AFTERWARDS
WEDNESDAY 18 AUGUST 1943
In the early morning, just after dawn, a contingent of German soldiers arrived at Syrets concentration camp. They had dogs, and they selected exactly one hundred of the surviving prisoners before marching them to the nearby ravine at Babi Yar. The ravine was full of bodies. The officer in charge asked if there were any blacksmiths among the prisoners. A handful of arms were raised in reply.
These men were taken to an area beyond an earth escarpment. There they found a collection of long metal rails. While the blacksmiths were put to work making a huge barbecue pit, criss-crossed with a lattice of iron rails, the rest of the men were fitted with fetters and chains and handed a shovel each. Their job, that day and over the days and weeks that followed, was to dig through the layers of decaying flesh and bone, preparing the bodies for incineration.
At night, the men slept in a prepared dugout, their hands over their faces to try and mask the stench of the bodies. Fires were prepared in the barbecue pits, and tombstones were brought from a Kyiv graveyard to strengthen the structure. At the bottom of the pits, the prisoners stacked firewood. Then came a layer of bodies, topped with more firewood, then more bodies, and yet more firewood and more bodies until the stack – topped with the barbecue grill – was as high as the fences around the Syrets camp. There were many pits and many stacks. Each of them, according to designers’ careful calculations, contained at least two thousand bodies. When each stack was complete, it was drenched in oil and set alight.
The smell of burning flesh drifted across Kyiv for many weeks. The Yar was eight kilometres away from the piles of rubble that had once been Khreshchatyk and people in the street tried to ignore the clouds of oily smoke, slowly shredding in the wind, but the smell made it impossible. Yids, they told each other.
At the start of the second week of excavations in the Yar, a prisoner called Davydov had started on a corner of the ravine that had yet to be touched. By now, he was paying little attention to individual corpses. Men, women, grandfathers, babies, it made no difference. After days and days with the shovel and a crude facemask, every face looked the same. He was a Jew himself, and he knew that he, too, would end up on one of the stacks. Partly because of his faith, but mainly because he knew the secret that the Germans were trying so hard to hide.
Then, on this sunny morning in late August, his attention was caught by a youngish looking woman sprawled on her back. She was in better condition than most of the bodies he’d seen, and – most unusually – she wasn’t naked. He paused, leaning on his shovel, aware that the nearest SS man was busy lighting a cigarette. The woman had been beautiful. He knew she had. Long legs. Lovely shape to her face. A wisp of blonde hair where the camp barber hadn’t quite finished the job. Even the grey and white fatigues couldn’t hide the way she must have been in real life, he thought, reaching for the shovel again.
*
Russian spearhead troops reached the banks of the Dnieper shortly after midnight on Saturday 6 November. They crossed the river, swept through the western suburbs, and had occupied the city centre by dawn. It had been raining for most of the night, but a watery sun shed a thin yellow light over the columns of weary Soviet troops crossing the foot of Khreshchatyk. The handful of veterans who had defended Kyiv against the Germans, barely two years earlier, stared at the grey ruins that lined the city’s biggest boulevard. They remembered shops here, hotels, theatres, trams, people, the beating heart of an enormous city. Kyiv, to their knowledge, had been neither bombarded nor bombed. So what can have happened?
Slowly, over the days to come, some of them talked to local people. They explained about the surprises lying in wait for the Germans, the lull before the storm, and then the week of savage violence that had ripped out the city’s heart and led to so much slaughter. The Yar, they said. Hold your nose and take a look at the ravine.
Some had the opportunity and took it. What they found, at first sight, was a disappointment but an hour or so in the ravine itself told a different story. Fragments of bone. Tiny gobbets of human flesh. Scorch marks on the bare earth. And no birds.
Another troop of soldiers were tasked to investigate the banks of the Dnieper beneath the towering walls of the Pechersk Monastery. One of them, wary of hidden mines, spotted the dull gleam of something that might conceivably have been valuable. He stopped and bent to retrieve it, brushing away the sand. It was a tooth, capped in gold. A religious man, he gazed at it for a moment, before slipping it into a pocket, looking up at the monastery and crossing himself.
*
Tam Moncrieff had been back at his desk in St James’s Street for nearly a year and a half. Everyone who had reason to work with him agreed that he’d changed. A lot of his confidence seemed to have gone. He was less sure of himself, less prepared to take a risk or two, somehow smaller. Maybe it was something that would pass, said some. Maybe not.
Only Ursula Barton knew the truth. That Moncrieff had taken on a challenge and lost. That his innate sense of fairness, and his nose for life’s fakes, had – in the end – brought him nothing but grief. He was still efficient, still reliable, still prepared to work impossible hours to see an operation to its end. He still had the knack of motivating newcomers, of sharing the spoils of his own rich experience, of gently – and sometimes not so gently – mocking the wilder delusions of the intelligence world. But his colleagues, people who still admired him, were right: that he no longer had the appetite for either risk or danger, that under his newly bluff exterior he was fragile inside and still needed very careful handling.
By Christmas, there was at last a hint that the war might come to an end. Bomber Command was bringing cities across the Third Reich to their knees. Wehrmacht troops were pulling back on the Italian front. And the Russian steamroller, heading west, appeared to be unstoppable.
Moncrieff, as usual, was planning to celebrate Christmas alone at the Glebe House. His preference for his own company had become the subject of quiet gossip in the corridors of MI5. Some said he was a born recluse. Others weren’t so sure. Once again, only Barton knew the real story.
Before his departure to Scotland, she took him to lunch at St Ermin’s Hotel. She’d knitted him a scarf with wool she’d been hoarding for years. The wool, a shade of the richest crimson, had been a long-ago present from her mother. Barton didn’t much like knitting, neither was she very good at it, but she knew that red suited Moncrieff and she hoped that he’d wear it.
She’d also been waiting for the moment to broach another subject, infinitely more personal, and she sensed that this might be it.
She’d been careful to book a table in the corner of the restaurant. She was on good terms with the maître d’ and in exchange for a modest pourboire, he agreed not to seat the neighbouring table. A degree of privacy, they both agreed, could be the essence of a frank conversation.
Moncrieff was waiting in the bar when she arrived. He bought her a large schooner of Tio Pepe and proposed a toast to the coming year. They both knew an invasion was in the offing, and Moncrieff was very happy to have been given a role in the many deceptions that would precede the first Allied boots on French soil. Working from the solitude of his own office suited him very nicely. As did the prospect of a Christmas week alone in the Glebe House.
They finished their aperitifs and went through to the restaurant. Barton had pre-ordered a bottle of Chablis, and it was waiting for them on the table. The moment they sat down, the maître d’ appeared to fill their glasses.
‘More than agreeable.’ Moncrieff had taken a sip of the wine. Now he was looking at the label. ‘Are we celebrating?’
‘In a way, yes. I’m sorry, Tam. Our line of work…’ she frowned. ‘… it’s all deception, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? I’m not with you.’
‘Maybe not deception. Maybe something kinder. Timing, Tam. It’s all about timing. I’m afraid I need to be frank with you. There’s something I should have shared but I haven’t. Is that deliberate? I
’m afraid it is. And am I going to put things right? Here’s hoping.’ She reached for her glass. ‘To truth and beauty,’ she was smiling. ‘Keats, I think.’
Moncrieff sat back, mystified, watching her bend and retrieve her handbag. She put it on her lap a moment, studying him the way a doctor might assess a patient, then she made a tiny gesture of resignation and handed him the envelope.
‘It came from Schultz,’ she said. ‘He sent it via Dahlerus in Sweden. I’m afraid I’ve hung onto it for quite a while.’
‘How long?’
‘In all?’ She was counting backwards. ‘More than two years.’
‘Two years?’ Moncrieff was staring at her. Birger Dahlerus was a favoured go-between, a Swedish businessman who had the ear of both the Abwehr and MI5. Both Moncrieff and Schultz had used him in the past.
‘Open it, Tam,’ she smiled. ‘Please.’
‘Must I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will it hurt?’
‘It might. But in the end, I promise, it will be for the good.’
‘Sounds like some ghastly medicine.’
‘You’re right. That’s exactly what it is.’
Moncrieff was gazing at the envelope. She’d hooked him, and she knew it. Just a hint of the old Tam, she thought: playful, bold, the prisoner of his own curiosity.
He opened the envelope. Inside was a photograph, black and white, head and shoulders. He picked it up and stared at it for a long moment. Barton caught a tiny tremor of movement as his hand began to shake.
‘It’s Bella,’ he looked up. ‘Where did Schultz get this?’
‘An SS Standartenführer gave it to him. You were right about the camp, Tam. Wrong about the location.’
‘Where was it?’
‘Kyiv.’
‘Babi Yar?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘Syrets?’
‘Syrets.’
‘There was no one left. I’ve read the NKVD reports. The SS murdered them all.’
‘Not quite all, Tam. A handful escaped but Bella wasn’t among them.’
‘And Schultz?’
‘We don’t know. We can only hope he’s still alive.’ Her hand briefly covered his as her gaze returned to the photograph. ‘I’m very sorry, Tam.’
He stared at her. Then he turned the photo over and left it face down on the tablecloth.
‘For the best,’ he said woodenly. ‘I expect.’
‘For the best,’ Barton agreed. She held the silence for a moment. ‘On a lighter note, there’s also this.’ From the bag she produced the scarf. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t wrapped it up, Tam. All my own work, I’m afraid.’
‘You knitted this?’ Moncrieff was unfolding it.
‘I did.’
‘But you can’t knit. You told me once. You said you hadn’t the fingers for it. Or the patience.’
‘Both true, Tam. I’d tell you how long it took me, but that would be shaming. It’s yours, Tam. Wear it for me in those hills of yours, promise?’
Moncrieff nodded. He was holding the scarf against his cheek, feeling its softness, sniffing it, smelling it. Then he wound it round his neck.
‘How does it look?’
‘Festive.’
‘Seriously?’
‘It looks perfect. It suits you. It won’t let you down.’
Moncrieff smiled, and then took the scarf off.
‘It was Bella’s favourite colour, did you know that?’
‘I guessed, Tam.’ She reached for her glass again. ‘There had to be some reason she ended up in bloody Moscow.’
The maître d’ returned. He admired the scarf and took their order. Dover sole was back on the menu, a sure sign – thought Moncrieff – that soon the bloody war might at last be over. They talked office politics for a while and Barton shared a story about Guy Liddell. Recently, she said, he’d written Broadway a stiff note about Kim Philby’s rumoured elevation to a new post but nobody in the swim understood the reason why.
Moncrieff tidied the remains of his fish and then sat back in his chair, gazing out across the restaurant. Finally, he turned Bella’s photograph over again.
‘Imagine I was right,’ he murmured. ‘Imagine she knew the truth about that man but took the secret to the grave. Does anyone deserve that kind of faith?’
About the author
GRAHAM HURLEY is the author of the acclaimed Faraday and Winter crime novels and an award-winning TV documentary maker. Two of the critically lauded series have been shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Award for Best Crime Novel. His French TV series, based on the Faraday and Winter novels, has won huge audiences. The first Spoils of War novel, Finisterre, was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Graham now writes full-time and lives with his wife, Lin, in Exmouth.
WWW.GRAHAMHURLEY.CO.UK
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Kyiv (Spoils of War) Page 33