Pavel & I (9 page)

When the door opened and the Colonel led in a stumbling Pavel, they found Sonia striding to the dining table, a steaming dish of potatoes clutched between two cheerily coloured tea towels.

Pavel sat in his chair, exhausted. The kidneys were bothering him and he wished that he could lie down on the sofa rather than sit at the dining table on a high-backed Biedermeier chair, a napkin spread across his lap, and good kitchen silver lined up before him. He watched with strange fascination as the Colonel cut the ham into half-inch slices upon a wooden cutting board, and listened to his story of how he had bought the monkey, quite cheaply, from a decommissioned
Wehrmacht
corporal after a night's carousing earlier that week. ‘I know what you will say, Pavel, he stinks and he is filthy, but by God I love the little critter.' The woman, Sonia, was dishing out boiled potatoes and fetched beer for the Colonel, chamomile tea for Pavel. The food stood before him and obscured the stench of animal; it rose to his nose and seduced his body. Pavel realized that he was hungry, ravenous even, and felt ashamed. He closed his eyes to conjure up Boyd's body but already it was difficult to remember
the details, the smell of gammon thick in his throat. Unable to wait any longer, he cut himself a bite and chewed on it. It tasted wonderful. He tried the potatoes and found them well salted and seasoned with chives.
Chives,
he berated himself,
you are betraying a friend over the smell of chives
. He chewed another bite and hoped the Colonel would break the silence. He didn't.

‘Who did it?' Pavel asked after he had finished the first slice and mopped up its juice with some bread. Sonia slid another onto his plate with a meat fork. ‘Who killed Boyd?'

Colonel Fosko wiped his lips with a cloth napkin, taking his time with the movement, making him wait.

‘We believe it was the Russians. Cannot prove it, naturally, but it looks like their handiwork. You know about the NKVD?'

‘Soviet secret police?'

‘Yes. They usually handle this sort of thing. Rumour has it that Mr White killed one of their agents, and that they acted in revenge. Again, we have no firm evidence. Not even the agent's body. We are equally stumped when it comes to the motive. You see, we had no idea Mr White was involved with the NKVD. The Americans assure us they are just as much in the dark as we are. All we know for certain is that his body turned up in our sector. Which is to say that it's our problem.
My
problem, Pavel. If there is anything you can help us with, Pavel, we would be most grateful. I, personally, would be most grateful, Pavel. Most grateful indeed.'

He sat back and took a swallow of beer. His rings clinked on the glass when he set it down. In his left, the silver knife stuck out daintily from a half-closed fist. Pavel nodded wearily, and cut a bite from his second slice of gammon.

There was no earthly reason why he shouldn't just hand over his keys and tell the Colonel about the midget. Pass things over to the authorities. He had no doubt that Fosko would accept the gesture and drop any inquiry into why he should have hidden a corpse for four
whole nights. There was hardly a chance, of course, that Boyd's killer would be brought to justice, not if he was a Russian operative, but at least Pavel could wash his hands of it, return to a quiet life dedicated to his books and the boy. In time, he would earn enough money to buy Boyd a gravestone and a space in the Catholic cemetery. A priest would speak and there would be closure; hookers in evening dresses paying their last respects, and a letter home to his mother whom Pavel had never met.

He made up his mind to speak, but cut himself another bite instead. Sat and chewed it with deliberate slowness. There was something about the fat man that made Pavel hold back; it was as though he begrudged him his ruddy good health. Stubbornly, half ashamed for his stubbornness, Pavel cast around for reasons to hold on to his secret. His eyes came to rest upon the woman. She sat stiff-backed, meat fork in hand, her eyes studiously avoiding his own. He took in her pallor, her cheekbones, the height of her brow. The smudge of moustache that framed her upper lip. Her face was impassive. It was foolish to expect that she would help him make up his mind.

‘Are your kidneys troubling you, Mr Richter?' she asked him coolly.

‘Yes,' he answered, though he had forgotten them the moment he had taken in food. ‘I think I shall have to lie down.'

‘Do you need help?'

‘No, thank you. Much obliged.'

The words sounded false to him, as though they were acting out a long-rehearsed scene. Pavel got up and made a show of hobbling towards the door.

‘Let me know about any developments,' he called over to Fosko, still with the same giddy feeling of acting out a farce. The fat man parted his meaty lips into a smile.

‘Rest assured I will, Pavel. Rest assured I will.'

Pavel bowed stiffly from the waist and closed the door behind him with an acute sense of relief.

‘Tomorrow,' he told himself. ‘You can always tell him tomorrow. It won't make any difference.'

Anders found his crew back at Paulchen's place. They sat in a circle and were having reheated cabbage soup and smoked fish for lunch. Wordlessly, Anders joined them, wedging himself onto the sofa between the Karlson twins. The fish's meat had a green shine to it and tasted bitter, but he ate it anyway. When it was all gone, Paulchen produced a tin of sugared peaches as a special treat. He passed them out personally, and Anders noted that he gave an extra-large portion to Schlo' who looked like he had not been sleeping well recently. Anders only got a single, mangled peach – Paulchen speared it with a knife and slipped it straight into his hand. The sugar water clung to his skin long after it was gone. Anders did not complain about the unequal distribution. He had not been around much lately, and Paulchen rewarded loyalty as much as earning potential. In order to signal his good will, Anders volunteered to do the dishes. It involved fetching water from a pump two blocks over. Even so the water was half-frozen by the time he got back. Once he was done he joined the other boys in Paulchen's bedroom. Under the magazine picture of an American pin-up in black underpants and bra, they lit up smokes and talked about the day's pickings, and what they had planned for the week ahead. Word had it that another train full of refugees from the east would be rolling into the station later that day, or early the next. Paulchen commandeered a few of the boys to go and wait for its arrival. Refugees meant business: they would get off the train and require food, shelter, a kilo of firewood. Most of them were too poor to be worth much, but there would be a few valuables amongst the family possessions they carried.

‘Don't rip them off too bad,' Paulchen warned them. ‘They are good people who got screwed by the Russians.' Paulchen made much of the point that he was a patriot.

As casually as possible, Anders steered the conversation onto the topic of the Colonel. He told them that he had seen him come out of a building wearing a mink coat. ‘A fat man in woman's furs. Man, we should rip the bastard off. That coat's worth a crapload.'

Paulchen cut in and told him the man was off-limits: ‘He's a Tommy. A general or something. Besides, word has it that he's a fairy.'

‘A what?'

‘A fairy.'

‘What's that?'

‘Somebody who fucks little boys like you.'

‘Fucks boys? How?'

‘What do you mean,
how
? He fucks them.'

They all sat in silence, contemplating the point.

‘It can't be,' Anders objected after some thought. ‘He fucks this woman. I heard him do it. I swear.'

Paulchen was unimpressed.

‘These
ped-i-rasts,
' he said knowledgeably, ‘they fuck anything that moves.

‘They should be gassed,' he told them. ‘Rounded up and gassed.'

At the edge of their circle, silent young Schlo' started to cry. He was ever so much of a girl.

Anders lit another smoke and decided to stick around for the day.

In those days there were many such rumours about the Colonel. I heard them drinking in bars, always mindful, of course, to keep secret the precise nature of my association with him. The Colonel, I would
hear, was a queer, a Soviet spy, a Nazi operative who had infiltrated British Intelligence back in '33 and had stayed under cover when the Reich went belly up. I was told that he was Italian royalty, part of the ‘di Fosco' family who'd been expatriated by Mussolini; that he made his money in banking, in real estate, at the horses. Once, an old French journalist swore to me that he had shared a roulette table with him – along with a woman – in pre-war Monte Carlo. ‘He was just back from Spain, fighting for Franco,' he confided, and would not be dissuaded otherwise. A German brothel madam told me the story of how she had had to pay the Colonel's money back, because none of her girls could satisfy his appetites, and an Irish sailor – God only knows what he was doing there – enacted for me their five dramatic rounds in the ring. ‘Bare-knuckle bout, my lad,' he sang with his liquor-oiled brogue. ‘That bastard's so fat, he hits the deck he bounces right back up again, like a fecking rubber ball.'

‘Did you win?' I asked him, but he shrugged his shoulders.

‘Now that I think of it, it was my cousin who did the fightin'.'

There is no telling where they came from, all these rumours, and I have wondered at times whether the Colonel himself was responsible for putting them in circulation, though for what purpose, other than sheer bravado, I am at a loss to say. Suffice it to state that he was the kind of man to whom legends attached themselves like lice. Every so often he would pick one out of his pelt, and pop it between his fingernails. Why not? There would always be more.

Pavel spent most of the afternoon in bed. By dinnertime he was hungry again and fried himself a piece of offal that the boy had left behind. The electricity ran out halfway through the cooking and some of the meat remained frozen at the centre. He found a bottle of beer in a cupboard over the sink, but was too impatient to wait for it to
defrost by the oven. In the end he broke open the neck and sucked on slivers of beer ice. The alcohol went straight into his blood and muffled his feelings. He realized he was still very sick and crawled back into bed.