Nehmann was in no hurry to go back to his tent. An hour with Fliegerkorps VIII’s forbidding chief had confirmed what he’d long believed to be the truth about the realities of being in charge. Capable or otherwise, High Command set you apart. Some, like Richthofen, could cope. Life had sandpapered their souls. They relished the bruising business of leadership, the endless confrontations, the ambushes that lay in wait, the guarantee that your peers – fellow chieftains – were always out to screw you. Others, maybe Stalin, certainly Goebbels, were more vulnerable, more thin-skinned. Richthofen, he knew, had a baroness for a wife and three fine children. He’d never waste a moment even thinking about the likes of Lida Baarova.
‘He liked you, Nehmann. I could tell.’
It was Messner. He’d emerged from nowhere, a cigarette between his fingers. The darkness softened his ruined face.
‘Should I be flattered?’ Nehmann enquired.
‘Yes. Getting his time is one thing. Gaining his confidence, his interest, is quite another. He likes people who answer back.’
Nehmann nodded, trying to mask his irritation. This was like having his homework marked, he thought.
‘So, what’s been happening?’ He nodded vaguely towards the east.
‘Good news. The best, in fact. Sixteenth Panzer are already on the river. They arrived yesterday afternoon. A good pair of binoculars, and you’re peering into Asia. From the Don to the Volga in a single day? Remarkable. A couple of our fighter pilots put on a bit of a display for their benefit. Victory rolls. Other stuff. You should write it up, Nehmann. They’re both back on base here. Kurt Ebener’s available tomorrow morning. I can fix for you to see him.’
‘You’re telling me the city’s fallen?’
‘No. Sixteenth Panzer are out on their own, north of Stalingrad, but it’s just a question of time now. The river crossings within the city are still open. If the Ivans are wise, they’ll bale out while they can. Otherwise we’re going to be taking another million prisoners.’
Nehmann nodded. Yakov Dzhugashvili, he thought. Stalin’s son.
‘There’s a man called Helmut,’ he said. ‘Propaganda Company. I’m sure you know him.’
‘And?’
‘Where would I find him?’
‘Now?’ Messner was frowning. ‘At this time of night?’
Nehmann stepped closer, put a hand briefly on Messner’s arm, a gesture of reassurance.
‘We’re journalists, Georg.’ He gave Messner’s arm a squeeze. ‘We never sleep.’
*
Helmut’s tent lay in the same quarter of the airfield as Nehmann’s. Messner drove him across. Like Nehmann, Helmut had the tent to himself. To Messner’s evident irritation, his oil lamp was still casting long shadows over the canvas.
Messner brought the Jeep to a halt.
‘You want me to come in?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then tell him it’s late. The oil in that lamp won’t last forever. You hear what I’m saying, Nehmann? You’ll give him the message?’
Nehmann fought the urge to laugh. Messner shrugged, gunned the engine and accelerated away. Nehmann waited until the lights of the vehicle had disappeared behind a line of nearby Heinkels. After a while, he could hear nothing but the soft keening of the wind and he spent several minutes immobile, his head tilted back, gazing at the million tiny lights pricking the blackness of the night sky. He was trying to imagine what it must be like to be a Russian, living in Stalingrad, waiting for the German axe to fall. Shackled to history’s guillotine, these people might themselves be searching the heavens, desperate for some sign of a reprieve. A shooting star burned briefly overhead, a leaving a trail of brightness that flickered and then died. Gone, Nehmann thought. Kaputt.
Inside the tent, Helmut was lying on his camp bed, fully clothed. He appeared to be dozing. There was a book open on his chest, rising and falling as he slumbered on. Nehmann closed the tent flap behind him and stepped across to the bed. The book was War and Peace, a German translation, much thumbed.
‘What do you want, Nehmann?’ Helmut wasn’t asleep.
‘Tell me about Tolstoy. Does he help at all?’
‘He always helps. This is my second time through. But you didn’t come for that, did you?’
Nehmann didn’t answer. Instead, he settled into the tent’s only chair, low-slung, canvas stretched over a wooden frame. He wanted to know how long Helmut had been with Sixth Army.
‘Too long. This bloody war goes on and on. Last winter was a bitch. You can’t believe how cold it gets. Minus forty-five degrees? Some days you end up pissing on your hands, just to get them moving again. Loading film can be a nightmare. Your fingers just don’t work any more and the only thing to do is keep melting snow, keep drinking, keep filling your bladder because that way you give yourself a minute or two to get a fresh roll in the camera. Sixteen-millimetre film? Those tiny sprocket holes? Piss on your fingers and it’s just possible. Believe it or not, we time each other. A minute, maximum, then you’re frozen stiff again.’
Nehmann nodded. As a kid, learning the basic skills of butchery, he’d been banished to an outhouse in the depths of winter. The cold in the mountains could be brutal, especially when the wind got up. He’d shared this arctic space with hanging sides of cattle and sheep, and he remembered the rough grain of the big table, scarred and bloodstained, and the long minutes it took to breathe life back into his frozen fingertips. Sometimes you had to saw the frozen meat from the bone and leave it to thaw out once you could find a fire. That bad.
Helmut had a bottle of vodka. He’d been with General von Bock when Army Group Centre’s advance had come to a halt in front of Moscow, back around Christmas. The news, all of a sudden, had been worse than bad – Zhukov’s armies bursting out of nowhere to chase the Wehrmacht away – and there were no pictures to feed the Glee Machine that was Goebbels’ Promi.
‘You called it that? The Glee Machine?’ Nehmann had never heard the term.
‘We did. In private. It made no difference, of course. When you tell Berlin the truth they don’t want to know, and when they insist you send stuff back, good news stuff, you start making it up. We settled on a theme in the end. How to get the better of winter. How to survive January. It was all campfires and huge stews and close-ups of grinning soldiers who badly needed a shave. There was a corporal who played the mouth organ and that helped. Kraft durch Freude. Strength through joy. Our guys looked like a bunch of Boy Scouts. Berlin? Delighted.’
Nehmann smiled. They’d done the third glass now. Helmut had coyly admitted to another bottle hidden in his rucksack and Nehmann watched him struggling off the bed to fetch it.
‘That truck,’ Nehmann murmured. ‘The SS truck.’
‘Yeah?’
‘You mentioned bodies.’
‘I did.’
‘What bodies?’
‘God knows. They could have been Jews. They could have been anyone. I think those bastards have given up counting.’
‘But what were they doing here?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You saw the bodies?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘I didn’t count. Maybe a dozen? All the faces were the same, even the little ones.’
‘The same?’
‘Smashed to pieces. Pulped. All over the place. Think of your friend Messner. They were much worse than that.’
‘Did you talk to anyone? The SS people maybe?’
‘Christ, no.’ At last, he’d found the vodka. He returned to the camp bed in triumph, the new bottle held aloft. The first time he tried to refill Nehmann’s glass, he missed. ‘Kyiv.’ He licked the vodka from his fingertips. ‘Did anyone ever tell you about Kyiv?’
‘Never.’
‘We were there last year. September. Most of the Ivans had gone and the rest were prisoners. Things were settling down nicely then bombs started to go off all over town. People were dying, our people, important people, people who mattered. Our SS friends aren’t subtle. One good deed deserves another. An eye for an eye. Very Old Testament. Ironic, eh?’
Helmut was swaying, the new bottle cradled in one arm like a baby. Nehmann gazed up at him. He was as keen on looted vodka as the next man but knew he had to remember some of this.
‘An eye for an eye?’
‘Ja. Kyiv was a bad place to be a Jew last year. The Ukrainians didn’t like them either. Our SS friends did what they do best, rounded them all up, kicked them into line, took them out of the city. There’s a ravine called Babi Yar. You could hear the shooting all over town. It went on for days. Like I say, no one was counting but in the end I think they ran out of ammunition.’
‘Hundreds?’
‘Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Kyiv’s a big place but there wasn’t a tailor or a pawnbroker left. All gone.’
Nehmann watched Helmut collapsing softly onto the camp bed. Miraculously, he kept the bottle upright.
‘More, Nehmann?’
Nehmann shook his head. He was thinking about Maria. What was her real name? And how soon before she, too, disappeared into the darkness?
Helmut had closed his eyes. For a moment, Nehmann thought he was asleep but again he was wrong.
‘You know about any of this stuff?’ he mumbled.
‘No.’
‘You should. Everyone should. Tolstoy would, if he was still around.’ His face creased into a smile and his fingers crabbed across the bare earth where he’d left the book. ‘You ever read Tolstoy?’
‘Never.’
‘You should,’ he said again. His eyes opened. ‘There are photos. I took photos.’
‘In Kyiv?’
‘Here. Yesterday. Of the SS truck.’ He tried to hoist himself up on one elbow but failed completely. ‘They’re in that shithole of a developing room, Nehmann. Box on the floor. Maybe you ought to take a look.’
Moments later, finally unconscious, he began to snore. Nehmann was drunk, too, but it made no difference. Maria, he told himself. For her sake. He sat beside the camp bed until he was sure that Helmut had gone. A key, he thought. I have to find a key. The developing room will be locked and there has to be a way to get in.
He started with Helmut’s rucksack, emptying it item by item, clothing, notebooks, a map of Hamburg, half a bar of chocolate, various items of cutlery, a metal cup, three rotting plums tucked inside a sock. No key. Then he found another bag, much smaller, stitched canvas, lying on the other side of the camp bed. More notebooks, a pair of binoculars, two light meters and a small framed photo of a woman sitting on a beach. She had the sun in her eyes and she was squinting at the camera. She looked much older than Helmut, but she was blowing him a playful kiss. Nehmann studied the image for a while, wondering about the life this man had left behind him, then repacked the bag. Still no key.
Helmut was wearing a pair of the loose black trousers favoured by the Propaganda Companies. They had deep buttoned pockets ideal for storing bits and pieces of equipment and he knelt beside the bed, easing the pockets open, slipping his fingers inside. Helmut never stirred, not once. In the second pocket, at the bottom, Nehmann found the keys. There were half a dozen of them on a knotted length of cord.
Outside the tent, the night was darker than ever. Layers of cloud had rolled in from the west and Nehmann could taste rain in the air. He set off across the airfield, making his way through lines of parked Heinkels, ghostly shapes that suddenly materialised from nowhere. Twice he fell, once heavily, rolling over onto his back and staring up at where the stars had once been. The maintenance workshop, with the darkroom attached, felt much further away than he remembered but finally he recognised the pert shape of Richthofen’s Storch and knew he was nearly there.
The door he needed was at the back of the building. He had the keys ready for whatever lock he found but to his surprise the door was already open. He paused in the darkness, running his fingers down the wooden frame. Where the tongue of the lock seated into the rim latch, the wood had been splintered. He paused a moment, trying to remember if the door had been this way before, but knew he couldn’t be certain. Then he put his face to the damaged frame and sniffed. A hint of fresh resin, he thought. Someone’s been here. Recently.
He stepped inside, feeling his way by touch alone. A tiny lobby, then another door into the cubbyhole that Helmut had converted into a darkroom. A box on the floor. Helmut had been specific. Nehmann found it within seconds, bending in the darkness, his arms outstretched. It was a metal box with a flap on top and once again it was unlocked. He knelt beside it, feeling inside.
Nothing.