by Philip Kerr
There were 50,000 of us who marched from Stalingrad to Beketovka—since then as many as 45,000 have died. I have learned from Germans transferred from other camps that in these, too, it is the same story. Those who died were the best of us for, strange as it might seem, often the strongest died first. For myself, I will not survive another winter; already I am sick. There is a rumor that I am to be sent to another camp—perhaps Camp 93 at Tyumen, in Omsk Province, or Oransky Number 74 in Gorky Province; but I don’t think I will live to complete the journey.
I would write more but cannot as I fear discovery; but there is no end to what could be written about this dreadful place. To whoever is reading this, I ask you, when the opportunity presents itself, please say a prayer for those like me whose deaths in this place will go unnoticed; and for those less fortunate souls who remain alive. God bless you, dear reader. And God bless the Fatherland. I ask forgiveness of all those I have wronged. They know who they are. I do not know the date, but I think it must be late September 1943.
Heinrich Zahler
Lieutenant
76th Infantry,
Camp Number 108
Beketovka.
I went to the hotel balcony and put my face in the sun just to remind myself I was still alive. Between the jumbled rooftops and the minarets, elegantly tall palm trees swayed in the warm breeze that swept off the Nile. In the street below, the Cairo traffic was going about its reassuringly argumentative business. I took a deep breath of air and tasted gasoline, sweat, Turkish coffee, horse dung, and cigarettes. It tasted good. Beketovka seemed like a million miles away, on another planet. I couldn’t think of a better antidote to Camp 108 than Cairo, with its smelly drains and its dirty postcards.
The smart thing to have done would have been to leave it alone. Not to get personally involved. Except that I was involved. So instead of doing the smart thing and lying to Reichleitner—telling him I had given the file to FDR—I decided that I had to talk to someone about what I had read. And I could think of no one better than the major himself. But first I went down to the Long Bar and asked the head barman if they had a bottle of Korn. He said they had several because there was no demand for German liquor among the British. It wasn’t that the English didn’t like the taste, just that they didn’t know such a thing even existed. I gave the man a couple of pounds and told him to bring me a bottle and two small glasses. Then I put it inside my briefcase and had Coogan drive me back to Grey Pillars.
Major Reichleitner was at work on the ciphers. He looked a little tired. But his eyes widened when he saw the bottle.
“My God, Fürst Bismarck,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”
I produced the two glasses, placed them on the table, and filled each to the brim. We toasted each other silently and then drained the glass. The German mixed-grain liquor slipped into my body as if it had been something that belonged there, like my own heart and my lungs. I sat down on the bed and lit us both a cigarette.
“I owe you an apology, Major.”
“Oh? How’s that?”
“Earlier on, when I told you I’d read the Beketovka File, that was a lie. I hadn’t read it at all. But I’ve read it now.”
“I see,” said Reichleitner. He looked a little uncertain of where this conversation was now headed. I wasn’t sure myself. I refilled his glass. This time he sniffed it carefully, several times, before emptying the spirits down his throat.
I produced the Beketovka File from my briefcase and laid it on the table next to the bottle of Korn.
“My father is a German Jew,” I told him. “Born in Berlin, but brought up and educated in the United States. My mother comes from an old German family. Her father was the Baron von Dorff, who also went to live in the United States, to seek his fortune. Or at least to make another. He left behind a sister and two brothers. One of them had a son, my mother’s cousin. Friedrich von Dorff. We all spent one Christmas together in Berlin. Many years ago.
“When the war started, Friedrich’s son, Helmut, joined the cavalry. The Sixth Panzer Army, Sixteenth Division. With General Hube. The battering ram of the Panzer Corps. In August 1942 they crossed the Don, heading for Stalingrad. I thought he had been killed there. Until this afternoon, that is, when I read Heinrich Zahler’s account of life in Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. If you can call it life.”
I picked up the relevant page and read from it aloud.
“Your mother’s cousin’s son,” said Reichleitner.
I nodded. “I know a second cousin doesn’t sound like very much of a reason to be affected. But we were a close family. And I remember Helmut von Dorff extremely well. He was just a boy when I knew him. Not more than ten or twelve years old, I suppose. A beautiful boy. Gentle, well read, thoughtful, interested in philosophy.” I shrugged. “As I said, I had thought he was dead already. So it seems strange to read about him now. And horrible, of course, to learn the mean and degrading circumstances of his death.”
“Then we are enemies no more,” said Reichleitner.
He took the bottle by the neck and filled our glasses himself. We toasted each other again.
“I just wanted you to know. So that you can be sure I will do everything I can to make sure that the president reads this.”
“Thank you,” said Reichleitner. He smiled sadly. “This is good stuff. Where did you get it?”
“Shepheard’s Hotel.”
“Ah, Shepheard’s. I wish I were there now.”
“After the war perhaps you will be.”
“You know, I was thinking. I never saw Hitler. Not close up, anyway. But in Teheran, you’ll probably get to see Stalin. Up close. As close as I am now, perhaps.”
“Perhaps.”
“I envy you that opportunity. A chance to look him in the eye and see what kind of man he is. If he’s the monster I imagine him to be.”
“Do you think he is a monster?”
“I tell you honestly,” said Major Reichleitner. “I think I’m more afraid that he might seem just like you or me. An ordinary man.”
I left Major Reichleitner with the bottle and the cigarettes to continue working on the ciphers.
Outside Grey Pillars, I found myself feeling light-headed. Light-headed but heavy of spirit. Diana Vandervelden seemed almost as far away from me as Beketovka. Which was a pity, as the battery inside my chest was needing the kind of boost that only the company of a good friend could provide. A good female friend who still cared for me a little, perhaps. So I bought some flowers and walked round to Elena’s house. We had arranged to meet that evening.
Elena’s butler, Hossein, asked me to wait in the drawing room until his mistress was awake, explaining she always slept for a couple of hours in the afternoon. But I had the distinct impression that she was not alone. There was a certain masculine smell in the air. A smell like American cigarettes, Old Spice, and brilliantine. On the sofa was the October edition of Jumbo Comics, featuring Sheena Queen of the Jungle, which hadn’t been there the previous evening. I flicked through the comic book while I waited. Sheena had large breasts and wore a fetching sort of loincloth made from leopard skin. For killing panthers and riding elephants, Sheena’s outfit looked like a good choice. But you needed something different when your prey had just two legs. Elena knew that. And when, eventually, she came into the drawing room, she was dressed in something much more practical. She was wearing a white silk dressing gown underneath which she was practically naked. Which was fine if she really had been sleeping. A lot of people sleep naked. A few of them even do it alone. Not that she felt any pressing need to explain herself.
“What a nice surprise,” she said.
“I’m a bit early,” I said. “But I was in the area. So, I thought I’d drop by.” I brandished the magazine as evidence. “I hope I’m not interrupting something.”
She took the magazine from my hand, glanced at it, and then tossed it aside. “One of the boys from last night must have left it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“Light me a cigarette, will you, darling?”
I lit us each one and concentrated on the little matching silk slipper that was holding on to the end of her perfect toes.
“I called your hotel this morning, but they said you’d already gone out.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. I wanted to see that you were all right. Last night, just after you’d left, I went up to bed and as I was drawing the curtains in my room, I saw a car parked on the corner. And a man standing beside it.”
“What kind of car?” I asked.
“Dark green. Alfa Romeo sports sedan.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I had the strange idea that the driver was Wlazyslaw Pulnarowicz. I mean, it looked very much like the colonel. Except for the fact that he wasn’t wearing his uniform. And he owns a white BMW.”
“I see. What was he wearing? This man you saw.”
Elena shrugged and played with her cigarette.
“The light wasn’t good. But I think he was wearing a light brown suit and spat shoes. You know, white, with a dark toe.”
“How about a hat?”
She shrugged. “Yes. A Panama. He was holding it in his hands.”
I thought for a moment about the man who had shot at me. “When you first talked about the colonel, you said he was the old-fashioned type and that he might get jealous and challenge me to a duel.”
Elena nodded.
“Do you think he’s the type that could murder a man in cold blood?”
“Oh, darling, they all are. That’s what the SOE is all about.”
“Someone took a shot at me last night. In Ezbekiah Gardens. He missed me, but another man, an Egyptian, was killed, Elena.”
“Oh my God, you don’t think it was Lazlo?”
“It looks that way. The only people running around Cairo carrying pistols with silencers work for SOE, or the German Abwehr.” I shrugged. It wasn’t anything like the ball I had pitched Harry Hopkins, but I still liked a German spy ring for the murders of Ted and Debbie Schmidt. I would have to speak to Colonel Powell about Wlazyslaw Pulnarowicz. “It might be that after the party, the colonel drove back home, changed out of his uniform, borrowed someone’s car, and then came back to see if I was still here. Then he followed me back to my hotel, where he tried to give my brain some air-conditioning.”
This time Elena took a proper hit on her cigarette. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be. You’re Desdemona in this play. Not Othello.”
“All the same, it was me who put you in harm’s way, Willy. It was me who made him jealous.” She shook her head. “God damn the man. It’s not like there was even anything to feel jealous about. We were just two old friends, catching up.”
“Maybe that was true last night,” I said and then kissed her on the lips. “But not now.”
She smiled and kissed me back. “No, you’re right. Now he would have every reason to feel jealous.”
“He’s not hiding upstairs, is he?”
“No. Would you like to check?”
“I think I should, don’t you?”
Elena stood up and, taking me by the hand, led me out of the drawing room toward the stairs.
“Of course you know what this means, don’t you?” I said. “It means you’re going to have to show me your bedroom wallpaper.”
“I hope you like it.”
“I’m sure I will.”
She led me into a hallway as big as a railway station, up the huge yellow marble stairs, into her bedroom, and closed the doors behind us. I glanced around. I didn’t see her wallpaper. I didn’t see the rug beneath my feet. I didn’t even see her bed. All I saw was Elena and the white silk gown slipping off her shoulders and the reflection of my own hands cupping her bare behind in a full-length cheval mirror.
I LAY STILL next to the refuge afforded by Elena’s naked body. I thought of Heinrich Zahler and Helmut von Dorff lying in the cold ground of Beketovka. I thought of the insane Polish colonel who wanted to kill me, and the ruthless Nazi agent on the ship, and the imprisoned German major who was working to decode some signals that might reveal me to have been a Russian spy. I thought of poor Ted Schmidt’s body, or what remained of it, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. I thought of Diana lying on the floor of her Chevy Chase house and her nameless lover’s bare backside framed between her knees. I thought of Mrs. Schmidt lying in the cold drawer of a Metro Police morgue. I thought of the president. I thought of Harry Hopkins and Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. I even thought of Wild Bill Donovan and Colonel Powell. But mostly I thought of Elena. The shadows moved across the bedside cabinet and I thought of death. I thought of my own death, and assured myself that it seemed a long way off when I was with Elena.
For a while I slept and dreamed of Elena. When I did wake, she was in the bathroom, singing quietly. I sat up, switched on the bedside light, lit a cigarette, and looked around for something to read. On a large chest of drawers were several leather-bound photograph albums, and thinking that these might contain some pictures of our old times together in Berlin, I opened one and started turning the pages. Mostly the album was full of pictures of Elena in various Cairo nightclubs with her late husband, Freddy, and, once or twice, with King Farouk himself. But it was a page of photographs taken in the roof garden at the Auberge des Pyramides (Elena captioned all of her pictures in a neat, penciled hand) that, for the second time that day, left me feeling as if a camel had kicked me in the stomach.
In the photographs, Elena was seated beside a handsome man in a cream linen suit. He had his arm around her and she looked to be on the most intimate terms with him. What was surprising was that this was a man currently occupying a cell at Grey Pillars, less than half a mile away. The man in the photograph was Major Max Reichleitner.
I told myself these pictures could hardly have been taken before the war. Hadn’t Coogan told me that the Auberge des Pyramides had opened just a few months before? Hearing Elena coming out of the bathroom, I quickly put aside the album and retrieved my hardly smoked cigarette from its ashtray.
“Light me one, will you, darling?” she said. She was wearing nothing but a gold watch.
“Here, you can have this one,” I said, moving to her side.
I watched her closely as she took a puff, then put it out. Unpinning her blond hair, which was long enough to come past her waist, she began to brush it absently. Thinking that I was looking at her with desire, she smiled and said, “Do you want to have me again? Is that it?”
She climbed onto the bed and held her arms open expectantly. Taking a deep breath, I knelt over her but I could not help but consider the possibility that she herself was working for the Germans. Given the intimacy in the photograph of her with Reichleitner, was it at all possible that he would have come to Cairo and not tried to see her? Elena simply had to be his contact. After all, she wouldn’t know that Reichleitner had been captured by the Allies.
I put myself inside her, drawing a long, shuddering gasp from her.
Only now did the speed with which she had gone to bed with me again seem at all suspicious. I began to thrust hard, almost as if I were trying to punish her for the duplicity I now strongly suspected. Elena came with equal force, and for a moment I abandoned myself to pleasure. Then she snuggled into my side, and my doubts returned. Was it possible that she was more than just a contact?
But if she was a German spy, when had she been recruited? Casting my mind back to Berlin in the summer of 1938, I tried to recall the Elena Pontiatowska with whom I’d been intimate.
Elena had hated the Bolsheviks, that much was easy to remember. I recalled one particular conversation we had had when news of Stalin’s Ukrainian terror began to reach the West. Elena, whose father had fought in the Russo-Polish war of 1920, had insisted that the whole edifice of Soviet communism was based on mass murder, but Stalin was no worse than Lenin in that
respect.
“My father always said that Lenin ordered the extermination of the entire Don Cossack people—a million men, women, and children,” she had told me. “It’s not that I like the Nazis. I don’t, as it happens. It’s just that I fear the Russians more. I know that however stupid and cruel the Nazis can be, the Russians are far worse. If Hitler wants the Sudetenland, it’s because he thinks he needs it as a bulwark against another Russian invasion. Perhaps the Czechs have forgotten what Trotsky did to them, in 1918, when he tried to turn their army into slave-labor battalions. Mark my words, Willy, they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing again. The Nazis are a bad lot, but the Bolsheviks are evil. That’s why Hitler got elected in the first place. Because people were terrified that the Reds might gain control in Germany. So you won’t convince me that there is anything good to be said about communism. Perhaps it sounds good in principle, as an ideal. But my family has seen it in practice, and it’s nothing short of bestial.”
Disliking the Russians was one thing; spying for the Nazis was another. There was only one thing for it. In order to be sure, one way or the other, I was going to have to search Elena’s house. If there were photographs of Major Reichleitner in an album, then there might easily be other evidence that would prove one way or the other if Elena were working for the Abwehr.
Elena roused herself, gave me a brief kiss, and returned to the bathroom.
I picked up the photo album. I wanted to see what she would say when she found me looking at it. At the pictures of her with Reichleitner. It would be instructive to see exactly how she tried to explain them. But when she emerged from the bathroom, she didn’t bat an eye.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist having a peek. I suppose I thought there might be one or two pictures of you and me, back in Berlin.”
“They’re in another album,” she said coolly, her only concern seeming to be that we dress and find some dinner. “I’ll show you later. It’s time you got ready. I thought we could go to the club. But you’ll need to change. We can stop at your hotel on the way.”
