The Coldest War Read online

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I might ask you the same,” he said, smiling. She sighed a second time. “Out with it, now. Your burdens are my own, and vice versa. We had something about that in our vows, as I recall.”

  “Oh, Will. I’m sorry. It’s just…” Her voice dropped to a whisper, so that their driver wouldn’t hear her. “Your brother’s wife is a vapid cow.”

  Will’s laughter, loud and barking, startled the driver. In the rearview, his eyes briefly checked on the couple before turning back to Lyall Street. Will took Gwendolyn’s hand, and he felt her tension begin to melt away as he stroked his thumb along the inside of her wrist.

  “You know, there was a time when Aubrey wanted nothing more for me than to settle down with somebody like Viola.”

  “You’d have gone mad.”

  “Back then? I nearly did,” he said, squeezing her hand and feeling grateful as ever that she had entered his life.

  4 May 1963

  Walworth, London, England

  A garden shed in springtime: mud, mildew, spiders, and the stink of compost. Squalid solitude. Blessed solitude.

  Raybould Marsh, formerly Lieutenant-Commander Marsh of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, and formerly of MI6, sat on a wobbly stool he’d nicked from a pub. He inspected tomato plants for bruises and fungus. He’d been taking them outside for longer periods each day and longer into the evening, acclimating them to the insult of cooler temperatures before permanently transplanting them into the garden. Done gradually enough, the transition wouldn’t shock the plants.

  People, thought Marsh, were much the same. Change things slowly enough, for long enough, and before you knew it, the world was warped beyond recognition.

  He had expanded the shed soon after the war with materials scavenged from a disassembled Anderson shelter. The addition featured a low, sloping roof of translucent plastic, once smooth and white, now cracked and dirty by weather and age. Marsh’s workbench sagged under paper sacks of potting soil, fertilizer, piles of planters. His cot stuck halfway under the bench, covered with rumpled sheets and a thin, water-stained, army-surplus blanket. A handmade bookcase, crammed with volumes of Kipling and Haggard, formed a makeshift headboard. A few old photographs had been pinned to the shelves, their edges yellowed and curled.

  The clatter of a broken dish echoed from the house. Liv, his wife, raised her voice in shrill alarm. Marsh reached behind the plants and clicked on the wireless.

  He didn’t particularly care for the news or the state of the world, but it did drown out the noise. Running electrical mains to the shed had been something of a job, but necessary for preserving his sanity. Sometimes, when the clamor from the house became too much, he’d tune the radio between stations as a white noise generator.

  The small of Marsh’s back twinged when he leaned over to inspect another plant. Pain flared in his knee, too. The problem in his knee was an old one, something he’d had even as a young man. It came and went over the years. The pain in his back was a souvenir of age.

  The odor of hot earth wafted through the shed. As the valves in the wireless heated up, they scorched away the fine layer of dust that had settled through the grille. Static became an ethereal warble laced with the suggestion of human voices. The amplifiers stabilized, and the voices became a Russian choir. Most stations on the Continent sounded like this when they weren’t spreading the latest propaganda from Moscow. Sometimes, when he could stomach it, he listened to those broadcasts. They reminded him of desperate days from long ago. Days spent studying maps, conferring with warlocks, hoping to entice the Soviets to finish off the Third Reich.

  Marsh gave the tuner dial a few flicks of his thumb. It landed on something loud and discordant—modern music played by a group out of Liverpool. Another flick brought him to a BBC station playing more familiar music. Marsh recognized the Benny Goodman recording, and remembered when it had been new. The big band hour was popular among people old enough to remember life before the war.

  He listened to the remainder of the program while mending a leaky hose with bit of inner tube cut from a bicycle tire. The hose was a motley thing, riddled with patches down its length, but Marsh had kept it working long past its useful life. They might have scraped together enough money to afford the extravagance of a new hose, but Marsh never suggested this to Liv. A new hose would have meant fewer excuses to spend time in the shed. Meant cutting off another avenue of escape.

  They’d purchased the bicycle for their newborn son, John, in happy anticipation of the day he’d be old enough to use it. It still leaned behind the shed, unused, rusting into nothing.

  Vera Lynn sang wistfully of bluebirds and white cliffs. Liv used to sing the same song, better than Lynn herself. But she hadn’t sung in the house since John was born.

  Marsh made to change the station again, but the song ended before he could get his hands free, and then it was the top of the hour and time for the news. That morning’s moon shot was the lead story. Three cosmonauts had departed the space station; in a few days’ time, they would become the first men to see the far side of the moon with their own eyes. Von Braun was sure to receive the Order of Lenin upon their safe return. Predictably, President Nixon had sent effusive congratulations to Khrushchev on behalf of the American people. In the Near East, the Royal Navy had stationed the carrier HMS Ocean into the Persian Gulf, near British Petroleum’s Abadan refinery in southern Iran, in response to increased Soviet activity along the borders of the Azerbaijan and Turkmen SSR. Elsewhere, scattered and confusing reports had trickled in to the BBC bureau in Cape Town, including rumors of abandoned villages in the Tanganyika Territory. Closer to home, foresters investigated a recent fire that had burned acres of woodland in Gloucestershire.

  Outside, the kitchen door creaked and slammed. Marsh sighed. He flicked off the wireless.

  Liv barged in a few moments later, rattling the tools hung behind the door. She stank of antiseptic and watered-down perfume. Marsh saw the bags beneath her eyes, darker than usual, and decided not to mention it. John had had one of his bad nights.

  The wrinkles in the hollows of her cheeks creased into the edges of a frown. “Were you planning to spend the entire day out here?”

  “I’m nearly finished.”

  Liv pursed her lips. “Nearly finished,” she muttered. “You always say that.”

  “The sooner I get these in the ground, the sooner we can have a decent salad again.” Marsh cringed inwardly as soon as the words passed his lips.

  “Decent,” she said. “As opposed to the indecent meals that I prepare the rest of the year.”

  Marsh wondered, as he sometimes did, about the passage of time. The years had transformed Liv’s freckles, once so endearing and erotic, into age spots that repulsed him. How had things gone so terribly wrong? Time was a cruel alchemist.

  “Don’t, Liv. You know what I meant.” She carried her handbag, he noticed. And she’d done her lips. Liv hadn’t bothered in years, but she’d begun again recently. It meant she’d come home late, smelling of another man’s aftershave and not respecting Marsh enough to hide it. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Out,” she said. Somehow, the plants didn’t shrivel and blacken before the naked contempt in her voice. But Liv never missed her mark, never missed a chance to make him feel useless. Emasculated.

  She flung something across the cramped shed. A ring of keys clattered on his workbench, knocking a large chip from a terra-cotta planter. “Feed your son.” Over her shoulder as she walked away, she added, “It’s your turn.”

  He waited in the shed until he heard the screeching of the garden gate. It banged shut behind Liv; he made a mental note to oil the hinges and replace the spring. Her heels clicked on the pavement outside, and then faded into the general low-level thrum of the neighborhood.

  Marsh considered finishing with the tomatoes before going inside, but rejected the idea. John had to eat.

  The house was quiet, but for the simmering of a pot Liv
had prepared: barley soup with peas, carrots, and a bit of beef. Marsh filled a bowl, grabbed a towel, and went upstairs. The stairs creaked. John launched into a new round of keening.

  John’s room was down a short hallway from the bedroom his parents ostensibly shared. Marsh fished out the key ring with one hand while balancing the bowl in the other. Four keys hung from the ring. John paused when Marsh scratched the first key into the first lock. Marsh noticed a puddle beneath the door when he worked his way to the final and lowest lock.

  He braced himself before turning the last bolt. Sometimes John ran, blind and mindless. But his son didn’t rush the door. Shards of crockery splintered beneath the soles of Marsh’s work boots when he entered. John had flung a bowl of soup across the room.

  The room stank. The door behind Marsh was splattered with brown stains. John had flung other things at Liv, too. No wonder she’d left for the day.

  Marsh turned on the light. Every wall had been covered with calico, and stuffed with carpet scraps, horsehair, and newspaper. Homemade soundproofing, the best Marsh could manage. In places, where the insulation was torn, he could glimpse the original robin’s egg blue walls. The paint was a holdover from those last giddy days, when they’d done up the nursery in the final weeks of Liv’s pregnancy. Before they’d taken John home from the hospital; before they’d discovered something wrong with their son.

  That was the doctors’ term. Wrong. Because they didn’t know what else to call it.

  Everything he’d done, everything they’d endured, all for naught. Ruined by a fluke of fate.

  Yellowing placards lined the walls near the ceiling, displaying the letters of the alphabet. Those were leftovers from the period before they realized the extent of the problem, when Liv had thought she might be able to homeschool their son.

  John himself huddled in his usual corner, naked. They’d given up trying to clothe him after he’d grown large enough to overpower Liv. He clenched his knees to his chest, rocking sideways and knocking his head against the wall with a steady, monotonous rhythm. That was another reason for the padding. John could do that for hours, even days, unless somebody moved him.

  “It’s me, son,” said Marsh. “Your father.”

  Sometimes—on good days—John paused in his rocking, ever so briefly, when Marsh entered. A token acknowledgment, a hint of connection. But not today. John kept batting his head against the wall without interruption. Marsh had recently replaced the padding there.

  “I brought something to eat.”

  Pat, pat, pat, pat, pat.

  Marsh hunkered down next to John, cross-legged, ignoring the protests from his knee. John’s rocking wafted the scent of his unwashed body at his father; he smelled faintly of sour milk. It took two people to bathe him, but Marsh and Liv rarely stayed in the same room together.

  “I see you gave your mum some trouble today. You shouldn’t be so difficult to her.”

  Pat, pat, pat, pat.

  “She loves you as much as I do.”

  Pat, pat, pat.

  Marsh sighed. “Let’s get some food in you, son.” He laid his hand on John’s shoulder.

  John rolled his head toward Marsh, turning a pair of colorless eyes at him. It always unnerved Marsh when he did that, just as much as it cut him with slivers of irrational hope. He knew those eyes were sightless, equally devoid of function as of warmth.

  John sniffed the air. He leaned toward Marsh, snuffling with a machine gun burst of quick, sharp inhalations. Marsh held his free hand toward John’s face, so that his son could get the scent. Then he did the same with the soup.

  John’s mouth fell open. But before Marsh could get the spoon in, his son began to wail: a single, unbroken note that lasted as long as the air in his lungs.

  He did it again. And again. And again.

  two

  9 May 1963

  Lambeth, London, England

  Modern London wasn’t a patch on its former self. The smells, the sounds, the architecture … little remained of the city Klaus remembered.

  He’d been here once before, briefly, on a rescue mission after Gretel had handed herself to a British agent. From time to time during the long years at Arzamas-16, his thoughts had drifted back to London. Britain had survived the war; to Klaus, that made it a shining place.

  He was a different man now. More enlightened. No longer the devoted, unquestioning tool he’d been a lifetime ago. But London had changed even more than he.

  He remembered a place somber yet grand, a temple built of granite and brick and marble. Gothic buildings, baroque buildings, and others for which he lacked the vocabulary. Statues, monuments, and memorials. They had struck him as a decadent obsession with the past; an omen of Britain’s inevitable downfall. What a naïf he’d been.

  But what he saw as their train entered London shocked him. And the deeper they delved into the heart of the city, the more it saddened him.

  Bits and pieces of the old city remained. Sometimes entire streets, but those were rare. Often the remnants were sandwiched between newer and utterly uninspired constructions. It was as though the city’s character, its personality, had been scrubbed away. The Blitz had destroyed the city’s soul—shattered it, charred it, tossed its ashes to the wind—and the hole had been patched with a cheap prosthetic. Functional but soulless.

  “It’s so different,” he whispered.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” said Gretel from the seat beside him, concentrating on her newspaper. The chill, his constant companion since their final night at Arzamas, tingled at the unscratchable spot between his shoulder blades. As it often did when she spoke. The Luftwaffe’s domination of the skies over Britain had unfolded largely because of her advice. She clicked the biro she’d snatched from a passing businessman and circled something in blue ink. She’d been scouring classified ads since they arrived in the country. Klaus hadn’t known what classifieds were until she’d explained the idea to him.

  It wasn’t just the buildings that had changed. He’d been immersed in half a dozen languages since crossing the border. Predominantly French, but also Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, something he guessed was Basque … even some German. The languages of those who had found a way across the Channel before the Iron Curtain slammed shut.

  Klaus had never perfected his English. He took comfort in knowing it didn’t matter any longer.

  Gretel and he had kept strictly to English since their midnight embarkation at Calais. Britain’s border policy wasn’t what it had been, no longer welcoming with open arms the huddled masses from the sliver of supposedly free Europe wedged between Paris and the coast. Draconian measures on both sides of the Channel had throttled the flow of refugees and immigrants to less than a trickle. Those without papers had little chance of staying in England. But Gretel, of course, had seen a way.

  Ireland and Canada sounded like better destinations, but she had shrugged off the suggestions.

  The screech of wheels on track reverberated through the train as it slowed to enter Waterloo Station. Klaus slid forward in his seat. He checked his fedora again. He didn’t have a wig, so he’d have to make do with a hat and ill-fitting clothes to hide his wires. During his first trip to London, he’d worn a wig and a counterfeit naval officer’s uniform. He yearned for that disguise now. Strutting around in public with exposed wires contradicted a lifetime of training.

  Gretel didn’t bother to hide her wires. They were twined, as always, through her braids. She had worn them that way back at the Reichsbehörde, too. Even then, the affectation had seemed overly young for her.

  They filed off the train into a muggy heat on the platform. But it wasn’t crowded, which made it bearable. At one end of the platform, a man with a roller brush and a putty knife scraped down placards announcing a lecture sponsored by a group of British Socialists. The speaker was a member of Parliament. The advertisements appeared to have been printed crudely and slapped up quickly.

  Klaus said, “Where now?”

  They
had nothing but the clothes on their backs, the few remaining batteries concealed beneath, and the money Klaus had pulled out of a cash register at the port. “We need to find a place to stay.”

  “That’s easy.” She looked up at him. “You shouldn’t worry so much, brother.”

  “We’ll also need money. We can’t keep—” He paused, lowering his voice. “—stealing.”

  “Pfff.” She waved away the concern with a petite hand.

  “Well, then? What does your plan say? What do we do?”

  Gretel folded the paper in thirds, then took his arm. “I’m in the mood for a rummage sale,” she said.

  * * *

  The taxi smelled of perfume from a previous passenger. It was a boxy, black hackney cab with suicide doors, like the only other London taxi Klaus had ridden in his life. That ride had ended with him killing the driver. He hoped this would be different.

  Their driver was very young, and olive skinned, but not with the gypsy look of Klaus and Gretel. A Spaniard, judging from his accent, perhaps a refugee from the purges after “spontaneous” workers’ uprisings had deposed Franco and put the puppet Juan de Borbón on the throne.

  Their route took them past a swath of green space. A park. It surprised Klaus to see something so vibrant and colorful in the middle of the sterile urban jungle. The taxi stopped at a traffic light. Cross traffic thrummed past the windscreen; a stream of pedestrians filled the zebra crossing. Klaus watched the park.

  A man and woman held hands while they strolled around the edges of a duck pond. Farther inside, a crying boy watched an adult—his father?—try to dislodge a shredded red kite from the boughs of an oak tree. Somebody else stood at an easel, painting a scene from the park.

  The light changed; the taxi pulled away. But Klaus held tightly to those glimpses. There was something odd, something unusual, about the entire thing.

  They pulled to a stop at a church. Their driver flipped a lever; the meter stopped with a ding. He put his arm across the front seat, craned his neck, and said something to Gretel. She handed him money. His face cracked into a smile when he counted the bills.