Laugh of the Hyenas

by Ivan Roussetzki

  Without a moment’s hesitation, he grabbed the flask, looked around and saw that no one was looking, and took a long pull of brandy. Helen nodded. “Keep it,” she offered.

  He slipped the flask into his tattered coat pocket before any of the other guards noticed. As Jean Lopié had predicted, flirting with the border guard and offering him a valuable gift distracted him from inspecting her forged documents too closely.

  After the guard returned her passport, his gaze again slowly drifted downward to the outline of her breasts beneath her sweater. “Thank you, Mademoiselle Noverman. Have a safe journey. Welcome to Bulgaria.” Then he slammed the train compartment door shut.

  

  As the train chugged through the snowy countryside, Helen pushed down the sinking feeling left in her stomach from another bad dream. She wondered if the nightmare about her father would ever stop.

  To clear her head, Helen focused on her new mission in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria: spying for the French and British Secret Service. Her false identity of a German middle-class widow working as a language teacher had passed the first test—getting by the Bulgarian border guard. She had already made arrangements to rent a modest apartment in central Sofia, so now another new life based on a lie was about to begin. Helen watched a man and woman with a young girl walking just beyond the railroad tracks, and for some reason, they reminded her of her dead parents—God rest their souls—and her own childhood memories came flooding back.

  

  At the turn of the century, Helen’s parents, Gisela Schmidt and Gunter Noverman, emigrated with their parents from the German town of Baden-Baden to America. Both families settled in downtown Brooklyn, New York, in a neighborhood filled mostly with Poles, Germans, and Italians.

  Helen’s father’s family was Jewish. They opened and operated a prosperous clothing business in lower Manhattan that manufactured military uniforms. Her mother’s family was Catholic. They owned a clothing store in Brooklyn that specialized in wedding gowns. Years later, Helen’s parents met and were married in Brooklyn’s St. Agnes Church. They brought Helen up in a cultured world of music, art, and literature, where she learned to speak German and French as easily as she spoke English.

  When the New York stock market crashed in 1929, their American dream shattered into a hundred pieces. Like so many who had lost their businesses, homes and nearly all of their money, Helen’s parents decided to return to Europe to start over. They sold their gold wedding rings and what jewelry they had left and bought three passages on a freighter bound for Hamburg, Germany. From Hamburg, they took a train to Berlin. Helen was thirteen years old when she left the United States, completely unaware of developing events in the world that would change her life forever.

  By 1931, Helen was once again happily attending school and studying hard while her parents built a new business selling cosmetics, gloves and other luxury items that women in high society craved. At the same time, her father held the post of Second Secretary in the Old Democratic Party, fighting against the rising tide of repression that was sweeping into Germany at an alarming rate.

  He often told her, “Helen, liberty is like bread. You must make it fresh every day.” But her newly adopted country had a cancer growing inside it in the form of Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party, both of whom denounced the democratic ideals that her father and his party stood for.

  Then, on February 27, 1933, the Nazis secretly set fire to the Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin. Hitler claimed that communists and members of the opposing bourgeois parties had set the fire to incite riots and chaos. Next, at a giant Nazi rally before thousands of supporters and soldiers waving flags with swastikas, Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag as an excuse to begin a brutal and bloody campaign of terror on those people he viewed as his political enemies.

  Within hours of Hitler’s speech, hundreds of people had been arrested and carted off to prison. That evening, as though he knew that a catastrophe was at hand, Helen’s father hastily sent her and her mother to stay with their cousins in Baden-Baden.

  Two agonizing weeks later, Otto Halder, another member of the Old Democratic Party, showed up at their cousin’s house and told Helen and her mother the sad story.

  “The Gestapo came to your house early the next morning and arrested Gunter. They threw him into a black car, took him to Gestapo headquarters at Prinnz-Albrecht Strasse 8, then beat and interrogated him for days. The Nazis wanted him to testify against other members of the Old Democratic Party and to accuse them of plotting against Hitler. When he refused and revealed nothing, the Gestapo sent him to Moabit Prison.”

  Otto paused and wiped flecks of white spittle that had collected at the corners of his mouth.

  “In that hellhole, guards kill people for pure pleasure. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the bastards took him to a basement cell…I never saw him again.” He shook his head. “If your Gunter had not sent the two of you here, well…”

  Helen and her mother bowed their heads and began to cry.

  “I was lucky,” he finally said. “I was being transferred to another prison when I managed to escape.”

  He paused again, this time to take a deep breath.

  “Your father is a hero,” Otto said to Helen as he took her trembling hand. “We know that he revealed nothing to the Nazis. We will not forget his bravery. Before they took him, Gunter insisted that if I got away, I would tell you and your mother to go to Paris. He said it was your only hope.”

  Stunned that she would never see her father again, and realizing that she and her mother were now homeless, Helen wiped her eyes and whispered to Otto, “I will avenge him. I swear to God, I will.” By that evening, she and her mother were on their way to Paris.

  The journey to Paris had been slow and difficult. Dazed and half asleep, Helen sat up on the cold bench in Paris’s Grand Railroad Station that had been her bed for the night. She heard the sounds of the jarring train whistles and steel wheels scraping on the tracks like fingernails on a school chalkboard. It took her a moment to remember that she and her mother had just arrived in France and that she would never see her father again. Tears streamed down Helen’s face.

  Their life in Paris quickly settled into a miserable existence, but it was especially bad for Helen’s mother. She found a job in a laundry, and for days on end they barely saw one another. Helen’s mother came home to their squalid, windowless basement flat so exhausted from the awful working conditions that she coughed all night. By the end of 1934, her health had deteriorated to the point that she needed Helen’s help simply to get out of bed. Without her mother working, they became desperate for money. But Helen was determined to live, and to make someone pay for her misery.

  Revenge and the struggle for survival can lead people to depths into which they might not otherwise descend. In Helen’s case, she learned that men would pay for the pleasure of touching her young body. She was pretty and they wanted her, so why not do what comes natural and make some money at the same time?

  Soon Helen was working along with other prostitutes in the neighborhood where she and her mother lived. In an odd way, Helen enjoyed the special attention she got from the men, and the money paid their bills. Meanwhile, her mother drifted in and out of consciousness, but she never asked Helen how she earned enough money to keep them alive.

  Her mother’s life ended in a fit of painful coughing on a cold, rainy night in April. Helen cried over her body until dawn. Later the next day, the local priest and Helen accompanied her mother to her grave in the tiny Cimetière St-Vincent in Montmartre. Sunlight glinted off the cold ground as two dark-skinned gypsy gravediggers lowered the cheap wooden coffin that held her mother’s emaciated body into a shallow hole scooped out of the unyielding earth. They hurried to cover the box with soil because they didn’t expect to get anything extra for their efforts. Likewise, the priest said no more than ten words before he left the gloomy place. All Helen wanted to do was run away, find
somewhere warm, and hide, but instead she stood beside her mother’s grave and cried. She didn’t remember exactly what she did after leaving the cemetery, but that night at home alone, Helen renewed her vow to make the Third Reich pay for turning her life into a nightmare.

  

  The train’s screeching brakes and harsh whistle signaled her arrival in a dreary Sofia. Her heart ached for Jean and Paris, but both were behind her now. She had to focus on her new assignment in this small but busy capital. Special Operations in London ordered Helen to locate key industrial, military or government people in Bulgaria and extract secret military information from them. Given the gravity of events throughout North Africa, Italy and parts of Europe, Bulgaria seemed of little value to Germany, and even less to the Allies. But orders were orders.

  Helen was in a city full of strangers, enemies and danger. As she stepped off the train and walked among the other passengers, she had to remind herself to be brave, recognizing that her time in Bulgaria presented another opportunity to avenge the deaths of her mother and father. With those thoughts in mind, she blended into the crowd and began her new life as a German language teacher and spy, living in Sofia, Bulgaria.

  CHAPTER 5

  Soon after Helen settled into her teaching position at the girl’s school, she was ordered to look into the possibility of recruiting Dr. Manol Belevski, a prominent medical doctor living in Sofia. Dr. Belevski was a professor at the Bulgarian Medical Academy and the Chief of Surgery in the General Military Hospital in Sofia. What interested British Intelligence was that he also ran a private clinic where he treated German and Bulgarian military officers, several high-placed government officials, and their families.

  Dr. Belevski was considered one of Europe’s top brain surgeons and was famous for his innovative surgical procedures. A series of successful brain operations in Germany, Austria, and France added to his international prestige. He had written many articles for journals and frequently spoke at medical conferences, where his speeches earned him enormous popularity—and envy—in the medical community.

  Helen wanted to find out more about Dr. Belevski’s patients. Who were they? What were their positions? What secrets—military or personal—might they be privy to? And hopefully, what were their areas of weakness that she might use against them?

  Her first step was to get inside his office and photograph the contents of his appointment book. Helen made an 8 a.m. appointment on a Monday morning but arrived an hour early so that no other patients were in the waiting room. She stood at the reception desk where she could see the doctor’s appointment book—upside down. A matronly nurse at the reception desk grumbled that the doctor wouldn’t arrive for another 45 minutes.

  “I’m in no hurry,” Helen said, “but I have a terrible headache. Would you be ever so kind as to bring me two aspirin and a glass of water?”

  The nurse frowned, looked her over, was about to say something but then changed her mind, and marched down the hall to another room in the rear of the office. The instant the nurse was out of sight, Helen pulled from her coat pocket a palm-size Minox camera, leaned over her desk, and turned the doctor’s appointment book toward her. The two open pages were filled from top to bottom with names.

  She flipped the pages, snapping photos of dozens of appointments. The nurse’s footsteps echoed from down the hall, getting closer and closer. With little more than seconds to spare, Helen calmly returned the book to its original pages and turned it around. When the nurse rounded the corner, she stopped and stared at Helen standing beside the desk. The nurse said nothing, but her suspicious gaze fell to Helen’s hands tucked into her pockets. The nurse handed her the glass of water and aspirin.

  “Thank you. Oh my goodness, I just remembered something I must do right now. Please excuse me. I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”

  The clinic was popular in Sofia because of Dr. Belevski’s reputation and nontraditional methods of treating certain illnesses and maladies. He didn’t hide the fact that he used ancient Chinese massage, unusual medical procedures, and natural drugs in his practice. Dr. Belevski’s clinic was a fashionable place to seek a cure for just about anything, but only for those who could afford to pay his high fees.

  Helen developed the miniature camera’s film and was astonished to find that Dr. Belevski’s patients included generals, diplomats, government leaders, and even a German intelligence officer working undercover in Bulgaria. He had far more potential contacts than she had ever dreamed, and she was sure that her photographic evidence was more than enough to get final approval for an operation that included the good doctor. Helen had no idea of his sexual appetite or his political leanings, but his access to important people made him an excellent potential source of military intelligence.

  The following morning, Helen sat in Dr. Belevski’s clinic waiting room. This time there were two well-dressed women in their mid-thirties reeking of French perfume. Their polished nails, modern hairstyles, diamond earrings, and expensive clothes immediately conveyed that they were from Bulgaria’s upper class. Occupying the seats just to Helen’s right, they seemed to barely notice her. Helen made it a point not to attract any undue attention. She wore a black dress that covered her like a nun’s habit. The wide brimmed hat hid her hair and cast a long shadow on her face so that no one would take notice of her looks. As she sat waiting for her turn with the doctor, Helen listened carefully to their conversation.

  “My stupid husband,” one of the women complained in Bulgarian. “He nearly ruined his career by arguing with one of his superiors in the Berlin Embassy.

  “Really,” the other said. “What did he do?”

  “I warned him about drinking too much at those diplomatic parties, but as usual, he had one too many glasses of vodka. Then, like an idiot, he told some officer that Bulgarian soldiers would never fight against the Russians if Germany invaded Russia.”

  “Oh dear! Then what happened?”

  “The fool lost his position in the German Embassy and we got reassigned here,” she moaned. “God I miss the Berlin nightlife!”

  What Helen had heard shocked her. Was it true that Germany was planning to invade Russia? Of course, there had been rumors, but had Hitler truly lost his mind? Did the Germans consider that if the Bulgarian Army were ordered to fight the Russians, they might refuse? Did this mean that the Germans did not trust Bulgaria’s Czar Boris?

  Although Helen could only guess at the usefulness of what she had just overheard, she memorized the conversation so she could write it down after her appointment. Jean told her that her job was to collect information—British Intelligence experts would analyze it.

  The nurse’s stern voice interrupted her thoughts. “Helen Noverman,” she barked. “Complete this medical form before you see the doctor.”

  Helen took the paper without looking up. The form asked for confidential information, such as past medical problems. Helen quickly realized that if she could see the forms of Dr. Belevski’s more influential patients, she might be able to find some useful information with which to blackmail them. Helen was good at sniffing out potentially dirty laundry, and she knew that the inside of the doctor’s filing cabinets offered a treasure trove of intelligence about some of Bulgaria’s elite and their German friends.

  Dr. Manol Belevski appeared at the door of the waiting room holding a file. He glanced at the contents and peered over his wire-rimmed glasses, looking for his next patient. Helen thought that his longish brown hair, laced with strands of gray, trimmed mustache and goatee, and stocky build made him look more like a college professor than an acclaimed medical doctor.

  “Mademoiselle Noverman? Please come in,” he said. As she entered a dimly lit examination room, Dr. Belevski pointed to a sheer white dressing gown hanging over a Chinese screen. “Please put that on and lay face down on this table. I want you to be comfortable.”

  Belevski read silently from her medical form and glanced at her body as she lay there waiting. Helen worried about what might happe
n if this famous doctor saw through her fake illness. But she was excited, too, because she was a step closer to completing her mission for British Intelligence.

  “So what brings you here today?” Dr. Belevski asked.

  “I’m prone to terrible headaches, Dr. Belevski,” she said. “I’ve been told that you are a genius and that you can make pain disappear.”

  Dr. Belevski smiled at the compliment. His strong hands lay on her back. He pressed his fingers gently along her spine. He was a perfect gentleman while he rubbed and massaged her head, neck, back, buttock, thighs, calves, the soles of her feet—even tugging each of her toes until she heard her knuckles crack.

  “This method for relieving migraine headaches is based on an ancient Chinese treatment that uses physical manipulation to relieve tension and special herbs that will help you relax.”

  He let his fingers lightly float over the contours of her body.

  “Please turn over onto your back and we shall continue. My goodness!” he said. “That’s a rather nasty looking scar you have on your forearm.”

  “I cut it several months ago trying to open a stubborn window,” Helen offered her prepared answer.

  “I see,” he said. Dr. Belevski wondered if the wound was self-inflicted.

  He brushed his hands across Helen’s soft white stomach and dug his fingers deeper into the shallow indentation in her skin where her lower abdomen met the inner part of her thighs. Helen’s heartbeat quickened and she felt a warm sensation creep into her groin. He was right when he said that his massaging might release tension. Helen wondered if Dr. Belevski would have liked to go beyond his special ancient Chinese therapy. Perhaps, but for the moment he kept his hands where they were as Helen silently planned how best to pry into his patients’ private lives.