Simon Pasternak

DEATH
ZONES

Translated from Danish by
Martin Aitken

CONTENTS

About the Author

Simon Pasternak is a Danish author, screenwriter and publisher living in Copenhagen. He is the co-author of a bestselling crime series with Christian Dorph, and has co-written two feature films including the historical thriller, The Idealist. Death Zones is his first solo novel, for which he drew inspiration from his own family history and Jewish roots in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish, including works by Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen and Pia Juul, and his translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.

Letters

Lida, 4 July 1943

Letter 7

Dear Eline

Thank you for the honey. I wonder if it might be drawn from our secret place on the heath, the abandoned beehives in the hollow, down near the banks of the Alster, the ones we found on our last night together? I like to think so. ‘And yet, how much he says who utters “night”, for from this word deep grief and meaning pour, like heavy honey from the honeycomb.’

To think it is eleven months now since we bade each other farewell at the station and Manfred and I departed for the unknown … Belorussia …

The jar is here on my desk, amid case files and topographic maps. It shall be our little secret, untouched by this raging war. Now and then I pick it up and unscrew the lid, allowing the fragrance of fragrant of summer the smell now and then I must breathe in its scent of balmy, luxurious summer I must take in its scent of balmy, luxurious summer. I pretend that it is your flaxen hair … fragrant …

I put the fountain pen down on the desk and read the last lines again. The jar of honey is next to the typewriter, on top of the case files concerning the killing of the Jew, Feigl. My work, my predicament: the dogfight between SS officers Heinz Breker and Sigmund Kindler.

I unscrew the lid of the jar, smell the solidified wax, the creamy white crust. It smells of nothing. I dip a finger, sweeping it round in an arc, then draw it out to lick. It tastes of honey, not of summer. Certainly not of Eline’s hair.

I toss the letter into the wastepaper basket, draw the typewriter towards me once more and turn the paper bearing my official letterhead into the carriage:

My cigarette lies smouldering in the ashtray.

After a long moment of indecision, I continue:

I remove the paper from the typewriter and furnish it with my stamp, Heinrich Hoffmann, Oberleutnant d. Polizei. I place the report in the case file, only to be struck by doubt. I have to telephone Manfred.

Eline’s brother. He is SS, and knows the hierarchy better than I.

No answer.

Today is his big day. He will be strutting about, barking at his minions, peering at their buttons and boots, inspecting weapons, making sure the streets are swept clean. The Obergruppenführer is coming. Dr Hubert Steiner, Manfred’s mentor, the man who taught him his trade.

I uncap my pen and start again, in an elaborate hand:

Damn it! I drum my fingers on the desk, remove my spectacles and draw my hands across my face, jump to my feet and go to the window. Falkowska Street is festooned with bunting, lined with flags at this end, where the road veers off towards Minsk. Manfred has had a grandstand erected opposite, in front of the yellow and white railway station from the Tsarist days, columns and capitals in operetta style. Three men drag cables, rigging up the loudspeaker system, while the orchestra sits perspiring in their chairs, the brass of their instruments gleaming in their laps. Perhaps Manfred hopes the Obergruppenführer’s wife, the actress, will do a turn. A truck appears and the guard of honour spill out, in black parade uniforms with red and white emblems. I open the window. The heat, the dust and the noise smother me in an instant. But Manfred is nowhere to be seen.

I call for my adjutant. Wäspli appears immediately, his stout figure constrained by tight uniform. I wonder if his letters to his fiancée are as poorly lyrical as my own. Or perhaps he is already married? I know nothing about him. He flutters his fat, bustling hands.

‘Has Hauptsturmführer Breker’s transfer come through yet?’ I ask.

‘I think so.’

‘Think?’

‘My friend said—’

‘Find out,’ I say.

We stand for a moment, in spite of the matter’s conclusion. I make a vague gesture and he withdraws. I return to my desk, open the bottom drawer and produce the Hungarian cognac and a small glass.

I telephone Manfred again.

I picture it ringing in his empty office in the hospital on the road to Vilnius.

Still no answer.

I curse.

_ _ _

Wäspli returns.

‘Yes?’ I demand.

‘He said the papers are being processed …’

‘But did he know?’

He smiles nervously.

No.

When he closes the door behind him I remove the portrait of the Führer from the wall behind the desk and turn the combination, open the safe, take the report on the killing of Feigl from the folder, repeat the case number to myself, then place the report back, underneath Eline’s letters. I take out the bundle and smell the ribbon. It smells of musty papers.

I close the safe and rehang the portrait.

I type the case number, the main particulars, and assign the new report the same number as the one in the box behind me: LZ 512–A.

I leave out Breker.

I leave out the witness, Finckelstein.

I conclude:

My right hand trembles as I stub out my cigarette and snatch the paper from the carriage.

I cross over to the window. The sky is full of dust, a haze.

I curse.

Again.

_ _ _

This is Belorussia, the Lida ghetto, case number LZ 512–A, – GHETTO LIDA/A. Feigl:

SS-Hauptsturmführer Sigmund Kindler has charge of the ghetto workshops. He claims his share, though is by no means greedy: six per cent of the intake, before the entries are made in the books. He protects a Jew who makes little birds from wood shavings: Feigl. Kindler sends them to his children in Kiel as Christmas decorations. They are fine and delicate, miracles of life. Feigl looks like a bird himself. There is some measure of contact between them. He brings gifts for Feigl’s wife, small items that can be turned into capital. Feigl is accorded privileges. They make him vulnerable. He bears the mark of Kindler. SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Breker works outside the ghetto. He is a friend of Manfred’s. They are boisterous, fond of hunting the hare – by which they mean partisans – and throw raucous parties, with excessive amounts of champagne. Kindler gets drunk and calls Breker’s wife a Bavarian whore. Breker threatens to shoot him like a dog, a suitable end for a Holsteiner such as him. He draws his P38, bellowing and frothing from his fat mouth, exposing the gap between his front teeth. Others intervene. The two of them square off like a pair of bulls, same size, same rage, same rank: equals. Breker puts a bullet through Feigl one night when Feigl is with his birds. Kindler demands a police investigation. I am the police.

The legalities are fiendishly complex, and yet brutally straightforward. The German Penal Code applies within both the Reich and the occupied territories. But if the perpetrator is German and the victim Jewish or local, the provisions of sections 211 and 212 concerning murder and manslaughter do not apply. If both perpetrator and victim are of the same racial value – German–German, Jew–Jew, Russian–Russian, Pole–Pole, Pole–Jew, Russian–Pole and various other combinations – then the stipulations do apply. Thus, any matter may potentially be made the object of investigation. I have a witness, Finckelstein, who saw the killing take place. He sat only a metre away, painting wings. Breker stuck his arm through the window and fired his 9mm into the room. His head was almost blown off, Finckelstein stated. Breker must have discharged a whole round into the vertebrae of the scrawny man’s neck. I have the blood-spattered birds in evidence bags. Autopsy is out of the question, but there are six bullets in the workbench and I have a reliable witness. I picked five fragments of bone, Feigl’s, from his throat and hand, tiny shards of organic shrapnel. I end up with two reports.

The truth for Kindler. A lie for Breker.

I don’t know who ranks highest in the real hierarchy.

If I deliver the wrong report, it could destroy me.

I need Manfred. He will know what to do. Kindler keeps on at me for a verdict.

I telephone Manfred again.

The adjutant says something has happened.

He won’t say what.

When I look out of the window again, people are running.

_ _ _

Manfred flings open the door.

He is pure energy, crackling electricity in his black uniform. He gives me a handshake, a slap on the back, a forceful embrace. When eventually he steps back I see he is fuming.

My eyes focus on his small head, his puckered mouth.

‘My car’s outside,’ he says.

‘What’s happened?’ I ask.

He is already at the desk, telephone receiver in hand. He pauses, stares at the letter to Eline. He sees the jar. He opens it, dabs a finger in the honey and puts it in his mouth.

‘Tell me what’s happened, for Christ’s sake!’ I snap at him.

‘What?’

‘Manfred!’

‘Steiner,’ he says quietly. ‘A reconnaissance plane spotted something north-east of Stützpunkt 43 … on his route … Gisela is with him …’

North-east of Stützpunkt 43

Manfred’s command vehicle bumps along the dirt road. I have asked him about Breker and Kindler, but have received only monosyllables in reply. Manfred picks at his teeth with a small ivory toothpick. It is stiflingly hot. A machine gunner is positioned at the front of the vehicle, his hand on the MG’s grip. There are four trucks behind us. Abruptly, the heavens open, a downpour, lightning leaping over the landscape. Manfred has Weber with him, a former forensics officer from Cologne, now regimental clerk. He keeps a small travelling case tucked under his right arm. His instruments? Manfred must fear the worst.

Weber’s slight frame trembles. He drops his cigarette.

I grind it underfoot and offer him my Efkas. He says something, without taking one. It’s cold now, visibility close to zero.

We pass Stützpunkt 43, heavily guarded by what appears to be Waffen-SS in camouflage and waterproof capes, the Leibstandarte. I thought they were further east, at the main front, Kursk. Are things moving that fast? Are the Russians already here in Belorussia, emerging from the forests in their heavy boots, with their Asiatic brains, their primitive battle cries? Our soldiers jump down from the trucks, man the flak, draw out the net. Men mill in the trenches and on the ridge, controlling the road. Hedgehogs are positioned further out, towards the swamps, the puszcza, the void.

Rain lashes at the tarp.

Manfred has left us. Weber shivers with cold.

We bide our time, waiting for it to end.

‘Partisans,’ Manfred says when eventually he returns and climbs back into the vehicle. ‘Several attacks today.’

He raps his knuckles against the driver’s helmet and we set off.

We are silent as we leave the last of the positions behind us and draw away into the terrain along an elevated gravel track. Nothing but green, broken only by white trunks as the fog rises after the rain.

_ _ _

Manfred jumps out.

Squeezing through the tarp, I see the burning vehicles, the dead strewn about, stripped naked, hanging from the vehicles, sprawled on the roadsides, heads submerged in ditchwater. It must have looked like a massacre from the air; black plumes rising up from the explosions, and flesh-coloured lumps.

Dogs sweep across a nearby field, jowls red with blood. They must come from the woods or the little village of broken-down farms a few hundred metres away. Our own dogs are in a frenzy, but will not be released. Not yet.

I bend down. There’s an ID tag in the mud.

3^rd SS-Panzer Division. Totenkopf. Steiner’s division.

Everything else is gone: weapons, uniforms.

Manfred releases the safety catch of his PPK and fires into the air. He shouts out an order, points towards the running dogs with his gun. The machine gunner removes his leather helmet and waves it back at him. He looks dim-witted: big ears, small face, blinking eyes. He unleashes a round in the direction of the hurtling animals: jets of blood burst from their flesh, bullets ricochet off the vehicles, water leaping from the puddles. One of the dead is hit and the volley wrenches the corpse upwards, tearing it asunder.

I run up to him.

He hears nothing. I climb onto the footplate and slap him hard in the face.

‘For God’s sake, man! Stop!’

He turns his head towards me, shoulder wrenching from the recoil as he carries on firing, oblivious.

Then abruptly he stops and laughs.

His gums are receded, teeth brown with rot.

He can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen years old.

Manfred is standing on a small mound.

He is waving at me frantically.

_ _ _

The open staff car smoulders, a shining black Mercedes in a ditch, behind it a trail of erratic skid marks in the wet clay. Manfred stands at the edge, looking down into the vehicle. There is a man in the passenger seat.

Something has hit him in the head, just above his shirt collar.

A large piece of shrapnel.

Leaning forward, I recognise the front teeth of Hauptsturmführer Heinz Breker. His distinctive gap.

I look up at Manfred. His eyes are fixed on something behind my back.

_ _ _

She is lying face-up in white fur, a feather boa slung around her neck. A white hat with a long red plume lies a metre away. Her white stockings are torn at the calves, her legs are alabaster, knickers at her ankles.

Her throat is taut, head turned to the side.

But I know who she is.

Frau Steiner, the actress. Gisela, née Lestrange. I saw her once at the Staatstheater in Hamburg, in ’41. Steiner, the SS general, smoking, in the front row. Braying and bragging. The society couple from the pages of Illustrierte. Beauty and the Beast of Minsk. She was Gretchen in Faust. Who could forget her doll’s face, her porcelain legs?

Fern? Or was it weit?

Weit. It’s weit. Afar, not distant.

Why did he bring her here, to the very edge of the world, in this grotesque finery?

Weber has unpacked his little case, laying his instruments out on a tartan blanket as if he were on a picnic. He sits on his haunches, stirring plaster of Paris in a small receptacle.

He has already put stakes in the ground and drawn twine between them, marking out the scene.

His cheeks have regained some colour. He is whistling.

I go towards him. He raises a hand.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ he says.

‘I’ve seen crime scenes before,’ I tell him.

He carries on, head down, spreading the plaster of Paris evenly in a footprint. The grass has been trampled flat. There must have been quite a number of them, all come to look. The turf beneath her, visible between her legs, has been churned up where they manhandled her, turning her this way and that.

And then they gave her to the dogs.

When they were finished, they gave her to the dogs.

I go over to the other side.

Stare at her.

Her body, her face.

What is left, on a bed of white feathers.

The dog handlers are next to arrive, their charges straining at the leash. Manfred stands with his back turned, pointing towards a cluster of smallholdings a couple of hundred metres up the hill: coordinates 54° 15′ N, 26° 30′ E. The map says Belize.

_ _ _

‘Why was the escort so small?’ I ask. ‘When the place is swarming with partisans?’

Manfred says nothing. He is standing at the kitchen window in the largest of the farmhouses. Hands on the windowsill, he leans forward and peers out into the yard. Two Sturmmänner are at the well, struggling with the long, stripped pole of the well sweep, pressing down on it with all their weight. I stand next to him and watch as eventually it tips and the rope quivers taut. There is something heavy at the other end. A moment later it is hoisted into view: a mottled pig, blood running from the snout, blood and water.

‘Where is Steiner?’ says Manfred, staring at the bloated animal. ‘And where the hell are the locals?’

He turns round and scans the kitchen: a great clay oven, wooden tubs, tables, shelves stacked with tin plates. The icon has been taken, only a tallow candle remains in the empty niche. He throws up his arms. He knows as well as I do that they flee into the forests as soon as they catch wind of us.

He goes over to the stove. There’s a loaf in the oven. He bends down and pats his hand on the crust.

‘Still warm,’ he says, and breaks off a chunk. ‘Want some?’

_ _ _

‘There’s someone here,’ a voice shouts from the garden.

We dash outside, down the step, kick open the gate into the tall grass, insects swarming in the air, heavy with the fusty smell of dungheap.

A trail has been tramped down in the grass. The beehives hum at the very bottom of the garden, as the ground slopes away, into wild rhubarb, a stream.

We hear shots, two or three: a shotgun. Manfred points to the right. Two Sturmmänner peel away behind the great leaves of the rhubarb. Two more go back in the other direction, in single file, releasing the safety catches of their carbines. Manfred slaps my face – Wake up, for Christ’s sake! – then jabs a finger towards the hill, to the left of the shimmering grey barn.

Crouching down, we approach, taking position with our backs to the wall next to the barn door. Manfred steps swiftly into the open doorway, legs apart, firing arm extended, sweeping right to left, and back.

No one. A horse stands harnessed to a cart covered by a tarpaulin. It tosses its head and snorts.

I walk up to it, run my hand through its mane, pull aside the tarp. Inside are barrels of fish, lashed down securely. Manfred is ransacking the place, already over on the other side.

‘Here!’

Standing beside him I can see the whole valley; the span of a ridge, a gulley, a river below. A man in a white smock is running through the tall grass, leaving a trail behind him of trampled sheaths and seed heads. His left hand holds a shotgun, and he is lugging a large bundle under his right arm. His stride is plunging and awkward, and yet he is getting away. Behind him, from both sides, our men close in. Ahead of him on the ridge stands Michael, the stumpy Oberscharführer from the Schwabenland, braced, a long iron bar, a crowbar perhaps, in his right hand. They lock eyes at the same moment. The running man looks back over his shoulder, and Michael descends the sandy slope in short, shuffling strides, directly into the man’s blind spot.

In a moment they will meet.

Michael places one foot in front of the other, twists his hip, and draws back the crowbar with both hands.

Now.

I turn away.

_ _ _

I don’t know who found the pulley and the chain.

The man is laid out on the straw in the stable, his feet bound, the chain slung over a beam. They hoist him up. His upper face has been obliterated. Only the lower jaw remains; shattered teeth and a gaping, blood-filled cavity at the throat. The man drips blood and a thick, dark liquid. The white smock is a mess.

Let him hang there.

Hang there and talk to himself.

Michael stands leaning against his crowbar, as if for a photograph.

‘What do we do with this one, Manfred?’

Michael’s even stumpier brother, Hans, has his hand on the head of a little girl in a white dress. She is perhaps five or six years old, and her hair has been put up in a white cap. Her face is smeared with blood, her dress spattered, from left to right.

Reconstruction: The girl was the bundle under the man’s arm, the reason he was running so awkwardly. Michael was standing to his right, and when the crowbar impacted against the man’s head, brain matter was ejected onto his daughter in this diagonal pattern.

‘I thought she was …’ Hans says when nobody answers. ‘Only then she came to all of a sudden and went off down the hill … like a little machine …’

His voice trails off and he grins sheepishly. Like an idiot. Manfred turns towards me.

‘What do you say, Heinrich? Fancy a bit of fatherhood?’

He steps up to the girl, unties the little ribbon under her chin. Her thick, yellow hair tumbles into his open hand. She rolls her eyes up like a doll.

‘You’ve always wanted a daughter, haven’t you? You’re about the right age for it. And you’ll never get anywhere with my sister …’

The girl stares into space. She is out of her senses, as though in another world. A blow to the head?

Her little hand slips into Manfred’s. Her other hand is clenched. There is something in it.

A striped candy stick. She does not look at her father. Does she even know he is dangling there, his insides dripping?

_ _ _

‘What do you say?’ says Manfred. ‘You’ve always been such a good person, Heinrich. Heart of gold.’

I say nothing. I am enraged.

‘Can’t hear you, Heinrich!’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ I reply. ‘Nothing.’

‘Very well.’

Manfred lets go of the girl’s hand and steps backwards, a single pace.

Now she is alone, in the middle of the room.

Everyone is silent.

Manfred is behind her. She turns round and gazes at us all.

‘We can’t do this,’ says Hans. ‘Not like this …’

Manfred glares at him.

‘Then you take her,’ he says.

‘No, I—’

The girl says something in Belorussian. She begins to unwrap the tight cellophane from her candy stick. Her small fingers struggle. Manfred draws his PPK and steps behind her back. He holds the gun down between his legs, as though to conceal it. He racks the slide to load the chamber. The girl turns and looks up at him.

She puts out her hand with the sweet in it.

He stops mid-movement.

She speaks to him.

‘What?’ he blurts, spit spraying from his mouth. His eyes are bloodshot. He raises the gun. His hand trembles. ‘What? What is it?’

‘She asks …’ says a Hiwi, a tall, dark-haired Belorussian I only notice now, his skin taut across the cheekbones, sockets black and empty, ‘She asks if you would help her with, what is it called … the paper …’

‘What?’

‘That’s what she said,’ the Hiwi says. ‘She can’t get it off.’

Manfred steps forward, snatches the sweet from the girl’s hand, but is unable to remove the wrapper, his pistol in the air. He puts it back in its holster, picks at the cellophane until eventually it comes off. He is furious. He gives the sweet back to her. She takes it and puts it in her mouth.

‘Khotite yvidet tjeloveka …’

‘What now?’ Manfred splutters.

‘She asks if we want to see the man.’

_ _ _

The Hiwi bends down to her. She says her name is Etke. She is six and three quarters. She has been to the market with her father. In Koreletjy. His name is Boris. Where is he? She speaks mechanically. Hans’s little machine. The Hiwi’s translation is a stutter. She walks through the stable, crosses a narrow path and enters a barn with a steeply sloping roof. She leads us through stalls, we come to a halt in front of a large mound of hay.

A grubby foot protrudes, a corner of a trouser leg, a crushed ankle sodden with blood.

Hiwis step past me, they pull away the hay to reveal the man’s head. He is gagged. His side gapes open, a brown slop has seeped from the waist of his trousers.

‘Is it him?’ Manfred shouts from outside.

‘Yes. It’s Steiner.’

_ _ _

Manfred is shaking the girl when I come back out. The Hiwi who was translating shrugs. The girl is crying. I go up to Manfred and put a hand on his arm.

‘Let me question her,’ I say.

‘You?’

He looks at my hand, astonished.

Michael freezes, cigarette lifted to his mouth.

‘You won’t get anything out of her that way. You can see that, surely?’

I take the girl by the hand and beckon to the interpreter. He comes over.

‘Say something to her,’ I tell him.

‘Like what?’ he asks. ‘What should I say?’

‘Anything at all.’

_ _ _

‘Heinrich,’ says Manfred.

He has sat down beside the girl in the back of the commando vehicle. I am standing next to the machine gunner at the front, watching the Hiwis torch the village. We can already hear the rumble of the flames, the frenzied crackling of shingled roofs.

As the driver pulls out onto the gravel track, the first windows shatter.

‘Heinrich,’ Manfred says again.

‘Yes?’

‘I want you to find him.’

‘What do you mean? Find who?’

‘Whoever did this …’

I twist round to look at him, my arm resting on the side of the vehicle, an Efka smoking between my fingers.

‘This is a war, Manfred. Anyone could have done it. There’s a whole Red Army out there, for crying out loud.’

‘Now you’re being silly, Heinrich. A single person did this, one person.’

‘We’re not in Hamburg now, Manfred, this is …’

The girl looks out on the burning village. The blood and grime on her face has begun to flake away. In a few hours, her home will be a smouldering ruin.

‘This is what?’ says Manfred. Then, when I fail to answer: ‘I don’t understand you, Heinrich. I’m doing you a favour.’

‘A favour?’

I inhale the cigarette smoke deep into my lungs, surprised by the bitterness in my voice.

‘That’s right, a favour. Steiner’s killer, if we find him, could be big for us. And you love Hamburg. Law and order, logic, justice. All that stuff.’

‘That stuff?’

‘Yes, that stuff. You can proceed however you like.’

‘Logic, order … Look over there,’ I say with a nod in the direction of Belize. ‘Is that order, justice, logic? Destroying evidence, killing witnesses?’

‘It’s logic of a higher order.’

‘A higher order? Oh, for God’s sake …’

‘You do the logic, I’ll do the higher order.’

He smiles now. There’s a gleam in his eye that I’ve seen before, back in our school philosophy society. The sweeping statements he used to love: the neo-Kantians are a bunch of homosexuals, objectivity is for weaklings. But I know him: he can turn in a heartbeat.

‘No.’

‘Stop the vehicle,’ he says, leaning forward and placing a hand on the driver’s shoulder. ‘Clear off for a minute. You too,’ he says with a nod to the machine gunner when the man fails to react.

The young Schütze pulls in to the side and both men climb out.

‘Heinrich,’ says Manfred. ‘Do you seriously think you have a say in the matter?’

‘Like with the Feigl case, you mean?’ I stare out at the two men who stand waiting a short distance away. One of them searches his pockets, the other offers him a cigarette.

‘Who the hell is Feigl?’

‘The man with the wood-shaving birds, Kindler’s Jew. It was Breker who shot him. But who cares? Another SS pantomime, a bloody …’

I realise I’ve gone too far.

‘Say that again?’ says Manfred. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Nothing. I’m sorry … I apologise, for God’s sake!’

He smiles and places his hand on Etke’s head.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘So. When you find him, when we’ve got him, I’m going to kill him. And Heinrich …’

‘What?’

‘Don’t get sentimental about the girl.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

The girl

Police headquarters, Lida.

The girl is seated on a chair in my office. She holds her hands in her lap and looks down at them. Her dress is sticky and bloodied. My adjutant, Wäspli, comes in with a fresh glass of cordial. There was fear in his eyes when he saw her fifteen minutes ago, but he came back with a little paper parasol that he put in her drink like a cocktail. After that he went away. An interpreter from Manfred’s unit just arrived, a stocky incarnation of Volksdeutsch, who extends his hand towards me and introduces himself. I nod a curt greeting and go over to the girl, squat down in front of her and ask the interpreter to translate:

‘Etke … that’s your name, isn’t it?’

She looks away as she answers.

‘What did she say?’

‘She says she wants to go home …’

‘Tell her she can’t just yet … tell her that.’

The interpreter says some words in Belorussian, modulating his voice.

‘She says she wants to go home to her mother now …’

She begins to cry.

‘Hello!’ I raise my voice. ‘Listen. Little girl.’

The interpreter shakes her, she bites his hand, he recoils, I grip his fist as he draws back his arm, then after a brief tussle he shouts and I shove him away.

‘Get out of here,’ I yell at him.

_ _ _

My house in Suwalska Street.

It’s boiling hot. The girl is seated on my sofa in the spacious drawing room facing the street. She swings her legs. Masja, my housekeeper, has washed her, she is clean and sweet-smelling. She must know something, but is she aware of it?

I am sitting by the window, my Efkas on the windowsill.

My Masja comes in, curtsies, though I have expressly forbidden her to curtsy, and sits down next to the girl. She smoothes the child’s dress, and pecks her on the cheek.

The girl begins to sing a song, her voice wavering and frail.

What the hell am I supposed to do?

I go over to the bureau, open a drawer and find a notepad and pen.

‘Translate for me, Masja,’ I say, and sit down in a chair in front of them.

The girl fidgets with a little ribbon of her dress, then looks up at me and says something.

‘She says …’ Masja has difficulty finding the words. ‘She asks, where is my father? Do you know?’

‘Yes,’ I reply, standing up again. I go over to the window, pull a cigarette out of the packet, light up and survey the dusty street. ‘Yes, I do.’

_ _ _

Later that afternoon, the mortuary in the basement of Manfred’s hospital.

Further down the corridor is Manfred’s secret room with the iron bed.

Weber has a camera with him.

Manfred and I are standing slightly back from the autopsy slab, he with his arms folded, while I lean against the tiled wall. A young SS-Schütze stands self-consciously over by the door. The pathologist, Dr Weiss, an SS physician Manfred has had flown in from the infirmary at Vibetsk, nods to the two Hiwis, who lift Steiner onto the terrazzo slab. They salute awkwardly and leave.

Weber takes a photograph.

Manfred has seeds in his hands, and asks if I want some.

I don’t.

‘Have you got a statement for me from the girl?’ he asks.

‘No. Not yet.’

The limbs of the Obergruppenführer are stiff, his jaw is dislocated, dentures gone, only blackened stumps remain in the lower jaw. His upper body is bare, his shoes and socks have been removed.

There are three entrance wounds in the chest, ringed with black residue.

The arms are locked at the elbow joints, right hand clasped. Incipient rigor mortis.

There is a brown discoloration at the crotch of his unbuttoned uniform trousers.

Manfred spits out the streaked hull of a sunflower seed.

‘When, then?’ he says.

‘Give me a couple of days.’

‘A couple of days?’

The Obergruppenführer’s feet are old and gnarled, but the toenails neatly clipped and filed.

On the toe tag someone has written 1–233 in ink. The name will not be released until the propaganda department has concocted a death more heroic.

‘If you want reliable information,’ I whisper, ‘then, yes.’

‘Let’s see what he’s got in his hand first, shall we?’ Weiss cuts in.

We nod. Weiss braces his legs, then grips the clasped hand, bending at the waist as he puts his strength into it, prising the fingers open.

‘Empty,’ he says. ‘Nothing at all.’

The flash illuminates the room as Weber takes another photograph. Weiss glares at him.

His brow is moist with perspiration.

‘Let us begin,’ he says with a nod to the young Schütze, and the boy, his face a smatter of freckles and fiery red lips, notes down in shorthand: ‘Deceased has three entrance wounds at the thorax, all sufficient to cause death …’

Weiss leans forward and smells the wounds.

‘Shot at close range, gunpowder smell, abrasion rings. No further injuries to torso.’

He picks up a pair of scissors, proceeds to Steiner’s feet and cuts open the trousers, removes them, stiffens.

‘Come here, Hauptsturmführer,’ he says softly. Then, when Manfred hesitates: ‘Come here, please.’

Manfred steps over to the slab, his head recoils as he sees what Weiss is pointing at. They exchange brisk whispers, agitated. Weiss turns towards me.

‘They’ve mutilated him,’ he says. ‘Cut off his—’

‘This goes no further,’ Manfred interrupts.

He darts towards the Schütze and tears the notepad from his hand.

‘Out!’ he commands.

The boy is at once seized with terror, his eyes wide, a bloom of red flushes his cheeks, a haemorrhage of embarrassment.

‘You have seen nothing, you were never here,’ says Manfred, spelling it out. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good, now get out.’

The Schütze gathers his things, knocking over the carbine he has propped up in the corner by the window. The gun clatters against the tiled floor; he picks it up and scuttles away.

‘You, too,’ Manfred says to Weber. ‘Leave the camera here.’

Manfred follows him out and locks the door behind him. Weiss has covered up the groin area with a piece of cloth.

‘What?’ I ask, but receive no answer. ‘If I’m supposed to find out who did this, you’ll have to tell me what happened.’

Neither of them speaks. Weiss has gone over to a table and starts arranging his instruments. Manfred pulls a cigarette from his breast pocket and lights up.

‘Please refrain from smoking in here,’ says Weiss.

‘I smoke wherever I want,’ Manfred replies. ‘Now tell us what the hell they did to Hubert.’

Weiss picks out a pair of long, steel pincers. From a leather case he takes a head lamp and straps it on. He returns to the slab, switches on the lamp, adjusts the angle, and with the pincers proceeds to investigate Steiner’s groin, its flaps of skin and lumps of coagulated blood.

‘I insist you put out your cigarette,’ he says. ‘Smell is an important part of the procedure.’

Manfred hesitates for a second before furiously grinding the cigarette underfoot.

‘And you’re taking notes?’ he says with a nod in my direction.

‘Yes,’ I reply.

‘So what’s the verdict?’ Manfred says after I pick up the notepad from the windowsill.

‘Well, it’s certainly not lege artis,’ Weiss says. ‘There’s been massive bleeding. Gaping wound at the scrotum. That’s with a c—’

‘I know how to spell it,’ I tell him.

‘Good … then let’s proceed. Both testes absent. Were his testicles found at the scene?’ Weiss inquires.

‘No,’ says Manfred. ‘No, they were not.’

‘This was done with a very sharp instrument indeed, probably a scalpel or a sharpened knife of some sort,’ Weiss goes on. ‘The wound edges are clean and precise, though as I said the incisions are not lege artis.’

‘So will someone tell me what lege artis means,’ Manfred says.

‘We’re dealing with an absence of surgical method,’ Weiss replies without looking up, without irony, persisting with his pincers.

‘No injuries to the remaining groin or thighs. And no injuries to the hands or arms that would accord with any struggle …’

Manfred steps closer, purses his lips.

‘So what are you saying? That Steiner cut off his own balls?’

‘I can’t say for sure. But no, I shouldn’t think so.’

Manfred tightens his jaw. Weiss continues the examination. He lifts the Obergruppenführer’s penis with the pincers, his long face peering from all angles, a finger nudging his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.

‘Severe injury to glans penis,’ he says. ‘Skin lacerated from glans, along corpus, almost as far as radix penis …’

‘Weiss,’ says Manfred, suddenly raising his hand. ‘I want to know one thing.’

Weiss looks up.

‘Yes?’

‘What was the sequence?’

‘Sequence?’

‘Yes. Did they … mutilate him first and shoot him afterwards, or …’

‘The massive bleeding would indicate …’

‘Indicate … indicate!’