Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

I kept asking myself if there had been a way I could have avoided that, but the same answer kept on coming back at me: Quidde opening his mouth about what he knew to someone in the Gestapo, the field police, Kripo, the SS or even the Wehrmacht would have been as good a way as any of destroying any future chance that Von Gersdorff – or one of his colleagues – might get to kill Hitler. No one’s life – not Quidde’s and certainly not my own – was more important than that. For the same reason, I knew I was going to have to tell Von Gersdorff about Quidde and the tape to prove to him that Von Kluge could no longer be trusted.

I knew that Batov’s killer enjoyed using a knife – a knife is such a close-quarters weapon that you have to take pleasure in the damage you can inflict on another human being. It’s not a weapon for someone who’s squeamish. I might have said that the man who had murdered Batov and his daughter was the same man who had murdered the two signallers, Ribe and Greiss – the throat-cutting was similar, of course – except that the motives for these crimes looked so entirely different.

I knew I needed to find Rudakov even if he was dead in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Rudakov had heard everything Batov had told me about the documentary and photographic proof of the Katyn massacre, and he’d heard the deal Batov had demanded. If that wasn’t a motive for a former NKVD officer to kill a man and his daughter, I didn’t know what was. If he had killed the Batovs, then I guessed he was long gone, and the field police were hardly likely to catch someone who had been resourceful enough to have faked a mental disability for the best part of eighteen months.

I knew I had to go to the Kommandatura now and report the murders, so that the field police and the local Russian cops could be summoned to the crime scene. Death had undone so many in and around Smolensk that Lieutenant Voss was going to wonder if murder was becoming infectious in the oblast that was his zone of responsibility. With four thousand men lying dead in Katyn Wood I was beginning to wonder that myself.

But most of all I knew I was about to have a big problem with the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda when I told him that the extra evidence I had promised him of exactly what had happened at Katyn had disappeared along with our one potential witness, and that we were now back to having to rely on the forensics and nothing else.

In that respect, it was fortunate for Goebbels and Germany and the Katyn investigation that Gerhard Buhtz was a highly competent forensic scientist – much more competent than I or Judge Conrad had anticipated.

I was about to discover just how competent he really was.

*

The officers’ canteen at Krasny Bor was a chintzy sort of place, a bit like a dining room in a provincial Swiss hotel, except for the Russian waiters wearing white mess jackets and the gleaming regimental silver on the sideboard; and no provincial Swiss hotel – even one at high altitude – ever had clouds inside the dining room: near the wooden ceiling of the canteen there was always a thick layer of tobacco smoke like a blanket of persistent fog over an aerodrome. Sometimes I would lean back in my chair and stare up at this grey fug and try to imagine myself back at Horcher’s in Berlin or even La Coupole in Paris. The food at Krasny Bor was as plentiful as it was at the Bendlerblock, and with an extensive wine list and a selection of beers that would have been the envy of any restaurant in Berlin, it was easily the best thing about being in Smolensk. The chef was a talented fellow from Brandenburg, and for Berliners like myself there was always an air of excitement when his two best dishes – Konigsberger Klopse and lamprey pie – were on the menu. So I was less than pleased when, just as I’d given my lunch order to the waiter, an orderly came and told me that Professor Buhtz was urgently requesting my presence in his laboratory-hut. I might have asked the orderly to tell Buhtz to wait until after lunch but for the fact that Von Kluge was seated at the next table and had certainly heard the details of the message, which, after all, came from someone who carried a major’s rank in the Wehrmacht. Von Kluge was always very Prussian about such things and took a dim view of junior officers shirking their duties in favour of their stomachs. He was an abstemious man and, unlike the rest of us, wasn’t much interested in the pleasures of the table. I expect he was thinking more about the pleasures of his bank account. So I stood up and went to find the forensic pathologist.

His makeshift laboratory was easily identifiable from the BMW motorcycle parked immediately outside. It was one of the larger huts on the outer perimeter of army headquarters at Krasny Bor. I knew Buhtz had an even larger and far better-equipped laboratory in the town hospital on Hospitalstrasse near the city’s main railway station, but he felt safer working at Krasny Bor, on account of the fact that the previous autumn some German doctors working in the hospital at Vitebsk had been kidnapped, genitally mutilated, and then murdered by partisans.

To my surprise, I found the professor in the company of Martin Quidde, whose dead body was now lying in an open coffin on the wooden floor. A crude Y-shaped stitch ran the length of his torso like the track for a small boy’s electric train set, and the top of his skull displayed the tell-tale purple line of having been removed and then replaced as if it had been the lid on a tea caddy. But it wasn’t Quidde that Buhtz had summoned me to discuss in confidence; at least not right away.

‘Sorry to interrupt your lunch, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to discuss this in front of everyone in the mess.’

‘You’re probably right, sir. It’s never a good idea to discuss forensics when other men are trying to eat lunch.’

‘Well, this is rather urgent. And not to say sensitive. And I’m not talking about the stomachs of our fellow officers.’

‘What is it?’ I asked coolly.

He took off his leather apron and then led me to a microscope by a frosted window. ‘You remember the skull I took away from Katyn Wood? Your dead Polack?’

‘How could I forget? Outside of a play by William Shakespeare it’s not often you see a man with a decomposing head under his arm.’

‘That Polish officer wasn’t – as you might have expected he would have been – shot with a Russian pistol like a Tokarev or a Nagant.’

‘I’d have thought the hole was too small to be from a rifle,’ I muttered.

Buhtz switched on a light near the microscope and invited me to take a look at the shell casing.

‘No, indeed, you’re quite right,’ he said as I peered through the eyepiece. ‘Quite right. On the bottom of the shell casing that your Russian friend Dyakov found in the mass grave you’ll see that the trademark and calibre are clearly visible on the brass.’

He was pulling on his army tunic while he spoke. I dare say that slicing open Corporal Quidde meant he’d worked up an appetite.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Geco 7.65. Bloody hell, that’s the Gustav Genschow factory in Durlach, isn’t it?’

‘You really are a detective, aren’t you?’ said Buhtz. ‘Yes, it’s a German shell. A 7.65 won’t fit a Tokarev or a Nagant. Those pistols only take 7.62-calibre ammo. But 7.65 does fit a Walther like the one I bet you’re wearing under your arm.’

I shrugged. ‘So what are you saying? That they were shot by Germans after all?’

‘No, no. I’m saying they were shot by German weapons. You see, I happen to know that before the war, the factory exported weapons and ammunition to the Ivans in the Baltic states. The Tokarev and the Nagant are all right as far as they go. The Nagant you can actually use with a sound-suppressor, unlike any other pistol, and a lot of NKVD murder squads like to use it where silence is required. It really is very quiet. But if you want to get the job done as efficiently and quickly as possible and you don’t mind about the noise – and I can’t see that they would have minded, particularly, in the middle of Katyn Wood – then the Walther is your weapon of choice. I’m not being patriotic. Not in the least. The Walther doesn’t jam, and it doesn’t misfire. If you’re shooting four thousand Polacks in one weekend then you need German pistols to get the job done. And my guess is that you’ll find that all four thousand of these fellows were topped in the same way.’