The Betrayers Page 3

  Krausner shook his head. “Coming from us, it would sound like smear tactics. And it’s the type of story no newspaper would carry. Papers that get too critical of these animals are liable to find themselves bombed and their editors murdered.”

  A young woman was pushing her way through the crowd toward them.

  “Comrade Menchik,” Krausner whispered. “A secretary at the Russian Embassy in Berlin. She was sent here to help assist in the preparations for the parade. A very good organizer.”

  Peter guessed the woman’s age at four or five years younger than his twenty-six. She had light brown hair pulled back tightly in a bun and large brown eyes. His first impression was that she was modestly attractive, but her physical appearance conveyed more than the sexual nuances members of the opposite sex convey to each other. There was a serious cast to her features, a studiousness that he himself was often accused of having. Like the proverbial absentminded scientist, Peter and Comrade Menchik both saw the world as a place that needed constant study and analysis.

  “Comrade Menchik, Comrade Cutter,” Krausner said.

  She offered a handshake. Peter was caught by surprise at the strength of her grip.

  “We are assembling six blocks from here,” she said, quietly. “We will keep a block away from this square as we march.”

  “Just a block? That will still provoke the Nazis,” Peter said.

  She stared at him and frowned. “Of course, that is our purpose. We will be attacked by these fascists, the police will intervene on their side, and many of us will receive the blows of martyrs. But the world will have another example of how these brutal animals treat anyone who does not agree with their sick theories.” She gave Peter a look, sizing him up. “Are you up to this, Comrade Britisher? Perhaps you are more used to defending our movement in the drawing room over a cup of tea rather than on the streets with blood.”

  He flushed. “I’m up to anything you are.”

  “Isn’t she a tiger?” Krausner said, grinning. “That’s why the Embassy sends her around to organize demonstrations. She’s wonderful at making a man stand up for himself … when he is shitting his pants from fright.”

  What annoyed Peter the most was that the woman had seen through him instantly. He was a drawing-room revolutionary.

  4

  Peter mulled over the young woman’s accusation that he was a drawing-room revolutionary as he walked toward the rendezvous point where the Communists were forming for their march through the streets. Although he was little more than middle-class in terms of British society, by comparison with the poor of Eastern Europe, he was privileged.

  His own father, Charles Cutter, was a minor British government career official, a supervising engineer in the electrical works of West Dorset. Asked to describe his father at a meeting of a Communist cell, he told the group of Reds that his father was a sturdy, pipe-smoking English yeoman, a stouthearted man of the kind who made Britain the empire that the sun never set upon.

  That description of his father brought criticism from his fellow radicals because they tended to see people in economic terms, as the exploited and the exploiters, and the British Empire was high on the list of exploiters. Although Peter, too, saw the world through eyes tinted by the economics of oppression, he didn’t think of his own family as part of those dynamics. His father was just a rather reserved and stern older man, who took little interest in politics—though he didn’t temper his own feelings about his son being a radical. Like most young intellectuals of Peter’s time, being a “Red” was not in his family’s ancestral makeup, and by all the odds of heredity and environment, he should never have been drawn to Marxism.

  He grew up next to the sea, in the picturesque fishing village of Lyme Regis at the foot of the cold, dark and windy waters of the English Channel. Like his father, he was bright, a good student, but while his father excelled at technical studies—math and physical science—Peter was drawn to the humanities—philosophy, politics, languages and other human concerns.

  Intensely intellectual, a hardworking student, Peter won a Queen’s scholarship to Cambridge, where he excelled at Central and Eastern European languages, speaking fluent German, Russian and Hungarian, hoping for a career in the foreign service because he loved traveling and experiencing different cultures.

  He entered Cambridge in 1922 and stayed there during most of that decade. In America, it was the decade of the Roaring Twenties, a vibrant, noisy time when Prohibition was in and morality went on vacation. In Europe, it was a more somber era. Germany was shackled by its crushing defeat in war and peace terms that kept it from recovering—people were out of work, and inflation was so hyper it was no joke that it took a wheelbarrow full of German marks to buy a loaf of bread. The rest of Central and Eastern Europe were no better off. The Russian Empire had fallen to the Communists, the Tsar and his family murdered, and the country transposed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin and Trotsky spent the rest of the decade battling for power before Trotsky went into exile in 1929, later to be murdered by assassins sent by Stalin.

  While a dynamic economy, booming stock market, jazz and the Charleston—knees-bent, toes-in, heels-out—were the rage in America, in Europe there was economic depression that got even sicker as the American stock market and economy went into a tailspin after the 1929 crash and the Great Depression was ushered in. The frightful economic conditions stirred social upheaval. Fighting in the streets between socialists and fascists when Peter entered college in 1922 had, by the 1930s, become murder in the streets as the “isms” violently collided.

  Peter evolved into young manhood on the British Isles as the British labor movement fought the factory owners for employment rights and continental Europeans tore at each other’s entrails. While his father, who had never left Britain except for a stint in the navy, saw a world where the well-defined social orders of the past should be maintained, Peter saw a world of have-and-have-nots, of greedy factory owners and workers without food to feed their families.

  Traveling in Eastern and Central Europe—Germany, Austria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia—to advance his knowledge of the languages, he saw an even wider gulf between rich and poor. Already a socialist and Marxist, when he returned to Britain he joined a Communist cell.

  The leader of the cell gave him an assignment to live with a working-class family to broaden his awareness of the suffering of the people. Living for a month with a coal-mining family in the Ruhr, he saw firsthand how the poor suffered under terrible living conditions and dangerous working ones. He had even shown up “for work” one day in the mine, falling into line with workers to see what it was like to work in a hot black hole hundreds of feet below the surface. Exposed by a supervisor, he was taken back atop and would have been prosecuted but he managed to talk his way out of it, putting across a story that he was a British university student doing research. Had the mine management found out he was a Communist, he would have been given a good beating before being turned over to the police.

  A week ago he had been instructed by his cell leader to leave the countryside and go to Munich to help build membership and organize resistance. The Communist march set for the same day and area as the Nazi rally made him nervous. It was planned to interfere with the Nazi meeting, sure to provoke a confrontation. He was bothered by the idea of violence on two levels—his own personal safety and his philosophy that a communist society could be achieved by peaceful means.

  He didn’t think of himself as a coward, but he also wasn’t practiced in the way of violence. Nor was he eager to be martyred—he wanted to live to see Communism victorious, not die for it. The idea of getting clubbed by a policeman or having to fight a Nazi brute knotted his stomach.

  Even though he was frightened, he kept one foot in front of the other, kept himself moving in the direction where the Communists were gathering. He would not let down his comrades, nor would he humiliate himself in front of the firebrand from Berlin. Comrade Men
chik had not only jabbed him through the chink in his armor, she had aroused a more fundamental aspect of mankind than bread and bullets. Lust. He didn’t particularly find himself attractive or desirable, although women, especially ones older than him, let him know otherwise. But the young Russian firebrand had stirred his blood.

  His sole sexual experience, beyond breast-petting and finger-fucking with a university girlfriend, and a brief and unsatisfactory “experiment” with the boy he roomed with when he attended a private prep school, had been losing his cherry to an older member of the Cambridge Communist cell he belonged to.

  She was the wife of a university don who was also a member of the cell. Peter had been invited to their country home for a weekend visit. After he retired, the don’s wife came in, took off her robe—totally naked—and crawled into bed with him. She explained that they had an “open” marriage and that if he liked, he could also have sex with the don. He had been too mortified to get it up even for her, much less climbing into bed with an older man. However, she had helped him along by stroking his penis until it finally came erect, and then pulled him into her.

  He had come quickly—and prematurely—as much out of fright as pleasure, and had left for town early the next morning to avoid any sort of tit-for-tat that the professor might expect after letting his wife fuck him.

  His reserve and shyness around women had cost him many opportunities for intimacies, but he had regretted few of them. He was very much more interested in cerebral matters than those of the flesh. In his own mind, he was reserving his passions for the cause of revolution. But Comrade Menchik had challenged him both intellectually and emotionally, arousing in him an instant sexual attraction.

  As he hurried down the street, he tried to imagine her naked body in his mind.

  5

  “You are late.”

  Comrade Menchik glared at him.

  “I shall have to mention your tardiness when I do a report on the demonstration.”

  Peter gaped at her. “Why? Look around you, people are still arriving.”

  “These are workers who had to leave jobs and family to come here at great personal sacrifice. All you had to do was get your bourgeois little ass in line—on time!”

  She gave him her back and walked away, leaving him angry and frustrated.

  What a bitch!

  Someone slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Are you ready to fight the Nazis thugs?”

  It was Krausner.

  “I’m ready to kick your Berlin friend in the ass. The girl just berated me like she was a colonel of artillery.”

  Krausner laughed. “You’re not the first one to want to do something with her ass, but not every man wants to kick it. Most of us want to stick our sausage in it. Some women who come into the cause believe in a bit of communal love to go with a communal economy. Personally, I’d like to give Comrade Menchik a taste of my sausage, but she isn’t the communal-love type. But I have never seen her so completely antagonistic toward anyone in the Party as she is with you, my friend. She seems to have taken an instant dislike for you.”

  Krausner moved away to greet an arriving Party member.

  Peter struggled with anger, resentment, frustration and inexorable attraction before he sought out Comrade Menchik in the crowd. At first he told himself he wanted to get close enough to tell her off, but deep down he realized that he merely wanted to get close enough—period.

  A dog, he told himself, a whipped dog that lies at its master’s feet and whimpers, that’s what I am.

  The verbal dressing-down she gave him had gotten him sexually aroused. Watching her work the crowd, going from one member to another to give instructions and encouragement, watching her eyes sparkle when she laughed, her breasts strut out, made him horny.

  He got close enough to her so he could listen to her instructions, even though Krausner had told him the drill earlier. They were to march down the middle of the street, sticking together, singing a communist song. They were to start no trouble with the police or Nazis. But everyone knew trouble would come, anyway. Even policemen who had not been attracted to Nazism were anticommunist. The marchers could expect no quarter from the Nazis and no help from the police.

  As he mingled, he listened to “veterans” of previous marches talk of police brutality, of comrades run down by police horses and clubbed by Nazis brutes. He wiped his wet palms on the sides of his pants. He became more excited and nervous as the time to march arrived.

  There were three hundred of them, a motley bunch: factory workers and miners, women store clerks and men employed in low-level government jobs; an old man and woman with white hair and a young woman with a baby in her arms, but most of the marchers were middle-aged and younger, at least half of them university students. Most wore black mourning bands on their arms to commemorate the death of two young Communists who were brutally murdered by fascist thugs called the Sturmabteilung, the SA, a paramilitary group loyal to Adolf Hitler.

  These so-called Storm Troopers attacked the two students in a beer hall when the two dared to sing “L’Internationale,” the anthem of socialism and communism written by a nineteenth-century Parisian transport worker. The Communist students had burst out with the song right after the Nazis finished singing “Horst Wessel Lied,” a song dedicated to a low-life Nazi student killed in a brawl with Communists in Berlin. The man in charge of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, had cleverly turned Horst Wessel, a bohemian slum dweller, into a martyr for the Nazi cause by having a song composed about his “martyrdom.”

  Storm Troopers were waiting when the two young students left the beer hall. They dragged the youths into an alley and beat them to death.

  As the march started, the word went out to pin red stars on lapels. Peter pinned his on and began marching under a banner of the hammer and sickle. As he marched, he joined the others singing “L’Internationale.”

  “Arise, the wretched of the world!

  “We were nothing—thus let us be everything!”

  As they walked, he pushed his way through the crowd until he was positioned next to Comrade Menchik. As he came up alongside, he asked, “What is your first name?”

  “‘Comrade,’ the same as yours, Comrade.”

  “Have we met before?” he asked.

  “Met?” She glanced at him. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Then why are you angry at me?”

  She stiffened and shot him a look. “I’m not angry at you.”

  “Yes, you are, from the very first moment we were introduced. You were friendly to Krausner and caustic to me.”

  They marched together for a moment before she answered.

  “I am not angry at you personally, I am angry at what you represent. You British and Americans play at being Communists. You believe it is an intellectual pursuit, something to debate with school chums. You forget that it is warfare between the classes, that at some point you must pick up a gun or a shovel, or use your bare hands if there is no other weapon, and go into the streets and fight. Without blood spilled, bourgeois society, with its class distinctions of workers and capitalists, will never be destroyed and the proletariat will not become the masters of their own fate. When I see you British take to the streets and spill blood for the cause, I will have respect.”

  “I don’t need your respect. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in the streets right now.”

  He moved away from her, angry. But after a moment his anger faded and he was a little amused at her attacks on him. In truth, he had met many other continental European Communists with the same attitude about British and American Communists. And he admired their courage and determination. He had come to the continent not only to experience firsthand the plight of the German worker, but to test his own mettle.

  He watched her as they marched and sang, her chin lifted high, her face glowing with determination. She wore the hat and pants of a Bolshevik worker, but had a red rose in the front of her blouse. He tried to keep beside her but los
t his position as enthusiastic marchers surged by him. As he marched and sang with his comrades, his fear and nervousness was replaced by a swelling of pride and camaraderie.

  She looked back, caught him looking at her, and linked her arm with a man next to her and lifted her chin higher. He laughed, delighted at her antics, thrilled to be finally on a street, demonstrating for the cause he had adopted as his life’s work.

  The anthem faded as the marchers turned a corner. Down the block stood a line of mounted German police, their spiked helmets and spit-polished leather shining, blocking their passage. Behind the marchers, several trucks pulled up and began unloading uniformed men carrying clubs and shields. The marchers slowly came to a halt.

  “Rohm’s storm troopers!” Comrade Menchik said.

  “They’re blocking us, they won’t let us through,” someone else yelled.

  It took a moment for Peter to understand. It was the police who were blocking them, preventing them from leaving the street so that the Storm Troopers would have their way with them.

  He felt the wave of fear and anticipation that went through the crowd, sucking it in, raising his own fear level. His elation was suddenly gone. These were the dreaded brown-shirt paramilitary thugs that carried out the bloody street battles and violent harassment of Jews that the Nazis had become identified with.

  He gawked as Comrade Menchik stepped forward and threw a rock at the line of Storm Troopers. My God, she’s insane, he thought.

  It broke the dam.

  The brown-shirt Nazis waded into the demonstrators, swinging clubs. The demonstrators had been warned not to carry any weapons out of fear of confrontation with the police. Now they were easy victims for the thugs.

  Peter was carried along as the panicked radicals tried to escape the brown shirts by rushing the police lines. The line of mounted officers drew their sabers and surged forward on their horses, ramming the demonstrators and bringing their sabers down on them.