Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘Your flight back to Berlin is fixed for early tomorrow afternoon,’ said Ahrens. ‘I don’t mind saying that I wish I was coming with you. The news from the front is not good. I’d hate to be in Von Kluge’s boots when the leader drops in for a chat tomorrow and demands a new offensive this spring. Frankly our troops aren’t nearly up to that task.’

‘Tell me, colonel, how soon is the ground around here likely to thaw?’

‘End of March, beginning of April. Why?’

I shrugged and looked generally apologetic.

‘You’re coming back?’

‘Not me,’ I said. ‘Someone else.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘We won’t know for sure until we find a complete body of course, but I’ve a pretty shrewd idea that there are Polish soldiers buried in your wood.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘I’m afraid it’s true. Just as soon as the ground thaws, my boss, Judge Goldsche, will probably send a senior army judge and a forensic pathologist down here to take charge of the investigation.’

‘But you heard the Susanins,’ said Ahrens. ‘The only Poles they saw around here remained on the train at Gnezdovo.’

I thought it best to avoid telling him that either the Susanins or perhaps Peshkov were clearly lying. I’d caused enough trouble for Ahrens already. Instead I handed him the button.

‘I found this,’ I said. ‘And the remains of a man’s foot in an officer’s riding boot.’

‘I don’t see that a fucking button and a boot tell us very much.’

‘I won’t know for sure until I consult an expert, but that looks to me like a Polish eagle on the button.’

‘Balls,’ he said angrily. ‘If you ask me that button could just as easily be from the coat of a White Russian Army soldier. There were Whites under General Denikin fighting the Reds in this area until at least 1922. No, you must be mistaken. I don’t see how something like that could have been covered up. I ask you, does this place feel like somewhere that’s built in the middle of a mass grave?’

‘When I was at the Alex, colonel, the only time we ever paid much attention to our feelings was when it was lunchtime. It’s evidence that counts. Evidence like this little button, the human bones, those two hundred Polish officers in the railway siding. You see, I think they did get off that train. I think they maybe came here and were shot by the NKVD in your wood. I’ve some experience of these murder squads, you know.’

I hardly wanted to tell the colonel about the document in Polish I had discovered and that Doctor Batov had painstakingly translated for me with his stereo microscope. I figured that the fewer people who knew about that the better. But I had little doubt that the bones found in Katyn Wood had belonged to a Polish soldier, and the bureau seemed certain to have a major war-crimes investigation in Smolensk just as soon as I could get home to Berlin and make my report to Judge Goldsche.

‘But look here, if there are two hundred Poles buried out there, what difference will it make to those poor buggers now? Answer me that. Couldn’t you pretend that there’s nothing of interest here? And then we can get on with our lives and the normal business of trying to get through this war alive.’

‘Look, colonel, I’m just a policeman. It’s not up to me what happens here. I’ll make my report to the bureau and after that then it’s up to the bosses and to the legal department of the High Command. But if that button does turn out to be Polish-’

I left my sentence unfinished. It was hard to know exactly what the result of such a discovery might look like, but I sensed that the colonel’s cosy little world at Dnieper Castle was about to come to an end.

And so I think did he, because he swore loudly, several times.

Saturday, March 13th 1943

It snowed again during the night, and the room was so cold I had to wear my greatcoat in bed. The window frosted on the inside and there were tiny icicles on the iron bedstead as if a frozen fairy had tiptoed along the metalwork while I had been trying to sleep. It wasn’t just the cold that kept me awake; every so often I thought of those three barefoot children and wished I’d given them something more than a few cigarettes.

After breakfast I tried to stay out of the way. I hardly wanted to remind Colonel Ahrens by my presence that I was soon to be replaced by a judge from the War Crimes Bureau. And unlike many of the men in the 537th I had no great desire to be up at dawn to stand on the main road to Vitebsk and wave to the leader as he drove from the airport to an early lunch with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters. So I borrowed a typewriter from the signals office and spent the time before the flight back to Berlin writing up my report for Judge Goldsche.

It was dull work and a lot of the time I was looking out the window, which was how I came to see Peshkov, the translator with the toothbrush moustache, having a furious argument with Oleg Susanin at the end of which Susanin pushed the other man onto the ground. There was nothing very interesting about this except that it’s always interesting to see a man who looks a bit like Adolf Hitler being shoved around. And so seldom seen.

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?’