A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) (48 page)

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 to escape from these fellows for a short while. Besides, it’s lamprey pie again. I’m never all that keen on lampreys, are you? Nasty things. That peculiar spiral-toothed mouth those creatures have. Horrible. Yes, why not, captain? Let’s go to my hut and we’ll take a closer look at what you’ve found.’

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.’

‘Yes,’ I said, grimly. ‘I already had the same thought myself.’

‘Tricky one, that.’

I lit a cigarette. ‘Look, I hate to ask you this again, sir, but would you mind keeping this quiet for now? The field marshal already dislikes me; his
Putzer
got drunk last night and started waving a gun around so I had to rubber-stamp his head.’

‘Yes, I heard about that from Voss this morning. It’s not like Dyakov. When you get to know him, Dyakov isn’t a bad fellow. For an Ivan.’

‘The field marshal isn’t going to like me any better if it gets around the camp that we think one of his favourite hunting rifles might have been used to murder me.’

‘Of course,’ said Buhtz. ‘You have my word. But look here, I owe a great deal to the field marshal; I owe my commission to him. But for him I’d still be languishing in Breslau, so I should hate it to get around that it was me who identified this bullet as coming from a rifle like his.’

I nodded. ‘I certainly won’t say anything about it,’ I told him. ‘For now.’

‘But you don’t seriously think for a moment that it was Günther von Kluge who tried to kill you?’ he asked. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think if the field marshal actually wanted me dead he could find a much better way of doing it than to shoot me himself.’

‘Yes. He could.’ Buhtz smiled grimly. ‘Then again you could just stay here. If you wait in Smolensk long enough the Russians will be in your lap.’

*

I skipped lunch. After seeing Berruguete’s autopsy I wasn’t that hungry. The only meal I wanted to have was in the schnapps bottle on the mess table, but that would have meant enduring Ines Kramsta’s stony indifference to my existence.
That hurt more than it ought to have done. So I went back to the car thinking I might drive to the castle and send a signal to the ministry telling them that the members of the commission had already forgotten about Berruguete, and that their work was proceeding as hoped. Sometimes it’s useful to have duties in which you can take refuge.

I drove out of the gates and east, along the main Smolensk road. About halfway there I saw Peshkov again, his coat flapping in the stiffening breeze. I didn’t stop to offer him another ride. I wasn’t in the mood to drive Hitler’s
doppelgänger
anywhere. I didn’t go to the castle either. Instead I kept on going. I suppose you might say that I was distracted, although that would have been an understatement. I had the distinct feeling that I’d lost so much more than the regard of a lovely woman – that in losing her good opinion of me I’d also lost the slightly better opinion that lately I’d formed of myself; but her good opinion was more important, not to mention her smell and her touch and the sound of her voice.

I had half an idea to go to the Zadneprovsky Market on Bazarnaya Square and buy another bottle, like the
chekuschka
that Dr Batov had bought for us, although I would have been just as satisfied with the more lethal
brewski
he had warned me about – possibly more so: complete and lasting oblivion sounded just fine to me. But a few blocks before the market, the field police had closed Schlachthofstrasse to all traffic – a security alert, they said; a suspected terrorist who was holed up in a railway shed near the main station – and so I turned the car around, drove a few metres west again, pulled up and just sat there, smoking another cigarette, before it dawned on me that I was right outside the Hotel Glinka. And after a while I went inside, because I knew they always had vodka in there and sometimes even schnapps
and a lot of other ways to take a man’s mind off what is troubling him.

Without a doorman since the Rudakov brothers had left Smolensk, the Glinka’s madame was now in charge of the temple entrance as well as the girls inside; she was little more than a
babushka
with a rather obvious wig possessed of long, Versailles-style locks. Gap-toothed, with too much lipstick and a cheap black peignoir, she had the face and faux demure manner of a corrupted milkmaid and was about as greedy as a hungry fox, but she spoke reasonable German. She told me they weren’t open yet, but let me in all the same when she saw my money.

Inside the place was decorated like the Blue Angel, with lots of tall mirrors and chipped mahogany and a little stage where a bespectacled girl wearing just a
Stahlhelm
was seated on a beer barrel pumping out a tune on a piano accordion that covered her rather obvious nakedness, or at least just about. I didn’t recognize the tune, but I could see she had nice legs. Over the fireplace there was a large portrait of Glinka lying on a sofa with a pencil in his hand and a score on his lap. From the dark and painful expression on his face I guessed he’d disappointed a woman he was keen on and she’d told him it was over between them; either that or it was his music being squeezed to death on the accordion.

The madame led me to a high-ceilinged corner room with a view of the street and an evil-smelling bed with a green button-back headboard and a little tin cup for tips. There was a green carpet on the wooden floor, pink sheets on the bed, and some chocolate-brown wallpaper that was almost hanging on the wall. The chandelier on the ceiling was made of barley-sugar glass with a shard missing as if someone had tried taking a bite out of it. The room was every bit as depressing
as I needed it to be. I handed the madame a fistful of occupation marks and told her to send me up a bottle, some company and a pair of sunglasses. Then I took off my tunic and put the only record on the gramophone player – Evelyn Künneke was always a local favourite on account of all the concerts she gave for soldiers on the eastern front. I pressed my face against the grimy windowpane and stared outside. Half of me was wondering why I was there, but it was not the half of me that I was listening to at that moment, so I unlaced my shoes, lay down, and lit a cigarette.

A few minutes later three Polish girls arrived with vodka, took off their clothes – without being asked, I might add – and lay close beside me on the bed. Two lay either side of me like a pair of sidearms; the third lay between my legs with her head on my stomach. Her name was Pauline I think. She had a nice body and so did the others, but I didn’t do very much and nor did they. They just stroked my hair and shared my cigarettes and watched me drink – too much – and generally despise myself. After a while one of them – Pauline – tried to unbutton my trousers but I swatted her hand away. There was comfort enough in their idle nakedness, which felt natural and like one of those old paintings of some stiff scene invoking pastoral poetry or a stupid bit of mythology, the way old paintings sometimes do. Besides, if you drink enough it provokes only the desire to sleep and takes the edge off any thoughts that might prevent this from happening; that was the general idea, anyway. Thinking I was playing some sort of coy game, Pauline laughed and tried to unbutton me again, and so I held her hand and told her in my halting Russian – for a moment I forgot that she was Polish and she spoke German – that her company and that of her friends was quite enough for me.