A Man Without Breath (49 page)

‘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.

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 Smorawi
ski 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.

They were useful and you tended not to throw one away. Unless it was prima facie evidence of a murder, in which case you ought to have thrown it away as soon as you’d loaded the gun, and certainly not kept it in your pocket out of habit, no doubt. The one I was holding was as clear a piece of evidence of murder as I’d seen in a long time, and had it not been for my hangover I might have cheered. But a moment’s further reflection persuaded me that there was still considerable reason for caution; a simple stripper clip in the Russian’s pocket would hardly have persuaded a man like Field Marshal von Kluge that his
Putzer
had murdered Dr Berruguete. I was going to have to find out why he had murdered him, and to do that I was going to have to find out a lot more about Alok Dyakov before I took what I had learned to his master.

It was then that I remembered the bayonet in Von Gersdorff’s car. If Dyakov had murdered Berruguete with Von Gersdorff’s gun, was it possible he might have used the Abwehr officer’s razor-sharp bayonet to do a bit of throat-cutting, too?

I switched off the map light and sat in the darkness of Katyn Wood for a moment before returning at last to the only reasonable explanation – an explanation that took account of the field marshal’s strange loyalty to his own
Putzer
. Everything was exactly as I had supposed from the very beginning, and the call-girl business that Ribe had been running from the castle switchboard had been nothing more than herring smoke that had got in my eyes.

Von Kluge knew the telephone on his desk was not working properly – I remembered him complaining to an operator about it when I was in his office. He must have realized – too late – that his compromising conversation with Adolf Hitler could have been overheard by the two signallers from the 537th manning the switchboard at the castle. It would have
been a relatively simple matter for Alok Dyakov – who was often in and out of the castle to see his girlfriend Marusya – to check the duty roster and see who had been running the telephones during the leader’s visit to Smolensk and – on his master’s orders – to have killed them, unaware that one of them had already thought to record the conversation on tape. Naturally, Von Kluge would have correctly assumed that the leader would have approved of Dyakov’s actions.