Belgrade Noir

One could clearly see from the interrogation notes that the Germans, thanks to the information obtained from a detective in the local Serbian police, knew about the meeting in the park, but it was even more clear that they in fact had no clue whom they’d nabbed. Gestapo chief Helm had thoroughly interrogated the captive about his false documents and connections to the black market and viewed his confiscated weapon as the basic tool of most common criminals. But he’d insisted most emphatically on knowing the name of his prisoner. He kept asking the suspect the same question, like a kind of refrain: “Are you Mars?”

Police agents had most likely found out about their meeting through some petty informant who worked for both the Germans and the Communists, and who was convinced that the man he’d betrayed deserved even worse because he was a party defector and traitor, and that his downfall would only strengthen the revolutionary movement.

Still, Makhin was bothered by the fact that the Germans had learned his code name.

“I can understand how they know the two of us have met because Tito’s people have been tailing the man who posed the biggest possible threat to them,” he said to Stalin after reviewing the notes from the interrogation. “But, Joseph Vissarionovich, where did my name come from?”

Stalin fixed him with that foxish gaze he had that led his interlocutor first to believe he’d been personally responsible for the suffering of Jesus, and then to sign a statement accusing Christ of collaborating with the Romans himself.

“Fyodor Yevdokimovich,” Stalin began softly, “neither you nor I are new to this game.”

“No, we’re not,” affirmed Makhin, completely aware that, as usual, he was not expected to say anything else.

“The two of us have worn more code names than coats.”

“We have.”

“Your name simply…”

“Came up?”

“Exactly, came up,” said Stalin almost cheerfully, even though Makhin could never tell what the generalissimo was really thinking. “Came up like an empty shell in which they found nothing.”

The notes from the interrogation proved this.

The Germans had simultaneously captured a man and overheard a name. And so they wanted to somehow connect them. For that reason they couldn’t grasp that one of the top Soviet secret agents had fallen into their hands, one who, among other things, had laid the groundwork for Trotsky’s liquidation.

“And you, Fyodor Yevdokimovich, know for sure that he was a hero?” Another soldier hopped into the grave, startling Makhin, picked up a large skull, and looked the martyr of the world revolution deep in the eye, while the muffled strains of Katyusha rockets drifted in from the edge of town.

“Certainly. And Comrade Stalin knows it too,” said Makhin.

The two Red Army soldiers stood at attention, and it was as if the whole front had suddenly fallen silent.

A silence much more complex reigned over the Kremlin the following day, when the leader of the world revolution laid that same skull on his desk and read carefully to himself Makhin’s message written in a steady hand on a frozen piece of paper.

Dear Comrade Stalin,

Acting on your personal orders, I send you the remains of the hero Mustafa Golubić from liberated Belgrade.

Mars

The contents of the message had so thoroughly absorbed Stalin’s attention that its baroque style went right over his head.

Even the best intelligence officers suffer from the desire to say much in as few words as possible, he thought. He struck a match, lit the piece of paper, and then his pipe with it, taking a few short, apprehensive puffs. Trying quickly to conjure a thought about silence as the only appropriate means of expression for comrades who, in the darkest basements of the Party, had been exterminating traitors hell-bent on subverting the foundations of world revolution (though it could just as well be the reverse: the basements of the revolution, and the foundations of the Party), Stalin went to the window where the vista of the war’s last winter unfurled.

Oh, my dear… he wanted to say to his fallen comrade, but suddenly he couldn’t remember a single one of the ten or so code names this one had used, so he returned to his desk, sat back down, and lowered his gaze to the dead man’s skull. Although there was no mustache on it, nor those oddly sagging sallow cheeks, it was the head of the only one who’d fearlessly dared to tell him what he really thought, and who wouldn’t have hesitated to liquidate even Karl Marx himself had the Party ordered it.

“There,” murmured Stalin, satisfied. “Now I can finally look you right in the eye, unafraid!”

The same couldn’t be said, however, by the German soldiers from the firing squad that stood, in late August 1941, facing the stout, mangled man, who was tied to a chair under the green treetops in a corner of the large park.

They stood while he sat and stared at them.