Night Soldiers (23 page)

At the consulate, Khristo had a day-by-day view of the war, and visitors represented a cross section of the Soviet intelligence and military elite. Walter Ulbricht, head of the German division of the NKVD, passed through, as did no less than three Russian marshals—Konev, Malinovsky, and Rokossovsky—who had come to Spain to learn all they could of German tactics and, most especially, the capabilities of German aircraft and weapons. People at the consulate also kept track of the other side. Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr was known to be based near Madrid, sent to Spain by Hitler to study the effects of aerial bombing on a civilian population. This had never before been tried in Europe—Mussolini had used the tactic in Abyssinia but that proved nothing—and the Germans urgently wanted good intelligence on the subject. Thus, beginning in late October, the bombing of Madrid began in earnest. What happened when you bombed a hospital? A school? A column of refugees on a road? With the aid of the Condor Legion pilots, flying Junkers-52 and Heinkel-51 bombers, these questions were soon answered.

By October 20, in an attempt to relieve the pressure being applied by Mola's four columns, Republican forces attacked the town of Illescas, west of Madrid. Singing and chanting slogans, some fifteen thousand fighters rode out from staging areas on double-decker city buses to attack Moroccan and Spanish Legion forces under Barrón. The Republican forces fought bravely for three days and gave not one inch until, on October 23, they were outflanked by a relief column of cavalry under Tella that came north from Toledo, and they had to retreat back to the city. Seeing the bloody, exhausted fighters returning, the city's population began to feel that the end might be nearer than anyone would admit.

This same Nationalist cavalry column was then confronted, in the streets of Esquivias, by Russian tanks under Pavlov. A Republican victory was sorely needed, and this was one way to get it. But the tanks—impossible to maneuver in the narrow streets—could not hurt the cavalry, and the horsemen could not hurt the tanks, so the confrontation was at best a draw.

But for those who could read the signs, two particular events signaled the beginning of the end: the national gold went out, and the refugees began to flow in.

The gold, some sixty-three million British pounds in value, was taken first by rail to Alicante, then on to Odessa by Russian freighter. Those who were responsible for guarding and counting the gold soon disappeared. Some time later, the Soviet Union announced major gold strikes in the Urals and, for the first time, began to sell gold on the world markets.

The refugees from outlying towns fled to the streets of Madrid and there set up housekeeping, amid pigs and goats and dressers and mirrors, building small fires to cook whatever food they could lay their hands on. There was, it seemed, less available every day.

The battle at Illescas was plainly audible on the streets of the city and, on October 23, Azaña, the prime minister of Republican Spain, fled the city in secret—his cabinet was not told he was leaving. He made his way to Barcelona, as close to the safety of the French border as possible, and declared the government of the country officially relocated. The exit of Castello, the minister of war, was even less illustrious. He went mad and had to be carried, foaming at the mouth, from his office. The rest of the government would stick it out for two weeks, then they too would head east. They left the city in a caravan of cars, loaded down with state ministers, bureaucrats, government records, wives and children and pets. A little way outside Madrid, the caravan was halted by a group of hooded men carrying rifles.
Go back
, they were told,
and lead the people of Madrid in their hour of crisis
. The caravan turned around, went west a few miles, turned again, and, achieving maximum speed, went barreling through the roadblock.

The city would fight on, under siege, until March of 1939, when Madrid fell and the Spanish war ended. Sascha arrived in Moscow on the ninth of November. Mitya was waiting for him, in a light snow, at Paveletski station. On the train ride north from Odessa he had in essence said good-bye to himself, a teary, miserable business as the train crawled across the southern steppe. In his colonel's uniform, he stood in the doorway of the passenger car as it crawled into the station, floating past a sea of anxious white faces in the waiting crowd. Then the train ground to a halt with a great hiss of steam, and the people behind him began to press—politely; one did not shove a uniform—to get off. He braced himself to attention, then stepped onto the platform. Somewhere in his imagination he had expected to be shot then and there, before his foot touched the earth of Moscow. But the reality was a sudden bear hug from Mitya and affectionate obscenities shouted in a blast of garlicky breath.

Mitya drove him home. His apartment, in a quiet little street behind Kutuzov Prospekt, was untouched. In the car, he had obliquely referred to Yezhov and the new purge, but Mitya had waved him off. Gossip, gossip, old women's tales. Yes, there had been changes, a few fools had managed to get themselves shot or sent off to the Siberian camps, but they
stole too much
, conspired for advancement
beyond what was good for them
, or
screwed the wrong people's wives
. Not to worry. They had put Sascha up for an Order of Lenin, Second Class, for his service in Spain, and he was certain to get it. Everybody knew Yaschyeritsa was a bastard. He would stay in Spain forever—nobody wanted him back. Not to worry, not to worry.

On Monday, he went to work at the NKVD complex on Dzherzhinsky Square. All were delighted to see him. There were six daisies in a water glass on his desk. His boss, General Grechko—a ham-fisted peasant with a sprouting mole on his nose—pounded him on the shoulders and called him all the old affectionate names:
Sascha my poet! My dreamer! My Chekhov!
Took him into his cluttered office and closed the door, knocked back a few shots accompanied by heartfelt toasts and told him
yes, the medal would go
through, even those pansies in Section Nine wouldn't dare stop it!
Sascha must learn to squeeze himself small so that Yezhov, all four feet ten inches of him, could give him the requisite hug and kiss when it was presented.

So for a week.

And he relaxed.

And then they took him.

According to the rules, it was to be done a certain way; each step in the process had been worked out, laboriously, over time, and thousands and thousands of arrests had fined the system down to a jewellike perfection. Instance: at the moment of arrest, the criminal must be beaten. From the
moment
. He opened the door to his apartment and they were waiting on the other side, and they hit him in the kidneys so hard he saw a black sun haloed by white lights, came to his senses on the parquet floor of his living room and threw up and for that they kicked him behind the knees. They showed him a fury he had not believed possible, and they knew all the places to hit, wasting not a single punch. It was the ferocity of Russia itself, for that was who he had betrayed, and it had a thousand fists. The intention was that he understand this lesson from the beginning. They threw him into the car like a weightless doll, and there they started on him again. The car was an old GAZ M-i and the back seat smelled of what they had, these past several months, been using it for. Pushed face down on the seat, he offered to confess then and there. Confess what? a voice asked. We already know. And they beat him all the way to the Lubianka. According to the rules. They wished him to understand that he had crossed a line, that he was a nonperson; all his
special friends
, relatives, bosses, no matter who had protected him all through his life and career—they no longer mattered. He was no longer
somebody
. Now he was nobody. Crossing into an endless darkness peopled by other
nobodies
that nobody could help.

They beat him with fury because the German ideal, the slow, nasty, pants-down business so dear to the hearts of the Gestapo on their western border, was repugnant to them. Sadism was despised as an integral aspect of fascism. This was righteous workers' anger, justified. Thus, after some endless, numberless group of nights in a wet cell, when the interrogator beat him up, he did it with a leg torn off a chair. The book of instruction said to do that very thing.

So, on the day when they would finally permit him to talk, when it was convenient for them to listen to him, he talked. They guided. It was, clearly, volume they wanted, they were sweeping with the big broom this time. Under Yagoda it had been a flick here, a flick there, specific enemies, definite plots. The
Yezhovschina
—Yezhof terror—wasn't like that. A big net, lots of fish, clean 'em out boys and get ready for the next batch.

He tried to give them Yaschyeritsa, but they just laughed at that. So he gave them Stoianev, the Bulgarian. Not much, but something. Those Bulgarians had too much Turkish blood for their own good, and it made them plot and scheme like pashas. Who else? They knocked out a tooth over Mitya's name. He was theirs, and they knew better than that. Sent him back to the wet cell and cut off the fishhead soup for two days so that without food he began to hear buzzing flies that didn't exist. When they brought him back he offered them Roubenis, the Armenian presently posing as Andres Cardona. Who had not delivered Fifth Column names because he had secretly gone over to them, with Stoianev's cunning assistance as conduit directly to the Nazis.
Good! Good! More of that
. But the names of some old schoolmates at Frunze military academy did not much excite them. They had, apparently, already mined that vein. Finally, at the end of his strength, when he knew for a certainty he had begun to die, he gave them General Grechko, his boss, who had maneuvered Stoianev to an assignment in Spain for the very purpose of collaboration with
Hitlerite elements
.

Suddenly, the interrogation ended. They left him alone in his cell, in an area where the guards wore slippers so that the prisoners could not hear them coming. They had what they wanted, what they'd wanted all along—Grechko. The others were merely spice in the soup.

In the basement of Gaylord's Hotel in central Madrid, in the code room, Khristo Stoianev closed his eyes with relief. Took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Read the cable again. Yes, it was true. Yaschyeritsa had, one day before the deadline, let him off the hook. He would be part of the operation known as SANCTUARY. He was instructed to work with Roubenis in this
new effort
. The leader of the operation was expected the following day, Captain Ilya Goldman. Good luck. Good hunting.

They used two cars. In the Citroën, Lubin sat behind the wheel with Andres in the passenger seat. Khristo and Ilya Goldman were in back. They'd taken the Degtyaryova machine guns from the trunk and held them across their knees. In the second car, a dark green Opel Kapitän parked across the street and up the block, sat four Spaniards in black suits. They were members of SIM, the Servicio de Investigación Militar, the Republican intelligence service most closely controlled by the NKVD.

The building in question was a four-story white house with a marble portico in the elegant diplomatic area near the parliament buildings. The Finnish flag, a blue cross on a white field, hung limply in the early morning drizzle. A tarnished brass plaque beside the front door was inscribed
EMBAJADA DE
F
INLANDIA
. The last of the Finnish diplomatic staff had cleared out some days earlier, when the Republican government had left the city.

“It moved,” Lubin said. “I am certain of it.”

All of them stared up at a curtain hanging at a window on the second floor.

“It looks the same to me,” Khristo said.

“I beg to differ—”

“Shut up, Sublieutenant,” Ilya said. “It does not matter if they see us. The phone line is dead.”

Lubin opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. Khristo was amazed at the changes in Ilya Goldman. He had become a captain, which meant he had proven himself to somebody powerful, and authority had settled comfortably upon him. He was still the same Ilya, near-sighted, physically slight, with the sharpish features and prominent ears of a rodent—not a rat, but a child's pet mouse. Women were irresistibly drawn to him, Khristo knew, finding him easy to pet, perfect to smother, adorable. Yet, Khristo was certain, among all the Brotherhood Front of 1934 his was the mind that moved most easily among the twisting trails and alleyways of the intelligence craft. Khristo found himself blunt and obvious by comparison. “I am a Jew,” he had long before explained to Khristo, at the Belov exercises, “survival in the shadows is nothing new to us.”

“There. It moves again.”

Lubin was right. Damnable ambitious brat. The curtain shifted slightly, then closed quickly.

“At last,” Ilya said, “we've got them thinking.”

Andres lit a cigarette. “One could stir the pot, perhaps.”

“Exactly,” Ilya said. “Khristo, you're the one who looks like a bloodthirsty bastard. Go say good morning to our Spanish brothers.”

Khristo left the machine gun on the floor. Walking diagonally across the pavement to the Opel, he kept his eyes from wandering to the second-floor window. But he had the sense of being watched, of being onstage. He just hoped they didn't panic in there and open up on him. Ilya had insisted, of course, that they make doubly sure they had
adequate reason to presume, and
that they didn't, by error, bag a sackful of Finns. Ilya had learned the Soviet ways in his heart—one required an
incident
in case the roof fell in. A moving curtain, by itself, wouldn't do.

The man in the driver's seat of the Opel rolled down the window as he approached. His face was pitted, and he wore a thick black mustache and sunglasses that hid his eyes. The SIM were brutal types, they were proud of it, using for their executions the Vile Gar-rote, a slow strangulation device of medieval invention. The victim was seated in front of a post and a metal collar was tightened slowly around the throat until death by ligature occurred—a three-hour death.