The Moscow Affair (From The Files Of Lady Dru Drummond Book 1)

by CW Hawes

  I wanted to be with Karl and I felt torn.

  “I think that is a good idea,” Karl said. He looked at me. “Should one of the cars not make it, then Mr. Hall will at least have one of us.”

  “Let’s go,” Dunyasha said.

  The sound of semi-automatic rifle fire and machine guns ripped through the dawn air. The acrid smell of gunpowder was on the light breeze.

  “I’ll go out the main gate,” Dunyasha said. “You go out the secondary entrance to the east. Good luck.”

  I kissed Karl goodbye, got into the car with Dunyasha, and we were off. On the way out, we grabbed weapons and ammunition. I had my pistol and revolver. I’m sure Dunyasha had a handgun of some sort. We each had machine pistols. I rolled down my window and got ready to use mine.

  Driving like she was possessed by demons, Dunyasha raced the Talbot Lago down the drive, swerved around the burnt out tanks, and gunned the car for all it was worth. Like a rocket it shot down the long drive. Up ahead we saw Russian soldiers. I opened fire and they dived for cover. Dunyasha rolled down her window, pulled out a P08 Luger and started firing.

  Not all the Soviet soldiers went into hiding. Two rounds hit the car on my side and Dunyasha swore like a sailor. To make things more difficult for the Reds she began weaving back and forth. I emptied one magazine, replaced it, and continued firing.

  At the main road, Dunyasha made the turn at such a high speed, she almost lost control. I fell against her and she quipped, “This is no time to get cozy, Dru.”

  “If you drove like a conservative maniac, I wouldn’t be in your lap.”

  “And if I did we’d be dead.”

  No one pursued us, although I would put my money on someone radioing the command center and telling them of our escape. We tore down the highway to the east, roared through the village of Voskresenkoye, and continued on. Up ahead was a car. We easily overtook it and passed it. It was the Mercedes. Kit Somers was driving. I waved and he waved back. Dunyasha didn’t slow or anything. The Talbot Lago sped off, leaving the Mercedes fading into the distance.

  “Dunyasha, why did you want me with you?”

  “Because I’m a selfish bitch. If I’m going to die I want to be with someone I love and who at least cares for me.”

  I reached out and touched her cheek. She covered my hand with hers. This woman whom fate thrust into my life and now, what could I say, how did I feel towards her? I was glad I was with her, even though I’d hoped to be with Karl and wanted him for my lover. But perhaps, as I had mentioned to Karl, sharing was an option. But loving a woman that way seemed strange to me. I know women and men do love each other, perhaps more than society wants to admit. But I didn’t feel I could do it. Yet this hard and at the same time sensitive and feminine woman loved both men and women. But I’m not Dunyasha. Despite my recent relationship with Mikhail, Karl was my soulmate. Nothing, no one would change that.

  Dunyasha returned her hand to the steering wheel.

  I sidled next to her and kissed her cheek. “I love you and I’m glad I’m with you. My heart, well, Karl is always first in my heart. And, and, I, I’m just not ready for more than what we now share.”

  “I understand, little kitten. You are truly my best friend. Perhaps my only friend. And I’m very happy we are friends.”

  I lightly nipped her earlobe, then said, “And you are a selfish bitch.”

  “And you are an incorrigible tease.”

  And we laughed and laughed while driving into the dawning new day.

  TWENTY-NINE

  We Are Moved By Love

  We drove east to Nizhny Novgorod and then south. Dunyasha’s immediate goal was to get as far away from the hot bed of active conflict as she could. Which meant we didn’t want to be anywhere within a three hundred kilometer radius of Moscow and Novgorod was just outside that radius.

  A little after nine, about four and a quarter hours on the road, we made a fuel stop on the outskirts of Novgorod.

  “Where are we going next, Dunyasha?”

  “Penza, Saratov, and Stalingrad. From Stalingrad we will drive into the Ukraine and then Romania.”

  “Will we go to Berlin?”

  “Yes. And hopefully rendezvous with the others.”

  I nodded and even though I’m far from religious, I prayed and begged God to protect Karl and bring him safely to me. Then added a postscript for Klara, Kit, and Pond.

  Dunyasha and I inspected the damage while her baby was being fueled. There were two bullet holes just ahead of the rear wing. She fingered them, muttered something foul under her breath, and said, “I’m glad they didn’t hit you. The car can be repaired.”

  “I’m flattered,” I replied. “I’m rating higher than your car.”

  “Dru Drummond, you are an imp! An incorrigible imp!”

  “I know,” I said looking over my shoulder while sashaying away from her. She merely shook her head and returned to the car.

  When the petrol tank was full, Dunyasha gave the attendant more than enough money and drove off.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Yes. You?”

  “Starving. Let’s see if we can find a grocer.”

  We drove around for twenty minutes and finally found the market district.

  “You stay with the car, I’ll get us some food.”

  So I sat in the car and hoped no one would stop and talk to me. I suppose I could always pretend to be deaf. I didn’t have to worry. She had her roller skates on and was back before I could finish singing “God Save the Queen.”

  “I got a box of oranges and grapefruit. Not much, though. Now off to the dry goods store and the butcher. Two more trips back to the car and we were ready to take off.

  “Here.” She handed me a jar, sausage, and a grapefruit. “The dry goods fellow sold me a jar and filled it with water. I bought tins of meat, vegetables, and fruit. I did get a can opener. The butcher had some very good, he says, hard dry sausage. No need to cook it. I bought all he had. He also had some dry beef and I bought that.”

  “Did you get any silverware?”

  “No. Hang on.” She got out of the car, ran down the street, and was back in a flash. “Now we’re set.”

  She started the car and we were on our way. I cut off chunks of sausage and fed them to her while she drove. I peeled a grapefruit and fed her sections.

  “I could get used to this,” she said. “Maybe I need to kidnap you and keep you for my slave.”

  “Karl will find you.”

  “Drat that Karl. Busybody journalist.”

  “Like me.”

  “If he’s anything like you, heaven help our world.”

  “Thank you very much, Baroness Bobrinsky.”

  “One of you is enough for this poor world, Dru Drummond. And I’m glad. It makes you unique.”

  “Here. Eat this grapefruit segment.”

  “You trying to shut me up?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, I’m full. Thank you. So you’ll have to listen to me talk.”

  “Okay.” And I popped the grapefruit segment into my mouth.

  “I think in Penza we’ll try to find a hotel for the night.”

  “How far is this place?”

  “About six hours.”

  “We’ll have a long day.”

  “Yes. But I think we’ll be alright.”

  “I wonder if the others made it.”

  “They made it.”

  “But you can’t know that.”

  “I believe it.”

  “Yes. I’m going to believe it, as well.”

  “You truly love him, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “He’s a lucky man and I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

  “And what lesson is that?”

  “When you have love don’t give it up.”

  “Yes. I see that now.”

  We fell silent as the Talbot Lago ate up the miles of rolling Russian countryside on our way to Penza and hop
efully a hotel for the night. And then softly, I began singing “Heart and Soul.”

  When I finished, Dunyasha said, “I think everything we do is for love. Love of a person, love of an idea, a country, an object, a piece of land, our family. We are moved by love.”

  I nodded. “We are also moved by hate and envy.”

  “Yes. We are. One could say Lenin was moved by his hatred of those who had money and power in society, which made him ‘love’ communism. And for him, perhaps that is what was true. But for you and I and the rest who are much simpler creatures. We are moved by love.”

  THIRTY

  On The Way To The Border

  Sunday night we stayed in Penza. We found a hotel on the outskirts of this large city and rented a room on the second floor. Dunyasha was nervous, however, and thought her decision not the wisest.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the Soviets still have tight control of the big cities. MGB will be everywhere.”

  “There is anonymity in numbers.”

  “There is. But we don’t exactly look like Russian peasants.”

  I didn’t say it, but that big, new luxury roadster she was driving didn’t help matters. And I wasn’t going to bring it up, unless I wanted to walk to the border; which I didn’t, thank you very much.

  “What are our options?” I asked.

  “I think we need to avoid the cities and stay in the small towns and rural areas.”

  “Fine with me. Whatever it takes to get us out of here.”

  We moved a table in front of the door and went to bed with our weapons handy. We slept like those proverbial logs. Four o’clock came much too quickly. We got up, having slept in our clothes, and I was looking to take a hot bath. Dunyasha put the kibosh on that idea.

  “Have you smelled yourself, lady?” I asked.

  “I smell like a rose a horse just shit on. Same as you. We have to go.”

  I was grumbling about grumpy, irascible, and unreasonable baronesses, when someone tried kicking the door in. He would have succeeded if it hadn’t been for the table. We picked up the submachine guns and got behind cover on opposite sides of the room. Another crash of a body into the door and it opened enough for a man to come through, and he did followed by two more. Dunyasha and I each fired short bursts from the machine pistols and they weren’t standing anymore. I fired another burst through the door. Someone yelled and an explosion shook the floor, turned our door to kindling, and punched holes in the wall along the corridor.

  My head hurt from the force of the blast. Dunyasha was shaking hers. “Let’s go,” she said.

  We carefully moved into the hall. It was a mess. I’d apparently hit the MGB agent just as he was going to toss a grenade in. Instead he dropped it and took out himself and his four companions. We ran down the hall took the stairs down to the ground floor. Coming up those same stairs were two agents, with pistols drawn. We fired the machine pistols. They fell backwards and tumbled down the stairs. We ran down the stairs, across the small lobby and out the front door.

  Four more MGB agents were running towards the doors we just came out of and tried scattering to gain cover. We emptied the magazines on the machine guns and pulled out our pistols.

  One agent fired at us and hit Dunyasha’s machine pistol. He was hiding behind a car. I fired my Sauer across the top to keep him down and Dunyasha fired under the car and hit him three times. We ran around opposite ends of the car. He saw me, raised his pistol, and Dunyasha put two more bullets into him. He collapsed onto the pavement.

  “To the car,” she said.

  We ran to the car and got in. She started the engine and took off like one of those German A-4 rockets. She had her foot on the accelerator and looked like she was trying to push it through the floor board. The big Talbot Lago roared out of the city and at one point the speedo needle was on one hundred eighty.

  The time was early and traffic was very light. Of course a farmer was driving a two-horse hay wagon down our side of the road and when Dunyasha pulled out to pass him there was a lorry coming toward us. He being on the wrong side of the divided highway. She took to the hard shoulder just as he did, she gunned the engine, shot across the lane he’d been in and continued down the motorway in the lane we’d been in when we came upon that farmer and his hay wagon.

  She gave me a sideways glance with a smirk on her face. “Heart in your mouth?” she said.

  “If we ever get home in one piece…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll buy you a fur coat.”

  “Little kitten, I have plenty of those. Get me a case of champagne, instead. And you and I will drink every one of the bottles.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  She reached out and gave my hand a squeeze and focused on keeping the Talbot Lago on the road and not parking her in a hay wagon or on a lorry’s grill.

  The next few days are a blur in my memory. We spent the daylight hours hiding in the woods and driving at night to avoid surveillance. We saw two army lorries and counted seventeen autogyros during those days. The bullet that hit Dunyasha’s machine pistol rendered its operation questionable, so we abandoned it.

  Our food and water ran out and we were reduced to begging at the tiny hamlets of the collective farms that dotted the countryside. Actually Dunyasha did the begging. I don’t know enough Russian. What we saw first hand was the hatred for the late Joseph Stalin’s policy of collectivization.

  “Lenin gave us land and Stalin took it away.” And more than once the speakers spat on the ground.

  At one house Dunyasha spoke to the wife, her husband was in the field. She asked the middle-aged woman for food, “for my sister and I,” and a bit of soap. Dunyasha caught a glimpse of an icon. And mentioned it to the woman.

  “Hopefully the church will come back now that he’s gone,” the woman said.

  “Yes. Perhaps it will take a new government to bring it about,” Dunyasha replied.

  The woman stopped and eyed Dunyasha up and down.

  “You are with them. Your clothes are dirty and you stink, but you are from the aristocracy.”

  Dunyasha didn’t mince words, “Yes, I am. The new Czar will be better. Better than the old one and better than the Communists.”

  “We believe so. My father was a Kulak. He was shot. Now go.”

  The woman handed Dunyasha a basket with bread, cheese, boiled potatoes and turnips, a piece of meat, our jar filled with water, a cake of soap, and a pail filled with hot water.

  “Thank you very much,” Dunyasha said. “May God be gracious to you for your kindness.”

  “And to you for your bravery,” the woman replied.

  I had been guarding the car and she told me about the conversation when she got back, while we stripped off our clothes and washed in what was by then lukewarm water. Lukewarm or not, it was welcomed. We smelled like overripe cheese in the hot sun and a two day old opened tin of sardines.

  Before we left, Dunyasha returned the pail with a ten ruble note in the bottom.

  The pattern continued and we noticed the peasants in the Ukraine were far more restive than their Russian counterparts. As long as we stayed in the countryside, we felt fairly safe.

  THIRTY-ONE

  We Kiss The Soviets Goodbye

  A half-hour before noon we pulled off the road into a clump of trees, of which there weren’t too many in the big expanse of farmland. Behind us lay Odessa and outside of Odessa the hamlet in which we hid. Two kilometers ahead of us was the town of Mayaky on the Dniester River across the river lay Romania and freedom. We broke from our ritual of traveling at night because Dunyasha wanted to scout out the border crossing in daylight.

  She and I covered the car as best we could to break up the lines and make it look less obvious from the road. We also left the machine gun. We had no way to hide it. She wanted me to accompany her. Once again, I was her deaf sister. Being Sunday, the workers were not working and we walked halfway to Mayaky before a farmer offered us a ride in the back
of his lorry.

  “Where are you going?” he asked in Russian.

  Dunyasha answered, “Romania to look for work.”

  “Good luck crossing the border. The guards aren’t letting many in or out. They’re looking for revolutionaries. Shot one the other day trying to leave the country. At least that is what they said he was.”

  Dunyasha thanked him for the information.

  When he arrived at his destination, we got out, and Dunyasha thanked him for the ride. She then asked which way to the river. He pointed and she again thanked him. We set off in the direction he pointed, finding our way back to the main road, and walking until we came to the bridge.

  “Across this river, Dunyasha, our lives can return to normal.”

  “Yes. If I hadn’t met you, I’d be back there. Perhaps dead or a prisoner.”

  “How lovely Romania looks.”

  “Don’t be fooled, Dru. King Carol is a dictator.”

  “I know. He made a deal with the devil, the Iron Guard. They promised to support him if he adopted most of their platform. Horia Sima is King Carol’s right hand man.”

  “You know quite a bit about Romanian politics.”

  “I’m a journalist. It’s my job to know.”

  “So the land looks lovely, but –”

  “The same dictatorial shit.”

  Dunyasha smiled. “Feel strongly about it, do you?”

  “More and more I’m appreciating the philosophy of John Locke.”

  “It has its points, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. But right now, there, on the other side of the river, there are no Communists. And that is a very good thing.”

  “Yes. No Communists. Let’s hope Carol and his fascist supporters treat us more kindly.”

  We observed the Soviet border guards at work. Very few vehicles were allowed into Romania most were turned back. More were allowed into the Soviet Union from across the border. Mostly lorries. Even the successful Soviet experiment has need for imported goods. Dunyasha talked with four drivers who were not allowed to cross into the Romanian kingdom. She found out there is a list of people who are allowed to leave the Soviet Union through the checkpoint for business in Romania. There is a second list of legitimate and authorized reasons to leave through the checkpoint. None of the four could tell Dunyasha details of the lists. They were simply told they couldn’t cross.