It wasn’t long before he made an uncomfortable discovery: the paintings could not be removed from the stone wall of the water tank. Try as he might—and he tried all night long—the best of them remained indelibly all around the circular wall, as if they’d been there for thousands of years. Soap and water and huge amounts of scrubbing, which left Max lathered in sweat, had absolutely no effect on Kalinka’s perfect little black palm prints and her excellent paintings of the Przewalski’s horses. At first, Max was puzzled that something so new could prove to be so indestructible; if it hadn’t been inconvenient to his plans, he might even have said it was a miracle that Kalinka’s paintings should prove to be as durable as the French ones, and it was several hours before the old man worked out exactly what must have happened. Unwittingly, the girl had created a perfect fresco painting: her homemade colors, mixed with water, had been applied to a damp stone surface; these pigments had been absorbed by the stone and then quickly dried by the wood fire that was still burning on the floor, so that the paintings were now as permanently fixed in the very fabric of the wall as if they had been painted on the ceiling of the great cathedral in Kiev. “That’s torn it, Taras,” said Max, quite forgetting for a moment that he had told his faithful dog to go with Kalinka and the horses. “If this situation wasn’t so dangerous, it might be funny.”
So he had to content himself with burning her old coat and the books with the cave pictures of the horses, and sweeping away some horse dung.
“With any luck, that captain will take my word about this place and not come here at all,” the old man told his absent dog. “I mean, it’s just an old waterworks, after all is said and done—not a weapons arsenal or a Red Army barracks. It makes no sense to be suspicious of absolutely everything, like he is.”
But in his bones, Max knew that Grenzmann wasn’t the type to accept anyone’s word for anything—least of all someone who was not German. And he knew that as soon as the captain saw the paintings, his life at Askaniya-Nova would become very awkward indeed—and quite possibly worse than that, since he knew the SS didn’t take kindly to being made fools of. He suspected that the same thing that had happened in the botanical gardens at Dnepropetrovsk would now happen to him.
“That doesn’t matter,” he told himself, for by now he had remembered that Taras had gone with Kalinka. “What matters is that they make their escape and start a new life somewhere else.”
When he was satisfied he had done all he could—he left the fire burning, to make sure that Kalinka’s old coat was properly consumed by the flames—Max went back into the brick passageway, past the pumping station, and opened the secret door that led outside onto the steppe.
An unpleasant but hardly unexpected discovery awaited him: it was Grenzmann on his tall Hanoverian horse, with four of his SS men seated on two motorcycles and in their sidecars.
“Max,” said Grenzmann. “This is a surprise. And, then again, perhaps not such a surprise.” Smiling thinly, he jumped down from the horse and walked toward the old man. “Here we all are, looking for the entrance to the baron’s old waterworks, and all of a sudden there you are, showing us exactly where to find it. How about that?”
“After you mentioned it last night, sir,” explained Max, his heart pounding, “I decided to come and have a look at the place myself. To see if there was anything I could scavenge. And in case, at a later date, you wanted me to show you around.”
Grenzmann grinned and wagged his finger at the old man. “You know, you’re such a bad liar, Max,” he said. “I don’t know why I put up with it. Really, I don’t. I give you my friendship—we invite you to supper—and this is how you repay our trust: with lies and evasions. It’s really quite intolerable. If your German wasn’t so perfect, I might be tempted to shoot you right here and now.”
Max shook his head and then snatched off his cap. “It’s not like that at all, sir. I told you the plant was useless, and it is.”
“Don’t split hairs with me, Max. It’s obvious that you are hiding something in there. The question is, what? Or perhaps who? But I think we’re going to find out.”
“I can assure you, sir, that there’s no one here except you and me and these men.”
“Perhaps that’s true now,” admitted the captain. “But these tracks, leading away from here to the horizon, suggest that it wasn’t true a while ago—until last night, perhaps, when I first mentioned this place to you and you were so hopelessly evasive.”