Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

Von Gersdorff laughed. ‘Might add to the sense of verisimilitude, sir,’ he said.

The general allowed himself a smile. ‘Perhaps it would at that.’

‘I know you’re a general,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got a better idea. How about you try to keep the lid on things here and I go down to Katyn Wood and take care of Dyakov?’

It certainly didn’t sound like a better idea – not to me. Maybe I was regretting making that little speech about me not being a tough guy; or maybe I just felt like hitting someone and Dyakov looked like he was made for it. What with the Polish Red Cross, someone shooting at me, and the murder of Dr Berruguete, it had been that kind of day.

‘Would you, Gunther? We would both be awfully grateful.’

‘Take my word for it. I’ve dealt with drunks before.’

‘Who better than a Berlin copper to deal with a situation like this, eh?’ He clapped me on the back. ‘You’re a good man, Gunther. A real Prussian. Yes, indeed, you can leave things here to me.’

Von Gersdorff had buttoned up his tunic and was pouring another drink.

‘I’ll drive you, Gunther,’ he said. ‘I’m going to send that signal off to the Tirpitzufer.’ He grinned. ‘You know, I think I’d like to see you take care of Dyakov.’ He handed me the drink. ‘Here. I’ve got a feeling you might need this.’

Thursday, April 29th 1943

It was after midnight when we got to Katyn Wood. I preferred it in the dark – the smell and the flies weren’t so bad at night. Things were quieter, too, or at least they ought to have been. We heard Dyakov a long time before we saw him; he was singing a lachrymose song in Russian. Von Gersdorff pulled the car up outside the front door of the castle where Colonel Ahrens was waiting with Lieutenants Voss and Schlabrendorff and several men from the field police and the 537th. They all ducked at once as a pistol shot rang out in the forest. It was easy to imagine that sound multiplied four thousand times during the early spring of 1940.

‘He does that every so often,’ explained Colonel Ahrens. ‘He fires his pistol in the air, just to let everyone know he’s not bluffing about shooting someone.’

I looked at everyone and snorted with derision. Dyakov wasn’t the only one with a few drinks inside him.

‘It’s one drunken Ivan,’ I sneered. ‘Can’t you just find a marksman and shoot the bastard?’

‘This isn’t any Ivan,’ said Von Schlabrendorff. ‘This is the field marshal’s own Putzer . This is the man who sleeps beside the dog, on his veranda.’

‘He’s right, Gunther,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘You shoot Alok Dyakov and Von Kluge is very likely to shoot you. He’s very attached to that damned Putzer .’

‘You couldn’t shoot him even if you wanted to,’ added Voss. ‘He’s knocked out all the damn spotlights. The ones above grave number one, which is where we think he’s sitting. As a result it’s hard to make out any kind of a target.’

‘Yeah, but not for him,’ said Von Schlabrendorff. ‘That man is like a cat. Drunk or not, I swear he can see in the dark.’

‘Give me your cosh,’ I said to one of the field policemen. ‘He’ll be hearing Berliner Luft in the forest theatre by the time I’ve finished stroking his head.’

The cop handed over his truncheon and I hefted it in my hand for a moment.

‘Wish me luck,’ I told Von Gersdorff. ‘And while I’m gone brief Voss about the latest murder. You never know, he might have an idea who did it.’

All right, Gunther, I told myself, as I set off up the slope in the direction of the singing Russian, now you’re really for it. After all that big talk, now you’re going to have to show them some old-fashioned police work.

Of course it was a long time since I’d done anything as honest as that.

Up until now four great mass graves had been found in Katyn Wood, but further test digging had revealed the existence of at least three more. Graves one, two, three and four were already completely uncovered to a depth of about two metres and the uppermost layer of bodies completely exposed. Most of the bodies so far removed had come from graves two, three and four. From graves five, six and seven only a few centimetres of earth had been removed and the graves only partly exposed. All of this meant that the whole area was difficult to navigate even in daylight, and I was obliged to come at Dyakov diagonally, across graves five and six; a couple of times I stumbled and almost gave the game away entirely.

Dyakov was still drinking and singing, and sitting on the shorter arm of the L-shaped grave number one, which was still full of bodies. I knew precisely where he was because I could see the hot red eye of his cigarette glowing in the dark. I thought I recognized the tune but I wasn’t at all sure about the words, which didn’t sound like any Russian dialect I had ever heard.

‘ Del passat destruim miseries, esclaus aixequeu vostres cors, la terra sera tota nostra, no hem estat res i ho serem tot. ’

Of course that was hardly unusual: in Smolensk they spoke not just Russian but White Ruthenian, not to mention Polish, and – until we Germans showed up – Yiddish. I don’t suppose there was anyone who still spoke Yiddish – anyone alive that is.

When I was perhaps less than ten metres away I picked up a length of wood, intending to throw it over Dyakov’s head, but ended up throwing it a lot higher when I discovered it wasn’t a stick at all but some human remains. The bone clattered into a grove of birch trees close to where he was sitting. Dyakov cursed and fired a shot into the branches. It was enough of a distraction for me to cover the rest of the ground at a lick and then clout him with the copper’s truncheon.

It had been a long time since I’d wielded a cop’s thumper. When I was a bull in uniform you would only have taken it away from me if I’d been dead. Patrolling a dark back street in Wedding at two o’clock in the morning, a thumper felt like your best friend. It was useful for knocking on doors, to smack a bar top, to rouse a sleeping drunk, or to curb an unruly dog; there was very little that could stop a brawl faster than a blow from a thumper to the shoulder or the side of the head. It was rubberized, but that was only to make it easier to grip in wet weather. Inside it was all lead and the effect was literally stunning: getting hit on the shoulder felt like you’d been hit by a car you didn’t see coming; getting hit on the head felt like you’d been run over by a tram. Some skill was needed to place a blow that would render a man unconscious without injuring him more seriously, and in a fight, this was rarely possible. But I was badly out of practice and it was dark. I was aiming for Dyakov’s shoulder only I was off balance because of the uneven ground, and instead I caught him on the temple, just above the ear and harder than I had intended. It sounded like a hundred-metre drive with a good hickory wood off the first tee at the GC Wannsee.

Silently, he toppled over into grave number one like he wasn’t coming back up, and I cursed, not because I’d hit him too hard but because I knew we were going to have to go among the bodies of all those stinking Poles and pull him out – possibly even take him to hospital.

I lit a cigarette, found the Walther P38 and the bottle he had been holding when I hit him, took a swig, and shouted to Voss and Von Schlabrendorff to bring some lights and a stretcher. A few minutes later we had hauled his insensible body out of the grave and Oberfeldwebel Krimminski, who had some medical training, was kneeling beside him checking his pulse.

‘I really am impressed,’ admitted Von Gersdorff, examining Dyakov’s P38.