by Philip Kerr
They were useful and you tended not to throw one away. Unless it was prima facie evidence of a murder, in which case you ought to have thrown it away as soon as you’d loaded the gun, and certainly not kept it in your pocket out of habit, no doubt. The one I was holding was as clear a piece of evidence of murder as I’d seen in a long time, and had it not been for my hangover I might have cheered. But a moment’s further reflection persuaded me that there was still considerable reason for caution; a simple stripper clip in the Russian’s pocket would hardly have persuaded a man like Field Marshal von Kluge that his Putzer had murdered Dr Berruguete. I was going to have to find out why he had murdered him, and to do that I was going to have to find out a lot more about Alok Dyakov before I took what I had learned to his master.
It was then that I remembered the bayonet in Von Gersdorff’s car. If Dyakov had murdered Berruguete with Von Gersdorff’s gun, was it possible he might have used the Abwehr officer’s razor-sharp bayonet to do a bit of throat-cutting, too?
I switched off the map light and sat in the darkness of Katyn Wood for a moment before returning at last to the only reasonable explanation – an explanation that took account of the field marshal’s strange loyalty to his own Putzer. Everything was exactly as I had supposed from the very beginning, and the call-girl business that Ribe had been running from the castle switchboard had been nothing more than herring smoke that had got in my eyes.
Von Kluge knew the telephone on his desk was not working properly – I remembered him complaining to an operator about it when I was in his office. He must have realized – too late – that his compromising conversation with Adolf Hitler could have been overheard by the two signallers from the 537th manning the switchboard at the castle. It would have been a relatively simple matter for Alok Dyakov – who was often in and out of the castle to see his girlfriend Marusya – to check the duty roster and see who had been running the telephones during the leader’s visit to Smolensk and – on his master’s orders – to have killed them, unaware that one of them had already thought to record the conversation on tape. Naturally, Von Kluge would have correctly assumed that the leader would have approved of Dyakov’s actions.
If any of this was true I would have to move even more carefully with an investigation into Alok Dyakov than could ever have been supposed.
I switched on the map light again and took another look at the key from the brown envelope. It was the key for a BMW motorcycle.
Everything was starting to make sense now. On the night of their murder, Ribe and Greiss would hardly have been on their guard meeting a figure as familiar to them as Dyakov outside the Hotel Glinka; and the sound of a German motorcycle heard by the SS sergeant who had disturbed their killer was now explained: Dyakov had access to a BMW. It certainly explained why their killer had chosen to escape along the Vitebsk road: he was heading home to Krasny Bor.
And if he had murdered Ribe and Greiss, then why not Dr Batov and his daughter, too? Here, the motive was harder to fathom, although the killer’s penchant for using a knife looked persuasive. Dyakov could easily have learned about their existence from Von Kluge after I had petitioned the field marshal to give the two Russians asylum in Berlin – a petition he had resisted. Was it possible the field marshal was sufficiently against the idea of their being granted the right to go and live in Berlin that he had ordered his Putzer to kill them, too?
But if he had just shot and killed Dr Berruguete, why had Dyakov gone to Katyn Wood and got drunk? To celebrate the death of a war criminal, perhaps? Or was the reason more prosaic – that by drawing attention to himself in Katyn Wood, he was simply trying to establish an alibi for what had happened at Krasny Bor? After all, who would have suspected a drunken man who was threatening to shoot himself of the cold and calculated murder of the Spanish doctor? And had I helped with that alibi by rendering him insensible?
But I was getting ahead of myself. First there was some elementary detective work to complete – work I ought to have done weeks ago.
I drove back to Krasny Bor and parked next to Von Gersdorff’s Mercedes. As usual his car door was not locked, and sitting in the passenger seat I searched the glovebox for the bayonet, intending to give it to Professor Buhtz in the hope that he might be able to find traces of human blood on the blade. But it wasn’t there. I checked the door pocket, too, and under the seat, but it wasn’t there either.
‘Looking for something?’
Von Gersdorff was standing immediately by the car, with a gun in his hand. The gun was pointed at me. I sat up, sharply.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Gunther, it’s you. What the hell do you think you’re doing in my car at nearly one in the morning?’
‘Looking for your bayonet.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Because I think that it was used to murder those two signallers. Just like your Mauser was used to murder Dr Berruguete. By the way I found your shoulder-stock.’
‘Did you? Good. Look, I can easily see why I might make a better suspect than Ines Kramsta. Her legs are better than mine.’
‘I didn’t say you were a suspect, colonel,’ I said. ‘After all, I hardly think you’d have been so careless as to use your own Mauser. No, I think someone else used a gun and a bayonet that he knew were in this car – quite possibly with the intention of compromising you at some later stage; or perhaps they were just convenient for him, I don’t know.’
Von Gersdorff holstered his Walther and went around to the back of the car, where he unlocked the trunk. ‘The bayonet is in here,’ he said, fetching it out. ‘And when you say someone, Gunther, I assume you don’t mean Dr Kramsta.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Funny thing about this bayonet,’ said Von Gersdorff, handing it to me. ‘When I fetched it from the glovebox the other day I thought for a minute it wasn’t mine.’
‘Why?’ I pulled the bayonet out of the scabbard and the blade gleamed in the moonlight.
‘Oh, it was mine. I just thought it wasn’t. That’s why I put it away in the trunk.’
‘Yes, but why did you think it wasn’t yours?’
‘It’s the same bayonet all right, just a different scabbard. Mine was loose. This one is a close fit.’ He shrugged. ‘Bit of a mystery, really. I mean, they don’t repair themselves, do they?’
‘No, they don’t,’ I agreed. ‘And I think you just answered my question.’
I told him about the bayonet and the pieces of broken scabbard found in the snow near the bodies of Ribe and Greiss.
‘So you think that was my scabbard probably?’ said Von Gersdorff.
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Christ.’
Then I told him about the stripper clip I’d found in Alok Dyakov’s pocket; and how Alok Dyakov was now my best suspect for the murders of Ribe and Greiss.
‘We’re going to have to be very careful how we proceed with this,’ he said.
‘We?’
‘Yes. You don’t think I’m going to let you do this alone, do you? Besides, I’d love to see the back of that Russian bastard.’
‘And Von Kluge?’
Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘I don’t think you’ve got much chance of hurting him with this,’ he said. ‘Not without that tape.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I gave it to General von Tresckow,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘He judged it too dangerous to use and destroyed it.’
‘That’s a pity,’ I said, but I could hardly fault the general for thinking, as I had done, that a tape recording of the leader offering to buy the loyalty of one of his top field marshals with a substantial cheque was much too dangerous to keep.
‘You’ll remember that Von Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were arrested. At the time we were more worried about the Gestapo than we were about Günther von Kluge. And I’m afraid it will take a lot more than a tape recording of a compromising conversation to bring down Hitler.’
I nodded and handed him back his bayonet.
‘So what’s the n
ext step?’ he asked. ‘I mean we are going after Dyakov, aren’t we?’
‘We need to speak to Lieutenant Voss,’ I said. ‘After all it was him who first encountered Alok Dyakov. The Russian told me his version of what happened on the road, much of which I’ve forgotten. I was distracted by the arrival of the members of the international commission when he told me. We need the whole story from Voss, I think.’
*
Before I went to bed I returned the envelope containing his belongings to Dyakov. His light was on in his hut, and so I was obliged to knock on his door and give him a story which I suspected he only half believed.
‘The nurse gave me the envelope to return to you,’ I said, ‘and then I’m afraid I forgot all about it. Your stuff’s been in my car all afternoon.’
‘I went back to the hospital to fetch it,’ he said. ‘And then I was looking for you, sir. Nobody knew where you were.’
Had he remembered that the stripper clip was in his pocket?
‘Sorry about that,’ I said. ‘But something came up. How’s your head, by the way.’
‘Not as bad as yours perhaps,’ he said.
‘Oh, is it that obvious?’
‘Only to a boozer like myself, perhaps.’
I shrugged. ‘Got some bad news, that’s all. But I’m fine now.’ I clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Glad to see you’re fine, too, old fellow. No hard feelings, eh?’
‘No hard feelings, sir.’
*
At the Polish gravesides later that morning there were twenty of us, of whom at least half were French, including de Brinon, two senior army officers, and three reporters who wore berets and smoked pungent French cigarettes and generally looked like characters from Pépé le Moko. De Brinon was a fifty-something figure wearing a fawn raincoat and an officer’s cap that made him look a bit like Hitler and seemed an affectation, given that he was merely a lawyer. Von Gersdorff – who knew about these things – informed me that de Brinon was an aristocrat, a marquis no less, and that he also had a Jewish wife whom the Paris Gestapo had been persuaded to ignore. Which might have explained why he was so keen to look like a Nazi. The French were making a big deal out of coming to Katyn Wood, because it seemed that prior to the Polish–Soviet War of 1920, the French had sent four hundred army officers to help train the Polish army, and many of these – including the two generals now in Katyn – had stayed on as part of the 5th Chasseurs Polonais to fight Marshal Tukhachevsky’s Red Army. All of which meant that Voss, Conrad, Sloventzik, Von Gersdorff and I endured a wasted morning answering endless questions and apologizing for the smell, the rather makeshift wooden crosses on the graves, and the sudden change in the weather. Even Buhtz put in an appearance, having left the international commission in the hands of the Polish Red Cross to conduct their own autopsies exactly as they saw fit. Someone took a picture of us: Voss is pictured explaining Russia’s ‘worst war crime’ to de Brinon, who looks at him uncomfortably, as if fully aware of the fact that he too would be shot by the French for war crimes in April 1947, while the two French generals do what French generals always do best: look smart.
There was no priest: the Poles had already conducted a proper burial service, and no one thought it important to pray again for the dead. Religion was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
After we’d disposed of the French – something that never takes very long for Germans – Von Gersdorff and I took Voss aside and asked him to sit with us for a while in the Abwehr colonel’s car. In his long field policeman’s coat and cunt cap, the tall military policeman – he had been the tallest of any man standing beside the graves – cut a handsome figure. Slimmer men look good wearing a cunt cap, and when they’re German officers they look businesslike, as if they have no time for appearances and formalities. There was just a hint of Heydrich about his canine features and in the way he bore himself, and for a moment I wondered what the former Reichsprotector of Bohemia would have made of my efforts in Katyn. Not much, probably.
Von Gersdorff handed out cigarettes and we were soon enclosed in a fug of tobacco smoke that made a very pleasant change from the rank air of Katyn Wood.
‘Tell us about Alok Dyakov,’ said the colonel, coming straight to the point.
‘Dyakov?’ Voss shook his head. ‘He’s a fox, that one. You know, for a former schoolteacher, he’s an excellent shot with a rifle. The other week one of the motorcycle lads who outride the field marshal’s car told me that he saw Dyakov take a dog down at seven hundred and fifty metres. Apparently they thought it was a wolf, but it turned out to be some poor fucking farmer’s mutt. Dyakov was very upset about it, too. Loves dogs, he said. Loves dogs, hates Reds. True, he’s got a telescopic sight on that rifle – same as the field marshal – but whatever he was teaching I don’t think it was Latin and history.’
‘What kind of a sight?’ I asked.
‘Zeiss. ZF42. But that rifle isn’t really designed to have a sight. The rifle has to be machined by a skilled armourer.’
‘That’s right,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘I have one like that myself.’
‘What, here in Smolensk?’
‘Yes. Here in Smolensk. Should I speak to a lawyer?’
Seeing Voss frown at that, I put him squarely in the picture and then prodded him for some more information about the Russian Putzer.
‘It was probably early September, 1941,’ said Voss. ‘My boys were on the south-east of the city, inside the Yelnya salient.’
‘That was a fifty-kilometre front that our Fourth Army had extended from the city to form a staging area for a continued offensive toward Vyazma,’ explained Von Gersdorff. ‘The Russians attempted an encirclement that failed thanks to our air superiority. But it only just failed. It was the most substantial reverse our armies suffered, until Stalingrad.’
‘We were operating on the flanks of the salient,’ continued Voss. ‘About ten kilometres along the Mscislau Road and charged with mopping up any last pockets of resistance. Partisans, a few deserters from the 106th Mechanized Rifle Division and the Twenty-Fourth Army, some NKVD units. Our orders were simple.’ He shrugged, and began to look evasive. ‘Anyone still resisting was to be shot, of course. Also anyone who had surrendered who fell within the guidelines issued by General Müller that we were still enforcing back then. Until they were cancelled in June last year.’
Voss was talking about Hitler’s Commissar Order demanding that prisoners who were active representatives of Bolshevism – which certainly included NKVD – should be shot summarily.
‘We’d already shot a lot,’ he said. ‘It was payback for what we’d been through. The Geneva Convention doesn’t seem to count for a lot the further you get from Berlin. Anyway, we came across this open-topped GAZ that had gone off the road near a farm.’
The GAZ was a Russian four-wheel-drive vehicle – the equivalent of a Tatra.
‘There were three people sitting in it. Two of them were wearing NKVD uniforms – the driver and one of the men in the back. They were dead. The third man, Dyakov, was in civvies. He was only half conscious and still handcuffed to the side rail in the back of the GAZ, and seemed very pleased to see us when he came around a bit. He claimed he’d been arrested by the NKVD and that he was being taken to prison, or worse, by the other two whom he’d attacked when the road in front of the car had been strafed by a Stuka.
‘We found the keys to the manacles, and fixed him up – he’d been banged about a bit when the car came off the road, and possibly also by the two NKVD when they arrested him. He spoke good German, and when we interrogated him he told us he was a German language teacher at the school in Vitebsk, which was why he’d been arrested in the first place, although by then he was making his living as a poacher. According to him, speaking German automatically brought you under suspicion from the secret police, but we later formed the impression that the real reason he’d been arrested was probably more to do with him being a poacher than anything else.’
‘What papers did Dyakov have on him?’ I
asked.
‘Just his propiska,’ said Voss. ‘That’s a residency permit and migration-recording document.’
‘No internal passport?’
‘He said that had already been confiscated by the NKVD on a previous security check. It’s what the NKVD termed “open arrest”, since there’s very little you can do in Soviet Russia without an internal passport.’
‘That’s convenient. And the NKVD men? What papers did they have?’
‘The usual NKVD cloth-bound identity booklets. And in the driver’s case his licence, his Komsomol Party ID book, some transit coupons, and a certificate for carrying a gun.’
‘I hope you kept those documents,’ I said.
‘I’m afraid the originals were destroyed in a fire with a lot of other documents,’ said Voss. ‘I think one of the officers was called Krivyenko.’
‘Destroyed?’
‘Yes,’ said Voss. ‘Not long after we moved into our billet at Grushtshenki there was a mortar attack by partisans.’
‘I see. That was very convenient, too. For Dyakov.’
‘I expect I have photographs of those at the Abwehr offices in Smolensk,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘It’s standard practice for the Abwehr to keep a photographic record of all captured NKVD documentation.’
‘Does Dyakov know that?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘No time like the present,’ I said. ‘Shall we take a look?’
On the drive to the army Kommandatura I had some more questions about Dyakov.
‘How did he come to meet the field marshal, for God’s sake?’ I asked.
Von Gersdorff cleared his throat uncomfortably. ‘I’m afraid that’s my fault,’ he said. ‘You see I handled the interrogation. I questioned him to see what he could tell us about the NKVD. The trouble with that Commissar Order was that we never got any good intelligence, and to have one of their own prisoners was about the next best thing. He was actually very helpful. Or so it seemed at the time. During the course of this interview Dyakov and I got talking about what kind of game there is to hunt around here.’