“You are free to go.”
“Bon après-midi.”
“Bon après-midi.”
Solange was home before she gave in to her terror. She trembled for a good ten minutes, made a cup of tea, and sat down at the kitchen table to compose herself. Louis came over, but she told him nothing of the encounter, lest he do something foolishly gallant.
Two days later, Louis was arrested.
“It was a week from a Zola novel,” Solange told Nicholai now, lying with her head in the crook of his arm. “One of the bad ones.”
She said it ironically, dismissing the possibility of self-pity, but Nicholai heard the deeply buried hurt in her voice as she continued her story.
They caught Louis red-handed — stopped him on his bicycle and found the coded messages in his anatomy text. They hauled him to the cellar of Gestapo headquarters, where Hoeger went to work on him. The handsome boy was quickly handsome no longer. Unfortunately for Louis, he was brave, loyal, and committed, and would not reveal names.
Solange heard about it that afternoon. She went to her room and sobbed, then washed her face, combed her hair and put on the prettiest dress she owned, examined her image, and undid the top two buttons to reveal a deep décolletage. Sitting in front of the mirror in her mother’s bedroom, she applied makeup the way she had seen the whores do it.
Then she walked to Gestapo headquarters and asked to see Colonel Hoeger.
Shown into his office, she stood in front of his desk, made herself look him in the eyes, and said, “If you release Louis Duchesne, I will give myself to you. Now and anytime that you wish. In any way.”
Hoeger looked at her and blinked.
Solange said, “I know that you want me.”
He burst into laughter.
Hoeger laughed until tears ran down his fleshy cheeks, and then he took a handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his eyes, and got up. “Get out of my office. The nerve of you. Do you think I would risk my career, betray my country, just for the honor of breaking your cherry for you?”
Solange stood her ground. “Can I see him?”
“Certainly,” Hoeger answered. “You can see him hanged. Thursday noon.”
In the square around the gallows where five ropes dangled from the crossbeam, a crowd formed and stood in sullen silence until a German army truck pulled up. Soldiers jumped out the back first, then hauled out a group of prisoners, five in all, who had been sentenced to death.
Louis was the last taken out.
There was nothing romantic about it, nothing heroic. Louis looked badly beaten, limp and in shock, his hands tied behind him as they dragged him up to the gallows. Standing there in just a bloodstained white shirt and dirty brown trousers, he peered out at the crowd uncomprehendingly, and Solange wondered if he was looking for her.
I should have given myself to him, she thought. I should have loved him completely. I should have taken him inside me, wrapped myself around him, and never let him loose.
A soldier went down the line. He finally came to Louis, jerked his head back roughly, put the noose around his neck, then bent down and tied his ankles together. At the colonel’s orders, they put no hoods over the condemned heads.
Louis looked terrified.
Other soldiers formed a line between the crowd and the gallows, lest anyone try to interfere or run up and pull on the legs of the hanged to break their necks and abbreviate their agony.
Solange forced herself to watch.
An officer shouted an order.
There was a crack of metal and wood and Louis dropped.
His neck jerked and he bounced. Then he hung there twisting — his legs kicking, his eyes bulging, his tongue obscenely thrust out of his mouth — as his face turned red and then blue.
Finally — it seemed like forever — he was still.
Solange walked away through the crowd.
She heard a man’s voice say, “He was a hero.”
“What?”
It was Patrice Reynaud, a railway conductor who had been a friend of Louis. Patrice kept walking, but repeated, “He was a hero, your Louis.”
“Your Louis,” Solange thought. If only I had let him be my Louis.
That night she walked over to La Maison de Madame Sette and went into the woman’s little office.
“I am ready to begin work,” she said.
Madame looked at her skeptically. “Why now, chérie?”
“Why not now, madame?” Solange answered. “Why delay the reality of life?”
“Your mother will not like it.”
Marie didn’t. She yelled, she lectured, she wept. “I didn’t want this kind of life for you. I wanted something better for you.”
So did I, Solange thought.
Life decided otherwise.
Madame Sette, of course, was delighted and decided to make an event of it. She spent an entire week promoting the auctioning off of Solange’s virginity. The girl would fetch a very high price.
“I will give you half,” Madame told her. “That is more than I usually give.”
“Half is fine,” Solange answered.
Put it away, don’t squander it, Madame advised her. Put your savings in the bank, work hard, and someday you can open up a little shop of your own. A woman should have her own money in this world, her own business.
“Yes, madame.”
The big night arrived, and the parlor was packed with German officers. Most of the local Frenchmen would have nothing to do with this, and those that would had been intimidated by word from the Resistance that it would not treat gently any man who bid for the virtue of a martyr’s girl.
Solange let Madame dress her for the occasion.
A crude mockery of wedding garb, the white diaphanous gown concealed little, her white lace headpiece was set gently on her hair that fell freely and shining down her back, adding to the image of virginity. Her makeup was slight and subtle, a little pencil to widen her already beautiful eyes, and just a shade of blush appropriate to a young bride.
Solange felt disgust.
Disgust when Madame insisted on examining her to verify her purity, disgust when she was being dressed up for the ceremonial travesty, disgust as she sat in the “bridal suite” and prepared herself for the event, disgust when she was led into the room, which fell instantly silent as men swallowed their lust. Disgust when Madame started the bidding high and it quickly went higher as the men were willing to spend small fortunes to have what they saw beneath the wedding gown.
Hoeger sat silent, his position and authority speaking for him. He let the bidding rise to an unprecedented height, then lifted the index finger of his right hand. The bidding stopped right there. No one, certainly not his subordinate officers, had the nerve to outbid the commander of the city’s Gestapo.
Madame quickly counted three and closed the bidding.
Hoeger took Solange by the arm and led her down the hallway to the “bridal suite.” He stripped off the dress, threw her down on the bed, and took her.
Solange moaned. She groaned in pleasure, called him her man, told him to do it harder, told him it was wonderful, he was wonderful. Said if she only knew, she would have let him before, let him anytime. She bucked and tensed, screamed as she came.
“You beautiful creature,” he panted. “I had no idea.”
She sighed. “So much pleasure.”
He closed his eyes, went back at it, intent on his own pleasure.
She reached under the mattress for the knife that Reynaud had given her, brought it up, and slashed his throat.
The Resistance got her out of the brothel and hid her in the back of a produce truck, then in a small cellar in the slums of Marseille. She was in the tight, dark space for three weeks and thought she might lose her mind before they finally took her out and up into the air, into the light. She still had nightmares.
There was plenty of work for her there, in the brothels frequented by the Germans. Her job was to listen, to pick up bits and pieces, and as a result trains were derailed, messages intercepted, Resistance fighters escaped just before the Gestapo came for them. And if one of the officers was gunned down at his favorite café or outside of his mistress’s place — all the better.
Solange never went home.
In the hungry winter of 1946, she returned to the only work she knew, becoming the mistress of an American officer. When he was rotated home, she found another, then another. This last one begged to marry her and take her back to Texas, but she told him not to be so foolish.
Shortly after, she met an OSS officer who said that they might have use for a woman like her.
With that, Solange finished her story.
Nicholai held her close until she finally fell asleep.
11
I
N THE MORNING,
Nicholai summoned Haverford and demanded to know the identity of the person he was meant to terminate. “As I’m a target now myself,” Nicholai said over coffee and croissant, “I think I have the right to know.”
Solange left the house earlier to buy groceries.
Haverford listened, seemed to seek a response in the milk swirling around in his cup, then looked up and answered, “You’re right. It’s time.”
“So?”
“The Soviet commissioner to Red China,” Haverford said. “Yuri Voroshenin.”
The name hit Nicholai like a hard slap, but — and perhaps only thanks to the minor paralysis of his facial muscles — he managed to keep his expression placid as he feigned a lack of recognition and asked, “Why eliminate him?”
“Korea,” Haverford answered.
Egged on by the Soviets, the madman Kim had invaded South Korea and the United States was forced to intervene. When MacArthur’s counterattack pushed to the Yalu River near the border with China, Mao felt that his hand had been forced and sent three hundred thousand troops into Korea.
The United States and China were at war. Worse, the conflict isolated China from the West and forced it to accept Soviet hegemony, thereby creating a solid Communist bloc from the Elbe to the shores of the Pacific.
“We have to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow,” Haverford concluded.
“By assassinating this Voroshenin?” Nicholai asked. “What good will that do?”
“We’ll hand the Russians sufficient evidence to blame the Chinese,” Haverford explained. “The Chinese will, of course, know that they didn’t do it, and conclude that the Soviets sacrificed one of their own in order to blame the Chinese and demand further concessions — perhaps permanent bases in Manchuria.”
It’s a classic Go ploy, Nicholai thought, to sacrifice a line of stones to lure your enemy into a misapprehension of your strategy. Uncharacteristic of Americans, who reveled in the childlike game of checkers. A deeper mind was behind this maneuver. It could be Haverford, but certainly he lacked the position to authorize a killing at this high level.
Who is it, then? Nicholai wondered.
Who is this Go player?
“Tell me about Voroshenin,” he said.
12
“D
ISABUSE YOURSELF
of the notion that we’re sending you to murder some innocent diplomat,” Haverford told Nicholai.
Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin was a high-ranking member of the KGB, a fact that the Chinese knew and deeply resented.
“Above all else,” Haverford warned, “our boy Yuri is a survivor.”
He laid out what the CIA knew about Yuri Voroshenin.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1898, the son of a schoolteacher, Voroshenin was a committed revolutionary even as a boy. By the time he was fifteen he had spent time in three Tsarist jails, at seventeen he barely escaped a traitor’s noose and was exiled to Siberia. The Bolsheviks ordered him to join the army in 1914, and he surfaced as a leader of the 1916 mutiny that sent soldiers streaming home from the front.
Haverford took out a photograph that showed a young Voroshenin in an army greatcoat and soldier’s peaked cap. Tall and thin, with the typical wire-rimmed spectacles of the left-wing Russian intellectual, he sported an open, happy grin that was unusual for an earnest revolutionary.
The great year of 1917 found him home, now an agent in the Petrograd division of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, the VchK, the “Cheka.” Violence was rife in the hungry city — demobilized soldiers shot, robbed, and raped. Mobs looted churches, stores, and the homes of the rich. The wives and daughters of bankers, generals, and Tsarist officials sold themselves as prostitutes to feed starving families.
Nicholai knew all about the Petrograd Cheka.
“You needn’t enlighten me,” Nicholai said. “My mother told me the stories.”
The Cheka began the Red Terror, a war of extermination against its “class enemies,” shooting dozens, sometimes even hundreds of “White” Russians in any single day, without trial or due process. Voroshenin cheerfully participated in the slaughter. “Why bother with a Commissariat of Justice?” he asked once in a party meeting. “Let’s just call it the Commissariat for Social Extermination and get on with it.”
They got on with it.
His tortures became the stuff of nightmares. He tied captured White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces, he shoved prisoners into nail-studded barrels and rolled them down hills, he peeled the skin off captives’ hands to create “gloves” of flesh. His name became a tool that mothers used to frighten their children.
In 1921 he helped suppress the mutiny at the naval base at Kronstad, accomplished with great bloodshed. Then he turned his attention to striking workers in the starving, freezing city. Through the firing squad, the truncheon, and the torture cell he reestablished order, then began tearing down sections of the city to provide fuel for the rest of it. All this activity brought him to the attention of the rising power in Moscow, Joseph Stalin.
“He next shows up in China,” Haverford went on. “In, of all places, Shanghai.”
It was, after all, at Stalin’s insistence that the Nationalists slaughtered the Communists there in 1927, and Uncle Joe thought Chiang Kai-shek could use an adviser experienced in such matters.
Nicholai was just a small boy when this happened, but he nevertheless remembered it. He used to prowl the streets of Shanghai, knew the “Reds” from the “Greens,” and when the shootings, stabbings, and beheadings of thousands of young Reds occurred, it was for him childhood’s end.
“We lose track of him for the next fifteen years,” Haverford said. “No one knows where he was or what he was doing, but it’s a pretty fair bet that he was involved in the Trotsky assassination in Mexico as well as Stalin’s staged murder of Sergei Kirov as a pretext for his great purges of the 1930s.”
The purge turned on Voroshenin himself. The dictator’s paranoia led him to imprison and execute his most gifted and ruthless subordinates, especially those who had stories to tell, and Yuri was tossed into Moscow’s dreaded Lubyanka Prison.
Voroshenin’s career should have ended there, with a bullet in the back of his head. But, as noted, he was a survivor who used all his craft, guile, and courage to survive his interrogations. He became a source of information too valuable to kill, and he sat in his cell for three long years, listening to the screams of less talented men, hearing their executions, and waiting for a moment of opportunity.
“Prison teaches you patience,” Voroshenin later said.
“It does,” Nicholai agreed, to Haverford’s blush.
Hitler opened the prison door when he invaded Russia. Faced with destruction, Stalin could no longer afford to keep his best people locked up. Voroshenin was quickly rehabilitated and released.
Yuri landed on his feet again.
Rather than be sent to the killing grounds of the war against Germany, he used his former connection to the Kuomintang to be assigned back to China, and found himself reunited with Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing. His assignment was not to help the Generalissimo fight the Japanese, but to track down Mao and his Communists, whom Stalin accurately viewed as a potential future rival.
Voroshenin had no problem fighting against his brother Marxists. No longer a true believer, he had lost his faith in Lubyanka, and was now a hardened cynic, believing in the advance of nothing except Yuri Voroshenin. To that end, he would ally himself with anyone, and as easily betray them.
Haverford showed Nicholai another photograph of a khaki-clad Voroshenin standing outside a Daoist temple with Chiang. Bareheaded, his hairline receding into a widow’s peak, his skin pale and drawn from the years in prison, there was still a vitality about him. His shoulders were wide, if a little stooped, and he had certainly put on no weight since his youth. A handsome man, powerful, he loomed over Chiang as both men pretended to study a map for the benefit of the photographer.
“Our man Yuri stayed with the Nats through the whole war and then some,” Haverford said. “When Stalin called all his agents back from China, he was afraid they’d been contaminated by Mao, so he had them purged.”
Again Voroshenin’s head should have been the first on the block, but he was the first to inform on his comrades and became the supervisor, rather than the prime victim, of the purge. Voroshenin personally conducted the interrogations, directed the torture, supervised the executions, in some cases pulling the trigger himself.
And now he was back in China.
“This is the man,” Haverford said, “that Stalin chose to represent him in China.”
It was a deliberate slap in the face, but what could Mao do about it? Isolated abroad, struggling to create a government and a viable economy at home, he needed Russian aid. If that meant swallowing his pride, the Chairman was willing to smile and bow and do it.
For the time being.
Nicholai listened to the biographical sketch of the Russian murderer and torturer, but much of it was redundant. From his mother, the Countess Alexandra Ivanovna, he already knew a great deal about Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin.
The question was how to accomplish the mission.
Beijing at the start of 1952 was perhaps the most tightly guarded city in the world. The Chinese secret police were everywhere, and the “Order Keeping Committees” — volunteer snitches and informers — were on every block and in every factory.
Worse, foreigners were a rarity in the country. Mao used the Korean War as a pretext to deport “spies” and “agents,” and the very few Westerners who remained were kept under constant surveillance.
“Why do you think that I — as opposed to another one of your ‘assets’ — have a chance to succeed at this?”
The question had been much discussed in rooms at Langley, and now Haverford debated with himself how much of the answer he should share with Nicholai Hel.
“The assignment requires someone who is fluent in Chinese,” Haverford said, “but who could pass for Russian if the moment demanded it.”
“You doubtless have many such people on your payroll,” Nicholai observed.
“True,” Haverford answered. “But in addition to being multilingual, the man must also be brilliant, unflappable, and a trained killer who can do the job without the benefit of a gun or other standard weapon. At this point the list of available candidates gets very short.”
Nicholai understood the thinking. A gun would be very hard to arrange in a police state, and in any case, Voroshenin wouldn’t be likely to let an armed assassin anywhere near him. That made sense, but Nicholai knew that there were other qualifications that narrowed the pool of candidates down to him, and he wondered if Haverford knew of the very personal motivation he had to kill Voroshenin. Certainly Haverford was manipulative enough — he wouldn’t blink at it. But Nicholai doubted that he knew — there was really no way that he could. No, Nicholai thought, he chose me for other reasons.
“You also require,” he said, “a man desperate enough to accept an assignment that has only a slight chance of success, and almost no chance of escape even if he succeeds in the mission. Isn’t that true?”
“Only partially,” Haverford answered. “We’ll have an extraction team standing by to get you out. But the odds are, yes, slim enough to require a man who otherwise has little to lose.”
Well, Nicholai thought, that would be me.
Or “Michel Guibert.”
The identity solved the problem of inserting Nicholai into Beijing. There was no “cover” available as a Russian, because he would instantly be spotted as an imposter. Obviously, he couldn’t be Chinese. An American or British identity was likewise impossible.
But the Guiberts had been particular darlings of the international left since the days of bomb-throwing anarchists with mustaches, and Papa Guibert had paid particular attention to the French Communists in Vichy during the war. So the Guiberts were exactly the type of capitalists that the Communists would tolerate.
And now the Chinese, Haverford explained, had a particular use for the son.
“It’s about Vietnam,” he said.
“More precisely?”
Both China and Russia supported Ho Chi Minh and his insurgency against the French colonial regime in Vietnam. Ho’s Viet Minh troops needed weapons — preferably American as the United States supplied the French and the Viet Minh could rearm themselves with captured ammunition. China possessed a large cache of American arms through weapons captured in Korea, and because the Americans had also armed the Kuomintang, from whom the Communist victors had seized mountains of American weaponry.
“Why can’t the Chinese simply send the guns to the Viet Minh?” Nicholai asked.
China shared a border with Vietnam and the Viet Minh controlled the mountainous area on the frontier. It should have been a simple matter to bring the armaments through the remote terrain to the Viet Minh strongholds.
“They can and do,” Haverford answered. “But it all comes down to money.”
Of course, Nicholai thought.
“The Chinese are cash poor,” Haverford explained. “They’d like to make some dough — especially in foreign currency — from the deal. At the same time, they don’t want to be seen making a profit off the backs of their revolutionary Asian comrades. So you provide a convenient excuse. ‘Gee, we’d love to give you the weaponry, but those slimy Guiberts got to them first. But we can make them sell the guns to you at a price.’ ”
So that was the plan. Nicholai, under the cover of “Michel Guibert,” would be inserted into Beijing to conclude an arms deal with the Chinese, under the pretext of then turning around and selling the guns to the Viet Minh.
“That gets me into Beijing,” Nicholai said, “but how does it get me into, shall we say, ‘operational proximity’ to Voroshenin?”
Haverford shrugged. “You’re the Go master.”