Field Gray

24

Königsberg is, was, important to me. My mother was born in Königsberg. When I was a child, we used to go on vacation to a seaside town near there called Cranz. Best vacation we ever had. My first wife and I went there on our honeymoon, in 1919. It was the capital of East Prussia—a land of dark forests, crystal lakes, sand dunes, white skies, and Teutonic knights who built a fine old medieval city with a castle and a cathedral and seven good bridges across the River Pregel. There was even a university founded in 1544, where the city’s most famous son, Immanuel Kant, would one day teach.

I arrived there in June 1944. As part of Army Group North. I was attached to the 132nd Infantry Division. My job was to gather intelligence on the advancing Red Army. What type of men were they? What condition were they in? How well armed were they? Supply lines—all the usual stuff. And from the German civilians who fled their homes ahead of the Russian advance, the intelligence I had was of well-equipped, ill-disciplined, drunken Neanderthals who were bent on rape, murder, and mutilation. Frankly, a lot of this seemed like hysterical nonsense. Indeed, there was a lot of Nazi propaganda to this effect that was designed to dissuade everyone from surrendering. And so I resolved to discover the true situation for myself.

This was made more difficult when, at the end of August, the Royal Air Force bombed the city to rubble. And I do mean rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed. All of the public buildings lay in ruins. So it was a while before I was able to verify the reports of atrocities. And I was left in no doubt as to the truth of these when our troops retook the German village of Nemmersdorf, about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg.

I’d seen some terrible things in the Ukraine, of course. And this was as bad as anything we’d done to them. Women raped and mutilated. Children clubbed to death. The whole village murdered. All seven hundred of them. You’ve got to see it to believe it, and now I believed it and I could have wished I didn’t. I made my report. The next thing, the Ministry of Propaganda had it and was even broadcasting parts of it on the radio. Well, that was the last time they were honest about our situation. The only part of my report they didn’t use was the conclusion: that we should evacuate the city by sea as soon as possible. We could have done it, too. But Hitler was against it. Our wonder weapons were going to turn the tide and win the war. We had nothing to worry about. Plenty of people believed that, too.

That was October 1944. But by January the following year, it was painfully clear to everyone that there were no wonder weapons. At least none that could help us. The city was encircled, just like at Stalingrad. The only difference was that as well as fifty thousand German soldiers there were three hundred thousand civilians. We started to get people out. But in the process, thousands died. Nine thousand died in just fifty minutes when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustloff outside the port of Gotenhafen. And we kept on fighting, not because we obeyed Hitler, but because for every day that we fought, a few more civilians managed to escape. Did I say it was the coldest winter in living memory? Well, that hardly helped the situation.

For a short while, the artillery and the bombing stopped as the Ivans prepared their final assault. When it came, in the third week of March, we were thirty-five thousand men and fifty tanks against perhaps one hundred fifty thousand troops, five hundred tanks, and more than two thousand aircraft. Me, I was in the trenches during the Great War and I thought I knew what it was to be under a bombardment. I didn’t. Hour after hour the shells fell. Sometimes, there were as many as two hundred fifty bombers in the sky at any one time.

Finally, General Lasch contacted the Russian High Command and offered our surrender in return for a guarantee that we would be well treated. They agreed, and the next day we laid down our arms. That was fine if you were a soldier. But the Russians were of the opinion that the guarantee had never applied to Königsberg’s civilian population and the Red Army proceeded to exact a terrible revenge on it. Every woman was raped. Old men were murdered out of hand. The sick and wounded were thrown out of hospital windows to make room for Russians. In short, the whole Red Army got drunk and went crazy and did what it liked to civilians of all ages before finally they set on fire what remained of the city and their victims. Those they didn’t kill they let fend for themselves in the countryside, where most of them starved to death. There was nothing any of us in the army could do about this. Those who did protest were shot on the spot. Some of us said this was justice—that we deserved it for what had been done to them—and this was true, only it’s hard to think of justice when you see a naked woman crucified on a barn door. Maybe we all deserved crucifixion, like those mutinous gladiators in ancient Rome. I don’t know. But every man who saw that wondered what lay in store for us. I know I did.

For several days we were marched east of Königsberg, and as we walked we were robbed of wedding rings, wristwatches, even false teeth. Any man refusing to hand over an object of value in a Russian’s eyes was shot. At the railway station, we waited patiently in a field for transport to wherever we were going. There was no food and no water, and all the time more and more German soldiers joined our host.

Some of us boarded a train that took us to Brno in Czechoslovakia, where at last we were given some bread and water; and then we boarded another train headed southeast. As the train left Brno we caught sight of the city’s famous St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, and for many men this was almost as good as seeing a priest. Even those who didn’t believe took the opportunity to pray. The next time we stopped we got out of the cattle cars, and finally we were given some hot soup. It was the thirtieth of April, 1945. Twenty days after our surrender. I know this because the Russians made a point of telling us the news that Hitler was dead. I don’t know who was more pleased to hear this, them or us. Some of us cheered. A few of us wept. It was the end of one hell, no doubt. But for Germany and us in particular, it was the beginning of another—hell as it really is, perhaps, being a timeless place of punishment and suffering and run by devils who enjoy inflicting cruelty. Certainly, we were judged by the book that was open, and that book was Mein Kampf, and for what was written in that book we were all going to suffer. Some more than others.

From that transit camp in Romania—someone claimed it was a place called Secureni, from where Bessarabian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz—there was another train traveling northeast, right through the Ukraine, a country I had hoped never to see again, to a stop in the middle of nowhere where MVD guards drove us from the cattle cars with whips and curses. Standing there, faint from lack of food and water, blinking in the spring sunshine like unwanted dogs, we awaited our orders. Finally, after almost an hour, we were marched along a dirt road between two infinite horizons.

“Bistra!” shouted the guards. “Hurry up!”

But to where? To what? Would any of us ever see home again? Out there, so far away from any sign of human habitation, it seemed unlikely; even more so when those who had only just survived the journey found they could walk no farther and were shot where they fell at the side of the road by mounted MVD. Four or five men were shot in this way like horses that had outlived their usefulness. No man was allowed to carry another, and in this way only the strongest of us were permitted to survive, as if Prince Kropotkin had been in charge of our exhausted company.

Finally, we arrived at the camp, which was a selection of dilapidated gray wooden buildings surrounded by two barbed-wire fences, and remarkable only because next to the main gate was the steeple of a nonexistent church—one of those sharp, metallic-roofed Russian church edifices that looked like some old Junker’s Pickelhaube helmet. There was nothing else for miles around—not even a few huts that might once have been served by the church to which the steeple had once belonged.

We trooped through the gate under the silent, hollow eyes of several hundred men who were the remains of the Hungarian Third Army; these men were on the other side of a fence, and it seemed we were to be kept separate from them, at least until we had been checked for parasites and diseases. Then we were fed, and having been pronounced fit for labor, I was sent to the sawmill. I might have been an officer, but no one was excused from work—that is, no one who wanted to eat—and for several weeks I spent every day loading and unloading wood. This seemed like a hard job until I spent a whole day shoveling lime, and returning the next day to the sawmill, half blinded by the stuff blowing in my face, and blood streaming from my nose, I told myself I was lucky that a few splinters in my hands and a sore back were the worst I had to suffer. In the sawmill I befriended a young lieutenant called Metelmann. Really he was not much more than a boy, or so it seemed to me; physically he was strong enough, but it was mental strength that was needed more and Metelmann’s morale was at a very low ebb. I’d seen his type in the trenches—the kind who awakes every morning expecting to be killed, when the only way of dealing with our predicament was to give the matter no thought at all, as if we were dead already. But since caring for another human being is often a very good means of ensuring one’s own survival, I resolved to look after Metelmann as best I could.

A month passed. And then another. Long months of work and food and sleep and no memories, for it was best not to think about the past and, of course, the future was something that had no meaning in the camp. The present and the life of a voinapleni was all there was. And the life of the voinapleni was bistra and davai and nichevo; it was kasha and klopkis and the kate. Beyond the wire was the death zone, and beyond that there was another wire, and beyond that there was just the steppe, and more of the steppe. No one thought of escape. There was nowhere to go, that was the real communist pravda of life in Voronezh. It was as if we were in limbo waiting to die so that we could be sent to hell.^*

But instead we—the German officers at Camp Eleven—were sent to another camp. No one knew why. No one gave us a reason. Reasons were for human beings. It happened without warning early one August evening, just as we finished work for the day. Instead of marching back to camp, we found ourselves on the long march somewhere else. It was only after several hours on the road that we saw the train and we realized we were off on another journey and, very likely, we would never see Camp Eleven again. Since none of us had any belongings, this hardly seemed to matter.

“Do you think we could be going home?” asked Metelmann as we boarded the train and then set off.

I glanced at the setting sun. “We’re headed southeast,” I said, which was all the answer that was needed.

“Christ,” he said. “We’re never going to find our way home.”

He had an excellent point. Staring out of a gap in the planks on the side of our cattle car at the endless Russian steppes, it was the sheer size of the country that defeated you. Sometimes it was so big and unchanging that it seemed the train wasn’t moving at all, and the only way to make sure that we weren’t standing still was to watch the moving track through the hole in the floor that served as our latrine.

“How did that bastard Hitler ever think we could conquer a country as big as this?” said someone. “You might as well try to invade the ocean.”

Once, in the distance, we saw another train traveling west, in the opposite direction, and there was not one of who didn’t wish we were on it. Anywhere west seemed better than anywhere east.

Another man said: “‘Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the sacred heights of Troy. Many cities of men he saw and learned their ways, many places he endured, heartsick on the open sea, struggling to save his life and bring his comrades home.’”

He paused for a moment and then, for the benefit of those who’d never done the classics, said, “Homer’s Odyssey.”

To which someone else said, “I only hope that Penelope is behaving herself.”

The journey took two whole days and nights before, finally, we disembarked beside a wide, steel-gray river, at which point the classics scholar, whose name was Sajer, began to cross himself religiously.

“What is it?” asked Metelmann. “What’s wrong?”

“I recognize this place,” said Sajer. “I remember thanking God I’d never see it again.”

“God likes his little jokes,” I said.

“So what is this place?” demanded Metelmann.

“This is the Volga,” said Sajer. “And if I’m right, we’re not far south of Stalingrad.”

“Stalingrad.” We all repeated the name with quiet horror.

“I was one of the last to get out before the Sixth Army was encircled,” explained Sajer. “And now I’m back. What a fucking nightmare.”

From the train we marched to a larger camp that was mostly SS, although not all of them German: There were French, Belgian, and Dutch SS. But the senior German officer was a Wehrmacht colonel named Mrugowski, who welcomed us to a barrack with proper bunk beds and real mattresses, and told us that we were in Krasno-Armeesk, between Astrakhan and Stalingrad.

“Where have you come from?” he asked.

“A camp called Usman, near Voronezh,” I said.

“Ah yes,” he said. “The one with the church steeple.”

I nodded.

“This place is better,” he said. “The work is hard, but the Ivans are relatively fair. Relative to Usman, that is. Where were you captured?”

We exchanged news, and like all the other Germans at K.A., the colonel was anxious to hear something about his brother, who was a doctor with the Waffen SS, but no one could tell him anything.

It was the height of the summer on the steppe, and with little or no shade, the work—excavating a canal between the Don and the Volga rivers—was hard and hot. But for a while at least, my situation was almost tolerable. Here there were Russians working, too—saklutshonnis^* convicted of a political crime that, more often than not, was hardly a crime at all, or at least none that any German—not even the Gestapo—would have recognized. And from these prisoners I began to perfect my knowledge of the Russian language.

The site itself was an enormous trench covered with duck-boards and walkways and rickety wooden bridges; and from dawn until dusk it was filled with hundreds of men wielding picks and shovels, or pushing crudely made wheelbarrows—a regular Potsdamer Platz of pleni traffic—and policed by stone-faced “Blues,” which was what we called the MVD guards with their gimnasterka tunics, portupeya belts, and blue shoulder boards. The work was not without hazard. Now and then, the sides of the canal would collapse in upon someone and we would all dig frantically to save his life. This happened almost every week, and to our surprise and shame—for these were not the inferior people that the Nazis had told us of—it was usually the Russian convicts who were quickest to help. One such man was Ivan Yefremovich Pospelov, who became the nearest thing I had to a friend at K.A., and who thought he was well off, although his forehead, which was dented like a felt hat, told a different story from the one he told me:

“What matters most, Herr Bernhard, is that we are alive, and in that we are indeed fortunate. For right now, at this very moment, somewhere in Russia, someone is meeting his undeserved end at the hands of the MVD. Even as we speak, a poor Russian is being led to the edge of a pit and thinking his last thoughts about home and family before the pistol fires and a bullet is the last thing to travel through his mind. So who cares if the work is hard and the food is poor? We have the sun and the air in our lungs and this moment of companionship that can’t be taken away from us, my friend. And one day, when we’re free again, think how much more it will mean to you and me just to be able to go and buy a newspaper and some cigarettes. And other men will envy us that we live with such fortitude in the face of what only appear to be the travails of life. You know what makes me laugh most of all? To think that ever I complained in a restaurant. Can you imagine it? To send something back to a kitchen because it was not properly cooked. Or to reprimand a barman for serving warm beer. I tell you, I’d be glad to have that warm beer now. That’s happiness right there, in the acceptance of that warm beer and remembering how it’s enough in life to have that and not the taste of brackish water on cracked lips. This is the meaning of life, my friend. To know when you are well off and to hate or envy no man.”

But there was one man at K.A. whom it was hard not to hate or envy. Among the Blues were several political officers, politruks, who had the job of turning German fascists into good anti-fascists. From time to time, these politruks would order us into the mess to hear a speech about Western imperialism, the evils of capitalism, and what a great job Comrade Stalin was doing to save the world from another war. Of course, the politruks didn’t speak German and not all of us spoke Russian, and the translation was usually handled by the most unpopular German in the camp, Wolfgang Gebhardt.

Gebhardt was one of two anti-fascist agents at K.A. He was a former SS corporal, from Paderborn, a professional footballer who once had played for SV 07 Neuhaus. After being captured at Stalingrad in February 1943, Gebhardt claimed to have been converted to the cause of communism and, as a result, received special treatment: his own quarters, better clothing and footwear, better food, cigarettes, and vodka. There was another anti-fa agent called Kissel, but Gebhardt was by far the more unpopular of the two, which probably explains why sometime during the autumn of 1945, Gebhardt was murdered. Early one morning he was found dead in his hut, stabbed to death. The Ivans were very exercised about it, as converts to Bolshevism were, despite the material benefits of becoming a Red, rather thin on the ground. An MVD major from the Stalingrad Oblast came down to K.A. to inspect the body, after which he met with the senior German officer and, by all accounts, a shouting match ensued. Following this, I was surprised to find myself summoned to see Colonel Mrugowski. We sat on his bed behind a curtain that was one of the few small privileges allowed to him as SGO.

“Thanks for coming, Gunther,” he said. “You know about Gebhardt, I suppose.”

“Yes. I heard the cathedral bells ringing.”

“I’m afraid it’s not the good news that everyone might imagine.”

“He didn’t leave any cigarettes?”

“I’ve just had some MVD major in here shouting his head off. Making me into a snail about it.”

“Show me a Blue who doesn’t like to shout and I’ll show you a pink unicorn.”

“He wants me to do something about it. About Gebhardt, I mean.”

“We could always bury him, I suppose.” I sighed. “Look, sir, I think I ought to tell you. I didn’t kill him. And I don’t know who did. But they should give whoever did it the Iron Cross.”

“Major Savostin sees things differently. He’s given me seventy-two hours to produce the murderer, or twenty-five German soldiers will be selected at random to stand trial at an MVD court in Stalingrad.”

“Where an acquittal seems unlikely.”

“Exactly.”

I shrugged. “So you appeal to the men and ask the guilty man to step up for it.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” He shook his head. “Not all of the plenis here are German. Just the majority. And I did remind the major of this fact. However, he’s of the opinion that a German had the best motive to kill Gebhardt.”

“True.”

“Major Savostin has a low opinion of German moral values but a high opinion of our capacity for reasoning and logic. Since a German had the best motive for the murder, he thinks it seems reasonable that we should have the most to lose if the killer is not identified. Which he believes is now the best incentive for us to do his job for him.”

“So what are you telling me, sir?”

“Come on, Gunther. Everyone in Krasno-Armeesk knows you used to be a detective at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz Praesidium. As the SGO, I’m asking you to take charge of a murder investigation.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Maybe none of this will be necessary. But you should at least take a look at the body while I parade the men and ask the guilty man to step forward.”

I walked across the camp in the stiffening wind. Winter was coming. You could feel it in the air. You could hear it, too, as it rattled the windows of Gebhardt’s private hut. A depressing sound it was, almost as loud as the noise of my own rumbling belly, and I was already reproaching myself for not exacting a price for my forensic services. An extra piece of chleb. A second bowl of kasha. No one at K.A. volunteered for anything unless there was something in it for him, and that something was nearly always food.

A starshina, a Blue sergeant named Degermenkoy, standing in front of Gebhardt’s hut, saw me and walked slowly in my direction.

“Why aren’t you at work?” he yelled, and hit me hard across the shoulders with his walking stick.

Between blows I explained my mission, and finally he stopped and let me get up off the ground.

I thanked him and went into the little hut, closing the door behind me in case there was anything in there I could steal. The first things, I saw were a bar of soap and a piece of bread. Not the shorni that we plenis received, but belii, the white bread, and before I even looked at Gebhardt’s body I stuffed my mouth full of what should have been his last meal. This would have been reward enough for the job I was doing, except that I saw some cigarettes and matches, and as soon as I had swallowed the bread I lit one and smoked it in a state of near ecstasy. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in six months. Still ignoring the body on the bed, I looked around the hut for something to drink and my eyes fell on a small bottle of vodka. And finally, smoking my cigarette and taking little bites off Gebhardt’s bottle, I started to behave like a real detective.

The hut was about ten feet square, with a small window that was covered with an iron grille meant to keep the occupant safe from the rest of us plenis. It hadn’t worked. There was a lock on the wooden door, but the key was nowhere to be seen. There was a table, a stove, and a chair, and feeling a little faint—probably from the cigarette and the vodka—I sat down. On the wall were two propaganda portraits—cheap, frameless posters of Lenin and Stalin—and, collecting some phlegm at the back of my throat, I let the great leader have it.

Then I drew the chair up to the bed and took a closer look at the body. That he was dead was obvious, since there were stab wounds all over his body, but mainly around the head, neck, and chest. Less obvious was the choice of murder weapon—a piece of elk horn that was sticking out of the dead man’s right eye socket. The ferocity of the attack was remarkable, as was the brutal instrumentality of the elk horn. I’d seen violent crime scenes before in my time as a detective, but rarely as frenzied as this. It gave me a new respect for elks. I counted sixteen separate stab wounds, including two or three protective wounds on the forearms, and from the blood spatter on the walls it seemed clear that Gebhardt had been murdered on the bed. I tried to raise one of the dead man’s hands and discovered rigor had already well set in. The body was quite cold, and I formed the conclusion that Gebhardt had met his well-deserved death between the hours of midnight and four o’clock in the morning. I also discovered some blood underneath his fingernails, and I might even have taken a sample of this if I’d had an envelope to put it in, not to mention a laboratory with a microscope that might have analyzed it. I did, however, take the dead man’s wedding ring, which was so tight and the finger so badly swollen that I had to use the soap to get it off. Any other man’s ring would have fallen off his finger, but Gebhardt drew better rations than any of us and was a normal weight. I weighed the ring in the palm of my hand. It was gold and would certainly come in useful if I ever needed to bribe a Blue. I looked closely at the inscription on the inside, but it was too small for my weakened eyes. I didn’t put it in my pocket, however; for one thing, the trousers of my uniform were full of holes, and for another, there was the starshina outside the door who might take it upon himself to search me. So I swallowed it, in the certainty that with my bowels as loose as vegetable soup I could easily retrieve the ring later.

By now I could hear the SGO addressing the German plenis outside. There was a cheer as he confirmed what most of them knew: that Gebhardt was dead. This was followed by a loud groan as he told them how the MVD were planning to handle the matter. I got up and went to the window in the hope that I might see one brave soul identify himself as the culprit, but no one moved. Fearing the worst, I took another bite off the vodka bottle and laid my hand on the stove. It was cold, but I opened it all the same, just in case the killer had thought to burn his signed confession; but there was nothing—just a few pages from an old copy of Pravda and some bits of wood, ready for when the weather turned colder.

A shallow closet, no deeper than a shoe box, was fixed against the corner of the hut and in it I found the Waffen SS uniform that Gebhardt had ceased wearing when he’d switched sides. It would hardly have done for an anti-fascist officer to have carried on wearing an SS uniform. His new Russian gimnasterka was hanging on the back of the chair. Quickly, I searched the pockets and found a few kopecks, which I pocketed, and some more cigarettes, which I also pocketed.

With time growing short now, I took off my own threadbare uniform jacket and tried on Gebhardt’s. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have fitted, but I’d lost so much weight that this was hardly a problem, so I kept it on. It was a great pity his boots were too small, but I took his socks—those were an excellent fit and, as with the jacket, in much better condition than my own. I lit another cigarette and, on my hands and knees, went hunting around the floor for something other than the dust and the splinters I found down there. I was still searching for clues when the hut door opened and Colonel Mrugowski came in.

“Did anyone come forward?”

“No. As a result, I can’t believe it was a German who did this. Our men aren’t so lacking in honor. A German would have given himself up. For the good of the others.”

“Hitler didn’t,” I observed.

“That was different.”

I pushed Gebhardt’s cigarettes across the table. “Here,” I said. “Have one of the dead man’s cigarettes.”

“Thanks. I will.” He lit one and glanced uncomfortably at the dead body. “Don’t you think we should cover him up?”

“No. Looking at it helps to give me ideas as to how it happened.”

“And have you any? Ideas about who killed him?”

“So far I’m considering the possibility that it was an elk with a grudge.” I showed him the murder weapon. “See how sharp it is?”

Gingerly, Mrugowski touched the bloodied end with his forefinger. “Makes a hell of a shiv, doesn’t it?”

I shook my head. “Actually, I think it was probably meant to be decorative. In here. There’s a couple of nails and a mark on the wall facing the window that’s consistent with this having been part of a small trophy set of horns. But I can’t say for sure, since I’ve never been in here before.”

“So where’s the rest of it?”

“Maybe he realized how effective a weapon it was and took the rest of it with him. I rather imagine there was an argument. The killer grabbed the trophy, broke it over Gebhardt’s skull, and found himself holding just a piece of it. A conveniently sharp piece. There are some smaller punctures on Gebhardt’s head that are consistent with that possibility. Gebhardt collapsed onto the bed. The killer then went at him with the point. Finished him off. Then he went outside and caught the U-Bahn home. As to who and why, your guess is as good as mine. If this was Berlin, I’d be telling the uniforms to look for a man with bloodstains on his jacket, but of course here that’s not so unusual. There are fellows out there who are still wearing uniforms stained with the blood of comrades at Königsberg. And I expect the killer knows that, too.”

“Is that all you’ve got?”

“Look, if this was Berlin I could pick up the rugs and beat them, you know? Interview some witnesses, some suspects. Speak to a few informers. There’s nothing like an informer in my business. They’re the flies who know their shit, and that’s the detective work that nearly always pays a dividend.”

“So why not speak to Emil Kittel? The other anti-fa agent? It’s in his interest to cooperate with your inquiry, wouldn’t you say? He might wind up being the killer’s next victim, after all.”

“That might work. Of course, speaking to Kittel means I have to speak to Kittel, and if that happens, I don’t want anyone in this camp thinking it’s because I’m turning Ivan like him.”

“I’ll make sure that people know the score.”

“But that’s only one objection. You see, Kittel’s already one of my suspects. He’s left-handed. And one of the only things I can tell you about the murderer is that he’s probably left-handed.”

“How do you figure that?”

“The stab wounds on Gebhardt’s body. They’re mostly on his right side. Less than ten percent of the population is left-handed. So out of more than a thousand men in this camp, I’ve got about a hundred suspects. And one of them is Kittel.”

“I see.”

“Somehow I’ve got to clear ninety-nine of them in less than seventy-two hours, with nothing more to go on than the fact they disliked the victim only a little less than the man who actually killed him. All of this would be more than enough to do if there wasn’t already a wheelbarrow with my name on it and several tons of sand ready for shifting around this canal. That’s not a tall order, it’s a tall order standing on a box.”

“I’ll speak to Major Savostin. See if I can’t get you off the work detail until this thing is sorted.”

“You do that, sir. Appeal to his sense of fair play. He probably keeps it in a matchbox alongside his sense of humor. And now I think about it, that’s another objection I have to this so-called investigation. I don’t like the Ivans knowing anything more about me than they already do. Especially the MVD.”

The SGO smiled.

“Did I say something funny, sir?”

“Before the war, I was a doctor,” said the SGO.

“Like your brother.”

He nodded. “In a mental asylum. We treated a lot of people for something called paranoia.”

“I know what paranoia is, sir.”

“Why are you so paranoid, Gunther?”

“Me, I suppose it’s because I have a problem trusting people. I should warn you, Colonel, I’m not the persistent type. Over the years I’ve learned it’s better to be a quitter. I find that knowing when to quit is the best way of staying alive. So don’t expect me to be a hero. Not here. Since I put on a German uniform I find that the hero business has been put back thirty years.”

The SGO gave me a disapproving look. “Perhaps,” he said stiffly, “if we’d had more heroes we might just have won the war.”

“No, Colonel. If we’d had more heroes the war might never have got started.”

I went back to work, filling my wheelbarrow with sand, pushing it up a gangplank, emptying it, and then pushing it back down again. Endless and unavailing, it was the kind of work that gets your picture on the side of a Greek amphora, or in a story that illustrates the dangers of betraying the secrets of the gods. It wasn’t as dangerous as the kind of work the SGO wanted me to do, and but for the vodka inside me and the nicotine in my lungs, I might have been feeling a little less than inspired about the prospect of saving twenty-five of my comrades from a little show trial in Stalingrad. I’ve never been the type to mistake intoxication for heroism. Besides, it’s not heroes you need to win a war, it’s people who stay alive.

I was still feeling a little intoxicated when the SGO and the MVD major came to fetch me from my Sisyphean labor. And this can be the only explanation for the way I spoke to the Ivan. In Russian. That was a mistake all on its own. The Russians liked it a lot when you spoke Russian. In that respect they’re like anyone else. The only difference is that Russians think it means you like them.

The MVD major, Savostin, dismissed the SGO with a wave of his hand as soon as Mrugowski had pointed me out. The Russian waved me toward him impatiently.

“Bistra! Davai!”

He was about fifty, with reddish hair and a mouth as wide as the Volga that looked as if it had been exaggerated for the purpose of a vindictive caricature. The pale blue eyes in his pale white head had been inherited from the gray she-wolf who’d littered him.

I dropped my shovel and ran eagerly toward him. The Blues liked you to do everything at the double.

“Mrugowski tells me that you were a fascist policeman before the war.”

“No, sir. I was just a policeman. Generally, I left the fascism to the fascists. I had enough to do just being a policeman.”

“Did you ever arrest any communists?”

“I might have done. If they broke the law. But I never arrested anyone for being a communist. I investigated murders.”

“You must have been very busy.”

“Yes, sir, I was.”

“What is your rank?”

“Captain, sir.”

“Then why are you wearing a corporal’s jacket?”

“The corporal to whom it belonged wasn’t using it.”

“What function did you have during the war?”

“I was an intelligence officer, sir.”

“Did you ever fight any partisans?”

“No, sir. Only the Red Army.”

“That is why you lost.”

“Yes, sir, that is certainly why we lost.”

The pale blue wolf eyes stayed on me, unblinking, obliging me to snatch my cap off while I stared back at him.

“You speak excellent Russian,” he said. “Where did you learn it?”

“From Russians. I told you, Major, I was an intelligence officer. That generally means you have to be something more than just intelligent. With me it was the fact that I’d learned Russian. But it wasn’t the same standard of Russian you’ve described until I came here, Your Honor. I have the great Stalin to thank for that.”

“You were a spy, Captain. Isn’t that right?”

“No, sir. I was always in uniform. Which means if I had been a spy I’d have been a rather stupid one. And as I told you already, sir, I was in intelligence. It was my job to monitor Russian radio broadcasts, read Russian newspapers, speak to Russian prisoners…”

“Did you ever torture a Russian prisoner?”

“No, sir.”

“A Russian would never give information to fascists unless he was tortured.”

“I expect that’s why I never got any information from Russian prisoners, sir. Not once. Not ever.”

“So what makes the SGO think that you can get it from German plenis.”

“That’s a good question, sir. You would have to ask him that.”

“His brother is a war criminal. Did you know that?”

“No, sir.”

“He was a doctor at the Buchenwald concentration camp,” said Major Savostin. “He carried out experiments on Russian POWs. The colonel claims not to be related to this person, but it’s my impression that Mrugowski is not a common name in Germany.”

I shrugged. “We can’t choose the people to whom we are related, sir.”

“Perhaps you are also a war criminal, Captain Gunther.”

“No, sir.”

“Come, now. You were in the SD. Everyone in the SD was a war criminal.”

“Look, sir, the SGO asked me to look into the murder of Wolfgang Gebhardt. He gave me the strange idea that you wanted to find out who did it. That if you didn’t find out, then twenty-five of my comrades were going to be picked out at random and shot for it.”

“You were misinformed, Captain. There is no death penalty in the Soviet Union. Comrade Stalin has abolished it. But they will stand trial for it, yes. Perhaps you yourself will be one of these men picked at random.”

“So it’s like that, is it?”

“Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet. But it sounds like you just handed me an extra incentive to find out.”

“Good. We understand each other perfectly. You’re excused from work for the next three days in order that you may solve the crime. I will inform the guards. How will you start?”

“Now that I’ve seen the body, by thinking. That’s what I normally do in these situations. It’s not very spectacular, but it gets results. Then I’d like permission to interview some of the prisoners, and perhaps some of the guards.”

“The prisoners, yes, the guards, no. It wouldn’t be right to have a good communist being cross-questioned by a fascist.”

“Very well. I’d also like to interview the surviving anti-fa agent, Kissel.”

“This I will have to think about. Now, then. It would not be appropriate for you to interview the other prisoners while they’re working. So you can use the canteen for that. And for thinking, yes, it might be best if you were to use Gebhardt’s hut. I’ll have the body removed immediately if you’re finished with it.”

I nodded.

“Very well, then. Please follow me.”

We walked to Gebhardt’s hut. Halfway there Savostin saw some guards and barked some orders in a language that wasn’t Russian and, noticing my curiosity, told me that it was Tatar.

“Most of these pigs who guard the camp are Tatars,” he explained. “They speak Russian, of course. But to make yourself clear you really have to speak Tatar. Perhaps you should try to learn.”

I didn’t answer that. He wasn’t expecting me to. He was too busy looking around at the huge building site.

“Just think,” he said. “All of this will be a canal by 1950. Extraordinary.”

I had my doubts about that, which Savostin seemed to sense. “Comrade Stalin has ordered it,” he said, as if this were the only affirmation needed.

And in that place, and in that time, he was probably right.

When we reached Gebhardt’s hut, he supervised the removal of the body.

“If you need anything,” he said, “come to the guardhouse.” He looked around. “Which is where exactly? I’m not at all familiar with this camp.”

I pointed to the west, beyond the canteen. I felt like Virgil pointing out the sights in hell to Dante. I watched him walk away and went back into the hut.

The first thing I did was to turn over the mattress, not because I was looking for something but because I intended to have a sleep and I hardly wanted to lie on top of Gebhardt’s bloodstains. No one ever had enough sleep at K.A., but thinking’s no good if you’re tired. I took off his jacket, lay down, and closed my eyes. It wasn’t just lack of sleep that made me tired but the vodka, too. The deflated football that was my stomach wasn’t used to the stuff any more than my liver was. I closed my eyes and went to sleep wondering what the Soviet authorities were likely to do to me and twenty-four others if the death penalty had indeed been abolished. Was it possible there was a worse camp than the ones I had already seen?

A while later—I’ve no idea how long I slept, but it was still light outside—I sat up. The cigarettes were still in my jacket pocket so I lit another, but it wasn’t like a proper cigarette; there was a paper holder and only about three or four centimeters of tobacco—what the Ivans called a papirossi cigarette. These were Belomorkanal, which seemed only appropriate since that was a Russian brand introduced to commemorate the construction of another canal, this one connecting the White Sea to the Baltic. The Abwehr’s opinion of the Belomorkanal was that it had been a disaster: too shallow, making it useless to most seagoing vessels, not to mention the tens of thousands of prisoners sacrificed in its construction. I wondered if this particular canal would fare any better.

I finished the cigarette and aimed the butt at Stalin, and something about the way it struck the great leader’s nose made me get up and take a closer look at the paper portrait; and when I tugged it off the wall, I was surprised to see that the picture had neatly concealed a small shelved alcove about the size of a book. On the shelf were a notebook and a roll of banknotes. It wasn’t a wall safe, but in that place it was perhaps the next-best thing.

The roll of banknotes was almost 405 “gold” ruble notes—about three or four months’ wages for a Blue. This wasn’t a fortune unless you were a pleni. Two thousand rubles plus a gold wedding band might just be enough to bribe some better treatment inside an MVD jail in Stalingrad. I looked at the rubles again, just to make sure, and to my relief they all had that greasy, authentically Russian feel about them. I even held the bills up to the light coming through the window to check the watermark before folding them into the back pocket of my uniform breeches, which was the only one with a button and without a large hole.

The notebook had a red cover and was about the size of an identity card. It was full of cheap Russian paper that looked more like something flattened by a heavy object and that contained a surprise all of its own, for on one page there was a name beneath which were written some dates and some payment details, and these seemed to indicate that the pleni named was in the pay of Gebhardt. Not that this made the pleni a murderer, exactly, but it did help to explain how it was that the Blues were able to police the POWs so effectively.

But the date of one particular payment caught my eye: Wednesday, August 15. This was the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, and for some Catholic Germans, especially those from Saarland or Bavaria, it was also an important public holiday. But nearly everyone in camp remembered this as the day when Georg Oberheuser—a sergeant from Stuttgart—had been arrested by the MVD. Angry that this date was to be treated as a normal working day, Oberheuser had loudly denounced Stalin to everyone in our hut as a “wicked, godless bastard.” There were other, no less slanderous epithets he used as well, and all of them well deserved, no doubt, but we were all a little bit shaken when Oberheuser was taken away and never seen again, and by the knowledge that with no Ivans in our hut, Oberheuser had been betrayed to the Blues by another German.

The name in Gebhardt’s notebook was Konrad Metelmann—the young lieutenant I had naïvely resolved to look out for. It appeared that he’d been doing a better job of looking out for himself.

I did a bit of thinking after that and remembered how the Blues were always ordering our hut to appear in the canteen for an identity check. They would ask each man his name, rank, and serial number in the hope—we had supposed—of catching one of us out, for it was certainly the case that there were several SS officers who, believing themselves to be wanted for war crimes, were pretending to be someone else, someone who had been killed in the war. We were always questioned alone, with Gebhardt translating, and any one of us could have used such an opportunity to give the MVD information. The only reason none of us had connected this with Oberheuser was that there had been no identity check on the day of his arrest, which meant that Metelmann and Gebhardt must also have been using some kind of dead-letter drop.

The Russians had a saying: The best way to keep your friends in the Soviet Union is never to betray them. I’d never much liked Georg Oberheuser, but he didn’t deserve to be betrayed by one of his own comrades. According to Mrugowski, Oberheuser was tried by a People’s Court and sentenced to twenty years of labor and correction. Or at least that was what the camp commander had told Mrugowski. But I saw no reason to believe what Major Savostin had told me: that the great Stalin had abolished the death penalty. I’d seen far too many of my fellow countrymen shot at the side of the road on the long march out of Königsberg to accept the idea that summary execution was no longer routine in the Soviet Union. Maybe Oberheuser was dead and maybe he wasn’t. Either way, it was up to me to make things up to him. That’s the debt we owe the dead. To give them justice if we can. And a kind of justice if we can’t.

The rest of the plenis were coming back from work, and I went straight over to the canteen to beat the rush. Seeing Metelmann, I fell in behind him and waited for some indication that he was anxious. But Sajer spoke first:

“Are you really going to finger someone for the Ivans, Gunther?”

“That all depends,” I said, shuffling forward in the line.

“On what?”

“On me finding out who did it. Right now I haven’t got a clue. And by the way, I’ve been told that I’m one of the twenty-five the Ivans are going to pick if they don’t get a name. Just so you know that I’m taking this seriously.”

“Do you think they mean it?” asked Metelmann.

“Course they mean it,” said Sajer. “When do the Ivans ever issue an idle threat? You can always depend on them in that way at least. The bastards.”

“What are you going to do, Bernie?” asked Metelmann.

“How should I know?” I glared at Mrugowski. “This is all his fault. But for him, I’d have the same chance as everyone else.”

“Maybe you’ll find out something,” said Metelmann. “You were a good detective. That’s what people say.”

“What do they know? Believe me, I’d have to be Sherlock Holmes to solve this case. My only chance is to bribe that MVD major and get myself off the list. Here, Metelmann, have you got any money you can lend me?”

“I can let you have five rubles,” he said.

“It’ll take a lot more than five rubles to bribe that major,” said Sajer.

“I’ve got to start somewhere,” I said as Metelmann gave me a five from his pocket. “Thanks, Konrad. How about you, Sajer?”

“Suppose I need to bribe someone myself?” He grinned unpleasantly at Metelmann. “If it’s you they pick, you might regret giving him that five, you silly bastard.”

“Fuck you, Sajer,” said Metelmann.

“Where does someone like you get five rubles, anyway?” asked Sajer.

Metelmann sneered and reached for his chunk of chleb. With his left hand.

I also noted the livid-looking scar on his forearm. He might have got the injury on-site. But all things considered, I thought it more likely that he’d got it while murdering Gebhardt.

I spent the next three days alone in Gebhardt’s hut catching up on my sleep. I knew what I was going to do, but I saw little point in doing it before the MVD’s allotted time had elapsed. I was determined to enjoy every minute of my holiday at K.A. while it was there to be had. After months of hard labor on starvation rations, I was exhausted and a little feverish. Once a day the SGO came over and asked how my inquiry was progressing, and I told him that despite any evidence to the contrary I had made good progress. I could see he didn’t believe me. But I didn’t care. It wasn’t like I was going to lose my army pension because of his opinion. Besides, the SGO and I were two different heads on the same imperial eagle—me looking left and him looking to the right. Even in a Soviet POW camp he could seldom leave a room without clicking his heels. Oh yes, our Colonel Mrugowski was a regular Fred Astaire.

On the third day, I rolled the stone away from the front door and went to the site to find Metelmann. I handed him back his five rubles. “Here,” I said, “you might as well keep this. I shan’t be needing it where I’m going.”

Quickly pocketing the note in case one of the guards should see it, Metelmann tried not to look relieved at my obvious disappointment. “No luck, huh?”

“My luck ran out on me a long time ago,” I said. “It was going so fast, it must have been wearing running shoes.”

“You know, maybe that MVD major was bluffing,” he said.

“I doubt it. The thing I’ve noticed about people with power is that they always use it even when they say they don’t want to.” I started to walk away.

“Good luck,” said Metelmann.

Major Savostin was playing chess when I found him in the guardhouse. With himself. Colonel Mrugowski was there, too. They were waiting for my report.

“There’s no one here that plays,” said the major. “Perhaps we should have a game, you and I, Captain.”

“I’m sure you’re much better than me, sir. After all, it’s virtually your national game.”

“Why is that, do you suppose? One would think as logical a game as chess would suit the German character rather well.”

“Because it’s black and white?” I suggested. “Everything is black and white in the Soviet Union. And perhaps because the game involves making sacrifices of smaller, less important pieces. Besides, sir, with you I should worry how to win without losing.” I snatched off my cap. “As a matter of fact, sir, I’ve been worried about that for the last three days. I mean, how to solve this case without pissing you off. And I’m still not satisfied I know the answer to that question.”

“But you do know who killed Gebhardt, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I fail to understand your difficulty.”

I wondered if I had misjudged him—if he wasn’t quite as intelligent as I’d thought. Then again, there is a whole earthwork of understanding between someone who is hungry and someone who is not. I could see no way of identifying Metelmann as the culprit without putting my own head in the lion’s mouth.

“I mean, you’re not suggesting it was a Russian, I trust,” he said, fiddling with his queen.

“Oh no, sir. A Russian would never have murdered a German and not owned up to it. Besides, why kill a pleni in secret when you could just as easily kill him in the open? Even if he was an anti-fascist agent. No, you were right, sir. It was a German who killed Gebhardt.”

I cast my eye over the board in the hope that I might see some evidence of intelligence there, but all I could tell was that the right pieces were on the right squares and that the major needed a manicure like I needed a hot bath. They probably didn’t care about manicures in the Soviet workers’ paradise. They certainly didn’t care about hot baths. It was a little hard to be sure, but I had the idea that the major smelled almost as bad as I did.

“The murder was not premeditated,” I said. “It happened on the spur of the moment. Frenzied stabbings are often like that where there’s no sexual aspect involved. Of course, it’s hard to say much with certainty at a crime scene that I’ve had to work without a thermometer to take the body’s temperature. And there were certainly fingerprints that could have been recovered from the murder weapon and the brass door handle. What can be said with confidence, however, is that the murderer was left-handed. Because of the pattern of wounds on the dead man’s body. Now, at the canteen, I observed all of the men in this camp and drew up a list of all the left-handed plenis. This was my initial pool of suspects. Since when I have identified the murderer, I will not say his name. As a German officer, it would be wrong for me to do so. But there is no need, since his name appears in Gebhardt’s notebook.”

I handed the red notebook to the major.

“Metelmann,” he said quietly.

“As you will see, this page contains details of payments that were made to this particular officer in return for information. In other words, the culprit was acting as the murdered man’s paid informer. I believe the two men argued about money, sir. Among other things. Possibly Gebhardt refused to pay the murderer five rubles—his usual rate—for information received. After the murder, the culprit took the money anyway.”

I handed Savostin a hundred of the five-ruble notes I had found behind the poster of Stalin. Savostin handed the notebook to the SGO.

“I found these bills hidden in Gebhardt’s hut. As you can see, all of the bills are marked in the top right-hand corner with a small pencil mark, which I believe is a Russian Orthodox cross.”

Savostin examined one of the notes and nodded. “All of them?” he said.

“Yes, sir.” I knew this because I had marked every one of the bills myself. “It’s my guess that if you were to search the officer named in that notebook, you would find him in possession of one or more five-ruble notes with the same penciled cross in the top right-hand corner, sir. The same officer is left-handed, and his arm currently bears a livid scar that was most probably sustained during the attack on Gebhardt.”

Still clutching my cap, I rubbed my shaven head with my knuckle. It sounded like something happening to a piece of wood in the camp workshop. “If I might speak frankly, sir?”

“Speak, Captain.”

“I don’t know what you’re going to do with this man, sir. Given who and what he is, I can appreciate that it might leave you with a problem. After all, he’s your man’s man. But he’s no good to you now, sir, is he? Not now that we know who and what he is. I suppose you could always use him to replace Gebhardt, as the anti-fa officer, although his Russian isn’t up to much. And you’d have to take him away anyway, for political reeducation. Either way, he’s finished in this camp. I just wanted to let you know that, sir.”

“Aren’t you jumping the gun a little, Gunther? You haven’t proved anything yet. Even if I do find this marked money on Metelmann, there’s nothing to prove he didn’t receive the money before Gebhardt was murdered. And have you considered the possibility that if this man is an informer, then it might suit me better to leave him here and have you and the colonel transferred to another camp?”

“I have considered that, yes, sir. It’s true there’s nothing to stop you doing that. But you can’t be sure that we haven’t told all our comrades what I’ve told you. That’s one reason why it wouldn’t suit you to send us to another camp. Another reason is that the colonel is doing an excellent job as SGO. The men listen to him. With all due respect, sir, you need him.”

Major Savostin looked at the colonel. “Perhaps I do, at that,” he said.

I shrugged. “As for proving anything to your satisfaction, Major, that’s your affair. I’ve handed you the gun. You can’t expect me to pull the trigger as well. However, if you do decide to search Metelmann, you might ask him the name of his wife, sir.”

“Meaning?”

“Konrad Metelmann’s wife is called Vera, sir.” I handed Savostin the ring I had found, which I had assumed was Gebhardt’s wedding ring. “There’s an inscription inside.”

Savostin’s eyes narrowed as he read what was engraved on the inside of the gold band. “‘To Konrad, with all my love, from Vera. February 1943.’” He looked at me.

“That was on Gebhardt’s ring finger, sir. The finger was broken, I think, because Metelmann tried to get the ring off Gebhardt’s finger after he killed him and failed. Possibly he even broke the finger, I don’t know. But I had to use soap to get it off myself.”

“Perhaps Gebhardt bought this from Metelmann.”

“Gebhardt bought it, all right. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from Metelmann. Metelmann hid that ring up his arse for weeks. Then he got a bad dose of diarrhea and had to wear it on a piece of string around his neck. But one of the guards found it and made him hand it over. As a matter of fact, I saw it happen.”

“Who?”

“Sergeant Degermenkoy. My guess is that Gebhardt bought it back from him and promised to return it to Metelmann but never did. Possibly he may have used the ring as leverage to obtain information from Metelmann. Either way, I’m certain this ring is what the fight was about. And I’m sure the sergeant will confirm what I’ve said, sir. That he sold the ring to Gebhardt.”

“Degermenkoy is a lying pig,” said Major Savostin. “But I don’t doubt that you are correct about what must have happened. You’ve done very well, Captain. I shall question both men in due course. For now, I thank you, Captain. You, too, Colonel, for recommending this man. You may go back to work now. Dismissed.”

Mrugowski and I went out of the guardhouse. “Are you sure about all of this?”

“Yes.”

“Suppose Savostin searches Metelmann and he doesn’t have that five-ruble note.”

“He had it half an hour ago,” I said. “I know that because it was me who gave it to him. And it’s marked with a lot more than just a Russian Orthodox cross. There’s a thumbprint in blood on it, too. Rather a good one, as it happens, although I daresay the Ivans won’t be looking to make a match.”

“I don’t understand,” said Mrugowski. “Whose thumbprint?”

“Gebhardt’s. I put the print on the bill using his dead hand. And I borrowed five rubles from Metelmann the day before yesterday, just so that I could repay him with a marked bill. I marked the bills with the cross myself. The thumbprint was merely for added effect.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I chalked him out for it. Metelmann. Framed him, so that he could take the bath out.”

Mrugowski stopped and stared at me with horror. “You mean he didn’t kill Gebhardt?”

“Oh, he killed him all right. I’m almost sure of that. But proving it is something else. Especially in this place. Anyway, I don’t much care. Metelmann was a point. A lousy informer, and we’re well rid of him.”

“I do not like your methods, Captain Gunther.”

“You wanted a detective from the Alex, Colonel, and that’s what you got. You think those bastards always play fair? By the book? Rules of evidence? Think again. Berlin cops have planted more evidence than the ancient Egyptians. This is how it works, sir. Real police work isn’t some gentleman detective writing notes on a starched shirt-cuff with a silver pencil. That was the old days, when the grass was greener and it only snowed on Christmas Eve. You make the suspect, not the punishment, fit the crime, see? It was always thus. But more especially here. Here most of all. That Major Savostin isn’t the laughing policeman. He’s from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I just hope you didn’t sell me too hard to that coldhearted bastard, because I tell you this. It’s not Lieutenant Metelmann I’m worried about, it’s me. I’ve been useful to Savostin. He likes that. The next time he gets cold hands, he’s liable to treat me like a pair of gloves.”

Konrad Metelmann was taken away by the Blues the same day and life at Krasno-Armeesk resumed its awful, gray, unrelentingly brutal routine. Or at least I thought it did until it was pointed out to me by another pleni that I was receiving double rations in the canteen. People always noticed things like that. At first none of my comrades seemed to mind, as everyone was now aware that I had uncovered an informer and saved twenty-five of us from a show trial in Stalingrad. But memories are short, especially in a Soviet labor camp, and as winter arrived and my preferment continued—not just more food, but warmer clothes, too—I began to encounter some resentment among the other German prisoners. It was Ivan Yefremovich Pospelov who explained what was happening:

“I’ve seen this before,” he said. “And I’m afraid it will end badly unless you can do something about it. The Blues have picked you out for the Astoria treatment. Like the hotel? Better food, better clothes, and in case you hadn’t noticed, less work.”

“I’m working,” I said. “Like anyone else.”

“You think so? When was the last time a Blue shouted at you to hurry up? Or called you a German pig?”

“Now you come to mention it, they have been rather more polite of late.”

“Eventually, the other plenis will forget what you did for them and remember only that you are preferred by the Blues. And they’ll conclude that there’s more to it than meets the eye. That you’re giving the Blues something else in return.”

“But that’s nonsense.”

“I know it. You know it. But do they know it? In six months from now you’ll be an anti-fascist agent in their eyes, whether you are or not. That’s what the Russians are gambling on. That as you are shunned by your own people you have no choice but to come over to them. Even if that doesn’t happen one day, you’ll have an accident. A bank will give way for no apparent reason and you’ll be buried alive. But your rescue will come too late. And if you are rescued, then you’ll have no choice but to take Gebhardt’s place. That is, if you want to stay alive. You’re one of them, my friend. A Blue. You just don’t know it yet.”

I knew Pospelov was right. Pospelov knew everything about life at K.A. He ought to have done. He’d been there since Stalin’s Great Purge. As the music teacher to the family of a senior Soviet politician arrested and executed in 1937, Pospelov had received a twenty-year sentence—a simple case of guilt by association. But for good measure the NKVD—as the MVD was then called—had broken his hands with a hammer to make sure that he could never again play the piano.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“For sure you can’t beat them.”

“You can’t mean that I should join them, surely?”

Pospelov shrugged. “It’s odd where a crooked path will sometimes take you. Besides, most of them are just us with blue shoulder boards.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Then you will have to watch out for yourself, with all three eyes, and by the way, don’t ever yawn.”

“There must be something I can do, Ivan Yefremovich. I can share some of my food, can’t I? Give my warmer clothing to another man?”

“They’ll simply find other ways to show you favor. Or they’ll try to persecute those that you help. You must really have impressed that MVD major, Gunther.” He sighed and looked up at the gray-white sky and sniffed the air. “Any day now it will snow. The work will be tougher then. If you’re going to do anything, it would be best to do it before the snow, when days and tempers are shorter and the Blues hate us more for keeping them outside. In a way, they’re prisoners just like we are. You’ve got to remember that.”

“You’d see the good in a pack of wolves, Pospelov.”

“Perhaps. However, your example is a useful one, my friend. If you wish to stop the wolves from licking your hand, you will have to bite one of them.”

Pospelov’s advice was hardly welcome. Assaulting one of the guards was a serious offense—almost too serious to contemplate. And yet I didn’t doubt what he had told me: If the Ivans kept on giving me special treatment, I was going to meet with a fatal accident at the hands of my comrades. Many of these were ruthless Nazis and loathsome to me, but they were still my fellow countrymen, and faced with the choice of keeping faith with them or joining the Bolsheviks to save my own skin, I quickly formed the conclusion that I’d already stayed alive for longer than I might otherwise have expected and that maybe I had no choice at all. I hated the Bolsheviks as much as I hated the Nazis; under the circumstances, perhaps more than I hated the Nazis. The MVD was just the Gestapo with three Cyrillic letters, and I’d had enough of everything to do with the whole apparatus of state security to last me a lifetime.

Clear in my mind what I had to do, and in full view of almost every pleni in the half-excavated canal, I walked up to Sergeant Degermenkoy and stood right in front of him. I took the cigarette from the mouth in his astonished-looking face and puffed it happily for a moment. I discovered I didn’t have the guts to hit him but managed to find it in me to knock the blue-banded cap off his ugly tree stump of a head.

It was the first and only time I heard laughter at K.A. And it was the last thing I heard for a while. I was waving to the other plenis when something hit me hard on the side of my head—perhaps the stock of Degermenkoy’s machine gun—and probably more than once. My legs gave way and the hard, cold ground seemed to swallow me up as if I’d been water from the Volga. The black earth enveloped me, filling my nostrils, mouth, and ears, and then collapsed altogether, and I fell into the dreadful place that the Great Stalin and the rest of his murderous Red gang had prepared for me in their socialist republic. And as I fell into that endless, deep pit they stood and waved at me with gloved hands from the top of Lenin’s mausoleum, while all around me there were people applauding my disappearance, laughing at their own good fortune, and throwing flowers after me.

I suppose I should have been used to it. After all, I was accustomed to visiting prisons. As a cop, I’d been in and out of the cement to interview suspects and take statements from others. From time to time I’d even found myself on the wrong side of the Judas hole: once in 1934, when I’d irritated the Potsdam police chief; and again in 1936, when Heydrich had sent me into Dachau as an undercover agent to gain the trust of a small-time criminal. Dachau had been bad, but not as bad as Krasno-Armeesk, and certainly not as bad as the place I was in now. It wasn’t that the place was dirty or anything; the food was good, and they even let me have a shower and some cigarettes. So what was it that bothered me? I suppose it was the fact that I was on my own for the first time since leaving Berlin in 1944. I’d been sharing quarters with one or more Germans for almost two years, and now, all of a sudden, there was only myself to talk to. The guards said nothing. I spoke to them in Russian and they ignored me. The sense of being separated from my comrades, of being cut off, began to grow and, with each day that passed, became a little worse. At the same time, I had an awful feeling of being walled in—again, this was probably a corollary of having spent so much of the last six months outside. Just as the sheer size of Russia had once left me feeling overwhelmed, it was the very smallness of my windowless cell—three paces long and half as wide—that began to weigh on me. Each minute of my day seemed to last forever. Had I really lived for as long as I had with so little to show for it in the way of thoughts and memories? With all that I had done I might reasonably have expected to have occupied myself for hours with a remembrance of things past. Not a bit of it. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. My past felt wholly insignificant, almost invisible. As for the future, the days that lay ahead of me seemed as vast and empty as the steppes themselves. But the worst feeling of all was when I thought of my wife; just thinking of her at our little apartment in Berlin, supposing it was still standing, could reduce me to tears. Probably she thought I was dead. I might as well have been dead. I was buried in a tomb. And all that remained was for me to die.

I managed to mark the passing time on the porcelain tile walls with my own excrement. And in this way I noted the passing of four months. Meanwhile, I put on some weight. I even got my smoker’s cough back. Monotony dulled my thinking. I lay on the plank bed with its sackcloth mattress and stared at the caged lightbulb above the door, wondering how long they gave you for knocking a Blue’s hat off. Given the immensity of Pospelov’s crime and punishment, I came to the conclusion that I might expect anything between six months and twenty-five years. I tried to find in me something of his fortitude and optimism, but it was no good: I couldn’t help recalling something else he had said, a joke he made once, only with each passing day it felt less and less like a joke and more like a prediction:

“The first ten years are always the hardest,” he’d said.

I was haunted by that remark.

Most of the time, I hung on to the certainty that before I was sentenced there would have to be a trial. Pospelov said there was always a trial of sorts. But when the trial came, it was over before I knew it.

They came and took me when I least expected it. One minute I was eating my breakfast, the next I was in a large room being fingerprinted and photographed by a little bearded man with a big box range-finder camera. On top of the polished wooden box was a little spirit level—a bubble of air in a yellow liquid that resembled the photographer’s watery, dead eyes. I asked him several questions in my best, most subservient Russian, but the only words he used were “Turn to the side” and “Stand still, please.” The “please” was nice.

After that I expected to be taken back to my cell. Instead, I was steered up a flight of stairs and into a small tribunal room. There was a Soviet flag, a window, a large hero wall featuring the terrible trio of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and, up on a stage, a table behind which were sitting three MVD officers, none of whom I recognized. The senior officer, who was seated in the middle of this troika, asked me if I required a translator, a question that was translated by a translator—another MVD officer. I said I didn’t, but the translator stayed anyway and translated, badly, everything that was said to or about me from then on. Including the indictment against me, which was read out by the prosecutor, a reasonable-looking woman who was also an MVD officer. She was the first woman I’d seen since the march out of Königsberg, and I could hardly keep my eyes off her.

“Bernhard Gunther,” she said in a tremulous voice. Was she nervous? Was this her first case? “You are charged—”

“Wait a minute,” I said in Russian. “Don’t I get a lawyer to defend me?”

“Can you afford to pay for one?” asked the chairman.

“I had some money when I left the camp at Krasno-Armeesk,” I said. “While I was being brought here, it disappeared.”

“Are you suggesting it was stolen?”

“Yes.”

The three judges conferred for a moment. Then the chairman said: “You should have said this before. I’m afraid these proceedings may not be delayed while your allegations are investigated. We shall proceed. Comrade Lieutenant?”

The prosecutor continued to read out the charge: “That you willfully and with malice aforethought assaulted a guard from Voinapleni camp number three, at Krasno-Armeesk, contrary to martial law; that you stole a cigarette from the same guard at camp number three, which is also against martial law; and that you committed these actions with the intent of fomenting a mutiny among the other prisoners at camp three, also contrary to martial law. These are all crimes against Comrade Stalin and the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

I knew I was in trouble now. If I hadn’t realized it before, I realized it now: Knocking a man’s hat off was one thing; mutiny was something else. Mutiny wasn’t the kind of charge to be dismissed lightly.

“Do you have anything you wish to say in your defense?” said the chairman.

I waited politely for the translator to finish and made my defense. I admitted the assault and the theft of the cigarette. Then, almost as an afterthought, I added: “There was certainly no intention of fomenting a mutiny, sir.”

The chairman nodded, wrote something on a piece of paper—probably a reminder to buy some cigarettes and vodka on his way home that night—and looked expectantly at the prosecutor.

In most circumstances, I like a woman in uniform. The trouble was, this one didn’t seem to like me. We’d never met before, and yet she seemed to know everything about me: the very wicked thought processes that had motivated me to cause the mutiny; my devotion to the cause of Adolf Hitler and Nazism; the pleasure I had taken in the perfidious attack upon the Soviet Union in June 1941; my important part in the collective guilt of all Germans in the murders of millions of innocent Russians; and, not happy with this, that I’d intended to incite the other plenis at camp three to murder many more.

The only surprise was that the court withdrew for several minutes to reach a verdict and, more important, have a cigarette. Smoke was still trailing from the nostrils of one member of the tribunal as they came back into the room.

The prosecutor stood up. The translator stood up. I stood up. The verdict was announced. I was a fascist pig, a German bastard, a capitalist swine, a Nazi criminal; and I was also guilty as charged.

“In accordance with the demands of the prosecutor and in view of your previous record, you are sentenced to death.”

I shook my head, certain the prosecutor had made no such demands—perhaps she had forgotten—nor had my previous record been so much as mentioned. Unless you counted the invasion of the Soviet Union, and that much was true.

“Death?” I shrugged. “I suppose I can count myself lucky I don’t play the piano.”

Oddly, the translator had stopped translating what I was saying. He was waiting for the chairman to finish speaking.

“You are fortunate that this is a country founded on mercy and a respect for human rights,” he was saying. “After the Great Patriotic War, in which so many innocent Soviet citizens died, it was the wish of Comrade Stalin that the death penalty should be abolished in our country. Consequently, the capital punishment handed down to you is commuted to twenty-five years of hard labor.”

Stunned at my declared fate, I was led out of the court to a yard outside where a Black Maria was waiting for me, its engine running. The driver already had my details, which seemed to indicate that the court’s verdict had been a foregone conclusion. The Black Maria was divided into four little cells, each of them so cramped and low you had to bend over double just to get inside one. The metal door was perforated with little holes, like the mouthpiece of a telephone. They were considerate like that, the Ivans. We set off at speed—you might have thought the driver was in charge of a getaway car after a bank robbery—and when we stopped, we stopped very suddenly, as if the police had forced us to stop. I heard more prisoners being loaded into the Black Maria and then we were off, again at high speed, with the driver laughing loudly as we skidded around one corner and then another. Finally we stopped, the engine was switched off, the doors were flung open, and all was made plain. We were beside a train that was already under steam and making strongly exhaled hints that it was impatient to leave, but to where, no one said. Everyone in the Black Maria was ordered to climb aboard a cattle car alongside several other Germans whose faces looked as grim as I was feeling. Twenty-five years! If I lived that long, it was going to be 1970 before I went home again! The door of the cattle car slid shut with a bang, leaving us all in partial darkness; the bogies shifted a little, throwing us all into each other’s arms, and then the train set off.

“Any idea where we’re going?” said a voice.

“Does it matter?” said someone. “Hell’s the same whichever fiery pit you’re in.”

“This place is too cold to be hell,” said another.

I peered through an airhole in the wall of the cattle car. It was impossible to see where the sun was. The sky was a blank sheet of gray that was soon black with night and salted with snow. At the other end of the wagon, a man was crying. The sound was tearing us all apart.

“Someone say something to that fellow, for God’s sake,” I muttered loudly.

“Like what?” said the man next to me.

“I dunno, but I’d rather not listen to that sound unless I have to.”

“Hey, Fritz,” said a voice. “Stop that crying, will you? You’re spoiling the party for some fellow at the other end of the carriage. This is supposed to be a picnic, see? Not a funeral cortege.”

“That’s what you think.” This accent was unmistakably Berlin. “Take a look out of this airhole. You can see the Kirchhof Cemetery.”

I moved toward the Berliner and got talking to him, and soon afterward we discovered that everyone in the wagon had been tried in the same court on some trumped-up charge, found guilty, and sentenced to a long term of hard labor. I seemed to be about the only man who had committed a real offense.

The Berliner’s name was Walter Bingel, and before the war he’d been a park keeper in the gardens of the Sansouci Palace in Potsdam.

“I was at a camp next to the Zaritsa Gorge, near Rostov,” he explained. “I was sad to leave, as a matter of fact. The potatoes I planted were about ready to pull up. But I managed to bring some seeds with me, so maybe we won’t go hungry at wherever it is we’re going.”

There was much speculation about where this might be. One man said we were going to a coal-mining camp at Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle. Then another mentioned the name of Sakhalin, and that silenced everyone, including myself.

“What’s Sakhalin?” asked Bingel.

“It’s a camp in the easternmost part of Russia,” I said.

“A death camp,” said someone else. “They sent a lot of SS there after Stalingrad. Sakhalin means ‘black’ in one of those sub-human languages they use out there. I met a man who claimed he’d been there. An Ivan prisoner.”

“No one really knows if it exists or not,” I added.

“Oh, it exists all right. Full of Nips, it is. The place is so far east, it’s not even attached to the fucking mainland. They don’t bother with a barbed-wire fence at Sakhalin. Why would they? There’s nowhere else to go.”

The train rolled on for almost three whole days, and there was relief when finally they broke the ice on the locks and the door of the wagon opened, because the faces of the guards who greeted us were vaguely European and not Oriental, which seemed to indicate that we’d been spared Sakhalin. Not all of us had been spared, however. As men jumped down from the wagon, it was clear that one man had managed to hang himself from a wooden peg. It was the man who had been crying.

Several hundred of us lined up beside the track awaiting our new orders. Wherever we were now was cold, but not nearly as cold as Stalingrad; perhaps it was the weather, but a new rumor—that we were home—quickly murmured its way through the ranks like a Hindu’s mantra.

“This is Germany! We’re home.”

Unlike most of the rumors to which we German plenis were often prey, there was some truth in this one, for it seemed that we were just across the border in what many of my more rabidly Nazi comrades probably still thought of as the German Protectorate of Bohemia, otherwise known as Czechoslovakia.

And excitement mounted as we marched into Saxony.

“They’re going to let us go! Why else would they have brought us all the way from Russia?”

Why else indeed? But it wasn’t long before our hopes of an early release were dashed.

We marched into a little mining town called Johannesgeorgenstadt and then out the other side, up a hill with a fine view of the local Lutheran church and several tall chimneys, and through the gates of an old Nazi concentration camp—one of almost a hundred subcamps in the Flossenburg complex. Most of us imagined that all of Germany’s KZs had been closed, so it was a bit of a shock to discover one still open and ready for business. A greater shock awaited us, however.

There were almost two hundred German plenis already living and working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt KZ, and even by the poor standards of Soviet prisoner welfare, none of these looked well. The SGO, SS General Klause, soon explained why:

“I’m sorry to see you here, men,” he said. “I wish I could have been welcoming you back to Germany with pleasure, but I’m afraid I can’t. If any of you are familiar with the Erzgebirge mountains, you will know that the area is rich with pitchblende, from which uranium ore is extracted. Uranium is radioactive and has a number of uses, but there’s only one use for it that the Ivans are interested in. Uranium in large quantities is vital for the Soviet atom bomb project, and it’s no exaggeration to say that they perceive the development of such a weapon as a matter of the highest priority. And certainly a much higher priority than your health.

“We’re uncertain what effect prolonged exposure to unrefined pitchblende has on the human body, but you can bet it’s not good—for two reasons. One is that Marie Curie, who discovered the stuff, died from its effect; and the other is that the Blues come down the mine shaft only when they have to. And even then only for short periods and wearing face masks. So if you’re down the pit, try to cover your nose and mouth with a handkerchief.

“On the positive side, the food here is good and plentiful and brutality is kept to a minimum. There are good washing facilities—after all, this was a German camp before it was a Russian one—and we’re allowed a day off once a week; but only because they have to check the lifting gear and the gas levels. Radon gas, I’m told. Colorless, odorless, and that’s about all I know about it, except I’m sure it’s also hazardous. Sorry, that’s another negative. And since we’re back on the side of the debits, I may as well mention now that in this camp the MVD employs a number of Germans as recruiting officers for some new people’s police they’re planning to create in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. A secret police designed to be a German arm of the MVD. The establishment of such a police force in Germany is banned by the rules of the Allied Control Commission, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to do it under the table, by subterfuge. But they can’t do it at all if they don’t have the men to do it, so be careful what you say and do, for they will most certainly interrogate and interview you at length. D’you hear? I want no renegades under my command. These Germans the Ivans have working for them are communists. Veteran communists from the old KPD. What we were fighting against. The ugly face of European Bolshevism. If there were some among you who doubted the truth of our National Socialist cause, I imagine you have learned that it was you who were mistaken, not the leader. Remember what I’ve said and watch yourself.”

I was one of the lucky ones, in that I wasn’t ordered down the pit immediately. Instead, I was put on the sorting detail. Wagonloads of rock were brought up from the mine and emptied onto a large conveyor belt that was running between two lines of plenis. Someone showed me how to inspect the pieces of brownish-black rock for veins of the all-important pitchblende. Rocks without veins were thrown away, the others graded by eye and tossed into bins for further selection by a Blue holding a metal tube with a mica window at one end: The better the quality of the ore, the more electric current that was reproduced as white noise by the tube. These higher-quality rocks were taken away for processing in Russia, but the quantities considered useful were small. It seemed that tons of rock would be needed to produce just a small quantity of ore, and none of the men working at the Johannesgeorgenstadt mine were of the opinion that the Ivans would be building an atom bomb anytime soon.

I’d been there almost a month when I was told to report to the mine office. This was housed in a gray stone building next to the pithead winding gear. I went up to the first floor and waited. Through the open door of the office I could see a couple of MVD officers. I could also hear what they said, and I realized that these were two of the Germans General Klause had warned us about.

Seeing me standing there, they waved me inside and closed the door. I glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was eleven a.m. There was a microphone on the table and, I imagined, somewhere a large tape machine ready to record my every word. Next to the microphone was a spotlight, but it wasn’t switched on. Not yet. There was an undrawn black curtain beside the window. They invited me to sit down on a chair in front of the desk.

“The last time I did this, I got twenty-five years hard labor,” I said. “So, if you’ll forgive me, I really don’t have anything to say.”

“If you wish,” said one of the officers, “you may appeal the verdict. Did the court tell you that?”

“No. What the court did tell me was that the Soviets are every bit as stupid and brutal as the Nazis.”

“It’s interesting you say that.”

I didn’t reply.

“It seems to support an impression we have of you, Captain Gunther. That you’re not a Nazi.”

Meanwhile, the other officer had picked up a telephone and was saying something in Russian that I could not hear.

“I’m Major Weltz,” said the first officer. He looked at the man now replacing the telephone receiver. “And this is Lieutenant Rascher.”

I grunted.

“Like you, I am also from Berlin,” said Weltz. “As a matter of fact, I was there just last weekend. I’m afraid you’d hardly recognize it. Incredible the destruction that was inflicted by Hitler’s refusal to surrender.” He pushed a packet of cigarettes across the table. “Please. Help yourself to a cigarette. I’m afraid they’re Russian, but they’re better than nothing.”

I took one.

“Here,” he said, coming around the desk and snapping open a lighter. “Let me light that for you.”

He sat down on the edge of the table and watched me smoke. Then the door opened and a starshina came in, carrying a sheet of paper. He laid it on the table next to the cigarettes and left again without saying a word.

Weltz glanced at the sheet of paper for a moment and then turned it to face me.

“Your appeal form,” he said.

My eyes flicked across the Cyrillic letters.

“Would you like me to translate it?”

“That won’t be necessary. I can read and speak Russian.”

“Very well, too, by all accounts.” He handed me a fountain pen and waited for me to sign the sheet of paper. “Is there a problem?”

“What’s the point?” I said dully.

“There’s every point. The government of the Soviet Union has its forms and formalities like every other country. Nothing happens without a piece of paper. It was the same in Germany, was it not? An official form for everything.”

Again, I hesitated.

“You want to go home, don’t you? To Berlin? Well, you can’t go home unless you’ve been released, and you can’t be released unless you appeal your sentence first. Really, it’s as simple as that. Oh, I’m not promising anything. But this form puts the process into motion. Think of it like that pithead winding gear outside. That piece of paper makes the wheel start to move.”

I read the form forward and then backward: Sometimes, things in the Soviet Union and its zones of occupation made more sense if you read them backward.

I signed it, and Major Weltz drew the form toward him.

“So at least we know that you do want to get out of here,” he said. “To go home. Now that we’ve established that much, all we have to do is figure out a way of making that happen. I mean, sooner rather than later. To be exact, twenty-five years from now. That is, if you survive what anyone here will tell you is hazardous work. Personally, I don’t much care to be even this close to large deposits of uraninite. Apparently, they turn it into this yellow powder that glows in the dark. God only knows what it does to people.”

“Thanks, but I’m not interested.”

“We haven’t told you what we’re offering yet,” said Weltz. “A job. As a policeman. I would have thought that might appeal to a man with your qualifications.”

“A man who was never a member of the Nazi Party,” said Lieutenant Rascher. “A former member of the Social Democratic Party.”

“Did you know, Captain, that the KPD and the SDP have joined together?”

“It’s a bit late,” I said. “We could have used the support of the KPD in December 1931. During the Red Revolution.”

“That was Trotsky’s fault,” said Weltz. “Anyway. Better late than never, eh? The new party—the Socialist Unity Party, the SED—it represents a fresh start for us both to work together. For a new Germany.”

“Another new Germany?” I shrugged.

“Well, we can hardly make do with the old one. Wouldn’t you agree? There’s so much that we have to rebuild. Not just politics, but law and order, too. The police force. We’re starting a new force. For the moment, it’s being called the Fifth Kommissariat, or K-5. We hope to have it up and running by the end of the year. And until then we’re looking for recruits. A man such as yourself, a former Oberkommissar with Kripo, with a record for honesty and integrity, who was chased out of the force by the Nazis, is just the sort of principled man we need. I think I can probably guarantee reinstatement at your old rank, with full pension rights. A Berlin-weighted allowance. Help with a new apartment. A job for your wife.”

“No, thanks.”

“That’s too bad,” said Lieutenant Rascher.

“Look, why don’t you think it over, Captain,” said Weltz. “Sleep on it. You see, to be perfectly honest with you, Gunther, you’re at the top of our list in this camp. And, for obvious reasons, we’d rather not stay here longer than we have to. I’m already a father, but the lieutenant here has no wish to damage his chances of having a son if and when he marries. Radiation does something to a man’s ability to procreate. It also affects the thyroid and the body’s ability to use energy and make proteins. At least, that’s what I think it does.”

“The answer is still no,” I said. “May I go now?”

The major adopted a rueful expression. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “How is it that you, a Social Democrat, were prepared to go and work for Heydrich? And yet you won’t work for us. Can you explain that, please?”

It was now I realized who the major reminded me of. The uniform might have been different, but with the white-blond hair, blue eyes, high forehead, and even loftier tone—I was already thinking of Heydrich before he mentioned the name. Probably Weltz and Heydrich would have been about the same age, too. If he hadn’t been murdered in June 1942, Heydrich would have been about forty-two now. The younger lieutenant was rather more gray-haired, with a face as wide as the major’s was long. He looked like me before the war and a year in a POW camp.

“Well, Gunther? What have you to say for yourself? Perhaps you were always just a Nazi in all but name. A party fellow traveler. Is that it? Did it take you this long to understand what you really are?”

“You and Heydrich,” I said to the major. “You’re not so very different. I never wanted to work for him either, but I was afraid to say no. Afraid of what he might do to me. You, on the other hand, have shot your bolt there. You’ve already done your worst. Short of shooting me, there’s not much more you can actually do to me. Sometimes it’s a great comfort to know that you’ve already hit rock bottom.”

“We could break you,” said Weltz. “We could do that.”

“I’ve broken a few men myself in my time,” I said. “But there has to be some point to it. And with me, there isn’t, because if you break me, then you’d be doing it just for the hell of it, and what’s more, I’d be no good to you when you were finished. I’m no good to you now, only you just don’t know it, Major. So let me tell you why: I was the kind of cop who was too dumb to act smart and look the other way, or to kiss someone’s behind. The Nazis were cleverer than you. They knew that. The only reason Heydrich brought me back to Kripo was because he knew that even in a police state there are times when you need a real policeman. But you don’t want a real policeman, Major Weltz, you want a clerk with a badge. You want me to read Karl Marx at bedtime and people’s mail during the day. You want a man who’s eager to please and looking for advancement in the Communist Party.” I shook my head wearily. “The last time I was looking for advancement in a party, a pretty girl slapped my face.”

“Pity,” said Weltz. “It seems you’re going to spend the rest of your life dead. Like all of your class, Gunther, you’re a victim of history.”

“We both are, Major. Being a victim of history is what being a German is all about.”

But I was also a victim of my environment. They made sure of that. Soon after my meeting with the boys from K-5, I was transferred off the sorting detail and into the mine shaft.

It was a world of constant thunder. There was the rumble of underground explosions that broke the rock into manageable chunks; and there was the crash of the cage doors before it slid down the guides and into the shaft. There was the din of rocks we split with pickaxes and then threw into the wagons, and the continual barrage as these moved backward and forward along the rails. And with each detonating noise there was dust and more dust, turning my own snot black and my sweat into a kind of gray oil. At night, I coughed great gritty gobs of saliva and phlegm that looked like burned fried eggs. It all felt like a high price to pay for my principles. But there was a camaraderie in the shaft that wasn’t to be had anywhere else in Johannesgeorgenstadt, and an automatic respect from the other plenis who heard our coughing and recognized their own comparative good fortune. Pospelov had been right about that. There’s always someone worse off than yourself. I hoped to get a chance to meet that someone before the work killed me. There was a mirror in the washroom. Mostly we avoided it, for fear that we’d see our own grandfathers or, worse, their decomposed bodies looking back at us; but one day I inadvertently caught sight of myself and saw a man with a face like the pitchblende rock we were mining. It was brownish black, lumpy and misshapen, with two dull opaque spaces where my eyes had once been, and a row of dark gray excrescences that might have been my teeth. I’d met a lot of criminal types in my life, but I looked like Mr. Hyde’s black-sheep brother. Acted like him, too. There were no Blues in the shaft, and we settled our differences with a maximum of violence. Once, Schaefer, another pleni from Berlin who didn’t much like cops, told me that he’d cheered when the leaders of the SDP had been chased out of Berlin in 1933. So I punched him hard in the face, and when he tried to hit me with a pickax, I hit him with a shovel. It was a while before he got up, and in truth, he was never quite the same again after that—another victim of history. Karl Marx would have approved.

But after a while I stopped caring about anything very much, including myself. I would squeeze into tight spaces in the black rock to work in solitude with my pick, which was the most dangerous thing to do, since cave-ins were common. But there was less dust to breathe this way than when they used explosives.

Another month passed. And then one day I was summoned to the office again, and I went along expecting to find the same two MVD officers and hear them ask me if my time in the mine shaft had helped to change my mind about K-5. It had changed my mind about a lot of things, but not German communism and its secret police force. I was going to tell them to go to hell, and perhaps sound like I meant it, too, even though I was ready for someone to come and put some plaster of Paris on my face. So I was a little disappointed that the two officers weren’t there, the way you are when you’ve worked up a pretty good speech about a lot of noble things that don’t add up to very much that’s important when you’re lying in the morgue.

There was only one officer in the room, a heavyset man with receding brown hair and a pugnacious jaw. Like his two predecessors, he wore blue breeches and a brown gimnasterka tunic but was better decorated; as well as the veteran NKVD soldier badge and Order of the Red Banner, there were other medals I didn’t recognize. The insignia on his collar tabs and the stars on his sleeves seemed to indicate that he was at least a colonel, or perhaps even a general. His blue officer’s cap, with its squarish visor, lay on the table alongside the Nagant revolver in its bucket-sized holster.

“The answer is still no,” I said, hardly caring who he was.

“Sit down,” he said. “And don’t be a bloody fool.”

He was German.

“I know I’ve put on a bit of weight,” he said. “But I thought you of all people would recognize me.”

I sat down and rubbed some of the dust from my eyes. “Now you come to mention it, you do seem kind of familiar.”

“You I wouldn’t have recognized at all. Not in a million years.”

“I know. I should lay off the chocolates. Get myself a haircut and a manicure. But I never do seem to have the time. My job keeps me pretty busy.”

The officer’s pork-butcher’s face cracked a smile. Almost. “A sense of humor. That’s impressive in this place. But if you really want to impress me, then stop playing the tough guy and tell me who I am.”

“Don’t you know?”

He tutted impatiently and shook his head. “Please. I can help you if you’ll let me. But I have to believe you’re worth it. If you’re any kind of detective, you’ll remember who I am.”

“Erich Mielke,” I said. “Your name is Erich Mielke.”