End of Spies by Alex Gerlis (popular ebook readers .txt) 📕

case. He’d relished the absence of danger and enjoyed the considerable trappings of victory. But as the summer took hold of Berlin, the city began to shake itself down and the Allied powers staked their various claims, his feelings began to change. It dawned on him how much he missed living with danger. He realised how the unique sense of exhilaration that came from risking his life had become an urgent physical desire.

Sometime in August, a young officer from one of Marshal Konev’s mechanised brigades had gone mad, climbing onto the table in the officers’ mess and shouting about peasants and Nazis as he fired his revolver at the ceiling before blowing off his own head.

Konev had been persuaded that this could well have been a direct consequence of the psychological effect of the war, and he realised the Red Army couldn’t risk a recurrence. As a result, a group of psychiatrists had been dispatched from Moscow with orders to interview all senior officers.

Kommissar Iosif Gurevich had been blasé about his own appointment. There was, after all, nothing wrong with him. He’d survived the war and had since been promoted, and he was absolutely fine, especially since he’d tracked down the SS officer who’d murdered his family in Minsk and wrought his revenge. Seeing the psychiatrist would be a mere formality, something he was only doing because he’d been ordered to. It would be like the visit he’d made to the dentist the previous week.

The dentist had turned out to be a rather beautiful woman from Leningrad who he was convinced had allowed her hands to brush his face: he’d even arranged another visit. The psychiatrist could not have been more different: a tiny man with thick spectacles and a slightly startled expression. But there was an unspoken connection between the two of them: the Jewish psychiatrist from Moscow, the Jewish commissar from Minsk.

‘Tell me about your family, Comrade.’

It was Gurevich’s turn to be startled. He’d only mentioned in passing that they’d been murdered by an Einsatzgruppen, and he was hoping the session would shortly come to an end with the psychiatrist assuring him he was fine.

But instead he found himself talking about his family’s murder, and how he had no one left other than a brother, and how much he regretted ditching a fiancée many years ago in order to save his career. By now he was pouring his heart out, and tears were running down his cheeks.

He stopped talking and apologised and assured the psychiatrist he had no idea what had got into him, but the man from Moscow said not to worry, it was good he was talking, and assured him this would not reflect badly on him at all.

‘It’s the ones who don’t react with any emotion that I worry about. You need have no concerns about my report, Comrade.’ He’d smiled: the unspoken connection.

Then Gurevich mentioned how he missed the sense of danger he’d experienced during the war, the sheer exhilaration of facing down death every day: was this… odd?

‘Not at all: it was your way of coping with the stress of war and with the personal traumas in your life. Subconsciously you felt you had little to lose and therefore you were able to be reckless: it was as if you were finding a way of redeeming yourself. But a consequence of this behaviour was that this sense of risk and the excitement became like a drug. You became addicted to it.’

‘I miss it dreadfully sometimes, like I’m drawn to danger.’

‘Of course you will be – it’s an addiction, as I said, and you are experiencing what we call withdrawal symptoms. It will take time to get over; you will need to be patient. If you occasionally flirt with danger, that may help, though do be careful.’

Iosif Gurevich said this all made sense and thanked the psychiatrist very much. As he prepared to leave, the psychiatrist came over and spoke quietly in his ear.

‘On a personal note, Comrade, if you want my advice, stay here as long as you can. Things are really not good for us in Moscow.’

Now Kommissar Iosif Gurevich was taking the doctor’s advice and flirting with danger. He’d crossed into the British sector, the risk increased by the fact that the British knew who he was but mitigated by not having shaved for a few days and being dressed in shabby civilian clothes. To add to his cover, he was accompanied by a female NKVD officer called Yulia, who provided a useful extra set of eyes and ears as they walked arm in arm through the city.

‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her, ‘our papers are very good. We’re Polish Germans, a married couple from Poznań, trying to escape the damned Russians!’

He laughed, but she looked nervous: even jokes could be dangerous. Just look down, he told her. ‘Avoid eye contact; look for cigarette butts on the ground. Keep coughing: they’ll think you’re ill and will want to move you on.’

Their destination was on Cornelius Strasse, just south of the Tiergarten. He told Yulia to wait in the shell of a bombed-out building opposite. Lean against the wall, look exhausted; if any British soldiers say anything, ask them for money. They’ll soon leave you alone then!

Of course he could have asked them to come to him in East Berlin. It would have been more of an order than anything else and they’d have been obliged to do as he said. It was like that with these people: you were meant to be on the same side, but when one was a master and the other in effect a servant, relationships were more fraught.

The main reason he’d crossed the city to see them was that he didn’t want his own people to know what he was up to. They’d benefit in the long run – possibly – but in the meantime it was best to be discreet. That familiar sense of excitement, which had been building up all day, was now even