Night's Black Agents: The Carmilla Sanction (part 2)

Soviet checkpoint, Vienna, 1948

Continuing on from where we left off two weeks ago, the Edom agents had just raided Schloss Karnstein in the Styrian Alps, killing two vampires and a number of the ghoul retainers of the 17th century vampire Carmilla Karnstein. Suspecting a mole within Edom, they reported back to Edom headquarters, telling Jetheth, their handler, that they were hunting for Carmilla in the British occupation zone near Salzburg. In reality, they prepared to get into the Soviet sector and make for Vienna, where the Romanian forger Popescu lived.

Staying at a nearby gasthof, the agents recuperated and Fox worked on their van to conceal their weapons and ammo preparatory to making a bid across the border into Soviet Austria. They also heard from their landlord that the Russians had closed off the entire city of Vienna to outside traffic.

Using their cover identities which centred around Blake and Hoffman's identities as a doctor and his assistant from Medicins Sans Frontieres, the agents slipped through a Russian checkpoint, although they did stop to question the soldiers about why Vienna had been closed. Being just privates, the border guards had no idea and anyway, had orders not to chin wag with anyone not in the Red Army.

Note - Medicins Sans Frontieres was founded in Paris in 1971, so the likelihood is the covers used here would have been International Red Cross, especially as Blake and Hoffman's cover was as Swiss medical personnel.

Proceeding towards Vienna, the agents stopped to place a call to a Russian army officer and black marketeer, Yuri Griginski, a British SIS asset who operated in the Soviet zone in Vienna. He told them how to get in through one of his smuggling routes down a large drain pipe near the Danube. He also arranged for a safe house in the Russian zone and transport.

Note - technically the agents breached Edom's instructions here by accessing an MI6 resource, but I reckoned Griginski was likely also a personal contact of Hoffmann's (codename Moth) and would not necessarily check this with SIS HQ in Vienna. SIS was oblivious of the Edom mission in Austria.

Once into the Soviet zone, the agents staked out the apartment belonging to Popescu. They searched it and found much of his forging materials and documents, including passport photos of several girls who could have met Carmilla's description. They were all oddly slightly out of focus, but obviously different people.

Hoffmann keeping an eye on the Popescu flat

Once Popescu arrived home, well after curfew, he was confronted by the agents and interrogated, revealing that Carmilla had instructed him to create the passes and identities for the girls, who visited him in 1946 to collect them. He knew Carmilla was a vampire, and lived in fear of her, but had only dealt with her through one of her agents (the bald ghoul killed by Hoffmann at Schloss Karnstein). He had created papers for 10 girls over the period 1945-46.

O'Reilly forced Popescu to reveal he kept the details of the girls in his client book, which he retrieved for them from his desk, but just as he did, he was hit by a rifle bullet fired from across the street and killed almost instantly. This forced the agents to evacuate the building at speed (having shot out the lights) before a Russian patrol turned up.

Fox and O'Reilly found the Popescu diary was written in a personal code, but managed to begin to decipher it and located some of Carmilla's girls, namely a Bulgarian actress called Alma Cril in the central zone of Vienna (shared by the occupation powers), a Tyrolese Italian called Carmalli di Pietri who lived in the Soviet sector, a local Austrian girl called Carmilla Liebfels who lived in the British sector and a Ukrainian named Clar-mila Vilsen who had been granted the identity of a nurse but seemed to have no address.

The team decided to pay a visit to di Pietri the following morning and observed a smartly dressed man leaving her abode with a briefcase and getting into a jeep driven by a Russian soldier. Fox bluffed his way into the house pretending to be a local Viennese aristocrat fallen on hard times, after which the other agents broke into the house with guns out and masks on.

Not many mirrors in this house.

By interrogating di Pietri, they found she was living with a senior Russian diplomat who worked with the Soviet legation in the centre of the city. She had been told to remain in place but had no contact with either Carmilla or the other girls, some of whom she had met at the schloss in 1946. She did not know where they lived although she had seen a few in the city since then. However, more interestingly, she admitted she was also working for US intelligence and passing information about her lover to an agent called Robert Verboelen at the American legation.

Di Pietri did show up in O'Reilly's shaving mirror, but was always slightly out of focus. She also demonstrated an obvious fear of Blake's crucifix. She told the agents she wanted to get out of Vienna and return to the Tyrol and her family. The agents decided to leave her in place and proceed to the central zone of the city to visit the abode of the Bulgarian Alma Cril. Fox took some of the headed note paper from the Soviet legation he found in the house and Hoffmann procured a list of names of prominent Russian administrative officials from di Pietri.

Next time - trouble at the Kommandatura...