by Gary Haynes
‘Without Himmler, none of this would have come about. He was interested in ancestral history. In the customs and beliefs of ancient peoples.’ He bowed his head and covered his eyes with his hands.
‘You knew Himmler?’
Richter did his best to straighten up, aware that he had expressed his thoughts and had put himself at risk by doing so.
‘Everyone in the SS knew this of Himmler.’
‘So, you are not telling me anything of interest.’
Richter coughed, a deep, phlegm-induced hack, and his eyes bulged.
‘Some water, perhaps?’ Volsky said.
‘No, I’m fine.’
What use is water? he thought. Cattle drink water. Horses drink water. Jews and Russian peasants drink water. He wiped an unpleasant mixture of spittle and a more viscous fluid from his chin, embarrassed by it. He craved opium in that moment. He craved it in a way he’d just about managed to suppress until now. He craved it as a new-born craved its mother’s breast milk. He felt the urge to wail, but controlled himself just in time. His body was disintegrating, he knew, just as his world had disintegrated.
‘The bunker, German. We know about the things that were stored there. Yes, we know. Tell me about the skulls. The other things. Save yourself, German.’
Richter couldn’t believe it. How had they survived? He felt lost. Abandoned. Vulnerable. Events were turning against him, his luck was deserting him. But even if I do, you would not understand, he thought. You would not believe me. He watched Volsky’s red-rimmed eyes glower at him.
‘Sing a sweet song for me, German. Stay out of the woodman’s pot.’
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘But this is information you will not want spoken about by a young man with drink inside him.’
Volsky turned to the side and motioned to the door with his chin, prompting the guard to leave the room. He opened a drawer below the table top and took out a notebook, a packet of cigarettes, a small bottle of vodka, an old fountain pen, matches and chocolate bars. He slid all but the notebook and pen over to Richter’s side of the table. Richter swallowed some vodka, ate a bar, and lit another cigarette. His craving eased a little.
‘The skulls and bones?’ Volsky said. ‘And the dead woman? All of it was found, even though I am told it looked as if they were meant to be destroyed.’
Richter kept his eyes on the table top. He still couldn’t believe it. He rebuked himself for taking the word of a moronic Waffen-SS NCO, who’d told him everything had been incinerated and not to worry about it. How could the man have been so slovenly in the execution of his duties? How could he himself have neglected to check that all was as the man had said?
He knew he would have to be extraordinarily careful. His life depended on it. He put the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. He held the smoke in his lungs, savouring it, before letting it out through his mouth. He thought about making out that they were nothing more than grisly trinkets, but thought better of it. They were so outlandish and incongruous to someone uneducated in their esoteric significance that he knew that could lead to a broken finger, or worse.
‘The skull cup is called a kapala. They are anointed and consecrated before use. They appease the wrathful deities.’
Richter coughed again and wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead with the stinking sleeve of his jacket.
‘All of the items are used by Tibetan Buddhist monks to evoke fear and thereby overcome it. To prove to themselves that they understand the Tantras. The sacred texts. The items could be called Tantric paraphernalia.’
‘And the woman?’ Volsky said, his mouth barely moving.
‘The mummified woman was a Tibetan nun. She is referred to as a living Buddha. A Śarīra. A Buddhist relic. Such mummies are incorrupt, without any sign of deliberate mummification. It’s a mystery, Major Volsky. I cannot explain it. No one can, at least not in any manner that is coherent to a Western mindset.’
He saw the look in the Russian’s eyes after he’d spoken, and he knew his interrogator hadn’t expected to hear such things from an SS officer, even one that had emerged from somewhere as outwardly weird as the bunker, and his self-confidence was restored as easily as it had deserted him.
Fuck your woodman’s pot, Richter thought. I’ll survive this. I can survive anything. Do you know who I am? No, of course you don’t. You lapdog of Jews.
He guessed the NKVD didn’t even know that Waffen-SS men could be identified by the blood-group tattoos on the underside of their left arms, usually near the armpit. Richter didn’t have one. He’d been classed as a non-combatant, as he’d said, at least for a portion of the war. He decided it could be weeks before they found out who he was.
But Volsky’s confidence appeared to have been restored too, now. He said, ‘And the vat of incense?’
‘I had the incense brought from the remnants of a Christmas smoker factory. Silly little hollow figurines invented by toymakers in the Ore Mountains. Cone incense burns down inside the figurines and the smoke emerges from the open mouths. There was a glut of them,’ Richter said, truthfully. ‘Berliners were shocked and saddened after Stalingrad. But they lost the will to celebrate after the Battle of Kursk. They knew the Red Army was coming. The puerile little incense smokers were redundant, together with the incense they were to hold. Except it didn’t go to waste. The vat was taken from a merchant’s house. It’s from Hong Kong, I think.’
Volsky leaned back in his chair. He said, ‘Why go to all the trouble?’
That’s a good question, Richter thought.
He stifled a smile. ‘To mask the smell.’ He eased back in his own chair, lethargically. ‘As I said, the men were camp guards before becoming front line troops. They got the taste for it, I suppose. It never leaves you, they say.’
‘Now answer my original question. How did they come to be there?’
‘I am a professor of contemporary anthropology. I study the lives and customs of ancient peoples that still exist in remote regions of the world. That is the why the items where there. They were for academic study. At my age, I am merely what you might call a sedentary academic. Other people do the legwork for me. I never travelled to the occupied territories. I never left Berlin.’
Richter breathed out, rather pleased with himself.
‘You are many things, it seems,’ Volsky said. ‘You were seen leaving the bunker by an observation post in a bomb-damaged hotel situated over the road. The order was to bring you in alive.’
‘I see,’ Richter said.
‘You think you do. We’d organized a force to attack the bunker. There was just an hour’s difference between the explosions and our troops being ready. But then again, an hour can be a long time in war, eh German?’
In total war, Richter thought. ‘Quite so.’
‘They would have shot you. But then it was decided that you should live. We Russians can be fickle. But the past never changes. There can be different interpretations, of course, but what has happened has happened, is that not so?’
‘It is.’
‘Where did those foul items come from?’
‘Kalmykia.’ Richter said. ‘Buddhist Kalmykia.’
Where else could he have said? It was the only place the Wehrmacht Heer had occupied that they could have come from. It fitted with his academic credentials too, which were themselves real enough.
‘With his dying breath, an SS captain told the Red Army assault squad that had stumbled upon the bunker just before you left, that the dead Soviet soldiers were killed because of Doctor Doll,’ Volsky said.
Richter was flabbergasted. What else did the NKVD know? The uncertainty troubled him deeply. But he would remain calm. Besides, he could see that Volsky didn’t have an inkling as to who or what Doctor Doll was.
He said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything to me. Perhaps the man was simply confused. Perhaps it was just a childhood memory.’
Volsky nodded his head slowly. ‘Perhaps.’
36
The same day.
Kazapov’s head had been filled with the images of the evidence that had been found in the room of death in the bunker, and they’d come to him one after the other, as if viewed through a zoetrope. But he’d had work to do and he’d spent most of the day supervising every aspect of the bunker’s clearance. It had been vital that nothing had gone wrong. He’d ensured that the outwardly disturbing items had been covered, as he’d ordered. He’d walked back and forth to the trucks. He’d checked the wooden crates had been secured properly. He’d allowed the men to work in their shirt sleeves. They’d been at it for hours, and the thick, low cloud, the heat from the bricks and the nearby still smouldering fires had transformed what would have been a cold day into a mild one.
But now, as dusk descended and the air cooled, two Poles dropped a crate as it was being lifted onto the bed of a truck, and it shattered. One of the Poles kneeled and pulled back the blanket, to check the condition of the contents, it appeared. A couple of NKVD riflemen ran over to shield the view from the other Poles.
Kazapov raced over to the kneeling man, who looked to be in his early twenties. Kazapov noticed that he was even skinnier than himself. The man wore a Star of David necklace. It poked out from between two buttons on the khaki shirt that he’d put back on. The other Pole had turned his face away. A clever man, Kazapov thought.
‘Cover it all up,’ he said.
He nodded towards the mummified hand, a skull shaped as a bowl with smooth stones in it, and the disfigured and dismembered corpse of a Soviet soldier.
The Pole did so.
‘Your name?’
‘Corporal Stolarski, sir.’ He saluted.
‘Your full name?’
‘Icchak Stolarski.’
Kazapov checked the man’s shoulder straps. The stupid, clumsy bastard, he thought.
‘Report to Sergeant Yeltsin. You’re finished for the day.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Stolarski said.
‘What else have you seen?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘You’re lying,’ Kazapov said, staring hard at him.
‘I’m telling the truth, lieutenant.’
Kazapov calmed himself. The last thing he needed to do was to be too overtly harsh on the man. Some of the Poles might become inquisitive. They might think there was something worth stealing. It seemed to him as if the war had turned everyone into a thief.
‘Don’t worry,’ Kazapov said. ‘Nothing will come of it. I just can’t afford for anything to get broken. You’re evidently too exhausted to continue. You’ve had quite a day.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Kazapov told one of the two NKVD men to wrap the smashed crate and its contents with a tarpaulin and put it on the truck. But Stolarski was still standing there, idling.
‘You still here, Stolarski? I told you to report to Sergeant Yeltsin. Now do it.’
‘Sorry, sir.’
Kazapov watched him slump off. Idiot, he thought. He would see to it personally that Stolarski received special treatment so that there was no chance of him revealing what he’d seen.
He thought about the glut of other Buddhist ritual items found in the room. He thought too about the film that the Russian sergeant named Pavel Romasko had recovered from the brass casket. He had to watch it. His left eye began to twitch as he had an idea how it might get him in front of the SS colonel he’d captured, Lutz Richter.
Major Volsky disapproved of his investigative work, he knew, considering it a waste of resources. He’d simply shoot everyone vaguely associated with war crimes. Kazapov considered him a dangerous fool.
The world was full of fools.
37
Major Volsky massaged his temples with his thumb and forefinger of his right hand before bringing the palm down over his nose, mouth and chin. He looked at Lutz Richter now in a manner that suggested he knew he was lying to him. But Richter could see too that he wasn’t agitated by it, and this worried him more than anything that had transpired, including the pistol’s barrel striking his nose. Richter adjusted his shoulders awkwardly.
Volsky said, ‘Most of your kind will never see Germany again. The criminals will hang. Some of the recent POWs will be executed within a few weeks for minor infringements. The others will do twenty-five years in a freezing hellhole. The majority will perish there. If you’re lucky, you will avoid such a fate and be one of those who gets back to Berlin within a short time. A Berlin under Soviet rule. But you must co-operate fully. Think on that.’
Richter believed him. The Soviets were capable of expediency on occasion and could be trusted to be true to their word, despite the betrayal by Hitler of the nonaggression pact with Stalin that Operation Barbarossa had brought about. He knew his recent history, and that there was only one sensible interpretation of it.
Ninety-two thousand men had been taken prisoner after the Battle of Stalingrad. The German Sixth Army had been surrounded by nearly 1,000,000 Soviets. Hitler had promoted the commander, General Paulus, to a Field Marshal in the last days of the battle, knowing that no German Field Marshal had allowed himself to be taken alive. It had been a signal, but one that Paulus had rejected. He was first and foremost a pragmatist and had known an ultimate defeat for the Nazis was inevitable. Besides, he’d blamed Hitler for not sending the panzers to relieve his men. He’d been right.
But the capture of Paulus and his twenty-two generals at Stalingrad had been gloomily portentous. The Sixth Army POWs had been sent off to camps in the Soviet Union, to places Richter would now do anything to avoid ending up in. It had been rumoured that many had failed even to survive the initial march, although over 10,000 had defied Paulus’s order to surrender. They’d fought to the last man in burned-out houses, cellars and sewers, preferring to die for their Führer. But Paulus had collaborated with his Soviet captors and, over the previous two years, had become a high-profile critic of the Nazis. Richter guessed he’d been treated well enough. The pragmatist.
Richter had spent all his adult life being anything but a pragmatist. But now he wanted to live, and so a pragmatist was what he would become. He knew too that torture was often a crude but well-tried means of obtaining small, specific pieces of easily verifiable information, like a name or a location. But sophisticated intelligence gathering took a lot longer and a lot more work. Real work.
But what else did they want him to make sense of? The thought made him shiver. Had he said too much already? He could be useful to them in other ways though. Couldn’t he? He could identify people. Soviet traitors and Jew killers. Would he do such a thing?
Volsky sighed. He looked as if he was about to pick his nose but thought twice about it and scratched his chin instead.
‘My father was a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University,’ he said. ‘In 1926, I told him I had joined the secret police. He begged me to give it up and follow him into the study of mathematics, which he called numerical poetry, and claimed was every bit as beautiful and elaborate as the written poetry of Alexander Pushkin or Vasily Zhukovsky. I said I wasn’t interested in mathematics and he called me a communist murderer. I dragged him outside his wooden house, pinned him to the frosted ground with my polished boot, and broke his jaw with a lump of limestone. He had to suck liquid food through a straw for months. I told him he was lucky he had a compassionate son.’
‘Ah.’
‘The Kalmyk volunteers killed many patriotic partisans. Were you with them in Kalmykia?’
Richter shook his head. If he said yes, he would be hung without delay. He had no doubt of it.
‘Say it.’
‘No. I’ve told you this already,’ Richter said.
‘What happened to the Kalmyk volunteers that followed the retreating Germans?’
‘They were formed into a cavalry corp. I was told that many died in the fighting at the Sea of Azov and the right bank of the Dnieper. Many more were killed in the retreat by partisans. The Balkans. Elsewhere. The remnants were sent to Austria, I think, with the surviving family members who�
�d trailed behind them all the way from the steppe. I don’t know what happened to them there.’
‘Why did you come to Berlin?’ Volsky said.
‘I have been here since the beginning, as I said.’
‘Why didn’t you make your escape earlier?’ Volsky said.
‘Duty, I suppose. We have that in common at least. Do we not, major?’
Volsky motioned to the vodka with his fat hand. ‘Drink, German. Finish it.’
Richter picked up the bottle and drank.
‘That will be the last time you taste alcohol.’
Volsky smirked.
38
Brooklyn Heights, 2015, the same day.
Gabriel had converted his cellar into a gym, six months after he’d bought the house. He’d plastered the brick walls and had laid a hardwood floor, although he’d paid an electrician to wire the strip lighting and had decided he could do without heating.
The floor was strewn now with resistance bands, compact dumbbells, a skipping rope. Mounted on the wall opposite the wooden staircase was a chin-up bar and a mountain climber. Incongruously, a glass-covered print of The Death of Actaeon by the Venetian Renaissance master, Titian, hung on the white wall at the foot of the staircase. The goddess Diana changed Actaeon into a stag in revenge for surprising her as she bathed naked in a remote pond. He was ripped to pieces by his own hounds. To remind Gabriel of what? He’d never known. Roxana had said that he was obsessed by tragedy. Was he?
Wearing a T-shirt and joggers, he took a long drink of water from a plastic bottle and towelled his skin. His otherwise symmetrical physiognomy was spoiled by damaged cartilage on the left side of his nose, the result of a climbing accident on the Gift at Red Rock Canyon in Nevada ten years before. He’d never got around to fixing it. Most climbers he knew wore their scars with boyish pride. Besides, Roxanna had told him that it lent a certain mystery to the architecture of his face.
