the wrist. He could be severely punished.
But not this time. ‘That’s all right,’ said Macke.
Wagner could not hide his relief. ‘Is it?’
‘We’ve learned something important,’ Macke said. ‘The fact that he shook us off so expertly tells us that he’s a spy – and a very good one.’
Volodya entered the Friedrich Strasse Station and boarded a U-bahn train. He took off the cap, glasses and dirty raincoat that had helped him look like an old man. He sat down, took out a handkerchief, and wiped away the powder he had put on his shoes to make them appear shabby.
He had been unsure about the raincoat. It was such a sunny day that he feared the Gestapo might have noticed it and realized what he was up to. But they had not been that clever, and no one had followed him from the bar after he had done his quick change in the men’s room.
He was about to do something highly dangerous. If they caught him contacting a German dissident, the best that he could expect was to be deported back to Moscow with his career in ruins. If he were less lucky, he and the dissident would both vanish into the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse, never to be seen again. The Soviets would complain that one of their diplomats had disappeared, and the German police would pretend to do a missing-persons search then regretfully report no success.
Volodya had never been to Gestapo headquarters, of course, but he knew what it would be like. The NKVD had a similar facility in the Soviet Trade Mission at 11 Lietsenburger Strasse: steel doors, an interrogation room with tiled walls so that the blood could be washed off easily, a tub for cutting up the bodies, and an electrical furnace for burning the parts.
Volodya had been sent to Berlin to expand the network of Soviet spies here. Fascism was triumphant in Europe, and Germany was more of a threat to the USSR now than ever. Stalin had fired his foreign minister, Litvinov, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov. But what could Molotov do? The Fascists seemed unstoppable. The Kremlin was haunted by the humiliating memory of the Great War, in which the Germans had defeated a Russian army of six million men. Stalin had taken steps to form a pact with France and Britain to restrain Germany, but the three powers had been unable to agree, and the talks had broken down in the last few days.
Sooner or later, war was expected between Germany and the Soviet Union, and it was Volodya’s job to gather military intelligence that would help the Soviets win that war.
He got off the train in the poor working-class district of Wedding, north of Berlin’s centre. Outside the station he stood and waited, watching the other passengers as they left, pretending to study a timetable pasted on the wall. He did not move off until he was quite sure no one had followed him here.
Then he made his way to the cheap restaurant that was his chosen rendezvous. As was his regular practice, he did not go in, but stood at a bus stop on the other side of the road and watched the entrance. He was confident he had shaken off any tail, but now he needed to make sure Werner had not been followed.
He was not sure that he would recognize Werner Franck, who had been a fourteen-year-old boy when Volodya had last seen him, and was now twenty. Werner felt the same, so they had agreed they would both carry today’s edition of the
His two years in Spain had not boosted his career in the way he had hoped – rather the reverse. Volodya had uncovered numerous Nazi spies like Heinz Bauer among the German ‘volunteers’. But then the NKVD had used that as an excuse to arrest genuine volunteers who had merely expressed mild disagreement with the Communist line. Hundreds of idealistic young men had been tortured and killed in the NKVD’s prisons. At times it had seemed as if the Communists were more interested in fighting their anarchist allies than their Fascist enemies.
And all for nothing. Stalin’s policy was a catastrophic failure. The upshot was a right-wing dictatorship, the worst imaginable outcome for the Soviet Union. But the blame was put on those Russians who had been in Spain, even though they had faithfully carried out Kremlin instructions. Some of them had disappeared soon after returning to Moscow.
Volodya had gone home in fear after the fall of Madrid. He had found many changes. In 1937 and 1938 Stalin had purged the Red Army. Thousands of commanders had disappeared, including many of the residents of Government House where his parents lived. But previously neglected men such as Grigori Peshkov had been promoted to take the places of those purged, and Grigori’s career had a new impetus. He was in charge of the defence of Moscow against air raids, and was frantically busy. His enhanced status was probably the reason why Volodya was not among those scapegoated for the failure of Stalin’s Spanish policy.
The unpleasant Ilya Dvorkin had also somehow avoided punishment. He was back in Moscow and married to Volodya’s sister, Anya, much to Volodya’s regret. There was no accounting for women’s choices in such matters. She was already pregnant, and Volodya could not repress a nightmare image of her nursing a baby with the head of a rat.
After a brief leave, Volodya had been posted to Berlin, where he had to prove his worth all over again.
He looked up from his paper to see Werner walking along the street.
Werner had not changed much. He was a little taller and broader, but he had the same strawberry-blond hair falling over his forehead in a way girls had found irresistible, the same look of tolerant amusement in his blue eyes. He wore an elegant light-blue summer suit, and gold links glinted at his cuffs.
There was no one following him.
Volodya crossed the road and intercepted him before he reached the cafe. Werner smiled broadly, showing
