Authors: Ben Pastor
Bernoulli nodded. A shadow of stubble on his razor-bald head betrayed a receding hairline, an antithesis to Bora’s thick skullcap of dark hair. “I was told, yes. We’re not liable for our relatives. Why, sometimes we can’t be held liable for the friends we have. Are you sure Tibyetsky gave you no hints during his residence here?”
“None that I caught. Neither of us was ready to acknowledge our connection.”
“Would he have mentioned his
collateral
to the RSHA?”
“I doubt it. Over there he refused to talk altogether. The fact that while in their custody he asked for Colonel Bentivegni – and for me, too – made me hope. Now it’s too late.”
The storm was directly above Kharkov. Thunderclaps boomed close enough to indicate that lightning must be striking the neighbourhood. The metal-roofed sheds where Kostya had stolen gasoline came to mind, lined up along the river south-east of here. In the muggy guardroom, Bernoulli unhooked the clasp of his collar, revealing a dazzlingly white shirt. “I needn’t tell an interrogator that lack of oral communication can be replaced by the written word.”
“Tibyetsky had no time. His forcible removal from this centre —”
“Yet even under great duress those who want to leave a clue will try to scrawl it quickly on virtually any surface, using any means available. I speak from courtroom experience, and you yourself showed me the prayer pencilled on a scrap of paper by the Alexandrovka Mennonites.”
“I went through Khan’s room carefully, tonight for the third time. Wallpaper, furniture, even the door: there’s no message scribbled anywhere.”
Bernoulli sighed; or else let out a deep breath. “Right. And the room was not his security. His tank was.”
Rain had begun to fall outside, hopefully breaking the lightning storm. Slowly the two men finished their coffee; when the light went off, they sat in silence with their thoughts
(Bora wondering whether he should mention Taras Tarasov, and deciding against it).
“I’m back where I started from, Dr Bernoulli.”
In the morning, the military judge left before Bora got up. When they’d parted ways five hours earlier, he’d said he had several matters to look into, and would start in good time. By 8 a.m., through flooded streets, Bora drove to divisional headquarters, where a still-drowsy von Salomon received him, signed not one but two authorization sheets and dismissed him, having exchanged no more than a “Good day” with him.
Outside the colonel’s office, the paper-pushing lieutenant supplied Bora with the most recent map of the minefields between Kharkov and the river. “We can vouch for those we laid, Herr Major. The wooded areas by the Donets remain iffy even after clearing. Partisan gangs are known to switch around our actual and dummy minefield signs often enough, so you can’t really trust them. Same for the right bank of the Udy, too.”
“Not the Udy at Kharkov, I take it.”
“No, sir. Much further down, past Borovoye and Schubino.”
The meandering, boggy course of the Donets tributary, full of islets and false rivers, bordered Krasny Yar from a west-north-west direction. Bora scanned the map and told himself he’d worry about it when he got there. Meanwhile, before heading for the
Kombinat
, there was enough time for him to drive to the northern suburb of Pomorki.
Just before the turn-off from the Belgorod road, across a field smothered by wild hyacinth, he saw the wooded rise where a half-hidden cluster of small
novyi burzhuy
villas stood, built in the ’20s for the members of a reborn commercial and artistic middle class. Most had fallen into disrepair, but Larisa’s less than others. Bora entered (in low gear) her overgrown garden, marked by a narrow corduroy path that allowed him not to get stuck in the muddy grass. A lean-to hut of unpainted logs had been added to the one-floored
dacha
, and deeply contrasted
with it. The side of the original house was graced with a wooden terrace; only part of its trellis remained standing, but even the segment that had collapsed was covered with blooming vines.
In front of the log cabin, a florid young woman in a white kerchief was tending chickens. She froze with her hands full of feed at the arrival of the German vehicle. Not wanting to alarm her even more, Bora stopped several metres back and addressed her in Russian. It took a few minutes for the girl to feel safe enough to answer his questions and let him in.
At the
Kombinat
, Russian prisoners poured buckets of crushed bricks out at the edge of the green in front of Stark’s office, where puddles gaped in the dirt of the parking spaces.
“Wipe your boots on the rag out there, will you?” was the first thing the commissioner said, the moment he heard the front door opening. He read the paperwork Bora had delivered, told his assistant to process it, and resumed what he’d been doing: applying his signature in indelible pencil onto blank documents. “I don’t have much time, Major, as we’re beginning to gear up: I’m expecting my agriculture and forestry specialists to report in at last. But do sit down a moment. You’re doubly in luck today. There are two hundred horses in this shipment, a good part of them Budenny and Chernomor breed or half-breed, the tough rangy mounts you want to have on this terrain. Even though you have to thank that old bastard Russki marshal for it, he always did know his cavalry animals.”
Bora declined a seat. “It didn’t do him any good when the Poles bowled him over at Komarov,
Konarmiya
or not. But I’m very grateful to Budenny for breeding mounts we’ll use against him.”
“And that’s not the best news. Or rather, given that someone’s death is somebody else’s gain – how do you say it in Latin? You young intellectual officers were given the opportunity of studying these fancy sentences, while in my time we had to make do with business school.”
“
Mors tua vita mea
, Herr Gebietskommissar?”
“Exactly. The
mors
in question is Brigadeführer Reger-Saint Pierre’s. His staff car struck an anti-tank mine near Mirgorod two days ago. He’s done with this vale of tears, horses included: the biggest piece of him left is a booted right foot.”
“That’s highly unfortunate.”
“Why, did you know him? Before expressing your sympathy, consider that I’m having the Karabakh stallion, barely arrived in Mirgorod, shipped back here. I can, I can – of course I can! What am I district commissioner for, if I can’t pull strings the way I see fit? The two general officers next in line to receive him don’t need to hear about it. Turian-Chai is getting an Olympic equestrian to ride him, or he becomes horse stew.”
“Don’t even say it in jest. How soon can he be here?”
“It might be ten days to two weeks.” Stark drove his pencil into a tabletop sharpener, and quickly turned the wheel. “I’ve got some pull, but I’m not a miracle-worker. And so that you’re not tempted to take it as a favour, I expect you and your army colleagues to think and speak well of this administration. Now that Army Group Kempf is moving to Kharkov, we politicians need all the military support we can get.”
Bora hadn’t heard the news; a clear sign that the attack on the Kursk salient was drawing near. The possibility secretly electrified him.
Glancing at his out-mail basket, Geko Stark checked the end of his pencil with the tip of his tongue. “Are you bound back to town, by any chance? If so, I’ll entrust you with hand-delivering these letters at your earliest convenience to the Southern Railway Station
Feldpost
. They’re important, and you’ll notice one of them is going to the General Army Office Medical Inspectorate, Personnel Branch, to track down that medic of yours.”
Bora had not anticipated another whirl through Kharkov, but one would have never known by the promptness of his assent. “Will do, Commissioner. Thanks for the trust.”
Trust was a term used elastically by
Abwehr
officers. From
the
Kombinat
, Bora drove straight to divisional headquarters; there he opened the letters, read them and ably re-sealed them before taking them to the Field Post Office. Not one to waste time, he then called at the SS first-aid station on Sumskaya, and asked to meet the surgeon there.
Merefa, 2.10 p.m.
I’m really back where I began. At the SS first-aid station on Sumskaya they lied to me again, feigning ignorance, which means I couldn’t speak to the man they had over at the RSHA jail the evening of 6 May. Worse: when I told them I know for a fact (from Odilo Mantau) that their medic was one of the last to see the prisoner alive, they flat-out denied it. It’s a pattern. Khan’s body was on the premises on 7 May, when they told me to my face they knew nothing about it; his post-mortem was carried out by their head surgeon, and only by a stratagem was I able to secure a copy of it. This reticence, along with my doubts about the role of UPA and NKVD (with or without the babushkas), leads me to wonder whether and to what extent the Security Service might be involved in this operation. All they’ll admit is that there was a candy wrapper in the victim’s pocket, which they threw away! On the other hand, do I really know what Dr Mayr at Hospital 169 is all about? Was he really too busy to do a post-mortem on Platonov when I asked him to? Is he unaware of Weller’s destination, as he says, or – as I suspect – is he behind it, for reasons of his own? He surely buried the old man in a hurry; and in the hospital garden, to boot. I may be reading too much into this, but I haven’t much to go on.
To all appearances, Khan ingested poison hours after the man sent from Sumskaya measured his blood pressure (the tantrum occasioned the check-up). A deadly dose of nicotine laced a lend-lease American D ration, identical to those Khan brought with him when he defected. Are we sure? Could things have gone otherwise? And what’s “otherwise”?
Here are some of the possibilities:
a.
The poison was administered in a different manner, for example by injection or other means, the night before Khan’s death. Objections: does such a delayed-action poison exist, and did anyone other than an SS medic have access to the cell? Most of all, traces of the poison were found in Khan’s stomach: hence he’d eaten it.
b.
For whatever unrelated reason, Khan became ill after waking up on 7 May, and was opportunistically administered the lethal dose during first aid. Objections: if Mantau can be believed, Khan was already beyond help by the time the medical personnel arrived from Sumskaya. And in any case, how did the killers know Khan would conveniently take sick, and what would have occasioned his illness in the first place?
c.
Khan did away with himself, and I’m butting my head against a wall. Objection: would a man of his temperament choose suicide, and ask for help in addition?
At any rate, lips are sealed over at Sumskaya, and I cannot fathom why someone inside the Security Service or the RSHA would kill a precious element like Khan Tibyetsky.
By mail last week a former colleague communicated bad news from the days with the 1st Cavalry Division. Our old regimental sergeant went on emergency leave three months ago because his wife, severely wounded in an air raid, had had both arms amputated. They’d been married twenty-two loving years, no children. He carried her photograph everywhere (we teased him for it). Well, on the anniversary of their wedding day last February he shot her and himself in the clinic where she was recovering.
Accustomed to bad news as I’m becoming, I was shocked nevertheless, as I knew the man and never expected him to fall apart so completely. Perhaps, as Cardinal Hohmann says, we’re all turning brittle in our “delusion of man-made glory”. I don’t feel brittle, but it may be that I keep my nose to the grindstone and don’t indulge much in melancholy. Our old comrade’s tragedy, however, induced me to sit down with Bauml during my latest stint at Bespalovka, and
talk to him man-to-man about his brother’s death in Stalingrad. It is better if he tells, rather than keeps everything inside like our old regimental sergeant.
It was hard: we both fought back our emotions to keep the conversation going. In the end, I hope the meeting was of some help to him. Bauml thanked me, at any rate. As for me, I can only hope nothing like it comes my way; and that’s all I can say about it. Incidentally, what he reports of the terrible day his brother was left behind with the desperately injured got me to rethink a little the scenario of Platonov’s death.
MEREFA, 3.38 P.M.
“Jesus, Martin, it’s the fourth shot you’ve put away in ten minutes. What’s going on?”
“I’m thinking.”
Back from delivering the Platonov dossier to the Kiev Branch Office, Lattmann had stopped by with mail and updates for his friend. He now hefted the bottle he’d brought for him from the city. “It’s a hell of a strong vodka to use as a thinking aid.”
“Well, here’s one for the road.” Seated in front of the minefield map, Bora drained another glass. “Scots blood, you know: holds drink well.”
“Ah, yes. When it doesn’t make you hare-brained.”
“Says who?”
“Your brother Peter, for one.” Taking advantage of the lowered defences alcohol was likely to cause even in Bora, Lattmann shot from the hip. “I hope it’s not true what he says: that you made him swear he’ll ask for a transfer away from Russia if you’re killed.”
“It’s not true.”
“So Peter made it up? He’s worried, for somebody who made it up.”
“Pilots exaggerate everything.”