Amelia Brandt, alias Rosa. He’d read the file in Moscow, listened to Sheslakov’s account of his talk with Luerhsen, and for some reason he’d been filled with a deep sense of foreboding. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps it was just that her life had been so different from his own, almost the reverse in fact. Perhaps it was her being a German, perhaps being a woman. What he wanted to know, he told himself, feeling the alcohol beginning to loosen his body, was whether she was ready to die. Like Nadezhda. How could she be?
Yes, she’d known tragedy, she’d met the enemy face to face, but only fleetingly — the rest of her life had been, no, not easy, but… removed. Espionage was a fantasy world, a game played out on the war’s margins. How could she, how could anyone in America know, really know, what thirty years of war had done to Europe, how thin the civilized crust had grown, how utterly cheap a mere life had come to seem?
He emptied the glass Russian style, feeling it sting his throat. No, he didn’t think he knew how to whistle anymore.
Amy sat on the edge of the basin with her legs dangling over the side and watched him walk toward her around the rim. He looked American, dressed in chinos and a checked shirt, but she knew it was him. She took the orange out of her bag and absentmindedly tossed it from one hand to the other like an impatient baseball pitcher waiting to be relieved.
He bought a Coke and sat down about fifteen feet away, separated by a fat man, watching, she knew, to make sure he hadn’t been followed. They’d done a good job in Moscow. The haircut was perfect, the army boots looked as if they’d seen a few Pacific Islands. She wondered how good his English would be — twenty-six years was a long time.
After about ten minutes the fat man got up to leave and Kuznetsky took out a cigarette, patted both shirt pockets, and discovered that he had no matches. “Would you like a light?” she asked, taking her cue. “Thanks,” he said with a flat Midwestern twang. He moved closer and casually took the matches and offered her a cigarette. As he lit hers their eyes met.
The last thing he’d expected to see was her half-veiled amusement. Nervousness yes, cold efficiency perhaps. She was either very right or very wrong for this sort of work, and he wasn’t in an optimistic mood. She looked so young too. You could go from one end of the Soviet Union to the other and not find a thirty-three-year-old that the years had treated so kindly.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a soft, almost accentless English. She picked up the orange. “The absurdity of things like this…” He was a remarkable-looking man. Not in a purely physical sense, but he seemed to radiate… power, that was the only word for it. His eyes had seemed to look straight through her, utterly clinical. And yet, as he walked around the basin, even as he’d sat not five yards away, she’d had an almost opposite impression, a sort of bearlike shambling…
He seemed to relax. The eyes switched to neutral, gazing blankly across the water. He was thinking about something that woman with Sheslakov had said. “She will be driven, she will drive herself…” Now that did sound absurd on a day like this, in a place like this.
He told her, slowly but precisely, what he had told Yakovlev about their problem with the escape route. She didn’t interrupt, merely asked whether it was still on.
“Until we hear otherwise, and I doubt whether we will. The Party would have us cross the Pacific on a raft rather than let this chance go by.”
She was pleased, he could see that. That was something. “All I need for now,” he said, “is a good look at your German friend.”
“He’s American. He’ll be picking me up outside the Library of Congress at six on Tuesday evening and dropping me at the same place later, I don’t know how much later.” She reached into her bag, brought out the photo of him she’d taken on their trip. “That’s him. Joe Markham is the name he’s using.”
“No trouble with him?”
“Not yet. He’s not the type to have doubts, but he’s not a fool. And he’s an excellent shot, or so he tells me.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
She got up, leaving the cigarette pack. “You can keep them,” she said.
He watched her walk away past the memorial, cursed softly under his breath in English, and then started off in the opposite direction.
Back in his hotel room, he removed the tightly folded rice paper from the cigarette package, memorized the address and telephone number it contained, and flushed the paper down the toilet at the end of the corridor.
Seven
Sheslakov watched the streets of Gothenburg roll past the open window of his limousine. The drive from Stockholm had taken most of the day, but he’d spent much of it asleep, recovering from the previous night’s flight across the Baltic. Perhaps it wasn’t really necessary for him to deal with Lorentsson personally, but he knew he couldn’t have trusted such a task with an underling.
They drove through the city center now, old buildings and young blondes, so many blondes, a nation of not-quite-Garbos. Sheslakov recalled the film he’d watched with Kuznetsky a few weeks before — Ninotchka — and smiled at the memory. Garbo had been so beautiful, and the bright young NKVD men watching had been too busy expressing their ideological outrage to notice. What did they expect from Hollywood — Alexander Nevsky?
“We’re nearly there,” the driver told him.
They had left the city behind, were close to the sea, and every now and then a gap in the trees would reveal the waters of the Kattegat bathed in the gold of the setting sun. Houses were few and far between, but they made up in size for what they lacked in numbers. It was a fitting place for a shipping magnate to make his home.
Lorentsson’s mansion was built like a castle, complete with stone walls and crenellations, perched above the rocky coast. Sheslakov was admitted by a butler and ushered into a reception room that, from the sensuous depth of its carpet to the exquisite workmanship of its chandeliers, reeked of affluence. There was no doubting that capitalism worked for this capitalist.
There he was left to his own devices for more than half an hour — a little lesson, he told himself, that Swedes don’t like the thought of being pressured. In his younger days Sheslakov would probably have been annoyed. Now he found such stratagems amusing.
The butler returned and led him up through the house to a study that overlooked the sea. Lorentsson sat behind a polished mahogany desk, a big man with blond hair and beard, fifty-five years old, according to the NKVD file in Sheslakov’s pocket. The shipping magnate didn’t rise to greet his visitor, merely gestured him to a chair. Another little signal.
Sheslakov sat down, savored the comfort of the chair, and smiled at the Swede. “We can speak English, yes?”
Lorentsson nodded.
“It has been made clear to you that I represent the Soviet Government, and doubtless you have made certain that this is so…”
Lorentsson nodded silently again.
“Good, I will come straight to the matter. We understand that according to an agreement between the British, the Germans and your own government, four Swedish ships are permitted to travel, unmolested, between Gothenburg and transatlantic destinations. Is that correct?”
Lorentsson nodded again, looking a trifle more wary.
“And this agreement is still honoured? We understand there were some problems in January but that since then everything is fine.”