I didn’t answer that. He wasn’t expecting me to. He was too busy looking around at the huge building site.
“Just think,” he said. “All of this will be a canal by 1950. Extraordinary.”
I had my doubts about that, which Savostin seemed to sense. “Comrade Stalin has ordered it,” he said, as if this were the only affirmation needed.
And in that place, and in that time, he was probably right.
When we reached Gebhardt’s hut, he supervised the removal of the body.
“If you need anything,” he said, “come to the guardhouse.” He looked around. “Which is where exactly? I’m not at all familiar with this camp.”
I pointed to the west, beyond the canteen. I felt like Virgil pointing out the sights in hell to Dante. I watched him walk away and went back into the hut.
The first thing I did was to turn over the mattress, not because I was looking for something but because I intended to have a sleep and I hardly wanted to lie on top of Gebhardt’s bloodstains. No one ever had enough sleep at K.A., but thinking’s no good if you’re tired. I took off his jacket, lay down, and closed my eyes. It wasn’t just lack of sleep that made me tired but the vodka, too. The deflated football that was my stomach wasn’t used to the stuff any more than my liver was. I closed my eyes and went to sleep wondering what the Soviet authorities were likely to do to me and twenty-four others if the death penalty had indeed been abolished. Was it possible there was a worse camp than the ones I had already seen?
A while later—I’ve no idea how long I slept, but it was still light outside—I sat up. The cigarettes were still in my jacket pocket so I lit another, but it wasn’t like a proper cigarette; there was a paper holder and only about three or four centimeters of tobacco—what the Ivans called a papirossi cigarette. These were Belomorkanal, which seemed only appropriate since that was a Russian brand introduced to commemorate the construction of another canal, this one connecting the White Sea to the Baltic. The Abwehr’s opinion of the Belomorkanal was that it had been a disaster: too shallow, making it useless to most seagoing vessels, not to mention the tens of thousands of prisoners sacrificed in its construction. I wondered if this particular canal would fare any better.
I finished the cigarette and aimed the butt at Stalin, and something about the way it struck the great leader’s nose made me get up and take a closer look at the paper portrait; and when I tugged it off the wall, I was surprised to see that the picture had neatly concealed a small shelved alcove about the size of a book. On the shelf were a notebook and a roll of banknotes. It wasn’t a wall safe, but in that place it was perhaps the next-best thing.
The roll of banknotes was almost 405 “gold” ruble notes—about three or four months’ wages for a Blue. This wasn’t a fortune unless you were a pleni. Two thousand rubles plus a gold wedding band might just be enough to bribe some better treatment inside an MVD jail in Stalingrad. I looked at the rubles again, just to make sure, and to my relief they all had that greasy, authentically Russian feel about them. I even held the bills up to the light coming through the window to check the watermark before folding them into the back pocket of my uniform breeches, which was the only one with a button and without a large hole.
The notebook had a red cover and was about the size of an identity card. It was full of cheap Russian paper that looked more like something flattened by a heavy object and that contained a surprise all of its own, for on one page there was a name beneath which were written some dates and some payment details, and these seemed to indicate that the pleni named was in the pay of Gebhardt. Not that this made the pleni a murderer, exactly, but it did help to explain how it was that the Blues were able to police the POWs so effectively.
But the date of one particular payment caught my eye: Wednesday, August 15. This was the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, and for some Catholic Germans, especially those from Saarland or Bavaria, it was also an important public holiday. But nearly everyone in camp remembered this as the day when Georg Oberheuser—a sergeant from Stuttgart—had been arrested by the MVD. Angry that this date was to be treated as a normal working day, Oberheuser had loudly denounced Stalin to everyone in our hut as a “wicked, godless bastard.” There were other, no less slanderous epithets he used as well, and all of them well deserved, no doubt, but we were all a little bit shaken when Oberheuser was taken away and never seen again, and by the knowledge that with no Ivans in our hut, Oberheuser had been betrayed to the Blues by another German.
The name in Gebhardt’s notebook was Konrad Metelmann—the young lieutenant I had naïvely resolved to look out for. It appeared that he’d been doing a better job of looking out for himself.
I did a bit of thinking after that and remembered how the Blues were always ordering our hut to appear in the canteen for an identity check. They would ask each man his name, rank, and serial number in the hope—we had supposed—of catching one of us out, for it was certainly the case that there were several SS officers who, believing themselves to be wanted for war crimes, were pretending to be someone else, someone who had been killed in the war. We were always questioned alone, with Gebhardt translating, and any one of us could have used such an opportunity to give the MVD information. The only reason none of us had connected this with Oberheuser was that there had been no identity check on the day of his arrest, which meant that Metelmann and Gebhardt must also have been using some kind of dead-letter drop.
The Russians had a saying: The best way to keep your friends in the Soviet Union is never to betray them. I’d never much liked Georg Oberheuser, but he didn’t deserve to be betrayed by one of his own comrades. According to Mrugowski, Oberheuser was tried by a People’s Court and sentenced to twenty years of labor and correction. Or at least that was what the camp commander had told Mrugowski. But I saw no reason to believe what Major Savostin had told me: that the great Stalin had abolished the death penalty. I’d seen far too many of my fellow countrymen shot at the side of the road on the long march out of Königsberg to accept the idea that summary execution was no longer routine in the Soviet Union. Maybe Oberheuser was dead and maybe he wasn’t. Either way, it was up to me to make things up to him. That’s the debt we owe the dead. To give them justice if we can. And a kind of justice if we can’t.
The rest of the plenis were coming back from work, and I went straight over to the canteen to beat the rush. Seeing Metelmann, I fell in behind him and waited for some indication that he was anxious. But Sajer spoke first:
“Are you really going to finger someone for the Ivans, Gunther?”
“That all depends,” I said, shuffling forward in the line.
“On what?”
“On me finding out who did it. Right now I haven’t got a clue. And by the way, I’ve been told that I’m one of the twenty-five the Ivans are going to pick if they don’t get a name. Just so you know that I’m taking this seriously.”
“Do you think they mean it?” asked Metelmann.
“Course they mean it,” said Sajer. “When do the Ivans ever issue an idle threat? You can always depend on them in that way at least. The bastards.”
“What are you going to do, Bernie?” asked Metelmann.
“How should I know?” I glared at Mrugowski. “This is all his fault. But for him, I’d have the same chance as everyone else.”
“Maybe you’ll find out something,” said Metelmann. “You were a good detective. That’s what people say.”