A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) by Philip Kerr
I shrugged. ‘But even if we do that I still think it will suit plenty of people to say that it was Germany who killed those men. Frankly, I think Goebbels is wasting his time, although I wouldn’t dream of telling him that. The Americans and the British have invested too much in Uncle Joe to turn away from him now. It might be embarrassing for it to be proved in front of the world what they already know in their heart of hearts – that the Bolsheviks are every bit as loathsome as the Nazis. Embarrassing, yes, but I don’t think it will really change very much, do you?’
Batov was quiet for a moment. His eyes flicked to one side and for a moment I thought he was listening to something I couldn’t hear – a neighbour perhaps, or even someone else in the apartment. But when he took a deep breath and clasped his hands tightly for a moment – so tightly his knuckles whitened – I realized he was steeling himself to tell me something even more important.
‘What if I could prove definitively that the NKVD murdered those Poles? What if I told you I had evidence of what Major Blokhin and his men had done here – here in Smolensk and in Katyn Wood? What would you say to that, my German friend?’
‘Well, things might be different, I suppose.’ I paused, lit another cigarette, and pushed the packet across the table toward Batov. ‘But different for who?’
‘I mean, could they be any different for me and my daughter?’
‘Do you mean money? I can give you money. I can get more money if what I can give you is not enough.’
‘No. Your money is no good. Nor is our money, if it comes to that. There’s nothing to buy with money. Not in Smolensk. You certainly cannot buy the one thing I need most of all – a future for me and my daughter. There’s no future for us here. You see, when the Red Army recaptures Smolensk – as, with respect, inevitably it will – there will be a dreadful reckoning in this city. The NKVD will conduct a new witch-hunt to find all of those traitors who did business with the Germans. And as someone who has been questioned before, whose wife was a spy and a wrecker, then I’m automatically suspect. But if that weren’t enough, then as someone whose hospital is full of wounded German soldiers – which is aiding and abetting the enemy, plain and simple – the fact of the matter is that I will be one of the very first to be shot. My daughter, too, probably. I have less chance of surviving this war than an ant on the floor.’
‘How old is she? Your daughter?’
‘Fifteen. No, our only chance of being alive this time next year is if I can persuade you Germans to take me back to Germany with you as a – what do you call it?’
‘A Zeppelin volunteer.’
Batov nodded.
‘Can you prove it?’
He nodded again. ‘I have the proof. Enough proof for it to seem almost suspicious. But it is proof nonetheless. It is proof that cannot be questioned. Enyoperovezhempe geraenka.’
He glanced out of the window. ‘It’s stopped snowing,’ he said. ‘We could walk, I suppose. It’s not far to the hospital. Me, I walk there every day. But you Germans don’t much like walking. I’ve noticed that when you invade someone else’s country you do it at great speed, and in as many vehicles as you can. You Germans, with your cars and your autobahns. Yes, I should like to see those. Germany must be a beautiful country if people want to get from one place to another at such enormous speed. Here no one is ever in a hurry to go anywhere else in Russia. What would be the point? They know it’s just as shitty somewhere else as the place you are now.’ He grinned. ‘Are you too drunk to drive that car of yours?’
‘I’m too drunk to take proper care of a pretty girl, but I’m never too drunk to drive a car. And certainly not in Russia. If I hit someone or something I’m not likely to care very much. I’m a German, right? So fuck it. Besides, a bit of fresh air will sober me up in no time.’
‘Again spoken like a true Russian. We have plenty of fresh air in Russia. Much more than we need.’
‘That’s why we came,’ I said. ‘At least according to Hitler. We needed the space to breathe. That’s why we hanged those two German soldiers this morning. It’s all part of the master race’s master plan to extend our living space.’ I laughed. ‘I’m drunk. That’s the only reason why it seems funny, I suppose.’
‘In Russia that’s the only reason anything ever seems funny, my friend.’
We left the apartment and I drove us down to the hospital. Despite the fresh snow, with all the cracks and potholes the car had little trouble in gripping the road. I felt like I was bouncing around on the floor of the plane from Berlin.
‘Do you remember I told you about Lieutenant Rudakov and how he fell and cracked his head on the floor, while he was drunk?’ asked Batov.
‘Yes.’ I swerved to avoid a cart and a horse in the middle of the road. ‘I’m beginning to understand how he must have been feeling.’
‘The lieutenant suffered a depressed skull fracture. I was able to repair his skull, but not his brain. The pressure on his brain caused a haemorrhage, damaging delicate tissue – speech centres, mainly. That and the acute insult to his system that was the amount of alcohol consumed was enough to render him an invalid. Most of the time he’s little better than a marrow. Quite a decent-looking marrow actually, as he still has a few moments of lucidity.’
‘Christ, Batov, you don’t mean to say he’s alive – that he’s still here? In your hospital?’
‘Of course he’s still here. This is his home-town. Where better to care for him than the Smolensk State Medical Academy?’
*
The man in the wheelchair did not look like a man who had helped murder four or perhaps five thousand people, but then, as I’d learned from first-hand experience, few men do. There were men in SS police battalions with faces like Handel’s favourite choirboys, who could charm the birds from the trees. Sometimes, for murder to take place, murderers must be full of smiles.
Arkady Rudakov’s ears were of normal size, his forehead was as upright as a parlour piano, his eyes and nose were quite symmetrical and his arms were of the usual length and without any tattoos. He didn’t even drool in a way that might have been described as savage or atavistic, and after Batov’s description of an enlarged flea, bloated with blood, it was almost a disappointment to meet a handsome, open-faced little man of about thirty, with a full head of luxuriant dark hair, a smiling, feminine mouth, small hands and warm brown eyes. He looked like a tailor or a baker – someone who was good with people instead of someone who was merely good at killing them.
Rudakov’s voice was no less improbable. Every few seconds he would say the same thing: ‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba. U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’ He had a cartoonish sort of voice, as if his chest was never quite filled with enough breath to make a man’s full voice, or as if someone had tried to strangle him.
‘What does he keep saying?’ I asked Batov.
‘He says “Everything is all right, thank you”,’ said Batov. ‘Of course he’s not all right. Never will be again. But he thinks he is. Which is a small mercy, I suppose. At first when officers from the NKVD came to visit him they would ask if he was all right and he would make this answer. But it was soon evident that he didn’t tend to say much else.’ Batov shrugged. ‘It was a very Soviet answer, of course. Always when someone in Russia asks you how things are, you make this answer, because you never know who’s listening. Any other answer would be unpatriotic, of course. But even the blockheads of the NKVD realized that there was something seriously wrong with this fellow. That’s probably the only reason they left him here and alive, because they didn’t think he was likely to pose any kind of threat to them. I suspect if he’d been the gabby type they’d have taken him away and shot him.
‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’
I pulled a face. ‘I can see why they weren’t worried. With all due respect, Doctor Batov, I can’t see this fellow making much of a witness. Not one that would satisfy the ministry of propaganda, anyway.’
‘As I said, there are times when he??
We were in a private room on the uppermost floor of the hospital. There was a bed and an armchair and a radio – everything a man who was no longer in possession of his senses might have needed. On the wall was a picture of Stalin, which was enough to persuade me that I was probably the first German who’d been in there since the battle for Smolensk. Any self-respecting German would probably have smashed the glass, which might be why I chose to ignore it.
‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’
Batov regarded his patient kindly and leaning over him for a moment, stroked his cheek with the back of his hand.
‘Kak ska zhesh,’ Batov said gently to Rudakov. ‘Kak ska zhesh. Ti khoro shii drug.’
‘So much for wanting to kill him,’ I said.
‘You mean me?’ Batov shrugged. ‘What good would that do? Look at him. It would be like killing a child.’
‘If you’d been to school in Berlin, doctor, you’d know why that’s not always a bad idea.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘Some of the damn children I knew.’ The match caught the loon’s eyes like a hypnotist’s gold watch. Experimentally I moved it one way, the other way, and then flicked it onto his forehead, just to see if he was putting on a dumb show. If it was an act, his middle name must have been Stanislavski.
‘Blagodariu,’ muttered the loon.
‘Nyezachto.’ I put the cigarette into his mouth and he smoked it automatically. ‘These lucid periods. Can they be predicted?’
‘Unfortunately not. It’s possible I might be able to bring him out of it temporarily with therapeutic chemical shock – perhaps methylamphetamine, or thiopental if I could get some. But there’s no telling what permanent effect that might have on what’s left of his mind.’
‘Let’s not tell that to the ministry,’ I said. ‘I doubt they’d be much interested in an NKVD lieutenant’s future welfare.’
‘No, indeed.’
‘I suppose we could film him being questioned, when he is being lucid,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘But it’s hardly ideal for what’s required here.’ I shook my head. ‘And besides, the people I work for – they’re judges. Generally speaking they like a witness to look like he knows what day it is. I doubt this fellow knows his arse from his earhole.’
Batov did not look perturbed by my scepticism.
‘I’m not saying that we can’t use this fellow,’ I added. ‘It’s just that it might be said by our critics that being feeble-minded he just repeats what we want him to say. Like a puppet.’
‘I said I had proof,’ said Batov. ‘I didn’t say he was it. Rudakov’s only the cherry on the cake. The real proof is something else.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Ya-veh paryatkeh, spasiba.’
‘When Rudakov turned up here he had some bags,’ said Batov. ‘In the bags were some ledgers and an FED – a camera – and in the camera was a roll of exposed film. The ledgers contained a list of names: yes, it was about four thousand names.’ He let that revelation hang in the air for a moment.
‘I see.’
‘After Rudakov had been here for a while I had the film developed. The NKVD – they took pictures. Like they were on some sort of hunting trip or safari. Trophy pictures of them actually shooting Poles. Like they were actually proud of what they’d done. Men with their wrists bound together with wire and kneeling on the edge of a trench while Rudakov and his friends shot them in the back of the head.’ Batov looked apologetic. ‘It’s hard to believe that anyone would want to commemorate such acts, but they did.’
‘The SS does this sort of thing, too,’ I said. ‘It’s hardly peculiar to the NKVD.’
‘I still have the ledgers and I still have the enlargements I made. Together they are all the evidence anyone could need of exactly what happened in Katyn Wood. Even for the exactingly high standards of your German judges.’
‘Sounds like the blue-hats had themselves quite a holiday. Could I see these pictures? And the ledgers?’
Batov looked evasive. ‘I can only show you one picture just now,’ he said. ‘I keep it here, with Arkady, and from time to time I show it to him in order to try to stimulate what’s left of his memory about who he was.’
Dr Batov lifted the picture of Stalin and unpeeled a 210x297 mm black and white photograph.
‘I keep this hidden for obvious reasons,’ he added, handing me the picture.
In the photograph were three NKVD officers who appeared to be relaxing for the camera. They were wearing their traditional gymnasterka tunics with crossbelts and riding breeches with high boots; one man was seated in a wicker basket chair, with another on the arm; Rudakov was standing beside them; each man was holding a Nagant revolver in his right hand and making the same curious hand sign – I suppose you’d call it the cuckold’s horns – with his left. Behind them was a building that I recognized immediately as Dnieper Castle, where the 537th signals was now based.
‘The man in the centre is Blokhin,’ said Batov. ‘The major I was telling you about – the one who was dead drunk. The man sitting on the arm of the chair is the blue-hat NCO who drove them both here.’
‘The hand sign,’ I remarked. ‘What does it mean?’
‘I think it’s a freemason sign,’ said Batov. ‘I’m not sure. I’ve heard that a lot of NKVD are freemasons – lots of people are in Russia, even today. But I’m not sure.’
‘And this was on the same roll of film as what? I mean what’s in these other pictures?’
‘Polish officers being shot by Blokhin and Rudakov. Piles of bodies. These three drinking. More buddy shots. The rest of the material – the pictures and the ledgers – are somewhere safe. When my daughter and I have travel documents to get us to Berlin I will give you everything. You have my word on it. You understand it’s Germans I don’t trust, Captain Gunther, not you.’
‘Kind of you to say so.’
‘I expect you will have to speak to your superiors about all of this,’ said Batov. He sat down on the bed and wiped his forehead with a loud sigh. ‘I’m really drunk.’
‘I doubt that.’ I grinned at him. ‘You were right what you said back in the marketplace when I was just a kraut buying brewski. For a clever man I’m also a stupid one. I rather imagine you planned this touching little scene, Doctor Batov. I might not have had my balls cut off by partisans, nonetheless you did a swell job of bringing me here to your parlour so you could put a tattoo on my chest like a drunken Cossack in one of your oversized novels. I don’t blame you. Really I don’t. Blame is for people with clearer consciences than mine. But don’t overplay your part, doctor. The audience doesn’t like it. That’s lesson one in the Stanislavski book of acting like someone who’s on the level.’
Batov grinned back at me. ‘You’re right, of course. I might not have been selling vodka or brewski but I’ve got something to sell just like anyone else who goes to the market. When you showed up here at the hospital the first time with that Polish intelligence report it was obvious to me where you must have got it from. I wanted to tell you about the lieutenant then, but I didn’t quite have the guts. Then you left and I figured my chance wa
‘I get a lot of that.’
‘So. Do we have a deal?’
‘I think so. Only it might take a little while. You’ll have to be patient.’
‘I’m Russian. Patience is something we’re born with.’
‘Sure, sure. That’s out of the same book as not putting any empties on the table. You don’t believe that shit any more than I do. But here’s something that you can believe. And this comes straight from the shoulder-holster. When you made that crack about not trusting Germans you implied you know what you’re doing, but I still wonder if you do. You tell me you’ve got evidence of what happened in Katyn Wood and I tell you I’m prepared to buy your story. But I’m not the one who owns the store. You’ll be making a deal with the devil here, not me. You appreciate that, don’t you? Once you’re out in the open with this I can’t protect you. Unlike me, you see, the Nazis are not the kind of people who can handle much disappointment. If they think for a minute you’re holding out on them in any way, they’re liable to reach for their pistols. The Gestapo is just as likely to put a bullet in your head as your own secret police. At that point I’ll be looking out for myself, see? Generally speaking it’s what I do best. I won’t have time or even the inclination to do any special pleading for you and your daughter’s ballet lessons.’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve thought about the risks. Really, I have. And I don’t think I have anything to lose.’
‘When people say that kind of thing, mostly I don’t believe them, or I think they haven’t thought things through. But I imagine you really do know what you’re doing. You’re right, I don’t think you have anything to lose. Just your life. And what’s that worth in the current market? In my case it’s not much and in yours it’s nothing at all. And in between there’s probably just a lot of misplaced optimism. Mine, mostly.’