‘Hossbach.’ It looked for a moment as if Hunyadi was going to say more, but he didn’t, leaving the man’s name to hover in the air like the tone of a lightly struck bell.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Hossbach, replacing the receiver in its cradle. ‘I thought they shipped you out in chains!’
‘I managed to get loose,’ remarked Hunyadi.
‘So,’ Hossbach narrowed his eyes in confusion, ‘are you back on the force?’
‘Not exactly. I’m doing some work for an old acquaintance.’
‘And you need my help?’ Hossbach wondered aloud.
‘I need you to get out of my office.’
And now the irritating smile began to spread across Hossbach’s face. ‘Well now, Hunyadi,’ he began, ‘I’m just not sure that’s possible.’
Hunyadi removed the envelope from his coat pocket and began to rummage through its contents.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Hossbach.
‘It’s in here somewhere,’ Hunyadi answered vaguely.
‘I’m damned if I’m giving up this office!’ shouted Hossbach, the smile still weirdly bolted to his cheeks.
‘You may well be, at that,’ answered Hunyadi. ‘Ah! Here it is.’ He pulled out a business card, bearing the initials AH, intricately twined into a monogram. Below that was a number, written in black fountain pen. Hunyadi placed the card down on the desk and, with one finger, slid it across to the detective. Then he picked up the phone receiver and handed it to Hossbach. ‘Make the call,’ he said. ‘I’ll be waiting right outside.’
Having returned to the hallway, Hunyadi closed the office door behind him. He breathed in the familiar smell of the office: a combination of cigarette ash, hair tonic, sweat, the eye-watering reek of mimeograph ink and of over-brewed coffee, although Hunyadi doubted that any real coffee had been drunk here in a long time. The air was filled with the clatter of typewriters and the voices of men who smoked too much, none of which he could distinctly hear, so that they merged into a throaty purr whose familiarity Hunyadi found reassuring.
After a few minutes, the door opened and Hossbach stepped into the hall. He was clutching a small orchid in an earthenware pot. His face was utterly white, as if the blood had drained out of his heart like dirty water from a bath. He said nothing as he walked away to find another office, the orchid stem wobbling over his shoulder, as if waving goodbye to Hunyadi.
On the night of 12 April 1945, Kirov, Pekkala and their guide found themselves strapped into uncomfortable metal seats in the unheated cargo bay of a Junkers transport plane.
Pekkala looked around at the aircraft’s curved frame supports, which arched down the bare metal of the interior walls, giving him the impression that he had been swallowed by a whale. Just then, Pekkala could not remember whether the story of Jonah had actually taken place or if it was simply the invention of some long-dead holy man, intended to steer the listener towards some greater truth which now eluded him.
The Junkers had been captured the year before when Russian troops overran an airfield near Orel. Since then, it had been used in several missions that involved dropping supplies or spare parts to Red Army soldiers encircled by the German Army.
On this occasion, however, the cargo was human.
Beside Pekkala sat Kirov. For the fifth time, the major was checking his parachute. Still echoing in Kirov’s head were the words of the jump instructor who had met them at the airport and having described how they would be jumping from the aircraft, went on to explain that, if his chute failed, he would reach a terminal velocity of approximately 110 miles per hour, the speed at which he would strike the ground, whether he fell from 500 or 5,000 feet, and that when he did strike the ground, he would break every bone in his body, even the tiny ones in his ears. In spite of the matter-of-fact delivery of this information, the instructor had meant this to be reassuring, since it would all be over in a second and there would be no time for feeling any pain.
Kirov, however, was having trouble seeing it that way. As he peered at the various straps and clips, he realised that he had no idea whether the parachute had been correctly assembled or not, and he was afraid to touch anything in case he accidentally rearranged or broke some important part, which would cause him to be gelatinised on impact.
He cast a scathing glance at Pekkala, who did not seem at all troubled by the fact that they would soon be hurling themselves into space. In fact, to judge from the look on Pekkala’s face, he appeared to be looking forward to it.
Muttering curses he knew no one would hear above the rumble of the Junkers’ engines, Kirov went back to checking his equipment.
Opposite them was their guide, a grim-faced man with a German accent, who introduced himself as Corporal Luther Strohmeyer.
One year before, Strohmeyer had been an Untersturmfuhrer, or lieutenant, commanding a much reduced company of Panzer Grenadiers from the SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’. During the same vast clash of armour in which his present mode of transport had been captured, Strohmeyer had been ordered to lead a frontal assault on a town called Fatezh. His orders were to attack without any preliminary bombardment of the town which, since it involved traversing a wide expanse of open ground, was tantamount to suicide. Assuming that there must have been a mistake somewhere up the line, Strohmeyer took matters into his own hands and ordered a mortar barrage on Fatezh. The Soviet defenders, surprised and out-gunned, immediately retreated, enabling Strohmeyer and his men to capture the town without a single casualty.
For this, Strohmeyer had expected an Iron Cross 1st Class at the very least, or perhaps even a Knight’s Cross to hang around his throat.
But this was not what happened.
It emerged that Strohmeyer’s company had been selected as a diversion for a much larger attack taking place to the north. He and his men were to be sacrificed. None had been expected to survive. As a result of Strohmeyer’s successful capture of Fatezh, he was charged with failing to carry out an order in the spirit in which it was given. He still had no idea what that really meant. The result, however, was exile for the duration of the war to a group known as Parachute Battalion 500, formed largely out of troops who, after disgracing themselves in one way or another, had been stripped of their rank and decorations and bundled into a military formation for whom survival was an even more remote prospect than it had been for them when they were regular soldiers.
In May of 1944, the battalion was sent to capture the Communist partisan leader Tito in his remote mountain hideaway near Dvor in western Bosnia. Not only did the battalion fail to capture Tito, but more than eight hundred of the thousand men taking part in the mission were killed or captured, thanks to a tip which the Communists had received before the battalion had even set out on their mission.
The man who tipped them off was Luther Strohmeyer, who had passed a message through an informant at the camp where the battalion underwent parachute training. Driven by bitterness at how he had been treated, the fanaticism with which Strohmeyer had entered the war on the side of the Fascists transferred almost seamlessly to the Communist cause.
Only rarely, in the months ahead, would the guilt of what he’d done emerge from the dark corners of his mind to torment Strohmeyer. Then images of the men whose deaths he had assured would flash behind his eyes and he would twitch and jerk his head, as if someone were holding a lit match too close to his face.
As soon as his feet touched the ground in Bosnia, he deserted to Soviet troops stationed in Dvor. From there, he was transferred to Moscow and cautiously welcomed as a hero for his role in saving Tito’s life.