A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  After lunch, Lieutenant Hodt drove me to the airport, where security was predictably tight – as tight as I’d ever seen: there was a whole platoon of Waffen SS Grenadiers guarding two specially equipped Focke-Wulf Condors and a squadron of Messerschmitt fighters that were waiting to escort the real Hitler’s flight to Rastenburg.

  Hodt left me in the main airport building, where an advance party of Hitler’s staff officers were enjoying a last cigarette before the leader’s convoy arrived – it seemed that the leader did not permit smoking aboard his own plane.

  While I was waiting, a young bespectacled Wehrmacht lieutenant came into the hall and asked the assembled company which of us was Colonel Brandt. An officer wearing a gold equestrian’s badge on his army tunic stepped forward and identified himself, whereupon the lieutenant clicked his heels and announced he was Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff and that he had brought a parcel from General von Tresckow for Colonel Stieff. My interest in this little exchange was only piqued when the lieutenant handed over the very same package containing two bottles of Cointreau that Councillor von Dohnanyi – to whom Von Schlabrendorff bore a strong resemblance – had brought with him on the plane from Berlin the previous Wednesday. This made me wonder – again – why Von Dohnanyi had not delivered the parcel to someone when we’d touched down in Rastenburg. Perhaps if I’d been a proper security service officer I might have made some mention of this fact – which struck me as suspicious – but I had enough on my plate already without interfering with the job of the Gestapo or the leader’s uniformed RSD bodyguards. Besides, my interest in the matter faded as a burly flight sergeant entered the hall and announced that our own flight to Berlin had been delayed until lunchtime the following day.

  ‘What?’ exclaimed another officer – a major with an impressive scar on his face. ‘Why?’

  ‘Technical problems, sir.’

  ‘Better we find out on the ground than when we’re in the air,’ I told the major, and went to look for a telephone.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sunday, March 14th 1943

  I spent another night at Dnieper Castle, and this time my sleep was interrupted not by cold, nor by thoughts of the three ragged children I’d met – and certainly not by any spiritual feeling about what might have happened in Katyn Wood – but by Lieutenant Hodt arriving in my room.

  ‘Captain Gunther,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, what is it, lieutenant?’

  ‘Colonel Ahrens apologizes for disturbing you and requests that you join him as soon as possible. His car is outside in front of the castle.’

  ‘Outside? Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘It would be best if the colonel explained things to you, sir,’ said Hodt.

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course. What time is it?’

  ‘Two a.m., sir.’

  ‘Shit.’

  I got dressed and went outside. An army Kübelwagen was waiting in the snow with the engine running. I climbed in alongside Colonel Ahrens and behind another officer I hadn’t seen before. Around the second officer’s neck was a metal gorget that identified him as a member of the uniformed field police, which was the easily recognized equivalent of the Kripo beer token I’d once carried in my coat pocket when I’d been a plainclothes detective. It was already obvious to me that we weren’t going to the local library. As soon as I was seated, the NCO driving the bucket punched it loudly into gear and we set off swiftly down the drive.

  ‘Captain Gunther, this is Lieutenant Voss of the field police.’

  ‘If it wasn’t so late I might be pleased to meet you, lieutenant.’

  ‘Captain Gunther works for the War Crimes Bureau in Berlin,’ explained Ahrens. ‘But before that he was a Kripo police commissar at the Alex.’

  ‘What’s this all about, colonel?’ I asked Ahrens.

  ‘Two of my men have been murdered, captain.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Was it partisans?’

  ‘That’s what we’re hoping you can help us to find out.’

  ‘I guess there’s no harm in hoping,’ I said sourly.

  We drove east along the road to Smolensk. A sign on the road said: PARTISAN DANGER AHEAD. SINGLE VEHICLES STOP! HOLD WEAPONS READY.

  ‘It looks like you’ve already made up your minds,’ I observed.

  ‘You’re the expert,’ said Voss. ‘Perhaps, when you’ve taken a look at the scene, you’ll tell us what you think.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘As long as everyone remembers that I’m boarding a plane back to Berlin in ten hours.’

  ‘Just take a look,’ said Ahrens. ‘Please. Then, if you wish, you can take your flight home.’

  The ‘if you wish’ part I didn’t like at all, but I kept my mouth shut. Lately I’d got a lot better at doing that. Besides, I could see the colonel was upset, and telling him I really didn’t give a damn about who had killed his men wasn’t exactly going to smooth my already delayed departure from Smolensk. I wanted to stay on in that city like I wanted to take an ice-cold bath.

  A few blocks west of the railway station the road split and we took the southern route down Schlachthofstrasse before turning right onto Dnieperstrasse, where the driver skidded to a halt. We got out and walked past an Opel Blitz that was full of field policemen and down a snow-covered slope to the edge of the Dnieper River, where another bucket wagon was parked with its spotlight trained on two bodies lying side by side at the water’s half-frozen edge. Two of the lieutenant’s men were standing beside the bodies and stamping their feet against the cold and the damp. The river looked as black as the Styx and almost as still in the moonlit silence.

  Voss handed me a flashlight, and although I was keen not to be involved, I made a nice show of casting a professional eye over the lieutenant’s crime scene. It was easy enough to call: two men in uniform, their bare heads bashed in and their throats neatly cut from ear to ear like a clown’s big smile, with blood all over the snow that, in the moonlight, hardly looked like blood at all.

  ‘Lieutenant? See if you can’t find their cunt covers, will you?’

  ‘Their what?’

  ‘Their hats, their fucking hats. Find them.’

  Voss looked at one of his men and passed on the order. The man scrambled back up the bank.

  ‘And see if you can’t find a murder weapon, while you’re at it,’ I shouted after him. ‘Some kind of a knife or bayonet.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘So what’s the story so far?’ I asked no one in particular and without much interest in an answer.

  ‘Sergeant Ribe and Corporal Greiss,’ said the colonel. ‘Two of my best men. They were on switchboard and coding duty until about four o’clock this afternoon, after the leader left.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Manning the telephone exchange. The radio. Decoding teletype messages with the Enigma machine.’

  ‘So when they went off duty they left the castle, how? In a bucket wagon?’

  ‘No, on foot,’ said Ahrens. ‘You can walk it in half an hour.’

  ‘Only if it’s worth your while, I’d have thought. What’s the attraction around here? Don’t tell me it’s that church near the railway station or I’ll start to worry I’ve been missing out on something important.’

  ‘The Peter and Paul? No.’

  ‘There’s a swimming bath that’s used by the army on Dnieperstrasse,’ said Voss. ‘It seems they went there to swim and use the steam room, after which they both went next door.’

  ‘And next door is?’

  ‘A brothel,’ said Voss. ‘In the Hotel Glinka. Or what used to be the Hotel Glinka.’

  ‘Ah yes, Glinka, I remember him. He’s the father of Russian classical music, isn’t he?’ I yawned loudly. ‘I’m looking forward to acquainting myself with some of his music. It’ll make a pleasant change from a cold Russian wind. Christ, my ears feel like something bit them.’

  ‘The whores in the brothel claim the two men were there until midnight and then left,’ said Voss. ‘No trouble. No fights. Nothi
ng suspicious.’

  ‘Whores? Why wasn’t I told? I just spent the evening alone with a good book.’

  ‘It wasn’t a place for German officers,’ said Voss. ‘It was a place for enlisted men. A cyria.’

  ‘What’s a cyria?’ I asked.

  ‘A round-up brothel.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘So strictly speaking they weren’t whores at all. Just innocent girls from out of town who’d been pressed into some horizontal service for the fatherland. Now I’m glad I stayed in with my book. Who found them?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The bodies? Who found them? A whore? Another Fritz? The Volga boatman? Who?’

  ‘An SS sergeant came out of the Glinka for a breath of fresh air,’ explained Voss. ‘He’d had a lot to drink and was feeling ill, he says. He saw a figure bent over these two men down here and thought he was witnessing a robbery. He challenged the man, who ran off in the direction of the west bridge.’ Lieutenant Voss pointed along the riverbank. ‘That way.’

  ‘Which is ruined, right? So we can assume he wasn’t looking to make it across the river tonight. Not unless he was a hell of a swimmer.’

  ‘Correct. The sergeant pursued the figure for a while but lost him in the darkness. A moment later he heard an engine start up and a vehicle driving away. He claims it sounded like a motorcycle, although I must say I don’t know how he could tell that without seeing it.’

  ‘Hmm. Which way did the bike go? Did he say?’

  ‘West,’ said Voss. ‘It never came back.’

  I lit a cigarette to stop me from yawning again. ‘Did he give you a description of the man he saw? Not that it matters if he was drunk.’

  ‘Says it was too dark.’

  I glanced up at the moon. There were a few clouds, and from time to time one of these drew a dark curtain over the moon, but nothing in the way of weather that looked at all likely to delay a flight back to Berlin.

  ‘That’s possible, I suppose.’

  Then I looked back at the two dead men. There’s something particularly awful about a man who’s had his throat cut; I suppose it’s the way it reminds you of an animal sacrifice, not to mention the sheer quantity of blood that’s involved. But there was an extra dimension of horror to the way these two men had been butchered – that was indeed the word – for such was the force used to cut their throats that each man’s head had almost been severed, so that the spine was clearly visible. If I’d looked closely I could probably have seen what each had had for dinner. Instead I lifted their hands to check for defensive cuts, but there were none.

  ‘I seem to recall that the partisans are fond of removing the heads of captured German soldiers,’ I said.

  ‘It has been known,’ allowed Voss. ‘And not just their heads.’

  ‘So it may be our killer meant to do the same but was disturbed by the SS sergeant.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘On the other hand, their side arms are still holstered and the flaps are still buttoned, which means they weren’t afraid of him.’ I started going through one of the men’s pockets. ‘Which is another mark against this being partisans. And almost certainly a partisan would have taken these weapons. Weapons are more valuable than money. Still, there’s no sign of a wallet.’

  ‘It’s here sir,’ said Voss, handing me a wallet. ‘Sorry. I took both of their wallets when I was trying to identify them earlier.’

  ‘May I see one of those?’

  Voss handed me a wallet. I spent a couple of minutes going through the contents and found several banknotes.

  ‘I guess these whores aren’t charging much money. This man has plenty of cash left. Which is unusual for a man leaving a brothel. So. The motive wasn’t robbery but something else. But what?’ I shone the flashlight up the slope towards the street and the brothel. ‘Perhaps just murder. It looks as if their throats were cut here, as they lay on the ground.’

  ‘How do you work that out?’ asked Colonel Ahrens.

  ‘The blood has soaked the hair on the backs of their heads,’ I said. ‘If their throats had been cut while they were standing up it would be all down the front of their tunics. Which it isn’t. Most of it is on the snow here. Neat job, too. Almost surgical. Like their throats were cut by someone who knew what he was doing.’

  The field policeman came back with one of the dead men’s cap in his hand. ‘Found the caps on the street, sir. Left the other where it was so you could take a look for yourself.’

  I took the cap and opened it up and found blood and hair on the inside.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, smartly. ‘Show me.’ And then to Ahrens and Voss: ‘You wait here, gentlemen.’

  I followed the man back up the bank, to a spot on the street where another field policeman was standing with his flashlight trained helpfully on the other cap. I picked it up and inspected the inside; there was blood in this one, too. Then I walked back down the bank to Ahrens and Voss, pointing the flash one way and then the other.

  ‘The killer probably hit them on the head up on the street,’ I said. ‘And then dragged them down here where it was quiet, to kill them both.’

  ‘Do you think it was partisans?’

  ‘How should I know? But I suppose unless we can prove it wasn’t, the Gestapo will want to execute some locals just to show everyone they’re on the job and taking things seriously, as only the Gestapo can.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘That’s probably why you’re not working for the Gestapo, lieutenant. Wait a minute. What’s this?’

  Something glinted in the snow – something metallic. But it wasn’t a knife or a bayonet.

  ‘Anyone know what this is?’

  We were looking at two rippled pieces of springy, flat metal that were joined together by a small oval socket at the end; the pieces of metal shifted around like a pair of playing cards in my fingers. Colonel Ahrens took the object from my hand and examined it for himself.

  ‘I think it’s the inside of a scabbard,’ he said. ‘For a German bayonet.’

  ‘Sure about that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ahrens. ‘This is meant to hold the bayonet in place. Stops it from jumping out. Here you.’ Ahrens spoke to the field policeman. ‘Are you carrying a bayonet?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Hand it over. And the scabbard.’

  The policeman did as he was told, and with the aid of his Swiss officer’s knife the colonel had soon extracted the holding screw from the man’s scabbard and withdrew an identical spring interior.

  ‘I had no idea that’s how the bayonet stays sheathed,’ said Voss. ‘Interesting.’

  We went back up the slope toward the Hotel Glinka. ‘Tell me, colonel, are there any other brothels in Smolensk?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know,’ he said, stiffly.

  ‘Yes there are, Captain Gunther,’ said Voss. ‘There’s the Hotel Moskva to the south-east of the city, and the Hotel Archangel near the Kommandatura. But the Glinka is the nearest to the castle and the 537th Signals.’

  ‘You certainly know your brothels, lieutenant,’ I said.

  ‘As a field policeman, you have to.’

  ‘So if they were on foot as you say, colonel, it’s likely the Glinka would have been their establishment of choice.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, either,’ said the colonel.

  ‘No, of course not.’ I sighed and looked at my watch, wishing I was already at the airport. ‘Maybe I should keep my questions to myself, colonel, but I had the head-hammered idea you actually wanted my help with this.’

  The Glinka was a fussy-looking white building with more architecturally effeminate flourishes than a courtier’s lace handkerchief. On the roof there was a short castellated spire with a weather vane; on the street was an archway entrance with thick, pepper-pot columns that put you in mind of a cut-price Philistine temple, and I half expected to find some muscular Ivan chained between them for the amusement of a local fertility god. A
s it was, there was just a bearded doorman holding a rusty sabre and wearing a red Cossack coat and an unlikely chestful of cheap medals. In Paris they might have made something out of a doorway like that, just as they might have made the interior of the place seem attractive or even elegant, with plenty of French mirrors, gilt furniture and silk curtains – the French know how to run a decent brothel in the same way they know what makes a good restaurant. But Smolensk is a long way from Paris and the Glinka was a hundred thousand kilometres from being a decent brothel. It was just a sausage counter – a cheap bang house where simply walking through the dirty glass door and catching the strong smell in the air of cheap perfume and male seed made you think you were risking a dose of drip. I felt sorry for any man who went there, although not as sorry as I felt for the girls, many of them Polish – and a few of them as young as fifteen – who’d been taken from their homes for ‘agricultural work’ in Germany.

  A few minutes of conversation with a selection of these unfortunates was enough to discover that Ribe and Greiss had been regulars at the Glinka, that they had behaved themselves impeccably – or at least as impeccably as was required in the circumstances – and that they had left alone just before eleven p.m., which was just enough time for them to get back to the castle in time for the midnight roll-call. And I quickly formed the impression that the ghastly fate that had befallen the two soldiers could have had little or nothing to do with what had happened in the Glinka.

  When I had finished questioning the Polish whores of the Glinka I went outside and drew a deep breath of clean cold air. Colonel Ahrens and Lieutenant Voss followed and waited for me to say something. But when I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned against one of the entrance pillars, the colonel interrupted my thoughts impatiently.

  ‘Well, Captain Gunther,’ he said. ‘Please tell us. What impression have you formed?’

  I lit a cigarette and shook my head. ‘That there are times when being a man seems almost as bad as being a German,’ I said.

  ‘Really, captain, you are a most exasperating fellow. Try to forget your personal feelings and concentrate on your job as a policeman, please. You know damn well I’m talking about my boys and what might have happened to them.’