Nah war der Freund, nun ist er …
Weit. It’s weit. Afar, not distant.
Why did he bring her here, to the very edge of the world, in this grotesque finery?
Weber has unpacked his little case, laying his instruments out on a tartan blanket as if he were on a picnic. He sits on his haunches, stirring plaster of Paris in a small receptacle.
He has already put stakes in the ground and drawn twine between them, marking out the scene.
His cheeks have regained some colour. He is whistling.
I go towards him. He raises a hand.
‘Don’t touch anything,’ he says.
‘I’ve seen crime scenes before,’ I tell him.
He carries on, head down, spreading the plaster of Paris evenly in a footprint. The grass has been trampled flat. There must have been quite a number of them, all come to look. The turf beneath her, visible between her legs, has been churned up where they manhandled her, turning her this way and that.
And then they gave her to the dogs.
When they were finished, they gave her to the dogs.
I go over to the other side.
Stare at her.
Her body, her face.
What is left, on a bed of white feathers.
The dog handlers are next to arrive, their charges straining at the leash. Manfred stands with his back turned, pointing towards a cluster of smallholdings a couple of hundred metres up the hill: coordinates 54° 15′ N, 26° 30′ E. The map says Belize.
_ _ _
‘Why was the escort so small?’ I ask. ‘When the place is swarming with partisans?’
Manfred says nothing. He is standing at the kitchen window in the largest of the farmhouses. Hands on the windowsill, he leans forward and peers out into the yard. Two Sturmmänner are at the well, struggling with the long, stripped pole of the well sweep, pressing down on it with all their weight. I stand next to him and watch as eventually it tips and the rope quivers taut. There is something heavy at the other end. A moment later it is hoisted into view: a mottled pig, blood running from the snout, blood and water.
‘Where is Steiner?’ says Manfred, staring at the bloated animal. ‘And where the hell are the locals?’
He turns round and scans the kitchen: a great clay oven, wooden tubs, tables, shelves stacked with tin plates. The icon has been taken, only a tallow candle remains in the empty niche. He throws up his arms. He knows as well as I do that they flee into the forests as soon as they catch wind of us.
He goes over to the stove. There’s a loaf in the oven. He bends down and pats his hand on the crust.
‘Still warm,’ he says, and breaks off a chunk. ‘Want some?’
_ _ _
‘There’s someone here,’ a voice shouts from the garden.
We dash outside, down the step, kick open the gate into the tall grass, insects swarming in the air, heavy with the fusty smell of dungheap.
A trail has been tramped down in the grass. The beehives hum at the very bottom of the garden, as the ground slopes away, into wild rhubarb, a stream.
We hear shots, two or three: a shotgun. Manfred points to the right. Two Sturmmänner peel away behind the great leaves of the rhubarb. Two more go back in the other direction, in single file, releasing the safety catches of their carbines. Manfred slaps my face – Wake up, for Christ’s sake! – then jabs a finger towards the hill, to the left of the shimmering grey barn.
Crouching down, we approach, taking position with our backs to the wall next to the barn door. Manfred steps swiftly into the open doorway, legs apart, firing arm extended, sweeping right to left, and back.
No one. A horse stands harnessed to a cart covered by a tarpaulin. It tosses its head and snorts.
I walk up to it, run my hand through its mane, pull aside the tarp. Inside are barrels of fish, lashed down securely. Manfred is ransacking the place, already over on the other side.
‘Here!’
Standing beside him I can see the whole valley; the span of a ridge, a gulley, a river below. A man in a white smock is running through the tall grass, leaving a trail behind him of trampled sheaths and seed heads. His left hand holds a shotgun, and he is lugging a large bundle under his right arm. His stride is plunging and awkward, and yet he is getting away. Behind him, from both sides, our men close in. Ahead of him on the ridge stands Michael, the stumpy Oberscharführer from the Schwabenland, braced, a long iron bar, a crowbar perhaps, in his right hand. They lock eyes at the same moment. The running man looks back over his shoulder, and Michael descends the sandy slope in short, shuffling strides, directly into the man’s blind spot.
In a moment they will meet.
Michael places one foot in front of the other, twists his hip, and draws back the crowbar with both hands.
Now.
I turn away.
_ _ _
I don’t know who found the pulley and the chain.
The man is laid out on the straw in the stable, his feet bound, the chain slung over a beam. They hoist him up. His upper face has been obliterated. Only the lower jaw remains; shattered teeth and a gaping, blood-filled cavity at the throat. The man drips blood and a thick, dark liquid. The white smock is a mess.
Let him hang there.
Hang there and talk to himself.
Michael stands leaning against his crowbar, as if for a photograph.
‘What do we do with this one, Manfred?’
Michael’s even stumpier brother, Hans, has his hand on the head of a little girl in a white dress. She is perhaps five or six years old, and her hair has been put up in a white cap. Her face is smeared with blood, her dress spattered, from left to right.
Reconstruction: The girl was the bundle under the man’s arm, the reason he was running so awkwardly. Michael was standing to his right, and when
