, about the Watchers. They were here, now, among the trees, in the woods, maybe camping out, maybe occupying a rented room down in the village, but always lying low, keeping him under observation, ready, prepared, waiting for their moment. He strode on, limping a little now, pausing to jump the little stream in the bed of the valley, glad of the first rays of the rising sun. At the top of the rise, still hidden by the elms, he’d find the caravan, and there he’d rest for a while. Until the moment came.
*
In Kyiv, it was raining yet again. Schultz had the grace to knock on the door of the Leningrad Gallery before barging in. Larissa was seated at the long table that dominated the middle of the display space. She’d handwritten the article and now she needed a typewriter.
‘Bitte.’ Schultz extended a hand.
‘You don’t trust me?’
‘I trust you completely. Give it to me.’
‘But you don’t speak Ukrainian. You can’t read it.’
‘Hand it over.’ He was impatient now. ‘Just do it.’
He took the two sheets of paper to Bella. She was asleep in the far corner of the gallery, curled up beneath a blanket. He stirred her with his boot.
‘Komm,’ he grunted.
She followed him to his office. An empty bottle of schnapps lay, neck-down, in the ammunition box that served as a wastepaper bin. The desk was empty apart from a big typewriter and a pile of yellowing paper.
‘Sit,’ Schultz pointed at the chair behind the desk. ‘Read me what she’s done.’
By now Bella was used to Larissa’s hand. In Cyrillic, she wrote at speed, foot to the floor, ignoring the speed limits, caring nothing about oncoming traffic. She pointed herself at a subject and let her imagination off the leash, and when the individual characters on the page began to blur into each other, Bella knew it was a sign that she was closing on her prey.
In this case, she’d started her account in the long shadow of the Ginzburg Skyscraper, a moment to which all of her readers could relate. This was the first of many body blows the city was to suffer over the coming days, and she painted a richly detailed picture of the scene that awaited the survivors of the blast. None of this was new to Schultz. Khreshchatyk suddenly full of flying glass? An eruption of smoke and dust? Secondary explosions from stored explosives? Passers-by, felled by the blast wave, picking themselves up, numbed by the seeming return of the Russians? Still impatient, he wanted Bella to get a move on.
She did her best. Cleverly, working on supposition rather than evidence, Larissa had wound the clock back to the last days of the Soviet occupation, with NKVD teams on the move under cover of darkness, hauling wooden boxes of explosive and all the ancillary gear down to the bowels of target after target. In this account, leadership of the sappers fell to Ilya Glivenko. He selected the transmission wavelengths and fine-tuned all the other communications protocols. He decided how long it would take for the Germans to make themselves comfortable in the new quarters they’d requisitioned. And once they’d lowered their guard, wrote Larissa, it was that same Glivenko who’d so artfully plotted patterns of multiple explosions to send the Germans scurrying from one pile of smoking rubble to the next, only to find themselves ambushed en route by a third blast. The little genius they called The Pianist, she’d concluded, had scored an anthem to chaos which had become the soundtrack of a city in flames.
Schultz was warming to this version of events. In Berlin, he muttered, they might even understand just what class of enemy he and his SD team had been fighting. The popular view of all Slavs, Russians in particular, was wildly misconceived. These people not only believed in their fucking revolution, but they had the guts and the know-how to make life near impossible for their enemies. Nothing works, he muttered, until it does.
‘What next?’ he grunted.
Bella bent to Larissa’s account again. She’d followed The Pianist and his teams of sappers to the island on the Dnieper. She’d described the twilight lives of the stay-behind agents who were in constant touch. She’d revealed how they’d spent their days on the city’s streets, invisible nobodies, carefully noting which buildings had been requisitioned, where the limousines of the High Command gathered at the kerbside, which of the juiciest plums should fall first from Glivenko’s tree.
Schultz was laughing now. He loved the thought of plums and trees. ‘The little bastard gave us a real shake,’ he said gleefully. ‘Until we put him out of business.’
The SD operation to end the bombings occupied the rest of the article. Larissa had embroidered what little Schultz had told her with a pacy account of two agencies – the SD and the SS – joining forces to understand the demolition mechanism, block the transmission frequencies and finally locate Glivenko’s team of sappers on Trukhaniv Island. The final raid h
ad been led by Schultz, but – in a wildly improbable quote – he’d been very happy to acknowledge the key contribution of his comrades in the Schutzstaffel. ‘Without our friends in the SS,’ he’d said, ‘it would have taken far longer to smash the Russian operation. The cost in yet more lost lives would have been unimaginable. We thank Standartenführer Kalb and his men for their invaluable assistance.’
‘That’s the purest shit,’ he shook his head in admiration. ‘These people kill Jews by the tens of thousands. What do they care about more blood on the streets?’
‘She’s being ironical. You asked her to put a smile on Kalb’s face and that’s what she’s done. Think of it as a thank-you.’
‘For what?’
‘Getting her out of their hands.’
‘But she’s taking the piss. He’ll see that.’
‘He won’t, Willi. I know the man, remember. I’ve been very close to him. He’s an accountant when it comes to killing, and a spectator when it comes to rape. But he has absolutely no sense of humour.’
*
Andreas returned to the museum less than an hour later. He’d located a lecturer at the university’s Medical School who’d once been a pathologist and was only too happy to embalm Ilya Glivenko. After the SS seizure of his faculty buildings, his normal schedule of lectures and seminars had been badly disrupted. He had access to an electric pump and the required chemicals, and he could start immediately. The process, he said, would take between two and three hours.
Schultz checked his watch. Half past nine. Bella was still translating Larissa’s article into German, adding one or two flourishes when Schultz felt the need.
‘How long before you’ve typed it all up.’
‘An hour, at least.’
Schultz nodded. Andreas was still at the door.
‘Fetch the embalmer,’ Schultz told him. ‘Take him down to Glivenko and make sure he’s got anything else he needs. Then deliver the article to Kalb. Tell him from me that we need to know he’s happy with it. Only then can he come for Glivenko.’
Kyiv (Spoils of War) Page 29
