Berlin Red (11 page)

‘Inspector?' whispered Major Kirov.

Pekkala was sitting at his desk. With unseeing eyes, he stared at the wall, a look of fixed intensity anchored to his face. His hands lay flat among the dusty white rings of mug stains on the woodwork of the desk, like someone who has just felt the ground shake beneath his feet.

Kirov was careful not to get too close. He had seen this phenomenon before. The Inspector was not asleep. Instead, he had travelled deep inside the catacombs of his mind, leaving behind all but the shell of his body.

When these trances overcame Pekkala, it was important to wake the man gently. Kirov had learned never to jostle him out from this state of waking dreams. The first time he had tried this, the Inspector exploded into movement and Kirov found himself staring down the barrel of Pekkala's Webley revolver. He had drawn the weapon from its holster with a speed Kirov had never seen before in the Inspector, or in anyone else, for that matter. There had been many times since, when, in the carrying-out of their duties, Kirov had watched Pekkala unholster the Webley and, although the Inspector was quick, the pace of his conscious movements was nothing like the speed with which this savagery erupted from his self-hypnotic state.

‘Inspector?' Kirov called again. He stood well back from the desk, edged in behind the wheezy iron stove they used to heat their office on Pitnikov Street. ‘Inspector, you must wake up. We are wanted at the Kremlin.' The call had come in only a few minutes before, ordering them to appear. Whenever Kirov had to listen to Poskrebychev, and especially over the phone, he always had the impression that he was being barked at by a small and irritating dog. Flinching involuntarily as he listened to Stalin's secretary relay the Kremlin's order, Kirov had glanced at the Inspector, unable to comprehend how the man could sleep through the clattering of the telephone bell, followed by the muffled ranting of Poskrebychev through the receiver.

After a few more attempts at trying to wake the Inspector with only the murmuring of his voice, Kirov removed an onion from a basket where he kept whatever food they had on hand. Removing a knife from his desk drawer, he sliced up the onion and placed it in an iron frying pan, along with a splat of butter, which he stored, wrapped in a handkerchief, on the sill outside the window, where the Russian winter kept it frozen solid.

Resting the pan on the flat surface of the stove, which had almost consumed its daily ration of wood, it was not long before the onions began to sizzle and the room soon filled with their aroma.

Almost imperceptibly, one of Pekkala's hands twitched. Then his fingers began to move, as if, in his unconscious state, the Inspector was playing out a tune upon some ghostly piano.

Sharply, Pekkala breathed in a breath. He blinked rapidly, as the focus returned to his eyes.

‘Where were you?' Kirov asked.

Pekkala shook his head, as if he could no longer recall, but the truth was he remembered perfectly. It was simply too complicated to explain.

He had been in St Petersburg, strolling with Lilya along the Morskaya and Nevsky Prospekts. They had stopped to buy chocolate at Conradi's, before going to see a play at the Théâtre Michel. And afterwards, they went for a drink at the Hôtel d'Europe, where the bartender was a man from Kentucky.

These things had never happened. They belonged to a parallel world in which he had never been separated from her, and there had never been a Revolution, and a bank robber named Joseph Dzhugashvili had not murdered his way to the Kremlin, from which he ruled under the name he gave himself – Stalin – Man of Steel.

Only in moments of great stillness, such as that quiet afternoon on Pitnikov Street, could Pekkala glimpse that other life he might have lived.

Sometimes, in that trance of overwhelming memory, he would reach out, as if to pull himself into that second world, only to watch that fragile loophole disappear when sounds or smells or the touch of his well-meaning assistant intruded, and he would find himself once more a prisoner of flesh and bone.

But this time it was different. Although Pekkala had long since resigned himself to the fact that those two paths – the one he had taken and the one he might have done – were never going to converge, still they both had a role to play, in this world if not in the other.

At the outset of her days in exile, Lilya Simonova had clung to every detail of the time she had spent with Pekkala.

But the more time that went by, the more difficult it became. The memories began, very slowly, to fracture. It was as if she had found herself in a room full of broken mirrors and even if she could have glued every shard back into its place, the image could never be properly restored.

Eventually, instead of trying to remember, she did all she could to forget. It was either that, or lose her sanity completely.

But some of them refused to fade away, especially in those moments just before she fell asleep at night, when no amount of concentration could force the memories back into the darkness. The most vivid and tenacious of these were the legends he had told her of the place where he came from.

Pekkala had grown up in the lake region of eastern Finland, not far from the town of Lappeenranta. His father had been born there, and knew the waterways and forest trails as well as if they’d been the creases on his palm. But Pekkala’s mother was a Sami, from the northernmost reaches of Lapland. It was from her that Pekkala had learned the stories which he then passed on to Lilya, as they walked the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo in those first weeks of their acquaintance.

He would meet her at the stone wall after she had locked up the schoolhouse for the day. Then they would walk to the yellow stone house known as the Bath Pavilion, or else they would make their way to the Lyceum garden, where the statue of Pushkin cast his brooding shadow on the ground.

But under the spell of Pekkala’s stories, Lilya barely noticed her surroundings.

He told her of the time when, as a child, he had gone to visit his mother’s family in the north and, after a three-day journey, arrived to find the men of the village on the point of setting out to hunt a bear. The beast had only recently emerged from hibernation and had already killed three calves from the reindeer herd on which the village relied, not only for food but for clothing.

So sacred was the bear that no one dared to speak its name. Instead, they just called him by a word which meant ‘the Walker in the Woods’.

The animal was tracked to its lair and brought down with spears tipped with bone from the reindeer it had killed. Then its corpse was tied to a V-shaped trellis made from birch trees and dragged back to the village. That night, meat from the bear was cooked over a fire made from the same trellis used to haul him in.

The taste of it, Pekkala told her, was rank and sour and, when no one was looking, he spat it back into the fire, where the fat burned with a flame like polished brass.

The next morning, the bear was buried in a hole as deep as the bear had been tall and even though the animal had been cut to pieces for the feast, his bones were now arranged in exactly the way he had carried them in life.

The place where they buried the bear was at the edge of a grove of trees where the People of the Twilight lived. But there were no houses to mark their property or any sign at all that they were there. The name of this tribe was the Sajvva, and they lived in a parallel world, making themselves known only when they had to. They were said to be tall and beautiful, and their skin appeared to radiate a glow like that of polished wood. The Sajvva lived much as Pekkala’s people did, catching their own fish from the lakes and tending their own herds of reindeer. These animals they did not share. Only the bear lived in both of their worlds; serving as an emissary between the Twilight World and that of men. They buried his bones with respect, not only for the animal itself but for the Sajvva who considered him a friend.

In time, when he was ready, the Walker would rise up from his grave and piece his body back together, bone by bone, until he was himself again, so he could carry on his ceaseless wandering between the worlds of gods and men.

He had told her that story one evening as they stood at the edge of the Façade Pond, with the Alexander Palace at their backs. The palace had been lit up and the moon had just risen above the trees, casting its mercury light across the still water.

‘What strange names they have for things up there,’ Lilya had remarked.

‘They would have a name for you as well,’ Pekkala told her.

She turned to him, smiling. ‘Oh, really?’ she asked. ‘And what name would that be?’

‘They would call you,’ he began, and then he paused.

‘Yes?’

‘Your name’, said Pekkala, ‘would be “She Whose Hair Glows Softly in the Moonlight”.’

Even though the words had just rolled off his tongue, there was something both ancient and haunting about them, as if the name had been waiting for her much longer than she’d waited for the name.

The last thing she heard of Pekkala, after the Revolution drove them apart, was that he had been sent to the labour camp of Borodok, in the valley of Krasnagolyana. As years passed, and only silence reached her from the forests of Siberia, she began to wonder if Pekkala was still alive.

At times like that, she would return to the stories he had told her, until it seemed to her that Pekkala had transformed into the Walker in the Woods, striding through the veil between the worlds of gods and men with no more effort than a sigh.

And then she would not worry any more.

While he waited for Pekkala to arrive, Professor Swift sat in a chair across from Stalin’s desk, nervously fingering his gold Dunhill lighter. In the other hand, he held an unlit cigarette, which he was desperate to smoke but did not dare to do in Stalin’s presence. Although Swift was well aware of Stalin’s tobacco habit, he had been warned by his station commander not to light up before the Boss himself saw fit to fill the room with smoke.

Stalin seemed to know this. Balanced between his yellowed fingertips was one of the many Markov cigarettes he puffed away each morning, often switching to a pipe come afternoon. He tapped the stubby white stick upon the leather blotter of his desk, letting it slide up between his fingers before turning it around and tapping it back down the other way.

‘Pekkala appears to be late,’ remarked Swift.

Stalin responded with a grunt.

Another minute passed.

Swift could feel perspiration sticking the shirt to his back. ‘Perhaps I should come back later,’ he suggested.

Stalin fixed him with emotionless yellow-green eyes.

‘Perhaps not,’ Swift corrected himself.

From the outer office an irregular clatter of typewriter keys, which seemed to pause now and then, as if the typist – that little bald man with a shifty expression – were listening for any words that passed between them.

Just when Swift was about to flee from the premises, he heard voices in the outer office. ‘Thank God,’ he muttered.

The doors to Stalin’s study opened.

Poskrebychev swung into the room, his hands touching both door knobs, which caused his arms to spread as if he were some large featherless bird in the moment before it took flight.

Pekkala and Kirov followed on his heels.

Swift was struck by the air of lethal efficiency these two men seemed to exude. He, himself, felt clumsily unprepared. The pretence of his job as sub-director of the Royal Agricultural Trade Commission was, by now, nothing more than an afterthought. The Soviets seemed to have known exactly who he was before he even arrived in the country and the charade that SOE’s concern for agent Christophe was purely humanitarian had also crumbled to dust. He felt like a man in a poker game who had bet everything on a bluff, only to realise that he’d been showing his cards all along.

On seeing Pekkala walk into the room, Stalin’s whole demeanour seemed to change. He smiled. The stiffness went out of his shoulders. He wedged the cigarette between his lips and lit it with a wooden match which he struck against a heavy brass ashtray already crowded with that morning’s crumpled stubs. ‘You are going to Berlin!’ he announced. ‘I hear it’s very nice this time of year.’

‘And me?’ asked Kirov.

‘You as well,’ confirmed Stalin, ‘along with a guide who will lead you to a safe house in the city. There, you will meet agent Christophe and bring her back across the Russian lines to safety.’

‘Who runs the safe house?’ asked Pekkala.

‘We do,’ answered Swift. Before continuing, he paused to light a cigarette, flooding his lungs with smoke. ‘It belongs to one of our contact agents, who is employed at the Hungarian Embassy.’

‘You will be provided with papers’, explained Stalin, ‘indicating that you are Hungarian businessmen who have been stranded in the city by the bombing and are staying with a member of the embassy until you are able to leave Berlin.’

‘Neither of us speaks Hungarian,’ said Kirov.

‘And nor, in all likelihood, will any policeman who stops and asks for your papers,’ answered Swift. ‘The contact has been told to expect you. If the police check with him, he will verify your story. There is one other thing.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘We have just learned from an informant in the German Security Service that Hitler has assigned a detective, a former member of the Berlin police, to root out a spy whom Hitler is convinced is operating from within his own headquarters. It’s possible that they are closing in on Christophe, so the sooner you can get her out of there, the better.’

‘A detective?’ asked Pekkala. ‘But surely they have a Security Service protecting the headquarters?’

‘Indeed they do,’ confirmed Swift. ‘It is headed up by a former Munich policeman named Rattenhuber.’

‘Why not use him?’ asked Kirov.

‘Hitler no longer knows whom to trust,’ Swift explained. ‘That’s why he chose someone from the outside: an old comrade of his from the Great War.’

‘Who is this man?’ asked Stalin.

‘His name is Leopold Hunyadi.’

‘Hunyadi!’ muttered Pekkala.

‘You know him?’ asked Swift.

‘By reputation, yes. Hunyadi is the best criminal investigator in Germany. When did Hitler assign him to the task?’ asked Pekkala.

Swift shook his head. ‘We’re not sure,’ he confessed. ‘It must be at least a few days.’

‘Then we are already behind schedule,’ said Pekkala. Turning to Stalin, he asked, ‘How soon can you get us to Berlin?’

‘If all goes well,’ he replied, ‘I’ll have you walking the streets of that city by the day after tomorrow.’

The ash on Swift’s cigarette was now precariously long and he began looking about for somewhere to tap it out. Stalin made no move to offer up his own ashtray and so, with gritted teeth, Swift tapped out the hot ash into his palm.

‘I’ll get a message through to agent Christophe,’ said Swift. ‘She will be waiting for you at the safe house upon your arrival in Berlin.’ He made his exit, still carrying the ash on his palm.

The men who remained waited until they heard the clunk of the outer door closing before they resumed their conversation.

‘There’s something he just told us which doesn’t make sense,’ remarked Stalin.

‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘One of our sources in the Berlin Justice Department informed us that Leopold Hunyadi was condemned to death more than a month ago.’

‘What did he do to deserve that?’ asked Kirov.

‘It’s not clear,’ answered Stalin. ‘All we know is that Hunyadi was sent to the prison camp at Flossenburg to await execution.’

‘Maybe they got the name wrong,’ suggested Kirov.

Stalin slowly opened his hands and then set them together again, to show that it was anybody’s guess.

‘If Swift is right, however,’ said Pekkala, ‘then it will not be long before Hunyadi tracks her down. Lilya’s only chance is for us get there first.’

‘You depart tonight,’ said Stalin. ‘The appropriate weapons have been set aside for you at NKVD Headquarters, as well as those false identification papers provided by the British. All you have to do is pick them up and be ready to go by six o’clock this evening.’

As both men turned to leave, Stalin loudly cleared his throat to show he wasn’t finished with them yet.

Both men froze in their tracks.

‘A word with you in private, Inspector,’ said Stalin. ‘Major, you can wait in the hall.’