The Lieutenant’s Lover (23 page)

Misha breathed slowly through his mouth.

He felt strange, a feeling of warmth spreading outwards from his chest to reach every part of his body. And though he’d never encountered the feeling before, he understood it instantly. It was a sense of certainty, a recognition of when something was absolutely right. Because this cartoon was exactly that. If Tonya saw the cartoon, she couldn’t help but understand its message: the names, the buried references, Misha’s own pet name for her written in his own handwriting. And at the bottom of every strip was a name and address: Willi Nichts, the Nothing Factory, Leipzigestrasse, Charlottenberg.

‘They’re perfect, Willi, perfect.’

Misha added the same title,
to the remaining strips, then stepped back, almost shocked at how good his idea was proving to be. Willi hung out with a group of journalists, satirists and artists who produced (very irregularly) a free newspaper called
Die Trümmerzeitung
, ‘The Rubble Gazette’. In return for a few cartons of cigarettes,
Die Trümmerzeitung
would print Willi’s cartoons. Misha and Willi would paste them up over Berlin, the Soviet sector especially, using the sides of buildings, trees, burned-out vehicles and anything else by way of hoardings. Such posters were fairly common these days. The Soviet authorities destroyed anything they didn’t approve of, but the
Kamerad Lensky
strip was endearing, funny – and consistently mocked only the Western military authorities. The Soviets, hopefully, would leave the cartoons up, till rain and ice destroyed them. Then they’d print more strips, paste them up again, and so on.

And if Tonya saw them she would understand. The cartoons were a love letter, addressed to her. All she needed to do was to walk across town and be in Misha’s arms again.

The first winter of occupied rule had been a bad one.

The weather had been cold. In parts of the country, snow had drifted in places up to ten feet high. Old folk, living in cellars, had had their doorways sealed in by snow and only the determined rescue efforts of neighbours and friends had kept casualties down.

In the meantime, the Allies, Western and Soviet, continued to struggle. The loveless peace between occupiers and occupied still held, but things were going downhill. The food rations were set far too low for an active population enduring bitter weather, but even those rations weren’t enough. There were shortages of meat, eggs, milk, potatoes, coal, electricity, clothing. The denazification process swelled until more and more ordinary Germans were lapped in its coils. Rumours about the living standards of the occupying forces swirled with increasing bitterness in the freezing air. The French were always drunk like pigs. Black American soldiers could buy a German girl for one bar of chocolate. The English were arrogant and treated Germany like a part of imperial India. The only industries which flourished were prostitution and the black market. There was no money that meant anything, only cigarettes.

And, in the meantime, the Soviets had continued to work towards a Germany that would be united under Communist rule. Their plan – bold in the extreme – was to merge the Communist Party with the pre-war Social Democrats. The intention was to use the new party to win democratic elections – then swallow the country. The whole country that is: not just the east zone, but the west zones too, bringing communist rule to the shores of the North Sea.

But the plan was failing. Badly. Horribly. In the west, the Social Democrats were contemptuously refusing to have anything to do with the proposed merger. In the east, the merger was being forced through, by a combination of lies, bullying, thuggery and bribes. But even in the east, no one trusted the new party. That was good news of a sort – but dangerous too.

How would Stalin react to the setback in the west? What would he do to harden his control over the east? And most of all, what of the original plan? What of the idea that Germany would remain one country, under joint four-power control? Most of all, what would happen to Berlin? The city was completely surrounded by the Soviet zone. If the Russians and the Western Allies finally fell out, what would happen to Berlin? Would Stalin take it, as he had already taken so much else? And if so, then what would happen to its people? Worse still, what would the rest of Europe think of an America and Britain so weak as to let it happen? If Berlin fell, what else might yet tumble? Austria? Germany? Italy? France?

As so often before, there were a million questions and no answers. The mood was bad. It was late March, 1946.

In the schoolyards of Hancock County, Kentucky, a promise sealed ‘spit ’n’ shake’ was a promise that could never be broken. And Harlan Bauer kept his word. He’d sent urgent requests to the governor of every district asking them to search their records for a Mikhail, or Michael, Malevich. Negative answers had begun to pour in. But Bauer kept the pressure up. He told those who’d answered too quickly to check again. He told those who answered too slowly to speed up.

And one day he got lucky.

A thick-witted, fat-necked, gum-chewing, German-hating Yankee major from the subterranean reaches of a hopelessly over-tangled military bureaucracy came up trumps. He had met Malevich and interviewed him. A movement authorisation had been applied for, granted, then never claimed. The major was based just a few blocks away here in Berlin, so Bauer went to interview the man. The major blustered, denied, chewed gum and defended – then admitted that as well as processing the movement order, he’d made a point of handing Malevich’s details over to the Russians.

Bauer had been furious.

‘You say the guy was a German citizen, who’d spent the war in camps? That he’d been persecuted by both the Commies and the Nazis? Then – Jesus – this guy’s life hasn’t been bad enough, you gotta go see if you can screw it up even worse!’

Bauer was out of line. Both men were majors but the other man was the senior. All the same, Bauer was in the right, the other man was in the wrong, and the sheer force of Bauer’s personality made him intimidating.

As soon as Bauer returned to his desk, he called Hollinger and gave him the news. Hollinger sent a man over to the address Bauer gave him, a ruined factory somewhere in Charlottenberg. The man Hollinger sent found a trio of women working some home-made weaving looms. The women told him that no one of the name Malevich lived there now, if ever. The only permanent residents were a man named Müller, a teenage boy who called himself Willi Nichts, and a little girl whom Müller had adopted. Questioned further, the women said that yes, they thought the NKVD had once raided the property. The boy, Willi Nichts, had been beaten and hospitalised. Perhaps there had been an abduction too; but if so they hadn’t heard about it.

Hollinger’s man checked dates and names with the hospital in question. The facts all seemed to match up.

The conclusion seemed inescapable. Malevich – the man whom Kornikova so badly wanted to find again – had been living right here under her nose in Berlin. A shamefully wrong-headed bureaucratic decision had allowed the NKVD to discover Malevich’s identity. Never ones to allow a supposed crime from twenty-five years back to be forgotten, the NKVD had come crashing in to try and snatch him. Perhaps they’d succeeded or perhaps they’d failed, but if so then Malevich had obviously gone on the run again, maybe changing his name, faking his papers. He could be anywhere now, under any name, impossible to find.

Hollinger’s normally sunny face grew cloudy, even brutal.

The agent Kornikova was just about old enough to be Hollinger’s mother, but she never seemed that way to him. Quite the reverse. Despite the life she’d led, despite the suffering and loss, there was something youthful about her, something light but also strong and enduring. Hollinger admitted to himself that he was emotionally bound up with Kornikova – not in a romantic way, but not in a mother—son way either. He just cared about her very deeply. It mattered to him, to an excessive and unprofessional degree, that her life should turn out for the best.

The first rule of sound intelligence is to avoid getting personally involved. Hollinger knew that. He believed in the rule. But he broke it anyway. He cared about Kornikova and his attachment blinded him.

Tonya had been busy.

She’d been hauled off to interpret on a long tour of industrial sites that took in Frankfurt an der Oder, Guben, Cotbus, the terribly ruined city of Dresden, Leipzig, Dessau, Brandenburg, Potsdam. She had been interpreting for a party of technical experts from Moscow, and every day had been long and tiring, ending with feasts of vodka and wild boar that ran late into the night. On top of that, the weather had been difficult, a sudden thaw and heavy rain combining to make the roads heavy and often impassable. She ended the ten-day tour with a bad head cold and a mountain of paperwork.

She worked till eleven o’clock that night, then walked back to her sleeping quarters, a former
Wehrmacht
barracks, a place of long concrete corridors, harsh lighting, echoing toilet blocks, and green-painted plywood doors. She reached her dormitory: eight narrow beds under high metal-paned windows. Between each bed, there was a gap of around twenty inches. Tonya was now
starshiy serzhant
, senior sergeant, and her rank had been recognised by the award of a corner bed and a small bedside table. She knew that her past would probably prevent her from rising further, but she liked the little privileges that she now possessed. She didn’t allow herself to think of that blue-and-gold passport, or Thompson’s rose-covered cottage. As far as possible, she didn’t even think of Misha, though that was like asking the bird not to think of the wind.

She made her way to the toilet block to get ready for bed. She washed her face and hands. And she went to the lavatory, one of a row of six doorless cubicles.

There was no lavatory paper, of course, just a pile of newspaper. The most easily available newspaper was the
Krasnaya Zvezda
, the Red Army publication, but most soldiers were scared of being caught wiping their bottoms on one of Stalin’s speeches and any alternatives were eagerly seized on. Today, at the top of the pile, there was a strip torn from one of the unauthorised single-sheet newspapers that were to be seen around Berlin. Tonya was just about to make use of the strip, when the drawing on it caught her eye.

The cartoon itself was an excellent example of the genre – well-drawn, characterful, engaging – but it was the title that grabbed her attention. The cartoon strip was entitled
Kamerad Lensky
and beneath the title, in hand-written Russian lettering, the translation:
.