When morning came John made a pot of strong coffee, chilled by a certainty that had grown as the heath fell silent. She hadn’t taken back her request for help. Surprised by his blindness, Roza hadn’t mumbled, ‘Forget what I said on the phone.’ She still wanted justice. She was still looking to him with that bullet in the background, despair misting her eyes.
After four large cups of Fair Trade Arabica from Peru, John picked up the phone and dialled one of the few numbers he knew by heart. All his life he couldn’t commit them to memory. Finally the Old Duffer put him through.
‘Anselm?’
‘Yep.’ The goat had managed it. ‘What’s up?’
‘I need a lawyer.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
A special kind of quiet reigned over the empty corridors of the IPN. Most of the staff had gone home. The outcome of Sebastian’s research lay on a long mahogany table in a large conference room. There were two sections of material, but each had their own piles with individual sheets laid out for ease of reference. The matching chairs on one side had been pulled back to the wall, allowing Sebastian and Anselm to move freely as if they were choosing what to eat at a self-service counter. Heavy gold curtains had been drawn. Ornate wall lights cast a pleasant, soft light. Sebastian had made coffee and the woman in white had found some Austrian biscuits. There was an unmistakable atmosphere of finality, embarrassment and secrecy which was odd because the substance of everything on the table would soon be on the TV and plastered over the front pages of the national press.
‘I’ll start with Klara,’ said Sebastian, moving to the far end of the table. He’d taken off his jacket and thrown it on the back of a chair. ‘Her file is missing. Maybe it went into one of the shredders. Its absence is unfortunate but not fatal to our purpose. There are lots of clues left behind and they give us a fairly clear picture of her value as an agent and the kind of work she carried out.’
He pointed at an open ledger, very much like a school attendance register. His finger tapped ‘Klara Fielding’ in a left-hand column. Alongside, to the right, was the agent name: JULITA.
‘While we have confirmation of her recruitment,’ he said, loosening his tie, ‘we don’t know whether she was a volunteer or whether she agreed to co-operate following an approach. The timing is significant. She goes into the book within a month of her marriage. That suggests a friendly tap on the shoulder after the exchange of rings:
Confirmed by her friends, thought Anselm. They’d found her changed by close proximity to English phlegm. She’d lost her sense of fun.
‘Obviously as the wife of a British diplomat, she was a well-placed and potentially high-value source.’ Sebastian stepped from left to right, drawing Anselm along. He picked up a sheaf of photocopied correspondence. ‘She didn’t disappoint. This letter is typical and shows what kind of material she was feeding to her handlers. When Churchill went to Washington in January fifty-two to show the world that the Brits and the Americans were ever the best of friends, JULITA had reported that there were, in fact, strong differences over policy to the Middle and Far East, defence strategy and the supply of US steel. I suppose Klara just listened to table talk and repeated what she’d heard.’ Sebastian tapped an annotation at the bottom of the page. ‘But it was important: this missive was copied to Vyshinsky in the Foreign Affairs Department in Moscow Klara was listening for Stalin. She’d become his ears in the British Embassy’
Sebastian shuffled further to the right.
‘Now these are as frustrating as they are enticing.’
Three books lay open in a line, like new acquisitions in a public library, the pages chosen to seize the curiosity of anyone who happened to pass by.
‘It seems Klara’s value was domestic as well as foreign. These are entry and exit registers. They show that Klara attended various locations, presumably to report back to her handler or other interested parties. The addresses are revealing, as are the names of the persons she met. Klara was talking to members of the Public Security Commission.’ Sebastian spoke with heavy significance, but it was lost on Anselm, so he spelled out the implication. ‘The Commission coordinated the Terror. Presumably Klara had information on friends and contacts of the UK government. Or the Commission was asking her to keep an ear to the ground about certain people. Without her file, we’ll never know’
He moved a step to the left, stopping in front of the third volume. Slowly he ran his finger across the bottom of the page as if to underline an entry.
‘JULITA came to Mokotow in nineteen fifty-two,’ he said, drily ‘She’d an appointment with Major Strenk. I’d love to know what they talked about.’
‘Me, too,’ said Anselm, managing to make a contribution at last.
They both read the sepia script several times. Anselm wanted to lift each word off the page and squeeze out the meaning, as if they were so many sponges soaked in blood.
‘She was in the building at the same time as Roza,’ said Anselm.
‘Yes:
‘Pure chance, but it makes my skin crawl.’
‘Mine, too.’
‘Is there anything in there — ’ Anselm gestured towards the neat piles thinking of bodies in a morgue — ‘which links Klara to Brack?’
‘No. But they could easily have met; Brack was Strenk’s immediate subordinate.’
He sure was. Father Kaminsky had called them pupil and master, father and son. ‘Anything that links Klara to Roza?’
‘Nothing.’ Sebastian sighed. ‘Being under the one roof is just a coincidence. The Commission were talking to Roza. Klara was talking to the Commission. All it shows is two women on different sides of the fence. They’d made contrary choices. They each paid a price… the cost, in the end, being roughly similar.’
From that perspective, the last document on the conference table was a kind of receipt. In August 1953 a functionary in the Ministry of Public Security had circulated a letter to Departments I, IV, V, VII and section heads at Bureaus A and B informing them (in terms) that JULITA’s stream of intelligence had dried up, a nice enough phrase, sufficiently wide to encompass death.
Sebastian moved along two paces, stopping at the beginning of the second group of records. Again they lay in a row like today’s specials in the canteen.
‘Now we come to John,’ said Sebastian, almost brightly.
Who didn’t know that JULITA had been found hanging from a set of railings. He knew nothing of her self-accusation. Maybe John had tracked down his proud maternal grandparents and seen the two medals that had been slipped under the door by Strenk or whoever.
She’d done important work for the future, they’d have said. She’d made a difference.
‘There is a file on John,’ began Sebastian, opening the green cover and closing it again as if it wasn’t worth a glance. ‘Like every other journalist he was watched but nothing of interest was picked up. His profile and conduct are just like any other correspondent. He doesn’t stand out. He doesn’t attract any attention. The only record of relevance is his expulsion from Warsaw for activities consistent with espionage.’
‘Any mention of Brack?’
‘None.’
‘Thought not.’
A second phone had appeared on Brack’s desk. He’d told Irina not to breathe a word of the Dentist to Frenzel. He’d been up to something that couldn’t make a bleep on anyone’s radar, neither the SB’s nor the Stasi’s.
‘At this point, I thought I’d come to a dead end,’ said Sebastian, hands deep in his pockets. The black stubble showed he hadn’t shaved. He’d been working hard. ‘Just to be sure, I sent off a string of emails to other archive holders throughout the former communist bloc. Nothing came back until this afternoon — ’ he began that relentless drift again from left to right — ‘when these arrived from Bucharest. This time Brack does make an appearance.