Alphabet House (10 page)

The names came to James from the depths of sleep, taking him so much by surprise that he opened his eyes and stared into the ward’s semi-darkness. The two remaining sergeants in
Gunga Din
were called McChesney and Ballantine.

Heavy breathing and scattered snoring brought him slowly back to reality. A faint beam of light penetrated the bomb shutters. James counted to forty-two. Then the beam came again. The men in the watchtower behind the SS barrack buildings swung the searchlight around another couple of times as part of their routine before creeping back to the shelter of the tower’s tar-papered roof. It was raining for the fourth night in a row, and only two nights ago the sound of bombs over Karlsruhe had reverberated along the rocky slopes, causing the guards outside to run around shouting shrill commands.

The patient in bed number 9 had drawn his legs up under him and begun sobbing quietly to himself. He was a
hauptsturmführer
who had been pinned by a tree trunk for over ten hours during an attack on the Eastern Front, while flame-throwers from his own striking force devastated the countryside. They were the only two in the ward who had been awake that night. Now only James was left.

He breathed heavily and sighed. That afternoon he’d made Petra blush. As usual she and Vonnegut, the porter with the iron hook, sat studying the casualty lists before Vonnegut cast himself over his newspaper’s tiny crossword, tapping his pitiful artificial limb on the table in irritation every time he was stuck for a word.

Vonnegut was keeping to himself because there’d been a bad mood in the ward all day.

There was an icy coldness between Petra and the senior nursing officer. First the senior nurse had adjusted the nursing badge on Petra’s headscarf and pushed some loose strands of fair hair back in place beneath it. Then Petra had adjusted the
nursing officer’s party emblem on her right lapel and polished it with her sleeve so the enamel encircling the white text, saying
Verband Deutsche Mädel
, shone a bright red.

Towards evening, when Petra should have gone off duty, the nursing officer had sent her replacement over to another ward on the pretext that she was to assist some novices. It was clearly an act of revenge and Petra, her eyes flashing, made threatening gestures at her as soon as she turned her back.

It was difficult to avoid falling for her as she stood there rebelliously in her flat shoes, oatmeal-coloured dress and white apron. James smiled every time she bent down and scratched herself behind her knees where the black woollen stockings irritated her most.

She turned around and caught his gaze as his eyes were dancing over her figure. It was an intimate moment.

That’s when she blushed.

Restless movements from Kröner in the next bed usually meant he was about to wake up. ‘Die in your sleep, you swine!’ James whispered inaudibly, and forced himself to go on thinking about Petra. At that moment she was probably asleep in her bed in her attic room above them, dreaming of the way he’d looked at her, just as he was lying there now, thinking about how she’d looked back at him. Perhaps James would have been better off without these fantasies. It was hard to be young and full of erotic stirrings he could never pursue.

Flickering in the darkness James saw, through his eyelashes, the image of Kröner turned towards him, examining him. James cautiously shut his eyes tight, waiting for the whispering to start again.

The nightmare had first manifested itself late one night, over two months ago. The hard click of the night nurse’s heels had woken him. She had just crossed the corridor towards the staff lavatories behind the stairs leading into the yard. Right in front of him a silhouette was bending slightly forward over the head end of the next bed. There was not a sound in the room
apart from two quick jerks from the foot end of the bed. Then the shape adjusted James’ neighbour’s pillow, walked quickly back to the other end of the ward and lay down in one of the beds.

When Vonnegut tapped the foot of the bed the following morning he found James’ neighbour dead. He was black in the face, tongue sticking vulgarly and grotesquely between his jaws. The protruding eyes looked desperate.

Rumour had it that he usually hid remnants of food under his pillow and must have choked on a fishbone. Holst, the surgeon lieutenant, shook his head as he lent an ear to the senior nursing officer, who whispered a few words. Dr Holst thrust his fists into his coat pockets. He brushed aside a couple of questions from Vonnegut and saw to it that the porters removed the body before the security officer and head doctor had a chance to make trouble for the staff on duty in the ward.

In his drugged and foggy nocturnal state James had witnessed a murder.

Several faces popped up from their beds, ducking from side to side as they watched the nursing helpers change the dead man’s bedclothes and leave the bed smooth, fresh and empty.

At lunchtime a patient got out of his bed, walked towards James and lay down in the newly made bed. He was the one who had stolen James’ idea of helping the nurses on their rounds. There he lay until the helpers brought in dumplings and leg of pork in the enamel food containers. His blubbering and whining were to no avail as the staff pulled him out of the bed. But this had little effect.

Every time they turned their backs he crept back into the bed, pulled the blanket right up to his chin and lay there, clutching it tightly. Not until he lay stretched out in the bed did he settle down. When this scene had repeated itself a few times the staff gave up and let him lie where he was.

However impossible it was to comprehend, James had just got himself an assassin for a neighbour.

James had no idea what was going on. For the first few nights he was too terrified to fall asleep. Whatever this lunatic’s motive might have been, if indeed there had been one, he would be capable of doing it again. So it was safer to sleep during the day and stay awake at night, counting the number of times his neighbour turned around heavily in the creaking bed. If anything happened he would shout for help or get up on the bed to reach the cord that hung from the wall and had been suitably shortened so the patients wouldn’t be able to pull it at all hours. Which no one thus far had attempted to do.

On the third night following this episode the ward lay in total darkness. The light in the corridor had been switched off for once and all the shutters closed. From around him came the sound of snoring and heavy breathing, easing James’ anxiety and making him relax. After re-enacting one of Pinkerton’s exploits he resorted to the last film he had managed to see in his happy Cambridge days, a magnificent epic by Alexander Korda, and dozed off.

To start with, the hushed, whispered words slid almost imperceptibly into James’ dream. Like foreign bodies they blended disturbingly with a love scene and didn’t stop when James’ eyes flew open with a start. The words were real and they were concrete. Subdued and measured. Not at all those of someone mentally unbalanced. They came from the pockmarked Kröner, the killer lying beside him.

Other voices in the darkness joined in the conversation. There were three altogether: Kröner’s and the men in the next two beds.

‘I had to make a scene, damn it,’ came the voice from the furthest bed. ‘That bitch of a nursing officer caught me reading Vonnegut’s magazines.’

‘That was a stupid thing to do, Dieter!’ growled Kröner at James’ side.

‘What the hell is one supposed to do? If you aren’t mad to start with, you go mad from lying here with absolutely nothing to occupy yourself!’

‘All right, but from now on, keep away from those magazines. You’re not doing that again!’

‘Of course not. Do you think I started doing it for fun? Do you think it was funny being stuck in the loony cell for days? I’m not ending up there again. Anyway, they’re starting to liquidate those crazies now,’ he continued. ‘What else can they do?’

‘What the hell do they scream for? I thought it was only Stuka pilots who went that crazy,’ whispered Horst Lankau, the broad-faced man in the middle.

James felt his heart pounding and his head growing light from lack of oxygen as he fought to control his agitation and follow the conversation at the same time. His temples throbbed as he slowly inhaled through his teeth so his breathing wouldn’t drown out the quiet whispering beside him. Apart from the circumstances, the conversation was quite normal. None of the three had ever been the slightest bit mentally deranged.

Not until morning did James fully realise how shaky the situation could be for himself and Bryan, if they were not the only ones who were feigning illness.

The greatest problem was that Bryan knew nothing. If he kept on trying to make contact, it could be the death of them.

James would have to avoid him at any price, ignore any attempts to make contact and anything else that might connect the two of them.

What Bryan would do about it was up to him. They knew each other so well that presumably Bryan would eventually realise James would only act like that if felt he had to.

Bryan would have to learn to be on his guard. He would, indeed.

Kröner’s manner of speech was cultivated. Behind the enormous, gnarled figure and the pockmarked face was an able-minded, well-educated and entirely self-centred man. It was he who was in charge and made sure they stopped talking if there was an unexpected movement or strange sound. Kröner was always
on the alert and in constant activity, while the other two – the broad-faced man and his skinny companion, Dieter Schmidt – slept most of the day so they could keep awake for the nightly discussions.

Everything he did had one simple purpose: to survive in that hospital until the war was over. In the daytime he was friends with everyone, patting them on the cheek and running errands for the staff. At night he was capable of murdering anyone he thought stood between him and his goal. He had already killed once.

During a night like this the whispering could last a couple of hours. The nightly control had been intensified somewhat since the affair with the fishbone and the night nurse could be expected to turn up in the ward at irregular intervals. She would wave the beam of a dynamo lamp to and fro over their faces. And the ward was always as silent as the grave.

But Kröner lay there ready, waiting just a moment to make sure the room was perfectly still again after the beam danced out of the room and the slight noise from the twisting finger movements that powered the little dynamo had disappeared in the direction of the nurses’ guardroom.

The whispering didn’t start up again until he gave the sign. And James pricked up his ears.

Kröner had strangled the man simply to be closer to his confederates so they could talk. As long as James constituted no threat to them, he had nothing to fear.

He would even have been able to sleep peacefully, if it weren’t for the stories the malingerers told.

For the most part the accounts were horrifyingly detailed. Night after night the malingerers feasted on tales of their atrocities and tried to outdo one another. Each of them usually began relating a piece of the mosaic with a ‘Do you remember…’ that gradually revealed why they had ended up beside him, and why they intended to remain there at any price until they could slip away or the war came to an end.

More often than not James was shocked.

When these monsters finally stopped talking, their stories became transformed into nightmarish dreams with a form, colour, smell and wealth of detail that usually ended with his waking up bathed in sweat.

Throughout 1942 and 1943,
Obersturmbannführer
Wilfried Kröner had been ordered make sure his
SS Wehrmacht
support troops for the
SD
security police kept close on the heels of the
Waffen SS
armoured divisions operating on the Eastern Front. Here he learned that every will can be broken, and that made him love his job.

‘Before we came to the Eastern Front we’d heard how stubborn the Soviet partisans could be when interrogated.’ Kröner paused. ‘But when the first ten partisans finished screaming, then it was time for ten more, right? One of them would always say something in order to get into Heaven a little less agonizingly.’

The silhouette in the bed beside James spoke about hangings in which the delinquents were hoisted up slowly until their toes just reached the ground, and tried to describe the tingling sensation he’d felt when the ground was frozen and the condemned’s toes danced feverishly over the mirror-smooth ice. He related with satisfaction the time he’d managed to fling the rope so precisely over the gallows that two equally heavy partisans could be hanged at each end. ‘Naturally, if they wriggled too much it wouldn’t work every time, so we had to resort to
more traditional methods,’ he added. ‘But otherwise one was encouraged to show a little imagination. It inspired respect. You could say the partisans spoke their minds more freely during my interrogations…’ Kröner glanced around to see if there was any movement in the ward. James shut his eyes instantly when Pock-Face turned around and stared at him. ‘…if they spoke at all,’ he added.

James felt nauseous.

In many respects those had been rewarding times for Kröner. During one interrogation a stubborn little lieutenant in the Soviet Army had broken down despite his iron will and obstinacy, and had pulled a leather purse from his riding breeches. It hadn’t helped him since they beat him to death anyway, but the purse was interesting.

Rings and money, silver and gold amulets and a few roubles poured out onto the table. Kröner’s aide-de-camp estimated there were 2,000 marks when the time came to share the spoils. That made 400 for each of the officers on Kröner’s staff and 800 for himself. They called it recovered spoils of war and took care in the future to search all the prisoners personally before they were brought for interrogation, or ‘liquidation’, as Kröner laconically termed the summary executions. Pock-Face laughed as he related the time his subordinates had caught him in the process of plundering a prisoner without intending to share with them. ‘They threatened to rat on me, the ridiculous beasts! They were just as guilty! Everyone pocketed something if they could get away with it.’ The two listeners laughed quietly with legs drawn up beneath them, even though they had heard the story before. Then, in a low, confidential voice Kröner said, ‘But one has to take care of oneself! So I got rid of all three of them so they couldn’t try any more stunts. I was questioned when two of the bodies were found, but of course they couldn’t prove anything. They reckoned the third man had deserted. All very admirable. And this meant that in the future I wouldn’t have to share with anyone, would I?’

The man in the middle bed raised himself on his elbows. ‘Ah, but you shared with me, nonetheless,’ he said. His face was absolutely the broadest James had ever seen, full of small transverse wrinkles that turned into a smile for no apparent reason or, more rarely, showed a tinge of anxiety. The dark eyebrows shot up and down, inspiring confidence.

A fatal misjudgement.

The first time Kröner and this Horst Lankau had come across each other was in the winter of 1943, more specifically two weeks before Christmas. Kröner had been on a raid in the southern sector of the Eastern Front. The objective was to mop up after a recent attack.

The villages had been devastated, but not crushed. Behind the bombarded plank walls and screened by bunches of straw, families were still sitting, making soup from the last bones of their slain animals. Kröner had them all hauled out and shot. ‘Onward!’ he commanded the SS soldiers. It wasn’t potential partisans he was after, but Soviet officers who had something to tell and perhaps also a few valuables to be stolen.

On the outskirts of the fourth village a detachment of SS soldiers dragged a man out from among the burning huts and threw him in front of Kröner’s staff car. The cur got up immediately, brushed the snow off his face and sneered at his captors. He stared fearlessly at their leader. ‘Order them to go,’ he said with a broad Prussian accent, waving SS men away with a deprecatingly cold-blooded look. ‘I have important things to tell!’

Kröner found such contempt for death irritating and ordered him to kneel down, tightening a leather-gloved finger on the trigger as he aimed at the defiant face. Without the slightest hesitation the man in the shabby peasant clothes reported that he was a German deserter, a
standartenführer
in a mountain commando division, and a damned good soldier who’d been decorated many times and definitely not one to be shot without a court martial.

Kröner’s rising curiosity saved the wretch’s life. Triumph was already painted on his broad face when he said his name was Horst Lankau and that he had a proposal to make.

Horst Lankau’s military past was diffuse. James concluded that he’d already started on a military career before war broke out. He was a seasoned soldier and had apparently been destined for a glorious, if traditional, military career.

But even the most illustrious traditions were quickly affected by the war on the Eastern Front.

Originally Lankau’s mountain division, one of the trump cards of the offensive, had been deployed in order to capture Soviet staff officers at the enemy’s rear. Whereupon they were to leave it to the SD, or occasionally the Gestapo, to extract what they could from them. This is what Horst Lankau had been doing for some months. A dirty, dangerous job.

One lucky day they had picked up a major general whose possessions included a tiny box containing thirty small diamonds, clear as glass and worth a fortune.

These thirty small stones made him decide to survive the war, whatever the price.

Kröner laughed with recognition when Lankau came to the point in the story where he said, almost apologetically, that the theft had been discovered by his own men.

‘I gathered them around the bonfire and gave them an extra ration of ersatz coffee, the trustful idiots.’ While they were slurping their coffee, Lankau blew all his elite soldiers and their prisoners into unrecognisable bits with a single hand grenade. Both he and Kröner laughed when he reached the climax of his story. After that, Horst Lankau had sought refuge among Soviet peasants with whom he traded small change for safety. He and the war would just have to get along without each other, he’d reckoned.

And then Kröner had come into the picture and made things complicated.

He’d enticed his captor, undaunted. ‘I’ll pay for my life with half the diamonds. If you want them all, you can shoot me now
because you won’t get them and you won’t find them, either. But you can have half if you hand over your pistol and take me to your quarters. When the time comes you’ll report that you’ve liberated me from Soviet partisans. Until then you’ll let me remain in your quarters without my having to have any contact with the other officers. I’ll tell you later what’s going to happen after that.’

He and Kröner haggled over the division of the diamonds, but it ended up with Lankau having his way. Fifteen each, and Lankau was to be quartered in Kröner’s camp with a loaded pistol in his pocket.

Kröner made a final attempt. ‘I want a diamond for every week I take care of your board and lodging.’ The broad face broke into an even broader smile. Kröner realised it was a refusal. He would have to get rid of Lankau as quickly as possible so he wouldn’t attract unwanted attention.

Lankau was by his saviour’s side constantly during the three days Kröner was on Christmas leave outside the camp. Kröner wasn’t sure whether it was the hand permanently planted in the pocket with the pistol or Lankau’s eternally foolish-looking, almost pious facial expression that made him uneasy. But he began respecting the man’s cold-blooded endurance. Gradually he began to realise that together they’d be able to achieve results that would be impossible to achieve separately.

On the third day they travelled to Kirovograd where most of the soldiers went when the food in the field kitchen became too monotonous or life at the front too depressing.

Kröner often sat there half-dozing with his elbows on the oak tables of the pub, amusing himself by picking out patrons he could start a fight with or, better still, who would pay him for not being beaten to a pulp.

It was there that Lankau initiated Kröner into the plans he had hatched during the months of dreary idleness in the Soviet village.

‘I want to go back to Germany as soon as possible and now I know how,’ he said quietly, straight in Kröner’s ear. ‘One of these days you’ll report to headquarters that you have liberated me from captivity, just as we’ve agreed. Then you’ll procure me a doctor’s certificate saying that I’ve been so badly tortured by the partisans that I’ve gone raving mad. When I’m sitting in the hospital train on its way west, you’ll get two more of my diamonds.’

The idea appealed to Kröner. He could get rid of Lankau and benefit from it at the same time. It could be a kind of dress rehearsal for what he himself could do if life at the front became too risky.

Dress rehearsal or not, it was not to be. Behind the officers’ pub there were four small outhouses to supplement the ones indoors. Kröner had always preferred shitting in the fresh air.

He swayed as he buttoned up his fly, relieved, and smiled at the thought of the two extra diamonds as he opened the door wide. In front of him stood a shape almost completely engulfed by darkness that made no signs of letting him pass. A stupid thing to do, thought Kröner, for someone so small in stature and puny to look at.

‘
Heil
Hitler, Herr Obersturmbannführer
,’ piped the man without budging. Just as Kröner had clenched his fist and was about to knock the obstacle out of his way, the officer stepped back into the feeble light illuminating the wall of the backyard.

‘
Obersturmbannführer
Kröner, have you time to talk for a moment?’ asked the stranger. ‘I have a proposal to make to you.’

After a few sentences the officer had Kröner’s undivided attention. He looked around, took the
hauptsturmführer
under the arm and led him out to the street where Lankau was standing, and into his car that he’d parked at the end of the nearest side street.

The sinewy, little man’s name was Dieter Schmidt. He had been ordered by his superior to make contact with Wilfried
Kröner. His superior didn’t wish to disclose his identity but added that Kröner wouldn’t find it very difficult to find out if he absolutely wanted to.

‘It’s safer for everyone that we don’t all know each other’s identity in the event that anything should go wrong,’ Dieter Schmidt said, glancing at Horst Lankau, who made no signs of introducing himself. ‘Since it is my superior’s plan, and until things get going he is the only one who would be incriminated, he asks that the gentlemen respect his desire for anonymity.’

The thin man undid the top buttons of his coat and looked them both in the eyes for a long time before he continued.

Dieter Schmidt came from an
SS Wehrmacht
armoured division, this was obvious. But originally he had been a
sturmbannführer
and vice-commandant of a concentration camp. This was something very few people knew.

Some months previously he and his commandant, who was responsible for the concentration camp and a few smaller work camps belonging to it, had been forcibly removed from their posts, degraded one level and transferred to administrative duty in the
SS Wehrmacht
on the Eastern Front, a practical alternative to dishonour and execution. But the longer they remained on Soviet soil, the more they realised they would probably never leave it again. The Germans fought like devils to hold their positions, but there was no longer any indication that they would be able to stop the massive Soviet Army. Despite the fact that Dieter Schmidt’s and his superior’s job consisted mainly of administration and office work, the distance from the front could be covered in less than half an hour by Soviet armoured cars.

In short, their lives were in constant danger. Every day their typewriter tapping was accompanied by the thunder of cannons. Only fourteen of the original twenty-four superior staff officers remained.

Such was life on the Eastern Front. Everyone knew that.

‘Our little game in the concentration camp probably wasn’t that unique, but we didn’t know that then,’ Dieter Schmidt
explained. ‘We had a daily budget for running costs that had to be kept. For example, we had 1,100 marks a day for the prisoners’ food. So we cheated central administration and skipped food distribution roughly every fifth day. The prison mob didn’t make a fuss. We called it collective hunger punishment and referred to offences that had never taken place. Of course a few thousand of them gave up the ghost because of it, but nobody complained about
that
.

‘Then there was the income from hiring out slave labourers, though we seldom kept precise accounts, and finally we lowered the hiring fees a bit, which definitely increased our turnover. The factory owners and the other employers never complained. The cooperation was exemplary.