THAT NIGHT, MAX PRAYED for it to snow to cover the tracks of Kalinka and the Przewalski’s horses, which led away from the old waterworks like a trail of bread crumbs, but no snow came—not so much as a flake. Max started to brush over the tracks, but this simply made their trail bigger and more obvious. He racked his brains for an idea as to how he might cover them effectively but none came. Finally, he decided that if he were asked about the tracks by Grenzmann, he would have to tell the German SS captain that the tracks had probably been made by deer or llamas; there were still a few around that the Germans had not killed and eaten.

If there wasn’t much that Max could do about concealing a suspicious-looking trail in the snow, there was something he could do about Kalinka’s “cave paintings,” and the old man reluctantly decided to clean the paintings off the walls of the water tank—just in case the captain turned up and put two and two together about what and perhaps who had been staying there. So as soon as he had given up trying to cover the trail of Kalinka and the horses, Max trudged back to his cottage to fetch a bucket, a broom, a brush and some soap flakes, and, returning immediately to the water tank, began to try to scrub the walls clean of evidence.

It wasn’t long before he made an uncomfortable discovery: the paintings could not be removed from the stone wall of the water tank. Try as he might—and he tried all night long—the best of them remained indelibly all around the circular wall, as if they’d been there for thousands of years. Soap and water and huge amounts of scrubbing, which left Max lathered in sweat, had absolutely no effect on Kalinka’s perfect little black palm prints and her excellent paintings of the Przewalski’s horses. At first, Max was puzzled that something so new could prove to be so indestructible; if it hadn’t been inconvenient to his plans, he might even have said it was a miracle that Kalinka’s paintings should prove to be as durable as the French ones, and it was several hours before the old man worked out exactly what must have happened. Unwittingly, the girl had created a perfect fresco painting: her homemade colors, mixed with water, had been applied to a damp stone surface; these pigments had been absorbed by the stone and then quickly dried by the wood fire that was still burning on the floor, so that the paintings were now as permanently fixed in the very fabric of the wall as if they had been painted on the ceiling of the great cathedral in Kiev. “That’s torn it, Taras,” said Max, quite forgetting for a moment that he had told his faithful dog to go with Kalinka and the horses. “If this situation wasn’t so dangerous, it might be funny.”

So he had to content himself with burning her old coat and the books with the cave pictures of the horses, and sweeping away some horse dung.

“With any luck, that captain will take my word about this place and not come here at all,” the old man told his absent dog. “I mean, it’s just an old waterworks, after all is said and done—not a weapons arsenal or a Red Army barracks. It makes no sense to be suspicious of absolutely everything, like he is.”

But in his bones, Max knew that Grenzmann wasn’t the type to accept anyone’s word for anything—least of all someone who was not German. And he knew that as soon as the captain saw the paintings, his life at Askaniya-Nova would become very awkward indeed—and quite possibly worse than that, since he knew the SS didn’t take kindly to being made fools of. He suspected that the same thing that had happened in the botanical gardens at Dnepropetrovsk would now happen to him.

“That doesn’t matter,” he told himself, for by now he had remembered that Taras had gone with Kalinka. “What matters is that they make their escape and start a new life somewhere else.”

When he was satisfied he had done all he could—he left the fire burning, to make sure that Kalinka’s old coat was properly consumed by the flames—Max went back into the brick passageway, past the pumping station, and opened the secret door that led outside onto the steppe.

An unpleasant but hardly unexpected discovery awaited him: it was Grenzmann on his tall Hanoverian horse, with four of his SS men seated on two motorcycles and in their sidecars.

“Max,” said Grenzmann. “This is a surprise. And, then again, perhaps not such a surprise.” Smiling thinly, he jumped down from the horse and walked toward the old man. “Here we all are, looking for the entrance to the baron’s old waterworks, and all of a sudden there you are, showing us exactly where to find it. How about that?”

“After you mentioned it last night, sir,” explained Max, his heart pounding, “I decided to come and have a look at the place myself. To see if there was anything I could scavenge. And in case, at a later date, you wanted me to show you around.”

Grenzmann grinned and wagged his finger at the old man. “You know, you’re such a bad liar, Max,” he said. “I don’t know why I put up with it. Really, I don’t. I give you my friendship—we invite you to supper—and this is how you repay our trust: with lies and evasions. It’s really quite intolerable. If your German wasn’t so perfect, I might be tempted to shoot you right here and now.”

Max shook his head and then snatched off his cap. “It’s not like that at all, sir. I told you the plant was useless, and it is.”

“Don’t split hairs with me, Max. It’s obvious that you are hiding something in there. The question is, what? Or perhaps who? But I think we’re going to find out.”

“I can assure you, sir, that there’s no one here except you and me and these men.”

“Perhaps that’s true now,” admitted the captain. “But these tracks, leading away from here to the horizon, suggest that it wasn’t true a while ago—until last night, perhaps, when I first mentioned this place to you and you were so hopelessly evasive.”

“Tracks, sir?”

The captain came and grabbed Max by the collar of his coat and led him to the trail, where he pushed the old man onto the snow. “These tracks,” he said. “The ones that lead to the southeast of here.”

Grenzmann frowned.

“Now look what you made me do. You made me lose my temper. I very much dislike losing my temper, Max. What is it someone said? ‘When you lose your temper, you lose the argument’? Not that this is much of an argument. I mean, we both know I’m right and that you’re lying.”

“Ah, you mean those tracks.”

“Yes, I do mean those tracks.”

“I hardly noticed them, sir. They look like deer tracks. I think there are still a few on the reserve that your men have not yet killed.”

Grenzmann laughed. “Really, it’s amusing. I have to hand it to you, Max. You are a most persistently stubborn fellow. You insult me with your lies. I think we both know that these tracks in the snow are not the tracks of a deer—which has two toes that make an upside-down heart shape—but the tracks of a small horse, which has no toes. Do you really think it’s possible that an Olympic equestrian like me—someone who’s been around horses all his life—would not recognize the hoofprint of a horse? To be more exact—two small horses, not to mention the tracks of a dog—your dog—and a human being. And this is the intriguing part: whose tracks are these? A partisan, perhaps? A Red Army soldier? Who?” He shrugged. “Well, perhaps we’ll find out more when we go inside the waterworks, if that’s what this is. I’m no longer sure about anything you’ve told me.” He looked at one of his men. “Bring him along,” he said coldly.

With Max now their prisoner, the Germans went through the hidden door and along the passageway. While two of the captain’s men inspected the mechanics of the pumping station, the captain and two others walked out the other side and into one of the stone water tanks, where the captain sniffed the air suspiciously.

“It smells very much like horse in here, Max.” Picking up the broom, Grenzmann turned it around and put his nose near the head. “No question about it,” he added. “Horse.” He smiled. “A horse that knows how to open a door and sweep up its own dung, perhaps.”

“Sir,” said a voice from inside the other water tank. “Come and take a look at this.”

Everyone went through the jagged doorway of the second tank, where an SS sergeant had lit a lantern and was lifting it above his head to illuminate Kalinka’s paintings.

Grenzmann took the lantern from his sergeant and was silent for a moment as he looked around the stone wall.

“Remarkable,” he said eventually. “Quite remarkable. And really very artistic. Exactly like being in one of those French caves at Lascaux. You haven’t heard of those, Max? Yes, they’re a recent discovery in Vichy France. I read about that in a newspaper. Apparently, they’re at least seventeen thousand years old. Although I’ll hazard a guess that these on your walls are not nearly so old. I’ll also guess that these are not the work of some primitive Stone Age man but of someone rather more contemporary.” He bent down beside one of Kalinka’s black palm prints and placed his own hand over it. “And altogether smaller. Most likely a child. Or a young woman. How about it, Max? Has someone been living in here, in secret?”

“Only very recently,” admitted Max. “And quite without my knowledge. As a matter of fact, it was only yesterday I discovered—quite by chance—that someone was living in here.”

“That remains to be seen,” said Grenzmann. He rubbed at one of the black palm prints with a gloved hand. “I must say, these handprints don’t look like they were done only yesterday. They seem quite indelible.”

“I can assure you, I’m telling you the truth, sir. And, really, it was so cold, I could hardly throw this person out onto the steppe.”

“And those sub-equine Przewalski’s horses of yours. Were they also here without your knowledge? This is your last chance to level with me.”

“No, sir. I brought them here.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“Two stallions? Two mares? One of each? What are we talking about?”

Max might have been more careful about how he answered this question if he had known just how far the SS captain was prepared to go in carrying out his orders.

“A stallion and a mare,” he said.

“So. A breeding pair. Perhaps the last two on the estate. Maybe even in the world.”

“I couldn’t bear to see them slaughtered like all the others,” said Max.

“Max,” said the captain sadly. “I told you. I had strict orders from my superiors in Berlin. The Przewalski’s horses are an altogether inferior species of Gypsy-like horses that must be liquidated. So as to prevent the domestic horse from being contaminated with their blood. You can see why that’s necessary, surely? If your stinking Przewalski’s horses were allowed to breed with decent domestic horses, they might affect the whole bloodline; it might even become impossible to domesticate horses at all. And then where would we be? I was quite clear about this matter, was I not?”

“Yes, sir,” admitted Max.

“All the same,” said Grenzmann. “I suppose that’s almost forgivable, under the circumstances, you having been here so long.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The horses will be tracked down and eliminated, of course. I have no choice in that matter. I have my orders and I’m obliged to carry them out. Come what may. Especially now that I know this is a pair capable of breeding. Yes, that makes things different. All of our earlier efforts to liquidate this breed will have been for nothing if they manage to reproduce.”

Grenzmann frowned.

“But what disturbs me more is that there was someone else here, looking after these horses. Someone about whom I have no knowledge. I don’t like that. I don’t like that at all. It smacks of subversion.”

“I can assure you, sir, that this person was absolutely no threat to you and your men.” He shrugged. “Otherwise I would never have let them stay here.”

“Hmm. I wish I could believe that.”

“Sir,” said the SS sergeant, and kicking the fire out, he bent down and retrieved the remains of Kalinka’s old coat from the embers. “It looks as if someone has been trying to burn the evidence of their being here. This looks like a coat.”

Instinctively—he was, after all, a kind of policeman—the sergeant started to search the pockets of the smoldering coat. He found a piece of foil in which Max’s chocolate had been wrapped, a few buttons, a coin and a carefully folded piece of yellow material that Kalinka had been saving as a souvenir of her dreadful experiences. The sergeant handed the material to the captain and then glanced sadly at Max, for he knew what this meant for the old man’s prospects. While a scrap of poor-quality yellow material would normally have told someone very little, this particular piece of yellow material was eloquence itself—especially to SS men like the sergeant and Captain Grenzmann—for it was by now obvious that the material had been cut off the coat’s breast pocket. But it was the shape of the material that everyone recognized immediately and that changed Max’s fortunes irrevocably.

It was a yellow Star of David.