by Robert Moss
“Max is the most extraordinary man I have ever met. A man like that breeds myths wherever he goes. But let me tell you one story about him I can vouch for. He had a Polish girl once, called Zinka. She was a poetess, quite beautiful. She fought with him in Russia. When the Bolsheviks won the civil war, she insisted on going home to Lvov, to make the revolution for her own people. But there was a spy in her circle, and he warned the police. They were waiting for her at the railway station. She was a Jew, and you know the Poles are not always subtle with Jews. They invaded her body with a hot iron. I imagine she talked. Inevitably she died. When word reached Max, he went to Lvov dressed as a Polish priest, traveling alone. He stalked the police torturer to his home and shot him on his own doorstep. He traced the spy and gave him the same rites that Zinka had received. In other words, he rammed a red-hot poker up his backside. This is the man you are going to deal with.”
“Why does he want to meet me?”
“I recommended you.”
A girl squeezed into their booth. She was a svelte brunette, elegantly dressed.
She said to Heinz, “He’s coming now.” She was attractive and conscious of it. She flirted with Johnny by affecting to ignore his existence.
“What’s the matter, Johnny?” Heinz teased him, noting his interest in the girl. “Why don’t you say hello to Magda?”
“Magda? It’s not possible—” But it was. Take away the clothes and the makeup, and wire-rimmed glasses, and he was looking at the mannish guerrilla he had briefly encountered in Hamburg. “I like you better this way,” he said, laughing at his own confusion. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“A glass of red wine.” Even the voice was softer.
“Heinz?”
But Heinz was sliding out of the booth. “I’ll see you later.” An ironic salute, and he was gone.
“Well,” Johnny turned back to the girl. “I see Berlin has had an agreeable effect.”
“For you, too, I trust.” This new voice startled Johnny. It was identifiably foreign, but only because of the perfect weight that it gave to every vowel. It had a metallic timbre. The effect was not harsh, but it suggested — at least to Johnny — a distance between what was said and what was intended.
The newcomer slid into Heinz’s place before Johnny realized he was there. It was the eyes Johnny saw first. They reached out and touched him with such force that he felt, for an instant, that he had been physically struck. He had to will himself not to look away. Under that violent stare, he felt completely exposed.
He thought, I’ve got to control myself. He tried to make a rational inventory of the stranger’s appearance. The man was of medium height, compact and strongly built. His clothes were dark and conservative, discreetly well cut. The index and second fingers of his right hand were tawny from nicotine. He was already lighting another cigarette. Black tobacco, the kind that smells like camel dung. A commanding forehead. Straight black hair, worn rather long, slicked back from a widow’s peak. The slant of the cheekbones, above cavernous hollows, gave the whole face a vaguely oriental cast. The eyes were black — or brown. No. They were violet.
I’m losing my balance. No man has violet eyes.
“I’ve been looking forward to this meeting,” said Max. The mutual inspection had taken something less than twenty seconds.
Max wanted the story of his whole life. He acted as if he had no other concern in the world, on that bright spring afternoon, than to listen to the hopes and disappointments of a man twenty years his junior. He interrupted Johnny only to order brandy and cigarettes. When Johnny paused, it was “Go on” or “What happened then?” — so that after a time the younger man forgot all about his initial, inexplicable panic and talked more freely than he had talked to anyone, even Heinz. When he got to Klaus Behring’s death and his own flight from Hamburg, he stopped.
Max nodded and said, through a blue haze, “The problem is, some of your countrymen mistook the second month of pregnancy for the ninth. But a good deal was gained, all the same. Don’t overlook that just because you lost a friend. Any revolt, any uprising, is ein Fanal. A beacon. It helps to show the people that the order of society can be changed. It’s a training for the revolution we shall win. And it helps us to know our own.
“You read, don’t you?” he suddenly changed tack. “What do you read?”
“Marx. Lenin—”
“Marx. Very well, then. Do you remember what Marx wrote to the French workers in 1850, when all his prophecies for a proletarian revolution next week had gone up the spout? No? He told them they would have to go through fifteen or twenty or fifty years of civil war in order to change themselves, to render themselves fit for political domination. Do you understand?”
“I hope we don’t have to wait fifty years.”
“Ah, we’ve learned how to hurry things up. I’m saying, be thankful for Hamburg, Johnny. Yes, I’m serious. Be thankful for anything that tests you. That’s how we know our own,” he repeated. “The fire that melts the butter tempers the steel. Now I’ve got a special question for you.”
“Anything.”
“Who is the greatest enemy of the German revolution?”
Johnny considered for a moment. Not square, ponderous Stresemann, with his face like a side of beef. The chancellor was just a front for the financiers and the industrial barons and the Prussians on the General Staff.
“Seeckt,” he decided, picturing the confident, monocled face of the chief of the General Staff, the face of an Erich von Arnim with ten times the brains and a thousand times more low cunning. “General von Seeckt.”
“Let’s suppose you are right,” Max went on. “What effect do you think General Seeckt’s assassination would have on the correlation of forces in Germany?”
“It would increase the contradictions within the ruling class.” Johnny thought rapidly. “It would disrupt the secret rearmament program. It would lead to reprisals — probably indiscriminate reprisals. More people would be forced to choose between us or the reactionaries.”
“Agreed. So. If I sat General von Seeckt down in front of you, at this table — would you be man enough to blow his brains out?”
Johnny was conscious of Magda watching him closely. Her lips were slightly curled. Was she mocking or encouraging?
He met Max’s eyes and said, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I have nothing to lose.”
Magda took Johnny back to a lavish apartment with a view of the Tiergarten. Her lovemaking, that night, was like the furniture: elaborate and impersonal. Afterwards she scrubbed herself all over, repeatedly, with a deodorant soap, as if she wanted no trace of another individual on her body.
It occurred to Johnny that this was the second of Heinz’s hand-me-downs he had enjoyed. He felt a wave of nostalgia for the first. He wondered what had happened to Helene, with her lust for life. He must find out from Heinz, when he came.
But this time, Heinz did not come.
In the morning Magda shook him awake.
“Get dressed.”
“What’s happening?”
“You must go to the Anhalter station before eleven. Seeckt is returning from Weimar by train.”
She gave him an Ortgies pistol. He had used one before, and it had jammed. He wanted to take his own gun, the Mauser, but she refused.
“There must be nothing that can be traced.”
She checked his pockets, removing anything that could be identified. Then she gave him some odd bits and pieces — a death’s-head badge to wear under his lapel, a membership card with a false name and the crest of a Fascist secret society.
“What’s all this?”
“In case you’re shot,” she replied blandly. “You’re ready for that, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
He loitered at the Anhalter station near the entrance to platform four. Seeckt’s train was late. No, it was merely his nerves.
There he was now. For a moment he saw the general’s head beyond a pr
ess of military aides and station guards. In a minute he would be coming this way. But wait. Seeckt had stopped. He stared around, then spun on his heel and marched back to his Pullman. What had happened? The stationmaster, flustered, ran puffing towards his office.
Ten minutes later, a troop of regular soldiers tramped through the station and joined their general. When Seeckt descended from his carriage, he vanished behind a ring of steel. There was no chance of getting a clear shot at him.
Johnny hesitated, his hand toying with the flap of the satchel in which his pistol lay concealed. If only they’d given him a bomb...
He heard a low whistle from nearby. He turned, and saw a man with his hands in his pockets. The stranger cocked his head and said, “Leave off. The bastard’s got a sixth sense.”
Johnny realized then that for every second since he had left the Hedermanstrasse Max had had him watched.
Under the full moon, Felseneck was beautiful. It was just a huddle of modest cottages with communal plots in the midst of the wasteland between Berlin and the neighbouring town of Reinickedorf. But tonight even the scruffy rows of onions and radishes had a kind of dignity, and the sweltering garbage dumps to the north glowed with unearthly fire.
By day or by night, appearances here were deceiving. Felseneck was a virtual military colony of the Communist party, complete with armed lookouts and concealed machine-gun posts. Max, it seemed, liked to be very sure of his ground. Or perhaps he had other business.
Magda waited with the car at the house of the district organizer while the two men walked side by side past cabbage patches and compost heaps.
“Do you think Seeckt was warned?” Johnny asked.
“It’s possible.”
“Your watchdog said he’s got a sixth sense.”
Max ignored the spin Johnny put on his words. “Seeckt has got luck,” he commented. “Napoleon said that’s the most important quality in a general. We tried before, you know. It was an excellent plan. Seeckt goes riding in the morning, in the Tiergarten, flanked by his spruce young ruffians with duelling scars. We got a girl to make a pass at one of these cavaliers. It looked very promising. She agreed to help us smuggle an assassin into the stables. Do you know what we forgot? No? A handsome young man like you should get to know women better. We forgot about a biological compulsion called love. Women, one gathers, are unusually vulnerable. The girl fell in love with her Prussian hussar and betrayed her contacts to the police. Naturally, we had to get rid of her.”
Max struck a match.
Remembering the story of Max’s Polish woman and the risks he had taken to avenge her, Johnny wondered how much of his cynicism was feigned.
“By the way,” Max turned back to him. “Do you have a woman of your own?”
“No attachments.”
“You should keep it that way. Revolutionaries can’t afford the luxury of emotional entanglements. Piatnitsky will tell you the same thing.”
“Piatnitsky?”
“Yes. You’ll see him in Moscow. You’ll take him some little presents from me.”
Johnny stared at him. Russia! It was what he had dreamed about since he had first heard the news that the Bolsheviks had seized power. But war of one kind or another had always kept him away.
“I made up my mind about you the day we met,” Max announced. “The rest was merely a test. I’ve learned caution, these last years.” His eyes were intense, but the violence was no longer directed at Johnny. “You’ve experienced more than many men go through in their whole lives, and learned more from it, too. But in some ways you’re still unformed. In Moscow we have special schools. You’ll be joining a very unusual elite recruited from all over the world. You belong on a bigger stage than this — this German cabbage patch.” He swung his foot at the vegetables.
“You’ll learn we have worse enemies than Seeckt.”
Max was silent for a time, apparently lost in his own thoughts.
“Can you be more specific?” Johnny pursued.
“What? Oh, yes. The British are the worst. The British are reactionaries without complexes, but not without subtlety. The Intelligence Service—” he pronounced this phrase in English— “is our most fanatical opponent, and the most deadly. You’ll learn.”
8
Johnny’s road to Moscow began in a cigar store in the Wedding district of Berlin.
“You know what they say in Russia,” said the little man behind the counter. “We don’t go by the passport, we go by the face.”
Alfred’s business seemed to be languishing. His shelves were half empty. He was coatless but bustled around with his hat on the back of his head. He produced a cigar box and pushed it across the counter.
Johnny inspected the contents. The passport looked real enough. It made him out to be a Dutch commercial traveller born in Eindhoven. There was bric-a-brac to support his cover letters addressed to him under his assumed name, Dutch guilders, a snapshot of a girl with plump cheeks he had never seen.
The railway tickets were first class. “Always travel first class if you can,” Alfred counselled. “The police give you an easier time, and you get a better dinner. There’s one thing more.” He went into the back room and returned with two handsome cowhide suitcases, secured by straps.
“Your samples,” he explained. “Whoever heard of a commercial traveller without samples?”
“What am I selling?”
“Douches.” Alfred’s round face was positively cherubic. “To the Russians?”
“You’re crossing Poland,” Alfred said wickedly. “The Poles are in dire need. Have a cigar, my dear fellow.”
The suitcases had false bottoms. Johnny was sure of it. But they were expertly constructed, like his passport. The only way you could tell for certain was to cut open the lining. Neither German nor Polish customs officials would dream of doing that to a first-class passenger’s luggage, not without a tip from a very good source.
He boarded the train at the Friedrichstrasse station and had a sleeper to himself. The amenities were even better than Alfred had promised, starting with morning tea on a silver salver and ending with a casual flirtation over champagne with a Baltic countess of violently anti-Bolshevik opinions. There was a two-hour stopover at Warsaw Central. Johnny got off the train and breakfasted in the station buffet. Elegant painted ladies were bidding farewell to paramours in uniforms with lots of gold braid.
He had fallen into a half sleep when he was roused by a faint rattle at the door. Someone was trying the handle. Then there was the scrape of a passkey being inserted in the lock, and the door opened. Two men in broad-brimmed hats and mufflers that concealed part of their faces rushed in. One of them flung himself on top of Johnny, who glimpsed the flash of a steel blade. The other reached for the luggage rack, making a grab for the suitcases.
Johnny wrestled with the first assailant, trying to turn the knife back against its user. Flat on his back, with his attacker’s knee on his chest, he was at a serious disadvantage. The knife point ratcheted down until it was inches from his face. He suddenly jerked his attacker’s hand closer, twisting so the knife missed his cheek, and sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The man yelped and let the blade fall. In the next instant Johnny had his thumbs on his assailant’s throat under the square-cut beard, pressing until the oxygen was cut off and the man fell back inert.
The second intruder was halfway out the door with Johnny’s bags. Johnny seized his revolver — he had always gone armed since he had started working for Kordt — and gave pursuit. The thief dropped the suitcases and ran. Johnny let him go. He hauled his bags back into his compartment and secured the door. His first assailant was still laid out, shoulders on the bunk, legs on the floor. Johnny opened the window, got a grip under the man’s armpits, and hoisted the body up until the head was lolling over the sill. It was going to be a tight squeeze. The man began to revive as Johnny forced his torso through the window. Johnny’s last sight of him was of a pair of thick, flailing legs. An obscure oath was swallowed
up in the rush of wind outside the carriage, and Johnny was left holding a patent leather boot. He tossed it after the body. Breathing hard, he flung himself back into his seat. Who were his assailants? Common criminals, or agents — possibly British agents who knew that he was carrying secret material for the Comintern? He would report the episode as soon as he got to Moscow. He promised himself one thing: nothing would come between him and his mission.
Several hours later, they reached the border. Johnny stayed in his compartment until the train was nearing the Soviet customs post at Niegorelodzhe. They passed under an arch with a Cyrillic inscription: “The Revolution breaks down all barriers.” Ahead was a giant’s cabin, a large building of rough-hewn logs rearing up against the grey sky. He saw a sentry with a greatcoat down to his ankles and a star on his tall, peaked cap. There were bright murals depicting stalwart workers and peasants wielding their tools. They had odd, tubular physiques. Tin men, Johnny thought.
“We’re in Russia,” the attendant announced. He pocketed his tip and added, “L’Europe est finie.”
9
“What language did they speak?”
The man asking the questions was short, stubby and grizzled, like a small, energetic bear. He scribbled constantly as he talked. He wore a military tunic, unbuttoned, without badges of rank, and worked at a rough wooden table littered with files that was utterly out of place in that enormous, echoing room. With its marble floors and tapestries, its gold leaf and ormolu, it might have served as a ballroom for the Tsars, and no doubt had.
“I only heard a couple of words. Curses,” Johnny specified, trying to summon up the dying gasp of the man he had pushed out the window. “It could have been Polish.”
“Or Russian,” Osip Piatnitsky suggested. “Poland is full of Whites who are still fighting the civil war. They hire themselves out to Western special services and gun down our agents for fun. Many have sold themselves to the British secret service. There’s only one answer for these retrogrades. Shooting.”