‘Up, Witch,’ the big soldier said to her.
Katya jerked back at the notion. ‘Me? No. Ivan, you go. We’ll stay down here. No.’
‘And who’s going to give me a boost? You? Maybe Lumanov? Come on. Up.’
‘He has a point,’ Leonid said.
Josef growled inside. ‘Now.’
Katya slung her rifle across her back and stepped into Ivan’s hands.
The big man heaved and she rose easily to land her boots on the side of the car.
Josef’s hand speared up through a broken window. He hoisted a machine pistol.
Katya took the German weapon and tossed it down to Leonid. The pilot caught the gun and gave it over to Ivan, who rammed it into a sack.
Josef scavenged among the scattered Germans for their guns, ammunition, and money. She watched from above, aghast at first at the piled corpses. There were seventy men or more, black blooded in the light of a full moon. In the first minute, Josef lifted up a dozen weapons. His hand thrust out of the windows and grew more stained with each rifle or pistol. Katya’s hands grew slick with blood. Josef kicked through the bodies like trash, he waded in them and walked on them, tripped and fell among them without a curse or any word, as grim as any of the dead.
By the second minute, the killed mounds at the bottom of the car were nothing to Katya. They were merely arms and legs to be pried out of the way by the dark walker Josef to get at their only worth. She tossed the weapons down to Leonid and watched him stagger to catch them, his legs still bad, his shoulders not recovered. She reveled in Leonid’s life, and the fact that she had saved him. The heaps of German dead, by comparison, became just loose figurines. Katya felt this change, a twinge in her gut, something soft stiffened. This is war, she decided, war. She fixed her eyes on Josef. She watched the old man walk through the dead, doing what he had to do. Papa, too, shirked nothing that needed to be done. She wanted to be like that as well, and he could teach her. Katya felt strongly the need to talk with him. She sensed her father was too far away and made herself a promise to write him a letter tomorrow. With that, Papa felt closer.
Ivan called up that their time was running out. Josef heard this and thrashed around the bodies for a last check of weapons. She walked above the old man’s head, tracking him while he made his way to the front of the passenger car. There only two bodies lay. By their uniforms and their privacy in the car, these two seemed to be officers. One of the officers was high ranking, a fat man, a big target for the machine-guns and riddled with bullets. The other lay on his back. This one was in a sling with a broken arm, his gaunt face was framed by a gauze wrap. He wore black and silver, an SS officer like Colonel Breit. Katya had never seen an SS officer before.
He was horrid looking, white and gossamer thin, the gauze and cast made him even paler, already a ghost even before he was turned into one by the partisans. She shivered to look at him, that place in her that was hardening somehow did not defend her against this one. He was different, not German, what was he? Barely human, thin like a blade. Josef rifled the body’s belt for a holstered Luger pistol. He handed the gun up to Katya.
She did not take her eyes off the corpse while Josef clambered on a bench to climb out.
Below, Ivan had divided the weapons among the four satchels. He lapped the fullest one over his back and turned to make for the trees.
Leonid struggled with the smallest sack, loaded only with papers and ammo clips.
Josef came up on the deck beside her. Katya held on to the Luger.
Josef slung himself to the ground. He lifted a hand to help her down.
Below, someone moaned. Katya glanced down into the dark recesses, into the piles of upturned and stolen life. One thing moved. The SS man, a gaunt white thing in silver and black, the body of a knife.
Katya lowered the Luger and fired. The thin body settled back.
It was wrong to leave anything alive in this train, that was what Plokhoi had come for. To kill all of them, even the ones leaving Russia, to send that message. She fired again, to do what she had to. Josef glared up at her.
Ivan and Leonid stopped with the sacks over their backs and turned to look.
The pistol smoked in Katya’s hand. A gray spirit trickled from the barrel and drifted past her face - smelling of oiled things, machines, and leather - then moved on.
* * * *
CHAPTER 34
July 17
1210 hours
Old National Gallery
Berlin
Odd, Breit thought, how suddenly, once again, the numbers don’t seem to matter as much.
He rested his eyes on three panels, Gauguin side by side with van Gogh and Degas. The Impressionists again. Humanity. Emotion, randomness, illogic. On the canvas, in the streets, on the battlefield, on the rectangular pages of history, there is in the end nothing but the squiggles of the human hand.
Breit chewed his sandwich. Today he was alone in the gallery except for the museum staff. The air raid over Berlin five days ago was still being dealt with by downtown Berliners, they were not out strolling this afternoon for their luncheon. Hitler himself was not in his Reich capitol to hear the catcalls of sirens and see the trees burst into flame or the giant looping water sprays from fire brigades to put them out. Hitler was in his Wolfsschanze castle in East Prussia. It’s fine, Breit thought. Hitler doesn’t need to see this, the man is miserable enough.
Four days ago in Prussia, Breit had been in Hitler’s presence. The morning after the air raid, he was called to Hitler’s eastern command lair to report on the battle for Kursk. He was also expected to speak on the Russian partisan movement, since he’d seen them with his own eyes, as if being tied up by one, being kicked by that witch woman, and then escaping them on horseback in a frenzy during a botched raid qualified him to talk about the partisans. He knew nothing about them, except they were determined, they were not ignorant, and they could be vicious. He did not know why the Witch did not come after him, as must surely have been her orders, she could have done it with no trouble. Instead, she’d ridden down the old twin. Breit did not see what happened when she caught him. But she rode like a demon, and a demon, Breit knew, she must have been.
On July thirteenth, the day after the slaughter at Prokhorovka, he was ushered into the large meeting room at the Wolfsschanze. He’d heard about the great one-day battle in his sanatorium cafeteria, gathering as much as was known about the aftermath, then he was summoned to Prussia. There’d been no winner at Kursk, he knew only that Germany was badly hurt. Now the Reds would answer, and the end game would begin.
In the meeting, von Manstein urged them to continue Citadel. Victory in the south was still achievable, the Field Marshal argued. He asked Hitler to permit him and von Kluge to relaunch the offensive. The Soviets were pummeled; they would not withstand one more concerted blow. Their reserves were spent defending Prokhorovka, there was nothing left of them. The SS force in the south was paused but not halted. Tiger and Panther tanks were being repaired every minute; if cut loose again, they would retake the battlefield. Kempf was catching up, he would link with II SS Panzer in a day, two at the most. Together they could punch through Prokhorovka, the Reds were reeling there. Von Manstein claimed to have reserves, three panzer divisions, in position. There was nothing the Reds could do to buck up their defenses at Prokhorovka. All their available armor was committed; if they withdrew anywhere along the lines to shore up their positions, their entire defense would collapse.