Pale Horse Riding Read online

  All Morgen’s old amphetamine energy was gone. Even his smoking lacked enthusiasm.

  ‘No map I can find of this place, apart from a pre-war street one of the town, with Polish names. I believe the camp is huge and everyone is employed – I use the word loosely as I doubt they get paid – to build a petrochemical plant.’ Morgen threw up his hands. ‘There must be a weight of paperwork but I can’t get near it. Stuff from a couple of years ago you can find – squabbles about who is supposed to pay for maintenance work, the SS or the army, from which it leases its barracks. Lists of quartermasters’ supplies. The number of vehicles owned by the garrison, and even their service records, down to changes of oil and the number of tyres used. But nothing after the end of 1941, which coincides with the big reshuffle that put Pohl at the top. Oh, and it’s a family posting, with schools and kindergartens.’

  ‘In a maximum-security area?’

  ‘It is, but information still available from the SS education office lists the books supplied to the adult and children’s libraries, and the prisoner library too.’

  Morgen said he had taken the precaution of coming up with a doctored warrant of investigation, assigning them on behalf of the post office, validated by the criminal police, with an array of impressive official stamps.

  As for personal passes, he had thought of that too: standard-issue identity cards, with their names replaced by a couple so anonymous they were laughable.

  ‘Where does Kammler fit in this?’ asked Schlegel.

  ‘What’s your instinct?’

  ‘Propaganda or Speer’s man.’

  Morgen shook his head. ‘Trained as a civil engineer. For several years fairly junior in Berlin’s city administration. Came to the attention of the SS when he was involved in the creation and design of its garden village in Krume Lanke.’

  Schlegel knew it slightly. Gingerbread cottages and grassy paths; beyond Zehlendorf.

  ‘Then employed by the Luftwaffe to construct airfields in northern France, before being headhunted by the SS, as one of a new breed of super-technocrats.’

  The world was increasingly full of such men with careers based on terrifying efficiency.

  ‘But why employ us to expose a corrupt dentist?’

  ‘Not clear, but two very interesting facts about Dr Kammler.’

  ‘Either good?’

  ‘The man has done well. He is now in charge of all SS construction.’

  Schlegel thought with the war effort construction was on hold.

  ‘Head of construction is somewhat misleading. Dr Kammler has a huge work pool at his disposal, perhaps running to hundreds of thousands. Dr Kammler is in command of all forced labour.’

  ‘The man we met!’

  ‘A pharaoh, lord of all slaves.’

  Schlegel found the information difficult to process.

  ‘More to the point, Dr Kammler is Oswald Pohl’s number two.’

  The inference was obvious. ‘You mean Kammler is setting us up on behalf of Pohl?’

  ‘An interpretation we ignore at our peril.’

  ‘And where does Pohl stand?’

  ‘He runs the WVHA, known to those that work there as We’re Very Harmless Actually. Economics and Administration is the harmless interpretation, but a huge section is unaccountable – the secret organisation within the larger secret state.’

  ‘The camps.’

  ‘And God knows how many of those there actually are. They are the core of Pohl’s empire.’

  ‘And the man himself?’

  ‘Ex-navy, around for years. Good organiser now considered a bit passé. Keen on hiring and firing. Mood swings. Don’t mess with. A bit of a thug, but also a collector and environmentally friendly. Supports bio-dynamic farming. That he has acquired landed estates may have something to do with it.’

  ‘Why does Pohl hate you so much?’

  ‘Politics. He’s protecting himself. If corruption is endemic in Pohl’s empire – and obscured from Heini – how better to scotch trouble than by inviting the idiots investigating into the lion’s den.’

  ‘What about the time I saw you sitting in the back of Heini’s car?’

  Morgen sighed. ‘Heini, for all his fearsome reputation, is a vacillating man. He frets that temptation is corrupting his elite, but he remains faint-hearted because he dislikes bad news. Heini’s real anxiety, I suspect, is that Pohl governs an empire inaccessible even to him, which is why for the moment our activities are unofficially condoned.’

  ‘Are you thinking Kammler might be Heini’s go-between rather than Pohl’s?’

  ‘Certainly Kammler and Heini know each other, but I think Dr K is too ambitious to confine himself to the role of intermediary. Even if he is acting as envoy, he will have his own agenda.’

  Schlegel said it looked like they were being used as bait.

  Morgen agreed.

  ‘What about us, what do we do?’

  Morgen shrugged. ‘We have anonymity on our side. Klein and Richter.’

  Their train turned up five hours late. Morgen took such delays for granted; Schlegel’s punctuality was shown to be increasingly pointless.

  Morgen arrived after four hours without cigarettes. The prospect of a smokeless journey was unbearable. He patted empty pockets and said, ‘I will have to throw myself off the train.’

  Schlegel told him to look after his bag. Morgen asked why was he standing on the crowded platform when there was an officers’ waiting room. Schlegel feared their assignment would reduce them to bickering.

  The arcade where the racketeers loitered included a little old fellow, bow-legged as an ex-jockey. He was suspicious when Schlegel asked, knowing he was police. Schlegel said he was going away so it didn’t matter. Ten minutes later the man returned and charged the going rate. Schlegel paid, thinking it would be amusing for a patrol to turn up now.

  Morgen was in the officers’ waiting room, which was nothing like as busy as outside. Schlegel gave him the cartouche of cigarettes. Morgen lit up with shaky hands. He had the most punishing hangover, he said.

  ‘The whites of my eyes are yellow.’

  The train at last backed into the station, hissing and blowing grey smoke over the platform. The crowd steadied itself for the onslaught of embarkation. Morgen looked unbothered. He had a disability card.

  ‘Fake.’

  A small riot ensued as everyone shoved to get on. Morgen’s mood deteriorated when it became apparent that the train was a mongrel of carriages from different countries, with no first class.

  He announced himself to the guard, who looked unimpressed until he saw Morgen’s papers, grew obsequious and marched off, officious. He came back and led them to a French second-class carriage where they had to shove their way down a corridor full of grumbling, standing passengers. There in a compartment two empty window seats waited.

  Morgen, too hungover to be grateful, asked what had happened to first class.

  The seats were upholstered but threadbare. Morgen prodded his before sitting down. The compartment was like an aquarium, with resentful faces in the corridor glaring through the glass. Schlegel wondered who had been turfed out and if they were among those staring in.

  The compartment offered the usual mixed bag: by the door, two junior officers in uniform, passed out, as hungover as Morgen, who immediately fell asleep, as if bewitched; next to Schlegel an overlarge boy, who smelled of urine; his chaperone, a sour crone in widow’s weeds, who clicked false teeth; opposite her a stick-like man in civilian clothes, with a toothbrush moustache, looking too ill for military service. The only interesting one sat next to Morgen, a young woman with attractive knees and a watchful air.

  After a final slamming of carriage doors the departure whistle at last sounded. The train crawled forward to the airport where they waited forty minutes. Then the outer suburbs of Mariendorf and Marienfeld slid by, like a diorama, leaving Schlegel to wonder if it was really the landscape moving while the carriage remained stationary. The unfolding picture showed everyt
hing shabbier.

  The long journey east continued in fits and starts, marked by flat horizons, dreary villages and towns, and fields after harvest. They entered a land beyond boredom, briefly enlivened by the sound of a scuffle down the corridor, which stopped as suddenly as it started, presumably because there wasn’t space for a fight.

  While the rest of the carriage fidgeted or snored the young woman remained composed. She was tidily dressed in what Schlegel presumed was an old suit because nothing was new any more.

  The sense of leaving was palpable as they crossed the old border. With that came a sense of the past receding and an unwelcome future. No one stuck their heads out of carriage windows and grinned, as they once had for propaganda shots; not any more.

  Morgen slept on. The boy smelling of urine squirmed. The careful eyes of the young woman suggested she wouldn’t stand for much nonsense. Hair fair, between blonde and brown. A sharp, angular face. In defiance of the habit now for women not to use make-up, she wore lipstick. She crossed her legs and patted her skirt. Their eyes met. She held Schlegel’s gaze, neither curious nor inviting. He looked away and decided she seemed sad or at least reluctant. His attention kept returning. What was it about her? Something hidden and mysterious, perhaps. He wasn’t conventionally attracted. He thought she might consider herself rather plain and too thin for popular taste. Her case on the rack above was a tatty leatherette, its luggage tag too far away to read, with no stickers to tell him anything of her story.

  The train rattled its excruciating way across countryside duller than before and not worth the view.

  They stopped again. At first it seemed like another delay. They had wasted hours stuck in different sidings waiting for more urgent transport to pass. Morgen woke and asked what was going on. When the guard passed down the corridor he went and asked. The guard, white-faced, said a young soldier had shut himself in the toilet at the other end of their carriage and slit his throat with a bayonet. Blood coming under the door had caused someone to pull the emergency cord.

  When they showed no sign of moving, people started to get down to stretch their legs. Schlegel and Morgen did too. Morgen offered his hand to the young woman, helping her down, while Schlegel was stuck with assisting the crone and her smelly ward.

  They were halted in a sandy gully with tall pines. Schlegel looked at the sky and wished he could jump ahead to the return journey. The mood became one of growing irritation at another delay, laced with morbid curiosity. Someone said the dead man was just a kid and hadn’t wanted to go back to the front after being dumped by his girlfriend.

  The guard conferred with the driver and his stoker, then peeped his whistle and asked if anyone was police. Morgen sighed and stepped forward. Schlegel watched them confer, aware of the young woman standing silent among the general grumbling. He wondered if it gave him reason to go over.

  Morgen told the guard the local police would have to hold the carriage and write a report.

  ‘Otherwise straightforward, as the death was unwitnessed and self-inflicted. We’re not talking about a locked-room mystery.’

  The guard looked uncertain. ‘What about those in the carriage?’

  ‘Either they find space in the rest of the train or wait for the next one available.’

  The guard said that would be in the morning, when the night train came through.

  They all got back on and after half an hour came out of the trees, started crossing an empty plain and eventually came to a small settlement with a siding, and a primitive inn opposite the station halt and a water tower.

  The young woman in their carriage surprised Schlegel by saying she was in no obvious hurry. Nor he. Her voice was easy and attractive. The old woman with the teeth and her ward annoyed Schlegel by deciding to stay too. He went to the inn to ask about rooms. A youngish woman with a scarred lip and a rural accent told him she had ten and all but one vacant. Not many passed through these days. Schlegel asked if there was food. Not much, she said.

  The view from the window of Schlegel’s sparse room was primitive. He wondered where he was, actually – in the middle of nowhere, obviously – and in his passage through life. Would he die young like most of the rest of the men on the train? He found their destination impossible to envisage. The size of a town. Abandon all hope, he thought. Faust? He supposed it lay somewhere between the meanest slums and the dread forests of childhood imagination.

  Morgen corrected him later. Not Faust. When Dante and Virgil reach the gates of hell.

  He gave Schlegel a light look. ‘Don’t be too melodramatic.’ He studied his dusty shoes and changed his mind. ‘You are probably right. We enter the realm of superstition.’

  Her name was Elizabeth Schulze. When Morgen and Schlegel entered the dining room she was sitting alone.

  ‘What’s in a name?’ Schlegel asked irreverently, without meaning to, when Schulze introduced herself. Morgen, more gallant, asked if she wanted company, as they were already travelling companions; it was up to her. Please do, she said, she was half-dead from boredom.

  They sorted out where they all came from. She had been born in the Ruhr and had lived near Hamburg. Morgen was from Frankfurt. Schlegel had always lived in Berlin but had been born in Shanghai.

  ‘How exotic,’ said Schulze.

  Schlegel was unsettled by the woman, as though they were fated to meet in that realm of superstition mentioned by Morgen; which made no sense.

  They were served a cabbage and potato soup, which they agreed was more than passable, followed by cauliflower cheese.

  ‘What about you?’ Morgen asked Schulze.

  She avoided answering directly, saying she was coming back from a course in administration in Berlin. Schlegel saw she faced a dilemma. It was always dangerous to volunteer any personal view, especially to two men in suits carrying sidearms. Morgen’s was visible on his belt, where his jacket had slid.

  Caution made everyday conversation increasingly elaborate and meaningless. Schlegel didn’t feel much like talking and lobbed her a couple of easy questions. She obliged, looking relieved, telling them about her time in the girls’ league, sent to Stettin, to help ethnic Germans coming back from all over to their spiritual homeland to serve the cause.

  Morgen said he remembered the newsreels, like big biblical processions, horses and carts piled high with worldly possessions. Schulze said she had appeared in one as part of a greeting for these homecoming pioneers. She added brightly, ‘Many came to learn modern farming practices before being sent to the new territories.’ Right where they were now, she added unnecessarily, looking out of the window.

  Schlegel wondered if she might be ironic or just dull. He wanted to ask directly: Why am I interested in you? He thought she must be more interesting than she let on. He wasn’t so sure when she told them her specialities were physical training and domestic science.

  Schlegel looked at Morgen and said, ‘I think it is all right to tell her we are not secret police.’

  ‘Just ordinary criminal police,’ added Morgen. He turned to her and said, ‘You were saying?’

  She recovered quickly. ‘I was boring you with my story. I can’t really talk about now.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Morgen. ‘The past is safe. Things were still glorious, so one can’t be held accountable. However, we can safely say this cauliflower is not bad. Go on. I am not bored. What next?’

  ‘I left the league and did a stenographer’s course in Berlin.’

  ‘What made you leave the other job?’

  ‘They wanted me to move into children’s education, which I didn’t want.’

  ‘So you became a stenographer. What made you decide?’

  Morgen sounded curious.

  Schulze said she had come across an advertisement in a magazine.

  ‘At the orphanage.’

  ‘Orphanage?’ echoed Morgen.

  ‘A man I knew in Stettin had gone there, and I was young and foolish and invited myself to visit when it was obvious he was having an affai
r with the woman running the orphanage, who had also been in Stettin, so more fool me.’

  ‘What did they do at this orphanage?’ Morgen asked.

  ‘Select children suitable for adoption to be sent home to be educated. I only did the dormitory patrols and I was supposed to be on holiday. A few times Dr Krick let me help with his measurement tests.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Schlegel in surprise. ‘Dr who?’

  ‘Krick. Do you know him?’

  Schlegel shook his head, saying he had misheard, thinking, fuck, Krick.

  ‘Strangely enough, he turned up last year where I am now.’

  ‘Was that awkward?’ asked Morgen.

  ‘At first. Talk about a small world. But I am over him.’

  Schlegel wondered what were the chances of stumbling across his name.

  Krick was an unwelcome reminder of the time Schlegel had done his hardest to forget. Morgen knew of it, having read his file, but they had passed over the matter quickly and Schlegel had not mentioned Krick.

  Two summers before, criminal police from all over, including Berlin, had been assigned to the new eastern territories for anti-partisan duties. Schlegel had been responsible for processing operation reports and it wasn’t until he had gone into the field as an observer that he learned that such duties were a euphemism for the roundup and elimination of whole villages. Once he had ended up in a ditch, knee-deep in bodies, administering the coup de grace to the poor devils whose shooting had been botched.

  Spending all day shooting civilians proved more psychologically arduous than anyone anticipated and suddenly no one was pretending the job was easy. A tier of management was quickly brought in to rationalise, including Krick. Schlegel recalled a handsome man, of composed manner, who said the big task they faced was how to normalise the process. He thought the days of firing squads were numbered. ‘In the meantime, don’t discriminate against those who say they have no stomach for the job. Plenty will.’

  ‘Lost your appetite?’ asked Morgen.