The Night of the Generals Read Free Page B

to cause death on their own. Two of them had pierced the woman's breasts at the nipple and the third had penetrated her navel. There were dozens of other wounds, all apparently inflicted with the same insensate fury and all with the same end in view: the disfigurement of every feminine sexual characteristic. Would you like me to give you any more details? No? I'm glad. It wasn't a pleasant business.
    "Conclusion: murder committed during an outburst of obsessive passion. There was nothing to indicate that Kupiecki had been done to death by a member of the Resistance--and even if it had been so I shouldn't have hesitated to bring him to book for an instant. The man was obviously as dangerous as a wild animal.
    "I didn't hesitate to call in Major Grau, either. There wasn't anything particularly daring about this course of action. It was more calculation on my part--instinct, you might call it. Grau was a lone wolf, you see. Everything about him was unusual.
    "Grau reacted promptly, just as I had expected. He took the witness's statement seriously and seemed determined to act on it. What was more, he actually seemed pleased to have got his hands on the material I gave him and took over the case himself.
    "Needless to say, I did a little ferreting around on my own account. There were seven German generals in Warsaw at the time of the crime. A lot, you think? Well, there were several thousand generals in the Wehrmacht--upwards of four thousand. Many of them were busy in Russia at the time. A large number of others were engaged as organizers and administrators in the Balkans and Scandinavia and on the so-called Home Front. Several hundred more were waiting behind the Atlantic Wall--and Warsaw had seven: one in the suburb of Praha, three, normally in transit, at the Hotel Metropol and another three in the Liechnowski Palace.
    "The Praha general spent the evening and most of the night with his troops--women signals auxiliaries, to be precise. Of the three generals living at the Hotel Metropol one was asleep in his room, the second was night-clubbing at the Mazurka with his A. D. C. and the third was playing host at a stag party in the hotel bar. In short, these four had an alibi.
    "It was impossible for me to check on the three gentlemen in the Liechnowski Palace. It was a sort of fortress, hermetically sealed and kept under strict surveillance from the wine-cellar to the chamber-maids' attic. Eighty or more people lived in the Palace--staff officers, aides-de-camp, clerks, signallers, women service personnel, batmen and visitors of various kinds--and the three generals, namely: iGeneral von Seydlitz-Gabler, General Officer Commanding a Corps; iiLieutenant-General Tanz, commanding the Nibelungen (Special Operations) Division; iiiMajor-General Klaus Kahlenberge, Chief of Staff to the Corps Commander.
    "Is that selection good enough for you?"
     
     
     
     
     
    2
     
     
    General von Seydlitz-Gabler had the distressing sensation that he had been buried alive in an avalanche of cotton wool. His head buzzed as though it were a built-in concrete mixer and the skin of his scalp seemed taut to breaking point. It was agony even to open his eyes.
    When he did open them, the first thing he saw was a bottle. It stood there fatly on his bedside table, and it was empty. It had once held a red burgundy by the name of Château Confran, a wine which had shrouded his memory of the night before as effectively as a blanket of fog. Perhaps it was just as well.
    The General heaved his corpulent body on to its side and groaned deeply. The light streaming through the tall windows of the Liechnowski Palace hurt his eyes and his head throbbed steadily to the rhythm of his heart-beat. Suddenly he clamped his eyes shut in something akin to terror. Silhouetted against the centre window, where his desk stood, was the seated figure of a woman--his wife, to be exact. He breathed stertorously through his gaping mouth and feigned sleep.
    "Well, have you slept it