Winner Lose All Page 33

  “It is good to see you again, Liebchen,” she began, as her words broke the spell. She spoke in halting, badly accented German, as if she had not spoken it in a long time. Again, she let her eyes dart around the crowd, moving from face to face as if from a well-ingrained habit. “With all these people around, I think it is safe for us to talk for a while,” she said as her eyes turned back and came to rest on him. “So, let us walk, the three of us.”

  Hanni took his arm, wrapping hers around his and pulling him close. As she did, Scanlon’s field of vision widened and he saw that she had her other arm wrapped around the arm of a teenage boy. He was the waiter from the party at the embassy, the one who slipped him the note. The boy was a head taller than Hanni, thin and gangly, but with black hair and a pair of angry gray eyes. In that instant, Scanlon understood everything. He now saw what he did not see the night before. It was like looking into a mirror.

  He stopped and faced her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded angrily.

  “Please,” she ignored his question and clutched them both even more tightly. “You are frightening him, Edward. I do not want that. It has taken far too long to get you two together, and I desperately want you to like each other,” she said as they resumed their slow stroll around the big colorful cathedral, arm in arm, with Hanni in the middle and completely in charge of the men in her life, just as it had always been.

  “His name is Georgi,” she told him. “He was born that September and I named him after old Horstmann. I did not think you would mind. I owed that crazy old man everything. Georgi only speaks Russian, so he does not understand what I am saying. Oh, perhaps the smattering of English they teach him in school, like the words he used last night, but that is all. Still, he is a clever boy, very smart, with a short temper and more than a touch of arrogance — just like his father,” she smiled. “And I warn you, he reads faces. He reads people, too; and he worries about me constantly.”

  “You knew you were pregnant, didn’t you?” Scanlon said, still not believing.

  “Of course, but it made absolutely no difference, nothing did. I tried to tell you that, repeatedly; but you refused to accept things for what they were. Beria had my father and had me by the throat, and there was nothing I could do except follow orders.”

  She leaned over and whispered something into the boy’s ear before she pushed him toward a large man whom Scanlon now noticed standing in the crowd about ten feet away. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his huge forearms, and he was watching Ed Scanlon intently. He did not look very happy to be here in Red Square to begin with, watching Hanni arm in arm with another man.

  “That is Pyotr, my husband. He knows all about you. So does Georgi,” she said. “We met in the labor camp after Georgi was born. Pyotr took care of me and saved my life, Georgi’s too. He is a good man. Without him, neither of us would have survived that first winter. In every practical way, he is the boy’s father and the boy is his son. That is why I would never, ever do anything to hurt him, to hurt either one of them. You do understand that, Liebchen?”

  Scanlon looked at the big man and gave him a polite nod as they kept walking. He watched her face, still too stunned to speak.

  “It truly is good to see you again, Edward, good to know that you are all right,” she said, as she looked away, her eyes casually but continually searching the crowd. Like him, she probably had a little speech all planned. She would have been working on it for years, as he had, spelling out each word on the ceiling above her, practicing, and praying that someday he would come and she would actually be able to say the words to him. Now, meeting her face to face like this, the words vanished like the morning mist under the hot sun.

  “It was a terrible thing I did to you,” she said. “I always made you take second place to someone or something, and that was not fair,” she said as she gripped his arm even tighter.

  He looked down at her hands. They were rough and scarred, the fingernails chipped and unpainted, and he wanted to cry. “It was the world you built for yourself, Hanni. I wanted to help you break free of it, but you wouldn’t let me.”

  “Oh, I knew that, and you were right. God, you were right,” she said as she looked up toward the sky and shook her head helplessly, fighting back the tears. “We both knew Stalin and Beria could never be trusted, but I had to pretend and hope. When I finally made it to Moscow with Raeder, even after everything I had done for them, they tossed me in the Lubyanka for my troubles. Frankly, it is what I should have expected. You know the old fable about the alligator who agrees to carry the scorpion across the river. He gets stung for his troubles, and they both drown.”

  “Because it is the nature of the scorpion.”

  “Yes, my mistake was giving them what they wanted.” She turned her sad eyes toward him. “Later, months later, I found out my father had died the summer before, in 1944. They shot him for being a ‘foreign subversive’ in one of their many mindless purges, so none of it mattered, the bastards.” He could see the pain in her face as if it had happened yesterday. “They only wanted reliable Germans running their new Germany. Anyone who had lived too long in the west or who had not slavishly toed the party line need not apply, especially a Jew.”

  “So they sent you to the Gulag?”

  “Yes, for a while. They moved us around to different work camps with no warning and no reason, of course. That is also ‘their nature.’ The first few years were the worst, but soon no one could even remember why they locked most of us up. They had already purged and executed most of the people who had been carrying out the purges, and after Stalin and Beria died, all the records were lost or intentionally destroyed. In the end, they simply let us go, like tens of thousands of others, because they did not know what else to do with us.”

  “Why didn’t you go back to Germany?”

  “Germany? I am not a German anymore, Liebchen. I do not think I ever was.”

  “But you’re sure as hell not Russian.”

  “No, but they are,” she said as she pointed toward Georgi and Pyotr with a half smile. “I could not leave them, and we have each other now.”

  “You should have come with me, Hanni. I begged you.”

  “The past is dead. Here in Russia, they even stuff it, cover it with wax, and put it under glass; so I do not dwell on it. I did what I had to do, and I would not have done it any other way, even if I could have. Neither would you and we both know it." She turned and wagged her finger at him with an amused twinkle in her eye. “But you had your revenge. That was a very dirty trick you played on me with Wolfe Raeder.”

  “It wasn’t me, Hanni. You tricked yourself.”

  “You knew the truth, though.”

  “Not until the very end, on that road, when Von Lindemann told me.”

  “I knew it! That snake! It was the loving look in his eyes that fooled me. For the first time in a long time, I let the romantic side of me win out. I let him have the Raeder girl, and look what it got me.”

  “I’m sure they thank you every day.”

  “Perhaps, but you do realize what you did to them?” she asked.

  “Did to whom?”

  “Did to them!” she laughed as she pointed at the Kremlin wall. “My God, you are CIA. You mean you really do not know?" She clutched his arm again and resumed her walking. “I was never allowed to see Raeder after I delivered him to Beria. They packed me off to the Lubyanka that very day, and I heard nothing for perhaps two or three years. I was a bit busy trying to stay alive back then, but the strangest things began to happen.” She smiled. “I would get visitors from Moscow, special visitors from the NKVD, or KGB as they call themselves now. At first, it was to punish me, as they always did; but as the months passed, they began to want information much more than they wanted to hurt me. They began to treat me better. I got more food, easier work, and the guards in the camps left me alone, as if someone had told them to be nice. Not all of them were from the KGB, either. I learned later that some of the visit
ors were from the Army, from the GRU, from other Politburo Members, even from Stalin himself, I suspect. It seems there was a big fish bone stuck in someone’s throat. Whatever, that is what kept me alive. No one wanted to sign the order for my execution or have me die on their watch for fear of being accused of trying to silence me. You see, it became a standoff between various Kremlin factions, all of whom feared and distrusted each other. That is why they kept sending people to question me, sometimes new faces and sometimes the same old ones, asking me over and over again about Raeder, Otto Dietrich, Nossing, Mannheim, the Research Institute, and all the rest. As time went by, they even asked me questions about you, Liebchen. Oh, yes, they wanted to know all about you, more so as you rose higher and higher in the CIA hierarchy. They wanted to know who made the decisions, and whose idea it was to get Raeder to defect to the Soviet Union. As I said, though, the men who asked all those questions were the very ones who ended up being liquidated — and I am still alive.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them the truth, of course. I was following Beria’s orders. After all, Wolfe Raeder had been a professor of aeronautics at the prestigious Berlin University and the head of a big German research institute. Göring and the Luftwaffe handpicked him for the job. He developed the famous Me-262, so who was I to doubt him? Besides, snatching him was all Dietrich’s idea, something he worked out with Beria. That is exactly what I told them. I think it was Beria’s name, the fact he was working on Stalin’s personal orders, the rivalries inside the Politburo, and the fact that I was just a dumb woman to begin with that kept me alive. I never mentioned Christina, because I knew nothing about her and her amazing talents; but the KGB would not have believed me anyway. A young girl? Responsible for all that brilliant mathematics? In this country, that is as unthinkable as her becoming a national chess champion. Years later, they showed me some scientific journals after her new work was published; but it was already too late for them. They fell farther and farther behind America, but no one could ever admit a mistake or a failure. That was also unthinkable.”

  She laughed to herself as she walked along. “You know how paranoid they were — how paranoid they still are,” she corrected herself. “So, it went on and on for years, but Stalin and Beria had become infallible by then — nothing was wrong and nothing could ever be wrong with their decisions. If Stalin and Beria had swallowed the good Doktor whole, how could anyone blame me? How could all those male geniuses on the top floor of Moscow Center possibly blame the poor, dumb little Steiner girl?”

  “You’re lucky they didn’t kill you just to cover it all up.”

  “Oh no, that was impossible. Russians do not like puzzles they cannot solve or chess moves they do not understand — and I think they were all just a little afraid of me. Remember, my orders came from Beria and his came directly from Stalin. What if this was another of Koba’s many tests? What if I was a plant? What if he was merely testing the interrogators, testing the testers? What if I died, and the Boss later changed his mind? Think of the position that would put them in. The doubts? The recriminations? As paranoid as Moscow was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, no one was brave enough to take that risk.“

  “So, they bought your story?”

  “No, no, but like the fish bone, they were stuck with it, and that kept me alive.”

  He studied her face with its wrinkles, the first streaks of gray in her hair, and the small scars. They made him feel guilty. “You were very lucky,” he told her.

  Her blue eyes flashed. “Luck had nothing to do with it. Your people were very clever — very, very clever. Looking back on it now, I think Raeder was a magnificent Trojan horse that your people ever so carefully crafted. He was perfect — larger than life, solid, arrogant, and as hollow as a dry gourd. Instead of being full of Greek soldiers, he was full of… well, nothing. He could rattle and make a lot of noise, but there was nothing inside.”

  “Hanni, if it was a setup, then they set me up, too.”

  “If you say so,” she said as she laid a finger across his lips, “but be honest with yourself. Why do you think they sent you back to Leipzig? Why only you? Why not five good men, or ten, or a hundred, if it was that important? In your day, you were good. However, by the time they sent you back in late March, you were little more than a broken down alcoholic. They knew that, and they were counting on me to succeed and on you to fail. No offense, Liebchen, but someone knew the truth. Perhaps it was the Luftwaffe big shots in Berlin who were working with your OSS bosses, but someone knew. Someone tipped them off about Raeder and the girl. Von Lindemann? Rudy Mannfried? You and I will never know, but like smart shoppers, your people in Washington knew to grab the good stuff as soon as the store opened; and they let the Russians think they were getting an equal share. I love you, but you know in your heart of hearts that what I am saying is true.”

  Hanni paused again to look around at the faces in the crowd. “You did not make it easy for me or for them though,” she went on. “Oh, no. The more I had to fight the SS, the Gestapo, British bombers, Patton’s Third Army, and you, the more blood and bodies we left in our wake — you and me — the more believable the story became to the Russians. It was all so sublimely beautiful,” she laughed. “The damage to them has been incalculable. It was truly the work of a tactician. He wound us up and set us in motion, you and I, and then relied upon us to do it to ourselves. I want to believe that. I need to believe that this was not simply some mistake, some stupid, unlucky accident. I need to believe that you and I were chess pieces being maneuvered by the hand of a Grand Master.”

  Scanlon turned his eyes away and said nothing; but in the back of his mind, the image of one person slowly emerged. He was a kindly, brilliant man in a gray suit and wire rimmed glasses, that master manipulator from Berne named Allen Welsh Dulles, the Director.

  “Well, Josef Stalin got the genius airplane designer he demanded,” she continued. “He put Raeder in charge of the whole thing, Liebchen, in charge of the whole goddamned thing, reporting directly to Beria! Why not? After all the commendations and medals that Raeder had received personally from Hermann Göring, after Otto Dietrich’s sales pitches to Beria, after everything that you and your vaunted OSS did to try to snatch him away to America, and after everything the British did to try to kill him, Stalin and Beria were absolutely convinced that Wolfe Raeder was the genuine article. They built a research institute for him near Novosibirsk, a huge factory, and a whole city to support it. They spent hundreds of millions on him, hundreds of millions that Stalin did not give to Mikoyan or Yakolev — the Russians who really could design good airplanes, as their MiG-15 and MiG-17, or the Yak-23 or Yak-25 later proved. Do you know what Stalin got for all his troubles? Nothing. All he got was a warmed-over Me-262, over and over again; because that is all Wolfe Raeder knew how to do. Poor Josef Stalin! When he finally got his hands on his German airplane expert, he got the wrong one. It was a classic set-up, and no one dared tell him the truth.”

  Finally, Scanlon nodded. “If we were chess pieces, we were nothing more than pawns,” he said, his lips forming a thin smile.

  “Yes, but I cannot complain. They were the best days of our lives… and the best of nights. We were alive, Liebchen. God, but we were alive!” she said as her face lit up in a broad grin. They were both laughing, standing in the middle of Red Square laughing at each other like two fools.

  “How did you figure all this out?” he asked. “You were in the Gulag.”

  “Where do you think they sent his staff, one by one? As his jet fighter program fell further and further behind the west — three or four years behind — that is what they did with the failures, except for Raeder himself. I was told that he had a nervous breakdown in 1950 or 1951 and was sent to one of their mental institutions for treatment. By then, Beria had shot or exiled everyone else, so the whole thing was swept under the rug and forgotten. They say that the very best intelligence and espionage coups are the ones that no one ever hears about, th
e ones that remain secret forever. Well, next to Lavrenti Beria and Josef Stalin himself, you and I probably did more to set back Russian air power than any two people alive.”

  “My God,” he said as he shook his head in amazement. “Raeder knew he could never pull it off. Despite his arrogant bravado, that was why he was so terrified when I let you drag him away and we kept his daughter.”

  “I should have seen it, but all I could see was you.”

  “Then come with me.”

  “No, please do not start that again.” She pressed her finger to his lips again and stopped him from saying anything more. ”I want to remember the dashing American spy who sacrificed everything, even the woman he loved, for his country. That is the Edward Scanlon who kept me alive all those years, the only thing that made it bearable.”

  They stood facing each other. Tears were running down her cheeks, but her bright blue eyes still sparkled. “That was also a wicked thing you did, shooting Otto Dietrich like you did. You denied me my revenge.”

  “No, shooting him was the one thing I did that I will never regret. You got your revenge and so did I. Just think of me as the instrument.”

  She looked at him and finally shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps. By the way, what ever happened to the Raeder girl?”

  “She ended up at MIT and then Cal Tech, I think. She teaches, writes articles that I can’t even understand the titles of, and does high-level avionics and platform design for aircraft companies.”

  “And her stuffy Major?”

  “Also working with the aircraft companies. I was the best man at their wedding.”

  “That bastard! You know he was the Luftwaffe contact with Berlin and your Air Force. I would also bet he was the go-between with the man in Berne, your boss, Allen Dulles. They both seem to have done quite well for themselves, have they not?”

  “I don’t think Paul knew anything about her or her father until…”

  “Liebchen,” she smiled benignly and shook her head as if correcting a slow third-grader. “How many months had your Major worked at Volkenrode? Yet you still believe he knew nothing? Tell me any fairy tale you care to tell me, but please do not tell me this was not some brilliant, monstrous plot that you and I found ourselves bested by. After all the pain and suffering you and I went through, all that we gave up, that would drive me insane.”