by James Philip
Margo Seiffert was less excitable.
“Have you recovered from yesterday’s homecoming, Peter?” She asked, smiling ruefully and shaking his proffered hand.
“No, not yet,” he confessed. “I believe Lieutenant Hannay may have preceded me...”
The Director of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women refreshed her smile and nodded.
“Just walk straight through to the courtyard at the back. Alan’s in the garden with Marija and Rosa.”
“Rosa?”
“Samuel Calleja’s widow.”
“Ah,” the man murmured, “of course.” He followed the direction indicated by the older woman’s pointing arm and stumbled towards his fate. He heard women’s voices and laughing before he emerged into the cool sheltered cloister hidden in the heart of the hospital.
He glanced up at the branches of the tree which grew in one corner of the courtyard, its upper boughs brushing against gables and gutters.
His eyes grew accustomed to the shadows.
Marija, dressed in her pale blue nursing smock was sitting at one end of a wooden bench next to a young woman in a wheel chair; and Alan Hannay was standing beside a woman whose profile was instantly familiar but not immediately recognisable to the newcomer.
“Peter!” Marija exclaimed, rising and moving to meet him as he emerged into the peaceful church-quiet yard. Her eyes twinkled with pleasure as she walked into his open arms as if she had been doing it all her life. He had hugged her close and planted kisses in her hair before he remembered the watching eyes. In a moment she took his hand and turned proudly to the others. The man was in a complete daze, hardly registering anything but the scent of Marija’s hair.
“This is my sister Rosa,” she said happily, introducing him to the young woman with the cropped hair and sutured skull. The invalid’s right eye was puffy and bloodshot, her lower right leg was encased in a clumsy plaster cast and she held her left hand resting immobile in her lap. She seemed unnaturally pale for a native-born Maltese but oddly, considering the circumstances which had brought her to Mdina, not remotely sorry for herself.
Peter Christopher bent low and shook Samuel Calleja’s widow’s small right hand.
“It is nice to meet you,” he murmured awkwardly.
“My sister,” Rosa Calleja replied, dredging an unlikely mischief from somewhere deep in her battered psyche, “never told me that you were as handsome as your famous father, Commander Christopher?”
Marija sucked her teeth in mock despair.
The two women giggled like schoolgirls.
“Rosa is making an amazing recovery,” Alan Hannay said, recognising his commanding officer was, for the moment, all at sea and a little out of his depth.
“I would have been lost without my sister,” the woman in the wheelchair said, suddenly not so certain of herself and unconsciously reaching for Marija’s hand. Instantly, her sister-in-law was by her side.
“These are strange times,” Peter blurted, finally recollecting the one and only time he had met the third woman in the courtyard. “Isn’t that so, Miss Pullman?”
Clara Pullman looked and felt older than she had the last time she had encountered the dashing young naval officer in a waterfront taverna overlooking the estuary of the River Tagus in Lisbon. She was dressed soberly in a calf-length fawn dress and an off cream blouse beneath a dark jacket, and her hair was trimmed severely, at least two inches off her shoulders. She saw his suspicion and mistrust.
“Commander Christopher and I met in Portugal when HMS Hermes put into Lisbon for repairs after the, er, modern day Battle of Trafalgar,” she explained to the others with irony playing in her dulcet tone. “I think he was a little down in the dumps at the time and I was able to cheer him up a little bit. I was working as an embassy courier, you see. Delivering messages, that sort of thing. It was very boring most of the time but occasionally, as in life, one meets interesting people.”
Peter Christopher wondered what a spook like Clara Pullman was doing here in St Catherine’s Hospital on the day he happened to pay a house call? It was not lost on him that the woman was already known to, and apparently, comfortable in the company of, and liked by the others. He said nothing, waited for her to explain what was going on.
Clara’s smile confirmed that she was reading his thoughts.
“I don’t work for British Intelligence any more, Commander,” she said. “I only ever ran errands and in these times one has a duty to do what one can to help, to pull one’s weight. I trained as a nurse many years ago. Just before you arrived I had an interview with Doctor Seiffert about the possibility of my employment either here, or in some other place or capacity with the medical wing of the Malta Defence Force.”
“Clara will be joining us here in Mdina,” Marija announced happily.
“From tomorrow morning, actually,” the older woman added.
“I see...”
Alan Hannay, Clara Pullman and Rosa Calleja were aware that the Marija and her beau wanted – badly needed and positively yearned – to be alone.
“If you would be willing to push my chair, Lieutenant Hannay,” Rosa decided, “I could show you and Clara around the hospital.”
“I’d be delighted,” the young officer beamed. “Just point the way!”
Clara Pullman paused as Rosa’s rather rickety wheelchair was gently coaxed across the cobbles and tiles to the door.
“Please believe me when I say I am honestly and truly not here to spy on anybody, Commander,” she said simply. “I don’t do that anymore.”
Peter shrugged.
“Whatever you say, Miss Pullman.”
The woman nodded and turned away.
“What was all that about, Peter?” Marija inquired, her brow furrowing in a way that he suspected was going to fascinate him for as long as they both lived. He grinned uncomfortably.
“I think that you and I have been persons of interest to people like Miss Pullman for longer than we know.”
“You mean all that stupid censoring of our letters after the war?”
“Yes. Among other things.” He looked to the empty bench and they sat down, not touching, each in their different ways suddenly shy to make the first renewal of physical contact. “I met your little brother this afternoon,” he confessed, feeling foolish and a little guilty.
His tone was the warning; and Marija decoded it instantly.
“Oh, no,” she groaned, resignedly. “What has Joe done now?”
“I think he’s got himself and some of his comrades on the Workers’ Council into a deal of hot water. He led a wild-cat strike,” he saw the term did not mean anything to Marija, hastily rephrased it, “he and his friends downed tools and walked off the Talavera without telling anybody first. The new Admiralty Dockyard Superintendent – a chap called Commodore Renfrew who arrived on the Sylvania - wanted to lock all the strikers out of the yard but I persuaded Joe to lead his comrades back to work and I refused to allow the dockyard police to board the ship to execute the new policy.”
“Oh,” Marija’s frown deepened. “Will you be in trouble with this Commodore Renfrew for helping Joe?”
“Probably, but I’m a new boy in Malta. I can always claim I was unaware of the new regulations and just wanted to get my ship’s repairs under way. Joe’s shift was onboard to plug the biggest holes and make the old girl safe for the surveyors to crawl over her tomorrow morning.”
“I am sorry. My brother is a good man, but,” she sighed, “very stupid sometimes. He was badly treated by the British,” she stopped herself, “sorry, by the security people after the October War. He was wrongfully imprisoned for nearly a year without trial. Sometimes I think he is okay, but he doesn’t laugh as much as he did before.”
Peter nodded.
“You and your family have been through a lot,” he sympathised. “What with Joe being locked away for no good reason and what happened to Samuel last month.”
“I think it is worst for my Mama,” Marija replied, forcing a br
ave smile. “Joe was always her favourite and she feels guilty now that Sam is gone...”
Peter reached for Marija and took her in his arms, onto his lap and cradled her as she began to weep the tears she had been afraid to cry until today. Presently, she quietened, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Chapter 13
Thursday 13th February 1964
Communist Party Headquarters, Bucharest, Romania
The Securitate had filmed the entire interrogation on incredibly scarce 8-millimetre Kodak colour film stock. They had filmed it all; right up to the end of the last session, by then their victim had been reduced to a pulped, unrecognisable mess chained to a steel chair in the ‘interview room’ sitting in the middle of an expanding puddle of his own blood, piss and shit. Nicolae Ceaușescu had watched a few minutes of the footage and told the technicians to turn off the projector. Now the words in the file on his desk burned at him off the page.
Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov had wept, pleaded, screamed, squealed for his life and told his inquisitors everything. The beating, the torture had not stopped. Everybody lied to stop the pain; every word they uttered had to be verified by additional agonies. Spilling the beans did not help a man, or a woman, once the Securitate had one at their mercy.
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had gone as white as a sheet and suffered a violent coughing fit when he started to read the key pages of interrogation transcript. Eventually, he had coughed so uncontrollably his cancerous lungs had burst and he had bled like a stuck pig, spitting gobs of blood and mucus in bubbling rivulets from the corners of his blue-tinged lips before collapsing into a coma. The strain of the last few days had been too much but Ceaușescu had little sympathy for his old friend and mentor.
Gheorghe had preventing him communicating directly with the West after Krasnaya Zarya started randomly lobbing thermonuclear hand grenades, and in hindsight, Ceaușescu realised he should have moved against Gheorghe then. In fact he ought to have moved against him after the first tactical nuclear weapon went off in Limassol Harbour. Elena, his wife, had harried him angrily over his ‘stupid sentimental attachment’ to the Dictator; but there were some men whom not even Nicolae Ceaușescu could betray at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless, he should have acted sooner because now it was almost certainly too late.
The phone on his top floor office desk rang shrilly.
He was relieved to hear the voice of the Soviet Ambassador on the other end of the line. At that moment he did not think he could cope with another vitriolic, spitfire harangue from his witch wife.
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky, the man who had turned up in Bucharest last January claiming to represent the ‘diplomatic and political interests’ of the Provisional Government of the USSR, and more recently styled himself Ambassador to the Romanians for and on behalf of the Troika was a forty-five year old Ukrainian whose face wore a perpetual mask of mourning for the loss of his beloved Republic. He was an angry, disputative man who had cultivated tolerably civil relations with Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He and Ceaușescu detested each other. Were it not for the fact that Shcherbytsky’s Embassy – he had commandeered the old Soviet Embassy with a gang of refugee ex-Red Army men, of whom there had been several thousand in and around the capital by early last year – regularly greased the palms of senior Party members with gold and silver, and since the summer had secured the release of military supplies, both ancient and new from allegedly ‘abandoned stockpiles’ in the ‘dead zones’, Shcherbytsky would have been ignored, imprisoned or simply disappeared long ago. Shcherbytsky described what was left of his ‘Mother Country’ as a ‘country in name only’. He had claimed the squabbling regions beyond the Ural Mountains and in Siberia were ‘like the wild west’. Shcherbytsky had painted himself as a mobster cashing in on the chaos and publicly backed Krasnaya Zarya as the ‘best defence against the West moving in and taking over’.
Nicolae Ceaușescu wanted to put his head in his hands; he and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had been seduced by the possibility that fate had dealt their small, forgotten backwater of a nation a winning hand in the global geopolitical game. For a blink of an eye they had been the heirs to the Romans for whom their country was named; and truly dared to believe that it might conceivably be their destiny to carve out a new empire from the ruins of the surrounding lands. Offering support and bases of operation for the surviving units of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet and Krasnaya Zarya had unexpectedly given them a stack of chips in the great game. Secure in the delusion that they had the power to turn off the oxygen of men and materiel to Red Dawn at a time of their own choosing, they had dreamed of gaining a bridgehead in both the western and eastern camps. Only days ago it had seemed as if their time had come. If they seized the moment and beheaded the Troika, what stood between them and immortality? Romania might yet be more than the aggressively neutral Switzerland of the Black Sea, it might be something great. Bucharest might become the capital of a new Roman Empire...
Except it had all now gone terribly wrong. Krasnaya Zarya had infiltrated and split the regime so badly that only the loyalty of the Securitate – bought at an extortionately high price largely with Shcherbytsky’s money – had enabled Gheorghe and Ceaușescu to cling onto power. And then the missiles had started to fly again...
“What the fuck is going on?”
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky’s savage interrogative hit Nicolae Ceaușescu like a slap in the face.
Contrary to what the members of the Troika had been led to believe at Otopeni Air Base no action had been taken against their entourage other than the enforced confinement of its members to a dingy run down hotel several blocks from where Ceaușescu now sat. The shooting had been for dramatic effect. The Soviet ‘delegation’ had been rounded up and a couple of Securitates had shot up the corridors of the bunker to intimidate the Troika. Ceaușescu’s loyal troops and the Securitate had had enough to do hunting down and liquidating Krasnaya Zarya activists without getting into a major fire fight at Otopeni. Ceaușescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had correctly anticipated that elements of the former Soviet forces that had sought sanctuary in Romania after the Cuban Missiles War would react badly to a clamp down on Krasnaya Zarya; neither of them had contemplated all out civil war erupting in the southern and eastern regions, and around the strategically vital port city of Constanta on the east coast.
But then they had not known at the time that the ‘former Soviet forces’ in their country were just the advanced guard of the whole fucking Red Army!
Ceaușescu was still struggling to come to terms with just how quickly everything had gone wrong. His ongoing bewilderment – and temptation to go into denial - was fogging his mind at exactly the moment he needed to be most alert.
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky was shouting abuse at him.
“Operations against counter-revolutionary elements continue, Comrade Ambassador,” Ceaușescu parroted lamely.
“You bastards wouldn’t recognise a fucking counter-revolutionary,” thundered the irate Ukrainian, “if he pissed in your face!”
Nicolae Ceaușescu winced.
“Comrade Gheorghiu-Dej has not been well and mistakes have been made,” he said hurriedly.
“What the fuck have you done with my people?”
Until a couple of hours ago the Soviet Embassy had been surrounded by a cordon of heavily armed Securitate troopers backed up with half-a-dozen tanks. All telephone lines had been cut and access into and out of the compound around the building blocked. It was symptomatic of the disintegration of the Party’s control of the city that somebody had, somehow, contrived to restore the Embassy’s communications with the outside World.
There was a loud banging on the door of Ceaușescu’s office. Before he could say a word a harassed Securitate officer ran in and slapped a message sheet on his blotter.
Two Soviet cruisers were shelling Constanta...
Two Soviet cruisers and a battleship!
Volodymyr Vasylyovych Shcherbytsky cursed.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, er, yes...” Nicolae Ceaușescu muttered. “Your people have been in protective custody since their arrival in Romania due to the unrest in the country following the irresponsible actions of your clients in the Krasnaya Zarya movement, Comrade Ambassador.”
That was it; the accusation he had never planned to voice. A taboo on a par with mentioning Stalin’s Gulag.
“I want to speak to Kosygin.”
“That’s not possible at this time...”
“I want to speak to Alexei Nikolayevich before my Government decides to drop a fucking great big bomb on your rat-faced head!”
“What, I...” Like most powerful men accustomed to being surrounded by subordinates he could cow into humiliating submission with a casual raising of an eyebrow or the utterance of a single, inoffensive word, Nicolae Ceaușescu, had no stomach for being on the receiving end of similar, or in this case, much worse medicine. He literally did not know how to deal with it. “How dare you threaten me...”
“Nobody’s threatening you!” Shcherbytsky raged. “The bombers are probably already in the air, you stupid little shit!”
“The bombers?” Ceaușescu queried, icy fingers exploring his spine with very sharp finger nails. He had heard gunfire in the streets about an hour ago, now he heard it again, much closer. Small arms fire interrupted sporadically with what sounded like an anti-aircraft cannon blazing off short bursts. His advisors had discounted the reports of Krasnaya Zarya armoured columns heading for the capital from the east and south, it was too incredible.
The neatly typed Securitate transcripts of the interrogation of Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, the so-called Commissar of the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti – the KGB – of the Provisional Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics lay partially read on his desk.
He dropped the handset of the phone back onto its rests, cutting off Shcherbytsky’s ranting.