A Man Without Breath (32 page)

‘A fire, a kettle, a comfy chair, it’s a nice place you have here, Captain Gunther,’ he said, glancing around my cosy room. He was so tall he’d had to stoop to come through the door.

‘It’s a bit Uncle Tom’s cabin,’ I said. ‘But it’s home. What can I do for you, lieutenant? I’d open a bottle of champagne in your honour but I think we drank the last fifty bottles last night.’

‘We’ve found another dead signaller,’ he said, brushing aside the wisecrack.

‘Oh, I see. This is becoming an epidemic,’ I said. ‘Was his throat cut, too?’

‘I don’t know yet. I just picked up the report on the radio. A couple of my men found the body in Glinka Park. I was hoping you might come and take a look at the scene with me. Just in case there’s some sort of pattern to all this.’

‘Pattern? That’s a word we cops only use back in civilization. You need sidewalks to see a pattern, Ludwig. There’s no pattern to anything out here. Haven’t you figured that out yet? In Smolensk everything is fucked up.’

How fucked up, I was only just beginning to understand, thanks to Martin Quidde and Friedrich Ribe.

‘It’s Corporal Quidde.’

‘Quidde? I was speaking to the poor man just the other day. All right. Let’s go and take a look at him.’

It felt curious to be standing over the dead body of a man I had murdered myself not two hours before. Investigating the death of my own victim wasn’t something I’d ever done – and would prefer never to do again – but there’s a first time for everything and the novelty of it helped sustain my interest long enough to inform Voss that to my rheumy but experienced eye, the deceased gave every appearance of having committed suicide.

‘The gun in his mitt looks ready to fire,’ I said. ‘Actually I’m surprised he’s still holding it at all. You’d think some Ivan would have pinched it. Anyway, after careful consideration of all the available facts that can be observed here, suicide would seem to be the most obvious explanation.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Voss. ‘Would you keep your tin helmet on if you were planning to shoot yourself?’

That ought to have given me pause, but it didn’t.

‘And would he have shot himself in the back of the head like that?’ continued Voss. ‘I had the impression that most people who shoot themselves in the head put one through the side of the head.’

‘Which is exactly why a lot of people who do that,
survive
,’ I said, authoritatively. ‘Temple shots are like a sure thing at the races. Sometimes it just doesn’t finish. For future reference, if you want to do it, then shoot yourself in the back of the head. The same way those Ivans killed those Poles. Nobody ever survives a shot that goes through the occipital bone like this one has. It’s why they do it that way. Because they know what they’re doing.’

‘I can see how that works, yes. But is it even possible to do it in this way – to yourself, I mean?’

I took out my own Walther – the very gun that had killed Quidde – checked the safety, lifted my elbow and placed the
muzzle of the automatic against the nape of my own neck. The demonstration was eloquent enough. It was easily possible.

‘There was no need even to remove his helmet,’ I said.

‘All right,’ said Voss. ‘Suicide. But I don’t have your Alexanderplatz experience and training.’

‘I never mind the obvious explanation. Sometimes it’s just too damned hard to be clever – clever enough to ignore what’s obvious. Well, I’m not sufficiently clever to offer an alternative in this case. It’s one thing shooting yourself in the head, it’s something else altogether to cut your own throat. Besides, this time we even have the weapon.’

Voss tugged off Quidde’s helmet to reveal a hole in the man’s forehead. ‘And it looks like we have the bullet, too,’ he said, inspecting the inside of the signaller’s tin hat. ‘You can see it embedded in the metal.’

‘So you can,’ I said. ‘For all the good it will do us out here in Smolensk.’

‘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.

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.