Sooner or later, war was expected between Germany and the Soviet Union, and it was Volodya’s job to gather military intelligence that would help the Soviets win that war.

He got off the train in the poor working-class district of Wedding, north of Berlin’s centre. Outside the station he stood and waited, watching the other passengers as they left, pretending to study a timetable pasted on the wall. He did not move off until he was quite sure no one had followed him here.

Then he made his way to the cheap restaurant that was his chosen rendezvous. As was his regular practice, he did not go in, but stood at a bus stop on the other side of the road and watched the entrance. He was confident he had shaken off any tail, but now he needed to make sure Werner had not been followed.

He was not sure that he would recognize Werner Franck, who had been a fourteen-year-old boy when Volodya had last seen him, and was now twenty. Werner felt the same, so they had agreed they would both carry today’s edition of the Berliner Morgenpost open to the sports page. Volodya read a preview of the new soccer season as he waited, glancing up every few seconds to look for Werner. Ever since being a schoolboy in Berlin, Volodya had followed the city’s top team, Hertha. He had often chanted: ‘Ha! Ho! He! Hertha B-S-C!’ He was interested in the team’s prospects, but anxiety spoiled his concentration, and he read the same report over and over again without taking anything in.

His two years in Spain had not boosted his career in the way he had hoped – rather the reverse. Volodya had uncovered numerous Nazi spies like Heinz Bauer among the German ‘volunteers’. But then the NKVD had used that as an excuse to arrest genuine volunteers who had merely expressed mild disagreement with the Communist line. Hundreds of idealistic young men had been tortured and killed in the NKVD’s prisons. At times it had seemed as if the Communists were more interested in fighting their anarchist allies than their Fascist enemies.

And all for nothing. Stalin’s policy was a catastrophic failure. The upshot was a right-wing dictatorship, the worst imaginable outcome for the Soviet Union. But the blame was put on those Russians who had been in Spain, even though they had faithfully carried out Kremlin instructions. Some of them had disappeared soon after returning to Moscow.

Volodya had gone home in fear after the fall of Madrid. He had found many changes. In 1937 and 1938 Stalin had purged the Red Army. Thousands of commanders had disappeared, including many of the residents of Government House where his parents lived. But previously neglected men such as Grigori Peshkov had been promoted to take the places of those purged, and Grigori’s career had a new impetus. He was in charge of the defence of Moscow against air raids, and was frantically busy. His enhanced status was probably the reason why Volodya was not among those scapegoated for the failure of Stalin’s Spanish policy.