A Man Without Breath (43 page)

‘Are they suspects?’ asked the general.

‘We’re all suspects,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘Isn’t that right, Gunther? Anyone could have helped himself to the Mauser in my car. Ergo, we’re all of us under suspicion.’

I didn’t contradict him.

General Von Tresckow grinned. ‘I’ll vouch for the colonel, Captain Gunther. He’s been here all night, with me.’

‘I’m afraid the captain knows that isn’t true, Henning,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘He and I went for a walk in the forest earlier this evening. I suppose I could have done it after that. I’m a pretty good shot, too. At my military school in Breslau I was considered the best marksman in my year.’

*

‘In Breslau, you say?’ I said.

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

‘Only that you seem to be one of several people here in Smolensk who have a Breslau connection. Professor Buhtz for one—’

‘And your friend, the beautiful Dr Kramsta, for another,’ added Von Gersdorff. ‘We mustn’t forget her. And yes, before you ask, I do know her – sort of. Or at least her family. She’s a von Kramsta from Muhrau. My late wife, Renata, was related to her, distantly.’

‘The von Schwartzenfeldts are related to the von Kramstas?’ said the general. ‘I didn’t know that.’

This was a lot more than I knew – about Ines, about everything. Sometimes I had the strange idea that I knew nothing and no one – certainly no one that the vons and the zus would have called anyone.

‘Yes,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘I believe she and her brother Ulrich came to our wedding, in 1934. Her father was with the foreign office. A diplomat. But we lost touch soon after that and haven’t seen each other in years. Ulrich became very left-wing – to be honest, I think he was a communist – and regarded me as not much better than a Nazi. He was killed after fighting for the republicans in 1938; murdered by the fascists in some Spanish concentration camp.’

‘How awful,’ said the general.

‘There was something awful about it,’ admitted Von Gersdorff. ‘Something nasty. I remember that much.’

‘Sounds like a motive for murder right there,’ said the general, gallantly fingering Ines Kramsta. ‘But Captain Gunther is right, Rudi. We need to manage this situation before it gets out of hand.’ He allowed himself another wry smile. ‘By Christ, but Goebbels is going to go mad when he finds out about this.’

‘Yes he is,’ I said, realizing that I was probably the one who was going to have to tell him. He had only just recovered from being told about the murder of Dr Batov and the disappearance of the only documentary evidence of precisely what had happened at Katyn.

‘And about the only person who’s going to be pleased at this turn of events is the field marshal,’ he added. ‘He hates all this.’

‘And the murderer,’ I said. ‘We mustn’t forget him.’ I said
‘him’ very firmly for the general’s benefit. ‘I’m sure he’s pleased as a snowman with a new carrot.’

‘Take whatever measures you think are appropriate here, Gunther,’ said the general. ‘I’ll back you all the way. Speak to my adjutant and tell him you need to make this problem go away. I’ll speak to him for you if you like?’

‘Please do,’ I said.

‘And perhaps I could contact the Tirpitzufer,’ said Von Gersdorff, ‘to see if the Abwehr’s Spanish section can turn up anything on this dead doctor. What was his name again?’

I wrote it down on a piece of paper for him. ‘Doctor Agapito Girauta Ignacio Berruguete,’ I said. ‘From the University of Madrid.’

Von Tresckow yawned and picked up the field telephone. ‘This is General von Tresckow,’ he said to the operator. ‘Find Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff and send him to Colonel von Gersdorff’s quarters right away.’ He paused. ‘Is he? Well put him on.’ He covered the mouthpiece for a moment and turned to Von Gersdorff. ‘For some reason Fabian’s down the road, with those ghastly signals people at the castle.’

He waited for a moment, tapping his boot impatiently, while I wondered why he thought they were ghastly. Was it possible he knew about the call-girl service that had been available through the 537th switchboard? Or were they just ghastly because they weren’t barons and knights?

‘Fabian? What are you doing over there?’ he said eventually. ‘Oh, I see. Can you really handle that by yourself? – he’s a big man, you know. Did he? I see. Yes, you had no choice. All right. Look, come and see me in my quarters when you get back here. Look, don’t for Christ’s sake do anything foolhardy. I’ll see if I can send you some help.’

Von Tresckow replaced the phone and explained the
situation. ‘Von Kluge’s
Putzer
is drunk. Some peasant girl who works at the castle has thrown him over and the ignorant Ivan bastard has been sitting all night beside grave number one with a bottle getting steadily pissed. Apparently he’s got a pistol in his lap and is threatening to shoot anyone who goes near him. Says he wants to kill himself.’

‘I can think of any number of people here who would like to do it for him,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘Me included.’

Von Tresckow laughed. ‘Exactly. It seems that Colonel Ahrens telephoned the field marshal’s office, and Von Kluge asked poor Fabian to go over there and sort it out. Typical of Clever Hans – to get someone else to do his dirty work. Anyway, that’s what Fabian is still trying to do, but without success.’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘I really don’t know why Von Kluge keeps that man around. We’d all be a lot better off if he did shoot himself.’

‘I wouldn’t care to disarm Dyakov,’ observed Von Gersdorff. ‘Not if he’s drunk.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ said the general.

‘Do you think Fabian’s up to it? He’s a lawyer, not a soldier.’

Von Tresckow shrugged ‘I would have told Fabian to leave the Russian and come back here,’ he said, ‘because what’s happened here at Krasny Bor is obviously more important. But always supposing they don’t go straight home tomorrow morning, Gunther’s experts will want to see the valley of the Polacks before they see anything. Under the circumstances, the last thing they probably want to meet is a fucking tanked-up Russian with a pistol in his hand.’

Von Gersdorff laughed. ‘Might add to the sense of verisimilitude, sir,’ he said.

The general allowed himself a smile. ‘Perhaps it would at that.’

‘I know you’re a general,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a better idea. How about you try to keep the lid on things here and I go down to Katyn Wood and take care of Dyakov?’

It certainly didn’t sound like a better idea – not to me. Maybe I was regretting making that little speech about me not being a tough guy; or maybe I just felt like hitting someone and Dyakov looked like he was made for it. What with the Polish Red Cross, someone shooting at me, and the murder of Dr Berruguete, it had been that kind of day.

‘Would you, Gunther? We would both be awfully grateful.’

‘Take my word for it. I’ve dealt with drunks before.’

‘Who better than a Berlin copper to deal with a situation like this, eh?’ He clapped me on the back. ‘You’re a good man, Gunther. A real Prussian. Yes, indeed, you can leave things here to me.’

Von Gersdorff had buttoned up his tunic and was pouring another drink.

‘I’ll drive you, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I’m going to send that signal off to the Tirpitzufer.’ He grinned. ‘You know, I think I’d like to see you take care of Dyakov.’ He handed me the drink. ‘Here. I’ve got a feeling you might need this.’

Thursday, April 29th 1943

It was after midnight when we got to Katyn Wood. I preferred it in the dark – the smell and the flies weren’t so bad at night. Things were quieter, too, or at least they ought to have been. We heard Dyakov a long time before we saw him; he was singing a lachrymose song in Russian. Von Gersdorff pulled the car up outside the front door of the castle where Colonel Ahrens was waiting with Lieutenants Voss and Schlabrendorff and several men from the field police and the 537th. They all ducked at once as a pistol shot rang out in the forest. It was easy to imagine that sound multiplied four thousand times during the early spring of 1940.

‘He does that every so often,’ explained Colonel Ahrens. ‘He fires his pistol in the air, just to let everyone know he’s not bluffing about shooting someone.’

I looked at everyone and snorted with derision. Dyakov wasn’t the only one with a few drinks inside him.

‘It’s one drunken Ivan,’ I sneered. ‘Can’t you just find a marksman and shoot the bastard?’

‘This isn’t any Ivan,’ said Von Schlabrendorff. ‘This is the
field marshal’s own
Putzer
. This is the man who sleeps beside the dog, on his veranda.’

‘He’s right, Gunther,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘You shoot Alok Dyakov and Von Kluge is very likely to shoot you. He’s very attached to that damned
Putzer
.’

‘You couldn’t shoot him even if you wanted to,’ added Voss. ‘He’s knocked out all the damn spotlights. The ones above grave number one, which is where we think he’s sitting. As a result it’s hard to make out any kind of a target.’

‘Yeah, but not for him,’ said Von Schlabrendorff. ‘That man is like a cat. Drunk or not, I swear he can see in the dark.’

‘Give me your cosh,’ I said to one of the field policemen. ‘He’ll be hearing
Berliner Luft
in the forest theatre by the time I’ve finished stroking his head.’

The cop handed over his truncheon and I hefted it in my hand for a moment.

‘Wish me luck,’ I told Von Gersdorff. ‘And while I’m gone brief Voss about the latest murder. You never know, he might have an idea who did it.’

All right, Gunther, I told myself, as I set off up the slope in the direction of the singing Russian, now you’re really for it. After all that big talk, now you’re going to have to show them some old-fashioned police work.

Of course it was a long time since I’d done anything as honest as that.

Up until now four great mass graves had been found in Katyn Wood, but further test digging had revealed the existence of at least three more. Graves one, two, three and four were already completely uncovered to a depth of about two metres and the uppermost layer of bodies completely exposed. Most of the bodies so far removed had come from graves two, three and four. From graves five, six and seven only a few
centimetres of earth had been removed and the graves only partly exposed. All of this meant that the whole area was difficult to navigate even in daylight, and I was obliged to come at Dyakov diagonally, across graves five and six; a couple of times I stumbled and almost gave the game away entirely.

Dyakov was still drinking and singing, and sitting on the shorter arm of the L-shaped grave number one, which was still full of bodies. I knew precisely where he was because I could see the hot red eye of his cigarette glowing in the dark. I thought I recognized the tune but I wasn’t at all sure about the words, which didn’t sound like any Russian dialect I had ever heard.

‘
Del passat destruïm misèries, esclaus aixequeu vostres cors, la terra serà tota nostra, no hem estat res i ho serem tot.
’

Of course that was hardly unusual: in Smolensk they spoke not just Russian but White Ruthenian, not to mention Polish, and – until we Germans showed up – Yiddish. I don’t suppose there was anyone who still spoke Yiddish – anyone alive that is.

When I was perhaps less than ten metres away I picked up a length of wood, intending to throw it over Dyakov’s head, but ended up throwing it a lot higher when I discovered it wasn’t a stick at all but some human remains. The bone clattered into a grove of birch trees close to where he was sitting. Dyakov cursed and fired a shot into the branches. It was enough of a distraction for me to cover the rest of the ground at a lick and then clout him with the copper’s truncheon.

It had been a long time since I’d wielded a cop’s thumper. When I was a bull in uniform you would only have taken it away from me if I’d been dead. Patrolling a dark back street in Wedding at two o’clock in the morning, a thumper felt
like your best friend. It was useful for knocking on doors, to smack a bar top, to rouse a sleeping drunk, or to curb an unruly dog; there was very little that could stop a brawl faster than a blow from a thumper to the shoulder or the side of the head. It was rubberized, but that was only to make it easier to grip in wet weather. Inside it was all lead and the effect was literally stunning: getting hit on the shoulder felt like you’d been hit by a car you didn’t see coming; getting hit on the head felt like you’d been run over by a tram. Some skill was needed to place a blow that would render a man unconscious without injuring him more seriously, and in a fight, this was rarely possible. But I was badly out of practice and it was dark. I was aiming for Dyakov’s shoulder only I was off balance because of the uneven ground, and instead I caught him on the temple, just above the ear and harder than I had intended. It sounded like a hundred-metre drive with a good hickory wood off the first tee at the GC Wannsee.

Silently, he toppled over into grave number one like he wasn’t coming back up, and I cursed, not because I’d hit him too hard but because I knew we were going to have to go among the bodies of all those stinking Poles and pull him out – possibly even take him to hospital.

I lit a cigarette, found the Walther P38 and the bottle he had been holding when I hit him, took a swig, and shouted to Voss and Von Schlabrendorff to bring some lights and a stretcher. A few minutes later we had hauled his insensible body out of the grave and Oberfeldwebel Krimminski, who had some medical training, was kneeling beside him checking his pulse.

‘I really am impressed,’ admitted Von Gersdorff, examining Dyakov’s P38.

‘So’s his skull,’ I told him. ‘I may have tapped him a little too hard.’

‘I don’t think I would like to take on an armed man in the dark like that,’ he added, kindly. ‘Look here, the fool had every chance to surrender. There’s no need to reproach yourself, Gunther. He fired a shot at you, didn’t he? And he had three shots left in the magazine. You could easily have been killed.’

‘It’s not my own opinion I’m worried about,’ I said. ‘I can live with that. It’s the field marshal’s displeasure I’m concerned about.’

‘Good point. It might be a while before this fellow’s able to find his own arsehole, let alone Smolensk’s best hunting spots.’