Winter of the World (32 page)

He sniffed, swallowing tears. He squared his shoulders and headed back towards the East End at a brisk walk. Today’s triumph had been soured. He knew he was a fool to care about Daisy
– clearly she did not care about him – but, all the same, it broke his heart that she was throwing herself away on Boy Fitzherbert.

He tried to put her out of his mind.

The police were getting back into their buses and leaving the scene. Lloyd had not been surprised by their brutality – he had lived in the East End all his life, and it was a rough
neighbourhood – but their anti-Semitism had shocked him. They had called every woman a Jewish whore, every man a Jew bastard. In Germany the police had supported the Nazis and sided with the
Brownshirts. Would they do the same here? Surely not!

The crowd at Gardiner’s Corner had begun to rejoice. The Jewish Lads’ Brigade band was playing a jazz tune for men and women to dance to, and bottles of whisky and gin were passed
from hand to hand. Lloyd decided to go to the London Hospital and check on Millie. Then he should probably go to the Jewish Council headquarters and break the news to Bernie that Millie had been
hurt.

Before he got any further he ran into Lenny Griffiths. ‘We sent the buggers packing!’ Lenny said excitedly.

‘We did, too.’ Lloyd grinned.

Lenny lowered his voice. ‘We beat the Fascists here, and we’re going to beat them in Spain, too.’

‘When are you leaving?’

‘Tomorrow. Me and Dave are catching a train to Paris in the morning.’

Lloyd put his arm around Lenny’s shoulders. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.

1937

Volodya Peshkov bent his head against the driving snow as he walked across the bridge over the Moscow River. He wore a heavy greatcoat, a fur hat, and a stout pair of
leather boots. Few Muscovites were so well dressed. Volodya was lucky.

He always had good boots. His father, Grigori, was an army commander. Grigori was not a high-flyer: although he was a hero of the Bolshevik revolution and a personal acquaintance of Stalin, his
career had stalled at some point in the twenties. All the same, the family had always lived comfortably.

Volodya himself
was
a high-flyer. After university he had got into the prestigious Military Intelligence Academy. A year later he had been posted to Red Army Intelligence
headquarters.

His greatest piece of luck had been meeting Werner Franck in Berlin, while his father had been a military attaché at the Soviet Embassy there. Werner had been at the same school in a more
junior class. Learning that young Werner hated Fascism, Volodya had suggested to him that he could best oppose the Nazis by spying for the Russians.

Werner had been only fourteen years old then, but he was now eighteen, he worked at the Air Ministry, he hated the Nazis even more, and he had a powerful radio transmitter and a code book. He
was resourceful and courageous, taking dreadful risks and gathering priceless information. And Volodya was his contact.

Volodya had not seen Werner for four years, but he remembered him vividly. Tall with striking red-blond hair, Werner looked and acted older than he was, and even at fourteen he had been enviably
successful with women.

Werner had recently tipped him off about Markus, a diplomat at the German embassy in Moscow who was secretly a Communist. Volodya had sought Markus out and recruited him as a spy. For some
months now Markus had been supplying a stream of reports which Volodya translated into Russian and passed to his boss. The latest was a fascinating account of how pro-Nazi American business leaders
were supplying the right-wing Spanish rebels with trucks, tyres and oil. Texaco’s chairman, the Hitler-admiring Torkild Rieber, was using the company’s tankers to smuggle oil to the
rebels in defiance of a specific request from President Roosevelt.

Volodya was on his way to meet Markus now.

He walked along Kutuzovsky Prospekt and turned towards the Kiev Station. Their rendezvous today was a workingmen’s bar near the station. They never used the same place twice, but finished
each meeting by arranging the next one: Volodya was meticulous about tradecraft. They always used cheap bars or cafés where Markus’s diplomatic colleagues would never dream of going.
If somehow Markus were to fall under suspicion and be followed by a German counter-espionage agent, Volodya would know, for such a man would stand out from the other customers.

This place was called the Ukraine Bar. Like most buildings in Moscow, it was a timber structure. The windows were steamed up, so at least it would be warm inside. But Volodya did not go in
immediately. There were further precautions to be taken. He crossed the street and ducked into the entrance of an apartment house. He stood in the cold hallway, looking out through a small window,
watching the bar.

He wondered if Markus would show up. He always had, in the past, but Volodya could not feel sure. If he did show up, what information would he bring? Spain was the hot issue in international
politics, but Red Army Intelligence was also passionately interested in German armaments. How many tanks were they producing per month? How many Mauser M34 machine guns per day? How good was the
new Heinkel He 111 bomber? Volodya longed for such information to pass to his boss, Major Lemitov.

Half an hour went by, and Markus did not come.

Volodya began to worry. Had Markus been found out? He worked as assistant to the ambassador, and therefore saw everything that crossed the ambassador’s desk; but Volodya had been urging
him to seek access to other documents, especially the correspondence of military attachés. Had that been a mistake? Had someone noticed Markus sneaking a peek at cables that were none of his
business?

Then Markus came along the street, a professorial figure in spectacles and an Austrian-style loden coat, white snowflakes spotting the green felt cloth. He turned into the Ukraine Bar. Volodya
waited, watching. Another man followed Markus in, and Volodya frowned anxiously; but the second man was obviously a Russian worker, not a German counter-espionage agent. He was a small, rat-faced
man in a threadbare coat, his boots wrapped in rags, and he wiped the wet end of his pointed nose with his sleeve.

Volodya crossed the street and went into the bar.

It was a smoky place, none too clean, and it smelled of men who did not often bathe. On the walls were fading watercolours of Ukrainian scenery in cheap frames. It was mid-afternoon, and there
were not many customers. The only woman in the place looked like an aging prostitute recovering from a hangover.

Markus was at the back of the room, hunched over an untasted glass of beer. He was in his thirties but looked older, with a neat fair beard and moustache. He had thrown open his coat, revealing
a fur lining. The rat-faced Russian sat two tables away, rolling a cigarette.

As Volodya approached, Markus stood up and punched him in the mouth.

‘You cowfucker!’ he screamed in German. ‘You pig’s cunt!’

Volodya was so shocked that for a moment he did nothing. His lips hurt and he tasted blood. Reflexively, he raised his arm to hit back. But he restrained himself.

Markus swung at him again, but this time Volodya was ready, and he easily dodged the wild blow.

‘Why did you do it?’ Markus yelled. ‘Why?’

Then, just as suddenly, he crumpled, falling back into his chair, burying his face in his hands, and beginning to sob.

Volodya spoke through bleeding lips. ‘Shut up, you fool,’ he said. He turned around and spoke to the other customers, who were all staring. ‘It’s nothing, he’s
upset.’

They all looked away, and one man left. Muscovites never voluntarily got involved in trouble. It was dangerous even to separate two scrapping drunks, in case one of them was powerful in the
Party. And they knew that Volodya was such a man: they could tell by his good coat.

Volodya turned back to Markus. In a lowered voice he said angrily: ‘What the hell was that for?’ He spoke German: Markus’s Russian was poor.

‘You arrested Irina,’ the man replied, weeping. ‘You fucking bastard, you burned her nipples with a cigarette.’

Volodya winced. Irina was Markus’s Russian girlfriend. Volodya began to see what this might be about and he had a bad feeling. He sat down opposite Markus. ‘I didn’t arrest
Irina,’ he said. ‘And I’m sorry if she’s been hurt. Just tell me what happened.’

‘They came for her in the middle of the night. Her mother told me. They wouldn’t say who they were, but they weren’t regular police detectives – they had better clothes.
She doesn’t know where they took her. They questioned her about me and accused her of being a spy. They tortured her and raped her, then they threw her out.’

‘Fuck,’ said Volodya. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘You’re sorry? It must have been you that did it – who else?’

‘This is nothing to do with Army Intelligence, I swear.’

‘Makes no difference,’ Markus said. ‘I’m finished with you, and I’m finished with Communism.’

‘There are sometimes casualties in the war against capitalism.’ It sounded glib even to Volodya as he said it.

‘You young fool,’ Markus said savagely. ‘Don’t you understand that socialism means freedom from this kind of shit?’

Volodya glanced up and saw a burly man in a leather coat come through the door. He was not here for a drink, Volodya knew instinctively.

Something was going on, and Volodya did not know what it was. He was new to this game, and right now he felt his lack of experience like a missing limb. He thought he might be in danger but he
did not know what to do.

The newcomer approached the table where Volodya sat with Markus.

Then the rat-faced man stood up. He was about the same age as Volodya. Surprisingly, he spoke with an educated accent. ‘You two are under arrest.’

Volodya cursed.

Markus jumped to his feet. ‘I am commercial attaché at German Embassy!’ he screamed in ungrammatical Russian. ‘You cannot arrest! I have diplomatic immunity!’

The other customers left the bar in a rush, shoving at each other as they squeezed through the door. Only two people remained: the bartender, nervously swiping the counter with a filthy rag, and
the prostitute, smoking a cigarette and staring into an empty vodka glass.

‘You can’t arrest me, either,’ Volodya said calmly. He took his identification card from his pocket. ‘I’m Lieutenant Peshkov, Army Intelligence. Who the fuck are
you?’

‘Dvorkin, NKVD.’

The man in the leather coat said: ‘Berezovsky, NKVD.’

The secret police. Volodya groaned: he might have known. The NKVD overlapped with Army Intelligence. He had been warned that the two organizations were always treading on each other’s
toes, but this was his first experience of it. He said to Dvorkin: ‘I suppose it was you who tortured this man’s girlfriend.’

Dvorkin wiped his nose on his sleeve: apparently that unpleasant habit was not part of his disguise. ‘She had no information.’

‘So you burned her nipples for nothing.’

‘Lucky for her. If she had been a spy it would have been worse.’

‘It didn’t occur to you to check with us first?’

‘When did you ever check with us?’

Markus said: ‘I’m leaving.’

Volodya felt desperate. He was about to lose a valuable asset. ‘Don’t go,’ he pleaded. ‘We’ll make this up to Irina somehow. We’ll get her the best hospital
treatment—’

‘Fuck you,’ said Markus. ‘You’ll never see me again.’ He walked out of the bar.

Dvorkin evidently did not know what to do. He did not want to let Markus go, but clearly he could not arrest him without looking foolish. In the end he said to Volodya: ‘You
shouldn’t let people speak to you that way. It makes you look weak. They should respect you.’

‘You prick,’ Volodya said. ‘Can’t you see what you’ve done? That man was a good source of reliable intelligence – but now he’ll never work for us again,
thanks to your blundering.’

Dvorkin shrugged. ‘As you said to him, sometimes there are casualties.’

‘God spare me,’ Volodya said, and he went out.

He felt vaguely nauseated as he walked back across the river. He was sickened by what the NKVD had done to an innocent woman, and downcast by the loss of his source. He boarded a tram: he was
too junior to have a car. He brooded as the vehicle trundled through the snow to his place of work. He had to report to Major Lemitov, but he hesitated, wondering how to tell the story. He needed
to make it clear that he was not to blame, yet avoid seeming to make excuses.

Army Intelligence headquarters stood on one edge of the Khodynka airfield, where a patient snowplough crawled up and down keeping the runway clear. The architecture was peculiar: a two-storey
building with no windows in its outer walls surrounded a courtyard in which stood the nine-storey head office, sticking up like a pointed finger out of a brick fist. Cigarette lighters and fountain
pens could not be brought in, as they might set off the metal detectors at the entrance, so the army provided its staff with one of each inside. Belt buckles were a problem, too, so most people
wore suspenders. The security was superfluous, of course. Muscovites would do anything to stay out of such a building: no one was mad enough to want to sneak inside.

Volodya shared an office with three other subalterns, their steel desks side by side on opposite walls. There was so little space that Volodya’s desk prevented the door from opening fully.
The office wit, Kamen, looked at his swollen lips and said: ‘Let me guess – her husband came home early.’

‘Don’t ask,’ said Volodya.

On his desk was a decrypt from the radio section, the German words pencilled letter by letter under the code groups.

The message was from Werner.

Volodya’s first reaction was fear. Had Markus already reported what had happened to Irina, and persuaded Werner, too, to withdraw from espionage? Today seemed a sufficiently unlucky day
for such a disaster.

But the message was the opposite of disastrous.

Volodya read with growing amazement. Werner explained that the German military had decided to send spies to Spain posing as antiFascist volunteers wanting to fight for the government side in
the civil war. They would report clandestinely from behind the lines to German-manned listening stations in the rebel camp.