Tin Sky (17 page)

Bora found that he couldn’t leave the vehicle, because Mantau leant on the car door with all his weight as he kept vomiting insults. “Are you out of your mind?” he shouted back, extricating himself from behind the wheel to exit from the passenger’s side.

“You and your cohorts, I’ll have your heads for not letting us keep him!”

Angry as he himself was becoming, Bora tried to decipher Mantau’s rant in order to piece together the message.
Not letting us keep him
was the phrase that stood out of the jumble enough for him to grasp it had something to do with Khan Tibyetsky; his next thought was that Bentivegni had ordered, unbeknownst to him, a retaliatory raid to get the defector back into
Abwehr
custody. The barely formed theory collapsed under Mantau’s next charge, sputtered at him face-to-face. “We could have all
been poisoned, do you realize? Every man jack of us! Good thing the candy bars were left untouched —”

Bora was one to keep his distance. An energetic shove on his part sent Mantau reeling back a full step. “Are you telling me Tibyetsky was poisoned?”

“He was
killed
, damn you!”

They came close to blows in the following frantic moments, during which Mantau accused the
Abwehr
of murdering its own defector. “The Russian workers are those you called for and then diverted to us two days ago. I threw Stark out of bed at six this morning to have a confirmation; it’s no point in your denying it!”

The struggle to make sense of the disconnected pieces started again. Bora groped for an intelligible explanation. “The Russian workers? The old women? I called the
Gebietskommissar
to complain about their diversion elsewhere!”

“Sure you did. You called the day
after
they’d already been sent to us!”

Commissioner Stark, attracted out of his office by the commotion, divided the two of them, now on the verge of a boxing match.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen! Transgressing this way – it’s unheard of!” (“I’ll kill him!” Mantau foamed at the mouth. “If I don’t kill you first,” was Bora’s reply.) “Major Bora, Hauptsturmführer Mantau, you are forgetting yourselves.” He held them both by the arm and apart from each other, like fractious schoolboys. “We are looking into the matter now,” he said, seeking to pacify them. “You both applied for Russian labour at the same time. But, gentlemen, there’s much confusion behind the lines these days. Our uniformed train personnel cannot be held responsible if someone gets passengers off one station early.”

Bora felt as though he was waking from one nightmare into another, where Colonel Bentivegni was about to arrive. “Someone, Herr Gebietskommissar? It must have been someone with the authority to appropriate native workers and redirect them to a different destination!”

“Well, we don’t know who that person might be, do we? I’m sure the Hauptsturmführer here can search the list of local officials working for us in the rail service.”

Both officers were suddenly quiet. Mantau took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and neck. Bora desperately worked out priorities in his mind, and although Khan’s apparent poisoning loomed largest, the need to secure further information came first. “However they’re involved, we could begin by asking the women in question,” he said.

Mantau’s face fell. “I ordered for the lot of them to be strung up.”

“
What
? That’s knee-jerk for you. What a brilliant idea! And when is the execution —”

It was Mantau’s turn to look confused. He glanced at his watch and his voice trailed low. “About now.”

“Jesus Christ, call immediately: stop the hanging, or we may never know!”

Without stopping to argue, Odilo Mantau ran indoors. Stark took advantage of the pause to ask Bora, under his breath, “What’s got into you, Major? Don’t you know who he is?”

“I know exactly who he is.”

“Please keep me out of your conflict, whatever it’s about. If you horse fellows have to be so troublesome, you won’t get much space to manoeuvre out here. Trust me, some of us had the same gall back in ’34, and had to be taught a lesson.”

Being compared to an SA irritated him. Bora straightened his uniform. “I’m not a
horse fellow
, District Commissioner.”

“Worse: you’re a Canaris horse fellow. Will you please keep your mouth shut while you’re being helped?”

Bora walked to the
Kombinat
. His watch read barely 7.15 a.m.; Bentivegni would not board his plane for another half hour. But there was no practical way of informing him in time; it all had to wait until he could give the bad news in person. Thoughts of Khan’s vitality, of his death long before (or long after) it actually happened, of all that had become forever lost
with him, crowded Bora’s mind in the short stretch to Stark’s office. Mantau was just getting off the phone, and what residual hostility he still had in his system went into the hateful look he gave his Army colleague.

Bora ignored it. “For God’s sake, Hauptsturmführer, tell me what happened.”

“It’s too late for two of the Russian whores. I’m sparing the other three until I can milk them for all they know, but don’t expect me to take down the bodies: they’ll hang there until they rot.”

Were he not pressed for time, anger at the stupidity of this response would have led Bora to reopen the argument. “That’ll do wonders for our public image. Christ, will you at least let me know
how
Tibyetsky died?”

“As if you didn’t. He was poisoned.”

“How’s that possible? What did he eat?”

“It was as you said – he refused our food.”

“So how did the poison get into him, and how could
you all
have been poisoned?”

“I told you we don’t mollycoddle those in our custody, Bora. My colleagues and I ate the rest of the provisions in his trunk. Yes, we had a small party: why not? You don’t get American provisions every day. When evening came and Tibyetsky still refused to touch any food, I decided he could have his American-made chocolate rations. Those, we heard, are vile-tasting, and we didn’t care to try them.” Grudgingly Mantau fell silent when the commissioner, without entering, sternly put his head into the room and gestured for him to lower his voice, pulling the folding door closed to ensure their privacy. Then he took up the story again. “I took them to his cell myself last night.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know how many; all there were. What difference does it make? He demanded to see Bentivegni, demanded to see you. When his demands went nowhere, he threw a tantrum. He warned me he’d only eat a single ration in the morning,
and for the rest of the time he’d go on a hunger strike. Why all these questions, Bora? It’s clear how it happened! All there was in his stomach was chocolate and oat flour, with enough poison to kill him. They don’t know yet what kind; they think it was an alkaloid, highly concentrated. Shortly after 05.00 hours this morning my men woke me up to report that the prisoner was thrashing about and asking for help. When I walked in, he was convulsing. He was fine when he awoke at 05.00, and half an hour later he was dead.”

Bora spoke through gritted teeth. “But why do you think he was killed? It sounds as if he committed suicide.”

“Asking for help? No.”

“Christ! Didn’t you have capable medical personnel on hand to intervene right away?”

“No, they’re short-handed at the first-aid station; their personnel go back overnight. It took them less than a quarter of an hour to arrive, but the prisoner was gone within minutes.”

A small poster on the commissioner’s desk, advertising a Ukrainian folk dance on Sunday, struck Bora as something from another world. He stared at it, as did Mantau, wondering who had time for such things. “What are the alternatives? Either Khan carried poison with him in his food supply, in case he felt compelled to do away with himself, or the poison entered the rations
after
he came under your watch.”

“There’s a third alternative. You poisoned the rations before bringing them over.”

“You have to decide whether it was us or the Russian cleaning women, Hauptsturmführer.”

“It could have been arranged by you through them. It will come out, so you might as well own up to it.”

Keeping his own anger in check took more effort than Bora was willing to employ. “Seen from the outside, the same charge could be levelled at its sender. It is our command that was deprived of Commander Tibyetsky’s person.” (“Fuck you
and your command,” Mantau interrupted.) “All told, who had access to him while in your custody?”

“Other than Medical Corps personnel to ensure he had nothing to harm himself with, only my picked men and myself.
And
the Russian whore I hanged, who cleaned up his cell last night.”

“Hm. Who’s in charge of your Medical Corps unit?”

“The SS surgeon at the first-aid station on Sumskaya. Why? Who’s in charge of yours?”

“Colonel Hans Mayr, the Army surgeon at Hospital 169. And you can vouch for all your subordinates with clearance —”

“Of course, the same as you can vouch for yours. I’ll find out somehow that you planned all this, so don’t you dare come anywhere near the prison.”

7.25 a.m. There would be time, if he moved with haste, to at least try and view Khan’s body. But Mantau was still on his high horse, so Bora tried a different tactic. “We could negotiate.”

“There’s nothing to negotiate.”

“But there is. Would you or your
Leibstandarte
colleagues be interested in knowing where we took the T-34?”

It was the one detail, orally communicated, that could not have been tapped. Mantau’s blond snout scented the possibility of capitulation on Bora’s part. “Where?”

“Allow me to view the body, and I will tell.”

“I don’t trust you.”

Bora held his breath. Much as he dreaded having to welcome Bentivegni with a disastrous piece of news, adrenaline kept him functioning well for now. However, as soon as he had a moment to himself again, he’d come crashing down. “We stored the tank on Lui Pastera Street in the Tractor Factory district. Where’s the body?”

Mantau’s lips jutted out in a strange grimace, as if he were about to whistle or blow up a balloon. “At the Sumskaya first-aid station, near the former university hospital.”

Sumskaya, less than a kilometre from the Aerodrome. Finally a glimmer in the dark. “Will they let me in?” Bora asked.

“They’ll let you in.”

It was like floating on a piece of timber after a shipwreck, but was all that could be done at the moment. Bentivegni would have to take it from here on. Bora and Mantau left the commissioner’s office one after the other without speaking a single word, but Stark wouldn’t let them get away with it. His gold-yellow, dapper bulk stopped them in the hallway.

“Shake hands, both of you. You’re not leaving here until you shake hands.”

They reluctantly obeyed. Mantau left the
Kombinat
first; Bora was about to do the same when the commissioner held him back. “By the way, Major, SS Brigadeführer Reger-Saint Pierre decided to accept the stallion: a week from now my fine Karabakh will be on his way to Mirgorod. Sorry about that.” He slipped his freckled hand into his tunic pocket. “This ought to console you, though. From your quasi-father-in-law Standartenführer Schallenberg, untouched by censorship.”

The envelope was slightly larger than letter size, powder blue, and the handwriting on it was Dikta’s.

“You’re blushing,” Stark grinned. “I imagined it wouldn’t actually
be
from Schallenberg.”

Bora thanked him, and jealously put the envelope away. “I would appreciate it, Herr Gebietskommissar, if you didn’t mention this morning’s episode.”

“I didn’t reach my position by mentioning things, Major. Take along the bottled sulphur dioxide or send for it soon; it won’t last if you leave it here.”

“I’ll take it now.”

The Kharkov University hospital belonged to the outer rim of the spectacular concrete semicircle that war had not succeeded in dismantling altogether: the gigantic Derzhprom complex of office buildings on the square that had been renamed Platz der Wehrmacht as late as 1941, but which since the tank battle in March had been dedicated to the
Leibstandarte
division. They
said that escaped animals from the zoo were the only ones to live in the abandoned citadel of battered cement; someone supposedly had taken photos of chimpanzees crouching on windowsills. Across from the hospital, on Sumskaya Street, was the SS-run first-aid station. Bora arrived there shortly after 8 a.m., and encountered no difficulties getting in. He should have become suspicious at that point, but there was a chance that Mantau had phoned ahead to lift the ban on his presence.

In reality, Khan Tibyetsky’s body was nowhere in the building, or so the SS surgeon told him. “Are you sure it wasn’t the ex-Red Army hospital two blocks from here?”

In mid-March, the
Leibstandarte
had torched the Red Army hospital with hundreds of wounded in it, on Mantau’s orders. Bora’s self-restraint came in handy. “I doubt it.”

“Then maybe it’s the
Wehrmacht
hospital in District Six.”

The SS meant Hospital 169. Possible. Bora couldn’t very well search the premises, and regardless of their attitude, the medical staff here did seem uninformed about a body laced with poison. He asked the surgeon for permission to telephone the other facility, and when he spoke to someone there, he received another denial. “Shortly after 05.30 hours, you say? This morning? Not here.”