Snow Wolf (4 page)

She didn't speak and I continued to look
at her.

"Can I tell you something? I lost my
father over four decades ago. Four decades of not having a father to talk to,
and to be loved by. It was like having a hole in my life for a long time, until
finally he just slowly became a wistful memory. I had to live with the lie that
he committed suicide. And you-you know how and why he really died. And what's
more I think you owe me an explanation."

She didn't reply, just looked at me
thoughtfully.

I said, "And I have a question. Why
did you want to meet me in Moscow, and not someplace else? I was told you
escaped from this country. Why come back?"

Anna Khorev thought for a moment. "I
suppose the simple truth of it is I would very much have liked to have gone to
your father's ceremony, Mr. Massey, but I considered it your own private
affair. But perhaps my just coming here was the next best thing." She
hesitated. "Besides, I've never seen his grave. And it was something I
wanted to do."

"The second grave, the one beside my
father's-it had the same unmarked headstone. Whom does the grave belong
to?"

Something passed across her face then, a
look like sadness, and she said, "Someone very brave. Someone quite
remarkable indeed."

"Who?"

She looked out at the view of the city,
toward the red walls of the Kremlin, as if she seemed to be trying to make up
her mind, and then she finally turned back to look at me. She seemed to soften
suddenly, and she looked down briefly at the flowers on the table.

"You know you look very much like
your father? He was a good man, a very good man. And everything you've said is
true." She paused. "You're right. All that pain and silence deserves
an explanation. And that's why I'm here. Tell me, what do you know about Joseph
Stalin, Mr. Massey?"

The unexpectedness of her question threw
me and I looked at her for several moments. I shrugged. "No more than
most. He was a god to some, I guess. The Devil to others. Depends on which side
of the fence you sat on. But certainly one of the great despots of this
century. They say he was responsible for as many if not more deaths than
Hitler. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage eight years after the war."

Anna Khorev shook her head fiercely.
"Twenty-three million deaths. Not including those who died in the last war
because of his stupidity. Twenty-three million of his own people whom he
murdered. Men, women, children. Slaughtered. Shot or sent to die in camps worse
than the Nazis ever imagined, by one of the cruelest men this world has ever
known."

I sat back, surprised by the sudden
ferocity in her voice. "I don't understand. What has this got to do with
what we're discussing?"

"it has everything to do with it.
Stalin died, certainly, but not in the way the history books record."

I sat there stunned for several moments.
Anna Khorev's face looked deadly serious. Finally she said, "I guess the
story I'm going to tell you goes back a long time, to when it first began in Switzerland."

She smiled suddenly. "And do you
know something? You're the first person I've spoken to about it in over forty
years."

Lucerne, Switzerland. December 11th, 1952

All over Europe that year the news seemed
to have consisted of nothing but bad.

In Germany, the past was to resurface at
Nuremberg where a tribunal began its hearing into the Katyn Forest massacre of
1940. Four thousand bodies had been unearthed outside a small Polish town, all
bound and shot with small-caliber pistols, the grisly remains of what had once
been the cream of the Polish Army.

It was the year that also saw the French
face an all-out offensive by the Viet Minh, a bloody war was raging in Korea,
and in Europe the Iron Curtain was lowered between West Berlin and the
surrounding Soviet Zone, the ultimate gesture by the Kremlin that a postwar
peace was not to be.

Otherwise, wartime rationing was still in
force in Britain, Eva Peren died, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower beat his
Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, in the US presidential election, and in
Hollywood, one of the few bright moments in a dull year was the debut
appearance of a stunning blond starlet named Marilyn Monroe.

To Manfred Kass, stalking through the
woods outside the old Swiss city of Lucerne that cold December morning, such
things hardly mattered. And although he could not have known it, that day was
to mark a beginning, and also an ending.

It was growing light when Kass parked his
ancient black Opel on the road in front of the entrance to the woods. He
removed the single-barrel shotgun from beneath the blanket on the backseat of
the car. It was a Mansten twelve-gauge, getting a little old now, but still
reliable. He climbed out and locked the doors before slipping a cartridge into
the breech but leaving the gun broken. He shoveled a boxful of cartridges into
the pockets of his shooting jacket, then he started to walk into the woods.

At thirty-two, Kass was a tall, awkward
man. He walked clumsily and with a slight limp. The clumsiness had been with
him since childhood, but the limp had been an unwanted memento from the Battle
of Kiev eleven years before. Though he had been born in Germany, being
conscripted into Hitler's army had not been one of Kass's ambitions in life. He
had intended emigrating to Lucerne before the war, where his wife's uncle ran
the bakery business, but he had left it too late, the way he had left many
things in his life too late.

"Trust me, Hilda," he had told
his wife when the winds of war had started to whisper and she suggested they
beat a hasty retreat to Switzerland and her family. "There won't be a war,
liebchen."

Two days later Hitler had invaded Poland.

Kass had been proved wrong on many other
occasions. Like volunteering for the front at the start of the Russian
campaign. He reckoned that because the German army was rolling across the
steppes of the Ukraine with such ease, and because the Russkis were dirty and
stupid peasants, the war against them would be a piece of cake.

He had been right about one thing. The
Russians he had met were generally dirty, stupid peasants. But they were also
fierce fighters. And the fiercest enemy of all had been the Russian winter. So
cold that your own piss froze and you had to snap it off when it turned to
solid ice. So razor-sharp were the freezing Baltic and Siberian winds that
swept over the steppes that within minutes of defecating, your shit was
freeze-blasted as hard as cement.

Kass had laughed the first time he saw
his own frozen turd. But it was nothing to laugh at really. Prodding the
phenomenon with his bayonet, he had been hit by a sniper's bullet. A clear shot
from two hundred meters, into the right flank of his bare ass.

Manfred Kass was used to making mistakes.

But the mistake he was about to make that
December morning in the woods outside Lucerne was to be the biggest of his
life. He knew the forest reasonably well. Which paths led where, and the
locations of the best rabbit grounds. The rabbits made tasty stew to accompany
the fresh, floury bread he helped bake six nights a week. And the thought of
food made him hungry as he stalked through the forest, snapping the breech of
the shotgun closed as he came closer to the clearing in the woods.

The light was reasonably good and getting
better. A faint watery mist lingering on the low ground, Not perfect light, but
good enough for him to get a clear shot.

As he stepped carefully toward the
clearing, he heard the voices. He halted and rubbed his stubbly jaw. He had
never met anyone in the woods that early and the sound of voices made him
curious. it occurred to him that he might have come across a courting couple,
still out after a late Friday-night dance in Lucerne, who had come to make love
in the woods. It sometimes happened, he supposed. But he had not seen any car
parked on the road, nor any bicycle tracks in the forest.

As Kass moved through the trees to the
edge of the clearing, his eyes snapped open, and he halted, riveted to the
spot.

A man wearing a dark winter overcoat and
hat stood in the center of the forest clearing. He held a revolver in his hand.
But what shocked Kass, stunned him, was that it was aimed at a man and a young
girl kneeling in the wet grass, their faces deathly white, their hands and feet
bound with rope.

As Kass stumbled back, his belly churned
and his body broke out into a cold sweat. The kneeling man was crying in
pitiful sobs. He was middle-aged, his face painfully thin and sickly gray, and
Kass noticed the dark bruises under his eyes and the cuts on his hands
indicating he had been savagely beaten.

The child was crying too, but there was a
white cloth gagging her mouth and tied behind her long dark hair. She was no
more than ten, Kass guessed, and when he saw the frightened, pitiful look on
her face, her body trembling with fear, it made him want to vomit.

And then suddenly Kass's anger flared,
his veins no longer ice, but boiling now, because there was something pitiful
and debauched about the man and the young girl kneeling there as if waiting for
death.

He looked at the man. His weapon had a
long, slim silencer, but from where Kass stood he couldn't see his face, only
his profile. But he noticed a vivid red scar that ran from the man's left eye
to his jaw, the blemish so livid that from a distance it looked as if someone
had painted it on.

He was talking to the man kneeling in the
grass, and in between his sobs the kneeling man was pleading. Kass couldn't
hear the words but he could see that the man with the scar was not listening,
realized that what he was about to witness was an execution.

And then it happened. So fast Kass hardly
had time to react.

The scar-faced man lifted his revolver
until it was Lebel with the kneeling man's forehead. The weapon gave a hoarse
cough. A bullet slammed into the man's skull and his body jerked and crumpled
on the grass.

The child screamed behind her gag, her
eyes wild with raw fear.

Kass swallowed, wanted to scream too,
felt icy sweat run down his face. He felt his heart was about to explode with
terror. He wanted to turn back, to run, not witness what was about to happen,
but for the first time he seemed to realize that he held the shotgun in his
hands and that unless he did something the child was going to die.

He saw her struggle helplessly as the
executioner pressed the tip of the barrel to her head and prepared to squeeze
the trigger.

As Kass fumbled to raise his shotgun, he
called out hoarsely, "Halt!"

A brutal, hard face turned to look at
him. The scar-faced man stared coldly at Kass, his thin lips like slits cut in
his face with a razor. His eyes seemed to take in everything at a glance,
flicking to the forest left and right, then settling on Kass again, assessing
his enemy, but no sign of fear in his eyes.

Kass called out shakily, "Stop, do
you hear me! Put down your weapon!"

He heard the naked fear in his own voice
and barely had time to squeeze the trigger as his adversary swung around and
the silenced pistol gave another hoarse cough. The bullet smashed into Kass's
right jaw, shattering bone and teeth, slicing through flesh, flinging him back
against a tree, the shotgun flying from his grasp.

As Kass screamed in agony he saw the man
fire into the child's head. Her body jerked and crumpled.

Kass stumbled back into the trees, but
the man was already rushing toward him. As Kass crashed through the woods and
fled, oblivious to the pain in his shattered jaw, his only thoughts were of
survival and making it back to the car.

Fifty meters to go and he could see the
Opel through the trees, could hear the man rushing through the forest after
him.

Fifty long meters that seemed like a
thousand, and Kass ran like a man possessed, a hand on his bloodied face, his
whole body on fire with a powerful will to survive, the savage image of the
young girl's execution replaying in his mind like a terrible nightmare,
spurring him on.

Please God. Thirty meters. Please.
Twenty. Ten. God Please A bullet zinged through the trees, splintering wood to
his left.

Sweet Jesus ... And then suddenly he was
out of the woods.

As he reached the Opel and yanked open
the door the man emerged out of the forest behind him.

Kass did not hear the shot that hit him
but he felt the bullet slip between his back ribs like a red-hot dagger. It
jerked him forward onto the hood of the Opel.

He was already dead before he hit the
ground.

The bodies were found in the woods two
days later. Another hunter, like Kass, but this one more fortunate because he
hadn't been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He threw up when he saw the
child's body.

Her pretty face was frozen and white. The
flesh around her head wound and behind her neck had been partly chewed away by
forest rodents.

Even the hardened policemen of the
Lucerne Krindnaiamt thought it one of the most brutal murder scenes they had
ever witnessed. There was always something pitiful and particularly brutal
about the body of a murdered child.