A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  They brought Tanya to the same depressing room where I had interviewed the unfortunate Corporal Hermichen, and as soon as I saw her I realized I had seen her before, but Russian nurses’ uniforms being as severe as they were, she’d looked very different from how she looked now. Voss had not exaggerated: her hair was the colour of my father’s pocket-watch and her eyes were as blue as a midsummer moon. Tanya was the kind of blonde who could have stopped a whole division of cavalry with one flash of her underwear.

  ‘Why am I still being kept here, please?’ she asked Voss anxiously.

  ‘This man wants to ask you a few questions, that’s all,’ said Voss.

  I nodded. ‘If you answer honestly we’ll probably let you go, Tanya,’ I told her, gently. ‘Today, I shouldn’t wonder. I don’t think you’ve done very much wrong in the great scheme of things. Now that I’ve met you I’m not sure that anyone has.’

  She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s not really you we’re interested in, but the Germans you worked with. And Oleg Rudakov, the doorman from the Glinka.’

  ‘He’s run away,’ she said. ‘That’s what I heard from some of the other girls.’

  ‘The girls in the apartment at Olgastrasse?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Are any of them nurses, too?’ I asked her. ‘At the Smolensk State Medical Academy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Several. At least the better-looking ones who speak a bit of German.’

  ‘The ones who need the money, eh?’

  ‘Everyone needs the money.’

  ‘Why did Oleg Rudakov run away? Because of what happened to you?’

  ‘No. I think he ran away after what happened to Doctor Batov.’

  Her spoken German improved as the interview progressed. Which is more than could be said of my Russian. I had some language books, and I kept trying it out, but without much success.

  ‘Was Dr Batov involved with your call-girl ring?’

  ‘Not directly. But he certainly knew about it. He helped keep us healthy. You know?’

  ‘Yes. Have you any idea who might have killed him?’

  Tanya shook her head. ‘No. Nobody knows. It’s another reason why people are scared. It’s why Oleg ran away, I think.’

  ‘Did you know that Oleg Rudakov had a brother who was a patient at the Smolensk State Medical?’

  ‘Everyone in Smolensk knew this. The Rudakov brothers were both from Smolensk. Oleg used to give money to the hospital – to Dr Batov – for looking after his brother, Arkady.’

  ‘Tell me about Arkady. Was he really injured as badly as Batov said he was? Or perhaps thought he was?’

  ‘Do you mean was Arkady faking?’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. Arkady was always very clever. That’s what people said. I did not know him before his injury – when he was NKVD – but to be lieutenant in NKVD you have to be clever. Clever enough never again to want to do what he and others had to do in Katyn Wood. Clever enough to find a way out perhaps that did not mean he too would be shot.’

  ‘So, you know about that, too? About what happened in Katyn Wood?’

  ‘Everyone in Smolensk knows about this terrible thing. Everyone. Anyone who says they don’t is lying. Lying because they are afraid. Or lying because they hate Germans more than they hate NKVD. I cannot say which it is because I don’t know, but they are lying. Lying is best way to stay alive in this town. Three years ago, when this thing happened – yes, it was spring of 1940 – the militia closed the road to Vitebsk, but they did not stop the train. I heard that people who were on the trains near Gnezdovo heard the sound of shots from Katyn Wood – at least until the NKVD came onto the trains and made sure all of the windows were closed.’

  ‘You’re sure about this?’ I said.

  ‘That everyone knows what happened? Yes, I’m sure.’ Tanya’s eyes flashed defiantly. ‘Just as everyone knows there were two thousand Jews from the ghetto at Vitebsk murdered by the German army at Mazurino. Not to mention all of the Jews who were found floating in the Zapadnaya Dvina River. They say that the lampreys caught from the Zap are the biggest ever this year because of all the bodies they had to feed on.’

  Voss groaned, and I guessed it was because he’d eaten lamprey pie for dinner in the mess at Krasny Bor the previous evening.

  I smiled. ‘Thank you, Tanya. You’ve been most helpful.’

  ‘I can go.’

  ‘We’ll take you home, if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, but no, I’ll walk. Is all right at night when no one sees. But not in the day. After you Germans have gone from Smolensk it will be pretty bad here, I think. It is best the NKVD don’t know I go with Germans.’

  *

  The local Gestapo was stationed in a two-storey house next to the railway station at Gnezdovo, so that officers could board the train and surprise anyone travelling on to the next stop, at Smolensk’s main station. The Gestapo always loved surprises, and so did I, which was why I was there, of course – although out of consideration for Lieutenant Voss I decided to spare him the ordeal of accompanying me to see Captain Hammerschmidt, who was in for a big surprise – perhaps the biggest surprise of his career. I pulled up in a cobbled yard next to a pair of camouflaged 260s, stepped out and took a longer look at the building in front of me. The bullet-marked walls were painted two contrasting shades of green, the darker matching the colour of the roof tiles, and there were bull’s-eye windows on the upper floor; the windows on the ground floor were all heavily barred. The clock above the arched entrance had stopped at six o’clock, which might have been meant as a metaphor, since that was often the time in the morning when the Gestapo preferred to call. In the grove of silver birch trees a short way from the house was a pile of sandbags fronted with an ominous-looking wooden post. Everything looked just as it ought to have done, although the building was, for my plainer taste, the wrong flavour: a sprinkling of chocolate chips on the mint ice-cream roof would hardly have looked out of place. Everything was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual; the Gestapo never has a problem with noisy neighbours. Even the squirrels in the trees were behaving themselves. Gradually a steam locomotive approached wheezily from the east. Very sensibly it didn’t stop at the deserted station – it was never a good idea to stop in the vicinity of the Gestapo. I knew that only too well, but I was never very good at listening to advice, especially my own.

  I went inside, where several uniformed men behind several typewriters were doing their best to type with two fingers and to pretend that I didn’t exist. So I lit a cigarette and calmly glanced over some of the paper on the noticeboard. Among this was a wanted notice for Lieutenant Arkady Rudakov, which struck me as ironic, since from the emblem on the noticeboard and on some of the drawers on the filing cabinets – a yellow-handled sword against a red shield – I took the house to have belonged to the NKVD before it had belonged to the Gestapo.

  ‘Can I help you?’ one of the men said in a tone that was distinctly unhelpful. From the mild outrage I could hear in his querulous voice and see on his equally peevish face, he might have been addressing an impertinent schoolboy.

  ‘I’m looking for Captain Hammerschmidt.’

  I went over to the window and pretended to look outside, but most of my attention was fixed on the fly running along the pane. The flies were everywhere now, following up the business of the Gestapo and the NKVD.

  ‘Not here,’ he said.

  ‘When are you expecting him back?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’ said the man.

  ‘I do.’ Now I was trying to match him for arrogance and contempt, well aware that I was about to win the game, and easily, too.

  ‘And who are you?’

  I showed him my identity card, which was better than any ace, and my letter from the ministry.

  The man folded.

  ‘Sorry sir. He was called back to Berlin, this morning. Unexpectedly.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘Compassionate leave, sir
. A death in the family.’

  ‘That’s a surprise. Which is to say it isn’t a surprise at all. At least not to me, anyway.’

  ‘How’s that sir?’

  ‘What I mean is, I didn’t know there was any compassion in the Gestapo.’

  I laid my business card on the corner of the man’s desk.

  ‘Tell him to come and find me at group HQ,’ I said. ‘That is when he’s finished grieving in Berlin. Tell him – tell him that I’m a friend of Tanya.’

  *

  Dr Marianne Kramsta had a noticeably galvanizing effect on the officers’ mess at Krasny Bor: it was as if someone had opened a grimy window and let the sunshine into that stuffy wooden room. Almost every officer in group HQ seemed to find her attractive, which was no surprise to me and probably not to her either, since she hadn’t dressed for dinner so much as armed herself for the conquest of all the Germans in Smolensk. Perhaps this is not entirely fair: Marianne Kramsta was wearing a very fetching grey crepe dress with a matching belt and long sleeves, and while she looked good, the plain fact of the matter is that she would have looked good wearing a truck tarpaulin. I watched with some amusement as one man drew out her chair, another fetched her a glass of Mosel, a third lit her cigarette, and a fourth found her an ashtray. All in all, there was a great deal of bowing and heel-clicking and kissing of her hand, which by the end of the evening must have looked like a Petrie dish. Even Von Kluge was struck with her, and having insisted that Dr Kramsta and Professor Buhtz join him and General von Tresckow at the field marshal’s own table, it wasn’t long before he was ordering champagne – I dare say that after cashing Hitler’s cheque he could afford it – and conducting himself like a smitten young subaltern in a romantic novel. Generally everyone behaved as if there had been an officers’ ball after all – with only one girl – and I’d almost made up my mind that the beautiful doctor had completely forgotten our date when, just after nine o’clock and underneath everyone’s widening eyes, she presented herself at my own insignificant corner table holding a fur coat and asked me if I was ready to drive her into Smolensk to see the Assumption Cathedral.

  I jumped up like a young subaltern myself, stubbed out a cigarette, helped the lady on with the coat and ushered her outside to a 260 I’d borrowed for the evening from Von Gersdorff. I opened the car door, and ushered her inside.

  ‘Oooh, has it got a heater?’ she said when I was seated beside her.

  ‘A heater, seats, windows, windscreen wipers, it’s got everything except a spade,’ I said as we drove away.

  ‘You’re not kidding,’ she said.

  I glanced to my right and saw she was holding the stock of a broom-handle Mauser on her lap. The stock was like a holster/carry-case: you clicked open the back of the stock and out came the gun that attached to it. Very neat.

  ‘It was in the door pocket,’ she said. ‘Like a road map.’

  ‘The fellow who owns this car is with the Abwehr,’ I said. ‘He likes to get where he’s going. A broom-handle Mauser will do that for you.’

  ‘A spy. How exciting.’

  ‘Be careful with that,’ I said, instinctively. ‘It’s probably loaded.’

  ‘Actually it’s not,’ she said, checking the breech for a moment. ‘But there’s a couple of stripper clips in the door pocket. And really, you mustn’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I’ve handled guns before.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘I always liked the old box cannon,’ she said. ‘That’s what my brother used to call this gun. He had two.’

  ‘Two guns are always better than one. That’s my philosophy.’

  ‘Sadly it didn’t work for him. He was killed in the Spanish Civil War.’

  ‘On which side?’

  ‘Does it matter now?’

  ‘Not to him.’

  She returned the Mauser to the inside of the stock and then to the leather door pocket. Then she flipped open the glovebox.

  ‘Your spy friend,’ said Marianne. ‘He doesn’t believe in taking any chances, does he?’

  ‘Hmm?’ I glanced at her again, and this time she was drawing a bayonet from its scabbard and scraping the edge with the flat of her thumb.

  I slowed the car at the gate, waved at the sentries on duty and drove onto the main road, where I slipped the spindle shift into neutral, lifted the clutch, pulled on the handbrake and took a closer look at the bayonet.

  ‘Careful, it’s as sharp as a surgeon’s catlin,’ she said.

  It was a standard-issue K98 of the kind you’d have found on any German soldier’s bolt-action short rifle; and she was right: the edge was paper-thin.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘It’s just a bayonet.’

  ‘Yes. It’s just a bayonet, isn’t it?’

  I nodded and handed it back to her to return to the glovebox – after all, Von Gersdorff’s bayonet wasn’t missing a scabbard. And I saw little point in telling her that a bayonet had been the probable weapon in the murders of four people in Smolensk, one of them a young woman who had been tortured.

  ‘I suppose I thought that the man who owns this car wasn’t exactly the type to use a knife.’

  I told myself he was hardly the type to blow himself up either. I put the car back in gear and drove on.

  ‘Then again, you can’t be too careful in an enemy country at night.’

  ‘You make that sound like I should stay very close to you, Gunther.’

  ‘Like a pill I swallowed. But you’re the doctor. I guess you’ll know what’s healthy for both of us.’

  ‘Call me Ines, would you? Most people do.’

  ‘Ines? I thought your name was Marianne.’

  ‘It is. But I never liked that name very much. When I was a girl living in Spain I decided I much preferred to be called Ines. It’s what my mother wanted to call me. Don’t you think it’s better?’

  ‘Actually it’s getting better every time I think about it. I think it suits you. Like that fur and the Carat you’re wearing.’

  All the way into Smolensk I kept Ines amused with my conversation, and her bright smiles and easy laughter were like a kind of prize in my eyes: when I spoke to her, it was as if there was no one else in the world.

  We reached the outskirts of the city, and at the roadblock on the Peter and Paul bridge we showed our papers to the field police. By now my association with Lieutenant Voss meant that they were beginning to recognize me, but seeing Ines Kramsta with her legs crossed in the front seat of the Mercedes gave them a thrill.

  ‘Watch it boys, she’s a doctor, and it’s castor oil for both of you if you don’t let us through.’

  ‘I’d drink anything right now,’ confessed one of the bloodhounds.

  ‘Mind me asking where you’re going, sir?’ asked the other.

  ‘The doc wants to see the cathedral. Saint Luke is the patron saint of doctors.’

  ‘Yes, well see if he can’t be persuaded to look out for a couple of sentries in the field police while he’s at it.’

  ‘We’ll certainly do our best,’ said Ines.

  There wasn’t much to do in Smolensk at night if you didn’t want to try the pleasures of the brothels or the local cinema, and the Cathedral Church of the Assumption was full of devout Russians and quite a few almost as devout German soldiers. You could tell they were devout by the fact that some of the Germans were praying to Our Lady and Saint Luke, but that might just have been the fact that our position in southern Russia was becoming critical – Soviet forces were now pushing west and threatening to isolate Army Group A in the Caucasus in the same way as the Sixth Army had been encircled at Stalingrad. One way or another there was quite a lot to pray about, if you were a German. I guess the Russians were praying their cathedral might still be standing when the Germans pulled out of Smolensk. They had quite a bit to pray about, too. Either way God was going to have to choose sides and choose soon: the godless communists or the blaspheming Germans. Who would be God with a choice like that?

  Inside, standin
g in front of the iconostasis, we were both silent for a long while, and gradually silence gave way to reflection. With so much gold around there was plenty of that to be found. I had to admit, the cathedral was beautiful, and it wasn’t just the gold that made me appreciate it. It reminded me a little of the Berlin Cathedral Church on Unter den Linden and going there at Easter with my mother. Every cathedral does that to me, which is why I tend to keep away from them. I guess Freud would have called it an Oedipus complex, but me, I think I just miss my mother.

  ‘They say Napoleon liked the cathedral so much he threatened to kill any French soldier who stole anything off the iconostasis,’ I said quietly in her ear.

  ‘That’s dictators for you. Always threatening to kill someone.’

  ‘Why do people want to be dictators anyway?’

  ‘Not people. Men. And have you noticed how they always claim to love art and architecture?’

  ‘Maybe so, but I happen to know that Hitler didn’t bother to look at this cathedral when he was here a few weeks ago. At least, not from the ground. He might have had a good look at it from the air.’

  ‘Then he missed a wonderful experience.’

  ‘Amen to that. You know I never had a date with a girl in a cathedral. I think maybe I should have tried it before now. Being here with you almost makes me believe in God.’

  ‘I think the incense is going to your head.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. I just had the megalomaniacal idea of trying to annex you for the Greater German Reich.’

  ‘I think it’s time you drove me back to Krasny Bor.’

  ‘What, and miss the Kremlin in the moonlight?’

  ‘There’s always tomorrow night. If you want to. Besides, Professor Buhtz likes to start his forensic work first thing.’