David Downing - Masaryk Station

They were on their way to bed when the two Russians arrived, but the lateness of the hour was apparently irrelevant-she and her sister were to come at once. She asked if they knew who she was, but of course they did. Refusal wasn’t an option.

Their destination was also secret. ‘Very nice house,’ the one with some German told them, as if that might make all the difference. He even helped her into the fur coat. Nina looked terribly scared, but the best she could do was squeeze her older sister’s hand as they sat in the back of the gleaming Audi.

Soon the car was purring its way eastward along a dimly lit and mostly empty Frankfurter Allee. The men in the front exchanged an occasional word in Russian, but were mostly silent.

Like thousands of others she’d been raped in 1945, but only on the one occasion. The three soldiers had been too excited by her house and possessions to do more than satisfy their immediate lust.

And now, she feared, it was going to happen again. In a ‘very nice house’.

She could feel her sister quivering beside her. Nina had only been twelve in 1945, tall for her age, but luckily still with the chest and hips of a child, and so the soldiers had left her alone. She had blossomed since, but was still a virgin. This was going to be so much harder for her.

They were leaving the city behind, driving through snow-covered fields. Three years after the war, the road signs caught in the headlamp beams bore Cyrillic script, and she had only the vaguest idea where they were. Not that it mattered.

They turned off the road up a tree-lined drive, and swung to a halt before a large three-storey house. There were soldiers on guard either side of the door, and another inside who gave them both a curious look. There was only one man in civilian clothes and he had a classic Russian face. This was an enemy camp, she thought. There wouldn’t be anyone there to whom they could appeal.

They were hustled upstairs and down a richly carpeted corridor to a door at its end. One of their escorts tapped it lightly with his knuckles, then responded to words from within by pushing it open and ushering them inside.

It was a large room, with several armchairs and a large four-poster bed. A fire was burning in the grate, and several electric lamps were glowing behind their shades, although the light was far from bright. She had never been in a brothel, but she imagined the better ones looked like this.

And then she saw who it was, and her heart and stomach plummeted.

He was wearing a dressing gown, and probably nothing else. The smile on his face was only for himself.

After calmly locking the door, he walked to a table holding several bottles, poured himself a tumblerful of clear liquid, and gulped half of it down. As he turned back to them the fire briefly glinted in his spectacles.

‘Zieh dich aus,’ he said. Take off your clothes.

‘No,’ Nina almost whispered.

‘We must do as he says,’ she told her sister.

Nina stared back at her. There was fear in her eyes, and pleading, and sheer disbelief.

‘Take me,’ she begged him. ‘She’s only a girl, take me.’

If he understood her-and she thought he did-all it did was increase his impatience.

They slowly stripped to their underwear, pausing at that point without much hope.

He gestured for them to continue, and then stared at their naked bodies. She watched his growing erection strain at the dressing gown, then finally break free. Nina’s gasp made him smile. He took two steps forward, grabbed her wrist, and tugged her towards the bed.

Nina jerked herself free and ran for the door, which rattled loudly but resisted her attempt to pull it off its hinges. As he crossed the room in pursuit, she tried to block his way, but he grabbed her by the arm and casually threw her aside.

Nina grabbed a convenient ashtray, and hurled it in his direction. She didn’t see where it struck him, but the grunt of pain as he doubled over left little room for doubt.

For a few brief seconds the world stood still.

Then he gingerly walked to his desk, and took a gun from the drawer.

‘No,’ she screamed, scrambling towards him.

He lashed out with the barrel, catching her across the cheek as it knocked her to the carpet.

Nina had sunk to her knees, and now he stood before her, his penis dangling in front of her face. He lifted her hair with the gun, and slowly moved around her, his erection returning.

She thought he would force the sobbing girl to take him in her mouth, but what could she do to step in that wouldn’t make things worse?

And then he was had the barrel of the gun in the nape of Nina’s neck, and his finger was pulling the trigger. There was no explosion, just a coughing sound, an almost derisory spurt of blood, a silent Nina crumpling on to the carpet.

She tried to speak, to rise from the floor, but both were beyond her.

He came across the room, gun in hand. Expecting to die, she felt almost disoriented when he pulled her up by her hair, and threw her face down on the bed. There was cold metal in the back of her neck, but his hands were wrenching her legs apart, and she knew there was one last thing to endure before she joined her sister.

And then he was ramming himself inside her, urgently pumping away. It only lasted a few seconds, and once he was out again, she lay there waiting for an end to it all, for the blackness the bullet would bring.

It didn’t come. After several moments his hands reached down for one of hers, and cradled it around the butt of the pistol. At first she didn’t resist, and by the time she realised the implication, he had taken it back again.

‘You’re too famous to kill,’ he said in explanation.

The Russian was almost certainly lying, but John Russell had no intention of sharing this suspicion with his British and American employers. If there was one thing he’d learnt over the last few years, it was never to divulge any information without first thoroughly assessing how much it might be worth in money, or favours, or blood.

The British major and American captain who shared command of the Trieste interrogation centre seemed less inclined to doubt the Russian. A kind reading of the situation might have them lacking Russell’s suspicious nature, although one would have thought that a necessary qualification for intelligence officers. Being about half Russell’s age and coming from two different realms of Anglo-American privilege, they certainly lacked his experience of European intrigue. But having said all that, a third explanation for their naivety-that both were essentially idiots-seemed by far the most likely.

The Brit’s name was Alex Farquhar-Smith, and Russell would have bet money on a rural pile, minor public school, and Oxford. At the latter he had probably spent more time rowing than reading, and only been saved from a poor Third by a timely world war. The Yank, Buzz Dempsey, was a Chicago boy with a haircut to suit his name, and a brashness only slightly less annoying than his English colleague’s emotional constipation. Usually they spent most of their working hours getting up each other’s noses, but today they were both too excited.

The source of their exhilaration was the tall, rather elegant, chain-smoking Soviet major sitting on the other side of the table. ‘I have some information about the Red Army’s battle order in Hungary,’ Petr Kuznakov had casually mentioned on arriving in Trieste the previous day, as if unaware that such intelligence was the current holy grail of every American and British officer charged with debriefing the steady stream of defectors and refugees from Stalin’s rapidly coagulating empire. That had made Russell suspicious, as had the Russian’s choice of Trieste. Had his superiors calculated that the chances of encountering real professionals would be less in such a relative backwater? If so, they’d done their homework well.