Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

‘Who did this?’ asked Pekkala. He had learned to speak German while at school in Finland, but his grammar was clumsy and the words crackled strangely in his mouth, as if he were chewing on bones.

‘Feldgendarmerie,’ replied the boy. Field Police.

Even back in Moscow, Pekkala had heard of these roving bands of soldiers, who rounded up anyone whom they suspected of desertion, or failure to place themselves in harm’s way. The execution of these stragglers was summary and swift. Their bodies, sometimes bearing placards on which their supposed crimes were listed, dangled from piano-wire nooses all across the shrinking territory of the Reich.

‘My son,’ said the hanged man, when he was finally able to talk. He gestured at the boy.

Pekkala wondered what charges had been laid against the man, who was not wearing military uniform, and by what stroke of fortune his son had been around to save him from the improvised gallows of the Feldgendarmerie. ‘Where are they now?’ he asked. ‘These Field Police?’

The man shook his head. He did not know. He brushed his hand towards the north to show in which direction they had gone.

‘And to Berlin?’ asked Pekkala.

With one trembling hand, the wrist rubbed raw by the wire with which it had been bound, the man reached out and pointed down the tracks. ‘But do not go,’ he told them. ‘In Berlin there is nothing but death and, when the Russians arrive, even death will not be enough to describe it.’

‘We must go there,’ replied Pekkala. He wished he could explain what must have seemed an act of total madness. Instead, he only muttered, ‘I’m afraid we have no choice.’

Neither the man nor his son asked any questions, but both seemed anxious to repay them for their kindness. Motioning for the two men to follow, they pointed across the field towards a grove of sycamore trees, on which the reddening buds glowed like a haze in the morning sunlight. Almost hidden in amongst the branches was a small brick chimney rising from a roof of grey slates patched with luminous green moss.

‘That is where we live,’ explained the boy.

‘We are grateful,’ said Pekkala, ‘but we must be moving on.’

‘If you want to reach your destination,’ warned the father, ‘then you should wait until the danger has passed. The Field Police barracks is on the outskirts of the city and they usually head back well before sunset. By mid-afternoon, it should be safe to travel. Then you can enter Berlin after dark.’

Pekkala hesitated, knowing he should take the man’s advice but so anxious to press on towards Berlin that his instincts faltered as they balanced the need against the risk.

‘We have food,’ said the boy. Knowing that only one of the men could understand what he was saying, he motioned with his hand to his mouth.

Kirov had been trying without success to follow the conversation between Pekkala and the half-hanged man. But he understood the gesture perfectly. He touched Pekkala on the arm and raised his eyebrows in a question, knowing that he could not speak without giving away the fact that he was Russian.

Feeling the touch against his arm, Pekkala glanced at the major. The reminder that he was responsible, not only for what might happen to himself but to them both, returned him abruptly to his senses. Pekkala gestured towards the house in the distance. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.

Without another word, the four of them set off across the field.

At the edge of the woods, the ground sloped away sharply, revealing a small farmstead tucked away in a hollow.

A dog was sprawled dead outside the farmhouse door. It had been shot several times and its blood had leaked out into the mud on which it lay.

Ringing the small farmyard were racks of small cages, the doors of which were open.

‘ Fasane ,’ said the father, gesturing at the cages. Pheasants.

The father fluttered his fingers, to show they had all flown away. ‘I let them go,’ he explained. His voice was still hoarse and the chafing of the noose had rubbed a bloody groove beneath his chin.

‘But why?’ asked Pekkala.

The father shrugged, as if he wasn’t even sure himself. ‘So that they would have a chance,’ he said. And then he went on to describe how the band of military police had spotted the birds as they took to the air and had come to investigate. The first thing they did was shoot the farmer’s dog after it growled at them. Then, finding that the farmer had released the birds, which might otherwise have fed the hungry soldiers, they accused him of treason and immediately condemned him to death. At gunpoint they had marched him out across the field until they came to the telegraph poles. When they brought out the rope, he asked them why they had not hanged him from a tree by his own house. They told him it was so that people passing on the tracks could see his body, and think twice before they, too, betrayed their country. They tied a noose and hauled him up to hang him slowly, rather than breaking his neck with a drop.

Unknown to the military police, the boy had followed them.

As soon as the soldiers had departed, the boy rushed in and set his shoulders underneath the father’s feet. And they stood there through the night, waiting for someone to help.

The boy fetched a shovel from the back of the house in order to bury the dog. Kirov went with him, to share in the burden of digging, while the father brought Pekkala into the barn. There, he opened up a horse stall, in which something had been hidden underneath an old grey tarpaulin. The man pulled back the oil-stained canvas, revealing two bicycles.

Their chains were rusted, the brake pads crumbling and the leather seats sagged like the backs of broken mules. But the tyres still held air and, as the father pointed out, this way was better than walking.

When the dog had been buried, they sat down to a meal of smoked pheasant served on slices of gritty bread which had sawdust mixed into the flour. Meagre as it was, this seemed to be the only food they had left.

By two o’clock that afternoon, the father announced that it was safe for them to travel.

They walked out to the narrow road that ran beside the farm.

‘Stick to the back roads,’ advised the father. ‘Just keep heading west and you’ll be there in less than a day.’

‘Good luck to you both,’ said Pekkala, and he shook hands with the man and his son.

‘ Udachi ,’ replied the father, wishing them good luck in Russian.

Kirov gasped to hear the sound of his own language.

But Pekkala only smiled.

The man had known all along where they came from.

Wobbling unsteadily upon the bicycles, Kirov and Pekkala set off towards Berlin.

At that precise moment, Inspector Hunyadi was sitting alone in a conference room in the Reichschancellery building, waiting to begin the first of several interviews of members of the German High Command about the leak of information from the bunker.

In choosing a location for these interviews, Hunyadi had been given little choice, since this was one of the few places left in the Chancellery with its roof remaining intact.

This had, until not too long ago, been the location of Hitler’s meetings with his High Command; one at midday and the other at midnight. It was a grand, high-ceilinged room, with white pillars in each corner and paintings of different German landscapes – the Drachenfels Castle overlooking the Rhine, a street scene in Munich, a farmer ploughing his field at sunrise on the flat, almost featureless plains along the Baltic coast. In between these paintings, windows taller than a man looked out on to the Chancellery garden. In the centre of the room stood a long, oak table, on which the maps of battlefields would be unfurled and gestured at by field marshals waving ceremonial batons. Along the back wall, comfortable chairs with padded red leather seats had welcomed those whose presence was not immediately required.