CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Lana,” he said quietly.

She blinked, surprised to see him but somehow not completely surprised. Before she could compose her face into an expression of disapproval, Metcalfe caught a fleeting glimpse of what looked very much like pleasure.

“Stiva?” She seemed to be attempting a coolness in her tone, a scolding. “But… we agreed, Sokolniki Park tomorrow at dusk.”

“I guess I couldn’t wait.”

She shook her head, giggled despite herself. “Look at you! What happened to the best-dressed man in Moscow?”

He was a mess, he knew: there was straw in his hair and all over his coat and suit, and he smelled of horse. “You see what you’ve driven me to, dusya?”

“I’m going riding. It’s one of my few pleasures these days.”

“And your German boyfriend?”

She scowled. “He rarely gets up before noon. He won’t even notice I’m gone. Everyone’s asleep in the house, actually.”

“Then you won’t mind if I join you?”

She inclined her head. “I won’t mind.”

She saddled up deftly, Metcalfe no less quickly. His mother had kept horses and had seen to it that he had learned to ride not long after he learned to walk. But he was surprised that Lana had gotten so skilled at horsemanship; it seemed to be something she had picked up in the last few years. Like so much that has changed about her, he thought.

There was a horse trail that ran through the woods, a trail he hadn’t noticed before. It had not been cleared in some time; they were whipped by small branches as they rode. Metcalfe allowed her to set the pace. When the path widened somewhat, she leaned forward, made a clucking sound with her mouth, squeezed her legs together. Her horse, the chestnut Arabian, increased his gait to a canter. She rode as if she’d been doing it all her life. The trail widened again, allowing them to ride alongside each other; but when it narrowed, she took the lead. Metcalfe turned his face up to the soft morning sun. It warmed him, soothed him. For a few moments, as they rode in silence, he was lulled by the rhythmic gallop. It was like old times again. The fear, the terror, the suspicion all was left behind. He watched her lithe figure; she seemed to be an extension of the horse. The perfect features of her face, framed by her gaily colored head scarf, were beautiful in repose. The sadness that seemed to have overtaken her was gone. God, he loved her so!

After a while the terrain began to look familiar. He called out to her, got her attention, interrupted her reverie. He pointed toward the denser section of the woods, through which he had fled the night before. Four, maybe five hours earlier, but already it seemed like another day. She looked perplexed but followed him off the path. They slowed to a walk as they made their way through the trees.

After a few minutes, she called, “There is no path here!”

“I know.”

“It will not be easy. We should go back to the path.”

“I need to find something. It won’t take long.”

Soon he came upon a tree that had been daubed with red paint, and he knew where he was. “Wait here a moment.” He dismounted and peered around for the patch of ground where he had strewn twigs and moss over the transmitter. His eye was immediately caught by an unexpected sight, something he hadn’t seen before.

The ground had been cleared, scraped to the bare soil. The large, flat rock had been moved, exposing the pit that Roger had dug. The hole was empty. The transmitter was gone.

Metcalfe knew at once what had happened, and he was seized with terror. The youngest member of the patrol had gone back, retraced his steps. That had to be it. Goaded, perhaps, by the jeers of his elders, determined to prove that what he had seen had not been just a stag, he had searched the woods. The transmitter had been concealed well, but he had concentrated on the area where he had first spotted an interloper, and somehow he had found it. Triumphant, vindicated, he had taken it to his comrades, proving that he was right all along. And if this was how it had happened now the NKVD patrol knew that what they had chased through the forest had been no stag and no mere intruder but… a spy. A genuine spy, a discovery that would make their careers and would land like a bombshell in the NKVD’s headquarters in the Lubyanka. A sophisticated transceiver of British manufacture! Proof that spies were operating in Moscow! Lights would burn through the night at the Lubyanka; urgent meetings would be held, frantic phone calls made, frenzied summonses.

Everything had suddenly changed. The NKVD would shift into high gear, searching for a spy or a spy ring, for, like cockroaches, where there was one there were undoubtedly others.

It was not safe to be here, in this place where the transmitter had been found. Teams would be assigned to hide, lie in wait for the spy to return to this spot, just as a criminal is said to always return to the scene of the crime.

He had to get out of here at once!

Metcalfe raced back to where Lana and the horses waited. As he climbed back into the saddle, she must have noticed the strain in his face. “Darling, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said tightly. He tugged at the reins to get his horse moving back through the woods and toward the path. A few seconds later, he clarified: “Everything.”

Lana stared at him, then nodded as if she understood. “Welcome to the USSR,” she said with a grim, knowing smile.

As soon as they reached the path, they began circling back toward the dacha, Metcalfe now taking the lead. Outside the stable they both dismounted, walking the horses back inside. Lana filled a bucket with water from a hand pump; her horse drank greedily. She pumped another bucketful and placed it in front of Metcalfe’s horse, which drank as well. They knew her, trusted her. She removed her horse’s tack, shook out the saddle before hanging it up, removed the bridle, and washed out the bit in a stream of water from the pump before hanging that up as well. She did all this quickly, expertly, all the time cooing softly to the horse, stroking him. She took a towel from a hook and rubbed the horse gently to restore the circulation in his back, then began grooming him with a soft-bristled brush. Metcalfe did the same. They worked in silence, but it was not an uncomfortable silence. It felt companionable, like old friends who did not need to talk. Once she had examined her horse’s hooves for stones, she led him back to his stall.

As Metcalfe shut the stall gate, he noticed that she had come over to him, as if she had something she wanted to say.

“Lana,” he began, but she placed a hand over his mouth, a quick touch, a request for silence. Her face was tilted upward to his, her eyes brimming with tears. She reached up with both hands this time, cupping his face. He wrapped his arms around her. Her lips parted as they touched his. He could feel the hot moisture of her tears against his face. She was trembling. He moved her hands down her back, fondling her, caressing her as they kissed with an urgency that surprised him. He pulled her in to him tight. Her hands kneaded the muscles of his back, of his buttocks, and he moved a hand around to her breast. Abruptly she pulled her mouth away from his. “Oh, God, Stiva,” she said, her voice plaintive. “Take me. Please. Love me!”

Their bed was a horse blanket thrown hastily over a few stacks of hay. It was coarse and not particularly comfortable, but in the urgency of their passion neither noticed. They made love quickly and without speaking, disrobing only partially. And just as quickly they dressed, both of them fearful, without needing to say anything, that they might be discovered. As she dressed, Lana began humming a tune.

“What is it?” Metcalfe said.

“What is what?”

“That song. It sounds somehow familiar.”

She laughed. ” “Comme Us etaient forts tes bras qui m’embrassaient’ How strong were your arms that embraced me. A song that came into my head for some reason.”

“It’s pretty. Will we still meet tomorrow evening?”

“Yes, of course. Why not?”

“Rudolf he won’t be suspicious?”

“Please,” she said fretfully. “I was feeling happy for the first time in a long, long while. Why did you have to mention his name?”

“What are you doing with him? I know you don’t love him. I don’t understand.”

“There’s so much you don’t understand, Stiva.”

“Tell me,” he said. He placed his hand over hers.

She bit her lower lip. “I had no choice.”

“No choice? You always have a choice, milenki.”

She shook her head slowly, sadly, and the tears returned to her eyes. “Not when you’re a prisoner, dorogoi moi. Not when you are a hostage.”

“What are you saying? How can this “

“It is my father. He knows how I love my father, how I would do anything to protect him.”

“Von Schussler is threatening your father?”

“No, it is nothing so open. He … he has a document. A piece of paper that has the power to kill my father. To get my father executed and me arrested.”

“Lana, what the hell ?”

“Listen to me. Please, just listen!” She took his hand in both of hers and held it tightly. “You know the name of the famous

Red Army general Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky, the great Hero of the Revolution?”

“I’ve heard the name, yes.”

“He defended Moscow in 1918, captured Siberia in 1920. A great, loyal military man. The chief of staff of the Soviet army. And he was an old friend of my father’s. A few times we had dinner with his family. My father worshiped him. He had a photograph of himself with Tukhachevsky which he displayed prominently on top of the piano.” She paused, drew in her breath as if steeling herself. “One night in May it was three years ago, in 1937 I was asleep when I heard our doorbell ring. I thought it must be some prankster, some hooligan, some drunk, so I rolled over and put the pillow over my head. The ringing did not stop. I looked at my clock. It was after midnight. Finally the ringing stopped, and I was able to fall back to sleep. I had a big performance the next evening we were doing Sleeping Beauty.

“It must have been an hour later when I was awakened again, this time by loud voices. My father’s voice. I got up from my bed and listened. The voices were coming from my father’s study. He seemed to be arguing with someone. I ran to his study but stopped just outside the door. Father was there, in his dressing gown, and he was talking quite agitatedly to Tukhachevsky. My first thought was that Marshal Tukhachevsky was yelling at Father for something, and I became quite angry. I stood there, eavesdropping. But I soon realized that Father was not yelling at him at all he was angry, furious as I had never seen him before, but not angry at his friend Mikhail Nikolayevich. He was furious at Stalin. Tukhachevsky did not seem to be angry, though. His tone of voice was sad, resigned, almost mournful.

“I looked around the corner to see the two men, and I was shocked to see that Tukhachevsky’s hair had turned gray. I had seen him two weeks earlier, and it was quite dark. Obviously something terrible had happened to him. I pulled back, careful not to be seen. I knew that if they knew I was there, that I was listening in, they would stop. And I had the feeling that whatever they were discussing was so serious, so dangerous, that my father would never tell me. He is always so protective of me, you know.”

“Not because he doesn’t respect you, dusya. But because he loves you.”

“Yes. I’ve come to understand this, though for years it made me so angry that he insisted on treating me like a small child. So I listened to Tukhachevsky tell my father that Stalin and his NKVD had uncovered a huge plot within the army. He said the NKVD was tailing him, on Stalin’s direct orders. The rumor was that Stalin had strong evidence indicating that a number of his top military officers were engaged in a secret conspiracy a plot with members of the German High Command to carry out a coup d’etat against Stalin. And that among these plotters was … Tukhachevsky!”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it? I don’t know the truth. I know that when my father and he spoke privately, they both agreed that Stalin was a dangerous man.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “My father loathes Stalin. This I know. He will not allow Stalin’s name to be used in our house. Oh, in public he joins in all the toasts to the General Secretary. He praises Stalin to the skies when others are listening. He is not stupid. But he hates the man. And so did Tukhachevsky.”

“What was the ’strong evidence’ that Stalin had? Was that ever revealed?”

“Never publicly, no. But there was talk. Apparently a dossier was obtained in Prague from Czech intelligence, given to the NKVD. The dossier contained letters written by these Soviet military officers, letters to their German counterparts seeking to enlist their support in a scheme to overthrow Stalin. The signatures were verified, the seals, everything. One of the letters was signed by Marshal Tukhachevsky himself.”

“He wrote such a letter?”

“Of course, he denied it. But he said it made no difference. He was convinced that he was about to be arrested, along with others.”

“He was warning your father, then?”

“That may have been part of why he came. Father told him to write a letter to Stalin himself to clear up this misunderstanding. Tukhachevsky said he had done so already, but he hadn’t received an answer. He said his days were numbered and he feared not only for his life but also for his family. He was a desperate man.

“The next morning, I asked my father who it was that had come in the night. He refused to tell me, of course. He said it was no concern of mine. But I noticed that he had removed the photograph of himself with Tukhachevsky. Later I found it hidden away in a drawer, wrapped in newspaper. And a few days later, Tukhachevsky and seven other high-ranking military officers were arrested. They were tried in secret their trial lasted barely three hours! and found guilty of espionage and treason against the motherland.”

Her hands were squeezing his so tight that it was painful. But Metcalfe just nodded, listened.

“They all confessed,” she said. “But the confessions were false. They were tortured, we later learned, and then told that the only way to save their lives and, more important, their families’ lives was to sign confessions admitting to a conspiracy with the Germans. They were executed in the Lubyanka. Not in the cellar, by the way, but in the courtyard, during the daytime. NKVD trucks were brought in to rev their engines during the execution in order to cover up the sound of the shots.” She paused for a long time, and Metcalfe said nothing. The only sound was the gentle breathing and nickering of the horses. “As they died,” she continued at last, her voice cracking, “they shouted, “Long live Stalin!” “

Metcalfe shook his head. He put his free arm around her shoulder, squeezed her tight.

“And of course,” Lana said, “this was not the end but the beginning of a cascade of blood. More than thirty thousand military officials were purged. Generals, army marshals, hundreds of division commanders, all of the navy’s admirals.”

“Lana, what does this terrible story have to do with you?”

“My father,” she whispered, “was one of the few generals who were not arrested.”

“Because he was not involved.”

She closed her eyes. Her face seemed wracked with pain. “Because he was not caught. Or perhaps it was luck. These things happen, too.”

“Not ‘caught’? Are you saying your father was … a plotter against Stalin?”

“It seems scarcely believable. And yet he has often whispered to me of his loathing of Stalin. I have no choice but to believe.”

“But he never told you he was part of any conspiracy, did he?”

“He never would! I told you, he is fiercely protective of me. One single word of his guilt and he would be summarily executed. Stalin does not give anyone the benefit of the doubt.”

“Then what makes you so certain?”

Abruptly she broke away from his embrace. She stood up, walked over to the chestnut horse, and began absently stroking his flank. She was obviously avoiding something extremely painful. After a few minutes, without looking at Metcalfe, she began to speak.

“A few months ago I was invited to a party at the German embassy. It was a terribly extravagant affair, the sort the Germans like to put on, and of course they must always have the creme de la creme of Moscow society there, which means the famous actors and singers and dancers. To be honest, I only go to these things to eat. Really! I’m embarrassed to say it, but it’s true.

“Well, a German diplomat came up to me and asked if I was the daughter of the famous general Mikhail Baranov.”

“Von Schussler.”

She nodded. “Why did he want to know? I wondered. My father now works in the Commissariat of Defense, and even though his job is quite boring, quite bureaucratic, I must always be careful whom I talk to; we are told there are spies everywhere. He seemed to know all about my father’s military career far more even than I knew. He said he wanted to talk to me in private, that he had something to share with me that I would find most interesting. I was intrigued, as he intended I would be. We took our drinks to a corner of the room and sat down, away from anyone else. Von Schiissler was clearly a cultured man, different from so many of the Nazi boors I’ve met. I didn’t much care for him he seemed arrogant and self-absorbed, not at all what you would call a charming man. But he spoke, in a very casual and offhanded way, and I listened. He told me that an old school friend of his who had gone into the SS had shown him a most interesting, top-secret dossier concerning certain highly placed members of the Soviet military. Some of the documents had already been obtained by Stalin, but there were others.”

“Oh, Jesus. Lana, dorogaya. How frightened you must have been.”

“He must have seen the fear in my face. I cannot help it I flush easily; I am not good at hiding my emotions. I said nothing, pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about, but he could sense my terror. Bozhe moi, Stiva! My God. He said that there were other letters in this dossier, names Stalin never knew about. The SS, he said, liked to hold on to compromising evidence to use when they had a use for it, as if they were trump cards.”

“The bastard was threatening you.”

“But nothing so vulgar, Stiva. Nothing so obvious. It was all quite subtle and understated. Von Schiissler said he saw no reason why this damaging piece of information should be revealed to the NKVD. What was past was past, he said. But didn’t I find it interesting? he said, so casually.”

“However subtly he played it, he was obviously blackmailing you.”

“Ah, but you see, he only wanted to take me to dinner, he said. He said he found me quite interesting and wanted to get to know me better.”

“That bastard.” Of course! It all made sense now. Metcalfe understood, and it sickened him.

“Naturally, I had dinner with him. And again the next night.”

“You had no choice,” Metcalfe said softly. “You couldn’t refuse.”

She shrugged. “I would do anything to protect my father. Just as my father would do anything to protect me. And if it meant spending nights with a man I find tedious and repulsive well, in Russia people often must do far worse things to save their loved ones. People lie and betray and turn their dearest friends in to the NKVD. People go to the gulag; they’re shot in the back of the neck. It is a very small thing, after all, for me to sleep with Rudolf von Schiissler. I would do far more, far worse, if I had to, to save my father.”

“When I came to see you backstage at the Bolshoi… you were terrified, weren’t you?”

She looked at him, and Metcalfe could see tears streaming down her cheeks. “Everywhere there are informants and gossips. If word had gotten back to him that my American lover was back in Moscow … I was afraid that jealousy might turn to rage. And he would carry out his threat. He would throw my father to the wolves of the NKVD. Oh, Stiva, I love you as life itself. I always have; you know that. But it cannot be. We cannot be.”

Metcalfe barely heard her words. His mind was spinning, turning, like a kaleidoscope shifting shards of colored glass into one new pattern after another. Lana’s father, a prominent general in the Soviet army, now retired from active military service but still working in the Commissariat of Defense. Her German inamorato, a man close to the Nazi ambassador, von der Schulenberg. An extraordinary chain of connections, links forged by ambition and coercion and power. A chain that bound his dearest Lana but was it a chain that could also be used?

Was that what Corky had intended all along?

Metcalfe’s pulse pounded. He stood up, came over to her, put his arms around her, comforted her. She went limp in his arms, seeming to dissolve into him, her body convulsed with deep sobs. Minutes went by. He held her; she wept. There was nothing he wanted to do more than hold his Lana, and in truth holding her was all he could do for her now; it was all she wanted as well. Then, still clinging to each other, she broke the silence. “I am like the Russian people themselves, you know, moi lyubimi. I am beyond help.”

“Maybe not,” Metcalfe said, his thoughts whirling. “Maybe not.”

The symphony of odors almost overwhelmed the violinist, as it did so often when he was indoors, particularly in an unfamiliar place. He could smell the Nivea skin cream that the petty bureaucrat obviously used in place of shaving soap, his Obel pipe tobacco, the rosemary hair tonic he used in a sad and failing attempt to prevent baldness, though it was far too late for that. He could smell the consular officer’s boot polish, which he recognized as Erdal brand; it took him back to his childhood and his father, a strict and orderly man who always kept his boots perfectly shined. His father bought canisters of Erdal shoe polish, which came with free collectible cards depicting zeppelins or gliders or, his favorite, prehistoric animals. He remembered with pleasure the beautiful color drawings of the diplodocus and the archaeopteryx and the plesiosaur, each cavorting in the primordial swamp. It was one of the very few happy memories of his childhood.

Less pleasantly most of the smells that assaulted his sensitive nasal membranes were, alas, far from pleasant ones he could smell the anxious bureaucrat’s lunch, whose digestion was not progressing well. The man had consumed bock wurst and pickled cabbage, and he had obviously had an episode of flatulence in this office shortly before the violinist had arrived. It had largely dissipated, but not completely.

“How long a list could that be?” Kleist asked. “I am asking only for a list of British or American males who have arrived in Moscow within the last seven days. How many of them can there possibly be?” The violinist simply wanted to know if one Daniel Eigen had entered Moscow in the last few days.

It was entirely possible, of course likely, in fact that Eigen had entered under a different name. However the spy had entered the country, a list was a good starting point, though. It would shorten considerably the amount of time Kleist would have to spend going from hotel to hotel investigating these recent arrivals, making visual identifications.

Meeting with this man was a waste of valuable time. But the military attache, General Ernst Kostring, with whom he properly should have been meeting, was out of the office for most of the day and had asked him to convey his request to this flunky.

The bureaucrat seemed to have one excuse after another at the ready. The man was a past master at the one skill that was paramount in the German Foreign Office: procrastination. For the last ten minutes he had improvised a veritable cadenza of reasons that he could do nothing. Kleist often encountered such an attitude in the Foreign Service, particularly when they dealt with the Sicherheitsdienst, whom they despised and feared.

Kleist did not particularly care that they despised the SD. That they feared the SD, on the other hand, was useful. So it was with this petty bureaucrat who postured at his little desk reeking of rosemary hair tonic and flatulence: he dislikes me, but he fears me more. These deskbound men, with their flabby asses and their flabby souls, disgusted him. They were frightened, resentful souls who felt superior to men such as the violinist, but they were nothing more than sparrows trailing in the slipstream of an eagle, mice who sought shelter with a lion. These virtuosos of the paper clip and the stapler: how ordinary was their existence, how drab their lives. They did not know, nor would they ever, the transcendence that Kleist, and his mentor, Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, knew: the transport of playing beautiful music, which could bring tears to the eyes of the listener. Or the similar transport of taking a life, which was another kind of music: measured, rhythmic, controlled, requiring not merely skill but instinct, art.

Kleist could not help but stare at the bureaucrat’s throat, as the man gulped nervously and explained why it was impossible, how they could not ask the NKVD for such a list, how they did not, could not, cooperate with the Soviet intelligence service, who after all were working against them, suspicious of them, no matter what the stated policies were…. Kleist watched the bobbing of the man’s hyoid bone, the thyroid cartilage of his larynx, the ligaments and tendons and soft fascia. It was so naked, so vulnerable. Briefly he imagined how it would feel to encircle the fleshy throat with a cold, high-tensile catgut E string and, gloriously, to snap it tight, to choke off this unending stream of Scheisse, all this bullshit! Kleist noticed the sharply pointed paper spike on the bureaucrat’s desk and wondered what it would feel like to plunge it into one of this blabbermouth’s eyeballs and into the soft tissue of his brain.

Something in the violinist’s expression, some glint of his malevolent little daydream, must have suddenly come across to the bureaucrat, because Kleist could see the man’s pupils shrink, his blinking become rapid, and all at once the desk man turned compliant.

“… Which is not to say that we do not have our contacts here in Moscow,” the man said hastily. “Bribes can be paid to the proper responsible authorities, our counterparts in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. They keep lists of all those who enter the country.”

“Excellent,” Kleist said. “When can I have this list?”

The bureaucrat swallowed, though he tried to cover his anxiety with a suave bravado. “I should think later this week we should be able to “

“Today. I need the list today.”

The color drained from the man’s face. “But of course, Herr Haupsturmfuhrer. I shall do my best.”

“And if it’s not asking too much, I wonder whether you might find me a room here where I can practice my violin while I’m waiting.”

“Certainly, Herr Haupsturmfuhrer. Why don’t you take my office?”