The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  The men of the rifle division were part of the military arm of the secret police, called tylova krysa, rear-guard rats, by the frontline troops. They’d beaten malingerers, shot deserters, and carried out mopping-up operations as the Red Army fought its way from deepest Mother Russia to Berlin. They were too enthusiastic in their treatment of the lesser mortals, as far as Kazapov was concerned, but they’d never disobey an order.

  In the far corner of the clearing was a single-storey building. Kazapov used his field binoculars to get a better look. The building had been shelled. The windows were blown out and black fire damage all but covered the outer walls. A concrete, bloodstained walkway encircled it. In his mind, he translated the barely intact German sign hanging off the façade: Hitler Youth District Training Centre. Despite this, it would have been a relatively safe sight in war, if it hadn’t been for the Waffen-SS military truck, making out to be a Soviet ambulance, parked a few yards away.

  The NKVD Divisional HQ had radioed Kazapov again and Major Volsky, who was overseeing the bunker operation, had told him that a Soviet combat convoy, a detachment of a Shock Army, was coming in the opposite direction to the SS truck, about three miles away. Kazapov guessed now that the German officer that had escaped from the bunker had seen it and had decided to veer off and hide the boxes, although he didn’t know what they contained. He suspected no one did. But he dared to hope for a breakthrough in respect of the atrocities he was investigating. One, in particular.

  He breathed out, focusing now. He vowed that the old, overweight officer and his shameless bunch of SS killers were his for the taking.

  ‘Remember, we need them alive,’ Kazapov said to his men. ‘If necessary, kill the SS men. But not the colonel. Don’t kill the officer, under any circumstances.’

  The Soviets had taken prisoners throughout the war, and the NKVD were used to missions with the sole purpose of capturing the enemy. It was part of their role, for military intelligence purposes. But his men weren’t told why the German officer had to be captured alive. He reckoned they just thought he must be very important, or very bad, or both.

  The Soviet survivors of the recent explosions in the bunker had already verified that Red Army soldiers had been mutilated within it. There was talk of a vat of incense, of discarded papers with a geometric design resembling a swastika. Before Kazapov left, he’d telephoned a man he knew in the ChGK, and had asked him to search the state commission’s own records under the SS officer’s name — just to be sure. He could barely contain his sense of anticipation.

  Kazapov replaced his binoculars into their canvas case and unbuttoned his holster. He took out a TT-30 semi-automatic pistol, attached by a cord to his webbed belt. It was time to act.

  *

  By the time Kazapov and his NKVD troops had reached the edge of the clearing, an attempt had been made to camouflage the already disguised SS truck with branches and netting. But it was a half-hearted affair and they’d obviously given up part way through the exercise. Kazapov examined it. He saw the peppering of rounds and leaking fuel, two lacerated rear tyres and a buckled wheel. They’d been lucky to get this far, he thought, despite the red crosses and the draped Soviet flag.

  About thirty feet from the truck, the five SS men were now throwing papers onto a fire, fuelled by scorched and broken furniture that Kazapov guessed they’d obtained from the Hitler Youth training centre a short while before. It was more of a little camping fire than a full-blown conflagration. They’d slung their Mauser bolt-action carbines and MP40 submachine guns over their shoulders, enabling them to destroy the documents relatively unhampered. But the aged SS colonel held a Walther pistol in his right hand and looked understandably apprehensive.

  The fire was struggling to cope with what had become a deluge. Kazapov heard the officer scream at an SS man, whose straw-coloured hair peeked out beneath the rim of his camouflage helmet. The subordinate picked up a large jerry can and began flinging what Kazapov guessed was gas over the flames, increasing the fire’s ferocity tenfold.

  Kazapov decided they had to move fast. He extended his arms over his head and dropped them to shoulder height: deploy to the right and left.

  NKVD intelligence stated that Hitler seemed to have aged almost twenty years in the past few months. Staring at the officer now, he felt the same accelerated deterioration may have afflicted him, though he was rotund rather than frail. Perhaps all of the perpetrators had aged prematurely, he thought. Perhaps their bodies hadn’t been able to deal with the singular evil inside them. Perhaps it was bringing an early death upon them, like a cancer.

  Two NKVD riflemen kneeled on the flat roof of the training centre, as ordered, and aimed their adapted SVT-40 rifles, fixed with optical sights, at the SS, who had their backs to them. A beefy NKVD man in his early twenties, with wild, joined-up eyebrows, began to sprint the short distance to the officer, his boots kicking up damp clods like a racehorse’s hooves.

  The other eleven, together with Kazapov, moved out and maintained a jagged line, their rifles and submachine guns raised. They shouted in German to the SS men, demanding they hold up their hands. The SS turned, looked startled. They glanced at one another, then raised their hands, almost as one. They seemed to be glad it was over. But now an ill-looking young man, his limbs lost in the folds of his grey uniform, jerked on his MP40, raising it to hip level.

  A shot sounded, echoing repeatedly from the walls of the training centre, as if a volley had been discharged. Hooded crows flew from the trees, their calls, Kazapov thought, ancient and nightmarish. At the far edge of the clearing, a trio of spring rabbits bolted for their burrows. The other Germans stood as frozen as fence posts, even though Kazapov knew that for them, such deaths had been a daily, and sometimes a second-by-second, experience. He knew too that one of the snipers had taken the German out. A spray of blood had erupted from the young man’s head and speckled the cheeks and greatcoat of the SS driver next to him. His legs had buckled, and his arms flailed briefly. He lay on the ground now, his feet at right angles, and his body going into spasms.

  The SS officer, no longer confused and paralyzed, held his pistol to his temple. But he lunged forward to a box, scooped up what appeared to be last remaining documents and scattered them like confetti over the fire. Standing straight, he raised his pistol to his head again, his expression stoic. The heavy-set Russian got to him just in time, hitting him a little above the pelvic bone with a powerful shoulder barge. They both ended up flat on the grass, the officer breathing heavily. The Russian prized the Walther from his hand and yanked him to his feet. Kazapov noticed that he hadn’t put up any resistance, and now looked dazed.

  He ordered his men to disarm the remaining Germans.

  He walked over to where the young SS man had been felled. Looking down at the corpse, Kazapov saw the entry wound was a black and crimson gash to the side of the head, rather than the sphere the size of a three-kopeck coin that spoke of a clean shot. Fragments of the shattered cranium were showing, jagged like a cat’s teeth. The expression was at once perplexed and terrified, as if a god he had forsaken had revealed the measure of his sins to him at the point of his premature death.

  Kazapov knew such an impulsive act could have sparked a full-scale bloodletting, and he turned and congratulated the men of the rifle division for their restraint and discipline.

  Wiping the stress-induced sweat from his gaunt face, he allowed himself the faintest of smiles now, despite everything. Apart from one death, they’d completed their mission, even if the all the papers had apparently been burned. He was going to the bunker. He would have it searched, brick by broken brick, if necessary. The previous recognition of the SS officer’s name had given him a kernel of hope that he may find evidence there of the war crime that haunted him at night, like some crowing succubus.

  Then he would orchestrate a session with the SS officer, assuming some heavy-handed NKVD interrogator didn’t brain damage the man first. That was something he didn’t want to dwell on. The potentia
l brain damage didn’t concern him, just the timing of it.

  15

  Kazapov had ordered the SS colonel, who said his name was Lutz Richter, to be separated from his men. They’d been put into the back of a Mechanized Corps truck that had arrived within ten minutes of their surrender and were now on their way to an improvised NKVD interrogation prison, twenty-five miles east of Berlin — although they didn’t know that, yet.

  Kazapov led Richter to the side of the road, just as the rear of the convoy heading for the streets around the Brandenburg Gate was passing by. Unlike the elite troops at the front, who rode on standard trucks, the sides of T-34 tanks and artillery tractors, the new recruits at the rear were sitting in filthy carts, pulled by sullen horses.

  The animals were not at all an odd sight in the war, Kazapov knew. The Germans had used almost a million in the conflict at any one time. There’d been the horse-drawn supply trains, which had utilized pneumatic tyres on the carts and wagons. The non-mechanized infantry divisions had been dependant on horses, particularly on the Eastern Front. His homeland had mile upon mile of grasslands served only by a crude road network that required horses as a means of effective transport. The Nazis had known this, too. Apart from the horses’ usefulness in logistics, there’d been the regular Wehrmacht Heer and the Waffen-SS cavalry, tens of thousands strong. There’d been the mounted Axis Allies, the Hungarians, the Italians, and the Romanians, together with the Russian Don Cossacks of the First SS Cossack Cavalry Division. There’d been the feared Kalmyks, the Buddhist horsemen of Europe.

  His mouth became parched and his breath quickened. His neck felt clammy and his eyes blinked repeatedly, as if he’d been suddenly afflicted by a neurological disorder. The echo of the hooves was a dread memory.

  The young Soviet soldiers recognized the man standing by the side of the road as an SS colonel, and they began spitting at him. They flicked cigarette butts at his face, called him a fascist beast, a child-murderer, a fucking criminal. Kazapov did his best to shield Richter with his arm, although he sympathized with their feelings.

  Behind the last of the carts was a group of boys. Some looked as young as eleven years old. Their faces were covered in dirt, their eyes deadened, and they wore mangy clothes on their drooping and attenuated bodies. Like some of the infantrymen, their feet were wrapped in filthy layers of rags, tied with string and stuffed with straw. The boys were variously armed with long-barrelled revolvers, German officers’ daggers, chipped pistols and rusted bayonets.

  Kazapov saw Richter looking at them. ‘They are orphans,’ he explained, in good German. ‘They feel safe with us. They clean our boots. Make us porridge.’

  The last of the sun was trying to break through the grey sky, the odd beam of muted, golden light. Clumps of flowers, snowdrops and purple crocuses, their petals half closed, adorned the banks of the country road. But the air smelled of a sickening cocktail of spilled fuel, horse dung, body odour and burning tobacco.

  ‘Where will you take me?’ Richter said.

  ‘Not I.’

  ‘May I smoke?’

  ‘Yes. But put it out when I say,’ Kazapov said.

  Richter nodded and opened a silver cigarette case, emblazoned with what Kazapov knew to be a rune. Ancient German writing. The German took out an unfiltered cigarette. Lit it with a matching lighter, inhaling deeply.

  ‘Too late, they are here,’ Kazapov said.

  A black staff car had appeared from around the verge of the right-hand bend, the horses on the road rearing up as its horn blared. The vehicle was escorted by two motorcycle outriders, wearing the uniforms of NKVD non-commissioned officers, who flapped their arms at the soldiers to move aside.

  ‘Well, I suppose it had to end,’ Richter said, tossing the burning cigarette to the ground.

  ‘End? Not for you.’

  ‘Will I be tortured?’ he asked as the staff car pulled up beside him.

  Kazapov felt it inappropriate to answer.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You see?’ Kazapov wiped thrown-up mud from his sleeve. ‘Just tell them everything they want to know.’ He looked hard at the German. ‘You are not a real SS colonel, are you?’

  Richter’s face was blank.

  ‘No, not a real SS officer at all. What are you, then?’

  Kazapov had no intention of informing him that he already knew who he was, at least for now.

  Two NKVD officers got out of the back of the car, their expressions sternly pinched. They wore regulation mid-length leather jackets and jodhpurs. The blue crowns of their caps and the square black visors were pristine. The red enamel and brass cap badges, with their hammers and sickles, looked as if they’d been polished every hour. Nothing was said. Kazapov knew they weren’t in a fighting unit and hadn’t seen action, and that fact alone made him a little nervous, although he refused to show it.

  ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ Richter said.

  Kazapov smirked. When they stick wooden splints under your fingernails and knock out your teeth with a hammer, you will not say such things, he thought.

  He heard Richter laugh raucously as he was ushered into the back of the car. The door was slammed hard behind him. The officer seemed unique, at least in his experience. He’d seen many people transported to interrogation centres, and although several had displayed remarkable courage, he’d never heard anyone laugh before.

  Watching the car drive off, he felt not a smidgen of pity. All that had happened, all the horrors he had seen, could not be erased from his memory, even if he lived a thousand lifetimes.

  16

  Federal correctional complex, New York State, 2015, the next day.

  Johnny Hockey had been told that he had a female visitor, even though it wasn’t visiting time, and he wondered whom it might be. The two officers of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, or BOP, stood in his cell, wearing thin black ties, navy-blue trousers and short-sleeved white shirts, with radios clipped to their left shoulder straps. He watched them as he put on the regulation orange jumpsuit over his white T-shirt and boxer shorts and bent down to slip on a pair of canvas shoes, scowling as he did so.

  ‘I hate this fucking jumpsuit,’ he said.

  One of the two officers, a black man with a pencil-line goatee, looked like an ex-football player that no longer bench-pressed.

  ‘You know why you gotta wear it,’ he said, his teeth glistening. ‘Let’s say a miracle happened and you escaped. How far you reckon you’d get, dressed as a carrot?’

  The white guard, a younger man, with a red-wine birthmark on the left side of his neck, caressed his riot baton and smirked.

  You got a point there, Hockey thought.

  The black officer shackled him with metal cuffs and leg irons, augmented by a tight-fitting body chain. He’d been gentle, as far as Hockey was concerned, and they all waited patiently for the cell door to open via the remote-control station.

  The fastened down bed was made from soldered metal. It had a waterproof mattress, as if Hockey was a child prone to bedwetting. The mirror was stainless steel, like the toilet pan, and cemented into the wall, the sparse furniture all immovable, moulded plastic. The space was little wider than his arm span, a little shorter than a family sedan. The overcooked food tasted of creosote, and the only view was of the opposite wing — and only when the heavy door was opened.

  Beyond the prison buildings were the patrolling officers, with rottweilers and Doberman pinschers. They walked between the parallel mesh fences that were linked into a CCTV system, which triggered the cameras when a perimeter alarm was generated. Next came the fifty-feet-high wall, with guard turrets and yards of concertina razor wire. And beyond the hub of concrete, five straight roads disappeared into a legion of white spruce trees, skeletal and forbidding things. There was no way out and he was stuck in his cell for twenty-three hours a day, the odour of his own body beginning to sicken him.

  He decided his visitor had to be May, although he was curious as to how she’d managed to outwit the syst
em. She wore two silver dog tags around her neck. One had her name on it, the other bore the words one hundred percent Aryan blood. She had a tattoo above her arse of a sonnenrad, a curved swastika, it was the insignia of the Fifth SS Panzer Division Wiking, she proudly said. It had been made up of foreign volunteers. The Nazi paraphernalia in their flat had been acquired by her, online, over a period of four years.

  Now he remembered that she’d been to the movies with friends on the evening in question. The feds must know that too, he thought.

  He worried that if things didn’t go well, he might never touch May’s skin again. He loved her in his own way, not least because she shared his beliefs and did things in bed that no one else he’d been with would even consider.

  He worried too that he’d become a spider monkey, a con doing hard time. He worried about outbursts of frustrated violence with a shiv by the stress box, the payphone booths, when his guard was down. He worried about the possibility of back door parole: dying in prison. But he’d never do the Dutch: commit suicide, or dry snitch: talk loud enough about another’s crimes so that the BOP officers could hear. He wouldn’t exploit fish: first timers, or pumpkins: new inmates. He wouldn’t have a June bug: a prisoner slave. He wouldn’t whistle at a Kitty Kitty: a female officer. He’d just drink mud: coffee, and avoid the porcelain termites: the crazies that smashed up the communal bathrooms.

  Hockey shuffled along the wing’s concrete corridor, passing the kidnappers, drug kings, gang members and cyber terrorists. Some of them called out to him. A white supremacist shouted, ‘Hey brother, keep the faith.’ In prison, they were known as the brand, or the rock. The only time he’d interacted with them had been in the exercise yard, a large grass and asphalt area with basic facilities. They’d nodded to him when they’d registered his racist tattoos. One of them had chatted about his joining up, if he got a long sentence.