Free Field Gray by Philip Kerr Page B

least what remained of it. Not that this looked like a particularly good idea either. Most of the wooden houses on the outskirts were still ablaze while, nearer the center, piles of rubble backed onto hollowed-out office and apartment buildings. I’d never seen a city so thoroughly destroyed as Minsk. This made it all the more surprising that the Uprava, the City Council, and Communist Party HQ had survived the bombing almost unscathed. The locals called it the Big House, which was something of an understatement: Nine or ten stories high and built of white concrete, the Uprava resembled a series of gigantic filing cabinets containing the details of every citizen in Minsk. In front of the building was an enormous bronze statue of Lenin, who viewed the large number of German cars and trucks with an understandable look of anxiety and concern, as well he might have done, given that the building was now the headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ostland—a German-created administrative area that stretched from the Byelorussian capital to the Baltic Sea.
    Pushing a heavy wooden door that was so tall it might still have been growing in a forest, I entered a cheap, marble-clad hall that belonged in a Métro station and approached a locomotive-sized central desk where several German soldiers and SS were attempting to impose some kind of administrative order on the ant colony of dusty gray men who were pouring in and out of the place. Catching the eye of one SS officer behind the desk, I asked for the SS divisional commander’s office and was directed to the second floor and advised to take the stairs, as the elevator was not working.
    At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second there was a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass, and there was a line of bullet holes on the gray wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open facing doors, through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit’s commanding officer, SS-Standartenführer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother’s womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me, he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.
    “The murder squad,” he said. “Did you catch them?”
    “Yes, Herr Oberst.”
    “Good work. What did you do with them?”
    “We shot them, sir.” I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I’d taken from the Russians before their executions.
    Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. “Including the women?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Pity. In future, all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich’s orders. Understand?”
    “Yes, Herr Oberst.”
    Mundt wasn’t much older than me. When the war broke out he’d been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: To be a decent detective you have to understand people, and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn’t like people. He wasn’t even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him—so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.
    “You disagree, Hauptmann?”
    “I don’t much care to hang women,” I said.
    He looked down his fine nose and smiled. “Perhaps you’d prefer to do something else with them?”
    “That must be someone else you’re thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don’t much like waging war on women.