The Girl from Krakow (18 page)

“Bring her in, immediately.”

Leideritz clicked his heels. “
Zur befehl, Generalmajor.”

The next morning
Generalmajor
Friedrich von Richter left for
Abwehr
headquarters in Berlin. He didn’t have this Rita Guildenstern woman to interrogate. But he had enough information to worry about her, and more than enough, he thought, to find her. It was just a matter of sending out a description to every police station in the country. Something would turn up.

PART III

MEANWHILE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I
t had been a hard war for Gil, six months of discomfort and even some danger. But now, in the spring of 1942, with any luck, it was over.

The worst moment had been a dive-bomber attack on the rail line somewhere near Uman during the thousand-kilometer retreat to Dnepropetrovsk. He’d been in the Red Army less than a month, assigned at Lvov to a mobile field hospital. At first he stumbled from one duty to another, with no real supervision, amid the chaos of a withdrawal in which the order of the day seemed to be
sauve qui peut—
every man for himself. Somehow the field hospital had been assigned to the headquarters of the 15th Rifle Corps of the Fifth Army. That got it a locomotive and six passenger cars, which were immediately painted—top and sides—with large red crosses. The train had been ordered east from Kiev a few days before the whole southern group of armies, 650,000 men, had been surrounded.

As it stood in a marshaling yard waiting to water and recoal, air-raid warning sirens began to shriek. Then Gil heard a throbbing, increasingly loud whine. Looking out the large window of his carriage, he could see the gull wings of a Junkers 87
Stuka
. A bomb was just beginning slowly to move from between its talon-like undercarriage. Freed from the weight, the plane lurched back upward and out of the window frame. He knew little of military aviation, but the
Stuka
was a type he recognized from newspaper photos in Spain. The German Condor Legion had flown them for Franco. The shriek, the anger of flames spitting from its radiators, the menace in its very shape, a predatory mechanical bird of prey, had made it an icon on both sides of the Civil War. But he had managed to avoid seeing one on the wing before now.

Gil rushed down the corridor, jumped off the carriage onto the gravel roadbed, and scurried under the train’s wheels for protection. From beneath the carriage, he saw an orderly ten meters away raise his head out of a slit trench, urgently imploring Gil to crawl over and slide in, along with the others from the train. Frozen in the sudden silence, Gil could not move. Instead he stood, waiting for the next group of four
Stukas
to go into their dive. When the second set of dive-bombers had finished, Gil was temporarily deaf and trembling uncontrollably, but otherwise unhurt.

The last carriage of the train had been derailed by the closest of the blasts. Fortunately, it could be abandoned, since the commander of the field hospital was not responsible for rolling stock. Soldiers and officers stood around as the trainmen decoupled the damaged car. Another medical corps officer came up beside Gil. “Well, Captain Romero, rather brave of you to stay with the train.” He was shouting over temporary deafness. “Seen it all before, I suppose
 
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in Spain?”

“What do you mean?” he shouted.

“They say you were with the Republicans in the Civil War. The orderlies thought you were a damn fool staying with the train when everyone knew it was the target. But the chief said you knew what you were doing. Those dive-bombers frighten, but he figured you knew they aren’t very accurate.”

Gil would pocket the compliment, but inwardly he was mortified at his own stupidity. Inexperience could masquerade as bravura once too often. He had to find a way out of the field hospital service, well away from the front.

After five months of retreat, the unit had detrained east o
f
Voronezh, setting up an evacuation hospital. Till that point they had been moving back too fast ever to see any real casualties, except for a brief period after they passed through Dnepropetrovsk. One night Gil had duty with triaged patients for whom nothing further, and in many cases nothing at all, could be done. It was said that in the Wehrmacht, frontline medical orderlies and even evacuation medical staff carried small caliber pistols to put such cases out of their misery. It seemed to Gil to be a good idea.

The dying man beside him was still in the remnants of a uniform, with the red tabs of an NKVD captain. So, here was a political commissar, a surprise to Gil since they were rarely to be found in harm’s way. This one had the stomach viscera of someone who had taken enough shrapnel to destroy a company. He was coming out of a morphine-induced sleep, and Gil began to wonder if there was any more available. Catching sight of his white coat, the captain asked, “Am I going to die, comrade?”

“Of course not.” It was Gil’s automatic answer. The dying man beckoned him close and, with a powerful grasp Gil had no reason to expect, took him by the throat. “That’s a lie.” Gil could taste the spittle, he was so close to the man’s face.

“All right, yes, you are going to die, and probably tonight.” This man deserved complete candor for the distress he had just caused Gil. “I was about to give you enough morphine to see you through to the end.”

“First, you have to listen. I can’t die without telling someone. There is something I did; it was wrong. Something we did, the NKVD. It’s changed everything for me. I have to tell someone.”

Gil shook his head. He had no need to learn NKVD secrets. “Whatever you did was for the Soviet state, for Comrade Stalin. Rest quiet now.”

The captain closed his eyes. “I’ve been in the security organs since ’37, when we were beating confessions out of the old Bolsheviks—harmless
 
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old comrades. It was for the good of the party, yes? We had to send a signal to the wreckers even if it meant liquidating some innocent true believers.” This was just what Gil didn’t want to know. But at least the man was whispering, and there was no one else on the ward that night to overhear. The wounded man stopped momentarily, and Gil breathed a sigh of relief. But then he continued. “Even when Stalin made the pact, we believed he was playing for time, that we weren’t ready.”

Here Gil was finally able to agree. “Yes, that’s right, Comrade Stalin understood everything.”

“So, why did he kill thousands of Polish officers who could have helped us fight the Fascists once we were ready?” Gil wanted to stop up his ears, but now he was hypnotized by the dying man’s words. What was he talking about? “Once Stalin got his hands on Poland, we were ordered to take them out of the POW camps and shoot them, one after the other. Was this Comrade Stalin’s way of preparing for war with Germany? To kill men whose only crime was to have fought against the Germans? No. He wasn’t getting ready for war against Hitler. He was going to join Hitler’s war, and the enemy of his friend was his enemy too. Our country is in the hands of one of Hitler’s pawns
 
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who only fights him now because his loyalty was betrayed.”

Gil almost reached up to cover the commissar’s mouth before he realized they were the only ones still awake or even alive in the ward.
No one can talk like this, not even a dying man,
he thought. As for those Polish officers? If there had been any, it was hard for Gil to work up much sympathy for them. They were probably catechizing Catholics, foppish second sons of landed families, happy to compete in dressage and attend embassy parties, indifferent to the sufferings of workers and especially minorities in their new Polish state. These dead officers were probably men with nothing much against their German fellow officers, combined with three hundred years of hating Russians and Jews. Surely Stalin knew what he was doing when he liquidated this potential internal threat. This, at any rate, was what Gil was going to convince himself of now that he had learned what he didn’t want to know.

Of course, the NKVD captain could have been making everything up. Perhaps it was even a test. Might it be that if he didn’t report these remarks, he’d be in trouble himself? Would they maim someone like that just to set me up? No, that was too paranoid even in a nation where paranoia was the key to survival.

The NKVD officer began again. “We just followed Koba.” This was Stalin’s pet name. “I betrayed the revolution. I became an unworthy person.” He lay back and smiled. “Now I’ve confessed.” After a pause, he smiled again. “I am a Soviet person again.” The dying captain fell asleep, exhausted by his exertion, and the morphine wasn’t needed. He was dead before Gil’s shift ended the next morning.

When his replacement arrived, Gil asked, “Comrade captain, do you believe deathbed confessions are to be trusted?”

The answer came back, “Yes, when they come from enemies of the state.” Like every sensible person, his colleague was ever on his guard.

Don’t make waves. Don’t get noticed, not in Stalin’s Russia. Gil was familiar with the maxim. But there was nothing for it. After the withdrawal from Dnepropetrovsk, Gil knew he had to act before the steady stream of wounded turned into a flood. He had to find a way out before the front caught up with him again. There was really only one chance.

Putting on a clean uniform, he made himself look as military as he could. The tunic fit nicely. Good-quality cloth, fully lined. There was smart beading down the trousers, the leather officer’s belt ready to carry a sidearm. As a medical officer, of course, Gil didn’t carry one. But there were officer’s tabs and epaulets. Hair cut short, but still the thin mustache. He’d put on a little weight, but his color was good. All that time in the outdoors during the retreat, no doubt. He enjoyed catching glimpses of himself in uniform. He would regret giving it up. But it wasn’t worth his life.

Steeling himself, he went to the colonel’s tent and asked to speak to him. He was shown in directly.

“Yes, Romero?” Colonel Volodin, commander of the evacuation hospital, was not a physician, nor was Leutnant Colonel Briansk, the party commissar who stood behind the seated colonel.

“Sir, as you will recall, I came to Poland from Spain before the war. The Soviet government has concluded an agreement with the Polish government in exile to allow former Polish residents here in the Soviet Union to join a Polish Army now forming on Soviet territory.”

“Yes. I am familiar with all this.”

“Sir, I request permission to be detached from this unit so that I can join these new forces.”

“You want to join Anders’s ex-POWs out east in Orenburg? That’s central Asia, man—there’s nothing there.” Apparently Volodin knew more about the matter than Gil did. He even seemed to know who was in charge of this fledgling army of Poles. “You’d be joining an army with no weapons, that probably won’t even get fed. The whole thing is just another stupid waste of manpower. I need you here, anyway.” He was about to conclude “Permission denied” when Briansk, the commissar, audibly cleared his throat. Gil tried not to notice its decided effect on Colonel Volodin, who turned. “Leutnant Colonel, what do you think about this request?”

“The first secretary, comrade Stalin, made this undertaking to the Poles, sir. He even had their general, Anders, taken from the Lubyanka to command it. Were Romero to file a grievance, he would have some grounds.”

Gil laughed inwardly. No one filed grievances in the Red Army. But his face remained immobile. Was this grievance talk coded language?

“Very well.” Volodin turned to Gil. “Report back for your orders tomorrow morning.”