A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) by Philip Kerr
Von Gersdorff chucked away his cigarette and straightened. ‘Er, yes. I was just joking, of course. My dear Ines, none of us thought for a minute that you actually shot the doctor. Well, I certainly didn’t. Not for a moment.’
This admission was no less club-footed than his joke, and it was plain from her face that the damage was well and truly done. I felt as if someone had just kicked away the stool I had been standing on and I was now hanging by the neck on a very thin length of cord.
‘It seems obvious now,’ she said, wresting her arm out of my grip. ‘All those interested questions about Spain and my brother. You were trying to find out if I shot Dr Berruguete, weren’t you?’ Her nostrils flared a little and her eyes filled with tears, again. ‘It actually crossed your mind that – to think that you thought I could have carried out an autopsy on a man I had murdered.’
‘Ines, please believe me,’ I said. ‘I never had any intention of arresting you.’
‘But you still considered the possibility that I might have killed him, didn’t you?’
She was right of course, and I felt a certain shame about that, which – of course – she was able to read in my eyes and on my face.
‘Oh, Bernie,’ she said.
‘Perhaps for just a minute,’ I said, fumbling for some words that might satisfy her. I felt my feet desperately reaching to touch the stool I had been standing on but already it was too late. ‘But not any more.’ I shook my head. ‘Not any more, do you hear?’
Her disappointment in me – her dismay that I could ever have suspected her of murder – were already turning to anger. Her face flushed and the muscles in her jaws stiffened as, biting her lip, she regarded me with new contempt.
‘I really thought that there was something special between us,’ she said. ‘I can see now I was terribly mistaken about that.’
‘Honestly, Ines,’ said Von Gersdorff, putting his polished jackboot in it again. ‘You’re making a mountain out of a molehill with this. You really are. The poor fellow was only doing his job. He is a policeman, after all. It’s his job to suspect people like you and me of things we didn’t do. And you must admit, for a while there you made a pretty reasonable suspect.’
‘Shut up, Rudi,’ she said. ‘Just for once know when you should say nothing.’
‘Ines, we do have something special,’ I told her. ‘We do. I feel that, too.’
But Ines was shaking her head. ‘Perhaps we did. At least for a moment or two.’
Her voice was husky with emotion. It made me acutely aware of just how much I wanted to comfort her and look after her, and but for the fact that it was me who had caused her hurt, I might have done so, too.
‘Yes, we were a good pair, Gunther. From the first time I was with you it really felt that we were more than just one man and one woman. But none of that matters a damn when one of the two decides to play cop on the other, as you just did with me.’
‘Really, Ines,’ muttered Von Gersdorff.
But she was already walking away, toward Buhtz and the international commission, not looking back, and out of my life, for ever.
‘I’m sorry, Gunther. I didn’t mean that to happen. You know I really should have remembered. Like a lot of lefties, Ines has never had much of a sense of humour.’ He smiled. ‘But look, I expect she’ll get over it. I’ll speak to her. Put things right. Obtain a reprieve for you. You’ll see.’
I shook my head because I knew no reprieve would ever arrive.
‘I don’t think that’s going to be possible, colonel,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m certain of it.’
‘I should like to try,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I feel terrible.’ He shook his head. ‘I had no idea that you and she … had become quite so close. It was – it was careless of me.’
There was very little I could say to that. Von Gersdorff was right about it being careless of him, although I might have added that it was typically careless of him and all Prussian aristocrats. They were just careless people, careless because they didn’t really care about anyone other than themselves. It was their carelessness that had allowed Hitler to take possession of the country in 1933; and through their carelessness, they had failed to remove him now, some ten years later. They were careless and then other people had to sort it out, or deal with the mess they had made.
Or not.
I walked away. I smoked a couple of cigarettes on my own and stared up at the blue sky through newly minted leaves in the tops of the tall, shifting silver birch trees and realized how, in that part of the world especially, all human life is grotesquely fragile. And feeling glimpses of raw Russian sunlight on my face – which after all was much more than the poor ghosts of four thousand Poles could ever have done – I eventually managed to recover a few blackened, ash-covered fragments of my earlier composure.
A little later on I found a nervous-looking Lieutenant Voss on the edge of the crowd. Several field policemen were doing their best to distinguish those who had a reason to be there from those who did not, which wasn’t easy, as many off-duty German soldiers and locals had come to see what all the fuss was about.
‘What a fucking circus.’ Voss slapped his neck irritably. ‘Christ only knows what will happen if Russian partisans choose today for an attack.’
‘I think malaria or old age is more likely to take down some of these fellows than a Russian hand grenade,’ I said, and slapped my own cheek, hard. ‘I almost wish it was cold again so we might be free of the plague of these fucking insects.’
Voss grunted his agreement.
‘By the way, how’s that Russian bastard you clouted with the truncheon last night? Dyakov? Good job by the way, sir. If anyone needed a thump on the head it’s the field marshal’s pet Ivan.’
‘Alive, thank God. And on his way back to Krasny Bor and his master.’
‘Yes, I heard Clever Hans tore a strip off your face this morning. Makes you wonder what Dyakov has got on the field marshal to make him behave like that.’
‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’
I led Voss a short distance away to ask if the late Dr Berruguete’s sudden absence had caused any alarm among our distinguished guests.
‘Not at all,’ said Voss. ‘On the contrary, several of them seemed quite relieved to hear he’d had to return to Spain. That’s what Sloventzik has told them, anyway. A family tragedy that required his immediate return during the night.’
‘After what I learned about him today, I’m hardly surprised they’re glad to see the back of that man. Nor am I surprised that someone put a bullet in him. Two actually. According to the autopsy I just attended, he was shot once in the head and once in the chest.’
‘Could one of them have done it?’ asked Voss, glancing over at the commission.
I pulled a face. ‘I don’t think so, do you? Look at them. There’s none of them that looks like he could hit a vein with a needle, let alone fire a broom-handle Mauser and actually hit anything.’
‘But if not one of them, who?’
‘I don’t know. Find that shoulder-stock yet?’
‘No. To be honest I can’t spare the men to look for it. We have our hands full keeping people away from this place and Katyn Wood.’
‘That’s all right. I’m just on my way back to Krasny Bor now. I’ll take a look for the stock myself.’
*
Back in the woods at Krasny Bor all of the wild flowers were in bloom and it was hard to believe there was a war on. Von Kluge’s huge staff car was parked in front of his villa but almost everywhere else there was no clue that the place was anything other than the health resort it had once been. Behind the neat curtains of the wooden huts where Russians had previously stayed to take the sulphurous spring waters to move their bowels, nothing moved. There were just the trees whispering to each other in the breeze and some birds punctuating the silence with their bright exclamations that spring had truly arrived at last.
I drove through the gates and, leaving my car, walked to the place where the field polic
I pocketed the length of rope and spent the next thirty minutes carefully searching the grass until I’d found two brass bullet casings. I didn’t bother to look for a third as it was immediately apparent that these could not have been fired from the same gun: one was a 9-millimetre Mauser casing, the other was something bigger – most likely a rifle bullet.
In Krasny Bor the spring silence endured, but inside my head there was now a riot of noise. Finally one clear voice asserted itself against the clamour. Had there been one gunman or two? Or perhaps one gunman with two different weapons – a pistol and a rifle? Certainly it made sense to shoot at me with a rifle – I had been the more distant target. But why not shoot Berruguete with the rifle, too – unless the reason had been to use the borrowed Mauser to point the finger of blame elsewhere?
I walked over to the upturned stump under which I had sought to bury myself to escape my putative assassin and glanced around, looking for the standing tree that the third bullet had hit instead of me, and when I found it I spent the next few minutes gouging it out with my lock-knife.
Lying on the palm of my hand were two misshapen pieces of metal, one of which – the one gouged from the tree – was larger than the other taken from my pocket, and before that from Berruguete’s chest.
*
When the international commission arrived back from their morning’s inspection of documents at Grushtshenki and went along to the Krasny Bor officers’ mess for lunch, I sought out Professor Buhtz.
Ines, who came into the mess with him, ignored me as if I had been invisible and continued into the dining room.
I motioned Buhtz to follow me. ‘Doubtless you’ve already heard something of the events of last night. The unfortunate death of Dr Berruguete.’
‘Yes,’ said Buhtz. ‘Lieutenant Sloventzik has put me in the picture about that and the overriding need for discretion. What happened, exactly? All Sloventzik told me was that Berruguete had been found murdered in the woods.’
‘He was shot in the woods with a Mauser C96,’ I said. ‘I only know that because we found the weapon on the ground not very far from the body.’
‘A broom-handle eh? Fine pistol. Can’t think why we stopped using them. Good stopping power.’
‘More importantly, how were our guests? Did they believe the story: that Berruguete was suddenly obliged to return home to Spain?’
‘Yes, I think so. None of them has commented on it, although Professor Naville said he was glad to see the back of him. There’s no love lost there, that’s for sure. Under the circumstances it has been a very satisfactory morning. The display of Polish documents recovered from grave number one is most effective. And persuasive. The smell or rather lack of it at Grushtshenki means that we have been able to take our time with the papers. To have read them in Katyn Wood would have proved difficult, I think. The inspection of the graves and the autopsies are an ordeal yet to come, of course. François Naville is perhaps the best of the experts, with the most searching questions – especially since he seems to detest the Nazis so much. I imagine it’s for this reason that he’s refused to take any payment from Berlin, unlike some of the others. Several of them are rather less principled than Naville, which makes the Swiss’s opinion all the more valuable, of course. He speaks good Russian, which is useful as he intends to interview several local people himself – the ones Judge Conrad has deposed. And he’s quite free with his opinions concerning politics and the rights of man. Several times this morning he’s told me in no uncertain terms what he thinks of “Herr Hitler” and his Jewish policies. I didn’t know what to say. Yes, he’s proving to be a very highly awkward fellow is our Professor François Naville.’
‘There’s a possibility that the death of Dr Berruguete is somehow connected with the death of Signalsman Martin Quidde,’ I told him. ‘You remember, at the beginning of April? What happened there? You were able to determine from the ballistics tests you carried out that it wasn’t a suicide but a murder.’
‘Yes, that’s right. Quidde was shot with a Walther that wasn’t the one we found in his own hand. A police pistol, I would suspect. Some fool assuming we’d simply accept the most obvious explanation.’
I nodded, doing a very good impersonation I thought of someone who was entirely innocent of this foolish crime.
‘And you gave me until the end of the month to find his killer before informing the Gestapo. In order that we might avoid any unnecessary action against the local population.’
‘Very principled of you.’ Buhtz nodded. ‘Hadn’t forgotten. Wondered if you had, though.’
‘This is one of the bullets that killed Berruguete,’ I said, handing him the spent bullet and its casing. ‘Your charming assistant, Dr Kramsta, dug it out of his chest first thing this morning when she carried out the autopsy.’
‘Good girl, Ines Kramsta. First-rate pathologist.’
‘The casing I found later on when I searched the area.’ I paused, and then added: ‘Yes, she is.’
‘Not had the best of luck though. Her brother was killed in Spain. And her parents were killed in a bombing raid just a year ago.’
‘I didn’t know.’
Buhtz looked at the metal on his palm and nodded. ‘Nine-millimetre, by the look of it. Quidde was shot with a Walther however. Not a Mauser. A PPK.’
‘Yes, I know. Look sir, I need to know more of what only the author of Metal Traces in Bullet Wounds can tell me.’
‘Of course. I am at your service.’
‘There were three shots fired in Krasny Bor last night. Two at Berruguete and a third at someone else.’
‘I didn’t hear a thing,’ admitted the professor. ‘But then I did have more than one schnapps last night. Then again I’ve noticed that the trees and the ground sort of deaden the sound around here. It’s a noticeable phenomenon. The NKVD picked a good spot to murder those Polacks.’
‘I know there were three shots,’ I continued, ‘because the third shot was fired at me.’
‘Really? How do you know?’
‘Because fortunately it missed me and hit a tree from which this was dug out just a few minutes ago.’ I handed him the bullet and the second brass casing.
Buhtz smiled with an almost boyish enthusiasm. ‘This begins to be interesting,’ he said, ‘since clearly this third shot you describe was fired not from a red nine but from a rifle.’
I nodded.
‘You need to know more about that rifle,’ he said.
‘Anything you can tell me would be useful.’
Buhtz glanced at the bullets in his hand and across the hall where commission members were now seating themselves at the various tables and reading lunch menus with rather obvious pleasure: for most of the forensic scientists who’d come to Smolensk the officers’ mess at Krasny Bor provided the best meal they’d had in a long time.
‘Well, now you come to mention it, I would rather like
In his neat little hut Buhtz took off his military belt, opened the top button of his tunic, sat down, collected a magnifying glass off his table, switched on a desk light and scrutinized the bottom of the brass rifle casing I’d found near the abandoned Mauser stock.
‘On the face of it,’ he said, ‘I should have said this came from a standard infantryman’s M98. It’s a fairly ordinary eight-millimetre round by the look of it. Except for one thing. The M98 uses a rimless bottlenecked rifle cartridge, and this is rimmed, which leads me to think of a different rifle and to suppose that the cartridges were loaded with something a little different: something a little heavier and more suitable for game shooting. A Brenneke rifle bullet perhaps. Yes. Why not?’
He took the bullet and placed it under the lens of his microscope, where he stared at it for several minutes.
‘I thought as much,’ he murmured, eventually. ‘A TUG. A torpedo-tail deformation bullet with a hard core for bigger game, like deer. Developed in 1935. That’s what you have here.’ He looked up and grinned. ‘You’re lucky to be here, you know. You were shot at with a decent hunting rifle. If this had hit you, Gunther, you’d be missing a large part of your head. When I have more time I can probably tell you what metal this is; maybe a bit more than that, like where this ammo came from.’
‘You’ve already told me a great deal,’ I said, wondering how he knew that the shooter had aimed at my head – although perhaps it was just a reasonable assumption. ‘But what kind of a hunting rifle?’
‘Oh well, Mauser have been making excellent hunting rifles for fifty years. I would have said a Mauser 1898. But given the fact that I almost mistook this bullet, I might almost say a Mauser Oberndorf Model B or a Safari.’ Buhtz frowned. ‘Oh, I just had a thought. You know who has a pair of Obendorfs, don’t you? Here? At Krasny Bor.’