CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Arkady Hotel, Central Moscow, USSR, October 8, 1961

The preparations, planning, bribing, and efforts to convince Leonid Zaslavskevich Breslav—the Pakhan of the vory v zakone [thieves-in-law] Solntsevskaya Bratva—consumed most of the ensuing year, and nearly five million dollars. Leonid Zaslavskevich argued that the project that Antoine and Michaele were planning could compromise the goodwill with Khrushchev that had taken so long to foster; and besides, the mission would require a great many men and considerable supplies. It was likely that some of the russkaya mafiyas would get injured, killed, or compromised, which would jeopardise his organization. Antoine saw Breslav’s protests as disingenuous bargaining and was certain that the Pakhan would lend his support in the end.

Antoine and Michaele took rooms in the Stockholm Grand Hotel under assumed names. They kept to themselves and did not venture out of the hotel. They ate a late dinner in the hotel’s exclusive restaurant—a small gastronomic event. The beginning of the courses involved little brown paper surprise bags holding krisp bread. Antoine had a selection of Soup of Morels from Turkey with poached egg and green asparagus. Michaele had French onion soup, as good as was served at the Hotel de Crillon in Paris. Both had thick, brown crusty bread spread with thick salted butter. The next course was crisp round croquettes of nettles from Kälinge farm served with a half lemon and dusted with sea salt.

For his second course, Antoine selected fresh white asparagus from Rhineland-pfalz and rilette of crab, egg, and parsley. Michaele ordered breaded fillet of lemon sole from Kattegatt. The fish was presented as two rectangles of golden sole with a generous line of black caviar on the mid-center surface lying on a bed of piped celeriac cream. Both men ate too much bread, but they were still unable to pass up the desserts displayed for them on a silver platter. Since it was the start of the Swedish rhubarb season, they indulged themselves too generously in the fried raw rhubarb from Holland, lemon sponge cake, quenelle of vanilla ice cream, and browned sugar.

Sweden did not produce anything exciting in the way of wine because it was too cold to ripen grapes properly. Sweden’s favorite—and national drink, and the only thing the two men liked about Russia—was vodka made from rye, wheat, corn, and potatoes. They topped the vodka off with generous goblets of Zumbali Chenin Blanc from South Africa. The formerly destitute concentration camp internees who had spent more than a decade in the worst that three nations had to offer laughed at how marvelous the food was and at the fact that they had consumed almost enough to make themselves sick. How far they had come.

It was sobering to get up early the next morning, to change identities into the appearance of common Swedish workers, and to wonder together if they were about to wreck their now almost idyllic existence. With directions from the concierge, they took the train to the harbor then went by ferry to the Tallinn, Estonia Soviet Socialistic Republic. The process of getting into the Soviet satellite buffer state was as unpleasant as the Soviets could make it—long, complicated, slow, and ponderous, with every one of the six separate border representatives they encountered being surlier and ruder than the next. The outside world’s policy of nonrecognition of the Soviet state of Estonia gave rise to the principle of legal continuity, which held that de jure, Estonia remained an independent state under illegal occupation throughout the period after the war. The officials of the regime–high and low–resented what they considered the disrespect of the westerners and their condescension. However, the two “Gebirgsjägers” spoke the universal language—money—which significantly greased the skids for their entrance.

“I remember now why I hated them so much. It was the world’s greatest mistake that the Soviets won the war. The Fourth Reich can’t come too soon,” Michaele said.

“True enough, but don’t say anything like that again until we are safely back in England, Michaele. No mistakes,” said Antoine soberly.

Michaele nodded and frowned. He had not needed to be told.

The two men arrived in the capital of the Estonian SSR on October 7, the USSR Constitution Day celebration. On the streets there was lackluster enthusiasm—no outright protests, but occasional mutterings. The Tallinn citizens were unhappy about two things. The Soviets had chosen to continue their destruction of Estonian graveyards and war memorials even during what was supposed to be an important day of celebration, with the powers in Moscow granting a day off work for all workers. The graveyards were still in the process of being dismantled, and the materials hauled away with no attention paid to the dismay that project caused the citizens of the city and the country. The Tallinn Military Cemetery was almost denuded of its original gravestones which were placed there between 1918 and 1944. Since then, that graveyard was being used by the Red Army.

The Baltic German cemeteries were now nothing but empty fields. The Kopli and Mõigu cemeteries from the seventeen hundreds and the oldest one in the city—the Kalamaja cemetery—which was established in the sixteenth century, were becoming unrecognizable. The monuments erected by the Republic of Estonia were being knocked down; and to add insult to injury, the stones were being used to construct drab utilitarian soviet block buildings. The Red Army had a designated Destruction Battalion with bright red right shoulder patches that made them stand out as perhaps the most despised unit of the most despised armed force in the country save only the KGB.

Two years after the end of World War II, Estonian private business disappeared, and along with it any vestiges of prosperity. The once vibrant city with its colorful Hanseatic League buildings was now a dull soviet gray with many of the war-torn buildings still windowless hulks. Even a brief step outside rekindled the hatred Antoine and Michaele had for the entire soviet regime. The citizens—now nearly fifty percent ethnic Russians—walked about like inmates of a huge prison compound, heads and eyes down, not speaking to one another. The majority of the intelligentsia, military officers, university professors, and respected businessmen were sent to Russian prison camps and never heard from again. The remaining people were as docile and colorless as their cities. The missing professors at the universities were replaced by politically reliable stooges, many of whom did not even have an education in the subjects they taught. The Balkans were a shadow of their former selves and a sad comparison for Antoine and Michaele who had now lived for years in the splendor of Paris, London, and Bonn.

The famous Song Festival of Estonia was in full swing such as it could be in those stodgy and penurious Soviet years, but it was only a forme fruste of its original vibrant self. That accounted for the hangdog expressions worn by the populace festively dressed in their colorful national costumes. Before the Germans and before the replacement tyranny of the Soviet Union, the Song Festivals were a national institution held in July once every five years with massive choruses from all over the country, indeed from all over the Balkans. Some of those choruses had as many as 18,000 singers. It was a time of meeting kin and old friends, of starting romances, of drinking and rollicking let down of inhibitions, and of producing the best choral music and dance that a nation of enthusiastic performers could bring to the capital. The foreign authorities—the hated Soviets—determined to use the Song Festivals in their own interests. The Soviet regime tied the Song Festivals to the “red holidays,” and forced the people to produce them several times a year. Soviet Constitution Day in October was one of them. Foreign and propagandist songs had to be sung in order to preserve the chance to sing Estonian songs at all. During this three-day period–as in the past several years–the people cautiously turned the festivals into minor mass demonstrations, spontaneously singing a few national songs and hymns, both of which were strictly forbidden. Even a few intrepid Estonian rock musicians played briefly and furtively.

On the morning of October 8, Antoine and Michaele hired a lorry to take them unobtrusively to the bus station where they caught the cross-border bus to the former St. Petersburg–called Leningrad ever since the Bolshevik revolution. They had only thought the transit from Sweden into Estonia was cumbersome and tedious. They got a university-level education in what bureaucratic obfuscation and inefficiency was like when they joined a silent queue to walk across the border into Russia.

Every individual border official wore a KGB uniform with its blue insignias. Every man and woman in the border guard had a permanent frown tattoed onto his or her lower face. Every syllable was a growl, and every facial expression was one of distrust and suspicion. The visitors’ documents were scrutinized with a thoroughness of a diamond cutter, including with magnifying lenses. There were six stations to go through, and each one of them required the applicants for entry into the communist paradise to answer the same litany of mind-numbing questions. They were patted down none too gently and prodded on to the next station. Their bags were emptied six times and had to be repacked. For Antoine and Michaele, it was a very unpleasant reminder of the mind-set of the gulag where they spent their first years after the fall of Berlin.

Finally they emerged on the other side of the gauntlet and began to search for transportation to the train station. Their Russian was good, and they took every advantage they had to pass for Russians. That advantage evaporated at the Leningrad to Moscow train station, where everyone who passed through passenger check-in went through a vetting as vigorous as they had encountered at the border. Their papers identified them as foreigners which entitled them to pay double the train fare that the citizens paid. They were hungry, thirsty, tired, and out of sorts like every other prospective passenger when they finally made it to the waiting area on the dock alongside the tracks. The only thing that lightened the mini-ordeal was the fact that the train station was a work of art—art deco with heroic paintings and statuary—and as clean and shining as an operating room.

Given the difficulty of finally getting to the point that they could board the comfortable train car their tickets entitled them to, they were highly surprised and relieved to find themselves ensconced in plush comfortable seats—in Soviet gray, but newly recovered—and to be served a decent meal which was included in the fare. They had been warned to buy platform food to supplement the filling but not necessarily interesting onboard food from rows of smiling babushkas who sold everything from freshly picked raspberries to home-smoked fish. There was fragrant bread, boiled eggs, and still-hot boiled potatoes flavored with butter, salt, and pepper, and dill. They put pancakes filled with goat’s cheese into their carry bags and had a quick small bowl of strawberries and sour cream.

The train kitchen crew provided borscht, caviar, a tepid cabbage soup with meatballs, and coarse brown bread. There was the expected freely provided national drink, vodka. Most Russians did not consider the water fit to drink. As an after-dinner drink, they were each given a small glass of champanskaya [champagne], not the equivalent of the French variety, but not bad for Russia.

Precisely on time, the Russian locomotive class U-U-127, Lenin’s 4-6-0 oil-burning compound locomotive, chugged out of the station for an overnight journey to Moscow. The sounds of the locomotive’s old engine and clickety-clack of the steel wheels on the joints of the tracks was like a lullaby to the two tired men, and they slept soundly the entire way into the Moscow train station. The station was massively crowded and hectic; so, no one paid attention to the two foreigners who looked every bit like the rest of the Russians around them. No one checked their papers.

Antoine and Michaele had been warned by the British foreign office to avoid Gypsy cabs, but friends had assured them that crime was rare. They elected to take one of the nondescript Fiat 124s which circled the train station, since in Moscow any car can legally be used as a taxi. There is a long tradition of Gypsy cabs, and they comprised most of the city’s meager fleet. They stepped up to the curb and raised their hands. A dented and rusting Fiat pulled up, and the driver leaned towards the open window. The driver and the two passengers—all speaking street Russian—negotiated a price, and a handshake bargain was stuck. The driver did not talk the entire way to the Arbat Hotel in central Moscow. The hotel was midrange in price and would not be likely to attract attention to the two men. It was completed in 1960 and still had a sense of newness about it. The accomodations and in-house restaurant were decent.

Per arrangement with the Pakhan Leonid Zaslavskevich Breslava, one of his Kryshas [extremely violent russkaya mafiya enforcers, employed to protect the organization’s business from other criminal organizations] named Artur Vsevolodovich Denisov, knocked on Antoine and Michaele’s room door—a series of four quick knocks followed by a single loud knock, followed by four more. Michaele responded with two sets of three knocks then opened the door. Denisov was a huge man—six-foot seven and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He was heavyset with muscles—not fat—and his almost neckless body looked uncomfortable in his wide-lapelled black suit that looked more like a character from 1930s Chicago mobster film than a modern 1960s businessman—the looked he hoped to convey. He had a gray shirt, black tie with an eagle tie tack, and matching cufflinks. His broad black shoes could have used a shine.

Artur Vsevolodovich’s brown hair was combed back and pomaded into a neatness that was almost waxen. The neatness did nothing to soften his face, which would have been chosen as the year’s best thug face for the movies if such a contest existed. He had several facial scars, and half of his right ear was missing. The left earlobe held a medium-sized gold ring, which gave that side of his face a piratical quality.

“Dobryy vecher, on poslal menya, chtoby pomoch [Good evening, he sent me to help],” the Mafioso said, presuming that “he” needed no further characterization.