Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

In spite of my late night I was up before any of the international commission had arrived in the mess. So was the field marshal, and as soon as he saw me, Von Kluge came to my table, kicked a chair out impatiently, and sat down. His granite-grey face was a study of snarling fury, like a gargoyle on an old German church.

‘I understand from Colonel Ahrens that it was you who thought fit to batter my man Dyakov over the head with a truncheon last night,’ he said through clenched yellow teeth. It was clear he would have bitten me if he had not been an officer and a gentleman.

‘Sir, with respect, he was drunk and he was shooting at people,’ I said.

‘Rubbish. I might have understood your actions, Gunther, if he’d been on a tram, or in a crowded building. But no – he was in the middle of a fucking forest. At night. I should have thought everyone with a brain in his head would have realized he was well out of harm’s way. It seems to me that the only people he was in danger of shooting were a few thousand of your beloved dead Polacks.’

Suddenly they were my dead Polacks.

‘That’s not how it seemed at the time, sir. General von Tresckow asked me to assist his adjutant and-’

‘Was anyone injured? No, of course they weren’t. But like some stupid, heavy-handed Berlin goon, you had to crack his skull. Probably enjoyed it, too. That’s the reputation of the Berlin police, isn’t it? Crack skulls, ask questions later? You should have left him alone to sleep it off. You should have waited until the morning. By now he’d have been quite manageable instead of fucking insensible.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘I just had a call from the hospital. He’s still unconscious. And there’s a lump on his head that’s the size of your fucking brain.’

Von Kluge leaned forward and extended a long thin forefinger toward the centre of my face. There was a slight smell of alcohol on his breath and I wondered if he’d already had a nip from the schnapps decanter. I knew that as soon as he was gone I was going to have one myself – there are better starts to a man’s day than being chewed out by an irate field marshal.

‘I tell you this, my blue-eyed Nazi friend. You had better fucking pray that my man recovers. If Alok Dyakov dies, I’ll court-martial you and then I’ll tie a rope under your ear myself. D’you hear? I’ll hang you for murder. Just like I hanged those two bastards from the Third Panzer Grenadiers. And don’t think I can’t. You’re a long way from the protection of the RSHA and the so-called Ministry of Enlightenment now. I run the show down here in Smolensk, not Goebbels or anyone else. I’m in command here.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Arse.’

He stood up abruptly, knocking over the chair he had been sitting on, turned, kicked it out of his way and stomped out of the mess leaving me in need of some clean underwear. I’d suffered a verbal barrage before, only none quite as public or perhaps as threatening, and Von Kluge was right about one thing: I was a long way from the relative safety of Berlin. A German field marshal – especially one whose loyalty had been expensively bought by Hitler – could do more or less what he liked with a whole army at his back.

Not that the ministry looked like it would be of much help to me anyway, as soon after the field marshal had left, an orderly presented me with a teletype message from State Secretary Otto Dietrich at the ministry informing me that if the international commission left Smolensk before completing its work, then neither Sloventzik nor myself should even bother coming home. It was – the message informed me – our joint responsibility to make sure the death of Dr Berruguete remained a secret, at all costs. I tossed a second glass of schnapps at the back of my head, since it seemed unlikely that I could feel any worse than I did right then.

‘It’s a little early for that, isn’t it?’

Ines Kramsta was standing behind me with a cup of coffee, a cinnamon roll and a cigarette. She was wearing the same combination of trousers, blouse and jacket she’d been wearing the previous night, but she still looked better than most women.

‘That all depends on whether I went to bed or not.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes, eventually; but I couldn’t sleep. I had too much to think about.’ I took the cigarette from her mouth and puffed at it for a second while ushering her to a spare table. We sat down.

‘I’m quite sure schnapps won’t help you think any better than you can manage normally.’

‘Well, that’s the whole point of it. Too much thinking is bad for me. I get ideas when I’m thinking. Crazy ideas like I know what I’m doing down here.’

‘Would some of those crazy ideas include me?’

‘After last night? They just might. Then again that’s hardly a surprise. It seems you’re a woman of many parts.’

‘I had formed the impression that there was only one part that really interested you. Are you sulking because I didn’t let you sleep with me last night?’

‘No. It’s just that even as I think I might be getting to know you I find I don’t know you at all.’

‘Do you think it’s because I’m smarter than you?’

‘It’s that or everything I’ve discovered about you, doctor.’

She didn’t flinch. I had to hand it to her, if she had killed Dr Berruguete she was a cool one.

‘Oh? Like what, for instance?’

‘For one thing I found out that you and Colonel Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff are related.’

Ines frowned. ‘I could have told you that.’

‘Yes, and I wonder why you didn’t when you suggested I should arrest him for Dr Berruguete’s murder. That was very cute of you.’ I stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray before quietly pocketing the stub.

She smiled a sly smile and then stopped it up with the cinnamon roll. It certainly didn’t stop her from being cute – not in my eyes.

‘We’re not exactly close, Rudolf and me. Not any more.’

‘He told me that himself.’

‘What else did he tell you?’

‘That you used to be a communist.’

‘That kind of thing is called history, Gunther. It’s a favourite subject for Germans. Especially rather backward Prussians like Rudolf.’

I sighed. ‘Family feud, huh?’

‘Not really. Tolstoy says that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. But it’s simply not true. With any family it’s always the same reasons that cause trouble for everyone: politics, money, sex. That’s how it was for us. I think that’s how it is for everyone.’

I sighed. ‘I don’t think any of those cover the kind of trouble I’m in right now.’

‘Your trouble is that you persist in seeing yourself as an individual in a systematized collectivist world. Trouble is what defines you, Gunther. Without trouble you have no meaning. You might think about that sometime.’

‘It will be a real comfort to me when I’m hanged to know that I really didn’t have any choice but to do what I did.’

‘You really are in trouble, aren’t you?’ She touched my arm solicitously. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘The field marshal tells me he’s going to hang me if his Russian Putzer dies.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘He means it.’

‘But what’s that got to do with you?’

‘After you went to bed I tried to knock some sense into the fellow. He was drunk and threatening to shoot people. German people.’

‘And you knocked a little too hard, is that it?’

‘You understand everything, doctor.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘In the state hospital. Unconscious. Maybe worse than that. I’m not so sure there’s anyone there who knows the difference anymore.’

‘Is that where they took Berruguete’s body last night?’