A Man Without Breath (53 page)

A long minute later, Schlächter was showing us the plastic explosive and the detonator it had contained. About the size of a tennis ball, the explosive was green and looked just like the same Plastilin modelling clay Schlächter had used to isolate the metal contact strips. He tore the wires off the detonator and then tested the 1½-volt AFA battery with a couple of wires of his own that were attached to a small bicycle lamp. The bulb lit up brightly.

‘German battery.’ He grinned. ‘That’s why it still works, I suppose.’

‘I’m glad that amuses you,’ remarked Von Gersdorff. ‘I don’t think I like the idea of being blown up by our own equipment.’

‘Happens all the time. Ivan bombers are nothing if not resourceful.’ Schlächter sniffed the explosive. ‘Almonds,’ he added. ‘This stuff is ours too. Nobel 808. Bit too much, in my opinion. Half as much would achieve the same result. Still, waste not want not.’ His grin widened. ‘I’ll probably use this when it’s my turn to set some traps for the Ivans.’

‘Well, that’s certainly a comfort,’ I said.

‘They fuck with us,’ said Schlächter. ‘We fuck with them.’

The afternoon passed safely, with three more hidden bombs discovered and neutralized, before we found what we were looking for: the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs personnel files that started with the Cyrillic letter K.

‘I’ve found them,’ I said. ‘The K files.’

Von Gersdorff and the sergeant appeared behind me. Minutes later he had identified the file we were looking for.

‘Mikhail Spiridonovich Krivyenko,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘Looks like your idea paid off, Gunther.’

The drawer appeared to be clear, but the sergeant reminded me not to pull out the file until we were quite sure it was safe to do so, and he checked this himself, again with the crucifix in his mouth.

‘Does that work?’ asked Von Gersdorff.

‘I’m still here, aren’t I? Not only that but I know for sure that this is solid gold. Anything else would be sucked to nothing by now.’ He handed Von Gersdorff Major Krivyenko’s file, which was at least five centimetres thick. ‘Best take it outside,’ he added, ‘while I close up in here.’

‘Delighted to,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘My heart feels like it’s about to burst through my tunic.’

‘Mine, too,’ I admitted, and followed the Abwehr colonel out of the door of the crypt. ‘I haven’t been such a bag of nerves since the last time the RAF came to Berlin.’

At the door the colonel opened the file excitedly and looked at the photograph of the man on the first page who, unlike Dyakov, was clean-shaven. Von Gersdorff covered the lower half of the man’s face with his hand and glanced at me.

‘What do you think?’ he asked. ‘It’s not the best photograph.’

‘Yes, it could be him,’ I said. ‘The eyebrows look much the same.’

‘But either we draw a beard on the picture and ruin it or we’ll have to persuade Dyakov to see the barber.’

‘Perhaps we can get a copy made,’ I suggested. ‘Either way, the picture in this file is nothing like the one on the photograph you have of Major Krivyenko’s identity card. It’s a different man. The real Dyakov, I expect.’

‘Yes, it looks like you were right about that.’

‘If my nerves weren’t shredded already from being in here, I’d suggest looking for Dyakov’s case file. I bet there’s something about him on those shelves, eh, sergeant?’

‘I’ll be with you in a minute, gentlemen,’ said Sergeant Schlächter. ‘I’m just going to make a quick note on the record of where all of the devices today were found.’

Von Gersdorff nodded, thoughtfully. ‘Page one; personnel record of Major Mikhail Spiridonovich Krivyenko in the NKVD Police Department of the Smolensk Oblast; hand-signed by the then deputy chief of the NKVD, one Lavrenty Beria, no less, in Minsk; Dneprostroy Badge – that means he was an NKVD officer who once supervised forced labour in a prison camp; Merited NKVD Worker medal – I suppose that’s what you would expect of a major; Voroshilov Marksman badge for shooting, on the left breast of his tunic – well, that certainly fits with what we already know about the man, all right. That he can shoot. But shooting what? I wonder. Wild boar? Wolves? Enemies of the state? Fascinating. But look, there’s more work to do on this file before we can put it in front of the field marshal. I can see I’m not going to get much sleep tonight while I translate what’s in here.’

‘All right,’ said the sergeant, ‘I’m coming.’ But we never saw him again. Not alive anyway.

Afterwards we could only tell Major Ondra, his furious commanding officer – Sergeant Schlächter had been his most experienced man in Smolensk – that we hadn’t a clue what had happened.

He himself thought there had been a deliberately loosened floorboard near the door in the safe area on the near side of the warning sign; the space immediately underneath the wooden board had already been checked for a pressure switch and was perfectly safe, but each time someone stood on one end of the board an exposed nail on the opposite end had been lifted several millimetres near another nail on the wall; we – and others besides us – must have walked across that part of the floor many times before finally it made contact and completed the circuit which exploded several kilos of gelignite that were hidden behind a piece of dummy plaster-work in the wall. The blast knocked both the colonel and myself off our feet. If we had been standing in the room beside the sergeant we too would probably have been killed, but it wasn’t the explosion itself that killed the sergeant but the bicycle ball-bearings that were pressed into the plastic explosive like several handfuls of sweets. The combined effect of those was like a sawn-off shotgun and took the man’s head off as cleanly as a cavalryman’s sabre.

‘I hope you think it was worth it,’ said Major Ondra. ‘Eighteen months we’ve left that crypt alone, and for a damned good reason. It’s a fucking death trap. And all for what? Some fucking file that’s probably out of date by now anyway. It’s a bloody shame, that’s what it is, gentlemen. It’s a bloody shame.’

We went to the sergeant’s funeral that same evening. His comrades buried him in the soldiers’ cemetery at Okopnaja church, on Gertnereistrasse near the panzergrenadiers’ billet
in Nowosselki, just west of Smolensk. Afterwards the colonel and I walked up to the banks of the Dnieper and looked back across the city at the cathedral where Schlächter had met his death just a few hours before. The cathedral seemed to hover above the hill on which it was built as if, like Christ’s assumption, it was physically being taken up into heaven, which was, I suppose the desired effect. But neither of us felt there was much consolation in that particular story. Or truth. Even Von Gersdorff, who was a Roman Catholic, confessed that these days he crossed himself largely out of habit.

When we drove back to Krasny Bor I noticed that Von Gersdorff’s glovebox now contained all of the Nobel 808 explosive that Sergeant Schlächter had made safe in the crypt – at least a couple of kilos of the stuff.

‘I’m sure I can find a proper use for it,’ he said quietly.

Saturday, May 1st 1943

The international commission headed by Professor Naville was returning to Berlin to draft the report for Doctor Conti, the head of the Reich Health Department, leaving the Polish Red Cross – from the beginning the Poles had worked separately from the international commission – still in Katyn. Gregor Sloventzik and I escorted the members of the commission to the airport in the coach, and understandably they were glad to be leaving – the Red Army was getting closer every day, and no one wanted to be around when finally they arrived in Smolensk.

I was glad to see the back of them, and yet it was a journey that left me feeling pretty hollow as – her work with Professor Buhtz now concluded – Ines Kramsta had chosen to fly back to Berlin with the commission. She comprehensively ignored me all the way to the airport, choosing to stare out of the window as if I didn’t exist. I helped to carry her luggage to the waiting Focke-Wulf – Goebbels sent his own plane, of course – and hoped to say something by way of atonement for having suspected her of Dr Berruguete’s murder; but saying sorry didn’t seem equal to the task, and when she
turned on her elegant patent heel and disappeared through the door of the plane without uttering a single word, I almost cried out with pain.

I could have told her the truth – that maybe she was looking for too much from a man. Instead I left it alone. For the few weeks while she’d been in Smolensk, my life had seemed like it mattered to someone more than it did to me; and now that she was going, I was back to not caring about it very much one way or the other. Sometimes that’s just how it is between a man and a woman: something gets in the way of it, like real life and human nature and a whole lot of other stuff that isn’t good for two people who think they’re attracted to each other. Of course, you can save yourself a lot of pain and trouble by thinking twice before you get into anything, but a lot of life can pass you by like that. Especially in a war. I didn’t regret what had happened – how could I? – only that she was going to live the rest of her life in complete and total ignorance of the rest of my life.

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?’