Masaryk Station (John Russell) (2 page)

The Russian lit another cigarette and said, for the fourth or fifth time, that the MGB would be frantically looking for him, and that he would be of no use to ‘the great world of freedom’ if his new friends allowed him to be killed. Surely it was time to move him somewhere safe, where they could discuss what sort of life they were offering in exchange for everything he knew?

Russell translated this as faithfully as he could; so far that day he had seen no potential benefit in concealing anything specific from the two English speakers.

‘Tell him he’s quite safe here,’ Farquhar-Smith said reassuringly. ‘But don’t tell him why,’ he added for the third time that morning, as if afraid that Russell had the attention span of a three-year-old.

He did as he was told, and was treated to another look of hurt incomprehension from Kuznakov. Russell had a sneaking feeling that the Russian already knew about the tip-off, and the two Ukrainians in the Old City hotel. He said he was worried, but the eyes seemed very calm for a man expecting his executioners.

With that thought, the telephone rang. Dempsey answered it,
while the rest of them sat in silence, trying in vain to decipher the American’s murmured responses. Call concluded, they heard him go outside, where the half-dozen soldiers had been waiting all morning. A few minutes later he was back. ‘They’re on their way,’ he told Russell and Farquhar-Smith. ‘They’ll be here in about ten minutes.’

‘Just the two of them?’ Russell asked, in case Dempsey had forgotten.

‘Yeah. You take Ivan here out to the stables, and we’ll come get you when it’s all over.’

‘But don’t tell him anything,’ Farquhar-Smith added. ‘We don’t want him getting too high an opinion of himself.’ He gave the Russian a smile as he said it, and received one back in return.

They deserved each other, Russell thought, as he escorted the Russian across the courtyard and down the side of the villa to the stable block. There were no horses in residence; all had been stolen by the locals three years earlier, after the Italian fascist owner’s mysterious plummet down the property’s well. A horsey odour persisted still though, and Russell took up position outside the entrance, where the sweeter smell of pine wafted by on the warm breeze, his ears listening for the sound of an approaching vehicle. Kuznakov had asked what was happening, but only belatedly, as if remembering he should. There was watchfulness in the Russian’s eyes, but no hint of alarm.

In the event, the two Ukrainians must have parked their car down the road and walked up, because the first thing Russell heard was gunfire. Quite a lot of it, in a very short time.

In the enduring silence that followed, Russell saw the look on Kuznakov’s face change from slight trepidation to something approaching satisfaction.

The birds were finding their voices again when Dempsey came to fetch them. The two would-be assassins were lying bloody
and crumpled on the courtyard stones, their British killers arguing ownership of the shiny new Soviet machine pistols. Neither of the dead men looked particularly young, and both had tattoos visible on their bare forearms which Russell recognised. These two Ukrainians had fought in the SS Galician Division; there would be other tattoos on their upper arms announcing their blood groups. Strange people for the MGB to employ, if survival was desired.

There was no sign that Dempsey and Farquhar-Smith had worked it out. On the contrary, they seemed slightly more respectful toward their Soviet guest, as well as eager to continue with the interrogation. Not that they learned very much. Over the next three hours Kuznakov promised a lot but revealed little, teasing his audience with the assurance of a veteran stripper. He would only tell them everything when he really felt safe, he repeated more than once, before casually mentioning another cache of vital intelligence that he could hardly wait to divulge.

It was almost six when Russell’s bosses decided to call it day, and by that time the four of them could barely make one another out through the fug of the Russian’s cigarette smoke. Outside the sky was clear, the sun sinking behind the wall of pines which lined the southern border of the property. Leaving Farquhar-Smith to sort out the nocturnal arrangements, Russell and Dempsey roared off in the latter’s jeep, and were soon bouncing down the Ljubljana road, city and sea spread out before them. There was already an evening chill, but the short drive rarely failed to raise Russell’s spirits, no matter how depressing the events of the day.

He had been in Trieste for two months now, having been loaned out by the American Berlin Operations Base—‘BOB’ for short—for ‘a week or two’, after the local Russian interpreter’s wife had been taken ill back home in the States. At this point in time, all the American intelligence organisations in Europe—and there were a
bewildering number of them—had only three Russian speakers between them, and since Russell was one of two in Berlin, a fortnight’s temporary secondment to the joint Anglo-American unit in Trieste had been considered acceptable. And by the time news arrived that his predecessor had died in a New Jersey highway pile-up, a veritable flood of interesting-looking defectors had stumbled into Trieste with stories to tell, and Russell had been declared indispensable by Messrs Farquhar-Smith and Dempsey. A replacement was always on the way, but never seemed to arrive.

In truth, Russell wasn’t altogether sorry to be away from Berlin. He missed Effi, of course, but she was currently shooting another movie for the Soviet-backed DEFA production company, and he knew from long experience how little he saw her when she was working. The German capital was still on its knees in most of the ways that counted, and over the previous winter the threat of a Soviet takeover had loomed larger with each passing week. Having failed to win control of the city’s Western sectors through political chicanery, the Russians had opted for economic pressure—exploiting the Western sectors’ position deep inside the Soviet Zone, and their consequent reliance on Russian goodwill for all their fuel and food. Until a couple of weeks ago, it had all seemed little more than gestures, but on April Fool’s Day—a scant twenty-four hours after the US Congress approved the Marshall Plan—the Soviet authorities in Germany had upped the stakes, placing new restrictions on traffic using the road, rail and air corridors linking Berlin with the Western zones. This had continued for several days, until a Soviet fighter had buzzed an American cargo plane a little too closely and brought them both down. Since then, things had got back to normal, although no one knew for how long.

Berlin’s intelligence outfits would still be in a frenzy, and that was something worth missing. His American controller Brent Johannsen,
though a decent-enough man, was handicapped by his ignorance of Europe in general and the Soviets in particular, and his misreading of the latter’s intentions could be downright dangerous to his subordinates. Russell’s Soviet controller Andrei Tikhomirov was usually too drunk to bother with orders, but in January he and Yevgeny Shchepkin had been farmed out to one of the new K-5 whizkids, a young Berliner named Schneider, who seemed to think the best way to impress his Russian mentors was to behave like the Gestapo.

No, Effi might be calling him home, but Berlin most definitely wasn’t.

Trieste was a monument to failure, a city crowded with people who only wanted to leave—it often reminded Russell of a film called
Casablanca
, which he’d seen during the war—but the food and weather were a huge improvement on Berlin’s. And the ‘Rat Line’ story Russell had been working on for over a month was making him feel like a journalist again. Over the last three years he had almost forgotten how much he enjoyed digging up such stories, sod by clinging sod.

‘This okay?’ Dempsey asked him, breaking his reverie. The American had stopped outside a tobacconist’s about halfway down the Via del Corso. ‘I need a new pipe,’ he added.

In the distance there was some sort of demonstration underway—in Trieste there usually was. Yugoslavs wanting the Italians out, Italians wanting the Yugoslavs out, everyone keen to see the backs of the Brits and the Yanks.

Russell thanked Dempsey for the lift, and took the first turning into the Old City’s maze of narrow streets and alleys. His hostel was on a small plaza nestling beneath the steep slope of St Giusto’s hill, a Serb family business which he had judged much cleaner than its Italian neighbour. The supply of hot water was, at best, sporadic, and his clothes always came back from washing looking
remarkably untouched by soap; but he liked the proprietor Marko and his ever-cheerful wife, Mira, not to mention their seven or eight children, several of whom were almost always guaranteed to be blocking the staircase with some game or other.

There was no one at the desk, no letters for him in the pigeonhole, and only one daughter on the stairs, twirling hair between her fingers and deep in a book. Russell worked his way around her and let himself into his home away from home, a room some five metres square, with an iron bedstead and faded rug, an armchair that probably remembered the Habsburgs, and, by day, a wonderful view of receding roofs and the distant Adriatic. The bathroom he shared with his mostly Serbian fellow guests was just across the hall.

Russell lay down on the over-soft bed, disappointed but hardly surprised by the lack of a letter from Effi—even when ‘resting’, she had never been a great correspondent. To compensate, he re-read the one from Paul which had arrived a few days earlier. As usual, his son’s written language was strangely, almost touchingly, formal. He was marrying Marisa on Friday the 10th of September, and the two of them hoped that Effi and his father would do them the honour of attending the ceremony at St Mary’s in Kentish Town. Solly Bernstein, Russell’s long-time British agent and Paul’s current employer, would be giving the bride away, Marisa’s parents having died in a Romanian pogrom. Solly also sent his love, and wanted to know where the new story was.

‘I’m working on it,’ Russell muttered to himself. London, like September, seemed a long way away.

He looked at his watch and heaved himself back up—he had a meeting with a source that evening, and was hungry enough to eat dinner first. There was still no one on the desk downstairs, and the drunken English private hovering in the doorway was looking for a less salubrious establishment. Russell gave him directions to the
Piazza Cavana, and watched the man weave unsteadily off down the cobbled street. Removing his trousers without falling over was likely to prove a problem. The restaurants on the Villa Nuova were already doing good business, with some hardy souls sitting out under the stars with their coats buttoned up. Russell found an inside table, ordered
pollo e funghi
, and sat there eating buttered ciabatta with his glass of Chianti, remembering his and Effi’s favourite trattoria on Ku’damm, back when the Nazis were just a bad dream.

An hour or so later, he was back in the Old City, climbing a narrow winding street toward the silhouetted castle. A stone staircase brought him to the door of a run-down delicatessen, whose back room doubled as a restaurant. There were only four tables, and only one customer—a man of around forty, with greased-back black hair and dark limpid eyes in a remarkably shiny face. He wore a cheap suit over a collarless shirt, and looked more than ready to play himself in a Hollywood movie.

‘Meester Russell,’ the man said, rising slightly to offer his hand after wiping it on a napkin. A plate with two thoroughly stripped chicken bones sat on the dirty tablecloth, along with a half-consumed bottle of red wine.

‘Mister Artucci.’

‘Call me Fredo.’

‘Okay. I’m John.’

‘Okay, John. A glass,’ he called over his shoulder, and a young woman in a grey dress almost ran to the table with one. ‘You can close now,’ Artucci told her, pouring wine for Russell. ‘My friend Armando tell me you interest in Croats. Father Kozniku, who run Draganović’s office here in Trieste. Yes?’

Russell heard the woman let herself out, and close the door behind her. ‘I understand your girlfriend works in the office,’ he began. ‘I’d like to meet her.’

Artucci shook his head sadly. ‘Not possible. And I know everything from her. But money talks first, yes?’

‘Always,’ Russell wryly agreed, and spent the next few minutes patiently lowering the Italian’s grossly inflated expectations to something he could actually afford.

‘So what you know now?’ Artucci asked, lighting a cigarette that smelled even worse than Kuznakov’s brand.

Russell gave him a rundown. The whole business had come to his attention while on a fortnight’s secondment to the CIC office in Salzburg the previous year. The Americans, having decided not to prosecute a Croatian priest named Cecelja for war crimes, had started employing him as a travel operator for people they wanted out of Europe. As he investigated the latter over the next few months, it became clear to Russell that Cecelja, far from working alone, was just one cog of a much larger organisation, which was run from inside the Vatican by another Croatian priest named Krunoslav Draganović. Using a whole network of priests, including Father Kozniku here in Trieste, Draganović was selling and arranging passage out of Central and Eastern Europe for all sorts of refugees and fugitives.

The Americans called the whole business a ‘Rat Line’, but Russell doubted they knew just how varied the ‘rats’ had become. In addition to those thoroughly debriefed Soviet defectors whom the American CIC was set on saving from MGB punishment, Russell had so far identified fugitive Nazis, high-ranking Croat veterans of the fascist Ustashe, and a wide selection of all those Eastern European boys’ clubs which had clung to Hitler’s grisly bandwagon. The Americans were paying Draganović $1,500 per person for their evacuees; but the others, for all he knew, were charity cases.

Artucci listened patiently, then blew out smoke. ‘So, what are your questions?’

‘Well, first off—are Draganović and his people just in it for the money? Or are they politically motivated, using the money they get from the Americans to subsidise a service for their right-wing friends?’

‘Mmm,’ Artucci articulated, as if savouring the question’s complexity. ‘A little of both, I think. They like money; they don’t like communists. All same, in the end.’