The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  He unpacked what little he needed and changed his shirt, then reopened the envelope from the Blumenthalstrasse. It seemed to hold just what Blagg- had described: a wad of old death certificates, or Sterbeurkunden, and two minute strips of colour negative film in a transparent packet. These were really tiny, the special film made for Minox 'spy' cameras, and Maxim was a little surprised that real s'pies actually used it. But the negatives, each no bigger than his little fingernail, were totally meaningless to the naked eye.

  Altogether there were thirty-eight certificates, each for somebody who had died in the parish of Bad Schwarzendorn on April 151945. The times of death seemed to span the whole day, but he couldn't be sure the thirty-eight covered everybody who died that day because the numbers of each certificate didn't add up to a complete sequence. Some had been signed as much as three days later. But that was less surprising than that somebody had still been issuing such certificates in the chaos that had been Germany, just three weeks before the final surrender.

  The results weren't impressive: Maxim had collected parking fines that looked far grander. Each was on cheap, discolouredas paper, about the size of pages from a novel, theindividual details clumpingly typed into the spaces provided in the print, and attested by the totally illegible signature of the then Standesbeamte.Each hada10-Pfennigstamp cancelled by the eagle-and-swastika symbol, but with the swastika roughly scraped away. Perhaps Bad Schwarzendorn had been in Allied hands by then.

  He settled down to sort through them.

  Half an hour later, he was back downstairs asking for the duty officer. The mess was almost empty except for an Education Corps captain who was also using the place as an hotel, and three unmarried young officers who'd been playing tennis and shouldn't have been in the ante-room dressed like that. When found, the duty officer obviously knew enough about Maxim's sponsors not to ask for more. He showed him the mess library and the official telephone, then discreetly vanished.

  "All quiet on the Western Front?" George was civil servant enough not to ask a simple question if a fancy one would do. "Did you get the paperwork?"

  "I think I got it all." He gave George the details. "There's one fora Brigitte Schickert,née Krone, who was living in Dornhausen. That's a small farming village a few kilometres out of Bad Schwarzendorn. She died there at11.3 o. Husband's name Rainer Schickert: I'm assuming that's Gustav Eismark."

  "Sounds like it. What was the cause of death?"

  "It doesn't give one. None of them do, there's no space for it, but there were twelve other people who died at that same time at Dornhausen, and four more from Dornhausen who died in the Karls Hospital at Bad Schwarzendorn at times later in the day."

  Over the telephone, George's grunt became an electronic honk. "Thirteen deaths at the same time, four later – that sounds like a bomb. She was supposed to have died from Allied bombing, so that ties up. Doesn't it?"

  "The only odd thing is that according to the military history, the place had been overrun by American First Army, either the jrd or pth Division, I can't quite make out their boundary line, nearly two weeks before." George enjoyed military detail and Maxim had got lucky with the library.

  "Well… Gustavneedn't have been telling the truth about the Allies – though it sounds as if he might have been telling it about his wife. You say you can't make anything of the photographs?"

  "I could ask if anybody in the barracks has an enlarger. There might be a camera club -"

  "Better not. You've got a new thrill on the way: Sims himself is coming over. You rememberhim'? You're at Alien-by Barracks? Good, he'll contact you there, it might even be tonight."

  "Isn't he taking a bit of a risk coming to Germany? I thought he'd be in strife with the Verfassungschutz."

  "That's his problem. I don't suppose he's travelling under his own name. Hejust wants to keep it all within his own unit. Anyway, you simply hand over everything you've got and try to be polite with it, by which I mean don't tell him how to do his own job. Buy himeine kleine Knackwurstand toddle home without a stain on your character. Is there any chance of your doing that?"

  When George had rung off, Maxim reached for the First British Corps telephone directory which sat just beside the phone. He hadn't, after all, promisednot to look up the name and home number of the divisional security officer, and one small stain wouldn't really count and might not even show.

  Captain Brian Apgood was a slight, very young-looking man with pale skin and wispy blond hair. In his Sunday dress of jeans and a fresh white shirt, he looked as if he'd get mugged the moment he set foot in a town with more cars than horses. He sat on the foot of Maxim's bed and lit a small cigar. "I'm not being inhospitable, " he explained, "but we have to assume the chance ofthem having my house and office both wired, and I imagine Number 10wouldn't like that. I know I shouldn't ask this, but -"

  "That's right, you shouldn't," Maxim said politely. On the phone he had mentioned nothing but his name and rank.

  Apgood smiled back. "Okay. Let's see what we'vegot. " He held up the packet of film against the light and made noncommittal noises. "It's infra-red, funny colours like this. Doesn't look like much, but I can print them up for you. Only black-and-white if you want them tonight…?"

  "Please."

  Apgood pocketed the film and sat down to browse through the stack of fragile old certificates.

  After that, he said: "I suppose it would be a silly question to ask how you got these?"

  "A… roundabout way. Am I right in thinking I shouldn't have them?"

  "They're not secret, nothing like that. But they shouldn't be floating around loose. They aren't copies, they're the originals. They should still be in the files at the Standesamt. Unless they've microfilmed them, of course, and these are just waste paper. Theyare microfilming a lot of old stuff now… Does any particular one mean anything to you?"

  "The top one."

  Apgood skimmed through Brigitte Schickert'scertificate, her husband's name, parents' names, place and date of birth, and the address of the Leistritzfarmhouse, Dornhausen.

  "I hope some of these names mean something to you; they don't ring any bells with me. "

  "That's all right. I just wondered what else you could tell me."

  "Like what?"

  "Well…" by now Maxim was far from sure himself; "… perhaps why so many of them?"

  "Did these get pinched from the Standesamt?"

  "Ah… in a sort of way, yes."

  "The simplest explanation would be that by pinching a whole day's deaths you help conceal an interest in just one of them. And you couldn't ask for copies of all these, you'd have to ask for just one, and that would give away your interest, too. Still, it seems a bit drastic to go and start looting the place."

  "But these can't be the only versions?"

  Apgood looked up at him curiously. "As a matter of fact, they most probably are. How much did you get taught about German documents at Ashford? – or Hereford?" The Army grapevine hadn't lost its bloom in the early heatwave: Apgoodhad a very good rundown on Maxim's background.

  "Assume it's nothing. "

  "Fair enough. Well… the thing to cling to is that everything like this is still decentralised. Births, marriages, deaths -all the routine stuff is still kept at the local Standesamtwhere it was first registered, andonly there. No copies to central government or anywhere like that. And since there's something like seven thousand Standesamterin West Germany alone, you can have quite a job looking somebody up if you don't know where to start. I imagine it's a legacy of the war: centralised personal data sounds too much like the Gestapo -though mind you, it would be a hell of a storage problem if youdid start collecting copies of all these. We'll see how long the libertarian principles last once everything's on microfilm. "

  "If you destroyed these, would it destroy evidence of the deaths?"

  "No-o… these things are numbered and they'll be cross-indexed to some sort of register of names. But you'd destroy the detail: time of day, exact place and so on.
Unless, as I say, it's all been microfilmed and these arejust garbage. You could easily find out: just ring up the Standesamtat… ah, Bad Schwärzendem, and -Hold on a minute! The Standesbeamtethere got killed the other day. Shot. "

  "I was in the UK at the time," Maxim reassured him.

  Apgood pinched his nose like an airline passenger trying to clear his eardrums, and looked Maxim over carefully. Then he let out his breath in a puff. "We-ell… Has all that been cleared up? I seem to recall some mystery woman…"

  "I think the police are treating the case as closed."

  "Look – my first responsibility is to Division -"

  "Of course. I just wanted an opinion. And I won't quoteyou.

  Still looking wary, Apgood walked over to the washbasin, tapped the ash from his cigar and washed it away. "I can see why you might not want to go near Bad Schwärzendem. Shall I ring up?"

  "If you can do it without…" then Maxim remembered that Apgood's whole life was devoted to doing things 'without'. He changed tack. "So you don't think there's any chanceof anybody having put a fake certificate into the files? – years after the event?"

  Apgood instinctively picked up a certificate and glanced through it, then shook his head. "No. I don't mean just the forgery, and that's a hell of a job, trying to fake something that's aged as badly as these – it's the numbering. It wouldn't fit into the sequence, it wouldn't match up with the ledger. Anyway, why should somebody want to do that?"

  He really looked so absurdly young and guileless, so like a starry-eyed subaltern about to go over the top into the machine-guns of the Somme, that Maxim almost answered. Just in time, he remembered he was talking to a thirty-year-old Captain from Int Corps who was deeply interested in anything that might be happening on his patch.

  "I really wouldn't know, " he said carefully.

  "Okay. But I can take some of these back to the office and have a look at them under the funny lights – ultra-violet, infra-red – to see if anything shows up. Having a whole batch together should make an odd one stick out like a sore thumb. That's another reason why you wouldn't try forging one."

  "Thanks, but… if you could just print up the photos for me…"

  "Will do. And you aren't asking for help to get the other stuff back into the files at Bad Schwärzendem."

  Thankfully, Maxim reflected that that was entirely Sims's problem. "I suppose they do belong there."

  "If anybody wants them to prove anything, they do. Floating about loose, all they prove is that whoever's got them is more or less of a crook. Present company excepted, of course."

  "Thank you. Do you want me to come and hold the stopwatch?"

  "No need. You stay and have lovely din-dins with the Sappers and I'll be back before lights-out. "

  Maxim didn't argue. In barracks he was where Sims could find him and while he didn't expect much from Sunday dinner in a near-deserted mess, just being back with the Army was sauce enough for the moment.

  The dinner, Maxim decided, would be best remembered as 'nourishing', and he went back to the ante-room to do something about the taste of it. A few more officers were drifting in from their various weekends, and the chatter turned to the likelihood of their being called out on an 'Agile Blade' exercise in the next few days. This was a test of how fast the regiment could pack up and move out to its battle positions, and was supposed to come as a big surprise, but Maxim knew how easy it was to predict. Most units were usually too busy to go to war: dispersed on training schemes, preparing for some grand parade, absorbing new equipment, training for a tour of Northern Ireland or retraining back from it. So on the rare occasions they did report themselves in a State of Readiness they knew an Agile Blade was likely. To the younger officers, Maxim's presence proved that tomorrow would be The Day and – by reverse logic – that he must be a spy from Allied Command Europe come to report on their morale and even sobriety. It became a joke to ply him with half-pints of beer and fantasies about each other's unfitness for battle.

  The mess sergeant arrived with a brief respite: Captain Apgood was at the back door.

  They sat on stubby pillars at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading to the parade square. The security officer handed over a bunch of small prints and lit a cigar. "Not very exciting, I'm afraid. Looks likejust a test strip. It's flash, you can tell by the shadows. Must be infra-red, the thing you don't notice unless you're looking straight at it."

  The pictures showed various angles of a small room that was furnished with little more than a big couch, a hi-fi and a table of drinks.

  "Like going to the pictures, isn't it?" Apgood said. "Always seems there's something better coming next week. Oh, by the way, I ran off copies for myself, I hope you don't mind. It's just conceivable that room might pop up in some other picture some day."

  Maxim didn't mind, although he had a vague sense Apgood was seeing something he'd missed himself. Then he remembered the magazine, Focus on Germany.

  "If you could dig up a back copy -" he gave the date, nineyears before; " – If the worst comes to the worst, just lift one from the Liaison Officer's back room."

  "Dear me. What strange morality one learns in high places. "

  Chapter18

  Maxim woke with a slightly tender head – those blasted lieutenants and their silly jokes – and the sombre feeling that he must be getting truly old if he could no longer sleep through a normal wakey-wakey in barracks. He lay for some minutes listening to the clatter of boots, slamming of doors and distant shouts before the snorts and squeals of armoured personnel carriers below his window made him realise this was far from normal and was, in fact, an Agile Blade.

  He was just wrapping himself in a garish Hong Kong dressing-gown when the door burst open and a hulking first lieutenant in combat dress, his helmet stuffed with leaves and his face already smeared with camouflage cream, stood staring at him. Maxim was about to explain when the lieutenant obviously came to a snap judgment on his military value and slammed out again. So he stood for ten minutes at the window watching soldiers tossing bundles of equipment into the gurgling FV 4325 parked around the parade ground and feeling the deep contentment of seeing other people working very hard very early in the day. Then he dressed and went down for what would now be a vulture's breakfast.

  At nine o'clock he and the transient education officer were still sitting in the ante-room reading old copies of Country Life when the mess sergeant came in to say Mr Sims was on the phone.

  He was all business. "I think you have all the papers? -good. Can you meet me at the parking place outside the cathedral in half an hour? I will come past in a dark blue Audi 100. Is that all right?"

  "Make it a quarter to ten. I don't know how quickly I can get into town."

  "Okay then, 0945."

  Maxim got the film and certificates from his room, then stood for a moment at the top of the front steps, looking across the parade ground. It was another hot windless day, and they were living in a bowl of milky haze and smog, so that the blue only began perhaps twenty degrees above the horizon. It would be murder out in the field, digging in, and the soldiers knew it. They were all slumped in the shade of the vehicles, blurred by patches of cigarette smoke.

  Then whistles started blowing and the scene shattered into movement. The mess sergeant appeared at Maxim's elbow, offering a key. "I don't know how long we'll be out, sir, but this is for the drinks cupboard. Write out a chit for whatever you use, as usual. And there'll be a sort of lunch in the cookhouse, nothing here. "

  "Thank you, Sergeant."

  The sergeant saluted and then, because Maxim wasn't wearing uniform, couldn't resist asking: "Are you really from Command, sir?"

  Slightly surprised at a mess sergeant who didn't know all about every officer, Maxim was about to deny it when he realised that, by chance, he had found a great cover story. So he just smiled as enigmatically as he knew how, and pocketed the drinks key. The first personnel carriers rumbled out of the main gate, blocking the workday traffic, and he watche
d them now with envy because they were off to play soldiers and he hadn't been invited.

  Sims stopped the car on a wooded readjust across the A64Autobahn, lit one of his menthol cigarettes and opened the envelope. "Is this everything?"

  "Everything I got. It's what Blagg said. "

  "Please tell me how you got it. "

  Maxim ran through a brief version of the Blumenthalstrasse meeting while Sims counted the death certificates.

  "You are sure the man Bruno gave you everything? He could perhaps have changed something." Sims took out a jeweller's eyeglass and peered at the tiny negatives.

  "He could have. But he only had about a couple of hours to do it in – after I'd rung from Hannover. Until then he'd beenexpecting Blagg, and he might know exactly what he'd left." Maxim had decided to play this bland and straight – well, fairly straight. Captain Apgood and the prints he had made weren't even going to get a mention-in-despatches.

  "I understand. But perhaps you think he would have changed something if he could?"

  "Out of pure habit, yes."

  Sims smiled at him. "Yes. Now, you have seen the certificates of death?" He had gone back to those.

  "I had a look through. "

  "And it seems that something happened at Dornhausen at 11.30 hours on April 15 1945. A bomb, do you think?"

  "Probably. The place had been occupied by the Americans for ten days or more, but 9th Air Force was flying missions down to the south and Czechoslovakia until the end of the month. And not every bomb falls in the right place."

  "That is very true, Major. But you have looked up some history for me? I am very grateful. "

  Maxim shrugged. "The rest of the news doesn't look too good. I mean, there's a death certificate for her and I don't see how it could be faked. You'd have a problem trying to fit it into the sequence, wouldn't you? There'd be a number in a ledger – or something…"