Hans Kirst - The Night of the Generals

also recorded eighteen years after the events in question.

Place: Warsaw

Speaker: Roman Liesowski, still a detective-inspector in the Warsaw police. Now living at No. 2a, Block 1c, one of the massive new apartment houses in the city centre. The following are extracts from Liesowski’s statement, with intervening questions omitted as before: “It was just about midnight when I arrived at the scene of the crime and began my inquiries. The name Maria Kupiecki rang a bell, so I told them to run a check on her at Headquarters. It turned out that Kupiecki was on our list of German agents, as I’d half suspected. Accordingly, I informed the competent German authority.

“The body was appallingly mutilated. Three of the knife-thrusts—possibly inflicted with a large clasp-knife—would have been sufficient to cause death on their own. Two of them had pierced the woman’s breasts at the nipple and the third had penetrated her navel. There were dozens of other wounds, all apparently inflicted with the same insensate fury and all with the same end in view: the disfigurement of every feminine sexual characteristic. Would you like me to give you any more details? No? I’m glad. It wasn’t a pleasant business.

“Conclusion: murder committed during an outburst of obsessive passion. There was nothing to indicate that Kupiecki had been done to death by a member of the Resistance—and even if it had been so I shouldn’t have hesitated to bring him to book for an instant. The man was obviously as dangerous as a wild animal.

“I didn’t hesitate to call in Major Grau, either. There wasn’t anything particularly daring about this course of action. It was more calculation on my part—instinct, you might call it. Grau was a lone wolf, you see. Everything about him was unusual.

“Grau reacted promptly, just as I had expected. He took the witness’s statement seriously and seemed determined to act on it. What was more, he actually seemed pleased to have got his hands on the material I gave him and took over the case himself.

“Needless to say, I did a little ferreting around on my own account. There were seven German generals in Warsaw at the time of the crime. A lot, you think? Well, there were several thousand generals in the Wehrmacht—upwards of four thousand. Many of them were busy in Russia at the time. A large number of others were engaged as organizers and administrators in the Balkans and Scandinavia and on the so-called Home Front. Several hundred more were waiting behind the Atlantic Wall—and Warsaw had seven: one in the suburb of Praha, three, normally in transit, at the Hotel Metropol and another three in the Liechnowski Palace.

“The Praha general spent the evening and most of the night with his troops—women signals auxiliaries, to be precise. Of the three generals living at the Hotel Metropol one was asleep in his room, the second was night-clubbing at the Mazurka with his A.D.C. and the third was playing host at a stag party in the hotel bar. In short, these four had an alibi.

“It was impossible for me to check on the three gentlemen in the Liechnowski Palace. It was a sort of fortress, hermetically sealed and kept under strict surveillance from the wine-cellar to the chamber-maids’ attic. Eighty or more people lived in the Palace—staff officers, aides-de-camp, clerks, signallers, women service personnel, batmen and visitors of various kinds—and the three generals, namely:

i General von Seydlitz-Gabler, General Officer Commanding a Corps;

ii Lieutenant-General Tanz, commanding the Nibelungen (Special Operations) Division;

iii Major-General Klaus Kahlenberge, Chief of Staff to the Corps Commander.

“Is that selection good enough for you?”

General von Seydlitz-Gabler had the distressing sensation that he had been buried alive in an avalanche of cotton wool. His head buzzed as though it were a built-in concrete mixer and the skin of his scalp seemed taut to breaking point. It was agony even to open his eyes.

When he did open them, the first thing he saw was a bottle. It stood there fatly on his bedside table, and it was empty. It had once held a red burgundy by the name of Château Confran, a wine which had shrouded his memory of the night before as effectively as a blanket of fog. Perhaps it was just as well.

The General heaved his corpulent body on to its side and groaned deeply. The light streaming through the tall windows of the Liechnowski Palace hurt his eyes and his head throbbed steadily to the rhythm of his heart-beat. Suddenly he clamped his eyes shut in something akin to terror. Silhouetted against the centre window, where his desk stood, was the seated figure of a woman—his wife, to be exact. He breathed stertorously through his gaping mouth and feigned sleep.

“Well, have you slept it off?” asked Wilhelmine von Seydlitz-Gabler.

“I’m utterly exhausted.”

“You had far too much last night,” said Wilhelmine in a tone of melancholy reproof. “Why are you drinking so much lately?”

The General tried to sit up, but the throbbing inside his head rose in a crescendo and he swayed like a ship in a storm. Groping for support he knocked over the bottle, which fell to the floor with a dull thud. “Sheer pleasure, my dear,” he said faintly, his bleary eyes pleading forgiveness, “sheer pleasure at having you with me again.”

Wilhelmine von Seydlitz-Gabler had the patrician good looks of a thoroughbred horse, not exactly beautiful but undoubtedly striking. Glancing across at her husband sitting hunched up in the enormous bed, she saw a jumbled heap of yellowish-white bedclothes and blue-and-red striped pyjamas surmounted by a fleshy face like that of an ageing operatic tenor, majestic but flabby, strong in profile but flaccid as a lump of dough when viewed from the front.

“Nonsense, Herbert. Tell me why you’re drinking so much.”

“Why?” The General sank back impotently on to his pillows. “I’m completely overworked, that’s why.”

Wilhelmine got up from the desk with reluctance, evidently fascinated by the piles of papers that lay strewn across it.

The General eyed his wife’s approaching figure with dismay and endeavoured to burrow down into the bed.

Wilhelmine was arrayed in a thick hard-wearing woollen night-gown, but her husband had a momentary illusion that he could see right through it to the protuberant bones, blotchy skin and scanty flesh beneath. An acrid smell assailed his nostrils, simultaneously erotic and repellent, like the odour of distant decay. It was his misfortune to see more acutely than other men, he reflected, to probe more deeply and think more logically. He looked on himself as a blend of general and philosopher.

Von Seydlitz-Gabler became oppressively aware of his wife bending over him. Her foam-rubber flesh touched his and her breath soughed across his face like a tropic wind. On the walls around him, on the heavy silk tapestry of vernal green interspersed with a pattern which might have been water-lilies, on the vivid white ceiling whose moulding resembled the work of some eccentric pâtissier, on the unnaturally plump and rosy figure of the effeminate baroque angel in the corner.

“I’m getting old,” he said with an effort, averting his face.

Wilhelmine von Seydlitz-Gabler straightened up, her thoroughbred features betraying pain of some unspecified kind.

Von Seydlitz-Gabler raised his imposing head from the pillow, the head of a heroic tenor seasoned by a thousand public performances. “These are trying times,” he announced dramatically. “All the powers of concentration at our command must be directed toward a single goal: the future of our nation!”

Frau Wilhelmine von Seydlitz-Gabler breathed deeply. “Believe me, Herbert,” she said, bosom heaving, “I have always been conscious of my responsibility toward you and your career. You must have confidence in me.”