Red Sky at Noon (The Moscow Trilogy)

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  III

  Consul Malamore was furious: Fabiana was gone, and the village was in utter chaos. Accompanied by his adjutant and some of his scouts, he had ridden into Radzillovo at dawn, looking forward to calling on her in the Red Cross tent.

  He felt he was making progress. She was shocked by the death of the milksop husband – a terrible soldier and not much better as a man – but war always sorted the strong from the weak; and so it had been with Ippolito Bacigalupe, removed so easily in his first skirmish. That was war and Fabiana would soon recover. She was tough and self-reliant, the sort of beautiful Italian woman he wanted to retire with; he would sire her children and those children would rule a new Aryan empire in the sun. He had been at war for a long time and he was weary; this would be his last fight. He was not short of girls. He had an apple-cheeked Russian girl back in Kharkov. But Fabiana of course was different. Hitler’s victory was now so close, just weeks away. If we secure the Don and Stalingrad, he told himself, the Russians will collapse and retreat behind the Urals, and then I can hang up my boots.

  As he rode into the village, he was dreaming of buying a vast farm in the rich black earth of southern Russia, like a soldier-settler of the Roman Empire. The Russian peasants would work like slaves on the soil; and he would ride across the golden acres of corn on his black stallion with Fabiana on her palomino, and sometimes he would rest his hand on the amber-coloured skin of her arm …

  Instead, as he and his men came to a halt, horsemen were galloping in with reports from east and west and God knew where, and Italian soldiers were running back and forth, some were even weeping, shots were being fired out into the steppe, horses were being saddled, Kalmyks were unpacking ammo boxes from their camels – and when they saw Malamore, they all froze. And here was Major di Montefalcone with his flabby oval face sobbing like a girl – yes, like a girl, for Christ’s sake!

  ‘She’s gone, consul, she’s gone. The prisoner took her!’ Montefalcone patted his eyes with his handkerchief.

  ‘I see that,’ said Malamore, dismounting. ‘But who is he?’

  ‘A Russian. We thought he was Schuma but he wasn’t. He must have been one of the partisans.’

  A flash of murderous fury electrified Malamore but he ground it between his teeth. ‘Get on the phone to the Schuma and find out. Then we hunt them and we catch them. And when we do, she belongs to me.’

  ‘Si, si, signore.’

  Malamore scowled at him. These aristocrats lacked Fascist passion; the day would come when he and his fellow Fascists would have to line them up against a wall – but there was more to it than that. He did not like the way Montefalcone was looking at him and he knew why the major was doing it. If the person who’d been kidnapped had not been a girl, if it had not been Fabiana, would they be going to all this trouble, taking this risk?

  ‘Just obey your orders, Montefalcone. Are you riding out with us?’

  ‘Me? If you wish it,’ said Montefalcone.

  ‘The prisoner’s escape was on your watch, major. It’s your responsibility.’

  ‘Understood, consul.’ He turned to his batman. ‘Jacopo, bring out Caruso.’

  Malamore swung up on to his stallion, Borgia, motioning to his squadron of Cossacks and Kalmyk scouts to follow. He took out a thin cigar and one of the Kalmyks lit it for him.

  ‘He forced her?’ he asked Montefalcone, running the scenario through in his mind.

  ‘Surely he forced her.’

  ‘Surely? Madonna santa, Montefalcone, give me firm answers.’

  ‘Yes. At gunpoint. What Italian girl would ride off with an Ivan? Yes, at gunpoint.’

  ‘But the horse? How did he get that?’

  ‘He must have threatened her with a knife?’

  ‘Who gave him a knife?’

  ‘Maybe it was one of the surgical instruments.’

  ‘Guns?’

  ‘He just grabbed what he could.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  ‘Isn’t your arsenal guarded according to regulations?’

  ‘Well, yes. But not every minute …’

  ‘You bungler,’ growled Malamore. Christ, these aristocrats were no good for anything.

  Now that he was sure that Fabiana was his woman, he had to know if she was a traitor. If she’d crossed the line, he’d have to deal with it … There’d been a girl in Abyssinia, a long-limbed, dark-skinned gazelle, who’d betrayed the Italians and he hadn’t hesitated – he’d dealt with her himself. But then she was a native, an African, while Fabiana was Italian. But still … He raised his bushy eyebrows and ran his hands over his face.

  ‘Jacopo saw them, he saw the prisoner hit her.’ Montefalcone was still babbling.

  ‘Grazie a Dio,’ said Malamore, breathing a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God.’ She was still his girl, a good Italian, his future wife.

  ‘When the men spotted them and opened fire, the Ivan grabbed her reins and pointed his gun at her. She had no choice.’

  ‘Then all is clear,’ said Malamore. When he rescued her, she would belong to him, Fabiana would know that, and there’d be no more stupid mistakes. He turned Borgia. ‘Let’s go,’ he shouted to his posse of men.

  ‘Si, signore! What vehicles do you require?’ asked Montefalcone.

  ‘This is horse country. We ride out now. Catch us up, Montefalcone,’ and he spurred Borgia towards the east and clattered out of the village, with his Italian men in their black shirts, the Kalmyks on their bony ponies, followed by the Cossacks in their German uniforms, the steel of their spurs catching the morning rays.

  Montefalcone mounted Caruso and followed Malamore’s men through the dust, his eyes burning. He too was thinking about Fabiana. She was forced, of course she was. He wiped his forehead, his head pounding. And yet he did wonder why she had her horse with her, why she had changed out of her white nurse’s uniform, and why so many weapons had gone missing.

  He sighed. There was nothing as unpredictable as women – whatever Malamore said.

  IV

  Martha Peshkova wore her favourite lilac scent and the dress copied from American Vogue magazine by Cleopatra Fishman for her first date with the handsomest young man in Moscow. He was Sergo Beria, who could not have been more different in looks from his father. If anything, Martha thought, he resembled the swashbuckling film star Errol Flynn with his slim figure, his thick black hair, his elegant pencil-thin moustache and his well-cut uniform. He was eighteen; she was sixteen, and too young to go out to the Aragvi Restaurant so he had invited her to a lunchtime feast at his house.

  Beria was the only Soviet leader to live in a mansion right in the middle of Moscow; most of the leaders, such as Molotov and Satinov, lived in the grand apartment block on Granovsky. But Beria was special. Sergo’s father worked so hard that he barely returned to eat or sleep, so it was his mother, Nino, a pretty blonde woman, and also a Georgian, who served Martha and Sergo a Georgian supra in the kitchen of the heavily guarded house.

  Martha watched Sergo carefully. She knew that his father was in charge of the dark realm of power, the Organs and the Camps. She was acquainted with this world because an earlier secret police chief, Yagoda, had been in love with her mother Timosha and had openly pursued his passion under the nose of her father, in front of her father-in-law Gorky, right there in his famous mansion. But Yagoda had been tried and shot before the war; and his successor Yezhov had also been sacked and had vanished, almost certainly shot too. Then Beria had been appointed, and it was clear that he was a much more impressive leader, intimately trusted by Stalin himself. Still, Martha had grown up in this carnivorous milieu and even though she was so young, she knew its dangers. Her friend Svetlana was kind but she was still a princess who liked to get her own way in all things, while Vasily Stalin was a vicious goblin, a budding Caligula, a future Nero. Martha’s mother, Timosha, had told her again and again: ‘Marthochka, don’t marry into the Berias. That man Beria is … Don’t ask but I know things. Just don’t!’ But
Martha had argued with her: ‘Mama, Sergo isn’t like his father. Really he’s a sweet and decent person.’

  But there was already one fly in the ointment. Someone else was also in love with Sergo Beria: her friend Svetlana Stalina. Martha knew that, when she was a little girl visiting the seaside in Georgia, where they had been guarded by Beria, Svetlana had fallen for Sergo. But now Sveta was infatuated with her screenwriter Lev Shapiro and she had quite forgotten about Sergo. So, surely, the coast was clear …

  After the Georgian feast, cooked by Nino herself, of khachapuri, a sort of pizza, lobio bean soup, mtsvadi and spicy pkhali, Sergo said, ‘Mama, I’m going to take Martha for a walk. Marthochka, shall we stroll?’

  ‘I’d love that …’ said Martha.

  It was a hot afternoon in Moscow as they walked through the battered streets. They came from similar worlds, attended the same schools, knew the same people – the Stalins, the Mikoyans, the Satinovs. They had to be careful but they could speak with some honesty to each other. So naturally as they strolled around Moscow, through the Alexandrovsky Gardens beside the Kremlin, around the Patriarchy Pond, up Tverskaya (now renamed Gorky Street, for Martha’s grandfather), they chatted in a way that was possible only for the tiniest coterie of young people. Sergo knew everything – how the Germans were about to burst across the Don and push for Stalingrad, how it was even possible that they might reach Stalin’s city and how the Red Army would fight to the death there, street by street, factory by factory – so when he asked after Svetlana, Martha hesitated and then told him all about her passion for Lev Shapiro.

  ‘I’m so glad for her,’ said Sergo, lighting up a Herzegovina Flor for himself and for Martha. ‘She must be so lonely in the Kremlin. So lonely. How lovely that she has someone. We all need someone.’

  ‘We do,’ agreed Martha. ‘But promise me, don’t tell a soul about Sveta. She told me in strictest confidence, no one else must know …’

  V

  Benya and Fabiana had ridden their horses through a stream and were now headed back the way they had come. Benya was no tracker but, like so many Russians, he had read The Last of the Mohicans and wondered if there had ever been a mounted Jewish scout before! He remembered that Prince Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s lover, had created a regiment of Jewish cavalry, the Israelovsky, but the Prince de Ligne had written that Jews couldn’t ride – they looked like ‘monkeys on horseback’. Well, it’s true Jews aren’t born horsemen; we are scholars not soldiers, and now I am trying to be both – just to live another day, he thought.

  Benya knew nothing about the countryside he was riding through except the books he’d read – And Quiet Flows the Don by Sholokhov and Babel’s Red Cavalry – and what the Cossacks had taught him. Where were his friends now? Were they even alive? Had they joined the Hitlerites? Not Panka, perhaps, but Prishchepa, light-footed and thoughtless as a wolf cub, could change his path like the flick of his whip. Knowing the Kalmyks would be tracking them, Benya assessed their position. It was not good. As the adrenalin thinned in his veins, he started to become more and more afraid. And Fabiana’s presence just made things worse. Then he remembered Panka telling him, ‘This is a big country, you’ve got to stretch yourself just to keep up with it, you’ve got to hear its voice,’ and he understood that he had to expand his plans to match its cunning, its expanse. He guessed their pursuers would presume he would head eastwards towards the Russian lines, so decided to take a more roundabout way to safety.

  After an hour of riding, they heard horsemen. They stopped, dismounted, and Benya unhitched his Papasha and pulled the horses into the high grass. A group of men, silhouetted over the marsh grass, were riding towards Shepilovka, the Schuma headquarters. Of course, he calculated, the Italians from Fabiana’s command had guessed he would be heading east and had decided to ride into Shepilovka to try and find out who he really was. This was good and bad; good because it gave him more time, but bad because if they recruited any of the auxiliaries or Germans there, the end – if they got him – would be a terrible one.

  Malamore and Montefalcone were riding towards the Schuma headquarters at Shepilovka as Montefalcone started to sing a love song in a strong tenor.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Malamore, and they rode on in silence.

  As they rode into Shepilovka, they heard the clucking of poultry, the nuzzing of camels, and tuneless soused yelling – even though it was mid-afternoon.

  The Schuma and Cossacks, many glassy-eyed, shirtless and reeking of alcohol, brandishing sabres and Schmeissers, came out into the street when they heard the horsemen clatter in.

  Two long gallows of swaying bodies with placards saying ‘Partisan’ had been placed on the green; one of them a woman. Not all of the men wore Red Army green, Malamore noticed. A couple were Cossacks in German uniforms with placards that read: ‘Double agent’. The Schuma were hanging their own people too.

  The Italians halted and stared. The gallows creaked like the rigging of an old sailing ship. ‘Take a look at that!’ said Malamore. There was nothing he loathed more than an unruly unit and these people were dangerous clowns.

  Montefalcone peered around him as if he was in the last circle of Dante’s Inferno.

  The new commander, Bron Kaminsky, now apparently calling himself an SS-Brigadeführer, was drinking with his crew of renegades. His shirt was wide open, chest like his face, a sunburned puce. Malamore could tell that he wasn’t too impressed with the Italians as he showed them to a chair.

  ‘Brigadeführer, was the partisan one of your prisoners?’ Malamore asked Kaminsky through his interpreter after he had recounted the bare essentials of how the wounded prisoner had escaped. They were in the handsome single-storey house commandeered by Kaminsky. Once owned by a well-off farmer, it had been converted into a mess room, and cheese and bread and tomatoes were spread on one table, half eaten. Bottles of vodka and local moonshine and boxes of Pervitin tablets were on another. A rack of weapons, mainly German but some Russian, had been stacked nearby.

  Kaminsky was half cut and high. ‘I don’t know,’ he drawled. ‘We just held a trial. We found two traitors in my outfit, and we hanged them. Over there.’

  ‘I’m more interested in the prisoner we lost.’ Malamore’s nostrils flared with distaste. Kaminsky called in a short garishly over-made-up girl in a German tunic and jodhpurs that did nothing for her sturdy legs.

  ‘Do we know anything about an escaped Russian prisoner?’

  ‘Yes, Brigadeführer,’ said the girl, who had a Schmeisser over her shoulder, ‘one of our prisoners got away after the ambush that killed Colonel Mandryka.’

  ‘How did he get away? And who was he?’ demanded Malamore.

  ‘Our doctor knows all about him.’

  ‘Get the doctor,’ ordered Kaminsky.

  A man was brought in, a sober and sensible professional; Malamore was somewhat relieved to find a sane person in this madhouse. Dapper in his German tunic with Red Cross armbands and riding boots, his handsome intelligence radiated from his lineless face.

  ‘Dr Kapto knew Colonel Mandryka at school,’ the woman explained in her nasal drone. She told the doctor the story of the escaped Russian partisan who had taken an Italian nurse as a hostage or human shield.

  ‘Yes, it’s probably him,’ Dr Kapto agreed. ‘After Mandryka’s funeral, one prisoner got out and I saw him ride off. I raised the alarm, got off a couple of shots but … it was dark.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Golden. He was a prisoner in the Gulags, a Shtrafnik who took part in the Mandryka ambush.’ It was only now that Malamore noticed the little girl who stood close beside the doctor’s legs, almost hiding in the skirts of his tunic, watching them all with the big, deep haunted eyes of a child who had seen the rottenness of the world in all its intricacies. She had a bandage on her leg and a ripped dress.

  He was about to ask who she was and what the hell she was doing here when Montefalcone, patting the sweat from his face and his upper lip, said, ‘Sir, le
t’s get out of here.’

  For once, Malamore agreed with him. ‘Thanks for your help,’ he said to Kaminsky. ‘Will you let me know if they come this way?’

  ‘He’s a Jew,’ said the woman with the stout legs.

  ‘Who is?’ asked Malamore.

  ‘Golden, the Soviet partisan who’s taken your nurse,’ said the woman. ‘A Jew has taken your nurse.’

  VI

  Fabiana was swaying in the saddle. It was early evening, and the sky was a turquoise blue strewn with crimson-lit clouds. As the sun set, they looked at each other, eyes like sleepwalkers, surprised to be alive. The horses were labouring; Socks had been unhappy for a while, fretting, ears back. She tripped in a marmot hole and lost her footing, and Benya had got down to check her fetlock, but they were lucky, nothing broken. Yet he knew if they went on much further, they would destroy the horses.

  ‘We must stop. Here.’ They’d arrived at a farmer’s cottage that seemed abandoned.

  Fabiana dismounted first, stiffly, staggering a little as she hit the ground. ‘I’ll water the horses if you check the house.’

  Papasha levelled, Benya walked through the cottage. It was empty. There was running water from a well in the copse, and Fabiana tried to lead Silver Socks but the horse stiffened and wouldn’t go with her.

  ‘Leave her, I’ll take her,’ Benya said. Together they poured water over their horses who snorted and threw back their heads. Silver Socks stamped her hooves impatiently.

  ‘Eh! Damned horse,’ muttered Benya. ‘Don’t I look after you all right? Don’t I spoil you?’

  Fabiana got the food out of the saddlebags and the two of them sat beside the horses and silently ate the Italian rations of smoked meat, black bread, army biscuit, dried cherries and sunflower seeds. There were two beehives by the well and they scraped out the honey with pieces of wood to get to the wads of honeycomb.