There are too many of them, making them panicked and aggressive. The passage is a bottleneck – a heaving frenzy of meat, and they are at each other’s throats. Then suddenly they are out, the arena is theirs, snouts rooting the sand.
For a moment they are confused.
Silence.
Then they see Goga.
‘I haven’t got my binoculars,’ I say to the man next to me, an officer I haven’t seen before.
‘You’re not borrowing mine, that’s for sure!’ he says, putting them to his eyes.
I turn and go down the steps, and hear the first clash as I leave.
Cheers.
Mirth.
_ _ _
Reaching the park, I change my mind and go back. I have to see it – his final moments – only then I think better of it, the whole thing is just too grotesque. I go back to the park, sit down on a bench and stare up at the civil commission offices again.
I sit for a while and wait, and then dash back.
The entrance to the hospital yard, the one I used twenty minutes ago, is locked so I must walk all the way around the building and in through the main entrance on the other side. I can hear the tumult from within, the screams of the beasts, the clamour of the crowd.
I run into an SS guard at the door and explain my business. He gives me directions and I walk through the great hall, turn right into a long, white corridor and follow the noise. The glass door at the end is locked, I back-track, down into the basement. Manfred’s secret room is locked, but the door of the mortuary chamber further down is open. The steel door leading directly out to the seating stand is locked too. I switch left, along a second corridor lined with hot-water tanks, make another turn, and then another, before entering a new corridor in which I find a Sturmmann.
‘The hospital yard, is it this way?’
‘Yes, just make a left down there and you’ll see the stairs, Herr Oberleutnant. You haven’t seen a toilet anywhere, by any chance? I’ve got the most awful diarrhoea …’
‘Sorry, no.’
I find the stairs, but when I go up I emerge at the other end of the yard, a tiny corner hemmed in between the building’s outer wall and the tall boarded fence enclosing the arena, some fifty metres from the entrance and the seating stand. SS are posted all along the perimeter, ready to pounce should Goga attempt to climb the fence, but here I am on my own. I can see only the upper rows of the stand at the far end. I am about to turn back when I realise the crowd is on its feet and looking towards my end of the arena.
Goga must be right on the other side of the boards.
There is an empty chair and a thermos flask.
They must belong to the Sturmmann I ran into.
I can hear the boars, they are so close.
_ _ _
I stand up on the chair and peer over the fence. I see three muscular beasts, battering, grunting, squealing, climbing each other’s backs. And there, less than half a metre below me, Goga pressed against the boards, upright. He has lost his helmet, his face is chewed open, his eyes closed, neck and shoulders gaping wounds, one arm visibly broken. He staggers, unable to react when one of the animals charges onto the backs of the two others, only to have misjudged the distance, jaws snapping furiously at the air in front of him as it slams its weight into the fence. The whole structure threatens to give and I almost lose my balance on the chair as the beast scrambles to its feet again. Then everything goes quiet for a moment.
It lifts its head and looks at me. A small, blue eye.
It is the black one with the spot on its ear, the one that killed the deaf boy.
I cannot keep my eyes from it.
‘Kill me …’
I am startled to hear Goga speak.
‘Have mercy …’
Before I can react, Goga twists round, reaches up with his good arm and has me in a headlock. I prise at his fingers in panic. He claws hard into my neck, pressing me down against the fence. I try to push back from the boards with my knees and thighs but find no purchase. I can’t get him off me.
‘I’ll tell you where the gold is.’
His rancid breath is in my face, his mashed features.
‘Let go!’
‘Steiner had it hidden. He told me to get it out of him …’
‘Who? Who did?’
‘The one who spoke before …’
‘… Manfred?’
_ _ _
My ears are ringing. Goga’s rapid breathing. The snorting animals. Manfred. A great silence from the stand.
I hear footsteps, the Sturmmann from before, but time has stopped. Everything is turned on its head. The edges are burning. Steiner. Gold. Manfred? What the hell is going on?
I manage to twist the PPK from the holster with my free hand and point it over the fence.
‘Strehling,’ Goga whispers. ‘Strehling has the gold …’
He tilts his head to the gun, his blue eyes look into mine as he closes his mouth around the barrel.
He nods.
The animals panic and disperse when I pull the trigger.
I see Manfred jump, then a moment’s indecision.
The Sturmmann hauls me from the fence.
_ _ _
It happens slowly. It is a play, a ringing fever.
A Feldwebel goes round the arena shooting the animals one by one. They puncture, the pistol fired into their foreheads, brains exploded, legs buckled beneath them.
They have dragged me up in front of the buffet.
The wind has got up.
I have ruined their party.
Manfred’s voice is hysterical as he grips my collar.
‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’
‘He was trying to pull me down, surely you could see that? He was …’
Dirlewanger’s ghoulish face is stiffened in scorn.
Grünfeldt with that stupid hat, gawping like a simpleton.
Round, incredulous faces, featureless, eyes on stalks, whispering tongues.
‘I panicked … I didn’t know what was happening. I was grabbed by a
