A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Yes,’ I said, grimly. ‘I already had the same thought myself.’

  ‘Tricky one, that.’

  I lit a cigarette. ‘Look, I hate to ask you this again, sir, but would you mind keeping this quiet for now? The field marshal already dislikes me; his Putzer got drunk last night and started waving a gun around so I had to rubber-stamp his head.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about that from Voss this morning. It’s not like Dyakov. When you get to know him, Dyakov isn’t a bad fellow. For an Ivan.’

  ‘The field marshal isn’t going to like me any better if it gets around the camp that we think one of his favourite hunting rifles might have been used to murder me.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Buhtz. ‘You have my word. But look here, I owe a great deal to the field marshal; I owe my commission to him. But for him I’d still be languishing in Breslau, so I should hate it to get around that it was me who identified this bullet as coming from a rifle like his.’

  I nodded. ‘I certainly won’t say anything about it,’ I told him. ‘For now.’

  ‘But you don’t seriously think for a moment that it was Günther von Kluge who tried to kill you?’ he asked. ‘Do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think if the field marshal actually wanted me dead he could find a much better way of doing it than to shoot me himself.’

  ‘Yes. He could.’ Buhtz smiled grimly. ‘Then again you could just stay here. If you wait in Smolensk long enough the Russians will be in your lap.’

  *

  I skipped lunch. After seeing Berruguete’s autopsy I wasn’t that hungry. The only meal I wanted to have was in the schnapps bottle on the mess table, but that would have meant enduring Ines Kramsta’s stony indifference to my existence. That hurt more than it ought to have done. So I went back to the car thinking I might drive to the castle and send a signal to the ministry telling them that the members of the commission had already forgotten about Berruguete, and that their work was proceeding as hoped. Sometimes it’s useful to have duties in which you can take refuge.

  I drove out of the gates and east, along the main Smolensk road. About halfway there I saw Peshkov again, his coat flapping in the stiffening breeze. I didn’t stop to offer him another ride. I wasn’t in the mood to drive Hitler’s doppelgänger anywhere. I didn’t go to the castle either. Instead I kept on going. I suppose you might say that I was distracted, although that would have been an understatement. I had the distinct feeling that I’d lost so much more than the regard of a lovely woman – that in losing her good opinion of me I’d also lost the slightly better opinion that lately I’d formed of myself; but her good opinion was more important, not to mention her smell and her touch and the sound of her voice.

  I had half an idea to go to the Zadneprovsky Market on Bazarnaya Square and buy another bottle, like the chekuschka that Dr Batov had bought for us, although I would have been just as satisfied with the more lethal brewski he had warned me about – possibly more so: complete and lasting oblivion sounded just fine to me. But a few blocks before the market, the field police had closed Schlachthofstrasse to all traffic – a security alert, they said; a suspected terrorist who was holed up in a railway shed near the main station – and so I turned the car around, drove a few metres west again, pulled up and just sat there, smoking another cigarette, before it dawned on me that I was right outside the Hotel Glinka. And after a while I went inside, because I knew they always had vodka in there and sometimes even schnapps and a lot of other ways to take a man’s mind off what is troubling him.

  Without a doorman since the Rudakov brothers had left Smolensk, the Glinka’s madame was now in charge of the temple entrance as well as the girls inside; she was little more than a babushka with a rather obvious wig possessed of long, Versailles-style locks. Gap-toothed, with too much lipstick and a cheap black peignoir, she had the face and faux demure manner of a corrupted milkmaid and was about as greedy as a hungry fox, but she spoke reasonable German. She told me they weren’t open yet, but let me in all the same when she saw my money.

  Inside the place was decorated like the Blue Angel, with lots of tall mirrors and chipped mahogany and a little stage where a bespectacled girl wearing just a Stahlhelm was seated on a beer barrel pumping out a tune on a piano accordion that covered her rather obvious nakedness, or at least just about. I didn’t recognize the tune, but I could see she had nice legs. Over the fireplace there was a large portrait of Glinka lying on a sofa with a pencil in his hand and a score on his lap. From the dark and painful expression on his face I guessed he’d disappointed a woman he was keen on and she’d told him it was over between them; either that or it was his music being squeezed to death on the accordion.

  The madame led me to a high-ceilinged corner room with a view of the street and an evil-smelling bed with a green button-back headboard and a little tin cup for tips. There was a green carpet on the wooden floor, pink sheets on the bed, and some chocolate-brown wallpaper that was almost hanging on the wall. The chandelier on the ceiling was made of barley-sugar glass with a shard missing as if someone had tried taking a bite out of it. The room was every bit as depressing as I needed it to be. I handed the madame a fistful of occupation marks and told her to send me up a bottle, some company and a pair of sunglasses. Then I took off my tunic and put the only record on the gramophone player – Evelyn Künneke was always a local favourite on account of all the concerts she gave for soldiers on the eastern front. I pressed my face against the grimy windowpane and stared outside. Half of me was wondering why I was there, but it was not the half of me that I was listening to at that moment, so I unlaced my shoes, lay down, and lit a cigarette.

  A few minutes later three Polish girls arrived with vodka, took off their clothes – without being asked, I might add – and lay close beside me on the bed. Two lay either side of me like a pair of sidearms; the third lay between my legs with her head on my stomach. Her name was Pauline I think. She had a nice body and so did the others, but I didn’t do very much and nor did they. They just stroked my hair and shared my cigarettes and watched me drink – too much – and generally despise myself. After a while one of them – Pauline – tried to unbutton my trousers but I swatted her hand away. There was comfort enough in their idle nakedness, which felt natural and like one of those old paintings of some stiff scene invoking pastoral poetry or a stupid bit of mythology, the way old paintings sometimes do. Besides, if you drink enough it provokes only the desire to sleep and takes the edge off any thoughts that might prevent this from happening; that was the general idea, anyway. Thinking I was playing some sort of coy game, Pauline laughed and tried to unbutton me again, and so I held her hand and told her in my halting Russian – for a moment I forgot that she was Polish and she spoke German – that her company and that of her friends was quite enough for me.

  ‘What are you doing in Smolensk?’ she asked when she realized I was quite serious about being serious.

  ‘Oppressing the Russians,’ I told her. ‘Taking what doesn’t belong to Germany. Committing a crime of truly historic proportions. Killing Jews, on an industrial scale. That is what we’re doing in Smolensk. Not to mention everywhere else.’

  ‘Yes, but you personally. What do you do? What is your job?’

  ‘I am investigating the deaths of four thousand of your countrymen,’ I told her. ‘Polish officers who were captured by the Russians as a result of an unholy alliance between Germany and Russia and then murdered in the Katyn Wood. Shot one after another and piled into a mass grave, one on top of the other, like so many sardines. No, not like sardines. More like a horrible lasagne, with layers and layers of pasta and something darker and slimier in between. Sometimes I have this nightmare that I’m part of that lasagne. That I’m lying in a pool of fat between two decaying human strata.’

  They were silent for a moment, then Pauline spoke. ‘That’s what we heard,’ she said. ‘That there were thousands of bodies. Some of the soldiers who come here say the whole area smells like a plague.’

>   ‘But is it true?’ asked the other. ‘Only we hear a lot of rumours about what is happening over at Katyn Wood and it’s hard to know what to believe. Soldiers are such liars. They’re always trying to scare us.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Hand over heart. Just for once the Germans aren’t lying about something. The Russians murdered four thousand Polish officers here in the spring of 1940. And many others besides in several other places we don’t yet know about. Perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty thousand men. Time will tell. But right now my government is rather hoping to tell the world about it first.’

  ‘My elder brother was in the Polish army,’ said Pauline. ‘I haven’t seen him since September 1939. I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. For all I know he could be one of those men in the forest.’

  I sat up and took her face in my hands. ‘Was he an officer?’ I asked.

  ‘No. A sergeant. In an Uhlan regiment. The 18th Lancers. You should have seen him on his horse. Very handsome.’

  ‘Then I sincerely doubt he’s one of these men.’

  This was a lie but I meant it kindly; by now we knew that as many as three thousand of the bodies found in the mass graves at Katyn were those of Polish NCOs, but it didn’t seem right to tell her that, not while she was lying beside me. Three thousand NCOs seemed like a lot to me – perhaps as many NCOs as there were in the whole Polish army. It wasn’t that I thought she would get up and leave, merely that I didn’t have the stomach for the truth. And, after all, what was one more lie now, when so many lies had and probably would still be told about what had really happened in Katyn Wood?

  ‘And we certainly didn’t find any horses,’ I added by way of corroboration.

  Pauline breathed a sigh of relief and laid her head back on my stomach. The weight of her head was almost too much for me.

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said. ‘To know that he isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t like to think of him lying up there and me lying down here.’

  ‘No indeed,’ I said quietly.

  ‘But it would be ironic, don’t you think, Pauline?’ said one of the others beside me. ‘Both of you eight hundred kilometres from home, in a foreign country, lying on your backs, all day and all night.’

  Pauline shot her friend a look. ‘You know, you don’t seem like the other Germans,’ she said, changing the subject.

  ‘No, you’re so wrong,’ I insisted. ‘I’m just like them. I’m every bit as bad. And don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that there’s any one of us who’s decent. We’re not worth a damn. None of us is worth a damn. Take my word for it.’

  Pauline laughed. ‘Why don’t you let me help you to forget about all that?’

  ‘No, listen to me, it’s true. You know it’s true, too. You’ve seen the bodies hanged on street corners as an example to the rest of the local population.’

  I drank some more and tried to lasso a stray thought that was running around my head like a loose horse. That image, and the picture of six Russians hanged by the Gestapo rope, was very much in my mind. I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was the length of rope in my tunic pocket that I’d untied from the shooter’s tree at Krasny Bor. And the certainty that I’d seen something since then that seemed relevant to all that.

  I drank some more and we just lay there on the bed and someone played the only German record again and I dreamed a terrible waking allegory of poetry and music and forensic pathology and dead Poles. It was always dead Poles and I was one of them, lying stiffly in the ground with two bodies pressed close beside me and one on top of me, so that I could not move my arms or my legs; and then the earth-mover started up its engine and started to fill in the grave with tonnes of soil and sand, and the trees and the sky gradually disappeared, and all was suffocating darkness, without end, amen.

  CHAPTER 11

  Friday, April 30th 1943

  When eventually I awoke with a start my eyes and my skin were leaking with fear at the idea of being buried alive. Or dead. Either one seemed an intolerable idea. My dreams always seemed designed to warn me about death, and they swiftly turned into nightmares when it appeared that the warning had come too late. Fuelled by alcohol and depression, this one had been no different to the worst of them.

  The three girls were gone and everything was bathed in a urine-coloured moonlight that seemed to add an extra loathsomeness to the already sordid room. Outside the window a dog was barking and a locomotive was moving in the distant railway yards like a large wheezing animal that couldn’t make up its mind which way to go. Through the floor I could hear the sound of music and men’s voices and women’s laughter. I felt as if one of the uneven bed springs was twisting its way through my stomach.

  An armoured car on Schlachthofstrasse came past the window, shaking the dirty glass in the damp casement. I glanced at my wristwatch and saw that it was well after midnight, which meant that it was time to leave and straighten myself. A delegation of French, including Fernand de Brinon, the Vichy secretary of state, had flown in the previous afternoon, and later this morning several German officers including me were supposed to escort them to the graves of those bodies already exhumed from Katyn Wood – among them two Polish generals, Mieczyslaw Smorawiski and Bronislaw Bohatyrewicz.

  When I got up from the bed an empty bottle of vodka and an ashtray that had been balanced on my chest fell onto the floor. Ignoring an overwhelming feeling of nausea, I found my boots and my tunic, and when I put my hands in my pockets and found the length of rope I’d untied from the tree at Krasny Bor I remembered what it was that I’d been trying to recall before the drink had claimed me.

  Peshkov’s coat. When I’d driven past him on the road from Krasny Bor to the castle, his coat – normally tied around the waist with a length of rope – had been loose. Had he lost the rope? Was that rope now in my pocket? And if it was, had Peshkov been the gunman who’d murdered Berruguete and taken a shot at me?

  I went downstairs and then – following a sincere and lengthy thank you to the madame for letting me sleep – I stepped out into the night air of Smolensk, retched into the gutter and walked back to the car congratulating myself that the other thing – the thing I had tried to forget – was now forgotten. Now if I could only remember my name.

  By the time I was on the road to Vitebsk I had started to feel well enough to think of my duties again, and I stopped at the castle and sent the message to Goebbels as I had originally intended doing. Lieutenant Hodt, the duty signals officer, was manning the radio himself because several of his men – including Lutz – were sick with fever.

  ‘It’s this damned place,’ he said. ‘The men keep getting bitten by insects.’

  I nodded at the livid red lump on the side of his neck.

  ‘Looks like you’ve been bitten yourself.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, that was one of the colonel’s bees. Hurts like bloody blazes.’

  I offered him a cigarette.

  ‘Given up,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘You should start again,’ I told him. ‘Insects don’t like the smoke. I haven’t been bitten since I got here.’

  ‘That’s not what I heard.’ Hodt grinned. ‘The word is Von Kluge bit you pretty hard, Gunther. They say your head is still lying on the floor of the officers’ mess.’

  I tried a grin – my first for a while; it almost worked, I think. ‘He’ll get over it,’ I said. ‘Now that his Putzer is out of the hospital.’

  ‘In my opinion you didn’t hit him hard enough.’

  ‘Given the field marshal’s threat to hang me,’ I said, ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  Rope again. I was going to have to find Peshkov and return his belt and keep a close eye on his expression as I did so.

  ‘Yes, you should,’ said Hodt. ‘The man’s a damned nuisance. He’s always in here. Acts like he owns the place. Only no one wants to irritate the field marshal by telling him to clear off.’

  ‘Maybe this incident will have brought Dyakov to his senses,�
�� I said. ‘I’m sure the field marshal will have a word with him.’

  ‘I wish I shared your confidence in the field marshal.’

  Back in the car I thought some more about Peshkov and remembered his familiarity with the history of the NKVD – the way he’d known about Yagoda and Yezhov and Beria. Was there more to his knowledge than just an interest in politics and current affairs? I unlocked the glovebox and was stuffing the rope inside when I noticed a brown envelope and remembered I still had Alok Dyakov’s things from the hospital. I placed the envelope on the seat beside me so as not to forget to return them and drove off. I hadn’t gone very far when an animal shot out of the bushes and across my path and instinctively I braked hard. A wolf, perhaps? I wasn’t sure, but now that we’d opened the graves the smell of the bodies had been drawing them in and the sentries had reported seeing several at night. I glanced down at the passenger seat and saw that the contents of the envelope had spilled to the floor of the car, so I risked the wrath of the sentry who was enforcing the blackout by turning on the map light to pick them up. As nurse Tanya had said, there was a watch, a gold ring, a pair of spectacles, some occupation money, a key and a simple piece of thin brass about ten centimetres long.

  And suddenly all thoughts of the rope in the glovebox and Peshkov were gone.

  I was looking at an empty brass stripper clip from an automatic weapon. It worked like this: you would fit the stripper clip of nine bullets, arranged one on top of the other, into the top of the pistol and then push them straight down into the magazine, leaving the strip standing proud of the gun. When you removed the stripper clip, the bolt would fall on the first round in the chamber and the weapon was ready to fire. Mauser was the only manufacturer that used a loading mechanism like that. The stripper clip for an M98 held five rounds and was shorter; this was the clip for a broom-handle Mauser, and from the amount of polish on the clip it was almost certain that this was one of the stripper clips that had been in the door pocket of Von Gersdorff’s Mercedes, and before that in his father’s immaculate wooden presentation case.