Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

I didn’t really believe that. Not that it mattered very much what I believed about the murders now I was back in Berlin. Trying to figure out who murdered the two army telephonists was down to Lieutenant Voss in Smolensk, and I told myself – and told Von Gersdorff – that if I never saw the place until the year 2043 it would be a hundred years too soon.

Monday, March 22nd 1943

It was his right leg. The minister limped into his office in the Leopold Palace at speed, and if the carpet hadn’t been so thick and the distance between the huge door and his desk hadn’t been quite so vast we might not have noticed the shiny special shoe and the even shinier metal brace. Well, almost. We were looking out for it, of course: there were so many jokes told about Joey’s cloven hoof that it was even more notorious than he was – almost a Berlin tourist attraction – and the judge and I kept a close eye on his club foot just so we could say that we’d seen it, in just the same way you wanted to be able to say you’d seen Lotte the bear in the pit at Kollnischer Park, or Anita Berber at the Heaven and Hell Club.

As Goebbels limped into the room the judge and I stood up and saluted in the customary way and he flapped a delicate little hand back over his shoulder in imitation of the way the leader did it – as if swatting an irritating mosquito, or dismissing some sycophant, of which there seemed to be a plentiful supply in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. I suppose it was just that kind of place: before the ministry took over the building in 1933 the palace had been the residence of the Hohenzollerns, the royal family of Prussia, which had employed more than a few sycophants itself.

Goebbels was all smiles and apologies for keeping us waiting. It made a nice change from the kind of hate that was usually heard spilling out of his narrow mouth.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please forgive me,’ he said in a deeply resonant voice that belied his dwarfish stature. ‘I’ve been on the telephone complaining to the High Command about the situation we found at Kharkov. Field Marshal von Bock had reported that all German supplies would be destroyed rather than left behind for the enemy; but when Field Marshal von Manstein took the city again he discovered large quantities of our supplies still undestroyed. Can you believe it? Of course von Bock blames Paulus, and now that Paulus is conveniently a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, who is there to contradict him? I know some of these people are your friends, Judge, but really, it beggars belief. It’s hard enough to win a war without being lied to by people on your own side. The Wehrmacht really needs to be combed out. Did you know that the generals are demanding rations for thirteen million soldiers when there are only nine million Germans under arms? I tell you the leader ought to take the severest action against someone.’

Goebbels sat down behind his desk and almost vanished until he leaned forward on his chair. I was tempted to go and fetch him a cushion, but in spite of his continuing smile, there was good reason to doubt he had a sense of humour. For one, he was short, and I’ve never yet met a short man who could laugh at himself as easily as a taller one; and that’s as true a picture of the world as anything you’ll find in Kant or Hegel. For another he was a doctor of philosophy, and nobody in Germany ever calls himself doctor unless he wants to impress upon other people how impeccably serious he really is.

‘How are you, Judge?’

‘Fine, sir, thank you.’

‘And your family?’

‘We’re all fine sir, thank you for asking.’

The doctor clasped his hands and bounced them excitedly on the blotter, as if chopping herbs with a mezzaluna. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band, although he was famously married. Maybe he figured that none of the starlets at the UFA studios in Babelsberg he was reputedly fond of banging would recall having seen the pictures that had been in every German magazine of the minister marrying Magda Quandt.

‘It’s a great pity your investigation into the sinking of that hospital ship didn’t come off,’ Goebbels said to me. ‘The British are experts at occupying the moral high ground. That would have removed them from it, permanently, make no mistake. But this is even better, I think. Yes, I read your report with great interest, Captain Gunther, great interest.’

‘Thank you, Herr doctor.’

‘Have we met before? Your name seems familiar to me. I mean before you were with the War Crimes Bureau.’

‘No, I’d certainly have remembered meeting you, sir.’

‘There was a Gunther who used to be a detective with Kripo. Rather a good one by all accounts. He was the man who arrested Gormann, the strangler.’

‘Yes sir, that was me.’

‘Well, that must be it.’

I was already nervous about meeting Dr Goebbels – about ten years ago I’d been asked to drop a case as a favour to Joey, but I hadn’t, and I wondered if this was what he remembered. And our little exchange did nothing to make me feel any less like a man sitting on hot coals. The judge was equally nervous – at least he kept tugging at the stud of his wing collar and flexing his neck before he answered the minister’s questions, as if his throat required a little more space to swallow whatever it was that he was going to have to agree to.

‘So, do you really think it’s a possibility?’ Goebbels asked him. ‘That there is some sort of a mass grave hidden down there?’

‘There are lots of secret graves in that part of the world,’ he said, carefully. ‘The problem is making absolutely sure that this is the right one: that this is indeed the site of a war crime committed by the NKVD.’

He nodded at a manila file that lay on top of a copy of that day’s Volkischer Beobachter .

‘It’s all there in Gunther’s report, sir.’

‘Nevertheless I should like to hear the captain talk about it, himself,’ Goebbels said smoothly. ‘My own experience of written reports is that you can usually get more out of the man who wrote it than the report itself. That’s what the leader says. “Men are my books”, he says. I tend to agree with that sentiment.’

I stirred a little under the minister’s sharp eye.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do think it’s a possibility. A strong possibility. The local inhabitants are quite unequivocal that there isn’t a grave in Katyn Wood. However, I believe that’s probably a good sign that there is. They’re lying, of course.’

‘Why would they lie?’ Goebbels frowned, almost as if he regarded lying as something quite inexplicable and beyond all countenancing.

‘The NKVD might be gone from Smolensk but the people are still afraid of them. More than they’re afraid of us, I think. And they’ve got good reason. For twenty years the NKVD – and before them the OGPU and the Cheka – have been murdering Russians wholesale.’ I shrugged. ‘We’ve only been doing it for eighteen months.’

Goebbels thought that was very funny.

‘I’ll say one thing for Stalin,’ he said, ‘he knows the best way to treat the Russian people. Mass murder is as primitive a language as there is, but it’s the best language in which to talk to them.’

‘So, there’s that,’ I said. ‘And there’s the fact that what they actually told me flies in the face of what I found lying on the ground.’

‘The bones and the button; yes, of course.’ Goebbels pinched his lower lip thoughtfully.

‘It’s not much to go on, I’ll admit, but I’ve had it verified as belonging to the greatcoat of a Polish officer.’

‘Is it possible that the coat could have been stolen from a Polish officer by a Red Army soldier, who was subsequently killed in the battle of Smolensk?’ asked Goebbels.