A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  Lutz started to deal with another call on the switchboard.

  I offered Quidde a cigarette to try to fool him into thinking I was an all-round decent guy. He didn’t expect a white rabbit of course, but for a couple of free cigarettes he seemed prepared to pretend that my black hat might just be empty; it’s why people like me smoke, I guess. In return he served me some hot Russian tea in a little glass with a lump of real sugar, and while I waited to receive confirmation that the ministry had received my message in full, Quidde asked me if any progress had been made in identifying the murderer of his two fellow signallers, Sergeant Ribe and Corporal Greiss.

  I shook my head. ‘I appreciate that those men were comrades of yours, corporal,’ I told Quidde. ‘But really, I’m the wrong man to ask about it. I’m not the investigating officer. It’s Lieutenant Voss of the field police who’s working that case. You should ask him, or the colonel, of course.’

  ‘Maybe so, sir,’ said Quidde. ‘But with all due respect to Lieutenant Voss, sir, he’s not a detective, is he? He’s just the local kennel hound. And as for the colonel, well, all he really cares about are his bloody bees. Look, sir, everyone here at the castle knows that before you were in the SD you used to be a top bull at the Alex.’

  ‘Not even a top donkey, corporal.’ I grinned. ‘Thanks, but they gelded all the best cops back in thirty-three.’

  ‘And everyone knows it was Voss and the colonel who asked you to go down to the Hotel Glinka to take a look at the crime scene. The word is that it was you who figured it wasn’t an Ivan that killed them – who chalked out another Fritz for it. And now everyone figures you’re still interested in finding out who killed them, on account of how it was you that was trying to get that rapist bastard they hanged last Saturday to give up what he knew about the murders.’

  ‘Colonel Ahrens,’ said Lutz. ‘I have Lieutenant Hodt for you, sir.’

  I shrugged and sipped my sweet tea before lighting one up for myself – one of the several handfuls of Trummers and a bottle of cognac I had stolen from Joey’s private plane on the flight down from Berlin; the cognac was long gone but the cigarettes were lasting nicely. I breathed the biscuity-smelling smoke deep into the walls of my chest, and as I paused to wait for my head to clear I pondered how to answer the corporal’s perfectly reasonable arguments. He was right, of course: in spite of Von Kluge’s fairly explicit order to forget all about the case of the two dead signallers, I was still very much interested in finding out who killed them. It takes a lot to shoo me away from a real crime; others – one or two of them even more powerful than Field Marshal von Kluge – had tried to warn me off something before, and it didn’t take then, either. We Germans have a great capacity for ignoring other people and what they tell us; it’s what makes us so damned German. It’s always been like that, I guess. Rome tells Martin Luther to lay off and does he lay off? – does he hell. Beethoven goes deaf and, in spite of what his doctors advise, he carries on writing music – well, who needs ears to listen to a whole symphony? And if a mere field marshal stands in the way of your investigation’s progress then you simply go over his head, to the minister of propaganda. Von Kluge was going to love me when he discovered what I’d done. And my continuing interest in the murders of Ribe and Greiss would be of small consequence beside the greater irritation that would plague him when Joey the Crip pulled rank over Clever Hans and told him that Dr Batov was to be allowed to come to Berlin after all – because I had no doubt the minister would agree to it. One thing you could say in defence of Joseph Goebbels was that he always knew a good thing when he saw it.

  ‘Some people don’t mind loose ends,’ I said. ‘But me, I always like to make the ends meet and sometimes tie a nice bow with them. I was in the trenches during the last war, Corporal Quidde. It bothered me then when men got killed for no good reason, and it bothers me now. Look, I tried my best. But it was no damned good. The fellow wouldn’t talk. Always assuming he really did know something about what happened. I wouldn’t have put it past Hermichen to have strung me along, just for the sheer joy of it. Maybe he was playing for time. Murderers are like that, sometimes. If we believed everything they told us the prisons would be empty and the guillotines would rust over.’

  Quidde was spared from having to answer; he pressed a hand to his headphones as the Torn woke from its sleep like the robot in Metropolis.

  ‘I think this must be your acknowledgement from Berlin, sir,’ he said, and picking up a pencil he began to write.

  When he had finished he handed the message to me and waited patiently while I read it.

  YOUR MESSAGE ACKNOWLEDGED. MINISTRY OF PUBLIC ENLIGHTENMENT AND PROPAGANDA. AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS.

  Underneath that message was another:

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY. LUTZ IS GESTAPO. THEY RECRUITED HIM WHILE HE WAS STILL AT SIGNALS SCHOOL IN LÜBECK. DON’T WANT TO SAY ANYTHING IN FRONT OF HIM. I HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT RIBE AND GREISS THAT MIGHT HAVE A BEARING ON THEIR DEATHS BUT I AM WORRIED THIS COULD GET ME KILLED. MEET ME IN THE GLINKA GARDEN ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON AT FOUR PM AND COME ALONE. NOD IF YOU AGREE.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I said, and put the folded-up message in my pocket.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wednesday, March 31st 1943

  Goldsche had appointed Judge Conrad to be in overall charge of the Katyn Wood investigation for the bureau. Conrad was a senior judge from Lomitz, near Wittenberg, and while he could be a little gruff, I liked him. In his early fifties, Conrad had served with distinction in the Great War. After a stint as a public prosecutor in Hildesheim he had joined the Army Justice Service in 1931 and had been a lawyer in the army ever since. Like most of the judges in the War Crimes Bureau, Johannes Conrad was no Nazi, and so neither of us felt comfortable at the idea of working closely with Army Group Centre’s own advisory coroner, Dr Gerhard Buhtz, who Von Kluge had succeeded in imposing on the bureau’s bosses as the man in charge of the forensic part of the investigation.

  On the face of it, Buhtz, a former professor of forensic medicine and criminal law from Breslau University and an expert on ballistics, was extremely well qualified, but he certainly wouldn’t have been my choice or Conrad’s for such a politically sensitive role, since prior to his appointment in August 1941 as the coroner of Army Group Centre, Gerhard Buhtz had been a colonel in the SS and an early member of the Nazi Party. Buhtz had also been the head of the SD in Jena, and Conrad argued that his being part of our investigation was a not-so-subtle attempt by Von Kluge to undermine it from the very outset.

  ‘Buhtz is a fanatical Nazi,’ Conrad told me on our way to a clearing in Katyn Wood where a meeting had been arranged with Buhtz, Ludwig Voss and Alok Dyakov. ‘If any of that bastard’s history gets out when the international commission is here it will fuck everything up.’

  ‘What sort of history?’ I asked.

  ‘While he was in Jena Buhtz was in charge of carrying out autopsies on prisoners who were shot while trying to escape from Buchenwald KZ. You can imagine what that meant, and what Buhtz’s death certificates were worth in terms of honesty. And then there was some scandal involving the Buchenwald camp doctor. Fellow named Werner Kircher, who’s now the chief physician with the RSHA in Berlin.’

  ‘Isn’t he the deputy director of the forensic pathology unit?’

  ‘That’s right. He is.’

  ‘I thought I knew the name. So what was the scandal?’

  ‘Apparently Buhtz persuaded Kircher to let him remove the head of a young SS corporal who had been murdered by some prisoners.’

  ‘He actually cut the head off?’

  ‘Yes, so that he could study it in the lab. Turns out he had quite a collection. God only knows what they did to the prisoners. Anyway, Himmler found out about it, and went crazy that an SS man should be treated with such disrespect. Buhtz got kicked out of the SS, which is why he went first to Breslau and then to Army Group Centre. The man is a barbarian. If the commission or any of these reporters picks up on the fact that Buhtz was
at Buchenwald, it will make us all look bad. I mean, what price the German search for truth and justice in Katyn when our leading pathologist is little better than a mad scientist?’

  ‘It would be just like Von Kluge to hope that something like that would put a stick in our spokes.’

  For a moment I thought of the two dead signallers near the Hotel Glinka and how their heads had been almost completely severed by someone – a German – who clearly knew what he was doing. And I wondered about Buhtz again as he arrived on a BMW motorcycle.

  I went down to greet him and watched him climb off the machine and remove his leather helmet and goggles. Then I introduced myself; I even held his leather coat while he found his glasses and his Wehrmacht officer’s cap.

  ‘My compliments, it’s a brave man who rides a motorcycle on these roads,’ I said.

  ‘Not really,’ said Buhtz. ‘Not if you know what you’re doing. And I like my independence. There is so much time wasted in this theatre just waiting for a driver from the car pool.’

  ‘You have a point.’

  ‘Besides, at this time of year the air is so fresh that one feels alive on a motorcycle in a way one never could in the back of a car.’

  ‘There’s plenty of fresh air in my car,’ I said. ‘Of course, not having any windows helps with that.’ I looked at the motorcycle more closely: it was an R75, also known as the ‘Type Russia’, and could cope with a wide variety of terrain. ‘But can you really carry all your stuff on this?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Buhtz, and threw open one of the leather panniers to remove a full anatomist’s dissection set and spread it out on the BMW’s saddle. ‘I never travel without my magician’s box of tricks. It would be like a plumber arriving without any tools.’

  One particular knife caught my eye. It was glitteringly sharp and as long as my forearm. It wasn’t a bayonet but it looked just the thing to cut a man’s throat back to the bone. ‘That’s one hell of a blade,’ I said.

  ‘That’s my amputation knife,’ he said. ‘Pathology in the field is largely just tourism. You turn up, you see the sights, you take a few photographs and then you go home. But I like to have a decent catlin about my person just in case I want a little souvenir.’ He chuckled grimly. ‘Some of these surgical knives, including that one, were my father’s.’

  He rewrapped his tools and I handed him back his coat and led the way up to the birch cross where the others were waiting for us. The snow was almost all melted and the ground felt softer. I swatted a fly away and reflected that winter really was behind us now, but with the Russians certain to mount a new offensive before very long there were few Germans in Smolensk who could have looked upon the spring and summer of 1943 with any great optimism.

  ‘I understand you think there may be as many as four thousand men buried in this wood,’ Buhtz said as we climbed the slope toward the waiting men.

  ‘At least.’

  ‘And are we planning to exhume all of them?’

  ‘I think we should exhume as many as we can in the time that’s available to us before the Russians begin a new campaign,’ I said. ‘Who knows when that will start and what the outcome will be?’

  ‘Then I shall have my work cut out,’ he said. ‘I shall need some assistants, of course. Doctors Lang, Miller and Schmidt from Berlin; and Dr Walter Specht, who’s a chemist. Also, there’s a former student of mine from Breslau I should like to send for: Dr Kramsta.’

  ‘I believe the Reich Health Leader in Berlin, Dr Conti, has already put these matters in hand,’ I said.

  ‘I sincerely hope so. But look, Leonard Conti is not always reliable. In fact I should say that as the RSHA physician he’s been nothing short of incompetent. A disaster. My advice to you, Captain Gunther, would be that you should keep the ministry on his tail to make sure everything that is supposed to happen does happen.’

  ‘Certainly, professor. I’ll do that. Now let’s meet the others and get started.’

  I walked him over to where Judge Conrad, Colonel Ahrens, Lieutenant Voss, Peshkov and Alok Dyakov were waiting for us.

  Buhtz was in his mid-forties, stout and powerful-looking, with a bow-legged way of walking – although that might just have been the fact that he had just climbed off a large motorcycle. He already knew the other men, who returned his brisk ‘Heil Hitler’ with a notable lack of enthusiasm. He shook his head in exasperation and then dropped down on his haunches to inspect the most recently discovered cadaver.

  As Voss lit a cigarette Buhtz looked at him irritably. ‘Please put that cigarette out, lieutenant.’ And then to Judge Conrad: ‘That’s really got to stop,’ he said. ‘Immediately.’

  ‘Oh, surely,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Do you hear?’ Buhtz said to Voss. ‘There’s to be no smoking anywhere on this site from now on. I don’t want this damned crime scene spoiled by so much as a soldier’s spit or a boot print. Colonel Ahrens, any man caught smoking in this wood is to be put on a charge, is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, professor,’ said Friedrich Ahrens. ‘I’ll pass that on right away.’

  ‘Please do so.’

  Buhtz stood up and looked down the slope towards the road. ‘We’re going to need some sort of hut or house here for the post-mortem work,’ he said. ‘With trestle tables, the stronger the better. At least six, so work on several bodies can be carried out at once. Results will seem more significant if they are made simultaneously. Oh yes, and buckets, stretchers, aprons, rubber gloves, some sort of water supply so medical personnel can wash human material and themselves, and electric lighting, of course. Some police photographers, too. They’ll need a good source of light of course. Microscopes, Petrie dishes, slides, scalpels, and about fifty litres of formaldehyde.’

  Voss was making copious notes.

  ‘Then I think we shall need a second hut for a field laboratory. Also, I shall be providing you with details of procedures for identifying and marking the bodies, as well as for preserving the personal effects we find on them. From what I’ve seen so far, the bodies appear to have been covered in sand, the weight of which will have pressed them into one large sandwich. Not a very nice one either. The chances are there’s quite a foul soup down there. This whole site is going to smell worse than a dead dog’s arse when we start the actual exhumations.’

  Colonel Ahrens groaned. ‘This used to be such a great place to have a billet. And now it’s little better than a charnel house.’ He glanced angrily at me, almost as if he held me personally responsible for what had happened in Katyn Wood.

  ‘Sorry about that, colonel,’ said Conrad. ‘But it’s now the most important crime scene in Europe. Isn’t that right, Gunther?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Buhtz. ‘Lieutenant Voss?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Your field police will need to organize a team of men to comb this whole area for more graves. I want to know where there are Polish graves, where there are Russian graves, and where there are … something else. If there’s a fucking cat buried within a thousand metres of this spot I want to know about it. This task requires accuracy and intelligence and of course scrupulous honesty, so it should be carried out by Germans, not Russians. As for the digging on the site itself, I understand Russian Hiwis are to be used. Which is fine as long as they can understand orders and work to direction.’

  ‘Alok Dyakov is organizing a special team of men,’ I said.

  ‘Yes sir.’ Dyakov snatched off his fur hat and bowed obsequiously to Professor Buhtz. ‘Every day Herr Peshkov and myself will be here in Katyn Wood to act as your foremen, sir. I have a team of forty men I’ve used before. You tell me what you want them to do and we will make sure they do it. Isn’t that right, Peshkov?’

  Peshkov nodded. ‘Certainly,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No problem,’ continued Dyakov. ‘I choose only good men. Good workers. Honest, too. I don’t think you want men who help themselves to what they find in the dirt.’

  ‘Good point,’ agreed B
uhtz. ‘Voss? You’d better organize a round-the-clock team of nightwatchmen. To protect this site from looters. It should be clear that anyone looting this site will suffer the severest penalty. And that includes German soldiers. Them most of all. A higher standard is expected of a German, I think.’

  ‘I’ll organize some signage to that effect, sir,’ said Voss.

  ‘Please do that. But more importantly, please organize the team of nightwatchmen.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Dyakov. ‘If I might make a small request? Perhaps the men digging here could receive some rewards. A small incentive, yes? Some extra rations. More food. Some vodka and cigarettes. On account of the fact that this will be very smelly, very unpleasant work. Not to mention all the mosquitoes there are in this wood in summer. Better that workers are happy than resentful, yes? In Soviet Union no workers are rewarded properly. They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. But Germans are not like this. Workers are paid well in Germany, yes?’

  I glanced at Conrad, who nodded. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘After all, we are not communists. Yes, I agree.’

  Buhtz nodded. ‘I shall also require the services of a local undertaker. Catafalques for the bodies that we exhume and dissect and eventually rebury. Good ones. Airtight if possible. I feel obliged to remind you once again that the smell here in the wood is going to become very bad. And you make a good point about mosquitoes, Herr Dyakov. The insects are already quite irritating enough in this part of the world, but as the weather improves these will become a severe hazard. Not to mention all the flies and maggots we will find on the cadavers. You will need to make provision for some sort of pesticide. DDT is the most recently synthesized and the best. But you can use Zyklon B if that’s not readily available. I happen to know for a fact that Zyklon B is in plentiful supply in parts of Poland and the Ukraine.’

  ‘Zyklon B,’ said Voss, continuing to write.