I can see the trail Manfred has left behind him. They lie on their stomachs, arms stretched out, legs protruding through doorways, long streaks of blood spattered across the cobbles. Shots ring out, somewhere to my left, not far from Feigl’s workshop.
_ _ _
Tovner’s bakery, second floor.
There are three of them – two men and a woman – on their knees with their hands behind their necks, staring at the wall, staring at the floor. Two already lie to the far right, their blood issuing out into the room, trickling crimson. Manfred’s voice is hysterical, he waves his PPK. Michael is seated on a chair. In front of him is a bottle. He wipes spit from his mouth with his thumb. Hans leans against the windowsill. Manfred fails to notice me; he goes up to the woman and puts the pistol to her neck.
‘Where is he!’
The woman says nothing, she appears to be catatonic, the petrification that precedes death, this state without name, in which a person loses all bearings and becomes mute, as stupid as death itself.
She squeezes her eyes tight shut, as if she already feels the blow to her neck.
‘Where is he!’
‘Manfred,’ I say.
He turns slowly towards me, his eyes distant. He smiles, turns back and pulls the trigger. The two men recoil as the projectile slams her head against the wall.
‘Manfred, for God’s sake!’ I yell.
‘What?’ he says.
‘This is meaningless,’ I say, more subdued, and step towards him, making eye contact. ‘These people know nothing. You don’t even know what to ask them. We’ll go to Koreletjy and look for those tattoos.’
He lowers his pistol, his body relaxes. Michael and Hans stare into space, impervious.
‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
Michael twists the lid back on the bottle and gets to his feet. Hans is already on his way down the stairs. Manfred raises his pistol again.
Two swift reports.
I slam the door as we leave.
Tattoos
Koreletjy
We find our man, Mad Mirko, behind the church in Koreletjy, a two-hour drive to the south.
His eyes radiate insanity, his face leathered by sun, a wrinkled landslide, mouth full of blackened gums. He gibbers and slurs, tosses his head, making sweeping, empty gestures with his hands, and then he sees an opening and is off in his flimsy shoes, a shuffle more than a run, around the back of the church. Michael drags him back by the arm, deposits him in front of us.
He smiles vacantly.
Hiwi: ‘He wants to know if we’ve got four kopeks – four kopeks for a tallow candle?’
Manfred looks at me. I rummage in my pocket and produce a large, shiny Reichsmark. Mirko snatches the coin from my hand, and conceals it in the folds of his clothing. Michael steps towards him and I stop him with a flat hand against his chest:
‘Give him some of that rotgut …’ I say, nodding towards the bottle.
‘What?’
‘Do as he says,’ says Manfred.
Michael hands him the bottle; Mirko tears it from his hand, downs the contents in one, belches, and glances sideways at us.
‘Ask if we can see his tattoos,’ I tell the Hiwi.
They exchange a few words, Mirko’s face lights up, he lifts his coat and brown homespun shirt, unties the cord around his trousers. His belly is white as chalk, skin covered in grimy tattoos, towers, crucifixes, a grinning devil.
‘What are they?’ I ask the Hiwi.
‘Vorkuta,’ the Hiwi says.
‘What?’
‘Gulag … Siberia … these are prison tattoos. He’s a thief, not political.’
The old man puts his hands out now, they too are tattooed, symbols etched across the backs of his hands, fingers and knuckles; even his wrists are covered. The Hiwi examines him.
‘Fifteen years inside … four prisons.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘They write their history in the tattoos: the cross here is for the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Leningrad, before the Revolution …’
I take out the notepad with Etke’s drawings in it, flick back through the pages until I find them: the eyes and the birds. I point, and nod to the Hiwi:
‘Ask him if he knows what these mean …’
Mirko takes the notepad, turns it in his hands, clicks his tongue.
He begins to laugh.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘Cockerel … It’s a cockerel.’
‘I can see that.’
The Hiwi asks him again, more words are exchanged.
‘This tattoo is enforced,’ says the Hiwi.
‘Enforced?’
‘Yes, how do you say, one of the strong inmates has carved it into his back with a razor blade, like the eyes … he is a sex slave, a slave of slaves,’ he explains.
‘What?’
‘It means the man who killed Steiner was probably an untouchable.’
‘A what?’
‘An outcast – the lowest, humiliated.’
_ _ _
Manfred pulls up outside a whitewashed house, a few hundred metres from the edge of woods on the outskirts of Koreletjy.
He puts his finger to his lips, presses the handle down and shoves the door open with the toe of his boot when it sticks. We enter, into the cool air of a scullery, then stand and listen. Not a sound. Manfred nudges me on.
The kitchen is warm from summer. It smells of cardamom and lime.
At the rear, on the bench, concealed from the street and the scullery, sit two Sturmmänner. Manfred leans forward to one of them.
Etke’s aunt stands with her back to us, whispers something to a girl who must be about seven or eight. The boy is tied to the table leg. In two strides, Manfred is over the Czapski woman, pulling down the zip at her back. The woman does not flinch. He exposes her shoulders, runs his hand along the shoulder blades. She is rigged up with wires. He slaps her buttock and she turns, her arm covering up her breasts, and I see her face is gnarled and bruised. There are some marks, burns perhaps, on her breastbone. Manfred has attached an explosive
