A couple on their way home, long coat for the woman and tan leather jacket for the man, looked in from the main street, almost said something, changed their minds and shrugged at each other. It was maybe half ten, maybe just before. Moscow shut earlier than any city Tom knew.
‘Drunk,’ he heard the man say.
They continued on their way and Tom went back to hammering on the side window, wondering how long it would be before the militsiya arrived.
Beziki beat them to it.
A door was thrown open inside and his bulk filled the unlit space. Stamping towards the side window, he peered through the glass, his eyes hooded and his mouth set. When he realized it was Tom, he nodded. Tom waited while he threw back the bolts and dug into his pocket for a key.
‘This is a bad time,’ Beziki said.
A revolver hung from his fingers. He had the fierce sobriety of the God-fearingly sober or the absolutely and unremittingly drunk. He held himself under such tight control that Tom had no idea which it was until Beziki breathed brandy on him.
‘You have company?’ Tom asked, looking at the revolver.
‘Not any longer.’ The fat man hesitated for a second, then shrugged. ‘Strangely enough, I’ve just finished writing to you.’ His eyes were so haunted that Tom was surprised he couldn’t simply see the ghosts behind.
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘About your sons.’
‘I always knew. No matter how hard I hoped, I always knew I wouldn’t get the second one back. It was my decision. My stupidity.’
‘You should have given them what they wanted?’
‘What they wanted shouldn’t have existed.’
Stepping back, Beziki gestured him in.
The restaurant floor was filthy, the tables pushed to one side and the chairs stacked against the wall. The room smelled dusty and unused. It looked so desolate in the light coming in through the front windows it was possible to believe Tom had imagined the waiters and endless dishes of his last meal here. They walked through to the back, avoiding a trestle with roller trays full of congealing white emulsion.
‘I sent everyone away,’ Beziki said.
He led Tom to a small, dark and empty room with what looked like a cupboard door at the far end. He tried the handle, swore and dug into his pocket for the Soviet equivalent of a Yale key. The room beyond was in darkness too. A lavishly furnished darkness with the silhouette of a chandelier overhead and the shadows of ornate chairs and the outline of a chaise longue against the far wall.
‘My office,’ Beziki said.
His hand hovered over a light switch and then he decided to do without. Instead he pulled back one heavy curtain to let in the yellow haze from a side street beyond. A truck growled its way along Gorky Street, coughing as it changed gears. ‘Sit,’ he said.
Tom pulled up a chair and waited for Beziki to take his place behind the heavy desk. The man put the revolver down as casually as if it had been a paperweight. Then he opened a folder, slipped out a photograph and pushed it across. It took Tom a moment to work out what he was seeing.
Six Russian soldiers stood round a seventh. Most of them were barely more than boys. The seventh was tied to a chair and clearly terrified. They were in the ruins of a cellar, with half the ceiling fallen in behind them. With a shock, Tom recognized Sveta’s grandfather as the oldest. ‘Berlin?’ he said.
‘Of course. Where else?’
Two of the group stared at the camera.
One looked solemn. The other was grinning.
‘General Dennisov,’ Beziki said. ‘And Kyukov, his attack dog. They grew up together. These days, Kyukov’s in a camp. With luck he’ll die there.’
‘Grew up together where?’ Tom asked.
‘Beyond Volgograd, Stalingrad as was. You heard of the Tsaritsyn Monastery? It was the scene of a massacre. Became an orphanage after that. I bribed the Oblast for the records. They arrived by truck. Boxes of mouldering cards. Kyukov’s were what you’d expect. No mention of Dennisov at all. These days he claims his father was a Cheka officer. I couldn’t even discover when he had the records cleaned.’
‘There are other photographs?’
‘Take them with you when you go. I was going to drop them at Sadovaya Samotechnaya. Do what you want with them.’
‘Who’s in the chair?’
‘Now there’s a question.’
‘Beziki …’
‘He was a junior political.’
‘You had political officers on the ground?’
‘Of course. The colonels told us how to fight, political officers how to think. I was too young. They wouldn’t let me in. I had to wait outside.’
‘Why did they do it?’
‘Ask them. Better still, don’t. Burn the file. Go home, mourn your daughter, comfort your wife, reassure your son. Let the dead bury their own bloody dead …’
‘I have to find Alex.’
‘Ask yourself why she matters more than doing any of that. Now, tell me about yourself. Tell me who Tom Fox really is.’
‘There’s not much to tell.’
‘That’s a lie.’
Tom ended up filling in the gaps.
The brief campaign in Belize where Tom, as a very young lieutenant, found himself drinking in a shack with a machine-gun-toting bishop. His years of walking across Hungerford Bridge from Waterloo to the MOD, mostly in a suit, occasionally in uniform. How far his work for military intelligence took him from what he’d once thought of as God’s business.
‘You know the motto of the chaplaincy?’
Beziki shook his head, stubbed out his cigar with half still to burn and selected another, rolling it between his fingers and listening to it crackle, before biting off the end and reaching for his desk lighter.
‘In this Sign we Conquer.’
‘Justinian.’
Tom looked at him and Beziki shrugged.
‘I believe,’ he said. ‘That’s one of my problems. Get to my age and you begin to wonder what’s waiting. I can justify every dead Nazi. I don’t regret a single one. They invaded and we chased them back to their nest and destroyed it. There are things after that … I’m going to find those harder.’
Tom nodded to show he understood.
‘Do British priests believe in God?’
‘Some of them, perhaps.’
‘I’m not sure ours do. They’re state-appointed. Mind you, it probably beats being a ticket inspector if you’re a smart boy who can keep his nose clean. We have freedom of religion, you know. It’s in our constitution. It’s just that most citizens have the sense not to exercise it. Was that you? A smart boy who didn’t want to inspect tickets?’
‘I need a drink,’ Tom said.
‘I heard you were cutting down.’
‘They lied.’
‘Not from what I hear.’ Pulling open a drawer, Beziki took a fresh bottle of chacha and broke the seal, filling its long metal top until the viscous liquid threatened to overspill the thin metal edge. Pushing it across the desk, he said, ‘Here.’
Tom downed the makeshift shot glass in one.
‘Need another?’
Tom shook his head. ‘I watched a dead girl being disembowelled this morning,’ he said. ‘It was very methodical. Very precise. She began as human and ended up as cuts of meat. And nowhere could I see space for a soul.’
‘You just tell yourself you don’t believe. Now, this vocation of yours …’
‘It wasn’t much of a vocation. Not really.’
And memory took Tom back to a small church on the edge of an army camp where his dad was based, somewhere hot and nasty, where the local gods were darker and stronger and had taken the trappings of the new religion. He’d come, aged seven, looking for answers to the only question that really bothered him.
‘How do you get God to give you something?’
‘You don’t.’ The padre, tired and sweating and ready for retirement, had looked at Tom’s stricken face and softened his words. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’<
br />
‘What if I offered him something?’
The man had smiled. ‘You have a very Old Testament view of the world. I know people kill cockerels round here, but my advice is pray.’
‘But I could make an offering as well?’
‘Nothing living.’
‘What then?’
‘A promise, if you must.’
‘That would help?’
‘Well,’ said the sweating man, conceding defeat or perhaps humouring the small boy with a swollen lip and bruises on his face, ‘it might.’
Silently, Tom made his promise on the spot.
If God would get rid of his dad, he’d serve him.
A priest was what his mother wanted him to become. He’d always known.
Tom had meant God to kill his dad. Instead, He’d had him arrested. Awaiting court martial for rape and theft wasn’t as good as being dead but it would do. When Tom told his ma he was going to become a priest, she smiled for the first time in a year. It was she who told Social Services when she and Tom got home, and it was Social Services who found a Catholic school in Kent that took boys from difficult backgrounds for boarding.
36
Finding Schultz, Berlin, April 1945
How could you find one German in a city full of dead men when most of the living lied about who they were, what jobs they had held and where they lived? After three false leads, and sorting through the bodies of the old men who had been forced into Volkssturm battalions to defend Berlin to the last and killed before they could even really start fighting, Colonel Milov was in a foul mood.
Beziki decided to stay silent.
He still trotted at the commissar’s side, drawing amused glances, sometimes disgusted ones. He didn’t see what the problem was. Other battalions had pets. Some had cats, one had a goat. His had him, Beziki.
The air around him stank of sulphur from artillery fire, while dust filled the ruined canyons of the streets like fog. Most of the government buildings were roofless, with dark holes where their windows had been. Later he would discover that a quarter of a million had died during these last few weeks of war. The only dead in sight were a dozen bodies slumped below the U-Bahn sign towards which the commissar was striding.
They were boys Beziki’s age, none in uniform. Their hands were tied behind their backs and a line of bullet holes in a wall showed how they died.
‘Recent,’ the commissar said.
He was talking to himself.
Beziki knew that the Germans killed their own people for showing insufficient enthusiasm. So did his side. It was just that recently the Germans had become much less enthusiastic about this war.
Glancing at the bodies, Beziki shrugged and examined the U-Bahn’s steps. Dr Schultz, the scientist Colonel Milov wanted, was somewhere down there in the darkness, forced into a Volkssturm battalion by some idiot with a death wish. That was what the commissar said, anyway. He also said there were 200,000 German soldiers supposedly protecting two million Berliners. If you could call a force cobbled from children, old men, released prisoners, the sick and the insane soldiers. There were fewer now.
Behind the commissar and Beziki, ministerial office blocks burned in hissing fury. Artillery fire, the thud of mortars and the crash of walls collapsing, roofs caving in and the clatter of tank tracks formed a backdrop to an incessant crackle of small-arms fire. There were fewer bombing raids now the fighting was street by street, building by building and hand to hand.
It would be over in days, the commissar said.
Howitzer fire from the Zoo gardens fell on Soviet troops trying to take the Reichstag. The building had been empty since it was damaged by fire in the 1930s but that just meant German soldiers had been able to dig themselves into the rubble. Beziki was grateful he wasn’t in there trying to get them out.
‘Wait,’ Colonel Milov told Beziki.
He removed the NKVD tabs from his own collar.
The boy understood. The man was a tank commander, and a commissar before and after that. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s retrieve our man.’
The major he approached swung round crossly, realized he was talking to a senior officer and bit back whatever he’d been about to say. It seemed that two hundred, perhaps three hundred Volkssturm were holed up in the underground station.
‘I’m delighted that you haven’t attacked. But do you want to tell me why you haven’t attacked?’
The major pointed to a girl in the entrance holding a soiled pillowcase tied to a broom. ‘I thought, Comrade Colonel, I thought …’
‘You thought right.’
The commissar stopped in front of the girl, who stared at him wide-eyed and gripped her makeshift white flag more firmly than ever. She was thinner than any girl Beziki had seen. Poor, dark-haired, possibly foreign. Her eyes were dark and sunken, her cheekbones painfully sharp and she was chewing her lips, which were chapped. Beziki adored her on sight.
She had been sent to say there were women and children inside.
‘And?’ the commissar demanded.
The girl blinked. After a moment, she repeated her words.
‘What do these women and children have to do with me?’
Obviously panicked, the girl glanced towards the dark steps down to the metro station below, hesitated and turned back, words spilling over so fast that the corporal sent to act as the commissar’s interpreter had trouble doing her job.
‘You’re meant to let them go.’
‘Who says?’
‘A Major Kraus. He said she was to tell the Russians there are civilians. Then the civilians would be allowed to go and the soldiers remain.’
‘Are the soldiers Volkssturm?’
It seemed they were. Lots of them. What was lots to a frightened girl? A dozen? A hundred?
‘Ask her if they’re in the tunnels.’
The tunnels had fallen in. Bomb damage. They were on the platforms. Apparently he had to let the civilians go, or they’d be killed in the fighting. There were sick people down there too, old women, babies.
Beziki watched, wondering what the commissar would do.
It seemed that the commissar was wondering the same thing himself. Catching Beziki watching him, he smiled sourly. ‘It seems,’ he told the boy, ‘that this major wants them out of his way.’
‘Makes sense,’ Beziki said.
‘For him, perhaps. Not for me.’ To the interpreter he said, ‘Tell the girl to tell the major I want to talk to him.’
‘He said she was to talk to you.’
‘Why her?’
‘She’s Romanian. It doesn’t matter if she gets shot. What should I reply?’
‘He must talk to me himself. Ask how many staff he has.’
The girl looked puzzled at the question.
‘When he walks, how many walk with him? One, two, five?’
Two, apparently.
‘And soldiers of his own?’
A few. Very few, it seemed. Most were Volkssturm, old men or boys her age. The real soldiers were dead. Or they’d run away.
‘If her major wants to negotiate free passage for civilians, he’s to talk to me. And tell her to leave her bloody broomstick by the wall.’
‘Comrade Colonel …’
In a street behind them, an M-34 fired and the Soviet major who’d had his men facing the U-Bahn steps twitched. Beziki waited for the ringing in his ears to stop, and watched the commissar nod to say the major should continue.
‘Sir … we should shoot them all.’
‘There’s a man down there I want. As for the rest … Three months ago, I’d have agreed. Now, we’re going to need them.’
‘To do what, Comrade Colonel?’
‘Rebuild this, repair that. Berlin’s ours. I imagine we’ll be keeping it.’
The major smiled as if that hadn’t occurred to him, and it probably hadn’t. It wasn’t his job to have thoughts like that. It wasn’t really Colonel Milov’s job either, but that didn’t stop him.
‘Sir,’ Beziki s
aid.
‘Seen them.’
A tall Waffen-SS major was climbing into the daylight, flanked by two lieutenants, the girl trailing behind them like an unwilling shadow. The major was the commissar’s age, which made him almost twice as old as his lieutenants. The major picked out his adversary without difficulty.
‘This won’t take long,’ the commissar said. Then, to the German: ‘Major Kraus?’
The two officers stared at each other.
‘You wish to surrender?’
The German smiled thinly. ‘There is no question of surrender. Orders have been issued. We will fight to the last man.’
‘Whose orders?’
‘The Führer himself.’
‘Your Führer is dead.’
‘I do not believe it. Even if it were true, all the more reason to obey.’
The commissar looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How many civilians do you have sheltering in there?’
‘Two hundred.’
‘And troops?’
‘Three hundred crack troops.’
So, no more than a hundred Volkssturm at most. ‘The girl said your army was made up of old men and children.’
The major’s face tightened. ‘They will do their duty.’
‘I do hope not.’ Drawing his Tokarev, the commissar shot him through the head. Beziki gasped as blood and brains splattered the German aide-de-camp standing slightly behind the major, gasping again when the commissar killed that man before he even had time to finish wiping his face. The junior lieutenant had his Luger levelled when a sniper’s rifle cracked from a building high behind and the German boy went down with a bullet between the eyes.
Beziki managed a grin.
Lieutenant Maya; it had to be.
She wouldn’t let the commissar forget that shot in a hurry.
‘Go down there,’ Colonel Milov told the interpreter. ‘Tell them Berlin has fallen. The major has surrendered. Tell them I’m looking for Dr Schultz. He is to make himself known to you. He is not in trouble. He will be well looked after. Say we have his family in protective custody already.’
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