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Gebietskommissar Alfred Lothar Stark. Despite this, he had time during the brief stretch to face two stocky Russian fighter planes heading for him, hedge-hopping back from who knows where – without ammunition, otherwise they wouldn’t have spared the solitary army car. They swept over him so low that he slammed on his brakes and nearly went off the road. He’d just accelerated again when they veered ahead of him, cutting across his path this time. Bora was able to decipher the white letters – Gitlerji – painted on one of the fighters. Whatever curse they were addressing Hitler with in Cyrillic, they attracted the attention of the German pilots stationed at Rogany, who appeared from nowhere, skimming the roofs with machine guns blazing. And even if they barely missed Bora, they scoreda direct hit on a picket fence, pulverizing it along with the ridge pole of the izba beyond, only to vanish behind the rooftops after their fleeing enemies, towards Oseryanka.
    When Bora reached his destination, an ominous plume of black smoke to the west marked the place where one of the Russian fighters had most likely met its end. The sky was otherwise free of noise and of the peculiar happy blue of the season. As a pilot’s brother, on principle Bora did not wish evil to flyers in general. All he could do was hope that there was another reason for the black cloud out there.
    The building that served as Stark’s brand-new headquarters had in the old days been the residence of a German manufacturer, such as one found in and around Kharkov before the Revolution. Whether descendants of Moravians settled here long ago or technologically advanced newcomers, Germans had frequented the region for years. The brick construction, gabled and tall, with the date 1895 inscribed on a limestone scroll under the peak of the roof, could have stood anywhere on German soil. Although the long-disused factory behind it had perished during the fighting, the house was still referred to as the Kombinat . A branch of the Kharkov railroad led directly to the factory and the residence from the old-fashioned little architectural jewel still called – the war notwithstanding – New Bavaria Station. The Kombinat ’s façade bore signs of the house’s old elegance, including stained glass in the bullseye windows by the door, miraculously intact. And this even though (Bora knew; he’d gone in a couple of times before) the interior had been partitioned into cubicles years ago to host Rabfak worker–students of the Kharkov Technical Institute for Engineers, and later the aeroplane factory employees. Only the ground floor maintained some of the old glory, and the district commissioner’s office was just inside the main entrance, to the right.
    Bora was in luck. No queue: only Russian prisoners on their knees, waxing the floor. In the small parlour to the left, a brown-jacketed assistant enquired as to his business; he then leapt frombehind his desk, stepped across the corridor and opened Stark’s double door just enough to put his head through. Whatever he was told, the assistant simply slid both wooden leaves wide open and went back to his desk.
    “Major Bora,” Stark called, seeing him on the threshold. “Come in, come in. What have you got for me today?”
    Bora walked in. The panelled, well-lit room was overly spacious, but then space was needed for the amount of paperwork that started and ended here; in just a few weeks, the Gebietskommissar (Geko, as he was nicknamed) had set up an efficient system of managing people and resources in the area that the army countenanced mostly because it hampered the Security Service’s overbearing. Whatever Stark’s office had been earlier – most likely a parlour – it had some pretence of elegance: a high ceiling, coffered, a chandelier shaped like a transverse metal bar, on which etched opaline glass bulbs the size of melons lined up; glass cabinets; a spotless, carpetless oak floor. Stark himself, in his