Luerhsen looked back at him placidly, a faint smile forming on his lips. “My loyalties survived many years in the enemy’s prisons; they will doubtless survive a few more in the prison of my friends. Who is the woman you wish to know about?”
“Amelia Brandt, now Brandon. We understand from your initial submission of her name as a possible GRU recruit that you knew her as a child and that you met again in Berlin in 1933.”
Luerhsen smiled. “She was always called Amy, never Amelia. Our Berlin meeting was very brief, two hours at most. But yes, she made an impression on me, mostly, I think, because seeing her then, in those circumstances, was like seeing her mother brought back to life. They looked so alike, but it was more than that.” He smiled inwardly, as if taken by a memory. “Hard to define,” he said. “Do you have a cigarette?”
Sheslakov offered his package, watched the old man inhale deeply. “I need as complete a picture of her as you can give me.”
“May I know why?”
“She’s a key figure in an operation we’re mounting in America. I can say no more than that.”
Luerhsen looked at him, took another deep drag on the cigarette. “That pleases me.”
“Tell me about when you knew her as a child.”
“Her mother and I were lovers, you know that. We met in the spring of 1918. Her husband had been killed several years before, at Tannenberg, I think. She was totally committed to the Party — the Spartakusbund as it was then. It was what we called a ‘comrades’ marriage’ in those days. Party work and bed and nothing much else. Amy must have been about seven—”
“She was born in August 1911.”
“Six, seven. A lovely child, though I’m afraid we didn’t have much time for doing things with her. You can imagine what it was like in Berlin in 1918 — more meetings than there were hours in the day, more newspapers than there was toilet paper, which was what most of them were used as. Elisabeth Brandt’s house was our center of operations; it was always swarming with people. Another woman, Anna Kaltz, also lived there, and she had a daughter the same age as Amy — Effi — so the two little girls looked after each other. One dark one, one blond one. They’d help out, too, making drinks, rolling leaflets off the printer. In fact they always seemed to have ink on their faces. They both worshiped their mothers, I do remember that. But so did a lot of people in Friedrichshain. They were remarkable women.”
“Can you remember any specific incidents with Amy?” Sheslakov asked. Fyedorova had insisted on that question.
Luerhsen furrowed his brow. “Not really. I bandaged her knee once, I remember that. She’d cut it quite badly, should have had stitches, and it obviously hurt like hell. But she hardly shed a tear. She was a determined little thing. Once she started something she’d finish it. Really stubborn. I expect she still is. People don’t change much, do they?” He gave Sheslakov a quizzical glance, accepted another cigarette.
“Then the roof fell in. January 1919. I was here in Moscow at one of those interminable conferences for setting up the Third International. Elisabeth was one of the Party leaders killed by the fascists, not that they called themselves that then. She was raped and beaten to death by a gang of them in her own house, and while it was all happening little Amy was sitting in the cupboard under the stairs where her mother had hidden her. She came out eventually and found her mother’s body, then walked halfway across Berlin to her aunt’s in the middle of the night. Imagine it! There was gunfire, gangs of thugs roaming the streets looking for Communists, everyone shut up tight in their houses, not daring to go out, and there’s this little girl walking miles across the city. She didn’t say a word for six months. The aunt married an American in 1921, and they all moved to America soon afterward.”
“How do you know all this? You say you weren’t there.”
“From Anna Kaltz. She was in Kiel looking after her sick father during the week it all fell apart, and she didn’t dare return to Berlin for several months. She’s also the link with 1933, because she and Amy kept up a correspondence over the years—”
“Did Amy keep up with Effi too?”
“No. Strange. Or perhaps not. I think Anna was Amy’s link with her mother.”
“1933?”
“The terrible year. It was the summer, late July, I think. I’d been sent back to Berlin to organize the relocation of the Pas Apparat — the underground passport factories. The Nazis were well into their drive against us and we’d decided to move everything to the Saar. Effi Kaltz was the best forger we had — an amazing talent. Anyway, we were there, five of us I think, in this house in Friedrichshain, packing up all the stuff, the inks, papers, rubber stamps, everything. And there was this knock on the door and there stood this beautiful young woman in American clothes. Amy. She was in Germany for a holiday, a pilgrimage really, had tried to find Anna Kaltz and learned that she’d been arrested. So she’d somehow tracked down Effi.
“We didn’t know what to do with her. We were expecting the Gestapo any minute, and for once we weren’t wrong… but I’m getting ahead of the story. We had another couple of hours’ work to do, and Amy said she’d wait, even though she must have known the risk she was running. I finished my tasks before the others and I talked to her for a time — twenty minutes, something like that. It was a strange conversation.
“At first I couldn’t get over how much she resembled her mother — it was uncanny. Then I started noticing the differences. There was a reticence about her that Elisabeth never had, a feeling she was holding herself in, holding herself very tightly. Maybe it was just being in Berlin again, with all that that must have meant for her. But I think it was more than that—”
“She was unhappy?”
“No, not at all. On the contrary, she seemed very happy. She was wearing an engagement ring—”
“Are you certain of that?”
“Yes.”
“But she never married.”
“Engagements can be broken off. No, it wasn’t unhappiness. I sensed divided loyalties, and remember, it was my job to do just that for many years. You get a feeling for it, you know there’s a split somewhere, sometimes even before the person concerned does. Amy was happy in one world but she still had at least half her heart in her mother’s world. And I don’t think she’d ever have been able to pull the two together. She had to choose.”
Luerhsen paused, seemed to be examining the cell floor. “Or have the choice made for her, which is probably what happened that evening.” He paused again.
“The Gestapo arrived,” Sheslakov prompted.
“Yes. A crashing on the door. Those bastards even enjoyed hitting doors. But we were prepared. There was a tunnel from the cellar that ran under the house behind and up through a grating in the next street. The Pas Apparat’s houses were the eighth wonder of the world when it came to hidden exits. We got away down the tunnel and piled into the car that was waiting and half-rammed our way past a Gestapo car that was blocking a crossroads. It was like an American gangster movie. And Amy…”
He smiled at the memory. “In the car I said something to her, something flippant like ‘Welcome home,’ and her face — the reticence was all gone — she was the absolute image of her mother in that moment. It was that look that made me put her name forward, because I knew, I knew, that the German part of her life wasn’t finished, and that sooner or later she would know it, too, and that somehow she would… not avenge her mother, but somehow justify her mother’s death. Do you understand?”