Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘It’s the Poles he really hates.’

‘Yes. He told me. But Poles aren’t Russians. That’s rather the point of who and what’s buried here, I imagine.’

‘In Von Kluge’s eyes, Polacks, Ivans, Popovs, they’re all the same.’

‘Which seems to be the exact opposite of the way the Russians think – about the Polacks I mean. As far as they’re concerned, Polacks and Germans are virtually the same thing.’

‘I know. But that’s just how this story is. It doesn’t make your job any easier, but I doubt Von Kluge is going to grant a homeland pass to anyone, with the possible exception of Dyakov.’

‘So what’s the story with Dyakov?’

Von Gersdorff shrugged. ‘The field marshal has only the one hunting dog. I suppose he felt there was no reason why he couldn’t have another.’

‘I never did like dogs much, myself. Never even owned one. Still, from what I gather it’s relatively easy to know all about a dog. You just buy them when they’re puppies and throw them a bone now and then. But with a man – even a Russian – I imagine it’s maybe a little more complicated than that.’

‘Lieutenant Voss of the field police is the man to speak to about Dyakov, if you’re interested in him. Are you interested in him?’

‘It’s only that the field marshal recommended I speak to Von Schlabrendorff and Dyakov about drafting in some Hiwi labour to dig up this whole damn wood. I like to know who I’m working with.’

‘Von Schlabrendorff is a good man. Did you know that he’s-’

‘Yes, I know. His mother’s the great-great-granddaughter of Wilhelm the first, the Elector of Hesse, which means that he’s related to the present king of Great Britain. That kind of pedigree should come in very useful when it comes to exhuming several thousand bodies.’

‘Actually I was about to tell you that he’s my cousin.’ Von Gersdorff smiled with good grace. ‘But I certainly think you can trust Dyakov to find a few Ivans to do the digging.’

I stopped digging for a moment and leaned forward to take a closer look before scraping at what looked to be a human skull and the back of a man’s coat.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ asked Von Gersdorff. He turned and waved one of the sentries over.

The man arrived at the double, came to attention and saluted.

‘Fetch some water,’ Von Gersdorff ordered. ‘And a brush.’

‘What sort of brush, sir?’

‘A hand brush,’ I said. ‘From a dustpan, if you can find one.’

‘Yes, sir.’ The soldier went away at the double in the direction of the castle.

Meanwhile I kept on scraping at the half-covered cadaver with the point of my spade, finally revealing two twisted hands bound tight together with a length of wire. I’d never seen anyone who’d been run over and flattened by a tank, but if I had I supposed that this is what it would have looked like. In the Great War I’d stumbled across the bodies of men buried in the mud of Flanders, but somehow this felt very different. Perhaps it was the certainty that there were so many other bodies buried there; or perhaps it was the wire wound around the almost skeletal wrists of the corpse that left me lost for words. There are no good deaths, but perhaps some are better than others. There are even deaths – execution by firing squad, for example – that seem to give the victim a little bit of dignity. The man lying face-down in the dirt of Katyn Wood had certainly died a death that was a long way from that. A more wretched sight would have been hard to imagine.

Von Gersdorff was already crossing himself solemnly.

The soldier arrived back with a brush and a canteen of water. He handed them to me and I started brushing the mud away from the skull before washing it with the water to reveal a small hole in the back of the skull, and then probing it with my forefinger. Von Gersdorff squatted down beside me and touched the perfect bullet hole experimentally.

‘A standard NKVD vyshka ,’ he remarked. ‘A nine-gram airmail from Stalin.’

‘You speak Russian?’

‘I’m an intelligence officer. It’s sort of expected.’ He stood up and nodded. ‘I also have French, English and some Polish.’

‘How does that come about?’ I asked. ‘You speaking Polish?’

‘I was born in Silesia. In Lubin. You know, if it hadn’t been for Frederick the Great bringing Lubin back into Prussia in 1742, I might well have been one of the Polish officers lying in this mass grave.’

‘There’s an amusing thought.’

‘Well, it looks like you’ve found what everyone has been looking for, Gunther.’

‘Not me,’ I said.

‘How’s that?’

‘Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,’ I said. ‘I’m not really here. Those are my orders. The SD and the ministry of propaganda are supposed to be a hundred miles from this site. Which is why I’m wearing an army uniform instead of an SD one.’

‘Yes, I was wondering about that.’

‘Even so, that might not stand close inspection. So I haven’t found anything. I think the report had better state that you found this body. All right?’

‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘You might need to make yourself popular with all the people you let down when you didn’t blow yourself up at the Arsenal.’

‘When you put it like that it’s a wonder I can look myself in the eye every morning.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that. It’s a long time since I so much as glanced at a mirror.’

*

With its chintz-curtained window, oak farmhouse chairs, open fireplace and framed watercolours of Berlin’s historic sites, the signals office was as neat as an old maid’s parlour. Underneath a shelf full of books and steel helmets there was a large table where plain-text messages could be written out on sheets of lined yellow paper. On this was a clean white tablecloth, a vase of dried flowers, a samovar full of hot Russian tea and a polished onyx ashtray. Ranged along the wall were a twenty-four- line switchboard, a five-watt Hagenuk transceiver, a big Magnetophon reel-to-reel tape-recorder, a Siemens Sheet-writer teletype machine, and an Enigma rotor-cipher machine with a Schreibmax printer attachment that could print all the letters of the alphabet onto a narrow paper ribbon, which meant the signal officer operating the Enigma didn’t have to see the decrypted plain-text information.

The under-officer in charge of the signals room was an open-faced young man with reddish hair and amber-framed spectacles. His hands were delicate and his touch on the massive Torn’s transmitting key was – according to Colonel Ahrens – as sure as a concert pianist’s. His name was Martin Quidde and he was assisted by an even younger-looking radio master recently arrived from the signals kindergarten in Lubeck, who had a nervously twitching thigh that looked as if it was permanently receiving a telegraph transmission from home. The pair of them regarded me with watchful respect, as though I were a chunk of raw pitchblende.

‘Relax boys,’ I said. ‘I’m not in an SD uniform now.’

Quidde shrugged as if such a thing hardly mattered to him, and he was right of course, it didn’t, not in Nazi Germany, where a uniform was a guarantee only that a man was afflicted with duties and superiors, and everyone – from some squirt in a pair of leather shorts to an old lady in a housecoat – could prove to be the Gestapo informer who revealed some careless word or patriotic shortcoming that put you in a concentration camp.

‘I’m not Gestapo and I’m not Abwehr. I’m just a prick from Berlin who’s here to do some amateur archaeology.’

‘Are there really four thousand Poles buried in our front garden, sir?’ Quidde was quoting the figure I had included in my telemessage to Goebbels.