‘What about them?’
‘They were from the Third Division,’ explained Voss. ‘The third absorbed the 386th Motorized Division, which more or less ceased to exist after Stalingrad.’
‘So they might have been driving for the signals racket, too,’ I said. ‘Like Viktor Reuth. Earning a little extra cash on the side. And they’d have had a better reason than the signals boys to be on the road.’
‘Perhaps that was what your Corporal Hermichen wanted to trade for his life,’ said Voss. ‘That they were part of the same racket as the two dead men.’
‘Yes, it might,’ I said. ‘It just might.’
I lit a cigarette and let the sweet tobacco smoke exorcise my nostrils of the loathsome stink of death that hung in the air. Unlike Dr Kramsta, I didn’t have any Carat to sprinkle on my handkerchief; I didn’t even have a handkerchief.
‘I’ll want to speak to this Tanya,’ I said. ‘I’d like to find out how many more girls from the house on Olgastrasse were nurses who had day jobs at the Smolensk State Medical Academy. Where is she now?’
‘Cooling her heels at the prison on Gefängnisstrasse. And probably trying to charm the guards into letting her go. Very beautiful is our Tanya. And very seductive.’
‘A blonde you say?’
‘Blonde and blue-eyed with skin like honey. Like a girl on the front page of New People.’
‘I like her already. All the same, sometimes I think attractive women in this part of the world are just like trams, lieutenant.’
‘How do you mean, sir?’
‘I don’t see one in weeks and then I meet two in one day.’
There was no women’s wing at Gefängnisstrasse, but some of the holding cells – in which several prisoners were held at once – were for women only, which counted for something, I suppose. All of the guards were men from the army or the field police, and while they treated their female charges with respect that was only in comparison with their male prisoners. Thanks to the many female soldiers who fought for the Red Army, it was generally held among Germans that Russian women were as potentially deadly as Russian men. Perhaps more so. The weekly Wehrmacht newspaper often had a story of a honey-trap sklyukhu going off with some unsuspecting Fritz who ended up losing more than just his virginity.
They brought Tanya to the same depressing room where I had interviewed the unfortunate Corporal Hermichen, and as soon as I saw her I realized I had seen her before, but Russian nurses’ uniforms being as severe as they were, she’d looked very different from how she looked now. Voss had not exaggerated: her hair was the colour of my father’s pocket-watch and her eyes were as blue as a midsummer moon. Tanya was the kind of blonde who could have stopped a whole division of cavalry with one flash of her underwear.
‘Why am I still being kept here, please?’ she asked Voss anxiously.
‘This man wants to ask you a few questions, that’s all,’ said Voss.
I nodded. ‘If you answer honestly we’ll probably let you go, Tanya,’ I told her, gently. ‘Today, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t think you’ve done very much wrong in the great scheme of things. Now that I’ve met you I’m not sure that anyone has.’
She nodded. ‘Thank you.’
‘It’s not really you we’re interested in, but the Germans you worked with. And Oleg Rudakov, the doorman from the Glinka.’
‘He’s run away,’ she said. ‘That’s what I heard from some of the other girls.’
‘The girls in the apartment at Olgastrasse?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Are any of them nurses, too?’ I asked her. ‘At the Smolensk State Medical Academy?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Several. At least the better-looking ones who speak a bit of German.’
‘The ones who need the money, eh?’
‘Everyone needs the money.’
‘Why did Oleg Rudakov run away? Because of what happened to you?’
‘No. I think he ran away after what happened to Doctor Batov.’
Her spoken German improved as the interview progressed. Which is more than could be said of my Russian. I had some language books, and I kept trying it out, but without much success.
‘Was Dr Batov involved with your call-girl ring?’
‘Not directly. But he certainly knew about it. He helped keep us healthy. You know?’
‘Yes. Have you any idea who might have killed him?’
Tanya shook her head. ‘No. Nobody knows. It’s another reason why people are scared. It’s why Oleg ran away, I think.’
‘Did you know that Oleg Rudakov had a brother who was a patient at the Smolensk State Medical?’
‘Everyone in Smolensk knew this. The Rudakov brothers were both from Smolensk. Oleg used to give money to the hospital – to Dr Batov – for looking after his brother, Arkady.’
‘Tell me about Arkady. Was he really injured as badly as Batov said he was? Or perhaps thought he was?’
‘Do you mean was Arkady faking?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. Arkady was always very clever. That’s what people said. I did not know him before his injury – when he was NKVD – but to be lieutenant in NKVD you have to be clever. Clever enough never again to want to do what he and others had to do in Katyn Wood. Clever enough to find a way out perhaps that did not mean he too would be shot.’
‘So, you know about that, too? About what happened in Katyn Wood?’
‘Everyone in Smolensk knows about this terrible thing. Everyone. Anyone who says they don’t is lying. Lying because they are afraid. Or lying because they hate Germans more than they hate NKVD. I cannot say which it is because I don’t know, but they are lying. Lying is best way to stay alive in this town. Three years ago, when this thing happened – yes, it was spring of 1940 – the militia closed the road to Vitebsk, but they did not stop the train. I heard that people who were on the trains near Gnezdovo heard the sound of shots from Katyn Wood – at least until the NKVD came onto the trains and made sure all of the windows were closed.’
‘You’re sure about this?’ I said.
‘That everyone knows what happened? Yes, I’m sure.’ Tanya’s eyes flashed defiantly. ‘Just as everyone knows there were two thousand Jews from the ghetto at Vitebsk murdered by the German army at Mazurino. Not to mention all of the Jews who were found floating in the Zapadnaya Dvina River. They say that the lampreys caught from the Zap are the biggest ever this year because of all the bodies they had to feed on.’
Voss groaned, and I guessed it was because he’d eaten lamprey pie for dinner in the mess at Krasny Bor the previous evening.
I smiled. ‘Thank you, Tanya. You’ve been most helpful.’
‘I can go.’
‘We’ll take you home, if you like.’
‘Thank you, but no, I’ll walk. Is all right at night when no one sees. But not in the day. After you Germans have gone from Smolensk it will be pretty bad here, I think. It is best the NKVD don’t know I go with Germans.’
The local Gestapo was stationed in a two-storey house next to the railway station at Gnezdovo, so that officers could board the train and surprise anyone travelling on to the next stop, at Smolensk’s main station. The Gestapo always loved surprises, and so did I, which was why I was there, of course – although out of consideration for Lieutenant Voss I decided to spare him the ordeal of accompanying me to see Captain Hammerschmidt, who was in for a big surprise – perhaps the biggest surprise of his career. I pulled up in a cobbled yard next to a pair of camouflaged 260s, stepped out and took a longer look at the building in front of me. The bullet-marked walls were painted two contrasting shades of green, the darker matching the colour of the roof tiles, and there were bull’s-eye windows on the upper floor; the windows on the ground floor were all heavily barred. The clock above the arched entrance had stopped at six o’clock, which might have been meant as a metaphor, since that was often the time in the morning when the Gestapo preferred to call. In the grove of silver birch trees a short way from the house was a pile of sandbags fronted with an ominous-looking wooden post. Everything looked just as it ought to have done, although the building was, for my plainer taste, the wrong flavour: a sprinkling of chocolate chips on the mint ice-cream roof would hardly have looked out of place. Everything was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual; the Gestapo never has a problem with noisy neighbours. Even the squirrels in the trees were behaving themselves. Gradually a steam locomotive approached wheezily from the east. Very sensibly it didn’t stop at the deserted station – it was never a good idea to stop in the vicinity of the Gestapo. I knew that only too well, but I was never very good at listening to advice, especially my own.