The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  The old man was aware that nothing could stop the forward motion of the chain reaction all the way to the villa. Nothing, that was, except the application of an external force. Newton’s first law of motion.

  He thought now about the Russian woman.

  Vezzani had told him about the story he’d heard about her while he’d been in the Spanish prison. She’d worked on a wayward member of the Galician mafia for two days. She’d done things to him that Vezzani had never heard of before. But the crucial aspect of the story, as far as the old man had been concerned, had been that the Spaniard had confessed his sins within the first three hours under her hands. The old man had decided to use her services, which he required on the rare occasions he felt threatened or compromised, from then on. But there had been nothing to compare to the risk to his safety that he was experiencing now.

  He didn’t have to continue killing himself. Sometimes he considered giving it up. The scholar in him ached for a purely cerebral life. But it was part of him. Nothing compared to it. Nothing at all. He understood Watson’s addiction. Besides, his enemies still needed to pay for what they had done to him. Didn’t they?

  Apart from the killings, Vezzani had been ordered to send all of the DVDs to the relatives of the dead girls after a period of three months following the old man’s death. He had promised him that he’d be well taken care of. He didn’t doubt that Vezzani would perform that last act. The old man would take his final revenge even as he was rotting in the earth.

  ‘Meet the Russian woman sooner than we spoke about.’

  ‘I will,’ Vezzani said.

  Encrypted messages would be sent. Electronic funds would be transferred. That done, the Russian woman would come. The old man’s favourite external force.

  He wound down the window and looked out at the forest, just to be sure, a habit from days long gone. The slight breeze rippled through the darkened treetops. Nothing more. Satisfied, he inhaled the scent of the pines, his nostrils flaring. The smell of citrus orange mixed with tinges of vanilla and ammonia evoked memories, as it always did. He was overcome by a sense of regret so profound that he felt unable to move or speak.

  The killing had to continue, to cleanse himself of guilt too.

  This was how he justified his descent into depravity, his conjoining with the darkness.

  21

  Outskirts of Berlin, 1945, two days later.

  They came for SS Colonel Lutz Richter early in the morning after his simple breakfast of black tea, a crust of rye bread, a small piece of cheese and half a hard biscuit. He had to admit it had been generous. But the tea had been tepid, the bread and biscuit stale. The cheese had been flecked with green mildew. Still, it had still been a sign, and one he’d taken to heart. Countless people were starving to death in Europe. He knew that a man’s importance, especially a prisoner’s, could be judged by the amount of food he had to eat each day. It had imbued him with a peculiar sense of optimism, given his predicament.

  There were two guards. Stocky and silent. They did not touch him. He was thrown clothes to wear and dressed hastily, and one used a head gesture to prompt him to move. He walked to the cell door, a pair of rubber-soled but tattered slippers on his feet, the navy-blue jacket on his back streaked with paint and reeking of something that he thought was stale vomit.

  He passed a door to a courtyard that had been left ajar, purposely so perhaps, halfway down a wooden staircase, and caught a glimpse of the splashes of blood on the far wall where a firing squad had been active at dawn. He heard a distant scream carried by the wind, reminding him of the cry of a mating vixen. He smelled faint wafts of fear-induced human waste. He’d had similar sensory experiences on countless occasions during the past decade. But now he was reduced to a luckless victim, rather than a trusted part of the ruling order.

  They carried on down the stairs to what he knew would be an interrogation cell, and the muscles on his face twitched, and he couldn’t stop wringing his hands. His optimism had dissipated. The building had been a Gestapo prison, part of the secret state police’s network of terror throughout Germany and the occupied territories. Their experience of schadenfreude seemed to linger in the air like foul breath.

  At the foot of the stairs there was a long corridor. They walked to the second door on the right. It was made of untreated oak, reinforced with a checked design of iron strips. One of the guards stood beside him, as the other knocked. He heard the harsh voice, and the guards stood either side of the door, and he knew they would remain there for the duration.

  This would be his initial interrogation. He’d been held in the filthy, windowless cell for what had seemed like a couple of days already. He stroked his neck and felt the red lesions left by his second failed attempt at suicide, when he’d first been incarcerated at the interrogation centre. He was forced to sleep naked now. The NKVD had removed everything he could use to kill himself.

  During the last days, he knew that suicide had become almost a national epidemic. It had even occurred in the bunker. He’d been deprived of that. He’d wanted to die. He’d considered suicide honourable compared to capture by the Jewish Bolsheviks. With the end of National Socialism, there’d been nothing to live for. The Third Reich had been his life. Like many of the leading Nazis, including Hitler and Goebbels, he’d been a relatively unsuccessful individual before the rise of the party, despite his high level of intelligence. Overlooked, living on hope and disaffected. He’d been on the fringes of society. All that had changed — for a while.

  He knew it was all over, yet he wished it wasn’t. A guard had shouted to him that Hitler was dead. He hadn’t believed it at first, but did now. He’d decided he wouldn’t try to commit suicide again, even if he could. He wanted a life. He was already planning his way in the new order. He’d consoled himself by acknowledging that it was a natural reaction.

  One of the guards reached over, pulled down on the handle and pushed the door open. Richter felt a sense of menace. He’d been told what the Russians were capable of. And who could blame them? They’d experienced four years of total war since Germany had breached the pact of non-aggression on the twenty-second of June 1941. Then the largest military action in history had been unleashed. Myriad atrocities had taken place in the Soviet Union, as the great force had moved towards Leningrad and Moscow, even by regular army units, many of the German soldiers being little more than boys. They’d acted with an encouraged viciousness that had been tempered on the Western Front. They’d been told that the Russians were subhuman. They were, weren’t they? Himmler had said that all 200,000,000 of them should die on the battlefield. Person by person, they should be made to bleed to death. If only it had been so, he now thought.

  He steadied himself as best he could and walked into the room.

  A man was sitting at a wooden table on a wooden chair. An exceptionally tall, wiry NVKD soldier stood behind him, a couple of feet away. Richter thought the guard looked about nineteen. His skin was as white as oyster flesh, his eyes bright and cerulean. His arms dangled by his sides, and a large leather holster hung on his belt, holding, he guessed, a Nagant revolver. The room was about fifteen feet square. The walls were red brick, the lower ceiling bare stone. The light, coming from a low-voltage bulb, cast an eerie yellow glow.

  The man sitting behind the desk gestured with the point of his chin to the empty seat opposite him. Richter walked over to it and sat down. The door closed behind him almost silently, and in that almost silence his thoughts screamed.

  22

  Outskirts of Berlin, the same day.

  Joseph Kazapov’s temporary NKVD barracks were a collection of three-storey granite buildings that had been built in 1865, according to a brass plaque. He was of insufficient rank to be billeted in a house. The high walls of the perimeter were topped with barbed wire and shards of glass and edged by an asphalt pathway. Fresh-faced Russian troops occupied the wooden guard towers and sentry boxes, the original barrier poles still intact.

  He’d first entered t
he barracks a few days ago, and had thought he’d heard the echoes of the marching feet of the Waffen-SS regiment that had been garrisoned here. He’d looked out at the parade ground that was marked at ten-feet intervals with whitewashed boulders, and it had been empty. The sound had been the wind causing the drainpipes to reverberate.

  His first minutes back, after his time on the frontline in the damp and cold of the make-do observation post, had been like returning to a haven. But still the three-inch scar on his left shoulder, which ended at the bottom of his neck, ached, even after he’d taken a painkiller and a drug that he’d found in the hospital block. The German assault troops had taken military-issue pills daily, he’d been told. Methamphetamine and a cocaine-based stimulant. Perhaps that was why they had fought so hard, so recklessly. Perhaps it allowed them to do the things they’d done, or had dulled their humanity enough not to care.

  While fighting in the Red Army, he’d escaped unscathed from the battles of Rostov and the Sea of Azov. His scar came from a near-fatal blow from a combat knife, wielded by a Waffen-SS panzergrenadier in hand-to-hand fighting in the Battle of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. He’d agreed with his comrades when they said, at the time, that if the unknown Soviet sniper hadn’t blown the back of the grenadier’s head off, he would’ve had his throat cut. He’d found out two months later that the sniper in question was a mother of three from Kiev named Marta Avdeyev. He’d written her a letter, thanking her for her bravery and the virtuousness of her skill, her devotion to the Motherland.

  His office was a cramped, sparsely furnished room with small, lattice windows. Even during the day, he had to turn on his desk lamp to work. He knew that NKVD lieutenants were of little importance. Instantly replaceable, in fact. Ninety per cent of the Red Army’s officer class had been murdered or removed during the purges in the 1930s, the Great Terror. After that, the instrument of the purges, the NKVD, had become the subject of a purge. It was insane. No one was safe. A person’s continued existence seemed to be ruled by blind chance. But it was something he’d learned to accept.

  His life before the war, although subject to the ever-present Stalinist oppression, had still been very different to the monotonous slog of those assigned to the urban factories, or the near servitude of back-breaking work on the rural collective farms. He was fortunate. He had a flair for languages and spoke fluent German and English. His Polish wasn’t half bad either. His pushy mother had been eager for him to do well and he’d excelled at school. There’d even been talk of him going into politics, despite his disdain for it.

  Sitting at his desk now, he took a shot of vodka from a hip flask and lit a cigarette. The SS officer that had occupied the office previously had owned a 78 rpm record player. It was still working, and he’d found a small collection of records in a wooden box, lying in a cabinet behind his swivel chair.

  Taking one out, he put it on. Listened. It was Wagner. He knew that Hitler had said that if anyone wanted to understand National Socialist Germany they must understand Wagner. He’d been told that the last broadcast from Berlin radio was Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. He hadn’t doubted it.

  The Soviet hierarchy also actively encouraged classical music as an important state mission. Up until a year ago, he’d never understood why that was, given that Stalin wasn’t interested in culture other than of a revolutionary nature. But he’d heard a remarkable tale, passed by word of mouth while he’d been fighting in the Caucasus, and which he’d known instinctively hadn’t been just another piece of propaganda dreamed up by the fanatical commissars, the political officers.

  The most celebrated Russian composer of the time, Dmitri Shostakovich, had composed part of his seventh symphony, The Leningrad, amid the 900-day battle for the city. In August 1942, a live performance by the half-starved musicians of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra had been relayed on dozens of loudspeakers. It had revitalized both the army and the civilian population, spurring them on to their eventual victory.

  Despite the inspirational aspects of the story, he’d felt morose when he’d first heard it. He still did. For he knew that even high art was nothing more than a tool of the state, as far as his crass masters were concerned.

  The grand refrains and mythical leitmotifs of Götterdämmerung filled the room, it was an opera he knew, and he turned his head to look out of the window. Beyond the parade ground were grass verges and pools of saplings. There was still no movement on the square, save for a solitary grey squirrel scampering about. Despite the talk of political ambition, he knew his life was worth less than that dumb animal. If he made a mistake, just one, it would mean the end for him. But he was a driven man.

  Following his advice, his mother and sisters had travelled south before the momentous assault on Stalingrad, with his father’s blessing. He’d guessed that Stalin would not allow the army’s lifeblood, the Baku oil fields of Azerbaijan on the south-western shores of the Caspian Sea, to be overrun. He’d encouraged them to attempt a return to his mother’s homeland, Georgia, a Soviet republic, via the gap in the Greater Caucasus mountain range at Baku. He’d said that they should follow the Volga River as it flowed south, to go further south from there, down the north-western shores of the Caspian Sea in Kalmykia, a sparsely populated steppe, the home of the Buddhist horsemen. It had still been an autonomous Soviet republic, then. He knew that others had sought refuge there, including Jews

  He’d joined the Red Army and then the NKVD because his mother had told him the Germans were beasts and had to be crushed. She’d been right, and he’d been wrong. His sisters and mother had never arrived back in her homeland of Georgia. He suspected they’d never left Kalmykia. To find them was his only purpose, now.

  He still dared to hope that the German officer he had captured might in some way help to unravel the mystery of what had happened to his mother and sisters. Lighting another cigarette as soon as the first had burned down to his fingers, he felt the pain of not knowing their fate gnaw at him like the snow and ice of a Russian winter.

  23

  The Russian interrogator had told SS Colonel Lutz Richter that his name was Major Volsky. His NVKD officer’s uniform was tight around his neck and revealed his bulging stomach. It was khaki green, with blue piping around the cuffs of his tunic and up the sides of his breeches. His feet were encased in black leather boots that reached above his calves.

  Richter had first recognized the uniform at the roadside after the staff car had arrived to bring him here. He knew the NKVD was the notorious People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, formed eleven years before. They were feared by everyone, including Red Army generals, since the military chain of command was bypassed. The NKVD hierarchy answered directly to its head, Lavrentiy Beria, a man suspected of raping and killing young women. A sexual sadist, his SS file had said.

  Richter looked at the floor between his knees. He saw an earwig scuttling towards the wall. He noticed spots of dried blood there, and what appeared to be slivers of dead skin. He looked up. High above his head, a meat hook hung from an iron hoop that was bolted to the vaulted ceiling.

  ‘Tell me, German. Why were you so eager to die?’ Volsky sucked hard on an untipped cigarette, blew the smoke out of his hairy nostrils. ‘Why was that?’ He mimicked shooting himself in the head with his stubby thumb and forefinger. ‘Nothing but dark oblivion then, German.’

  Richter ignored him. He thought the man looked about forty, with receding grey-black hair. His teeth were nicotine-stained, and his breath smelled of tobacco and offal. He was tough-looking and, he imagined, uncouth, his eyes gleaming black onyx, his face pitted by what Richter guessed had been childhood smallpox.

  Volsky offered Richter a cigarette and nodded, encouraging him to accept. Richter thought he looked like a seabird, regurgitating food for its young.

  Subtlety isn’t his strongest point, he thought. But he’s no fool.

  He took the cigarette and examined it. Put it between his thin lips. Volsky lit it for him with a
silver lighter which he then returned to the pocket of his breeches.

  It’s my lighter, Richter thought.

  ‘You speak good German,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, well, I’ve had a lot of you Germans to practise on.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Your name and rank?’

  ‘SS Colonel Lutz Richter.’ He inhaled deeply.

  Opium, he thought. He inhaled again, as if savouring its intoxicating and addictive fumes. He was a scholar of some note. He’d adhered to the tenets of the Third Reich. But opium was his true love.

  ‘Your regiment?’

  ‘I was not assigned to a specific regiment. I undertook administrative tasks. Only administrative tasks. I am Allgemeine-SS.’

  ‘Allgemeine-SS in the camps?’

  ‘No,’ Richter said, shaking his head. He was telling the truth.

  ‘There’s an old saying in my country, German. The bird that sings the sweetest song is the last to enter the woodman’s pot.’

  Richter smiled, grudgingly. Volsky banged his fist on the table. Richter flinched, saw the young guard standing behind Volsky’s back smirk.

  ‘The bunker, German. Tell me about the bunker.’

  ‘It was just a bunker.’

  Volsky whipped out his hand and caught Richter flush across the face, knocking the cigarette from his lips so that it rolled under the table. He had to force himself not to urinate as his breathing was reduced to hollow gasps.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ he said, putting up his hands.

  ‘I see you, German, I see nothing more than a cockroach.’

  ‘I understand,’ Richter said, his cheek throbbing.

  ‘For what purpose was the bunker used?’

  Richter knew he had to give him something, however small, even at this early stage of the interrogation.

  ‘I used it as a storage facility for certain items brought from the Caucasus and its environs, from the peoples there. Soil and grass samples. Farm machinery. Reports from local farmers and such like. I’m an academic. A bureaucrat. I was doing a research paper for the RSHA, the Reich Security Main Office.’