Night Soldiers

the Soviet port on the Danube, after which he would make his way to Sfintu Gheorghe-nominally in the nation of Romania, but in fact a part of the ancient region known as Bessarabia, a remote corner of the world, so lost as to be nearly unknown.

If the letter were delivered to Voluta, he would use the NOV apparatus to move the letter to a Western intelligence service, and Sascha believed he would be exfiltrated from the little fishing village of Sfintu Gheorghe. The letter had to go to Voluta because Sascha was aware that Voluta knew him personally and that he, as well as other members of the BF 825 conspiracy, were in a position to confirm his value to the Western services.

It was, in its own way, a reasonably clever plan. Escape from a camp in the Kolyma was nearly impossible- the land itself was a prison. And no Allied intelligence service would want to attempt this sort of covert action in the country of a nominal ally, thus Sascha had placed responsibility on himself for leaving Russian soil. Romania, on the other hand, was in a condition of political flux that might facilitate an operation to remove a desirable asset.

But, Ilya realized, years of training and practical experience said no. The scheme had virtually no chance of success: too many steps, too many assumptions, a blind thrust from a doomed man. In effect, it sentenced Sascha to death and, once he escaped from Belgorod and someone checked on how he came to be transferred there in the first place, sentenced Ilya Goldman to death as well.

Unless by April 12, Ilya thought, listening to the slow beat of the wheels, I am somewhere else.

But if the exfiltration scheme was wishful thinking, the part of the plot that touched him was close to perfect. Considered objectively, Sascha Vonets had built a fine trap. In it, Ilya realized, he could move in only one direction; there were no exits along the way and, at the end, it sent him where he wanted to go. The white face in the window smiled ruefully. Truly, you couldn’t ask for a better trap than that.

Christmas, Rozhdyestvo, was no longer a holy day in the Soviet Union, yet somehow, on the night of December 24, the duty roster at the Fourth Division of the Sixth Directorate was seriously depleted. The inspector general’s central bureau in Moscow was on Ulyanovskaya Street, in a turn-of-the-century building with vast marble hallways that had once housed the czar’s Corn Tax apparat. Ilya Goldman was very nearly alone in the building on Christmas Eve-most of the senior officers seemed to be down with the flu or engaged in important business outside the office. Perhaps, Ilya thought, they were engaged in the surveillance of Dedushka Moroz, Father Frost, as he visited children on the night before Christmas. In any event, Captain Ilya Goldman was a Jew and, as such, found it productive not to have the flu or important business elsewhere on Christmas Eve, and had volunteered to work a double shift and assume the responsibility of night duty officer.

He dug away at his paperwork until a little after midnight, then strolled down the corridor to the office of Major General Lyuzhenko, whose chief responsibility was the suppression of the occasional uprising within the camp populations. He’d chosen Lyuzhenko, a particularly nasty brute with a savage temper, rather carefully, for the man was, in Ilya’s scheme of things, about to commit the single honorable act of his life. One could, when the fat was in the fire, hear him all over the seventh floor-screaming on the telephone, cursing, almost weeping with rage.

Lyuzhenko had locked his office door, but to Captain Goldman, trained as he was by the NKVD, that did not present a serious problem. Ilya turned on the office lights and rummaged through the files until he found a packet of transfer forms. He put one in Lyuzhenko’s secretary’s typewriter and filled it out, making all the proper marks in the appropriate boxes. Under the heading Reason for Transfer he wrote: “By order of Major General Lyuzhenko.” That had been reason enough in the past, it would be now. He found a letter signed by the general, slid it beneath the transfer and traced out the signature, using a pen from the desk drawer. He turned off the lights, locked up the office, and proceeded down the hall, collecting three countersignatures in precisely the same manner in three other offices. He then deposited the transfer in the Action box on the desk of the commanding officer’s secretary and Sascha Vonets was on his way to Belgorod-Dnestrovskij. How quickly, Ilya thought, the Soviet bureaucracy could move when it wanted to.

He left the building, walking along Ulyanovskaya Street for several blocks, then turning north toward one of the buildings given over to the Ministries of Transport (Internal). The door guard, seeing his NKVD uniform, let him in without question. Who knew what business these people might be about, even on what used to be Christmas Eve.

The hallways of this particular ministry were even grander than his own, and each floor had its own cleaning lady, traditional Russian babas in kerchiefs who spent the long night down on their knees with buckets of soapy water and hard brushes, rubbing away at the heelmarks of the previous day’s boots. On the third floor, Ilya walked carefully along the wet marble, his footsteps echoing down the empty corridor. He found the third-floor cleaning lady just outside an office door marked Bureau of Streetcar Maintenance-Assistant to the Deputy Director. She was all in black, large breasts swaying within an old cotton dress as she scrubbed, humming to herself, absorbed in this work that would go on night after night, apparently forever.

She saw him approach and stand before her but took no notice of him, he was just another pair of boots. When he handed her a slip of brown paper with tiny printing crammed on one side and the coded name of an addressee on the other she took no notice of that either, simply tucked it away somewhere inside her dress with one hand while scrubbing away with the other.

Back on Ulyanovskaya Street, Ilya walked slowly toward his office. The night was icy cold and clear, a million stars overhead.

At 6:30 on the morning of December 25, Natalya Federova, a cleaner at the offices of the Ministries of Transport, waited at the Usacheva tram station for the number 26 trolley, which would take her back to the flat she shared with her daughter and son-in-law and their children. By coincidence, her sister’s husband, Pavel, took this same route, and six days a week they greeted each other as she got on the trolley to go home and he got off to go to his job. It was snowing lightly, a fine, dry snow of the sort that often went on for days.

The trolley was twenty minutes late, but Natalya waited patiently with the other night workers heading home, all of them standing quietly in the falling snow. When the trolley finally did arrive, Pavel was among the last to get off, so they kissed hurriedly and he murmured a salutation-Shrozedestvrom Kristovim, Christ is born-by her ear as their cheeks brushed. He clasped her hand warmly for a moment, then tucked the slip of brown paper away in the pocket of his infantryman’s coat. He had lost an eye in the fighting at Stalingrad and wore three ranks of medals on his chest.

The brief greeting kept her from being early on the tram, so she had to stand for the hour-and-a-half ride back to her flat. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and gazed pensively out the windows at the passing city, looking forward to the dinner she would have with her sister and Pavel that night. She planned to bake a Christmas bread for the occasion. It would have to be made without eggs, sadly, and raisins were out of the question, but Pavel had received a little packet of powdered sugar at his job, so there would be something sweet for the Christmas meal.

A few minutes before seven, Pavel arrived at the Usacheva Street offices of the temporary Belgian mission, where he worked as a porter. Humming to himself, he took out the garbage cans-the big, dented one with food scraps and other “wet materials” would be picked up by a garbage truck. The small wooden one, “dry materials,” was mostly office waste, paper trash of all sorts generated by the night shift of communications clerks at the mission, and it was picked up by two men in a black car who never spoke to him.

Next, he made a round of the mission offices, making sure the ashtrays were clean and emptying the pencil sharpener shavings into a piece of newspaper. The tiny office at the end of the hall was used by a junior diplomat-a devout Catholic, the grandson of Polish immigrants to Belgium-and after Pavel emptied his pencil shavings on the paper he left him a little something in return: a slip of brown paper, folded once, inserted in the barrel of the pencil sharpener before the canister was wiggled back into place and left upside down, a signal that the mailman had visited.

On January 10, a Canadian war correspondent was driven west from Moscow to the suburbs of Warsaw, to be on hand when Marshal Zhukov’s First White Russian Front, accompanied by units of the Lublin Polish Army, marched in to take official control of the city. Zhukov’s divisions had been waiting across the Vistula since August of 1944, while the Polish Home Army under General Bor fought it out in the streets and sewers of Warsaw with Hitler’s Totenkopf (Death’s Head) Division. Some quarter of a million Polish partizans had died in the fighting-only occasionally supplied by the Russians. Thus there would be no resistance from the Poles when the Lublin Army, representing the Polish Communist party, took over the administration of the country. The Canadian