by Gary Haynes
Richter hung his head in his hands, his breath becoming erratic.
Kazapov put his hand on the Sonderführer’s forearm. ‘Calm yourself. We will not speak of generalities again,’ he said. ‘There is only one atrocity that interests me. You will tell me the names of the Kalmyk volunteers involved and you will tell me the name of the Einsatzgruppen film maker. All the other known German and Kalmyk officers are dead or dispersed. You know this.’
Kazapov removed his hand and stiffened up. ‘Four women. They looked like Jews but were not. A middle-aged woman and her three daughters. They were hiding in a barn. But the Einsatzgruppen didn’t kill them. Maybe they had revolvers on them. Maybe not. Maybe the Kalmyks thought they were partisans. Maybe not. You destroyed the useful records you had in that fire. But the film is now mine. I must have the names. You gave up the Waffen-SS in the bunker easily enough. I suspect that you won’t want to give up the Kalmyks as lightly, but you know you will.’
He paused.
‘Why did you keep the film?’
Richter looked up. His eyes were red rimmed, his lips quivering. ‘I didn’t order them killed, I swear.’ His voice was little more than a warbling whisper. ‘I kept it to remind me of those times, to remind me that the Kalmyks had a savage side too. It was meant to be destroyed in the fire.’ He cleared his throat and he lowered his eyes again. ‘Will you ensure that I survive this?’
‘I have offered you a deal. But I must have the names,’ Kazapov said.
He’d done his best to stop from screaming the words.
Ignoring him, Richter said, ‘So, the women on the film were your mother and your sisters.’ Richter fingered the thin strands of his own hair and blinked. ‘The colouring. I’m right, aren’t I?’ he said.
‘If you speak to me like that again I will beat you to death myself,’ Kazapov said.
Richter began to wheeze. Sweat broke out on his forehead. The cigarette fell from his fingers. He grasped his collar, jerking at it. He hugged his body with his other hand and doubled over.
Kazapov left his chair and moved over to him, calling out for a guard worriedly. The German seemed to be experiencing a terrible cramp, a closing over of his airways.
The door opened. Two NKVD captains were standing there. Not what Kazapov had expected. By the look on their pale faces, he knew Richter’s time was up, and he cursed himself for not obtaining the information he desperately wanted.
He attempted to remonstrate with them, but they just glared at him as if he was barely human. If he attempted to bribe them, he’d likely beat Richter to Lubyanka. But he had to do something, even if not immediately.
‘He needs a medic. He needs one now,’ he said.
61
Shafts of sunlight fell through the lattice windows and Richter felt somewhat pleased with himself. He could see the bluish-grey sky, the high branches of a spruce tree. The office was lined with oak bookshelves and a few mundane items, a decanter, spirit glasses, a desk lamp. He believed that his tactical approach was beginning to pay off, especially with the arrival of Joseph Kazapov.
A deal, he thought. He’d jump at it, but he would play it soberly. He’d feigned breathing problems, on that occasion at least, simply because he’d needed time to think. It had all become rather too emotional. The fate of the Kalmyks had genuinely disturbed him. But he was lucid now. He saw things clearly again.
He’d been attended to by a Red Army medical officer, and got a shot of morphine after he said that he was a narcotics user and was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. One of the guards at the cell block had been called in and had attested to the fact that he often moaned himself to sleep due to stomach cramps, and that he often stumbled and sweated excessively. It was true. But he hadn’t expected this treatment. He decided that these NKVD were as soft as cotton wool.
The two officers that had escorted him from the medical centre had remained outside the office, he knew. His new environment was a positive sign too, he believed. He expected Lieutenant Kazapov to enter at any moment.
Now he thought: why were captains on guard duty for a lieutenant? Especially as they were NKVD. Perhaps it was because he was a war crimes investigator. Perhaps not.
The wooden double doors hadn’t been closed. The man that entered and walked stiffly to the window, overlooking the tree where a wood pigeon now preened itself, had a gaunt and stony face. He wore an NKVD officer’s uniform that hugged his lean body, which to Richter’s eyes verged on emaciated. He looked about thirty, with fine, swept-back hair. His eyes were large and lifeless. They were dark green and flecked with umber.
‘We are going to Moscow, you and me, Nazi,’ he said.
‘Moscow? But I don’t want to go to Moscow.’ It was all he could think of saying.
‘Comrade Beria has ordered it.’
‘Beria? Beria knows about me?’ Richter said, his expression fearful.
He stepped forward a couple of paces, almost involuntarily, as if breaking a fall.
‘Are you going to torture me in Moscow?’
‘You are an old fool,’ the man said.
The officer pulled out a padded chair from the desk, sat on it. He put his high leather boots onto the desktop, twiddled a pencil he’d picked up there in his right hand.
‘Comrade Stalin hates the Kalmyk people for their betrayal. Following your testimony, Comrade Beria will describe to him in detail all the things they did for you German fascists and all the things the NKVD will do to the Kalmyk people in exile for that betrayal, and Comrade Stalin will nod, and Comrade Beria will continue to be Comrade Beria.’
‘Where is Lieutenant Kazapov?’ Richter said, his breath quickening.
‘It seems that Comrade Beria’s general has a soft spot for him. But when Comrade Beria hears what I have to say, Lieutenant Kazapov will be digging ditches in Siberia for the next twenty years. Comrade Beria is my uncle and he despises insubordination above all things.’
Richter felt petrified and his cheeks began to quiver.
‘But there’s no need. I’ll tell you everything. Important things. Ask Kazapov.’
‘Did you tell Kazapov anything other than you told Major Volsky?’
Richter thought about that. If he said yes, his one chance of survival may be thwarted. If he said no, he’d confirm that Kazapov was just an insubordinate officer with too high an opinion of himself. He suspected that Kazapov had engineered his session with him. He knew why. He suspected too that Major Volsky wasn’t pleased about that. An insubstantial snub, no doubt. But an insubstantial snub in the NKVD was enough to finish a man, something that Beria’s nephew had just confirmed.
Before he had a chance to answer, the two officers outside the door appeared. They each grabbed one of Richter’s arms, steadying him. A trickle of frothy saliva ran from the corner of his mouth to his chin, and his body started to quake.
Opium, he thought. I need my opium. The morphine had drained from him, its demise accelerated by the shock of this turn of events.
Beria’s nephew took a clean white handkerchief from the left-hand pocket of his breeches, rolled it up and tossed it to one of the guards.
‘Clean him up. My uncle likes his meat fresh. We leave in twenty minutes.’
62
Hale County — Berlin, 2015, the same day.
Fury was standing in the rain, about three feet from the shelter, knowing the roof would be secured from the inside. Their only option was to remove the wet sods and smash their way through unless Billy Joe Anderson surrendered once the excavation had begun. But she decided that that was unlikely.
‘Dig him out,’ she said.
Her voice was contemptuous. She stood still, expectant, vicious, as if she’d morphed into a ratter that was waiting for a rodent to be unearthed. The three soaked men proceeded with the manual work, digging out the sods with pickaxe and shovel.
Just as they got to the makeshift waterproofing, a blast sounded, splintering the wood and causing a flurry of shredded polythene, a disorienta
ting cloud of sand. One of the men caught many of the discharged pellets full in the face, causing eruptions on his skin. Fury, temporarily stunned, watched him spring back, his feet leaving the ground. Lying on the wet grass, he looked as if he’d been assaulted with a cheese grater, so shredded and bloodied were his cheeks.
Regaining her composure within a second, she knew that Billy Joe Anderson had one more shell, unless he’d used a pump-action shotgun. But a pump had a distinctive sound. One she hadn’t heard.
‘Pick him up. Pass him over the hole,’ she said in Russian.
The two men did so, holding the obviously fatally wounded man by his wrists and ankles as they swung him back and forth over the partially shattered roof. The next shot hit him in the middle of his spine, causing a bloody rupture of bone and tissue. The two Russians just managed to hold him in place, even though they were smarting.
‘Drop him,’ Fury said, taking off her hat.
The moment the body hit the jagged hole she leaped into the air and landed feet first onto the now dead man’s stomach, sending them both careering through the weakened roof with the force of a propelled boulder.
*
Billy Joe sidestepped as he saw the body he’d obviously shot at fall through what remained of the roof, but he wasn’t fast enough to avoid it hitting him. He heard his shoulder pop, and felt a strangely detached numbing pain, just before he landed on the filthy carpeted floor.
Dazed, he vaguely registered a heavy weight on his chest among the rising dust: the hideous-looking corpse. He looked around. Hazily, he saw the shotgun three feet away. A good-looking blonde, who seemed to have come from nowhere, picked it up, smashed it against the wall. He breathed deeply, saw two men appear in the hole in the roof. They were big, able to handle themselves. One had a shovel in his hand. The woman said something to the men that sounded to him like Polish. He’d never left the US. The man with the shovel let it fall from his hand and the woman caught it by the handle.
The two men dropped down into the shelter like crazed predators. They pulled the dead man from him and lay the wet and ravaged corpse against the wall opposite. The rain was coming through the massive hole in the roof. He could see a black cloud rolling by.
Suddenly, it felt unreal, as if he would wake up in a sweat.
‘Strip him,’ she said in English.
He knew she’d used English purposely. He didn’t doubt it. He saw the two men glower at him before producing thin-bladed knives from leather sheaths attached to their now exposed belts. He figured the stiff had been a friend.
They began to slice at his jeans and T-shirt with a deftness that was disconcerting, as if they were fishmongers boning a prize catch. They ignored his groans and winces, and he knew in that moment that their trade was killing. He just prayed it would be quick. But something told him it wouldn’t be, and he had to force himself not to weep openly.
The woman put the shovel against the wall and removed her rain jacket. She bent over him from the side, about six inches from his head.
As if reading his mind, she said, ‘I work on you for hours.’
He glanced at her. Up close, he saw that she was muscular, her green eyes shimmering like sunlight on a pond.
‘Wait. Just hold up. I’ll tell you anything you wanna know.’
She backed off and, bending down again, took a pair of scissors from her discarded jacket pocket. He thought they looked like dressmaker’s scissors. Like the ones his mama used. Heavy and cutthroat sharp. She stared hard at him.
‘You get drunk in bar. Tell friends you big man. You killed Watsons. Yes?’
‘Jesus, no. I won’t.’
‘Snow Lion,’ the woman said.
Billy Joe flinched. He couldn’t help it. Hockey had mentioned the name on several occasions.
‘And, Vezzani?’ she said.
He hesitated but knew he must speak if there was a chance of saving himself.
‘Hockey just said that he was gonna pay us for doing things.’
‘What things?’
‘Like killing the Watsons.’
She eased down beside his head, stroking his damp forehead with her free hand. He felt a gnawing sensation on the left side of his face. He lifted his hand instinctively. He had no earlobe, just a raw unevenness that paralyzed him. Blood gushed down onto his neck to the floor. Desolate, he let the tears flow too.
*
Billy Joe was an unrecognisable pulp, barely alive. What was left of his face was no longer contorted in agony, and instead of the screams all that left his swollen mouth was a trickle of yellow vomit streaked with blood.
Fury knew now that he didn’t know anything of significance and that he hadn’t told anyone about the Watsons other than his girlfriend, after all. But that was enough. Wasn’t it? Besides, he’d heard the name Snow Lion, and knew that Vezzani had been the paymaster.
A frail moan emerged from the pulp. A finger twitched. Nothing more. Picking up the shovel, she thrust the sharp metal blade into the flayed neck, before pushing down with her mud-splattered boot, as if she was about to dig a grave.
*
They stopped at a payphone on Main Street in Greensboro, still in Hale County, one hour later. The tornado damage was far less than in Newbern, as if it had skirted around the small city. The street was still bordered by two-storey buildings, mostly whitewashed retail shops with red-brick accommodation above. Some of them looked ransacked rather than ruined. The rain had stopped.
The payphone had no dial tone, which didn’t surprise Fury. She took out her smartphone, thumbed in a number.
Three seconds later, she said, ‘The rooster and hen dead.’
‘Did they know anything?’ César Vezzani said.
‘Some.’
‘I need a full report.’
‘Report, yes.’
‘Stand down now.’ Vezzani said.
She smirked.
*
In his Berlin villa, the old man was informed by César Vezzani that the country and western singers, Rimes and Anderson, were dead, and that he’d sent Fury and the Russians home.
The old man used his thumb and forefinger to stroke his earlobe. ‘No. Tell her to come to Berlin with her boys. Don’t tell her why. Let it cook a bit. In truth, I don’t know why myself. But always be prepared. Good soldiers are always prepared.’
He had a feeling in his bowels, and it wasn’t a pleasant one.
Vezzani said, ‘Carla Romero has a four-year-old daughter. Gabriel Hall is unmarried and childless. He teaches at Yale.’
The old man’s bald head nodded.
He thought about his nickname. It had meant to conjure up something not quite human. Something elusive and mysterious. Something to be used only by those who served him, or at least that he paid for their services. There was nothing in it that could link him to his actions unless someone who knew his nickname also saw one of his DVDs. That may well have happened or may happen now, in the future. This was the real reason he had had the country and western singers killed.
He began to grind his back teeth with a mixture of frustration and anxiety. It was a habit he’d started after the war. Like his desire for revenge, it had never left him.
63
Brussels, the same day.
Robert Dubois sipped the second Leffe Blonde he’d ordered in a bar just down from Bruxelles-Central railway and metro station, where the waiters wore long masonic-like aprons and black ties. He took off his suit jacket and unbuttoned the top two buttons of his white shirt. It was a balmy night, and he plumped to sit on one of a row of brightly coloured deckchairs on the pavement outside. He checked his wristwatch. She was twenty minutes late. Nothing changes, he thought.
‘Robert.’
The voice was unmistakable. He turned and saw Carla leaning against the bar’s façade of grey, cast-iron window jambs and red brick. She wore an apricot-coloured blouse and had what looked like a green yoga bag slung over her shoulder. The last time he’d seen her had been almost two years ago.<
br />
He stood up as she walked over to him. He kissed her on both cheeks, inhaling her musky perfume. Her hair was held up with an elaborate gold hairpin that was decorated with embossed kanji, and he had to stop himself from running his tongue over her caramel neck.
He thanked her for coming and paid for the drinks. They walked to the edge of the pavement and he hailed a cab.
‘Rue Lesbroussart,’ he said to the Arabic driver, who had his window down.
He’d decided they’d have dinner at an expensive Vietnamese restaurant there, although he knew his lack of communication on such matters, his inability to share mundane decision making, was but one of his idiosyncrasies she disliked. But he did it anyway. Perhaps he deserved to be on his own, he thought.
*
They were sitting across from each other at a teak table with a fine lace tablecloth. The lighting was dim, the pearl-coloured wallpaper made of silk. Bright watercolours of Ha Long Bay hung there, the limestone pillars topped with rainforest reflecting in the emerald Gulf of Tonkin. Carla found herself gazing at the islet of Stone Dog, the depiction of a junk passing by it.
‘Where the dragon descends into the sea,’ Dubois said, smiling.
She knew he was referring to the local legend of the creation of the islets. They had spent a week on holiday at the nearby Cat Ba Beach Resort. It felt like a thousand years ago.
The first time Carla had come to this restaurant, she’d loved it. It was an undeniably happy time. But tonight, she was at best unsure of her emotions. She’d travelled to Brussels to get answers from Robert Dubois, and for that reason alone. She asked him to order for her and when he asked her if she was sure, she snapped at him.
The minutes before the food arrived passed in relative silence, punctuated only by rather brusque exchanges between them. It was a relief when the tiny, smiling waitress, clad from neck to toes in a bridal-white dress, brought them their meal, placing the plates of food beside a small lazy Susan that held the condiments. She remembered that they’d eaten the same dishes when they’d been here before, and Dubois’s lack of subtlety irritated her.