Pavel & I

by Dan Vyleta

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Just get the man out of there. Tell him it’s for the best. You’re good with words, aren’t you, Mr Richter?’

  As though on cue they both turned to look at Sonia who sat huddled together with the boy on the back seat of the limousine. Karpov’s voice took on an unpleasant edge.

  ‘She is quite beautiful, you know. A German Grushenka. Only not as plump. The fox suits her.’

  ‘There is no need to threaten me.’

  ‘Who is threatening you?’

  ‘You’ll let her go afterwards?’

  ‘She holds no value for the Soviet Union. Don’t do anything stupid, Mr Richter, and everything will go as agreed.’

  Pavel threw his cigarette into a mound of snow and gestured to Lev. Together they crossed the road and approached the brown brick building.

  And so they went inside. Woke up the caretaker in the ground-floor flat with a rap on his window, bade him unlock the front door, and vanished inside. Karpov sent the other Russian in after, to keep guard at the bottom of the stairs, then positioned himself near the door, always keeping his eye on us, the hostages. A working-class neighbourhood, two blocks north of the Tiergarten; a horse butcher’s on the corner next to a derelict beer cellar with no glass in the windows. Nobody spoke. Sonia sat stone-faced, her hands drawn back into ample sleeves; shoulders squared, feet planted, fast, shallow breaths through a half-open mouth. To her left sat Anders. He kept glowering at me, mistaking me for young Salomon’s killer, then cocked his head to listen for internal seepage. Pavel’s talk about internal bleeding must have got to him: a twelve-year-old boy, face to face with his own mortality. His hands searched his belly, to test it for swelling, defiant eyes turning to fear. As for myself, I kept my eye on the General, six foot tall and sleek in his greatcoat. He took a gamble when he sent Pavel up to act as his mouthpiece, a strategy aimed at defusing those first few seconds of shock in which a man might do something foolish, before the realities hit home and accommodation replaced rebellion as the motive force of action. It wasn’t much of a gamble – Lev’s gun made sure of that – but a gamble nonetheless. I thought I knew its origin. Karpov liked Pavel. The way they had stood together, sharing a smoke, their faces lighting up with every puff. While Lev paced and awaited orders, they shared a moment’s peace: time enough to discuss procedure, and to comment on a woman’s beauty. We in the car witnessed it all with stoic resignation; slaughterhouse cattle on the threshold of the knacker’s barn. All we could do was watch and wait. I remember that, despite the cold, sweat kept gathering on the inside of my eye-patch until I was forced to mop it up with a corner of my handkerchief.

  The caretaker held the door open for them, then quickly disappeared back into his apartment; he had long since learned to display no curiosity. Pavel mounted the stairs, reading the nameplates off doors whenever they got to a new landing. Lev was right behind him, his eyes transparent in the staircase light. Here and there he would stop to spit tobacco from one corner of the mouth. They stopped on the fourth floor, in front of a door marked ‘Braun’. A sliver of light bled from under its wood.

  ‘He’s pretending he’s Braun?’ Lev asked.

  ‘No. He’s hiding with the Brauns. Now, not another word. I do the talking.’

  Pavel reached out a hand and twice rapped the door. A shadow moved inside the apartment’s hallway, then the silence of indecision.

  ‘Who is it?’ sounded through the door.

  ‘Herr Braun? We need to talk to you. Open up, please.’ His German gentle and educated; a doctor making a house call. The door opened a crack.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Please,’ said Pavel. ‘Don’t do anything stupid. All we want is to talk to the Professor.’

  The man started to say something, a denial of knowledge, and close the door on them. Then he saw Lev’s gun. It wasn’t pointed at anything in particular but he got the point.

  ‘Russians?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m American. Please. We just want to talk.’

  The man hung his head and let them in. Chez Braun: a room, a kitchen, and the toilet out on the landing. In the living room the marital bed stood squeezed right next to the sofa. A cracked mirror adorned the wall. The place smelled of cauliflower and burned wood varnish. One kitchen cupboard lay dismantled to serve as firewood. Braun’s wife turned at the cooker, wearing her coat indoors against the cold. She saw the gun and started crossing herself. Pavel nodded to her in greeting, then put a finger to his lips.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked, the voice reassuring even in whisper.

  By way of an answer Braun pushed to one side the sagging sofa. It slid with ease, the floor long worn smooth by the motion. The backboard hid a half-sized door, visible only by its wooden knob and hinges. Pavel bent to open it, but Lev shouldered him aside. He took a deep breath, flaring his nostrils, then tore the door open and leapt inside.

  Behind the door lay a closet big enough for a cot and a writing desk, minus the chair; one would have to work from bed. On the cot sat the Professor: an elderly man wearing a dressing gown over his sweater and slacks; the eyes overlarge behind thick slabs of glass; Prussian whiskers and an unkempt air of genius. There was no window from which he could have thrown himself, but even so Lev took no chances. He jumped on the old man and pushed him into the wall; tied his wrists with a length of wire, then stuck two fingers inside his mouth to search his gums for cyanide. It was a well-executed, methodical arrest. He even confiscated the man’s glasses for purposes of disorientation. Pavel watched it all through the open door. He only stepped through once Lev had straightened up, pleased with his handiwork. There was a bloom of colour on the Georgian’s cheek, from the exercise. The Professor, by contrast, was deathly pale.

  ‘Manfred! Wilma!’ he called out past the two men who filled his closet. ‘Who is this? Are they Russians?’

  ‘The dark one says he is American. He speaks German, though.’

  A glimmer of hope woke in the Professor’s myopic eye. Lev yanked him up by the crook of his arm, then dropped him back on the cot when he saw Pavel moving to intervene. The gun rose and perched itself in the soft of Pavel’s neck.

  ‘Easy now.’

  ‘I just wanted to ask him to collect his papers.’

  He gestured to the stacks layered upon desk and floor; page upon page of equations and notes, all in the same fastidious hand. ‘Karpov will want them.’

  Lev considered this. ‘You do it. Haldemann can give you instructions.’

  Pavel bent to follow the command, but there was hardly enough space to move. Grudgingly, Lev backed out of the doorway in order to make space. He sat crouching in the exit, his eyes alert to each of their movements. The Brauns stood behind him, holding hands. Bent low, picking up papers, all Pavel could see of them were their legs and those hands, folded in companionship. To his side, still lying on his cot, the Professor quietly began to weep.

  ‘You need to tell me which of the papers are the most important, Professor. We can’t take them all.’ Pavel located a leather satchel and opened it up. ‘How about this folder here? Will you need this?’

  ‘What will you do to me?’

  ‘You are a famous man, Professor. These people’ – he pointed to Lev – ‘they just want to talk.’

  ‘He’s a Russian?’

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  Haldemann lost control of himself then: broke into sobs that shook his whole body, until Pavel laid a hand on his cheek and shushed him like a little girl. Abruptly, in between sobs, the man told him about his modest little dream. It was as though he had rehearsed it. All he’d ever wanted, he told Pavel, was a cottage by the sea. The Ostsee, if he had any choice, though any sea would do, he loved the smell of it, the brine and the sand; it reminded him of childhood. And in this cottage he would devote himself to the breeding of snails. Pavel thought he had misunderstood at first; mixed up the word, or simply misheard. Then it dawned on him.

  ‘For
eating, you mean?’ he asked him, still busy stroking Haldemann’s hand.

  ‘ Ja, ja,’ the man nodded. ‘For eating.’ He mimed the act of sinking his fork in a shell and eating its contents, his cheeks dry now, though still salty with tears.

  ‘Professor,’ Pavel told him politely, ‘you need to tell me which papers to pack.’

  Behind them, in the doorway, Lev barked at them to hurry the fuck up.

  There may have been time, in that closet, to smuggle a question past Lev’s vigilance. A moment was all Pavel needed. Surely he will have wanted to know how much Karpov’s prize was really worth. I know that I have lost sleep over it for a good twenty years. He must have asked him, then. Surely he will have asked. About the German bomb. How close they had got, Haldemann and his colleagues, down in their underground lab. Perhaps it hadn’t been so much a question as an exchange of glances while he tended to the Professor’s tears: a touch, a gesture, a twitch of the mouth. Enough to constitute a question and an answer, and perhaps just a little bit more: an agreement about their mutual future.

  I know it must have happened, back in the Brauns’ closet, in that half moment when Lev patted his pockets for a fresh twist of tobacco, or when the Hausfrau distracted him with her confused offer of a cup of Ersatzkaffee. It eludes me, however, the precise nature of their secret communication. Try as I might, I have never been able to put it down on paper. It is a hole at the centre of the story. It isn’t the only one.

  His dream divulged, Haldemann calmed down sufficiently to assist in the selection of his papers. Pavel filled up the satchel, then helped the old man step through the half-sized doorway and into Lev’s custody. The wire cuffs were biting into the Professor’s wrists and cutting off the circulation; his hands looked grey and lifeless. He may never have felt Pavel’s furtive squeeze designed to wish him good fortitude. Without another look at the Brauns, Lev marched them out into the corridor, Haldemann walking first, and the Russian last, his gun in Pavel’s back. Short-sighted and unable to support himself against the banister, the Professor moved very slowly, probing for the stairs with his feet before every step. He stopped to catch his breath on the third-floor landing, Lev skittish and snarling at him to keep moving.

  ‘I really thought you would try something,’ he said to Pavel as they resumed their descent. ‘Karpov said you’d be the kind of man to try something. He said he read it in your file.’

  Pavel just shook his head.

  ‘That mysterious file,’ he complained. ‘I don’t know where you got it from, but someone’s been telling you stories.’

  Lev grinned and spat tobacco on the floor.

  On the second-floor landing, Pavel missed a step and stumbled forward. He fell into Haldemann’s back, then reached out with his arms, to catch him lest he fall. His pale, fine-fingered hands missed the old man’s shoulder and grabbed his neck and chin instead.

  They used to slaughter chickens like this.

  When it was done, Pavel eased him gently to the floor. He turned to face Lev, his features calm and composed. Between them, in the staircase, the bark of broken bone. The Georgian stood, wide-eyed, choking on his twist of tobacco.

  There you have it: Professor Dr Joseph Haldemann, rocket scientist, dead as a doornail. All this time my story has been about him, and no sooner does he take the stage than he dies, his neck broken, the taste of imaginary snail still fresh on his palate. He didn’t know a thing about Fosko, Söldmann, and all the rest; had spent his days in ignorance, hiding out with the Brauns, his proletarian relatives by marriage, and slinking back into his shelter behind the sofa whenever someone thought to ring the bell. Oh, he had heard them, the stories of scientists who were being rounded up by the Russians and shipped eastward, to serve his namesake in the fortification of Socialism in One Country. The past two years had not been easy for the good Professor. First the Reich fell apart, and with it his hopes of unlocking the atom’s secret. Then he found he had little hope of denazification on account of his distinguished record of service for yesterday’s Heimat. As a potential war criminal, he was eligible only for the lowest category of ration card and consequently starved. But at least he was in the western half of the city, safe – or so he thought – from the Bolsheviks and their voracious appetite for German science.

  As soon as he heard that the Soviets had no compunction about venturing into their allies’ sectors for ill-masked abductions, and had compiled lists of preferential targets, he went into hiding. Cousin Manfred had a secret room. In the years of the Reich it had briefly housed a nephew who Witnessed to Jehova but saw this as no reason to share the burdens of camp life alongside Yids and Queers. Back then, Haldemann had known and kept his mouth shut; now he came looking for shelter himself. Manfred Braun wasn’t enthusiastic, either about the Professor as a person, or at the prospect of having another mouth to feed, but the stamp collection the disgraced Nazi handed over to him did much to sweeten that particular pill. Not that Manfred gave a monkey’s about stamps but he soon learned that he could get five pounds of fresh steak for a single pre-Napoleonic Thurn-und-Taxis, and that was good enough for him.

  But there’s no point in dwelling on Haldemann much longer. He was a scared old man, with crimes on his conscience, and a brain full of formulas that could scorch the earth. More to the point, he was dead; died mid-step, his hands numb and feet probing to escape a fall.

  There can’t have been much pain. The execution had been too professional for that. It is the executioner one should pity. There he stood, moist of eye, before Lev’s loaded gun, asking himself whether he was visiting death upon those he loved most dearly.

  Anders was restless. Pavel and the blond Russian had been gone for a quarter-hour. How long did it take to pick up one man? Sonia said he was called Haldemann. The name rang a bell somehow; perhaps he had heard it on the radio.

  ‘Is he important?’ he asked.

  ‘Fosko was willing to pay thousands of pounds for him.’

  The boy whistled. He had never met anyone quite as important as that.

  His body hurt, and he was sure now that his insides were leaking, filling him up with his own blood. Even his hands and feet felt bloated, and he did not seem to be able to get enough breath. He wondered whether one could drown from bleeding on the inside. If so, he hoped Pavel would return to be with him when it happened. Perhaps they would kiss again, never mind it being yucky.

  Beside him, Sonia sat as stiff as a doll. She did not react when he reached over and squeezed her hand, nor when he raised a hand to remove a strand of hair that had fallen to mask her face.

  ‘No need to worry,’ he whispered to her. ‘They’ll be right out.’ There was no telling whether or not she had heard him. Anders sat and wondered how she could be so aloof.

  At long last Pavel emerged. He was carrying an old man in his arms, staggering under his weight. A bruise showed in his face, narrow and oblong, from ear to mouth. Anders heard Karpov curse in Russian. Sonia did not move, only her lip started to tremble. Anders wished she would get a hold on herself and tell him what the hell was going on.

  She saw it and knew he was lost to her. Perhaps she had already known it when he’d left her in the car. He hadn’t kissed her. She hadn’t asked him to. It had violated their mutual sense of decorum. Now he was carrying a corpse.

  It was clear to her that he must have killed the man. It was there in his face, and in Water-Eye’s angry gesture. The thought chilled her: that her Pavel was a killer. Everything ended here. The only question left to her was whether she would live through the night. Suddenly, in her chest, there unfolded an enormous need to live. It took her by surprise. She watched Karpov run over to Pavel, furious. The third Russian emerged from the building and saw they had been left unguarded. He rushed over to the car, waving his gun. Not one of them had made a move to escape.

  Sonia watched them talking, Pavel and Karpov. At first, the Russian was agitated, but within a few moments he had calmed. The cigarette case appeared in his hand, took the
place of his gun. The two men strolled the street, smoked and talked. They would be negotiating about Anders’ life, and her own. It angered her that it was this way: two men smoking, figuring out whether or not she should live. Pavel looked like he had done this all his life. God only knew what he had left to offer; she would have thought he’d long run out of trumps. He had put the corpse down, and the old whiskered man was lying on the cobblestones, his head loose upon its trunk. The neck was broken. She looked back up, to Pavel’s hands, and found no trace of violence there. An hour earlier those very hands had held her own; had touched her cheek, and the rim of one ear. She hammered on the car window, but he was too far away to hear it. Eventually, they concluded their talk. Both men looked impassive, as though little enough had happened. Pavel stepped towards the car and, despite Lev’s hiss, she rolled down the window. Pavel bent forward a little, gazed in. His eyes were veiled in shadow.

  ‘They’ll let you go. All three of you. Peterson – your job is to explain Fosko’s death to the British. Without mentioning Karpov and his men. I gave him my word you could do it. On my life, you understand.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Bring the boy to a hospital. And give her the money. Anything you can find at Fosko’s. It belongs to her. Can you do this for me?’

  Only then did he deign to turn to her. He looked as he always had. Eyes like moist pebbles, and a voice to charm killers.

  ‘Sonia?’

  Tears blinded her. She lifted her hands into fists, then buried her face in them.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ she started to ask, but never got past the first word. There was no hope for an answer.

  A moment later she heard the boy call out and knew Pavel was gone. She did not see whether he’d just turned around or had been ushered away. Then Lev’s bark: ‘Get out, all of you!’ Anders made her leave the car. He opened the door and lifted her ankles out onto the street. The click of high heels on cobbles. She stood up mechanically, braced herself against the cold. Behind them, car doors closed and engines started. Wheels turning upon the icy road. Then silence. When she finally turned she was relieved to find the street empty.