by Ben Pastor
“And then you bartered him again, with the International Red Cross.”
In the stillness of the hour, a bell tolling somewhere sent waves of clear sound outwards, like circles in a pond. Bora recognized it. It was the schoolhouse bell that Father Victor had nagged him for and obtained two weeks earlier; if the priest was out on a procession, it must be his old mother, the busybody Nefedovna, who was ringing it. Still, the small hammering echo was pleasing to the ear. Bora drove his hands into the pockets of his breeches in an impudent show of easiness. He was growing accustomed to these exchanges, somewhere between gossip and threat, not being above them himself when necessary.
“Well, I needed medical supplies for my unit, and they needed a Yiddish speaker.” Each sarcastic word rolled off his tongue like tart fruit, not altogether unpleasant. “It was expedient. We all barter on the Eastern Front, as you know. It’s the rage. Don’t they call it Tauschmanie?”
The approach of two soldiers on bicycle patrol – eyes right, salute, regular motion of knees and booted feet – gave Mantau a reason to return to the side of the road, where (as Bora had expected) he nonchalantly stepped on to the low retaining wall as if it were a podium, gaining instant eye-level parity with his colleague.
“It seems to me you’ll barter your Saxon arse for a lot of trouble one of these days.”
Bora did smile this time. When they come out in the open they’re less dangerous: you can squash them because you can see them. “Did I commit an irregularity? I’m told that district commissioners and even SS commanders keep Jews for special positions they can’t fill in this desolate neck of the woods: accountants, office machinery technicians, or hairdressers for their wives. We can’t all be so improper. May I enquire whether you asked for and received clearance from Gebietskommissar Stark before you ordered the hanging? It would be an irregularity otherwise.”
The mention of the hanging was sure to irritate. Mantau fell for it, immediately saying what he might have meant to add piecemeal for effect. “Do you deny the Jew’s name was Weiss, like your piano teacher? His old woman had already been packed off to Palestine through the Polack consulate in Leipzig back in ’38.”
“Not by me. I was then a twenty-five-year-old at the War Academy in Berlin.”
“Well! See that it doesn’t go to your head being a twenty-nine-year-old with your own personal regiment.”
“I’m obliged to you for the helpful advice, and I’ll see to it. Did you get clearance from Commissioner Stark?”
“Go get screwed.”
“Literally? I wish.” Smiling came from somewhere deep, amused and secure. Bora let Mantau stew for a while, because Mantau’s real problem was not the babushkas’ hanging; it was losing Khan Tibyetsky. Without further exacerbating matters, he simply said, “We’re in the same boat, but I might be able to help.”
“How so? By admitting that you’re behind the murder?”
“You’ll have to abandon that notion. No. Discovering how it happened; short of Tibyetsky having committed suicide.”
“He did no such thing. And I don’t need your help.”
You do, you do. That’s why you stopped me. Unhurriedly Bora turned to head for his vehicle. “Look, Hauptsturmführer, my agency and yours will be exchanging potshots over losing the man, but it’s at your place that he died. In case you should modify your views, you know where to find me.”
Predictably, Mantau’s voice reached him after a brief pause. “It won’t do any good, but speak.”
Still with hands in pockets, Bora pretended to hesitate. He stopped, turned, walked back. Critically he kicked the front tyre of Mantau’s car. “Don’t keep them so full; on these roads they’re better off slightly deflated.”
“I’m not asking you for mechanical advice!”
“Right. But you shouldn’t keep the tyres so full.”
“Major Bora —”
“I’m coming to it. The babushka you executed first, Agrafena – are you positive she could have introduced the poison during the time she was cleaning Khan’s cell?”
“As if you didn’t know the chocolate bars are lend-lease provisions. The NKVD or whomever could have supplied her with a sealed, poisoned ration to use.”
That means they didn’t search local labourers working at the jail. I can see why Mantau gets in hot water: he’s a dolt. “But she would have had to add a poisoned bar to Khan’s lot, and she would have had to be very clever not to be noticed. He was suspicious of everyone. You said you let him keep all the D rations in his cell. Do you still have what remains?”
“What a question! Yes. You can believe that none of us would taste it.”
“Good, because I itemized the food and drink Khan Tibyetsky brought along. We can determine whether a poisoned piece was introduced from the outside without him knowing.”
Mantau looked unconvinced. “We’ve been through that. It only works if you know how many of those damned treats he ate daily.”
“As far as I know, they pack 600 calories each, and three of them make up a day’s minimum energy requirement.”
“But he was also regularly eating his provisions at your place, was he not? He told me he’d only have one bar in the morning, and stay on hunger strike the rest of the day. That damned candy being all he had on hand, he might have consumed more than one ration overnight.”
“It’s still worth a shot trying to do some maths, Hauptsturmführer. I can tell you right off that when Khan first arrived I counted fourteen D-rations. When I brought his trunk to your place, there were twelve: fourteen minus the two bars he’d eaten in the two intervening days. He ate the poisoned one on the morning of 7 May, so there ought to be eleven bars left in all. If there are twelve, it means someone brought a poisoned ration in and mixed it with the original stock, even though it’d be chancy placing one poisoned piece of food among many others. It could have been days before Tibyetsky ate the lethal one. If the plan was to keep him from talking —”
“We don’t know that, Bora. The Reds might simply have wanted to punish him for defecting.”
“True. Is there a lamp that can be turned on from inside the cell?”
“You forget it was originally a Soviet jail.”
“I take that as a No. So in the dawn light Tibyetsky might not have noticed there were thirteen chocolate bars instead of twelve.”
Mantau did not comment. Whether he felt anxious to verify the theory, or was simply running late for his appointment, he told Bora “I’ll see you later,” entered the car and ordered the driver to get going.
Once the Opel was out of sight along the road, Bora once again took his place behind the wheel and followed it towards Kharkov.
*
All went well with von Salomon, who had good news regarding equipment and mounts for Bora’s regiment. The two of them dined on the upper floor of a building meant for Soviet apparatchiks, on Red Army plates and with Red Army tableware. The small price for Bora to pay was listening to the colonel’s nostalgic tales of his younger days. Georgian wine led to polite familiarity, and at other tables officers had already gone beyond the adjective polite.
Von Salomon came from landowning stock (Bora’s own), but unlike Bora’s people, the dreadful decade stretching from 1919 to 1929, not to speak of the years that had followed, had played havoc with his family’s finances. He saw the loss of the family’s East Prussian estate as a personal slight; he regarded it (and, worse, the fact that Poles had eventually bought the property) as a wrong to be righted. Discovering after the invasion of Poland that the mansion had been turned into a hospital had devastated him. The fact that German soldiers were treated or convalesced there these days didn’t make up for his dejection. Wherever he went, even in Russia, he carried a watercolour of the estate, painted before the Great War.
“I’ll show it to you,” he said, “after the Ukrainian dance.”
Courteously Bora objected that he had an engagement for the evening already, namely to listen to an all-Brahms Lieder concert.
“And what, hear that ‘In Heaven, too, Power is permitted’? No, Major Bora. I require your company this evening, and you will do me the favour of obeying. No arguing, please.”
It meant sitting for over three hours downstairs, where a stage had been set up for the dozen energetic folk dancers District Commissioner Stark had in his providence brought to town. Buxom, big-legged, booted girls who twirled in unison, looking for all the world like decorated dinner bells in their short flared skirts. Nothing but accordions in the orchestra; nothing but uniforms in the audience. Stark sat in the first row, and Mantau was there too, at the extreme right of the second row, where Bora and von Salomon also had their seats.
During the interval Bora had nearly succeeded in sneaking away when Stark saw him and loudly insisted on having a drink with him. He, too, was merrily in his cups. The district commissioner pointed to some of the overheated girls cosying up to some of the men present. “They’re desperate to come along if the fortunes of war change again,” he said philosophically, as if Bora didn’t know. “Whoever stays here after we’re gone will get a bullet in his head for collaborating. Imagine the gals. My dear Major, I’m a good man and married to boot, and don’t sleep around, but there are some first-rate movables here tonight.”
Cosiness with any kind of woman was just what Bora meant to avoid. Still, he had to sit through the second half of the show, and when Mantau at lights on signalled to him that he wanted to speak, he jumped at the opportunity to absent himself from von Salomon.
“Remember you’re to stay at my lodgings tonight,” the colonel said, dashing his hopes. “I mean to show you the watercolour of the family estate; and besides, I don’t feel like sleeping.”
Mantau led the way outside, where the night was mild and field gendarmes everywhere made it safe for the public to disperse. In the dim glare of screened headlights, some officers idled, lighting themselves cigarettes and cigars; others chatted and laughed. Many of them would be dead in two months’ time, but tonight Kursk was still merely the name of a Ukrainian city north of here.
“Fucking accordions; I hate them,” Mantau grumbled.
“Not as much as I do, Hauptsturmführer. Ten more minutes and I’d have opened fire on the orchestra.”
“Well, let’s waste no more time tonight. What I wanted to tell you is that there are ten rations left: not twelve, and not even eleven.”
Bora was at a loss to understand. “It suggests that the poisoned item was in the original stock, and that Khan ate two of them between the sunset of 6 May and the following dawn.”
“Whatever. The one he ate the morning of 7 May was what killed him.”
“So it seems. It continues to sound like suicide. Did you check how many discarded wrappers were lying around in the cell?”
“Of course. You must think I’m stupid. There was one wrapper.”
“One?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. It consists of aluminium foil and a parchment paper shell.”
“But that makes no sense.” To Bora, Mantau’s ill-humour was as annoying as the added complication of numbers. He’d argue, if it would do any good. “Whether he did it in one sitting or not, if Khan ate two rations between the time you delivered them to his cell and the time he died, there ought to be two discarded wrappers: two foil pieces and two parchment paper jackets.”
“Well, there was one double wrapper, and that’s all.”
“I wonder what happened to the other one. Did the babushka clean the cell before or after you gave Khan the D rations?”
Mantau yawned. All around, staff cars and personnel carriers were slowly beginning to move, drawing narrow trails of glare across the tarmac, like slime from oversized snails. “I told you he made a scene the evening of 6 May, on account of ‘being held against his will’: as if we cared. He threw his bedding around, kicked the furniture, and worked himself up so much that we had to check his blood pressure and then send in the cleaning woman to tidy up. So you see, if he’d already eaten a ration, she had time not only to sweep up any discarded wrappers lying around, but also the opportunity to plant a poisoned piece. Besides, when they came from the Sumskaya first-aid station in the morning to pick up the body from the floor, there was a lot of confusion, and they could have inadvertently removed any piece of trash lying around as well. It’ll be lost by now.”
Bora stepped aside when a pennant-bearing staff car drove dangerously close to him, carrying its high-ranking cargo. “Didn’t you have medical personnel on hand at the prison to intervene as soon as he became ill?”
“I told you already. No, they’re short-handed at Sumskaya, and their personnel return to the first-aid station overnight. Not that it’d have made a difference; Khan was gone in minutes.”
“Well, ask the folks at Sumskaya anyway. Anything might help at this point.”
“Why don’t you go ask them yourself?”
As God is my witness, I’ll punch him in the public square. Bora held his breath to avoid physically reacting to Mantau’s rudeness. “Naturally you have access to the toxicological test, and to the remaining double wrapper.”
“Yes, but the foil and paper shell were torn in the process of opening, so there’s no telling for sure whether the poison was injected through the wrapper or in some other way.”
“Hm. And do you happen to know whether the contents of Khan’s stomach equalled the amount of one or two bars?”
Mantau waved for his driver, standing at attention by the Opel, to bring the car closer to where he stood with Bora. “Come on, Major! We’re talking a small amount of food, and Khan vomited part of what he’d ingested. The surgeon wouldn’t be able to tell. For Christ’s sake, he’s just a military bonesetter.”
“That’s true, and it might make little difference now. As you say, Khan could have broken his rules and consumed a ration the night before his death – it’d have been digested by the morning. We’re back where we started. Short of what you might learn from the other babushkas, we can only guess how the poison got into the chocolate, or when.”
“Well, thanks for nothing, Bora. I knew you’d just waste my time.”
Never as you did mine, you bastard. The Opel had silently drawn close, and waited nearby. Bora recognized von Salomon’s slope-shouldered outline pacing impatiently at the exit of the building, and took his leave from Mantau less than amiably. “Keep waiting for the NKVD or the Ukrainian Insurgent Army to claim the murder, then.”
6
WEDNESDAY 12 MAY
Bora didn’t know how prophetic he was. Moscow claimed responsibility for the assassination just after he’d spent two days in the woods south of Bespalovka with three-quarters of his cavalry unit assembled and the filling of his officer and non-com positions nearly completed. It was Bruno Lattmann who first intercepted the Russian communication via radio, although leaflets of the Moscow-run Partisan Movement had also appeared overnight in Kharkov, celebrating the “People’s stern and righteous reckoning”. Khan was indicted as a Trotskyite, Zinovievist traitor and enemy spy, whose death while in the hands of the “Nazi hangman hordes” had proved how far Soviet justice could reach.
Early Wednesday morning, during a stop at Borovoye on his way back to Merefa (officially to see Lattmann before he left with the Platonov papers for the Kiev Branch Office, unofficially to hear if he had news about the medic’s reassignment), all Bora could do was note Lattmann’s words. “Hell, Mantau was right on the mark. I still don’t understand how exactly they managed it, and I’d have wagered the UPA would get to Khan first, given his long Bolshevik career. But Ukraine is becoming more acronym-ridden than Spain six years ago. I wonder how long the NKVD knew Tibyetsky was in Kharkov.”
Lattmann kept his outlook philosophical. “They must have found out where he’d crossed over early enough. Count your blessings the babushkas got to him when he was no longer at your place.”
“That’s puzzling, too. Whoever diverted them to Mantau’s supervision did it before the defector
was taken from us. Either Sydir Kovpak’s Moscow-run partisans have a crystal ball, or they have a mole inside Mantau’s SD, which would be egregious. I would love that. By the way, does Narodnaya Slava mean anything to you?”
“‘National Glory’, or ‘Glory of the People’ – what is it, a slogan?”
“I don’t know. Khan pencilled it behind a photo of himself standing in his tank, wearing an impressive array of medals.”
“It might refer to the T-34.”
“Or to himself, knowing the type. See what else you can find out about those claims, Bruno.”
“Won’t be easy; I’ll do what I can. The communiqué doesn’t specify the names of the ‘patriots’ who carried out the punitive action. It means nothing per se, but you’d expect it.”
“Yes, especially since we had a list including the women’s patronymics to begin with. If they were operatives, theirs could have been aliases. Still, why not identify the two who were publicly hanged, at least? Language-wise, I can’t argue with the authenticity of the claim – Down with the brown plague to mankind and culture! The hangman hordes shall perish! The rhetoric is all there.” It was warm out here; both men were perspiring heavily. Bora removed the camouflage smock he used on patrol, and unbuttoned the neck of his summer shirt. “Have there been any official German reactions thus far?”
“I’ll say. The Ukrainian railway personnel were brought to task for the arrival of the babushkas at Pokatilovka instead of Merefa. Yesterday the Security Service shot them all: at both stops, from the assistants to the German stationmasters to the last signalman and switchman. At Pokatilovka some resistance was attempted, understandably, and an SD man was wounded. Now they’re dragging people out of bread lines at random and machine-gunning those who try to escape. And since some Ukrainian gendarmes are lending a hand here and there, there’s got to be some heavy-duty settling of old accounts going on.” Lattmann followed Bora as he hurried to the personnel carrier, and watched him toss his smock on the front seat. “They’ll stop you north of Khoroshevo if you continue from here. I wouldn’t go to Kharkov if I were you, Martin.”