by Ben Pastor
With just enough gasoline in his tank to make it to Kharkov and back, Bora started out for the third meeting of the day, and it was barely 9.30 a.m. His additional task at the moment, as if bringing his unit up to full size were not enough, was what he’d been painstakingly trained for: interrogating Russian prisoners, mostly high-ranking officers and the occasional party bureaucrat. For him, ever since the start of the campaign, interrogating those political commissars who hadn’t been executed on the spot had gone hand in hand with reconnaissance duty and the frequent, bloody skirmishes with the enemy. They’d given him headaches, those ideologically obdurate young men whom he often only got to see after they’d already been beaten or tortured. In some cases he succeeded in extracting something out of them; in most cases, he failed and could do nothing as they were dragged out to the gallows or the firing squad. As of this spring, he had been faring better with disheartened Ukrainian partisans, and best of all with privates and a few grudging non-coms. Officers were a mixed bag: some committed suicide (but not as often as commissars did), and others could be talked into saying what they knew, which was sometimes – not always – of real use.
With colonels, and more recently a handful of generals, each represented a case in its own right. Bora had a good record with them. Among them, however, General-Lieutenant Gleb Platonov was a thorn in his side. Old fox that he was, he hadn’t answered a single question put to him by Army interrogators since his capture in mid-April aboard a plane that had got lost in the fog and crash-landed on this side of the Donets. Surviving his badly injured pilot, he’d managed to burn the papers he had with him before the Germans reached the accident site. Identification had only been possible through photographs until a couple of his unranked Russian prisoners, who had nothing to gain from keeping mum, confirmed who he was.
Bora, to whom the prisoner had been sent as a last resort due to his extensive interrogation experience, bristled with irritation even as he drove to South Kharkov. For over ten days Platonov (referred to as Number Five) had sat in front of him with his mouth shut, blinking every now and again, impervious to all arguments. Bora kept the pressure on, but knowing the man’s past – how, tried and jailed during Stalin’s purges, he’d only been fished out when war made it necessary – his hopes of breaking him were dim. Platonov used the poor health of his three years in Siberia to his advantage; more than once he’d passed out (or pretended to), forcing Bora to call for medical help and the expected shot of caffeine or whatever else eventually brought him to. The medic from a nearby hospital who periodically checked Bora after his bout with typhoid pneumonia said he couldn’t be sure the prisoner suffered from any real pathology. A student drafted before finishing his degree in medicine, Weller had flown out of Stalingrad with the last wounded before the trap closed; now he compensated for the limitations of his non-commissioned rank with thoroughness tinged by melancholy. In his words, “Whatever the prisoner’s state, surgeon’s orders are that his health be closely guarded, Herr Major.” As if Bora didn’t know.
The Germans had given Platonov decent quarters in the Velikaya Osnova district at the southern edge of Kharkov, where the Lopany River bent like an elbow and the beleaguered railroad tracks on the opposite side formed a comparable, lesser angle. The area was like an island: the river and the tracks coming down from the South Station nearly touched the river north of the district, and tracks and river crossed below it. The building adapted as a special detention centre stood on Mykolaivska Street, less than a kilometre from the war-damaged hospital on Saikivska. The hospital had once stood in a garden setting, but was sparsely manned these days and being hastily repaired by the Germans. Bora and many others referred to it merely as 169, the number that marked it on army maps, as army units changed and street names alternatively transcribed into German from Russian or Ukrainian only created confusion.
Grabbing his folded tunic from the front seat and stepping inside, Bora asked, for the sake of asking, “Has Number Five said anything?” When the expected negative reply came, he showed none of the crankiness he felt. “There, Mina.” He patted the watchdog, a large Belgian shepherd the men here had adopted and aptly renamed after defusing the Soviet anti-tank charges she carried strapped on to her body. “There, girl, let me through. Is she pregnant, or are you making her fat?”
“We’re making her fat, Herr Major. She eats anything. You ought to see her catch flies.”
Platonov’s secure quarters were on the third floor. Bora climbed the stairs, telling himself the obvious: sometimes captured enemies give you a hard time, sometimes they collaborate at once; most of them have to be worked on. But, damn it, Lieutenant General Platonov had withstood Stalin’s methods. Bora wasn’t in a hurry but would be soon, since Platonov stood to know about the latest STAVKA plans, the line-up of Soviet forces in the Kursk salient, and – most importantly – details about the reserves massed at the back of them.
At the first landing, he stopped to remove his pistol belt in anticipation of wearing the tunic over his summer army shirt for the sake of protocol. As if it were worth it. Platonov strongly disliked him, and if in his arrogance (his rank and connected importance allowed him) he addressed his jailers as “brown vermin” and “fascist garbage”, to Bora he said nothing at all, not even “good day”. The same routine repeated itself day after day: he stood, Platonov sat, and told him nothing. Ten minutes or an hour made no difference to his silence; and neither did an entire night of patient reasoning on Bora’s part.
But then… At the start of the second week of detention, Bora discovered through informants that Platonov’s wife and daughter, reportedly victims of Stalin’s Purge, lived in Poltava, some 150 kilometres south-west of Kharkov. Far away, but by Russian standards practically next door. Through all kinds of bureaucratic snags and difficulties he’d arranged for the women to be picked up and brought to Kharkov as soon as possible. It was a matter of days now. This morning, Bora planned to show the prisoner a photograph he’d ordered to be taken of his two relatives: indoors, without recognizable landmarks or objects other than this month’s calendar on the wall. See, we have your women, it meant. Unlike Stalin, who told you they were dead, we haven’t even arrested them. Yet. It could be done in a friendly or in a threatening way, without in the least contravening protocol; such an exchange of precious goods might be irresistible for a man who hadn’t seen his family in six years.
Third landing. Flies circled in the narrow corridor leading to the rooms adapted as cells, all empty at the moment except the general’s. Above, on the fourth floor, there was only one more room set up, where Bora occasionally spent the night when interrogations dragged late into the dark hours. Regardless of the stifling heat, Bora now put on and buttoned his tunic, buckling his pistol belt over it. When he slipped the photo of the prisoner’s women inside his left breast pocket, his fingertips touched the button he’d picked up in the woods.
No, he didn’t look forward to facing Platonov’s bad-humoured leanness again. Dark and tall once, he’d grown stooped and grey by the time of his rehabilitation, but in the way rock only grows harder. You’d never believe he had nightmares and the guards sometimes heard him cry out at night.
Entering the room, furnished with every comfort that could not be used for committing suicide, Bora surprised himself by thinking of Krasny Yar. Touching the button had sufficed to take him back there. How was it possible that a bushy piece of land with a handful of murdered Russians in it kept bobbing up to the surface when millions had died thus far? It annoyed him. The Russkis will try to spook us if they can’t do anything else, the non-com had said. Well, maybe.
Platonov, seated in a green velvet armchair, would not even raise his eyes towards him. For a change, Bora didn’t open his mouth either. He took the prisoner’s indifference in his stride, and walked around the small table to face Platonov as he sat with his eyes doggedly turned to the floor. Having been briefly in enemy hands himself a year and a half earlier, he fully understood the refusal to give in
formation. He’d done the same; the Russians had broken his left arm for it. But then he’d managed to escape. Despite the velvet seat and lace doily on the table, Platonov would no more be given the chance of fleeing now than he’d been given by Stalin back then. As a rule, Bora normally remained standing, but this time he reached for a stool and seated himself across from the prisoner.
Platonov looked up. Bora met his glance, as one would acknowledge a fellow passenger on a train. For close to twenty minutes they sat facing each other, Bora steadily keeping his eyes on Platonov while he stared past him at the opposite wall. Neither man moved, shifted his weight on the seat or even caused its wooden frame to creak. There was a solitary fly in the cell, and Bora could hear it land and take off from various objects.
To the prisoner, it was perhaps one more form of nerve-wracking challenge to resist; to Bora it amounted to an exercise of mental discipline, devoid of emotion. And although no one could know what Platonov was thinking, Bora let a myriad other sensations, all unrelated to the place and moment, go through him without thinking about them, in the same way a breeze on a water’s surface doesn’t affect it enough to make it ripple. Platonov’s seamed face, marked by pain and overbearing, might equally indicate a similar ability to abstract himself, or else the stolid, spiteful intention to withhold communication now and forever.
Finally Bora rose to his feet. Tight-lipped, he unbuttoned his breast pocket, took out the photograph and laid it on the table, face down. By the time he curtly rapped on the door to be let out, the prisoner had made no attempt to turn the print around or even reach for it; he might have lowered his glance to it, but Bora didn’t stick around to see whether this was the case.
Letting things settle in Platonov’s mind was all Bora could do for now. He started back for Merefa, and at the Udy River crossing he began to think some luck was already coming his way. A makeshift filling station had been improvised by army engineers in a clearing by the road, too good an opportunity to pass by. The officer in charge was unsympathetic at first; lorries and half-tracks took precedence. In the end he agreed to give him half a tank, but remarked, “You know, you cavalrymen ought to travel on fodder. Where’s your horse, Major?”
Gasoline being at a premium, it was best not to argue. Bora replied with the truth: that time was too tight this morning for a ride. He’d driven uneventfully as far as the Kremesnaya turn-off when a motorcycle courier overtook him in a storm of fine dust, signalling for him to slow down, much as a traffic policeman gives directions to an unruly driver.
The army vehicle came head to head with the still-running motorcycle, and stopped. “Major Bora?” the courier enquired, raising the goggles on his forehead.
“Yes. What is it?”
“I was told at the Mykolaivska Street detention centre I’d find you along this road, Major.” The courier took a folded sheet out of his pouch. “There’s a high-priority communication awaiting you at Borovoye.”
“Borovoye?” Bora scanned the message, which bore the name of an Abwehr colleague usually stationed at Smijeff, on the Donets.
The courier turned the motorcycle around, in the direction of Kharkov. “You could go back five kilometres and take the first dirt road to the right, but I don’t recommend it: they’re still clearing it of mines. You might as well keep on to Merefa at this point.”
“Thank you; I know the road from there.”
What his foul-mouthed colleague Bruno Lattmann might be doing at Borovoye, in the middle of nowhere, was not indicated on the sheet. The place was at least thirty kilometres from here, which in Ukraine meant anywhere between one and two hours’ travel. There was nothing at Borovoye as far as he knew. His first thought was that the courier would bring news of Platonov: that he was ready to talk – or that he’d smashed his head against the wall. Now, Bora didn’t know what to think.
The dirt trails were a nightmare of ruts and crumbling shoulders once away from the minimally maintained roads. On both sides, fallow fields, burned farms, flocks of peasant women around the occasional water troughs and long stretches of absolute, undulating solitude went by.
Son of a Deutsche Welle radio executive, Lattmann was a close friend. When they’d last met ten days earlier, the conversation had ended on a personal note, not unusually for them. “Can you confirm she’s still living there?” Bora had asked.
“Yes. I thought you’d have gone to see her already.”
“I haven’t.”
“What are you waiting for? For the front to turn again?”
“It was a long relationship, Bruno. I’m in two minds about it.”
“Well, this is probably the last chance you have. A year ago things were different, but now… If it matters to you, you’d better make time to see her.”
Recalling the conversation, Bora sped as much as the road allowed. Yes, he’d have to go and see Larisa. He promised himself he’d do it. At Stalingrad, towards the end, he’d told himself, full of regret, I’ll die without seeing her again. Now he resisted again. If there’s time, I’ll go.
Not that Lattmann would be sending couriers or urgent messages about private matters. When Bora reached Borovoye, just before noon, he found a small radio shack newly set up there, and his Abwehr colleague pacing back and forth in front of it.
The first words Lattmann said were, “Fucking hell, Bora, I’ve been chasing you all morning!”
“I’ve been busy all morning.”
“Drop everything. We’ve got a top-ranking Russian commander who waded over this morning from across the Donets. News came in via radio, coded and in Morse. Seems he contacted us beforehand on our radio frequency to keep us from shooting at him. Says he’s defecting.”
“Really.” After Platonov, Bora wasn’t looking for another disappointment. “Are we sure?”
Lattmann took him by the arm and led him out of the shack, away from the radio man. “Listen to this. He asks specifically for the head of our Office of Foreign Intelligence III.”
“Specifically?”
“By name. And rank. It’s possible he might know about Colonel Bentivegni, you’ll say. Well, he also speaks serviceable German, and seems to know lots about us.”
Us meant Counterintelligence to those in it. German-speaking Russian officers were not infrequent; the generation before Bora’s had learnt Russian while training secretly in the Soviet Union during the Weimar days, and vice versa. Bora remained cautious.
“Does he. Hm. And who does he say he is?”
“He says he’s Tibyetsky.”
Bora felt a nervous sting down to his fingertips, like an electric shock. “The ‘Tibetan’? The one they call Khan?”
“Right.”
“Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, we had him facing us in Stalingrad. He’s into all of STAVKA’s planning. Can it be…? It’d be the lucky break of the year!”
Lattmann grinned. “You’re the interrogator; you be the judge. He came rumbling up in a brand-new model of tank the Panzer Corps will drool over. Big stuff. Scherer, whom you know, was called in for armoured support in case it were a trick, and cordoned off the place.”
Other than Konev and Rokossovsky, Khan was the prize catch of a lifetime, never mind the year. To hell with Platonov and his convenient swoons. Bora could hardly contain himself. Tibyetsky was as elusive as his assumed name. (Like other old revolutionaries, he had two or three aliases.) Bora had studied him as far back as Cavalry School and the War Academy, and what Khan had later achieved at Stalingrad, at Smolensk, was legendary. Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded the Red and Gold Stars, and God knows what other medals… All hope of taking him prisoner had been out of the question. How likely was it that he should defect – and now? If I think how he thundered over the loudspeakers while we were spitting blood in Stalingrad so we’d surrender, if I think he bowled us over just four months ago…
“Bruno, when can I see him?”
Without being asked, Lattmann placed a jerrycan of gasoline in the back of Bora’s vehicle. He habitually che
wed his nails, and his fingertips always gave the impression of having been nibbled by fish.
“Go at once. Scherer is anxious for you to get there. The Russian is still inside his tank and won’t get down until we assure him an official contact will be made with Bentivegni in Berlin-Zossen. So I checked with our Kiev people. Given the mess on the Tunisian front, Colonel Bentivegni is reported ‘somewhere’ in Southern Italy conferring with commanders there, more’s the shame. By the way, it was coincidence that Scherer and his unit were in transit to the 11th Panzer Division’s new deployment area; imagine how desperate they are to get their hands on the tank. I needn’t tell you that the Abwehr must have the defector first before RSHA gets hold of him; the Central Security Office would transfer him then, and we wouldn’t get another chance.” Given that when alone with Bora Lattmann usually spoke of the RSHA as “Kaltenbrunner’s thugs”, it was a sign of his haste that he’d simply called SS-Gestapo intelligence by its acronym.
Bora flew over every rut and pothole along the next twenty-odd kilometres; any forgotten landmine in the criss-cross of dishevelled lanes zigzagging between Borovoye and the river could have blown him sky-high.
2
4 MAY, AFTERNOON, NORTH OF NOVO ANDREYEVKA
The immediate area along the Donets, south of the ford Bora himself had used the day before, was cordoned off by troops, a sign of the importance and secrecy of the event. All around stood heavily armed soldiers and artillery from the 161st, in case it were a ruse, and, further back, armoured vehicles and three tank busters from the 11th Panzer at the ready. The place where the Russian tank had stopped was on the nearside of a slight incline fifty or so metres from the river bank, undetectable from enemy lines. On its oversized turret the commander’s cupola was open, and a man in a leather jacket and visored cap stood leaning, with his arms crossed over its rim. Distant grass fires to the east, invisible from here, caused infinitesimal flecks of grey ash to rain slowly over the scene, resembling bits of foil.
