into it, and eventually teased out a reply.
'Festival Aviation,' the man told him, taking both hands of the wheel to mime an aeroplane in flight. 'Tushino,' he added definitively.
Russell was more interested in a bath than an aerial pageant, but explaining this to his companion proved impossible. Not, he suspected, that it would make any difference if he could. If the NKVD had decided he needed to watch aeroplanes, then that was what he'd be doing.
They drove for about twenty minutes through Moscow's north-western suburbs. The architecture was uninspiring, the streets almost empty of people, and the only other vehicles on the road seemed to be lorries. Part of the drabness, Russell realized, was the complete absence of advertising hoardings. But only part. The Party had obviously legislated for only two colours of paint in the latest five year-plan.
After passing a line of giant hangars, they stopped at gates in a high wire fence and the driver showed his documentation to the waiting guards. A dim roar in the distance swelled with astonishing speed, and well over a hundred bombers appeared in the windscreen, flying across their line of sight in close formation, no more than four hundred metres from the ground.
His companion made an enthusiastic noise, and gestured towards the disappearing bombers with obvious admiration.
It was just like home, Russell thought.
The aerodrome building was flanked with what looked like temporary grandstands. The driver drew up behind the one on the right, said 'Come with me please,' again, and led Russell around to the front. 'Foreign press,' his guide said, pointing to a particular section of seats. Not that Russell needed the help. His fellow hacks were easy to pick out - less conservatively dressed, less interested in the proceedings, and smoking cigarettes which didn't jettison all their tobacco if held in anything other than a horizontal plane.
There were also seats to spare, which couldn't be said of the other sections. Russell noticed a couple of familiar faces - a German journalist whom he had loathed for years, and an American whom he remembered meeting somewhere in the Rhineland, in the days that followed Hitler's reoccupation. He raised a hand to the latter, and received a wry smile in reply.
The bombers had gone wherever bombers went to, and a succession of fighter pilots were now showing their skills, twisting and turning and inverting their speeding planes at alarming proximity to the ground. Binoculars had been provided for the journalists, and Russell pointed his at the terrace of the aerodrome building. As he adjusted the focus Stalin swam into view, dressed in a lightweight suit, smiling broadly at the acrobatics on display.
Molotov, by contrast, looked like he'd just swallowed something particularly nasty. That, or he'd just found out that Ribbentrop was on his way.
It was scary, Russell thought, how much damage a few deranged bastards could do.
The demonstration of potency went on. An autogyro was wheeled out in front of them, lifted off by its rotors, and driven out of sight by its engine. A fleet of gliders hove silently into view and landed in almost perfect harmony across the wide field. And that, as Russell saw from his programme, concluded the morning session. 'Luncheon gratis' came next.
As he left the grandstand in search of the promised repast, a thin man in a very shiny suit fell into step beside him. 'You will attend a meeting tomorrow morning,' the man said in near-perfect English. 'That is August 19,' he added for good measure. 'You will be collected from your hotel at 10am.'
'Okay,' Russell agreed. 'Do you know which hotel I'm staying at?'
'Metropole,' the man said with a surprised look. 'Yes?'
'If you say so.'
'The press bus will take you,' the man said, just to be sure. 'And this is for your expenses,' he added, handing Russell an envelope. An address in Russian had been crossed out, most of a stamp torn off.
The man disappeared as abruptly as he had materialised. Russell ripped open the envelope, transferred the small wad of brand new notes to his back pocket, and walked on to the VIP refreshment tent. He was half-hoping to find Stalin at the front of the queue, but the great leader was obviously lunching in private. Russell found his American acquaintance hovering by the buffet of cold meats, either spoilt for choice or wondering where the least potential damage lay. They shared recent histories and reasons for being in Moscow, and agreed that things looked ominous.
So did the weather. As the first event of the afternoon - the bombing of a dummy factory on the far side of the aerodrome - got started, dark clouds were looming above the low hills to the west, tiny forks of lightning fizzing inside them. As the thunder of exploding bombs rolled across the airfield, nature's thunder offered a distant counterpoint, like an enemy drawing near.
There was time for two small airships to sail languorously past before the first drops of rain fell, but the sky grew darker by the second, and a steady downpour was in progress when the final act began - the mass dropping of airborne troops from a fleet of transport planes. The parachutes opened like a frenetic garden of flowers, and floated down like so many windblown petals. The troops rolled as they fell and bounced back up, except for one left clutching his ankle and writhing in pain. His comrades ignored him, racing to their designated rendezvous points, a series of flags planted in oil drums, glowing red in the stygian gloom.
The press bus deposited Russell and most of the other foreign journalists outside the Metropole soon after five. His third floor room had a spartan no-nonsense feel to it, but was comfortable enough, and the view across Sverdlov Square was impressive. A huge portrait of Stalin adorned the Bolshoi Theatre, causing Russell to ponder the possibility that the General Secretary had been taking dancing lessons. It seemed unlikely.
The storm had passed, leaving a slightly fresher feel. Russell stood by the open window, wondering about next morning's rendezvous with the NKVD. Everything seemed relatively straightforward - he had nothing to hide, or at least not very much. They would ask him about Sarah Grostein and Josef Mohlmann, and he would tell them all he knew. They would hand him their fake responses to the SD's fake questions, along with any additional briefing they considered necessary. If they wanted him to do anything else - shoot Goebbels, perhaps - he would politely decline. What could they do? As far he could judge the NKVD needed him as much, if not more, than he needed them.
Everything would be fine.
He needed to check in with the press liaison people, and find out when and where the briefings were being held. A fellow hack would know, and a fellow hack was more than likely to be propping up the bar. He headed downstairs.
A solitary English journalist was drinking tea in the bar. He looked about sixteen, and claimed to be a freelance, but the upper-crust accent made Russell suspect, perhaps unfairly, that the young man was spending pater's money on a Thirties version of the Grand Tour. He had the information Russell required, and passed it on with a sneer, as if keen to show how little official briefings mattered to a real journalist.
Outside the sky had cleared, and a fiery dusk hung over the eastern end of Marx Prospekt. Russell walked up the slope into Red Square, remembering the excitement of doing so fifteen years before. The square looked much the same, the huge expanse of cobbles, the sombre majesty of the surrounding walls and buildings. Some public spaces, like Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, evoked a frantic joy in modern life; others, like Pariser Platz or Trafalgar Square, seemed merely pompous. None evoked raw power like this place did. Whether draped in snow or bathed in a sultry evening haze, Red Square almost hummed with power, as if the stones were straining to hold it in.
He had felt this in 1924, and been reassured - all this power at the service of the revolution! But now it felt different, both empty and sinister, and the illuminated red stars above the Kremlin walls seemed like baubles, worn only to flatter and deceive.
Later in that same visit, he and Ilse had walked around the square after making ever-so-silent love in the crowded dormitory. It had been two in the morning, but a politburo meeting must have been imminent, because cars carrying Trotsky and Zinoviev swept across the cobbles and in through the Kremlin's Spassky Gate as they watched, and a few minutes later Nikolai Bukharin had hurried across the square on foot, looking, as ever, like an absent-minded young professor. Stalin had presumably already been inside, trying on the dead Lenin's shoes for size. He was probably in there now, finalising his price for letting Hitler off the leash. Slaney had been right. The British, the French, the Poles...they had given Stalin no choice. And boy, would they pay for their mistake. They and everyone else.
Saturday proved interesting. Emerging from the Metropole a few minutes early, Russell found his driver
