by Dan Vyleta
‘Who did it?’ Pavel asked after he had finished the first slice and mopped up its juice with some bread. Sonia slid another onto his plate with a meat fork. ‘Who killed Boyd?’
Colonel Fosko wiped his lips with a cloth napkin, taking his time with the movement, making him wait.
‘We believe it was the Russians. Cannot prove it, naturally, but it looks like their handiwork. You know about the NKVD?’
‘Soviet secret police?’
‘Yes. They usually handle this sort of thing. Rumour has it that Mr White killed one of their agents, and that they acted in revenge. Again, we have no firm evidence. Not even the agent’s body. We are equally stumped when it comes to the motive. You see, we had no idea Mr White was involved with the NKVD. The Americans assure us they are just as much in the dark as we are. All we know for certain is that his body turned up in our sector. Which is to say that it’s our problem. My problem, Pavel. If there is anything you can help us with, Pavel, we would be most grateful. I, personally, would be most grateful, Pavel. Most grateful indeed.’
He sat back and took a swallow of beer. His rings clinked on the glass when he set it down. In his left, the silver knife stuck out daintily from a half-closed fist. Pavel nodded wearily, and cut a bite from his second slice of gammon.
There was no earthly reason why he shouldn’t just hand over his keys and tell the Colonel about the midget. Pass things over to the authorities. He had no doubt that Fosko would accept the gesture and drop any inquiry into why he should have hidden a corpse for four whole nights. There was hardly a chance, of course, that Boyd’s killer would be brought to justice, not if he was a Russian operative, but at least Pavel could wash his hands of it, return to a quiet life dedicated to his books and the boy. In time, he would earn enough money to buy Boyd a gravestone and a space in the Catholic cemetery. A priest would speak and there would be closure; hookers in evening dresses paying their last respects, and a letter home to his mother whom Pavel had never met.
He made up his mind to speak, but cut himself another bite instead. Sat and chewed it with deliberate slowness. There was something about the fat man that made Pavel hold back; it was as though he begrudged him his ruddy good health. Stubbornly, half ashamed for his stubbornness, Pavel cast around for reasons to hold on to his secret. His eyes came to rest upon the woman. She sat stiff-backed, meat fork in hand, her eyes studiously avoiding his own. He took in her pallor, her cheekbones, the height of her brow. The smudge of moustache that framed her upper lip. Her face was impassive. It was foolish to expect that she would help him make up his mind.
‘Are your kidneys troubling you, Mr Richter?’ she asked him coolly.
‘Yes,’ he answered, though he had forgotten them the moment he had taken in food. ‘I think I shall have to lie down.’
‘Do you need help?’
‘No, thank you. Much obliged.’
The words sounded false to him, as though they were acting out a long-rehearsed scene. Pavel got up and made a show of hobbling towards the door.
‘Let me know about any developments,’ he called over to Fosko, still with the same giddy feeling of acting out a farce. The fat man parted his meaty lips into a smile.
‘Rest assured I will, Pavel. Rest assured I will.’
Pavel bowed stiffly from the waist and closed the door behind him with an acute sense of relief.
‘Tomorrow,’ he told himself. ‘You can always tell him tomorrow. It won’t make any difference.’
Anders found his crew back at Paulchen’s place. They sat in a circle and were having reheated cabbage soup and smoked fish for lunch. Wordlessly, Anders joined them, wedging himself onto the sofa between the Karlson twins. The fish’s meat had a green shine to it and tasted bitter, but he ate it anyway. When it was all gone, Paulchen produced a tin of sugared peaches as a special treat. He passed them out personally, and Anders noted that he gave an extra-large portion to Schlo’ who looked like he had not been sleeping well recently. Anders only got a single, mangled peach – Paulchen speared it with a knife and slipped it straight into his hand. The sugar water clung to his skin long after it was gone. Anders did not complain about the unequal distribution. He had not been around much lately, and Paulchen rewarded loyalty as much as earning potential. In order to signal his good will, Anders volunteered to do the dishes. It involved fetching water from a pump two blocks over. Even so the water was half-frozen by the time he got back. Once he was done he joined the other boys in Paulchen’s bedroom. Under the magazine picture of an American pin-up in black underpants and bra, they lit up smokes and talked about the day’s pickings, and what they had planned for the week ahead. Word had it that another train full of refugees from the east would be rolling into the station later that day, or early the next. Paulchen commandeered a few of the boys to go and wait for its arrival. Refugees meant business: they would get off the train and require food, shelter, a kilo of firewood. Most of them were too poor to be worth much, but there would be a few valuables amongst the family possessions they carried.
‘Don’t rip them off too bad,’ Paulchen warned them. ‘They are good people who got screwed by the Russians.’ Paulchen made much of the point that he was a patriot.
As casually as possible, Anders steered the conversation onto the topic of the Colonel. He told them that he had seen him come out of a building wearing a mink coat. ‘A fat man in woman’s furs. Man, we should rip the bastard off. That coat’s worth a crapload.’
Paulchen cut in and told him the man was off-limits: ‘He’s a Tommy. A general or something. Besides, word has it that he’s a fairy.’
‘A what?’
‘A fairy.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Somebody who fucks little boys like you.’
‘Fucks boys? How?’
‘What do you mean, how? He fucks them.’
They all sat in silence, contemplating the point.
‘It can’t be,’ Anders objected after some thought. ‘He fucks this woman. I heard him do it. I swear.’
Paulchen was unimpressed.
‘These ped-i-rasts,’ he said knowledgeably, ‘they fuck anything that moves.
‘They should be gassed,’ he told them. ‘Rounded up and gassed.’
At the edge of their circle, silent young Schlo’ started to cry. He was ever so much of a girl.
Anders lit another smoke and decided to stick around for the day.
In those days there were many such rumours about the Colonel. I heard them drinking in bars, always mindful, of course, to keep secret the precise nature of my association with him. The Colonel, I would hear, was a queer, a Soviet spy, a Nazi operative who had infiltrated British Intelligence back in ’33 and had stayed under cover when the Reich went belly up. I was told that he was Italian royalty, part of the ‘di Fosco’ family who’d been expatriated by Mussolini; that he made his money in banking, in real estate, at the horses. Once, an old French journalist swore to me that he had shared a roulette table with him – along with a woman – in pre-war Monte Carlo. ‘He was just back from Spain, fighting for Franco,’ he confided, and would not be dissuaded otherwise. A German brothel madam told me the story of how she had had to pay the Colonel’s money back, because none of her girls could satisfy his appetites, and an Irish sailor – God only knows what he was doing there – enacted for me their five dramatic rounds in the ring. ‘Bare-knuckle bout, my lad,’ he sang with his liquor-oiled brogue. ‘That bastard’s so fat, he hits the deck he bounces right back up again, like a fecking rubber ball.’
‘Did you win?’ I asked him, but he shrugged his shoulders.
‘Now that I think of it, it was my cousin who did the fightin’.’
There is no telling where they came from, all these rumours, and I have wondered at times whether the Colonel himself was responsible for putting them in circulation, though for what purpose, other than sheer bravado, I am at a loss to say. Suffice it to state that he was the kind of man to whom legends attached themse
lves like lice. Every so often he would pick one out of his pelt, and pop it between his fingernails. Why not? There would always be more.
Pavel spent most of the afternoon in bed. By dinnertime he was hungry again and fried himself a piece of offal that the boy had left behind. The electricity ran out halfway through the cooking and some of the meat remained frozen at the centre. He found a bottle of beer in a cupboard over the sink, but was too impatient to wait for it to defrost by the oven. In the end he broke open the neck and sucked on slivers of beer ice. The alcohol went straight into his blood and muffled his feelings. He realized he was still very sick and crawled back into bed.
It was ten or eleven before he rose again and faced up to what he had wanted to do ever since lunchtime. He was ill-equipped for the task. It was hard work even to get the trunk to open. Both its hinges and copper latches were frozen and he had to work on them with the ice pick. Eventually he managed to remove the lid and slid it onto the boy’s bed. When he tried to lift out the body, his kidneys rebelled and he had to sit down in front of the oven and warm them up for half an hour. He tried again, this time by turning the entire trunk upside down and waiting for the corpse to roll out. There was no sound, and when he lifted the suitcase up an inch, he saw that the midget had become glued to its lining by his own frozen blood and hung suspended halfway between trunk and wooden floor. Exasperated, too exhausted to flip the whole thing over one more time, Pavel slid a knife into the leather from above and in this manner cut enough of the lining until it finally ripped and dropped the midget onto the floor. After another break in front of the oven, Pavel pushed the trunk aside and grabbed the body’s wooden feet. He’d decided to drag him over to the front room, where the light was better. The head banged the floorboard both times he cleared the doors’ elevated thresholds. By the time he finally had him in front of the coal oven, Pavel was so exhausted, he slipped to the floor next to it and nearly nodded off.
The opening of the door snapped him out of his lethargy. He could not believe he had forgotten to lock it. He expected the boy, of course, but in came Sonia in her heavy tweed dress, a glass of what looked like fruit juice in one hand. When she saw him sitting there next to the body she stopped dead in her tracks. The liquids that surrounded the midget were starting to melt in the heat from the oven and a heavy, livid smell had begun to spread through the room. Pavel tried to speak, to make up some sort of explanation. His mind was a blank. All he managed to say was: ‘It’s a midget. Dead.’ It sounded so callous to him that his cheeks flushed with shame. Any second now she would scream, and dial for the Colonel.
‘You should put a blanket under him before all the blood starts running,’ she said. ‘Otherwise it will seep into the floorboards. Here, have some juice.’
She crouched before him and passed him the glass.
‘It is important you drink a lot, now that you are on the mend.’ When she smiled some of the pallor seemed to leave her face. Pavel drank the juice greedily, and pointed out a blanket they could use.
‘Wait,’ she said, ‘I will fetch it for you.’
Without her help, he would never have managed to cut the clothing off the midget’s body. It was she who fetched the scissors from her apartment and dared the first cut. They melted some water by the oven and patiently wiped down his body, first the front and then his back. There was less bruising than he would have predicted; his skin shone youthful and white. A hand’s breadth above the buttocks Pavel discovered a slender hole, a quarter-inch across. Its edges were perfectly smooth.
‘He has been stabbed,’ he said to Sonia. ‘Boyd told me he’d run him over. With his car. Cats licking at his blood.’
‘Your friend lied to you?’ she asked, and he wondered whether she was teasing him for his naivety.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He must have thought I would judge him.’
‘Would you have? Judged him?’
He thought about it.
‘Who knows,’ he said. ‘It’s hard not to judge murder.’
She bit her lip then and for a moment he was sorely tempted to reach out and stroke her cheek. His hand, he noticed, was encrusted with blood, especially around the fingernails. He dropped it and looked for words to explain himself.
‘Sonia,’ he said, ‘I know this isn’t fair on you, but I don’t want the Colonel to know. About the midget. Not yet, in any case.’
She shrugged like it wasn’t much to ask. All she wanted to know was: ‘Why?’
He looked down at the midget. ‘The truth is, I have no idea. No idea at all.’
They decided to remove the body to the attic. In summer it was used for hanging up washing; in these temperatures it would be deserted even by rats. They wrapped a blanket around him as one would around a dead child. He tried to lift him but found he could not. In the end it was she who cradled the corpse in her arms and walked it up two flights of stairs. The attic was enormous, the space cut up by wooden posts that helped support the roof. Washing lines hung taut between these posts, empty save for a single, hole-ridden sock that balanced an icicle off its stiffened tip. Sonia wedged the body into the utmost corner of the enormous room. Pavel watched her do it, holding a candle high above her shoulder. When they turned around in the doorway, they were no longer able to make out the bundle; it had been swallowed up by shadows. On the way back they snuck past the doors of the other tenants. This is what it must feel like, thought Pavel, to be a thief. It was a lonely feeling. He felt expelled from the brotherhood of men.
Back in his apartment, they struggled to clean the floor, then cut all the remaining lining out of the trunk and stuffed it in the oven. The trunk itself Pavel pushed under his bed. It was too big to burn. The smell of the corpse lingered and Pavel felt compelled to force open a window. The cold that blew in hurt him in his teeth, his lungs, the skin of his tongue.
‘Let’s go to my place while it airs,’ Sonia suggested. He followed her demurely, and accepted some cold coffee, along with a bread roll. She sat at the piano and played some music for him. At first he did not listen, but then the melodies drew him into themselves and he began to recognize various fragments.
‘Beethoven?’ he asked her when she took a break to warm her hands.
‘Yes. Do you like him?’
‘I always thought him melodramatic.’
She shook her head in reproach. ‘Melodramatic? I just helped you hide a frozen midget.’
God, it felt good to laugh.
He stayed far too long and was conscious of doing so. Over a second cup of coffee she explained to him that the Colonel wanted her to lure him away to the doctor’s the next day, so that he could search Pavel’s flat.
‘He doesn’t trust you,’ she said. ‘He thinks you are hiding things.’
‘It’s okay,’ he shrugged, ‘I’m going out tomorrow anyway. Boyd told me to go look for a woman. If anything went wrong, he said, go look for Belle. One of his girls, you know. A prostitute. “ Find Belle!” That’s what I’m going to do.’
‘Find a whore in Berlin?’ she asked him caustically. ‘Good luck.’
He fell asleep on her couch and Sonia woke him an hour before sunrise so that he could get ready before the Colonel showed up.
4
23 December 1946
Anders slept over at Paulchen’s, along with a handful of the other boys. It took them until well past midnight to settle down. Before that they sat around, huddled into blankets, and swapped stories about the city and about the war. Some were old and they had all heard them before, like the one about the thirteen boys who had stood around in the schoolyard toilets late in April ’45, sharing a smoke.
‘Give me another week,’ one of them had bragged, ‘and I’ll give Gretchen a good old going over.’
‘One week,’ he swore, ‘and she’ll spread them like she’s a gymnast doing splits.’
‘Right,’ said his friends. ‘And Hitler’s still got us primed for the Endsieg.’
They all laughed. A teacher who passed by the toilet
s just then overheard them. It was nothing but chance, but he heard them, both the comment and the laughter. One of those hyper-loyal types who had worn his party pin from before ’33. He made a phone call, and the Gestapo came right over; didn’t even need a car, the headquarters were two blocks down the road. They say they rounded up the boys in the yard and marched them back into the toilets. They had to line up by the piss trough, eyes to the wall, and then they were shot, one by one, through the back of the neck. Shot for high treason and ‘demoralization of the German Volk’. Thirteen dead, mid-morning on the twenty-eighth of April, when bullets were already running thin, amongst the Germans that is – the Russkies had plenty, and mortars the size of God’s fists. On the thirtieth of April, Hitler killed himself. Some said poison, and some said a bullet through the heart. Either way, thirteen boys dead, in the fucking toilets.
‘I swear to God,’ said one of the Karlsons, ‘I was there when they carried out the bodies.’
There were other stories, newer ones. Stories about the Russians tracking down every German scientist and engineer in their sector. They would come into a man’s home while he was away at work, pack up all his stuff in a truck, put his wife and kid inside, and then wait for him in the empty flat, with only a stool and a little wooden desk set up in the middle of the living room, and on it a piece of paper that said he kindly requested transfer of work to the esteemed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.