The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  When he reached it, the village was little more than six huge farm buildings in the classic German style: each wall a grid of brown-painted timbers, filled in with rough-plastered brickwork. And each building could be a farm in itself, housing animals and machinery on the ground floor, humans above that, wine and vegetables in the cellar and hay in the loft under the steep-pitched tile roof. You could never believe just how big such places were until you got up close. Beside them, the modern tractor sheds and dairies looked ready to collapse in the first breeze.

  And the villagers would have the same massive unity as their houses. Maxim had run into that before, on exercises, when he wanted to dig his troops in among the growing vegetables, and probably Hitler's soldiers had been no more welcome. A small farming community would be a good place to hide out a war.

  The tap-room of the tiny inn was down a deep step and he nearly sprawled on the tiled floor, coming abruptly into the cool darkness. When he had got his balance back, a woman in adowdy black dress was looking at him with tired amusement. There was nobody else in the room.

  "Are you open?" he asked.

  "We are never closed. Did you want to eat?"

  "No, thank you. Just a Pils. "

  It came in a stone mug, deliciously cold and wiping out in one mouthful the heat of the morning and the traces of last night's headache (he wondered briefly how the Engineer regiment was getting on in its battle positions; by now they should be dug in and pausing for sips of lukewarm water or barely warmer tea. Even war games are hell).

  He finished the beer and asked for another. The woman was probably in her middle forties, with a body that looked strong rather than fat under the shapeless clothes, ¿ind a long lined face that had already done all the ageing it was likely to.

  "Were you here in the war?" Maxim asked; he'd never feel comfortable trying to start conversations like this.

  "Yes."

  "Can you help me? It's about somebody who was killed here. I think there was a bomb…"

  "Yes. The Bomber. There's a memorial, up by the church. "

  "The church?" He hadn't seen anything that could be a church.

  "The old one. Up the road. " Her expression hadn't changed by a fraction throughout.

  A little perplexed, he left the second mug of Pils on the table.

  Not noticing the church hadn't been quite as crass as he'd feared, because whatever else the bomb had done, it had blown the church apart. Hardly any part of it stood more than waist high now, much was covered in grass or blackthorn bushes, and it could never have been more than a chapel anyway. The road ended just there, in a long concrete hard-stand where a cart and some rusting old farm machinery were parked. Beyond, the pastureland sloped up to the skyline.

  Beside the ruin, the grass had been scythed to rough ankle-length around a handful of old gravestones and an incongruously clean slab of veined grey marble that lay glinting in 178 the sun. It was carved with very competent lettering, but all it said was 15 April 1945 and a list of names. There were seventeen in all, three recurring -Scholz, Leistritzand Brenner; probably the main families in the village. The Schickerts' address had been the Leistritz farmhouse.Brigitte Schickert'sname was there, too.

  Maxim wrote down the names, then took out the new camera and fiddled with it; presumably the gravestone was evidence of a sort.

  "Are you looking for something?" The old man must have moved very softly to get within twenty yards of him unheard, although the quiet afternoon was in fact a steady rumble and distant clatter of farm machinery.

  "Er… I was interested in a name. "

  "One of those?" The old man jabbed his stick towards the marble. He had a face like a leather potato, all bumps and creases, and wore a thick clothjacket over-shirt buttoned to the neck, all grey and brown and far too hot for the day. But he was well past seventy, when the blood runs thin even in June.

  "Brigitte Schickert. "

  "Oh, her. Did he send you?"

  He? Whichhe? Of course, the presumably-still-alive Rainer Schickert. Now we find out if they really don't know what became of him. "No, not her husband. Just a London lawyer wanting to know where she's buried. They don't tell you what it's all about, but they pay you for it. " He took a second picture and pocketed the camera. "I have an unfinished beer at the Wirtshaus. Would you like to join me?"

  The solid old barrel of a body moved stiffly but not very carefully, like a heavy vehicle in low gear. Seeing the village again, from a new angle, Maxim could see other scars of the blast and its debris. The great linden tree, the traditional place for a village parliament, was lopsided even now from missing branches, and the nearest farmhouse was patched with un-matching brickwork and some of the window frames were too square to be old. But the signs of prosperity far outweighed those of damage: the new BMWs and Mercedes, freshly painted woodwork and the constant noise of machinery from the outhouses.

  "A nice village, " Maxim commented. "How many farms is it?"

  "It used to be three, now it's two. The Leistritz family packed up and sold out, just after the war. Two of the boys were killed in Russia, then their father was killed by The Bomber. The last boy couldn't keep it going."

  "You lost more in the war than we did," Maxim said, and instantly felt he'd pitched it too strong.

  But the old man nodded emphatically. "Yes, we did that. You're right. War is a terrible thing."

  "What happened about the Leistritz farm?"

  "That's it." The stick waggled at a great building nesting among its outhouses at the bottom of the village. "Karl Scholz bought most of the land and my father bought the house and the rest and gave it to me to run. It was a terrible business. "

  Maxim said nothing more until they were back at the inn.

  The old man's name was Brenner and he chosea Dunkeland a Korn – a very dark beer plus a chaser of the local heart-stopper that tasted somewhere between very young whisky and vodka. Purely out of tact, Maxim braced his brain cells for a kamikaze mission and opted to drink in parallel.

  For a quarter of an hour, Brenner talked about the weather, the Common Market and taxes. When he had finished the first beer, Maxim asked: "Did you know the Schickerts well?"

  "Not well, no. They only came in the last winter of the war, just a few months. Old Leistritz took them in – he got paid, naturally. Everybody was taking in women and children from the cities, away from the bombing, or storing their furniture for them. My father said he'd never known a season before when chairs and commodes were the best crops." He chuckled, and finished his Korn as well. "After 1941 the village was full of strangers. They even sent us some French and Belgians, people like that, to work the land. Our own lads were getting killed in Russia, so they sent us Belgians to play with their widows. War isn't just terrible, it's ridiculous."

  "But you did know them?" Maxim persisted.

  Brenner looked at him. "Him, yes, a bit. He had a glass eye. Something of a scholar, and Leistritzsaid he'd done farm work before. He liked him."

  "And her?"

  "Ach."Brenner banged his right hand on the head of his stick as if to knock some feeling back into it. "I hardly saw her. It was winter, she stayed indoors with the baby. "

  "Of course. Would you like another drink?"

  While the woman was bringing more beer and the bottle of Korn, three other men came in. One wore a city suit but was carrying the jacket; the other two were in farm clothes. Brenner called the one in the suit over and introduced him as Rolf Scholz.

  "This young Englishman wants to know something about Frau Schicken- do you remember her? What was her first name?"

  "Brigitte,"Scholz said.

  "That's right."

  Maxim asked what Scholz would drink. He wa^ a hulk of a man in his middle fifties, inches taller than Maxim and instinctively stooping under the low beams of the tap-room. He moved with a delicacy that emphasised his power, and he had a slow smile and a gentle handshake.

  They drank and Scholz asked bluntly: "What did you want to know abo
ut her?"

  "Nothing much… just that she was killed by the bomb."

  "The Bomber." It was said just the way the woman and Brenner had said it,Das Kampßugzeug,like The Event, and Scholz saw Maxim's puzzlement. "It wasn'tjust a bomb, but a whole bomber. An American, a B-26. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it still had all its bombs on board when it came down there, behind the church."

  Maxim had wondered about that: the blast effect had seemed pretty widespread for just a bomb. Now they were talking about perhaps four tons of bombs toppling out of the sky one morning when Dornhausen thought the war had passed it by. And not even an air raid warning to send them into the cellars.

  Maxim thought of asking if the bomber's crew had bailed out, but decided it might be tactless.

  "She didn't actually get killed by The Bomber," Scholz went on. "She died later. Oh, there would be seven or eight who died later, in hospital."

  Maxim sat for a while, absorbing that thought. "She didn't die here then?"

  "That's what he said." Brenner sounded testy.

  "You didn't help take her to hospital, or anything?"

  Scholz took out a meerschaum pipe that was burned to a dark orange and blew through it. "The Americans did that. They were quick with it, too. Their medical service was probably the best thing about their Army."

  Maxim glanced at him sharply and Scholz smiled a slow smile back. "I was in the Army then. Field engineers. But I picked up glandular fever and liver trouble in Italy that winter and I was still at home on sick leave when the whole thing finished. So… I just privately discharged myself and let the Americans think I'd been here all along. " Maxim instinctively smiled at him, then despised himself for the silly band-of-brother-soldiers stuff. Anyway, they didn't know he was a soldier.

  "Do you know how badly she was hurt?", Brenner burst out: "No, we don't! D'you think when The Bomber came down it just killed twenty people and left the rest of us drinking Korn and singing fal-lal-lal? It blew the whole village upside down. They took another twenty people to hospital and I had the dairy roof down on my back and it took them two hours to dig me out. I was in bed for a week with concussion and the doctor said at first he thought I'd got a broken pelvis. And my leg's never been properly better since. No, I don't know how badly she was hurt. Just badly enough to die, I imagine."

  Scholz listened gravely, taking pinches of tobacco and pressing each gently into the pipe with his thumb, then sucking noisily to make sure it wasn't too tight. "I think I remember seeing her. She got it in the back of the neck. With neck wounds you can't tell, it could be nothing or everything. Her husband, Rainer, he wasn't hit but he went in with them. He spoke the best English. Then he came back the next day – I think it was the next day – and told us who'd died. Then hecame again a couple of days after and took the baby. "

  "He just took it away?" Maxim was surprised. "It was only five months, wasn't it?"

  Scholz lit his pipe and puffed quickly. "What else should he do? We couldn't look after it forever. He said he was going off to find his sister. It wasn't easy, travelling, in those days, but it wasn't as if he belonged here anyway."

  "Who arranged things like the death certificates?"

  Brenner said: "How should we remember who arranged them? I was in bed the whole week. You may say the Americans were wonderful with their ambulances but they didn't pay for the dairy and half the animals were dead already or had to be slaughtered. It was an American bomber. But the English would have been worse."

  "It was Rainerwho did that," Scholz said unperturbed, as if Brenner had never spoken. "I remember him going about the village, collecting the details, the birth certificates and things. He was good with forms, dealing with the bureaucrats. "

  "He was a scholar," Brenner said, banging his hand on the stick again.

  "And you never saw him after that?"

  "Why should we?" Brenner wanted to know. "He wasn't one of the village."

  Scholz was wearing that wise, reflective look that pipe-smokers get or act on the few occasions their pipes are working well. "There was somebody else asking about him, or her. A few weeks ago. "

  "I didn't meet them. " Brenner sounded offended.

  "Neither did 1.1 forget who told me; probably somebody in town. Would you know who it was?"

  Maxim tried for an expression of indifference – tried desperately. Of course Mrs Howard must have been asking around. You know, the one whose driving-licence picture was in the paper, she'd been shot, wasn't she asking about the Schickerts? And now there's this Englishman asking about them: will you ring the police or shall I?

  He should have thought of that risk; he wondered if Simshad thought of it.

  "I haven't heard of anybody," he said casually, "but if thelawyers asked me they might have asked somebody else before… You said a few weeks ago?"

  "About a month, I think it was."

  "I've got to get back to town," Maxim said, "but can I get you another drink?"

  Brenner was willing; Scholz had to go into town himself. Maxim waited nervously while the woman brought one more Dunkeland Korn. Trying to change the subject, he asked: "And nobody did anything about the church? I mean rebuild it."

  "It's still church land," Scholz said. "Nobody's stopping them building it up. But the pastor only came for one service every two weeks even then, in the war."

  "It wasn't much good as a sanctuary, either," Brenner said with an odd cackle.

  "It was a Sunday," Scholz explained. "April 15. The Bomber came down in the middle of morning service."

  Outside, the sun lashed him across the forehead with a warning of another headache to come, and he wished he hadn't had a drink with lunch at Paderborn. No wonder plainclothes coppers ended up able to conduct surveillances from behind the cover of their own stomachs.

  The easiest way to turn the car was to drive on up to the hardstand by the church, and as he swung about he realised it was in fact the old foundations of small cottages, completely gone with The Bomber. He, paused, working out that a shallow dent in the pasture was the remnant of a huge crater, and then got out to take another look at the marble. Seventeen names. Seven or eight had died in hospital, yes, and some of those would have lingered for a day or two; fair enough or evenblondgenug, as the Army usually put it. But the death certificates had shown thirteen people dying in Dornhausen itself. Thirteen plus seven or eight…

  The woman came out of the inn and saw him, hesitated, then walked up. He waited.

  "Did they tell you what you wanted to know?" she asked.

  "I think so. Did you know Frau Schickert?"

  "Yes. I was young at the time, a little girl. Sometimes I'd goin and she'd let me give the baby his bottle." A smile rippled across her wrinkled face and was gone. "A hussy from the city who peroxided her hair to look like a good Aryan."

  "Did she?"

  "I suppose so. It was something my mother said. To me, she just seemed kind. But sad. "

  "What about?"

  "Nobody was happy, that winter. The Americans were coming. I thought that must be a good thing. I didn't understand."

  "Were you here when The Bomber came down?"

  "Down in the cellar, getting some vegetables for lunch. The whole earth wentschunk and all the dust and bits fell out of the ceiling. I thought I was going to be buried. "

  "Did you see her?-after she was hurt?"

  She folded her arms and frowned briefly at the memory. "There was blood all over her shoulders. He -Herr Schick-ert – was holding a towel to her neck. Why do you want to know?"

  "Some lawyer wanted to know where she was buried. I don't know why. But now I've got a photograph…"

  She gave a little snort of laughter. "She isn't buried here. "

  Maxim looked from her to the marble and back. "Not? -not there?"

  "Not all the ones named are buried here, and some are here who aren't named. It's just a memorial, really."

  "Some are buried here who aren't named?"

  "Three Belgians,
labourers. They were in the cottages." She nodded at the hardstand. "By the time they put this up, nobody could remember their names, and they didn't belong here, of course."

  Death, the great leveller. Except in Dornhausen. But it explained the numbers that didn't add up – though not why Brigitte Schickertwas shown on her-certificate as having diedm Dornhausen when everybody seemed to know she had been taken to hospital.

  "Do you know where sheis buried?"

  "No. It isn't in the Evangelical cemetery, with the others who died in hospital. None of them came back, you see: the Americans couldn't spare the trucks and the farms weren't allowed to use their petrol for anything but getting food to market. Later, months later when I was taken into town for the first time since The Bomber, I wanted to put some flowers on her grave. I couldn't find it. Nobody seemed to know. They just said she didn't belong here really. "

  For strangers, death in Dornhausen seemed to be oblivion of a peculiarly total sort.

  Chapter 21

  He had half an hour left before meeting Sims, so he took a cup of coffee at thecaféwhere Mrs Howard had set up her last rendezvous, then walked her route along the great Gradierwerkin the park outside. He had never seen it or anything like it before: a solid wall of blackthorn twigs a good forty feet high, smeared in long rusty streaks by the gypsum and salt in the trickling water that had changed the wood into coral branches. The spa season was at its height and the park was full of elderly couples strolling or filling the benches, thecafétables and the chairs in front of the bandstand and staring down at their paunches from grey faces. It made Maxim feel not just young but uncomfortably young, and to walk at his usual pace would have been hooliganism. But the trimmed grass, the bright flowerbeds and the constant whisper of water from the wall and the many fountains gave, the park a sedate gaiety – and made it a very odd place to get shot. Two murders must have been the talk of the sanatorium for… well, it still would be. He began to feel too conspicuous and walked without pausing through the archway where Hochhauserand Mrs Howard had died.