by Philip Kerr
‘Of course,’ I said lightly.
‘I was hoping for some deer, but Dyakov told me that all of the deer had been killed by local hunters for food the previous winter but that there were still plenty of wild boar about and if I was interested he could show me where all the best spots were and even organize a drive for us. I happened to mention this to Von Kluge, who as you know is a very keen hunter, and he got very excited at the prospect of shooting wild boar in Russia – at his estate in Prussia there are several drives like that a year. I hadn’t seen him quite so happy since we captured Smolensk. A boar hunt was duly organized, for several guns – the field marshal, the general, myself, Von Boeselager, Von Schlabrendorff and other senior officers – and I have to say it was very successful. I think we got three or four. The field marshal was delighted, and almost immediately he ordered another drive, which was equally successful. After that, he decided to make Dyakov his Putzer, since when there have been more shoots, although lately the wild boar seem to have disappeared – I think we shot them all, quite frankly – which is why the field marshal now goes after wolves, not to mention hare and rabbit and pheasant. Dyakov seems to know where all the good spots are. Voss is right; I think it’s much more likely the fellow was a local poacher.’
‘Not to mention a murderer,’ I said.
Von Gersdorff looked sheepish. ‘I could hardly have known something like that would happen. In many ways Dyakov is a very affable sort of chap. It’s just that since the field marshal took him under his wing he’s become a law unto himself and insufferably arrogant, as you witnessed for yourself the other night.’
‘Not to mention a murderer,’ I repeated.
‘Yes, yes, you’ve made your point.’
‘To you,’ I said. ‘But if it’s going to stick I’m going to need more than a damned stripper clip. So let’s hope we find something in the Abwehr files.’
The Abwehr office in the Smolensk Kommandatura overlooked a small garden that was planted with vegetables and faced onto the windows of the local German foreign ministry. Beyond that you could see the jagged crenellations on top of the eastern Kremlin. On the wall of the office was a map of the Smolensk Oblast and a larger one of Russia, with the front clearly marked in red and uncomfortably nearer than I had previously supposed. Kursk – which was where German armour was now grouped before the Red Army – was only five hundred kilometres to the south-west of us. If Russian tanks broke through our lines, they could reach Smolensk in just ten days.
A young duty officer with an accent so astonishingly upper-class that I almost laughed – where did they get these people? I wondered – was on the telephone and quickly concluded his conversation when we appeared in the door. He stood up and saluted smartly. Von Gersdorff, whose manners were normally impeccable, went straight to the filing cabinets without bothering to introduce us and started to hunt through the drawers.
‘What was that you were saying about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, Lieutenant Nass?’ he murmured.
‘The reports from Brigadier Stroop indicate that all resistance has ended, sir.’
‘We’ve heard that before,’ he said. ‘I’m amazed the resistance has lasted so long. Women and small boys fighting the furious might of the SS. Mark my words, gentlemen, this won’t be the last we hear of it. In a month’s time the yids will still be coming up from their crypts and their cellars.’
Finally he found the file he was looking for and laid it on a map table by the window.
He showed me the photographs of the documents found on the dead NKVD men and on Alok Dyakov.
‘The propiska found on Dyakov tells us nothing,’ I said. ‘There’s no photograph and it could belong to anyone. At least anyone called Alok Dyakov.’
I spent the next few minutes staring closely at the pictures of the two NKVD identity cards – one in the name of Major Mikhail Spiridonovich Krivyenko and the other in the name of Sergeant Nikolai Nikolayevich Yushko, an NKVD driver.
‘Well, what do you think?’ asked Von Gersdorff.
‘This one,’ I said, showing the two men the picture of Krivyenko’s identity card. ‘I’m not sure about this one.’
‘Why?’ asked Voss.
‘The right-hand page is clear enough,’ I remarked. ‘It’s not so easy to be sure without the original document in my hands, but the stamp on the picture page on the left looks suspiciously faint on the bottom right-hand corner photograph. Almost as if it’s been taken off something else and stuck on. Plus the circumference of the stamp seem slightly out of line.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Voss. ‘I hadn’t noticed that before.’
‘It would have been better if you had noticed it at the time,’ I said, pointedly.
‘So what are you saying, Gunther?’ asked Von Gersdorff.
‘That maybe Dyakov is really Mikhail Spiridonovich Krivyenko?’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But just think about it for a minute. You’re a major in an NKVD car with a prisoner when you realize that the Germans are probably just a few miles down the road – that you’re going to be captured at any moment, which means an automatic death sentence for NKVD officers. Don’t forget that Commissar Order. So what do you do? Perhaps you shoot your own driver and then force your prisoner – the real Alok Dyakov – to undress and put on your NKVD uniform. Then you put on his clothes and murder him, too. You take the picture from Dyakov’s internal passport and use it to replace the one on your own NKVD identity card. They were found near a farm, so maybe he could have used some egg white to stick the picture down. Or maybe some grease off the axle, I don’t know. Then you destroy your own picture and the real Dyakov’s internal passport – you can maybe get away with one fake document but not two. Next you drive the GAZ off the road and make things look like an accident. Your last action is to handcuff yourself to the handrail and wait for rescue as Alok Dyakov. What German could argue with a man who had been such an obvious prisoner of the NKVD? Especially a man who speaks good German. Almost automatically you would be less suspicious of him.’
‘That’s right,’ said Voss, who was still smarting from my earlier comment. ‘We didn’t suspect him at all. Well, you don’t, do you, when you find a man who’s a prisoner of the Reds? You just assume – besides my men were tired. We’d been on the go for days.’
‘That’s all right, lieutenant,’ I told him. ‘Better men than you have fallen for Russian tricks like that. Our government has been treating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as if it was gospel ever since the nineteen-twenties.’
‘The way you tell that story, Gunther,’ said Von Gersdorff, ‘it sounds obvious; but it would take a hell of a lot of nerve to pull it off.’
I turned to Voss. ‘About how many so-called commissars did your unit execute, lieutenant?’
Voss shrugged. ‘Lost count. Forty or fifty at least. Eventually it was like shooting rabbits, quite frankly.’
‘Then Dyakov – let’s call him that for now shall we? – he had nothing to lose, I’d have thought. Shot summarily, or shot after a game attempt at remaining alive.’
‘Yes, but having deceived us,’ asked Von Gersdorff, ‘why not just slip away back to your own lines, one night?’
‘And give up a nice little berth here in Smolensk? The field marshal’s confidence? Three meals a day? As much booze and cigarettes as you can handle? Not to mention an excellent opportunity to spy on us – perhaps even carry out some small acts of sabotage and murder? No, I should say he’s well set here. Besides, his own lines are hundreds of kilometres away. At any time on that road he could be arrested and then shot by the field police. And if ever he did get back to his own lines, then what? It’s generally held that Stalin doesn’t trust men who’ve been in German custody. Chances are he’d end up with a bullet in the back of the head and a shallow grave, just like those fucking Polacks.’
‘You’re very persuasive,’ admitted Lieutenant Voss. ‘If this was any Ivan but Dyakov you could have him in jail by now. But all this is just a theory,
isn’t it? None of it proves anything.’
‘He’s right,’ agreed Von Gersdorff. ‘Without those original identity papers you’ve still got nothing.’
I thought for a moment. ‘What you were saying just a moment ago, about the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Coming up from their crypts and their cellars.’
‘One has to admire courage like that. And to deplore the kind of treatment that brings about a situation where the German military behaves like an army of condottieri from the Middle Ages. I know I do, and many others besides me.’
Von Gersdorff bit his lip for a moment and shook his head bitterly. I tried to interrupt with an idea I’d just had, but seeing the colonel had hardly finished I kicked the door shut in case anyone heard our raised voices – even after Stalingrad there were plenty of men serving with the Wehrmacht in Smolensk who still worshipped Adolf Hitler.
‘This whole exercise in Katyn Wood – aren’t the Reds awful? this is the kind of Bolshevik barbarism that Germany is fighting against – it’s all bullshit while we’re busy blowing up synagogues and firing tank rounds at schoolboys with Molotov cocktails. What, do we think the world hasn’t noticed what we’re doing in Warsaw? Do we honestly believe that public opinion is going to ignore heroism like that? Are we really expecting that the Americans are ever going to come over to our side after we’ve murdered thousands of lightly armed Jews in Poland on the strength of what we’re uncovering here in Smolensk?’ He made a fist and held it front of his face for a moment as if wishing he could hit someone with it – me probably. ‘This Warsaw ghetto uprising has been going on since January 18th, long before anyone found a human bone in Katyn Wood, and it’s the scandal of Europe. What kind of a propaganda minister is it who thinks that the corpses of thirteen thousand Jewish insurgents can be hidden away or ignored while we bring the world’s reporters here to show them the bodies of four thousand dead Polacks? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘When you put it like that,’ I said, ‘it does sound ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous?’ Von Gersdorff laughed. ‘It’s the most stupendously fatuous piece of public relations nonsense I’ve ever heard. And thanks to you, Gunther, my name will forever be associated with it as the man who found the first body in Katyn Wood.’
‘Then tell him that,’ I suggested. ‘Joey the Crip. Tell him that next time you see him.’
‘I can hardly be the only person who thinks the same way. My God I expect there are lots of Nazis who recognize the obvious truth of what I’m saying, so perhaps I will.’
‘And what good would that do? Seriously. Look, colonel, I’m too old to lie to myself, but I’m not so stupid that I can’t lie to others. I’ve had a rotten feeling in my stomach every morning for the last ten years. There’s hardly been one day when I haven’t asked myself if I could live under a regime I neither understood nor desired. But what am I supposed to do? For the present, I just want to pinch a man for the murders of three – possibly five – people. That’s not much, I’ll agree. And even if I do succeed in pinching him I won’t get much satisfaction from it. For now, being a policeman seems like the only right thing I can do. I’m not sure that makes sense to a man with a keen sense of honour like you. But it’s all I’ve got. So. What you were saying just a moment ago, about the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto coming up from their crypts and their cellars. That’s given me an idea for what to do about Dyakov.’
*
The entrance to Smolensk Cathedral was up a series of wide steps under a great white vault that was as big as a circus tent. The outer corridors with their low roofs and frescoes of rather fey-looking angels were more like fairy grottoes. Inside, the gold iconostasis resembled a couple of stalls in a street full of jewellers’ shops and framed a Fabergé egg of a central shrine and a copy of a Madonna – the original having been destroyed during the battle for Smolensk – who looked out from the window of her gleaming home with a mixture of pique and embarrassment. Light from the hundreds of flickering candles that burned in several tall brass chandeliers added an ancient, pagan touch to the cathedral interior, and instead of the Christian Madonna I would not have been surprised to see a vestal virgin maintaining the sacred fire of the many candles or weaving a straw figure to throw into the Tiber. All religion seems like something hermetic to me.
Preceded by a sergeant of panzer engineers, who was an expert in hidden bomb removal – by Von Gersdorff’s account, Sergeant Schlächter had removed more than twenty mines left by the Reds on the two remaining bridges across the Dnieper and, as a result, was a twice-decorated pioneer – the colonel and I stepped carefully down a long and narrow winding stone staircase that led into the cathedral crypt. There was a small elevator, but that had stopped working and no one cared to try to fix it, just in case that was booby-trapped too.
A strong smell of damp and decay filled our nostrils, as if we were going so deep into the dark bowels of the earth that we might find the river Styx itself; but as Schlächter informed us, the crypt and the church were really not all that old:
‘The story goes that during the great siege of Smolensk in 1611 the city’s defenders locked themselves down here and then set fire to the ammunition depot to stop it from falling into Polish hands. There was an explosion and everything in the crypt – including the Ivans themselves – was destroyed or killed. That’s probably true. Anyway, the place fell into complete disrepair and had to be demolished in 1674; but it was 1772 before the rebuilding was finished, because the first attempt fell down, and so when Napoleon turned up and told everyone how marvellous he thought the cathedral was it could only have been about thirty or forty years old. Down here is damp only because they didn’t build proper drainage for the foundations – it’s right next to an underground spring, see? Which is why those original defenders thought it a good place to barricade in the first place – because of the access to fresh water. But it’s not so damp that an explosive charge won’t go off.
‘We removed the main explosive charges when we captured the cathedral,’ he explained. ‘At least the ordnance that was meant to blow the place right up to heaven when the Ivans cleared out of Smolensk. Now that’s what I call a bloody assumption. The Red Army had filled the whole fucking crypt with explosive, just like they did in 1611, and they thought to detonate it with radio-controlled fuses from several hundred kilometres away, the same as in Kiev; only this time they forgot that the signal couldn’t travel underground, so the charges didn’t go off. We were walking around upstairs for days before we found the stuff down here. It could have blown us up at any time.’
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I asked Von Gersdorff. ‘I don’t see any point in us both risking our lives. This was my crazy idea, not yours.’
‘You forget,’ said Von Gersdorff, ‘I’ve armed and disarmed anti-personnel mines before. Or had you forgotten the Arsenal? Besides, I speak much better Russian than you, and more to the point, I read it too. Even if you do manage to open one of the NKVD’s filing cabinets without getting your head blown off, you don’t really know what the hell it is you’re looking for.’
‘You have a point there,’ I admitted. ‘Although I’m not even sure that what we’re looking for is down here.’
‘No, of course not. But like you I think it’s certainly worth a shot. I’ve been longing to get a chance to come down here and now you’ve given me a good reason. Anyway, two of us can get the job done much more quickly than one.’
At the foot of the stairs Schlächter unlocked a heavy oak door and switched on a light to illuminate a long and windowless basement that was full of filing cabinets and bookshelves and religious paraphernalia, including some precious-looking silver icons, and a couple of spare chandeliers. A large marker sign of a yellow skull and crossbones hung on a length of wire that extended across the width of the room and here and there – on walls and cupboards – were some red chalk marks.
‘Right gentlemen,’ said Schlächter. ‘Pay attention please. I’m going to tell you what I would te
ll anyone who joins the panzer engineers. I apologize if any of this sounds like basic training but it’s the basics that will help to keep you alive.
‘What we have down here is the handiwork of a real joker of an Ivan. He must have had days down here setting up practical jokes for us. Funny for the enemy no doubt, but not I can assure you for us. You pull something open and find that whatever it is you’re pulling – a drawer, a cabinet door, a box-file off a shelf – is linked by a short length of detcord to a half-kilo of plastic explosive that goes off before your arm has stopped moving. I’ve had one man lose his face and another lose his hand, and frankly I just don’t have the men to spare for a job like this right now – not when there’s still so much to clear up top. The SS have offered me some Russian POWs to clear this room, but I’m the old-fashioned type; I don’t believe in that sort of thing. Besides, it would defeat the object if the hidden bomb clearance resulted in the destruction of the very thing that makes hand clearance of this kind of ordnance necessary in the first place.
‘So here’s how it works. You get to find them. That’s the hard part – which is to say it’s hard finding them without getting a nasty surprise. Then I’ll come along and do the business. Now the first thing is to understand your adversary. The aim of using a hidden bomb is not to inflict casualties and damage. That is merely a means to an end. The main thing is to create an attitude of uncertainty and suspicion in your enemy’s mind. This lowers morale and creates a degree of caution that slows up his movement. Maybe so. But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of uncertainty in here.
‘Please put out of your mind any preconceptions you might have about Russians, because I can tell you that the man or men who made these devices had a keen understanding of the essence of hidden bombing, which is low cunning and variety, not to mention human psychology. While you are in here continual vigilance is essential. It must become second nature. Keen eyesight and a suspicious mind will keep you alive in this room, gentlemen. You must look for signs of unusual activity which will warn you of potential hazards. Spend a good while looking at something before you think to touch it.
