Pavel & I (24 page)

‘That's how easy it is,' Anders said to himself, ‘to kill a man.'

He mused that there should have been more comfort to the thought.

Across from him, not five feet away, the watcher lay sprawled over his steering wheel, bloody spit slowly freezing upon his lip. For a
moment Anders thought about getting out from his sleeping bag and wiping him off. Then he remembered his purpose, and squeezed the butt of the Luger.

It was just as well he hadn't got up. The killer returned after mere minutes. The same purposeful walk. He let himself into the car on the passenger side and arranged the dead man so that his head lay thrown back over the headrest and the eyes lay closed under thick-veined lids. The bottle of schnapps he placed prominently upon the dash, and the blanket went over chest and belly, where the watcher had become wet with his dying. Having finished with these ministrations, the killer got out, closed the door gently and walked away. His boots, thought Anders, looked British.
You can strip off your uniform,
he thought,
but you still need warm feet.
He put the watcher down against the Colonel's account. The fat man was ripe for the sticking. All he needed to do now was reappear.

Fosko didn't make him wait too long. In fact, he made it easy for Anders. He strolled through the front door in the most casual of manners, pulling tight the mink around his shoulders. A luxurious swagger over to the watcher's car; a look through the windshield; a slow, deliberate rounding, taking note of the make, plate and tyres. Then the passenger door was opened for a second time. Huffing a little, the Colonel lowered himself into the seat. Reached over with delicate fingers to fish out the man's wallet and identification. Pocketed both without a second look, opened the glove compartment and searched it with a distracted air. Broke into song all of a sudden, a Christmas carol draped in schoolboy Latin, the voice a high tenor, dead words drifting through the air. The Colonel lit a cigar from out of his pocket, shaking out his fingers first to force enough life into them to be able to manipulate his match book. Continued humming to himself, the swine, past the cigar's soggy stump, his cheeks growing rosy in the cold that his Yuletide mood proved impotent to banish.

In short, the Colonel sat there, mere yards from the boy, and presented him with the easiest of targets: a fat man, sitting in a cloud of smoke, humming Latin. Nor was there any time constraint. He must have stayed there a full quarter-hour, smoking and humming and running a lazy hand over his scalp's massive sphere. Anders lay breathless, the Luger in his hand; the hand shaking; the other reaching forward to steady the first but adding little by way of calm; the gun barrel dancing in front of his eye; calling upon his anger to sustain him, now, when courage was needed and the fat man must die. For perhaps twenty minutes he lay thus, taking a shaky aim upon the Colonel's breast, his finger stiff on the trigger. He would have done it, too (he told himself), if his hands had been calm, and if it hadn't been for that eerie tenor, singing the baby Jesus in a long-dead tongue. What was it to him? This man had threatened him, had strangled him; was his enemy, and Pavel's; fucked boys (somehow); sat smoking and leering next to a dead man, red-eyed and lonely and British boots on his killer.

‘Shoot, you coward,' he barked at himself. ‘Shoot while you can.'

He did not shoot.

Then the moment passed and the Colonel got out of the car. Across the road, Pavel appeared in the house's doorway. In his arms lay Schlo', dead, the head dangling like a wilted flower's. Behind him there was the man with the patch, holding a gun with some embarrassment and saluting the Colonel with his left.

‘Get Richter to the villa,' the latter instructed, ‘and make sure someone gets rid of that body.' He pointed back to where the car's door still stood open, a bloom of crystals upon the window. ‘Oh – and tell my wife I'll be right home. I'll just pop up and listen to one final tune. Beethoven, Peterson. That girl loves Beethoven. I can't imagine why.'

Then they were gone – Pavel and One-Eye climbing into a car way down the road, and the Colonel mounting the stairs to see his woman
– and Anders still lay there, gun in hand, taking aim at an empty space. He might have cried, but the cold had dried out his eyes and stoppered up his tear ducts.

He returned to her one more time that night, his big face ruddy with cold, and a cigar on his breath. He let himself in with his own key and crept up to where she was sitting at the piano. There was no way of telling how long he had already been there when she finally noticed him. Strangely, it did not scare her. She was playing Beethoven in the dark.

Fosko lit a candle, pulled up a chair and sat next to her, attentive, listening to her play.

‘We have taken him into custody now,' he said in between sonatas.

‘Pavel, that is. He is wanted for questioning.'

He gave a pause.

‘Did you like him, my dear?'

Sonia noted the past tense; shrugged. Only her shoulders and her fingers moved.

‘Oh, I should say you liked him. Did you fuck him?'

‘No.'

‘You should have. If you liked him, you should have. Where is the harm in that?'

She went on playing, thinking, conceding to herself that perhaps, yes, she should have fucked him. It might have made for a memory, or a disappointment.

The Colonel got up to hover next to her. In the semi-dark she felt his girth like the weight of an executioner's axe. He was close enough to throw into shadow both her hands. His own were stroking the keyboard's lid.

‘Beethoven,' he said. ‘Beethoven was a romantic. A deaf man, obsessed with music. What could be more romantic than that?

‘You play nicely, my dear, but you play like clockwork. No passion. It makes a mockery of him.'

‘Please,' she told him, though she left her hands where they were.

‘Please don't break my fingers.'

He chuckled softly, then bent low to kiss her knuckles.

‘Good gosh. How melodramatic. Cold but melodramatic. That's just why I love you so.'

When he led her into the bedroom, he was as gentle as a groom on his first night of possession. He hoped, he said, that her abdominal pains had cleared up, and praised the curative powers of brandy. Halfway through she realised she did not mind the act, that her body responded naturally enough. Later yet, she lay awake while he dressed and smiled at the fact that a few hours ago she should have thought of killing him. How ridiculous! She might as well take a swipe at the moon, or try to gouge out the stars. He would survive and always be there, on a night like this, sitting in the shadows behind her, making conversation.

He kissed her goodbye upon her brow, and Sonia fell asleep to the thought that he might break her back sometime. He would use a hammer, she thought, an ordinary three-pound household hammer, and break her bone for bone.

There we are, Christmas Eve drawing to a close. Across town, the good people of Berlin are bidding one another Good Night and God Bless. Children, their tummies filled for the first time in ages, rolling themselves into their blankets, content for once in this year of scarcity and hopeful for their morning's future (though there are also those who're crying themselves to sleep, poor wretches). Over at Paul-chen's, yet another brood of children, some with bruises on their bodies and all of them wounded in their pride. They are sitting up
late, commiserating, already busy converting events into song, in the manner of the Ancients. For these boys, all life is Epic. Their chieftain, meanwhile, is absent to their telling. He is sitting on a rickety chair, alone and exposed to the draught of a hospital's long corridor, with his arm and teeth broken and something worse, cursing Pavel, the British, and that little rat of a boy, Anders. The latter can be found not half a mile away, trussed up in his Russian sleeping bag, and berating himself over a job undone; thinking that he has flunked some test of manhood, and in a rage with himself over it, and with the Lord God, too, whose language is Latin and to whom carols were sung. Before long it gets too cold for his anger, and he runs inside, up to where Pavel's rooms stand empty and his bed is soiled with icy mud. There he goes to sleep, exhausted, though not before he has stared, pale-faced, at the empty noose swinging in front of the window, cold and stiff to the touch. Right on top of him (though he does not spare her a thought just now), there is Sonia, sleeping, alone and dreamless, while the monkey, that bundle of irrepressible vitality, sits over her pillow, petting her hair in some curious reversal of mistress and beast, before it scuffles off to sniff curiously at her chamber pot's contents of frozen urine and drills a leathery paw into its surface. Its owner, the Colonel, is in his car driving westward, towards what by convention he calls his home. In this home, in the drawing room to be precise, his wife is sitting nervously under a giant tree's shadow, framing her face for the delight she means to display upon his entrance. Upstairs her children, a girl and a boy, lie excited at the prospect of Santa's presents, and their reunion with Daddy. ‘Perhaps,' confides the younger of the two, ‘perhaps I shall get a new coat, the colour of poppies.' Two flights down, in the house's over-heated cellar, Pavel is receiving a perfunctory beating before he is locked up in a cage that has been pinched from a similar basement closer to the centre of town, where it had – until the recent withdrawal of favours by that most capricious of maidens, History – served a similar purpose, to wit
the unofficial incarceration of enemies to a regime that flew, as its insignia, a skewed and broken cross. He does not seem to curse his fate, Pavel, though on occasion he raises an angry word about the boy, Salomon, who is dead now and had nothing to do with any of this. No questions are being asked of Pavel at the moment, the beating belonging to the sort that is to interrogation as foreplay is to sexual intercourse. Out east, in an unmarked office, an aristocratic officer in a Bolshevik greatcoat is poring over questions distinctly related to those on Pavel's interrogators' minds; poring over them in the form of a surprisingly thick secret-service file entitled ‘Richter, Jean P.' while his young adjutant, Lev, stands in one corner and plays Russian folk on a well-worn fiddle. Another file lies on Greatcoat's lap, open to a page that reveals a grainy surveillance photo of the Colonel, mouth agape and a fork midway between lens and eye. On his plate, toad-in-the-hole and mash, in an
ambiance
that can only be the British officers' mess. Both reader and fiddler take occasional, furtive glances at the phone, but the man they hope will call is dead (we saw him stabbed) and is presently being mutilated on Fosko's orders: a man is carving up his face, though ignorant as he is of the means of modern forensics, he leaves in place both the ears and the teeth. Elsewhere, in a billiards hall in Dahlem, a dozen ruffians, still upset by the disappearance of their pint-sized leader, are hotly debating the rules of succession. They need not occupy us unduly, no longer having any stake in this game of buy-and-sell; it has passed on to their occupiers, though both the Americans and the French seem blissfully ignorant of its commencement. Equally ignorant, though nightly plagued by the darkest of anticipations, is an old man in Alt-Moabit; hairs on his nose and Darwinian whiskers. He's had his Christmas sausage with his hosts, whom he calls ‘family' and deeply despises; for afters, they shared a song, a shot of plum brandy, and a tin of US Army orange juice. Now he's back in his cubbyhole, reading, thinking, brooding on life. It's where we will find him before the story is out. As for myself: I
was tired that night and worse – weary. I turned in soon after Pavel fell asleep.

For all my exhaustion, I was gratified to locate, in the depth of my heart, the budding promise of joy. It was getting time now for Pavel and me to sit and talk. When it came to interrogation, I was the Colonel's most trusted aide.

Pavel slept and thought he must be dreaming. One cheek wet upon the concrete floor. There was a man there, standing over him, wearing a winter coat and satchel. A man with an eye-patch, who smelled like coffee. He reached a hand down through the bars but did not touch.