Pale Horse Riding

by Chris Petit

  The commandant had been dimly aware of the sinister figure of the shrink in his spiffy, ridiculous gear that rendered him almost invisible in the pale light of early morning. What he really did was anyone’s guess, other than indulge a number of wives – his own included – into believing that what went on between their ears was of the slightest consequence.

  The mist had burned off, to reveal the start of another day of remorseless, sullen heat.

  Further towards the garrison, he spotted the shrink again, up ahead, in the distance; waiting, not on his bicycle, but standing in the road. Maybe he had a puncture; serve him right.

  The shrink held up his arm.

  He said nothing until the commandant was alongside. The mare stamped her disapproval, as though sharing his mistrust of the man.

  ‘You should take a look.’ He gestured towards the ditch by the road.

  IV

  Whatever Schlegel had been expecting, it wasn’t a dead young woman in a splashy print dress with scratched legs, slide-away eyes and her brains bashed in, lying on a gurney in a large tiled room that resembled a morgue except it was too hot to keep anything cool. The women’s feet turned inwards, making her look pigeon-toed. Such was the unreality of the hot morgue that Schlegel started to believe she was sweating even in death. He thought of the cold-bath corpses in the medical block and the dead dentist. Two garrison murders in as many days.

  They had got as far as the station and the omens were good, with the train on time, and a dining car. Morgen was calculating that evening’s entertainment and didn’t care what it was; getting out was enough.

  The night sleeper from Berlin drew up on the incoming platform and the station became busy with passengers disembarking.

  Schlegel saw Morgen looking over his shoulder.

  Juppe was striding towards them. For a second Schlegel thought they had forgotten something but he knew their reprieve was in the process of being undone. Juppe demanded they come on the commandant’s orders.

  Morgen looked disinclined. Schlegel was in two minds, thinking: Sybil. As they were leaving they were approached by a tall man in uniform, carrying a suitcase, who said he was just off the night train and could he scrounge a lift. He introduced himself as garrison doctor Wirths and when Morgen gave his name he took a step back, visibly unsettled.

  Schlegel presumed it could only be because he knew who Morgen was and had something to hide.

  Morgen sat in the front. The doctor, as tall as Schlegel, if not taller, folded himself into the back. His long, angled limbs reminded Schlegel of a wading bird. After his moment of alarm, his manner became sociable and friendly. He asked whether they had just arrived too.

  ‘So to speak,’ said Morgen.

  ‘What brings you?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘No one seems to be able to agree on that,’ said Morgen. ‘But in a word, corruption.’

  Wirths appeared flustered again. He seemed to want to talk to them but not in front of Juppe.

  ‘Are you up to date with your jabs?’ he asked.

  They were supposed to present their medical cards at the staff infirmary to check their vaccines and booster shots were in order.

  ‘You should do it this morning,’ said Wirths. ‘I will be there until one o’clock. We can’t have you getting ill.’

  Was it a summons? Schlegel couldn’t tell.

  They dropped the doctor off at his house.

  The room where the dead woman’s body was held was part of the garrison complex with the tall chimney, which stood behind the grassy bank. Juppe was dismissed so they were alone with the commandant.

  Schlegel wondered what had made the commandant change his mind about them.

  ‘I had her brought here to show you. A young German woman, murdered, obviously. She will be taken and kept at a more appropriate temperature until an autopsy can be performed. There is a backlog.’

  He marched them out and up the main street, where they were joined by a blue-eyed German shepherd that trotted alongside the commandant, obviously familiar, tongue lolling. They crossed into the industrial zone and a complex net of alleyways. Schlegel lost his bearings in the maze of narrow overshadowed runs, where it was at least cooler. The commandant’s sweating neck bulged over his collar, razored almost to the rim of his cap. Schlegel saw blackheads, and smelled sweat and cologne.

  The commandant led them to a small, low, windowless building surrounded by its own security fence; Schlegel was reminded of an electricity sub-station. The dog was told to wait, rewarded with a treat from the commandant’s pocket.

  Keys were produced and the security gate and entrance unlocked. They stood waiting inside for the tube lights to flicker on. The single room was bigger than it looked from outside, full of glass display cases and dozens of racks. Some of the walls had photographic enlargements pinned to boards – stark forensic images.

  The commandant said, ‘This is our black museum.’

  He crossed to a table where a handbag lay.

  ‘This was hers.’

  He emptied the contents. Nail file. Identity card. Handkerchief. Pretty pathetic, thought Schlegel, in terms of worldly possessions.

  The commandant picked up the card. ‘She is wearing spectacles in the photograph. Aged twenty-one. Tanner, Ingeborg. Secretary in the motor pool. She was seeing a man or men plural because, according to her dormitory supervisor, she often spent nights away, not so unusual among these women. Fucking for the fatherland!’ The commandant gave a shrill laugh and reached for a large envelope. He took out photographs.

  ‘Taken in situ. A rush job.’

  They showed Tanner’s body from different angles, including a close-up of her caved-in skull, which forced Schlegel to turn away. The commandant appeared transfixed by the woman’s final expression, which reminded Schlegel of photographs taken at the wrong moment, when the face was not composed as it should be.

  Morgen commented on the professional quality of the job. The commandant looked pleased. They had been done by a prisoner who had been a police photographer.

  ‘Rigor mortis hadn’t set in by the time she was found.’

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘The garrison psychiatrist while out on his bicycle.’

  The commandant made the image sound risible.

  ‘Is that Krick?’ asked Schlegel, surprised.

  The commandant sounded surprised in return. ‘Yes, I found him with the body. He said he had just come across it.’

  Schlegel saw that the photographs on the wall were of women’s bodies hanging from fence wire, with more hacked corpses on the ground, blood black as oil. In the glass cases were what looked like crime-scene exhibits, carefully labelled, including billy clubs and knuckledusters.

  ‘Where was the body found?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘On the road to Rajsko, within the larger security zone. She could have been visiting. There are garrison quarters there.’

  ‘We are not homicide,’ said Schlegel, a line he had used before.

  ‘You are criminal investigators.’

  ‘Financial. You have your own police.’

  ‘Security police, not investigative.’

  Schlegel pointed to the pictures on the wall. ‘Someone must have investigated that.’

  ‘On the contrary. The security police made arrests but it did not require criminal investigation.’

  ‘Why ask us back when we are persona non grata?’ asked Morgen. ‘What is wrong with your own people?’

  The commandant gestured helplessly. ‘Can I trust them? What if it is one of them? A killing in a high-security area.’

  ‘Are you asking for our help?’ asked Morgen dubiously.

  ‘Work for me in confidence and I can help.’

  ‘Invite me at your peril.’

  ‘Get rid of Grabner.’

  Morgen looked doubtful.

  ‘Isn’t that why you are really here, man? A clear-out,’ insisted the commandant.

  Morgen remained slow to react.

 
‘See garrison doctor Wirths,’ the commandant urged. ‘Don’t say I sent you. Ask about Grabner. He will tell you all you need to know.’

  ‘You have resisted tooth and nail to opening the place up.’

  ‘I was trained in Dachau where we were taught to mind our stall.’ The commandant drew himself to attention. ‘But we can’t have German women being murdered.’

  ‘Are you saying this is a garrison murder?’ Morgen asked.

  ‘The shrink who found the body breaks it down into the four Ds. Drunkenness. Demoralisation. Dames. And denial.’

  ‘Is he right?’

  ‘Everyone stuck in this place for a year, unable to get out. Someone was bound to snap.’

  ‘Denial?’

  ‘About what a hole this is. Pretending everything is normal.’

  ‘Still, a better life than the prisoners.’

  ‘Except their demoralisation is catching. They not only pass on physical disease, they infect us with their depression.’

  ‘Perhaps the garrison needs a shrink after all.’

  ‘He’ll be a spy. They are everywhere. On top of that, he is vain and views the garrison as an experiment for his study.’ The commandant paused. ‘There is a terrible homicide rate among prisoners. We are constantly told of cases where one prisoner beats another to death for no reason, other than some congenital fault or behaviour problem. The women can be worse than the men. Look at this.’

  He crossed to the photographs Schlegel had noticed earlier.

  ‘That was the women’s sub-camp at Budy last autumn. I was called out in the middle of the night. A Jewess attacked a German prisoner and all hell broke loose with women being chucked out of windows and cut to pieces. In fact, German female prisoners turned out to be responsible, egged on by the guard, many of which were involved with these women, who were prostitutes. Confronted with such degeneracy, the guard was inevitably corrupted. One must be vigilant at all times. We are not given the elite by way of staff, not even the rank and file. Minimum height used to resemble something passing for normal; now you can be little more than a dwarf. It is what we are reduced to. Our fighting troops get the pick. We were forced to employ anti-Soviet Ukrainian guards, until they had to be transferred. One headache after another, I tell you! There are bound to be rotten apples in such a poor barrel. But now, this!’

  ‘And if we find out who did it?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘I would like nothing more than for you to tell me you have discovered a stray Russian prisoner hiding in the zone who is responsible for murdering these women, but what if one of my men has cracked? I am bound to describe them as mine, as their commandant. I know of several who are going off the rails. On the other hand, don’t discount some of the prisoners, the ones that have freedom of movement and can drive trucks and so forth. Better it were one of them.’

  ‘You said women, plural, suggesting more than one murder . . .’

  The commandant ignored the question and moved on to another set of photographs.

  ‘Come, look.’

  Schlegel saw mutilated bodies in rags, half-drowned in mud.

  ‘Russians took to eating each other. That’s what we were having to deal with. We prepared ourselves for many things but not that!’

  The bodies looked like they had been hacked open with blunt instruments or torn apart with teeth and bare hands. What was the man trying to tell them? Schlegel wondered. That there was only so much of this sort of stuff his men could take?

  ‘They turned up starved after marching for weeks.’

  ‘When was this?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘Two years ago, autumn of 1941. Thirty thousand! Three times as many prisoners as we already had. They had to be kept in a field to start with because there were no quarters, and they became animals, howling like dogs. We found half-eaten bodies buried in the mud. Hearts and livers ripped out. Cannibals, like in darkest black Africa.’

  ‘Are they still here?’

  ‘The cannibals?’

  ‘The Russians.’

  ‘Gone, mostly.’

  He pointed to another set of photographs. The light was poor, the images grainy. Schlegel took a while to understand they were desiccated bodies.

  The commandant said, ‘Polish prisoners remain convinced that vampires walked among the Ivans. These two corpses were drained of their blood. They ate their flesh and drank their blood. Is that natural?’

  ‘Did this Russian violence extend beyond themselves?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘No, but their coming was the start of everything going wrong.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Terrible overcrowding. Language. Translation.’

  Morgen asked if the garrison had come to believe in the vampire stories.

  ‘Of course not, ha-ha!’

  But the question nagged and the commandant paced before announcing, ‘In some respects, yes, we were bound to. Bloodsuckers. Red corpuscles. The bacillus. We were right to fear them. They brought the typhus. Which was the start. They didn’t even have the decency to stay dead.’

  He pointed at a group of photographs of decomposed corpses half out of the ground.

  Morgen asked, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What it looks like! Bodies resurrecting themselves!’

  Morgen murmured, ‘Next we will be talking of transubstantiation.’

  ‘Not funny,’ said the commandant. ‘We are not discussing superstition here but facts. Fact – the Russians died like flies. Fact – they didn’t adapt. Fact – they weren’t given enough to eat. Rations are controlled by Berlin. Fact – few were equipped to survive the winter of 1941/2. Fact – they had to be buried in the woods and – fact – last summer they started pushing themselves up out of the ground.’ He surprised Schlegel by giggling. ‘Body gas, marshy substrata and extreme heat combined to form a chemical reaction where they appeared to rise from the dead. Fourth of July. What a day! There was a train from Slovakia that morning, a Saturday. The last of Kammler’s deal.’

  ‘Kammler?’ asked Morgen sharply.

  ‘Yes,’ said the commandant irritably. ‘A shortage of construction workers, so a deal was done with the Slovak government. I had dead Russians coming out of the ground; the stink was indescribable; hotter than it is now. And the same day the doctors threw up their hands and said an epidemic was unavoidable – unavoidable! – and I had a general inspection on my plate in less than a fortnight.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  Morgen reminded Schlegel of a straight man feeding a bad comedian his lines. The commandant appeared dangerously absurd.

  ‘We kept quiet about the epidemic.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Political reasons.’

  The commandant pointed back to Tanner’s bag.

  ‘This woman is the maybe the fourth, perhaps even the fifth in terms of numbers.’

  ‘Murders?’

  ‘Disappearances.’

  The commandant crossed to the far wall and pointed to photographs of three women, all young and physically different.

  ‘Are you now telling us this isn’t the first?’ Morgen looked like a man who suspected he was about to put his foot down on a rotten plank.

  ‘The first time there has been a body.’

  ‘And those?’ asked Morgen, pointing to the three.

  ‘Vanished. Disappeared.’

  ‘Reported missing?’

  ‘Not at first. Two were unmarried. One was a switchboard operator, the other worked in the staff pharmacy. It was several days before it was noticed they were gone. We find anyway the younger ones don’t stick at it. They’re always coming up with excuses. Going off to get married is the usual, when they are not. It was thought these two had bunked off or run away with a man.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘She was married. Eventually reported missing by a neighbour.’

  ‘Not her husband?’

  ‘He presumed she had made herself scarce and gone home because he found out she was having an affair.’
r />   ‘So, while these disappearances were noted nothing was done?’ Morgen asked.

  ‘Women are notoriously unreliable. There was no indication of anything untoward.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone gossip?

  ‘They do nothing but!’

  ‘No family enquiries?’

  ‘No.’ The idea seemed not to have occurred to the commandant before. He considered. ‘Life in wartime. A lot of young women come here to get away from home.’

  ‘Now you have this latest body, you wonder if these other women—’

  ‘One is bound to.’

  ‘Where is the missing woman’s husband?’

  ‘Transferred months ago.’

  ‘And the man she was having an affair with?’

  ‘Palitsch. He’s still around.’ The commandant rolled his eyes. ‘You may remember him showing off at the shooting party.’

  Palitsch again, thought Schlegel, as Morgen asked, ‘Did no one worry for these women?’

  The commandant stared at the ceiling. ‘The worst anyone thought is they might have been abducted by partisans, but all three had a reputation for flightiness. Women do, frontier life and all that, with a lot of men passing through . . . Women can’t be listed as deserters because their job description is voluntary helper. As for the wife, there’s no law against her leaving her husband, ha-ha.’

  The man’s tight laugh died in the room.

  ‘You said there was maybe a fifth.’

  The commandant cast around and searched through a stack of folders.

  ‘A hit-and-run. It may have been just that. God knows, there is enough drunk driving.’

  He produced photographs showing a fair-haired young woman lying at the side of the road, with her arms thrown up in what looked like surrender. She bore a passing resemblance to Tanner, with the same tall, slender build.