The Samurai Inheritance

XV

The third room on the right showed even fewer signs of life than the previous one and put Jamie in mind of an impromptu morgue. It took a moment before he sensed chests rising and falling in the heavy, stinking darkness and made out the figures of sleeping men. He waited, seeking some sound or movement that would identify the man he was looking for — He’ll be the one who’s awake — but heard nothing but the faint hiss of laboured breathing.

‘Dimitri? Dimitri Kaganovich.’ The whisper cut through the doom-laden silence like a buzz saw. At first it evoked no reaction, but soon Jamie felt a chill run through him. In a single instant something had changed. Something indefinable, then not. Previously the atmosphere in the room had been oppressive, now it contained a definite hint of danger. His eyes sought out the source, drifting across the gloom and finding nothing — until he detected the faintest gleam in the far corner to the left of the window, away from any light source. Not one gleam, but two, reflecting the dull glow from the corridor lamp. A pair of eyes, watching him, wary, but not frightened; malevolent, hateful eyes that wished him dead.

‘Dimitri?’ Jamie pushed carefully through the beds until he was standing at the foot of the one occupied by the watching man. A hollowed-out face showed above the blanket. Skin stretched tight across bones like knife blades, a razor-lipped mouth collapsed over toothless gums, the high dome of the bare scalp etched with an elongated wine-stain. The face of a dead man. Apart from the eyes.

‘Six one two five seven four Kaganovich.’

‘What?’ Jamie barely caught the hoarse growl.

‘So you’ve come at last?’ The old man struggled with each word as if it were the verbal equivalent of a blacksmith’s anvil, and the sentences that followed were punctuated by the wheezing breaths of an asthmatic. ‘About time. I have been waiting for you. I am ninety-eight years old and I’ve been waiting to die since before you were born. Don’t hesitate. Come closer.’ The tone changed and it took Jamie a moment to realize the next words were thoughts he wasn’t supposed to hear. ‘Yes, come closer, you bastard. If this had been twenty years ago, or even ten, I’d have my hands round your neck or my fingers in your eyes. If I still had my teeth, I’d rip your throat out, but you smashed them in with a hammer, didn’t you?’ A long sniff. ‘So take your fucking Tokarev and put the barrel on the back of my neck so I can feel the cold steel. Look, I’ll turn my head away to make it easier. One bullet, one corpse, that’s the Cheka way. Just the right angle, up and into the skull.’

‘I haven’t come to kill you.’

In the suspicious silence that followed, Jamie could almost hear the wheels turning in the old man’s brain. ‘Why not? Am I of so little danger to you now? Not that I ever was, of course, but that didn’t matter to you. A denounced man is a dead man, isn’t that what you used to say?’

‘I’m not the secret police. I only want to talk to you about the old days.’

‘You have cigarettes?’

The abrupt change of subject was designed to give the other man time to think, but Jamie was happy to accommodate him. He fumbled in his pockets. Knowing the fondness of elderly Russians for the kind of cigarette that would choke a donkey, he’d bought two packets from the hotel bar. Still, he thought it was worth pointing out the ‘no smoking’ signs that decorated the walls.

‘Pouf,’ the old man grunted. ‘You think a nail is going to kill me now? Or any of these old fools I share this cell with. If anybody objects I tell them to go and fuck their mother.’ Jamie shrugged and handed him one of the thin cardboard tubes and produced a cheap disposable lighter, tucking the lighter and pack beneath his blanket when he’d done. The Russian inhaled with a long, whistling appreciative sigh and the thin lips twisted into a smile.

‘What were we talking about?’

‘The old days.’

Kaganovich choked on a cough of chesty laughter. ‘When you are as old as I am there are many old days. Do you mean the old days when I was young and fought in Manchuria? Or when Stalin himself noted my facility for languages and made me a diplomat and sent me to meet the beast Hitler?’

‘Yes, I—’

But Kaganovich wasn’t going to be interrupted. The voice became harsher. ‘Or when I came back and was denounced by that crooked bastard thief Berzarin? Berzarin, who had me sent to the gulag, ruined my life and destroyed my family. I always vowed that one day I would piss on Berzarin’s grave, but it is too late for me now. Maybe I will tell you what you want if you promise to piss on it for me, huh? Is it Dimitri the human mine detector you want to hear about? Or Dimitri the war hero who smashed the Fascisti on the Seelow Heights and marched into Berlin. Or perhaps it is Dimitri the traitor to the Motherland who ended up working in the same mines as the Fascisti he had been killing, because that cocksucker Stalin remembered his name, may he rot in a thousand hells.’

His strength spent, Dimitri lay back with his eyes closed and the cigarette drooping from his lips, the smoke spiralling up in wispy ribbons to form a cloud below the nicotine-stained ceiling.

Jamie gently removed the cigarette. ‘Why don’t you tell me about Hitler and Berzarin?’

It must have been five minutes before the old man started speaking.

‘I can’t remember taking a piss in the morning,’ he began in a voice that shook with effort, ‘but I remember those days like they were yesterday. It was just after that bastard Hitler had made his backstabbing treaty with the Yipponski, the Japs. Berzarin, who was my chief, called me into his office and told me we were both ordered to the Kremlin. I remember his hands were shaking and the sweat was pouring off him,’ the haggard features took on a semblance of a smile at the memory, ‘not that I wasn’t shitting my pants myself. This was at the start of the Great Purge. There were already plenty of rumours going round about people, loyal people, being pulled in and never being seen again. So you have to imagine us, Berzarin and me, shaking in our shoes as we drive there in one of those fancy new ZiLs—’ He was interrupted by a shout from the bed by the door, followed by a string of muttered curses that died away to be replaced by a desperate gasping struggle for breath. Jamie automatically turned to help the other man. ‘Do you want to hear my story or not?’ Dimitri rasped. ‘He’ll soon be dead, and good riddance.’ Reluctantly Jamie turned his attention back to Kaganovich. ‘Good.’ The old man nodded. ‘We saw Litvinov first. He wasn’t a bad fellow for a Jew, but all he told us was that our mission was deadly secret. We must reveal its existence to no one, not even our wives — not that I had one then. The Boss would tell us the rest. So we’re feeling a little braver when we go in to see him, knowing we’re not going to the Lubyanka after all. He’s in a good mood, the Boss, all jovial and friendly. There’s been a big mistake, he says, the fucking Yipponski have persuaded the Nazis we’re some kind of threat to them. You’re going to Berlin to convince Hitler different. Tell him that Stalin is his best friend and that the Soviet Union has no interest in German spheres of interest (which wasn’t entirely true, because everyone in the Foreign knew the Boss had his eye on Bessarabia and so did Hitler). We’ll share technology and we’ll share information for an assurance that the Anti-Comintern Pact has no military dimension.’ He smiled at the memory and the ravaged features resembled a crow-pecked skull. ‘He has this big deep belly laugh, and he does it now. Hitler doesn’t like German Communists, he says, I don’t like them either; tell him we don’t care how many of them he kills. In fact, we’ll give him a list if that’s what it takes. Hitler’s a pragmatist, he says, he’s not going to rock the boat for a bunch of Mongolian by-blows.’ There followed a long silence, but Jamie knew better now than to hurry the old man. Sometimes it seemed he was finished, but eventually he would take up the story again, as if he’d only been drawing a long breath.

‘Then it’s back to Litvinov for the details,’ Kaganovich continued. ‘More or less what the Boss had said with the rough edges smoothed off. Next day we flew to Berlin in time for Christmas, which, let’s face it, even for a party loyalist like me was a fucking sight better than a freezing Moscow apartment with a couple of old farts and a family with four kids.’

His chest started to heave and he was racked by a paroxysm of coughing that shook his whole body, wave after wave until Jamie thought he would surely die. Slowly, it subsided to a dry wheeze and the old man hacked something from his throat and spat it beside the bed.

‘Not long now,’ he whispered. ‘The last doctor these lousy Chechens brought to examine me said a build-up of fluid is putting a strain on the heart and pressure on the lungs. Next step renal failure. Of course, that’s if the black bastard knows what he’s talking about.’

‘You were talking about meeting Hitler.’

Kaganovich nodded. ‘They kept us waiting for a week.’ He grunted what might have been a laugh. ‘Meetings with clerks and endless visits to their fucking boring museums. Some secret, eh? Everywhere we went they offered us things. Free tickets to the theatre. A Swiss watch. Hampers of food. Jewellery for the wife or girlfriend. Even bits and pieces from the museums if you saw something that took your fancy. I didn’t touch a thing, but Berzarin was a man with deep pockets, as they say. Nothing was too small or too large for him. He thought it was Christmas every day. Stupid bastard. Of course, I reported everything to Sergeev, our NKVD minder. What—’

‘Do you remember what sort of things Berzarin chose from the museums?’

‘I thought you wanted to know about Hitler?’

‘Later.’

‘Mostly gold, but other small portable stuff.’

‘Anything from the South Sea Islands?’

‘Who knows, at my age you expect me to remember the details? They sometimes split us up, but you could bet one thing: if it had value Berzarin wouldn’t refuse it. He hid his loot in a big chest he thought I didn’t know about in our apartment off Wilhelmstrasse. I couldn’t figure out how he was going to get it all home until much later.

‘One day a car drew up outside the apartment, complete with an SS driver and a Hauptsturmführer with a Death’s Head badge on his uniform cap. He was square jawed and blond, like you see in the pictures, and he looked at us as if we were shit on his shoe. Berzarin had more clout than me and he didn’t like it much, but he knew this was the day, so he kept his fat mouth shut. Well, they took us to the back door of the Reich Chancellery — the old one, where they built Hitler’s bunker under the gardens. We were escorted up endless flights of stairs to a big office where a Nazi bigwig called von Neurath was waiting. Berzarin managed to hide his disappointment — we’d been briefed that von Neurath was already on the way out, and Ribbentrop was the man to get results — but he said his piece. He was just finishing when a door opens and this figure dressed in a grey business suit walks in. You want to say that when you first met Adolf Hitler the room went cold, or he gave off an aura of terrible power.’ He shook his head. ‘Just this ordinary fellow in a suit, with a silly moustache. “You must tell Comrade Stalin that Germany and the Soviet Union will always be friends,” he says in this quiet voice, not like the newsreels at all. “The pact is a purely diplomatic instrument, with no military dimension.” He made to leave, but turned back for a second. “Tell him I believe we have much in common, he and I.” Then he was gone. The Great Dictator? Adolf Hitler was more like a used-car salesman, and just about as honest, huh? So we had what we came for and we went home to Moscow. Only Kaganovich didn’t get home. As soon as we got off the plane they took me to one side and opened my luggage. Surprise, surprise, eh? What do we have here, Comrade Kaganovich? Gold coins. Nazi propaganda. Hashish. “It seems you are a Nazi spy, comrade.” I turn to Berzarin and Sergeev for help, but they’re looking at me as if they knew all the time, and then Berzarin smiled — a sort of I-told-you-so smile.’ He shrugged. ‘They walked away and I never saw either of them again. I denied it, of course, but in those days they just beat you and beat you until you admitted anything just to make them stop. A two-minute trial and twenty years’ hard labour. Only the war came. I ended up in a punishment battalion where I was expected to atone for my crimes by becoming dead. But Kaganovich fooled them. Kaganovich lived and in time Kaganovich the survivor became Kaganovich the legend, then Kaganovich the hero. Four wounds and you were sent back to a regular unit. When I knocked out three machine guns holding up the regiment’s attack on the Seelow Heights, they put me in for the Order of Lenin. Of course, I think that’s it, Kaganovich is back, but Stalin had a long memory. They came for me as soon as the war was over and it was back to the gulag for another eight years for my impudence, and then the next thirty spent scraping a living any way I could find without the right papers. Shit jobs every one, and then,’ he emitted a harsh cackle, ‘just when you don’t think life can get any worse, you end up in a fucking place like this.’

‘Do you know what happened to Berzarin?’

‘I’d like to say someone put the bastard’s nuts through the ringer like they did mine, but Berzarin the betrayer naturally prospered. When I was released from the gulag I looked for him, but all I know is he ended up running some district out east, where no doubt he robbed honest men blind and had his hand stroked by the other crooks. He’s dead now, of course, but I find it comforting to think of him spending a few years lying in his own piss like me, before he went.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Now I’m tired. Unless you have another packet of nails, please fuck off and leave me to die.’

‘Thank you for your time, Mr Kaganovich.’

‘Yob tvoyu mat. Just remember. If you find Berzarin, you will piss on his grave for old Kaganovich.’