Vendetta

‘Ah, but Russia goes on forever. Want a drink?’ offering the flask to Meister.

‘You know I don’t drink.’

‘Christ! What do you do except spout propaganda? What did I do to deserve this, nursemaid to a college kid? Have you ever had a woman?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Of course,’ Meister lied.

‘One like this?’ Lanz took a creased photograph of a naked woman wearing stiletto-heeled shoes from his wallet and showed it to Meister. She was smoking a cigarette in a holder and smiling coyly at the camera.

‘Prettier than that,’ Meister told Lanz

‘So who’s looking at her face?’

Remembering the quivering embraces with Elzbeth in the back of the Mercedes-Benz, the tentative, exploratory caresses, Meister was ashamed of the flicker of arousal he had experienced when he had looked at the photograph.

Lanz said: ‘Have you got a photograph of your girl?’

‘No,’ Meister said, but his hand strayed to the pocket of his tunic where, beneath studio lights, Elzbeth lay close to his heart.

Lanz shrugged. ‘Did you expect it to be like this?’ he asked, waving the flask towards the battle in the north of the city.

‘I don’t think anyone realised how tough the Russians are.’

‘If you’d been at Moscow you would have got the general idea.’

‘I suppose I imagined killing and suffering. But not massacre – on both sides.’

‘Can you give me one good reason why I should look after you?’ Lanz asked.

‘None.’

‘Well, I can. Being with you I stand a better chance of surviving. And surviving is what I’m good at. So don’t ever think I’m doing it for you.’

‘I never thought that,’ Meister said.

‘It was your sort of people that got us into this. Prussians, Junkers.’

‘The French got us into this,’ said Meister, resurrecting the lectures at college. ‘And the British. The Treaty of Versailles that bled us white.’

‘What I meant,’ Lanz said, choosing his words with drunken care, ‘was that it was your sort got us into the first war. If that hadn’t happened there wouldn’t have been a Treaty of Versailles. And maybe we would never have heard of this arschloch of a place.’

But the last war was too long ago for argument.

‘Were you a successful thief?’ Meister asked.

‘Watch your wallet,’ Lanz said.

‘They say the Russians have got a division of criminals in the 62nd Army.’

‘The 112th. Beware of them. They won’t get any medals but they’ll survive. Like me.’ Lanz picked up a toy soldier and pocketed it. ‘For my son,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know you were married.’

‘I’m not.’ Lanz slipped another soldier into his pocket. ‘They tell me Antonov has got a nanny too. An old soldier from the Ukraine. Old soldiers, they’re survivors too.’

Meister picked up his field-glasses and peered through a shell-hole in the wall. He saw a woman in black pushing a pram filled with rubble; she was obviously crazy but, Meister wondered, had she been sane before the battle began? He saw a Persian cat picking its way around a crater and the rotting corpse of a Russian soldier smiling at him from beneath a cloud of flies.

He focussed the field-glasses on the fighting. A ragged line of German soldiers was advancing into the smoke. A young officer was urging them forward.

And for a moment it seemed to him that the officer and his men were probing the cordite mists for some truth to which they hadn’t yet been introduced.

The Katyusha that exploded in their midst must have killed them all.

Then a breeze crossed the Volga breaching gaps in the smoke and through one of them Meister saw Antonov.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_bfabe6c4-134f-5e29-8293-266c4b6914e2)

Antonov, searching for Meister in the vacuum behind the German attack, felt naked as the smoke parted around him.

He looked to his left. A factory of sorts built on a rise, long and squat, roofless and windowless, walls pocked by shells and bullets. Good cover, good vantage …

He threw himself to the ground taking Razin with him. The bullet hit the street lamp at the level where their heads had been. Glancing up, Antonov saw the bright wound in the green-painted metal.

The last thing he noticed before smoke swathed them again was a woman pushing a pram, searching, it occurred to him, for the past.

Back in the tunnel Razin’s rat was waiting for them. Its name was Boris and Razin maintained that it was shell-shocked; it had wandered into the tunnel but, unlike its fellows, had shown no inclination to swim the Volga; instead it had circled the two of them, sitting down from time to time to favour them with a pink-eyed stare. It had impudent whiskers and protruding teeth and at times Antonov felt that Razin was more concerned about its welfare than the outcome of the vendetta with Meister.