Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘It was in the door pocket,’ she said. ‘Like a road map.’

‘The fellow who owns this car is with the Abwehr,’ I said. ‘He likes to get where he’s going. A broom-handle Mauser will do that for you.’

‘A spy. How exciting.’

‘Be careful with that,’ I said, instinctively. ‘It’s probably loaded.’

‘Actually it’s not,’ she said, checking the breech for a moment. ‘But there’s a couple of stripper clips in the door pocket. And really, you mustn’t worry. I know what I’m doing. I’ve handled guns before.’

‘So I see.’

‘I always liked the old box cannon,’ she said. ‘That’s what my brother used to call this gun. He had two.’

‘Two guns are always better than one. That’s my philosophy.’

‘Sadly it didn’t work for him. He was killed in the Spanish Civil War.’

‘On which side?’

‘Does it matter now?’

‘Not to him.’

She returned the Mauser to the inside of the stock and then to the leather door pocket. Then she flipped open the glovebox.

‘Your spy friend,’ said Marianne. ‘He doesn’t believe in taking any chances, does he?’

‘Hmm?’ I glanced at her again, and this time she was drawing a bayonet from its scabbard and scraping the edge with the flat of her thumb.

I slowed the car at the gate, waved at the sentries on duty and drove onto the main road, where I slipped the spindle shift into neutral, lifted the clutch, pulled on the handbrake and took a closer look at the bayonet.

‘Careful, it’s as sharp as a surgeon’s catlin,’ she said.

It was a standard-issue K98 of the kind you’d have found on any German soldier’s bolt-action short rifle; and she was right: the edge was paper-thin.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘It’s just a bayonet.’

‘Yes. It’s just a bayonet, isn’t it?’

I nodded and handed it back to her to return to the glovebox – after all, Von Gersdorff’s bayonet wasn’t missing a scabbard. And I saw little point in telling her that a bayonet had been the probable weapon in the murders of four people in Smolensk, one of them a young woman who had been tortured.

‘I suppose I thought that the man who owns this car wasn’t exactly the type to use a knife.’

I told myself he was hardly the type to blow himself up either. I put the car back in gear and drove on.

‘Then again, you can’t be too careful in an enemy country at night.’

‘You make that sound like I should stay very close to you, Gunther.’

‘Like a pill I swallowed. But you’re the doctor. I guess you’ll know what’s healthy for both of us.’

‘Call me Ines, would you? Most people do.’

‘Ines? I thought your name was Marianne.’

‘It is. But I never liked that name very much. When I was a girl living in Spain I decided I much preferred to be called Ines. It’s what my mother wanted to call me. Don’t you think it’s better?’

‘Actually it’s getting better every time I think about it. I think it suits you. Like that fur and the Carat you’re wearing.’

All the way into Smolensk I kept Ines amused with my conversation, and her bright smiles and easy laughter were like a kind of prize in my eyes: when I spoke to her, it was as if there was no one else in the world.

We reached the outskirts of the city, and at the roadblock on the Peter and Paul bridge we showed our papers to the field police. By now my association with Lieutenant Voss meant that they were beginning to recognize me, but seeing Ines Kramsta with her legs crossed in the front seat of the Mercedes gave them a thrill.

‘Watch it boys, she’s a doctor, and it’s castor oil for both of you if you don’t let us through.’

‘I’d drink anything right now,’ confessed one of the bloodhounds.

‘Mind me asking where you’re going, sir?’ asked the other.

‘The doc wants to see the cathedral. Saint Luke is the patron saint of doctors.’

‘Yes, well see if he can’t be persuaded to look out for a couple of sentries in the field police while he’s at it.’

‘We’ll certainly do our best,’ said Ines.

There wasn’t much to do in Smolensk at night if you didn’t want to try the pleasures of the brothels or the local cinema, and the Cathedral Church of the Assumption was full of devout Russians and quite a few almost as devout German soldiers. You could tell they were devout by the fact that some of the Germans were praying to Our Lady and Saint Luke, but that might just have been the fact that our position in southern Russia was becoming critical – Soviet forces were now pushing west and threatening to isolate Army Group A in the Caucasus in the same way as the Sixth Army had been encircled at Stalingrad. One way or another there was quite a lot to pray about, if you were a German. I guess the Russians were praying their cathedral might still be standing when the Germans pulled out of Smolensk. They had quite a bit to pray about, too. Either way God was going to have to choose sides and choose soon: the godless communists or the blaspheming Germans. Who would be God with a choice like that?

Inside, standing in front of the iconostasis, we were both silent for a long while, and gradually silence gave way to reflection. With so much gold around there was plenty of that to be found. I had to admit, the cathedral was beautiful, and it wasn’t just the gold that made me appreciate it. It reminded me a little of the Berlin Cathedral Church on Unter den Linden and going there at Easter with my mother. Every cathedral does that to me, which is why I tend to keep away from them. I guess Freud would have called it an Oedipus complex, but me, I think I just miss my mother.

‘They say Napoleon liked the cathedral so much he threatened to kill any French soldier who stole anything off the iconostasis,’ I said quietly in her ear.

‘That’s dictators for you. Always threatening to kill someone.’

‘Why do people want to be dictators anyway?’

‘Not people. Men. And have you noticed how they always claim to love art and architecture?’

‘Maybe so, but I happen to know that Hitler didn’t bother to look at this cathedral when he was here a few weeks ago. At least, not from the ground. He might have had a good look at it from the air.’

‘Then he missed a wonderful experience.’

‘Amen to that. You know I never had a date with a girl in a cathedral. I think maybe I should have tried it before now. Being here with you almost makes me believe in God.’

‘I think the incense is going to your head.’

‘Maybe you’re right. I just had the megalomaniacal idea of trying to annex you for the Greater German Reich.’

‘I think it’s time you drove me back to Krasny Bor.’

‘What, and miss the Kremlin in the moonlight?’

‘There’s always tomorrow night. If you want to. Besides, Professor Buhtz likes to start his forensic work first thing.’

‘The early bird catches the worm, huh?’

‘In my line of work there’s always that possibility. But it’s more likely the other way around. There’s not much escapes worms. Believe me, you can tell a lot from them. That’s one of my forensic specialties: tissue degeneration. How long a body has been dead. That kind of thing.’

‘You’re right. I’d better drive you home.’

‘Hey, I thought you liked my perfume, Gunther.’

‘Formaldehyde number one? Oh, I do like it. But I have to get some rest, too. I’m taking a girl to see the Kremlin in the moonlight tomorrow night.’

We hardly knew each other and yet, without ever having acknowledged it with so much as a word or a brushed finger, we both seemed to recognize something in the other’s eyes that – against all expectation and beyond all understanding – felt as if it was determined to make us lovers. We had connected on some invisible level behind our clever conversation and common courtesies, and it would have spoiled the game if either one of us had mentioned aloud what we sincerely hoped would happen. There was no admission of what we really felt – an atavistic attraction that was more than lust and yet not love either. Words – even German words – would have been inadequate and certainly too clumsy for what we felt. No more was there any kind of objection raised to the idea of what hovered unspoken in the air between us. Never; not once. It just seemed as if we both knew it was going to happen because it was simply meant to be. Of course that kind of thing happened a lot during the war, but still this felt like something out of the ordinary. Perhaps it was the place we were in and what we were doing, as if there was so much death around that it would have seemed a kind of blasphemy not to have gone along with what the capricious generosity of life seemed willing to thrust upon us.