Death Zones Read online

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

  3rd 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?

  Bin ich doch so jung, so jung!

  Und soll schon sterben!

  Schön war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.

  Nah war der Freund, nun ist er fern

  I’m still so young,

  So very young, and must so early die!

  Fair was I once, hence hath my ruin sprung,

  My love is now distant, he then was nigh …

  Fern? Or was it weit?

  Nah war der Freund, nun ist er …

  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 the
m 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.