Winter of the World

by Ken Follett

  "We could dig at night."

  "Would that seem less suspicious?"

  Ada scratched her head.

  Carla said: "We have to take the body somewhere and dump it. A park, or a canal."

  "But how will we carry it?" said Ada.

  "He doesn't weigh much," said Maud sadly. "So slim and strong."

  Carla said: "It's not the weight that's the problem. Ada and I can carry him. But somehow we have to do it without arousing suspicion."

  Maud said: "I wish we had a car."

  Carla shook her head. "No one can get petrol anyway."

  They were silent. Outside, dusk was falling. Ada got a towel and wrapped it around Joachim's head, to prevent his blood staining the floor. Maud cried silently, the tears rolling down a face twisted in anguish. Carla wanted to sympathize but first she had to solve this problem.

  "We could put him in a box," she said.

  Ada said: "The only box that size is a coffin."

  "How about a piece of furniture? A sideboard?"

  "Too heavy." Ada looked thoughtful. "But the wardrobe in my room is not so weighty."

  Carla nodded. A maid was assumed not to have many clothes, nor to need mahogany furniture, she realized with a touch of embarrassment, so Ada's room had a narrow hanging cupboard made of flimsy deal wood. "Let's get it," she said.

  Ada had originally lived in the basement, but that was now an air raid shelter, and her room was upstairs. Carla and Ada went up. Ada opened her cupboard and pulled all the clothes off the rail. There were not many: two sets of uniforms, a few dresses, one winter coat, all old. She laid them neatly on the single bed.

  Carla tilted the wardrobe and took its weight, then Ada picked up the other end. It was not heavy, but it was awkward, and it took them some time to manhandle it out of the door and down the stairs.

  At last they laid it on its back in the hall. Carla opened the door. Now it looked like a coffin with a hinged lid.

  Carla went back into the kitchen and bent over the body. She took the camera and films from Joachim's pocket, and replaced them in the kitchen drawer.

  Carla took his arms, Ada took his legs, and they lifted the body. They carried it out of the kitchen into the hall and lowered it into the wardrobe. Ada rearranged the towel about the head, though the bleeding had stopped.

  Should they take off his uniform? Carla wondered. It would make the body harder to identify--but it would give her two problems of disposal instead of one. She decided against.

  She picked up the canvas bag and dropped it into the wardrobe with the corpse.

  She closed the wardrobe door and turned the key, to make sure it did not fall open by accident. She put the key in the pocket of her dress.

  She went into the dining room and looked out through the window. "It's getting dark," she said. "That's good."

  Maud said: "What will people think?"

  "That we're moving a piece of furniture--selling it, perhaps, to get money for food."

  "Two women, moving a wardrobe?"

  "Women do this sort of thing all the time, now that so many men are in the army or dead. It's not as if we could get a removal van--they can't buy petrol."

  "Why would you be doing it in the half dark?"

  Carla let her frustration show. "I don't know, Mother. If we're asked, I'll have to make something up. But the body can't stay here."

  "They'll know he's been murdered, when they find the body. They'll examine the injuries."

  Carla, too, was worried about that. "Nothing we can do."

  "They may try to investigate where he went today."

  "He said he had not told anyone about his piano lessons. He wanted to astonish his friends with his skill. With luck, no one knows he came here." And without luck, Carla thought, we're all dead.

  "What will they guess to be the motive for the murder?"

  "Will they find traces of semen in his underwear?"

  Maud looked away, embarrassed. "Yes."

  "Then they will imagine a sexual encounter, perhaps with another man, that ended in a quarrel."

  "I hope you're right."

  Carla was not at all sure, but she could not think of anything they could do about it. "The canal," she said. The body would float, and be found sooner or later, and there would be a murder investigation. They would just have to hope it did not lead to them.

  Carla opened the front door.

  She stood at the front of the wardrobe on its left, and Ada positioned herself at the back on the right. They bent down.

  Ada, who undoubtedly had more experience of heavy lifting than her employers, said: "Tilt it sideways and get your hands under it."

  Carla did as she said.

  "Now lift your end a little."

  Carla did so.

  Ada got her hands underneath her end and said: "Bend your knees. Take the weight. Straighten up."

  They raised the wardrobe to hip height. Ada bent down and got her shoulder underneath. Carla did the same.

  The two women straightened up.

  The weight tilted to Carla as they went down the steps from the front door, but she could bear it. When they reached the street, she turned toward the canal, a few blocks away.

  It was now full dark, with no moon but a few stars shedding a faint light. With the blackout, there was a good chance no one would see them tip the wardrobe into the water. The disadvantage was that Carla could hardly see where she was going. She was terrified she would stumble and fall, and the wardrobe would smash to splinters, revealing the murdered man inside.

  An ambulance drove by, its headlights covered by slit masks. It was probably hurrying to a road accident. There were many during the blackout. That meant there would be police cars in the vicinity.

  Carla recalled a sensational murder case from the beginning of the blackout. A man had killed his wife, forced her body into a packing case, and carried it across town on the seat of his bicycle in the dark before dropping it in the Havel River. Would the police remember the case and suspect anyone transporting a large object?

  As she thought that, a police car drove by. A cop stared out at the two women with their wardrobe, but the car did not stop.

  The burden seemed to get heavier. It was a warm night, and soon Carla was running with perspiration. The wood hurt her shoulder, and she wished she had thought of putting a folded handkerchief inside her blouse as a cushion.

  They turned a corner and came upon the accident.

  An eight-wheeler articulated truck carrying timber had collided head-on with a Mercedes saloon car, which had been badly crushed. The police car and the ambulance were shining their headlights onto the wreckage. In a little pool of faint light, a group of men gathered around the car. The crash must have happened in the last few minutes, for there were still people inside the car. An ambulance man was leaning in at the back door, probably examining the injuries to see whether the passengers could be moved.

  Carla was momentarily terrified. Guilt froze her and she stopped in her tracks. But no one had noticed her and Ada and the wardrobe, and after a moment she realized she just needed to steal away, double back, and take a different route to the canal.

  She began to turn, but just then an alert policeman shone a flashlight her way.

  She was tempted to drop the wardrobe and run, but she held her nerve.

  The cop said: "What are you up to?"

  "Moving a wardrobe, officer," she said. Recovering her presence of mind, she faked a grisly curiosity to cover her guilty nervousness. "What happened here?" she said. For good measure she added: "Is anyone dead?"

  Professionals disliked this kind of vampire inquisitiveness, she knew--she was a professional herself. As she expected, the policeman reacted dismissively. "None of your business," he said. "Just keep out of the way." He turned back and shone his light into the crashed car.

  The pavement on this side of the street was clear. Carla made a snap decision and walked straight on. She and Ada carried the wardrobe containing the
dead man toward the wreckage.

  She kept her eyes on the little knot of emergency workers in the small circle of light. They were intensely focused on their task and no one looked up as Carla passed the car.

  It seemed to take forever to pass along the length of the eight-wheel trailer. Then, when at last she drew level with the back end, she had a flash of inspiration.

  She stopped.

  Ada hissed: "What is it?"

  "This way." Carla stepped into the road at the back of the truck. "Put the wardrobe down," she hissed. "No noise."

  They placed the wardrobe gently on the pavement.

  Ada whispered: "Are we leaving it here?"

  Carla drew the key from her pocket and unlocked the wardrobe door. She looked up: as far as she could tell, the men were still gathered around the car, twenty feet away on the other side of the truck.

  She opened the wardrobe door.

  Joachim Koch stared up sightlessly, his head wrapped in a bloody towel.

  "Tip him out," Carla said. "By the wheels."

  They tilted the wardrobe, and the body rolled out, coming to rest up against the tires.

  Carla retrieved the bloody towel and threw it into the wardrobe. She left the canvas bag lying beside the corpse; she was glad to get rid of it. She closed and locked the wardrobe door, then they picked it up and walked away.

  It was easy to carry now.

  When they were fifty yards away in the dark, Carla heard a distant voice say: "My God, there's another casualty--looks like a pedestrian was run over!"

  Carla and Ada turned a corner, and relief washed over Carla like a tidal wave. She had got rid of the corpse. If only she could get home without attracting further attention--and without anyone looking inside the wardrobe and seeing the bloody towel--she would be safe. There would be no murder investigation. Joachim had become a pedestrian killed in a blackout accident. If he had really been dragged along the cobbled street by the wheels of the truck, he might have received injuries similar to those caused by the heavy base of Ada's soup pot. Perhaps a skilled autopsy doctor could tell the difference--but no one would consider an autopsy necessary.

  Carla thought about dumping the wardrobe, and decided against. Even without the towel it had bloodstains inside, and might spark a police investigation on its own. They had to take it home and scrub it clean.

  They got home without meeting anyone else.

  They put the wardrobe down in the hall. Ada took out the towel, put it in the kitchen sink, and ran the cold tap. Carla felt a mixture of elation and sadness. She had stolen the Nazis' battle plan, but she had killed a young man who was more foolish than wicked. She would think about that for many days, perhaps years, before she could be sure how she felt about it. For now she was just too tired.

  She told her mother what they had done. Maud's left cheek was so puffed up that her eye was almost closed. She was pressing her left side as if to ease a pain. She looked terrible.

  Carla said: "You were terribly brave, Mother. I admire you so much for what you did today."

  Maud said wearily: "I don't feel admirable. I'm so ashamed. I despise myself."

  "Because you didn't love him?" said Carla.

  "No," said Maud. "Because I did."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1942 ( III )

  Greg Peshkov graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, the highest honor. He could have gone on effortlessly to take a doctorate in physics, his major, and thus have avoided military service. But he did not want to be a scientist. His ambition was to wield a different kind of power. And, after the war was over, a military record would be a huge plus for a rising young politician. So he joined the army.

  On the other hand, he did not want actually to have to fight.

  He followed the European war with heightened interest at the same time as he pressured everyone he knew in Washington--which was a lot of people--to get him a desk job at War Department headquarters.

  The German summer offensive had started on June 28, and they had swiftly pushed east, meeting relatively light opposition, until they reached the city of Stalingrad, formerly called Tsaritsyn, where they were halted by fierce Russian resistance. Now they were stalled, with overstretched supply lines, and it was looking more and more as if the Red Army had drawn them into a trap.

  Greg had not long been in basic training when he was summoned to the colonel's office. "The Army Corps of Engineers needs a bright young officer in Washington," the colonel said. "You've interned in Washington, but all the same you wouldn't have been my first choice--you can't even keep your goddamn uniform clean, look at you--but the job requires a knowledge of physics, and the field is kind of limited."

  Greg said: "Thank you, sir."

  "Try that kind of sarcasm on your new boss and you'll regret it. You're going to be an assistant to a Colonel Groves. I was at West Point with him. He's the biggest son of a bitch I ever met, in the army or out. Good luck."

  Greg called Mike Penfold in the State Department press office and found out that until recently Leslie Groves had been chief of construction for the entire U.S. Army, and had been responsible for the military's new Washington headquarters, the vast five-sided building they were beginning to call the Pentagon. But he had been moved to a new project that no one knew much about. Some said he had offended his superiors so often that he had been effectively demoted, others that his new role was even more important but top secret. They all agreed he was egotistical, arrogant, and ruthless.

  "Does everybody hate him?" Greg asked.

  "Oh, no," Mike said. "Only those who have met him."

  Lieutenant Greg Peshkov was full of trepidation when he arrived at Groves's office in the striking new War Department Building, a pale tan art deco palace on Twenty-first Street and Virginia Avenue. Right away he learned that he was part of a group called the Manhattan Engineer District. This deliberately uninformative name camouflaged a team who were trying to invent a new kind of bomb using uranium as an explosive.

  Greg was intrigued. He knew there was incalculable energy locked up in uranium's lighter isotope, U-235, and he had read several papers on the subject in scientific journals. But news of the research had dried up a couple of years ago, and now Greg knew why.

  He learned that President Roosevelt felt the project was moving too slowly, and Groves had been appointed to crack the whip.

  Greg arrived six days after Groves had been reassigned. His first task for Groves was to help him pin stars to the collar of his khaki shirt: he had just been promoted to brigadier general. "It's mainly to impress all these civilian scientists we have to work with," Groves growled. "I have a meeting in the secretary of war's office in ten minutes. You'd better come with me, it'll serve you for a briefing."

  Groves was heavy. An inch under six feet tall, he had to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, maybe three hundred. He wore his uniform pants high, and his belly bulged under his webbing belt. He had chestnut-colored hair that might have curled if it had been grown long enough. He had a narrow forehead, fat cheeks, and a jowly chin. His small mustache was all but invisible. He was an unattractive man in every way, and Greg was not looking forward to working for him.

  Groves and his entourage, including Greg, left the building and walked down Virginia Avenue to the National Mall. On the way, Groves said to Greg: "When they gave me this job, they told me it could win the war. I don't know if that's true, but my plan is to act as if it is. You'd better do the same."

  "Yes, sir," said Greg.

  The secretary of war had not yet moved into the unfinished Pentagon, and War Department headquarters were still in the old Munitions Building, a long, low, out-of-date "temporary" structure on Constitution Avenue.

  Secretary of War Henry Stimson was a Republican, brought in by the president to keep that party from undermining the war effort by making trouble in Congress. At seventy-five Stimson was an elder statesman, a dapper old man with a white mustache, but the light of intelligence still gleamed in his gray eyes.<
br />
  The meeting was a full-dress performance, and the room was full of bigwigs, including Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. Greg felt nervous, and he thought admiringly that Groves was remarkably calm for someone who had been a mere colonel yesterday.

  Groves began by outlining how he intended to impose order on the hundreds of civilian scientists and dozens of physics laboratories involved in the Manhattan Project. He made no attempt to defer to the high-ranking men who might well have thought they were in charge. He outlined his plans without troubling to use such mollifying phrases as "with your permission" and "if you agree." Greg wondered whether the man was trying to get himself fired.

  Greg learned so much new information that he wanted to take notes, but no one else did, and he guessed it would not look right.

  When Groves had done, one of the group said: "I believe supplies of uranium are crucial to the project. Do we have enough?"

  Groves answered: "There are twelve hundred fifty tons of pitchblende--that's the ore that contains uranium oxide--in a yard on Staten Island."

  "Then we'd better acquire some of that," said the questioner.

  "I bought it all on Friday, sir."

  "Friday? The day after you were appointed?"

  "Correct."

  The secretary of war smothered a smile. Greg's surprise at Groves's arrogance began to turn to admiration of his nerve.

  A man in admiral's uniform said: "What about the priority rating of this project? You need to clear the decks with the War Production Board."

  "I saw Donald Nelson on Saturday, sir," said Groves. Nelson was the civilian head of the board. "I asked him to raise our rating."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said no."

  "That's a problem."

  "Not any longer. I told him I would have to recommend to the president that the Manhattan Project be abandoned because the War Production Board was unwilling to cooperate. Then he gave us a triple-A."

  "Good," said the secretary of war.

  Greg was impressed again. Groves was a real pistol.

  Stimson said: "Now, you'll be supervised by a committee that will report to me. Nine members have been suggested--"

  "Hell, no," said Groves.

  The secretary of war said: "What did you say?"

  Surely, Greg thought, Groves has gone too far this time.