by Ben Pastor
In the air, despite some turbulence, he anchored his torch so that he could write in his diary, as he’d done at night as a boy, under his bed.
Sunday 8 June, 12.14 a.m., above the Aegean Sea. I don’t think I ever was so foolish as I was in Spain. Can Waldo Preger have been so much more conscious than I? We were there for the bloody feast, because it wasn’t our country after all, it wasn’t our civil war. We could go at it with all we had and feel enthused about it. I was fighting for decency, religion and the Holy Mother Church, to stop Bolshevism from taking over the western world, and so on. I’m sure Waldo took to Spain the same twin-fisted aggressiveness he’d practised on German streets and refined as a policeman.
Was it true? Was it what we were there for? I wonder what the hell it was that we learnt in Spain. Surely we didn’t learn humility, something a man if not a soldier should become familiar with. If anything, we came away from it believing ourselves invincible. We’ll see. It’s something I still want to believe, although travelling in and out of Russia I’m all too aware of the size of the mouthful we’re about to take. Will our jaws stand up to our appetite? England has ruled wide portions of the world, including India. Can’t Germany rule the vastness of Russian Eurasia? In Spain we’d just got our nose bloodied, skinned our knees and elbows. We were a frustrated, mutilated country coming back from the dead after Versailles. Preger, with his fallen brother and social expectations, was a substantial part of it. I was a part of the Reich that lost the Great War and was unbearably oppressed by the Allies. Together, he and I formed a whole. Now we’re coming apart, we don’t see eye to eye, we discern darkly, in a dark mirror, a different Germany from each other’s. If we win the war, it won’t matter which one of us was right. If – I don’t even know why I go on thinking of it – if by any remote chance we should not prevail, Captain Preger’s Reich stands to be punished much more severely than my stepfather’s Germany ever was.
Enough. He and I might not be there to see the outcome in any case, so it’s all in the lap of the gods at this point. The question is: am I foolish now?
13
Viel täuschet Anfang Und Ende.
Full of deceit is the beginning And the end.
F. HÖLDERLIN, “ONCE I ASKED OF THE MUSE”
1.49 A.M., DEKELEIA AIRPORT, ATHENS
In the stifling, small airport office where they met, Lattmann wasted no time. He pulled out his notebook and flipped through it. His unreadable miniature longhand was reminiscent of Carolingian script, with round lower-case letters and exaggeratedly tall ascenders.
“I made no promises, mind you. Major Busch, who’s still overseeing matters from Lublin, hounded me more than you did, because he wants you to hand him the full report there. This is what I’ve got.”
“Well, Bruno, I’m off in forty-five minutes, so it’s good if it’s short, and hopefully useful.”
“Judge for yourself. Under his own name, notwithstanding his love story with Heini Himmler, your Switzer comes out as clean as unused underwear. Don’t know why they lifted his file from our central office.”
“Except that he was more than just Alois Villiger.”
Lattmann yawned, which was the only reminder to Bora that he’d got him up from a comfortable bed. “And in fact Duvoin is more interesting. First of all, the Lucerne address on his passport belongs to a shop, not a residence. He travelled via what was then Austria to Italy in the spring of 1938, officially on an antiquarian bookselling trip, but seems to have done little and moved little from the Hotel Miramare in Ostia, just outside Rome. We were checking on foreigners on Italian soil due to the Führer’s visit, so details are pretty certain.”
“The Miramare? That’s where I lunched, and where Bondarenko’s Comintern colleague ‘Paolo’ was reported to work out of!”
“Right. Did you ever get to meet him, or see him at least?”
“That wasn’t my charge. I was supposed to find out whether Bondarenko or other personnel from the Soviet embassy ever visited the hotel – which they didn’t.”
“So it isn’t enough to say that Villiger-Duvoin could have been ‘Paolo’ to the Italian secret service, and ‘Emma’ to ours. All we know is that he was lodging there at the time…”
Bora took notes himself, hunching because the neon light was bothering him and he had to shield his weary eyes from it. “…and travelled under a false name. What can you tell me about Federico Steiger?”
“You hit the nail on the head: one of our Moscow informants, although not a resident of Hotel Lux. No existing photos of him at the time. Seems to have worked for us exclusively. His stint in China as a merchant in raw silk goes back thirteen years. He appears to have been dormant at the time. The unusual thing for a kaltgestellt, and the only detail I could find, is that he did not mix much. He didn’t frequent bars or restaurants patronized by other foreigners. That’s all I have.”
“If he wasn’t as dormant as we thought, he might have had his favourite meeting places elsewhere.” Bora felt like he was scooping the dregs at the bottom of a container, and the dregs were his mental energy. “Let me sum this up: Villiger worked above water as Professor Alois Villiger of the Ahnenerbe; M. A. Duvoin might or might not have served the Soviets in Italy; Federico Steiger spied for us in Moscow and possibly Shanghai. The Reichskommissar won’t be glad to hear it. No wonder Villiger was ‘jittery’, as they reported to me. If indeed he was or had been a double agent and planned a trip away from Crete to escape trouble, he’d have to go as far as the moon. Depending on Emma’s identity, Germany could have had as good a reason to eliminate him as the Soviet Union. Twice a double-crosser: no wonder the Abwehr wanted to look into his death. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, Bruno, but what I really hoped you’d tell me —”
“I’m getting there. In 1928 Shanghai, a leading contact for the Reds was rumoured to be a British subject, supposedly a military man in the so-called Volunteer Corps. We never discovered his real name, and – you can bet your boots – neither did the Brits. There were others in Soviet employ we never figured out, like the one they used to call ‘Tin Man’. In this case, the codename was ‘Valencia’. You’d think he’d be Spanish.”
What did Caxton say about Cambridge’s Pembroke College students? That they’re nicknamed Valencians. And Sinclair was one of them.
“Wait. No other details about the Englishman in Moscow’s employment?”
“No.” Lattmann had to decipher his own handwriting, mouthing the words. “Unless you consider useful that he’d previously served with the Shanghai Defence Force whose British-led troops guarded the International Settlement during the local troubles. When the Force was withdrawn at the close of 1927, he must have stayed on with the Volunteer Corps. Both he and Steiger incidentally resided on Nanking Road, but we know it was a foreign enclave. Not nearly enough to make a connection between them, and besides ‘Valencia’ was transferred shortly thereafter.”
“Where, do we know?”
“We don’t know. He probably left the service.”
That confirms why Sinclair, an Anglo-Indian with a good education but no military school training, a draftee to all effects, was still a first lieutenant in his mid-thirties.
“You’ve got to find me something more about him, Bruno.”
“Why?”
“Because if Patrick Sinclair was in Shanghai for the Reds and used the codename ‘Valencia’, I’d have a ready-made motive for his silencing a double-crosser and all the witnesses.”
Lattmann fanned himself with the notebook, frowning. “It’s not something I can do at the drop of a hat.”
“It’ll take me until nearly six to reach Bucharest. There, I have a four-hour stopover. What if I get in touch with you from there?”
“It depends on what it is that you want. Give me specific questions, and I’ll radio you at Baneasa airport if and when I have something. After eight o’clock in any case. And keep in mind I promise even less than before.”
Bora took the notebook from his coll
eague and wrote: Was the 14th Infantry Brigade among the units of the Shanghai Defence Force? Was there an India connection with other reported Soviet spies in town?
“I don’t understand your last point,” Lattmann observed.
“We know that Chatto, the Indian communist executed by Stalin in the Great Purge, was in Shanghai at the time. See if you can find a link between Indian revolutionaries and ‘Valencia’. Also, anything else. Anything. Including the language he used in his coded messages.”
Lattmann snorted. “Why do I end up giving in to you?”
“I’ll make it up to you, Bruno.”
“My foot. I’m going back to bed.”
6.00 A.M. BANEASA AIRPORT, BUCHAREST
The moment they came in view of the Danube, it started to pour. Bora’s first hour of stopover in Bucharest was spent enquiring about his next flight, unlikely because of the weather to take off before 10.30 or later. He then went to sit in the Romanian Air Force mess hall, where he’d awaited his flight to Greece a few days earlier.
A handful of pilots in uniforms very similar to German ones, with belt compasses, drank coffee at a long table by a rainy window. Bora overheard their chatter as he wrote in longhand the draft of his final report. He requested and obtained a typewriter, although he was still missing the details he hoped to receive from Lattmann when he radioed from Athens in two hours’ time.
He kept writing. Just before seven, the Romanian pilots rose from their chairs, exchanged a salute with him, and left. At 8.30 a.m. Bora wasn’t yet worried about the delay of Lattmann’s call, although by 9 a.m. he was uncomfortable, and downright preoccupied by 9.30. Outside, it thundered enough to make the glass panes rattle. A Luftwaffe Junkers 52 landed in a crown of splashes and crossed the space of the window out of sight only to reappear from the opposite direction, no closer to the building.
Still no radio contact from Athens. Due to leave Romania in little more than an hour, Bora decided he’d attempt to contact his colleague himself, and started gathering his unfinished papers. What interrupted him was seeing someone who looked like a very wet Lattmann walk into the room: recognizing him as Lattmann himself plunged him for an impractical second into a reel of assumptions, the most egotistical of them being that war with Russia had begun without him.
Lattmann tossed his rain-limp side cap onto the table. “Hello, Martin. Don’t ask. Major Busch sent me after you, and I never had a worse flight in my life. Get me some coffee, will you?” Coffee came. Although they were perfectly alone in the room, Lattmann spoke in a low tone with his lips on the rim of his steaming cup. “Guess what. The 14th Infantry Brigade was in the Shanghai Defence Force, and – curiously – the only coded message in our hands that surely originated in Shanghai from ‘Valencia’ is in Latin. Does that help? I thought so. As far as the ‘India connection’, as you call it, for our man it has a first and last name, and is not a man: Agnes Smedley, an American socialist with leanings towards Indian independence.” (Yes, Bora thought, a meddlesome freethinker of the Frances Allen type.) “She was Chatto’s lover at the time, but also frequented other men in the communist milieu, including ‘Valencia’. She reportedly was involved in a row over the fact that ‘Valencia’ was refused membership of the exclusive, whites-only Shanghai Club, a point I don’t quite understand, because he was supposed to be a Briton.”
Bora had been taking notes, and now his writing accelerated. “Not enough in the class- and colour-conscious British diaspora, maybe. Excellent! If he’s one and the same as ‘Valencia’, Sinclair might not have qualified as wholly white: he’s Anglo-Indian.”
“Well, shit. Why didn’t you tell me beforehand?”
“You wouldn’t have dug up as much as you did, as quickly as you did.”
So, privilege had something – or everything – to do with it, Sinclair was right. And so was Waldo Preger. But it wasn’t only a matter of being refused access to an exclusive club, or being a hired man’s son. Injustice, real or perceived, weighs just the same. A half-breed like Sinclair was likely to have developed just as much anger against the system because of what he was, rather than simply for political reasons. British universities did produce fine operatives. Why shouldn’t the Comintern sound even more attractive to a discontented, bright young man than His Majesty’s class- and race-bound service?
Bora watched Lattmann finish his coffee. Whatever had happened after Shanghai, things had changed. Sinclair might have gone into civilian life and lain dormant until the war began, or even until he landed in Crete, where Federico Steiger was undoubtedly known to be living under his real name, Alois Villiger. Villiger was now back to serving the Reich exclusively, and there was no telling how much damage he’d already cost the Soviets: blowing his colleagues’ covers, bringing about the arrest of comrades in the Greek mainland…Who better than Sinclair, a faultless British subject coincidentally quartered in Crete, to dispose of him? The German invasion had only given the perfect excuse for the massacre.
“That’s the final link, Bruno. Sinclair fits the profile perfectly, down to his use of Latin. It’s up to our central office now, to do with it as they see fit in regard to the Reichskommissar, the War Crimes Bureau and International Red Cross.”
“Except that it might have been our central office that made the Villiger file disappear in the first place. I’d hold on to my britches when it comes to the zeal they’ll put in it.”
“Well, regardless. Let’s finish drafting this. I’ll type it quickly and hand it in to Major Busch in Lublin.”
“He’ll be there waiting.” Lattmann reached with his spoon into the sugar bowl and fished out a heap of sweet stuff he put in his mouth. “I need the energy,” he mumbled. “But wait before you reach your conclusions, I’m not finished. Do you know somebody called Kostaridis in Crete?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I was boarding the plane to come here when a communication reached our Athens office through Cretan Police, from a Police Inspector Kostaridis in Iraklion. He reported that an unknown marksman had just opened fire on British prisoners boarding a German hospital ship at seven this morning. One of them was killed. No, no name given, but he was the only officer in the lot, and I’m willing to bet it was your Anglo-Indian. The rifle was fired from at least 800 yards away, Kostaridis said. Said that from that distance only an Olympic shooter could have hit his target.” Lattmann poured himself more coffee. “If I hadn’t met you on the Athens runway and well away from Iraklion by seven a.m., Martin…”
Is there any last thing I can do for you in Crete?
Bora said nothing. That moment at sundown the day before, the transient quality of the hour between day and night… the meaningful glance he and Kostaridis had exchanged. He was so relieved, weariness suddenly came down heavily upon him. Like a blow, he had to steady himself under it.
Wet as he was, Lattmann was newly in a good mood. He resembled a rabbit when he smiled. “I love this intrigue, don’t you?”
“Mostly, I wonder what we’re going to tell the Reichskommissar.”
“Ah, that’s up to Busch. If Heini Himmler has charged us and not his own secret service with this case, it’s because he doesn’t want to hear what he doesn’t want to hear. Busch will cut and paste the findings so that Villiger comes out clean, the mere victim of England’s viciousness. As for the War Crimes Bureau, they’ll put the murder enquiry back in the drawer, now that our paratroopers are excused. The IRC will have to take note. And to His Majesty’s Army, what’s there to say? It isn’t as if we killed Sinclair.”
In Lublin, where Bora landed at 1.45 p.m., Major Busch waited on the runway inside a staff car, so as not to be seen by the pilots of the shiny Russian Lisinov ready to pick up Bora for the last leg of the journey.
Bora was told through the car window to step inside, and in less than ten minutes, the typed final draft passed into the major’s hands. Typical of his profession, he only asked, “Is everything in the report?” and when Bora said it was, he slipped it inside a leather por
tfolio. No other comments, much less compliments. “Good. Go, now.”
TUSCHINO AIRPORT, MOSCOW, 7.30 P.M., MOSCOW TIME
Around the capital, the sandy-floored, beautiful birch woods of the Podmoskovye slid under the plane. Lining up with the runway for landing, the Lisinov threaded through the calm evening air. Compared with Crete, the greenness of Russia and Moscow gardens were to Bora like long-awaited draughts of water. He only had to put it to the back of his mind (exhaustion made this possible) that Lavrenti Pavlovich had buried his victims by the thousand in those merry birch woods.
There was an embassy colleague waiting for him – a fellow from the Seelow Hills, with an accent as though every sentence were a question. He sounded as if he was asking him, but he actually told Bora he had to hurry with the wine.
“Come, Bora, you have to change and personally oversee delivery at the Spiridonovka Palace!”
Bora had just come down the ladder and was trying to steady himself after some twenty long hours of travel. “Why? The reception isn’t until next Sunday.”
“Was. It’s being held tonight. Big affair. Get moving, I’ll give you a ride.”
“I’ve got the wine with me, remember?”
“There’s a van waiting. It’ll follow us to the National, where you have to change in no time, and then to the Spiridonovka. Is this all the luggage you have?” The colleague nodded towards Bora’s small bag and grabbed the rucksack from him. “Good. Let’s go.”
That haste was at play was proven by the fact that there was no checking of the bags, and they walked out of the terminal undisturbed. The van, an embassy car and a car with NKVD plain-clothes men in it were indeed parked outside.
“Did you hear about Manoschek?”
The question came as if it were possible that – despite days of absence – Bora had an answer. He was too tired to play games. “He’s in Berlin as far as I know,” he said. “Why?”
