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  The prosecutor made no attempt to establish a coherent case; witnesses were called who quoted what seemed to be quite innocuous criticisms of Party officials who were not meeting Zagorsky’s high standards of performance. His Polish origins were established but not emphasised, and the status of the five witnesses was no more than routine clerks and minor administrators in Zagorsky’s department. The Polish invasion of Kiev was mentioned but not dwelt on, and an hour after he had started the prosecuting lawyer sat down. He had demanded the death penalty for persistent and secret subversion of the security of the State.

  When the defence lawyer rose to his feet Zagorsky’s voice rang out, surprisingly loud.

  “Dismiss this man. I am defending myself.”

  There was a whispered conversation among the judges and the senior officer said that the court would note that Zagorsky had refused the legal aid provided by the State. But if Zagorsky wished to conduct his own case the court would hear him.

  Josef had noticed that like the men who had interrogated him they referred to him as Zagorsky not as Comrade Zagorsky or Commissar Zagorsky which was his actual status. They were already distancing him from the Party.

  Zagorsky took a deep breath and his voice was clear although he spoke very slowly.

  “I quote from the rules of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Paragraph four—I quote—‘the promotion, in every possible way, of inner-party democracy, the activity and initiative of the Communists, criticism and self-criticism.’

  “I quote from the same document Part One clause three subclauses b and c. I quote—‘A party member has the right to discuss freely questions of the Party’s policies and practical activities at Party meetings, conferences and congresses, at the meetings of Party committees and in the Party press; to table motions; openly to express and uphold his opinion as long as the Party organisation concerned has not adopted a decision; to criticise any Communist, irrespective of the position he holds, at Party meetings, conferences and congresses, and at the full meetings of Party committees. Those who commit the offence of suppressing criticism or victimising anyone for criticism are responsible to and will be penalised by the Party, to the point of expulsion from the CPSU.’ ”

  He paused and he was shaking visibly, his whole body trembling as if tormented by an ague.

  “That is all I have to say. That is all that needs to be said. This trial is a farce and the laws of the Soviet Union are being abused in this process. The evidence of the poltroons you bring as witnesses shows how hopeless this prosecution must be.” He paused and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he said, “You will see that I am trembling, comrades. Make no mistake. I do not tremble from fear. Not even from illness. Oh, no. I tremble because I have been beaten near to death to make me give false evidence that would incriminate me. All my life I have worked loyally for the Party. I ask that those who know me and know my record will step in and punish those people who have so infamously brought this case to the court. I ask not for mercy but for justice. The justice that I sought for all of us when I first walked with my fellow-workers holding that beautiful red flag above our heads. You may cause my death but it will not be execution—it will be murder. Murder from others’ greed, jealousy and ambition.” He seemed to hesitate before his final words, gulping for air before he said, “People in the pay of our enemies, the Germans.”

  There was a sudden murmur in the courtroom, quickly stopped by the angry face of the senior judge. He kept his eyes away from Zagorsky as he said, “The judgement of the People’s Court will be promulgated after due consideration.”

  The officers stood up and filed to the door and Josef and Anna saw two policemen carry Zagorsky from the witness box. They handled him quite gently.

  Outside it was beginning to rain and Josef was glad that it was, so that the rain could hide the tears on Anna’s face.

  Despite her anxiety to get back to their son she had insisted that they went to the church at the back of the museum. And there she prayed and wept, with Josef standing awkwardly beside her, his hand just touching her shoulder.

  They went back to Warsaw and they heard rumours that Zagorsky had been sent to one of the Siberian labour-camps and other rumours that he had been shot the same day, after the trial, at the Lubyanka building.

  The treatment meted out to Zagorsky and the totally spurious trial frightened and angered them both. They said nothing to anybody about their feelings. Even between themselves there was a reluctance to admit their disillusion with the Party.

  The breaking point came when Anna had to take notes of a meeting where the annexation of Poland was being recommended. Half of Poland would become the Polish Soviet State and a rump would be left that the planners were willing to leave to be annexed in due course by Germany. Hearing Poles describe the annexation of their own country, and listening to the details of how its industry and agriculture would serve the Soviet Union had sickened her.

  They walked the streets of Warsaw that night, Josef carrying the small boy in his arms as they talked. Anna wanted to get away, anywhere, and quickly. Josef knew that there was no chance of planning their escape. Anna wouldn’t be able to dissemble her feelings long enough. She was ready to carry on for a few days, but no longer. He told her that they would leave at the weekend, starting their journey on the Friday night. If anyone saw them they would say they were having a weekend break in the country.

  There was little preparation that Josef could make. They would have to leave their few possessions behind them. But fortunately, like most underground party members, he had always kept their meagre savings in cash, and they both had Soviet passports. He still had his British passport and he tucked their marriage certificate inside it.

  Josef bought tickets for only the journey from Warsaw to Łodz. And there he booked them onto the night train to Berlin. At the German frontier there were no problems when they presented their USSR passports. In Berlin they found a cheap lodging house. Josef calculated that he had enough money for them to live frugally for six weeks while they decided what to do.

  After a few days Josef realised that because he didn’t speak German it was going to be difficult to find work. His Russian and smattering of Polish he was afraid to use in case there were local Party members who would check up on him and cause trouble. Having worked in the Cheka he knew that it had its people in every big European city. As the days went by he became desperate for anything that would provide some income. It was then that he took a job as a dish-washer in the kitchens of a night-club on the Kurfurstendamm. He worked long hours and the wages were just enough to pay for their room and food, and his share of the tips went on clothes and other necessities. After six months he was promoted to serving drinks in the bar, where his English was useful with American and English tourists.

  The club’s main business came from foreigners. Businessmen on a night out, looking for a girl, and long-term visitors like reporters and a sprinkling of writers and painters.

  He had heard nothing about how the news of their escape had been received in Warsaw and Moscow because he had no contacts back there and had no intention of trying to find out.

  It was two weeks before their first Christmas in Berlin and he had bought cakes and a bunch of flowers on the way home as an early treat. When he saw the police-car and the ambulance and the small crowd of people outside the building he knew at once that it was Anna. He didn’t know what had happened but he knew it was her.

  They had let him travel in the ambulance with her body. They had driven straight to the morgue and he had officially identified her body. And then at the police station there had been the questions. The detectives had been sympathetic and considerate. Almost as if they knew or guessed why she had been murdered. Garotting was generally confined to assassins and professional criminals. There were more questions about his son. Why did he think that he’d been taken rather than killed with his mother? What kind of people did he know who were so ruthless? Had he met any people at the club
where he worked who might have had a grudge against him? But after a couple of hours they had let him go. It was obvious that they would not spend much time looking for the boy. They acted as if they were aware that he knew who had committed both crimes. The inquest would be held in two days’ time.

  He never went back to the rooms. For two days and nights he wandered the streets of Berlin like a lost soul. Oblivious of his surroundings, his mind a turmoil of grief and hatred.

  The inquest gave a verdict of murder by strangulation by a person or persons unknown. The coroner had commented on the fact that nothing appeared to have been stolen or even disturbed. But Josef has seen the small red star stamped on the inside of her wrist and for him it was not murder by a person or persons unknown. He knew all too well who had murdered her. Half demented, Josef had gone back to his job that night. There had been a great deal of sympathy for him. Staff and customers had seen the two small paragraphs in the evening paper.

  Just on midnight he was serving a drink to a man he had seen several times before. He had been told that he was a journalist for one of the press agencies. When he had poured the double whisky the man looked at Josef’s face, lifted his glass and said in Russian, “To the dead, Josef. The living should remember it and learn the lesson.”

  Josef felt the room spin and the man said quickly in English, “My friend, I’m on your side. Make no mistake. I’ll help you all I can.”

  “Who are you, mister?”

  The man half-smiled. “Just call me Johnny.” He paused and said softly, “I saw the red star before they took her downstairs.”

  “You were there?”

  “I was with the police inspector when they got the phone call.”

  “What phone call? They never mentioned a phone call to me or at the inquest.”

  “Somebody phoned in to the police HQ. They said she had been executed and gave the address. Then they just said—‘The red flag will fly all over the world.’ They said it first in Russian and then in heavily accented German.”

  “Why didn’t the police mention it at the inquest?”

  The man took a sip of his whisky. “Who knows, Josef? Who knows?”

  “How is it you speak Russian?”

  The man shrugged but didn’t reply.

  “You’re a reporter, yes?”

  “A foreign correspondent. Much the same thing.”

  “You knew what the red star meant?”

  “Of course I did.” He paused. “What are you going to do about it, my friend?”

  Josef looked down at the bar-counter and wiped a damp patch with his cloth before he looked back at the man’s face. “I’m going to make those bastards pay a thousand times. I don’t know how. But I’ll do it if it takes the rest of my life.”

  “Were you one of them way back?”

  “Not way back. Six months ago I was one of them. I was a fool.”

  “You’re in good company, Josef. There are a lot of people being fooled by the thought of the brotherhood of man. They’ll learn in due course.” He paused. “I could help you do a lot to hurt them. Could we talk some time?”

  “Prove to me that it’ll hurt them and I’ll talk all you want.”

  “Are you staying at the same place?”

  “No. I sleep here at nights.”

  “How about three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “OK.”

  Almost every day for three weeks Johnny asked questions and listened. Josef was surprised at the reporter’s interest in the people in the Cheka International Affairs section. Names and personal details, their families, their vices, favourite foods, their houses and their office responsibilities. It was five weeks after Anna’s death when the journalist asked if Josef would like to go back to England.

  “They wouldn’t let me back in.”

  “I think it could be arranged if you went about it the right way. There’s always people who are interested in what goes on in Moscow.”

  Josef shrugged. “They’d think I was a stooge sent in by the Cheka.”

  “I know a lot of people in London. Would you like me to talk to them?”

  “Yes. If you think it’d do any good. But don’t get into trouble for my sake.”

  “Look. Do you want to go back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, just leave it to me to see what I can do.”

  The meeting with the British Consul had gone smoothly enough. After it had all been arranged the journalist asked for the Soviet passports that Josef and Anna had held, as souvenirs of their getting to know one another.

  Josef disembarked from the boat at Newcastle, on January 22, 1924. He was twenty-two years old. There were two main items on the front page of the Evening Chronicle that night. Ramsay MacDonald had formed the first Labour Government that day, and Lenin had died in Moscow the previous day. Neither Josef, nor even the man who called himself Johnny, who spoke to him in the bar at the Railway Hotel later that evening, could have imagined the strange life that was starting for him that day.

  2

  The man who sometimes called himself Emil Goldfus and other times Martin Collins was nearly fifty when he signed the lease for the premises at 216 West 99th Street in New York. His birth certificate gave his age as fifty-three and no casual observer was likely to doubt it. He had the air of a European refugee academic. Rather old-fashioned but charming. Some of the people he met thought he looked rather sad. A sad man who put a brave face on life.

  He banked a few hundred dollars a month at the 96th Street branch of the East River Savings Bank. And like any other customer there were small withdrawals from time to time. But unlike most other customers Emil Goldfus had similar accounts at banks all over the city. And at all of them, Emil Goldfus, retired photographer, was a respected client.

  When he had first come to New York in 1950 he had spent his days studying the city. Riding the bus and subway routes, getting himself established locally with the neighbourhood shopkeepers, eating simple meals in the local cafeterias. He knew how long the express train took to get from his nearest station to Times Square and how to change lines for the Bronx or connect with Lexington Avenue. He never owned a car and seldom took taxis. There were two cinemas that he visited regularly. One he particularly favoured. Many people would have seen it as a mildly idyllic existence. Sitting on the park benches reading a paper, strolling along unfrequented streets, standing and staring sometimes at derelict buildings and weed-ridden plots of waste-land. But there was no observer of the quiet unobtrusive oldish man.

  There were two or three people who lived on East 71st Street who knew him. But they knew him as Milton, an Englishman.

  Later in 1953 Goldfus moved to Brooklyn and rented studio space in a drab seven-storey building that flattered itself by having the name of the Ovington Building. The Ovington Building was on the outskirts of Brooklyn Heights and, in addition to the fifth-floor studio, Goldfus also took a room in a boarding house on Hicks Street.

  It was a more expansive time in his life. He painted and sketched and slowly got to know a number of the artists who worked in the building. He was quite liked, the old-world charm and wry humour made him pleasant company. He made friends with several of the struggling artists who occupied the studios.

  The couple he knew on East 71st Street were Mona and Morris Cohen, and he had been in touch with them from his first days in New York.

  There were other people whom he met regularly on his strolls in the parks, or at the cinema. Some knew him as Emil Goldfus, others as Martin Collins or Milton. Some years earlier there were people who knew him as Andrew Kayotis.

  He became an accepted and well-liked neighbour to several of the artists who shared the rooms in the building. His paintings were amateurish but he accepted criticism with good grace and seemed eager and determined to improve his painting skills. One of his neighbours even gave up a little of his time to teaching Emil Goldfus to play classical guitar. He joined in their late-night discussions and they came to the conclusion tha
t Emil was no intellectual and marked him down as an elderly Socialist whose vaguely liberal views belonged more to the pre-war thirties than the late fifties.

  Part Two

  3

  Despite its name, the Canadian township of Cobalt was better known for its silver mining, and in 1920 its population of just over a thousand was what you could expect in a boom town. Wildcat prospectors, surveyors, a handful of officials from Toronto and Ottawa, and the suppliers of goods and services that batten on such communities. Three hundred and thirty miles by rail from Toronto it was one of the richest silver deposits in the world.

  Jack Emmanuel Lonsdale was a half-breed who found his life in Cobalt rewarding and congenial, and he reckoned he had made a good move when he married the immigrant Finnish girl. Their son Gordon was born four years later in 1924. But instead of cementing the marriage it marked the beginning of the end. Only a special kind of woman thrives in boom towns and even they see it as a place and a time to make your pile and then get out. The girl from Karelia saw no future for a family in the rough and tumble of Cobalt, and the couple slowly drifted apart.

  The half-breed couldn’t understand why the woman hated what to him seemed a veritable paradise of money, booze, and girls on the make. It was not so much a difference of opinions as a total inability to comprehend the woman’s objections. When she eventually left, taking the boy with her, there was no rancour from the man. She wanted to go back to Karelia, to Finland, where she was born.

  He gave her cash for the journey and enough for a few months’ keep. He was neither angry nor hurt. It was just beyond his understanding. He never heard again from his wife or son and when, in 1940, the Soviet Union invaded Finland through Karelia he neither heard nor knew of the world’s praise for the gallant Finns who fought back against overwhelming odds for over a month. So he never knew that his son was sixteen years old when he was killed or that his wife had died in a Soviet slave-labour camp a few years later. He had long forgotten them both and had no idea where Finland was. He had only the vaguest idea where Toronto was.