The Secret of Spandau (36 page)

‘Transparently,' answered Red.

‘Then we will go in.' He knocked and opened the door.

Colonel Klim, small, sallow, distinctly oriental in feature, was standing by the arched window trying to operate the blind. He was wearing a Soviet army raincoat over bottle-green pyjamas. He must have come specially from his quarters. His neat toes peeped out of leather sandals. He seemed to have been caught unprepared. Giving up his struggle with the blind, he glided behind the director's desk, a teak and metal status-symbol, massive enough to serve as a screen for a man of his size. He gave an order in Russian to the two guards who had entered the room with Red. They saluted and withdrew, leaving only the NCO in attendance.

Another order, and a chair was placed in the centre of the room for Red, a couple of yards back from the desk. All that was now visible of Colonel Klim was his face, framed by his hands so that even the collar of the pyjamas was obscured.

Formality restored, he said in correct English that sounded like lesson one of a language laboratory course, ‘Good morning. My name is Colonel Klim. What is yours?'

‘Calvin Moody,' answered Red, knowing it would not be believed, but with no alternative to offer.

Colonel Klim tilted his eyebrows and said with gentle sarcasm, ‘How strange! We have a warder here with the same name, but he is nothing like you.'

Red made it clear with a sideward glance that he wasn't interested in a verbal chess game.

The Russian continued, ‘To avoid misunderstanding, I will tell you that my position here is permanent. I have been the Soviet director of the prison since April 1982. I know the warders personally. Moody has a narrower face than yours. His hair is darker and certainly shorter. Feature for feature he is quite unlike you. What is your name?'

‘Calvin Moody.'

Colonel Klim scowled. ‘This is very unwise, young man. My sleep has been disturbed by this breach of prison regulations. My patience has a short limit. However, let us try another avenue of conversation. How did you enter the prison?'

‘Through the front gate.'

The NCO interposed something rapidly and earnestly in Russian that Red guessed was a first attempt to paper over the breach of security.

Colonel Klim barked back a few syllables and then resumed to Red, ‘It seems that the normal procedure at the gate was not observed. There should have been a warder on duty there. We were a man short tonight.'

‘I know.'

‘A telephone message was received that Moody was coming in late. Was that part of your scheme to enter the prison illegally?'

‘That's a leading question,' commented Red.

‘But you had better answer it,' Klim insisted.

‘I didn't make a phone call.'

There was another exchange in Russian.

‘It was a woman who called,' Klim informed Red. ‘She spoke to the duty warder. He passed the message to the guardroom. That is why you were admitted. I presume that this woman is in league with you.'

And how! Red thought. It's the super-league if I ever get out of this place alive.

Colonel Klim asked, ‘Is that assumption correct?'

‘I don't know what you're on about,' Red answered with a baffled expression.

‘Very well. Let's turn to something we can both agree on.' Klim picked Cal's pass off the desk and held it up by one corner. ‘This appears to be genuine. It has Moody's photograph, not yours, and his signature, not the poor imitation you scribbled in the guardroom book. How did it come into your possession?'

Red was tempted to answer with the truth, just to see whether the fact of Cal's murder would make any impression on the Buddha-like repose of the face across the desk. But the truth was his defence, not to be surrendered. So long as he remained of interest to the Russians, kept them puzzled about his identity and his reason for being there, he stood a chance of survival.

When it was obvious that no answer was forthcoming, Klim said with a harder edge to his words, ‘You stole it. You stole his clothes as well. You had better tell me the reason now. You tricked your way in here. Why? Are you politically motivated? Making some form of demonstration?'

‘Like saving the whales?' Red flippantly suggested.

Colonel Klim snapped out some sentences in Russian and the NCO came from behind Red, grabbed his arms and strapped them together at the elbows and hard against the vertical struts of the chair-back. The pain was bearable, but not for long.

‘How about the electrodes?' Red muttered. ‘I thought you people had all the latest gear.'

‘We are not torturers,' said Klim with a show of umbrage. ‘This is a necessary safeguard while I speak to you in private.'

‘Yes?' said Red sceptically. Then he heard the door close as the NCO withdrew. ‘So what is there to say?' He braced his arms, and one of the struts snapped, bringing him some relief.

Colonel Klim got up and moved around the desk, tugging his raincoat across his chest. He stood facing Red, studying him, making up his mind. ‘I will be frank with you. I know that Moody is dead. The information reached me earlier this evening.'

Aware that he was under the closest scrutiny, Red made no attempt to fake a reaction. He wanted to know where this was leading.

Klim continued like a judge summing up, ‘You were able to trick your way in here because the prison staff have not yet been informed about Moody. But it was a crude attempt at impersonation which the guards detected easily. Occasionally, we have to deal with crazy people and publicity-seekers who make trouble at the prison gate. I would treat you as such a minor nuisance if you could persuade me that there is not some more sinister motive governing your actions.'

Red didn't respond. His tired brain was wrestling with the implications of what he had just learned. Klim had been informed about Cal's killing.
Earlier this evening
, he had said, implying that he had heard the news early enough to have put the guards on alert if he had chosen. So it could only have come from Cal's murderer, Valentin, or his employer, the KGB. Colonel Klim was either a KGB agent himself, or he was acting on their orders.

The realisation led to a significant shift in Red's tactics. His entry into Spandau had started so disastrously that up to now he had scarcely given a thought to anything but survival. He had fully expected to be shot. Now other possibilities were emerging. The Colonel knew things. He probably knew the reason why Edda Zenk and Cal had been murdered. It might be possible to draw it out of him by trading information.

‘I knew Cal,' he volunteered. ‘He was no villain. He didn't deserve to be shot in the head.'

Klim's brown eyes gleamed with satisfaction. ‘Yes, it will come as a shock to everyone in Spandau. So you have been to his apartment?'

‘I broke in,' admitted Red.

‘And found him dead? Then, for some reason, you dressed up in his clothes and tried to enter Spandau. Why?'

‘To get some answers.'

‘From whom?'

‘Anyone who knew anything.'

Klim looked disbelieving. ‘I think you could be more precise than that.'

‘How?' asked Red.

‘I think you had ideas of meeting the man we call Number 7.'

‘Rudolf Hess?'

Klim nodded. ‘You believe he can tell you why Moody had to be shot.'

‘Had to be?'

‘But I doubt whether he would have helped you in the least, even if you had miraculously arrived in his cell. Number 7 is singularly uncommunicative. He would be suspicious of your motives. Do you deny that you intended to make contact with him?'

‘Of course I deny it,' Red affirmed. And now he would stonewall again, because he had got as much from Colonel Klim as he was likely to give: the admission that Cal's killing had been carried out because it ‘had to be'; and the strong suggestion that Hess would know the reason why, even if he refused to talk.

More questions followed and, as Red reverted to short answers, Klim showed increasing signs of annoyance. The questions began to be replaced by thinly-veiled threats. ‘If you persist in this way, I shall have to bring in people who are experienced in questioning suspicious persons.'

‘The police?'

‘Not the police. They have no jurisdiction here.'

‘The military police?'

The phone on Klim's desk bleeped. He picked it up and spoke his name. Then something was said that made the blood run from his face. He had been standing with one sandalled foot turned downwards, resting on the tip. He brought the heel down sharply and practically stood to attention. He clutched at the collar of his raincoat and drew it across his chest. His contributions to the conversation were minimal.

As soon as he was able to replace the phone, he picked it up again and dialled a two-digit number, presumably internal. This time he was doing most of the talking, evidently passing on urgent information. Red tried to understand some of it. The only certain thing he gleaned was a name, spoken and repeated with great emphasis, as if to make sure there were no misunderstanding: General Vanin.

Colonel Klim cradled the phone again, staring at Red as if he had no inkling how he had arrived there, and went across to the door and opened it. He shouted something to the NCO outside.

The guards came in and loosened Red's arms. They hustled him outside, past Klim, who stood distractedly at his door, rubbing his face with his hand. He said nothing.

They took Red down the stairs, this time allowing him to use his own feet. Down one level, they steered him into a once-whitewashed, now yellow-grimed and flaking corridor that stretched the length of the block, almost a hundred yards. Dim lights under old-fashioned conical shades showed open cell-doors from end to end on each side. If ventilation had been the intention, it was not a success. The place smelt musty and unused.

The NCO ordered a halt while he looked into a couple of cells. He selected the second on the right.

‘You want me to go in there?' asked Red, as if there were any choice.

Nobody bothered to answer. As he went in, he asked, ‘Who is General Vanin?'

The door slammed shut.

Spandau.

Its bleak reality closed in on Red. The cell had the stale smell of many years' disuse. The walls were coated with mould. This disregarded section of the prison had probably not been used in forty years.

The place was still furnished with its iron bedstead, wooden table and stool. Red stretched out on the steel mesh of the bed-frame and stared upwards. Either the moon was clear, or dawn had broken outside the small, arched window, because there was enough light to count the panes behind the bars. Eighteen, three of them cracked.

The last occupant would have been one of the outcasts of Hitler's Germany, detained here for ‘processing', prior to execution, or transportation to a concentration camp. In 1947, it had seemed grimly appropriate to bring the men convicted at Nuremberg to this place where the victims of their system had suffered.

Seven Nazi leaders, ranging in age from forty to seventy-four, had been brought here, handcuffed to US soldiers. They were the so-called ‘difficult' cases of the Nuremberg Trial. Twelve others had been sentenced to hang and three had been acquitted. Of the Spandau seven, three – Raeder, Funk and Hess – had been sentenced to life imprisonment. After eight years in Spandau, Admiral Raeder, ill and in his eightieth year, had been released; two years later, Walter Funk, 66, physically and mentally depleted by the years he had served, was allowed to walk out to freedom, ‘with allowance for his age and ill-health'. That was in 1957. Spandau's other lifer was still waiting for clemency.

Red pictured Rudolf Hess lying in a cell on one of the lower levels, in the block he had once shared with the other six. They had all gone by 1966, having served their terms or been granted compassionate release. Hess alone was left to bear the burden of guilt for the Third Reich. Yet he alone of the seven had been found not guilty both of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He had received his life sentence for being guilty of conspiracy and – a curious irony – crimes against peace.

The impact of nearly half a century of confinement was beyond imagination. Red didn't fool himself into thinking that a few hours locked in Spandau would bring him any closer to understanding Hess and how he had endured his punishment. He could pity the man and wonder at his power of survival. He could touch the walls and lie on a prison bed and breathe the prison air, but he would be no nearer to comprehending the scale of the experience.

He was sure of one thing: if he was lucky enough to get out of the place alive, he wouldn't have much self-respect if the best he could produce would be a piece for the tabloids entitled ‘My Night in a Spandau Cell'. His story wasn't going to be about Red Goodbody. He was certain that the secret of Spandau, the reason why Hess would never be released, was behind the killings of Cal and Edda Zenk. Someone – maybe Hess himself – had lit a fuse and the KGB were in a panic because the story was about to blow sky-high. Hess was certainly at risk. He deserved to be told. By some means, Red was going to reach him. And survive to tell the story.

Daybreak. Emphatically. The light grew stronger, picking out the details of the cell, the divisions between the bricks, the studs in the iron door, the square opening that served as a Judas-hole.

An hour or more passed. Sometimes he heard slight movements from the Soviet guard posted in the corridor. Once or twice there was the clatter of steps on the iron staircase. They went away.

Unexpectedly, because this time Red had heard no steps, the small sliding panel in the door was opened. ‘
Café noir
?'

‘
Oui
.' He got up quickly and came close to the hole. In French, he asked if the owner of the voice was a warder.

‘Yes. The chief warder. I speak English. You want something else?'