Authors: Sam Eastland
As Kirov backed away, he watched a sliver of smoke, or maybe it was steam, slither from the dead man’s mouth, as if his soul were fleeing from the prison of his corpse.
With no clue as to precisely where they were, and no way to check the body of their guide for maps or any other sign of where they were supposed to go when they arrived in Berlin, the two men headed for the church, weaving between the gravestones until they reached the entrance. But the door was locked and there was no sign of life inside, so they retreated to a clump of trees in the corner of the churchyard to wait out the night. Their clothing had been soaked by the descent through the clouds and they decided to light a small fire, keeping its meagre flames hidden by a circle of stones their muddy fingers gouged out of the ground.
A cold wind raked across the field beyond the churchyard wall, rattling the branches of the trees.
Crouched above the mesh of burning twigs, both men reached their hands into the smoke as if somehow to wash them in the scent of burning alder.
With his head tucked down and chin tucked into the collar of his mud-spattered coat, Pekkala resembled one of the tramps who lived in the Vorobjev woods on the south-west outskirts of Moscow.
‘There’s no point going on,’ said Kirov, struggling to speak as his jaw trembled with the cold.
Pekkala looked up from the fire. ‘What?’ he asked in disbelief.
‘Without our guide,’ explained Kirov, ‘we’ll never find the safe house.’
‘We have some clues,’ countered Pekkala.
Kirov looked at him in astonishment. ‘Such as?’ he demanded.
‘We know that the contact is Hungarian,’ said Pekkala, ‘and the date we are supposed to meet at the safe house.’
‘It’s not enough,’ said Kirov. ‘Not nearly enough! The rendezvous is three days from now, and even if we can get to Berlin in time, what good is that in a city which is doubtless home to thousands of Hungarians, not to mention the refugees who have been pouring in from the east? You must face the fact, Inspector, that there’s no chance of making the rendezvous with Comrade Simonova.’
‘There is always a chance,’ said Pekkala.
An image appeared in Kirov’s mind of the two of them, shuffling from house to house and knocking at every door they came to. It would take them the rest of their lives. Kirov paused before he spoke again. It did not surprise him that Pekkala did not want to turn back, especially with what was now at stake. He knew he would have to choose his words carefully if he was to have any hope of persuading the Inspector to come home. ‘Inspector,’ he began, as he attempted to reason with Pekkala, ‘please consider the possibility that your judgement might be clouded in this instance.’
‘It might well be,’ replied Pekkala.
Encouraged by the Inspector’s admission, Kirov felt it safe to go on.
‘When morning comes,’ he said firmly, ‘we’ll return to the Soviet lines.’
‘Whatever you think of my judgement,’ Pekkala told him, ‘I have come too far to turn back now.’
‘But it isn’t so far!’ Kirov tried to reason with him. ‘It can’t be more than a day or two if we keep up a steady pace. All we have to do is head east. The Red Army is massing on the Seelow Heights. Once we reach the River Oder, we’ll be safe.’
‘Safe?’ echoed Pekkala. ‘How safe do you think you will be if we return to the Kremlin empty-handed?’
‘But we won’t,’ insisted Kirov. ‘As soon as we reach the Soviet lines, we can make contact with Special Operations in Moscow. They can reschedule the rendezvous at the safe house and find another guide to take us there. We’ll make it to Berlin, Inspector. It just might take a little longer than we thought.’
‘That is the problem, Major Kirov.’ Pekkala picked up a stick and jabbed it at the embers. ‘It might only be a matter of hours before Hunyadi tracks her down. So even if we did have the time to spare, Lilya Simonova does not.’
Having tried and failed to reason with Pekkala, Kirov realised that he had only one card left to play. ‘Inspector,’ he said, ‘by the authority of Comrade Stalin, I am giving you an order.’
For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind in the branches of the trees.
‘And if Stalin was here with us now,’ Pekkala gestured at a patch of dirt beside the fire, ‘do you think that would change my opinion?’
Kirov stared at the place where Pekkala was pointing, half expecting Stalin to rise like some hideous mushroom from the patchwork collage of dead leaves. ‘What would you have us do, Inspector?’
‘Give me until the deadline for the rendezvous has passed,’ answered Pekkala. ‘That’s all the time I’ll need.’
‘How on earth do you expect to find her in three days, with no idea of where she might be hiding?’ asked Kirov.
‘You let me worry about that,’ replied Pekkala.
That same night, Peter Garlinski, former supervisor of British Special Operations Relay Station 53A, was woken by a heavy hand rapping on his Moscow flat door.
Bleary-eyed with sleep, Garlinski went to see what the fuss was about and found himself face to face with a sergeant of NKVD, the Soviet Internal Security Agency. The sergeant was crisply dressed, with dark blue trousers and a
gymnastiorka
tunic. Across his waist, he wore a heavy leather belt with a plain iron buckle and a Tokarev in its polished leather holster.
Garlinski was simultaneously worried by the sight of this man and grateful for the visit. He had not spoken to anyone since the arrival of Inspector Pekkala some days before.
‘I have come to get you out of here!’ announced the sergeant, a rosy-cheeked man with a double chin and thick, dark eyebrows. His short-fingered hands, the colour of raw pork, were criss-crossed with scars across the knuckles, as if he had once punched his way through a window.
‘Out of here?’ Garlinski asked suspiciously. ‘Where to?’
The sergeant poked his head into the room. ‘Some place better than this.’
‘Finally!’ sighed Garlinski.
‘Pack your things,’ said the sergeant.
‘I have no things.’
‘All the better. Follow me!’
They walked towards the gate, the sergeant’s iron heel plates sparking off the flint stones of the courtyard. Outside in the street, a car was parked, its engine running.
The sergeant got behind the wheel.
Garlinski climbed into the back.
‘We have to make a stop at Lubyanka,’ said the sergeant, as he put the car in gear and set off down the road. ‘You haven’t been debriefed yet.’
‘I know!’ Garlinski replied excitedly. ‘I’ve been waiting for that.’
‘It won’t take long,’ said the sergeant. ‘Then we can get you to your new apartment.’
‘What about employment?’ asked Garlinski. ‘I think I could be very useful. I’m trained as a decoder, you know. I was head of a listening post back in England.’
The sergeant glanced at him in the rear-view mirror and smiled broadly. ‘Sounds like you’ll have your pick of assignments. Not like me. I have no special talents.’
Garlinski found his gaze drawn to the scars on the sergeant’s knuckles, but he could make nothing of them and soon turned his attention to the sight of the people walking in the streets, passing through the cones of street-lamp light, still bundled in their winter scarves and furs.
The car pulled in to the Lubyanka courtyard.
Garlinski climbed out and looked around. He had heard that Lubyanka was once a fashionable neo-baroque building and it was still possible to see how grand it must have been before the Revolution. Now the windows were covered by angled metal shields, which prevented anyone from looking out, and strong lights glared down from the rooftops, obscuring his view of the sky.
A shudder passed through Garlinski. Even though he knew that he was being welcomed as a hero for his many years of service to the Soviet cause, the Lubyanka was still a place of nightmares for anyone who knew its history.
‘Where do I go?’ asked Garlinski.
‘I’ll walk you in,’ said the sergeant.
They entered the building and Garlinski was made to sign a register. The page on which he wrote was partially covered by a heavy metal screen, which hid all but the space in which he wrote his name.
‘This way.’ The sergeant beckoned for Garlinski to follow him.
The two men made their way downstairs and along a narrow corridor lined with pale green painted doors. Along the way, they passed two guards, with a prisoner shuffling along between them.
The prisoner, a young man with coal-black hair and narrow eyes, immediately turned to face the wall as Garlinski and the sergeant walked by.
There was complete silence in the corridor. Even the floor on which they walked had been covered with thick grey carpeting which dampened the sound of their footsteps.
Garlinski wanted to ask how much further they would have to go but the quiet was so threatening and profound that he did not dare to speak.
At the end of the corridor, they came to another door, which was made of dark, heavy panels and had a slightly arched top.
‘It’s the old wine cellar,’ whispered the sergeant, as he reached into his pocket for the key. ‘The men who worked at this place, back when it was still an insurance company, kept a king’s ransom in bottles down here for entertaining their wealthy clients. That’s all gone now, though, men and bottles both.’ He swung open the door and gestured grandly. ‘After you, Comrade Garlinski.’
Garlinski stepped inside. The ceiling of the room was arched and the walls were made of brick. The floor had been laid with tiles and there were shallow gutters running along the edges of the floor. He wondered why a wine cellar needed gutters. He looked around for furniture, but there was none. Not even a chair in which to sit.
He turned to ask the sergeant if they were in the right place.
The last clear thing Garlinski saw was the fist of the sergeant, knuckles spider-webbed with scars, as it slammed into his face.
He sprawled on to the floor, nearly blinded by the pain. Blood from his broken nose poured down the back of his throat and, propping himself up on one elbow, he retched as he struggled to breathe. Dimly, Garlinski watched as the sergeant removed his tunic and belt and hung them on the door handle. Then the man rolled up the sleeves of his thin, brown cotton shirt, the armpits of which were already darkened with sweat.
The sergeant’s smile had vanished. His face now appeared almost blank, as if he were only half aware of what he was doing. He reached down, took hold of the front of Garlinski’s coat and hauled him to his feet.
‘Wait!’ called Garlinski, peppering the sergeant’s face with blood. ‘There must be some mistake. I am a hero of the Soviet Union!’
Without a word of explanation and, using nothing more than his fists, the sergeant beat Peter Garlinski to death, as he had done countless others in the past.
He left the body lying on the floor, removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood off his hands. He studied a few new cuts on his knuckles. It was always their teeth that caused those.
Then he put on his tunic and belt and departed from the room, leaving the door open.
A few minutes later, two men dragged away Garlinski’s body, while a third mopped down the floor with a bucket of soapy water. Bubbles, poppy red, sluiced along the gutters and were gone.
In the dove-grey light of dawn, with darkness still clinging to the western sky, Pekkala and Kirov set off towards Berlin.
Although it was still cold, the breeze blowing up from the south was not as bitter as it had been the night before. Slowly, as they marched along, the warmth returned to their bones. They thought longingly of food they did not have and of the wheezy stove and battered chairs at their office on Pitnikov Street.
‘I knew it wouldn’t work,’ said Kirov.
‘What wouldn’t work?’ asked Pekkala.
‘Me giving you orders.’
‘Maybe you should have tried a little harder,’ suggested Pekkala.
Kirov turned to him. ‘Do you mean it might have worked?’
Pekkala thought about this for a moment. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘but it would have been interesting to watch.’
They soon came across a railway track, which appeared to be heading directly towards the city. They followed it, timing their strides to the laddering of sleepers and smelling the oily creosote with which the wooden beams had been painted.
Through eyes bloodshot with fatigue, Pekkala watched the rails flow out on either side of him, like streams of mercury, converging in the distance. His memory tilted back to when he’d walked along another set of tracks which had been sutured across the earth.
In that moment, the mildness of that spring morning peeled away, leaving behind a world of bone-white snow and ice-sheathed trees and silence so profound that he could hear the rush of blood through his own veins. The cold slammed into his bones, and his heart seemed to cower behind the frail cage of his ribs.
He was back in Siberia again.
The tracks which he recalled were those of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which skirted the edge of the valley of Krasnagolyana, home to the labour camp of Borodok.
For much of the year, what few wagon trails criss-crossed that lonely forest lay deep beneath the snowdrifts or else were so clogged with mud that no one, not even the long-legged reindeer, could make their way along them.
During those seasons, the railway became the only means of crossing this vast landscape. It marked the boundary of Pekkala’s world. The land he roamed belonged to the Gulag of Borodok, whose trees he marked for cutting with red paint. Beyond the tracks lay the territory of Mamlin Three, another camp, where experiments were carried out on behalf of the Soviet military. At Mamlin, inmates were submerged in icy water until their hearts stopped beating. Then they were resuscitated with injections of adrenalin administered directly into their hearts. The procedure was repeated, with longer and longer intervals between the stopping of the heart and the adrenalin injections until, finally, the patient could not be revived. These experiments were designed to replicate the conditions of pilots brought down in the sea. Other tests, using extremes of high and low pressure, produced a steady flow of cadavers, which were packed into barrels of formaldehyde and sent to medical schools all across Russia.
For Pekkala, to walk across those tracks meant certain death if he was ever caught. But he was drawn to them in spite of the danger. At night, he stood back among the trees, while the carriages of the Trans-Siberian Express rattled past. He caught glimpses of the passengers, bundled in coats and asleep or staring out into the darkness with no idea that the darkness was staring back at them.
Until that memory finally stuttered to a halt, like a film clattering off its spool, he could not bring himself to step beyond the confines of the rails.
The first rays of sunlight glimmered faintly on the tracks. A moment later, the world around them ignited into a million coppery fragments as tiny stones out in the fields beyond, puddles of dirty water and even the powdery condensation of their breath caught the fireball’s reflection.
‘What’s that?’ asked Kirov, pointing up ahead.
Pekkala squinted at some strange, segmented creature, leaning up against one of the telegraph poles which ran beside the tracks. As he looked, it seemed to move, bowing out slightly in the centre and then settling back into its original shape. ‘Whatever it is,’ he whispered, ‘I think it is alive.’
Just then they heard a voice, calling out faintly across the empty fields.
At first, the two men could not even tell its source.
Then it came again, and they realised it was coming from the creature by the telegraph pole.
It was calling for help.
Without a moment’s consultation, the two men set off running, unsure what they would find but drawn by the exhausted terror in that voice.
Not until they were standing practically in front of it did they fully understand what they were seeing.
A man had been hanged by a rope from one of the crooked spikes used by linemen for climbing to the wires above. But his life had been saved by a boy, who had placed himself beneath the man’s feet so that the victim’s neck did not bear the full weight of the noose.
It looked as they had been there all night, or even longer.
The man’s hands had been tied behind his back. He wore heavy wool trousers and thick-soled boots, but only a flannel shirt above the waist. If he’d ever had a coat, it had been taken from him. Even though he was not dead, the noose had tightened on his throat and he was half-choked, breathing in short gasps like a fish pulled up on to a river bank.
The boy was tall and skinny, with a thick crop of ginger-red hair cow-licked vertically at the front. What strength he had was almost gone, and fatigue had made his pale skin almost translucent. His white-knuckled hands gripped the man’s trouser legs in an attempt to hold him steady.
While Kirov climbed the pole to cut him down, Pekkala took the boy’s place, settling the man’s boots upon his own shoulders and feeling the sharp heel irons dig into the flesh above his collarbone.
Carefully, they lowered the man to the ground, cut the rope from around his neck and propped him up against the dirty rails to let him breathe.
The boy sat down on the ground and stared at the men, too tired even to thank them except with the expression in his eyes.
‘Who did this?’ asked Pekkala. He had learned to speak German while at school in Finland, but his grammar was clumsy and the words crackled strangely in his mouth, as if he were chewing on bones.
‘Feldgendarmerie,’ replied the boy. Field Police.
Even back in Moscow, Pekkala had heard of these roving bands of soldiers, who rounded up anyone whom they suspected of desertion, or failure to place themselves in harm’s way. The execution of these stragglers was summary and swift. Their bodies, sometimes bearing placards on which their supposed crimes were listed, dangled from piano-wire nooses all across the shrinking territory of the Reich.
‘My son,’ said the hanged man, when he was finally able to talk. He gestured at the boy.
Pekkala wondered what charges had been laid against the man, who was not wearing military uniform, and by what stroke of fortune his son had been around to save him from the improvised gallows of the Feldgendarmerie. ‘Where are they now?’ he asked. ‘These Field Police?’
The man shook his head. He did not know. He brushed his hand towards the north to show in which direction they had gone.
‘And to Berlin?’ asked Pekkala.
With one trembling hand, the wrist rubbed raw by the wire with which it had been bound, the man reached out and pointed down the tracks. ‘But do not go,’ he told them. ‘In Berlin there is nothing but death and, when the Russians arrive, even death will not be enough to describe it.’
‘We must go there,’ replied Pekkala. He wished he could explain what must have seemed an act of total madness. Instead, he only muttered, ‘I’m afraid we have no choice.’
Neither the man nor his son asked any questions, but both seemed anxious to repay them for their kindness. Motioning for the two men to follow, they pointed across the field towards a grove of sycamore trees, on which the reddening buds glowed like a haze in the morning sunlight. Almost hidden in amongst the branches was a small brick chimney rising from a roof of grey slates patched with luminous green moss.
‘That is where we live,’ explained the boy.
‘We are grateful,’ said Pekkala, ‘but we must be moving on.’
‘If you want to reach your destination,’ warned the father, ‘then you should wait until the danger has passed. The Field Police barracks is on the outskirts of the city and they usually head back well before sunset. By mid-afternoon, it should be safe to travel. Then you can enter Berlin after dark.’
Pekkala hesitated, knowing he should take the man’s advice but so anxious to press on towards Berlin that his instincts faltered as they balanced the need against the risk.
‘We have food,’ said the boy. Knowing that only one of the men could understand what he was saying, he motioned with his hand to his mouth.
Kirov had been trying without success to follow the conversation between Pekkala and the half-hanged man. But he understood the gesture perfectly. He touched Pekkala on the arm and raised his eyebrows in a question, knowing that he could not speak without giving away the fact that he was Russian.
Feeling the touch against his arm, Pekkala glanced at the major. The reminder that he was responsible, not only for what might happen to himself but to them both, returned him abruptly to his senses. Pekkala gestured towards the house in the distance. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
Without another word, the four of them set off across the field.
At the edge of the woods, the ground sloped away sharply, revealing a small farmstead tucked away in a hollow.
A dog was sprawled dead outside the farmhouse door. It had been shot several times and its blood had leaked out into the mud on which it lay.
Ringing the small farmyard were racks of small cages, the doors of which were open.
‘
Fasane
,’ said the father, gesturing at the cages. Pheasants.
The father fluttered his fingers, to show they had all flown away. ‘I let them go,’ he explained. His voice was still hoarse and the chafing of the noose had rubbed a bloody groove beneath his chin.
‘But why?’ asked Pekkala.
The father shrugged, as if he wasn’t even sure himself. ‘So that they would have a chance,’ he said. And then he went on to describe how the band of military police had spotted the birds as they took to the air and had come to investigate. The first thing they did was shoot the farmer’s dog after it growled at them. Then, finding that the farmer had released the birds, which might otherwise have fed the hungry soldiers, they accused him of treason and immediately condemned him to death. At gunpoint they had marched him out across the field until they came to the telegraph poles. When they brought out the rope, he asked them why they had not hanged him from a tree by his own house. They told him it was so that people passing on the tracks could see his body, and think twice before they, too, betrayed their country. They tied a noose and hauled him up to hang him slowly, rather than breaking his neck with a drop.
Unknown to the military police, the boy had followed them.
As soon as the soldiers had departed, the boy rushed in and set his shoulders underneath the father’s feet. And they stood there through the night, waiting for someone to help.
The boy fetched a shovel from the back of the house in order to bury the dog. Kirov went with him, to share in the burden of digging, while the father brought Pekkala into the barn. There, he opened up a horse stall, in which something had been hidden underneath an old grey tarpaulin. The man pulled back the oil-stained canvas, revealing two bicycles.
Their chains were rusted, the brake pads crumbling and the leather seats sagged like the backs of broken mules. But the tyres still held air and, as the father pointed out, this way was better than walking.
When the dog had been buried, they sat down to a meal of smoked pheasant served on slices of gritty bread which had sawdust mixed into the flour. Meagre as it was, this seemed to be the only food they had left.
By two o’clock that afternoon, the father announced that it was safe for them to travel.
They walked out to the narrow road that ran beside the farm.
‘Stick to the back roads,’ advised the father. ‘Just keep heading west and you’ll be there in less than a day.’
‘Good luck to you both,’ said Pekkala, and he shook hands with the man and his son.
‘
Udachi
,’ replied the father, wishing them good luck in Russian.
Kirov gasped to hear the sound of his own language.
But Pekkala only smiled.
The man had known all along where they came from.
Wobbling unsteadily upon the bicycles, Kirov and Pekkala set off towards Berlin.