you, Professor, I’d get myself a lawyer. You’re going to need one.”
XXIII
The entire operation in Teheran was directed by Beria, the head of the Soviet Security Agency (the NKVD), and General Avramov, of the new Eastern Office. Beria had arrived from Baku that same day, with Stalin. Aboard the same SI-47 aircraft had been General Arkadiev, and it had given the general some considerable pleasure to witness the Soviet leader demonstrate his intense fear of flying by delivering a spectacular dressing-down on the person of Beria himself. Stalin had been drunk, of course. It was the only way he had been able to find enough courage to get on the plane; and, filled with fear and vodka, Stalin had let loose a torrent of abuse upon his fellow Georgian when the plane had encountered some air turbulence over the Caspian Sea.
“If I die on this plane, the last order I give will be to throw you out the door, snake eyes. Do you hear? We spend all that time on a train to Baku in order to avoid having to fly, only to end up on a fucking airplane. Doesn’t make sense.”
Beria had turned as red as a beetroot. Arkadiev had avoided Beria’s eye. It did not do to show pleasure in the NKVD chairman’s discomfiture.
“Do you hear what I’m saying, snake eyes?”
“Yes, Comrade Stalin,” said Beria. “Perhaps Comrade Stalin has forgotten that we went over the travel itinerary back in Moscow. It was always agreed that the last leg of the journey would be made by plane.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to that,” snarled Stalin. “Makes no sense. Churchill and Roosevelt both had warships to carry them across the sea. Why couldn’t I have a warship? The Caspian Sea is no bigger than the Black Sea. Is the Russian navy short of warships? Is the Caspian Sea more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean? I don’t think so, Beria.”
“Both Roosevelt and Churchill are making the journey from Cairo to Teheran by air,” insisted Beria.
“Only because they have to. There’s no other fucking way for them to get there, snake eyes.”
Now, several hours after the flight, in a large room on the first floor of the NKVD headquarters on Syroos Street in the eastern part of the city, Arkadiev saw that Beria was in a foul mood himself, doubtless still smarting from Stalin’s comments. He and his secretary, Stepan Mamulov, were reviewing the arrangements for Stalin’s security with General Merkulov, Beria’s deputy. Joining them were: General Krulev, who commanded the 3,000 men of Stalin’s personal guard, stationed in Teheran since the end of October; General Melamed, the head of the local NKVD; and Melamed’s deputy, Colonel Andrei Mikhalovits Vertinski. Beria’s ill temper had not been improved by the discovery that at least a dozen SS paratroopers were still at liberty. Of the two teams of men, one had been picked up near the holy city of Qom within hours of their landing; another forty men had been surrounded at a house in Kakh Street but had chosen to shoot it out. There were no survivors. But several were still unaccounted for.
“Although commanded by German officers and German NCOs, they’re Ukrainians, most of them,” Melamed told Beria. “From General Vlasov’s army that was lost on the Volkhov front in 1942.”
“Traitors,” hissed Beria. “That’s what they are.”
“Traitors, yes, of course,” agreed Melamed. “But not easy to crack. We’ve been French wrestling with the bastards all night and they’ve hardly told us a thing.” Until Beria’s arrival in Teheran, Melamed had been the most feared NKVD officer in Iran, and “French wrestling” was what he and his thugs jokingly called the process of breaking a man with beatings and torture. “These men are pretty tough, I can tell you.”
“Need I remind you that Comrade Stalin is now in the city?” demanded Beria. “That each hour these traitors and Fascists remain at liberty represents a potential threat to his life?” Beria leveled a white, pudgy finger at the center of Melamed’s poorly shaven face. “You’re a Ukrainian yourself, aren’t you, Melamed?”
“Yes, Comrade. From Kiev.”
“Yes, I thought so.” Beria sat back in his chair and folded his arms, smiling unpleasantly. “You know, if none of these bastards talks, it might be surmised that you’ve been lenient with them because of where they are from.”
“I can assure you, Comrade Beria, that the reverse is true,” said Melamed. “The truth is, that as a Ukrainian I am ashamed of these traitors. No one is keener to see them talk or punished, I promise you.”
“And I can promise you this, Melamed,” sneered Beria. “If one of these fuckers who are still at large gets to within a hundred feet of our embassy, I’ll have you shot. That goes for you, too, Vertinski. And you, Krulev, you ugly bastard. Christ only knows what you’ve been doing in the last four weeks you’ve been here. I’m furious about this. Furious. That we should have allowed the great Stalin to come to a city where there are terrorists planning to kill him. If it was up to me he wouldn’t be here at all; but Comrade Stalin is made of sterner stuff. He refused to stay in Russia. So I tell you this. We must find these men and we must find them quickly.” Beria took off his pince-nez. He was forty-four and probably the most intellectually gifted of all Stalin’s henchmen, but he was no party wallflower. Even by the depraved standards of the NKVD, he was notorious for his brutality.
“Where are these bastards, anyway?” he asked. “The ones you’ve been questioning.”
“We’ve got about ten of them downstairs, Comrade Beria,” explained Melamed. “The rest of the bunch are in the Red Army barracks to the north of the city, in Meshed.”
“The Germans are to be kept alive, do you hear?” said Beria. “But I want the highest measure of punishment for the Ukrainians at Meshed. To be carried out this day, Krulev. Is that understood?”
“Without questioning them?” asked Krulev. “Suppose the ones we’ve got downstairs don’t talk? What then? We might wish that we’d kept the prisoners at Meshed alive for a bit longer.”
“Do as I say and shoot them today. You may rest assured, the ones downstairs will talk.” Beria stood up. “I never met a man yet who wouldn’t talk, when questioned properly. I’ll take charge of it myself.”
Beria, Mamulov, Melamed, and Vertinski went down into the basement of the house at Syroos Street, where there was nothing that might have led a prisoner to believe that this was Teheran and not the Lubyanka in Moscow. The walls and floors were concrete, and the corridors and cells were brightly lit to prevent any prisoner from enjoying the temporary escape of sleep. The smell was uniquely Soviet, too: a mixture of cheap cigarettes, sweat, animal fats, urine, and human fear.
Beria was a squarely made man, but light on his feet; with his glasses, polished shoes, neatly cut Western suit, and silk tie, he gave off the can-do air of a successful businessman who was nevertheless quite prepared to pitch in on the shop floor alongside his employees. He tossed his jacket at Arkadiev, removed his tie, and rolled up his sleeves as he bustled his way through the door of the NKVD’s torture chamber. “So where the fuck is everyone?” he yelled. “No wonder the bastards aren’t talking. They’ve got no one to talk to. Vertinski. What the hell is going on here?”
“I expect the men are tired,” said Vertinski. “They’ve been working on these men for a whole day.”
“Tired?” screamed Beria. “I wonder how tired they’ll feel after six months in Solovki. I want one of the prisoners in here, now. The strongest. So you’ll see how you should do these things.” He shook his head wearily. “It’s always the same,” he told Mamulov. “You want a job done properly, you’ve got to do it yourself.”
Beria asked one of the NKVD officers to hand over his gun. The man obeyed without hesitation, and Beria checked that the revolver, a Nagant seven-shot pistol, was loaded. Although old, the pistol was favored by some of the NKVD because it could be fitted with a Bramit silencer, and thus it was immediately clear to Beria that the officer had been an executioner.
“Have you questioned any of the prisoners?” he asked the man.
“Yes, sir.”
“And?”
“They’re very stubborn, sir.”
“What’s your name?” Beria asked him.
“Captain Alexander Koltsov,” said the officer, clicking the heels of his boots as he came smartly to attention in front of the comrade chairman.
