The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

  ‘We were at a dinner party last week, and the butler refused to serve one of the other guests! Claimed she was Jewish – he had somehow found out her maiden name was Goldstein. Afterwards our hostess said she couldn’t sack him because he knew things about her.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘She didn’t say. My guess is she’s part-Jewish too.’

  ‘Why do you put up with it, Kurt?’

  Kurt shook his head. He reached down and chucked Caroline’s chin. ‘What choice do I have?’

  ‘Can’t you resign?’

  ‘And then what would I do?’ He sighed. ‘I’ve always hated things that are unfair, even as a child. Especially as a child – I drove my parents mad. That’s why I became a lawyer, to sort out all the unfair stuff. And it’s why I became a socialist. Society is unfair. It’s not fair that some people are rich and powerful and some people are poor and starving. At university I learned how to phrase all this in terms of jurisprudence and justice, but, basically, it’s just not fair. It’s wrong.’

  ‘And yet you ended up working for a Nazi government,’ I said.

  Kurt gave me half a smile. ‘There are some little things I can do.’

  I understood. ‘What do you have to tell me?’

  ‘You remember how you passed on my message about your friend Cyril Ashcott in Paris?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I have a similar request. Once again, I would rather you didn’t tell your husband if you can. From what I know of your current ambassador, he will want to squash what I have to say. Ideally, you should find a way of getting my message directly to the right people in London.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to do that. It would depend on the nature of the message, but I would find a way.

  ‘This may shock you. It certainly shocked me. It’s about a country that I know is close to both our hearts.’

  ‘France?’

  ‘No.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘Russia.’

  Forty

  Bernadette, the French babysitter, was due to look after Caroline that afternoon anyway, so I was able to visit the Stabi, as the Staatsbibliothek was affectionately known by those who toiled in her. I had become interested in the nineteenth-century writer Heinrich von Kleist, who had sought solace from a life plan he had drawn up for himself at the age of twenty-one, but from which he had diverged when he had shot himself and his terminally ill girlfriend at the age of thirty-four. I found him fascinating, and his stories wonderful. I had ordered up a biography and a couple of pieces of literary criticism.

  I had difficulty concentrating on the words as I turned the pages, one pencil lying across the other on my desk, waiting for Kay to stroll past and spot the signal. My habitual desk was located in one of the many crannies off the large octagonal central reading room, which, while partially hidden, was easy for Kay to pass naturally.

  She didn’t come in every day, but she usually visited the library two or three times a week to check on me. Presumably there were other spies she dealt with in Berlin other than just me. I probably had equivalents from other countries – France, maybe, or America.

  She strolled past my desk shortly after four. She took a book out from a nearby shelf, and ten minutes later she replaced it. I waited ten minutes and then removed the same book. Inside, I found a scrap of paper with two numbers. I subtracted three from the first number to get that day’s date, and added six to the second number to get eight. Eight o’clock at her flat that evening.

  Roland and I were due to see Coriolanus as the guest of an official in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Shakespeare had always been popular in Germany, and in recent years Coriolanus had become the Nazis’ favourite play. All those opportunities for Roman salutes.

  I telephoned Roland at the Chancery to tell him that I couldn’t come because I would be out with a friend from the American Women’s Club, and bribed Bernadette to babysit Caroline. Kay had suggested that I join the Women’s Club – there were also a small number of British women members – as a cover for making her acquaintance. They gave occasional literary talks, which I found interesting, as well as the odd concert. I left the teas and bridge to others.

  Roland wasn’t happy about me chucking him and his Nazi friend at such short notice, but I told him that was the kind of diplomatic incident he was qualified to deal with. Inconsistency and unpredictability were still my watchwords in my dealings with him.

  At five past seven I set off on my roundabout route to Kreuzberg, as certain as I could be that I wasn’t being followed.

  * * *

  ‘What have you got for me?’ asked Kay.

  ‘Russia and Germany are in talks about an alliance.’

  ‘What?’ Kay frowned. ‘You’re kidding me, Emma. The Russians are negotiating with the British and the French, you know that. Comrade Stalin’s greatest enemy is Hitler. Who told you this?’

  ‘Kurt Lohmüller. He was a second secretary at the German Embassy in Paris. Now he works for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. He’s reliable. He’s also upset. He can’t believe that the Soviet Union would ally with Germany.’

  ‘And why does that upset him? Because he’s a Nazi?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think he’s a communist. He’s certainly a socialist. That’s why we know each other. That’s why I trust him.’

  ‘OK,’ said Kay. ‘I’m sure there’s nothing in this, but I’m going to have to report it to Moscow. Give me the details.’

  So I told her what Kurt had told me. That Litvinov, Russia’s Jewish and profoundly anti-Fascist foreign minister, had been sacked at the beginning of May and replaced by Molotov. That Molotov had severe doubts about an alliance with France and Britain, but seemed to like the idea of cooperation with Germany. That the German government believed that they could persuade the Russians to look the other way when they invaded Poland, in return for the Russians helping themselves to Polish territory and maybe the Baltic States.

  ‘How advanced are these talks?’ Kay asked.

  ‘They are just at the initial stages, Kurt says.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Hitler doing a deal with Stalin,’ said Kay.

  ‘It bothers me more that Stalin would even contemplate doing a deal with Hitler. I mean, Nazi Germany is the enemy! You live here. You see what they do to the Jews. And the communists. They are evil, so much more evil than the capitalist West. The idea that the Soviet Union would overlook Fascist crimes just for a chunk of other countries’ territory fills me with disgust. As it does Kurt. That’s why he told me. He wants me to tell the British government.’

  I remembered Kristallnacht. I remembered that boy watching the crowd of thugs kick his mother and his grandfather on the ground.

  It was easy enough to hate Fascism when reading The Times in the library at Chaddington. But it was impossible not to loathe Fascism when living in Berlin. It was bad for the British to negotiate with Hitler. For the Russians to do so was to betray the whole point of communism.

  ‘I’ll check with Moscow first whether you should,’ said Kay. ‘If there’s nothing in this rumour, they may not want you to confuse the British.’

  I had known this would have been Kay’s response.

  ‘I think I’ll do what Kurt asked.’

  ‘You can’t,’ said Kay. ‘Not without Moscow’s permission. It’s impossible for you or me to have the big picture. We’re individual agents. For world socialism to succeed, there must be discipline. Discipline from people like the both of us.’

  ‘If it’s true, if the Soviets are doing a deal with the Nazis, then Moscow won’t give me permission.’

  ‘Of course it’s not true. I strongly advise you do as instructed. Otherwise, Moscow may have to enforce discipline.’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  Kay had become a good friend over the last seven months. I trusted her. We had been through a lot together: both loving and then losing Hugh, my using her flat as a rendezvous with Lothar in Paris, a
nd now these sessions where I discussed with her what I had heard from Roland and the diplomatic circuit, and where I passed on the occasional film of documents I had photographed for developing. I didn’t trust Kay in the same way I had trusted Lothar. It was more that, despite our very different backgrounds, I saw in her a kindred spirit.

  ‘I don’t want to threaten you, Emma. But I do need to tell you about consequences. This is just baloney.’

  ‘Is it?’

  I looked directly at Kay.

  ‘Is it?’ I repeated.

  Kay didn’t answer. She was thinking. Hard.

  ‘Can you contact Lothar somehow?’ I said. ‘Ask him what he thinks?’

  Kay swallowed. ‘Lothar’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  Kay got up and went to a cupboard next to her empty bookshelf. She extracted a bottle of vodka, grabbed two glasses, and filled each.

  She knocked hers back in one. She winced. ‘I learned that in Moscow.’

  ‘At spy school?’

  ‘Spy university.’

  ‘So what about Lothar?’ I said, sipping my own vodka and wincing. I was unused to neat spirits.

  Kay collapsed into her armchair, holding on to her glass.

  ‘You know he was recalled to Moscow last September?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He wasn’t the first. He told me three other NKVD illegals that he knew of had been recalled over the previous year. And they had all been arrested when they returned. Lothar knew one of them had been shot for sure; he suspected they all had.’

  ‘Yet he went anyway?’

  Kay sighed and took a gulp of vodka. ‘I tried to persuade him not to go. But he said they were his orders. He had always put his own life behind the cause, and he wasn’t going to change now. He said he knew that one day he would die for world communism.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous! Why would they execute him anyway?’

  ‘Comrade Stalin is sore. You may have read about the show trials of the last few years? Zinoviev, Kamenev, other Trotskyites, the generals? Well, there was a parallel purge of the NKVD. Those are the people you and I work for – the Comintern is nothing any more. There were a couple of executions in Paris when I was there: Trotsky’s son went into a White Russian hospital with appendicitis and never came out, and another guy was found floating in the Seine. Without his head. Stalin is convinced they were all planning to overthrow him, helped by the British. That was why I have been asking you all year for evidence that the British secret service is conspiring against the Politburo. That’s all Moscow is interested in these days.’

  ‘But there’s nothing there! I keep telling you!’

  ‘And I keep telling them. But they don’t believe me. And they don’t believe you. Some of them think you are a double agent working for the British.’

  ‘That’s insane!’

  ‘It sure is,’ said Kay, staring into her glass.

  ‘Will they recall you?’ I asked. And execute you too, I could have added.

  ‘They might. I’m hoping that I’m too unimportant for them to notice. But telling them what you’ve just told me won’t help.’

  ‘My source is a good one,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes. I know that.’

  A thought struck me. ‘Do you know Kurt?”

  Kay hesitated, and then nodded.

  ‘In the same way you know me?’

  Kay nodded again. ‘You put us on to him. I made contact and Lothar recruited him. Lothar handled him in Paris, and I’ve taken over handling him here in Berlin.’

  I had known that Kurt had communist sympathies, but I hadn’t realized they were that strong. As strong as mine.

  ‘And did he tell you about the Soviet–German talks?’

  ‘No,’ said Kay. ‘No, he didn’t. Which poses its own problems.’

  ‘You mean because he told me rather than you?’

  ‘Precisely. It suggests he doesn’t trust us any more. Which is hardly surprising if the Soviets really are in secret negotiations with the Nazis.’

  ‘I trusted you,’ I said. But there was regret in my voice. Perhaps I had made a mistake. Had I got Kurt into trouble with the Russians?

  But Kay smiled. ‘You did. And I trust you. We both trusted Lothar. But Moscow? I’m not so sure.’

  She looked up at me. ‘I had heard about these talks from another source. Not Kurt. I’ve already told Moscow and they denied it. They suggested my other source was a double agent spreading disinformation.’

  I considered this. ‘If you tell them that Kurt warned me of these talks, they are not going to be happy, are they? With any of us?’

  ‘No,’ said Kay. ‘I was thinking that. They will say that you are lying. They’ll say that Kurt has turned to the British by talking to you. And they might decide that I’m working for the British, just because that’s the way they think. And then they will recall me to Moscow and it will all be over.’

  She exhaled. ‘I need another drink. Want one?’

  She topped up our glasses. My head was beginning to feel woozy – from the vodka, and from what Kay was telling me.

  ‘You know,’ she said. ‘I’m beginning to believe it might be best not to tell Moscow any of this. What do you think?’

  ‘I think that sounds about right,’ I said carefully.

  We were silent. I was trying to make sense of what I had just heard. Lothar’s recall to Moscow to be executed. Kurt working for the Russians just like me. The mistrust that the people in charge in Moscow felt towards all of us: me, Lothar, Kay, Kurt. That made me angry. We were all putting our lives on the line for the cause of the international proletariat, and this was how they thanked us. With distrust. With death.

  ‘It might be true, mightn’t it?’ I said, quietly.

  ‘That the Soviets are speaking to the Nazis? Who knows?’ She sighed. ‘Yes, it might be true.’

  ‘At least Hugh didn’t see any of this.’

  Kay winced. An unexpected tear leaked from her left eye. I was surprised; Kay didn’t seem the weeping type. I reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘You miss him, don’t you?’

  Kay put her hand to her mouth. ‘It’s not that. I do, but it’s not that.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Hugh knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘Knew that the Russians were not to be trusted.’

  ‘Then why did he decide to spy for them?’

  ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I haven’t been straight with you, Emma,’ Kay said. ‘Hugh didn’t work for us.’

  She blinked.

  ‘He wasn’t a Russian spy.’

  Forty-One

  I stared at her blankly. That didn’t make any sense. The whole point was that Hugh was a Russian spy. That he had agreed to work for Lothar. That that was why he had denied his communism to me and his friends.

  That was why he had been killed.

  That was why I had agreed to spy for the Comintern for the last three years.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘I recruited Hugh. I told you that, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It wasn’t easy, but I persuaded him. I had gotten to know him on that Moscow trip, and he was very taken with the Soviet Union. But he had second thoughts: I think Dick had gotten to him. Dick had a professor at Oxford who was from the Ukraine and told him baloney about famines and the Russians locking up counter-revolutionaries. At least, I thought it was baloney then. But Hugh believed him. And he was reluctant to betray his country.’

  I listened. It was possible.

  ‘So he told me and Lothar he wanted out. He tried to persuade me that I should stop working for Lothar too, but I refused. I was angry with him; we were both angry with each other. Hugh had just asked me to marry him, like I told you, but after he decided to back out, it was over between us. The irony is, a few days later the British killed him anyway.’

  She winced. ‘I wish we had had a cha
nce to make up before he died. Although I’m not sure we ever would have.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’ I demanded. ‘I would never have started working for you if you had told me.’

  ‘I know,’ Kay said. ‘That was exactly why I didn’t tell you. I’m a spy. I lie. I lie all the time.’ She looked at me with regret.

  I felt an intense surge of fury rise up in my chest. Fury that I had been led to believe a lie about my brother. Fury that when I thought I was walking in his footsteps, he had actually turned around and faced the other way. Fury that Kay hadn’t told me any of this, had manipulated me shamelessly. And Hugh, probably. No doubt she had been sent on that Intourist trip to Moscow to entrap promising young Englishmen, and Hugh had been her victim.

  Kay opened up her hands and shrugged. ‘You know why I lied to you. What’s stranger is that I’m telling you the truth now.’

  The anger evaporated, or rather it retired, waiting for a new target. Yes, I had been misled. But so had Kay. Both of us had been misused, drawn to betray our countries on the basis of false promises. As had Lothar. Who was now dead.

  Hugh had seen sense, right at the end.

  I had a thought. ‘Was it the Russians who killed Hugh? When they realized he wasn’t going to spy for them?’

  ‘No,’ said Kay. ‘It was the British. Lothar told me.’

  ‘And you trust him?’

  ‘Yes, I trust him. He and I were very close.’

  I understood. Oddly, my first response was a flash of jealousy: Lothar was an attractive man, and he had earned my trust. Then suspicion: had she been Lothar’s lover and Hugh’s at the same time?

  Kay read my expression. ‘It was in Paris. Just for a few months and just before he was recalled. I barely knew Lothar when Hugh and I were together.’

  Everything was falling apart. Everything.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ I said.

  Kay picked up the bottle of vodka. ‘We deal with it the Russian way. We get plastered.’

  * * *

  I didn’t get home till after midnight.