A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) (20 page)

‘Jews are your eternal enemies!’ proclaimed the poster on the noticeboard by the front door of the prison. ‘Stalin and Jews belong to the same gang of criminals’.

As if to make sure you understood the message there was a large drawing of a Jew’s head against the background of a star of David. The Jew was winking in a sly, dishonest way and, as if to remind everyone that this race was not to be trusted, the poster listed the names of thirty or forty Jews who had been convicted of various offences. Their fates were not mentioned, but you didn’t need to be Hanussen the clairvoyant to divine what this would have been: in Smolensk there was only one punishment for anything if you were a Russian.

The prison was an assemblage of five ancient buildings from the time of the Tsars, all grouped around a central courtyard, although two were little better than ruins. The high brick wall of the courtyard had a large shell-hole in it that had been covered with a screen of barbed wire and the whole area was observed by a guard in a watchtower with a machine gun and a searchlight. As I crossed the courtyard and headed into the main prison building, I heard the sound of a woman weeping. And if all of that wasn’t depressing enough, there was the simple window-frame gallows they were erecting in the prison yard. It wasn’t tall enough to guarantee the mercy of a broken neck, and whoever the gallows was meant for faced death by strangulation, which is about as depressing as it gets.

In spite of the hole in the prison-yard wall, security was tight: once you were through the hellish main door there was a floor-to-ceiling turnstile to negotiate and then a couple
of steel doors that, when they closed behind you, made you think you were Doctor Faustus. I shivered a little just to be in the place, especially when a tall, skinny guard walked me down a circular flight of iron stairs into the depths of the prison and along a beige-tiled corridor that smelt strongly of misery, which, as anyone will tell you, is a subtle mixture of hope, despair, rancid cooking fat and men’s piss.

I was visiting the local prison to take the witness statements of two German NCOs accused of rape and murder. They were both from a division of panzer grenadiers: the Third. I met the two NCOs one after the other in a cage with a table and two chairs and a bare light bulb. The floor was covered in a grit or sand that cracked under my shoes like spilled sugar.

The first NCO they brought to me had a jaw the size of the Crimea and bags under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in a while. That was understandable, given his situation, which was serious. There were red marks on his neck and chest as if someone had stubbed out several cigarettes on his body.

‘Corporal Hermichen?’

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘And why am I still in here?’

‘My name is Captain Gunther and I’m from the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, which ought to give you a clue why I am here.’

‘Is that some kind of a cop?’

‘I used to be a cop. A detective. At the Alex.’

‘I haven’t committed any war crime,’ he protested.

‘I’m afraid the priest says different, which is why you were arrested.’

‘Priest.’ The corporal’s tone was scathing.

‘The one you left for dead.’

‘Rasputin, more like. Have you seen him? That so-called priest? Black devil.’

I offered him a cigarette and as he took it, I lit this and explained that his commanding officer, Field Marshal von Kluge, had asked me to come to the prison and determine if there were indeed grounds for a court martial.

The corporal grunted his thanks for the cigarette and studied the hot end for a moment as if comparing it with his own situation.

‘Incidentally, those marks on your chest and neck,’ I said. ‘They look like cigarette burns. How did you come by them?’

‘They’re not cigarette burns,’ he said. ‘They’re bites. From the bedbugs. A whole fucking army of bedbugs.’ He took a nervous puff and started to scratch eloquently.

‘So why don’t you tell me what happened? In your own words.’

He shook his head. ‘I certainly haven’t committed any war crimes.’

‘All right. Let’s talk about the other fellow, your comrade, Sergeant Kuhr. He’s quite a fellow, isn’t he? First-class Iron Cross, old fighter – that means he was a member of the Nazi Party before the Reichstag election of 1930, doesn’t it?’

‘I’ve got nothing to say about Wilhelm Kuhr,’ said Hermichen.

‘That’s a pity, because this is your one chance to put your side of the story. I’ll be speaking to him after you and I expect he’ll tell me his side of the story. So if he blames it all on you it will be your misfortune. From where I’m sitting you both look guilty as hell, but generally speaking military courts like to balance justice with clemency, albeit in a completely arbitrary way. And my guess is they’ll only convict one of you. The question is, which one? You or Sergeant Kuhr?’

‘I really don’t understand what this shit is all about. Even
if I did kill those two Ivans – and I’m not saying I did – what the fuck?’

‘They weren’t Ivans,’ I said. ‘They were just a couple of laundry maids.’

‘Well, whatever I’m supposed to have done the SS has done a lot fucking worse – Sloboda, Polotsk, Bychitsa, Biskatovo. I went through those places. They must have shot three hundred Jews in those four villages alone. But I don’t see anyone charging them bastards with murder.’

‘
Rape
and murder,’ I said, reminding him of the whole charge that had been laid against him. I shrugged. ‘Look, I tend to agree with you. For the reasons you mentioned, the whole idea of charging idiots like you with war crimes in this theatre strikes me as absurd. However, the field marshal feels rather differently about these things. He’s not like you or me. He’s the old-fashioned type. An aristocrat. The kind who believes there’s a proper way to conduct yourself if you’re a soldier in the Wehrmacht, and an example must be made of someone who deviates from that standard. Especially since you were both part of the platoon guarding his headquarters at Krasny Bor. Which is hard luck for you, corporal. He’s determined to make an example of you and Sergeant Kuhr unless I can persuade him that there’s been a mistake.’

‘What sort of example?’

‘They’ll try you tomorrow and after they find you guilty they’ll hang you on Sunday. Right here in the yard outside. They were erecting the gallows as I came through the door of the prison. That kind of an example.’

‘They wouldn’t,’ he said.

‘I’m afraid they would. And they do. I’ve seen it. The commanders are coming down hard on that kind of thing.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m here to help, if I can.’

‘But what about Hitler’s decree?’ said the corporal.

‘What about it?’

‘I heard about this barbarian decree the leader had made that said it wasn’t the same standard required out here, see? On account of how the Slavs are fucking barbarians.’ He shrugged. ‘I mean, anyone can see that, can’t they? I mean look at them. Life means less down here than it does back home. Anyone can see that.’

‘The Ivans are not so bad. Just people, trying to survive, make a living.’

‘No, they’re hardly human. Barbarians is right.’

‘By the way, it’s not called the barbarian decree, you block-head,’ I sneered. ‘It’s the Barbarossa Decree, after the German Holy Roman Emperor of the same name. He led the Third Crusade, which is probably why we chose to name the military operation we’ve mounted against the Soviet Union after him in the first place. Out of some misplaced sense of fucking history. Not that you’d know much about history. What you’d better know is that this decree was not passed on to the local field commanders by Von Kluge. Like a lot of those old-style general staff officers, the field marshal chose to sit on Hitler’s decree – you might say, even to ignore it altogether. And it certainly didn’t apply to those men guarding Army Group Centre headquarters. What the SS and the SD do is their affair. And I must tell you this: if you and your old fighter friend were gambling on an appeal to Berlin over the field marshal’s head, then you can forget it. That’s just not going to happen. So you’d better start talking.’

Corporal Hermichen hung his head and sighed. ‘That bad, eh?’

‘Damn right that bad. My advice to you is to make a statement as quickly as possible in the hope of saving your neck.
I’m not really interested in whether you hang or not. No, what I’m more interested in is the way you – or your sergeant – killed those two women.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was Sergeant Kuhr. He killed them both. Rape – yes, I went along with that. He raped the mother and I raped the daughter. But I was for letting them go. It was the sarge who insisted on killing them. I tried to talk him out of it, but he said killing them was best.’

‘This was in a quiet spot west of the Kremlin, right?’

The corporal nodded. ‘Narwastrasse. There’s a little cemetery just north of there. That’s where it – where it happened. We’d followed them from our barracks on Kleine Kasernestrasse where they did the laundry, to a little chapel. The church of the Archangel Michael – Svirskaya, I think the Ivans call it. Anyway, we waited for them to come out of the church and then followed them south down Regimenstrasse. When they went in the cemetery, the sarge said they were leading us on so we could fuck them in there. That they wanted to us to fuck them. Well, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.’

‘You followed them how?’

‘Motorcycle and sidecar. The sarge was driving.’

‘So that means you were carrying the jerrycan full of gasoline, in the sidecar.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The witness – the Russian Orthodox priest from the Svirskaya church who saw you, who took the number on the bike’s licence plate, who you shot and left for dead – he says you burned the bodies with the gasoline, and that you had the
gasoline beside you when you were raping the laundry maids. By the way, why didn’t you burn his body, too?’

‘We were going to. But we ran out of gasoline and he was too big to haul on top of them.’

‘Which one of you shot the priest?’

‘The sarge. Didn’t hesitate. Soon as he saw him. Pulled his Luger and let him have it. That was half an hour before we finished with the two girls, during which time we didn’t hear a peep out of him, which persuaded us he was dead. But of course it was just a flesh wound and he was just knocked out. Fell down and banged the back of his head. I mean, how were we to know?’

‘Tell me something, corporal, would you have shot him again if you’d known he was still alive?’

‘You mean me, sir? Yes, I was so scared I would have.’

‘Now tell me about when you murdered the two women.’

‘Not me, sir. I told you. It was the sarge.’

‘All right. He cut their throats, didn’t he?’

‘Yes, sir. With his bayonet.’

‘Why did he do that, do you think? Instead of shooting them the way you say he’d shot the priest.’

The corporal thought for a moment and then tossed his cigarette end onto the floor, where he ground it underneath the heel of his boot.

‘Sergeant Kuhr is a good soldier, sir. And brave. I never knew a braver one. But he’s a cruel man, so he is, and he likes to use a knife. It’s not the first time I saw him use a blade on a man – on someone. We took an Ivan prisoner near Minsk and the sarge murdered him in cold blood with his knife, although I don’t remember if he used his bayonet or not. He slit the Ivan’s throat before cutting his whole fucking head off. Never seen anything like it.’

‘When you saw that, did you have the impression that he’d done that before? I mean, cut a man’s throat.’

‘Yes sir. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. Well that was bad, but this time – with the two girls I mean – that was worse. And it wasn’t the sight that lives with me, sir. It was the sound. You can’t explain that, the way they kept on breathing through their throats. It was horrible. I couldn’t believe it that he killed them that way. The two girls, I mean. I really couldn’t believe it. I threw up. That’s how bad it was. They were still breathing through their throats like a couple of slaughtered pigs when the sarge poured the gasoline on them.’

‘Did he set them alight? Or did you?’ I paused. ‘It was your lighter that the field police found near the scene of the crime. With your name on it, Erich?’

‘My nerves were gone. I’d lit a cigarette to get something inside myself. The sarge snatched the nail out of my hand and tossed it onto the bodies. But he used so much gasoline that it almost took my fucking eyebrows off when they went up. I fell over backwards to get away from the flames. Must have dropped the lighter then. In some long grass. Looked for it, but by then the sarge was back on the bike and starting it up. I thought he’d drive away without me so I just left it.’

I nodded, lit a cigarette and sucked hard on the loosely packed end. The smoke helped to cure the degraded feeling I had from listening to this sordid story. I’d come across many evil bastards and heard some loathsome stories in my time with Kripo – the Alex wasn’t known as Grey Misery for nothing – but there was something about this particular crime I found more ghastly than I could ever have imagined. Perhaps it was just the idea of the two Russian women – Akulina and Klavdiya Eltsina – surviving the battle for Smolensk that had killed
Akulina’s husband, Artem, and keeping themselves alive by doing the laundry of their gentlemanly German conquerors, two of whom would rape and murder them both in the most squalid, inhuman way. I’d come across the sensation if not the facts that were peculiar to this case many times before, of course: I suppose it’s just the curse of hindsight, the way you see the fate that was always hanging over people like the Eltsinas – the way it seemed they were meant to meet two bastards like Hermichen and Kuhr and then be raped and murdered in a snow-covered cemetery in Smolensk. Suddenly I wanted to leave, to go outside and throw up and then breathe some fresh air, but I forced myself to sit there with Corporal Hermichen, not because I thought I could help him but because I had more questions – questions about another pair of murders that had been nagging at me ever since I’d been back from Berlin.

‘I believe your story. It’s just dirty enough to smell right. Naturally, Sergeant Kuhr will pay you the same compliment you paid him: that it was all your idea. But that’s the thing about three stripes and a first class hero badge. It’s generally assumed you’re not so easily led.’