by Ben Pastor
Bora felt as though he was waking from one nightmare into another, where Colonel Bentivegni was about to arrive. “Someone, Herr Gebietskommissar? It must have been someone with the authority to appropriate native workers and redirect them to a different destination!”
“Well, we don’t know who that person might be, do we? I’m sure the Hauptsturmführer here can search the list of local officials working for us in the rail service.”
Both officers were suddenly quiet. Mantau took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and neck. Bora desperately worked out priorities in his mind, and although Khan’s apparent poisoning loomed largest, the need to secure further information came first. “However they’re involved, we could begin by asking the women in question,” he said.
Mantau’s face fell. “I ordered for the lot of them to be strung up.”
“What? That’s knee-jerk for you. What a brilliant idea! And when is the execution —”
It was Mantau’s turn to look confused. He glanced at his watch and his voice trailed low. “About now.”
“Jesus Christ, call immediately: stop the hanging, or we may never know!”
Without stopping to argue, Odilo Mantau ran indoors. Stark took advantage of the pause to ask Bora, under his breath, “What’s got into you, Major? Don’t you know who he is?”
“I know exactly who he is.”
“Please keep me out of your conflict, whatever it’s about. If you horse fellows have to be so troublesome, you won’t get much space to manoeuvre out here. Trust me, some of us had the same gall back in ’34, and had to be taught a lesson.”
Being compared to an SA irritated him. Bora straightened his uniform. “I’m not a horse fellow, District Commissioner.”
“Worse: you’re a Canaris horse fellow. Will you please keep your mouth shut while you’re being helped?”
Bora walked to the Kombinat. His watch read barely 7.15 a.m.; Bentivegni would not board his plane for another half hour. But there was no practical way of informing him in time; it all had to wait until he could give the bad news in person. Thoughts of Khan’s vitality, of his death long before (or long after) it actually happened, of all that had become forever lost with him, crowded Bora’s mind in the short stretch to Stark’s office. Mantau was just getting off the phone, and what residual hostility he still had in his system went into the hateful look he gave his Army colleague.
Bora ignored it. “For God’s sake, Hauptsturmführer, tell me what happened.”
“It’s too late for two of the Russian whores. I’m sparing the other three until I can milk them for all they know, but don’t expect me to take down the bodies: they’ll hang there until they rot.”
Were he not pressed for time, anger at the stupidity of this response would have led Bora to reopen the argument. “That’ll do wonders for our public image. Christ, will you at least let me know how Tibyetsky died?”
“As if you didn’t. He was poisoned.”
“How’s that possible? What did he eat?”
“It was as you said – he refused our food.”
“So how did the poison get into him, and how could you all have been poisoned?”
“I told you we don’t mollycoddle those in our custody, Bora. My colleagues and I ate the rest of the provisions in his trunk. Yes, we had a small party: why not? You don’t get American provisions every day. When evening came and Tibyetsky still refused to touch any food, I decided he could have his American-made chocolate rations. Those, we heard, are vile-tasting, and we didn’t care to try them.” Grudgingly Mantau fell silent when the commissioner, without entering, sternly put his head into the room and gestured for him to lower his voice, pulling the folding door closed to ensure their privacy. Then he took up the story again. “I took them to his cell myself last night.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know how many; all there were. What difference does it make? He demanded to see Bentivegni, demanded to see you. When his demands went nowhere, he threw a tantrum. He warned me he’d only eat a single ration in the morning, and for the rest of the time he’d go on a hunger strike. Why all these questions, Bora? It’s clear how it happened! All there was in his stomach was chocolate and oat flour, with enough poison to kill him. They don’t know yet what kind; they think it was an alkaloid, highly concentrated. Shortly after 05.00 hours this morning my men woke me up to report that the prisoner was thrashing about and asking for help. When I walked in, he was convulsing. He was fine when he awoke at 05.00, and half an hour later he was dead.”
Bora spoke through gritted teeth. “But why do you think he was killed? It sounds as if he committed suicide.”
“Asking for help? No.”
“Christ! Didn’t you have capable medical personnel on hand to intervene right away?”
“No, they’re short-handed at the first-aid station; their personnel go back overnight. It took them less than a quarter of an hour to arrive, but the prisoner was gone within minutes.”
A small poster on the commissioner’s desk, advertising a Ukrainian folk dance on Sunday, struck Bora as something from another world. He stared at it, as did Mantau, wondering who had time for such things. “What are the alternatives? Either Khan carried poison with him in his food supply, in case he felt compelled to do away with himself, or the poison entered the rations after he came under your watch.”
“There’s a third alternative. You poisoned the rations before bringing them over.”
“You have to decide whether it was us or the Russian cleaning women, Hauptsturmführer.”
“It could have been arranged by you through them. It will come out, so you might as well own up to it.”
Keeping his own anger in check took more effort than Bora was willing to employ. “Seen from the outside, the same charge could be levelled at its sender. It is our command that was deprived of Commander Tibyetsky’s person.” (“Fuck you and your command,” Mantau interrupted.) “All told, who had access to him while in your custody?”
“Other than Medical Corps personnel to ensure he had nothing to harm himself with, only my picked men and myself. And the Russian whore I hanged, who cleaned up his cell last night.”
“Hm. Who’s in charge of your Medical Corps unit?”
“The SS surgeon at the first-aid station on Sumskaya. Why? Who’s in charge of yours?”
“Colonel Hans Mayr, the Army surgeon at Hospital 169. And you can vouch for all your subordinates with clearance —”
“Of course, the same as you can vouch for yours. I’ll find out somehow that you planned all this, so don’t you dare come anywhere near the prison.”
7.25 a.m. There would be time, if he moved with haste, to at least try and view Khan’s body. But Mantau was still on his high horse, so Bora tried a different tactic. “We could negotiate.”
“There’s nothing to negotiate.”
“But there is. Would you or your Leibstandarte colleagues be interested in knowing where we took the T-34?”
It was the one detail, orally communicated, that could not have been tapped. Mantau’s blond snout scented the possibility of capitulation on Bora’s part. “Where?”
“Allow me to view the body, and I will tell.”
“I don’t trust you.”
Bora held his breath. Much as he dreaded having to welcome Bentivegni with a disastrous piece of news, adrenaline kept him functioning well for now. However, as soon as he had a moment to himself again, he’d come crashing down. “We stored the tank on Lui Pastera Street in the Tractor Factory district. Where’s the body?”
Mantau’s lips jutted out in a strange grimace, as if he were about to whistle or blow up a balloon. “At the Sumskaya first-aid station, near the former university hospital.”
Sumskaya, less than a kilometre from the Aerodrome. Finally a glimmer in the dark. “Will they let me in?” Bora asked.
“They’ll let you in.”
It was like floating on a piece of timber after a shipwreck, but was all that could be
done at the moment. Bentivegni would have to take it from here on. Bora and Mantau left the commissioner’s office one after the other without speaking a single word, but Stark wouldn’t let them get away with it. His gold-yellow, dapper bulk stopped them in the hallway.
“Shake hands, both of you. You’re not leaving here until you shake hands.”
They reluctantly obeyed. Mantau left the Kombinat first; Bora was about to do the same when the commissioner held him back. “By the way, Major, SS Brigadeführer Reger-Saint Pierre decided to accept the stallion: a week from now my fine Karabakh will be on his way to Mirgorod. Sorry about that.” He slipped his freckled hand into his tunic pocket. “This ought to console you, though. From your quasi-father-in-law Standartenführer Schallenberg, untouched by censorship.”
The envelope was slightly larger than letter size, powder blue, and the handwriting on it was Dikta’s.
“You’re blushing,” Stark grinned. “I imagined it wouldn’t actually be from Schallenberg.”
Bora thanked him, and jealously put the envelope away. “I would appreciate it, Herr Gebietskommissar, if you didn’t mention this morning’s episode.”
“I didn’t reach my position by mentioning things, Major. Take along the bottled sulphur dioxide or send for it soon; it won’t last if you leave it here.”
“I’ll take it now.”
The Kharkov University hospital belonged to the outer rim of the spectacular concrete semicircle that war had not succeeded in dismantling altogether: the gigantic Derzhprom complex of office buildings on the square that had been renamed Platz der Wehrmacht as late as 1941, but which since the tank battle in March had been dedicated to the Leibstandarte division. They said that escaped animals from the zoo were the only ones to live in the abandoned citadel of battered cement; someone supposedly had taken photos of chimpanzees crouching on windowsills. Across from the hospital, on Sumskaya Street, was the SS-run first-aid station. Bora arrived there shortly after 8 a.m., and encountered no difficulties getting in. He should have become suspicious at that point, but there was a chance that Mantau had phoned ahead to lift the ban on his presence.
In reality, Khan Tibyetsky’s body was nowhere in the building, or so the SS surgeon told him. “Are you sure it wasn’t the ex-Red Army hospital two blocks from here?”
In mid-March, the Leibstandarte had torched the Red Army hospital with hundreds of wounded in it, on Mantau’s orders. Bora’s self-restraint came in handy. “I doubt it.”
“Then maybe it’s the Wehrmacht hospital in District Six.”
The SS meant Hospital 169. Possible. Bora couldn’t very well search the premises, and regardless of their attitude, the medical staff here did seem uninformed about a body laced with poison. He asked the surgeon for permission to telephone the other facility, and when he spoke to someone there, he received another denial. “Shortly after 05.30 hours, you say? This morning? Not here.”
Bora was seething, but he’d also lied to Mantau, after all – or at least given him only half the truth. The tank had been gone from Lui Pastera since dawn on Wednesday. Once in Field Marshal Manstein’s hands in Zaporozhye, Tibyetsky’s new tank model was off limits to anyone but the Field Marshal’s closest collaborators.
Despite the war damage, there were several medical facilities in Kharkov, and no practical way of knowing if Khan’s body had been brought to any of them. Bora could not afford a wild goose chase at this point. Deep down, he hoped against hope that the RSHA had been lying all the time. Tibyetsky could still be alive and in their hands, possibly out of the Kharkov Oblast or Ukraine altogether. Bentivegni will have to get a view of the corpse before we accept the story as true. Hanging Russians is cheap, and there’s no guarantee Mantau told it as it was.
Before leaving the SS first-aid station Bora checked the fuel gauge, an automatic reflex on this straitened front. The Aerodrome, on the highway that led north to Belgorod and Moscow, sat in an area where – aside from the pre-revolutionary horse track – a large cemetery, barracks, gardens and a massive tile factory in various states of disrepair formed the north-eastern suburbs of the city. Bora had driven that way other times, especially during his first stint in Kharkov. Larisa lived not far away, in Pomorki, and more than once he’d sat in his vehicle looking at her house from a distance, without ever walking up to her door.
An easterly breeze pushed the oppressive clouds ahead of itself, undoing their thick vapours. At this time, Colonel Bentivegni would be midway through his flight from Kiev, which meant at least an hour’s wait by the runway. Outside the entrance to the landing field, Bora was tempted to make time for himself and read Dikta’s letter, but he had an almost superstitious reserve about reading her words in his present state of anxiety. He fingered and hefted the envelope without unsealing it, grateful to her mother’s high-ranking lover for eluding censorship. Dikta was often intimate in her expressions, always suggestive; thinking of army employees poring through words meant for him before he did had made him shy and resentful over the last three years. Its size and weight suggested there was a card inside, or a photograph. Bora kissed the envelope and put it away. Tonight, he told himself. However it goes with Bentivegni, tonight I’ll find a quiet moment to read it. Postponing pleasure, they say, sees you through otherwise dismal days.
So he decided to pass time by driving north, past the Aerodrome’s entrance, beyond the old brick stables and the thinning-out buildings. Up there, a west–east balka formed a swell beyond which the road parted the Shevchenko industrial area on one side and on the other the beginning of the vast woods of the Biological Institute, a park that had become wilderness. Already the horizon was immense; sluices and wet spots overflowed across the rolling fields. On both sides of the road, steam rose from the sodden grassland and from the ditches that ran to the Kharkov River. Above the Pyatikhatky forest, south of Lisne, hovered a grandiose scene of rain coming down in sheets and gaps opening and closing in the storm clouds. Bora drove a short way up the Belgorodskye highway, and then to a clearing off the road on the right. There, he stopped to take some photos from behind the wheel, because he’d have sunk to his ankles in the mud outside.
At 10.15 a.m. the aeroplane touched down. It was a rickety-looking pre-war Ju-52 that even at its top speed of 260 kilometres per hour could not have done much against headwinds. No wonder Bentivegni had had to wait out the storm in Kiev.
Bora greeted the colonel on the much-mended runway. He saw no point in delaying the inevitable unpleasantness, so he simply gave Mantau’s version of the facts, which was all they had at this time.
Although they’d often communicated since Bentivegni had taken over Section III in September ’39, it was the first time they had met in person. With the face of a bulldog under the new “standard cap” many wore these days – even outside of the mountain troops – the middle-aged, sunburned Bentivegni, in his mixed summer and winter uniform, instantly managed to layer an image of control over his total astonishment. He had shaved recently and as best he could, judging by the nicks on his chin.
“It’s extremely serious news,” he said in a clipped voice. Only his stiff-necked stance suggested how hard the blow must have hit him. No other form of disappointment transpired. Bora was left to wonder whether Khan had been an Abwehr operative or not, and if he had, for how long. What both of them were thinking (that it was unexpected but conceivable that it could have happened, and now that it had, what next?) did not surface at all.
“Herr Oberst, I assume all responsibility for what happened.”
“None of this is your responsibility, Major.” Bentivegni had a small knapsack with him, which he now calmly let down from his shoulders and brought to rest on the ground – a sign they would speak here, away from all ears. “What happens from now on will be. Give me details.”
Bora did. Bentivegni listened while fixing his gaze beyond his interlocutor, an Abwehr habit which allowed the listener to appear marginally interested while (Bora knew) nothing actually escaped their peripher
al vision. At the end of the report, his comment was, “We must first confirm the truth of Captain Mantau’s statement. He’ll try to keep it from you, but I expect you to reconstruct exactly what happened. Not the charge I’m sure you expected or were hoping for, but the organization of your regiment gives you the perfect cover to stay in this area. Assuming there is a death and they have nothing to do with it, the Central Security Office as a whole will take the blow as we do, although Amt IV Gruppenführer Müller will be very cross. I predict Odilo Mantau won’t have an easy time of it. As for us, we knew as far back as 1939 that it’s the Gestapo’s job to keep an eye on the army in the field. It’s our task to work around it. Unless there’s a lead to follow through Mantau, act as if we have dropped the Tibyetsky matter, Major. If Gebietskommissar Stark enquires about this morning’s spat, say the disagreement between you and the captain was exclusively about the Russian workers. It was very improvident of Mantau to let out that Tibyetsky had been killed, and at the district commissioner’s office to boot. Either he’s lost his cool – we know his history – or he meant to make a scene for reasons of his own.” A sunbeam out of the clouds suddenly spread a lake of bright light around the men, dazzling them. “It’d have been preferable if there had been no argument, but on the other hand, lack of response on your part would have been read as a possible sign of involvement on our side. I assume you did it on purpose.”
“Not really, Herr Oberst.”
“Hm. Start looking into things, and locate the corpse. Over at the jail they’ll be busy about now doing some quick damage control, so that news of Tibyetsky’s death doesn’t leak out. You say you don’t believe the Russian workers were involved, but we don’t know for sure. In any case, little harm done: executions of civilians need no justification. As for the Soviets, they never will acknowledge their champion even crossed over.”