Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

the envelope up to the light, looking for evidence that it might have been opened, but he knew they routinely used steam to loosen the glue and had special techniques to reseal the flap without leaving any trace.

Schultz was curious. He wanted to know who Nehmann had upset in Berlin. Nehmann wouldn’t tell him. I’d need a really big sheet of paper, he said, and I know you’re easily bored. Schultz laughed and checked his watch. The dinner was tonight. Half past seven, he said. Death to the Ivans.

In the early evening they made their way to the church on foot, hugging the shadows, moving carefully from one ruined building to another, following the tracks of others in the crusted snow. It was cloudless, very little wind, and a huge yellow moon was rising in the east. Overhead, a million stars.

At the corner of a street, Schultz paused to get his bearings. Lately, civic-minded troops had taken to making signposts out of the leg bones of dead horses, the flesh stripped off, the knee joint immobilised with a nail. The top of the bone, where it hinged into the animal’s pelvis, had been split to make room for thin wedges of wood daubed with directions. Tonight’s sign read ‘Pozhaluysta’.

‘It’s Russian,’ Nehmann said. ‘It means “you’re welcome”.’

The church lay at the bottom of the street. Nehmann recognised the remains of the orthodox onion dome, silhouetted in the moonlight. There was very little activity on the front line and in the silence he could hear a door opening and closing as shadowy figures made their way inside. Tonight, according to veterans who’d been with the campaign since last summer, the entire Soviet Army retired for the night to get blind drunk, often literally if they’d run out of vodka and had to rely on industrial alcohol. It would, of course, have been the perfect moment to mount a crushing attack but Nehmann drew some comfort from the fact that Sixth Army, on this of all nights, also preferred to party rather than kill.

They were at the church now. Schultz led the way inside. Nehmann had been expecting something a little select, even decorous. A menu and wine list had circulated earlier in the day. The meal was to begin with fish from upriver, where the Panzers had broken through. The fish had been slaughtered with a volley of grenades tossed into the water mixed with little parcels of high explosive and would be served with a medley of wayside weeds. The fish came with chilled Chablis, and alongside the foal’s liver dumplings and prime cuts of steppe pony, guests would be offered a choice of burgundies. That, at least, may have been the intention.

Alas, no. The moment Nehmann stepped into the church he sensed they were in for a rough evening. The nave had been cleared of pews, making space for the long silver wing of an aircraft. The wing was propped upside down on three wooden trestles. The large red star suggested it must have come from a downed Soviet fighter and now it served as a table, littered with bottles and the odd glass. Everywhere there were candles: propped in jars, in cups, even on battered Orthodox bibles.

The rest of the nave was a swirl of bodies, most of them wearing oddments of clothing and equipment lifted from Russian prisoners or perhaps the Soviet dead that littered the front line. Men affecting shawls and bonnets under their helmets. Men sporting gaudy ochre stars scissored from canvas and soaked in animal blood. Men dressed as wayside hags, clad in rags, ash rubbed into their faces. Men offering themselves as campaign wives, their lips daubed in something scarlet and sticky, arm in arm with fellow grotesques, already insensible.

The last time Nehmann had seen anything like this was in a Tbilisi bar on New Year’s Eve when he was barely out of his teens. On that occasion he’d abandoned himself to the mercies of three women, all of them older, who’d led him up a narrow flight of stairs to an attic room at the very top of the building and taken their turn to fuck him. Watching two men waltzing drunkenly to the lilt of a mouth organ, he could still hear their laughter. The ugliest of them had stayed with him all night. One day, she promised, you’ll thank us for what we’ve done. And, in a way, she was right.

In the far corner of the church, under the watchful eye of an orthodox priest, a fire was burning on the tiled floor. From a huge iron frying pan came the warm, yeasty smell of fresh griddle cakes, flour, milk and a little salt. Despite the fire, and the sheer mass of people, the temperature was dropping by the minute and every shouted conversation was wreathed in white as warm breath clouded in the freezing air.

‘Here—’

Schultz had brought one of the bottles of wine Nehmann had lifted from the remains of Guram’s cellar. He dug out the cork with a hunting knife and passed it across. Nehmann had never drunk red wine so cold but it didn’t matter. He could smell madness in this place, and he knew it was no time to be sober.

Within minutes, more bodies were pressing in through the door. One of them, with a touching faith in his own immediate future, was dressed as Santa Claus, his cheeks and chin sprouting clumps of glued-on upholstery stuffing, a red bobble cap on his head. Another sported a pair of horns he’d acquired from somewhere while other newcomers wore crude paper masks with big Stalin moustaches and an extra large hole for a mouth. The hole had to accommodate any size of bottle or glass. Vodka passed from hand to hand, pursued by roars of laughter.

Then, from nowhere, came the keening of a violin and the bedlam paused. This wasn’t a gipsy fiddle, far from it. The notes were long, beautifully held, plangent, mournful, and Nehmann recognised the