by Dan Vyleta
Pavel pushed open the door, felt for the light switch, flicked it to no effect. There he stood upon the threshold, his heart beating in his throat suddenly, wedged snug against the base of his tongue. Inside, a familiar smell, of unwashed body, piss and blood. He squinted, trying to make things out. The shadows were deeper here, the moon sickly behind the double pane of frozen glass, half obscured by the curtain’s swinging curve.
Only he no longer had any curtains.
He had taken them down weeks ago, to fashion blankets for the boy, leaving a bare copper rod. A dozen times or more he had used it in lieu of a drying rack, had hung up dress shirts, socks and underwear and watched the water drip upon his windowsill, until it had got too cold for washing and the sickness had made him oblivious to his stink. The rod had been empty when Pavel had left the apartment.
It was no longer empty.
He panicked, dug in his heels, stared at the shadow that must not be; took in the rod’s bend, and the tautness of the rope, his hands casting around for a book of matches. He broke one against the box’s gravelly side; broke another; broke a third, his fingers stiff and clumsy. On the next attempt, Pavel dropped the whole box; crouched and searched for it in the darkness of the floor. Then, finally, a match caught fire: a wild flare of light that recoiled into itself before gradually transforming into the steady flame of burning wood. Shadows danced before it, exposed, then scuttled back into the dark. At the window, one such shadow refused to budge; instead it solidified, took on features, four foot something, and skinny.
Its head stuck out of the noose at an impossible angle.
Pavel breathed and moved towards the hanging boy. He grabbed his foot – had he not been told of such a thing but two hours ago? – and spun him round. He found a death mask of a face, an angel’s face, a murdered angel, young, and a little cracked on one side. Pavel spun him, faced him, placed his match so close it was as though he wished to light him up, the dead boy hanging from his curtain rod. Spun him, faced him, saw – and laughed.
Sweet mother of Jesus. He laughed! It nearly did me in, that laughter.
You must understand, of course, that I had been sitting there all along, splayed out on top of his bed, my back propped up against some pillows. He never noticed me, not until he had faced the boy, that is, and shot out that frightening bark of laughter. Only then – when I yelled at him to stop – did he turn and make my acquaintance.
I imagined I peeled out of the shadows for him, in my bulky overcoat and the eye-patch, like some divine messenger bringing news of final things. I remember his looking at my shoes, which I had placed carelessly upon his sheets, with some special sort of loathing. He had been raised better than that, and chances are he thought I should have been, too. But I was tired and cold that night, and my feet hurt from standing around outside the boys’ hideaway, and besides, he wasn’t going to be using his bed for a while. I suppose I could have taken them off, my shoes, but how is a man to arrest another in his stockings? It would have been absurd, particularly in combination with the gun that was in my hand. Pavel looked at it with tired eyes. It did not seem to hold much meaning for him.
But events are getting the better of me, and I am in danger of unravelling this yarn from the wrong end entirely. Let me retrace the steps that served to place me within that room, upon that bed, dirty shoes soiling Pavel’s sheets and the broken eye itching under its patch like something rotten. You last found me watching elsewhere, out in the street across from Paulchen’s quarters, placing an anxious phone call for company in my vigil. It was a long and tiresome wait. There was a curious diversion not long after I had established myself – the other men had just come out to join me – but it was not the sort of thing liable to comfort a man’s spirits. Quite the contrary. It concerns the boy, the one hanging from the rafters, dead, I amafraid, and never to wake. He showed up all of a sudden, God only knows from where. He might have been in the house, or in the courtyard behind it, or up in a tree for all I know. The first knowledge I had of him was his drawing up short, mid-step, not two yards from where I stood guard, and giving a mighty start.
‘Good God!’ said I, similarly startled, and thinking that the Colonel had laid a claim to this child. ‘You are Pavel’s little friend.’
And off he bolted.
Looked at me, a twitch of the lip – a curious sort of curling – and then he was off, flying like the wind, or rather like a nasty little gust, down the street as fast as his little legs would carry. I had no choice but to give chase, my superior limbs encumbered by my superior girth, clambering after him, shouting (like a fool, no doubt!) for him to stop. He had no intention of complying with my request.
I chased him down the empty street and was getting within perhaps five feet of him when he, nimble as a rabbit, feinted to the left and then cut to the right, down some dark alley with bomb rubble peeking out of the snow every five yards. I tried to follow his motion, unaware that my bulk would not take to sudden changes of direction with the selfsame elegance the boy had just displayed, hence stumbled, hit upon a nasty patch of ice, one foot shooting to the right, the other to the left and my arms turning into a veritable windmill. In short, I fell, and fell in a rather dramatic manner that hurt my rump and brought a curse to my lips.
‘Christ!’ I shouted.
It was the last word the boy would hear on this earth.
Something about my invocation of our saviour compelled him. He whipped his head round, perhaps to gloat, or else to make sure there were no other pursuers (there were none, the other men being too lazy to go chasing after a street Arab, and on Christmas Eve to boot). In any case he looked back while his legs ran on. Stubbed his toe upon a bent piece of metal pipe, half lost in a snow drift. Fell forward at great velocity and broke his neck upon the sidewalk’s edge, just like that, a half-inch under the base of the skull. He broke his face open a little, too, of course, and probably broke his ankle, but principally he broke his neck, so there was nothing doing, apart from picking him up and calling the Colonel. Who, in a conspiratorial whisper, instructed me to engineer that little scene in Pavel’s bedroom, specifying the curtain rod and the rope, and that the light bulb be smashed, so that the man would have shadows to contend with, and the uncertainties of moonlight.
After I repeated the instructions back to the Colonel – he was particular that way – I sent a man ahead to do the hanging, it not being my line of work, and because I was uncomfortable at the thought of walking Berlin’s streets on Christmas Eve with a dead child under my arm, the package’s contents only rudimentarily obscured by being wrapped in a blanket. The truth is that it sickened me, this accidental death of someone so young, though I guess things would have been no better had he been killed on purpose.
Once the boy was out of sight I resumed, with heavy heart, my position outside Paulchen’s flat. Our instructions were to wait for Pavel to leave. I was to follow, while the rest of the men stormed the flat and ascertained whether Pavel had been there with a view to selling the merchandise (though why he should be selling it to children, I can’t say). It would call for some cracking of heads no doubt, though more like than not, not much worse than that.
As for myself, after I followed Pavel back and made sure he went to Sonia’s rooms first – the Colonel had predicted this with a degree of certainty that has never ceased to astonish me – I stepped into Pavel’s rooms in order to ascertain that all had been arranged, which it had. I was about to walk out, and let the man – Jeremiah Easterman, a real brute of a fellow with shoulders like a bull – make the arrest, when it occurred to me that it just wouldn’t do. Having Easterman wave his gun at Pavel and mock him for his grief over the child: it felt like a betrayal of the budding kinship that I felt had sprung up between Pavel and me during the days I had dogged his steps through the streets of Berlin and tried, vainly no doubt, to divine his soul. So I sent Easterman home to his Christmas, and took up the post myself. Initially I sat on one of his chairs, but soon my aching rump and stone-co
ld feet compelled me to move over to the bed, and into the ill-bred sprawl Pavel later found me in.
The Colonel looked in on me, perhaps a quarter-hour before Pavel showed up. He opened the door, gave the arrangements a most cursory glance, nodded in my direction, and asked whether we had taken care of the man in the car outside.
‘Yes,’ I nodded, having received word about this shortly after Easterman had left. ‘But we didn’t know what to do with the body.’
‘So?’
‘So we left it there. It looks like he’s sleeping. I thought no harm in it.’
The Colonel smiled at that and made to leave. ‘When Richter comes down, take him home to the villa. Only make sure my wife and children don’t see him. It might upset them.’
‘I will, Colonel.’ And added, upon consideration, and because there was a contentment in the Colonel I had only rarely noted before: ‘May I ask a question?’
‘But of course, my good Peterson.’
‘Why this charade?’ I nodded over to where the boy was swinging.
‘Why not just arrest him and beat it out of him?’
The Colonel shrugged like it was an imbecilic query. ‘In everything one does, Peterson, it is imperative to have a certain je ne sais quoi. And to be economical with one’s opportunities. We have – one – a dead boy loved by a man, and – two – the man himself, who needs to be broken. I’d prefer the boy alive and the man dead, on the whole, and Söldmann’s merchandise in my pocket, but we are not always free to choose our circumstances.’
‘Ah,’ I said, pretending I understood. And added: ‘Would you have interrogated the boy? If he had lived, I mean? Would you have, you know, hurt him?’
The Colonel scoffed.
‘Peterson, Peterson,’ he said. ‘Of course I wouldn’t have.’ He smiled at me sweetly. ‘You would have.’
‘Aye, sir, I presume I would’ve,’ I conceded after he wouldn’t let me out of his eye. He waved with his fat fingers and half closed the door behind him. I leaned back against the wall and waited for Pavel.
When he came in, finally, after what may have been twenty minutes, I sat still as a doorpost. He never noticed me, not when he was fumbling with the matches (I nearly offered to help him it was so pathetic), nor when he managed to light one, and approached the boy with solemn step. Then the laughter. I was tempted to jump up to shake him out of it, thinking he had gone hysterical, only my back hurt so. ‘Why are you laughing?’ I shouted instead from my perch’s comfort.
‘You got the wrong one,’ he cried. ‘You got the wrong boy.’
I couldn’t understand what he meant. It was the boy who had been to visit him that afternoon. I had never met another.
‘The one the Colonel is looking for, right?’ I asked.
He shook his head.
‘That one,’ he spat, ‘got away, and curse you for killing this one, who was a good boy, not twelve years old, his parents dead in the camps.’
It was the first time it occurred to me that there might be more to the man than was suggested by the unobtrusiveness of his demeanour. I remembered, then, that he had been in the war, and must know what it meant to kill. His laughter stopped, was replaced by a frown. Then: that indignant stare at my shoes, his indifference towards my gun.
‘Help me take him down,’ he told me, and I did, not having been instructed differently.
Once we got the boy out of his noose, Pavel cradled him in his arms. He would not deposit him on the bed, as I asked, but rather kept him there, pressed against his narrow chest, as I walked him out at gunpoint, and down the staircase’s darkness. When we had rounded the first set of stairs, I could hear someone gently close a door upstairs.
Sonia had been listening.
Seconds later, I heard her starting to play. The notes ran through the building like a shiver.
Anders was having a miserable day, out alone in the cold. He’d spent his morning chasing down a black-market vendor who owed him one, and persuading him to sell him a sleeping bag on credit. The bag was Soviet Army issue, complete with a red star and Cyrillic name stencilled into its side; was not of bad quality, but stained a vivid rust colour, and smelled strongly of pickled herring. Lunchtime, Anders had found himself starving, and been forced to beg food at the British Army barracks along with a horde of other boys, though none that belonged to Paulchen. He got some boiled beef and beans, and a half-bar of chocolate for which he had to fight a fifteen-year-old with a gammy leg. He settled the fight with a kick to his testicles and a flash of the Luger barrel. Then, the sun already low in the sky, he ran to take up position before Pavel’s house and wait for his prey.
Taking up position was easier said than done. There was a surprisingly constant stream of pedestrians walking down the street and Anders had no wish for witnesses; there were windows, too, where it was hard to tell whether anyone might be watching through their frosty murk. The encroaching dark soon took care of that, and Christmas preparations thinned out the foot traffic, but as Anders strolled casually down the sidewalk in order to stake out a likely hiding hole, he took note of a man in a car who sat, evidently freezing, wrapped in some blankets and taking regular swigs at a bottle of schnapps. He would roll down one window whenever the windshield got so steamed up he could no longer make out a thing; that and rub at the condensation with a gloved palm, which did little to help. Once he left the car altogether, to buy cigarettes from a young woman who was walking past, pushing a pram. Anders heard him wish her a Merry Christmas.
‘I’m married,’ she responded and hurried off down the road.
It struck Anders that the man was engaged in something not unrelated to his own endeavour. For a moment he took comfort in the thought that he was to share his stake-out, until it occurred to him that this might be one of the Colonel’s men. He was not wearing a uniform, however, and when he had asked for the ciggies, the accent had not been an English one.
There was a little mound of garbage and rotten sandbags not three yards from him by the side of a building that Anders had long identified as the most likely place for him to hide. At length, he realized he had little choice but to risk the knowledge of his co-vigilante. Anders walked towards the mound casually, then leapt on top, shifted some sandbags and in this manner dug for himself a shallow crater. Crawling into his sleeping bag, the herring smell nauseating in his nose, and lying flat on his stomach, Anders became invisible in the failing light. As an added bonus he was able to watch the street through the gap left between two sandbags. He fingered his gun and felt like a regular sniper. The man in the car, he noted, had watched his manoeuvre with a melancholy air, but made no move to speak to him, let alone chase him away. Anders saw him finish his liquor with a final, protracted swallow. His eyes were red-rimmed, tired; he needed a shave, coffee, twelve hours of sleep. The boy nodded to him curtly, and the man nodded back, and that was that. Then, shivering in his down-padded burrow, Anders set to watching, waiting for the fat man, murder on his mind.
Anders had arrived too late to witness Schlo’ delivering his message to Pavel, but trusted implicitly that his friend had not failed him. Anders wondered how Pavel would react. It was hard to fathom. Pavel had not been himself recently, not since the kidneys, and that woman made a fool of him too, somehow, though Anders did not dislike her as much as he might. He hoped that whatever Pavel found in his coat lining was something that he would know how to dispose of. It might be diamonds, Anders mused, a million Reichsmarks in bold glitter, or else proof certain that Hitler was alive and plotting revenge. Either way, he was sure Pavel would figure out what to do. There had never been a man such as Pavel, even if he had cried.
Another hour or two passed before Pavel appeared in the flesh. He stepped out of the building, his hat drawn low into his brow and the coat sitting awkward on account of the cut lining. Anders restrained his impulse to call out and greet him; he studied his gait instead and felt reassured that his kidney’s limp was barely noticeable now. Pavel hadn’t gone twenty steps down the
road when a second man shot out of the doorway. A man in a decent coat, middle-aged and a little heavy, with a patch over one eye and a lively growth of brow over the other. He followed Pavel without much of an attempt to remain unknown to him. They were both soon out of sight. His fellow watcher gazed after them with interest, but made no move to follow. Anders wondered who he was watching for.
Minutes later the Colonel showed up. He parked his car just up the road and came strolling down, walking his mink with a fat-bellied swagger, a swing tune upon his fleshy lips. Anders whipped out the gun and took aim. The man in the car, he noted, slid halfway down the seat to avoid detection. It was a difficult shot across ten yards of shadow and the watcher’s bulky hood. Thoughtful, teeth in one lip, Anders held his fire. There would be a better moment, one when he would be sure of his man. He stuck his arms back into the sleeping bag and rubbed them warm against his body. The smell of herring had become natural to his nose and no longer bothered him. It was just as well. Had he pondered the circumstance, it might have made him hungry.
Anders did not pay much attention when another man came walking down the street, carrying a large bundle in both arms. The same man would come out, a good while later, with no bundle. It was clear to the boy that he was one of Fosko’s men, but it seemed impossible to keep an eye on all of them. All he wanted was for Pavel to be safe, and for Fosko to make himself available to his gun. These were small favours to ask of the day; he considered appealing to God for them, but it was unclear whether He would be interested. So Anders waited, without prayer, and left religion to those with more pious needs.