she was led into the room, which fell instantly silent as men swallowed their lust. Disgust when Madame started the bidding high and it quickly went higher as the men were willing to spend small fortunes to have what they saw beneath the wedding gown.
Hoeger sat silent, his position and authority speaking for him. He let the bidding rise to an unprecedented height, then lifted the index finger of his right hand. The bidding stopped right there. No one, certainly not his subordinate officers, had the nerve to outbid the commander of the city’s Gestapo.
Madame quickly counted three and closed the bidding.
Hoeger took Solange by the arm and led her down the hallway to the “bridal suite.” He stripped off the dress, threw her down on the bed, and took her.
Solange moaned. She groaned in pleasure, called him her man, told him to do it harder, told him it was wonderful, he was wonderful. Said if she only knew, she would have let him before, let him anytime. She bucked and tensed, screamed as she came.
“You beautiful creature,” he panted. “I had no idea.”
She sighed. “So much pleasure.”
He closed his eyes, went back at it, intent on his own pleasure.
She reached under the mattress for the knife that Reynaud had given her, brought it up, and slashed his throat.
The Resistance got her out of the brothel and hid her in the back of a produce truck, then in a small cellar in the slums of Marseille. She was in the tight, dark space for three weeks and thought she might lose her mind before they finally took her out and up into the air, into the light. She still had nightmares.
There was plenty of work for her there, in the brothels frequented by the Germans. Her job was to listen, to pick up bits and pieces, and as a result trains were derailed, messages intercepted, Resistance fighters escaped just before the Gestapo came for them. And if one of the officers was gunned down at his favorite cafe or outside of his mistress’s place – all the better.
Solange never went home.
In the hungry winter of 1946, she returned to the only work she knew, becoming the mistress of an American officer. When he was rotated home, she found another, then another. This last one begged to marry her and take her back to Texas, but she told him not to be so foolish.
Shortly after, she met an OSS officer who said that they might have use for a woman like her.
With that, Solange finished her story.
Nicholai held her close until she finally fell asleep.
11
IN THE MORNING, Nicholai summoned Haverford and demanded to know the identity of the person he was meant to terminate. “As I’m a target now myself,” Nicholai said over coffee and croissant, “I think I have the right to know.”
Solange left the house earlier to buy groceries.
Haverford listened, seemed to seek a response in the milk swirling around in his cup, then looked up and answered, “You’re right. It’s time.”
“So?”
“The Soviet commissioner to Red China,” Haverford said. “Yuri Voroshenin.”
The name hit Nicholai like a hard slap, but – and perhaps only thanks to the minor paralysis of his facial muscles – he managed to keep his expression placid as he feigned a lack of recognition and asked, “Why eliminate him?”
“Korea,” Haverford answered.
Egged on by the Soviets, the madman Kim had invaded South Korea and the United States was forced to intervene. When MacArthur’s counterattack pushed to the Yalu River near the border with China, Mao felt that his hand had been forced and sent three hundred thousand troops into Korea.
The United States and China were at war. Worse, the conflict isolated China from the West and forced it to accept Soviet hegemony, thereby creating a solid Communist bloc from the Elbe to the shores of the Pacific.
“We have to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow,” Haverford concluded.
“By assassinating this Voroshenin?” Nicholai asked. “What good will that do?”
“We’ll hand the Russians sufficient evidence to blame the Chinese,” Haverford explained. “The Chinese will, of course, know that they didn’t do it, and conclude that the Soviets sacrificed one of their own in order to blame the Chinese and demand further concessions – perhaps permanent bases in Manchuria.”
It’s a classic Go ploy, Nicholai thought, to sacrifice a line of stones to lure your enemy into a misapprehension of your strategy. Uncharacteristic of Americans, who reveled in the childlike game of checkers. A deeper mind was behind this maneuver. It could be Haverford, but certainly he lacked the position to authorize a killing at this high level.
Who is it, then? Nicholai wondered.
Who is this Go player?
“Tell me about Voroshenin,” he said.
12
“DISABUSE YOURSELF of the notion that we’re sending you to murder some innocent diplomat,” Haverford told Nicholai.
Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin was a high-ranking member of the KGB, a fact that the Chinese knew and deeply resented.
“Above all else,” Haverford warned, “our boy Yuri is a survivor.”
He laid out what the CIA knew about Yuri Voroshenin.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1898, the son of a schoolteacher, Voroshenin was a committed revolutionary even as a boy. By the time he was fifteen he had spent time in three Tsarist jails, at seventeen he barely escaped a traitor’s noose and was exiled to Siberia. The Bolsheviks ordered him to join the army in 1914, and he surfaced as a leader of the 1916 mutiny that sent soldiers streaming home from the front.
Haverford took out a photograph that showed a young Voroshenin in an army greatcoat and soldier’s peaked cap. Tall and thin, with the typical wire-rimmed spectacles of the left-wing Russian intellectual, he sported an open, happy grin that was unusual for an earnest revolutionary.
The great year of 1917 found him home, now an agent in the Petrograd division of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, the VchK, the “Cheka.” Violence was rife in the hungry city – demobilized soldiers shot, robbed, and raped. Mobs looted churches, stores, and the homes of the rich. The wives and daughters of bankers, generals, and Tsarist officials sold themselves as prostitutes to feed starving families.
Nicholai knew all about the Petrograd Cheka.
“You needn’t enlighten me,” Nicholai said. “My mother told me the stories.”
The Cheka began the Red Terror, a war of extermination against its “class enemies,” shooting dozens, sometimes even hundreds of “White” Russians in any single day, without trial or due process. Voroshenin cheerfully participated in the slaughter. “Why bother with a Commissariat of Justice?” he asked once in a party meeting. “Let’s just call it the Commissariat for Social Extermination and get on with it.”
They got on with it.
His tortures became the stuff of nightmares. He tied captured White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces, he shoved prisoners into nail-studded barrels and rolled them down hills, he peeled the skin off captives’ hands to create “gloves” of flesh. His name became a tool that mothers used to frighten their children.
In 1921 he helped suppress the mutiny at the naval base at Kronstad, accomplished with great bloodshed.
