by Alan Furst
My God, Ilya thought, I’m talking to Sascha Vonets.
He lurched forward, face lit by recognition. Opened his mouth to speak. Sascha’s hand shot across the table and Ilya felt a rough finger pressed briefly against his lips in a plea for silence. Ilya was caught with admiration. Sascha didn’t miss a beat-“inspired by the Great Leader”-as he pointed back and forth to the far wall and his right ear. Ilya nodded his complicity. The camp commandant was evidently making sure that nobody said the wrong thing. The interrogation room had been cleverly constructed within a maze of administrative offices, essentially three partitions built against an exterior wall. It was windowless, as all interrogation facilities were supposed to be; one wanted to avoid even the implicit suggestion that the prisoner had any way out of the difficulties in which he found himself. The camp commandant, Ilya realized, would likely have some flunky sitting next to one of the walls and taking verbatim notes in shorthand.
Sascha, having wound up his introductory remarks, now began the recitation of a poem entitled “Red Banners,” a reference to the NKVD medal of honor that could never be worn in public. This poem was, apparently, a personal contribution to the war effort. From the first stanza it became clear to Ilya that it was to be a kind of modern epic, an inspirational hymn of praise to the security services:
Arise!
O patriots of the shadows-
who do not see the flight of cranes,
whose red banners fly in darkness only-
we salute you!
It went on for quite some time, stern images of struggle and heroism marching forward in a grand parade. Then, as he ended the recitation, Sascha came around the table and thrust two slips of paper into the front of Ilya’s uniform jacket. When he moved away and sat down again, Ilya slowly exhaled the breath he’d been holding. Up close, the smell of mildew and stale sweat had nearly gagged him.
“Might one ask, comrade Captain, your opinion of my humble poem?”
“Laudable,” Ilya said. “I will certainly inform the appropriate agencies of the existence of this work, you may depend on it.”
“Thank you, comrade Major.”
“Thank you, 503775. You are dismissed.”
Sascha stood. For one instant his eyes were naked, and Ilya saw the truth of the eight years he had spent in the camps. Then the man drew back inside himself, his eyes dulled, and he became again a clerk in a Kolyma gold-mining facility.
Ilya found himself wanting desperately to reassure him, to offer at least a gesture of human fellowship, and so patted the place where the slips of paper rested over his heart. Sascha closed his eyes in a silent gesture of gratitude and bowed his head, then turned and left the room, his dragged leg scraping softly over the floorboards.
Before Ilya could be alone to read the letters, there was a great deal to be gotten through: a formal meeting with the camp NKVD officer, followed by a painfully formal exchange of “confidences” with the camp commandant’s principal assistant, during which Ilya made sure to communicate his great satisfaction with all he’d found. Followed in turn by an endless, vodka-sodden dinner given in his honor by the commandant and attended by senior staff and their wives. He was seated next to a fat, red-faced woman with merry eyes, stuffed into a gown from the 1920 s, who rested a hand on his thigh beneath the table and leaned against his shoulder. “You are eating breast of wolf,” she giggled in his ear, “is it not delectable?”
At long last, late at night, he was returned to the two-car train that sat chuffing idly on the rail spur that serviced Camp 782 and took its gold away. He entered his private compartment-in an old boxcar that rode high over its cast-iron wheels-and told his adjutant he did not wish to be disturbed, then turned up the flame on an oil lamp that lit the rough wooden interior of the car.
He felt the first shudder of motion a few minutes later when, as the couplings clanged, the train slowly began to make way. Outside, the endless snowfields shone white and empty in the darkness, and the slow, steam-driven rhythm of the engine sharpened the sense of being lost in vastness.
The first letter was scrawled-apparently written in great haste: Ilya Goldman: I observed you entering the camp this morning and realized that we have known one another. If I have not been able to approach you, I will identify myself as Colonel A. Y. Vonets-Sascha. We met briefly while serving in Spain in 1936.In March of 1943, a man named Semmers came to this camp, sentenced under Article 38(Anti-Soviet Statement). He told me of a conspiracy known as BF 825 that existed among the Brotherhood Front of 1934 in the training facility on Arbat Street. He claimed to have been approached by Drazen Kulic, and that others were involved, including Josef Voluta, Khristo Stoianev and yourself. Semmers attempted to escape in March of this year, was discovered, and shot.I will inform no one of your complicity in this conspiracy as long as you undertake two actions on my behalf: (1) The accompanying letter is for Josef Voluta, I believe that you are able to transmit it to him. (2) Within the next sixty days, I must be transferred to Camp 209, in Belgorod-Dnestrovskij at the mouth of the Dniester on the Black Sea. I know you have the ability to do this within the labor camp administration. If you choose not to do it, or to reveal these communications, I will inform local NKVD of the existence of BF 825, and your participation within it. Forgive me, Ilya. I will not live out another year in this place.
The second letter did not have a heading and was printed in tiny letters crammed together on a small slip of brown paper: On 12 April I will be in the Romanian village at Sfintu Gheorghe, on the southern arm of the Dunaarea, where it empties into the Black Sea. I have extraordinarily valuable information for Western intelligence services. The information is recorded in a document I will carry, but it is usable only with my personal assistance. For example, the agent known as ANDRES (Avram Roubenis) was murdered in Paris in 1937 with a slow-acting poison clandestinely administered in a cafe at the direction of Col. V I. Kolodny, of the Paris rezidentura. The above is one item among many hundred. I will remain in Sfintu Gheorghe from April 12 on-until I am discovered or betrayed. I will then confess to the BF 825 plot and all else I know. Signed: An NKVD Colonel. Ilya sat back and stared at his reflection in the dark window. He saw a taut, colorless face above the green NKVD uniform. By inference, he pieced together what he took to be Sascha’s intentions. The mouth of the Dniester was less than a hundred miles from the Romanian delta of the Dunaarea-the Danube. Since the surrender, converted ore steamers moved constantly back and forth between the two areas, sailing empty into Romania, returning with wheat, vegetables, horses, and God knew what else. Sascha intended to escape from the camp, then he meant to stow away on a Black Sea steamer that left from Odessa and called at Belgorod, where a chemical works was being built by Gulag labor. He would hide aboard the ship at Belgorod, then disembark secretly at Izmail, the Soviet port on the Danube, after which he would make his way to Sfintu Gheorghe-nominally in the nation of Romania, but in fact a part of the ancient region known as Bessarabia, a remote corner of the world, so lost as to be nearly unknown.
If the letter were delivered to Voluta, he would use the NOV apparatus to move the letter to a Western intelligence service, and Sascha believed he would be exfiltrated from the little fishing village of Sfintu Gheorghe. The letter had to go to Voluta because Sascha was aware that Voluta knew him personally and that he, as well as other members of the BF 825 conspiracy, were in a position to confirm his value to the Western services.
It was, in its own way, a reasonably clever plan. Escape from a camp in the Kolyma was nearly impossible-the land itself was a prison. And no Allied intelligence service would want to attempt this sort of covert action in the country of a nominal ally, thus Sascha had placed responsibility on himself for leaving Russian soil. Romania, on the other hand, was in a condition of political flux that might facilitate an operation to remove a desirable asset.
But, Ilya realized, years of training and practical experience said no. The scheme had virtually no chance of success: too many steps, too many assu
mptions, a blind thrust from a doomed man. In effect, it sentenced Sascha to death and, once he escaped from Belgorod and someone checked on how he came to be transferred there in the first place, sentenced Ilya Goldman to death as well.
Unless by April 12, Ilya thought, listening to the slow beat of the wheels, I am somewhere else.
But if the exfiltration scheme was wishful thinking, the part of the plot that touched him was close to perfect. Considered objectively, Sascha Vonets had built a fine trap. In it, Ilya realized, he could move in only one direction; there were no exits along the way and, at the end, it sent him where he wanted to go. The white face in the window smiled ruefully. Truly, you couldn’t ask for a better trap than that.
Christmas, Rozhdyestvo, was no longer a holy day in the Soviet Union, yet somehow, on the night of December 24, the duty roster at the Fourth Division of the Sixth Directorate was seriously depleted. The inspector general’s central bureau in Moscow was on Ulyanovskaya Street, in a turn-of-the-century building with vast marble hallways that had once housed the czar’s Corn Tax apparat. Ilya Goldman was very nearly alone in the building on Christmas Eve-most of the senior officers seemed to be down with the flu or engaged in important business outside the office. Perhaps, Ilya thought, they were engaged in the surveillance of Dedushka Moroz, Father Frost, as he visited children on the night before Christmas. In any event, Captain Ilya Goldman was a Jew and, as such, found it productive not to have the flu or important business elsewhere on Christmas Eve, and had volunteered to work a double shift and assume the responsibility of night duty officer.
He dug away at his paperwork until a little after midnight, then strolled down the corridor to the office of Major General Lyuzhenko, whose chief responsibility was the suppression of the occasional uprising within the camp populations. He’d chosen Lyuzhenko, a particularly nasty brute with a savage temper, rather carefully, for the man was, in Ilya’s scheme of things, about to commit the single honorable act of his life. One could, when the fat was in the fire, hear him all over the seventh floor-screaming on the telephone, cursing, almost weeping with rage.
Lyuzhenko had locked his office door, but to Captain Goldman, trained as he was by the NKVD, that did not present a serious problem. Ilya turned on the office lights and rummaged through the files until he found a packet of transfer forms. He put one in Lyuzhenko’s secretary’s typewriter and filled it out, making all the proper marks in the appropriate boxes. Under the heading Reason for Transfer he wrote: “By order of Major General Lyuzhenko.” That had been reason enough in the past, it would be now. He found a letter signed by the general, slid it beneath the transfer and traced out the signature, using a pen from the desk drawer. He turned off the lights, locked up the office, and proceeded down the hall, collecting three countersignatures in precisely the same manner in three other offices. He then deposited the transfer in the Action box on the desk of the commanding officer’s secretary and Sascha Vonets was on his way to Belgorod-Dnestrovskij. How quickly, Ilya thought, the Soviet bureaucracy could move when it wanted to.
He left the building, walking along Ulyanovskaya Street for several blocks, then turning north toward one of the buildings given over to the Ministries of Transport (Internal). The door guard, seeing his NKVD uniform, let him in without question. Who knew what business these people might be about, even on what used to be Christmas Eve.
The hallways of this particular ministry were even grander than his own, and each floor had its own cleaning lady, traditional Russian babas in kerchiefs who spent the long night down on their knees with buckets of soapy water and hard brushes, rubbing away at the heelmarks of the previous day’s boots. On the third floor, Ilya walked carefully along the wet marble, his footsteps echoing down the empty corridor. He found the third-floor cleaning lady just outside an office door marked Bureau of Streetcar Maintenance-Assistant to the Deputy Director. She was all in black, large breasts swaying within an old cotton dress as she scrubbed, humming to herself, absorbed in this work that would go on night after night, apparently forever.
She saw him approach and stand before her but took no notice of him, he was just another pair of boots. When he handed her a slip of brown paper with tiny printing crammed on one side and the coded name of an addressee on the other she took no notice of that either, simply tucked it away somewhere inside her dress with one hand while scrubbing away with the other.
Back on Ulyanovskaya Street, Ilya walked slowly toward his office. The night was icy cold and clear, a million stars overhead.
At 6:30 on the morning of December 25, Natalya Federova, a cleaner at the offices of the Ministries of Transport, waited at the Usacheva tram station for the number 26 trolley, which would take her back to the flat she shared with her daughter and son-in-law and their children. By coincidence, her sister’s husband, Pavel, took this same route, and six days a week they greeted each other as she got on the trolley to go home and he got off to go to his job. It was snowing lightly, a fine, dry snow of the sort that often went on for days.
The trolley was twenty minutes late, but Natalya waited patiently with the other night workers heading home, all of them standing quietly in the falling snow. When the trolley finally did arrive, Pavel was among the last to get off, so they kissed hurriedly and he murmured a salutation-Shrozedestvrom Kristovim, Christ is born-by her ear as their cheeks brushed. He clasped her hand warmly for a moment, then tucked the slip of brown paper away in the pocket of his infantryman’s coat. He had lost an eye in the fighting at Stalingrad and wore three ranks of medals on his chest.
The brief greeting kept her from being early on the tram, so she had to stand for the hour-and-a-half ride back to her flat. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and gazed pensively out the windows at the passing city, looking forward to the dinner she would have with her sister and Pavel that night. She planned to bake a Christmas bread for the occasion. It would have to be made without eggs, sadly, and raisins were out of the question, but Pavel had received a little packet of powdered sugar at his job, so there would be something sweet for the Christmas meal.
A few minutes before seven, Pavel arrived at the Usacheva Street offices of the temporary Belgian mission, where he worked as a porter. Humming to himself, he took out the garbage cans-the big, dented one with food scraps and other “wet materials” would be picked up by a garbage truck. The small wooden one, “dry materials,” was mostly office waste, paper trash of all sorts generated by the night shift of communications clerks at the mission, and it was picked up by two men in a black car who never spoke to him.
Next, he made a round of the mission offices, making sure the ashtrays were clean and emptying the pencil sharpener shavings into a piece of newspaper. The tiny office at the end of the hall was used by a junior diplomat-a devout Catholic, the grandson of Polish immigrants to Belgium-and after Pavel emptied his pencil shavings on the paper he left him a little something in return: a slip of brown paper, folded once, inserted in the barrel of the pencil sharpener before the canister was wiggled back into place and left upside down, a signal that the mailman had visited.
On January 10, a Canadian war correspondent was driven west from Moscow to the suburbs of Warsaw, to be on hand when Marshal Zhukov’s First White Russian Front, accompanied by units of the Lublin Polish Army, marched in to take official control of the city. Zhukov’s divisions had been waiting across the Vistula since August of 1944, while the Polish Home Army under General Bor fought it out in the streets and sewers of Warsaw with Hitler’s Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division. Some quarter of a million Polish partizans had died in the fighting-only occasionally supplied by the Russians. Thus there would be no resistance from the Poles when the Lublin Army, representing the Polish Communist party, took over the administration of the country. The Canadian reporter was entertained on the night of January 15 by a group of Zhukov’s aides. There was great good fellowship and many toasts were drunk. As a cold sun rose on the morning of the sixteenth, the correspondent walk
ed down to the Vistula and stared out at the haze of gray smoke hanging over the burnt-out city. When he returned to the old manor house that served as Zhukov’s headquarters, the little slip of brown paper had been removed from the bottom of his sleeping bag. He was glad to see it go. The tiny Cyrillic printing had been beyond his ability to read, but he’d taken special care of the thing while it was in his possession. These little “favors” he did for his Belgian friend made him nervous, but in return he was sometimes permitted to send solid background material off to Canada in the Belgian diplomatic pouch, thus evading the heavy-handed Russian censorship. The newspaper was delighted with these transmissions, spread the material about to protect their source, and had advanced him three pay grades since August. He was glad of that, for he was very much a man who wanted to do well at his work. Josef Voluta had returned to Occupied Poland in the summer of 1944, along with two other members of NOV, the Polish Nationalist group made up of loosely affiliated army officers and Roman Catholic priests. They had been ordered to Warsaw to be on hand when their country returned to life but, instead, had witnessed its death.
By the end of July, the Poles could virtually taste freedom. July or August, that was the prevailing view. Pessimists spoke in favor of October. The German troops were giving ground, retreating from occupied territory throughout Eastern Europe, leaving behind terrified colonies of German “settlers” put in place by Hitler to bring civilization to the “barbarian” lands he had conquered.
By July 31, even the pessimists were heard whistling on the streets. The First Byelorussian Front under Rokossovsky was ten miles from Warsaw, but Hitler could not seem to bear the thought of losing his beloved Poland-his first conquest by force of arms, his first amour. NOV intelligence nets photographed the arrival of the SS Viking and Totenkopf divisions, the Hermann Goring Division, and the 19 th Panzer Brigade. They were the best-the worst-that Hitler could bring to bear.