The Night of the Generals Page 2

  They found Engel standing in the centre of the room. In front of him, not far from Maria Kupiecki’s body, stood the witness, wearing a more co-operative expression.

  “I’ve had a few words with our lavatory-man.” Engel clapped his hands. “Now then birdie, start singing! What did you see?”

  Wionczek shuffled self-consciously. Detective-Inspector Liesowski leant against the wall as though seeking support. Major Grau sat stiffly erect in his chair.

  “Well, I sat there listening to the screams. At first I thought, Maria’s tight again. She was always drinking and making a racket, you know. But then it struck me that she sounded really frightened. Then everything went quiet.”

  “Go on,” prompted Engel. “You looked through the keyhole.”

  “Yes, because I heard steps coming downstairs from the floor above.”

  “What exactly did you see?”

  Wionczek hesitated. “I must have been mistaken.”

  “Why not?” said Engel cheerfully. “You’re only human, after all. Anyone can make a mistake. The main thing is, tell us what you saw—mistakenly, of course.”

  “There’s no need to be afraid,” Liesowski said gently.

  “I caught sight of a man,” Wionczek blurted out. “He was wearing uniform—the sort of uniform the Germans wear, grey or greenish—the light in the corridor was too dim for me to see clearly.”

  “You don’t say!” exclaimed Engel. “A German soldier? He’ll be telling us it was a German officer next.”

  “Kindly don’t interrupt him,” said Major Grau. “And don’t make any leading remarks. Let him speak for himself.”

  “It could well have been a German officer,” said Wionczek. Words suddenly gushed from him like water from a spring, “At least, that’s what I thought at the time. Of course, I could be wrong. I was in a bit of a state—not feeling too good—that’s why I was sitting there in the first place. Anyway, I caught sight of something else, something red, like a red stripe running down the man’s trouser-leg—a wide red band. And there was something that looked like gold up by his collar.”

  “Great balls of fire!” exclaimed Engel. “Can you beat it? He goes the whole hog and describes a German general. I’ve half a mind to withdraw my generous offer and…”

  Major Grau cut him short. “You can forget that idea, Engel,” he said curtly. “Let the witness repeat his statement.”

  “The man must be wrong.” Liesowski looked shocked. “These alleged patches of red could have been bloodstains.”

  “It’s possible,” said Major Grau ruminatively, “but you can’t deny that his description fits a German general to a tee.”

  Engel gazed round somewhat dismayed, vainly looking for someone to share his consternation. “But that’s utterly absurd!”

  “I agree,” said Liesowski with some emphasis.

  Major Grau sprang to his feet. His lean and expressive features betrayed an odd glimmer of satisfaction. “What’s to prevent us from taking this witness’s statement seriously?” he inquired. “Personally, I’m inclined to believe in the man’s sincerity. He may be mistaken, but why should he be lying? His evidence is unusual, but that only makes it more interesting. We shall draw our own conclusions and act on them—exhaustively and without compunction, as our sense of duty demands. Am I right, Engel?”

  “As always, sir. After all, nothing’s impossible in our line of country.”

  “I still find it difficult to take this witness’s statement at its face value,” said Liesowski.

  Grau led the Inspector aside and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I think we should proceed as follows. You, my dear Liesowski, will record every detail of this inquiry. Do so without fear or favour. Bear in mind that the truth is all that matters, however unpleasant it turns out to be. Also bear in mind that I am prepared for any eventuality. Act as though justice were the one factor involved. No exceptions are to be made, even if a general’s head has to roll.”

  INTERIM REPORT

  PRELIMINARY DOCUMENTARY RECORDS

  Excerpts from conversations dealing with events in Warsaw, 1942. These conversations took place eighteen years later and were recorded on tape.

  Track 1

  Place: Cologne

  Speaker: Engel, Gottfried, ex-sergeant, now employed by a firm of carriers in Cologne. What follows is an abstract of Engel’s statement, omitting the interviewer’s questions:

  “Did I know a man called Roman Liesowski? Yes, that’s right. We used to call him ‘tortoise’ or ‘gnome’. We took Liesowski over from our predecessors for the simple reason, I seem to remember, that he was one of the few senior members of the Warsaw police force who spoke fluent German. That’s all I know about him.

  “I can’t remember much about Maria Kupiecki’s body. I ask you, there were so many bodies lying around! It was just another lousy murder—in a crummy lodging-house somewhere off the main street, as I recall. It was three flights up and well after midnight. I was out on my feet.

  “This Kupiecki woman was a tart of the first order. It’s quite possible she worked for us—not as a tart, of course. She was more of a post-box for secret agents. Anyway, someone bumped her off. There wasn’t the slightest indication of any political motive.

  “I don’t know how the case turned out. Major Grau took over all the particulars, so it wasn’t my affair any longer.”

  So much, thus far, for Gottfried Engel. A further meeting was arranged with his consent, of which more later.

  Track 2, 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 t
hree 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?”

  2

  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.”

  She kissed him, very lightly, on the lofty dome of his noble brow, and then released him. He closed his eyes in momentary relief. When he opened them again his wife was once more seated at the desk, as she had been when he first awoke.

  It was not an unfamiliar sight. Wilhelmine made it her business to take an interest in everything to do with his work. She had played an active part in every stage of his career, and even in war-time she hurried to his side whenever circumstances permitted, as they did from time to time. General von Seydlitz-Gabler, it should be explained, was a specialist in pacification. Having mastered the art of appearing strict and paternal simultaneously, he made an acceptable conqueror. Thus it was no accident that his headquarters were located in Warsaw, and it was this fact which made it possible for his wife to visit him.

  “How do you interpret these suggestions from Supreme Headquarters?” she asked, holding up a document resembling a diagram.

  The General’s limp skin looked grey as a worn-out dishcloth, but he summoned up a brisk nod of approval. “You’ve put your finger on the essential point, my love. It contains nothing but suggestions.”

  “And you can interpret them as you think fit?”

  “Of course, but my interpretation must be dictated by the conditions prevailing here.” The General hoisted himself up in bed slightly, as though trying to enhance the dignity of his appearance, but conditions were hardly in his favour. He sank back again.

  “Surely, Herbert,” she inquired gently, “isn’t it always advisable to be decisive in a position like yours?”

  “By all means,” he replied, fidgeting with the buttons on his pyjama jacket, “but the decision involved here is one of far-reaching importance. Under certain circumstances I might be compelled to burn parts of this city to the ground.”

  “And what would your conscience say to that?”

  “Decisions of this nature must be very carefully weighed.” Growing restless, the General rolled out of bed, his pyjamas billowing loosely except in the nether regions, where they moulded themselves tightly to his haunches. He disappeared into the bathroom, leaving the door open. “The consequences could be simply catastrophic.”

  “Why do you imagine Supreme Headquarters has allotted you General Tanz’s division?”

  “Purely a safety measure. Just because I’m allotted a division of that sort, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be used.”

  A fierce jet of water shot into the basin as von Seydlitz-Gabler spun the taps in an endeavour to drown his wife’s observations, however valuable, but his efforts were in vain. Wilhelmine had followed him in and stood leaning against the door-frame smiling pensively.

  “Damn it all!” exclaimed von Seydlitz-Gabler in an access of sudden but muted energy. “I really can’t understand your everlasting preoccupation with this chap Tanz. There’s a great deal to be said for him, I’ve no doubt, but he hasn’t
got a Regular Army background—never went through the mill as we did. I find it a little irritating, the way you always sing his praises.”

  Wilhelmine smiled. “I have my reasons, and they should be good enough for both of us. After all, Ulrike is just as much your daughter as mine and Tanz is more than a successful general—he’s a bachelor as well. Besides, there’s a sort of tradition at stake. When Father was your C.O. he told Mother that I was going to marry the best man in the regiment—and that happened to be you.”

  Major-General Klaus Kahlenberge, Chief of Staff to General von Seydlitz-Gabler, tilted his chair back from the desk, digging the heels of his boots into the floor as he did so. The chair tottered alarmingly, but Kahlenberge had an admirable sense of balance.

  “Do me a favour, Otto,” General Kahlenberge told the pancake of a man who stood facing him. “Don’t ask me any trick questions at this ungodly hour of the morning. What’s a human life worth?—I could say, a pinch of cow-shit. I might equally say, a very great deal. No, the real answer is, it all depends. Every human being has his market value. It fluctuates according to supply and demand, that’s all.”

  “I know Lance-Corporal Hartmann pretty well, sir,” said the rotund man in corporal’s uniform.

  “So what?” Kahlenberge gave a long, dry-as-dust laugh. His hairless skull glistened as though it had been basted with oil. It always shone like this, hence the nickname “Moonface,” a sobriquet which his subordinates used whenever they were absolutely sure he was not within earshot. His eyes, greenish and phosphorescent like those of a lynx, twinkled with amusement. The rest of his face was smooth, round and inflated, as though modelled in plasticine.

  “You say you know Lance-Corporal Hartmann. Where from, may I ask? Did you play in the same sand-pit as children or were you drafted into the same shower when you joined up?”

  Otto the Fat, corporal clerk and plaything of General Kahlenberge, grinned broadly. The General had put his finger on the spot as usual. Kahlenberge possessed what amounted to a sixth sense. You couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes, which was why he was never boring to work for.