Faked Passports (53 page)

“Strange, the tricks Fate plays with men, isn't it?” Gregory commented.

Kuporovitch refilled the glasses; his hand was steady as a rock but his voice had begun to slur just a trifle as he went on:

“Yes. Fate served me well, though, to put me where it did. I'd probably have done the same if I'd been with the Army commanded by Tukachevsky—been made a Red General afterwards too—but I'd be dead by now. As it was, I was a Voroshilov man and no soldier ever served under a finer leader. He was just a mechanic—never handled a rifle until the Revolution broke out; but he held Tsaritsyn for six months against all comers. He wasn't afraid of God or the Devil. He even told War Lord Trotsky to go to hell when Trotsky wanted to relieve him of his command because he wasn't a professional soldier.” The General leaned forward and banged the table. “D'you know what Clim Voroshilov said to Trotsky?”

“No,” said Gregory.

“I'll tell you,” said the General a little thickly. “Trotsky threatened to arrest him for insubordination, so Clim turned
round and said: ‘
You
arrest
me
, a Russian working man, one of the oldest members of the Bolshevik Party and an active revolutionary of twenty years' standing? You—who only sneaked back from Canada after the Revolution was all over to join the Party six months ago? Get to hell out of here—you dirty, snivelling Jew journalist, or I'll throw you out—and you can tell Lenin what I said!'”

“Good for him!” laughed Gregory. “Of course, Tukachevsky was Trotsky's pet, wasn't he, while Voroshilov was backed by Stalin; who wasn't such a big noise in those days?”

Kuporovitch paused with the bottle in his hand and replied in a lowered voice: “It's all right to mention Stalin here—these old walls have no dictaphones—but wiser not to talk about him where you're liable to be overheard. He was with us down at Tsaritsyn, as Clim's Political Commissar. Clim's a decent sort and never soiled his hands with murder; but the other one—well, sometimes I think he's the Fiend in person.”

Gregory nodded. “He must have bumped off a good few people in his time.”

“You'd never believe what's been going on these last three years.” The General raised his eyebrows to heaven. “It started with the Tukachevsky
Putsch
in 1937. They executed him and eight other leading Generals; then the Ogpu began to trace the ramifications of the whole conspiracy. Thirty Army Corps commanders disappeared and hundreds of other Generals—yes,
hundreds
I said. Staff after staff was wiped out. They did the same thing in the Navy and the Air Force. There was hardly an officer over the rank of Captain left in the Soviet Army. That's the inside story of this colossal mess they've made in Finland. Fellows commanding the battalions there have been jumped up from platoon leaders. Not one out of ten of the staff officers has ever seen the inside of a military college for as much as a month's course. At a rough estimate—judged by the divisions I know about—Koba Stalin must have executed between 30,000 and 40,000 senior officers in the last two and a half years.”

Gregory had heard the same tale of wholesale murder from a very different source but he forbore to comment and asked:

“How did you manage to escape?”

The General laughed, a little drunkenly. “Because I'm an old friend of Clim's. After Tsaritsyn I was with him when we formed the First Cavalry Army, which took Rostov, and I was with him all through the Polish campaign.
Sacré nom
, those were the days! We thought we were going to Paris! Luckily
for me, Clim Voroshilov doesn't forget his old friends. All the same, they won't trust me with a command and I have to put up with a damned Political Commissar who pries into everything I do. Thank God his wife's ill, so he's down in the town tonight, otherwise I'd never risk talking to you like this; but it's the first chance that I've had for years to talk to anyone intelligent without fear of being reported.”

“I'm very flattered, General,” Gregory smiled, “but don't you think it's a risk to talk to me? Say I repeated what you've said?”

The Russian's lazy blue eyes narrowed. “There's no fear of that. In the first place, you're one of my own kind, so you wouldn't let me down. In the second, if you
did
nobody would believe you. I haven't kept my head on my shoulders for all these years without learning a thing or two. I'm so pro-Stalin that the Pope of Rome is a heathen by comparison and although old Oggie—that's my Political Commissar—is a nuisance, he's more frightened of me than I am of him.”

“That's the spirit!” Gregory laughed, filling up the glasses yet again. “But since we're being frank, don't you get damned sick of it? I shouldn't think it's much fun being a Soviet General and always having to mind your p's and q's.”

“Fun!” The General waved an arm. “It's a godforsaken life and this is a godforsaken country. There's
nothing
here—
nothing
, d'you understand?—which could appeal to any civilised human being. It's drab, dreary, poverty-stricken, and it gets worse instead of better with every year that passes. What wouldn't I give to see Paris again?”

“You used to go there as a young man?”

“
Mon Dieu
, yes! Every year. And what a place it was in those days! Girls—scores of them—real girls—in silk and feathers—not animals, which are all we have left here. Beautiful women—exquisitely gowned and perfumed. Did you know Paris in those days? But no; you're not old enough.”

“I'm old enough to remember the original Moulin Rouge,” Gregory smiled.

“Ah; the Moulin Rouge—and the Abbaye Thélème; where the girls danced on the tables without any drawers and we drank champagne out of their slippers.”

“That's it. And the Rat Mort—and the Café de l'Enfer.”

“And the Bal Tabarin. What nights I had in those places! But it wasn't only that. There's something about Paris. The flower-women outside the Madeleine. Lobster washed down
with that fresh
pétillant
Touraine wine for lunch at Pruniers, the paintings in the Louvre, taking one's
aperitif
on the pavement outside the Taverne Wagner, the bookshops in the arcade of the Palais Royal, the Sacré Cœur by moonlight, the Latin Quarter, the students in the Luxembourg Gardens, and … and the trees, when they're just budding in the Bois. Yes, that's it! Paris in the springtime—Paris in May. Shall I tell you something?” The grey-haired but still immensely virile-looking Russian leaned forward suddenly. “I'm damned well going there again before I die.”

“You'll find it pretty difficult to get out of Russia, won't you?'

“Oh, it
can
be done. Quite a lot of people manage to get themselves appointed to Soviet Embassies abroad, and once they're out of this lousy country they never come back.”

“Doesn't the Kremlin usually hold the wife and children of people sent abroad, as hostages?”

“Ah! But I'm all right there. I haven't got any wife or children.”

“In that case, they'd never attach you to an Embassy.”

“Perhaps not. But I might manage to slip over the frontier one dark night.”

“In that case, what's kept you here so long?”

“Valuta—foreign exchange—my boy. I'd rather teach Russian in Paris than be a General here; but I've got to have the money for the journey and I want to take a good-sized nest egg so that I don't starve in my old age. I've been saving up and secreting foreign currency for years. I should think another twelve months ought to do it.”

Gregory glanced at the clock. It was half-past three and they were attacking the third bottle of
slievowitz
. He was a little tight himself now but he could drink most people under the table and for some time past plans had been forming again in his agile brain. “I suppose,” he said casually, “if you fail to get any information about us from your Military Intelligence people you'll send my friends and myself under escort to the German Embassy in Moscow?”

“That's it,” the General nodded.

“Well, to be honest with you, that wouldn't suit our book at all.”

“Why?” asked the Russian suspiciously, and he suddenly seemed to become quite sober again.

“Because I and my friends are not very popular with the
Gestapo—that's why we arranged to get ourselves given special work in Finland. ‘Out of sight, out of mind', you know; and since we've failed to do the job we were given, we're going to be even more unpopular when we get home.”

“Will they shoot you?” asked Kuporovitch with interest.

“I don't think they'll go as far as that; but we'd much rather remain out of Germany until the war's over. I suppose—as between friends—you couldn't fix it for us to be sent to some neutral country, like Estonia, for example?”

The General raised his dark, pencilled eyebrows which contrasted so strangely with his grey hair. “
Sacré Tonnerre
, no! Oggie will be back tomorrow morning. I call him that because he's a member of the Ogpu. When he arrives he'll want to know all about you. If I failed to put in a report to the proper quarter afterwards it would probably cost me my life.”

“In that case, what about letting us go tonight?”

“Help yourself to some more
slievowitz
, my friend, and try to talk sense. Those two who serve me as orderlies will report to Oggie that you all dined with me this evening; so I've got to produce either the four of you or your bodies, haven't I? Otherwise, what would Oggie say?”

“I see,” said Gregory thoughtfully. “Still, if it could be arranged, may I take it that you would have no personal objection to our leaving Kandalaksha?”

“None at all. None whatever, now I know that you're not spies,” the General said suddenly.

“How d'you know?” Gregory asked with quick curiosity.

“Because of what you just told me. And, anyhow, there's nothing worth spying on up in the Arctic, since Petsamo fell. You and your friends are just a party of Germans who managed to get out of Germany and want to keep out of it because the Gestapo's after you.”

Gregory grinned. “You've hit it, General. Now, how are we going to work this thing? If you can't get us out of Russia into a neutral country, and you must report us if you keep us here, who
could
get us out of the country?”

“Stalin could, if he wanted to—or Molotov or Krassin or Voroshilov; but I don't see why they should, do you?”

“If only I could get to one of them I believe I'd manage to persuade him to, all right.”

“Well, you can't, so I'm afraid that's the end of it,” said the General thickly.

“Saying I could,” Gregory persisted, “which of them d'you think would be likely to prove the most reasonable?”

“Oh Clim—Clim Voroshilov every time. He may be a red-hot Communist but he's not like these mealy-mouthed politicians. He wanted a fair deal—a fair deal for all; but he's not like the other fellows—he's human; used to like his drink and a pretty girl when he was younger.
Nom d'un nom!
The scandal there was after one of our victories at Tsaritsyn, when Clim and all his staff drove through the streets as drunk as hell with a whole lot of girls and danced the
trepka
in a restaurant. All the seedy intellectuals in Moscow said we were a disgrace to the Party but Clim didn't care. Their bally revolution would have gone to blazes if he hadn't held Tsaritsyn. D'you know what we called him? The Organiser of Victories.
Mon Dieu! What
a man! Did I ever tell you how he threw the Chief of the Leningrad Ogpu down his own stairs?”

“No,” said Gregory.

“Well, he did. Found out that the fellow had bribed one of his mistresses to spy on him. Anyone else would have had ten fits—but not Clim. He walked straight round into that den of assassins and beat the fellow up with his bare fists. God! It makes me cold to think of it. There isn't another man in Russia who would have dared to do that. Have some more
slievowitz.
”

“Then, if I could get to Voroshilov he might be sympathetic when he hears that the Gestapo are after myself and my friends?”

“He might; but he won't; because you can't get to him. No-one has ever escaped out of this old castle since I've been here. It's no good your trying; and in this country a man is either above suspicion or else he's dead. I haven't managed to keep alive among these blackguards for twenty-three years by taking any chances, so don't imagine that because I'm a bit tight I'm taking any now. If I let you go Oggie would be on the warpath tomorrow and I might receive an invitation to Moscow. Then I'd never get to Paris again before I die.”

The General was certainly tight—very tight indeed—but Gregory knew the type of man with whom he was dealing too well to set any great hopes on that. The Russian was one of the old school who could take any amount of liquor and might show it by a slight slurring of his speech but would keep all his mental faculties about him until he suddenly passed out. The fact that he had managed to keep alive so long, although he liked his liquor and loathed the Soviet régime, was ample evidence that
he was an efficient officer and never made a serious slip. Since he said that it would be impossible for his prisoners to escape Gregory accepted that as a fact; but he felt that tonight was his one big chance. From tomorrow onwards the little “filth” referred to as Oggie would be snooping round and, in consequence, the General would have become ten times more difficult. If the all-important schedule for the Nazi “Family Reunion” was ever to reach London it must be got out of the castle that night.

Russians, Gregory knew, were notoriously open to graft and it had already occurred to him to try to bribe Kuporovitch; but he wondered desperately if he dared to risk it. The fact that the General had been collecting valuta for years with a view to shaking the dust of the Soviet off his feet would make him eager to acquire foreign currency that he could secure without risk of being reported. But if he were offered a large bribe he would know that his prisoner had had no opportunity to secrete the money since he had arrived at the castle; so he must be carrying it on him. Having played a lone hand successfully against murderers and bandits for so long it was heavy odds in favour of the General's being a most unscrupulous man. Once he learned that there was money to be had for the taking what was there to prevent him from having his prisoner shot and acquiring the cash without any risk to himself? Yet how else, except by taking this desperate chance, was there any hope of getting out of the castle?