by Philip Kerr
“So where’s the rest of it?”
“Maybe he realized how effective a weapon it was and took the rest of it with him. I rather imagine there was an argument. The killer grabbed the trophy, broke it over Gebhardt’s skull, and found himself holding just a piece of it. A conveniently sharp piece. There are some smaller punctures on Gebhardt’s head that are consistent with that possibility. Gebhardt collapsed onto the bed. The killer then went at him with the point. Finished him off. Then he went outside and caught the U-Bahn home. As to who and why, your guess is as good as mine. If this was Berlin, I’d be telling the uniforms to look for a man with bloodstains on his jacket, but of course here that’s not so unusual. There are fellows out there who are still wearing uniforms stained with the blood of comrades at Königsberg. And I expect the killer knows that, too.”
“Is that all you’ve got?”
“Look, if this was Berlin I could pick up the rugs and beat them, you know? Interview some witnesses, some suspects. Speak to a few informers. There’s nothing like an informer in my business. They’re the flies who know their shit, and that’s the detective work that nearly always pays a dividend.”
“So why not speak to Emil Kittel? The other anti-fa agent? It’s in his interest to cooperate with your inquiry, wouldn’t you say? He might wind up being the killer’s next victim, after all.”
“That might work. Of course, speaking to Kittel means I have to speak to Kittel, and if that happens, I don’t want anyone in this camp thinking it’s because I’m turning Ivan like him.”
“I’ll make sure that people know the score.”
“But that’s only one objection. You see, Kittel’s already one of my suspects. He’s left-handed. And one of the only things I can tell you about the murderer is that he’s probably left-handed.”
“How do you figure that?”
“The stab wounds on Gebhardt’s body. They’re mostly on his right side. Less than ten percent of the population is left-handed. So out of more than a thousand men in this camp, I’ve got about a hundred suspects. And one of them is Kittel.”
“I see.”
“Somehow I’ve got to clear ninety-nine of them in less than seventy-two hours, with nothing more to go on than the fact they disliked the victim only a little less than the man who actually killed him. All of this would be more than enough to do if there wasn’t already a wheelbarrow with my name on it and several tons of sand ready for shifting around this canal. That’s not a tall order, it’s a tall order standing on a box.”
“I’ll speak to Major Savostin. See if I can’t get you off the work detail until this thing is sorted.”
“You do that, sir. Appeal to his sense of fair play. He probably keeps it in a matchbox alongside his sense of humor. And now I think about it, that’s another objection I have to this so-called investigation. I don’t like the Ivans knowing anything more about me than they already do. Especially the MVD.”
The SGO smiled.
“Did I say something funny, sir?”
“Before the war, I was a doctor,” said the SGO.
“Like your brother.”
He nodded. “In a mental asylum. We treated a lot of people for something called paranoia.”
“I know what paranoia is, sir.”
“Why are you so paranoid, Gunther?”
“Me, I suppose it’s because I have a problem trusting people. I should warn you, Colonel, I’m not the persistent type. Over the years I’ve learned it’s better to be a quitter. I find that knowing when to quit is the best way of staying alive. So don’t expect me to be a hero. Not here. Since I put on a German uniform I find that the hero business has been put back thirty years.”
The SGO gave me a disapproving look. “Perhaps,” he said stiffly, “if we’d had more heroes we might just have won the war.”
“No, Colonel. If we’d had more heroes the war might never have got started.”
I went back to work, filling my wheelbarrow with sand, pushing it up a gangplank, emptying it, and then pushing it back down again. Endless and unavailing, it was the kind of work that gets your picture on the side of a Greek amphora, or in a story that illustrates the dangers of betraying the secrets of the gods. It wasn’t as dangerous as the kind of work the SGO wanted me to do, and but for the vodka inside me and the nicotine in my lungs, I might have been feeling a little less than inspired about the prospect of saving twenty-five of my comrades from a little show trial in Stalingrad. I’ve never been the type to mistake intoxication for heroism. Besides, it’s not heroes you need to win a war, it’s people who stay alive.
I was still feeling a little intoxicated when the SGO and the MVD major came to fetch me from my Sisyphean labor. And this can be the only explanation for the way I spoke to the Ivan. In Russian. That was a mistake all on its own. The Russians liked it a lot when you spoke Russian. In that respect they’re like anyone else. The only difference is that Russians think it means you like them.
The MVD major, Savostin, dismissed the SGO with a wave of his hand as soon as Mrugowski had pointed me out. The Russian waved me toward him impatiently.
“Bistra! Davai!”
He was about fifty, with reddish hair and a mouth as wide as the Volga that looked as if it had been exaggerated for the purpose of a vindictive caricature. The pale blue eyes in his pale white head had been inherited from the gray she-wolf who’d littered him.
I dropped my shovel and ran eagerly toward him. The Blues liked you to do everything at the double.
“Mrugowski tells me that you were a fascist policeman before the war.”
“No, sir. I was just a policeman. Generally, I left the fascism to the fascists. I had enough to do just being a policeman.”
“Did you ever arrest any communists?”
“I might have done. If they broke the law. But I never arrested anyone for being a communist. I investigated murders.”
“You must have been very busy.”
“Yes, sir, I was.”
“What is your rank?”
“Captain, sir.”
“Then why are you wearing a corporal’s jacket?”
“The corporal to whom it belonged wasn’t using it.”
“What function did you have during the war?”
“I was an intelligence officer, sir.”
“Did you ever fight any partisans?”
“No, sir. Only the Red Army.”
“That is why you lost.”
“Yes, sir, that is certainly why we lost.”
The pale blue wolf eyes stayed on me, unblinking, obliging me to snatch my cap off while I stared back at him.
“You speak excellent Russian,” he said. “Where did you learn it?”
“From Russians. I told you, Major, I was an intelligence officer. That generally means you have to be something more than just intelligent. With me it was the fact that I’d learned Russian. But it wasn’t the same standard of Russian you’ve described until I came here, Your Honor. I have the great Stalin to thank for that.”
“You were a spy, Captain. Isn’t that right?”
“No, sir. I was always in uniform. Which means if I had been a spy I’d have been a rather stupid one. And as I told you already, sir, I was in intelligence. It was my job to monitor Russian radio broadcasts, read Russian newspapers, speak to Russian prisoners…”
“Did you ever torture a Russian prisoner?”
“No, sir.”
“A Russian would never give information to fascists unless he was tortured.”
“I expect that’s why I never got any information from Russian prisoners, sir. Not once. Not ever.”
“So what makes the SGO think that you can get it from German plenis.”
“That’s a good question, sir. You would have to ask him that.”
“His brother is a war criminal. Did you know that?”
“No, sir.”
“He was a doctor at the Buchenwald concentration camp,” said Major Savostin. “He carried out experime
nts on Russian POWs. The colonel claims not to be related to this person, but it’s my impression that Mrugowski is not a common name in Germany.”
I shrugged. “We can’t choose the people to whom we are related, sir.”
“Perhaps you are also a war criminal, Captain Gunther.”
“No, sir.”
“Come, now. You were in the SD. Everyone in the SD was a war criminal.”
“Look, sir, the SGO asked me to look into the murder of Wolfgang Gebhardt. He gave me the strange idea that you wanted to find out who did it. That if you didn’t find out, then twenty-five of my comrades were going to be picked out at random and shot for it.”
“You were misinformed, Captain. There is no death penalty in the Soviet Union. Comrade Stalin has abolished it. But they will stand trial for it, yes. Perhaps you yourself will be one of these men picked at random.”
“So it’s like that, is it?”
“Do you know who did it?”
“Not yet. But it sounds like you just handed me an extra incentive to find out.”
“Good. We understand each other perfectly. You’re excused from work for the next three days in order that you may solve the crime. I will inform the guards. How will you start?”
“Now that I’ve seen the body, by thinking. That’s what I normally do in these situations. It’s not very spectacular, but it gets results. Then I’d like permission to interview some of the prisoners, and perhaps some of the guards.”
“The prisoners, yes, the guards, no. It wouldn’t be right to have a good communist being cross-questioned by a fascist.”
“Very well. I’d also like to interview the surviving anti-fa agent, Kissel.”
“This I will have to think about. Now, then. It would not be appropriate for you to interview the other prisoners while they’re working. So you can use the canteen for that. And for thinking, yes, it might be best if you were to use Gebhardt’s hut. I’ll have the body removed immediately if you’re finished with it.”
I nodded.
“Very well, then. Please follow me.”
We walked to Gebhardt’s hut. Halfway there Savostin saw some guards and barked some orders in a language that wasn’t Russian and, noticing my curiosity, told me that it was Tatar.
“Most of these pigs who guard the camp are Tatars,” he explained. “They speak Russian, of course. But to make yourself clear you really have to speak Tatar. Perhaps you should try to learn.”
I didn’t answer that. He wasn’t expecting me to. He was too busy looking around at the huge building site.
“Just think,” he said. “All of this will be a canal by 1950. Extraordinary.”
I had my doubts about that, which Savostin seemed to sense. “Comrade Stalin has ordered it,” he said, as if this were the only affirmation needed.
And in that place, and in that time, he was probably right.
When we reached Gebhardt’s hut, he supervised the removal of the body.
“If you need anything,” he said, “come to the guardhouse.” He looked around. “Which is where exactly? I’m not at all familiar with this camp.”
I pointed to the west, beyond the canteen. I felt like Virgil pointing out the sights in hell to Dante. I watched him walk away and went back into the hut.
The first thing I did was to turn over the mattress, not because I was looking for something but because I intended to have a sleep and I hardly wanted to lie on top of Gebhardt’s bloodstains. No one ever had enough sleep at K.A., but thinking’s no good if you’re tired. I took off his jacket, lay down, and closed my eyes. It wasn’t just lack of sleep that made me tired but the vodka, too. The deflated football that was my stomach wasn’t used to the stuff any more than my liver was. I closed my eyes and went to sleep wondering what the Soviet authorities were likely to do to me and twenty-four others if the death penalty had indeed been abolished. Was it possible there was a worse camp than the ones I had already seen?
A while later—I’ve no idea how long I slept, but it was still light outside—I sat up. The cigarettes were still in my jacket pocket so I lit another, but it wasn’t like a proper cigarette; there was a paper holder and only about three or four centimeters of tobacco—what the Ivans called a papirossi cigarette. These were Belomorkanal, which seemed only appropriate since that was a Russian brand introduced to commemorate the construction of another canal, this one connecting the White Sea to the Baltic. The Abwehr’s opinion of the Belomorkanal was that it had been a disaster: too shallow, making it useless to most seagoing vessels, not to mention the tens of thousands of prisoners sacrificed in its construction. I wondered if this particular canal would fare any better.
I finished the cigarette and aimed the butt at Stalin, and something about the way it struck the great leader’s nose made me get up and take a closer look at the paper portrait; and when I tugged it off the wall, I was surprised to see that the picture had neatly concealed a small shelved alcove about the size of a book. On the shelf were a notebook and a roll of banknotes. It wasn’t a wall safe, but in that place it was perhaps the next-best thing.
The roll of banknotes was almost 405 “gold” ruble notes—about three or four months’ wages for a Blue. This wasn’t a fortune unless you were a pleni. Two thousand rubles plus a gold wedding band might just be enough to bribe some better treatment inside an MVD jail in Stalingrad. I looked at the rubles again, just to make sure, and to my relief they all had that greasy, authentically Russian feel about them. I even held the bills up to the light coming through the window to check the watermark before folding them into the back pocket of my uniform breeches, which was the only one with a button and without a large hole.
The notebook had a red cover and was about the size of an identity card. It was full of cheap Russian paper that looked more like something flattened by a heavy object and that contained a surprise all of its own, for on one page there was a name beneath which were written some dates and some payment details, and these seemed to indicate that the pleni named was in the pay of Gebhardt. Not that this made the pleni a murderer, exactly, but it did help to explain how it was that the Blues were able to police the POWs so effectively.
But the date of one particular payment caught my eye: Wednesday, August 15. This was the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, and for some Catholic Germans, especially those from Saarland or Bavaria, it was also an important public holiday. But nearly everyone in camp remembered this as the day when Georg Oberheuser—a sergeant from Stuttgart—had been arrested by the MVD. Angry that this date was to be treated as a normal working day, Oberheuser had loudly denounced Stalin to everyone in our hut as a “wicked, godless bastard.” There were other, no less slanderous epithets he used as well, and all of them well deserved, no doubt, but we were all a little bit shaken when Oberheuser was taken away and never seen again, and by the knowledge that with no Ivans in our hut, Oberheuser had been betrayed to the Blues by another German.
The name in Gebhardt’s notebook was Konrad Metelmann—the young lieutenant I had naïvely resolved to look out for. It appeared that he’d been doing a better job of looking out for himself.
I did a bit of thinking after that and remembered how the Blues were always ordering our hut to appear in the canteen for an identity check. They would ask each man his name, rank, and serial number in the hope—we had supposed—of catching one of us out, for it was certainly the case that there were several SS officers who, believing themselves to be wanted for war crimes, were pretending to be someone else, someone who had been killed in the war. We were always questioned alone, with Gebhardt translating, and any one of us could have used such an opportunity to give the MVD information. The only reason none of us had connected this with Oberheuser was that there had been no identity check on the day of his arrest, which meant that Metelmann and Gebhardt must also have been using some kind of dead-letter drop.
The Russians had a saying: The best way to keep your friends in the Soviet Union is never to betray them. I’d never much lik
ed Georg Oberheuser, but he didn’t deserve to be betrayed by one of his own comrades. According to Mrugowski, Oberheuser was tried by a People’s Court and sentenced to twenty years of labor and correction. Or at least that was what the camp commander had told Mrugowski. But I saw no reason to believe what Major Savostin had told me: that the great Stalin had abolished the death penalty. I’d seen far too many of my fellow countrymen shot at the side of the road on the long march out of Königsberg to accept the idea that summary execution was no longer routine in the Soviet Union. Maybe Oberheuser was dead and maybe he wasn’t. Either way, it was up to me to make things up to him. That’s the debt we owe the dead. To give them justice if we can. And a kind of justice if we can’t.
The rest of the plenis were coming back from work, and I went straight over to the canteen to beat the rush. Seeing Metelmann, I fell in behind him and waited for some indication that he was anxious. But Sajer spoke first:
“Are you really going to finger someone for the Ivans, Gunther?”
“That all depends,” I said, shuffling forward in the line.
“On what?”
“On me finding out who did it. Right now I haven’t got a clue. And by the way, I’ve been told that I’m one of the twenty-five the Ivans are going to pick if they don’t get a name. Just so you know that I’m taking this seriously.”
“Do you think they mean it?” asked Metelmann.
“Course they mean it,” said Sajer. “When do the Ivans ever issue an idle threat? You can always depend on them in that way at least. The bastards.”
“What are you going to do, Bernie?” asked Metelmann.
“How should I know?” I glared at Mrugowski. “This is all his fault. But for him, I’d have the same chance as everyone else.”
“Maybe you’ll find out something,” said Metelmann. “You were a good detective. That’s what people say.”
“What do they know? Believe me, I’d have to be Sherlock Holmes to solve this case. My only chance is to bribe that MVD major and get myself off the list. Here, Metelmann, have you got any money you can lend me?”