The Bedbug (6 page)

Klop, by now quite accustomed to getting his own way with women, devoted some time to describing the delightful life she might lead with him if she fled from her family and homeland. She in turn, seeing an opportunity about to slip from her grasp, found herself falling in love and praying for guidance. She made an ultimatum. Klop must do the honourable thing and marry her in church, in front of her family. Klop, professing that had always been his true intention, produced an engagement ring of thick silver with a black stone, bearing a carving of an Egyptian princess, which had come from his father’s collection of Middle Eastern antiquities.

Klop won doubtful acceptance from Nadia’s parents, who were naturally suspicious of a visitor from a country with whom they had so recently been at war. The wedding was fixed for 3 p.m. on Saturday 17 July at St Catherine’s Lutheran Church on Bolshoi Avenue, Vasilievsky Island, traditionally the place of worship for the German community in St Petersburg.

Nadia wore a dress of opaque white batiste linen made from an old nightdress of her grandmother’s, and borrowed white shoes that were too big for her, a veil decorated with orange blossom and a Fabergé gold bracelet which had been her mother’s and was one of the few pieces of jewellery to escape the looters, having been buried in the grounds of their summer retreat at Peterhof. Valeria, who had made the first introductions, accompanied Nadia as she made her way on foot to the church. Klop, whose own wardrobe was limited, wore a borrowed pair of white tennis trousers and greeted her with a bouquet of blue hydrangea. They exchanged rings that had been handed down through their respective families. The reception was enlivened with homemade mocha cake and a couple of bottles of wine that had been hidden under the floorboards.

CHAPTER 4: BOLSHEVIKS

E
ven before the wedding, Klop had been increasingly nervous about the authorities. A well-wisher in the Soviet Foreign Office warned them that the Cheka – the Communist secret police – were investigating Klop’s credentials. He had told them, fairly unconvincingly, that he was a greengrocer’s assistant from Amsterdam. He could hardly admit to being a journalist and any suggestion that he was gathering secret intelligence for the German government would have been fatal. He had also begun dealing in black market art, hoping to make a small fortune to start married life in the West.

Nadia, who only seems to have learned that his visit was not solely for the purpose of finding his family after they escaped, was surely being disingenuous years later when she wrote: ‘Maltzan asked Klop to keep his eyes open should he succeed in getting into Russia. He did not mean spying of course, only wanting him to report on the whole atmosphere and conditions inside Russia.’
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In such a time of turmoil and mutual suspicion, espionage was exactly what Ago von Maltzan had in mind and the preparations could have left Klop in no doubt. He had travelled on a boat taking Russian soldiers and prisoners of war home. Friedrich Rosen obtained a passport for him, in the name of Oustinoff rather than the Germanic ‘von Ustinow’. It is not clear what nationality Klop assumed or whether this was an early example of the Nansen passport, introduced by the Norwegian explorer,
diplomat and commissioner for refugees Fridjof Nansen for use as travel authority for the many stateless displaced people milling around the continent. Klop passed himself off either as a returning Russian – difficult when his command of the language was less than perfect – or a Dutch trader. He travelled light, a solitary bag with few clothes and gifts of tinned meat and chocolate that might smooth away some of the minor obstructions to his progress. For negotiating the major obstacles he had gold coins sewn into the lining of his coat. The ship dropped them at Hungerborg near Narva, on the Estonian border, where they began a tediously slow train journey. The full extent of the famine that was gripping the Russian countryside quickly became apparent as starving peasants lined the tracks begging the passengers for scraps of food. A rumour rippled through the train to the effect that able-bodied men would not be allowed to disembark until they got to Moscow, where they would immediately be pressed into military service. As the train slowed outside St Petersburg, Klop leapt down to the tracks and completed the journey on foot.

Klop arrived on 7 May and set about ingratiating himself with officials of the Cheka and the Foreign Office in the course of searching for his family. At the Cheka his contact was an official named Rougaev who impressed Klop with his bevy of secretaries. They obeyed his every word and appeared not to object to sitting on his lap or being slapped on the backside. Klop was amused to be offered fish and potato soup by his host, who served it by hand, disguising the smell of fish with liberal application of Houbigant’s
Quelque Fleurs
perfume that he kept in his desk; Klop’s memory for fine detail demonstrating a skill valuable to storytellers and spies alike. That he should strike up such fellow-feeling in an official of the Cheka was fortunate. He had discovered on arrival in St Petersburg that his family had been living on the ‘Fifth Line’ of Vassilievsky Island, the once fashionable suburb now overrun by Bolshevik squatters. To his distress, he soon discovered that his father had died of dysentery a year earlier and his mother and sister
had moved to Pskov, about four to six hours rail journey south west of St Petersburg near the border with Estonia. He needed a Cheka 24-hour travel permit to visit them and the family reunion was necessarily brief though long enough for Klop to promise to make the arrangements to get the two women out of the country. Typically, his abiding memory years later was of the pretty, freckled peasant girls, their hair tied back by a kerchief, whom he saw on the train. The kerchief became a small fetish that he liked to try out on later girlfriends.
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Despite the great risks involved, Klop decided to leave Russia briefly and make contact with Maltzan from the Estonian capital of Reval. There is a record in German Foreign Office archives, dated 13 July, simply stating that the Württemberg citizen Ustinoff was returning to Russia and requesting that Gustav Hilger should be informed by radio. It added that he would not be travelling on a German passport. If Klop filed a fuller report at that stage it has not survived in the records. But it is significant that he was already working with Gustav Hilger, Maltzan’s other secret emissary to the Soviet Union. Hilger was born in Moscow in 1886 and brought up there. He studied engineering in Germany but returned to Moscow in 1910 to work for his father-in-law’s crane company, travelling all over Russia. He was interned during the First World War and on his release worked for the main commission for aid to German prisoners of war in Russia assisting their evacuation with only limited and reluctant help from the Soviet authorities. He was briefly expelled when relations between the Russia and Germany were broken off but returned in June 1920, and was witness to the starvation, misery, and desperation, of the population.
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On his return to St Petersburg, Klop had found lodgings with Nikolai Nikolaevitch Schreiber. He was an inventor who had lived in the next street when Klop’s parents had an apartment in St Petersburg and had been courting Klop’s sister, Tabitha. He was a suspiciously fortuitous landlord for a man who was gathering intelligence for Germany. Schreiber had been a Rear Admiral
of the old Imperial Russian Navy, a specialist in torpedoes and mines. During the First World War he had been in charge of planning the minefields in the Baltic and Black Sea intended to keep the German fleet at bay. He had worked in close contact with the British Admiralty, including the development of a British invention, the paravane, a mine clearance device.

Klop’s quest for travel permits for his mother and sister took him from the Cheka to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here again he managed to charm his way into their good books. According to his son, Peter, his best contact there was Ivan Maisky, which would be yet another extraordinarily lucky break. Maisky had been in London prior to the First World War, at the same time as Klop. His circle of friends included the radical writers George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Beatrice Webb. From 1932 to 1943 he was Soviet ambassador in London, a man of enormous influence and importance in the Allied relationship against Germany. There is no doubt the two knew each other at that time, but it is less clear how they could have met in 1920. Maisky was then a local government official in Samara, near the Kazakhstan border. It is not impossible, with his literary interests, that he visited Gorky’s House of Arts club in St Petersburg, which was frequented by Klop and Nadia, but less likely that he was in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In any event, Klop’s mother Magdalena and sister Tabitha were in due course able to escape via the Crimea and Istanbul. They spent some time in Germany but eventually settled back in the Middle East.
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Klop’s difficulties with the authorities were compounded by his new relationship with the Benois family, some of whom were not entirely above suspicion. They had potentially damning British connections at a time when Britain had been supporting the monarchist side in the civil war with arms, money and men. British secret agents were up to their necks in plots to assassinate Lenin and bring down the Bolshevik regime.

Nadia’s aunt, Camilla Benois, had married her English tutor Matthew Edwardes, whose younger brother George introduced
the glamorous Gaiety Girls chorus line to the London theatre scene. Matthew became a successful business man in Russia but he died in 1917 and Camilla escaped to England. Her son Julius stayed behind and became involved in the notorious British action to seize control of the enormous oilfields around Baku, then part of southern Russia. As a result he spent three years in a Russian jail. The two families remained close and Camilla’s grandson, Julius Caesar Edwardes, became Peter Ustinov’s business partner.

Nadia’s cousin, also Camilla, had married General Dmitri Horvath, general manager of the Chinese Eastern Railway. After the Bolshevik revolution, he led White Russian resistance in the East, declaring himself provisional ruler of all Russia from his power base in Vladivostok. He could never muster sufficient support and eventually threw in his lot with the ill-fated rebellion led by Admiral Alexander Kolchak, with British backing. Kolchak was executed by the Bolsheviks; General Horvath survived in exile with Camilla in Peking. Their daughter Doushka married the British First World War flying ace Cecil Lewis, who in 1922 was one of the founders of the BBC, and in later life lived for a while with Nadia and Klop at their home in Gloucestershire.

In St Petersburg, too, there were dangerous associations about which the Benois family needed to be wary. The Mariinsky Opera had a British conductor, Albert Coates, and in the years prior to the Revolution one of his protégés was a young Paul Dukes who had run away from home to join the orchestra. By 1918 he was an MI6 officer, using his old contacts for information and safe houses to hide from the authorities.

In August 1918 an attempt to assassinate Lenin unleashed the Cheka’s Red Terror in which thousands of suspects were rounded up and hundreds executed. The British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, who was implicated in the plot, was arrested, only to be freed through the intervention of the lover he shared with Maxim Gorky, Moura Benckendorff. Whether Moura knew Klop or Nadia at this stage is not clear but she would feature prominently
in their later lives in her adopted guise as the London society hostess Moura Budberg.

In such turbulent times Klop was running huge risks with his frequent visits to the department of Foreign Affairs and he compounded those risks with an ill-judged attempt to bribe an official to let Nadia leave the country. Klop told more than one version of this event. According to Nadia he had offered Comrade Rougaev a wad of foreign currency he had smuggled into the country and was immediately rebuffed. According to his son Peter the bribe was chocolate and bacon and the recipient was Ivan Maisky, who rejected it.
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Once more fortune smiled upon Klop. Gustav Hilger, in his role of representative of the German Red Cross and the Nansen Relief Agency responsible for the welfare of POWs, could offer Klop an escape route. Klop had good reason to be grateful and he did not forget. Twenty-five years later he returned the compliment.

Hilger took the only photo Klop had of himself and Nadia – from the wedding a few days earlier – and used it to create repatriation authorisations as if Klop were a soldier returning from the Siberian prison camps.

Three days later, on 16 August, Klop and Nadia spent the day getting export licences for Klop’s treasure trove of art and that night came the news that they should be at the railway station by 7 a.m. next day. There was a frenzy of packing and in the dark early hours next morning they crept through the deserted streets, pushing their few possessions and a picnic basket on a handcart. Hilger was waiting for them and guided them swiftly to the top bunks of a civilian carriage where they lay still for hours, not daring to move in case they were challenged. It was gone midnight by the time the hissing steam engine slowly headed south-westward to impending freedom. They travelled all the next day, through searches and security checks, Nadia clinging on to a single brooch and a string of pearls. At Narva, on the Estonian border, they camped overnight before boarding a ferry to spend three days
sailing almost the full length of the Baltic Sea to the German port of Stettin – now Szczecin in Poland. Another night in a camp was as much as Klop could bear and he managed to telegraph to Berlin to get money sent to the best hotel in town, where he and Nadia gorged on champagne and lobster before ordering complete new sets of clothes. Nadia was already pregnant, although she may not have been aware of it at the time.