A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  It was dark when I dared to move from the cover of my open grave. By now it was clear that whoever had been shooting at me was long gone, and also that no one else had heard the shots – but for an owl hooting its derision at my own lack of courage, the wood at Krasny Bor was quiet. I might have reported the matter to the field police but I had no wish to waste any more time. So I brushed the earth off my army uniform and went and knocked on her door.

  *

  Ines greeted my appearance at her door with a mixture of shock and amusement. There was an unlit cigarette in her hand and her boots and medical whites lay on the floor where she had dropped them earlier. She seemed a little less pleased to see me than the previous evening, but that might just have been because she was tired.

  ‘You look like you need a drink,’ she said, ushering me inside. ‘Correction: you look like you’ve already had two. What did you do? Exhume a dead body with your bare hands?’

  ‘I was almost a dead body myself. Someone took a shot at me just now.’

  ‘Anyone you know?’ She closed the door and then looked out of the window.

  ‘You don’t sound very surprised about it.’

  ‘What’s another corpse around here, Gunther? I’ve spent my whole day with them. I never saw so many dead people. You were in the war – the Great War. Was it anything like this?’

  ‘Yes, now you come to mention it.’

  ‘Think he’s still out there?’ She drew the curtain and turned to face me.

  ‘Who? The gunman? No. All the same I think I’d better stay here tonight. Just in case.’

  Ines shook her head. ‘Not tonight, lover. I’m exhausted.’

  ‘Have you got a drink?’

  ‘I think so. If you don’t mind Spanish brandy.’ She pointed at the bed. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘I don’t mind it at all,’ I said.

  Ines opened one of her cases, took out a silver hip flask that was as big as a hot water bottle and poured me one into a teacup. I sat down on the edge of her bed, tipped it into my mouth and let the stuff chase down my nerves and put them safely under anaesthetic for another time.

  ‘Thanks.’ I nodded at the flask in her hand. ‘Is there a dog that comes with that thing? To rescue travellers?’

  ‘There should be, shouldn’t there? This was a present to my uncle, from the nursing staff at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, when he retired.’

  ‘I can see why he had to go. That’s quite a drinking habit he must have had.’

  She was wearing black baggy trousers and a thick tweed jacket over a plaid shirt; her red hair was gathered at the back of her head in a bun and there were black loafers on her feet; she smelt lightly of sweat and her usually pale flesh was looking just a little flushed – the way all natural redheads do when they’ve been doing something strenuous like running or making love.

  ‘You’re hurt, do you know that?’

  ‘It’s just a scratch. I threw myself on the ground when the shooting started and landed on a tree root.’

  ‘Take off your shirt and let me put some iodine on it.’

  ‘Yes, doctor. But I’d rather you saved the shirt, if you could. I didn’t bring that many with me, and the laundry here is a little slow.’

  I took off my tie and then my shirt and let her clean the scratch with some lint.

  ‘I think this shirt has had it,’ she said.

  ‘Which makes it fortunate I own a needle and thread.’

  ‘I’m considering asking you to fetch it. Your wound is actually quite deep. But for now we’ll see how you manage with a field dressing.’

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  Ines tore open a bandage parcel and began to wind a roll around my chest. She worked quickly and expertly, like someone who’d done it many times before, but gently, too, like she wanted to spare me from pain.

  ‘You know, I really don’t think there’s much wrong with your bedside manner.’

  ‘Maybe that’s because you’re used to sitting on my bed.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Help yourself to more brandy.’

  I poured another cupful, but before I could drink it she took it out of my hands and drank it herself.

  ‘Why didn’t you come to dinner tonight?’

  ‘I told you, Gunther, I’m exhausted. After we picked up the commission from the airport, Professor Buhtz and I went back to grave number one and did another sixteen autopsies. The last thing I feel like doing is putting on a nice dress and having my hand kissed by so many gallant army officers. It still stinks of the rubber glove it’s been wearing.’

  ‘Tough day.’

  ‘Tough but interesting. As well as having been shot, some of the Poles were stabbed first with a bayonet. Probably because they resisted being dragged to the graveside.’ She paused and finished tying off the bandage. ‘Interestingly, many of the bodies we’ve found aren’t in a condition of decomposition at all. They’re in the initial phase of desiccation and of formation of adipocere. The internal organs have almost normal colour. And the brains are more or less … Well, it’s interesting to me, anyway.’ She smiled a sad little smile, stroked my cheek and added: ‘There. It’s done.’

  ‘There’s mud on your shoes.’

  ‘I went for a walk instead of coming to dinner.’

  ‘See anything suspicious?’

  ‘You mean like a man with a gun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The last time I looked there were several by the front gate.’

  ‘I meant hiding in the bushes.’

  ‘I should really give you a tetanus shot. God only knows what’s in the ground around here. Luckily for you I brought some from Breslau. Just in case I cut myself working down here. No, I didn’t see anyone like that. If I had I would have roused the sheriff.’

  She fetched her doctor’s bag, found an unpleasant-looking syringe, and filled it from a little vial of tetanus vaccine.

  ‘Was that your uncle’s, too?’

  ‘As a matter of fact it was.’

  ‘It looks as if it’s going to hurt,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It is. So it’s best I stick it in your behind. If I put this needle in your arm it’ll hurt for days, and then you might not be able to do a nice salute and you wouldn’t want that. This way only your dignity is affected. Not your Nazism.’

  When the needle went in it felt like it was going all the way down my leg, but of course that was just the cold tetanus vaccine.

  ‘Is my dignity affected if I groan?’

  ‘Of course. Weren’t you ever a boy scout? They’re not supposed to cry out when they’re in pain.’

  I groaned. ‘I think you’re confusing them with the Spartans.’

  She rubbed on some alcohol and then let me alone. The hypodermic went into a little velvet-lined black leather case with a latch in the front.

  ‘But I wasn’t ever a boy scout,’ I said, buttoning my trousers. ‘And I was never a Nazi.’

  ‘Did you consider the possibility that maybe it’s why someone was trying to shoot you?’

  I left off my shirt and put my tunic back on. ‘It’s not something I generally tell people. So, no.’

  ‘I think that’s where the problem started, don’t you? Too many people keeping quiet about what they really think?’ She collected her still unlit cigarette and put a match to it, but nervously, like it was about to go off in her mouth.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Me?’ She tossed the match on the floor. ‘I’m a Nazi through and through, Gunther. SA brown on the outside and falangist black in the middle. I hate the stab-in-the-back politicians who betrayed Germany in 1918 and I hate the Weimar republican fools who bankrupted the country in 1923. I hate communists and I hate the people who live in Berlin West and I hate the Jews. I hate the bloody British and the god-damned Americans and the traitor Rudolf Hess and the tyrant Josef Stalin. I hate the French and I hate defeatists. I even hate Charlie Chaplin. Is all that clear enough for you? Now, if you don’t mind, let’s change the
subject. We can talk politics all you like when we’re both banged up in a concentration camp.’

  ‘You’re all right,’ I said. ‘I like you a lot, you do know that, don’t you?’

  Ines frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t tell you anything about what I think.’

  ‘Maybe not then, but just now, when you frowned, your face told me plenty, doctor. Like you meant not a word of what you said.’

  We both looked around as somewhere outside in the Krasny Bor forest we heard a police whistle blowing.

  ‘You’d best stay here,’ I said, reaching for the door handle.

  ‘I should have pushed that needle right down to your hip bone,’ she said, pushing past me. ‘Don’t you get it? I’m a doctor, not a delicate Meissen figurine.’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of doctors at Krasny Bor,’ I said, and went after her. ‘Most of them are ugly and old and quite expendable. But delicate Meissen figurines are in shorter supply.’

  *

  The police whistle had stopped blowing but the cops were easy to find – they usually are. There were two field police under-officers standing in the forest: the army-issue flashlights suspended from their greatcoat buttons looked like the eyes of an enormous wolf. At their feet was what looked like a discarded raincoat and a lost Homburg hat. In the air was a strong smell of cigarettes – as if someone had just put one out – and little Pez breath mints that nearly every man in the German army ate when he was going to see a girl or he had nothing better to do but suck on his own thoughts.

  ‘It’s Captain Gunther,’ said one.

  ‘We’ve found a body, sir,’ said the other, and shone his flashlight onto a man lying on the ground as other uniformed men arrived with more lights, and the scene soon resembled some arcane midsummer-night ritual with all of us standing in a circle, our heads bowed in what might have looked like prayer. But it was too late for the man lying on the ground: no amount of prayer was ever going to bring him back to life. He was about sixty years old; most of the blood had dyed his grey hair red; one of his eyes was closed but his mouth was open and his tongue was hanging out of his bearded mouth as if he was pushing it out to taste something – maybe he’d been sucking a mint, too. It appeared he’d been shot in the head. I didn’t recognize him.

  ‘That’s Professor Berruguete,’ said Ines. ‘From the International Commission.’

  ‘Jesus. Which country?’

  ‘From Spain. He was Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Madrid.’

  I groaned loudly. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I’m quite sure.’

  ‘This could be the end of everything. The Poles are already in fear of their lives. If the commission gets wind of this they might never come out of their damned hut.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to try to contain the situation,’ she said, coolly. ‘Won’t you?’

  ‘That’s not going to be easy.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. But what else can you do?’

  ‘Gentlemen, this is Dr Kramsta,’ I said to the field police. ‘She’s been assisting Professor Buhtz at Katyn Wood. Look, you’d best fetch Lieutenant Voss from Grushtshenki right away. And General von Tresckow’s adjutant, Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff. The field marshal will have to be told, of course. Next, I shall want the immediate vicinity of this crime scene cordoned off. No one from the international commission is to see or hear about this. No one. You understand?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘If any of them ask about the police whistle, it was a false alarm. And if anyone asks about the professor, he had to return to Spain unexpectedly.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Ines was kneeling beside the body. She pressed her fingers against the dead man’s neck. ‘Body’s still warm,’ she murmured. ‘He can’t have been dead long – half an hour, perhaps.’ She bent forward, sniffed at the dead man’s mouth, and then pulled a face. ‘You know, he stinks of garlic.’

  ‘Search the area,’ I told two other field policemen. ‘See if you can find the murder weapon.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Ines, ‘the person who you thought took a shot at you earlier wasn’t shooting at you at all. Maybe it was Berruguete he was shooting at.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said, although it was not obvious why if someone had been aiming to shoot Berruguete, they had almost hit me on the opposite side of the forest.

  ‘Or maybe they were aiming at you and hit him instead. Lucky for you. Not so lucky for him.’

  ‘Yes, even I can understand that.’

  ‘Here,’ said Ines to one of the field policemen. ‘Give me your flashlight.’

  I bent down beside her as she took a closer look at the dead man’s body.

  ‘He appears to have been shot through the forehead.’

  ‘Right between the eyes,’ I said. ‘A good shot.’

  ‘That all depends, doesn’t it?’ she asked.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On how far away the shooter was when he fired the cannon.’

  I nodded. ‘He smells of garlic. You’re right.’

  ‘But it’s not the reason Berruguete wasn’t exactly popular with his medical colleagues.’

  ‘And what is the reason?’

  ‘He held some rather extreme views,’ she said.

  ‘That doesn’t exactly put him outside of polite society. Not these days. Some of our leading citizens hold views that would embarrass Doctor Mabuse.’

  Ines shook her head. ‘From what I heard, Berruguete’s views were rather worse than his.’

  ‘So maybe one of them shot him,’ I said. ‘Professional jealousy. Settling an old score. Why not?’

  ‘They’re all of them highly respected doctors, that’s why not.’

  ‘But this Spanish fellow wasn’t highly respected. At least not by you, Dr Kramsta.’

  ‘No. He was – he was—’ She shook her head and smiled. ‘It doesn’t really matter what I think about him now, does it? Not now he’s dead.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  She stood up and looked around. ‘If I were you I’d stick to my first instinct: which was to try to cover this up, not investigate it. There’s a bigger picture here, right? Those men from the international commission have enough awkward questions of their own without you asking some more.’

  ‘All right,’ I said and stood up next to her. ‘There’s that way. And then there’s my way – the Gunther way.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Maybe I can find out who did it without asking anyone any awkward questions. During the course of the past decade I’ve grown to be quite good at that.’

  ‘I’ll bet you have.’

  ‘Sir,’ said one of the field policemen. ‘Over here sir. We’ve found a gun.’

  Ines and I walked toward him. The cop was about seventy or eighty metres away. His flashlight was trained on the ground – it was pointed right at a broom-handle Mauser, very like the one Ines had found in the door pocket in Von Gersdorff’s car. I might even have said it was the same one, because of the red number nine that was burned and painted onto the grip panel to warn the pistol’s users not to load it with 7.63 ammunition by mistake but to use only the nine-mill Parabellum cartridge for which the gun had been re-chambered.

  ‘That looks kind of familiar,’ said Ines. ‘Doesn’t your friend with the 260 own a Mauser exactly like this?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘Hadn’t you better see if he’s still got it?’

  ‘I don’t see what that will prove.’

  ‘I don’t know, but it could prove that he did it,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it could.’

  ‘You know I don’t see what there is to be so cagey about, Gunther, I was only making a suggestion.’

  ‘Do you remember back in your hut just now, I was telling you I might need a tetanus shot, and you were telling me you didn’t think it was necessary?’


  She frowned. ‘I didn’t say anything of the kind. And nor did you.’

  ‘Exactly. You do your job, doctor and I’ll do mine. Okay?’

  She stood up abruptly, momentarily angry. Her hands were shaking and it took a moment for her to calm down.

  ‘Is it your job?’ she said, evenly. ‘To play detective here? I don’t know. I thought you were working with the ministry of propaganda in Katyn.’

  ‘Actually it’s the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda; and being a detective, enlightenment – which is to say the full comprehension of a situation – is what I’m good at. So maybe I’ll just stick to that.’

  ‘You manage to make being a detective sound almost religious.’

  ‘If praying helped solve crimes there would be more Christians than there are lions to eat them.’

  ‘Spiritual, then.’

  I borrowed the field cop’s flashlight and flicked it over the ground while she talked. Something small caught my eye, but for a moment I left it alone.

  ‘Maybe. The ultimate goal of the science of criminal detection is a state of complete understanding, and of course the liberation of oneself from various states of imprisonment.’ I shrugged. ‘Although these days there’s only one state of imprisonment that means a damn to anyone.’

  ‘Self-preservation, huh?’

  ‘It’s generally preferable to ending up like your friend Dr Berruguete.’

  ‘He was no friend of mine,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even know him.’

  ‘That’s good. Maybe that makes you the right person to perform an autopsy.’