A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  After this poignant little scene, Sloventzik and I got back into the coach and rode it back to the wood, where we found a scene of great excitement: the Russian POWs, working under the supervision of the field police and Alok Dyakov, had found another grave. This one – number eight – was more than a hundred metres to the south-west of all the others and much nearer the Dnieper, but I paid little attention to this news until Count Casimir Skarzynski, the secretary general of the Polish Red Cross, informed me during lunch that none of the bodies in grave eight were dressed for winter. Moreover their pockets contained letters, identification cards and newspaper clippings that seemed to indicate they had met their deaths a whole month after the other Poles we had found. A discussion ensued between Skarzynski, Professor Buhtz and Lieutenant Sloventzik about the Russian internment camp from which the men had been removed, but I kept out of it and as soon as I was able I went back to my hut and tried to contain my impatience while Colonel von Gersdorff stayed in his own hut translating the file we had recovered from the crypt at the Assumption Cathedral.

  It was a very long afternoon, so I did a little smoking and a little drinking and read a little Tolstoy, which is like a lot of something else and almost a contradiction in terms.

  To avoid the field marshal, I ate an early dinner and then went for a walk. When I got back to my hut, an anonymous note under the door read as follows:

  I UNDERSTAND YOU ARE LOOKING FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ALOK DYAKOV – THE REAL ALOK DYAKOV THAT IS AND NOT THE ILLITERATE PEASANT WHO PRETENDS TO BE THIS MAN. I WILL SELL YOU HIS GESTAPO/NKVD CASE FILE FOR 50 MARKS. COME ALONE TO THE SVIRSKAYA CHURCH IN SMOLENSK BETWEEN TEN AND ELEVEN O’CLOCK TONIGHT AND I WILL GIVE YOU ALL YOU NEED TO DESTROY HIM FOR EVER.

  The paper and the envelope were good-quality: I held the paper up to the light to see the watermark. Nathan Brothers on Unter den Linden had been one of Berlin’s most expensive stationers until the Jewish boycott had forced its closure. Which begged the question why someone who once had been able to afford expensive stationery was asking fifty marks for a file.

  I read the note again and considered the wording carefully. Fifty marks was nearly all the cash I had, and not to be given away lightly, but worth every penny if indeed the file proved to be the real thing. Of course, as a detective in Berlin I’d used many informers, and the request for fifty marks presented me with a more reliable motive for betrayal: if you’re going to give a man away you might as well get paid for it. I could understand that. But why had the author used the words ‘Gestapo/NKVD case file’? Was it possible that the Gestapo knew much more about Alok Dyakov than I had considered? Was it possible that they already had a file on Dyakov? Even so, ten o’clock at night was not the sort of time I like to be in a remote part of a city in enemy country. And you can call it superstitious of me, but I decided to take two guns along with me, just for luck: the Walther PPK I always carried, and – with its neat shoulder-stock and handy carrying-strap – the broom-handle Mauser that I had yet to return to Von Gersdorff. Since the war started, I’ve always believed that two guns are better than one. I loaded both automatic pistols and went out to the car.

  The road east into Smolensk just north of the Peter and Paul bridge across the Dnieper was blocked as usual with a field police patrol and – as usual – I talked with them for a little while before driving on. The only way to the Svirskaya church – without incurring a thirty-mile diversion to the west – was across this bridge in the centre of Smolensk, and I thought that talking to the fellows at the roadblock might give me some clue as to the identity of my new informer. You can learn a lot from field policemen if you treat them with respect.

  ‘Tell me, boys,’ I said – they knew me of course, but like everyone else I had to show them my papers, anyway – ‘what other traffic has been along here in the last hour?’

  ‘A troop transport,’ said one of the cops, a sergeant. ‘Some lads from the 56th Panzer Corps who’ve been stationed in Vitebsk and are now ordered north. They were heading to the railway station. They say they’re on their way to a place called Kursk and that there’s a big battle brewing up there. Then there were some fellows from the 537th Signallers who were going to the Glinka for a bit of a night out.’

  He made a ‘night out’ at the Glinka sound like something as innocent as a trip to the cinema.

  ‘Naturally you took their names,’ I said.

  ‘Yes sir, of course.’

  ‘I’d like to see those names if I could.’

  The sergeant went to fetch a clipboard, and although it was another brightly moonlit night, he showed me a list under the flashlight attached to his coat. ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sergeant,’ I said, casting my eye down the list. None of the names meant anything to me. ‘I’m just being nosy.’

  ‘That’s the job, isn’t it? People don’t understand. But where would any of us be without a few nosy cops to keep us safe?’

  *

  The church was in an isolated and quiet part of the city west of the Kremlin wall and well away from any civilian houses or military outposts. Built of pink stone with just the one cupola, it was positioned at the top of a gentle grassy knoll and looked like a smaller version of the Assumption Cathedral; there was even a surrounding wall made of white stucco with an octagonal bell tower and a large green wooden gate through which entrance to the church and its grounds could be gained. There were no lights on inside the church, and although the gate was open, the place looked as if even the bats in the bell tower had taken the night off to go somewhere more lively.

  I parked at the bottom of a small path that led up to the gate and helped myself to a handful of broom-handle. The automatic felt comfortingly large in my hand and easy against my shoulder, and while the old box cannon might have been hard to clean – one reason it was superseded by the Walther – it was a reassuringly solid weapon to point and fire. Especially at night when the longish barrel made it easier to aim and the shoulder-stock made it look altogether more substantial. It wasn’t that I was expecting trouble, but it’s best to be ready for it if it shows up with a gun in its hand.

  I advanced slowly through the gate of the bell tower, which was almost as high as the cupola of the church itself and occupied a corner position on the wall affording it an excellent view of at least two thirds of the church grounds. Before entering the church, I walked once around it – clockwise for good luck – just to see if anyone was waiting around the back to ambush me. Nobody was. But when I went to go inside the church I found the door was locked.

  I knocked and waited without answer. I knocked again and it sounded as hollow inside the church as the beating of the heart in my own chest. It was obvious that there was no one inside. I ought to have left there and then, but working on the assumption there was possibly a different entrance I might have missed, I took another walk around the church. This time I went anti-clockwise, which, in retrospect, was probably a mistake. There wasn’t another entrance – at least not one that was open – and thinking now that the whole thing had been a wild goose chase I started down the slope toward the gate in the bell tower. I hadn’t gone very far when I stopped in my tracks, for it took only a split second to see that someone had closed the gate. It was at the same moment equally obvious that from the octagonal bell tower the same someone probably had an uninterrupted sight of me. My nose twitched: I was like a rabbit in no man’s land. It twitched again but it was much too late. I was a fool and I knew I was a fool and nothing about that could be altered now.

  In the other half of that same split second a loud gunshot hit the polished oak shoulder-stock I was holding against my chest; but for that I would certainly have been killed, and as it was, the impact knocked me backwards off my feet and sent me sprawling onto the grass. But I knew better than to crawl for cover. For one thing there wasn’t any I could have reached in time, and for another whoever had shot me had worked the bolt and pushed another bullet into the breech and was probably already staring at me
down his rifle sights. On a night like this one a mole with one eye could have put a bullet in my head. My best chance was to play dead – after all, the gunman had hit me dead centre, and he wasn’t to know that his bullet had actually struck a piece of hardened wood.

  My chest hurt and the back of my head as well, and I wanted to groan and then to cough, but I lay as still as I could and held what was left of the breath inside my body, waiting either for the almost welcome oblivion that would be provided by another shot, or the sound of my assailant’s footsteps walking towards me as, almost inevitably, he came to see where his bullet had struck me. I’d never yet met a man who didn’t like to check on the accuracy of his marksmanship if he could. It was several minutes before I heard footsteps on some stairs, and then a door opening inside the gate, and I enjoyed a worm’s-eye view of a man coming across the churchyard in the moonlight.

  The Mauser – minus the shoulder-stock which, split in two, now lay on the ground either side of my body – was still in my hand, and seeing this demanded that he ought to have pumped another shot into me just to make sure. Instead he shouldered his rifle on a strap and walked over to me, paused for a moment and lit a cigarette with a lighter. I didn’t see his face but I had an excellent view of his jackboots. Like his expensive notepaper and cigarettes the man was German. He inhaled loudly and then kicked at the gun in my hand with the toecap of a polished German jackboot. That was my cue. The next moment I was on my knee, ignoring the pain in my sternum and levelling the long barrel of the broom-handle at the man with the rifle and pulling the trigger without much thought for where the shot would hit him as long as it took him down. He cursed and reached for the carrying-strap and dropped his cigarette, but it was all too late. The shot spun him sharply to one side and I knew for sure that I had hit him in the left shoulder.

  He was wearing an officer’s leather coat and a Stahlhelm; a pair of goggles sat up on the front of the helmet and a pair of thick motorcyclist’s gauntlets were tucked under his belt. He looked like a German but the beard was unmistakable. It was or had been Alok Dyakov, whom I now knew a little better as Major Krivyenko. He bit his lip and writhed on the ground from side to side as if trying to get comfortable. I ought to have shot him again, but I didn’t. Something stopped me from pulling the trigger a second time, although I badly wanted to.

  This was just enough hesitation for him to come back at me with a bayonet in his hand.

  I was up on my toes in a second and twisting around in an almost complete circle to avoid the sharp point of the blade. If I’d been the great Juan Belmonte with a cape in my hand I couldn’t have done it better. Then I shot him again. The second shot was as lucky for him as it was for me: the bullet went through the back of the hand holding the bayonet and this time he went down, clutching his hand and looking altogether incapable of mounting a third attack, but I kicked the side of his head anyway, just for good measure. I get upset when people try to shoot and then stab me within the space of a few minutes.

  I let out a breath and gulped down some air.

  After that the only problem I had was how to get Krivyenko to the prison in Kiewerstrasse. I didn’t have any manacles, the Tatra didn’t have a trunk I could throw him in, and the field radio that had been in the back of the car was now back at the castle. Kicking him in the head hadn’t helped much either, since that had merely rendered him unconscious – I was already regretting that. After a while I removed the leather shoulder-strap from his rifle and used it and my necktie to bind his arms together behind his back. Then I smoked a cigarette while I waited for him to come round. I decided it was best to question him before I took him into custody, and to do that properly I needed to have him to myself for a while.

  Finally he sat up and groaned. I lit another cigarette, puffed it gratefully and then pushed it between his bloodied lips.

  ‘That was a good shot,’ I said. ‘Dead centre. In case you were wondering, the bullet hit the Mauser’s shoulder-stock. This is the same Mauser you used to shoot Dr Berruguete.’

  ‘I was wondering how you survived that, pizda zhopo glazaya.’

  ‘I’m just a lucky man, I guess.’

  ‘Pozhi vyom uvidim,’ he muttered. ‘If you say so. You know, you should thank me, Gunther. I could have killed you before and didn’t. At Krasny Bor.’

  ‘Yes, I can’t figure that. You must have had me plumb in your sights. Like tonight.’

  ‘At the time I just wanted you out of the way, not dead. Big mistake, huh?’ He puffed hard on the cigarette and nodded. ‘Thanks for the smoke but I’m done with it now.’

  I took it out of his mouth and flicked it away.

  ‘The quality notepaper was a nice touch,’ I said. ‘I was ready to believe the author was a German. I presume it’s the field marshal’s personal notepaper you used. And asking for fifty marks. That was good, too. You don’t expect a man who’s asked you for money really just wants to shoot you.’ I glanced around. ‘I have to hand it to you. This place – it’s inspired. Quiet, out of the way, nobody to hear the shot. I walk in, like a rat into a trap, and you’re up there in the tower, with an excellent field of fire. Well, mostly. Tell me, what would have happened if I’d gone behind the church?’

  ‘You’d never have got that far,’ he said. ‘I don’t usually need a second shot.’

  ‘No, I guess not.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a drink on you, comrade?’

  ‘Matter of fact, I have.’ I took out a little hip flask – it was full of schnapps I’d stolen from the mess – and let him take a bite of it before taking one myself. I needed it almost as much as him; my chest felt like an elephant had stamped on it.

  ‘Thanks.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought if I only killed Berruguete you krauts would try to cover it up, for the sake of your international commission. Von Kluge hates all these fucking foreigners anyway. He just wanted them away from Krasny Bor as soon as possible. But you being an officer and all – even though he hates you, too – well, he’d have felt obliged to order the field police to conduct an investigation. Not that Voss could find his own prick in his trousers, but still, on top of everything else, I didn’t need that shit. So, I put one just past your skull to make you keep your head down until I could make my getaway.’

  ‘All right. I owe you. But why did you shoot Berruguete? I can’t figure that out. What did you care about him?’

  ‘You don’t know anything, do you?’ He grinned, painfully. ‘It’s comical really, how much you don’t know after all this time. Give me another drink and I’ll tell you.’

  I let him have some more schnapps. He nodded, smacked his lips, and then licked them.

  ‘Before the war I was a political commissar with the international brigades in Spain. I loved that place. Barcelona. Best time of my life. I heard all about that fascist doctor then, what he did to some of my comrades. Experiments on the brains of living men because they were communists, that kind of thing. I took an oath then that if ever I got the chance I would kill him. So when he turned up here in Smolensk I couldn’t fucking believe it. And I knew I’d never get another opportunity, so I did it and I don’t regret it for a moment. I’d do it again in ten seconds.’

  ‘But why use the Mauser and not the rifle?’

  ‘Sentiment. All my life I’ve been in love with guns.’

  ‘Yes, I saw from your NKVD file you’d won the Voroshilov Marksman badge.’

  He didn’t acknowledge that – just kept on talking: ‘When I was in Catalonia I carried a Mauser, the same as that one in your hand. I loved that gun. Best gun you krauts ever made, in my opinion. The Walther is all right – good stopping power and all right for a coat pocket and it doesn’t jam, I’ll say that for it – but in the field you can’t beat the Mauser, not least because it has a ten-shot magazine. They used that gun to shoot the Tsar, you know. When I saw that Colonel von Gersdorff had one, I was dying to have a go with it. So I borrowed it and used it to kill the doctor.’

  ‘You’re a
damned liar,’ I said. ‘You were quite well aware that Professor Buhtz is an expert in ballistics. You just wanted to throw us off your scent. The same with the rope you used to steady your aim – that was what Peshkov had been using to tie his coat up, wasn’t it? Just to help point the blame somewhere else.’

  Krivyenko grinned again.

  ‘You guessed that if you used your rifle, we would give Professor Buhtz the bullet and he would tell us the kind of rifle that was used. Your rifle. So you borrowed Von Gersdorff’s gun. You knew it was in the door pocket of his car the same way you knew there was a bayonet in the glovebox – the same bayonet you used to kill Dr Batov and his daughter, and before them very likely the two signalsmen at the Hotel Glinka. I suppose Von Kluge put you up to that.’

  ‘Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, but that’s my insurance policy, isn’t it? Because what you know, you could put in a fucking matchbox. And what you can prove to the field marshal wouldn’t butter a crust of bread.’

  ‘I don’t know that I have to prove anything, do I? Your word against a German officer’s? Soon as we’ve shaved your beard off in the prison hospital we can match you with the photograph in your NKVD file and prove to anyone’s satisfaction that you’re a major in the people’s commissariat. I doubt even the field marshal will want to help you once we’ve demonstrated that.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll think he has to help me. To keep my mouth shut. Have you thought of that? Besides, why would I kill Dr Batov? Or maybe you think he put me up to that, too. Have you thought of that?’

  ‘My guess is that you had something to do with what happened in Katyn Wood. Maybe you were even one of the team of murderers who executed all those Polacks. When you heard from the field marshal that I’d asked for asylum in Germany for Batov and his daughter you asked him a few questions, and Von Kluge told you what I’d told him: that Batov had documentary evidence of what happened back there in Katyn Wood. So you tortured and killed them both and took the ledgers and photographs from Batov’s apartment. I suppose Batov must have given away Rudakov and possibly you killed him, too. His brother, the doorman at the Hotel Glinka – well, maybe he just put two and two together and ran; or maybe you killed him, too, just in case. Besides, that’s what you do best, isn’t it? You’re good at killing wild boar and wolves, but you’re even better at killing people. As I almost discovered to my cost.’