Nightfall Berlin

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘Ready when you are, sir.’

  The doors into the Kremlin offices opened and Sir Edward allowed himself to be shown to the lifts. If lifts anywhere in the USSR could be expected to work then those in the Politburo’s inner sanctum had to head that list.

  They rose smoothly to an upper floor.

  The last tsar had kept an office here. Lenin had slept for a while on a camp bed in one of the dressing rooms, with teenage Bolsheviks guarding his door. Stalin had so disliked the sight of the Union Flag flying from the British embassy that he’d demanded that London sell him the building.

  When they refused he had curtains fitted instead.

  ‘We’re here,’ Sir Edward said.

  Their guard had stopped by a gilded doorway.

  Stepping forward, he knocked smartly. When there was no reply he opened the door anyway and indicated that they should enter. A coffee pot stood on a desk beside a dish piled high with biscuits. What Sir Edward really noticed though was a red telephone. The guard indicated the telephone, the coffee and biscuits, nodded politely and withdrew. A few seconds later, the telephone rang.

  ‘I think you should answer it, sir.’

  The ambassador hesitated for only a second. ‘Masterton,’ he said.

  Tom sat back in his seat, watched the door close behind Marshal Milov, and wondered if he was telling the truth when he promised not a single word of this call would be recorded. It seemed unlikely.

  But with the commissar you could never tell.

  ‘Sir Edward,’ Tom said. ‘It’s Tom Fox.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m telephoning from Berlin. I’m assured by Marshal Milov, who is here in person, that this line is entirely secure.’

  ‘Milov is with you?’

  ‘He’s no longer in the room.’

  ‘I don’t imagine he needs to be.’

  ‘He gave me his word,’ Tom said.

  Sir Edward considered that. ‘Thought this was about Chernobyl,’ he said crossly. ‘I’ve been preparing myself the whole bloody way.’

  ‘The place is going to be radioactive for a thousand years.’

  ‘Milov told you that?’ Sir Edward sounded shocked.

  ‘I had it from someone in the area.’

  ‘Was he dying?’

  ‘She,’ Tom said. ‘And I hope not.’ He tried to brush away the guilt of getting drunk with Amelia and failed.

  ‘Then she can’t have been that close.’

  ‘Footage from an over-flight shows birds sickening on the wing and plummeting into the broken reactor. The cinematographer died within a day and his camera was so radioactive they buried it. I had that from my friend. It was her friend who died.’

  ‘Christ,’ Sir Edward said.

  ‘Indeed.’ Tom steeled himself. ‘I have a question …’

  ‘So do I,’ Sir Edward said.

  ‘I didn’t kill Sir Cecil.’

  ‘That wasn’t my question. And I’ve never believed you did. Cold-blooded murder of a man you’ve never met? Not your style, Fox.’

  ‘What’s the question, sir?’

  ‘Have you defected? Are you thinking of defecting? Are you a double agent?’

  The strangeness of his situation hit Tom. He was in Berlin searching for the truth, while relying on a Russian ballerina to rescue his son, and he was on the telephone to an Englishman in Moscow who doubted his loyalty.

  ‘No,’ Tom said firmly. ‘I’m none of those things.’

  ‘Are you prepared to swear it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said.

  ‘What matters to you?’

  ‘My son,’ Tom said it without hesitation.

  ‘Right then. Are you prepared to swear it on his life?’

  Tom was silent.

  ‘Don’t expect me to play nice,’ Sir Edward said. ‘In my job I can’t afford to be. Are you prepared to swear on your son’s life that you haven’t defected, you don’t intend to defect and you’re not working against the state?’

  ‘I swear. On my hopes of getting him back alive.’

  ‘Getting him back?’

  ‘He’s been taken, sir.’

  ‘Why?’ Sir Edward’s question was abrupt.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to work out. What does Reinickendorf-Tegelerforst mean to you, sir?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Sir Edward’s reply was instant. ‘Never heard of it.’ He seemed to think for a second. ‘Wait. Isn’t it a district in Berlin?’

  ‘It relates to why my son’s been taken. Quite possibly to why Sir Cecil was killed. And why I’m here,’ Tom added, ‘when I should be back home finding him.’

  He felt close to fury.

  ‘Sir,’ he heard himself say. ‘I think you should answer.’

  81

  The bellboy who carried Maya Milova’s Harrods bags into her room was sweet. Young enough, really, to be a boy. Thin as a dancer and with cheekbones to make Nureyev jealous. ‘Are you all right, madam?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was abrupt.

  She wasn’t, of course. The stop-off in Paris had been a mistake.

  Given what Rudolph Nureyev’s defection did to Maya’s world she should have hated him. But he was dying, damn him. Down to skin and bones. His flesh ravaged, his hair falling out. Hidden behind shutters in that Parisian apartment of his. No sign left of the glorious god who’d commanded every stage on which he ever danced. No one was meant to know he had the American disease.

  Word had got out just the same. Rudi was denying it, of course.

  You would. Wouldn’t you?

  He’d been spoilt and self-obsessed, a nightmare to work with. His defection had destroyed the tour, thrown the Kirov Ballet under suspicion and seen some of them jailed. But she’d been wrong to doubt his abilities. He really was the greatest male dancer in the world.

  The videos showed him as better than she remembered.

  ‘Put those down here,’ Maya ordered.

  The bellboy nodded, putting her Harrods bags on a fold-out table designed to take luggage, and bowed slightly. He looked shocked when Maya put out her hand for him to shake and slipped him a folded £5 note with the casual finesse of a businessman asking a maître d’ for a better table.

  She could do this stuff without thinking.

  When he looked at her he saw an elderly and, she hoped, elegant Russian woman dressed in a Soviet copy of a Chanel black dress. A bad copy, she had to admit, and she’d be doing something about that.

  When she looked at herself she saw the prima ballerina. The woman who’d travelled from New York to Paris to London representing the Soviet state.

  Unless she looked closely, of course.

  Then she saw what the boy saw. A Muscovite trying hard not to look too obviously at the luxury around her. The commissar had given her English currency, enough of it for her to check that he realized how much he’d given.

  He had, of course.

  She was in London as a tourist. A pilgrim, really.

  Maya thought of the interview she’d just done with the Guardian.

  Their journalist had obviously looked her up. The Guardian was not like Pravda. None of their newspapers were.

  She’d said she’d lived through the Great Patriotic War, Stalin’s terror, the Khrushchev thaw. That she’d danced for kings and been imprisoned in the Lubyanka. That she’d never felt as proud of the Soviet Union or as hopeful about the possibilities for peace as she did today.

  ‘Was that what your Soviet handlers told you to say?’ the journalist had asked.

  ‘It’s what I’d have said anyway. You’ll find I speak my mind, whatever the consequences.’

  The girl had been friendlier after that.

  To the English she was a dissident …

  Arrest, trial, public confession. Time in the gulags. That practically made her a saint for them. It helped that she’d been famous; that she’d been imprisoned; that she’d been a sniper at Stalingrad. It also helped that she was old, able to speak English, could be charming and understated, an
d just a little bit sharp with the young if necessary.

  More than anything it helped that she’d danced with Nureyev.

  Of course, she’d danced at the Coliseum long before the Tartar was old enough to perform in public. The Kirov Ballet took its foreign trips seriously. They were government-funded, government-promoted, government-ordered. They showed the world that the USSR was a civilized, cultured place. Every aficionado of ballet who walked away from seeing her dance couldn’t help but think differently about a country that could inculcate that level of perfection.

  It was propaganda. Of course it was.

  The Politburo would never have let them out of the country if it was simply about art. The other side did the same. Everyone knew that. From Jackson Pollock to Beat poetry, most modern Western work was CIA-inspired.

  The English had given her a tourist visa.

  That was important to remember. Her being in London was not official.

  She’d be making a pilgrimage to Marx’s grave in Highgate. And visiting his rooms in Soho’s Dean Street, where he and his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, lived in such poverty that three of their children died. She would walk, if her legs allowed, from Camden, where he later had a house, to the British Museum, where he wrote Das Kapital. If they followed her at all, Maya doubted it would be for long. At least, she hoped not.

  On her way to the lifts, Maya stopped in front of a huge gold mirror to admire the Chanel dress she’d bought in Harrods that morning. It was beautifully made, exactly the right depth of black and stupidly expensive.

  Maya liked her new life, with its cars, warm clothes and shopping, for all her granddaughter disapproved of the last. But she hadn’t changed. She’d simply folded herself inside a brighter, more impressive layer of rags.

  Inside she was the same.

  She was the person who’d unfolded herself from the snow, on the steps of a church in Moscow, where she used to steal candles to carve angels, and found herself staring into the face of a man whose eyes held an even greater wilderness than her own. Tom Fox was the one she’d been waiting for.

  She was not sure he knew it, even now.

  God help the world if that child of his was killed. Because what he kept in that locked room inside his head would break free.

  And who would cage it then?

  No one would, because if he couldn’t, nobody could.

  Who knew these things better than her? She’d taken her madness out to Moscow’s street corners, huddled with it in church doorways, sharpened it with shards of glass, pissed it in narrow alleys for people to walk through. Its final manifestation was the little wax figures tourists used to buy without knowing what they bought. Maya was proof that, if God was kind, no matter how far madness took you, you could find your way back to food, warmth, even your family. Tom had played his part in that.

  It was her turn to help him.

  In reception, a smart young man rushed to get the hotel door. While another, already standing outside, hailed a taxi.

  ‘Fortnum’s,’ Maya told the driver. ‘I’m meeting a friend for tea.’

  82

  The man Maya was meeting on the fourth floor of Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly had never met her. But Tom’s father-in-law would recognize her all the same. Her hair, her clothes, her manner. How many other elderly Soviet ballerinas would be taking tea?

  She liked the Fortnum tearooms. Always had. She hoped that they were still the strange, almost turquoise, duck-egg blue she remembered. Did they know how Russian a colour that was, how imperial? Although perhaps this could be forgiven in a country still primitive enough to have a queen.

  She had a request for Lord Eddington when they met.

  A request that was simple, if slightly odd. In the very early sixties, she would tell him, Cecil Beaton had taken her photograph in Trafalgar Square, while police kept the crowds away. He’d photographed her in a huge hat, leaning on the bonnet of a purple Rolls-Royce. It was a lie that the car had been purple. It had, in fact, been a very ordinary blue. And afterwards she’d been driven round Trafalgar Square in it. A journalist from The Times had asked what she thought of the vehicle and she’d said it was wonderful. That too had been a lie.

  It was less impressive than a Zil.

  All the same, for the purposes of telling Lord Eddington, the Rolls would become purple. A purple Silver Cloud Coupé. She would explain that she wanted to have her photograph taken in such a car again. For old times’ sake. In memory of a world that had vanished. She was a friend of his son-in-law. An admirer of his country. She wondered if he or any of his government colleagues knew who owned such a vehicle …

  ‘Do try one of the biscuits …’

  The man opposite lifted a bone china plate and waited expectantly. He was younger than Maya had expected, with that pink English look and swept-back, slightly greying hair. He’d been handsome once. If you liked the type.

  She could tell that he’d fallen back on good manners as a way of keeping his distress under control. His grandson had been abducted, his son-in-law was suspected of being a traitor, his daughter …

  Who knew what was going on there? The man had closed up like a shell when Maya asked after Tom’s wife.

  ‘You were in the war?’ she asked.

  ‘Just missed it,’ he said. ‘I believe you served?’

  He’d done his research, like that girl at the Guardian. Although he’d probably been examining more interesting files. Maya bit into the biscuit she’d dutifully taken. It was good, depressingly so. Lemon zest, fresh butter, good sugar. Quite possibly made that morning.

  ‘Stalingrad,’ she said. ‘We ate rats.’

  Lord Eddington looked shocked.

  ‘When those were gone we ate our leather boots.’

  He changed the subject slightly, probably because he couldn’t tell whether or not she was joking. ‘You were a soldier?’

  ‘I was a sniper.’

  ‘And you’re here with?’

  ‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘You know this. I’m alone.’

  He nodded unhappily to himself. ‘My son-in-law …’

  ‘Trusts me,’ Maya said. ‘You should do the same.’

  It was hard to have a conversation when neither side was allowed to say what they were actually thinking; when talking about one thing was really talking about something else. But, by the end of tea, she’d acquired a handful of facts. He would ask around about Rolls-Royces. The only purple one that sprung to mind belonged to a famous actor. It was unlikely to be available, however. Because he’d very sadly, and very recently, died of an overdose.

  The man’s voice trembled as he said this and Maya realized Lord Eddington was afraid. For his grandson, she imagined.

  ‘One final thing,’ he said. ‘My daughter doesn’t know.’

  Maya stared at him. ‘That I’m here?’

  ‘About anything. Nor do the police. I had to make a call. I ordered the school not to tell her. Not to tell the police.’ He looked at Maya, face hollow. ‘Most kidnapped children die at the point the authorities become involved.’

  Maya waited.

  ‘The other boys have been told he’s ill.’ Eddington hesitated. ‘I have friends who might help. But whoever has done this obviously has friends too. I’ve stopped knowing who to trust.’

  Maya could remember how that felt.

  ‘Caro will hate me when she finds out,’ Eddington said. ‘But she’s been having a hard time of it.’ He looked haunted. ‘A private matter … I hope to see Tom soon, but if you see him first, perhaps you could tell him? Until this is resolved, it’s best Caro doesn’t know.’

  83

  The two boys had met three weeks earlier in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery, cameras in hand. Strangely, perhaps not so strangely, they were back there a week later. And the week after that. They were the same age but the English boy looked older, his face unshaven and shadowy, while the Russian was unshaven and smooth. It was September 1945, a week before the Victory Parade.

  The
y wore uniforms and had chosen to walk the last of the way.

  This was uphill and in darkness, with roots and dried dirt underfoot, rustling trees around them and stars in the sky above.

  The Russian boy felt the Englishman’s knuckles brush his and looked across to see the Englishman’s silhouette look away. It might have been an accident but they both knew it wasn’t. Next time, the Russian let his knuckles brush the back of the Englishman’s hand and fingers found each other.

  They walked up the path together.

  The wind was warm and the breeze scented, and they were both soothed by the stillness of the night, and shocked to find themselves holding hands. For all they’d both been in uniform a year, they were very young and this was not what they’d expected to happen. At least, not consciously.

  There might have been a hope, a whisper, a rustle of thought and desire as quiet as that night’s breeze; but that was all it was, and it was not a whisper they were used to hearing.

  If they’d been less taken up with the strangeness of their fingers entwined they might have heard the ragged boys before they got close. The first either of them knew about it was the glare of a torch in their eyes and mocking laughter. The boy holding the torch held a knife in his other hand.

  It was sharp and narrow.

  The pommel and cross guard were brass, the handle black, the blade was shaped like an elongated leaf and glinted in the moonlight. The original owner of the Hitler Youth presentation dagger was probably dead; unless he’d had the sense to run away when his city was overrun, unless he was the one who jabbed it towards them. That seemed unlikely.

  Most of that kind died like rats in the ruins.

  Although the ragged boys circled, there was no need, because their prey was surrounded. All of the boys had knives, and one held both a knife and a flare gun. They were jeering, not loudly but with feeling.

  Eddie Masterton, newly arrived in the city, felt the Russian boy beside him grip his hand tightly for a second and then let go. Reaching for the revolver in his belt, Nicolai drew it faster than Eddie would have thought possible and shot the boy with the torch through the head.