The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  ‘I’m going to kill that German sniper,’ he said.

  ‘You’re crazy, lieutenant,’ one said; a skinny wretch with broken teeth, who smelled even worse than the rest.

  ‘When I move, cover me,’ Kazapov said.

  ‘Go on, lieutenant. Kill the bastard,’ another said.

  Then the others joined in, screaming and baring their yellow teeth like madmen.

  Kazapov watched them, faintly amused. It was easy to rouse the young to violence. For him, it was his last chance to get to Richter and obtain the names he craved. A company of NKVD troops from a rifle division were on their way, he knew. Sent by the general in the hope of placating Comrade Beria for his loss.

  He crawled forward and readied himself for the dash. The four remaining privates flung themselves towards the lip of the crater, aiming their weapons with a newfound relish.

  70

  Kazapov wiped the grainy rain from his gaunt face and, after springing up and rushing behind a burned-out Wehrmacht staff car, he raced forward again, slaloming to avoid the craters, jagged metal, strewn masonry and smouldering timbers. He clenched his jaw and murmured to himself. He spoke of revenge, of the things he would do to those that had killed his mother and sisters, of how he would make it last, the Poles’ covering fire a discordant accompaniment.

  A bullet hit an oil drum less than six inches to his right as he sprinted past. He forced himself to ignore it, pounding through the foul puddles and leaping over the mounds of rubble, mortar holes and disfigured corpses. Soft ash floated down from the sky, covering them in a grey shroud.

  Another bullet ricocheted off a boulder an inch from his left foot and he grimaced, but the red-brick wall of the Mercedes building was less than five feet away now. Reaching it, he bent over and gasped for breath before edging towards the nearest entranceway. He was safe — at least, for a while.

  The entranceway had been hit by mortar fire. A lintel hung down in front of him like broken signage. The walls were blood splattered, the floor a mixture of cigarette butts and discarded ration packs. He reckoned the entranceway had seen more than its fair share of war.

  Further up, about three yards away, lay the corpse of a pregnant woman, riddled with mortar fragments. A patchwork scarf half covered her head so that it was impossible to tell what colour her hair had been. Not that it mattered, he thought. The street ahead seemed devoid of life.

  The dark blue wooden door hung inwards from its bottom hinges. He kicked it down and ran in, his Shpagin raised to his shoulder, with both hands steadying it. He scanned the entrance hall. The floor was wet and covered with debris and discarded personal items: a satchel, a woman’s hat, a black bicycle. The staircase leading from the hall’s rear had a bulky wooden and metal banister that still looked robust. Kazapov knew that the sniper was waiting for him above.

  As he began to ascend the stairs, a door on the ground floor was flung open. Three plainclothes men rushed through, firing their MP40s somewhat haphazardly in his general direction, their vision hampered by the bannister. The bullets embedded themselves deep into the blue walls of the staircase and ricocheted off the lattice ironwork beneath the rail, causing flashes of sparks. The sound was deafening, adding to the sense of chaos as pieces of concrete, wood and plaster careered through the air about him.

  Pressing his body hard to the stairs, he fingered his belt for a grenade. He pulled the lever and tossed it over the staircase. Then he did the same with a second and a third grenade, in rapid succession.

  The first grenade exploded with a resounding force, accentuated by the confined space of the entrance hall. To Kazapov, it felt like diving into water from a great height. It seemed to hammer his head and burn his chest, all at once.

  With blood oozing from his ears and shards of plaster and wood cutting into his face, he took aim through the middle of an iron swirl and discharged at least thirty-five rounds from his submachine gun. He rolled sideways, waiting for the other grenades to detonate.

  A couple of seconds after hearing the blasts, he rolled back and let off another long burst, hitting the thighs, chests and heads of the men who’d been blown off their feet or lacerated by grenade fragments. Their screams and wailings degenerated into pitiful moans.

  Kazapov wiped the blood from his forehead, the protective tears from his eyes, and moved down to the floor, which was slippery with fresh blood. All the men were dead. One had a gaping hole where his stomach had been, a scarlet chasm with strands of bloody tissue hanging down, like a crimson jellyfish.

  He guessed that Richter was behind the door through which the men had charged.

  The sniper, he thought.

  If he went for Richter first, the sniper might come for him from behind. Richter couldn’t go anywhere, since if he did, the Poles or one of the other soldiers would surely kill him. He checked himself, turned and began to ascend the stairs again, one at a time, his Shpagin raised before him.

  He stopped at the top of the first staircase. There were two more floors.

  He called out in German, ‘Come down, we will escape through the sewers underneath the cellars.’

  He heard a noise above, a scuffling that could have been a rat, but was more likely to have been the sniper repositioning himself.

  He isn’t going to fall for it, he thought. And he decided his accent must have been atrocious. It had been a stupid idea.

  The upper floors were solid, like the rest of the building. Built with precision, built to last. It hadn’t sustained a direct hit in a bombing raid, that much was clear. He discounted spraying the floors above him with bullets.

  Two minutes later, he reached the top of the staircase on the third floor. Two men, dressed in smart trousers and overcoats, were half slumped against a wall. Both were middle-aged. One moustachioed. There was no way of knowing how they’d died, or when, except that they didn’t smell bad, so he decided it couldn’t have been that long ago. There didn’t appear to be any wounds on their bodies. But he’d seen enough dead men to know there was no mistake. It was a mystery, but one he had no interest in. He waited.

  There was a massive, ground-level explosion, which shook the building and made him cover his head instinctively. But no masonry fell. Too well built. And he guessed it was another gas explosion.

  ‘I have radioed for flamethrowers,’ he said in German.

  The flammable liquid fried a man to cinders. The Soviet version had three backpack fuel tanks that shot out a trio of flames. He knew soldiers on all sides feared death by a flamethrower as much as they feared being buried alive.

  ‘OK, Ivan. I’m coming out. Don’t shoot.’

  There was a corridor that looked remarkably pristine. On either side, there were four doors. The third on the left, facing the street, opened, and a plainclothes man appeared. He looked to be in his early twenties, but his body had been ravaged by war. His cheeks were concave, his blue eyes bloodshot and glazed. His hands were empty, raised above his bare head. The light brown hair was matted with sweat.

  Kazapov said, ‘Now we go down.’

  He motioned with his Shpagin: walk ahead of me. The German obeyed, clearly knowing that the war was over for him and choosing to surrender rather than face certain death by flamethrowers.

  Kazapov shot him in the back after the sniper’s foot had hit the third step. He felt the weapon buck in his hands and pump against his shoulder muscle. The impact of the bullets flung the sniper down the staircase and left him sprawled on the second-floor landing. His eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he’d just seen something astonishing.

  The smoke rose in curls from the entry holes before dissipating.

  71

  Kazapov had searched the rooms on the ground floor but he hadn’t found Richter. He hadn’t panicked though. There was only one place he could be now. The cellar.

  Twenty seconds later, Kazapov lowered his torch.

  He said, ‘It is me, Lieutenant Joseph Kazapov.’

  There was silence for a few seconds.

>   ‘I can’t go back with you, young man. I would rather die here, than in Moscow.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Over here,’ Richter said.

  Kazapov raised his torch and saw Richter huddled against a damp-blackened wall, his crouching body half covered by a wooden ladder, some stacked pallets and crunched newspaper.

  Kazapov said, ‘We could leave together. For the West. The Allied lines aren’t far. We can surrender together.’

  ‘We’d never make it,’ Richter said.

  ‘Not so,’ Kazapov said. ‘You will be a prisoner of an NKVD officer. No one will question us on the way.’

  ‘Why would you do this?’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘The deal is still on?’ Richter said.

  ‘It is. But you will write the names before we leave the building. I have a pen and paper. The Kalmyks who murdered my mother and sisters. The Einsatzgruppen filmmaker.’

  Richter nodded in the white glow of the torch beam.

  *

  Kazapov and Richter had waited for twenty minutes before crawling out of a back door and on towards some long grass and a ditch, outwitting the few troops at the rear in the process. The road they’d scrambled up to was ridden with shell craters and strewn with broken tree branches and burned-out military vehicles.

  Further on, they’d watched two Polish officers wearing rogatywka, the distinctive four-pointed peaked caps, execute three Waffen-SS men with their pistols. They’d passed columns of refugees, trudging silently through muddy verges, their heads bowed like nags ploughing fields. Even the old women couldn’t cry any more. They’d walked to the end of the cordoned-off road on the outskirts of the town.

  A gnarled log was used as a makeshift barrier, the ends lying across two rusted oil drums. Tangles of barbed wire filled the ditches on either side of the roadblock. Beyond the ditches was dense pine forest. A frail mist still hung between the branches, like shreds of gossamer.

  Richter now wore the civilian clothes of one of the dead men at the Mercedes-Benz factory. Kazapov had worried that the SS uniform would be too inflammatory. He’d tied Richter’s hands behind his back with rope. The old Sonderführer had agreed to be punched in the right eye. It was swelling, a livid bruise beneath that resembled a crescent of raw meat. Kazapov knew that such an injury would likely prevent anything similar happening; it was how things were in war, when the victors saw a subdued and beaten enemy.

  The guards by the barrier weren’t front line troops. They looked to Kazapov like ineffectual peasants from the Urals. But they also looked like the types known to shoot Red Army officers in drunken confrontations. Not well-disciplined, political troops. He wasn’t particularly worried, though. They appeared sober and their Shpagins and carbines were slung over their shoulders. They kept them there as he approached.

  ‘Papers, comrade lieutenant, if you please.’

  The man that spoke was a corporal, his exposed skin windburned, his nose askew. He held out his filthy hand. Kazapov passed him his ID papers, keeping a stern face.

  ‘Who’s this?’ the corporal said, gesturing to Richter.

  ‘A suspect.’

  ‘Papers.’

  ‘He doesn’t have papers. He’s suspected of being in the SS. Now open that fucking barrier before I report you personally to Comrade Beria.’

  The men hurried to lift the barrier and said no more. Kazapov was NKVD, and he guessed they’d rather embrace the Devil they still likely believed in, than face Beria’s wrath. His raping of teenage girls abducted from the streets of Moscow by his henchmen was a state secret, but most Russians were too terrified to even mention his name. He wasn’t the most feared and hated man in the Soviet Union for nothing.

  Kazapov and Richter walked past the Soviet roadblock and on down the road between the endless pine trees that infused the dusk air with their scent. They heard the songs of small birds.

  Richter said, ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘There’s an NKVD checkpoint about four miles ahead. They don’t trust Red Army troops to be so close to the Americans and British. They might defect for a chocolate bar or a packet of cigarettes. We’ll skirt around it.’

  Richter shook his head and Kazapov knew that such behaviour was alien to him, even now. It was, he believed, a simple matter of the German having felt a part of something larger than himself. The Reich. That had changed.

  All things change, he thought.

  At the inception of Operation Barbarossa, the progress of the Germans had been so swift that many of the Gulag labour camps in western Russia had been abandoned by the NKVD in a state of panic. Fearing that those labourers that remained may be used by the Germans or defect to them, they’d been systematically murdered, to a man. That was the system he himself was a part of, and but one reason over a million Soviets had joined the German army in one capacity or another.

  They walked on for a further two miles or more, keeping to the road so as not to arouse unnecessary suspicion. Kazapov had said that an NKVD officer would not walk a prisoner through mud when he had a road to travel on, even if it was crater-ridden. It would have appeared clandestine.

  Now, Kazapov put out his arm, halting Richter.

  ‘Cossacks,’ he said.

  72

  They’d emerged from the forest; twenty or more astride their Russian Don war horses. Like the Kalmyks, the Don Cossacks had suffered greatly under Stalin. Consequently, some had fought for the Nazis, Kazapov knew. The traitors had been formed into SS cavalry regiments and fearsome anti-partisan units.

  But these Cossacks were loyal to the Motherland, and that helped to ease his concern, although he had seen their tactics in East Prussia at the beginning of the year, when as part of the Red Army, some 2,500,000 strong, he’d crossed Germany’s outer borders. Sitting astride their mounts, laughing and screaming, the Cossacks had used their curved sabres to butcher small groups of civilian refugees attempting to reach the inner Reich. They’d even sliced off the outstretched arms of the surrendering Wehrmacht Heer. But they’d been renowned for their bravery for all that and had helped prevent the Nazis from entering the vital Caucasus oil fields during the Battle of Stalingrad. They’d galloped out of the frozen mists like ghost riders to sever the Germans’ horse-drawn supply lines. He watched them trot up.

  ‘Comrade,’ a lean sergeant said, nodding his head slightly.

  He had black eyes and a wiry, grey moustache. He fingered the hilt of his sabre, that was sheathed beside his left leg. He wore a blue overcoat, black boots and a woollen pillbox hat. Kazapov breathed out through his nostrils, attempting to relax.

  ‘We search for Nazis and deserters, comrade.’ The Cossack removed a tin box from his coat pocket. He took out some tobacco, bit into it and began chewing. ‘And you, comrade?’ He smiled broadly, revealing a gap where his two front teeth should have been.

  ‘I have this prisoner. I have orders to swap him for an SS camp guard held by the Americans. The guard was responsible for murdering Russian POWs. He’ll hang by the gates of that place.’

  ‘And this one is what?’

  ‘He ordered the shooting of captured Americans.’

  ‘Why don’t you let us take the Nazi for you, comrade?’ the sergeant said, looking at Richter the way a Siberian tiger might eye a lame goat.

  ‘I can’t do that, sergeant. I have strict instructions to make the swap personally.’

  Kazapov sensed Richter trembling beside him.

  ‘I think it’s not safe out here, comrade lieutenant. Many SS and traitors. The Nazi will be safer with us.’

  Slowly, Kazapov removed his pistol. The Cossacks had Mosin carbines, but they were slung over their backs to allow them to ride unfettered.

  ‘I said I can’t do that, sergeant,’ Kazapov said, raising the pistol and pointing it at the Cossack’s horse. ‘Now be on your way and I’ll forget all about it. If you’re not gone very quickly, you will be walking all the way back to the Don steppe. And that’s a long way to walk.�
� He knew a war horse was a Cossack’s most prized possession.

  The sergeant grinned and brought his heels into his mount and trotted off. Kazapov lowered his pistol. The Cossacks spat at Richter as they passed by him and a couple even kicked out at him. The last of them jerked on his reins so that the horse reared up and Kazapov found himself gulping saliva. The Cossacks never really did take to anyone giving them orders; apart from their ancestral leaders.

  ‘Thank you,’ Richter said.

  ‘You would have been better off in Moscow than with them.’

  ‘So, the war is over for me?’ Richter said.

  Ignoring him, Kazapov said, ‘You shouldn’t have come to my country.’

  Richter looked down at his feet. ‘I know that now. And history will judge us harshly because of it.’

  ‘I can’t take you to the Americans or the British,’ Kazapov said.

  Richter’s eyes narrowed. ‘But we have an agreement.’

  Kazapov raised his pistol.

  Richter’s face softened and he looked remarkably calm.

  He said, ‘You should have seen Berlin in the summer of thirty-eight.’

  Kazapov lowered the pistol, so that he could see Richter’s face clearly.

  Richter said, ‘Every one of you Soviets will continue to live in constant fear, despite winning the war.’ He nodded. ‘We believed in something. What do you believe in, Joseph Kazapov?’

  Kazapov knew that Richter had spoken the truth. But what did it matter? He would remain in the NKVD or whatever replaced it. He could kill with impunity. He couldn’t risk doing what he’d set his mind to outside of the major system of order in the Soviet state, even if he did it alone and without consent.