The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

  He wasn’t taken in. He didn’t trust the German authorities, even now. Their recent actions were, he believed, born of a lingering guilt that time would not assuage. Besides, they couldn’t save everyone in need, even if their intentions were honest. They still chose who lived and died, he thought. He wanted nothing from them, least of all sympathy.

  He picked up the plastic bottle and tipped its contents onto the floor. He worried then that they would think he’d urinated. But what difference did it make, given his predicament?

  He was dressed in a disposable hazmat suit, his shoes fashioned from single pieces of canvas and edgeless. He glanced up at the fluorescent strip lighting, itself encaged in taut wire. There was not a single item in the room that was both moveable and with which he could self-harm. Even the plastic bottle was too thick.

  The shmucks, he thought.

  He thought now of how it had been for Joseph Kazapov in the secure hospital. Perhaps he should have left him to rot in his hell. There, the anti-psychotic drugs would’ve dulled the sharp brain, his only companions the poor souls that slow-danced to the monotonous background noise of absurd TV programmes.

  But no, he’d deserved to die by his own hand and in the manner he’d executed. A high-calibre bullet in the upper body. A liver shot. A slow death shot. The male nurses had been kept at bay long enough for him to see his enemy bleed out, the blood thick and black and glorious to his eyes.

  Stolarski had found his faith again in an American city, twenty years ago or more. It hadn’t been the result of a miracle he’d witnessed. He’d simply sought guidance and had been given it, he’d believed. He’d read what his finger had randomly fallen upon: A false witness should suffer the same punishment which he sought to have inflicted upon the person he accused. Nor could any law be more just. Deuteronomy. The speeches of Moses on the plains of the Moab opposite Jericho. It had been fitting, he’d believed.

  He’d waited these two decades for the God of Moses to bring this to fruition, for this had been guided by the hand of God, or he was not a man and the words worth less than a granule of rock salt.

  The door opened and in walked a man of learning, he knew. A brave man, though perhaps not in the conventional sense as he saw it. But brave, no doubt about it. His name was Gabriel Hall, the secular lawyer. God used all manner of men, he believed. He knew Gabriel to be a modern man, one who had not killed, nor had he seen others killed with his eyes. A man whose mind was not contaminated by images of total war. A civilian.

  His own mind was lost in the distant past still. He saw nothing but the havoc and desolation of war, even in his dreams and when his mind wandered in his everyday life in a futile attempt to avoid it. He’d tried to subdue it once, with learning of his own, with a profession of his own. With a kindly woman from Nebraska with a teenage daughter, too. It hadn’t worked out. Nothing had worked out for him. But he’d found a semblance of peace with Ned, partly because the black veteran was a man more disturbed by war than himself. He sat on the porch on guard duty, waiting for the Viet Cong to come out of the forest, with their conical bamboo-leaf sunhats and blazing AK-47 assault rifles. The poor bastard.

  Gabriel Hall sat down, his expression resigned, and said, ‘I’m listening.’

  He wore a beautiful suit of fine cloth, a white, open-necked shirt that showed a mottling to the skin about the upper regions of his chest, and Stolarski knew the source. The hands were bandaged still. He’d walked with an awkwardness that had spoken of discomfort.

  He knew Gabriel Hall did not realize the real source of his own pain — pain that he’d carried within him for years after the war, which ran much deeper than the cancer, even. How could he? He’d lied to him. Besides, who knew the pain that transcended the cells and was the pain of the lost soul? The lawyer had been spared that in the end, thank God. But not even his rekindled faith had eased the pain. Only the act of killing Joseph Kazapov had come close to doing that.

  ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Hall. It’s appreciated. I am guilty as charged, you should know that from the off. But I will not lie to you again.’

  ‘What lies?’

  ‘I will tell you. I promise you that. I will ask one more thing of you, if I may? I know you to be a serious man, and this was why I asked you to come here. Serious men are hard to find.’

  He stopped speaking and held his neck, winced and went to pick up the bottle to drink… but realized he’d poured the juice away. He knew it wouldn’t have quenched the sense of parched wood in his throat, in any event. It was deep-rooted and a symptom of his grave illness. The cancer was real enough.

  ‘No brother of mine was ever in a uranium mine. But I was. No brother of mine had cancer. But I do. The mine caused it. Icchak Stolarski did not have a wife and children, but I did. A boy and girl. I knew Icchak in the mine. As he lay dying, I asked him if I could assume his identity. To live, I suppose. He consented, of course. After I got out of Europe I decided to become Bronislaw Stolarski and use Icchak as a backstory. He wouldn’t have minded.’

  Gabriel’s eyes didn’t move. He didn’t move at all.

  ‘By the beginning of 1953 there were almost two and a half million inmates of Soviet prison camps, a fifth of whom were political prisoners. There were special camps for children, for the disabled and mothers with babies. There were special camps for the wives of traitors of the Motherland. There were special camps for traitors of Motherland family members. But my family didn’t even arrive at a special camp. SMERSH killed my family — because of what Joseph Kazapov had said. I killed Joseph Kazapov.’

  He wanted to weep even now, but he did not. Could not.

  ‘They broke my children’s little bodies. They whipped my wife with barbed wire. They tossed their corpses down a well, like the Romanovs. They told me this in the mine. As if I wasn’t suffering enough, I suppose. They didn’t want us to die, you see. Not quickly, at least. There was not sufficient punishment in that. Joseph Kazapov orchestrated the death of my family because of the things I had seen. The things I told you about. He could trust his fellow NKVD, but I was a risk. I could have made connections. But you found him for me. You and God found him for me. You made the connections. I am Russian by birth, not Polish. A Christian. Not a Jew. I was a sergeant in the Red Army. The sergeant that decided to go into the bunker, even though everything was telling me not to. It started all this. One decision, that led to my family dying. Can you see that? My name is Pavel Romasko.’

  Gabriel shook his head. He said, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. For you suffering.’

  ‘I feel a little better now.’

  Gabriel rubbed his brow with the fingers of his right hand. Pavel could see the stress there, but he didn’t comment upon it.

  ‘Why did you lie about your identity?’

  Pavel said, ‘To get to the US, of course. A Polish Jew had a much better chance than a Red Army solider from a village near Rostov. I heard about perebezhahiki. It means defectors. But what did I have to offer? What secrets did I know? Nothing worth more than a packet of cigarettes. I was Bronislaw Stolarski to the outside world. But I was always Pavel Romasko inside. Soon, I can be Pavel Romasko on the outside too.’

  Gabriel sighed. He said, ‘You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.’

  Pavel thought for a moment, squinting.

  ‘There was a white heat inside me,’ he said. ‘There has always been a white heat inside me since then. Now it has eased. I never thought it would. I never thought anyone would find him. He said I was a spy, you see. Death to spies meant death to their families too. I only survived because Stalin died before I did. Lucky, I suppose. I want you to represent me, Mr Hall.’

  Gabriel nodded, knowingly rather than in agreement, Pavel could see. But Pavel wasn’t averse to evoking sympathy.

  He said, ‘I’m dying, Mr Hall. I’ll be dead in three months or less, they say.’

  ‘I have no jurisdiction here.’

  ‘No, no, no. No legal niceties. I will plead guilty and that is it.
You will be my advocate. I want you to tell my story. All of it. It’s important for the story to be told, isn’t it, Mr Hall? It is, despite the horror. The only thing we can do to prevent it happening again is to speak the truth.’

  ‘But you didn’t kill Kazapov. I don’t doubt you are familiar with firearms and know how to use a bolt-action sniper rifle like the one you handed in. But it wasn’t you.’

  Pavel was silent.

  ‘I figure it was Ned. You told me he was a sniper. Remember?’

  ‘Ned brought me to Germany, although we travelled separately through the airports. He had no notion of my plan. I told him I wanted to pay my respects to my men that had perished here before I died, is all.’

  Gabriel shook his head and bunched his mouth. He said, ‘I don’t buy it.’

  ‘Even if you are correct, Mr Hall, you should know that my finger pulled the trigger. It wasn’t Ned’s. No, sir.’

  ‘But he lined up the shot. He kept the male nurses at bay. Didn’t he?’

  ‘We came to this country separately as far as the German authorities are concerned. I’d like to keep it that way. I will stand before God and He knows the truth of it.’

  Gabriel said, ‘How did he get a sniper rifle?’

  ‘Anyone can buy anything anywhere for the right price, Mr Hall. You know that to be true.’

  ‘Where is Ned?’ Gabriel said.

  ‘We said our goodbyes before I gave myself up.’

  Gabriel stood to leave. He walked halfway to the door. He turned back but didn’t speak. Pavel guessed he wanted to speak, so he spoke for him and forced a half smile.

  ‘The death of my wife and children kept me alive, Mr Hall. I found my Orthodox faith, too. It left me in the war. God left the world then, whatever the priests say. I know that to be true. He came back again. After you represent me, I have decided to die. Choosing when you can die is something that millions didn’t have back then. Civilization is a veneer, Mr Hall. Is it not? The brutal and primitive nature of man lies waiting beneath. You will represent me, won’t you?’

  108

  New York State.

  Gabriel and Sangmu had hiked for five miles in the Adirondack Mountains. They’d sweated and ached and pushed their rucksacks up their backs to relieve the strain on their shoulders and lower backs.

  He’d rented a log cabin with good facilities to placate the worriers. His sister and brother-in-law, principally.

  It was a cloudless afternoon. The light here was without equal, the air so clean it possessed a primal quality.

  Pavel Romasko had been a remarkable man, he thought. His duplicity had staggered him. Gabriel had left the prison interview room that day, silent and without any clear idea of when the law should give way to the purely moral, or whether it should do so at all. That idea had bothered him at night.

  But he’d told the man’s story for him in the courtroom — after he’d pleaded guilty. Pavel had said that Gabriel spoke the words with the authority and conviction of a religious litany, and that he’d repeated each sentence in his head, as was befitting. He’d thanked Gabriel and had shaken his hand before he was led away. Gabriel hadn’t mentioned what he knew about Ned.

  A week later, Pavel had died. Just as he’d foretold. Gabriel had suspected suicide, although that was, in retrospect, too harsh a word for what had been the last defiant act of a dying man.

  Gabriel left his position at Yale and sold his law practice. He couldn’t have continued after what had happened, the things he’d done. He didn’t know what he would do in the future, and today he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything but the here and now.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing.

  A bald eagle had left its huge nest, built from twigs and sticks, high up in a tree bordering a lake. The brown wingspan was seven feet or more. It beat its wings before soaring on the thermal currents acrobatically. A figure of eight. A double circle. Its call was staccato, a little shrill, resembling a gull’s.

  It swooped low now over balsam fir and red spruce, down the slope of the valley to the lake, the sunlight playing there like so many silver fish. But the eagle was not fooled, he knew.

  ‘His eyes are keen, and he will find himself a lunch,’ Gabriel said, as if to himself.

  He watched Sangmu, fascinated and almost overwhelmed by the sight of the raptor, he could tell, its tufted white head and hooked yellow beak, its undeniable grace and power in flight.

  The eagle’s great sand-coloured talons came down like an aircraft’s landing gear, and it snagged a fish from just below the surface of the glistening water, causing a white splash. It beat its wings again and rose with its catch.

  Sangmu was smiling. The whites of her eyes were moonstones, the irises black pearls.

  There was hope and vitality there.

  And Gabriel smiled too.

  If you enjoyed The Blameless Dead, please share your thoughts on Amazon by leaving a review.

  For more free and discounted eBooks every week, sign up to our newsletter.

  Follow us on Twitter and Instagram.