Hitler's peace

XXIII

The entire operation in Teheran was directed by Beria, the head of the Soviet Security Agency (the NKVD), and General Avramov, of the new Eastern Office. Beria had arrived from Baku that same day, with Stalin. Aboard the same SI-47 aircraft had been General Arkadiev, and it had given the general some considerable pleasure to witness the Soviet leader demonstrate his intense fear of flying by delivering a spectacular dressing-down on the person of Beria himself. Stalin had been drunk, of course. It was the only way he had been able to find enough courage to get on the plane; and, filled with fear and vodka, Stalin had let loose a torrent of abuse upon his fellow Georgian when the plane had encountered some air turbulence over the Caspian Sea.

“If I die on this plane, the last order I give will be to throw you out the door, snake eyes. Do you hear? We spend all that time on a train to Baku in order to avoid having to fly, only to end up on a fucking airplane. Doesn’t make sense.”

Beria had turned as red as a beetroot. Arkadiev had avoided Beria’s eye. It did not do to show pleasure in the NKVD chairman’s discomfiture.

“Do you hear what I’m saying, snake eyes?”

“Yes, Comrade Stalin,” said Beria. “Perhaps Comrade Stalin has forgotten that we went over the travel itinerary back in Moscow. It was always agreed that the last leg of the journey would be made by plane.”

“I don’t remember agreeing to that,” snarled Stalin. “Makes no sense. Churchill and Roosevelt both had warships to carry them across the sea. Why couldn’t I have a warship? The Caspian Sea is no bigger than the Black Sea. Is the Russian navy short of warships? Is the Caspian Sea more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean? I don’t think so, Beria.”

“Both Roosevelt and Churchill are making the journey from Cairo to Teheran by air,” insisted Beria.

“Only because they have to. There’s no other fucking way for them to get there, snake eyes.”

Now, several hours after the flight, in a large room on the first floor of the NKVD headquarters on Syroos Street in the eastern part of the city, Arkadiev saw that Beria was in a foul mood himself, doubtless still smarting from Stalin’s comments. He and his secretary, Stepan Mamulov, were reviewing the arrangements for Stalin’s security with General Merkulov, Beria’s deputy. Joining them were: General Krulev, who commanded the 3,000 men of Stalin’s personal guard, stationed in Teheran since the end of October; General Melamed, the head of the local NKVD; and Melamed’s deputy, Colonel Andrei Mikhalovits Vertinski. Beria’s ill temper had not been improved by the discovery that at least a dozen SS paratroopers were still at liberty. Of the two teams of men, one had been picked up near the holy city of Qom within hours of their landing; another forty men had been surrounded at a house in Kakh Street but had chosen to shoot it out. There were no survivors. But several were still unaccounted for.

“Although commanded by German officers and German NCOs, they’re Ukrainians, most of them,” Melamed told Beria. “From General Vlasov’s army that was lost on the Volkhov front in 1942.”

“Traitors,” hissed Beria. “That’s what they are.”

“Traitors, yes, of course,” agreed Melamed. “But not easy to crack. We’ve been French wrestling with the bastards all night and they’ve hardly told us a thing.” Until Beria’s arrival in Teheran, Melamed had been the most feared NKVD officer in Iran, and “French wrestling” was what he and his thugs jokingly called the process of breaking a man with beatings and torture. “These men are pretty tough, I can tell you.”

“Need I remind you that Comrade Stalin is now in the city?” demanded Beria. “That each hour these traitors and Fascists remain at liberty represents a potential threat to his life?” Beria leveled a white, pudgy finger at the center of Melamed’s poorly shaven face. “You’re a Ukrainian yourself, aren’t you, Melamed?”

“Yes, Comrade. From Kiev.”

“Yes, I thought so.” Beria sat back in his chair and folded his arms, smiling unpleasantly. “You know, if none of these bastards talks, it might be surmised that you’ve been lenient with them because of where they are from.”

“I can assure you, Comrade Beria, that the reverse is true,” said Melamed. “The truth is, that as a Ukrainian I am ashamed of these traitors. No one is keener to see them talk or punished, I promise you.”

“And I can promise you this, Melamed,” sneered Beria. “If one of these fuckers who are still at large gets to within a hundred feet of our embassy, I’ll have you shot. That goes for you, too, Vertinski. And you, Krulev, you ugly bastard. Christ only knows what you’ve been doing in the last four weeks you’ve been here. I’m furious about this. Furious. That we should have allowed the great Stalin to come to a city where there are terrorists planning to kill him. If it was up to me he wouldn’t be here at all; but Comrade Stalin is made of sterner stuff. He refused to stay in Russia. So I tell you this. We must find these men and we must find them quickly.” Beria took off his pince-nez. He was forty-four and probably the most intellectually gifted of all Stalin’s henchmen, but he was no party wallflower. Even by the depraved standards of the NKVD, he was notorious for his brutality.

“Where are these bastards, anyway?” he asked. “The ones you’ve been questioning.”

“We’ve got about ten of them downstairs, Comrade Beria,” explained Melamed. “The rest of the bunch are in the Red Army barracks to the north of the city, in Meshed.”

“The Germans are to be kept alive, do you hear?” said Beria. “But I want the highest measure of punishment for the Ukrainians at Meshed. To be carried out this day, Krulev. Is that understood?”

“Without questioning them?” asked Krulev. “Suppose the ones we’ve got downstairs don’t talk? What then? We might wish that we’d kept the prisoners at Meshed alive for a bit longer.”

“Do as I say and shoot them today. You may rest assured, the ones downstairs will talk.” Beria stood up. “I never met a man yet who wouldn’t talk, when questioned properly. I’ll take charge of it myself.”

Beria, Mamulov, Melamed, and Vertinski went down into the basement of the house at Syroos Street, where there was nothing that might have led a prisoner to believe that this was Teheran and not the Lubyanka in Moscow. The walls and floors were concrete, and the corridors and cells were brightly lit to prevent any prisoner from enjoying the temporary escape of sleep. The smell was uniquely Soviet, too: a mixture of cheap cigarettes, sweat, animal fats, urine, and human fear.

Beria was a squarely made man, but light on his feet; with his glasses, polished shoes, neatly cut Western suit, and silk tie, he gave off the can-do air of a successful businessman who was nevertheless quite prepared to pitch in on the shop floor alongside his employees. He tossed his jacket at Arkadiev, removed his tie, and rolled up his sleeves as he bustled his way through the door of the NKVD’s torture chamber. “So where the fuck is everyone?” he yelled. “No wonder the bastards aren’t talking. They’ve got no one to talk to. Vertinski. What the hell is going on here?”

“I expect the men are tired,” said Vertinski. “They’ve been working on these men for a whole day.”

“Tired?” screamed Beria. “I wonder how tired they’ll feel after six months in Solovki. I want one of the prisoners in here, now. The strongest. So you’ll see how you should do these things.” He shook his head wearily. “It’s always the same,” he told Mamulov. “You want a job done properly, you’ve got to do it yourself.”

Beria asked one of the NKVD officers to hand over his gun. The man obeyed without hesitation, and Beria checked that the revolver, a Nagant seven-shot pistol, was loaded. Although old, the pistol was favored by some of the NKVD because it could be fitted with a Bramit silencer, and thus it was immediately clear to Beria that the officer had been an executioner.

“Have you questioned any of the prisoners?” he asked the man.

“Yes, sir.”

“And?”

“They’re very stubborn, sir.”

“What’s your name?” Beria asked him.

“Captain Alexander Koltsov,” said the officer, clicking the heels of his boots as he came smartly to attention in front of the comrade chairman.

“I knew a Kolstov once,” said Beria absently, neglecting to add that the man he remembered had been a journalist whom Beria had tortured to death at Sukhanov Prison. The Sukhanovka was Beria’s personal prison in Moscow, where those he had singled out for an extra measure of cruelty, or women he had decided to rape before handing them over to be shot, were sent.

The guards returned, dragging a naked man in shackles, and stood him roughly in front of the NKVD chief. Beria looked closely at the prisoner, who stared back at him with undisguised hatred. “But there’s hardly a mark on this man,” he objected. “Who questioned him?”

“I did, Comrade Beria,” said Koltsov.

“What did you hit him with? A feather duster?”

“I can assure you, sir, I used the utmost severity.”

Beria touched a couple of bruises on the prisoner’s face and arms and laughed. “The utmost severity? Koltsov, you wouldn’t know the utmost severity if it fucked you up the ass. You’re an executioner, not an interrogator.” Looking straight into the prisoner’s eyes, Beria continued: “Big difference. You see, it takes a certain kind of person to beat a man with a club for thirty minutes. I can see you know what I’m talking about. I can see it in your eyes. Killing a man, putting a gun to his head and pulling a trigger, is nothing. Well, maybe the first time it feels like something. But when you’ve killed as many as a hundred, a thousand, then you know how easy it is. Like something you do in an abattoir. That’s just killing, it means nothing, and any fool can do it.”

Even as he spoke, Beria turned quickly, pointed the revolver, and shot Captain Kolstov in the head. Before the captain had hit the floor, Beria had returned his cold, merciless stare to his Ukrainian prisoner.

“See what I mean? Nothing. It means nothing. Nothing at all.” Beria handed the pistol to Vertinski, who took it in his shaking hand. Then, nodding down toward the dead captain, Beria told the prisoner, “Look at him. Look at him,” and he took hold of the Ukrainian’s hair, pulling his head down. “Imagine it. He was one of mine. Not a traitor like you.” Beria snorted, then turned and spat onto the dead man’s head. “No, he was just incompetent.”

Beria let go of the man’s hair and, taking a step back, turned his sleeves up another few inches and selected a rubber rod that was hanging from a shiny new nail in the wall. “All I have for you, my friend, is a promise. That before I’m finished, you will envy this”-Beria kicked the dead man’s face, negligently-“this piece of shit.” Beria glanced meaningfully at Vertinski and Melamed. “This clown, Koltsov, who was too soft for his own good. Because there’s only one way to deal with an animal like a Ukrainian peasant. You beat him. And then you beat him again.

“You.” Beria snapped his fingers at one of the other NKVD officers in the torture chamber. “Put that chair up on the table.” Then he clicked his fingers at the two men holding the Ukrainian. “You two. Sit him up in that chair and tie his feet to the legs. The rest of you pay attention. This is how we amuse the spies and traitors in our midst. This is what we do. We tickle their feet.” And seeing that the prisoner was now securely bound to the chair, Beria brought the rod down hard on top of the man’s toes. Raising his voice over the Ukrainian’s howl, Beria said, “We tickle their toes until they beg for mercy.” Beria struck the prisoner’s feet again, and this time he screamed aloud. “Like that! And that! And that! And that!”

Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria took off his pince-nez, placed it safely in his trouser pocket, and then licked his lips. He wasn’t a fit man despite the frequent games of volleyball he played with his bodyguards, but he was strong enough, and he inflicted the beating with an economy of effort that spoke of years of practice, and some considerable enjoyment. “Energetic” was how people usually described Beria, and for the officers witnessing this beating it would have been difficult to disagree. Mamulov, Beria’s secretary, had always thought vegetarians were weak and listless and held human life in awe, until he worked for Beria. Beating a man on his bare feet for a full thirty minutes was something awful to behold. A lesson from the deepest pit in hell that was not lost on any NKVD in that room.

At last Beria threw aside the rubber rod and, taking hold of the towel that Mamulov had thoughtfully fetched for him, wiped his face and neck. “Thank you,” he said, quietly. “By God, I needed that, after the journey.

“On the floor with him,” he ordered the two men holding the now unconscious prisoner, still bound to the chair. “Idiots,” he snarled, as they tried to lift the chair down. Beria sprang onto the table like a cat. “Not like that. Like this.” He placed his foot on the chair and pushed it off the table so that the prisoner fell heavily onto the floor. “It’s not a fucking ambulance service. You,” Beria pointed at Melamed. “Get a bucket of water and some vodka.”

Beria threw the bucket of water onto the Ukrainian’s head and then tossed it aside as the man, whose feet were the size and color of two pieces of raw beef, started to revive. “Pick him up,” said Beria.

The guards straightened the chair, and Beria, taking the vodka from Vertinski, pushed the neck of the bottle into the prisoner’s mouth and tipped it up, so that the man could drink. “Watch and learn,” he told his men. “You want a man to tell you something, don’t beat him about the head and mouth so that he can’t talk. Beat him on the feet. On his ass. On his back, or on his balls. But never interfere with his means of speech. Now, then, who sent you on this mission, my friend?”

“Schellenberg,” whispered the prisoner. “General Walter Schellenberg, of the SD. There are two teams. A North Team and a South Team. The South Team is commanded by…”

Beria patted the man on the cheek. “See what I mean? This bastard’s not only talking but we’ll have a hard job to shut him up now. He’d tell me Charlie Chaplin sent him on this mission if that’s what I wanted to hear.” Beria wiped the neck of the bottle and took a long swig of vodka himself. “Well, don’t just stand there,” he yelled at Melamed. “He’s ready to split like a pomegranate. Get a pencil and paper and take down every stinking word that comes out of his mouth.”

Still holding the vodka bottle, Beria collected his jacket and went back upstairs, followed closely by Mamulov. He handed his secretary the bottle. “Where are Sarkisov and Nadaraia?” These were the two NKVD colonels who acted as his unofficial pimps and procurers.

“They’re at the summer embassy, Comrade Beria.”

With Stalin occupying the winter embassy in the center of Teheran, it had been decided that Beria would have the run of the summer embassy in Zargandeh, about five miles outside the capital.

“They’ve got women?”

“Quite a variety. A couple of Poles, several Persians, and some Arabs.”

“Very Rimsky-Korsakov,” Beria said, and laughed. “Let’s hope there’s enough time, and that our guests don’t arrive too early. I’ve never fucked an Arab bitch before. Are they clean?”

“Yes, Comrade Beria. Comrade Baroyan has examined them all thoroughly.”

Dr. Baroyan was the director of the Soviet hospital in Teheran. He also worked for the NKVD, and in that capacity he sometimes murdered troublesome patients with neglect, unnecessary surgery, or overdoses of drugs.

“Good, because I’ve only just recovered from that syphilis. I wouldn’t want to go through that again. It was that actress, you know. What’s her name?”

“Tatiana.”

“Yes. Her. Which camp did we send her to? I’ve forgotten.”

“Kolyma.”

The camps at Kolyma, a three-month journey from Moscow, were the most wretched places in the whole Soviet Gulag system.

“Then she’s probably dead by now,” said Beria. “The bitch. Good.”

Beria went into Melamed’s office, ignoring the pretty secretary who was the local security commissar’s gatekeeper, and threw himself down on the sofa. He farted loudly and then ordered Mamulov to “tell the girl” to bring him some tea. “And some wine,” he yelled after Mamulov’s retreating figure. “Georgian wine, too. I don’t want any of the local piss.”

He closed his eyes and slept for almost half an hour. When he opened them again, he saw Melamed standing nervously over him. “What the fuck do you want?” he growled.

“I have a transcript of Kosior’s statement, Comrade Beria.”

“Who the hell is Kosior?”

“The Ukrainian prisoner you interrogated downstairs.”

“Oh, him. Well?”

Melamed handed him a typed sheet of paper. “Would you like to read it?”

“Fuck, no. Just tell me what you’re doing about it.”

“Well, naturally, Comrade Beria, I wanted to confer with you first, before doing anything.”

Beria groaned loudly. “I thought I made it abundantly clear that it is imperative we catch the remaining terrorists as quickly as possible. You should have woken me.”

Melamed glanced uncomfortably at the box of silk teddy bears that now occupied a corner of his office-presents for the young women with whom Beria was planning to spend his evening. “The comrade chairman must be tired after his long journey from Moscow,” he said. “I didn’t want to disturb him.”

“When an assassin presents himself in front of Comrade Stalin,” said Beria, snatching the transcript out of Melamed’s hands, “I’ll remember your thoughtfulness.” Fixing the pince-nez on the bridge of his broad nose, Beria glanced over the typescript. “Very well. Here are my orders. I want the bazaar surrounded with troops. No one is to be allowed in or out until a house-to-house search has been carried out.”

“Yes, Comrade Chairman.”

Beria read on a way. “Wrestlers?” he said.

“They have high status in the local community,” explained Melamed. “Many of them used to be bodyguards.”

“Have you ever heard of this fellow, Misbah Ebtehaj?”

“He’s quite famous, I believe.”

“Arrest him. Go to wherever it is that wrestlers go-”

“The Zurkhane?”

“Go there. And arrest them all. Also this address in Abassi Street. Arrest everyone there, too.”

Melamed moved smartly toward the door.

“Melamed!”

“Yes, Comrade Beria?”

“While you’re at it, put up some signs offering a reward for information leading to the capture of the German terrorists. Twenty thousand dollars, in gold. That ought to be enough to persuade anyone who’s hiding them to give them up.”

“But where shall I find such a sum?”

“Leave that to me,” said Beria, still glancing over the transcript. “This Kosior. He doesn’t say exactly how many were in his team. Don’t you think it might be useful to know that? So we can be sure how many we are still looking for. Is it ten? Is it a dozen? Is it thirteen? I want to know.”

“I’m afraid he fainted, Comrade Beria, before we could establish a precise number.”

“Then bring him around again and ask him. And if he doesn’t tell you, beat him. Or beat one of the others until you know absolutely everything. How many Ukrainians? How many Germans?” Beria threw the transcript at Melamed’s feet. “And you’d better bring the Americans and the British in on this. The time is past when we could have kept this to ourselves. Only don’t, for Christ’s sake, mention that most of these terrorists are from the Ukraine. They’re SS. Have you got that? SS. And that makes them Germans. Got that?”

“Yes, Comrade Chairman.”

“Now get out of here and do your job before I have you shot.”

Melamed passed the arrest orders to Vertinski and then telephoned the British legation, asking to speak to Colonel Spencer, in command of British security in Teheran. It was the second conversation the two had had about the German parachutists. In the first, Melamed had assured Spencer that the plot had been nipped in the bud and that all the SS troopers were dead or safely in custody. Now he told Spencer that several were still at liberty. Spencer immediately offered 170 British detectives and MPs to help with the search, and Melamed agreed, suggesting that the British concentrate their searches on Abassi Street. Next Melamed called Schwarzkopf’s office and spoke with Colonel L. Steven Timmermann, who promised to assist in any way possible and dispatched a team of American MPs to help search the bazaar. With the whole of Teheran, from Gale Morghe Airfield in the south to Kulhek in the north, being searched by Allied troops, Melamed then turned to the reward notices, and when these had been posted, he began fielding phone calls from some of the search teams. And only gradually did he fall to thinking about why it was that the Germans had betrayed their own assassination team to Beria himself, and about the many unusual preparations that were still taking place within the grounds of the winter embassy under the supervision of Beria’s own son, Sergo.

Stalin was not staying in the main building of the recently redecorated embassy but in one of the several smaller cottages and villas that were on the grounds of what had once been the sumptuous estate of a rich Persian businessman. Until the Big Three Conference, many of these villas and cottages had been empty, and for the last two weeks, Zoya Zarubina, the stepdaughter of NKVD general Leonid Eitingen, had been scouring the local shops for carpets and furniture. New bathrooms had been installed and, unusually perhaps, in one of the villas, a portrait of Lenin had been replaced with one of Beethoven. No less peculiar, in Melamed’s view, had been the decision to refurbish a large underground bunker and to drain and paint a series of secret tunnels that connected the main building with several of the villas; after all, Teheran was protected by as many as a dozen squadrons of Russian and British fighter aircraft, and any air attack of the kind countenanced by the SS general who had sent in the teams of German parachutists would have been suicide. Melamed thought there was less likelihood of Stalin needing to seek the refuge of a bomb shelter while he was in Teheran than there was of Beria requiring the pastoral care of a Russian Orthodox priest.

By late afternoon, several more of the SS parachutists had been arrested. By Melamed’s final account, this left three men, two of them German, still unaccounted for. As night fell, Melamed was informed about the arrival (under cover of darkness) of some early guests at Gale Morghe Airfield that very same evening, but was given no information as to who they were. These guests had been received by Beria, personally, and then, amid great secrecy, had been taken not to the British or to the American embassy but to the grounds of the Russian embassy itself. All of which prompted Melamed to wonder just who it was in the Kremlin that could have been accorded the same level of importance and security as Comrade Stalin himself. Molotov? Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana? His son, Vasily? Stalin’s mistress, perhaps?

But perhaps the strangest of all Melamed’s discoveries that day came just before midnight, when, mindful of Beria’s threats to have him shot, he took a walk around the winter embassy grounds and found, to his astonishment, that one of the NKVD officers patrolling near the gates, with a Degtyarev submachine gun cradled in his arm, was Lavrenti Beria himself.