Come into my Parlour (29 page)

“Silence!” snapped the Marshal. “Do you think that we send our Generals to garrison places for their own amusement? Wherever a soldier of the Republic is sent he should be proud and honoured to serve his country.”

“Yes, Marshal, yes. No one would dream of disputing that. It is only that I was hurt by your suggestion that I could ever be capable of deserting in the face of the enemy. After all, you should know me better than even to consider such a thing possible.”

“In any case, you admit that you deserted,” Voroshilov said, now slightly on the defensive. “And you know the penalty for that.”

“On the contrary,” lied Kuporovitch boldly, “I did not desert, as you would know if only you had received the letter that I left for you.”

“Well, I did not!”

Never having written such a letter, Kuporovitch knew perfectly well that the Marshal could not possibly have received it, but he went on brazenly: “That is most unfortunate, but it is not my fault. Had you done so you would be aware that I simply left one employment where whatever I did was of little moment, for another, in which my work could be of the utmost value.”

“And who gave you permission to change your employment?”

“No one. The matter arose very suddenly. There was no time to consult my immediate superior. I had to take the responsibility for the decision myself. It was not easy, but I said to myself:

“‘Stefan Kuporovitch, your country's interests come before everything else. This is a chance in a million to be of real service to the Soviets. This castle in the backwoods is well garrisoned, well
provisioned and in no way threatened. Your real duty lies elsewhere. There you will meet sterner trials and carry your life in your hand; but what matter when true patriotism demands that you should seize this opportunity so amazingly thrust in your way? Never mind if your motives in leaving your command are misunderstood. Never mind if you die unhonoured in a foreign land. Your old comrade of the Revolution, Clim Voroshilov, at least, will continue to have faith in you; and if you are fated never to return, he will guess the great thing that you died in attempting to do, and shed a silent tear for you.' ”

Gregory could not understand a single word they were saying to each other, but he felt from Kuporovitch's tone that his friend was putting up a remarkably good show, and he saw that the Marshal was visibly weakening as he muttered a trifle testily:

“How the hell could I guess what you were attempting, since I had never had this letter of which you speak?”

“Ah, tragedy, tragedy!” muttered Kuporovitch. “But as you thought me dead, you wept for me all the same, no doubt? Anyway, as there was no time to consult anyone, I simply gave myself leave of absence and——”

“What? For eighteen months!

Kuporovitch spread out his hands and opened wide his blue eyes with an innocent expression. “How was I to know how long my self-imposed mission would take? I wrote telling you of my decision and hinting at what I hoped to achieve. I naturally supposed that having known me all these years you would be only too pleased to regularize the position for me. It needed only one stroke of your pen to appoint a successor to my command at Kandalaksha, and another to place my name on the special employment list.”

“All right, all right. For the moment let us forget this precious letter of yours. Your having written makes no difference to the fact that leaving your post without permission to do so renders you liable to court-martial and a traitor's death.”

“But, my dear Marshal, if I were a traitor, is it likely that, of my own free will, I should have returned here to be shot?”

This argument seemed unanswerable, so Voroshilov murmured: “Well, where have you been all this time?”

“Why, in Germany, of course!”

“The devil you have!” The ill-humour vanished from the Marshal's face and it suddenly lit up with intense interest.

“At least,” Kuporovitch amended, “I was in Germany tor most of the time, but I have spent the last few months in England, and have only just managed to get back from there.”

“And what were you doing in Germany?”

“Intelligence work on the highest level.”

“Explain yourself.”

“It was this way. Kandalaksha is a lonely place. No one worth talking to arrives there from year's end to year's end. Naturally, therefore, when Colonel Baron von Lutz returned from your headquarters in Finland I had him to dine with me. At that time, you will remember, the Germans were not ‘Hitlerite bandits'. We had done a deal with them over Poland, and to all intents and purposes they were our ‘Gallant Allies'. But old hands like you and I knew that was only window-dressing and that the Germans and ourselves were only waiting for the word to cut one another's livers out.

“Well, it seemed to me too good an opportunity of pumping a high German staff officer to miss, so I filled the Baron full of vodka and got him talking. Far from his being a Nazi, as I had supposed, it transpired that he hated Hitler and all his works. He even went so far as to say that he was one of a group of highly placed officers who considered Hitler had become a menace to Germany's best interests. They felt that his lust for power had unbalanced his mind, and that unless he were stopped in time he might saddle the German people with a greater weight of armed opposition than even they could stand up to, and so, finally, bring them down to irredeemable defeat and ruin. In consequence, when the time was ripe, this group was determined either to remove or kill him.

“Naturally I was intensely interested in all this. I became even more so when the Baron said he was convinced that Hitler would break his promise to the German people about not waging a war on two fronts simultaneously, and meant to attack the Soviets. The Baron went on to say that then would be the time to strike at Hitler. As long as he was victorious he would have the support of the great mass of the German people and, even if he were eliminated, one of his colleagues with similar ideas would take his place. But once the Germans were given cause to doubt the final outcome and their casualties became really heavy, then a reaction would set in, and a
coup d'état
to restore peace before Germany had crippled herself seriously would become a practical possibility.”

The Marshal gave a quick nod. “Such reasoning was sound enough. Well, what then?”

“It seemed to me that if Hitler was planning to attack the Soviet Union it was my duty to find out as much about his intentions as I possibly could.”

“So you went to Germany?”

“Yes. At first, I pretended not to believe the Baron, but he said to me:

“‘All right then; come back to Germany with me and I will prove to you that I speak the truth. I can introduce you to a dozen high officers who are already working on the plans for the invasion of Russia. They are one and all opposed to this mad idea of launching a war in the east before the war in the west has been brought to a successful conclusion, because they are convinced that it must lead to Germany's ultimate defeat. But for the time being they must either continue to do as they are told or be disgraced and be removed from the positions of authority in which, later, they can be of great service to their country.”'

“That I understand. But surely it was not seriously suggested that these German staff officers would be prepared to disclose to you, a Soviet General, their plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union?”

“Indeed it was, Marshal. It was, and still is, the Baron's view that the Nazi régime could not be overthrown until the German people had lost their faith in it through the German Army suffering a series of reverses. He and his friends were prepared to accept such reverses as the price that Germany must pay if she was to escape far greater disasters later on. They were convinced that these reverses would not only provide them with the popular backing to overthrow the Nazi régime, but also furnish a new German Government with a suitable excuse to call off the war while Germany was still so formidable a power that she could insist on a peace which would leave her as strong, if not stronger, than she was before the war started. It follows that the sooner this series of reverses could be stage-managed the sooner the
coup d'état
could be brought off and the greater the strength Germany would still have left in reserve with which to bargain. Therefore it was the Baron's idea that I should return with him to Germany, and there be given the plans for the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in order to ensure this series of defeats being inflicted on the German armies as soon as the invasion was launched.”

“You amaze me!”

Kuporovitch spread out his hands. “I was amazed myself, but the whole conception was so logical that it seemed to me criminal not to accept such an offer.”

“But why should the Baron have made this suggestion to you, an isolated Fortress Commander, instead of getting into touch with our Intelligence people in Moscow?”

“The suggestion was quite unpremeditated. It arose spontaneously from this long talk that we had while drinking glass after glass together, far into the night. It was only through unforeseen circumstances that he arrived at Kandalaksha, and his plans were so immature at that time that he had not even considered approaching anyone in
Russia about them. But we took an immediate liking to one another, and he insisted that I was the very man to undertake this great task.”

“Why you, rather than another?”

“For one reason, Marshal, because, as you will recall, I started life as a Czarist officer, and in my youth I travelled fairly widely. He felt that I talked the same language as these friends of his to whom he intended to introduce me, and that I should prove more acceptable to them than an officer of solely Bolshevik antecedents. But there was more to it than that. Had this mission been entrusted to an ordinary agent he might not have grasped the full significance of the German plans and failed to absorb certain important technical details, whereas that risk could be eliminated by confiding them to a Soviet General of many years' standing like myself.”

“But, surely, for a matter of such great importance, you could have found some way of delaying the Baron's departure until you had time to communicate his proposals to Moscow and ask official permission to undertake this mission?”

“Short of arresting him, which would immediately have destroyed his confidence in me and sabotaged any prospect of my securing this vital information, there was no way to do so. The ice was just breaking up in the Gulf of Finland. He had made arrangements to sail from Leningrad on a Norwegian tramp that was leaving immediately the channels were reported free of ice. He offered to take me with him to Oslo, and said that from there he would have no difficulty in making arrangements for me to enter Germany with him; but he was absolutely adamant in his refusal to delay his departure for even a few hours, as, had he done so, he might have missed his ship. I had to go with him or lose the magnificent chance to render my country a signal service. Having made up my mind to go, I realised that if I waited till morning the Political Commissar who was attached to my command might prevent my leaving, so we got him out of bed and locked him in the grain store——”

Voroshilov's eyes twinkled, and suddenly he laughed. “Stefan, you old devil! Surely you realise that many a Soviet General has been shot for less.”

Kuporovitch smothered a sigh of relief by a loud guffaw. After this incredible tissue of lies that he had been compelled to tell he had at last got the Marshal laughing, so it looked as if they were almost out of the wood. With a happy, expansive grin, he replied:

“Hang it all, Clim! Who but yourself taught me the way to treat these snivelling spies that the
Ogpu
put upon us soldiers? Shall I ever forget how you chased War Lord Trotsky out of your headquarters at Tzaritsyn when he tried to interfere with you, and told him that he was
no true Russian man, but only a dirty Jew scribbler! And later, in this very flat, when you were Military Governor of Leningrad—you can't have forgotten that pretty little girl you used to keep here—and how, when you found out that she had been set to spy on you by the Chief of the Leningrad
Ogpu
, you marched round to his office, blacked both his eyes and threw him down his own stairs.”

“Enough, enough!” The Marshal brushed these memories aside with a wave of his hand and tried, not very successfully, to regain his dignity. “We were young in those days. Things are different now. The Politicals have a difficult task and most of them do it well. Their work is a necessary part of the organisation of the State, and they are entitled to our co-operation and respect.”

“Yes, Marshal, yes,” Kuporovitch agreed smoothly. “But this fellow was one of the stupid, officious kind, and not the sort of man I could possibly take into my confidence. It must have been he who suppressed the letter I left behind on my desk to be forwarded to you; no doubt to revenge himself on me for having locked him up. I suppose he simply put in a report that I had absconded during the night?”

Voroshilov nodded. “As far as I remember, that was what happened. At all events, all I heard was that you had just disappeared, without leaving any indication as to whether you had met with an accident while out hunting early in the morning, been murdered, or gone off of your own free will. The Commissar probably thought he would look a fool if he admitted that you had locked him up in the grain store, so he burnt your letter and omitted the locking up from his report.”

“Exactly!” exclaimed Kuporovitch, with inward delight that this most satisfactory explanation should have been volunteered. “And you will appreciate now why it was that I left Kandalaksha in the way I did.”

“You have at least made clear your object,” the Marshal agreed. He had relaxed his stern, judicial air and was now obviously intrigued. Turning to a side table on which were some bottles and glasses he added: “Perhaps you and your friend would like a drink, while you tell me how it came about that you failed to achieve it.”