‘They wouldn’t,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid they would. And they do. I’ve seen it. The commanders are coming down hard on that kind of thing.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m here to help, if I can.’
‘But what about Hitler’s decree?’ said the corporal.
‘What about it?’
‘I heard about this barbarian decree the leader had made that said it wasn’t the same standard required out here, see? On account of how the Slavs are fucking barbarians.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, anyone can see that, can’t they? I mean look at them. Life means less down here than it does back home. Anyone can see that.’
‘The Ivans are not so bad. Just people, trying to survive, make a living.’
‘No, they’re hardly human. Barbarians is right.’
‘By the way, it’s not called the barbarian decree, you block-head,’ I sneered. ‘It’s the Barbarossa Decree, after the German Holy Roman Emperor of the same name. He led the Third Crusade, which is probably why we chose to name the military operation we’ve mounted against the Soviet Union after him in the first place. Out of some misplaced sense of fucking history. Not that you’d know much about history. What you’d better know is that this decree was not passed on to the local field commanders by Von Kluge. Like a lot of those old-style general staff officers, the field marshal chose to sit on Hitler’s decree – you might say, even to ignore it altogether. And it certainly didn’t apply to those men guarding Army Group Centre headquarters. What the SS and the SD do is their affair. And I must tell you this: if you and your old fighter friend were gambling on an appeal to Berlin over the field marshal’s head, then you can forget it. That’s just not going to happen. So you’d better start talking.’
Corporal Hermichen hung his head and sighed. ‘That bad, eh?’
‘Damn right that bad. My advice to you is to make a statement as quickly as possible in the hope of saving your neck. I’m not really interested in whether you hang or not. No, what I’m more interested in is the way you – or your sergeant – killed those two women.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was Sergeant Kuhr. He killed them both. Rape – yes, I went along with that. He raped the mother and I raped the daughter. But I was for letting them go. It was the sarge who insisted on killing them. I tried to talk him out of it, but he said killing them was best.’
‘This was in a quiet spot west of the Kremlin, right?’
The corporal nodded. ‘Narwastrasse. There’s a little cemetery just north of there. That’s where it – where it happened. We’d followed them from our barracks on Kleine Kasernestrasse where they did the laundry, to a little chapel. The church of the Archangel Michael – Svirskaya, I think the Ivans call it. Anyway, we waited for them to come out of the church and then followed them south down Regimenstrasse. When they went in the cemetery, the sarge said they were leading us on so we could fuck them in there. That they wanted to us to fuck them. Well, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.’
‘You followed them how?’
‘Motorcycle and sidecar. The sarge was driving.’
‘So that means you were carrying the jerrycan full of gasoline, in the sidecar.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The witness – the Russian Orthodox priest from the Svirskaya church who saw you, who took the number on the bike’s licence plate, who you shot and left for dead – he says you burned the bodies with the gasoline, and that you had the gasoline beside you when you were raping the laundry maids. By the way, why didn’t you burn his body, too?’
‘We were going to. But we ran out of gasoline and he was too big to haul on top of them.’
‘Which one of you shot the priest?’
‘The sarge. Didn’t hesitate. Soon as he saw him. Pulled his Luger and let him have it. That was half an hour before we finished with the two girls, during which time we didn’t hear a peep out of him, which persuaded us he was dead. But of course it was just a flesh wound and he was just knocked out. Fell down and banged the back of his head. I mean, how were we to know?’
‘Tell me something, corporal, would you have shot him again if you’d known he was still alive?’
‘You mean me, sir? Yes, I was so scared I would have.’
‘Now tell me about when you murdered the two women.’
‘Not me, sir. I told you. It was the sarge.’
‘All right. He cut their throats, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, sir. With his bayonet.’
‘Why did he do that, do you think? Instead of shooting them the way you say he’d shot the priest.’
The corporal thought for a moment and then tossed his cigarette end onto the floor, where he ground it underneath the heel of his boot.
‘Sergeant Kuhr is a good soldier, sir. And brave. I never knew a braver one. But he’s a cruel man, so he is, and he likes to use a knife. It’s not the first time I saw him use a blade on a man – on someone. We took an Ivan prisoner near Minsk and the sarge murdered him in cold blood with his knife, although I don’t remember if he used his bayonet or not. He slit the Ivan’s throat before cutting his whole fucking head off. Never seen anything like it.’
‘When you saw that, did you have the impression that he’d done that before? I mean, cut a man’s throat.’
‘Yes sir. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Well that was bad, but this time – with the two girls I mean – that was worse. And it wasn’t the sight that lives with me, sir. It was the sound. You can’t explain that, the way they kept on breathing through their throats. It was horrible. I couldn’t believe it that he killed them that way. The two girls, I mean. I really couldn’t believe it. I threw up. That’s how bad it was. They were still breathing through their throats like a couple of slaughtered pigs when the sarge poured the gasoline on them.’
‘Did he set them alight? Or did you?’ I paused. ‘It was your lighter that the field police found near the scene of the crime. With your name on it, Erich?’
‘My nerves were gone. I’d lit a cigarette to get something inside myself. The sarge snatched the nail out of my hand and tossed it onto the bodies. But he used so much gasoline that it almost took my fucking eyebrows off when they went up. I fell over backwards to get away from the flames. Must have dropped the lighter then. In some long grass. Looked for it, but by then the sarge was back on the bike and starting it up. I thought he’d drive away without me so I just left it.’
I nodded, lit a cigarette and sucked hard on the loosely packed end. The smoke helped to cure the degraded feeling I had from listening to this sordid story. I’d come across many evil bastards and heard some loathsome stories in my time with Kripo – the Alex wasn’t known as Grey Misery for nothing – but there was something about this particular crime I found more ghastly than I could ever have imagined. Perhaps it was just the idea of the two Russian women – Akulina and Klavdiya Eltsina – surviving the battle for Smolensk that had killed Akulina’s husband, Artem, and keeping themselves alive by doing the laundry of their gentlemanly German conquerors, two of whom would rape and murder them both in the most squalid, inhuman way. I’d come across the sensation if not the facts that were peculiar to this case many times before, of course: I suppose it’s just the curse of hindsight, the way you see the fate that was always hanging over people like the Eltsinas – the way it seemed they were meant to meet two bastards like Hermichen and Kuhr and then be raped and murdered in a snow-covered cemetery in Smolensk. Suddenly I wanted to leave, to go outside and throw up and then breathe some fresh air, but I forced myself to sit there with Corporal Hermichen, not because I thought I could help him but because I had more questions – questions about another pair of murders that had been nagging at me ever since I’d been back from Berlin.