I reached the farmhouse about an hour before dawn and hammered on the door. After several minutes it opened, and a tall, lean figure with piercing blue eyes peered out at me.
‘Kann ich Ihnen helfen?’ he said, in an unmistakably English accent. He looked exactly the same as he had the last time I’d seen him.
‘You’re English,’ I said, searching his face for a reaction but getting none. ‘That is good news. I’m afraid I’m lost. I’m looking for the British headquarters at Lübeck.’
‘You are lost,’ he said, placing his emphasis equally carefully. ‘It’s a good distance from here. Come in and I can show you on a map.’
It was typical of Father: the war in Europe had been over for two months and there wasn’t a soul for miles around, but he had still insisted on keeping to nonsensical recognition codes with his own son until we were inside the house. As soon as we were, he shook my hand and asked if I had had a safe journey. Barely pausing to listen to my reply, he led me through to a cramped, low-ceilinged room and told me to take a seat. He didn’t ask about Finland, or Mother, or anything else. He had business to attend to.
The area looked as though it had once been a sitting room, judging by the elaborate floral pattern on the wallpaper and armchairs, but it was now inescapably the domain of a military operation, with most of the space given to a row of card tables that had been pushed together and covered in maps and papers. The room was lit by candles – there was no electricity in the house, and wouldn’t be for several weeks.
Against one of the walls was a dilapidated-looking wardrobe, next to which stood a ramrod-straight officer-type. Despite a neat moustache and severe spectacles, he looked only a few years older than me. I guessed that this was Henry Pritchard, a Scot who had been Father’s second-in-command on several operations early in the war. Father confirmed this, and Pritchard extended a bony hand to shake mine, but said nothing.
Father seated himself in one of the armchairs and I did the same. Pritchard remained standing.
‘The first thing I wish to make clear,’ Father said, ‘is that this job is completely off the books. And I mean completely. Only one living soul outside this room knows what we are doing here, and that’s the Prime Minister. Nothing is on paper, nor will it ever be. This goes with us to the grave, or we shall have done more damage than we are trying to rectify. In the hands of our enemies, this information could create the next war. I gave the PM my word, and I intend to stick to it. Do you understand?’
I glanced over at Pritchard to see if it was some sort of a prank. His face was set like stone. Father didn’t go in for pranks, I reminded myself.
‘I visited him in London a couple of weeks ago,’ Father continued. ‘It wasn’t easy to pull off, but I called in some favours. He gave me ten minutes to outline what I had in mind. He didn’t like it at first. Said it would get out, one way or another, and that that would put us in a terrible position.’ He smiled, the first time I’d seen him do so since arriving. ‘He asked me to leave the building and never come back, actually.’
‘What changed his mind?’
He nodded at Pritchard, who turned to the wardrobe and unlocked it. Inside, someone had placed a shelf where the coat-hangers would normally have been, and on it were several stiff-backed folders. Pritchard took one of these out and handed it to me.
It contained a sheaf of documents telling of the execution of two British commandos at a German concentration camp in November 1943. There were photographs of the corpses and eyewitness accounts, all of which pointed to one man as having ordered the deaths. Bodhan Shashkevich was a Ukrainian who had led an Einsatzkommando—an SS mobile killing unit—that had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women and children. The British commandos had interrupted some of his fun and games, but had been made to pay.
I looked back at the wardrobe, and at the other folders in it. ‘Why do you need me?’ I asked. ‘This isn’t my field.’
Father smiled tersely. ‘Since May, SAS have been building up dossiers on suspected war crimes committed against their men and other British commandos. Last month a team moved into a villa at Gaggenau, over in the French Zone, and started trying to track down the perpetrators in order to bring them to trial. Henry is part of that team.’ He nodded at the younger man, who smiled at me: for some reason, I wished he hadn’t.
‘Henry contacted me while he was on leave in London last month,’ Father continued. ‘He was concerned that some of the guilty parties could evade justice even if they were to be brought before a court. In cases where our men were out of uniform, their lawyers are bound to argue that the conventions did not apply. As a result, they may escape with light sentences, perhaps as little as five or ten years. Worse, some may not even come to trial at all: under the terms of Yalta, most Ukrainians, for example, are being sent back to the Soviet Union. Many of them will be killed on arrival, but the likes of Shashkevich survived the war against strong odds – if they have enough money or other influence, they may yet slip through the net.’
He stood up and walked over to the window. It looked onto a small garden, surrounded by a high wall. He turned back to face me.
‘Henry showed me six files, concerning the very worst offenders. As soon as I read them, I realized it was an intolerable situation: many of the victims were British officers, and we should do everything in our power to see they receive justice. I set about trying to get in contact with the PM, and when he gave the go-ahead, came out and secured these premises. Henry has helped prepare a lot of ground for the job I have in mind – unfortunately, his leave ends on Wednesday, and his absence from Gaggenau would be too conspicuous if he did not return. You, however, are off everyone’s radar, and that, to answer your question, is why you’re here. We will be working very much along the same lines as the team at Gaggenau, with one major distinction: we will not be bringing any of these men to trial. We will have very limited access to supplies, fuel and transport, but Henry has put together papers identifying both of us as members of a British war crimes investigation team, and those should be accepted everywhere apart from the Soviet Zone. Once Henry leaves, though, we are on our own. Do you have any questions?’
I wondered if the two of them had lost their minds and begun weaving fantasies; many were these days. But they didn’t look mad: that was the frightening thing.
Although barely in my twenties, I was already an old hand at the spy game, having been attached to several cloak-and-dagger units over the course of the war. This was something else entirely – an execution squad, pure and simple – and the war in this part of the world was meant to be over. But as I looked into Father’s grim face flickering in the candlelight, I knew I had no choice in the matter, and shook my head meekly.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘We start tomorrow – Henry’s located Shashkevich.’
*
It was a beautiful morning. The air was crisp and clean, and the fields seemed almost to be glowing as the sunlight travelled across them. Somehow it made what we were about to do even worse. Father had briefed me on the day’s job, but he hadn’t told me how I would feel: as we cut our way through the countryside, a chasm of despair opened up in my stomach and I became terrified I would have to ask him to stop driving so I could vomit. For the first time in my life, I felt like a child playing at soldiers.
When we reached the camp, the guard on duty hardly glanced at our papers, waving us through at the sight of our jeep. In the central reception hall, Pritchard showed our papers again and we were led through to an area of stone cell blocks. A young American corporal marched us down a dimly lit corridor, unlocked one of the doors, saluted us, and marched away again without a word.
Shashkevich was seated on the bed, shivering under a rough grey blanket despite the morning sun filtering through the small window set high in one wall. He was still a large man, but the imperious-looking officer of the photographs in his dossier had been all but extinguished. His eyes were now deeply sunken and his skin pitted and sallow. He looked up at us, confusion spreading across his face as he registered our uniforms and berets. He wasn’t shivering, I realized then, but rocking back and forth and mumbling something to himself in his own language. Whether he was reciting a prayer, a list of everyone he had ever met to keep his mind active or the defence he planned to use when he reached court I do not know.
Father told him to get up in Russian, and the fear turned to defiance.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Get up,’ Father repeated, gesturing with his Luger.
After he and Pritchard had cuffed him, I held the door open as they marched him into the hallway and out to the jeep.
We headed out towards Frankfurt, taking small lanes to avoid the delays on the crater-heavy autobahn. It was mid-morning now, and the lines of refugees tramping across the fields, either on their way to DP camps or simply foraging for food, had grown. On the outskirts of the city, we took a turning into deep woods and kept going.
I breathed in the fresh air and tried to fix the moment in my mind: the birdsong, the smell of the trees, the strange emptiness of the sunlit ruined land. The engine stopped. We walked into the middle of a clearing and Father handed me the Luger. I released the safety and pressed the muzzle against the back of Shashkevich’s pale neck. The coldness of it woke him up, and the fear came over him in a rush. His hands started shaking violently and I had to clutch him towards me to restrain him. I called out to him in a voice that sounded surer than the one in my head to stop moving or I would shoot. It was an absurd thing to say, because by now he knew I was going to shoot him anyway, and something in me realized this, but I suddenly couldn’t stomach the position I was in, shooting him from so close. Without even considering it, I let go of him and stepped away, at the same time jerking one of his arms towards me so that he swivelled around as though it were a ballet. It all took place very fast, and contrary to everything we had planned – we hadn’t considered the possibility he might lose control. Shashkevich’s hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his eyes were staring out of his skull like a maniac’s. I thought hard of the photographs I had seen in the dossier and squeezed the trigger.
‘Pockets,’ said Pritchard after. ‘Don’t forget his pockets.’
I leaned down and ripped away some papers and trinkets, then handed them to Father and staggered off into the trees.
*
Pritchard returned to Gaggenau a couple of days later, leaving Father and me to work together. We had five more men to find, and it didn’t appear that any of them were in custody. We began following the clues contained within the dossiers, re-reading the testimonies and tracing possible escape routes on large-scale maps in the makeshift operations room set up in the house. The pace was furious, and we worked all day, every day, and often through the night. We visited scores of rundown barns and cellars all over the Zone, and I grew accustomed to the look in the eyes of children as we questioned their parents and grandparents. On one occasion, a young boy tried to rush us as we entered a disused stable where he and his family were hiding, and Father very nearly shot him. I began to know what it felt like to be part of an occupying power, and it frightened me. Sometimes I would lie awake in my bed in the attic of the farmhouse and watch the spiders making webs in the beams, thinking back to before the war and dreaming of a future when it would finally be over for me.
Father had no such doubts about the mission, of course. It was his crusade: there was a light shining in his eyes and a spring in his step. He was meting out justice. Although we never spoke of much aside from the work, I was initially pleased that he had felt the need for my assistance, and did all I could to show him I was worthy of his trust. He never mentioned Shashkevich again, and in time I forgot that I had almost botched it and was pleased that I had at least contributed to getting rid of one of them.
It took me several weeks to realize the true nature of my role in the operation. As well as helping him in the field, it was also my job to polish our boots, care for our uniforms and, once we had got the electricity back, cook from the stores in the larder. He never thanked me for any of it, and it slowly dawned on me that this was the primary reason he had wanted me with him. It was his operation, but he needed someone to deal with the household chores and offer support – I was effectively his batman. I felt like I was twelve years old again, lugging his gear around Brooklands. Did he not know what I’d been through in Finland? Hell on earth! Only to be followed by weeks underground in Sweden. And for what? I’d thought he had finally realized that I was now an officer, and a highly capable one at that – but he still saw me as a boy.
My resentment was muted by fear, however: I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a dirty job. With the war over, there were no longer any hard and fast conventions to follow – or if there were, we certainly weren’t following them. I remembered the righteous anger that had overtaken us all the previous year when we’d heard about Hitler’s Commando Order, which said that we could be shot without trial. In avenging the men killed under that order, weren’t we committing the same crime?
By the end of August, four of the targets were dead. But the final name on the list was the one Father wanted most: Gustav Meier. He was an SS officer, and there was compelling evidence that he had raped and tortured the families of suspected members of the Resistance in France, including children. We hunted for him throughout September, but with no luck. Father was acutely aware that the chances of finding him were fading with every day that passed: he might have jumped on a boat to Argentina by now. But in the last week of September, there was a breakthrough. Father returned from a long excursion and barged into my room. ‘I’ve found him!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve found the bastard!’
He had discovered from the papers of one of Meier’s colleagues that he had relatives living near Hamburg, right across the road from a British army barracks. We had conducted surveillance on the area for several days, but to no avail. But Father had returned for another look and had chanced to spot Meier as he had driven through the nearest village. He was working as a gardener, and further enquiries revealed he had been living with the family under an assumed name.
Father had come back to the farmhouse for a very particular reason. On the two previous targets, he had found pea-sized suicide capsules hidden in their clothing, similar to the potassium cyanide ‘L-pills’ SOE gave its agents. Himmler had bitten into one when he had been captured in June, and Father was determined not to allow any of our targets to take the same way out: he didn’t want them to have that control, and I suppose also felt they deserved to know that vengeance was being served on them. Some reports had claimed that Himmler had been equipped with two capsules – one in his clothing and one that he had kept in his mouth. Although they were rubber-cased to avoid accidents – they could be swallowed with no harm done – there was clearly a danger that in a tussle someone might bite down without meaning to. Father wanted very much to deal with Meier on his own terms, so to be doubly sure no accidents happened, he needed another pair of hands: mine.
That evening, he came up with a plan. It involved me dressing up as a displaced person and him as a policeman. We would approach Meier and I would accuse him of some crime – a petty theft. Meier would naturally protest and, taking the opportunity of surprise, I would pretend to fly into a rage and pounce on him: in the resulting mêlée, either Father or I would retrieve any capsules he had on his person. As soon as this was done, Father would ‘arrest’ Meier, and it wouldn’t be until we were some distance away that he would realize what had happened.
After going over it several times, we set out for Hamburg the next afternoon. We found Meier soon enough, working in one of the gardens as he had been the previous day. We approached him in our respective garbs and I claimed that the tools he was using were mine, stolen from me the previous week. But either Father’s plan wasn’t as clever as we’d thought or my acting was poor, because he saw through it at once and made a dash for it across the garden and into a nearby field. We had no choice but to go after him, but when I caught up and leapt on top of him, I found that he didn’t have any capsules on him – but he did have a knife. Where he had hidden it, I don’t know, because he had been dressed in very little in the afternoon sunshine, but I felt it go in, and it was the last thing I remembered when I woke in the sanatorium.
*
I have very little recollection of the first few days after the stabbing: I was blacked out for most of it. I do remember being forced to drink endless amounts of a tepid broth that seemed to stick in my throat. And I was occasionally lucid enough when being given a bath or being taken to the bathroom to feel enough residual shame at the indignity of being exposed to strangers that I lashed out at a few people who, after all, were only trying to help me.
One of those was Anna, but I only became aware of her once I had fully regained consciousness and was already a fair way along the road to recovery. She had explained how I had been brought there by a British officer one afternoon with a great gash under my kidneys, and had given me the letter from Father, still sealed in its envelope. The letter enraged me, because he had couched his abandonment of me in a mixture of military jargon and euphemisms: I was now ‘on the bench for the remainder of the game’ – that sort of thing. As an emergency measure, he left encoded directions for a dead drop near an abandoned well a few miles from the hospital. He said he would check this each day as long as he was in the area, which should be a few weeks more. But the main message was clear: recover, return to England, and forget I’d ever been to Germany.
I disliked Anna at first – or rather, I disliked myself for finding her attractive. Although not long out of boyhood, I was no stranger to the opposite sex, and had had my share of flings along the way. But none of the girls I’d known were anything like this. She was twenty-six, a Georgian with dark, rather flamboyant looks, but there was an unforced grace to her manner that set her apart. After five years of blood and battle, this fit, efficient woman, with her tanned arms, long lashes and perfectly set features seemed almost like a goddess to me. She seemed to belong to another world, where everything was bright and calm, and I wanted to jump through the looking glass and join her in it – but what hope had I of that? I knew that her beauty and job would mean she had probably long become tired of being mooned over, especially by patients, so I resolved not to fall for her, while, of course, at the same time hoping that my aloofness would make me more attractive than more obvious suitors.
My resolution barely lasted a couple of weeks, partly because my wound was so messy that it required almost constant attention, and I was isolated in my own room. While she administered medicine and changed my linen, I had discovered she spoke excellent English. After a few tentative exchanges, I dared to ask if she would mind arranging for me to have some books from the mess library. This she did, and I soon discovered she was very well-read, so after that we began to discuss literature: she was shocked I had never read any of the Russian greats, and proceeded to feed me all the English translations she could find.
I soon found that she was also passionate about the state of the world – when I asked her what she thought the future held for the new Europe, she openly condemned the British for pursuing what she saw as an openly anti-Communist policy so soon after the Soviet Union had, as she saw it, almost single-handedly defeated the Nazis. ‘It’s not you, Paul,’ she would smile, ‘but your government is really doing some despicable things. I thought we were allies.’
I tried to steer us away from such topics at first, but she was clever and eloquent – and I was happy just to be able to talk to her. We wrangled good-naturedly, with her usually taking the line that Marxism was the only way ahead and me desperately trying to remember all the reasons I’d been taught that that was wrong. But I couldn’t catch her out: her answers were always lucid and thought-provoking. She was very good at sticking to abstract concepts. Whenever I brought up problems, such as the Moscow show trials and executions, she would fix me with her calmest gaze, concede that humans had misunderstood and abused the ideology, then solemnly insist that the world would only be bettered when class and states had been completely abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat had taken their place. She used the language of Communist ideology with such a straightforward faith in Peace and Brotherhood that most of the time I acquiesced, simply not to appear a cynical beast and thereby lose her friendship. But when I felt particularly bloody-minded and pursued her on such points, her apparent innocence and naivety vanished and she would counter-attack, questioning British policy in India, for example, or picking out some other apposite situation to prove her point. I realized with growing surprise and admiration that her view of the world had rather more consistency and logic to it than my own, and over time had to concede that, in many areas, I was far more naive and ill-informed than she.
But politics was only one subject of our many conversations that autumn. Anna taught me about Russia, but also about herself. She was a born storyteller, giving vivid and moving accounts of her upbringing and her experiences in the war: she had been with the Red Cross all the way through it, which was why she was now working in the British Zone, rather than the Soviet one. Our friendship soon developed into one of those intimate affairs where you stay up all night talking; we ranged over every subject imaginable, skipping from one to the other like pebbles skimming across a lake. She would often visit me for an hour or so between her shifts on the wards, and it was on one of these occasions that I first kissed her.
Love is a fast worker, especially first love, and so it was that, barely three months after being admitted into the sanatorium, I found myself in bed contemplating proposing marriage to my nurse. I could scarcely imagine how Father would react at the news! The instructions in his letter had been clear: I should not visit the farmhouse again unless it was an emergency, but I was past caring – and well enough to leave the hospital. I had been well enough for a couple of weeks, in fact, but had been loath to leave for fear of letting go of Anna. Now I knew she loved me, I made up my mind to propose to her and, if she agreed, journey out to see Father and tell him the news before taking her back to England.
All my dreams evaporated later that evening, however, when she came to visit me after her usual rounds. I was sitting up smoking a cigarette and I sensed the change in her the moment she entered the room.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Paul,’ she said, looking up at me with a strange panic flooding her eyes. ‘I am so sorry.’
I gestured for her to take a seat next to me. ‘Why? What’s happened?’ She was usually so controlled.
She walked into the room and closed the door, but didn’t move any nearer to the bed. ‘I have lied to you,’ she said simply.
‘What have you lied about?’ A cold feeling had begun creeping through me.
She looked down at her hands. ‘My name is not Anna Maleva,’ she said quietly. ‘My real name is Anna-Sonia Kuplin, and I am an agent of the Narodny Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del. Two months ago, I was instructed by my superior, a man in the DP camp at Burgdorf, to seduce you and recruit you to our cause.’
She seemed to be talking at me through a fog or a dream. I looked at my hands and was surprised to see they were shaking. I couldn’t seem to stop them. ‘Why?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Why… were you asked to recruit me?’
She walked over to the bed and stood by the edge of it. ‘My superior wants to know about all my patients, but he was particularly interested in you,’ she said. ‘He knew of your father, and of his hatred for Communism. Your experience in intelligence and your youth were also seen as… attractive qualities.’ She grimaced at this, but made herself continue. ‘I was told to work on the bitterness you feel against your father to persuade you to join us.’
The blood was rushing around my head, and my chest was heaving.
‘So all of this…’ I said, gesturing futilely at the room where we had spent so much of our time together in the previous weeks, where we had made love, even. ‘All of this was because you wanted me to spy for you?’
‘It was also thought that once I revealed the true nature of your work here, you would be more interested in hearing our proposals.’
‘What work?’ I said, rage suddenly sweeping over me. I leaned over and grabbed her by the wrists, then thrust my face into hers. ‘You can’t possibly know what my bloody work involves, you… you little Russian whore!’ I brought up my hand to slap her, then stopped myself. She hadn’t flinched.
‘I know more about it than you,’ she said quietly, her eyes facing the floor. ‘You have been deceived by your father. He was a prominent member of several British fascist groups before the war, and is now part of a secret movement intent on waging a new war against the Soviet Union. The men you were hunting down and murdering were not Nazi war criminals, but Soviet agents.’
She looked up at me for a moment, desperately trying to hold my gaze. But it was too late. There was nothing there for me any more: she wasn’t my Anna. I had an almost overwhelming desire to take the pillow from the bed and place it over her face so she wouldn’t be able to utter any more lies. ‘So that was meant to be enough to turn me, was it?’ I said, finally. ‘A few fireside chats about politics and a half-baked story about a fascist conspiracy and you thought I’d sign up for Uncle Joe’s brand of storm-troopers? How dare you accuse me of such a thing? And did you really expect me to believe that our side’s made up of blood-thirsty savages and you’re all pure as the driven—’
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me tell you it is true.’
‘It is not true,’ I said coldly. ‘And you are the one who has been deceived. I read the orders given by these men. I read the witness reports.’
She had recovered something of her old composure now, and was prepared to fight back. ‘Such documents can be easily forged, as you must know. Would anyone else be able to confirm that your mission was legitimate, or did your father perhaps tell you it had been deemed too secret to go through the usual channels?’ She looked up, saw the confirmation in my eyes, and continued. ‘The first couple of men would have been bona fide, to persuade you. But after that, did you see all the files of the men you killed?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Meier,’ she said. ‘Did you read the file on him?’
‘Yes, Anna, and he was a rapist! He raped children. How can you do this?’
‘I can’t!’ she said, and her eyes began to well with tears. ‘Don’t you see? I told my superior to go to hell. I love you, Paul, more than I ever thought it was possible to love someone, and I want us to start again. To forget this.’ She stood up and walked towards me. ‘I thought at first not to tell you, just to ask that we leave this place, with no explanations. But I don’t want any secrets between us, Paul, none at all. Don’t you see? I had to tell you.’ She let her arms open, beckoning me. ‘Please.’
I looked at her and part of me wanted more than anything to take a step forward. But that, I knew somewhere deep in the core of me, was weakness, and the kind of immature sentimentality that had led me into this situation. Without looking at her, I told her to leave. She refused at first, continuing to plead with me to listen to her. But I had detached myself, and after a few minutes she saw it. She ran from the room, and I listened dispassionately to the sound of her sobs echoing down the corridor. Then, taking great care not to lean on my wound, I manoeuvred my way down from the bed and started dressing.
*
It was my first taste of fresh air in a long while, but I hardly noticed it. I stopped thinking about Anna’s betrayal of me and started focusing on what it meant. She knew about Sacrosanct – and, presumably, so did her handler in Burgdorf. Father had said in his letter that he would continue the operation for a few more weeks. If he had done so from the same location, as seemed likely, he could be in great danger.
As I started heading for the house, a terrible thought occurred to me. Anna’s allegation that Father had mounted a rogue operation and was running around murdering Russians was clearly fantasy, but she had still known a great deal about the operation: the name Meier, for instance. Only two other people had access to that information: Pritchard and Father – and Pritchard had left months earlier. Perhaps Father had risked venturing into the Soviet Zone, and been taken into custody. Under interrogation, he could have revealed Pritchard’s and my involvement, and even our locations. Pritchard was surrounded by commandos in the French Zone, so they wouldn’t pursue him, but I was alone, and injured. Anna had been assigned as my nurse a few days after I had entered the sanatorium – perhaps the idea for her to recruit me had stemmed from knowledge they had gained from questioning Father.
It all seemed horrifyingly plausible: I couldn’t think how else she could have known about the operation. And if I was right, Father was almost certainly dead, and they would soon be hunting me. They would probably be waiting for me at the farmhouse, in fact.
I slowed down, and started walking in the other direction. Father’s letter to me had still been firmly sealed, and I guessed Anna had not dared open it for fear of losing my trust early on. The drop, then. I headed for it at once, and left a message that Anna Maleva, a nurse in the Red Cross hospital in Lübeck, was an NKVD agent, and knew about Sacrosanct.
*
A few hours later, I was holed up in a cabin halfway up the mountains, shivering in a wooden cot in the dark. Father had come across the place one day when we had been tramping across the Zone looking for clues. It had been used before the war by local mountaineers as a resting stop on their way to higher climes. Later, the Hitler Youth had taken it over for their excursions, and there were still signs of their occupation, from the insignia above the entrance to graffiti they had carved on the walls: the same sort of obscene phrases and drawings teenage boys make all over the world, for the most part, but disturbing nonetheless. I had immediately thought of the place, because it was well away from the main paths and still within easy walking distance of the nearest town if I needed food. There were no amenities for cooking, or anything else, and it was a lot less comfortable now than it had been during July, when we had come across it. But it was shelter.
I had placed my clothes in one of the cots for padding and tried to sleep as soon as I had reached it. But it was no use. Although still seething over Anna’s betrayal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had missed something in her allegations against Father, something in the tone of them. As daylight began to seep through the wooden slats of the walls, I finally realized what it was: despite trying to resist it, part of me could not help recognizing the ring of truth. He had been a fascist before the war, and was ardently, even fanatically, anti-Communist. And even if the Ukrainians had been guilty of the most horrendous crimes, we had nevertheless murdered them – did it make any difference in what cause? But the thing that kept pushing to the front of my mind was Father’s obsession for protecting the operation at all costs: his insistence that nobody could ever learn of it.
Had I just signed Anna’s death warrant?
As soon as I thought it, I knew I had to reach her again. We would do just as she had said: leave here and start again. I had an image of her in her nurse’s smock in a clinic somewhere in England. She loved me – how could I let her go?
*
After eating a handful of wild berries to give me energy for the journey, I walked back to the outskirts of Sankt Gertrud, then ran the remainder of the way to the sanatorium. The other nurses seemed perturbed at seeing me, and after I had managed to push past some of them into the ward area I saw why. One of the doctors was talking to a group of men in uniform. Russian uniform. As one of the men saluted, he turned away and I saw the stretcher. Blankets had been placed over her body, but her head was still exposed and the features beneath the yellowish grey complexion and closed lids were unmistakable. One of the nurses told me in a hushed voice that she had been found in her quarters a few hours earlier, and that her body was being taken to the Russian Zone, and then back to Georgia. Apparently the soldiers were looking to trace a visitor she had had the previous evening: a man wearing the uniform of a British officer.
Father had received my message loud and clear, and had acted to eliminate the threat: nobody could know about Sacrosanct. I turned before any of the soldiers spotted me and started running for the farmhouse.
*
As I finally crested the hill two hours later, I saw the outline of the jeep and made a desperate effort to increase my pace. He was still here! I pushed open the front door and almost fell into the living room. ‘Where are you, you bastard?’ I screamed. ‘Where the hell are you?’ But there was no reply, to that or the other abuse that I hurled at him, and I found out why when I reached his bedroom. He was lying at the foot of the bed, still in his uniform. No pills – he hated the easy option. He’d done it the same way he had meted it out, with a bullet to the temple from his Luger. The left side of his face had been completely destroyed, and the wall behind him was splattered with blood. There was no note, so I could only guess as to why one more murder had woken his conscience. Perhaps she had begged for her life, or told him about her love for me.
It didn’t matter any more. He didn’t matter. I took him out to the garden and buried him. The wind was fierce – winter would be here soon. I had only one thought in me. I had to get to Burgdorf and find Anna’s handler.
I had a proposition to make him.