Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

Dyakov grinned. ‘Because there’s no money to be made doing that. The Germans at Krasny Bor pay him very well, sir. Good money. Better than electricity worker. Besides there are Germans running electricity power station now. They don’t trust Russians to do this.’

‘And the hunting? Who taught you to hunt?’

‘My father was hunter, sir. He taught me to shoot.’ Dyakov grinned. ‘You see sir? I’ve had very good teachers. My father and the Austrians.’

Friday, March 12th 1943

I awoke thinking I must be back in the trenches, because there was a strong smell of something horrible in my nostrils. The smell was like a dead rat only worse, and I spent the next ten minutes sniffing the air in various areas of my room in the castle before finally I decided that the source of the stink was underneath my own bed. And it was only when I went down on my hands and knees to look that I remembered the frozen leather boot I had tossed on the floor the previous morning; except that the boot and whatever was still in the boot was now frozen no longer.

I took a deep breath, and at the same time I looked inside the leg of the boot, squeezing the toe. There were several hard objects inside it, the remains of a decayed foot to add to the colonel’s collection of bones on the floor of the cold storeroom downstairs. I had a good idea that the foot and the leg bones wrapped in the tarpaulin had belonged to the same man, because the boot had been chewed in several places, presumably by the wolf. But there was something else in the boot beside a dead Pole’s stinking foot, and gradually I peeled out of the leg a piece of oiled paper that must have been wrapped around the dead man’s calf. At first I was inclined to believe that the Pole had simply tried to insulate his leg against the cold, much as I did with my own poorer-quality boots; but newspaper would have done for that – oiled paper was for preserving things, not keeping them warm.

I unfolded the paper as best I could, using the leg of the bed and a chair. It was folded in half and inside the fold were several typed sheets of onion-skin paper. But in spite of the oilskin paper, what was written was almost illegible, and it was clear it was going to require the resources of a laboratory to decipher what was written on these pages.

Until the ground thawed it was hard to see how I was going to make much more progress with this preliminary investigation, and it looked as if the button would have to be evidence enough. But I wasn’t happy about that. One button, an old boot and a few bones didn’t seem like much of a haul to take back to Berlin. I badly wanted to know what was written on the pages before I mentioned them to anyone. I wasn’t about to make myself or the bureau a sucker for some elaborate lie dreamed up by the propaganda ministry. All the same, I couldn’t help but think that if the Mahatma’s men had planted evidence of a massacre in Katyn Wood, they’d have made it a little more obvious and easy for someone like me to find.

I dressed and went downstairs to find some breakfast.

Colonel Ahrens looked pleased when I told him I had probably concluded my investigation and would be returning to Berlin just as soon as possible. He looked a lot less pleased when I told him that I had reached no firm conclusions.

‘At this stage I really can’t say if the bureau will want to take this any further. Sorry sir, but that’s just the way it is. I’ll be off the back of your collar just as soon as I can get on a plane home.’

‘You won’t get a flight out of here today. Saturday looks like a better bet. Or even Sunday. There will be plenty of planes arriving here tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The leader. He’s coming here, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Look, I’ll telephone the airfield and arrange things for you. Until then you’re welcome to make use of the facilities here at the castle. There’s a shooting range if you care for that kind of thing. And there’s a movie in the theatre this afternoon and evening. All leave is cancelled from midnight tonight, so the movie has been brought forward. I’m afraid it’s Jud Suss . All we could get at short notice.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s not one of my favourites.’ I shrugged. ‘You know, maybe I’ll take a look at the local cathedral after all.’

‘Good idea,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ll lend you a car.’

‘Thank you, sir. And if you could give me a map of the city, I’d be grateful. From a distance it’s hard to tell one onion dome from another.’

*

I didn’t give a damn about the cathedral. I had no intention of looking at the place, or anything else for that matter, but I didn’t want Colonel Ahrens knowing that. Besides, I don’t believe in tourism during wartime, not any more. Sure, when I was stationed in Paris during 1940 I’d walked about a bit with a Baedeker and seen a few of the sights – Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower – but that was Paris: you could always read a Frenchman in a way you couldn’t ever do with a Czech or an Ivan. I’d learned a bit of caution since then, and even in Prague I didn’t go abroad with the Baedeker very much. Not that there ever were any Baedekers written about Russia – what would have been the point? – but the principle holds good I think, as two examples might serve to illustrate.

Heinz Seldte was a lieutenant in a police battalion I knew from the Alex in the early Thirties; I helped get him a leg up into Kripo. He was one of the first Germans into the city of Kiev in September 1941, and on a quiet summer’s afternoon he decided to go and look at the city’s Duma building on Khreshchatyk, which is the main street – apparently it was a big deal, with a spire and a statue of the archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kiev. What he didn’t know – what nobody knew – was that the retreating Red Army had booby-trapped the whole fucking street with dynamite, which they exploded with radio-controlled fuses from over four hundred kilometres away. The historic buildings of Khreshchatyk – the Germans renamed the ruins Eichhornstrasse – were never seen again; nor was Heinz Seldte.

Victor Lungwitz was a waiter from the Adlon Hotel. He waited tables because he couldn’t make a living at being an artist. He joined an SS Panzer Division in 1939 and was sent to Belarus as part of Operation Barbarossa. When he was off-duty he liked drawing churches, of which Minsk has almost as many as Smolensk. One day he went to look at some old church on the edge of town. It was called the Red Church, which ought to have put him on his guard. They found Victor’s drawing but no sign of him. A few days later a mutilated body was found in some marshland nearby. It took them a while to identify poor Victor: the partisans had cut almost everything off his head – his nose, his lips, his eyelids, his ears – before cutting off his genitals and letting him bleed to death.

When you fight a war with a Baedeker you don’t always know what you’re going to see.

In the colonel’s draughty little Tatra I drove east along the Vitebsk highway with Smolensk in front of me and the Dnieper River on my right. For most of the way the road ran between two railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main station; it was a huge icing-cake of a place with four square corner towers and an enormous archway entrance. Like a lot of buildings in Smolensk it was painted green, and either green meant something significant in that part of Russia or green was the only colour of paint they’d had in the stores the last time anyone had thought of carrying out some building maintenance. Russia being Russia, I tended to subscribe to the second explanation.

A little further down the road, I stopped to consult my map and then turned south down Bruckenstrasse, which sounded promising given that I needed to find a bridge to cross the river.