The Folks at Fifty-Eight (11 page)

“So who was this Russian officer? The one you killed in Berlin?”

“There were many more than one.”

“All of them Russian officers?”

“Yes.”

“It may be a naive question, but why?”

“The teachings of Kali: cut the head from the demon, and the body dies.”

She spoke in monotones and stared into her own private torment. Hammond pressed.

“So who was the first?”

He had raised his voice, intending to interrupt her abstraction. She snapped back at him.

“In Berlin?”

“I suppose so.”

“I didn’t know his name, but he was the same filthy Bolshevik pig who made me watch while his soldiers gang-raped and then murdered my mother. The same filthy Bolshevik pig who laughed in my face when I begged them not to hurt her. The same filthy Bolshevik pig, who mauled at my breasts and put his hand between my legs while he held me there. The same filthy Bolshevik pig who left his animals to defile and murder my mother, while he took me into the next room and raped me. The same filthy Bolshevik pig whose laughing face I can still see, and whose filthy breath and vile stench I can still smell whenever I close my eyes.”

She suddenly directed her anger to the old woman.

“You’re German. I shouldn’t need to tell you. You must have seen enough of them.

“Well, I swore an oath on the grave of my mother, and I swear it again now. I don’t give a damn if you think I’m a murdering lunatic bitch. I won’t stop and I won’t rest. Not until I’m dead, or until I’ve wiped every single filthy Bolshevik pig from the face of this earth.”

A long uncomfortable ten seconds followed, during which nobody spoke.

Hammond didn’t quite know what to say. He just knew that he suddenly felt so sorry for her, and, for a reason he didn’t fully understand, he also felt ashamed.

The old woman broke the silence. She placed a comforting arm around the girl’s shoulders and led her from the table.

“I understand, my dear. We both understand, and we’re sorry. Now you’re cold, and shivering. Come and sit by the fire, warm yourself while I make some more coffee.”

Paslov was a man to instil terror in friend and enemy alike, and panic in all those who considered themselves somewhere between the two. Obeyed without question and avoided if possible, he held the power of life or death over every captive German between Berlin and the Czechoslovakian border. Stanislav Paslov was also a man who had more reason than most to hate those same captive Germans.

Not that Paslov was, at first sight, a striking or imposing individual; all appearance to the contrary. Stanislav Paslov was short and thin, with greying hair, bad skin, and bad teeth, the product of a desperate childhood spent under the yoke of Romanov indifference.

Twenty-five years of personal sacrifice in the Bolshevik cause, topped off by two years of malnutrition and abuse in a Nazi labour camp, had aggravated that earlier decay. However, and despite his lack of immediate presence or stature, Paslov terrified everyone he met, important official and lowest proletarian alike. This was partly due to him being the regional head of state security, and in part because Stanislav Paslov was known to be a close friend of Lavrenti Beria.

It was gone seven when Paslov walked through the door of his Leipzig apartment. He dropped a stack of folders on to the table, and turned to his wife as she came out from the kitchen with his customary evening glass of schnapps.

To those who knew them both, Anna was everything Stanislav was not. She was round and plump, with homely features and soft brown eyes, a gentle and pleasant woman, with a ready smile and a genuine warmth of spirit.

“You are late,” she said, then noticed his downcast demeanour. “What is the matter? What is wrong, Stanislav? Tell me.”

She passed him his drink, and then brushed his cheek with her hand. He took her hand in his and softly kissed each fingertip in turn. It was a demonstration of affection and gentleness that anyone who knew Comrade Colonel Paslov, the cold and calculating state policeman and infamous public tyrant, would have found hard to believe. But this was the other side of Paslov, the personal and private side. He forced a smile, and shrugged.

“We lost her.”

“Lost who? What happened?”

Paslov didn’t want to say too much. There was so much about his work he couldn’t tell her; so much that was too secret, or too sensitive, or simply too grisly to relate. So much, too, that made him feel ashamed.

“Just a girl who killed some Red Army officers. We were taking her down to Prague by train. Someone helped her to escape, and now we do not know where she is.”

Anna stared pointedly at the folders on the table.

“So you think being late is not bad enough? Now you want to ruin what is left of our evening by going through that lot as well.”

“I am sorry, Anna, just for an hour or so. It is important. You see, I have to be missing something about this girl and her escape. It has to be something simple, something obvious; it always is. Whoever rescued her was a professional, an American agent, we think, but I cannot understand why they should want her. Now Beria is involved. He telephoned. He wants her found at all costs, but he would not say why. I do not understand why she is so important to him. There has to be something I have missed, something stupidly obvious.”

Anna suddenly looked worried.

“Beria?”

“Yes. After sending her down to Prague, I was supposed to send her to him. It was one of his people who told us where she was hiding. Now she has escaped, and he is not happy.”

Stanislav Paslov controlled a large section of Soviet-occupied territory with terror and fear, and the proverbial fist of iron. However, inside this particular Leipzig apartment, his wife maintained a similar measure of control, with warmth, and love, and the occasional manufactured frown. He was watching that frown as she said,

“You have forty-five minutes, until dinner is ready; not a second more.”

He nodded gratefully. She returned to the kitchen and closed the door. He sat down at the table, opened the first file, and began scanning the documents.

The first showed sketches of a derelict apartment in Berlin, where a Russian army detachment had discovered the mutilated remains of an officer. It provided a copy and translation of some political graffiti found drawn on the wall, and a sketch of a reverse fylfot cross. An attached forensic report confirmed that the killer had used the victim’s blood to draw the symbol. It went on to describe the condition of the corpse, and provide drawings of similar crosses carved into the face and torso. At the bottom of the page, a number of other files were referenced. Paslov searched through the pile until he found them.

Each contained reports of unsolved gruesome murders. The first had been committed in Prague, the remaining five in Berlin. Each of the victims had been officers in the Red Army, and each had died under similarly bizarre circumstances.

They had been found naked, bound hand and foot with a woman’s silk stockings, their mouths gagged with a pair of silk knickers. In every case, reverse fylfot crosses had been gouged into the face and torso, and the genitals crudely hacked away. The cause of death given was the same in each case: loss of blood, from stab wounds to the jugular veins. Traces of semen and strands of blonde hair had also been found at each of the scenes.

Paslov downed the schnapps. He shuddered as the harshness hit home, and then read on.

No less than seven ‘experts’ had documented their opinions on the reverse fylfot crosses. Their conclusions ranged from the sign of a Hindu goddess, to all manner of Nazi insignia and trappings of the occult. They had considered geographic origins as diverse as Scandinavia, Central America and the Indian subcontinent. Some claimed the sign to be Pagan, some said it was Runic, others thought Mayan or Celtic. Someone had even suggested medieval witchcraft.

They had seemingly agreed on only one thing. It wasn’t an official Nazi-party symbol.

As Paslov studied the sign, he recalled an earlier conversation on the subject of Thor’s hammer. One of the ‘experts’ had claimed it was that, and said the connection between the hammer and the reverse fylfot dated back to medieval Norse and England before Christianity. Norse mythology claimed that Thor’s Hammer could strike anywhere, any time, and he never missed his target. That same expert had insisted it was a message to the authorities: there would be more killings, and the killer would strike without warning.

That was when Paslov had headed for home. He’d had enough of ‘experts’ for one day.

But it still left him with many questions, and no answers. What was the symbol, and what, if anything, did it mean? Was it the sign of some fanatical neo-Nazi group, targeting Red Army officers, or just a haphazard scrawl from the warped mind of a lunatic girl? When he had interviewed the girl she seemed sane enough, and denied any knowledge of the killings. When he showed her the reverse fylfot cross, she shrugged and looked blankly at it. She said she had no idea what it was, but he hadn’t believed her then and he still didn’t.

He put the reports aside, and worked his way through the stack until he came to the file on the girl. It contained scant information. The profile had her photograph glued to the top. The Soviet authorities had obviously taken the picture when she was in custody. The result did her less than justice. The information gave her full name as Catherine Louise Schmidt, born in Köpenick, Berlin, on May 29, 1928, to parents Joseph Conrad and Marta Alice Schmidt.

Apart from a transcript of Paslov’s interview with her, the arrest report, and two witness statements, there was nothing else. The girl had blonde hair and had been detained coming out of the same derelict apartment block in which they’d found the latest victim. Both witnesses identified her as having been with the victim, in a local bar, on the previous night.

During Paslov’s interview with her, he had asked about her parents. She said her father had been assassinated in Prague during the war, and her mother had been raped and murdered by Red Army soldiers in Berlin. That offered an obvious motive, but the reason Paslov and the MGB had been called in was not the cross-border murders of Red Army officers, or the alleged Soviet responsibility for the death of the mother.

It had been an early morning call from Lavrenti Beria, telling Paslov about the girl’s arrest. Beria had also talked about the identity of her former guardian and, it was rumoured, lover. The man had been a friend of the family and a close colleague of her late father. Following Schmidt’s death, he had taken over all espionage activities for the then Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He was Gestapo Kriminaldirektor Martin Kube.

But Kube was now dead. Paslov had no doubt about that, because he and the Smersh teams had located and identified Kube’s body in Berlin. According to a note from the records clerk, Lavrenti Beria now held the file on the ex-Gestapo spymaster. However, Paslov still had the file on the father; there might be something in that. He found it at the bottom of the stack.

Documents within the folder affirmed that Oberführer Josef Conrad Schmidt had been an important Nazi during the early years of the war. He would undoubtedly have gone on to greater rank and infamy, had he not been assassinated in central Prague, at four p.m. on May 27, 1942. Eight hours earlier, in a northern suburb of the same city, a bomb thrown into his car had fatally injured Schmidt’s close friend and colleague, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Czech resistance fighters, parachuted in by the British, had assassinated Heydrich in the morning and Schmidt in the afternoon. It had been a disastrous day for the Third Reich.

So, Paslov thought, where was the connection and what was the connection? There had to be one. Was the girl part of some fanatical group, left over from the old Prague SS and Gestapo? If so, what group and why her? Her father had been important, but he hadn’t been an iconic figure, or someone whose name could be used to rally support. He had just been another ruthless and fanatical SS colonel, and there had been plenty of those.

Paslov moved on. It had to be something connected with Martin Kube. Kube was dead, so why did Beria suddenly need his file? A thought occurred. Perhaps, before he died, Kube had given the girl some of the old Prague espionage network files to look after? Perhaps she still had them? Was that why the Americans had rescued her? Was that why Beria wanted her? It made sense, but where would she have hidden them, assuming they existed?

He shook his head. There was no proof they did. Yet again, he was going around in circles. His wife saved him from any further guesswork and frustration. She came in with a stack of plates and cutlery and told him to get his junk off her table. He didn’t argue.

Two minutes later they were sitting at the table, eating their meals, when he suddenly remembered something. In all the commotion over the girl, he had forgotten about it.

“The other day, you asked about Lavrenti; about why we have not seen him for so long.”

“Yes, I remember. I was worried that we might have fallen out of favour. You know how easily such things can happen these days. You laughed. You said he was probably just busy.”

He nodded, but on this occasion there was no humour in him.

“Yesterday I heard something else, about the weapons the Americans have: the atom bombs. I am told that Stalin has ordered Lavrenti to build the same. He has set a very tight deadline for the first test, and this is now Lavrenti’s absolute priority.”

“So you were right then; he is busy, but why the sudden panic?”

Paslov tried not to show his concern and scepticism as he answered.

“Stalin believes that only the atom bomb will halt western imperialism and allow our continued expansion.”

“But you obviously do not agree?”

Paslov smiled. She knew him too well. He could never fool her. He recalled an earlier time.