Faked Passports (52 page)

Gregory grinned. The cynical humour of the lazy-eyed Russian appealed to him tremendously and with a further word of thanks for the General's courtesy in providing them with bedrooms instead of cells he followed the others out of the room.

The orderly led them down a long corridor and throwing open two doors side by side, tapped first Erika then Gregory on the shoulder, indicating that they should go in and remove their furs. The rooms had the same lingering flavour of past glories that they had noticed in the General's office, so evidently the castle had not been sacked in the Revolution but had been taken over with its furnishings complete. The beds were large and looked comfortable but the sheets were of the poorest quality cotton and pale grey in colour. There were no fixed basins in the rooms or water in the jugs, so having taken off their furs they both came out into the corridor again.

A door on its far side stood open and looking in they saw that it was a big room with a huge four-poster double-bed. Freddie was standing near it, blushing furiously, while Angela was taking off her furs, and the orderly leaned against the wall near the door smoking a cigarette. Erika caught Angela's eye, then
Gregory's, and all three of them had difficulty in suppressing their mirth. They had forgotten for the moment that Angela and Freddie were supposed to be the von Kobenthals; their host was naturally treating them as man and wife.

With a muttered word the orderly took them to the far end of the corridor and showed them a big, old-fashioned bathroom where they all took turns to wash. He then escorted them back to the main hall on the first floor of the castle and threw open another door next to that of the General's office.

Kuporovitch was there standing with his back to a big fire of logs. Another orderly was laying a mahogany table for five people. Moving over to a sideboard the General poured out five glasses of vodka.

The fiery spirit made Angela choke but Gregory took his down in one gulp, as he knew he was expected to do, and was poured a second ration as they sat down to table where, to start off with, they were given helpings of caviar which would have cost a pound a portion in London.

It was their first opportunity for nearly two months to learn anything of the progress of the war and the General spoke quite freely about it when they questioned him.

The Finns had put up a much stronger resistance than had been expected. It seemed that the Soviet Political Commissars had been grossly misinformed. They had believed that they had only to create a Finnish Communist Government under Kuusinen for the Finnish Workers to arise and revolt against the brigand, Mannerheim; but that had not proved the case at all. Instead of a walkover the war was proving an expensive business for the Soviet. The early attacks on the Mannerheim Line had failed completely so many more troops had been brought up and another onslaught launched between January the 22nd and 28th; but that had failed also. It had not been until a third great offensive, at the end of the first week in February, that the line had even been dented at its coastal extremity to the south and the Finns were still holding their first-line positions in the north, at Taipale, where the line ended on Lake Ladoga.

The Soviet attacks had proved equally disastrous against the Finnish waistline further north and owing to the incredibly bad communications several Russian divisions had been very badly mauled. The General attributed these reverses to the fact that, against the advice of the military commanders, the politicals had insisted that second-rate troops were quite good enough to use in the easy victory they anticipated over Finland; but he said
he thought that things would be different now as Marshal Budenny had brought some of his crack divisions up to be employed on the Karelian Isthmus, and the Russian War Lord, Marshal Voroshilov, had taken command of operations there in person.

As a dish of venison was served they passed to the war between Germany and England and France; but about this the General had little to tell. He said that all over Europe it had proved the severest winter for the best part of a century. Even England was reported to have been under snow for several weeks at a stretch and Central Europe had been entirely frozen up; which probably accounted for the continued delay in the launching of the threatened Nazi
Blitzkrieg
.

The Germans had been making continuous air-attacks on British shipping and, if their reports were to be believed, half the British Navy and countless British cargo ships had been sunk; but then … he smiled a cynical apology to his guests … nobody outside Germany
did
believe the German reports. It was quite clear from bulletins issued in the United States and other neutral countries that the British convoy system was working with almost miraculous effect and the British Air Force was continuing to drop leaflets with impunity all over Germany. The raids on both sides were, however, no more than tip-and-run affairs and the war in the West seemed to have reached a stalemate.

“No other countries became involved, then, during the time that we were out of the world?” asked Erika.

The General shook his head. “No.
Herr
Hitler continues to exercise pressure on the Balkans and it looks as though he is gaining ground there. At the end of January the Rumanian Government took over the control of all the oil concerns, in order to ensure Germany a good supply, but Italy is the dominating factor in the Balkans now. Mussolini is straining every nerve to keep the peace there, but he continues to be very antagonistic towards us. He has sent quite a number of planes to Finland.”

“How about the Scandinavian countries?” Gregory inquired. “Do you think they will continue to keep out?”

“Yes. Sweden and Norway are helping Finland with military supplies and they have sent many volunteers. Without them I doubt if the Finns could have held out for so long; but they dare not openly declare war on us—much as they would like to do so, They are much too frightened of being attacked by Germany in
the south. There was great excitement in Norway last week, though. A German cargo ship with three or four hundred British prisoners on board who had been captured during the actions of the
Graf Spee
in the South Atlantic sought refuge in Norwegian territorial waters and was creeping down the coast on her way home. For once the British took the bull by the horns and sent a destroyer right up the fjord where this ship, the
Altmark
, was lying up. The British sailors boarded her with cutlasses and took their compatriots off. It was a direct contravention of Norwegian neutrality, of course, and set every Embassy in Europe humming with activity.”

Freddie's French was not very good but he had been managing to follow the conversation with a word of help from Angela here and there. Having gathered the gist of the General's remarks he began to grin with delight at this grand, old-fashioned naval action; Gregory caught his expression before he could speak and, giving him a hard kick under the table to remind him that he was supposed to be a German, launched out into a bitterly hostile attack against Britain's cunning, injustice and hypocrisy.

Some very sticky sweet cakes completed the meal and with them Caucasian champagne was served—at least, strictly speaking, it was not
served
, for the orderlies just opened a couple of bottles and dumped them on the table.

As they drank the rich, sweet wine the General turned the conversation and refused to discuss the war any further, saying that he was much more interested in other developments outside Russia, of which he had been able to gather very little for a long time past owing to the strictness of the Soviet censorship. Erika and Gregory willingly gave him many details about conditions in Germany at the time they had left it and the state of things in other European countries which they had visited before the war; all of which their host lapped up with the eagerness of a child who is let loose in a sweet shop after having long been denied sweets.

While they talked they drank. There appeared to be an inexhaustible supply of the Muscat-flavoured champagne which, since the orderlies had left the room after stacking the dirty plates together while the diners were still at table, the General fetched, bottle by bottle as it was required, from a case under the sideboard. By midnight Angela and Erika were so tired that they had great difficulty in suppressing their yawns, while Freddie looked extremely bored; he could only follow the
conversation with great difficulty and had long since given up any attempt to do so. At length, as the General showed not the least inclination to go to bed, Erika asked if he would excuse them since they were all terribly tired after their ninety-mile sleigh-drive.

He stood up at once and apologised for his thoughtlessness but expressed his hope that the men would not leave him yet as he had not enjoyed himself so much for ages. Gregory expressed his willingness to make a night of it but he noted with some concern the look of almost comical indecision on Freddie's face.

Having lived within earshot of Freddie and Angela for weeks at a stretch he knew that they were as amorously inclined as most healthy engaged couples, but Freddie would never have admitted such a thing to a third party and his embarrassment upon being shown into a double bedroom with Angela earlier that evening arose from his desire to continue to shield Angela's reputation even before their friends. Gregory did not care two hoots if Freddie took what the gods and Angela seemed prepared to give him or slept in his clothes on the sofa in her room; the one thing he did
not
want was any fuss about their
sharing
a room, which might cause the General to suspect the particulars he had been given about the party even more than he obviously did at the moment.

To Gregory's joy Angela stepped into the breach by gamely relieving Freddie of any responsibilty. Smiling at the General she said sweetly in her best French: “As the Baron is going to remain up with you I'm sure that you won't object to my taking my husband with me, because I never sleep well without him.”

Picking up the old silver candelabra the General personally lighted his guests to their rooms and a few minutes later returned to Gregory.

Having polished off the current bottle of champagne Kuporovitch fetched a bottle of
sleivowitz
from the sideboard, remarking: “That fizzy stuff's all right for a change but I only had it up for the women. I expect that, like myself, you prefer a man's drink, eh, Baron?”

“Thanks.” Gregory kicked the logs into a blaze before settling down beside the fire. “I'm all for something with a kick in it.”

Putting the bottle of plum brandy on a small table between them, the General sat down again and they began to talk once more upon many topics which are a closed book to Russia's
millions: the possibility of German and Austrian restorations; the part still played by the British monarchy in the affairs of the Empire; the truth behind the headlines about the Civil War in Spain; the purchasing power of the mark in Germany, the franc in France, the pound in England and the dollar in America; the development of the film industry outside Soviet Russia with the part that ballet and the theatre played in the Western world; the price of stalls and gallery in terms of roubles; the cost of good food in the best restaurants in capitalist countries; the price of apartments, steamship travel and clothes.

It was quite clear to Gregory that General Kuporovitch was not an ordinary Bolshevik leader who had started his life as one of the ignorant Russian masses, but a man of considerable culture who was rusty on his subjects only because he had so little opportunity to talk of them, and when they were half-way through the second bottle of
sleivowitz
the General's story began to emerge.

He was not an aristocrat of sufficient prominence for his name alone to have brought disaster on him in the Revolution, but he came of a good family and had been a captain, aged twenty-nine, in a cavalry regiment when the Revolution had broken out. As he said: “All thinking Russians were atheists and Liberals in those days. We knew that the monarchy was rotten and it disgusted us to think that the Little Father, weak fool that he was, should allow himself to be made a dupe by that dirty villainous priest, Rasputin. We officers who had to fight the war had plenty of evidence of the corruption that was rife in high places. The soles of the boots issued to our men were made of paper. They were sent to the front with only one rifle between three men and there was never enough ammunition for the guns. The country was long overdue for a proper clean-up; so when the Social Democrat Revolution took place, and the Tsar was forced to abdicate, we officers hailed the news with every bit as much joy as our men.

“When the Bolsheviks seized power, six months later, that meant very little to us down on the lower Volga until a movement started among the men to shoot all their officers. But we had been fighting the Turks most of the time and I had had the luck to save the life of one of my sergeants—a chap called Budenny.”

“
The
Budenny?” Gregory asked with interest.

“That's it. All the world knows him as Marshal Budenny today; but
then
he was just Sergeant Budenny, of the Dragoons;
a great strapping fellow with a moustache like a couple of horses' tails. He protected me when some of the others wanted to put me up against a brick wall.

“Someone—God knows who—ordered us away from the front and we went to Tsaritsyn—they call it Stalingrad now. They would have shot me if I'd tried to leave them, so I went with my regiment. A few weeks later Voroshilov arrived there after his amazing retreat from the Ukraine and was elected to defend the town. It was Voroshilov who picked Budenny out of the rut and Budenny took me with him. Horses were his speciality and he hadn't got much of a brain—but enough to know that my military education would be useful.

“Tsaritsyn was right at the apex of the triangle held by the Bolsheviks. They called it the Salient of Death, you know—the Red Verdun. The odds against us were tremendous; but if the Reds hadn't managed to hang on there the grain barges would no longer have been able to get up the Volga. Moscow would have starved and the Revolution would have collapsed. By the time I had been fighting there for a few weeks it became a matter of professional honour to me and lots of other regular soldiers who were with the Reds that the town should not be allowed to fall. I don't think we cared much whom we were fighting, but by the time it was all over I was looked on as a dyed-in the-wool Bolshevik.”