Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘It will be just another rant by the great necromancer about Bolshevik poison. But now I begin to understand. That’s why there are so many judges from the bureau out of town, isn’t it? They’re avoiding this duty.’

‘That’s very true. None of them want to be anywhere near Berlin this weekend.’ He puffed his pipe for a moment and then added: ‘Perhaps they’re afraid of failing to show the proper amount of respect and enthusiasm for the leader’s ability to lead our nation in such a solemn moment of national commemoration.’ He shrugged. ‘On the other hand, they might just be afraid.’

I lit a cigarette – if you can’t beat them, join them – and took a long drag before speaking again.

‘Wait a minute. Is something going to happen, Judge? At the Armoury? To the general staff?’

‘I think something is going to happen, yes,’ said the judge. ‘But not to the general staff. At least not right away. Afterwards it’s quite possible there may be some kind of overreaction on the part of the Gestapo and the SS. Of the kind we were discussing earlier. So I wouldn’t forget your firearm if I were you. In fact, I’d be very grateful if you made sure you brought it with you. I’ve never been much of a shot with a pistol.’

Even as the judge was speaking I remembered a remark made by Colonel Ahrens during one of our more frank conversations – something about the amount of treason talked in Smolensk – and suddenly a lot of what I’d seen seemed to make sense: the package addressed to Colonel Stieff in Rastenburg that Von Dohnanyi had carried all the way from Berlin and which – strangely – Lieutenant von Schlabrendorff had asked Colonel Brandt to carry on Hitler’s plane back to Rastenburg must surely have been a bomb, albeit a bomb that hadn’t exploded.

And what better motive could there be for someone to have killed a couple of telephonists than the possibility that they had overheard the details of a plan to kill Hitler? But when that plan had failed, another plan must have been put into action. That made sense, too: Hitler was increasingly a recluse and the opportunities to kill him were few and far between. All the same, if this was indeed why the two telephonists had been murdered, I found the act repugnant. Hitler certainly deserved to die, and secrecy was undoubtedly important if his assassination was ever to be carried out, but not if that meant the cold-blooded murder of two innocent men. Or was I just being naive?

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The mist clears. I begin to see the elf-king, father. He’s near.’

The judge frowned, trying to recognize my allusion. ‘Goethe?’

I nodded. ‘Tell me something, Judge,’ I said. ‘I suppose Von Dohnanyi’s involved.’

‘Christ, is it that obvious?’

‘Not to everyone,’ I said. ‘But I’m a detective, remember? It’s my job to smell when the fuse is burning. However, if I’ve guessed, it’s possible others might guess too.’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s why the bomb didn’t go off on Hitler’s plane. Because someone else figured it out.’

‘Christ,’ muttered the judge. ‘How did you know about that?’

‘You know, for an intelligence officer with the Abwehr your friend isn’t very clever,’ I said. ‘Brave, but not smart. He and I were on the same plane down to Smolensk. If you’re going to carry a parcel that’s addressed to someone in Rastenburg it looks a lot less suspicious if you deliver it the first time you’re there.’

‘That parcel you saw was only ever the back-up plan to Plan A.’

‘And what was that? Fix the brakes on Hitler’s car? Nobble the vegetarian option in the officer’s mess? Push him over in the snow? The trouble with these damned aristocrats is that they know everything about good manners and being a gentleman and absolutely nothing about cold-blooded murder. If you’re going to do this kind of thing you need a professional. Like the person who murdered those two telephonists. Now he knew what he was doing.’

‘I don’t know for sure what the plan was then.’

‘So what do you know? I mean how are they going to try it this time?’

‘Another bomb, I believe.’

I smiled. ‘You know your salesmanship stinks, Judge. You invite me along to a party and then tell me that a bomb is going to explode while we’re there. My enthusiasm for Sunday morning is diminishing all the time.’

‘A very brave officer from Army Group Centre in Smolensk, who has the duty of taking Hitler round an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry, has agreed to carry a bomb in his jacket pocket. I believe it’s his plan to be as close to the leader as possible when it goes off.’

I wondered if this officer was the Abwehr colonel I’d seen on the plane back from Smolensk. I would have asked the judge, but I thought I’d probably unnerved him quite enough with my remarks about Von Dohnanyi. I certainly didn’t want Goldsche calling this officer and telling him to call off the assassination just because of what I’d guessed.

‘Then we’d better just hope for the best,’ I said. ‘Usually that’s the only option available in Nazi Germany.’

Sunday, March 21st 1943

The Zeughaus or Arsenal was a baroque building of pinkish stone on Unter den Linden that housed a military museum. In the centre of the facade was a classical open pediment, and surrounding the roof was a spindle balustrade along which were arranged a series of twelve or fourteen suits of classical armour, made of stone and empty, as if ready to be claimed by a busload of Greek heroes. But I was inclined to think of these empty suits of armour as belonging to men who were already dead, and therefore more typical of Nazi Germany and the disastrous war we were now waging in Russia. This seemed especially true on the first Heroes Memorial Day that Berlin had witnessed since the surrender at Stalingrad, and there would have been many of the several hundred officers who paraded in front of the huge staircase on the north side of the inner courtyard to hear the leader’s ten-minute speech who had the same unpalatable thought as me: our true heroes were lying under several feet of Russian snow, and all the memorials in the world wouldn’t alter the fact that Hitler’s retreat from Moscow would not be long in following Napoleon’s, and with equally terminal effect upon his leadership.

It was however a more imminent termination to Hitler’s leadership that many of us were praying for on that particular Sunday morning. We stood there to attention, under the barrels of the 10-centimetre field guns Army Group Centre had taken from the Reds, and I for one could cheerfully have wished that someone would fire a fragmentation shell at our beloved leader: the 10-centimetre K353 delivered a 17-kilogram shell containing about six hundred bullets and was devastating to 50 per cent of targets in a 20- to 40-metre area. Which sounded just fine to me. I would probably have been killed as well, but that was all right just so long as the leader didn’t walk away from an explosion.

We listened to a sombre piece of Bruckner that did little to make anyone feel optimistic about anything; then, bare-headed and wearing a grey leather greatcoat, the leader walked to the lectern, and like a malevolent fisherman casting a long line into an infernal black lake, he sought to hook our lowered spirits with an announcement of a lifting of the ban on furlough for serving men because the front had been ‘stabilized’. Then he got to more standard fare about the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the warmonger Churchill, and how the enemies of the Reich meant to abduct and then to sterilize our male youth before eventually slaughtering us in our beds.

In that place of war and destruction, Hitler’s cold, hard voice seemed darker and more subdued than normal, which did nothing to encourage any feeling at all, let alone soldierly sentiment for fallen comrades. It was like listening to the sepulchral tones of Mephistopheles as, in some cavernous mountain hall, he threatened us all with hell. Only the threats were no good; hell was waiting just down the road and we all knew it. You could smell it in the air like hops from a local brewery.