Charles McCarry - The Miernik Dossier

In the end it was decided that Miernik will go back to Rome and fly to Cairo. Money does not seem to be a problem for him. Of course he has his final pay from WRO, and I suppose he has been able to save some of his salary. It’s possible, too, that Kirnov packed a few thousand dollars into Zofia’s rucksack along with the Ecuadorian passport. Then again, if you’re right about his auspices, he has no worry about funds.

The rest of us, including Zofia, will wait for the ship. Kalash will not leave his father’s Cadillac in the care of an Egyptian crew on the high seas: “The governor would be most unsympathetic if I turned up to tell him that I’d let some Egyptian halfwit put the car ashore in Libya. These coasts are teeming with people looking for bargains in big American automobiles.”

The presence of Ilona Bentley in Naples adds a certain drama to the proceedings. Both Miernik and Collins have been looking pretty feverish since she arrived, and the notion of leaving Ilona behind in Miernik’s care does not appeal to the Englishman. Ilona added to the tension by taking Kalash with her in her rented two-seater Fiat when we left the pier, leaving the rest of us to follow by taxi. They did not reappear until dinner time. Kalash told me they had driven to Positano for lunch.

“She ordered some disgusting mess of noodles and began shoveling away,” Kalash said. “Ilona is a very coarse feeder, as you know- must have something to do with all that starvation as a child. She says she saw the value of appetite very early in life, watching her fellow prisoners scuffling around the soup pot in the concentration camp. She’s been indulging all her appetites ever since, so she’ll have something to look back on if ever she’s locked up again. Odd sort of girl. It’s rather appealing, her ignorance of modesty.

“We were lying on the bed a little later. Ilona was messing about with her tongue and I was quite sleepy. She crawled up my body and prised open my eyelids with her fingers. Most annoying, but you know what she is-sex jolts her wide awake. ‘Kalash,’ she said, ‘you are a god.’ I thought that rather nice of her, as I hadn’t put forth any special effort after such a heavy lunch. ‘Kalash,’ she said, ‘take me with you.’ It appears that she wants to join us in our journey down the Nile. Copulation in the desert has a great appeal for English girls. Ilona has always dreamed of ecstasy under the desert stars. She hears the babble of exotic marketplaces in her imagination. She is in love with all of us, including poor Miernik, it seems. She lay there on top of me, murmuring all these secrets, licking my eyes and rolling my member between her knees. Impossible to refuse under the circumstances, although I must say I wonder about the morale of our little group if she decides to do the same for all of us, all at the same time instead of separately.”

So do I. Miernik and Collins do not have Kalash’s sexual insouciance. (Perhaps they would have if they were sharing a black girl instead of a white one; Kalash regards European females as part of the fauna and beds them as casually as an English prince would shoot grouse driven into his gun.) We will at least be spared an orgy aboard the Nefertiti. Ilona plans to fly to Cairo with Miernik. Miernik does not as yet know this. Neither does Nigel Collins.

I don’t altogether believe that Ilona’s only motive is sexual adventure, though she certainly gives every indication that this is important to her. I suppose that it would be a good idea to get a rundown on her so that I’ll know whether I’m dealing with a nymphomaniac or something else. You can assume that your man Christopher will be staying on the bench: Ilona is awfully pretty, and as your investigations have doubtless shown, I am normal. But the potential mess is bad enough without my adding to it.

Bentley, Ilona Maria. Born at Berlin on 11th May, 1935, the daughter of a Hungarian national named Hanne Szemle (born at Budapest on 21st December, 1905) and of Bentley, John Brian Thomas, a British subject born at St. Petersburg, Russia, on 9th February, 1899, the elder son of Roger Alan Arthur Bentley, C.M.G. (q.v.), and of Lucy Anne Wyndham. For fifty years before the Russian Revolution, the Bentley family operated an export-import business at St. Petersburg; John Bentley’s father and grandfather served as H.M. Consul in that city for brief interims in the nineteenth century. John Bentley was educated privately in St. Petersburg by English and German tutors; he spoke both these languages, as well as Russian, perfectly. He witnessed the Bolshevik uprisings in St. Petersburg and afterwards claimed personal acquaintance with a number of the leading Bolsheviks, including Trotsky himself. Bentley hinted throughout his life that he had actually taken part in street fighting in St. Petersburg in 1917. In 1919, the family returned to England, and the following year Bentley went up to Magdalen College, Oxford; he took a third in Oriental Languages. In 1926 he published a book about the British expedition to Russia in 1918-19, The Death Rattle of Imperialism. It is believed (though not confirmed by documentary evidence) that he became a member of the British Communist Party in 1928. From 1927 to 1931 he frequently published articles in a variety of British periodicals on political and literary subjects. In 1932 he went to Berlin as a correspondent, accredited by a number of British publications including the Daily Star. Bentley wrote frequently for the Daily Worker under a variety of pseudonyms.

Ilona Maria Bentley, who is Bentley’s only child, was illegitimate. The marriage between Bentley and Hanne Szemle did not take place until 23rd September, 1938, in Berlin. At that time Bentley claimed paternity, and the child was afterwards granted British nationality on the basis of her father’s claim. Bentley had left Miss Szemle and their daughter in Berlin in 1937, when he went to Spain to cover the Civil War from the Nationalist side. Three weeks after his marriage to Miss Szemle, he returned to Spain, where he was killed on Christmas Day, 1938, while covering the Nationalist assault on Barcelona. Bentley’s wife was half Jewish, the daughter of a German-born Jewess. The German government refused to recognize the British nationality of Mrs. Bentley and her child, owing to the German parentage of the mother, and to the disparity between the child’s date of birth and the date of her parents’ marriage. It was believed that the authorities were influenced also by Bentley’s outspoken Communist sympathies. In refusing permission to Mrs. Bentley and her child to leave Germany in 1939, the German authorities referred to an undissolved previous marriage between Bentley and a German woman, but the existence of the earlier marriage was never established to the satisfaction of H.M. Consul.

In 1942 (date probable) Hanne Szemle Bentley and her child were arrested by the German authorities and sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The mother died there on 18th April, 1943. Ilona Bentley was liberated with other surviving inmates in 1945. She was at that time barely ten years old, and she was unaware of her own identity. She was not identified as Ilona Bentley, and therefore as a British subject, until February, 1946, when an examination of the files at Bergen-Belsen brought forth her British passport and that of her mother. In June, 1946, investigators succeeded in locating the child in a refugee centre in the British Zone of Occupation, and in establishing her identity through a comparison of the number tattooed on her forearm and the one entered by a German clerk on her British passport, which formed part of her file at Bergen-Belsen.

The child was given into the custody of her paternal grandparents on 15th July, 1946. The grandmother died the following year, and the grandfather in 1952. Ilona Bentley, as her grandfather’s only heir (her father’s brother died in action in Crete), inherited an estate valued at £175,000 after death duties. This included substantial amounts in Swiss franc accounts in the Union de Banques Suisses, Geneva.