The Mask of Troy (20 page)

The soldier turned. His eyes were dull, and his skin seemed to have taken on the hue of the place. ‘Later, mate. Don’t you worry about that.
Later
.’

Mayne cleared his throat, trying to control his nausea. He turned to Cameron. His voice sounded muffled, distant. ‘These SS men, the guards. How on earth have they survived?’

‘We were amazed they were still here to surrender. But they’re arrogant and defiant. They seem to have no idea of the crimes they’ve committed. Utterly indoctrinated. For them, the Jews, the Slavs are all animals, and they don’t understand how we don’t see that too. They’re even rather proud of some they’ve kept alive, rich Jews that Hitler wanted kept as ransom to their families in the West. Like all gangsters, the Nazis were perfectly able to put profit before ideology. We’ve even got the commandant, an
SS
-
Untersturmführer
. He’ll stand trial. It’s important we don’t kill them all. But there are others hiding in the forest, being hunted by the more able-bodied of the inmates, those who only arrived here in the last days. It’s a kind of ghastly no-man’s-land out there, as if the hell of this place is seeping out like an infectious disease. They especially loathe the
SS-Helferin
, the female auxiliaries. One of the women still at large is the
Lagerführerin
, the camp leader. She seems to have been a particularly vile bully. They think she’s hiding in the woods. They want to rip her to pieces.’

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ Mayne muttered, looking around.

‘I just want them to get it over and done with. My main job now is dealing with the typhus. We need to get the inmates all back in the camp for scrubbing and delousing. If typhus spreads among the local population and then gets into the advancing Allied troops, it could seriously impede the war effort.’ He gestured at the SS men. ‘And there’s another factor. Doing this job, helping us, is also their survival strategy. The more enthusiastically they help, the less likely we are to take revenge. That’s what they think. And they’re probably right. With each hour that passes, the horror will become part of our landscape, will become almost mundane. It’s a ghastly thing to say, but true. It’s our own survival strategy, mentally. The emotions switch off. We get numbed to it, just as they did. And they know it’s a relief for us to have them do this appalling job.’

Mayne stared at the scene, mesmerized, watching the SS men repeat the same odious task over and over again. It was like a medieval image of hell, like one of the punishments set in Hades to those condemned forever to repeat the same task, like Tantalus or Sisyphus. Only here the SS were not tormented by what they were doing. They almost seemed to be relishing it. He swallowed hard, and felt a cloying sensation at the back of his throat. He knew it must be the reek of this place, but he seemed no longer able to smell it, as if it had overwhelmed his senses. He suddenly felt tremulous all over, barely able to stand. He forced himself to concentrate on the scene, abstractly. He had tried his hand at painting before the war. He thought how he might frame the image, how he might capture his emotional response, refracted through his own experience. He watched a naked body sail through the air, a woman, her arms flung out before her, like a diver plunging into a swimming pool. But she was dead, and the swimming pool was a pit of rotting bodies. Mayne shook his head. Here, art as metaphor, art as suggestion, had no place. Here it could only be reality. Stark, unadorned reality. He turned to Cameron. ‘Is anyone photographing this?’

Cameron shook his head. ‘This place is top secret until you chaps give it the all-clear. Only essential army and medical personnel are allowed in. Bringing in those civilians to watch was understandable, but burdens us even more. I warned the CO but he’d made his mind up. With the typhus risk, they’ll have to be interned, probably until the war is over. But the horror’s on record, if that’s what you’re asking. The Army and Film Photographic Unit is at Belsen. Come on. I haven’t got much time. I need to supervise setting up those hospital tents.’

Mayne and Lewes followed him. Stein was still in the jeep, ashen-faced, wiping his mouth. Mayne could see that he had been sick. He climbed unsteadily out of the vehicle and followed them around the far side of the pit, towards the other line of barracks. On the open ground in front lay smouldering piles of rags, so impregnated with human grease that they burned like funeral pyres. They passed the entrance to the first of the barrack buildings, and Mayne stopped to peer in. It took him a moment to adjust to the gloom. All he could hear was the droning of flies. The air was fetid, humid. He had completely lost his sense of smell. He tried to look through the squalor, to remember what Cameron had said.
They are human beings
. The body nearest to him was naked, a man, the skin like parchment, discoloured with filth. He was lying on his back, his abdomen grotesquely hollow, as if he had been disembowelled, as if the life had been sucked out of him by that hurricane force that had blown the other man against the barbed-wire fence, the first body Mayne had seen in this place. His arms were outstretched, touching two other bodies that were curled up, facing away in opposite directions. Mayne saw no backdrop, only darkness, and as he stood aside to let the light in, the bodies seemed almost luminous, like a painting of Christ on the Cross and the two thieves. He swayed slightly, nearly retching. These were not images of atonement. These people did not die for the sins of mankind. They died horribly because the world had let it happen. He clenched his hands. This was reality. Stark reality.

He pushed away from the barrack entrance and went to where the others were waiting for him, further along the building. Lewes offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. Stein turned to Cameron. ‘Before we go on. We know you’ve got to get back to your job. Is there anything more you can tell us? About what was going on in this place?’

Cameron stared hard at the ground, then looked up. Mayne noticed how pale he was, his eyes bloodshot. Cameron pointed to a long, low mound on the other side of the clearing, against the line of the pine forest. ‘Just a few things. Over there, that’s where they buried the Soviet prisoners back in ’41. Hundreds of them, used as labour to build this place, then shot.’

‘That’s four years ago,’ Mayne murmured. ‘Yet you say most of the Jews here arrived from Auschwitz only in the last few months. What was going on here before then?’

Cameron took a deep breath. ‘All right. It may as well be me who briefs you. This should have come from the intelligence officer with the AA regiment, but I couldn’t see him anywhere when we came through and I haven’t got time to hunt for him. At any rate, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell you any more than I can. When we arrived, he interrogated the camp commandant, the
SS-Untersturmführer
. I was there, as a witness. The IO was a newly commissioned replacement, been out here about as long as I have, with a smattering of Italian and fluent French. Wrong theatre, wrong war. Typical army foresight. I was the only German-speaker. I said I could spare ten minutes, no more. People were dying as we spoke. I’m supposed to be a doctor.
A doctor
.’ Cameron rubbed his forehead, suddenly distressed.

‘All right. Go on,’ Mayne said.

‘The commandant said it had been an
Arbeitslager
, a labour camp, for forestry workers. There are tracks leading off from the compound into the forest, and he said they were used by work parties. He said the wood-cutting operations wound down last year and after that the camp was used to house rich Jews, the ones Hitler intended to use as bargaining chips with the Allies. According to this man, they seriously believed they could use Jews in this way as recently as a few months ago, only shelving the idea when the Allies crossed the Rhine. God know what other desperate schemes the Nazis had prepared.’

‘That’s what we’re interested in,’ Mayne said. ‘Anything you say might help.’

‘All right.’ Cameron nodded, more collected now. ‘The
SS-Untersturmführer
said that for this reason the camp had only ever housed a relatively small number of healthy inmates: first the fit young men selected for forestry work, and then the members of wealthy Jewish families, who were well fed and looked after. He claimed he only arrived as a replacement commandant six weeks ago. His job was to remove the remaining inmates and shut the camp down.’

‘Remove?’ Mayne said.

‘Remove. You can guess what that means. But we didn’t have time to pursue that. We wanted him to talk, not clam up. That’ll doubtless come up at his trial.’

‘So then what?’

‘He said they were totally unprepared for the influx of Jews marched here from Poland, and had no way of dealing with them. But take that with a pinch of salt. He seems to have had a full team of seasoned SS guards, including the female camp leader. It wasn’t chaos in here until the final week or so. Before then, they seemed perfectly able to inflict a systematic regime of brutality and sadism.’

‘The story seems plausible,’ Mayne said slowly. ‘But it doesn’t account for the extreme secrecy of the place, those signs outside warning of epidemics.’

Cameron nodded. ‘There’s something else. I spoke to one inmate who claimed to be the only survivor from the earlier phase of the camp, a man the SS used as a cook. Evidently quite a good one, a trained chef. He’d been here since at least ’42. He was some kind of common criminal, a Frenchman from Marseille, not a Jew. I didn’t think he was a particularly savoury character. He said that when the new commandant arrived, the SS shot everyone still in the camp, stripping them naked and throwing them into a ditch over where the Russians are buried. He said that with the new commandant and guards, none of them would have known of his cooking skills and given him special status, so he survived by hiding in the barracks and then commingling with the new influx from Auschwitz when they arrived, disguising himself as a Jew. They were all supposed to be kept alive for the work gangs in the cities, but that never happened. He was one of the healthier inmates when we arrived, and he went straight to me, evidently trusting the idea of a doctor more than a soldier to talk to.’

‘Why was he keen to talk?’ Stein asked.

‘The other inmates knew he wasn’t Jewish,’ Cameron replied. ‘They were suspicious of him. He knew they’d finger him. He wanted to assure us that he wasn’t a former SS guard disguising himself. He also thought that by showing us he wasn’t Jewish, we’d give him preferential treatment. A bit of an anti-Semite. He had short shrift from me there, I’m afraid.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘After I put him at the back of the queue for treatment, he disappeared. Gone into the forest and then headed south, I imagine. He claimed he was from Marseille, arrested by the Vichy police and then handed over to the Gestapo. Probably some kind of small-time gangster. A pretty wily character. I doubt whether you’ll find him again.’

‘So did he tell you? About this place?’

‘Before I went cold on him and he clammed up, he was eager to please. He said the Soviet prisoners in ’41 hadn’t just been used to make this clearing and build the camp. They’d also built something deep in the forest, involving a lot of concrete. It became a feared place. By the time our Frenchman arrived, rumour was that nobody who went there came out alive. He said that every few weeks a truck with a Gestapo motorcycle escort would appear at night at the camp entrance and disappear down a track into the forest. Once he watched the truck become enmired in mud and saw the people inside taken out. He said they were fit, healthy-looking young men and women, some with the Star of David on their sleeves, but of all different races and types - Slavs and Mongolians who were probably Soviet prisoners, fair-haired Nordic types, maybe from occupied Norway and Denmark, darker Mediterranean people, and North Africans like he grew up with in Marseille, perhaps French colonial prisoners of war.’

‘Almost as if they’d been chosen to represent every race the Nazis came across,’ Mayne murmured.

Cameron nodded. ‘The trucks would disappear into the forest, and a few days later there’d be activity at a deep pit beyond the mound where the Soviets had been shot. Our Frenchman said he knew there were fresh burials because of the lime, which was trucked into the camp in large quantities and taken over there. Huge amounts of lime, apparently, far more than you’d need unless the bodies were really contaminated, I thought.’

‘Contaminated with
what
?’ Mayne asked.

Cameron stared at him. ‘I don’t know. I dread to think. I’ll come to that. Our man also said an SS servant he’d befriended in the kitchen told him a story, about an SS guard who’d lost his temper with the Jews who were used to carry the lime. The guard had said that unless they worked harder, he’d send them to the
Geherer
in the forest and they’d suffer the fate of all the others who had gone in there. The Gestapo who were apparently always lurking around this camp got wind of his threat and took the guard away the next day, never to be seen again. Whatever was going on was clearly very top secret.’

‘
Geherer
,’ Stein murmured. ‘That means bunker, storage room.’

Mayne started to take a deep breath, then stopped abruptly. His sense of smell had returned. The stench suddenly seemed to fill his stomach, and he nearly threw up. He swallowed hard. ‘
Geherer
. A bunker. That sounds like a place for storing stolen art. What you suspected, Stein? That’s what we’re after. But it’s hard to tally with this man’s story, if it’s true. Perhaps the people he saw going in were just more construction labour, fit young men.’

‘And women,’ Cameron said.

Stein turned to them. ‘Two weeks ago, the US 8th Infantry Division stumbled on a sealed-up copper mine at Siegen, near Aachen. Inside they found a huge cache of art treasures, old masters by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, as well as priceless artefacts, including the crown of Charlemagne. Some were local cathedral treasures there for safekeeping during the war, but there was also art looted by the Nazis. It was just what the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives section had been looking for. It was our breakthrough. That’s why I was rushed here. We believe there will be many more such places, dozens, hundreds, some of them in mines and other makeshift hiding places, others in purpose-built bunkers.’