Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘And these judges in the War Crimes Bureau, they’re not much more than relics themselves, captain. Their attitudes, their working methods, their accents are positively antediluvian. Even the way they dress. You would think it was 1903 and not 1943. How can a man feel comfortable in a stiff collar? It’s criminal to ask a man to dress like that just because he happens to be a lawyer. I’m afraid every time I look at Judge Goldsche I see the previous British prime minister – that old fool Neville Chamberlain with his ridiculous umbrella.’

‘An umbrella is only ridiculous if it’s not raining, Herr Reich minister. But really, the judge is not the fool he looks. If he sounds ridiculous and slow, that’s just how law is. However, I think I get the picture.’

‘Of course you do. You used to be a top detective. That means you know about law in real life, not what’s in a lot of dusty legal textbooks. I could have spent the next hour talking to Judge Goldsche and he’d have given me the same old nonsense about “standard practice” and “proper procedure”.’ Goebbels shrugged. ‘That’s why I sent him away. I want a different approach. What I don’t want is all his Prussian stucco and dusty wainscoting and piss-elegant protocol. You understand?’

‘Yes. I understand.’

‘So, you can speak freely now that he’s gone. I could sense that you didn’t agree with what he was saying but that you were too loyal to say so. That’s commendable. However, unlike the judge you’ve actually been on the scene. You know Smolensk. And you’ve been a cop at the Alex and that means something. It means that whatever your politics used to be, your methods were the most modern in Europe. The Alex always had that reputation, did it not?’

‘Yes. It did, for a while.’

‘Look, Captain Gunther, whatever you say here and now will be in confidence. But I want your own opinions about how best to handle this investigation, not his.’

‘You mean if we do find some more bodies in Katyn Wood when it thaws?’

Goebbels nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘There’s no guarantee we will. And there’s another thing. The SS were busy in that area. There are Ivans digging for food down there who worry that they’re going to pull a lot more than a potato out of the ground. Frankly, it’s probably a lot easier to find a field that doesn’t contain a mass grave than one that does.’

‘Yes, I know and I agree – we’ll have to be careful. But the button. There is the button you found.’

‘Yes, there’s the button.’

I didn’t mention the Polish captain’s intelligence report – the one I’d found in his boot. It had left me in no doubt that there were Polish officers buried in Katyn Wood, but I had some very good reasons for not mentioning this to the minister – my own safety being the most important.

‘Take your time,’ said Goebbels. ‘I’ve got plenty of time this morning. Would you like some coffee? Let’s have some coffee.’ He picked up the telephone on the coffee table. ‘Bring us coffee,’ he said, curtly. He replaced the receiver and settled back on the sofa.

I stood up and helped myself to another Trummer, not because I wanted another smoke but because I needed time to arrive at an answer.

‘Gunther, I know you’ve handled large-scale, high-profile murder inquiries under the eyes of the press before,’ he said.

‘Not always satisfactorily, sir.’

‘That’s true. Back in 1932, I seem to remember you screwing up a press conference in the police museum at the Alex to talk about the lust murder of a young girl. As I recall, you had a small disagreement with a reporter by the name of Fritz Allgeier. From Der Angriff .’

Der Angriff was the newspaper set up by Joseph Goebbels during the last days of the Weimar Republic. And I had good reason to remember the incident now. During the course of the investigation – which proved fruitless, as the killer was never apprehended – I’d been asked by a man named Rudolf Diels, who subsequently took charge of the Gestapo, to drive the case into a sand dune. Anita Schwarz had been a cripple, and Diels had hoped to move the case out of the public eye in order to spare the feelings of the similarly disabled Goebbels. I refused, which did little to help my career in Kripo, although at the time it was already more or less over. Soon after that I left Kripo altogether, and stayed out of the force until, some five years later, Heydrich obliged me to return.

‘You have an excellent memory, sir.’ I felt my chest tighten, but it was nothing to do with the cigarette I was smoking. ‘I don’t remember what your newspaper said about that press conference, but the Beobachter described me as a liberal left-wing stooge. Are you sure you want my opinions about this investigation?’

‘I remember that, too.’ Goebbels grinned. ‘You were a stooge, through no fault of your own however. But look, all that’s behind us.’

‘I’m relieved you think so.’

‘We’re fighting for our survival now.’

‘I can’t disagree with that.’

‘So please. Give me your best thoughts about what we should do.’

‘Very well.’ I took a deep breath and told him what I thought. ‘Look, sir, there’s a cop’s way to run an investigation, there’s a lawyer’s way to run one, and then there’s a Prussian lawyer’s way of doing it. It seems to me that what you want is the first, because it’s the quickest. The minute you put lawyers in charge of something, everything runs slow; it’s like oiling a watch with treacle. And if I tell you that this needs a cop running things down there it’s not because I want the job. Frankly, I never want to see the place again. No. It’s because there’s an extra factor here.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The way I look at it is this, and I hope you’ll forgive my foolhardy honesty here, but it seems to me that you need this inquiry to be completed urgently, within the next three months – before the Soviets overrun our positions.’

‘Don’t you believe in our final victory, captain?’

‘Everyone on the Russian front knows that the whole thing is going to come down to Stalin’s maths. When we recaptured Kharkov it cost the Reds seventy thousand men and us almost five thousand. The difference is that while the Ivans can afford to lose seventy thousand men we can ill afford to lose five thousand. After Stalingrad, there’s a good chance of a Russian counterattack this summer – on Kharkov and on Smolensk.’ I shrugged. ‘So, this inquiry has to be handled quickly. Before the end of the summer. Perhaps earlier.’

Goebbels nodded. ‘Let’s suppose for a moment that I agree with you,’ he said. ‘And I don’t say that I do. The leader certainly doesn’t. He believes that once the colossus that is the Soviet Union starts to totter, it will suffer an historic collapse, after which we’ll have nothing to fear from an Anglo-American invasion.’

I nodded. ‘I’m sure the leader knows the situation better than me, Herr Reich minister.’

‘But go ahead anyway. What else would you recommend?’

The coffee arrived. It gave me time to fetch another cigarette from the elegant box on the table and to wonder if I should mention another idea. Good coffee has that effect on me.

‘As I see it, we’ve got two weeks before we can do anything – and I think it’s going to take two weeks to make this happen. I mean, it won’t be easy.’

‘Go on.’

‘This is going to sound crazy,’ I said.

Goebbels shrugged. ‘Speak freely, please.’

I pulled a face, and then drank some coffee while I mulled it over for another second.

‘You know, I talk to my mother a lot,’ confessed Goebbels. ‘Mostly in the evening when I return from work. I always think she knows the voice of the people much better than me. Better than a lot of the so-called experts who judge things from the ivory tower of scientific inquiry. What I always learn from her is this: the man who succeeds is the man who is able to reduce problems to their simplest terms and who has the courage of his convictions – despite the objections of intellectuals. The courage to speak, perhaps, even when he believes that what he is suggesting sounds like madness. So, please captain, let me be the judge of what’s crazy and what isn’t.’