John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“You’ve heard about Hitler, haven’t you? Why are you having a party on the day that hopes for peace in Europe just died?”

“To cheer us up. And because we’re not dead yet. Bring vodka, sausage, whatever you can spare.”

“Where’s Winnie’s place?”

“She’s got a room in the attic in the Red Star Hotel on Lenin Prospekt. We kind of spill over onto the roof. From ten o’clock.”

The truck ground to a sudden halt and Beal banged on the metal wall, dividing the cab from the back of the truck.

“Time for you to get out,” Haywood said.

The truck had stopped, ludicrously, directly outside the Metropol. Jones jumped out of the back, Haywood passed him his hat and briefcase, and he walked directly through the doors. The doorman, Dmitry, nodded as he passed, then wrinkled his nose in distaste. So, thought Jones, the stink of fish was still all over him. Hurrying to the cloakroom, he spent a good five minutes washing his hands over and over again. Cleaner than before, but still feeling fish slime on his fingers, he made his way to the bar where he ordered a vodka, then another.

After the second, he held out his hand in front of his face. The trembling had stopped, somehow.

The Red Star Hotel was a dowdy copy of the Hotel Lux. The lobby’s seating area had been done up in red velour some time in the last century and, over the decades, the colour had degenerated to a brownish stain. It smelt as if a creature had died under the floorboards. As in the Lux, a concierge played prison warder, his eyes patrolling the lobby from behind a gloomy desk. Automatically, Jones handed over a copy of his passport, and the concierge opened a thick black book to start copying down the details with an ink pen.

Oils of Stalin and Lenin stared down on the joylessness. A telephone rang in a back office but no-one answered it. On a sofa sat two men in ill-fitting suits. They didn’t pretend not to stare at Jones as the forms were filled in, his name and passport number copied, twice. After an ice age of time, Jones made towards the lift shift and pressed the oval ceramic call button. It had once been a pale cream but it had aged over time, and now had the look of a cracked brown egg.

The elevator car descended arthritically and an old babushka within swung the inner scissor gate to one side, then opened the outer door. Once, it had been a wonder of delicate cast iron filigree. Now, it was a spider’s web spun in metal, trapping dust and decay in its rusting coils. Jones indicated the seventh floor and the old grandma clanged the cast iron outer cage door shut, then heaved the scissor gate closed and stabbed the button for the seventh. As the lift rose, Jones saw one of the two thugs take out a notebook and start jotting something in it.

The melancholy notes of a tenor saxophone drifted down the elevator shaft from above. On the seventh floor, another babushka sat behind a schoolchild’s desk. She held out her hand and Jones handed over his passport so that she could scratch the details all over again in a thick book. When she had finished, she returned the passport to Jones and her eyes followed him as he made his way to the room from which the music was coming. He knocked on a stout wooden door and, while he waited, he counted up in his head, just for the fun of it, that five people had witnessed his entry to the hotel.

Then a hidden hand swung open the door.

Stepping across the threshold, he entered another Moscow, another world.

Swirls of thick cigarette smoke hung in a red spotlight. It was Beal who was playing the sax, Winnie to his side, beating her thigh with her hand. The negress was sporting her trademark boiler suit, red handkerchief tumbling out of a pocket, and bowler hat. It was a ridiculous ensemble, New Soviet Man meets English Banker, and all the more subversive for that. She smiled delightedly at Jones and he grinned back. The room was some kind of suite, unusually spacious for Moscow in these times, its walls crowded with old American radicals, some Russians, and no other reporters that he could see. Before he could move further, he was accosted by Haywood, gripping a beer. Haywood gestured to a door which opened out on to a roof, beyond which lay the whole of the Moscow skyline. To the south lay the Kremlin, a red star atop its highest tower, a drop of blood in a pool of ink.

“Drink?” asked Haywood.

“Yes, please.”

Haywood produced a bottle of vodka from his overcoat pocket, uncorked it with his teeth and passed the bottle to Jones. Outside, they leaned against a stack of chimneys, warming their backs – while, from inside, came the strains of Winnie singing a German lullaby.

“Guten Abend, gute Nacht…”

“Winnie sings so beautifully,” said Jones.

“Like an angel. Not that she is an angel,” Haywood corrected himself with a mocking grin. “Far from it.”

“Cheers.”

“Cheers,” returned Haywood. “Too much alcohol, they say, is bad for your health.”

“With Herr Hitler in power, I don’t think any of us need to worry too much about that.”

Haywood allowed himself the tightest of smiles, then turned away to consider the red star above the Kremlin.

“He” – Jones knew exactly who Haywood meant – “helped Hitler do this. That’s what makes no sense to me, none at all. The KPD, the German Communists, they worked with the Nazis. Their boss, Ernst Thälmann, he smashed the Social Democrats. Social Fascists? No, sir. Now the real fascists are in power in Berlin. And that man in his fancy palace,” Haywood was still staring remorselessly at the Kremlin, “made this nightmare come about. I reckon purity matters to him. Better have total purity, total loyalty to the Party, than ally with people who are less sure about the certainty of Communism. You run with that logic, you get Hitler.”

Jones nodded but said nothing.

“Back in my day, we Wobblies, we felt we were on the cusp of history, that if we tried a little bit harder, capitalism in the United States would crash and burn. We got that wrong. Boy, did we get that wrong! But I never dreamt that we – or, at least, the people supposedly on our side – would end up helping the likes of Adolf Hitler to power. Today is the darkest moment of my long life, no question.”

“Mine too,” said Jones.

“You’ve met Hitler, people say. That true?”

“They gave me a lift on his plane. I had a few words with him, nothing deep.”

“And?”

“More than anything, Hitler’s banal.” Jones eyed the sleeping city underneath the snow, the Kremlin’s towers dully lit by the half-moon. “Not magical, not uplifting, not clever, not to me, anyway. Whey-faced, flabby. But… there’s a certain magnetism in his eyes. His voice electrifies his supporters. They’re so unquestioning it’s terrifying and toxic. You have the worshippers who may have been good people, once, locked in adoration of their strange blue-eyed God. He hates, with a passion. He hates the Jews, above all, but it’s the hate that drives him more than anything. His volk , they feed off him. He feeds off them. It’s a kind of madness, a mad larva grown, mutated into a monstrous insect. And that insect now controls a nation in thrall to a political religion.”

“And this? What’s this, here?” Haywood gestured to the great city lying beyond the red star.

“It’s the same show.”

“God help us. Not that I believe in God, of course.”

Jones smiled and shivered, both at the same time.

“We’ve been asking around about your friend at the British Embassy, Mr Ilver.”

“And?”

“He’s no Communist. Hates this place, hates Russia, hates New Soviet Man.”

“So he’s safe?”

“I didn’t say that.”