by Robert Moss
Johnny’s effort to play the Scarlet Pimpernel and his involvement with some barroom floozie who had been dissected by mobsters confirmed Bailey in his view that women would be the fellow’s downfall. For his own sake and that of the Firm, he had to be kept on a tight rein. If Johnny survived whatever lay in store for him in Moscow, Bailey promised himself to see to this in person.
7
For much of the journey back to Moscow from Vladivostok, Helene was dazed and disoriented. She couldn’t keep food down or look in a mirror. When the questioning began in Moscow, she could remember nothing of her last forty-eight hours in Shanghai. They didn’t believe her at first. But finally they brought in a doctor who diagnosed partial amnesia. Her sanity was not impaired. The doctor prescribed a prolonged vacation at one of the spas in the Crimean peninsula.
“You ought to go with her,” the doctor told Johnny. “You look as if you’ve had a touch of yellow fever.”
But Johnny had something else to do. He found out that Sigrid had returned to Moscow and had stayed for a time at the Lux Hotel. But she had left two months before, leaving no messages. At the Fourth Department and at Comintern headquarters, people denied all knowledge of what had happened to her. He went to Starik, who had promised to look out for her.
“You’ve come to the wrong department,” General Berzin told him.
He telephoned to the Lubyanka and asked for Max. He had to explain himself to three men in succession before they told him that Max was not in Moscow, but that someone would be coming to see him. He had expected that.
It was after midnight when the chekist came to his hotel room. He introduced himself only as Genrikh. He was slim and well-tailored and trailed a faint odour of expensive cologne.
“I have a letter for you,” Genrikh announced.
He watched while Johnny scanned it.
It was in Sigrid’s hand, but the feel was all wrong. It read as if she were taking dictation. She had been posted to Copenhagen. She hoped he was well. It was a polite note to a stranger.
There was a sentence he read and reread. She had had a miscarriage. His child. And she had never told him.
He glowered at smooth, polished Genrikh. “Why wasn’t I told? What happened to her letters? She must have written to me before.”
“Don’t shoot the messenger boy.” Genrikh smiled beatifically.
Copenhagen. It might just as well have been the South Pole.
“Why is she in Denmark?”
“It’s livelier than Moscow. It’s not something to be sneezed at, a posting abroad.”
Johnny calculated that his hands could just about circle Genrikh’s thin, perfectly barbered neck.
The chekist may have read that thought in his eyes, because he said, more seriously, “She is working for Max. Copenhagen is his new base.”
He was made to write the chronicle of his time in China, then to write it again. Then they questioned him at Ozhod-Niriat and the Fourth Department. He wasn’t called to the Lubyanka, but OGPU men sat in on some of these sessions. They hovered silently, like vultures. He told as much of the truth as he could, and in every version the villain was Emil Brandt. He wondered whether Emil was experiencing equally gentle treatment. Come October, Johnny’s prophecies were proven right. The Chinese Communists — those that were left — abandoned their base in Kiangsi. Mao squeezed the shattered remnants of the Red Army through a gap that he found in von Seeckt’s iron ring and led them off into the wilderness. Nobody knew where the trek would end. Like a psychotic mother, the Comintern smothered its babies and promptly got pregnant again. Johnny had attended enough crib deaths to recognize the pattern. If he had experienced doubts about his double role in the presence of the brave young guerrillas of Shanghai and the peasant fighters of Kiangsi, the behaviour of the men from the Big House — as the Latin Americans in Moscow called the Comintern — satisfied him that he had chosen the right course.
Piatnitsky asked Johnny to come and see him. “You’ve done all right,” Piatnitsky told him. “You seem to have a way with people. Both Emil and Otto Braun speak highly about you, and they don’t have much time for each other. You can pick your own assignment.” Piatnitsky held up a finger. “With certain limitations.”
“Yes.”
“You can go back to China. We have to get guns to Mao’s forces overland. You’d be reporting to Berzin and the Fourth Department.”
“What’s the alternative?” Johnny asked. He did not think he had anything new to learn about China.
“You can go to Brazil.”
His mind flashed back to what Verdi, the Argentinian, had said about how South Americans talked themselves into making revolutions.
“What is the nature of the operation?”
“Armed insurrection. You’re going to kick out the government and put in our man. He’s here in Moscow. You’ll find him quite unusual.”
“What resources are available?”
“Do your own homework. There is a young officers’ movement opposed to the government. There is only a small urban proletariat, but millions of hungry peasants who can be organized. The requirement is that the revolution should take place by January 1936.”
Piatnitsky said all this in a deadpan manner, and Johnny began to realize that the head of the Orgbureau was no enthusiast for the project. Johnny was bemused by the idea. The two most powerful Communist movements outside Russia had just been dealt crushing defeats. What had persuaded the Comintern that it could succeed in a country of sambas and sugar cane when it had failed in Germany and China?
Piatnitsky’s tone encouraged Johnny to risk a provocative question.
“Isn’t this a sideshow?”
“No!” the Comintern chief said sharply. He got up and started pacing, his hands clasped behind his back. “I haven’t explained very well. This project has the personal interest of someone very high up. The orders come from the top, the very top. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” So the plan for Brazil had Stalin’s personal backing.
“We are prepared to spend whatever it costs — millions of dollars, if necessary. Our best operatives are to be made available. So I wouldn’t call it a sideshow.” Piatnitsky’s tone had turned from indifference to almost open disgust. “Well? Are you going or not?”
“I’m going. Who will be in charge? Guralsky?”
Guralsky was the veteran chief of the South American bureau of the Comintern. He had personally recruited many of the local Communist leaders.
“The South American bureau is getting a new boss. Emil Brandt. As a matter of fact, he asked to have you on his team.”
Piatnitsky saw Johnny’s expression and added, “I read your reports from China. They were accurate. Not a word—” he stopped Johnny from speaking. “I would prefer that you didn’t say it. Emil was chosen for this mission by someone very close to the top. Are you still with me? End of story. The man must be given credit for recognizing his deficiencies. Why else would he ask for you?”
Emil’s promotion was emblematic of what was happening in Moscow — how much so became obvious to Johnny in December, when the whole vast organization of the Comintern was shaken by the news that Kirov, the second most powerful man in Russia, had been shot dead in his office in Leningrad. How the assassin had managed to smuggle himself and his revolver past all the security guards was a mystery. It was said that the killer had previously been seen in the company of OGPU men who reported directly to Dzerzhinsky Square. In any event, Kirov’s slaying was blamed on Trotskyites in high places and the “Zinoviev clique” in the Communist International. Old Bolsheviks were rounded up. Overnight, Piatnitsky and his files vanished from his office. It was rumoured that the head of the Orgbureau was being grilled in the cellars of the Lubyanka. Closed sessions of the Comintern were interrupted by pistol-toting chekists in black coats who hurled accusations at platform speakers in full view of the foreign delegates. “Less literature!” they bellowed when their victims tried to explain themselves. A man’s record wa
s worthless unless it demonstrated undeviating loyalty to Stalin. It was plain that the only men Stalin trusted completely were those he had created out of the muck. The city stank of fear.
But Emil took all this in his stride. Emil, Johnny discovered, had a protector, and Dmitri Manuilsky was the right man to have on your side in Moscow at the close of 1934. Manuilsky was Stalin’s creature in the Comintern. From Shanghai, Emil had fed him a string of poisonous backchat, reporting — or inventing — the anti-Stalin gossip of his rivals and even his superiors at the Big House. In Stalin’s Moscow, Emil’s willingness to betray his comrades counted for infinitely more than success or failure in China.
When they met, Emil was so effusively cordial that Johnny became convinced that the new chief of the South American bureau had ratted on him too. As more and more old faces disappeared from the Big House, it struck Johnny that maybe he and Emil had survived for the same reason: in a climate of generalized distrust, the plausible liar has a better chance of saving his skin than anyone who presumes to speak his mind.
Emil introduced Johnny to the others who would lead the rising in Brazil.
Chief among them was a tiny, taciturn man with delicate features. Indrawn and mystical, he carried a faint aroma of the cloisters. He had been living in a house in Moscow with his mother and sisters for several years. In Brazil they called him the Knight of Hope. It seemed that, a decade before Mao, he had led a Long March of his own through the interior of Brazil, from the parched backlands of the north-east to the great falls of Iguagu. The revolutionary lieutenants who had marched in his column were scattered all over Brazil. Some had become colonels or governors. They were expected to rise and join the revolution when this little man gave the word. His name was Luis Carlos Prestes. It was hard for Johnny to imagine him on horseback, waving a sword.
Yet Prestes’ quiet fanaticism was not unimpressive. The army would rise. He could vouch for it. He had letters from his comrades in all the major garrisons. He even had supporters in the police and on the general staff. Several state governments would turn against the president once they saw that the movement was serious. The peasants would take up arms and chase the landowners into the sea.
After meeting Prestes for the first time, Johnny asked Emil, “Do you like the Brazilians?”
A vacant look, the same one Johnny had observed when he had come back from Kiangsi and reported facts that Emil found inconvenient, took possession of the other man’s face.
Emil said, “I haven’t given the matter the slightest thought.”
Johnny spent time with the files. Just six months before, in June, the South American bureau, under its former management, had drawn up an exhaustive report on the prospects for Communist takeovers in the various countries of the hemisphere. The prospectus for Brazil was discouraging. “In Brazil,” Johnny read, “the Communist party is only weakly connected with the masses, and in this respect it is on a downward grade.” The authors of the secret report found “great objective possibilities for the development of the revolutionary movement” in the radicalism of junior army officers, popular hatred of the foreign banks and the misery of the peasants, especially in the north. But nothing in their findings suggested that the revolution was at hand.
A summons came from Manuilsky. Perhaps Stalin’s man had the answers.
Manuilsky fingered a moustache that seemed to be made of cotton wool. He might look like a favourite uncle, but he cultivated the manners of a boorish petty official. He kept Johnny standing while he went through a sheaf of papers.
“Another bloody German,” he finally greeted Johnny. “Moscow is full of you people.”
And whose fault is that? Johnny thought.
“So what do you think of the Popular Front?” Manuilsky challenged him.
“I think it requires study.”
“That’s a sensible answer. I see you’re a strawberry from our patch after all.” Manuilsky gave him a shrewd look. “Sit over there, on the sofa. Let’s have some brandy.”
The stuff he poured was good French cognac, not the Armenian product.
“What do you think of our Knight of Hope?”
“He has a certain quality. It’s hard for me to picture him in uniform.”
“You know what they say about the Portuguese. They don’t kill the bull. It’s the same with Brazilians. Prestes spent three years marching up and down the country, with hardly a shot fired in anger. But he’s their hero. We work with what we’ve got. At least he’s no Chiang Kai-shek. He’s a good party member, and he’ll do what he’s told.”
“But in Brazil the party is insignificant.”
“It doesn’t matter. Prestes will give us the army. We can buy up half the state governors with money or promises. What you have to do is kill the bull.”
Manuilsky embarked on a speech about what a Communist victory in Brazil would mean. It would be the decisive step toward creating a federation of soviet republics in all of South America. It would knock the stuffing out of the British and American banks. Faced with a knife at its soft underbelly, the United States would be powerless to act outside its own hemisphere. And with Brazil in its pocket, the Soviet Union would control the one raw material it lacked: rubber.
Manuilsky replenished their glasses and said, “It will also show Hitler we mean business.”
He paused to assess Johnny’s reaction.
Johnny raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
They clinked glasses.
Manuilsky looked at him approvingly and said, “I’m going to do you a favour you won’t forget. I’m going to take you to see the boss.”
8
The next day Johnny received orders to meet Manuilsky at his office at midnight. Since Stalin didn’t sleep at night, official Moscow was obliged to be insomniac too.
They took the road along the embankment to the Moskva gate. The river gleamed dully, like pewter, under the thin ice.
Militiamen stopped them under the arch. Their officer snapped smartly to attention at the sight of Manuilsky’s papers. There were soldiers with heavy machine guns at the entrance to the vast palace courtyard.
The Kremlin guards in the lobby were a head taller than Johnny. They dwarfed the man who was hopping down the wide staircase. He was birdlike with his narrow, slightly hunched shoulders and hard, bright little eyes.
Manuilsky went up and pumped his hand. He mumbled a joke, and they both laughed. The chekist was looking at Johnny.
“Comrade Yezhov,” Manuilsky said, “This is Johann Lentz, one of our Germans.”
“A pleasure,” Yezhov said. His stare was like a slap across the face. He nodded, and hurried out of the building.
“Yezhov is one of the most powerful men in Moscow,” Manuilsky whispered as they crossed an echoing reception room at the top of the stairs. “He may get Yagoda’s job. Of course,” he added, so softly that Johnny had to strain to make out the words, “Yagoda is Jewish.”
Stalin’s secretary slid out from behind the padded door. “The Vozhd is waiting.”
The Vozhd. It was a curious form of address, just starting to creep into newspaper editorials and official speeches. It was stronger than the English word “leader.” Its resonance was the same as that of “Führer” in German.
The Vozhd did not look much like his statues. Stalin was short and squat. His skin was yellowish and deeply pitted. His eyes were puffy and narrowed into slits, so that the whites hardly showed. He wore brown boots and a cotton rubashka, and his pipe wheezed like an asthmatic as he sucked at it.
Manuilsky made the introductions. Stalin motioned for Johnny to sit in a low-slung chair and returned to his own desk, which was set high up on a specially built platform so that Johnny had to tilt his head back to see the leader’s face.
He expected to be quizzed about the Brazil mission or perhaps about China. Stalin’s opening shot caught him completely off guard.
“You’re a German. Do you believe that Hitler has the support of the German people?”
/>
“Many of them,” Johnny conceded.
“Thousands of former Communists have joined him.”
“I’m afraid that’s true.”
“And he rules with a rod of iron. All opposition has been ruthlessly crushed.”
“There is still opposition. But of course it is forced deeper and deeper underground. The Gestapo is a very effective organization.”
Stalin grunted.
“If the Japanese strike us,” he went on, “will Hitler make war on us, too?”
“I’m in no position to judge. But I think Germany is still
weak. Hitler will wait till he has built up his war machine.”
“And you think a conflict with Hitler is inevitable?”
“It’s in his book—” Johnny began.
“I’ve read his book, fuck your mother!” Stalin burst out. “All the sermon mongers in that lavotchka, that clip-joint you work for, spout it at me. I think I know Hitler better than any of you. It’s not our system that he hates. It’s the Jews. When he wrote Mein Kampf he believed that the Jews were running the Soviet Union. Am I right?”
Johnny said nothing.
“If we show him that we know how to deal with the Jewish problem, what do we have left to fight about?”
Johnny was shaken by this but remained perfectly still.
“We have more in common than either of us has with any of the bourgeois democracies. Germany and Russia are both victims of Versailles. We have been allies since the war, regardless of who sat in the Berlin Chancellery, united against the Western capitalists. We have no quarrel over territory. Hitler has designs on Poland. Well, there is enough of Poland for both of us. Hitler and I understand the nature of power. As for Britain and France, they are rotting, pustular invalids. They are too feeble to hold on to their empires. Their colonies are waiting to be shared out among those who are not scared to act. The United States is too busy making money to fight.”