THE JUDAS CODE

Derek Lambert

COPYRIGHT

Collins Crime Club

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton Ltd 1983

Copyright © Derek Lambert 1983

Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008268442

Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008268435

Version: 2017-12-20

DEDICATION

For Len and Dorothy Wellfare

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Encoding

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Part Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Part Three

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Part Four

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Five

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Part Six

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Decoding

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

It should not be forgotten that this is a novel. But nor should it be forgotten that it concerns an established and bewildering fact: that, despite all the evidence, Joseph Stalin refused to believe that Hitler intended to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. If he had heeded the warnings – and there were many – two tyrannies might have remained relatively unscathed and the world today might have been a very different place. With such a momentous fact as the pivot of a novel it soon becomes easy to believe that the accompanying material is also true. Who knows, perhaps it is.

And what of Stalin? How was he reacting to the fact that almost the entire German army was on his doorstep? Incredibly, he appeared to ignore it. Was he the victim of some kind of hysteria that deprived him of the ability to act? Or were there other powerful reasons for not acting – reasons known only to him? – Russia Besieged by Nicholas Bethell and the editors of Time-Life Books

Despite all the indications that war with Germany was approaching neither the Soviet people nor the Red Army were expecting the German attack when it came … History of World War II, editor-in-chief A.J.P. Taylor

Never had a state been better informed than Russia about the aggressive intent of another … But never had an army been so ill-prepared to meet the initial onslaught of its enemy than the Red Army on June 22, 1941. The History of World War II, by Lt. Col. E. Bauer

It is almost inconceivable but nevertheless true that the men in the Kremlin, for all the reputation they had of being suspicious, crafty and hard-headed, and despite all the evidence and all the warnings that stared them in the face, did not realise right up to the last moment that they were to be hit, and with a force which would almost destroy their nation. – The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

ENCODING

My advertisement in the personal columns of The Times read: ‘Would anyone with the key to the Judas Code please contact me.’ The response was prompt: at nine a.m. on the day of publication a man called at my London home and threatened to kill me.

The threat wasn’t immediate but as soon as I saw him on the doorstep smiling and tapping a copy of the newspaper with one finger I sensed menace.

He was in his sixties with wings of silver hair just touching his ears and what looked like the scar from a bullet wound on his right cheek; he wore a light navy blue topcoat with a velvet collar and carried a furled umbrella; the elegance and the legacy of violence combined to give the impression of a commando who had retired to the City.

‘Your request interested me’, he said. ‘May I come in?’

Wishing that I hadn’t unlocked the ground-floor door by remote control and allowed him to reach my apartment on the top floor of the old block near Broadcasting House, I said: ‘It is rather early. Perhaps—’

‘Nine o’clock? You look pretty wide awake, Mr. Lamont, and I won’t take up much of your time.’ He took a step forward.

‘Before we go any further, Mr. …’

‘Chambers.’

‘Do you mind telling me how you found out where I live? I only gave a telephone number …’

‘It’s not so difficult to obtain an address from a telephone number. If you know how to go about it, that is.’

‘And my name?’

‘The same source. Now if you would be good enough …’

‘To step aside? I don’t think I would, Mr. Chambers. Perhaps you would be good enough to telephone me to make an appointment.’

‘Aren’t you being a little formal for someone as obviously enterprising as yourself?’ He tucked The Times beneath his arm on his umbrella side.

‘I’ve always been a stickler for protocol.’

‘Really? You surprise me. I had heard quite the opposite.’ His voice frosted. ‘Let me in, Mr. Lamont.’

‘Get stuffed,’ I said, terminating my brief relationship with protocol.

He, too, abandoned niceties. He levelled a Browning 9mm automatic at my chest and said: ‘Don’t try slamming the door. It’s only in Hollywood that wood panels stop bullets. Now turn round and go inside.’ The door clicked snugly behind me. ‘That’s better,’ he said as we entered the living-room. ‘Now sit down in that easy chair beside the fireplace.’

I sat down, feeling slightly absurd in my red silk dressing gown, rumpled blue pyjamas and leather slippers savaged by a friend’s dog, and waited. Chambers sat opposite me and appraised the room – the books scattered across the worn carpet, bottle of Black Label and its partner, an empty glass, punished leather sofa, windows looking across the rooftops to the pale green trees of Regent’s Park. In short, fading elegance; in fact, the workshop of an author who commuted to a house in Surrey where his wife and children lived.

Having completed his inventory, Chambers waved the gun and said: ‘Do I really have to go on pointing this at you? I know I’m much older than you. Forty-five aren’t you?’ – I was forty-four – ‘But I think I’d get the better of you in physical combat, and I’m not just being conceited.’

He could well have been right. Anyway I told him to put down his gun and tell me what he wanted. There was always the possibility that I might be able to surprise him later.

He stood up and slipped off the topcoat. Underneath he wore a charcoal grey pin-stripe with a waistcoat and a gold watch-chain with a seal fob looped across it. He slipped the Browning inside the jacket without spoiling its shape and sat down again. ‘And now,’ he said pleasantly, ‘tell me why you want to know about the Judas Code,’ one finger straying to his cheek; the bullet must have taken a lot of bone with it because the scar was almost a furrow.

‘You must have guessed that – I’m writing a book.’

‘The Judas Code … a good title. Why did you choose it?’

‘I didn’t: it was unavoidable. Kept cropping up while I was researching a book about the last war. I wanted to know why Stalin ignored all the warnings that Germany intended to invade Russia in 1941.’

‘That’s simple. The warnings came from Churchill and Roosevelt and other interested parties and he interpreted them as mischief-making. Most accounts of World War II have made that quite clear.’

‘But it doesn’t wash, does it? He also ignored warnings from his own spies. Richard Sorge in Tokyo, for instance. And the evidence before his own generals’ eyes – the build-up of the German army on his borders.’

‘And why are you, a novelist, so anxious to put the record straight?’

‘Three reasons. One, because I abhor flawed logic. Any history student who suggested in an exam that Uncle Joe misread Hitler’s intentions just because he thought the Allies were deceiving him would deserve to get C minus.

‘Two, because if Stalin had got it right then you’d have to re-draw today’s maps of the world. If, for instance, Germany and Russia had persevered with their unholy alliance, if their armies hadn’t bled each other for more than three years, then Britain might be a Nazi or a Soviet satellite.’

Chambers took a silver cigarette case from the inside pocket of his jacket, on the other side from the Browning. He didn’t offer it to me – perhaps he even knew I’d given up smoking – and selected a cigarette. He lit it with a gold Dunhill lighter and inhaled with pleasure. A true smoker, not a chain-smoker. ‘And the third?’

‘Because it’s my guess that the real reasons behind Stalin’s apparent stupidity will make a better story than any novel I’ve written.’

‘I see.’ He blew a jet of smoke into a shaft of dusty sunlight. ‘Yes, I can see that.’ His voice had assumed an introspective quality and I wondered if I could jump him. I had never been an athlete, let alone a fighter, but I was big enough and fairly fit. He said crisply: ‘Don’t try it,’ followed by: ‘But you haven’t explained about the Judas Code.’

‘Why don’t you explain it? It seems to have worried the hell out of you.’

‘Because I have the gun,’ slipping his hand inside his jacket. I told him.

To try and plug the gap in appraisals of World War II caused by Stalin’s apparent aberration I had travelled all over Europe winkling out people who might once have had access to secret information that could explain it. Spies in other words; among them former members of Britain’s XX Committee, various branches of America’s OSS, Germany’s RSHA VI (foreign intelligence) and Abwehr and the Soviet Union’s two European espionage organisations known as the Red Orchestra and the Lucy Ring.

Predictably, most of the agents denied that they had ever been spies. Who wants to admit to a furtive past if he is currently a burgormaster or the chairman of a bank? But a few, mostly the very old whose cloaks of secrecy were now in tatters, did agree that the history books should be rewritten. Watching their reactions to my questions was like peering into coffins and seeing corpses momentarily resuscitated. From each coffin came a dusty whisper: ‘The Judas Code.’ No more. Ageing reflexes belatedly recognised indiscretion, coffin lids snapped back into place.

Chambers seemed to relax, relieved, I guessed, that I appeared to know nothing more. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I should forget all about it.’ He crossed his legs, revealing black silk socks.

‘Why? It was important enough to bring you round here like a dog after a bitch on heat.’

‘There are some secrets that are best left undisturbed. For everyone’s sake.’

‘You would have to be more explicit than that to convince me.’

He was about to reply when the phone on the coffee table between us rang, as intrusive as a fire alarm. I reached for the receiver but Chambers beat me to it.

He gave the telephone number, paused and said: ‘Yes, I inserted the advertisement. Can you help me?’

As I tried to snatch the receiver Chambers backed away and, with a pickpocket’s agility, plucked the Browning from his pocket and aimed the barrel between my eyes.

‘… Yes, my name is Lamont. Can we meet somewhere? … Very well, midday … Yes, I’ll explain then … Thank you for calling …’

‘So where are we meeting?’ I asked as he sat down again.

‘You are not meeting anyone.’

‘Are you in the habit of impersonating people?’

‘Not recently. In the past, well yes, it has been known.’ He handled the gun with love, then asked: ‘Do you have a price?’

‘They say everyone does.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘A niche at the top of the best-seller list.’

‘Alas the one bribe I can’t offer you because if The Judas Code achieved that distinction it would negate everything I have set out to achieve.’

‘Which is?’

‘To persuade you to abandon your inquiries.’

‘And why would you want to do that?’

‘I can’t tell you that. Would £10,000 persuade you that I had good reasons?’

I shook my head.

‘Twenty thousand?’

‘I’m going to write the book.’

He stubbed out his cigarette fastidiously, making sure he didn’t soil his fingers with tar, and stared at me without speaking. In the hall the grandfather clock chimed 9. 30; a pigeon on the windowsill pecked at the glass; I became aware of the hum of the traffic far below.

Finally he said: ‘If you continue to follow this up I shall kill you.’

He took a gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket and consulted it as though shortly he had another appointment to threaten someone with death.

‘I’m going to call the police,’ I said.

‘Please do so,’ he said. ‘But have the courtesy to wait till I’ve gone.’ He stood up, walked to the window and gazed at the dignified streets below. ‘You have a wife and three children, I believe?’

‘You keep them out of this!’

‘Don’t worry, I won’t touch them. But they’re very fond of you, aren’t they? Would it be fair to deprive your wife of a husband, your children of a father? Because, please believe me, Mr Lamont, I mean what I say. Try and crack the Judas Code and you’re a dead man.’

Throat pulsing, the pigeon backed away along the windowsill.

Perhaps I should have said: ‘I don’t scare that easily,’ but it wouldn’t have been the truth. Instead I said: ‘All right, you’ve had your say, now get out.’

He shrugged, buttoned his overcoat, walked to the door, said: ‘Please be sensible,’ and was gone.

I considered calling the police but even if they traced my visitor - I doubted whether his name was Chambers but he couldn’t escape the scar – he would merely deny everything.

As I was making a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen the phone rang again.

A man’s voice: ‘If you want to meet Judas go to the lion house at the Zoo at eleven this morning. Be carrying a copy of—’

‘The Times?’

‘The Telegraph. And appear to be making some notes.’ Click as he cut the connection.

So I had more than an hour. I shaved and dressed in a blue lightweight and took the antiquated lift to the ground floor where the porter, Mr. Atkins – I had never known his first name – had stood guard ever since I had come to the musty old block ten years ago. He was as permanent as the stone horsemen on the portals and just as worn.

‘Good morning, Mr. Atkins.’

‘Good morning, Mr. Lamont. Fair to middling this morning.’

I don’t think he ever left the hallway because the weather was ‘fair to middling’ even if a blizzard was raging outside.

I walked up Portland Place towards Regent’s Park. An April shower had washed the street, the sun was warm, pretty girls had blossomed overnight. A chic woman in grey waited patiently while her poodle watered a lamp-post; a man in a bowler-hat carrying a briefcase danced down a flight of steps; a nun smiled shyly from beneath her halo; an airliner chalked a white line across the blue sky.

Faced by all this, Chambers’ lingering menace dissolved; the gun probably hadn’t been loaded anyway.

I crossed Marylebone Road and the Outer Circle, Nash terraces behind me benign in the sunlight, and walked down the Broad Walk between the chestnut trees.

Nursemaids were abroad with prams and for a moment I imagined them steering them towards clandestine meetings with red-coated soldiers.

And that scar—he had probably fallen on to the railings at school.

Inside the lion house my mood changed. The big cats hopelessly padding up and down their cages, their prison smelling like sour beer. I displayed the Telegraph, took out a notebook and began to make notes. Lions watching the spectators brought there for their delectation …

The young man in the fawn raincoat said: ‘I’m afraid you won’t meet Judas here.’ His voice and dress were irrefutably English but there was a Slavonic cast to his features; he had grey, questing eyes and was, I guessed, in his late twenties. ‘You see you’ve been followed.’

My earlier optimism was routed. A lion bared yellow teeth behind its bars; captivity tightened around me.

‘Who are you?’

‘That doesn’t matter. Just an intermediary. We had to do it this way otherwise …’ He shrugged. ‘… you would never have got your story.’

‘How did you know I wanted a story?’

Without answering, he took my arm. ‘Let’s get out of here, I can’t stand jails. But before you go take a look at the man in the sports jacket with the patched elbows looking at the tigers.’

Casually I glanced towards the tiger cage. The man in question seemed absorbed with the occupant; he was squat, balding, powerfully built, about the same age as Chambers.

We left the cats dreaming about wide open spaces and returned to the sunlight.

‘And now,’ he said as we walked past a polar bear sunning itself beside its pool, ‘I have another assignation for you. But first you’ll have to shake off your tail and make sure that he hasn’t got a back-up.’

I stopped and gazed at the bear, glancing at the same time to my right. The man in the sports jacket was standing about seventy-five yards away consulting a hardbook.

We walked on. ‘One more word of advice,’ he said, ‘don’t use your telephone on Judas business – it’s bound to be bugged. That wasn’t you who answered the phone the first time, was it?’

‘It was a man who says his name is Chambers.’

‘We thought as much. It was he who hired the private detective who’s following us.’

‘Do you mind telling me what this is all about?’

‘I can’t; Judas can.’

‘And when am I going to meet Judas?’

‘Soon. But, first of all, do you mind telling me just how you intend to use any information you might get hold of?’

‘Write a book. You seemed to know that.’

‘We’ve known about you for a long time, Mr. Lamont. Ever since you started making inquiries. We’ve checked you out and you seem to be an author of integrity …’

‘Don’t forget I write novels. In my particular field it pays to be sensational.’

‘At least you’re being honest. That’s what I want to establish – before you meet Judas – that your book will be honest.’

‘I can give you this assurance: I want to write a book that puts the record straight about the second world war. Our civilisation is shaky enough without being saddled with false premises. There was, for instance, no way Britain could have stood alone in 1940–41 unless something occurred behind the scenes that we know nothing about. The Battle of Britain was a famous victory but it wasn’t sufficient to deter Hitler from calling off the invasion. There was something more behind that decision, just as there was something more behind Stalin’s refusal to believe that Germany was going to attack Russia. Stalin, after all, was a very wily Georgian …’

‘And you’ll stick to the truth? If, that is, you believe what you’re told?’

‘As I said, I’m a novelist. I may use the fictional form to mould the facts into a digestible composition. But, yes, I’ll stick to what I learn. If and when I learn it.’

A flock of schoolchildren shepherded by a harassed woman in brogues passed by, watched from aloft by a giraffe. I turned, ostensibly to watch the children, and spotted the man in the sports jacket.

The young man seemed to accept my assurance. He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘I wonder,’ he said, slowing down as though he was about to break away, ‘if you realise just what you’re getting into.’

‘When you’re forced into your own flat at gunpoint you get the general idea.’

‘He wasn’t play-acting, you know.’

‘The gun didn’t look like a prop.’

‘Well, so long as you understand …’

I said impatiently: ‘Where can I meet Judas, for God’s sake?’

‘It’s 11.30 now. At Madame Tussaud’s in one hour.’

‘Where at Madame Tussaud’s?’

‘Beside the figure of Winston Churchill.’ Where else? his tone seemed to say. ‘Good luck, I’ll take care of our friend. But it will only be a temporary measure, so take care.’

He turned abruptly and hurried away – straight into the man in the sports jacket. The man fell. I raced past a line of cages and, while the two men untangled themselves, took refuge in Lord Snowdon’s aviary, watched incuriously by a blue and red parrot. There was no sign of the man in the sports jacket.

I emerged cautiously from the aviary and, leaving the jungle squawks behind, made my way to the zoo’s exit. At Camden Town I took an underground train to King’s Cross on the Northern Line and changed on to the Circle Line, alighting at Baker Street.

At 12.25 I entered Madame Tussaud’s Waxwork Exhibition and made my way into the Grand Hall on the ground floor. Churchill, hands clasping the lapels of his suit, chin thrust out belligerently above his bow tie, seemed about to speak. To offer, perhaps, nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’.

It was exactly 12.30. The voice behind me said: ‘He could tell the story much better than I can. But I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me.’

I turned and came face to face with Judas.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

July 11, 1938. A wondrous Sunday in Moscow with memories of winter past and prospects of winter to come melted by the sun. The golden cupolas of the Kremlin floated in a cloudless sky, crowds queued for kvas and icecream and in Gorky Park the air smelled of carnations.

In a forest behind a river beach thirty miles outside the city a blond young man who would one day be asked to take part in the most awesome conspiracy of modern times was courting a black-haired beauty named Anna Petrovna.

If anyone had hinted about his future role to Viktor Golovin he would have dismissed them as a madman. And abruptly at that because it was his nineteenth birthday and he hoped to celebrate it by making love for the first time in his life.

It was a daunting prospect. In the first place he feared his inexperience might be ridiculed; in the second, being a serious young man – his solemn demeanour made the laughter that occasionally transfigured his features into an explosion – he believed that the act of love should involve more than casual pleasure. It should, he reasoned, be a seal of permanency. But did he truly desire permanency with Anna Petrovna? And if he didn’t wasn’t he betraying his beliefs?

Standing under a silver birch where coins of light shifted restlessly on the thin grass he bent and kissed her on the lips and gazed into her eyes, seeking answers. She stared boldly back and gave none. He slipped his arm round her waist and they walked deeper into the forest.

The trouble was that although he loved her there were aspects of her character that angered him. Not only was she supremely self-confident, as any girl desired by half the male students at Moscow University was entitled to be, but she was politically assertive, and dangerously so. She believed that Joseph Stalin had made a travesty of Marxist-Leninism and she wasn’t afraid to say so. But surely love should transcend such considerations.

He glanced down at her; she was small but voluptuously shaped with full breasts that he had caressed for the first time two nights ago, and there was a trace of the gypsy in her, an impression heightened today by her red skirt and white blouse. She was three months older than him and unquestionably far more experienced.

She smiled at him and said: ‘You’re looking very serious, Viktor Golovin. Let’s sit down for a while and I’ll see if I can make you smile.’

She tickled his lips with a blade of grass as he lay back, hands behind his head, and tried not to smile. He could feel the warmth of her body and see the swell of her breasts.

Finally he grinned.

‘That smile,’ she said, ‘is your key.’

‘To what?’

‘To anything you want.’

She unbuttoned his white, open-neck shirt ‘to let the fresh air get to you’, and he wondered if her previous words were an invitation and whether he should accept in view of his misgivings about her character, but when she kissed him … such a knowing kiss … and when he felt the pressure of her thighs on his and heard her sigh his principles fled.

He lost his virginity with surprising ease. None of the fumbling and misdirected endeavour that he had feared. And, at the time, such was his need that it didn’t occur to him that his accomplishment owed not a little to her expertise.

She helped him with his clothes. She lay back, skirt hitched to her hips, legs spread, breasts free. She touched him, stroked him, guided him. And when he was inside her, marvelling that at last it had happened, wondering at the oiled ease of it all, she regulated their movements. ‘Gently … stop a moment … harder, faster … now, now …’

For a while they didn’t speak. Then, when he had taken a bottle of Narzan mineral water from his knapsack and they were sipping it from cardboard cups, she said: ‘It was the first time for you, wasn’t it?’

As though it implied retarded development. But he had refused to conform with the sexual boasting of the students obsessed with masculinity. If they were to be believed they coupled every night, fuelled on lethal quantities of vodka. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it was. Should I be ashamed?’

‘Ashamed? Why should you be ashamed? You’re young.’

So was she and for a moment the obvious question about her experience hovered between them; but he knew the answer and then, in her way, she answered it: ‘At our age a girl is much older than a boy.’ She stroked his hair. ‘You’re very attractive, Viktor, you’re not … not so obvious as the others.’

‘You mean I’m insignificant?’

‘Far from it. You’re tall and you’re slim and your eyes always seem to be searching for the truth. I think you’re going to have terrible trouble with your conscience in the future.’

He grinned at her. ‘I didn’t just now.’

‘It’s a pity that politically you’re such a conformist.’

Here we go, he thought and said: ‘What’s so wrong with that? I’m only conforming to communism, the beliefs that have rescued our country from tyranny.’

‘Rescued it? Twenty years ago perhaps. But now we’ve got a tyranny far worse than anything the Tsars ever dreamed up.’

‘Watch that tongue of yours, Anna, or it will lead you to Siberia.’

Triumphantly she exclaimed: ‘You see, you’re proving my point. What sort of a country is it when you can’t say what you believe?’

‘A better country than Germany,’ Viktor said quickly, annoyed with himself for having given her ammunition. ‘At least it’s not a crime here for a Jew to observe the Sabbath.’

‘Anyone with a weak argument always resorts to comparisons.’ She stood up and smoothed her skirt. ‘You must have heard about the purges …’

Of course he’d heard the stories. But he didn’t believe them. Iconoclasm was a permanent resident of student society. He preferred to believe the evidence around him that Lenin, and now Stalin, had helped Mother Russia to rise from her knees and given her self-respect. Not that he believed that the Revolution had been quite as heroic as the historians would have you believe – that was for children and none the worse because of it; but he did believe in equality. He knew older people who had once lived on potato skins, black bread and tea.

‘They say he’s quite mad you know.’ She began to walk back towards the beach.

‘Who’s mad?’ picking up his knapsack and following her.

‘Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, better known as Stalin.’

‘They also say that genius is akin to madness.’

‘A psychopath.’

‘One of those words created to disguise our ignorance of the human condition.’

How pompous we students can be, he reflected.

Through the birch trees he could see a glint of water and, faintly, he could hear the babble from the beach and the tattoo of ping-pong balls on the tables beside the sand.

‘I wonder,’ Anna said, ‘just what it would take to convince you.’ She kicked a heap of old brown leaves and her red skirt swirled. ‘Blood?’

‘Why do you talk treason all the time? Why can’t you enjoy the benefits the system has brought us?’

‘It has certainly brought you benefits, Viktor Golovin.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

But he knew. For an orphan he had enjoyed a protected upbringing; and for no apparent reason his foster parents seemed to have rather more than their share of communal benefits. An apartment near the University on the crest of the Lenin Hills, a small dacha in the village of Peredelkino where the writers lived. Not bad for a librarian and his wife.

‘Your privileges are your cross.’

Would she always be like this after making love? ‘I’ve been lucky, I admit.’

‘It must be difficult to hold forth about equality when you’ve had such luck.’

‘Luck! Everyone has a share of it. The trick is knowing what to do with it when you get it.’

‘Nonsense. Not everyone has luck. It isn’t lucky to be an army officer these days.’

‘Ah, the purges again.’

‘Purges, a euphemism. Massacres is a better word.’

They emerged from the green depths of the forest into bright light. Beyond the table-tennis players and the fretted-wood restaurant where you could buy beer, kvas and fizzy cherryade, pies and cold meats, the beach was packed with Muscovites unfolding in the sun. They shed their clothes, they shed the moods of winter. Flesh burned bright pink but no one seemed to care. Rounding a curve in the river came a white steamboat nosing aside the calm water.

The doubts that had reached Viktor in the forest dissolved. Ordinary people wouldn’t have been able to enjoy themselves like this before 1917. Possessively, Viktor, lover and philosopher, took Anna’s arm.

‘But do you?’ She must have been talking while he savoured the fruits of socialism. Impatiently, she said: ‘You haven’t been listening, have you?’

‘I don’t want to hear anything more about purges.’

She pulled her arm away. ‘Of course you don’t. You don’t want anything to interfere with your beautiful, cossetted life. Least of all truth.’

‘I don’t believe it is the truth.’ Her attitude nettled him. ‘Let’s go and have a beer.’

They sat at a scrubbed wooden table and drank beer from fluted brown bottles. Around them families ate picnic lunches and guzzled; in one corner a plump mother was feeding a baby at the breast.

‘I was asking,’ she said, ‘when you weren’t listening, that is, whether you would like to see proof of what I’ve been saying.’

‘If it will please you.’

‘Please me!’ She leaned fiercely across the table. ‘It certainly won’t please me. But it will give me a certain satisfaction to see that smug expression wiped off your face.’

‘Not so long ago my eyes were always searching for the truth …’

‘In everything except politics.’

‘What you’re alleging is more than political.’

‘I can’t understand how you’re so blind. Everyone knows that Stalin is killing off all his enemies, real and imagined. They say the army is powerless now because he’s murdered all the generals.’

Some of the men and women sharing the long table were looking curiously at them. ‘Keep your voice down,’ Viktor whispered, covering her hand with his to soften the words, knowing that any moment now she would accuse him of cowardice.

‘I will for your sake,’ which was the same thing. ‘We don’t want you thrown into Lubyanka, do we?’

A man with a walrus moustache who was peeling an orange pointed his knife at them and said: ‘Cell 28. I spent three years there. Give my love to the rats.’

Viktor said: ‘You see, everyone can hear you even when you lower your voice.’ He felt faintly ashamed of his caution; but really there was no need to: if she had been speaking the truth then, yes, he would have sided with her.

‘Am I to speak in whispers all my life?’

He thought: Yes, if I’m to share my life with you. But the possibility was becoming less attractive by the minute; he seemed to have expended a lot of ideals with his sexual passion.

The man with the walrus moustache bit into his orange and, with juice dribbling down his chin, sat listening. The woman in the corner transferred the baby to her other plump breast.

Viktor said: ‘There are a lot of informers about. Even I admit that.’

‘I suppose you think they’re a necessary evil.’

He thought about it and said: ‘Frankly, yes I do,’ waiting for her voice to rise another octave.

Instead she spoke softly. ‘I meant what I said, Viktor. I will show you the proof of what I say. Or rather I will arrange for you to see it.’

The man with the walrus moustache frowned and edged closer, evidently believing that he had qualified to take part in the conversation.

Viktor tilted the bottle, drained it and wiped the froth from his lips. ‘Make the arrangements,’ he said.

‘What arrangements?’ asked the man with the walrus moustache. He spat out an orange pip. ‘I remember there was one rat who got quite tame. I called him Boris.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.

Without speaking, they made their way along the dusty path beside the river. The bushes to their right were the changing quarters and from behind them came shrieks and giggles, the smack of a hand on bare flesh.

As they neared the bus terminal she said: ‘You know Nikolai Vasilyev?’

‘Your private tutor? I know of him. Isn’t he supposed to be a great admirer of Trotsky?’

‘He believes Stalin cheated him. He also believes that one day Stalin will murder him.’

‘Another of your psychopaths by the sound of it.’

‘He’s a very fine man,’ Anna said and from the tone of her voice Viktor guessed that he was, or had been, her lover.

‘Does he teach you Trotsky’s theories?’

‘Sometimes when our sociology lesson is finished he talks about what he believes in. The dreams that peasants dreamed before Stalin made nightmares out of them.’

Exasperated, Viktor punched the palm of one hand with his fist and said: ‘This proof. Tell me about it.’

‘Nikolai’s best friend is an army officer, a captain. The captain’s father was a general.’

‘Was?’

‘He was executed by a firing squad along with thirty other officers. His crime – he questioned the disposition of Soviet troops on the eastern borders. He was proved right when the troops clashed with the Japanese at Manchukuo ten days ago. But the fact that he was right merely made his crime worse.’

‘Perhaps he was executed for treason. Or treasonable talk,’ Viktor said.

Anna ignored him. ‘Nikolai knows where the executions take place. And he will know through his friend when the next one will be. For all I know they take place every day,’ she added.

‘In the imagination of Nikolai Vasilyev and his friend.’

‘There’s only one answer: you must see for yourself. If you have the stomach for it.’

Then he couldn’t refuse.

*

In the red and white coach packed with Muscovites radiating heat from their sun-burn Viktor considered Anna’s jibes about his privileged upbringing. In fact it had bothered him long before she had mentioned it.

He had been born in 1920 when the Red Army was still fighting its enemies in the civil war that followed the Revolution. There were many orphans in those days but not many who had the good fortune to be farmed out almost immediately to a respectable but childless young couple.

Viktor stood up to give his seat to a pregnant woman who had pushed her way through the strap-hanging passengers. The bus bounced as the hard tyres passed over pot-holes in the roads, but at least the crush of bodies stopped you from falling.

From what he had subsequently gathered the Golovins had become remarkably self-sufficient in the dangerous, disordered streets of Moscow. They had found a small house in a relatively tranquil suburb; his father had been given a job at the library where he helped Bolshevik authors re-write history; his mother had devoted herself to the upbringing of little Viktor.

In photographs he looked an uncommonly smug child, scrubbed, combed, smiling complacently at the cameraman. It was a paradox that such self-assurance should have led to the self-doubts he was experiencing now.

It wasn’t until he was sixteen that his father had told him that he was adopted. And it was only then that he began to question the uneventful security of his life.

To the inevitable question: ‘Who were my parents?’ his father, bearded and patient, replied, ‘We don’t know. There were thousands of children without parents in those days. You see it wasn’t just the men who were killed in the Revolution and the fighting after it: women fought side by side with them.’

‘But how did you find me?’ Viktor asked.

‘We didn’t find you. You were allocated to us. We knew by this time that my wife, your mother … foster mother? … no, let’s always call her your mother … we knew that she couldn’t have a child so we went to an orphanage. You had been taken there by an old woman who left without giving any details about your background. Perhaps she didn’t know them; perhaps she was your babushka; we shall never know.’ His father put his hand on Viktor’s shoulder. ‘But we do know that we were very lucky.’ A pause. ‘And I think you were very lucky too.’

But it wasn’t the mystery of his birth that bothered Viktor because it was true, a baby could easily have lost its identity in those chaotic days when a new creed was being spawned. What bothered him was the cloistered life that he and his parents lived; questioned on this subject his father had no real answers.

‘We’re decent, upright citizens,’ he said in his calm voice. ‘Your mother keeps a good home.’ Which was true; in her early forties when Viktor was sixteen, she was a fair-haired, handsome woman who cooked well and was obsessively house-proud. ‘And I work hard,’ which Viktor later discovered wasn’t quite so true because his father had taken to nipping vodka behind the bookshelves in the library off Pushkin Square. ‘So why shouldn’t we have our security? We’ve earned it.’

When he was seventeen Viktor pointed out that the apartment on the Lenin Hills, to which they had just moved, and the dacha were hardly commensurate with a librarian’s income. And it was then that he first heard about his father’s biography of Tolstoy. ‘I was given a considerable advance by my publishers,’ he confided.

‘Enough to support two homes?’

‘They have high hopes of my project.’

Viktor’s doubts were assuaged until he discovered that the great work consisted of an exercise book half filled with jumbled notes and a letter from the State-controlled publishers saying that they would consider the manuscript on its merits when it was delivered. Which, judging by the scope of Tolstoy’s life and the paucity of his father’s notes, wouldn’t be this century.

The bus swung round a corner and the standing passengers swayed together, laughing, still drunk with the sun. Viktor loved them all; but he wasn’t one of them – his parents had seen to that.

At school he had subtly been kept apart from other children. Even now at university where he was studying languages – English, German and Polish (he could have taken a couple more because foreign tongues gave up their secrets to him without a struggle) – his privileged circumstances created suspicion.

Through the grimy windows of the coach he could see blue and pink wooden cottages tucked away among birch and pines; then the first scattered outposts of Moscow, new apartment blocks climbing on the shoulders of old houses.

Pride expanded inside him. So much achieved during his lifetime! What scared him was the gathering threat to the achievement. War. Fermented in the east by Japan and in the west by Germany. Viktor, orphan of war, was a preacher of peace. Russia had most certainly had her fill of war, but would the belligerents of the world let her rest?

By the time he and Anna alighted from the bus and made their way towards her lodgings in the Arbat her mood had changed. She seemed to regret what she had proposed.

‘Of course you don’t have to go,’ she said and, when he protested, she insisted: ‘No, I mean it. You’re entitled to your opinions. I was being possessive.’

‘No, I must go,’ confident that in any case there would be nothing to see.

It was early evening and heat trapped in the narrow streets of leaning houses engulfed them. In the distance they could hear the rumbling of a summer storm.

She slipped on the cobblestones and he held her and she leaned against him.

She said: ‘There’s no one in the house. Would you like to come in and I’ll make some tea?’ and he said he would, but he wasn’t thinking about tea and his double standards surprised him; an hour ago they had been snapping at each other like wayward husband and nagging wife.

She slid the key into the door of the tenement owned by a baker and his wife. The stairs creaked beneath their feet, splintering the silence.

Her room was a revelation. He had expected garish touches, photographs of film stars, vivid posters from Georgia, beads and powder scattered on the dressing-table. But it was a shy, chaste place and he wondered if he had misjudged her. On the mantelpiece above the iron fireplace stood a photograph of her parents, and the only beads on the dressing table were those strung on a rosary … So even she had to admit that you were still free in Russia to worship whatever god you chose.

She lit a gas-ring in the corner of the room, put a blackened kettle on it and sliced a lemon. ‘What are we doing this evening?’ she asked.

‘Whatever you like.’ He was fascinated by the change in her.

‘You know something? You’re the first man who’s ever been up here.’

He believed her.

‘I always kept it reserved for … for someone special.’

‘I’m honoured,’ he said inadequately.

‘How do you like your tea?’

‘Hot and strong,’ he told her.

‘I wish I had a samovar. Perhaps one day. But I have a little caviar.’

She poured the tea in two porcelain cups and spread caviar on fingers of black bread.

As he sipped his tea, sharp with lemon, he said softly: ‘You know you really should take care. Your talk, it’s too bold. It will get you into trouble.’

‘So, who would care?’ She was estranged from her parents; he didn’t know why.

‘I would care.’

‘But we must be free, Viktor.’

‘Aren’t we?’

She shook her head sadly. ‘Let’s not start that again.’ She popped a finger of bread loaded with glistening black roe into her mouth.

‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. After I’ve been to this place that Professor Nikolai Vasilyev babbles about I’ll prove to you that this is a free country.’

‘You really believe it, don’t you?’

‘We’ll each try to prove our points.’

‘And yet by warning me to watch my tongue you disprove yours … But enough of that. Here, have some more tea.’ She poured a scalding stream into his cup. ‘How about going to the Tchaikovsky?’

Her suggestion was hardly inventive: they went there most evenings since they had paired off together. It was a student café, strident with debate and none too clean; but the beer was cheap and the company stimulating.

‘Why not?’

‘Do you mind looking the other way while I change?’

He stared through the window thinking how strange it was that a girl who only that afternoon had lain half naked beneath him in the forest should suddenly be overcome by modesty.

Suddenly thunder cracked overhead. The first blobs of rain hit the window and slid down in rivulets. Behind him he heard the rustle of clothing.

Another crack of thunder and he turned and she was naked and he reached for her

*

The summons came ten days later.

His father took the call in the living room.

‘It’s that girl,’ he said, exuding displeasure, and handed the receiver to Viktor.

‘Do you still want to go through with it?’ Anna asked.

‘Of course. Where shall I meet you?’ He wanted to stop her from committing any indiscretion on the phone. But why should I worry?

‘Nikolai says—’

‘Forget about Nikolai,’ he broke in. ‘Just tell me where to meet you.’

‘At the Tchaikovsky in half an hour. But Viktor—’

‘I’ll be there.’ He hung up.

He glanced at his watch. Six pm.

‘That girl,’ his father said, stroking his grey-streaked beard. ‘Anna, isn’t it?’

‘How did you know her name?’

‘I’ve heard you talk about her.’

Viktor who didn’t remember ever discussing her said: ‘Well, what about her?’

‘I’ve heard,’ his father said, ‘that she’s a bit of a firebrand.’ His voice didn’t carry authority; but it was a voice that wasn’t used to being contradicted.

‘Really? Who told you that?’

‘We get a lot of people from the university in the library.’

‘And they thought fit to discuss your son’s friends with you? Your adopted son,’ he added because he was angry.

‘Just one of your friends. They seemed to think that she wasn’t desirable company.’

‘What were they implying? That she was a whore?’

‘Viktor!’ exclaimed his mother who had just entered the room, clean and bright from a good dusting that morning.

‘I’m sorry, mama, I didn’t know you were there.’

‘What sort of excuse is that? I won’t have that sort of language in my house.’ With one finger she dabbed at a trace of pollen that had fallen from a vase of roses on the table.

Viktor turned to his father. ‘Why did they think she was undesirable, whoever they are?’

‘Apparently she has an ungovernable tongue.’ He had a way of emphasing long words as though he had just invented them.

‘She’s got spirit if that’s what you mean.’

‘Misdirected by all accounts. I really think, Viktor, that you should give her up.’

‘There must be some nice girls in your class,’ his mother said.

What would they say, Viktor wondered, if they knew that he had celebrated his release from celibacy by making love to her twice in one day? Twice! He almost felt like telling them; but that wouldn’t be fair, they had been good to him in their way.

His father said: ‘Wasn’t there some gossip about her and her private tutor?’

‘Was there? I didn’t know.’

‘Your father’s only telling you for your own good,’ his mother said.

Viktor wondered if his father had been fortified by a few nips of vodka. ‘And I’m grateful,’ he said stiffly, ‘but I’m nineteen years old and capable of making my own judgements.’

His father drummed his fingers on a bookcase crammed with esoteric volumes discarded by the library. ‘You’re going to see her now?’

‘You were listening to my conversation, you know perfectly well I am.’ He consulted his watch again. ‘And I’m late.’

His father’s fingers returned to his beard but the combing movements were quicker. ‘You realise you are displeasing your mother and me. Do you think we deserve that?’

Addressing his mother, Viktor said: ‘Look, you’ve been wonderful to me. If it wasn’t for you I might be living in a hovel, working on an assembly line; I might even be dead. I’ve never been disobedient before. But I’m a man now. And I have the right to choose my friends. After all, it is a free country. Isn’t it?’ turning to his father.

His father said: ‘I’ve warned you.’

‘And your warning has been considered and dismissed.’ Viktor kissed his mother on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry but there it is: your little boy has grown up. And now I must rush.’

He took a tramcar to the centre of the city. It was another fine day, cumulus cloud piled high on the horizon. Two more months and the jaws of winter would begin to close. But Viktor didn’t mind the long bitter months. Perhaps his parents had been Siberians. That would account for his blue eyes.

He walked briskly through the Arbat, past sleeping dogs and a group of children wearing scarlet scarves and red stars on their shirts and old people in black becalmed in the past on the pavements.

She was waiting for him at a table by an open window. A breeze breathed through the window stirring her black hair. She wore a yellow dress with jade beads at her neck. She was smoking a cardboard-tipped cigarette with nervous little puffs.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Coffee?’

‘We haven’t time. Come, we can’t talk here.’ Outside she said: ‘You have to promise me, Viktor, that whatever you see you won’t tell a soul. You won’t say where you’ve been and you won’t say who with. Do you promise?’

‘Of course, it was understood anyway. Where am I going anyway?’

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: ‘To a place of execution.’

Apprehension was germinating inside him: she seemed so confident. ‘How do we get there?’ he asked. ‘Wherever there is.’

She took his arm, propelling him along the pavements until they arrived at Theatre Square. There they caught a No 18 tram to the Kaluzhskaya Zastava and thence a No 7 to the Sparrow Hills.

‘And now?’ He looked at her questioningly, apprehensively. An old grey limousine answered his question. Anna pulled open the rear door and pushed him in. The car moved off, leaving her behind.

The driver had cropped brown hair and his accent was Ukrainian. ‘I have one request,’ he said, ‘and it’s up to you whether or not you obey it. But I’d be grateful if you didn’t take too much notice of where we’re going.’

‘You seem to take it all rather lightly,’ Viktor said, ‘if we’re going to see what Anna claims we’re going to see.’

‘Is there any other way? In any case Anna says, through Nikolai Vasilyev, that you don’t believe there are any restrictions in the Soviet Union. If that is so why should I bother too much about what you see?’

‘But you do bother …’

The shoulders in front of him, clothed in blue serge despite the heat, shrugged. ‘It’s immaterial. If you go telling tales then we’ll kill you.’

The driver handed Viktor a flask. ‘A little firewater, perhaps, to prepare you for what lies ahead?’

Viktor took the flask. He had only drunk vodka once and had considered himself quite sober until he had walked into the fresh air, whereupon he had collapsed. He took a sip and handed the flask back to the crop-haired enigma in front of him.

The vodka felt like molten metal in his stomach.

From the crown of the Sparrow Hills, he could see the valley of the Moskva River, fields of vegetables, Tikhvinski Church, the Novo-Dyevitchi Convent and to the right, on the wooded slopes of the river, the Merchants’ Poor House. It all looked very peaceful in the evening haze.

The Ukrainian took a rambling route as though trying to confuse anyone following. In the outlying suburbs where the Tartars had once lived men were coming home from work to wives and children standing at the doors of houses surrounded by wooden fences threaded with dog roses. The homecomings had an ordered rhythm to them that soothed Viktor’s doubts. The proposition that he was being taken to a mass execution became ludicrous. And yet … Why had Anna gone to such elaborate lengths? What possible motive could the Ukrainian have for taking him on this confusing journey? Perhaps some bizarre mime would be staged; perhaps they would claim they had missed the killing and show him some bloodstains. Well, they would have to do better than that.

‘Another nip?’ The Ukrainian handed back the flask, silver with a family crest engraved on it. Viktor took another sip; if the Ukrainian was trying to get him drunk he had another think coming. But the liquor did embolden him to ask: ‘What sort of farce is this that we’re acting?’

The Ukrainian laughed, massaging the bristles on his scalp. There were a couple of incipient creases on his neck; he wasn’t so young. ‘A tragedy,’ he said, ‘not a farce. Grand Guignol.’

‘You don’t seem to be taking it too tragically.’

‘That way lies madness.’

‘And how do you know about these … alleged executions?’

‘Because, my dear Viktor, I have become a desk-bound soldier, a military clerk, after being wounded in a skirmish with the Japanese. But a clerk with a difference. I was considered bright enough to be enrolled in military intelligence known to one and all as the GRU. Do you know how the GRU came into existence?’

‘It seems irrelevant.’

‘But then you wouldn’t know, would you, because it was born of defeat and defeats don’t have any place in our history books.’ He swung the old car round a bend in a dirt road, sending up a cloud of dust. ‘In 1920 the Poles invaded the Soviet Union and stormed through my country. The Ukraine, that is,’ he explained. ‘They were thrown out eventually; then Lenin made a mistake.’ He turned his head and grinned. ‘Heresy, Viktor Golovin? But a mistake it certainly was. His intelligence, the Cheka Registry Department, got it all wrong and told him the Poles were ripe for revolution. As ripe as green apples as it turned out. The Red Army attacked Poland and got torn to ribbons for their pains. As a result the GRU was formed and a certain Yan Karlovich Berzin was put in charge.’

Viktor said: ‘What’s all this got to do with executions?’

‘The GRU is in charge of military purges, even though we’re only a branch of the Secret Police, the NKVD. The NKVD itself didn’t do too badly in the purging business under a gentleman named Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda. But apparently he didn’t purge quite diligently enough and he was shot in Lubyanka Prison. Now they have a fellow named Nikolai Yezhov in charge. He’s doing a good job – seeing off about thirty a day, they estimate – but it’s only a question of time before they cart him off to Lubyanka.’

‘I don’t believe any of this,’ Viktor said.

‘Where have you been, comrade? In solitary confinement?’

‘I’ve heard the rumours, of course.’

‘You should listen to rumours. They’re the alleyways in the maze surrounding the truth.’

‘If what you say is true – and I don’t for one second believe it is’ – Or did he? – ‘then why are you honouring me with a visit?’

‘Because I’m in love with Anna Petrovna. So is my friend Nikolai Vasilyev. So, I believe, are you. Wouldn’t you do anything she asked?’

Viktor thought about it, then said firmly: ‘No.’

‘Ah, but you are young. Perhaps you are the sort of young man she needs. Someone who will stand up to her.’

The Ukrainian’s words surprised Viktor: he seemed to be the sort of man who would stand up to anyone.

The Ukrainian went on: ‘But I assure you that what I’m doing is not entirely selfless. You see I think you’ll be so horrified, so disgusted, that you’ll do something rash – and leave Anna to me. And Nikolai Vasilyev —’ He circumvented a cow that had wandered into the road. ‘There is another reason,’ he said abruptly, his tone flinty. ‘You see I’ve heard all about you from Nikolai. You’re something of a hothouse plant, aren’t you? And in my book naïvety, feigned or otherwise, is as much to blame for tyranny as greed or corruption or any of the other usual culprits.’

Viktor shivered; but he knew he still had to attack. ‘By your own admission you play your part in this blood-letting. Are you proud of that, comrade?’

‘I have saved more than I have sentenced to death. It’s all I can do.’

‘So you select the victims?’

‘I don’t intend to be cross-examined.’ His voice was suddenly weary.

‘Not a very proud achievement, to condemn men to death and come to terms with yourself by saving a few souls.’

‘Then you believe me?’

Too late, Viktor realised that he had been manoeuvred into accepting the Ukrainian’s claims. ‘And what if I tell the authorities that you took me to this place of execution?’

‘Then you, too, would be executed. Comrade Stalin doesn’t like to have people in the know around too long. Yan Berzin’s days are numbered. So are my own. So, you see, I don’t really care what you do or say.’

He pulled into a track leading to a farmyard and parked the car in a stable. ‘And now, my patriotic young friend, we walk.’

The Ukrainian was shorter than Viktor had imagined him to be. He wore a brown tweed jacket and grey trousers and an open-neck grey shirt making Viktor self-conscious about the alpaca jacket that had looked so smart in the shop in the Alexander Arcade.

He also walked with an unnatural stiffness and when he saw Viktor staring at him he said: ‘The bullet hit me in the spine. I wear a steel corset. Ridiculous, isn’t it? But perhaps it will stop another bullet one day. Except that in Lubyanka they pump them into the back of your head.’ They turned into the dirt road and headed east. ‘You’re not a very curious young man, are you? I suppose it’s part of your upbringing. But you haven’t even asked me my name. It’s Gogol, like the author. Mikhail Gogol.’

Bats fluttered in the calm air, swallows skimmed the road ahead of them. In the fields peasants were scything lush green grass. A bearded muzhik wearing brown carpet slippers wandered past, eyes vacant.

‘I’d better tell you where we’re going and what we’re going to do,’ Mikhail Gogol told Viktor. ‘We’re on the outskirts of a village that was once called Tzaritzuino-Datchnoye. Does that mean anything to you?’

‘Not a thing,’ replied Viktor, with the terrible certainty growing upon him that it soon would.

‘Well, the village was given by Peter the Great to Prince Kantemir of Moldavia. In 1774 Catherine the Second – Catherine the Great – bought it back for Russia. She started to build a huge dacha here but abandoned it. There’s a theatre – also unfinished – next to it and there are lakes, lawns, gazebos … but all overgrown. In fact the place is a jungle,’ Gogol said.

‘Why the history lesson?’

‘You must know your background. One day, perhaps, you’ll write about it.’

‘I might,’ Viktor said. ‘But it will be fiction.’

‘Touché.’

Gogol stopped for a moment, holding his back as though it pained him. He thumped the base of his spine with his fist. ‘I can’t walk very far these days. Would you believe that I was once an athlete? Hundred metres sprint champion at the military academy in Kiev?’

‘Why are we going to a decayed dacha?’ Viktor asked.

‘To witness a massacre, of course. I forgot to tell you why Catherine abandoned the place. It was because it reminded her of a coffin.’

*

From behind his cover Viktor could just see the dacha over the top of the ivy-covered wall surrounding it. And it did resemble a coffin. A long, low building surmounted with spires that looked like funeral candles.

He was crouching behind a clump of dusty-leaved laurel bushes. Facing him, across a stony path, a massive wooden door, studded with iron spikes, opened into the wall; set into it was a smaller door; both were guarded by a grey-uniformed sentry who every ten minutes marched along the length of the wall, first to the right and then, re-passing the door, to the left. According to Gogol, who had brought Viktor through the undergrowth to the rear entrance, the smaller door was unlocked and only needed a push to open it. Clearly the sentry, a shabby-looking fellow with pock-marked features, didn’t expect intruders because he marched dispiritedly, staring at the ground; and no official visitors either because he had taken off his cap and was smoking a cigarette. Locals, said Gogol, had been warned not to come anywhere near the mansion and only a select few (GRU, for instance) knew that it was used for executions.

‘Make your move when he’s halfway to the right-hand extremity of the wall,’ Gogol had instructed Viktor, before making his way to the front entrance of the mansion where, apparently, he was expected. ‘Then make your way through the shrubbery to the theatre. At the back you’ll find a potting shed, wait for me there. If you get caught then I’ve never heard of you. I admit,’ he added, ‘that I do still have some faint instincts for self-survival.’

The sentry took a deep drag on his yellow cigarette, pinched out the tip and slipped the remainder into the pocket of his jacket. Then, carrying his rifle as though it were a cannon, he started out to the right of the door.

Viktor tensed himself. Twigs cracked beneath his feet. Dust from the laurel leaves made him want to sneeze.

Halfway across the path he slipped, righted himself and made it to the door. The sentry, a hundred yards away, didn’t look around. Viktor reached out one hand and pushed the smaller door. But it didn’t move. Perhaps Gogol had locked it from inside. Perhaps he wants me dead with a bullet from the sentry’s rifle in my back – or an NKVD bullet in the back of my head in Lubyanka.

The sentry was turning. Viktor pushed again. The door swung open with a creak. He was inside, closing the door, peering round, sprinting for a privet hedge enclosing a shrubbery. He crouched behind a rhododendron. In front of him a spider on a web suspended between dead blooms was devouring a fly; through the web he saw a man wearing a brown smock pushing a handcart. A gardener – reassuring; gardening and bloodshed were contradictions. Then it occurred to him that the garden was so overgrown that gardeners were superfluous; he thought of gardeners exterminating insects and wondered if this one had turned his hand to humans.

He was through the shrubbery and halfway across a stretch of knee-high grass strung with brambles when a shot rang out, freezing him. The explosion stayed with him for a moment like a splash of ink; then it was erased and he was away again.

Was that what he had been brought to hear? he wondered, kneeling behind a lichen-covered wall surrounding a stagnant pool. A single shot and then, perhaps, a glimpse of a body, or what looked like a body, being removed under a blanket? He almost smiled.

Through a crack in the wall he could see the pool; a stone cherub with a ruined face smiled crookedly at him; a fish with a white, diseased body surfaced briefly before returning to the moss-green depths with a flick of its tail. Viktor crawled to the end of the wall; keeping low, he ran to a thicket of holly bushes. Above him loomed the walls of the dacha, the coffin.

On one side lay the half-finished theatre where Catherine the Great had once planned to watch the cream of Russian thespians. It looked a dull place from the outside, dead-eyed and brooding, but then theatres often did. Beside it stood the potting shed, ferns growing from its windows.

Inside the shed Viktor waited. Outside, the shadows were lengthening. The swallows and bats had vanished but somewhere in the tangled undergrowth a bird sang.

Gogol said: ‘Follow me,’ his voice reaching Viktor through the ferns. Viktor joined him outside.

‘Right,’ Gogol whispered. ‘Through that gap,’ pointing at a gap in the wall of the theatre intended for a door. Gogol got there first; inside the doorway he paused, grinding his fist into the base of his spine. ‘Now you’ve got to be careful,’ he said. ‘Just round the corner you’ll see a passage, just like the corridors behind the auditorium at the Bolshoi. Take the first door on the right. You’ll find yourself in a box. If you stand in the shadows at the back you can’t be seen from below. But you’ll have one of the best seats for the show.’ He grinned fiercely. ‘Wait there afterwards for me,’ and was gone.

If there had once been a stage it was no longer there; nor were there any seats; just a rubble-strewn arena cleared at one end in front of a wall that would have been the back of the stage. Half a dozen civilians strolled restlessly about, smoking; leaning against another wall opposite Viktor’s box stood a collection of old M 1891 rifles and two green boxes of ammunition.

So it was going to happen. His belly lurched and with it everything he believed in. No, it wasn’t going to happen; this was bizarre play-acting, a charade. Why the ammunition, Viktor? And what are those stains, so black and regular on the floor?

He returned to his schoolroom where, as a treat, they had screened flickering newsreels of the Revolution. There was Lenin, fierce and yet avuncular, accepting the adulation of his triumphant rebels. He opened a history book and the first page was a red flag that reminded him of a field of poppies rippled by a breeze. There was the new order, there was justice.

The men below selected rifles. More civilians, all in shirtsleeves, entered the arena and picked up the rest of the guns. Crisply, they loaded them. Outside, he heard a vehicle, a lorry by the sound of it, draw up.

Viktor bit deep into the flesh inside his lower lip and tasted blood.

From behind the wall he heard shouts. Hands clenched, body taut, he waited the entrance from the wings. Shouldn’t there have been an orchestra? A conductor in white tie and tails?

In came the players. Middle-aged mostly. All men. All wearing military trousers, all in shirt-sleeves. They walked erect but there was a strange docility about them. They were obviously officers. Did those trained to command accept commands just as readily?

Desperately Viktor wanted to leave his vantage point. To return to the sanctuary of his adolescence, to the toy soldiers of his nursery.

The officers were blindfolded and lined up against the wall, hands behind their heads, elbows touching. Thirty of them, Stalin’s daily ration. I don’t believe it. His skull filled with ice, his legs bent and he had to steady himself with one hand against the wall of the box.

The firing squad lined up opposite the blindfolded men raised their rifles. Some of the condemned crossed themselves.

Now surely they would be granted their last wishes. That always happened. In books, in films …

They slumped. Blood appeared at their breasts. And it seemed to Viktor that he heard the explosions from the rifles after the impact of the bullets.

The abruptness of the transition from life to death astonished him; he could barely comprehend it. A second volley of shots made the bodies jump as they slid to the ground.

Two of the executioners propped their rifles against the wall, drew pistols and walked along the line of bodies shooting out any vestiges of life.

Then the gardener made his entrance pushing his handcart. But Viktor, unconscious on the floor of the box, didn’t see them load the bodies into it.

*

He waited the following evening at the Café Tchaikovsky for three hours. From seven in the evening, the hour at which they usually met, until ten.

But she didn’t come and some inexplicable perversity – nothing had rational explanations any more – stopped him from calling at her lodgings. Perhaps the whole episode had been an act of cruelty on her part for which she had found some anarchic justification; perhaps, like Gogol, she had merely wanted to knock him off his smug perch. Perhaps even now she was naked in the arms of Nikolai Vasilyev. Or Gogol.

She hadn’t attended her class that day but she had sent a note explaining that she had to visit a sick relative at Kuntsevo. Well, she had a grandmother in Kuntsevo (Stalin also had a house there), but that was only seven miles away so she could have been back by seven, eight at the latest, especially when she knew what he had been through.

Later, he decided that he had done so little about finding her because he was still in a state of shock. He believed nothing any more, least of all the earnest babble of the students in the Tchaikovsky.

When she didn’t appear in class the following day he telephoned Nikolai Vasilyev and then, when he didn’t get any reply, went round to Anna’s lodgings in the lunchtime break. Her landlady, an old crone with features as sharp as a claw, told him that Anna had packed her belongings two nights before – the night of the massacre – paid a week’s rent and disappeared.

Viktor didn’t believe her. He threatened her, offered money, but fear and the bribe she had received (the new Viktor Golovin knew she had been bribed) had efficiently silenced her.

He called at Nikolai Vasilyev’s house in the north of the city. But he, too, had disappeared; the woman who answered the door was in her thirties, blonde, pretty and distraught, possibly Vasilyev’s mistress. She didn’t know what had happened; he had been missing for two days. But she had an address for Gogol.

Gogol lived in an apartment near the Alexander Brest Railway Station. Viktor rang the bell but its chime had a lost quality to it. Neighbours told him that they had seen Gogol leave with four men in civilian clothes. Leave? Well, escorted would be a better description, said one old man. ‘But don’t say I said so,’ he added, pocketing Viktor’s rouble.

When Viktor continued to pursue his inquiries his father took him aside and said: ‘Best leave it alone, Viktor. What’s done is done. You can’t bring them back …’

Them? Again Viktor wondered about his father’s source of information.

But what astonished him most as, with suicidal intent, he asked his questions, was the lack of reprisals. What he was suggesting to those he cross-examined was tantamount to treason. And yet he remained untouched. Privileged.

When he had finally ascertained beyond all reasonable doubt that Anna, Vasilyev and Gogol had been purged, Viktor took the only step left to him.

He, too, disappeared.

CHAPTER TWO

It is difficult enough to determine when a conspiracy is born. Is it at a moment of decision, of inspiration, or is it when two schemers meet on the same train of thought?

It is well-nigh impossible to decide when a conspiracy is conceived. A chance remark, an afterthought, a memory … any such stimulus can do the trick without the potential conspirator realising what has happened.

So it would be foolhardy to suggest that, when he sat up in bed to eat his breakfast on September 28, 1938, the man in the crumpled blue pyjamas had conceived the plan that was to reach out for the soul of Viktor Golovin.

What was certain was that he was already contemplating an awesome concept. What was equally certain was that he was enjoying a hearty meal – partridge, bacon, hot-buttered toast and marmalade.

He ate rapidly but fastidiously – his hands were remarkably small for such a bulky body – and as he put away the food he read the newspapers, his features a mixture of petulance and pugnacity, unrelieved by the boyish smile that so often disarmed his critics.

The only item that gave him any pleasure was the news, prominently displayed, that the Royal Navy had been mobilised. He considered it to be a halting step in the right direction; unfortunately it was belied by most of the other items.

The previous evening the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast to the nation: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country’ – bracketing Czechoslovakia with the Arctic! – ‘between people of whom we know nothing …’

Dear God, the glib insularity of the man!

‘… I would not hesitate to pay even a third visit to Germany if I thought it would do any good … I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul.’

After making the broadcast, Chamberlain had received a letter from Hitler and there was no doubt that it was an invitation to appeasement. Would they never learn, these men of lofty resolve, that idealism could only survive on strong shoulders?

With a sigh Winston Churchill pushed aside his tray, climbed out of bed, put on a dressing gown and sauntered on to the lawns of Chartwell, his country manor, near the village of Westerham in Kent, to which he had escaped from his flat at Morpeth Mansions in London for a brief respite from the crisis.

War clouds were gathering over London, Berlin, Paris and Prague; but they weren’t in evidence in rural Kent. Bonfire smoke wreathed the seventy-nine acres of grounds; the trees were autumn red and gold; chrysanthemums still insisted it was summer despite the first frost on the grass.

He lit a cigar. The sole hint of war – and that only apparent to himself – was the foundations of the cottage he was building in which Clemmie and his four grown-up children could find tranquillity when it came.

As come it undoubtedly would. But not as most people seemed to think when the present negotiations over Czechoslovakia broke down. No, Chamberlain would return to Germany, a grovelling pact would be struck with Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier, and the Czechs would be sacrificed on the altar of compromise. It was ironic that those who had failed to heed his warnings about the Nazi threat now expected war immediately whereas he still gave twelve months or so.

But if Chamberlain does return with peace in his bag then watch out, Winston, because there’ll be no place in Britain for a warmonger.

He made his way to the foundations of the cottage and with a mason’s trowel scraped a few crusts of cement from the first row of bricks. Warmonger! His cross, unjustly borne, ever since … He supposed it went back to those dashing days in Cuba, India, the Sudan and South Africa when, as warrior or reporter, he had always breathed gunsmoke.

Then it hadn’t mattered too much; in fact his escape from captivity during the Boer War had helped him to gain his first seat in the Commons. In 1900. In two months he would be sixty-four. But age didn’t bother him because he didn’t heed it.

Stretching for a crumb of dried cement just out of his reach, he felt a warning nudge of pain in the shoulder he had dislocated when embarking from a troopship in Bombay in those young, fire-eating days. He dropped the trowel, threw away six inches of cigar and started back towards the red-bricked old mansion that he had bought in 1922 when the roofs leaked and weeds had occupied the grounds.

Like one of those weeds the warmonger epithet had taken root during the Great War when, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had extended hostilities to Turkey. But despite the catastrophic Gallipoli Campaign, he still believed that his instincts had been correct; the back-door assault on the enemy should have shortened the war by a couple of years. What he had lacked had been support and loyalty.

And what no one realised, then or now, was that he only revelled in battle, as indeed he did, when his sights were set on peace. Did a true warmonger lay bricks? Or paint landscapes? Or build his own swimming pool?

When the second world war finally broke out, when he was recalled to the helm as he had no doubt he would be, then he would pursue peace more vigorously than ever. But this time his quarry wouldn’t be a butterfly that flitted capriciously between conflicts: it would be a lasting peace.

And to achieve that he would have to indulge in manoeuvres that would dwarf Gallipoli by comparison. He had no idea what those manoeuvres would entail – there had as yet been neither birth nor conception of any concrete plan. But he did know that if he divulged even a glimmering of his wondrous, horrendous vision then it would be stillborn. And he would be finished.

The public must never know.

At least not in his lifetime.

*

For several years Chartwell had been a Foreign Office in exile.

There, Churchill had conferred with his closest henchmen, Bob Boothby and two red-haired stalwarts, his son-in-law Duncan Sandys and Brendan Bracken.

There, energetically but impotently, he had drawn up the policies he would have pursued had Stanley Baldwin or his successor, Neville Chamberlain, given him office in the Government.

There, he had furiously denounced Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, Austria and now the Sudetenland territory of Czechoslovakia.

There, he had sounded the trumpets for King Edward VIII when he was forced to abdicate the throne because he was determined to wed the American-born divorcée Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Not only was he a warmonger, he was a defender of lost causes.

And it was to Chartwell that he repaired with Bracken when the Munich crisis was over. Chamberlain, fresh from his betrayal of Czechoslovakia, had waved his meaningless agreement with Hitler at the crowds outside Downing Street and told them: ‘I believe it is peace for our time.’

The First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, had resigned in protest. Churchill had passionately mourned Munich in the Commons: ‘All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness … Do not suppose this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.’

As he had feared, his sentiments had been anathema in the euphoria that followed Chamberlain’s homecoming.

‘I wouldn’t mind so much,’ he told Bracken as he restlessly paced one of Chartwell’s reception rooms, ‘if Neville believed any of this eyewash himself. But he doesn’t. Even when he was waving at the crowds on his way back from Heston he told Halifax, “All this will be over in three months.”’

‘He believed it once,’ Bracken remarked. ‘Even you must give Chamberlain credit for that.’

‘This is the first time I have disputed his sincerity,’ Churchill said. ‘In the past I’ve always respected his idealism – however unwisely it was dispatched. He was the conscience of a nation still recovering from the haemorrhage of the war. Twenty years, that’s all it’s been, Brendan, twenty wasted years.’

Despite Churchill’s sombre mood Bracken grinned, running his hand through his crinkly, ginger hair, because it was typical of his mentor that he couldn’t resist salting a compliment. Wasted years. Perhaps so. But a little misplaced in the context.

Churchill poured himself a whisky and soda and continued to patrol the book-lined room littered with newspapers. ‘And I’ve never doubted his strength. He’s a tough old bird is Neville, and a wily one too, despite outward appearances.’ Bracken grinned again. ‘The toughness, stringiness if you like’ – Churchill permitted himself a smile – ‘is still there but the sincerity … I’m afraid it’s been dissipated, Brendan.’

‘I assume he’s only buying time.’

‘Then why doesn’t he come clean?’

‘In public? Come now, Winston, that would be an abuse of honesty. If he admitted he had dallied with the Führer just to give Britain the chance to re-arm, Hitler would march into the rest of Czechoslovakia tomorrow. But he has expressed his doubts to his confidants; and I don’t have to remind you, Winston, that you aren’t one of them.’

Churchill grunted and lit a cigar from a fresh consignment from John Rushbrook in New York.

Bracken, Irish-born newspaper publisher and M.P., regarded Churchill fondly from the depths of a sighing leather armchair. He had known him for years, from the time Churchill had moved to the Admiralty after his tempestuous reign at the Home Office. Like Churchill, Bracken enjoyed talking and liked to educate people. His favourite topic was Churchill, youthful adoration was behind him, mature understanding in its place.

He understood the melanchola, veiled from the public, that frequently afflicted Churchill, a legacy handed down from the Dukes of Marlborough but tempered, thanked God, by his mother’s American blood; he understood the flamboyance summoned to smother doubt, the bravado employed to mask fear. ‘You can’t be a hero without being a coward,’ Churchill had once told him.

He believed he knew Churchill better than anyone except Clementine. Not that he wasn’t bombastic, arrogant and impetuous; far from it; but what people didn’t comprehend was his sensitivity – Churchill made damn sure of that.

But what you could never quite cope with was his unpredictability. It erupted now as Churchill, thumbs in the waistcoat of his crumpled grey pinstripe, stared at a portrait of his grandfather, the 7th Duke.

‘What about Joe?’ he said.

‘Joe? Joe who?’ Bracken asked, bewildered.

‘Joe Stalin. I wonder how he views this grovelling policy of ours – if he’s got time to think in between his purges.’

‘I shouldn’t think he’s very pleased. He would like to see the capitalist powers fight each other to a standstill.’

Silence.

Somewhere a clock chimed. Bracken could hear the crackle of Churchill’s cigar as he rolled it between his fingers.

The silence continued. Nervously, Bracken cleared his throat.

Finally Churchill said: ‘That’s a very interesting remark, Brendan.’

But hardly an original one, Bracken thought.

‘Let’s put it to one side for a moment,’ Churchill said. ‘But we may return to it,’ as though they were in for a long session which, Bracken knew to his cost, could last until four am. ‘Don’t think for one second that Stalin, that wily old Georgian, is hoodwinked by Neville’s scrap of paper. He knows that Corporal Hitler is going to wage war and he’s got to decide whom to support. To put it more bluntly, who’s going to win, Germany or us. Who do you think he’ll put his money on, Brendan?’

Bracken thought about it. ‘Well,’ he said, giving his spectacles a polish, ‘he’s been chasing an anti-Hitler coalition for three years.’

‘As indeed he might,’ Churchill said, returning to his perusal of the 7th Duke. ‘In 1936 Hitler was bellowing that the Ukraine and even Siberia should be part of the lebensraum, Germany’s living space. But pray continue, Brendan.’

‘But then again he thinks that we’ve deliberately allowed Germany to re-arm so that she can fight Russia. He must interpret Munich as an inducement to the Nazis to further that aim. On one side he’s got the aggressor, on the other the betrayer. An unenviable choice, Winston.’

Churchill wheeled round, waving his cigar so vigorously that Bracken feared his suspect shoulder might pop out. ‘I’ll tell you what he’ll do first: he’ll sit on the barbed-wire fence and wait to see who looks like winning the war in Spain. It is, after all, a dress rehearsal for the next world war.’

‘Suppose the Fascists win – and that seems likely. It would be very strange to see a Bolshevik going over to the other side.’

Churchill gave a fleeting smile which reassured Bracken who had feared that he was on the brink of a deep depression. ‘I did it once,’ he said.

‘But this is a bit different. Communists siding with Fascists. It’s ridculous.’

‘History is littered with strange bedfellows.’

‘Not strange, grotesque. If Franco wins he’ll be expected to throw in his lot with Hitler. You seem to be suggesting that Stalin of all people will join him. A preposterous notion, if you don’t mind me saying so, Winston.’

‘I don’t mind in the slightest, my dear Brendan, because you are giving rein to assumption. I merely said that Stalin would observe which way the winds of war blow in Spain. If Franco wins – and I have little doubt that he will – then Hitler will be that much stronger. Another prospective Fascist ally instead of a Bolshevik foe in western Europe. Another Italy – although if you’ve got allies like Mussolini you don’t need enemies.’

Bracken said: ‘I’ve reined in my assumption and I still don’t understand. You don’t appear to have contradicted the proposition that Stalin would side with Hitler and Franco.’

‘Ah, then you haven’t reined hard enough. There will be no question of such an unholy triumvirate because Franco, another wily bird, won’t actively side with Hitler, he’ll sit on the barbed-wire fence, too. Do you know what I would do if I were Chamberlain?’

Bracken shook his head. It was, he decided, a gala night for unpredictability.

‘I’d promise Franco that I’d give him Gibraltar if he stayed neutral. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be in a position to give that promise …’ Churchill sat down opposite Bracken and took a swig of his whisky and soda. ‘But I digress. What I’m saying is that Stalin will wait till the Fascists have thrashed the Reds in Spain, then he’ll throw in his lot with Hitler. You see, Brendan, it’s really the only option open to old Joe.’ Stalin, Bracken reflected, was five years younger than Churchill. ‘He knows that one day Hitler will turn on him and he’s got to delay that inevitable moment until Mother Russia has girded her loins to meet such an attack.’

‘And that will take a few years,’ Bracken remarked. ‘According to estimates here Stalin has purged upwards of 30,000 Red Army officers. Not only that but he’s got rid of nearly all of the Supreme Military Council. Do you know the total estimate of Stalin’s victims, killed or imprisoned?’

‘No,’ Churchill said irritably, ‘but you will tell me.’

‘Something like six million. And you know, of course, what he’s reputed to have said when one of his sons tried unsuccessfully to shoot himself …’ Bracken was beginning to enjoy himself.

‘An educated guess would be words to the effect that he couldn’t shoot straight.’

‘An inspired guess! And did you know—’

‘For God’s sake, Brendan,’ Churchill said, ‘let’s get on with the business at hand.’

They were interrupted by Clementine who came into the room to bid them goodnight, somehow managing to be both dignified and homely in a pink robe. Sometimes she reminded Bracken of a Society hostess, sometimes of Gracie Fields. But contradictions had been thrust upon her by marriage: she should by now have withdrawn into gracious patronage and yet here she was by the side of a man who in his sixties was talking about leading his country in a second world war. Small wonder that there were occasionally wry edges to her smile.

‘Goodnight, Brendan,’ she said, ‘please don’t get up,’ as Bracken sprang to his feet, and to her husband: ‘It’s nearly midnight dear, will you be much later?’ The question, Bracken suspected, was purely academic.

‘Not much longer,’ Churchill said, kissing her lightly. ‘You run along now.’ And when she had gone: ‘What a lucky devil I was, eh, Brendan? I was never much good at the niceties of courtship, you know, but Clemmie understood.’

As if she had any choice, Brendan thought.

Churchill regarded the smoking tip of his cigar. ‘She’s never liked these things, you know,’ and ground out the long stub as a gesture of penitence. ‘And now where were we?’

‘Stalin. You prophesied he would go in with Hitler.’

‘No doubt about it.’ Churchill gave himself another whisky and siphoned soda water into it. ‘Now let’s get that phrase of yours back off the shelf.’

‘What phrase was that?’

‘He, Stalin that is, would like to see the capitalist powers fight each other to a standstill. It made my hair curl, Brendan, what little there is left of it. Of course you’re absolutely right, that’s just what old Joe would like to happen.’

Patiently, Bracken waited for enlightenment.

Holding his glass of whisky in one hand, pausing to tap some of the books in the cases with one small, plump finger as though they contained the answers to the questions that had defied the sages, Churchill began to pace the room again. There was his own novel, Savrola, written in his youth; there was The Aftermath in which he had poured out his post-war hatred of the Bolsheviks. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, finger lingering on The Aftermath, but my fear – yes, fear, Brendan – of the Reds has always been greater than my fear of the Nazis. We shouldn’t have squeezed the Nazis so hard, Brendan, we should have left them a little pith.’

Still Bracken waited.

‘Supposing,’ Churchill said, turning to study Bracken’s reactions, ‘supposing we reversed the process to which you have just referred. Supposing we took steps to make sure that Russia and Germany fought each other to a standstill?’

Tentatively, Bracken said: ‘A formidable proposition, Winston,’ aware that he was being used as a sounding board.

Churchill got up steam. ‘I wonder if it could be done … why not … it has always been possible to manipulate great men … just kick them in their Achilles heel – conceit …’

‘But what about this pact you’re so sure they’re going to sign?’

‘It won’t fool either of them. Hitler intends to march through the steppes, Stalin knows it. It’s just a matter of buying time. Like Munich,’ he added, scowling.

The distant clock chimed again. A single note. Half an hour had passed since Clementine had taken herself to bed. It was 12.30 a.m.

Like Munich … That was the only truth, Bracken realised. He had been frog-marched into a debate about a war that hadn’t been declared, a Soviet-German Alliance that didn’t exist.

But Churchill had become an exultant prophet, his glass of whisky his crystal ball. ‘What we must do,’ he said, ‘is make the sands of time run with great alacrity.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, Winston, you’re talking in riddles.’

Churchill’s words lost their ring. ‘No more you should, Brendan, no more you should. I’m not even sure that I do at this moment. But it will come, it will come.’

He sat down abruptly.

Then, voice sombre, he wound up the debate: ‘But I tell you this. Unless some stark and terrible measures are devised, this island of ours is doomed to be pillaged by the barbaric hordes of either the Nazis or the Bolsheviks.’

Watched by a stunned Bracken, he drained his crystal ball. ‘We have but one hope of survival and that is to make sure that these two arch-enemies of freedom fight each other to the death.’

Without warning he strode to the door. Turning, he said: ‘Come on, Brendan, there’s a good chap, you’re keeping me from my bed.’

PART TWO

CHAPTER THREE

By the second week of June 1940 much of Europe lay in ruins, the people dazed and beaten by Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium had fallen and France was poised to throw in the Tricolour.

But in Lisbon you could have been forgiven for forgetting that there was a war on at all.

The sun shone; the boulevard cafés in the cobbled squares and wide avenues were crowded with customers, British and German among them, the broad, flat waters of the Tagus estuary were scattered with ships of many nations; the little yellow tramcars butting along their shining rails and climbing the steep hills were stuffed with cheerful, sweating passengers.

In the grand arenas of the Baixa, business in the banks was brisk, hotels were full, shops were relatively well-stocked. In the precipitous maze of the Alfama, women garlanded their leaning cottages with laundry, dogs slept in the alleyways and the hot air was greased with the smell of grilling sardines.

It was only on closer inspection that you realised that the Portuguese capital had not entirely escaped the war. There was a restlessness abroad in those pavement cafés; conversations were muted, money changed hands surreptitiously. And in the grand hotels, the Avenida Palace and the Aviz, the atmosphere was majestically clandestine.

The perpetrators of this atmosphere were mostly refugees but quite a few were spies. The refugees had flocked to neutral Portugal from the countries over-run by the Nazis, following in the footsteps of the Jews who had fled from Germany itself. Together they formed a cosmopolitan society that shivered with intrigue and suspicion.

At first they all had but one aim – to get out of Europe through Lisbon, the gateway to freedom. The rich usually managed it, liberally tipping the custodians of the city’s portals. Their poorer brethren, those more used to using the tradesmen’s entrance, didn’t escape so easily.

And it was they who were the most furtive. Selling jewellery, worthless bonds, secrets and their bodies if they were well nourished enough. Lying, cheating, cajoling, bribing. Anything to get a berth on a ship or, more ambitiously, on a New York-bound Clipper seaplane or an aircraft flying by night from Sintra airport. For preference a passage to the United States, traditional haven of desperate emigrants; second choices Britain, because, being at war, she was less hospitable to aliens, and South America, which was such a long way off and the sympathies of some of those far-off countries were suspect.

They wore incongruous clothes, these homeless fugitives. Long coats and cloaks, slouch-hats and absurd peaked caps, moth-eaten stoles and peasant blouses. Collectively they looked like extras from a dozen period movies. And the longer they stayed the more threadbare became their costumes, the more humble their homes.

The really tough persevered, in particular the Jews who were used to such privations. Others, dogged by ill-luck, double-crossed by swindlers, took to the hills or one of the shanty settlements on the outskirts of Lisbon where they could share their poverty without humiliation.

Their empty seats in the cafés were immediately filled, their rooms soon occupied by newcomers feverish with optimism. Some were luckier than others, in particular the British – many of them in transit, via Spain, from the South of France – who were accommodated outside the city. After all, Portugal was Britain’s oldest ally even if she had to placate the Germans – you didn’t upset Hitler, not if you were as small and unprepared as Portugal, you didn’t.

On June 13, the eve of the German occupation of Paris and a fine, dreamy day in Lisbon, the plight of the refugees seemed more stark than usual.

Or so it seemed to the tall young man in grey flannel trousers and white shirt striding loose-limbed along the Avenida da Liberdade, the Champs-Elysées of Lisbon, on his way to meet a girl in the Alfama.

It was feira, the Festival of St Anthony of Padua, Lisbon’s own saint, and the groups of dark-clad aliens seemed so remote from it; particularly the children with their hollowed eyes, pale skin and sharp bones. They should have been part of it – the processions, the feasts, the fireworks – because feira is a time for children (and lovers and drunks); instead they sat quietly in their ghetto groups in their peaked caps and too-long shorts, having learned already that insignificance is survival.

But today Josef Hoffman was determined not to be affected by the refugees. He had earned a day off from their suffering.

He had been in Lisbon for a year now, working with the Red Cross. At first his work had been coldly selective, weeding out the frauds – German agents mostly – and the rich from the deserving. With his Czech passport and his way with languages – he was already fluent in Portuguese – he was a natural agent provocateur.

But he had soon sickened of this. He wanted no more contact with spies or men who would offer him 5,000 escudos to help them jump the queue in the American Export Line offices. He wanted to help the helpless, that was why he had joined the Red Cross.

And, although he was only twenty-two, he had grown old with them.

As he made his way across the Praça Rossio, the city’s main square, he could hear firecrackers exploding like gunfire. He stopped and bought a red carnation, its stem wrapped in silver paper, from the flower-seller beside the fountains, to give to the girl whose name was Candida. She was slumbrous and warm-limbed and she would cut the stem off the carnation and wear the flower in her hair that shone blue-black in the sunlight. Hoffman wasn’t in love with her which he thought was a pity.

He left the square and turned up the Rua da Madalena, intending to climb towards the ramparts of the Castelo de São Jorge, St George’s Castle, which stands astride one of Lisbon’s seven hills. Or was it eleven, or thirteen even? The travel guides begged to differ; Hoffman thought it was typically Portuguese, unaware, because he was young, that practically nothing is typical.

He was also unaware that he was being followed by a man carrying a gun, a Russian-made automatic pistol, in the pocket of his raincoat. The man had puffy features and a fleshy nose and he walked as though the pointed brown and white shoes he was wearing hurt his feet; in normal times the heavy gaberdine raincoat and wide-brimmed hat would, together with the shoes, have been conspicuous on a hot evening, but not these days when it was common enough to see a Bohemian or a Slovakian in outlandish clothes hurrying to some secret rendezvous.

Hoffman turned left and began to climb, the walls of the castle ahead of him. He was early for his appointment and intended to spend ten minutes or so wandering around the battlements of the castle with their sensational views of the city and the Tagus.

The man with the pointed shoes followed.

Absorbed with the thought of the pleasures to come that evening, Hoffman almost collided with a woman carrying a basket of fruit on her head; she cursed him but kept her balance with dignity. A procession of children in national dress scattered as a firecracker thrown by an urchin fell hissing in their midst; when it exploded everyone screamed delightedly.

The man in the pointed shoes felt the gun in his pocket, crooked his forefinger round the trigger. The gun felt hot and heavy, like himself. Why couldn’t they have given him an older quarry instead of a mountain goat? Hoffman didn’t have the build of a natural athlete, but he was slim and supple.

Hoffman strode along a short street lined with linden trees and entered the castle grounds. The castle was Phoenician and Moorish and Christian; apart from the walls there wasn’t much of it left.

In a dusty clearing just past the gates teenage girls were performing an impromptu folkdance. They wore long skirts striped in green and gold and red, white blouses and green and red headscarves. A woman spectator bursting with knowledge told Hoffman that they were from the north, affronted that feira in Lisbon was such a discreet affair.

Not in the Alfama, he thought: nothing was ever discreet down there. He walked over to the stone parapet and gazed down at the labyrinth below, rooftops like a discarded pack of mildewed playing-cards. So closely were the hillside terraces packed, so sturdily were they planted, that they had resisted the earthquake which devastated the rest of Lisbon on All Saints’ Day, 1755, and the tidal wave which had followed it. Down there every day was feira.

The man with the pointed shoes moved nearer, paused. He hadn’t expected Hoffman to come to this public place. Indecisively, he turned and looked at the dancers tripping about self-consciously in front of a statue. He put his free hand into the other pocket of his raincoat and fingered the purchase he had made that morning, a dozen firecrackers.

Hoffman gazed across the city and the Tagus, called the Straw Sea, because it was often gold at sunset. It was gold now. So broad was the estuary that visitors often thought that the open sea lay to the left of the city whereas, of course, the Atlantic lay to the right through a narrower channel.

Hoffman walked on towards the remains of the fortifications. Apart from the girls dancing it was aloof from the festival up here. You could feel space. A few Americans carrying cameras strolled the ramparts. Hoffman thought that there would be Americans at the Day of Judgement taking pictures.

He knew one of them, a rangy young man from the American Consulate, who did his best for the endless queue seeking visas to the United States. It was a hopeless task but at least he was polite and he treated all the old ladies as he would treat his mother.

He pointed at the ships becalmed in the golden waters and said: ‘Kind of hard to believe that Europe’s in flames, isn’t it?’

Hoffman asked: ‘Has Paris fallen?’ The American, whose name was Kenyon, knew about such things.

‘Not quite, but it’s there for the taking. Tomorrow, I guess. Then France will quit. The only neutral countries in Europe will be Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Turkey, Ireland and, of course, Portugal. And Britain will stand alone. But not for long unless some sort of miracle occurs.’

‘Churchill talks in miracles,’ Hoffman said. ‘Dunkirk was a miracle.’

‘A miracle? Perhaps. It was a retreat just the same, a defeat. That’s the kind of miracle they can do without.’

‘I suppose,’ Hoffman said, choosing his words, ‘the sort of miracle they need is American intervention.’

‘Fat chance,’ Kenyon said. ‘Last year Roosevelt promised that there would be no “black-out of peace” in the States. If he does decide to stand for a third term he can hardly go back on his word.’

‘But if and when he does become President again?’

Kenyon shrugged. ‘Perhaps, who knows? But it may be too late. No, Churchill will have to pull that miracle first, and not just with words. If he doesn’t, then one day the whole world will be full of refugees.’

A firework fizzed and exploded. A small boy watched artfully from behind a pillar. Behind him Hoffman caught sight of a man wearing a raincoat and a broad-brimmed hat. He had a lost air about him; a refugee probably. He turned to look at the decorative birds pecking the dust and Hoffman forgot all about him.

The birds were either black or white, the colours of Lisbon’s mosaic pavements. There was even a white peacock.

Hoffman glanced at his watch. In five minutes’ time he was due to meet Candida Pereira. He bade farewell to the American and retraced his footsteps. They would have some bacalhau, cod, served with baked potatoes, onions and olives and one of the honey-sweet desserts washed down with a bottle of vinho verde, and then … well, they might dance in the streets, carouse … and then …

Hoffman walked quicker.

So did the man in the pointed shoes, wincing with each footstep. But at least they seemed to be heading for the teeming streets of the Alfama which was where he wanted Hoffman.

Hoffman plunged into the maze like a rugby player into a loose scrum. Above him the rooftops reached for each other; from the walls hung pots of pink and red geraniums and bird-cages from which only the song of the captives escaped. From the dark mouths of bars came shouting and laughter and music, sometimes Tommy Dorsey or Bing Crosby on scratched phonograph records, sometimes the fado, the lament of Portugal.

He stopped at the foot of a flight of steps named Beco do Carneiro. Old hands still got lost in the Alfama. He turned and, over the heads of the crowds, noticed a broad-brimmed hat glide into a doorway. But it didn’t really register; he was imagining the invitation in the slumbrous eyes of Candida Pereira and was by now alarmed that he might be late. However slumbrous their eyes, the Candida Pereiras of this world didn’t wait around.

He hurried on, emerging eventually in the Largo de Santo Estevão. He had come a long way round but it wasn’t far now.

Near the café where they had arranged to meet, the scene was particularly boisterous. A group of men who looked like American gangsters’ barbers were singing lustily, children were wrestling and from the windows above women were shouting across the street.

The man in the pointed shoes took the firecrackers from his pocket. He gave three to children and told them to light them and throw them.

He moved up closer to Hoffman and, reluctantly, let go of the butt of the automatic. He lit three more firecrackers – Whizz Bangs they were called – and threw them just ahead of Hoffman. As they landed the children’s firecrackers exploded, cracks as loud as pistol shots in the cramped space.

He returned his hand to his pistol pocket and through the gaberdine aimed the barrel at Hoffman’s back. He waited for his own Whizz Bangs to detonate, finger caressing the trigger.

The three explosions were almost simultaneous. In fact everything happened at once. The shoulder charge that knocked Hoffman sprawling, the explosion behind him, the screaming.

When he got to his feet Hoffman was surprised to see the man he had noticed wearing the broad-brimmed hat in the grounds of the castle lying on his back, brown and white shoes pointing towards the sky.

*

‘What I don’t understand,’ Hoffman said, ‘is how you just happened to be there at the right time.’

The sun-tanned man in the navy-blue lightweight suit said: ‘We didn’t just happen to be there. We had been keeping tabs on the man who tried to shoot you.’

‘Shoot me? Why should he want to shoot me? Why should anyone want to shoot me?’

The man who had told him his name was Cross – ‘Double-cross’, with the mechanical laugh of one who had made the joke many times before – said: ‘We rather hoped you would be able to tell us that, Mr. Hoffman.’

Us? There was only Cross present; although in the Alfama earlier there had been two of them.

As he had picked himself up after the gunshot, one of the men – Cross, he thought – had thrust him through the throng and said: ‘Let’s get out of here before all hell breaks loose,’ and Hoffman had thought: ‘They must know about me.’

If not, he reasoned as they hustled him down steps and alleys to a waiting car, they wouldn’t have been so sure that he would be willing to be bundled away from trouble.

Beside the car, a black Wolseley, he had made a token resistance: ‘Before I get into that thing I want to know just who the hell you are.’

‘We’re from the British Embassy. We want to help you.’

And he had believed them. In the society in which he moved, British or American still had a reassuring ring to them.

‘Is the man who tried to shoot me dead?’

‘We think so.’

The car, with the second man, obviously junior to Cross, at the wheel, had taken them along the waterfront to an old, comfortable-looking block of flats in the Belém district, close to the Jeronimos Monastery.

The apartment itself, presumably Cross’s, was splendid. The living room was spacious and filled with light; the curtains were gold brocade, the chairs and sofas Regency-striped. Through the windows, before Cross drew the curtains, Hoffman could see the first lights of evening pulled across the Tagus.

Cross, who had identified himself as a second secretary at the British Embassy, was interrogating him in the nicest possible way. He held up a cut-glass decanter and said ‘Scotch?’ as if there could be any other drink.

Hoffman shook his head; Cross made him feel immature, and yet Cross couldn’t have been all that much older. Twenty-five perhaps, but contained and assured – some might have said condescending – in the way of some Englishmen; those, Hoffman divined, who were not quite of the noble birth to which they aspired, but formidable just the same. And well-heeled because few diplomatic services, least of all the British, would provide a twenty-five old employee with a flat as luxurious as this.

‘Well, I’m going to have one. Are you sure you won’t have a wee dram?’

‘No, thank you,’ sitting back to study Cross as he poured himself a drink.

Hoffman had met quite a few Englishmen since he came to Lisbon but somehow this one didn’t quite fit. He was elegant enough, suit not too keenly pressed, striped tie deliberately askew; his manner was languid, his smooth hair was a warm shade of brown and his features were handsome in a military sort of way. Odd, then, that he wasn’t in the Army. Hoffman could sense contradictions about him and they bothered him.

The sun-tan, for instance; diplomats were never bronzed. And his hands were too big, strangler’s hands, making an absurdity of the white silk handkerchief tucked in the sleeve of his jacket. Hoffman couldn’t imagine Cross playing the English game of cricket; blood sports would be more his line. His voice was modulated but controlled; when Cross appeared to be wasting words he was wasting them for a purpose. No, Hoffman thought, your appearance is camouflage; beneath those casual graces lurks a hunter.

Glass in hand, Cross walked to a coffee table standing in front of a coldly-empty marble fireplace and picked up a pistol. ‘Taft, the man who drove us here, took it out of the pocket of your assassin’s raincoat pocket. Would-be assassin,’ he corrected himself. He held the automatic by the barrel. ‘Crude but effective, as they say.’ He pointed at the letters CCCP on the walnut barrel. ‘No doubt where it came from.’ He sat on the sofa opposite Hoffman, still holding the gun.

‘Was he Russian?’ Hoffman asked.

Cross laid the gun on the striped cushion beside him and drank some whisky. ‘I think perhaps I should ask the questions,’ he said. ‘A rescuer’s privilege.’ He gave a cocktail party smile. ‘How long have you been in Lisbon, Mr. Hoffman?’

‘About a year.’

‘Czech passport, I believe. And you work for the Red Cross.’

Statements not questions.

Cross said: ‘When did you leave Czechoslovakia, Mr. Hoffman?’

‘In 1938, when the Germans marched into the Sudetenland.’

‘You were from the Sudetenland?’

Hoffman shook his head. ‘From Prague.’

‘Weren’t you a little premature in leaving?’

‘On the contrary, that was the time to get out, before the whole of Czechoslovakia was occupied.’

‘What language do you speak?’

‘English,’ Hoffman said.

Cross didn’t smile. ‘Your native language?’

‘Both Czech and Slovak and a little Hungarian.’

‘I wish I had your talent for languages,’ Cross said. ‘It’s not our strong point – we think everyone should speak English.’

Is he dead?

We think so.

So casual. The reply had barely registered. A man who tried to shoot me is lying dead in a Lisbon street or in a morgue and here we are discussing languages.

‘Did you leave anyone behind?’

‘Sorry, I don’t quite … I will have that drink,’ Hoffman said, ‘if you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all,’ in a tone that did mind just a little.

Cross poured him a whisky. ‘Soda?’

‘Please.’

He sipped his drink. ‘Did I leave …’

‘When you left Czechoslovakia, did you leave any relatives behind?’

‘Only my mother. My father died five years ago.’

‘Wasn’t that a little callous?’

‘She had married again. To a man who had all the makings of being a good Nazi when the Germans finally took Prague.’

‘And where did you go to?’

Hoffman, who felt that Cross knew the answer to this and most of the other questions, replied: ‘To Switzerland.’

‘How? Across Germany?’

‘Austria.’

‘Same thing by then.’

We think so. Hoffman took a gulp of whisky. ‘It wasn’t too difficult. I had forged papers and foreign languages didn’t surprise people in that part of Europe in those days. The Balkan tongues had spilled over …’

‘Why the Red Cross?’ Cross asked abruptly.

‘Should I be ashamed of it?’

‘It’s a dedication not a job. You were very young to choose a dedication.’

‘I knew what was happening in Europe. To the Jews in Germany. I knew what was coming. I wanted to help.’

‘But not to fight?’

‘Apparently you didn’t wish to fight either, Mr. Cross.’

Cross didn’t look as angry as he should have done. But the interrogation lapsed for a few moments. A ship’s siren sounded its melancholy note, bringing a touch of loneliness to the evening.

Cross poured himself another whisky. Then he said: ‘For a pacifist that was a very belligerent remark, Mr. Hoffman.’

‘Pacifist? I suppose I am. I happen to think I can do more good working for the Red Cross than becoming another freedom fighter.’

‘An unusual appointment, isn’t it? A Czech working for the Red Cross in Lisbon?’

‘On the contrary. As you know, the city’s full of refugees from central and eastern Europe. I can help them, we understand each other.’

‘Quite a cushy number,’ Cross remarked. Hoffman hadn’t come across the word ‘cushy’ but guessed its implication and guessed that Cross was trying to needle him. ‘Like mine,’ Cross added. ‘Did you go to Berne?’

‘Geneva. I spent a year there. I learned English there. Second secretary of what, Mr. Cross?’

‘Chancery,’ Cross said without elaborating.

The phone rang.

Cross spoke into the receiver. ‘Yes … He is, is he? … Yes, he’s here … No, we won’t … I won’t forget … I’ll ring you back.’

He replaced the receiver saying to Hoffman: ‘Yes, he’s dead all right.’

‘Do you mind if I ask a few questions?’

‘Fire away, but don’t expect too many intelligent answers.’

‘I presume you’re with British Intelligence.’

‘You may presume what you wish, Mr. Hoffman.’

‘Who was he?’

‘Your very-dead, would-be assassin? A man named Novikov.’

‘Russian like his gun?’

‘As far as we can gather. As you know Portugal doesn’t recognise the Soviet Union. But quite a few Russians managed to infiltrate during the Spanish Civil War when they were backing the Communists. They settled here with false identities and kept their heads down.’

‘And why were you following him?’

‘He worked as an interpreter – like you he was quite a linguist – and did a lot of work for us. But, of course, he was a Soviet agent. Who isn’t an agent of some sort or another in Lisbon these days? He was also a hit man,’ Cross said. A breeze breathed through the open window, ruffled the curtains and, with a tinkle, spent itself in the chandelier. ‘But we had penetrated his set-up and we got word that today he had a contract. We didn’t know who but it soon became obvious that it was you. Why, we didn’t know, still don’t,’ raising an eyebrow at Hoffman. ‘At one stage Taft and I thought he was going to clobber you in the castle grounds.’

‘Then why didn’t you try and stop him?’

‘We wanted to know where you were leading him and then perhaps why he was after your blood.’

‘Mistaken identity?’

Cross grimaced at such a preposterous suggestion. He picked up the automatic, pointed it at Hoffman and said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.’

‘Never was?’

‘Oh, it was loaded all right. Taft took the bullets out.’ He aimed the gun at the window and pulled the trigger. Click. ‘There,’ he said.

Hoffman put down his glass; he wasn’t used to hard liquor and the whisky had affected his reasoning. There was a catalogue of questions to ask but he had to search for them.

‘Until today I was a stranger to you?’

‘Not quite. We make a point of checking out Red Cross personnel. I admire your dedication, Mr Hoffman, but it’s not unknown for a few devils to flit among the angels of mercy.’

‘But I—’

‘We just checked you out, that’s all. Any more questions?’

‘Why did you shoot him? It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘As a matter of fact it wasn’t. Taft did the dirty work.’

‘Did you have to kill him?’

‘He was going to kill you. Don’t let that dedication of yours blind you to reality.’

‘And you think you’ll get away with it?’

‘I’m quite sure we will. There are a lot of unsolved murders in Lisbon these days as I’m sure you know. The PIDE can’t follow up the death of every stateless mid-European. Perhaps he had stolen someone’s family jewels, their papers, their seat on the Clipper …’ Cross spread wide his hands. ‘My turn again?’

‘What more questions can there be? I don’t know why he tried to kill me, nor do you.’

Cross leaned forward, grey eyes looking intently at Hoffman. ‘Novikov worked for the NKVD. Have you really no idea why the Russian secret police should be so anxious to remove you from the face of this earth?’

‘No idea at all,’ lied Viktor Golovin.

CHAPTER FOUR

‘So,’ Churchill said to the tweed-suited man sitting opposite him on the lawns of Chartwell, ‘contact has been made in Lisbon?’

The man, who had fair hair needled with grey and a withdrawn expression that looked as though it had been recently but permanently acquired, nodded. ‘Some weeks ago.’

‘You didn’t inform me,’ Churchill said reprovingly.

‘With respect, Prime Minister,’ said Colonel Robert Sinclair, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, ‘you told me not to worry you with details. Only the grand stratagem.’

‘You’re right, of course.’ Churchill smiled at him brilliantly through the smoke from his cigar and the spymaster’s pipe. ‘I’ve had a few things on my mind recently …’

In the distance they heard the wail of air-raid sirens; then the alarm at Westerham groaned into life.

A few things on my mind, Churchill thought, and all of them disasters.

Since his becoming First Lord of the Admiralty on the declaration of war and then Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, after Chamberlain’s policies had finally collapsed, the Nazi jackboot had crushed most of Western Europe; now its toe was aimed across the English Channel at Britain.

Well, he had told the Commons three days after becoming Premier that he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’. But even he hadn’t anticipated the scale of the catastrophes that lay ahead in the next three months.

Now Britain stood alone. Hitler had, on July 16, issued a directive for an invasion. And, judging by the armadas of Messerschmitts, Dorniers, Heinkels and Junkers swarming across the skies, had every intention of carrying it out.

But had he? Wasn’t it more likely that the attacks were aimed at softening up Britain to induce her to make the sort of deal with Germany that Hitler had always dreamed about?

Indeed only three days after issuing the directive Hitler had told the Reichstag: ‘In this hour, I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense in Great Britain as much as elsewhere …’

The Führer was dumbfounded by the stubbornness of the British people. Hurt, even, that they didn’t appreciate his benevolent schemes that would leave the British Empire, or most of it, unscathed.

No, Hitler’s heart wasn’t truly in the occupation of Britain: his ambition lay elsewhere – to the east.

And it was this belief that formed the cornerstone of the first phase of Churchill’s Grand Stratagem that had been gestating ever since he had first suggested to Brendan Bracken, two years earlier, that Germany and Russia should be manoeuvred into fighting each other to a standstill.

From the south there came the drone of approaching aircraft.

Clementine called from the house: ‘You’d better come in, Winston.’

Churchill who was wearing a painter’s smock and grey trousers pretended not to hear and shaded his eyes to look at the enemy squadrons. They were flying high in the summer sky in parade-ground order.

Churchill said: ‘I wish I had my field-glasses but if I go in to get them Clemmie will collar me.’

‘So she should,’ Sinclair told him. ‘We can’t afford to have our Prime Minister strafed by a Messerschmitt.’

His tone was almost flippant and it surprised Churchill. Sinclair, who looked like a Scottish laird, was canny but dour. In the past he had shown animation solely when talking about his only son Robin; Robin had died on the beaches of Dunkirk.

Perhaps imminent danger brought out the flippancy in him; it was a drug that affected men in many different ways. It made some grovel, it made some exultant, some foolhardy. For me it does all those things, he thought, but the public must only see the bravado.

Suddenly from the direction of the afternoon sun Spitfires attacked. Machine-guns chattered; the neatly-arranged squadrons of German aircraft broke up and Churchill was on his feet shouting: ‘Bravo!’

Clementine came running out and handed them both steel helmets. ‘If you won’t take shelter,’ she said, ‘you’d better wear it.’

The sky above the serene countryside was now daubed with skeins and whorls of white smoke; from the midst of the high-battling planes one fell spinning towards the ground, trailing black smoke.

‘One of theirs or one of ours?’ Sinclair asked.

‘God knows, poor devil.’ Churchill sat down again on the garden seat beside Sinclair. ‘But I do know this, we can’t afford to lose many more. Max Beaverbrook is doing a superb job but even he can’t replace the aircraft at the rate we’re losing them. You see people only count the planes we lose in battle: they forget the ones destroyed on the ground when the Huns bomb our airfields.’

‘At least we know where they’re going to hit,’ Sinclair said, flippancy discarded.

‘Ah, Ultra, my most secret source. But we’ll have to do better than that. If they continue to hit the airfields then we’re done for. I wonder,’ said Churchill thoughtfully, ‘if a bombing raid on Berlin would taunt Hitler and Göring into bombing our cities instead of our defences …’

Two aircraft detached themselves from the battle. A Dornier chased by a Spitfire. They roared so low over Chartwell that Churchill and Sinclair could see the pilots. The Spitfire’s guns were blazing, shell cases clattering on the roof and terrace.

Black smoke burst from the Dornier. It turned over slowly with funereal majesty and disappeared as the Spitfire climbed exultantly and returned to the battle.

But the battle was almost over. The battered armada was returning home, discharging its bombs on to the countryside as it went. The trails of white smoke spread, entwined, drifted … ‘Floral tributes,’ Churchill remarked.

But Sinclair was looking towards the pall of black smoke where the Dornier had crashed and Churchill knew what he was thinking.

Churchill guided him back to Lisbon. ‘This contact, this man Hoffman, or Golovin as he used to be called, is he sympathetic?’

‘He’s being cultivated,’ Sinclair said.

‘In what way? It’s a warm day, you can divest yourself of your cloak of secrecy.’

‘As you know, he works for the Red Cross and he’s a pacifist.’

‘So was Chamberlain,’ Churchill remarked enigmatically. ‘But he was strong.’

‘I think Hoffman – we both know that his real name is neither Hoffman or Golovin – is strong. But at the moment he doesn’t realise that he’s being manipulated, so he’s cooperating.’

‘In what way is he being manipulated?’ Churchill asked impatiently.

‘Moulded would perhaps be a better word. As you well know, there have been a lot of peacemakers in evidence in recent years, and some of them are still swanning around Lisbon. Hoffman has been put in touch with them. Persuaded that he might be able to contribute something towards ending hostilities.’

Churchill said drily: ‘He might be able to do just that.’

An all-clear sounded in the distance, others joined in, an eerie but welcome orchestra on a tranquil afternoon.

‘I believe they’ve been dubbed Wailing Winnies,’ Churchill said. ‘Anything personal, do you think?’ He took off his tin hat and threw it on the grass. ‘I wonder how many more there’ll be today.’

‘I hear’, Sinclair said, ‘that they intend to put up something like 1,800.’

‘And I wonder how many will get back.’

‘More than we tell the public,’ Sinclair said.

‘You really are a pessimist, aren’t you. What about some champagne?’ He waved towards the house but Clementine was already on her way with a tray, a bottle of Möet Chandon and two glasses. ‘What a woman!’ Churchill exclaimed.

Clementine put the tray on the wooden table in front of them. ‘I’m going back for a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘But I thought you’d like a victory celebration.’

‘As if I needed an excuse,’ Churchill said, easing the cork out of the bottle.

When Clementine had gone, Sinclair said: ‘I think I’m realistic, not pessimistic. You forget I’ve been in Intelligence for a long time.’

‘Then you must realise that it’s necessary to broadcast encouraging statistics. God knows, the British people have little enough to be optimistic about. There’s not so much difference between the statistics we put out and my speeches.’

‘Your speeches are magnificent. A rallying call. The greatest weapon we have. Bar none,’ he added, so that Churchill wondered if he was casting doubts on the Grand Stratagem in which, Lisbon apart, he was the only other conspirator. How old was Sinclair? Fifty-five, something like that. When war was declared Churchill had wondered if Sinclair wasn’t too decent for his job; he had, after all, been employed by a Government that deified naïvety. But if there had been too much chivalry in his character it had been sent packing by bereavement and he now wore it as a disguise.

Sipping his champagne, Churchill stared at the white trails that had merged into a single cloud in the sky and thought: ‘I enjoyed that battle, no doubt about it; but I’m not a warmonger …’ But the introspective arguments were all too familiar. ‘I am a man for the times,’ he reassured himself. ‘And they will discard me once again when it’s all over …’

Despite the warmth, the champagne, the presence of Sinclair, he felt suddenly alone. A man for the times … a figure beckoned into an arena by circumstance.

‘And the final circumstance,’ he said, ‘will be victory. And to win that victory,’ he said to Sinclair who was looking at him curiously, ‘we have to return to the plan, the reason for your visit.’

Sinclair relaxed saying: ‘Of which Lisbon is the last instalment.’

‘But the most important. Without it the first phase will be for nothing. Now let’s run through Phase One again,’ by which he meant he would run through it.

*

The comprehensive idea, Churchill said, was to match Germany and Russia against each other in a prolonged engagement in which they would bleed each other dry. In that way the world would be rid of two tyrannies of which, by their magnitude, the Bolsheviks were the more dangerous.

On August 23, 1939, Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact with Poland as the shared spoils. Both dictators were merely buying time because there had never been any secret about the Führer’s ultimate designs on the Soviet Union. It was, in fact, a classic pact of shared deceit. (Earlier that year Stalin might just as adroitly have signed a pact with Britain and France had they shown any inclination to throw in their lot with the Bolsheviks.)

But if Britain was to be saved – and she was militarily in no position to save herself – then she could not sit back and wait for one or other of the two despots to break their infamous alliance. While she waited she could succumb to invasion or slow death through isolation.

The first step then of Phase One was to blast the Luftwaffe out of the skies and sink as much as possible of the invasion fleet that Hitler would undoubtedly assemble across the Channel. By doing that Britain would convince Hitler that the invasion of Britain – Operation Sea Lion – was a mistake.

‘His heart isn’t in it anyway,’ Churchill said, lighting a fresh cigar and pouring them both more champagne. ‘So now we reach the crux of Phase One. Having been persuaded that his instincts are right – that it would be a mistake to invade Britain – he must then be convinced that the time is ripe to break his pact with Stalin and attack Russia. Prematurely!’ Churchill stood up and took a turn round the garden seat. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said, stopping in front of Sinclair. ‘Two questions will always torment historians chronicling the Second World War – until, one day, the truth comes out as it always does …’

Sinclair tilted his head politely. ‘And they are?’

‘One, why Hitler exposed himself on two fronts by invading Russia too soon.’ He stared into the bubbles rising in his glass of champagne.

‘And two?’

‘Why Stalin ignored all the warnings that Hitler intended to attack when he did.’

‘Warnings from whom?’ asked Sinclair, trying to cope with an invisible invasion force that had been assembled across the Channel, dispersed and converted into an army poised to attack the Russians.

‘Myself among others,’ said Churchill enigmatically.

Then he sat down again and continued to expound on Phase One.

If Hitler was to be persuaded to invade the Soviet Union prematurely then he must be convinced that his tactics against Britain had been successful. In other words that Britain had been forced to the edge of the negotiating table. If he believed that then the nightmare of war on two fronts would recede.

But the Führer was a wary negotiator – ‘the only mortal he wholly trusts is Adolf Hitler’ – and any suggestion that Britain was ready to come to terms would have to come from the top. From Churchill!

It would be the duty therefore of British Intelligence to get word to Hitler that Churchill was willing to discuss an armistice after he had turned against Russia. After, that was, he had proved his determination to eliminate the Bolshevik menace – an aim which Churchill shared.

At the same time he would have to be persuaded that the Red Army wasn’t prepared for such an attack. This was easy enough because Stalin himself had torn the heart out of it.

Churchill slumped back in the seat. ‘Well, what do you think?’

Sinclair said: ‘You want me to work out details of how your alleged intentions should reach Hitler?’

‘Without committing anything to paper,’ Churchill said. ‘Of course we can’t make any move through normal diplomatic channels: I’d get thrown out of the Commons if word got out that I was contemplating a deal with Adolf. Hitler will understand that.’

‘It shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Sinclair said. ‘All we need is an intelligence source that Hitler trusts – as much as he trusts anyone.’

Churchill nodded, yawned. He needed a snooze; that was the way to defeat fatigue; naps enabled you to work a long day – and night. He was grateful to Jacky Fisher for teaching him to work at night: the eccentric old First Sea Lord in the last war had started work at two a.m. and finished at two p.m.

But Churchill couldn’t snooze just yet: he had to convey the most important part of the conspiracy to Sinclair. He straightened up and said: ‘But all this will be for nought if Stalin realises that the Nazis are poised to stab him in the back.’

‘So we have to persuade him otherwise?’

‘Exactly, and that is Phase Two, the eye of the whole conspiracy. If Stalin believes that Hitler is reneging on his agreement so soon then he will mass his troops, purged or otherwise, on the borders and there will be two possible outcomes.’

Churchill paused as he caught sight of Clementine at one of the windows of the house. She was pointing at her wristwatch. The message was clear: time for your nap. He waved at her.

Sinclair filled in the first possible outcome. ‘There would be one hell of a battle.’

Churchill nodded. ‘But not the sort we want. It would be another Waterloo with one or the other side emerging victorious. We would still have an enemy and an implacable one at that.’

‘And the other outcome?’

‘They’d patch it up. Slap each other on the back and blather about military manoeuvres. Withdraw their hordes and prolong their alliance. The first outcome,’ Churchill said sombrely, ‘would be unfortunate, the second would be a disaster – we could well have two implacable and united enemies.’

Churchill projected his imagination to what he hoped would happen. He saw blood on snow. He blinked – and saw a sparrow taking a dust-bath in a bed of roses.

He stretched, massaged his aching shoulder. He sipped what was left of the champagne in his glass but it was flat.

If they have accused me in the past of being a warmonger what would they say if they knew what I was contemplating now? They must never know in my lifetime, he decided. Perhaps one day when the war was distant history. When what I hope to achieve can be assessed against the sacrifices involved.

He sighed and said to Sinclair: ‘What we have to achieve is a long, drawn-out war and that can only happen if Stalin is caught unawares. If Hitler is fooled by that lack of preparation and lured across the border to come face to face with the Russian winter. The Bolshevik hordes will retreat, regroup, re-arm; the Nazis will be extended until they’re ready to snap. Then, God willing, they’ll fight each other to a standstill. Or, at the very least, be so palsied that it will be at least a decade before either of them can muster the strength to turn on us once again. By which time we and the rest of the world should, in any case, be prepared.’

Sinclair said levelly: ‘What you are suggesting, Prime Minister, could involve the deaths of millions.’

Churchill said quietly: ‘Millions of deaths? You are probably right. But what you have to remember is the alternative. And that, quite simply, is the end of civilisation as we know it. The extermination of democracy. The death of liberty. The end,’ pointing at the green tranquillity in front of them, ‘of all this.’

The sparrow finished its dust-bath and flew away.

‘Winston.’ Clementine’s voice reached him from the back door but Churchill ignored it: his deafness, not as bad as some people believed, was sometimes a great asset.

After a while Sinclair said: ‘Odd to think that the key to the whole thing is a young man named Hoffman who hasn’t the slightest inkling of what’s afoot.’ He knocked out his pipe on the heel of one of his brogues.

‘The key to Phase Two certainly,’ Churchill replied. ‘But first of all we have to convince Corporal Hitler of our good intentions if he does attack Russia. Do you have any ideas?’

‘Some,’ Sinclair replied.

‘Please be a little more explicit, colonel, we are on the same side you know.’

Sinclair scraped the charred bowl of his pipe with the blade of a silver penknife. Where would either of us be without our dummies? Churchill pondered as ash fell from his cigar.

‘I believe in keeping an operation like this as tightly parcelled as possible,’ Sinclair said at last.

‘Lisbon?’

‘It’s the obvious centre. Much better than Switzerland, always has been. You can get in and out of the place because it’s not landlocked. By sea and air,’ he added.

Churchill said: ‘I do know where Lisbon is.’

‘But, of course, we wouldn’t use Hoffman in this phase. He isn’t ready for it.’

‘Of course not. That goes without saying, surely.’ Churchill suspected that Sinclair was wasting time, hoping that Clemmie reached them before he had to elaborate. ‘Who then?’

‘Another agent,’ Sinclair told him.

Clementine was walking across the lawn towards them, determination in her stride.

‘Who, man, who?’

‘With respect, sir, you did say you weren’t interested in the details.’

‘I am now.’

Clementine was a hundred yards away, rounding a bed of red, white and blue petunias.

‘Well, the man I have in mind won’t be an innocent abroad like Hoffman.’

Churchill stood up and prodded his now-cold cigar at his spymaster. ‘For the last time, Sinclair, who is this man?’ He wasn’t all that interested but he didn’t like to be defied.

‘Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence,’ Sinclair said. His usually enigmatic features added: Satisfied?

‘Thank you, colonel,’ and to Clementine who was now standing beside them, empty basket and scissors for cutting flowers in her hand: ‘There you are, my dear.’

‘Here I am,’ she said, ‘and there you are, which is not where you’re supposed to be at all. It’s long past time for your nap.’ Her tone implied that this was a far more serious matter than staying out of doors during an air-raid.

Churchill gave her a peck on the cheek and Sinclair a wink. ‘Very well, my dear, just off.’

‘And so am I,’ said Sinclair, bowing to Clementine.

As Churchill walked thoughtfully across the lawns the siren at Westerham began to moan another warning. Churchill turned and looked inquiringly at his wife but she shook her head firmly and he continued on his way to the house.

CHAPTER FIVE

The softest touch for a creator of disinformation is a subject who wants to believe the creator’s lies.

So I am lucky in that respect, Sinclair thought as he walked his red setter in the woods near his Berkshire home: Hitler wants to believe my lies – that Britain is at last ready to acknowledge his genius and do a deal.

And I’m also lucky that, for the time being, Hitler still trusts the purveyor of the lies, Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the intelligence section of the German High Command.

But I am unlucky in my own state of mind. The head of an intelligence agency should be impersonal, clinical in his judgement. But that is no longer true of me, not since the death of Robin. Now I am fuelled by hatred and that distorts judgement.

He picked up a stick and threw it for the dog, who disappeared among the rotting silver birch trees; a gun emplacement had blocked the natural drainage and the trees were dying like over-watered house plants. But it was a quiet place, becalmed among green fields, especially on evenings such as this with shafts of fading sunlight reaching its bed of moss. A place to contemplate. A place to plan. A place to hate.

The dog came bounding back and placed the stick at his feet and he threw it again, thinking: ‘Admiral Canaris and I have a lot in common. We are both confused by hatred. I loved my son and so now I hate Germany: he loves Germany but hates Hitler. But you’ve got to stop this,’ he admonished himself. ‘Start to plan!’

Once more he threw the stick. How to entice Canaris to Lisbon? That shouldn’t be too difficult; he was already involved with Franco in neighbouring Spain, and Lisbon was the European capital of espionage, which was Canaris’s profession.

To anticipate the reactions of Canaris he would have to study him more deeply. As he walked down the flinty lane towards his home in Finchampstead he poked a particularly bright flint with his walking stick and found that it was a jagged sliver of shrapnel.

When he reached the big rambling house he called to the setter: ‘Robin, come here.’ But the dog’s name was Rufus.

*

In his study he consulted the file on Canaris.

He lit his pipe and, as the day died outside and his wife cooked an austerity meal in the kitchen, the admiral emerged from the dossier and took a bow.

He was fifty-three years old but looked older. His silken hair was prematurely grey and he was known as Old Whitehead.

He had served in the Navy in the last war with distinction. On one occasion his cruiser had been scuttled off the South American coast before the superior guns of a British warship; he had been interned on an island close to Chile but had escaped to the mainland in a rowing boat disguised as a Chilean. He had crossed the Andes on horseback … taken a train to Argentina … sailed to Amsterdam on a forged passport, calling at the British port of Falmouth!

A man to be reckoned with.

His escapades had continued in spectacular fashion and his star had been in the ascendant until he had fallen foul of Admiral Erich Raeder who had blocked his promotion in the conventional Navy, thereby setting him on course for espionage.

Ironic, mused Sinclair, that Raeder had advocated defeating Britain before attacking the Soviet Union.

On January 1, 1935, on his forty-eight birthday, Canaris had become head of the Abwehr.

He was 5 feet 3 inches tall. He had pale blue eyes. His manner was mild. He had difficulty in sleeping. He was a hypochondriac although his only known complaint was bad circulation which accounted for the coldness of which he continually complained.

He was a pessimist. He detested Hitler because of his persecution of the Jews and he feared for his country because he believed its leader was a madman.

He was subject to fits of melancholia.

In Lisbon the approach would have to be circumspect. Canaris was co-operating with British Intelligence but he certainly would not co-operate to the extent of bringing about Germany’s downfall.

So he would have to be persuaded that Churchill genuinely wanted to settle for peace; that, with the spectre of war on two fronts removed, Hitler would be able to concentrate on crushing Russia.

But Canaris was a sly old fox. What if he still had lingering doubts about perfide Albion? Well, there was one way in which the admiral could be persuaded that it was in everyone’s interests to tell Hitler about Britain’s change in policy. Blackmail.

From the kitchen came his wife’s voice. ‘Dinner’s ready, dear. Spam fritters and scrambled eggs – dried eggs, I’m afraid.’

*

Old Whitehead winced at the first scream.

He abhorred cruelty. But then he reminded himself that the man being beaten up in the adjoining room was a draft-dodger and felt a little better because he also abhorred that particular brand of cowardice.

But who are you to moralise? Admiral Canaris asked himself, sitting in an easy chair and picking up a copy of Signal, the Services’ propaganda magazine. You with your double standards.

His hands trembled as he turned the pages of the magazine. What a mess he had become since the death and glory days when he had been a U-boat commander and then captain of the cruiser Schlesien; since he had been diverted into espionage.

But perhaps that is your true vocation, intrigue, because you even intrigue with yourself. Deceive yourself, manipulate your conscience, trade secrets with the enemy, assuring yourself that it is for the good of the country you love …

Furthermore you are a pessimist, Canaris. Your punishment? The admiral turned a page of the magazine and stared at a photograph of a sailor with his arm round the waist of a girl with her hair in braids; the sailor’s face was bold; like mine once was in those far off days of youth and optimism.

He turned another page and Adolf Hitler stared at him.

From the room next door another scream and a voice shouting in English: ‘I don’t know! I … tell you … I … don’t … know.’

A thud, followed by the sound of a body falling.

Canaris glanced at his wristwatch. Another couple of minutes and he would call it off because in all probablity the Englishman was telling the truth.

He was one of the many informants who during the past couple of weeks in Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden and, indeed, in London itself, had reported a dramatic change in Britain’s policy.

According to the reports Churchill, despite his swashbuckling oratory, wanted to do a deal with Hitler because he realised that the position of his bombarded and besieged islands was hopeless.

In his offices in Tirpitzufer in Berlin Canaris had studied the reports with scepticism. There were too many of them all at once.

Then two highly plausible sources had come up with the same information in Lisbon and he had flown to the Portuguese capital.

But before confronting them he had decided to put a lesser informant to the test. A dispensable informant such as the draft-dodging Englishman – of whom there were quite a few in Lisbon – who was at this moment having his teeth knocked down his throat in the basement of the German Minister’s residence.

Canaris shivered despite the heavy leather overcoat he wore. He felt cold. But then he always felt cold. From a silver pillbox he took a white tablet to aid his circulation.

He opened the door to the adjoining room and told the two shirt-sleeved inquisitors to put down their rubber hoses.

The Englishman who had been propped against a wall of the bare room slid to the floor. Just as they did in the movies, Canaris thought. Although unlike movie interrogators the two sweating Gestapo bully-boys did not appear to have been enjoying themselves. Presumably they preferred more refined and less exhausting methods of extracting information which he didn’t permit – that was the domain of Reinhard ‘Hangman’ Heydrich, Himmler’s deputy and head of all SS security, which included the Gestapo.

Perhaps one day men such as this will interrogate me, Canaris thought, and felt even colder.

He said to the Englishman: ‘Get up.’

The body on the floor moved. The bloodied head turned. Eyes slitted between swollen flesh regarded Canaris. With hatred or gratitude? With a face in that condition you couldn’t tell.

To one of the interrogators Canaris said: ‘Bring him a chair.’ When the Englishman was sitting on the kitchen chair beneath a naked electric light bulb Canaris gave him a cigarette and lit it for him.

The Englishman, whose name was Spearman, inhaled and coughed and inhaled again as if the smoke was a medicament. He was young, about twenty-three, with fair wavy hair and a face that, before the beating, had been half-saint and half-delinquent. According to Abwehr records in Lisbon he was a homosexual.

To one of the interrogators, Canaris said: ‘What was it he didn’t know? What was the question?’

‘He didn’t know whether it was true or not.’

‘Whether what was true?’

‘The information he brought, whatever that was,’ the man said sullenly.

So the Gestapo, who unfortunately handled all interrogations in Lisbon, were learning at last: don’t tell your inquisitors too much, thereby keeping risks to a minimum.

To the Englishman he said: ‘Why aren’t you fighting for your country?’

Spearman spat out blood. ‘This is a neutral country and I shall report you to the authorities.’

‘Really? What authorities, I wonder? The Portuguese? We Germans really are calling the tune here, you know, and their police won’t risk upsetting us. The British? I don’t think so, do you? They would lock you up or, worse, make you fight. But you didn’t answer my question. Why aren’t you helping to defend your country? You see I am a patriot and the reasoning of a traitor interests me.’

‘I’m not a traitor.’ The voice was slurred.

‘What are you then?’

‘A pacifist.’

‘Then you should have registered as a conscientious objector in England.’

‘I prefer the sunshine,’ Spearman said.

‘Where did you get this information?’

‘At the Casino at Estoril, where else?’

‘A hundred and one places,’ Canaris said. ‘The Aviz or the Avenida Palace, in Lisbon, the Palácio or the Hotel do Parque in Estoril …’

‘I like to gamble.’

‘Who gave you the information?’

‘I gleaned it.’

He spoke beautiful English. Perhaps he had been to Cambridge where the Russians were so assiduously recruiting agents.

‘Who from?’

Spearman put two fingers inside his mouth. They came out holding a tooth. Then the spirit seemed to go out of Spearman, so often the case when a homosexual realises his looks have been damaged.

Sensing that the moment had come to change the approach, Canaris dismissed the two Gestapo thugs. They hesitated, unsure of Canaris’s authority.

Without raising his voice, Canaris said: ‘Get out.’

They went.

Canaris sat down opposite Spearman, gave him another cigarette and said in a friendly, almost paternal, tone: ‘Come now, stop being so obstinate. An admirable quality, I agree, and very British, but entirely misplaced at the moment.’

Tears gathered in Spearman’s eyes. ‘I just don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I pass on information, that’s all. I don’t pretend it’s true, I never have. And what happens …?’ His voice trembled and he brushed at his eyes with blood-stained fingers; Canaris felt almost, but not quite, sorry for him. ‘This is what happens … It isn’t fair.’

‘If you co-operate it won’t happen again. Believe me, I don’t want to see you hurt.’ True enough. ‘And if you do help us we might even increase your reward.’

Spearman stared at Canaris beseechingly. ‘But I have co-operated; I don’t understand …’

‘Your informant, who was he?’ Canaris hardened his tone a little.

‘I told you it was only hearsay.’

‘A homosexual?’

‘Does that make it more suspect?’ a little spirit returning to him.

Canaris shook his head. ‘It makes no difference. Gossip is gossip. It’s up to us to process it.’ He handed Spearman a handkerchief. ‘Who was he?’

Spearman pressed the white silk handkerchief to his eyes. ‘Yes, he’s queer all right.’

‘Your … friend?

Spearman nodded.

‘British?’

‘Swiss.’

‘You move in exalted circles, Mr. Spearman,’ because there was no such mortal as a poor Swiss here, or anywhere else for that matter.

‘I move in influential circles.’

‘You mean, I think, that for reasons we won’t pursue you are briefly admitted to the fringe of such circles. Among the fugitive kings of Europe reigning in Estoril.’

‘And bankers and businessmen and diplomats and spies, of course. There are more spies in Estoril than whores in Piccadilly.’

‘And your friend … what is his profession?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Oh yes,’ Canaris said, ‘it matters very much.’

‘Very well then, he’s a businessman.’

‘You’re not giving very much away, Mr. Spearman. I understood you were going to co-operate.’

‘I thought it was an unwritten law,’ Spearman said, puffing away at his cigarettes, ‘that informants weren’t obliged to give away their source of information.’

‘I just re-wrote that law.’

‘Very well, his business is cork.’

‘Along with every other businessman in Lisbon. But hardly a profitable enterprise for a Swiss. After all, they don’t produce that much wine, and none of that particularly memorable. Are you sure it’s cork, Mr Spearman?’

‘I understand he’s a middleman.’

‘Ah, but he wouldn’t be anything else, would he?’ Canaris touched his grey eyebrows, a habit of his; his wife had clipped them for him at their home on Lake Ammersee in Bavaria just before he left for Portugal; he wished profoundly that he was back there now. He unbuttoned his overcoat, leaned forward and snapped: ‘His name please.’

‘I can’t give it to you. You’ll have him beaten just as you’ve beaten me.’

‘A Swiss businessman? I doubt that, I doubt that very much,’ Canaris said. ‘British draft-dodgers, yes, we beat the hell out of them. But not Swiss businessmen. In any case we might need his cork, if cork it is, for some of our Rhine wines. He is German Swiss?’

‘No, French … Shit!’ Spearman stamped on his cigarette butt. ‘That was bloody clever.’

‘At least it narrows the field. You might as well tell me his name, I’ll find out soon enough. If you die during further interrogation,’ his voice still pleasant, man-to-man, ‘then it will merely be a process of elimination.’

Spearman began to shiver. ‘If I do, you won’t —’

‘Reveal the source of my information? Certainly not. I am an officer and a gentleman, although that may have escaped you.’

Spearman gave him a name. Cottier. Canaris stood up and began to pace the floor. Cottier? It meant nothing to him.

‘… in any case,’ Spearman was saying, ‘he only heard it indirectly at a party. You know those Estoril parties …’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Canaris, thinking of France, Belgium, Holland bleeding from the wounds of war. ‘And who was his informant, for God’s sake?’

The transfer of responsibility seemed to cheer Spearman up a little. He uttered a name which stopped Canaris in his tracks because it was the name of one of the two sources that had brought him to Lisbon.

*

Half an hour later Canaris lunched with Fritz von Claus, head of the Abwehr operation in Portugal, in his small terrace house overlooking the flea market.

He usually enjoyed himself there. It was so cramped, so full of books, so bachelor, and the schnapps was so smoky on the tongue that it reminded him of his youth when, on leave from naval college, he had planned – not conspired – breathtaking visions for the Fatherland.

To Canaris, von Claus always seemed like a professor, although he was the younger of the two (the deformity on his back, not quite a hunch, had added years to his fragile frame) and, of course, junior in rank.

By the time they were halfway through a bottle of schnapps washed down with pale beer imported from Munich the present was an unwelcome stranger to their conversation. But an intrusive one.

‘So, what do you think?’ Canaris asked.

‘About the rumours? As you say, they’re a little too thick on the ground. I wouldn’t have suggested you came to Lisbon if they hadn’t been backed up by two of our prime contacts.’

‘I’m glad you did,’ Canaris said. ‘I like it in your home. It’s a forgotten outpost of the Germany we once knew. Before—’

‘Careful,’ von Claus whispered.

‘Hey, what’s this? Spy warning spy about eavesdroppers? Are the British so alert?’ But his voice was hushed.

‘The Gestapo are, you must know that.’

His words sobered them both. Von Claus switched on the radio.

Finally Canaris said softly: ‘But they answer only to Himmler and Heydrich. I answer to Hitler. For the time being,’ he said sombrely. ‘What has it come to, Fritz, fearing your own countrymen more than the enemy?’ He tossed back a measure of schnapps. ‘But back to the business of the moment – then we can luxuriate about the past over lunch. What’s for lunch, Fritz?’

‘Frankfurters,’ said von Claus. ‘Frankfurters that spit their juice at you when you sink your teeth into them. Sauerkraut and potato salad.’

Canaris licked his lips. ‘If you eat like that every day why don’t you put on any weight?’

‘I wish I did, I have a lot of trouble getting suits to fit me,’ said von Claus who was as dapper as he was deformed. ‘But tell me, Wilhelm, if this is an elaborate disinformation operation how could it possibly benefit the British?’ He turned up the volume of the radio.

Canaris shrugged. ‘God knows. But I wouldn’t put anything past Churchill. On the face of it his strategy is logical enough: persuade us to smash Russia so that Britain and Germany can co-exist without the Bolshevik menace. I’d like to think it’s as simple as that …’

‘Except that in our world things never are? Have another drink, Wilhelm. Blast the suspicions out of that old grey head of yours.’

‘Not so old,’ Canaris said. ‘You see, what Churchill is saying to Hitler is this: “We will cause no trouble in the west, leaving you free to pursue your dream of expansion in the east.” Or more concisely: “We, the British, will allow you to go to war on only one front.”’

‘So?’

‘You don’t fool me, professor. You just want me to express your own doubts.’

‘And they are?’ smiling his pinched smile.

‘Timing, my dear Fritz, timing. Just supposing Hitler was delayed? Drawn into the Russian winter. And then just supposing Churchill didn’t keep his side of the bargain. Just supposing he attacked. Voilà. A war on two fronts.’

‘Britain isn’t strong enough to attack,’ von Claus objected.

‘She would be if the United States had by then entered the war. Timing, you see. She would be with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and all the rest of her Empire beside her.’

Von Claus stood up and said loudly: ‘Come on, let’s eat and soak up some of that liquid cordite.’ As Canaris stood up he again lowered his voice to a whisper: ‘You know what I think, Wilhelm? I think it might be a good idea if Stalin was warned that the Führer intended to attack. That way there would probably be no war at all and thousands, possibly millions, of German lives would be saved.’

‘That possibility,’ said Canaris equally softly, ‘had not escaped me.’ He put his finger to his lips in a gesture that was only slightly theatrical.

*

The first of the two sources on which Canaris had decided to gauge the strength of the reports about Churchill’s new policy was a sleek, well-fed cat.

His hair, grey at the temples, was sleek; his physique, aided by Savile Row suits, was sleek; when paid compliments he purred.

He was one of the Abwehr’s most trusted agents in Lisbon and unique because he never asked for money; certainly, being a banker, he had more than enough but it was the sad experience of the accountants in Tirpitzufer that the richer the agent the more he charged. Apparently all that the banker required was recognition when Germany won the war.

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