Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

I took out my own Walther – the very gun that had killed Quidde – checked the safety, lifted my elbow and placed the muzzle of the automatic against the nape of my own neck. The demonstration was eloquent enough. It was easily possible.

‘There was no need even to remove his helmet,’ I said.

‘All right,’ said Voss. ‘Suicide. But I don’t have your Alexanderplatz experience and training.’

‘I never mind the obvious explanation. Sometimes it’s just too damned hard to be clever – clever enough to ignore what’s obvious. Well, I’m not sufficiently clever to offer an alternative in this case. It’s one thing shooting yourself in the head, it’s something else altogether to cut your own throat. Besides, this time we even have the weapon.’

Voss tugged off Quidde’s helmet to reveal a hole in the man’s forehead. ‘And it looks like we have the bullet, too,’ he said, inspecting the inside of the signaller’s tin hat. ‘You can see it embedded in the metal.’

‘So you can,’ I said. ‘For all the good it will do us out here in Smolensk.’

‘Perhaps we should search his billet for a suicide note,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Perhaps there was a woman. Or perhaps there wasn’t a woman. Either one of those can seem like a good enough reason for some Fritzes. But even if there’s not a note, it won’t make a difference. Who’d read it anyway, apart from you and me and maybe Colonel Ahrens?’

‘Still it’s curious, don’t you think? Three fellows from the one signals regiment meeting an untimely end in as many weeks.’

‘We’re at war,’ I said. ‘Meeting an untimely end is what being in this crummy country is all about. But I take your point, Ludwig. Maybe there’s something dodgy in those radio waves after all. That’s what some people think isn’t it? That they’re hazardous? All that energy heating up your brain? It would certainly explain what’s been happening at the Ministry of Enlightenment.’

‘Radio waves – yes, I never thought of that,’ said Voss.

I smiled; I was taking to obfuscation like a duck to water, and I wondered how much muddier my wings and webbed feet could make that water before flying away from the scene of my crime.

‘Those signals boys are living right next to a powerful transmitter, day in, day out. The mast at the back of the castle looks just like the lanky lad. It’s a wonder they haven’t sprouted aerials on their damn heads.’

Voss frowned and then shook his head. ‘The lanky lad?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s what we Berliners call the radio tower in Charlottenburg.’ I shook my head. ‘So maybe radio waves gave poor Quidde’s brain an itch that he decided he had to scratch with a bullet from a Walther automatic. Probably while he was standing up, too, from the way the blood’s splattered across the grass.’

‘It’s an interesting theory,’ admitted Voss. ‘About the radio waves. But you’re not serious.’

‘No, it’d be hard proving it.’ I shook my head. ‘More likely he was just depressed at being out here in this shit-hole and staring down the barrel of a Red Army counteroffensive this summer. I can see where he was coming from there. Smolensk would drive anyone to suicide. Frankly I’ve thought about nothing else but blowing my brains out since I got here.’

‘That’s one way of getting back home,’ said Voss.

‘Yes, there’s a curious atmosphere at Dnieper Castle and Katyn Wood. Colonel Ahrens seemed very disturbed by it himself the other day. Don’t you think so?’

‘He’s certain to take this badly. I never met an officer who was more concerned with the welfare of his men.’

‘That does make a pleasant change, it’s true.’ I narrowed my eyes and looked up at the trees. ‘But why this park? You don’t suppose this fellow was a music lover, do you?’

‘I dunno. It is sort of peaceful.’

Hearing a loud whoop and a raucous cackle of laughter I glanced around. The drunks were still there with the dogs and the campfire. It wasn’t just novels that were absurdly long in Russia, it was drinking sessions, too; this one was starting to look a lot like War and Peace .

‘Almost peaceful,’ added Voss.

‘Do you speak any Russian, Voss?’

‘A bit,’ said Voss. ‘Do this and do that, mostly. You know – the language of the occupier.’

‘It’s probably a waste of time,’ I said, ‘but let’s go and ask the Red Army if they saw anything.’

‘I’m afraid the orders come a lot more easily than the questions. And I’m not sure I’ll understand the answers.’

‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet, Ludwig.’

I was pushing my luck and I knew it, but I don’t play skat and I never liked dice much, so in Smolensk I was going to have to get my thrills where I could. The Hotel Glinka was off limits to suckers like me who prefer it if a girl does that sort of thing because she wants to and not because she has to. That left the impossibly thick Russian novel back in my room and the flutter from a conversation with a bunch of hard-drinking Ivans who might just have seen a civilian answering my own description shoot a German soldier in cold blood. Of course, speaking to all the possible witnesses is what a real detective would have done anyway, and I was gambling they could not or didn’t care to remember anything at all. And when, after a five-minute chat with these piss-artists, Voss and I ended up with nothing but a lot of uncomprehending fearful shrugs and some very bad breath in our nostrils, I felt like a winner all the same. It wasn’t like breaking the bank at Monte Carlo, but it was enough.

Thursday, April 1st 1943

The following morning I went to see Doctor Batov at the Smolensk State Medical Academy. By now I had come to recognize the canary-coloured building as typically Soviet – the kind of outsized hospital that was very likely the subject of some aspirin commissar’s ambitious five-year plan for treating Russia’s sick and injured. The noticeboards in the enormous admissions hall still displayed yellowing Cyrillic notices boasting about the efficiency of Smolensk’s medical personnel and how the number of patients treated had increased, year on year, as if the sick had been so many tractors. Given what I now knew about Stalin, I wondered what might have happened if the number of patients treated had fallen. Would the communists have concluded that Russians were just becoming healthier? Or would the director of the academy have been shot for failing to meet his target? It was an interesting dilemma and pointed up a real point of difference between Nazism and Communism as forms of government: there was no room for the individual in Soviet Russia; conversely not everything was state-managed in Germany. The Nazis never shot anyone for being stupid, inefficient or just plain unlucky. Generally speaking the Nazis looked for a reason to shoot you, the commies were quite happy to shoot you without any reason at all – but when you’re going to be shot, what’s the difference?

Batov was absent from his sixth-floor office, and when I failed to see him in his laboratory I asked a weary-looking German medical orderly if he knew where the Russian doctor was to be found. He told me that the Russian doctor hadn’t been seen at the hospital for a couple of days.

‘Is he ill? Is he at home? Is he just taking some time off? What?’

The orderly shrugged. ‘Don’t know, sir. But really it’s not like him at all. He may be an Ivan but I’ve never known a man who was more dedicated to the patients. Not just his patients, but ours too. He was supposed to carry out an operation on one of our men yesterday afternoon and he never showed up for it. And now the man is dead. So you can draw your own conclusions.’