A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  “I presume you understand the situation.”

  Elías nodded, adding nothing. This is what he was expected to do. Beria scrutinized him. He was the sort of man adept at finding invisible cracks in the smooth surface of a stone.

  “Things have changed a lot since 1934. My predecessors had a different way of seeing things.”

  This was an indirect apology for what he’d been through on Nazino. In the three months he’d spent in Moscow waiting, Elías had already gotten an idea of the kinds of changes Beria was referring to. The first thing that this new Georgian commissar had done on taking power was to purge the NKVD itself. Yagoda, Berman, and their GULAG thugs were now victims of their own methods. Beria tried to make Elías see it was necessary to change the mind-set of those in the security services. It was no longer about summary executions and indiscriminate arrests like those Elías and thousands of others had suffered in 1933.

  “New times require new behavior. We must be pragmatic, observe and understand before we act. Naturally, this does not preclude taking forceful action when necessary.”

  Naturally. The word was like a knife, slicing open the veil of innocence. Elías had already found Beria’s police to be a formidable force, ever-present and striking hard where it hurt their enemies the most. Information and counterespionage were the two areas in the greatest need of restructuring in light of these new times they were living in.

  “War with Hitler is now a certainty, no longer a matter for debate,” declared this man who could have passed for a librarian or stamp collector. “They will lose, of course.” He smiled. “The vastness of our land has always been the ace up our sleeve; the weather, too, has proved to be on our side ever since the Swedish and Napoleonic invasions, but we have to do our part. My guess is that the Germans will attack in spring or early summer. We must delay their advance as long as possible, until winter. Then will come the thaw, and in those conditions their style of war, this so-called blitzkrieg that has shocked the world, will prove useless. We need people well versed in modern warfare and intelligence services. And this is where men like you come in, comrade. Few agents have your experience, and your superiors have enthusiastically praised your work at the MIS and in Argelès. You are disciplined, cold, and efficient. And this is what I’m looking for in men for new service.”

  Beria stood, thereby concluding their meeting. Elías did the same, waiting for his new boss’s final words.

  “All men have a heart—an inconvenience, no doubt, but it’s inevitable. Perhaps we place our ideals above our emotions, and this is as it must be, but there is no doubt that our sentiments remain, eating away at our determination.”

  This was a bona fide threat. No clear gestures or ominous expressions, but Beria was warning him.

  “I know that you will never forget what happened on Nazino, and I can understand your frustration.”

  “With all due respect, Comrade Commissar, I believe I have thoroughly demonstrated that my loyalty is beyond reproach.”

  Beria nodded, unshakable.

  “I was told that a Spanish police officer came to see you in Argelès but did not arrest you. Why?”

  “He didn’t recognize me.”

  Beria frowned and stroked the arm of the sofa.

  “He didn’t recognize you…but you recognized him. Ramón Alcázar Suñer is a childhood friend, and he was under your care in Barcelona. Mysteriously, he managed to escape with his wife and child.”

  Elías paled, which made Beria smile. He liked people to see from the first moment that nothing escaped him. He knew everything; this was his secret weapon.

  “You organized quite a system in Argelès and many comrades are grateful to you for it; you saved many lives. But I have also heard stories of dismembered Senegalese, of beatings and killings not ordered by the Party. The Tristán business was a grave error, Elías. He worked for us. You knew this, yes?”

  Elías’s mouth fell open in shock. “I was given a red paper with his name on it. He was collaborating with the guards and—”

  “Yes, sleeping with one of them, I know. Pierre and his little red papers…Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the baker when the time comes. The point is that you made decisions on your own. And this cannot be tolerated under current circumstances. Not anymore.”

  Elías wondered what would happen next. Maybe they’d forced him to come to Moscow simply to be executed. Maybe that was what Beria had in mind and for some reason couldn’t do it.

  “What does loyalty mean to you, comrade?” the commissar asked. This was a trick question, one of those dangerous games they liked so much, a chess match in which checkmate equaled a shot to the back of the head.

  “It means subordinating personal emotions to the overall cause,” Elías said without a pause.

  Beria liked his reply, because it was honest. He knew when men were lying; that was his job. But he still had his doubts. That’s why he’d come up with a test for this MIS lieutenant whom everyone raved about while overlooking his lack of discipline and contradictory actions. The man would be put to the test before Beria decided what to do with him.

  “To the ultimate consequences?”

  “To the ultimate consequences.”

  Beria strode to the telephone on the desk, issued a brief order, and hung up, observing Elías with an innocent smile.

  Two minutes later, an elegant young man appeared in the door. He looked like a California industrialist, deeply tanned and smiling from ear to ear, in a bespoke pin-striped suit and ankle boots. His gold cuff links matched both his tie pin and watch. He had the air of a mafia boss on top of his game. And he was.

  “Hello there, Elías. That eye patch looks good on you.”

  Igor Stern hadn’t lost one ounce of his arrogance. In fact, it had multiplied exponentially, as had his wealth, by all appearances.

  “Looks like we’re going to be playing on the same team.”

  He looked to Beria for some explanation, but the commissar gauged Elías’s reaction to this sudden shock before offering any information.

  “Comrade Stern is an enthusiastic collaborator with our war effort. His services are very useful to the Red Army, providing us with much-needed supplies that must reach our borders inconspicuously. Comrade Molotov holds him in high regard. Does this in any way affect your loyalty?”

  It had been a long time. Igor hadn’t realized how quickly life had changed since the night his cell door opened in 1935 and he saw a pair of muddy boots and a military cape dripping rain onto the concrete floor. Someone shone a flashlight directly into his face.

  “On your feet.”

  He was sure he was going to be executed; this time it was really going to happen. It had been over a year since he fled Nazino, and eight months since he finally found Elías and his gang on the run. Igor regretted the favor he’d done Elías by letting him live. It was a sign of weakness he came to lament, like not making certain that Martin, along with his lover boy Michael, was definitely dead. He’d been too cocky, too euphoric about having won: Elías’s coat lay smoldering in the fire, and Anna, the little girl, was in his possession.

  He should have carried out his threat, should have let his men rape her and then dismember her body. But he hadn’t, and that, too, he would come to regret. Because when the patrol stopped him near the Urals, there was evidence against him. The redhead had testified against him after recovering; he told them everything that had happened—the cannibalism, the reign of terror that Igor had commanded. The only thing to be said in Martin’s favor was that he’d neither exaggerated nor glossed over anything. Igor was convicted in court and sentenced to death, and they took Anna from him.

  So there he was on that night in 1935 yet again, prepared to laugh in the face of death, when the door to his cell opened and a small man in military uniform appeared. He was led through the domed foyer and through an open side door onto the pr
ison yard. The man in the cape pointed to a series of walkways and sheds to the west. The prison gates were open.

  “We’ll be in touch, comrade,” he said, shouting to be heard above the roaring deluge that had flooded the clay yard, rain pinging off the metallic roof with such force it sounded like an army of tin drums. Igor looked up at the perimeter wall and guard post on the far side of the prison yard. Either intentionally or by coincidence, the guard was staring off in the opposite direction.

  “What does this mean?” Igor asked mistrustfully.

  “It means that, from now on, you will be the perfect Soviet. And you’d better be quick. Doors that open are also prone to close.”

  Igor knew all sorts of men and none of them frightened him. But something about this man’s smile, his glasses drenched in rain, made him shudder.

  He crossed the prison yard and walked out onto the road, boots getting soaked in the puddles, heart pounding as he wondered if the guard would shoot him.

  He didn’t.

  Igor was free for almost an entire year. He could go wherever he wanted, steal, rape, and kill. Every time he was almost caught, someone loosened the rope around his neck. And he knew who it was, and knew that sooner or later he’d be called in to pay off his debt. It happened one night at a police station near Leningrad. This time he’d done nothing to be arrested for; the police came in search of him and presented him to the same man, Beria.

  “You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to work.”

  Igor started out as part of a small network of informers and whistle-blowers under Beria’s command. Normally he dealt with Beria’s assistant—Vladimir Dekanozov, a man with a sinister sense of humor who disliked the sort of lowlifes with whom Igor felt right at home—but occasionally it was Beria himself.

  Over time, Igor was given more responsibilities, and two years later his moment arrived. The deal was simple: Igor would be given carte blanche to organize a smuggling ring; they could bring in whatever illegal imports they wanted provided that a substantial portion of profits went to the NKVD coffers (that is, to Dekanozov and Beria’s coffers). Whenever it was required of him, he was to bring in other types of merchandise, hidden in with his regular contraband: heavy weaponry, prototypes of German airplane engines, minerals like wolfram, experimental explosives. Sometimes he was to provide cover for NKVD agents, passing them off as members of his mafia crew, transporting them to Poland, Finland, France, England, or Germany. Other times he was ordered to act as an operative himself, infiltrating autonomous criminal networks in order to obtain information about people’s vices—politicians, influential military officers, or other VIPs in foreign countries. Beria’s men then used this to blackmail them for much more valuable information.

  Igor enjoyed playing these games of chance; they made him feel alive, intense, always on the edge of a precipice. He was fully aware of the fact that Beria would get rid of him the moment he was no longer useful. So his job during those years was to ensure, at all costs, that he was necessary. After the Great Terror that did away with Yagoda and Berman, Beria was promoted to head of the NKVD and the doors to the future were flung wide open.

  Now Igor was a wealthy, renowned entrepreneur tolerated by the Party, which turned a blind eye to his excessive vanity. His business dealings, in part, were legal: He provided equipment to the army, earned cash in dollars and German marks that he kept in Swiss banks. He had high-level contacts both inside and outside the country, access to most government ministries and important cultural icons as well as those in the world of intelligence. He’d become refined, his taste for music, theater, and grand salons had turned him into a sort of celebrity that almost made people forget his Jewish cartwright’s background. Fate was finally smiling on him, and all he had to do was remain vital to Beria. He was twenty-seven years old and on top of the world.

  And it was from this vantage point that he now observed Elías Gil. He, too, had changed over the course of those six years, and in a way his presence in Beria’s office was evidence of the direction it had taken. Elías had become an officer in the service of those who had sentenced him to Nazino. What had he gotten in return? This was what Igor Stern wanted to know.

  Beria had asked Elías a question and was awaiting a reply. So was Stern. Perhaps deep down both of them were expecting the same answer: that Elías couldn’t work with the man who had caused all his misfortune. But they were wrong.

  “My loyalty to the Party and the Soviet people remains intact, comrade. I can work with Stern if it is to the benefit of our cause.”

  “Oh, it will be, I’m quite sure of that,” replied the NKVD commissar, thereby bringing to a close their meeting.

  Two days later a car pulled up outside the modest apartment building where Elías was living. Two people stepped out, a man and a girl of about ten. Witnesses—slack jawed at the sight of this elegantly dressed pair in their poor neighborhood—would later say the girl looked like an angel, in a thick fur coat and matching hat, beautiful golden curls peeking out from beneath it. Her expression and demeanor were nearly as arrogant as those of the man holding her hand. The girl was Anna Akhmatova and the man holding her hand, Igor Stern.

  “I wanted you to see her.”

  Elías remained standing in the middle of the room, staring at the little girl who no longer resembled in any way the one he had abandoned when he left her in Igor’s hands six years earlier. Stern wanted Elías to admire his work of art, to see what he’d done with her, the way he was slowly shaping her in his own image and likeness.

  “Who is this man, Papa?” Anna asked Igor, clinging to his leg. Hearing her call Stern Papa cut Elías to the quick and pleased Stern. Anna was taking on Stern’s decisive air but would not yet let herself be loved by the man stroking her blond little head.

  “Take a good look at him, Anna; don’t forget his face. This is the man who killed your mother. He let her drown in Nazino River to save his own pathetic life. And he would no doubt have killed you, too.”

  The girl had no way of comprehending Igor’s words, no way of processing what they meant, but she understood, the way animals do, that she was expected to glare at the stranger in hatred and disgust. And she did so quite convincingly.

  “Go on back to the car and wait for me there. I’ll be right out.”

  Anna cast one last sidelong glance at Elías, who caught a glimpse of something that had come from her mother, some learned behavior in the girl’s expression. And something told him that one day the spirit she’d inherited would rebel against this shroud Igor was smothering her in. A faint hope in which to take comfort.

  “So. I didn’t eat her, after all.”

  He was trying to be caustic, but his comment was much more than that.

  “Does Beria know who she is?”

  Igor opened a silver cigarette case, took out an American cigarette, and tapped it several times against the cover. Everything about him had become more civilized, but beneath his affected sophistication lurked a hungry wolf, perhaps still longing for nomadic nights spent roaming the land.

  “Beria knows how often every last peasant in this country takes a shit. And as long as his trucks and his cash keep coming in, he doesn’t care. That little man might look like a hick, but he’d eat you and me alive in the same bite and not bat an eye. He’s the one with the real power.”

  And that was what Igor was aspiring to; he’d become ambitious, much more than he used to be. Having seen the sparkle of that intangible good, he was unwilling to let it slip away. Elías could see it in his face. Some men succumb to misfortune, others are fortified by it. Igor was one of those. He’d negotiate with the Russians, the Germans, the English, or the devil himself if it was in his interest.

  “What do you want, Igor?”

  Stern lit his cigarette and shook his head.

  “Everything?”

  I want you, is what his furious look said. I want wha
t can’t be bought with money. I want your respect and if I can’t get that I want your fear and your submission.

  They were still, after six long years, engaged in the same battle; it was simply being waged on different territory.

  “Any chance we could be friends? I’m not asking for your devotion, just a sign that the past has been forgotten.”

  “You just told that girl I killed her mother.”

  “Isn’t it true? It sounds terrible because it is. We did what we had to do to survive. Like now. And when all this is over, we will be judged harshly, I assure you of that. Your children and grandchildren will point fingers, call you a savage and a murderer. They’ll say worse about me, I’m sure. And they’ll be right, but none of them will have been here, or on Nazino. Judges always cast judgment from up in their ivory towers. With a little luck, the coin might land heads up and you’ll be remembered as a hero of the revolution, a brave and committed idealist. Personally, I don’t give a shit about posterity, although maybe it means something to you.”

  Elías said nothing. Igor had always talked too much, trying to invent himself through words, using them to recant the evidence of his acts. He was a lowlife. That’s all he was.

  “You and I will be friends when heaven and earth become one. I don’t care what kind of agreement you’ve made with Beria, or what you’ve done to get ahead, or how far you’ve come. There’s one thing you need to know: You might have ripped out my eye, but it’s going to follow you no matter how far you get. And one day, whether it’s now or in a hundred years, I’m going to rip your head off with my bare hands.”

  Igor’s composure melted away too quickly, making clear that his newly learned habits were but a shiny varnish, easily scratched off. He clenched his fists and tilted his head sinisterly toward the door Anna had walked out after calling him Papa.