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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG
“Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times
“Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ
“While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail
“Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman
“Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness
“A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat
“Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig
“A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo
“A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka
Death’s Head
Campbell Armstrong
For Olivia Sayers
‘I prayed with them. I pressed myself into a corner and cried out to my God and theirs. How glad I should have been to go into the gas chambers with them! Then an SS officer in uniform would have been found in the gas chambers.’
– SS-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein
‘I swear to thee Adolf Hitler
As Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich
Loyalty and Bravery.
I vow to thee and to the superiors
whom thou shalt appoint
Obedience unto death
So help me God.’
– SS Oath
PART ONE
Berlin, September 1945
1
It sometimes surprised him that he was still alive; that his body, like some flawed machine, continued to function of its own accord. It had nothing to do with the lack of food and the sickness he frequently felt; it was the simple fact that beneath the surface of his brain and body there was no real reason for his life to go on. The idea of death and dying fluttered every so often on the darker edges of his mind, as if it were some kind of wounded butterfly seeking its last glimpse of light. And yet death terrified him because it brought still one more unanswerable question: what is it like not to exist?
He lay for a time with his eyes open, staring at the broken shaft of sunlight that came through the hole in the masonry. Outside was a large expanse of rubble, a desert where there had once been a city. He could hear various sounds – someone moving across the stones, a foreign voice screaming an order, the rattle of a passing truck. Not far away the Untergrundbahn used to run through the Alexander-Platz and he recalled the crowded red and yellow cars without affection. Everything then had been efficient, murderously so, the people moving with the sort of insane regularity you associate with clockwork.
He did not move for some minutes. There was nothing to move for. There were no special events that differentiated one day from the next. His environment, the architecture of his life, had become the stark remains of the bombast of the Third Reich. Fallen concrete eagles could be seen amongst the ruins, looking like birds that have always been too heavy to fly. Stone swastikas that rang when you struck them with slabs of brick, as if they retained fading echoes of the million voices that had once sustained them and given them meaning. It was as if some giant hand had crushed everything and the thousand-year concept of the Reich had ended – not in a chamber in the Wilhelmstrasse – but in a few granules of dark dust and the pathetic sight of colourful flowers growing out of slag heaps.
Rising, very slowly, he went towards the hole in the masonry and blinked in the bright morning light. Yesterday he had placed a piece of bread in the pocket of his coat and he felt for it now. A blackish kind of bread that tasted vile if it had any taste at all. But that was something else; he doubted now whether he could tell the difference between any of the scraps of food he put in his mouth.
He went outside after he had chewed the bread and stood for a time. The sunlight was hard against his face. On good days he found that he lived only for the present time. All his thoughts and instincts were devoted to the single achievement of dragging himself through yet another day. On bad days his mind kept returning to the past, as if by searching there he could find a single seed of justification for what he had done. But his thoughts of the past had a peculiar texture: they weren’t like memories of events he had lived through himself. They were distant from him, and they were cold, like the memories of a stranger he could never hope to know.
Moving carefully across the rubble he stared at the faces of the few people who had ventured out. There had once been another Berlin. A summer day would have drawn them out in their thousands to the cafés and beer restaurants on the Unter den Linden, to the Königin Victoria and the Kranzler, to the Admiral in the Friedrichstrasse. A touch of sunlight and the young men with their girls would have been outside on the terraces, laughing, talking, thinking of love.
A couple of Russian soldiers in their absurd and grubby uniforms were talking on the corner of the street. He walked past them as quickly as he could. They could stop you and ask to see your papers and yet beneath their seriousness was the constant feeling that they wanted to turn you into an object of fun. They stopped talking as he went past and he waited to hear them call to him; but they didn’t, and when he glanced back once he saw that they were hunched together lighting cigarettes. The simple act of passing them seemed to have drained him of energy. He leaned against a wall and caught his breath and observed with some alarm that his pulse was hammering away under his flesh. Uniforms; nothing but uniforms. Now and in the past, his whole life seemed to have been dominated by uniforms. Something extraordinary happened to a man when he climbed inside one: he ceased to exist, he became nothing more than the sum of his various insignia. The brown-shirts of the SA, the black of the SS, the steel-blue of the Wehrmacht, the cold white of –
Something caught his eye above and he turned his face upwards. A flock of birds, nothing more, frightened by the sudden backfire of a truck. Feeling cold all at once, he walked on: even if there was nowhere to go, the mere act of walking generated some kind of heat.
They sat in a prefabricated hut made from rusted slabs of thin metal. They went there day after day with their belongings in cheap suitcases usually kept shut with pieces of string. Some brought children along and the children waited in artificial silence like creatures that have had every spark of life obliterated in them. Sometimes he imagined that they looked older than their parents, that they were the ones who had recently fought a war and returned, with incurable wounds, from some forlorn front. Their dumbness and silence was a mask of sheer incomprehension.
He entered the ante-room and sat on a bench near the door. The place depressed him. It had the same effect upon him as a doctor’s waiting-room except that here nobody was looking for a clean bill of health. If you wanted to speak you spoke in whispers. But there was nothing to say. Apart from himself there was an old couple holding hands tightly as if any break in their contact would be an irrevocable loss, a young woman with an emaciated baby, a man in a patched overcoat not unlike his own. The Wilhelmstrasse wasn’t far from here. The centre of the world until a short time ago: now, the men who had manned it with all the dedication of soldiers protecting something pure and holy, were either dead or about to die. It caused him an intense pleasure to think of th
is. The mad Goebbels, whose shrill voice he had heard on a hundred radio broadcasts. Heini, unprotected by his monolithic SS, crushing the poison capsule between his teeth – a banal death and yet somehow a predictable one. And poor Adolf – it was said that his corpse had been burned and taken away by the Russians.
A door that led to an inner room was suddenly opened and a young man in uniform stood there with a sheaf of papers in his hand. His expression was that of someone who has stretched his patience to its limits and has realized he is fatigued beyond belief. The old couple rose slowly and still holding hands disappeared through the door which was closed immediately.
The man in the patched overcoat whispered something and Grunwald leaned forward to hear what was being said. The man turned his hands over and looked at them. His hands were filthy and the cuffs of his coat ragged.
‘I didn’t hear you,’ Grunwald said apologetically.
The man smiled. ‘It hardly seems worthwhile,’ he said.
‘What doesn’t?’
‘Waiting here. What are we waiting for?’
Grunwald sat back against the wall and was silent. There wasn’t an answer to that question. People waited for different reasons.
The man took a rag from his coat and spat into it. In spite of his appearance, there was still a sort of faded dignity in his movements. It was a peculiar German trait, Grunwald sometimes thought, that they could look like demobilized officers of the Wehrmacht even in rags. Or possibly this young man had fought valiantly for the city of Berlin, surrendering his uniform for a cast-off coat in some dark cellar only when he learned that the Führer had taken his life. Even then some part of him would go on struggling; even in defeat he would still respond to the rallying-cries of his imaginations. And where did it all lead to? Grunwald stared at the young man and then at the woman with the baby; he loathed these people and yet his hatred was involuntarily touched with a sense of pity. He despised them as he despised all Germany and he found some consolation in the thought that the Reich, like some proud animal finally hunted down and slain, was crawling now with the parasites of occupation.
He got up from the bench and looked through the window. Outside were the same old shells of buildings where the bombs had fallen and the fires had spread. It was amazing how quickly you could become accustomed to the architecture of destruction. You realized that it had all looked very different once but somehow the new environment was the only possible one. As he turned round to look at the young man again, the woman’s baby uttered a tired cry. She cradled its head with her hands and held it tightly against her breasts. Grunwald was reminded of the baby he had come across only a few days ago. Nobody had taken the trouble to bury it; it had simply been placed, naked, amidst a pile of broken stones. Its hands were clenched, the lips a dark colour of blue. Sickened, he had stepped back from the sight, thankful at least that the eyes had been closed.
The door opened and the old couple came out. The woman was sobbing, the man was trying desperately to console her. Grunwald returned to the bench and sat down, staring at the floor. The young man continued to spit from time to time into his rag. The woman, carrying her baby, went towards the door where the young officer was waiting. And then there was a long silence.
The officer could hardly have been more than twenty-five. His thick hair had been closely and crudely cropped by some insensitive army barber and there was a pale blue tint to the area at the back of his solid neck. The tiny room in which he sat was barely furnished; a desk, two hard chairs, a filing cabinet. The desk and the floor were littered with bundles of papers, some tied with string or ribbon. A decrepit paraffin heater burned in one corner, hissing noisily sometimes, filling the room with a smell that choked and sickened Grunwald.
The officer looked at Grunwald and then at his identity papers. His manner was that of a man who would have liked to be brisk and efficient, but who was overwhelmed with the volume of papers and the length of his working day.
‘Grunwald. Leonhard Israel Grunwald.’ He said the name as if it were something solid he could taste but with the uncertainty of someone trying an exotic food for the first time. His German was precise and correct even if his accent was poor. He rose and went to the filing cabinet and began to look through it.
‘I have no record,’ he said at last and slammed the drawer shut. ‘It doesn’t surprise me. I hardly have records for anybody. When anything comes in it gets filed.’ He looked at Grunwald hopelessly. ‘But of course very little comes in.’
Grunwald wished he could open the window. The smell of paraffin was overwhelming now. He undid the top button of his shirt and watched the officer return to his chair. He picked up a pen and searched for a piece of paper.
‘I will take the necessary particulars.’
‘What particulars?’ Grunwald asked.
‘Information that I require.’ The officer yawned and covered his mouth with a hand; the hand, Grunwald noticed, was smeared with stains of dark blue ink.
‘I forget things sometimes,’ Grunwald said and wondered what special talent this young man brought to his job. Was it simply the case that he had been chosen because he could speak German? He was young, conceivably ambitious – so why should he be content in the sort of post that at best could only be described as a stagnant backwater? Picking his way amongst the scattered relics of humanity that the Reich left behind was hardly a task of any great importance: what did people matter when politicians were squabbling over territorial gains and slicing Europe as though it were a stale birthday cake? Somewhere great decisions were being made, but it wasn’t here in this shabby prefabricated hut.
The officer looked at his pen with the disgusted expression of a man who joined the army because he wanted to carry a gun. ‘Place and date of birth,’ he said.
‘Munich,’ Grunwald said. ‘April, 1908.’
The officer put his pen down. ‘Who are you looking for?’
Grunwald said, ‘In 1939 I had a wife and a son. My wife was thirty years of age. The boy was five. We lived in an apartment in Wendl-Dietrichstrasse in the Neuhausen district of Munich. All things considered, it was not altogether an unpleasant apartment.’ Grunwald stopped, conscious of the monotonous way he had been speaking; and yet why should he speak otherwise? He was reciting only dead facts, he was speaking of the fleshless skeleton that had once been his life. It did not call for a tone of animation.
The officer stopped writing and put his pen into the ink-bottle. For no apparent reason he said, ‘I fought all the way from the Polish front, driving the Germans back. I don’t know what I expected them to be like. Perhaps I imagined they were supermen. But they had nothing to offer until we reached Berlin and then they fought like insane men. Young boys, old men, anybody who could carry a weapon – they came out against us. And I asked myself, What are they protecting? Don’t they know the war is already over? What do you imagine they were fighting for?’
The officer smiled: ‘I asked myself, Where was all the great efficiency I’d heard so much about? What kind of people send out schoolboys with machine-guns and old men with grenades?’ He rose from his desk and went to the window and, as if conscious for the first time of the heavy smell of paraffin, pushed the window open. ‘The great efficiency was a myth. The infallibility was a lie. I know what you are going to tell me, Herr Grunwald.’ He paused a second. ‘You had a wife and a child. And one day, they are no longer there. They vanish. You ask questions but there are no answers.’
Grunwald looked at the officer. ‘I arrived home. The apartment was empty. Someone had come in a truck and they had been taken away. I never saw either of them again.’
The officer shook his head. ‘That was their real ability, you see. That was the real gift. They could take a single human being, or a million human beings, and they could deny that they had ever existed. And they did it very well. They did it with great skill.’
Grunwald was sweating: why had he come here? What was the point of it all? The young officer knew only a part of t
he truth.
‘You never saw either of them again,’ the officer said, and began to write. ‘Give me their names.’
‘Martha Sara Grunwald, unmarried name Brock. And Hugo Israel Grunwald. Aged five.’
The officer shrugged. ‘You know that there isn’t any hope. The chances of their being alive are practically zero.’
Grunwald moved his head. They were dead, he knew they were dead. Nothing would alter that conviction. Why had he come here? Simply to have confirmed what he already knew to be true? He rose from his chair.
The officer said, ‘One thing puzzles me. How did you survive?’
Grunwald watched the young man’s eyes. They were pale and blue: he might have been German, one of Himmler’s ideal men. He waited for Grunwald’s answer, tapping his pen on the desk.
‘I survived in the easiest possible way,’ Grunwald said, and moved towards the door. He opened the door and peered into the ante-room. There were more people than before, some Germans, some Jews, all of them seeking a shred of comfort through the humanitarian auspices of the occupying army. Why did the conquerors bother? Grunwald wondered. Was it to compensate in some way for the thousands of German women they were said to have raped? It was an easy solution: stick some young officer in a tiny room and let these poor defeated bastards think that something was being done for them. It was easy and it was cheap.
The officer said, ‘Come back in about ten days.’
Grunwald, nodding his head, moved through the anteroom and into the street. A squad of Russian soldiers was parading lethargically up and down, working through pointless military manoeuvres – up with their rifles, down with their rifles, twenty paces forward, about turn, twenty paces back. Grunwald knew that he wouldn’t go back to see the young officer. How did you survive? The question, the expression in the young man’s eyes – these things pained him. These were the things that would deter him in the future. How did you survive?
Death’s Head Page 1