Margarita felt that, behind the small talk, he was sizing her up somehow. Then, Bruno came to greet her, though he seemed more interested in talking to the Professor about some meeting they had both attended earlier in the week. She waited until after the Christmas carols, and then she told her sister that she was leaving. As she said goodbye, Larissa whispered, ‘Things have come to a head. In the new year I’m going to leave Bruno.’

  4.

  An icy, mid-January shock of cold came off the Spree as Alyosha locked Captain Malinowski’s motor car. It had been bitter for some days, the whipping frozen wind coating everything with a stubborn rime. He was glad to step in to the warm fug of the café after his brisk walk through the cold. Vicky hadn’t arrived, of course, so he told the waitress he would wait for his friend before ordering, and sat there, gradually thawing out. Vicky was late for everything apart from KPD meetings or committees. She was never late for those.

  Alyosha smoked his cigarette and studied the menu on the blackboard. The Aschinger was a good place for cheap food. Almost three-quarters of an hour went past before Vicky appeared, her cheeks red and her hands cold, the old and ragged gloves she wore pitifully inadequate.

  ‘We have to go.’

  ‘But I’m starving.’

  ‘No time. Where did you park?’

  He followed her out.

  ‘I can’t take you far,’ Alyosha told her as he started the engine. ‘I’ll be lucky to get to the Adlon without being late as it is.’

  ‘This is really important, Alyosha, you have to give me a lift.’

  ‘Vicky, can I ask one thing? Why is every last thing you do so very important and everything I do not at all important?’

  ‘It was you who chose to work for that that Polish bourgeois.’

  ‘He’s an aristocrat.’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Well, you can split hairs if you want. Come on, drive.’

  ‘Says you who does nothing but split hairs with me!’ He laughed as he turned the Mercedes and began to drive through the icy streets. Pulling him up on his many solecisms was second nature to Vicky, and by now, Alyosha felt he was familiar with every Marxist precept in existence.

  ‘Can’t you drive faster?’

  She was rolling a cigarette on her knee.

  ‘Certainly, if you want me to crash.’

  In the early days, Alyosha used to capitulate, because she knew Marxism like the back of her hand, and would always beat him in any argument. But the constant questioning of his every statement had sharpened his mind, and by now, he could sometimes win his point. So now, he told her that Marx had never mentioned the importance of the aristocracy as a class, only the bourgeoisie. ‘Someone can grow to be bourgeois, it’s not important where you came from, but you have to be born an aristocrat. Pride is the root of aristocracy, a pride in your own lineage. That’s why the genealogy of the family and the heroic deeds of valour of their ancestors are so important to them. They’re outside the class war.’

  ‘The aristocracy stands outside the class war?’ she asked incredulously. ‘You talk such sentimental rubbish. They’ve always been an elite in favour of perpetuating social, political and economic inequality and they’ll use schools, universities, the church, theatres, parliaments, all those institutions and more, to make sure it continues, just like the bourgeoisie. There’s nothing to choose between them, or if there is, it’s inconsequential. So why on earth would you want to work for one of them?’

  ‘Because the wages are better than any I’ve been offered in a very long while. I only have to drive him. It’s easy work. I’d have been stupid to turn it down.’

  ‘I’ll give you a better offer.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Don’t laugh, I’m serious. You can help by selling

  Die Rote Fahne for us’

  ‘Vicky, seriously, how can I do that when the SA are still after me?’ Vicky wouldn’t accept his reasoning, and kept on trying to persuade him, as she was determined to see Alyosha join the KPD. Nothing was more important to her than that, and if he truly loved her, as he claimed he did, why was he still so resistant?

  She directed him to the Welfare Centre in Charlottenburg. Alyosha had been there once before, with their neighbour, Franz, Frau Kempowska’s son. It was housed in an old shoe factory which had closed in the slump of 1929, and to reach the room on the ground floor where the dole was distributed, one had to cross a wide cobbled courtyard. In one corner, the old night watchman’s hut had been turned into a rough and ready soup kitchen by some charitable society, so that the poor could fill their bellies with a bowl of greasy broth while they waited to be seen.

  A bear of a man was loitering on the pavement outside when Alyosha came to a stop outside the gates. He’d lost an eye and part of an ear, and on the breast of his greatcoat was the Iron Cross and the gold medal given to a badly injured soldier. When he saw Vicky in the Mercedes, he came over to her window.

  ‘We can’t talk inside. They’ve got ears sitting in there.’

  He spat out a mouthful of chewing tobacco and climbed into the back.

  ‘Vicky, Captain Malinowski is expecting me,’ said Alyosha, irritated.

  ‘Just drive us around the corner first.’

  Sighing, he put the motor into gear.

  ‘How did it go in court this morning, Erich?’ she asked the man in the back.

  He told her he had put in his glass eye to look respectable, worn his medals, and had taken his military record. That had probably saved him from a prison sentence for painting anti-Nazi slogans on factory walls. Erich had the rasping voice of a man who smoked too much for his own good. He was a stalwart communist, turning out in all weather in spite of his weak chest and hacking cough.

  Alyosha kept the engine running, but they didn’t take the hint.

  ‘It’s so cold, let us stay,’ she wheedled.

  ‘Five minutes, no more.’

  She and Erich discussed tactics for agitating the workers at the foundries of Aron, Zweitusch, and Werner, and at the large power station at Siemensstadt, with a view to all-out strikes. They divided up the work of liaising with other cells between them.

  Alyosha gathered that Erich had worked at Siemensstadt until, along with several other communists, he had been sacked for being too active in the union.

  ‘Vicky, I have to go now.’

  ‘Alright, alright. Thanks for the lift.’

  She and Erich stepped out into the January cold.

  5.

  After taking Captain Malinowski back to the Adlon from his dinner at the Polish Embassy, it was two in the morning when Alyosha parked the Mercedes near his apartment block, and Nehringstrasse was unusually quiet. Vicky was already fast asleep when he got into bed, curled up on her side with her back to him, her hands under her cheek. Sleep eluded him, so he lit a cigarette and lay there, listening to her even breathing. They hadn’t made love since he didn’t know when.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and turned on his side to try to sleep, but as he shut his eyes, there was a knocking on the door.

  Vicky woke immediately and jumped out of bed.

  She was back in a moment and told him to get dressed as quickly as he could.

  ‘They’re on their way.’

  Vicky rushed out to warn other comrades in the building. Alyosha’s first thought was that he’d better move Captain Malinowski’s Mercedes out of harm’s way, as he was meant to park it in the Adlon’s garage at night and make his own way home. As he sprinted down the stairs, the lights were on in several of the apartments. A dog barked, and set several others howling in sympathy. He could hear frantic knocking, voices raised, doors opening and shutting. Out on the street, a white-haired man in a nightshirt ran past him – to where, God only knew. Some others were already out on the street, and there was the odd rallying shout of ‘Red Front!’ to gather everybody together.

  Alyosha jumped into the Mercedes, but as he began to drive down the street, he heard a rumbling sound, and then he was suddenly blinded by strong lights. Squinting, he made out a convoy of motor lorries coming towards him. Panicking, he reversed at speed, though it felt painfully slow. The he heard the revving of motorcycles, as they approached from both ends of the street, and wild voices shouting from the block, ‘They’re here…’ He just managed to slam on the breaks and turn the Mercedes into a courtyard, before stones and the odd flower pot started crashing down into the street from the balconies of the apartment block.

  He extinguished the engine and the lights and sat there, his heart pounding. He could see a section of the street from he sat, and saw dark shadows flying past. Voices shouted, doors opened and banged shut, and there was a faint knocking, an echo on an echo, from inside the building, swiftly followed by the sound of blows and screams and shouts. Then a gun fired, and fired again, and then the sound of pounding feet. Then, as quickly as they arrived, the SA left, leaving two corpses in the street.

  The next day, the two dead men were identified as a middle-aged schupo and Vlasich Pesotski of the SA. The Nazis weren’t overly concerned about the policeman, but Vlasich Pesotski was the latest martyr for the cause, nothing less than another Horst Wessel. Their loud outrage began at once, as well as their demands for swift retaliation: this latest atrocity must be avenged.

  There was not a word in the press to suggest that it had been the Nazis who had instigated the attack, or who had been the only ones shooting that night. According to Der Angriff, members of a communist cell from Nehringstrasse were responsible for both murders.

  But as Alyosha saw it all, he knew the truth.

  6.

  The room was packed, stuffy, the heat coming in waves from the stove in the corner where newcomers gathered to warm their hands. Alyosha was standing in front of the Nehringstrasse Defence Committee, facing three dozen men and women, many of whom looked exhausted. He told them that he had seen the schupo and Vlasich Pesotski, in the confusion and panic, shoot each other. One or two laughed scornfully.

  ‘Would you be prepared to say this publicly?’ asked an old woman wearing a floral apron.

  He wasn’t blind to the danger.

  ‘Would you?’ asked Vicky, who was chairing the meeting.

  ‘I would.’

  A low murmur broke out through the room.

  ‘We won’t give our street over to the fascists without a fight.’

  Fritz Kempowski was on his feet, a hot-headed young man with wide shoulders and a thatch of blonde hair. He had lost his left hand in the 1914–1918 war when he was only eighteen. After he’d been demobbed, he’d wandered from town to town scratching a living before ending up in Hamburg. As an ex-soldier, by his own admission still politically naïve, he’d joined the Volkswehren, the regiments the Government formed in 1919 under the name ‘The People’s Army,’ in order to quell the Spartacist Uprising, which Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg were attempting to ignite. Franz had thought he was only keeping law and order. After all, that’s what every officer had told him, and he’d still respected them enough back then to take their word for it. But everything had changed for him in 1923. He’d been employed as a night watchman in a factory, though his wages had barely bought half a loaf, never mind any butter to put on it. With his union, he’d started to organise strikes for higher wages, and, following a run-in outside the factory with his employer’s bully-boys, had ended up in prison for six months, where an old Marxist who had attended Rosa Luxembourg’s classes had been his cellmate. He’d changed Franz’ world view forever.

  ‘We have to show everybody who the real murderers are,’ he told the meeting earnestly. ‘We need to use every means at our disposal to get the truth out: newspapers, pamphlets, slogans – the medium doesn’t matter, as long as the message reaches the people loud and clear.’

  Vicky agreed, and the discussion went on at length about how to proceed.

  7.

  Adolf Hitler himself attended Vlasich Pesotski’s funeral service, along with many prominent members of the SA and the SS. Alyosha gazed at a photograph of the Russian lying in his coffin in his SA uniform, his hands crossed on his chest, his leather patch over his eye. The man who had been set on killing him had now met his end, and there were long reports in the newspapers; obituaries, tributes and photographs of the mourners. Even the schupo’s widow was used in the campaign against the communists. There was a rumour going around that she’d had little choice in this, as she was afraid of losing her widow’s pension, with three children to raise alone. On the wireless, there were countless items about their life together, until the myth-making grew wings and became outright lies. A story was also peddled in most of the papers about a peaceful march by the SA through Nehringstrasse in order to show their respect to Vlasich Pesotski, and their contempt towards the communists who murdered him, where they had been shot at by cowards hidden on the rooftops. When further enquiries were made, nobody was quite sure from where exactly the shots were fired. But, in any event, it was only a matter of luck that nobody had been injured. Wasn’t it high time to re-establish law and order by bringing the communists into line?

  When Vicky arranged to meet him in the bar opposite Karl Liebknecht Haus, Alyosha assumed she wanted to discuss the KPD’s continuing campaign to counter such lies, and expose the truth about Vlasich Pesotski’s shooting. So far, things were going badly: all their pamphlets and red slogans on the walls of Berlin had either been ignored, or dismissed as propaganda from ‘Moscow pigs, trying to save their own skins’. At the same time, the real lies were fast becoming truths in the Nazi newspapers, and worse still, among the general public.

  From the door, Alyosha spotted her standing by the bar, smoking and talking to some man who had his back to him. She was so deep in conversation, she didn’t notice him coming towards her, and he heard Kai-Olaf’s name being mentioned, though she broke off when she saw him.

  ‘At last – where have you been?’

  ‘It’s not me that’s late, it’s you that’s early for once.’

  Had he heard the news? Hitler had just been made Chancellor. Paul turned to face him. He had grown a thin rim of beard, as white as flour, down the sides of his face and on his chin, which accentuated the grey hollows of his cheeks. As he ran his eye over Alyosha, he didn’t so much as lift his elbow from the bar. Alyosha felt it was no coincidence that he was there. For whatever reason, Vicky had arranged for Paul to come face-to-face with him. But why?

  The three of them went to sit at a table where they would not be overheard.

  ‘The revolution,’ Paul lifted his glass.

  ‘The revolution,’ seconded Vicky.

  The burning issue was what Hitler’s promotion would mean, and, particularly, how it would affect the KPD. Vicky underlined how important it was to have a correct communist interpretation of the situation. Alyosha felt strangely uneasy. Eventually, looking from one to the other, he blurted out, ‘Have you two got something you want to say to me?’

  Vicky turned to Paul and gestured for him to speak.

  ‘One or two things, yes,’ he said, putting Rosa down on the table. ‘There are one or two things to discuss.’

  As the mouse sniffed around the glasses, Paul reminded Alyosha of the hours they’d spent together in Moabit prison. By the time the ex-printer had finished, Alyosha was facing a litany of accusations, including being an agent provocateur and a Nazi spy.

  With a cigarette dangling between her lips, Vicky asked Alyosha what he had to say.

  ‘I’ll answer each accusation in turn, if that’s allowed.’

  ‘There’s no need to be like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He received a severe look from Vicky. Incensed that she had so obviously aligned herself with Paul, he longed to kick the man where it hurt.

  With a sigh, Alyosha denied the accusations made against him, one by one.

  ‘And every word is the truth.’

  ‘What about the SA?’ asked Paul as Rosa climbed up his arm. ‘Do you deny that you were associating with them too?’

  How was it possible for him to deny that he had been exercising with the auxiliaries on Rittmeister von Kunz’ estate? He admitted it, and told them about his job as a driver to the Nazis, but emphasised that he had turned his back on them a long time ago, and that he no longer had anything to do with them.

  And another thing for them to chew over: hadn’t he testified to the KPD about the schupo and Vlasich Pesotski shooting each other on the night of the attack on Nehringstrasse? Hadn’t he also put himself in danger outside the picture house when he rescued his cousin, Margarita, from being badly beaten, or worse?

  ‘You know I was badly injured myself in that fight. What more is there to say?’

  ‘That could be a trick,’ suggested Paul.

  ‘A trick?’

  ‘To hide the fact that you’re one of them.’

  Alyosha pulled his shirt out and held it high above his chest.

  ‘This? A trick?’

  ‘I’ve seen worse scars,’ answered Paul indifferently.

  Alyosha itched to plant a punch in the middle of that loathsome face.

  ‘You think I’d jump towards a razor in my guts? You stupid bastard.’

  ‘Hey, hey!’ Vicky placed a restraining arm on his chest, as he seemed about to go for Paul ‘None of that. No fighting.’

  But Alyosha was furious, and in a great torrent of words, he told them everything he knew about the SA, listing their strengths: plenty of money, plenty of arms and plenty of discipline and order. More men were likely to throng to the Nazis, especially now that their leader had been made Chancellor. Their greatest strength was their motor cars and motorcycles, their trucks and lorries, which could transport them efficiently from place to place: the Roter Frontkämpferbund couldn’t hope to match them there. He felt the communists’ battle against them was already lost. No wonder Hitler was in the place he was.