The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  He raised his palm and the pole lifted. The SUV pulled away, keeping to the mandatory five miles per hour. Carla glimpsed the nozzle of a heavy machine gun in the centre of the six-inch wide aperture of the blockhouse to the right. She looked at the seated MP inside the box, a white man with deep lines in his forehead. He glanced back at her, his expression cynical, as if there was no escape for those that entered, including himself.

  Carla saw exercise yards and what looked like red-brick military barracks inside the fence. APCs and jeeps were parked outside a central, two-storey building, with a colonnade of cement pillars. There was a checkerboard pattern of roadways and grass lawns, as immaculate as bowling greens, to its rear, where other low-level buildings of various design and construction were dotted about. An empty flagpole stood at the edge of a parade ground to the far left. There were no military insignias, nor signage. No more than five armed soldiers were visible.

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you left the talking to me,’ Hester said.

  ‘You want me to take minutes?’ Carla said, regretting her retort immediately.

  Hester shook his head.

  78

  The restaurant was just off the highway, twenty miles from Concord. There was a dozen or so tables, finished in light-blue Formica, with a bunch of laminated menus in red plastic holders and glass-held condiments placed upon them. Gabriel had helped Stolarski take off his overcoat and they sat at a booth by the window.

  Gabriel sipped coffee from an off-white mug. Stolarski hadn’t touched his glass of milk. They’d both ordered waffles with maple syrup.

  On the way over, Stolarski had explained how he and Ned had teamed up after meeting at a rehabilitation facility Stolarski worked in as a psychiatric nurse. It was a profession he’d entered to try to make sense of the world, he said. But it hadn’t helped him on that search, so he’d read the Greek philosophers and Marcus Aurelius, but they hadn’t helped either. The old man was intriguing, Gabriel thought, on several levels.

  ‘I need to take a leak,’ Stolarski said.

  Gabriel smiled, weakly.

  Stolarski stood up and walked totteringly towards the toilets to their left. Gabriel looked around. A middle-aged waitress, with hair like pink candyfloss, was taking a food order from a young mother with noisy kids. Behind her, a couple of truckers were sitting on stools at the counter, eating their way through corn dogs stacked like freshly-sawn lumber.

  Stolarski returned to the table after a few minutes. He massaged his forehead with the palm of his left hand as the waffles arrived, brought by a girl who looked too young to be working. She placed the white plates down on the table.

  ‘Enjoy,’ she said.

  After she’d returned to the counter to collect another order, Stolarski said, ‘She should be in school.’ He shuffled on his plastic seat.

  ‘Can we talk about Berlin?’ Gabriel said.

  ‘Later,’ Stolarski said, his tone brusque.

  Stolarski began to eat his food, his movements slow and determined. But the syrup on his waffle ran over his chin and Gabriel turned away, seeing his own outline reflected in the large windowpane, and beyond, the tree-clad mountain, the sky that had turned from dough to sapphire in the time it had taken them to get here.

  When he turned back, Stolarski was staring at the middle-aged waitress.

  ‘You ever seen hair like that before?’

  Ignoring him, Gabriel said, ‘We need to talk about Berlin.’

  Stolarski put his knife and fork down and looked at Gabriel. His eyes had narrowed, and his chin was raised. ‘When you show me a copy of that DVD,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ Gabriel said, shaking his head to emphasize his words. ‘Why do you want to see a thing like that anyway?’ He was troubled by the request.

  Stolarski’s already deeply lined brow furrowed to the point that it resembled something other than skin, something synthetic. ‘To know you’re not stringing me along, is all.’

  ‘I can’t show it to you. That’s a red line.’

  ‘OK. But I want details and I will give you details,’ Stolarski said.

  ‘Do I have your world you won’t repeat anything I tell you?’

  Stolarski nodded.

  ‘Say it for me.’

  ‘You have my word.’

  Gabriel felt he could tell him some of the details. He had to, didn’t he?

  When he mentioned the snow lion embroidered on the back of the Tibetan monk’s robe and the fact that the young victim was a Kalmyk, Stolarski’s gaunt face tightened, such that Gabriel thought it looked like a skull clothed in gossamer. A ghost.

  There were wastelands in his eyes.

  79

  Stolarski had talked for five minutes or more. He’d told Gabriel about his childhood, his beautiful mother and sister and his intellectual elder brother, Icchak, who’d read Leontiev, Jung and Luria, had studied medicine at university and hoped to become a psychiatrist. He seemed to have transformed into something more noble and erudite. He was still surprising Gabriel.

  ‘We were living in Lublin in 1939. He was eighteen years old. A good student. We Poles got hit from both sides then, the Germans from the west and the Soviets from the east. We found ourselves in the ghetto. Most of the Jews were sent to Belzec and Majdanek death camps after the Ordnungspolizei, the German Order Police, hunted them down in the cellars. But there were escape routes for those young and healthy enough to try. My brother got me and my mother out of Lublin and we joined the Jewish partisans, who were fighting the Nazis from the forests. But we had nothing to speak of. Friends that were injured died of their wounds. The Germans flattened the ghetto after their evil work was done. My father had died early on, fighting the advancing Germans in a cavalry regiment.’

  Stolarski stopped speaking and drank some water from a glass that he’d asked the girl to bring over. He still hadn’t touched his milk.

  ‘My brother, Icchak, joined the Polish Home Army and fought at his beloved Lublin in July 1944. He fought the Germans and the Hungarians. He fought the Kalmyk cavalry.’

  Gabriel’s pupils dilated, his chest heaved.

  He said, ‘Kalmyk cavalry?’

  ‘Yes,’ Stolarski said. ‘That’s why I reacted the way I did earlier.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘When the Red Army arrived,’ he went on, ‘my brother joined the newly-formed Polish First Army. Those communist sonsofbitches sent the defeated Poles to POW camps after they’d invaded. They killed thousands of our officers and intellectuals in the Katyn massacre in 1940. Doctors, and such like. Lawyers, like you. Beria, the head of the NKVD, had agreed to the invasion from the east with the Gestapo at a conference in Zakopane. Still, my brother fought for the Soviets. The Nazis were beasts. At least the Soviets hadn’t gassed the children or smashed their little heads in with rifle butts.

  ‘There were some 80,000 like my brother. They fought all the way to Berlin, to the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. He was told to help clear a bunker by carrying the items from its entrance onto waiting trucks.’

  He confirmed what Gabriel had been told by Boris Iliev at Yale. Gabriel didn’t doubt he was telling the truth.

  ‘There’s a name that might interest you,’ Stolarski said.

  He reached for the glass of milk. He put it to his lips and drank.

  He said, ‘It’s the name of a young man back then, and I will never forget it. My mother told me that Lieutenant Joseph Kazapov of the NKVD turned my brother over to SMERSH officers before he was sent to the Gulag. They interrogated him for days. Knocked three of his teeth out. Did other things, my mother said, that he wouldn’t repeat, not even to a priest. You heard of SMERSH?’

  ‘I have a vague memory,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘It’s an acronym for Smert Shpioam. It means ‘death to spies’. A name thought up by Stalin. But in the war years in the Soviet Union, spies were said to be everywhere. Not that the details would matter much. SMERSH had a human quota of Soviet ex-POWs to torture and either d
eport to the frozen tundra or subject to extrajudicial killings. Icchak Stolarski was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They wanted to kill him. He was in no doubt about it. But for some reason, they didn’t. He told my mother he knew enough about psychology to convince them that he hadn’t said or thought anything anti-revolutionary or traitorous. I guess that was the reason.

  ‘At first, he was sent to a lumber camp in Siberia. My brother was skinny but still managed to lose another thirty pounds. He lost four toes to frostbite.’ He sighed. ‘If it had stopped there he might have survived. But he was sent to a uranium mine. They said the uranium mines were the longest torture the NKVD could think up. My brother said it was Kazapov’s doing and I don’t doubt it. It was because of what he’d seen outside the bunker.’

  Stolarski finished his waffles, wiped his mouth clean with a paper napkin.

  ‘You haven’t touched yours.’

  ‘Not hungry,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘One thing I will always carry from my past as a young refugee in New York. I never leave a scrap.’

  Gabriel wanted to confide in someone now. It was a natural reaction to share his pain after hearing so much of someone else’s, he supposed. It was a desire to empathize. Besides, they had an agreement to reciprocate, didn’t they? It was the right thing to do.

  ‘My sister adopted a Kalmyk girl,’ he said.

  Stolarski pursed his lips and nodded, as if he wasn’t surprised by what Gabriel had just said.

  ‘She disappeared.’

  ‘Was it your niece in the DVD?’ Stolarski said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what is the reason for all your questions?’ Stolarski said.

  ‘The same people responsible for the DVD could’ve taken my niece. Tell me, what happened to Lieutenant Kazapov?’

  ‘Some of my brother’s old comrades that I managed to track down years after said that nobody knew. They never heard of him again. Some said they guessed he’d died after the war, or in the last moments of it.’

  Stolarski burped. ‘Well, best get back. Ned doesn’t like being on his own for long.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Stolarski nodded. But his eyes were sparkling with tears.

  But Gabriel wanted more answers. ‘How did you find out about Boris Iliev’s lecture?’

  Stolarski looked worn out. He said, ’Are you taping this?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Gabriel said.

  ‘They have a computer at the treatment centre I mentioned to you. They showed me how to use it. I’ve read a couple of Iliev’s books too. I’ve done my research, Mr Hall. I know where those Tibetan Buddhist things come from.’

  ‘But why were you interested? You know Kazapov wasn’t responsible for what was in the bunker or the death of the Red Army soldiers.’

  Stolarski looked a little taken aback before he rested his hands on the table top and nodded a fraction. ‘Are you a prosecutor? A government man?’

  Gabriel sat back and put his open hands up to his shoulders. ‘You can check me out. I’ve got some ID if you want to see it.’

  Stolarski shook his head. ‘That won’t be necessary, and put your hands down.’ He rubbed his mouth and nose with one hand before putting in his lap. ‘I’ll be honest with you. I wanted to find Kazapov, but there was no way I would’ve gone to the Soviet Union. I would’ve been shot if I went snooping around after him there. I knew that. So, I waited. But by the time the iron curtain came tumbling down, he’d disappeared completely.’

  ‘He resurfaced before then?’

  Stolarski sighed. ‘Are you gonna let me tell it the way it was or not?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Five years ago, I was on one of those ex-military chatrooms on the Internet, down at the treatment centre, which was my purpose in learning how to use it, in point of fact. Anyway, I was still searching for Kazapov, although I’ll admit I was on the point of giving up, when I was contacted by a real old guy, a Russian who was now living in Nebraska. He’d been a guard at Lubyanka in Moscow, the headquarters of the NKVD in the days before Stalin died. He was a minor defector in the 1960s after he’d been in security in the nuclear programme. He wasn’t worried about retribution after the old guard died.’

  Stolarski made a face, as if he wasn’t sure if he should continue, but didn’t have a good enough reason not to.

  ‘He said a major called Joseph Kazapov liked to cut the noses and ears off the women there. Said he called it penal amputation. Apparently, Kazapov got drunk one night and said the Tibetan Buddhists used to do it, and that it was something the Kalmyks had done in the war. Worse than that too, he said. That’s what led me to Iliev. It was a long shot, I knew. A dead end. Except after what you’ve told me, maybe it wasn’t.’

  Gabriel felt his stomach tense, his hands knot. ‘What was the defector’s name?’

  Stolarski sniffed. ‘He died about three years back.’

  Gabriel was apologetic for his previous tone and his questioning. Stolarski was dying, after all. But had he tried to mislead me earlier? he thought. He gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided the old man would’ve opened up to him at some point, maybe on the way back to the bungalow he lived in with Ned.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I know it looks like me and Ned are off the radar, that we live like pigs, but we like it that way. We’ve done regular jobs. I still got my US passport and enough money to get by. Ned’s got an inheritance and a military pension. We’re doing OK. We’re still alive.’

  ‘You think Kazapov is?’ Gabriel said.

  Stolarski was silent for a few seconds.

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  80

  They were sitting at the back of a rectangular mess hall. The dining facility’s tables and chairs had been stacked with an almost obsessive precision against the breezeblock side walls, which were painted an ivory colour. Four MPs stood in each corner of the facility.

  The Chechen had refused to give his real name. The house in Baton Rouge he’d been extracted from had been searched and, apart from the drugs and pornography, four false passports had been found, all with different names and all bearing the Chechen’s photograph. There were no weapons, other than the machete. The Chechen had no record of violence. But Carla suspected he was a violent man. She could smell it on him now too.

  He sat across from Carla and Hester on a dining bench at a long wooden table with metal legs. He smoked a hand-rolled cigarette, using a plastic cup of water as an ashtray.

  Even here, he has no sense of propriety, she thought.

  Hester said, ‘Where did you obtain the DVD?’

  ‘From an old serial killer in Berlin,’ the Chechen said, inhaling smoke.

  ‘Who did you sell it to?’

  ‘An American.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  The Chechen grinned and tapped the cigarette on the edge of the cup.

  ‘Jed Watson,’ he said.

  Carla did her best to keep her poker face.

  ‘Do you want to end up with your throat slit by a member of the Russian mafia in a high security federal prison?’ Hester said, making a reference to Johnny Hockey.

  The Chechen dropped his cigarette into the cup and scratched his goatee. ‘No.’

  ‘That’s good, because I can help you with that. Do you need any more cigarettes?’

  ‘No.’

  Hester coughed into a fist and rested his forearms on the table top, a shoulder width apart. ‘Who is Snow Lion?’

  ‘The old serial killer in Berlin.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  The Chechen grinned again and turned to Carla. ‘What do you think of his interrogation technique?’

  Carla was silent.

  ‘Have you heard of Hanns Joachim Scharff?’ the Chechen asked her.

  She glanced at Hester. He was gritting his teeth.

  She said, ‘I’m not here to be interviewed.’

  Ignoring her, the Chechen continued. ‘He was a Luftwaffe interrogator i
n World War Two. He was known as the master interrogator of Nazi Germany, and as you can imagine, there was a lot of competition. He was charged with interrogating US Air Force pilots. He was even used to interrogate VIPs, very important prisoners. He was so good that his methods shaped US intelligence techniques during the Cold War. Many of his methods are still used by US Army intelligence. He was successful because he didn’t once use physical torture to obtain the information he wanted.’

  He looked at her, his eyes demanding a response.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ she said.

  ‘Hanns Joachim Scharff made the POWs think he was their greatest asset. They were told that if they didn’t pass over information, they would be deemed a spy and handed over to the Gestapo. He said that there was no way he’d allow that to happen and shared jokes and food with them. He spoke fluent English and new the social mores of the day in the US. He asked them questions he knew the answers to and then asked them a question he didn’t know the answer to. They often told him the answer, thinking he knew that answer too, believing they weren’t betraying a secret, but rather they would obtain more favourable treatment.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Hester said.

  ‘Is it?’ the Chechen said. ‘In 1948, Scharff was invited to the US and gave lectures to the US Air Force. He was granted immigration status, even though his former paymasters were the enemies of the US. In the decades that followed, he became a world-renowned artist in mosaics. His works hang in the Epcot Center and in the Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World, Florida. A happy ending.’

  Hester said, ‘The only thing you will get is a continuation of the status quo.’

  Ignoring him, the Chechen said, ‘I’m prepared to tell you today what type of house you will buy for me in Miami Beach and how much you will deposit in a bank account in my new but legal name, here in the US, at least. I will tell you the new hairstyle I want and the shape of my new nose.’ He fingered his fleshy nose. ‘Perhaps I will go from a Muslim from the North Caucasus to a Christian from Boston. Perhaps not.’

  ‘As I said, I’ll pass,’ Hester said. ‘You think the US government is Santa Claus?’