Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘So’s his skull,’ I told him. ‘I may have tapped him a little too hard.’

‘I don’t think I would like to take on an armed man in the dark like that,’ he added, kindly. ‘Look here, the fool had every chance to surrender. There’s no need to reproach yourself, Gunther. He fired a shot at you, didn’t he? And he had three shots left in the magazine. You could easily have been killed.’

‘It’s not my own opinion I’m worried about,’ I said. ‘I can live with that. It’s the field marshal’s displeasure I’m concerned about.’

‘Good point. It might be a while before this fellow’s able to find his own arsehole, let alone Smolensk’s best hunting spots.’

‘How is he?’ I asked Krimminski.

‘He’s alive,’ murmured the Oberfeldwebel. ‘But his breathing is shallow. Of course, that could be the booze. And either way he’s going to have a hell of a headache. Feels like a duck egg on the side of his crown.’

‘We’d best take him to the hospital and have them keep an eye on him,’ I said, feeling a little guilty.

‘That might be a good idea,’ said Von Schlabrendorff.

‘Let me know how he is in the morning,’ I said. ‘Would you?’

‘Of course. I’ll have them telephone the office first thing.’

‘Don’t for Christ’s sake tell Professor Buhtz about this,’ I said to no one in particular. ‘If he finds out that we just trampled through his crime scene to fetch this Ivan out of there he’ll go nuts.’

‘You manage to upset everyone, don’t you Gunther?’ said Colonel Ahrens. ‘Sooner or later.’

‘You noticed that too, eh?’

*

At the castle Von Gersdorff sent a telemessage to the Abwehr in Berlin asking for information about Dr Berruguete. We sat in the neat little sitting room Ahrens had created for officers awaiting a reply, under an Ilya Repin print of Russian men hauling a barge along a bit of coastline. They were making heavy going of it, and their hopeless bearded faces reminded me of the Red Army prisoners we were using to carry the bodies out of the graves. I don’t know what it is about Russians, but I can’t look at any of them without my soul, and then my back, beginning to ache.

‘Quite a night,’ observed Von Gersdorff.

‘It is when you’ve been shot at,’ I said. ‘Twice.’ I told him about the gunshots in Krasny Bor.

‘That explains why you’re not wearing a shirt,’ he said, offering me a cigarette. ‘And why there’s dirt on your tunic.’

‘Yes, but it certainly doesn’t explain why I was shot at.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought it was one of life’s greatest mysteries. Not from one who is as insubordinate as you, my friend.’

‘I’m not always insubordinate. It’s a little special service I provide everyone with a red stripe on his trouser leg.’

‘Then how about a case of mistaken identity?’ Von Gersdorff lit us both with his lighter and leaned back in his chair. He was the most elegant smoker I ever saw: he held the cigarette between his middle fingers so as to minimize the amount of staining on his well-manicured nails, and consequently everything he said seemed to have a similarly measured aspect to it. ‘Perhaps the murderer intended shooting you and managed to hit Dr Berruguete instead. Colonel Ahrens perhaps. And by the way, what have you done to offend him so egregiously, Gunther? The man seems to have taken a very personal dislike to you which goes well beyond simple insubordination.’

‘The sleeping dogs outside,’ I said, nodding at the window. ‘I rather think he wishes I’d let them lie there.’

‘Yes. I can imagine. This used to be a nice little post until we started digging it up. Certainly the air was a lot easier to breathe.’

‘I think it’s safe to assume that one of the first two shots accounted for Dr Berruguete and that only the third was meant for me; or not, given that the shooter missed – perhaps deliberately, perhaps I was just further away. Berruguete was on the opposite side of the wood, after all. Which is one reason I’m not buying a case of mistaken identity. How accurate is that broom-handle of yours anyway?’

‘With the stock attached? It’s very accurate to about a hundred metres. But the sights are more optimistic. They say a thousand metres; a hundred metres is about right in my opinion. But, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, why would someone shoot at you intending to miss?’

‘Perhaps to make me keep my head down until they’d made their escape.’

‘Yes, the Mauser is good at that. Keep your trigger tight and it’s like a garden hose of bullets.’

‘Been a while since I used one. And never with nine-mill ammo. Much of a kick to it?’

Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘Hardly any at all. Why?’

I shook my head, but being an intelligence officer Von Gersdorff wasn’t so easily fobbed off or treated like an idiot. He smiled.

‘What you really mean is – could a woman have fired it?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘No, but it’s what you meant. Dammit Gunther, are you suggesting Dr Kramsta could have killed Dr Berruguete?’

‘I wasn’t suggesting it,’ I insisted. ‘I think you were. All I asked was if the C96 has much of a kick on it.’

‘She’s a doctor,’ he said ignoring my evasion. ‘And a lady. Although one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise since, unaccountably, she seems to have singled you out for particular favour.’

‘I’ve met some doctors who were as lethal as any Mauser. Those fancy clinics in Wannsee are full of them. Only there it’s the bill that packs a kick, not the ammunition. As for the ladies, colonel, my policy is simple: if they can bang a door shut to end an argument, they can bang a gun to the same effect.’

‘So you do think she’s a suspect?’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

Signalman Lutz came into the room bearing a telemessage from Berlin. He delivered a smart Hitler salute and then left us in private, although having decoded the message on the Enigma he knew the contents well enough.

‘It’s from Admiral Canaris himself,’ said Von Gersdorff.

I glanced at my watch. ‘I guess he’s one of those admirals who can’t sleep on land.’

‘Not with Himmler breathing down his neck.’ Von Gersdorff started to read aloud.

‘MET BERRUGUETE IN 1936. NOT SURPRISED WAS MURDERED AS B. MAJOR ARCHITECT OF FRANCOIST POST-WAR REPRESSION.’

‘Yes, of course,’ he said, breaking off for a moment, ‘the admiral was stationed in Spain during the civil war, setting up our own spy network down there. Canaris learned to speak fluent Spanish while he was a prisoner in Chile during the last lot. There’s no one in the whole Tirpitzufer knows more about the Iberian peninsula than him. It was the admiral who persuaded Hitler to support Franco during the war. Spain has always been his special area of interest.’

‘That worked out well for everyone,’ I said.

Von Gersdorff ignored me – he was good at that – and continued reading the telemessage:

‘B. STUDIED MEDICINE AT UNIV. VALLADOLID AND ANTHROPOLOGY AT KAISER WILHELM INSTITUTE IN BERLIN WHERE INFLUENCED BY OTMAR FREIHERR VON VERSCHUER AND PROF VON DOHNA-SCHLODIEN WHO ARGUED CASE FOR STERILIZING MENTALLY DISABLED. TAUGHT GENETICS AT CIEMPOZUELOS MILITARY CLINIC. 1938 SET UP RESEARCH BUREAU OF INSPECTION OF POWS IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS NEAR SAN PEDRO DE CARDENA. CARRIED OUT EXPERIMENTS ON INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE POWS TO ESTABLISH EXISTENCE OF A RED GENE BELIEVING ALL MARXISTS WERE GENETIC RETARDS. PROVIDED FRANCO WITH SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTS TO JUSTIFY FASCIST VIEWS ON SUBHUMAN NATURE OF RED ADVERSARIES. CARRIED OUT FORENSIC WORK ON MANY SPANISH COMMUNISTS LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE OF SMALLER BRAINS. PROB RESPONSIBLE FOR SPANISH STERILIZATION PROGRAMME AND REMOVAL OF 30,000 CHILDREN FROM RED FAMILIES. BELIEVES ALL REDS ARE DEGENERATE AND IF ALLOWED TO BREED WILL ENFEEBLE SPANISH RACE. NONSENSE, OF COURSE, SO GOOD RIDDANCE. COMMUNISTS JUST WRONG NOT EVIL. ROSA LUXEMBURG THE MOST INTELLIGENT WOMAN I EVER MET. CANARIS.’