The Coldest War (5 page)

The evening ended as they frequently did, with Will and Aubrey discussing foundation business at one end of the table while Gwendolyn and Viola chatted. The North Atlantic Cross-Cultural Foundation was a small, private, nongovernmental organization chartered with fostering improved relations between the United Kingdom and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Aubrey had created the foundation via permanent endowment in 1942, just in time for it to take a leading role in dealing with the flood of refugees streaming across the Channel. The flow of refugees came to an abrupt halt the following spring when the Iron Curtain slammed shut. But the foundation remained, and quickly became the place where, publicly, the British and Soviet empires intersected. Will liked to joke that he was both a lion tamer and a bear keeper. As the head of the foundation, Will worked closely with members of the Soviet diplomatic mission, their British counterparts, various members of Parliament, and occasionally the Foreign Secretary himself.

On the ride home, the London night cast dark shadows across Gwendolyn's face, interspersed with pale reflections from streetlamps shining on the white stucco houses of Belgrave Square. The interplay of light and shadow turned her blond hair white; it spun the faint dusting of gray at her temples to silver. She sighed, and tucked an errant lock behind her ear. She noticed Will watching her.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I might ask you the same,” he said, smiling. She sighed a second time. “Out with it, now. Your burdens are my own, and vice versa. We had something about that in our vows, as I recall.”

“Oh, Will. I'm sorry. It's just…” Her voice dropped to a whisper, so that their driver wouldn't hear her. “Your brother's wife is a vapid cow.”

Will's laughter, loud and barking, startled the driver. In the rearview, his eyes briefly checked on the couple before turning back to Lyall Street. Will took Gwendolyn's hand, and he felt her tension begin to melt away as he stroked his thumb along the inside of her wrist.

“You know, there was a time when Aubrey wanted nothing more for me than to settle down with somebody like Viola.”

“You'd have gone mad.”

“Back then? I nearly did,” he said, squeezing her hand and feeling grateful as ever that she had entered his life.

4 May 1963
Walworth, London, England

A garden shed in springtime: mud, mildew, spiders, and the stink of compost. Squalid solitude. Blessed solitude.

Raybould Marsh, formerly Lieutenant-Commander Marsh of Her Majesty's Royal Navy, and formerly of MI6, sat on a wobbly stool he'd nicked from a pub. He inspected tomato plants for bruises and fungus. He'd been taking them outside for longer periods each day and longer into the evening, acclimating them to the insult of cooler temperatures before permanently transplanting them into the garden. Done gradually enough, the transition wouldn't shock the plants.

People, thought Marsh, were much the same. Change things slowly enough, for long enough, and before you knew it, the world was warped beyond recognition.

He had expanded the shed soon after the war with materials scavenged from a disassembled Anderson shelter. The addition featured a low, sloping roof of translucent plastic, once smooth and white, now cracked and dirty by weather and age. Marsh's workbench sagged under paper sacks of potting soil, fertilizer, piles of planters. His cot stuck halfway under the bench, covered with rumpled sheets and a thin, water-stained, army-surplus blanket. A handmade bookcase, crammed with volumes of Kipling and Haggard, formed a makeshift headboard. A few old photographs had been pinned to the shelves, their edges yellowed and curled.

The clatter of a broken dish echoed from the house. Liv, his wife, raised her voice in shrill alarm. Marsh reached behind the plants and clicked on the wireless.

He didn't particularly care for the news or the state of the world, but it did drown out the noise. Running electrical mains to the shed had been something of a job, but necessary for preserving his sanity. Sometimes, when the clamor from the house became too much, he'd tune the radio between stations as a white noise generator.

The small of Marsh's back twinged when he leaned over to inspect another plant. Pain flared in his knee, too. The problem in his knee was an old one, something he'd had even as a young man. It came and went over the years. The pain in his back was a souvenir of age.

The odor of hot earth wafted through the shed. As the valves in the wireless heated up, they scorched away the fine layer of dust that had settled through the grille. Static became an ethereal warble laced with the suggestion of human voices. The amplifiers stabilized, and the voices became a Russian choir. Most stations on the Continent sounded like this when they weren't spreading the latest propaganda from Moscow. Sometimes, when he could stomach it, he listened to those broadcasts. They reminded him of desperate days from long ago. Days spent studying maps, conferring with warlocks, hoping to entice the Soviets to finish off the Third Reich.

Marsh gave the tuner dial a few flicks of his thumb. It landed on something loud and discordant—modern music played by a group out of Liverpool. Another flick brought him to a BBC station playing more familiar music. Marsh recognized the Benny Goodman recording, and remembered when it had been new. The big band hour was popular among people old enough to remember life before the war.

He listened to the remainder of the program while mending a leaky hose with bit of inner tube cut from a bicycle tire. The hose was a motley thing, riddled with patches down its length, but Marsh had kept it working long past its useful life. They might have scraped together enough money to afford the extravagance of a new hose, but Marsh never suggested this to Liv. A new hose would have meant fewer excuses to spend time in the shed. Meant cutting off another avenue of escape.

They'd purchased the bicycle for their newborn son, John, in happy anticipation of the day he'd be old enough to use it. It still leaned behind the shed, unused, rusting into nothing.

Vera Lynn sang wistfully of bluebirds and white cliffs. Liv used to sing the same song, better than Lynn herself. But she hadn't sung in the house since John was born.

Marsh made to change the station again, but the song ended before he could get his hands free, and then it was the top of the hour and time for the news. That morning's moon shot was the lead story. Three cosmonauts had departed the space station; in a few days' time, they would become the first men to see the far side of the moon with their own eyes. Von Braun was sure to receive the Order of Lenin upon their safe return. Predictably, President Nixon had sent effusive congratulations to Khrushchev on behalf of the American people. In the Near East, the Royal Navy had stationed the carrier HMS
Ocean
into the Persian Gulf, near British Petroleum's Abadan refinery in southern Iran, in response to increased Soviet activity along the borders of the Azerbaijan and Turkmen SSR. Elsewhere, scattered and confusing reports had trickled in to the BBC bureau in Cape Town, including rumors of abandoned villages in the Tanganyika Territory. Closer to home, foresters investigated a recent fire that had burned acres of woodland in Gloucestershire.

Outside, the kitchen door creaked and slammed. Marsh sighed. He flicked off the wireless.

Liv barged in a few moments later, rattling the tools hung behind the door. She stank of antiseptic and watered-down perfume. Marsh saw the bags beneath her eyes, darker than usual, and decided not to mention it. John had had one of his bad nights.

The wrinkles in the hollows of her cheeks creased into the edges of a frown. “Were you planning to spend the entire day out here?”

“I'm nearly finished.”

Liv pursed her lips. “Nearly finished,” she muttered. “You always say that.”

“The sooner I get these in the ground, the sooner we can have a decent salad again.” Marsh cringed inwardly as soon as the words passed his lips.

“Decent,” she said. “As opposed to the indecent meals that I prepare the rest of the year.”

Marsh wondered, as he sometimes did, about the passage of time. The years had transformed Liv's freckles, once so endearing and erotic, into age spots that repulsed him. How had things gone so terribly wrong? Time was a cruel alchemist.

“Don't, Liv. You know what I meant.” She carried her handbag, he noticed. And she'd done her lips. Liv hadn't bothered in years, but she'd begun again recently. It meant she'd come home late, smelling of another man's aftershave and not respecting Marsh enough to hide it. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“Out,” she said. Somehow, the plants didn't shrivel and blacken before the naked contempt in her voice. But Liv never missed her mark, never missed a chance to make him feel useless. Emasculated.

She flung something across the cramped shed. A ring of keys clattered on his workbench, knocking a large chip from a terra-cotta planter. “Feed your son.” Over her shoulder as she walked away, she added, “It's your turn.”

He waited in the shed until he heard the screeching of the garden gate. It banged shut behind Liv; he made a mental note to oil the hinges and replace the spring. Her heels clicked on the pavement outside, and then faded into the general low-level thrum of the neighborhood.

Marsh considered finishing with the tomatoes before going inside, but rejected the idea. John had to eat.

The house was quiet, but for the simmering of a pot Liv had prepared: barley soup with peas, carrots, and a bit of beef. Marsh filled a bowl, grabbed a towel, and went upstairs. The stairs creaked. John launched into a new round of keening.

John's room was down a short hallway from the bedroom his parents ostensibly shared. Marsh fished out the key ring with one hand while balancing the bowl in the other. Four keys hung from the ring. John paused when Marsh scratched the first key into the first lock. Marsh noticed a puddle beneath the door when he worked his way to the final and lowest lock.

He braced himself before turning the last bolt. Sometimes John ran, blind and mindless. But his son didn't rush the door. Shards of crockery splintered beneath the soles of Marsh's work boots when he entered. John had flung a bowl of soup across the room.

The room stank. The door behind Marsh was splattered with brown stains. John had flung other things at Liv, too. No wonder she'd left for the day.

Marsh turned on the light. Every wall had been covered with calico, and stuffed with carpet scraps, horsehair, and newspaper. Homemade soundproofing, the best Marsh could manage. In places, where the insulation was torn, he could glimpse the original robin's egg blue walls. The paint was a holdover from those last giddy days, when they'd done up the nursery in the final weeks of Liv's pregnancy. Before they'd taken John home from the hospital; before they'd discovered something wrong with their son.

That was the doctors' term. Wrong. Because they didn't know what else to call it.

Everything he'd done, everything they'd endured, all for naught. Ruined by a fluke of fate.

Yellowing placards lined the walls near the ceiling, displaying the letters of the alphabet. Those were leftovers from the period before they realized the extent of the problem, when Liv had thought she might be able to homeschool their son.

John himself huddled in his usual corner, naked. They'd given up trying to clothe him after he'd grown large enough to overpower Liv. He clenched his knees to his chest, rocking sideways and knocking his head against the wall with a steady, monotonous rhythm. That was another reason for the padding. John could do that for hours, even days, unless somebody moved him.

“It's me, son,” said Marsh. “Your father.”

Sometimes—on good days—John paused in his rocking, ever so briefly, when Marsh entered. A token acknowledgment, a hint of connection. But not today. John kept batting his head against the wall without interruption. Marsh had recently replaced the padding there.

“I brought something to eat.”

Pat, pat, pat, pat, pat.

Marsh hunkered down next to John, cross-legged, ignoring the protests from his knee. John's rocking wafted the scent of his unwashed body at his father; he smelled faintly of sour milk. It took two people to bathe him, but Marsh and Liv rarely stayed in the same room together.

“I see you gave your mum some trouble today. You shouldn't be so difficult to her.”

Pat, pat, pat, pat.

“She loves you as much as I do.”

Pat, pat, pat.

Marsh sighed. “Let's get some food in you, son.” He laid his hand on John's shoulder.

John rolled his head toward Marsh, turning a pair of colorless eyes at him. It always unnerved Marsh when he did that, just as much as it cut him with slivers of irrational hope. He knew those eyes were sightless, equally devoid of function as of warmth.

John sniffed the air. He leaned toward Marsh, snuffling with a machine gun burst of quick, sharp inhalations. Marsh held his free hand toward John's face, so that his son could get the scent. Then he did the same with the soup.

John's mouth fell open. But before Marsh could get the spoon in, his son began to wail: a single, unbroken note that lasted as long as the air in his lungs.

He did it again. And again. And again.

 

two

9 May 1963
Lambeth, London, England

Modern London wasn't a patch on its former self. The smells, the sounds, the architecture … little remained of the city Klaus remembered.

He'd been here once before, briefly, on a rescue mission after Gretel had handed herself to a British agent. From time to time during the long years at Arzamas-16, his thoughts had drifted back to London. Britain had survived the war; to Klaus, that made it a shining place.

He was a different man now. More enlightened. No longer the devoted, unquestioning tool he'd been a lifetime ago. But London had changed even more than he.