The Sacred Scroll (30 page)

‘More than they should,’ smiled Adler.

‘$5,000 a seat,’ said Kutuzov. ‘But we include a bottle of Taittinger.’

‘Pocket money,’ said Adler.

It amused him to run the club, and its exclusivity guaranteed his security. There wasn’t a single member whose own position in life wouldn’t have been drastically compromised if he or she divulged its existence.

‘What made you choose such a name?’ asked Mehta. ‘Zara la Salope? Zara the Slut. Isn’t that rather a giveaway?’

Adler gave him a thin smile that promised nothing. ‘Private joke,’ he said, thinking of a city which, long ago, had been brought to its knees by his hero.

His hero had sought to conquer the West. Apart from the obvious jewel of Brazil, Adler’s ambitions lay in the opposite direction.

Conquer the East, and the problem of the West would take care of itself.

But he needed the box which the key in his pocket fitted. Within the box, he was convinced, lay the secret. And with the secret in his grasp, he could achieve more than his hero had ever have dreamt possible.

After his associates had left, he turned to Frau Müller. ‘We need to speed things up,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Tell them what to do. We’ve wasted enough time on that line of enquiry.’

She nodded, but he could see that she was hesitating. He waited.

She looked at him diffidently. ‘Shouldn’t we give it a little longer? It seemed so promising.’

‘If there was anything to get out of them, we’d know it by now. I want the thing aborted. Send them back to do it personally.’

She nodded, fear in her face. He always liked to see that, it reassured him, and he knew that in some twisted way she enjoyed it. Then she left.

He turned and sat at the desk. His mind turned to the next meeting, the one tomorrow morning. The one which he had really come to New York to attend.

The one with friends in high places.

Zürich,
AD
1917

Early April, just before dawn, and it was cold. Erich Ludendorff stood near the front of locomotive Hk1.293, flanked by a semicircle of five general staff officers. All were wrapped in stiff, high-collared greatcoats. All were tense. Their breath plumed in the freezing air.

Ludendorff hated the assignment, but it was necessary if the war, already abandoned as hopeless by his colleague Tirpitz two years earlier, had the faintest chance of being won.

Russia had to be neutralized, so Germany could concentrate on the Western Front, and this was the only way of achieving that aim. By good fortune, protests among the Russian people had spread. The hardships the country was enduring as a result of the war had forced the tsar to abdicate. Russia was now a leaderless country on the brink of revolution.

There was a new leader waiting in the wings, a leader who’d been in exile a dozen years. And that leader was living here, in Zurich.

The German officers waiting at the central railway station drew themselves up as, from the dark entrance to the platform, a group of thirty Russians emerged. At their head was a stocky, balding, middle-aged man with a
goatee. He was pale and underfed, but his Mongolian features and his hard eyes made him instantly recognizable to Ludendorff, who stepped forward to greet him.

Neither made a move to shake hands. For his part, Ludendorff had a horror of everything which Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his Communist Party stood for. But there’d be time to deal with them later, when they’d achieved the desired effect and plunged Russia into civil war. Russia would then no longer be a threat to Germany. On the contrary, Russia would be grateful.

‘Is everything in place?’ asked Lenin, looking at the locomotive. The engine, with its flanged smokestack and its sturdy cattle-bar, looked tough enough for a long journey, but the single first-class carriage it drew looked frail and vulnerable.

‘Yes,’ Ludendorff ground out.

‘The train enjoys extraterritorial status?’

‘As you stipulated.’

‘Good.’ Lenin looked around. His open overcoat had a fur collar, but he was bareheaded, and under the coat Ludendorff could see that the man’s suit and shirt were threadbare. Lenin looked round at his companions and then back at Ludendorff. ‘We will go,’ he said, in a voice used to command.

Ludendorff didn’t like his tone.

‘My people will sit in the front half of the carriage, you Germans, segregated, must take the back two rows.’ Lenin looked keenly at the general. ‘But I will need to have some conversations with you,’ he added.

His German was good, his accent thick.

Five minutes later than the appointed time of 4 a.m.,
the train rolled out of Zurich
Hauptbahnhof
. It was still dark. There was frost on the inside of the carriage windows, but this quickly thawed with the heat of the bodies of the passengers. Ludendorff didn’t like the smell of the Russians, either metaphorically, or – as he was coming quickly to realize – physically. It was going to be a long few days, getting this lot to Berlin. From there, Lenin and his followers would make their way across Sweden and Finland and end up at Petrograd’s Finland Station. St Petersburg, which the tsar had renamed Petrograd two years earlier, was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, and from there Lenin could create whatever havoc he wanted, thought Ludendorff; just as long as it kept Russia out of the kaiser’s war.

Long before then, though, Ludendorff would have handed the Communist leader over to his fellow revolutionaries. His job ended at Berlin’s Stettiner Station. His part of the mission would be over. Thank God.

He bunched his hands inside his gloves to try to warm them further.

They crossed the border into Germany later that day, and the Russian exiles, watching through the grimy windows of the carriage, commented irritatingly on the absence of men at the stations they rolled past in the fields, and in the towns. The only males they saw were elderly, teenagers, or children. Any man between sixteen and sixty was fighting in the trenches of Belgium and France. Ludendorff hoped the German situation didn’t look desperate to his unwelcome charges.

On the second day, Lenin moved
from his usual seat to place himself next to Ludendorff, who sat alone, apart from his officers, as his senior rank dictated. He smiled sociably at the German general, who nodded back guardedly.

‘I love Beethoven’ was Lenin’s unexpected opening remark.

‘Really?’ replied the general, uncertain of himself, disliking the man’s guttural accent as much as he disliked the scent of violet cachous which came from his mouth.

‘Yes,’ continued the Russian reflectively. ‘But some of his music, I cannot listen to.’ He paused, looking at Ludendorff, and when the general remained silent, unable to formulate any kind of response to that proposition, he continued, ‘Especially the piano sonatas. Especially the
Appassionata
.’

Ludendorff shifted in his seat. ‘And why might that be?’ he asked helplessly.

Lenin’s eyes became distant. ‘Because it engenders emotions in me which I cannot afford to have.’

Ludendorff looked at him blankly. There was an awkward pause, after which he said, ‘I hope they’re feeding you well. Looked like you and your friends needed a bit of that.’ He spread his hands. ‘No shortage of food in Germany, as you can see. I gather they have a problem with that in Russia.’

Lenin ignored him. ‘I cannot afford emotions which make me wistful and sad. I need to concentrate on things which are solid, which are material. But I also need’ – his voice became more confidential and he leaned forward; Ludendorff could smell the violets strongly on his breath – ‘I also need to be able – without fear of making any mistake – to sway the minds of men.’

The thought of a man like Lenin ever feeling wistful and sad made Ludendorff want to laugh, but he suppressed it. ‘You have the support of the German state,’ Ludendorff assured him, his official voice switched on. He’d read some of Lenin’s writings, had even ploughed through
What is to be Done?
He couldn’t make much of it, but he’d done enough research to know what to say: ‘And your ideas will fall on fertile soil.’

‘I hope so,’ said Lenin. ‘But I need to be sure.’ In the silence that followed, broken only by the repetitive rattling of the train, he shifted his position so that he was sitting in the window seat opposite Ludendorff.

The two men looked each other straight in the eye. All around them, fellow-passengers were reading or sleeping. There was no conversation except for desultory exchanges between Lenin’s wife, Nadya Krupskaya, who looked to Ludendorff like a codfish, and her companion. A nib scratched on paper as one of the officers behind Ludendorff compiled a report.

For a time, Lenin turned his attention to the monotonous farmland the train was passing through. It was a grey day, and the countryside lay sullenly under a sky the colour of cement. ‘And if
I
am sure,’ he continued, as if the silence had lasted a matter of seconds rather than minutes, ‘
you
can be sure that Russia will be out of the war. Your Eastern Front will no longer exist, and you can transfer the forces that become available to defeat the British and the French. You’ll need all the men you’ve got. Hasn’t the United States just joined in – finally – on the Allies’ side? Silly of you to sink that liner. They might have stayed out of it.’

Ludendorff pursed his lips. The man was well informed. ‘You have our full, disinterested support,’ he repeated guardedly.

‘But the faster I move, the faster you can, no?’ said Lenin.

Ludendorff didn’t know where the conversation was going, but something within him didn’t like the turn it was taking. He remained silent.

‘My friends in Berlin –
a
friend, I should say, a professor of ancient history at Moscow university, currently in exile on account of his political views – has been most enthusiastic about the discoveries made by his colleague, your compatriot, Robert Koldewey,’ Lenin continued, looking out of the window as if fascinated by the dull view.

‘Not my field,’ said Ludendorff. ‘Know nothing about it.’

Lenin turned to him, raising his eyebrows. ‘Now that
is
surprising. I’m told you were with Koldewey in Istanbul only two years ago.’

‘Official business, that’s all.’

‘Of course.’ Lenin paused, but could not conceal his impatience. It was as if he were trying to pace himself. Ludendorff waited, hoping to be able to counter whatever was coming next. Damn it, how much did the man know?

‘I hear you brought some trifles back from Koldewey’s dig to Berlin,’ Lenin continued, his voice less light. ‘Among them, something of great value – great power.’

‘A handful of artefacts, yes. I left all that to Koldewey. He’s the expert.’

‘This … this thing I’m thinking about,’ Lenin went on insistently, and there was no doubting the gleam in his eye
now. ‘It seems that it’s being kept under wraps. But if it were in the right hands, it might be – how shall I say? – of enormous practical and political value.’

‘To you?’

Lenin spread his hands. ‘Who else? And don’t forget, my friend, that my success is your success.’

‘You want us to give you this thing?’

‘My friend Professor Kaschei has had several conversations with Dr Koldewey. Discreetly. They have drunk vodka together. My friend the professor assures me that this is a line well worth pursuing. And if nothing comes of it, no harm will have been done.’

‘And if something does come of it?’

Lenin smiled. ‘As I said, if I win, you win. You needn’t think for a moment that a grateful Russian Soviet Republic, with all the might of our natural resources and a truly motivated workforce, wouldn’t be eternally grateful to our friend, benefactor and ally, Imperial Germany.’ Lenin looked at him. The eyes were bright and dark, and bored through the general. There was something of genius and something of madness in them.

‘But I have tired you,’ said the Russian, stretching and rising to his feet. ‘I will rejoin my companions and sleep. You should sleep too. There is little else to do on this train except eat, read, and try to keep clean.’ He turned to go but something made him turn back. The eyes fixed Ludendorff. ‘All I ask is that you think about what I have proposed. We could change history together, you and I.’ Lenin relaxed. ‘We will talk again,’ he said in parting. ‘We still have a day, I think, before we reach Berlin.’

Left to himself, Ludendorff closed his eyes. But he didn’t sleep. His mind was not in turmoil, it never was that, but he was disquieted, and there was no one to consult. Nor would there be, for there was no time. The schedule of the journey to the Finland Station was tight, and it was crucial that it be kept to. He tussled with the idea Lenin had put to him for two hours.

But by the end of that time, his decision was made. Whatever else Herr Lenin might say to him in the twenty-four hours in which he was forced to remain in the Russian’s company, nothing would sway him from his course.

Edirne, the Present

It felt as if they had been walking for days, not hours, and the ragged landscape burned under the high sun. Rocks cut their feet in the depths of the remote valley, they were still blinded by the light after so long a time in the darkness of their prison, and yet they stumbled along, hauled upright, pushed and shoved whenever either of them showed any sign of collapse.

But they were out, away from the torture. And the blindfolds had been taken from their eyes when the black SUV had come to a halt after a long drive.

They didn’t know where they were, or what country they were in. Somewhere hot, somewhere southern. But the rocks, tussock grass and sparse shrubs, among which lean goats foraged, gave them few clues. There were no villages, no people. But, drugged and beaten though they had been, they knew they couldn’t have travelled far – they had never completely lost consciousness, even if most of their recent experience had unfolded like a dream. How many days or even weeks was it since their abduction? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Time eluded them.