The Coldest War (9 page)

Cherkashin closed the door behind them.

“Your office couriered an itinerary to us yesterday, for next month's trade delegation,” said Fedotov.

Will suppressed a happy sigh of relief. This wasn't what he'd feared.

“I remember,” he said. “It was satisfactory, I hope?” Leather squeaked as he settled into an armchair.

Fedotov took the seat behind his desk. He looked slightly embarrassed. “Not entirely.” He lifted a typed sheet from his mostly empty desk, scanning it. “I know Minister Kalugin, and I can tell you honestly, my friend, he will not enjoy the Wilde production on Wednesday.”

Will took the sheet. “But if you're seeking a deeper cultural exchange with Great Britain, you couldn't do better than Oscar Wilde.
The Importance of Being Earnest
is one of his best. Besides which, he was an advocate of socialism.”

“Nevertheless … While I admire his wit, and of course his politics, there are issues about his lifestyle that would be poorly received by Kalugin.”

“Ah.” Will pondered this. “Well, there is no shortage of excellent productions in the West End. Some Shaw, perhaps? A staunch socialist, that one.”

“I'll leave it to your discretion.”

“Very good.” Will took a fountain pen from the inner breast pocket of his Savile Row suit and made a note on the itinerary. The ambassador made a similar notation, in Cyrillic, on his own copy.

Cherkashin served himself from the sideboard. Will recognized the
clink
characteristic to fine crystal. “May I pour you a drink?” he asked.

“No,” said Will. “Thank you.”

Cherkashin snapped his fingers. “I forgot. You're a teetotaler, isn't that right?”

The usage took Will aback. Sometimes Cherkashin's command of English came across far better than he let on. Will didn't correct him; his past history was convoluted, and private. “If you prefer.”

Fedotov looked at the itinerary again. “Wednesday for the show? Your brother is hosting a function that evening.”

Will glanced at his own copy, and sighed. “Damnation. I thought we'd fixed that.” He crossed out a few more lines, added another annotation in the margin. “I'm at a bit of a loss for how that slipped through.”

“No matter.” Fedotov marked his own copy accordingly.

Cherkashin, sitting in the corner with drink in hand, cleared his throat.

Fedotov said, while making notes on his itinerary, “Speaking of things slipping through, there is another, more delicate matter I'd like to bring to your attention. It's an issue of some embarrassment for us, if I may appeal to your discretion?”

“By all means,” said Will, echoing his wife in both words and wariness.

“Recently, two patients escaped from a psychiatric hospital in the Ukraine. A brother and sister. Both very dangerous. They are violent, prone to flights of delusion.” Fedotov shook his head sadly. “Runs in the family, I presume. They were undergoing treatments to lessen their antisocial tendencies.”

Will said, “And you have reason to believe they're coming here?”

“We don't know where they may be headed. But we do have reason to believe that they've passed through France in the past ten days.”

Will frowned. “That's many hundreds of miles from the Ukraine. It's rather difficult to imagine that a pair of nutters like those you describe could travel so far without giving themselves away.”

“Don't underestimate this pair. That would be a mistake. If they are headed for Britain, they could be a terrible danger to your countrymen.” A rueful smile. “What damage would that do to our hard-won détente, if a pair of Russian maniacs were to start cutting down Her Majesty's innocent subjects?”

“You should alert the authorities,” said Will.

Behind him, Cherkashin coughed. He said, “The ambassador would prefer to handle this matter quietly.”

Will said, “I fear there's little I can do.”

“Of course, of course, my friend.” Fedotov waved his hands. “We would never ask you to put yourself or anybody else in harm's way. But if you happen to hear anything?”

Will shrugged. “I suppose it would do no harm to pass it along. They're truly dangerous, this pair?”

“Yes.”

“I'd be the last person in Britain to hear anything, but if it puts you at ease, I'll keep my ears open.”

“That's all we ask.”

Will blew on his annotated itinerary. Satisfied the ink had dried, he folded it in thirds and tucked it in the pocket where he kept his pen. He put his hands on his knees. “Well, then. If there's nothing else?”

They returned upstairs. Across the ballroom, Gwendolyn—once again stuck chatting with Viola—watched the three men with a strange expression on her face. In fifteen years of marriage, he had never seen its like. Will smiled at her. He hoped it was reassuring, and that she didn't detect the guilt undermining it.

What did she suspect? She deserved the truth and so much more.

Soon,
he promised himself.
She'll have it soon
.

Just as he had promised himself for months.

 

three

13 May 1963
Westminster, London, England

Rainwater trickled down the windowpanes of Morgan, Kavanagh, and Kynaston, Solicitors at Law. Earlier in the day, it had trickled down the windowpanes at the bank where Klaus and his sister had arranged a draft on the cash they'd stolen from a number of newspaper stands and small businesses. The thievery had drained another battery.

Klaus was content to watch the rain while Gretel finalized her arrangements with the solicitor. She handed him an envelope; oddly, it wasn't addressed to Reinhardt. This was the second of two letters she had written. Yesterday, she'd slipped out of Reinhardt's flat while he was distracted to mail the first letter, which
was
addressed to him.

The man whom Gretel had just hired wore brown suspenders with blue pinstripes over a crisp white shirt, and a red bow tie. He uncapped a fountain pen, then pulled a sheet of watermarked letterhead from a drawer. Pen poised above the blank page, he looked up to ask, “And when shall we put this in the post for you?”

“The fourteenth of May,” said Gretel.

The solicitor blinked. A beat, then: “Tomorrow?”

Gretel laid a hand on the armrest of Klaus's chair. “My brother and I will be occupied tomorrow.” Then she leaned forward, as if taking the fellow into her confidence. “A family matter.”

Klaus didn't bother to wonder about this. He'd find out soon enough. His sister's machinations no longer spurred his curiosity. They brought only a weary dread.

“Ah. I see,” said the solicitor. Clearly he didn't. But he didn't need to. He wrote the mailing date on the blank sheet; confirmed it with Gretel; signed it; handed it to Gretel and Klaus for countersigning and witnessing (she signed as Gretel von Westarp, he followed her lead); clipped the page to the envelope; and summoned his secretary to take the package.

Motor traffic hissed and splashed through rain on the street below. From Klaus's vantage, the pedestrian traffic on the pavement appeared as a mass of black umbrellas, each bobbing up and down to an individual rhythm. Here and there he spotted a break in the pattern, a flash of color or even stripes in the sea of black.

Most of the pedestrians in this part of London were businessmen and government workers: business-suited shock troops primed for financial warfare, wielding briefcases and plain umbrellas. Those with the colorful umbrellas were different. Klaus's eyes followed one in particular, lime green with orange spots. Here and there he caught glimpses of its carrier. She was younger than he, much so, in a red sleeveless dress that ended at her knees. Her galoshes flapped against her legs. There were other flashes of color in the crowd, too, but they didn't capture his interest in quite the same way.

Klaus wondered what it would have felt like to be so carefree at that age. Or was it aimlessness? Was he a better man for always having his purpose defined for him?

“I'm so pleased,” said Gretel, smiling. This was the mask she wore when she wanted to charm somebody. She stood. The men followed suit.

The solicitor extended his hand. Klaus shook it. Then the fellow took Gretel's hand, and not for the first time his gaze drifted to the wires twined through her braids.

By way of explanation, Klaus said, “The camps.”

Most British knew little of the camps Germany had built in the years before the war. The Soviets had found the camps useful in their own right. So the conquerors had never seen fit to publicize the atrocities.

That left only rumors. Nobody truly knew the situation in Europe, nor had they in many years, but everybody had heard the rumors. Klaus had learned that a subtle reference to such things was enough to goad people into constructing a private narrative to explain Gretel's wires, or his own. It even earned sympathy.

Klaus waited for the inevitable flash of discomfort on the other man's face. Then, to give the fellow a graceful out, he said, “Thank you for your time.”

On the way outside, Klaus nicked an umbrella from a stand in the lobby. He handed it to Gretel as they joined the stream of pedestrians on the pavement. The woman in the red dress was long gone. A sigh escaped him, riding a surge of wistfulness that caught him off guard.

He followed the flow of foot traffic. His thoughts were jumbled. Unsettled. They'd crossed several streets, turned a few corners, before he realized he had no destination. Gretel hadn't said anything.

He started to ask her, but stopped himself. They'd run her errands all day, moved according to her purposes. Klaus decided to cling to a few more minutes of aimlessness. Idle time was something new to him. It was seductive.

They passed a park, larger than the one he'd glimpsed from the taxi a few days earlier. “Let's go there,” he said, and didn't wait for her approval.

For the most part, the rain meant they had the park almost to themselves. It was a Monday, Klaus reminded himself. He wondered what it would be like to have a job, a responsibility, that didn't occupy every minute of every day. He tried to imagine life as a shopkeeper rather than a research subject, or a soldier, or a secret weapon, or a prisoner.
What does a shopkeeper do when he's not keeping his shop? What
is
a shopkeeper when not keeping shop?

What am I?

Walking paths of slate gray gravel meandered through stands of scarlet oak and plane. Fig trees lined a small lake. Klaus chose a path at random. Just to see where it went. Then another, and another.

They passed a stand advertising warm peanuts, salted in the shell. Klaus bought a packet, though he wasn't hungry. They found a bench sheltered from the lessening rain beneath a black mulberry tree. Klaus shared the peanuts with his sister. The rip of paper as they tore open the packet sounded oddly loud in the quiet park. So did the cracking of shells, and Gretel's chewing.

The peanuts were warm, almost hot, which felt wonderful after wandering in the cool drizzle. The shells dusted his fingers with salt. Delicious.

A troop of mounted cavalrymen practiced formations on the parade ground abutting the park. Klaus licked salt from his fingers, listening to the jingle of harnesses, the
clopclopclop
of hooves, the bark of the regimental commander as he called out maneuvers. The members of the ceremonial regiment wore shining helmets with black plumes. The plumes drooped in the rain.

Klaus let his sister have the rest of the peanuts. A strange emotion preoccupied him. Gretel still hatched her plans, still did things according to her own secret desires. That was the same as always. But she was close to her goal now; he could tell. And they were in England, and they were free. This was new.

The unfamiliar feeling, he decided, was contentment. A sense of struggles complete, burdens at rest. A sense that finally,
finally,
he could relax. Both physically and mentally, he could ease his guard. He hadn't felt anything like it since before he'd begun to experience misgivings about the Reichsbehörde, when Doctor von Westarp had ordered him to oversee the construction of ovens for disposing of unsuccessful test subjects.

“We need to think about finding a place to stay,” he said. The four nights with Reinhardt had been cramped, uncomfortable, and awkward. Klaus had slept very little; at night, Reinhardt had prowled like a cat, waiting for them both to doze off so that he could steal their batteries.

Gretel said, “No, we don't. That's easy.”

“You keep saying that. Why is it easy?”

“Because,” she said, pointing past the parade ground, “we're going to turn ourselves in.”

My brother and I will be occupied tomorrow.

Klaus realized he'd been in this park before. He'd probably dashed past this very same mulberry tree with Gretel in tow. It had been at night, and very dark, because it was wartime and Britain had shrouded itself in a nationwide blackout. And that meant the building behind the parade ground was the Old Admiralty.

*   *   *

As always, Gretel knew exactly what to say. Knew exactly how to mollify Klaus. He resented her manipulations, even as he succumbed to them.

We're free now, Gretel. I want to stay that way.

We've never been free.

Then why did we escape?

Because we had to be here. Now.

Why now?

There is nothing but now.

We could have escaped at the end of the war. Why did I have to endure so many years at Arzamas?

This thing, this now, wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Why must I get pulled along in your wake?

Because I need your help.

Why?