Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (simple ebook reader .TXT) 📗

‘And the Ivans? Up in the air?’

‘We have fighters of our own. And some excellent pilots.’

‘So still three thousand tons a day? Or thereabouts?’

‘We’ll do our best.’

The officer nodded, seemingly satisfied. For a brief moment there was silence. A truck ground past on the dirt road outside. Then another of the figures around the table stirred. For the first time, through the fog of cigarette smoke, Messner realised that he didn’t belong to Sixth Army. Instead, he was wearing the Feldgrau uniform and lightning flashes of an SS Standartenführer. His cap, with its unmistakeable death’s head symbol, lay on the table in front of him. His hair was beginning to recede over a bony forehead, and he had a cast in one eye.

‘You’re here on behalf of Generaloberst Richthofen? Is that what we are to understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when will he pay us the honour of a personal visit?’

‘Very soon. I suspect.’

‘Before we move out of here? Before we cross the river?’

‘I imagine so. You have a question for him? Can I help at all?’

‘Maybe yes. Maybe no. You have plans to bomb Stalingrad?’

‘Of course.’

‘And do you know when?’

‘Soon. Very soon. Maybe you saw what we did to Sevastopol. Stalingrad isn’t a place you’d want to be just now.’

‘Good.’ The Standartenführer produced a handkerchief and mopped his face. ‘Very good. How many aircraft?’

‘As many as necessary. If we can smash the city before you get there, I imagine it will save you gentlemen a great of time and effort.’

Messner paused. He’d no idea where these questions were leading, and he suspected the rest of the officers around the table were equally mystified.

The Standartenführer returned the handkerchief to his pocket and reached for his cap before checking his watch and getting to his feet. He had a face, Messner later realised, that was bred for madness: the cast in his eye, the tightness of his mouth, the thin sprout of unrazored hair beneath his nose that appeared to serve as a moustache.

‘One aircraft, Messner.’ He tried to force a smile. ‘That’s all we’d need.’

‘We?’

‘Myself. And my Gruppenführer. It will be a pleasure to do business with your Generaloberst.’

8

VENICE, 10 AUGUST 1942

The bed was empty by the time Nehmann finally woke up. He lay still for a while, listening to the muted clamour of the city through the open window: iron-shod wheels on the cobblestones outside the house, the mewing of gulls from the lagoon, an occasional parp from one of the passenger liners he’d seen moored on the seaward end of the Grand Canal.

Back in Berlin, it was impossible to ignore a widespread contempt for the Reich’s Axis partner. Only last year, Mussolini had suffered a bad bout of indigestion after trying to gobble up Albania and it had taken German steel and German blood to bail him out. The shortest read in history, went the word on the Wilhelmstrasse, must be the Book of Italian War Heroes.

This would guarantee a chuckle in most Berlin bars but here in Venice, Nehmann wasn’t entirely sure that the joke wasn’t on the Germans. A decade of frantic rearmament, huge rallies and the ever-tighter chokehold of a police state had certainly delivered the spoils of war, but most Italians, it seemed to Nehmann, had altogether different priorities.

Nehmann stretched and closed his eyes. He and Hedvika had got drunk last night in a hotel restaurant she often used. The dining room belonged to an elderly Italian maître d’of immense charm,plainly smitten by Hedvika, and he’d reserved a table beside the window with a dramatic view of the Grand Canal and the Accademia Bridge. Nehmann had bought a bottle of champagne and then another, while he and Hedvika took it in turns to murmur passages aloud from Goebbels’ letter.

Hedvika, who’d met Goebbels on a number of occasions, had caught the Minister’s voice perfectly. As a gifted public speaker, spot-lit on countless stages, he was capable of an immense range of effects from whispered pathos to chest-beating frenzy, but over the crisp white tablecloth beside the window, Hedvika had cleverly imagined herself into the head of this demagogue, driven to plead his case at the feet of a woman he swore he’d never ceased to love. These laboured endearments had turned heads at neighbouring tables, adding to a surreal sense of theatre that Nehmann knew he’d never forget.

The letter was briefer than Nehmann had expected. It was handwritten, two and a half pages of Goebbels’ tightly meticulous script, and it had taken him an hour or two up in the bedroom to decipher every word. The opening passages, they both agreed, belonged in one of the cheap novelettes now available on Kraft durch Freude cruise liners.

Goebbels missed his Czech mistress more than he could ever have believed. His submission to his wife, and by implication his Führer, was an act of the most contemptible weakness. He’d treated Lida worse than badly and now – as he should – he was paying the price. But the truest love, the only love that really mattered, was beyond price. It was something immeasurable, something eternal, and he wanted his Czech treasure to know that he would meet any bill, risk any consequence, in order to share time again together. I am your Tristan, he’d written. And you? Du bist meine Isolde.

The heart of the letter, its denouement, came on the last page. By now, the maître d’had signalled for their plates to be cleared away and their glasses recharged. Hedvika, hunched over the letter, desperate, intimate, pleading, ignored the scurrying waiters.

‘My body was yours to conquer. To you, Liebling, I was terra incognita, virgin earth, yours for the taking. You planted your standard and stated terms for the glorious peace that followed our first lovemaking. The land is bare now, the rains long overdue. Nothing grows, not even a single flower. I’m a parched man in a dry land, happy only in our memories. I long for your return. I long for the