They had let him travel in the ambulance with her body. They had driven straight to the morgue and he had officially identified her body. And then at the police station there had been the questions. The detectives had been sympathetic and considerate. Almost as if they knew or guessed why she had been murdered. Garotting was generally confined to assassins and professional criminals. There were more questions about his son. Why did he think that he’d been taken rather than killed with his mother? What kind of people did he know who were so ruthless? Had he met any people at the club where he worked who might have had a grudge against him? But after a couple of hours they had let him go. It was obvious that they would not spend much time looking for the boy. They acted as if they were aware that he knew who had committed both crimes. The inquest would be held in two days’ time.
He never went back to the rooms. For two days and nights he wandered the streets of Berlin like a lost soul. Oblivious of his surroundings, his mind a turmoil of grief and hatred.
The inquest gave a verdict of murder by strangulation by a person or persons unknown. The coroner had commented on the fact that nothing appeared to have been stolen or even disturbed. But Josef has seen the small red star stamped on the inside of her wrist and for him it was not murder by a person or persons unknown. He knew all too well who had murdered her. Half demented, Josef had gone back to his job that night. There had been a great deal of sympathy for him. Staff and customers had seen the two small paragraphs in the evening paper.
Just on midnight he was serving a drink to a man he had seen several times before. He had been told that he was a journalist for one of the press agencies. When he had poured the double whisky the man looked at Josef’s face, lifted his glass and said in Russian, “To the dead, Josef. The living should remember it and learn the lesson.”
Josef felt the room spin and the man said quickly in English, “My friend, I’m on your side. Make no mistake. I’ll help you all I can.”
“Who are you, mister?”
The man half-smiled. “Just call me Johnny.” He paused and said softly, “I saw the red star before they took her downstairs.”
“You were there?”
“I was with the police inspector when they got the phone call.”
“What phone call? They never mentioned a phone call to me or at the inquest.”
“Somebody phoned in to the police HQ. They said she had been executed and gave the address. Then they just said—‘The red flag will fly all over the world.’ They said it first in Russian and then in heavily accented German.”
“Why didn’t the police mention it at the inquest?”
The man took a sip of his whisky. “Who knows, Josef? Who knows?”
“How is it you speak Russian?”
The man shrugged but didn’t reply.
“You’re a reporter, yes?”
“A foreign correspondent. Much the same thing.”
“You knew what the red star meant?”
“Of course I did.” He paused. “What are you going to do about it, my friend?”
Josef looked down at the bar-counter and wiped a damp patch with his cloth before he looked back at the man’s face. “I’m going to make those bastards pay a thousand times. I don’t know how. But I’ll do it if it takes the rest of my life.”
“Were you one of them way back?”
“Not way back. Six months ago I was one of them. I was a fool.”
“You’re in good company, Josef. There are a lot of people being fooled by the thought of the brotherhood of man. They’ll learn in due course.” He paused. “I could help you do a lot to hurt them. Could we talk some time?”
“Prove to me that it’ll hurt them and I’ll talk all you want.”
“Are you staying at the same place?”
“No. I sleep here at nights.”
“How about three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“OK.”
Almost every day for three weeks Johnny asked questions and listened. Josef was surprised at the reporter’s interest in the people in the Cheka International Affairs section. Names and personal details, their families, their vices, favourite foods, their houses and their office responsibilities. It was five weeks after Anna’s death when the journalist asked if Josef would like to go back to England.
“They wouldn’t let me back in.”
“I think it could be arranged if you went about it the right way. There’s always people who are interested in what goes on in Moscow.”
Josef shrugged. “They’d think I was a stooge sent in by the Cheka.”
“I know a lot of people in London. Would you like me to talk to them?”
“Yes. If you think it’d do any good. But don’t get into trouble for my sake.”
“Look. Do you want to go back?”
“Yes.”
“Well, just leave it to me to see what I can do.”
The meeting with the British Consul had gone smoothly enough. After it had all been arranged the journalist asked for the Soviet passports that Josef and Anna had held, as souvenirs of their getting to know one another.
Josef disembarked from the boat at Newcastle, on January 22, 1924. He was twenty-two years old. There were two main items on the front page of the Evening Chronicle that night. Ramsay MacDonald had formed the first Labour Government that day, and Lenin had died in Moscow the previous day. Neither Josef, nor even the man who called himself Johnny, who spoke to him in the bar at the Railway Hotel later that evening, could have imagined the strange life that was starting for him that day.
2
The man
