The Desolate Garden

by Daniel Kemp

  Chapter Thirty-One: Snapdragons

  “I haven't got copies of what I leave in the church for him to contact me, you know. How are we to do that, then?” George asked, as I finished the first part of the story of why we were going to Hamburg to meet his father. I had covered the murders and the attempt on both Judy and my own life, adding her thoughts to the reason behind these things. Sir David Haig had called Judy and told of how the mercury switch to the bomb would have activated the sophisticated device on the first corner we would have taken.

  “It may have been crude in its objective, but not in its design. It was expertly balanced, so that no amount of leaning against the car would trigger it, nor simply getting in. However, I'm told that as the car would have gone over one of the many humps in the road surrounding you, or around a sharp corner, the mercury would have completed the circuit and well, they would be scraping the bits up,” was the succinct way in which he put it!

  “We are all targets, it would seem, George…and maybe your father Paulo Sergeyovitch Korovin knows why,” was the last thing I had said to George, before he mentioned the means of contact. I could not pass up on this opportunity to bring up Loti, but Judy got there first.

  “We know you haven't, George. The bible is with auntie Loti, except that isn't her real name. She is Tanya Malonovna Kuznetsoka. Your real mother.”

  It wasn't the plan to get this far ahead but, as with so many plans, improvisation is a fundamental and necessary tactic. During the next hour and a half remaining of the time before the flight to Hamburg, Judy went back to 1956 and told of the legend that involved Paulo and Tanya, but omitted one important detail, which was spotted and leapt upon by George. And it was not the discovery of both parents.

  “How did Maudlin fit into all of this? Why did my mother arrive at Eton Square?” he asked, simplistically.

  “That's your domain, Harry. I'll let you answer that one,” Judy declared adamantly, looking away from the two of us. She stared into the distance, as if wanting to detach herself from the answer.

  “You're his grandson,” I answered. He wasn't as surprised as I thought he would have been.

  “I did wonder, you know. The story in the letter that I received after his death was all a bit fanciful and heroic. There was not enough there to justify the money he bequeathed me; nor, looking back on things, the effort and attention he bestowed on me throughout his life. I sensed I was special to him, but I didn't know why. Loti being my mother makes more sense. She kept her secret well, didn't she?”

  “To protect you, George. That's why you're still alive,” Judy announced.

  “You have a step-sister named Katherine. Did you know?” I stupidly asked.

  “No, how do you?”

  I related the story of Vancouver, and told him how I had felt in Grönwohld and of the ensuing conversation in Moscow. That's when George dropped it; the same story as Alexi's but from a different perspective.

  “You're lucky to have met him. I tried, once. I shouldn't have, mind you, but it didn't matter…he never showed up.”

  It was Judy's turn as she rejoined our conversation and started her questions, black and red notebook to the fore, pen waving in tune to that metronome, marking the time for the notes of his replies. The flight was short, as was the journey to the hotel, but the dialogue between the two went on into the night, neither of them noticing my return with a torn page showing the kneeling figure of one steadfast man whilst another anointed him. I decided that, having defaced a Bible and my sins being done for the day, I would punish myself in the bar resorting to red wine in the absence of anything from the Isle of Jura. I never even asked…it wasn't that classy a hotel.

  There were three full days left to unravel this mystery before the funeral on Sunday, not sufficient time to wait for replies and set up meetings in Berlin from numbered lists. This was too urgent for such niceties, regardless of bombs or whatever else had to be settled. There was a way that had not been discussed. Perhaps it was guilt that had caused me not to; but I wondered why Judy had not broached the subject of Katherine.

  * * *

  Paulo had done great work for the Soviet Union in the Middle East, and for himself. The loss of Anacova had not stopped him building relationships with militant groups and ruling families throughout the area. Katherine had been eight when she lost her mother to Hamas, being then raised by an array of nannies under the watchful eye of her father. He had previously firmly eschewed away from meaningful partnerships. They had brought him no satisfaction. What had, though, was what he saw as his duty to his daughter.

  He loved her, but his love was impassive, unemotional. He was detached yet systematic, everything placed within a structured plan, as though one would when designing a house for someone else to live in, not a home for yourself. No subtleties, no spontaneity mirroring Paulo himself, for whom everything was predetermined. The foundations had to be laid, and she was to be cocooned in luxury and shielded from danger, never to know anything of his many double lives.

  The walls were made from images of him leading the way towards political reforms, restoring Russia to the pinnacle of world power by adopting Western ideas, but ones sheathed in communist principles. The roof was his money and his influence. These would protect and guide her, countering the corners of life where ordinary folk can become snarled, entangled with backward views of despair instead of forward ones towards glory. Paulo's vision contained that glory; one where reliance on wits alone within a closed society unwilling to look forward, such as the one that had strangled his own notional ambitions, would not exist for her. His wealth would see to that.

  Her vision never extended to her father's role in identifying terrorists whom the Soviets could use in their subversion against America and their ally Israel, nor the arms deals he arranged for the less stable regions and organisations. Paulo was instrumental in the decision taken by many of the OPEC members to cut back on oil supplies to the West in the 1980s. It was in order, he said, to cripple their industries; but, in reality, it made the extraction of Soviet oil from the Caspian basin and Siberia more cost-effective. She may well have approved, had she known.

  He invested his time and his money early in such ventures, enhancing the education of his daughter by the employment of specialist governesses in both academic and cultural fields. She attended the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow from the age of eleven and, by the time of Paulo's elevation to the Presidium of the Federation of Russia, the International University of Russia. She majored in economics and social studies in the place of learning that Paulo had helped establish when 'Glasnost' was the byword for radicalism and outward-looking.

  Katyerena Illich Sarenova, she was given her mother's name, married Richard Dwight Friedal, an American working with Cable News Network, in 2004. The wedding took place in Brussels, where Richard was based as the news channel's NATO and European Union representative. Paulo was delighted, as it had been his suggestion that Katherine spread her wings from Russia. The headquarters of the European Community was a place where she could hear the wise speak of profit and capitalism and perhaps, he thought, pass some of that insight his way. He did not know of her change of name, nor the real reason for the marriage.

  She had been inducted and trained in the ways of the FSB whilst at the Academy of Science, the cradle for its operatives. Her father had no knowledge of this, or of the fact that Katherine was in love with another. From her husband and his many acquaintances, the FSB in Moscow discovered multifarious facets of the working of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation it had never known before. Her identity was clouded by history. Her papers said that she was Estonian, born in the city of Tallinn, and that both parents were descendants from Russian migrants drafted into that country to bolster its industrialisation and militarisation after the Second World War. They replaced the millions that had been deported or murdered by Stalin, then Hitler, then Stalin again, firstly during the Soviet conquering, then the German occupation, and finally the retaking by the
communists. The antecedents of such people were impossible to validate, as it was the old KGB who had destroyed them, and the new FSB who hadn't replaced them. In the same year as her marriage, Estonia entered the European Community; giving Katherine free unrestricted access to all of Europe as well as America, thanks to her matrimonial citizenship.

  * * *

  Alexi Vasilyev had tended his student well. He had always been a good listener, trying to hear the footsteps before the knock on the door came. He heard what the late Vladimir Sokolov was saying when only a Colonel in a dingy office, to him and the other incumbent, who had quickly organised a transfer, leaving Alexi with no one to blame if the knocks were in the middle of the night. He had hidden away his doubts of Paulo in a windowless vault with no filing cases; just his memory.

  He stepped quietly through the offices of the ranks above, carrying Political Officer Dimitriy Lebedov's letters of protestation as an introduction. He found no substance, as he reported, but wondered at Paulo's meteoric rise and the lack of evidence as to a Strategic Studies Group in President Reagan's time. Alexi had been born in Warsaw six years into the Soviet occupation of Poland, and had witnessed the carnage that followed Stalin's death, as positions of power were fought over by previous family friends. He knew what naivety was and the punishment it carried. He clung patiently to Sokolov's flowing cloak of anonymity and indecision, until one day he found himself in the stratosphere of the FSB, along with Korovin, amongst Vladimir's visitors. That's when he knew that Lebedov's suspicions were valid.

  His decision to seduce Katherine was not a hardship. She was an extremely attractive girl and, although twenty-seven years his junior, not beyond reach of his shrewdness and well exercised prowess. He began his task at the Academy, giving lectures on counter intelligence and its importance in every walk of life. He singled out Katherine for his special tuition. They extended this 'one-to-one' and began their special relationship when she was sixteen. Paulo was seldom at home in Moscow throughout the early nineties, away fostering his own affinities with foreign governments or less reputable individuals who wielded power. His connection with oligarchs and the Mafia were growing stronger by the minute, and he noticed nothing closer to home.

  * * *

  Richard Dwight Friedal did not appear to be an easy target for Katyerena. Outwardly he was a consummate man, proficient in his vocation and assured around women. He had never married, presumably preferring the single life of transient affairs to one of nuptial vows. This judgement, however, was wrong. At thirty-four years of age he longed to be settled into a partnership with someone to fill the void in his life that his housemaid could not adequately accomplish. Past liaisons had been with already married women who were unwilling to leave one domestic role for another, or single women, who had no wish to become his replacement housekeeper. Washing, ironing and cooking did not rate as highly with them as it did with Richard. Katyerena's joyous agreement in fulfilling this role changed everything and made his dreams come true; in the most important parts of his home, that is. Richard had at last found his surrogate mother, and was happy.

  Paulo's daughter never intended to share this confused happiness of Richard's idyllic life. She had what she and Alexi wanted. She left a note, stating the days she spent washing his well-used, smelly golf socks as a reason for her leaving, and disappeared, carrying her American citizenship, occupying her talents elsewhere. Katherine met Donald Howell in Silvio's wine bar in Downtown New York in August 2009, and the name of Paterson was mentioned again.

  “Oh yes, it was Paterson money from the private bank they ran for us that set up Refining Derivatives four years ago. Have you heard the name before, then?” Howell asked: A name she could never forget. She put the love of Alexi before the familiarity of a father, telling her handler of a meeting in Vancouver and of a flamboyant lover who went by the same surname.

  “My father met him in Moscow, and said he would be useful to him at some stage. He kept calling him Lord Harry. I slept with him, Alexi…it was before I loved you. Will you forgive me?”

  Alexi was instructed to continue in his rumination on Paulo Sergeyovitch Korovin; only this time, he was authorised to go further.

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Weedkiller

  Dietmar Kohl had spent the best part of forty-seven years, in one capacity or another, in the Lutheran Church, before his sudden death at the age of sixty-seven in 1987. He had lived for the first twenty-five years of that life in the unified German City of Leipzig, then for five further years in the same place. Only this time, Leipzig was under Soviet control in the Eastern partitioned sector of Germany, from where he and his wife and eight children were deported into the allied controlled democratic West, and it was not only for his religious beliefs that this action was taken. By the time he fathered his final child he had five boys and three daughters, none of whom knew of the dark secret he and his wife had borne, carrying it throughout their lives, until it was swallowed up by the consecrated ground in which they found their eternal rest. Well, almost.

  Dietmar had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht three years before the start of World War Two, and by its end he could be implicated in the death of 6 million Jews, along with millions of others disapproved of by the German Army leaders. He was the Gestapo Oberfeldwebel who directly passed on Heinrich Himmler's orders of extermination to the death squads who carried out Himmler's orders of genocide. Like many Germans at the end of the conflict, he would profess his innocence to this crime by proclaiming that he was simply doing his duty by following instructions. However, his case was more complicated. It was not repulsion that was instrumental in his deportation for the governing Soviets, as repulsion was an everyday sentiment of those who held different views than their own.

  The Stasi, the East German secret police, and the KGB were as equally hateful of Jews and misfits as were the Gestapo, dispatching millions more to their death. His crime was more repugnant than even that. He was manipulatable and easily led, believing the propaganda that Hitler preached above that of his church; he had betrayed his own, believing it his duty.

  Out of uniform, and carrying no insignia of office or rank, Dietmar and Steffi, his wife, had covertly organised small congregations of churchgoers, extending their open arms to all creeds of religious believers. She had secretly photographed them, then together they had reported them to the Gestapo, who had administered the appropriate punishment for being a follower of Christ and not a full time member of the Nazi party.

  'Give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar,' was their combined justification to this sin. Obligations are written in the Bible as well as by Senior Gestapo officers, they told themselves, conveniently forgetting the rest of the quotation.

  * * *

  Anotoly Petronikov had told Paulo of Dietmar's existence at the onset of the plan to plant an agent codenamed 'Mother' in the West.

  “We have just the man for you, Paulo. He has performed tasks for us before. He is not far from Hamburg. An easy place to contact, and close enough to Berlin for him to place the messages.”

  “What happens when he dies, comrade? Do we look for another way?” the young naval attaché and assistant translator had asked.

  “Do not worry, comrade Korovin. His secrets do not die with him…they are a never-ending damnation on his family. We have seen to it!” Petronikov told his underling.

  The method of collection of those Mother inspired messages was also discussed and decided upon that day in the yellow stone building in Lubyanka Square.

  “Do you know what they call this place, Paulo? It's called the tallest building in Moscow. Do you know why? Because they say you can see Siberia from its basement, that's why!” Anotoly slapped his new friend's back, sharing his joke heartily.

  “Since 1948 and the airlifts into Berlin, passage between East and West has become harder and will get worse. Beria built on what Stalin wanted; a divided Germany and Khrushchev will be no different. Berlin will see changes, Paulo. You will need a good reason to visit West
Berlin…they will be watching everything you do.”

  Paulo met Dietmar Kohl in the Soviet-administered City of Schwerin, by the side of the lake, three months before he travelled to London. Here he established the rules of communications in the same way as he and Maudlin had discussed. Dietmar suggested the Bible, and the encryptions therein. He would do anything, he said, to avoid the shame of what he had done being made known to the outside world. Paulo made it clear what would happen to his family if he or any of his descendants ever broke the promise made that day.

  The once impoverished Paulo stood on the battlements of Schwerin Castle, and gazed astonishingly at the vista he beheld, lavishly reflected from the waters below. He had never seen such beauty and he found it impossible to convey in words, as he declared its magnificence to Maudlin. His father wrote back, using the code for number 29 the next prime number in the sequence, on the way to 101 and the return to 7.

  You will have the breath taken from you when you see the Zugersee from the town of Zug. On a summer's day there is no more beautiful sight that I have ever seen.

  * * *

  When Harry Paterson left John the Steadfast in the church, it required Dietmar to deviate drastically from the normal routine of message collection. Free Will could take its time; being steadfast needed urgency. Fortunately, mobile texting had evolved, taking over from the written word. The message Paulo received on the spare cellular phone that had never been used before contained an innocuous question: What is the difference between Public and Private International Law?

  Paulo found a bar away from the Hilton in Brasilia and called Dietmar. After deliberating on the answers he received from the voice at the other end of the telephone, he made his decision. On his arrival back in Moscow he contacted Katherine, and arranged the meeting that night in Vancouver.