Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘Is that all? Done. Your nag awaits!’

‘Getting out was easy,’ said Panka when they reached the office of the Sergei Kirov Collective Farm 23 some hours later. ‘It’s getting back that will be difficult.’ Behind them the sun was sinking over the Don, the light sticky.

Just as they had done that morning, they dismounted and tied up the horses and lay in the grass and watched. The Germans’ horses were still where they’d been tied up. Around them, they could hear the cawing of crows; and a vulture on a branch like a priest in his cowl.

‘No one’s there,’ said Panka. ‘Over to you, Benya.’

‘Go on, Granpa,’ said Prishchepa.

‘Do your duty and we can get back,’ said Spider.

A pause. ‘Garanzha, I need you to come up with me,’ said Benya.

‘Afraid of stiffs?’ asked Garanzha.

Benya nodded.

‘Come then,’ said Garanzha, waving his fingers like a magician.

‘Wait,’ said Mogilchuk. ‘I give the orders here.’

‘What are your orders?’ Benya sighed. It was all going to be much more difficult with Mogilchuk watching them.

‘Right, let us proceed!’ ordered Mogilchuk.

They had to humour him. If they made it back, he would decide their destiny.

Garanzha smirked. ‘Good, let us proceed.’

Panka remained on watch, covering the hut with his Papasha as the others approached the door, Mogilchuk creeping up as if playing grandmother’s footsteps. Garanzha winked at them.

As they scaled the steps into the office, Benya tentatively looked round the corner to the couch and Kapto was there, untouched, paler and chalkier as if made of plaster. He already looked deader than he had appeared before. As if he had subsided a little.

‘There’s our friend,’ said Garanzha.

‘Right,’ said Mogilchuk, trying to assume the gravity of command. ‘Shtrafnik Golden, proceed to replace the documents.’

Benya hesitated, still unwilling to touch the body.

‘Get on with it, Golden,’ said Garanzha. ‘He won’t bite. Or maybe he will – ha!’

Benya unstrapped the satchel around his neck and put it on the table, taking out the maps, the notebooks. He opened the maps, laid out the pencils, positioned the notebook open at Manteuffel’s neat notes. Then he took out the ID papers of the dead men.

‘Put them back in their pockets,’ ordered Mogilchuk, wiping his forehead.

Benya moved closer to Kapto’s body. ‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Mother of God!’ Garanzha took the papers.

‘Make sure you put the right papers in the right pockets,’ said Mogilchuk.

‘Mother of God!’ Garanzha said again. He slipped them into Kapto’s pockets and then, to shock the others, kissed him on the forehead and rolled his eyes like a clown as the body slipped slowly sideways.

‘Done,’ said Benya thankfully.

‘Shtrafnik Garanzha, how dare you fool around with official business!’ said Mogilchuk.

‘Who’s going to believe these maps are real when there are three dead bodies here?’ asked Garanzha, going outside to replace the papers in the pockets of the two Germans.

‘Don’t ask, Spider, don’t think,’ said Benya. ‘We’re just screws in the big machine. They must have thought of that…’

‘Shtrafnik Garanzha, this is your second and last warning!’ blathered Mogilchuk from behind them. ‘You are prohibited from speculating on this top-secret mission. And, Shtrafnik Golden, that applies to you too.’

‘Are we finished here, senior lieutenant?’ asked Panka. ‘The shooting has increased over at the Don and I really think we should try to get home…’

‘Yes, yes, let us proceed, Sergeant Churelko.’

‘Let us proceed up my arse,’ leered Spider Garanzha to Prishchepa behind Mogilchuk’s back. Prishchepa grinned.

The sun was almost gone now but the sky was cloudy for the first time Benya could recall. The air wafting over the Don was burning and dusty. Ahead of them, the artillery was thundering. Benya was relieved. Tiredness was making his vision blur and he swayed in the saddle. Twice, Prishchepa nudged him. ‘Wake up, Granpa.’ But he drifted off again and then he froze.

The men around him in the greyness were no longer Garanzha and Prishchepa but other horsemen, one or two, then more, phalanxes of them, ghostly squadrons in the grainy red twilight. The Italian cavalry were moving up to the front line. Benya could hear swear words in Italian and the sounds of hundreds of horses on the move, snaffles clinking, the creak of leather. Men whispered to their horses, and all around Benya was the smell of horse shit. Silver Socks nuzzled an Italian horse, and Benya caught his right spur on an Italian spur and he heard the clacketing of the steel. His body stiffened and poured sweat as he looked straight ahead. A single word and it would all be over but he kept riding through them, Socks making her way towards the horses she knew who were standing, waiting under the trees ahead.

‘Thank God!’ said Panka.

‘Thank Silver Socks!’ They turned silently and glanced back. The air around them was the colour of good coffee, the sky a gaudy, blood-spattered crimson with new terraces of backlit clouds through which shone stairways of sun-gold, the Day of Creation one minute, Apocalypse the next. The countryside itself was alive with the grit of a thousand hooves, the chink of spurs; and on another, aural level, the gunning of engines, tanks on the move, the crump of howitzers.

Panka raised his hands: Don’t move; they can’t see us here; wait. Then he pointed. On the hill a few hundred yards behind, illuminated by one of the day’s last sunbeams, they could see the Italian command in a heartbreakingly beautiful square of golden light. A few horses stood towards the front, commanders watching their squadrons coming up. Benya took Panka’s binoculars, knowing what he would see: and there he was, the hunched shoulders, and that way of leaning in the saddle like a fearsome but half-collapsed castle. It was Malamore, and behind, one hand on Violante’s mane, right there where he knew she would be, was Fabiana.

Svetlana climbed the steps to her Kremlin apartment fearfully. At least her father would be in his office, she told herself. It was late evening, and he’d still be working in the Little Corner. But she halted at the top of the steps. Four uniformed Chekists – she knew their names of course – stood outside with their Papashas on their arms.

‘It’s going to be OK, Svetlana Josefovna,’ General Vlasik whispered, breath fishy and spicy. Unmistakably ukha soup.

‘How long has he been here, Uncle Kolya?’

‘All day. He hasn’t even been to the Little Corner yet.’

‘All day? Is he still furious, Uncle Kolya?’

‘A little, yes, but it will pass. Daughters fall in love, fathers are angry! It’s the order of things. But, Sveta, you’ve been a bad girl! If it was my daughter, well, I’d give her more than a slap… He’s a Georgian and Georgian fathers reach for the shotgun even before Russian ones. And he’s under unspeakable pressure. Don’t make it worse, Sveta. Be calm. Go in.’ And he took her by the shoulders and guided her through the front door.

Inside the sound of papers being torn, the smell of pipe smoke. In the sitting room stood her father ripping up Shapiro’s love letters while Svetlana’s nanny watched miserably.

Stalin looked up at her. ‘Calls himself a writer, does he? I found his letters. I’ve read them.’ He was speaking calmly, tearing Lev’s letters into little pieces and sprinkling them around the table, barely looking at her. ‘There’s the war on. Every family has lost someone. Have you any idea what I am going through? In the south? And this hack is sending messages to a schoolgirl in his newspaper reports! Oh, that playboy played you all right, didn’t he? You fell for it, you fool! What kind of writing is this? It’s repulsive claptrap. And what does he want you for, did you ask yourself that? Only one reason. To get close to me. Yes, to worm his way to me! And if you wanted a filthy writer, couldn’t you have chosen a proper Russian? This one’s a Jew. Out of all the filth in Moscow, and the scum around Vasily, you had to choose a Jew. Yes, a Jew!’