The Moon Tunnel

25

Back in the Capri Dryden let his head rock back on the rest and as he closed his eyes he felt the grit under the lids, scratching. He had evaded sleep for more than thirty-six hours – but for his snatched few minutes in the Capri – and the adrenaline-fired lightheadedness was suddenly transmuted into exhaustion. It flooded through him, each muscle settling into individual sleep ahead of his brain, which continued to whirr under the effects of caffeine. He felt sick, but managed to say ‘The Tower’ before slipping off, descending immediately into a dream overseen by Valgimigli’s cloven head, the lips a livid deathly blue.

He awoke disorientated; clearly, hours had passed and the cab’s interior was illuminated by stark moonlight. Beside him Humph slept, an unconscious guardian angel, an oily fish-and-chip paper held in a ball in one of his tiny fists.

Dryden checked his watch: 11.48pm. The Victorian façade of The Tower showed no other light than a dozen images of the floating moon. He slipped past reception and, listening at the foot of the echoing stone stairwell, heard only a single distant cry of pain from the rest of the hospital.

Laura’s room was in darkness, the printer silent, the computer screen of the COMPASS dead. Dryden sat, lit one of the cigarettes from the bedside table and poured some wine, uncorking the opened bottle. Laura slept, her breathing so faint he leant forward to catch its reassuring rhythm. As he did so he touched the computer keyboard and the screen lit up, awakened from hibernation mode. A document stood open and Dryden recognized the typography as that from the online edition of Who’s Who.

MANN, Siegfreid Viktor, CBE, FRHS. Historian and writer. Reader in History at the University of Cambridge 1985–90, b 10 April 1920; s of late Prof Werner Mann and Elka Mann (nee Hauptmann) m Ruth Jane Holland 1948 d 1965; two s one d. Educ. Heidelberg Uni (BA) 1938–41. Oberstleutnant, German Wehrmacht 1941–5. St Edmund’s Coll, Cambridge. (MA 1949–52, Hon Fellow 1985–) Fellow and Tutor, New Hall (1953–65). Visiting Reader in Military Studies: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1965–83). Reader in German international relations, University of Parma (1983–5). Publications: Reconciliation and Contemporary Politics: the occupation of Greece and the development of post-war democracy 1943–1954, 1955; The German Army: a definitive history, 1966; Blitzkrieg: the utilisation of terror in war, 1971; Unholy Alliance: the politics of the Axis Powers: 1940–1945, 1980; The Soldier’s Story: a memoir, 1981; The Storm Passed: recovery and reconstruction in occupied Europe: 1945–1958, 1988; Never Again: contemporary European attitudes to war, a review of the literature, 1994. Recreations: Greek wine, gardening: volunteer assistant curator Cambridgeshire Museum Service. Clubs: The Cambridge Society, The Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA), British Association of German ex-PoWs. Address: Vintry House, West Fen Road, Ely, Cambridgeshire. e-mail siegfriedv.mann@cam.ac.uk

Dryden closed his eyes and wished for sleep, but felt only the claustrophobia of the moon tunnel. He thought of Serafino Amatista, dying in his grave, and the German officer who had identified him as a deserter. Could that officer really have been Siegfried Mann? The short Who’s Who entry left little doubt he had been a prisoner. Had he spent the last years of the war inside the wire at California? Was the aged historian the agent of Serafino’s nemesis?

Dryden swung the COMPASS screen round, pulled up the bedside chair, and using Google typed in ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘Agios Gallini’, the village Roman Casartelli had named as the scene of Serafino’s desertion.

No matches. He deleted the village name and trawled an official site on the Nuremberg Trials, which had been held in occupied Germany between 1945 and 1949, and at which the leading Nazi war criminals had been arraigned. There was no mention of Agios Gallini but there was a brief reference to a 1942 agreement between the Allied Powers to allow, at the end of hostilities, local courts to pursue allegations of war crimes committed in occupied countries. Two such courts were listed in Greece in 1946, in Athens and Salonika. Dryden found a weblink to an online account of the proceedings for both courts on a site run by the Greek government: there were four language versions – Greek, English, German and Italian. Following the English route he found the first reference to Agios Gallini – Case 42 of the sixty-eight heard at Salonika.

He called up the full indictment and let the cursor blink on the name of the principal accused: Oberstleutnant Siegfried Viktor Mann.

The complete transcript was eighteen pages long and he decided not to print it out in case the clatter woke Laura. Instead he settled himself by the bedside, pouring a fresh glass of wine.

Mann was not the only accused. He was indicted alongside four men in his command who had, under their own admission, formed a firing squad in a quarry outside the village of Agios Gallini on the afternoon of 4 August 1943. Mann, however, as the commanding officer, was the only accused who faced the death penalty if convicted. The charge was straightforward: that they had summarily executed Constantine Karamanlis, a 73-year-old peasant farmer in the village, in reprisal for the alleged murder of Serafino Ricci, an Italian conscript and the guard provided by the civilian occupying administration. While the court noted that a proclamation issued by the Italian authorities specifically required reprisals in such cases, the presiding judge referred to an Allied declaration of 1943 which made it clear that such acts were barbarous, and would constitute a war crime whatever local legislation had been put in place. Mann and his comrades faced a further charge: that on the afternoon of the same day, while the rest of the villagers were held in the church by other members of Mann’s company, he or his soldiers were responsible for the death of Katina Papas, Constantine Karamanlis’s five-year-old granddaughter. She was last seen entering her grandfather’s house shortly before his arrest.

Mann and his co-accused did not appear at the preliminary hearing. A statement was entered into the court records by his lawyer in which Mann stated that a search of the village had revealed a cache of three rifles and a box of ammunition hidden in the old man’s house. Karamanlis had, therefore, been shot as a partisan, not in reprisal for the death of the village guard. Mann’s lawyer, who had secured statements from two Greek eyewitnesses to the ransacking of the village, stated that the discovery of the arms and ammunition was not disputed. Further, there was no evidence, except the circumstantial, to link Mann and his men to the disappearance of the child. The submissions were reluctantly accepted by the court, and the indictment put aside. The fate of Katina Papas remained unknown, the court ruled, adding a direct appeal for any information which could help identify the whereabouts of the child’s body.

Dryden briefly reviewed the other cases before the court. More than forty preliminary hearings led to full trials, before a bench of three judges, in Salonika in 1947. Of these twenty-nine resulted in convictions and eight German officers were hanged at Piraeus in November of that year. Six others were given prison sentences, served out in their native Germany. Dryden followed another link to a newspaper cutting on the executions. There was a grainy black and white picture: the eight strung up from a single gibbet in a prison yard.

Outside Laura’s room the moon hung, perfectly framed in the clear cool glass of the window. Dryden considered the life and times of Siegfried Mann. A well-educated young man, set for an academic career, pressed into Hitler’s army. Posted to Greece, where the simple polarities of war are blurred by the Italian civil government, and the simmering hatred of Right and Left, which would later explode into civil war. Then came Agios Gallini, and the events of 4 August 1943.

‘Did Mann kill Serafino?’ Dryden asked his sleeping wife. Perhaps Azeglio Valgimigli had suspected Dr Mann of the killing. The Italian academic appeared to have known him well – and it didn’t look, from the Who’s Who account, that the German had tried to hide his background and history. Professor Valgimigli knew the story of Serafino Amatista, the missing member of the legendary ‘gardeners’ of California. When the body was found in the moon tunnel he may have suspected the identity of the victim, and that of his killer. Had he confronted his former tutor with the crime? It was a motive Dryden was sure the police had considered.

The moon had moved to the edge of the window, and now shone through the monkey puzzle tree at the centre of the hospital lawns.

‘But why the execution?’ he asked himself. He stood, bringing the PC screen into Laura’s sightline again. Dryden stroked a single auburn hair back from her eyes, the tiny movement prompting her eyelashes to flicker, and then open.

They held each other’s gaze for a moment before the effort became too much and the brown irises swam slightly, losing their focus.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have woken you. Hair?’

He took up the brush and ran it lightly over her scalp.

‘Well done – on the Mann biog, I found it on the screen. I did some more digging as well. Not only was he almost certainly a prisoner at California, he was the German officer involved in the incident at Agios Gallini – the village where Serafino deserted. My guess is he identified Serafino. Perhaps he killed him too.’

He took up the mouse to close down the computer screen for the night. Various folders dotted the sky-blue surface of the desktop. He recognized correspondence with family, some friends in London, and work that Laura had been doing towards writing a play – using her gifts as an actress in one of the few ways left to her. But in the bottom right-hand corner was a single document marked Untitled (WP). It was unlike her not to tidy up her work. Dryden moved the cursor quickly to the spot and double-clicked.

An Enter Password box appeared. Dryden stared nonplussed at the blinking cursor, aware it was demanding a key he didn’t possess.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, immediately aware that his tone was wrong, both peremptory and patronizing. He’d had no right to try to open the file without asking. But the question rankled, so he lifted the suction tube from its antiseptic dish and placed it lightly between her lips. He waited for the familiar clatter of the PC and printer but nothing came, so he poured himself some more wine, brushing his wife’s lifeless hair. Troubled that they could not share a secret he asked again, ‘What’s in this document, Laura?’

The machine jumped, and he watched appalled as the individual letters were spelt out: PRIVATE.

She deserved privacy, now that all her life was open except what was in her head. But he bridled at this exclusion, and wondered what possible secret she would want to keep from him.

He stood, unable to think how he could repair the damage she had done in that single word.

‘I must sleep,’ he said. ‘There’s a press conference at eight tomorrow morning – on Valgimigli. Forgive me – I’ve been – I’m sorry.’ He felt more anger that he should seek to apologize. He lowered her head on to the pillow, turned off the lights and said, ‘Goodnight’ kissing her by moonlight, but unable to see her eyes in the shadows of the room.