Natalia thought about their conversation that last night in Warsaw when she and Adam had huddled in the ammunition cellar. Adam had told her about his uncle, Ludwik Banach, who was arrested in 1939 and sent to Sachsenhausen, then his aunt’s arrest the next day. “I’m sure they’re both dead by now,” he’d said. So, on that night, just ten months ago, he hadn’t known that his uncle had been released from Sachsenhausen four years earlier.
But someone knew. The British, someone at SOE, must have learned just recently about Banach’s release from Sachsenhausen. And they knew he’d been sent back to Krakow in the custody of Hans Frank. Why else would they send her a message instructing her to locate the Provider?
Natalia left the café and walked quickly through the mostly deserted streets of the eastern Kazimierz District, avoiding eye contact with the occasional cripples and beggars and hunched figures lurking in the shadows—the desperate, starving people who could slit her throat for a single zloty.
She made her way back toward the busy Stare Miasto District, where she could disappear into the flow of pedestrian traffic on a work-day morning. Her stomach ached from hunger, and she eventually spotted a small bakery with a half-dozen poppy seed rolls in the otherwise empty display case. She purchased one, found a bench on the Rynek Glowny and sat down, thinking carefully about what to do next.
Why was the message sent to her? If SOE needed to contact the Provider why wouldn’t they have sent the message to the priest? Natalia took a bite of the poppy seed roll, then another, and it was all gone. She was still hungry. She considered walking back to the bakery to buy another when the answer suddenly struck her.
SOE didn’t send the message to the priest because they don’t know about him. They sent it to her because she was their only contact. She was the only one they knew of with knowledge about the Provider.
Natalia’s stomach growled, but she ignored it, trying to sort out the mystery. There were only three people besides the priest who knew that the documents she smuggled out of Krakow originated with someone called the Provider: Falcon, Colonel Stag and Adam. She felt a lump in her throat when she thought about Adam and what they might have had together, in some other place, at some other time.
But Adam had died that night at Raczynski Palace.
That left Colonel Stag or Falcon. The hair on the back of her neck bristled, remembering her last encounter with the drunken, abusive Falcon. But he wasn’t high enough in the AK chain of command to have contact with SOE.
Was it Stag? She remembered what the colonel had said the day she arrived in Warsaw with the smuggled documents: “You’ve done excellent work. And so has the Provider, whoever he or she is.” Stag’s uncertainty about the Provider’s gender indicated he also hadn’t known Banach’s identity.
Natalia stood up and walked around the square to clear her mind. In the end it was insignificant how the British had learned Banach’s secret identity. What really mattered was what they didn’t know. They know Banach is the Provider, but they don’t know about the journal.
And they didn’t know about Banach’s stunning discovery in January of 1945, one of the last entries in the journal. As Natalia recalled the revelation she had read in that entry, icy fingers raced up her spine. What if I’m the only other person who knows this? Banach is gone. Is it all up to me?
Natalia reached into her vest pocket and touched the journal.
She felt very alone.
Thirty-Four
AT HIS OFFICE IN BERLIN, General Andrei Kovalenko hung up the telephone and banged his fist on the massive oak desk. “Výdi von!” he shouted at the orderly who had just entered the office carrying a tray of coffee and biscuits. As the orderly scurried away, the general glared at Captain Andreyev, who sat across from him. “What the hell is that son of a bitch, Tarnov, trying to pull?” he demanded.
“He’s NKVD,” Andreyev replied. “You never know with them.”
The general gestured toward the phone. “That was the American, Colonel Meinerz, the head of their War Crimes Investigation Team. He wants to know why the NKVD is demanding that Hans Frank’s records be sealed. It was the first I’d heard of it. Apparently, Tarnov called him and didn’t bother to inform me.” Kovalenko leaned over the desk. “And how did Tarnov find out about the American diplomat’s visit to Sachsenhausen?”
“I think Major Vygotsky, the commander of the camp detail, was the leak, sir. He’s disappeared.”
The general pulled a cigarette from a crumpled pack and snapped his gold-plated lighter three times. It didn’t light. “Goddamned piece of shit,” he grumbled and tossed it into the wastebasket.
Captain Andreyev pulled out his own lighter and lit the general’s cigarette.
Kovalenko stared at the younger officer, thinking, considering. Andreyev had been with him a long time. The young officer had put his own life at risk, and lost his eye, rescuing Kovalenko from a Luftwaffe attack in Stalingrad. He could be trusted. And now, perhaps, he could be useful. “What I’m about to tell you, Captain Andreyev, stays between the two of us.”
Andreyev nodded.
Kovalenko continued. “I first encountered Dmitri Tarnov in 1940, while I was serving out my sentence in Siberia, thanks to the treachery and deceit of the NKVD. It was in late April, a miserable, rainy night, and I was swabbing the floor in the kitchen of the guard’s mess hall…” He paused as Andreyev raised his eyebrow. “Yes, swabbing the floor. As hard as it may be for you to believe, Captain, that’s what those of us who were caught up in Stalin’s great purge were reduced to… until they needed us again in ’41.” He took a long drag on the cigarette. “As I said, I was swabbing the floor, and I overheard a conversation between three NKVD officers sitting around a table in the mess hall with a bottle of vodka. One of them was quite drunk and was bragging about an assignment he’d just carried out in the Katyn Forest.”
Andreyev pulled his chair closer. “Tarnov?”
“Da, Tarnov. He’d just returned. And he was bragging about it, bragging how he’d carried out the execution of four thousand Polish officers—‘Polish dogs,’ he called them—and bulldozed their bodies into a ditch.”
Andreyev whistled softly and adjusted his eye patch. “So it’s true… about Katyn? It was the NKVD?”
“Of course it was. And that son of a bitch Tarnov was directly involved. More than twenty thousand Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia were all intentionally murdered, at three different locations. One of those locations was in the Katyn Forest. I heard him boast about it with my own ears.”
“Does Tarnov know that you overheard?” Andreyev asked.
Kovalenko shook his head and pulled out another cigarette, which Andreyev lit for him. “No, he never knew I was there.” The general stood and walked over to the window, looking out over the ruins of Berlin. “I’ve been loyal to Russia, Captain Andreyev. Even after being fingered by the NKVD in the purge of ’37, even when we invaded Poland in ’39. As you know, I’m half Polish, yet I remained loyal and did my duty. But what happened at Katyn…” Kovalenko was silent for a long time, smoking his cigarette, staring out at what little remained of Berlin.
Andreyev cleared his throat. “Is there anything you can do about it… about Tarnov and Katyn?”
Kovalenko turned around and smiled at his young protégé. “Perhaps. For years, especially after ’43 when the Katyn massacre became public and Stalin blamed the Germans, I tried to find out as much as I could about Tarnov. He’s related to Beria, you know.”