by Philip Kerr
‘All right,’ I told Lutz. ‘Now you can type this out neatly. There are others who need to see this, including the Polish Red Cross.’
When Lutz had finished typing out the message I folded it up and placed it carefully in an envelope. As I was leaving the castle I bumped into Alok Dyakov. As usual he was carrying the Mauser Safari rifle that had been a gift from the field marshal. Seeing me, he snatched off his cap respectfully and grinned, almost as if he knew that I knew he was there to see Marusya, one of the castle kitchen maids with whom he had a romantic attachment.
‘Captain Gunther, sir,’ he said. ‘How are you, sir? Good to see you again.’
‘Dyakov,’ I said. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you something. When we first met, Colonel Ahrens told me you were rescued from an NKVD murder squad that was going to shoot you. Is that right?’
‘Not a squad, sir. It was an individual NKVD officer called Mikhail Spiridonovich Krivyenko and his blue-hat driver. German soldiers found me handcuffed to his car after I killed him, sir. He was taking me to prison in Smolensk, sir. Or possibly to execute. I hit him and then couldn’t find the key to the manacles. Lieutenant Voss found me sitting at the side of the road beside his body.’
‘And the NKVD arrested you because you were a German teacher. Is that right?’
‘Yes sir.’ He shrugged. ‘You are right. Today, if you are not working for NKVD and you speak German is virtually the same as to be a member of fifth-column community. How Peshkov stayed out of their hands I don’t know. Anyway, after 1941, when Germany attacked Russia, this made me suspicious to the authorities. It is the same as if I had been a Polish–Russian.’
‘Yes, I know.’ I gave him a cigarette. ‘Tell me, did you know any other NKVD officers in Smolensk?’
‘You mean other than Krivyenko? No, sir.’ He shook his head. ‘Mostly I tried just to keep out of their way. They’re easy to recognize, sir. NKVD wear a very distinctive uniform. Names I hear, sometimes. But like I say, I keep away from these men. Is only sensible thing to do.’
‘What names did you hear?’
Dyakov was thoughtful for a moment and then looked pained. ‘Yezhov, sir. Yagoda. These were famous names in NKVD. Everyone heard their names. And Beria. Him of course.’
‘I meant lower-ranking than those names.’
Dyakov shook his head. ‘It’s been a while, sir.’
‘Rudakov,’ I said. ‘Ever hear about him?’
‘Everyone in Smolensk knows that name, sir. But which Rudakov do you mean? Lieuntenant Rudakov was head of local NKVD station, sir. After he was hurt, his half-brother Oleg came back to Smolensk to look after him. From where I don’t know. But when Germans took Smolensk he got the job as doorman at Glinka to stay on and keep an eye on his brother, sir. You know what I think, sir? I think he found out that Dr Batov had told you about what happened here in Katyn. And so he killed Batov and took Arkady away somewhere safe. To protect him. To protect them both, I think.’
‘You might just be right about that,’ I said.
Dyakov shrugged. ‘In life we can’t always win, sir.’
I smiled. ‘I’m not sure I ever learned how.’
‘Is there anything else I can help you with, sir?’ asked Dyakov, unctuously.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You know, sir, now that I come to think about it, there is someone who might know something about Oleg Rudakov: Peshkov. Before he got his job translating for the adjutant at Krasny Bor, Peshkov was translating for the girls at the Hotel Glinka. So that the madame could tell the German boys about how much and how long.’
*
The experts in the international commission were accommodated in one large hut at Krasny Bor which had been vacated by German officers – most of whom went to live in the GUM department store in Smolensk; and that night, in the absence of half his general staff, Field Marshal von Kluge offered these distinguished professors the hospitality of his mess, which he had not done with the members of the Polish Red Cross. Perhaps this wasn’t so strange: of the many countries represented in the international commission, five were friendly to Germany and two were neutral. Besides, the field marshal was keen to speak French – which he did excellently – with Professor Speelers from Ghent and Dr Costedoat from Paris. I won’t say that we were a jolly party. No, I wouldn’t have said that. For one thing, Ines absented herself from the dinner, which, for me at any rate, was like someone blowing out a beautifully scented candle. And after Tanya’s story about the river Zapadnaya Dvina, I had little stomach for more lamprey pie. But I had no choice but to swallow a dull conversation with Judge Conrad, who had been spending most of his time examining some reluctant Russian witnesses about what had happened at Katyn – which was the last thing I wanted to talk about.
After an excellent brandy and a cigarette from the field marshal’s own silver box, I went for a walk around the grounds at Krasny Bor. I hadn’t gone very far when Colonel von Gersdorff caught up with me.
‘It’s a fine night,’ he said. ‘Mind if I join you?’
‘Be my guest. But I’m not much company tonight.’
‘Nor am I,’ he said. ‘I missed dinner. Somehow I didn’t fancy dining with all those forensic scientists. It looked a bit like the aquarium at Berlin Zoo in there. All those cold fish in their precise little spaces. I was speaking to one of them this afternoon: Professor Berruguete, from Spain. It was like talking to a very unpleasant species of squid. So I went for a walk instead. And now here you are.’
Try as I might it was hard to imagine the colonel holding that bayonet; a duelling sabre, maybe – even the broom-handle Mauser – but not a bayonet. He didn’t look like someone who could ever have cut someone’s throat.
‘What did you talk about?’ I asked.
‘With the professor? He holds some very unpleasant opinions about race and eugenics. Seems to think that Marxists are degenerates and will enfeeble our German race, if we let them live. My God, I swear some of these Spanish fascists make the Nazis look like models of reason and tolerance.’
‘And what do you think, colonel? About Marxists?’
‘Oh, please, for God’s sake let’s not talk about politics. I might not like the communists but I’ve never thought of them as subhuman. Misguided, perhaps. But not degenerate or racially corrupt, the way he does. Christ, Gunther, what do you take me for?’
‘You’re not the fool I thought you were, that’s for sure.’
Von Gersdorff laughed. ‘Thanks very much.’
‘By the way, what’s the news of Von Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer?’
‘They’re both in Tegel Military Prison, awaiting trial. But so far we’ve been very lucky. The Judge Advocate General appointed to investigate their case is Karl Sack. He’s very sympathetic to our cause.’
‘That is good news.’
‘Meanwhile, we listened to your tape. Myself and General von Tresckow. And Von Schlabrendorff.’
‘It wasn’t my tape,’ I insisted. ‘It was Corporal Quidde’s tape. Let’s get that straight, just in case of any mishap. I don’t happen to have any friends who are Judge Advocate General.’
‘Yes. All right. I take your point. But the tape certainly confirms what you said about Von Kluge. You know I didn’t believe it when you told me, but I could hardly ignore the evidence of that tape. Anyway, it puts a whole new complexion on our conspiracy here in Smolensk. It’s very clear we can’t trust those we thought we could trust. Henning – I mean von Tresckow – is very upset and angry with the field marshal. They’re old friends, after all. At the same time, it now seems that Von Kluge may not be the first Prussian Junker that Hitler ever bought off. There have been others, including I’m afraid to say, Paul von Hindenburg. It may even be that back in 1933 Hitler agreed to drop the Reichstag’s “East-Help” investigation into the misappropriation of parliamentary subsidies by Junker land barons in return for the president’s blessing for his becoming Chancellor.’
I nodded. It was only what many like
me had always suspected: a behind-the-scenes deal between the Nazis and the impoverished aristocrats of East Prussia that had let the Nazis snatch control of the German government.
‘Then it seems only fitting that your class should be the one to get rid of Hitler, given it was your lot who landed us with him in the first place.’
‘Touché,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘But look here, you can’t say we haven’t tried.’
‘No one could ever say you haven’t tried,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not so sure about the others.’
A little sheepishly Von Gersdorff looked at his watch. ‘I’d better be getting along. General von Tresckow is joining me for a drink in a while.’ He flicked away his cigarette. ‘By the way, have you heard the news? The Soviets have broken off diplomatic relations in London with the Poles. I got a telegram this morning from the Abwehr. It would seem that the little doctor’s plan is working.’
‘Yes. I’m almost sorry I gave him the idea.’
‘Did you?’
‘I think I did,’ I said. ‘Although him being him, he probably thinks it was all his idea.’
‘Why did you?’
‘You have your plans to knock over the heap and so have I. Perhaps my plans will take less courage than yours, colonel. In fact, I’m sure of it. I aim to be alive when my bomb goes off. Not a real bomb, you understand. But there will be a sort of an explosion and I hope some serious repercussions.’
‘Would you care to share those plans with me?’
‘Trust doesn’t come easily to a Fritz with my background, colonel. Perhaps if I had an extensive family tree framed on the wall of my big house in East Prussia, I could share them with you. But I’m just a regular boy from Mitte. The only family tree I can remember is a rather sorry-looking linden in the gloomy yard my mother called a garden. Besides, I think you’ll do better not knowing what I’m up to. I’m not a hundred per cent sure yet I’m even doing the right thing, but when I go through with it – or don’t go through with it – I mean to make sure I’m only answerable to my own conscience and no one else’s.’
‘Now I really am intrigued. I had no idea you were so independently minded, Gunther. Or so resourceful. Of course, there is the rather enterprising way you shot Corporal Quidde in the head in Glinka Park. Yes, we mustn’t forget what happened there.’
‘That certainly doesn’t make me independently minded, colonel. Not since Operation Barbarossa. These days everyone is shooting someone in the head. It was necessary to put a tap in the corporal’s head and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I’ve always been lucky that way. No, it’s my sense of adventure that’s persuaded me to take the course I’m on. That and an overpowering desire to cause trouble for the people who invented it.’
‘And if it did? What then? What if I were to suggest that whatever you have in mind might also cause trouble for me and my friends? In the same way that you believed Corporal Quidde might cause trouble?’
‘Are you threatening me, colonel?’
‘Not at all, Gunther. You mistake me. I’m just trying to point out that there are times when you need a very steady arm when you’re taking aim at something. Or someone. Someone like Hitler, for example. And it helps if someone isn’t rocking the boat while you’re doing it.’
‘That’s a good point. And I’ll certainly bear it in mind the next time you’re taking aim at him.’ I made a face. ‘Whenever that might be.’
*
After Von Gersdorff left, I walked on my own for a while and smoked another cigarette in the encroaching darkness. I was tempted to go and knock on Ines’s door, only I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle a whole evening without her. And I was just about ready to concede that I couldn’t handle a whole evening without her when I heard two shots in the distance; there was a short interval and then a large splinter from the birch tree next to my head flew into the air as a split second later, I heard a third shot. I dropped to the ground and extinguished my cigarette. Someone was trying to kill me. It was a while since anyone had fired a gun at me, but absence had not made the experience feel any less personal or unpleasant. Bullets don’t care who they hit.
I kept my head down for several minutes and then glanced nervously around. All I could see were trees and more trees. My own hut and the officers’ mess were on the other side of the health resort; Ines’s front door was two or three hundred metres away, but without knowing where the shots had come from, there was no point in making a run for it. I could as easily have run towards the shooter as away from him.
Another minute passed and then another. Two wood pigeons settled on a branch above me and a gust of wind rose and then died away. All was silence now, apart from the beating of my heart. Ignoring the sharp pain in my ribs – I had fallen onto the root of an upturned tree stump – I tried once again to estimate where the shots had come from, but without success, and deciding that caution was the better part of valour, I scrambled behind the rest of the stump and tried to get as much of my body underneath it as possible. Then I took out my gun, worked the slide quietly, and waited for something to happen. Four long years in the trenches had taught me the wisdom of staying put and doing nothing under fire until it’s possible to make out a target. I lay very still, hardly daring to breathe, staring up at the treetops and the twilight sky, assuring myself that one of the guards at Krasny Bor would surely have heard the shots, and asking myself who wanted me dead enough to try to make that happen sooner than later. I could think of any number of people, of course, but mostly they were in Berlin, and gradually, instead of questioning the identity of my assailant, I started questioning the wisdom of the plan I had been reluctant to tell Von Gersdorff.
In truth, there wasn’t much to it; conceived in the office of the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda, it certainly wasn’t heroic and didn’t compare to the bravery of Von Gersdorff’s attempt on Hitler’s life. You might say it was nothing less than an attempt to restore the value of truth in a world that had debased it; because the minute I’d mentioned to Goebbels the idea of inviting foreign journalists to Katyn Wood, I’d realized that the proper thing to do with the military intelligence report I’d found in the frozen boot of Captain Max Schottlander was simply to try to give it to the journalists. If I couldn’t destroy the Nazis, I could perhaps acutely embarrass them.
Eight correspondents had arrived from Berlin. Of course the majority were Nazi stooges from Spain, Norway, France, Holland, Belgium, Hungary and Serbia, and none of these was likely to print a story that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt the criminality of the present German government; but the correspondents from the neutral countries – Jaederlund from Stockholms Tidningen and Schnetzer from the Swiss newspaper Der Bund – looked like they were still interested in truth: a truth that exposed the most egregious lie of the Second World War – how the war had started.
Everyone in Europe had heard about the Gleiwitz Incident. In August 1939, a group of Poles had attacked a German radio station in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, a piece of provocation that was used by the Nazis as justification for the invasion of Poland. Even in Germany there were some who did not believe the Nazi version of what had happened, but Max Schottlander’s report was the first detailed proof of the perfidy of the Nazis. The report demonstrated unequivocally that prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp had been forced to dress up in Polish uniforms and, led by a Gestapo major named Alfred Naujocks, to mount an assault on German territory. The prisoners were all killed by lethal injection and then riddled with bullets to make it look – when the world’s press correspondents were brought in to observe the scene – as though the saboteurs’ attack had been beaten off by brave German soldiers.
Goebbels always had his propaganda aims, and now so had I. History was not going to be prevented from knowing what had really happened at Gleiwitz – not if I had anything to do with this.
Speaking to any of the correspondents assembled in Smolensk wasn’t going to be easy. They were all accompanied by
Secretary Lassler from the Foreign Office, Schippert from the Reich Chancellery press department, and Captain Freudeman, a local army officer who, according to Von Gersdorff, was very possibly Gestapo too. I thought my best chance was to speak to one of the reporters the next day, when they visited the temporary laboratory where all the Katyn documents recovered from grave number one were now exhibited; this was the specially glassed-in veranda of the wooden house where the field police was billeted just outside Smolensk, in Grushtshenki – the temporary lab in Katyn Wood having proved unsuitable because of the overpowering smell of the corpses and the swarm of flies that had descended upon the open grave.
I must have lain under that stump like one of those dead Polish officers for ten or fifteen minutes, and perhaps it was this image that changed my mind about what I was proposing to do. I won’t say that I started to see things through the eyes of the dead men in Katyn Wood. Let’s just say that lying there, in what was not much less than an open grave, after someone had tried to put a bullet in my head, I began to see things from a different perspective. I started to feel uneasy about what I was planning to do with Captain Schottlander’s intelligence report. And I remembered something my father had told me once during the course of a very German argument about Marx and history and ‘the world’s spirit on horseback’ – I think that was his phrase. He’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade me not to volunteer for the army in August 1914. ‘History’, he said – with a dismissive inconsequence that stopped me from paying more attention to his words at the time – ‘is all very well, and perhaps it does progress by learning from its mistakes, but it’s people that really matter; nothing ever matters quite as much as them.’ And as I stared up at the treetops, it began to dawn on me that while it was one thing owing a responsibility to history, it was surely something greater when you owed a responsibility to more than four thousand men. Especially when they had been ignominiously murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. Their story deserved to be told, and in a way that could not be denied – as it surely would be if another egregious Nazi lie was now exposed to the world’s press. A genuine effort by the Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda to expose the truth of what had really happened at Katyn Wood would certainly be compromised if I revealed the truth of what had really happened at Gleiwitz.