The Conduct of Major Maxim

Chapter 20

Until they had got out of the car to phone, Maxim had never seen Sims standing up. He turned out to be a couple of inches shorter than Maxim himself, but slightly heavier in build, the figure of a boxer rather than a sprinter – except for those tiny hands.

Now it seemed as if his arms tapered all the way down to his fingertips where they lay lightly on the wheel of the Audi. The cuffs of his cream silk shirt were still linked, the discreet but expensive tie still knotted at his neck; his only concession to the sun was that his light blue blazer was carefully laid out along the back seat. Maxim wondered if he dressed that way only because he worked for The Firm, and decided probably not. As a nation, the Germans were far more formal dressers than the British: the only people around the centre of Osnabrücknot wearing ties were obviously foreigners by the rest of their dress. Maxim had a tie with him, but at the moment it was in his pocket.

"Will you be able to get those photographs blown up?" he asked casually. Now that he was going to be with Sims for most of the day, knowing what was on the photographs was an uncomfortable burden.

"I will arrange it in Paderborn." It was just about a hundred kilometres to Bad Schwarzendorn, with Paderborn – another town with a British garrison – shortly before it.

"What are we going to do at Bad Schwarzendorn?"

"You will look. Go to the place, Dornhausen. On the map it is a very small place. Somebody will remember. "

"Do the Germans – I mean in the West – know Gustav Eismark was Rainer Schickert?"

"No. It is what Guy told you: a politician in the GDR has no public past. The official history is that he was in the Communistresistance. That is all, the whole war, for him. And of course everybody was in the Communist resistance – now."

"Wouldn't somebody in West Germany recognise him?"

"He was Rainer Schickert for only a year and a few months – and mostly in hiding. How many saw him then? And then he was, I think, twenty-three. By the time he is becoming a politician, his picture in the paper, he is fifty. It is a long time, a lot of change. "

"How didyou know?"

Sims took a long time to think about answering that. He was driving well, perhaps too well, as if there was one perfect speed for every individual metre of road and he had to slow down or speed up to reach it. It wasn't jerky, just a little unsettling, and Maxim might not have been asking so many questions if he'd been able to sit back and watch the countryside flow past.

At last Sims said: "It was Mrs Howard who came to know that. It was the first thing we had… Do you know the island of Hiddensee, near to Rügen? Ah – of course you must know Rügen."

And 'of course' Maxim did, because it was the island – little more than a peninsula really – in the Baltic where the East German version of the Special Air Service did its training. He had studied the snatched photos of their Jeeps and Land-Rovers, their NATO uniforms, that proved their wartime mission was just the same as the SAS's. It could have been Sims's unit who supplied those photos.

"I don't know Hiddensee. "

"It is a place for Freikultur, not what you call nudism but… a liberation of the body, a going back to natural things… It was very strong with the old Weimar Republic. People go there to holiday, to lose all their problems, and also their ranks. The Democratic Republic is very bureaucratic, very much full of class distinctions. But at Hiddensee, you become anybody… or nobody. Somebody will sit down beside you on the sandhills and just talk. They will tell you anything, things they would never say to anybody anywhere else. Things they would get arrested for. "

'Sounds a good place to plant a few informers."

"It is not easy to be diguised without clothes, " Sims said dryly. "The Republic needs that place, places like that. It is a safety valve, you might say a brothel of the mind. But yes – there are some informers, too. There was one who was sitting beside Gustav Eismark, many years ago, just when he was about to be married the second time. He talked about getting married – of course he did not know the man recognised him, although it is not far from Rostock, where he lived then. Eismark said he felt guilty because his first marriage had never ended, he said it could never end -das wird nie vorüber sein-and it would always be a secret he must keep from his new wife.

"So of course the informer – he worked for himself, not the state – tried to find some proof of this. But all he could discover was that Gustav's roadname had-been Schickert, and the marriage certificate at Sangerhausen."

"It wasn't the marriage that was in question."

"No, but all the other proof was in West Germany so he could not do anything more. Then one time when he was doing some other business with the woman we called Mrs Howard, he sold her the story for a few marks. She did nothing much about it – Eismark was still just somebody in shipping, not a politician – and it was only when he came onto the Secretariat that she asked for money to do some more work about it."

"It doesn't seem much, just a few remarks made at a Freikulturcamptwenty years ago. "

Sims glanced a smile at him. "In our work we live on whispers. In your work perhaps you control a thousand tanks. In one way – please understand me – that is easy: they arethere. They can do many things, but they cannot destroy a man's reputation. One whisper may do that. Our work is to find that whisper, to control it."

Maxim had been long enough in Whitehall to know what Sims was talking about.

They cruised in silence for a while, then Sims asked abruptly: "Have you got a camera?"

"No."

"You should buy one at Paderborn, there may be something to photograph. And hire a car also; I must take the photographs for printing. We will meet late in the afternoon. " So in the end it would be Maxim's name on the pieces of paper, not whatever Sims was calling himself on this trip. And it must be a nice life to be able to decide /need a camera and buy a camera, just like that. He wished… Oh, come off it, Harry, he told himself. You've said 'Fire!' and seen the price of a dozen cameras blow away in a few seconds' worth of flash and bang, with nothing left at the end to stick in the family album. Every profession has its own little extravagances.

The village of Dornhausen lay about eight kilometres out of Bad Schwarzendorn itself, and the final road to it was a narrow concrete track that even in June was still covered in flaking mud and cow dung. It ran straight up a wide shallow valley, with tilled fields on both sides, to a huddle of buildings. Beyond, a slightly steeper slope of pasture rose to a low skyline with a toupee of trees. Maxim drove it slowly, enjoying the first real countryside he had been in since the hot weather began.

When he reached it, the village was little more than six huge farm buildings in the classic German style: each wall a grid of brown-painted timbers, filled in with rough-plastered brickwork. And each building could be a farm in itself, housing animals and machinery on the ground floor, humans above that, wine and vegetables in the cellar and hay in the loft under the steep-pitched tile roof. You could never believe just how big such places were until you got up close. Beside them, the modern tractor sheds and dairies looked ready to collapse in the first breeze.

And the villagers would have the same massive unity as their houses. Maxim had run into that before, on exercises, when he wanted to dig his troops in among the growing vegetables, and probably Hitler's soldiers had been no more welcome. A small farming community would be a good place to hide out a war.

The tap-room of the tiny inn was down a deep step and he nearly sprawled on the tiled floor, coming abruptly into the cool darkness. When he had got his balance back, a woman in adowdy black dress was looking at him with tired amusement. There was nobody else in the room.

"Are you open?" he asked.

"We are never closed. Did you want to eat?"

"No, thank you. Just a Pils. "

It came in a stone mug, deliciously cold and wiping out in one mouthful the heat of the morning and the traces of last night's headache (he wondered briefly how the Engineer regiment was getting on in its battle positions; by now they should be dug in and pausing for sips of lukewarm water or barely warmer tea. Even war games are hell).

He finished the beer and asked for another. The woman was probably in her middle forties, with a body that looked strong rather than fat under the shapeless clothes, ¿ind a long lined face that had already done all the ageing it was likely to.

"Were you here in the war?" Maxim asked; he'd never feel comfortable trying to start conversations like this.

"Yes."

"Can you help me? It's about somebody who was killed here. I think there was a bomb…"

"Yes. The Bomber. There's a memorial, up by the church. "

"The church?" He hadn't seen anything that could be a church.

"The old one. Up the road. " Her expression hadn't changed by a fraction throughout.

A little perplexed, he left the second mug of Pils on the table.

Not noticing the church hadn't been quite as crass as he'd feared, because whatever else the bomb had done, it had blown the church apart. Hardly any part of it stood more than waist high now, much was covered in grass or blackthorn bushes, and it could never have been more than a chapel anyway. The road ended just there, in a long concrete hard-stand where a cart and some rusting old farm machinery were parked. Beyond, the pastureland sloped up to the skyline.

Beside the ruin, the grass had been scythed to rough ankle-length around a handful of old gravestones and an incongruously clean slab of veined grey marble that lay glinting in 178 the sun. It was carved with very competent lettering, but all it said was 15 April 1945 and a list of names. There were seventeen in all, three recurring -Scholz, Leistritzand Brenner; probably the main families in the village. The Schickerts' address had been the Leistritz farmhouse.Brigitte Schickert'sname was there, too.

Maxim wrote down the names, then took out the new camera and fiddled with it; presumably the gravestone was evidence of a sort.

"Are you looking for something?" The old man must have moved very softly to get within twenty yards of him unheard, although the quiet afternoon was in fact a steady rumble and distant clatter of farm machinery.

"Er… I was interested in a name. "

"One of those?" The old man jabbed his stick towards the marble. He had a face like a leather potato, all bumps and creases, and wore a thick clothjacket over-shirt buttoned to the neck, all grey and brown and far too hot for the day. But he was well past seventy, when the blood runs thin even in June.

"Brigitte Schickert. "

"Oh, her. Did he send you?"

He? Whichhe? Of course, the presumably-still-alive Rainer Schickert. Now we find out if they really don't know what became of him. "No, not her husband. Just a London lawyer wanting to know where she's buried. They don't tell you what it's all about, but they pay you for it. " He took a second picture and pocketed the camera. "I have an unfinished beer at the Wirtshaus. Would you like to join me?"

The solid old barrel of a body moved stiffly but not very carefully, like a heavy vehicle in low gear. Seeing the village again, from a new angle, Maxim could see other scars of the blast and its debris. The great linden tree, the traditional place for a village parliament, was lopsided even now from missing branches, and the nearest farmhouse was patched with un-matching brickwork and some of the window frames were too square to be old. But the signs of prosperity far outweighed those of damage: the new BMWs and Mercedes, freshly painted woodwork and the constant noise of machinery from the outhouses.

"A nice village, " Maxim commented. "How many farms is it?"

"It used to be three, now it's two. The Leistritz family packed up and sold out, just after the war. Two of the boys were killed in Russia, then their father was killed by The Bomber. The last boy couldn't keep it going."

"You lost more in the war than we did," Maxim said, and instantly felt he'd pitched it too strong.

But the old man nodded emphatically. "Yes, we did that. You're right. War is a terrible thing."

"What happened about the Leistritz farm?"

"That's it." The stick waggled at a great building nesting among its outhouses at the bottom of the village. "Karl Scholz bought most of the land and my father bought the house and the rest and gave it to me to run. It was a terrible business. "

Maxim said nothing more until they were back at the inn.

The old man's name was Brenner and he chosea Dunkeland a Korn – a very dark beer plus a chaser of the local heart-stopper that tasted somewhere between very young whisky and vodka. Purely out of tact, Maxim braced his brain cells for a kamikaze mission and opted to drink in parallel.

For a quarter of an hour, Brenner talked about the weather, the Common Market and taxes. When he had finished the first beer, Maxim asked: "Did you know the Schickerts well?"

"Not well, no. They only came in the last winter of the war, just a few months. Old Leistritz took them in – he got paid, naturally. Everybody was taking in women and children from the cities, away from the bombing, or storing their furniture for them. My father said he'd never known a season before when chairs and commodes were the best crops." He chuckled, and finished his Korn as well. "After 1941 the village was full of strangers. They even sent us some French and Belgians, people like that, to work the land. Our own lads were getting killed in Russia, so they sent us Belgians to play with their widows. War isn't just terrible, it's ridiculous."

"But you did know them?" Maxim persisted.

Brenner looked at him. "Him, yes, a bit. He had a glass eye. Something of a scholar, and Leistritzsaid he'd done farm work before. He liked him."

"And her?"

"Ach."Brenner banged his right hand on the head of his stick as if to knock some feeling back into it. "I hardly saw her. It was winter, she stayed indoors with the baby. "

"Of course. Would you like another drink?"

While the woman was bringing more beer and the bottle of Korn, three other men came in. One wore a city suit but was carrying the jacket; the other two were in farm clothes. Brenner called the one in the suit over and introduced him as Rolf Scholz.

"This young Englishman wants to know something about Frau Schicken- do you remember her? What was her first name?"

"Brigitte,"Scholz said.

"That's right."

Maxim asked what Scholz would drink. He wa^ a hulk of a man in his middle fifties, inches taller than Maxim and instinctively stooping under the low beams of the tap-room. He moved with a delicacy that emphasised his power, and he had a slow smile and a gentle handshake.

They drank and Scholz asked bluntly: "What did you want to know about her?"

"Nothing much… just that she was killed by the bomb."

"The Bomber." It was said just the way the woman and Brenner had said it,Das Kampßugzeug,like The Event, and Scholz saw Maxim's puzzlement. "It wasn'tjust a bomb, but a whole bomber. An American, a B-26. I don't know what was wrong with it, but it still had all its bombs on board when it came down there, behind the church."

Maxim had wondered about that: the blast effect had seemed pretty widespread for just a bomb. Now they were talking about perhaps four tons of bombs toppling out of the sky one morning when Dornhausen thought the war had passed it by. And not even an air raid warning to send them into the cellars.

Maxim thought of asking if the bomber's crew had bailed out, but decided it might be tactless.

"She didn't actually get killed by The Bomber," Scholz went on. "She died later. Oh, there would be seven or eight who died later, in hospital."

Maxim sat for a while, absorbing that thought. "She didn't die here then?"

"That's what he said." Brenner sounded testy.

"You didn't help take her to hospital, or anything?"

Scholz took out a meerschaum pipe that was burned to a dark orange and blew through it. "The Americans did that. They were quick with it, too. Their medical service was probably the best thing about their Army."

Maxim glanced at him sharply and Scholz smiled a slow smile back. "I was in the Army then. Field engineers. But I picked up glandular fever and liver trouble in Italy that winter and I was still at home on sick leave when the whole thing finished. So… I just privately discharged myself and let the Americans think I'd been here all along. " Maxim instinctively smiled at him, then despised himself for the silly band-of-brother-soldiers stuff. Anyway, they didn't know he was a soldier.

"Do you know how badly she was hurt?", Brenner burst out: "No, we don't! D'you think when The Bomber came down it just killed twenty people and left the rest of us drinking Korn and singing fal-lal-lal? It blew the whole village upside down. They took another twenty people to hospital and I had the dairy roof down on my back and it took them two hours to dig me out. I was in bed for a week with concussion and the doctor said at first he thought I'd got a broken pelvis. And my leg's never been properly better since. No, I don't know how badly she was hurt. Just badly enough to die, I imagine."

Scholz listened gravely, taking pinches of tobacco and pressing each gently into the pipe with his thumb, then sucking noisily to make sure it wasn't too tight. "I think I remember seeing her. She got it in the back of the neck. With neck wounds you can't tell, it could be nothing or everything. Her husband, Rainer, he wasn't hit but he went in with them. He spoke the best English. Then he came back the next day – I think it was the next day – and told us who'd died. Then hecame again a couple of days after and took the baby. "

"He just took it away?" Maxim was surprised. "It was only five months, wasn't it?"

Scholz lit his pipe and puffed quickly. "What else should he do? We couldn't look after it forever. He said he was going off to find his sister. It wasn't easy, travelling, in those days, but it wasn't as if he belonged here anyway."

"Who arranged things like the death certificates?"

Brenner said: "How should we remember who arranged them? I was in bed the whole week. You may say the Americans were wonderful with their ambulances but they didn't pay for the dairy and half the animals were dead already or had to be slaughtered. It was an American bomber. But the English would have been worse."

"It was Rainerwho did that," Scholz said unperturbed, as if Brenner had never spoken. "I remember him going about the village, collecting the details, the birth certificates and things. He was good with forms, dealing with the bureaucrats. "

"He was a scholar," Brenner said, banging his hand on the stick again.

"And you never saw him after that?"

"Why should we?" Brenner wanted to know. "He wasn't one of the village."

Scholz was wearing that wise, reflective look that pipe-smokers get or act on the few occasions their pipes are working well. "There was somebody else asking about him, or her. A few weeks ago. "

"I didn't meet them. " Brenner sounded offended.

"Neither did 1.1 forget who told me; probably somebody in town. Would you know who it was?"

Maxim tried for an expression of indifference – tried desperately. Of course Mrs Howard must have been asking around. You know, the one whose driving-licence picture was in the paper, she'd been shot, wasn't she asking about the Schickerts? And now there's this Englishman asking about them: will you ring the police or shall I?

He should have thought of that risk; he wondered if Simshad thought of it.

"I haven't heard of anybody," he said casually, "but if thelawyers asked me they might have asked somebody else before… You said a few weeks ago?"

"About a month, I think it was."

"I've got to get back to town," Maxim said, "but can I get you another drink?"

Brenner was willing; Scholz had to go into town himself. Maxim waited nervously while the woman brought one more Dunkeland Korn. Trying to change the subject, he asked: "And nobody did anything about the church? I mean rebuild it."

"It's still church land," Scholz said. "Nobody's stopping them building it up. But the pastor only came for one service every two weeks even then, in the war."

"It wasn't much good as a sanctuary, either," Brenner said with an odd cackle.

"It was a Sunday," Scholz explained. "April 15. The Bomber came down in the middle of morning service."

Outside, the sun lashed him across the forehead with a warning of another headache to come, and he wished he hadn't had a drink with lunch at Paderborn. No wonder plainclothes coppers ended up able to conduct surveillances from behind the cover of their own stomachs.

The easiest way to turn the car was to drive on up to the hardstand by the church, and as he swung about he realised it was in fact the old foundations of small cottages, completely gone with The Bomber. He, paused, working out that a shallow dent in the pasture was the remnant of a huge crater, and then got out to take another look at the marble. Seventeen names. Seven or eight had died in hospital, yes, and some of those would have lingered for a day or two; fair enough or evenblondgenug, as the Army usually put it. But the death certificates had shown thirteen people dying in Dornhausen itself. Thirteen plus seven or eight…

The woman came out of the inn and saw him, hesitated, then walked up. He waited.

"Did they tell you what you wanted to know?" she asked.

"I think so. Did you know Frau Schickert?"

"Yes. I was young at the time, a little girl. Sometimes I'd goin and she'd let me give the baby his bottle." A smile rippled across her wrinkled face and was gone. "A hussy from the city who peroxided her hair to look like a good Aryan."

"Did she?"

"I suppose so. It was something my mother said. To me, she just seemed kind. But sad. "

"What about?"

"Nobody was happy, that winter. The Americans were coming. I thought that must be a good thing. I didn't understand."

"Were you here when The Bomber came down?"

"Down in the cellar, getting some vegetables for lunch. The whole earth wentschunk and all the dust and bits fell out of the ceiling. I thought I was going to be buried. "

"Did you see her?-after she was hurt?"

She folded her arms and frowned briefly at the memory. "There was blood all over her shoulders. He -Herr Schick-ert – was holding a towel to her neck. Why do you want to know?"

"Some lawyer wanted to know where she was buried. I don't know why. But now I've got a photograph…"

She gave a little snort of laughter. "She isn't buried here. "

Maxim looked from her to the marble and back. "Not? -not there?"

"Not all the ones named are buried here, and some are here who aren't named. It's just a memorial, really."

"Some are buried here who aren't named?"

"Three Belgians, labourers. They were in the cottages." She nodded at the hardstand. "By the time they put this up, nobody could remember their names, and they didn't belong here, of course."

Death, the great leveller. Except in Dornhausen. But it explained the numbers that didn't add up – though not why Brigitte Schickertwas shown on her-certificate as having diedm Dornhausen when everybody seemed to know she had been taken to hospital.

"Do you know where sheis buried?"

"No. It isn't in the Evangelical cemetery, with the others who died in hospital. None of them came back, you see: the Americans couldn't spare the trucks and the farms weren't allowed to use their petrol for anything but getting food to market. Later, months later when I was taken into town for the first time since The Bomber, I wanted to put some flowers on her grave. I couldn't find it. Nobody seemed to know. They just said she didn't belong here really. "

For strangers, death in Dornhausen seemed to be oblivion of a peculiarly total sort.