Such evidence was easier imagined than found. His employers mightn’t need him at the moment, but he doubted they’d sanction a week in Rome.
That morning a message from Artucci had been pushed under Russell’s door-‘same place, same time, FA’. He remembered the place but not the time, which seemed to sum up his sojourn in Trieste. ‘Could try harder,’ as one schoolmaster had written on his term report several aeons ago.
Eight o’clock rang a vague bell, so Russell allowed ten minutes for the walk, and duly ventured out into the rain. This had grown noticeably heavier since his last outing, beating a heavy tattoo on his umbrella as he splashed his way up the streaming cobbles. Artucci was waiting for him in the small deli-restaurant, alone as before, and apparently wearing the same set of clothes. This time there were no bones on his plate, just a pool of tomato sauce which he was sponging up with a wedge of ciabatta.
He raised the bread in greeting, and summoned the same young woman to pour Russell a drink.
‘So what do you have for me?’ Russell asked when she was gone. ‘Has Signor Kozniku been selling any more documents?’
‘He away,’ Artucci said. ‘Go to family in Verona. For holiday, he says, but Luciana say he runs out the door. Very angry with Americans, but she not know why.’
Russell could guess. Given Kozniku’s part in Palychko’s intended emigration, certain Ukrainians would be wanting their piece of flesh.
The memory brought a pang to Russell’s groin. ‘So what do you have?’ he asked Artucci, shaking his head at the offer of a cigarette.
The Italian lit his own. ‘The two Krizari I tell you about, the Croats from Osijek. They multiply.’ He smiled. ‘Is that right word?’
‘I don’t know. What do you mean?’
‘There are four now, and they all move to a house above the city. A house with no one home. An Englishman arranges it all. A man named Seddon. And soon they go to Yugoslavia.’
Russell had met Seddon, and strongly suspected he was employed by MI6. In fact, an MI5 acquaintance had more or less told him so. ‘How do you know all this?’ he asked Artucci.
‘You care?’
‘Yes, actually.’
Artucci gave him a resentful glance, as if Russell was deliberately making it difficult for him to play a Man of Mystery. ‘There is a man-another Croat-who makes papers for Kozniku. He also make paper for English and Americans, and this week the English ask him to make new paper for Yugoslavia.’
It sounded convincing. ‘Do you know when they’re crossing the border?’ Russell asked. He couldn’t see any way to use the information, but you never knew.
‘No,’ Artucci admitted. ‘But why wait when glory calls?’
‘Or Goli Otok,’ Russell said dryly. Goli Otok, or Naked Island, about a hundred miles south of Trieste, was where Tito had established a prison camp for his growing number of opponents.
Artucci laughed, displaying gold molars which Russell hadn’t known were there.
‘Can you get me all the names on the new papers?’ he asked.
‘I think so. How much you pay?’ After they’d settled on a price, the Italian pulled the list from his pocket.
At least it had stopped raining when Russell left. He walked back down the narrow streets, between lines of dripping eaves, wondering what benefits the British and Americans thought helping people like that would bring them. Whisking war criminals out of Tito’s reach would further stain the West’s reputation, and sending their descendants into Yugoslavia was just a waste of lives-the Communist regime there might be vulnerable to Soviet pressure, but not to anything the West and its sordid allies could do. Intelligence services had once seen their job as collecting intelligence, but these days they seemed to be paraphrasing Marx: ‘Spooks have hitherto interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.’
And by arming Europe’s disaffected and letting them loose on their enemies, they were only changing it for the worst. Russell was sick of the lot of them.
Outside his hostel two of Marko’s daughters were playing what looked like a Serbian version of hopscotch on the slippery paving stones. The older of the two, whose name he knew was Sasa, treated him to a big-eyed smile.
Which was something to take from the day.
It was a pleasant spring Sunday in Berlin, and after admiring Hanna’s vegetable garden the adults all sat out in the sunshine, sipping the French wine which Bill Carnforth had liberated from the PX stores. Rosa and Lothar were busy exploring the rest of the garden, and Effi found herself remembering Thomas’s children at that age, in the last couple of summers before the war. Joachim had died in Russia, but Lotte was only a few feet away, looking now very grown up.
The ten who eventually sat down to eat were likely to share an appreciation of Hanna’s cooking, but Effi was wondering how much disagreement the traditional Sunday discussion would unleash. For the moment though, it all seemed fine. Any group containing Major Bill Carnforth and one of the KPD administrators charged with making American lives difficult was likely to be fraught, but, for the moment at least, Strohm and Zarah’s boyfriend were getting on much better than their governments did.
Various aspects of Russian behaviour soon came to dominate the conversation, and Effi was impressed by Carnforth’s refusal to join the chorus of condemnation. Others were much less restrained: Thomas with a scathingly funny account of the latest events at City Hall, Annaliese with a heartfelt attack on Soviet interference in the city’s hospitals. And Effi soon found herself lamenting the recent shift by the Soviet cultural authorities, and lampooning the story of A Walk into the Future.
Strohm took it all in good spirit, although he regretted the general tendency to lump the KPD in with the Soviets, as if they were one and the same. He rhapsodised about his old friend Gebauer, and expressed his own hope that Germans would get to decide their own future.
It was left to Lotte to defend the Russians. ‘What do you expect of them?’ she asked indignantly. ‘They lost twice as many people as all the other countries put together, and they deserve all the reparations they can take. I know some of their soldiers behaved badly here in Berlin, but were they any worse than some of our soldiers in the Soviet Union? They’ve got the economy moving again in their zone, and theatres and cinemas open, and their dancers and orchestras come here to play. And the Americans-I’m sorry, Major-but your government is so aggressive. Everyone knows the Marshall Plan is just a way of getting their businesses back into eastern Europe. And it is absurd that they and the British and the French have these sectors inside the Soviet zone. They’re like three Trojan horses!’
Effi noticed Thomas smiling and shaking his head.
Bill Carnforth seemed lost for words.
‘But cutting off the milk supply?’ Zarah asked. ‘How could that be justified?’
‘It can’t,’ Strohm agreed. ‘It was a stupid thing to do. But both sides make mistakes. I think these mistakes might even be an inevitable consequence of occupying a foreign country.’ He turned to Carnforth. ‘And wouldn’t your men be happier at home.’
‘Sure they would, but how would that work?’
‘Get back to the table. Unify the country again. Demilitarise it. Make it neutral. From what I can see both you and the Russians have punished all the Germans you’re going to punish, so why not leave us to rebuild our country?’
‘It sounds like sense,’ Carnforth agreed, ‘but then I’m just a soldier.’
‘It sounds a bit ingenuous to me,’ Thomas said. ‘Gerhard, you’re a communist-don’t you believe that a country has to choose between one socio-economic system and the other? You can’t have both free enterprise and state planning, can you? It has to be one or the other-the American way or the Soviet way.’