Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

What was more certain and enduring in my mind was the belief that what I had discovered in that boot was now a source of no small danger to me.

Thursday, March 18th 1943

There were hundreds of snowdrops growing in the garden of the flower house; spring was in the air and I was back in Berlin; the Russian city of Kharkov had been retaken by von Manstein’s forces, and the previous day a number of prominent state and Party figures had been named in the trial of a notorious Berlin butcher called August Nothling. He’d been accused of profiteering, although it would have been more accurate to describe his real crime as that of having supplied large quantities of meat without the requisite food coupons to high government officials such as Frick, Rust, Darre, Hierl, Brauchitsch and Raeder. Frick, the minister of the interior, had received more than a hundred kilos of poultry – this at a time when it was rumoured the food ministry was considering reducing the daily meat ration by fifty grams.

All of this ought to have put me in a better mood – generally speaking there was nothing I enjoyed more than a very public scandal involving the Nazis. But Judge Goldsche had asked me to come and see him a second time to discuss my report on Katyn Wood, and although he had already dispatched Judge Conrad to Smolensk to take charge of an investigation that was still unofficial and secret, I had a bad feeling my part in it was not yet over. The reason for this feeling was simple: despite having been back in the office for three days, I had yet to be assigned to another case, even though a new one was already demanding a high level of investigation.

Grischino was an area to the north-west of Stalino, in Russia. Following a counteroffensive in February, the area had been retaken by the 7th Armoured Division, which found that almost everyone in a German field hospital – wounded soldiers, female nurses, civilian workers – some six hundred people including eighty-nine Italians, had been murdered by the retreating Red Army. For good measure the Reds had raped the nurses before cutting off their breasts and then slitting their throats. Several judges – Knobloch, Block, Wulle and Goebel – were already in Jekaterinovka taking depositions from local witnesses, and this left the bureau severely overstretched. There were a few survivors from the Grischino Massacre now in Berlin’s Charite Hospital who had yet to be deposed by a bureau member, and I could not understand why Goldsche hadn’t asked me to do it immediately upon my return from Smolensk. I’d seen the photographs that were supplied by the Propaganda Service Battalion. In one particular house, the bodies were piled up to a height of 1.5 metres. Another picture of ten German soldiers lying in a line by the side of the road showed that the skulls of the men had been flattened to one third of their normal size, as if someone had driven a truck or a tank over them, most likely while they were still alive. Grischino was the worst war crime committed against Germans I had seen since coming to the bureau, but the judge did not seem inclined to discuss it with me.

‘These murders in Smolensk that you looked into,’ he said, lighting his pipe. ‘Is there anything in that for us, do you think?’

Brahms was playing on the radio in his office, which suggested we were going to have a very private conversation.

‘I assume you mean the two soldiers from the signals regiment and not the six civilians the Gestapo hanged in the street.’

‘I wish they wouldn’t overreact like that,’ said Goldsche. ‘Killing innocent people in retaliation. It really compromises what we’re about in this department. You can dress that kind of thing up any way you like, but it’s still a crime.’

‘Will you tell them or shall I?’

‘Oh, I think it’s best coming from you, don’t you think? After all, you used to work for Heydrich, Bernie. I’m sure Muller will listen to you.’

‘I’ll get right on it, Judge.’

Goldsche chuckled and sucked on his pipe. The chimney in his office must have been bomb-damaged – which was common enough in Berlin – because it was hard to distinguish the smoke off the coal fire from the smoke off his pipe.

‘I’m certain it was a German who killed them both,’ I said. My eyes were starting to water, although that could just as easily have been the syrupy Brahms. ‘It was probably an argument about a whore. That’s one case we can leave to the local field police.’

‘What’s he like, this Lieutenant Ludwig Voss?’

‘He’s a good man, I think. Anyway, I told Judge Conrad he could rely on him. Not so sure about Colonel Ahrens. The man is a little too protective of his men to be really helpful to us. His men and his bees.’

‘Bees?’

‘He keeps an apiary at the castle where the 537th are quartered, which is right in the middle of Katyn Wood. For the honey.’

‘I don’t suppose he gave you any?’

‘Honey? No. In fact by the time I left I got the distinct impression he didn’t like me at all.’

‘Well, there are going to be plenty of bees buzzing around his ears before this particular investigation’s over,’ observed Goldsche. ‘And I expect that’s why, don’t you?’

‘I’ll bet August Nothling could have sold you some honey.’

‘He’s a butcher.’

‘Maybe so. But he still managed to supply twenty kilos of chocolate to the minister of the interior and the field marshal.’

‘That’s exactly what one would expect of a man like Frick. But I certainly didn’t expect it of Field Marshal von Brauchitsch.’

‘When you’ve been retired by the leader, what else can an old soldier do but eat if he’s not to fade away?’

The judge smiled.

‘So what now?’ I asked. ‘For me, I mean? Why don’t you let me depose those wounded soldiers in the Charite? The ones from Grischino.’

‘Actually, I’m going to depose them myself. Just to keep my hand in. Anyway, I was hoping to catch two birds with one trap. I suffer from fearful indigestion, and it occurred to me I might persuade one of the doctors or the nurses to let me have a bottle of liver salts. There’s none to be had in any of the shops.’

‘As you wish. I’m certainly not going to stand between you and your liver. Look, I’m not anxious to head back to Russia, but it strikes me there’s a lot of work to do in Stalino, right now. That’s near Kharkov, isn’t it?’

‘That depends on what you mean by near. It’s three hundred kilometres south of Kharkov. That’s much too far to send you, Bernie. I need you here in Berlin. Especially now and this weekend.’

‘Would you mind telling me why?’

‘I’ve been warned by the ministry of propaganda that we can expect a summons to the Prince Carl Palace at any time. So that we might brief the minister himself on what you discovered in Katyn Wood.’

I let out a groan.

‘No, listen Bernie, I want you to make sure that there is nothing in your report he can find fault with. I don’t think the bureau can afford to disappoint him again so soon after the disappointment he felt after we lost our witness to the sinking of the SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim .’

‘I should have thought that overcoming disappointment is what propaganda is all about.’

‘Besides, it’s Heroes Memorial Day this Sunday. Hitler’s inspecting an exhibition of captured Soviet military material and making a speech, and I need someone with a uniform to accompany me to the Armoury Building and help represent this department. All of the general staff will be there, as usual.’

‘Find someone else, Judge. Please. I’m no Nazi. You know that.’

‘That’s what everyone in this department says. And there is no one else. It seems that this weekend there is only you and me.’