A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) by Philip Kerr
‘Perhaps we should search his billet for a suicide note,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Perhaps there was a woman. Or perhaps there wasn’t a woman. Either one of those can seem like a good enough reason for some Fritzes. But even if there’s not a note, it won’t make a difference. Who’d read it anyway, apart from you and me and maybe Colonel Ahrens?’
‘Still it’s curious, don’t you think? Three fellows from the one signals regiment meeting an untimely end in as many weeks.’
‘We’re at war,’ I said. ‘Meeting an untimely end is what being in this crummy country is all about. But I take your point, Ludwig. Maybe there’s something dodgy in those radio waves after all. That’s what some people think isn’t it? That they’re hazardous? All that energy heating up your brain? It would certainly explain what’s been happening at the Ministry of Enlightenment.’
‘Radio waves – yes, I never thought of that,’ said Voss.
I smiled; I was taking to obfuscation like a duck to water, and I wondered how much muddier my wings and webbed feet could make that water before flying away from the scene of my crime.
‘Those signals boys are living right next to a powerful transmitter, day in, day out. The mast at the back of the castle looks just like the lanky lad. It’s a wonder they haven’t sprouted aerials on their damn heads.’
Voss frowned and then shook his head. ‘The lanky lad?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s what we Berliners call the radio tower in Charlottenburg.’ I shook my head. ‘So maybe radio waves gave poor Quidde’s brain an itch that he decided he had to scratch with a bullet from a Walther automatic. Probably while he was standing up, too, from the way the blood’s splattered across the grass.’
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ admitted Voss. ‘About the radio waves. But you’re not serious.’
‘No, it’d be hard proving it.’ I shook my head. ‘More likely he was just depressed at being out here in this shit-hole and staring down the barrel of a Red Army counteroffensive this summer. I can see where he was coming from there. Smolensk would drive anyone to suicide. Frankly I’ve thought about nothing else but blowing my brains out since I got here.’
‘That’s one way of getting back home,’ said Voss.
‘Yes, there’s a curious atmosphere at Dnieper Castle and Katyn Wood. Colonel Ahrens seemed very disturbed by it himself the other day. Don’t you think so?’
‘He’s certain to take this badly. I never met an officer who was more concerned with the welfare of his men.’
‘That does make a pleasant change, it’s true.’ I narrowed my eyes and looked up at the trees. ‘But why this park? You don’t suppose this fellow was a music lover, do you?’
‘I dunno. It is sort of peaceful.’
Hearing a loud whoop and a raucous cackle of laughter I glanced around. The drunks were still there with the dogs and the campfire. It wasn’t just novels that were absurdly long in Russia, it was drinking sessions, too; this one was starting to look a lot like War and Peace.
‘Almost peaceful,’ added Voss.
‘Do you speak any Russian, Voss?’
‘A bit,’ said Voss. ‘Do this and do that, mostly. You know – the language of the occupier.’
‘It’s probably a waste of time,’ I said, ‘but let’s go and ask the Red Army if they saw anything.’
‘I’m afraid the orders come a lot more easily than the questions. And I’m not sure I’ll understand the answers.’
‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet, Ludwig.’
I was pushing my luck and I knew it, but I don’t play skat and I never liked dice much, so in Smolensk I was going to have to get my thrills where I could. The Hotel Glinka was off limits to suckers like me who prefer it if a girl does that sort of thing because she wants to and not because she has to. That left the impossibly thick Russian novel back in my room and the flutter from a conversation with a bunch of hard-drinking Ivans who might just have seen a civilian answering my own description shoot a German soldier in cold blood. Of course, speaking to all the possible witnesses is what a real detective would have done anyway, and I was gambling they could not or didn’t care to remember anything at all. And when, after a five-minute chat with these piss-artists, Voss and I ended up with nothing but a lot of uncomprehending fearful shrugs and some very bad breath in our nostrils, I felt like a winner all the same. It wasn’t like breaking the bank at Monte Carlo, but it was enough.
CHAPTER 5
Thursday, April 1st 1943
The following morning I went to see Doctor Batov at the Smolensk State Medical Academy. By now I had come to recognize the canary-coloured building as typically Soviet – the kind of outsized hospital that was very likely the subject of some aspirin commissar’s ambitious five-year plan for treating Russia’s sick and injured. The noticeboards in the enormous admissions hall still displayed yellowing Cyrillic notices boasting about the efficiency of Smolensk’s medical personnel and how the number of patients treated had increased, year on year, as if the sick had been so many tractors. Given what I now knew about Stalin, I wondered what might have happened if the number of patients treated had fallen. Would the communists have concluded that Russians were just becoming healthier? Or would the director of the academy have been shot for failing to meet his target? It was an interesting dilemma and pointed up a real point of difference between Nazism and Communism as forms of government: there was no room for the individual in Soviet Russia; conversely not everything was state-managed in Germany. The Nazis never shot anyone for being stupid, inefficient or just plain unlucky. Generally speaking the Nazis looked for a reason to shoot you, the commies were quite happy to shoot you without any reason at all – but when you’re going to be shot, what’s the difference?
Batov was absent from his sixth-floor office, and when I failed to see him in his laboratory I asked a weary-looking German medical orderly if he knew where the Russian doctor was to be found. He told me that the Russian doctor hadn’t been seen at the hospital for a couple of days.
‘Is he ill? Is he at home? Is he just taking some time off? What?’
The orderly shrugged. ‘Don’t know, sir. But really it’s not like him at all. He may be an Ivan but I’ve never known a man who was more dedicated to the patients. Not just his patients, but ours too. He was supposed to carry out an operation on one of our men yesterday afternoon and he never showed up for it. And now the man is dead. So you can draw your own conclusions.’
‘What do the Russian nurses tell you?’
‘Hard to say, sir. There’s none of us Germans that slyuni much Popov and they don’t slyuni any German. We’re understaffed as it is. Half my medical orderlies have just been ordered south-east, to a place called Prokhorovka. Batov was about the only one who could talk with us, at a surgical level.’
‘What’s at Prokhorovka?’
‘No idea, sir. All I know is that it’s near a city called Kursk. But it’s all very secret and I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Our own men weren’t told where they were going. The only reason I found out was because several large boxes of wound dressings were taken from the stores here and someone had written the destination on the side.’
‘There’s no chance that Batov was swept into the same draft as them, I suppose?’
‘Not a chance, sir. There’s no way they’d have pressed an Ivan into service.’
‘Well, I’d better look for him at home, I suppose.’
‘If you see him, tell him to hurry back, sir. We need him more than ever now that we’re so short-staffed.’
It was then I thought to go and look for Batov in the private room where Rudakov was being cared for, but it was empty and the wheelchair in which I had seen him sitting was now gone. The bed didn’t look as if it had been slept in and even the ashtray looked as if it hadn’t been used in a while. I laid my hand on the radio, which had been on when last I’d been in that room, and it was cold. I glanced up at the picture of Stalin but he wasn’t telling. He stared
suspiciously at me with his dull dark eyes, and when I put my hand behind him to look for the photograph of the three NKVD men and found it missing, I started to get a bad feeling about things.
I left the hospital and drove quickly to Batov’s apartment building. I rang the bell and knocked on the door but Batov didn’t answer. The floor lady downstairs had an ear trumpet that looked like it had belonged to the Beethoven Museum in Bonn, and she didn’t speak any German, but she didn’t have to; my identification was enough for her to assume I was Gestapo, I suppose – the woman certainly crossed herself enough, as Batov had said she would – and she soon found some keys and let me into Batov’s apartment.
As soon as the floor lady opened the door I knew something was wrong: all of the doctor’s precious books that had been so carefully arranged were now lying on the floor, and sensing I was about to discover something awful – there was a faint smell of sweet and sour decay in the apartment – I took the key and sent the babushka away, then closed the door behind me.
I went into Batov’s drawing room. The tall ceramic stove in the corner was still warm, but Batov’s motionless body was not. He lay face-down on the uncarpeted floor underneath a patchwork quilt of tossed books and newspapers and cushions. In the side of his neck was a wound like a large slice of water melon. His bruised and battered mouth had been stuffed with a sock, and from the number of fingers that were missing from his right hand it was clear that someone had been preparing him to play Ravel’s piano concerto for the left hand on the upright by the window or – more likely perhaps – torturing him methodically: four severed fingers and a thumb were arranged in a vertical series along the mantelpiece like so many cigarette butts. I wondered why he’d lain still and taken it until I saw the hypodermic in his thigh and figured he’d been injected with some sort of muscle relaxant they use in surgery, and by someone who knew what they were doing, too. It must have been just enough to stop him moving but not enough to stop the pain.
Had he given up the information that had prompted this treatment? From the way the apartment had been turned over and the number of fingers on display it seemed unlikely. If someone can stand the loss of more than one finger it can be assumed they could stand the loss of all five.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said aloud, because I had the strong idea that Batov’s suffering and death had been occasioned by the same information he had promised me – the photographic and documentary evidence of exactly what had happened in Katyn Wood. ‘I really am. If only – if only I’d come yesterday, the way I’d planned, then perhaps you’d still be alive.’
Of course it had already crossed my mind that Lieutenant Rudakov’s absence from his room at the SSMA was an indication that he had met a similarly grisly end, but it was now that I started to wonder just how disabled the NKVD man had really been. Could Rudakov have fooled Batov into thinking his condition was perhaps worse than it was? What better way of hiding out from your NKVD colleagues than affecting a mental disability? In which case, wasn’t it perfectly possible that Doctor Batov had been murdered by the very man he’d been trying to protect? And wasn’t life just like that sometimes?
I went into the bedroom. I hadn’t met Batov’s only daughter before; I didn’t even know her name; all I really knew about the girl was her age and the fact that she wouldn’t ever be celebrating her sixteenth birthday or dancing Swan Lake in Paris. As a homicide detective I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, many of them female, and of course it’s fair to say that the war had rendered me even less sensitive than before to the sight of violent death, but nothing prepared me for the appalling sight that greeted me in that bedroom.
Batov’s daughter had been tied to the four corners of the bed and tortured with a knife, like her poor father. Her killer had slit her nose horizontally and cut off both her ears before opening the veins in one of her arms. She was still wearing a pair of rubber overshoes. Very likely she must have arrived back in the apartment after the killer had failed to extract the information he wanted from her father, and he had set to work with his knife on the daughter, whose mouth was similarly stuffed with a sock to stifle her loudest screams. But where I wondered were her ears?
Eventually I found both of them in the breast pocket of the dead man’s jacket, as if he had brought them into the room, one after the other, before Batov had told him what exactly he wanted to know.
A quick glance in the other bedroom confirmed that Batov had indeed talked. A picture of Lenin had been taken down from the wall and was now leaning against it. The space it had covered was just raw brickwork, with several of the bricks torn out like the centre of a jigsaw puzzle. There was just enough room in this rectangular hiding place – which was about the height and width of a letterbox – to have hidden the ledgers and pictures Doctor Batov had promised to give to me.
In the bathroom I dropped my trousers and sat down on the toilet to do some thinking with a couple of cigarettes. Without the bloody distractions of the two bodies it was easier to reflect upon what I knew and what I thought I knew.
I knew that they had both been dead for not much more than a day: Batov’s own body had been covered with books and newspapers, which meant that access for female houseflies had been more difficult, but already masses of tiny eggs that had yet to hatch into maggots were covering the girl’s eyelids. Depending on the temperature, fly eggs usually hatched into larvae within twenty-four hours – especially when a body was found indoors, where things are warmer, even in Russia. All of which meant they had probably died the previous afternoon.
I knew it was a waste of time asking the floor lady if she’d seen or heard anything. For one thing my Russian wasn’t equal to the task of an interrogation, and for another her ear trumpet hardly encouraged the prospect of success. As a detective, I’d seen more promising witnesses in a mortuary. Not that I was feeling a lot like a homicide detective since murdering Martin Quidde.
I kept asking myself if there had been a way I could have avoided that, but the same answer kept on coming back at me: Quidde opening his mouth about what he knew to someone in the Gestapo, the field police, Kripo, the SS or even the Wehrmacht would have been as good a way as any of destroying any future chance that Von Gersdorff – or one of his colleagues – might get to kill Hitler. No one’s life – not Quidde’s and certainly not my own – was more important than that. For the same reason, I knew I was going to have to tell Von Gersdorff about Quidde and the tape to prove to him that Von Kluge could no longer be trusted.
I knew that Batov’s killer enjoyed using a knife – a knife is such a close-quarters weapon that you have to take pleasure in the damage you can inflict on another human being. It’s not a weapon for someone who’s squeamish. I might have said that the man who had murdered Batov and his daughter was the same man who had murdered the two signallers, Ribe and Greiss – the throat-cutting was similar, of course – except that the motives for these crimes looked so entirely different.
I knew I needed to find Rudakov even if he was dead in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Rudakov had heard everything Batov had told me about the documentary and photographic proof of the Katyn massacre, and he’d heard the deal Batov had demanded. If that wasn’t a motive for a former NKVD officer to kill a man and his daughter, I didn’t know what was. If he had killed the Batovs, then I guessed he was long gone, and the field police were hardly likely to catch someone who had been resourceful enough to have faked a mental disability for the best part of eighteen months.
I knew I had to go to the Kommandatura now and report the murders, so that the field police and the local Russian cops could be summoned to the crime scene. Death had undone so many in and around Smolensk that Lieutenant Voss was going to wonder if murder was becoming infectious in the oblast that was his zone of responsibility. With four thousand men lying dead in Katyn Wood I was beginning to wonder that myself.
But most of all I knew I was about to have a big problem with the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda when I told him that the e
xtra evidence I had promised him of exactly what had happened at Katyn had disappeared along with our one potential witness, and that we were now back to having to rely on the forensics and nothing else.
In that respect, it was fortunate for Goebbels and Germany and the Katyn investigation that Gerhard Buhtz was a highly competent forensic scientist – much more competent than I or Judge Conrad had anticipated.
I was about to discover just how competent he really was.
*
The officers’ canteen at Krasny Bor was a chintzy sort of place, a bit like a dining room in a provincial Swiss hotel, except for the Russian waiters wearing white mess jackets and the gleaming regimental silver on the sideboard; and no provincial Swiss hotel – even one at high altitude – ever had clouds inside the dining room: near the wooden ceiling of the canteen there was always a thick layer of tobacco smoke like a blanket of persistent fog over an aerodrome. Sometimes I would lean back in my chair and stare up at this grey fug and try to imagine myself back at Horcher’s in Berlin or even La Coupole in Paris. The food at Krasny Bor was as plentiful as it was at the Bendlerblock, and with an extensive wine list and a selection of beers that would have been the envy of any restaurant in Berlin, it was easily the best thing about being in Smolensk. The chef was a talented fellow from Brandenburg, and for Berliners like myself there was always an air of excitement when his two best dishes – Königsberger Klopse and lamprey pie – were on the menu. So I was less than pleased when, just as I’d given my lunch order to the waiter, an orderly came and told me that Professor Buhtz was urgently requesting my presence in his laboratory-hut. I might have asked the orderly to tell Buhtz to wait until after lunch but for the fact that Von Kluge was seated at the next table and had certainly heard the details of the message, which, after all, came from someone who carried a major’s rank in the Wehrmacht. Von Kluge was always very Prussian about such things and took a dim view of junior officers shirking their duties in favour of their stomachs. He was an abstemious man and, unlike the rest of us, wasn’t much interested in the pleasures of the table. I expect he was thinking more about the pleasures of his bank account. So I stood up and went to find the forensic pathologist.
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Perhaps there was a woman. Or perhaps there wasn’t a woman. Either one of those can seem like a good enough reason for some Fritzes. But even if there’s not a note, it won’t make a difference. Who’d read it anyway, apart from you and me and maybe Colonel Ahrens?’
‘Still it’s curious, don’t you think? Three fellows from the one signals regiment meeting an untimely end in as many weeks.’
‘We’re at war,’ I said. ‘Meeting an untimely end is what being in this crummy country is all about. But I take your point, Ludwig. Maybe there’s something dodgy in those radio waves after all. That’s what some people think isn’t it? That they’re hazardous? All that energy heating up your brain? It would certainly explain what’s been happening at the Ministry of Enlightenment.’
‘Radio waves – yes, I never thought of that,’ said Voss.
I smiled; I was taking to obfuscation like a duck to water, and I wondered how much muddier my wings and webbed feet could make that water before flying away from the scene of my crime.
‘Those signals boys are living right next to a powerful transmitter, day in, day out. The mast at the back of the castle looks just like the lanky lad. It’s a wonder they haven’t sprouted aerials on their damn heads.’
Voss frowned and then shook his head. ‘The lanky lad?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘That’s what we Berliners call the radio tower in Charlottenburg.’ I shook my head. ‘So maybe radio waves gave poor Quidde’s brain an itch that he decided he had to scratch with a bullet from a Walther automatic. Probably while he was standing up, too, from the way the blood’s splattered across the grass.’
‘It’s an interesting theory,’ admitted Voss. ‘About the radio waves. But you’re not serious.’
‘No, it’d be hard proving it.’ I shook my head. ‘More likely he was just depressed at being out here in this shit-hole and staring down the barrel of a Red Army counteroffensive this summer. I can see where he was coming from there. Smolensk would drive anyone to suicide. Frankly I’ve thought about nothing else but blowing my brains out since I got here.’
‘That’s one way of getting back home,’ said Voss.
‘Yes, there’s a curious atmosphere at Dnieper Castle and Katyn Wood. Colonel Ahrens seemed very disturbed by it himself the other day. Don’t you think so?’
‘He’s certain to take this badly. I never met an officer who was more concerned with the welfare of his men.’
‘That does make a pleasant change, it’s true.’ I narrowed my eyes and looked up at the trees. ‘But why this park? You don’t suppose this fellow was a music lover, do you?’
‘I dunno. It is sort of peaceful.’
Hearing a loud whoop and a raucous cackle of laughter I glanced around. The drunks were still there with the dogs and the campfire. It wasn’t just novels that were absurdly long in Russia, it was drinking sessions, too; this one was starting to look a lot like War and Peace.
‘Almost peaceful,’ added Voss.
‘Do you speak any Russian, Voss?’
‘A bit,’ said Voss. ‘Do this and do that, mostly. You know – the language of the occupier.’
‘It’s probably a waste of time,’ I said, ‘but let’s go and ask the Red Army if they saw anything.’
‘I’m afraid the orders come a lot more easily than the questions. And I’m not sure I’ll understand the answers.’
‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet, Ludwig.’
I was pushing my luck and I knew it, but I don’t play skat and I never liked dice much, so in Smolensk I was going to have to get my thrills where I could. The Hotel Glinka was off limits to suckers like me who prefer it if a girl does that sort of thing because she wants to and not because she has to. That left the impossibly thick Russian novel back in my room and the flutter from a conversation with a bunch of hard-drinking Ivans who might just have seen a civilian answering my own description shoot a German soldier in cold blood. Of course, speaking to all the possible witnesses is what a real detective would have done anyway, and I was gambling they could not or didn’t care to remember anything at all. And when, after a five-minute chat with these piss-artists, Voss and I ended up with nothing but a lot of uncomprehending fearful shrugs and some very bad breath in our nostrils, I felt like a winner all the same. It wasn’t like breaking the bank at Monte Carlo, but it was enough.
CHAPTER 5
Thursday, April 1st 1943
The following morning I went to see Doctor Batov at the Smolensk State Medical Academy. By now I had come to recognize the canary-coloured building as typically Soviet – the kind of outsized hospital that was very likely the subject of some aspirin commissar’s ambitious five-year plan for treating Russia’s sick and injured. The noticeboards in the enormous admissions hall still displayed yellowing Cyrillic notices boasting about the efficiency of Smolensk’s medical personnel and how the number of patients treated had increased, year on year, as if the sick had been so many tractors. Given what I now knew about Stalin, I wondered what might have happened if the number of patients treated had fallen. Would the communists have concluded that Russians were just becoming healthier? Or would the director of the academy have been shot for failing to meet his target? It was an interesting dilemma and pointed up a real point of difference between Nazism and Communism as forms of government: there was no room for the individual in Soviet Russia; conversely not everything was state-managed in Germany. The Nazis never shot anyone for being stupid, inefficient or just plain unlucky. Generally speaking the Nazis looked for a reason to shoot you, the commies were quite happy to shoot you without any reason at all – but when you’re going to be shot, what’s the difference?
Batov was absent from his sixth-floor office, and when I failed to see him in his laboratory I asked a weary-looking German medical orderly if he knew where the Russian doctor was to be found. He told me that the Russian doctor hadn’t been seen at the hospital for a couple of days.
‘Is he ill? Is he at home? Is he just taking some time off? What?’
The orderly shrugged. ‘Don’t know, sir. But really it’s not like him at all. He may be an Ivan but I’ve never known a man who was more dedicated to the patients. Not just his patients, but ours too. He was supposed to carry out an operation on one of our men yesterday afternoon and he never showed up for it. And now the man is dead. So you can draw your own conclusions.’
‘What do the Russian nurses tell you?’
‘Hard to say, sir. There’s none of us Germans that slyuni much Popov and they don’t slyuni any German. We’re understaffed as it is. Half my medical orderlies have just been ordered south-east, to a place called Prokhorovka. Batov was about the only one who could talk with us, at a surgical level.’
‘What’s at Prokhorovka?’
‘No idea, sir. All I know is that it’s near a city called Kursk. But it’s all very secret and I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Our own men weren’t told where they were going. The only reason I found out was because several large boxes of wound dressings were taken from the stores here and someone had written the destination on the side.’
‘There’s no chance that Batov was swept into the same draft as them, I suppose?’
‘Not a chance, sir. There’s no way they’d have pressed an Ivan into service.’
‘Well, I’d better look for him at home, I suppose.’
‘If you see him, tell him to hurry back, sir. We need him more than ever now that we’re so short-staffed.’
It was then I thought to go and look for Batov in the private room where Rudakov was being cared for, but it was empty and the wheelchair in which I had seen him sitting was now gone. The bed didn’t look as if it had been slept in and even the ashtray looked as if it hadn’t been used in a while. I laid my hand on the radio, which had been on when last I’d been in that room, and it was cold. I glanced up at the picture of Stalin but he wasn’t telling. He stared
I left the hospital and drove quickly to Batov’s apartment building. I rang the bell and knocked on the door but Batov didn’t answer. The floor lady downstairs had an ear trumpet that looked like it had belonged to the Beethoven Museum in Bonn, and she didn’t speak any German, but she didn’t have to; my identification was enough for her to assume I was Gestapo, I suppose – the woman certainly crossed herself enough, as Batov had said she would – and she soon found some keys and let me into Batov’s apartment.
As soon as the floor lady opened the door I knew something was wrong: all of the doctor’s precious books that had been so carefully arranged were now lying on the floor, and sensing I was about to discover something awful – there was a faint smell of sweet and sour decay in the apartment – I took the key and sent the babushka away, then closed the door behind me.
I went into Batov’s drawing room. The tall ceramic stove in the corner was still warm, but Batov’s motionless body was not. He lay face-down on the uncarpeted floor underneath a patchwork quilt of tossed books and newspapers and cushions. In the side of his neck was a wound like a large slice of water melon. His bruised and battered mouth had been stuffed with a sock, and from the number of fingers that were missing from his right hand it was clear that someone had been preparing him to play Ravel’s piano concerto for the left hand on the upright by the window or – more likely perhaps – torturing him methodically: four severed fingers and a thumb were arranged in a vertical series along the mantelpiece like so many cigarette butts. I wondered why he’d lain still and taken it until I saw the hypodermic in his thigh and figured he’d been injected with some sort of muscle relaxant they use in surgery, and by someone who knew what they were doing, too. It must have been just enough to stop him moving but not enough to stop the pain.
Had he given up the information that had prompted this treatment? From the way the apartment had been turned over and the number of fingers on display it seemed unlikely. If someone can stand the loss of more than one finger it can be assumed they could stand the loss of all five.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said aloud, because I had the strong idea that Batov’s suffering and death had been occasioned by the same information he had promised me – the photographic and documentary evidence of exactly what had happened in Katyn Wood. ‘I really am. If only – if only I’d come yesterday, the way I’d planned, then perhaps you’d still be alive.’
Of course it had already crossed my mind that Lieutenant Rudakov’s absence from his room at the SSMA was an indication that he had met a similarly grisly end, but it was now that I started to wonder just how disabled the NKVD man had really been. Could Rudakov have fooled Batov into thinking his condition was perhaps worse than it was? What better way of hiding out from your NKVD colleagues than affecting a mental disability? In which case, wasn’t it perfectly possible that Doctor Batov had been murdered by the very man he’d been trying to protect? And wasn’t life just like that sometimes?
I went into the bedroom. I hadn’t met Batov’s only daughter before; I didn’t even know her name; all I really knew about the girl was her age and the fact that she wouldn’t ever be celebrating her sixteenth birthday or dancing Swan Lake in Paris. As a homicide detective I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, many of them female, and of course it’s fair to say that the war had rendered me even less sensitive than before to the sight of violent death, but nothing prepared me for the appalling sight that greeted me in that bedroom.
Batov’s daughter had been tied to the four corners of the bed and tortured with a knife, like her poor father. Her killer had slit her nose horizontally and cut off both her ears before opening the veins in one of her arms. She was still wearing a pair of rubber overshoes. Very likely she must have arrived back in the apartment after the killer had failed to extract the information he wanted from her father, and he had set to work with his knife on the daughter, whose mouth was similarly stuffed with a sock to stifle her loudest screams. But where I wondered were her ears?
Eventually I found both of them in the breast pocket of the dead man’s jacket, as if he had brought them into the room, one after the other, before Batov had told him what exactly he wanted to know.
A quick glance in the other bedroom confirmed that Batov had indeed talked. A picture of Lenin had been taken down from the wall and was now leaning against it. The space it had covered was just raw brickwork, with several of the bricks torn out like the centre of a jigsaw puzzle. There was just enough room in this rectangular hiding place – which was about the height and width of a letterbox – to have hidden the ledgers and pictures Doctor Batov had promised to give to me.
In the bathroom I dropped my trousers and sat down on the toilet to do some thinking with a couple of cigarettes. Without the bloody distractions of the two bodies it was easier to reflect upon what I knew and what I thought I knew.
I knew that they had both been dead for not much more than a day: Batov’s own body had been covered with books and newspapers, which meant that access for female houseflies had been more difficult, but already masses of tiny eggs that had yet to hatch into maggots were covering the girl’s eyelids. Depending on the temperature, fly eggs usually hatched into larvae within twenty-four hours – especially when a body was found indoors, where things are warmer, even in Russia. All of which meant they had probably died the previous afternoon.
I knew it was a waste of time asking the floor lady if she’d seen or heard anything. For one thing my Russian wasn’t equal to the task of an interrogation, and for another her ear trumpet hardly encouraged the prospect of success. As a detective, I’d seen more promising witnesses in a mortuary. Not that I was feeling a lot like a homicide detective since murdering Martin Quidde.
I kept asking myself if there had been a way I could have avoided that, but the same answer kept on coming back at me: Quidde opening his mouth about what he knew to someone in the Gestapo, the field police, Kripo, the SS or even the Wehrmacht would have been as good a way as any of destroying any future chance that Von Gersdorff – or one of his colleagues – might get to kill Hitler. No one’s life – not Quidde’s and certainly not my own – was more important than that. For the same reason, I knew I was going to have to tell Von Gersdorff about Quidde and the tape to prove to him that Von Kluge could no longer be trusted.
I knew that Batov’s killer enjoyed using a knife – a knife is such a close-quarters weapon that you have to take pleasure in the damage you can inflict on another human being. It’s not a weapon for someone who’s squeamish. I might have said that the man who had murdered Batov and his daughter was the same man who had murdered the two signallers, Ribe and Greiss – the throat-cutting was similar, of course – except that the motives for these crimes looked so entirely different.
I knew I needed to find Rudakov even if he was dead in order to eliminate him as a suspect. Rudakov had heard everything Batov had told me about the documentary and photographic proof of the Katyn massacre, and he’d heard the deal Batov had demanded. If that wasn’t a motive for a former NKVD officer to kill a man and his daughter, I didn’t know what was. If he had killed the Batovs, then I guessed he was long gone, and the field police were hardly likely to catch someone who had been resourceful enough to have faked a mental disability for the best part of eighteen months.
I knew I had to go to the Kommandatura now and report the murders, so that the field police and the local Russian cops could be summoned to the crime scene. Death had undone so many in and around Smolensk that Lieutenant Voss was going to wonder if murder was becoming infectious in the oblast that was his zone of responsibility. With four thousand men lying dead in Katyn Wood I was beginning to wonder that myself.
But most of all I knew I was about to have a big problem with the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda when I told him that the e
In that respect, it was fortunate for Goebbels and Germany and the Katyn investigation that Gerhard Buhtz was a highly competent forensic scientist – much more competent than I or Judge Conrad had anticipated.
I was about to discover just how competent he really was.
*
The officers’ canteen at Krasny Bor was a chintzy sort of place, a bit like a dining room in a provincial Swiss hotel, except for the Russian waiters wearing white mess jackets and the gleaming regimental silver on the sideboard; and no provincial Swiss hotel – even one at high altitude – ever had clouds inside the dining room: near the wooden ceiling of the canteen there was always a thick layer of tobacco smoke like a blanket of persistent fog over an aerodrome. Sometimes I would lean back in my chair and stare up at this grey fug and try to imagine myself back at Horcher’s in Berlin or even La Coupole in Paris. The food at Krasny Bor was as plentiful as it was at the Bendlerblock, and with an extensive wine list and a selection of beers that would have been the envy of any restaurant in Berlin, it was easily the best thing about being in Smolensk. The chef was a talented fellow from Brandenburg, and for Berliners like myself there was always an air of excitement when his two best dishes – Königsberger Klopse and lamprey pie – were on the menu. So I was less than pleased when, just as I’d given my lunch order to the waiter, an orderly came and told me that Professor Buhtz was urgently requesting my presence in his laboratory-hut. I might have asked the orderly to tell Buhtz to wait until after lunch but for the fact that Von Kluge was seated at the next table and had certainly heard the details of the message, which, after all, came from someone who carried a major’s rank in the Wehrmacht. Von Kluge was always very Prussian about such things and took a dim view of junior officers shirking their duties in favour of their stomachs. He was an abstemious man and, unlike the rest of us, wasn’t much interested in the pleasures of the table. I expect he was thinking more about the pleasures of his bank account. So I stood up and went to find the forensic pathologist.