Winner Lose All Page 3

  The Great Game! It was the only one Hanni knew and she excelled at it, not that she had any choice. Moscow had a sharp, barbed hook dug into her, which guaranteed her complete loyalty. It was her father’s life. To the Kremlin, a well-set hook mattered much more than an agent’s age, sex, experience in the field, or the amount of money they were paying. It mattered little that they had trained her or that her father had been a senior party member for twenty-five years. The NKVD trusted no one, especially a German. It was only her work in Leipzig and her ability to keep an unpredictable maniac like Lavrenti Beria happy that kept her father alive.

  “Have you ever killed a man, Liebchen?” she asked him one night, not that she did not already know the answer. “It is not a pleasant thing to do, even when it is a Nazi thug whose life you are taking, but you get over it. In time, you can get over almost anything. I killed six men in the Crimea, five with my rifle and one with a bayonet. I killed many more at Stalingrad. I do not know how many. After a while, a callus forms deep inside you, until it completely covers your soul. By then, I had become a very good shot, so they gave me a real sniper rifle. It was their ultimate sign of respect. In your country, young women get a pretty dress or a tube of lipstick as a present. At Stalingrad, it was a Mosin-Nagant rifle with a good scope.”

  “Must have been tough.”

  “Tough? The best snipers were women, and there were hundreds of us. But like the others, I stopped counting and just kept doing it, over and over again.”

  General Usipov, the head of the NKVD’s foreign operations department had an eye for talent and was Beria’s talent scout. No matter how good a shot she was, with Hanni’s background and her language ability, once she proved her loyalty and her nerve, she was far too valuable an asset to waste in the front lines. Usipov pulled her from the trenches and sent her to the NKVD’s top spy schools. When she was ready, it was Lavrenti Beria himself who sent her back into Germany, to the Underground cell in Leipzig. Over the next year, she became one of his top agents, masquerading in turn as a schoolteacher, a shop clerk, the mistress of a Danish businessman, and a simple farm girl. As she did, she rose through the ranks from Private to Lieutenant, Captain, and now Major in the NKVD, all before her twenty-fourth birthday. Tough and street smart, Hanni harbored no illusions about this life or their chances of surviving in it. She took it as it came, fully expecting each day to be her last.

  Since 1941, life held few ambiguities. Regardless of which side they were on, people knew precisely who their enemies were, and that simple equation had not changed for four to five years. Allies were allies, the enemy of my enemy was my friend, and those loyalties did not change. As the autumn of 1944 wore on, everyone knew that the collapse of Nazi Germany was simply a matter of time. For Hanni Steiner and Ed Scanlon, it only took a few days for them to become friends. By mid-November, as the white shroud of an early winter covered Saxony, they grew closer still and she soon became his enthusiastic lover. Why not? It was an intense, high-stress world they shared. In the beginning, before it grew into something much deeper and more complex, their lovemaking was little more than manic fumbling in the dark by two people grasping at warmth, affection, and a moment’s pleasure in each other’s arms. She had no inhibitions in that regard. She knew what she wanted, and in the mélange of contradictions that made up Hanni Steiner, what she wanted then was the young American Captain.

  “Love me,” she demanded as she threw her arms around his neck and looked deep into his eyes. “Love me as passionately as I love you, but never trust me, Liebchen. Remember, Comrade Beria does not send virgins to do work like this. I lie, I cheat, and I steal. I grab babies from their mother’s arms, steal their grandmother’s purses, con them out of their last warm meal, and I break hearts. So do not ever trust me.”

  Memories. Most of his memories of Hanni had the brilliant colors and warmth of a sunrise. The ones he treasured most were of those cold winter nights he spent in her arms in the hayloft of an old barn. It was Christmas, 1944. He and Hanni were hiding from the incessant Gestapo sweeps in the city and they took refuge on a small farm in the hills south of Leipzig. Outside, it was “Stille nacht, heilige nacht,” Silent night, holy night, and as beautiful as an old Christmas card. Lying on their backs wrapped in thick blankets, they could look out through a dormer window into the moonless sky. The sky was filled with stars and each one seemed as if it had been freshly minted just for them.

  Hanni! Closing his eyes, he could still see her flashing blue eyes, golden hair, pink cheeks, and infectious smile. She knew precisely who she was, and how thin the threads their lives hung from in those days. No doubts. No hesitation. No half efforts. That was the way she lived and the way she loved. Strong willed? When she wanted something, she attacked it with a reckless physical abandon that Ed Scanlon had never experienced in an American woman. No doubt the war contributed, with all its gut-wrenching emotion and tensions; but when you do not expect to see too many more tomorrows, you squeeze every drop you can out of your todays. Whatever, all Scanlon knew was that nothing before or since seemed as intense as those long, cold winter nights with her in that old hay barn as their naked bodies searched out the warm spots between the goose-down comforters and each other.

  “Go ahead,” she said with a wet, husky laugh as she rolled on top of him. “I will not break.” Break? Hanni? That winter he doubted anything ever could, but he was wrong. They were doomed, each in their own intensely painful way, but he was too close to see it then and too young and too dumb to understand.

  “Come away with me,” he begged her.

  “Poor Liebchen.” She smiled up at him and ran her fingernails slowly down his chest, setting him on fire. “You know I cannot do that.”

  “I know you won’t. There’s a difference,” he argued, not that it mattered. “It’s your father; he’s in Moscow under Beria’s thumb, isn’t he?” He kissed the nape of her neck, waiting for a denial that never came. “You know they’re just using you.”

  “Like you are using me?”

  “Hanni, there’s using, and then again, there’s using. I love you.”

  “Love? Do not use big words that you do not understand.”

  “Hanni, I do love you. Why can’t you understand that?”

  “And why can you not understand that the war will not stop simply because you want it to? I am a Communist and a proud one like my father and his father before him,” she said as she pushed his lips away.

  “The Russians own you.”

  “The Russians? I do not even like them, Edward. They are stupid and can be senselessly cruel simply for the sake of being cruel. No, I work for a better Germany, not for Mother Russia. We are finally getting rid of Hitler and it will not be long before the Russian people get rid of Stalin. You shall see.”

  “The Russians? Who is being naive now? They wouldn’t know how to start.”

  Moscow tasked her small Communist cell with gathering intelligence about German troop movements, describing any new equipment headed east, and conducting whatever mischief they could. With all the rail lines and regional highways that passed through the city, it was not difficult to count rail cars and trucks, note unit markings on the trucks and tanks, identify their insignias, and ferret out information from the troops and their officers. That much was easy. It was what Hanni had been trained to do. As she often complained to Scanlon, her larger problem was getting Moscow Center to believe any of it.

  “They refuse to accept anything that does not fit into one of Stalin’s pet theories, Liebchen. They will not even listen.” Finally, tired of risking her life for absolutely nothing of any value, Hanni’s frustration boiled over and she began waging a private little war of her own on the Nazis by making increasing forays into sabotage. Over the months, she and her band of arthritic old men had become quite adept at slipping delayed explosive charges on outbound freight cars and sabotaging machinery in the city’s armament factories, until they ran out of explosives. That was when Hanni shifted into assassinati
on.

  “Why are you taking risks like this?” he asked her in frustration as she was about to set out to Berlin for a few days. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “I am a soldier. It is my war too,” came her angry reply. “Besides, this is nothing, Liebchen, nothing.” She dismissed his challenge with an innocent smile. “You should have been at Stalingrad.” True, he thought, but even she knew that sabotaging trains and equipment was one thing. Killing high-ranking German officers one-on-one was a risk she did not need to take, even in the chaos of a war gone this badly. That was equally true, but killing was a skill at which Hanni proved to be very adept. Her unique talent was in making murder appear to be an accident or an ordinary street crime. Young and attractive, she had little trouble drawing the attention of senior SS officers and Nazi Party big shots out for a night on the town in Leipzig, Dresden or even Berlin itself. For many of them, it would be their last. The next morning they would be found in a dark alley or behind a brothel in one of the city’s seamy nightclub districts, pants down, pockets empty, and a slit throat or a knife between the ribs.

  Hanni was always careful to pick her targets. She would vary the pattern so the Cripo, the criminal police, would have little, if anything, to go on. These were not the kind of sleazy back-street crimes that they or the Gestapo, the infamous secret police, liked to publicize, so they would be quietly dismissed as the work of the city’s criminal element. Like the cockroach, the criminal underground was the only part of German society to survive twelve years of Hitler and five years of war relatively unscathed.

  Still, that did not make the deed any less dangerous. “I don’t like it,” Scanlon told her.

  “I do not recall asking you,” she shot back.

  “It’s too risky.”

  “Life is risky, Edward. And in case you have not noticed, there is a war going on.”

  “Not like the one you’re waging,” he argued. “It will be over in a matter of months, maybe a year, tops. You don’t have to take these kinds of risks.”

  “Over? You do not understand the German people’s infinite tolerance for pain. They will continue to starve and die as long as Herr Goebbels tells them it is their patriotic duty. They are moral sheep and they need a push, Liebchen. Besides, it gets us papers, identity cards, and the money we need to operate — and it is what I do.”

  Yes, it is, but you do not have to be so goddamned good at it, he thought; and you do not have to be so goddamned stubborn. “It’s changing you, Hanni. No matter how tough you think you are, killing men with your own hands is turning you hard and dry inside, and you’re too damned stubborn to admit it. Hell, it’s sapping the life out of both of us,” he pleaded, but she would not listen. “All right, all right, go, but I’m going with you,” he finally said.

  It was a cold winter evening in mid-December when they left. Berlin was blacked out. The worst of the Allied bombing was yet to come, but you could smell the fear in the air. By 10:00 p.m., the only people on the dark streets were a few bundled-up men and women hurrying home to their basements or a bomb shelter. They knew the math. Like everyone else who had not yet abandoned the city, they knew the flying time from Surrey to Berlin and they knew they were safe for a few more hours. Soon, only the drunks and the terminally brave would be out at night. They were the ones who made the best targets.

  Sauntering through the lobby of the Hotel Adlerhof, she had little trouble being picked up by a jowly, half-drunk Waffen SS Standartenführer, or Colonel. He was a burly stump of a brute just back from the Eastern Front. A monstrous ego usually went with the rank, and luring the fellow outside and down a dark alleyway was easy. She stopped to pull out a cigarette, turned provocatively towards him, and waited for him to proffer a match. He stepped closer, breathing heavily as he pressed her back into a dark doorway and held out the match. Above its yellow glow, she saw him leer as his eyes locked on hers and he slipped his other hand inside her coat. As he groped for her crotch, a stiletto dropped into her hand from the sleeve of her coat. The thin, razor-sharp blade opened with a whispered Snick! as she drove it into him below the rib cage. Their faces only inches apart, she pushed the blade upward, twisting, cutting, and lifting him onto the toes of his well-worn field boots. He would have died right then and there, had it not been for his thick winter coat and layers of fat. They stayed the blade just enough for her to miss his heart.

  “You!” he gasped as his eyes bulged and his round face turned crimson. His fingers went to the hilt of her knife. He grabbed it and tried to pull it out, but she would not let him. His effort only twisted the blade and cut him even deeper as he felt his own warm blood pumping out between his fingers. The knife must have severed a major artery. Wool coat or not, the wound was mortal. It was only a matter time. How ironic, he must have thought as he looked down. With all those ribbons and medals on his chest from battles from France to Moscow, he would meet his end in a back alley in Berlin at the hands of a murderous local whore. He stumbled backward into the alley, growling, determined to get away, only to find Scanlon blocking his way. The two men stared at each other, both round-eyed and unsure, until the Colonel realized this newcomer must be with the woman.

  “You… bastard,” the German hissed as he lunged forward and wrapped his bloody fingers around Scanlon’s throat. He could not move. The German was big and strong. Dying or not, the fury of his attack caught Scanlon completely off guard. With the handle of the knife sticking out of his ribs, it was amazing that the man was still upright. Somehow, he willed his remaining strength into his fingers as he tried to crush the American’s throat. Face to face and their eyes only inches apart, the German’s hatred and anger washed over Scanlon as if he’d been standing in front of the open door of a blast furnace. If the big bastard was going to die, he had decided he was not making the trip to hell alone.

  Scanlon grabbed the Colonel’s wrists and tried to pry them apart, but they would not budge. Locked together, swaying back and forth, Scanlon saw spots dancing in front of his eyes. He felt his knees buckle. Finally, desperately, he head-butted the German square on the nose, and drove him backward until he lost his balance and toppled over. They fell together onto the pavement with Scanlon on top, his weight driving the dagger in even deeper. The SS Colonel uttered a last, loud, painful grunt before he went limp and those large, angry eyes glazed over. Finally, the big bastard was dead.

  Scanlon rolled off him and lay on the ground, coughing. He took a series of deep, rasping breaths until his head cleared and the spots in front of his eyes faded. He turned his head and was stunned to see Hanni kneeling next to the Colonel’s lifeless body, already picking through his pockets for his papers and money.

  “Do not look at me like that,” she snapped at him, her eyes cold and pitiless. “Do not dare!”

  She was right, he realized. He should not judge her; but at times like these, she scared the hell out of him and he realized he barely knew her at all.

  Despite all that Hanni had been through in her life and the things she had done, it never ceased to amaze him that she remained the eternal optimist, while he was the one who descended into nervous pessimism. “It’s only a matter of time before they catch you,” he said, realizing he had fallen hopelessly in love with her. The only thing his incessant warnings accomplished was to start another of their increasingly frequent arguments. He tried to persuade her to leave with him for the west when the time came, but she refused to even consider it.

  “I know what I am doing, Liebchen. They aren’t going to catch me, not yet; because it is not written in the Book,” she said with that infectious smile of hers. “We each have our page in the Book of Life and it shows when our days are up. My page has not been written on yet, not yet. It is as bright and clean as the day I was born.”

  However, Ed Scanlon was from New York, from the streets of Manhattan. He was not an optimist, and he sure as hell was not a mystic. “When I leave here, you’re coming back to England with me,” he insisted.

&n
bsp; “You know I cannot do that,” she said fondly. “So, enjoy our time together and do not worry about me. I do not, and you should not either.”

  However, he did, and he never stopped worrying about her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As dangerous as Leipzig was in the fall and winter of 1944, with nightly Allied bombing raids, Gestapo manhunts, and the inherently suicidal nature of their work, Ed Scanlon found the city to be deeply magical. Even into late 1944, the Innenstadt, the bustling old city center, retained a semblance of its tree-lined squares, broad boulevards, and steep-pitched tile roofs. Until then, there had been only minor damage to the statues, the fountains, the old city hall, and the baroque splendor of the Thomaskirche. Soon, however, the full fury of modern war would pound Leipzig into a pile of brick and rubble like all the other German cities. It had not happened yet, but those days were coming.

  Since the dark ages, Leipzig had been Germany’s progressive and open doorway to the Slavic lands to the east, known throughout Europe for its trade fairs and international exhibitions. While Munich, Frankfurt, and Nuremburg were the cradles of right-wing extremism, Berlin and Leipzig nurtured the radical left, intellectuals, and internationalists. It thrived on its own unique blending of street vendors, smugglers, baroque churches, freethinkers, publishing houses, Bach cantatas, spies, the avant-guard, modern abstract painters, musicians, Socialists, furriers, peddlers, rich merchant bankers, Jews, and the Socialist and Communist parties. Despite Hitler’s best efforts to crush its spirit, Leipzig remained a center of that radical culture.