A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

  ‘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.’

  ‘How is he?’ I asked Krimminski.

  ‘He’s alive,’ murmured the Oberfeldwebel. ‘But his breathing is shallow. Of course, that could be the booze. And either way he’s going to have a hell of a headache. Feels like a duck egg on the side of his crown.’

  ‘We’d best take him to the hospital and have them keep an eye on him,’ I said, feeling a little guilty.

  ‘That might be a good idea,’ said Von Schlabrendorff.

  ‘Let me know how he is in the morning,’ I said. ‘Would you?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll have them telephone the office first thing.’

  ‘Don’t for Christ’s sake tell Professor Buhtz about this,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘If he finds out that we just trampled through his crime scene to fetch this Ivan out of there he’ll go nuts.’

  ‘You manage to upset everyone, don’t you Gunther?’ said Colonel Ahrens. ‘Sooner or later.’

  ‘You noticed that too, eh?’

  *

  At the castle Von Gersdorff sent a telemessage to the Abwehr in Berlin asking for information about Dr Berruguete. We sat in the neat little sitting room Ahrens had created for officers awaiting a reply, under an Ilya Repin print of Russian men hauling a barge along a bit of coastline. They were making heavy going of it, and their hopeless bearded faces reminded me of the Red Army prisoners we were using to carry the bodies out of the graves. I don’t know what it is about Russians, but I can’t look at any of them without my soul, and then my back, beginning to ache.

  ‘Quite a night,’ observed Von Gersdorff.

  ‘It is when you’ve been shot at,’ I said. ‘Twice.’ I told him about the gunshots in Krasny Bor.

  ‘That explains why you’re not wearing a shirt,’ he said, offering me a cigarette. ‘And why there’s dirt on your tunic.’

  ‘Yes, but it certainly d
oesn’t explain why I was shot at.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was one of life’s greatest mysteries. Not from one who is as insubordinate as you, my friend.’

  ‘I’m not always insubordinate. It’s a little special service I provide everyone with a red stripe on his trouser leg.’

  ‘Then how about a case of mistaken identity?’ Von Gersdorff lit us both with his lighter and leaned back in his chair. He was the most elegant smoker I ever saw: he held the cigarette between his middle fingers so as to minimize the amount of staining on his well-manicured nails, and consequently everything he said seemed to have a similarly measured aspect to it. ‘Perhaps the murderer intended shooting you and managed to hit Dr Berruguete instead. Colonel Ahrens perhaps. And by the way, what have you done to offend him so egregiously, Gunther? The man seems to have taken a very personal dislike to you which goes well beyond simple insubordination.’

  ‘The sleeping dogs outside,’ I said, nodding at the window. ‘I rather think he wishes I’d let them lie there.’

  ‘Yes. I can imagine. This used to be a nice little post until we started digging it up. Certainly the air was a lot easier to breathe.’

  ‘I think it’s safe to assume that one of the first two shots accounted for Dr Berruguete and that only the third was meant for me; or not, given that the shooter missed – perhaps deliberately, perhaps I was just further away. Berruguete was on the opposite side of the wood, after all. Which is one reason I’m not buying a case of mistaken identity. How accurate is that broom-handle of yours anyway?’

  ‘With the stock attached? It’s very accurate to about a hundred metres. But the sights are more optimistic. They say a thousand metres; a hundred metres is about right in my opinion. But, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, why would someone shoot at you intending to miss?’

  ‘Perhaps to make me keep my head down until they’d made their escape.’

  ‘Yes, the Mauser is good at that. Keep your trigger tight and it’s like a garden hose of bullets.’

  ‘Been a while since I used one. And never with nine-mill ammo. Much of a kick to it?’

  Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘Hardly any at all. Why?’

  I shook my head, but being an intelligence officer Von Gersdorff wasn’t so easily fobbed off or treated like an idiot. He smiled.

  ‘What you really mean is – could a woman have fired it?’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘No, but it’s what you meant. Dammit Gunther, are you suggesting Dr Kramsta could have killed Dr Berruguete?’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting it,’ I insisted. ‘I think you were. All I asked was if the C96 has much of a kick on it.’

  ‘She’s a doctor,’ he said ignoring my evasion. ‘And a lady. Although one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise since, unaccountably, she seems to have singled you out for particular favour.’

  ‘I’ve met some doctors who were as lethal as any Mauser. Those fancy clinics in Wannsee are full of them. Only there it’s the bill that packs a kick, not the ammunition. As for the ladies, colonel, my policy is simple: if they can bang a door shut to end an argument, they can bang a gun to the same effect.’

  ‘So you do think she’s a suspect?’

  ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

  Signalman Lutz came into the room bearing a telemessage from Berlin. He delivered a smart Hitler salute and then left us in private, although having decoded the message on the Enigma he knew the contents well enough.

  ‘It’s from Admiral Canaris himself,’ said Von Gersdorff.

  I glanced at my watch. ‘I guess he’s one of those admirals who can’t sleep on land.’

  ‘Not with Himmler breathing down his neck.’ Von Gersdorff started to read aloud.

  ‘MET BERRUGUETE IN 1936. NOT SURPRISED WAS MURDERED AS B. MAJOR ARCHITECT OF FRANCOIST POST-WAR REPRESSION.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, breaking off for a moment, ‘the admiral was stationed in Spain during the civil war, setting up our own spy network down there. Canaris learned to speak fluent Spanish while he was a prisoner in Chile during the last lot. There’s no one in the whole Tirpitzufer knows more about the Iberian peninsula than him. It was the admiral who persuaded Hitler to support Franco during the war. Spain has always been his special area of interest.’

  ‘That worked out well for everyone,’ I said.

  Von Gersdorff ignored me – he was good at that – and continued reading the telemessage:

  ‘B. STUDIED MEDICINE AT UNIV. VALLADOLID AND ANTHROPOLOGY AT KAISER WILHELM INSTITUTE IN BERLIN WHERE INFLUENCED BY OTMAR FREIHERR VON VERSCHUER AND PROF VON DOHNA-SCHLODIEN WHO ARGUED CASE FOR STERILIZING MENTALLY DISABLED. TAUGHT GENETICS AT CIEMPOZUELOS MILITARY CLINIC. 1938 SET UP RESEARCH BUREAU OF INSPECTION OF POWS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS NEAR SAN PEDRO DE CARDENA. CARRIED OUT EXPERIMENTS ON INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE POWS TO ESTABLISH EXISTENCE OF A RED GENE BELIEVING ALL MARXISTS WERE GENETIC RETARDS. PROVIDED FRANCO WITH SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS TO JUSTIFY FASCIST VIEWS ON SUBHUMAN NATURE OF RED ADVERSARIES. CARRIED OUT FORENSIC WORK ON MANY SPANISH COMMUNISTS LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE OF SMALLER BRAINS. PROB RESPONSIBLE FOR SPANISH STERILIZATION PROGRAMME AND REMOVAL OF 30,000 CHILDREN FROM RED FAMILIES. BELIEVES ALL REDS ARE DEGENERATE AND IF ALLOWED TO BREED WILL ENFEEBLE SPANISH RACE. NONSENSE, OF COURSE, SO GOOD RIDDANCE. COMMUNISTS JUST WRONG NOT EVIL. ROSA LUXEMBURG THE MOST INTELLIGENT WOMAN I EVER MET. CANARIS.’

  Von Gersdorff took a last puff on his cigarette before extinguishing it. ‘Jesus,’ he said.

  ‘No relation, I suppose?’ I said cruelly. ‘Von Verschuer and Professor von Dohna-Schlodien?’

  Von Gersdorff frowned. ‘I believe I met a Von Dohna-Schlodien who commanded a Freikorps in the Silesian uprisings. He was a navy man not a doctor. Perhaps it’s his son to whom Canaris was referring. But I strongly object to the implied suggestion that my family in any way condones the sterilization of mentally disabled people.’

  ‘Take it easy, Bismarck. I’m not suggesting anything that would get you drummed out of the club.’

  ‘Really, Gunther, I wonder how it is that you can have stayed alive for so long. Especially under the current government.’

  ‘I like the way you say that,’ I told him. ‘Like you think there’s another government just around the corner.’

  ‘It’s very simple. When we get rid of Hitler, we’ll have a government that’s worthy of the name.’

  ‘You mean a government of the barons. Or even the restoration of the monarchy.’

  ‘Would that be so bad? Tell me. I’m interested in your opinion.’

  ‘No you’re not. You just think you are. And I’m more interested in your opinion about what’s going on in Germany right now, and not what might happen in the future. You’re in the Abwehr. You’re supposed to know more than most about what is going on. Do you suppose it’s possible there are German doctors conducting similar experiments?’

  ‘Frankly? I think the Nazis are capable of just about anything. After Borisov …’

  ‘Borisov?’

  ‘It’s a city in the Minsk Oblast. In early 1942 we learned that six death camps were in operation around Borisov where more than thirty thousand Jews have been systematically killed. Since then we have learned of the existence of many larger camps: Sobibor, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka. I don’t doubt for a minute that there are things going on in these places that would horrify any decent German. It’s equally certain that the mentally weak are already being murdered in special clinics throughout the Reich.’

  ‘I thought as much.’

  Both of us were silent for a moment before Von Gersdorff brandished the plain text in his hand. ‘Well, there’s your motive,’ he said. ‘Quite clearly this Dr Berruguete was a bastard. And deserved to be murdered.’

  ‘With an attitude like that I don’t think you have much of a future as a policeman, colonel.’

  ‘No, perhaps not.’

  ‘Didn’t you say that Dr Kramsta had a brother, Ulrich, who was murdered in a
Spanish concentration camp?’

  ‘Yes. I did. Only I don’t know if Berruguete had anything to do with it.’

  ‘But she might.’

  ‘She might at that.’

  ‘Dr Kramsta was very quiet on the bus from the airport after it was revealed that Dr Cortes had been replaced by Dr Berruguete. She seemed to have recognized his name right away. There’s that and the fact that she knew where your Mauser was. By her own admission, she knew how to use it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she could put a bullet through a buttonhole at a hundred metres.’

  ‘Anything else before you telephone the field police?’

  ‘There was a cigarette near the Mauser. A Caruso. Dr Kramsta smokes Carusos. And there was mud on her shoes when I went to see her earlier on this evening.’

  Von Gersdorff glanced down at his own hand-made boots. ‘There’s mud on my boots, too, Gunther, but I haven’t murdered anyone.’ He shook his head. ‘Still, it just might help explain why the shooter missed when they shot at you. Although frankly I’m beginning to think that was a mistake. I hate to think how you treat your enemies if this is how you treat your friends.’

  I stubbed out my own cigarette and grinned patiently.

  ‘I didn’t say I was going to send her over,’ I said. ‘I just want to know who did it, that’s all. In case there are any more experts from the international commission she decides to murder. Look here, we might get away with one – although the jury is out on that until breakfast – but I can’t see them all staying on at Krasny Bor and calmly carrying out their investigations while some modern Medea conducts a personal vendetta against the European forensic profession.’

  ‘No, perhaps not,’ admitted Von Gersdorff. ‘Although it seems unlikely Dr Kramsta would have a motive to kill any of them.’