‘Not at all. I’m telling you I put him to some use. I’m beyond redemption, and so is Kalb. I expect I’ll die, as well, but before you shoot me, might I ask one favour?’
‘What? What favour?’
‘That you eat me, too.’
The Leutnant didn’t answer. He thinks I’m mad, Nehmann thought. He thinks I’m clinically insane and he’s probably right.
The interview at an end, the Leutnant left the classroom without a backward glance. The sun was sinking towards the horizon, a huge orange ball wreathed in the smoke of battle, and Nehmann began to shiver as the temperature fell. A couple of books lay within his reach and he opened one of them with his spare hand. ‘A’ for ‘Apple’. ‘B’ for ‘Boy’. He stared at the cartoon faces, the sweetness of the smiles, at the way that every object triggered a thought, even the beginnings of a story. At the end of a lifetime devoted to telling stories, he thought, my days are ending where they began. ‘A’ for ‘Apple’. ‘B’ for ‘Boy’.
Had his questions made any impact on the Leutnant? Had they touched a nerve or two? Prompted a ripple in the cess pit that was his conscience? Had he gone away to think? To reflect? Or was he even now slipping a fresh magazine into that machine pistol of his?
Nehmann didn’t know, and he was so cold, so numb, that he didn’t really care. Why not now, he thought. Why not get it over with? Why not spare himself another night on this earth?
Darkness fell. The battle seemed to intensify. Then the classroom door opened, and a uniformed figure loomed briefly over him. It wasn’t the Leutnant.
‘Here—’
Expecting to be released from the radiator, expecting to be hauled to his feet and dragged out into the snow, expecting to find himself on his knees, the cold muzzle of a gun to the back of his neck, Nehmann felt something rough settling around him.
‘What’s this?’
‘Blankets.’ A soft laugh. ‘They belonged to Kalb.’
The figure disappeared. The door of the classroom closed. The noise of battle seemed to have diminished. Curled awkwardly beside the radiator, Nehmann slept.
He awoke at dawn, shivering. Another cloudless day. Nehmann pulled the blankets more tightly around him. He smelled of Kalb, he knew he did. He smelled of camphor, of mothballs, of menthol. He smelled sour. He smelled of death.
From the corridor outside the door came a murmur of voices then a thump as something heavy was dragged across the floor. The voices receded. A door opened and closed. Then came the soft crunch of footsteps in the snow outside and, perhaps a minute or so later, Nehmann heard a single shot, very close, followed quickly by another. Schultz, he thought. Dawn. The hour of our passing. The moment of execution. Me, next.
He closed his eyes, tried to still the raging in his empty guts. Please let it be quick. Please let me think of nothing. In this city of nothing, nothing.
But nothing happened. No more footsteps. No more voices. Nothing. Slowly, over the next hour or so, the sunshine grew stronger and the temperature in the freezing classroom began to inch up. And then, for the first time, Nehmann saw the hunting knife. It belonged to Schultz. It was the same one he’d used on Kalb. Someone had left it on the floor beside the radiator. Someone had stolen into this room during the night and measured the space by eye and given Nehmann a little parting gift.
He struggled free from the blanket, rubbing his eyes, trying to ease the cramp in his legs, and reached for the knife. It was close, tantalisingly close, teasingly close, maybe ten centimetres beyond his closest foot. Someone, maybe the Leutnant, was playing games with him. With the point of the knife he might be able to force the lock on the handcuffs. With the serrated top of the blade, and a little time and effort, he could certainly saw through a link in the chain. But how could he reach the fucking thing?
A challenge, he thought. For the journalist from the Promi, for the little Georgian cannibal, one last test. He stared fiercely at the knife, concentrating every gramme of psychic will, trying to make it move, trying to make it levitate. Hopeless. He looked round for a stick, a child’s ruler, anything to bring the knife within reach. Then he realised the answer. The blanket, he told himself. Use the blanket.
And so he did, casting it out towards the knife one-handed, like a fisherman spreading a net. The first couple of times, it didn’t work, but the third cast snagged the knife and he heard a scraping on the rough wooden floorboards as he tugged the blanket towards him. Nehmann, all his life, had loved irony. Kalb, he thought, may have saved my life.
For most of the morning, Nehmann worked to get himself free. When he failed to unpick the lock itself – the angle too awkward, the lock too well made – he began to saw through the chain. He chose a particular weld in one of the links, hoping to find a point of weakness, but the metal was tough and it was difficult to keep the chain steady. Expecting the return of the Feldgendarmerie at any moment, he once lifted his face to find himself looking at a rat, large, brown, plump, crouched peaceably among the schoolbooks on the floor, watching his efforts. He’s waiting, Nehmann told himself, returning to the tiny groove in the link. He’s waiting for me to give up and die.
But he didn’t give up. By what he judged to be noon, he was nearly through. Another minute, and another minute after that, and the serrated edge of the knife was sawing at empty air. In the golden pool of sunshine, Nehmann had even worked up a light sweat. Redemption, he thought. Who’d have guessed?
He used the knife to lever the broken link apart and then pulled the chain from the radiator, trying to keep the noise to the minimum. He was still wearing a single handcuff, but he was free. He stood up, uncertain of his balance, watching the rat scurrying away. He did his best to massage the pain from his aching arm, and then he stole across the classroom towards the door, aware of the noise of battle ever louder.
The door was unlocked. He stepped into the corridor beyond, alert for the sound of movement, the murmur of voices, but the thunder of exploding shells masked everything. He moved quickly from room to room, beginning to realise that these people had gone. The Chain Dogs had shipped out. Was the airfield at Gumrak still operational? Had they forced their way onto a departing flight? Were they even now droning westward over the steppe? Thinking about the bodies they’d left behind?
Nehmann ventured outside. He could see Schultz lying in the snow. He approached him carefully. He’d heard rumours of bodies booby-trapped with a live grenade. Take care, he told himself. Now is no time to die.
He was standing over Schultz, swamped with a fathomless grief, staring down at the big face cushioned by the snow. Then, very slowly, he realised that something was wrong. The snow had melted around his nose and mouth. He was breathing. He was still alive. Schultz opened one eye. Not dead at all, but asleep.
‘They play games with us, these fuckers.’ Schultz was chained to an iron ring embedded in a huge block of concrete.
‘They’ve gone, Willi. It’s just us.’
Nehmann was looking at the chain, at the ring, at the block of concrete. The grunts of effort at dawn, he thought, as the Chain Dogs wrestled this thing into the snow. And then the two shots, so terrifyingly final. A game, indeed.
The lock, this time, surrendered to the point of Schultz’s hunting knife. Nehmann hauled him to his feet, asked him if he was OK.
‘I’m starving,’ Schultz grunted. ‘There has to be something to eat.’
There wasn’t. Not in the wreckage of the kitchen. Not in any of the cupboards littered around the school. Not in the big room the Chain Dogs seemed to have used as a dormitory. Then Nehmann found himself in the little cubbyhole that must have belonged to Kalb. The smell of the man still lingered in the cold air. A camp bed occupied most of the available space and there was a wardrobe wedged into the corner beside it. The wardrobe was locked but Nehmann prised it open with the knife.
Inside, he found an SS-issue kitbag. He pulled it out. It was much heavier than he’d expected, and he could hear the clunk-clunk of objects inside. He emptied it on
the camp bed, staring down at tins and tins of US Army-issue spam, of beans in tomato sauce, and at tube after tube of menthol pastilles. Kalb, too, had been packed and ready to go.
*
Nehmann and Schultz slowly made their way back to the bus depot, their bellies full of spam. They shuffled along like the two old men they’d become, ignoring everything on the way, the frozen bodies, the smashed-up vehicles, the occasional face peering out of this ruin or that, even the roar of the approaching juggernaut that was the Soviet Army.
The bus depot was empty. There were no signs of Schultz’s tiny Abwehr staff. Schultz rubbed his face and used his hunting knife to prise open another tin of spam while Nehmann fetched snow from outside.
Schultz hoped his men would get through OK.
‘Get through where?’
‘Fuck knows.’
Nehmann tried to kindle a flame from the remains of the wood but gave up the attempt. He told Schultz he wanted to pay a visit to the priest at the church.
‘Now?’
‘Yes. You’ve got something better to do?’
Schultz shook his head. He’d finish the spam first, but why not?
‘What’s that in your hand?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’ Nehmann folded the sheets of paper into the pocket of his greatcoat, and then nodded at the tin of spam.
‘Do I get any of that?’ he asked.
*
They set out for the church. It was mid-afternoon by now and the battle seemed to have paused. Nothing stirred in the ruined landscape. Even the crows had given up.
Nehmann found the old priest sweeping the tiles in front of the altar. Watching him from the emptiness of the nave, it seemed a crazy gesture, readying an empty church for a non-existent congregation, and Nehmann remembered the lines from Goebbels’ editorial in Das Reich that had lodged in his memory. Above his head, he could see sky through the gaps in the roof.
In the limitless fields of the east yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe. Work will once more be a pleasure and it will be marked by a joy in life which will find expression in brilliant parties and contemplative peace.
‘Brilliant parties and contemplative peace,’ he told Schultz. ‘Remember all that shit?’
The priest had put down the broom and was on his knees at the altar rail, praying. At the sound of a voice, he half turned. Nehmann was shocked by how much weight he’d lost. A bag of holy bones, he thought.
The priest limped very slowly down the aisle. His breath clouded on the freezing air and his beard, Nehmann noticed, had turned the colour of fresh snow. No longer grey, but white.
Nehmann dug in his pocket and gave the priest three sheets of paper. The priest studied them one by one, his head nodding as a finger moved from line to line.
‘You want me to play this?’
‘Yes please, father.’
‘You’ll help with the bellows? Nothing works any more.’
‘My friend will.’
The priest slowly led the way up a flight of wooden steps to the organ loft, explained what Schultz had to do, and then settled himself at the keyboard. Nehmann heard the sigh of the bellows as Schultz began to pump. Then came the opening chords of the music Nehmann remembered so well. He could see the priest from the nave, a hollowed-out figure, a stick of a man clad entirely in black, plucking at the instrument’s bank of stops, urging more and more volume from the foot pedals as the music briefly filled the church. Then came the first of the faster virtuoso passages, and the priest slumped back on the stool, defeated.
For a long moment, absolute silence, then Nehmann heard Schultz enquire whether the priest liked American spam. The priest whispered something Nehmann didn’t catch, then one of the big doors of the church swung open and Nehmann spun round to find three black figures silhouetted against the still-bright afternoon.
They stood motionless for a second or two before the tallest of them strode down the aisle towards Nehmann, his boots echoing on the flagstones. He was wearing a neatly buttoned, full-length greatcoat but he’d removed his cap and his head was bare. Nehmann was staring at his shoulder boards. A captain in the Russian artillery? Kalb, he thought. Redux. Was this levitation? The blackest magic? Had the SS Standartenführer risen from the dead?
The captain was cradling a machine gun, the leather strap looped around his neck. He looked around, taking his time, and gestured up towards the organ loft. Nehmann understood his Russian perfectly.
‘Again,’ he said. ‘Play it again.’
The priest gazed down at him, then shrugged. A nod to Schultz on the bellows, and he squinted at the first sheet of music and bent to the keyboard.
The Soviet Captain listened to the music for several seconds, his boot tapping on the flagstones, and then told the priest to stop.
‘Beethoven.’ The Russian seemed amused. ‘The Pathétique.’
Nehmann nodded, and then slowly raised his arms. He couldn’t take his eyes off the machine gun.
‘я подчиняюсь,’ he said. I surrender.
About the Author
Graham Hurley is the author of the acclaimed Faraday and Winter crime novels and an award-winning TV documentary maker. Two of the critically lauded series have been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel. His French TV series, based on the Faraday and Winter novels, has won huge audiences. The first Spoils of War novel, Finisterre, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Graham now writes full-time and lives with his wife, Lin, in Exmouth.
www.grahamhurley.co.uk
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