Voice dry as the inside of his own mouth, Bokov said, “Whoever planned our party would have gone to it himself. Chances are decent he’s a casualty, too.”
He was shivering by the time the jeep got to the Cecilienhof. It wasn’t just the cold-it was the influenza trying to jump on him again. He choked down two of the pills the doctor had given him. Colonel Shteinberg did the same thing.
They had to pass through several belts of security. That would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. No fanatics could get in and shoot up the place-but nobody’d bothered to vet the booze. Shteinberg said it: they’d got careless. And they’d played right into the bandits’ hands.
An English country house for the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law: that was how the Schloss Cecilienhof got started, just before World War I. Country house, nothing, Bokov thought, the benzedrine making his heart drum again. It’s a goddamn country palace, is what it is.
And, at the moment, it was a country palace in one of the nastier districts of hell. Spotlights spread harsh light on the snow-covered grounds around the main buildings-and on the uniformed bodies stacked there like cordwood. One of the bodies wasn’t uniformed, but wore black tie and boiled shirt. A barman had poured it down on the sly…and got what the officers he was serving got. “He didn’t know the shit was poisoned,” Bokov said, pointing to the corpse in the fancy suit.
“You wouldn’t expect many to,” Shteinberg answered. “Some American said three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He knew what he was talking about.”
“Sensible, for an American,” Bokov said. He jumped down from the jeep. The noises from inside the Cecilienhof sounded like something from a low-rent district in hell, too. He didn’t want to go in there, and he knew he had to. Then he stopped almost in spite of himself. “Comrade Colonel, tell me-please tell me-that isn’t Marshal Zhukov.”
“It is.” Shteinberg’s voice was hard and flat. “The revenge Stalin will take…Unless…” He quickly shook his head and went inside.
Unless what? Bokov wondered. Unless Stalin decided to get rid of the popular Zhukov and blame it on the Heydrichites? Was that what the other NKVD man meant? Even if it was, Bokov didn’t believe it. If Stalin wanted Zhukov shot, shot Zhukov would be, and never mind that he was the leading soldier in the Red Army. But that Bokov could wonder-and that Shteinberg could, too-spoke volumes about how the system they lived under worked.
Bokov had no time to read those volumes, and no interest in them. He was, after all, part of the system himself. He followed his superior into the Cecilienhof.
It was as bad as he’d expected, maybe worse. The palace stank of sweat and smoke and vomit and shit. Men reeled here and there, some clutching their bellies, others rubbing frantically at their eyes. “Who turned out the lights?” a major shouted furiously. The lights were blazing. His eyes had gone dark. Wood alcohol, sure as the devil, Bokov thought.
“The NKVD men!” a sergeant shouted. “They’ll take over!”
“Thank God!” another noncom exclaimed. Now the monkey’s off our backs, he meant. Nobody could blame the poor underofficers for screwing up if they weren’t in charge.
“No officers here still on the job?” Shteinberg asked, in the tones of a man hoping against hope.
But the two noncoms shook their heads. Bokov wasn’t surprised, either. Why else would a man come to a New Year’s festival, except to drink himself blind? And how many Red Army officers had done just that here tonight?
“Have you got the Germans under guard?” Bokov asked.
The two underofficers gave each other apprehensive looks. “Comrade Captain, we have…some of them,” answered the one who’d spoken first. “Some went home before people started getting sick.” He paused unhappily. “Some may have slipped out when the Devil’s grandfather got loose, too. Things were pretty confused there for a while.”
Whenever a Russian hauled the Devil’s kin into a conversation, he knew he was in the middle of a mess. Bokov knew it, too. As far as he could see, things were still plenty confused. Part of him wanted to lie down and forget about everything but the influenza. But neither duty nor benzedrine would let him.
A word from him or Shteinberg could destroy these noncoms. What point, though? They hadn’t done anything wrong. Most of the ones who had screwed up were poisoned, which served them right. If I weren’t sick, I’d be poisoned, too, Bokov thought.
“Comrade Captain, what do we do if the Nazi bandits rise up now?” the other conscript asked. “Who’d give orders to help us fight back?”
“People like you,” Bokov answered. “And if they try it, we’ll whip them right out of their boots. I hope they do-fuck your mother if I don’t. If they come out and fight fair, we’ll smash them like the cockroaches they are. The one way they can hurt us is by sneaking around like this.”
“Unfortunately, they’re too damned good at sneaking.” Colonel Shteinberg’s voice was dry as usual. Only the way his hands shook and the unnatural glitter in his eyes told of the war between disease and drugs inside him. He went on, “Take us to the Germans. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”
Guards with submachine guns stood outside the door to the room where the servers were corralled. Nobody was going anywhere now. Of course, it was much too likely that anyone with guilty knowledge had already got away. As Bokov and Shteinberg went in, one of the guards muttered to another: “Never thought I’d be glad to see the damned Chekists get here.”
“Shut up,” the other fellow hissed. “They’ll hear you.”
If Bokov didn’t have bigger things to worry about…But he did. If Moisei Shteinberg heard the whispers from the Red Army men, he also gave no sign.
Inside the splendid chamber-a plaque said it had been the smoking room-huddled a gaggle of scared-looking Fritzes. Bokov nodded glumly to himself: sure as hell, the women were chosen for looks and figures. The Red Army men in charge were careful about that. About some other things, things that turned out to matter more, they weren’t.
Colonel Shteinberg pointed to one of the women, a statuesque brunette. “You, bitch-come outside with us,” he snarled. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish. She’d be able to follow it, though. And it ought to frighten her even more. Most Germans hadn’t had anything direct to do with killing Jews. But they’d had a notion of what was going on even so. They didn’t like the idea of Jews holding power over them now. They feared revenge-and well they might.
Her lower lip trembled, but she came. As soon as she got out into the hall and the door closed behind her, Bokov slapped her in the face. She stared at him, her mouth an O of injured astonishment. She had eyes green as jade.
She didn’t squawk, which wasn’t what he wanted. “Scream your head off,” he told her. “Give those other pigdogs back there something to worry about.”
When she obeyed, he felt as if he were standing in front of an air-raid siren. “Enough, already!” Shteinberg said, and she shut it off as abruptly as she’d let loose. The Jewish NKVD man went on, “So you’re one of the ones who thought you could wipe out the Red Army, eh?”
“I work in a shoe factory,” the dark-haired woman said. “One of your men pulled me out and said he would shoot my little son if I didn’t come here and give your officers drinks and-” She stopped, then made herself finish: “-and anything else they wanted.”
Bokov didn’t know if she was telling the truth. Her story sounded as if she could be, though. “Tell us what happened here,” he said.
“They gave me these clothes to wear,” she said. The black and white maid’s outfit didn’t cover that much of her. After a sigh, she continued, “I brought drinks. I brought food. I got groped a couple of times, but nothing worse.”
The Red Army officers would still have been more or less sober. And the sour resignation in the woman’s voice said she might have been on the receiving end of worse when the Russians took Berlin. Nobody knew how many rapes there’d been then. A lot, though; no doubt of that.