Winter of the World

Not everyone in Red Army Intelligence was a cloak-and-dagger spy, of course. They got most of their information legitimately, mainly by reading the German newspapers. They did not necessarily believe everything they read, but they took note of clues such as an advertisement by a gun factory needing to recruit ten skilled lathe operators. Furthermore, Russians were free to travel Germany and look around – unlike diplomats in the Soviet Union, who were not allowed to leave Moscow unescorted. The young man whom Macke and Wagner were now tailing might be the tame, newspaper-reading kind of intelligence gatherer: all that was required for such a job was fluent German and the ability to summarize.

They followed Peshkov past Macke’s brother’s restaurant. It was still called Bistro Robert, but it had a different clientele. Gone were the wealthy homosexuals, the Jewish businessmen with their mistresses, and the overpaid actresses calling for pink champagne. Such people kept their heads down nowadays, if they were not already in concentration camps. Some had left Germany – and good riddance, Macke thought, even if it did, unfortunately, mean that the restaurant no longer made much money.

He wondered idly what had become of the former owner, Robert von Ulrich. He vaguely remembered that the man had gone to England. Perhaps he had opened a restaurant for perverts there.

Peshkov went into a bar.

Wagner followed him in a minute or two later, while Macke watched the outside. It was a popular place. While Macke waited for Peshkov to reappear, he saw a soldier and a girl enter, and a couple of well-dressed women and an old man in a grubby coat come out and walk away. Then Wagner came out alone, looked directly at Macke, and spread his arms in a gesture of bewilderment.

Macke crossed the street. Wagner was distressed. ‘He’s not there!’

‘Did you look everywhere?’

‘Yes, including the toilets and the kitchen.’

‘Did you ask if anyone had gone out the back way?’

‘They said not.’

Wagner was scared with reason. This was the new Germany, and errors were no longer dealt with by a slap on the wrist. He could be severely punished.

But not this time. ‘That’s all right,’ said Macke.

Wagner could not hide his relief. ‘Is it?’

‘We’ve learned something important,’ Macke said. ‘The fact that he shook us off so expertly tells us that he’s a spy – and a very good one.’

(ii)

Volodya entered the Friedrich Strasse Station and boarded a U-bahn train. He took off the cap, glasses and dirty raincoat that had helped him look like an old man. He sat down, took out a handkerchief, and wiped away the powder he had put on his shoes to make them appear shabby.

He had been unsure about the raincoat. It was such a sunny day that he feared the Gestapo might have noticed it and realized what he was up to. But they had not been that clever, and no one had followed him from the bar after he had done his quick change in the men’s room.

He was about to do something highly dangerous. If they caught him contacting a German dissident, the best that he could expect was to be deported back to Moscow with his career in ruins. If he were less lucky, he and the dissident would both vanish into the basement of Gestapo headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse, never to be seen again. The Soviets would complain that one of their diplomats had disappeared, and the German police would pretend to do a missing-persons search then regretfully report no success.

Volodya had never been to Gestapo headquarters, of course, but he knew what it would be like. The NKVD had a similar facility in the Soviet Trade Mission at 11 Lietsenburger Strasse: steel doors, an interrogation room with tiled walls so that the blood could be washed off easily, a tub for cutting up the bodies, and an electrical furnace for burning the parts.

Volodya had been sent to Berlin to expand the network of Soviet spies here. Fascism was triumphant in Europe, and Germany was more of a threat to the USSR now than ever. Stalin had fired his foreign minister, Litvinov, and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov. But what could Molotov do? The Fascists seemed unstoppable. The Kremlin was haunted by the humiliating memory of the Great War, in which the Germans had defeated a Russian army of six million men. Stalin had taken steps to form a pact with France and Britain to restrain Germany, but the three powers had been unable to agree, and the talks had broken down in the last few days.

Sooner or later, war was expected between Germany and the Soviet Union, and it was Volodya’s job to gather military intelligence that would help the Soviets win that war.

He got off the train in the poor working-class district of Wedding, north of Berlin’s centre. Outside the station he stood and waited, watching the other passengers as they left, pretending to study a timetable pasted on the wall. He did not move off until he was quite sure no one had followed him here.