Moskva

36 Finding Schultz, Berlin, April 1945

How could you find one German in a city full of dead men when most of the living lied about who they were, what jobs they had held and where they lived? After three false leads, and sorting through the bodies of the old men who had been forced into Volkssturm battalions to defend Berlin to the last and killed before they could even really start fighting, Colonel Milov was in a foul mood.

Beziki decided to stay silent.

He still trotted at the commissar’s side, drawing amused glances, sometimes disgusted ones. He didn’t see what the problem was. Other battalions had pets. Some had cats, one had a goat. His had him, Beziki.

The air around him stank of sulphur from artillery fire, while dust filled the ruined canyons of the streets like fog. Most of the government buildings were roofless, with dark holes where their windows had been. Later he would discover that a quarter of a million had died during these last few weeks of war. The only dead in sight were a dozen bodies slumped below the U-Bahn sign towards which the commissar was striding.

They were boys Beziki’s age, none in uniform. Their hands were tied behind their backs and a line of bullet holes in a wall showed how they died.

‘Recent,’ the commissar said.

He was talking to himself.

Beziki knew that the Germans killed their own people for showing insufficient enthusiasm. So did his side. It was just that recently the Germans had become much less enthusiastic about this war.

Glancing at the bodies, Beziki shrugged and examined the U-Bahn’s steps. Dr Schultz, the scientist Colonel Milov wanted, was somewhere down there in the darkness, forced into a Volkssturm battalion by some idiot with a death wish. That was what the commissar said, anyway. He also said there were 200,000 German soldiers supposedly protecting two million Berliners. If you could call a force cobbled from children, old men, released prisoners, the sick and the insane soldiers. There were fewer now.

Behind the commissar and Beziki, ministerial office blocks burned in hissing fury. Artillery fire, the thud of mortars and the crash of walls collapsing, roofs caving in and the clatter of tank tracks formed a backdrop to an incessant crackle of small-arms fire. There were fewer bombing raids now the fighting was street by street, building by building and hand to hand.

It would be over in days, the commissar said.

Howitzer fire from the Zoo gardens fell on Soviet troops trying to take the Reichstag. The building had been empty since it was damaged by fire in the 1930s but that just meant German soldiers had been able to dig themselves into the rubble. Beziki was grateful he wasn’t in there trying to get them out.

‘Wait,’ Colonel Milov told Beziki.

He removed the NKVD tabs from his own collar.

The boy understood. The man was a tank commander, and a commissar before and after that. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s retrieve our man.’

The major he approached swung round crossly, realized he was talking to a senior officer and bit back whatever he’d been about to say. It seemed that two hundred, perhaps three hundred Volkssturm were holed up in the underground station.

‘I’m delighted that you haven’t attacked. But do you want to tell me why you haven’t attacked?’

The major pointed to a girl in the entrance holding a soiled pillowcase tied to a broom. ‘I thought, Comrade Colonel, I thought…’

‘You thought right.’

The commissar stopped in front of the girl, who stared at him wide-eyed and gripped her makeshift white flag more firmly than ever. She was thinner than any girl Beziki had seen. Poor, dark-haired, possibly foreign. Her eyes were dark and sunken, her cheekbones painfully sharp and she was chewing her lips, which were chapped. Beziki adored her on sight.

She had been sent to say there were women and children inside.

‘And?’ the commissar demanded.

The girl blinked. After a moment, she repeated her words.

‘What do these women and children have to do with me?’

Obviously panicked, the girl glanced towards the dark steps down to the metro station below, hesitated and turned back, words spilling over so fast that the corporal sent to act as the commissar’s interpreter had trouble doing her job.

‘You’re meant to let them go.’

‘Who says?’

‘A Major Kraus. He said she was to tell the Russians there are civilians. Then the civilians would be allowed to go and the soldiers remain.’

‘Are the soldiers Volkssturm?’

It seemed they were. Lots of them. What was lots to a frightened girl? A dozen? A hundred?

‘Ask her if they’re in the tunnels.’

The tunnels had fallen in. Bomb damage. They were on the platforms. Apparently he had to let the civilians go, or they’d be killed in the fighting. There were sick people down there too, old women, babies.

Beziki watched, wondering what the commissar would do.

It seemed that the commissar was wondering the same thing himself. Catching Beziki watching him, he smiled sourly. ‘It seems,’ he told the boy, ‘that this major wants them out of his way.’

‘Makes sense,’ Beziki said.

‘For him, perhaps. Not for me.’ To the interpreter he said, ‘Tell the girl to tell the major I want to talk to him.’

‘He said she was to talk to you.’

‘Why her?’

‘She’s Romanian. It doesn’t matter if she gets shot. What should I reply?’

‘He must talk to me himself. Ask how many staff he has.’

The girl looked puzzled at the question.

‘When he walks, how many walk with him? One, two, five?’

Two, apparently.

‘And soldiers of his own?’

A few. Very few, it seemed. Most were Volkssturm, old men or boys her age. The real soldiers were dead. Or they’d run away.

‘If her major wants to negotiate free passage for civilians, he’s to talk to me. And tell her to leave her bloody broomstick by the wall.’

‘Comrade Colonel…’

In a street behind them, an M-34 fired and the Soviet major who’d had his men facing the U-Bahn steps twitched. Beziki waited for the ringing in his ears to stop, and watched the commissar nod to say the major should continue.

‘Sir… we should shoot them all.’

‘There’s a man down there I want. As for the rest… Three months ago, I’d have agreed. Now, we’re going to need them.’

‘To do what, Comrade Colonel?’

‘Rebuild this, repair that. Berlin’s ours. I imagine we’ll be keeping it.’

The major smiled as if that hadn’t occurred to him, and it probably hadn’t. It wasn’t his job to have thoughts like that. It wasn’t really Colonel Milov’s job either, but that didn’t stop him.

‘Sir,’ Beziki said.

‘Seen them.’

A tall Waffen-SS major was climbing into the daylight, flanked by two lieutenants, the girl trailing behind them like an unwilling shadow. The major was the commissar’s age, which made him almost twice as old as his lieutenants. The major picked out his adversary without difficulty.

‘This won’t take long,’ the commissar said. Then, to the German: ‘Major Kraus?’

The two officers stared at each other.

‘You wish to surrender?’

The German smiled thinly. ‘There is no question of surrender. Orders have been issued. We will fight to the last man.’

‘Whose orders?’

‘The Führer himself.’

‘Your Führer is dead.’

‘I do not believe it. Even if it were true, all the more reason to obey.’

The commissar looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How many civilians do you have sheltering in there?’

‘Two hundred.’

‘And troops?’

‘Three hundred crack troops.’

So, no more than a hundred Volkssturm at most. ‘The girl said your army was made up of old men and children.’

The major’s face tightened. ‘They will do their duty.’

‘I do hope not.’ Drawing his Tokarev, the commissar shot him through the head. Beziki gasped as blood and brains splattered the German aide-de-camp standing slightly behind the major, gasping again when the commissar killed that man before he even had time to finish wiping his face. The junior lieutenant had his Luger levelled when a sniper’s rifle cracked from a building high behind and the German boy went down with a bullet between the eyes.

Beziki managed a grin.

Lieutenant Maya; it had to be.

She wouldn’t let the commissar forget that shot in a hurry.

‘Go down there,’ Colonel Milov told the interpreter. ‘Tell them Berlin has fallen. The major has surrendered. Tell them I’m looking for Dr Schultz. He is to make himself known to you. He is not in trouble. He will be well looked after. Say we have his family in protective custody already.’

‘We’ve done it?’ Beziki asked.

The commissar looked down at him. ‘Yes,’ he said, clapping the boy on the shoulder, ‘we’ve done it. Now, stand still…’

Digging into the backpack Beziki carried, the commissar found the loaf of black bread and chunk of cheese the boy had stolen that morning when he thought no one was looking. Nodding at the Romanian girl, he said, ‘Take your little friend somewhere and share this. I’m sure she’ll be grateful.’

When Beziki got back, the commissar was questioning a nondescript German in an ill-fitting uniform. The man was carrying a rabbit rifle.

A woman came down the steps of the house crying, wrapped her arms round Dr Schultz and held him so tightly he might as well have been straitjacketed. After a moment, his hand came up to stroke his wife’s hair and she buried her face in his neck and began wailing. Behind her, a blond boy of about fifteen and a girl a few years younger looked on, embarrassed. They’d had a day or two to adjust to being safe and to turn back into children. Although the manicured lawns of the strange concrete house, the blossom on the neatly pruned cherry trees and the neat rows of peas in the vegetable garden suggested that the war had never come that close.

The only person who didn’t look happy was a hard-faced woman in her sixties dressed entirely in black, who didn’t bother to hide her contempt either for the returning man or for his new Russian friends. Eventually, Dr Schultz peeled his wife’s arms from around his neck, took her hand and led her inside. When they reappeared an hour later, he was freshly shaved, his mismatched uniform had gone and he was wearing a dark suit, white shirt and red tie. She was smiling.

‘My turn,’ Lieutenant Golubtsov said. He dug into his pocket for a notebook with a pencil pushed into the gap between the sewn pages and the spine. When he flipped it open, the commissar was surprised to see the pages were empty.

‘You’ve memorized the questions?’

The boy looked embarrassed, as if the commissar had just said something stupid. ‘There aren’t questions, as such, Comrade Colonel. I simply need to make sure our German understands his physics, that the answers he gives me make sense.’

‘And you’re qualified to judge that?’

‘Oh yes, sir. I mean… I hope so.’

Having misplaced them, the commissar found Golubtsov and Dr Schultz two hours later in the garden, drinking tea from china cups and eating pepper biscuits, with their heads bent together as if they were old friends. The notebook that had been empty was now full and Golubtsov was grinning.

‘He’s the real thing?’

‘Oh yes, sir. Very definitely. He’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve just been telling him how much he’ll enjoy life at Moscow University.’

‘You’ve explained the travel arrangements?’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel…’

The German would leave on a flight from Tempelhof to Moscow first thing next morning. The rest of his family would follow by train within the week. That would allow them to take their prized possessions.

‘And the poodles?’ the lieutenant asked. ‘He really can’t take the poodles?’

‘They’ll be well looked after,’ the commissar replied, knowing he’d shoot the animals the moment the family was gone. When the lieutenant asked something, Dr Schultz nodded firmly, patting his pockets.

‘What did you just ask?’

‘If he had all his working notes. Those are to go with him on the plane. My father was quite firm about that.’

‘Your father?’

The boy named a high-ranking member of the NKVD, a man whose position gave him direct access to Beria, possibly to Stalin himself.

‘Who else knows of this?’

‘That my father’s Beria’s right-hand man?’

The commissar winced.

‘Kyukov asked. Then Dennisov. I thought they were being funny. I thought you knew. People always know.’

‘Well,’ the commissar said, ‘we didn’t. You can travel on the same plane. Dr Schultz will need someone to babysit him. I’m sure you’ll do fine.’

An hour later, the general who had given the commissar the job of retrieving Dr Schultz called. Having praised Colonel Milov’s success, and saying that he’d never doubted for a minute the colonel’s competence, loyalty or ability, he added that he’d be happier if Lieutenant Golubtsov remained in place. His father would also regard it favourably. The boy spent too much time wrapped up in his books. It wouldn’t hurt him to get a little experience of the real world…

What he meant, the commissar realized, was that it wouldn’t hurt for the boy’s father to be able to say his son had been in Berlin. After the battles were done, of course. But why mention that? The boy could go back to his university with a handful of medals and a couple of photographs of himself in uniform.

Glittering careers had been built on less.

‘Comrade General…’

‘You do know who his father is, don’t you?’

‘I do now,’ the commissar said.

There was silence on the line.

‘I mean,’ said the commissar, ‘I can think of nothing better than the chance to fly home, to be safe with my family.’

‘Your wife is dead. Your father is dead. I was under the impression that your lover was with you…’

‘Russia is my family. I was speaking figuratively.’

‘Of course you were.’

The line went dead.

The next time the commissar saw Golubtsov he was with Dennisov and Kyukov and they were heading out in the lend-lease Jeep. The lieutenant had a borrowed helmet pulled low over his face, a hunting rifle jutting from between his knees and a bottle of champagne in his hand.

Kyukov was grinning.

‘Sir… Sir…’

The commissar came awake without even realizing he’d pulled the Tokarev from under his pillow until Beziki twisted away and threw up his hands as if to ward off a bullet. Dropping out the magazine, the commissar worked the slide to eject the round he’d jacked into the chamber on instinct.

‘We’re under attack?’

‘No, sir.’

‘The war’s ended?’

The boy shook his head.

‘Stalin himself is on the phone?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Then why the fuck are you waking me at whatever time of night this is and who the fuck said you could enter my room without knocking?’

‘Sir. I think you’d better come.’

‘What is it?’

‘You’d better see for yourself.’

At the front door, the commissar found Dr Schultz, his wife and son being prevented from leaving by Maya and a sergeant he only vaguely recognized.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to see you,’ Maya said. ‘Unfortunately for me.’

Telling the sergeant to keep the family inside, she led the commissar down the steps. For all its brutalist concrete and glass, Dr Schultz’s house looked so peaceful at night in its tended gardens the commissar wondered if Allied pilots had been told not to bomb it. The Red Army had certainly had.

‘Golubtsov’s missing,’ she said. ‘Kyukov and Dennisov have taken the jeep. They’ve gone to find him. They sent Beziki to Golubtsov’s room to see why he’d gone to bed early and Beziki found… He found a blood-covered dagger. One of those swastika ones. You’re not going to like this.’

She led the commissar between the cherry trees towards a stable block beyond them. Beziki stood by the stable door, looking green in the light of the hurricane lamp he held in his shaking hands. There was vomit at his feet.

‘Who’s in there?’

‘No one, sir.’

‘No one?’

‘Except…’ Turning aside, the boy spewed what was left of his supper on to the cobbles of the stable yard. He was still apologizing when the commissar said: ‘Give that to me.’

Taking Beziki’s lamp, he pushed open the door.

Inside was hotter than hell. Bales of straw piled against the walls generated their own heat. It took him a moment to notice anything wrong. For a split second after that, his mind simply refused to accept what he was seeing.

Hanging by her heels from a rafter, Dr Schultz’s younger child was a flayed mockery of everything that had once been human. It was only when he got closer that he realized she was still alive. Raw flesh glistened with lymph from where her body had fought to protect itself.

Her eyes watched him get closer, her shoulders hunching at the sight of his uniform.

Black blood at her mouth made him realize her tongue had been cut out. Stepping back, he lifted the lamp to force himself to look at her and managed only a moment. Then he flicked open his lock knife, put his hand to her back, wincing as she arched away with a silent scream. As his blade slid between her ribs, she stiffened and then her body went slack.