11
North Rome (Soviet sector)
Ivanov muscled the deadweight of the corpse back into the shadows under the building’s portico. The NKVD man’s bladder and bowels had let go in death, forcing Ivanov to drag the body by the head, which he had snapped off the spinal column. The loose, detached feeling of dragging so much mass around on a thin column of ruptured meat was unsettling but not unfamiliar. He was cautious not to befoul himself with the man’s bodily wastes. The clothes he had stolen from his last victim were already a little rank.
Taking a moment to scope out his surroundings, Ivanov considered his options. Via Rodi traversed the Soviet sector, from the southwest to the northeast about six blocks north of the Wall, where it abutted the edge of the Vatican. There were fewer apartments in this part of the city, the buildings tending toward larger, boxy, modern structures given over to official use. It was, thankfully, something of a dead zone at this time of night. There were fewer witnesses to raise an alarm and fewer eyes to follow his progress as he attempted to exfiltrate the area. There were also, unfortunately, far fewer options to dispose of the body. This part of North Rome was not like the rats’ nest Franco had led him through earlier, with hundreds of dark, twisting alleys and Byzantine passageways in which he might hide a multitude of sins.
Ivanov scanned up and down the quiet street, his eyes playing over the blank, unlit façades. Leafless trees stood sentinel outside the anonymous-looking buildings, most of them five or six stories high. Unlike the streets of Free Rome, which were gridlocked with traffic day and night, very few vehicles were parked along Via Rodi. He counted two vans in the livery of the city government, one slab-sided Trabant sedan and, away in the distance, what looked like a horse-drawn cart. Without horses. Nowhere suggested itself as a quick and dirty dumping ground for a recently murdered secret policeman.
Ivanov was beyond overwatch. He could not call in the cleaners as he might in the Allied sector. He couldn’t even stuff the corpse into a garbage bin. For the duration of the GATT conference, the local authorities removed all the trash cans and Dumpsters from the streets at the end of each day. The regime declared it a security measure, and rounded up a hundred or so “suspected insurgents” to back up the claim, but really they just wanted to discourage any scavenging by the city’s impoverished and hungry inmates. It was not a good look for a worker’s paradise.
He examined the doors of the building in front of which he stood. They were massive, nearly twice as tall as him, constructed of dark hardwood, securely padlocked. No joy to be had there.
There was nothing for it. He resolved simply to drag the body a little deeper into shadows and abandon it. A quick search yielded up some currency, a Makarov pistol with two spare clips, and a transit pass that would allow him free use of any form of public transport. The last was of marginal usefulness. The buses and trains in the Soviet sector ran sporadically, but fares were cheap. He could afford to ride them for a month with the cash he had in his pockets.
He found the dead man’s ID card inside the breast pocket of the overcoat. His name was Stanislav Borodin, a sergant special’noy with the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Roughly translated: a master sergeant in the NKVD’s “special services” division. Ivanov pocketed that next to the ID he had taken from the body of Borodin’s colleague back at the market square. Neither of the deceased looked like him in life, death, or the black-and-white photo IDs, but very few people were apt to examine the documents too closely, and as a free pass within Occupied Rome, they beat the hell out of a bus ticket.
He dragged Borodin as far back into the shadows as he could and arranged the body to look like he was sleeping off a drinking binge. It was not unknown among the occupying forces, although it was rare for Beria’s men to behave so unprofessionally. Such foolishness was almost inevitably fatal. If the Great Satan himself did not see to your demise, the local population almost certainly would.
Ivanov set off once more, drifting east, then south toward Via Giordano Bruno. Back in July 1944, partisans in this part of the city had staged a brief but intense last stand against the Red Army paratroopers who had jumped into Rome when the fascist regime fell apart. Strange bedfellows these resistance fighters had been. Gangs of criminals, demobilized soldiers who had held on to their weapons, anarchists, and even some local Communists who had sided with Trotsky decades before. There had also been rumors of Allied special operators fighting alongside the Italians, in order to delay and frustrate a complete Soviet takeover of Rome. Ivanov had been working with the Office of Strategic Services since the end of the war and he had heard most of these rumors from fellow operatives. None of them, however, ever laid claim to having been on the ground here at the time.
The burned-out shells of buildings, large piles of rubble, and occasional overgrown, weed-choked lots on both sides of Giordano Bruno spoke of high-intensity urban warfare. The Russians had done well to confine it to a few blocks, although the partisans had aided in preserving the wider city by not spreading and escalating their fight. To the trained eye of the former Spetsnaz officer, the rumors of OSS and British Special Operations Executive involvement looked less like wish fulfillment as he strode through the ruined district. Stalin’s forces had bled out here for two weeks, and yet a couple of blocks away, the Eternal City appeared untouched by war, the Transition, and even time itself. Maybe there was some truth to the stories.
Moving slowly in the direction of the Wall, Ivanov reviewed the situation. He had elected to make his own crossing back to Free Rome, without the support of Franco’s people or whatever network the elder Furedi was running. The Roman Wall was not impenetrable; it was merely very difficult to cross aboveground, under the muzzles of the machine guns in the watchtowers. That was the escape route normal people took, and that was how so many contemporary Romans had died. But the Furedis had shown him there were alternatives. He just didn’t know how to navigate them.
He slowed down as a six-wheeled troop carrier rumbled through an intersection two blocks ahead. The vehicle commander was buttoned up inside, Ivanov noticed, in contravention of the Red Army mandate that officers ride uncovered while on patrol, head out of the hatch. But he was obviously a wiser man than the superiors who issued a standing order that amounted to an invitation to be sniped. The big diesel engines of the BMP grunted and roared as it coughed oily smoke from its exhausts and rolled on into the night.
With the money, transit pass, and ID lifted from the men he had killed, Ivanov did have the option of lying low in the occupied sector, or even of going deeper into Communist northern Italy. That he was expressly barred from doing so by his handlers was of minor concern. They were using him, and he was using them. In the end, only results would matter. Sobeskaia had given the OSS enough of a fright to put Ivanov into North Rome, the first time in many years the Americans had let him operate within the Eastern Bloc. Whatever the businessman had to offer, they wanted it. And Ivanov wanted it too.
His track had taken him through the bomb-blasted, skeletal remains of three blocks along Via Giordano Bruno. Quite abruptly, he now entered a neighborhood less ravaged by the previous decade’s street fighting. Here the apartment buildings were covered in scaffolding; a cement truck and a small crane, both of them locked up for the night, were further signs of local reclamation work. Within another block, he’d left behind all evidence of the small, intimate war that had once been fought here. Between Vias Ostia and Candia, the only damage had been done by the dead hand of Soviet occupation. The heavy, drab graying out of any color or sense of vibrancy in the streetscape was consistent with the rest of Communist-controlled Rome. But at least the fabric of the city had not been torn apart. Once the Stalinists were driven out, life would return. Real life.
A helicopter thudded through the night a mile or so away. A big Hind gunship, by the sound of it, apparently patrolling in a long, lazy arc. A searchlight stabbed down at one point, but blinked out again almost immediately—a routine procedure, to remind citizens that they were forever under surveillance. If the chopper crew had been searching for a particular target, they would’ve lanced it with the spotlights and possibly opened up with miniguns. There had been no such incidents since the start of the trade conference, but Ivanov did not doubt that should one of the gunships catch Franco and his colleagues out in the open, image management would quickly give way to an opportunistic firestorm.
He checked his watch. It was late, many hours since he had broken contact with that dog Skarov. The relative quiet on the streets and the apparent concentration of occupying forces near the Wall gave him to believe that Skarov had poured his resources into pursuing the Romans there, hoping to bottle them up before they could escape via their maze of underground passages. Even as he argued with himself in favor of this conclusion, another helicopter hammered by in the night sky, overhead this time, making for the airspace above the Wall a few blocks to the south. Once there, the Hind took up a holding pattern, occasionally slicing up the streets below with all four of its spotlights.
Forcing himself to maintain a steady, even pace when all of his instincts told him to shy away in the shadows, Ivanov continued on a course toward Sobeskaia’s hotel. He turned up the collar of the long black coat and reassured himself there were any number of reasons and justifications he could cite for taking such a risk. Primary among them, his failure. He had failed to make contact with the businessman or the man’s mistress. He had failed to collect whatever intelligence they had to offer. He had failed even to establish the nature of that offering. The presence of Skarov, the wild, intemperate response of the Communists while the whole world looked toward Rome—these things indicated a measure of desperation on Beria’s part. Whatever game was in play here, the stakes were high. It was worth Ivanov’s taking a risk just to keep playing.
But as he moved back into the streets he had escaped earlier with the help of Franco and Marius and, let’s not forget, cousin Carlo’s murderous little girl, he knew that all of the reasons and justifications in the world meant nothing really. Only one thing was drawing him back to that hotel, only one man, and it was not Valentin Sobeskaia. It was Colonel-General Skarov of the NKVD. Pavel Ivanov meant to kill him. Maybe he would be at the Albergo. Maybe not.
His bootheels clicked on ancient flagstones as he advanced, in character as Sergant Special’noy Stanislav Borodin of the NKVD. Perhaps the troopers he’d encounter ahead would recognize him from alerts and bulletins, not to mention the wanted posters that hung in their thousands throughout the USSR and its satellite territories. Perhaps they would sling the submachine guns they carried and open up on him in panic.
Or perhaps he might walk right past them and into the hotel.