‘Don’t know a Herr Nebe,’ he said thickly, almost as if his mouth didn’t work properly. Naturally I was reluctant to turn round and take a good look to make sure.
‘Yes, that’s right, he changed his name, didn’t he?’ I tried hard to remember Nebe’s new surname. Meanwhile I heard the man behind me step back a couple of steps.
‘Now walk to your right,’ he told me. ‘Towards the trees. And don’t trip on your shoelaces or anything.’
He sounded big and not too bright. And it was a strangely accented German he spoke: like Prussian, but different; more like the Old Prussian I had heard my grandfather speak; almost like the German I had heard spoken in Poland.
‘Look, you’re making a mistake,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you check with your boss? My name is Bernhard Gunther. There’s a meeting at ten o’clock this morning. I’m supposed to be at it.’
‘It’s not even eight yet,’ grunted my captor. ‘If you’re here for a meeting, how come you’re so early? And how come you don’t come to the front door like normal visitors? How come you walk across the fields? How come you snoop around in the outhouses?’
‘I’m early because I own a couple of wineshops in Berlin,’ I said. ‘I thought it might be nice to take a look around the estate.’
‘You were taking a look all right. You’re a snooper.’ He chuckled cretinously. ‘I got orders to shoot snoopers.’
‘Now wait a minute -’ I turned into a clubbing blow from his gun, and as I fell I caught a glimpse of a big man with a shaven head and a lopsided sort of jaw. He grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and hauled me back on to my feet, and I wondered why I had never thought to sew a razor blade under that part of my coat collar. He pushed me through the line of trees and down a slope to a small clearing where several large dustbins were standing. A trail of smoke and a sweet sickly smell arose through the roof of a small brick hut: it was where they incinerated the rubbish. Next to several bags of what looked like cement,
Now I had it. He was a Latvian. A big, stupid Latvian. And I decided that if he was working for Arthur Nebe he was probably from a Latvian SS division, that had served in one of the Polish death camps. They had used a lot of Latvians at places like Auschwitz. Latvians were enthusiastic anti-Semites when Moses Mendelssohn was one of Germany’s favourite sons.
I hauled the iron sheet away from what was revealed as some kind of old drain, or cesspit. Certainly it smelt every bit as bad. It was then that I saw the cat again. It emerged from between two paper sacks labelled calcium oxide close by the pit. It mewed contemptuously, as if to say, ‘I warned you there was someone standing in that yard, but you wouldn’t listen to me.’ An acrid, chalky smell came up from the pit and made my skin crawl. ‘You’re right,’ mewed the cat, like something from Edgar Allan Poe, ‘calcium oxide is a cheap alkali for treating acid soil. Just the sort of thing you would expect to see in a vineyard. But it’s also called quicklime, and that’s an extremely efficient compound for speeding human decomposition.’
With horror I realized that the Latvian really did mean to kill me. And there I was trying to place his accent like some sort of philologist, and to recall the chemical formulas I had learned at school.
Then I got my first good look at him. He was big and as burly as a circus horse, but you hardly noticed that for looking at his face: its whole right side was crooked like he had a big chew of tobacco in his cheek; his right eye stared wide as if it had been made of glass. He could probably have kissed his own ear lobe. Starved of affection, as any man with such a face would have been, he probably had to.
‘Kneel down by the side of the pit,’ he snarled, sounding like a Neanderthal short of a couple of vital chromosomes.
‘You’re not going to kill an old comrade, are you?’ I said desperately trying to remember Nebe’s new name, or even one of the Latvian regiments. I considered shouting for help except that I knew he would have shot me without hesitation.
‘You’re an old comrade?’ he sneered, without much apparent difficulty.
‘OberSturmFuhrer with the First Latvian,’ I said with a poor show of nonchalance.
The Latvian spat into the bushes and regarded me blankly with his pop eye. The gun, a big blue steel Colt automatic, remained pointed squarely at my chest.
‘First Latvian, eh? You don’t sound like a Lat.’
‘I’m Prussian,’ I said. ‘Our family lived in Riga. My father was a shipworker from Danzig. He married a Russian.’ I offered a few words of Russian by way of confirmation, although I could not remember if Riga was predominantly Russian or German-speaking.
His eyes narrowed, one rather more than the other. ‘So what year was the First Latvian founded?’
I swallowed hard and racked my memory. The cat mewed encouragingly. Reasoning that the raising of a Latvian SS regiment would have to have followed Operation Barbarossa in 1941, I said, ‘1942.’
He grinned horribly, and shook his head with slow sadism. ‘1943,’ he said, advancing a couple of paces. ‘It was 1943. Now get down on your knees or I’ll give it to you in the guts.’
Slowly I sank down on my knees on the edge of the pit, feeling the ground wet through the material of my trousers. I had seen more than enough of SS murder to know what he intended: a shot in the back of the neck, my body collapsing neatly into a ready-made grave, and a few spadefuls of quicklime on top. He came around behind me in a wide circle. The cat settled down to watch, its tail wrapping neatly around its behind as it sat. I closed my eyes and waited.
‘Rainis,’ said a voice, and several seconds passed. I hardly dared to look around and see if I had been saved.
‘It’s all right, Bernie. You can get up now.’
My breath came out in one huge burp of fright. Weakly, my knees knocking, I picked myself up from the edge of the pit and turned to see Arthur Nebe standing a few metres behind the Latvian ugly. To my annoyance he was grinning.
‘I’m glad you find it so amusing, Dr Frankenstein,’ I said. ‘Your fucking monster nearly killed me.’
‘What on earth were you thinking of, Bernie?’ Nebe said. ‘You should know better. Rainis here was only doing his job.’
The Latvian nodded sullenly and bolstered his Colt. ‘He was snooping,’ he said dully. ‘I caught him.’
I shrugged. ‘It’s a nice morning. I thought I’d take a look at Grinzing. I was just admiring your estate when Lon Chancy here stuck a gun in my ear.’
The Latvian took my revolver out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Nebe. ‘He was carrying a lighter, Herr Nolde.’
‘Planning to shoot small game, is that it, Bernie?’
‘You can’t be too careful these days.’
‘I’m glad you think so,’ said Nebe. ‘It saves me the trouble of apologizing.’ He weighed my gun in his hand and then pocketed it. ‘All the same, I’ll hang on to this for now if you don’t mind. Guns make some of our friends nervous. Remind me to return it to you before you leave.’ He turned to the Latvian.
‘All right, Rainis, that’s all. You were only doing your job. I suggest that you go and get yourself some breakfast.’
The monster nodded and walked back towards the house, with the cat following him.
‘I’ll bet he can eat his weight in peanuts.’
Nebe smiled thinly. ‘Some people keep savage dogs to protect them. I have Rainis.’
‘Yes, well I hope he’s house-trained.’ I took off my hat and wiped my brow with my handkerchief. ‘Me, I wouldn’t let him past the front door. I’d keep him on a chain in the yard. Where does he think he is? Treblinka? The bastard couldn’t wait to shoot me, Arthur.’
‘Oh, I don’t doubt it. He enjoys killing people.’
Nebe shook his head to my offer of a cigarette, but he had to help me light mine as my hand was shaking like it was talking to a deaf Apache.
‘He’s a Latvian,’ Nebe explained. ‘He was a corporal at the Riga concentration camp. When the Russians captured him they stamped on his head and broke his jaw with their boots.’
‘Believe me, I know how they must have felt.’
‘They paralysed half his face, and left him slightly soft in the head. He was always a brutal killer. But now he’s more like an animal. And just as loyal as any dog.’
