The Informer by Craig Nova Page A

hidden, sealed off in the most secret and darkest of recesses.

T he man on the train from Moscow to Berlin was Russian, but he was traveling under the name “Gerhard Schmidt.” He was over six feet tall and wore dark pants and stylish shoes made of very thin leather, which he got through the Italian embassy. His jacket was European, too, but his topcoat was Russian, long, heavy, and with a skirt that came down below his knees. He was vain about his broad-brimmed hat. He had emerged from steam on the platform of the Moscow train station as though materializing out of a dream, one hand carrying his small suitcase in which there were two shirts, two changes of underwear, his razor, a badger shaving brush, and a pistol. There was no need to worry about the pistol, since he traveled on a diplomatic passport. He had one other suitcase, too, which was filled with reichsmarks. Fresh, new, just printed. They were well made, and he doubted if someone from the German mint would be able to tell the difference between these notes made in Moscow and the ones produced in Berlin.
    He turned and looked through the steam to the entrance of the platform. The streets had been almost deserted, just some hungry people who were trying to find something to eat. He thought about the days just after the revolution in Moscow when wooden houses had been pulled down for firewood. And when the peasants in the countryside had withheld food, the army had been sent to collect what was needed. The Russian peasant was going to have to be dealt with, and the question was how. Hunger. That was one way. In fact, as he smelled the machine-scented steam, he thought it was probably the best way to deal with them. Hunger was something they should be able to understand.
    He thought about the Moscow River, too, and how, when it was still and reflected the city, it gave him a moment of clarity. Nothing movedthen. Just the mirror of river, which showed the buildings on the other side, the bridges, the sky. It was the only memory that made him homesick when he was away, and while he had been sent to many places in Russia recently, he wasn’t so comfortable leaving Moscow just now. People like him had gone to Italy or France, and then when they had come back, they had been destroyed because they had seen how people lived in Europe. Or just because they hadn’t been able to keep up with developments in Moscow. And so while it was an honor to be chosen to go to Berlin, he still looked uneasily at the steam, the glistening engines, the lighted train cars. Gerhard Schmidt thought about the people the police had been pulling out of the Moscow River recently, officials of one kind or another. Then he shrugged and got on the train.
    He didn’t read. He sat upright, hands folded in his lap, occasionally looking out the window at the landscape. It was spring now, but he thought of fall, when the stands of popple around the fields were a haunting yellow. He liked to think about that color, as though if he could just remember it clearly enough, why then he couldn’t ever really feel that he was too far away. And there was another aspect of those fields around Moscow in the fall. Some afternoons the light had a yellow, smoky quality, and while it was like a warm fog, it suggested a kind of ghost of spring, or perhaps it was just the promise of spring. Still, he liked the ghostlike association. That was probably closer to the truth.
    He checked to make sure the pistol was still in his bag. He was surprised that he needed to do this, since the bag was never out of his sight, but even though he knew it was there, he still began to feel uneasy. He imagined the trouble he would have if it got out of his hands, and even though he knew this was unlikely, every hundred miles or so, maybe a little more when he tried to resist, he got up and took the suitcase down from the rack and looked inside, glancing at the sheen of black metal, touching it once and then, after he had put the