Tin Sky (54 page)

“Precisely.” Von Salomon made an about-face from the window. “He’s been absent without
any
justification since the thirty-first, do you understand? His automobile was recovered early this morning in an abandoned industrial area outside Kharkov, with his wallet and pistol inside. Gone of his own accord, it seems. No signs of violence; nothing. The city is rife with rumours. Magunia’s visit is seen as the precipitating factor. There’s wild gossip going around that a tape was found on Tuesday in Stark’s desk accusing him of illicit deals and other such things.” (Bora, who’d slipped the tape in the drawer himself, showed mild surprise: “Really?”) “And that’s not all. The Gestapo went through the District Commissariat’s storage and supply areas and supposedly discovered a number of crates – I don’t know what kind, Major,
crates
– filled with dirt and rocks, can you believe? Like in the film
Nosferatu
, eh? But the vampire only carried around soil from Transylvania! Rumour has it that the crates used to contain valuables, because bits of gold jewellery were found in the dirt after sifting… It’d be enormous! I have from a reliable source that the suspicion is that Stark kept gold extracted from the Jewish community in Kiev two years ago and plans to run off with it somewhere – some say Switzerland, others over to the Reds… Officially none of it is surfacing, of course. The story of the tape, then! Why would Stark keep a compromising tape in his desk? What do you say, Major?”

“I say we ought to keep clear-minded about hearsay, Herr Oberstleutnant. I don’t see how the commissioner could reach Switzerland from here with a load of stolen gold.”

“Right.”

“And to the
Reds
? Only a defector would go over to the Reds!”

“Right.”

“As for the tape in his desk, admitting that it does exist… If it’s not the only copy of whatever it is, it’d be useless for him or anyone to destroy it. Others are certainly circulating.”

“Right, right.” Von Salomon stopped his pacing. He checked the hour on his wristwatch and then cracked his knuckles. “You
are
clear-minded. It’s all hearsay, on the whole. They’re looking for Stark all over town. Maybe he was upset about Magunia’s visit and shot himself.”

“Not with his pistol, if – as you say – it was left inside the car.”

“Oh, well, not that it matters to us. The Army has everything to gain from staying away from it all. Back to business: when are you off to Bespalovka for good?”

“On Saturday at the latest, Herr Oberstleutnant.”

“Excellent. I’ll see you in the field, then. And would you do me a favour, Major Bora? Kindly give a ride to Heeresoberpfarrer Galette as you leave the building.”

Bora would have done so in any case, for reasons of his own. Senior Army Chaplain Father Galette stopped by divisional headquarters twice a week, Thursday and Sunday. After lunch Bora drove him to his lodgings, and since the chaplain had with him his portable altar and all he needed to say Mass, he volunteered to help him with it to his second-floor room.

It would be a good time to take advantage of the situation and have his confession heard, but Bora was not in a revelatory frame of mind at the moment. He did, however, entrust Khan’s film reel and Weller’s note to the priest. “Under the seal of the sacrament of penance,” he specified. “To be turned in on my behalf to Chief of
Abwehr
Central Office, Colonel Eccard von Bentivegni, when you reach Berlin.”

As Hohmann’s one-time secretary, Galette seldom enquired of the cardinals’ former students beyond the bare minimum. He did not ask why Bora chose to avoid the
Abwehr
chain of command on the eastern front. He safely put away what he’d been given. “His Eminence hasn’t heard from you in some time, Major,” he said, a reasonable comeback. “He wishes you
to remember that for our Holy Mother Church no action is so dire that it forever changes the man who commits it, provided there’s repentance.”

Bora did not smile, but remained agreeable. “Repentance is where the rub is,
Heeresoberpfarrer
. I feel none whatever.”

From Galette’s downtown quarters to Pomorki the distance was less than nine kilometres; Bora doubled it by using unguarded minor roads. When he drove through the open gate Nyusha was outside the dacha, searching for eggs where the chickens laid them in the garden. She looked up in alarm before she recognized him. Bora wondered when his arrival would no longer make women react in fear. He watched her wipe her hands on her apron and start towards the door to announce his visit.

“I don’t need to come in,” he told her. He hadn’t been able to scrape up much sugar: there was less than a hundred grams in the paper bag he handed the girl. “Give this to the most esteemed, the
mnogouvazhaemaya
Larisa Vasilievna, from Martyn Friderikovich and with Commander Tibyetsky’s compliments.”

“… and with Commander Tibyetsky’s compliments,” Nyusha repeated, spelling the words out. “Yes, sir.” Eggs formed little bumps in the pockets of her apron; beads of perspiration dotted the peach fuzz of her young face. Who knows, her soldier husband might have imagined her this way when he died, standing under the sun in a lush garden – minus a German officer.

Bora felt, not for the first time, that he belonged nowhere. The last image he’d somehow prearranged for his own death was Remedios’ in Spain, because Remedios stood for all women before and since, including his wife. But he no more fitted in 1937 Spain than in 1943 Ukraine: the awareness made him free, or alone, or both. He said, “Thank the esteemed Larisa Vasilievna ever so much for showing me her ‘beautiful corner’, and ask her to pray to Our Lady of Oseryan for my brother and myself.”

MEREFA

There were still a few things to do before leaving the schoolhouse to radiomen from the 7th Panzer. At 3.45 p.m. Bora called in his orderly.

“Go to the train station, Kostya. Your wife is coming.” He ignored the young man’s astonishment by continuing to transfer documents from the desk to his briefcase. “Take your things with you. Here are your papers: she has hers. You’re to climb on the train and travel with her to my family’s in Germany: there’s work for you at Borna, which you’ll like. Whatever happens, take my advice: don’t come back to Russia afterwards – hide out if you have to.”

Kostya began to cry. Bora, however, was in a cranky mood and not up to displays of emotion. “Yes, yes, fine. That’s enough. You have ten minutes to get there: take the sentry along with you to bring back the droshky. He’ll look after the chicks, don’t you worry. Be nice to your girl, and let her wear trousers once in a while.”

It felt lonely in the building after everyone left. Bora packed the odds and ends he hadn’t already transferred to Bespalovka in the past few days. From the open windows the chatter of birds, far and near, entered the room, and it was the only sound. He’d given the sentry the night off in order to collect his thoughts, or to take one last risk. Since Monday, it was the first occasion he’d had to consider things in a less pressing, immediate manner. He anticipated there would be a rise in anxiety as a result, when in fact it was bodily weariness that had crept in; more an irresistible, nearly desperate need to rest. In the frantic activity of the last several days he’d burned the candle at both ends; tension and lack of sleep made every muscle feel strained and sore, as if he’d been in a fist fight. His entire system wanted to shut down. Bora sat on his bed telling himself he wasn’t one to drop off during the day, much less when he had work to do – which was his last consideration before falling asleep.

In his dream, he lay with Dikta in their Prague room. It was all sweetness, not a back-breaking contest as their lovemaking often turned out to be. In Prague she’d been angry, and yet (to convince him not to go back to Russia? Who knows?) she’d given him more sweetness than he’d ever experienced. They’d shared such love, the recollection on awakening made him feel full of tenderness instead of merely aroused. In the sultry afternoon Bora tried to fall asleep again so that he might recapture fragments of the scene. All that emerged from his drowsiness was the ceiling of the hotel room, not as it was but cheaply ornate, tiles of pressed tin like those in the Narodnaya Slava movie house. Or no, not a ceiling, either: a borderless metal sheet, an immense aeroplane wing hovering down over the bed, a tin sky. It was unpleasant and oppressive and it woke him up for good in a state of foreboding and alert.

An hour later, Bora was burning in the wood stove the handful of papers he wouldn’t take along. Kaspar Bernoulli must have parked on the road because he didn’t hear the squeal of gravel under the tyres, only the sound of displaced pebbles as someone approached the door.

“Major Bora?”

“Come in, Judge.”

In his shirtsleeves and braces, Bora started to reach for his blouse when Bernoulli shook his head. “As you were, please. Continue what you’re doing.” He was himself severely attired as usual, and the glare from the window drew green and blue twin crescents on the glass of his spectacles. It made one wonder how he could see behind those colourful mirrors.

The heat and stillness in the room, a stunned silence all around, made this no less a ghostly time than the middle of the night. As soon as Bernoulli reached the middle of the room and stood there, his dark eyes became visible behind the lenses. “I’m returning to Berlin, Major Bora.”

“I thought you might be.”

“Is there anything you’d like me to hand-carry there?”

“No, thank you.”

“Not even for Colonel Bentivegni?”

“No.”

The burning bits of paper let out a crisp, acidic odour. Bernoulli observed the young man’s frowning paleness, his exacting care over the disposal. He said, “You must be aware of Commissioner Stark’s disappearance.”

“Yes.” Bora looked over, stared the military judge straight in the eye. “More than aware, Heeresrichter.” He crumpled a typewritten sheet and lit it with a match. “In Kiev you asked me whether I could prove who killed Platonov and my notorious relative, Khan Tibyetsky. Well, I now can.”

“So.” Bernoulli inhaled deeply, smelling as it seemed the invisible smoke. Outside, flies banged against the netting of the windows, unable to get in. “And I take it that doesn’t make you feel better.”

“Not one bit.”

“Tell me at least there was a higher motivation behind the crimes.”

“There wasn’t. Forgive me if I don’t say more about it, Dr Bernoulli. It’s best if we drop the subject.”

A fairly long silence followed, during which Bora also burned sketches and half-done watercolours from his trunk. The judge remained standing. Between them, next to its powder-blue envelope, Dikta’s studio portrait lay face down on the desk.

“Objectively, Major, you do look and sound rather troubled for one who’s solved a difficult case.”

Nothing else was said to elicit disclosure of any kind on Bora’s part. However, the photograph on the wooden surface automatically became the focus of both men’s interest, merely by lying there. Dikta needn’t be mentioned to be recognized as a factor or to subjugate their thoughts and channel desire, curiosity, male resentment. Bora acknowledged the guest’s attention on the rectangle of matte paper.

“I keep telling myself it’s not the case, but I think that by volunteering again I might have lost her.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“Such things are possible.”

Surprisingly, or merely because his grief was beyond shame and well past social conventions, Bora did not react when the judge reached for the photograph and turned it over.

The result was a dispassionate, careful scrutiny. Bernoulli’s pensive face lost none of its sternness; it revealed how under his eyes the extreme intimacy of the image, its significance as a means of private seduction disassembled into its elements, becoming nothing else – and nothing more – than crucial evidence. No comments were called for. But clinicians make diagnoses; judges emit sentences. Bernoulli scrupulously replaced the portrait in its envelope. “Allow me,” he said. With steady-fingered hands he tore envelope and photo in half, and then in half again. “It is necessary.” One step took him next to Bora by the stove. He tossed the fragments in the fire, where they curled into a bluish flame and were gone. “This, too, is measured according to the St Petersburg Paradox.”

The determination of the value of an object must be based not on its price, but rather on the utility it can bring.

Bora tasted blood. His lower lip, bitten through, did not hurt, however. He rigorously kept dropping shreds in the stove until he was done. Save a farewell, he and Bernoulli had no further exchange until the judge left the schoolhouse, bound for the Alexandrovka turn-off. From there he’d travel to the Rogany airfield by way of Khoroshevo and Bestyudovka. Up to Alexandrovka, it was the same itinerary Bora himself, having relinquished his post to the radiomen, followed the day after, continuing, however, eastwards to Borovoye.

FRIDAY 4 JUNE, BOROVOYE

Lattmann turned down the volume on the radio. Some melancholy tune about homeland and shining stars was being crooned, and once the dial turned to the left the singer sounded far away, lost at the bottom of a solitary well.

He and Bora had no need for explanations or details. Geko Stark’s final exit was an accepted given, so much so that Lattmann didn’t ask about it, and his first news for his friend was that Krasny Yar had caught fire. “You can see the smoke drifting from the rise out there; it covered the sun at one point. That nutty priest of yours carried out his threat after all. The Ukrainian police caught him red-handed and arrested him, but it’s likely the Autocephalous Orthodox Church will plead for his release. It smells like charcoal if you pay attention. Ashes come down when the wind’s right.”