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.
That in itself was red-hot information.
But there was more.
Werner had the names.
Volodya had to restrain himself from whooping with joy. A coup like this could happen only once in the lifetime of an intelligence man, he thought. It more than made up for losing Markus. Werner was solid gold. Volodya dreaded to think what risks he must have taken to purloin this list of names and smuggle it out of Air Ministry headquarters in Berlin.
He was tempted to run upstairs to Lemitov’s office right away, but he restrained himself.
The four subalterns shared a typewriter. Volodya lifted the heavy old machine off Kamen’s desk and put it on his own. Using the forefinger of each hand, he typed out a Russian translation of the message from Werner. While he was doing so the daylight faded and powerful security lights came on outside the building.
Leaving a carbon copy in his desk drawer, he took the top copy and went upstairs. Lemitov was in. A good- looking man of about forty, he had dark hair slicked down with brilliantine. He was
