Hitler's peace

“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.

“I knew a Kolstov once,” said Beria absently, neglecting to add that the man he remembered had been a journalist whom Beria had tortured to death at Sukhanov Prison. The Sukhanovka was Beria’s personal prison in Moscow, where those he had singled out for an extra measure of cruelty, or women he had decided to rape before handing them over to be shot, were sent.

The guards returned, dragging a naked man in shackles, and stood him roughly in front of the NKVD chief. Beria looked closely at the prisoner, who stared back at him with undisguised hatred. “But there’s hardly a mark on this man,” he objected. “Who questioned him?”

“I did, Comrade Beria,” said Koltsov.

“What did you hit him with? A feather duster?”

“I can assure you, sir, I used the utmost severity.”